Marina, I reach out telepathically. Give me an igloo.

Marina reacts immediately. She creates a dome of ice over her and Nine, thick and sturdy. As soon as it’s created, I hit the structure with my stone-vision, turning it from ice to solid granite. Then I run forward, joining them underneath it. BK charges in, too. Five sees what we’re doing and snorts. Instead of diving in with us, he simply flies clear of the battle. Mogs run towards us, but Marina and I quickly seal the entrance.

“Sweet bunker,” Nine comments in the dark.

Open fire, I tell Ella.

The four of us huddle underneath the stone igloo as our warship bombards the Mogs surrounding it. The ground shakes, and the air gets hot enough that Marina has to start generating a field of cold to keep us from boiling. Cracks form in our makeshift structure, and chunks rain down on our hair; but I quickly seal them up with my stone-vision.

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.