On the next level was a floor where all of the fruit glowed, but no water tendrils sought to capture me. Regalia didn’t know where I’d gone. Excellent. I crept out into another office room. This floor was cultivated, to an extent, with carefully kept pathways and trees that had been trimmed into a garden. It was a striking sight, after the wildness of the other levels.
I started down a path, imagining the people who had decided to take this floor and make it their own personal garden, buried in the middle of a building. I was so captivated by the imagery I nearly missed the blinking fruit. It hung right in front of me and pulsed with a soft light.
A warning of some sort? Cautious, I continued forward, then heard a footstep on the path ahead.
My breath caught, and I ducked off the path and into the foliage. The fruit closest to me went out, making the area around me darker. A few moments later Newton strode down the path and passed right under the fruit that had pulsed.
She had her katana out resting on her shoulder, and she carried a cup of water.
A cup of water?
“This is a distraction,” Newton said. “Unimportant.”
“You’ll do as told.” Regalia’s voice rose from the cup. “I heard him moving down there, but he’s gone silent. He’s hiding in the darkness, hoping we’ll go away.”
“I have to make it to the confrontation with the others,” Newton protested. “Steelslayer is meaningless. If I don’t fall into their trap, then how are you going to—”
“Obviously you’re right,” Regalia said.
Newton stopped in place.
“You are a wonderful help,” Regalia continued. “So brilliant. And … Blast. I need to deal with Jonathan. Find that rat.”
Newton cursed under her breath and continued on, leaving me behind. I shivered, waiting until I heard the door to the stairwell shut, then I stepped back out onto the path.
Regalia was worried enough about me to pull Newton away from other plans to hunt me. That seemed a very good sign. It meant she felt that keeping me from warning Prof was extremely important.
So I had to break through and reach him. Unfortunately, the moment I stepped out of this building, I’d be in the bull’s-eye again. I’d have to push through it, dodging as I had been before. I walked up to a window and prepared to leap out, but then found that my pocket was buzzing. I dug in it, pulling out the baggie, and removed the radio.
“Are you there? David, please answer!”
“I’m here, Mizzy,” I said softly.
“Thank heavens,” she said, tense. “David, you were right. Obliteration isn’t here!”
“Are you sure?” I said, checking out the window.
“Yes! They’ve set up a kind of white mannequin thing with a floodlight right underneath it, so it glows like Obliteration. They then filled the rooftop with other powerful floodlights; that makes it seem like he’s still here, but he isn’t.”
“That’s why she wanted to keep everyone away,” I said. Sparks. Obliteration was somewhere in the city, planning to destroy the entire place.
“I’m almost to Prof,” I said. “Regalia keeps getting in my way. See if you can turn off the lights. That will warn the other Reckoners, assuming I don’t make it.”
“Okaaaay,” Mizzy said. “I don’t like this, David.” She sounded scared.
“Good,” I said back. “Means you aren’t crazy. See what you can do. I’m going to make a final push toward Prof.”
“Right.”
I tucked the radio away, then glanced at a glowing fruit hanging nearby. “Thanks again for the help,” I said. “If you have anything more like that to throw my way in the future, I wouldn’t say no.”
The fruit blinked.
I nodded grimly, then took a deep breath and jumped out the window.
46
I got about two streets from the building before Regalia found me. She appeared on the surface of the water along my path, standing tall, her eyes wide and alight and her hands to the sides as if to hold up the sky. Waves rose around her like the peaks of a crown emerging from the water.
This time she didn’t bother with conversation. Jets of water erupted beneath me. The first one clipped me along the side, slashing through both clothing and skin. I gasped in pain, then started weaving and bobbing, using the handjet to dodge to the side as Regalia sent an enormous ripple through the water that crested some fifteen feet high. It chased me around a corner but broke against a building as I landed on the roof and ran across it. I passed tents and screaming people and caught the scent of something odd in the air. Smoke?
I leaped off the other side of the building, and as I did, a blur zipped across the rooftop beside me. I yelped, cutting my jets and dropping just beneath the blur, which launched toward me, trailing an afterimage of neon red.
The blur passed right over my head, then landed on the building across from me, where it pulled to a stop, revealing Newton, katana in hand. She whipped out a handgun and spun in my direction.