The nearly finished hideout was tall and thin, going up three narrow stories. In places, I could reach out and touch both walls at once. We’d made the outside of it look like lumps of rock to match the other growths like this in the city. All in all, we’d decided we preferred a place that was more secure, built ourselves, rather than moving into one of the houses out there.
I headed down the steep pink crystal steps to the next level, the kitchen—or at least where we’d set up a hot plate and water jug, along with a few small appliances powered by one of the jeeps’ power cells.
“Finally done unpacking?” Mizzy asked me, wandering by with the coffeepot.
I stopped on the bottom step. “Uh…” Actually, I hadn’t finished.
“Too busy smooching, eh?” Mizzy said. “You do realize that without doors, we can kinda hear everything.”
“Uh…”
“Yeaaaah. I wish there were a rule against team members making out and stuff, but Prof would never have done that, considering that him and Tia were a thang.”
“A thang?”
“It’s a word you probably shouldn’t ever say again,” she said, handing me a cup of coffee. “Abraham wanted to see you.”
I set the coffee aside and got a cup of water instead. I could never see why people drank that stuff. It tasted like soil boiled in mud, with a topping of dirt.
“You still have my old mobile?” I asked Mizzy as she climbed the steps. “The one Obliteration broke?”
“Yup, though it’s cracked pretty good. Saved it for parts.”
“Grab it for me, will you?”
She nodded. I climbed down to the ground floor, where we’d stashed most of our supplies. Abraham knelt in one of the two rooms here, lit only by the light of his mobile—the upper two floors had hidden skylights and windows, but not much filtered down this far. We’d built him a worktable here out of saltstone, and he was going over the teams’ weapons one at a time, cleaning and checking them.
Most of us were perfectly willing to do it on our own, but…well, there was something comforting about knowing that Abraham had approved your gun. Besides, my Gottschalk was no simple hunting rifle. With electron-compressed magazines, hyperadvanced scope, and electronics systems that hooked into my mobile, I would be able to do only the basics on my own. It was the difference between putting ketchup on your hot dog and decorating a cake. Best to let an expert take over.
Abraham nodded to me, then waved toward his pack nearby on the floor, which hadn’t been completely unloaded. “I brought something back for you during my trip out to the jeeps.”
Curious, I walked over and rummaged in the pack. I pulled out a skull.
Made entirely of steel, it reflected the mobile’s light with its eerie, smooth contours. The jaw was missing. That had been separated from it in the blast that had killed this man, the man who had named himself Steelheart.
I stared into those eye sockets. If I had known then that there was a chance of redeeming Epics, would I have pushed forward with my insistence on killing him? Even now, holding this skull made me think of my father—so hopeful, so confident that the Epics would turn out to be the saviors of mankind, not its destroyers. Steelheart, in murdering my father, represented the ultimate betrayal of that hope.
“Oh, I’d forgotten about that,” Abraham said. “I threw it in at the last minute, because there was space.”
I frowned, then set the skull on a salt shelf overhead. I dug farther in the pack and located a heavy metal box. “Sparks, Abraham. You carried this in?”
“I cheated,” he said, snapping the trigger guard assembly onto my rifle. “Gravatonics at the bottom of my pack.”
I grunted, lugging out the box. I thought I recognized it. “An imager.”
“Thought you might want one,” Abraham said. “To set up the plan, like we used to do.” Prof would often call the team into a room to go over our plans, and he used this device to project ideas and images onto the walls.
I wasn’t nearly that organized. I turned on the imager anyway, plugging it into the power cell Abraham was using. The imager scattered light through the room. It wasn’t calibrated to this location, so some of the images were fuzzy and distorted.
It showed Prof’s notes. Scribbled lines of text, as if made in chalk on a black background. I walked to the wall and felt at some of the scribbled writings. They smudged as if real, and my hand made no shadow on the wall. The imager wasn’t like an ordinary projector.
I read through some of the notes, but there was little of relevance here. These were from when we’d been fighting Steelheart. Only one sentence struck me: Is it right? Three solitary words, alone in their own corner. The rest of the writing was cramped, words fighting with one another for space like too many fish in a tiny tank. But these sat on their own.
I looked back at Steelheart’s skull. The imager had interpreted it as part of the room and had projected words across its surface.
“How’s the plan?” Abraham asked. “I assume you have something brewing?”
“A few things,” I said. “They’re kind of random.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” Abraham said, a hint of a smile on his lips as he affixed the stock onto the Gottschalk. “Shall I gather the others into one of the rooms so we can talk about it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Grab them, but not in one of the rooms.”
He looked at me, questioning.
I knelt and switched off the imager. “Maybe we’ll use this another day. For now, I want to go for a walk instead.”
MIZZY tossed me the broken mobile as she joined the rest of us on the street outside our hideout. We kept the place hidden by slipping out through a secret door into the mostly abandoned apartment building next to us. It housed no family, only loners who couldn’t find their own to join, which we hoped would make them pay less attention to strangers like us.
“Security set up?” I asked Mizzy.
“Yup. We’ll know if anyone tries to enter the place.”
“Abraham?” I asked.
He shook his pack, which contained our data pads, our extra power cells, and the two pieces of Epic-derived equipment that Knighthawk had given us. If someone did rob our hideout, all they’d get away with were a few guns, which were replaceable.
“That was under five minutes,” Cody said. “Not bad.”
Abraham shrugged, but seemed pleased. This hideout was far less secure than others we’d used; that meant either leaving at least two of us behind to guard at all times, or coming up with a routine pull-out protocol when we went on operations. I liked the second idea far better. It would let us field larger teams in the city without worrying. Either way, we’d had Mizzy set up some sensors on the door that, if opened, would send our mobiles warnings.
I slung my rifle over my shoulder—Abraham had scuffed it up, then painted over a few portions to make it look both more battered and less advanced at the same time. That should help me not draw attention. Each of us wore a new face granted by Megan. It was early afternoon, and I found it odd how many people were about. Some hung laundry; others walked to or from the market. A large number were carrying possessions in sacks, having been ousted from the decaying side of the city and sent in search of someplace new to live. This sort of thing seemed constant in Ildithia; someone was always moving house.
I didn’t see anyone alone—the kids playing ball in an empty lot were watched by no fewer than four elderly men and women. Those heading to market went in pairs or groups. People congregated on steps up to houses, and quite a few had rifles nearby, though they laughed and smiled.
It was a strange kind of peace. The atmosphere implied that so long as everyone stuck to their own business, everyone would get along. I was disturbed to see how many of the groups seemed segregated along racial lines though. Our group with mixed ethnicities was irregular.
“So, lad,” Cody said, walking beside me with hands shoved into the pockets of his camo pants. “Why are we out on the street again?
I was planning on a wee nap this afternoon.”
“I didn’t like the idea of being cooped up,” I said. “We’re here to save this city. I don’t want to sit and plan in a sterile little room, away from the people.”
“Sterile little rooms are secure,” Megan said from behind, where she walked with Abraham. Mizzy was to my right, humming to herself.
I shrugged. We could still talk and not be overheard. People on the street kept to themselves, and gave way when others approached them. The smaller groups actually demanded more respect—when one person did pass walking alone, everyone moved to the other side of the street in a subtle motion. A solo man or woman might be an Epic.
“This,” I said as we walked, “is what passes for a functional society these days. Each group with their territory, each with an implicit threat of violence. This isn’t a city, it’s a thousand communities one step from war with one another. It’s the best the world has to offer. We’re going to change that, once and for all. And it starts with Prof. How do we save him?”
“Make him confront his weakness,” Mizzy said. “Somehow.”
“We have to find it first,” Megan noted.
“I have a plan for that,” I said.
“What, really?” Megan asked, moving up so she was walking beside Cody. “How?”
I held out the broken phone and wiggled it.
“Folks,” Cody said, “looks like the lad’s finally snapped and gone completely mental. I take full credit.”