Steelheart (25 page)

“Go!”
Cody yelled in our ears.

I vaporized the lock on the door to the room and the two of us burst out into the hallway. People were peeking out of doors—it seemed to be a busy floor, even at night. Some of the people were cleaning staff in blue overalls, but others were technicians in lab coats.

“Explosion!” I did my best to seem panicked. “Someone’s attacking the building!”

The chaos started immediately, and we were soon swept up into the crowd fleeing from the building. About thirty seconds later, Cody triggered the second explosion, on an upper floor. The ground trembled and people in the hallway around us screamed, glancing at the ceiling. Some of the dozen or so people clutched small computers or briefcases.

There wasn’t actually anything to be frightened of. These initial explosions had been set in unpopulated locations that wouldn’t bring down the building. There would be four of those early blasts, and they’d been placed to shepherd all the civilians out of the structure. Then the real explosions could begin.

We made a hasty flight through hallways and down stairwells, being careful to keep our heads down. Something felt odd about the place, and as we ran I realized what it was. The building was clean. The floors, the walls, the rooms … too clean. It had been too dark for me to notice it when we were making our way in, but in the light, it seemed stark to me. The understreets weren’t ever this clean. It didn’t feel right for everything to be so scrubbed, so neat.

As we ran it became clear that the place was big enough that any one employee wouldn’t know everyone else who worked there, and though our intelligence said that the security officers had the faces of all employees in portfolios that they checked against security feeds, no one challenged us.

Most of the security officers were running with the growing crowd, just as worried about the explosions as everyone else, and that dampened my fears even more.

As a group we flooded down the last flight of stairs and burst out into the lobby. “What’s going on?” a security officer yelled. He was standing by the exit with his gun out and aimed. “Did anyone see anything?”

“An Epic!” Megan said breathlessly. “Wearing green. I saw him walking through the building throwing out blasts of energy!”

The third explosion went off, shaking the building. It was followed
by a series of smaller explosions. Other groups of people flooded out of adjacent stairwells and from the ground-floor hallways.

The guard cursed, then did the smart thing. He ran too. He wouldn’t be expected to face an Epic—indeed, he could get in trouble for doing it, even if that Epic was working against Steelheart. Ordinary men left Epics alone, end of story. In the Fractured States that was a law greater than any other.

We burst out of the building and onto the grounds. I glanced back to see trails of smoke rising from the enormous structure. Even as I watched, another series of small explosions went off in an upper row of windows, each one flashing green. Prof and Abraham hadn’t just planted bombs, they’d planted a light show.

“It
is
an Epic,” a woman near me breathed. “Who would be so foolish …”

I flashed a smile at Megan, and we joined the flood of people running to the gates in the wall surrounding the grounds. The guards there tried to hold people in, but when the next explosion went off they gave up and opened the gates. Megan and I followed the others out into the dark streets of the city, leaving the smoldering building behind.

“Security cameras are still up,” Cody reported on the open channel to everyone. “Building is still evacuating.”

“Hold the last explosions,” Prof said calmly. “But blow the leaflets.”

There was a soft pop from behind, and I knew that the leaflets proclaiming that a new Epic had come to town had been blasted from the upper floors and were floating down to the city. Limelight, we were calling him—the name I’d chosen. The flyer was filled with propaganda calling Steelheart out, claiming that Limelight was the new master of Newcago.

Megan and I were to our car before Cody gave the all clear. I climbed in the driver’s side, and Megan followed through the same door, shoving me over into the passenger seat.

“I can drive,” I said.

“You destroyed the last car going around one block, Knees,” she said, starting the vehicle. “Knocked down two signs, I believe. And I think I saw the remains of some trash cans as we fled.” There was a faint smile on her lips.

“Wasn’t my fault,” I said, thrilled by our success as I looked back at Station Seven rising into the dark sky. “Those trash cans were totally asking for it. Cheeky slontzes.”

“I’m triggering the big one,” Cody said in my ear.

A line of blasts sounded in the building, including the explosives Megan and I had placed, I guessed. The building shook, fires burning out the windows.

“Huh,” Cody said, confused. “Didn’t bring it down.”

“Good enough,” Prof answered. “Evidence of our incursion is gone, and the station won’t be operating anytime soon.”

“Yeah,” Cody said. I could hear the disappointment in his voice. “I just wish it had been a little more dramatic.”

I pulled the pen detonator from my pocket. It probably wouldn’t do anything—the explosives we’d placed on the walls had probably already set off the ones in the floor. I clicked the top of the pen anyway.

The following explosion was about ten times as strong as the previous one. Our car shook and debris sprayed out over the city, dust and bits of rock raining down. Megan and I both spun around in our seats in time to catch the building collapse in an awful-sounding crunch.

“Wow,” Cody said. “Look at that. I guess some of the power cells went up.”

Megan glanced at me, then at the pen, then rolled her eyes. In seconds we were racing down the street in the opposite direction of fire trucks and emergency responders, heading for the rendezvous point with the other Reckoners.

I
grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.

The construction had been set up around the tunnel into the Reckoner burrow, which was the only way in or out. It had been five days since our attack on the power station, and we’d been lying low during most of that, planning our next move—the hit on Conflux to undermine Enforcement.

Abraham had just gotten back from a supply run. Which meant that I’d stopped being one of the team’s tensor specialists and started being their source of free teenage labor.

I continued pulling, sweat dripping from my brow and beginning to soak through my T-shirt. Eventually the crate appeared from
the depths of the hole, and Megan pulled it off its rollers and heaved it into the room. I let go of the rope, sending the roller board and rope back down the tunnel so Abraham could tie on another crate of supplies.

“You want to do the next one?” I asked Megan, wiping my brow with a towel.

“No,” she said lightly. She heaved the crate onto a dolly and wheeled it over to stack it with the others.

“You sure?” I asked, arms aching.

“You’re doing such a fine job,” she said. “And it’s good exercise.” She settled the crate, then sat down on a chair, putting her feet up on the desk and sipping a lemonade while reading a book on her mobile.

I shook my head. She was unbelievable.

“Think of it as being chivalrous,” Megan said absently, tapping the screen to scroll down more text. “Protecting a defenseless girl from pain and all that.”

“Defenseless?” I asked as Abraham called up. I sighed, then started pulling the rope again.

She nodded. “In an abstract way.”

“How can someone be
abstractly
defenseless?”

“Takes a lot of work,” she said, then sipped her drink. “It only
looks
easy. Just like abstract art.”

I grunted. “Abstract art?” I asked, heaving on the rope.

“Sure. You know, guy paints a black line on a canvas, calls it a metaphor, sells it for millions.”

“That never happened.”

She looked up at me, amused. “Sure it did. You never learned about abstract art in school?”

“I was schooled at the Factory,” I said. “Basic math, reading, geography, history. Wasn’t time for anything else.”

“But before that. Before Calamity.”

“I was eight,” I said. “And I lived in inner-city Chicago, Megan.
My education mostly involved learning to avoid gangs and how to keep my head down at school.”

“That’s what you learned when you were
eight
? In grade school?”

I shrugged and kept pulling. She seemed troubled by what I’d said, though I’ll admit, I was troubled by what she’d said. People hadn’t really paid that much money for such simple things, had they? It baffled me. Pre-Calamity people had been a strange lot.

I hauled the next crate up, and Megan hopped down from her chair again to move it. I couldn’t imagine that she was getting much reading done, but she didn’t seem bothered by the interruptions. I watched her, taking a long gulp from my cup of water.

Things had been … different between us since her confession in the elevator shaft. In a lot of ways she was more relaxed around me, which didn’t make that much sense. Shouldn’t things have been more awkward? I knew she didn’t support our mission. That felt like a pretty big deal to me.

She really
was
a professional, though. She didn’t agree that Steelheart should be killed, but she didn’t abandon the Reckoners, or even ask for a transfer to another Reckoner cell. I didn’t know how many of those there were—apparently only Tia and Prof knew—but there was at least one other.

Either way, Megan stayed on board and didn’t let her feelings distract her from her job. She might not agree that Steelheart needed to die, but from what I’d pried from her, she believed in fighting the Epics. She was like a soldier who believed a certain battle wasn’t tactically sound, yet supported the generals enough to fight it anyway.

I respected her for that. Sparks, I was liking her more and more. And though she hadn’t been particularly affectionate toward me lately, she wasn’t openly hostile and cold any longer. That left me room to work some seductive magic. I wished I knew some.

She got the crate in place, and I waited for Abraham to call up that I should start pulling again. Instead he appeared at the mouth of the tunnel and started to unhook the pulley system. His shoulder
had been healed from the gunshot using the harmsway, the Reckoner device that helped flesh heal extraordinarily fast.

I didn’t know much about it, though I’d spoken to Cody—he’d called it the “last of the three.” Three bits of incredible technology brought to the Reckoners from Prof’s days as a scientist. The tensors, the jackets, the harmsway. From what Abraham told me, Prof had developed each technology and then stolen them from the lab he’d worked in, intent on starting his own war against the Epics.

Abraham got the last parts of the pulley down.

“Are we done?” I asked.

“Indeed.”

“I counted more crates than that.”

“The others are too big to fit through the tunnel,” Abraham said. “Cody’s going to drive them over to the hangar.”

That was what they called the place where they kept their vehicles. I’d been there; it was a large chamber with a few cars and a van inside. It wasn’t nearly as secure as this hideout was—the hangar had to have access to the upper city and couldn’t be part of the understreets.

Abraham walked over to the stack of a dozen crates we’d heaved into the hideout. He rubbed his chin, inspecting them. “We might as well unload these,” he said. “I’ve got another hour to spare.”

“Before what?” I asked, joining him at the crates.

He didn’t reply.

“You’ve been gone a lot these last few days,” I noted.

Again, he didn’t reply.

“He’s not going to tell you where he’s been, Knees,” Megan said from her lounging position at the desk. “And get used to it. Prof sends him out on secret errands a lot.”

“But …,” I said, feeling hurt. I’d thought I’d earned my place on the team.

“Do not be saddened, David,” Abraham said, grabbing a crowbar
to crack open one of the crates. “It is not a matter of trust. We must keep some things secret, even within the team, should one of us be taken captive. Steelheart has his way of getting to what one hides—nobody except Prof should know everything we are doing.”

It was a good rationale, and it was probably why I couldn’t know about other Reckoner cells either, but it was still annoying. As Abraham cracked open another crate, I reached to the pouch at my side and slipped out my tensor. With that, I vaporized the wooden lids off a few crates.

Abraham raised an eyebrow at me.

“What?” I said. “Cody told me to keep practicing.”

“You are growing quite good,” Abraham said. Then he reached into one of the crates I’d opened and fished out an apple, which was now covered in sawdust. It made something of a mess getting it out. “Quite good,” he continued. “But sometimes, the crowbar is more effective, eh? Besides, we may wish to reuse these crates.”

I sighed, but nodded. It was just … well, hard. The sense of strength I’d felt during the power station infiltration was difficult to forget. Opening the holes in the walls and creating those handholds, I’d been able to bend matter to my will. The more I used the tensor, the more excited I grew about the possibilities it offered.

“It is also important,” Abraham said, “to avoid leaving traces of what we can do. Imagine if everyone knew about these things, eh? It would be a different world, more difficult for us.”

I nodded, reluctantly putting the tensor away. “Too bad we had to leave that hole for Diamond to see.”

Abraham hesitated, just briefly. “Yes,” he said. “Too bad.”

I helped him unload the supplies, and Megan joined us, working with characteristic efficiency. She ended up doing a lot of supervising, telling us where to stow the various foodstuffs. Abraham accepted her direction without complaint, even though she was the junior member of the team.