Firefight (25 page)

I faltered for a moment, holding the pieces of the spyril. The powers of a dead Epic. Then I redoubled my efforts, pulling on the gloves, locking the wires in place from hands and legs up to the backplate. I stood up and engaged the streambeam—the laserlike line that would draw water once pointed at it. I looked back out through the window. The blaze had fully started, black smoke billowing up into the air.

I’d forgotten how wide the bay was separating me from the burning building. The scope made things look close, but I had a lot of water to cross before reaching the burning building.

Well, I’d just have to work more quickly. I placed my earpiece and mobile into the waterproof pocket of my pants. Then I took a deep breath and jumped out the window.

Pointing the streambeam downward, I started the water jets on my legs enough to slow my impact and splashed down into the ocean water. The shock of the cold and the taste of the briny salt was immediate. Sparks! It was way colder than it had been during practice.

Fortunately, I had the spyril. I pointed myself toward the smoking building and jetted away. This time, unfortunately, I didn’t have one of Prof’s forcefields, and each time I came crashing down into the ocean porpoiselike, water hit my face like the slap of a jilted lover.

I dealt with it. Gasping for breath each time I emerged from the ocean. Sparks! The waves were a lot stronger out here than they had been in the Central Park sea, and it was tough to see when surrounded by them.

I slowed the jets to get my bearings and had a moment of severe disorientation. I was in the middle of
nothing
. With the waves surging, I couldn’t see the city at all, and it seemed like I was in a vast, endless sea. Infinity all around me, the depths below.

Panic.

What was I doing out here? What was
wrong
with me? I started hyperventilating, twisting myself about. Each wave was a threat trying to pull me underneath the water. I got a mouthful of brine.

Luckily, some gut instinct to survive kicked in and I engaged the spyril, jetting myself up out of the water.

Hanging there, water dripping from my clothing, I gasped for air and squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted to move. I
needed
to move. But in those moments, I could more easily have lifted a semi truck filled with pudding.

That water. All that
water
 …

I took a deep breath and tried to slow my breathing, then forced my eyes open. From my vantage hovering on the spyril jets, I could see over the waves. I’d gotten turned around, and had to reorient myself. I’d crossed half the distance and needed to continue, but it was sparking difficult to motivate myself to release the streambeam and fall back down.

With effort, I let myself down, splashing back into the sea. I used the black smoke rising into the sky as a guidepost. I thought of the people inside the building. With no water to jump to, they’d likely be fleeing from the flames above, moving down to the lower levels. But that would leave them to drown when the waters returned.

How horrible a death that would be, trapped inside a building as the waters rushed back in, perversely stuck between the heat above and the cold depths below.

Furious, I increased the speed of the spyril.

Something snapped.

Suddenly, I was spinning in a rush of water and bubbles. I cut the thrust. Blast! One of the footjets had stopped working. I struggled to the surface, coughing, cold. It was really hard to stay afloat with the weight of the now-powerless spyril towing me down and with my clothing still on.

And why was it so hard to float? I was made of mostly water, right? Shouldn’t I float easily?

Fighting the swells, I tried to reach down and fix the spyril jet. But I didn’t even know what had caused it to stop working, and I wasn’t particularly good at swimming unaided. Eventually the inevitable happened and I started sinking. I had to engage the single working jet of my spyril to get back afloat.

I felt like I’d swallowed half the ocean so far. Coughing, I started to panic again as I realized just how dangerous the open waters could be. I positioned my one leg with a working jet behind me, turned the spyril on half power, and pushed myself toward the distant buildings.

I could focus only on keeping myself afloat and pointed toward civilization. It was slow going. Too slow. Keenly, I felt the shame of having rushed in to be a hero only to end up limping along, having nearly created a new crisis instead of solving the first one. What better example of Prof’s warnings could I get?

Fortunately, my terror was manageable, so long as I had that spyril jet to give me some measure of control over the situation. As I got closer to the city, the water warmed around me. Eventually, blessedly, I reached one of the outer buildings, a low one with the roof only two stories or so out of the water. The single jet was enough to propel me upward—if at an unexpected angle—and I grabbed the rooftop’s lip and hauled myself over, coughing.

Though the spyril had done all the work, I was exhausted. I flopped over, smelling smoke in the air, and stared at the sky.

Those people. I tried to climb to my feet. Maybe I could …

The building blazed nearby, only one street over. Fully alight, the top half had burned completely, an inferno. I could feel the heat even from a distance. This was more than the work of just one or two firebombs. Either Newton had continued
throwing more in, or the place had been primed to go up. Around the structure, water coursed in a vortex, revealing a broken, wet street far below.

A few corpses spotted the ground. People had tried to leap free of the flames.

Even as I watched, the water was released. It crashed back in upon the building, and the hissing indicated that the fire had managed to creep down toward those levels that had formerly been submerged. The impact caused the top floors of the building to collapse into the water, blowing steam into the air with a horrible noise.

I stumbled to my feet, feeling utterly defeated. On a nearby roof I saw Regalia’s watery projection standing with hands clasped before her. She looked toward me, then melted into the surface of the sea and vanished.

I collapsed onto the rooftop. Why? It was so pointless.

Prof is right
, I thought.
They murder indiscriminately. Why did I think that any of them could be good?

My pants buzzed. I sighed, fishing out my mobile. I got a little water on it, but Mizzy said it was fully waterproof.

Prof was calling. I lifted the mobile beside my head, ready to accept my lecture. I could see now what had caused the spyril to malfunction—I hadn’t done the wires correctly leading to the left leg. They’d come undone. A simple problem, one that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been more careful putting on the equipment.

“Yeah,” I said into the phone.

“Is she gone?” Prof’s voice asked.

“Who?”

“Regalia. She was watching, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably still is, remotely,” Prof said. He sounded winded. “I’ll have to sneak these people out in the sub, somehow.”

I stood up.
“Prof?”
I said, excited.

“Don’t look too eager,” he said with a grunt. “She’s probably watching you. Act dejected.” In the background, over the line, I heard a child crying. “Can you quiet her?” Prof snapped to someone.

“You’re in the building,” I said. “You … you saved them!”

“David,” Prof said, voice tense. “This is
not
a good time for me. Do you understand?”

He’s keeping the water and the flames back
, I realized.
With forcefields
.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“I left the sub behind. I had to run across the bottom of the ocean to get here.”

I blinked in surprise. “Is that
possible
?”

“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.