The water was an icy shock, jets propelling me face-first under the surface. Diving for the water had been my first instinct in order to avoid that gunfire, and it worked, as I didn’t get shot. But it did put me in Regalia’s grasp.
The water around me began to constrict, to thicken, like syrup. I twisted, thrusting my feet downward, and engaged the spyril at full force.
It was as if the water had become tar, and each progressive inch of movement was harder than the inch before it. Bubbles grew trapped as I breathed them out, frozen like in Jell-O, and I felt the spyril shake violently on my back. Blackness surrounded me.
I didn’t fear that blackness any longer. I’d looked it in the eye. My lungs strained, but I shoved down the panic.
I broke the surface. Once my arms were free, the spyril thrust me out into the air with a triumphant jet, but tendrils of water waited for me. They wrapped around my legs.
I pointed the streambeam of the spyril right at them.
My machine sucked up those tendrils like it did any other water, spraying them out the jets at the bottom and freeing me in a heartbeat. I burst higher into the air, dazed from lack of oxygen. I reached a rooftop and let the jets cut out, rolling across it, breathing deeply.
Okay, I thought, no more going underwater with Regalia around.
I’d barely caught my breath when water tendrils climbed up over the roof, like the fingers of an enormous beast. Newton landed near me in a blur, trailing glowing color from her hair. She came right at me, fast as an eyeblink, and all I could do was engage the spyril, my streambeam pointed right at one of Regalia’s tendrils.
The sudden jet of power lurched me across the rooftop away from Newton. Just barely. Worse, only one of the footjets engaged. I didn’t know if it was the constriction down below, the tendrils that had grabbed me after, or the rough landing. But the machine had always been finicky, and it had chosen this moment to finick.
Newton moved past me, her sword striking the ground where I’d just been lying, throwing up sparks. She reached the side of the rooftop, where another building rose up alongside this one, no space between. There she stopped.
And, from what I saw, stopping was pretty dramatic. Best I could tell, she came out of her super-speed run by throwing one hand up against the wall of the building next door. All of her momentum was transferred to the structure and, in the bizarre way of Epics, completely scrambled the laws of physics. The wall exploded into a spray of dust and crumbling bricks.
She turned around, dropping her sword—now jagged and broken—and reached to her side, slipping another one out of a sheath at her waist. She spun the sword, regarding me, and walked forward more casually. Around us, Regalia’s tendrils continued surrounding the entire building, creeping up over the sky, making a dome. This small rooftop was abandoned, and its painted graffiti reflected off the water around us. Liquid began to pour in over the lip of the roof, flooding it with an inch or two of water, and Regalia took shape from it beside Newton.
I pulled out my gun and fired. I knew it was pointless, but I had to try something, and the spyril just sputtered when I engaged it—both jets refusing to spit anything out now. The bullets bounced off Newton, reflected out toward the closing dome of water, making little splashes. Newton leaned down, one hand on the ground, preparing to sprint, but Regalia raised a hand and stopped her.
“I want to know,” she said to me, “what you did earlier.”
My heart thumping, I scrambled to my feet and glanced to the side, looking for a way out. Regalia’s dome of water completely encased the rooftop, and new tendrils were rising from the flooded roof to try to snatch me. Desperate, I pointed the streambeam at one and tried to engage the spyril. The jets at my feet wouldn’t work.
But, to my relief, the handjet did. I was able to slurp up the tendril and shoot it the other way. I got the next, then the next, then started shooting them at Newton as I hopped backward. My attack just splashed away from her, but she seemed to find it annoying.
More and more tendrils came for me, but I sucked each one up, jetting them outward.
“Stop doing that!” Regalia roared, voice booming. A hundred tendrils grew up, far more than I could target.
Then they immediately started to shrink.
I blinked at them, then looked at Regalia, who seemed as baffled as I was. Something else was coming up out of the water around me. Plants?
It was roots. Tree roots. They grew wickedly fast around us, sucking in the water, draining it from every source it could find, feeding upon it. Dawnslight was watching. I looked back at Regalia and grinned.
“The child is acting up again,” Regalia said with a sigh, crossing her arms and looking at Newton. “End this.”
In an instant Newton became a blur.
I couldn’t outrun her. I couldn’t hurt her.
All I could do was gamble.
“You’re beautiful, Newton,” I yelled.
The blur became a person again, plants curling up at her feet. Her lips pursed, she looked at me, eyes wide, sword held in limp fingers.
“You’re a wonderful Epic,” I continued, raising my gun.
She backed away.
“Obviously,” I said, “that’s why both Obliteration and Regalia are always sure to compliment you. It couldn’t, of course, be because compliments are your weakness.” That was why Newton let her gang be so rowdy and insubordinate. She hadn’t wanted them complimenting her by accident.
Newton turned and ran.
I shot her in the back.
It wrenched my gut as she fell face-first to the overgrown ground. But at my core, I was an assassin. Yes, I killed in the name of justice, bringing down only those who deserved it, but at the end of the day, I was an assassin. I’d shoot someone in the back. Whatever it took.
I walked up, then planted two more bullets in her skull, just to be certain.
I looked at Regalia, who stood, arms still crossed, among the growing flora around us—saplings becoming full trees, fruit sprouting, swelling, and sagging from limbs and vines. Her figure started to shrink as Dawnslight drank up the water that formed her current projection, and her dome fell apart, showering down upon me and the rooftop.
“I see that I spoke too freely when punishing Newton,” Regalia said. “This is my fault, for giving away her weakness. You really are an annoyance, boy.”
I raised the handgun and pointed it at Regalia’s head.
“Oh please,” she said. “You know you can’t hurt me with that.”
“I’m coming for you,” I said softly. “I’m going to kill you before you kill Prof.”
“Is that so?” Regalia snapped. “And do you realize that while you’ve been distracted, the Reckoners have already executed their plan? That your idolized Jonathan Phaedrus has killed the woman you love?”
A shock ran through me.
“He used her as bait, to draw me,” Regalia said. “Noble Jonathan murdered her in an attempt to make me appear. And I did, of course. So that he’d have his little data point. His team is storming my supposed sanctuary right now.”
“You’re lying.”
“Oh?” Regalia said. “And what is that you smell?”
I’d smelled it earlier. With an edge of panic, I ran to the side of the building and looked toward something I could barely make out against the darkness. A column of smoke rising from a nearby building—the place where Mizzy said Prof had been waiting.
Fire.
Megan!
47
REGALIA let me go. That probably should have worried me more than it did.
I focused only on reaching that building. I fiddled with the leg wires on the spyril and managed to get one of the jets working. That let me awkwardly cross the gaps between rooftops. I landed on a building next to the one belching the column of smoke, and heat blasted me despite the distance. The fire was burning from the lower floors upward. The roof itself wasn’t yet consumed, but the lower floors were engulfed. It seemed like the entire stru
cture was close to collapsing.
Frantic, I looked down at the glove of my handjet. Might it be enough? I jetted across to the rooftop, where the heat was actually less intense than it had been when facing the burning lower floors. Sweating, I sprinted across the roof and found a stairwell access door.
I shoved it open. Smoke billowed out, and I got a lungful. Driven back by the heat, I stumbled away, coughing. I squeezed tears from my eyes at the smoke and looked at the spyril strapped to my arm. Thoughts of using the spyril like a fireman’s hose seemed silly now. There was no way I could get close enough, and there wouldn’t be water inside the building anyway.