“There’s no Sanctuary to protect,” Marina says forlornly.

“We can still take the Anubis,” I reply. “And there’s still Ella.”

“Man, I can’t see shit from back here,” Mark adds.

I turn invisible so that I can poke my head out from behind the log without running any risk of being seen. I get a way better view of the landscape than what Mark and Adam can see from their spots behind cover. The dust from the Anubis attack is still settling in the clearing; between that and the sunset, the entire area is cast in a gritty golden haze. Three thick plumes of black smoke curl into the air—booby-trapped Skimmers that had their bombs explode when the Anubis discharged its fury. However, even though some of them are flipped over or knocked into distant areas, I still see a bunch of the Skimmers that we set to blow.

So we might still be able to salvage one of our traps to fight off the Mogadorians. But the pit we spent so much effort digging is gone. Or, more accurately, it has gotten a whole lot bigger.

The land where the Sanctuary sat for centuries is now a smoking crater. It’s about sixty feet deep with stubborn chunks of the temple’s bricks still rooted in the ground and small fires from the Anubis’s cannon blast only now guttering out in the heat-baked dirt. That force field was in place precisely so something like this wouldn’t happen. We made it into the Sanctuary and this is the result. Total destruction.

Unless . . .

Still invisible, I climb up onto the log so I can get a better angle on the crater. Sarah flinches at the noise I make and brings her blaster up in my direction.

“Relax, it’s just me,” I whisper quickly. “I’m trying to get a look at something.”

“What do you see?” Marina asks.

I see a mellow blue glow that emanates from the very center of the crater. I see the stone lip of the well where we dropped our Inheritances, the place where the Entity emerged from.

I hop down from the tree trunk and turn visible again. I want Marina to see the hope in my face because it’s very real.

“The well is still there,” I tell her. “He didn’t or maybe couldn’t blow it up. The Entity is fine.”

“Really?” Marina replies, wiping her hands across her face.

“Seriously,” I say. “We’ve still got an extraterrestrial god to protect.”

“Thing should be protecting us,” grumbles Mark.

“What if he wasn’t trying to blow it up, though?” Sarah wonders. “What if the whole point is to, like, get at it? What if he had to clear the temple away?”

“Shit,” I reply, because that theory makes a lot of sense.

“They’re coming down,” Adam hisses in warning.