Chapter 1 #2
What I did know was that there were rules to this world I’d woken up in—I might not fully understand what the Rift was, or why I had been in it—but I knew that you didn’t stay with other people’s groups.
You passed by, traded with each other, exchanged information and then moved on.
You sure as shit didn’t show weakness—that was an invite for trouble.
“I’ll go then. Thank you for pulling me out. You have my gratitude.”
The giant red-haired man laughed and gently turned me around.
He was easily six and a half feet, and I found myself looking up at him.
“Where are you going to go to, lady? Dakota isn’t trying to run you off by saying you aren’t one of ours.
Just answering your question. Come on, my girl Helayne will get you something to eat, get you something to put on your feet too.
We don’t have much, but in this world…well…
we do our best to look out for our own kind, right? ”
He clapped me on the back, the meat of his hand spanning my upper back, the blow rattling my rib. I grit my teeth and blink away some stars. “Thanks…what was your name?”
“Well, my given name is Horace, which I fucking hate, so everyone who is my friend, calls me Red.”
My lips twitch upward. “Weird that they’d call you that.”
“Well now,” he frowned and motioned for me to follow him, “It’s on account of my hair, you see?”
“She’s yanking your fucking chain,” Dakota was on my other side and looked like he was holding back a laugh, better than the suspicion that had been in his eyes a moment before. “She knows why we call you Red. Don’t you?”
The urge to laugh with them or to make another joke at Red’s expense was right there on the tip of my tongue, but the truth was nothing about my situation was funny.
I had no idea who the fuck I was, where I was, or where I should be…
the world tilted as I realized just how lost I was—lost and alone.
The world tipped, something in the region of my heart squeezed as if my body was trying to tell me something awful, something I couldn’t remember.
I touched a hand to my chest and slowed my breathing.
Tried to at least, it was as if I were squeezing air through a too small tube, unable to fill my lungs.
“Whoa, you gonna fall back down again?” Red grabbed me and slung me up in his arms like I weighed nothing, nearly squeezing me in half, my rib jabbing me deeper. I couldn’t breathe. “Jeez, you’re a solid gal, bigger than I thought! Must have a lot of muscle. What’s your name then?”
“God,” Dakota groaned. “How the hell did you ever catch a woman, Red?”
“Like that,” I muttered around the rib poking at my innards, as Red held me. “She probably fell over, and he caught her.”
Dakota snorted and Red snickered. “Well maybe. But you still didn’t give a name.”
Before I could answer, there was an ear shattering caw of a bird, the flap of wings, a whoosh as if it had swooped by my head, the feathers brushing against my cheek.
“What the fuck?” Red held me a little tighter. “Dakota, you see that?”
“Hard to miss.”
I closed my eyes against the sensations, against the questions, the fear and the uncertainty, the world doing that strange tilt that I knew was my body trying to pass out and managed five words before the world went dark as the Rift. “I don’t know my name.”
I had only been out a few minutes at most. That’s what I thought, but when I cracked one eye open, the light had shifted. Longer shadows stretched across the floor, and a lantern glowed brightly next to where I lay.
A quick internal check told me my ribs had been wrapped. I lifted my shirt and pressed my fingers against the coarse bandage. It was tight, scratching my skin, pulling at me. Whoever had done this had taken their time. More than a few minutes. An hour, maybe more.
“Helayne, we pulled her out of the seam over there, the one at the edge of the forest that opened last night! She might not be human—I never heard of anyone coming out of a seam like that. We gotta be careful.” Red’s whisper was anything but quiet. I didn’t mind.
“You think she’s Riftborn? If she is, then the monsters have gotten awfully good at pretending to be one of us,” the woman said, her voice a proper whisper but I still heard her.
“I don’t know. You’re probably right but…a sorrowbird marked her. Nearly shit my pants as it went by.”
The caw, the feathers…that was a sorrowbird? My mind didn’t give me any hint of what it looked like, not like it had with the hybrids chasing me.
My larger concern was that Red…was he right? Could I be a monster like the hybrids?
Almost like an internal check, my mind denied the possibility. A monster wouldn’t have asked for help, wouldn’t have passed out in Red’s arms, a monster wouldn’t have run from the hybrids or been grateful to be pulled out of the darkness.
A bitch, maybe, but not a monster.
We were in an old canvas tent that had stains on several sides—water and something darker that could have been blood. Patched here and there, the canvas had a funk to it that only came with more use than not.
I lay on a cot, a thin sheet pulled up around me though it wasn’t particularly cold. The room had sparse furnishings, though all that was there looked to be specific to medical needs. Clean linens, shining scrubbed clean pots, mortar and pestle.
Several canisters were set along the edge of the table, with labels like Grey Bark, Grave root, Knit leaf, Blood flower, Dreamsap.
The one my eyes locked on though was Breathsbane. That one I knew and it was a killer.
The woman who sat beside me was in her mid-thirties, her dirty blonde hair swept up in a messy bun on top of her head, her face was lean, eyes a gentle brown. Clothes threadbare but clean too—more than I could say for myself.
I cleared my throat and tried to sit up.
Her hand set on my shoulder and pushed me gently back down.
Her voice was the one who’d asked me how I’d fallen in when the seam had only opened the night before.
Helayne. “No, just rest, Mallory. You broke two ribs. We’ve wrapped them for now. Resting is good.”
Wait. My brain scrambled. Had she just used my name? It didn’t sound familiar. “Do you know me? How do you know my name?”
Her smile was as gentle as her eyes, but sad. “No, hun I don’t know you, but you had a piece of ID in your back pocket.”
She held it out to me, a small square of hammered tin, a hole in the top for a chain. Dog tags.
I swept my thumb over the cold metal tag, feeling the letters, seeing them what felt like for the first time.
At least I hadn’t forgotten how to read, though the words didn’t seem like they belonged to me.
Mallory Swift
New Chicago
Born: August 15, Year 2
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Brown
There was no picture of course—not with this kind of ID. “I have blue eyes?” That felt odd to know when I should have known. How did one not feel like their eyes were blue? Gods this was fucked up. She handed me a thin string of leather and helped me put the ID on over my head.
“You have light blue eyes.” Helayne’s voice was kind and it tugged at my heart. Kindness was rare in our world—another truth I knew without understanding how.
I reached up and tugged the long length of my hair around to get a better look at it. Brown, medium brown. I blinked and stared at it sliding through my fingers. The length felt right but the color did not. “It doesn’t seem real.”
“Give yourself time, Mallory. If you hit your head, only time will heal it.” She smiled that same sad smile.
Above us, the tent canvas sagged under the weight of something. The dark shadow of a large bird was there and gone.
The urge to ask what a sorrowbird was, or if they really thought I was some sort of monster was there on the tip of my tongue but I chose to ignore it—it was the least of my worries.
I ran my fingers over the edge of the square metal tag, the ring on my left-hand ring finger catching my eye. The only real mark of identification other than this single piece of ID was the ring.
The ring was gold, but the edges sandwiching it were silver.
A wedding band for sure but I felt nothing, not even a whisper of a distant love.
I closed my eyes and spun it slowly with my thumb reaching to feel anything at all.
Was someone missing me too, or was I alone in this world, and that’s why I ended up in the Rift?
Not alone.
The confusion and contradictions did nothing more than irritate me.
On the ID hanging from my neck there was nothing about a married name or emergency contact. Shouldn’t there be something like that?
“What year is it now?”
“Year 34. That would make you, thirty-two by your ID. Do…you remember anything, Mallory? How you got here, or if anyone else was with you? No way to look you up unless you go into one of the bigger cities, even then so many records have been lost.” Helayne sat quietly beside me.
Her words made sense, but also, they didn’t. Year 34. Bigger cities. Lost records.
I scrunched up my face, then shook my head. “No. I don’t even know where here is…or what the Rift is but it seems to be important?” And apparently birthing bad things.
Monsters. Hybrids.
And me.