Firefight (39 page)

It looked like turning the lights out was the best Dawnslight could do for me. Desperate, I fumbled my way down the hallway in one last mad dash toward freedom.

The tendrils of water struck.

Right at the place where I’d been standing before.

I couldn’t see it, but I could feel them brush past me, converging on that location. I stumbled away, listening to the crash of water hitting wall, and fell back against one of them in the dark—a large, armlike glob of water, cold to the touch. I accidently put my hand into it, and my skin sank right through.

I pulled it out with a start and backed away, hitting another tendril. None of them stopped moving, but they didn’t come for me. I wasn’t crushed in the darkness.

She … can’t
feel
with them
, I realized.
They don’t convey a sense of touch! So if she can’t see, she can’t direct them
.

Incredulous, I poked another of the tendrils in the darkness, then slapped it. Perhaps not the smartest thing I’d ever
done, but it provoked no reaction. The tendrils continued thrashing about randomly.

I backed away, putting as much room between myself and those tendrils as possible. It wasn’t easy, as I kept stumbling over tree trunks. But …

Light?

A single fruit glowed up above. I chased it. It hung in front of a stairwell, and the floor here was dry. No water for Regalia to peer through.

“Thanks,” I said, stepping forward. My foot crunched something. A fortune cookie. I grabbed it and opened it.

She’s going to destroy the city
, it read.
You don’t have much time left. Stop her!

“Trying,” I muttered, squeezing between vines to climb into the stairwell and starting upward. Fruit glowed to light my way, then winked out behind me.

On the next level was a floor where all of the fruit glowed, but no water tendrils sought to capture me. Regalia didn’t know where I’d gone. Excellent. I crept out into another office room. This floor was cultivated, to an extent, with carefully kept pathways and trees that had been trimmed into a garden. It was a striking sight, after the wildness of the other levels.

I started down a path, imagining the people who had decided to take this floor and make it their own personal garden, buried in the middle of a building. I was so captivated by the imagery I nearly missed the blinking fruit. It hung right in front of me and pulsed with a soft light.

A warning of some sort? Cautious, I continued forward, then heard a footstep on the path ahead.

My breath caught, and I ducked off the path and into the foliage. The fruit closest to me went out, making the area around me darker. A few moments later Newton strode down the path and passed right under the fruit that had pulsed.

She had her katana out resting on her shoulder, and she carried a cup of water.

A cup of water?

“This is a distraction,” Newton said. “Unimportant.”

“You’ll do as told.” Regalia’s voice rose from the cup. “I heard him moving down there, but he’s gone silent. He’s hiding in the darkness, hoping we’ll go away.”

“I have to make it to the confrontation with the others,” Newton protested. “Steelslayer is meaningless. If I don’t fall into their trap, then how are you going to—”

“Obviously you’re right,” Regalia said.

Newton stopped in place.

“You are a wonderful help,” Regalia continued. “So brilliant. And … Blast. I need to deal with Jonathan. Find that rat.”

Newton cursed under her breath and continued on, leaving me behind. I shivered, waiting until I heard the door to the stairwell shut, then I stepped back out onto the path.

Regalia was worried enough about me to pull Newton away from other plans to hunt me. That seemed a very good sign. It meant she felt that keeping me from warning Prof was extremely important.

So I had to break through and reach him. Unfortunately, the moment I stepped out of this building, I’d be in the bull’s-eye again. I’d have to push through it, dodging as I had been before. I walked up to a window and prepared to leap out, but then found that my pocket was buzzing. I dug in it, pulling out the baggie, and removed the radio.

“Are you there? David, please answer!”

“I’m here, Mizzy,” I said softly.

“Thank heavens,” she said, tense. “David, you were
right
. Obliteration isn’t here!”

“Are you sure?” I said, checking out the window.

“Yes! They’ve set up a kind of white mannequin thing with a floodlight right underneath it, so it glows like Obliteration. They then filled the rooftop with other powerful floodlights; that makes it seem like he’s still here, but he isn’t.”

“That’s why she wanted to keep everyone away,” I said. Sparks. Obliteration was somewhere in the city, planning to destroy the entire place.

“I’m almost to Prof,” I said. “Regalia keeps getting in my way. See if you can turn off the lights. That will warn the other Reckoners, assuming I don’t make it.”

“Okaaaay,” Mizzy said. “I don’t like this, David.” She sounded scared.

“Good,” I said back. “Means you aren’t crazy. See what you can do. I’m going to make a final push toward Prof.”

“Right.”

I tucked the radio away, then glanced at a glowing fruit hanging nearby. “Thanks again for the help,” I said. “If you have anything more like that to throw my way in the future, I wouldn’t say no.”

The fruit blinked.

I nodded grimly, then took a deep breath and jumped out the window.

46

I
got about two streets from the building before Regalia found me. She appeared on the surface of the water along my path, standing tall, her eyes wide and alight and her hands to the sides as if to hold up the sky. Waves rose around her like the peaks of a crown emerging from the water.

This time she didn’t bother with conversation. Jets of water erupted beneath me. The first one clipped me along the side, slashing through both clothing and skin. I gasped in pain, then started weaving and bobbing, using the handjet to dodge to the side as Regalia sent an enormous ripple through the water that crested some fifteen feet high. It chased me around a corner but broke against a building as I landed on the roof and ran across it. I passed tents and screaming people and caught the scent of something odd in the air. Smoke?

I leaped off the other side of the building, and as I did, a blur zipped across the rooftop beside me. I yelped, cutting my jets and dropping just beneath the blur, which launched toward me, trailing an afterimage of neon red.

The blur passed right over my head, then landed on the building across from me, where it pulled to a stop, revealing Newton, katana in hand. She whipped out a handgun and spun in my direction.

Sparks! I should have been expecting her. I dove downward, passing the stories of a nearby building in a flash, and hit water as the popping noises of gunfire sounded above.

The water was an icy shock, jets propelling me face-first under the surface. Diving for the water had been my first instinct in order to avoid that gunfire, and it worked, as I didn’t get shot. But it did put me in Regalia’s grasp.

The water around me began to constrict, to thicken, like syrup. I twisted, thrusting my feet downward, and engaged the spyril at full force.

It was as if the water had become tar, and each progressive inch of movement was harder than the inch before it. Bubbles grew trapped as I breathed them out, frozen like in Jell-O, and I felt the spyril shake violently on my back. Blackness surrounded me.

I didn’t fear that blackness any longer. I’d looked it in the eye. My lungs strained, but I shoved down the panic.

I broke the surface. Once my arms were free, the spyril thrust me out into the air with a triumphant jet, but tendrils of water waited for me. They wrapped around my legs.

I pointed the streambeam of the spyril right at them.

My machine sucked up those tendrils like it did any other water, spraying them out the jets at the bottom and freeing me in a heartbeat. I burst higher into the air, dazed from lack
of oxygen. I reached a rooftop and let the jets cut out, rolling across it, breathing deeply.

Okay
, I thought,
no more going underwater with Regalia around
.

I’d barely caught my breath when water tendrils climbed up over the roof, like the fingers of an enormous beast. Newton landed near me in a blur, trailing glowing color from her hair. She came right at me, fast as an eyeblink, and all I could do was engage the spyril, my streambeam pointed right at one of Regalia’s tendrils.

The sudden jet of power lurched me across the rooftop away from Newton. Just barely. Worse, only one of the footjets engaged. I didn’t know if it was the constriction down below, the tendrils that had grabbed me after, or the rough landing. But the machine had always been finicky, and it had chosen this moment to finick.

Newton moved past me, her sword striking the ground where I’d just been lying, throwing up sparks. She reached the side of the rooftop, where another building rose up alongside this one, no space between. There she stopped.

And, from what I saw, stopping was pretty dramatic. Best I could tell, she came out of her super-speed run by throwing one hand up against the wall of the building next door. All of her momentum was transferred to the structure and, in the bizarre way of Epics, completely scrambled the laws of physics. The wall exploded into a spray of dust and crumbling bricks.

She turned around, dropping her sword—now jagged and broken—and reached to her side, slipping another one out of a sheath at her waist. She spun the sword, regarding me, and walked forward more casually. Around us, Regalia’s tendrils continued surrounding the entire building, creeping up over the sky, making a dome. This small rooftop was abandoned,
and its painted graffiti reflected off the water around us. Liquid began to pour in over the lip of the roof, flooding it with an inch or two of water, and Regalia took shape from it beside Newton.

I pulled out my gun and fired. I knew it was pointless, but I had to try something, and the spyril just sputtered when I engaged it—both jets refusing to spit anything out now. The bullets bounced off Newton, reflected out toward the closing dome of water, making little splashes. Newton leaned down, one hand on the ground, preparing to sprint, but Regalia raised a hand and stopped her.

“I want to know,” she said to me, “what you did earlier.”

My heart thumping, I scrambled to my feet and glanced to the side, looking for a way out. Regalia’s dome of water completely encased the rooftop, and new tendrils were rising from the flooded roof to try to snatch me. Desperate, I pointed the streambeam at one and tried to engage the spyril. The jets at my feet wouldn’t work.

But, to my relief, the handjet did. I was able to slurp up the tendril and shoot it the other way. I got the next, then the next, then started shooting them at Newton as I hopped backward. My attack just splashed away from her, but she seemed to find it annoying.

More and more tendrils came for me, but I sucked each one up, jetting them outward.

“Stop
doing
that!” Regalia roared, voice booming. A hundred tendrils grew up, far more than I could target.

Then they immediately started to shrink.

I blinked at them, then looked at Regalia, who seemed as baffled as I was. Something else was coming up out of the water around me. Plants?

It was roots.
Tree
roots. They grew wickedly fast around us, sucking in the water, draining it from every source it could
find, feeding upon it. Dawnslight was watching. I looked back at Regalia and grinned.

“The child is acting up again,” Regalia said with a sigh, crossing her arms and looking at Newton. “End this.”

In an instant Newton became a blur.

I couldn’t outrun her. I couldn’t hurt her.

All I could do was gamble.

“You’re beautiful, Newton,” I yelled.

The blur became a person again, plants curling up at her feet. Her lips pursed, she looked at me, eyes wide, sword held in limp fingers.

“You’re a wonderful Epic,” I continued, raising my gun.

She backed away.

“Obviously,” I said, “that’s why both Obliteration and Regalia are always sure to compliment you. It couldn’t, of course, be because compliments are your weakness.” That was why Newton let her gang be so rowdy and insubordinate. She hadn’t wanted them complimenting her by accident.

Newton turned and ran.

I shot her in the back.

It wrenched my gut as she fell face-first to the overgrown ground. But at my core, I was an assassin. Yes, I killed in the name of justice, bringing down only those who deserved it, but at the end of the day, I
was
an assassin. I’d shoot someone in the back. Whatever it took.

I walked up, then planted two more bullets in her skull, just to be certain.

I looked at Regalia, who stood, arms still crossed, among the growing flora around us—saplings becoming full trees, fruit sprouting, swelling, and sagging from limbs and vines. Her figure started to shrink as Dawnslight drank up the water that formed her current projection, and her dome fell apart, showering down upon me and the rooftop.

“I see that I spoke too freely when punishing Newton,” Regalia said. “This is my fault, for giving away her weakness. You really
are
an annoyance, boy.”

I raised the handgun and pointed it at Regalia’s head.

“Oh please,” she said. “You know you can’t hurt me with that.”

“I’m coming for you,” I said softly. “I’m going to kill you before you kill Prof.”

“Is that so?” Regalia snapped. “And do you realize that while you’ve been distracted, the Reckoners have already executed their plan? That your idolized Jonathan Phaedrus has killed the woman you love?”

A shock ran through me.

“He used her as bait, to draw me,” Regalia said. “Noble Jonathan murdered her in an attempt to make me appear. And I did, of course. So that he’d have his little data point. His team is storming my supposed sanctuary right now.”