Calamity (The Reckoners 3)

“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.