Steelheart (The Reckoners 1)

She closed her mouth; she looked like she’d been about to do just that.

“The tensors?” I asked again.

“Something Prof invented,” Cody said. “Either right before or right after he left the lab. He’s got a couple of things like that, inventions that give us our main edge against the Epics. Our jackets are one of those—they can take a lot of punishment—and the tensors are another.”

“But what are they?”

“Gloves,” Cody said. “Well, devices in the form of gloves. They create vibrations that disrupt solid objects. Works best on dense stuff, like stone and metal, some kinds of wood. Turns that kind of material to dust, but won’t do anything to a living animal or person.”

“You’re kidding.” In all my years of research I’d never heard of any technology like that.

“Nope,” Cody said. “They’re difficult to use, though. Abraham and Tia are the most skilled. But you’ll see—the tensors, they let us go where we’re not supposed to be. Where we’re not expected to be.”

“That’s amazing,” I said, my mind racing. The Reckoners did have a reputation for being able to get where nobody thought they could. There were stories … Epics killed in their own chambers, well guarded and presumed safe. Near-magical escapes by the Reckoners.

A device that could turn stone and metal to powder … You could get through locked doors, regardless of the security devices. You could sabotage vehicles. Maybe even knock down buildings. Suddenly, some of the most baffling mysteries surrounding the Reckoners made sense to me. How they’d gotten in to trap Daystorm, how they’d escaped the time when Calling War had nearly cornered them.

They’d have to be clever about how they entered, so as to not leave obvious holes that gave them away. But I could see how it would work. “But why …,” I asked, dazed, “why are you telling me this?”

“As I said, lad,” Cody explained. “You’re going to see them at work soon anyway. Might as well prepare you for it. Besides, you already know so much about us that one more thing won’t matter.”

“Okay.” I said it lightly, then caught the somber tone of his voice. He’d left something unsaid: I already knew so much that I couldn’t be allowed to go free.

Prof had given me my chance to leave. I’d insisted they bring me. At this point I either convinced them utterly that I wasn’t a threat and joined them, or they left me behind. Dead.

I swallowed uncomfortably, my mouth suddenly dry. I asked for this, I told myself sternly. I’d known that once I joined them—if I joined them—I wouldn’t ever be leaving. I was in, and that was that.

“So …” I tried to force myself not to dwell on the fact that this man—or any of them—might someday decide I needed to be shot in the name of the common good. “So how did he figure these gloves out? The tensors? I’ve never heard of anything like them.”

“Epics,” Cody said, his voice growing amiable again. “Prof let it drop once. The technology came from studying an Epic who could do something similar. Tia says it happened in the early days—before society collapsed, some Epics were captured and held. Not all of them are so powerful they can escape captivity with ease. Different labs ran tests on them, trying to figure out how their powers worked. The technology for things like the tensors came from those days.”

I hadn’t heard that, and some things started to click into place for me. We’d made great advances in technology back then, right around the arrival of Calamity. Energy weapons, advanced power sources and batteries, new mobile technology—which was why ours worked underground and at a significant range without using towers.

Of course, we lost much of it when the Epics started to take over. And what we didn’t lose, Epics like Steelheart controlled. I tried to imagine those early Epics being tested. Was that why so many were evil? They resented this testing?

“Did any of them go to the testing willingly?” I asked. “How many labs were doing this?”

“I don’t know,” Cody said. “I reckon it’s not very important.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

Cody shrugged, rifle still over his shoulder, the light of his mobile illuminating the tomblike metal corridor. The catacombs smelled of dust and condensation. “Tia is always talking about the scientific foundation of the Epics,” he said. “I don’t think they can be explained that way. Too much about them breaks what science says should happen. I sometimes wonder if they came along because we thought we could explain everything.”

It didn’t take much longer for us to arrive. I’d noticed that Megan was leading us by way of her mobile, which showed a map on its screen. That was remarkable. A map of the steel catacombs? I didn’t think such a thing existed.

“Here,” Megan said, waving to a thick patch of wires hanging down like a curtain in front of a wall. Sights like that were common down here, where the Diggers had left things unfinished.

Cody walked up and banged on a plate near the wires. A distant bang came back at him a few moments later.

“In you go, Knees,” he said to me, gesturing toward the wires.

I took a breath and stepped forward, pushing them aside with the barrel of my rifle. There was a small tunnel beyond, leading steeply upward. I would have to crawl. I looked back at him.

“It’s safe,” he promised. I couldn’t tell if he was making me go first because of some latent mistrust, or because he liked seeing me squirm. It didn’t seem the time to question him or back down. I started crawling.

The tunnel was small enough to make me worry that if I slung my rifle on my back, a good scrape stood a chance of knocking the scope or sights out of alignment. So I kept it in my right hand as I crawled, which made it all the more awkward. The tunnel led toward a distant, soft light, and the crawl took long enough that my knees were aching by the time I reached the light. A strong hand took me by the left arm, helping me out of the tunnel. Abraham. The dark-skinned man had changed into cargo pants and a green tank top, which showed well-muscled arms. I hadn’t noticed before, but he was wearing a small silver pendant around his neck, hanging out of his shirt.

The room I stepped into was unexpectedly large. Big enough for the team to have laid out their equipment and several bedrolls without it feeling cramped. There was a large table made of metal that grew right out of the floor, as well as benches at the walls and stools around the table.

They carved it there, I realized, looking at the sculpted walls. They made this room with the tensors. Carved furniture right into it.

It was impressive. I gawked as I stepped back and let Abraham help Megan out of the tunnel. The chamber had two doorways into other rooms that looked smaller. It was lit by lanterns, and there were cords on the floor—taped in place and out of the way—leading down another small tunnel.

“You have electricity,” I said. “How did you get electricity?”

“Tapped into an old subway line,” Cody said, crawling out of the tunnel. “One that was half completed, then forgotten about. The nature of this place is that even Steelheart doesn’t know all of its nooks and dead ends.”

“Just more proof the Diggers were mad,” Abraham said. “They wired things in strange ways. We’ve found rooms that were sealed completely but had lights left on inside, shining for years by themselves. Repaire des fantômes.”

“Megan tells me,” Prof said, appearing from one of the other rooms, “that you recovered the information, but that your means were … unconventional.” The aging but sturdy man still wore his black lab coat.

“Hell yeah!” Cody said, shouldering his rifle.

Prof snorted. “Well, let’s see what you recovered before I decide if I should yell at you or not.” He reached for the backpack in Megan’s hand.

“Actually,” I said, stepping toward it, “I can—”

“You’ll sit down, son,” Prof said, “while I have a look at this. All of it. Then we’ll talk.”

His voice was calm, but I got the message. I pensively sat down beside the steel table as the

others gathered around the pack and began rifling through my life.

12

“WOW,” Cody said. “Honestly, lad, I thought you were exaggerating. But y’all really are a full-blown supergeek, aren’t you?”

I blushed, still sitting on my stool. They had opened the folders I’d packed and spread out the contents, then moved on to my notebooks, passing them around and studying them. Cody had eventually lost interest and moved over to sit by me, his back to the table and elbows hitched up on it behind him.

“I had a job to do,” I said. “I decided to do it well.”

“This is impressive,” Tia said. She sat cross-legged on the floor. She had changed to jeans but was still wearing her blouse and blazer, and her short red hair was still perfectly styled. Tia held up one of my notebooks. “It’s rudimentary in organization,” she said, “and doesn’t use standard classifications. But it is exhaustive.”

“There are standard classifications?” I asked.

“Several different systems,” she said. “It looks like you’ve got a few of the terms here that cross between the systems, like High Epic—though I personally prefer the tier system. In other places, what you’ve come up with is interesting. I do like some of your terminology, like prime invincibility.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I felt a little embarrassed. Of course there were ways of classifying Epics. I hadn’t the education—or the resources—to learn such things, so I’d made up my own.

It was surprising how easy it had been. There were outliers, of course—bizarre Epics with powers that didn’t fit any of the classifications—but a surprising number of the others showed similarities. There were always individual quirks, like the glimmering of Refractionary’s illusions. The core abilities, however, were often very similar.

“Explain this to me,” Tia said, holding up a different notebook.

Hesitantly, I slid off my stool and joined her on the floor. She was pointing toward a notation I’d made at the bottom of the entry for a particular Epic named Strongtower.