She cursed and ducked beside the broken wall. “Didn’t realize you’d gotten so close,” she said through the line. “Wait. That girl looks familiar. Is that…”
Oh boy…
“Lad,” Cody said over the line, “I can’t make out what’s going on up there. Are y’all fighting him somehow?”
“Kind of,” I said, sliding my gun from its holster. Prof was consumed by his conflict with Tavi. A spike hit the girl, pinning her arm, spraying blood against the wall in a gruesome display. She fell to her knees, and moments later the wound started to heal. She deflected further spears of light with tensor power, clutching her arm. She then wobbled to her feet, flesh scabbed over, blood stanched.
Still hiding near the hole into the room, I gaped. She healed. And her powers had come back far quicker than Megan’s did after touching fire.
Like Edmund. Her weakness doesn’t affect her as much as it does Prof or the others. She’s faced her fears, overcome them long ago, perhaps?
Prof still bore the cuts where she’d hit him. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that I was missing something big about the nature of powers and weaknesses. Prof was fighting her. Wouldn’t that mean facing his fears himself? Why was he still so obviously consumed by the darkness?
Inside the room, and through the broken wall on the west, Tia had finally managed to get into Prof’s office. I could barely make her out in there, moving past a generator like the one we’d found above. She sat down at his desk and began furiously working at the computer there.
But Tavi…poor Tavi. I didn’t know her, but my heart wrenched to see her being driven back by Prof’s blasts of power. She still fought, but she was obviously less experienced with combat than he was.
I stood up, gripping my little pistol in two hands. Over my shoulder, I saw Megan approaching down the hallway, actively weeping, her face a mask of pain and concentration.
I had to stop this. It wasn’t working, and it was destroying Megan. I leveled my gun at Prof while he was focused on Tavi; I breathed out and fell still. I waited for a wave of Tavi’s tensor power to wash over him, destroying a forcefield.
Then I fired.
I can’t say if I pulled to the side on purpose, or if it was an effect of the floor shaking. The ceiling here was straining like the one in the other room; too many walls gone.
Either way, my shot clipped Prof on the side of the face instead of drilling him right in the back of the head. The bullet ripped off a chunk of his cheek, spraying blood. His innate forcefield protections were down. Maybe I could have killed him.
The moment passed. Prof tossed up a forcefield wall behind him to prevent other shots—an almost absent gesture, as if I were an afterthought. Calamity…what if he killed Tavi? We’d pulled her from her reality and thrust her into our war. I looked again at Megan.
Fire, I thought. That was another way to end this. I fished in my pocket, searching for my lighter. Where was it? I hadn’t even noticed how ragged my clothing had become, the nice coat covered in salt, the trousers ripped. I couldn’t find my lighter; I’d lost it somewhere.
I did find something else in my pocket though. A small cylinder. Knighthawk’s tissue sample incubator.
I looked up, toward where I’d shot Prof. Dared I? Could Megan hold out a little more?
I made my decision and dashed across the room, ducking around the forcefield and hopping over the remnants of a sofa that had been half melted by the tensor. This put me in the middle of the battle, Prof and Tavi fighting near the lush room’s wet bar. Waves of dust blew over me, getting into my eyes. Salt forced its way into my mouth, making me want to gag. The ground rocked, and I threw myself to the floor, rolling out of the way as an invisible tensor blast gouged a large hole nearby. Dust rained down from a hole in the ceiling.
I came up, skirting very close to Prof as I made for the bloodstain on the floor. He turned on me, eyes wide with fury. Sparks, sparks, sparks!
I skidded across the floor and—in the bloody patch—found a loose chunk of skin from his cheek. He’d already healed from the shot. Apparently the cuts remained unhealable only if he was hit by one of the spikes of light. An ordinary wound would start healing as soon as his powers reasserted themselves.
I scooped up the piece of flesh into Knighthawk’s device, too panicked to worry about the morbidity of it. Prof summoned spikes of light, a dozen or more. He roared, flinging them toward me.
I threw myself sideways.
Right into one of the shifting ripples in the air.
THIS time I didn’t drop twenty feet after transitioning to the other world, which was a plus. I instead rolled onto the top of a roof in a quiet section of the city. This wasn’t a skyscraper, just some apartment building, though an admittedly tall one.
Nothing was dissolving, no gunfire sounded, and there was a complete absence of the disconcerting hum of Prof’s tensor power. Only the serene night sky. Beautiful…with no red spot to glare down upon me.
I clutched the tissue sample, lying there, and stared up at the sky, drawing in a few calming breaths. That might have been the craziest thing I’d ever done, and my life so far had set a pretty high bar.
“You,” a voice said from behind me.
I rolled over to a kneeling position, holding Prof’s cells closer with one fist while raising my handgun with the other. Firefight hovered beside the rooftop, alight and burning, skin and clothing consumed by his curling flames. Bullets wouldn’t hurt a fire Epic; they’d simply melt away. Had I traded one deadly situation for another?
I have to stall until I’m pulled back into my own world, I thought. Except…how long would I stay, if Megan wasn’t actively trying to pull me back? I couldn’t have slipped over permanently, right?
Firefight was inscrutable, his aura of heat and flame warping the air around him. Eventually he stepped up onto the rooftop and, surprisingly, his flames dampened. Clothing emerged, a jacket over a tight T-shirt, a pair of jeans. The fire continued to burn along his arms, but it was subdued, like the last flames of a campfire before they gave themselves up to the embers. His face was the same as the other times I’d seen him.
“What have you done with Tavi?” he demanded. “If you’ve hurt her…”
I licked my lips, which were extremely dry and salty. “I…” Again, the morality of what we’d done smacked me upside the head, like the fist of the Factory’s lunch lady after I’d tried to steal an extra muffin. “She’s been sucked into my world.”
“So Tia is right. You are actively looking to pull us into your dimension?” He strode forward, his fires flaring up again. “Why are you doing this? What is your plot?”
I scrambled backward on the rooftop. “It’s not that! Or, well, we didn’t know—Megan didn’t, at first, know what—I mean, we didn’t—”
I had no idea what I was trying to say.
Fortunately Firefight stopped, then dampened his flames once more. “Specks, you’re terrified.” He took a deep breath. “Look, can you bring Tavi back? We’re in the middle of something. We need her.”
“Tia…,” I said, lowering my gun as I put it together. “Wait. You’re one of the Reckoners?”
“Is that why you keep pulling me into your world?” he asked. “Is there no version of me there?”
“I…think you might be a girl,” I said. And dating me. I’d noticed the similarities before; Firefight was blond and had a face that, if you ignored its masculinity, was reminiscent of Megan’s.
“Yes…,” he said, nodding. “I’ve noticed her. She’s the one who pulls me through. Odd to think that I might have a sister, in another place, another world.”
A flash of light ignited a building nearby—a tall, round building. Sharp Tower? For the first time I realized that I was still in the same district of Ildithia. But outside the tower, on top of a building like the one where Cody had set up.
Firefight spun toward the explosion, then cursed. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll deal with you later.”
“Wait,” I said, scra
mbling to my feet. That flash…it felt familiar. “Obliteration. That light was caused by Obliteration, wasn’t it?”
“You know him?” Firefight said, spinning back to me.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. “You could say that. Why are—”
“Wait,” Firefight said, putting his hand to his ear. “Yes, I saw it. He’s come to Sharp Tower. You were right.” He squinted, looking up at the taller building. “I want to engage. I don’t care if he’s trying to lure me, Tia. We have to face him eventually.”
I hesitantly walked over beside Firefight, who stood at the edge of our building. There was so much that was different here, but so much was the same. Obliteration, Ildithia itself. Tia, apparently? And Tavi…her daughter?
The flash of heat from Obliteration returned, a deep pulsing heat. The salt couldn’t catch fire, but Obliteration continued radiating it. Shadows moved up there. I squinted, and then—silhouetted against the flames—I saw figures leap from the windows.
“Specks!” Firefight said. “Tia, there are people up there. Jumping out to avoid the heat he’s creating. I’m going.”
Firefight burst alight and streaked into the air—though I could see that he wouldn’t reach the people in time. It was too far, and they were falling too quickly. My heart lurched. What a terrible decision: be burned by Obliteration, or fall to your death? I wanted to tear my eyes away, but couldn’t. Those poor souls.
Someone else leaped from the room atop the burning building. A figure with glowing hands—a magnificent form that shot downward, trailing a silvery cape. Like a meteor, he made a brilliant, powerful streak of light as he rocketed toward the falling people. My breath caught as he seized the first person, then the second.
I stumbled backward. No.
Firefight turned around and landed by me again. “Never mind,” he said to Tia, his flames partially dampening. “He got here in time. Should have known. When has he ever been late?”
I knew that figure. Dark clothing. Powerful build. Even at a distance, even in the gloom of night, I knew that man. I’d spent my life studying him, watching him, hunting him.
“Steelheart,” I whispered. I shook myself, then grabbed Firefight, completely forgetting he was on fire. The flames vanished on contact, fortunately, and I wasn’t burned. “Steelheart is helping you?”
“Of course he is,” Firefight said, frowning.
“Steelheart…,” I said. “Steelheart’s not evil?”