“Exel?” Val called from the front.
“Yes, Val?”
“Stop being creepy.”
“It’s not creepy,” he said. “Everyone dies, Val. Ignoring the fact won’t make it not true!”
I took the opportunity to scoot a little farther away from Exel. This put me near Mizzy, who was packing away her bomb. “Don’t mind him,” she said to me as Val and Exel continued to chat. “He was a mortician, back before.”
I nodded, but didn’t prod. In the Reckoners, the less we knew about one another’s family members and the like, the less we could betray if an Epic decided to torture us.
“Thanks for standing up for me,” Mizzy said softly. “In front of Tia.”
“She’s intense sometimes,” I said. “Both her and Prof. But they’re good people. She can complain all she likes, but in your place I doubt that either of them would have let those people die. You did the right thing.”
“Even if it put you in danger?”
“I got out of it, didn’t I?”
Mizzy glanced at my throat. I felt at it, reminded of the soreness. It hurt when I breathed.
“Yeaaah,” she said. “You’re just being nice, but I appreciate that. I didn’t expect you to be nice.”
“Me?” I said.
“Sure!” She seemed to be recovering some of her natural perkiness. “Steelslayer, the guy who talked Phaedrus into hitting Steelheart. I expected you to be all intimidating and brooding and ‘They killed my father’ and intense and everything.”
“How much do you know about me?” I asked, surprised.
“More than I probably should. We’re supposed to be secretive and all that, but I can’t help asking questions, you know? And … well … I might have listened in when Sam told Val about what you guys were planning in Newcago.…”
She gave me a kind of apologetic grimace and shrugged.
“Well, trust me,” I said. “I’m more intense than I look. I’m intense like a lion is orange.”
“So, like … medium intense? Since a lion is kind of a tannish color?”
“No, they’re orange.” I frowned. “Aren’t they? I’ve never actually seen one.”
“I think tigers are the orange ones,” Mizzy said. “But they’re still only half orange, since they have black stripes. Maybe you should be intense like an orange is orange.”
“Too obvious,” I said. “I’m intense like a lion is tannish.” Did that work? Didn’t exactly slip off the tongue.
Mizzy cocked her head, looking at me. “You’re kinda weird.”
“No, look, it’s just because the metaphor didn’t work. I’ve got it. I’m intense like-”
“No, it’s okay,” Mizzy said, smiling. “I like it.”
“Yeah,” Exel said, laughing. “I’ll remember that orange thing for your eulogy.”
Great. A few hours into the new team, and I’d convinced them that Steelslayer was adorably strange. I settled back into my seat with a sigh.
We traveled for a while, an hour or more. Long enough that I wasn’t certain we were still in Babilar. Eventually the sub slowed. A moment later the entire thing lurched, and some kind of clamps locked on from the outside.
Wherever we were going, we had arrived. Exel got to his feet and dug out some towels. He nodded to Val, who climbed up the ladder.
“Kill the lights,” she said.
We obligingly put out the lights, and I heard Val undo the hatch up above. Water streamed down, but from the sound of it, Exel quickly mopped it up.
“Out we go,” Mizzy whispered to me. I felt my way to the ladder, letting the others each go up before me. I heard them chatting above, so I knew that when Tia came to the ladder, she was last.
“Prof?” I asked her softly.
“The others don’t know exactly what happened,” she whispered. “I told them that Prof led Obliteration off, but that he was all right and would catch up to us.”
“And what really happened?”
She didn’t reply in the darkness.
“Tia,” I said, “I’m the only other one here who knows about him. You might as well use me as a resource. I can help.”
“He doesn’t need either of our help right now,” she said. “He just needs time.”
“What did he do?”
She sighed softly. “He deliberately let himself get hit with a burst of fire, something no ordinary person could have survived. While Obliteration was standing over him gloating, Jon healed himself, leaped up, and snatched off the man’s glasses. The tip about Obliteration being nearsighted? Turns out it was a good one.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Jon said that scared the wits out of the creature,” Tia whispered. “Obliteration ported away and didn’t return. Jon’s safe; everything is okay. So you can stop worrying.”
I let her pass. Everything wasn’t okay. If Prof was staying away, it was because he was afraid of how he’d act around us. I reluctantly shouldered my pack and gun, then climbed up into a pitch-black room.
“You out, David?” Val’s voice sounded in the darkness.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Over here.”
I followed the sound of her voice. She took me by the arm and steered me through a doorway with some black cloth on it. She followed, then closed a door behind us before opening one in front, letting in light so I could finally see the bolt-hole the Reckoners were using as a base here in Babilar.
Turns out it wasn’t a hole at all.
It was a mansion.
16
Lush red carpets. Dark hardwood. Lounge chairs. A bar with crystal that reflected the light of Val’s mobile. Open space. A lot of open space.
My jaw hit the floor. Well, the door, technically. I smacked it as I stepped into the room and turned, trying to stare in all directions at once. The place looked like a king’s palace. No … no, it looked like an Epic’s palace.
“How …” I stepped into the center of the room. “Are we still underwater?”
“Mostly,” Val said. “We’re in some rich dude’s underground bunker on Long Island. Howard Righton. Built the thing with its own airtight filtration system in case of nuclear fallout.” She slung her pack onto the bar. “Unfortunately for him, he anticipated the wrong kind of apocalypse. An Epic knocked his plane out of the sky as he and his family were flying home from Europe.”
I looked back toward the short hallway leading to the submarine room. Exel closed its door, locking the hallway in darkness. I had a vague impression that we’d risen up through the floor of the room, which probably had some kind of docking mechanism. But how had the submarine docked under a bunker in the ground?
“Storage basement,” Exel explained as he waddled past. “Righton’s bunker had a big chamber for food storage cut out underneath it. That’s flooded now, and we broke open one side, forming a kind of cave we can drive the sub into. Prof cut into it through the floor and installed the docking seal a few years back.”
“Jon likes to have safe places in every city he might visit,” Tia said, settling on one of the plush couches with her mobile. It would work down here-they worked in the steel catacombs of Newcago, so I was pretty sure they’d work anywhere.
Honestly, I was feeling a little naked without mine. I’d saved for years working in the Factory to buy it. Now that my rifle was gone and the mobile destroyed, I found I didn’t really have much from that time of my life.
“So now what?” I asked.
“Now we wait for Jon to finish his reconnaissance,” Tia said, “and then we send for someone to pick him up. Missouri, why don’t you show David to his quarters.” Which should keep him out of my hair for now, her tone implied.
I shouldered my pack as Mizzy nodded and bobbed off down a corridor with a flashlight. It suddenly hit me just how tired I was. Even though we’d spent the trip here driving at night, I hadn’t completely switched my days and nights. For the last few months it had been a novel thing for me to live in the light, and I’d enjoyed it.
Well, it seemed darkness would become the norm again. I followed Mizzy out of the main sitting room down a corridor lined with artistic photos of colored water being flung into the air. I figured it was supposed to look modern and chic. All it did was remind me that we were on the bottom of the ocean.