The pile of bricks shook, as if the officers were trying to cut through them to get to me.
“That scares me about myself,” I said softly, not looking at Megan. “For what it’s worth, thank you for making me care about something other than Steelheart. I don’t know if I love you. But whatever the emotion is, it’s the strongest one I’ve felt in years. Thank you.” I fired widely but fell back as a bullet grazed my arm.
The magazine was empty. I sighed, dropping Megan’s gun and raising my father’s. Then I pointed it at her.
My finger hesitated on the trigger. It would be a mercy. Better a quick death than to suffer torture and execution. I tried to force myself to pull the trigger.
Sparks, she looks beautiful, I thought. Her unbloodied side was toward me, her golden hair fanning out, her skin pale and eyes closed as if asleep.
Could I really do this?
The gunshots had paused. I risked glancing over my crumbling pile of bricks. Two enormous forms were mechanically clomping down the hallway. So they had brought in armor units. A piece of me felt proud that I was such a problem for them. The chaos the Reckoners had caused this day, the destruction we’d brought to Steelheart’s minions, had driven them to overkill. A squad of twenty men and two mechanized armors had been sent to take down one guy with a pistol.
“Time to die,” I whispered. “I think I’ll do it while firing a handgun at a fifteen-foot-tall suit of powered armor. At least it will be dramatic.”
I took a deep breath, nearly surrounded by Enforcement forms creeping forward in the dark corridor. I began to stand, my gun leveled at Megan more firmly this time. I’d shoot her, then force the soldiers to gun me down.
I noticed that my mobile was blinking.
“Fire!” a soldier yelled.
The ceiling melted.
I saw it distinctly. I was looking down the tunnel, not wanting to watch Megan as I shot her. I had a clear view of a circle in the ceiling becoming a column of black dust, cascading in a shower of disintegrated steel. Like sand from an enormous spigot, the particles hit the floor and billowed outward in a cloud.
The haze cleared. My finger twitched, but I had not pulled the trigger. A figure stood from a crouch amid the dust; he had fallen from above. He wore a black coat—thin, like a lab coat—dark trousers, black boots, and a small pair of goggles over his eyes.
Prof had come, and he wore a tensor on each hand, the green light glowing with a phantom cast.
The officers opened fire, releasing a storm of bullets down the hallway. Prof raised his hand and thrust forward the glowing tensor. I could almost feel the device hum.
Bullets burst in midair, crumbling. They hit Prof as little shavings of fluttering steel, no more dangerous than pinches of dirt. Hundreds of them pelted him and the ground around him; the ones that missed flew apart in the air, catching the light. Suddenly I understood why he wore the goggles.
I stood up, slack jawed, gun forgotten in my fingers. I’d assumed I was getting good with my tensor, but destroying those bullets … that was beyond anything I’d been able to comprehend.
Prof didn’t give the baffled soldiers time to recover. He carried no weapon that I could see, but he leaped free of the dust and dashed right toward them. The mechanized units started firing, but they used their rotary guns—as if they couldn’t believe what they’d seen and figured a higher caliber was the answer.
More bullets popped in the air, shattered by Prof’s tensors. His feet skidded across the ground on the dust, and then he reached the Enforcement troops.
He attacked fully armored men with his fists.
My eyes widened as I saw him drop a soldier with a fist to the face, the man’s helmet melting to powder before his attack. He’s vaporizing the armor as he attacks. Prof spun between two soldiers, moving gracefully, slamming a fist into the gut of one, then spinning and slamming an arm into the leg of the other. Dust sprayed out as their armor failed them, disintegrating just before Prof hit.
As he came up from the spin he pounded a hand against the side of the steel chamber. The pulverized metal poured away, and something long and thin fell from the wall into his hand. A sword, carved from the steel by an incredibly precise tensor blast.
Steel flashed as Prof struck at the disordered officers. Some tried to keep firing, and others were going in with batons—which Prof destroyed just as easily as he had the bullets. He wielded the sword in one hand, and his other hand sent out near-invisible blasts that reduced metal and kevlar to nothing. Dust streamed off soldiers who got too close to him, making them slip and stumble, suddenly unbalanced as helmets melted around their heads and body armor fell away.