Steelheart Read online

  He raised a hand, staring intently at the city beneath him, and the hand started to glow with a wicked power. Yellow-white, to contrast the violent red below. The power around his hand wasn’t electricity but raw energy. He built it up for a time, until it was shining so brightly the camera couldn’t distinguish anything but the light and the shadow of Steelheart in front of it.

  Then he pointed and launched a bolt of blazing yellow force into the city. The power hit a building, blasting a hole through the side, sending flames and debris exploding out the opposite windows. As the building smoldered, people fled from it. The camera zoomed in, making sure to catch sight of them. Steelheart wanted us to know he was firing on an inhabited structure.

  Another bolt followed, causing the building to lurch, the steel of one side melting and caving inward. He fired twice more into a building beside it, starting the innards there aflame as well, walls melting from the enormous power of the energy he threw.

  The camera pulled back and turned to Steelheart again, still in the same half-crouched stance. He looked down at the city, face impassive, red light from beneath limning a strong jaw and contemplative eyes. There was no explanation of why he’d destroyed those buildings, though perhaps a later message would explain the sins—real or perceived—that the inhabitants were guilty of.

  Or perhaps not. Living in Newcago brought risks; one of them was that Steelheart could decide to execute you and your family without explanation. The flip side was that for those risks, you got to live in a place with electricity, running water, jobs, and food. Those were rare commodities in much of the land now.

  I took a step forward, walking right up to the wall to study the creature that loomed there. He wants us to be terrified, I thought. It’s what this is all about. He wants us to think no one can challenge him.

  Early scholars had wondered if perhaps Epics were some new stage in human development. An evolutionary breakthrough. I didn’t accept that. This thing wasn’t human. It never had been. Steelheart turned to look toward the camera, and there was a hint of a smile on his lips.

  A chair scraped behind me and I turned. Prof had stood up and was staring at Steelheart. Yes, there was hatred there. Deep hatred. Prof looked down and met my eyes. It happened again, that moment of understanding.

  Each of us knew where the other stood.

  “You haven’t said how you’ll kill him,” Prof said to me. “You haven’t convinced Megan. All you’ve shown is that you have a fragile half of a plan.”

  “I’ve seen him bleed,” I said. “The secret is in my head somewhere, Prof. It’s the best chance you or anyone will ever have at killing him. Can you pass that up? Can you really walk away when you’ve got a shot?”

  Prof met my eyes. He stared into them for a long moment. Behind me Steelheart’s transmission ended, and the wall went black.

  Prof was right. My plan, clever though it had once seemed to me, depended on a lot of speculation. Draw Steelheart out with a fake Epic. Take down his bodyguards. Upend Enforcement. Kill him using a secret weakness that might be hidden in my memory somewhere.

  A fragile half plan indeed. That was why I had needed to come to the Reckoners. They could make it happen. This man, Jonathan Phaedrus, could make it happen.

  “Cody,” Prof said, turning, “start training the new kid with a tensor. Tia, let’s see if we can start tracking Conflux’s movements. Abraham, we’re going to need some brainstorming on how to imitate a High Epic, if that’s even possible.”

  I felt my heart jump. “We’re going to do it?”

  “Yes,” Prof said. “God help us, we are.”

  PART TWO

  14

  “NOW, y’all gotta be gentle with her,” Cody said. “Like caressing a beautiful woman the night before the big caber toss.”

  “Caber toss?” I said as I raised my hands toward the chunk of steel on the chair in front of me. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the Reckoner hideout, Cody on the ground beside me, his back to the wall and legs stretched out in front of him. It had been a week since the hit on Fortuity.

  “Yeah, caber toss,” Cody said. Though his accent was purely Southern—and strongly that—he always talked as if he were from Scotland. I guessed his family was from there or something. “It’s this sport we had back in the homeland. Involved throwing trees.”

  “Little saplings? Like javelins?”

  “No, no. The cabers had to be so wide that your fingers couldn’t touch on the other side when you reached your arms around them. We’d rip ’em out of the ground, then hurl them as far as we could.”

  I raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Bonus points if you could hit a bird out of the air,” he added.

  “Cody,” Tia said, walking by with a sheaf of papers, “do you even know what a caber is?”

  “A tree,” he said. “We used them to build show houses. It’s where the word cabaret came from, lass.” He said it with such a straight face that I had trouble determining if he was sincere or not.

  “You’re a buffoon,” Tia said, sitting down at the table, which was spread with various detailed maps that I hadn’t been able to make sense of. They appeared to be city plans and schematics, dating from before the Annexation.

  “Thank you,” Cody said, tipping his camo baseball cap toward her.

  “It wasn’t a compliment.”

  “Oh, you didn’t mean it as one, lass,” Cody said. “But the word buffoon, it comes from the word buff, meaning strong and handsome, which in turn—”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be helping David learn the tensors?” she interrupted. “And not bothering me.”

  “It’s all right,” Cody said. “I can do both. I’m a man of many talents.”

  “None of which involve remaining silent, unfortunately,” Tia muttered, leaning down and making a few notations on her map.

  I smiled, though even after a week with them I wasn’t certain what to make of the Reckoners. I’d imagined each pod of them as an elite special forces group, tightly knit and intensely loyal to one another.

  There was some of that in this group; even Tia and Cody’s banter was generally good-natured. However, there was also a lot of individuality to them. They each kind of … did their own thing. Prof didn’t seem so much a leader as a middle manager. Abraham worked on the technology, Tia the research, Megan information gathering, and Cody odd jobs—filling in the spaces with mayonnaise, as he liked to call it. Whatever that meant.

  It was bizarre to see them as people. A part of me was actually disappointed. My gods were regular humans who squabbled, laughed, got on one another’s nerves, and—in Abraham’s case—snored when they slept. Loudly.

  “Now, that’s the right look of concentration,” Cody said. “Nice work, lad. Y’all’ve got to keep a keen mind. Focused. Like Sir William himself. Soul of a warrior.” He took a bite of his sandwich.

  I hadn’t been focused on my tensor, but I didn’t let on to that fact. Instead I raised my hand, doing as I’d been instructed. The thin glove I wore had lines of metal along the front of each finger. The lines joined in a pattern at the palm and all glowed softly green.

  As I concentrated my hand began to vibrate softly, as if someone were playing music with a lot of bass somewhere nearby. It was hard to focus with that strange pulsation running up my arm.

  I raised my hand toward the chunk of metal; it was the remnant of a section of pipe. Now, apparently, I needed to push the vibrations away from me. Whatever that meant. The technology hooked right into my nerves using sensors inside the glove, interpreting electrical impulses from my brain. So Abraham had explained.

  Cody had said it was magic, and had told me not to ask any questions lest I “anger the wee daemons inside who make the gloves work and our coffee taste good.”

  I still hadn’t managed to make the tensors do anything, though I felt I was getting close. I had to remain focused, keep my hands steady, and push the vibrations out. Like blowing a ring of smoke, Abraham had said. Or like
using your body warmth in a hug—without the arms. That had been Tia’s explanation. Everyone thought of it their own way, I guess.

  My hand started to shake more vigorously.

  “Steady,” Cody said. “Don’t lose control, lad.”

  I stiffened my muscles.

  “Whoa. Not too stiff,” Cody said. “Secure, strong, but calm. Like you’re caressing a beautiful woman, remember?”

  That made me think of Megan.

  I lost control, and a green wave of smoky energy burst from my hand and flew out in front of me. It missed the pipe completely, but vaporized the metal leg of the chair it sat on. Dust showered down and the chair went lopsided, dumping the pipe to the floor with a clang.

  “Sparks,” Cody said. “Remind me to never let you caress me, lad.”

  “I thought you told him to think of a beautiful woman,” Tia said.

  “Yeah,” Cody replied. “And if that’s how he treats one of them, I don’t want to know what he’d do to an ugly Scotsman.”

  “I did it!” I exclaimed, pointing at the powdered metal that was the remains of the chair leg.

  “Yeah, but you missed.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I finally made it work!” I hesitated. “It wasn’t like blowing smoke. It was like … like singing. From my hand.”

  “That’s a new one,” Cody said.

  “It’s different for everyone,” Tia said from her table, head still down. She opened a can of cola as she scribbled notes. Tia was useless without her cola. “Using the tensors isn’t natural to your mind, David. You’ve already built neural pathways, and so you have to kind of hotwire your brain to figure out what mental muscles to flex. I’ve always wondered if we gave a tensor to a child, if they’d be able to incorporate using it better, more naturally, as just another kind of ‘limb’ to practice with.”

  Cody looked at me. Then he whispered, “Wee daemons. Don’t let her fool you, lad. I think she works for them. I saw her leaving out pie for them the other night.”

  Trouble was, he was just serious enough to make me question whether he really believed that. The twinkle to his eye indicated he was being silly, but he had such a perfectly straight face.…

  I took off the tensor and handed it over. Cody slipped it on, then absently raised a hand—palm first—to the side and thrust it outward. The tensor began vibrating as his hand moved, and when it stopped a faint, smoky green wave continued on, hitting the fallen chair and the pipe. Both vaporized to dust, falling to the ground in a puff.

  Each time I saw the tensors work, I was amazed. The range was very limited, only a few feet at most, and they couldn’t affect flesh. They weren’t much good in a fight—sure, you could vaporize someone’s gun, but only if they were very close to you. In which case taking the time to concentrate and fight with the tensors would probably be less effective than just punching the guy.

  Still, the opportunities they afforded were incredible. Moving through the bowels of Newcago’s steel catacombs, getting in and out of rooms. If you managed to keep the tensor hidden, you could escape from any bond, any cell.

  “You keep training,” Cody said. “You show talent, so Prof will want you to get good with these. We need another member of the team who can use them.”

  “Not all of you can?” I asked, surprised.

  Cody shook his head. “Megan can’t make them work, and Tia’s rarely in a position to use them—we need her back giving support while on missions. So it usually comes down to Abraham and me using them.”

  “What about Prof?” I asked. “He invented them. He’s got to be pretty good with them, right?”

  Cody shook his head. “Don’t know. He refuses to use them. Something about a bad experience in the past. He won’t talk about it. Probably shouldn’t. We don’t need to know. Either way, you should practice.” Cody shook his head and took off the tensor, tucking it into his pocket. “What I’d have given for one of these before.…”

  The other pieces of Reckoner technology were awesome too. The jackets, which supposedly worked a little like armor, were one. Cody, Megan, and Abraham each wore a jacket—different on the outside, but with a complicated network of diodes inside that somehow protected them. The dowser, which told if someone was Epic, was another piece of such technology. The only other piece I’d seen was something they called the harmsway, a device that accelerated a body’s healing abilities.

  It’s so sad, I thought, as Cody fetched a broom to clean up the dust. All of this technology … it could have changed the world. If the Epics hadn’t done that first. A ruined world couldn’t enjoy the benefits.

  “What was your life like back then?” I asked, holding the dustpan for Cody. “Before all of this happened? What did you do?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” Cody said, smiling.

  “Let me guess,” I said, anticipating one of Cody’s stories. “Professional footballer? High-paid assassin and spy?”

  “A cop,” Cody said, subdued, looking down at the pile of dust. “In Nashville.”

  “What? Really?” I was surprised.

  Cody nodded, then waved for me to dump the first pile of dust into the trash bin while he swept up the rest of it. “My father was a cop too in his early years, over in the homeland. Small city. You wouldn’t know it. He moved here when he married my mother. I grew up over here; ain’t never actually been to the homeland. But I wanted to be just like my pa, so when he died, I went to school and joined the force.”

  “Huh,” I said, stooping down again to collect the rest of the dust. “That’s a lot less glamorous than I’d been imagining.”

  “Well, I did take down an entire drug cartel by myself, you understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “And there was the time the president’s Secret Service were shuttling him through the city, and they all ate a bad mess of scones and got sick, and we in the department had to protect him from an assassination plot.” He called over to Abraham, who was tinkering with one of the team’s shotguns. “It was them Frenchies who were behind it, you know.”

  “I’m not French!” Abraham called back. “I’m Canadian, you slontze.”

  “Same difference!” Cody said, then grinned and looked back at me. “Anyway, maybe it wasn’t glamorous. Not all the time. But I enjoyed it. I like doing good for people. Serve and protect. And then …”

  “Then?” I asked.

  “Nashville got annexed when the country collapsed,” Cody explained. “A group of five Epics took charge of most of the South.”

  “The Coven,” I said, nodding. “There’s actually six of them. One pair are twins.”

  “Ah, right. Keep forgetting that y’all are freakishly informed about this stuff. Anyway, they took over, and the police department started serving them. If we didn’t agree, we were supposed to turn in our badges and retire. The good ones did that. The bad ones stayed on, and they got worse.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  Cody fingered the thing he kept at his waist, tied to his belt on the right side. It looked like a thin wallet. He reached down and undid the snap, showing a scratched—but still polished—police badge.

  “I didn’t do either one,” he said, subdued. “I took an oath. Serve and protect. I ain’t going to stop that because some thugs with magic powers start shoving everybody around. That’s that.”

  His words gave me a chill. I stared at that badge, and my mind flipped over and over like a pancake on a griddle, trying to figure out this man. Trying to reconcile the joking, storytelling blowhard with the image of a police officer still on his beat. Still serving after the city government had fallen, after the precinct had been shut down, after everything had been taken from him.

  The others probably have similar stories, I thought, glancing at Tia, who was busy working away, sipping her cola. What had drawn her to fighting what most would call a hopeless battle, living a life of constant running, bringing justice to those the law should have condemned—but could not touch? What had dr
awn Abraham, Megan, the professor himself?

  I looked back at Cody, who was moving to close his badge holder. There was something tucked behind the plastic opposite it in the holder—a picture of a woman, but with a section removed, a bar shape that had contained her eyes and much of her nose.

  “Who was that?”

  “Somebody special,” Cody said.

  “Who?”

  He didn’t answer, snapping the badge holder closed.

  “It’s better if we don’t know, or ask, about each other’s families,” Tia said from the table. “Usually a stint in the Reckoners ends with death, but occasionally one of us gets captured. Better if we can’t reveal anything about the others that will put their loved ones in danger.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense.” It just wasn’t something I’d have considered. I didn’t have any loved ones left.

  “How is it going there, lass?” Cody asked, sauntering over to the table. I joined him and saw that Tia had spread out lists of reports and ledgers.

  “It’s not going at all,” Tia said with a grimace. She rubbed her eyes beneath her spectacles. “This is like trying to re-create a complex puzzle after being given only one piece.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I couldn’t make sense of the ledgers any more than I’d been able to make sense of the maps.

  “Steelheart was wounded that day,” Tia said. “If your recollection is correct—”

  “It is,” I promised.

  “People’s memories fade,” Cody said.

  “Not mine,” I said. “Not about this. Not about that day. I can tell you what color tie the mortgage man was wearing. I can tell you how many tellers there were. I could probably count the ceiling tiles in the bank for you. It’s there, in my head. Burned there.”