Cosmic Rift Read Free Page B

continent. South America had, by contrast, gotten off lightly, but still the population had been culled to perhaps fifteen percent of what it had once been, and the rise in base-level radioactivity had left many people sterile, resulting in a fall in the birthrate and a concurrent rise in the appearance of “mutie” babies, creatures who had perhaps started life as human but whose DNA had become so mangled that they now resembled nothing short of monsters. They had been strange days indeed, those that had followed the nukecaust.
    Despite its remoteness, Domi and Mariah had had little trouble getting here from their base in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana in North America. They had traveled via an instrument called the interphaser, a portable teleportation device that tapped the quantum pathways between spaces to move people and objects instantaneously all over the world and beyond. The interphaser relied on fixed-point locations to transmit its passengers, utilizing an ancient connected web that underlay the structure of Earth itself. These locations were called parallax points and many of them had become sites of worship to primitive cultures, when men were more in tune with the planet and aware of the vortices that flowed around these strange places.
    “‘Hot’ or ‘hot hot’?” Domi asked, taking in the forest with her gaze.
    “Welllll...” Mariah said, stretching out the word. “The plant life is certainly flourishing. As are the birds and whatever passes for the other local fauna, too.”
    “‘Fauna’?” Domi queried before Mariah could continue. Mariah had forgotten that Domi was a child of the Outlands, and that sometimes she didn’t know what their colleagues might call the ten-dollar words for things.
    “Animals,” Mariah clarified. “The strange part is, while the soil is showing a lot of radioactivity, it’s not leaked into the rocks.”
    “Meaning?” Domi prodded. The albino was a woman of few words.
    “Whatever caused this is most likely a recent phenomenon,” Mariah mused, “which may also explain why it didn’t appear on our previous sweeps of the area. My computer is doing a spectral analysis, which should bring us closer to an answer.”
    “How long?” Domi asked, eyeing the area warily.
    Mariah checked the flip-open screen of the laptop where she had placed it on a large, flat rock at the edge of the river bank. “Eight minutes.”
    “Hah,” Domi sneered. “Computers don’t know everything.” With that, she padded barefoot into the forest, brushing a low-hanging branch aside.
    Mariah eyed the computer screen again before watching Domi trudge through the trees. A countdown on the screen assured her that the spectral analysis would be complete in seven minutes and forty-nine seconds, which to a geologist used to dealing with rocks that may have been formed over thousands or even millions of years, didn’t seem a very long time to wait. But Domi was impatient, and Mariah couldn’t help but admire her blind determination to make something happen, even if she was one hundred percent certain that nothing would.
    “Hold up,” Mariah called to Domi. “I’m coming with you.”
    Domi turned her head and slowed for a moment, granting Mariah an eerie smile, white teeth gleaming between white lips. It was the most unsettling thing the geologist had seen today.
    Pushing her sweat-damp hair from her face, Mariah walked deeper into the forest after Domi. It took just fifteen paces to completely lose sight of the river, such was the density of the foliage here. Up ahead, however, Domi was always visible, a streak of white amid the green.
    A few steps farther and Domi stopped. She stood there, in the space between the trees, her nose twitching as she sniffed the air.
    “What are you looking for?” Mariah asked as she came alongside her colleague.
    “Something’s not right,” Domi said, pitching her voice low.
    Mariah knew better than to argue with the albino warrior. While Domi