“—the least she could do is show me some new moves so I can defend myself the next time she attacks.”

Six tries to punch Eight in the arm, but he quickly teleports behind the couch.

“See?” Eight grins. “I’m already too quick for you!”

Six bounds over the couch after him and Eight sprints off towards the Lecture Hall. Before giving chase, Six looks back at me.

“Maybe you should try talking to Ella,” Six says.

“Me?”

“Yeah,” she replies. “Maybe you can decide if her visions mean something or if she’s just traumatized.”

As soon as Six leaves the room, there’s a heavy thud on the floor behind me. I turn around to find Nine grinning at me, shirtless just like Sarah said he’d be, gripping a sketchpad in his meaty hands. I glance up at the ceiling.

“How long were you standing up there?”

Nine shrugs. “I do my best thinking upside down, dude.”

“I didn’t realize you did any thinking.”

“Okay, fair point, you usually do enough thinking for all of us.” He thrusts the sketchpad at me. “But check this out.”

I take the sketchpad and start thumbing through the pages. They’re covered with floor plans drawn in Nine’s precise hand. It’s like the architecture of some military base, yet it looks strangely familiar.

“Is this—?”

“West Virginia,” Nine declares, proudly. “Every detail I could remember. This should come in handy when we make our assault on the place. I’m sure it’s where that fat jerk-off Setrákus is hiding out.”

I sit down on the couch, tossing the sketchpad on the cushion next to me. “When I wanted to attack the cave, you were totally against it.”

“That was after you’d run into a force field like a dummy,” he replies. “I said we needed numbers. We’ve got numbers.”

“Speaking of which, did you check the tablet this morning?”

Nine nods. “Five’s staying put for now.” We’ve been keeping an eye on our locater tablet since returning to Chicago. Five—the one Garde we haven’t made contact with—has been on an island off the coast of Florida for the last few days. Before we left for New Mexico, he was in Jamaica. His moving around is standard Loric on-the-run protocol. Finding him, even with the tablet to point us in the right direction, might not be easy.

“Now that we’ve had a chance to rest up, I think we should make it a priority. The more of us the better, right?”

“And maybe while we’re searching for Five, Setrákus Ra mounts a full-scale invasion of Earth.” Nine slaps the front of his sketchpad for emphasis. “We’ve got him on the run. We should finish it off now.”

“On the run?” I ask, staring at Nine. “That’s not exactly how I remember it.”

“What? He did retreat, didn’t he?”