“This place is too far away from the city center—it’s from the northern edge of the section of old Atlanta that became Ildithia. Why pick the cold warehouse when you can have a group of townhomes for your family?”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said.
“Plus, a whole bunch of people got murdered in here,” Cody added. “So nobody wants to be near the place.”
“Um…what?”
“Yeah,” he said, “tragic event. Bunch of kids started playing here, but it was too close to another family’s territory. The other family got spooked, thought rivals were moving in on them, so they tossed some dynamite through the door. They say you could hear the survivors crying under the rubble for days, but a full-on war had started by then, and nobody had time to come help the poor kids.”
I regarded him, stunned. Cody started whistling and continued to work. Sparks. He had to be making that story up, right? I turned and took in the vast, empty room, then shivered.
“I hate you,” I muttered.
“Ach, now, don’t be like that. Ghosts are drawn to negative emotions, you see.”
I should have known better; talking to Cody was generally among the least productive things you could do. I went looking for Megan instead, passing Larcener, who—of course—had refused to help carry anything to the new base. He swept into Cody’s unfinished chamber and flopped down, an overstuffed beanbag materializing beneath him.
“I’m tired of being interrupted,” he said, pointing at the wall. A door appeared, propped up against it. “Work that into your construction, and I’ll put a lock on the thing. Oh, and make the walls extra thick so I don’t have to listen to the lot of you squeaking and babbling all the time.”
Cody gave me a long-suffering look, and somehow I could tell that he was contemplating walling the Epic up.
I found Megan with Mizzy, near where Abraham was unpacking his guns. I held back, surprised. Megan and Mizzy sat on the floor surrounded by our notes—some in my careful hand, others in her…well, Megan’s handwriting could be mistaken for the aftermath of a tornado in a pencil store.
Mizzy nodded as Megan pointed at one page, then gestured wildly at the sky. Megan thought a moment, then huddled over the paper and started writing.
I sidled up to Abraham. “The two of them are talking,” I said.
“You expected maybe clucking?”
“Well, shouting. Or strangulation.”
Abraham turned back to unloading equipment from his bags.
I started toward the women, but Abraham took me by the arm without looking up. “Perhaps it would be best to simply let them be, David.”
“But—”
“They are adults,” Abraham said. “They do not need you to work out their problems.”
I folded my arms, huffing. What did their being adults have to do with it? Plenty of adults did need me to work out their problems—otherwise Steelheart would still be alive. Besides, Mizzy was seventeen. Did that even count as an adult?
Abraham removed something from one of the packs and set it down with a soft thump. “Instead of poking where you aren’t needed,” he said to me, “how about helping where you are? I could use your aid.”
“Doing what?”
Abraham lifted the top of the box, revealing a pair of gloves and a jug of sparkling mercury. “Your plan is daring, as I would expect. It is also simple. The best often are. But it does require me to do things I am not sure I can do.”
He was right; the plan was simple. It was also exceptionally dangerous.
Knighthawk had used drones to explore a few of the caverns underneath Ildithia, the ones Digzone had created long ago. There were many under the region, tunneled into the rock here. Ildithia was passing over a large set of them, and we’d chosen this warehouse in part because here we could dig down into one of the caverns and practice there.
Our plan was to train for a month. By then Ildithia would have left these caverns behind—but they would still make a perfect location for a trap. Lots of tunnels, places to set up explosives or to plot escape routes. We’d be familiar with the tunnels, which would give us an edge in the fight.
Once we were ready, we’d sneak from the city and go back to the caves. From there we could lure Prof out. All it would take was using the motivators based on his powers, and he’d come right to us. Ildithia would be miles away, and safe from whatever destruction happened during our fight.
Abraham and Megan would hit him first. The idea was to wear him down before revealing Cody, wearing the full “tensor suit,” as we were calling the set of devices that mimicked Prof’s power portfolio. It hadn’t arrived yet, but Knighthawk claimed it was on its way. So once Abraham and Megan had worn Prof down a little, Cody would appear, manifesting all of Prof’s powers.
We had to hope that Tavi’s power hadn’t been recognized by Prof as being “his.” After all, her forcefields had been a different color.
A piece of me whispered that there might be a larger problem. Prof had been wounded by Tavi’s forcefields, but they hadn’t shut down his powers completely, like what happened with Megan and most Epics.
Could Tia have been wrong? I’d decided that she wasn’t, but now—confronted with one last shot at stopping Prof—I wavered. Some things about Prof and his powers didn’t add up.
What was it that Prof feared?
“For this to work,” Abraham said from beside me, snapping me out of my introspection, “I will need to be able to use the rtich to face Prof. And facing him will require not getting squished by his forcefields.”
“The rtich should be enough,” I said. “The structural integrity of the mercury will be—”
“I believe your notes,” Abraham cut me off, pulling on the gloves. “But I’d still rather do some testing, followed by much practice.”
I shrugged. “What did you have in mind?”
—
What he “had in mind,” apparently, was to put me to work. Our warehouse had a little loft inside it. I spent the next hour working with Cody, who created some large slabs of saltstone in the loft. I then lashed these together and positioned them, in several bunches, ready to push them off the loft.
Finally, I wiped my brow with a rag that was already soaked through, then settled down with my legs hanging over the ledge.
Below, Abraham practiced.
He’d developed his own training regimen with the rtich, based on some old martial art. He stepped into the center of a ring of lights he’d set out on the ground, thrust his hands to one side, then pulled them back and thrust them the other way.
Mercury danced around him. At first it covered his arm, like a silvery sleeve and glove. As he thrust his hands forward, it sprayed outward, becoming a disc connected to his palm. When he moved back into his martial arts motions, it withdrew and covered his arm again, then shot into the shape of a spike as he thrust his hands the other way.
I watched hungrily. The metal moved with a beautiful, otherworldly flow, reflecting light as it snaked around Abraham’s arms—first one, then across his shoulders to the other, like something alive. He turned and ran, then leaped—and the mercury coursed down his legs, becoming a short pillar that Abraham landed upon. It held his weight, though it looked spindly and frail.
“Ready?” I called from above.
“Ready,”
he called.
“Be careful,” I said. “I don’t want this crushing you.”
He gave no response, so I sighed, then stood and used a crowbar to pry one of the large, lashed-together slabs of saltstone off the loft and send it tumbling toward him. The idea was for him to create a thin line of mercury in the path of the falling slabs, then see how much the impact twisted the mercury.
Instead, Abraham stepped directly into the path of the stones and raised his hand.
My view was obstructed, but best I could figure, Abraham caused the mercury to run up his side and arm—becoming a long ribbon that extended from his palm, down his side, and to his feet to form a kind of brace.
My breath caught as the saltstone plummeted toward him. I craned my neck to look down, and the pile hit hard, bouncing off Abraham, the lashings snapping. The slabs crashed to the sides, revealing Abraham grinning below, his hand still raised, his palm coated with mercury. The brace had been enough to deflect the weight of the slabs.
“That was foolhardy,” I called to him. “Stop trying to put me out of a job!”
“Better to know now if this will work,” he called back to me, “than to find out in the middle of a fight with Prof. Besides, I was relatively certain.”
“Still want to try this next part?” Cody asked, coming up beside me, sniper rifle on his shoulder.
“Yes, please,” Abraham said, thrusting his hand toward us and making the shield. It grew as large as he was, shimmering and incredibly thin.
I looked at Cody, then shrugged and put my hands over my ears. A series of shots followed; fortunately they were suppressed, so the ear-holding wasn’t as necessary as it might have been.
The mercury puckered, catching the bullets. Or, well, it stopped them—which upon consideration wasn’t all that impressive, as bodies technically did that all the time. Mine had done so on occasion.
Still, the mercury didn’t tear or split, so it was an effective shield, though unfortunately the application was limited. Abraham didn’t have superhuman reflexes; he wouldn’t be able to stop bullets already fired.
He turned and the mercury flowed back to him, scattering the bullets to the floor. It ran down his arm and then his leg before streaking from his feet to form a series of steps rising toward me. He walked up them, grinning widely.