“I should’ve killed him,” Marina mutters. I shoot a quick look in her direction. She’s been peaceful while we’ve been at the Sanctuary, so much like the old Marina, all nonviolent and serene. One mention of Five, though, and the darkness comes rushing back.

Sarah continues, not hearing Marina. “Once they’ve got that sorted out, John will be on his way, but . . .”

I look towards the jungle’s tree line. The sun is already starting to get low.

“He won’t make it in time,” I say, feeling it in my stomach. “It’s just going to be us.”

“He’s going to try,” Sarah insists, and I can tell she’s hoping to see her boyfriend appear on the horizon like some conquering hero, he and Sam backed by the full might of the U.S. armed forces. I don’t hold on to any such delusions.

“We need to get back to it,” I say. “We need to get ready.”

“Or we could bail,” Mark says, raising his hand. When that earns him a dirty look from Marina, he backs down. “All right, all right. Show me where I need to dig.”

We get to work.

First, Adam moves Dust’s twisted body onto Lexa’s ship. The Chimæra seems a bit more alert now, like the tension is going out of his muscles, but he still can’t change forms and is nowhere near fighting shape. He’s just going to have to sit this one out.

Lexa wants to see the cloaking devices we stripped out of the Skimmers, so then Adam and I show her where we piled them in the ammunition tent. Each one is a solid black box about the size of a laptop.

“They were hooked in to the Skimmer consoles, behind the piloting controls,” Adam says, fingering the ports and cords on the back of one of the devices. “I tried to keep them as intact as possible.”

We gather them up in a duffel bag and bring them onto Lexa’s ship, ready to be delivered to our generous friends in the government, who, in trade, will be giving us a whole lot of nothing.

Of course, that’s all assuming we get out of Mexico alive.

“Will it work?” I ask her.

“I think so,” Lexa replies. She strips the rubber off a cable and then connects the exposed wire to the cloaking device’s power port. “I guess we won’t know for sure until we try flying through their warships’ shielding.”

Careening towards a massive warship while on board a refurbished Loric vessel that may or may not be able to pass through the impenetrable force field surrounding it. There’s a situation I’m not looking forward to.

“If it doesn’t work . . .”

“We’d explode,” she says, before I can even finish the question. “Let’s not rush trying it out, okay?”