I woke in the family car, houses a blur through the windows. A pulsing white-yellow light
fogged the night sky and cast a silvery sheen over Mom's dark hair. Her fingers gripped the
center console as she shot a frightened look at Dad in the driver's seat. We were going too
fast. A siren wailed—a frightening bellow very different from the fun wee-woo of a fire truck.
Squealing tires and blaring horns hurt my ears. I tried to cover them, but my car seat was too
tight, and I started to cry.
Mom turned, dark eyes roving over me.
My heart panged. Mom?
The two moles beneath her left eye, a trait passed to both her children, scrunched with worry
even as she smiled.
"It's alright, honey." She reached back and squeezed my knee. "Mommy promises."
"Here, Torrin." A stuffed lion hovered in front of my nose. I hugged it and looked over at Seth,
his eyes too big in his face, all knobby knees and elbows. "It's okay. Dad's playing race car."
"Turn, turn!" Mom slapped the passenger window in a panic. "Don't get near it!"
As we swerved, I strained in my restrictive seat, craning my neck to look out the window at
the hole in the sky. It burned too bright, a shimmering sun expanding over town. The military
Humvees were dark blots behind the twisted chain-link fence that was supposed to keep
people away. Something big and scaly perched on top of the bent metal. A dinosaur!
It shook a doll in its mouth—a toy soldier.
"That way, that way!" Mom cried before I could tell her to look.
"It's blocked!" The horn blared. "Shit!"
I flew forward in my seat, and when I looked out the window next, the dinosaur was gone.
We were passing the school. My eardrums compressed as a heavy whump smothered every
other sound, and a flash of light seared golden streaks across my eyes. The car rocked, and
Seth's hand flew out, bracing against my chest.
Blinking away tears, ears ringing, I gaped at the school. Rock and roots had punched
through the roof, ripped away half the brick structure. A waterfall tumbled over the Go
Bearcats! banner strung above the front doors, tearing it loose. Golden particles, like
dandelion fluff, sparkled in the air.
The car labored, wheels kicking up dirt and clods of grass that splattered my window. Dad's shouts were garbled. Someone was screaming.
Yellow eyes blinked at me through my window, a toothy muzzle rising over the lip of the door,
dripping thick saliva. I clutched my lion, and the dinosaur vanished as Dad floored it, finally
zipping forward. The world shook, the car creaking and swaying. The engine roared. Dad
spun the wheel like a captain in a storm.
"Look out!" Seth yelled.
The headlights caught a falling tree, thick branches careening toward the hood. The car
jerked. The back wheels left the ground, then smashed back down with a groan of tearing
metal and shattering glass. Shards stung my cheeks. My harness cut my neck. The smell of
copper pricked at my nose.
The front seats were smashed, dark. Leaves fluttered inside the car, falling on crumpled
forms I didn't want to look at.
Gasping, unable to breathe, my hands fumbled with the buckle on my stomach.
What the hell?
The tiny child's seat crushed my ribs and pelvis, my legs spilling over onto the floor. I
wrestled myself loose and clambered my way out onto a jungle floor, high grass and plant
fronds grabbing at my calves. Seth stood nearby, a backpack over one shoulder, eyes
scouring the landscape. He nodded to himself and then set off with long, sure strides.
"Wait!" I called.
He still looked like a gangly preteen, but when he peered at me, those large, boyish eyes
had changed. That glare I'd come to know over the years skewered me, and when he spoke,
he had the deep voice of a man. "No. You'll slow me down."
He turned his back and disappeared into the thick foliage, leaving me by the wreck, the
stuffed lion still dangling from one hand. I looked down at the blood in its mane, and its
mouth opened.
"Mrow!"
My eyes snapped open on Milo's judgmental gaze. He lay atop my chest, each pound of his
overfed body crushing my lungs.
"Milo…" I groaned over the shrill beeping of my alarm. "Do you mind? I need to breathe."
The tabby scrunched his face, forming yet another fold beneath his chin that conveyed his displeasure.
I gently shoved the cat away and, with my airway restored, pawed blindly at my phone until I hit the snooze.
I lay tangled in covers, my pillow somehow under my foot, and let my heart rate slow as the
nightmare faded. I hadn't dreamt of the night we'd fled Lyman in years. Talking about the
lake and the orphanage with Jace must have brought it back.
Rubbing my aching eyes, I turned my head and checked my clock: nearly ten in the morning.
I sat up in shock and grabbed a shirt I'd thrown over my chair. After slipping into my
remaining clothes, I rushed to the kitchen in such a stupor that I smacked my shoulder
against the doorway.
"Good morning," Hanna said from the couch, her eyes absorbed in a heavily annotated
book. "Seth told me you'd be tired, so I sent Milo after you. That alarm of yours just wouldn't
stop."
"Morning," I muttered as I rushed through the room. "And sorry, I gotta run! I'm late for
training."
Hanna shook her head. "Not this time. The gym you're using won't be ready for a couple of
hours. Noon, he said."
I skidded to a stop and turned around. "Really?"
"Mmhmm." She ran a highlighter across the page. "Sounds to me like you've got quite the
day ahead of you."
I took a deep breath and ran a palm down my face to hide my worry. "This wouldn't have
anything to do with what happened at the rift yesterday, would it?"
Hanna laughed. "Oh, don't make a fuss! We both figured you'd need some extra sleep after
your first fight with a parabeast."
This time, I sighed with complete relief. "Thanks, Hanna. For not making a bigger deal out of
it."
"Oh, you're still in trouble, mister, just not with me. I suggest you make yourself a hearty
breakfast. You're going to need it."
"Thanks for the warning." I returned to the kitchen and took out a frying pan while filling my
other hand with eggs. "Can I make you anything?"
"No thanks." A hesitant note slipped into her voice, and I watched her eyes peek over the top
of her book. "But I wouldn't mind one of those fudge brownies you have hidden in the
pantry."
I gave her a pointed look. "I hid those because Seth told me your doctor—"
That was last trimester," she corrected. "I'm practically a different person now. Well… two
people." Hanna rubbed her pregnant belly and gave me puppy dog eyes. "Isla is saying,
'Please, Uncle Torrin? Just one.'"
I rolled my eyes. "Just don't tell Seth, or I won't live to meet Isla." I tossed the final packaged
brownie across the room before returning to prepare my eggs.
Hanna's foot shot up with the speed of a shrike and caught the corner of the plastic between
her toes.
"Was that the move that won Seth over?" I teased, watching her deftly peel the brownie open
with her fingers.
"I didn't need any moves. Your brother fell head over heels at first sight," she said with a grin.
I raised a brow. "Did you have brownie chunks stuck on your teeth then too?"
A fluffy slipper hurdled past my ear. Snorting, I mixed myself a protein shake from a plastic
jug. I finished frying my eggs and then hauled my meal over to the couch.
I sat next to my sister-in-law and placed the slipper beside its sibling before reaching for the
remote. "What do you think of that book?"
"Not bad. It's pretty informative, but the writing is hard to sit through. If you want to watch
something on the television, go right ahead. It won't distract me."
I turned on the TV and was greeted by a talk show host seated at a half-circle table with
three guests: a scientist, a comedian, and a retired ardent with a book coming out next
month.
"If you want to save some time," I offered, glancing at the back of Hanna's book, "just read
the chapters on parabeast physiology. All the author's theories on behavior were debunked
by a researcher in Canada."
"Really?" she asked. "Which researcher?"
"Him." I pointed my remote toward the ardent on the screen. "That book you're reading
clumped all parabeasts into categories by rift, like the different types of ants in an ant colony:
workers, soldiers, queens, etcetera."
"I already read that," said Hanna as she finished her brownie. "I thought it was crude but
persuasive."
"And that's the problem," I said between forkfuls of eggs. "A bad idea that's persuasive sells
books, which spreads misinformation."
Hanna smiled. "And what's so wrong with this author's argument?" she asked, clearly testing me for her own enjoyment.
I washed a mouthful of eggs down with the chalky, protein-enhanced milk. "For starters,
neither ants nor parabeasts behave identically, even in the same environment. You could cut
down a tree in the Amazon and find like a dozen different types of ants crawling in it.
Parabeasts are the same way. I've studied the scales and teeth of venators from the same
rift that looked nothing alike. Shoehorning them into scientifically dubious groups only
corrupts what understanding we do have."
"And what would you write instead?"
I shrugged. "Nothing. I'm not a scientist."
"Come on," she said plaintively. "Imagine you were my boss."
"Like that would ever happen!" I laughed.
"Humor me."
I scraped my plate clean. "Well, I'd say no matter how similar some rifts look, they can
contain completely different ecosystems. Deserts, forests, caverns, frozen wastelands…"
Waterfalls. "Sure, maybe some parabeasts in these different environments have common
ancestors, but the gaps between them are as huge as those between dragons and
dragonflies."
"We already know that," she countered. "The author specified that all he did was classify
them."
"And I'm saying he shouldn't have. Some of these rifts are so dissimilar that it wouldn't
surprise me if they come from completely different planets."
This made my sister-in-law pause a moment. "So, you're a proponent of the 'otherworlds'
theory?"
"Not really." I shrugged. "I'm just saying it's too soon to be publishing half-baked theories as
facts. We're still at the flat-Earth stage of understanding the parabeasts, and that goes
double for the rifts themselves. Even if they lead to a different world—or two, or
trillions—there's no way of knowing whether they exist in different dimensions or just some
other corner of our galaxy."
Hanna glanced at the author's picture on her book's dust jacket. "You know, Torrin, I read
these for research, but that's where I stop. It's just a desk job. You read even more books
than I do, and you actually pass through the rifts every chance you get."
"That's one of the few advantages of missing out on raden. More free time to use our oldest
superpower: reading. Do you mind if I change the channel?"
"Go right ahead".
I started flipping through the news.
"The problem with fallout shelters in China—"
"—growing danger in Korea and—"
"—report that raden levels are spiking exponentially throughout the Northern tropics,
impacting the populations of Southern Asia, Central Africa, South and Central America, the
Caribbean, and Hawaii. Government leaders are optimistic that the influx of tourists to these
parts will only bolster their economies, but they warn that illegal entry from Europe, Russia,
China, and the United States will be met with full military—"
I changed the channel again, hoping to find a cheerier subject to start the day.
"—continual new development. Invention often moves faster than implementation. The public
only hears a fraction of what comes out of the Global Defense Council, and they shouldn't
expect to know anything more about our methods than the law allows. Whoever leaked this
information is trying to cause panic, just like the propaganda used back when we still had
election years."
Ugh. Click.
"The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons treaty does not apply to the beyond. They were
agreements meant for this world! We cannot—"
I pressed the mute button, and the oily voice of the military spokesperson cut off.
Hanna swallowed before she spoke. "I hate it when they talk about using nukes inside the
rifts. I know we have every right to defend ourselves, but when has nuclear warfare ever
worked out for the human race?"
"I used to think that," I started, "but honestly, raden has changed the world so much that the
things we used to fight over, and fight with, are small potatoes now. I mean, nearly twenty
years of total world peace? An unheard-of record. The rifts united the globe, and the
radiation they released made most people stronger than the gods we used to worship. Sure,
we're still disagreeing over some political crap, but the more time we spend fighting
parabeasts inside the rifts, the fewer lives we lose to war and genocide here at home."
"I still don't like it." Hanna rubbed her belly like a totem. "I just want one generation of
humanity to grow up without ever going to war with itself. We are so close to doing that, and
I don't think we'll get another chance."
"Agreed across the board." I turned off the TV during a commercial for a sale on fallout
shelters. "Sorry for all the bad news."
"Don't apologize!" she laughed. "You don't rule the world".
Thank God," I said as I pushed off the sofa and walked over to the duffle bag I'd left beside
the door.
"Where do you think you're going?"
"To the Towers."
"Not without me, you aren't."
I smiled. "Hanna, didn't Seth take the car?" I waggled our one unbroken umbrella at her.
"You really want to walk all the way to the station in the rain?"
"What's a little rain?" Hanna heaved herself to her feet and made a beeline for the bathroom.
This time, I laughed out loud. "You're already on leave."
"I know!" she shouted behind her door. "But you raised a few good points about the rifts that I
want my colleagues to hear from you."
I nearly choked. "You can't be serious."
Hanna emerged from the bathroom with her hair up. "Come on. It'll be fun! Besides, it's good
to keep my research team on their toes. They're probably slacking off without me!" She shot
me a wink before disappearing into the bedroom she shared with Seth.
I shifted uneasily. "You know that, to them, I'm just a grunt from the armory." I pinched the
bridge of my nose and tried to suppress my rising anxiety. "Besides… I have training."
I also didn't exactly have a stellar reputation around the research wing of Lightbridge Towers.
"Oh, don't let them bother you." The bedroom door muffled Hanna's voice. "Researchers are
all competitive. And they probably already disliked you for your good looks."
Hanna opened the door and came out looking surprisingly business formal for someone
wearing little more than a black yoga outfit and a cream cardigan. Maybe it was the
high-level ID card hanging from a lanyard around her neck.
"Ready?" she asked, like I hadn't been the one waiting on her.
Huddled under one umbrella, we walked the block and a half to the nearest subway stop. My
left sleeve and pant leg were dripping by the time we hurried down the stairs into the tunnel
and tapped our cards at the turnstile. On the platform, business types in long raincoats vied
for space with ardents in their Conglomerate leathers, helmets under their arms and
sheathed weapons further bulking out their frames. I even spotted a few in finely made
boneplate armor, and one guy in a rich blue robe made of raden-channeling fibers with
pauldrons shaped like drake heads. It probably cost three years' worth of our rent money.