The Fate of Ten

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 thinking . . . ?”

“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.

“We should be good with twelve,” I tell Adam. “Don’t blow yourself up, okay?”

“I’ll try my best.”

“Great. Come on, Marina.”

I grab an empty burlap sack from the Mog supply tent before setting out towards the landing strip. Marina follows next to me.