“I’m Marina of the sea, Héctor. Remember?” I allow the iciness to spread from my fingertips to the bullet hole in his arm. I watch it turn from black and gray and red to a tan patch of wrinkled skin. I quickly concentrate on the bite wound on his stomach beneath his shirt, and Héctor suddenly stands up straight with energy. I look into his eyes. “As the Queen of the sea, I will swim with you.”

“But you have that,” Héctor says, pointing at the Chest.

“You’ll have to hold it then,” I say, dropping it into his arms.

We jog into the water until our feet no longer touch the lake floor, and then I wrap my right arm around Héctor’s chest and paddle with my left. Héctor hugs the Chest to his stomach, and he floats on his back, his head just above water. Ella and Crayton tread water in the middle of the lake, and I pull Héctor towards them.

The clouds overhead dissipate, shrinking into a hundred wispy lines of gray in the sky. The advancing Mogadorians are no longer a blur in a rainstorm, and the moment they can see they charge at the lake with dozens of krauls yipping in front of them.

A tiny black speck falls from above as the last cloud disappears, and the closer the speck gets, the more it appears to be a human.

Wearing a large blue pendant around her neck, she lands on the shore, rippling the sand. It’s a strikingly beautiful girl with raven-colored hair; and the second I see her I know she’s the one I’ve been dreaming of, the one I painted on the cave’s wall.

“She’s one of us!” I shout.

The girl looks around, we make eye contact, and then she vanishes a moment later. I’m shocked, crushed, believing I must have imagined her.

“Where’d she go?” Ella asks.

The moment I realize Ella saw her, too, that I hadn’t imagined her, I watch as the two nearest krauls are somehow yanked backwards in the air. They’re hovering, yipping and snarling at something behind them, and then they slam into each other until they fall limp. One kraul goes sailing into the legs of two soldiers, and the other is swung in the air, connecting with other krauls and soldiers.

“Invisibility. She has the Legacy of invisibility.” Crayton breathes.

She’s invisible? I’m amazed and jealous at the same time, but most of all I’m grateful. Every kraul that touches the water is yanked backwards by an unseen hand and slammed into the hard sand or a Mogadorian soldier. A dropped cannon rises from the grass and starts firing in all directions. Kraul after kraul is destroyed. Dozens of Mogadorians burst into clouds of ash.