Eight of Hearts: The Rift Blade - Book 1

Chapter 36

Dr. Euclid Higgins rushed down the hallway. He grumbled under his breath as he lurched along, cursing his old bones that slowed him down. He slid to a halt as someone new stepped out of the shadows ahead. It was his assistant, Dr. Faust, of all people.

"Where are you going?" the heavyset doctor demanded.

Dr. Higgins smiled disarmingly. "Come now, Dr. Faust, you of all people should know-"

Dr. Faust cut him off by pointing a gun at his head. "I do know, doctor," he said, calmly looking him straight in the eyes. "I've been watching you for quite some time now. The Security Force does not take kindly to those that abuse power, even one of our own."

Dr. Higgins smiled, his eyes growing wide with excitement. "That's a clever disguise, impostor. What did you do with my assistant?"

The impostor just stared impassively back at him. "Dr. Faust is not your concern, Higgins; I am."

Dr. Higgins reached for the gun in his lab coat, but was too slow. A bullet ripped through his right shoulder, leaving a tear in his lab coat sleeve. He fell to his knees, clutching his shoulder as he ground his teeth through the pain.

The impostor stepped closer, keeping his gun trained on him. "There's nowhere to go, Dr. Higgins. I removed the warp drives from the stock room already, and I have alerted General Quinn about this mess you've made."

Dr. Higgins lurched to his feet, making the impostor take a cautious step backward. He growled through gritted teeth, "You would never understand."

"Don't start with-"

"You and all the rest-gah!" Dr. Higgins cursed as a fresh wave of pain ripped through his arm. "None of you could understand what I've seen! I must...must see it again! The all-consuming power in the void!"

"You can tell the psychologist all about it in detainment," the impostor said, motioning with his gun. "You're coming with me to HQ."

The two men glared at each other in silence, waiting for the other to take the first action. As the impostor began moving toward Dr. Higgins, the hallway suddenly lit up bright red as an alarm sounded. The air reverberated with the deafening siren, and the doors all around slid open.

The impostor looked around in surprise, caught off guard by the sudden commotion.

"The prisoners!" Dr. Higgins shouted over the din. He drew the gun he kept inside his coat, and leveled it at the impostor. "They're distracting you!"

Flora sat on the hard floor in her dark cell wishing for a distraction. The cell was completely barren, and pitch-black compared to the ones she'd seen when they brought her here. Her brief resistance to the agents that captured her had been enough to land her in the high-security wing, though she failed to grasp the true irony of the discussion going on outside between Tobias and Isaac. It was excessive, but something had made them cautious after that wide-eyed doctor had scanned her. She'd briefly noted that his scanner was built into his glove, very similar to the one Shyla now wore. Eerily similar.

Was that why they had targeted them? Were they just trying to retrieve Shyla's glove? Then why had they gone for Bryce first? They had claimed to be a police force, and arrested them for crossing dimensions. But they didn't even know how they crossed dimensions in the first place.

To make things worse, after her embarrassing failure to do anything of significance in the village, they treated her like a threat. It was salt in the wound, and all she could do was sit in the darkness and cry. She longed for a distraction to take her mind off her self-pity, but there was nothing except for the tiny bit of light that peeked through the slat on her cell door.