Jordan looked down at me, his eyes wet and shoulders shaking. “It’s true. My dad confirmed as much. That disgusting nonhuman was my …”

I grabbed his head between my palms and placed my forehead against his. “Your dad was your dad, no matter what. Please. We still have to figure out how to save my mom and the rest of Mount Hope. Ishango is still alive, Jordan!”

He nodded slowly, then got up from the ground. With a final glance down the fissure, he asked, “So what now?”

“Let’s take some inventory first.”

I checked on my mom, whose bleeding appeared to have subsided, while Jordan carried his still-unconscious father over to us.

“There’s no way we can get back to the plant to drop these explosives down the hole,” Jordan said. “Even with all of my new powers, I’d be no match for an entire armed military force and all of those workers—and animals—under Ishango’s control. We couldn’t take these guys with us”—he gestured to my mom and his dad—“and I’m not leaving you up here.”

I looked out at the Sweetbay River, my gaze sweeping over the view of the valley where the power plant was nestled.

Then I turned back to Jordan and said in my most chipper TV-rerun voice, “I have an idea so crazy that it just might work!”

CHAPTER 55

Jordan

“WE’RE GOING TO jail for this,” Maggie’s mom said, then coughed up some blood.

“Mom!” Maggie cried.

“Okay, forget I said anything,” her mom said, waving off her daughter and running the back of her hand over her dripping lips. “Jails have hospitals, anyway.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “the explosion and radiation might kill us before we get arrested.”

“And I already have cancer, remember?” Maggie chirped.

“Well, as long as we’re all feeling upbeat,” Dr. Gooding said, “you go right ahead.”

When Maggie told me her idea, I didn’t think the world’s most intelligent and sociopathic supercomputer would have anticipated it. That in itself seemed reason enough to proceed.

I turned to Maggie. “Won’t this ruin all the farms beyond?” I asked. “All that irradiated water by the time the whole thing is finished?”

“Right. That’s if it all goes well.”

“How confident are you right now?”

“Not at all,” Maggie said, then grinned.

“Me neither,” I said. “Fuck it.”

After what Alpha told me before plunging into the abyss, hope wasn’t something I ever expected to feel again. Now I had a glimmer—as well as a new infusion of energy.

Maggie pulled out the battery and attached the first wire to the negative terminal. She looked at me.

“Yippee-ki-yay,” I said with a nod.

She touched the second wire to the positive terminal, and the whole mountain trembled beneath us. Whoa, Nelly! We were as far away from the danger zone as the long detonation cord would allow us to go. I hoped it was enough.

An enormous BOOM! sounded, and small rocks jiggled from their resting places and scattered down the cliffside on the opposite end of the crevasse. That was just the beginning. Huge chunks and boulders started falling into the Sweetbay River below us. The water was churning, and trees were being flattened by the massive rocks falling from above. Finally, the entire cliffside collapsed in what felt like slow motion, peeling away from the fissure. We were irrevocably changing the landscape in which we’d lived our entire lives.