Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Time snapped back. A terrible weight smashed into my back. My knees buckled. Scalding teeth sank into my right shoulder.
Pain tore through me, turning into an ice-cold rage.
I turned the sword into a dagger, bent my elbow, and stabbed the blade straight into the female stalker’s face. She dropped off me, backing away to the fissure. I chased her, blood running down my arm. She made it all the way through the gap before I caught her. She spun to face me and bared her teeth, her nose wet with blood. I bore down on her and kicked as hard as I could. My foot connected with her head. She stumbled back and slid off the stone bridge. For a moment she hung on, digging her claws into the bare rock, but her talons slipped, and she plunged into the river below.
Bear. Shit.
I spun around and sprinted back into the tunnel. The three stalker bodies lay unmoving. Bear sat in the middle. Her shoulder was bloody, and there was a long streak of red across her right side. She panted, her eyes bright, her mouth opened in a happy canine smile, like she just ran around through the surf on some beach and was now waiting for a treat.
She saw me, grabbed the smallest stalker by the paw, and tried to drag it toward me. Hi, I’m Bear and these are my dead stalker friends. Look how fancy.
I dug into my pocket, fished out some jerky, and offered it to her. She took it from my fingers, dropped it to the ground, went back to the stalker, bit it some more, came back, and ate the jerky.
“Good girl, Bear. Best girl.”
We were both bleeding, but we were still alive. Four stalkers! We took down four…
I should be dead. And Bear should’ve been dead with me. It took the assault team a bucket of bullets to stop eight stalkers, and Bear and I killed four. A creature the size of a Great Dane had jumped on my back, and I stayed upright. It should’ve knocked me off my feet.
It wasn’t just the weird hallucinations and the unusual precision of my talent. I was changing. Physically changing.
The thought pierced me like a jolt of high-voltage current. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
The year after the divorce had twisted me. I used to like flying. In my head, flying was married to vacation, because the flights of my childhood took me to the beach and amusement parks. Suddenly I was terrified to board a plane. The fear was so debilitating, I couldn’t even talk while boarding. I became obsessed with traffic, avoiding driving whenever I could. I developed a fixation on my health that bloomed into hypochondria.
I ended up in therapy, where we got to the root of the problem. I had realized that Roger was truly, completely gone and if something happened to me, the kids would be alone. I was desperately trying to exert control over my environment, and when I failed, my body locked up and refused to respond. It took years to get over it, and the hypochondria was the hardest to defeat. Every time I thought I’d finally broken free, it would come back with a vengeance over some minor thing like a new mole or some weird pain in my arm.
In a way, becoming an assessor was the best thing for me. Facing death on a regular basis didn’t leave room for anxiety. I was too busy surviving.
In this moment, it was like all those years of therapy, exercise, and rewiring my brain’s responses never happened. Was I dying? Was that glowing thing in my head eating at me like cancer? No doctor would be able to get it out of me. There was no treatment for whatever the fuck it was. The woman had called me her daughter. Would this gem reshape me into someone like her? What if I wasn’t human anymore? What if I got back to the gate and it wouldn’t let me exit back to Earth?
The grip of anxiety crushed me. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I just stood there, desperately cataloging everything happening in my body. My breathing, my aches and pains, the strange electric prickling feeling in my fingers. I could hear my own heartbeat. It was fast and so loud…
A cold nose nudged my hand.
I still couldn’t move.
Bear pushed her muzzle into my fingers, bumping me. I felt her fur slide against my hand.
Bump. Bump.
I exhaled slowly. The air escaped out of me, as if it had been trapped in my lungs. I swallowed, crouched, and hugged Bear. Gradually the sound of my heart receded.
Yes, I was changing. No, I had no control over it, and I didn’t know what I would become at the end of this process. But I was getting stronger. There were three stalker corpses on this cave floor. I made that happen.