“Megan’s still down there!” I said. “In what room?”
“Two floors down, but she’s dead, David. She has to be. Too much fire. I think …” He seemed dazed. “I must have been wrong about her all along. And you were right. Her illusions broke apart, you see.…”
“Prof,” I said, grabbing him. “We have to go for her. Please.”
“I can hold it back, can’t I?” Prof said. He looked to me, and his face seemed too shadowed; only his eyes glittered, reflecting starlight. He seized me by the arms. “Take some of it. Take it away from me, so I can’t use it!”
I felt a tingling sensation wash through me. Prof, gifting me some of his powers.
“Jon!” Tia’s voice barked from the mobile on his shoulder, where he’d strapped it, apparently eschewing an earpiece. “Jon, it’s Mizzy.… Jon, she’s got the camera that was watching Obliteration, and she’s been writing messages on paper and holding them up for us to see. She says Obliteration isn’t there.”
Clever, Mizzy, I thought.
“No, that’s because he’s here,” Val’s voice said over the line. “Prof, you’ve got to see this. We’ve swept Regalia’s base at Building C. She’s nowhere to be seen, but there’s something else. Obliteration, we think. At least, something is glowing in here, and glowing powerfully. This looks bad.…”
Prof looked to me, then seemed to grow stronger. “I’m coming,” he said to them. “Hold that building.”
“Yes sir,” Val said.
Prof darted away, a forcefield forming to make a bridge for him from this building to the next.
“It’s all wrong, Prof,” I called after him. “Regalia isn’t bound by the limits you thought she was. She knows all about the plan. Whatever Val just found, it’s a trap. For you.”
He stopped at the edge of the rooftop. Smoke billowed out of the building around us, so thick it was growing hard for me to breathe. But for some reason, the heat seemed to have lessened.
“That sounds like her,” Prof said, his voice trailing back to me in the night.
“So …”
“So if Obliteration is really there,” he said, “I have to stop him. I will simply need to find a way to survive the trap.” Prof charged across his forcefield, leaving me.
I sat down, drained, numb. Megan’s handgun lay on the ground before me. I picked it up. Megan … I’d been too late. I’d failed. And I still didn’t know what Regalia’s trap entailed.
So what? a piece of me said. You give up?
When had I ever done that?
I shouted, standing up and charging toward the stairwell down. I didn’t care about the heat, though I assumed it would drive me back. Only it didn’t. It felt practically cold in the stairwell.
Prof’s forcefield, I realized, driving myself onward. He just gifted one to me. One had protected me against Obliteration’s heat. It would work just as well against this fire, it appeared.
I kept my head down, breath held, but eventually had to suck in some air. I muffled my mouth and nose with my T-shirt, which was soaked from the fight with Regalia, and it seemed to work. Either that, or Prof’s forcefield kept the smoke away from me. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how they worked, even still.
Two floors down, where Prof said he’d left Megan, I entered a place alight with fire. Violent flames created an alien illumination. It was a place a man like me wasn’t supposed to go.
I gritted my teeth and pushed forward, trusting in Prof’s forcefield. Part of me, deep inside, panicked at the sight of all this fire—walls burned from floor to ceiling and flames dripped down from above, Dawnslight’s trees engulfed in orange. There was no way I could survive this, could I? Prof’s forcefields were never a hundred percent effective when given to someone else.
I was too worried about Megan, too desperate and shaken, to stop moving. I shoved my way through a burning door, charred wood breaking around me. I stumbled past a hole in the floor, my arm up warding against the heat I could not feel. Everything was so bright. I could barely see in here.
I took in a breath but felt no pain from the heat. The forcefield wouldn’t cool the air as I drew it in. Why wasn’t I burning my throat with each breath? Sparks! Nothing made sense.
Megan. Where was Megan?
I stumbled through another doorway and saw a body on the floor, in the middle of a burned rug.
I cried out and ran to it, kneeling, cradling the half-burned figure, tipping the charred head to see a familiar face. It was her. I screamed, looking at the dead eyes, the burned flesh, and pulled the limp body close.
I knelt in the inferno of hell itself, the world dying around me, and knew I had failed.