Chapter 70 - Sixty Hectares of Land

The dimensional jump back to the Acacias penthouse lasted the exact two seconds logged on the interface timer.

When the ether vacuum collapsed over the plush living room rug, Dante and Maria landed on their feet in the center of the air-conditioned room.

Nicole was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, a half-gallon tub of chocolate ice cream in her lap and a stainless-steel spoon in her right hand, absorbed in a car chase movie on the fifty-inch screen. She gave a sharp start, her spoon freezing an inch from her lips, all four amber eyes wide behind her dark fringe.

"You're back fast," she said, swallowing her bite of ice cream with a click of her tongue. "I figured you'd be stuck all day at that registry office."

"We bought the land in cash on the spot, girl," Maria answered with a broad grin, unhooking her empty pack and tossing it onto the sofa. "Deed is signed, the truck is rented, and the gate is locked in our names. Grab your gear, we're changing addresses right now."

Nicole looked toward the canvas duffel where she had already stashed her black-scaled coat, Elen's brass lockbox, and the repeating crossbow with its silver-tipped bolts.

She sprang off the rug with fluid speed, pulled on her leather boots without bothering to lace them, and grabbed the shoulder strap with her right hand.

"We're going back to that jungle?"

"We're going to our homestead," Dante corrected, calling up his interface's fourth tab. "One hundred and fifty acres of virgin forest and a freshwater stream. You'll have room enough to sprint without looking at a concrete wall for the next ten days."

Dante held out his open right hand in the center of the room.

Nicole locked her fingers around his forearm in a firm grip, and Maria clamped her heavy hand onto his left shoulder.

Dante selected the secondary surface beacon newly consolidated within his soul matrix: Secondary Terrestrial Anchor - Sítio Três Meninas (Cruzeiro do Sul - AC).

Planar Transit: Jump.

The snap of the dimensional vacuum swallowed the Acacias living room.

Two seconds later, the ceiling moldings and the scent of floor wax dissolved into nothingness.

The three of them touched down onto the hard-packed red clay of the clearing, right beside the silver four-door pickup parked beneath the canopy of the three giant rubber trees.

The humid heat of the Amazon washed over Nicole's face with the rich scent of damp foliage and earth baking in the four o'clock sun.

Dante let go of her arm, walking to the bed of the truck to retrieve the first tool chest.

"You can take off the beanie and glasses, Nicole," Dante said without looking back, dropping the pickup's tailgate with a solid metallic latch. "For two miles in every direction, there are no neighbors, no paved roads, and no police cruisers. This ground is ours."

Nicole stood motionless in the red clay.

She brought both hands to her crown, peeling the black knit cap back in a single unhurried motion.

Her dark hair tumbled down her neck, the two small rounded horn buds drinking in the virgin forest air, and she slipped the dark sunglasses from her face, tucking the frames into her pocket.

She drew three deep breaths through her nose in sequence.

The absolute absence of walls was something her mind was still trying to fathom.

In the Third District of the Capital, the furthest horizon she had ever known was the brick facade of an adjoining tenement twenty feet away or the sixty-foot steel wall slicing the sky. Inside Conduit Seven, her reality had been a twenty-foot circle of cast-iron pipe.

Here, in this open pasture carved between the trees, the land rolled out for hundreds of yards in every direction.

One hundred and fifty acres.

Six hundred thousand square meters of level soil, tall green grass, thickets of wild ferns, and towering stands of hardwood timber soaring a hundred feet into the air, weaving a natural vaulted canopy that filtered the sunlight into shafts of amber over the pasture.

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Nicole broke into a ten-pace sprint across the red dirt, skidding to a halt in the middle of the grass with her arms spread wide.

She looked up at the pristine blue sky, looked out along the tree line bounding the property, and let out a ringing, unburdened laugh that carried none of the bitter chill of a sewer huntress.

"There's no ceiling..." she called out, the chitin mandibles beneath her lips parting in an open grin. "Maria! There are no iron walls boxing in this air!"

"Told you there was plenty of room, girl!" Maria hollered from the truck bed, dropping to the red dirt with her forty-eight-pound greatsword in her hands.

The Sentinel wasted no time.

She strode over to a side clearing where three massive dead tree trunks had fallen during an ancient storm, rotting into the low brush.

Gripping the long leather-wrapped hilt of the black boiler steel sword two-handed, she sank her hips with the natural balance of thirty-three Strength and dragged air deep into her chest.

For the past several days, Maria had been forced to rein in every strike to keep from shattering basalt walls in the townhouse or splitting concrete slabs in the city courtyards.

Here, on this virgin soil, she held nothing back.

Her [Seismic Rift] skill flared as the blade descended.

The six-and-a-half-foot dark steel crashed down in a furious vertical cleave against a three-foot-thick log of solid hardwood.

CRACK-BOOOOM.

The impact sheared the dense timber clean in two as if it were kindling, blasting splintered wood thirty feet across the clearing.

The concussive shockwave ripped through the red earth in a sixteen-foot furrow, heaving up roots and stones in a percussive blast that boomed through the rainforest, startling a flock of green parakeets that erupted from the rubber tree canopy in a screeching squall.

Maria let out a deep, rolling laugh, twirling the forty-eight-pound blade one-handed before resting the flat across her broad shoulder.

"Now this is where you build arm strength without worrying about paying damages to a landlord!" she yelled across the pasture, wiping sweat from her brow with her forearm.

Dante unloaded the four carbon-steel machetes and the gas-powered chainsaw onto the grass.

He followed the path of flattened grass down to the creek bank at the parcel's southern boundary.

The stream ran twenty feet wide and three feet deep down its central channel, its waters clear and dark over a bed of white sand and rounded pebbles. The flow was cool, completely untouched by industrial runoff, mirroring the canopy of Brazil nut trees that formed an unbroken roof of green overhead.

Dante paused on the sandbar.

He looked up toward the canopy ninety feet above his head: a tangled lattice of interlacing branches and broad leaves that completely blocked any aerial line of sight that a commercial airliner or government satellite might cast over the riverbed.

He unbuckled his heat-resistant leather vest, undoing the side straps with both hands.

The basilisk bone plate housing the Primordial Iron Core rested cold between his shoulder blades.

He closed his gray eyes, drawing his mental intent down into his soul core.

Deploy: Winged Vestige.

The two skeletal frames parted the slits in his gray shirt with that subtle click of expanding cartilage and setting sinew.

The ash-gray wings fanned out under the cool forest shade across their six-and-a-half-foot span, the rigid stone-like feathers settling with a dry snap against the jungle moisture.

In this wide-open clearing between titanic trunks, free from the threat of Capital flak batteries and shielded from passing highway motorists, Dante took two running strides along the sandbar and drove his wings downward with power.

WHOOSH.

The downburst of concentrated air scattered dry leaves across both banks of the stream.

Dante's frame vaulted straight up, clearing sixteen feet in a vertical climb with an ease that rendered his nine Strength utterly irrelevant.

He did not check his climb at six feet as he had in the quarry crater.

He stroked the wings a second time, banking between the massive trunks of the nut trees thirty feet above the water, tracing fluid curves over the flowing creek, feeling the cool Amazonian air slide across the stone pinions without friction.

He touched down onto a thick bough of a copaiba tree forty feet in the air, his boot soles settling with a light, clean touch that barely creaked the tree's bark.

From his high perch, Dante looked down.

He saw Nicole padding barefoot along the sandy creek bank, her dark hair blowing free in the breeze, all four amber eyes marveling at the clean water coursing over the pebbles.

He saw Maria wielding a carbon-steel machete to carve a path through a thicket of bamboo at the edge of the clearing, slicing through the thick stalks with the casual ease of trimming lawn grass.

And he saw the truck laden with tools resting under the canopy of the centenary rubber trees.

This parcel of land in northern Brazil was no mere rural acreage recorded in a frontier courthouse ledger.

It was their absolute physical freedom.

Here they could punch rifts straight into the heart of the Capital at any hour of the day or night, swing forty-pound blades without cracking municipal pavement, and let stone wings stretch wide beneath the rainforest canopy without a single white-jacket official suspecting the existence of their sanctuary.

Dante spread his gray wings on the high branch, catching the afternoon breeze against his stone pinions, before dropping into an unhurried glide back toward the sandbar where the two girls waited to raise the first shelter of their new territory.