The

Enforcers

Book 2 – St. Antoni - The Forbidden Colony

Gail Daley

Gail's Other Books

SPACE COLONY JOURNALS

Options of Survival

Destiny Rising

Tomorrows Legacy

The Interstellar Jewel Heist

The Designer People

Alien Trails

Quantum Light

Confederation Planets & People

PORTAL WORLD TALES

Portal World Notes

Rulari—Land of Myth & Magic

ST. ANTONI – THE FORBIDDEN COLONY

Warriors of St. Antoni

The Enforcers

The Gaslight Bandits

The Portal Lawman

Cradle of Fire

The Clone Initiative

THE OUTLAW COLONIES

Apex Predator*

Game Theory*

Heirs of Avalon*

Babylon Shattered*

Cloned Ambition*

MAGI OF RULARI

Spell of The Magi

Magi Storm

Paladin

NON-FICTION

The Complete Modern Artist’s Handbook

PAMPHLETS

Introduction to The Internet #1

The Hard Stuff – Handbook #2

Art Show Basics – Handbook #3

Framing on a Budget – Handbook #4

Are You Making Money? – Handbook #5

Just For Writers – Handbook #6*

*Working Title. Release dates TBA

Copyright © 2020 by Gail Daley dba Gail Daley's Fine Art

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Print ISBN: 9781393088974

e-book ISBN- 9781393128588

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Gail Daley

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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is unintentional and accidental.

Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

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The Enforcers St. Antoni The Forbidden Colony book 2- Gail Daley—1st ed. Copyright © 2020 by Gail Daley dba Gail Daley's Fine Art

Cover Art Copyright © 2020 Used with permission

About This Book

A former assassin for hire plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with a serial killer. On the Forbidden Colony planet of St. Antoni you're born tough—or you die young.

Chloe was trained from a young age to be an assassin. Since her move to Junction City, she has been trying hard to reinvent herself as an investigator. But her first case has a huge complication: she finds Samuel Adams, the man she came to question, dead. He has a wicked knife sticking out of his groin. She didn't do it, but given her history, who will believe her? It looks as if her past is about to catch up with her.

Caleb Jones is a man with a violent past. After his family was destroyed in a city state war, he went to work at the only job he knew. As an Enforcer for the Marshals of the Federated City States of St. Antoni, he hunts killers. He came to Junction City looking for a serial killer. Instead, he finds Chloe. Is she the killer he's looking for or the woman who can replace everything he lost?

Table of Contents

Gail's Other Books

About This Book

Prologue

White In The Moon

The Enforcer

A Dismal Sheen

Murder Most Foul

Suspicion

Shadow Of A Killer

A Glittering Eye

Treads The Shadow

Smoke & Mirrors

Dance Upon The Air

Sunshine & Shadow

Idle As A Painted Ship

Bright As A New Penny

The Death Fires Dance

Dead Men's Tales

Hold off! Unhand Me!

Way Hay & Up She Rises

Thickening Shadows

A Light In the Darkness

The Game's Afoot!

Early In The Morning

A Rusty Razor

Evil As Evil Can Be

The Stars Rush Out

St. Antoni Historical Notes

TECHNOLOGY

POLITICAL STRUCTURE

NATIVE ANIMALS

About The Author

A Note From Gail

Bonus: Excerpt from Warriors of St. Antoni

Something Wicked This Way Comes

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Prologue

THE STOREKEEPER WAS nervous. His chest felt tight, and he had trouble catching his breath. Someone was watching him; he could feel it, but he hadn't found the watcher, but he thought he knew who was paying him; it had been a mistake to dally with such a dangerous man's wife, but the danger had added a spice to his sexual excitement. He poured another glass of expensive Earth  whiskey and downed it hastily. The bottle was almost empty. He would need to order another from the Portal Runner. Hell, why not order a case? He had money now.

There was a sound from the back of the storeroom. His wife? No, she was asleep upstairs, zonked out on that sleeping potion she had taken.

A sudden cramp caused him to double over. He looked at the whisky bottle in sudden suspicion. His last thought as he slid down the counter to the floor was, he had been poisoned!

The killer stood in the doorway to the storage room and watched dispassionately as Adams puked up the Whiskey he had just drunk. He had been paid to kill the storekeeper in a certain way. Poisoning the man wasn't in his instructions and he had already been paid. He shrugged, and rolled Adams over with his foot. He took the knife he had taken from the kitchen and drove it into the body several times, leaving it sticking out of the man's groin. He would have preferred to use one of his own knives, but then he wouldn't have left it behind as he had been instructed.

White In The Moon

CHLOE STOOD ON THE deck of the steamer Sally Sue watching River Crossing slide off into the distance. As they pulled away from the hustle and bustle of the busy waterfront, the noise of the town dropped away. Instead, there was the sound of the fifty or sixty passengers and crew and the muted splash of water falling as it was pulled through the paddlewheel driven by a mighty bluestone steam engine.

Although not born on St. Antoni (her mother had escaped Earth with her when she had been only a few months old), Chloe had grown to womanhood on the forbidden colony. Had she been transported back to earth she would have found its people and technology strange and alien. To Chloe, there was nothing strange in the juxtaposition of St. Antoni's mixed primitive and modern technology. It was primitive by earth standards; without Earth's powerful manufacturing base to maintain and create advanced technology, the colony had been forced to fall back on more primitive means to maintain their standard of living. Instead of gas-powered transportation, they domesticated native animals to ride and to pull plows or carriages. As an alternative to using coal to power steam engines, they used a native mineral, bluestones. Bluestones were unique to St. Antoni; when water was poured on them, they burst into flame and continued to produce heat until the mineral was absorbed by the water.

Good fortune had shone on the settlers of St. Antoni when they first snuck through the illicit portal. They found a world that closely resembled Earth in the Pleistocene epoch. Settlers using other illicit gates weren't always so lucky: some of them found themselves stranded on rocky wastelands whose soil lacked the nutrients to maintain life or a water covered planet with little or no land to grow crops.

St. Antoni possessed a yellow sun only a little darker than the one that shone on Earth. The constellations overhead might be new and strange, but the sun looked down on blue seas, lush grass covered land masses with dense forests, high snowy mountains, and hot dry deserts. Large rivers and small streams threaded the continents. Plants and animals were genetically close enough to those on Earth  to support human life, and St. Antoni's temperature range made living there bearable for humans.

St. Antoni was still wild and unexplored except for a few roads connecting isolated farms and ranches to towns and the railroads directly connecting the City States to each other. However, the illegal portal from Earth  in Gateway City had been open for several hundred years, and in that time the citizens of St. Antoni had established seven City States whose loosely connected governments cooperated with each other to keep anarchy from thriving.

Back on Earth , daring Portal Runners dodged police and military to bring in a steady trickle of new settlers and other items highly valued on a planet without its own technological resources.

The only other means of getting from place to place was by using the rivers. Like others of her kind, the Sally Sue, the riverboat Chloe and her companions had booked passage on, regularly traversed the Black River to and from Junction City and the coast. She was a large flat-bottomed boat; the wheelhouse stuck up in the middle of the boat. Passenger cabins took up the next two decks below it, with a cargo hold at the very bottom of the boat. Half of Sally Sue's large upper deck was taken up by walled corrals holding livestock. A portion of the other half was used by travelers who couldn't afford the price of a cabin. During the day these passengers lounged on bags of luggage they had brought, passing the time by playing cards and other games of chance.

The Riverboats plying the Black River usually traveled during daylight hours and dropped anchor overnight. Even with a good navigator, sand bars and boulders made night travel on a river too dangerous. During the day it was possible to see low water just below the surface or obstacles sticking up out of the water. If she hit them going at any speed it might wreck the steamer.

At night deck passengers would lay out bedrolls and sleep in the open air. Cabins for the more affluent passengers were located on the deck opposite the corrals. Chloe and her companions, her godmother Giselle and her best friend and maid Lizette, had been fortunate to secure a cabin, but they would be sharing it with another family. Henry had taken one of the cots in the bunkroom reserved for single men.

Chloe was slight, with curling dark hair worn in a braid wound around the crown of her head. A wide brimmed straw hat trimmed with feathers shaded the creamy skin of her heart shaped face. Her Large dark eyes were set above a short, straight nose and her generous naturally red lips offset her determined chin.

Despite technological advances like steam engines and refrigerators to keep food from spoiling, St. Antoni was a frontier society. Chloe had turned twenty this month, an age when many girls her age were married. Chloe's marital status didn't concern her much; unlike many women she didn't need to secure a husband to support her. Thanks to her mother's tutoring, Chloe had a unique skill set that would always ensure she could feed and clothe herself. While those skills gave her independence, she had never met a man she thought could accept the unusual profession for which she had been trained. What man wanted to marry a woman who knew a thousand ways to kill him and not get caught? It wasn't as if she was resigned to being single the rest of her life; like any girl her age she dreamed of falling in love. Her mother had found her true love. Chloe kept hoping the dream could become real for her as well.

Although she wasn't ashamed of how her mother had supported them and was grateful her skills gave her the ability to support herself, Chloe always needed to force herself to kill the target. When her Godmother Giselle St. Vyr offered Chloe the opportunity to re-invent herself as an investigator, she grabbed it eagerly. Junction City was going to be her fresh start.

On Earth , Chloe's mother Angela had been very good at her job. Angela had been schooled as a spy and an assassin by a government agency. When she made the mistake of falling in love with the man she was assigned to kill, her agency turned on her. She and Charles DeMille fled, taking false identities and hiding underground. When Angela discovered she was going to have a child, she was both elated and terrified. Nine months later she gave birth to a girl and named her Chloe. Angela had heard about a man who offered passage through one of the illegal gates to another world—for a price. She and Charles made the decision to escape from Earth to St. Antoni where they hoped to make a fresh start.

Unfortunately they didn't get away unscathed; the organization found them the night they were to go through the portal. Charles sent Angela ahead with a promise to follow them after he had laid a false trail. He made her promise she would go through the gate without him if he didn't arrive in time. "I'll follow you," he said. "Wait for me."

Angela never saw her love again, and life on St. Antoni was hard for a single woman with a baby. Like many before her, Angela soon realized that on St. Antoni women as well as men were expected to be able to protect, feed and clothe themselves on their own. Here, a woman had to be tough enough to do those things or find a man to do it for her. Since Angela still had some hope her husband might make it through the Portal, she took steps to protect herself and her three-month old baby.

She wasn't without resources. She had brought ten thousand dollars in paper bills with her when she fled through the portal. The paper money might be useless on St. Antoni, but it could be used by Portal Runners returning to Earth to purchase items needed in a society with few technological resources. Angela had approached the leader of the Women's Circle for help.

Like Angela, Giselle had been left alone on St. Antoni with a child to raise soon after she had arrived. She and a few other women banded together to help each other, developing the Women's Circle in the process. When she met Angela, Giselle had been an attractive woman in her forties and she had still possessed the trim figure that drew men's eyes. The two women had felt an immediate friendship and Giselle became Chloe's godmother.

Giselle understood Angela's situation all too well; after her arrival on St. Antoni, her husband had been murdered. To support herself and her son, she had done a variety of things; she had once been a successful Portal Runner, told fortunes with tarot cards, and sold jewelry she made from gems. She now lived in Copper City and sold rare gemstones and herbal medicines. She wasn't often in Gateway City anymore, and another woman now ran the Women's Circle there, but she made yearly tours of each of the cities to check on the operations of what she had founded. Unsure what to do about Angela, the local head of the Women's Circle had sent her to Giselle.

"I can pay," Angela said when she made her request to change her Earth money for the coins and gems used on St. Antoni as currency.

Giselle had gestured to the pile of bills on the table before her. "It's true that one of the Portal Runners might be able to use this money back on Earth to buy items ordered, but if the bills are marked someone might be watching for them. That would draw unwanted attention to the Runner using them."

"They aren't marked," Angela had said. "I drew it from our hidden accounts just before we left. But if you think it's too dangerous to use, I can pay in kind."

"With what?"

Angela took a deep breath. "Who do you want killed?"

Ostensibly the Circle existed to give help to women in the area who needed it, supplying them with food, medicines and clothing. Unknown to all but a few leaders, it sometimes removed threats as well. So began Angela and Chloe's lives as agents of the Women's Circle. Having no one to leave her baby with when she took an assignment, Angela took Chloe with her wherever she went. As soon as Chloe was old enough, she had begun to teach her daughter the tricks of her trade.

Angela had done her best to ensure that Chloe could support herself by teaching her daughter the only trade she knew, and Chloe had continued to ply it after Angela had died on an assignment in Azure City. When her mother had been killed on that job, fourteen-year-old Chloe had finished the contract. She had been earning her living ever since as a paid assassin. Unfortunately, the local sheriff in Azure City had become suspicious, so Marie Nguyn, the local leader of the Woman's Circle had sent Chloe to Giselle in Kenefic.

Giselle had taken Chloe aside soon after she arrived in River Crossing to speak about her career choices.

"Do you like what you are doing for the Circle?" she had asked.

Chloe bit her lip. "It's what my mother did, what I'm trained for," she replied.

"That isn't what I asked." Giselle had said mildly. "I asked you if you liked it."

Chloe had thought about how it felt when her knife slid into the target's body and shuddered inwardly. "No, I don't," she replied. "But what else can I do?"

"I thought you might use your skills to become an investigator," Giselle had said calmly. "While you are building up your clientele, you can earn a living by selling cosmetics and healing potions."

"The only potions I really know how to make are poisons," Chloe pointed out.

"I suspected as much. As it happens, I know a great deal about creating cosmetics and healing potions. If you want to learn, I can teach you."

"Thank you," Chloe had said, blinking back tears. "I would like to learn."

Chloe's thoughts returned to the present and she turned her head when she heard Giselle's light footsteps behind her on the deck.

"Henry made sure our trunks are in our room," Giselle said, joining her at the rail. "And I left Lizette there with the bags. Unfortunately, we don't have it to ourselves. We are sharing with a woman and her daughters, a Mrs. Dominique."

"Is she the one who was ranting at the crew when we boarded?"

Giselle made a face. "Yes, I believe so. The four girls seem quiet and well behaved though. The two older girls are about your age."

Chloe eyed her. "Does that mean you want me to befriend them?"

"Not unless you want to. I just thought someone to talk to besides me and Lizette might make the journey pass faster."

"Alright."

Although Chloe found the Dominique girls pleasant company, she soon realized she had very little in common with Lily, the oldest girl, whose life seemed centered around finding a husband. Lily had soft, dark hair, blue eyes, pretty features and a timid disposition. Francis, the second oldest daughter was different. The family resemblance was there; Francis too had dark hair and blue eyes, but her tall, spare figure lacked the pleasing shape of her elder sister. Her looks were striking rather than pretty; she possessed cut-glass cheekbones, a firm mouth and intelligent eyes. Francis also had a lively wit and a sharp tongue which she was careful how she exercised around her mother. She was a reader and as she and Chloe shared views on books and life, they found a lot in common. Francis was possessed of an independent streak lacking in her sister. The next oldest daughter, Hetty was about thirteen and her sister Sydney about ten. Both the younger girls had the family dark hair and blue eyes.

Francis was puzzled by her mother's tolerance of her developing friendship with Chloe DeMille. As a rule Cora Dominique kept her daughters close, stringently supervising any friendships that came their way, and discouraging any that might lead to association with what Cora considered the lower classes. True, Chloe and her mentor Giselle St. Vyr seemed to have connections with the upper strata of Junction City, but both women had an independent attitude which Cora didn't want rubbing off on her daughters.

Cora had homeschooled the girls, as much to discourage them making friends with unsuitable classmates, as to ensure that despite their nomadic lifestyle the girls were well fitted for the life she intended them to lead. Francis and Lila could embroider delicate designs, paint pretty pictures, run a house, plan a party and in short do anything expected of the wife of a wealthy man. Despite her mother's insistence they make wealthy marriages, the family was never short of money. As she grew older, Francis had wondered more than once if her father did something on the side besides bookkeeping to account for the additional money she recorded as the family bookkeeper. Whatever it was, she was sure if it wasn't actually illegal, it probably skirted it. It would account for the frequent moves from city to city and her mother's stringent supervision of any friendships the girls tried to make.

During their last days in Azure City, Cora had been increasingly desperate to marry off her daughters. When the letter from their father ordering them to come to Junction City had arrived, it had obviously angered her, but she had obeyed it. Cora always submitted to their father's orders. Having grown up with her parent's behavior, it didn't occur to her that the relationship was an odd one. On the surface Cora Dominique was the ruler of her family, yet while she might nag and criticize him publicly, but in private she obeyed her husband.

Although Cora allowed Francis to peruse local libraries and bookstores, she always cautioned her not to broadcast her wide-ranging interests. "Most men don't want an intellectual for a wife," she had cautioned. "Novels are an acceptable interest for a lady, so confine any discussions of books you've read to them."

Whatever her mother's reasons for allowing it, Francis was enjoying making her first real friend in Chloe, partly because once she discovered Chloe shared her interest in subjects like history and science as well as in novels. She had ignored her mother's ban on speaking of those subjects to Chloe and the pair passed the time with many a lively discussion, occasionally joined by the younger girls. Hetty usually took no part in the debates but listened avidly. Sydney preferred to draw in her sketchbook.

The trip upriver took five days. Junction City was located at the headwaters of three rivers, the Sanguine, Thunderfalls Run and Whispering Waters. It was also the base where the new railroad lines connecting the City States met.

It was the furthest inland settlement on St. Antoni. In the beginning, the new immigrants had stayed close to the Portal, but colonists had long since migrated to the coastal areas where the climate was cooler, the soil fertile and the fishing plentiful. Junction City sat at the very northern edge of the territory claimed by the City State of Kenefic. Beyond it, to the north and across it to the west lay terra incognita. Even though it was now summer, high mountains to the north and west showed snowy peaks.

On the fifth morning, when they had docked at the busy river port Chloe had awakened to a cacophony of sound. Junction city was a busy place. During any given day it was common to see more than a hundred steamboats lining the cobblestone levees to unload cargo and passengers.

A wooden gangplank allowed the Sally Sue's passengers and their luggage to debark onto the long wooden wharf running the length of the town waterfront. An assortment of rickshaws and carriages crowded into the street around the end of every gangplank where a boat had docked. The air resounded with yells and curses as dockmen and drivers tried to gain access to the departing passengers and cargoes.

Across from the wharf were warehouses where cargo could be stored. Narrow streets sprawled through the warehouse district to more affluent areas. Along these streets, eating houses and saloons sat cheek by jowl with  places where inexpensive rooms could be rented by the day or the week.

Further away from the Wharf area was the Red Rock District where the more expensive houses and hotels were frequented by the rich and newly rich of the town. The further from the docks, the more expensive the hotel rooms, Giselle had told Chloe.

"When I came here with Iris and Jeanne we stayed in a hotel. Since we will be here longer this time, I asked my friend Amy Wong to make arrangements for us to rent a house."

"A house means nosy servants," Chloe had reminded her.

"I trust Amy," Giselle had said. "She will have hired trustworthy people to work there. Even if they are curious about our doings, they won't talk about it. She wrote me the house is in a quiet neighborhood and has an attached stable behind it for the tricorns as well."

When the first colonists arrived on St. Antoni it was immediately obvious that they needed a source of transportation, Since they had left behind motorized cars and trucks an alternative method was needed that didn't require factories to make or ran on gas and oil that needed refineries to use. Inspiration came from history. Man had domesticated horses for centuries. The tricorns who ranged the valleys and plains of the new world in large herds, made an admirable substitute. Tricorns resembled large horses with two slim horns poking out of a broad forehead and a short, blunt horn just above their nostrils. Tricorns came with a variety of colors but the most common was red and black striped coats. The stripes, like those of zebras on Earth's savannah's, enabled the wild tricorn herds to blend in with the grasses found on much of St. Antoni's prairie lands. Once tamed to man’s use, the settlers rode the tricorns and used them to pull plows or other forms of transportation much the way their ancestors on Earth had used horses and oxen.

Chloe had left her own gruella tricorn back at Rancho De Oro with Bethany who bred and trained racing tricorns. The mare was in foal and she didn't want to chance the river voyage with her. Also, Marie Nguyn had told her the Sheriff in Azure City had been questioning stablemen there about a Tricorn that looked like hers. It was better for the mare to remain in Bethany St. Vyr's stable where her presence would go unremarked.

They had brought riding animals from the ranch with them. During the trip upriver, the animals had stayed on deck with other livestock also being transported.

A tall thin man in stableman's clothes came up the gangplank. He glanced around until he spotted Giselle, Lizette and Chloe standing by the pile of luggage Giselle had deemed necessary to bring with them.

"Mrs. St. Vyr?" he asked, doffing his hat.

"Yes, I'm Giselle St. Vyre," she answered.

"I'm Terry. Joe sent me. I'm to take you and your luggage to the new house. Is this it?" he asked, pointing at the mound of trunks and bags.

"Yes. We also have four riding mounts. Henry is seeing to them."

"Which one is Henry?" the man asked, gesturing at the crowd around the animal enclosures.

"That's him," she pointed at Henry, "He's the man in the grey shirt with the red and white tricorns."

"Excuse me, a moment, Mrs. St. Vyr," Terry said. He moved over to Henry.

"Your Amy appears to be very efficient," Chloe remarked. "Is Joe her husband?"

"Yes, they are very old friends. Uh-oh, here comes Mrs. Dominique. I wonder what she wants."

Cora Dominique was a tall blowsy woman with graying hair. She was trailed by her four pretty daughters and her husband Larry, a thin man with a patch of bald pate, who had come aboard to meet them. He appeared to be remonstrating with her.

"Are you leaving the ship?" Cora asked Giselle.

"Yes, we've taken a house here," Giselle answered.

"The prices they want for transporting our bags is simply outrageous. I noticed you were met by that man with a wagon. Could you take us to our rooming house?"

"Cora that is an imposition," her husband whispered.

"Nonsense Larry!" Cora's voice boomed. "I'm sure Giselle won't mind, will you dear?"

Chloe, who had glanced at Larry Dominique when he remonstrated with his wife, was startled when she saw the murderous rage in his eyes as his wife dismissed his complaint, However, the flash was gone so fast, she thought she must have been mistaken.

"Where are you staying?" Giselle asked her.

"Not one of these places around the docks," Cora said with disdain. "I have daughters. I don't want them exposed to this riffraff. We might no longer have money, but we can do better, I'm sure."

"Did you make reservations?" Giselle asked.

"No, but I'm sure we can find something. Since you have a house, perhaps we could stay with you until we get settled?"

"No, I'm sorry but the house we rented is much too small to accommodate all of you as well as ourselves. Why don't I ask Terry to find you transport to the Hotel Royale? I'm sure they can put you up there until you find something that suits you better."

"Those prices are too high," Cora protested.

"I'll take care of the transport charges," Giselle assured her, and moved over to where Henry and Terry were discussing unloading the Tricorns.

"I'm sorry," Lila, Cora's oldest daughter, whispered. "Mother can be very pushy."

"Mother's up to her old tricks, I see," Francis observed. "We aren't really as poor as she makes out. She just doesn't like to spend money."

Lizette snorted rudely, rolling her eyes.

Chloe grinned at her. "Don't let it worry you. Giselle can handle her. Perhaps you and I can get together after we've all settled in. I'll send our direction to the Hotel."

Giselle had arrived back with Terry in tow.

"Come with me," he told the Dominique's. "I think I have a driver that will suit you. Is that your stuff?" he pointed at another large pile of luggage.

"Yes," Larry Dominique answered.

Terry gestured, and two of the long shoremen waiting on the deck gathered up the bags and followed him down the gangplank.

Chloe watched them depart. "That was slick," she told Giselle. "You aren't really intending to pay for their transport are you?"

"You bet I am," Giselle retorted. "Anything is better than having to endure that woman's company. Besides, I don't want her to have our address."

Chloe looked guilty. "I already told Francis I would send it to her."

"Don't you worry about that Miss Chloe," Lizette, Giselle's longtime maid and companion said. "This one's got a lot to learn, but she has possibilities," she informed Giselle, who snorted in reply.

The Enforcer

A MONTH before Chloe and Giselle decided to make the trip upriver to Junction City, Caleb Jones stood in front of the office of the Consolidated City State Law Enforcement Bureau in Gateway City. Caleb was a man of medium height, with the dark, harshly cut features that marked the men of his family. He moved with an economy of movement characteristic of men who led outdoor lives.

He directed the three massive canines accompanying him to lie down in the shade between the hitching rail and the boardwalk to wait for him. The dogs, like many of the colonists had ancestors born on Earth. They showed their Rottweiler bloodlines in their large, muscular bodies and powerful jaws. The strain had been mixed with Collie breeds to add intelligence and they had taken their multicolored fur from that breed.

Gateway City, St. Antoni's oldest settlement, rested on the edge of a prairie of buttery grass stretching halfway across the continent. Behind it were low rolling hills that gradually rose into mountains. The foothills were split by a long valley extending south to the ocean.