“Or, you know, you could interview the perfectly willing Epic walking beside you.”
I coughed into my hand. “Well, um, this scheme may have started because I was thinking about how to rescue you from your powers. I figured if I knew how long it took, and what was required to hold an Epic … You know. It might help you.”
“Aw,” she said. “That has to be the sweetest way someone has ever told me they were planning to kidnap and imprison me.”
“I just—”
“No, it’s okay,” she said, actually taking my arm. “I understand the sentiment. Thank you.”
I nodded, and we walked for a time. There was no urgency. Val would take hours on her mission, and Obliteration wasn’t going anywhere. So it was okay to enjoy the night—well, enjoy it as much as was possible, all things considered.
Babilar was beautiful. I was growing to like the strange light of the spraypaint. After the dull, reflective grey of Newcago, so much color was mesmerizing. The Babilarans could paint whatever murals they wanted, from scrawled names along the side of one building we passed, to a beautiful and fanciful depiction of the universe on the top of another.
While I still wasn’t comfortable with how relaxed people were here, I did have to admit that there was a certain appealing whimsy about them. Would it really be so bad if this were all there was to life? Tonight, as we passed them swimming or chatting or drumming and singing, I found the people annoyed me far less than they had before.
Perhaps it was the company. I had Megan on my arm, walking close beside me. We didn’t say much, but didn’t need to. I had her back, for the moment. I didn’t know how long it would last, but in this place of vibrant colors I could be with Megan again. For that I was thankful.
We passed up onto a tall building, approaching the eastern side of town, where Obliteration waited. I turned our path toward a bridge leading to an even higher building. That would be a good spot to either place Tia’s camera or scope out a better location.
“I’m worried that when I reincarnate, it’s not really me that comes back,” Megan said softly. “It’s some other version of me. I worry when it happens that eventually, something will go wrong and that other person will mess things up. Things I don’t want messed up.” She looked at me.
“It’s the real you,” I said.
“But—”
“No, Megan. You can’t spend your life worrying about that. You said that the powers grab a version of you that didn’t die—everything else is the same. Just alive.”
“I don’t know that for certain.”
“You remember everything that happened to you except the time right before the death, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It means you’re still you. It’s true—I can sense that it is. You’re my Megan, not some other person.”
She grew silent, and I glanced at her, but she was grinning. “You know,” she said, “talking to you sometimes—it makes me wonder if you’re actually the one who can reshape reality.”
A thought occurred to me. “Could you swap Obliteration?” I asked. “Pull out a version of him without powers, or with a really obvious weakness, then stuff this one into another dimension somewhere?”
She shook her head. “I’m not powerful enough,” she said. “The only times I’ve done anything truly dramatic are right after I die, on the morning when I reincarnate. Those times … it’s like I can pull bits of that reality with me, since I just arrived from it. But I’m not myself enough then to really control it at those times either, so don’t get any ideas.”
“It was worth asking,” I said, then scratched my head. “Though, I suppose even if you could do it, we probably shouldn’t. I mean, what good is it to protect this Babilar if we let tons of other people die in another Babilar.” If the things she could do were even from other worlds that did exist, rather than just possibilities of worlds that could have existed.
Man. Thinking about this was giving me a headache.
“The goal is still to get rid of my powers, remember,” Megan said. “Regalia claimed to be uncertain she could achieve it, but she told me that if I served her, she would see.” Megan walked for a time, thoughtful. “I don’t know if she was lying or not, but I think you’re right. I think there has to be something behind all this, a purpose.”
I stopped on the lip of the rooftop, looking at her standing on the edge of the bridge just behind me. “Megan, do you know your weakness?”
“Yes,” she said softly, turning to look out over the city.
“Does it have some kind of connection to your past?”
“Just random coincidences,” Megan said. She turned and met my eyes. “But maybe they aren’t as random as I thought.”
I smiled. Then I turned and continued across the rooftop.
“You’re not going to ask what the weakness is?” she said, hurrying up behind me.
“No. It belongs to you, Megan. Asking you for that … it’d be like asking someone for the key to their soul. I don’t want to put you in that position. It’s enough to know that I’m on the right course.”
I continued on, but she didn’t follow. I glanced back at her and found her staring at me. She hurried up in a sudden motion and placed her hand on my back as she passed, letting her fingers trail around my side. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Then she took the lead, hurrying across the top of the roof to where our vantage waited.
36
OBLITERATION was still perched in the same place, though he glowed more powerfully now; in the night, he was so bright that it was getting tough to pick out his features. This particular rooftop was high enough to get a vantage on him but was still quite distant—only the powerful zoom on my scope let me get a good look. I’d have to move closer to plant the camera.
I zoomed out a step and found that one of the readouts on the side of my holosight was a light meter. “You getting this, Tia?” I asked over the mobile. Megan sat beside me silently, now that I had an open line to the Reckoners. The only video being recorded came from my scope, so I figured we should be safe.
“I can see him,” Tia said. “That’s in line with what I expected—if he follows the pattern from before, we still have a few more days until detonation.”
“All right then,” I said. “I’ll plant the camera and make my way back to the pickup.”
“Be careful,” Tia said. “The camera will need to be pretty close to be effective. You want support?”
“Nah,” I said. “I’ll call in if I need anything.”
“Okay then,” Tia said, though she sounded hesitant. I hung up, deactivated the wireless link to my scope, and pocketed the mobile. I raised an eyebrow at Megan.
“They have this place under guard,” she said softly. “The bridges have all been cut, and Newton frequently runs patrols. Regalia doesn’t want anyone wandering close.”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” I said.
“I didn’t say we couldn’t,” Megan said. “I’m just worried about you improvising.”
“I’d assumed all your complaints about my improvisation back in Newcago were because you didn’t want us to actually kill Steelheart.”
“In part,” she said. “But I still don’t like the way you run crazy all the time.”
I grunted.
“We need to talk about Steelheart, by the way,” Megan said. “You shouldn’t have done what you did.”
“He was a tyrant,” I said, using the scope to check out buildings near Obliteration, scouting out a good place for the camera. I lingered on the gaping block of water where the building had been burned down. Charred beams and bits of other rubble jutted from the ocean like the broken teeth of a giant submerged boxer with his mouth open and head tipped back.
Megan didn’t reply, so I glanced at her.
“I feel sorry for them, David,” she said softly. “I know what it feels like; that could have been me the Reckoners executed. Steelheart was a tyrant, but at least he ran a good city. All th
ings considered, he wasn’t so bad, you know?”
“He killed my father,” I said. “You don’t get a pass on murder because you’re not as bad as you could be.”
“I suppose.”
“Do you have this hang-up regarding Regalia?”
Megan shook her head. “I feel bad for her, but she’s planning to let Obliteration vaporize the city. She has to be stopped.”
I grunted in agreement. I just wished I could shake the feeling that despite our precautions, Regalia was a step ahead of us. I handed the rifle to Megan. “Spot for me?” I asked.
She nodded, taking it.
“I’m going to go for that building just beyond the one they burned down. It’s high enough that if I put the camera on the lip just below the roof, it should have a clear line of sight.” I fished out the box Tia had given me, a waterproof housing with the small camera inside. I put in my earpiece, then attuned my mobile to a private frequency matching Megan’s so we could talk without using the Reckoners’ common frequency.
“David,” Megan said. She pulled her P226 out of the holster on her leg and offered it to me. “For luck. Just don’t drop the thing in the ocean.”
I smiled and took the gun, then jumped off the building.
There was certainly something liberating about the spyril. Jets of water slowed me until I touched down, softly, into the water. From there, not wanting to draw attention, I used the jets under the water to zip me through the streets.
About two streets away I noticed that my dimensional clothing—man, that sounded cool—vanished. I was left in just the wetsuit again. It looked like Megan’s powers only worked at very close range. That fit with what I’d discovered years ago, when I’d figured out that a shadowy figure was always nearby when “Firefight” was seen in Newcago. Megan had needed to stay near to maintain the crossover.
When I reached the building I looked upward. I’d need to go up some ten stories to get into a position where the camera could see Obliteration. The spyril might be able to get me there, but I was close enough to Obliteration now that if I hovered up that high, someone was sure to spot me.
I took a breath and let the spyril lift me up one story, then I pulled my way into the building through a broken window. “I’m going to climb up through the building,” I said softly to Megan. “Have you spotted any of Regalia’s watchers?”