Firefight (7 page)

Tia and Prof looked at Val; Tia cocked an eyebrow.

“Mizzy is quite capable,” Val said. “She’s just a little …”

As Mizzy scuttled toward us, she tried to duck under the front of a half-assembled jeep that was up on risers. However, the rifle over her shoulder stuck up too high, and it clanged against the front of the jeep, pushing her backward. She gasped, grabbing the jeep as if to steady it—though it hadn’t budged. Then she patted it as if in apology.

She was maybe seventeen years old or so, and had a cute face with round features and creamy brown skin.
She smiles too wide to be a refugee
, I thought as she ran over and saluted Prof.
Where has she been living that hasn’t beaten that bubbly nature out of her?
I wondered.

“Where’s Exel?” Tia asked.

“Watching the boat,” Val said.

Prof nodded, then pointed at Val. “David, meet Valentine, leader of this cell of the Reckoners. She and hers have been living in Babylon Restored for the last two years, doing reconnaissance on Regalia. You obey orders from her as if they came from me. Understand?”

“Got it. Val, are you point?”

Val’s expression darkened. “Operations,” she said, giving no indication why my words had bothered her. “Though if Tia is going to be joining this crew …”

“I am,” Tia said.

“Then,” Val said, “she’ll probably run operations. I’d
rather be in the field anyway. But I don’t run point. I do heavy weapons and vehicle support.”

Prof nodded, gesturing toward Mizzy. “And this is Missouri Williams, I assume?”

“Excited to meet you, sir!” Mizzy said. She seemed the type to be excited about pretty much everything. “I’m the team’s new sniper. Before, I did repairs and equipment, and I have experience with demolitions. I’m training to run point, sir!”

“Like hell you are,” Val said. “She’s good with a rifle, Prof. Sam had kind of taken her under his wing.…”

Probably the person they lost recently
, I thought, reading Prof’s stiff expression, Tia’s look of sorrow. Sam. I guessed he’d been their point man, the one who shouldered the most danger—interacting with Epics and drawing them into the traps.

It was the job I did in our team. The job Megan had done before she left. I didn’t know Sam, but it was hard not to feel a surge of empathy for the fallen man. He’d died fighting back.

But Megan had
not
been responsible, no matter what Prof claimed.

“Glad to have you, Mizzy,” Prof said, voice even. I sensed a healthy dose of skepticism in that tone, but that was only because I knew him pretty well. “Go pull our jeep into the garage. David, go with her, scope out just in case.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. He returned a flat gaze.
Yes
, the gaze said,
I’m getting rid of you for a few minutes. Deal with it
.

I sighed but followed Mizzy out the side door, turning off the lights on the way. That left the others in the dark, in order to make the opening and closing doors less noticeable.

I got out my new rifle, extending the night-vision scope, and walked with Mizzy toward the jeep. Behind us, one of the
garage doors opened, making almost no noise at all. Inside, by the faint starlight, I saw Prof, Tia, and Val in hushed conversation.

“Sparks,” Mizzy said softly, “he’s
intimidating
.”

“Who?” I asked. “Prof?”

“Yeaaah,” she said, reaching the jeep. “Wow. Phaedrus himself. I didn’t make
too
much a fool of myself, did I?”

“Um. No?” No more a fool than I had made of myself on several occasions after first meeting Jon. I understood how intimidating he could be.

“Good.” She stared at Prof in the darkness, and frowned. Then she turned to me and stuck out a hand. “I’m Mizzy.”

“They
just
introduced us.”

“I know,” she said, “but
I
didn’t get to introduce
myself
. You’re David Charleston, that guy who killed Steelheart.”

“I am,” I said, taking her hand hesitantly. This girl was a little weird.

She shook my hand, then pulled in closer to me. “You,” she said softly, “are
awesome
. Sparks. Two heroes in one day. I will have to write
this
in my
journal
.” She swung into the jeep and started it up. I did a sweep of the area with my rifle, looking to see if we’d been noticed. I didn’t see anything, so I backed into the garage, following the jeep Mizzy drove.

I tried not to pay too much attention to the fact that Prof had asked her, and not me, to pull the jeep in. I could totally park a jeep without crashing. Sparks, I didn’t even crash going around corners anymore. Most of the time.

Mizzy lowered the garage door and locked up the place. Prof, Tia, and Val ended their clandestine conversation, then Val led us through the back of the shop, down into a tunnel under the streets. I expected to keep walking for a while, but we didn’t—only a few minutes later she led us up again, through a trapdoor to the outside.

Here, water lapped against a dock, and a wide river led out of the city into a dark bay. Colorful lights shone distantly on the other side. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. I’d looked at maps before coming, and could guess where we were. This was the Hudson River, and that was old Manhattan over there—Babylon Restored. They had electricity, it seemed, and that was the source of the distant haze of illumination I’d seen earlier. But why were the lights so colorful? And oddly dim?

I squinted, trying to make out details, but the lights were just clusters of specks to me. I followed the team along the docks, and my attention was quickly drawn by the water. Despite living in Newcago, I’d never actually been near a large body of water before. Steelheart had turned enough of Lake Michigan to steel that I’d never been to the coast. Something about those dark depths made me strangely uncomfortable.

Ahead of us at the end of the dock, a flashlight flicked on, illuminating a medium-sized motorboat with an enormous man seated at the back, wearing about five shirts’ worth of red flannel. Bearded and curly haired, he waved at us with a smile.

Sparks, this man was large. It was like one lumberjack had eaten another lumberjack, and their powers had combined to form one
really
fat lumberjack. He stood up in the boat as Val hopped on. He shook hands with Prof and Tia, then smiled at me.

“Exel,” the man said softly, introducing himself. He paused briefly between the syllables, as if he were saying it “X.L.” I wondered which position in the team he’d fulfill. “You’re Steelslayer?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking his hand. The darkness, hopefully, covered my embarrassment. First Val, then this guy, referring to me that way. “But you don’t really need to call me that.”

“It’s an honor,” Exel said to me, stepping back.

They expected me to climb onto the boat. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? I realized I was sweating, but I forced myself to step onto the unsteady vehicle. It rocked a lot more than I’d have wanted—and then rocked even
more
as Mizzy climbed on. Were we really going to cross this enormous river in something so small? I sat down, discomforted. That was a
lot
of water.

“Is this it, sir?” Exel asked once we were all on.

“This is everyone,” Prof said, settling himself by the prow of the boat. “Let’s move.”

Val took the seat at the back next to the small outboard motor. She started it with a soft sputtering sound, and we pulled away from the dock onto the choppy black water.

I held on to the rail tightly, watching the water. All of that blackness beneath us. Who knew what was down there? The waves weren’t huge, but they did rock us. Again, I wondered if we shouldn’t have something larger. I scooted closer to the middle of the vessel.

“So,” Val said as she steered us along. “Have you prepped the new guy?”

“No,” Prof said.

“Now might be a good time, considering …,” Val said, nodding toward the distant lights.

Prof turned toward me, his form mostly hidden in shadows. The wind ruffled his dark lab coat. I hadn’t completely gotten over the awe I’d felt upon first meeting him. Yes, we were close now, but occasionally it still struck me—this was
Jonathan Phaedrus
, founder of the Reckoners. A man I’d practically worshipped for most of my life.

“The one who rules this city,” he said to me, “is a hydromancer.”

I nodded eagerly. “Rega—” I began.

“Don’t say her name,” Prof interrupted. “What do you know of her abilities?”

“Well,” I said, “supposedly she can send out a projection of herself, so when you see her, it might just be her duplicate. She also has the portfolio of a standard water Epic. She can raise and lower water, control it with her mind, that sort of thing.”

“She can also see out of any open surface of water,” Prof said. “And can hear anything spoken near the water. Do you have any idea of the ramifications of that?”

I glanced at the open water around us. “Right,” I said, shivering.

“At any time,” Exel said from nearby, “she could be watching us. We have to work under that assumption … and that fear.”

“How are you still alive?” I asked. “If she can see so widely …”

“She’s
not
omniscient,” Prof said to me, speaking firmly. “She can only see one place at a time, and it’s not particularly easy for her. She looks into a dish of water she’s holding, and can use it to see out of any surface of water that touches air.”

“Like a witch,” I said. “From the stories.”

“Sure, like that,” Exel said, chuckling. “I doubt she has a cauldron though.”

“Anyway,” Prof said, “her powers are extensive—but they don’t make it easy for her to scan and find things randomly. Something has to draw her attention.”

“It’s why we avoid saying her name,” Val added from the back of the boat. “Unless we’re whispering over the mobile network.”

Prof tapped his earpiece. I turned on my mobile, with voice amplification, and wirelessly connected it to my earpiece.

“Like this,” Prof whispered, but it came into my ear loud enough to be heard.

I nodded.

“Right now,” he continued, “we are in her power. We float across the open sea. If she knew we were here, she could summon tendrils of water and drag this ship into the depths. In this city, like most others, the Reckoners can exist because we are careful, quiet, and hidden. Don’t let the way we’ve been acting in Newcago make you sloppy here. Understood?”

“Yeah,” I said, whispering like he did, trusting that the sensors on my earpiece would pick up my voice and transmit it. “Good thing we’ll be out of open water soon, eh?”

Prof turned toward the city and fell silent. We passed something nearby in the water, a large, towering length of steel. I frowned. What was that, and why had it been built into the middle of the river like this? There was another in the distance.

The tops of a suspension bridge’s towers
, I realized, spotting wires trailing down into the water. The entire bridge had been sunk.

Or … the water had risen.

“Sparks,” I whispered. “We’re never going to get off the open water, are we? She’s sunk the city.”

“Yes,” Prof said.

I was stunned. I’d heard that Regalia had raised the water level around Manhattan, but this was far beyond what I’d taken that to mean. That bridge had probably once loomed a hundred feet or more above the river; now it was
beneath
the surface, only its support towers visible.

I turned and looked at the water we’d crossed. Now I could see a subtle slope to the water. The water bulged here, and we had to move
up
at an incline to approach Babilar, as if we were climbing a hill of water. How bizarre. As we drew closer to the
city itself, I saw that the entire city was indeed sunken. Skyscrapers rose like stone sentries from the waters, the streets having become waterways.

As I took in the strange sight, I realized something even odder. The glowing lights I’d seen on our approach didn’t come out of the windows of the skyscrapers; they came from
the walls
of the skyscrapers. Light shone in patches, bright and fluorescent, like the illumination from an emergency glowstick.

Glowing paint? That was what it seemed to be. I held to the side of the boat, frowning. This was
not
what I had expected. “Where are they getting their electricity?” I asked over the line.

“They aren’t,” Val said in my ear, whispering but fully audible to me. “There’s no electricity in the city other than in our own hidden base.”

“But the lights! How do they work?”

Suddenly the sides of our boat began to glow. I jumped, looking down. The glow came on like a dimmed light that slowly gained strength. Blue … 
paint
. The side of the boat had been spraypainted. That was what was on the buildings too. Spraypaint … graffiti. In all its various colors, the graffiti was glowing vibrantly, like colored moss.

“How do the lights work?” Val said. “I wish I knew.” She slowed the boat, and we sailed between two large buildings. Their tops glowed and, squinting, I made out spraypainted boards rimming the roofs. They shone with vibrant reds, oranges, greens.

“Welcome to Babylon Restored, David,” Prof said from the prow. “The world’s greatest enigma.”

10

VAL
cut the motor and handed oars to me, Mizzy, and Exel, keeping one for herself. The four of us took up rowing duty. We floated out from between the two taller buildings and approached a series of much lower structures, their tops only a few feet above the water.

They might have once been small apartment buildings, now submerged except for the uppermost floor or so of each. People lived on the roofs, mostly in tents—vibrant, colorful tents that glowed from the spraypaint casually marking them with symbols and designs. Some of the paintings were beautiful while others displayed no skill whatsoever. I even saw some glows beneath the water—graffiti that had been flooded over. So old spraypaint glowed as well as newer paintings like the ones atop the skyscrapers.