My phone vibrated. Hino Academy. Please don’t be a problem, please don’t be a problem…

  “Yes?”

  “Ms. Moore?”

  Gina Murray, the assistant principal. That wasn’t good.

  “We have a problem.”

  Of course, we do.

  A woman emerged from the gate and waved. A scout the assault team had left behind. An hour had passed without incident, and it was time to go in.

  “Alright people!” London called out. “You know the drill. Last gear check. Move out in two minutes.”

  “What happened?”

  I needed to fix this fast. Phones didn’t work inside the gate. There was no connection, and if you tried to take a picture or record audio, you only got static. London had to stick to schedule and account for any delay. If we went inside five minutes late and a disaster struck, even if it was completely unrelated, the Guild would drag him over hot coals for it.

  “Tia left campus without permission.”

  Melissa rolled her eyes.

  “Okay.” What was that kid doing…

  “Before she left, several students and a member of the faculty heard her make a self-harm threat.”

  “What?”

  “We are required to contact the police…”

  “Please don’t do anything. Let me speak to her first. I’ll call you right back!”

  I ended the call and stabbed Tia’s number in my contacts.

  Beep.

  She wouldn’t. Tia wouldn’t. Not in a million years.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  I knew my kid. She would not.

  “Yes, mom?”

  “Are you going to hurt yourself?”

  “What?”

  The mining crew formed up in front of the gate. London gave me a pointed stare.

  “Oh look, Stella’s dog is malfunctioning,” Melissa said too loudly.

  Stella pretended to shake Bear’s leash. “Won’t turn on. Something broke.”

  London headed for us.

  “The Academy called. You told them you were going to hurt yourself and left campus.”

  “Well, you know what, maybe I should kill myself because they just assigned us a fifth essay due next week…”

  “Tia!” I couldn’t keep the pressure from vibrating in my voice. “This is really serious. I need you to be honest with me. Are you thinking of hurting yourself?”

  London cleared the distance between us. “What’s the hold up?” he asked quietly.

  “Give her a minute,” Melissa told him. “It’s her daughter.”

  “No. I was in the cafeteria, I failed Latin again, and then there was the fifth essay due…”

  London met my gaze. “Three minutes.”

  Thank you, I mouthed. Three minutes was a gift.

  “…Mr. Walton made a snide comment about not applying myself and I said, ‘Just kill me, it will solve all my problems…’”

  And…?

  “…And then I went to get Starbucks! I always sneak out to get Starbucks. Everybody does it. Nobody cares!”

  It wasn’t a real threat. Someone overreacted. The relief washed over me like an icy flood. Not a real threat.

  “Mr. Walton hates me!”

  “Tia, I’m about to go into the gate. The school wants to call the cops.”

  “What? Why?!”

  “If this happens, things will get very complicated, and I can’t help, because I’ll be inside the breach. I need you to return to school and fix this.”

  “I was already on my way! I’m almost there.”

  I started toward the gate.

  “I’m walking into the school building right now.”

  “Kiss their ass, do whatever you need to, but make sure you fix it. I love you.”

  “I love you too. Mom…”

  The gate loomed.

  “Here we go,” Melissa muttered.

  “I have to go, Tia.”

  “Mom!”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t die!”

  “I won’t,” I promised. I hung up, powered the phone off, and slipped it into the zippered pocket of my coveralls.

  “Remember,” London called out. “We go in together as one, we come out together as one. Nobody gets left behind.”

  The mist swirled in front of us, held back by an invisible boundary. I took a deep breath and stepped into the dark.

  Stepping through the gate felt like trying to push your way through dense, rubber-thick Jello.

  I blinked, trying to adjust to the low light.

  A stone passage stretched in front of me, illuminated by patches of bioluminescent lichens, moss, and fungi. They climbed up the walls, glowing with turquoise, green, and lavender, some curling like fern sprouts, others spreading in a net like bridal veil stinkhorn mushrooms.

  The otherness slapped you in the face. It didn’t look familiar, it didn’t smell right, and it didn’t feel like home. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Fear dashed down my arms like hot electric needles. I wanted out of this gate. The urge to turn around and run back to the familiar blue sky was overwhelming.

  This burst of panic used to happen every time I entered a breach. I’d tried everything in the beginning: counseling, breathing, counting, cataloging random things I saw... My primary prescribed some Xanax, which I couldn’t take because it was strictly off limits for gate divers. Slowed the reaction time down too much.

  Medication wouldn’t have worked anyway. Nothing had worked until one week we got a cluster breach. Four gates opened simultaneously in close proximity, and I was the only DeBRA in range. I went through four breaches in forty-eight hours, and by the middle of the third my panic switch got permanently broken. This anxiety was an unwelcome blast from the past, and it needed to go away right now.

  It was probably residual stress from the school call.

  “Alright,” Melissa called out. “We have a limestone cave biome. The assault team found a large chamber with promising mineral deposits, so we have a nice short hike ahead of us. Watch your step. Do you remember how Sanders fell into a crevice and got stuck, and we spent ten minutes pulling him out while he was farting up a storm and giggling? Don’t be Sanders.”

  Sanders, a tall bear of a man in his mid-thirties, chuckled into his reddish beard. “I didn’t have chili this time, I swear!”

  A light laughter rippled through the crew. Melissa was going right down her playbook: item one, put everyone at ease the moment the crew stepped into the breach; item two, reach the mining site; item three, profit.

  “We have Adaline Moore with us this morning. She is the strongest DeBRA in the region, which means if there is good pay in this hellhole, she will find it for us,” Melissa announced. “Another day, another dollar. Isn’t that right, Assessor Moore?”

  “That’s right.” I matched her tone. “Living the dream.”

  Another ripple of laughter.

  “Once more…” one of the miners called out.

  “Don’t you say it!” Melissa growled. “You know better!”

  “…into the breach!”

  “Damn it, Hotchkins!”

  The actual quote was “unto the breach,” but it had mutated long ago. Guild superstition held that if you said the line just as you entered the breach, you would come out alive, but you would kiss the chance of a big score goodbye. It didn’t matter. Someone always said the line.

  “I swear if you jinxed us, I will fire you myself…” Melissa carried on.

  Aaron looked at London. The blade warden nodded, and the massive tank started down the passageway, moving fast. Time was money. The mining crew followed, keeping the four equipment carts in the middle, the strikers guarding the flanks like border collies obsessed with their herd.

  I joined the flow of people. Melissa and Stella walked behind me and London on my right. Elena, the assault team’s scout who’d come back to escort the miners, fell in step next to London. Lean, with a harsh face and blond hair pulled into a tight ponytail, Elena didn’t walk, she glided.

  In theory, being on the mining crew was the safest part of the gate dive. Safe was a relative term. Walking across a narrow beam over molten lava was also safe, as long as you didn’t fall.

  “Doing okay?” London murmured.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Is Tia alright?”

  “Yes. She’s a smart kid. She will handle it. Thank you for the three minutes.”

  “You’re welcome.” He glanced at me, his eyes concerned. “Not feeling this one?”

  “No.”

  Gate divers were like ancient sailors. We ventured into the unknown that could kill us at any moment. In the breach, survival depended on luck and intuition, and our rituals were an acknowledgment of that. We knocked on wood, we muttered lucky sayings under our breath, and we trusted our instincts. My instincts were pumping out all of the dread they could muster.

  “Anything specific?” London asked.

  “It makes my skin crawl.”

  “Don’t worry,” he promised quietly. “I’ll get you out of here in one piece.”

  I glanced at him.

  “I mean it, Ada. The only way you go down is if I’m down, and I’m really good at surviving. We get in, get out, and you can go home and sort the kid issues out. Tomorrow will be like this never happened.”

  “Thank you.”

  He nodded.

  Ten years had passed since Roger had abandoned us. I’d been on my own for a decade, taking care of the kids, paying the bills, surviving. Every decision in my life was up to me, and I made them without support or help from anyone else. I’d become used to it, but London just reminded me how it felt to share all of that with someone. Someone who cared if you lived or died.

  This was the worst moment to wonder about things. I promised my daughter I would come back. I had to concentrate on that.

  The passageway forked. We turned right. Hotchkins, a short, dark-haired man, spraypainted a backward orange arrow on the wall. He would do this every time we made a turn. It was a proven fact that people running for their lives had trouble orienting themselves.

  Ahead a glowing stick shone among the rocks. Beyond it eight furry bodies sprawled on the ground in a puddle of blood. My foot slid on something. A spent shell casing. The cave floor was littered with them. The assault team had made a stand here.

  We passed the bodies, skirting them to the sides. The dead things were large, about the size of a Great Dane, with long lupine jaws and massive feet armed with hook-like claws. Their pelts, chewed up by bullets, were shaggy with blue-grey fur. They didn’t look like anything our planet could’ve spawned.

  “A variant of Calloway’s stalkers,” London said. His voice was perfectly calm.

  “Yeah. There were a lot of them, and they are spongy. They soak up bullets like they’re nothing and keep coming,” Elena said. “And they spit acidic bile.”

  “Good to know,” London said.

  “We did our best to clean up, but the place is a maze.” Elena kept her voice low. “Passages going everywhere, so we may run into some. We didn’t see anything more dangerous until we went much deeper, so there is that.”

  “No worries,” Stella offered from behind them. “Bear will let us know if anything is coming.”

  Elena gave her a cold smile. “I will let us know if anything is coming.”

  “Don’t pay her any attention, Bear,” Stella murmured. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Bear twitched her right ear. One day I would pet that dog.

  Elena kept gliding forward, her face portraying all of the warmth of an iceberg.

  A lot of combat Talents developed similar abilities, so many that the government began to classify them. Tank classes, like London’s blade warden or Aaron’s bastion, had a lot of defensive skills, so they drew the attention of the enemy and absorbed damage. Damage dealers, like strikers or pulse carvers, attacked the target, causing rapid destruction.

  Elena was a pathfinder, a scout class that came with heightened hearing and vision, upgraded speed, and an unerring sense of direction. If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear a person murmuring behind a closed door two floors above her. But as awesome as Elena was, I would trust Bear over her any day. There was a reason every guild brought canines into the breaches. The transdimensional monstrosities wigged them out, and they let us know when something came near. Dogs were the best early warning system we had.

  The cave passage kept branching. Left, left, right, another right, each tunnel glowing with swirls of colorful lichens and fungi. Elena was right, the place was a maze. At least we didn’t have that far to go. I had seen the preliminary survey of the breach, and the mining site was half-a-mile from the entrance, off to the side.

  The way was clear, the tunnels were empty, and Bear stayed quiet. Just like any other gate dive. It should’ve felt routine, but it didn’t. I kept expecting some kind of awful shoe to drop.

  Ten years ago, when the first set of gates appeared out of nowhere near the major population centers, they’d taken humanity by surprise. We’d cordoned them off so we could carefully study them and before anyone had a chance to adjust, the gates burst, spilling a horde of monsters into the world.

  We knew a lot more about the gates now. Beyond every gate lay the breach, a miniature dimension stuffed to the brim with creatures so dangerous, they were biological weapons rather than living beings. That dimension connected Earth and the hostile world like a gangplank linking two ships. The breaches were how the enemy got from their world to ours.

  Every breach had an anchor, a core that stabilized it. Once the breach appeared, the anchor began to accumulate energy. When it got enough, the gate would burn through the fabric of our reality and rip open, releasing the monsters into our world to rampage and murder everything they came across. The more dangerous the breach was, the longer it took to burst.

  There was a brief period, anywhere from a few days to a few months from the moment the gate appeared, when the monsters couldn’t escape yet, but we could enter the gate from our side. It gave us a chance to extinguish the anchor and collapse the breach. The moment a gate manifested, the clock started ticking.

  At first, destroying the anchors was the sole responsibility of the military, but it quickly got prohibitively expensive. Regular humans were no match for the breach beasts, and casualties were high. And it was discovered that the breaches contained a wealth of materials: strange ores, medicinal plants, and monster bones with incredible properties. Resources that could aid our fight and make us stronger. It wasn’t just about destroying the anchors anymore. We had to strip the breach of anything valuable before it collapsed.

  Within months after the first Talents manifested their abilities, they banded into guilds, and governments around the world began to outsource gates to them, taking a percentage of the profits. Economic and security crisis solved at the cost of volunteer lives.

  By now, the process of gate diving was almost routine. As soon as a gate appeared, it was graded, its threat level measured, a government assessor like me assigned, and the appropriate guild contacted. The guild sent a team in to do a preliminary survey and let the DDC know when they were ready to proceed, at which point I arrived at the site.

  The attack began with the assault team, heavy hitters with combat talents, who entered the gate and cut and burned through the miniature pocket dimension until they found the anchor and destroyed it. The journey to the anchor took days, sometimes weeks.

  While the assault team worked their way to the anchor, the mining crew came in and stripped the breach bare, extracting anything that could be of use and would help humanity keep fighting. Each breach’s resources were unique and precious. My job was to assess the space, guide the mining team, and make sure that the government got their thirty percent cut.

  Once the anchor was destroyed, the assault team would rush back to the exit, because without the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days. Nobody knew what happened to the breaches once the gate closed. Hopefully everybody got out before the gate vanished, and when the next one appeared, we would do it all over again.

  Ahead Aaron stopped. Finally. It was time to earn my paycheck. The sooner I found something of value, the sooner we all got out of here.

  Apprehension curled around me like a cold snake. I could just turn around and run back to the gate, quit, and never go into any breaches again. I could absolutely do that. But then whatever this breach held would stay in it instead of becoming weapons, armor, and medicine.

  I took a deep breath and pushed forward, past the miners, to do my job.

  2

  A massive cavern spread in front of us, awash in bioluminescence like some bizarre rave. It resembled an enormous egg set on its side, with the wider end to the right ending in a solid wall and the narrow end to the left splitting off into several dark passages. The cavern’s floor sloped to the center where a wide stream ran through the cave from left to right. The water was like glass, perfectly clear.

  At the banks, the stream branched into several small pools bordered by rimstone dams, some shallow, others deeper. The pools flowed into each other, stretching toward a flat island on our right. The stream split around it and emptied into a lake, its waters moving slowly and disappearing under a spectacular flowstone wall where layers of calcite formed a frozen stone waterfall.

  Melissa turned to London.

  The blade warden surveyed the cavern. “Go ahead.”

  “I need lights, people!” Melissa called out.

  The mining crew spread out, planting floodlights along the nearest wall. The only flat space available was directly by the entrance, and the mining crew managed to fit three out of the four carts on it. The portable generator on the central cart sputtered into life, and bright electric light illuminated the cavern. The sloping floor was ridged with calcite, and it looked slick. A good way to break a leg.

  “Much better,” Melissa declared. “It’s almost like we know what we’re doing.”

  London nodded to the tank. Aaron moved to the left and planted himself in the narrower part of the cave, between the dark tunnels and the mining crew. London stayed at the entrance, guarding our exit route. The three strikers fanned out along the perimeter.