deflects off the turret’s windshield, but then she ducks for cover. Marina continues to strafe them,
although she’s careful to avoid the area around Adam.
With Dust taking down one of the warriors, Adam elbows his second captor in the stomach. When
he doubles over, Adam shoves him backwards, right into the invisible border around the Sanctuary.
With a flare of cold, blue energy, the shield surrounding the temple reveals itself – it’s like a giant electrical web stretched into the shape of a dome. The Mog flares up like the tip of a matchstick when he hits the force field. His body leaves a coating of ash that seems to float in the air once the shield disappears again, until a gentle gust of wind blows it away.
Freed from his captors, Adam throws himself on to his stomach. Right away, Marina swings the
turret around to take out the Mogs cluttered around him. A few of them, including Phiri Dun-Ra, have
made it to the cover of one of the parked ships. Even though they can’t see us, they return fire on the turret. Our gun soon begins to belch smoke and rattle dangerously.
‘It’s overheating!’ I yell. ‘Jump!’
Marina and I dive in opposite directions as the turret explodes in a cloud of acrid black smoke.
We’re visible and without any cover to speak of.
Before the surviving Mogs can take aim, Adam pounds his fist against the ground. A tremor ripples
in their direction and knocks the Mogs off their feet. I use the distraction to roll beneath one of the other ships, already channeling my Legacy to call down a storm.
The sky darkens and it begins to rain. Out here in the jungle, it’s a cinch to call up this kind of
weather, but I’m still a few seconds away from channeling lightning and I’m not sure I’ll be quick
enough. Phiri and her troops are already drawing a bead on me, their blaster fire scoring the wet dirt in front of my position.
That’s when a fist-sized hailstone strikes Phiri right in her bald head. She falls back, shielding
herself.
I notice Marina hiding behind a stack of crates. She’s focusing intently on the raindrops, turning
them to ice around the Mogs and knocking them senseless with hail. I feel the storm above reach a
boiling point and let loose with a jagged stripe of lightning. Phiri manages to dive aside at the last second, but her last two warriors are electrocuted into dust.
And then, to my surprise, Phiri Dun-Ra runs. Without even a look over her shoulder, the Mog
trueborn bolts into the nearby jungle.
Adam leaps to his feet. Both his lips are split open where Phiri clubbed him, blood trickling down
his chin. Otherwise, he looks unharmed and alert. He starts to run after Phiri, his feet sliding through the reddish-brown mud my storm has created. Phiri is out of sight before Adam can get very far. He
pulls up short a few yards away from me.
‘Let her go,’ I tell him, willing the storm I whipped up to taper off.
‘Shouldn’t we go after her?’ Adam asks, spitting blood into the dirt. His eyes scan the nearby ruins
and tree line, and I can tell he’d like a fair fight against the other trueborn. Dust, back in wolf form, lopes over and sits down next to Adam, lapping gently at his hand. He glances back to me. ‘Thanks
for the save, by the way.’
‘Yeah, I figured since the whole distraction thing was my call, I kinda owed it to you to not let you
get slaughtered.’
‘Glad you saw it that way,’ Adam replies, then looks back towards the ruins around the Sanctuary.
‘We should catch her. She’s dangerous.’
‘Forget about Phiri what’s-her-face,’ I say, turning away from the jungle and gazing up at the
waiting temple.
‘We’ve got more important things to do than chase down one Mog,’ Marina puts in as she walks
over to join us. ‘No matter how nasty she might be.’
I nod in agreement. ‘She’s alone out there. Maybe something will eat her. We’ll leave Dust back
here to keep watch over the ships, in case she tries to double back.’
Adam continues to stare into the jungle. After a moment, he finally nods his head. ‘Fine. I’ll keep
an eye on things while you guys go inside.’
I exchange an inquiring look with Marina to make sure she doesn’t have any misgivings with what
I’m about to say. She shrugs her shoulders in response, then starts towards our ship to begin the
unloading. I cock my head at Adam.
‘You don’t even want to try coming in with us?’ I ask.
Adam stares at me. ‘Are you joking? Did you see what contact with that field did to Phiri Dun-Ra?’
‘I’ll heal you if that happens,’ Marina offers over her shoulder.
‘I don’t understand,’ Adam says. He turns to look up at the temple, his hands on his hips. He looks
nervous. ‘Why would you even want me to go in there? It’s a Loric place.’
‘Like that Phiri bitch said, you’re part Garde now,’ I explain. ‘You’re not Loric, but you’ve got
Legacies.’
‘I’ve got one Legacy,’ Adam clarifies. ‘And it wasn’t even mine to start with. I – I’m not even sure
if I’m supposed to have it.’
‘Doesn’t matter. If I understood what Malcolm told us – and I guess that’s maybe a big if – there’s
a living piece of Lorien in that temple. That’s where our Legacies come from. Which means you’re
connected to it, just like us.’
‘Everything has happened for a reason,’ Marina says as she climbs up on to our ship’s hull. She
looks back at us, a thoughtful frown straining her soft features. ‘Just look at Eight’s prophecies.’
Adam looks unconvinced. He swallows hard.
‘We don’t know what’s waiting for us in there or what to expect. We might need you in there. So
man up.’
I’m not sure how Adam will respond to being called out. A smile flickers across his face, like that
one in the cockpit when he was spacing out.
‘I’m in,’ he says. ‘Assuming that invisible wall doesn’t burn my face off.’
We walk over to the ship to help Marina. She pulls the Chest with our gathered Inheritance out of
the cockpit and floats it down to me with telekinesis. Then, she carefully floats Eight’s body out of the ship. She has him hover right in front of her, almost like she was carrying him in her arms. To my
surprise, she unzips the top half of the body bag. There’s Eight, looking just as he did when he was
alive, those Mogadorian electrodes preserving him.
‘Marina? What are you doing?’
‘I want him to see the Sanctuary,’ she says, then gently smooths some of Eight’s curly hair back
from his forehead. ‘You’re going home,’ she whispers to him.
Marina climbs down from the ship, focusing her telekinesis so that Eight’s body stays with her the
entire way. There’s a look of deep purpose on her face, and she doesn’t even look at me or Adam
before walking towards the temple. I realize that she’s been waiting days for this moment, the time
when she can properly lay Eight to rest. Wordlessly, Adam and I join her somber procession.
As we approach the edge of the land the Mogs cleared, the wild and overgrown temple looming
before us, I feel a strange tickle against my chest. I look down to find John’s pendant glowing brightly and rising up against the front of my tank top. I adjust my shirt and the pendant floats out in front of me, straining against its chain. It’s like it’s magnetically drawn to the Sanctuary. The two pendants
Marina wears are doing the same thing.
Adam gives me a look and arches an eyebrow at my gravity-defying jewelry. I shrug in response.
This is all new to me, too.
Marina is the first to pass over the threshold. The force field appears again, cobalt and electric,
and there’s a static popping as she passes through it. Loose tangles of her hair charged by the energy float up around her head, but otherwise nothing happens.