If I told Hindley about my concerns as a new captain, she might dislike being forced to be the one to oversee my role. I wanted her to have faith in me. No, I needed her to believe in my abilities. If I confessed my struggles with handling my team, it might make me sound weak.
"It's been all right, overall," I said, forcing the words to come out cool and calm. "I'll try to do better during the drill next time by making sure my team is actually ready."
Hindley paused. For a moment, I expected her to pounce on my denial, but she merely gave a polite nod and shuffled the papers in front of her. She was hard to read. I'll get better at figuring her out eventually. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was a pleasant working relationship with a challenging boss. I would do better.
"There's a new mission," Hindley announced, and briefly looked at her papers. I had no doubt that Hindley had already memorized everything that was on that page, but that stack was thick. The monster assignments usually came in smaller packets. I shifted, both excited and nervous about what was to come. "You're going to take the Hellraisers into the Sierra Nevada mountain range for your next assignment. We've sent a few teams to investigate an area near a small lakeside town that was partially sucked into the Immortal Plane during the meld. Until recently, the area wasn't dangerous and there were few reports of monster activity from the remaining residents. Things have changed."
She let me process that information. Last time I checked, the worst area was where Lyra and Bryce had gone in western Utah two days ago.
"Is it monster hunting?" I asked, because the papers seemed far too numerous to be just for a simple assignment. My Valentine's Day paperwork was only six pages, most of them grainy photos that our tech squad managed to get with cameras at the edge of the forest. They’d had to go back and update them with cameras specifically for night photography once we’d figured out the beasts were particularly active after sunset. Luckily, for my last assignment, we’d had Jessica's grating voice to lure the gator monster out.
"I'm sure there will be some sprinkled in, but the nature of this mission is higher priority than your past assignments. Human survivors have been rescued from this town near the Sierras, but they've told us that many people have disappeared. They were with the other survivors one moment, but when the meld finished, they were simply gone," Hindley relayed.
A shiver worked down my spine.
Kane had disappeared like that. It was insane how one moment I could be looking at him, and the next he was gone. The harvester kids, too. I remembered Chipper's ghostly touch suddenly vanishing, as if the universe had ripped him away.
"Understood." I wanted her to tell me the goal, because there could be many, but there was no rushing Hindley. In our short time together, I had learned she liked to explain things properly. This annoyed me, but the whole bureaucratic system annoyed me at times. The Bureau was dragging its feet with explorations of the Leftovers because they had to be cautious. It was dangerous out there. Even the few vampire scouts who came through the safe and established portals feared coming through from the Immortal Plane into the Leftover areas. It was better to send highly trained teams. It's why Lyra went to Black Rock. Normal human teams wouldn’t be as successful with little to no knowledge of the Immortal Plane and its monsters.
I paused as Hindley looked for a piece of paper in the middle of the packet, and a hard lump of anticipation settled in my throat. Something she’d said stuck in my mind.
"You said it wasn't dangerous before," I pointed out. "What changed?"
She yanked a page from the packet and placed it in front of me. It was a map of the Sierra Nevada mountain range with three circles in red. A total number of survivors sat in a tidy box next to it. Thirty-five.
"Monsters don't like to lay dormant for long," she said simply. "There's an increased report of strange activity, happening at a level like the Black Rock area. People are disappearing again from the rest of the town. Your goal is to take your team of hunters, find what is attacking people outside the Leftovers, and eliminate it." I studied the map in front of me. "The circles you see are recent interactions with the local environment that two teams failed to make much progress with. The mountain, or whatever mutated part of it that's left, didn't seem to want the old teams to go in."
She talked of the mountains as though they were sentient.
"I'm not letting rocks and trees stop me," I muttered.
"I've included the reports for you to look over." Her brow furrowed into a light expression of genuine concern. "You should be warned. The soldiers reported that the landscape appeared to be responding to them."
While the landscape in the Leftovers near Salt Lake City was strange, I’d never gotten more than a spooky vibe from it. To be fair, I was more focused on monsters whenever I went out to those areas, so I rarely paid much attention to the odd trees left behind in the meld. They appeared as weird as all plant life did to me in the Immortal Plane. I traced the trails that the last two failed teams had attempted.
