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 fly down into the middle of the field. 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 baffle 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 effective for our own good,” Tia said. “We’ve got him positioned, and we can bring him out to fight 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 find 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 fight 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 fight him here, or the Reckoners are finished,” 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 find 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 finally 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 fights, 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. But even if we fail, we might be the cause of his death. Someday.”
“Don’t be so sure we’ll fail,” Prof said. “If I thought this was suicide for certain, I wouldn’t let us continue. As I said, I don’t intend to pin our hopes of killing him on a single guess. We’ll try everything. Tia, what do your instincts say will work?”
“Something from the bank vault,” she said. “One of those items is special. I just wish I knew which one.”
“Did you bring them with you when we abandoned the old hideout?”