Prof wasn’t in the main room, and Tia glanced at me, raising an eyebrow. “What are you telling Prof?”
“I’ll explain,” Megan said, sitting down beside her. As usual, Tia had her table covered with papers and cans of cola. It looked like she’d gotten the insurance records Cody mentioned, and she had them up on the screen in front of her.
If Prof wasn’t in here, I figured he was probably in his thinking room with the imager. I walked over and knocked softly on the wall; the doorway was only draped with a cloth.
“Come in, David,” Prof’s voice called from inside.
I hesitated. I hadn’t been in the room since I had told the team my plan. The others rarely entered. This was Prof’s sanctum, and he usually came out—rather than inviting people in—when they needed to speak to him. I glanced at Tia and Megan, both of whom looked surprised, though neither said anything.
I pushed past the cloth and stepped into the room. I’d imagined what Prof was doing with the wall imagers—maybe exploiting the team’s hack of the spy network, moving through the city and studying Steelheart and his minions. It wasn’t anything so dramatic.
“Chalkboards?” I asked.
Prof turned from the far wall, where he’d been standing and writing with a piece of chalk. All four walls, along with ceiling and floor, had been turned slate-black, and they were covered in white scribbled writing.
“I know,” Prof said, waving me in. “It’s not very modern, is it? I have technology capable of representing just about anything I want, in any form I want. And I choose chalkboards.” He shook his head, as if in amusement at his own eccentricity. “I think best this way. Old habits, I guess.”
I stepped up to him. I could see now that he wasn’t actually writing on the walls. The thing in Prof’s hand was just a little stylus shaped like a piece of chalk. The machine was interpreting his writings, making the words appear on the wall as he scribbled them.
The drape had fallen back into place, masking the light from the other rooms. I could barely make Prof out; the only light came from the soft glow of the white script on all six walls. I felt as if I were floating in space, the words stars and galaxies shining at me from distant abodes.
“What is this?” I asked, looking upward, reading the script that covered the ceiling. Prof had certain bits of it boxed away from others, and had arrows and lines pointing to different sections. I couldn’t make much sense of what it said. It was written in English, kind of. But many of the words were very small and seemed to be in some kind of shorthand.
“The plan,” Prof said absently. He didn’t wear his goggles or coat—both sat in a pile beside the door—and the sleeves of his black button-up shirt were rolled to the elbows.
“My plan?” I asked.
Prof’s smile was lit by the pale glowing chalk lines. “Not any longer. There are some seeds of it here, though.”
I felt a sharp sinking feeling. “But, I mean …”
Prof glanced at me, then laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did a great job, son. All things considered.”
“What was wrong with it?” I asked. I’d spent years … really, my entire life on that plan, and I was pretty confident in what I’d come up with.
“Nothing, nothing,” Prof said. “The ideas are sound. Remarkably so. Convince Steelheart that there’s a rival in town, lure him out, hit him. Though there is the glaring fact that you don’t know what his weakness is.”
“Well, there is that,” I admitted.
“Tia is working hard on it. If anyone can tease out the truth, it will be her,” Prof said, then paused for a moment before he continued. “Actually, no—I shouldn’t have said that this isn’t your plan. It is, and there are more than just seeds of it here. I looked through your notebooks. You thought through things very well.”
“Thank you.”
“But your vision was too narrow, son.” Prof removed his hand from my shoulder and walked up to the wall. He tapped it with his imitation chalk stylus, and the room’s text rotated. He didn’t appear to even notice, but I grew dizzy as the walls seemed to tumble about me, spinning until a new wall of text popped up in front of Prof.
“Let me start with this,” he said. “Other than not specifically knowing Steelheart’s weakness, what’s the biggest flaw in your plan?”
“I …” I frowned. “Taking out Nightwielder, maybe? But Prof, we just—”
“Actually,” Prof said, “that’s not it.”