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Could it be the same for Tlalo, Drena and the others? They reinvented themselves after the occupation. Their untreated scars were visible proof of that. Abandoning the old values, the old hierarchy with themselves sitting in golden thrones atop all other living things...glimpsing the ugliness of that worldview reflected in the precision engineered faces of the enemy. 

I set the saucer down gently in a clearing surrounded by trees. Without my phone I couldn’t be sure, but judging by the topography and distant lights of the city, it was no more than twenty miles or so from there to Stonehouse U. 

The hatch folded down with a pneumatic hiss, admitting a chilling breeze. Light spilled out across the grass in the shape of the opening. I kept the exterior lights turned off for fear we’d be spotted from the nearby road, though the trees between the road and clearing were pretty densely packed. 

I left Tlalo looking forlorn, light from the open hatch partly illuminating his sculpted physique. I felt pangs of guilt, but turned and fled. I had to know for sure if he’d allow it. The cold night air verged on painful due to the toga-like garment doing basically nothing to insulate me. 

I tried for a few minutes to wave down cars. When at last one of them stopped, I hesitated to get in. I’m ashamed to say it’s because the driver was a Middle Eastern man. “Are you in trouble miss? Should I call the police?” I assured him that wasn’t necessary and concocted a fib about a sorority hazing ritual out in the woods. 

“My friends just disappeared, I guess to frighten me. Probably that’s part of the ritual.” He rolled his eyes and chuckled. “It’s no big deal for me” he confessed, “I drive for Uber part time. It’s not like I haven’t heard weirder stories. Nice toga though.”

Despite my conviction that I’d been prejudiced to hesitate earlier, he did wind up placing his hand on my leg during the drive. On my knee at first, then when I didn’t complain, sliding it up to my thigh. It only took a terse cough to put a stop to it though. 

“Arm rest used to be there, force of habit” he said. “What music do you like?” I didn’t answer, not wanting to give any further encouragement. “I hope classical is fine.” We arrived in the Stonehouse U parking lot without further incident. He offered to drive me the rest of the way to the dorms but of course I declined. 

“Well, my name is Aziz. Maybe you’ll get me as a driver? I take a lot of fares around this area, it’s a small world you know.” I just did a half hearted little wave and headed for a nearby group of students discussing something or other at the bus stop. 

I breathed a sigh of relief simply to be someplace better lit than the parking lot, and with several other girls around. “You just come from a party or something?” one of them asked. I nodded and smiled, adding that it was a sorority thing. She unexpectedly asked which one. 

Thinking on my feet, I claimed I wasn’t allowed to say. On my way to the dorms I reflected on the events of the drive over. His trespass had been so completely contrary to my expectations. But then, I suppose only because I’ve gone to great lengths to cultivate expectations diametrically opposed to those of white racists. 

A fluke, I guess. Strange things happen sometimes, no reason to tell anybody as it would only reinforce that ugly narrative, adding fuel to a fire I was determined to help extinguish. Melanie did a double take when she opened the door to find me standing there.

“WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN!? Cops came by to talk to me! There was an organized search for you in the surrounding woods, do you even know-” I cut her off there, barging in and flopping down on the couch. 

I knew too well what must’ve happened in my absence, but had no energy right then to handle her nearly hysterical reaction to my reappearance. “Your mom and dad came by to pack up all your stuff and put it in storage. They probably think you’re fuckin’ dead. Do you realize that?”

My voice muffled by a face full of couch, I did my best to placate her immediate concerns. “I’ll call my parents. Don’t tell anybody I’m here, let me handle it.” She slowed her roll as I hoped she would, then knelt next to me. “What happened to you?” 

It was a question I wasn’t prepared to fully answer before getting some coffee in me. The only thing open nearby was a Denny’s. When I told her that Neil was in some sort of cult, she revealed that popular opinion around Campus was that he’d abducted me and had me tied up in a sex dungeon or something. 

Not that far from the truth, actually. Her eyes grew progressively wider as I told her about the stairs beneath the Feuerbach monument. About the shower room, the black robes, and the ceremony with the drums and horns. 

...Only for her to suddenly grimace at me when I described the nordic arn and gy-ei who appeared before us. She stopped me there. “You really had me going. Don’t fuck around though. If you think I don’t have much patience for it, wait till you’re giving a statement to the cops.”

I insisted I was relating exactly what happened. She no longer looked frustrated with me but instead bore an uncertain, furrowed brow. Trying to determine, as I did with Tlalo, how much of what I told her was true. 

I then described our descent further into the Earth, via the ancient elevator. The immense, Vril-ya sized chambers, corridors, chairs and control consoles. Then the hangar full of 1940s era flying saucers. “Alright, fuck off, now you’re just fucking with me.”

I told her she asked where I was and what happened to me, so I was telling her. That no matter how many times she accused me of lying, she would get no other story out of me, and so may as well listen all the way through. 

By this point stragglers nursing their own coffees, one of them smoking like a chimney, were visibly eavesdropping on us. “Not here though” I stipulated. “Let’s go for a drive.” I had no specific destination in mind, but Melanie did. 

“This looks like one of those places.” Melanie smirked and told me I’d have to be a little bit more specific than that. Her air freshener, shaped like a cartoon alien head, swayed to and fro as the shitty suspension on her $900 Craigslist special struggled to cope with the potholes. 

“Like makeout point, or whatever it’s called in old movies where they go to slobber all over each other until the dude in the rubber monster suit interrupts them.” It really did, too. You could see the whole city from here, spread out below like a jewel encrusted rug. 

“I’ve never come here for that” she confessed, adding “but when I first got my license I used to just hang out up here and listen to music. Sometimes I’d pretend I was a super villain, plotting to unleash a deadly plague on the unsuspecting citizens down there.”

It tickled me, coming from her. But then I remembered what that headspace is like. When you’re a teenager, and it’s you against the rest of humanity. Not because they’ve necessarily wronged you, just because you’re looking for a fight. 

As I soaked in the sight of the glittering lights before us, I imagined pale golden saucers laying waste to everything. Fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, Screaming in a mixture of terror and confusion as an impossible reality forces itself on them. 

It would look just like the ruins outside of Tlalo’s hideout. If I were to survive the invasion, I might wind up living that life. Staking out the wreckage of the world I used to know up in these hills, plotting attacks on the same hideously beautiful monsters who destroyed his world as well.

That’s when I noticed light coming from the clearing by the road. I couldn’t be certain it was the same one until I fished a pair of ‘nocs out of the glove compartment to confirm it. In the darkness I couldn’t make out the shape of the saucer itself, just the light coming out of its windows and open hatch. 

“I have to go back” I muttered. Melanie’s ears perked up. “What, back to underground fantasyland? Where Neil took you?” I shrugged it off and nodded. Melanie asked me flat out if I was on drugs. I shrugged that off, too. 

She still lived in this world, where the Earth is solid all the way through and things make sense. I didn’t see any reason to spoil that. “Do you see the lights down there in the clearing?” It took some work to point it out precisely, but she did ultimately recognize the road passing by it. “Do you think you can take me there?”

She had the audacity to shine a light in my eyes before we left. Checking to see if my pupils were dilated, I assume. Yet I couldn’t blame her for any of it. I’d been the same way with Neil. Imagining then that I had a solid grasp on reality, one which there could be no major upsets to. 

“This is a cult thing then, isn’t it. While you were with Neil, they brainwashed you with all this stuff about blonde giants and underground cities. If that’s what’s going on, I know some people my Mom used to work with that specialize in deprogramming. They’re not police or anything like that, they-” I assured her I wasn’t in any cult that I knew of. She pointed out that cultists never think so, and I stuck out my tongue.  

She continued trying to talk me into it right up until I told her to stop at the side of the road. She then gave it a rest long enough to ask whether to leave the engine running and how long I’d be. “Years, maybe. As long as it takes.” I climbed out of the passenger side, and headed into the woods. 

Tlalo was right where I left him. Still standing motionless in the open hatch, stupid puppy dog eyes and pursed lips like he’d been practicing in front of a mirror while I was gone. I’d resolved to give up completely on trying to discern his motives. 

Unknowable to me, and therefore irrelevant. My own motives were what mattered. I knew I couldn’t just resume my old life up here. I always knew, but had to come back up here to actually feel it. As I approached Tlalo, I recalled Brother Trent.

Brother Trent was this loon who would hang out in the common areas on campus preaching to anybody who would listen that the end of the world was imminent. I realized I might soon owe him an apology. Maybe I’d even have wound up joining him with my own sandwich sign and megaphone, had Tlalo not waited for me. 

“You came back!” he gushed. “As if you didn’t know I would” I replied in my flattest monotone. He began to protest, but then I pointed out that he couldn’t control the Vril staff, and without it the saucer wouldn’t fly. 

“...That’s true. I didn’t have a plan B, though. There was no point to devising one. You’re the most promising candidate in decades. It was going to be you or nobody. I still have my laser, I could’ve fed myself here by hunting for a few days...but if you didn’t come back, there would be no reason for me to return either.”

I told him to cram it and get in the saucer. Just then I heard a shriek behind me. Melanie stood just barely within range of the light coming from the hatch, jaw hanging open, eyes bugging out of her skull. I looked over my shoulder at her as I boarded the saucer. “Go home, Melanie.” 

The hatch shut behind me with a hiss, then a kerchunk as it formed an airtight seal. Tlalo gestured to one of the swiveling seats, which I eased myself into before mentally commanding the craft to lift off. I briefly worried about hurting Melanie before recalling that there was no hot exhaust and no exposed moving parts.

Not like a helicopter or a rocket. If she was still standing there, staring gormlessly at what was probably the first truly ‘beyond the pale’ sight of her life, from her perspective we’d quietly rise into the air with a gentle gust before zipping off into the star speckled night. 

“Should I be worried about her?" I queried. “...Or should you, for that matter?” Tlalo shook his head. “If it’s just one witness, there’s no cause for concern. Nobody will believe her.” I thought back to outlandish stories I’d read on the internet while researching Neil’s background.

How I once scoffed at accounts of statuesque blonde “Pleiadians” conducting all sorts of experiments on drunken hillbillies. Probably the same experiments they’d be conducting on me, had Tlalo’s buddies never shot down Neil’s saucer. 

The end of the world. I repeated that phrase in my head a few times, savoring the gravity of it. The end of the world. Like so many ants crawling around in the back yard, oblivious to the house that’s just a hundred feet away. Oblivious to its owner, getting ready to start the lawnmower.

No, I couldn’t ignore it. Not something of this magnitude. Life topside would be impossible. Sleeping through the night would be impossible, knowing what’s happening down there. Like a reverse ostrich, sticking its head above ground to ignore what’s below it. 

It’s a common misconception that the word apocalypse means the end of the world. It actually means “sudden revelation”. A revelation which, in my case, made my world impossible to return to. One which at the same time ushered in a fantastical, terrifying replacement I couldn’t opt out of. 

The new world which replaces the old. The sudden revelation which re-frames everything I thought I knew so drastically as to effectively destroy it. Though I suppose the yard is not technically destroyed when the ant learns it isn’t the entire world...it just becomes a miniscule, nearly irrelevant part of the new understanding. That process looks very much like destruction from some angles. 

I dwelled on my family. On Melanie and other friends I left behind, even knowing it would only bring me pain I could do nothing to diminish. If I love them, I decided, I could do nothing except throw my whole body and spirit into this fight. They were good as dead if I failed. 
 
A burst of static interrupted my ruminations. Just by wanting it to be audible, I somehow caused it to be. The staff interpreting that desire as a command to focus on the signal and amplify it no doubt. “From the eastern passage...exploded, then the generators caught fire, there’s no...surrounded on all sides, more coming out of the ruins. Don’t…”

Screaming and the sound of what I assumed to be rapid vaporization followed, then silence. Tlalo just stood there grimly absorbing it all. “Do we help them?” I asked. He shook his head. “Nothing left to save by now. They’re very thorough.” 

Drena...how I wished that she could’ve escaped in time. “The captive. They must’ve been tracking him somehow, maybe even allowed us to capture him for that purpose. An implant? Or by mental connection to his staff. We were so excited to finally have one of them completely at our mercy, it made us sloppy…”

He made no effort to disguise the pain in his voice. I did not embrace him this time, instead focused on navigating the serpentine tunnel through the Earth’s crust. I knew exactly how “excited” they were, anyway. I was there, I saw what they did. 

 A guerilla war that’s gone on for this long has no “good guys”. Though of course Tlalo never made any such pretense, that was just my naivete showing.  Fresh out of that by now. The exterior lights illuminated the tunnel for about fifty feet above and below.

If not for that, it would seem as if we hovered perfectly still in darkness. Something about how the saucer stabilized itself prevented me from feeling any acceleration or vibration except on the rare occasion that it scraped the tunnel wall. 

There was an ever-present humming though, as well as a faintly detectable resonance. Really low pitched, what I assumed was the entire craft flexing under the forces of constant changes in direction and speed that I couldn’t feel. 

It felt strangely familiar. Natural, good and right to be in control of this machine. Something like getting onto a bicycle again after having not so much as seen one for so long that you no longer remember what a bicycle is. Just lingering muscle memory. 

This vessel. This staff. Everything where it needs to be, working in perfect harmony, with me at the helm. I briefly felt unstoppable. Despite the fact that Tlalo’s last redoubt had been taken, despite the fact that we were descending towards a civilization on the interior of the Earth I knew to be aligned against us. 

“It feels like we still have a shot.” Tlalo didn’t react immediately. When he turned towards me, there were tears running down his face, but he was smiling. “I believe you’re right. Of course now there’s no other choice but to try. Even so, when I hear you say it, you make me believe it.” 

As we approached the terminus of the tunnel, Tlalo informed me that Kembis and his troops would be launching their attack on ground based anti-saucer weapons, detection and tracking systems and so on in 14 hours. 

“You really cut it close, didn’t you? With me on the surface, I mean. What if I decided to come back, but took a day or two?” Tlalo confessed that he’d worried about that but did not want the information to sway my decision. 

The tunnel emptied out not in the Earth’s hollow interior but a cavern, much smaller than the one Tlalo’s base and ancestral ruins occupied. There was nothing like a city here, or even any recognizable dwellings. 

Just machinery. Somehow looking at the same time old fashioned and futuristic, spiraling electrical towers and what resembled computers alongside oversized gears, pistons and drive belts. It all reminded me somewhat of the huge electrical equipment seen in theatrical depictions of Frankenstein’s lab. 

Some of it advanced beyond any possibility of identifying its purpose. Other components almost laughably primitive. The result of technological progress along a path isolated for millennia from the one humanity took.

I realized as we passed by the contraptions that, even with my layman’s understanding of the principles involved, I could have pointed out a dozen or more improvements to how certain components were designed. Just a result of human brains being wired differently, excelling in areas where the Vril-ya’s brains fell short, and vice versa. 

Probably not what he wanted to hear right then. I just couldn’t help but dwell on it because of the relevance to our situation. How easy it must’ve been for our enemies, and even for the native Vril-ya for that matter, to narrowly consider only the capacities in which they excelled and conclude that they were the most superior life form. 

Ignoring, perhaps not even consciously, the areas where they lagged behind us. Maybe their culture never considered those capacities important, dignified or whatever other nonsense one conjures up to rationalize away feelings of inadequacy. 

“I am skilled at X, therefore X is the most important skill one can have. I am not skilled at Y, but it is of no importance because Y is a trivial and useless skill.” Then designing their society in such a way as to rely upon and leverage X, but not Y, in order to reinforce their conviction.  

The notion of “more evolved” always struck me as absurd in the same way. Every species alive today has been evolving for the same amount of time. Every species is therefore equally well adapted to the environment it lives in, unless there has been some recent, significant change to it. 

The cavern was very plainly not intended for continuous habitation. I never noticed back at Tlalo’s hideout, but that cavern must’ve had some hidden mechanism for dehumidifying the air and managing seepage from above.

By contrast, this cavern was like any I’d ever been in before all of this started. Drippy, cool, humid. A constant gentle whoosh of moving air. I never really gave any thought to what sort of technologies would be necessary to condition the atmosphere of a cave system to make it more like the surface, so that you could tolerate living in it long term.

The machinery didn’t appear rusty. Worn out, but not a spot of rust to be seen, presumably because the materials it was made out of do not oxidize. I assumed those multi colored metallic plates on the floor had been copper, aluminum and other familiar metals. 

I now figured they were probably just superficially similar, and that if these people had developed that pale golden alloy so long before we did, probably all of their other metals were unknown to human metallurgists as well.

“How old is this place?” Tlalo didn’t turn to look at me, just kept walking. “Millennia” he muttered. “Before the staffs. Before servitors, at least of the type you’ve seen. All of this used to be necessary for atmospheric processing, and recycling of all types of waste.”

I idly thought to myself that almost anything down here that I pocketed and brought to the surface, even their junk, would likely be worth millions just because of what it’s made out of. Perhaps a bit premature to have such ideas though, given recent events. Odds seemed better than even that I’d be dead before tomorrow. 

We came to a point where the cavern widened into a much larger tunnel, perhaps a lava tube. The ceiling was collapsed in a few places within reach of the light, such that there were sizable piles of ragged boulders blocking our way. 

All of a sudden, Tlalo tensed up. He seized me by the shoulders and forced me down behind one of the boulders with him. Before I could object, he clasped one hand over my mouth. I did not understand why until I peered around the edge of the boulder, as he did. 

A second saucer was coming in for a landing next to ours. Familiar golden haired demigods emerged from it, surveying the cavern for any sign of us. They flew, but wore no winged flight packs as Tlalo and his troops did.

Instead they just levitated, rigidly upright and perfectly still as they floated along, as if standing on invisible moving platforms. Each one held a staff like mine, and I worked out that they must have such perfect mental self-control that they do not think twice about using their staffs to transport themselves. 

After the adamant warnings from Drena never to do that, watching those men casually willing the staffs to move them about inspired some faint blend of awe and terror. The same staffs which, with an errant thought, could disassociate every atom in their bodies. 

That degree of mastery over the Vril staff did not seem possible to challenge. Not for a human, much less one with so little training. Instead, recalling that the staffs require knowledge of the target’s location to work, I used mine to activate one of the atmospheric processors. 

The Nordics nearby recoiled, plainly startled by the machine’s seemingly unprovoked sputtering. It belched out a rapidly growing mass of fog. By the time they used their own staffs to shut it down, visibility in the cavern was reduced to what you could see five or six feet in front of you. 

I turned to Tlalo, whose face I struggled to make out after the fog reached us. He did not laugh, lest it give away our position, but he did grin as he unholstered his laser pistol and gestured for me to follow him down the lava tube.

It soon became apparent our cover would be short lived. The gentle whooshing I felt when we arrived, simply natural air currents traveling down the lava tube, would carry away the fog. With the atmospheric processor disabled, there would be no way to replenish it either. 

As we advanced, I used my staff to reshape the rock into human shaped figures behind us. A simple ruse, but with the aid of the fog, it might buy us some time. Sure enough, a distant crackling soon echoed down the tunnel. The sound of those rock figures being demolished at the speed of thought. 

Traversing the boulders soon wore me out. It didn’t help that our pursuers could simply float over them. When Tlalo frantically gestured to hide myself among the boulders, I quickly intuited why and was soon nestled in a narrow crevice like a frightened little mouse.

It felt the way I sometimes have in nightmares when I could hear some sort of monster approaching, but could not yet see it. That feeling of tightness in your chest, of impending doom bearing down on you. 

My breath caught in my throat as the pair of Nordics floated silently overhead in tandem formation. I could just barely make out their silhouettes. I couldn’t see Tlalo at all down here, and dearly wished that I could right then. I think he assumed they would continue down the tunnel long enough that we could double back to the saucer.

Instead, they halted. Then both reversed course until they floated near enough that I could hear their nervous chatter, but not make them out. With the fog threatening to thin out at any moment, I wracked my brain for some way out of what should’ve been the end. 

I focused on the staff. Then on the boulders, rapidly molding them into human figures. A dozen, then a hundred, surrounding the floating Nordics. They vaporized them, but I kept remaking them faster than they could keep up. 

Finally they just floated there, still out of sight or I might’ve delivered the killing blow. Waiting to see what I was up to with the rock figures, I expect. Each statue held a rock staff, some resembling Tlalo while others resembled me. 

I made one of them move. The atoms quickly re-arranged such that it took one step, then another. Creeping bit by bit around the periphery of the stone crowd. They vaporized it. So I made another one begin to move.

They vaporized three before realizing what I was up to. Must’ve been told there were only two of us beforehand. The third time, I rose to take my place with the rock figures, having instructed the staff to coat me with a layer of powdered rock.

As I hoped, in the fog I was impossible to distinguish from the statues. Despite my pounding heart, I focused, making one of the stone replicas nearest me run for it. At last, this provoked the Nordics to give chase. Believing perhaps that I’d given up on the charade, and was trying to escape? 

Only, the minute they floated within view, I vaporized one of them. Before I could vaporize the other, my staff went cold and stopped responding to commands. Locked down by the staff of the remaining Nordic. 

I tensed up, struggling not to breathe. He drew closer...raised his staff...then vaporized the statue immediately next to me. It was all the distraction Tlalo needed to pop up from cover and unload on him with his laser pistol. 

He aimed for the Nordic’s arm, reducing it to smoldering ash in an instant, which separated him from his staff. It clattered to the ground, then disappeared down a crevice between two boulders. The Nordic cried out, even his agonized wails having some melodic resonance to them which I could not help but appreciate. 

“That was some quick thinking” Tlalo remarked. “How did you subvert their staff’s thermal detection?” I explained that I’d warmed all of the rock statues up to body temperature. I’d also bothered to make their chests rise and fall at the same rate as my own, just in case it made any difference. 

“Drena taught you all that?” he boggled. I shook my head, beaming as he lavished me with praise. The burnt, mangled body of the surviving Nordic lay sprawled across the rocks, his charred stump not gushing blood as I expected it to because the laser cauterized the wound. 

When the fog thinned out enough that he could see me clearly, his icy blue eyes widened. “So it was true” he managed, despite his wounds. “They really found one.” Tlalo advanced on him. “Listen to me!” The Nordic urged. “I don’t know what they told you about us, but-”

With one more blast from the laser pistol, Tlalo finished him off. I looked away, weary of death by this point. “Find his staff, if you can” Tlalo barked at me. “Yours should still work. Typically they just neutralize the supply of Vril inside it.”

After clambering around on the rocks for a while, I caught a golden glint out of the corner of my eye. There, pinned in the cleavage between two boulders, was the Nordic’s Vril staff. It looked almost identical to mine, but sleeker. 

It made me wonder how long ago mine was stolen. Tlalo instructed me on how to open the compartment with the vial of Vril inside. The one in the Nordic’s staff I recovered still emitted its warm, soothing golden glow. 

By contrast, the one in my own staff was dark and cold. I popped it out and discarded it, then transplanted the still glowing vial from the recovered staff to my own. “Good, now hide it among the rocks. Odds are good it sent out a distress message when I shot its owner. Better for us if whoever they send to recover it wastes some time trying to find the damned thing, rather than hunting us.”

I lodged it somewhere I doubted if anybody would think to look, between the ceiling and an overhead shelf-like rock formation. I assumed they would expect it to be down among the boulders someplace. 

I began to ask why we didn’t just destroy it, before properly grasping the meaning of what he’d said a moment ago. I was still exhausted from the trek, not to mention the fight. Nervously, I wished for the staff to rejuvenate me somewhat. To my surprise within a matter of seconds, I felt wholly re-energized. 

Just the illusion of recovery, I thought. Like morphine. Yet when I searched my legs for scrapes I knew I had incurred while climbing the boulders, there were none to be found. Some clotted blood, mixed into the powdered rock still coated my skin...but when I wiped it away, there was no wound underneath. 

I next wished to be clean. Perhaps frivolously? But the gritty feeling of the mineral particulate was getting to me, and the need for that disguise had long since passed. “Hang on” I called to Tlalo. He stopped in his tracks, and looked over his shoulder at me.

On our way back to the saucer, we’d come upon something like a fork in the tunnel. Not really, just a place where the wall of the lava tube had crumbled to reveal a cavern on the other side...but good enough for my purpose. I reshaped the tunnel such that it curved directly into the cavern.

Any more unwanted visitors trying to approach us through the lava tube would be redirected by the new curved section, hopefully not realizing that in fact the tunnel continued straight beyond it. Tlalo looked impressed. I wondered how sincere it could be, given that it would be like if I were to clap for some chimp which managed to tie a shoe.

I scolded myself for still assuming the worst of him, this late in the game. “He’s all I have left. He’s all I have left” I repeated inwardly. My last connection to the rebels...quite possibly even the last of his kind, depending on what became of Kembis and the others. We’d find out one way or the other soon enough.

By the time we reached the two parked saucers, there were just ten hours remaining. No way to contact Kembis or any of the other cells, each one acting in assumed concert with the rest. All or nothing, just ten hours until the moment of truth. 

I recalled reading that anxiety grows exponentially as the event causing it approaches. It then peaks, and dissolves immediately afterward. It certainly felt true just then, with zero hour bearing down on us. The moment when everything would be decided. 

It became a sort of mania that I struggled to control as Tlalo and I made preparations to move the saucer. What good could it do? They surely knew to expect us now. Zero Hour...zero hour...zero hour...The tipping point which would determine the future of humanity, if there was to be any. 

It was a feat to calm myself enough that I felt up to piloting the saucer, but within the hour we were situated in another small cavern Tlalo assured me was not on any of their maps. Was that not true of the last one? 

To my surprise, the cavern opened up to a stunning view of the Earth’s interior. When I asked him whether we were in any danger of being detected, he assured me otherwise. “This is one of countless passages between the caverns within the Earth’s crust and its interior. For all their scientific capacity, there are still passages of this type which their instruments have yet to identify. 

This is one of them, mapped by my people but not by theirs because they originated as a subpopulation which dwelled almost exclusively on the Earth’s inner surface for untold centuries, whereas my own people never lost our attraction to subterranean spaces. In the chaos and confusion of the occupation, I saw to it that the archives with maps of passages such as these were destroyed, save for backups that I hid within my own body.”

I was unclear what he could possibly mean by that until, passing his silver staff over his forearm, the shimmering outline of an implanted device became briefly visible. I gasped, realizing I’d never asked him about his people’s stance on cybernetics. 

I had never seen any of them with machinery visibly integrated into their bodies, though the mental connection with those wing packs was sufficiently intimate as to consider them an artificial body part. 

I paced and struggled to calm myself as the hours counted down. Tlalo just continued to surveil enemy movements in the population center close enough to us that individuals could be made out with modest magnification. The device he peered through had no obvious lenses, but he seemed able to see what he wanted through it.

With nothing else to do and eager for some sort of distraction, I asked him if I could peer through the device myself. He shrugged and offered it to me. It projected the images into my eye such that they filled my entire field of view unless I looked away from the tiny little eyepieces. 

What I saw were Nordics. Row upon row of them, marching through the streets in black uniforms like Neil’s. Some floated overhead, moving at the same pace as the marchers. Not standing on anything I could see, just floating along under their own power like the two we fought in the fog. 

Just a continuous stream of slowly marching blondes, chiseled bodies moving together in perfect synchronization with one another. Something like the slow motion swarming of so many golden ants. It would be gratuitously banal, were it not also obnoxiously beautiful. 

I recalled something Einstein once said about how the sort of person who feels invigorated by mindless marching in rank and file to music has already earned his contempt, because he or she was given a brain by mistake when just the spinal cord would have sufficed. 

Above all of it loomed the black sun. Invisible to me, shrouded behind the blinding halo of warm, golden light it bathed these lands in. Yet I knew it was there, for I could see the slender towers holding it in that position. As I watched, vertical trains moved along these towers between the black sun and stations at the base of each tower. 

Every bit as I remembered from the day Neil’s saucer was shot down. The day my still beating heart was torn from my chest, unsure and unready, only for Tlalo and Drena to fix it. To teach me how to love and who deserves that love, before patiently mending my body and mind despite my constant hostile suspicion.

How I wished Drena were here. Every one of them lost to us was a compounded tragedy, not only as a soldier who might’ve lent their strength to the fight, but as someone invested in it because of what they lost who now could never receive any closure. 

Their beautiful, soft faces, battered down and bloodied by the brutality of a war which stole their youth. Which came at them like a wild animal, scarring each of them in a way they held onto, knowing it would make them stronger by always reminding them of why they fight. 

How could we do anything but triumph? I ran my fingers through my hair, errant strands spilling back down over my baby blues as they steadily widened. We could only lose if nobody is watching this. If nobody is in control of it all which means well for us. The “All-good” as Tlalo called it. 

___

**That's all for now, stay tuned for part 9!**