‘Hold up,’ Nine whispers in my ear. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Exposed as we are, I’m not sure it’s a great time for one of Nine’s crazy ideas. But, a moment after he stops us, the cow-beast in the cage groans again and lumbers awkwardly to its feet. It staggers to the side and pushes all its weight against one side of the cage, causing the Mogs pushing it to yell for assistance as the whole thing threatens to topple. Then, the monster mule-kicks one of its huge cloven hooves at the bars, nearly smashing the face of a Mog.
‘I asked it to give us a distraction,’ Nine whispers, more Mogs closing in on the cage to try sedating their experiment. ‘Poor thing was happy to help.’
Nine’s animal telepathy works like a charm. As if it’s at last discovered a purpose in life, the cow thrashes about, bulling towards the sides of its cage, even catching one Mog in the shoulder with its horn. The chaos creates an opening for us to slip through the mass in front of the greenhouse and make our way towards the hangar.
We all stop at the sound of a Mog blaster being fired. Turning around, I see the officer holstering his blaster, a smoking hole in the side of the cow’s head. It slumps in the cage, unmoving. He yells some orders, and the Mogadorians begin loading the corpse on to the warship.
As I tense up, Nine whispers to me, ‘Better this way. It was in a ton of pain.’
With some distance between us and the highest concentration of Mogs, I feel comfortable enough to whisper back. ‘What were they doing to it?’
Nine pauses before answering. ‘I couldn’t, like, have a heart-to-heart with the thing. But I think they were trying to figure out how they could make it more efficient. They’re, uh, experimenting with the ecology.’
‘Demented,’ Marina mutters.
We pick up some speed as we move towards the hangar. On our right, at the edge of the runway, are a trio of the smaller, saucer-shaped Mogadorian ships. A maintenance crew of five Mogadorians huddles around one of them, pulling circuit boards out of the ship’s underbelly and generally looking befuddled. I guess Mogadorians can have technical difficulties, too. Other than those guys, the coast is clear.
The huge, sheet-metal doors of the hangar, wide enough for a small plane to pass in and out, are only open a few feet, just enough to let a person pass through. There are lights on inside the hangar, but all I can see through the gap is empty space.
Marina slows down as we reach the doors and then stops fully to peek inside. While she’s doing that, I look over my shoulder. Nothing’s changed – the Mogs are still loading materials on to the warship, completely unaware that we just snuck through their ranks.
‘Anything?’ Nine whispers, and I can sense him craning his neck, trying to see through the crack in the hangar doors. Before I can answer, I hear Marina’s breath catch in her throat. My hand stings, shot through with cold, like I’m suddenly clutching a block of ice.
‘Shit, Marina!’ I hiss, but she’s not listening. Instead, she’s lunging through the doors. Considering my hand is numb, it takes all my willpower to keep hold of her. I tug Nine along behind me and his shoulder strikes the steel door, his grunt covered by the echoing metallic rattling.
The hangar is almost completely empty, the Mogadorians having already cleared all their gear out. Large floodlights shine down from the rafters, illuminating the metal table and chair in the center of the room. They’re the only things left in the hangar, and the lights from above cast long shadows across the concrete floor.
Eight’s body is on the table.
He is wrapped in a black body bag, unzipped to the waist. He’s shirtless, the quarter-sized wound where Five stabbed him through the heart plainly visible on his chest. His brown skin is ashen, but Eight still looks very much like himself, like at any moment he’ll teleport off the table and play some annoying joke on me. There are black electrodes with short, fragile-looking antennae attached to Eight’s temples and a few more running down his sternum. The electrodes generate some kind of field that’s barely visible to the eye, like a low and steady current of electricity is passing over Eight’s body. I think it’s something the Mogs attached to Eight to keep his body intact for their experiments. In addition to the electrodes, someone has cleaned the blood off him and, surprisingly, they’ve left his Loric pendant around his neck, the jewel shimmering dully against his chest. It kills me to see him like this, but Eight looks almost peaceful.
Of course, Eight isn’t the reason Marina shoved through the hangar doors, or the reason that she’s currently giving my hand a wicked case of frostbite.
Seated next to Eight, head in his hands, is Five.
Five sits crouched forward, almost like he wishes he could fold in on himself. There’s a thick pad of gauze over the eye Marina stabbed back in the swamp, a very faint pink stain beginning to soak through. His good eye is red-rimmed; it looks as if he’s been crying or hasn’t been sleeping – or both. Five’s head is freshly shaven since we last saw him, and I wonder how far off he is from getting a set of his own Mogadorian tattoos. He’s dressed in Mogadorian formal attire similar to the officer directing traffic at the warship. However, his uniform is severely wrinkled, the buttons around the neck undone, everything looking a little too tight.
There’s no way the one-eyed traitor didn’t hear us enter. Thanks to Marina, we made a ton of noise coming through the door, and the emptiness of the hangar amplifies everything to the point where I’m suddenly extremely conscious of my breathing. Even worse, I can hear a low growl coming from Marina, like she’s fighting back an intense scream, ready to throw herself at Five. Behind me, I can sense Nine basically holding his breath.