Firefight

  “With a forcefield bubble extending in front of me?” Prof said. “Yeah. Haven’t practiced it in ages.” He grunted. “I came into the building from below, by vaporizing a section of ground and crossing over into the basement. I’m going to make a forcefield tunnel through the water for these people and hike back to the building we left. Can you meet me there?”

  The thought of going back into the bay nauseated me, but I wasn’t about to admit that. “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  “Prof …,” I said, trying to look morose, though I felt distinctly the opposite. “You’re a hero. You really are.”

  “Stop.”

  “But, you saved—”

  “Stop.”

  I fell silent.

  “Get back to the building,” he said. “I’ll need you to pilot the sub and take the people to a place well outside Regalia’s range, then let them go. Do you understand?”

  “Sure. But why can’t you pilot it?”

  “Because,” Prof said, voice growing soft. “It’s going to take every bit of my willpower over the next few minutes not to murder these people for inconveniencing me.”

  I swallowed. “Got it,” I said, then fixed the wires on my boot. I pocketed the phone and pointed the streambeam at the water, testing to make certain everything was operating—then I double-checked the wires just to be certain.

  Finally I started out, more carefully this time. It took a long while, but I eventually arrived. Then I had to wait in a room near where we’d docked the submarine for the better part of an hour before I heard sounds.

  I stood up as a door opened, and an ashen group of people began to pile out of a hallway. Prof had led them up into another part of the building. I rushed to help, calmed them, then explained how we’d have to enter the submarine in the darkness with everyone being as quiet as possible. We couldn’t risk Regalia discovering what Prof had done.

  With some effort, I got the coughing, wet, and exhausted group of people into the submarine. There were about forty of them, but we could all fit. Barely.

  I helped the last one down, a mother with a baby, then climbed out and crossed through the building to the room where I’d met the people, shining my mobile to make certain I hadn’t left anyone.

  Prof stood in the opposite doorway, mostly in shadow. His goggles reflected the light so I couldn’t see his eyes. He nodded to me once, then turned around and vanished into the gloom.

  I sighed and clicked my mobile off, then walked back to the submarine room and used the ropes to guide me. I climbed in and pulled down the hatch, sealing it, then descended into the crowded sub full of wet people who smelled of smoke. Prof’s attitude disturbed me, but it wasn’t enough to dispel the warmth I felt inside. He’d done it. Despite his complaints about my recklessness, he’d gone and saved the people himself.

  He and I were the same. He was just a hell of a lot more competent than I was. I took the sub’s front seat and called Val to ask for instructions on how to pilot the thing.

  31

  I set the box of rations down with a thump, then stood and wiped my brow. Several of the Babilaran refugees Prof had saved picked up the boxes and hurried off with them, making quickly for the nearby wreckage of a warehouse. They’d cleaned off some of the soot in the day since I’d dropped them off here in the rotting remains of a small island off the coast of New York, but they seemed to have gained a healthy sense of self-preservation during that time. It must not have been buried very deep.

  “Thank you,” a woman named Soomi said, bowing. Though it was evening, their spraypainted clothing didn’t glow here, so it just looked dirty. Old.

  “Just remember our deal,” I said.

  “We didn’t see anything,” she promised. “And we won’t return to the city for at least a month.”

  I nodded. Soomi and her people believed that the Reckoners had saved them using secret forcefield technology. They weren’t to tell anyone what they’d seen, but even if it got out, hopefully the stories wouldn’t implicate Prof as an Epic.

  Soomi picked up one of the last boxes and joined the others, hurrying back toward a group of ramshackle buildings with overgrown grounds. It was best not to be seen with food, in case scavengers saw you. Fortunately, the only way off this island was a bridge just to the north, so hopefully they would be safe here.

  My heart wrenched to see them without homes or possessions, cast adrift, but this was all we could do. And it was maybe more than we should have done—we’d needed to have Cody airlift us supplies out of Newcago to provide rations for these people.

  I turned and made my way down an empty, broken street, rifle over my shoulder. It was a short walk to the old dock where we’d parked the submarine. Val lounged, seated on top of it. She’d stacked the boxes of food on the dock, while the refugees and I had carried them inside.

  I hesitated on the dock, looking out toward Babilar to the southwest. It glowed with surreal colors, like a portal to some other dimension. Though the water extending out before me looked flat, I knew that it sloped upward slightly. Regalia had sculpted this city’s look intentionally; she even maintained different water levels in different parts of Babilar, creating handcrafted neighborhoods of rooftops and sunken streets.

  She does care, I thought. She built this city like she intended to stay here, to rule. She made it inviting.

  So why destroy it now?

  “Coming?” Val called to me.

  I nodded and crossed the dock and scrambled aboard the sub—this area was outside of Regalia’s range of sight, theoretically, so we could let it surface in the open.

  “Hey,” Val said as I passed, “when are you going to tell me how you saved them? For real, I mean.”

  I hesitated at the hatch, light from down inside rising to bathe me. “I used the spyril,” I said.

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “I put out the fire in a room,” I said, using the lie Tia and I had prepared. We’d been expecting Val or Exel to prod eventually. “I was able to crowd everyone into the same room, then keep them safe and quiet until Regalia thought everyone was dead. Then I snuck them out.”

  It was a good enough lie. Val didn’t know that the building had basically collapsed once the water came rushing back in. It was plausible that I’d have been able to get the people out.

  Good lie or not, I hated telling it. Couldn’t Prof be straight with the members of his own team?

  Val regarded me carefully, and though her face was too much in shadows to read, I felt like the only rotten strawberry in a line of strawberries. Finally, she shrugged. “Well, nice work.”

  I hurriedly slipped down into the submarine. Val followed, then locked the hatch and moved to the front seat. She didn’t believe what I’d told her, not completely. I could read it in the stiff way she sat down, the too-controlled sound of her voice as she called Tia and said we were on our way back to the supply dump to get the next set of boxes, which would restock our base.

  I fidgeted, and we moved under the waves and traveled for a while in silence. Finally, I forced myself to get into the copilot’s seat next to Val at the front. I still knew next to nothing about Val. Maybe some disarming conversation would ease her suspicion about what had happened the day before.

  “So,” I said, “I notice you prefer a Colt 1911. A good, time-tested gun. Is that a Springfield frame and slide set?”

  “Don’t know, honestly,” she said, glancing at the gun she wore on her hip. “Sam gave it to me.”

  “But, I mean, surely you need to know. For replacement parts.”

  Val shrugged. “It’s just a gun. If it breaks, I’ll get another.”

  Just a …

  Just a gun? Had she really said that?

  I found my mouth working, but no sound coming out, as we puttered beneath the waves. The gun you carried was literally your life—if it malfunctioned, you could be dead. How could she say something like that?

  Be disarming, I told myself forcefully. Chastising her won’t m
ake her more comfortable around you.

  “So, uh,” I said, coughing into my hand, “you must have enjoyed it here, on this assignment. Sweet undersea base, no Epics to fight, a city full of good-natured people. Must be the best job a Reckoner team could get assigned.”

  “Sure,” Val said. “Until one of my friends got murdered.”

  And now I was “replacing” that friend in the team. Great. Another reminder why she shouldn’t like me.

  “You’ve known Mizzy for a while,” I said, trying another tactic. “You didn’t grow up in the city, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you stationed before this?”

  “Mexico. But you shouldn’t ask about our pasts. It’s against protocol.”

  “Just trying to—”

  “I know what you’re trying to do. It’s not necessary. I’ll do my job; you do yours.”

  “Sure,” I said. “All right.” I settled back in my seat.

  Wait. Mexico? I perked up. “You … weren’t in on the Hermosillo job, were you?”

  Val eyed me, but said nothing.

  “The hit on Puños de Fuego!” I exclaimed.

  “How do you know about that?” Val asked.

  “Oh man. Was it true, did he really throw a tank at you?”

  Val kept her eyes forward, tapping a button on the sub’s control panel. “Yeah,” she finally said. “An entire flippin’ tank. Broke open the wall of our base of operations.”

  “Wow.”

  “What’s more, I was running ops.”

  “So you—”

  “Yeah. I was inside when this tank comes crashing right through the wall. He’d dodged around Sam and managed to double back, so he could hit our operations station. Still not sure how he even knew where we were.”

  I grinned, imagining it. Puños had been a beastly strength Epic, capable of lifting practically anything—even things that should have broken apart as he did it. Not a High Epic, but hard to kill, with enhanced endurance and skin like an elephant’s.

  “I never did figure out how you beat him,” I said. “Only that the team eventually took him out, despite the job going wrong.”

  Val kept her gaze trained straight ahead, but I caught a hint of a smile on her lips.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well … I was there,” she said, growing slightly more animated, “in the rubble of our operations station—a little brick building in the center of the city. And he was coming for me. I was alone, no support.”

  “And?”

  “And … well, there was a tank in the room.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Val said. “At first I climbed into the thing just to hide. But then, it was armed, and he walked right in front of the barrel. The tank was on its side, but it had crashed in through the wall rear-end-first. So I figured, what the hell?”

  “You shot him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “With a tank.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “It was stupid,” Val said, though she was still smiling. “If that barrel had been bent, I’d probably have blown myself up instead. But … well, it worked. Sam said he found Puños’s arm seven streets over.” She looked at me, then seemed to realize who she was talking to. Her expression dimmed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For not being Sam.”

  “That’s stupid,” Val said, turning away from me. She hesitated. “You’re kind of infectious, Steelslayer. You know that?”

  “It’s my gritty, determined manliness.”

  “Um. No. It’s not. But it might be your enthusiasm.” She shook her head and pulled back on the steering column, raising the sub up toward the surface. “Either way, you can go be manly hauling boxes. We’ve arrived.”

  I smiled, glad to have finally had a conversation with Val that didn’t involve a lot of scowling. I got up and made my way over to the ladder. The door to the bathroom was rattling again. We really needed to get Mizzy to fix the blasted thing. I nudged it closed with my toe, then I climbed up and opened the hatch.

  The land up above was pitch-black, darkness fully upon us. This supply dump wasn’t as far up the coast as City Island, but we should be well outside Regalia’s range. Still, it seemed a good idea to never leave the sub without someone in it, so I’d fetch the boxes and carry them the short distance to the coast, then set them down for Val. She’d get them from shore to the sub, then carry them down the ladder and stack them.

  I shouldered my rifle and climbed out onto a quiet dock, water lapping against the wood, as if to pointedly remind me that it was still there. I hurried across the dock and approached a dark building ahead, an old shed where Cody had unloaded our supplies.

  I slipped inside. At least there wouldn’t be as many boxes this time around. We probably should have carried them all down before, but our arms had been aching, and a short break had sounded really nice.

  I turned on the light on my mobile and checked the room.

  Then I pulled open the hidden trapdoor in the floor, and climbed down to check on Prof.

  32

  BURROWED into the rock beneath the shed was one of the secret Reckoner stopover bases, set up with a cot, some supplies, and a workbench. Prof stood by the bench, holding up a beaker and inspecting it by the light of a lantern. That was an improvement; when I’d come down here before, he’d been lying on the cot looking through some old photos—they lay scattered on the cot now.

  Prof didn’t look up as I came down. “We’re grabbing the rest of the supplies,” I said, thumbing over my shoulder. “You need anything?”

  Prof shook his head and stirred his beaker.

  “You going to be all right?” I asked.

  “I’m feeling fine,” Prof said. “I’m planning to head back into the city a little later in the evening. Might return to the base tomorrow; might stay away another day. We’ll need to give it enough time that Val’s team will believe I went to check in on another Reckoner cell.”

  That had been Tia’s explanation for his absence. I watched curiously as he mixed another beaker with a liquid of a different color.

  “We’re hitting Newton in two days,” I told him. “Tia made the call, since she said you weren’t being responsive.”

  Two days was well before Obliteration’s expected deadline, which would give us some wiggle room in case things went poorly.

  He grunted. “Two days? I’ll be back by then.” He mixed the two beakers into a jar and stepped back. A large jet of foam launched from the container, reaching almost to the ceiling, then fell back in a frothy splat. Prof watched, then smiled.

  “Hydrogen peroxide mixed with potassium iodide,” he said. “The kids used to love that one.” He reached over and started mixing some other materials.

  “Could you come back sooner?” I asked him. “We still don’t have a plan to deal with Obliteration, and he’s got a gun to the city’s head.”

  “I’m working on how to deal with that,” Prof said. “I think if we bring down Regalia, it might scare him away. If it doesn’t, we might find intel on his weakness among her notes.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We evacuate the city,” Prof said.

  Tia had theorized the same possibility, but it seemed like a bad option to me. We couldn’t start a theoretical evacuation until Regalia was dead—otherwise she’d surely move against the fleeing people. I doubted we’d have enough time to get everyone out before Obliteration wasted the place.

  “Tell Tia to call me a little later tonight,” Prof said. “We’ll talk about it.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, then paused as he worked on another mixture. “What are you doing?”

  “Another experiment.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, turning away. His face fell into shadow. “Remembering the old days helps. Remembering the students, and their excitement, their joy. The memories see
m to push it back.”

  I nodded slowly, but he wasn’t looking at me. He’d returned to his science experiment. So instead I inched forward to see if I could catch a glimpse of the photos he’d been looking at.

  I reached the cot and leaned down and picked one up. The photo showed a younger version of Prof, wearing casual clothing—jeans, a T-shirt—standing with some people in a room filled with monitors and computers. Other people were scattered throughout the room, wearing uniform blue shirts.

  Prof glanced at me.

  I held up the photo. “Some kind of lab?”

  “NASA,” he said, sounding reluctant. “The old space program.”

  “I thought you said you were a schoolteacher!”

  “I’m not the one who worked there, genius,” Prof said. “Look more closely.”

  I looked back down, and realized that in the photo Prof looked more like a tourist, grinning and getting his picture taken. It took me a second to spot that one of the many people in the photo wearing a blue NASA shirt had short red hair. Tia.

  “Tia’s a rocket scientist?” I asked.

  “Was,” Prof said. “That was a long time ago. She let me visit right after we first started dating. Highlight of my life—bragged about it to my students for months.”

  I looked down at the picture. The man in this photo, though it was obviously Prof, looked like a different species entirely. Where were the lines of worry on the man’s face, the haunted eyes, the imposing stature?

  Nearly thirteen years of Calamity had changed this man. And not just because of the powers he’d gained.

  Another photo peeked out from underneath the sheet. I pulled it out. And Prof didn’t stop me, turning back to his experiment.

  In this picture, four people stood in a line. One was Prof, wearing his now-trademark black lab coat, goggles in the pocket. Beside him Regalia stood with hand outstretched, a glob of water hovering above her fingers. She wore an elegant blue gown. Tia was there, and there was another man, one I didn’t know. Older, with white-grey hair sticking out from his head in an almost crown shape, he sat in a chair while the others stood.

  “Who is this man?” I asked.