“I think tigers are the orange ones,” Mizzy said. “But they’re still only half orange, since they have black stripes. Maybe you should be intense like an orange is orange.”
“Too obvious,” I said. “I’m intense like a lion is tannish.” Did that work? Didn’t exactly slip off the tongue.
Mizzy cocked her head, looking at me. “You’re kinda weird.”
“No, look, it’s just because the metaphor didn’t work. I’ve got it. I’m intense like—”
“No, it’s okay,” Mizzy said, smiling. “I like it.”
“Yeah,” Exel said, laughing. “I’ll remember that orange thing for your eulogy.”
Great. A few hours into the new team, and I’d convinced them that Steelslayer was adorably strange. I settled back into my seat with a sigh.
We traveled for a while, an hour or more. Long enough that I wasn’t certain we were still in Babilar. Eventually the sub slowed. A moment later the entire thing lurched, and some kind of clamps locked on from the outside.
Wherever we were going, we had arrived. Exel got to his feet and dug out some towels. He nodded to Val, who climbed up the ladder.
“Kill the lights,” she said.
We obligingly put out the lights, and I heard Val undo the hatch up above. Water streamed down, but from the sound of it, Exel quickly mopped it up.
“Out we go,” Mizzy whispered to me. I felt my way to the ladder, letting the others each go up before me. I heard them chatting above, so I knew that when Tia came to the ladder, she was last.
“Prof?” I asked her softly.
“The others don’t know exactly what happened,” she whispered. “I told them that Prof led Obliteration off, but that he was all right and would catch up to us.”
“And what really happened?”
She didn’t reply in the darkness.
“Tia,” I said, “I’m the only other one here who knows about him. You might as well use me as a resource. I can help.”
“He doesn’t need either of our help right now,” she said. “He just needs time.”
“What did he do?”
She sighed softly. “He deliberately let himself get hit with a burst of fire, something no ordinary person could have survived. While Obliteration was standing over him gloating, Jon healed himself, leaped up, and snatched off the man’s glasses. The tip about Obliteration being nearsighted? Turns out it was a good one.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Jon said that scared the wits out of the creature,” Tia whispered. “Obliteration ported away and didn’t return. Jon’s safe; everything is okay. So you can stop worrying.”
I let her pass. Everything wasn’t okay. If Prof was staying away, it was because he was afraid of how he’d act around us. I reluctantly shouldered my pack and gun, then climbed up into a pitch-black room.
“You out, David?” Val’s voice sounded in the darkness.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Over here.”
I followed the sound of her voice. She took me by the arm and steered me through a doorway with some black cloth on it. She followed, then closed a door behind us before opening one in front, letting in light so I could finally see the bolt-hole the Reckoners were using as a base here in Babilar.
Turns out it wasn’t a hole at all.
It was a mansion.
16
LUSH red carpets. Dark hardwood. Lounge chairs. A bar with crystal that reflected the light of Val’s mobile. Open space. A lot of open space.
My jaw hit the floor. Well, the door, technically. I smacked it as I stepped into the room and turned, trying to stare in all directions at once. The place looked like a king’s palace. No … no, it looked like an Epic’s palace.
“How …” I stepped into the center of the room. “Are we still underwater?”
“Mostly,” Val said. “We’re in some rich dude’s underground bunker on Long Island. Howard Righton. Built the thing with its own airtight filtration system in case of nuclear fallout.” She slung her pack onto the bar. “Unfortunately for him, he anticipated the wrong kind of apocalypse. An Epic knocked his plane out of the sky as he and his family were flying home from Europe.”
I looked back toward the short hallway leading to the submarine room. Exel closed its door, locking the hallway in darkness. I had a vague impression that we’d risen up through the floor of the room, which probably had some kind of docking mechanism. But how had the submarine docked under a bunker in the ground?
“Storage basement,” Exel explained as he waddled past. “Righton’s bunker had a big chamber for food storage cut out underneath it. That’s flooded now, and we broke open one side, forming a kind of cave we can drive the sub into. Prof cut into it through the floor and installed the docking seal a few years back.”
“Jon likes to have safe places in every city he might visit,” Tia said, settling on one of the plush couches with her mobile. It would work down here—they worked in the steel catacombs of Newcago, so I was pretty sure they’d work anywhere.
Honestly, I was feeling a little naked without mine. I’d saved for years working in the Factory to buy it. Now that my rifle was gone and the mobile destroyed, I found I didn’t really have much from that time of my life.
“So now what?” I asked.
“Now we wait for Jon to finish his reconnaissance,” Tia said, “and then we send for someone to pick him up. Missouri, why don’t you show David to his quarters.” Which should keep him out of my hair for now, her tone implied.
I shouldered my pack as Mizzy nodded and bobbed off down a corridor with a flashlight. It suddenly hit me just how tired I was. Even though we’d spent the trip here driving at night, I hadn’t completely switched my days and nights. For the last few months it had been a novel thing for me to live in the light, and I’d enjoyed it.
Well, it seemed darkness would become the norm again. I followed Mizzy out of the main sitting room down a corridor lined with artistic photos of colored water being flung into the air. I figured it was supposed to look modern and chic. All it did was remind me that we were on the bottom of the ocean.
“I can’t believe how nice this is,” I said, peering into a library lined with books, more than I’d ever seen in my life. Small, emergency-style lights glowed on the walls in most of the rooms, so it appeared we had power.
“Yeaaah,” Mizzy said. “People out on Long Island had it nice, didn’t they? Beaches, big houses. We’d visit when I was a little girl, and I’d play in the sand and think about what it must be like to live in one of those mansions.” She trailed her fingers along the wall as she walked. “I took the sub past my old apartment once. That was a hoot.”
“Was it tough to see now?”
“Nah. I barely remember the days before Calamity. For most of my life I lived in the Painted Village.”
“The what?”
“Neighborhood downtown,” she said. “Good place. Not too many gangs. Usually had food.”
I followed Mizzy farther down the corridor, and she pointed toward a door in the hallway. “Bathroom. Go in the first door and always close it. Then go through the other door. There is no light; you’ll have to move by touch. There are facilities and a sink. That’s the only running water in the place. Never bring anything out; not even a cup to drink from.”
“Regalia?”
Mizzy nodded. “We’re outside her range, but even if she almost never moves, we figure it’s best to be safe. If she finds this place, after all, we’re dead.”
I wasn’t certain. As Tia had pointed out, Regalia could have killed us up above, but she hadn’t. She seemed to be holding back the darkness, like Prof. “The gangs,” I said, joining Mizzy as we kept walking. “Regalia got rid of those?”
“Yeah,” Mizzy said. “The only gang left is Newton’s, and even she’s been pretty relaxed lately, for an Epic.”
“So Regalia is good for the city.”
“Well, other than flooding it,” Mizzy said, “killing tens of thousand
s in the process. But I suppose by comparison to how terrible she used to be, she’s not as bad now. Kind of like the dog chewing on your ankle is pleasant compared to the one that used to be chewing on your head.”
“Nice metaphor,” I noted.
“Though shockingly bereft of lions,” Mizzy said, stepping into another larger room. How big was this place? The room we entered was circular and had a piano on one side—I’d never seen one of those except in movies—and some fancy dining tables on the other side. The ceiling was painted black, and …
No. That wasn’t black. That was water.
I gasped, cringing down as I realized that the ceiling was pure glass, and looked up through the dark waters. Some fish swam by in a little school, and I swore I could see something large cruising past. A shadow.
“This guy built a bomb shelter,” I said, “with a skylight?”
“Six-inch acrylic,” Mizzy answered, shading her flashlight, “with a retractable steel plate. And before you ask, no, Regalia can’t see through it. First off, as I’ve pointed out, we’re far enough from the city that we should be outside her range. Secondly, she needs a water surface open to the air.” She hesitated. “That said, I wish we could get the thing closed. Blasted plate is jammed open up there.”
We passed quickly through that awful room and entered another nice, windowless corridor. A little ways down it, Mizzy pushed open a door and gestured inside toward a large bedroom.