Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“Close enough,” Cody said, patting me on the arm. “Abraham’s a strange one, lad. The rest of us, we make sense. You fight for revenge. I fight because I was a cop, and I took an oath. Mizzy, she fights because of her heroes, people like Val and Sam. She wants to be like them.

“Abraham though…why does he fight? I couldn’t tell you. Because of his fallen brothers and sisters in the special forces? Maybe, but he doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge. Maybe to protect the country? But if that’s the case, why’s he down here in the Fractured States? All I’ve been able to figure is that he doesn’t want to talk about it—and you shouldn’t assume he’s gentle because he’s in control, lad.” Cody rubbed his jaw. “Learned that the hard way once.”

“He punched you?”

“Broke my jaw,” Cody said with a laugh. “Don’t poke, kid. That’s what I learned!” He seemed not to care much, though a broken jaw sounded like a pretty big offense to me.

But then, who hadn’t wanted to punch Cody on occasion?

“Thanks,” I said, sitting down to begin wiggling into the sniper nest. “But you’re wrong about me, Cody. I don’t fight for revenge, not anymore. I fight for my father.”

“Isn’t that the same as revenge?”

I reached into my shirt and took out the small S-shaped symbol of the Faithful that I wore around my neck. The mark of one who awaited a day when the heroes would come. “No. I don’t fight because of his death, Cody. I fight for his dreams.”

Cody nodded. “Good on ya, lad,” he said, turning to walk to the steps. “Good on ya.”

I crawled into the sniper nest, head brushing the low ceiling, and lifted Cody’s rifle, patching my mobile into it. I pulled off my night-vision goggles and used the gun’s scope instead—it had an overlaid map of the area, as well as thermal imaging. Better than either, the rifle had an advanced sound-detection system. It would alert me if it heard anything nearby, creating a small blip on my map.

At the moment, nothing. Not even pigeons.

I lay there positioned on cushions Cody had left. Occasionally I would twist about in the square enclosure, poking my rifle out one of the other sides.

Sounds came from below, inside the warehouse. I checked in with the others, and Mizzy said that my idea—sending Cody into the parallel dimension to practice—was working. Said he had to frighten some kids away over there, who were living in the warehouse in that dimension, but otherwise he hadn’t encountered anyone.

I checked on an oddity after that—noise the rifle had picked up—but it turned out to be a few scavengers moving through the alleyway. They didn’t stop at our warehouse. Instead they continued on toward the outskirts of the city. This let me have an extended period alone to think. My mind wandered in the silence, and I realized something was nagging at me. I was dissatisfied, though annoyingly I couldn’t figure out exactly why. Something bothered me, either about the place we’d set up or the plan we’d made. What was I missing?

I mulled it all over for about an hour—only a fraction of my shift—and was actually glad when the alarm on my gun buzzed again. I zoomed in on the source of the disturbance, but it was just a feral cat scampering along a rooftop nearby. I watched it carefully, in case it was some kind of shapeshifting Epic.

By this time light had dawned on the horizon, and I yawned, licking my lips and tasting salt. I wouldn’t be sad to be away from this place. Unfortunately my watch was a full eight hours, which would include another six hours of dullness until noon arrived.

I yawned again and rubbed my fingernail on the rooftop’s saltstone rim in front of me. Curiously, our warehouse was still growing. The changes were minute, but looking closely I could see that vines as thin as pencil lines were growing along the saltstone, as if carved by an invisible hand.

The city’s major changes happened on the first and last days of a building’s life, but the times between weren’t static. Tiny ornamentations often popped up, ones that would be gone in another day or two, weathered away by the inevitable decay that was this city’s infinite cycle.

The alarm on my rifle buzzed again, and I looked through the scope at the map. The sound was coming from on top of our warehouse, and a moment later I heard footsteps grinding on the saltstone. They came from the direction of the staircase from the building below, the one that led from the loft to the roof. It was likely one of my team. Still, I carefully slipped my mobile out the side of the sniper hole, using its camera—which had a feed to the scope—to see who was up there.

It was Larcener.

I hadn’t been expecting that. I couldn’t recall him setting foot outside his room at any of the three bases, except during times when we’d needed to transition from one to the other. He stood with his hand shading his face, scowling at the distant sunrise.

“Larcener?” I asked, crawling back out of the sniper hole, rifle in tow. “Is everything all right?”

“People enjoy these,” he said.