Calamity (Reckoners, #3)(31)
Prof’s powers destroyed not only the salt structure, but the furniture inside it as well, leaving people and personal effects to plummet. The people hit the ground with awful thuds and cries of pain. Except for one, who remained flying in the air about twenty feet up. He leveled a pair of uzis at Prof and fired.
The bullets had no effect, of course. In an instant, the hovering man was surrounded by a glowing green sphere. He dropped his guns, feeling at the walls of his new prison in a panic.
Prof made a fist. The sphere shrank to the size of a basketball, crushing the Epic inside into pulp.
I looked away, suddenly sick. That…that was what he had done to Exel and Val.
“False alarm,” Cody said over the line, sounding relieved. “He’s not looking for us. He’s hunting Epics who still follow Larcener.”
Prof released the sphere and dropped the remnants of the dead Epic to the ground with a nauseating splat. From a shop next to mine, someone else stepped out onto the street, a young man—still a teenager—in a loose necktie and a hat. He stood facing Prof for a moment, then dropped to one knee, bowing.
A sphere of light appeared around him. The young man looked up in a panic. Prof held out a single palm, as if weighing the newcomer. Then he swiped his hand to the side, and the sphere vanished.
“Remember that feeling, little Epic,” Prof said. “You are the one they call Dynamo, I believe. I accept your allegiance, tardy though it is. Where is your master?”
He gulped, then spoke. “My former master?” the youth asked, his voice breaking. “He is a coward, lord. He runs from you.”
“He was with you earlier today,” Prof said. “Where did he go?”
The youth pointed along a street, hand shaking. “He has a safehouse one street over. He forbade us to join him. I can show you.”
Prof gestured, and the youth ran past him on wobbly legs. Prof clasped his hands behind his back and started to follow at a stroll, but paused.
My breath caught in my throat. What was wrong?
Prof took a few steps in my direction, then knelt, looking at the crate I’d dropped earlier. It had cracked open at the side. He nudged it with his foot and seemed contemplative.
“Lord?” the youth asked.
Prof turned away from the crate and swept after the youth, his lab coat rippling at the motion. The forcefield carrying Stormwind followed like an obedient puppy. The woman inside didn’t look up.
I relaxed, slumping against the wall, and lowered my gun. “Mizzy,” I whispered over the line, “he’s coming your direction.”
“Sounds like he’s searching for Larcener,” Megan said over the line. “We’ve managed to stroll right into his final throw-down with the city’s former leader. How delightful for us.”
“I’m following him with my scope,” Cody said. “But I won’t be able to see much as he moves to the next street. You want me to maintain surveillance, lad, or stand down?”
“Being this close to him is dangerous,” Abraham said. “If he so much as glimpses one of us…”
“Yeah,” Cody said, “but I sure would like to know what he’s capable of before we try to bring ’im down. That thing he did with the building…that makes the tensors look like a child’s toy by comparison.”
“Nice metaphor,” I said absently. “We need to know the results of his face-off with Larcener, if it happens. Cody, see if you can get in position. Mizzy, I do want you out of there.”
“Trying,” she said, grunting. “I’m pressed into a room with a lot of people, and…Blah. I don’t know how quickly I can get out, guys….”
Well, we weren’t going to fall back while one of our own was in danger. “Megan, be ready for a distraction. Abraham, stay with Megan.” I took a deep breath. “I’m going to tail Prof.”
Nobody objected. They trusted me. I shouldered my pack—there was no time to assemble my Gottschalk—and stood up beside the doorway, peeking through the fluttering cloth draping. Before ducking out, I glanced at the room’s other occupants.
All of them—the man with his children, the woman who had talked to me earlier—were staring at me with dumbfounded expressions.
“Did you say you’re going after that Epic?” the man demanded. “Are you insane?”
“No,” the woman said softly. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? The ones who fight. I heard you were all killed in New York.”
“Don’t tell anyone you saw me, please,” I said. I saluted them with a lift of my gun, then slipped out onto the empty street.
I stopped to nudge the box that Prof had paused beside—the crate I’d dropped. It was filled with foodstuffs, the packaged kind you had to trade to get, that came from cities that still had factories: beans, canned chicken, soda. I nodded, then hurried in the direction Prof had gone.
“ALL right,” I said, pulling up beside the wall of an alleyway, my pistol in a two-handed grip before me. “Let’s play this very, very carefully. Our primary objective is to make sure Mizzy extracts safely. Information gathering comes second.”
A sequence of “rogers” came over the line. I tapped my mobile’s screen into Cody’s feed. Our earpieces, which had a part that curled over the ear and pointed forward, could give any of us a view of what another one of us was doing.