Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)

I tore o down the street. I’d told Megan that I’d been a cabdriver.

Which was true; I’d tried it a few months back, right after graduating from the Factory. I hadn’t mentioned, however, that the job had lasted only one day; I’d proven terrible at it.

You never know how much you’l like something until you try it out. It had been one of my father’s famous sayings. The cab company hadn’t expected me to “try out” driving for the rst time in one of their cars. But how else was a guy like me supposed to get behind a wheel? I was an orphan who had been owned by the Factory for most of my life. My type didn’t exactly make big money, and the understreets don’t have room for cars anyway.

Regardless, driving had proven a tad more di cult than I’d expected it to be. I screeched around the corner of the dark street, the gas pedal pressed to the floor, barely in control. I knocked down a stop sign and a street sign on my way, but I made it down the block in a matter of heartbeats and screeched around another corner. I hit a few trash cans as I went up over the curb, but managed to retain control as I turned and pulled the car to a stop facing south.

I was pointing it directly down the alleyway. Fortuity was still stumbling through it toward me, tripping on refuse and boxes as Megan slowed him.

There was a pop, Fortuity

dodged, and my windshield

suddenly cracked—a bullet blasting through it about an inch from my head. My heart leaped. Megan was still shooting.

You know, David, I thought to myself. You real y need to start thinking your plans through a little more careful y.

I slammed the pedal down, roaring into the alleyway. It was just barely wide enough for the car, and sparks ew up on the left side as I veered a hair too far in that direction, shearing o the side mirror.

The headlights shone on a gure in a red leisure suit, hands cu ed together, cape apping behind him. He’d lost his hat while running. His eyes were wide. There was nowhere for him to go in either direction.

Checkmate.

Or so I thought. As I got close, Fortuity leaped into the air and slammed his feet into the front of my windshield with superhuman dexterity.

That utterly shocked me. Fortuity wasn’t supposed to have any enhanced physical abilities. Of course, for a man like him—who avoided danger so easily—there may not have been many

opportunities to display such things. Either way, his feet hit my windshield in an expert maneuver only someone with super re exes could have managed. He pushed off and jumped backward, the

windshield shattering into pebbled glass, using the momentum of the car to throw himself into a backflip.

I slammed on the brakes and blinked as the glass sprayed my face. The car screeched to a halt in a shower of sparks. Fortuity landed his flip with poise.

I shook my head, dazed. Yeah, super re exes, a piece of my mind thought. I should have realized.

Perfect complement to a precog portfolio. Fortuity was wise to keep the secret. Many a powerful Epic had realized that hiding one or two abilities gave them an edge when another Epic tried to kill them.

Fortuity ran forward. I could see him glaring at me, lips curling up in a sneer. He was a monster—I’d documented over a hundred

murders tied to him. And from the look in his eyes, he intended to add my name to that list.

He leaped into the air, toward the hood of the car.

Crack! Crack!

Fortuity’s chest exploded.





5

FORTUITY’S corpse slammed down onto the hood of the car.

Megan stood behind him, my ri e in one hand—held at the hip—her pistol in the other hand. The car’s headlights bathed her in light.

“Sparks!” she cursed. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”

She red both at once, I realized.

She checkmated him in the air with two shots. It had probably only worked because he’d been jumping —in midair it would have been harder for him to jerk out of the way. But still, shooting like that was incredible. A gun in each hand, one of them a rifle?

Sparks, I thought, echoing her.

We’d actually won.

Megan pulled Fortuity’s body o the hood and checked for a pulse.

“Dead,” she said. Then she shot the body twice in the head. “And double dead, to be certain.”

At that moment about a dozen of Spritz’s thugs appeared at the end of the alleyway, sporting Uzis.

I swore, scrambling into the back seat of the car. Megan jumped onto the hood and slid through the shattered windshield, ducking down in the passenger seat as a hailstorm of bullets slammed into the vehicle.

I tried to open the back door— but, of course, the walls of the alleyway were too close. The back window shattered and pu s of stu ng ew from the seats as they were shredded by Uzi fire.

“Calamity!” I said. “Glad it’s not my car.”

Megan rolled her eyes at me, then pulled something out of her top. A small cylinder, like a lipstick case. She twisted the bottom, waited for a lull in the bullets, then lobbed it out the front window.

“What was that?” I yelled over the shots.

I was answered by an explosion that shook the car, blowing scraps of trash from the alleyway across us. The bullets stopped for a moment, and I could hear men crying out in pain. Megan—still toting my ri e—hopped over the torn-up seat and lithely slipped through the broken back window, then ran for it.

“Hey!” I said, crawling out after her, bits of safety glass falling from my clothing. I jumped to the ground and dashed to the end of the alleyway, cutting to the side just as the survivors from the explosion started firing again.

She can shoot like a dream and she carries tiny grenades in her top, a bit of my addled mind thought. I think I might be in love.

I heard a low rumbling over the gun re, and an armored truck pulled around the corner ahead, roaring toward Megan. It was huge and green, imposing, with

enormous headlights. And it looked an awful lot like …

“A garbage truck?” I asked, running up to join Megan.

A tough-looking black man rode in the passenger seat. He pushed open the door for Megan. “Who’s that?” the man asked, nodding to me. He spoke with a faint French accent.

“A slontze,” she said, tossing my ri e back to me. “But a useful one.

He knows about us, but I don’t think he’s a threat.”

Not

exactly

a

glowing

recommendation, but good enough.

I smiled as she climbed into the cab, pushing the man to the middle seat.

“Do we leave him?” asked the man with the French accent.

“No,” said the driver. I couldn’t make him out; he was just a shadow, but his voice was solid and resonant. “He comes with us.”

I smiled, eagerly stepping up into the truck. Could the driver be Hardman, the sniper? He’d seen how helpful I’d been. The people inside reluctantly made room for me. Megan slipped into the back seat of the crew cab beside a wiry man wearing a leather camou age jacket and holding a very nice-looking sniper ri e. He was probably Hardman. To his other side was a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length red hair. She wore spectacles and business attire.

The garbage truck pulled away, moving faster than I’d have thought possible. Behind us a group of the thugs came out of the alley, ring on the truck. It didn’t do much good, though we weren’t out of danger quite yet. Overhead I heard the distinctive sound of Enforcement copters. There would probably be a few high-level Epics on the way too.

“Fortuity?” the driver asked. He was an older man, perhaps in his fties, and wore a long, thin black coat. Oddly, he had a pair of goggles tucked into the breast pocket of the coat.

“Dead,” Megan said from behind.

“What went wrong?” the driver asked.

“Hidden power,” she said. “Super re exes. I got him cu ed, but he slipped away.”

“There was also that one,” the guy in the camo jacket—I was pretty sure that was Hardman— said. “He came up in the middle of it all, caused a wee bit of trouble.”

He had a distinctive Southern accent.