Calamity

  Finally Mizzy entered, bearing one of the team’s rugged laptops. She tossed a data chip to Abraham, who plugged it into the imager.

  “This isn’t going to be pretty, guys,” Mizzy noted.

  “Cody is on the team,” Abraham said. “We are accustomed to things that are not pretty.”

  Cody tossed the broom at him.

  Abraham engaged the imager, and the walls and floor went black. A three-dimensional projection of Ildithia appeared on them, but one drawn as a red wireframe. We seemed to be hovering above it.

  At one time this had been disorienting to me, but I was used to it now. I leaned forward, peering down through the floor toward the large city. It seemed to be growing and disintegrating at an accelerated rate in this illustration, though the details weren’t terribly specific.

  “It’s a time-lapse computer model from Tia’s data,” Mizzy said. “I thought it was cool. The city moves at a constant rate, so you can predict what its shape and look will be for any given day. Apparently whoever controls the city can steer it using a big wheel that grows in one of the buildings downtown.”

  “What happens if it hits another city?” I asked, uncomfortable. In the time-lapse model, the city looked alive—like some kind of crawling creature, buildings shooting up like stretching spines.

  “Collisions are messy,” Abraham said. “When I scouted here years back, I asked that very question. If Ildithia intersects a city it grows into the cracks, buildings squeezing between buildings, streets covering streets. In times past, people got trapped inside rooms while sleeping and died. But a week later the salt crumbled, and Ildithia moved on basically unaffected.”

  “Aaanyway,” Mizzy said, “this ain’t the ugly part, kids. Wait until you see the plan.”

  “The plan looked well developed when I glanced at it,” I said, frowning.

  “Oh, it’s developed,” Mizzy said. “The plan is awesome. But we’re never going to pull it off.” She turned her hand, using the motion to zoom us down toward the wireframe city. In Newcago this had all been done with cameras, and it had felt like we were flying. Here it seemed more like we were in a simulation, which made it a lot less disorienting.

  We stopped near the downtown, which was—in the simulation—currently on the growing edge of the city, fresh and new. A particularly tall building sprang up, cylindrical, like a giant thermos.

  “Sharp Tower,” Mizzy said. “That’s its new name—used to be some fancy hotel in Atlanta. It’s where Larcener made his palace, and it’s where Prof has set up. Upper floors are occupied by whatever lackeys are most favored at the moment, with the reigning Epic living in the large room near the very, very tippy top.”

  “They climb all those steps?” I asked. “Prof can fly. Do the rest take the stairs?”

  “Elevators,” Mizzy said.

  “Made of salt?” I asked, looking up.

  “They swap in a metal one and use new cables—salt ones don’t work, go figure—and bring in a motor. The shafts are perfectly reasonable though.”

  I frowned. Still seemed like a lot of work, especially since you had to redo it each week. Though a little slave labor and heavy lifting for their minions was hardly a bother.

  “Tia’s plan,” Mizzy said, “is pretty good. Her goal was to kill Prof, but she had decided she needed more intel before trying that. So the first part of her plan includes a detailed plot for infiltrating Sharp Tower. Tia intended to raid Prof’s computers to figure out what he was up to in the city.”

  “But we,” I said, “can use that same plan to rescue Tia instead of raiding his computers.”

  “Yup,” Mizzy said. “Judging by the signal from the broken mobile, Tia’s been stashed near the top of this building, on the seventieth floor. She’s in some kind of old hotel room. It’s a nice suite, judging by the maps. I’d have expected something more prisonlike.”

  “She said Prof would at first try to persuade her he was rational,” I said, feeling cold. “Once she refuses to give him the information he asks for, he’ll grow impatient. That’s when things will start going badly.”

  “So what is this plan?” Megan said. She was still leaning against the wall, which was obscured by the imager’s blackness. We hovered, looking up at the red lines of Sharp Tower. A stupid name, since it was basically round and had a flat top.

  “Right,” Mizzy said. “Two teams will run the mission. First one will infiltrate a party at the top of the building. Larcener let one of the town’s most important people—an Epic named Loophole—throw parties in Sharp Tower. Prof hasn’t stopped the tradition.”

  “Infiltrate?” Abraham asked. “How?”

  “Heads of important communities in the city get an invitation to Loophole’s parties in exchange for sending specialist workers to help throw the shindig,” Mizzy explained. “Tia planned to join with members of the Stingray Clan who were already attending.”

  “That’s…going to be tough,” Abraham said. “Will we be able to do the same? We don’t have the trust of any of the clans.”

  “It gets worse,” Mizzy said pleasantly. “Watch.”

  “Watch?” Cody asked.

  “There are animations,” Mizzy said. A group of people—represented by bouncing stick figures—hopped along the road and joined a larger group thronging the tower. The two “teams” were represented in blue. One group bounced their way into the elevators at the rear. Another team slipped in through a back door and entered a different elevator shaft. They somehow shot up along the shaft, toward the roof.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “Wire climbers,” Mizzy said. “Devices you hook to a cable, then ride up by holding on. See, there’s a service elevator, since the reaaal important folk need other folk to do stuff for them. And who wants to ride up in the elevator with stinky servants, right? The second team sneaks up that shaft to position themselves on the top residential floor.”

  “And we get these wire climbers…how?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Mizzy said. “There certainly aren’t any for sale in the city. I think the community that took Tia in must have been planning to buy them somehow.”

  I sat tight, seeing what Mizzy meant by “ugly.” When we’d departed the Stingray Clan, Carla and her companions had been very clear in explaining to me that they wouldn’t help rescue Tia. They were too frightened by their close call with Prof, and were determined to get their people out of the city. Over the next week, they’d covertly pull out of Ildithia and run.

  “That’s not the whole of it,” Mizzy said. “To pull off Tia’s mission, we’d need a whole ton of other stuff. Advanced hacking devices, parachutes, kitchen mixers…”

  “Really?” Cody asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Sweet,” he said, settling back.

  It didn’t seem sweet to me. I watched the plan play out, as animated by the little bouncing figures. Two teams, operating independently to distract, infiltrate, and steal—all without Prof knowing what had happened. It was a good plan, and we could use it to get to Tia instead of the computers.

  It was also impossible.

  “It would take months to gather this equipment,” Abraham said as we watched figures parachuting off the building. “Assuming we could pay for it.”

  “Yeah,” Mizzy said, arms folded. “Warned ya. We’re going to have to come up with something else—and we have less time and fewer resources. Which sucks.”

  The simulation of stick figures ended, and the building hovering in front of us eventually reached the edge of Ildithia and disintegrated, melting away like a lonely ice cream sundae with nobody to eat it.

  We don’t have time to come up with something better, I thought, glancing at the list of required and suggested supplies that hovered in the air nearby. Or even something worse.

  I stood and walked from the room.

  Megan was first to chase after me, and she caught up quickly. “David?” she asked, then scowled as she saw that her jacket was covered in salt from leaning against
the wall. She brushed it off as we headed down the steps to the second floor.

  The others followed as well. I didn’t speak, leading the group to the first floor. Here, we could hear voices from the buildings next to us. Our neighbors were moving out in preparation for their homes falling apart.

  I turned and walked into Larcener’s room, where the Epic was sitting wrapped in blankets, though it wasn’t that cold, in a chair beside a fireplace—which he hadn’t lit.

  I needed to play this cool, careful, like a true leader.

  I flopped down on one of Larcener’s couches. “Well, it’s over. We’re totally screwed. Sorry, great one. We failed you.”

  “What are you babbling about?” he demanded, perking up in his blankets.

  “Prof captured a member of our team,” I said. “He’s probably torturing her right now. He’ll soon know anything he wants about us. We’ll all be dead by the end of the day.”

  “Idiot!” Larcener said, standing up.

  The rest of the team gathered outside the room.

  “You might want to simply kill us yourself,” I said to Larcener. “So that you get the satisfaction, instead of Prof.”

  Megan gave me a What are you doing, you slontze? look. I was pretty used to that one.

  “How did this happen?” Larcener demanded, pacing. “Aren’t you supposed to be skilled, efficient? Adept! I see that you’re as utterly incapable as I’d guessed all along!”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “I will be alone in the city,” he continued. “Nobody else would dare stand against a High Epic. You’ve thoroughly inconvenienced me, human.”

  To an Epic, that was a major insult.

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do now.”

  “What, you aren’t going to even try to kill your friend?”

  “Well, there’s a plan that…” I trailed off. “Kill?”

  “Yes, yes. Murder her, so she can’t speak. The rational course.”

  “Oh, right.” I swallowed. “Well, we’ve got this plan, and it’s a good one, but we’ll never make it work. It requires all kinds of things we don’t have. Parachutes. Mannequins. Technology.” I made a good show of it. “Of course, if someone could make that stuff for us…”

  Larcener spun on me, and his eyes narrowed.

  I smiled innocently.

  “Impudent peon,” he muttered.

  “All you Epics use language like that,” I said. “Do you take some kind of evil dictator language course or something? I mean, who talks like—”

  “This is a ploy to get me to be your servant,” Larcener interrupted, stepping over to me. “I expressly told you that I would not use my powers to serve you.”

  I stood up, meeting his eyes. “Tia, a member of our team, has been captured by Prof. We have a plan to save her, but without resources we won’t be able to make it work. Either you summon the objects we need, or we’ll have to pull out of the city and abandon this cause.”

  “I do not get involved,” Larcener said.

  “You’re already involved, bub. You can start working as a member of this team, or you’re out. Good luck surviving in the city. Prof has every thug and two-bit Epic here searching for you. Random stops on the streets with a dowser, huge bounties, your likeness being distributed…”

  Larcener clenched his jaw. “I thought I was supposed to be the evil one.”

  “No. You beat the darkness somehow. You’re not evil; you’re just spoiled and selfish.” I nodded toward the others. “We’ll bring you a list. It should all be within your powers. You can make…what, anything up to about the size of a couch, right? Range of three miles, if I recall. Maximum mass limit shouldn’t be an issue.”

  “How…” He focused on me, as if seeing me for the first time. “How do you know that?”

  “You got your conjuration powers from Brainstorm. I had a whole file on her.” I walked toward the doorway.

  “You’re right about one thing,” Larcener said after me. “I’m not evil. I’m the only one. Everyone else in this filthy, horrible, insane world is broken. Evil, sinful, revolting…whatever you want to call it. Broken.”

  I looked over my shoulder, meeting his eyes again. In those eyes, I swear I saw it. The darkness, like an infinite pool. Seething hatred, disdain, overwhelming lust for destruction.

  I was wrong. He hadn’t overcome it. He was still one of them. Something else held him back.

  Disturbed, I turned and left the room. I told myself I needed to get him a list as soon as possible, but the truth was that I couldn’t look into those eyes any longer. And I wanted to be as far from them as I could get.

  “WELL, yes,” Edmund said over my mobile, “as I think about it, something like that did happen to me.”

  “Tell me,” I said, eager. I wore the mobile stuck to my jacket on the shoulder, earpiece in my ear, as I put together things for the mission tonight. I was alone in a room of our new, interim hideout. It had been five days since Tia’s capture, and we’d moved as planned. I’d talked to Cody about using the caverns under the city, but we’d eventually decided they hadn’t been explored well enough and might be unstable.

  Instead, we’d used one of his suggestions, a hidden location under a park bridge. As eager as I was to get to Tia, we hadn’t been able to move immediately. We’d needed the time to set up somewhere new and practice. Beyond that, Tia’s plan required a party to be happening at Sharp Tower, and the soonest one was tonight. We had to hope that Tia had been able to hold out.

  “It must have been…oh, two, three years ago now,” Edmund said. “Steelheart was told by my previous masters that dogs were my weakness. He would occasionally lock me up with them. Not for any specific punishment though. I never could figure it out. It seemed random.”

  “He wanted you to be afraid of him,” I said, going through the contents of a pack and checking it against my list. “You’re so even-keeled, Edmund. Sometimes you don’t seem afraid of anything. You probably worried him.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m an ant among giants, David! I’m hardly a threat.”

  That wouldn’t have mattered to Steelheart. He’d kept Newcago in perpetual gloom and darkness, all to make certain that his people lived in fear. Paranoia had been his middle name. Except he’d had only one name—Steelheart—so Paranoia had been more like a last name for him.

  “Well,” Edmund continued over the line, “he’d lock me in with dogs. Angry, terrible ones. I’d huddle against the wall and weep. It never seemed to get better, maybe even worse.”

  “You were afraid of them.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said. “They negated my powers. They ruined me, turned me into a common man.”

  I frowned, zipping up the backpack and then taking off my mobile so I could look at the screen and see Edmund, an older man with brown skin and a faint Indian accent.

  “You gave away your powers anyway, Edmund,” I said. “You’re a gifter. Why would being powerless bother you?”

  “Ah, but my value to others has let me live in luxury and relative peace, while other men starve and scramble for life. My powers make me important, David. Losing them terrified me.”

  “Dogs terrified you, Edmund.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Yes, but you might have the cause wrong. What if you weren’t afraid of dogs because they negated your powers; what if they negated your powers because you were afraid of them?”

  He looked away from me.

  “Nightmares?” I asked.

  He nodded. I couldn’t see much of the room he was in; a safehouse outside Newcago, one Prof didn’t know about. We hadn’t been able to contact Edmund until Knighthawk had delivered him a new mobile, via drone. He’d turned the old one off at our request, and had neglected to ever turn it on again. He’d claimed he was merely being careful, in case our attack on the Foundry had gone wrong. Another one of his little rebellions.

  “Nightmares,” he said, sti
ll looking away from the screen. “Being hunted. Teeth gnashing, rending, ripping…”

  I gave him a moment and turned back to my work. As I knelt to the side, something slipped out of my T-shirt at the top. My pendant, the one Abraham had given me, marked with a stylized S shape. The sign of the Faithful, those who believed good Epics would come.

  I wore it now. After all, I did have faith in the Epics. Kind of. I tucked it into my shirt. Three packs checked over; two left. Even Cody, who would run ops on this mission, needed an emergency pack in case things went wrong. Our new hideout—a hastily constructed set of three rooms beneath the bridge in a rarely traveled park—wasn’t as secure as our other one, and we didn’t want to leave much behind.

  I needed to finish this, but I wanted to be able to see Edmund, not just hear him. This was an important conversation. I thought for a moment, then spotted one of Cody’s camo baseball caps sitting atop a stack of supplies we’d carted from the previous hideout.

  I smiled, grabbed some duct tape, and hung my mobile from the front of the bill—it took about half a roll of the tape, but whatever. When I put the cap on, the mobile hung down in front of me like a HUD on a helmet. Well, a very sloppy HUD. Either way, it meant I could see Edmund while keeping both hands free.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.

  “Nothing,” I said, getting back to work, mobile dangling near my face. “What happened with the dogs, Edmund? The day things changed. The day you faced them down.”

  “It’s silly.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  He seemed to weigh the situation. He didn’t have to obey, not with all of us so distant.

  “Please, Edmund,” I said.

  He shrugged. “One of the dogs went for a little girl. Someone opened the doors to let me out, and…well, I knew her. She was a child of one of my guards. So when one of the beasts lunged for her, I tackled it.” He blushed. “It was her dog. It didn’t want to attack her. It was just excited to see its master.”

  “You faced your fear,” I said, digging into the next pack, comparing its items to my list. “You confronted the thing that terrified you.”