Calamity (Reckoners, #3)(27)
I sat on the hood of our jeep, which we’d parked in a little stand of trees a mile or two from Ildithia, and studied the city with my scope. Ildithia was made up of a good chunk of old Atlanta—downtown, midtown, some of the surrounding suburbs. About seven miles across, according to Abraham.
Its skyscrapers reminded me of Newcago—though admittedly, living inside the city hadn’t given me a good sense for what its skyline looked like. These buildings seemed more spaced out, and pointier. Also, they were made of salt.
When I’d heard about a city made of salt, I’d imagined a place made of translucent crystal. Boy, had I been wrong. The buildings were mostly opaque, translucent only at the corners where the sun shone through. They resembled stone, not giant growths of the ground-up stuff for eating.
The skyscrapers represented a marvelous variety of colors. Pinks and greys dominated, and my scope’s magnification let me pick out veins of white, black, and even green running through the walls. Honestly, it was beautiful.
It was also changing. We had approached from the back—this city definitely had a “back” and a “front.” The districts at its rear were slowly crumbling away, like a dirt wall in the rain. Melting, sloughing off. As I watched, the entire side of a skyscraper crumbled; then the whole thing came tumbling down with a crash I could hear even at this distance.
The salt piled in lumps as it fell, getting smaller the farther along the trail they were. That made sense; most Epic powers didn’t create objects permanently. The fallen salt buildings would eventually melt and vanish, evaporating and leaving the dead, flattened ground we’d traveled along.
As I understood it, on the other side of the city new buildings would be growing—like crystals forming, Abraham had explained. Ildithia moved, but not on legs or wheels. It moved like mold creeping across a piece of discarded toast.
“Wow,” I said, lowering my rifle. “It’s incredible.”
“Yes,” Abraham said from beside the jeep. “And a pain to live in. The whole city cycles through every week, you see. The buildings that decay back here regrow on the front side.”
“Which is cool.”
“It is a pain,” Abraham repeated. “Imagine if your home crumbled every seven days, and you had to move across the city into a new one. Still, the local Epics are no more cruel than anywhere else, and the city has some conveniences.”
“Water?” I asked. “Electricity?”
“Their water supply is collected from rain, which falls often, because of a local Epic.”
“Stormwind,” I said, nodding. “And that—”
“Doesn’t melt the salt?” Abraham interjected before I could ask. “Yes, but it does not matter much. The buildings on the back side do get weathered by the time they fall, and perhaps they leak, but it is manageable. The bigger problem is finding ways to collect water that isn’t too salty to drink.”
“No plumbing then,” I said. The Reckoner hideout in Babilar had had a septic tank, which was a nice luxury.
“The rich have electricity,” Abraham said. “The city trades food for power cells.”
Megan strolled up, one hand shading her eyes as she looked at the city. “You sure this plan of yours will get us in, Abraham?”
“Oh, certainly,” Abraham said. “Getting into Ildithia is never a problem.”
We piled into the jeeps again, then did a careful loop around the city, keeping our distance just in case. We finally ditched our jeeps in an old farmhouse, fully aware that they might not be there when we returned, fancy Reckoner locks or not. We also swapped our clothing for battered jeans, dusty coats, and backpacks with old water bottles at the sides. When we set out, we hopefully looked like a group of loners working to survive on their own.
The following hike left me missing the bumpy ride of the jeep. As we drew close to the leading edge of Ildithia, we walked among more of those fields—things I’d read about, heard about, but never seen before today.
There was more connectivity between city-states in the Fractured States than I’d once assumed. Perhaps the Epics could have survived without any kind of infrastructure, but they tended to want subjects to rule. What good was it to be an all-powerful force of destruction and fury if you didn’t have peasants to murder now and then? Unfortunately peasants had to eat, or they’d go and die before you got a chance to murder them.
That meant building up some kind of structure in your city, finding some kind of product you could trade. Cities that could produce a surplus of food could trade for power cells, weapons, or luxuries. I found that satisfying. When they’d first appeared, the Epics had wantonly destroyed anything and everything, ruining the national infrastructure. Now they were forced to bring it all back, becoming administrators.
Life was so unfair. You couldn’t both destroy everything around you and live like a king.
Hence the fields. The ones I’d noticed alongside the city’s path had already been harvested, but these cornfields were ripe and ready. People worked them in large numbers, and though it was early spring, they were already harvesting.
“Stormwind again?” I whispered to Abraham, who hiked beside me.
“Yes,” he said. “Her rains cause hyperquick growth around the city; they can get a new crop every ten days. Periodically, the people travel with her a few days in advance of the city’s path and plant, then she waters. Workers travel ahead and manage the fields, then rejoin the city when it passes them. Oh, and you might want to keep your head down.”