“Megan, I don’t understand.”
She stood up. “It’s not enough to make promises. It’s not enough to hope I won’t end up hurting you.” She turned and strode, unsteadily at first, from the room.
I scrambled to my feet and followed, trying to sort out what she was planning. Salt scuffed under our feet as we walked past a table in the main room where the others sat; this building’s time had come, as it was too near to the trailing edge of Ildithia. It wouldn’t last the night.
Megan crossed the room and walked into Larcener’s smaller chamber. Sparks! I jogged after her, stumbling into the room. There was a way to make sure Megan never hurt anyone with her powers again. It was here, inside our base.
“Megan,” I said, seizing her by the arm. “Are you sure you want to do something so drastic?”
She studied Larcener, who lay on a plush couch with his headphones on. He didn’t notice us.
“Yes,” she whispered. “During my time with you, I’ve started to lose my hatred of the powers. I started to think it could be controlled. But after the things that happened last night…I don’t want this anymore, David.”
She looked to me questioningly.
I shook my head. “I won’t stop you. This is your choice. But maybe we should think about it some more?”
“This from you?” she said with a grim smile. “No. I might lose my nerve.” She strode up to Larcener, and when he didn’t notice her, she kicked at his foot, which was dangling over the side of his couch.
He immediately pulled off his headphones and scrambled up. “You drudge,” he snapped. “Useless peasant. I’ll—”
Megan thrust her arm toward him, wrist upward. “Take my powers.”
Larcener gaped, then backed away from her, regarding the arm like one might regard a ticking box with the words NOT A BOMB stenciled on it. “What are you babbling about?”
“My powers,” Megan said, stepping toward him. “Take them. They’re yours.”
“You’re insane.”
“No,” she said, “just tired. Go ahead.”
He didn’t reach for her arm. I strongly suspected that no Epic had ever offered to give him their powers before. I stepped up to Megan.
“I spent months in Babilar serving Regalia,” Megan said to Larcener, “all because of the implication that she could make Calamity remove my powers. I wish I’d known about you; I would simply have come here. Take them. They’ll make you immortal.”
“I’m already immortal,” he snapped.
“Then be double immortal,” Megan said. “Or quadruple, or whatever. Take them, or I’ll reach into another dimension, and I’ll—”
He grabbed her arm. She gasped, jerking upright, but didn’t pull her arm away. I steadied her by her shoulders, worried. Sparks. Watching her was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Should I have persuaded her to wait? To think it over?
“Like ice water,” she hissed, “in my veins.”
“Yes,” Larcener said. “I’ve heard it is unpleasant.”
“Now it’s become fire!” Megan said, trembling. “Pouring through me!” Her eyes went glassy and unfocused.
“Hmm…,” Larcener said, his tone like that of a careful surgeon. “Yes…”
Megan jerked, growing tense, staring into the distance.
“Perhaps you should have thought this through before prancing in here and making demands,” Larcener said. “Enjoy being even more of a peasant. I’m sure you’ll fit in brilliantly with this crew, if you can even think straight when this is done. Most can’t, you see—”
The room caught fire.
I ducked as ribbons of flame lanced across the ceiling, then down the walls. The heat was distant, subtle, but I could feel it.
Megan stood up straight, and her trembling ended.
Larcener let go, then looked at his hands. He seized Megan again, sneering, and she met his eyes. There was no trembling this time, no jerk of pain, though her face tightened as she clenched her jaw.
The flames didn’t go away. They were a phantom burning. She’d said that she’d learned to create those dimensional shadows to help hide her weakness and her fear of fire. They came out by instinct.
The room started to grow very hot.
Larcener let go of her hand and backed away.
“You can’t take them, it seems,” Megan said.
“How?” he demanded. “How do you defy me?”
“I don’t know,” Megan said. “But I was wrong to come here.”
She turned and strode from the room. I followed her, confused. Abraham and Mizzy stood at the doorway, and Megan brushed past them. I gave them a shrug as I followed her into the communal bedroom.
“You really still have the powers?” I asked her.
She nodded, looking tired. She slumped down onto her pallet. “I should have guessed it wouldn’t be so easy.”
I knelt beside her, hesitant, but also relieved. That had been a roller coaster of emotions—the type that was old and rickety and didn’t have proper seat belts.
“You…all right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t understand it either. It was strange, David—in that moment, with him sucking my abilities out in that wave of ice, I realized…that the powers are as much me now as my personality.” She closed her eyes. “I realized I couldn’t give them to him. If I did, I’d become a coward.”
“But how did you defy him?” I said. “I’ve never heard of something like that happening.”
“The powers are mine,” she whispered. “I claim them. My burden, my task, my self. I don’t know why that mattered, but it did.” She opened her eyes. “So what now?”
“When we were at Sharp Tower,” I said, “I visited the other world. The one where Firefight lives. There’s no darkness there, Megan. Steelheart is a hero.”
“So we got born one dimensional degree away from paradise.”
“We’ll just have to bring paradise here,” I told her. “Regalia’s plan was for Prof to travel to Calamity and, once there, steal his powers. If we can get Prof back, he’ll give us the teleportation device she developed. Seems like that would give us a pretty good opportunity to kill Calamity and free us all.”
She smiled and took me by the arm. “Let’s do it. Rescue Prof, bring down Calamity, save the world. What’s your plan?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not fully formed yet.”
“Good,” she said. “You have great ideas, David, but your execution is crap. Go grab some paper. We’re going to come up with a way to pull this off.”
I set down my pack in the center of the large, open building. The place had a sharp salty scent. Newly grown. The floor reflected my mobile’s light; polished white saltstone. After leaving behind a hideout that had literally been decomposing around us, this place felt almost too clean. Like a baby the moment before it barfed on you.
“This feels wrong,” I said, my voice echoing in the large chamber.
“In what way?” Mizzy said, passing with a sack of supplies over her shoulder.
“It’s too big,” I said. “I can’t feel like I’m hiding if I have a whole warehouse to live in.”
“One would think,” Abraham said, setting down his supplies with a clink, “you would be happy to escape the tight confines of our previous dwellings.”
I turned around and felt distinctly creeped out that—by the frail light of my mobile—I couldn’t see the edges of the room. How could I explain that sensation without sounding silly? Every Reckoner hideout had been tucked away and secure. This empty warehouse was the opposite.
Cody claimed it would be secure anyway. Our time in Ildithia had let him and Abraham do some investigating, and they’d come up with this warehouse as a spot nobody used, and one that was convenient to a spot I wanted to use in our plan to attack Prof.
I shook my head, grabbing my pack and lugging it across the room to the far wall, where Abraham and Mizzy had set theirs. Nearby, Cody had already started growing a smaller room inside the ware
house. He worked carefully with a gloved hand, stroking the salt outward like he was sculpting clay, using the trowel to make smooth surfaces. His glove hummed softly, making the crystal structure of the salt extend behind his motions. He’d only been working for about an hour, but he already had a good start on the smaller chamber.
“Ain’t nobody gonna bother us here, lad,” Cody said in a reassuring voice as he worked.
“Why not?” I asked. “Seems like a perfect place to hole up a large group of people.” I could imagine the warehouse filled with families, each around their own trash can fire. That would transform it. Rather than being tomblike and empty, it would be full of sounds and life.
“This place is too far away from the city center—it’s from the northern edge of the section of old Atlanta that became Ildithia. Why pick the cold warehouse when you can have a group of townhomes for your family?”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said.
“Plus, a whole bunch of people got murdered in here,” Cody added. “So nobody wants to be near the place.”
“Um…what?”
“Yeah,” he said, “tragic event. Bunch of kids started playing here, but it was too close to another family’s territory. The other family got spooked, thought rivals were moving in on them, so they tossed some dynamite through the door. They say you could hear the survivors crying under the rubble for days, but a full-on war had started by then, and nobody had time to come help the poor kids.”
I regarded him, stunned. Cody started whistling and continued to work. Sparks. He had to be making that story up, right? I turned and took in the vast, empty room, then shivered.
“I hate you,” I muttered.
“Ach, now, don’t be like that. Ghosts are drawn to negative emotions, you see.”
I should have known better; talking to Cody was generally among the least productive things you could do. I went looking for Megan instead, passing Larcener, who—of course—had refused to help carry anything to the new base. He swept into Cody’s unfinished chamber and flopped down, an overstuffed beanbag materializing beneath him.
“I’m tired of being interrupted,” he said, pointing at the wall. A door appeared, propped up against it. “Work that into your construction, and I’ll put a lock on the thing. Oh, and make the walls extra thick so I don’t have to listen to the lot of you squeaking and babbling all the time.”
Cody gave me a long-suffering look, and somehow I could tell that he was contemplating walling the Epic up.
I found Megan with Mizzy, near where Abraham was unpacking his guns. I held back, surprised. Megan and Mizzy sat on the floor surrounded by our notes—some in my careful hand, others in her…well, Megan’s handwriting could be mistaken for the aftermath of a tornado in a pencil store.
Mizzy nodded as Megan pointed at one page, then gestured wildly at the sky. Megan thought a moment, then huddled over the paper and started writing.
I sidled up to Abraham. “The two of them are talking,” I said.
“You expected maybe clucking?”
“Well, shouting. Or strangulation.”
Abraham turned back to unloading equipment from his bags.
I started toward the women, but Abraham took me by the arm without looking up. “Perhaps it would be best to simply let them be, David.”
“But—”
“They are adults,” Abraham said. “They do not need you to work out their problems.”
I folded my arms, huffing. What did their being adults have to do with it? Plenty of adults did need me to work out their problems—otherwise Steelheart would still be alive. Besides, Mizzy was seventeen. Did that even count as an adult?
Abraham removed something from one of the packs and set it down with a soft thump. “Instead of poking where you aren’t needed,” he said to me, “how about helping where you are? I could use your aid.”
“Doing what?”
Abraham lifted the top of the box, revealing a pair of gloves and a jug of sparkling mercury. “Your plan is daring, as I would expect. It is also simple. The best often are. But it does require me to do things I am not sure I can do.”
He was right; the plan was simple. It was also exceptionally dangerous.
Knighthawk had used drones to explore a few of the caverns underneath Ildithia, the ones Digzone had created long ago. There were many under the region, tunneled into the rock here. Ildithia was passing over a large set of them, and we’d chosen this warehouse in part because here we could dig down into one of the caverns and practice there.
Our plan was to train for a month. By then Ildithia would have left these caverns behind—but they would still make a perfect location for a trap. Lots of tunnels, places to set up explosives or to plot escape routes. We’d be familiar with the tunnels, which would give us an edge in the fight.
Once we were ready, we’d sneak from the city and go back to the caves. From there we could lure Prof out. All it would take was using the motivators based on his powers, and he’d come right to us. Ildithia would be miles away, and safe from whatever destruction happened during our fight.
Abraham and Megan would hit him first. The idea was to wear him down before revealing Cody, wearing the full “tensor suit,” as we were calling the set of devices that mimicked Prof’s power portfolio. It hadn’t arrived yet, but Knighthawk claimed it was on its way. So once Abraham and Megan had worn Prof down a little, Cody would appear, manifesting all of Prof’s powers.
We had to hope that Tavi’s power hadn’t been recognized by Prof as being “his.” After all, her forcefields had been a different color.
A piece of me whispered that there might be a larger problem. Prof had been wounded by Tavi’s forcefields, but they hadn’t shut down his powers completely, like what happened with Megan and most Epics.
Could Tia have been wrong? I’d decided that she wasn’t, but now—confronted with one last shot at stopping Prof—I wavered. Some things about Prof and his powers didn’t add up.
What was it that Prof feared?
“For this to work,” Abraham said from beside me, snapping me out of my introspection, “I will need to be able to use the rtich to face Prof. And facing him will require not getting squished by his forcefields.”
“The rtich should be enough,” I said. “The structural integrity of the mercury will be—”
“I believe your notes,” Abraham cut me off, pulling on the gloves. “But I’d still rather do some testing, followed by much practice.”
I shrugged. “What did you have in mind?”
—
What he “had in mind,” apparently, was to put me to work. Our warehouse had a little loft inside it. I spent the next hour working with Cody, who created some large slabs of saltstone in the loft. I then lashed these together and positioned them, in several bunches, ready to push them off the loft.
Finally, I wiped my brow with a rag that was already soaked through, then settled down with my legs hanging over the ledge.
Below, Abraham practiced.
He’d developed his own training regimen with the rtich, based on some old martial art. He stepped into the center of a ring of lights he’d set out on the ground, thrust his hands to one side, then pulled them back and thrust them the other way.
Mercury danced around him. At first it covered his arm, like a silvery sleeve and glove. As he thrust his hands forward, it sprayed outward, becoming a disc connected to his palm. When he moved back into his martial arts motions, it withdrew and covered his arm again, then shot into the shape of a spike as he thrust his hands the other way.
I watched hungrily. The metal moved with a beautiful, otherworldly flow, reflecting light as it snaked around Abraham’s arms—first one, then across his shoulders to the other, like something alive. He turned and ran, then leaped—and the mercury coursed down his legs, becoming a short pillar that Abraham landed upon. It held his weight, though it looked spindly and frail.
“Ready?” I called from above.
“Ready,”
he called.
“Be careful,” I said. “I don’t want this crushing you.”
He gave no response, so I sighed, then stood and used a crowbar to pry one of the large, lashed-together slabs of saltstone off the loft and send it tumbling toward him. The idea was for him to create a thin line of mercury in the path of the falling slabs, then see how much the impact twisted the mercury.
Instead, Abraham stepped directly into the path of the stones and raised his hand.
My view was obstructed, but best I could figure, Abraham caused the mercury to run up his side and arm—becoming a long ribbon that extended from his palm, down his side, and to his feet to form a kind of brace.
My breath caught as the saltstone plummeted toward him. I craned my neck to look down, and the pile hit hard, bouncing off Abraham, the lashings snapping. The slabs crashed to the sides, revealing Abraham grinning below, his hand still raised, his palm coated with mercury. The brace had been enough to deflect the weight of the slabs.
“That was foolhardy,” I called to him. “Stop trying to put me out of a job!”
“Better to know now if this will work,” he called back to me, “than to find out in the middle of a fight with Prof. Besides, I was relatively certain.”
“Still want to try this next part?” Cody asked, coming up beside me, sniper rifle on his shoulder.
“Yes, please,” Abraham said, thrusting his hand toward us and making the shield. It grew as large as he was, shimmering and incredibly thin.
I looked at Cody, then shrugged and put my hands over my ears. A series of shots followed; fortunately they were suppressed, so the ear-holding wasn’t as necessary as it might have been.
The mercury puckered, catching the bullets. Or, well, it stopped them—which upon consideration wasn’t all that impressive, as bodies technically did that all the time. Mine had done so on occasion.
Still, the mercury didn’t tear or split, so it was an effective shield, though unfortunately the application was limited. Abraham didn’t have superhuman reflexes; he wouldn’t be able to stop bullets already fired.
He turned and the mercury flowed back to him, scattering the bullets to the floor. It ran down his arm and then his leg before streaking from his feet to form a series of steps rising toward me. He walked up them, grinning widely.