“What did he do?”
She sighed softly. “He deliberately let himself get hit with a burst of fire, something no ordinary person could have survived. While Obliteration was standing over him gloating, Jon healed himself, leaped up, and snatched off the man’s glasses. The tip about Obliteration being nearsighted? Turns out it was a good one.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Jon said that scared the wits out of the creature,” Tia whispered. “Obliteration ported away and didn’t return. Jon’s safe; everything is okay. So you can stop worrying.”
I let her pass. Everything wasn’t okay. If Prof was staying away, it was because he was afraid of how he’d act around us. I reluctantly shouldered my pack and gun, then climbed up into a pitch-black room.
“You out, David?” Val’s voice sounded in the darkness.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Over here.”
I followed the sound of her voice. She took me by the arm and steered me through a doorway with some black cloth on it. She followed, then closed a door behind us before opening one in front, letting in light so I could finally see the bolt-hole the Reckoners were using as a base here in Babilar.
Turns out it wasn’t a hole at all.
It was a mansion.
16
LUSH red carpets. Dark hardwood. Lounge chairs. A bar with crystal that reflected the light of Val’s mobile. Open space. A lot of open space.
My jaw hit the floor. Well, the door, technically. I smacked it as I stepped into the room and turned, trying to stare in all directions at once. The place looked like a king’s palace. No … no, it looked like an Epic’s palace.
“How …” I stepped into the center of the room. “Are we still underwater?”
“Mostly,” Val said. “We’re in some rich dude’s underground bunker on Long Island. Howard Righton. Built the thing with its own airtight filtration system in case of nuclear fallout.” She slung her pack onto the bar. “Unfortunately for him, he anticipated the wrong kind of apocalypse. An Epic knocked his plane out of the sky as he and his family were flying home from Europe.”
I looked back toward the short hallway leading to the submarine room. Exel closed its door, locking the hallway in darkness. I had a vague impression that we’d risen up through the floor of the room, which probably had some kind of docking mechanism. But how had the submarine docked under a bunker in the ground?
“Storage basement,” Exel explained as he waddled past. “Righton’s bunker had a big chamber for food storage cut out underneath it. That’s flooded now, and we broke open one side, forming a kind of cave we can drive the sub into. Prof cut into it through the floor and installed the docking seal a few years back.”
“Jon likes to have safe places in every city he might visit,” Tia said, settling on one of the plush couches with her mobile. It would work down here—they worked in the steel catacombs of Newcago, so I was pretty sure they’d work anywhere.
Honestly, I was feeling a little naked without mine. I’d saved for years working in the Factory to buy it. Now that my rifle was gone and the mobile destroyed, I found I didn’t really have much from that time of my life.
“So now what?” I asked.
“Now we wait for Jon to finish his reconnaissance,” Tia said, “and then we send for someone to pick him up. Missouri, why don’t you show David to his quarters.” Which should keep him out of my hair for now, her tone implied.
I shouldered my pack as Mizzy nodded and bobbed off down a corridor with a flashlight. It suddenly hit me just how tired I was. Even though we’d spent the trip here driving at night, I hadn’t completely switched my days and nights. For the last few months it had been a novel thing for me to live in the light, and I’d enjoyed it.
Well, it seemed darkness would become the norm again. I followed Mizzy out of the main sitting room down a corridor lined with artistic photos of colored water being flung into the air. I figured it was supposed to look modern and chic. All it did was remind me that we were on the bottom of the ocean.
“I can’t believe how nice this is,” I said, peering into a library lined with books, more than I’d ever seen in my life. Small, emergency-style lights glowed on the walls in most of the rooms, so it appeared we had power.
“Yeaaah,” Mizzy said. “People out on Long Island had it nice, didn’t they? Beaches, big houses. We’d visit when I was a little girl, and I’d play in the sand and think about what it must be like to live in one of those mansions.” She trailed her fingers along the wall as she walked. “I took the sub past my old apartment once. That was a hoot.”
“Was it tough to see now?”
“Nah. I barely remember the days before Calamity. For most of my life I lived in the Painted Village.”
“The what?”