Firefight

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.

Good lie or not, I hated telling it. Couldn’t Prof be straight with the members of his own team?

Val regarded me carefully, and though her face was too much in shadows to read, I felt like the only rotten strawberry in a line of strawberries. Finally, she shrugged. “Well, nice work.”

I hurriedly slipped down into the submarine. Val followed, then locked the hatch and moved to the front seat. She didn’t believe what I’d told her, not completely. I could read it in the stiff way she sat down, the too-controlled sound of her voice as she called Tia and said we were on our way back to the supply dump to get the next set of boxes, which would restock our base.

I fidgeted, and we moved under the waves and traveled for a while in silence. Finally, I forced myself to get into the copilot’s seat next to Val at the front. I still knew next to nothing about Val. Maybe some disarming conversation would ease her suspicion about what had happened the day before.

“So,” I said, “I notice you prefer a Colt 1911. A good, time-tested gun. Is that a Springfield frame and slide set?”

“Don’t know, honestly,” she said, glancing at the gun she wore on her hip. “Sam gave it to me.”

“But, I mean, surely you need to know. For replacement parts.”

Val shrugged. “It’s just a gun. If it breaks, I’ll get another.”

Just a …

Just a gun? Had she really said that?

I found my mouth working, but no sound coming out, as we puttered beneath the waves. The gun you carried was literally your life-if it malfunctioned, you could be dead. How could she say something like that?

Be disarming, I told myself forcefully. Chastising her won’t make her more comfortable around you.

“So, uh,” I said, coughing into my hand, “you must have enjoyed it here, on this assignment. Sweet undersea base, no Epics to fight, a city full of good-natured people. Must be the best job a Reckoner team could get assigned.”

“Sure,” Val said. “Until one of my friends got murdered.”

And now I was “replacing” that friend in the team. Great. Another reminder why she shouldn’t like me.

“You’ve known Mizzy for a while,” I said, trying another tactic. “You didn’t grow up in the city, did you?”

“No.”

“Where were you stationed before this?”

“Mexico. But you shouldn’t ask about our pasts. It’s against protocol.”

“Just trying to-”

“I know what you’re trying to do. It’s not necessary. I’ll do my job; you do yours.”

“Sure,” I said. “All right.” I settled back in my seat.

Wait. Mexico? I perked up. “You … weren’t in on the Hermosillo job, were you?”

Val eyed me, but said nothing.

“The hit on Punos de Fuego!” I exclaimed.

“How do you know about that?” Val asked.

“Oh man. Was it true, did he really throw a tank at you?”

Val kept her eyes forward, tapping a button on the sub’s control panel. “Yeah,” she finally said. “An entire flippin’ tank. Broke open the wall of our base of operations.”

“Wow.”

“What’s more, I was running ops.”

“So you-”

“Yeah. I was inside when this tank comes crashing right through the wall. He’d dodged around Sam and managed to double back, so he could hit our operations station. Still not sure how he even knew where we were.”

I grinned, imagining it. Punos had been a beastly strength Epic, capable of lifting practically anything-even things that should have broken apart as he did it. Not a High Epic, but hard to kill, with enhanced endurance and skin like an elephant’s.

“I never did figure out how you beat him,” I said. “Only that the team eventually took him out, despite the job going wrong.”

Val kept her gaze trained straight ahead, but I caught a hint of a smile on her lips.

“What?” I asked.

“Well … I was there,” she said, growing slightly more animated, “in the rubble of our operations station-a little brick building in the center of the city. And he was coming for me. I was alone, no support.”

“And?”

“And … well, there was a tank in the room.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Val said. “At first I climbed into the thing just to hide. But then, it was armed, and he walked right in front of the barrel. The tank was on its side, but it had crashed in through the wall rear-end-first. So I figured, what the hell?”

“You shot him.”

“Yeah.”

“With a tank.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awesome.”

“It was stupid,” Val said, though she was still smiling. “If that barrel had been bent, I’d probably have blown myself up instead. But … well, it worked. Sam said he found Punos’s arm seven streets over.” She looked at me, then seemed to realize who she was talking to. Her expression dimmed.

“Sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For not being Sam.”

“That’s stupid,” Val said, turning away from me. She hesitated. “You’re kind of infectious, Steelslayer. You know that?”

“It’s my gritty, determined manliness.”

“Um. No. It’s not. But it might be your enthusiasm.” She shook her head and pulled back on the steering column, raising the sub up toward the surface. “Either way, you can go be manly hauling boxes. We’ve arrived.”

I smiled, glad to have finally had a conversation with Val that didn’t involve a lot of scowling. I got up and made my way over to the ladder. The door to the bathroom was rattling again. We really needed to get Mizzy to fix the blasted thing. I nudged it closed with my toe, then I climbed up and opened the hatch.

The land up above was pitch-black, darkness fully upon us. This supply dump wasn’t as far up the coast as City Island, but we should be well outside Regalia’s range. Still, it seemed a good idea to never leave the sub without someone in it, so I’d fetch the boxes and carry them the short distance to the coast, then set them down for Val. She’d get them from shore to the sub, then carry them down the ladder and stack them.

I shouldered my rifle and climbed out onto a quiet dock, water lapping against the wood, as if to pointedly remind me that it was still there. I hurried across the dock and approached a dark building ahead, an old shed where Cody had unloaded our supplies.

I slipped inside. At least there wouldn’t be as many boxes this time around. We probably should have carried them all down before, but our arms had been aching, and a short break had sounded really nice.

I turned on the light on my mobile and checked the room.

Then I pulled open the hidden trapdoor in the floor, and climbed down to check on Prof.