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Setrákus Ra yanks down hard on the chain. Impossibly, with a logic available only in nightmares, the entire ceiling collapses. The room is flooded with that viscous black ooze.
“I wanted you to feel my power.”
It’s like a dam breaking. Within seconds, the interrogation room is completely lost to me, and I’m awash in the inky liquid. It’s ice-cold and slimy against my skin. I try to swim against it, but it’s quickly over my head, stinging my eyes, creeping into my lungs.
I panic and thrash. For a moment, I forget that this is only a dream.
There’s a heaviness inside me now, like my guts are filled with thick sludge. My skin prickles. It feels like thousands of tiny mouths are trying to gnaw on me.
But I can breathe. I’m alive. The realization helps me to calm down.
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.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“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.
