Firefight (The Reckoners 2)

I turned to look and there, standing just inside the storage room, was Megan.

33

MEGAN.

Megan was inside the Reckoner base.

I let out a sound that was definitely not a whimper. It was something far more manly, no matter what it sounded like.

I glanced after Mizzy in a moment of panic, then stepped into the storage room, taking Megan by the arm. “What are you doing!”

“We need to talk,” she said. “And you were ignoring me.”

“I wasn’t ignoring you. Things have just been very busy.”

“Busy looking at women’s backsides.”

“I wasn’t … Wait.” It hit me and I smiled. “You sound jealous!”

“Don’t be a buffoon.”

“No,” I said. “You were jealous.” I found I couldn’t stop grinning.

Megan seemed confused. “Normally, that’s not something people smile about.”

“It means you care,” I said.

“Oh please.”

Time to say something suave. Something romantic. My brain, which had been working a few steps behind all day, finally came to my rescue. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’d rather ogle you any day.”

Wait.

Megan sighed, peeking out into the hallway past me. “You are a buffoon,” she said under her breath. “Is she likely to come back here?”

Right. Enemy High Epic. Reckoner base. “I’m assuming you’re not here to turn yourself in?” I said softly.

“Turn myself in? Sparks, no. I just needed to talk to someone. You were the most convenient.”

“This is convenient?” I asked.

Megan looked at me and blushed. A blush looked really good on her. Of course, so would soup, mud, or elephant earwax. Megan on a bad day outshined anyone else I’d ever known.

“Come on,” I said, taking her by the arm. I didn’t want to encourage her to use her powers to hide, not when she was so obviously acting like the Megan I’d known before. Which meant moving quickly. I towed her after me in a heart-pounding rush down the hallway toward my room.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who’d just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

Megan inspected the room. “You didn’t get one with a porthole, I see. Still the new kid on the team, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“Nice, anyway,” she said, strolling forward. “Better than a metal hole in the ground.”

“Megan,” I said. “How … I mean, does anyone else out there know where our base is?”

She met my gaze, then shook her head. “Not so far as I know. I don’t meet with Regalia often—I don’t think she trusts me—but from what I’ve heard of the others, they’re searching for you. Regalia thinks your base is somewhere on the northern coast, and seems thoroughly annoyed that she hasn’t been able to find it.”

“How did you find us, then?” I asked.

“Steelheart had me bug everyone in the team,” she said.

“So you …”

“I can listen in,” Megan said, “on some of your calls. Or I could, for a while. Phaedrus is paranoid, changes both his phone and Tia’s regularly. Yours is dead. I can only listen in these days if someone calls Abraham or Cody.”

“The supply shipment,” I said. “You heard where it was, got there before us, then snuck onto the submarine.”

Megan nodded.

“I was there,” I said. “I didn’t see you at all! Were you using your powers?”

“Nah,” Megan said, flopping back onto the bed, lying across it sideways. “I only needed good old-fashioned stealth.”

“But …”

“I was about to sneak aboard after you’d been out of the sub for a while, and then Val came out following you and nearly gave me a heart attack. But I ducked just in time, then went in and hid in the bathroom.”

I grinned, though she couldn’t see it—she was staring at the ceiling. “You’re amazing,” I said.

The corners of her lips tugged up at that, though she remained staring upward. “It’s getting really difficult, David.”

“Difficult?”

“Not using my powers.”

I scrambled up to the side of the bed. “You’ve been doing what I asked? Avoiding the abilities?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know why I listen to you. Just makes life difficult. I mean, I’m basically a divinity, right? So I end up hiding in a bathroom?”

I settled down, sitting on the bed beside her. The tension in her voice, that look in her eyes. “Is it working?” I asked. “Do you feel like murdering people indiscriminately?”

“I always feel like murdering you. If only just a little.”

I waited.

“Yes,” Megan finally said with a sigh. “It’s working. It’s driving me insane in other ways, but not using my powers has removed some of the … tendencies from my mind. But I honestly don’t ever feel like killing people. For me, it manifests more as irritability and selfishness.”

“Huh,” I said. “Why do you think that is?”

“Probably because I’m not very powerful.”

“Megan, you’re a High Epic! You’re wicked powerful.”

“Wicked?”

“Heard it in a movie once.”

“Whatever. I’m not a very powerful Epic, David. I have to use a gun for Calamity’s sake! I can reincarnate, yes, but have you seen how weak my illusions are?”

“I think they’re pretty awesome.”

“I’m not fishing for

compliments, David,” she said. “We’re trying to get me to not use my powers, remember?”

“Sorry. Uh, wow. Your powers are so lame. They’re like, about as useful as an eight-by-eighty mounted on a twelve-gauge firing birdshot.”

She looked at me, then started laughing. “Oh sparks. You’d have a real good view of the pheasant dying, though.”

“Up close and personal,” I said. “The way avian massacres were meant to happen.”

This made her laugh more, and I grinned. She seemed to need the laughter. There was a desperation to it; though it did occur to me that we should make sure to keep things quiet.

Megan stretched her arms back, then folded them on her stomach, sighing.

“Feel good?” I asked.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said softly. “It’s horrible.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She glanced at me.

“I’d like to know,” I said. “I’ve made a habit of … ending people with these powers. I don’t know if it will make me feel better or worse to know what they’re going through, but I think I should hear it either way.”

She looked back at the ceiling and didn’t speak at first. I’d left one light on in the room, a small reddish-orange lamp with a glass shade. The room was silent, though I thought sometimes I could hear the ocean outside. Waves surging, water rolling. It was probably just my imagination.

“It’s not like a voice,” Megan said. “I’ve read what some of Tia’s scholars write, and they treat it like schizophrenia. They claim that Epics have something like an evil conscience telling them what to do, which is a load of crap. It’s nothing like that.

“You know how, some mornings, you just feel a little angry at the world?” she continued. “Or you’re irritable, so that small things—things that normally wouldn’t annoy you—set you off? It’s like that. Only mixed with an inability to care about consequences.

“Even that’s kind of normal—I’ve been there, felt like that, long before I got these powers. You know how it is when you’re up late, and you know that if you don’t go to bed, you’re going to hate life the next day? Then you stay up anyway, because you don’t care? It’s like that. As an Epic, you just don’t care. After all, you deserve to be able to do what you want. And if you go too far, you can change later. Always later.”