“Do it,” he growled. “Do it, you bastard!”
My hand was steady, my aim unwavering, as I rested my finger on the trigger—and remembered.
Another day, in a steel room, with a woman I’d driven to rage.
Me, kneeling on a gridiron battlefield.
My father, his back to the bank pillar, in the shadow of a deity.
“No,” I said, turning away.
Megan didn’t object. She joined me. Together, we walked away from Prof.
“Who’s the coward now?” he demanded, kneeling in shadows and flickering firelight. Weeping. “David Charleston! Killer of Epics. You’re supposed to stop me.”
“That,” a new voice said, “can be arranged.”
I turned, completely astonished, as Larcener strolled from the shadows of a stone overhang nearby. Had he been there all along? It defied reason. But—
He reached Prof and lightly rested his fingers on the man’s neck. Prof screamed, going stiff.
“Like ice water in the veins, I’m told,” Larcener said.
I charged toward them across the open cavern. “What are you doing?”
“Ending your problem,” Larcener said, holding on to Prof. “You wish me to stop?”
“I…” I swallowed.
“Too late anyway,” Larcener said, pulling his fingers away and inspecting them. He looked into Prof’s eyes. “Excellent. It worked this time. I did need to check, after our little…problem with your girlfriend.” He looked up at the sky, then glared at the sunlight, stepping back into the shadows. Sparks. The sun was low on the horizon; it had to be at least five by now. I hadn’t realized we’d been fighting so long.
I knelt down beside Prof. He was staring ahead, looking stunned. I prodded him softly, but he didn’t move, didn’t even blink.
“It’s a good solution, David,” Megan said, joining me. “It’s either this or kill him.”
I looked into those sightless eyes and nodded. She was right, but I couldn’t help feeling that I’d failed in some monumental way. I’d fought Prof to a halt, figured out his weakness, and negated his powers. Yet he hadn’t pushed back the darkness.
We could have found another method, right? Kept his weakness engaged until he came to himself? I wanted to weep—but strangely, I felt too tired even for that.
“Let’s go find the others,” I said, rising. I pulled off the vest, still with wires attached for the motivators. We’d need to get the harmsway running again to heal Abraham. I set it beside the metal boxes that held the motivators, then I scanned the sky, hoping to spot one of Knighthawk’s drones.
A flash of light.
Obliteration’s hand fell on my shoulder. “Well done,” he said. “The beast is vanquished. It is time for me to make good on my promise.”
We vanished.
WE appeared on a barren cliff overlooking a scrub desert with sweltering air that smelled of baked earth. Red rocks peeked from the soil, displaying a variety of strata, like pancakes piled high.
Behind me, something glowed brightly. I turned and raised my hand, squinting at it.
“A bomb,” Obliteration said. “Made of my own flesh. My son, you might say.”
“You used one of these to destroy Kansas City.”
“Yes,” he said, subdued. “I cannot travel well when full of energy. I must sun myself in the place I am to destroy, but that creates a conundrum. The more my notoriety grows, the more people flee my presence. And so…”
“And so you took Regalia’s offer. Your flesh in exchange for a weapon.”
“This one was for Atlanta,” he said, then rested his hand on my shoulder in an almost paternal way. “I give it to you, Steelslayer. For your hunt. Can you use this to destroy the king above, the Epic of Epics?”
“I don’t know,” I said, eyes watering against the light. Sparks…I was so tired. Drained. Wrung out, like a threadbare dishrag so full of holes it was good for nothing more than propping up the corner of your wobbly kitchen table. “But if anything can do it, that will.” Even powerful High Epics had been known to fall to overwhelming outpourings of energy like nukes, or Obliteration’s own destructive force.
“I will take you, and it, to the palace above,” he said. “The new Jerusalem. Detonate the bomb with this.” He handed me a small rod, kind of penlike, which was startlingly familiar. A universal detonator. I’d had one of these once.
“Could I…maybe do it from down here?” I asked.
Obliteration laughed. “You ask if you may set aside your cup? Only natural. But no, you must face this in person. I have extended your life to perform this act because I know its result. The detonator has a short range.”
I gripped the detonator in a sweaty palm. A death sentence then. Perhaps the bomb could have been rigged with a timer, but I doubted Obliteration would agree to that.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Megan, I thought, feeling sick. Yet here was the chance I’d insisted I sought. An ending.
“Can I…think about it?”
“For a short time,” he said, checking the sky. “But not long. He will soon rise, and we cannot let him see what we are planning.”
I sat down, trying to clear my mind, trying to recover some strength and confront the opportunity I’d been handed. I tried to sort through it. Prof defeated, but drained of powers. He’d seemed so numb when I’d looked at him, as if he’d been hit by some strong blow to the head. He’d recover, right? Some assumers left their prey stunned, even brain-dead, after their powers were taken. Those people recovered when the powers were restored, but Larcener never gave back what he stole. How had I never considered that?
Sparks, how had I missed Prof’s weakness? His timid planning, the way he looked for excuses to give away his powers and mitigate failures—it all pointed to his fears. All along, he’d been unwilling to fully commit.
“Well?” Obliteration finally asked. “We have no more time.”
I didn’t feel any more rested, despite the breather. “I’ll go,” I whispered, hoarse. “I will do it.”
“Well chosen.” He led me to the bomb that, I assumed, had been placed here in this wasteland to gather heat from the sun. I moved closer to it and got a sense of its shape—a metal box about the size of a footlocker. It wasn’t hot, though it seemed as if it should be.
Obliteration knelt and put one hand on it; the other he placed on my arm. “ ‘You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.’ Farewell, Steelslayer.”
My breath caught as I was seized in the flash of light. A second later, I found myself looking down at Earth.
I barely heard the crash behind me as Obliteration left, abandoning me. I was in space. I knelt on what appeared to be a surface of glass, looking down at a gloriously stomach-twisting sight: the Earth in its splendor, surrounded by a haze of atmosphere and clouds.
So peaceful. From up here, my daily concerns seemed insignificant. I tore my eyes away from that sight to look around, though I had to put my back to the bomb and squint to make anything out over its light. I was in some kind of…building, or ship? With glass walls?
I stumbled to my feet, noting the walls’ rounded corners, and a distant red light somewhere in this glassy structure. Then I realized that despite the fact that I was all the way up in space, my feet remained planted on the surface beneath me. I would have expected to float.
The bomb shone like a star behind me. I fingered the detonator. Should I…do it now?
No. No, I needed to see him first. Up close. He glowed crimson, bright as the bomb, but was somewhere ahead of me in the ship, his light refracting through corners and surfaces of glass.
My eyes were gradually adjusting, and I noticed a doorway. I stumbled toward it, as the floor was uneven, lined with ladderlike grips and bars. The walls were also uneven, made of different compartments filled with wires and levers—only it was all glass.
I passed through a corridor, with difficulty. There was something
etched into one wall, and I ran my hand over it. English letters? I could read them—some kind of company name, it seemed.
Sparks. I was in the old international space station, but it had been transformed into glass.
Feeling an unreal disconnect, I continued toward the light. The glass was so clear, I could almost believe that it wasn’t there. I stumbled through room after room, my arm out to make sure I didn’t walk into a wall, and the red light grew larger.
I eventually stepped into one last room. It was bigger than the others I’d passed through, and Calamity waited on the far side—facing away from me, I thought, though he was so bright it was difficult to make out much about him.
Arm raised against the light, I clutched the detonator tighter. I was being stupid. I should have blown the bomb. Calamity might kill me the moment he saw me. Who knew what powers this being had?
But I had to know. Had to see him with my own eyes. I had to meet the thing that had ruined my world.
I walked through the room.
Calamity’s light dimmed. My breath caught in my throat, and I tasted bile. What would the people below think? Calamity going out? The light lowered to a faint glow, revealing a young man in a simple robe, with red glowing skin. He turned to face me…and I knew him.
“Hello, David,” Larcener said.
“YOU,” I whispered. “You were down below! With us, all along!”
“Yes,” Larcener said, turning to regard the world. “I can project a decoy of myself; you know this. You even mentioned the power on several occasions.”
I reeled, trying to connect it all. He’d been with us.
Calamity had been living with us.
“Why…What…”
Larcener sighed, a shockingly human sound. Annoyance. An emotion I’d felt from him quite often. “I keep looking at it,” he said, “trying to find what you see in it.”
I hesitantly stepped up beside him. “The world?”
“It’s broken. Terrible. Horrid.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “Beautiful.”
He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.
“You’re the source of it all,” I said, resting my fingers on the glass in front of me. “You…all along…The powers you stole from other Epics?”
“I simply took back what I once gave,” he said. “Everyone was so quick to believe in an Epic who could steal abilities, they never realized they’d had it backward. I’m no thief. ‘Larcener,’ they called me. Petty.” He shook his head.
I swallowed, blinking. “Why?” I asked Calamity. “Please, tell me. Why have you done this?”
He mused, hands clasped behind him. It was Larcener. Not only the same face, but the same mannerisms. The same way he sniffed before speaking, as if forming words to speak with me were beneath him.
“You are to destroy yourselves,” he said quietly. “I am but the harbinger; I bring the powers. You use them and orchestrate your own end. It is what we have done in countless realms. I’m…told.”
“You’re told? By who?”
“It is a wonderful place,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “You wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. Peace. Softness. No terrible lights, no lights at all. We don’t sense with horrid appendages like eyes. We live there, as one, until our duty arrives.” He sneered. “And this is mine. So I came here and left it all. And exchanged it for…”
“Harsh lights,” I said. “Loud sounds. The pain of heat, of sensation.”
“Yes!” he said.
“Those aren’t my nightmares,” I said, raising my hand to my head. “They’re yours. Sparks…they’re all yours, aren’t they?”
“Don’t be foolish. Babbling about your silly notions again.”
I stumbled back, catching myself on a boxy protrusion from the wall. I could see it in my nightmares. Visions of being born in this world, a place so foreign to Calamity. To his senses, a terrible place.
The harsh lights of my nightmares were no more than common ceiling lights.
The clatter and yells? People talking, or the thumps of furniture moving.
The terrible nature of it was all in comparison to where he’d lived before. Another place, one I couldn’t comprehend, one that lacked such intense stimuli.
“Were you supposed to leave us?” I asked.
Calamity didn’t reply.
“Calamity! After you granted our powers, were you supposed to leave?”
“Why would I remain in this terrible place longer than I had to?” he said, dismissive.
“In Megan’s parallel world,” I whispered. “There you did leave, and the darkness never claimed the Epics. Here, you remained…and you infected us somehow. Your hatred, your loathing. You turned each Epic into a copy of you, Calamity.”
Megan had said that her fear of flames hadn’t been nearly as pronounced before her powers arrived. My fear of the depths had started once his eyes turned upon me. Whatever Calamity did, whatever he was, when he wormed his way into someone, he magnified their terrors to an unnatural level.
And when people were exposed to those fears—the things he hated—Calamity withdrew. Gone were the powers, and gone was the darkness.
Confronting the fears, that worked into it too somehow. It had to. When you confronted your fears, what happened?
They are mine, Megan had said. I claim them.
Sparks. Did that mean she had seized the powers and cast out Calamity fully? Separated them from the darkness?
“You all make so many excuses,” Calamity said. “You refuse to see what your people are, once they get a little power.” He looked at me. “What you are, David Charleston. You have hidden it from the others, but you cannot fool the source himself. I know what you are. When will you release it? When will you destroy, as is your destiny?”
“I never will.”
“Nonsense! It is your nature. I’ve seen it over and over again.” He stepped toward me. “How did you do it? How did you hold me off so long?”
“Is that why you came to us?” I asked. “In Ildithia? Because of me?”
Calamity glowered at me. Even now, even seeing him in his glory, I had the same impression of him I’d always had: that of a great spoiled child.
“Calamity,” I said, “you have to go. Leave us.”
He sniffed. “I am not allowed to go until my work is done. They made that clear, after I—”
“What?”
“I do not see you answering the questions I gave you,” he said, then turned back to look out his window. “Why have you denied your powers?”
I licked my lips, heart thumping. “I can’t be an Epic,” I said. “My father was waiting for them….”
“So?”
“I…” I trailed off. I couldn’t voice it.
“Eleven years, and still your kind lingers,” Calamity muttered. “Dwindling, yes, but also lingering. Ten years as a child I lived among you, until I fled to this place.”
That’s when Calamity rose, I thought. When he was ten—and when he decided to start giving away powers.
“This place,” Calamity said, “which is closer to my home than anything else in this rotten realm. But…I found I had to start going down again, among you. I had to know. What did you see in all of this? Eleven years more, and I haven’t been able to find it….”
I looked down at the thin detonator rod still clenched in my hand. I had my answers. They raised more questions, true. What was the place he had come from? Why did his kind seek to destroy us? He acted like it was predetermined, but by who, and why?
Questions I would probably never see answered. My single regret was that I hadn’t said goodbye to Megan. I would have liked one last, farewell kiss.
My name is David Charleston.
I clicked the button.
And I kill Epics.
The bomb detonated.
THE explosion ripped through the glass space station, shattering it to pieces. The heat and force hit me in an instant, then curved around me. It streamed into Calamity’s
outstretched palm, sucked like water through a straw.
It was over in an eyeblink. Behind me, the station reknit itself, glass forming back together, resealing.
I stood like an idiot, clicking the button again and again.
“You thought,” Calamity said without looking at me, “that my own power could destroy me? I suppose there would be a poetry to that. But I am master of the powers, David. I know them all, in their intricacy. Yes, I could tell you how Ildithia works. Yes, I could explain what Megan does in jumping to other realms—both core possibilities and ones ephemeral. But I am truly immortal. None of the powers could harm me, not permanently.”
I sank to the floor. The strain of it all overwhelmed me. The fight with Prof. Being stolen away by Obliteration. Pressing that button and being prepared to die.
“I’ve wondered if I should simply tell them,” Calamity mused, and turned to me. “You should understand that you need to destroy yourselves. But you see, I am not supposed to interfere. Even the small infractions—like being forced to make devices for your assault on Sharp Tower—worry me. It is against our way, though maintaining my cover required it.”
“Calamity, you’re already interfering. Deeply. You make them go mad! You make them destroy!”
He ignored me.
Sparks…how could I get him to see? How could I show him that he was causing the darkness and destruction, that men wouldn’t take to it as naturally as he claimed?
“You are worthless, as a whole,” he said softly. “You will destroy yourselves, and I will bear witness. I will not shirk my duty as others have. We are to watch, as is our calling. But I must not interfere, not again. The acts of youth can be forgiven. Though I was never truly a child, I was new. And your world is a shock. A dreadful shock.” He nodded, as if convincing himself.
I forced myself to stand. Then I slipped my gun from its holster on my leg.
“Your answer to everything, David Charleston?” Calamity said with a sigh.
“Worth a try,” I said, raising the gun.
“I contain the very powers of the universe. Do you understand that? They are all mine. I am what you call a High Epic a thousand times over.”