“How did this happen?” Larcener demanded, pacing. “Aren’t you supposed to be skilled, efficient? Adept! I see that you’re as utterly incapable as I’d guessed all along!”
“Yup,” I said.
“I will be alone in the city,” he continued. “Nobody else would dare stand against a High Epic. You’ve thoroughly inconvenienced me, human.”
To an Epic, that was a major insult.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do now.”
“What, you aren’t going to even try to kill your friend?”
“Well, there’s a plan that…” I trailed off. “Kill?”
“Yes, yes. Murder her, so she can’t speak. The rational course.”
“Oh, right.” I swallowed. “Well, we’ve got this plan, and it’s a good one, but we’ll never make it work. It requires all kinds of things we don’t have. Parachutes. Mannequins. Technology.” I made a good show of it. “Of course, if someone could make that stuff for us…”
Larcener spun on me, and his eyes narrowed.
I smiled innocently.
“Impudent peon,” he muttered.
“All you Epics use language like that,” I said. “Do you take some kind of evil dictator language course or something? I mean, who talks like—”
“This is a ploy to get me to be your servant,” Larcener interrupted, stepping over to me. “I expressly told you that I would not use my powers to serve you.”
I stood up, meeting his eyes. “Tia, a member of our team, has been captured by Prof. We have a plan to save her, but without resources we won’t be able to make it work. Either you summon the objects we need, or we’ll have to pull out of the city and abandon this cause.”
“I do not get involved,” Larcener said.
“You’re already involved, bub. You can start working as a member of this team, or you’re out. Good luck surviving in the city. Prof has every thug and two-bit Epic here searching for you. Random stops on the streets with a dowser, huge bounties, your likeness being distributed…”
Larcener clenched his jaw. “I thought I was supposed to be the evil one.”
“No. You beat the darkness somehow. You’re not evil; you’re just spoiled and selfish.” I nodded toward the others. “We’ll bring you a list. It should all be within your powers. You can make…what, anything up to about the size of a couch, right? Range of three miles, if I recall. Maximum mass limit shouldn’t be an issue.”
“How…” He focused on me, as if seeing me for the first time. “How do you know that?”
“You got your conjuration powers from Brainstorm. I had a whole file on her.” I walked toward the doorway.
“You’re right about one thing,” Larcener said after me. “I’m not evil. I’m the only one. Everyone else in this filthy, horrible, insane world is broken. Evil, sinful, revolting…whatever you want to call it. Broken.”
I looked over my shoulder, meeting his eyes again. In those eyes, I swear I saw it. The darkness, like an infinite pool. Seething hatred, disdain, overwhelming lust for destruction.
I was wrong. He hadn’t overcome it. He was still one of them. Something else held him back.
Disturbed, I turned and left the room. I told myself I needed to get him a list as soon as possible, but the truth was that I couldn’t look into those eyes any longer. And I wanted to be as far from them as I could get.
“WELL, yes,” Edmund said over my mobile, “as I think about it, something like that did happen to me.”
“Tell me,” I said, eager. I wore the mobile stuck to my jacket on the shoulder, earpiece in my ear, as I put together things for the mission tonight. I was alone in a room of our new, interim hideout. It had been five days since Tia’s capture, and we’d moved as planned. I’d talked to Cody about using the caverns under the city, but we’d eventually decided they hadn’t been explored well enough and might be unstable.
Instead, we’d used one of his suggestions, a hidden location under a park bridge. As eager as I was to get to Tia, we hadn’t been able to move immediately. We’d needed the time to set up somewhere new and practice. Beyond that, Tia’s plan required a party to be happening at Sharp Tower, and the soonest one was tonight. We had to hope that Tia had been able to hold out.
“It must have been…oh, two, three years ago now,” Edmund said. “Steelheart was told by my previous masters that dogs were my weakness. He would occasionally lock me up with them. Not for any specific punishment though. I never could figure it out. It seemed random.”
“He wanted you to be afraid of him,” I said, going through the contents of a pack and checking it against my list. “You’re so even-keeled, Edmund. Sometimes you don’t seem afraid of anything. You probably worried him.”
“Oh, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m an ant among giants, David! I’m hardly a threat.”
That wouldn’t have mattered to Steelheart. He’d kept Newcago in perpetual gloom and darkness, all to make certain that his people lived in fear. Paranoia had been his middle name. Except he’d had only one name—Steelheart—so Paranoia had been more like a last name for him.
“Well,” Edmund continued over the line, “he’d lock me in with dogs. Angry, terrible ones. I’d huddle against the wall and weep. It never seemed to get better, maybe even worse.”
“You were afraid of them.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he said. “They negated my powers. They ruined me, turned me into a common man.”
I frowned, zipping up the backpack and then taking off my mobile so I could look at the screen and see Edmund, an older man with brown skin and a faint Indian accent.
“You gave away your powers anyway, Edmund,” I said. “You’re a gifter. Why would being powerless bother you?”
“Ah, but my value to others has let me live in luxury and relative peace, while other men starve and scramble for life. My powers make me important, David. Losing them terrified me.”
“Dogs terrified you, Edmund.”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Yes, but you might have the cause wrong. What if you weren’t afraid of dogs because they negated your powers; what if they negated your powers because you were afraid of them?”
He looked away from me.
“Nightmares?” I asked.
He nodded. I couldn’t see much of the room he was in; a safehouse outside Newcago, one Prof didn’t know about. We hadn’t been able to contact Edmund until Knighthawk had delivered him a new mobile, via drone. He’d turned the old one off at our request, and had neglected to ever turn it on again. He’d claimed he was merely being careful, in case our attack on the Foundry had gone wrong. Another one of his little rebellions.
“Nightmares,” he said, sti
ll looking away from the screen. “Being hunted. Teeth gnashing, rending, ripping…”
I gave him a moment and turned back to my work. As I knelt to the side, something slipped out of my T-shirt at the top. My pendant, the one Abraham had given me, marked with a stylized S shape. The sign of the Faithful, those who believed good Epics would come.
I wore it now. After all, I did have faith in the Epics. Kind of. I tucked it into my shirt. Three packs checked over; two left. Even Cody, who would run ops on this mission, needed an emergency pack in case things went wrong. Our new hideout—a hastily constructed set of three rooms beneath the bridge in a rarely traveled park—wasn’t as secure as our other one, and we didn’t want to leave much behind.
I needed to finish this, but I wanted to be able to see Edmund, not just hear him. This was an important conversation. I thought for a moment, then spotted one of Cody’s camo baseball caps sitting atop a stack of supplies we’d carted from the previous hideout.
I smiled, grabbed some duct tape, and hung my mobile from the front of the bill—it took about half a roll of the tape, but whatever. When I put the cap on, the mobile hung down in front of me like a HUD on a helmet. Well, a very sloppy HUD. Either way, it meant I could see Edmund while keeping both hands free.
“What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.
“Nothing,” I said, getting back to work, mobile dangling near my face. “What happened with the dogs, Edmund? The day things changed. The day you faced them down.”
“It’s silly.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He seemed to weigh the situation. He didn’t have to obey, not with all of us so distant.
“Please, Edmund,” I said.
He shrugged. “One of the dogs went for a little girl. Someone opened the doors to let me out, and…well, I knew her. She was a child of one of my guards. So when one of the beasts lunged for her, I tackled it.” He blushed. “It was her dog. It didn’t want to attack her. It was just excited to see its master.”
“You faced your fear,” I said, digging into the next pack, comparing its items to my list. “You confronted the thing that terrified you.”