“Hey, Six,” I say. “Good to hear your voice.”

“You, too,” she replies, her smile audible. “Want me to catch you up on the details? Or should we get to the part where you try talking me out of fighting Setrákus Ra and his warship?”

I can’t help grinning at her bluster. Between talking to Sarah and now Six, things no longer feel so massively overwhelming. We’re definitely up against it, but at least I’m not up against it alone.

“I want you to catch me up,” I tell Six. “But first, I really need to talk to Adam.”

“Oh,” Six replies, sounding surprised. “Sure. Hang on a second.”

Sam fixes me with a look, like I should’ve immediately told Six and the others to flee the Sanctuary. I’m not sure that’s the right move yet. We know Setrákus Ra is heading there, but he doesn’t know that we know. That gives us a rare advantage. Ella showed me the Sanctuary in her vision. She told me to warn Six and the others. Maybe it’s there that the final battle against Setrákus Ra will be fought. If that’s the case, at least it’ll be fought in the middle of nowhere. Civilians won’t be in danger.

Adam gets on the phone, sounding weary. “How can I help?”

“Your warships—I mean, the Mog warships, they’re protected by force fields. Tell me how to bring them down.”

Adam snorts. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I need to give the government something,” I tell Adam. “Setrákus Ra has set a deadline for their surrender and if they don’t see a way to defeat his armada they aren’t going to help us.”

“John, those warships were designed before the invasion of Lorien,” Adam replies. “The shields are meant to sustain attacks from a planet full of Garde. There’s no weapon on Earth short of a nuclear bomb that could even potentially break through them and attempting such an attack over a major population center would be catastrophic.” Adam pauses, and I can hear dirt crunching. He’s moving towards something. “Although . . .”

“What? I’ll take anything you can give me, Adam.”

“Maybe brute force isn’t the answer. I’m staring at an airstrip of disabled Skimmers,” he says. “It occurs to me that there are a hundred or so assigned to each warship. They act as scouts and transport squads of ground troops. They come and go from the warships quite a bit, which makes lowering the warship’s force field each time impractical. So, the Skimmers are outfitted with an electromagnetic field generator that masks them from the warship’s shield, allowing them to pass through unharmed.”