Larcener seemed to have his own psychosis. I reached into a bowl on a little marble pedestal beside the door. Glass beads trickled between my fingers. No—diamonds.
“I don’t suppose,” I said, “you could make me a—”
“Stop.”
I glanced at Larcener.
“I should have made this clear at the start,” he said. “You get nothing from me. I am not here to give you gifts, nor to make your life easier. I will not become some servant.”
I sighed, dropping the diamonds. “You don’t sleep,” I said, trying a different tack.
“So?”
“You gained that power from another Epic, I assume. Did you take that one specifically because of the nightmares?”
He stared at me for a moment, then suddenly tossed his headphones aside and leaped to his feet. He took a single step, but crossed the wide distance between us in an instant.
“How do you know about my nightmares?” he demanded, looming in front of me. Larger. Taller.
I gaped, my heart racing again. Before this, he’d been determinedly lazy with us. Now—dwarfed by Larcener, who stood seven feet tall, with a terrible sneer and wild eyes—I felt I was a moment from being destroyed.
“I…” I swallowed. “All Epics have them, Larcener. Nightmares.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “They are mine. I am unique.”
“You can talk to Megan,” I said. “She’ll tell you she has them. Or you can go find any Epic and beat it out of them. They have nightmares, which are tied to their weaknesses. What the person fears becomes—”
“Stop your lies!” Larcener shouted, then growled at me and spun on his heel, stalking back to his couch and throwing himself down. “Epics are weak because they are fools. They will destroy this world. Give men power, and they abuse it. That is all one needs to know.”
“And you’ve never felt it?” I asked. “The sudden darkness that comes from using your powers, the lack of empathy? The desire to destroy?”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Silly little man.”
I hesitated, trying to read him—and having a tough time of it. Maybe he was constantly consumed by the darkness. He certainly acted arrogant enough.
But he hadn’t hurt any of us. He liked to order us around, but not in the way of an Epic, I realized. In the way of a spoiled child.
“You faced it young,” I guessed. “You grew up as an Epic, able to get whatever you wanted, but you never felt the darkness.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “I forbid you to speak of this idiocy anymore. Darkness? You want to blame the terrible things that Epics do on some nebulous idea or feeling? Bah. Men destroy themselves because that’s what they deserve, not because of some mystical force or emotion!”
He has to be facing it continually, I thought. Whatever his fear is, he must see it every day, and defeat it. That was what we’d learned with Megan; if she didn’t stay vigilant, the darkness crept back toward her.
I slipped from his palace of a room.
“I do hate you, you understand,” Larcener called from behind.
I glanced in again. He lounged on his couch, and like that he really did look like a kid. A teenager with his headphones on, trying to ignore the world.
“You deserve this,” he continued. “People are evil to the core. That’s what the Epics prove. That’s why you’re dying out.” He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, away from me.
I shivered, then checked the other room—which was now packed with supplies—for Megan. Not there. Above, Abraham was still practicing in the kitchen. On the top floor, I knocked outside the small bathroom—we’d resorted to using buckets again, unfortunately. Finally I peeked into the other bedroom once more.
Empty. Where—
Wait. Something about that dark room seemed too…um…dark? I frowned and walked into the room, passing through a veil of something. Megan sat cross-legged on the floor on the other side, a small candle on the floor beside her. She was staring out the wall.
Which was now gone.
The wall of the hideout was simply…gone. And there was no city beyond either. Megan looked out upon a nighttime landscape of blowing fields beneath a billion stars. She was rubbing her hand.
She noticed me as I walked up, first reaching for the gun on the floor beside her, then relaxing when she realized who it was. “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Nah,” I said, settling down beside her. “That’s quite the view.”
“Easy to make,” she said. “In so many of the branching possibilities, Ildithia didn’t come this direction. It was simple to find one where it isn’t here, and the field is empty.”
“So what is this, then?” I asked, reaching out. “Is it real?”
My hand felt something—the saltstone wall, though it looked like I was touching empty space.
“Just a shadow, for now,” she said.
“But you can go further,” I said. “Like you did when saving me from Knighthawk.”
“Yes.”
“You brought Firefight through,” I continued, feeling again at the invisible wall. “Not just his shadow, not just a…projection of the other world. He himself was here.”
“I see your brain working, David,” she said, cautious. “What are you thinking?”
“Is there a reality where Prof hasn’t given in to his powers?”
“Probably,” Megan said. “That’s a little change, and very recent.”
“So you might be able to bring him here.”
“Not for very long,” Megan said. “What? You want to replace him in the team? My solutions are temporary. It…” She trailed off, eyes widening. “You don’t want a new Prof as a replacement. You want one to fight ours.”
“His fear is his powers, Megan. I initially tried to think how to trick him into gifting his abilities to someone—but there’s no reason we have to do that when we have you. If you can bring a version of Prof in from another world, we can make them face off, and bam…we engage Prof’s weakness. Make him confront his own powers in the most direct way possible, and therefore help him defeat the darkness.”
She looked thoughtful. “We could try it,” she said. “But David, I don’t like relying on the powers. My powers.”
I looked to where she was rubbing her hand. A fresh burn. I glanced at the candle.
“This might be the only way,” I told her. “He certainly won’t be expecting it. If we’re going to save Tia…”
“You still want me to practice,” she said. “Go further than I’ve gone before.”
“Yes.”
“That’s dangerous.”
I didn’t reply. I knew it was, and I knew I shouldn’t be asking this of her. It wasn’t fair. But sparks…Tia was in Prof’s hands. We had to do something.
“All right,” Megan said. “I’m going to try to alter reality a little further. You might want to move back from the wall.”
I did so. Megan’s face darkened in concentration.
And the entire building vanished, leaving me alone, hanging in the sky, in an unfamiliar world.
MY stomach lurched as I dropped a good twenty feet before crashing into some thick brush. The growth broke my fall, but the landing knocked the wind out of me. I lay there, trying to gasp but unable to draw in breath. Finally, painfully, I managed to suck air into my lungs.
A star-filled sky spun and wavered above me, my watering eyes making it difficult to see. Sparks…there were so many stars, and in such strange patterns. Clusters, ribbons, fields of light upon the black. I still wasn’t used to it. In Newcago the sky had been veiled in darkness by Nightwielder, so I’d had to imagine stars. Over the years my memories had grown fuzzy, and I’d started to imagine the stars spaced evenly, like in my vague recollections of picture books.
The reality was far messier. More like cereal spilled on the floor. I groaned and managed to sit up. Well, I thought, looking around, I probably deserved that. What had happened? Had
I been sucked into Megan’s shadow dimension?
It seemed that way at first, though I was confronted with an oddity: Ildithia was here, off in the distance. Hadn’t Megan said that in her shadow world, it hadn’t come this way?
Something else was wrong. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.
Where was Calamity?
The stars were all there, sprinkling the sky, but the omnipresent red spot was gone. That was discomforting. Calamity was always there at night. Even in Newcago it had pierced the darkness, glaring at us.
I climbed to my feet, staring upward, trying to find it. And as I stood, everything around me fuzzed.
I found myself in our hideout again, near Megan, who was shaking me. “David? Oh, sparks, David!”
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to take it all in. Yes, I was back, right where I’d been standing when I’d fallen. The wall was no longer transparent. “What happened?”
“I sent you through by accident,” Megan said. “You vanished completely, until you popped back out. Sparks!”
“Interesting.”