Calamity Read online

  “What?” Mizzy asked.

  Prof was glowing. The pale green light spread from him as he turned in place on the street. “Are you going to come out?” he bellowed. “I know you are here! Show yourselves!”

  I hated hearing Prof’s voice sound so…like an Epic. He’d always been gruff, but this was different. Imperious, demanding, angry. I held the handgun in a sweaty grip. Behind me, one of the children whimpered.

  “I’m going to lead him away,” I whispered.

  “What!” Megan demanded.

  “There isn’t time,” I said, standing up. “If he starts ripping apart the area looking for me, he’ll kill people. I’ve got to draw his attention.”

  “David, no,” Megan said. “I’m coming your way. Just—”

  Prof thrust his arms forward, toward the building in front of him—not mine, but an apartment complex across the street. It was some eight stories high, constructed entirely of pink and grey salt.

  And at Prof’s gesture, it vaporized.

  In Newcago, I’d seen him do incredible things with his powers. He’d faced down an Enforcement squad, destroying their weapons, bullets, and armor as he fought. But that had been nothing compared to this. He disintegrated an entire building into dust in an eyeblink.

  Prof’s powers destroyed not only the salt structure, but the furniture inside it as well, leaving people and personal effects to plummet. The people hit the ground with awful thuds and cries of pain. Except for one, who remained flying in the air about twenty feet up. He leveled a pair of uzis at Prof and fired.

  The bullets had no effect, of course. In an instant, the hovering man was surrounded by a glowing green sphere. He dropped his guns, feeling at the walls of his new prison in a panic.

  Prof made a fist. The sphere shrank to the size of a basketball, crushing the Epic inside into pulp.

  I looked away, suddenly sick. That…that was what he had done to Exel and Val.

  “False alarm,” Cody said over the line, sounding relieved. “He’s not looking for us. He’s hunting Epics who still follow Larcener.”

  Prof released the sphere and dropped the remnants of the dead Epic to the ground with a nauseating splat. From a shop next to mine, someone else stepped out onto the street, a young man—still a teenager—in a loose necktie and a hat. He stood facing Prof for a moment, then dropped to one knee, bowing.

  A sphere of light appeared around him. The young man looked up in a panic. Prof held out a single palm, as if weighing the newcomer. Then he swiped his hand to the side, and the sphere vanished.

  “Remember that feeling, little Epic,” Prof said. “You are the one they call Dynamo, I believe. I accept your allegiance, tardy though it is. Where is your master?”

  He gulped, then spoke. “My former master?” the youth asked, his voice breaking. “He is a coward, lord. He runs from you.”

  “He was with you earlier today,” Prof said. “Where did he go?”

  The youth pointed along a street, hand shaking. “He has a safehouse one street over. He forbade us to join him. I can show you.”

  Prof gestured, and the youth ran past him on wobbly legs. Prof clasped his hands behind his back and started to follow at a stroll, but paused.

  My breath caught in my throat. What was wrong?

  Prof took a few steps in my direction, then knelt, looking at the crate I’d dropped earlier. It had cracked open at the side. He nudged it with his foot and seemed contemplative.

  “Lord?” the youth asked.

  Prof turned away from the crate and swept after the youth, his lab coat rippling at the motion. The forcefield carrying Stormwind followed like an obedient puppy. The woman inside didn’t look up.

  I relaxed, slumping against the wall, and lowered my gun. “Mizzy,” I whispered over the line, “he’s coming your direction.”

  “Sounds like he’s searching for Larcener,” Megan said over the line. “We’ve managed to stroll right into his final throw-down with the city’s former leader. How delightful for us.”

  “I’m following him with my scope,” Cody said. “But I won’t be able to see much as he moves to the next street. You want me to maintain surveillance, lad, or stand down?”

  “Being this close to him is dangerous,” Abraham said. “If he so much as glimpses one of us…”

  “Yeah,” Cody said, “but I sure would like to know what he’s capable of before we try to bring ’im down. That thing he did with the building…that makes the tensors look like a child’s toy by comparison.”

  “Nice metaphor,” I said absently. “We need to know the results of his face-off with Larcener, if it happens. Cody, see if you can get in position. Mizzy, I do want you out of there.”

  “Trying,” she said, grunting. “I’m pressed into a room with a lot of people, and…Blah. I don’t know how quickly I can get out, guys….”

  Well, we weren’t going to fall back while one of our own was in danger. “Megan, be ready for a distraction. Abraham, stay with Megan.” I took a deep breath. “I’m going to tail Prof.”

  Nobody objected. They trusted me. I shouldered my pack—there was no time to assemble my Gottschalk—and stood up beside the doorway, peeking through the fluttering cloth draping. Before ducking out, I glanced at the room’s other occupants.

  All of them—the man with his children, the woman who had talked to me earlier—were staring at me with dumbfounded expressions.

  “Did you say you’re going after that Epic?” the man demanded. “Are you insane?”

  “No,” the woman said softly. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? The ones who fight. I heard you were all killed in New York.”

  “Don’t tell anyone you saw me, please,” I said. I saluted them with a lift of my gun, then slipped out onto the empty street.

  I stopped to nudge the box that Prof had paused beside—the crate I’d dropped. It was filled with foodstuffs, the packaged kind you had to trade to get, that came from cities that still had factories: beans, canned chicken, soda. I nodded, then hurried in the direction Prof had gone.

  “ALL right,” I said, pulling up beside the wall of an alleyway, my pistol in a two-handed grip before me. “Let’s play this very, very carefully. Our primary objective is to make sure Mizzy extracts safely. Information gathering comes second.”

  A sequence of “rogers” came over the line. I tapped my mobile’s screen into Cody’s feed. Our earpieces, which had a part that curled over the ear and pointed forward, could give any of us a view of what another one of us was doing.

  He was moving down a dark hallway. Diaphanous light seeped through the wall to his right, like a flashlight shining inside someone’s mouth. He reached a room that still had a salt door—I was surprised when he shoved it that it moved. He slipped inside and crept up to a window. He broke the salt there—which proved more difficult than I’d have guessed—with the butt of his rifle, then poked the gun out. When he patched through the feed from his scope instead of his earpiece, it gave us a vantage from several stories up.

  The market was easy to spot—it was an old parking garage, the sides draped with colorful cloths and awnings that spread out onto the streets around it.

  “Yeah,” Mizzy said as Cody focused on it, “I’m in there. Got pushed down onto one of the lower levels by the crowd. I’m trying a stairwell now. Still a lot of people hiding in here.”

  Prof was heading right for the market, the green glow of his forcefields lighting up the street. I followed a parallel path down a smaller side street, eventually taking cover beside some bushes made of pink salt.

  In fact, this bush was still growing. I stared, momentarily transfixed by the little salt leaves sprouting out of tiny branches like crystals. I’d assumed that things grew up on the leading edge of the city, stopping once they matched the way Atlanta had once been, then remained static. It seemed that parts of the inner city were still developing.

  “David?” a voice whispered. I turned to see Megan and Abraham scrambling up to me.


  Right, right. Friend and mentor on a murderous rampage. I should probably remain focused.

  “Megan,” I said, “a little more cover might be nice.”

  She nodded, and concentrated for a moment. In an eyeblink, the bushes in front of us became far more dense. It was an illusion, a shadow pulled from another world where those shrubs were more dense, but it was perfect.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking off my pack and quickly assembling my rifle.

  Prof strode out onto the street a short distance from us. The teenage Epic I’d seen earlier led him, gesturing as they walked. Stormwind’s bubble had been parked at the mouth of an alleyway and left there, hovering.

  The younger Epic with Prof…Dynamo? I wasn’t sure what his powers were. In a city like this there would be dozens of lesser Epics, and I didn’t have them all memorized.

  Dynamo pointed toward the ground, then toward the market. Prof nodded, but I was too far away to hear what they said.

  “An underground room,” Abraham whispered. “That has to be the safehouse—an office linked to the parking garage, perhaps?”

  “Can there be basements in this city?” I asked.

  “Shallow ones,” Abraham said, tapping the ground with his foot. “Depending on the area, Ildithia can grow up on a mass of salt rock that’s several stories high in some places; it replicates the landscape of the original Atlanta, filling in holes and creating hills. It’s as shallow as a few feet elsewhere, but this is a thick portion. Did you notice the slope while we walked to the warehouse?”

  I hadn’t. “Mizzy,” I said, “he might be coming in there. Status?”

  “Trapped,” she whispered. “Stairwell is packed; everyone and their dog thought to hide in here. Like, seriously. There are four dogs. I can’t find a way out.”

  Prof didn’t follow the young Epic toward the parking garage. He strode farther down the street and swept both hands before himself.

  The street melted away. The salt became powder, and that blew off in a gust of air that Prof created by quickly pushing two concave forcefields. The rest drained away into a hollow space below, leaving behind a set of stairs that Prof walked down without breaking stride.

  It was amazing. I’d studied Epics, come up with my own systems of categorization. I admit I was a little obsessed. In the same way that a million preschoolers asking questions over and over at the same time might be a little obnoxious.

  Prof’s power was unique—he didn’t just destroy matter, he sculpted it. It was beautiful destruction, and I found that I envied him. Once, I’d held that power, gifted to me. After Steelheart’s death, Prof had stopped doing that so much. I’d had the spyril to keep me entertained, but I could see that even then he’d been withdrawing from us.

  It was the time he saved me from Enforcement, I realized. That was the beginning of the problems.

  I’d started him down this path. I knew I couldn’t take all the blame—Regalia’s plot to turn Prof would probably have happened whether or not I had joined the Reckoners—but neither could I deny responsibility.

  “Mizzy,” I said over the line, “hold tight. You might be safest in there after all.”

  Prof stepped down into the chamber he’d uncovered, but Cody’s vantage from above let us watch on our mobiles. Prof didn’t descend far before turning around and striding up again, dragging someone by the collar. Back on the street, he tossed the person aside. The figure fell limply to the ground, neck at an unnatural angle.

  “A decoy,” Prof barked. His voice carried through the square. “Larcener is a coward, I see.”

  “Decoy?” Megan said, taking my rifle from me and zooming in on the body.

  “Ooooh,” I whispered, excited. “Larcener absorbed Dead Drop. I wondered if he was ever going to do that.”

  “Talk normal-person, Knees,” Megan said. “Dead Drop?”

  “An Epic who used to live in the city. He could make copies of himself—kind of like Mitosis, but Dead Drop could make only a few at a time. Three, I think? The copies each retained his other powers though. And, well, you know how Larcener is….”

  The other two looked at me blankly.

  “He’s an assumer….Don’t you know what one does?”

  “Sure,” Cody said over the line. “Makes an ass out of you and Mer. Hate that guy.”

  I sighed. “You people know very little, for being a specialized team trained to hunt Epics.”

  “Maintaining lists of Epics and their powers was Tia’s job,” Abraham said. “Now yours. And we haven’t had our briefing.”

  After a few days in the city, spent investigating who was here and who wasn’t, I had planned to sit them down and explain all the Epics they needed to watch for. I probably should have prepped them for Larcener early. We’d been too focused on Prof.

  “An assumer,” I said, “is the opposite of a gifter. Larcener steals powers from other Epics—it’s his one natural ability, but he’s very powerful. Most assumers only ‘rent’ the powers, so to speak. Larcener can take another Epic’s abilities permanently, and he can keep as many as he wants. He’s got an entire collection of them. If Prof found a clone, it means Larcener grabbed Dead Drop’s powers—an Epic who could create a decoy of himself, imbue it with his consciousness and powers, then retreat to his real body if the decoy was threatened.”

  I took my gun back from Megan and studied the decoy. It was decomposing quickly now that it had been killed, the skin melting off the bones like a marshmallow slipping off its roasting stick. Undoubtedly this was how Prof had recognized that he didn’t have the real Larcener.

  “Larcener makes other Epics very uncomfortable,” I explained. “They don’t like the idea that someone might be able to take their abilities. Fortunately for them, he’s not very ambitious, and has always been content to stay in Ildithia. The Coven relied on him—or the idea of him—to keep other Epics from moving in on their territory….”

  Megan and Abraham were rolling their eyes at me now.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “You look like you just found an old hard drive,” Megan said, “full of lost songs by your favorite pre-Calamity band.”

  “This stuff is cool,” I grumbled, inspecting Prof. He seemed thoroughly displeased by what he’d discovered in that hole. Now he was contemplating the market, which I could see from out here was packed like Mizzy had said.

  “I don’t like that look on his face,” Abraham said.

  “Guys,” Mizzy said, “I think I’m by a wall to the outside. I can see sunlight through it if I squint. Maybe we can get me out that way.”

  Abraham looked at Megan. “Can you make a portal into another dimension, where the wall isn’t there?”

  Megan looked skeptical. “I don’t know. Most of what I can do is ephemeral, unless I’ve recently reincarnated. I can trap someone in another world for a time, so long as it’s very similar to our own—or pull that world into ours. But they’re only shadows, and sometimes things seem to reset after the shadow fades.”

  Prof was on the move, striding toward the marketplace. He snapped his fingers, and Dynamo hurried over to him. A moment later when Prof spoke, his voice boomed through the area, as loud as if enhanced by a speaker.

  “I am going to destroy this building,” Prof said, pointing at the market. “And all of those nearby.”

  Ah, right, a part of me thought. Dynamo. He has sound manipulation.

  The rest of me was horrified.

  “Everyone who wishes to live,” Prof continued, “must come out here to the square. Those who run will die. Those who remain will die. You have five minutes.”

  “Oh, hell,” Cody said over the line. “You want me to pop him? Make a distraction?”

  “No,” I said. “He’d come for you, and we’d trade one problem for another.” I looked at Megan.

  She nodded. If she created a distraction and Prof came for her, she’d reincarnate. Sparks. I hated thinking of her ability to die as some kind of disposable resource.

&nbs
p; Hopefully we wouldn’t need that.

  “Abraham, fall back and support Cody,” I said. “If something goes wrong, you two continue with the plan to make a safehouse in the city. Be sure he doesn’t spot you.”

  “Roger,” Abraham said. “And you two?”

  “We’re going to get to Mizzy,” I said. “Megan, can you conjure up some temporary faces for us?”

  “Not a problem.” She concentrated and changed in a split second—eyes the wrong color, a face that was too round, and hair that was black instead of golden. I assumed I’d undergone a similar transformation. I took a deep breath, then handed my rifle to Abraham. Though I’d seen people in Ildithia carrying guns, mine was far too advanced. It would draw attention.

  “Let’s go,” I said, slipping out from behind the cover and joining the groups of people who were—timidly—leaving buildings and the market to stand before Prof.

  MIZZY was in the parking garage on the other side of the street from us, which presented a problem. “How close do you need to be to give her an illusory face?” I whispered to Megan.

  “The closer the better,” she whispered back as we moved into the crowd. “Otherwise, I risk catching more people in the ripple between worlds.”

  So we had to cross the street in front of Prof without drawing attention. He was fully in the grip of his powers, so he’d be selfish to the extreme, completely lacking the ability to empathize. It wouldn’t matter who we were or what we looked like; if someone inconvenienced him, he’d kill them as easily as another man swatted a mosquito.

  I slumped my shoulders and pinned my eyes to the ground. The act was still second nature to me; they’d drilled it into us at the Factory. I used it now to become inconspicuous as I stepped away from the mass of other people and headed eastward across the street, moving purposefully, yet careful to keep my posture hunched and subservient.

  I shot a furtive glance over my shoulder to see if Megan was following, and she was—but she stood out like a hammer in a birthday cake. She was obviously trying to look innocuous, hands shoved in her pockets, but she walked too tall, too unafraid. Sparks. Prof would spot her for certain. I reached out and took her hand, then whispered to her, “You need to be more beaten down, Megan. Pretend you’re carrying a lead statue of Buddha on your back.”