“I’m not French!” Abraham called back. “I’m Canadian, you slontze.”
“Same difference!” Cody said, then grinned and looked back at me. “Anyway, maybe it wasn’t glamorous. Not all the time. But I enjoyed it. I like doing good for people. Serve and protect. And then …”
“Then?” I asked.
“Nashville got annexed when the country collapsed,” Cody explained. “A group of five Epics took charge of most of the South.”
“The Coven,” I said, nodding. “There’s actually six of them. One pair are twins.”
“Ah, right. Keep forgetting that y’all are freakishly informed about this stuff. Anyway, they took over, and the police department started serving them. If we didn’t agree, we were supposed to turn in our badges and retire. The good ones did that. The bad ones stayed on, and they got worse.”
“And you?” I asked.
Cody fingered the thing he kept at his waist, tied to his belt on the right side. It looked like a thin wallet. He reached down and undid the snap, showing a scratched—but still polished—police badge.
“I didn’t do either one,” he said, subdued. “I took an oath. Serve and protect. I ain’t going to stop that because some thugs with magic powers start shoving everybody around. That’s that.”
His words gave me a chill. I stared at that badge, and my mind flipped over and over like a pancake on a griddle, trying to figure out this man. Trying to reconcile the joking, storytelling blowhard with the image of a police officer still on his beat. Still serving after the city government had fallen, after the precinct had been shut down, after everything had been taken from him.
The others probably have similar stories, I thought, glancing at Tia, who was busy working away, sipping her cola. What had drawn her to fighting what most would call a hopeless battle, living a life of constant running, bringing justice to those the law should have condemned—but could not touch? What had drawn Abraham, Megan, the professor himself?
I looked back at Cody, who was moving to close his badge holder. There was something tucked behind the plastic opposite it in the holder—a picture of a woman, but with a section removed, a bar shape that had contained her eyes and much of her nose.
“Who was that?”
“Somebody special,” Cody said.
“Who?”
He didn’t answer, snapping the badge holder closed.
“It’s better if we don’t know, or ask, about each other’s families,” Tia said from the table. “Usually a stint in the Reckoners ends with death, but occasionally one of us gets captured. Better if we can’t reveal anything about the others that will put their loved ones in danger.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense.” It just wasn’t something I’d have considered. I didn’t have any loved ones left.
“How is it going there, lass?” Cody asked, sauntering over to the table. I joined him and saw that Tia had spread out lists of reports and ledgers.
“It’s not going at all,” Tia said with a grimace. She rubbed her eyes beneath her spectacles. “This is like trying to re-create a complex puzzle after being given only one piece.”
“What are you doing?” I asked. I couldn’t make sense of the ledgers any more than I’d been able to make sense of the maps.
“Steelheart was wounded that day,” Tia said. “If your recollection is correct—”
“It is,” I promised.
“People’s memories fade,” Cody said.
“Not mine,” I said. “Not about this. Not about that day. I can tell you what color tie the mortgage man was wearing. I can tell you how many tellers there were. I could probably count the ceiling tiles in the bank for you. It’s there, in my head. Burned there.”
“All right,” Tia said. “Well, if you are correct, then Steelheart was impervious for most of the fight and only harmed near the end. Something changed. I’m working through all possibilities—something about your father, the location, or the situation. The most likely seems the possibility you mentioned, that the vault was involved. Perhaps something inside it weakened Steelheart, and once the vault was blown open it could affect him.”
“So you’re looking for a record of the bank vault’s contents.”
“Yes,” Tia said. “But it’s an impossible task. Most of the records would have been destroyed with the bank. Off-site records would have been stored on a server somewhere. First Union was hosted by a company known as Dorry Jones LLC. Most of their servers were located in Texas, but the building was burned down eight years back during the Ardra riots.