in it, pulling out the baggie, and removed the radio.
“Are you there? David, please answer!”
“I’m here, Mizzy,” I said softly.
“Thank heavens,” she said, tense. “David, you were right. Obliteration isn’t here!”
“Are you sure?” I said, checking out the window.
“Yes! They’ve set up a kind of white mannequin thing with a floodlight right underneath it, so it glows like Obliteration. They then filled the rooftop with other powerful floodlights; that makes it seem like he’s still here, but he isn’t.”
“That’s why she wanted to keep everyone away,” I said. Sparks. Obliteration was somewhere in the city, planning to destroy the entire place.
“I’m almost to Prof,” I said. “Regalia keeps getting in my way. See if you can turn off the lights. That will warn the other Reckoners, assuming I don’t make it.”
“Okaaaay,” Mizzy said. “I don’t like this, David.” She sounded scared.
“Good,” I said back. “Means you aren’t crazy. See what you can do. I’m going to make a final push toward Prof.”
“Right.”
I tucked the radio away, then glanced at a glowing fruit hanging nearby. “Thanks again for the help,” I said. “If you have anything more like that to throw my way in the future, I wouldn’t say no.”
The fruit blinked.
I nodded grimly, then took a deep breath and jumped out the window.
46
I got about two streets from the building before Regalia found me. She appeared on the surface of the water along my path, standing tall, her eyes wide and alight and her hands to the sides as if to hold up the sky. Waves rose around her like the peaks of a crown emerging from the water.
This time she didn’t bother with conversation. Jets of water erupted beneath me. The first one clipped me along the side, slashing through both clothing and skin. I gasped in pain, then started weaving and bobbing, using the handjet to dodge to the side as Regalia sent an enormous ripple through the water that crested some fifteen feet high. It chased me around a corner but broke against a building as I landed on the roof and ran across it. I passed tents and screaming people and caught the scent of something odd in the air. Smoke?
I leaped off the other side of the building, and as I did, a blur zipped across the rooftop beside me. I yelped, cutting my jets and dropping just beneath the blur, which launched toward me, trailing an afterimage of neon red.
The blur passed right over my head, then landed on the building across from me, where it pulled to a stop, revealing Newton, katana in hand. She whipped out a handgun and spun in my direction.
Sparks! I should have been expecting her. I dove downward, passing the stories of a nearby building in a flash, and hit water as the popping noises of gunfire sounded above.
The water was an icy shock, jets propelling me face-first under the surface. Diving for the water had been my first instinct in order to avoid that gunfire, and it worked, as I didn’t get shot. But it did put me in Regalia’s grasp.
The water around me began to constrict, to thicken, like syrup. I twisted, thrusting my feet downward, and engaged the spyril at full force.
It was as if the water had become tar, and each progressive inch of movement was harder than the inch before it. Bubbles grew trapped as I breathed them out, frozen like in Jell-O, and I felt the spyril shake violently on my back. Blackness surrounded me.
I didn’t fear that blackness any longer. I’d looked it in the eye. My lungs strained, but I shoved down the panic.
I broke the surface. Once my arms were free, the spyril thrust me out into the air with a triumphant jet, but tendrils of water waited for me. They wrapped around my legs.
I pointed the streambeam of the spyril right at them.
My machine sucked up those tendrils like it did any other water, spraying them out the jets at the bottom and freeing me in a heartbeat. I burst higher into the air, dazed from lack of oxygen. I reached a rooftop and let the jets cut out, rolling across it, breathing deeply.
Okay, I thought, no more going underwater with Regalia around.
I’d barely caught my breath when water tendrils climbed up over the roof, like the fingers of an enormous beast. Newton landed near me in a blur, trailing glowing color from her hair. She came right at me, fast as an eyeblink, and all I could