“How’s the city up there?” I asked Exel.
“Lots of funerals,” he said. “Attended a really nice one over near the central expanse. Flowers on the water, a beautiful eulogy. Terrible embalming, though I suppose you can’t blame them, considering the lack of resources.”
“You did reconnaissance at a funeral?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “People like to chat at funerals. It’s an emotional time. I caught some of Newton’s flunkies watching from a distance.”
Mizzy looked up from her mobile. “What did they do?”
“They just watched,” Exel said, shaking his head. “Can’t figure that group out, honestly. We may need to infiltrate them at some point.…”
“I doubt her gangs are recruiting fat dudes in their forties, Exel,” Val said from the doorway.
“I’d just pretend to be a chef,” Exel said. “Every organization needs both good chefs and good morticians. The two great constants of life. Food and death.”
Tia and Prof entered a short time later, Prof carrying an easel under one arm. Tia took a seat in the room’s remaining chair while Prof set up the easel and paper just in front of the aquariumlike window. How wonderful. I was going to have to stare at that water the entire time.
“Imager isn’t set up yet,” Prof said. “So we’ll do this the old-fashioned way. Mizzy, you’re low man on the team roster. You get scribe duties.”
She hopped up from her chair and actually seemed excited by the prospect. She took a marker and wrote Reckoner Super Plan for Killing Regalia at the top of the sheet. Each i was dotted with a heart.
Prof watched this with a flat expression, then soldiered onward. “In killing Steelheart, the Reckoners made a promise, one we need to keep. Powerful Epics aren’t beyond our reach. Regalia has proven her disrespect for human life, and we are the only law capable of bringing her to justice. It’s time to eradicate her.”
“I’m worried about this,” Exel said, shaking his head. “Regalia has been running a solid PR campaign lately. People in the city don’t love her, but they don’t hate her either. Are you certain this is what we should be doing, Prof?”
“She spent the last five months sending assassins to try to kill my team in Newcago,” Prof said, voice cold. “Sam is dead by her order as well. It’s personal, Exel. Good PR or not, she’s murdering people right and left in this city. We bring her down. It’s not negotiable.”
He looked at me when he said it.
Mizzy wrote Really important, and we totally need to do it on the paper, with three big arrows pointing at the heading above. Then, after a moment, she added Boy, it’s on now in smaller letters beside that one.
“All right,” Val said from beside the doorway. “So we’ll need to find her weakness, which is something we’ve never been able to do. I doubt soap is going to be enough.”
Prof looked to Tia.
“Abigail isn’t a High Epic,” Tia said.
“What?” Exel said. “Of course she is. I’ve never met an Epic as powerful as Regalia. She raised the water level of the entire city to flood it. She moved millions of tons of water, and holds it all here!”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t powerful,” Tia said. “Only that she isn’t a High Epic—which is defined as an Epic whose powers prevent them from being killed in conventional ways.”
Mizzy wrote Regalia totally needs to get with the business on her sheet.
“What about Regalia’s prognosticative abilities?” I asked Tia.
“Overblown,” Tia said. “She’s barely class F, despite what she’d have people believe. She can rarely interpret what she sees, and it certainly can’t elevate her to High Epic status by virtue of its protective nature.”
“I’ve theorized about that in my notes,” I said, nodding. “You’re sure it’s true?”
“Very.”
Exel raised his hand. “Um, I’m lost. Anyone else lost? Cuz I’m lost.”
Mizzy wrote Exel needs to pay better attention to his job on the board.
“Regalia,” I explained to him, “has no form of protective powers, not directly. That’s what makes someone a High Epic. Steelheart’s skin was impenetrable; the Clapper warped air around him so anything stabbing or hitting him was teleported to his other side; Firefight reincarnates when killed. Regalia has none of that.”
“Abigail is powerful,” Prof agreed, “but actually quite fragile. If we can find her, we can kill her.”
It was true, and I realized I’d been thinking about Regalia like I had Steelheart. That was wrong. Killing him had been all about his weakness. The “weakness” that would stop Regalia’s powers wasn’t nearly as important as finding out where she was hiding her physical form.
“This, then,” Tia said, taking a sip of her cola, “should probably be the core of our plan. We need to locate Regalia. I’ve told you that the functional range on her abilities is just under five miles. We should be able to use that knowledge to pinpoint where she’s hiding.”
Mizzy obligingly wrote on the board, Step One: find Regalia, then totally explode her. Lots and lots.
“I’ve always wondered,” Val said, regarding Tia, “how do you know so much about her powers? From the lorists?”
“Yes,” Tia answered, completely straight-faced. Sparks. Tia was a good liar.
“You’re sure,” I said, “that there isn’t more?”
Prof glared at me and I stared right back at him. I wasn’t going to outright say things he’d told me in confidence, but this hiding things from the team made me uncomfortable. The rest of the team should at least know that Prof and Regalia had a history together.
“Well,” Tia said, reluctantly. “You should all probably know that Jon and I knew Regalia during the years just after she became an Epic. This was before the Reckoners.”
“What?” Val said, stalking forward. “You didn’t tell me?”
“It wasn’t relevant,” Tia replied.
“Not relevant?” Val demanded. “Sam is dead, Tia!”
“We’ve passed on to you things we’ve thought you could use against her.”
“But—” Val began.
“Stand down, Valentine,” Prof said. “We have kept secrets from you. We will continue to do so if we think it’s for the best.”
Val fumed but crossed her arms, now standing beside my chair. She didn’t say anything, though Mizzy wrote on the board, Step Two: put Val on decaf. I wasn’t certain what that meant.
Val took a deep breath, but she finally sat down.
Mizzy kept writing. Step Three: Mizzy gets a cookie.
“Can I have a cookie too?” Exel asked.
“No,” Prof snapped. “This meeting is going nowhere. Mizzy, write down …” He trailed off, looking at her sheet for the first time since we’d started, and realizing she’d already filled the entire thing up with her comments.
Mizzy blushed.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Prof said to her. “We probably don’t need that anyway.”
Mizzy scurried to a seat, head down.
“Our plan,” Prof said, “needs to be about locating Regalia’s base of operations, then sneaking in to kill her, preferably when she’s asleep and can’t fight back.”
My stomach lurched at that. Shooting someone in the head while they’re sleeping? Didn’t seem very heroic. But I didn’t say anything, and neither did anyone else. At our core we were assassins, and that was that. Was killing them in their sleep really any different from luring them into a trap and killing them there?
“Suggestions?” Prof said.
“You sure that finding her base will work?” I asked. “Steelheart moved around a lot, sleeping in different places each night. I know a lot of Epics who maintain many different residences precisely to stop something like this from happening.”
“Regalia isn’t Steelheart,” Prof said. “She isn’t anywhere near as paranoid as he was—and she likes her comforts. She’ll have picked one place and bunkered down in it, and I doubt she m
oves from it often.”