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.