I jump off the ledge and fly down to help Five. BK follows me, back in his griffin form. I quickly glance over my shoulder and see Nine, healed, sprinting down, too, using his antigravity Legacy to stick to the walls. Marina clings to him in a piggyback position.
As I get closer, I get a better look at this latest Augment. His entire lower body is missing. From the waist down, he’s nothing but semisolid shadows. These shadow limbs wave back and forth like fishtails and propel him through the air. Worse yet, his jaw and a good part of his upper chest are missing. It looks like he’s stuck in a perpetual scream, an acidic green spray frothing from his mouth. That’s what burned Nine, and it’s what is currently tormenting Five, the spray melting through even his metal-encased skin.
The Augment doesn’t see me coming. He’s about to take another pass at Five when I hit him full speed with both feet between the shoulder blades. I pin him like that and ride him two hundred feet down, onto the ledge, where he smashes with a sickeningly wet sound and stops moving.
Five lands next to me and, with no fanfare, shoves his blade through the back of the already-dead Augment’s head. Making sure, I guess. He looks up at me, and, for the first time, I see something like horror in Five’s eye.
“Did you see that thing?” he asks me.
“I saw it.”
“Why . . . ?” He shakes his head. “He promised the Mogs, he promised me, new Legacies. Who would want something like that?”
I shake my head and approach Five, touching the eroded sections of his arms and shoulders so I can heal them. He flinches away for a moment, then calms down and lets it happen.
“He’s a madman, Five,” I say. “You were taken in by a madman.”
“He has to die.”
“Finally, we agree on something,” Nine says, jumping down from the ledge above ours. Marina climbs off his back and studies the dead Augment.
“This is an abomination,” she says. “He has twisted the work of Lorien into something . . . something . . .” Marina covers her mouth with the back of her hand and walks away. Her path takes her across the entrance to the nearest tunnel, where she immediately freezes. “Oh . . . oh my God.”
We all rush to her side.
It’s the smell that hits me first. The rotten odor, the stench of decay, made all the more inescapable by the oppressive heat down here, close as we now are to the vat of black ooze.
Bodies are piled high in this tunnel. Some of them have the dark hair and pale skin of Mogadorians. Those are half-disintegrated, warped, their limbs turned into fragile, dusty husks. Others are unmistakably human. They look like they’ve been drained, their flesh gray and puckered, dried black veins visible beneath their skin. It looks like he’s sucked the vitality right out of them. A closer look reveals that, despite their shriveled appearances, the human bodies are exclusively teenagers.
I remember Lawson telling me about how the Russians were turning over suspected Garde to the Mogadorians, and it dawns on me. These are ours. The human Garde from the countries that surrendered and the other ones his people tracked down. He pulled the Loric spark right out of them.
Staring at this, unconsciously, I’ve drawn my Voron dagger. It glows with a dull red energy now. Seeing it in my hand, Nine takes a step back.
“Careful with that thing, Johnny,” he says weakly. His eyes are actually filled with tears from the sight of the bodies. Marina covers her face. Five simply stares.
I’ve charged the dagger with Dreynen without even realizing it. When I talked to Ella, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my Ximic to copy this power because of how unnatural it feels. But no, I’ve never wanted to cut someone off from Lorien so badly as I do Setrákus Ra.
I spin away from this latest atrocity, stand at the edge of the ledge and scream.
“SETRÁKUS RA!”
There’s a rumble overhead. Rock dust drifts down from the ceiling. It feels like the earth itself moved. I’m not sure if that was caused by my yelling or something else.
And I don’t care. Because I see movement down below. In the center of the lake of Mogadorian ooze.
Setrákus Ra emerges from the oily muck, rising up from the depths. The worms of ooze don’t drip off him, rather they slither under his skin like they’re seeking shelter. He wears the red-and-black Mogadorian armor that I’ve seen before, ornate and showy, with a flowing black cape attached to his studded shoulders. His bulbous, pale head is coated with thick bristles of dark hair. That’s new. Similarly, his features aren’t so sunken anymore, not so old. Even the purple scar around his neck has begun to fade. He’s younger, healthier than I’ve ever seen him. He floats with his hands spread out at his sides like some twisted savior.