Finally I started out, more carefully this time. It took a long while, but I eventually arrived. Then I had to wait in a room near where we’d docked the submarine for the better part of an hour before I heard sounds.
I stood up as a door opened, and an ashen group of people began to pile out of a hallway. Prof had led them up into another part of the building. I rushed to help, calmed them, then explained how we’d have to enter the submarine in the darkness with everyone being as quiet as possible. We couldn’t risk Regalia discovering what Prof had done.
With some effort, I got the coughing, wet, and exhausted group of people into the submarine. There were about forty of them, but we could all fit. Barely.
I helped the last one down, a mother with a baby, then climbed out and crossed through the building to the room where I’d met the people, shining my mobile to make certain I hadn’t left anyone.
Prof stood in the opposite doorway, mostly in shadow. His goggles reflected the light so I couldn’t see his eyes. He nodded to me once, then turned around and vanished into the gloom.
I sighed and clicked my mobile off, then walked back to the submarine room and used the ropes to guide me. I climbed in and pulled down the hatch, sealing it, then descended into the crowded sub full of wet people who smelled of smoke. Prof’s attitude disturbed me, but it wasn’t enough to dispel the warmth I felt inside. He’d done it. Despite his complaints about my recklessness, he’d gone and saved the people himself.
He and I were the same. He was just a hell of a lot more competent than I was. I took the sub’s front seat and called Val to ask for instructions on how to pilot the thing.
31
I set the box of rations down with a thump, then stood and wiped my brow. Several of the Babilaran refugees Prof had saved picked up the boxes and hurried off with them, making quickly for the nearby wreckage of a warehouse. They’d cleaned off some of the soot in the day since I’d dropped them off here in the rotting remains of a small island off the coast of New York, but they seemed to have gained a healthy sense of self-preservation during that time. It must not have been buried very deep.
“Thank you,” a woman named Soomi said, bowing. Though it was evening, their spraypainted clothing didn’t glow here, so it just looked dirty. Old.
“Just remember our deal,” I said.
“We didn’t see anything,” she promised. “And we won’t return to the city for at least a month.”
I nodded. Soomi and her people believed that the Reckoners had saved them using secret forcefield technology. They weren’t to tell anyone what they’d seen, but even if it got out, hopefully the stories wouldn’t implicate Prof as an Epic.
Soomi picked up one of the last boxes and joined the others, hurrying back toward a group of ramshackle buildings with overgrown grounds. It was best not to be seen with food, in case scavengers saw you. Fortunately, the only way off this island was a bridge just to the north, so hopefully they would be safe here.
My heart wrenched to see them without homes or possessions, cast adrift, but this was all we could do. And it was maybe more than we should have done—we’d needed to have Cody airlift us supplies out of Newcago to provide rations for these people.
I turned and made my way down an empty, broken street, rifle over my shoulder. It was a short walk to the old dock where we’d parked the submarine. Val lounged, seated on top of it. She’d stacked the boxes of food on the dock, while the refugees and I had carried them inside.
I hesitated on the dock, looking out toward Babilar to the southwest. It glowed with surreal colors, like a portal to some other dimension. Though the water extending out before me looked flat, I knew that it sloped upward slightly. Regalia had sculpted this city’s look intentionally; she even maintained different water levels in different parts of Babilar, creating handcrafted neighborhoods of rooftops and sunken streets.
She does care, I thought. She built this city like she intended to stay here, to rule. She made it inviting.
So why destroy it now?
“Coming?” Val called to me.
I nodded and crossed the dock and scrambled aboard the sub—this area was outside of Regalia’s range of sight, theoretically, so we could let it surface in the open.
“Hey,” Val said as I passed, “when are you going to tell me how you saved them? For real, I mean.”
I hesitated at the hatch, light from down inside rising to bathe me. “I used the spyril,” I said.
“Yeah, but how?”
“I put out the fire in a room,” I said, using the lie Tia and I had prepared. We’d been expecting Val or Exel to prod eventually. “I was able to crowd everyone into the same room, then keep them safe and quiet until Regalia thought everyone was dead. Then I snuck them out.”
It was a good enough lie. Val didn’t know that the building had basically collapsed once the water came rushing back in. It was plausible that I’d have been able to get the people out.