Firefight

33

Megan.

Megan was inside the Reckoner base.

I let out a sound that was definitely not a whimper. It was something far more manly, no matter what it sounded like.

I glanced after Mizzy in a moment of panic, then stepped into the storage room, taking Megan by the arm. “What are you doing!”

“We need to talk,” she said. “And you were ignoring me.”

“I wasn’t ignoring you. Things have just been very busy.”

“Busy looking at women’s backsides.”

“I wasn’t … Wait.” It hit me and I smiled. “You sound jealous!”

“Don’t be a buffoon.”

“No,” I said. “You were jealous.” I found I couldn’t stop grinning.

Megan seemed confused. “Normally, that’s not something people smile about.”

“It means you care,” I said.

“Oh please.”

Time to say something suave. Something romantic. My brain, which had been working a few steps behind all day, finally came to my rescue. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’d rather ogle you any day.”

Wait.

Megan sighed, peeking out into the hallway past me. “You are a buffoon,” she said under her breath. “Is she likely to come back here?”

Right. Enemy High Epic. Reckoner base. “I’m assuming you’re not here to turn yourself in?” I said softly.

“Turn myself in? Sparks, no. I just needed to talk to someone. You were the most convenient.”

“This is convenient?” I asked.

Megan looked at me and blushed. A blush looked really good on her. Of course, so would soup, mud, or elephant earwax. Megan on a bad day outshined anyone else I’d ever known.

“Come on,” I said, taking her by the arm. I didn’t want to encourage her to use her powers to hide, not when she was so obviously acting like the Megan I’d known before. Which meant moving quickly. I towed her after me in a heart-pounding rush down the hallway toward my room.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who’d just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

Megan inspected the room. “You didn’t get one with a porthole, I see. Still the new kid on the team, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“Nice, anyway,” she said, strolling forward. “Better than a metal hole in the ground.”

“Megan,” I said. “How … I mean, does anyone else out there know where our base is?”

She met my gaze, then shook her head. “Not so far as I know. I don’t meet with Regalia often-I don’t think she trusts me-but from what I’ve heard of the others, they’re searching for you. Regalia thinks your base is somewhere on the northern coast, and seems thoroughly annoyed that she hasn’t been able to find it.”

“How did you find us, then?” I asked.

“Steelheart had me bug everyone in the team,” she said.

“So you …”

“I can listen in,” Megan said, “on some of your calls. Or I could, for a while. Phaedrus is paranoid, changes both his phone and Tia’s regularly. Yours is dead. I can only listen in these days if someone calls Abraham or Cody.”

“The supply shipment,” I said. “You heard where it was, got there before us, then snuck onto the submarine.”

Megan nodded.

“I was there,” I said. “I didn’t see you at all! Were you using your powers?”

“Nah,” Megan said, flopping back onto the bed, lying across it sideways. “I only needed good old-fashioned stealth.”

“But …”

“I was about to sneak aboard after you’d been out of the sub for a while, and then Val came out following you and nearly gave me a heart attack. But I ducked just in time, then went in and hid in the bathroom.”

I grinned, though she couldn’t see it-she was staring at the ceiling. “You’re amazing,” I said.

The corners of her lips tugged up at that, though she remained staring upward. “It’s getting really difficult, David.”

“Difficult?”

“Not using my powers.”

I scrambled up to the side of the bed. “You’ve been doing what I asked? Avoiding the abilities?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know why I listen to you. Just makes life difficult. I mean, I’m basically a divinity, right? So I end up hiding in a bathroom?”

I settled down, sitting on the bed beside her. The tension in her voice, that look in her eyes. “Is it working?” I asked. “Do you feel like murdering people indiscriminately?”

“I always feel like murdering you. If only just a little.”

I waited.

“Yes,” Megan finally said with a sigh. “It’s working. It’s driving me insane in other ways, but not using my powers has removed some of the … tendencies from my mind. But I honestly don’t ever feel like killing people. For me, it manifests more as irritability and selfishness.”

“Huh,” I said. “Why do you think that is?”

“Probably because I’m not very powerful.”

“Megan, you’re a High Epic! You’re wicked powerful.”

“Wicked?”

“Heard it in a movie once.”

“Whatever. I’m not a very powerful Epic, David. I have to use a gun for Calamity’s sake! I can reincarnate, yes, but have you seen how weak my illusions are?”

“I think they’re pretty awesome.”

“I’m not fishing for compliments, David,” she said. “We’re trying to get me to not use my powers, remember?”

“Sorry. Uh, wow. Your powers are so lame. They’re like, about as useful as an eight-by-eighty mounted on a twelve-gauge firing birdshot.”

She looked at me, then started laughing. “Oh sparks. You’d have a real good view of the pheasant dying, though.”

“Up close and personal,” I said. “The way avian massacres were meant to happen.”

This made her laugh more, and I grinned. She seemed to need the laughter. There was a desperation to it; though it did occur to me that we should make sure to keep things quiet.

Megan stretched her arms back, then folded them on her stomach, sighing.

“Feel good?” I asked.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said softly. “It’s horrible.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She glanced at me.

“I’d like to know,” I said. “I’ve made a habit of … ending people with these powers. I don’t know if it will make me feel better or worse to know what they’re going through, but I think I should hear it either way.”

She looked back at the ceiling and didn’t speak at first. I’d left one light on in the room, a small reddish-orange lamp with a glass shade. The room was silent, though I thought sometimes I could hear the ocean outside. Waves surging, water rolling. It was probably just my imagination.

“It’s not like a voice,” Megan said. “I’ve read what some of Tia’s scholars write, and they treat it like schizophrenia. They claim that Epics have something like an evil conscience telling them what to do, which is a load of crap. It’s nothing like that.

“You know how, some mornings, you just feel a little angry at the world?” she continued. “Or you’re irritable, so that small things-things that normally wouldn’t annoy you-set you off? It’s like that. Only mixed with an inability to care about consequences.

“Even that’s kind of normal-I’ve been there, felt like that, long before I got these powers. You know how it is when you’re up late, and you know that if you don’t go to bed, you’re going to hate life the next day? Then you stay up anyway, because you don’t care? It’s like that. As an Epic, you just don’t care. After all, you deserve to be able to do what you want. And if you go too far, you can change later. Always later.”

She closed her eyes as she spoke, and I felt a chill. I had felt like she’d described. Who hasn’t? Listening to her, it seemed perfectly logical to me that an Epic should do what they do. That horrified me.

“But you’ve changed,” I told Megan. “You’ve resisted.”

“For a few days,” she said. “It’s hard, David. Really, really hard. Like going without water.”

“You said it’s easier when you’re near me.”

She opened her eyes and glanced over at me. “Yeah.”

“So there’s a secret to beating it.”

“Not necessarily. A lot of things relating to Epics don’t make any sense.”

“Everyone says that,” I replied, standing and walking to my desk. “We say it so much, I wonder if we just take it for granted. Here, look at this.” I dug out my research on Epic weaknesses.

“What’s this?” Megan said, standing up as well. She walked over and leaned down next to me, her head so close to mine. “You going all-out nerd on me again, Knees?”

“I’ve been finding connections between Epics and their weaknesses,” I said, pointing at my notes on Mitosis, then Sourcefield. “We say the weaknesses are random, right? Well, there are some large coincidences related to these two.”

Megan read. “His own music?” she asked. “Huh.”

“What about Steelheart?” I asked, excited. “His powers were negated by people who didn’t fear him. You knew him-is there something in his past you can connect to his weakness?”

“It’s not like we went to dinner parties together,” Megan said dryly. “Most people in the city, even the higher-ups, didn’t even know about me. All they knew was ‘Firefight,’ my dimensional double.”

“Your … what?”

“Long story,” Megan said, distracted as she looked over my notes on Sourcefield. “Steelheart wanted to keep everything about me as secret as possible. So he kept his distance from the real me, so as not to draw attention. Sparks, he kept his distance from pretty much everyone.”

“There’s a connection here,” I said, flicking the papers with one hand. “There’s a connection to all of it, Megan. Maybe even a reason.”

I expected her to object, like both Prof and Tia had. Instead, she nodded.

“You agree?” I asked.

“This was done to me,” Megan said. “Against my will. I became an Epic. I’d sure like to know if there was more meaning to it all. So yeah, I’m willing to believe.” She still stared at the page. “More than willing, maybe.”

It was hard not to notice how near to me she was standing, her cheek almost brushing my own. The urge to reach out and pull her even closer was so powerful that, in that moment, I thought I understood how she must feel being drawn to use her abilities.

“If there is a connection to the weakness,” I said, to distract myself, “there might be a secret to overcoming the influence of the powers. We can get you out of this, Megan.”

“Maybe,” she said, then shook her head. “So help me, if this is related to ‘the power of love’ or some similar kind of bull, I’m going to strangle somebody.…” Her face was right next to mine. So close.

“The power of w-what?” I stammered.

“Don’t read too much into that.”

“Oh.”

She smiled. So, figuring it couldn’t hurt-the worst she could do was shoot me-I leaned forward to kiss her. This time, remarkably, she didn’t pull away.

It felt fantastic. I didn’t have much experience, and I’d heard these things were supposed to be awkward, but this time-for once in my life-nothing went wrong. She pressed her lips against mine, head tilted to the side, and wrapped her arms around me, warm and inviting. It felt like … like …

Like something fantastic I didn’t ever want to end. And wasn’t going to try to explain, lest I somehow screw it up.

A little voice in the back of my head did buzz a warning, though. Dude. You’re making out with an Epic.

I turned that piece of me off. How easy it was to not worry about consequences in that moment, just as Megan had said. I barely heard the knock come at my door.

I did notice, however, when that door started to open.