Firefight (12 page)

“Dish soap,” Val confirmed. “Changes the surface tension of the water, makes it almost impossible for
her
to control it.”

“Also warps her view out,” Exel said.

“That’s awesome,” I said. “Her weakness?”

“Not so far as we know,” Mizzy said eagerly. “Just an effect on her powers. It’s more like how dumping a lot of water on a fire Epic might make their abilities sputter. But it’s reeeaaal useful.”

“Useful, but perhaps meaningless,” Val said, shaking out the last of her bottle of soap. “In the past we’ve used this as a precaution only. Tia, she’s
seen
us. I’m sure she identified every one of us.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Tia said.

“But—”

“Lights out,” Tia said.

Val, Mizzy, and Exel shared a look. Then they clicked off their mobiles, plunging the place into darkness. This seemed
another good precaution—if Regalia could look into the room, all she’d see was blackness.

Our boat rocked, and I grabbed Mizzy by the arm, worried. Something seemed to be happening in the room. Water streaming from somewhere? Sparks! Was the building sinking? Worse, had Regalia found us?

It stopped, yet the stillness was, for a second, even more unsettling. Heart thumping, I imagined I was back in that water with the chain on my leg. Sinking toward the depths.

Mizzy pulled on my arm. She was stepping out of the boat, but in the wrong direction.
Into
the water. But—

I heard her foot hit something solid. What? I allowed myself to be led out of the boat, and I stepped on something metal and slick. Had I gotten turned around? No, we were walking on something that had risen out of the water in the room here. A platform?

As we reached a hatch, and I felt my way to a ladder downward, it suddenly struck me. Not a platform.

A submarine.

15

I
hesitated, standing in the darkness, holding the ladder leading down into the sub I couldn’t yet see.

I hadn’t realized that this whole “water” thing was going to be an issue for me. I mean … half the world is water, right? And we’re all half water to boot. So stepping into the sub should have felt like a sheep falling into a big pile of cotton.

Only it didn’t. It felt like a sheep falling into a pile of nails. Wet nails. On the bottom of the ocean.

I wasn’t about to let the other Reckoners see me sweat, though. Even if they couldn’t see me in the darkness. Hear me sweat? Ew. Anyway, I swallowed and climbed down into the submarine by touch. Exel’s heavy footfalls followed last. Something thumped above us, and I assumed he was twisting the hatch closed, sealing it.

It was as black as charcoal at midnight inside. Or, well, as black as a grape at midnight—or pretty much anything at midnight. I felt my way to a seat as the machine started to putter, then sank down quietly.

“Here,” Mizzy said, forcing something into my hand. A towel. “Wipe up any water you might have tracked in.”

Glad to have something to do, I wiped my seat down, then the floor, which was carpeted. Another towel followed, and I dried myself as best I could. Obviously, hiding from Regalia required making certain that no open surfaces of water were around.

“Okay?” Mizzy asked a few minutes later.

“We’re good,” Val replied.

Mizzy turned on her mobile, bathing us in light, letting me see the chamber around us. It was lined on both sides with plush orange and blue vinyl benches under windows that had been covered with heavy black cloth. I realized that, unlike what I’d expected, this wasn’t a military submarine. It was some kind of sightseeing vehicle, like one that might take people on tours around a reef. The carpet on the floor had obviously been installed later to help keep pools of liquid from forming.

Exel sat at the ready, watching for any puddles we’d missed in the darkness. “Regalia supposedly needs two inches or so to look through,” he said to me, “but we prefer not to take chances.”

“Does it matter?” I asked. “Can’t she just look under the waves and find us?”

“No,” Tia said. She’d settled into the last seat in the sub, near what appeared to be a restroom hung with a sign reading,
MIZZY’S EXPLOSIVE BUNKER. ENTER AT PEACE. EXIT IN PIECES
. The latch was broken, and the door kept swinging open and closed.

“Imagine you’re contacting me via your mobile,” Tia continued. “My face appears on your screen, and yours appears on mine. Could you instead, if you wanted to, turn your perspective around and look
inside
my mobile?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way,” I said. “The screen faces outward.”

“That’s how her abilities work,” Tia said. “A surface of water exposed to the air is like a screen for her, and she can look out of it. She can’t just look the other direction. Under the surface, we’re invisible to her.”

“We’re still in her power,” Val pointed out from the driver’s seat up ahead. “She raised water to flood all of Manhattan—reaching down to rip apart this submarine would be nothing to her. In the past, we counted on her not knowing we were down here.”

“She could have killed us in the boat above,” Tia said. “She let us go instead, which means that for now she doesn’t want us dead. Now that we’re under the surface, she won’t know where to look for us. We’re free, for the moment.”

Everyone seemed to accept this. At the very least, there wasn’t much point in arguing. As we sailed—or whatever you did in a submarine—onward, I relocated to a seat just beside Tia.

“You know a lot about her powers,” I said softly.

“I’ll give you a briefing later,” she said.

“Will that briefing include
how
you know all of this?”

“I’ll let Jon decide what needs to be shared,” she answered, then rose and moved to the front of the vehicle to speak quietly with Val.

I sat back and tried not to think about the fact that we
were underwater. We probably couldn’t go very deep—this was a recreational craft—but that didn’t bring me much comfort. What happened if something went wrong? If this sub started leaking? If it just stopped moving and sank down to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor here, with us all trapped inside …

I shifted uncomfortably, and my pocket crinkled. I grimaced, reaching in and pulling out my mobile. What was left of it at least.

“Wow,” Exel said, settling down next to me. “How’d you do
that
?”

“Angered an Epic,” I said.

“Give it to Mizzy,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “She’ll either fix it or get you a new one. Be warned, though: whatever she gives you might come with some … modifications.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“All
good
and
very useful
additions,” Mizzy said. She’d taken the bomb from me and was disarming it in her seat.

“So,” I said, turning to Exel, “Mizzy is repairs and equipment—”

“And point,” she said.

“—and other things,” I continued. “Val is operations and support. I’ve been trying to place your job in the team. You’re not point. What do you do?”

Exel put his feet up on the seat across from him, leaning with his back to the covered window. “Mostly I do the stuff that Val doesn’t want to do—such as talking to people.”

“I talk to people,” Val snapped from the driver’s seat ahead.

“You yell at them, dear,” Exel said.

“It’s a form of talking. Besides, I don’t
only
yell.”

“Yes, you occasionally grumble.” Exel smiled at me. “We’ve
been a deeply embedded team, Steelslayer. That means lots of observation and interaction with the people in the city.”

I nodded. The large man had a disarming way about him, with those rosy cheeks and that thick brown beard. Cheerful, friendly.

“I’ll also bury your corpse,” he noted to me.

Ooookaaaay …

“You’ll look good in the coffin,” he said. “Nice skeletal structure, lean body. A bit of cotton under the eyelids, some embalming fluid in the veins, and poof—you’ll be done. Too bad your skin is so pale, though. You’ll show bruises really easily. Nothing a little makeup can’t solve, eh?”

“Exel?” Val called from the front.

“Yes, Val?”

“Stop being creepy.”

“It’s not creepy,” he said. “Everyone dies, Val. Ignoring the fact won’t make it not true!”

I took the opportunity to scoot a little farther away from Exel. This put me near Mizzy, who was packing away her bomb. “Don’t mind him,” she said to me as Val and Exel continued to chat. “He was a mortician, back before.”

I nodded, but didn’t prod. In the Reckoners, the less we knew about one another’s family members and the like, the less we could betray if an Epic decided to torture us.

“Thanks for standing up for me,” Mizzy said softly. “In front of Tia.”

“She’s intense sometimes,” I said. “Both her and Prof. But they’re good people. She can complain all she likes, but in your place I doubt that either of them would have let those people die. You did the right thing.”

“Even if it put you in danger?”

“I got out of it, didn’t I?”

Mizzy glanced at my throat. I felt at it, reminded of the soreness. It hurt when I breathed.

“Yeaaah,” she said. “You’re just being nice, but I appreciate that. I didn’t expect you to be nice.”

“Me?” I said.

“Sure!” She seemed to be recovering some of her natural perkiness. “Steelslayer, the guy who talked Phaedrus into hitting Steelheart. I expected you to be all intimidating and brooding and
‘They killed my father’
and intense and everything.”

“How much do you know about me?” I asked, surprised.

“More than I probably should. We’re supposed to be secretive and all that, but I can’t help asking questions, you know? And … well … I might have listened in when Sam told Val about what you guys were planning in Newcago.…”

She gave me a kind of apologetic grimace and shrugged.

“Well, trust me,” I said. “I’m more intense than I look. I’m intense like a lion is orange.”

“So, like … medium intense? Since a lion is kind of a tannish color?”

“No, they’re orange.” I frowned. “Aren’t they? I’ve never actually seen one.”

“I think tigers are the orange ones,” Mizzy said. “But they’re still only half orange, since they have black stripes. Maybe you should be intense like an
orange
is orange.”

“Too obvious,” I said. “I’m intense like a lion is tannish.” Did that work? Didn’t exactly slip off the tongue.

Mizzy cocked her head, looking at me. “You’re kinda weird.”

“No, look, it’s just because the metaphor didn’t work. I’ve got it. I’m intense like—”

“No, it’s okay,” Mizzy said, smiling. “I like it.”

“Yeah,” Exel said, laughing. “I’ll remember that orange thing for your eulogy.”

Great. A few hours into the new team, and I’d convinced them that Steelslayer was adorably strange. I settled back into my seat with a sigh.

We traveled for a while, an hour or more. Long enough that I wasn’t certain we were still in Babilar. Eventually the sub slowed. A moment later the entire thing lurched, and some kind of clamps locked on from the outside.

Wherever we were going, we had arrived. Exel got to his feet and dug out some towels. He nodded to Val, who climbed up the ladder.

“Kill the lights,” she said.

We obligingly put out the lights, and I heard Val undo the hatch up above. Water streamed down, but from the sound of it, Exel quickly mopped it up.

“Out we go,” Mizzy whispered to me. I felt my way to the ladder, letting the others each go up before me. I heard them chatting above, so I knew that when Tia came to the ladder, she was last.

“Prof?” I asked her softly.

“The others don’t know exactly what happened,” she whispered. “I told them that Prof led Obliteration off, but that he was all right and would catch up to us.”

“And what really happened?”

She didn’t reply in the darkness.

“Tia,” I said, “I’m the only other one here who knows about him. You might as well use me as a resource. I can help.”

“He doesn’t need either of our help right now,” she said. “He just needs time.”

“What did he do?”

She sighed softly. “He deliberately let himself get hit with a burst of fire, something no ordinary person could have survived.
While Obliteration was standing over him gloating, Jon healed himself, leaped up, and snatched off the man’s glasses. The tip about Obliteration being nearsighted? Turns out it was a good one.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Jon said that scared the wits out of the creature,” Tia whispered. “Obliteration ported away and didn’t return. Jon’s safe; everything is okay. So you can stop worrying.”

I let her pass. Everything wasn’t okay. If Prof was staying away, it was because he was afraid of how he’d act around us. I reluctantly shouldered my pack and gun, then climbed up into a pitch-black room.

“You out, David?” Val’s voice sounded in the darkness.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Over here.”

I followed the sound of her voice. She took me by the arm and steered me through a doorway with some black cloth on it. She followed, then closed a door behind us before opening one in front, letting in light so I could finally see the bolt-hole the Reckoners were using as a base here in Babilar.

Turns out it wasn’t a hole at all.

It was a mansion.

16

LUSH
red carpets. Dark hardwood. Lounge chairs. A bar with crystal that reflected the light of Val’s mobile. Open space. A lot of open space.

My jaw hit the floor. Well, the door, technically. I smacked it as I stepped into the room and turned, trying to stare in all directions at once. The place looked like a king’s palace. No … no, it looked like an
Epic’s
palace.

“How …” I stepped into the center of the room. “Are we still underwater?”

“Mostly,” Val said. “We’re in some rich dude’s underground bunker on Long Island. Howard Righton. Built the thing with its own airtight filtration system in case of nuclear fallout.” She slung her pack onto the bar. “Unfortunately for him, he anticipated the wrong kind of apocalypse. An Epic
knocked his plane out of the sky as he and his family were flying home from Europe.”