Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

We called it Herman. Well, I called it Herman, and nobody else had come up with something better. We’d used it to grow this entire building in an alleyway over the course of two nights, expanding upon a large lump of salt that had grown there already. This place was on the northern rim of the city, which was still growing, so that the half-finished structure wouldn’t look odd.

The nearly finished hideout was tall and thin, going up three narrow stories. In places, I could reach out and touch both walls at once. We’d made the outside of it look like lumps of rock to match the other growths like this in the city. All in all, we’d decided we preferred a place that was more secure, built ourselves, rather than moving into one of the houses out there.

I headed down the steep pink crystal steps to the next level, the kitchen—or at least where we’d set up a hot plate and water jug, along with a few small appliances powered by one of the jeeps’ power cells.

“Finally done unpacking?” Mizzy asked me, wandering by with the coffeepot.

I stopped on the bottom step. “Uh…” Actually, I hadn’t finished.

“Too busy smooching, eh?” Mizzy said. “You do realize that without doors, we can kinda hear everything.”

“Uh…”

“Yeaaaah. I wish there were a rule against team members making out and stuff, but Prof would never have done that, considering that him and Tia were a thang.”

“A thang?”

“It’s a word you probably shouldn’t ever say again,” she said, handing me a cup of coffee. “Abraham wanted to see you.”

I set the coffee aside and got a cup of water instead. I could never see why people drank that stuff. It tasted like soil boiled in mud, with a topping of dirt.

“You still have my old mobile?” I asked Mizzy as she climbed the steps. “The one Obliteration broke?”

“Yup, though it’s cracked pretty good. Saved it for parts.”

“Grab it for me, will you?”

She nodded. I climbed down to the ground floor, where we’d stashed most of our supplies. Abraham knelt in one of the two rooms here, lit only by the light of his mobile—the upper two floors had hidden skylights and windows, but not much filtered down this far. We’d built him a worktable here out of saltstone, and he was going over the teams’ weapons one at a time, cleaning and checking them.

Most of us were perfectly willing to do it on our own, but…well, there was something comforting about knowing that Abraham had approved your gun. Besides, my Gottschalk was no simple hunting rifle. With electron-compressed magazines, hyperadvanced scope, and electronics systems that hooked into my mobile, I would be able to do only the basics on my own. It was the difference between putting ketchup on your hot dog and decorating a cake. Best to let an expert take over.

Abraham nodded to me, then waved toward his pack nearby on the floor, which hadn’t been completely unloaded. “I brought something back for you during my trip out to the jeeps.”

Curious, I walked over and rummaged in the pack. I pulled out a skull.

Made entirely of steel, it reflected the mobile’s light with its eerie, smooth contours. The jaw was missing. That had been separated from it in the blast that had killed this man, the man who had named himself Steelheart.

I stared into those eye sockets. If I had known then that there was a chance of redeeming Epics, would I have pushed forward with my insistence on killing him? Even now, holding this skull made me think of my father—so hopeful, so confident that the Epics would turn out to be the saviors of mankind, not its destroyers. Steelheart, in murdering my father, represented the ultimate betrayal of that hope.

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that,” Abraham said. “I threw it in at the last minute, because there was space.”

I frowned, then set the skull on a salt shelf overhead. I dug farther in the pack and located a heavy metal box. “Sparks, Abraham. You carried this in?”

“I cheated,” he said, snapping the trigger guard assembly onto my rifle. “Gravatonics at the bottom of my pack.”

I grunted, lugging out the box. I thought I recognized it. “An imager.”

“Thought you might want one,” Abraham said. “To set up the plan, like we used to do.” Prof would often call the team into a room to go over our plans, and he used this device to project ideas and images onto the walls.

I wasn’t nearly that organized. I turned on the imager anyway, plugging it into the power cell Abraham was using. The imager scattered light through the room. It wasn’t calibrated to this location, so some of the images were fuzzy and distorted.

It showed Prof’s notes. Scribbled lines of text, as if made in chalk on a black background. I walked to the wall and felt at some of the scribbled writings. They smudged as if real, and my hand made no shadow on the wall. The imager wasn’t like an ordinary projector.

I read through some of the notes, but there was little of relevance here. These were from when we’d been fighting Steelheart. Only one sentence struck me: Is it right? Three solitary words, alone in their own corner. The rest of the writing was cramped, words fighting with one another for space like too many fish in a tiny tank. But these sat on their own.