Steelheart(31)

“Chalkboards?” I asked.

Prof turned from the far wall, where he’d been standing and writing with a piece of chalk. All four walls, along with ceiling and floor, had been turned slate-black, and they were covered in white scribbled writing.

“I know,” Prof said, waving me in. “It’s not very modern, is it? I have technology capable of representing just about anything I want, in any form I want. And I choose chalkboards.” He shook his head, as if in amusement at his own eccentricity. “I think best this way. Old habits, I guess.”

I stepped up to him. I could see now that he wasn’t actually writing on the walls. The thing in Prof’s hand was just a little stylus shaped like a piece of chalk. The machine was interpreting his writings, making the words appear on the wall as he scribbled them.

The drape had fallen back into place, masking the light from the other rooms. I could barely make Prof out; the only light came from the soft glow of the white script on all six walls. I felt as if I were floating in space, the words stars and galaxies shining at me from distant abodes.

“What is this?” I asked, looking upward, reading the script that covered the ceiling. Prof had certain bits of it boxed away from others, and had arrows and lines pointing to different sections. I couldn’t make much sense of what it said. It was written in English, kind of. But many of the words were very small and seemed to be in some kind of shorthand.

“The plan,” Prof said absently. He didn’t wear his goggles or coat—both sat in a pile beside the door—and the sleeves of his black button-up shirt were rolled to the elbows.

“My plan?” I asked.

Prof’s smile was lit by the pale glowing chalk lines. “Not any longer. There are some seeds of it here, though.”

I felt a sharp sinking feeling. “But, I mean …”

Prof glanced at me, then laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did a great job, son. All things considered.”

“What was wrong with it?” I asked. I’d spent years … really, my entire life on that plan, and I was pretty confident in what I’d come up with.

“Nothing, nothing,” Prof said. “The ideas are sound. Remarkably so. Convince Steelheart that there’s a rival in town, lure him out, hit him. Though there is the glaring fact that you don’t know what his weakness is.”

“Well, there is that,” I admitted.

“Tia is working hard on it. If anyone can tease out the truth, it will be her,” Prof said, then paused for a moment before he continued. “Actually, no—I shouldn’t have said that this isn’t your plan. It is, and there are more than just seeds of it here. I looked through your notebooks. You thought through things very well.”

“Thank you.”

“But your vision was too narrow, son.” Prof removed his hand from my shoulder and walked up to the wall. He tapped it with his imitation chalk stylus, and the room’s text rotated. He didn’t appear to even notice, but I grew dizzy as the walls seemed to tumble about me, spinning until a new wall of text popped up in front of Prof.

“Let me start with this,” he said. “Other than not specifically knowing Steelheart’s weakness, what’s the biggest flaw in your plan?”

“I …” I frowned. “Taking out Nightwielder, maybe? But Prof, we just—”

“Actually,” Prof said, “that’s not it.”

My frown deepened. I hadn’t thought there was a flaw in my plan. I’d worked all those out, smoothing them away like cleanser removing the pimples from a teenager’s chin.

“Let’s break it down,” Prof said, raising his arm and sweeping an opening on the wall, like he was wiping mud from a window. The words scrunched to the side, not vanishing but bunching up like he’d pulled a new section of paper from a spool. He raised his chalk to the open space and started to write. “Step one, imitate a powerful Epic. Step two, start killing Steelheart’s important Epics to make him worried. Step three, draw him out. Step four, kill him. By doing this you restore hope to the world and encourage people to fight back.”

I nodded.

“Except there’s a problem,” Prof said, still scribbling on the wall. “If we actually manage to kill Steelheart, we’ll have done it by imitating a powerful Epic. Everyone’s going to assume, then, that an Epic was behind the defeat. And so, what do we gain?”

“We could announce it was the Reckoners after the fact.”

Prof shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. Nobody would believe us, not after all the trouble we’ll need to go through to make Steelheart believe.”

“Well, does it matter?” I asked. “He’ll be dead.” Then, more softly, I added, “And I get revenge.”

Prof hesitated, chalk pausing on the wall. “Yes,” he said. “I guess you’d still have that.”

“You want him dead too,” I said, stepping up beside him. “I know it. I can see it.”

“I want all Epics dead.”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I’ve seen it in you.”

He glanced at me, and his gaze grew stern. “That doesn’t matter. It is vital that people know we were behind this. You’ve said it yourself—we can’t kill every Epic out there. The Reckoners are spinning in circles. The only hope we have, the only hope that humankind has, is to convince people that we can fight back. For that to happen, Steelheart has to fall by human hands.”

“But for him to come out, he has to believe an Epic is threatening him,” I said.

“You see the problem?”

“I …” I was starting to. “So we’re not going to imitate an Epic?”

“We are,” Prof said. “I like the idea, the spark of that. I’m just pointing out problems we have to work through. If this … Limelight is going to kill Steelheart, we need a way to make certain that after the fact, we can convince people it was really us. Not impossible, but it is why I had to work more on the plan, expand it.”

“Okay,” I said, relaxing. So we were still on track. A false Epic … the soul of my plan was there.

“There’s a bigger problem, unfortunately,” Prof said, tapping his chalk against the wall. “Your plan calls for us to kill Epics in Steelheart’s administration to threaten him and draw him out. You indicate that we should do this to prove that a new Epic has come to town. Only, that’s not going to work.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s what the Reckoners would do,” Prof said. “Killing Epics quietly, never coming out into the open? It’ll make him suspicious. We need to think like a real rival would. Anyone who wants Newcago would think bigger than that. Any Epic out there can have a city of his own; it’s not that hard. To want Newcago, you’d have to be ambitious. You’d have to want to be a king. You’d have to want Epics at your beck and call. And so, killing them off one by one wouldn’t make sense. You see?”

“You’d want them alive so they’d follow you,” I said, slowly understanding. “Every Epic you kill would lessen your power once you actually took Newcago.”

“Exactly,” Prof said. “Nightwielder, Firefight, maybe Conflux … they’ll have to go. But you’d be very careful who to kill and who to try to bribe away.”

“Only we can’t bribe them away,” I said. “We wouldn’t be able to convince them that we’re an Epic, not long term.”

“So you see another problem,” Prof said.

He was right. I wilted, like soda going flat in a cup left out overnight. How had I not seen this hole in my plan?

“I’ve been working on these two problems,” Prof said. “If we’re going to imitate an Epic—and I think we still should—we need to be able to prove that we were behind it all along. That way the truth can flood Newcago and spread across the Fractured States from there. We can’t just kill him; we have to film ourselves doing so. And we need to, at the last minute, send information about our plan to the right people around the city—so that they know and can vouch for us. People like Diamond, non-Epic crime magnates, people with influence but no direct connection to his government.”

“Okay. But what about the second problem?”

“We need to hit Steelheart where it hurts,” Prof said, “but we can’t spread it out over too much time, and we can’t focus on Epics. We need one or two massive hits that make him bleed, make him see us as a threat, and we need to do it as a rival seeking to take his place.”

“So …”

Prof tapped the wall, rotating the text from the floor up in front of him. He tapped a section and some of the text started glowing green.

“Green?” I said, amused. “What was that about liking things old-fashioned?”

“You can use colored chalk on a chalkboard,” he said gruffly as he circled a pair of words: sewage system.

“Sewage system?” I said. I’d been expecting something a little more grand, and a little less … crappy.

Prof nodded. “The Reckoners never attack facilities; we focus only on Epics. If we hit one of the city’s main points of infrastructure, it will make Steelheart believe it’s not the Reckoners working against him, but some other force. Someone specifically trying to take down Steelheart’s rule—either rebels in the city, or another Epic moving on his territory.