I frowned.
“Did you talk to that one?” I asked Abraham, nodding to a man toward the rear of the departing group. He wore simple clothing, jeans and a faded T-shirt, and no socks with his sneakers.
Tattoos ringed his forearm, and he wore an earring in one ear. He was muscular, with distinctively knobbed features, and was perhaps in his late thirties. There was something about him.…
“He didn’t say much,” Abraham said. “Do you know him?”
“No.” I narrowed my eyes. “Wait here.”
I followed the group, pulling out my mobile and looking at it as I walked, feigning distraction. They continued on as we’d instructed them, making for the offices at First Union Square. Maybe I was jumping at nothing. I usually got a little paranoid when the Professor wasn’t in town. He and Cody had supposedly gone out east to check in with another cell of the Reckoners. Babiar or someplace.
Prof been acting weird lately—at least, that was how we phrased it. “Weird” was actually a euphemism for “Prof is secretly an Epic, and he’s trying hard not to go evil and kill us all, so sometimes he gets antisocial.”
I now knew three Epics. After a lifetime of hating them, of planning how to kill them, I knew three. I’d chatted with them, eaten meals with them, fought beside them. I was fond of them. Well, more than fond, in Megan’s case.
I checked on the walking group, then glanced at my mobile again. Life was annoyingly complicated now. Back when Steelheart had been around, I had only needed to worry about—Wait.
I stopped, looking back up at the group I was following. He wasn’t there. The man I’d been tailing.
Sparks! I pulled up against a steel wall, slapping my mobile into its place on the upper-left front of my jacket and unslinging my rifle. Where had the man gone?
Must have ducked into one of the side streets. I edged up to the one we’d just passed and peeked in. A shadow moved down it, away from me. I waited until it moved around the next corner, then followed at a dash. At the corner, I crouched and peeked in the direction the shadow had gone.
The man from before, in the jeans and wearing no socks, stood there looking back and forth.
Then there were two of him.
The twin figures pulled away, each heading in a different direction. They wore the same clothing, had the same gait, the same tattoos and jewelry. It was like two shadows that had overlapped had broken apart.
Oh, sparks. I pulled back around the corner, muted my mobile so the only sound it made would come through my earpiece, then held it up.
“Tia, Abraham,” I whispered. “We have a big problem.”
2
“Ah,” Tia said in my ear, “I’ve found it.”
I nodded. I was trailing one of the copies of the man. He’d already split twice more, sending clones in different directions. I didn’t think he’d spotted me yet.
“Mitosis,” Tia said, reading from my notes. “Originally named Lawrence Robert—an unusual Epic with, so far as has been identified, a unique power: he can split into an unknown number of copies of himself. You say here he was once a guitarist in an old rock band.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He still has the same look.”
“Is that how you spotted him?” Abraham said in my ear.
“Maybe.” I wasn’t certain. For the longest time, I’d been sure I could identify an Epic, even when they hadn’t manifested any powers. There was something about the way they walked, the way they carried themselves.
That had been before I’d failed to spot not only Megan, but Prof as well.
“You categorize him as a High Epic?” Tia asked.
“Yeah,” I said softly, watching a version of Mitosis idle on the street corner, inspecting the people who passed. “I remember some of this. He’s going to be tough to kill, guys. If even one of his clones survives, he survives.”
“The clones can split as well?” Abraham asked.
“They aren’t really clones,” Tia said. I heard papers shuffling on her line as she looked through my notes. “They’re all versions of him, but there’s no ‘prime’ individual. David, are you sure about this information?”
“Most of my information is partially hearsay,” I admitted. “I’ve tried to be certain where I can, but anything I write should be at least a little suspect.”
“Well, it says here that the clones are all connected. If one is killed, the others will know it. They have to recombine to gain one another’s memories, though, so that’s something. And what’s this? The more copies he makes …”
“The dumber they all get,” I finished, remembering now. “When he’s one individual, he’s pretty smart, but each clone he adds brings down the IQ of all of them.”
“Sounds like a weakness,” Abraham said over the line.
“He also hates music,” I said. “Just after becoming an Epic, he went around destroying the music departments of stores. He’s known to immediately kill anyone he sees walking around wearing headphones or earbuds.”
“Another potential weakness?” Abraham said over the line.
“Yeah,” I said, “but even if one of those works, we still have to get each and every copy. That’s the big problem. Even if we manage to kill every Mitosis we can find, he’s bound to have a few versions of himself scattered out there, in hiding.”
“Sparks,” Tia said. “Like rats on a ship.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Or glitter in soup.”
Tia and Abraham fell silent.
“Have you ever tried to get all of the glitter out of your soup?” I demanded. “It’s really, really hard.”
“Why would there be glitter in my soup in the first place?” Abraham asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the other boys dumped it in there. Does it matter? Look, Tia, is there anything else in the notes?”
“That’s all you have,” Tia said. “I’ll contact the other lorists and see if anyone has anything more. David, continue observation. Abraham, make your way back to the government offices and quietly put them on lockdown. Get the mayor and her cabinet into the safe cells.”
“You going to call Prof?” I asked softly.
“I’ll let him know,” she replied, “but he’s hours away, even if we send a copter for him. David. Don’t do anything stupid.”