Chapter 63 - Red Earth

The inner courtyard of townhouse forty-two was sealed behind double cast-iron padlocks, the workshop's crossbar dropped securely into place from within.

No sound from the cobblestone lane of the Boilermakers' Village penetrated the thirteen-foot walls of dark basalt.

Dante stood at the center of the slag pavement, two empty mountain rucksacks resting on the stones beside his boots. He wore an ordinary waterproof canvas duster, stripped of his leather vest and hunting reagent pouches.

Maria stood beside him in jeans and a plain black shirt, her six-and-a-half-foot greatsword sheathed and lashed with cloth ties to keep the steel from clattering.

Nicole lingered three paces back, her black-scaled coat buttoned to the chin, her twin daggers concealed beneath the loose drape of the leather.

She stared at the clean stone flags under Dante's feet, her four amber eyes narrowed in a suspicion that had not entirely dissolved.

"We're doing this in here?" Nicole asked in an undertone, her voice laced with nervous tension.

"Right here," Dante answered, opening the fourth tab of his mental interface. "You need to understand the physics of this transition before you lay a hand on my arm, Nicole."

He pointed his index finger toward the dark stone floor of the courtyard.

"We aren't stepping into our comfortable penthouse in the Acacias district, where there is running municipal water, television, and groceries in the fridge," Dante explained the mechanics of the jump. "If we wanted to reach that apartment, we'd have to take the train back, spend eighteen days rattling over iron gravel, and open the rift inside the stone shelter out in the Ash Wastes, twenty-six hundred miles from where we stand."

Maria stepped forward, crossing her heavy arms over her chest.

"The rift here cuts straight up into the soil resting directly above this city, girl," Maria added. "A patch of dirt in northern Brazil we've never laid eyes on in our lives. A rural town called Cruzeiro do Sul, out in the deep woods near the Peruvian border. We know nobody there, and we have no safehouse built on that ground yet."

Nicole looked between them, swallowing dry.

"Why are we going there now?"

"So you see the dirt exists," Dante held his open right hand toward her. "So you know our escape route isn't tavern gossip. And because I need to calibrate the spatial coordinates before dropping a million reais on that land deed."

He locked his gaze onto the huntress's eyes.

"One non-negotiable rule: you do not drop your cowl on that plane. You have horn buds on your skull, pointed ears, and chitin plates along your jaw. Humans in that world have no interface, no classes, and assume monsters are television folklore. A single local farmer catches sight of your face on that dirt road, federal police seal the border in two hours."

Nicole pulled the black lizard-skin hood over her crown with a firm yank, shading her brow down to her lash line, drawing the collar high over her snout until only her dark, faceted eyes peered from the fabric's shadow.

Stepping forward two paces, she reached out her gloved right hand and gripped Dante's forearm with a tension that locked her shoulders tight.

Maria planted her heavy palm on Dante's left shoulder, completing the circuit.

Dante closed his eyes.

The fourth menu tab flared across his retina in silent silver runes.

[Tab 04: Planar Transit.]

[Registered Origin: Central Bastion of Iron Souls (Residential Courtyard 42).]

[Surface Destination: Terrestrial Equivalent Coordinate (Tier 1).]

[Active Passenger Link: 2 entities in direct biological contact.]

[Mana Consumption: 120 MP.]

[Anchoring countdown: 3 seconds... 2... 1...]

The snap of the dimensional vacuum ripped the three of them off the slag cobblestones.

The sensation was not the violent tumble over volcanic gravel they had known before.

It felt as though a colossal hydraulic sluice gate had swung wide within the center of the chest, followed by a sudden gravitational decompression that sent blood rushing straight to Nicole's head.

The stench of coal soot, hot engine grease, and iron dust vanished in a split second.

The surface under their rubber boot soles was not cast metal.

It was damp earth.

A soft, reddish clay, tangled with rotting leaves and thick tree roots that yielded an inch beneath their combined weight.

Nicole hit her knees in the red mud with a wet squelch.

The huntress clutched both hands to her chest, her mouth falling open beneath the collar of her coat in a desperate scramble for air.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The air on this plane held no Mana density.

It was a thin, weightless atmosphere, scrubbed clean of mineral particles, devoid of etheric pressure to the point where Nicole's lungs felt completely hollow on her first inhalation. There was no acidic burn of sulfur, no high-voltage static that made hair stand on end like in the avenues of the Capital.

The stillness of the clearing was staggering to someone who had drawn every breath under the deafening roar of trip-hammers and steam pistons.

The only sound in the clearing was the relentless drone of invisible cicadas in the canopy, the steady drip of rainwater rolling off tropical leaves ninety feet up, and a warm breeze rustling through dense jungle brush.

Nicole looked up through the slit of her hood.

The sky was not purple.

It was an endless vault of pale blue, swept by drifting white clouds, lit by a brilliant yellow sun whose natural heat warmed her face without the choking reek of burning coal.

Earth's sun.

The daylight struck Nicole's four multifaceted lenses, forcing her pupils to snap shut into hairline threads as they adjusted to the unvarnished radiance of a tropical midday.

"What... what is this?" Her voice came out in a faint rasp, her gloved fingers sinking into the red clay. "The air... weighs nothing. There's no iron in the breath."

Maria released Dante's shoulder, taking a long, unhurried breath through her nose with her eyes closed, spreading her arms wide.

"Jungle air," Maria said, her tone carrying an easy relief she hadn't displayed in nearly a month. "No boiler soot, no rancid machine oil. This is Brazil, Nicole."

Dante pulled his smartphone from the inner pocket of his duster.

The glass display woke with a press of his thumb.

The digital clock read eleven-forty in the morning on a bright Thursday. In the upper right corner of the screen, the cellular signal icon flickered twice in yellow before steadying on a single bar of satellite data roaming.

Dante brought up the offline mapping application.

The blue beacon pulsed in the center of the satellite overlay:

Highway BR-364 - Unpaved stretch nine miles outside the urban perimeter of Cruzeiro do Sul, State of Acre.

Dante surveyed their surroundings with clinical focus.

They had landed in an abandoned turnout of red clay, fifty yards off an unpaved road bounded by old barbed-wire fences strung on hardwood posts. Beyond the fence line stretched an overgrown pasture of signal grass and wild rubber trees climbing toward the untouched rain forest of the western ridges.

Tacked to a weathered cedar post by the ditch, a rusted tin sign bore hand-painted lettering in faded white enamel:

For Sale: 150 Acres with Freshwater Stream. Inquire at City Registry.

Dante let out a brief scoff through his nose, slipping the handset into his pocket.

"The parabolic curve landed dead-center on the fence line," Dante pointed toward the weathered sign. "One hundred and fifty acres of isolated timber, a freshwater stream running out back, and zero neighbors for over a mile in any direction."

Maria walked up to the barbed-wire fence, resting a heavy hand on one of the hardwood posts.

She looked down the straight red dirt road vanishing into the forest. Far off, miles in the distance, the muffled drone of a four-cylinder diesel engine from an old farm pickup broke the forest quiet, rolling down the road without the driver having the faintest inkling that fifty paces off the shoulder stood three hunters from another dimensional plane.

"Buying this dirt is pocket change for us, Dante," Maria remarked, taking in the green horizon. "We liquidate five hundred thousand reais from the brokerage account, execute the deed using our emancipation decrees, and contract a crew to pour a double-walled concrete barn right in the center of these trees."

Nicole remained kneeling in the red earth.

The huntress reached out her right hand, touching a wild fern frond growing along the margin of a clear rainwater puddle.

The leaf was vibrant green, soft to the touch, devoid of the mineral plating or leaden stiffness infernal vegetation developed to survive sulfur heat. An ordinary red ant crawled along the stem, working its spindly legs without ferrite armor or acid glands in its jaws.

She lifted her head slowly, watching the blue horizon where a flock of long-winged birds cut across the sky heading south, flying free with no Legion artillery batteries tracking their flight path.

The chitin mandibles beneath Nicole's cowl snapped shut with quiet force.

Her hands trembled, curling into the red mud until the moisture soaked through the leather of her gloves.

"It's real..." the girl whispered, her voice rough, tears welling in the multifaceted lenses of her amber eyes before being swallowed by the sheer conceptual shock. "A world where people aren't born branded to pay off debts in a boiler. Where the ground isn't forged from crushed iron."

Dante took two paces forward, stopping at her shoulder.

"It's real," Dante answered quietly, standing straight against the jungle breeze. "And this patch of dirt is our extraction route when we drop down into Sector Zero."

He looked toward the unpaved road, listening to the diesel engine fade into the distance.

"We don't enter the town today," Dante established the parameters. "We aren't dressed in standard Earth clothing, and you can't walk down a municipal sidewalk with that hood drawn without drawing local law enforcement. We came solely to lock the anchor and verify the passage is stable."

He offered his open right hand to her.

"We head back to the townhouse now, Nicole. We have sanitation contracts to execute and scrip to bank before we book the flights to execute this deed."

Nicole looked down at the red earth beneath her knees for three more seconds, searing the scent of wet foliage and the yellow warmth of that clean sun into the deepest vaults of her trench-hardened mind.

Then she rose with her customary fluid grace, dusted the mud from her trousers with quick slaps of her hands, and gripped Dante's forearm with a firm, unwavering hold.

Maria caught the boy's opposite shoulder, closing the circuit.

Dante triggered the recall command on his interface.

Planar Transit: Return to Anchor Point.

The dimensional vacuum collapsed the clearing in the Amazon basin, wrenching the three of them from the warm forest breeze, dropping them two seconds later onto the cold slag cobblestones of the inner courtyard of townhouse forty-two in the Boilermakers' Village.

The crushing Mana density of the Capital descended over Nicole's lungs like a lead blanket, carrying the familiar reek of coal soot and the deafening roar of the Second District's trip-hammers.

Yet the girl did not hit her knees this time.

She kept her boots firmly planted on the dark basalt flags, the red Amazonian clay drying swiftly under the heat venting from the workshop, meeting the thirteen-foot stone walls with a cold, unbreakable spark in her amber eyes.

The secret was no longer the lunacy of two arrogant youths.

The earth was real, the escape hatch was open, and the absolute certainty that this iron empire was not the only destiny for their lives had just become the most lethal weapon any of the three could carry into battle.