Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)

“What?”

“Try saying it a few times really quickly,” I suggested.

He moved his mouth, then a huge grin split his mouth. “Well, well, well …”

I shook my head in wonder as I continued eating my jerky. What to make of Edmund? He wasn’t the hero people like Abraham and my father were looking for, not by a long shot. Edmund paled when we talked of ghting Steelheart; he was so timid, he often asked for permission to speak before voicing an opinion.

No, he wasn’t some heroic Epic born to ght for the rights of men, but he was nearly as important. I’d never met, read of, or even caught a story of an Epic who so blatantly broke the stereotype. Edmund had no arrogance, no hatred, no dismissiveness.

It was ba ing. Part of me kept thinking, This is what we get? I nal y nd an Epic who doesn’t want to kil or enslave me, and it’s an old, soft-spoken Indian man who likes to put sugar in his milk?

“You lost someone, didn’t you?”

Edmund asked.

I looked up sharply. “What makes you ask?”

“Reactions like that one, actually. And the fact that everyone in your team seems to be walking on crumpled tinfoil and trying not to make any sound.”

Sparks. Good metaphor. Walking on crumpled tinfoil. I’d have to remember that one.

“Who was she?” Edmund asked.

“Who said it was a she?”

“The look on your face, son,”

Edmund said, then smiled.

I didn’t respond, though that was in part because I was trying to banish the ood of memories washing through my mind. Megan, glaring at me. Megan, smiling.

Megan, laughing just a few hours before she died. Idiot. You only knew her for a couple of weeks.

“I killed my wife,” Edmund said absently, leaning back, staring at the ceiling. “It was an accident.

Electri ed the counter while trying to power the microwave. Stupid thing, eh? I wanted a frozen burrito. Sara died for that.” He tapped the table. “I hope yours died for something greater.”

That wil depend, I thought, on what we do next.

I left Edmund at the table and nodded to Cody, who was standing by the wall and doing a very good job of pretending he wasn’t playing guard. I wandered into the other room, where Prof, Tia, and Abraham were sitting around Tia’s datapad.

I almost went looking for Megan, my instincts saying she’d be standing guard outside the hideout, since all of the others were in here. Idiot. I joined the team, looking over Tia’s shoulder at the screen of the enlarged mobile datapad. She was running it from one of the fuel cells we’d stolen from the power station. Once Edmund had withdrawn his

abilities, the city power had gone out, including those wires that sometimes ran through the steel catacombs.

Her pad showed an old steel apartment complex. “No good,”

Prof said, pointing to some numbers at the side of the screen.

“The building next to it is still populated. I’m not going to have a showdown with a High Epic when there are bystanders so close.”

“What about in front of his palace?” Abraham asked. “He won’t expect that.”

“I doubt he’s expecting anything in particular,” Tia said. “Besides, Cody’s done some scouting. The looting has started, so Steelheart has pulled Enforcement in close to his palace. He’s really only got infantry left, but that’s enough.

We’ll never get in to make any preparations. And we’re going to need to prepare the area if we’re going to face him.”

“Soldier Field,” I said softly.

They turned to me.

“Look,” I said, reaching over and scrolling along Tia’s map of the city. It felt downright primitive compared to the real-time camera views we’d been using.

I got the screen to an old portion of the city that was mostly abandoned. “The old football stadium,” I said. “Nobody lives nearby, and there’s nothing in the area to loot, so nobody will be around. We can use the tensors to tunnel in from a nearby point in the understreets. That will let us make preparations quietly, without worry that we’re being spied on.”

“It’s so open,” Prof said, rubbing his chin. “I’d rather face him in an old building, where we can confuse him and hit him from a lot of sides.”

“That will still work here,” I said.

“He’ll almost certainly y down into the middle of the eld. We could put a sniper in the upper seats, and could carve ourselves a few unexpected tunnels—with rope lines—down through the seats into the stadium’s innards. We could ba e Steelheart and his minions by putting tunnels where they aren’t expected, and the terrain will be unfamiliar to his people— far more so than a simple apartment complex.”

Prof nodded slowly.

“We still haven’t addressed the real question,” Tia said. “We’re all thinking it. We might as well talk about it.”

“Steelheart’s

weakness,”

Abraham said softly.

“We’re too e ective for our own good,” Tia said. “We’ve got him positioned, and we can bring him out to ght us. We can ambush him perfectly. But will that even matter?”

“So it comes to this,” Prof said.

“Listen well, people. These are the stakes. We could pull out now. It would be a disaster—everyone would nd out we’d tried to kill him and failed. That could do as much harm as killing him would do good. People would think that the Epics really are invincible, that even we can’t face someone like Steelheart.

“Beyond that, Steelheart would take it upon himself to personally hunt us down. He is not the type to give up easily. Wherever we go, we’d always have to watch and worry about him. But we could go.

We don’t know his weakness, not for certain. It might be best to pull out while we can.”

“And if we don’t?” Cody asked.

“We continue with the plan,”

Prof said. “We do everything we can to kill him, try out every possible clue from David’s memory.

We set up a trap in this stadium that combines all of those possibilities, and we take a chance.

It will be the most uncertain hit I’ve ever been part of. One of those things could work, but more likely none of them will, and we will have entered into a ght with one of the most powerful Epics in the world. He’ll probably kill us.”

Everyone sat in silence. No. It couldn’t end here, could it?

“I want to try,” Cody said.

“David’s right. He’s been right all along. Sneaking about, killing little Epics … that’s not changing the world. We’ve got a chance at Steelheart. We have to at least try.”

I felt a flood of relief.

Abraham nodded. “Better to die here, with a chance at defeating this creature, than to run.”

Tia and Prof shared a look.

“You want to do it too, don’t you, Jon?” Tia asked.

“Either we ght him here, or the Reckoners are nished,” Prof said.

“We’d spend the rest of our lives running. Besides, I doubt I could live with myself if I ran, after all we’ve been through.”

I nodded. “We do have to at least try. For Megan’s sake.”

“I’ll bet she would nd that ironic,” Abraham noted. We looked at him, and he shrugged. “She was the one who didn’t want to do this job. I don’t know what she’d think of us dedicating the end of it to her memory.”

“You can be a downer, Abe,”

Prof said.

“The truth is not a downer,”

Abraham said in his lightly accented voice. “The lies that you pretend to accept are the true downer.”

“Says the man who still believes the Epics will save us,” Prof said.

“Gentlemen,” Tia cut in.

“Enough. I think we’re all in agreement. We’re going to try this, ridiculous though it is. We’ll try to kill Steelheart without any real idea what his weakness is.”

One by one, we all nodded. We had to try.

“I’m not doing this for Megan,” I nally said. “But I’m doing it, in part, because of her. If we have to stand up and die so that people will know that someone still ghts, so be it. Prof, you said that you worry our failure will depress people. I don’t see that. They’ll hear our story and realize that there’s an option other than doing what the Epics command. We may not be the ones to kill Steelheart.