“Where to next?” I asked as Cody climbed down the ladder. “How about we do that escape hole farther up in the third deck?”
Cody slung his welding gear over his shoulder and cracked some kinks out of his back. “Abraham called to say he’s going to take care of the UV floodlights now,” he said. “He finished packing the explosives under the field a while ago, so it’s time for me to go weld down there. Y’all can handle the next hole on your own—but I’ll help you carry the ladder there. Good job on these holes so far, lad.”
“So you’re back to lad?” I asked. “What happened to mate?”
“I realized something,” Cody said, collapsing the ladder and tilting the top to one side. “My Australian ancestors?”
“Yeah?” I lifted the lower end of the ladder and followed him as he walked from the first deck of seats into the stadium innards.
“They came from Scotland originally. So if I want to be really authentic, I need to be able to speak Australian with a Scottish accent.”
We kept walking through the pitch-black space beneath the stands that was kind of like a large, curved hallway—I think it was called a concourse. The planned lower end for the next escape hole was in one of the restrooms down the hall. “An Australian-Scottish-Tennessean accent, eh?” I said. “You practicing it?”
“Hell no,” Cody said. “I’m not crazy, lad. Just a little eccentric.”
I smiled, then turned my head to look in the direction of the field. “We’re really going to try this, aren’t we?”
“We’d better. I bet Abraham twenty bucks that we’d win.”
“I just … It’s hard to believe. I’ve spent ten years planning for this day, Cody. Over half my life. Now it’s here. It’s nothing like what I’d pictured, but it’s here.”
“You should feel proud,” Cody said. “The Reckoners have been doing what they’ve been doing for over half a decade. No changes, no real surprises, no big risks.” He reached up to scratch his left ear. “I often wondered if we were getting stagnant. Never could gather the arguments to suggest a change. It took someone coming in from the outside to shake us up a wee bit.”
“Attacking Steelheart is just a ‘wee bit’ of a shakeup?”
“Well, it’s not like you’ve gotten us to do something really crazy, like trying to steal Tia’s cola.”
Outside the restroom, we set the ladder down and Cody wandered over to check on some explosives on the opposite wall. We intended to use them as distractions; Abraham was going to blow them when needed. I paused, then pulled out one of my eraser-like blasting caps. “Maybe I should put one of these on them,” I said. “In case we need a secondary person to blow the explosives.”
Cody eyed it, rubbing his chin. He knew what I meant. We’d only need a secondary person to blow the explosives if Abraham fell. I didn’t like thinking about it, but after Megan … Well, we all seemed a whole lot more frail to me now than we once had.
“You know,” Cody said, taking the blasting cap from me, “where I’d really like to have a backup is on the explosives under the field there. Those are the most important ones to detonate; they’re going to cover our escape.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Do you mind if I take this and stick it down there before I weld it closed?” Cody asked.
“No, assuming Prof agrees.”
“He likes redundancy,” Cody said, slipping the blasting cap into his pocket. “Just keep that pen-dealy of yours handy. And don’t push it by accident.”
He sauntered back toward the tunnel under the field, and I took the ladder into the restroom to get to work.
I punched my fist out into open air, then ducked as the steel dust fell around me. So that’s how he did it, I thought, flexing my fingers. I hadn’t figured out the sword trick, but I was getting good at punching and vaporizing things in front of my fist. It had to do with crafting the tensor’s sound waves so that they followed my hand in motion, creating kind of an … envelope around it.
Done right, the wave would course along with my fist. Kind of like smoke might follow your hand if you punch through it. I smiled, shaking my hand. I’d finally figured it out. Good thing too. My knuckles were feeling pretty sore.
I finished off the hole with a more mundane tensor blast, reaching up from the top of my ladder to sculpt the hole. Through it I could see a pure black sky. Someday I’d like to see the sun again, I thought. The only thing up there was blackness. Blackness and Calamity, burning in the distance directly above, like a terrible red eye.