Steelheart(20)

“He’s using Conflux to augment his power stores,” Prof said. “Somehow.”

“So that makes Conflux an even better target!” I said.

“We talked about this months ago,” Prof said, leaning forward, fingers laced before him. “We decided he was too dangerous to hit. Even if we succeeded, we’d draw too much attention, be hunted down by Steelheart himself.”

“Which is what we want,” I said.

The others didn’t seem convinced. Take this step, move against Steelheart’s empire, and they’d be exposing themselves. No more hiding in the various urban undergrounds, hitting carefully chosen targets. No more quiet rebellion. Kill Conflux, and there would be no backing down until Steelheart was dead or the Reckoners were captured, broken, and executed.

He’s going to say no, I thought, looking into Prof’s eyes. He looked older than I’d always imagined him being. A man in his middle years, with grey speckling his hair, and with a face that showed he had lived through the death of one era and had worked ten hard years trying to end the next era. Those years had taught him caution.

He opened his mouth to say the words, but was interrupted when Abraham’s mobile chirped. Abraham unhooked it from its shoulder mount. “Time for Reinforcement,” he said, smiling.

Reinforcement. Steelheart’s daily message to his subjects. “Can you show it on the wall here?” I asked.

“Sure,” Cody said, turning his mobile toward the projector and tapping a button.

“That won’t be ne—” Prof began.

The program had already started. It showed Steelheart this time. Sometimes he appeared personally, sometimes not. He stood atop one of the tall radio towers on his palace. A pitch-black cape spread out behind him, rippling in the wind.

The messages were all prerecorded, but there was no way to tell when; as always there was no sun in the sky, and no trees grew in the city any longer to give an indication of the season either. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be able to tell the time of day just by looking out the window.

Steelheart was illuminated by red lights from below. He placed one foot on a low railing, then leaned forward and scanned his city. His dominion.

I shivered, staring at him, presented in large scale on the wall in front of me. My father’s murderer. The tyrant. He looked so calm, so thoughtful, in this picture. Long jet-black hair that curled softly down to his shoulders. Shirt stretched across an inhumanly strong physique. Black slacks, an upgrade from the loose pants he’d worn on that day ten years ago. This shot of him seemed like it wanted to present him as the thoughtful and concerned dictator, like the early communist leaders I’d learned about back in the Factory school.

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.