I felt more like myself.

  There were so many fucking questions I didn’t have the answers to. What happened to the worlds after the Tsuun won? They could be destroyed, occupied, vassalized… Did anyone ever win against the Tsuun?

  The answers to all those questions were likely in my head and out of reach for now. The most pressing question was, what do I do now? How do I fix this mess?

  Staggering out of the gate and announcing to the world that I was sadrin was out of the question. I had no intention of becoming a bargaining chip. Nor would I let the government collect me like a weird specimen or turn me into a weapon by keeping my kids hostage. If they understood what I was, I would face the choice of being eliminated, confined, or controlled for the rest of my life. Not going to happen.

  My priorities were the same: get out of the breach alive and return to my children. But now there was one final part to that awesome plan. Once I managed to escape, I would end this invasion.

  There would be no thirteen centuries of conflict. My children deserved a safe future. I deserved it.

  The Tsuun wanted my mother because she was a threat. I would use her legacy. I had to get out and study the gem. I needed to learn what it contained, how to access it quickly, and where to find the information I required. I needed to know what we faced. I needed to learn the limits of my new body. All of this meant I would need to hide until I accomplished that.

  Bear and I had been stuck in this breach for at least a week. Whoever had the rights to this breach – whether it was still Cold Chaos or some other guild – would be sending a new team in. For all I knew, they were already inside. That team would attempt to blast through the passageway London collapsed, because they would want to recover the corpses and the incredibly valuable adamantite.

  London’s face flashed before me. Soon. We would meet very soon.

  When the second assault team entered that cave, they would find the corpses of four alien humanoids and my mother. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to avoid anything that drew attention to the existence of sadrin.

  If our government already knew about the Tsuun and other sophonts on the other side of the breach and were actively hiding it, they could disappear the entire assault team for just discovering the bodies. Not to mention that the devourer shroud required living hosts. By now it would have fallen into a semi-dormant state from starvation but the moment a human approached one of the gress corpses, the shroud would strike. People would die.

  London was pond scum, Melissa was a selfish coward, but the rest of the Cold Chaos members didn’t deserve to die or disappear if I could prevent it.

  I looked at the anchor. It still loomed large in my mind’s vision, an ominous evil thing that had to be destroyed.

  I focused. Still solid black, impenetrable to my talent. I didn’t know what it was made of or how it came to be, but I understood what it did far better now. It was a pushpin. The breach was a notecard. Someone picked it up from its place on a desk and used a pushpin to stick it to a corkboard. Once the pushpin disappeared, the note card would fall back to its place on the desk. The caves, the spider herders, the lake dragons, they probably wouldn’t even notice the shift as their little slice of biosphere returned to its rightful spot in the world that had spawned it.

  If I shattered the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days, as the breach ran out of energy to stay wedged between dimensions. But it wouldn’t solve the problem of the bodies, because it left enough time to search the mining site. The corpses would still be found.

  Besides, everyone would know that I had destroyed the anchor. The anchors didn’t just spontaneously collapse on their own. I couldn’t stagger out of the breach and have it collapse behind me. My life would be over.

  The compulsion burned in me. I had to destroy it.

  No. I was my own person. I had other things to do. I had to clean this up. The sooner the better.

  I turned to the body of the gress, squeezed the amulet until it clicked, and spoke a single word in an alien language. “Irhkzurr.”

  The amulet on the gress’ exposed chest turned red, then orange. The assassin’s flesh sizzled. The devourer shroud hissed, trying to crawl away from the heat and failing, trapped by its roots with the alien body.

  The amulet grew yellow, then finally a blinding white, and the corpse turned to ash, the grey shroud writhing as it too was incinerated. A moment and the pile of ash collapsed onto the floor.

  Jovo stood up on the dead skelzhar’s head, his bracelet clutched in his hand. He was splattered with blood and his eyes looked a little wild.

  I gave him a little wave.

  The lees hopped off the corpse of his enemy, shook himself, flinging blood everywhere, ran over to me, and showed me the bracelet. It was a metal band about two inches wide, that looked to be made of copper. Thin red lines crossed it, carving it into smaller sections.

  He grinned at me.

  “Home,” I said.

  “Home!”

  He jumped from foot to foot, spinning in place, then turned around, and hugged me. “Ada.”

  “Jovo.”

  He took my hand, squeezed it to his chest, and pointed to the exit, toward the gate. “Home.”

  I nodded. “My home.”

  Jovo put his paw on his chest and said, pronouncing the words very carefully. “Help.” He pointed at me. “Ada. Dan-ge-rous. Help.”

  He waved his knives around and struck a dramatic pose.

  It took me a minute. My nice new friend from a different world, who helped me kill an assassin from an alien planet, was determined to walk me home. Because it wasn’t safe. Gentleman Jovo.

  I sat on the floor and laughed.

  The trek from the anchor chamber to the gate was short. So short, I nearly cried. Only a few dozen yards on the other side of the anchor chamber the ground sloped downhill into a wide tunnel that led pretty much straight to the gate. I had wandered through the tunnels for days. I must’ve crossed above this tunnel several times, never finding access to it.

  After the first few minutes I started running. Jovo kept up with me and we bounded through the passage, with Bear in the lead. The way was clear. All the monsters were either dead or too scared to get in our way.

  We’d crossed the killing site of Malcolm’s team. I stopped long enough to pick up some aetherium charges. I didn’t look at the bodies.

  The assault team had marked their path with white arrows painted on the walls. Following their route was easy.

  We’d been running for what felt like an hour, when I saw an orange arrow on the wall. I remembered when Hotchkins drew it. We had reached the turn off to the mining site.

  Finding London’s cave-in took no time at all. Two aetherium detonations later, we blasted a hole through the rubble. With my new strength, I could’ve dug through it, but I was in a hurry, and when I flexed, my talent conveniently marked the best place for an explosion.

  We made it into the mining site. The bodies lay where they fell. Nothing fed on them, nothing touched them. They had been decomposing for a week and some were beginning to bloat. The four gress, however, had shrunk as the shrouds drained the last of their body fluids. I set off the remaining amulets one by one, until the dead gress became ash.

  My mother was decomposing too, although much slower than the humans around her. I wrapped her in her robe, carried her into a side tunnel, to one of the dead ends, and placed her on the bottom of a shallow pool while Jovo stood guard. I used the last aetherium charge to collapse the passageway. Cold Chaos had no reason to go this way and with luck, her body would remain undiscovered.

  I stood there by her tomb in silence for a long moment.

  Thank you for your gift. I promise I won’t squander it.

  The secret of the breach was hidden. It was time to go home.

  Main blade, backup blade, four aetherium grenades…

  Elias turned away from the table filled with his gear. Something was going on outside. He headed to the library’s entrance. Outside the window, the sunrise barely began, the street and the gate awash in the early dawn light.

  Elias stopped by the tinted window. The gate was on his left. In front of it, Leo stood with his arms crossed. Kovalenko was on Leo’s right, lean, dark-haired, holding his bow. The cryo ranger was poised on his toes, the bow casually hanging in his hand. Kovalenko summoned energy projectiles, which his mind shaped into arrows. Contrary to the misleading name of his talent, they didn’t encase things in ice. When one of Kovalenko’s arrows struck, his target seized up, frozen in their tracks for a couple of moments, as if tased. The bow wasn’t strictly necessary, but it helped him aim.

  To the right, at the mouth of the street, ten people had disembarked from a personnel carrier, grouping themselves around their leader. Tall and broad-shouldered, he towered over his team, and his bulky tactical armor, reinforced with adamant, only made him look larger. Anton Sokolov, a bastion Talent, a good solid tank with just the right amount of aggression. The woman next to him was older and willowy, her dark blond hair pulled back into a French braid. JoAnne Kersey, otherwise known as the Bloodmist. For some reason, a lot of women awakened as pulse carvers, high-burst damage dealers who used bladed weapons and diced their opponents into pieces in a controlled frenzy. JoAnne was one of the best.

  Elias recognized a few other faces. All ten had the same charcoal and white patch on their gear: a dark square showing a shield with two stylized wings spreading from its sides. A faceless human bust rose out of the shield with a sharp corona of triangular rays stabbing outward from its head. It was meant to evoke guardian angels and general badassery, but to him it looked like some winged crash dummy thrust its head through the shield and was now stuck wearing it like a yoke.

  The ten people on the street wore it proudly. The Guardian Guild had sent their A team to claim the Elmwood gate.

  He didn’t hold it against Graham. It wasn’t personal. Graham was like a shark: always hungry and looking for something to sink his teeth into.

  Krista walked out of the library’s depths and stopped next to Elias. A faint red glow traced her long dark fingers, a precursor to an inferno.

  “Look at them all dressed up. Bless their hearts.”

  “Are we ready?” Elias asked.

  “We’re good.”

  “London?”

  “Geared and armed. If he isn’t happy about it, he’s keeping it to himself.”

  “I’ll need you to watch him in the breach.”

  She smiled. “No worries. If he sneezes the wrong way, I’ll be on him like a hawk.”

  On the street Anton shrugged his massive shoulders. “You’re standing between me and my gate, Leonard.”

  “Funny, I thought I was standing between you and our gate.”

  Anton sighed. “Don’t be fucking difficult. We both know the DDC is going to announce the gate change.”

  “If they reassign it and if the Guardians get that assignment, we’ll revisit the issue.” Leo’s voice was cold and light. “Until then, you are trespassing. This is your only warning: turn around, sashay back to your soccer dad minivan, and get the fuck out of here.”

  “Your healer is stuck in Hong Kong,” Anton boomed. “And the old man isn’t here to pull your ass out of the fire.”

  The old man, huh?

  “We know he left for HQ last night.”

  Elias’s eyebrows crept up. Last night he and Leo returned to HQ. It was late but he wanted to speak to Ada’s children one more time before the news broke. Leo came with him for that conversation and then went back to the site in the Cold Chaos vehicle. Elias stayed for another hour, finishing up some last-minute things. He’d taken a ride-share back, had it drop him off several streets away, then ran the last couple of miles to clear his head. It worked – he’d slept well for the first time in a week.

  Someone from the Guardians must’ve been watching the site and noted Leo coming back without him.

  “We all know you can’t go in,” Anton continued. “There are ten of us here and we’re ready to enter. Why don’t you step aside and let us fix your mess?”

  “He did just say that there were ten of them?” Leo asked.

  “Yes,” Kovalenko confirmed. “He learned to count.”

  “Did that sound like a threat to you?” Leo wondered.

  “It did.”

  Leo’s eyes blazed with white. Two huge dark wings thrust from his back, ethereal as if woven from a thunderstorm. Lightning crackled and danced across the phantom contour feathers.

  A pulse of deep green shot from Anton and contracted back into an aura that sheathed the big man like second armor.

  “Persistent,” Krista said. “What do they know that I don’t?”

  “There is a big adamantite vein in that breach,” Elias said.

  “Someone has been talking.”

  “Mhm.”

  And he had a very good idea who. The pool of suspects was limited to four. Wagner was too pessimistic, Drishya was too young and inexperienced, and Melissa thought the guild completely had her back, thanks to Leo’s gentle style of interrogating. Only one person’s future was in doubt. London had taken an opportunity to open another door for himself.

  “They aren’t normally that aggressive.” Krista frowned.

  “This is being recorded,” Elias said. “They are hoping to provoke us and then splatter it all over the media.”

  “You are in violation of Article 3 of the Gate Regulation Act.” Leo’s voice was an eerie, unnaturally loud whisper underscored by the roar of a distant storm. “Retreat or we will be forced to remove you for your safety.”

  Anton took a step forward. The team behind him fanned out into a battle formation. Anton took another step. A third.

  “That’s my cue.” Elias picked up his coffee mug and stepped out the door.

  JoAnne was the first to see him. She put her hand on Anton’s arm and when he didn’t react, she said something under her breath. Anton stopped walking.

  For a moment nobody moved.

  Elias sipped his coffee and started forward. Behind him, Jackson came out of the library and leaned on the wall.

  Elias reached the middle of the street, took a deeper breath, and let go. Power roared out of him, snapping into an invisible half-sphere. Twenty yards ahead of him a mining cart slid out of the way.

  Anton glanced at the cart and back at Elias.

  Elias kept walking. His forcefield moved with him. The two heavy trailers just ahead of the Guardian group slid to the sides, gouging the pavement, pushed out of Elias’s path.

  The rival guild group backed away. Anton remained and pulled a sword off his back. The seventy-five-inch-long blade was solid black. Pure adamant. Nice.

  The forward edge of Elias’ shield touched the rival tank.

  Anton gripped his sword, and the oversized blade burst into purple glow. The big man swung. The sword smashed into the forcefield and bounced off.

  Elias kept walking.

  Anton took a step back and slashed again. The sword rebounded.

  Anton slid backward. Two feet. Three. Four. The tank reversed his sword and raised it above the pavement, about to stab it into the ground to anchor himself.

  “It will break,” Leo called out.

  “I’d listen to him.” Elias said, pausing. “It’s a good sword.”

  Anton stared at them for a long second.

  Elias drank his coffee.

  The Guardian tank sheathed his sword. Elias dropped the shield. Another moment and it would be tapped out anyway.

  The Guardians eyed him, wary.

  Elias took the final swallow of his coffee. “Tell Graham that if he feels some way about this, he’s welcome to give me a call after I’m done with this gate.”

  Anton turned his back to him and went back to the van. His team followed.

  Elias watched them go, then turned around. “Alright people, I want us in that breach in ten minutes!”

  The gate loomed before me, huge and dark. I turned to Jovo and pointed at it.

  “Home.”

  He grinned.

  I opened my arms and hugged him.

  He hugged me back and said something in his language. If my gem was awake, I might have understood it, but it was still dormant.

  Jovo tinkered with his bracelet. A pale hole formed in the middle of the tunnel, with a fiery rim that spun like a pinwheel, throwing long trails of sparks. I glimpsed a strange city of sand-colored stone poised against a purple sky with a huge, shattered planet hanging above it.

  Jovo pointed at the portal. “Baha-char. Kiar sae Baha-char.”

  I had no idea what a baha-char was.

  He grabbed my hands, looking into my eyes, and pronounced the words slowly.

  “Baha-char, Ada. Kiar sae Baha-char.”

  This seemed vitally important. “Kiar sae Baha-char.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll remember,” I promised.

  Jovo grinned, let go of my hands, bowed to me, and dove into the portal. It snapped closed behind him, vanishing into thin air.

  The tunnel lay dark and silent.

  I took a deep breath and pulled my phone out of the pocket of my coveralls. I had carried it with me all this time, in a military grade shatterproof and water-tight case. I had turned it off when I entered the breach and hadn’t fired it back up even once. Even when turned off, phones still lost charge, and I needed it to power on now. My life literally depended on it.

  I pushed the power button.

  Elias surveyed the nine-member assault team in full battle gear. The best Cold Chaos had to offer. They looked ready. Everyone was rested. The sun was up. It was time.

  He turned back to the black hole of the gate. “Alright. Let’s do this.”

  The electric glow of the phone screen lit up the tunnel. Only two percent of the charge left, but it was enough. Just enough.

  The camera wouldn’t work and I couldn’t waste any charge on it. I couldn’t see myself. I didn’t know what I looked like now or if I had enough humanity left in me to exit. My hands shook from the pressure.