Between Gates (The Gate Chronicles Book 1)

Chapter 9: Tracking

Shaking off her melancholy mood, Nari pulled a piece of wafer bread out of her backpack. It was wet too, but she didn’t have anything else. She set it aside and put all of her sleeping gear back onto the back of the backpack. Wet or not, she had no option but to keep moving. No time for stuff to dry. She hooked the backpack up onto her back, and then she picked up the wet wafer bread.

She started walking at a brisk, but maintainable pace while she ate. She knew she should be catching up with Amory’s party sometime in the next day, so she kept a sharp lookout for the group because she didn’t want to accidently stumble upon them.

The silence of the day nearly drove her mad. She wished she could sing, but that would be a terrible idea. If she were to come upon Amory’s group unawares, it would be a very bad outcome if they knew she was there before she knew where they were.

Around midday, Nari stopped to eat and rest. She checked her communication equipment again. Still wasn’t working. It didn’t even turn on. As she was doing so, she heard strange noises coming from ahead of her and to her right. People were laughing.

It wasn’t unusual in and of itself. After all, Nari was walking through a preserve that had placed camping grounds within its borders to allow campers to be near some of the site’s most interesting features. It was lunch time, though, so most campers would be out eating somewhere or still visiting special spots in the preserve. Not many of them would be sitting in a spot like this. There wasn’t even anything interesting to see.

She quietly packed her water and communication devices away, and then she crept towards the bushes. Her silent, lithe strides carried her quickly to where the group was.

In an instant, she knew. It was Amory’s group.

She crouched down in the bushes letting their voices drift to her.

Amory was speaking to the group.

“Alright, listen up men. We are, as I’m sure the smartest of you have figured out by now, heading for East Gate. We will be taking over East Base. With any luck, my contacts and friends will already be working on taking it from within. I’ve contacted them already, and they said that they thought they could have the Base taken before we get there. Once we have East Base, we will work on fixing my fool brother’s mess. We will kick him and his cronies out of the MBC, and then we will establish a system that works far better!”

Nari wanted to laugh. The men were laughing and roaring their approval. Good thing they were out in the middle of nowhere or they would have been arrested for being so uproarious and crude. Not to mention the fact that they were talking about attacking something. Although humans would have no idea what the East Gate or Base was, so Nari supposed they would probably just put all the men into a mental facility for being insane.

She thought about what Amory had said. He hadn’t said anything at all about how he was going to fix Andrew’s “mess”. But he had acted as though Andrew was the villain. This made Nari think that perhaps Amory was tricking some of the men into following him. Would they all still follow him if they knew that he was the one behind all the reports of problems on Earth?

Andrew had checked the systems before she left, and it was quite clear that someone had been setting the sudden wave of magical creatures from the Dark Realms very carefully. All the evidence pointed to Amory.

She stayed silent, and then she heard a calm, resonant voice begin speaking.

“You say that we’ll take over East Base. Fine. You say you have agents in place there already. We don’t have any way of knowing, but we’ll believe you on that. But when you say that you’re going to establish a system that works better than the one currently in place, I have to ask you what. The problem here isn’t the system. It’s your brother, Andrew, and all of his minions. So why get rid of the system unless you have some hidden motive for it?”