Steelheart (The Reckoners 1)

She was using that nickname of hers for me again. It actually seemed like a good sign, as she only seemed to use it when she was less annoyed at me. It was kind of affectionate, wasn’t it? I just wished the nickname hadn’t been a reference to something so embarrassing. Why not … Super-Great-Shot? That kind of rolled off the tongue, didn’t it?

We climbed the rest of the way in silence. Megan turned our audio feed to the rest of the team back on, which seemed an indication that she thought the conversation was over. Maybe it was—I certainly didn’t know what else to say. How could she possibly think that living under Steelheart was a good thing?

I thought of the other kids at the Factory, of the people in the understreets. I guessed that many of them thought the same way—they’d come here knowing that Steelheart was a monster, but they still thought life was better in Newcago than in other places.

Only they were complacent—Megan was anything but that. She was active, incredible, capable. How could she think like they did? It shook what I knew of the world—at least, what I thought I knew. The Reckoners were supposed to be different.

What if she was right?

“Oh sparks!” Cody suddenly said in my ear.

“What?”

“Y’all’ve got trouble, lad. It’s—”

At that moment the doors to the elevator shaft just above—the ones on the third floor—slid open. Two uniformed guards stepped up to the ledge and peered down into the darkness.

22

“I’M telling you, I heard something,” one of the guards said, squinting downward. He seemed to be looking right at me. But it was dark in the elevator shaft—darker than I’d thought it would be, with the doors open.

“I don’t see anything,” the other said. His voice echoed softly.

The first pulled his flashlight off his belt.

My heart lurched. Uh-oh.

I pressed my hand against the wall; it was the only thing I could think to do. The tensor started vibrating, and I tried to concentrate, but it was hard with them up there. The flashlight clicked.

“See? Hear that?”

“Sounds like the furnace,” the second guard said drily.

My hand rattling against the side of the wall did have a kind of mechanical sound to it. I grimaced but kept on. The light of the flashlight shone in the shaft. I nearly lost control of the vibration.

There was no way they could have missed seeing me with that light. They were too close.

“Nothing there,” the guard said with a grunt.

What? I looked up. Somehow, despite being only a short distance away, it seemed they hadn’t seen me. I frowned, confused.

“Huh,” the other guard said. “I do hear a sound, though.”

“It’s coming from … you know,” the first guard said.

“Oh,” the other said. “Right.”

The first guard stuffed the flashlight back into place on his belt. How could he have missed seeing me? He’d shined it right in my direction.

The two backed away from the opening and let the doors slide shut.

What in Calamity’s fires? I thought. Could they have actually missed us in the darkness?

My tensor went off.

I’d been preparing to vaporize a pocket into the wall to hide in—get us out of their line of fire if it came to that. But because I wasn’t focusing the blast, I took a large chunk out of the wall in front of me, and in an instant my handhold disappeared. I grabbed at the side of the hole I’d made, barely finding a grip.

A burst of dust fell back over me and cascaded over Megan in an enormous shower. Holding tight to the side of the hole, I glanced down to find her glaring up at me, blinking dust from her eyes. Her hand actually seemed to be inching toward her gun.

Calamity! I thought with a start. Her scarf and skin were dusted silver, and her eyes were angry. I don’t think I’d ever seen an expression like that in a person’s eyes before—not directed at me at least. It was like I could feel the hate coming off her.

Her hand kept inching toward the handgun at her side.

“M-Megan?” I asked.

Her hand stopped. I didn’t know what I’d seen, but it was gone in a moment. She blinked, and her expression softened. “You need to watch what you’re destroying, Knees,” she snapped, reaching up to wipe some of the dust off her face.

“Yeah,” I said, then looked back up into the hole I was hanging onto. “Hey, there’s a room here.” I raised my mobile, shining light into it to get a better look.

It was a small room—a few orderly desks outfitted with computer terminals lined one wall and filing cabinets ran along the other. There were two doors, one a reinforced metal security door with a keypad.

“Megan, there’s definitely a room here. And it doesn’t look like there’s anyone in it. Come on.” I pulled myself up and crawled through.

As soon as I was in I helped Megan up and out of the shaft. She hesitated before taking my hand, then once she was out she walked past me without a word. She seemed to have gone back to being cold toward me, maybe even a little mean.

I knelt beside the hole back into the elevator shaft. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something very strange had just happened. First the guard hadn’t seen us, then Megan went from opening up to me to totally closing off in seconds flat. Was she having second thoughts about what she’d shared with me? Was she worried I’d tell Prof that she didn’t support killing Steelheart?

“What is this place?” Megan said from the center of the small room. The ceiling was low enough that she almost had to stoop—I would definitely have to. She unwrapped her scarf, releasing a puff of metal dust, grimaced, and then began shaking out her clothing.

“No idea,” I said, checking my mobile and the map Tia had uploaded. “The room’s not on the map.”

“Low ceilings,” Megan said. “Security door with a code. Interesting.” She tossed her pack to me. “Put an explosive on the hole you made. I’ll check things out here.”

I fished in the pack for an explosive as she cracked open the door that didn’t have the security pad and then stepped through. I attached the small device to the hole I’d made, then noticed some exposed wires in the lower part of the wall.

I followed them down and was prying up a section of the floor when Megan came back.

“There are two other rooms like this,” she said. “No people in them, small and built up against the elevator shaft. Best I can figure, this is where furnace equipment and elevator maintenance is supposed to be, but they hid some rooms here instead and took them off the building schematics. I wonder if there’s space between other floors—if there are rooms hidden there too.”

“Look at this,” I said, pointing at what I’d discovered.

She knelt beside me and eyed the wall and the wiring.

“Explosives,” she said.

“The room’s already set to blow,” I said. “Creepy, eh?”

“Whatever is in here,” Megan said, “it must be important. Important enough that it’s worth destroying the entire power plant to keep it from being discovered.”

We both looked up at the computers.

“What are you two doing?” Cody’s voice came back onto our feed.

“We found this room,” I said, “and—”

“Keep moving,” Cody said, cutting me off. “Prof and Abraham just ran into some guards and were forced to shoot them. The guards are down, bodies hidden, but they’ll be missed soon. If we’re lucky we’ll have a few minutes before someone realizes they’re not on their patrol anymore.”

I cursed, fishing in my pocket.

“What’s that?” Megan asked.

“One of the universal blasting caps I got from Diamond,” I said. “I want to see if they work.” I nervously used my electrical tape to stick the little round nub on the explosives we’d found under the floor. In my pocket I carried its detonator—the one that looked like a pen.