room again, shining my mobile into shadowed corners behind tree trunks. Nothing jumped out at me. When I was convinced I was alone, I bent down to the cookies again and searched among them, reading other slips of paper. They all said either Help me or She has me captive.
“David?” Tia’s voice sounded in my earpiece. “You into position yet?”
I jumped almost to the ceiling.
“Uh, not yet,” I said, stuffing some of the pieces of paper and the bits of cookie into my pocket. “I just stumbled onto something. Um … has anyone ever reported finding cookies growing from the fruit trees?”
Silence on the line.
“Cookies?” Tia asked. “David, is something wrong with you?”
“Well, I’ve kind of had some indigestion lately,” I noted, moving toward the room’s other door, behind a decomposing receptionist’s desk. “But I don’t think that’s causing me to hallucinate cookies. Usually indigestion strictly causes cheesecake delusions.”
“Ha, ha,” Tia said dryly.
“Take a sample,” Prof said. “Move on.”
“Done and done,” I said, listening at the door, then shoving it open and checking each corner of the room on the other side. It was empty, though a pair of broad windows shone light in on me. It was an executive office strewn with fallen books and metallic doodads, like those little ball things where you raise one side, then it clicks annoyingly against the others. Only two trees were growing in here, one on either side of the room, sending vines creeping up the bookcases on each wall.
I continued forward, stepping over the debris and doing my best to stay low, approaching the large windows. This building was secluded, off by itself in the middle of the ocean. Waves broke against the base, water churning below. Distantly across some kind of bay, other buildings broke the surface of the ocean. Babilar proper.
I knelt down, set aside my backpack, and poked the front of my gun out a broken section of window. Eye to the scope, I dialed up to ten times magnification. It worked beautifully. I could see five hundred yards easily; in fact, dialing up the zoom, I bet I could get to two thousand yards with reasonable detail.
Sparks. I’d never made shots like that before. I was good with a rifle, but I wasn’t a trained sniper. I doubted the Gottschalk had the range for that shot anyway, though the scope was excellent for peeking about.
“I’m in position,” I said. “Which building is it?”
“You see a peaked one?” Exel said over the line. “Next to the two flatter rooftops?”
“Yup,” I said, zooming in. It was quite a distance, but no problem for the gun’s excellent magnification.
And there he was.
29
OBLITERATION looked much as he had the other two times I’d seen him, except he’d removed his shirt, black trench coat, and glasses, which were now strewn on the rooftop beside his sword. His bandaged chest was exposed, and he sat cross-legged, goateed face stretched toward the sky, eyes closed. His posture was serene, like a man doing morning yoga.
The major difference between now and when I’d seen him before, however, was that he glowed with a deep inner light, like something was burning just beneath his skin.
I felt a surprising surge of anger. I remembered thrashing in the water, the shackle around my leg pulling me toward the depths. Never again.
I focused on Obliteration, holosights putting a dot right on his head. Then I tapped the side of my gun, flipping a switch and sending a feed from the scope to my mobile. That sent the image to Tia.
“Thanks,” Tia said, watching the feed. “Hmm … Doesn’t look good. You thinking what I am?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can you dig out my photos of Houston?”
“I’ve got better ones,” Tia said. “Asked around once I knew he was here. Sending.”
I looked away from the scope and took the mobile off my arm. Tia’s message arrived soon after, including a set of photos taken in Houston. This was from the height of Obliteration’s reign in the city. It had been a terrible place to live, but—like Newcago—there’d been a certain level of stability. As I’d had proven to me in both Newcago and Babilar, people would rather live with the Epics—and their tyranny—than waste away in the chaos between cities.
This meant there had been a lot of witnesses when Obliteration had settled down right before his palace, an old government building he’d repurposed, and started glowing. Most of those witnesses had died soon after. Some had gotten out, though, and more had