Calamity (The Reckoners 3)

“At least the wire didn’t break on you halfway,” I noted.

“What?” Mizzy asked.

“Nothing.”

“David,” Abraham said, composed again. “There is a problem. Tia didn’t come with us.”

“She what?”

“Tia remained above,” Abraham said. “When we jumped into the elevator shaft, she ran the other way.”

Toward Prof’s room. Calamity’s shadow, that woman was stubborn. After all the work we’d done, she was going to get herself killed.

“Continue your extraction,” I said. “Tia is on her own now. Nothing we can do.”

“Roger.”

After all the work we’d gone through to get to her, she did this. Part of me couldn’t blame her; I was tempted by that information too. The rest of me was irate with her for forcing me into this position, where I had to make the call to leave a team member behind.

The lights suddenly came on again.

The ground lurched under the dining tables—Megan and I, near the hub, were on the nonrotating portion. To our left a short, balding Epic from Prof’s team approached around the hub, triumphantly raising the dampening device we’d attached to the generator.

Prof looked at it, then shouted, “They’re here! Secure both the elevators and the steps. Wiper, sweep the room!”

Wiper…That was a name I recognized.

“Oh!” Cody said. “Right, Wiper. I found that Epic for you, David. Sorry, lad. Had it in hand right as everything went to Wales in a handbasket. Wiper. Her powers—”

“—are to disrupt other Epics’ abilities,” I whispered. “Short them out for a second.”

A flash of light pulsed through the room. In that moment, I turned and found Megan looking at me. Not the false face she’d created, but Megan herself. Beautiful though that was, it wasn’t what I’d wanted to see at all.

Our disguises were gone.

FOR better or worse, my time with the Epics had seriously helped me deal with being surprised. I was almost as quick as Megan was in pulling out my handgun.

Pointedly, while we both moved by instinct, neither of us fired on Prof. Megan gunned down the three armed soldiers who had been firing out the window. Our little popguns acquitted themselves well, for compacts.

I shot Wiper.

She died a lot more easily than most Epics I’d killed—in fact, watching her drop in a spray of blood almost surprised me more than losing our disguises. I’d grown used to Epics being exceptionally tough; it was sometimes difficult to remember that the majority of them had only one or two powers, not a full suite.

Prof roared in outrage. I didn’t dare look at him; he’d been intimidating enough when he hadn’t been trying to kill me. Instead, I sprinted for the open stairwell door and gunned down the surprised Epic standing inside.

Megan followed me. “Duck!” she shouted at me as people in the room behind us pulled out guns. A few fired.

I dove through the doors. Nobody outside got off more than two or three shots before an explosion rocked the room, cracking saltstone walls and sending a shower of dust raining down.

I coughed, blinking salt from my eyes, and struggled to my feet. It had been one of Megan’s grenades. I managed to grab her outstretched hand and join her in running down the steps.

“Sparks,” she said, “I can’t believe we’re alive.”

“Wiper,” I said. “Her bursts negate Epic powers, specifically external usages, like Prof’s forcefields. Her burst left him momentarily unable to trap us.”

“Could we have…”

“Killed him?” I asked. “No. Wiper would have been executed by one High Epic or another long ago if her powers were that strong. She can’t…well, couldn’t…remove an Epic’s innate protections, just fiddle with manifestations for a second or two. Forcefields, illusions, that sort of thing.”

Megan nodded. The stairwell was dark—nobody had thought to hang lights in here—but we heard when people ventured in from above. Megan pulled back against the wall, looking up. I could make her out by the light trickling down from above.

I nodded to her unasked question when she glanced at me. We needed time to plan, and that meant keeping the pressure off us. She pulled her other mini-grenade from her thigh case, then activated it and tossed it upward.

The second explosion sent chunks of saltstone tumbling down on us, and seemed to have broken an entire section of steps above. I nodded to her, and we looked down the stairwell. There was no way we’d be able to take this stairway down seventy floors without finding ourselves trapped at the bottom. We needed another way out.

“David?” Cody’s voice. “I spotted some explosions up there. Y’all all right?”

“No,” I said over the line, “we’ve been compromised.”

Abraham swore softly in French. “We left the backup equipment, David. Where are you?”

David and Mizzy had brought extra wire climbers, in case there were more prisoners than Tia—or in case Megan and I joined them. Mission parameters called for emergency equipment to be left behind, just in case.

“We’re right by the door to floor seventy,” I said. “Where’s the equipment?”

“Black backpack,” Abraham said, “hidden in the air vent near the service elevator. But David, that level was flooding with guards when we were leaving.”

It would also be the same floor where Tia had given them the slip to go after Prof’s data. I wasn’t sure I could save her though. Sparks. I wasn’t sure I could save myself at this point.

“Radio chatter went silent right after Abraham was spotted,” Cody said. “They must have some kind of secure signal to use in emergencies. And they won’t be using Knighthawk mobiles, you can bet your kilt on that.”

Great. Well, at least with that pack, Megan and I had a chance. My back to the wall beside the door onto the seventieth floor, I took out my mobile. Its light bathed us as we examined the map that Cody helpfully sent of this level. We were marked as a green dot; the elevator, red.

That red dot was halfway across the sparking building. Lovely. I memorized the route—noticing Prof’s chambers. We’d travel close to it, down a hallway right outside his suite.

I glanced at Megan, and she nodded. We slid the door open and Megan leaped out, gun ready, checking right and then left. I followed, keeping watch down the right hallway as she scouted ahead to the left. A string of lightbulbs hung along the ceiling, revealing absurdly beautiful waves of red salt shot through the otherwise black and grey walls. It looked like a pigeon on fire.

I exhaled. No guards yet. The two of us continued down the left hallway, passing closed doors that I knew led into luxurious apartments. By the time we’d reached the end of the hall, I was feeling pretty good about our chances. Maybe the guards had all been pulled out to search other floors or to protect Prof upstairs.

Then the wall about ten feet in front of us disintegrated.

We stumbled back as the night wind whipped in through a new gap in the outside wall of the building, blowing in more salt dust from seventy floors up in the air. I raised my hand against the salt, blinking.

Prof hovered outside on a glowing green disc. He stepped off it and into the building, feet crunching on salt dust. Megan cursed, backing away, gun out in front of her. I remained in position and searched Prof’s face, hoping for some sign of warmth; pity, even. I found only a sneer.

He raised his hands at his sides, summoning lances of green light—spears of forcefield to impale us. In that moment, I felt something unexpected.

Pure anger.

Anger at Prof for not being strong enough to resist the darkness. The emotion had been hidden within me, tucked away behind a series of rationalizations: He’d saved Babilar. Regalia had manipulated him into his fall. The things he did weren’t his fault.

None of that stopped me from being angry—furious—at him anyway. He was supposed to be better than this. He was supposed to have been invincible!

Something trembled in

side me, like an ancient leviathan stirring in its slumber within a den of water and stone. The hair on my arms stood up, and my muscles tensed, as if I were straining to lift something heavy.

I looked into Prof’s eyes and saw my death reflected back at me, and something within me said no.

That sense of confidence was gone in a moment, replaced with sheer terror. We were going to die.

I leaped to the side, dodging a spear of light. I rolled as Megan jumped back against the wall, managing to get out of the way of another razor-sharp lance of forcefield.

I tried to scramble down the hallway, but smashed right into a glowing green wall. I groaned, turning to see Prof studying me with a look of disdain. He raised a hand to destroy me.

Something tiny hit him in the side of the head. He started, then turned, and another one smacked him in the forehead. Bullets?

“Oh yeah,” Cody said over the line. “Did y’all see that? Who just sniped a guy at a thousand yards? I did.”

The bullets didn’t penetrate Prof’s defensive powers, though they did seem to annoy him. I scrambled over to Megan. “Can you do anything?” I asked.

“I…”

A forcefield sprang up, surrounding both me and Megan, gouging out a large chunk of the saltstone floor as well. Sparks. This was it. We were going to be crushed like Val and Exel.

I reached for Megan, wanting to be holding her as it happened. She had adopted a look of concentration, teeth clenched, eyes staring sightlessly.