Maintaining absorb, I ran for the mess hall, Emerald hot on my heels. We pulled to a stop when we reached the doorway and looked inside. Nearly a dozen dead enemy soldiers were sprawled on the deck among the scattered and damaged tables and chairs.

  “You bastard!” David again drew my attention. He’d jerked Sheri’s gun out of her hand and had stumbled to a stop. Her other hand had slipped free of his arm, and she scrambled to reach for him again. “You killed my mother!” he screamed, taking aim at the imposter. He squeezed the trigger, the energy blast burning into her abdomen.

  She looked down at the damage with no more concern than if she were checking to see if her shoelaces were untied. When she lifted her head again, she had a sadistic grin on her face. “Boo hoo, little boy,” she taunted. “No more mommy.” David shot the Aleal in the face, destroying her mouth. A new one sprouted on her neck. “So sorry. Not.”

  “I hope she got all the stabilizers before she became lunch,” Emerald commented.

  “Not now, Em,” I growled. The first of the reinforcement’s plasma bolts bit through the webbing. Sheri and David were running toward us again, but the blasts were landing too close to their churning feet for my comfort. “Ixy, help ‘em!”

  “Yesss,” Ixitat agreed, nimbly plucking the gun from David’s hands before wrapping one forelimb around him and the other around Sheri, picking them both up and scurrying toward us. She put Sheri down beside me but held onto David who was sobbing uncontrollably.

  ”Emerald, you and Ki take point. And Em, be careful.”

  She nodded, and they rushed forward. I took up the rear to throw a blanket of reflect over Ixy’s web. The further I got from it, the more energy it would take to hold it in place, but I could keep it up long enough to give us a head start.

  The plasma blasts that hit it now ricocheted back at the guards. While I couldn’t see the outcome, their fire thinned out considerably within seconds.

  Reaching the stabilizer at the far end of the corridor just ahead of the southern extension doors, I paused beside the column while the others waited for the doors to open. When they did, four enemy guards rushed through, their weapons drawn. It took them too long to take aim. Only the first guard got off a shot, and it went wide. A quick burst of frantic shooting from our side left all four guards dead on the floor.

  I had to drop reflect to use separate. Fortunately, it took a few seconds of cautious shooting before the enemy knew it was gone. They quickly burned through the webbing while I finished damaging the stabilizer and beat a hasty retreat through the door. Ayane led the assault, sprinting toward me with unnatural speed. I pulled the door closed in front of her face, using combine to merge the two sides, sealing it. The Aleal pounded on the other side of the door, but with the metal combined to the rock, there was no way she or anyone else on the other side could get through.

  Turning back around, I saw we were in a shorter corridor, with another stabilizer halfway down, a branching corridor beside it, and a handful of doors running the length of the passage. No sign of more guards.

  I shifted my attention to David. He was down on the floor on his knees, puking while Sheri knelt beside him, rubbing his back. In his anger, he had shot the Aleal who’d killed his mother. I didn’t blame him for feeling sick.

  “We need to search the rooms,” I announced to my crew. “Ki, George, Quasar—search these rooms. Em, Shaq—you’re with me. Sheri, stay with David until he’s on his feet. Ixy, you too. Then all of you catch up with us. Stick together, be cautious. There’s no guarantee the enemy didn’t set another trap.” The others split into their respective groups. I stopped to lay my hand on David’s shoulder. “David, I’m sorry about your mom.”

  “Are you?” he snapped back over his shoulder at me. “Are you really sorry? Or are you glad she’s dead?”

  “David!” Sheri chided.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I know you’re hurting, man. I didn’t like what your mother did to you back on Earth, but that doesn’t mean I wanted her dead. She helped us out here, and if we manage to take out this facility, it’ll be because of her. She knew she wasn’t going to make it back. That’s why she wouldn’t take your ring. The only one of its kind. That’s why she said goodbye the way she did.”

  He glared at me for a moment before his eyes softened. “Why’d she have to be so brave?” he bawled, dropping his head onto Sheri’s shoulder.

  “On second thought—Sher, Shaq—stay with David. Ixy, you’re on my squad now.”

  “Yesss,” Ixy replied.

  Shaq jumped from my shoulder to Sheri’s. David slumped to the floor again, hanging his head. I could understand why he was so upset, but right or wrong, it bugged me that he couldn’t pull himself together, at least until we got out of here.

  I led my group down the branching corridor, carefully approaching the corner. Still no guards. The passageway stretched about two hundred feet, with nearly a dozen doors on either side. We walked over to the first, Emerald poised to shoot whomever might be waiting for us on the other side. Ixy crouched, preparing to spring as well.

  I pushed the door inward. The room on the other side appeared to be an ancient sick bay, with a handful of beds overshadowed by the equipment hanging above them. All of it was dark, decaying, and covered in dust. It hadn’t been used in probably over a thousand years.

  We went to the next door and repeated the procedure, getting a look at a nearly barren storage room. A few boxes of gauze and bottles of pills were the only indication of what had been kept here.

  “David’s mom made it seem like there was something important back here,” Emerald said. “All I see is dust and cobwebs. Ixy, you should be right at home.”

  “Bitesss me,” Ixy replied to Emerald’s laughter.

  “They kept her away from here for a reason,” I said. “We just need to find whatever that reason is.”

  “It’s pretty sad for David,” Emerald continued, “losing his mom to an Aleal like that. Do you think a cake would make him feel better?”

  “No,” I answered, not in the mood for her off-the-wall machinations right now. “Stay focused, Em.”

  “Geez, someone has a bug up their—”

  “Em!” I snapped, glaring at her. She pressed her lips together and made a zipping motion, falling silent.

  We checked the next few doors—offices I assumed were for the medical team that had once been stationed here.

  “Ben, we’re done with our search,” Quasar said over the comms. “Nada.”

  I heaved a sigh. Maybe Ayane had been wrong about this part of the facility. If Grizz’s wife and kids were somewhere else, we might not be able to find them.

  We stopped at the next door. I pushed it open. Emerald shoved her rifle inside, lighting it up with its built-in flashlight. She immediately looked back at me, face pale. “I think I found them.”

  I stepped around her, peering into the room, finding three bodies slumped in chairs. An older woman that could have been Grizz’s wife flanked by two other adults. They looked more like they were sleeping than dead, save for their shattered skulls and the blood staining their clothing.

  “They were fed to more Aleal,” I said, disgusted by the scene. I turned away. “Who knows where they might be now.” I smacked my hand into the wall. “It doesn’t matter. Grizz’s family is dead.”

  Emerald put her hand on my shoulder. “They were never going to keep them alive,” she said softly. “I think we both knew that.”

  I turned to look her in the eye. “I wanted to believe I was wrong.”

  “We got David. He’s the one we really need.”

  “That doesn’t make it suck less.”

  “Nope.”

  “Zar,” I said over the comms. “We’re coming back to you. Grizz’s wife and kids are dead. Aleal have their essences.”

  She hesitated before responding. “Copy that, Cap.”

  I looked at Emerald again. “It’s time to bring this hell house down.”

  CHAPTER 31

  I returned to the primary corridor of the southern extension with my half of the crew, rejoining the others. Sheri still had her arm draped over David’s shoulder, giving him some human contact and support. He seemed to have calmed down. He was no longer crying, though his defeated posture still bothered me.

  I stared at him, waiting until he noticed me and made eye contact before speaking. “We came here for you. Make your mother’s sacrifices and everyone else’s worthwhile.”

  “How?” he asked meekly. “Quasar destroyed my research. I don’t have anything else to offer.”

  In truth, the greater part of the reason we had come was to prevent him from creating more sigils for the enemy. I could only imagine how they might have employed reverse, considering how we had already used it to turn a loss into a win. “You’re a smart guy. You’ll think of something.”

  He didn’t seem too confident about that at the moment, but he also didn’t argue.

  “It’s time to go,” I announced, heavy-hearted from the loss of so many Royal Marines, David’s mother, and Grizz’s family. It was almost more than I could bear, and an unquenchable fury smoldered behind the ache of grief within me. I was eager to finish things once and for all.

  Considering the state of this part of the facility, I hadn’t yet weakened the two stabilizers propping our passageways up. I didn’t see any reason to do so now. They would keep us from being crushed in the time it took me to transition from pushing and pulling the mountain down on this facility to opening the portal back to Prestige.

  Moving my fingers to the guitar strings, I closed my eyes and did my best to steady myself before starting to play. For once, we weren’t in a desperate fight for our lives, reliant on sigiltech to pull us out of an impossible situation. The enemy was at the gates, but I had sealed them out, and it seemed they weren’t too eager to unseal us. We hadn’t killed all of the archons studying at the so-called academy. I found it hard to believe they couldn’t separate the doors, or dissolve them or otherwise break through if they really wanted. Having seen the damaged stabilizers, maybe they were busy packing up to get out before I did what I was about to do.

  I played slowly and deliberately. Slow Dancing in a Burning Room. Listening to it coming out of my custom-built guitar, I could feel my soul emanating from the piece. The fear, the pain, the anger. I let it run for twenty or thirty seconds before drawing the chaos energy into my construct. Picturing the mountain from what I had seen of it on the outside, I activated my construct, tugging not at the entire mass of rock—that would be impossible for me alone to bring down—but focusing on the area just beneath the passageways. I imagined the floors I had crossed as a giant snake convulsing from huge feet stomping down on its back.

  It took a lot of effort to make the ground shift, probably more than I should have used. But I couldn’t stand the thought of this place continuing to exist. It wasn’t created to forge sigils for peace and healing. With its deadly cache of sigiltech catalyst, its etchers and the datastore that no doubt held backups of David’s most recent designs, it was only meant for war. I wanted all of it gone, lost and forgotten. Buried beneath countless tons of stone.

  I soaked up more chaos energy, feeding it into my construct and through it into the action that moved the floors, further damaging the stabilizers and quaking the ground beneath our feet. At first, it was like being on a boat, rocking in the calm before the storm. Then the storm hit, jostling us more violently, the stabilizers groaning and creaking as they fought to maintain themselves intact. Deeper down, a rumble like a speeding freight train echoed through the rock, increasing the violence of the shaking as my initial output created a full-blown earthquake.

  “Ben, we need to go!” Quasar shouted. My eyes snapped open. I had almost forgotten myself in the music, in the chaos, in the desire to destroy this place. The rumbling across the installation deepened considerably, and cracks appeared in the floor beneath my feet. The closest stabilizer popped and began to bend.

  I stopping pushing, switching to the combination of sigils needed to transit out of here. My crew instinctively lined up around me, connecting hands, pedipalps, and paws so we could travel the void together. The stabilizer near me collapsed, the rock over it cracking and beginning to come down with it. The one on the other side broke more quickly, the ceiling above it fracturing to allow big chunks to break loose.

  Rather than opening the portal in front of me to run through, I opened it directly under our feet, the floor beneath us disappearing as the mountain collapsed over our heads. We fell into the void seconds ahead of the cave-in.

  With the portal open on both ends, gravity and our building momentum carried us toward the bottom end. I yearned to stay, to feed on the chaos inside the void. I heard it. I still wanted it. But there was nothing it could do to tempt me to stay. We fell through the other end, dropping ten feet to Head Case’s hangar deck, landing sprawled in a pile.

  I canceled the transit as quickly as I could, unsure of how much of the mountain had followed us through. A few smaller chunks of rock came through behind us, bouncing harmlessly off our armored bodies before the portal closed.

  Stillness followed. For a few seconds, nobody spoke or moved. We were all just grateful to be alive.

  “I think I broke my butt,” Emerald murmured.

  “I think you broke my butt,” Sheri said.

  “I think you should all get off my butt,” Quasar growled.

  “Ixy, do you have a butt?” Emerald asked.

  “Yesss,” she replied, turning to shake it at Emerald.

  “That was too close,” George said. “Ben, are you okay?”

  I wasn’t. I had the weight of almost everybody on top of me, and my body felt like it was literally on fire. My insides, too. “Could everybody get off me, please,” I gasped. “Matt, are you there?”

  “Ben? Are you here?” he asked.

  “In the hangar. Activate the fire suppression system. Just the water. No gel.”

  “Is there a fire?” he questioned as everybody, starting with Emerald and ending with George, slid slowly off me. “I’m not getting any alerts.”

  “Just do it please.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Water began spraying from the overhead sprinklers, quickly dousing me while everybody else jumped up and ran for cover under the stairs leading up to the elevator. I laid there spread eagle on the deck, listening to the trickle of the water running down drains in the deck. Never had cold water felt so good.

  I stayed there for a few minutes, finally getting to my feet as the flow of water subsided, the suppression system emptied. The elevator door opened at the top of the stairs, and Matt ran to the railing to look down on me, a huge grin on his face. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve been better,” I replied. I was exhausted. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. My face hurt from where Coil had repeatedly punched me. And despite the cold water, I still felt like I was burning up. Just not quite as badly. “But I’m still alive.”

  “Where’s David?” Matt asked.

  “Here,” David said, moving out from under the steps as the deluge from overhead dwindled to drips.

  “We’re all here,” George added as the others emerged from cover.

  “What about the Marines?” he questioned.

  “They didn’t make it.”

  “None of them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Damn.” He fell silent after that, at a loss for words.

  “Contact Volker,” I said. “Tell him the base on Gloin is destroyed and the objective has been recovered. Tell him every Royal Marine who participated is a hero.”

  “Aye, Captain,” he replied. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

  I offered a weak smile. I’d had enough experience with dizziness and fatigue that I already knew what came next. “I’ll be in sick bay. I just need someone to carry me…there.”

  And with that, I passed out.

  CHAPTER 32

  “How long have I been out?” I asked, the moment I regained consciousness. I didn’t bother to open my eyes.

  “Four hours,” Matt replied.

  “Did you talk to Keep?”

  “Dutch used the collator to reach him, yeah.”

  “Dutch?”

  “Short for Duchess. You know, Dryka?”

  “I hate it.”

  “Too bad, most of us think it’s badass.”

  “What did Keep say?”

  “He wasn’t happy about the casualties.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “He wasn’t that happy Quasar smashed David’s laptop, either.”

  I opened my eyes for that. Matt sat in a chair next to me. Shaq was curled up near my feet, head lifted while he followed the conversation. I half expected Emerald to be curled up there with him. I was glad she wasn’t.

  “Really? He probably wanted the most powerful sigils, too. Despite what he said about burying sigiltech again.”

  “Why so suddenly cynical about Keep?” Matt asked. “I thought you two were besties?”

  “You’re my best friend,” I replied. “Keep’s more like—”

  “Replacement dad?” Matt ventured.

  “My Cousin Vinny,” I replied.

  He laughed. “Wow, you reached back in time for that one.”

  “You’re the one who made me watch it.”

  “On a recommendation from Jennifer Hewitt’s father,” Matt said, laughing. “The movie was so much more entertaining than Jennifer.”

  “That’s not nice.” He shrugged. “Where are we now? And don’t say on the way to Atlas.”

  “We’re on the way to Atlas.”

  “I just told you not to say that.”

  “But, Keep told Volker to come out of hyperspace on your command. He figured we might as well get headed in the right direction while you were sleeping.”

  “Did I do any magic while I was out?”

  “Not this time.” I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “Justus ran another scan on you, though.”

  “Did he give you the news?”