There were just so many in Khan’s care, and there was no rhyme or reason to the way he’d arranged them. Ancient treatises on fabric weaving lay next to a tome dedicated to Empyreal lineages, and that rested in a case situated between a volume on basic cycling and another with recipes for lotus flowers. The only way to find my target was to look in each case and pray that it held what I needed. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Time was ticking away, but I couldn’t leave.
Finally, forty-five minutes after I’d left the School, I found what I needed. The trio of orichalcum keys rested on a black velvet pillow inside a glass case. Thin, almost invisible, wires ran down the corners of the panes into the case, and from there they continued down into the circuits beneath the floor. The instant the glass broke, an alarm would summon the police. Most importantly, once Khan’s guard heard the alarm, he’d activate a very expensive security technique that would prevent any portals in or out of that basement. In the most recent article I’d read, Khan bragged that it would take less than thirty seconds for any burglars to be trapped in his vault.
The urge to grab the keys and run welled up inside me. But I held off. I’d only get one shot at this. The timing had to be absolutely perfect. So I waited.
And I waited some more.
An hour had passed since I’d jumped through the portal into Tariq’s basement. Then seventy minutes. Maybe I’d made a mistake. If my mother had outsmarted me here, everything was ruined.
The sizzling crack of a portal opening in the basement reached my ears, and a wave of relief poured over me. Finally, the bad guys had shown their faces.
“I’m over here,” I shouted, and summoned a blazing ball of jinsei that lit up half the basement as bright as day.
“It’s him!” someone shouted, and a dozen figures charged across the basement toward me. They crashed into the display cases, knocked books to the floor, and set off a loud, piercing alarm. Red and white strobe lights burst to life. Their flashing illumination turned my opponents’ charge into eerie still frames.
It was time to go.
I cracked the portal return token in my left hand and drove my right elbow through the glass display case that held the keys.
My enemies raised their weapons and sent a storm of bullets tearing across the basement. I trusted to instinct and ducked beneath the deadly hail of projectiles and rushed toward the portal that opened beside me.
“Close it!” I shouted to the intern. He bobbed his head and slapped his hand down on the control panel. The portal snapped shut behind me, instantly silencing the alarm I’d triggered.
“Are you in trouble?” he asked me.
“Always,” I said. “But not as much as the people trapped in that basement.”
It was hard to stop grinning. My mother had clearly invested a lot of her forces into coming after me. With any luck, they’d been trapped in that basement by Khan’s security system. In the meantime, my friends and I had a clear shot at our goal with no heretics on our tail.
“I’ve held the other portal stable. You’re good to go, Mr. Warin,” the intern said. “Abi said you’re a hero. I’m proud to help you.”
Hero. That was not how I thought of myself. If I could roll back time and get a do-over on my entire life, be born to parents who didn’t treat me like an occult experiment, I’d do it in a heartbeat. There was a rush to saving the world, I wouldn’t deny that. But it was also terrifying, frustrating, and way more work than I ever felt like doing.
“Thanks,” I said as I strung the keys I’d stolen on the chain around my neck. They weighed surprisingly little, and were warm against my skin. It was comforting to think that we almost had everything we needed to head for the Umbral Forge. “That means a lot.”
I raced into the frigid teeth of the Siberian wilderness, pulled my goggles down over my eyes, and followed my friends’ footsteps into the darkness.
The Tomb
IT WAS HARD TO DESCRIBE the cold that gripped me when I emerged from the portal. The frigid temperature had a physical presence, like a hungry creature that lurked just out of sight. Every breath burned, each gust of wind chapped my lips raw, even through the scarf I’d pulled up over my mouth. Icicles weighed down my lashes and returned seconds after I brushed them away with the back of a glove.
I followed the trail that marked my friends’ passing, pushing sacred energy into my channels to keep myself moving. If I stopped, even for a minute, my disciple-level core wouldn’t be enough to save me from the monstrous cold that wanted to drain every bit of warmth from my flesh.
Lake Baikal was off to my left, a gleaming expanse of whitewater waves dotted with floes of ice. It was more of a sea than a lake, its distant shore lost in layers of fog so thick they looked like walls of gray stone.
I focused my thoughts on the stark beauty of the wilderness and the people who’d lived here so long ago. They’d survived without fancy snow gear or electricity. Their lives had been hard-won races from one survival crisis to another. Those were dark times, indeed.
In some ways, though, I envied those who’d come before. There was no time for politics when your biggest concern was whether you’d find a caribou or a mammoth to feed yourselves. When everyone had to pull together to live, they couldn’t afford to stab each other in the back.
There was something pure about that way of life. I wondered if I would’ve survived in those long-gone days.
Despite
