I decided the best way to distract myself from the horror of Kansas City was to try to get something productive done. So I took out one of the boxes Knighthawk had given us. Mizzy twisted around in her seat, looking back over the headrest curiously. Abraham glanced at me in the rearview mirror but said nothing, and I couldn’t read his emotions. I’d known piles of ammunition more expressive than Abraham. The guy could be like some kind of Zen monk sometimes. With a minigun.
I lifted the lid, turning the box so Mizzy could see inside. It contained a pair of gloves and a jar filled with a silver liquid.
“Mercury?” Mizzy asked.
“Yeah,” I said, taking out a glove and turning it over.
“Isn’t that stuff, like, reaaaal bad for you?”
“Not sure,” I admitted.
“It causes madness,” Abraham said. Then, after a moment, “So no big change for anyone in this particular car.”
“Hur hur,” Mizzy said.
“Mercury is quite toxic,” Abraham said. “Quickly absorbed into the skin, and can even emit vapors that are dangerous. Be careful with it, David.”
“I’ll leave the lid on until I know what I’m doing. I’ll just see if I can get the mercury to move around in the jar.”
I pulled on the glove, eager. Immediately, lines of violet light ran down the fingers to a central pool in the palm. The softly glowing purple reminded me of the tensors, which I supposed made sense. Prof had created those to imitate Epic-derived technology. He’d probably used one of Knighthawk’s designs.
“This is going to be breathtaking,” I said, imagining the things I’d read about Rtich’s powers. I held my hand over the jar of mercury, but then paused. How exactly did I engage the abilities? The spyril had been tough to control, though easy to engage in the first place. But with the tensors, it had taken time before I’d managed to make them do anything.
I tried giving mental commands, tried using the tricks I’d used to make the tensors work, yet nothing happened.
“Is it gonna take my breath now,” Mizzy asked, “or, like, sometime down the road? I’d like to be prepared.”
“I have no idea how to make these work,” I said, waving my hand and trying again.
“Are there instructions, perhaps?” Abraham asked.
“What kind of super-amazing Epic technology comes with an instruction book?” I said. That seemed too mundane. Still, I looked through the box. Nothing.
“It is for the best,” Abraham said. “We should wait to try this in a more controlled environment—or at least until we aren’t driving on a half-broken road.”
With a sigh, I took off the glove, then picked up the large jar of mercury and stared at it. The stuff was weird. I’d imagined what a liquid metal would be like, but it defied those expectations. It flowed quickly, lightly, and was incredibly reflective. Like someone had melted a mirror.
I packed the jar away at another prompting from Abraham and set the box at my feet, though I did send a text to Knighthawk asking for instructions. Not long after, however, Megan’s car slowed ahead of us. Abraham’s mobile buzzed.
“Yeah?” he said, tapping it and pressing his earpiece in tighter. “Huh. Curious. We’re stopping now.” He slowed the jeep, then glanced back at me. “Cody has spotted something ahead.”
“The city?” I asked.
“Close. Its trail. Look at two o’clock.”
I got out my gun and—unzipping the top of the jeep—stood up. From that vantage, I could see something very interesting off the roadway: a huge plain of flattened, dead weeds. It extended into the distance.
“The city definitely came this way,” Abraham said from below. “You can’t tell from here, but that’s part of a very wide strip—as wide as a city—of dead grass. Ildithia leaves that behind as it travels, like a giant slug’s trail.”
“Great,” I said, yawning. “Let’s chase it down.”
“Agreed,” Abraham said, “but look closer. Cody says he spotted people walking the trail.”
I looked again, and indeed several small groups of people trudged along the wide strip of ground. “Huh,” I said. “They’re headed away from the city. We think it’s moving northward, right?”
“Yes,” Abraham said. “This confused Cody and Megan as well. Do you want to investigate?”
“Yes,” I said, settling back into the jeep. “I’ll send the other two.”
We turned off the road and moved toward the strip of dead grass as I texted Megan. See what you two can find out from those stragglers, but don’t take any risks.
They’re refugees, she sent. What kind of risks could be involved? Scurvy?
—
Cody and Megan went on ahead, and we hung back. I tried to catch a nap, but the jeep’s seat was too uncomfortable and—even though there really was no reason to worry—I was worried for Megan.
Eventually, her text came. They *are* refugees. They know about Prof, though they call him Limelight. He’s been here for two or three weeks, and some of the other Epics are resisting him, the main one in charge—a guy named Larcener—included.
The people have fled the city because they think a confrontation between Prof and Larcener is coming, and they figure they’ll get away for a week or two—live off the land—before going back and seeing who’s ended up in control.
Did they say how far away the city is? I asked.
They’ve been walking for hours, she sent, so…maybe an hour or two by jeep? They say we’ll pass other refugees moving toward Ildithia. People from Kansas City.
So at least some of the inhabitants escaped. I was relieved to hear that.
I showed the texts to Mizzy and Abraham.
“This note about Ildithian politics is good,” Abraham said. “It means that Prof has not stabilized power in the city. He will not have the resources to watch for us.”
“Will we be able to get in?” Mizzy asked. “Without looking suspicious?”
“We can hide among the refugees from Kansas City,” I said.
“We wouldn’t even need that,” Abraham said. “Larcener allows people to enter or leave Ildithia without penalty, so there is often a trickle going in and out. We can present ourselves as hopeful workers, and they should take us right in.”
I nodded slowly, then delivered the order to continue off-road, but to give the swath of dead land a wide berth. Working cars—which had to be converted to run off power cells—were a novelty in most parts of the world. Who knew what sort of stupid bravery we could run into if we came too close to people desperate enough?
Megan and Cody rejoined us, and together we traveled across the bumpy ground for about an hour. Watching through my scope, I spotted the first signs of Ildithia: fields. They grew alongside the city, not in the patch of dead ground, but right next to it. I’d expected this; Atlanta was known for its produce.
Shortly after spotting this, I noticed something else peeking over the horizon ahead of us: a skyline incongruously rising from the center of a large, otherwise featureless landscape.
We’d found Atlanta, or Ildithia, its modern name.
The city of salt.
I sat on the hood of our jeep, which we’d parked in a little stand of trees a mile or two from Ildithia, and studied the city with my scope. Ildithia was made up of a good chunk of old Atlanta—downtown, midtown, some of the surrounding suburbs. About seven miles across, according to Abraham.
Its skyscrapers reminded me of Newcago—though admittedly, living inside the city hadn’t given me a good sense for what its skyline looked like. These buildings seemed more spaced out, and pointier. Also, they were made of salt.
When I’d heard about a city mad
e of salt, I’d imagined a place made of translucent crystal. Boy, had I been wrong. The buildings were mostly opaque, translucent only at the corners where the sun shone through. They resembled stone, not giant growths of the ground-up stuff for eating.
The skyscrapers represented a marvelous variety of colors. Pinks and greys dominated, and my scope’s magnification let me pick out veins of white, black, and even green running through the walls. Honestly, it was beautiful.
It was also changing. We had approached from the back—this city definitely had a “back” and a “front.” The districts at its rear were slowly crumbling away, like a dirt wall in the rain. Melting, sloughing off. As I watched, the entire side of a skyscraper crumbled; then the whole thing came tumbling down with a crash I could hear even at this distance.
The salt piled in lumps as it fell, getting smaller the farther along the trail they were. That made sense; most Epic powers didn’t create objects permanently. The fallen salt buildings would eventually melt and vanish, evaporating and leaving the dead, flattened ground we’d traveled along.
As I understood it, on the other side of the city new buildings would be growing—like crystals forming, Abraham had explained. Ildithia moved, but not on legs or wheels. It moved like mold creeping across a piece of discarded toast.
“Wow,” I said, lowering my rifle. “It’s incredible.”
“Yes,” Abraham said from beside the jeep. “And a pain to live in. The whole city cycles through every week, you see. The buildings that decay back here regrow on the front side.”
“Which is cool.”
“It is a pain,” Abraham repeated. “Imagine if your home crumbled every seven days, and you had to move across the city into a new one. Still, the local Epics are no more cruel than anywhere else, and the city has some conveniences.”
“Water?” I asked. “Electricity?”
“Their water supply is collected from rain, which falls often, because of a local Epic.”
“Stormwind,” I said, nodding. “And that—”
“Doesn’t melt the salt?” Abraham interjected before I could ask. “Yes, but it does not matter much. The buildings on the back side do get weathered by the time they fall, and perhaps they leak, but it is manageable. The bigger problem is finding ways to collect water that isn’t too salty to drink.”