by Matt Blake
I felt my skin crawl as the eyes of the others focused on me, waiting for me to make a decision. I couldn’t lie—I had the same concerns as everyone else. After all, nigh-on drowning myself because Saint said he had a load of old unactivated ULTRAbots hidden under the sea, just waiting for someone to send them to fight… it seemed like a stretch.
But then, I’d seen the enemy we were up against. I’d seen how eager they were to wipe out all of ULTRAkind. And I didn’t think they were discriminating between Saint and everyone else.
“It’s the only option we have,” I said.
Stone shook his head. “Technically, it’s not.”
“Got any better ideas?”
“We could always go home and drown ourselves in the bath. Least that way I won’t get salt in my eyes.”
I shook my head then flew down to Saint’s side.
Of course I was reluctant.
Of course I had reservations.
But it seemed like the only half-decent plan we had right now in the defense against the enemy.
I waited down there a few seconds, looking up at everyone else and watching them.
“I always knew you were intelligent,” Saint said. “I always knew there was more to you than meets the eye.”
“Don’t think this makes us allies or anything like that.”
Saint chuckled a little. “Oh, don’t you worry. I wouldn’t think a thing like that.”
Gradually, one by one, the rest of the Resistance drifted down to our side. Before I knew it, we were all right there, just above the water, staring at our rippled reflections.
“The plan is, we shoot directly down. Roadrunner is the fastest here, so we’d do much worse than holding on to her as she leads the way. That okay?”
Roadrunner puffed out her lips. “Doesn’t really seem like I’ve got much of a choice.”
Saint nodded, clearly taking that as a resounding “yes.” “Okay,” he said. “Then we link our arms and we make the move. Hold your breath. Because this facility is quite a way down.”
I took Cassie’s hand on one side and Saint’s on the other.
Saint tightened his grip.
“If you even think about doing anything,” I said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do a thing. We’re friends now. Right?”
I felt sick even thinking of being friends with Saint. I tightened my grip on his hand though, just to assert my authority above anything. “Don’t push your luck.”
Saint chuckled. “On my count. Three, two—”
What happened next happened so quickly.
There was a blast. A large splash of water flew up and hit me right in the face. At first, I was just confused. I didn’t know what it was, and my instinctive gut reaction made me let go of Saint’s hand because I was convinced he must’ve double-crossed us in some way.
When I spun around, I saw three of those metal, tentacular craft surging in our direction.
My stomach sank as the one in the middle opened a mouth I didn’t even realize it had and fired out rapid blasts of perfectly round, green energy.
The first of the energy balls slammed past us. It threw us all to the sides. Shit. Whatever that energy was, it was strong. Stronger than anything we were used to.
I saw more of the energy balls hurtling toward the Resistance and I knew, as cautious as I was, that I couldn’t just stand by and watch.
I had to fight back.
An energy ball fired out of the craft’s mouth, making a beeline for Vortex.
I lifted my hands and fired a blast of ice and telekinesis at it.
But the ice melted before it could reach it.
And the energy ball was just so, so heavy.
The ball flew past Vortex—just past her—and fell into the sea. It kicked up a massive wave, as did more of those energy balls as they fell.
“They’re too tough,” Daniel shouted. “I don’t think we can—”
I saw an energy ball moving near to him.
Then I saw it slam against him.
My body went numb. All the sounds in my ears disappeared.
I watched the energy ball slam into Daniel, again and again, and again.
My brother.
I don’t know what drove me to do what I did next. I don’t even know where I found the strength.
But I did.
I found myself crying out as I reached into what felt like Daniel’s body.
As I cracked my way through inside it with my mind, trying to repair the damage and reverse what’d happened.
I saw the sky turning gray. I saw lightning all around.
I heard a voice in my mind—a voice like the one that’d spoken to my from the mothership—and I felt a tingling sensation all through my body like I’d never heard before.
I screamed out even louder as I tried and tried to reverse what’d happened to Daniel—as I tried to save him.
Then, something strange happened.
I saw the green energy ball move back out of Daniel’s chest.
I saw his body lifting upwards like things were… reversing.
I let my grip loose then, baffled and staggered by what I’d just seen.
The energy ball fired at Daniel again.
This time, I lifted my hands and I stopped it.
I held that energy ball with my mind. My entire body was tensed. My nose was bleeding again.
But I was moving the energy ball, and everyone else around me was… still. Totally still.
I pulled that energy ball back with all the strength I had. It was the heaviest thing I’d ever carried. Even heavier than that damned Kilimanjaro debris I’d saved myself from back in one of my old scraps with Nycto.
I moved it up to the sides of the crafts, all of them in a row.
I spun the metal ball around. Even though it wasn’t in my hands, I felt the skin being sliced away by them, like I was pushing them up against a hot sander.
I put it in place.
I let out a cry.
And then I let go.
I blinked, and I missed it.
But when I opened my eyes, I knew what’d happened right away.
There was a hole in each of the crafts.
All of them were hovering there one moment.
The next, they were falling into the sea.
There was silence for a while. Total quietness as we figured out what’d just happened.
Then, Stone lifted his head and looked right at me. “What the hell just happened?”
I wished I could’ve answered.
We quickly linked arms again, then fired our way down into the sea. I didn’t have the same trepidation as we headed downward this time. After what I’d just done—saving Daniel’s life even after the damage had been done—I had to admit I was on a bit of a high.
But it was tinged with sadness, too.
If I had those abilities all along, then who else could I have saved?
Mom?
My thoughts were soon interrupted when we slammed against solid ground and landed inside some kind of underwater building.
“Damn,” Damon said, rubbing at his eyes. “Why couldn’t they just build it in, like, a mountain or something?”
Saint ignored him. “Quick. We should get them awake as soon as we can. I don’t want to risk running into any more of those crafts.”
As I started to walk, I felt Daniel grab my arm. I turned and faced him for a second.
“Whatever happened back there,” he said, his voice low. “Whatever happened… I know you helped. So thank you. Really.”
Then he walked off after Saint.
Wow. Even my psycho brother was thanking me.
We all followed Saint through a number of doors, down a maze of corridors.
“This place is big,” Roadrunner said.
“It needed to be,” Saint said, hopping through security doors and making turns that just seemed to be instinctive to him even though these corridors were all the same. “There couldn’t be any risk of anyone else fi
nding these things. Anyone but…”
He stopped.
I soon saw why.
The room ahead was enormous. It was hard to believe there was room enough in the ocean for it.
But there was no mistaking what this room contained.
There were stacks and stacks of glass capsules.
Inside each of those capsules, engulfed in water, there were ULTRAbots.
I felt nervous. My skin crept as I remembered the battles we’d had with those ULTRAbots, which Saint had been using as his armies all along back when he disguised himself as Mr. Parsons.
Saint smiled. “Come on. We have to awaken and program them. We can’t delay much longer.”
We all reluctantly followed Saint over to a huge screen, which I guessed was the activation hub.
“How long will this take?” Roadrunner asked.
“Any time between five minutes and five days.”
“Five days?” Damon scoffed. “We’ll be lucky if the world’s still here by then.”
“Then we just have to hope for the best,” Saint said.
He lifted a hand and went to place it on the screen.
I felt fear and tension fill my body.
His hand came within inches of the screen.
Then I heard a thump.
I didn’t know where it came from at first. I didn’t know where it was.
But then I heard another.
And another.
My heart started pounding. My palms went sweaty.
I looked up, slowly, not wanting to see what I knew all along I was going to see.
“Shit,” Stone said. “They found us. They goddamned found us.”
Stone was right.
On the glass ceiling of this room, there were three of those crafts.
And their tentacles were slicing away at the glass, trying to break inside.
21
“So, did you account for evil metal octopuses attacking this place when you dragged us a zillion feet under the sea?”
I heard Stone’s disdain toward Saint’s rapidly failing plan, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him. The crafts were slamming down into the glass ceiling on top of the hidden ULTRAbot facility. Soon, they would break through, and not only would the whole weight of the ocean fall down on us, but so too would a shitload of those enemy crafts.
I heard the bangs of the crafts against the glass. I could hear their metal claws slicing at the glass, and the sound of it went right through me. I wiped the salt away from my drying lips and I looked at Saint.
He stared up at the falling crafts, transfixed, like this wasn’t a part of his plan at all.
“Saint,” Orion said, walking to Saint’s side. “We’re going to have to do something. We can’t just stand here. We have to act.”
I could see the disappointment in Saint’s eyes. And I never thought I’d say it, but I felt that disappointment too. This was supposed to be the moment where we made our grand fight back, taking the ULTRAbots out of this facility and training them to attack the enemy.
Instead, it didn’t look like we had much time at all, and the ULTRAbots still hadn’t been activated.
Another thump against the ceiling, which made me flinch. I looked and saw more of those tentacles slicing away. I swore I could hear water dripping to the floor below. We had barely any time left.
“There’s two options,” Saint said.
“Then share them quick,” I said.
“First option is we proceed with the plan.”
Cassie shook her head. “But you said that could take—”
“Up to five days,” Saint said. “Right. Which is what takes us to plan B.”
His voice broke uncharacteristically when he said “plan B.”
“What’s plan B?” I asked.
Saint paused for a few seconds.
Another craft hit the glass ceiling.
Time was running out.
“Saint,” I shouted. “What’s the plan B?”
“The plan B is to overdrive the activation and immediately wake the ULTRAbots. But they will be wild, and they will be untrained. And they will attempt to destroy everything in their path. Including people. And including us.”
My stomach knotted. “So it’s a choice between probably dying here and… probably dying here.”
“I don’t like either plan,” Saint said. “But I think… I think plan B’s all we’ve got.”
I gritted my teeth together. “You knew this was going to happen all along, didn’t you?”
Saint frowned. “What—”
“You brought us down here. You planned for us all to die here and for your ULTRAbots to destroy everything else on this planet. All for your own gain. Didn’t you?”
I saw, at the bottom of his mask, a smile creep across Saint’s face then. “Kyle. Dear Kyle. I might be power-crazy, but I certainly am not suicidal.”
I still didn’t believe him.
I didn’t have to.
The glass cracked, and water started to flood down.
I looked up and saw that water falling in slow motion. I lifted my hands and tried to return to the state of mind I’d been in before when I’d managed to reverse time somehow.
But I couldn’t.
The water and the crafts were falling toward us.
“What should I do?” Saint shouted.
I looked up at the water, then back at him.
“Glacies. Make the call. What should I do?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat and held my breath. “Activate the overdrive.”
Saint put his hands on the monitor. He tapped at it a few times as the water hurtled closer.
Then I saw him look up at the ULTRAbots and whisper, “God help us all.”
The ULTRAbots were still. Totally still.
And then, their eyes opened, and I knew it had almost begun.
22
I held my breath as the ULTRAbots opened their eyes and hurtled out of their containers.
Darkness filled the ULTRAbot facility as both the enemy crafts and the mass of water fell toward us. It was impossible to tell what the conditions outside were like. And it didn’t really matter anymore, either.
This was a world in itself. And it was a world we needed to escape. Fast.
The Resistance all stood in a line as the water and the crafts fell out. To the right, the ULTRAbots clawed their way out of their capsules. Some of them immediately shot in the direction of the crafts and engaged in conflict. Some of them were batted away in an instant. Others clung on, and seemed to be making progress.
Then a few of the ULTRAbots turned their attention to me and the rest of the Resistance and we knew our time here was over.
“Quick,” I said. I reached out a hand to Cassie; then the others grabbed her hand. “We need to get out of here while we can.”
“What about the ULTRAbots?” Damon asked.
I looked at them as they flew at the crafts. It was impossible at this stage to say who was winning, and who had the upper ground. But we couldn’t stick around to find out who won. “We’ll see what happens. But we have to—”
I felt a burning sensation slam into my chest.
A large, black cloud was right in front of me, screaming at me.
I felt total fear inside. I tumbled back, shaking. I tried to climb back to my feet and stand my ground, to push back.
Then the cloud wrapped around my neck and I heard the voice of the leader of the mothership speak again.
“Do not resist,” it said. “You’re only resisting the inevitable…”
I tensed my fists around that black cloud, unable to give up.
“Kyle!”
Cassie’s voice snapped me from my trance. I gasped for air, looking around, disoriented.
The black cloud was nowhere to be seen.
“We need to get out of here!” she screamed.
The water was just meters above her head.
“We need to get…”
Then, it happened again.
I saw the water slamming into Cassie, Orion, Daniel.
I heard their necks breaking as their heads jolted forward.
I felt that strength inside—an unfamiliar, alien strength that was more raw and more powerful than anything I was used to.
And then I pushed back, and their necks moved back into place.
The water lifted upwards.
Only this time, I didn’t give up.
I took deep breaths. I pushed that water back up, feeling everything reverse as I did so. My heart raced. I was reversing time. That’s what this was. All along and I didn’t know I had the ability to actually reverse time.
In the space of a second, drifting for a moment, I wondered just how far I could reverse time. Whether I could go right back and change things that’d gone wrong; fix the things I’d broken.
And then I lost my grip and the water started to fall again.
I grabbed Cassie’s hand, and Orion’s hand, and then they held on to the hands of the others.
“Quick!” Damon shouted.
I closed my eyes.
Held my breath.
And then I teleported the lot of us away from here, right as the water thumped against the floor.
When I opened my eyes, I was hovering in the sky right above the underwater ULTRAbot facility. I could tell from the movement and activity of the sea that this was the place.
Not just that, but the floating bodies of both ULTRAbots and crafts drifting to the surface.
“The ULTRAbot plan,” Roadrunner said. “Do you… do you think it worked?”
I looked at Saint, feeling a strange, uneasy sense of disappointment on his behalf. He’d had an idea. A good idea. He’d tried to make it work. The idea had failed.
I knew how that felt. And I knew how vulnerable and plan-less that left us all.
“We’d better get away from here,” Vortex said. “Before…”
I heard the screeching of movement above me and my stomach sank.
“Ah, hell,” Stone said. “Looks like we’re too late.”
A whole crowd of the crafts was blasting toward us.
I saw them open up their metallic mouths. I saw the green balls of energy charging up and the crafts getting ready to fire. I saw it all unfolding.
