With the Mogs dispatched, John turns to me. It’s like he just swatted a fly.

“I’m about to take the bridge,” he says. “I could use your help.”

Moments later, we’re following John through the segmented halls of the warship. It looks like a war zone in here. I have to cover my mouth and nose with the crook of my arm on account of how much Mogadorian ash is in the air, not to mention the acrid black smoke that pours from one section where it looks like an inferno erupted.

“You did all this?” I ask.

John nods. He brought one of the fuel tanks with him, carrying it along with his telekinesis.

“What do you need that for?” I ask, nodding to the tank. “Seems like your Lumen was working pretty well.”

He flexes his hands in answer. I notice that his skin is bright pink, like he just soaked his hands in hot water. Apparently, that didn’t heal with the rest of his wounds.

“Might have overdone it with the fire,” John says thoughtfully. “Fried some nerve endings or something.”

“So I guess you still have some limits.”

“Apparently.” John frowns at the thought. “Anyway, there’s a bunch of them barricaded in front of the bridge. It’s a bottleneck. I went toe-to-toe with them for as long as I could. Decided I needed to get creative.”

“Kill smarter, not harder,” I say dryly.

It’s just a short walk through more debris and carnage to the hallway that leads to the bridge. John stops us short with a raised hand, not letting us go around the corner.

“Figure they’re shooting anything that moves at this point,” John says.

“Logical strategy,” Adam replies.

John turns his gaze towards the fuel tank, and the air in the passageway gets cold. Slowly, a shell of ice begins to form around the metallic keg until the canister isn’t even visible anymore. When the frozen wrecking ball is complete, John forms sharp icicles across its surface. Some of these crack and break off, and John has to redo the work.

“I haven’t exactly mastered this,” he says while Adam and I look on.

“You’re doing fine,” I reply. “Shit. Better than fine.”

After a few minutes’ work, John has a spiked boulder of ice with a fuel core.

“You’re going to chuck that at them,” I observe.

John nods. “You want to help me out? Could use the extra telekinetic force.” When I nod, John turns towards Adam and the Chimærae. “This probably won’t get them all, but it should shake them up. When you hear the explosion, come in hot.”

“You got it,” Adam responds, arming a blaster he picked up in the docking bay.

John takes my hand, then floats the ice-covered fuel tank in front of us so we can both rest a hand on it. We turn invisible, disappearing the tank along with us, and edge around the corner. My hand starts to get numb, but the temperature doesn’t seem to bother John.

There are blaster burns all over the walls from John’s earlier skirmish with this entrenched bunch of Mogs. At the end of the hallway, over a hundred vatborn are crowded up and down a short staircase shoulder to shoulder. The air in between us and them is hazy with particles. Their blasters are leveled, ready to fire, but all they see is empty hallway.

That changes when John and I send the ice ball speeding towards them. It turns visible as soon as it leaves our touch and must look like a boulder appearing from thin air. We shoved it into the Mogs, crushing the first of them. Then we swipe it from side to side, impaling a bunch more on the spikes.

The Mogs recover from the surprise quickly and begin firing at our icy weapon. They blow off the spikes and begin chipping away at it. Some of them start to look confident.

But then one of them shoots into the center and detonates the fuel tank.

The resulting explosion knocks me off my feet. John falls to the side, banging his shoulder against the wall, but keeps his balance. My ears ring. The hallway is filled with choking black smoke, at least until I conjure up some wind to blow that bad air towards the Mogadorian bridge. As Adam helps me to my feet, I see BK and Dust charge down the hall, pouncing on the few stragglers that survived the explosion.

“That worked better than expected,” Adam says.

“Ow. No shit,” I reply.

From the bridge, we can hear shouts in Mogadorian. These aren’t battle cries. These are screams of desperation, and they’re being responded to by a cold female voice that I’d recognize anywhere.

Phiri Dun-Ra. Someone, probably the ship’s captain, has Phiri Dun-Ra on the communicator.