Chapter 1
Earlier that day…
Moving furtively, her long copper hair hidden under a dark hooded sweater, Kate swiped her pass card and walked into the building.
Her reflection was briefly caught in the double glazing: wide hazel-green eyes in a round face, bow-shaped lips, and a smattering of redhead freckles over the bridge of her nose and the tops of her full cheeks.
It was three a.m. and nobody, not even the campus cops, was around.
This was the time she did her best work, her most important work.
She wasn’t supposed to be there, of course, but Kate had gotten used to skirting the rules in the name of getting what she wanted and needed.
She was toting a big backpack that contained a bunch of items technically belonging to the college, stuff she took between her apartment and the lab so she could work on it wherever she was.
The lab did have a few toys she didn’t have at home though, hence the late-night visit.
Technically what she was doing was stealing.
Technically it was also breaking several federal restrictions on research.
Technically… she’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble if she got caught.
Fortunately, Kate was able to put all those technicalities aside and focus on the task at hand.
She didn’t feel bad about breaking the law. She practically considered it her duty.
Real work, real science, that didn’t take place during daylight hours.
It never had. Not since the fathers of science had begun their explorations of the physical world had their work been entirely legal.
That was what Kate comforted herself with anyway.
As an accelerated post-grad student, she had a lot of leeway and access, but the work she was truly passionate about was banned, hence the sneaking.
As she moved toward the lab, she clutched her notebook to her chest. None of her work was on a computer.
It was all contained in the simple dog-eared exercise book that she never let out of her sight.
Not even when she was showering. Then it went in a plastic bag and sat on a ledge above the water spray.
Some people would have called that obsessive, but Kate knew it was necessary.
If any of her peers saw what was in those pages, she’d be in deep trouble.
Thus far, she’d been lucky. She’d managed to avoid both detection and even any kind of suspicion.
During the day she maintained a certain blandness that made her sort of sink into the background.
Her appearance wasn’t too noteworthy in either direction, which helped.
To others she appeared to be a curvy young woman with long copper hair usually tied back in a ponytail.
Her dress was almost always a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers.
She thought of herself as cute, when she had time to think about what she looked like, which wasn’t all that often.
“Hey there! What the hell are you doing?”
Kate jumped nearly out of her skin as a flashlight rounded the corner and the beam landed on her. She’d been wrong about the campus police. At least one of them was around, and had just found her.
“This is a restricted area.” The guard’s voice boomed down the hall forcefully, making her recoil.
“I know!” She tucked her notebook under her arm and held her hands up as best she could, as if the man with the loud voice and the torch was actual police—which he absolutely wasn’t. “I’m allowed here. Sort of. I mean, I have permission for…”
“Oh, it’s you again,” the guard said, shining the light in her eyes, temporarily blinding her. Almost simultaneously, they realized that this was not the first time they’d run into one another. The security guard’s name was Ben or Burt or…
“Brian,” she said, catching a glance of his name tag. “Sorry, I just forgot something, and I really need it for my assignment…”
“It’s Saturday night,” the man behind the flashlight snorted, as if she might not be aware of the calendar week. “You should be at a party or something, shouldn’t you? Get yourself a boyfriend before it’s too late. Got to look after your love life. Now go on, get out of here.”
“You won’t report me?”
“Why would I bother?” The guard shrugged. “It’s not like they pay attention to anything I say. Go on and get home—or just plain out!”
“I just need to get a couple of things,” Kate stammered. “I have this project due and…”
“Fine,” the guard sighed. “Get what you need, then get out of here.”
“Thank you!”
She went into the lab and pulled a couple of pieces of equipment from her nook.
This was definitely not allowed, but she needed them to perform her final trial—her first real run.
She didn’t need to take too many things, just a small amount of radioactive material and a couple of decent-sized electromagnets, plus a little more material to transform them—along with the bits and pieces she already had set up back home—into something extraordinary.
As she worked to gather the necessary materials, the guard’s words about a love life made her smirk to herself. “Love life? Hah.”
She’d never had anything remotely resembling a love life.
There hadn’t been time. She had her sights set on more than any man could offer her.
The biggest scientific breakthrough of a generation had happened when she was months from graduating high school—the discovery of a parallel world, full of sentient dragons.
It had sounded ridiculous, until you saw the footage for yourself.
The Mojave was still marked with the scars of the facility where the first and thus far only portal opened by humans had once stood.
She’d watched, stunned from her little home in the Midwest as the California power station that had been heralded as the answer to humanity’s energy crisis melted down the moment it was activated.
In doing so, it had ripped a hole in the sky.
That had been horrific enough—but then the dragons had come, pouring through the aperture that linked the human realm to the realm of humanity’s nightmares.
California was still rebuilding from the damage that had been done by those sentient lizards, creatures that not only had fearsome animal forms, but which could allegedly take a human form as well.
The world was still reeling from the events of those days, and though the war was over, the dragons vanquished, the portal closed, the fear remained.
There was a lot of research going on around the accident, but it was absolutely, highly, incredibly, federal prison illegal to attempt to open any kind of portal again.
And that was precisely what Kate was preparing to do tonight.
It wouldn’t be like the first portal though.
That had been a giant, uncontrolled accident.
She was certain that she could do it under controlled, repeatable circumstances that would not enlarge into great tears in the fabric of time and space, but would function more like doorways between the realms. Her math was solid, but even the most elegant equations could turn to chaos when translated into reality.
Reality had a way of twisting at the very last second, turning and biting a scientist in the butt.
That had happened in a spectacular and devastating way with the power plant, so Kate was exercising a fair bit of caution with her experiments.
She could still remember the hour and the day on which she had started down the path she now found herself at the end of.
As part of the attempt to clean up California, the government had started running tours around the remains of the power plant. Kate was the only teenage girl there on the day she went. She’d saved up money for her plane tickets, and the tour itself, working double shifts at the grocery store.
Having lost both her parents young, Kate had come up through the foster care system, bouncing between homes several times before her eighteenth birthday.
Fortunately she was smart enough to be able to bury herself in her study and not pay too much attention to the emotional deficits all around her.
Being quiet, studious, and determined were qualities that had saved her a thousand times over.
Her hard work had paid off to the tune of a full ride to NYU.
She’d been accepted to several other colleges, some of them with more cachet, but NYU was in New York and she wouldn’t have to do another shift at the grocery store as long as she was there.
She’d worked in the dining hall instead all through undergrad, until finally getting a tutoring position.
Really, her journey had started a hundred times in a hundred different ways, but she’d known for certain what she wanted to do when she had found herself walking where the portal had once been, on the very land across which dragons had once soared.
She had stood there in the ruins of the power station, wearing a radiation suit and listening to the guide’s voice coming through the speakers in the headset.
The guide had a Texas twang and a real enthusiasm for his subject.
He was a veteran of the dragon war, had flown planes against them and was full of stories, but what had caught Kate’s attention most was when he talked about the dragon realm, and the reason humans couldn’t survive there.
A very particular type of radiation, native to that realm, was highly dangerous to humans.
“Radiation shreds DNA. Burns right through it. At first you don’t know you’ve been exposed.
Then the sores break out. Then everything in your body breaks down bit by bit, because the cells can’t replicate anymore, you see?
You can’t get near that realm unless you have some kind of protection. The dragons have a resistance to it.”