I glance down. My hands, which were resting on the arms of my chair, left blackened imprints in the fabric. My Lumen must have triggered while I was in that nightmare. The smell of burned fabric fills the room.

“Sorry . . . ,” I say, shakily standing up.

Adam hesitates, waiting for an explanation. “You okay?” he finally asks.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, slowly walking out of the room.

There’ll be no more sleep for me. Not until this is over.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I JUST NEED A LITTLE MORE TIME WITH IT,” Sam says. “I swear I can get it to work. I mean, it could already be working. I’ve got no way to test it. . . .”

It’s dawn. Sam paces in front of our bed, talking fast. I notice a pile of crushed soda cans on the desk behind him, all their logos very out-of-date. I guess stale soda still has a bunch of caffeine. I watch him patiently, a small smile on my lips.

“My dad tried to give me a crash course in electromagnetism,” Sam continues. “Frequencies, ultraviolet, uh, the ionosphere. Do you know what the ionosphere is?”

I shake my head.

“Okay, me neither. I mean, I didn’t know until my dad explained it, and now I only sort of know. The ionosphere is part of the atmosphere. It’s like nature’s force field. Radio waves bounce off it. If you want to understand how a force field would work outside of science fiction, you’d start there. Or at least you would’ve until aliens came to Earth and changed our understanding of, well, all kinds of shit. . . .”

“You’re getting off topic, Sam.”

I was already in bed last night when Sam came into the room. I’d listened drowsily as he complained about how Malcolm had made him go to bed—like he was a kid again and not trying to save the world. He tossed and turned next to me for a while. Eventually, he went over to work at the room’s small desk. By work I mean insistently whisper a bunch of nonsense phrases to an assortment of handheld devices—the now-infamous Game Boy, an array of cell phones, tablets, an e-reader. Sam’s quiet voice lulled me back to sleep.

“Sorry. So, some of the engineers working on the cloaking device tried to go into more detail about force fields—did you know the military already had a working prototype? It keeps stuff out, but you can’t see through it, so you’d be shielded but blind. Anyway, I think they eventually started to feel like explaining all that was a waste of time since I’m technically a high school dropout.”

“They underestimate you at their peril,” I say with a sleepy smile.

Sam holds the Mogadorian cloaking device he uninstalled from our ship in one hand and an old flip phone in the other, hoisting them up and down like he’s a scale.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No. Keep going.”

“So, my dad and the science team, they’ve already figured out the basics of how this thing works,” Sam says, holding up the black box that allows Skimmers to pass unharmed through warship force fields. “It emits an ultrasonic frequency that, according to the dudes downstairs, we’d be able to replicate no problem. What’s slowing them up is that the sound wave is, uh, thickened somehow, I think they said, so that it can carry through a data packet to the warship. That data packet identifies the Skimmer as friendly. Problem is, it’s written in code that we don’t understand, that we can’t even create yet, in a programming language that none of our machines are coded to work with—”

“Sam,” I say, interrupting as soon as he takes a breath. “I’m sure this is all very interesting but . . .”

“Ha, no it isn’t,” Sam replies with a sheepish grin. He sets aside the cloaking device so he can rub the back of his neck. “All right, cutting to the chase—”

“Please do.”

“All those guys downstairs, they’re trying to copy this data packet thingy. But that’s hard, because a. they don’t have Mog technology to work with, and b. they’d still need to learn how to use that even if they did. So I was thinking—why not let the machines do the work for us?”

“Okay . . . ,” I say, waving my hand to speed him up.

Sam holds up the flip phone. “I’ve been talking to this guy here.”

“Talking to it?”

“Well, at it—it doesn’t talk back. Not like you do anyway.” He opens and closes the phone like a mouth. “I’ve been telling it just to copy the cloaking device signal. The whole thing. Sound and data. I mean, we don’t need to understand how this works, Six; we just need to rip it off.”