Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)

“Can Prof and Abraham stall for a little longer?” Megan asked from below. “David seems to be working at a good clip, but it might take us about fifteen minutes to get up.”

“Tia’s calculating,” Cody said.

“Well, I’m going after David,”

Megan said. She sounded mu ed. I glanced over my shoulder; she’d wrapped a scarf around her face.

The dust from the handholds; she doesn’t want to breathe it in. Smart. I was having trouble avoiding it, and steel dust did not seem like a smart thing to inhale. Abraham said tensor dust wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed, but I still didn’t think it would be a good idea, so I ducked my head and held my breath each time I made a new hole.

“I’m impressed,” a voice said in my ear. Prof’s voice. It nearly made me leap in shock, which would have been a very bad thing.

He must have patched into my visual feed with his mobile, and could see the images made by the camera on my earpiece.

“Those holes are crisp and well formed,” Prof continued. “Keep at it and you’ll soon be as good as Abraham. You might already have passed up Cody.”

“You sound worried about something,” I said between making handholds.

“Not troubled. Just surprised.”

“It needed to be done,” I said, grunting as I pulled myself up past another floor.

Prof was silent for a few moments. “That it did. Look, we can’t have you extract down this same route. It will take too long, so you’ll have to go out another way.

Tia will let you know where. Wait for the first explosion.”

“Affirmative,” I said.

“And, David,” Prof added.

“Yeah?”

“Good work.”

I smiled, pulling myself up again.

We continued at it, climbing up the elevator shaft. I worried that the elevator would come down at some point, though if it did it should miss us by a few inches. We were on the side of the shaft where there should have been a ladder.

They just hadn’t installed one.

Perhaps Steelheart has watched the same movies that we have, I thought with a grimace as we finally passed the second floor. One more to go.

My mobile clicked in my ear. I glanced at it on my wrist— someone had muted our channel.

“I don’t like what you’ve done to the team,” Megan called up, her voice muffled.

I glanced over my shoulder at her. She wore the backpack with our equipment in it, and her nose and mouth were covered with the scarf. Those eyes of hers glared at me, softly lit by the glow of the mobile strapped to her forearm.

Beautiful eyes, peeking out above the shroud of a scarf.

With a huge, black pit stretching behind her. Whoa. I lurched woozily.

“Slontze,” she called. “Stay focused.”

“You’re the one who said something!” I whispered, turning back around. “What do you mean you don’t like what I did to the team?”

“Before you showed up we were going to move out of Newcago,”

Megan said from below. “Hit Fortuity, then leave. You made us stay.”

I continued climbing. “But—”

“Oh, just shut up and let me talk for once.”

I shut up.

“I joined the Reckoners to kill Epics who deserved it,” Megan continued. “Newcago is one of the safest, most stable places in the entire Fractured States. I don’t think we should be killing Steelheart, and I don’t like how you’ve hijacked the team to ght your own personal war against him. He’s brutal, yes, but he’s doing a better job than most Epics. He doesn’t deserve to die.”

The words stunned me. She didn’t think we should kill Steelheart? He didn’t deserve to die? It was insanity. I resisted the urge to look down again. “Can I talk now?” I asked, making another pair of handholds.

“Okay, fine.”

“Are you crazy? Steelheart is a monster.”

“Yes. I’ll admit that. But he’s an effective monster. Look, what are we doing today?”

“Destroying a power plant.”

“And how many cities out there still have power plants?” she asked. “Do you even know?”

I kept climbing.

“I grew up in Portland,” she said.

“Do you know what happened there?”

I did, though I didn’t say. It hadn’t been good.

“The turf wars between Epics left the city in ruins,” Megan continued, her voice softer now.

“There is nothing left, David.

Nothing. All of Oregon is a wasteland; even the trees are gone.

There aren’t any power plants, sewage treatment plants, or grocery stores. That was what Newcago would have become, if Steelheart hadn’t stepped in.”

I continued climbing, sweat tickling the back of my neck. I thought about the change in Megan —she’d grown cold toward me right after I’d rst talked about taking down Steelheart. The times when she’d treated me the worst had been when we’d been making breakthroughs. When we’d gone to fetch my plans and when I’d found out how to kill Nightwielder.

It hadn’t been my “improvising”

that had set her against me. It had been my intentions. My successes in getting the team to target Steelheart.

“I don’t want to be the cause of something like Portland happening again,” Megan continued. “Yes, Steelheart is terrible. But he’s a kind of terrible that people can live with.”

“So why haven’t you quit?” I asked. “Why are you here?”

“Because I’m a Reckoner,” she said. “And it’s not my job to contradict Prof. I’ll do my job, Knees. I’ll do it well. But this time, I think we’re making a mistake.”

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 a ectionate, 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 o 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 oor—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 rst pulled his ashlight o 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 ashlight 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 ashlight 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

rst guard stu ed the