Firefight (26 page)

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 make 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 seem 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.

“Those are also memories from another time,” Prof said, not turning to me. “And ones I’d rather not revisit.”

“Because of Regalia?”

“Because I thought the world could be a different place back then,” Prof said, stirring a solution. “A place of heroes.”

“Maybe it still can be that place. Maybe we’re wrong about what is causing the darkness, or maybe there’s a way to resist it. Everyone’s been wrong about the Epic weaknesses, after all. Maybe we don’t understand all of this as well as we think.”

Instead of replying, Prof set down his beaker. He turned toward me. “And you’re not afraid of what would happen if we fail?”

“I’m willing to risk it, Prof.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Can I trust you, David Charleston?”

“Yes. Of course.” Where had that question come from? It didn’t seem to follow our conversation.

He studied me, then nodded. “Good. I’ve changed my mind. Tell Tia I’ll head into the city as soon as you leave; she can tell Val and Exel that the emergency with the other Reckoner team got solved quickly, and I came back early.”

“All right.” Prof had a motorboat from a hidden Reckoner dock. He could get back to the city on his own easily. “But what was that about trusting—”

“Go finish loading those boxes, son.” He turned around and began packing up his things.

I sighed, but put the picture down and climbed up, closing the trapdoor, leaving him in the hidden chamber. I grabbed a box of supplies, then almost ran headfirst into Val as I left.

“David?” she said. “What were you
doing
in there?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Had to catch a breather.”

“But—”

“You left the sub?” I asked.

“I—”

I hurried past her. Sparks! What if some scavenger found it and decided to take it on a joyride? Fortunately, it was still there, sitting in the calm black waters.

Val and I got the boxes loaded quickly, with minimal conversation. I tried to bring Val out again with some questions, but she didn’t say much. Even during our ride back in the sub she was mostly quiet. She knew I was hiding something. Well, I didn’t blame her for feeling annoyed at that—I felt the same way about the entire situation, honestly.

At the base, we docked and climbed out into the dark room. The docking mechanism was completely airtight, fitted
exactly to the submarine. Quite ingenious. They still left the room dark though, in case of a leak. Even outside of Regalia’s range the Reckoners were careful. It was one of the things I liked about them.

I found the guide ropes in the darkness and grabbed two pairs of night-vision goggles off the rack on the wall. I handed one down to Val, then put on the other pair. Together we began unloading the boxes. Eventually I grabbed one and hefted it onto my shoulder, then left the darkened docking room and hauled the box toward the storage room down the hallway.