The Founder (A Broken World Volume 4)

By Dean Murray

Falling in love with Brennan showed Skye a world she'd been taught couldn't exist. Since then she's saved his life multiple times, and dealt a severe blow to the Society in the process, but all is not as it seems.

Skye's nanites continue to adapt at an astonishing rate, making her quite possibly the most dangerous person on the planet, but fighting a guerrilla war against her former masters involves situations she's not prepared for, situations where she won't be able to save everyone, situations where she's no longer sure she's fighting on the right side.

Desperate to end the fighting, Skye sets off on her most dangerous mission yet, and what she'll learn this time may very well destroy her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Firshan Publishing, Inc
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370337972

Dean Murray

Dean started reading seriously in the second grade due to a competition and has spent most of the subsequent three decades lost in other people's worlds. After reading several local libraries more or less dry of sci-fi and fantasy, he started spending more time wandering around worlds of his own creation to avoid the boredom of the 'real' world.Things worsened, or improved depending on your point of view, when he first started experimenting with writing while finishing up his accounting degree. These days Dean has a wonderful wife and daughter to keep him rather more grounded, but the idea of bringing others along with him as he meets interesting new people in universes nobody else has ever seen tends to drag him back to his computer on a fairly regular basis.

Book preview

Falling in love with Brennan showed Skye a world she'd been taught couldn't exist. Since then she's saved his life multiple times, and dealt a severe blow to the Society in the process, but all is not as it seems.

Skye's nanites continue to adapt at an astonishing rate, making her quite possibly the most dangerous person on the planet, but fighting a guerrilla war against her former masters involves situations she's not prepared for, situations where she won't be able to save everyone, situations where she's no longer sure she's fighting on the right side.

Desperate to end the fighting, Skye sets off on her most dangerous mission yet, and what she'll learn this time may very well destroy her.

The Founder

by Dean Murray

Copyright 2015 by Dean Murray

Also by Dean Murray:

The Reflections Series

Broken

Torn

Splintered

Intrusion

Trapped

Forsaken

Riven

Driven

Lost

Marked

Left

The Greater Darkness (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

A Darkness Mirrored (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

The Dark Reflections Series

Bound

Hunted

Ambushed

Shattered

Burned

The Awakening

Reborn

Immortal

Endless

A Broken World

The Society

The Destroyer

The Warlord

The Founder

The Outsider

The Desolation

The Guadel Chronicles

Frozen Prospects

Thawed Fortunes

Brittle Bonds

Shattered Ties

The Compelled Chronicles

Stone Heart

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Also by Dean Murray

Chapter 1

The problem in front of me was bad enough that under almost any other circumstances I probably would've given up and headed back toward where I'd come from with my tail between my legs. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it—I wasn't the kind to quit after traveling more than ten thousand miles to get where I was, at least not when my final destination was less than a hundred yards away.

Of course, I hadn't actually walked that entire distance. I'd flown the vast bulk of the distance I'd crossed during the last two weeks, but even after my nanites had put my body back together, the flights had still been the kind of harrowing experience I wasn't eager to replicate anytime soon. My stolen jet fighter had good enough stealth capabilities that it could be flown during the day with some chance of escaping detection, but I needed more than just a pretty good chance, I needed to be sure I would be able to make it to the enclave without being noticed.

That meant flying at night, when there was enough cloud cover to make thermal and visual detection impossible, and it meant making the trip in short hops whenever a likely-looking set of clouds rolled in overhead. It meant debating every minute of flight as I weighed ever-increasing odds that the clouds would become too thin to conceal me against the fact that my food and water stores were not unlimited.

I'd taken off from the command center where Brennan and I had parted ways with what I thought was a reasonable plan for getting halfway around the world so that I could sneak into the enclave which was my mother's last known location, but I'd been woefully unprepared for the reality of what I was up against. The first-class engineering that the ants had put into my stolen fighter had given me a lot more in the way of options than I'd had any right to expect, but even so things had gotten awfully hairy at several points along the way.

As long as I could find a supply of water and a suitably hidden place in which to set up the array of solar panels stowed in the fuselage of my plane, the aircraft was capable of refueling itself, but finding a suitable place to land—especially during stressful situations where I didn't know how long I had before my cloud cover broke up—had been trying. When you added in my need to find food for myself along the way, it was more than a little amazing that I'd made it as far as I had.

The enclave which was my destination presented yet another set of challenges at a time when I was reaching the end of both my willpower and my resources. Alexander, the Citizen-President who changed his face every few years to provide the illusion that the democratic elections inside the enclave were something other than rigged, had to maintain certain other illusions in order to keep the rest of the enclave's residents happy.

Chief among those illusions was the idea that their efforts to control everyone on the outside of the barrier—the grubbers—were not only successful, but the right thing to be doing. A scorched area three hundred miles deep in every direction around the enclave would have provided the maximum defense possible against the Society's low-tech opponents—who wanted nothing more than to see the enclave and everyone inside of it burn—but that wouldn't have been conducive for the story Alexander was trying to sell.

Instead, the Society's military personnel had been ordered to leave a band of virgin wilderness around the enclave that was nearly a hundred miles deep, and then create a zone of desolation around that. The idea was that the wilderness immediately around the enclave would provide the illusion that the world outside the barrier was returning to a paradisiacal state without extending so far as to make it possible for the Society's enemies to sneak up on the enclave.

It was a valid strategy, given that the monitoring devices mounted immediately on either side of the barrier were capable of detecting incoming air vehicles—both high- and low-tech—well into the barren area Alexander was using as a moat. That meant anyone trying to approach the enclave would have to cross the barren area on foot, a journey that would take several days under anything but the absolute best of circumstances.

If I'd been coming at the problem cold, with nothing more than the minimal information I'd been able to scrounge from the databanks inside of my captured fighter, I would've said there was no way to get close enough to the enclave to carry out my plan. Fortunately I knew that it was possible to sneak into the enclave, since Katya—my mother—had done it on at least a couple of occasions.

That tiny, but critical piece of information meant I approached the problem from a completely different angle than I would have otherwise. I knew there was a way in, which meant I just needed to figure out how she'd done it. A slow, multi-day circuit around the outside of the barren area under the cover of night finally presented me with a possible way forward.

A hundred and fifty years was an awfully long time to remain vigilant, and it wasn't entirely surprising that the military personnel responsible for maintaining the wasteland I needed to cross had gone a little lax in their duties. There were areas where the vegetation from the inner barrier had been allowed to expand out beyond the initial boundaries established for it, but that was only part of my solution.

It was a small outcropping of rock—barely worth the name—positioned midway between the enclave and the barren zone that turned the vegetation I spotted into something other than just a clever trap designed to lure the unwary out where the enclave's outer defenses could turn them into so much falling wreckage. That fifty-foot chunk of rock created a radar and visual shadow that was just big enough to fly a strike fighter into if the pilot was both skilled and desperate.

With only a couple hundred hours of simulations and roughly that amount of time inside a real cockpit under my belt, I wasn't sure I qualified as skilled, but I was definitely desperate. What little I knew about the ants' sensor capabilities indicated that a variety of other detection measures had been seeded throughout the inner, more parklike zone of their defenses. I was fairly confident that those secondary measures were expected to detect anyone coming in using the chink I thought I'd detected in their armor, but there was a very slight possibility that Katya had found a way to spoof or otherwise disable the sensors along the very edge of that inner zone.

There'd been no way to test my hypothesis before taking off to fly my stolen fighter along the corridor identified, but that hadn't stopped me from doing exactly that. It was the same kind of all-or-nothing throw of the dice that I'd told Brennan just weeks earlier was nothing less than irresponsible, but at least this time I was only wagering my life and the fighter I was flying. Both were assets that Brennan and the rest of the resistance would miss if the worst came to pass, but they wouldn't cripple our efforts in the same way that losing what had been at the time our only assault dropship would have.

For all that there were differences between what Brennan had proposed and my current plan, there was no getting around the fact that my hands were sweating and my pulse was racing when I started my fighter into the corridor I was hoping would allow me to get to the inner defense zone without being seen. For more than twenty-four hours after I set my plane down under the most heavily overgrown stand of trees I could find, I was still convinced that a dropship full of soldiers would show up at any moment.

Even after I got the camouflage netting in place and had done everything else I could to ensure that my fighter would remain invisible unless someone tripped over it, I still half expected fighter-bombers to come roaring past and drop a few dozen tons of incendiary bombs in an effort to flush me out. It wasn't until I'd covered nearly half of the distance between my fighter and the enclave that I finally allowed myself to believe I'd really made it across the outer zone without being detected.

The journey across the inner zone was every bit as brutal as I'd been expecting. I had next to no real-life experience when it came to surviving in this kind of terrain. What little time I'd spent outside the dropship after we'd fled Brennan's territory had been inside a jungle that was much different than the thick forest surrounding the enclave. I got by through a combination of bits and pieces I'd been able to nurse out of my fighter's databanks and a double helping of willpower.

Even then, I wouldn't have survived if I'd been a normal, unaugmented human like Brennan or Jax. Several times I ate something that turned out to be poisonous and had to spend a number of uncomfortable hours curled up on the ground while I waited for my nanites to finish clearing the toxins out of my system. Despite all of that, I managed to make better time than I'd been hoping to, which led me to my current predicament.

The enclave was surrounded by a one-of-a-kind energy barrier that had stood up to small-scale nuclear strikes back when it had been attacked during the Desolation. Once I'd arrived at the enclave and had a chance to confirm there weren't any sensors really designed to detect something as small as an individual person, I'd chucked a rock against the barrier just to see what would happen. The barrier vaporized the rock in a flash of light and smoke that amply demonstrated what would happen if I touched it by mistake.

Once again, the fact that Katya had managed to cross the barrier not just once, but many times, was the extra push I needed to continue on in the face of something that otherwise would've felt impossible. I knew that there was no way to brute-force my way past the barrier—not without multiple nuclear warheads at my disposal, which would defeat my purpose in going to the enclave in the first place—so there had to be a different way inside.

I spent two days creeping around the outside of the barrier during the day and then curling up under a thermally neutral survival blanket at night before I finally admitted to myself that there was almost zero possibility of me finding a cave—natural or otherwise—that would take me under the barrier. That left me only one other option.

As much as Alexander probably would've preferred to just isolate himself behind the barrier and never interact with the outside world, he knew that left unchecked, eventually people like Brennan and Jax would build up a technology base capable of challenging the Society's current stranglehold on the world.

Not only that, Alexander wanted the resources that only the outside world could provide. The enclave had fields—mostly scattered around the periphery of the parks—which were capable of keeping the inhabitants fed, but everything from iron ore and industrial diamonds to plutonium and titanium had to be imported from the outside world.

The traffic between the enclave and the large, tracked resource extractors slowly wandering the outside world was infrequent, but regular, and it spawned a whole host of additional traffic in and out of the enclave. For every one of the heavy transport planes that shoveled raw materials into the enclave, there were a dozen flights across the barrier by every kind of military transport from strike-fighters and fighter-bombers to assault dropships.

Despite having trained with the military at one point, I'd never quite appreciated just how large it actually was. It was possible that was because I was nearly as self-absorbed as the rest of what passed for individuals inside the enclave, but I suspected it actually had more to do with a purposeful campaign of disinformation on Alexander's part.

Contrary to what the Society's franchised citizens might believe, the Citizen-President was very much capable of controlling the output of the crèches that were responsible for all new births inside the enclave. It was possible that the majority of children born and raised there were the natural result of adults who for whatever reason ended up pregnant, but the more I thought about it the less sense that made. It was far more likely that Alexander—whose field of expertise leaned heavily towards biology—had figured out a way to grow babies from harvested genetic material without any further input from the human host.

If that was the case, then Alexander could easily breed and raise however many soldiers he needed. Even if I was wrong about the actual birth rates inside the enclave, just lying about the full extent of the extra life expectancy granted by military nanites over the less capable version injected into franchised citizens would lead to a dramatically different-sized military than would be expected by anyone making reasonable estimates from the outside.

For decades now, the grubbers had been so cowed that military personnel were far more likely to die as a result of simple accidents than because of any kind of enemy fire. When the Society's soldiers did end up engaging the grubbers, they almost always did so from distances that made effective response all but impossible.

In the grand scheme of things, it didn't much matter whether you were killed by incendiary bombs dropped from ten thousand feet above your head, a sniper using precision munitions from more than a mile away, or computer-aided large-caliber fire directed down from a mobile command center. They all resulted in the target dying without even realizing in most instances that they were under attack until it was too late to do anything but die.

Whatever the cause, two days of watching military traffic move back and forth across the barrier convinced me that there were far more people—even after the losses Brennan's people had inflicted when Alexander had attacked his territory—than could be accounted for by the military I'd believed Alexander possessed.

The methodology used to bring aircraft through the barrier was stunningly simple, but the straightforwardness of the apparent protocol being used didn't make it any easier to exploit. As nearly as I could tell, the enclave's monitoring systems were tracking inbound aircraft—and no doubt going through a complicated set of exchanges to ensure that the vehicle in question was what it was claiming—and then a split-second before the incoming aircraft would have slammed into the barrier and been converted into a short-lived ball of fire, the barrier came down for just long enough to allow the aircraft through.

The barrier was down for less than two seconds, which was a short enough time that a pilot who came in thirty or forty percent slower than he was supposed to would more than likely be vaporized before he'd had a chance to realize his error, but it appeared that there was no way to bring just part of the barrier down. Every time anybody needed to get in or out of the enclave, the entire barrier came down, leaving the enclave vulnerable for a short period of time.

It wasn't long enough for any kind of large force to take advantage of. It would probably be possible to slip a missile in if an attacker's timing was perfect, but the odds of that happening were incredibly small. I was sure that the personnel manning the switch that brought the barrier down were constantly monitoring the surrounding airspace. They would warn approaching aircraft off if there was any indication that the enclave had enemies in position to attack. Even after a hundred and fifty years—even after everyone inside the enclave had become sure that it would be impossible for the savages living on the other side of the barrier to ever challenge them—they would still be careful to make sure that the barrier never came down while there was a significant threat in the area.

In its own way though, the Society's technological supremacy was a kind of blind spot on its own. The soldiers in charge of the enclave's defense were trained to think in terms of bringing superior technology to bear to compensate for their smaller numbers. For them, one man—or woman—could only be a threat to a much larger force if they employed the kind of high-tech paraphernalia that was part and parcel of service in the Society's military branch. Fighters, dropships, and mobile command centers were incredible force multipliers, but I was living proof that under the right circumstances a single person with only minimal resources could shift the tide of battle in unexpected ways.

With Tyrell's cutting-edge nanites swimming around inside my blood, and now that I'd had enough time to recuperate from all the damage I'd taken during my assault on the second mobile command center, I was capable of running impossibly fast. If I'd had a way to know exactly when the barrier was going to come down, and the ability to start from a spot only inches away from the barrier itself, I had no doubt about my ability to cross the danger zone before the barrier came back up.

Unfortunately, I hadn't been waiting around outside the enclave for long enough to have detected any kind of significant pattern to the comings and goings inside the enclave. Even worse, there was a cleared area between the barrier and vegetation surrounding the enclave. It was hard to say for sure whether that was by design because the ants wanted to ensure that nobody could do exactly what I wanted to do, or if it was just a function of the barrier stunting and even in some cases destroying all of the plants in the proximity.

I'd eyeballed the distance between the vegetation and the other side of the barrier in a couple of different spots, and then measured out a similar distance in a safe spot a few hundred yards away from the barrier where I could practice making a similar run. So far, the results hadn't been pretty.

Using a digital stopwatch overlay that my neural computer had helpfully provided in the top left corner of my field of vision, I'd run several dozen trials without managing to make it to the far side of the barrier within the amount of time I thought I realistically had. With the right set of protocols running on my nanites—maximum increase to the strength in my legs with most of the rest of my nanites tasked toward souping up my reaction time—I'd come very close, but in this particular trial of speed 'close' was just another way of getting killed.

I knew that there were some things I hadn't successfully been able to include in my attempts so far. For one, I didn't have any areas where the ground was as clear and even as the spots I scouted out for making the actual crossing. When you added in the fact that I would be functioning on a massive amount of adrenaline when the time came to make my attempt, there was every reason to believe that I'd be able to shave a significant—if still very small—amount of time off of my best attempt so far, but I didn't have any frame of reference with which to estimate just how much time I would be able to save when the time came to really make my attempt.

It was nice to be able to put a couple of things in the plus column, because there was one very big issue that I'd been avoiding facing when I did my math. I didn't know when the energy barrier would be coming down, and that meant there would be a delay between it shutting off and me springing into action.

Maybe if my nanite computer had been something I had more control over I could've run a simulation where I told my computer to let a random amount of time pass before flashing something up in front of me indicating that it was time to run, but even that probably wouldn't be a perfect simulation.

Sitting still for twenty minutes or even half an hour while I waited for an artificial signal might come close, but it still wouldn't be quite the same as being forced to wait for three or four hours hoping that the ants would drop the energy barrier. Even under normal circumstances when I didn't have my time sense dialed all the way up, it would've been hard to maintain complete readiness, but with the set of protocols I'd chosen for my attempt it would be even worse. Everything would seem to take five or six times as long as it normally did, which meant no matter how scared I was of dying, there was a very good chance that eventually boredom would dull my readiness.

The fact that the terrain I would be crossing immediately before the barrier would be level and clear still didn't guarantee that I would be able to avoid tripping at the last moment as I made my run. I'd had that happen already several times during my simulated runs, and if it happened during my actual run I was probably going to end up staggering right into the barrier as it popped back up.

This was nothing at all like the biannual games that the best of the best citizen-athletes competed in, there was no do-over here if I got off to a bad start, no opportunity to come back and try again in a couple years if I didn't take home the gold on my first attempt.

This was for keeps, right from the start, and it was for something that most people would've said I was stupid to be risking my life over. Katya had stopped communicating with Brennan and Tyrell several months before I'd headed into Brennan's territory. Even under the best of circumstances she was going to be extremely hard to find, and if I were to be honest with myself I had to acknowledge that there was a very real possibility that she'd been killed, and that was why nobody had heard from her for so long.

Even if she was alive and I somehow managed to track her down, there was no guarantee that I was going to get what I wanted out of her, especially since even I wasn't positive what I was hoping for. By all accounts she had spent most of her life being the antithesis of warm and caring. If she'd displayed any real mothering instincts at all while going through her training, Alexander certainly would have seen to it that she washed out of the program rather than risk her developing attachments to a bunch of grubbers.

The cold, rational part of me said that our reunion was going to be the kind of big disappointment that legends were made of, that I would realize she was nothing more than a stranger who'd donated genetic material to help create me. I knew I was unlikely to find the connection I was hoping for, but no matter how persistent my doubts were, a tiny part of me couldn't help but put some weight on the things she'd done during the latter part of her life.

Katya might have started off as an emotionless assassin, but interacting with Tyrell's people—with Jax—had changed her somehow. It was the only explanation for why she would throw her lot in with Tyrell—a man she had no reason to believe had any chance of successfully standing up to the Society.

If that were all she had done, maybe I would've been able to convince myself that trying to make it through the barrier in a probably-futile effort to find her was not worth doing, but it wasn't. Katya had left Jax, the man she loved, behind and made the exact same journey I was attempting—while pregnant—in order to make sure that her daughter would grow up with the opportunity to get the life-extending nanite injections that had made Katya effectively immortal.

Not only that, rather than abandoning me once she'd succeeded in placing me inside a Society crèche, she'd stuck around for seventeen years and kept an eye on me. I hadn't known it at the time, but looking back it was clear as day. Throughout my childhood there had always been one adult in my life who'd paid a little more attention to me than had been granted to the rest of the children. As the years had rolled by, Katya had been forced to wear different faces and assume different identities, but she'd always been there. Despite being limited to very casual interactions, she'd watched out for me and tried to prepare me as best she could for life outside the enclave.

Even as a child, I'd noticed that my crèche nannies had always had an extra treat or a kind word beyond what the rest of the kids had been able to expect, but I never understood the reason behind it. I'd just assumed I was special in some way.

It was ironic, really. Kids are programmed to believe that they are special, that there's something about them which makes them worthy of great things, but I'd actually been right. I'd been special enough to have a mother who risked death not just once but many times every day that she'd remained inside the enclave.

A woman who would do that was anything but emotionless, and I couldn't help but feel like I owed it to her to find out what had happened.

If this had all been about nothing more than trying to establish an emotional connection with someone I shared genetic material with, then I probably would've given up well before getting to the barrier. It wasn't though, and because of that I knew I was going to go forward. I was going to try to sneak into the enclave regardless of the danger involved.

If I'd had access to more food and water in an easily portable form, I probably would've tried circumnavigating the barrier in the hopes of finding a better point for crossing into the enclave, but I was very much operating against a clock. I wasn't going to starve to death anytime soon, but living off of gathered fruits like I was couldn't provide enough protein to keep my muscles from starting to atrophy. If I were to make the long, dangerous journey around the enclave it was all too likely I would fail to find a better option than the two I was already considering, and I would probably end the journey several tenths of a second slower over the requisite distance than I was right then.

That meant there really was no choice. I was going to make the attempt, and I was going to make it soon—before my muscles could start to atrophy. I went to sleep knowing that I was going to make my crossing the next day.

I slept in late since there was no point making the run before the ambient temperature had warmed up to the point where I wouldn't stand out for anyone watching on a thermographic device. Once I woke up, I stretched, walked over to the better of the two crossing points I'd identified, and then assumed a crouch with one foot resting against a rock outcropping that seemed steady enough to withstand whatever amount of force I was capable of generating. With my nanites tasked to strengthen my muscles to the point where I could feel the blood throbbing through them, and my time sense turned up as far as the rest of my spare nanites could manage, I waited like that, shifting slightly every few minutes in an attempt to keep from cramping up.

It felt like an hour passed, and I could feel my attention starting to wander in spite of my best efforts. I'd been trying to keep an ear out for incoming aircraft as a way of anticipating the moment when the barrier might come down, but I'd known even before I started that the bulk of the planes had been coming in from another direction. I'd almost given up on making it inside the enclave for that day, but then it happened.

Between one second and the next, the constant, barely visible shimmer of the barrier disappeared.

Some part of me had questioned my ability to actually take advantage of the moment when the barrier went down. Up until now, nearly all of my life-and-death experiences had been the sort where a failure to react was asking to be killed. When you were standing less than twenty feet away from a highly trained soldier who fully intended on cutting you down, there was nothing to do but try to kill them before they got you.

This was completely different. For the first time I could remember, my acting didn't take me out of danger, it was going to put me in much greater danger, and despite my resolve to go forward, I hadn't been entirely sure that I would be able to carry through with my plan.

It turned out I needn't have worried.

The muscles in my right leg bunched up as I pushed off explosively from the rock under my right foot and pulled forward with both hands, clawing for every bit of extra speed I could muster. The adrenaline hadn't had a chance to hit my system yet, but I still managed the best take off of my life. In fact, I was still almost horizontal when my left foot came up and pushed off of the ground with enough force I could've sworn I felt the bones in that leg flexing.

By the time I took my third step I'd come up to something much more closely resembling the posture typical of sprinters, but I could still feel that my center of gravity was far enough forward that if I gave the next couple of seconds anything less than my absolute best effort, I would end up skidding across the ground unable to maintain my balance.

The next step brought me out of the dense vegetation where I'd been hiding and put my feet on the hard-packed ground immediately in front of the spot that normally contained the energy barrier.

I dug down, looking for something extra to give now that there was less chance I was going to trip over a stray root, but my muscles didn't have anything else to give—they were already performing at their maximum limit. The next step pushed me far enough forward that my head was inside the danger zone where the barrier normally resided, and I was fully committed.

I'd been right in thinking that I would find extra resources when faced with a run that really could result in my death, but the extra effort I was making came with a cost. Normally I could easily sprint the first half of a thirty-yard dash before my body started yelling at me that it needed more oxygen, but that wasn't the case this time.

Maybe it was the result of how high I had my time sense turned up. Even just the handful of steps I'd taken to get this far felt like they'd been stretched out over the better part of three full seconds, which was well past the point when my brain usually complained about the side effects of trying to maintain peak exertion.

I was gasping, but it was worse than I was used to because the air felt thicker than normal. It was taking a concerted effort of will to force the air in and out of my lungs, and what was making it inside me didn't seem to have any oxygen content. My muscles likewise weren't happy, despite the assist they were getting from my nanites. Everything from my glutes on down was pure agony, and my bones felt like they'd been bruised in some horrific collision, but I refused to dial back my desperate sprint forward.

At the speed I was currently moving, an awful lot of the distance I covered happened while neither foot was in contact with the ground. That meant that I'd flown forward far enough that my hips were well out of the danger zone by the time my off foot touched down and it was time to push again. I did so, fighting not just against inertia or gravity, but also against my body itself, and then all of the hair on my body suddenly stood on end.

It shouldn't have been possible—even if all of my nanites had been tasked toward spinning up my time sense—to register the brief instant between when the barrier's circuitry was fed power and when the energy field itself sprang into existence. Maybe it was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, but the sensation of being at ground zero in a lightning strike caused me to yank both feet forward in an action guaranteed to result in me taking a nasty fall.

Failing to follow through with that final step meant that I lost some of my speed, which could have potentially lethal consequences, but as both knees came up tight against my stomach I felt searing pain across the back of my right foot a split second before I was flung violently into the bushes on the enclave side of the barrier.

I went through three complete revolutions and picked up more than a dozen scrapes and cuts before everything finally sank in. A ginger probing of my right heel confirmed what I'd suspected. It'd been much