out of the way. I tried pushing, thumping—I even grabbed the chair from the desk and beat it against the forcefield. All, of course, had no effect.
Breathing hard from the exertion, next I tried to break the wood of the frame around the forcefield. That didn’t work either. I had no leverage and the building was too sturdy. Maybe with tools and a day or so, I could break through one of the walls into another room, but that would take way too long. There were no other exits.
Except …
I turned and eyed the large window, taller than a man and several times as wide, looking out at the ocean. It was midnight, and therefore dark, but I could see shapes shifting out there in that awful blackness.
Each time I went into the water, I felt that void trying to suck me down. Consume me.
Slowly, I walked to Tia’s desk and fished in the bottom drawer, picking up the nine-millimeter. A Walther. Good gun, one that even I’d admit was accurate. I loaded the ammo, then looked up at the window.
I immediately felt an oppressive dread. I’d come to an uneasy truce with the waters, yet I still felt like I could sense them eager to break through and crush me.
I was there again, in the blackness, with a weight on my leg towing me down into oblivion. How deep were we? I couldn’t swim up from down here, could I?
What a stupid idea. I set the gun on the desk.
But … if I stay here, there’s a good chance they both die. Prof kills Megan. Regalia kills Prof.
In the bank nearly eleven years ago, I’d cowered in fear when my father fought. He’d died.
Better to drown. I gathered up all of the emotions I felt at looking into the depths—the terror, the foreboding, the primal panic—and held them in hand. Then crushed them.
I would not be ruled by the waters. Pointedly, deliberately, I picked up Tia’s gun again and leveled it at the window.
Then I fired.
41
THE bullet barely harmed the window.
Oh, it made a tiny hole, which sent out a little spiderweb of cracks—like you see in bulletproof glass that takes a slug. Only this was just a nine-millimeter, and the window in front of me had been built to withstand a bombing. Feeling stupid, I shot again. And again. I unloaded the entire magazine into the glass wall, making my ears ring.
The window didn’t break. It barely sprung a small leak. Great. Now I was going to drown in this room. Judging by the size of that leak, I only had … oh, somewhere around six months before it filled the entire place.
I sighed, slumping down in the chair. Idiot. And here I’d faced the depths, challenged my fears, and prepared myself for a dramatic swim to freedom. Instead I now had to listen to tinkling water dripping onto the wood floor—the ocean making fun of me.
I stared at it pooling on the ground and had another really bad idea.
Well, I’ve already sold the family name for three oranges, I thought. I dragged one of the room’s bookshelves over and obscured the doorway and the forcefield. Then I took out one of the desk drawers and put it under the leak to contain some of the water. A few minutes later, I had a respectable pool in there.
“Hello, Regalia,” I said. “This is David Charleston, the one called Steelslayer. I’m inside the Reckoners’ secret base.”
I repeated this several times, but nothing happened of course. We were all the way out on Long Island, well outside Regalia’s range. I’d just hoped that maybe, if she really was playing us all, Prof and Tia’s information about her range might be—
The water in my drawer started to move and shift.
I yelped, stumbling back as the little hole I’d made in the window expanded, water forcing its way through in a larger stream. It rose up, growing into a shape, then stopped flowing as color flooded the figure.
“You mean to tell me,” Regalia said, “that all this time I had my agents searching along the northern coast, when he had a sparking underwater base?”
I backed away, heart thumping. She was so calm, so certain, wearing her business suit, a string of pearls around her neck. Regalia was not out of control. She knew exactly what she was doing in this city.
She looked me up and down, as if evaluating me. Tia’s information about Regalia’s range was wrong. Maybe her powers, like Obliteration’s,