Had I done something to offend her?
“If we can get that grenade, I can use it to negate Refractionary’s powers,” I said. “She likes to stay near her teams. So if we can draw the soldiers into an enclosed space, she’ll probably follow. I can blow the grenade, then shoot her when it makes her appear.”
“Good enough,” Cody said. “But how are we going to manage all of that and get your notes?”
“Easy,” I said, reluctantly handing my rifle to Megan. I’d have a better chance of fooling them if I wasn’t armed. “We give them the thing they’re waiting for. Me.”
10
I crossed the street toward my flat, hands in the pockets of my jacket, fingering the roll of industrial tape I usually kept there. The other two hadn’t liked my plan, but they hadn’t come up with anything better. Hopefully they’d be able to fulfill their parts in it.
I felt completely naked without my rifle. I had a couple of handguns stashed in my room, but a man wasn’t really dangerous unless he had a rifle. At least, he wasn’t consistently dangerous. Hitting something with a handgun always felt like an accident.
Megan did it, I thought. She not only hit, but hit a High Epic in the middle of a dodge, firing two guns at once, one from the hip.
She’d shown emotion during our fight with Fortuity. Passion, anger, annoyance. The second two toward me, but it had been something. And then, for a few moments after he fell … there had been a connection. Satisfaction, and appreciation of me that had come out when she’d spoken on my behalf to Prof.
Now that was gone. What did it mean?
I stopped at the edge of the playground. Was I really thinking about a girl now? I was only about five paces from where a group of Enforcement officers were hiding, probably with automatic or energy weapons trained on me.
Idiot, I thought, heading up the metal stairway toward my apartment. They’d wait to see if I got out anything incriminating before grabbing me. Hopefully.
Climbing steps like that, with my back to the enemy, was excruciating. I did what I always did when I grew afraid. I thought of my father falling, bleeding beside that pillar in the broken bank lobby while I hid. I hadn’t helped.
I would never be that coward again.
I reached the door to my apartment, then fiddled with the keys. I heard a distant scrape but pretended not to notice. That would be the sniper on top of the playground equipment nearby, repositioning to aim at me. Yes, from this angle I saw for certain. That playground piece was just tall enough that the sniper would be able to shoot through the door into my apartment.
I stepped inside my single room. No hallways or anything else, just a hole cut into the steel, like most dwellings in the understreets. It might not have had a bathroom or running water, but I was still living quite well, by understreets standards. A whole room for a single person?
I kept it messy. Some old, disposable noodle bowls sat in a pile beside the door, smelling of spice. Clothing was strewn across the floor. I had a bucket of two-day-old water sitting on the table, and dirty, beat-up silverware sat in a pile beside it.
I didn’t use those to eat. They were for show. So was the clothing; I didn’t wear any of it. My actual clothing—four sturdy outfits, always clean and washed—was folded in the trunk beside my mattress on the floor. I kept my room messy, intentionally. It actually itched at me, as I liked things neat.
I’d found that sloppiness put people off guard. If my landlady came snooping up here, she’d find what she expected. A teenager just into his majority blowing his earnings on an easy life for a year before responsibility hit him. She wouldn’t poke or prod for secret compartments.
I hurried to the trunk. I unlocked it and pulled out my backpack—already packed with a change of clothing, spare shoes, some dry rations, and two liters of water. There was a handgun in a pouch on one side, and the smoke grenade was in a pouch on the other side.
I walked to my mattress and unzipped the case. Inside was my life. Dozens of folders, filled with clippings from newspapers or scraps of information. Eight notebooks filled with my thoughts and findings. A larger notebook with my indexes.
Maybe I should have brought all of this with me when going to watch the Fortuity hit. After all, I’d hoped to leave with the Reckoners. I’d debated it but had eventually decided that it wouldn’t be reasonable. There was so much of it, for one thing. I could lug it all if I needed to, but it slowed me down.