Firefight (40 page)

“You’re lying.”

“Oh?” Regalia said. “And what is that you smell?”

I’d smelled it earlier. With an edge of panic, I ran to the side of the building and looked toward something I could barely make out against the darkness. A column of smoke rising from a nearby building—the place where Mizzy said Prof had been waiting.

Fire.

Megan!

47

REGALIA
let me go. That probably should have worried me more than it did.

I focused only on reaching that building. I fiddled with the leg wires on the spyril and managed to get one of the jets working. That let me awkwardly cross the gaps between rooftops. I landed on a building next to the one belching the column of smoke, and heat blasted me despite the distance. The fire was burning from the lower floors upward. The roof itself wasn’t yet consumed, but the lower floors were engulfed. It seemed like the entire structure was close to collapsing.

Frantic, I looked down at the glove of my handjet. Might it be enough? I jetted across to the rooftop, where the heat was actually less intense than it had been when facing the burning
lower floors. Sweating, I sprinted across the roof and found a stairwell access door.

I shoved it open. Smoke billowed out, and I got a lungful. Driven back by the heat, I stumbled away, coughing. I squeezed tears from my eyes at the smoke and looked at the spyril strapped to my arm. Thoughts of using the spyril like a fireman’s hose seemed silly now. There was no way I could get close enough, and there wouldn’t be water inside the building anyway.

“She’s dead,” a quiet voice said.

I started, jumping to the side and reaching for Mizzy’s handgun. Prof sat on the side of the rooftop, shadowed by the little stairwell shack so that I hadn’t seen him at first.

“Prof?” I asked, uncertain.

“She came to save you,” he said softly. He was slumped down, a shadowy mountain of a man in the gloom. No neon glowed near here. “I sent her a dozen messages with your phone, made it seem like you were in danger. She came. Even though I’d already started the fire, she broke into the building, thinking you were trapped inside. She ran, coughing and blind, to the room where she thought you lay trapped and pinned under a fallen tree. I caught her, took away her weapons, and left her in there with forcefields on the doorways and the window.”

“Please, no …,” I whispered. I couldn’t think. It wasn’t possible.

“Just her alone in the room,” Prof continued. He held something in his hand. Megan’s handgun, the one I’d given back to her. “Water on the floor. I needed Regalia to see. I was sure she’d come. And she did—but only to laugh at me.”

“Megan’s still down there!” I said. “In what room?”

“Two floors down, but she’s dead, David. She has to be.
Too much fire. I think …” He seemed dazed. “I must have been wrong about her all along. And you were right. Her illusions broke apart, you see.…”

“Prof,” I said, grabbing him. “We have to go for her.
Please
.”

“I can hold it back, can’t I?” Prof said. He looked to me, and his face seemed too shadowed; only his eyes glittered, reflecting starlight. He seized me by the arms. “Take some of it. Take it away from me, so I can’t use it!”

I felt a tingling sensation wash through me. Prof, gifting me some of his powers.

“Jon!” Tia’s voice barked from the mobile on his shoulder, where he’d strapped it, apparently eschewing an earpiece. “Jon, it’s Mizzy.… Jon, she’s got the camera that was watching Obliteration, and she’s been writing messages on paper and holding them up for us to see. She says Obliteration isn’t there.”

Clever, Mizzy
, I thought.

“No, that’s because he’s
here
,” Val’s voice said over the line. “Prof, you’ve got to see this. We’ve swept Regalia’s base at Building C. She’s nowhere to be seen, but there’s something else. Obliteration, we think. At least,
something
is glowing in here, and glowing powerfully. This looks bad.…”

Prof looked to me, then seemed to grow stronger. “I’m coming,” he said to them. “Hold that building.”

“Yes sir,” Val said.

Prof darted away, a forcefield forming to make a bridge for him from this building to the next.

“It’s all wrong, Prof,” I called after him. “Regalia isn’t bound by the limits you thought she was. She knows all about the plan. Whatever Val just found, it’s a trap. For you.”

He stopped at the edge of the rooftop. Smoke billowed out
of the building around us, so thick it was growing hard for me to breathe. But for some reason, the heat seemed to have lessened.

“That sounds like her,” Prof said, his voice trailing back to me in the night.

“So …”

“So if Obliteration is really there,” he said, “I have to stop him. I will simply need to find a way to survive the trap.” Prof charged across his forcefield, leaving me.

I sat down, drained, numb. Megan’s handgun lay on the ground before me. I picked it up. Megan … I’d been too late. I’d failed. And I still didn’t know what Regalia’s trap entailed.

So what?
a piece of me said.
You give up?

When had I ever done that?

I shouted, standing up and charging toward the stairwell down. I didn’t care about the heat, though I assumed it would drive me back. Only it didn’t. It felt practically cold in the stairwell.

Prof’s forcefield
, I realized, driving myself onward.
He just gifted one to me
. One had protected me against Obliteration’s heat. It would work just as well against this fire, it appeared.

I kept my head down, breath held, but eventually had to suck in some air. I muffled my mouth and nose with my T-shirt, which was soaked from the fight with Regalia, and it seemed to work. Either that, or Prof’s forcefield kept the smoke away from me. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how they worked, even still.

Two floors down, where Prof said he’d left Megan, I entered a place alight with fire. Violent flames created an alien illumination. It was a place a man like me wasn’t supposed to go.

I gritted my teeth and pushed forward, trusting in Prof’s forcefield. Part of me, deep inside, panicked at the sight of
all this fire—walls burned from floor to ceiling and flames dripped down from above, Dawnslight’s trees engulfed in orange. There was no way I could survive this, could I? Prof’s forcefields were never a hundred percent effective when given to someone else.

I was too worried about Megan, too desperate and shaken, to stop moving. I shoved my way through a burning door, charred wood breaking around me. I stumbled past a hole in the floor, my arm up warding against the heat I could not feel. Everything was so
bright
. I could barely see in here.

I took in a breath but felt no pain from the heat. The forcefield wouldn’t cool the air as I drew it in. Why wasn’t I burning my throat with each breath? Sparks! Nothing made sense.

Megan. Where was
Megan
?

I stumbled through another doorway and saw a body on the floor, in the middle of a burned rug.

I cried out and ran to it, kneeling, cradling the half-burned figure, tipping the charred head to see a familiar face. It was her. I screamed, looking at the dead eyes, the burned flesh, and pulled the limp body close.

I knelt in the inferno of hell itself, the world dying around me, and knew I had failed.

My jacket was burning, and my skin was darkening from the flames. Sparks. It was killing me too. Why couldn’t I feel it?

Crying, reckless, I grabbed Megan’s body and blinked away the horrid light of fire and smoke. I stumbled to my feet and looked toward a window. The glass was melting from the heat, but there was no sign of a forcefield—Prof must have already dismissed the forcefields surrounding the room. With a yell, I ran for the window, holding her, and crashed out into the cold night air.

I fell a short distance before engaging the spyril. The single jet I had fixed still worked, fortunately, and slowed my fall
until I was hovering in the air outside the burning building, holding Megan’s corpse, water jetting beneath me and smoke breaking around me. Slowly, on a single jet, I raised us to the next building over and landed before setting Megan down.

Charred flakes of blackened skin fell from my arms, revealing pink flesh beneath—which immediately became a healthy tan. I blinked at it, then suddenly realized why I hadn’t felt pain, and why I’d been able to breathe in the heated air. Prof hadn’t just given me a forcefield, he’d gifted me some of his healing powers as well. I touched my scalp and found that though my hair had burned away, it was growing back—Prof’s healing power restoring me to the way I had been before entering the inferno.

So I was safe. But what did it matter? Megan was still dead. I knelt above her, feeling helpless and alone, broken inside. I’d worked so hard, and I’d still failed.

Overwhelmed, I bowed my head. Maybe … maybe she’d lied about her weakness. She’d be okay then, right? I touched her face, turning it. Half of it was burned, but when I nudged her head to the side, I could ignore the burned part. The other side looked barely singed. Just a little ash on the cheek. Beautiful, like she was just sleeping.

Tears leaking down the sides of my face, I took her hand. “No,” I whispered. “I watched you die once. I don’t believe it happened again. Do you hear me? You aren’t dead. Or … you’re coming back. That’s it. Do you have that recording going like last time? Because if you do, I want you to know. I believe in you. I don’t think …”

I trailed off.

If she came back, it meant she’d lied to me about her weakness. I wanted that to be true, desperately, because I wanted her to be alive. But at the same time, if she’d lied about her
weakness, what did that mean? I hadn’t demanded it, hadn’t wanted it, but she’d given it to me—so it seemed something sacred.

If she’d lied to me about her weakness, then I knew I wouldn’t be able to trust anything else she said. So, one way or another, Megan was lost to me.

I wiped tears from my chin, then reached out one last time to take her hand in mine. The back of the hand was burned, but not too badly, yet her fingers were stuck together in a fist. It was almost like … she was clutching something?

I frowned, prying her fingers apart. Indeed, her palm held a small object that had been melted to her sleeve: a small remote control.
What in Calamity’s light?
I held it up. It looked like the little remotes that came with car keys. It had melted at the bottom but looked to be in good shape otherwise. I hit the button.

Something sounded from just beneath me. A faint clicking noise, followed by some odd cracks.

I stared at the control for a long moment, then scrambled to my feet and ran to the side of the building. I pushed the button again. There. Was that … gunfire? Suppressed gunfire?

I lowered myself with the spyril to a window two stories down. There, set up in the shadows of a window, was the Gottschalk, sleek and black, with suppressor on the end of the muzzle. I moved to the side and pushed the button. It fired remotely, pelting the wall of the burning building with bullets.

It was firing into the room where Megan had been.

“You sly woman,” I said, snatching the gun. I raised myself on a jet of water and ran back to her body and rolled it over. The heat had dried the blood, darkened the skin, but I could make out the bullet holes.

Never had I been so happy to see that someone had been
shot. “You set it up so you could shoot yourself,” I whispered, “in case things went bad. So you’d reincarnate, rather than risking death by fire. Sparks, you’re
brilliant
!”

Emotion flooded me. Relief, exultation, amazement. Megan was the most awesome, most clever, most
incredible
person ever. If she’d died by bullets, she
was
coming back! In the morning, if what she said about her reincarnation timing was true.

I touched her face, but this … this was just a husk now. Megan,
my
Megan, would return. Grinning, I grabbed the Gottschalk and stood up. It felt good to have a solid rifle in my hands once again.

“You,” I said to the gun, “are officially
off
probation.”

Megan had survived. In the face of that, anything else seemed possible.

I could still save this city.

48

“MIZZY,”
I said, holding the walkie-talkie to my ear as I ran in the direction Prof had gone. “Does this stupid thing still work?”

“Yup,” came the reply.

“Clever move, using the camera to get a message to Tia.”

“She saw?” Mizzy said with an exuberant perkiness that seemed a distinct contrast to the agony I’d been through a few moments ago.

“Yeah,” I said, charging across a bridge. “I overheard a message from Tia to Prof. That might get him to scrap the mission.”

Unlikely. But it was possible.

“You found Prof?” Mizzy asked. “What happened?”

“Too much to explain,” I told her. “They say they stormed
Regalia’s supposed base—Building C, on Tia’s map—and found Obliteration glowing inside. I’m sure it’s some kind of trap.”

“That’s not Obliteration they found.”

“What? Val said she’d found him.”

“He appeared back here just after I knocked out the lights,” Mizzy said. “Nearly gave me a heart attack. Didn’t seem to notice me hiding, though. Anyway, he wasn’t glowing at all, but I got a goooood look at him. Whatever Val found, it isn’t Obliteration.”

“Sparks,” I said, trying to push myself faster. “Then what is Prof walking into?”

“You’re asking me?” Mizzy said.

“Just thinking out loud. I’m heading uptown. Can you get here? I might need fire support.”

“Already on my way,” Mizzy said, “but I’m pretty far. Any sign of Newton your direction?”

“Newton’s dead,” I said. “I managed to guess her weakness.”

“
Wow
,” Mizzy said. “Another one? You’re
really
making the rest of us look bad. I mean, dude,
I
couldn’t even shoot an unarmed, powerless enemy who fell in my lap.”