Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“Uh…David?” Abraham asked. “Do you want to say something more, perhaps? That we…”

He trailed off as he spotted one person among the group wearing a hoodie, rifle slung over her arm. The hood made her face difficult to see, but several locks of red hair poked out next to her chin.

Tia.





ABRAHAM didn’t say anything as the two of us were quickly surrounded by armed people and hustled off the street toward one of the apartment buildings. He simply gave Tia a friendly salute, one finger tapping the middle of his brow. He’d obviously figured out what we were doing long ago.

Tia’s people shuffled us into a room with no windows, lit only by a row of candles that were slowly melting onto the countertop of an old kitchen bar. Why bother with candlesticks when your home would be dissolving anyway? Though the room did have an actual wooden door on it, which was rare in this city. It would have to be carted each week to the next location and reattached.

One of the armed Ildithians relieved us of our weapons, while another shoved us down into chairs. Tia stood at the back of the group, arms folded, her face shrouded by that hood. She was slender and short, and her lips—which I could see within the hood’s shadows—were drawn into a line of disapproval. She was the Reckoners’ second in command, and one of the smartest people I’d ever met.

“David,” she said calmly, “in Babilar, you and I met together in our hideout, after you’d gone out to deliver supplies. Tell me what we discussed.”

“What does that matter? Tia! We need to talk about—”

“Answer the question, David,” Abraham said. “She is testing to see if we are ourselves.”

I swallowed. Of course. Any number of Epics could have created doppelgangers of the Reckoners at Prof’s command. I tried to recall the event she was talking about. Why hadn’t she picked something more memorable, like when I’d first joined the Reckoners?

She needs something Prof wouldn’t know about, I realized.

I started to sweat. I’d been out on the submarine, and…Sparks, it was hard to think with those armed men and women staring at me, each as angry as a cabdriver who’d discovered I’d ralphed all over his back seat.

“I met with Prof that day,” I said. “I came to the base to report, and we talked about some of the other Epics in Babilar.”

“And what…interesting metaphor did you make?”

“Sparks, you expect me to remember those?”

“I’ve heard a few that were rather hard to forget,” Abraham noted. “Despite a great deal of time trying.”

“Not helping,” I muttered. “Uh…mmm…Oh! I talked about using toothpaste for hair gel. No, wait. Ketchup. Ketchup for hair gel, but as I think about it, toothpaste would have been a way better metaphor. It hardens stronger, I think, and—”

“It’s him,” Tia said. “Put your guns down.”

“How did you know she was with us, kid?” said one of the Ildithians, a stocky older woman with thinning hair.

“Your shipments,” I said.

“We get shipments twice a week,” the woman said. “As do most of the sizable families in the city. How would that have led you here?”

“Well…,” I said.

Tia groaned, putting her hand to her face. “My cola?”

I nodded. I’d spotted it in the crate that day when I’d first seen Prof. Not just any cola; the brand she loved. It was expensive, unique, and worth playing a hunch on.

“I told you,” said another Ildithian, a bulky man with a face like a barbecue grill. In that it was ugly. “I told you that accepting this woman among us would be trouble. You said we wouldn’t be in danger!”

“I never said that,” replied the woman with thinning hair. “I said that helping her was something we needed to do.”

“This is worse than you think, Carla,” Tia said. “David is smarter than he might first seem, but it’s hardly outside of reason that something he discovered might be discovered by someone else.”

“Uh…,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “Prof might know about the cola. At least, he spotted some of it in the boxes the other day.”

The people in the room froze, then started shouting to one another, sending messengers, warning their lookouts. Tia pulled off her hood, exposing her short red hair, and rubbed her forehead. “I’m a fool,” she said, barely audible over the shouted orders from Carla. “They put in their supply order and asked if I needed anything. I barely gave it any thought. A few cans of cola would be nice….”

Nearby, the ugly Ildithian man entered with the crate that had held the cola and dug through it, discovering the broken mobile. “A Knighthawk mobile?” he said. “I thought these were untraceable.”