Calamity (Reckoners, #3)(90)

The others carted all this away, Mizzy placing the old harmsway in the drone—the one that had healed Megan and me—and sending it off to return to Knighthawk. We had something better now, though we’d have to be careful about using it lest we alert Prof.

I caught Megan by the arm as the team passed, carrying the goodies. She nodded to me. She felt all right about using her powers. I didn’t follow her into the warehouse below, but instead walked over to Cody’s sniper nest. It was my turn to be on watch.

The nest was shaped like a wide, shallow box near the center of the roof. Cody had devised a ceiling for it with the crystal grower that merged right into the roof and made the structure look like another normal building feature. It had slits on all sides, however, and a large enough hole at the rear for you to crawl in and lie down.

I peeked in; the lanky Southerner was cuddled into the hole like a joey in its mother’s pouch—though people really shouldn’t let baby kangaroos play with a Barrett .50 cal with armor-piercing rounds.

“Has my new toy arrived?” Cody asked, setting aside the gun and wriggling backward out of the nest.

“Yeah,” I said, stepping out of his way as he stood up. “It looks great.”

“You sure you don’t want to pilot it, lad?”

I shook my head. “You have more experience with the tensors, Cody.”

“Yeah, but you were way more talented with them.”

“I…” I swallowed. “No, I need to be running the mission from behind.”

“Right, then,” he said, turning toward the steps down to the building.

“Cody?” I said, and he stopped, turned back. “The other day I was talking to Abraham and…well, he kind of bit my head off.”

“Ah. You were poking around, were you?”

“Poking around?”

“In his past.”

“No, of course not. I just asked why he didn’t want to be in charge.”

“Close enough,” Cody said, patting me on the arm. “Abraham’s a strange one, lad. The rest of us, we make sense. You fight for revenge. I fight because I was a cop, and I took an oath. Mizzy, she fights because of her heroes, people like Val and Sam. She wants to be like them.

“Abraham though…why does he fight? I couldn’t tell you. Because of his fallen brothers and sisters in the special forces? Maybe, but he doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge. Maybe to protect the country? But if that’s the case, why’s he down here in the Fractured States? All I’ve been able to figure is that he doesn’t want to talk about it—and you shouldn’t assume he’s gentle because he’s in control, lad.” Cody rubbed his jaw. “Learned that the hard way once.”

“He punched you?”

“Broke my jaw,” Cody said with a laugh. “Don’t poke, kid. That’s what I learned!” He seemed not to care much, though a broken jaw sounded like a pretty big offense to me.

But then, who hadn’t wanted to punch Cody on occasion?

“Thanks,” I said, sitting down to begin wiggling into the sniper nest. “But you’re wrong about me, Cody. I don’t fight for revenge, not anymore. I fight for my father.”

“Isn’t that the same as revenge?”

I reached into my shirt and took out the small S-shaped symbol of the Faithful that I wore around my neck. The mark of one who awaited a day when the heroes would come. “No. I don’t fight because of his death, Cody. I fight for his dreams.”

Cody nodded. “Good on ya, lad,” he said, turning to walk to the steps. “Good on ya.”

I crawled into the sniper nest, head brushing the low ceiling, and lifted Cody’s rifle, patching my mobile into it. I pulled off my night-vision goggles and used the gun’s scope instead—it had an overlaid map of the area, as well as thermal imaging. Better than either, the rifle had an advanced sound-detection system. It would alert me if it heard anything nearby, creating a small blip on my map.

At the moment, nothing. Not even pigeons.

I lay there positioned on cushions Cody had left. Occasionally I would twist about in the square enclosure, poking my rifle out one of the other sides.

Sounds came from below, inside the warehouse. I checked in with the others, and Mizzy said that my idea—sending Cody into the parallel dimension to practice—was working. Said he had to frighten some kids away over there, who were living in the warehouse in that dimension, but otherwise he hadn’t encountered anyone.

I checked on an oddity after that—noise the rifle had picked up—but it turned out to be a few scavengers moving through the alleyway. They didn’t stop at our warehouse. Instead they continued on toward the outskirts of the city. This let me have an extended period alone to think. My mind wandered in the silence, and I realized something was nagging at me. I was dissatisfied, though annoyingly I couldn’t figure out exactly why. Something bothered me, either about the place we’d set up or the plan we’d made. What was I missing?

I mulled it all over for about an hour—only a fraction of my shift—and was actually glad when the alarm on my gun buzzed again. I zoomed in on the source of the disturbance, but it was just a feral cat scampering along a rooftop nearby. I watched it carefully, in case it was some kind of shapeshifting Epic.

By this time light had dawned on the horizon, and I yawned, licking my lips and tasting salt. I wouldn’t be sad to be away from this place. Unfortunately my watch was a full eight hours, which would include another six hours of dullness until noon arrived.