Steelheart (The Reckoners 1)

“I did it!” I exclaimed, pointing at the powdered metal that was the remains of the chair leg.

“Yeah, but you missed.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I finally made it work!” I hesitated. “It wasn’t like blowing smoke. It was like … like singing. From my hand.”

“That’s a new one,” Cody said.

“It’s different for everyone,” Tia said from her table, head still down. She opened a can of cola as she scribbled notes. Tia was useless without her cola. “Using the tensors isn’t natural to your mind, David. You’ve already built neural pathways, and so you have to kind of hotwire your brain to figure out what mental muscles to flex. I’ve always wondered if we gave a tensor to a child, if they’d be able to incorporate using it better, more naturally, as just another kind of ‘limb’ to practice with.”

Cody looked at me. Then he whispered, “Wee daemons. Don’t let her fool you, lad. I think she works for them. I saw her leaving out pie for them the other night.”

Trouble was, he was just serious enough to make me question whether he really believed that. The twinkle to his eye indicated he was being silly, but he had such a perfectly straight face.…

I took off the tensor and handed it over. Cody slipped it on, then absently raised a hand—palm first—to the side and thrust it outward. The tensor began vibrating as his hand moved, and when it stopped a faint, smoky green wave continued on, hitting the fallen chair and the pipe. Both vaporized to dust, falling to the ground in a puff.

Each time I saw the tensors work, I was amazed. The range was very limited, only a few feet at most, and they couldn’t affect flesh. They weren’t much good in a fight—sure, you could vaporize someone’s gun, but only if they were very close to you. In which case taking the time to concentrate and fight with the tensors would probably be less effective than just punching the guy.

Still, the opportunities they afforded were incredible. Moving through the bowels of Newcago’s steel catacombs, getting in and out of rooms. If you managed to keep the tensor hidden, you could escape from any bond, any cell.

“You keep training,” Cody said. “You show talent, so Prof will want you to get good with these. We need another member of the team who can use them.”

“Not all of you can?” I asked, surprised.

Cody shook his head. “Megan can’t make them work, and Tia’s rarely in a position to use them—we need her back giving support while on missions. So it usually comes down to Abraham and me using them.”

“What about Prof?” I asked. “He invented them. He’s got to be pretty good with them, right?”

Cody shook his head. “Don’t know. He refuses to use them. Something about a bad experience in the past. He won’t talk about it. Probably shouldn’t. We don’t need to know. Either way, you should practice.” Cody shook his head and took off the tensor, tucking it into his pocket. “What I’d have given for one of these before.…”

The other pieces of Reckoner technology were awesome too. The jackets, which supposedly worked a little like armor, were one. Cody, Megan, and Abraham each wore a jacket—different on the outside, but with a complicated network of diodes inside that somehow protected them. The dowser, which told if someone was Epic, was another piece of such technology. The only other piece I’d seen was something they called the harmsway, a device that accelerated a body’s healing abilities.

It’s so sad, I thought, as Cody fetched a broom to clean up the dust. All of this technology … it could have changed the world. If the Epics hadn’t done that first. A ruined world couldn’t enjoy the benefits.

“What was your life like back then?” I asked, holding the dustpan for Cody. “Before all of this happened? What did you do?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Cody said, smiling.

“Let me guess,” I said, anticipating one of Cody’s stories. “Professional footballer? High-paid assassin and spy?”

“A cop,” Cody said, subdued, looking down at the pile of dust. “In Nashville.”

“What? Really?” I was surprised.

Cody nodded, then waved for me to dump the first pile of dust into the trash bin while he swept up the rest of it. “My father was a cop too in his early years, over in the homeland. Small city. You wouldn’t know it. He moved here when he married my mother. I grew up over here; ain’t never actually been to the homeland. But I wanted to be just like my pa, so when he died, I went to school and joined the force.”

“Huh,” I said, stooping down again to collect the rest of the dust. “That’s a lot less glamorous than I’d been imagining.”

“Well, I did take down an entire drug cartel by myself, you understand.”

“Of course.”

“And there was the time the president’s Secret Service were shuttling him through the city, and they all ate a bad mess of scones and got sick, and we in the department had to protect him from an assassination plot.” He called over to Abraham, who was tinkering with one of the team’s shotguns. “It was them Frenchies who were behind it, you know.”

“I’m not French!” Abraham called back. “I’m Canadian, you slontze.”

“Same difference!” Cody said, then grinned and looked back at me. “Anyway, maybe it wasn’t glamorous. Not all the time. But I enjoyed it. I like doing good for people. Serve and protect. And then …”

“Then?” I asked.

“Nashville got annexed when the country collapsed,” Cody explained. “A group of five Epics took charge of most of the South.”

“The Coven,” I said, nodding. “There’s actually six of them. One pair are twins.”

“Ah, right. Keep forgetting that y’all are freakishly informed about this stuff. Anyway, they took over, and the police department started serving them. If we didn’t agree, we were supposed to turn in our badges and retire. The good ones did that. The bad ones stayed on, and they got worse.”

“And you?” I asked.

Cody fingered the thing he kept at his waist, tied to his belt on the right side. It looked like a thin wallet. He reached down and undid the snap, showing a scratched—but still polished—police badge.

“I didn’t do either one,” he said, subdued. “I took an oath. Serve and protect. I ain’t going to stop that because some thugs with magic powers start shoving everybody around. That’s that.”

His words gave me a chill. I stared at that badge, and my mind flipped over and over like a pancake on a griddle, trying to figure out this man. Trying to reconcile the joking, storytelling blowhard with the image of a police officer still on his beat. Still serving after the city government had fallen, after the precinct had been shut down, after everything had been taken from him.

The others probably have similar stories, I thought, glancing at Tia, who was busy working away, sipping her cola. What had drawn her to fighting what most would call a hopeless battle, living a life of constant running, bringing justice to those the law should have condemned—but could not touch? What had dr

awn Abraham, Megan, the professor himself?

I looked back at Cody, who was moving to close his badge holder. There was something tucked behind the plastic opposite it in the holder—a picture of a woman, but with a section removed, a bar shape that had contained her eyes and much of her nose.

“Who was that?”

“Somebody special,” Cody said.

“Who?”

He didn’t answer, snapping the badge holder closed.

“It’s better if we don’t know, or ask, about each other’s families,” Tia said from the table. “Usually a stint in the Reckoners ends with death, but occasionally one of us gets captured. Better if we can’t reveal anything about the others that will put their loved ones in danger.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense.” It just wasn’t something I’d have considered. I didn’t have any loved ones left.

“How is it going there, lass?” Cody asked, sauntering over to the table. I joined him and saw that Tia had spread out lists of reports and ledgers.

“It’s not going at all,” Tia said with a grimace. She rubbed her eyes beneath her spectacles. “This is like trying to re-create a complex puzzle after being given only one piece.”

“What are you doing?” I asked. I couldn’t make sense of the ledgers any more than I’d been able to make sense of the maps.

“Steelheart was wounded that day,” Tia said. “If your recollection is correct—”

“It is,” I promised.

“People’s memories fade,” Cody said.

“Not mine,” I said. “Not about this. Not about that day. I can tell you what color tie the mortgage man was wearing. I can tell you how many tellers there were. I could probably count the ceiling tiles in the bank for you. It’s there, in my head. Burned there.”