Page 47 of Legacy of Chaos

Liar.

Whatever.

“How much time do we have?” he asked her.

“Best guess?” Cyan blew out a breath. “Twenty-four hours. Maybe thirty, if we’re lucky.”

Damn, he’d hoped for double that. “Okay, let’s use the time to come up with another solution. And we need a plan to make using the submersible safer. Taran, get your people on that. I’ll go down to the crew quarters and do what I can for the injured.”

“What do you want me to do?” Cyan asked.

“Work on getting communications back up. We need help.” He felt around in his pocket for his injector. He’d need his next dose soon, which would leave him with three more doses. After that, he’d be in trouble if he didn’t get off this rig or get a supply brought in.

He’d been stupid to leave without grabbing another one. But that was how he lived, wasn’t it? Daring Death to take him and making it easy for the bastard.

Clearly, being a genius didn’t mean he was smart about everything.

The communications were fucked. All of them.

No matter what Cyan did, she couldn’t get any piece of equipment to operate, even with magical assistance. One of the crew, a hyena shifter named Ubundi, did his best to repair the machines that had been damaged in the helicopter crash. But according to him, the satellite had been destroyed, and the radio, while functional, seemed to be blocked by the malevolent fog surrounding the rig.

Cyan tried using magic to boost the signals, but nothing she did affected transmissions, which led her to believe that the fog had grown thicker.

“I think we’re screwed.”

Ubundi nodded. “I cannot do anything else here. I will make sure the submersible wasn’t damaged.”

Good idea. She hadn’t thought of that. Without a way to get down to the enchanted glyphs, the seal on the breach would continue to weaken until it broke, releasing evil toxins into the human realm like radiation from a damaged nuclear reactor.

“Check the lifeboats too,” she said. “They may be our only way to get out of here if worse comes to worst.”

“I will do that.” He took off.

“We got new images!” Twila shouted. “Yes!”

“The camera is working again?”

“Thanks to whatever you did.”

Cyan had sent a generic repair spell into the equipment with few hopes of success. Thankfully, it had worked. The camera hadn’t been physically damaged, but a power surge had killed it. Fortunately, the fine weaves in her spell had patched all the burned-out components. The fix was temporary but obviously enough to relay some updated images of the damaged glyphs deep below the surface.

She hurried over to Twila’s station as the other female threw the images into the air like half a dozen big-screen TVs.

“How do the glyphs look?” Twila asked.

Cyan’s blood chilled as she compared old images to the new ones. “They’re degrading. Faster than I thought.” She peered more closely at one that had begun to peel away from the pipe. If that one went—

The floor beneath her rocked so violently that Twila stumbled and would have fallen if Cyan hadn’t steadied her. All around them, metal groaned and creaked as the platform shuddered. Outside, something screeched.

“We’re running out of time,” Cyan croaked, her throat clogged with terror.

Between the demonic danger and the threat of the platform collapsing into the sea, Cyan felt like she was on the verge of hyperventilating. Drowning in a dark body of water was her second biggest fear, right after being raped, tortured, and eaten alive by demons. All those things could happen on this death trap.

She needed to get down to the glyphs immediately.

The rig stopped shaking, but Cyan’s nerves didn’t. This assignment sucked.

Get it together. You’ve been through worse.

---