“I am the creator now, John,” Setrákus Ra says. “Come. See for yourself.”
My hands shake. My Lumen won’t work. The darkness surrounds me. . . .
“John! John!”
My eyes snap open. Adam’s got me by the shoulders, shaking me. I’m back in the sub-subbasement of Patience Creek, not drowning in black muck, not having my Legacies stolen by a Mogadorian.
“You fell asleep,” Adam says, eyes wide. “And then, well . . .”
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 I notice a pile of crushed soda cans on the desk behind him, all their logos very out-of-date.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.”
I take a closer look at the cell phone. “Why’d you pick such a shitty phone?”
“The older stuff is easier for me to work with because it’s less complex,” he says with a shrug. “They’re better listeners.”
“And you think it worked? That it listened to you?”
“I don’t know,” Sam says. “I can tell that it’s emitting the frequency, but I can’t tell if it copied the data packet, too. Not unless . . .”
“Unless you use it to pass through a force field.”
“Bingo,” Sam says, and tosses me the phone.
I catch it and turn it over in my hands. The plastic is hot to the touch, and it’s only got about 83 percent battery life.
“The battery drains fast when it’s emitting the frequency, and it’s doing that constantly once I give it the command,” Sam says. “And when it shuts down, the phone forgets what I told it. Even with those limitations, I think it could make a difference.”
I nod my head, remembering how Lawson plans to coordinate a worldwide assault on the warships. Assuming all goes smoothly this morning and we manage to steal the cloaking devices from aboard the Niagara Falls warship, that’s what? A few hundred cloaking devices? That means a few hundred missiles for the world’s armies to bombard those huge warships with. How many hits would it take to bring down one of those colossal ships? Seems to me like they’d want as many shots as possible and then some.
I look behind Sam. He’s got all his devices plugged into a few overloaded power strips. He’s also got a fire extinguisher parked nearby, just in case.
Seeing where I’m looking, he says, “If it’s working, I’ve already taught those dozen things to speak cloaking device. I’m getting pretty good at it—I think. It feels like it’s getting easier anyway. Although, I could be doing nothing and having, like, a Legacy placebo effect.” Sam sighs tiredly and waves this thought away. “I’m going to use my Legacy on every mobile thing I can get my hands on until it’s verified one way or the other.” He sighs. “Or maybe I just wasted one of the last days of my life talking to a bunch of cell phones like a crazy person. No big deal.”
I leap off the bed and kiss Sam. “No way. This is going to work.”
Sam returns my smile, holding my hand. “Just be careful today, all right?”
“When am I not careful?”
Down in the hangar, a large space has been cleared, the military Humvees parallel parked impossibly close to the walls. They’re arranged neatly, one right next to the other, so they can speed on out at a moment’s notice, convoy-style. I can tell by the precision of the parking arrangement that it was either done by some really anal-retentive drivers or with telekinesis.
The new Garde—Nigel, Fleur, Bertrand, Ran, and Daniela—are all lined up in this open space. They look sleepy, nervous, excited. Daniela gives me a little wave when she sees me watching. I smile at her.
Caleb and Christian stand apart from the others, closer to the handful of marines spectating than to their fellow Garde. As usual, Christian looks completely stone-faced. Caleb, on the other hand, appears more attentive than his brother.