Prof drove with goggles on, the jeep’s headlights replaced with UV floodlights that would be invisible to anyone without the proper headgear. I sat in the jeep’s back seat and spent my time reading through the notes and essays Tia had given me. I held the sheets inside a small box in my lap that had a flashlight inside of it, and this mostly masked the light.
The car slowed, then thumped up and down as Prof carefully navigated a bad patch of rubbled asphalt. Cars lay like the husks of enormous beetles along the sides of the road; they’d first been drained of their gasoline, then gutted for parts. Our vehicle, fortunately, had been converted to run on one of Edmund’s power cells.
As we drove slowly over the rubble, I heard something out in the night, like a snapping branch. The jeep’s back seat wasn’t enormous, but it didn’t have a roof, so I could easily set my box aside and maneuver my new rifle. I raised it to my shoulder and tapped a button that folded out the automatic scope. It worked very well, I was forced to admit, switching to night vision on its own and letting me zoom in on the source of the noise.
Through the holosights I picked out a few scavengers in ragged clothing squatting behind one of the broken cars in the darkness. They seemed like wild people, with long beards and sloppily stitched clothing. I watched them with the safety off, looking for weapons, until another head bobbed up. A little girl, maybe five years old. One of the men hushed her, pushing her down, then continued watching our jeep until we crossed the patch of broken street and sped up, leaving them behind.
I lowered the gun. “It really is bad out here.”
“Anytime a town starts to band together,” Tia said from the front passenger seat, “an Epic decides to either rule the place or lay waste to it.”
“It’s worse,” Prof said softly, “when one of their own develops powers.”
New Epics were rare, but they did happen. In a city like Newcago, we’d get maybe a single new one every four or five years. But they were dangerous, as an Epic who first manifested powers almost always went a little mad in the beginning, using their abilities wildly, destroying. Steelheart had quickly rounded up such individuals and subjugated them. Out here, there would be nobody to stop their initial rampage.
I settled back, disturbed, but eventually returned to my reading. This was our third night on the road. When dawn had broken after the first night, Prof had driven us into a hidden safe house. Apparently, the Reckoners had many of them along major roadways. Usually they were hollows sheared into rock with tensors, then secured with hidden doors.
I hadn’t pushed Prof too much about the tensors. Even with me, he talked about them as if they were technology-and not secretly just a cover for his powers. He only allowed the Reckoners in his personal team to use them, which made sense. Most Epic powers had a distinct range. From what I’d been able to determine, you had to be within a dozen miles or so of Prof for the gifted tensors or energy shields to work.
What made it even more confusing was that the Reckoners did have technology that emulated Epic powers. Such as the gauss gun I’d used in fighting Steelheart, and the dowser, which was a device they used to test if someone was an Epic or not. I’d been suspicious that these things had also secretly been from Prof’s powers, but he’d promised me they weren’t. It was possible to kill an Epic, then use something about their DNA to reverse engineer machines that mimicked their powers. That’s what made Prof’s deception so believable. Why assume that your team leader is an Epic when there’s a perfectly good technological explanation for the things the team can do?
I flipped through to the back of the stapled series of notes that Tia had given me. There, I found the profile for Sourcefield, which we’d gathered soon after she’d come to Newcago. Emiline Bask, it read. Former hotel desk clerk. Fan of Asian pulp cinema. Gained Epic powers two years after Calamity.
I scanned through her history. She’d spent some time in Detroit, Madison, and Little Blackstone. She’d allied with Static and his band of Epics for a few years, then she’d vanished for a while before turning up in Newcago to kill the lot of us. This was interesting, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to know her pre-Epic history, in particular her personality before she became one of them. Had she been a troublemaker, like Steelheart?
For that, I only had a few paragraphs. She’d been raised by an aunt after her mother committed suicide, but the pages said nothing about her personality. There was a note at the end. Mother’s trauma related to grandparents, obviously.
I leaned forward as the jeep picked up a little speed. “Tia?”
“Hmm?” she asked, looking up from her datapad, which she hid in a box like mine to shield the light.
“What does this mean-it references Sourcefield’s mother’s trauma being related somehow to her grandparents?”
“Not sure,” she said. “What I gave you was part of a larger file that Jori had compiled; he sent us only the relevant information.”
My own files didn’t have much on Sourcefield. I looked at that paragraph again, lit inside my shoebox. “Would you mind asking him for the rest of the information?”
“What is it about dead Epics that fascinates you so?” Tia asked.
Prof kept his eyes forward, but he seemed to perk up.
“You remember Mitosis?” I asked. “That Epic who tried to take Newcago a few months back?”
“Of course.”
“His weakness was rock music,” I said. “Specifically his own music.” He’d been a minor rock star before gaining his Epic powers.
“So?”
“So … it’s a mighty coincidence, isn’t it? That his own music should negate his powers? Tia, what if there’s a pattern to the weaknesses? One we haven’t cracked yet?”
“Someone would have spotted it,” Prof said.
“Would they?” I asked. “Early on, nobody even knew about the weaknesses. The Epics weren’t quick to tell people about them. Besides, there was mass chaos.”
“Unlike now?” Tia asked.
“Now … there’s institutionalized chaos,” I said. “Look, how long ago did the Reckoners start working? How long ago did the lorists start gathering data on weaknesses? It’s only been a few years, right? And by then, it was just common knowledge that Epic weaknesses are bizarre and random. Only, what if they’re not?”
Tia tapped her datapad. “Worth looking into, I suppose. I’ll get you more about Sourcefield’s past.”
I nodded, gazing between them, eastward along the road. I couldn’t see much in the darkness, though a haze on the horizon took me by surprise. Was that light?
“Dawn already?” I asked, checking my mobile.
“No,” Prof said. “It’s the city.”
Babylon Restored. “So soon?”
“David, we’ve been traveling for over two days,” Tia said.
“Yeah, but Babilar is on the other side of the country! I figured … I don’t know, like it would take at least a week. Or two.”
Prof snorted. “When the roads were good, you could make this drive in one day, easy.”
I settled back in my seat, bracing myself against the bumps as Prof sped up. He obviously wanted to reach the city well before daybreak. We passed a growing number of suburbs, but even still, things out here were just so … empty. I’d imagined buildings everywhere, maybe farms squeezed between them. The truth was that the landscape outside Newcago just seemed to be filled with … well, a lot of nothing at all.
The world was both a larger place and a smaller place than I’d imagined.
“Prof, how do you know Regalia?” I blurted out.
Tia glanced at me. Prof kept driving.
“What do you remember about Regalia, David?” Tia asked, perhaps to break the silence. “From your notes.”