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The wound on his shoulder doesn’t heal. Instead, it fills with the black ooze.
I barely have time to process this information as I propel myself forward, enraged. If Dreynen won’t work, there are other ways.
Brute force.
I slam into Setrákus Ra with my shoulder. He barely budges. Quickly, I light my Lumen, my fists spouting white-hot flames, and throw one punch, two punches, three punches. He moves his head just enough to the side each time, his speed impossible.
The next punch he catches. I smell burning flesh as his hand covers mine. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“After all these years,” Setrákus Ra says, the two of us face-to-face, “do you still not understand?”
Five crashes into Setrákus Ra’s back and starts to stab him. He jams his blade through Setrákus Ra’s throat, into his back, through his cheek.
Each wound is quickly sealed over by black ooze.
Setrákus Ra’s free arm rotates around in the socket 180 degrees. His hand turns over like he’s double-jointed, and, without turning away from me, he grasps Five by the throat. Now he’s holding on to both of us.
“You could never win,” Setrákus Ra finishes his thought. “You were only sent here to die.”
Then he crushes my hand. I feel every finger break, every knuckle get compacted. The pain is excruciating. He flings me away from him with such force that I lose control of my flight. Luckily, Nine leaps up in the air and catches me around the waist. Marina, positioned on the ledge, creates an ice floe on the lake of ooze where Nine and I can safely land.
Nine stares at me, wild-eyed. “John, what . . . what the hell are those powers?”
I swallow hard, trying to quickly heal my hand, grimacing as the compacted bones pop back into place. “I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, Setrákus Ra swings his arm around to its normal position, still holding Five by the neck. Five has given up on stabbing the Mogadorian and is instead desperately prying at Setrákus Ra’s fingers.
“You,” Setrákus Ra says. “One of my greatest disappointments. The power I could have given you, boy. . . .”
Setrákus Ra holds up his hand. His fingertips shimmer, each of them tipped with a razor-sharp claw. He wants us to see this. He’s toying with us.
I pull at Five with my telekinesis. I sense that Nine and Marina do the same. We aren’t strong enough to drag him from Setrákus Ra’s grip.
There’s a piercing screech of metal, and then Five starts to scream. Setrákus Ra drags his clawed fingers over Five’s face, slicing through his steel skin like it was butter. Then he peels it away, like taking off a mask, and tosses the metal chunk of face aside.
Five’s not screaming anymore. I’m not sure if he’s conscious or even alive.
“Let me show you what you missed out on, traitor,” Setrákus Ra says.
Setrákus Ra’s arm stretches out as if it was made of rubber, and he dunks Five into the Mogadorian slime. Now, Five thrashes; and, briefly, his skin changes consistency, taking on the oily quality of the ooze. As I watch, bits of light-blue energy are sucked out of Five and drawn into the muck.
It only takes a few seconds until Five stops moving. Setrákus Ra lets his body sink beneath the surface of the muck. I grasp at my ankle, but there’s no new scar. Either Five’s somehow still alive, or Setrákus Ra and his muck have stripped away the energy that granted his Legacies so that the charm no longer recognizes him.
A single bubble rises up to the surface of the ooze, pops, and then the dark lake is still. There’s no way anyone could survive that.
Setrákus Ra turns to us. Smiles.
“You children were never meant to live this long,” he says. “A discrepancy I shall soon remedy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN WE MAKE IT UP TO THE MOUNTAIN BASE control room, there are only six Mogs left in a space that could accommodate five times that. They’re all glued to a bank of monitors attached to the cave wall, fixating on the screens that show the base’s exterior. On those screens, the rest of our group are destroying the many vatborn protecting the entrance to the mountain.
Adam and I are invisible. These six don’t hear us come in. I give his arm a squeeze, asking if he’s ready to take this group down. He pats my hand slowly twice. A signal to wait.
Looking closer, I realize all these Mogs are trueborn. They cradle blasters, but they don’t look all that eager to rush out and join the fray.
A male trueborn with a stupid Mohawk says something in Mogadorian to a female trueborn with long braids. She snaps back at him. They’re arguing. The others join in.
Suddenly, Mohawk aims his blaster at Braids’s face. She follows suit. In a matter of seconds, they’re all pointing guns at each other, still yelling harsh words in Mogadorian.
It’s a tense situation that I’m happy to help along.
With my telekinesis, I depress one of the blaster triggers, then another. The trueborn do the rest, screaming with rage and firing into each other. In a matter of seconds, they’re all down. A few of them begin to disintegrate in sections.
I let go of Adam’s arm, and we turn visible. He puffs out his cheeks with a sigh, looking down at these dead trueborn with disappointment, and then begins searching the control panels for the one that operates the mountain’s force field.
“What were they fighting about?” I ask him. Like the Mogs before, my eyes are drawn to the battle playing out on screen.
“The one with the Mohawk wanted to know how this could happen. He wanted to know why Beloved Leader would allow the Anubis to fall, why he’d let the Garde get this far,” Adam explains morosely. “The woman, she said that Setrákus Ra has gone mad, that the Augmentations are disturbing. The others called this blasphemy and . . .” He waves his hand in the air, indicating that I know the rest.
“Huh,” I reply, glancing down at the female Mog. Unlike the others, she hasn’t disintegrated at all. I nudge her with my toe, and her head lolls to the side. It’s weird to me when they leave bodies. Makes me feel something I’d almost call guilt. “Maybe we should’ve helped her.”
Adam shakes his head. “She would’ve tried to kill us,” he replies.
“Rex didn’t.”
“If there are other sympathetic Mogadorians like Rex, we will not find them in the heat of battle,” he responds.
Adam finds the right interface and begins to hit a few buttons. A flashing symbol pops up on his screen—a warning in any language. He makes an annoyed noise and keys in another sequence.
“I’ve got to bypass a security protocol,” he says. “See if there’s a key card on one of those bodies.”
Quickly, I pat down the Mogadorian uniforms. I find a plastic chip in the front pocket of the first trueborn I check, blow some dust off it and hand it over to Adam.
“Great,” he says. He inserts the key card, throws a lever, and seconds later there’s a loud electric sigh. Adam turns to me. “Shields are down.”
“Awesome,” I reply. I feel a tickle in my mind, like for a moment there’s someone else taking up space in my brain. That’s Ella checking in. She’s probably already reported our progress to John. I clap my hands. “Let’s hit it.”
“Wait,” Adam says hesitantly. “There’s something I need to tell you before—before it’s too late.”
I cock my head. “Right now?”
Adam nods, his lips in a tight line. “John has asked me to go back to our warship and destroy this mountain. If you don’t kill Setrákus Ra—he wants me to bring it down even if you’re still in here.”
I think this over for a moment. “Okay. So?”
“So?” he replies, incredulous.
“Yeah, so what? If we don’t kill Setrákus Ra, then we’re probably dead anyway, right?” I shrug. “Do what he told you.”
“What about living to fight another day?”
“I think we’re about out of more days, don’t you? Time to end this, one way or the other.”
If Adam has any more prote
sts to make, they’re cut off by a flash of light on the monitors. Both of us turn to watch as our warship opens fires on the Mogs outside, John and the others safely ensconced under what looks like a stone turtle shell.
“They’ll be in soon,” I say. “Let’s get down to meet the—”
My sentence finishes in a wet cough. I look down at myself, puzzled by a sudden pain in my chest.
There’s a sharpened tentacle of oily Mogadorian ooze protruding from under my left breast. It went in my back, between the shoulder blades. I can feel it, itchy and burning inside me. Nicked a lung, probably. My breath wheezes out of me, blood on my lips.
“Oh” is all I think to say.
“Six!” Adam shouts.
“Oh, how I hoped it would be you two,” says a familiar voice behind me.
I turn my head because I’m unable to move the rest of my body, impaled as I am by a tentacle. Phiri Dun-Ra stands in the control room doorway. Her Augmentation is just like John described: a sickening mass of writhing black ooze that’s attached to her shoulder where her arm should be.
