I watched her eyes. Watched her serene, calm face as the beeps slowed. Then stopped. There was no flatline sound from the mobile. Just silence that carried a weight of meaning. Nothingness laden with data.
“This …,” I said, blinking tears. “I mean, I carried her all the way here, Tia.…”
“I’m sorry,” Tia said. She raised a hand to her face, leaving a bloody mark on her forehead. Then she sighed and leaned back against the wall, looking exhausted.
“Do something,” I said. Not an order. A plea.
“I’ve done what I can,” Tia said. “She’s gone, David.”
Silence.
“Those wounds were bad,” Tia continued. “You did everything you could. It’s not your fault. To be honest, even if you’d been able to get her here immediately, I don’t know if she’d have made it.”
“I …” I couldn’t think.
Cloth rustled. I glanced to the side. Prof stood in the doorway to his room. He’d dusted off his clothing, and he looked clean and dignified, a sharp contrast to the rest of us. His eyes flickered to Megan. “She’s gone?” he asked. His voice had softened a little from before, though he still didn’t sound like I felt he should.
Tia nodded.
“Gather what you can,” Prof said, slinging a pack over his shoulder. “We’re abandoning this position. It’s been compromised.”
Tia and Abraham nodded, as if they’d been expecting this order. Abraham did pause to lay a hand on Megan’s shoulder and bow his head, and then he moved his hand to the pendant at his neck. He hurried off to gather his tools.
I took a blanket from Megan’s bedroll—it didn’t have sheets—and brought it back to lay over her. Prof looked at me, and he seemed about to object to the frivolous action, but he held his tongue. I tucked the blanket around Megan’s shoulders but left her head exposed. I don’t know why people cover the face after someone dies. The face is the only thing left that is still right. I brushed it with my fingers. The skin was still warm.
This isn’t happening, I thought numbly. The Reckoners don’t fail like this.
Unfortunately, facts—my own facts—flooded my mind. The Reckoners did fail; members of the Reckoners did die. I’d researched this. I’d studied this. It happened.
It just shouldn’t have happened to Megan.
I need to see her body cared for, I thought, bending down to pick her up.
“Leave the corpse,” Prof said.
I ignored him, then felt him gripping my shoulder. I looked up through bleary eyes and found his expression harsh, eyes wide and angry. They softened as I looked at him.
“What’s done is done,” Prof said. “We’ll burn out this hole, and that will be a fitting burial for her. Regardless, trying to bring the body would just slow us down, maybe get us killed. The soldiers are probably still watching the front position. We can’t know how long it will take them to find the new hole I cut in here.” He hesitated. “She’s gone, son.”
“I should have run faster,” I whispered, in direct contrast to what Tia had said. “I should have been able to save her.”
“Are you angry?” Prof asked.
“I …”
“Abandon the guilt,” Prof said. “Abandon the denial. Steelheart did this to her. He’s our goal. That has to be your focus. We don’t have time for grief; we only have time for vengeance.”
I found myself nodding. Many would have called those the wrong words, but they worked for me. Prof was right. If I moped and grieved, I’d die. I needed something to replace those emotions, something strong.
Anger at Steelheart. That would do it. He’d taken my father from me, and now he’d taken Megan too. I had a lurking understanding that so long as he lived, he’d take everything I loved from me.
Hate Steelheart. Use that to keep me going. Yes … I could do that. I nodded.
“Gather your notes,” Prof said, “and then pack up the imager. We’re leaving in ten minutes, and we’ll destroy anything we leave behind.”
I looked back down the new tunnel Prof had cut into the hideout. Harsh red light glowed at its end, a funeral pyre for Megan. The blast Abraham had rigged was hot enough to melt steel; I could feel the heat from here, far away.
If Enforcement managed to cut into the hideout, all they’d find would be slag and dust. We had carried out what we could, and Tia had stashed a little more in a hidden pocket she’d had Abraham cut into a nearby corridor. For the second time in a month, I watched a home I’d known burn.
This one took something very dear with it. I wanted to say goodbye, to whisper it or at least think it. I couldn’t get the word to form. I just … I guess I just wasn’t ready.
I turned and followed the others, hiking away into the darkness.
An hour later I was still walking through the dark corridor, head down, pack slung on my back. I was so tired I could barely think.
It was odd, though—as strong as my hatred had been for a short time, now it was just lukewarm. Replacing Megan with hatred seemed a poor trade.
There was motion ahead and Tia fell back. She’d changed quickly from her bloodstained clothing. She’d also forced me to do so before abandoning the hideout. I’d washed my hands too, but there was still blood crusted under my fingernails.
“Hey,” Tia said. “You’re looking pretty tired.”
I shrugged.
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not about her. Just … not right now.”
“Okay. Then something else, maybe?” Something to distract you, her tone implied.
Well, maybe that would be nice. Except the only other thing I wanted to talk about was nearly as distressing. “Why is Prof so mad at me?” I asked softly. “He looked … He looked indignant that he had to come rescue me.”
That made me sick. When he’d spoken to me via mobile, he’d seemed encouraging, determined to help. And then after … he felt like another person. It lingered with him still, as he walked alone at the front of the group.
Tia followed my gaze. “Prof has some … bad memories attached to the tensors, David. He hates using them.”
“But—”
“He’s not mad at you,” Tia said, “and he’s not bothered by having to rescue you, regardless of how it might have seemed. He’s mad at himself. He just needs some time alone.”
“But he was so good with them, Tia.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I’ve seen it. There are troubles there you can’t understand, David. Sometimes doing things we used to do reminds us of who we used to be, and not always in good ways.”
That didn’t make much sense to me. But then, my mind wasn’t exactly the most crisp it had ever been.
We eventually reached the new bolt-hole, which was much smaller than the hideout—only two small rooms. Cody met us but spoke with a subdued tone. He’d been briefed, obviously, about what had happened. He helped us carry our equipment up into the main chamber of the new hideout.
Conflux, the head of Enforcement, was captive in there somewhere. Were we foolhardy to think we could hold him? Was this all part of another trap? I had to assume that Prof and Tia knew what they were doing.
As he worked, Abraham flexed his arm—the one that had taken a bullet. The little diodes of the harmsway flashed on his biceps, and the bullet holes had scabbed over already. A night sleeping with those diodes on and he’d be able to use the arm without trouble in the morning. A few days and the wound would only be a scar.
And yet, I thought, handing my pack to Cody and crawling through the tunnel to the upper chamber, it didn’t help Megan. Nothing we did helped Megan.
I had lost a lot of people in the last ten years. Life in Newcago wasn’t easy, particularly for orphans. But none of those losses had affected me this profoundly since my father’s death. I guess it was a good thing—it meant I was learning to care again. Still, it felt pretty crappy at the moment.
When I came out of the entry tunnel and into the new hideout, Prof was telling everyone to bed down fo
r the night. He wanted us to have some sleep in us before we dealt with the captive Epic. As I arranged my bedroll, I heard him speaking with Cody and Tia. Something about injecting the captive Epic with a sedative so that he remained unconscious.
“David?” Tia asked. “You’re wounded. I should hook up the harmsway to you and …”
“I’ll live,” I said. They could heal me tomorrow. I didn’t care at the moment. Instead I lay down on my bedroll and turned over to face the wall. Then I finally let the tears come in force.
32
ABOUT sixteen hours later I sat on the floor of the new hideout, eating a bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with raisins, harmsway diodes flashing on my leg and side. We’d had to leave most of our good food behind and were relying on storage that had been packed in the bolt-hole.
The other Reckoners gave me space. I found that odd, since they’d all known Megan longer than I had. It wasn’t like she and I had actually shared anything special, even if she had begun warming up to me.
In fact, as I looked back on it, my reaction to her death seemed silly. I was just a boy with a crush. It still hurt, though. Badly.
“Hey, Prof,” Cody said, sitting in front of a laptop. “You should see this, mate.”
“Mate?” Prof asked.
“I’ve got a little bit of Australian in me,” Cody said. “My father’s grandfather was one-quarter Aussie. Been meaning to try it out for a spin.”
“You’re a bizarre little man, Cody,” Prof said. He was back to his normal self, for the most part—maybe a little more solemn today. So were the rest of them, even Cody. Losing a teammate wasn’t a pleasant experience, though I got the sense that they’d been through all of this before.
Prof studied the screen for a moment, then raised an eyebrow. Cody tapped, then tapped again.
“What is it?” Tia asked.
Cody turned the laptop around. None of us had chairs; we were all just sitting on our bedrolls. Even though this hideout was smaller than the other, it felt empty to me. There weren’t enough of us.
The screen was blue, with simple block letters in black. PICK A TIME AND LOCATION. I WILL COME.
“This,” Cody said, “is all people can see on any of the one hundred entertainment channels in Steelheart’s network. It’s displayed on every mobile that logs on, and on every information screen in the city. Something makes me think we got through to him.”
Prof smiled. “This is good. He’s letting us pick the place for the fight.”
“He usually does that,” I said, staring into my oatmeal. “He let Faultline choose. He thinks it sends a message—this city is his, and he doesn’t care if you try to find a place that gives you the better ground. He’ll kill you anyway.”
“I just wish I didn’t feel blind,” Tia said. She was sitting in the far corner with her datapad. It had her mobile stuck to the back so its display expanded what was on the mobile’s screen. “It’s baffling. How did they find out that I’d hacked their camera system? I’m locked out on all sides, every hole plugged. I can’t see a thing of what’s going on in the city.”
“We’ll pick a place where we can set up our own cameras,” Prof said. “You won’t be blind when we face him, Tia. It—”
Abraham’s mobile beeped. He raised it up. “Proximity alarms say that our prisoner is stirring, Prof.”
“Good,” Prof said, standing up and looking toward the entrance to the smaller room that held our captive. “That mystery has been itching at me all day.” As he turned, his eyes fell on me, and I caught a flash of guilt from him.
He moved past me quickly and began giving orders. We’d interrogate the prisoner with a light shining directly on him, Cody standing behind him with a gun to the Epic’s head. Everyone was to wear their jackets. They’d replaced mine with a spare. It was black leather, too large for me by a size or two.
The Reckoners began moving to set things up. Cody and Tia entered the prisoner’s room, eventually followed by Prof. I shoved a spoonful of oatmeal in my mouth, then noticed Abraham, who was lingering in the main room.
He walked over to me and knelt on one knee. “Live, David,” he said softly. “Live your life.”
“I’m doing that,” I grumbled.
“No. You are letting Steelheart live your life for you. He controls it, each step of the way. Live your own life.” He patted my shoulder, as if that made everything all right, then waved for me to come with him into the next room.
I sighed, climbed to my feet, and followed.
The captive was a spindly older man—perhaps in his sixties—balding and dark skinned. He was turning his head about, trying to figure out where he was, though he was still blindfolded and gagged. He certainly didn’t look threatening, strapped into his chair as he was. Of course many an “unthreatening” Epic could kill with little more than a thought.
Conflux wasn’t supposed to have powers like that. But then, Fortuity wasn’t supposed to have had heightened dexterity. Besides, we didn’t even know if this was Conflux. I found myself pondering the situation, which was good. At least it kept me from thinking about her.
Abraham aimed a large floodlight right at the captive’s face. Many Epics needed line of sight to use their powers on someone, so keeping the man disoriented had a very real and useful purpose. Prof nodded to Cody, who cut off the prisoner’s blindfold and gag, then stepped back and leveled a wicked .357 at the man’s head.
The prisoner blinked against the light, then looked about. He cringed in his chair.
“Who are you?” Prof asked, standing by the light where the prisoner wouldn’t be able to make out his features.
“Edmund Sense,” the prisoner said. He paused. “And you?”
“That is not important to you.”
“Well, seeing as to how you have me captive, I suspect it’s of utmost importance to me.” Edmund had a pleasant voice, with a faint Indian accent. He seemed nervous—his eyes kept darting from side to side.
“You’re an Epic,” Prof said.
“Yes,” Edmund answered. “They call me Conflux.”
“Head of Steelheart’s Enforcement troops,” Prof said. The rest of us remained quiet, as instructed, to not give the man an indication of how many were in the room.
Edmund chuckled. “Head? Yes, I suppose you could call me that.” He leaned back, closing his eyes. “Though, more appropriately, I might be the heart. Or maybe just the battery.”
“Why were you in the trunk of that car?” Prof asked.
“Because I was being transported.”
“And you suspected your limo might be attacked, so you hid yourself in the trunk?”
“Young man,” Edmund said pleasantly, “if I had wanted to hide, would I have had myself tied up, gagged, and blindfolded?”
Prof was silent.
“You wish for proof that I am who I say,” Edmund said with a sigh. “Well, I’d rather not force you to beat it out of me. Do you have a mechanical device that has been drained of energy? No battery power at all?”
Prof looked to the side. Tia fished in her pocket and handed over a penlight. Prof tried it and no light came out. Then he hesitated. Finally he waved us out of the room. Cody remained, gun on Edmund, but the rest of us—Prof included—gathered in the main chamber.
“He might be able to overload it and make it explode,” Prof said softly.
“We will need proof of who he is, though,” Tia said. “If he can power that by touching it, then he’s either Conflux or a different Epic with a very similar power.”
“Or someone who Conflux gifted his abilities to,” I said.
“He registers as a powerful Epic on the dowser,” Abraham said. “We’ve tried it on Enforcement officers before who had powers given to them by Conflux, and it didn’t register them.”
“What if he’s a different Epic?” Tia asked. “With some powers gifted by Conflux to show he can give energy to things and make us think he’s Conflux? He could act harmless, then when we aren’t expecting, turn his ful
l powers on us.”
Prof slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s just too convoluted, and too dangerous. Why would they think we would decide to kidnap Conflux? We could just as easily have killed him right there when we found him. I think this man is who he says he is.”
“Why was he in the trunk, though?” Abraham asked.
“He’ll probably answer if we ask him,” I said. “I mean, he hasn’t exactly been difficult so far.”
“That’s what worries me,” Tia said. “It’s too easy.”
“Easy?” I asked. “Megan died so we could capture that guy. I want to hear what he has to say.”
Prof glanced at me, tapping the penlight against his palm. He nodded, and Abraham fetched a long wooden rod, which we tied the light to. We returned to the room, and Prof used the rod to touch the light to Edmund’s cheek.
Immediately the flashlight’s bulb started glowing. Edmund yawned, then tried to settle himself in his bonds.
Prof pulled the flashlight back; it continued to shine.
“I recharged the battery for you,” Edmund said. “Might that be enough to persuade you to get me a drink …?”
“Two years ago,” I said, stepping forward despite Prof’s orders, “in July, you were involved in a large-scale project on Steelheart’s behalf. What was it?”
“I don’t really have a good sense of time …,” the man said.
“It shouldn’t be hard to remember,” I said. “The people of the city don’t know about it, but something odd happened to Conflux.”
“Summer? Hmm … was that when I was taken out of the city?” Edmund smiled. “Yes, I remember the sunlight. He needed me to power some of his war tanks for some reason.”
It had been an offensive against Dialas, an Epic in Detroit who had angered Steelheart by cutting off some of his food supplies. Conflux’s part had been handled very covertly. Few knew of it.
Prof was looking at me, lips drawn to a tight line. I ignored him. “Edmund,” I said, “you came to the city on what date?”
“Spring of 04 AC,” he said.
Four years after Calamity. That clinched it for me—most people assumed that Conflux had joined Steelheart in 05 AC, when Enforcement had first gained mechanized units and the power outages of 04 AC had finally begun to stabilize. But inside sources that I’d carefully gathered claimed Steelheart hadn’t trusted Conflux at first, and hadn’t used him for important projects for nearly a year.