Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

I wore it now. After all, I did have faith in the Epics. Kind of. I tucked it into my shirt. Three packs checked over; two left. Even Cody, who would run ops on this mission, needed an emergency pack in case things went wrong. Our new hideout—a hastily constructed set of three rooms beneath the bridge in a rarely traveled park—wasn’t as secure as our other one, and we didn’t want to leave much behind.

I needed to finish this, but I wanted to be able to see Edmund, not just hear him. This was an important conversation. I thought for a moment, then spotted one of Cody’s camo baseball caps sitting atop a stack of supplies we’d carted from the previous hideout.

I smiled, grabbed some duct tape, and hung my mobile from the front of the bill—it took about half a roll of the tape, but whatever. When I put the cap on, the mobile hung down in front of me like a HUD on a helmet. Well, a very sloppy HUD. Either way, it meant I could see Edmund while keeping both hands free.

“What are you doing?” he asked, frowning.

“Nothing,” I said, getting back to work, mobile dangling near my face. “What happened with the dogs, Edmund? The day things changed. The day you faced them down.”

“It’s silly.”

“Tell me anyway.”

He seemed to weigh the situation. He didn’t have to obey, not with all of us so distant.

“Please, Edmund,” I said.

He shrugged. “One of the dogs went for a little girl. Someone opened the doors to let me out, and…well, I knew her. She was a child of one of my guards. So when one of the beasts lunged for her, I tackled it.” He blushed. “It was her dog. It didn’t want to attack her. It was just excited to see its master.”

“You faced your fear,” I said, digging into the next pack, comparing its items to my list. “You confronted the thing that terrified you.”

“I guess that’s one possibility,” he said. “Things did change after that. These days, being around dogs still dampens my powers, but it doesn’t completely negate them. I assumed I’d been wrong all along—I thought maybe my weakness was actually pet dander or something like that. I couldn’t experiment though, without alerting everyone to what I was doing.”

Would that happen to Megan too? Over time, would fire stop negating her powers? Her weakness still worked on her, but she could make the darkness retreat. Perhaps what Edmund experienced was the next stage.

I zipped up the pack and set it with the others beside the wall.

“Tell me,” Edmund said. “Why is it that, if dogs are my weakness, devices with power cells charged by my abilities don’t fail when they’re around dogs?”

“Hmm?” I said, distracted. “Oh, the Large Dispersal Rule.”

“What?”

“An Epic’s weakness has less and less influence on their powers the farther you get from the Epic’s presence,” I said, zipping up the fourth pack. “Like in Newcago—if Steelheart’s powers had been negated in all places where someone didn’t fear him, then he wouldn’t have been able to turn the whole city to steel. Most of the people in the city didn’t know who he was, and couldn’t fear him. There would have been pockets of non-steel all over the place.”

“Ah…,” Edmund said.

I stood up, setting the pack with the others. This hat was not working as well as I wanted it to—it was too front-heavy, and kept slipping down.

Needs ballast, I decided. I grabbed the duct tape and used what was left to attach a canteen to the back of the cap. Much better.

“Are you…all right?” Edmund asked.

“Yup. Thanks for the information.”

“You can repay me,” he said, “by agreeing to give me to another master.”

I stopped in place, the empty cardboard roll from the duct tape in my hand. “I thought you liked helping us.”

“You’ve grown weak.” He shrugged. “You can’t protect me any longer, David. I’m tired of hiding in this little room; I’d rather serve a High Epic who can make sure I’m cared for. I hear Night’s Sorrow is still dominant.”

I felt sick. “You can go free, Edmund. I won’t stop you.”

“And risk being murdered?” He gave me a thin-lipped smile. “It’s dangerous out there.”

“You’ve escaped the darkness, Edmund,” I said. “You stumbled on the secret before anyone else. If you don’t want to run off, why not come join us? Be a member of the team?”

He picked up a book, turning away from the screen. “No offense, David, but that sounds like an awful ruckus. I’ll pass.”

I sighed. “We’ll send you another supply drop,” I said. “Knighthawk might want you to charge some power cells for him though.”

“Whatever I am commanded to do,” Edmund said. “But David, I do think you’re wrong about one aspect of the powers. You claim my fear of dogs created my weakness originally, but before Calamity, I wasn’t so afraid of them. I didn’t like them, mind you. Might even have hated them. But this fear? It seemed to bloom alongside my powers. It’s like the powers…needed something to be afraid of.”

“Like water,” I whispered.

“Hmm?”