I’m totally not a nerd though. I still know the truth at least.
I looked over the guns for a few minutes, proud of how many I could identify. Unfortunately none of them seemed distinctive enough. Actually, the fact that I could identify them guaranteed that they weren’t distinctive enough. We needed something nobody had seen before.
Maybe he won’t have anything, I thought. If he has a rotating stock, then we may have picked the wrong time to visit. Sometimes a grab bag doesn’t give anything worthwhile. It—
I stopped as I noticed something different. Motorcycles.
There were three of them in a row near the far side of the hallway. I hadn’t seen them at first, as I’d been focused on the guns. They were sleek, their bodies a deep green with black patterns running up their sides. They made me want to hunch over and crouch down to make myself have less wind resistance. I could imagine shooting through the streets on one of these. They looked so dangerous, like alligators. Really fast alligators wearing black. Ninja alligators.
I decided not to use that one on Megan.
They didn’t have any weapons on them that I could see, though there were some odd devices on the sides. Maybe energy weapons? They didn’t seem to fit with much of what Diamond had here, but then again, what he had was pretty eclectic.
Megan walked past me and I raised a finger to point at the motorcycles.
“No,” she said, not even looking.
“But—”
“No.”
“But they’re awesome!” I said, holding up my hands, as if that should have been enough of an argument. And, sparks, it should have been. They were awesome!
“You could barely drive some lady’s sedan, Knees,” Megan said. “I don’t want to see you on the back of something with gravatonics.”
“Gravatonics!” That was even more awesome.
“No,” Megan said firmly.
I looked toward Abraham, who was inspecting something nearby. He glanced at me, then over at the bikes, and smiled. “No.”
I sighed. Wasn’t shopping for weapons supposed to be more fun than this?
“Diamond,” Abraham called to the dealer. “What is this?”
The weapons merchant began waddling over. “Oh, it’s wonderful. Great explosions. It …” His face fell as he neared and saw what Abraham was actually looking at. “Oh. That. Um, it is quite wonderful, though I don’t know if it would suit your needs.…”
The item in question was a large rifle with a very long barrel and a scope on top. It looked a little bit like an AWM—one of the sniper rifles the Factory had used as a model in building their products. The barrel was larger, however, and there were some odd coils around the forestock. It was painted a dark black-green and had a big hole where the magazine should have fit.
Diamond sighed. “This weapon is wonderful, but you are a good customer. I should warn you that I don’t have the resources to make it work.”
“What?” Megan asked. “You’re selling a broken gun?”
“It’s not that,” Diamond said, tapping the section of wall beside the gun. An image displayed of a man set up on the ground, holding the rifle and looking through the scope at some run-down buildings. “This is called a gauss gun, developed using research on some Epic or another who throws bullets at people.”
“Rick O’Shea,” I said, nodding. “An Irish Epic.”
“That’s really his name?” Abraham asked softly.
“Yeah.”
“That’s horrible.” He shivered. “Taking a beautiful French word and turning it into … into something Cody would say. Calice!”
“Anyway,” I said. “He can make objects unstable by touching them; then they explode when subjected to any significant impact. Basically he charges rocks with energy, throws them at people, and they explode. Standard kinetic energy Epic.”
I was more interested in the idea that the technology had been developed based on his powers. Ricky was a newer Epic. He wouldn’t have been around back in the old days when, as the Reckoners had explained, Epics had been imprisoned and experimented on. Did this mean that kind of research was still going on? There was a place where Epics were being held captive? I’d never heard of such a thing.
“The gun?” Abraham asked Diamond.
“Well, like I said.” Diamond tapped the wall and the video started playing. “It’s a type of gauss gun, only it uses a projectile that has been charged with energy first. The bullet, once turned explosive, is propelled to extreme speeds using tiny magnets.”
The man holding the gun in the video flipped a switch and the coils lit up green. He pulled the trigger and there was a burst of energy, though the thing seemed to have almost no recoil. A splash of green light spat from the front of the gun’s barrel, leaving a line in the air. One of the distant buildings exploded, giving off a strange shower of green that seemed to warp the air.