United as One (30 page)

Still, I have to try. This is the only way it ends.

Setrákus Ra screams as I force healing into him. But quickly, he fights back. He bites down on my shoulder, his mouth hideously huge, teeth sharpened, and tears off a chunk of flesh.

“John!” Marina shouts. Her one arm hanging limp at her side, blood streaming down her face, she races forwards to help.

Spikes of hardened ooze thrust forth from Setrákus Ra's body. One goes through my leg, another my side, another my shoulder. I'm not even sure if he's controlling this or if it's a reaction brought on by my healing, like the ooze is trying to escape. Either way, now we're pinned together. Another spike nearly makes it to
Marina's eye before she skids to a stop a few feet away.

I redirect some of my healing to my own wounds. Try to close them as fast as Setrákus Ra can make them while still beating back the vileness that's spread throughout him.

As my healing Legacy drives it from Setrákus Ra's body, the ooze coalesces around us in battering tendrils. Marina can't even get close anymore.

“Go!” I yell at her. “Take Nine and get out of here!”

“I'm not leaving you!”

“Six is in the caverns up there; she needs healing,” I tell her, gritting my teeth against the pain. “Please—
gah
—please, Marina—GO!”

Marina looks at me, tears in her eyes. I can barely see her anymore through the mess of ooze thrashing around me. I see her look up doubtfully at the spiraling pathway that leads back to the surface, then down at Nine.

With a groan, Nine touches Marina's leg. He shudders.

“Just . . . just like we practiced,” he says deliriously, transferring his Legacies to her.

I remember that. Capture the Flag in Chicago. Nine's team won because he gifted Marina his antigravity Legacy.

Marina scoops Nine up with her working arm. She's got his strength too. With one last look at me, she runs
straight up the wall, leaping over the ledges as she sprints for the surface.

Via my telepathy, Sam has witnessed this whole thing. He feels what I'm feeling. The ebb and flow of pain, the tearing throughout my body.

Sam. The others are coming out. Will you do it now, Sam?

John . . .
His sadness flows into me, worse than all the pain.

He'll do it. I know he will.

I turn off my telepathy. Focus only on healing. I let all the Loric energy stored inside of me cascade forth.

I pray it's enough.

I am face-to-face with Setrákus Ra. The two of us locked together. My healing continues to pour into him, and, with every second, his young face melts away, the oil driven back. His pale skin returns, his bulbous bald head, the sunken cheeks, the vivid purple scar. He snarls at me. He spits in my face. Headbutts me.

In his black eyes, for the first time, I see doubt.

“I'm going to kill you,” he snarls, his breath hot and wretched against my face.

I know this is true. I'm going to die down here. Tangled together with my worst enemy. Healing him, even as he tears me apart.

“You . . .” A bubble of blood pops when I try to speak. “You'll die first.”

A tendril of his ooze, razor sharp and ice-cold, slashes across my abdomen. Opens me up.

I push warm, healing energy into him. Watch as his face turns gray and wrinkled. A centuries-old man.

The ooze coalesces around my legs. Crushes them like a vice, my bones snapping like twigs.

More healing. A little bit for my body—just enough to keep me going—the rest for him.

A chunk of hardened ooze falls away from him and turns to dust on the cavern floor. Setrákus Ra bellows.

He rips into my rib cage. His claws dig through my flesh, saw through bone. He's trying to dig out my heart.

Hold on, John.

I let him shred me. Focus on the warm glow. I could melt away in that glow. . . .

“Do you . . . do you really think you can outlast me?” he sneers. A black vein bursts on his forehead.

“I've done it all these years, what's a few more minutes?”

“You were always a fool, Pittacus.”

“I'm not Pittacus Lore,” I say through gritted teeth. “I am Number Four. I'm the one who kills you.”

A tremor. The entire cavern complex shakes. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a vivid flash of red light.

The bombardment has begun.

Thank you, Sam.

Just keep him here. Bury him down here, with all his horrible experiments.

The withered, hideous face before me laughs maniacally.

I close my eyes.

Picture Sarah. She holds up a camera, snaps a photo and smiles at me.

I let my Legacies pour out of me. All of them.

Until there's nothing left.

CONSCIOUSNESS COMES BACK SLOWLY. THE CAVERN
floor vibrates under my face, a rumble louder than thunder shaking the entire complex. I come dangerously close to the edge of the chasm that Adam and Phiri fell down. With a groan, I roll away from the gap, onto my back, and try to sit up.

“Ugh . . .”

My mouth tastes of blood. Every breath feels like I'm rolling around on broken glass. The mountain shakes again, and rock-dust falls from the ceiling. I close my eyes to avoid the stinging debris.
Maybe
, I think,
I'll keep them closed a little longer.

Six! You stay awake! You get up!

Ella, her voice coming through a megaphone directly into my brain, so loud that it makes my head ache.

“I'm up, I'm up,” I reply out loud as I struggle into a sitting position. It hurts to bend like that, and I have to
stifle a cry. “What's happening?”

We're going to bring down the mountain
, Ella replies.
Sam's chipping away at it, but we're not unleashing the main cannon until you're out.

“Guess I better get up then,” I grunt, and struggle to my feet.

So Sam's been forced to play the role Adam was meant for—if everything goes wrong, blow the whole thing up. Adam . . . I just couldn't get to him in time. I peek over the edge of the chasm but see nothing but jagged rocks and shadows. Something along the edge catches my eye, though. A thick blood trail that wasn't there before that stretches from the control room to the chasm.

Dust's body isn't where it fell. Was the Chimæra still alive? Did it go down after Adam?

I cup my hands around my mouth and shout into the gulf. “DUST? ADAM?”

No response. The yelling causes a fresh lance of pain in my lungs. I hold both my hands over the hole in my chest and stagger backwards, supporting myself against the nearest wall.

Marina and Nine are on their way up to you
, Ella guides me.
They'll meet you in the main entrance.

I can make it that far . . . I think.

Slowly, I begin to navigate the twisting cavern corridors. I have to pause to catch my breath a few times, and each time I have to choke back a little blood. I glance over
my shoulder and notice that I'm leaving a blood trail of my own. Looking back makes me feel a little woozy, my eyes getting hooded.

Keep going. Straight ahead now. Almost there.

“Six!”

I stumble into the main entrance at the same time that Marina emerges from the narrow passageway that leads deeper into the complex. Nine is flung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Never knew Marina to be the bodybuilding type—Nine must have transferred his Legacies before he went down. I cringe when I see Nine's condition—unconscious, face ashen, missing an arm. Marina makes as if to reach out to me with her free arm, but the shoulder is dislocated, so she ends up awkwardly jerking her shoulder in my direction.

“Where's John and Five?” I ask her.

“Five . . . no one deserved to die like that, Six, not even him.” Marina shakes her head disgustedly as she delivers this news, avoiding my eyes. “John is still down there, holding Setrákus Ra until we can drop this place on top of him.”

As if to punctuate Marina's words, another tremor passes through the mountain base. That would be Sam, very slowly demolishing the Mogadorian lair.

Marina takes a look at the hole in my chest, and her mouth opens like she's surprised I'm still standing. “Can you make it a little farther? I'll heal you once we're clear.”

“No,” I tell her. “Heal me now.”

She glances up at the ceiling. “But . . .”

“Ella, if you're listening, you tell Sam to cut that shit out!”

“You didn't see Setrákus Ra, what he's become,” Marina says, her eyes wide. “Six, this might be the only way to stop him.”

When Adam told me about collapsing this mountain, I supported it. But that was when it was a last resort, when none of us were left standing to fight against Setrákus Ra.

Well, I'm still standing.

“Fuck that,” I respond to Marina. “I'm not letting John martyr himself. I'm going down there. When I've got him, you can go right ahead and drop this mountain on whatever's left of Setrákus Ra.”

I add that last part more for Ella, who I'm sure is listening in telepathically, than for Marina. I want Ella to relay that to Sam.

Keep this place standing. Let me have a chance.

Marina looks in my eyes, and I can tell she's trying to decide whether I've lost it or not. Then she carefully sets Nine down, the big guy groaning deliriously, and presses her good hand against my chest. As her cool healing energy flows into me, I greedily suck in the first deep breath I've been able to take since my fight with Phiri Dun-Ra.

“I should go with you . . . ,” Marina says. Her gaze drifts towards Nine.

“No, he doesn't look good,” I reply. “Stay with Nine; make sure he doesn't die. Nobody else dies today, okay?”

Marina finishes healing me. She grabs my hand.

“Be careful, Six,” she says.

Feeling rejuvenated, I sprint in the direction that Marina just came from. I remember this place well—it wasn't too long ago that I escaped from these caverns. Never thought I'd see the day when I'd be running back into its depths, especially not when blowing it up is a viable alternative.

I won't let John die down here. He thinks he can win this without the rest of us, thinks he needs to shoulder all this to make up for what happened with Sarah.

He doesn't need to carry it alone.

So I run. My feet slap hard against the uneven terrain. Soon, I'm sprinting down the spiral ledge, deeper and deeper. I can see the disgusting reservoir of black ooze below. I know that's where they'll be. I hurdle a fallen chunk of rock, duck under a sagging stalactite and leap from the ledge onto one of the narrow stone bridges to save time. The descent is dizzying, and my heart is pounding.

At the bottom, I slow down and turn invisible. As soon as I reach the edge of the ooze lake, I stop in my tracks.

A mess of the black oil is spread across the stone floor here, almost as if a balloon filled with the stuff exploded. Some of the tendrils flop back and forth on the ground like fish out of water. Most of the stuff is dry and hardened, though.

John lies at the epicenter of it all. He looks like he's been put through a meat grinder. There's not an inch of his body that isn't soaked with blood. His skin is shredded, mutilated, bones poking through in places. I think his legs and arms are broken. I watch his chest for a few seconds, hoping to see it rise and fall.

He doesn't move.

I remember the way he was when I first tracked him down in Paradise. Handsome and brave, so naïve. Ready to put his life on the line. I remember holding that hand—the fingers now shattered, cut to ribbons—and I remember the warmth, the comfort that he gave to me when I needed it.

He died down here alone.

I should scream. But after all these years, all these deaths, I don't feel rage and sorrow like that anymore. I feel cold determination.

Finish this.

I swallow back bile and turn my attention to the other form on the cavern floor. Frail and withered, an old man, his skin splotchy gray in some spots and, in others, a hardened black like the ooze spread across the floor. Even as I watch, those dark sections of his body slowly disintegrate, blowing away like ash off the end of a cigarette. The old man leaves a trail of the sooty substance as he drags himself across the rocks, inching towards the lake of ooze, his gnarled hand outstretched.

The purple scar around his neck is unmistakable.

Setrákus Ra. Still alive. Barely.

Inch by inch, he drags himself towards the muck.

I start forward. With my eyes locked on Setrákus Ra, I don't notice the Voron dagger that John made until my foot bumps up against it. The blade makes a skittering sound as I kick it a few feet across the stones.

I pick up the dagger. When I look back at him, Setrákus Ra has turned over on his side. His dark eyes cast about, searching for the source of the noise. His nose is completely missing, just a skeletal hole in the front of his face, and his mouth is completely empty of teeth.

He's afraid.

I turn visible and meet his eyes.

“Hello, old man.”

He lets out a low moan, turns back onto his belly and increases the pace of his crawl towards the oil.

I overtake him with ease, kick him in the side and roll him over. My foot actually punches a hole in his body, like kicking into a beehive. His chest is skeletal, concave, with a darkened space where his heart should be. He makes a sloppy swipe at me with a hand tipped with disintegrating claws. I swat his hand away and drop down on top of him, digging my knee into his belly.

“In a few minutes, this place is going to come down on top of what's left of you,” I tell Setrákus Ra, keeping my voice cold and steady. “I want you to know, after that, I'm going to track down every copy of your stupid fucking
book and burn it. All your work, everything you made—it's getting unmade.”

He tries to say something but can't. I twist my knee lower.

“Look at me,” I say. “This is what progress looks like, bitch.”

I hack the Voron dagger into the side of his neck, right at the scar. Setrákus Ra gurgles. I slice again.

I drop the dagger and stand up.

I hold Setrákus Ra's head in my hands.

It only takes a few seconds before it starts to disintegrate. I wait until it's all gone, the pieces of the Mogadorian warlord, the destroyer of my world, killer of my people, of my friends, fluttering through my fingertips like dark confetti.

I dust off my hands.

There's a wet bursting noise behind me. I spin around to see a bubble of the black ooze that had been hovering over the lake pop. Bernie Kosar springs free, shaking off his coat, and immediately leaps to the floor. BK looks at me and lets go a low, plaintive whine.

We both go to John's side. He's a mess, almost unrecognizable. BK lies down on his belly next to him and nuzzles his hand. I touch John's forehead, smoothing back an errant piece of blond hair that's sticky with blood.

“You stupid idiot,” I whisper. “It's over, and you don't even know, you goddamn moron.”

John gasps.

I jump back, startled at first, tears stinging my eyes. It's a sharp noise, and his entire body arches. He spasms, coughs, trembles in my arms. I cling tighter to him. When I look down, I see that his injuries are beginning to mend. It's slow, almost imperceptible compared to how fast we normally heal, but it's happening.

His eyes are swollen shut. One of his hands grasps my upper arm weakly.

“Sarah . . . ?” he whispers.

I kiss him. Just a quick one on the lips, tears streaming down my face. I'm sure Sam won't care. Considering the circumstances, I bet he'd kiss John too.

John smiles a little, then falls unconscious again, breathing ragged but steady.

BK turns into his griffin shape, and, very carefully, I settle John onto his back. I climb up behind him. We fly upwards, towards the exit to the cave, leaving the dark stench of the Mogadorian world behind.

“Ella, guys,” I say to the air, hoping someone is telepathically listening in. “We're coming.”

Outside, dawn is just beginning to break.