I made a snap decision and continued inward, for now, shoving my way past old desks and enormous mountains of overgrown roots. Maybe I could lose her in here. Unfortunately, as I made my way inward, I heard water tendrils breaking through windows on the other side of the building. I scrambled out into a hallway and found water creeping toward me, running across the old carpet.
She was flooding the place.
She’s trying to see, I realized. She could send water in through the windows and cover the floor of the entire office. She’d be able to see into any nook. I ran the other direction, trying to find a stairwell or another way out, and burst into another large office space. Here, translucent tentacles of water wove between the trunks of trees like the prehensile stalks of some enormous, many-eyed slug.
Heart beating more quickly, I ducked back into the hallway. Light shone behind me from fruit that had been knocked by the tentacles, sending dancing shadows down the hall. A disco for the damned.
My back to the wall, I realized I was trapped. I looked at the fruit next to me.
Worth a try.
“I could use some help, Dawnslight,” I said.
Wait, was I praying now? This wasn’t the same thing at all, was it?
Nothing happened.
“Uh …,” I said. “This isn’t a dream, by the way. Some help. Please?”
The lights went out.
In an instant, the fruit just stopped glowing. I started, heart pounding. Without the glowing fruit, the place was as black as the inside of a can of black paint that had also been painted black. Despite the darkness, though, I heard the tendrils thrashing and coming close.
It looked like turning the lights out was the best Dawnslight could do for me. Desperate, I fumbled my way down the hallway in one last mad dash toward freedom.
The tendrils of water struck.
Right at the place where I’d been standing before.
I couldn’t see it, but I could feel them brush past me, converging on that location. I stumbled away, listening to the crash of water hitting wall, and fell back against one of them in the dark—a large, armlike glob of water, cold to the touch. I accidently put my hand into it, and my skin sank right through.
I pulled it out with a start and backed away, hitting another tendril. None of them stopped moving, but they didn’t come for me. I wasn’t crushed in the darkness.
She … can’t feel with them, I realized. They don’t convey a sense of touch! So if she can’t see, she can’t direct them.
Incredulous, I poked another of the tendrils in the darkness, then slapped it. Perhaps not the smartest thing I’d ever done, but it provoked no reaction. The tendrils continued thrashing about randomly.
I backed away, putting as much room between myself and those tendrils as possible. It wasn’t easy, as I kept stumbling over tree trunks. But …
Light?
A single fruit glowed up above. I chased it. It hung in front of a stairwell, and the floor here was dry. No water for Regalia to peer through.
“Thanks,” I said, stepping forward. My foot crunched something. A fortune cookie. I grabbed it and opened it.
She’s going to destroy the city, it read. You don’t have much time left. Stop her!
“Trying,” I muttered, squeezing between vines to climb into the stairwell and starting upward. Fruit glowed to light my way, then winked out behind me.
On the next level was a floor where all of the fruit glowed, but no water tendrils sought to capture me. Regalia didn’t know where I’d gone. Excellent. I crept out into another office room. This floor was cultivated, to an extent, with carefully kept pathways and trees that had been trimmed into a garden. It was a striking sight, after the wildness of the other levels.
I started down a path, imagining the people who had decided to take this floor and make it their own personal garden, buried in the middle of a building. I was so captivated by the imagery I nearly missed the blinking fruit. It hung right in front of me and pulsed with a soft light.
A warning of some sort? Cautious, I continued forward, then heard a footstep on the path ahead.
My breath caught, and I ducked off the path and into the foliage. The fruit closest to me went out, making the area around me darker. A few moments later Newton strode down the path and passed right under the fruit that had pulsed.
She had her katana out resting on her shoulder, and she carried a cup of water.
A cup of water?
“This is a distraction,” Newton said. “Unimportant.”
“You’ll do as told.” Regalia’s voice rose from the cup. “I heard him moving down there, but he’s gone silent. He’s hiding in the darkness, hoping we’ll go away.”
“I have to make it to the confrontation with the others,” Newton protested. “Steelslayer is meaningless. If I don’t fall into their trap, then how are you going to—”
“Obviously you’re right,” Regalia said.
Newton stopped in place.
“You are a wonderful help,” Regalia continued. “So brilliant. And … Blast. I need to deal with Jonathan. Find that rat.”
Newton cursed under her breath and continued on, leaving me behind. I shivered, waiting until I heard the door to the stairwell shut, then I stepped back out onto the path.
Regalia was worried enough about me to pull Newton away from other plans to hunt me. That seemed a very good sign. It meant she felt that keeping me from warning Prof was extremely important.
So I had to break through and reach him. Unfortunately, the moment I stepped out of this building, I’d be in the bull’s-eye again. I’d have to push through it, dodging as I had been before. I walked up to a window and prepared to leap out, but then found that my pocket was buzzing. I dug in it, pulling out the baggie, and removed the radio.
“Are you there? David, please answer!”
“I’m here, Mizzy,” I said softly.
“Thank heavens,” she said, tense. “David, you were right. Obliteration isn’t here!”
“Are you sure?” I said, checking out the window.
“Yes! They’ve set up a kind of white mannequin thing with a floodlight right underneath it, so it glows like Obliteration. They then filled the rooftop with other powerful floodlights; that makes it seem like he’s still here, but he isn’t.”
“That’s why she wanted to keep everyone away,” I said. Sparks. Obliteration was somewhere in the city, planning to destroy the entire place.
“I’m almost to Pr
of,” I said. “Regalia keeps getting in my way. See if you can turn off the lights. That will warn the other Reckoners, assuming I don’t make it.”
“Okaaaay,” Mizzy said. “I don’t like this, David.” She sounded scared.
“Good,” I said back. “Means you aren’t crazy. See what you can do. I’m going to make a final push toward Prof.”
“Right.”
I tucked the radio away, then glanced at a glowing fruit hanging nearby. “Thanks again for the help,” I said. “If you have anything more like that to throw my way in the future, I wouldn’t say no.”
The fruit blinked.
I nodded grimly, then took a deep breath and jumped out the window.
46
I got about two streets from the building before Regalia found me. She appeared on the surface of the water along my path, standing tall, her eyes wide and alight and her hands to the sides as if to hold up the sky. Waves rose around her like the peaks of a crown emerging from the water.
This time she didn’t bother with conversation. Jets of water erupted beneath me. The first one clipped me along the side, slashing through both clothing and skin. I gasped in pain, then started weaving and bobbing, using the handjet to dodge to the side as Regalia sent an enormous ripple through the water that crested some fifteen feet high. It chased me around a corner but broke against a building as I landed on the roof and ran across it. I passed tents and screaming people and caught the scent of something odd in the air. Smoke?
I leaped off the other side of the building, and as I did, a blur zipped across the rooftop beside me. I yelped, cutting my jets and dropping just beneath the blur, which launched toward me, trailing an afterimage of neon red.
The blur passed right over my head, then landed on the building across from me, where it pulled to a stop, revealing Newton, katana in hand. She whipped out a handgun and spun in my direction.
Sparks! I should have been expecting her. I dove downward, passing the stories of a nearby building in a flash, and hit water as the popping noises of gunfire sounded above.