Exel put his feet up on the seat across from him, leaning with his back to the covered window. “Mostly I do the stuff that Val doesn’t want to do—such as talking to people.”
“I talk to people,” Val snapped from the driver’s seat ahead.
“You yell at them, dear,” Exel said.
“It’s a form of talking. Besides, I don’t only yell.”
“Yes, you occasionally grumble.” Exel smiled at me. “We’ve been a deeply embedded team, Steelslayer. That means lots of observation and interaction with the people in the city.”
I nodded. The large man had a disarming way about him, with those rosy cheeks and that thick brown beard. Cheerful, friendly.
“I’ll also bury your corpse,” he noted to me.
Ooookaaaay …
“You’ll look good in the coffin,” he said. “Nice skeletal structure, lean body. A bit of cotton under the eyelids, some embalming fluid in the veins, and poof—you’ll be done. Too bad your skin is so pale, though. You’ll show bruises really easily. Nothing a little makeup can’t solve, eh?”
“Exel?” Val called from the front.
“Yes, Val?”
“Stop being creepy.”
“It’s not creepy,” he said. “Everyone dies, Val. Ignoring the fact won’t make it not true!”
I took the opportunity to scoot a little farther away from Exel. This put me near Mizzy, who was packing away her bomb. “Don’t mind him,” she said to me as Val and Exel continued to chat. “He was a mortician, back before.”
I nodded, but didn’t prod. In the Reckoners, the less we knew about one another’s family members and the like, the less we could betray if an Epic decided to torture us.
“Thanks for standing up for me,” Mizzy said softly. “In front of Tia.”
“She’s intense sometimes,” I said. “Both her and Prof. But they’re good people. She can complain all she likes, but in your place I doubt that either of them would have let those people die. You did the right thing.”
“Even if it put you in danger?”
“I got out of it, didn’t I?”
Mizzy glanced at my throat. I felt at it, reminded of the soreness. It hurt when I breathed.
“Yeaaah,” she said. “You’re just being nice, but I appreciate that. I didn’t expect you to be nice.”
“Me?” I said.
“Sure!” She seemed to be recovering some of her natural perkiness. “Steelslayer, the guy who talked Phaedrus into hitting Steelheart. I expected you to be all intimidating and brooding and ‘They killed my father’ and intense and everything.”
“How much do you know about me?” I asked, surprised.
“More than I probably should. We’re supposed to be secretive and all that, but I can’t help asking questions, you know? And … well … I might have listened in when Sam told Val about what you guys were planning in Newcago.…”
She gave me a kind of apologetic grimace and shrugged.
“Well, trust me,” I said. “I’m more intense than I look. I’m intense like a lion is orange.”
“So, like … medium intense? Since a lion is kind of a tannish color?”
“No, they’re orange.” I frowned. “Aren’t they? I’ve never actually seen one.”
“I think tigers are the orange ones,” Mizzy said. “But they’re still only half orange, since they have black stripes. Maybe you should be intense like an orange is orange.”
“Too obvious,” I said. “I’m intense like a lion is tannish.” Did that work? Didn’t exactly slip off the tongue.
Mizzy cocked her head, looking at me. “You’re kinda weird.”
“No, look, it’s just because the metaphor didn’t work. I’ve got it. I’m intense like—”
“No, it’s okay,” Mizzy said, smiling. “I like it.”
“Yeah,” Exel said, laughing. “I’ll remember that orange thing for your eulogy.”
Great. A few hours into the new team, and I’d convinced them that Steelslayer was adorably strange. I settled back into my seat with a sigh.
We traveled for a while, an hour or more. Long enough that I wasn’t certain we were still in Babilar. Eventually the sub slowed. A moment later the entire thing lurched, and some kind of clamps locked on from the outside.
Wherever we were going, we had arrived. Exel got to his feet and dug out some towels. He nodded to Val, who climbed up the ladder.
“Kill the lights,” she said.
We obligingly put out the lights, and I heard Val undo the hatch up above. Water streamed down, but from the sound of it, Exel quickly mopped it up.
“Out we go,” Mizzy whispered to me. I felt my way to the ladder, letting the others each go up before me. I heard them chatting above, so I knew that when Tia came to the ladder, she was last.
“Prof?” I asked her softly.
“The others don’t know exactly what happened,” she whispered. “I told them that Prof led Obliteration off, but that he was all right and would catch up to us.”
“And what really happened?”
She didn’t reply in the darkness.
“Tia,” I said, “I’m the only other one here who knows about him. You might as well use me as a resource. I can help.”
“He doesn’t need either of our help right now,” she said. “He just needs time.”