Chapter 68 - The Cruzeiro Shortcut

Their return from the bakery was marked by a brown paper grocery bag stuffed with warm cheese bread, three bottles of soda, and two tubs of ice cream that Maria insisted on hauling in her arms like war trophies.

The moment the heavy deadbolt of the Acacias penthouse clicked shut, Nicole stripped off the knit beanie and cloth mask with a long sigh of relief.

Her dark hair tumbled over her brow, the two small rounded horn buds drinking in the climate-controlled air as the chitin mandibles along her jaw flexed in an unhurried stretch. Tossing the sunglasses onto the entryway console, she padded directly into the kitchen, hopping onto one of the tall granite barstools with an excitement she couldn't hide in her four amber eyes.

She spent the following thirty minutes investigating every switch and knob within reach.

She opened the refrigerator door three times in a row simply to watch the interior white LED lamp snap to life in the dark, filled a glass with chilled water straight from the dispenser nozzle, and stood mesmerized before the fifty-inch television as Maria keyed the remote.

When the flat panel illuminated with an aerial documentary surveying the Amazon river basin, sweeping across winding rivers and unbroken emerald canopies basking under golden sunlight, Nicole slid off the stool, halting two steps from the glass screen.

She stared at the macaws wheeling over the forest canopy, her slit pupils completely blown open.

"That forest where we landed..." She pointed at the screen with an ungloved finger. "...has flocks of birds flying completely free like that? No iron cages and no metal plating across their wings?"

"Has a whole lot more than that, girl," Maria answered from the couch, working through her third roll with her long legs sprawled over the coffee table. "There are six-foot freshwater fish that don't bite with steel fangs, monkeys swinging through the branches, and warm rain falling like clockwork at four in the afternoon."

Nicole traced the plastic bezel of the television with her fingertips, fascinated by the total absence of furnace heat radiating from the device.

"And nobody clears that forest for iron ore?"

"Loggers take some down for cattle pasture and hardwood timber," Maria shrugged, taking a swig of cold soda. "The jungle is immense, though. That stretch of dirt in Acre where Dante mapped the rift is so far beyond the back of beyond that the authorities barely have the patrol cars to check the fences."

Dante stepped out of the office at the end of the hall, carrying a stack of laser-printed sheets alongside a black credit card fitted with a security chip.

He took the other end of the leather sofa, nudging Maria's shins aside with his forearm to clear space on the coffee table.

He laid out the printouts across the glass.

They were high-resolution satellite composites of the rural boundaries of Cruzeiro do Sul, accompanied by title deeds and land registry certificates he had pulled from the Brazilian digital notary registry over the past twenty minutes.

"The bakery run was well earned," Dante said, his voice settling into the strategic cadence that steered the party's operational decisions. "We didn't come here to spend two weeks eating pastries on the balcony, though. We came to eliminate our primary logistical bottleneck."

Nicole turned away from the screen, padding over to the coffee table on silent, bare feet.

She perched on the edge of the adjacent armchair, drawing her oversized hoodie sleeves down over her wrists as she looked over the aerial surveys scored with swathes of emerald jungle and red dirt roads.

"What is a logistical bottleneck?" Nicole asked, the phrasing foreign on her lips.

"A bottleneck is spending eighteen days trapped on an ore car every single time we need to rotate out of the Capital," Dante tapped the map of Earth with his pen. "The military freight functions, but the round trip devours forty days of transit. That bleeds our hunting tempo dry and leaves townhouse forty-two abandoned for weeks, inviting scavengers to breach the workshop."

He highlighted the enlarged satellite shot of a clearing bounded by dense rainforest, bisected by a silver ribbon of water:

"The parcel we spotted with the for-sale sign sits at mile nine along Highway BR-364. Exactly one hundred and fifty acres encompassing cleared pasture, native timber, and an unpolluted freshwater stream running along the back. The title belongs to a cattle rancher who resides in town, registered under a clean deed at the district courthouse."

"What does he want for it?" Maria asked, washing down another bite.

"Three hundred and eighty thousand reais," Dante answered without missing a beat. "Lump-sum wire transfer straight out of our brokerage account. We have over a million and a half parked in daily liquidity notes that have been compounding interest over the last seven years. Three hundred and eighty thousand doesn't leave a dent."

A provenance note for curious readers: carries the author's publication, while this copy was made without permission. Reading there helps.

Nicole studied the figures on the real estate printout.

"If we buy this land... what changes for us down below?"

Dante met her gaze, his gray eyes locking onto her four amber lenses.

"It changes everything, Nicole," Dante said, his voice carrying the calm weight of undeniable certainty. "Planar Transit operates on strict vertical coordinate correspondence. Townhouse forty-two in the Capital, over on the First Great Continent, aligns along the exact dimensional axis as that red clay pasture in Acre."

He brought his palms together, hovering one flat over the other separated by two inches of air.

"As it stands, we must ride an eighteen-day freight run back to the Ash Wastes just to pop the rift into this southeastern penthouse," he pulled his hands apart to illustrate the gap. "Once we pour a concrete slab and erect a reinforced masonry bunker on that parcel in Acre, the jump between our workshop in the Capital and our living room in Brazil will take precisely two seconds."

Nicole caught her breath.

The small chitin plates along her jaw clicked in a rapid twitch.

"Two seconds?" she whispered, her hands balling in her lap. "We step out of the iron Capital... and two seconds later we're standing in that jungle?"

"Two seconds flat," Dante confirmed. "We can hunt monsters all morning in the Tar Mire, strip the cores, trigger the rift inside the workshop in the Boilermakers' Village, eat lunch on our homestead in Brazil, and jump back to the Capital before the Legion's afternoon watch even changes. The iron empire becomes our workplace, and Earth remains our inviolable shelter."

Maria grinned, slapping her heavy palm onto her denim thigh.

"That is tactical paradise, Dante," Maria boomed. "No more dry flour in a coal gondola. No more iron ballast grit in our teeth for eighteen days straight."

Nicole looked down at the aerial photos of the red road on the table.

Her excitement dipped, yielding to the instinctual caution that never left her for long.

"There is an obstacle," Nicole murmured, tapping a thumbnail against her brow beneath her dark fringe. "You said that to reach this Acre town you must board that metal bird at the airport terminal. You told me the security scanners will flag me the second I try to board with these horns and this jaw."

Dante let out a brief scoff through his nose, producing two electronic flight confirmations he had booked on his phone.

"You aren't boarding any plane, Nicole," Dante replied with complete serenity.

Nicole knitted her brows, confused. "I stay here alone?"

"You hold down this apartment with the deadbolt locked and a refrigerator full of groceries," Dante explained the play with practiced patience. "Tomorrow morning at five-thirty, Maria and I catch a taxi down at the lobby, head to Guarulhos International, and board a commercial flight using our clean Brazilian national identity cards. We are ordinary humans, legally of age under our court decrees, and nobody looks twice at two students traveling north."

He set the itinerary onto the glass:

"We touch down in Rio Branco at ten in the morning, catch the regional hop into Cruzeiro do Sul, and land by midday. We meet the broker directly at the land registry office, wire the three hundred and eighty thousand reais straight from our accounts, sign the deed, and take the gate keys."

Nicole hung on every word, absorbing each contingency.

"And then?"

"Once the parcel is legally ours, Maria and I rent a truck in town and drive nine miles out along the dirt road to the exact turnout where our rift opened this morning," Dante offered a sharp smirk. "We pull off into the trees where no passing traffic can see. I trigger the rift into townhouse forty-two in the Capital, jump from there to our old redoubt in the Ash Wastes via our established route, open the portal back to this very living room, take you by the arm, and shuttle you straight through to our homestead in Brazil."

Nicole blinked her four amber eyes, her jaw parting as the full architecture of the scheme assembled in her head.

"You..." She looked from Dante to Maria, letting out an astonished laugh through her nose. "...you're using Hell as a subterranean bypass beneath the airport network to smuggle me across the country without ever crossing a checkpoint?"

"The dimensional rift charges no baggage fee and there are no security scanners buried in basalt bedrock, girl," Maria answered with a boisterous laugh, bumping her elbow into the huntress's shoulder. "We sidestep border patrol by turning another dimension into our transit tunnel. Cleanest contraband run this country has ever seen."

Nicole leaned back against the plush armchair, letting her breath out slowly, an unvarnished admiration lighting her slit pupils that she made no effort to mask.

"You are brilliant, Dante," she murmured, gazing at him with an intensity that brought a faint warmth creeping to the tips of his ears behind his dark fringe. "Not a soul in that entire Citadel would ever conceive of a vector like that."

Dante cleared his throat, snapping his gaze toward the office monitors down the hall to brush off the fluster.

"It is merely spatial optimization," he answered briskly, gathering the papers from the table with hurried efficiency. "We depart tomorrow at five in the morning. You have rations in the pantry, the television is on, and the deadbolt stays thrown from the inside. Nobody sets foot on this top floor without a lobby key."

Maria rose from the couch, snagging the last cheese roll from the basket, waving the remote toward the glowing screen on the wall.

"Drop the bureaucracy, bighead, I'm teaching Nicole how to run this remote," Maria gestured to the huntress. "Today you find out what cartoons and terrestrial action movies are all about. And tomorrow night we meet on the other side of the jungle with a signed land deed in hand."

Nicole popped up from the armchair with an agile leap on bare feet, a bright smile lighting her pale features as she slid in beside Maria on the deep leather sofa, ready to spend the next twelve hours discovering the world that would become her permanent sanctuary from the iron empire within two days.