Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“Yes and no.”


In the moments I’d been down, Prof and Tavi had leveled walls separating rooms, creating a much larger field of battle. They exchanged bursts of light and tensor powers, leaving rips and craters in the floor.

That ceiling wasn’t going to last much longer. I sought out Megan, who knelt beside the remnants of a wall. She hissed between clenched teeth, watching the contest with unblinking eyes. I stepped toward her, but when she looked at me, her lips curled, teeth clenched. A sneer.

Uh-oh.

This was dangerous. She’d pulled too many things through to our world too quickly.

But sparks, it was working. Prof was backing down the hallway before an assault by Tavi—flying spears of blue light, which he was able to vaporize with his tensor power. The outer wall to his left was in shambles, wind howling through. To his right, rooms were pocked with holes, the floor and walls almost completely destroyed.

I threw myself toward Megan as the ceiling to Prof’s right fell in. Blinking—sparks, that salt made a scrape I’d gotten on my arm sting—I saw spears of glowing green launch toward Tavi, their light illuminating the dust around them. She deflected those, barely.

Prof had lost his air of uncompromising confidence; he was sweating and cursing as he fought, and—to my surprise—I saw a few scratches on his arm.

They weren’t healing.

Her powers were indeed negating his. But why hadn’t he turned good? Hadn’t he confronted his fears?

“David,” Tia said, anxious. “It sounds like the entire building is coming down. Are you all right?”

“For now. Tia…Megan summoned a version of him from another world. Someone with his powers. They’re fighting.”

“Sparks!” Tia cursed over the line. “You’re insane.” She grew silent for a moment as I stared at Prof, mouth agape, awed by the use of power. “All right,” Tia said, sounding reluctant. “I’m coming to you.”

“No,” I said. “Stay hidden. I don’t think there’s anything you can do. Anything any of us can do.”

I looked at Megan, her teeth clenched, and started toward her.

She looked at me, angry. “Stay back, David,” she growled. “Just…stay back.”

I stopped, then sighed and scuttled farther down the corridor—toward Prof and Tavi. Stupid, perhaps, but I needed to watch this. I passed the room where the ceiling had collapsed on my right, then came up toward the two combatants. The corridor turned here, but they’d continued on, vaporizing the wall and stepping into a lavish suite.

Prof unleashed a wave of tensor power toward Tavi, melting tables and chairs and hitting her full force. Buttons on her shirt disintegrated to dust, though the shirt didn’t. Only dense nonliving materials were affected.

Her forcefields vanished. She jumped for cover, narrowly dodging lances of light. It took a count of three before she was able to summon a forcefield to block oncoming blasts. It was working. She seemed to have the same weakness as Prof: the powers themselves, wielded by someone else. Getting hit by the tensors negated her abilities for a time, like fire did to Megan.

Could I do something? Explain this to her? I stepped forward, then hesitated as the air warped near me.

I was drawn into a momentary vision of another world: Firefight standing on a rooftop, hands clenched at his sides, fire rising from his fists. A night sky. Cold air punctuated by bursts of heat from the Epic.

The vision passed, and I was on the skyscraper battlefield again. I stepped away from the warping air, then took cover behind a broken saltstone wall, outside the room where Prof and Tavi were fighting. A few spears of light shot overhead, slamming into the wall above me like forks into a cake.

Now that I knew to look, I spotted other places where the air twisted and warped. They dotted the corridors and rooms; Megan’s powers were tearing our reality apart, interweaving it with Firefight’s.

That seemed to me like a very, very bad thing.

The lights suddenly dimmed, went out—then almost immediately came back on. Prof and Tavi didn’t even pause in their contest, but I did notice that the young woman looked far more haggard than he did. She was sweating, her teeth clenched, and tears streaked her face, washing through the prevalent salt dust there.

“Sparks,” Tia cursed over the line. “Still can’t get through this door. Jon has a backup generator in his rooms somewhere. It turned on when I cut the wires; I can hear it chugging inside.”

“You’re still going on about that?” I demanded.

“I’m not just going to sit here,” she said. “If he’s distracted, then—”