The Countdown (The Taking #3)(76)

“Not pilot,” I explained. “Power up. Tyler and I . . . we’re some sort of power source for these things. Dr. Clarke told us that when we got here, the EVE sent out a signal, but she was wrong. The entire fleet sent out signals. All of the ships. That’s how the M’alue knew the ships were here. But the thing is, they need us.” I looked at Tyler. “The ship I piloted . . . the ISA made . . .” I frowned, trying to pinpoint the right word. “Modifications to its original design. They put in manual controls designed to be used by humans. If they can get us . . . or some other Replaced . . .” I thought of Alex Walker and the way I thought he might be like us before the NSA had snatched him away and experimented on him. “All they need is to power up their ships, and then someone else can step in and fly them.”

“Why not use Adam? If all they need is a power source?” Jett asked.

I shook my head. “He’s too sick. They’ve done”—bile flooded my throat—“too much to him. He’s barely hanging in there.”

“So if the ISA rejected their offer, why haven’t the M’alue already blown this place sky-high?” It was Agent Truman asking, and I wasn’t surprised that his first response was to resort to violence. I also wondered why he wasn’t more concerned that this agency that claimed to be peaceful had secretly been amassing an army of spaceships.

“The M’alue don’t want war. They want this to end peacefully. But if we can’t make that happen . . .” I thought of the other part . . . the other images they’d shown me, of what they could do to us if we couldn’t find the ISA’s fleet in time. Images of the Earth, scorched and in ruin. Of a world decimated.

It was grim. Brutal.

Hopeless.

“Tyler and I weren’t sent here by accident,” I went on. “Those maps Tyler was drawing and the messages we heard—the M’alue were trying to contact us. To remind us of our mission, something we’d both apparently forgotten once we were returned.”

“What mission?” Tyler asked.

“To find Adam and send him home.” I was overwhelmed by how powerful my sense of allegiance was.

Except it wasn’t to the M’alue as a whole. It was to Adam.

Even if it hadn’t been coded into me to save him, knowing what he’d been through all these years—trapped in that tube and experimented on—I would have wanted to free him from this place . . . from these people who’d spent years torturing him.

I added, “And now that they’ve discovered the truth about the ships, we need to stop the ISA from getting them into space. If we can do that and free Adam, they’ve promised to retreat. There will be no war. And they will leave us alone.” I searched the room, the eyes of the Returned—different from everyone else’s because of what had been done to them—and thought of the things we could stop. “For good.”

“As in, no more abductions?” Jett asked, scratching his arm.

I nodded, tears filling my eyes. “As in, never again. No more abductions.”

I’m not sure Griffin was even aware she was standing by her dad now, her shoulders thrust back defiantly. “How do you know you can trust them? These ships might be the only line of defense we have against them. What if the M’alue are tricking us into destroying the only thing we can use to defend ourselves against an attack?”

“I can’t,” I answered truthfully, but I couldn’t erase the images of what the M’alue had promised to do to us if we didn’t destroy the ships. And I couldn’t erase the way I felt about Dr. Clarke and the others here. “But we can’t trust the ISA either. No good can come from what they’ve done—holding Adam hostage, stealing the M’alue technology, building spaceships. How could that not be seen as hostile? The M’alue believe we want war, and for all we know, that’s where this is headed.” I swallowed, my throat suddenly raw with the idea of going up against a race that was so much more advanced than we were. “We need to stop this from happening,” I said resolutely.

“So, judging by the way you keep looking at the clock, you know we’re on a countdown,” Simon said. “How much time did they give us?”

I frowned. “Not enough. That’s what I was trying to say. Time isn’t the same for them. When I was out there, it really felt like only half an hour. I had no idea an entire day had passed, which means we have even less time than I thought we did.” I glanced again at the clock on the wall. “As far as I can tell, we have until nine tonight,” I said as calmly as I could.

Jett jerked. “Nine? But that’s only four hours.”

“Not much time,” Willow chimed in.

I nodded. “When they attack, they plan to start with this facility.”

There were several long seconds while I let everyone absorb what I’d just told them. I gave them that. It was a lot to take in, possible extinction.

“So where are these ships?” Griffin finally asked, squaring her shoulders as she rolled her head from side to side, cracking her neck. “Did the M’alue tell you, or are we going in blind?”

Blind. That was the answer to Griffin’s question about whether I knew where this alleged fleet of spaceships had been stashed.

All I knew for sure was that the ships were here somewhere. Somewhere in this huge-vast-enormous facility that seemed to extend all the way to the Earth’s core and back again. And it was our job to find them.