I shoved down my envy. I doubted I’d ever stop wishing I had been able to make this device work, but I could avoid acting childish about it. Cody and I clapped Abraham on the shoulder, giving him a thumbs-up. The Canadian man bore an uncharacteristic smile of pleasure, which was good to see. It wasn’t that he never smiled, it was just that his smiles always seemed so controlled. He rarely seemed to enjoy life. It was more that he let it pass around him, regarding it curiously, like a rock watching a river.
“Maybe this will actually work,” he said to me. “Maybe we won’t all end up dead.” He held up his hand and the mercury ran up his arm, pooling in a sphere above his gloved palm. It rippled and shook like a miniature ocean with waves and a tide.
“Do a puppy next!” Mizzy called from below. “Oh! Then a hat. Make me a silver hat. A tiara.”
“Shut it, you,” Abraham called.
My pocket buzzed. I pulled out my mobile, finding yet another text from Knighthawk. The guy considered me his personal entertainment factory. I flipped the message open.
Jonathan contacted me again today.
He’s discovered you sent him on a wild rat chase?
Rat?
I’ve never seen a goose, I wrote back to him. Don’t know why you’d chase one. But Newcago has lots of rats.
And you’d chase those instead?…Never mind. Kid, Jonathan sent a message to me. For you.
I felt cold, then waved for Abraham and Cody to step over and read along with me.
He said, Knighthawk continued, that you have two days to turn over Larcener to him, or he’ll destroy Newcago. Every single person in it. Then Babilar the next day.
Abraham and I shared a look.
Do you think he could actually do that? Knighthawk wrote.Destroy a whole city?
“Yes,” Abraham said softly. “If he killed Tia, he’s capable of anything.”
“I think he’s asking if Prof has the power to do it,” I said.
“Didn’t you say you talked to Obliteration at the party?” Abraham asked.
“Yeah. And he implied that Prof had summoned him by using a device linked to Obliteration’s powers. Even though Regalia made the bombs to hide her true goal—the teleportation device—I think it’s safe to assume Prof has access to at least one bomb.”
“He has the capability,” Abraham said. “And we have to assume he’ll do it. Which means…”
“…we have a new deadline,” I said, tucking away the mobile.
So much for our month of preparation.
THE drone landed on our warehouse roof that night. Four of us waited in a silent huddle, cloaked in darkness, while Cody scanned the city from inside a sniper nest he’d made on the rooftop nearby.
I reached into my pocket and clicked a button on my mobile; its screen went dark. The click sent a message I’d prepared earlier: Drone has landed the prize. We’re inspecting it now.
We knelt over the drone, night-vision goggles in place, looking at a world painted green. Mizzy pulled the drone open.
Inside, packed in straw mixed with old newspapers, was a glorious sight: a vest, a small metal box, and a pair of gloves. I breathed out. Those gloves looked exactly like the tensors—black, with lines of metal running like tiny rivers up the fingers and pooling at each tip. Those would glow green when engaged.
“Niiiice,” Mizzy whispered, poking at the vest. “Three different motivator casings. The first one offers healing, judging by the sensors you attach to the skin; it probably activates automatically upon injury. This one is connected to the tensors. Last one for forcefields.”
She turned over one of the gloves. I couldn’t help feeling that this suit represented something new, a different step in the creation of Epic-derived technology. Instead of one lone power, this replicated everything Prof could do. A complex network of wires and multiple motivators, combined in an imitation of an enhanced human. Should I be disturbed or impressed?
Heroes will come, son. My father’s words. I thought of that as I ran my fingers along the sleek metal of the suit’s motivators. But sometimes, you have to help them along….
“There is a problem with this,” Abraham said. “Cody cannot practice with this device without alerting Prof that he’s using it, and therefore revealing ourselves to him.”
“I’ve got an idea for that,” I said. “Though it will require Megan to use her powers.”
She looked up at me, curious.
“I doubt Prof can sense Cody practicing,” I said, “if he’s in another dimension.”
“Clever,” she said. “He’ll only be able to stay a short time though. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, if I push it.”
“Don’t push it,” I said. “It might not give us much time, but at least we’ll be able to make sure the motivators are working.”
Everyone seemed to like this plan, and together we dug out the tensor suit. Beneath were some other supplies that we’d managed to beg off Knighthawk: some explosives, some tiny drones that were little more than cameras with feet, and some technological gizmos Mizzy had suggested as additions to Megan’s and my plan.
The others carted all this away, Mizzy placing the old harmsway in the drone—the one that had healed Megan and me—and sending it off to return to Knighthawk. We had something better now, though we’d have to be careful about using it lest we alert Prof.
I caught Megan by the arm as the team passed, carrying the goodies. She nodded to me. She felt all right about using her powers. I didn’t follow her into the warehouse below, but instead walked over to Cody’s sniper nest. It was my turn to be on watch.
The nest was shaped like a wide, shallow box near the center of the roof. Cody had devised a ceiling for it with the crystal grower that merged right into the roof and made the structure look like another normal building feature. It had slits on all sides, however, and a large enough hole at the rear for you to crawl in and lie down.
I peeked in; the lanky Southerner was cuddled into the hole like a joey in its mother’s pouch—though people really shouldn’t let baby kangaroos play with a Barrett .50 cal with armor-piercing rounds.
“Has my new toy arrived?” Cody asked, setting aside the gun and wriggling backward out of the nest.
“Yeah,” I said, stepping out of his way as he stood up. “It looks great.”
“You sure you don’t want to pilot it, lad?”
I shook my head. “You have more experience with the tensors, Cody.”
“Yeah, but you were way more talented with them.”
“I…” I swallowed. “No, I need to be running the mission from behind.”
“Right, then,” he said, turning toward the steps down to the building.
“Cody?” I said, and he stopped, turned back. “The other day I was talking to Abraham and…well, he kind of bit my head off.”
“Ah. You were poking around, were you?”
“Poking around?”
“In his past.”
“No, of course not. I just asked why he didn’t want to be in charge.”
“Close enough,” Cody said, patting me on the arm. “Abraham’s a strange one, lad. The rest of us, we make sense. You fight for revenge. I fight because I was a cop, and I took an oath. Mizzy, she fights because of her heroes, people like Val and Sam. She wants to be like them.
“Abraham though…why does he fight? I couldn’t tell you. Because of his fallen brothers and sisters in the special forces? Maybe, but he doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge. Maybe to protect the country? But if that’s the case, why’s he down here in the Fractured States? All I’ve been able to figure is that he doesn’t want to talk about it—and you shouldn’t assume he’s gentle because he’s in control, lad.” Cody rubbed his jaw. “Learned that the hard way once.”
“He punched you?”
“Broke my jaw,” Cody said with a laugh. “Don’t poke, kid. That’s what I learned!” He seemed not to care much, though a broken jaw sounded like a pretty big offense to me.
But then, who hadn’t wa
nted to punch Cody on occasion?
“Thanks,” I said, sitting down to begin wiggling into the sniper nest. “But you’re wrong about me, Cody. I don’t fight for revenge, not anymore. I fight for my father.”
“Isn’t that the same as revenge?”
I reached into my shirt and took out the small S-shaped symbol of the Faithful that I wore around my neck. The mark of one who awaited a day when the heroes would come. “No. I don’t fight because of his death, Cody. I fight for his dreams.”
Cody nodded. “Good on ya, lad,” he said, turning to walk to the steps. “Good on ya.”
I crawled into the sniper nest, head brushing the low ceiling, and lifted Cody’s rifle, patching my mobile into it. I pulled off my night-vision goggles and used the gun’s scope instead—it had an overlaid map of the area, as well as thermal imaging. Better than either, the rifle had an advanced sound-detection system. It would alert me if it heard anything nearby, creating a small blip on my map.
At the moment, nothing. Not even pigeons.
I lay there positioned on cushions Cody had left. Occasionally I would twist about in the square enclosure, poking my rifle out one of the other sides.
Sounds came from below, inside the warehouse. I checked in with the others, and Mizzy said that my idea—sending Cody into the parallel dimension to practice—was working. Said he had to frighten some kids away over there, who were living in the warehouse in that dimension, but otherwise he hadn’t encountered anyone.
I checked on an oddity after that—noise the rifle had picked up—but it turned out to be a few scavengers moving through the alleyway. They didn’t stop at our warehouse. Instead they continued on toward the outskirts of the city. This let me have an extended period alone to think. My mind wandered in the silence, and I realized something was nagging at me. I was dissatisfied, though annoyingly I couldn’t figure out exactly why. Something bothered me, either about the place we’d set up or the plan we’d made. What was I missing?
I mulled it all over for about an hour—only a fraction of my shift—and was actually glad when the alarm on my gun buzzed again. I zoomed in on the source of the disturbance, but it was just a feral cat scampering along a rooftop nearby. I watched it carefully, in case it was some kind of shapeshifting Epic.
By this time light had dawned on the horizon, and I yawned, licking my lips and tasting salt. I wouldn’t be sad to be away from this place. Unfortunately my watch was a full eight hours, which would include another six hours of dullness until noon arrived.
I yawned again and rubbed my fingernail on the rooftop’s saltstone rim in front of me. Curiously, our warehouse was still growing. The changes were minute, but looking closely I could see that vines as thin as pencil lines were growing along the saltstone, as if carved by an invisible hand.
The city’s major changes happened on the first and last days of a building’s life, but the times between weren’t static. Tiny ornamentations often popped up, ones that would be gone in another day or two, weathered away by the inevitable decay that was this city’s infinite cycle.
The alarm on my rifle buzzed again, and I looked through the scope at the map. The sound was coming from on top of our warehouse, and a moment later I heard footsteps grinding on the saltstone. They came from the direction of the staircase from the building below, the one that led from the loft to the roof. It was likely one of my team. Still, I carefully slipped my mobile out the side of the sniper hole, using its camera—which had a feed to the scope—to see who was up there.
It was Larcener.
I hadn’t been expecting that. I couldn’t recall him setting foot outside his room at any of the three bases, except during times when we’d needed to transition from one to the other. He stood with his hand shading his face, scowling at the distant sunrise.
“Larcener?” I asked, crawling back out of the sniper hole, rifle in tow. “Is everything all right?”
“People enjoy these,” he said.
“What?” I asked, following his gaze. “Sunrises?”
“They always talk about the sunrise,” he said, sounding annoyed. “How beautiful it is, blah blah. Like each one is some unique wonder. I don’t see it.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m increasingly certain,” he said dryly, “that I’m the only one on this planet who isn’t.”
“Then you must be blind,” I said, looking toward the sunrise. As sunrises went, it wasn’t much. It didn’t have clouds to reflect off, and today it was pretty much uniformly one color instead of spanning the spectrum.
“A ball of fire,” he said. “Garish orange. Harsh light.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Amazing.” I thought of the years in Newcago’s darkness, when we’d judged the time of day by the dimness of the lights. I thought of emerging to an open sky for the first time since my childhood, watching the sun come up and bathe everything in warmth.
The sunrise didn’t need to be beautiful to be beautiful.
“I come look at them sometimes,” Larcener said, “just to see if I can pick out what everyone else seems to see.”
“Hey,” I said. “How much do you know about the way this city grows?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because it’s interesting,” I said, kneeling down. “Do you see this vinework? It’s still growing. Is that because the original warehouse had this pattern in its brick and wood? I mean, it wouldn’t make much sense if it did, but the other option would be that the powers are making art here. Isn’t that odd?”
“I really couldn’t say.”
I looked at him. “You don’t know, do you? You absorbed this power when you took over the city, but you don’t know how it works.”
“I know that it does what I want. What else matters?”
“Beauty,” I said, rubbing my finger along one of the vines. “My father always said that the Epics were wonderful. Amazing. A glimpse of something truly divine, you know? It’s easy to pay attention to the destruction, like what Obliteration did to Kansas City. But there’s beauty too. It almost makes me feel bad to kill Epics.”
He sniffed disdainfully. “I see through your act, David Charleston.”
“My…act?” I stood back up and turned toward him.
“The act of despising Epics,” he said. “You hate them, yes, but as the mouse hates the cat. The hate of envy. The hate of the small who wishes to be great.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Silly?” Larcener asked. “You think it isn’t obvious? A man does not study, learn, obsess as you have because of hatred. No, these are the signs of lust. You have sought a father among the Epics, a lover among them.” He stepped toward me. “Admit it. You want nothing more than to be one of us.”
“I loved Megan before I realized what she was,” I said, teeth clenched, shocked at the sudden anger I felt. “You don’t know anything.”
“Don’t I?” he said. “I’ve watched people like you so many times—you see the truth of men manifest in those first moments, David. New Epics. They murder, they destroy, they show what every man would do if his inhibitions were removed. Men are a race of monsters, inefficiently chained. That’s what’s inside you. Deny it, I dare you. Deny it, man who presumes to know Epics better than he knows himself!”
I didn’t dare. I spun from him and climbed back into the sniper nest to finish my shift. Eventually, he grumbled behind me and left.
Hours passed. I couldn’t shake the things Larcener had said, though I tried. As noon approached, and the time for my shift to end, I found myself fixating on something he’d said to me.
Man who presumes to know Epics better than he knows himself…
Did I really know them? I knew their powers, yes, but not the Epics themselves; they weren’t all of one mind. That was one of the easy mistakes people made. Epics felt an overwhelming sense of arrogance, so you could predict some of their actions, but they were still people. Individuals. No, I didn’t know them.
But I d
id know Prof.
Oh, Calamity, I thought.
It finally came together. The thing that had been bothering me. I pulled out of my sniper nest and dashed down the steps into the warehouse.
I stumbled out of the stairwell into the loft, running to the edge to look at the warehouse floor below. Mizzy sat on a table, spinning her keys around her finger, while Megan sat cross-legged on the floor, concentrating. Near Megan, the air shimmered and Cody appeared.
“Well,” Cody said, “I think I’m getting the hang of this. It seems way more powerful than the tensors were back in Newcago. Full-blown forcefield walls work too.”
“Guys!” I shouted.
“David, lad?” Cody called up. “This dimensional deal is working great!”
“Why,” I shouted, “would Prof give us a two-day deadline?”
They all regarded me in silence.
“To…make us panic?” Mizzy asked. “Force us to give in? That’s why you usually give deadlines, right?”
“No, look at it like a Reckoner,” I said, frustrated. “Assume that Prof is plotting, like we are. Assume he’s formed his own team, his own plan to attack. We’re thinking of him like some faceless despot, but he’s not. He’s one of us. That deadline is way too suspicious.”
“Sparks,” Megan said, standing up. “Sparks! In this case, you’d only give a two-day deadline…”
“…because you’re planning to attack in one day,” Abraham finished. “If not sooner.”
“We need to pull out,” I said. “Out of this location, out of the city. Move!”
THE subsequent mad scramble had some order to it, as we never set up a base without first preparing to pull out. The team knew what to do, even if there was a lot of cursing and some chaos.
I dashed down the steps, almost colliding with Mizzy, who was on her way up to the loft to get our extra ammunition and explosives, which we kept far from where we slept. Abraham went for our power cells and guns, where he’d set them out along the wall.
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