Twisted Sister of Mine (Overworld Chronicles) by John Corwin Page A

dead.
    A frantic knot of worry bowled up my throat. What the hell had roared at her? What terrible things were the Templars doing to her? I took deep breaths, somehow managing to quell my rising panic. Elyssa was a total badass. She could take care of herself—I hoped.
    "Well ain't this dandy," Shelton said. "Guess we're stuck here."
    To keep myself from pouting about Elyssa, I forced myself to think about something else. "I wonder what's causing these Gloom cracks to appear all of a sudden."
    Shelton looked toward the stables. The layout of Queens Gate station looked very similar to the one at the Grotto, so I knew what he was thinking before he even said anything.
    "The operator might know," I said.
    Shelton nodded. "I wonder if it has something to do with this Darkwater project of the Conroys."
    We headed toward the control room, passing by the Templars and Arcanes who'd rescued the mother and son from the Gloom, and headed around the back of the stables. The control room door here at Queens Gate was hidden in about the same spot as the one in the Grotto. Shelton opened it and found two operators immersed in an intense conversation.
    "I'm with Darkwater," Shelton said without preamble. "Mind telling me what the hell is going on with the arches?"
    I had to admire how ballsy Shelton was with this subterfuge. Then again, he probably used it all the time with his bounty hunting.
    The two operators glanced over at Shelton. One of them spoke. "I explained matters to Mr. Conroy. These sorts of anomalies are to be expected. We haven't used these arches in centuries because they're unstable," he said, waving a hand toward the rows of smaller black arches identical to the ones I'd seen at the Grotto.
    The other man stepped forward. "We told him there must be damage at the other end. Thunder Rock was abandoned for a reason and trying to use one of these arches to get there might be more dangerous than sending an expedition in a more conventional manner."
    My chest went cold at the thought of anyone wanting to wade through the horrors lurking in the water and caves in that accursed place, but I held back the next question begging to escape my lips, namely, why in the world did Jeremiah Conroy want to go to Thunder Rock? If I asked such a question, the operators would know we had nothing to do with Darkwater.
    Shelton was a step ahead of me already. "What I don't get is what the old man expects once we get there."
    The operators paused, glancing at each other as if wondering how we wouldn't know. They seemed to shrug off the doubt, though, and one of them spoke. "All he told us was there's a special arch there that he wants the arcane engineers to get working." The operator shrugged. "He won't tell us anything else."
    "The long and short of this bloody mess is this," the second man said. "Something is breaching the traversion tunnels created by the arches. This means anyone who goes through one of these arches could drop out in a completely random place—maybe another realm, maybe the Gloom." He threw up his hands. "I have no bloody idea. The other problem is these cracks in the traversion tunnel are wreaking havoc with the Obsidian Arch network. We still don't fully understand the magic behind these things even though our people have studied them for centuries."
    I thought back to the tunnels of light depicted on the global map in the control room while an arch was in use. The magical pipes carried people from one point to another. If one had leaks in it—my mind flashed to the terrifying journey I'd taken from the small arch in Thunder Rock to El Dorado. It had dropped me into several different places, some of which were most definitely not of this earth before depositing me where I'd wanted to go. At the time, I'd been trying to get back to Elyssa after cherubs had separated us in the depths of Thunder Rock. But a strange bubble in reality had prevented me from reaching her, and I'd been sucked back in and dropped through a broken