Firefight (The Reckoners 2)

I hadn’t realized that this whole “water” thing was going to be an issue for me. I mean … half the world is water, right? And we’re all half water to boot. So stepping into the sub should have felt like a sheep falling into a big pile of cotton.

Only it didn’t. It felt like a sheep falling into a pile of nails. Wet nails. On the bottom of the ocean.

I wasn’t about to let the other Reckoners see me sweat, though. Even if they couldn’t see me in the darkness. Hear me sweat? Ew. Anyway, I swallowed and climbed down into the submarine by touch. Exel’s heavy footfalls followed last. Something thumped above us, and I assumed he was twisting the hatch closed, sealing it.

It was as black as charcoal at midnight inside. Or, well, as black as a grape at midnight—or pretty much anything at midnight. I felt my way to a seat as the machine started to putter, then sank down quietly.

“Here,” Mizzy said, forcing something into my hand. A towel. “Wipe up any water you might have tracked in.”

Glad to have something to do, I wiped my seat down, then the floor, which was carpeted. Another towel followed, and I dried myself as best I could. Obviously, hiding from Regalia required making certain that no open surfaces of water were around.

“Okay?” Mizzy asked a few minutes later.

“We’re good,” Val replied.

Mizzy turned on her mobile, bathing us in light, letting me see the chamber around us. It was lined on both sides with plush orange and blue vinyl benches under windows that had been covered with heavy black cloth. I realized that, unlike what I’d expected, this wasn’t a military submarine. It was some kind of sightseeing vehicle, like one that might take people on tours around a reef. The carpet on the floor had obviously been installed later to help keep pools of liquid from forming.

Exel sat at the ready, watching for any puddles we’d missed in the darkness. “Regalia supposedly needs two inches or so to look through,” he said to me, “but we prefer not to take chances.”

“Does it matter?” I asked. “Can’t she just look under the waves and find us?”

“No,” Tia said. She’d settled into the last seat in the sub, near what appeared to be a restroom hung with a sign reading, MIZZY’S EXPLOSIVE BUNKER. ENTER AT PEACE. EXIT IN PIECES. The latch was broken, and the door kept swinging open and closed.

“Imagine you’re contacting me via your mobile,” Tia continued. “My face appears on your screen, and yours appears on mine. Could you instead, if you wanted to, turn your perspective around and look inside my mobile?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way,” I said. “The screen faces outward.”

“That’s how her abilities work,” Tia said. “A surface of water exposed to the air is like a screen for her, and she can look out of it. She can’t just look the other direction. Under the surface, we’re invisible to her.”

“We’re still in her power,” Val pointed out from the driver’s seat up ahead. “She raised water to flood all of Manhattan—reaching down to rip apart this submarine would be nothing to her. In the past, we counted on her not knowing we were down here.”

“She could have killed us in the boat above,” Tia said. “She let us go instead, which means that for now she doesn’t want us dead. Now that we’re under the surface, she won’t know where to look for us. We’re free, for the moment.”

Everyone seemed to accept this. At the very least, there wasn’t much point in arguing. As we sailed—or whatever you did in a submarine—onward, I relocated to a seat just beside Tia.

“You know a lot about her powers,” I said softly.

“I’ll give you a briefing later,” she said.

“Will that briefing include how you know all of this?”

“I’ll let Jon decide what needs to be shared,” she answered, then rose and moved to the front of the vehicle to speak quietly with Val.

I sat back and tried not to think about the fact that we were underwater. We probably couldn’t go very deep—this was a recreational craft—but that didn’t bring me much comfort. What happened if something went wrong? If this sub started leaking? If it just stopped moving and sank down to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor here, with us all trapped inside …

I shifted uncomfortably, and my pocket crinkled. I grimaced, reaching in and pulling out my mobile. What was left of it at least.

“Wow,” Exel said, settling down next to me. “How’d you do that?”

“Angered an Epic,” I said.

“Give it to Mizzy,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “She’ll either fix it or get you a new one. Be warned, though: whatever she gives you might come with some … modifications.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“All good and very useful additions,” Mizzy said. She’d taken the bomb from me and was disarming it in her seat.

“So,” I said, turning to Exel, “Mizzy is repairs and equipment—”

“And point,” she said.

“—and other things,” I continued. “Val is operations and support. I’ve been trying to place your job in the team. You’re not point. What do you do?”

Exel put his feet up on the seat across from him, leaning with his back to the covered window. “Mostly I do the stuff that Val doesn’t want to do—such as talking to people.”

“I talk to people,” Val snapped from the driver’s seat ahead.

“You yell at them, dear,” Exel said.

“It’s a form of talking. Besides, I don’t only yell.”

“Yes, you occasionally grumble.” Exel smiled at me. “We’ve been a deeply embedded team, Steelslayer. That means lots of observation and interaction with the people in the city.”

I nodded. The large man had a disarming way about him, with those rosy cheeks and that thick brown beard. Cheerful, friendly.

“I’ll also bury your corpse,” he noted to me.

Ooookaaaay …

“You’ll look good in the coffin,” he said. “Nice skeletal structure, lean body. A bit of cotton under the eyelids, some embalming fluid in the veins, and poof—you’ll be done. Too bad your skin is so pale, though. You’ll show bruises really easil

y. Nothing a little makeup can’t solve, eh?”

“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.”