Steelheart

20

When we returned, Cody was off on a mission to do some scouting for Tia. She waved toward some rations on the back table of the main room, awaiting devourment. Devouration. Whatever that word is.

“Go tell Prof what you found,” Abraham said softly, walking toward the storage room. Megan made her way to the rations.

“Where are you going?” I asked Abraham.

“I need a new gun, it seems,” he said with a smile, ducking through the doorway. He hadn’t chided me for what I’d done with his gun-he saw that I’d saved the team. At least I hoped that was how he viewed it. Still, there was a distinct sense of loss in his voice. He’d liked that gun. And it was easy to see why-I’d never owned a weapon as nice as that one.

Prof wasn’t in the main room, and Tia glanced at me, raising an eyebrow. “What are you telling Prof?”

“I’ll explain,” Megan said, sitting down beside her. As usual, Tia had her table covered with papers and cans of cola. It looked like she’d gotten the insurance records Cody mentioned, and she had them up on the screen in front of her.

If Prof wasn’t in here, I figured he was probably in his thinking room with the imager. I walked over and knocked softly on the wall; the doorway was only draped with a cloth.

“Come in, David,” Prof’s voice called from inside.

I hesitated. I hadn’t been in the room since I had told the team my plan. The others rarely entered. This was Prof’s sanctum, and he usually came out-rather than inviting people in-when they needed to speak to him. I glanced at Tia and Megan, both of whom looked surprised, though neither said anything.

I pushed past the cloth and stepped into the room. I’d imagined what Prof was doing with the wall imagers-maybe exploiting the team’s hack of the spy network, moving through the city and studying Steelheart and his minions. It wasn’t anything so dramatic.

“Chalkboards?” I asked.

Prof turned from the far wall, where he’d been standing and writing with a piece of chalk. All four walls, along with ceiling and floor, had been turned slate-black, and they were covered in white scribbled writing.

“I know,” Prof said, waving me in. “It’s not very modern, is it? I have technology capable of representing just about anything I want, in any form I want. And I choose chalkboards.” He shook his head, as if in amusement at his own eccentricity. “I think best this way. Old habits, I guess.”

I stepped up to him. I could see now that he wasn’t actually writing on the walls. The thing in Prof’s hand was just a little stylus shaped like a piece of chalk. The machine was interpreting his writings, making the words appear on the wall as he scribbled them.

The drape had fallen back into place, masking the light from the other rooms. I could barely make Prof out; the only light came from the soft glow of the white script on all six walls. I felt as if I were floating in space, the words stars and galaxies shining at me from distant abodes.

“What is this?” I asked, looking upward, reading the script that covered the ceiling. Prof had certain bits of it boxed away from others, and had arrows and lines pointing to different sections. I couldn’t make much sense of what it said. It was written in English, kind of. But many of the words were very small and seemed to be in some kind of shorthand.

“The plan,” Prof said absently. He didn’t wear his goggles or coat-both sat in a pile beside the door-and the sleeves of his black button-up shirt were rolled to the elbows.

“My plan?” I asked.

Prof’s smile was lit by the pale glowing chalk lines. “Not any longer. There are some seeds of it here, though.”

I felt a sharp sinking feeling. “But, I mean …”

Prof glanced at me, then laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did a great job, son. All things considered.”

“What was wrong with it?” I asked. I’d spent years … really, my entire life on that plan, and I was pretty confident in what I’d come up with.

“Nothing, nothing,” Prof said. “The ideas are sound. Remarkably so. Convince Steelheart that there’s a rival in town, lure him out, hit him. Though there is the glaring fact that you don’t know what his weakness is.”

“Well, there is that,” I admitted.

“Tia is working hard on it. If anyone can tease out the truth, it will be her,” Prof said, then paused for a moment before he continued. “Actually, no-I shouldn’t have said that this isn’t your plan. It is, and there are more than just seeds of it here. I looked through your notebooks. You thought through things very well.”

“Thank you.”

“But your vision was too narrow, son.” Prof removed his hand from my shoulder and walked up to the wall. He tapped it with his imitation chalk stylus, and the room’s text rotated. He didn’t appear to even notice, but I grew dizzy as the walls seemed to tumble about me, spinning until a new wall of text popped up in front of Prof.

“Let me start with this,” he said. “Other than not specifically knowing Steelheart’s weakness, what’s the biggest flaw in your plan?”

“I …” I frowned. “Taking out Nightwielder, maybe? But Prof, we just-”

“Actually,” Prof said, “that’s not it.”

My frown deepened. I hadn’t thought there was a flaw in my plan. I’d worked all those out, smoothing them away like cleanser removing the pimples from a teenager’s chin.

“Let’s break it down,” Prof said, raising his arm and sweeping an opening on the wall, like he was wiping mud from a window. The words scrunched to the side, not vanishing but bunching up like he’d pulled a new section of paper from a spool. He raised his chalk to the open space and started to write. “Step one, imitate a powerful Epic. Step two, start killing Steelheart’s important Epics to make him worried. Step three, draw him out. Step four, kill him. By doing this you restore hope to the world and encourage people to fight back.”

I nodded.

“Except there’s a problem,” Prof said, still scribbling on the wall. “If we actually manage to kill Steelheart, we’ll have done it by imitating a powerful Epic. Everyone’s going to assume, then, that an Epic was behind the defeat. And so, what do we gain?”

“We could announce it was the Reckoners after the fact.”

Prof shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. Nobody would believe us, not after all the trouble we’ll need to go through to make Steelheart believe.”

“Well, does it matter?” I asked. “He’ll be dead.” Then, more softly, I added, “And I get revenge.”

Prof hesitated, chalk pausing on the wall. “Yes,” he said. “I guess you’d still have that.”

“You want him dead too,” I said, stepping up beside him. “I know it. I can see it.”

“I want all Epics dead.”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I’ve seen it in you.”

He glanced at me, and his gaze grew stern. “That doesn’t matter. It is vital that people know we were behind this. You’ve said it yourself-we can’t kill every Epic out there. The Reckoners are spinning in circles. The only hope we have, the only hope that humankind has, is to convince people that we can fight back. For that to happen, Steelheart has to fall by human hands.”

“But for him to come out, he has to believe an Epic is threatening him,” I said.

“You see the problem?”

“I …” I was starting to. “So we’re not going to imitate an Epic?”

“We are,” Prof said. “I like the idea, the spark of that. I’m just pointing out problems we have to work through. If this … Limelight is going to kill Steelheart, we need a way to make certain that after the fact, we can convince people it was really us. Not impossible, but it is why I had to work more on the plan, expand it.”

“Okay,” I said, relaxing. So we were still on track. A false Epic … the soul of my plan was there.

“There’s a bigger problem, unfortunately,” Prof said, tapping his chalk against the wall. “Your plan calls for us to kill Epics in Steelheart’s administration to threaten him and draw him out. You indicate that we should do this to prove that a new Epic has come to town. Only, that’s not going to work.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s what the Reckoners would do,” Prof said. “Killing Epics quietly, never coming out into the open? It’ll make him suspicious. We need to think like a real rival would. Anyone who wants Newcago would think bigger than that. Any Epic out there can have a city of his own; it’s not that hard. To want Newcago, you’d have to be ambitious. You’d have to want to be a king. You’d have to want Epics at your beck and call. And so, killing them off one by one wouldn’t make sense. You see?”

“You’d want them alive so they’d follow you,” I said, slowly understanding. “Every Epic you kill would lessen your power once you actually took Newcago.”

“Exactly,” Prof said. “Nightwielder, Firefight, maybe Conflux … they’ll have to go. But you’d be very careful who to kill and who to try to bribe away.”

“Only we can’t bribe them away,” I said. “We wouldn’t be able to convince them that we’re an Epic, not long term.”

“So you see another problem,” Prof said.

He was right. I wilted, like soda going flat in a cup left out overnight. How had I not seen this hole in my plan?

“I’ve been working on these two problems,” Prof said. “If we’re going to imitate an Epic-and I think we still should-we need to be able to prove that we were behind it all along. That way the truth can flood Newcago and spread across the Fractured States from there. We can’t just kill him; we have to film ourselves doing so. And we need to, at the last minute, send information about our plan to the right people around the city-so that they know and can vouch for us. People like Diamond, non-Epic crime magnates, people with influence but no direct connection to his government.”

“Okay. But what about the second problem?”

“We need to hit Steelheart where it hurts,” Prof said, “but we can’t spread it out over too much time, and we can’t focus on Epics. We need one or two massive hits that make him bleed, make him see us as a threat, and we need to do it as a rival seeking to take his place.”

“So …”

Prof tapped the wall, rotating the text from the floor up in front of him. He tapped a section and some of the text started glowing green.

“Green?” I said, amused. “What was that about liking things old-fashioned?”

“You can use colored chalk on a chalkboard,” he said gruffly as he circled a pair of words: sewage system.

“Sewage system?” I said. I’d been expecting something a little more grand, and a little less … crappy.

Prof nodded. “The Reckoners never attack facilities; we focus only on Epics. If we hit one of the city’s main points of infrastructure, it will make Steelheart believe it’s not the Reckoners working against him, but some other force. Someone specifically trying to take down Steelheart’s rule-either rebels in the city, or another Epic moving on his territory.

“Newcago works on two principles: fear and stability. The city has the basic infrastructure that many others don’t, and that draws people here. The fear of Steelheart keeps them in line.” He rolled the words on the walls again, bringing over a network of drawings he’d done in “chalk” on the far wall. It looked like a crude blueprint. “If we start attacking his infrastructure he’ll move on us faster than if we’d attacked his Epics. Steelheart is smart. He knows why people come to Newcago. If he loses the basic things-sewage, power, communications-he’ll lose the city.”

I nodded slowly. “I wonder why.”

“Why? I just explained.…” Prof trailed off, looking at me. He frowned. “That’s not what you mean.”

“I wonder why he cares. Why does he go to so much trouble to create a city where people want to live? Why does he care if they have food, or water, or electricity? He kills them so callously, yet he also sees that they’re provided for.”

Prof fell silent. Eventually he shook his head. “What is it to be a king if you have nobody to follow you?”

I thought back to that day, the day when my father died. These people are mine.… As I considered it I realized something about the Epics. Something that, despite all my years of study, I’d never quite understood before.

“It isn’t enough,” Prof whispered. “It isn’t enough to have godly powers, to be functionally immortal, to be able to bend the elements to your will and soar through the skies. It isn’t enough unless you can use it to make others follow you. In a way, the Epics would be nothing without the regular people. They need someone to dominate; they need some way to show off their powers.”

“I hate him,” I hissed, though I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. I hadn’t even realized I’d been thinking it.

Prof looked at me.

“What?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me that my anger doesn’t do any good?” People had tried to tell me that in the past, Martha foremost among them. She claimed the thirst for vengeance would eat me alive.

“Your emotions are your own business, son,” Prof said, turning away. “I don’t care why you fight, so long as you do fight. Maybe your anger will burn you away, but better to burn yourself away than to shrivel up beneath Steelheart’s thumb.” He paused. “Besides, telling you to stop would be a little like a hearth telling the oven to cool down.”

I nodded. He understood. He felt it too.

“Regardless, the plan is now realigned,” Prof said. “We’ll strike at the wastewater treatment plant, as it’s the least well guarded. The trick will be making sure Steelheart connects the attack to a rival Epic, rather than just rebels.”

“Would it be so bad if people thought there was a rebellion?”

“It wouldn’t draw Steelheart out, for one,” Prof said. “And if he thought the people were rebelling, he’d make them pay. I won’t have innocents dying in retaliation for things we’ve done.”

“But, I mean, isn’t that the point? To show the others that we can fight back? Actually, as I think about it, maybe we could set up here in Newcago for good. If we win, maybe we could lead the place once-”

“Stop.”

I frowned.

“We kill Epics, son,” Prof said, his voice suddenly quiet, intense. “And we’re good at it. But don’t get it into your mind that we’re revolutionaries, that we’re going to tear down what’s out there and put ourselves in its place. The moment we start to think like that, we derail.

“We want to make others fight back. We want to inspire them. But we dare not take that power for ourselves. That’s the end of it. We’re killers. We’ll rip Steelheart from his place and find a way to pull his heart from his chest. After that, let someone else decide what to do with the city. I want no part of it.”

The ferocity of those words, soft though they were, quieted me. I didn’t know how to respond. Maybe Prof did have a point, though. This was about killing Steelheart. We had to stay focused.

It still felt odd that he hadn’t challenged me on my passion for vengeance. He was pretty much the first person who hadn’t served me some platitude on revenge.

“Fine,” I said. “But I think the sewage station is the wrong place to hit.”

“Where would you go?”

“The power station.”

“Too well guarded.” Prof examined his notes, and I could see that he had a schematic of the power station as well, with notations around the perimeter. He’d considered it.

I got a thrill from the idea that the two of us thought along the same lines.

“If it’s well guarded,” I said, “then blowing it up will look that much more impressive. And we could steal one of Steelheart’s power cells while we’re there. We brought back a gun from Diamond, but it’s dry. It needs a powerful energy source to run.” I raised my mobile to the wall and uploaded the video of the gauss gun firing. The video appeared on the wall, shoving aside some of Prof’s chalk writings, and played.

He watched in silence, and when it was done he nodded. “So our fake Epic will have energy powers.”

“And that’s why he’d destroy the power station,” I said. “It’s in theme.” Epics liked themes and motifs.

“It’s too bad that removing the power station wouldn’t stop Enforcement,” Prof said. “Conflux powers them directly. He powers some of the city directly too, but our intel says he does it by charging power cells that are stored here.” He pulled up his schematics of the power station. “One of those cells could power this gun-they’re extremely compact, and they each have more juice packed into them than should be physically possible. If we blow the station, and the rest of those cells, it will cause serious damage to the city.” He nodded. “I like it. Dangerous, but I like it.”

“We’ll still have to hit Conflux,” I said. “It would make sense, even for a rival Epic. First remove the power station, then take out the police force. Chaos. It will work particularly well if we can kill Conflux using that gun, giving off a big light show.”

Prof nodded. “I’ll need to do more planning,” he said, raising a hand and wiping away the video. It came off like it had been drawn in chalk. He pushed aside another pile of writing and raised his stylus to start working. He stopped, however, then looked at me.

“What?” I asked.

He walked over to his Reckoner jacket, which sat on a table, and took something out from under it. He walked back and handed it to me. A glove. One of the tensors. “You’ve been practicing?” he asked me.

“I’m not very good yet.”

“Get better. Fast. I won’t have the team underpowered, and Megan can’t seem to make the tensors work.”

I took the glove, saying nothing, though I wanted to ask the question. Why not you, Prof? Why do you refuse to use your own invention? Tia’s warning not to pry too much made me hold my tongue.

“I confronted Nightwielder,” I blurted out, only now remembering the reason I’d come to talk with Prof.

“What?”

“He was there, at Diamond’s place. I went out and pretended to be one of Diamond’s helpers. I … used a UV fingerprint scanner he had to confirm Nightwielder’s weakness.”

Prof studied me, his face betraying no emotions. “You’ve had a busy afternoon. I assume you did this at great risk to the entire team?”

“I … Yes.” Better he heard it from me, rather than Megan, who would undoubtedly report-in great detail-of how I’d deviated from the plan.

“You show promise,” Prof said. “You take risks; you get results. You have proof of what you said about Nightwielder?”

“I got a recording.”

“Impressive.”

“Megan wasn’t very happy with it.”

“Megan liked the way things were before,” Prof said. “Adding a new team member always upends the dynamic. Besides, I think she’s worried you’re showing her up. She’s still smarting from being unable to make the tensors work.”

Megan? Worried that I was showing her up? Prof must not know her very well.

“Out with you, then,” Prof said. “I want you up to speed with the tensor by the time we hit the power plant. And don’t worry too much about Megan …”

“I won’t. Thank you.”

“… worry about me.”

I froze.

Prof started writing on the board and didn’t turn back when he spoke, but his words were sharp. “You got results by risking the lives of my people. I assume nobody was hurt, otherwise you’d have mentioned it by now. You show promise, as I said. But if you brashly get one of my people killed, David Charleston, Megan will not be your problem. I won’t leave enough of you for her to bother with.”

I swallowed. My mouth had suddenly gone dry.

“I trust you with their lives,” Prof said, still writing, “and them with yours. Don’t betray that trust, son. Keep your impulses in check. Don’t just act because you can; act because it’s the right thing to do. If you keep that in mind, you’ll be all right.”

“Yes sir,” I said, leaving with a quick step out the cloth-covered doorway.