Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)

ashlight 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 res? 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 re 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 nding 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 nd 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 o 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 out tted with computer terminals lined one wall and ling cabinets ran along the other. There were two doors, one a reinforced metal security door with a keypad.

“Megan, there’s de nitely 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 o in seconds at. 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 de nitely have to. She unwrapped her scarf, releasing a pu 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 shed 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 oor 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 gure, this is where furnace equipment and elevator maintenance is supposed to be, but they hid some rooms here instead and took them o the building schematics. I wonder if there’s space between other oors—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 o . “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 oor. In my pocket I carried its detonator—the one that looked like a pen.

“By the map Tia gave us,”

Megan said, “we’re only two rooms over from the storage area with the energy cells, but we’re a little below it.”

We shared a glance, then split up to scour the hidden room. We might not have much time, but we needed to at least try to nd out what information this place contained. She pulled open a ling cabinet and grabbed a handful of folders. In an instant I was up and opening desk drawers. One had a couple of data chips. I grabbed them, waved them at Megan, then tossed them in her bag. She threw the folders in, then searched another desk while I raised a hand to the right wall and made us a hole.

Since the hidden room was halfway between two oors, I wasn’t certain how that related to the rest of the building. I made a hole in the wall in the direction we wanted to go, but I made it near the ceiling.

That opened up into a room on the third oor, but near the oor.

So there was some overlap between our hidden room and the third oor. With a glance at the map, I could see how they’d hidden the room. On the schematics the elevator shaft was shown as slightly bigger than it actually was.

It also included a maintenance shaft that wasn’t actually there— and that explained the lack of handholds in the elevator. The builders assumed the maintenance shaft would provide a way to service the elevator, not knowing that the hidden room would actually go in that space.

Megan and I climbed through the hole and onto the third oor. We crossed that room—a conference room of some sort—and passed through another, which was a monitoring station. I vaporized the wall and opened a hole into a long, low-ceilinged storage area. This was our target: the room where the power cells were kept.

“We’re in,” Megan said to Cody as we slipped inside. The room was lled with shelves, and on them were various pieces of electrical equipment, none of which we wanted.

We went in di erent directions, searching hastily.

“Awesome,” Cody said. “The power cells should be in there somewhere. Look for cylinders about a handspan wide and about as tall as a boot.”

I spied some large storage lockers on the far wall, with locks on the doors. “Might be in here,” I said to Megan, moving toward them. I made quick work of the locks with the tensor and pulled the doors open as she joined me. Inside one was a tall column of green cylinders stacked on top of one another on their sides. Each cylinder looked vaguely like a cross between a very small beer keg and a car battery.

“Those are the power cells,”

Cody said, sounding relieved. “I was half worried there wouldn’t be any. Good thing I brought my four-leaf clover on this operation.”

“Four-leaf clover?” Megan said with a snort as she

shed

something out of her pack.

“Sure. From the homeland.”

“That’s the Irish, Cody, not the Scottish.”

“I know,” Cody said without missing a beat. “I had to kill an Irish dude to get mine.”

I pulled out one of the power cells. “They aren’t as heavy as I thought they’d be,” I said. “Are we sure these will have enough juice to power the gauss gun? That thing needs a lot of energy.”