Firefight (21 page)

“Regalia,” I said, stepping forward. “Abigail. You don’t have to be like this. You—”

“Do not act as if you know me, young man,” Regalia said. Her tone was quiet but firm.

I stopped in place.

“You have killed Steelheart,” Regalia continued. “For that alone I should destroy you. We have so few pockets of civilization remaining to us, and you bring down one that has not only power but advanced medical care? Hubris of the most high, child. If you were in my court, I’d see you locked away for life. If you were in my congregation, I’d do even worse.”

“If you hadn’t noticed,” I replied, “Newcago is running just fine without Steelheart. Just like Babilar would run fine without you. Isn’t that why you’ve forced Prof to come here? Because you want him to kill you?”

She hesitated at that, and I realized I might have said too much. Did I just give away that Prof knew her plan? But if she really wanted him to stop her, she’d expect him to figure it out, right? I needed to be more careful. Regalia was not only an Epic; she was also an
attorney
. That was like putting curry powder in your hot sauce. She could talk rings around me.

But how could I get information from her without saying anything? I made a snap decision and jumped off the rooftop, engaging the spyril and jetting through the water of Central Park Bay. I burst from the water a few minutes later, landing on another roof far north of the one I’d been on before.

“You
do
realize how ridiculous you look doing that,” Regalia said, stretching up from the water, speaking even before her new shape fully formed.

I yelped, pretending to be alarmed. I left this building and splashed farther northward until I was at the very northern edge of the bay. Here, exhausted, I broke from the water again and settled onto a rooftop, water streaming from my brow.

“Are you quite done?” Regalia asked as her chair formed from the water just before me again. She picked up her cup of tea. “I can appear anywhere I want, silly boy. I’m surprised Jonathan didn’t explain this to you.”

Not anywhere
, I thought.
You have a limited range
.

And she’d just given me two more data points that would help Tia pinpoint her true location. I slipped off the roof into the water, intending to take another swim and see if I could get her to follow one more time.

“You
are
good with the device,” Regalia noted. “Did you
ever know Waterlog, the Epic in whom those powers originated? I created him, you know.”

I stopped in the water beside the building, frozen like a beetle who’d just discovered that his mother had been eaten by a praying mantis.

Regalia sipped her tea.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Oh, so that interests you, does it? His original name was Georgi, a minor street thug down in Orlando. He showed promise. I made him into an Epic.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, laughing. Nobody could
make
Epics. Sure, once in a while new ones appeared. Though the vast majority had been here since about a year after Calamity’s rise, I knew of a few notable Epics who had only recently manifested powers. But no one knew why or how.

“So certain in your denial,” Regalia said, shaking her head. “Do you think you know so much about the world, David Charleston? You know how everything works?”

I stopped laughing, but I didn’t believe her for a moment. She was playing me somehow. What was her game?

“Ask Obliteration next time you see him,” Regalia said idly, “assuming you live long enough. Ask about what I’ve done to his powers, how much stronger they are, despite what I have taken from him.”

I looked up at her, frowning. “Taken from him?” What did she mean by that? What would she “take” from an Epic? And that aside, was she also implying she’d
enhanced
Obliteration’s powers? Was that the reason for the lack of cooldown on his teleporting?

“You can’t fight me,” she said. “If you do you’ll end up dead, alone. Gasping for breath in one of these jungle buildings, one step from freedom. Your last sight a blank wall that
someone had spilled coffee on. A pitiful, pathetic end. Think on that.”

She vanished.

I climbed up onto the rooftop and wiped some water from my eyes, then sat down. That had been a decidedly surreal experience. As I rested I thought on what she’d told me. There was so much that it only grew more troubling the more I thought it through.

Eventually I jumped back into the water and swam to the others.

26

TWO
days later I lingered in the library of our underwater base, alone, looking at Tia’s map. The points where I’d seen Regalia were marked with red pins and little exclamation points scribbled right on the paper. I smiled, remembering Tia’s excitement as she’d placed those pins. Though the math of what she was doing here wasn’t particularly interesting to me, the end result certainly was.

I moved to walk away, then stopped myself. I’d done well enough in my mathematics training at the Factory, even if I hadn’t enjoyed the subject. I couldn’t afford to be lazy just because someone else had things in hand. I wanted to know for myself. I forced myself to turn back and try to figure out Tia’s notations. From what I eventually worked out, my points had helped a lot, but we needed more data from the southeastern
side of the city before we could really determine Regalia’s center base.

Feeling satisfied, I left the library. With nothing to do.

Which was odd. Back in Newcago, I’d always had something to occupy my time, mostly because of Abraham and Cody. Whenever they’d seen me looking idle, they’d handed me a project. Cleaning guns, carrying crates, practicing with the tensors—something.

Here, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t practice with the spyril down here—and I could only go up above to practice during certain preplanned excursions. Besides, my body ached from the hours I’d already spent power-swimming around the city. Prof’s forcefields kept me from getting battered, but they didn’t protect my muscles from strain.

I peeked in on Tia—her door was cracked—and I knew from her look of concentration and the six empty cola pouches by her seat that I shouldn’t disturb her. Mizzy was in the workroom with Val helping her, fixing one of our boat motors. When I stepped in to talk to them, I got an immediate cold scowl from Val. I stopped dead in the doorway, chilled by that stare. Val seemed to be in an even worse mood than normal in the last few days.

Mizzy gave me a little shrug, wiggling her hand and making Val pass her a wrench. Sparks. I turned around and left them. Now what? I should be doing
something
. I sighed and headed back toward my room, where I could dig into my notes on Epics yet again. I passed Tia’s room and was surprised when she called out.

“David?”

I hesitated by the door, then pushed it open farther. “Yeah?”

“How did you know?” Tia asked, head down over her datapad, typing something furiously. “About Sourcefield.”

Sourcefield. The Epic we’d killed just before leaving Newcago. I stepped forward, eager. “You found something more? About her background?”

“I’ve just recovered the truth about her grandparents,” Tia said with a nod. “They tried to kill her.”

“That’s sad, but …”

“They poisoned her drink.”

“Kool-Aid?”

“A generic,” Tia said, “but close enough. The grandparents were a strange pair, fascinated by cults and old stories. It was a copycat killing, or an attempted one, based on an older tragedy in South America. The important thing is that Sourcefield—rather, Emiline—was old enough at the time to realize that she’d been poisoned. She crawled out into the street when her throat and mouth started burning, and a passerby took her to the hospital. She became an Epic years later, and her weakness—”

“Was the very thing that had almost killed her,” I finished, excited. “It’s a connection, Tia.”

“Maybe a coincidental one.”

“You don’t believe that,” I said. How could she? This was another connection, a
real
one—like Mitosis, but even more promising. Was this where Epic weaknesses came from? Something that nearly killed them?

But how would bad rock music nearly kill a guy?
I wondered. Touring, perhaps? An accident. We needed to know more.

“I think a coincidence
is
possible,” Tia said, then looked up and finally met my eyes. “But I also think it’s worth investigating. Nice work. How did you guess?”

“There’s got to be some logic to it, Tia,” I said. “The powers, the weaknesses, the Epics … who gets chosen.”

“I don’t know, David,” Tia said. “Does there really
have
to be a rationale behind it? In ancient days, when a disaster struck everyone would try to make sense of it—find a reason. Somebody’s sins. Angered gods. But nature doesn’t always have a reason for us, not the type we want.”

“You’re going to look into it, right?” I asked. “This is like Mitosis—similar at least. Maybe we can find a connection with Steelheart and his weakness. He could only be harmed by someone who didn’t fear him. Maybe in his past he was nearly killed by someone who—”

“I’ll look into it,” Tia said, stopping me. “I promise.”

“You seem reluctant,” I pressed. How could she be so skeptical? This was exciting! Revolutionary!

“I thought we were beyond this. The lorists spent the early years searching for a connection between Epic weaknesses. We decided there wasn’t one.” She hesitated. “Though I suppose that was a challenging time—when communication was difficult and the government was collapsing. We made other mistakes back then; I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised to discover we’d been too hasty in making some of our decisions.” She sighed. “I’ll look into this further, though Calamity knows I don’t have the time these days with the Regalia issue.”

“I can help,” I said, taking another step forward.

“I know you can. I’ll keep you informed of what I discover.”

I stayed where I was, stubborn not to leave so easily.

“That was a dismissal, David.”

“I—”

“The people I work with are very secretive,” Tia interrupted. “I’ve been implying to them that you should be allowed to join our ranks, but if you do you’ll have to give up on fieldwork. Having access to our knowledge necessitates preventing you from taking risks, lest you get captured and interrogated.”

I grunted, annoyed. I’d been looking forward to the chance, someday, to meet with Tia’s lorists. But I wasn’t going to give up on running point, not when there were Epics to kill. Being a lorist sounded like a job for a nerd anyway.

I sighed and retreated from the library. This left me with the same problem as before, unfortunately. What to do with myself? Tia wouldn’t let me in on the research, and Val didn’t want me nearby.

Who would have thought that living in an awesome undersea base would be so boring?

I walked slowly back toward my room. The hallway was quiet except for some echoing sounds from farther down the dark stretch. Faint, with a rasping quality, they called to me like the ding on a microwave as it finished nuking a pizza pocket. I passed door after door until I eventually reached Exel’s room. He had the door wide open, and the inside was plastered wall to wall with posters of interesting buildings. An architecture buff? I wouldn’t have guessed—but then again, I was having trouble guessing anything about Exel.

The man himself sat filling up a large chair near a small table set with an antiquated piece of machinery. He nodded to me, then continued to fiddle with the machine in front of him. It made buzzing noises.

Feeling welcome for the first time all day, I walked in and settled into a seat beside him. “A radio?” I guessed as he turned a dial.

“Specifically, a scanner,” he said.

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It just lets me look for signals, mostly local ones, and see if I can hear them.”

“How … old-fashioned,” I said.

“Well, maybe not as much as you think,” he answered. “This isn’t
actually
the radio, just a control mechanism. We’re
buried far enough underwater that I wouldn’t get good signals here; the real radio is stashed above.”

“Still—radio?” I tapped my new mobile. “We have something better.”

“And most people above do not,” Exel said, sounding amused. “You think the people partying and lounging in this city have the resources to use
mobiles
? Knighthawk mobiles no less?”

I hesitated. Mobiles had been common in Newcago, where Steelheart had had a deal with the Knighthawk Foundry. While that sounded altruistic of him, there was a simpler truth to it. With everyone carrying mobiles, he could force upon them “obedience programs” and other warnings to keep them in line.

Apparently Regalia didn’t have something similar.

“Radios,” Exel said, tapping his receiver. “Some things just
work
. There is elegance in simplicity. If I were up there living a relatively normal life, I’d want a radio instead of a mobile. I can fix a radio; I know how it works. Calamity only knows what goes on inside one of those modern devices.”

“But how do the radios get power?” I asked.

Exel shook his head. “Radios just work here in Babilar.”

“You mean …”

“No explanation for it,” he said with a shrug of his ample shoulders. “Nothing else works without a power source—blenders, clocks, whatever you try. Won’t work. But radios turn on, even if you don’t have batteries in them.”

That gave me a shiver. Even more than the strange lights in the darkness, this creeped me out. Ghostly powered radios? What was
happening
in this city?

Exel didn’t seem bothered. He tuned to another frequency, then took out his pen, leaning in, writing. I scooted my chair closer. From what I could tell, he was just listening to random
chatter of townspeople. He made a few notes, then moved on. He listened to this frequency for a while without making notes before going to the next one, where he scribbled things down furiously.

He really seemed to know what he was doing. His notes were neat and efficient, and he seemed to be searching to see if some of the people might be speaking in code. I took one of his sheets off the table; he glanced at me but didn’t stop me.