Excerpt
Chapter One
Montanhas Realm
August 2017
Leena Cohen had never killed anyone, and she didn't intend to change that today. There'd been a few close calls. A riot in Zorras, Chile, when she was chased to the corporate helicopter by a massive mob; the wars in the late '80s that forced them to shut down harvesting operations on the eastern side of Iraq; the mugger in Manhattan with a knife and balls the size of the borough who demanded her purse while she was wearing her Hall robes after leaving an alumni gathering.
"Will you authorize lethal force?" asked Mikhail Dresden, her head of security. The man had the warmth of a reptile. She was always surprised when he blinked. His blue eyes matched the environment in Montanhas—cold and inhospitable.
"The day I authorize lethal force is the day that we have irrevocably failed."
"Gate security personnel was hit with a rock. He'll need twelve stitches and need to be sent back for an MRI at the next available opportunity. It could have killed him."
Leena stared out the window overlooking the Lifestone compound. On the far side of the brick offices, past the barriers and shock lines that encircled the gate, a mixed group of humans and Montas with signs that read No Lifestone in Montanhas! or Corporate Rapers chanted.
"No reprisals. Your man shouldn't have had his helmet off, nor been outside the gate building. He was taunting them. I watched the footage," said Leena as she took a sip of her black coffee. "Control your people."
"My apologies, but if you don't allow me to make a statement, they'll be emboldened by your reluctance. Fault or no."
Dresden stared unblinking, as if he knew her thoughts.
"Noted," said Leena.
When he left, she shivered. There'd be a missive to headquarters, a complaint about her unwillingness to back his reprisal and that it was jeopardizing safety—as if violence could prevent violence.
Leena stared past the company compound to the ring of mountains—jagged, snow-kissed, a greenish tinge from copper corrosion, as the rocks were dotted with the mineral. Her mind tricked her into thinking it was Earth. At least until she glanced into the sky to the twin moons that hovered over the mountains: one grayish blue, the other rust red. Olho Frio and Vermelha. Night brought unfamiliar stars. She liked to tell herself she was still in her original universe and that one of those pinpricks could have been the sun, but researchers at the Halls had long ago proved these were separate universes, each to its own rules, like soap bubbles pushing against each other. Some were stranger than others. The idea of the Eternal City fascinated her, but the maetrie were dangerous and prickly, a deadly combination. Montanhas, thankfully, was nearly identical to her own world.
A faint rumble in the balls of her feet brought a tightness in her midsection. It was the third one this week. Leena checked the seismograph, noting the unsightly squiggle mark. The circular graph next to the first showed a similar trajectory, except it was measuring the presence of faez. A report on her desk from headquarters projected there could be a significant impact to the region in the window of six to fifteen months, which had increased their demands to extract as much product from the region as possible before they were forced to shut it down.
The gray smoke over the factory alerted her to a new batch of Aevita, the life-extension elixirs that had been a huge hit back home. No one else had been able to duplicate their results because they didn't understand the critical quality that gave their users three to five times the extension that D'Agastine Industries' and Pyramid Health's did. The only problem was that bathing their alchemical agents in copious amount of faez created secondary problems like the degradation of local environments. It'd cost Lifestone a fortune to find another realm that had thin barriers where faez could be extracted, since industry in the Undercity beneath Invictus was forbidden.
