Chapter 5

Ellery drove straight out of the city limits. She bypassed her apartment entirely. She needed absolute, unquestionable privacy.

She pulled into the cracked asphalt parking lot of a rundown motel off the interstate. The neon sign buzzed, flickering in the gray afternoon light. She walked into the lobby, slapped a fifty-dollar bill on the counter, and refused to give her real name. The clerk didn't care. He slid a rusty key attached to a cheap plastic diamond across the counter.

Room 7.

Ellery walked down the exterior corridor, her boots crunching on gravel. She shoved the door open, stepped inside, and slammed it shut. She threw the deadbolt. She slid the metal chain into place.

The room smelled like stale cigarette smoke and bleach. She walked straight to the window and yanked the heavy, dust-caked blackout curtains completely shut. The room plunged into darkness.

She reached over and clicked on the bedside lamp. It cast a sickly, yellow glow over the stained bedspread.

Ellery sat on the edge of the mattress. She opened her palm, revealing the dull gold necklace. She brought it close to the light, inspecting the heavy pendant. Carved into the metal was an intricate, ancient crest-a shield flanked by two wolves. She didn't recognize it as the Harvey family crest. To her, it was just the lock to her survival.

She unzipped her handbag and pulled out a small, red plastic first-aid kit. She snapped it open and extracted a sealed, sterile lancet.

She didn't hesitate. She twisted the plastic cap off the needle, pressed the tip against the fleshy pad of her left index finger, and pushed down hard.

A sharp prick of pain shot through her finger. She squeezed the tip, forcing a thick, dark drop of blood to bead on the surface of her skin.

She hovered her bleeding finger directly over the center of the wolf crest. She let the drop fall.

The blood hit the cold metal. But it didn't smear. It didn't roll off. The gold absorbed the blood instantly, sucking it into the microscopic grooves of the metal like a sponge.

A blinding flash of white light erupted from the pendant.

Ellery's stomach dropped. A violent wave of vertigo hit her, making her ears pop. The motel room vanished.

When she opened her eyes, she braced herself. She expected to see the sprawling, high-tech underground bunker Kendal had bragged about. She expected steel walls and endless shelves.

Instead, she choked on a lungful of air that smelled like rotting earth and mildew.

Her consciousness was violently yanked into a narrow space. She wasn't physically standing; her physical body remained slumped on the stained bedspread, but her mind was trapped inside a literal box. It was barely half a meter square, like the inside of a military crate. She couldn't even turn her phantom perspective.

She mentally reached out, feeling the texture of the wall. A sharp sensation of rotten wood scraped against her virtual palm.

"What is this?" she whispered, her voice cracking.

Panic seized her throat. Was this it? Did her rebirth alter the timeline? Did she break the artifact? This wasn't a bunker. This was a grave.

She shifted her viewpoint downward. The floorboards were soft and spongy. But right in the center, embedded in the rot, was a small, rusted metal plate.

Ellery focused her will, lowering her perspective to the floor. She mentally brushed the grime off the plate. It was a shallow depression, shaped roughly like a balancing scale. It looked empty. Hungry.

Her brain fired rapidly. She remembered Kendal's bizarre behavior in the apocalypse. Kendal had never hoarded food. She had hoarded jewelry. She had sent men to their deaths just to raid abandoned pawn shops for gold rings and watches.

Ellery's hands flew to her ears. She was wearing a pair of fourteen-karat gold hoop earrings.

She unclasped the left hoop, her physical fingers trembling in the motel room. She focused her mind on the rusted metal plate inside her spatial vision. With a thought, the earring vanished from her fingers and appeared directly over the plate, dropping onto the rust.

The moment the gold touched the rust, a low, vibrating hum rattled Ellery's teeth. The gold hoop began to melt. It liquefied into a glowing, molten puddle and was instantly sucked into the metal plate.

A horrific screeching sound echoed through the tiny space. The rotten wooden walls violently shuddered.

The sheer force of the expansion shoved her consciousness backward as the walls physically pushed outward. The ceiling groaned and lifted. The space expanded by at least two feet in every direction. The black, rotting wood lightened in color, hardening into solid, sturdy oak planks.

Ellery's breath caught in her throat. Her eyes widened in absolute shock.

It wasn't broken. It was a living, breathing entity. It was an evolutionary dimension that fed on precious metals. Kendal's bunker hadn't started as a bunker. She had fed it the gold of a thousand dead survivors to build it.

Ellery focused her mind on the motel room. The vertigo hit her again, and her consciousness instantly slammed back into her physical body on the stained bedspread.

She looked at her phone. She looked at the 1.1 million dollars sitting in her bank account.

A manic, feral grin stretched across her face. She knew exactly what she had to do. She was going to feed this space until it became a fortress.