Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“We wouldn’t even need that,” Abraham said. “Larcener allows people to enter or leave Ildithia without penalty, so there is often a trickle going in and out. We can present ourselves as hopeful workers, and they should take us right in.”


I nodded slowly, then delivered the order to continue off-road, but to give the swath of dead land a wide berth. Working cars—which had to be converted to run off power cells—were a novelty in most parts of the world. Who knew what sort of stupid bravery we could run into if we came too close to people desperate enough?

Megan and Cody rejoined us, and together we traveled across the bumpy ground for about an hour. Watching through my scope, I spotted the first signs of Ildithia: fields. They grew alongside the city, not in the patch of dead ground, but right next to it. I’d expected this; Atlanta was known for its produce.

Shortly after spotting this, I noticed something else peeking over the horizon ahead of us: a skyline incongruously rising from the center of a large, otherwise featureless landscape.

We’d found Atlanta, or Ildithia, its modern name.

The city of salt.





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.