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orbs to knock the men through the open rift. When less than a handful remained and most of the ammunition had been used up, she stepped forward with her shield up and kept firing the power orbs.
    Keep back, Solar. They are dangerous.
    I know that better than you do. I lived with them—
    She didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence. A scream broke from her throat as she was pierced by a bolt. She looked down in shock, and a chain was attached to the glowing metal protruding from her arm. The man on the other end of the chain gave her a harsh yank, and she stumbled forward with another scream.
    By this method, she was pulled through the rift along with the retreating military men. Her pain was pushed aside by her shock when she didn’t recognize the place she had been hauled to.
    The platform she was on was the centre of a buzzing, gathering of lab workers, more men in uniform and several scowling administrators in addition to the shocked colonists.
    “General, we have one of the Project clones.”
    “Blow the rift.” A man with dark eyes and a darker expression looked down at her. “My, my. I have heard of your kind but never seen one. Mr. Winthrop will enjoy seeing you.” Solar made a show of trying to stand, but she remained slouched on the floor. Two men lifted her with no consideration for her shoulder and carried her to a holding room where her hands were cuffed to the table. She could break the cuffs, heck, she could melt the cuffs, but first, she wanted to meet this Mr. Winthrop.
    She wasn’t kept waiting long.
    “Well, well. One of the Project clones. I never thought to see one of you in person, but here you are. Now, why are you here?” Mr. Winthrop was a tall, thin man, but his suit fit him perfectly. In human society, his aspect said he had money and power.
    “Your men shot me and dragged me through the rift.” She jerked her head toward the bolt still in her shoulder.
    “But why were you at our little colony? There is no file for you to chase, no coordinates for you to follow, and I heard that one of you actually blew up the underground lab where they had been keeping you. That wasn’t nice.” He made a tsking noise with his mouth.
    She didn’t speak.
    “Answer me. You will answer or you will learn how it feels to have that bolt removed millimeter by millimeter.”
    “The Dimensional Arrest Retrieval and Extraction assignment did not disappear when the lab did. It was what we are and what we must do.”
    “Well, you don’t work for me. We don’t care if the world shatters into bits, we just want to get to safety, and my clients are willing to pay for the privilege. I am running a business here, clone, and you and yours are not going to get in the way.”
    “We will do what we must do to save Earth and the connected dimensions. When one fails, the rest will soon follow.”
    He smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile. “I don’t care. I will be moving to a pleasant little island dimension soon, and when I do, I will live out my life before the cascade catches up to it. Once I am dead, why would I care what happens to the rest of the universe?”
    Her shock was palpable, but a feeling behind her was familiar.
    She melted her cuffs and the bolt in her shoulder. “Thank you, you have told me enough. Goodbye, Mr. Winthrop.”
    A dragon’s hand appeared in the reflection she could see ahead of her, and she stepped back and into Denhar’s grasp. He closed his claw carefully and pulled her back to the smoke-filled world now devoid of humanity.
    What happened? They pulled you through and the rift closed.
    They have tech to blow the rifts shut. They just don’t use it much, I am guessing.
    I smell blood.
    There is still a hole in my shoulder. I think I need a medic.
    I will get us home and take care of it.
    She nodded, but he was already flying to get a good angle on a sky-born rift. Great beats of his wings echoed the slow pounding of her heart as they went from night on an alien world to the