“I’ll take care of them,” Lorne said through the earbud. “You take care of the crystals.”

The officers all stopped shooting to find cover as Lorne started firing at them from the ship.

I jumped down two levels into the mine and then got to work.

I pulled out the tool and hit crystals that I knew were bad—the ones I’d only hit once. The ones with my purple marks.

I moved down the mine, running along the edges. As I activated more and more crystals, my head started to throb. I stumbled and nearly fell, but I gripped the crystals on the wall to stay upright. I took only enough time for my vision to clear a bit and then kept going.

Each crystal I activated was more excruciating than the one before it.

My vision started to double and dim, but I kept moving. The memory of Declan’s cry for help kept me rushing along as fast as I could. I didn’t give myself time to deal with the pain. And as I moved, I wondered if a part of Carl knew what I was going to do.

He’d given me the key to destroying this whole moon. If anyone hated this moon more than me, it had to be the guy who’d trained all the volunteers only to watch them die.

Two hits to make them volatile. Set one crystal off and the whole place would be blown. Add in his method of marking them up, and I had a recipe for how to destroy Apollyon.

Still, it’d be hard to time the explosion right. Carl’s endless afternoon training had drilled into me how unstable lucole were and also unpredictable—they didn’t necessarily always blow up right away. Sometimes the vibrations would crescendo, which could take from thirty seconds to ten minutes.

There was a cluster in particular that I was looking for. It was the one that had nearly killed me. It was highly volatile and bigger than any other cluster in the mine. If I could get that one to blow, it should produce an explosion big enough to tear the moon apart. Add in the rest of the activated crystals, and I’d have one hell of a distraction. I wasn’t sure if the timing and orbit would work out for the debris to land on the base itself, but even if it landed on the other side of the planet, that should be enough to cause the whole lava surface to destabilize. No matter what technology was built into the base’s pylons, it couldn’t combat that.

I hit more. And more. And more crystals as I searched for the one I was looking for. Ignoring the shaking of my legs. Ignoring the blood dripping from my nose. Ignoring the sounds of gunfire around me. I kept going, trusting Lorne to have my back.