Steelheart

21

“How’s the signal?” Prof asked through the earpiece.

I raised my hand to my ear. “Good,” I said. I wore my mobile-newly tuned to the Reckoner mobiles and made completely secure from Steelheart’s prying-on my wrist mount. I’d also been given one of the jackets. It looked like a thin black and red sports-style jacket-though it had wiring all around the inside lining and a little power pack sewn into the back. That was the part that would extend a concussion field around me if I was hit hard.

Prof had built it for me himself. He said it would protect me from a short fall or a small explosion, but I shouldn’t try jumping off any cliffs or getting shot in the face. Not like I was intending to do either.

I wore it proudly. I’d never been officially told I was a member of the team, but these two changes seemed essentially the same thing. Of course, going on this mission was probably a good indication too.

I glanced at my mobile; it showed that I was only on the line with Prof. Tapping the screen could move me to a line to everyone in the team, cycle me to a single member, or let me pick a few of them to talk to.

“You in position?” Prof asked.

“We are.” I stood in a dark tunnel of pure steel, the only light that of my mobile and Megan’s up ahead. She wore a pair of dark jeans and her brown leather jacket, open at the front, over a tight T-shirt. She was inspecting the ceiling.

“Prof,” I said softly, turning away, “you sure I can’t pair up with Cody for this mission?”

“Cody and Tia are interference,” Prof said. “We’ve been over this, son.”

“Maybe I could go with Abraham, then. Or you.” I glanced over my shoulder, then spoke even more softly. “She doesn’t really like me much.”

“I won’t have two members of my crew not getting along,” Prof said sternly. “You will learn to work together. Megan is a professional. It’ll be fine.”

Yes, she’s professional, I thought. Too professional. But Prof wasn’t hearing any of it.

I took a deep breath. Part of my nervousness, I knew, was because of the job. One week had passed since my conversation with Prof, and the rest of the Reckoners had agreed that hitting the power station-and imitating a rival Epic while doing so-was the best plan.

Today was the day. We’d sneak in and destroy Newcago’s power plant. This would be my first real Reckoner operation. I was finally a member of the team. I didn’t want to be the weak one.

“You good, son?” Prof asked.

“Yeah.”

“We’re moving. Set your timer.”

I set my mobile for a ten-minute countdown. Prof and Abraham were going to break in first on the other side of the station, where all the huge equipment was. They’d work their way upward, setting charges. At the ten-minute mark, Megan and I would go in and steal a power cell to use with the gauss gun. Tia and Cody would come in last, entering through the hole Prof and Abraham had made. They were a support team; ready to move and help us extract if we needed to, but otherwise hanging back and giving us information and guidance.

I took another deep breath. On the hand opposite my mobile, I wore the black leather tensor, with glowing green strips from the fingertips to the palm. Megan eyed me as I strode up to the end of the tunnel that Abraham had dug the day before during a scouting mission.

I showed her the countdown.

“You’re sure you can do this?” she asked me. There was a hint of skepticism in her voice, though her face was impassive.

“I’ve gotten a lot better with the tensors,” I said.

“You forget that I’ve watched most of your practice sessions.”

“Cody didn’t need those shoes,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow at me.

“I can do it,” I said, stepping up to the end of the tunnel, where Abraham had left a pillar of steel jutting from the ground. It was short enough that I could step up on it to reach the low ceiling. The clock ticked down. We didn’t speak. I mentally sounded out a few ways to start conversation, but each one died on my lips as I opened my mouth. Each time I was confronted by Megan’s glassy stare. She didn’t want to chat. She wanted to do the job.

Why do I even care? I thought, looking up at the ceiling. Other than that first day, she’s never shown me anything other than coldness and the occasional bit of disdain.

Yet … there was something about her. More than the fact that she was beautiful, more than the fact that she carried tiny grenades in her top-which I still thought was awesome, by the way.

There had been girls at the Factory. But, like everyone else, they were complacent. They’d just call it living their lives, but they were afraid. Afraid of Enforcement, afraid that an Epic would kill them.

Megan didn’t seem afraid of anything, ever. She didn’t play games with men, fluttering her eyes, saying things she didn’t mean. She did what needed to be done, and she was very good at it. I found that incredibly attractive. I wished I could explain that to her. But getting the words out of my mouth felt like trying to push marbles through a keyhole.

“I-” I began.

My mobile beeped.

“Go,” she said, looking upward.

Trying to tell myself I wasn’t relieved by the interruption, I raised my hands up to the ceiling and closed my eyes. I was getting better with the tensor. I still wasn’t as good as Abraham, but I wasn’t an embarrassment any longer. At least not most of the time. I pressed my hand flat against the metal ceiling of the tunnel and pushed, holding my hand in place as the vibrations began.

The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody’s metaphors for it; I’d said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.

I pushed and kept my hand steady, humming softly to myself in the same tone as the tensor. That helped me focus. The others didn’t do it, and they didn’t always have to keep their hand pressed against a wall either. I eventually wanted to learn to do it like they did, but this would work for now.

The vibrations built, but I contained them, held them in my hand. Kept hold of them until it felt like my fingernails were going to rattle free. Then I pulled my hand back and pushed somehow.

Imagine holding a swarm of bees in your mouth, then spitting them out and trying to keep them pointed in a single direction by the sheer force of your breath and will. It’s kind of like that. My hand flew back and I launched the half-musical vibrations away, into the ceiling, which rattled and shook with a quiet hum. Steel dust fell down around my arm, showering to the ground below like someone had taken a cheese grater to a refrigerator.

Megan crossed her arms and watched, a single eyebrow raised. I prepared myself for some cold, indifferent comment. She nodded and said, “Nice work.”

“Yeah, well, you know, I’ve been practicing a lot. Hitting the old wall-vaporizing gym.”

“The what?” She frowned as she pulled over the ladder we’d brought with us.

“Never mind,” I said, climbing up the ladder and peeking my head into the basement of Station Seven, the power station. I’d never been inside any of the city stations, of course. They were like bunkers, with high steel walls and fences surrounding them. Steelheart liked to keep things under a watchful eye; a place like this wouldn’t just be a power station but would have government offices on the upper floors as well. All carefully fenced, guarded, and observed.

The basement, fortunately, had no cameras watching it. Most of those were in the hallways.

Megan handed me my rifle, and I climbed out into the room above. We were in a storage chamber, dark save for a few of those glowing “always on” lights that places tend to … well, always leave on. I moved to the wall and tapped my mobile. “We’re in,” I said softly.

“Good,” Cody’s voice came back.

I blushed. “Sorry. I meant to send that to Prof.”

“You did. He told me to watch over y’all. Turn on the video feed from your earpiece.”

The earpiece was one of those wraparound kinds and had a little camera sticking out over my ear. I tapped a few times on my mobile screen, activating it.

“Nice,” Cody said. “Tia and I have set up here at Prof’s entrance point.” Prof liked contingencies, and that usually meant leaving a person or two back to create diversions or enact plans if the main teams got pinned down.

“I don’t have much to do here,” Cody continued, his Southern drawl as thick as ever, “so I’m going to bother you.”

“Thanks,” I said, glancing back at Megan as she climbed up out of the hole.

“Don’t mention it, lad. And stop looking down Megan’s shirt.”

“I’m not-”

“Just teasing. I hope you keep doing it. It’ll be fun to watch her shoot you in the foot when she catches you.”

I looked away pointedly. Fortunately it didn’t appear that Cody had included Megan in that particular conversation. I actually found myself breathing a little easier, knowing that Cody was watching over us. Megan and I were the two newest members of the team; if anyone could use coaching it would be us.

Megan carried our pack on her back, filled with the things we’d need for the infiltration. She had out a handgun, which honestly would be more useful in close quarters than my rifle. “Ready?” she asked.

I nodded.

“How much ‘improvising’ do I have to be ready for from you today?” she asked.

“Only as much as needed,” I grumbled, raising my hand to the wall. “If I knew when it would be needed, it wouldn’t be improvising, would it? It would be planning.”

She chuckled. “A foreign concept to you.”

“Foreign? Did you not see all the notebooks of plans I brought to the team? You know, the ones we all almost died retrieving?”

She turned away, not looking at me, and her posture grew stiff.

Sparking woman, I thought. Try making some sense for once. I shook my head, placing my hand against the wall.

One of the reasons that the city stations were considered impregnable was because of the security. Cameras in all of the hallways and stairwells; I had thought we’d hack into security and change the camera feeds. Prof said we’d certainly hack the feeds to watch them, but changing those feeds to cover sneaking rarely worked as well as it did in the old movies. Steelheart didn’t hire stupid security officers, and they’d notice if their video looped. Besides, soldiers patrolled the hallways.

However, there was a much simpler way to make sure we weren’t seen. We just had to stay out of the hallways. There weren’t cameras in most of the rooms, as the research and experiments done there were kept secret, even from the security watching the building. Besides, logically, if you kept really close watch on all the hallways, you could catch intruders. How else would people move from room to room?

I raised my hand and, with some concentration, vaporized a four-foot-wide hole in the wall. I glanced through it, shining my mobile. I’d ruined some computer equipment on the wall, and I had to shove a desk out of the way to get in, but there was nobody inside. At this hour of the night much of the station was unoccupied, and Tia had drawn up our path very carefully, with the goal of minimizing the chances that we’d run into anyone.

After we crawled through, Megan took something from the pack and placed it on the wall beside the hole I’d made. It had a small red light that blinked ominously. We were to place explosive charges beside each hole we created so that when we detonated the building, it would be impossible to find out about the tensors from the wreckage.

“Keep moving,” Cody said. “Every minute y’all are in there is a minute longer that someone might wander into a room and wonder where all those bloody holes came from.”

“I’m on it,” I said, sliding my finger across my mobile’s screen and bringing up Tia’s map. If we continued straight ahead through three rooms, we’d reach an emergency stairwell with fewer security cameras. We could avoid those, hopefully, by looping through some walls and moving up two floors. Then we needed to make our way into the main storage chamber for energy cells. We’d set the rest of our charges, steal a power cell or two, and bolt.

“Are you talking to yourself?” Megan asked, watching the door, her gun at chest level and arm straight and ready.

“Tell her you’re listening to ear demons,” Cody suggested. “Always works for me.”

“Cody is on the line,” I said, working on the next wall. “Giving me a delightful running commentary. And telling me about ear demons.”

That almost provoked a smile from her. I swore I saw one, for a moment at least.

“Ear demons are totally real,” Cody said. “They’re what make microphones like these ones work. They’re also what tell you to eat the last slice of pie when you know Tia wanted it. Hold for a second. I’m patched into the security system, and there’s someone coming down the hall. Hold.”

I froze, then hastily quieted the tensor.

“Yeah, they’re entering that room next to you,” Cody said. “Lights were already on. Might be someone else in it too-can’t tell from the security feed. Y’all might have just dodged a bullet. Or rather, dodged having to dodge quite a few of them.”

“What do we do?” I asked tensely.

“About Cody?” Megan asked, frowning.

“Cody, could you just patch her in too?” I asked, exasperated.

“You really want to talk about her cleavage when she’s on the line?” Cody asked innocently.

“No! I mean. Don’t talk about that at all.”

“Fine. Megan, there’s someone in the next room.”

“Options?” she asked, calm.

“We can wait, but the lights were already on. My guess is some late-night scientists still working.”

Megan raised her gun.

“Uh …,” I said.

“No, lass,” Cody said. “You know how Prof feels about that. Shoot guards if you have to. Nobody else.” The plan included pulling an alarm and evacuating the building before we detonated our charges.

“I wouldn’t have to shoot the people next door,” Megan said calmly.

“And what else would you do, lass?” Cody asked. “Knock them out, then leave them for when we blow up the building?”

Megan hesitated.

“Okay,” Cody said. “Tia says there’s another way. You’re going to have to go up an elevator shaft, though.”

“Lovely,” Megan said.

We hurried back to the first room we’d come through. Tia uploaded a new map for me, with tensor points, and I got to work. I was a little more nervous this time. Were we going to find random scientists and workers just hanging around all over? What would we do if someone surprised us? What if it was some innocent custodian?

For the first time in my life, I found myself nearly as worried about what I might end up doing as I was about what someone might do to me. It was an uncomfortable situation. What we were doing was, basically, terrorism.

But we’re the good guys, I told myself, breaking open the wall and letting Megan slide through first. Of course, what terrorist didn’t think he or she was the good guy? We were doing something important, but what would that matter to the family of the cleaning woman we accidentally killed? As I hastened through the next darkened room-this one was a lab chamber, with some beakers and other glasswork set up-I had trouble shaking off these questions.

And so, I focused on Steelheart. That awful, hateful sneer. Standing there with the gun he’d taken from my father, barrel pointed down at the inferior human.

That image worked. I could forget everything else when I thought of it. I didn’t have all the answers, but at least I had a goal. Revenge. Who cared if it would eat me up inside and leave me hollow? So long as it drove me to make life better for everyone else. Prof understood that. I understood it too.

We reached the elevator shaft without incident, entering it through a storage room that bordered it. I vaporized a large hole in the wall, and then Megan poked her head in and looked up the tall, dark shaft. “So, Cody, there’s supposed to be a way up?”

“Sure. Handholds on the sides. They put them in all elevator shafts.”

“Looks like someone forgot to inform Steelheart of that,” I said, looking in beside Megan. “These walls are completely slick. No ladder or anything like that. No ropes or cords either.”

Cody cursed.

“So we’re back to going the other way?” Megan asked.

I scanned the walls again. The blackness seemed to extend forever above and below us. “We could wait for the elevator to come.”

“The elevators have cameras,” Cody said.

“So we ride on top of it,” I said.

“And alert the people inside when we drop onto it?” Megan asked.

“We just wait for one that doesn’t have anyone in it,” I said. “Elevators are empty about half the time, right? They’re responding to calls people make.”

“All right,” Cody said. “Prof and Abraham have hit a small snag-waiting for a room to clear out so they can move through. Prof says you have five minutes to wait. If nothing happens by then, we’re scrapping the job.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a stab of disappointment.

“I’m going to run some visuals for them,” Cody said. “I’ll be offline from you for a bit; call me if you need me. I’ll watch the elevator. If it moves, I’ll let you know.” The line clicked as Cody switched frequencies, and we started waiting.

We both sat quietly, straining to hear any sounds of the elevator moving, though we’d never spot it before Cody did with his video feeds.

“So … how often is it like this?” I asked after a few minutes of kneeling beside Megan, stuck in the room beside the hole I’d burrowed into the side of the elevator shaft.

“Like what?” she asked.

“The waiting.”

“More than you’d think,” she said. “The jobs we do, they’re often all about timing. Good timing requires a lot of waiting around.” She glanced at my hand, and I found that I’d been nervously tapping the side of the wall.

I forced myself to stop.

“You sit,” she said, voice growing softer, “and you wait. You go over and over the plan, picture it in your mind. Then it usually goes wrong anyway.”

I eyed her suspiciously.

“What?” she asked.

“The thing you just said. It’s exactly what I think too.”

“So?”

“So if something usually goes wrong, why are you always on my back about improvising?”

She grew thin-lipped.

“No,” I said. “It’s time you leveled with me, Megan. Not just about this mission, but about everything. What is with you? Why do you treat me like you hate me? You were the one who originally spoke up for me when I wanted to join! You sounded impressed with me at first-Prof might never have listened to my plan at all if you hadn’t said what you did. But since then you’ve acted like I was a gorilla at your buffet.”

“A … what?”

“Gorilla at your buffet. You know … eating all your food? Making you annoyed? That kind of thing?”

“You’re a very special person, David.”

“Yeah, I take a specialness pill each morning. Look, Megan, I’m not letting go of this. The whole time I’ve been with the Reckoners, it seems like I’ve been doing something that bothers you. Well, what is it? What made you turn on me like that?”

She looked away.

“Is it my face?” I asked. “Because that’s the only thing I can think of. I mean, you were all for me after the Fortuity hit. Maybe it’s my face. I don’t think it’s too bad a face, as far as faces go, but it does look kind of stupid sometimes when I-”

“It’s not your face,” she interrupted.

“I didn’t think it was, but I need you to talk to me. Say something.” Because I think you’re hotter than hell and I can’t understand what went wrong. Fortunately I stopped myself from saying that part out loud. I also kept my eyes straight at her head, just in case Cody was watching in.

She said nothing.

“Well?” I prompted.

“Five minutes is up,” she said, checking her mobile.

“I’m not going to let this go so easily, this-”

“Five minutes is up,” Cody suddenly said, cutting in. “Sorry, kids. This mission is a bust. Nobody is moving the elevators.”

“Can’t you send one for us?” I asked.

Cody chuckled. “We’re tapped into the security feed, lad, but that’s a far cry from being able to control things in the building. If Tia could hack us in that far, we could blow the building from the inside by overpowering the plants or something.”

“Oh.” I looked up the cavernous shaft. It resembled an enormous throat, stretching upward … one we needed to get up … which made us …

Bad analogy. Very bad. Regardless, there was a twisting feeling in my gut. I hated the idea of backing down. Above lay the path to destroying Steelheart. Behind lay more waiting, more planning. I’d been planning for years.

“Oh no,” Megan said.

“What?” I asked absently.

“You’re going to improvise, aren’t you?”

I reached out into the shaft with the hand that wore the tensor, pressed it flat against the wall, and began a small vibrative burst. Abraham had taught me to make bursts of different sizes; he said that a master with the tensors could control the vibrations, leaving patterns or even shapes in your target.

I pushed my hand hard, flat, feeling the glove shake. It wasn’t just the glove, though. It was my whole hand. That had confused me at first. It seemed like I was creating the power, not the glove-the glove just helped shape the blast somehow.

I couldn’t fail at this. If I did the operation was over. I should have felt stress at that, but I didn’t. For some reason, I was realizing, when things got really, really tense I found it easier to relax.

Steelheart looming above my father. A gunshot. I would not back down.

The glove vibrated; dust fell away from the wall in a little patch around my hand. I slipped my fingers forward and felt what I’d done.

“A handhold,” Megan said softly, shining the light of her mobile.

“What, really?” Cody asked. “Turn on your camera, lass.” A moment later he whistled. “You’ve been holding back on me, David. I didn’t think you were nearly practiced enough to do something like that. I might have suggested it myself if I’d thought you could.”

I moved my hand to the side and made another handhold, placing it beside the other in the shaft just next to the hole in the wall. I made two more for my feet, then swung out of the hole in the wall and into the elevator shaft, placing my hands and feet in the handholds.

I stretched up and made another set of holds above. I climbed up, rifle slung over my shoulder. I did not look down but made another set of holds and continued. Climbing and carving with the tensor wasn’t by any means easy, but I was able to shape the tensor blasts to leave a ridge at the front of each handhold, making them easy to grip.

“Can Prof and Abraham stall for a little longer?” Megan asked from below. “David seems to be working at a good clip, but it might take us about fifteen minutes to get up.”

“Tia’s calculating,” Cody said.

“Well, I’m going after David,” Megan said. She sounded muffled. I glanced over my shoulder; she’d wrapped a scarf around her face.

The dust from the handholds; she doesn’t want to breathe it in. Smart. I was having trouble avoiding it, and steel dust did not seem like a smart thing to inhale. Abraham said tensor dust wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed, but I still didn’t think it would be a good idea, so I ducked my head and held my breath each time I made a new hole.

“I’m impressed,” a voice said in my ear. Prof’s voice. It nearly made me leap in shock, which would have been a very bad thing. He must have patched into my visual feed with his mobile, and could see the images made by the camera on my earpiece.

“Those holes are crisp and well formed,” Prof continued. “Keep at it and you’ll soon be as good as Abraham. You might already have passed up Cody.”

“You sound worried about something,” I said between making handholds.

“Not troubled. Just surprised.”

“It needed to be done,” I said, grunting as I pulled myself up past another floor.

Prof was silent for a few moments. “That it did. Look, we can’t have you extract down this same route. It will take too long, so you’ll have to go out another way. Tia will let you know where. Wait for the first explosion.”

“Affirmative,” I said.

“And, David,” Prof added.

“Yeah?”

“Good work.”

I smiled, pulling myself up again.

We continued at it, climbing up the elevator shaft. I worried that the elevator would come down at some point, though if it did it should miss us by a few inches. We were on the side of the shaft where there should have been a ladder. They just hadn’t installed one.

Perhaps Steelheart has watched the same movies that we have, I thought with a grimace as we finally passed the second floor. One more to go.

My mobile clicked in my ear. I glanced at it on my wrist-someone had muted our channel.

“I don’t like what you’ve done to the team,” Megan called up, her voice muffled.

I glanced over my shoulder at her. She wore the backpack with our equipment in it, and her nose and mouth were covered with the scarf. Those eyes of hers glared at me, softly lit by the glow of the mobile strapped to her forearm. Beautiful eyes, peeking out above the shroud of a scarf.

With a huge, black pit stretching behind her. Whoa. I lurched woozily.

“Slontze,” she called. “Stay focused.”

“You’re the one who said something!” I whispered, turning back around. “What do you mean you don’t like what I did to the team?”

“Before you showed up we were going to move out of Newcago,” Megan said from below. “Hit Fortuity, then leave. You made us stay.”

I continued climbing. “But-”

“Oh, just shut up and let me talk for once.”

I shut up.

“I joined the Reckoners to kill Epics who deserved it,” Megan continued. “Newcago is one of the safest, most stable places in the entire Fractured States. I don’t think we should be killing Steelheart, and I don’t like how you’ve hijacked the team to fight your own personal war against him. He’s brutal, yes, but he’s doing a better job than most Epics. He doesn’t deserve to die.”

The words stunned me. She didn’t think we should kill Steelheart? He didn’t deserve to die? It was insanity. I resisted the urge to look down again. “Can I talk now?” I asked, making another pair of handholds.

“Okay, fine.”

“Are you crazy? Steelheart is a monster.”

“Yes. I’ll admit that. But he’s an effective monster. Look, what are we doing today?”

“Destroying a power plant.”

“And how many cities out there still have power plants?” she asked. “Do you even know?”

I kept climbing.

“I grew up in Portland,” she said. “Do you know what happened there?”

I did, though I didn’t say. It hadn’t been good.

“The turf wars between Epics left the city in ruins,” Megan continued, her voice softer now. “There is nothing left, David. Nothing. All of Oregon is a wasteland; even the trees are gone. There aren’t any power plants, sewage treatment plants, or grocery stores. That was what Newcago would have become, if Steelheart hadn’t stepped in.”

I continued climbing, sweat tickling the back of my neck. I thought about the change in Megan-she’d grown cold toward me right after I’d first talked about taking down Steelheart. The times when she’d treated me the worst had been when we’d been making breakthroughs. When we’d gone to fetch my plans and when I’d found out how to kill Nightwielder.

It hadn’t been my “improvising” that had set her against me. It had been my intentions. My successes in getting the team to target Steelheart.

“I don’t want to be the cause of something like Portland happening again,” Megan continued. “Yes, Steelheart is terrible. But he’s a kind of terrible that people can live with.”

“So why haven’t you quit?” I asked. “Why are you here?”

“Because I’m a Reckoner,” she said. “And it’s not my job to contradict Prof. I’ll do my job, Knees. I’ll do it well. But this time, I think we’re making a mistake.”

She was using that nickname of hers for me again. It actually seemed like a good sign, as she only seemed to use it when she was less annoyed at me. It was kind of affectionate, wasn’t it? I just wished the nickname hadn’t been a reference to something so embarrassing. Why not … Super-Great-Shot? That kind of rolled off the tongue, didn’t it?

We climbed the rest of the way in silence. Megan turned our audio feed to the rest of the team back on, which seemed an indication that she thought the conversation was over. Maybe it was-I certainly didn’t know what else to say. How could she possibly think that living under Steelheart was a good thing?

I thought of the other kids at the Factory, of the people in the understreets. I guessed that many of them thought the same way-they’d come here knowing that Steelheart was a monster, but they still thought life was better in Newcago than in other places.

Only they were complacent-Megan was anything but that. She was active, incredible, capable. How could she think like they did? It shook what I knew of the world-at least, what I thought I knew. The Reckoners were supposed to be different.

What if she was right?

“Oh sparks!” Cody suddenly said in my ear.

“What?”

“Y’all’ve got trouble, lad. It’s-”

At that moment the doors to the elevator shaft just above-the ones on the third floor-slid open. Two uniformed guards stepped up to the ledge and peered down into the darkness.