Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“Shut up, Cody,” Megan said, tucking her gun back into its place under her arm. “Warn Abraham and Mizzy we had a run-in with Obliteration. We’re moving on step three now.”


“Roger,” Cody said. “And David…”

“Yeah?”

“Y’all ever stick your tongue in my ear, and I’ll shoot ya in yer bagpipes.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, then proceeded to undress.

I was wearing slacks under my bulky jeans and a button-up shirt underneath my jacket. Megan tossed me her jacket; I pulled out the lining, which reversed the jacket into a tuxedo coat.

Her sweater came off next, revealing the gown she had bunched up around her waist. Off came her trousers—she wore tight biker shorts beneath—and then she yanked down the gown’s skirt, covering her legs.

I tried not to gawk. Or, well, I tried to gawk covertly. Megan’s sleek red gown was all sparkly and gorgeous and…well, it really accented her curves. Like how a nice cheekpiece with shadow lines accents a perfect rifle stock.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t wearing her own face. That ruined the effect. But still, that neckline…

I caught her looking at me and blushed. Only then did I realize she didn’t seem to have noticed my ogling, but was instead nodding to herself, a faint smile on her lips.

“Are you…staring at my chest?” I asked.

“What?” she said. “Stay focused, Knees.”

Awesome, I thought, tossing on my jacket.

“Take this,” she said, handing me the small box she’d removed from her mixer’s power adapter. “Dresses like this don’t have much in the way of storage.”

“Don’t you usually…” I nodded toward her cleavage.

“I’ve already got my mobile stuffed in there,” she said. “And before you ask, no, there wasn’t more room for any mini-grenades. I strapped those to my thigh. A girl’s got to be prepared.”

Sparks, I love this woman.

I tucked the box into a pocket, and the two of us stepped to the door. Megan concentrated, transforming our features again. I felt a warping as it happened. A blink of another world, another reality. In it, the people we’d been disguised as walked away—a woman with the face Megan had been wearing, and a man with a solemn expression and wide lips.

Gone were the two pastry chefs. What stepped out into the main room was instead a pair of rich dinner guests wearing a different pair of false faces. For a moment there, I’d seen what Megan must when she used her powers—the ripples of time and space that made up our reality.

Megan slipped her arm through mine and we started to stroll through the large disc of a room, on the upper walkway, a portion that didn’t rotate. I noted that Obliteration had returned to his throne, a coconut in hand, of all things. He’d probably teleported somewhere and fetched one. So far as I’d been able to discover, there was no distance limitation to his teleportation—he simply had to have seen the place, or at least had it described, to get there.

He glanced toward me and nodded. Sparks. He saw through this disguise too? I didn’t buy his line about my eyes; he had some kind of power he was keeping hidden. Maybe he was a dowser and could sense Epics. Though this room was filled with Epics. How would he recognize the two of us?

Troubled, I tried to keep my mind on our task.

“Nice work,” Cody said in my ear. “Keep it up. A quarter rotation through the room to go.”

“Team Hip still good?” I asked.

“Ready and waiting,” Cody said.

We continued, passing close to Loophole’s table. The lean, short-haired woman was shrinking servers and making them dance on her table for the amusement of her gathered crowd. I’d always wondered…

Megan steered me onward as I started to linger.

“Her powers are awesome,” I whispered to her. “She has incredible control of what she can shrink and how she does it.”

“Yeah, well, ask for an autograph later,” Megan said.

“Um…are you jealous? Because your powers are way better than—”

“Focus, David.”

Right. We walked around the room until we approached a small door marked with a restroom sign. It was in the central hub, same as the kitchens. We stepped in, and as Tia’s plans indicated, beyond was a small service hallway, with a restroom on either side. Straight ahead was our goal. A nondescript white door, obviously important—the other doors were still salt, heavy and awkward to move. This one was wood, with a silvery doorknob.

I got out a set of lockpicks. “This would be easier if you could swap the door for one that wasn’t locked,” I said, working on the knob.

“I might be able to do that,” she said. “But I don’t know if I could make it permanent. Which would mean that you’d enter through the door, step into another dimension, and change things there—then it would all swap back once you stepped out.”

“You fixed the cupcakes,” I said.