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“No, you’re right, Six,” Adam replies dryly, shrugging. “I’m a coward because I don’t want to die today. I’m a coward because, as a boy, I watched from the deck of one of those warships as your home planet was obliterated. I’m a coward because I think we should find a better way. A smarter way.”
“All right, Adam,” I say, feeling a tightness in my chest at his casual mention of Lorien’s destruction. “We hear you.”
“It might not be smart,” Marina adds. “But it’s what’s right.”
Adam rounds on us, his tone acidic. “In that case, which one of you is going to do it?”
“Do what?” I ask.
“Kill Ella,” he replies. “We all heard what John said. Setrákus Ra has her bound with his own version of your old Loric charm. You can’t hurt him without first hurting her. I’ve never even met the girl and I can tell you right now, I’m not going to do it. So tell me, which one of you is going to kill your friend?”
“No one,” I say resolutely, locking eyes with Adam. “We’re going to figure out a way to stop Setrákus Ra without hurting her.”
Adam glances up at the sun, as if trying to figure out how much daylight we’ve got left.
“Great,” Adam says. “Fantastic. Our resources are some broken-down ships and whatever the hell we can find in the jungle. Tell me how the hell you’re going to stop Setrákus Ra in our situation, Six.”
“John said there’d be backup coming, the military—”
“He said he’d try,” Adam practically shouts at me. “Look, I trust John, but he’s thousands of miles away. Help is thousands of miles away. Right here? It’s just us. We’re it.”
“Help is right behind us,” Marina says. Her voice is still calm, but there’s a strain there. What Adam’s been saying has gotten under her skin. “The Sanctuary will give us a way to fight.”
Adam takes this in for a moment before rolling his eyes. “A miracle. That’s what the two of you are hoping for? A miracle! I get that you woke that thing in there up, and I know it let you talk to your . . . your friend one last time. But that’s all it’s going to do, okay? It is done helping us. Don’t believe me? Maybe we could ask some of the Loric how much that Entity helped during the last Mogadorian invasion. If they weren’t all dead.”
The air around me gets cold. At first, it feels pretty good in this overbearing jungle heat, until I realize that it’s Marina fuming in her own special way. She takes a step towards Adam, her fists clenched, the whole serene-sister-of-the-Sanctuary thing dropped in a hurry.
“Don’t talk about what you don’t know, you monster!” she yells, jabbing her finger in the air at him. An icicle shoots from Marina’s index finger and stabs into the dirt at Adam’s feet. Immediately, it begins to melt. Adam takes a surprised step back, staring at Marina.
“Enough,” I say, stepping in between the two of them. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
From the airstrip, Phiri Dun-Ra makes a series of muffled gagging noises. I realize that she’s laughing at us. I tune her out, turn around and take Marina by the shoulders. Her skin is cold to the touch.
“Much as I love the air conditioning right now, you need to walk away for a minute,” I tell her.
Marina gives me a look of disbelief, like she can’t believe I’m siding with Adam against her. I shake my head gently and raise my eyebrows, letting her know that’s not what this is. She sighs, pushes a hand through her hair and walks towards the Sanctuary.
I turn to glare at Adam. At first, he doesn’t look at me. He’s too busy watching the icicle Marina fired at him turn to water.
“Lucky she didn’t take your eye out,” I say, only half joking.
“I know,” he replies, finally looking up at me. “Six, look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought up Lorien. That’s not—that’s not my place.”
“You bet your ass it isn’t,” I say, taking a step closer to him. “It’s all right, you’re freaking out a little, I’m gonna chalk it up to that. But yeah, don’t talk about our dead families and massacred planet again, okay? Because I seriously wanted to punch you in the face.”
Adam nods. “Understood.”
“I’m still not sure you do,” I reply, lowering my voice and getting even closer. “Let me make it perfectly clear for you, Adam. I’ve got no intention of dying out here today. You think I don’t get that the odds are against us? Dude, I don’t need that explained to me. But you didn’t magically fix one of those Skimmers while I wasn’t looking, did you?”
He frowns at me. “You know I didn’t, Six.”
“Then we’re stuck here until reinforcements arrive. And if we’re stuck here, we’re going to fight. You get me?”
“We could run,” Adam replies, pointing to the jungle. “We don’t need a Skimmer to escape.”
“Look at it this way. Booking it into the jungle is never going to stop being an option,” I admit to him. “If the Anubis gets here and things don’t go our way, we’ll run.”
“Will we?” Adam asks, his gaze sliding off me and towards Marina. “All of us?”
I turn my head to subtly watch Marina. Her back is to us as she takes deep breaths, calming herself. She’s staring at the Sanctuary again, like she’s been doing most of the day. Marina’s developed an almost religious devotion to the old temple. I understand why—our experience with the Entity was pretty heavy, maybe more so for a girl who was raised around a bunch of nuns. Not to mention, the guy she loved is buried in there. The Sanctuary’s become both a religious symbol and a gravesite to her.
“I’ll drag her away if I have to,” I tell Adam, meaning it.
Adam seems satisfied with that answer. The frantic look he had when he berated us is gone, replaced by cold Mogadorian calculation. I never thought I’d actually be happy to see those features on someone’s face.
“I can start removing the force field cloaking modules for John and keep trying to repair the Skimmer, but neither of those things is going to help us defend this place or survive an attack by the Anubis.” He looks at me, eyebrows raised. “So, what’s our plan for not dying?”
Good question.
I take a look around. The plan aspect of this whole thing is something I’m still working out. How can we stop Setrákus Ra from doing whatever he wants to the Sanctuary? How can we even hurt him without endangering Ella? Once again, my gaze drifts towards Phiri Dun-Ra. She isn’t laughing at us anymore, instead she’s watching us like a hawk. I think of her hands, currently tied to the wheel strut behind her back, and the way they were bandaged up, the dirt-stained dressings covering electrical burns she suffered from the Sanctuary’s force field. The Mogs spent years out here, trying to force their way into the Sanctuary to earn favor with their Beloved Leader. It’s too bad we didn’t see a fuse box or control panel inside the Sanctuary to turn that force field back on.
“At least we know where he’s going,” I say out loud, still thinking. “Setrákus Ra wants inside the Sanctuary, he’s gotta come down from his big bad warship. That gives us a chance.”
“A chance to do what?” Adam asks.
“We can’t hurt Setrákus Ra without hurting Ella, which means we can’t really stop him from muscling into the Sanctuary. But if he’s got Ella and the Sanctuary, well, maybe we should take something of his.”
Adam catches on quickly. “Are you t
hinking . . . ?”
“You did mention you always wanted to fly one of those warships. Whatever Setrákus Ra wants in the Sanctuary, he won’t be able to take it anywhere,” I say, feeling the beginnings of a plan starting to take shape. “Because we’re going to rescue Ella and steal his ship.”
Our preparations begin mostly in silence, tension still in the air between Marina and Adam. We start by going through the equipment that the Mogadorians left behind. There are crates piled in one of the larger tents, a veritable arsenal of weaponry and tools that the Mogs shipped down here only to have it all break against the Sanctuary’s force field. There’s a whole array of Mogadorian blasters, but the rest of the gear appears to have been manufactured here on Earth. There are crates of weapons stamped as property of the U.S. military, mining equipment shipped from Australia and what Adam tells me are experimental EMPs covered in Chinese lettering. Adam went through this stuff earlier when he was looking for spare Skimmer parts, so he knows how it’s organized.
“We want explosives,” I tell him. “What have they got?”
Carefully, Adam moves some crates around before opening up one packed with blocks of a beige substance that reminds me of clay.
“Plastic explosives,” he says. “C-4, I think.”
“You know how to work with that stuff?”
“A little bit,” Adam replies, and starts gently pushing aside objects in the crate. Besides the C-4, there are also some wires and cylinders that I assume have some role in detonation. After a quick search, Adam smirks and holds up a small paper booklet. “There’s instructions.”
“Perfect,” Marina mutters.
“How many bombs total?” I ask.
Adam does a quick count of the clay bricks. “Twelve. But I can break them up, make them smaller if you want. The smaller the brick, the smaller the explosion, though. And we’ve only got the dozen blasting caps, so the smaller ones would need to be wired together.”
Before replying to Adam, I poke my head out of the tent and do a quick count of Skimmers parked on the landing strip. Sixteen of them, including the one Adam’s been working on and the one Phiri Dun-Ra’s tied to.
