“She’ll betray you.”
“Likely,” Obliteration agreed. “But she has given me knowledge and power. She has taken a piece of my soul, and it lives on without me. And so, I become the seeds of the end of time itself.” He paused. “She had not warned me that she had persuaded the archangel to grant you a portion of his glory.”
“You can’t kill me,” I called, glancing down the hallway at him. “There’s no reason to try.”
He smiled and frost crept forward down the darkened hallway, reaching like fingers toward me, freezing a fruit that hung from a vine like a single lightbulb above. “Oh,” Obliteration continued, “I think that you’ll find a man can do many things thought impossible, if he tries hard enough.”
I had to deal with him. Quickly. I made a snap decision and withdrew the suppressor on the front of my gun. Then I ducked around the corner and shot him, making him vanish. I tossed my gun into a side room and ran the other direction. A moment later I held down the button on the remote, triggering the rifle to fire in the room.
I charged through the building to a window on the other side and ducked out onto a balcony. I turned, pressing my back against the wall, and hit the remote again, firing the gun while digging Megan’s handgun out of my pocket with my other hand.
Cursing filtered out from inside the building. Obliteration must have found the gun and not me. Now, if I could just get out of here …
Suddenly he was on the balcony beside me, letting out a wave of heat.
Damn it! I aimed and shot him with Megan’s gun to make him vanish. It worked, though I was left with charred skin.
I clenched my teeth against the pain. With the healing coming more slowly, I had time to feel the pain.
I checked Megan’s gun. Two bullets left.
What I couldn’t figure out was how he was finding me. It had happened before; he seemed to be able to track us somehow. Did he have some kind of visionary power? How did he teleport away, then know exactly where to teleport back to find me?
Then it clicked.
I turned just as Obliteration appeared beside me again. He was shouting scripture and glowing with power. I didn’t shoot him.
This time, I grabbed him.
49
IT was something I could never have managed without Prof’s powers. The heat was incredible and threatened to set me ablaze. Obliteration’s surprise, however, worked to my advantage as I raised the pistol and shot him in the head.
He teleported.
I held tight, and he took me with him.
We appeared in a dark, windowless room, and Obliteration immediately turned off his heat. He did it so quickly, it had to be something he’d trained himself to do by reflex. Wherever we were, he couldn’t destroy this place. I let go but grabbed his glasses, ripping them free as I fell backward.
Obliteration cursed, his normally calm demeanor breaking down in his outrage at being tricked. I backed away, throwing myself against the wall of the dark room. I couldn’t make out much, though the pain of the burns he’d given me made it difficult to pay attention to anything else. I’d dropped the gun, but gripped the spectacles tightly with my other hand.
He pulled his sword from beneath his trench coat and looked toward me. Sparks! He could obviously see well enough without the glasses to find me.
“All you have done,” he said, walking toward me, “is box yourself in with me.”
“What nightmares do you have, Obliteration?” I asked, slumped against the wall. Prof’s healing powers were working very, very slowly now. Gradually the feeling in my hands was returning, first as a tingling, then as sharp pinpricks. I gasped and blinked against the pain.
Obliteration had stopped advancing on me. He lowered his sword, the tip touching the floor. “And how,” he said, “do you know of my nightmares?”
“All Epics have them,” I said. I was far from certain about this, but what did I have to lose? “Your fears drive you, Obliteration. And they reveal your weakness.”
“I dream of it because it will someday kill me,” he said softly.
“Or is it your weakness because you dream of it?” I asked. “Newton probably feared being good enough because of her family’s expectations. Sourcefield feared the stories of cults, and the poison her grandmother had tried to give her. Both had nightmares.”
“And the angel of God spake unto me in a dream,” Obliteration whispered. “And I said, Here am I.… So that is the answer.” He threw his head back and laughed.
The pain in my hands only seemed to be getting worse. I let out a whimper despite myself. I was basically an invalid.
Obliteration rushed to me, kneeling, taking me by the shoulders—which were now bare, and burned. Pain flared and I cried out.
“Thank you,” Obliteration whispered. “For the secret. Give my … regards to Regalia.”
He let go, bowed his head to me, and exploded into a flash of light and ceramic.
I blinked, then curled up on the floor and trembled. Sparks! Earlier the healing had happened so quickly that it had felt refreshing, like a cool breeze. Now it happened at the speed of a drop of rain rolling down a cold pane of glass.
It seemed like an eternity that I sat there suffering the pain, but it was probably only three or four minutes. Eventually the agony subsided and, groaning, I climbed to my feet. I flexed my fingers and squeezed them into fists. My hands worked, though my skin stung as if I had a bad sunburn. That didn’t seem to be going away. The blessing that Prof had given me was no more.
I stepped forward and kicked something with my foot. Obliteration’s sword. I picked it up, but all I found of Megan’s gun was a melted piece of slag.
She was going to kill me for that.
Well, Obliteration obviously had enough control over his powers to not melt objects he preferred to keep intact. I clutched the sword as I felt my way through the small dark room to a door. I opened it; beyond was a narrow wooden stairway, framed by banisters on both walls. From what light there was I could see that I’d been in some kind of small supply room. My clothes had basically been vaporized. All I had left was Abraham’s pendant, which still hung around my neck, one side of the chain melted. I pulled it off, worried that the melted chain would snap.
I found a length of cloth—it looked like it could have once been curtains—and wrapped it around myself. Then, holding the sword in one hand, pendant in the other, I climbed the stairs slowly, step after step. As I ascended the light grew brighter, and I began to make out odd decorations on the walls.
… Posters?
Yes, posters. Old ones, from the decades before Calamity. Bright, vibrant colors, women in ruffled skirts, sweaters that exposed a shoulder. Neon on black. The posters had faded over time, but I could see they’d been hung meticulously back in the day. I stopped beside one in that silent stairwell. It showed a pair of hands holding a glowing fruit, a band’s name emblazoned at the bottom.
Where was I?
I looked up toward the light at the top of the stairs. Sweating, I continued to climb until I came to the top and to a door with a chair next to it. The door was cracked open, and I pushed it farther, revealing a small, neat bedroom decorated like the stairwell with posters on the walls, proclaiming a glorified urban life.
Two hospital-style beds lay in the room, out of place, with steel frames and sterile white sheets. One held a sleeping man in his thirties or forties hooked u
p with all kinds of tubes and wires. The other held a small wizened woman with a tub of water next to her.
Another woman wearing medical scrubs stood over this patient. As soon as I entered, the doctor looked at me and gave a little start, then walked out the way I had come in. The only sounds were those of the heart rate monitors. I stepped forward, hesitant, feeling an uncanny, surreal sensation. The aged woman, obviously Regalia, was awake and staring at something on the wall. As I entered, I noted three very large television screens.
On the center one, Prof, Val, and Exel stood just inside a room glowing so brightly I could barely make them out.
“So,” Regalia said. “You’ve found me.”
I looked to the side. A figure of her as I knew her had appeared from the tub of water. I looked back at the woman in the bed. She was far, far older than her projected self. And far more sickly. The real Regalia there breathed in and out with the help of a respirator and didn’t say anything.
“How did you get here?” the projection asked.
“Obliteration,” I said quietly. “He located me too easily each time I hid from him. I realized that he had to teleport somewhere when he vanished. It stood to reason that he was coming to you and getting instructions on where to go. He can’t see everything in the city, but you can.” I looked at the television screens. “At least, everywhere with water.” She’d set these up so she could watch other places, obviously.
But why? What was going on in that room with Prof, Val, and Exel? I looked back at Regalia.
The projection glanced at the elderly figure in bed. “It is frustrating that we still age,” she said. “What is the point of divine power if your body gives out?” She shook her head as if disgusted at herself.
I slowly moved through the room, trying to figure out what to do next. I had her, right? Of course, she had that tub of water, so she wasn’t entirely defenseless.
I stopped next to the other bed, the one with the man I didn’t recognize. I glanced down at him and noted the blanket—like a child’s blanket—draped around his shoulders. It depicted fanciful trees and glowing fruit. “Dawnslight?” I asked Regalia.