United as One (16 page)

I can see, even though there's nothing around me except for solid, impenetrable darkness. As I float through the oily slime, I look down at my hands and light up my Lumen. It works—light shines in a halo around me.

The effect only lasts for a moment. In my glowing hands I can see veins of cobalt-blue Loric energy running beneath the skin. The sludge painfully burrows into my fingertips, drawn to that energy, and begins to eat away at it.

“Doesn't it feel good?”

I look up. Setrákus Ra floats in the darkness above me. He's dropped the whole young-Setrákus thing and now looks like I expect: hideous. He's shirtless—maybe entirely naked, the ooze thankfully obscures his lower body—his skin startlingly pale in the darkness, the purple scar around his neck thick. His eyes, hollow and empty like a skull, bore into me.

There's an open wound on Setrákus Ra's chest. The gash is just to the left of his heart. That must be where Six hit him. She really was so damn close. Tendrils of the ooze lap at the broken skin, worm their way inside his body. The substance isn't healing the wound; it's
filling it in, replacing the ghastly hole with a chunk of pure obsidian.

Another body floats in front of Setrákus Ra. It's a Mogadorian woman with dark hair drawn back in thick cornrows. I notice that she has burn scars all across her hands. She seems to be unconscious. Setrákus Ra waves his hands over her, and the slimy substance surrounding us all moves at his command, burrowing under her skin, reshaping her.

I open my mouth, and although the slime rushes down my throat, I find that I'm still able to speak.

“This is where you are, isn't it?” I say. “This is real. Your great idea of progress, it's . . . this sewage bath.”

Setrákus Ra smiles at me. “You resist. But here, John, here I control the fate of all our species. Here, I make Legacies. I take the mundane and shape it, augment it to my will.”

He holds up his hand, two fingers extend towards me, and my arm raises in response completely out of my control. My Lumen glows, the ooze tendrils coalescing around my hand. It feels as if my skin's being peeled away.

A ball of Loric energy is ripped out of my hand. My Lumen grows dim as the energy floats through the sludge. It's slowly eaten away, transformed, until Setrákus guides it into the Mogadorian woman. Her body convulses for a moment, sending waves through the slime.

But then fire surrounds her. She turns her head and grins at me, her teeth bared like a wild animal.

“I am the creator now, John,” Setrákus Ra says. “Come. See for yourself.”

My hands shake. My Lumen won't work. The darkness surrounds me. . . .

“John! John!”

My eyes snap open. Adam's got me by the shoulders, shaking me. I'm back in the sub-subbasement of Patience Creek, not drowning in black muck, not having my Legacies stolen by a Mogadorian.

“You fell asleep,” Adam says, eyes wide. “And then, well . . .”

I glance down. My hands, which were resting on the arms of my chair, left blackened imprints in the fabric. My Lumen must have triggered while I was in that nightmare. The smell of burned fabric fills the room.

“Sorry . . . ,” I say, shakily standing up.

Adam hesitates, waiting for an explanation. “You okay?” he finally asks.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” I say, slowly walking out of the room.

There'll be no more sleep for me. Not until this is over.

“I JUST NEED A LITTLE MORE TIME WITH IT,”
Sam says. “I swear I can get it to work. I mean, it could already
be
working. I've got no way to test it. . . .”

It's dawn. Sam paces in front of our bed, talking fast. I notice a pile of crushed soda cans on the desk behind him, all their logos very out-of-date. I guess stale soda still has a bunch of caffeine. I watch him patiently, a small smile on my lips.

“My dad tried to give me a crash course in electromagnetism,” Sam continues. “Frequencies, ultraviolet, uh, the ionosphere. Do you know what the ionosphere is?”

I shake my head.

“Okay, me neither. I mean, I didn't know until my dad explained it, and now I only sort of know. The ionosphere is part of the atmosphere. It's like nature's force field. Radio waves bounce off it. If you want to understand how a force field would work outside of science fiction, you'd
start there. Or at least you would've until aliens came to Earth and changed our understanding of, well, all kinds of shit. . . .”

“You're getting off topic, Sam.”

I was already in bed last night when Sam came into the room. I'd listened drowsily as he complained about how Malcolm had made him go to bed—like he was a kid again and not trying to save the world. He tossed and turned next to me for a while. Eventually, he went over to work at the room's small desk. By work I mean insistently whisper a bunch of nonsense phrases to an assortment of handheld devices—the now-infamous Game Boy, an array of cell phones, tablets, an e-reader. Sam's quiet voice lulled me back to sleep.

“Sorry. So, some of the engineers working on the cloaking device tried to go into more detail about force fields—did you know the military already had a working prototype? It keeps stuff out, but you can't see through it, so you'd be shielded but blind. Anyway, I think they eventually started to feel like explaining all that was a waste of time since I'm technically a high school dropout.”

“They underestimate you at their peril,” I say with a sleepy smile.

Sam holds the Mogadorian cloaking device he uninstalled from our ship in one hand and an old flip phone in the other, hoisting them up and down like he's a scale.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No. Keep going.”

“So, my dad and the science team, they've already figured out the basics of how this thing works,” Sam says, holding up the black box that allows Skimmers to pass unharmed through warship force fields. “It emits an ultrasonic frequency that, according to the dudes downstairs, we'd be able to replicate no problem. What's slowing them up is that the sound wave is, uh, thickened somehow, I think they said, so that it can carry through a data packet to the warship. That data packet identifies the Skimmer as friendly. Problem is, it's written in code that we don't understand, that we can't even create yet, in a programming language that none of our machines are coded to work with—”

“Sam,” I say, interrupting as soon as he takes a breath. “I'm sure this is all very interesting but . . .”

“Ha, no it isn't,” Sam replies with a sheepish grin. He sets aside the cloaking device so he can rub the back of his neck. “All right, cutting to the chase—”

“Please do.”

“All those guys downstairs, they're trying to copy this data packet thingy. But that's hard, because a. they don't have Mog technology to work with, and b. they'd still need to learn how to use that even if they did. So I was thinking—why not let the machines do the work for us?”

“Okay . . . ,” I say, waving my hand to speed him up.

Sam holds up the flip phone. “I've been talking to this guy here.”

“Talking
to
it?”

“Well,
at
it—it doesn't talk back. Not like you do anyway.” He opens and closes the phone like a mouth. “I've been telling it just to copy the cloaking device signal. The whole thing. Sound and data. I mean, we don't need to understand
how
this works, Six; we just need to rip it off.”

I take a closer look at the cell phone. “Why'd you pick such a shitty phone?”

“The older stuff is easier for me to work with because it's less complex,” he says with a shrug. “They're better listeners.”

“And you think it worked? That it listened to you?”

“I don't know,” Sam says. “I can tell that it's emitting the frequency, but I can't tell if it copied the data packet, too. Not unless . . .”

“Unless you use it to pass through a force field.”

“Bingo,” Sam says, and tosses me the phone.

I catch it and turn it over in my hands. The plastic is hot to the touch, and it's only got about 83 percent battery life.

“The battery drains fast when it's emitting the frequency, and it's doing that constantly once I give it the command,” Sam says. “And when it shuts down, the phone forgets what I told it. Even with those limitations, I think it could make a difference.”

I nod my head, remembering how Lawson plans to coordinate a worldwide assault on the warships. Assuming all goes smoothly this morning and we manage to steal the
cloaking devices from aboard the Niagara Falls warship, that's what? A few hundred cloaking devices? That means a few hundred missiles for the world's armies to bombard those huge warships with. How many hits would it take to bring down one of those colossal ships? Seems to me like they'd want as many shots as possible and then some.

I look behind Sam. He's got all his devices plugged into a few overloaded power strips. He's also got a fire extinguisher parked nearby, just in case.

Seeing where I'm looking, he says, “If it's working, I've already taught those dozen things to speak cloaking device. I'm getting pretty good at it—I think. It feels like it's getting easier anyway. Although, I could be doing nothing and having, like, a Legacy placebo effect.” Sam sighs tiredly and waves this thought away. “I'm going to use my Legacy on every mobile thing I can get my hands on until it's verified one way or the other.” He sighs. “Or maybe I just wasted one of the last days of my life talking to a bunch of cell phones like a crazy person. No big deal.”

I leap off the bed and kiss Sam. “No way. This is going to work.”

Sam returns my smile, holding my hand. “Just be careful today, all right?”

“When am I not careful?”

Down in the hangar, a large space has been cleared, the military Humvees parallel parked impossibly close to the
walls. They're arranged neatly, one right next to the other, so they can speed on out at a moment's notice, convoy-style. I can tell by the precision of the parking arrangement that it was either done by some really anal-retentive drivers or with telekinesis.

The new Garde—Nigel, Fleur, Bertrand, Ran, and Daniela—are all lined up in this open space. They look sleepy, nervous, excited. Daniela gives me a little wave when she sees me watching. I smile at her.

Caleb and Christian stand apart from the others, closer to the handful of marines spectating than to their fellow Garde. As usual, Christian looks completely stone-faced. Caleb, on the other hand, appears more attentive than his brother.

“So, first lesson. You've all got telekinesis, right?”

Nine strolls across the line of new recruits, awaiting their answers. I cringe when I see what he's got in his hand. A semiautomatic pistol, likely borrowed, or maybe stolen, from one of the soldiers on the sideline. Nine twirls it around his index finger like he's a cowboy in an old Western movie.

The new recruits all nod in response. Except for Daniela, they look universally intimidated by Nine in drill sergeant mode. They've got reason to be since, as soon as they answer, Nine points his gun at them.

“Cool. So who wants to try stopping a bullet?”

“
Psh
, I will turn your ass to stone, you point that thing
at me again,” Daniela says.

Nine smirks and makes sure to aim away from Daniela. If I really thought he was going to shoot at one of the new kids, I'd step in. He's not that stupid, though. I don't think.

Nigel glances down the line of his fellow Garde. When it's clear no one else is going to volunteer, Nigel steels himself and steps forward.

“All right, mate,” he says, tentatively holding out a hand in a “stop” motion as Nine points the gun at him. “I'll give it a whirl.”

Nine grins. “That's brave of you, John Lennon—”

“John Lennon was a wanker.”

“Whatever that is,” Nine continues. “I bet he had more common sense than your scrawny ass. Stopping bullets is some advanced-class shit that you're definitely not up for yet. And anyway, if you're fighting Mogadorians, which you can expect to be, those bastards use energy weapons. Can't turn energy away with telekinesis. So what's the smarter, safer, easier thing to do?”

“Disarm the enemy,” Caleb calls from the sideline.

Nine points at him with his gun-free hand. “Very good, weirdo twin number one.” He looks back at Nigel. “Give it a try. Pull the gun out of my hand.”

Nigel scowls like he's annoyed at being lectured. All the same, he makes a grasping and jerking motion. Nine stumbles forward like his arm was tugged, but he maintains his grip on the gun.

“That's decent power,” Nine says. “But you're pulling my whole arm. Focus on the weapon itself. Be precise. Someone else want to try?” Nine glances down the line. He squints at Ran, the small Japanese girl staring blankly at him. “She understanding anything I'm saying?”

“She doesn't say much,” Fleur responds. “But we think she understands.”

“Huh,” Nine says. He points the gun at Ran. The second he does, she whips her hand up, and the barrel of the gun crumples like paper, the trigger mechanism pinching closed on Nine's finger. He drops the weapon with a cry.

“Hell yeah,” I say.

Nine flashes me a pissed-off look, but I can tell it's all show. He's as impressed as I am. He looks back at the group and nods. “That's another way to do it.”

There's a small commotion at the elevator as John, Marina, and Adam enter. Ella and Lexa follow a few steps behind them, along with a bounding Bernie Kosar. Last comes Dust, back in wolf form, looking much healthier than when I last saw him. Everyone comes to stand by me except for Lexa, who goes off to get the ship fired up.

It's time to go.

Catching a look from John, Nine walks down the line of human Garde, handing out unloaded weapons. “Practice on each other,” he says. “I'll be back later, and I expect your badass quotient increased by, like, tenfold.”

Daniela raises an eyebrow, looking past Nine to John and me. “What're you guys doing? Leaving us here?”

John waves us over towards Lexa's ship, and the whole group of us—humans and Loric and reformed Mogadorian—gather at the base of the ramp. Even Caleb and Christian join the impromptu huddle.

“We're going to make a covert assault on one of the Mogadorian warships,” John says, his voice gravelly. He looks like he hasn't slept at all. “Only myself, Six, and Adam will actually be boarding the ship. The others coming along will be strictly backup in case things go bad.” He looks at the humans. “You guys should stay here, hone your powers. We don't need you on this one. It's an unnecessary risk.”

Fleur and Bertrand look relieved. Daniela shakes her head and jabs a finger into John's chest.

“I saved your ass in New York,” she says, pointing her thumb at the other humans. “And now what? I'm demoted to rookie with these losers?”

“You promised us action,” Nigel complains next.

John sighs. “Look, we've been doing this a lot longer than you. It was stupid of me to ask you to throw yourselves into the fray without proper training. Right now, the best thing you can do to help the earth is get stronger, get better. Your time will come.”

Nigel glances down at Bernie Kosar. “You're bringing a beagle along.”

“They also have a wolf,” Bertrand points out. “May I ask why you have a wolf?”

“That little dog would have you shitting your knickers,” Nine says to Nigel.

“LANEs aren't authorized to go on this op anyway,” Caleb puts in.

“Oh, piss off, Captain America,” Nigel replies. “I'm ready to fight.”

“Aw, kid,” Nine says. “You aren't.”

“Look, here's what John's really saying,” I say, crossing my arms. “In the event that we all get killed, which isn't totally out of the realm of possibility, it's going to be up to you guys to save the world. So, better if you're not there.”

“Nice, Six,” Marina murmurs, shaking her head.

Nine claps his hands. “Let's do this.”

We leave the human Garde behind and board Lexa's ship. Minutes later, we're strapped in and rocketing out of the tunnel, taking the exact same course as yesterday.

Once we're in the air, John stands up.

“There's one thing I didn't bring up back there,” John says. “I didn't want the military getting wind of it.”

Everyone stares curiously at John. “What're you talking about?” I ask.

“We aren't just going to steal the cloaking devices,” John says. “We're stealing the warship too.”