“Then we can’t use our bomb,” Cade muttered, understanding dawning on him in a black wave of despair. “We’d blow ourselves up.”

Marius cursed.

Only now did Cade see the rest of the original contenders had joined him, except for Quintus, who was dragging Cantelo’s box out of the keep.

As they digested the Codex’s words, they stared at him in horror and disappointment. And as he looked at them, awash with his own shock at the revelation, their disappointment turned to outrage.

“Cade … you didn’t,” Amber whispered.

Her face was full of pain and betrayal, and as he looked her in the eye, she turned her face away.

He was suddenly intimately aware of his pack. And the Gray alien toy inside it. One press, and he could end this whole farce. Tell them why he had done what he’d done.

But he couldn’t. Not with an enormous army ready to invade. Not when it was the very technology he was about to disable that held them at bay.

“It’s your job to make the rounds fair,” Cade growled at Abaddon. “We’ve got fewer than a hundred men. There’s at least five times that number out there.”

The girl’s voice giggled. “I have agreed to open and close the force field once, in half an hour. Two waves, the second larger than the first. That sounds fair to me, Cade.”

Now Cade knew he could not trigger the EMP, even if he wanted to. They’d all attack at once.

“Hey, don’t look so glum,” Abaddon said. “If you win, you’ll switch places with them. You get to go home. All of you.”

Cade gritted his teeth and looked at the timer.

00:09:26

00:09:25

00:09:24

“Marius, we have to survive an hour. Is there somewhere we can survive that long without fighting them?”

Marius thumped the wall. “We’ll hold them at the wall,” he said. “They’ve no weapons that I can see, only their mandibles.”

Cade rubbed his eyes. “Ants can lift at least ten times their body weight, and they have a hardened carapace. Some have venomous stingers; some shoot acid. We don’t know how similar these aliens are to ants, but they’re at the top of the leaderboard for a reason.”

Marius growled but nodded his head. “We hold the first wave at the wall, test their strength. Then, if we struggle to hold them in the first wave, we fall back to the keep, try to blockade the windows and door. Lastly we retreat to the baths.”

Cade nodded. It was the same plan that he had followed when they had fought the vipers all that time ago.

“Men, defend the walls!” Marius bellowed to his legionaries, the Codex translating for the benefit of the others. “Prepare for attack!”

They had no other choice, Cade knew. They could not hide out in the jungles, nor did the fields of stumps within the area present a strategic advantage, nor did the waterfall, or the orchards above.

But the tunnel. That perfectly round, narrow tunnel, bored through the mountain like a straw … that did present one advantage.