Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“There’s only one set, as far as I know. The Creer boys, Hanjah and the Mad Pen, in the Coven. They’ve been active lately in…Charleston, isn’t it?”


“Good, good,” Knighthawk replied. “You do know your stuff. You want a seat? You look uncomfortable.”

The mannequin pulled over a stool for me and I sat.

“Those two go all the way back,” Knighthawk explained, “to about a year after Calamity, around the time that Prof and the others got their powers. First wave, you lorists call it. And they’re what started some of us thinking about how the powers worked. They have—”

“—the exact same power set,” I said. “Air pressure control, pain manipulation, precognition.”

“Yup,” Knighthawk said. “And you know what, they aren’t the only pair of twin Epics. They’re merely the only pair where one didn’t kill the other.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “I’d have known about them.”

“Yeah, well, my associates and I made sure nobody heard of the others. Because in them was a secret.”

“Each set of twins had the same abilities,” I guessed. “Twins share a power set.”

Knighthawk nodded.

“So it is genetic, somehow.”

“Yes and no,” Knighthawk said. “We can’t find anything genetic about Epics that gives clues to their powers. That mumbo-jumbo about mitochondria? We made it up; seemed plausible, since Epic DNA tends to degrade quickly. Everything else you’ve heard about motivators is technobabble we use to confuse those who might be trying to figure out how to compete with us.”

“Then how?”

“You realize that by telling you, I’d be breaking an agreement I have with the other companies.”

“Which I appreciate.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me, and his mannequin folded its arms.

“If there’s even the slightest chance that I’m right,” I said, “and I can stop the Epics forever, isn’t it worth the risk?”

“Yes,” Knighthawk said. “But I still want a promise out of you, kid. You don’t share this secret.”

“It’s wrong of you to keep it,” I said. “Perhaps if the governments of the world had possessed this knowledge, they’d have been able to fight back against the Epics.”

“Too late,” he said. “Your word.”

I shook my head. “Fine. I’ll tell my team, but I’ll swear them to secrecy too. We won’t tell anyone else.”

He thought about that for a moment, then sighed. “Cell cultures.”

“Cell…what?”

“Cell cultures,” he said. “You know, when you take a sample of cells and keep them growing in a lab? That’s the answer. Grab an Epic’s cells, stick them in a test tube with some nutrients, and run power through them. Boom. You can emulate that Epic’s powers.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Nope.”

“It can’t be that easy.”

“It’s not easy at all,” Knighthawk said. “The voltage of the electricity determines which power you get out. You have to be ready to channel it properly, or you could blow yourself—hell, the entire state—to the moon. Most of our experimentation, all of this equipment, is based on harnessing the abilities that come off the cells.”

“Huh,” I said. “So you’re saying that Calamity can’t distinguish between an actual person and a pile of cells?” That was a strange mistake for an intelligent being to make.

“Eh,” Knighthawk said. “More like they just don’t care. If Calamity is an Epic, I mean. Besides, maybe there’s some kind of interaction with motivators we don’t understand. Truth is, those things can be touchy, even in the best of cases. Once in a while, a power simply won’t work for someone. Everyone else can use it fine, but one person can’t operate the device.

“It happens more often to Epics. Jonathan proved that Epics could use motivators, but occasionally we’d run into one that he couldn’t operate. Same goes for two different motivators being used by the same person. Sometimes they interfere and one craps out.”

I sat back on the stool, thoughtful. “Cell cultures. Huh. Makes sense, I suppose, but it seems…so simple.”

“The best secrets usually are,” he said. “But it’s simple only in retrospect. Do you know how long it took scientists in pre-Calamity days to figure out how to make cultures of normal human cells? It was a strikingly difficult process. Well, same with motivators. We slaved to create the first ones. What you call a motivator is really a little incubator. The motivator feeds the cells, regulates temperature, expels waste. A good motivator will last decades, if built right.”

“Regalia knew your secret,” I said. “She took Obliteration and used his cells to create a bomb.”

Knighthawk was silent. When I looked at him, his mannequin had settled against the wall, hands behind its back, head down as if uncertain.

“What?” I asked.

“Making motivators from Epics who are still alive is dangerous.”

“For the Epic?”