Calamity (Reckoners, #3)(54)

“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.

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.