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)
Sadrin. The word turned over in my mind. One of my coworkers back at the agency had a crystal cube on her desk with dichroic film paper inside of it. When she turned it, the colors on the inside would change. The same section of the cube could look blue or red or yellow depending on the position and the light. Sadrin was like that.
I was sadrin. I am sadrin.
There was a world of meaning in that word, but I couldn’t decode it. It felt at once weighty and ephemeral, something I should know, something I already knew, something I had to discover… It was breaking my brain in the same way the lectures on quantum physics I attended as part of the DDC training did. The electron was both a particle and wave, light was a quantum field, and I was sadrin.
It was the same strange feeling when I spoke to the spider herders. I knew what I said, and I was understood, and yet, I didn’t speak their language. It was more like I formed an intent to communicate gratitude and something in my mind put it into the appropriate sounds.
Technically, that was how speech worked in general. We formed intent to speak, and our body produced the sound, but when I spoke English, that process was instant. With the spider herders, I felt that neural connection happen in slow motion. It was disconcerting.
What did that woman put into my head?
Bear trotted to the pond, drank, and ran over to me. It was time to go.
We trekked across the cavern to another tunnel. I closed my eyes for a moment, checking the position of the anchor. Yep, still straight ahead. It was very close now and it had gotten more distracting. I’d compared it to a psychic splinter before; that splinter had become infected. It wedged itself in my consciousness and throbbed.
The anchor was usually well protected. I had leveled up, figuratively speaking, but I wasn’t sure I could take whatever guarded it. A part of me wanted to try. Wanted something to be there, something I could slice to pieces. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to punish whoever created the breach in the first place by killing their prized bioweapon or if I wanted to prove something to myself because deep down, I was still scared. Dwelling on it wouldn’t do me any good. The anchor was our destination. We would get to it.
Maybe I would get some answers there.
The tunnel ended and Bear and I walked onto another stone bridge. An oval cavern stretched out on both sides of us, not very large but deep, about one hundred yards across and twice that down. The narrow stone bridge spanned it just off center. On the other side, another tunnel waited.
We kept walking, sticking to the center of the path. We were about halfway across when I caught a glint of something below.
“Rest.”
Bear lay down. We were working on new commands. Cold Chaos likely taught most of them already, but I didn’t know the German words for them, so we had to improvise. So far, she got rest, up, drop it, and back. That last one was especially useful in a fight. Our battle strategies generally went one of two ways. If the opponent was smaller or roughly the same size as Bear, she rammed them and went for their throat. If the enemy was larger, she usually targeted a limb, clamped on, and used her weight to slow them while I cut them down. Calling her back behind me was crucial, because some creatures, like the lake dragon, were strong enough to fling her away. Although lately when Bear bit something, she stayed on. Her cuspids were now three point two inches long and the rest of her teeth had gotten larger as well.
She also seemed to understand not food, but we had mixed success with that.
I had no idea how hard it was to train a dog, but cute puppy videos on Instagram taught me that it required repetition. Command, compliance, reward, rinse and repeat. It took Bear only five repetitions to learn a command, and once she learned it, it stuck. I was sure it wasn’t normal, but nothing had been since I walked into this breach. Normal had packed its bags and left the building.
I knelt and carefully leaned over the edge to look down.
Bodies sprawled below. Human bodies in the familiar indigo of Cold Chaos.
I went cold.
They lay strewn around the bottom of the cave like Noah’s action figures thrown onto the bed. Some were missing limbs, some had been cut in half. It looked familiar. I had seen this at the mining site. This controlled carnage. One slice. One death.
I forced myself to focus on the corpses. They were too far to fully analyze, but I noticed that when I measured distances with my Talent, it gave me a moment of enhanced distance vision. The body directly under me was lying on its back. I flexed, and for a split second my talent grasped its face.