Larcener seemed to have his own psychosis. I reached into a bowl on a little marble pedestal beside the door. Glass beads trickled between my fingers. No—diamonds.
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “you could make me a—”
“Stop.”
I glanced at Larcener.
“I should have made this clear at the start,” he said. “You get nothing from me. I am not here to give you gifts, nor to make your life easier. I will not become some servant.”
I sighed, dropping the diamonds. “You don’t sleep,” I said, trying a different tack.
“So?”
“You gained that power from another Epic, I assume. Did you take that one specifically because of the nightmares?”
He stared at me for a moment, then suddenly tossed his headphones aside and leaped to his feet. He took a single step, but crossed the wide distance between us in an instant.
“How do you know about my nightmares?” he demanded, looming in front of me. Larger. Taller.
I gaped, my heart racing again. Before this, he’d been determinedly lazy with us. Now—dwarfed by Larcener, who stood seven feet tall, with a terrible sneer and wild eyes—I felt I was a moment from being destroyed.
“I…” I swallowed. “All Epics have them, Larcener. Nightmares.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “They are mine. I am unique.”
“You can talk to Megan,” I said. “She’ll tell you she has them. Or you can go find any Epic and beat it out of them. They have nightmares, which are tied to their weaknesses. What the person fears becomes—”
“Stop your lies!” Larcener shouted, then growled at me and spun on his heel, stalking back to his couch and throwing himself down. “Epics are weak because they are fools. They will destroy this world. Give men power, and they abuse it. That is all one needs to know.”
“And you’ve never felt it?” I asked. “The sudden darkness that comes from using your powers, the lack of empathy? The desire to destroy?”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Silly little man.”
I hesitated, trying to read him—and having a tough time of it. Maybe he was constantly consumed by the darkness. He certainly acted arrogant enough.
But he hadn’t hurt any of us. He liked to order us around, but not in the way of an Epic, I realized. In the way of a spoiled child.
“You faced it young,” I guessed. “You grew up as an Epic, able to get whatever you wanted, but you never felt the darkness.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “I forbid you to speak of this idiocy anymore. Darkness? You want to blame the terrible things that Epics do on some nebulous idea or feeling? Bah. Men destroy themselves because that’s what they deserve, not because of some mystical force or emotion!”
He has to be facing it continually, I thought. Whatever his fear is, he must see it every day, and defeat it. That was what we’d learned with Megan; if she didn’t stay vigilant, the darkness crept back toward her.
I slipped from his palace of a room.
“I do hate you, you understand,” Larcener called from behind.
I glanced in again. He lounged on his couch, and like that he really did look like a kid. A teenager with his headphones on, trying to ignore the world.
“You deserve this,” he continued. “People are evil to the core. That’s what the Epics prove. That’s why you’re dying out.” He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, away from me.
I shivered, then checked the other room—which was now packed with supplies—for Megan. Not there. Above, Abraham was still practicing in the kitchen. On the top floor, I knocked outside the small bathroom—we’d resorted to using buckets again, unfortunately. Finally I peeked into the other bedroom once more.
Empty. Where—
Wait. Something about that dark room seemed too…um…dark? I frowned and walked into the room, passing through a veil of something. Megan sat cross-legged on the floor on the other side, a small candle on the floor beside her. She was staring out the wall.
Which was now gone.
The wall of the hideout was simply…gone. And there was no city beyond either. Megan looked out upon a nighttime landscape of blowing fields beneath a billion stars. She was rubbing her hand.
She noticed me as I walked up, first reaching for the gun on the floor beside her, then relaxing when she realized who it was. “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Nah,” I said, settling down beside her. “That’s quite the view.”
“Easy to make,” she said. “In so many of the branching possibilities, Ildithia didn’t come this direction. It was simple to find one where it isn’t here, and the field is empty.”
“So what is this, then?” I asked, reaching out. “Is it real?”
My hand felt something—the saltstone wall, though it looked like I was touching empty space.
“Just a shadow, for now,” she said.
“But you can go further,” I said. “Like you did when saving me from Knighthawk.”
“Yes.”
“You brought Firefight through,” I continued, feeling again at the invisible wall. “Not just his shadow, not just a…projection of the other world. He himself was here.”
“I see your brain working, David,” she said, cautious. “What are you thinking?”
“Is there a reality where Prof hasn’t given in to his powers?”
“Probably,” Megan said. “That’s a little change, and very recent.”
“So you might be able to bring him here.”
“Not for very long,” Megan said. “What? You want to replace him in the team? My solutions are temporary. It…” She trailed off, eyes widening. “You don’t want a new Prof as a replacement. You want one to fight ours.”
“His fear is his powers, Megan. I initially tried to think how to trick him into gifting his abilities to someone—but there’s no reason we have to do that when we have you. If you can bring a version of Prof in from another world, we can make them face off, and bam…we engage Prof’s weakness. Make him confront his own powers in the most direct way possible, and therefore help him defeat the darkness.”
She looked thoughtful. “We could try it,” she said. “But David, I don’t like relying on the powers. My powers.”
I looked to where she was rubbing her hand. A fresh burn. I glanced at the candle.
“This might be the only way,” I told her. “He certainly won’t be expecting it. If we’re going to save Tia…”
“You still want me to practice,” she said. “Go further than I’ve gone before.”
“Yes.”
“That’s dangerous.”
I didn’t reply. I knew it was, and I knew I shouldn’t be asking this of her. It wasn’t fair. But sparks…Tia was in Prof’s hands. We had to do something.
“All right,” Megan said. “I’m going to try to alter reality a little further. You might want to move back from the wall.”
I did so. Megan’s face darkened in concentration.
And the entire building vanished, leaving me alone, hanging in the sky, in an unfamiliar world.
MY stomach lurched as I dropped a good twenty feet before crashing into some thick brush. The growth broke my fall, but the landing knocked the wind out of me. I lay there, trying to gasp but unable to draw in breath. Finally, painfully, I managed to suck air into my lungs.
A star-filled sky spun and wavered above me, my watering eyes making it difficult to see. Sparks…there were so many stars, and in such strange patterns. Clusters, ribbons, fields of light upon the black. I still wasn’t used to it. In Newcago the sky had been veiled in darkness by Nightwielder, so I’d had to imagine stars. Over the years my memories had grown fuzzy, and I’d started to imagine the stars spaced evenly, like in my vague recollections of picture books.
The reality was far messier. More like cereal spilled on the floor. I groaned and managed to sit up. Well, I thought, looking around, I probably deserved that. What had happened? Had
I been sucked into Megan’s shadow dimension?
It seemed that way at first, though I was confronted with an oddity: Ildithia was here, off in the distance. Hadn’t Megan said that in her shadow world, it hadn’t come this way?
Something else was wrong. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.
Where was Calamity?
The stars were all there, sprinkling the sky, but the omnipresent red spot was gone. That was discomforting. Calamity was always there at night. Even in Newcago it had pierced the darkness, glaring at us.
I climbed to my feet, staring upward, trying to find it. And as I stood, everything around me fuzzed.
I found myself in our hideout again, near Megan, who was shaking me. “David? Oh, sparks, David!”
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to take it all in. Yes, I was back, right where I’d been standing when I’d fallen. The wall was no longer transparent. “What happened?”
“I sent you through by accident,” Megan said. “You vanished completely, until you popped back out. Sparks!”
“Interesting.”
“Terrifying,” she said. “Who knows what you might have found on the other side, David? What if I’d dropped you into a world where the atmosphere was different, and you suffocated?”
“It was like our world,” I said, rubbing my side and looking around. “Ildithia was there, except in the distance.”
“What…really?” she asked. “Are you sure? I specifically picked a world where this region was empty, so I’d have a good view.”
I settled down. “Yeah. Can you reach out to the same world again, on purpose?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The things I do, they just kind of happen. Like bending your elbow.”
“Or eating a bagel,” I said, nodding.
“Not…actually like that, but whatever.” She hesitated, then settled down on the floor beside me. A moment later, Cody peeked in on us—apparently she’d been too loud when she’d cried out to me. Megan’s veil of dark fog had vanished, and he could see us.
“Everything all right?” he asked, rifle in hand.
“Depends on your definition,” Megan said, lying back on the floor. “David convinced me to do something stupid.”
“He’s good at that,” Cody said, leaning against the doorframe.
“We’re testing her powers,” I said to Cody.
“Ach,” he said. “And y’all didn’t warn me first?”
“What would you have done?” I asked.
“Gotten up and eaten some haggis,” Cody said. “Always nice to have a good haggis before someone accidentally destroys your hideout in a burst of unexpected Epic power.”
I frowned. “What’s haggis?”
“Don’t ask,” Megan said. “He’s just being silly.”
“I can show him,” Cody said, thumbing over his shoulder.
“Wait,” Megan said. “You actually have some?”
“Yeah. Found it in the market the other day. Guess they believe in using the whole animal round here, eh?” He paused. “The stuff’s nasty, of course.”
Megan frowned. “Isn’t it like a Scottish national dish or something?”
“Sure, sure,” Cody said, sauntering into the room. “Being nasty is what makes it Scottish. Only the bravest of men dare eat it. Proves you’re a warrior. Like wearing a kilt on a cold, windy day.” He settled down with us. “So what’s up with the powers?”
“Megan sent me into an alternate dimension,” I said.
“Neat,” Cody said, digging in his pocket and pulling out a chocolate bar. “You didn’t bring me a mutant bunny or something, did ya?”
“No mutant bunnies,” I said. “But Calamity wasn’t there.”
“Now that’s even stranger,” Cody said, taking a bite of the chocolate bar. He grimaced.
“What?” I asked.
“Tastes like dirt, lad,” he said. “I miss the old days.”
“Megan,” I said, “can you bring up an image of that world again?”
She looked at me, skeptical. “You want to keep going?”
“By the measuring stick of Epic powers,” I said, “this doesn’t seem too dangerous. I mean, you dropped me into another world, but I popped back in under a minute.”
“And if that’s a result of lack of practice?” Megan asked. “What if, in doing it more, it gets more dangerous?”
“Then that means you’re learning to affect things more permanently,” I said. “Which is going to be a huge advantage to us. It’s worth the risk.”
She drew her lips to a line, but seemed persuaded. Maybe I was a little too good at getting people to do stupid things. Prof had accused me of that on more than one occasion.
Megan waved at the wall she’d changed before, and it vanished, once again providing the view of an empty plain of grass.
“Now the other side,” I said, pointing at the wall with the doorway Cody had come through.
“That’s dangerous,” she warned. “Trapping us between two shadows means that the other dimension is more likely to bleed into…But you don’t care, do you? All right. You owe me a back rub for this, by the way.”
The opposite wall vanished, and it now seemed like the three of us were in a solitary building on the plains, with two walls cut out. The new perspective gave us a view of what I’d seen before: Ildithia in the distance.
“Huh,” Cody said, standing up. He unslung his rifle and used the scope to inspect the city.
“The city is in a different place in this dimension,” Megan said. “Not surprising. It’s easier to view dimensions that are similar to ours, so I should have guessed.”
“Nah, that’s not it,” Cody said. “Ildithia is in the same place in that dimension. But your window isn’t opening where our hideout would be there.”
“What?” Megan said, standing up.
“See those fields? Those are the eastern side of Ildithia, marked by that stand of trees. Same as in our dimension. The city’s in the same place; we’re merely looking at it from the outside.”
Megan seemed troubled.
“What’s the problem?” I asked her.
“I always assumed that my shadows had a direct location connection,” she said. “That if I pulled something through, it was because that was what was happening in another dimension, right where I was.”
“We’re talking about altering the shape of reality,” Cody said with a shrug. “Why should location matter, lass?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just…it’s not what I’ve always thought. It makes me wonder how much I’ve been wrong about.”
“No Calamity,” I said, walking as close to the invisible wall as I dared. “Megan, what if the shadows you grab are always from the same world, a parallel one to ours? I keep seeing Firefight during moments when you use your powers. That seems to indicate that the shadows you’re pulling are always from his world.”
“Yeah,” she said, “that or there are hundreds upon hundreds of different versions of him, and each world has one.”
Cody grunted. “This sounds like a headache.”
“You have no idea,” Megan said. She sighed. “I’ve done things that your theory can’t explain, David. Though perhaps there is one similar parallel world that I reach into most often—but if my powers can’t find what I need there, they reach farther. And right after I reincarnate, they go anywhere, do anything.”
I stared at that distant Ildithia for as long as Megan kept the shadow active. A world parallel to our own, a world without Calamity. What would it be like? How were there still Epics, if there was no Calamity to give them powers?
Eventually Megan let the images vanish, and I gave her a neck rub to try to deal with the headache all of this had given her. She kept glancing at the candle, but didn’t reach for it. Before long, all three of us returned to our beds. We needed sleep.
Tomorrow we would dig into Tia’s plan and try to figure out how to save her.
I rubbed my hand along the
saltstone shelf, disconcerted to find that my fingers left gouges. I dusted my hand off, sprinkling pink sand to the floor. As I stood there, the shelf on the wall split in the middle, crumbling away. Salt ran down like sand through an hourglass.
“Uh, Abraham?” I said as he passed.
“We have a day left before we need to leave, David,” he said.
“Our hideout is literally disintegrating.”
“Accessories and ornaments crumble first,” he said, ducking into our third-floor spare bedroom—the place where Megan and I had experimented with her powers the night before. “The floors and walls will hold for a time yet.”
I didn’t find this very comforting. “We’ll still have to move soon. Find a new hideout.”
“Cody’s been working on that. He says he has a few options to talk to you about later today.”
“What about the caverns?” I asked. “Under the land the city is passing over? The ones made by Digzone? We could hide there.”
“Perhaps,” Abraham said.
I followed Abraham into the room, where Cody was whistling and sweeping salt into a pile. Apparently the saltstone we’d grown disintegrated at the same rate as the stone around it. Soon this entire region would collapse, and the salt would vanish.
Morning light shone through the thinning saltstone roof above. I settled in on a stool, one of the ones Cody had purchased during a scrounging mission. It was strange to be in a city where there wasn’t trash to pick through; Ildithia just moved away, leaving behind anything people discarded. It left a sparseness I hadn’t seen in Newcago or Babilar.
Megan came in but didn’t sit. She leaned against the wall, arms folded, wearing her jacket and jeans. Abraham knelt by the wall, fiddling with the imager, which he’d calibrated earlier. Cody lifted his old broom and shook his head. “Ya know, I think I might be making more salt than I’m cleaning up.” He sighed, walking over and settling down on a stool beside me.