Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

with Kaya had only strengthened the feeling.
    He increased the length of his stride, dreading to be late for his first encounter with military life. His father’s backpack felt heavier, and he was switching it from one shoulder to the other more often. His surroundings were becoming noisier. Birds chirped musically as some began to take flight, and it at last became clear to him that the forest had decided it was daytime. Nature’s dawn had finally arrived.
    Despite everything he’d been taught about nature’s adaptation to his home planet, Toni still found its biological clock fascinating. In the absence of day-night cycles, the forests had adopted their own circadian rhythm of about twenty two hours, although the cycle-length happened to vary depending on the time of month. On more than one class excursion out to the groves, Toni and his primary school colleagues had been instructed to sit silently and listen to the forest as it woke. It wasn’t every day that nature’s dawn coincided with the chronological one. Today was no exception.
    Nature’s dawn was not, however, a simultaneous continent-wide event. It appeared to progress in waves, the gradual increase in wildlife activity propagating across the countryside like a planet-wide Mexican wave. The wave moved along at over a hundred kilometers per hour and was eleven hundred kilometers deep, sometimes taking more than two weeks to make a full circuit around the Thaumantian supercontinent’s arid center. There were never less than twelve such dawn waves in motion at any time, although very rarely dawns fused, or spontaneously emerged from between sister waves progressing at particularly large distances from each other, or even swirled and eddied over vast mountain ranges and other interruptions to the far south. Watching a time-lapse simulation of the event on a continent-wide scale, it had appeared to Toni as if a giant hypnotic eye was hard at work, trying to bewitch him.
    The tree-roots under his feet had become so densely intermingled he was having difficulty keeping his footing. The road had been reduced to a long disused path, but he knew it was too late to think about turning back. Besides, there was supposed to be nothing else out there except for the base. He maintained his heading, swallowing his anxiety as the minutes passed by.
    Half an hour later, the road began to look promisingly well-traveled, and every once in a while he would find a dirt path leading off it, wide enough for a single column of men to travel through. The visibility had also begun to improve and Toni could see farther out around him. He groaned inwardly, knowing that it was now only a matter of time before it began to rain. He kept following the dirt road until finally he spied something that made his heart leap. He took a quick look at his watch. It was a quarter to six.
    Two hundred meters down an arrow-straight paved road, he saw an ornate wrought-iron military gate with a solitary black sentry box standing beside it. To its left was a whitewashed wall of about a man’s height, and it led off into the forest without any end in sight. Another wall on the opposite side led off diagonally into the forest as well.
    Toni sprinted to a skidding halt in front of the gate only to find the sentry box empty.
    The gate must open at six o’clock sharp , he realized as he slowly recovered his wind.
    The avian chirping gradually grew to become a nuisance, and Toni saw a number and variety beyond count in flight, or pecking along the ground in ever closer proximity to him as he rested on a rock beside his pack.
    As Toni tried unsuccessfully to attract the attention of several marauding crows, the long expected drizzle finally began to fall, reducing visibility once more as well as chilling Toni to the bone. He removed an oversized jersey from his pack and used it to cover his shoulders like a cloak, and then parked a wide-brimmed farmer’s hat on his head, an accessory as useful to keep his