Only then did I notice that surrounding the perfect hole about thirty feet above was a squadron of fifty men and women.
They carried flamethrowers.
FLAMES rained down toward us. They’d been prepared for this—we hadn’t been forcing Prof to retreat. He’d been leading us by the nose!
The rtich vanished as the flames surrounded us. Megan’s images and shadows all snapped together and there was suddenly one crisp version of her, lit by firelight. She threw herself to the ground as the sheets of flame fell.
“No!” I screamed, thrusting my hand toward her, my glove flashing. I couldn’t afford to be bad at forcefields. Not now! I strained, like I was stretching to carry too heavy a weight.
Blessedly, a glowing protective dome appeared around Megan, blocking the flames. She pressed her hands against the shield I’d created, eyes wide as the entire thing was bathed in fire.
I stumbled back from the heat, my hand in front of my face. The fires got awfully close, but the burns I took healed.
Up above, men and women began firing automatic weapons. I screamed, releasing the tensor power and vaporizing the weapons in a wave of dust. Guns and flamethrowers crumbled. The gap above widened, raining down salt—and then people as their footing vanished beneath them.
The fires stopped falling, but the damage was done. Pools of liquid flame burned in the now-open cavern floor, curling black tongues of smoke toward the sky. It was so hot, sweat beaded on my forehead. Megan’s powers would be worthless in here. I blinked against the dust and smoke as Prof emerged from the shadows—grim, bloodied, but still not afraid.
Sparks. Still not afraid.
“Did you think I wouldn’t have a plan?” he said to me softly. “Did you think I wouldn’t prepare for Megan and her powers?” His feet ground against salt dust as he walked past a groaning soldier. “That’s what you forget, David. A wise man always has a plan.”
“Sometimes the plans don’t work,” I snapped. “Sometimes careful preparation isn’t enough!”
“And so you storm in, taking no care?” he shouted, startlingly angry.
“Sometimes you just have to act, Prof! Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you’re in the thick of it!”
“That doesn’t give you an excuse to upend another man’s life! Doesn’t give you an excuse to ignore everyone else to follow your own stupid passions! Doesn’t excuse your complete lack of control!”
I roared, building a crescendo of tensor power. I didn’t aim it toward the ground or the walls. I hurled it toward him: a charge of raw power, a vessel for my frustration, my anger. Nothing was working. Everything was falling apart.
It hit him, and he leaned back as if struck by something physical. Buttons on his shirt disintegrated.
Then Prof yelled and sent a blast of tensor power at me in return.
I hit it with my own. The two slammed against one another, like discordant sounds, and the cavern shook, stone rippling as if it were made of water. Vibrations washed over me.
The gun in my hand crumbled to dust, as did the tensor glove on the hand holding it. But the blast didn’t reach the rest of me. Still, the shock of it knocked me off my feet.
I groaned and rolled over. Prof was there, looming above me. He reached down and grabbed the three boxes on the front of my vest, ripping them free of the fabric—removing the motivators from the tensor suit. “These,” he said, “belong to me.”
No…
He backhanded me, a powerful blow that sent me sprawling across the rock and dust.
I came to rest near Megan, who was out of her protective dome—I was no longer holding the power to maintain it. She stood in the firelight, raised her gun in two hands, and shot at Prof.
A meaningless popping. Prof didn’t even seem to care. I lay there with my arm buried in the mottled dust of the floor.
“You’re fools,” Prof said, tossing the motivators aside. “Both of you.”
“Better a fool than a coward,” I hissed. “At least I’ve tried to do something! Tried to change things!”
“You’ve tried and you’ve failed, David!” Prof said, stepping forward as Megan ran out of bullets. I could hear the anguish in his voice. “Look at you. You couldn’t defeat me. You’ve failed.”
I rose to my knees, then settled back, feeling suddenly drained. Megan sank down beside me, burned, exhausted.
Perhaps it was the lack of the harmsway to prop me up. Perhaps it was the knowledge that at last we were done. But I didn’t have the energy to rise. I barely had the energy to speak.
“We’ve been beaten, yes,” Megan said. “But we haven’t failed, Jonathan. Failure is refusing to fight. Failure is remaining quiet and hoping someone else will fix the problem.”
I met his eyes. He stood about five feet before us in the cavern, which was now more of a crater. Ildithia’s creeping salt crystals had begun to crawl over the rim of the hole, crusting over the sides. If other soldiers were up there, they’d wisely taken cover.
Prof’s face was a network of cuts—injuries from debris blown by our violent explosion of tensor power, which had temporarily negated his forcefields. As if in defiance of my hopes, those wounds started to heal.
Megan…Megan was right. Something glimmered in my memories. “Refusing to act,” I said to Prof, “yes, that’s failure, Prof. Like…perhaps…refusing to enter a contest, even though you dearly wanted the prize?”
He stopped right in front of me. Tia had told me a story about him, when we were in Babilar. He’d wanted desperately to visit NASA, but wouldn’t enter the contest that might have won him the chance.
“Yes,” I said. “You never entered. Were you afraid to lose, Prof? Or were you afraid to win?”
“How do you know about that?” he demanded with a roar, summoning a hundred lines of light around him.
“Tia told me,” I said, climbing to my knees, placing my hand on Megan’s shoulder for support. It was starting to click. “You’ve always been like this, haven’t you? You founded the Reckoners, but refused to push them too far. Refused to face the most powerful Epics. You wanted to help, Prof, but you weren’t willing to take the last step.” I blinked. “You were afraid.”
The lines around him faded.
“The powers are part of it,” I said. “But not the whole story. Why do you fear them?”
He blinked. “Because…I…”
“Because if you are so powerful,” Megan whispered, “if you have all of these resources, then you don’t have any excuses left for failing.”
He started weeping, then gritted his teeth and reached for me.
“You’ve failed, Prof,” I said.
The forcefields faded and he stumbled.
“Tia’s dead,” Megan added. “You failed her.”
“Shut up!” The wounds on his face stopped healing. “
Shut up, both of you!”
“You killed your team in Babilar,” I said. “You failed them.”
He lunged forward and seized me by the shoulders, knocking Megan aside. But he was trembling, tears streaming from his eyes.
“You were strong,” I told him. “You have powers no others can match. And still you’ve failed. You’ve failed so deeply, Prof.”
“I can’t have,” he whispered.
“You did. You know you did.” I braced myself in his grip, preparing for the lie I spoke next. “We killed Larcener, Prof. You can’t complete Regalia’s plan. It doesn’t matter if I die. You’ve failed.”
He dropped me. I stumbled up to my feet, but he sank to his knees. “Failed,” he whispered. Blood dripped from his chin. “I was supposed to be a hero….I’ve had so much power…and I still failed.”
Megan limped up beside me, ashen-faced, rubbing her cheek where Prof had hit her. “Hell,” she whispered. “It worked.”
I looked at Prof. He still wept, but when he turned his face toward me, I saw pure loathing in his eyes. Hatred for me, for this situation. For being made a weak, common mortal.
“No,” I said, my stomach sinking. “He didn’t face it.”
We’d found the true weakness. Tia had been wrong. His fear was something deeper than just the powers, though they—and his competence as a whole—were certainly part of that. He was afraid of stepping up, of becoming everything he could be—not because the powers themselves frightened him. But because if he tried, then the failure was far, far worse.
At least if he held something back and failed, he could tell himself it wasn’t completely his fault. Or that it was part of the plan, that he’d always intended for it to go this way. Only if he gave his all, only if he was using every resource he had, would the failure be complete.
What a terrible burden the powers were. I could see how they’d become a focus for him, how they represented the whole of his competence—and how they also represented his potential for true failure.
Megan pressed something into my hand. Her gun. I regarded it, then—my arm feeling like lead—I raised it to Prof’s head.