“There’s going to be nowhere safe on this planet soon,” I tell Lawson. “They need training that only we can give them.”

“I get that,” Lawson responds. “But you understand why it might make some people nervous, don’t you? You building an army from our young people?”

I shake my head in disbelief and hope my expression conveys just how ridiculous I find this bureaucratic nonsense. It almost makes me look back fondly on my days on the run.

“We aren’t building anything,” I say, then look at the twins. “You two. Did I demand that you come here? Did I force the others?”

The twins look taken aback to be spoken to directly. They exchange a glance, then look to Lawson for permission.

“Speak freely,” he says.

“No. You didn’t do anything like that,” Caleb replies immediately, his brother sitting there stone-faced. Caleb points at Nine. “That one did call us all wimps, though.”

Nine shrugs at that. I look at Lawson.

“Satisfied?”

“For now,” he replies. “At least give us a heads-up if you’re going to do anything like that again.”

I sigh. “You said something about timing concerns?”

Lawson motions to the map behind him, the one depicting the positions of two dozen Mogadorian warships.

“Like I said, we’re all for you trying to chop the head off this snake. Hell, I’ll send as much backup with you to West Virginia as we can afford to spare,” Lawson begins. “But right now the enemy thinks we’re belly-up. When we strike, what happens to all these cities? Everyone’s in evacuation mode right now, but it isn’t easy moving millions of people. One attack on Setrákus Ra could open up battles on every front.”

Lexa speaks up. “As the only survivor of our planet’s Mogadorian invasion old enough to really remember how it went down, let me tell you, their tactics have changed. They laid waste to our planet in hours. . . .”

“Heartening,” Lawson responds.

“They want to occupy Earth, not blast it to inhabitability,” Lexa continues. “Doesn’t knowing that give us some advantage?”

“Could Setrákus Ra be bluffing?” Lawson asks.

“It’s true that my people want to occupy,” Adam says with a thoughtful frown. “In all likelihood, the fleet isn’t capable of another intergalactic trip. They need to stay here. But if you think that somehow limits their willingness to destroy even dozens of cities, you underestimate them.”

“So we’re back to a doomsday countdown,” Lawson replies. “Once you attack Ra, we have to assume that countdown stops and the destruction begins.”

“What happens when he recovers and realizes his deadline passed while he was licking his wounds?” Six interjects. “He’ll attack then anyway.”

“Exactly.” Lawson nods. “The attacks are an inevitability either way. That doesn’t mean we want to hurry them up. We want to be as ready as we can be. Get as many civilians to safety as possible. Use every minute of this delay you’ve given us.”

“You want us to wait,” I say, gritting my teeth. Although I still need more time to collect Legacies, I’m eager for a fight. Right now, it’s what I’m living for. Sitting through this meeting has been difficult enough. “How long?”

“It isn’t easy coordinating a series of international strikes against a technologically superior opponent,” Lawson says. “We’ve received the cloaking devices your team recovered from Mexico, and our science guys are attempting to reverse engineer them.”

Lawson’s people have probably spent more time with those cloaking devices than I have. Lexa—who I only met in person this morning—brought the Mogadorian technology to me first thing. They don’t look all that impressive. Solid black boxes with a few inputs and wires, about the size of a paperback book, but they’re the key to the human armies having a chance. We turned most of them over to Lawson a couple of hours before this meeting. We kept the one already installed in Lexa’s ship, and I set one aside for myself.

“I can help with that,” Adam says to Lawson. “I know the tech fairly well.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Mog,” Lawson replies. “Even if we do crack the devices and put them into production, we’ve still got to get this tech into the hands of our allies around the world. Now that we know what they look like, other countries, particularly India, have had some success knocking down the Skimmers during skirmishes and stripping out the cloaking devices themselves. Assuming we get beyond the shields, we’re still assessing whether we’ll be better served attempting to board these warships or rely on ballistic missiles.”