United as One (Lorien Legacies #7)(87)

It only takes about thirty seconds.

When the shooting stops, Nine slams through the stone cover with his telekinesis. Outside, the ground is completely scorched. Thick dust hangs in the air, and twisted chunks of melted blasters litter the ground.

The entrance to the mountain base is clear.

Five floats down from above. “There weren’t many left inside,” he says with a crazed smile. “They panicked when you brought down the Anubis and rushed out here to honor their Beloved Leader.”

“Did you see him?” I ask. “Any sign of Setrákus Ra?”

He shakes his head. “Probably cowering down in the vats.”

We take a moment to catch our breath, then move forward into the cavernous complex. The place is just like I remember it. The gray stone walls are polished smooth, accented every twenty feet or so by a power conduit or a halogen lamp. The air is cool in here, the ventilation system on full blast. On our left, there’s a staircase carved out of the rock that leads up to where we think the control rooms are. On our right, a tunnel slants downward, deeper into the mountain, down to the vats.

He’s waiting for us there. I know it.

A handful of vatborn come charging out from the tunnel. Stragglers who missed the real fight. I dispatch them with a fireball, almost like an afterthought.

There’s no sign of Six and Adam yet.

“What are we waiting for?” Five grumbles. He and Nine press ahead, towards the down-sloping tunnel, like they’re in a competition to get there first. Marina and BK stay on either side of me.

Six says to give her a minute, Ella’s voice enters my mind.

Is there a problem? I think back at her. I’m about to cast about with my own telepathy for Six, find out what is delaying her, when a pained shout draws my attention up ahead.

“That was Nine,” Marina says, alarmed.

We run forward and down, BK on our heels, into the narrowing tunnel. Nine and Five, so eager for more combat and looking to show each other up, got way too far ahead of us. As we run, the air gets humid and stifling, laden with a smell like rotten meat covered with gasoline.

After a quick sprint through the bottleneck, Marina and I emerge in the mountain base’s cavernous central chamber. Here, a rocky ledge spirals downward along the walls, passing dozens of tunnels, crisscrossed here and there by arched stone bridges. Two huge columns run from the floor to the ceiling overhead. Last time, I remember how busy with Mogadorians this place was, how the structure reminded me of a beehive and the Mogs drones. Now, the place is all but empty.

The ledge terminates a half mile down at a vast lake of the black Mogadorian sludge. I remember that being green the last time I was here and reeking of chemicals, but that was before Setrákus Ra arrived on Earth and really put his experiments to work. There are machines down there now, jutting up from the lake of ooze like oil derricks. Even from this height, I can see the occasional blue spark of Loric energy bubble up from that goo and then, just as quickly, dissolve.

“There!” Marina shouts, grabbing my arm.

Nine stands on the ledge just underneath ours, clutching his face. I grab Marina and fly us over to him.

“Thing came out of nowhere,” he growls. The side of his face is burned and cracked, like it was splashed with chemicals, patches of hair on that side of his head now bleached white. Quickly, Marina presses her hand against Nine’s cheek and begins to heal him.

“Where—?”

I don’t need to finish my question. I see them, swooping through the air below our current perch. Five flies in a loop, dodging away from a Mogadorian trueborn, definitely an Augment, one that can fly also. It reminds me of a ghost, its form raggedy, wisps of shadows trailing out from its lower body.

I jump off the ledge and fly down to help Five. BK follows me, back in his griffin form. I quickly glance over my shoulder and see Nine, healed, sprinting down, too, using his antigravity Legacy to stick to the walls. Marina clings to him in a piggyback position.

As I get closer, I get a better look at this latest Augment. His entire lower body is missing. From the waist down, he’s nothing but semisolid shadows. These shadow limbs wave back and forth like fishtails and propel him through the air. Worse yet, his jaw and a good part of his upper chest are missing. It looks like he’s stuck in a perpetual scream, an acidic green spray frothing from his mouth. That’s what burned Nine, and it’s what is currently tormenting Five, the spray melting through even his metal-encased skin.

The Augment doesn’t see me coming. He’s about to take another pass at Five when I hit him full speed with both feet between the shoulder blades. I pin him like that and ride him two hundred feet down, onto the ledge, where he smashes with a sickeningly wet sound and stops moving.

Five lands next to me and, with no fanfare, shoves his blade through the back of the already-dead Augment’s head. Making sure, I guess. He looks up at me, and, for the first time, I see something like horror in Five’s eye.

“Did you see that thing?” he asks me.

“I saw it.”

“Why . . . ?” He shakes his head. “He promised the Mogs, he promised me, new Legacies. Who would want something like that?”

I shake my head and approach Five, touching the eroded sections of his arms and shoulders so I can heal them. He flinches away for a moment, then calms down and lets it happen.

“He’s a madman, Five,” I say. “You were taken in by a madman.”