“You sure?” I asked, arms aching.
“You’re doing such a fine job,” she said. “And it’s good exercise.” She settled the crate, then sat down on a chair, putting her feet up on the desk and sipping a lemonade while reading a book on her mobile.
I shook my head. She was unbelievable.
“Think of it as being chivalrous,” Megan said absently, tapping the screen to scroll down more text. “Protecting a defenseless girl from pain and all that.”
“Defenseless?” I asked as Abraham called up. I sighed, then started pulling the rope again.
She nodded. “In an abstract way.”
“How can someone be abstractly defenseless?”
“Takes a lot of work,” she said, then sipped her drink. “It only looks easy. Just like abstract art.”
I grunted. “Abstract art?” I asked, heaving on the rope.
“Sure. You know, guy paints a black line on a canvas, calls it a metaphor, sells it for millions.”
“That never happened.”
She looked up at me, amused. “Sure it did. You never learned about abstract art in school?”
“I was schooled at the Factory,” I said. “Basic math, reading, geography, history. Wasn’t time for anything else.”
“But before that. Before Calamity.”
“I was eight,” I said. “And I lived in inner-city Chicago, Megan. My education mostly involved learning to avoid gangs and how to keep my head down at school.”
“That’s what you learned when you were eight? In grade school?”
I shrugged and kept pulling. She seemed troubled by what I’d said, though I’ll admit, I was troubled by what she’d said. People hadn’t really paid that much money for such simple things, had they? It baffled me. Pre-Calamity people had been a strange lot.
I hauled the next crate up, and Megan hopped down from her chair again to move it. I couldn’t imagine that she was getting much reading done, but she didn’t seem bothered by the interruptions. I watched her, taking a long gulp from my cup of water.
Things had been … different between us since her confession in the elevator shaft. In a lot of ways she was more relaxed around me, which didn’t make that much sense. Shouldn’t things have been more awkward? I knew she didn’t support our mission. That felt like a pretty big deal to me.
She really was a professional, though. She didn’t agree that Steelheart should be killed, but she didn’t abandon the Reckoners, or even ask for a transfer to another Reckoner cell. I didn’t know how many of those there were—apparently only Tia and Prof knew—but there was at least one other.
Either way, Megan stayed on board and didn’t let her feelings distract her from her job. She might not agree that Steelheart needed to die, but from what I’d pried from her, she believed in fighting the Epics. She was like a soldier who believed a certain battle wasn’t tactically sound, yet supported the generals enough to fight it anyway.
I respected her for that. Sparks, I was liking her more and more. And though she hadn’t been particularly affectionate toward me lately, she wasn’t openly hostile and cold any longer. That left me room to work some seductive magic. I wished I knew some.
She got the crate in place, and I waited for Abraham to call up that I should start pulling again. Instead he appeared at the mouth of the tunnel and started to unhook the pulley system. His shoulder had been healed from the gunshot using the harmsway, the Reckoner device that helped flesh heal extraordinarily fast.
I didn’t know much about it, though I’d spoken to Cody—he’d called it the “last of the three.” Three bits of incredible technology brought to the Reckoners from Prof’s days as a scientist. The tensors, the jackets, the harmsway. From what Abraham told me, Prof had developed each technology and then stolen them from the lab he’d worked in, intent on starting his own war against the Epics.
Abraham got the last parts of the pulley down.
“Are we done?” I asked.
“Indeed.”
“I counted more crates than that.”
“The others are too big to fit through the tunnel,” Abraham said. “Cody’s going to drive them over to the hangar.”
That was what they called the place where they kept their vehicles. I’d been there; it was a large chamber with a few cars and a van inside. It wasn’t nearly as secure as this hideout was—the hangar had to have access to the upper city and couldn’t be part of the understreets.
Abraham walked over to the stack of a dozen crates we’d heaved into the hideout. He rubbed his chin, inspecting them. “We might as well unload these,” he said. “I’ve got another hour to spare.”
“Before what?” I asked, joining him at the crates.
He didn’t reply.
“You’ve been gone a lot these last few days,” I noted.
Again, he didn’t reply.