Steelheart(21)

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.