Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)

I hesitated. The others waited for me to follow, so I forced myself forward, joining Tia. The rest of them came along behind, our mobiles providing the only light.

No, wait. There was light up ahead; I could barely make it out, around the shadows of Tia’s slender gure. We eventually reached the end of the tunnel, and I stepped into a memory.

Tia had set up a few lights in corners and on tables, but they did little more than give a ghostly cast to the large, dark chamber. The room had settled at an angle, with the oor sloping downward. The skewed perspective only enhanced the surreal sensation of this place.

I froze in the mouth of the tunnel. The room was as I remembered it, shockingly well preserved. Towering pillars—now made of steel—and scattered desks, counters, rubble. I could still make out the tile mosaic on the oor, though only its shape. Instead of marble and stone it was now all a uniform shade of silver broken by ridges and bumps.

There was almost no dust, though some motes dodged lazily in the air, creating little halos around the white lanterns Tia had set up.

Realizing that I was still standing in the mouth of the tunnel, I stepped down into the room. Oh sparks …, I thought, my chest constricting. I found my hands gripping my ri e, though I knew I was in no danger. The memories were coming back in a flood.

“In

retrospect,”

Tia

was

explaining—I listened with only half an ear—“I shouldn’t have been surprised to

nd it so well

preserved.

Faultline’s

powers

created a kind of cushion of earth as the room sank, and Steelheart turned almost all of that earth to metal. The other rooms in the building were destroyed in his assault on the bank, and they broke o as the structure sank. But this one, and the attached vault, were ironically preserved by Steelheart’s own powers.”

By coincidence we’d entered through the front of the bank.

There had been wide, beautiful glass doors here; those had been destroyed in the gun re and energy blasts. Steel rubble and some steel bones from Deathpoint’s victims littered the ground to both sides. As I stepped forward I followed the path Steelheart had taken into the building.

Those are the counters, I thought, looking directly ahead. The ones where the tel ers worked. One section had been destroyed; as a child I’d crawled through that gap before making my way to the vault. The ceiling nearby was broken and misshapen, but the vault itself had been steel before Steelheart’s intervention. Now that I thought about it, that might have helped preserve its contents, because of how his transfersion abilities worked.

“Most of the rubble is from where the ceiling fell in,” Tia said from behind, her voice echoing in the vast chamber. “Abraham and I cleaned as much out as we could. A large amount of dirt had tumbled through the broken wall and ceiling, lling one part of the chamber over by the vault. We used the tensors on that pile, then made a hole in the corner of the oor—it opens into a pocket of space underneath the building— and shoved the dust in there.”

I moved down three steps to the lower section of the oor. Here, in the center of the room, was where Steelheart had faced Deathpoint.

These people are mine.… By instinct, I turned to the left.

Huddling beside the pillar I found the body of the woman whose child had been killed in her arms. I shivered. She was now a statue made of steel. When had she died?

How? I didn’t remember. A stray bullet, maybe? She wouldn’t have been turned to steel unless she’d already been dead.

“What real y saved this place,”

Tia continued, “was the Great Transfersion, when Steelheart turned everything in the city to steel. If he hadn’t done that, dirt would have

lled this room

completely. Beyond that, the





settling of the ground probably would have caved in the ceiling.

However, the transfersion turned the remaining things in the room to steel, as well as the earth around it.

In e ect he locked the room into place, preserving it, like a bubble in the middle of a frozen pond.”

I continued forward until I could see the sterile little mortgage cubicle I’d hidden in. Its windows were now opaque, but I could see in through the open front. I walked in and ran my ngers along the desk. The cubicle felt smaller than I remembered.

“The insurance records were inconclusive,” Tia continued. “But there was a claim submitted on the building itself, an earthquake claim. I wonder if the bank owners really thought the insurance company would pay out on that.

Seems ridiculous—but of course, there was still a lot of uncertainty surrounding Epics in those days.

Anyway, that made me investigate records surrounding the bank’s destruction.”

“And that led you here?” Cody asked, his voice coming from the darkness as he poked around the perimeter of the room.

“No, actually. It led me to nd something curious. A cover-up. The reason I couldn’t nd anything in the insurance reports, and why I couldn’t nd any lists of what was in the vault, was because some of Steelheart’s people had already gathered

and

hidden

the

information. I realized that since he had made a dedicated attempt to cover this up, I would never discover anything of use in the records. Our only chance would be to come to the bank, which Steelheart had assumed was buried beyond reach.”

“It’s a good assumption,” Cody said, sounding thoughtful. “Without the tensors—or some kind of Epic power like the Diggers had— getting here would have been near impossible. Burrowing through fty feet of solid steel?” The Diggers had started out as normal humans and had been granted their strange powers by an Epic known as Digzone, who was a gifter like Con ux. It … hadn’t gone well for them. Not all Epic powers were meant to be used by mortal hands, it appeared.

I was still standing in the cubicle.

The mortgage man’s bones were there, scattered on the oor around the desk, peeking out from some rubble. All of it was metal now.

I didn’t want to look, but I had to. I had to.

I turned around. For a moment I couldn’t tell the past from the present. My father stood there, determined, gun raised to defend a monster. Explosions, shouts, dust, screams, fire.

Fear.

I blinked, trembling, hand to the cold steel of the cubicle wall. The room smelled of dust and age, but I thought I could smell blood. I thought I could smell terror.

I stepped out of the cubicle and walked to where Steelheart had stood, holding a simple pistol, arm extended toward my father. Bang.

One shot. I could remember hearing it, though I didn’t know if my mind had constructed that. I’d been deafened by the explosions by then.

I knelt beside the pillar. A mound of

silvery

rubble

covered

everything in front of me, but I had my tensor. The others continued talking, but I stopped paying attention, and their words became nothing more than a low hum in the background. I put on my tensor, then reached forward and— very carefully—began vaporizing bits of rubble.

It didn’t take long; the bulk of it was made of one large piece of ceiling panel. I destroyed it, then froze.

There he was.

My father lay slumped against the pillar, head to the side. The bullet wound was frozen in the steel folds of his shirt. His eyes were still open. He looked like a statue, cast with incredible detail— even the pores of the skin were clear.

I stared, unable to move, unable to even lower my arm. After ten years, the familiar face was almost crushing to me. I didn’t have any pictures of him or my mother; I hadn’t dared go home after surviving,

though

Steelheart

couldn’t have known who I was. I’d been paranoid and traumatized.

Seeing his face brought that all back

to

me.

He

looked

so … normal. Normal in a way that hadn’t existed for years; normal in a way that the world didn’t deserve any longer.

I wrapped my arms around myself, but I kept looking at my father’s face. I couldn’t turn away.

“David?” Prof’s voice. He knelt down beside me.