Steelheart

  “What are you doing, you fool!” Diamond bustled over to me. He didn’t seem very worried about the scanner, more about my offending Nightwielder somehow. “I’m so sorry, Great One. He is a bumbling idiot, but he’s the best I’ve been able to find. It—”

  Diamond hushed as the shadows nearby lengthened, then swirled upon themselves, becoming thick black cords. He stumbled away and I jumped to my feet. The darkness didn’t strike at me, however, but scooped up the fallen fingerprint scanner.

  The blackness seemed to pool on the floor, writhing and twisting about itself. Tendrils of it raised the scanner up into the air in front of Nightwielder, and he studied it with an indifferent gaze. He looked to us, and then more of the blackness rose up and surrounded the scanner. There was a sudden crunch, like a hundred walnuts being cracked at once.

  The intended message was clear. Annoy me, and you will meet the same fate. Nightwielder neatly obscured his fear of the scanner, and his desire to destroy it, behind the guise of a simple threat.

  “I …” I said softly. “Boss, why don’t I just go to the back and keep working on that inventory, like you said?”

  “What you should have done from the first,” Diamond said. “Off with you.”

  I turned and scrambled away, hand held to my side, clutching the data chip from the UV scanner. I hurried my pace, not minding how I looked, until I was running. I reached the boxes and the relative safety of their shadows. There, close to the floor, I found a completed tunnel burrowed through the back wall.

  I lurched to a stop. I took a breath, got on my hands and knees, and scrambled into the opening. I slid through the seven feet of steel and came out the other side.

  Something grabbed my arm and I pulled back by instinct. I looked up, logic fleeing as I thought of how Nightwielder had made the shadows themselves come alive, but was relieved to see a familiar face.

  “Hush!” Abraham said, holding my arm. “Are they chasing?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said softly.

  “Where’s my gun?”

  “Um … I kind of sold it to Nightwielder.”

  Abraham raised an eyebrow at me, then towed me to the side, where Megan covered us with my rifle. She was the definition of professional—lips a terse line, eyes searching the tunnels nearby for danger. The only light came from the mobiles she and Abraham wore strapped to their shoulders.

  Abraham nodded to her, and there was no further conversation as the three of us made our escape down the corridor. At the next intersection of the catacombs, Megan tossed my rifle to Abraham—ignoring that I’d put my hand out for it—and unholstered one of her handguns. She nodded to him, then took point, hurrying ahead down the steel tunnel.

  We continued that way, no talk, for a time. I’d been hopelessly lost before, but now I was turned around so much I barely knew which direction was up.

  “Okay,” Abraham finally said, holding up a hand to wave Megan back. “Let’s take a breather and see if anyone is following.” He settled down in a small alcove in the hallway where he could watch the stretch behind us and see if anyone had followed. He seemed to be favoring the arm opposite the shoulder that had been shot.

  I crouched beside him and Megan joined us.

  “That was an unexpected move you made up there, David,” Abraham said softly, calmly.

  “I didn’t have time to think about it,” I said. “They heard us working.”

  “True, true. And then Diamond suggested you go back, but you said you wanted to stay?”

  “So … you heard that?”

  “I could not have just mentioned it if I hadn’t.” He continued looking down the hallway.

  I glanced at Megan, who gave me a frosty stare. “Unprofessional,” she muttered.

  I fished in my pocket and brought out the data chip. Abraham glanced at it, then frowned. He obviously hadn’t stayed long enough to see what I was doing with Nightwielder. I tapped the chip to my mobile, downloading the information. Three taps later, it started displaying the video from the UV scanner. Abraham glanced over, and even Megan craned her neck to see what it was showing.

  I held my breath. I still didn’t know for certain if I was right about Nightwielder—and even if I was, there was no telling whether my hasty spin of the scanner had captured any useable images.

  The video image showed the ground, with me waving my hand in front of the lens. Then it turned on Nightwielder and my heart leaped. I tapped the screen, freezing the image.

  “You clever little slontze,” Abraham murmured. There, on the screen, Nightwielder stood with half his body fully corporeal. It was difficult to make out, but it was there. Where the UV light shone, he wasn’t translucent, and his body seemed to have settled more.

  I tapped the screen again and the UV light panned past, letting Nightwielder become incorporeal again. The video was only a second or two, but it was enough. “UV forensics scanner,” I explained. “I figured this was the best chance we’d get to know for certain.…”

  “I can’t believe you took that chance,” Megan said. “Without asking anyone. You could have gotten all three of us killed.”

  “But he didn’t,” Abraham said, plucking the data chip from my hand. He studied it, seeming oddly reverent. Then he looked up, as if remembering he’d been planning to watch the hallway for signs of people following. “We need to get this chip to Prof. Now.” He hesitated. “Nice work.”

  He stood up to go, and I found myself beaming. Then I turned to Megan, who gave me an even colder, more hostile look than she had earlier. She rose and followed Abraham.

  Sparks, I thought. What would it take to impress that girl? I shook my head and jogged after them.

  20

  WHEN we returned, Cody was off on a mission to do some scouting for Tia. She waved toward some rations on the back table of the main room, awaiting devourment. Devouration. Whatever that word is.

  “Go tell Prof what you found,” Abraham said softly, walking toward the storage room. Megan made her way to the rations.

  “Where are you going?” I asked Abraham.

  “I need a new gun, it seems,” he said with a smile, ducking through the doorway. He hadn’t chided me for what I’d done with his gun—he saw that I’d saved the team. At least I hoped that was how he viewed it. Still, there was a distinct sense of loss in his voice. He’d liked that gun. And it was easy to see why—I’d never owned a weapon as nice as that one.

  Prof wasn’t in the main room, and Tia glanced at me, raising an eyebrow. “What are you telling Prof?”

  “I’ll explain,” Megan said, sitting down beside her. As usual, Tia had her table covered with papers and cans of cola. It looked like she’d gotten the insurance records Cody mentioned, and she had them up on the screen in front of her.

  If Prof wasn’t in here, I figured he was probably in his thinking room with the imager. I walked over and knocked softly on the wall; the doorway was only draped with a cloth.

  “Come in, David,” Prof’s voice called from inside.

  I hesitated. I hadn’t been in the room since I had told the team my plan. The others rarely entered. This was Prof’s sanctum, and he usually came out—rather than inviting people in—when they needed to speak to him. I glanced at Tia and Megan, both of whom looked surprised, though neither said anything.

  I pushed past the cloth and stepped into the room. I’d imagined what Prof was doing with the wall imagers—maybe exploiting the team’s hack of the spy network, moving through the city and studying Steelheart and his minions. It wasn’t anything so dramatic.

  “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 te
xt 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.

  “Newcago works on two principles: fear and stability. The city has the basic infrastructure that many others don’t, and that draws people here. The fear of Steelheart keeps them in line.” He rolled the words on the walls again, bringing over a network of drawings he’d done in “chalk” on the far wall. It looked like a crude blueprint. “If we start attacking his infrastructure he’ll move on us faster than if we’d attacked his Epics. Steelheart is smart. He knows why people come to Newcago. If he loses the basic things—sewage, power, communications—he’ll lose the city.”

  I nodded slowly. “I wonder why.”

  “Why? I just explained.…” Prof trailed off, looking at me. He frowned. “That’s not what you mean.”

  “I wonder why he cares. Why does he go to so much trouble to create a city where people want to live? Why does he care if they have food, or water, or electricity? He kills them so callously, yet he also sees that they’re provided for.”

  Prof fell silent. Eventually he shook his head. “What is it to be a king if you have nobody to follow you?”

  I thought back to that day, the day when my father died. These people are mine.… As I considered it I realized something about the Epics. Something that, despite all my years of study, I’d never quite understood before.