Firefight (6 page)

As we drove slowly over the rubble, I heard something out in the night, like a snapping branch. The jeep’s back seat wasn’t enormous, but it didn’t have a roof, so I could easily set my box aside and maneuver my new rifle. I raised it to my shoulder and tapped a button that folded out the automatic scope. It worked very well, I was forced to admit, switching to night vision on its own and letting me zoom in on the source of the noise.

Through the holosights I picked out a few scavengers in ragged clothing squatting behind one of the broken cars in the darkness. They seemed like wild people, with long beards and sloppily stitched clothing. I watched them with the safety off, looking for weapons, until another head bobbed up. A little girl, maybe five years old. One of the men hushed her, pushing her down, then continued watching our jeep until we crossed the patch of broken street and sped up, leaving them behind.

I lowered the gun. “It really is bad out here.”

“Anytime a town starts to band together,” Tia said from the front passenger seat, “an Epic decides to either rule the place or lay waste to it.”

“It’s worse,” Prof said softly, “when one of their own develops powers.”

New Epics were rare, but they did happen. In a city like Newcago, we’d get maybe a single new one every four or five years. But they were dangerous, as an Epic who first manifested powers almost always went a little mad in the beginning, using their abilities wildly, destroying. Steelheart had quickly rounded up such individuals and subjugated them. Out here, there would be nobody to stop their initial rampage.

I settled back, disturbed, but eventually returned to my reading. This was our third night on the road. When dawn had broken after the first night, Prof had driven us into a hidden safe house. Apparently, the Reckoners had many of them along major roadways. Usually they were hollows sheared into rock with tensors, then secured with hidden doors.

I hadn’t pushed Prof too much about the tensors. Even with me, he talked about them as if they were technology—and not secretly just a cover for his powers. He only allowed the Reckoners in his personal team to use them, which made sense. Most Epic powers had a distinct range. From what I’d been able to determine, you had to be within a dozen miles or so of Prof for the gifted tensors or energy shields to work.

What made it even more confusing was that the Reckoners
did
have technology that emulated Epic powers. Such as the gauss gun I’d used in fighting Steelheart, and the dowser, which was a device they used to test if someone was an Epic or not. I’d been suspicious that these things had also secretly been from Prof’s powers, but he’d promised me they weren’t. It
was
possible to kill an Epic, then use something about their
DNA to reverse engineer machines that mimicked their powers. That’s what made Prof’s deception so believable. Why assume that your team leader is an Epic when there’s a perfectly good technological explanation for the things the team can do?

I flipped through to the back of the stapled series of notes that Tia had given me. There, I found the profile for Sourcefield, which we’d gathered soon after she’d come to Newcago.
Emiline Bask
, it read.
Former hotel desk clerk. Fan of Asian pulp cinema. Gained Epic powers two years after Calamity
.

I scanned through her history. She’d spent some time in Detroit, Madison, and Little Blackstone. She’d allied with Static and his band of Epics for a few years, then she’d vanished for a while before turning up in Newcago to kill the lot of us. This was interesting, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to know her pre-Epic history, in particular her personality before she became one of them. Had she been a troublemaker, like Steelheart?

For that, I only had a few paragraphs. She’d been raised by an aunt after her mother committed suicide, but the pages said nothing about her personality. There was a note at the end.
Mother’s trauma related to grandparents, obviously
.

I leaned forward as the jeep picked up a little speed. “Tia?”

“Hmm?” she asked, looking up from her datapad, which she hid in a box like mine to shield the light.

“What does this mean—it references Sourcefield’s mother’s trauma being related somehow to her grandparents?”

“Not sure,” she said. “What I gave you was part of a larger file that Jori had compiled; he sent us only the relevant information.”

My own files didn’t have much on Sourcefield. I looked at that paragraph again, lit inside my shoebox. “Would you mind asking him for the rest of the information?”

“What is it about dead Epics that fascinates you so?” Tia asked.

Prof kept his eyes forward, but he seemed to perk up.

“You remember Mitosis?” I asked. “That Epic who tried to take Newcago a few months back?”

“Of course.”

“His weakness was rock music,” I said. “Specifically his own music.” He’d been a minor rock star before gaining his Epic powers.

“So?”

“So … it’s a mighty coincidence, isn’t it? That his own music should negate his powers? Tia, what if there’s a pattern to the weaknesses? One we haven’t cracked yet?”

“Someone would have spotted it,” Prof said.

“Would they?” I asked. “Early on, nobody even
knew
about the weaknesses. The Epics weren’t quick to tell people about them. Besides, there was mass chaos.”

“Unlike now?” Tia asked.

“Now … there’s institutionalized chaos,” I said. “Look, how long ago did the Reckoners start working? How long ago did the lorists start gathering data on weaknesses? It’s only been a few years, right? And by then, it was just common knowledge that Epic weaknesses are bizarre and random. Only, what if they’re not?”

Tia tapped her datapad. “Worth looking into, I suppose. I’ll get you more about Sourcefield’s past.”

I nodded, gazing between them, eastward along the road. I couldn’t see much in the darkness, though a haze on the horizon took me by surprise. Was that light?

“Dawn already?” I asked, checking my mobile.

“No,” Prof said. “It’s the city.”

Babylon Restored. “So soon?”

“David, we’ve been traveling for over two days,” Tia said.

“Yeah, but Babilar is on the other side of the country! I figured … I don’t know, like it would take at least a week. Or two.”

Prof snorted. “When the roads were good, you could make this drive in one day, easy.”

I settled back in my seat, bracing myself against the bumps as Prof sped up. He obviously wanted to reach the city well before daybreak. We passed a growing number of suburbs, but even still, things out here were just so … 
empty
. I’d imagined buildings everywhere, maybe farms squeezed between them. The truth was that the landscape outside Newcago just seemed to be filled with … well, a lot of nothing at all.

The world was both a larger place and a smaller place than I’d imagined.

“Prof, how do you know Regalia?” I blurted out.

Tia glanced at me. Prof kept driving.

“What do you remember about Regalia, David?” Tia asked, perhaps to break the silence. “From your notes.”

“I’ve been scanning,” I said, getting excited. “She’s one of the most powerful Epics around, and one of the most mysterious. Water manipulation, remote projection, hints of at least one other major power.”

Tia snorted.

“What?” I asked.

“Your tone,” she said. “You sound like a fan talking about his favorite movie.”

I blushed.

“I thought you hated the Epics,” Tia said.

“I do.” Well, you know, all except for the one I’d kind of fallen for. And Prof. And I guess Edmund. “It’s complicated. I hated Steelheart.
Really
hated Steelheart—and all of them because of it, I guess. But I’ve also spent my life studying them, learning about them.…”

“You can’t immerse yourself in something,” Prof said softly, “without coming to respect it.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

When I’d been a kid, I was enthralled by sharks. I’d read every book I could find about them, including the most gruesome accounts of shark-related deaths. I’d loved reading about them precisely because they were so dangerous, so deadly, so weird. Epics were the same way, only so much more. Creatures like Regalia—mysterious, dynamic, powerful—were
fascinating
.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I noted, “about how you know Regalia.”

“No,” Prof said. “I didn’t.”

I knew better than to prod further. We soon reached the ruins of a larger city, but we didn’t seem to have reached Babilar yet—at least, we hadn’t reached the haze of light. This place was pitch-black, no fires, let alone any electricity. What I’d spotted earlier was beyond it, out a distance—and even that wasn’t really “lights.” More a faint glow in the air, like might be caused by a lot of lit areas, though I couldn’t make out any distinct lights. We were still too far, and the buildings blocked my view.

I took out my rifle and watched the passing landscape through the night-vision scope. Most everything was rusted and crumbling here—though this city was bigger than the others we’d passed on our way. It also looked wrong to me for some reason. So grey, so decayed. So … fake?

Because it looks like the movies
, I realized, thinking back to the films I’d watched with the other kids at the Factory. We’d all lived in Newcago, a city of pure steel. Faded signs, brick walls, woodpiles—these were things from another world. The only place I’d seen them before was in the films.

This was what the rest of the world thought was normal. How bizarre.

We drove through this dead city for a long while, still on the expressway, but going at a slow speed. I assumed that Prof didn’t want to make any noise. Eventually he pulled onto an off-ramp and drove down into the dark city itself.

“Is this Babilar?” I asked softly.

“No,” Prof said. “This is … was … New Jersey. Fort Lee, specifically.”

I found myself on edge. Anything could be watching from among those broken husks of buildings. This place was abandoned, an enormous grave for the time that had come before Calamity.

“So empty,” I whispered as Prof drove us down a street.

“A lot of people died fighting the Epics,” Tia whispered back. “And a lot more died once the Epics started fighting back in earnest. But the most died in the chaos that followed, when civilization just … surrendered.”

“A lot of people avoid the cities,” Prof said. “Hard to grow anything here, and they attract the worst kind of scavengers. However, the land isn’t as empty as you think.” He rolled us around a corner. I didn’t miss that Tia had a handgun out in her lap, though I’d never seen her fire a weapon before. “Besides,” Prof added, “most everyone in this area has made their way to the island by now.”

“Life’s better there?” I asked.

“Depends.” He stopped the jeep in the middle of a darkened road, then turned back toward me. “How well do you trust the Epics?”

It seemed a loaded question, considering the source. He climbed out of the jeep, boots scraping on asphalt. Tia got out the other side, and they started walking toward a looming building.

“What’s this?” I asked them, standing up in the back of the jeep. “Where’s the road into Babilar?”

“Can’t drive into Babilar,” Prof said, stopping by the door of the building.

“Too noticeable?” I asked, hopping down and joining them.

“Well, there’s that,” Prof said. “But mostly it’s because the city doesn’t have any streets. Come on. It’s time to meet your new team.”

He pushed open the door.

9

I
followed Prof and Tia into the building. It looked like an old mechanic’s garage, with large bay doors on the front. And it smelled … too clean. Not musty, like the forgotten chambers of Newcago’s understreets. It was pitch-black, though, and creepy. I couldn’t make out much besides some large dark shapes that might have been vehicles.

I unslung my rifle, feeling the hair on the back of my neck rising. What if this was some kind of trap? Had Prof prepared for that? I—

Lights came on in a sudden flare. Blinded, I cursed and jumped to the side, slamming my back against something large. I raised my rifle.

“Oops!” a feminine voice said. “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry! Too bright.”

Prof grunted nearby. Rifle stock firmly against my shoulder, I blinked until I could make out that we were in some kind of workshop. We were surrounded by tool-covered benches and a few half-disassembled cars, including one jeep just like our own.

The door clicked closed behind me, and I pointed my rifle that direction. A tall Hispanic woman in her early thirties had shut the door. She had angular features and dark hair with one lock in the front dyed purple. She wore a red shirt and a blazer, with a black necktie.

“Mizzy,” the woman snapped, “the point of dimming the lights until they were in was to
avoid
alerting the entire neighborhood that this building has power. That doesn’t work if you turn the lights back on while the door is still
wide open
.”

“Sorry!” called the voice from before, the sound echoing in the large room.

The Hispanic woman glanced at me. “Put that gun down before you hurt someone, kid.” She strode past me and gave Prof a sloppy salute.

He extended a hand. “Val.”

“Jon,” Val said, taking his hand. “I was surprised to get your message. I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

“Considering what happened,” Prof said, “I figured you’d be planning to do something brash.”

“Here to stop me, sir?” Val asked, voice cold.

“Sparks no,” Prof said. “I’m here to help.”

Val’s expression cracked, a hint of a smile tugging at her lips. She nodded to me. “That’s Steelslayer?”

“Yes,” Prof said as I finally stepped out of my cover.

“Excellent reflexes,” Val said, looking me up and down. “Terrible fashion sense. Mizzy, where the hell are you?”

“Sorry!” that voice from before came again, followed by clanks. “Coming!”

I stepped up beside Tia as I spotted a young black woman climbing down from a catwalk above, a sniper rifle slung over her shoulder. She hit the ground and jogged toward us, a bounce in her step. She wore jeans and a short jacket, with a tight white shirt underneath. She had her hair braided in cornrows on the top, and it exploded into a frizzy puff behind her head.