“Megan, I don’t understand.”
She stood up. “It’s not enough to make promises. It’s not enough to hope I won’t end up hurting you.” She turned and strode, unsteadily at first, from the room.
I scrambled to my feet and followed, trying to sort out what she was planning. Salt scuffed under our feet as we walked past a table in the main room where the others sat; this building’s time had come, as it was too near to the trailing edge of Ildithia. It wouldn’t last the night.
Megan crossed the room and walked into Larcener’s smaller chamber. Sparks! I jogged after her, stumbling into the room. There was a way to make sure Megan never hurt anyone with her powers again. It was here, inside our base.
“Megan,” I said, seizing her by the arm. “Are you sure you want to do something so drastic?”
She studied Larcener, who lay on a plush couch with his headphones on. He didn’t notice us.
“Yes,” she whispered. “During my time with you, I’ve started to lose my hatred of the powers. I started to think it could be controlled. But after the things that happened last night…I don’t want this anymore, David.”
She looked to me questioningly.
I shook my head. “I won’t stop you. This is your choice. But maybe we should think about it some more?”
“This from you?” she said with a grim smile. “No. I might lose my nerve.” She strode up to Larcener, and when he didn’t notice her, she kicked at his foot, which was dangling over the side of his couch.
He immediately pulled off his headphones and scrambled up. “You drudge,” he snapped. “Useless peasant. I’ll—”
Megan thrust her arm toward him, wrist upward. “Take my powers.”
Larcener gaped, then backed away from her, regarding the arm like one might regard a ticking box with the words NOT A BOMB stenciled on it. “What are you babbling about?”
“My powers,” Megan said, stepping toward him. “Take them. They’re yours.”
“You’re insane.”
“No,” she said, “just tired. Go ahead.”
He didn’t reach for her arm. I strongly suspected that no Epic had ever offered to give him their powers before. I stepped up to Megan.
“I spent months in Babilar serving Regalia,” Megan said to Larcener, “all because of the implication that she could make Calamity remove my powers. I wish I’d known about you; I would simply have come here. Take them. They’ll make you immortal.”
“I’m already immortal,” he snapped.
“Then be double immortal,” Megan said. “Or quadruple, or whatever. Take them, or I’ll reach into another dimension, and I’ll—”
He grabbed her arm. She gasped, jerking upright, but didn’t pull her arm away. I steadied her by her shoulders, worried. Sparks. Watching her was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Should I have persuaded her to wait? To think it over?
“Like ice water,” she hissed, “in my veins.”
“Yes,” Larcener said. “I’ve heard it is unpleasant.”
“Now it’s become fire!” Megan said, trembling. “Pouring through me!” Her eyes went glassy and unfocused.
“Hmm…,” Larcener said, his tone like that of a careful surgeon. “Yes…”
Megan jerked, growing tense, staring into the distance.
“Perhaps you should have thought this through before prancing in here and making demands,” Larcener said. “Enjoy being even more of a peasant. I’m sure you’ll fit in brilliantly with this crew, if you can even think straight when this is done. Most can’t, you see—”
The room caught fire.
I ducked as ribbons of flame lanced across the ceiling, then down the walls. The heat was distant, subtle, but I could feel it.
Megan stood up straight, and her trembling ended.
Larcener let go, then looked at his hands. He seized Megan again, sneering, and she met his eyes. There was no trembling this time, no jerk of pain, though her face tightened as she clenched her jaw.
The flames didn’t go away. They were a phantom burning. She’d said that she’d learned to create those dimensional shadows to help hide her weakness and her fear of fire. They came out by instinct.
The room started to grow very hot.
Larcener let go of her hand and backed away.
“You can’t take them, it seems,” Megan said.
“How?” he demanded. “How do you defy me?”
“I don’t know,” Megan said. “But I was wrong to come here.”
She turned and strode from the room. I followed her, confused. Abraham and Mizzy stood at the doorway, and Megan brushed past them. I gave them a shrug as I followed her into the communal bedroom.
“You really still have the powers?” I asked her.
She nodded, looking tired. She slumped down onto her pallet. “I should have guessed it wouldn’t be so easy.”
I knelt beside her, hesitant, but also relieved. That had been a roller coaster of emotions—the type that was old and rickety and didn’t have proper seat belts.
“You…all right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t understand it either. It was strange, David—in that moment, with him sucking my abilities out in that wave of ice, I realized…that the powers are as much me now as my personality.” She closed her eyes. “I realized I couldn’t give them to him. If I did, I’d become a coward.”
“But how did you defy him?” I said. “I’ve never heard of something like that happening.”
“The powers are mine,” she whispered. “I claim them. My burden, my task, my self. I don’t know why that mattered, but it did.” She opened her eyes. “So what now?”
“When we were at Sharp Tower,” I said, “I visited the other world. The one where Firefight lives. There’s no darkness there, Megan. Steelheart is a hero.”
“So we got born one dimensional degree away from paradise.”
“We’ll just have to bring paradise here,” I told her. “Regalia’s plan was for Prof to travel to Calamity and, once there, steal his powers. If we can get Prof back, he’ll give us the teleportation device she developed. Seems like that would give us a pretty good opportunity to kill Calamity and free us all.”
She smiled and took me by the arm. “Let’s do it. Rescue Prof, bring down Calamity, save the world. What’s your plan?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not fully formed yet.”
“Good,” she said. “You have great ideas, David, but your execution is crap. Go grab some paper. We’re going to come up with a way to pull this off.”
I set down my pack in the center of the large, open building. The place had a sharp salty scent. Newly grown. The floor reflected my mobile’s light; polished white saltstone. After leaving behind a hideout that had literally been decomposing around us, this place felt almost too clean. Like a baby the moment before it barfed on you.
“This feels wrong,” I said, my voice echoing in the large chamber.
“In what way?” Mizzy said, passing with a sack of supplies over her shoulder.
“It’s too big,” I said. “I can’t feel like I’m hiding if I have a whole warehouse to live in.”
“One would think,” Abraham said, setting down his supplies with a clink, “you would be happy to escape the tight confines of our previous dwellings.”
I turned around and felt distinctly creeped out that—by the frail light of my mobile—I couldn’t see the edges of the room. How could I explain that sensation without sounding silly? Every Reckoner hideout had been tucked away and secure. This empty warehouse was the opposite.
Cody claimed it would be secure anyway. Our time in Ildithia had let him and Abraham do some investigating, and they’d come up with this warehouse as a spot nobody used, and one that was convenient to a spot I wanted to use in our plan to attack Prof.
I shook my head, grabbing my pack and lugging it across the room to the far wall, where Abraham and Mizzy had set theirs. Nearby, Cody had already started growing a smaller room inside the ware
house. He worked carefully with a gloved hand, stroking the salt outward like he was sculpting clay, using the trowel to make smooth surfaces. His glove hummed softly, making the crystal structure of the salt extend behind his motions. He’d only been working for about an hour, but he already had a good start on the smaller chamber.
“Ain’t nobody gonna bother us here, lad,” Cody said in a reassuring voice as he worked.
“Why not?” I asked. “Seems like a perfect place to hole up a large group of people.” I could imagine the warehouse filled with families, each around their own trash can fire. That would transform it. Rather than being tomblike and empty, it would be full of sounds and life.