“STOP.”
I froze. The tone of his voice sent a spike of shock down my spine.
Prof breathed in and out deeply, his hands buried in steel dust. He closed his eyes. “Don’t speak like that, son. It doesn’t do me any good. Please.”
“All right,” I said carefully.
“Just … accept my apology, if you are willing.”
“Of course.”
Prof nodded, turning back to his work.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “I won’t mention … you know. Not directly, at least.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“Well, you invented these things. Amazing things. The harmsway, the jackets. From what Abraham tells me, you had these devices when you founded the Reckoners.”
“I did.”
“So … why not make us something else? Another kind of weapon, based off the Epics? I mean, you sell knowledge to people like Diamond, and he sells it to scientists who are working to create technology like this. I figure you’ve got to be as good at it as any of them are. Why sell the knowledge and not use it yourself?”
Prof worked in silence for a few minutes, then walked over to help me pull dust out of the hole I was making. “That’s a good question. Have you asked Abraham or Cody?”
I grimaced. “Cody talks about daemons or fairies—which he claims the Irish totally stole from his ancestors. I can’t tell if he’s serious.”
“He’s not,” Prof said. “He just likes to see how people react when he says things like that.”
“Abraham thinks it’s because you don’t have a lab now, like you used to. Without the right equipment, you can’t design new technology.”
“Abraham is a very thoughtful man. What do you think?”
“I think that if you can find the resources to buy or steal explosives, cycles, and even copters when you need them, you could get yourself a lab. There’s got to be another reason.”
Prof dusted off his hands and turned to look at me. “All right. I can see where this is going. You may ask one question about my past.” He said it as if it were a gift, a kind of … penance. He had treated me poorly, in part because of something in his past. The recompense he gave was a piece of that past.
I found myself completely unprepared. What did I want to know? Did I ask how he’d come up with the tensors? Did I ask what it was that made him not want to use them? He seemed to be bracing himself.
I don’t want to drag him through that, I thought. Not if it affects him so profoundly. I wouldn’t want to do that any more than I would have wanted someone to drag me through memories of what had happened to Megan.
I decided to pick something more benign. “What were you?” I asked. “Before Calamity. What was your job?”
Prof seemed taken aback. “That’s your question?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure you want to know?”
I nodded.
“I was a fifth-grade science teacher,” Prof said.
I opened my mouth to laugh at the joke, but the tone of his voice made me hesitate.
“Really?” I finally asked.
“Really. An Epic destroyed the school. It … it was still in session.” He stared at the wall, emotion bleeding from his face. He was putting a mask up.
And here I thought it had been an innocent question. “But the tensors,” I said. “The harmsway. You worked at a lab at some point, right?”
“No,” he said. “The tensors and the harmsway don’t belong to me. The others just assume I invented them. I didn’t.”
That revelation stunned me.
Prof turned away to gather up his buckets. “The kids at the school called me Prof too. It always sticks, though I’m not a professor—I didn’t even go to graduate school. I only ended up teaching science by accident. It was the teaching itself that I loved. At least, I loved it back when I thought it would be enough to change things.”
He walked off down the tunnel, leaving me to wonder.
• • •
“That’s it. Y’all can turn around now.”
I turned, adjusting the pack I was toting on my back. Cody, balanced on a ladder above me, lifted the welding mask from his face and wiped his brow with the hand not holding the torch. It was a few hours after I had carved out the pocket under the field. Cody and I had spent those hours carving smaller tunnels and holes throughout the stadium, with Cody spot welding where support was needed.
Our most recent project was making the sniper’s nest that would be my post at the beginning of the battle. It was at the front of the third level of seats on the west side of the stadium, at about the fifty-yard line, overhanging the top of the first deck. We didn’t want it to be visible from above, so I’d used the tensor to carve away a space under the floor, leaving only an inch of metal on top, except for two feet right near the front for my head and shoulders to poke out so I could aim a rifle through a hole in the low wall at the front of the deck.
Cody reached up from his perch on the ladder and jiggled the metal framework he had just welded to the bottom of the area I had hollowed out. He nodded, apparently satisfied it would support me when I lay in wait there in the sniper’s nest. The floor of that section of seating was too thin to hollow out a hole deep enough to hide in; the framework was our solution to that problem.
“Where to next?” I asked as Cody climbed down the ladder. “How about we do that escape hole farther up in the third deck?”
Cody slung his welding gear over his shoulder and cracked some kinks out of his back. “Abraham called to say he’s going to take care of the UV floodlights now,” he said. “He finished packing the explosives under the field a while ago, so it’s time for me to go weld down there. Y’all can handle the next hole on your own—but I’ll help you carry the ladder there. Good job on these holes so far, lad.”
“So you’re back to lad?” I asked. “What happened to mate?”
“I realized something,” Cody said, collapsing the ladder and tilting the top to one side. “My Australian ancestors?”
“Yeah?” I lifted the lower end of the ladder and followed him as he walked from the first deck of seats into the stadium innards.
“They came from Scotland originally. So if I want to be really authentic, I need to be able to speak Australian with a Scottish accent.”
We kept walking through the pitch-black space beneath the stands that was kind of like a large, curved hallway—I think it was called a concourse. The planned lower end for the next escape hole was in one of the restrooms down the hall. “An Australian-Scottish-Tennessean accent, eh?” I said. “You practicing it?”
“Hell no,” Cody said. “I’m not crazy, lad. Just a little eccentric.”
I smiled, then turned my head to look in the direction of the field. “We’re really going to try this, aren’t we?”
“We’d better. I bet Abraham twenty bucks that we’d win.”
“I just … It’s hard to believe. I’ve spent ten years planning for this day, Cody. Over half my life. Now it’s here. It’s nothing like what I’d pictured, but it’s here.”
“You should feel proud,” Cody said. “The Reckoners have been doing what they’ve been doing for over half a decade. No changes, no real surprises, no big risks.” He reached up to scratch his left ear. “I often wondered if we were getting stagnant. Never could gather the arguments to suggest a change. It took someone coming in from the outside to shake us up a wee bit.”
“Attacking Steelheart is just a ‘wee bit’ of a shakeup?”
“Well, it’s not like you’ve gotten us to do something really crazy, like trying to steal Tia’s cola.”
Outside the restroom, we set the ladder down and Cody wandered over to check on some explosives on the opposite wall. We intended to use them as distractions; Abraham was going to blow them when needed. I paused, then pulled out one of my eraser-like blasting caps. “Maybe I should put one of these on them,” I said. “In case we need a secondary person to blow the explosives.”
Cody eyed it, rubbing his chin. He knew what I meant. We’d only need a secondary person to blow the explosives if Abraham fell. I didn’t like thinking about it, but after Megan … Well, we all seemed a whole lot more frail to me now than we once had.
“You know,” Cody said, taking the blasting cap from me, “where I’d really like to have a backup is on the explosives under the field there. Those are the most important ones to detonate; they’re going to cover our escape.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Do you mind if I take this and stick it down there before I weld it closed?” Cody asked.
“No, assuming Prof agrees.”
“He likes redundancy,” Cody said, slipping the blasting cap into his pocket. “Just keep that pen-dealy of yours handy. And don’t push it by accident.”
He sauntered back toward the tunnel under the field, and I took the ladder into the restroom to get to work.
I punched my fist out into open air, then ducked as the steel dust fell around me. So that’s how he did it, I thought, flexing my fingers. I hadn’t figured out the sword trick, but I was getting good at punching and vaporizing things in front of my fist. It had to do with crafting the tensor’s sound waves so that they followed my hand in motion, creating kind of an … envelope around it.