to become the thing he hates. I believe, in the end, that is what convinced Calamity to agree to my request.”
She slapped me in the chest with a liquid hand, shoving me off her platform. I fell backward into the waters, and they churned about me, raising me in a pillar toward the night sky. I sputtered, righting myself, and discovered that I was hanging some hundred feet in the air, as if on an enormous jet made by the spyril. I looked upward.
And there was Calamity.
The star burned fiercely, and the land around me seemed to grow red, bathed in a deep light. Like on that first night, so long ago, when Calamity had come and the world had changed. Impossibilities, chaos, followed by Epics.
It dominated my view, that burning redness. I didn’t feel as if I—or it—had changed locations, and yet suddenly it was all that I could see. I felt, against reason, that I was so close I could reach out and touch the star. And within that blazing, violent redness, I swore I saw a pair of fiery wings.
My skin grew cold, then shocked alive with a tingling, electric sensation—as if recovering from numbness. I screamed, doubling upon myself. Sparks! I could feel it coursing through me. A foul energy, a transformation.
It was really happening.
No, no … Please …
The redness upon the land retreated, and my water pillar slowly lowered. I barely noticed, as the tingling feeling continued, more frantic, like thousands of worms squirming under my skin.
“It is unsettling at first,” Regalia said softly as I lowered down to sea level beside her. “I have been assured that you will be given powers that are ‘thematically appropriate.’ I suggested the same water-manipulation abilities that young Georgi possessed. That, if you have forgotten, is the Epic who was killed to make that abomination you call the spyril. I think you’ll find being an Epic to be far more liberating than using some device to ape us.”
I groaned, rolling over, face toward the sky. Calamity now seemed only a distant prick, but that red glow upon the land remained—faint, but noticeable. Everything around me was bathed in a shade of crimson.
“Well, on with it,” Regalia said. “Let’s see what you can do. I am distinctly interested to see how your former teammates react when you bumble into the middle of their careful planning, manifesting Epic powers, murdering everyone you see. It should be … amusing.”
A distant part of my brain realized that this was why she’d been so fast to help me escape the base. She hadn’t believed I was defecting; she intended to use me, and my new powers, as a way to disrupt the Reckoners’ plans.
I rolled back over, finding my way to my knees, still positioned on a section of water that Regalia had made solid. My face reflected in the waters, lit by spraypaint on a nearby building.
Was I now an Epic?
Yes. I felt it was true. What had just happened between me and Calamity was no trick. But still, I had to test it. I had to know for absolute certain.
And then I would kill myself, quickly, before the desires consumed me.
I reached out to touch the water.
42
I felt something.
Well, I felt the water, of course. I mean something else. Something inside of me. A stirring.
Hand on the surface of the water, I peered into those depths. Just beneath me was an ancient steel bridge cluttered with a line of rusted cars. A window into another world, an old world, a time before.
I imagined what it would have been like to live in this city when the waters swept in. My fears returned, the images of being crushed, drowned, trapped.
Only … I found that they didn’t control me as they once had. I was able to shove them aside. Nothing would ever again be as bad as standing before the glass wall beneath the ocean and firing a pistol toward it, inviting the sea to come and crush me.
Take it, a voice said in my head. A quiet, distant voice, but a real one. Take this power. It is yours.
I …
Take it!
“No.”
The tingling vanished.
I blinked at the waters. Calamity’s light had retreated, and everything looked normal again.
I stumbled to my feet and turned to face Regalia.
She smiled. “Ah, it takes hold!”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m a washing machine at a gun show.”
She blinked, looking totally befuddled. “… What did you just say?”
“Washing machine?” I said. “Gun show? You know. Washing machines don’t use