Calamity (Reckoners, #3)(55)

“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.