The water was an icy shock, jets propelling me face-first under the surface. Diving for the water had been my first instinct in order to avoid that gunfire, and it worked, as I didn’t get shot. But it did put me in Regalia’s grasp.
The water around me began to constrict, to thicken, like syrup. I twisted, thrusting my feet downward, and engaged the spyril at full force.
It was as if the water had become tar, and each progressive inch of movement was harder than the inch before it. Bubbles grew trapped as I breathed them out, frozen like in Jell-O, and I felt the spyril shake violently on my back. Blackness surrounded me.
I didn’t fear that blackness any longer. I’d looked it in the eye. My lungs strained, but I shoved down the panic.
I broke the surface. Once my arms were free, the spyril thrust me out into the air with a triumphant jet, but tendrils of water waited for me. They wrapped around my legs.
I pointed the streambeam of the spyril right at them.
My machine sucked up those tendrils like it did any other water, spraying them out the jets at the bottom and freeing me in a heartbeat. I burst higher into the air, dazed from lack of oxygen. I reached a rooftop and let the jets cut out, rolling across it, breathing deeply.
Okay, I thought, no more going underwater with Regalia around.
I’d barely caught my breath when water tendrils climbed up over the roof, like the fingers of an enormous beast. Newton landed near me in a blur, trailing glowing color from her hair. She came right at me, fast as an eyeblink, and all I could do was engage the spyril, my streambeam pointed right at one of Regalia’s tendrils.
The sudden jet of power lurched me across the rooftop away from Newton. Just barely. Worse, only one of the footjets engaged. I didn’t know if it was the constriction down below, the tendrils that had grabbed me after, or the rough landing. But the machine had always been finicky, and it had chosen this moment to finick.
Newton moved past me, her sword striking the ground where I’d just been lying, throwing up sparks. She reached the side of the rooftop, where another building rose up alongside this one, no space between. There she stopped.
And, from what I saw, stopping was pretty dramatic. Best I could tell, she came out of her super-speed run by throwing one hand up against the wall of the building next door. All of her momentum was transferred to the structure and, in the bizarre way of Epics, completely scrambled the laws of physics. The wall exploded into a spray of dust and crumbling bricks.
She turned around, dropping her sword—now jagged and broken—and reached to her side, slipping another one out of a sheath at her waist. She spun the sword, regarding me, and walked forward more casually. Around us, Regalia’s tendrils continued surrounding the entire building, creeping up over the sky, making a dome. This small rooftop was abandoned, and its painted graffiti reflected off the water around us. Liquid began to pour in over the lip of the roof, flooding it with an inch or two of water, and Regalia took shape from it beside Newton.
I pulled out my gun and fired. I knew it was pointless, but I had to try something, and the spyril just sputtered when I engaged it—both jets refusing to spit anything out now. The bullets bounced off Newton, reflected out toward the closing dome of water, making little splashes. Newton leaned down, one hand on the ground, preparing to sprint, but Regalia raised a hand and stopped her.
“I want to know,” she said to me, “what you did earlier.”
My heart thumping, I scrambled to my feet and glanced to the side, looking for a way out. Regalia’s dome of water completely encased the rooftop, and new tendrils were rising from the flooded roof to try to snatch me. Desperate, I pointed the streambeam at one and tried to engage the spyril. The jets at my feet wouldn’t work.
But, to my relief, the handjet did. I was able to slurp up the tendril and shoot it the other way. I got the next, then the next, then started shooting them at Newton as I hopped backward. My attack just splashed away from her, but she seemed to find it annoying.
More and more tendrils came for me, but I sucked each one up, jetting them outward.
“Stop doing that!” Regalia roared, voice booming. A hundred tendrils grew up, far more than I could target.
Then they immediately started to shrink.
I blinked at them, then looked at Regalia, who seemed as baffled as I was. Something else was coming up out of the water around me. Plants?
It was roots. Tree roots. They grew wickedly fast around us, sucking in the water, draining it from every source it could find, feeding upon it. Dawnslight was watching. I looked back at Regalia and grinned.
“The child is acting up again,” Regalia said with a sigh, crossing her arms and looking at Newton. “End this.”
In an instant Newton became a blur.
I couldn’t outrun her. I couldn’t hurt her.
All I could do was gamble.
“You’re beautiful, Newton,” I yelled.
The blur became a person again, plants curling up at her feet. Her lips pursed, she looked at me, eyes wide, sword held in limp fingers.
“You’re a wonderful Epic,” I continued, raising my gun.
She backed away.
“Obviously,” I said, “that’s why both Obliteration and Regalia are always sure to compliment you. It couldn’t, of course, be because compliments are your weakness.” That was why Newton let her gang be so rowdy and insubordinate. She hadn’t wanted them complimenting her by accident.
Newton turned and ran.
I shot her in the back.
It wrenched my gut as she fell face-first to the overgrown ground. But at my core, I was an assassin. Yes, I killed in the name of justice, bringing down only those who deserved it, but at the end of the day, I was an assassin. I’d shoot someone in the back. Whatever it took.
I walked up, then planted two more bullets in her skull, just to be certain.
I looked at Regalia, who stood, arms still crossed, among the growing flora around us—saplings becoming full trees, fruit sprouting, swelling, and sagging from limbs and vines. Her figure started to shrink as Dawnslight drank up the water that formed her current projection, and her dome fell apart, showering down upon me and the rooftop.
“I see that I spoke too freely when punishing Newton,” Regalia said. “This is my fault, for giving away her weakness. You really are an annoyance, boy.”
I raised the handgun and pointed it at Regalia’s head.
“Oh please,” she said. “You know you can’t hurt me with that.”
“I’m coming for you,” I said softly. “I’m going to kill you before you kill Prof.”
“Is that so?” Regalia snapped. “And do you realize that while you’ve been distracted, the Reckoners have already executed their plan? That your idolized Jonathan Phaedrus has killed the woman you love?”
A shock ran through me.
“He used her as bait, to draw me,” Regalia said. “Noble Jonathan murdered her in an attempt to make me appear. And I did, of course. So that he’d have his little data point. His team is storming my supposed sanctuary right now.”
“You’re lying.”
“Oh?” Regalia said. “And what is that you smell?”
I’d smelled it earlier. With an edge of panic, I ran to the side of the building and looked toward something I could barely make out against the darkness. A column of smoke rising from a nearby building—the place where Mizzy said Prof had been waiting.
Fire.
Megan!
47
REGALIA let me go. That probably should have worried me more than it did.
I focused only on reaching that building. I fiddled with the leg wires on the spyril and managed to get one of the jets working. That let me awkwardly cross the gaps between rooftops. I landed on a building next to the one belching the column of smoke, and heat blasted me despite the distance. The fire was burning from the lower floors upward. The roof itself wasn’t yet consumed, but the lower floors were engulfed. It seemed like the entire stru
cture was close to collapsing.
Frantic, I looked down at the glove of my handjet. Might it be enough? I jetted across to the rooftop, where the heat was actually less intense than it had been when facing the burning lower floors. Sweating, I sprinted across the roof and found a stairwell access door.
I shoved it open. Smoke billowed out, and I got a lungful. Driven back by the heat, I stumbled away, coughing. I squeezed tears from my eyes at the smoke and looked at the spyril strapped to my arm. Thoughts of using the spyril like a fireman’s hose seemed silly now. There was no way I could get close enough, and there wouldn’t be water inside the building anyway.
“She’s dead,” a quiet voice said.
I started, jumping to the side and reaching for Mizzy’s handgun. Prof sat on the side of the rooftop, shadowed by the little stairwell shack so that I hadn’t seen him at first.
“Prof?” I asked, uncertain.
“She came to save you,” he said softly. He was slumped down, a shadowy mountain of a man in the gloom. No neon glowed near here. “I sent her a dozen messages with your phone, made it seem like you were in danger. She came. Even though I’d already started the fire, she broke into the building, thinking you were trapped inside. She ran, coughing and blind, to the room where she thought you lay trapped and pinned under a fallen tree. I caught her, took away her weapons, and left her in there with forcefields on the doorways and the window.”
“Please, no …,” I whispered. I couldn’t think. It wasn’t possible.
“Just her alone in the room,” Prof continued. He held something in his hand. Megan’s handgun, the one I’d given back to her. “Water on the floor. I needed Regalia to see. I was sure she’d come. And she did—but only to laugh at me.”
“Megan’s still down there!” I said. “In what room?”
“Two floors down, but she’s dead, David. She has to be. Too much fire. I think …” He seemed dazed. “I must have been wrong about her all along. And you were right. Her illusions broke apart, you see.…”
“Prof,” I said, grabbing him. “We have to go for her. Please.”
“I can hold it back, can’t I?” Prof said. He looked to me, and his face seemed too shadowed; only his eyes glittered, reflecting starlight. He seized me by the arms. “Take some of it. Take it away from me, so I can’t use it!”
I felt a tingling sensation wash through me. Prof, gifting me some of his powers.
“Jon!” Tia’s voice barked from the mobile on his shoulder, where he’d strapped it, apparently eschewing an earpiece. “Jon, it’s Mizzy.… Jon, she’s got the camera that was watching Obliteration, and she’s been writing messages on paper and holding them up for us to see. She says Obliteration isn’t there.”
Clever, Mizzy, I thought.
“No, that’s because he’s here,” Val’s voice said over the line. “Prof, you’ve got to see this. We’ve swept Regalia’s base at Building C. She’s nowhere to be seen, but there’s something else. Obliteration, we think. At least, something is glowing in here, and glowing powerfully. This looks bad.…”
Prof looked to me, then seemed to grow stronger. “I’m coming,” he said to them. “Hold that building.”
“Yes sir,” Val said.
Prof darted away, a forcefield forming to make a bridge for him from this building to the next.
“It’s all wrong, Prof,” I called after him. “Regalia isn’t bound by the limits you thought she was. She knows all about the plan. Whatever Val just found, it’s a trap. For you.”
He stopped at the edge of the rooftop. Smoke billowed out of the building around us, so thick it was growing hard for me to breathe. But for some reason, the heat seemed to have lessened.
“That sounds like her,” Prof said, his voice trailing back to me in the night.
“So …”
“So if Obliteration is really there,” he said, “I have to stop him. I will simply need to find a way to survive the trap.” Prof charged across his forcefield, leaving me.
I sat down, drained, numb. Megan’s handgun lay on the ground before me. I picked it up. Megan … I’d been too late. I’d failed. And I still didn’t know what Regalia’s trap entailed.
So what? a piece of me said. You give up?
When had I ever done that?
I shouted, standing up and charging toward the stairwell down. I didn’t care about the heat, though I assumed it would drive me back. Only it didn’t. It felt practically cold in the stairwell.
Prof’s forcefield, I realized, driving myself onward. He just gifted one to me. One had protected me against Obliteration’s heat. It would work just as well against this fire, it appeared.
I kept my head down, breath held, but eventually had to suck in some air. I muffled my mouth and nose with my T-shirt, which was soaked from the fight with Regalia, and it seemed to work. Either that, or Prof’s forcefield kept the smoke away from me. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how they worked, even still.
Two floors down, where Prof said he’d left Megan, I entered a place alight with fire. Violent flames created an alien illumination. It was a place a man like me wasn’t supposed to go.
I gritted my teeth and pushed forward, trusting in Prof’s forcefield. Part of me, deep inside, panicked at the sight of all this fire—walls burned from floor to ceiling and flames dripped down from above, Dawnslight’s trees engulfed in orange. There was no way I could survive this, could I? Prof’s forcefields were never a hundred percent effective when given to someone else.
I was too worried about Megan, too desperate and shaken, to stop moving. I shoved my way through a burning door, charred wood breaking around me. I stumbled past a hole in the floor, my arm up warding against the heat I could not feel. Everything was so bright. I could barely see in here.
I took in a breath but felt no pain from the heat. The forcefield wouldn’t cool the air as I drew it in. Why wasn’t I burning my throat with each breath? Sparks! Nothing made sense.
Megan. Where was Megan?
I stumbled through another doorway and saw a body on the floor, in the middle of a burned rug.
I cried out and ran to it, kneeling, cradling the half-burned figure, tipping the charred head to see a familiar face. It was her. I screamed, looking at the dead eyes, the burned flesh, and pulled the limp body close.
I knelt in the inferno of hell itself, the world dying around me, and knew I had failed.
My jacket was burning, and my skin was darkening from the flames. Sparks. It was killing me too. Why couldn’t I feel it?
Crying, reckless, I grabbed Megan’s body and blinked away the horrid light of fire and smoke. I stumbled to my feet and looked toward a window. The glass was melting from the heat, but there was no sign of a forcefield—Prof must have already dismissed the forcefields surrounding the room. With a yell, I ran for the window, holding her, and crashed out into the cold night air.
I fell a short distance before engaging the spyril. The single jet I had fixed still worked, fortunately, and slowed my fall until I was hovering in the air outside the burning building, holding Megan’s corpse, water jetting beneath me and smoke breaking around me. Slowly, on a single jet, I raised us to the next building over and landed before setting Megan down.
Charred flakes of blackened skin fell from my arms, revealing pink flesh beneath—which immediately became a healthy tan. I blinked at it, then suddenly realized why I hadn’t felt pain, and why I’d been able to breathe in the heated air. Prof hadn’t just given me a forcefield, he’d gifted me some of his healing powers as well. I touched my scalp and found that though my hair had burned away, it was growing back—Prof’s healing power restoring me to the way I had been before entering the inferno.
So I was safe. But what did it matter? Megan was still dead. I knelt above her, feeling helpless and alone, broken inside. I’d worked so hard, and I’d still failed.
Overwhelmed, I bowed my head. Maybe … maybe she’d lied about her weakness. She’d be okay then, right? I touched her
face, turning it. Half of it was burned, but when I nudged her head to the side, I could ignore the burned part. The other side looked barely singed. Just a little ash on the cheek. Beautiful, like she was just sleeping.
Tears leaking down the sides of my face, I took her hand. “No,” I whispered. “I watched you die once. I don’t believe it happened again. Do you hear me? You aren’t dead. Or … you’re coming back. That’s it. Do you have that recording going like last time? Because if you do, I want you to know. I believe in you. I don’t think …”
I trailed off.
If she came back, it meant she’d lied to me about her weakness. I wanted that to be true, desperately, because I wanted her to be alive. But at the same time, if she’d lied about her weakness, what did that mean? I hadn’t demanded it, hadn’t wanted it, but she’d given it to me—so it seemed something sacred.
If she’d lied to me about her weakness, then I knew I wouldn’t be able to trust anything else she said. So, one way or another, Megan was lost to me.
I wiped tears from my chin, then reached out one last time to take her hand in mine. The back of the hand was burned, but not too badly, yet her fingers were stuck together in a fist. It was almost like … she was clutching something?
I frowned, prying her fingers apart. Indeed, her palm held a small object that had been melted to her sleeve: a small remote control. What in Calamity’s light? I held it up. It looked like the little remotes that came with car keys. It had melted at the bottom but looked to be in good shape otherwise. I hit the button.
Something sounded from just beneath me. A faint clicking noise, followed by some odd cracks.
I stared at the control for a long moment, then scrambled to my feet and ran to the side of the building. I pushed the button again. There. Was that … gunfire? Suppressed gunfire?
I lowered myself with the spyril to a window two stories down. There, set up in the shadows of a window, was the Gottschalk, sleek and black, with suppressor on the end of the muzzle. I moved to the side and pushed the button. It fired remotely, pelting the wall of the burning building with bullets.