“Tell me you’re seeing this,” she says in a panicked voice.
“I’m seeing it,” I answer in kind. “The walls are moving.”
“Something on the walls is moving.” She reaches for my hand. “What the hell is that?”
They move as one big wave toward us. Frozen in place, I send up a quick wish. Please don’t let anything happen to our baby. Legolas begins to go wild on my shoulder, jumping and clacking his pinchers together. The wave begins to slow as it draws near and Legolas leaps from my shoulder to stand in front of us like a little protector.
“Oh my stars, they’re legalocts.” My voice lifts in a coo. “Aren’t you all sweet?”
“Sweet!” Aria exclaims. “How in the world can you call a bunch of spiders sweet?”
Legolas clicks his two front legs together in rapid motion. “Wait, I think he’s talking to them.”
“Well, I don’t know what he’s saying, but I’ve never been happier that you made him your pet.”
Whatever Legolas says has the mass of spider-like creatures retreating to the walls of the cave. When the last one is gone, he climbs back up my suit leg and settles on my shoulder. I give him a scratch on his abdomen as a thank you. “My hero,” I tell him.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but you are so weird.” Aria laughs. “Come on, let’s get out of here before they change their mind and decide to make us supper.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was meant as one.”
With another half-hour or so of climbing, the tunnel begins to narrow and soon we’re crawling along on our hands and knees. I’m grateful as the walls begin to press in on us that I’m not especially claustrophobic. The tunnel, according to some of the maps we found in Breccan’s Reserves, should lead to a field of sorts a little ways away from the facility. It should give us enough distance for our plan to work.
The troops who attack on ground will cloister around the facility’s outer portion and we’ll come up behind them. The plan is to lure as many Big Birds, armworms, and sabrevipes as possible right where the majority of Earth II’s soldiers will be concentrated. It’s risky and has as much chance of being deadly to us as it will be to them, but we’ll do anything to keep our men safe. Using suits we found stored in the boxes—Breccan really did think of everything—we help each other zip into them.
“Let’s be quick about it. I don’t want to leave Sokko for too long,” Aria says as we squeeze out of the small opening to the tunnel and lift ourselves onto the field.
Thankfully, a small herd of something that looks like a cross between a turkey and a hedgehog is grazing in front of us. Using the small guns we’d stolen from the Reserves, we take out at least half of them. The scent of their green-black blood is pungent in the heat and strong. It will draw predators in no time now that the geostorm has begun to subside.
“Good shooting,” I tell Aria, who beams at me.
She goes to wipe a hand over her sweaty face and hits the glass plate of her mask instead. Sighing, she says, “Let’s get out of here before they show up and eat us for lunch instead.”
Aria inches back into the tunnel and I’m waiting my turn, already dreading the slow descent, when I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye. I glance up, expecting to see one of the monsters coming right at me for a snack, but it’s not an armworm or a sabrevipe. It’s one of the outer doors to the facility. I’d caught the motion of them opening.
She’s already in the tunnel a ways ahead of me, but I can’t look away from the sight of a mort in a suit bursting free from the opening. He hits the ground in a dead run and there’s no mistaking his suit. It’s always covered in grime and dirt from his experiments.
It’s Galen.
I scream for him instinctively, but of course he can’t hear me this far away without a communicator.
“Where the rekk is he going?” I say to no one.
Is he abandoning the other morts to try and save himself? I think of Oz and how hard he’s worked. They need everyone in order to survive the coming attack. What could be so important that it would force Galen to leave his family? A loud roar has me throwing myself to my knees and slithering back inside the tunnel.
But it’s not the beasts. It’s the sound of an engine.
I have just enough room in the tunnel to glance back at the slice of blue above me.
An army of Kevins fills the sky.
Epilogue
Avrell
Exilium, Many Solars Ago
They are doing nothing to prevent the spread of The Rades. Rekking nothing. It’s a shock that everyone here hasn’t caught it. Perhaps they have but aren’t presenting symptoms. There’s so much to explore now that I’m here.