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‘Oh, well, in that case, let’s fly,’ Nine says sarcastically, but settles into one of the hard-backed plastic seats all the same. I hop into the pilot’s chair. Marina hesitates for a moment, giving the console where the Mog’s voice came from a look of distrust.
‘How do we know that’s really John?’ she asks. ‘Setrákus Ra can change forms. This might be some kind of trap.’ In my excitement to hear John and Sam, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that this could be a ploy. Behind me, Nine shouts towards the communicator.
‘Hey, Johnny, remember back in Chicago? When you were claiming to be Pittacus Lore and we had a debate about whether to go to New Mexico?’
‘Yeah,’ John’s voice sounds like it’s coming through clenched teeth.
‘How’d we settle that?’
John sighs. ‘You dangled me off the edge of the roof.’
Nine grins like that’s the best thing ever. ‘It’s definitely him.’
‘Marina,’ John says, probably thinking Nine’s little test wasn’t good enough. ‘The first time we met, you healed two bullet wounds in my ankle. And then we almost got hit by a missile.’
A small smile forms on Marina’s face, the first I’ve seen in days. ‘I thought you were about the coolest guy I’d ever met, John Smith.’
Nine barks out a laugh at that, shaking his head. Marina climbs aboard, taking a seat next to Eight’s body. She drapes a hand protectively on the body bag and settles in.
‘Watch your heads,’ Adam warns as the cockpit hisses closed above us. There’s a moment where I feel a sense of panic at being sealed inside a Mogadorian ship, but I shove that feeling down and tightly clutch the steering apparatus. It’s dim in the cockpit, the glass having a tinted sunglasses-like look. Streams of data in compressed Mogadorian symbols are projected directly on to the glass, the readouts something only a Mog pilot could make sense of.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘What now?’
‘Hold up,’ Nine interjects, leaning forward. ‘How come you get to drive?’
Adam’s voice comes through clear, patient but authoritative. ‘Turn the wheel in front of you. That will rotate the ship.’
I do as he instructs, the wheel turning easily, the saucer portion of the ship doing a 180 without the wheels moving at all. I stop turning when we’re pointed towards the hangar’s exit.
‘Good,’ Adam says. ‘Now, the lever on your left moves the wheels.’
I grip the lever and push it just a tad. The ship jerks forward almost immediately. The controls are sensitive, and it doesn’t take much pressure to get us slowly rolling out on to the runway.
‘Give it some gas, Six, damn,’ Nine complains. ‘Drive it like we stole it.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Marina says, hugging herself.
‘If you’re out from under the hangar, you can stop,’ Adam instructs.
I look up through the glass of the cockpit, see only sky and so let go of the lever. The ship creaks to a stop.
‘Okay,’ Adam says. ‘Now, grasp the wheel in front of you at three and nine. Do you feel the triggers?’
I take the wheel again and feel around for the two buttons indented in its underside. ‘Got ’em,’ I reply, testing out the trigger on the left by squeezing it. As soon as I do, the vibration from the ship’s engine reaches a bone-rattling crescendo and we rise into the air.
‘Ho, shit!’ Nine yells. Next to me, Marina squeezes herself a little tighter, closing her eyes.
‘Be careful, Six,’ she whispers.
I let go of the button and the ship effortlessly maintains its elevation. We’re hovering about twenty yards off the ground.
‘You weren’t supposed to do that yet,’ Adam admonishes.
‘Uh, yeah, sorry. First time flying a spaceship,’ I reply.
‘No big deal,’ Adam replies. ‘The trigger on your left increases your elevation. The one on your right decreases it.’
‘Left up, right down. Got it.’
‘Also,’ Adam says. ‘you’re in what my people call a Skimmer. It isn’t built for interplanetary travel, so it isn’t quite a spaceship.’
Nine makes a loud snoring noise. ‘Is this dude about to give us a lesson in Mogadorian aviation or something? The hell?’
‘You know I can hear you, right?’ Adam replies over the mic. ‘And no, I am not.’
‘Sorry about Nine,’ I say, giving him a dirty look over my shoulder. ‘Does this thing come with ejector seats?’
‘Yes, actually,’ Adam replies.
‘Whoa, now,’ Nine says, edging forward so his butt isn’t entirely on the seat. ‘Don’t get any ideas, Six.’
I shush Nine when I hear a series of clanking noises emanating from the ship’s underbelly.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘Don’t worry,’ Adam replies. ‘I just remotely put up your landing gear.’
When the clanking finishes, two small panels on the steering wheel slide aside, revealing thumb-sized buttons positioned so they can be pressed at the same time as the elevation triggers.
‘You should see a couple of buttons,’ Adam continues. ‘Depress them to accelerate. Simply let them go to brake.’
I grip the steering wheel more tentatively than before and gently squeeze the buttons, careful not to hit the triggers on the wheel’s underside. The Skimmer zips forward, then lurches to a stop when I let the button go.
‘It’s like a video game,’ Nine says, leaning over the back of my chair. ‘Any idiot could work this thing. No offense, Mog guy.’
‘None taken.’
I press down the accelerator a little more forcefully and the ship shoots forward. A diagnostic on the screen starts flashing – a warning in any language – right before I scrape the bottom of the Skimmer against the top of a tree. I hear branches breaking and, craning my neck, see them hit the ground below.
‘Oops,’ I say, and glance sidelong at Marina.
‘Six, I swear,’ she says, flashing me a half-panicked look.
‘You’ll want to get some more elevation,’ Adam says. ‘And, um, consider steering.’
Nine laughs and leans back. I pull the trigger for vertical and we rise up higher. As we clear the dense trees of the swampland, the horizon becomes visible. A laser-fine dotted line appears on the cockpit glass, superimposed over the view, like a trail.
‘I’ve plotted your course,’ Adam says. ‘Just follow the line.’
I nod and give the ship some juice, following the laser-path north.
‘All right, boys,’ I say. ‘Here we come.’
The flight from Florida to Washington takes about two hours. On Adam’s instructions, I keep our altitude low enough that we won’t be picked up on satellites or accidentally cross paths with any airplanes, but high enough that there won’t be a rash of UFO sightings along the Eastern Seaboard. Although, considering how serious the threat of all-out Mogadorian invasion seems, maybe we should let our stolen ship be seen, shoot off some fireworks, warn the locals.
After the initial rush of elation at hearing John and Sam, at knowing our friends are alive, the conversation turns
grim. Over the radio, they describe what went down at the John Hancock Center. After that, John tells us about what he saw in the nightmare vision he shared with Ella and why he thinks Setrákus Ra doesn’t want to hurt her. John’s pieced together a theory that Ella could be related to Setrákus Ra and that the Mogadorian ruler could actually be some kind of twisted Loric, the banished Elder mentioned in Crayton’s letter. I’m not ready to grapple with that yet.
Once John’s caught us up, it’s our turn to fill in the others on what happened in Florida. Even over the radio, I can tell John’s trying not to press us too much. I think about the days that John’s been living with a fresh scar on his ankle, wondering which one of us wouldn’t be making it back – as much as it hurts to talk about, he deserves to know what happened to Eight. However, neither Marina nor Nine are very forthcoming, so it falls to me to describe how Five betrayed us, how he murdered Eight technically by accident, but only because he was actually trying to murder Nine. I was unconscious for most of the fight, so I keep the description bare bones, just the facts, not sugarcoating anything. Then, I give them the details of rescuing Eight’s body from the Mogadorian encampment and tell them about what Five did to his Mogadorian pal. When I’m finished, a grim mood settles inside the cockpit and we ride in silence until we reach suburban D.C.
I land the ship in the middle of a basketball court. We’re in a fancy-ass suburban development, one made extraordinarily eerie by all its darkened windows and general emptiness. The cockpit opens for us and Marina flashes me a relieved look as she stands up. Carefully, Nine picks up Eight’s body and climbs out of the ship. Marina stays close to him, her hand on Nine’s elbow, making sure that Eight doesn’t get jostled too much. It’s still hard to believe that’s our friend in that body bag, and it feels wrong to be carrying him around so much.
‘Your travels are almost over,’ I overhear Marina whisper to Eight’s body. She must feel the same as I do.
Marina and I hop down to the ground and turn around to help Nine lower Eight’s body. Instead of passing Eight down, Nine squints into the darkness around us.
‘Whoa,’ he says. ‘There are, like, some random creatures watching us right now.’
