Gee thanks, Lannon. Would’ve been nice to know these things existed on this Earth. It felt a bit like need-to-know information.

The sun was blotted out of view by the silhouette of a horribly massive bird.

The dreadhawk was as big as a commercial jet plane. Metallic feathers glinted hot sunbeams off their fringes. The gravity of the thing was enormous, and yet it lofted overhead like an albatross in transoceanic flight. It made a high pass over the fenced-in community before looping back and descending, angling its massive warhead beak towards us.

Belatedly, I spoke.

“Shield, on!”

White sparks crackled around me, and the personal force field snapped into formation. I grabbed my mother, AI of the body shield easing the field off my finger pads to allow me a good grip.

She stiffened in alarm as I grabbed the back of her shirt and scooped her up like I had Lannon.

“Laura!”

She was staring in alarm at the divebombing behemoth.

I ran, tucking my mother against my chest like she was a football. I made a drive for the endzone, hustling down the street away from where the dreadhawk was headed. Moments later, an impact rattled the earth beneath me as the bird’s clawed feet collided with the top floor of the hospital.

Brick and plaster and metal spewed from the structure like spray off the top of a waterfall. The bird perched on top of the building, which somehow didn’t collapse under its weight. It shrieked again and swiveled its neck at a sharp angle, searching for prey on the ground below.

A burst of laser light from several buildings away speared into the beast. It roared in anger and leapt across the compound with a gentle flap of its wings, crushing a smaller building under its claws. Its massive beak slashed and stabbed at the ground, gobbling MEAD soldiers like a nightmarish hungry hippo.

I heard a voice chatter through the micro-communicator.

“Laura, this is Lannon. Do you read me?”

I spoke, letting the receiver in the mucosa of my cheek broadcast back to Lannon.

“I read you. What the hell are we supposed to do about this thing?”

“Dreadhawks are bad news.”

I bit back a sarcastic comment.

He continued, “the reflective scales probably evolved to manage the desert heat, but they also diffuse the power of any laser-based weapons. They’re also tough enough that small bullets can’t penetrate.”

“So what now?”

“We get into the bunker and hit it with old fashioned explosives before it causes too much damage.”

A shadow blotted out the sun. Cool air whispered danger across my neck.

The bird was back in the air.

I adjusted my grip on my mother and kept moving, staying close to the walls of buildings where I’d be a less obvious target. The body shield wrapped around my bare feet to create invisible shoes that protected me from the burning sand.

“Where’s the bunker?”

It was hard to hear Lannon’s voice over the sound of sand crunching under my feet and the winged wrecking ball performing a demolition job behind me.

“Immediately south of the medical building. I’m sending you coordinates.”

A compass and blinking arrow appeared at the bottom of my vision, augmented over my natural visual field by the lenses Dr. Glass had installed behind my corneas.

Still hefting my mother, I pivoted on a dime in a maneuver that would’ve made a woman my age throw her back out for weeks. It was effortless. The steel vertebral reinforcements and muscular support wires latticed down my spine worked in well-oiled harmony. I might set off every metal detector I looked at the wrong way, but damn these modifications felt good.

“Who were you talking to?” my mother asked as she bounced up and down in my grasp.

Before I could answer, a wall of shining feathers and propeller-blade claws crashed into the building directly to my left. Plaster exploded and the dying building spat a mouthful of dust into the sky before collapsing.

The bird leapt off its newly-created wreckage nest onto the street before us, throwing a wave of sand over my mother and me. It turned its head to stare at us with a ravenous dinner-plate eye.

Shit.

A normal athletic human didn’t have the footspeed or agility to get away from this thing. My mother was a sixty-one-year-old with arthritis in her knees. I thought about setting her down and distracting the bird while she ran for cover, but I didn’t think I could buy her the time she would need to escape. There wasn’t much of anything I could do to retaliate against this thing. I was unarmed. I had my modifications and body shield, but I was pretty confident my shield wasn’t powerful enough to withstand the amount of force that existed between the crushing jaws of this monster’s beak.

The only other option was to run and bring my mother with me.

I turned and sprinted for the alleyway behind us. The dreadhawk lunged forward, thrusting its neck out like a snapping goose. I cut hard to the left at the last second, putting strain on my knee that would’ve torn a normal human ACL like an old rubber band. Instead, my augmented joint flexed and kicked hard against the sand, sidestepping the vorpal thrust. I heard the harsh clack of the dreadhawk’s beak snapping shut just inches from me.

My mother screamed, unhelpfully.

I carried her toward the alley, fighting for traction in the sliding sand, already running faster than a human should be able to run, even with the added maternal weight. I heard the rustling of a thousand metallic feathers behind me as the dreadhawk moved, but we were closing in on safety. A chance to get out of the beast’s line of sight.

Forty yards, thirty yards, twenty yards.

White sparks flashed all over my body as my shield reacted to a force smashing into my side like a truck. Worse than a truck. At least trucks had bumpers. This was a wall of rock-hard bird-beak keratin.

I was sent flying. With the help of the reactive AI balancing me in the air, I was able retain enough coordination to toss my mother softly into the sand just before the alleyway. She landed hard. I prayed she didn’t break a hip, but I didn’t have time to check.

The bird tried to eat me.

One second, I was pushing myself off the sand where I’d landed, the next, a gaping, halitotic maw with serrated beak edges and a writhing sandpaper tongue had fallen down over me like a predatory blanket.

I raised a hand to grab the edge of the beak, kicking out with my feet against the lower jaw in an effort to hold the dreadhawk’s mouth open. White sparks flew furiously from my palms where they pressed into the edge of the beak. The bird bit down, and even my superhuman strength was overcome.

Something snapped in my elbow, and my left arm fell uselessly at my side as the beak shut.

The only thing that kept me from being sliced down the middle like a club sandwich was my body shield.

The interior of the dreadhawk’s mouth was illuminated by reactive white sparks pouring off the force field as it fought to maintain its rigidity. A bolt of pain stabbed through my broken elbow and up my shoulder for a few seconds before analgesics were automatically pumped into my bloodstream.

The bird chomped and slapped me with its tongue. Chewing me, I realized.

The sparks continued to fly. A red line of text flashed in the corner of my vision.

Warning: Shield battery at twenty-five percent.

The bird chewed on me like a hard candy that wouldn’t break, nutcrackering down on my limbs with voracious determination.

“Shield!” I shouted. “Do something.”

I wasn’t an expert in operating the AI built into my body shield, but I knew enough to know that was an incredibly vague request. I prayed that the shield had some feature I was unaware of. Something that could get me out of this situation.

Miraculously, it did.

The interior of the bird’s mouth flashed with blinding light so intense it made the shield sparks vanish from perception. Hot electricity snapped outward from the AI charging port buried under the flesh of my wrist. Greedy tendrils stabbed into the walls of the dreadhawk’s mouth and buried themselves into its tongue as a wave of charge radiated out in all directions.

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I caught a whiff of burnt flesh before I was spat out with disgust.

Unfortunately for me, the dreadhawk’s head had been held upright, about fifty yards above the ground. Wind roared past my ears with windows-down-on-the-highway intensity. I prayed there was just a little juice left in my body shield after that stunt.

I heard my mother scream just before I hit the sand like it was a sheet of concrete. The sparks of the body shield flashed, and I smacked against the earth like a steak slapped onto a chopping block.

I opened my eyes after a second and took stock of my situation.

A red message flashed in the corner of my vision.

Warning: body shield reserves depleted

I tried moving my arms. My right was fine. The left was still a marionette limb after I’d broken it trying to hold the dreadhawk’s beak open. My legs, surprisingly, were able to move. The shield had managed to absorb most of the fall, and my reinforced anatomy must’ve been able to withstand the rest of the impact.

Using my right hand for balance, I pushed myself onto my feet.

The dreadhawk had taken flight and moved on to terrorize a different part of the MEAD compound.

My mother ran to me and embraced me.

“Oh my God,” she panted, out of breath. “Oh my God. I thought you were dead.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

She released her octopus strangle and stepped away.

“Can you walk?” I asked, still worried I’d hurt her with my throw.

“Of course.”

I looked her up and down. Maybe she was tougher than she looked.

“Good. Let’s get to the bunker. I have directions.”

I took her hand with my good arm and led her through the wreckage to the location Lannon had sent me. Our feet sank into the sand, slowing our process. My mother’s tepid pace through the carnage frustrated me, but I couldn’t carry her with only one good arm. And the bird seemed to be off hunting prey elsewhere for the moment.

It took us five or ten minutes find the bunker. A flat concrete structure with dictionary-thick steel doors.

They swung open as we approached, and a group of men and women hustled us inside.

We were placed on an escalator that lowered us deep into the bowels of the desert terrain. The air became cool. In the industrial lighting, I could see a collection of several hundred people waiting in the space below. Other escalators connected entry points on the surface to this subterranean shelter.

Lannon was on a medical cot nearby.

I hurried to him, and his eyes lit up upon seeing my mother and me.

“Oh, good. I was worried you were dead.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Any other monsters living on this Earth that I should be aware of?”

I was still smarting a bit over the fact nobody had warned me about the giant death birds.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “These things are rare, but we should’ve told you they live here. As far as we know, there isn’t anything on this Earth as dangerous as dreadhawks.”

He chuckled dryly.

“Maybe now you’re understanding why the Republic isn’t interested in colonizing this reality. Not a very hospitable place.”

A young soldier ran up to Lannon.

“Rockets are loaded. Letting you know that we’re about to begin firing.”

He nodded.

“Don’t wait a second longer. Let’s bring this thing down.”

The young man raised a hand to signal a group of soldiers working in front of a series of computer screens. They began pressing buttons, and I heard the faint rumble of explosions passing through the layers of sand between us and the surface.

A great snoring vibration shook the bunker every few seconds.

My mother grabbed my broken arm, examining the elbow joint that swung with pendular freedom.

“Your arm is broken!” she exclaimed.

“It’ll be fine, Mom. They have medicine here to fix that.”

She stared up at me. For once, there was nothing concealed behind the wrinkles of her face, just an expression awash with awe.

“You’re so strong now.”

“Thanks to that surgery with Dr. Glass.”

“You saved my life. Out there.”

“Well, yeah. I couldn’t let that thing eat you.”

There were swimming pools brimming over the rim of her lower eyelids.

“Why are you crying?”

She hurriedly wiped away at her eyes with the sleeve of her hospital gown.

“I don’t know.”

She wiped again, smearing the fabric of her gown down the length of her face.

“A part of me worried you wished I was dead. I guess it’s a relief to know you want me around.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded.

“What are you talking about? I…” I stumbled over the sentence. “I don’t like a lot of the things you do, but of course I don’t want you to die. You’re my mom.”

Her lip trembled in a wineglass-fragile smile.

A thought crossed my mind.

“Mom, are you depressed?”

The smile cracked as she shook her head.

“No. Of course I’m not depressed.”

She reached out and touched the sleeve over my broken arm, as if she wanted to make sure I was real.

“It’s just lonely. All I want is to be your mother. I’m not good at anything else, and I guess I’m not so good at this either. But without you in my life, things are awfully glum.”

A strange combination of feelings welled up within my gut. I wanted to punch a wall and breath fire and dissolve into the floor. Preferably all at once.

I spoke gently, pulling back the venom that usually laced my questions to my mother.

“Then why do you make it so hard for me to spend time with you? Why did you keep expecting me to be a perfectionist? Why do you keep criticizing my marriage?”

“I just…don’t want you to turn out like me.”

Her shoulders sagged.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Laura. I’m a failure. I can barely support myself. I could never hold down a job or even gather the courage to try.”

My brow furrowed in concern. Dust drifted lazily from the ceiling as more rockets exploded above the surface.

“Your father told me as much,” she said. “He was a brilliant scientist, but he was never recognized for it. And it was all because of me.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. I felt an anchor chain unspooling in my stomach.

“I didn’t let us move to Berkley when he got the job offer because I was too afraid. I was always getting in the way of his research when I was pregnant with you. Your father could’ve saved the world with his science, but he made the mistake of marrying someone like me. Your husband is a nice man, but he doesn’t have a career, and he’s going to hold you back from whatever you try to accomplish. Just like I held back your dad.”

Now my eyes welled with tears. I hated the sensation.

“That’s not true,” I insisted. “If Dad really wanted to save the world with his research, he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

She fell silent. So did I.

The statement echoed angrily. Permeating the space between us with the acknowledgement of shared suffering. The day that had ruined everything. For both of us.

“I really do think Jack is a kind young man,” she said. “But I can’t let that cycle repeat itself. I don’t want your husband to be someone who holds you back. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

“Mom, I’m not going to kill myself.”

She nodded.

“And Jack isn’t going to ruin my career. Just like you didn’t ruin Dad’s.”

“You never really knew him,” she said. “You were only eleven when he passed. But he was a star. Everyone loved him. He had so many ideas. So many things that would change the world.”

“I know.”

“But I ruined that. I’ve thought about that day for years and all the things I could’ve done differently. Instead, I held him down in a shitty career in Pendervale and made him give up those dreams and his life.”

“No,” I insisted. “Dad killed himself because he was depressed. That’s it. There’s nothing you could’ve done about that.”

She sighed.

“You didn’t know him like I did.”

We were interrupted by a commotion at the top of the escalator.

Both our heads turned.

People had been steadily trickling into the bunker from all entry points. Now, a group of four entered. Between them, they held a struggling woman who was writhing hard in their grasp.

Revella.

Her broken hand had been repaired but was now locked to its partner with handcuffs as thick as my arm. She gradually gave up her fight as the escalator brought the group down below, where a crowd of hundreds regarded her with curiosity and disgust.

“What are you all looking at?” she shouted at nobody in particular.

The soldiers, two per side, grabbed her upper arms and chaperoned her stiffly along to where Lannon was resting.

“We caught her trying to escape in the chaos, sir,” one of them reported. “She almost made it to the fence before we caught her.”

“Good work,” Lannon said to the group. “If she escapes, she’ll deactivate her biometrics from Republic database, and our entire plan falls apart.”

Revella stared at him.

“You’re still going ahead with this? You’re going to steal a bridgemaker?”

Lannon ignored her.

“Bring her over there,” he pointed to an empty corner of the bunker. “And keep a close eye on her, please.”

The soldiers began leading her away.

“You’re crazy!” Revella shouted.

She turned to address the crowd.

“Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, it’s not worth doing something so dangerous. Billions could die, and it’ll be all your fault.”

“Shut up,” a solider commanded.

She seemed to realize the shouting was futile and let herself be led away.

I stared at Lannon and back at Revella. He wasn’t paying her any attention. Nobody was. Someone from the rocket-firing station was getting ready to make an announcement.

I wandered toward Revella. She was sitting in a chair. The four guards leaned against the wall beside her.

“What did you mean?” I asked her.

She looked up, eyes glazed over with disinterest.

“What?”

“You said billions could die. What are you talking about?”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Of course Lannon didn’t tell you about it. Why would he? Not part of the plan.”

“About what?” I demanded.

She looked over at her guards.

“You guys know what I’m talking about, right?”

They were stoic.

Revella met my eyes again.

“You don’t know how bridgemakers work, do you?”

She looked me up and down.

“All those modifications, and I bet you don’t know how any of them work.” She laughed. “You know nothing about the multiverse, and yet here you are, talking down to me like I’m the one deserving of reprimand.”

“Just tell me what you were talking about.”

“Creating a bridge to another dimension is not like building a trestle over a pond. There are dozens of security protocols that must be followed exactly in order to create a bridge that’s stable enough to resist the turbulence of the void. If you try to build a bridge without the right techniques, it’s liable to leak open, creating an unstable access point that allows all kinds of nightmares from the multiverse to gain access the bridge’s interior.”

“What do you mean, nightmares?”

She shook her head disdainfully.

“It’s a big multiverse out there, and radish demons are at the bottom of the food chain.”

Oh. Well, that wasn’t horrifying to think about.

“And I know these terrorists,” she spat out the word, “aren’t capable of operating a bridgemaker safely and with all the appropriate protocols. They’re going to blindly start punching tunnels in reality and pray that nothing goes wrong.”

I looked over at the guards.

No reaction.

“Let’s assume you manage to steal a bridgemaker and create a bridge to your reality. If it’s done by these people, done sloppily, then the consequences could be catastrophic for your reality and anywhere else the bridge connects to.”

I looked at the guards again. Their solemn expressions told me there was truth to what Revella was saying.

I leaned in, hoping to keep my voice out of reach of the onlookers.

“Okay then. Will the Republic help create a way to access my Earth?”

Revella laughed and shook her head.

“Not a chance. Not now.”

“Why?” I demanded. “If we don’t get back there with help within a few months, the entire planet will be killed off by that radish demon.”

“My mission to your Earth was a charity effort. Done purely out of the goodwill of the Republic since your reality didn’t have the ability to protect itself. Now that your demon’s infection has begun spreading and we’ve already taken losses, we’re not going to risk opening up that Earth to the multiverse again.”

I was reminded again of how much I disliked Revella.

“You’re going to let all those people die?”

“It’s not up to me.”

I stood straight and regarded her.

“Well then, it looks like my decision’s pretty simple. If you won’t give me a safer way to save my home, then I’m going to help steal a bridgemaker. It doesn’t matter how risky it is to create a bridge to my Earth. The alternative is certain death.”

I was halfway spun around to return to Lannon and my mother when she replied.

“You could stay here.”

I paused.

“What?”

“You and your mother could stay in the connected multiverse. There’s thousands of Earths where you could live peacefully. Find new friends. Just cut your losses and give up this stupid plan.”

I closed the gap between Revella and myself with a don’t-try-me stride, planting my foot resolutely down in front of her.

“My husband and my daughter are back home. That’s not an option.”

I turned my back on Revella.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said as I walked away.