Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

After the search wrapped up, we were cleared. The guy from before, who’d given us our orientation, pointed. “You can take any building that’s not occupied. But if I were you, I’d keep my head down these next few weeks.”


“Why?” I asked, slinging my pack over my shoulder.

He eyed me. “Trouble between Epics. Nothing we can bother ourselves with, other than to lie low. Might be less food to be had in coming days.” He shook his head, then pointed toward a stack of crates sitting outside the border. “I tell you what,” he said to us and a few other newcomers. “I lost my work crew this morning. Sparking morons ran off. You help me cart those crates in, and I’ll give you a full day’s grain requisition, as if you’d started in the morning.”

I looked to the others, who shrugged. If we’d actually been the loners we pretended to be, there was little chance we’d have passed up such an opportunity. Within minutes, we were hauling crates. The wooden containers were stamped with the burned-in mark of UTC, a group of nomadic traders ruled by Terms, an Epic with time manipulation powers. Looked like I’d missed her visit, unfortunately. I’d always wanted to see her in person.

The work was hard, but it did give me a chance to see some of the city. Ildithia was well populated; even with a large number of people manning the fields, the streets were busy. No cars, except the ones on the sides of the road that were made of salt, leftovers from when the city had originally been transformed. Apparently when the city regrew each week, it also reproduced things like these cars. None of them worked of course. Instead, there were a striking number of bicyclists.

Laundry was draped on lines outside windows. Children played with plastic cars alongside one road, their knees covered in salt that had rubbed off the ground. People carried goods purchased from a market that, after a few trips, I managed to pinpoint on a street one over from our path—which ran between the outer edge of the city and a warehouse about a half hour inside.

As I traipsed back and forth with box after box, I was able to get a good feel for how the buildings grew. Right inside the border, bulges formed into the knobs of weathered-looking foundations, like stones that had stood for centuries in the wind. Beyond those, the buildings had begun to fully take shape, walls stretching upward, brickwork emerging. It was like erosion in reverse.

The process wasn’t perfect. Occasionally we would pass unformed lumps on the ground or between buildings, like cancerous growths of salt. I asked one of the other people lugging boxes about it, and he shrugged and told me that each week there were some irregularities. They’d be gone the next time the city cycled through, but others would have grown.

I found it all fascinating. I lingered for a long moment before what seemed like it would become a row of apartments formed out of a black-blue salt with a swirling pattern. I could almost see the buildings rising, ever so slowly, like…popsicles getting un-licked.

There were trees too—that was a difference from Newcago, where nothing organic had transformed. These grew up like the buildings, crafted delicately from salt. They were only stumps here, but farther in they were full-blown trees.

“Don’t stare too long, newbie,” a woman said, hiking past and dusting off her gloved hands. “That’s Inkom territory.” She was one of the workers from the field, recruited to haul with us.

“Inkom?” I asked, catching up and nodding to Abraham as he passed, carting another box.

“That neighborhood,” the tall woman said. “Closed doors—they don’t take new members. They’re up for degrade on the trailing edge, and usually move into that apartment set until their homes reconstitute. After Inkom moves out, Barchin tends to move in, and you don’t want to try to deal with them. Nasty bunch. They’ll let anyone join, but they’ll take half your rations, and only to let you sleep in a gutter between two buildings until you’ve been with them for a year.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said, looking over my shoulder at the lumpish buildings. “But this place is big—looks like there’s lots of empty space. Why would we want to join a family anyway?”

“Protection,” the woman said. “Sure, you can set up in an empty home—there are lots of those—but without a good family at your back, you’re likely to get robbed blind, or worse.”

“Rough,” I said, shivering. “Anything else I should know? Isn’t there a new Epic to worry about?”

“Limelight?” she said. “Yeah, I’d stay out of his way. Any Epic’s way, even more than usual. Limelight is mostly in charge now, but there are a few holdouts. Stormwind. Larcener. War is brewing. Either way, Epics like the skyrises, so stay away from downtown. Right now, the downtown is about five.”