Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)

“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 o 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—di erent 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. Al of this technology … it could have changed the world. If the Epics hadn’t done that rst. 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 rst 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 di erence!” 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 ve 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 stu . 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 ngered 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 ipped over and over like a pancake on a griddle, trying to gure out this man. Trying to reconcile the joking, storytelling blowhard with the image of a police o cer 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 ghting 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 drawn 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.”

“All right,” Tia said. “Well, if you are correct, then Steelheart was impervious for most of the ght and only harmed near the end.

Something changed. I’m working through all possibilities—something about your father, the location, or the situation. The most likely seems the possibility you mentioned, that the vault was involved. Perhaps something inside it weakened Steelheart, and once the vault was blown open it could affect him.”

“So you’re looking for a record of the bank vault’s contents.”

“Yes,” Tia said. “But it’s an impossible task. Most of the records would have been destroyed with the bank. O -site records would have been stored on a server somewhere. First Union was hosted by a company known as Dorry Jones LLC. Most of their servers were located in Texas, but the building was burned down eight years back during the Ardra riots.

“That leaves the o chance that they had physical records or a digital backup at another branch, but that building housed the main o ces, so the chances of that are slim. Other than that, I’ve been looking for patron lists—the rich or notable who were known to frequent the bank and have boxes in the vault. Perhaps they stored something in there that will be part of the public record. A strange rock, a speci c symbol that Steelheart might have seen, something.”

I looked at Cody. Servers?

Hosted? What was she talking about? He shrugged.

The problem was, an Epic