I refused to let ET die again. Although probably not the smartest thing I could have done (considering all I'd been through), I didn't hesitate, I dove right in after him.

"Elliott! Wait!" Roy's big body came splashing down behind me.

I glanced back in surprise for a second, but then swam ahead in search of my alien friend.

Another splash rippled through the water.

"Gertie! No! Get out of there!" Jamie's voice, already on the edge of weeping.

Splash. Jamie now paddled furiously after my sister.

Splash, splash, splash. The accompanying silence indicated our Qulpari friends had come along for the swim.

I looked back. Even Charlie hovered over the subterranean river. Only our tour guide remained on the sidewalk, scowling at us like he thought us all fools.

Very difficult to see anything in the murky water. It stung my eyes to even duck my head under and look around that way.

That being said, parts of the mechanical debris floated, and I caught sight of a dark, submerged Qulpari shape.

And then...I spotted his glowing red heart.

The moment I got close, Roy grabbed the back of my outfit. "C'mon, kid. Give it up. He's gone."

"No!" I shouted. "I see him!"

Roy didn't take no for an answer. He grabbed me around the midsection.

He would have pulled me out completely, had a bunch of black tentacles of slime not dragged me under.

The first thought that popped into my head: This again?

The black ooze, unlike the other slime I encountered, did not invade my thoughts. Instead, I heard ET's voice in my mind.

Reach out to me.

I didn't see him as much as felt his energy, instinctively stretching my hand out to where it sought me.

The moment our hands touched, I felt the liquid around me separating out, like grease before a soap droplet. Not enough to completely free us from the muck, but enough to create a small pocket. Thanks to ET's glowing, and my own inner glow, I could even see.

Without warning, he planted his lips on mine, filling my mouth with air.

Still clutching my clothes, Roy nearly drowned when ET did the same for him. He really didn't like the alien kissing him.

Fiercely gripping ET's hand, I paddled against the current, toward the sidewalk. Upon spotting Jamie, I passed her air.

Although her eyes bugged out at first, she understood and accepted it, illumination practically exploding from her chest. Mine shone twice as bright just seeing it happen.

She giggled, closed mouthed, bubbling out her nose as her warm hand clutched mine.

Jamie glanced back in worriment, but Boofsuru had taken to casually accepting the inhalations of the other two water breathing Qulpari. My girlfriend squeezed my hand.

The current had carried us far downstream, but Roy pointed to a cluster of rocks nearby. I nodded, paddling that way.

The ooze closed in on us from all sides with snake-like tentacles, but we gripped each other tightly and fought back, ET's voice telling me that love would keep us together.

Not sure about Charlie's location at this point. I couldn't see anything through that skin of black ooze on the surface.

Every water system needs some kind of filtration apparatus to prevent debris from clogging things up, and the current had brought us swiftly to meet it.

It fairly resembled an automated car wash, but the giant roller brushes had been built in a continuous line all the way around the drainage channel, vacuum pipes and suckered mechanical octopus tentacles flailing around between then. The function: Rolling solid waste into small pipes going to who knows where. The metal grates and screens blocked the center, scoured periodically by robotic squids.

The mass of industrial debris hadn't really suited the works. Dark clouds puffed out the tubes, some rollers had ceased to move. The chunks of metal had even torn holes through the grating and destroyed a couple squids.

And the current pulled us in that direction. I shuddered to think what lay beyond. Would we be swept...out to sea? To the bottom of a cavern trench?

A tendril of slime wrapped around my ankle, dragging me down. I lost my grip on ET's hand.

As his influence on me faded, another tendril shot between my hand and Jamie's.

Charlie flew down and tried to help, but the ooze snapped at him. He got scared and flew away.

Roy gurgled as he also lost his grip.

I screamed in bubbles, losing precious air.

All of a sudden...I'm floating.

I felt my body drifting out of the water, into the air.

I felt...cold. I sensed...light beyond my eyelids.

Thinking I'd just died, I opened my eyes.

Dark. Still inside the underground tunnel...somewhere.

I had risen bodily from the water. The brilliant light...shone beneath me.

Instead of a gateway to the afterlife, my eyes focused on a female figure, hands raised in the air like a magician.

"Jamie?" I cried in disbelief. "Are you...doing this?"

"I love you."

I glowed the moment she said it. "But how? How are you doing this?"

I dropped a foot, ankles splashing into the water. Tendrils of sludge whipped up to grab me. "Quiet! I'm trying to concentrate!"

Jame glowed brighter, and I shot upwards again.

Seconds later, my body flipped sideways across the tunnel, I hit a wall, and I came crashing down on a rock shelf.

I slowly got up from the floor, rubbing several bruises. "Owww. You need to work on your release!"

"You're welcome!" she snapped.

I nearly tripped over a feathery Qulpari body. "Sorry, Yizewo."

The moment I said this, Olxebak squawked. I'd just stepped on his foot. I apologized profusely.

Roy, in the meantime, had grabbed hold of a chunk of machinery lodged between a couple stalagmites, hauling my sister up on the shelf with me. As Roy pulled ET out of the current, Spike pretty much clambered over the man's head to get to safety.

Jamie still drifted in the river, her glow slowly fading.

Roy nodded to ET. "Get her, will you?"

ET only sputtered and coughed. The sludge hadn't been good for him.

"Shit."

Roy hefted ET onto the flat rock like a bag of concrete, wading out after my girlfriend. Lucky for us, we'd hit a sort of shallows, deep for us kids, but an adult like him could set their feet down on the bottom. His head and shoulder blades poked out from the surface.

"Go!" Jamie shouted to him. "I'm f—"

Black slime shot up. The rest of her words came out in a glub.

I leaned over the edge, watching breathlessly as Roy fought against the waves.

He grabbed my girlfriend, slung her over his back. The ooze swallowed him for a moment, but he emerged...glowing, and after a long, bitter struggle, thrust Jamie onto the rocks beside me. She knelt and coughed, spitting up water and sludge.

The man grabbed a handhold on the granite, pulled himself up.

About halfway out, dozens of wormy snakes launched out of the water, enveloping his calves and ankles. He fought hard, but his body sunk back in.

Wide eyed in horror, he slipped sideways, hands losing grip on the rocks as he once again became submerged, all the way up to his neck.

Roy could no longer hold on. The current took him.

The moment I saw it happen, I leapt forward and grabbed his hands.

Jamie grabbed me.

Gertie grabbed Jamie.

The aliens grabbed us.

I imagine we all fairly resembled that illustration from Winnie the Pooh where they're all trying to pull the bear out of a hole in the ground.

It worked, though. After a few minutes' struggle, Roy regained his footing, and we all lay gasping for breath on the shelfstone.

Still weary, I crawled up to my girlfriend, pressing my forehead to hers. "Thank you!" I caught my breath. "I thought I was a goner!...What was that, though? How did you get powers?"

Jamie shook her head. "Dunno. Maybe the moon or Jufuceri air, or Frenching aliens, I..." She kissed me on the mouth, shoving me backwards on the granite.

My eyes bugged out as Jamie glowed and kept on kissing me, tugging my zipper down, exposing my throat, my chest...

Roy grabbed the back of her jumpsuit, pulling her away from me. "Okay you two. I'm glad you made up, but let's not get pregnant in a dingy underground tunnel. Anyway, we need to attend to more important matters, like, for example, getting the hell out of here?"

I gave a reluctant nod. Jamie giggled.

Blushing, I zipped up my outfit and staggered to my feet.

More machinery ceased to function. The river backed up, swelling over the sides of the rock.

Roy frowned. "We need to move."

The rock shelf did not connect to any sidewalk or route back to the school. In fact, we faced a solid wall when attempting to go that direction. It did, however, lead to two different tunnels.

Instinctively, we chose the one closest to the barrier, but that tunnel brought us to a fork, and the path to the left terminated in a vertical shaft.

The underground river had backed up a lot more by then, lapping at out feet, then our ankles. The water carried the ooze along with it.

"Damn," Roy muttered. "How are we supposed to get out of this? Swim back?"

The Qulpari weren't much help. I noticed they all seemed a bit weaker, and more pale than usual.

Jamie actually happened to be the one to solve our dilemma.

At first, she stared at the walls, muttering to them.

I furrowed my brow, wondering if the long isolation on Jufuceri had caused her to lose her mind. It would explain the passionate kissing. "What are you doing?"

She pointed. "Look at this lichen." And then she sang to the wall. "Laaaa!"

The lichen glowed a pale blue in response to the vibrations.

"That's a neat trick, but..."

"Turn around," ET said.

Roy glanced at the pit we'd narrowly avoided. "Okay...that's pretty obvious..."

ET reversed direction and whistled at a wall, making a different section of the lichen glow.

The ooze, bore along by the river, seemed intent on throwing us down the shaft, but we fought back and got to a safe distance from it to avoid calamity. Olxebak fell to the floor, but only received minor bruises.

Jamie trailed after ET, near trampling his toes in her impatience with his slow pace. "I think he knows where to go."

ET pointed at the next section. "This is a directional symbol. Ancient Qulpari treated walls with special enzymes to produce secret writing on rocks."

Not something simple like an arrow. More like my mom's chicken scratches, or writing the lowercase letter H in Olde English. You only knew it wasn't the letter B in the context of a word like Hallelujah. Still, we had a hint.

Smirking, ET whistled a tune as he waddled up the next corridor. After a few bars, I recognized the tune: Popcorn by Hot Butter. As we followed him through a narrow section of spelothems, Jamie joined in, then my sister.

Oddly enough, the ooze seemed to recede somewhat at the sound of our whistling, becoming near dormant until we came to a lull.

The ceiling of the connecting cavern hung lower than the one previous. Roy stooped lower, supplying the notes for Popcorn's musical bridge.

We abruptly stopped whistling when we entered an immense flowstone cavern.

Sunlight trickled down through an algae caked glass dome high above us, the glow broken up by a grid of rusting orange bars. Roy gave a low whistle when he noticed what else the cavern held.

We'd entered a cenote of sorts, a large island at the center of this underground lake bearing old looking Qulpari machinery of unfathomable purpose.

The equipment, festooned with crystal mushrooms and sucker buttons, glowed from one color of the rainbow to the other, silently idling.

Beside this machinery stood a cluster of pillars, designed for a purpose just as mystifying as the device itself. Roy suggested they might be some sort of static generator or Tesla machine, maybe an elaborate Jacob's ladder.

He pushed on a pillar, but it didn't move. "Maybe they generate electricity from the water currents."

Yizewo examined the glowing apparatus, poking the mushrooms until holographic images shone in the air.

"You sure he should be messing with that?" Roy asked.

I shrugged. "He probably knows more about how that thing works than we do."

Lightning did crack between the pillars, lending credence to Roy's idea about the Jacob's ladder.

Across from the device stood music stands. I even spotted instruments here and there, though, due to age, they had all decayed to the point of uselessness. A mandolin-like thing showed signs of rot, its strings snapped. Another item, resembling a bassoon, had been claimed by calcite processes, like something recovered from an underwater wreck.

Gertie, spotting a decently preserved crystal flute, picked it up, giving a few experimental puffs. Some dirt and bugs blew out the end, and she ended up spitting a lot to get the filth out of her mouth.

Yizewo kept tinkering with the crystal mushrooms.

ET, in the meantime, had rinsed out the flute somewhat, playing a few notes.

It seemed...purposeful.

Noting how intently he stared at a wall, I glanced over and discovered Qulpari music notation carved on the surface, illuminated by active glowing lichen.

Jamie rushed up to him. "Wait, what are you playing?"

ET pointed to the wall, fluted a note, then paused his playing for a moment. "It is an ancient song about water purification. Do you know it?"

She nodded.

I and ET stared at her.

"Play the notes again."

ET did.

Jamie took a deep breath and sang: "Thy strong word did cleave the darkness, at thy speaking it was done. For created light we thank thee while thine ordered seasons run..."

I kept staring.

Jamie reddened. "I learned it at church."

I opened my mouth to say something, but then, not wanting to offend, closed it again.

"Okay, so I'm not Jewish. You got a problem with that?"

"N-no," I stammered. "I...you...have a beautiful voice."

Roy had been staring...at the water. Something there had distracted him so much that he walked backwards into me, nearly bowling me over. "Hey, uh...could you possibly sing that song again?"

I and Jamie looked at each other and laughed.

I grinned. "I think you might have a singing career in your future."

The man squatted near the edge of the shelfstone. "Your music is doing something funny to the oil slick."

"So much for the music career," Jamie groaned.

The music actually had been doing something, and not just making it recede or stop moving. When Jamie and ET stepped up to the edge and performed again, the ooze...evaporated. Not just the drop-of-dish-soap effect either, the sludge foamed up and turned white, leaving behind pure H2O.

Roy clapped his hands. "Cool! Wish it were that easy to rid earth of pollution like that!"

"That stuff tried to grab us. I don't think earth ever had pollution like that."

"Guess you have a point..."

Brilliant light flooded the cavern. We all turned to look, jaws dropping as we pieced together what had happened.

A glowing circle had materialized amidst the posts, through which we could see...another world: Huge white glaciers, a vast icy tundra, and...

Jamie ran up to the machine. "Oh my God! Elliott, look!"

Impossibly, snowflakes blew into the cavern from this glowing circle, and as I got nearer, arctic wind blew through my damp clothing. I shivered as I turned my gaze in the direction she pointed.

Then I saw it: A row of Quonset huts, and an American flag flapping in the cold air.

"Elliott! This could be our ticket home!"