Chapter 3

When Jax left home that day, she took a circular route to backtrack into the mountains.

Despite the money her father had put away for her, Jax knew that her training was going to be very expensive, and now she had to support herself as well. She was going to need more coin and had three weeks to get herself established in the town.

As she walked, Jax decided that she would tell people that she was a Burgis and an orphan so that she wasn’t bothered. Single Prol women not living with their clan weren’t trusted. Her status as a Prol would cause her problems.

Jax was glad that her height and features would leave doubt in people’s minds. She didn’t dare claim to be a shifter as they weren’t trusted either. Some people feared a shape-shifter impersonating them.

Jax was deep in the old mine when she ducked into a side cavern she had explored before. She retrieved her mining clothes from one of the old lockers.

The lockers had been in use some twenty years earlier when her people had mined this section of the mountain. It had long since played out, and they had moved on.

The finely-woven woollen clothes had been dyed a cacky-green. We’d call them, khaki but they didn’t have that word. Surprisingly, they looked a lot like World War II uniforms that were worn by the men in the Australian Army.

Jax’s leather, lace-up boots were made with the new method of stitching the leather upper to the thicker soles. You would have to look carefully to realise that the soles were strips of leather rather than rubber. They had been dipped in a tar-like solution to seal them.

Her father had splashed out and bought a pair for her, and everyone still at home when he had been on his little spending spree. He had received a lot of coin from selling the Quaz crystals.

Jax hadn’t had many opportunities to wear the boots since, so they still looked new. She had just finished lacing her boots up when her medallion got hot on her chest.

Then she heard a man say, “She came this way, but there are four tunnels. Which one did she take?”

“Buggared if I know. I remember that the one to the right went to the old change and crib rooms, but we didn’t get far down any of the other three the last time we were here. So, I have no idea where she went,” the second man grumbled.

“Shit! The boss really wants to know where she got the damn crystals from,” the first man replied.

“Well, from what her father said when we interrogated him, she came here a lot, and this is the only way out of here. Why don’t we set up a tripwire and then wait in the crib room?”

“He said that she hasn’t been in here for ages. So, I bet she won’t waste time going to get some more crystals. We can nab her when she comes back,” the second man responded.

“Yeah, I can’t think of a better plan; let’s do that. I sure hope that she isn’t gone long; I hate these tunnels. They reminded me of when we were in the tunnels in Mount Dragon with that idiot, Kerr. Fuck knows what lives in these ones,” the first man complained as he shuddered.

Jax quickly and quietly packed her other clothes and town shoes into her pack and carefully re-shouldered it. She had planned to leave it in here, but now she couldn’t.

She knew that a rear tunnel led to a latrine area, and she could climb up and out through a little known fissure that was higher up in the wall.

She could also use it to get to where she needed to go.

Stealthily, Jax headed down the rear passage.

She was very agile and had scaled the 5m high, steep, sloped back, rocky cliff in little time. She was working her way across a small ledge to the crack in the wall and stopped when she heard a rock being kicked.

She looked down to see a stream of piss arc out into the light shining from the man’s hat onto a wall. She had to cling to the rock and wait for him to finish his business.

While she couldn’t see him clearly, her night-vision and magical abilities let her see enough to know that he wasn’t a Prol but a man of the Burgis race. Jax had a pretty good idea who he and his friend were.

She wasn’t happy that they had returned and guessed that they had been watching the house to have seen her leave. She wondered who told them that she was moving out as she only told Hana and Marx a few days before.

This didn’t bode well for her setting up in Alpha Point if they were still interested in where she got the crystals from. Single women disappeared all the time in the port city.

She didn’t want these men anywhere near her.

To Jax’s disgust, after he peed, the man started playing with himself.

From what she could observe from her angle and being above him, he didn’t have a lot to play with. She could barely even tell what was in his fast-moving hand. Thankfully, he was also quick off the mark.