“You’re beautiful, Newton,” I yelled.
The blur became a person again, plants curling up at her feet. Her lips pursed, she looked at me, eyes wide, sword held in limp fingers.
“You’re a wonderful Epic,” I continued, raising my gun.
She backed away.
“Obviously,” I said, “that’s why both Obliteration and Regalia are always sure to compliment you. It couldn’t, of course, be because compliments are your weakness.” That was why Newton let her gang be so rowdy and insubordinate. She hadn’t wanted them complimenting her by accident.
Newton turned and ran.
I shot her in the back.
It wrenched my gut as she fell face-first to the overgrown ground. But at my core, I was an assassin. Yes, I killed in the name of justice, bringing down only those who deserved it, but at the end of the day, I was an assassin. I’d shoot someone in the back. Whatever it took.
I walked up, then planted two more bullets in her skull, just to be certain.
I looked at Regalia, who stood, arms still crossed, among the growing flora around us—saplings becoming full trees, fruit sprouting, swelling, and sagging from limbs and vines. Her figure started to shrink as Dawnslight drank up the water that formed her current projection, and her dome fell apart, showering down upon me and the rooftop.
“I see that I spoke too freely when punishing Newton,” Regalia said. “This is my fault, for giving away her weakness. You really are an annoyance, boy.”
I raised the handgun and pointed it at Regalia’s head.
“Oh please,” she said. “You know you can’t hurt me with that.”
“I’m coming for you,” I said softly. “I’m going to kill you before you kill Prof.”
“Is that so?” Regalia snapped. “And do you realize that while you’ve been distracted, the Reckoners have already executed their plan? That your idolized Jonathan Phaedrus has killed the woman you love?”
A shock ran through me.
“He used her as bait, to draw me,” Regalia said. “Noble Jonathan murdered her in an attempt to make me appear. And I did, of course. So that he’d have his little data point. His team is storming my supposed sanctuary right now.”
“You’re lying.”
“Oh?” Regalia said. “And what is that you smell?”
I’d smelled it earlier. With an edge of panic, I ran to the side of the building and looked toward something I could barely make out against the darkness. A column of smoke rising from a nearby building—the place where Mizzy said Prof had been waiting.
Fire.
Megan!
47
REGALIA let me go. That probably should have worried me more than it did.
I focused only on reaching that building. I fiddled with the leg wires on the spyril and managed to get one of the jets working. That let me awkwardly cross the gaps between rooftops. I landed on a building next to the one belching the column of smoke, and heat blasted me despite the distance. The fire was burning from the lower floors upward. The roof itself wasn’t yet consumed, but the lower floors were engulfed. It seemed like the entire structure was close to collapsing.
Frantic, I looked down at the glove of my handjet. Might it be enough? I jetted across to the rooftop, where the heat was actually less intense than it had been when facing the burning lower floors. Sweating, I sprinted across the roof and found a stairwell access door.
I shoved it open. Smoke billowed out, and I got a lungful. Driven back by the heat, I stumbled away, coughing. I squeezed tears from my eyes at the smoke and looked at the spyril strapped to my arm. Thoughts of using the spyril like a fireman’s hose seemed silly now. There was no way I could get close enough, and there wouldn’t be water inside the building anyway.
“She’s dead,” a quiet voice said.
I started, jumping to the side and reaching for Mizzy’s handgun. Prof sat on the side of the rooftop, shadowed by the little stairwell shack so that I hadn’t seen him at first.
“Prof?” I asked, uncertain.
“She came to save you,” he said softly. He was slumped down, a shadowy mountain of a man in the gloom. No neon glowed near here. “I sent her a dozen messages with your phone, made it seem like you were in danger. She came. Even though I’d already started the fire, she broke into the building, thinking you were trapped inside. She ran, coughing and blind, to the room where she thought you lay trapped and pinned under a fallen tree. I caught her, took away her weapons, and left her in there with forcefields on the doorways and the window.”
“Please, no …,” I whispered. I couldn’t think. It wasn’t possible.
“Just her alone in the room,” Prof continued. He held something in his hand. Megan’s handgun, the one I’d given back to her. “Water on the floor. I needed Regalia to see. I was sure she’d come. And she did—but only to laugh at me.”