The warm air hit Cyrus’ face like a sledgehammer, and the sudden rush of moisture almost brought on a coughing fit. He struggled to lock it down, stumbled a bit and almost fell…

  …then he felt hands tug at the straps of his oversized backpack, and he let himself

  be half-walked, half-dragged out of the way. The ground was slippery underfoot, moss thick and bearing standard-issue bootprints. Cyrus set his feet carefully to keep from slipping.

  “There,” Phillips said. “You’re clear, Colfax. Puke if you have to, nobody’s around.”

  Cyrus let himself cough then, leaning on the nearby green-spotted wall, blasting out lungs full of Texas winter and drawing in gasping breaths of Elysia.

  “That’s right, your file said you had breathing problems,” Palmer muttered right in his ear.

  Cyrus froze as he realized who the OTHER set of hands on his shoulder was. He sucked in a little more air, then turned to look at Phillips for reassurance. No such luck, though. The officer was moving away, heading down the line of the chamber, crouching under the high windows.

  With no other option, Cyrus put on his best poker face and looked to Palmer. “Help me get the pack off,” he rasped, almost feeling the wetness of this world slide down his throat.

  “That’s why I’m here. Hold still.”

  Between the two of them, they got the pack off Cyrus’ back and settled it onto the ground. “Easy,” Cyrus told him as they got it down the last few inches. “Without this we’re stuck if it all goes to shit.”

  He was exaggerating, but not by much.

  The first time Cyrus had opened the world gate, he’d lucked into the method, even though he hadn’t realized it at the time. After seeing the undulating tendrils through his prototype scope, he’d used the device itself to make a circuit between them. At the time, he’d thought it had worked because the scope was mostly metal.

  It turned out it was more complicated than that.

  Once Cyrus and Bristol had gotten the current scope working properly, they’d tested various metal objects, used different combinations. Nothing had worked, at first. And they couldn’t risk sacrificing the only scope they had. The portal tended to fry half the objects they tried.

  But only half. Some merely slid through the tendrils without finding purchase, and hit the ground.

  Why only half? That had been the clue that cracked open the actual key. With Carmina’s help, they had narrowed down just why certain things got crispy.

  That was when Bristol had come through. Cyrus had only activated the portal through luck. Bristol used science, and skill.

  For all that Cyrus had grown up surrounded by a culture that scorned “book learning,” and valued common sense over fancy pants degrees, the older he got the more he realized that sometimes there just wasn’t a substitute for knowledge.

  And the fruits of that endeavor were in the pack right in front of him. Two forearm-length aluminum rods, woven with steel wire and studded with transistors. A light dusting of radium painted over with clear sealing glue glowed in the shadows, as Cyrus drew them out from the neatly packed tangle of heavy scope ports.

  “They’re beautiful,” Carmina whispered over his shoulder, and Cyrus almost fell over. He managed to rebalance himself and glare at his half-sister.

  “Thought I told you not to go invisible and sneak up on me out here.”

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  “I didn’t. Not my fault I’m quiet and you didn’t notice.” She reached out. “Give me one.”

  Cyrus kept eye contact. “You sure on this?”

  “Bristol says the math and the tests check out.”

  “That was a yes or no question. Didn’t hear a yes.”

  She rolled her eyes and snatched one of the rods from him. Cyrus straightened out of his squat in time to turn and watch her march straight up to the portal’s base, and wave it through the air. “You SHALL pass!” she said as she posed.

  “Been stealing my books again.” Cyrus grumbled as he watched the rainbow light flare and coalesce.

  But it was good to feel the tension ease from his back as his sister failed to burst into flames. It would have been a shitty way to lose one of the only kin he had left.

  The rainbow glory of the portal flickered, and Patrick Bateman stumbled through a second later, arms loaded down with sacks. Palmer moved up to steady him, but the pilot shook his head and passed over his cargo, one canvas bag at a time. “I’m fine. I can handle G-shifts and pressure drops, I can handle this.”

  As the last of the gear was sorted and settled, Bateman looked around in wonder. “Holy shit. You weren’t crazy after all.”

  “This thing is getting hot,” Carmina said. Her voice quavered a bit. “Can I…”

  “Yeah, we’re good,” Cyrus said, and his sister immediately backed up and put what they’d dubbed the ‘gate key’ onto the mossy ground. “Bristol said this might happen. Shoot, I was supposed to track that. Um…” he strolled back through his recollection. “You had it open… half a minute?”

  “About forty-five seconds,” Palmer said, as he checked and sorted the bags, adding them to a pile of stuff that the team had brought through.

  Cyrus reached into a BDU pocket, drew out a spare notebook, and jotted it down. “Right. I’ll check the gate key when it cools down some. Uh,” God DAMN, he hated being in charge, “Carmina, how’s your… concealment? How’s that thing going?”

  Carmina smiled. “Good. It’s hiding the sight and sound of anyone inside the ruin from anyone outside the ruin. It cost a lot to cast but only poquito… only a little bit to keep going because it only acts up when someone is there to be affected. It only activated once. I think someone passed by. Probably an elf, they have rangers.”

  “Well so do we,” Cyrus smiled. He touseled her hair and she squeaked and pulled away.

  Cyrus picked his way down the gallery of the ruin’s main room, doing his best to stay out of the windows.

  It took a moment or five to find Phillips, crouched down and talking with Guiscare. Not far away, one of the privates peered out the nearest window, scanning the swamp beyond with binoculars.

  “What’s the sitch, sir? Ah, Major?” Shit, old habits were coming back. He had to watch that.

  “Colfax,” Phillips glanced back. “All quiet. Specialists Mossjaeger and Holden are scouting the treeline. PFC Potts had a bad reaction upon breaching. Doctor Guiscare treated him for nausea, and he’s recovering in a secured room now. The others are monitoring the perimeter.”

  “A secured room?” Cyrus blinked.

  Phillips pointed to what Cyrus had initially taken as a patch of shadow. “Recessed stairs, the tunnel turns at the bottom. There’s a twenty by twenty round chamber. No other way in or out.”

  “Perfect,” Cyrus shot a glance toward the window. “That’s our HQ. Help me get the scope parts down there.”

  Five minutes later, Cyrus was sitting on a squishy mud floor and getting to work.

  The initial thought behind the gate keys was that ideally, one could just get them in the general area of the breach and wave the key around to trigger it. A couple of fried keys attached to (thankfully,) grounded waldoes had nixed that idea. The breach was like a jellyfish, with multiple wiggly tendrils of energy that was KINDA like electricity but not really. You had to connect two, and only two of the tendrils.

  The good thing was once you did that, the other tendrils pulled away. You just had to slide it in like a tension bar popping tumblers.

  Carmina could do it easily, that had just been proven. Her assensing trick could let her see what she was doing.

  But the grim reality was that they had to account for the possibility of losing Carmina.

  The newest iteration of the scope was man-portable. Technically the other one was too, but this was less fragile, far less back-breaking.

  Cyrus raised the bazooka-like thing to his head, put his eye to the viewport. He attached the wires to the car battery, slotted it into place, and cycled the scope on. It activated, and the shadowy little room flickered into view, though the electric lantern holding down the edge of the tarp was putting out some pretty nasty light distortion.

  He panned it around, and caught the pale, freckled face of PFC Potts, slumped against the wall and staring at him in fascination.

  “Sir? What is that? Some kind of weapon?”

  “No,” Cyrus said, powering it down and thinking of just why it was needed. “Just a tool I hope we never have to use.”