Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“You brought Firefight through,” I continued, feeling again at the invisible wall. “Not just his shadow, not just a…projection of the other world. He himself was here.”


“I see your brain working, David,” she said, cautious. “What are you thinking?”

“Is there a reality where Prof hasn’t given in to his powers?”

“Probably,” Megan said. “That’s a little change, and very recent.”

“So you might be able to bring him here.”

“Not for very long,” Megan said. “What? You want to replace him in the team? My solutions are temporary. It…” She trailed off, eyes widening. “You don’t want a new Prof as a replacement. You want one to fight ours.”

“His fear is his powers, Megan. I initially tried to think how to trick him into gifting his abilities to someone—but there’s no reason we have to do that when we have you. If you can bring a version of Prof in from another world, we can make them face off, and bam…we engage Prof’s weakness. Make him confront his own powers in the most direct way possible, and therefore help him defeat the darkness.”

She looked thoughtful. “We could try it,” she said. “But David, I don’t like relying on the powers. My powers.”

I looked to where she was rubbing her hand. A fresh burn. I glanced at the candle.

“This might be the only way,” I told her. “He certainly won’t be expecting it. If we’re going to save Tia…”

“You still want me to practice,” she said. “Go further than I’ve gone before.”

“Yes.”

“That’s dangerous.”

I didn’t reply. I knew it was, and I knew I shouldn’t be asking this of her. It wasn’t fair. But sparks…Tia was in Prof’s hands. We had to do something.

“All right,” Megan said. “I’m going to try to alter reality a little further. You might want to move back from the wall.”

I did so. Megan’s face darkened in concentration.

And the entire building vanished, leaving me alone, hanging in the sky, in an unfamiliar world.





MY stomach lurched as I dropped a good twenty feet before crashing into some thick brush. The growth broke my fall, but the landing knocked the wind out of me. I lay there, trying to gasp but unable to draw in breath. Finally, painfully, I managed to suck air into my lungs.

A star-filled sky spun and wavered above me, my watering eyes making it difficult to see. Sparks…there were so many stars, and in such strange patterns. Clusters, ribbons, fields of light upon the black. I still wasn’t used to it. In Newcago the sky had been veiled in darkness by Nightwielder, so I’d had to imagine stars. Over the years my memories had grown fuzzy, and I’d started to imagine the stars spaced evenly, like in my vague recollections of picture books.

The reality was far messier. More like cereal spilled on the floor. I groaned and managed to sit up. Well, I thought, looking around, I probably deserved that. What had happened? Had I been sucked into Megan’s shadow dimension?

It seemed that way at first, though I was confronted with an oddity: Ildithia was here, off in the distance. Hadn’t Megan said that in her shadow world, it hadn’t come this way?

Something else was wrong. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.

Where was Calamity?

The stars were all there, sprinkling the sky, but the omnipresent red spot was gone. That was discomforting. Calamity was always there at night. Even in Newcago it had pierced the darkness, glaring at us.

I climbed to my feet, staring upward, trying to find it. And as I stood, everything around me fuzzed.

I found myself in our hideout again, near Megan, who was shaking me. “David? Oh, sparks, David!”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to take it all in. Yes, I was back, right where I’d been standing when I’d fallen. The wall was no longer transparent. “What happened?”

“I sent you through by accident,” Megan said. “You vanished completely, until you popped back out. Sparks!”

“Interesting.”

“Terrifying,” she said. “Who knows what you might have found on the other side, David? What if I’d dropped you into a world where the atmosphere was different, and you suffocated?”

“It was like our world,” I said, rubbing my side and looking around. “Ildithia was there, except in the distance.”

“What…really?” she asked. “Are you sure? I specifically picked a world where this region was empty, so I’d have a good view.”

I settled down. “Yeah. Can you reach out to the same world again, on purpose?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The things I do, they just kind of happen. Like bending your elbow.”

“Or eating a bagel,” I said, nodding.

“Not…actually like that, but whatever.” She hesitated, then settled down on the floor beside me. A moment later, Cody peeked in on us—apparently she’d been too loud when she’d cried out to me. Megan’s veil of dark fog had vanished, and he could see us.

“Everything all right?” he asked, rifle in hand.