Firefight

The window is built to withstand an explosion, so David only causes a small leak. Knowing that he can’t break the glass, he collects water in a container and then deliberately calls to Regalia until she appears. David strikes a deal—if Regalia helps him protect Megan, he promises to switch to her side. By way of agreeing, Regalia uses the water to shatter the window and brings him to the surface. She reveals that Calamity is an Epic and is also the force behind the creation and augmentation of Epics in Babilar. Regalia has convinced Calamity to turn David into an Epic. She feels that it is “poetry for one who has killed so many of [them] to become the thing he hates” (343). Regalia shoves David upward so that Calamity’s red glow fills his sight, growing brighter. David feels a tingling sensation spread through him.

A voice in David’s head shouts for him to take the power, but David refuses, and the tingling vanishes. Regalia looks truly frightened and disappears, leaving David to swim to a nearby building. David joins a crowd and blends in until Newton passes by. People lob fruit at Newton to protest her destruction of the building, and although David appreciates their decision to take a stand, he cannot “help but be annoyed by their timing” (352). David takes cover and notices Mizzy nearby.

David sneaks up on Mizzy and manages to disable her communications before she attacks him. Mizzy demands to know why David betrayed them. David argues that he didn’t—that Regalia has been playing them all along and that Megan shouldn’t be killed because she isn’t evil. Mizzy says that the Reckoners kill Epics precisely because the Epics are evil, and David realizes that this is wrong. He says that the Reckoners “don’t kill [Epics] because of what they are. [They] kill them because of the lives they threaten” (360). David tells Mizzy about killing Sourcefield while she was helpless and scared, and Mizzy thaws, giving David the spyril.

Mizzy helps David put on the spyril. David plans to stop Prof from killing Megan while Mizzy goes to check on Obliteration’s progress. Mizzy figures out that Prof is an Epic and cannot believe that the entire Babilar struggle has been nothing but a turf war. David argues that the struggle is really about helping Prof to become a good Epic. When Mizzy asks why Prof can’t do that on his own, David says, “Sometimes you have to help the heroes along” (364). The two each take a walkie-talkie and go.

As David zips through the city, Regalia appears beside him. She is angry that David ruined her plans and denied Calamity’s gift. Regalia sends water after David, who darts into a building to hide before realizing that Regalia can simply form puddles to track him. David asks Dawnslight for help, and all the fruit in the building stops glowing, making the place “as black as the inside of a can of black paint that had also been painted black” (371). Dawnslight lights a path to safety for David, and Mizzy calls on the walkie-talkie to tell David that Obliteration is gone.

Back outside, Regalia finds David. She and Newton chase him to a rooftop, where Regalia demands to know what happened with Calamity. When David doesn’t speak, Regalia summons hundreds of waves to crush him, but Dawnslight grows vines to suck up the water. Newton charges, but David neutralizes her by correctly guessing her weakness. He points his gun at Regalia, knowing that it can’t harm her, and promises, “I’m coming for you” (380). Regalia taunts him, saying that Prof has already killed Megan, and with a jolt, David realizes that he smells fire.

David rushes to a burning building, where he finds a despondent Prof sitting in the shadows. Prof tricked Megan into thinking that David was in danger. When she came to save him, Prof trapped her inside with the fire and then realized that he had been played when Regalia arrived to laugh in his face. Now, Prof gives David some of his power so that David can try to save Megan and then goes to where the rest of his team has found Obliteration, who is now glowing powerfully. David charges inside to find a room dripping with fire, though the flames somehow don’t touch him. He finds Megan’s charred body and cradles it to him, thinking, “I knelt in the inferno of hell itself, the world dying around me, and knew I had failed” (385). Still, David knows that he has to try to save her, so he breaks through a window and uses the spyril to get to another rooftop. He notices that one of Megan’s hands is fisted and pries open her fingers to find a remote control that is linked to a gun a few floors down. Megan rigged it so that she could remotely shoot herself instead of dying in the fire. David realizes that she will be able to reincarnate.

Over the walkie-talkie, Mizzy informs David that Obliteration reappeared on the rooftop. This means that whatever the team found isn’t really Obliteration. As David works his way over toward Mizzy, Obliteration appears. David fires at the Epic, but Obliteration always teleports right back to where David is, no matter how far he runs. Finally, David realizes what to do, and when Obliteration appears, he grabs onto the Epic.

When David shoots again, Obliteration teleports both of them to a dark room, where David asks Obliteration about his nightmares. Obliteration thanks David for the “answer” and then vanishes, leaving David to explore. He finds a room with two hospital beds, one of which holds Regalia, who is much older and frailer than her images have indicated. The other person is Dawnslight, who has been in a coma nearly all his life. A monitor on the wall shows Prof in a blazing room, and the light is clearly coming from a bomb made using Obliteration’s powers. Regalia presses a button, and the bomb explodes. Prof contains the explosion, opening a hole in the ceiling to release the energy harmlessly upward. The amount of power required to achieve this feat is more than any Epic can handle, and David realizes why Regalia brought Prof here just as she tells him, “I did it because I need a successor” (403).

On the monitor, Prof turns on his own team, killing them in a blink. His face is twisted and angry, and David realizes, “I didn’t know this man any longer” (405). David kills Regalia. On the screen, Prof turns to a monitor, and David notices a video camera in the corner of the room. He and Prof share a look, and David realizes that Prof is coming for him.

David starts to run but realizes that he can’t outrun Prof. Instead, he climbs up to the roof to wait for his former mentor, wondering whether pushing Prof to be a hero has contributed to the man’s downfall. Prof arrives and encases David in a forcefield. David tells Prof that he believes in heroes, but Prof tries to crush him, only for the field to fall away. A bright ray of light lands between them; Megan has arrived. Prof tries to crush both of them. With each attempt he makes, Megan switches reality so that the forcefields are around Prof instead. For the first time, David sees genuine fear in Prof’s eyes. Megan moves her and David to a nearby building, and Prof leaves as Megan passes out. David realizes that Epics can overcome the corruption of their powers by confronting their fears. He concludes, “I’d been right to have faith in the Epics. I’d just chosen the wrong one” (411).

In the aftermath of the fight with Prof, David and Megan return to Babilar, where the plants still glow and the people are working to rebuild their lives without the water. Dawnslight has sent Mizzy and Tia messages, telling them to hide, and when Mizzy joins David and Megan, the two call a hesitant truce. David announces, “We have a lot of work to do” (418).