“We should wipe them out,” Marina says matter-of-factly.

Nine blinks at her. “Are you serious? I count at least a hundred Mogs and the biggest goddamn ship I’ve ever seen.”

“So what?” Marina counters. “Don’t you love to fight?”

“Fights I can win, yeah,” Nine replies.

“And if you can’t win, you just run your mouth, right?”

“Enough,” I hiss before Nine can say anything more. I don’t know how long Marina’s going to hold this grudge against Nine or what it’ll take to ease the tension, but now is definitely not the time to deal with it. “Bickering isn’t getting us anywhere.”

We’re on our stomachs in the mud, shielded from the busy Mogadorians by overgrown tallgrass, right at the edge of where the swamp begins to encroach on the manmade clearing. There are two buildings in front of us; one is a glass-and-steel one-story that looks almost like a greenhouse, and the other is an aircraft hangar with a narrow landing strip, perfect for small propeller planes or the saucer-shaped Mogadorian crafts, nowhere near large enough for the warship floating above us. Just like Dale told us before he fled, the whole place looks like it was abandoned until recently. The swamp is beginning to creep back in and crack the asphalt, the metal struts of the greenhouse are rusted over, and the NASA logo has almost completely faded from the side of the hangar. Of course, these conditions don’t appear to have deterred the Mogs from setting up a small base here.

But now, it looks like they’re packing up.

“Marina, do you sense anything?” I ask. At this point, we’ve got nothing else to go on except this intuition of hers. It’s gotten us this far—right into a swarming nest of Mogadorians. Might as well let it take us a little further.

“He’s here,” she says. “I don’t know how I know, but he’s here.”

“Then we’re going in,” I say. “But we’re doing it the smart way.”

I reach out and grab both of their hands, turning the three of us invisible. If a Mogadorian was to look over here now, we’d be nothing more than three strange indentations in the mud. As a group, we stand up, confident that the horde of Mogs won’t be able to see us.

“Marina, you lead the way,” I whisper.

As we step out of the swamp, Nine trips over a root and nearly topples over, our chain almost breaking. That would’ve been the shortest covert mission in history. I squeeze his hand hard.

“Sorry,” he says quietly. “It’s just weird not being able to see my legs.”

“That can’t happen again,” I warn him.

“I’m reconsidering that whole rushing-in-and-killing-them-all thing,” Nine replies. “Being sneaky isn’t exactly my strong suit.”

Marina makes an annoyed noise, so I squeeze her hand hard, too.

“We need to move as a unit,” I say through gritted teeth, hoping we can regain some of that instinctual teamwork we managed during the earlier fight with Mog scouts. “Take it slow, be quiet and don’t bump into anything.”