Steelheart

16

D shop wasn’t set up in a room, but instead in one of the long corridors of the catacombs. I assumed that the other end of the corridor was either a dead end or had guards. The space was lit from above by portable lights that were almost blinding after the general darkness of the catacombs.

Those lights shone on guns-hundreds of them hung on the walls of the hallway. Beautiful polished steel and deep, muted blacks. Assault rifles. Handguns. Massive, electron-compressed beasts like the one Abraham carried, with full gravatonics. Old-style revolvers, grenades in stacks, rocket launchers.

I’d only ever owned two guns-my pistol and my rifle. The rifle was a good friend. I’d had her for three years now, and I’d come to rely on her a lot. She worked when I needed her. We had a great relationship-I cared for her, and she cared for me.

At the sight of Diamond’s shop, though, I felt like a boy who’d only ever owned a single toy car and had just been offered a showroom full of Ferraris.

Abraham sauntered into the hallway. He didn’t give the weapons much of a look. Megan entered and I followed on her heels, staring at the walls and their wares.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s like … a banana farm for guns.”

“A banana farm,” Megan said flatly.

“Sure. You know, how bananas grow from their trees and hang down and stuff?”

“Knees, you suck at metaphors.”

I blushed. An art gallery, I thought. I should have said “like an art gallery for guns.” No, wait. If I said it that way, it would mean the gallery was intended for guns to come visit. A gallery of guns, then?

“How do you even know what bananas are?” Megan said quietly as Abraham greeted a portly man standing beside a blank portion of wall. This could only be Diamond. “Steelheart doesn’t import from Latin America.”

“My encyclopedias,” I said, distracted. A gallery of guns for the criminally destructive. I should have said that. That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? “Read them a few times. Some of it stuck.”

“Encyclopedias.”

“Yeah.”

“Which you read ‘a few times.’ ”

I stopped, realizing what I’d said. “Er. No. I mean, I just browsed them. You know, looking for pictures of guns. I-”

“You are such a nerd,” she said, walking ahead to join Abraham. She sounded amused.

I sighed, then joined them and tried to get her attention to show off my new metaphor, but Abraham was introducing us.

“… new kid,” he said, gesturing to me. “David.”

Diamond nodded to me. He had on a brightly colored floral-pattern shirt, like people supposedly once wore in the tropics. Maybe that was where I’d gotten the whole banana metaphor. He had a white beard and long white hair, though he was balding at the front, and wore a huge smile that sparkled in his eyes.

“I assume,” he said to Abraham, “you want to see what’s new. What’s exciting. You know, my-ahem-other clients haven’t even been through here yet! You’re the first. First picks!”

“And highest prices,” Abraham said, turning to look at the wall of guns. “Death comes at such a premium these days.”

“Says the man carrying an electron-compressed Manchester 451,” Diamond said. “With gravatonics and a full grenade dock. Nice explosions on those. Little on the small side, but you can bounce them in really fun ways.”

“Show us what you have,” Abraham said politely, though his voice seemed strained. I could swear he had sounded more calm talking to the thugs who had shot him. Curious.

“I’m getting some things ready to show you,” Diamond said. He had a smile like a parrot fish, which I’ve always assumed look like parrots, though I’ve never actually seen either. “Why don’t you just have a look around? Browse a bit. Tell me what suits your fancy.”

“Very well,” Abraham said. “Thank you.” He nodded to us-we knew what we were supposed to do. Look for anything out of the ordinary. A weapon that could cause a lot of destruction-destruction that could seem like the work of an Epic. If we were going to imitate one, we’d need something impressive.

Megan stepped up beside me, studying a machine gun that fired incendiary rounds.

“I’m not a nerd,” I hissed at her softly.

“Why does it matter?” she asked, her tone neutral. “There’s nothing wrong with being smart. In fact, if you are intelligent, you’ll be a stronger asset to the team.”

“I just … I … I just don’t like being called that. Besides, who ever heard of a nerd jumping from a moving jet and shooting an Epic in midair while plummeting toward the ground?”

“I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.”

“Phaedrus did it,” I said. “Execution of Redleaf, three years ago up in Canada.”

“That story was exaggerated,” Abraham said softly, walking by. “It was a helicopter. And it was all part of the plan-we were very careful. Now please, keep focused on our current task.”

I shut my mouth and began studying the weapons. Incendiary rounds were impressive, but not particularly original. That wasn’t flashy enough for us. In fact, any type of basic gun wouldn’t work-whether it shot bullets, rockets, or grenades, it wouldn’t be convincing. We needed something more like the energy weapons Enforcement had. A way to mimic an Epic’s innate firepower.

I moved down the hallway, and the weapons seemed to grow more unusual the farther I walked. I stopped beside a curious group of objects. They appeared to be innocent enough-a water bottle, a mobile phone, a pen. They were attached to the wall like the weapons.

“Ah … you are a discerning man, are you, David?”

I jumped, turning to see Diamond grinning behind me. How could a fat man move so quietly?

“What are they?” I asked.

“Advanced stealth explosives,” Diamond answered proudly. He reached up and tapped a section of the wall, and an image appeared on it. He had an imager hooked up here, apparently. It showed a water bottle sitting on a table. A businessman strolled past, looking at some papers in his hand. He set them on the table, then twisted the cap off the water.

And exploded.

I jumped back.

“Ah,” Diamond said. “I hope you appreciate the value of this footage-it’s rare that I get good shots of a stealth explosive being deployed in the field. This one is quite remarkable. Notice how the explosion flung the body back but didn’t damage too much nearby? That’s important in a stealth explosive, particularly if the person to be assassinated might have valuable documents on them.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, turning away.

“We are in the business of death, young man.”

“The video, I mean.”

“He wasn’t a very nice person, if it helps.” I doubted that mattered to Diamond. He seemed affable as he tapped the wall. “Good explosion. I’ll be honest-I half keep these to sell just because I like showing off that video. It’s one of a kind.”

“Do they all explode?” I asked, examining the innocent-looking devices.

“The pen is a detonator,” Diamond said. “Click the back and you set off one of those little eraser devices next to it. They’re universal blasting caps. Stick them close to something explosive, trigger them, and they can usually set it off. Depends on the substance, but they’re programmed with some pretty advanced detection algorithms. They work on most explosive substances. Stick one of those to some guy’s grenade, walk away, then click the pen.”

“If you could clip one of those to his grenade,” Megan said, approaching, “you could have just pulled the pin. Or better yet, shot him.”

“It’s not for every situation,” Diamond said defensively. “But they can be very fun. What’s better than detonating your enemy’s own explosives when he’s not expecting it?”

“Diamond,” Abraham called from down the corridor. “Come tell me about this.”

“Ah! Excellent choice. Wonderful explosions from that one …” He scuttled off.

I looked at the panel full of innocent yet deadly objects. Something about them felt very wrong to me. I’d killed men before, but I’d done it honestly. With a gun in my hands, and only because I’d been forced to. I didn’t have many philosophies about life, but one of them was something my father had taught me: never throw the first punch. If you have to throw the second, try to make sure they don’t get up for a third.

“These could be useful,” Megan said, arms still crossed. “Though I doubt that blowhard really understands what for.”

“I know,” I said, trying to redeem myself. “I mean, recording some poor guy’s death like that? It was totally unprofessional.”

“Actually, he sells explosives,” she said, “so having a recording like that is professional of him. I suspect he has recordings of each of these weapons being fired, as we can’t test them hands-on down here.”

“Megan, that was a recording of some guy blowing up.” I shook my head, revolted. “It was awful. You shouldn’t show off stuff like that.”

She hesitated, looking troubled about something. “Yes. Of course.” She looked at me. “You never did explain why you were so bothered by being called a nerd.”

“I told you. I don’t like it because, you know, I want to do awesome stuff. And nerds don’t-”

“That’s not it,” she said, staring at me coolly. Sparks, but her eyes were beautiful. “There’s something deeper about it that bothers you, and you need to get over it. It’s a weakness.” She glanced at the water bottle, then turned and walked over to the thing Abraham was inspecting. It was some kind of bazooka.

I secured my rifle over my shoulder and stuck my hands in my pockets. It seemed that I was spending a lot of time lately getting lectured. I’d thought that leaving the Factory would end all of that, but I guess I should have known better.

I turned from Megan and Abraham and looked across at the wall nearest me. I was having trouble focusing on the guns, which was a first for me. My mind was working over what she’d asked. Why did being called a nerd bother me?

I walked over to her side.

“… don’t know if it’s what we want,” Abraham was saying.

“But the explosions are so big,” Diamond replied.

“It’s because they took the smart ones away,” I said softly to Megan.

I could feel her eyes on me, but I continued staring at the wall.

“A lot of kids at the Factory tried so hard to prove how smart they were,” I said quietly. “We had school, you know. You went to school half the day, worked the other half, unless you got expelled. If you did poorly the teacher just expelled you, and after that you worked full days. School was easier than the Factory, so most of the kids tried really hard.

“The smart ones, though … the really smart ones … the nerds … they left. Got taken to the city above. If you showed some skill with computers, or math, or writing, off you went. They got good jobs, I hear. In Steelheart’s propaganda corps or his accounting offices or something like that. When I was young I’d have laughed about Steelheart having accountants. He’s got a lot of them, you know. You need people like them in an empire.”

Megan looked at me, curious. “So you …”

“Learned to be dumb,” I said. “Rather, to be mediocre. The dumb ones got kicked out of school, and I wanted to learn-knew I needed to learn-so I had to stay. I also knew that if I went up above, I’d lose my freedom. He keeps a lot better watch over his accountants than he does his factory workers.

“There were other boys like me. A lot of the girls moved on fast, the smart ones. Some of the boys I knew, though, they started to see it as a mark of pride that they weren’t taken above. You didn’t want to be one of the smart ones. I had to be extra careful, since I asked so many questions about the Epics. I had to hide my notebooks, find ways to throw off those who thought I was smart.”

“But you’re not there anymore. You’re with the Reckoners. So it doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” I said. “Because it’s not who I am. I’m not smart, I’m just persistent. My friends who were smart, they didn’t have to study at all. I had to study like a horse for every test I took.”

“Like a horse?”

“You know. Because horses work hard? Pulling carts and plows and things?”

“Yeah, I’ll just ignore that one.”

“I’m not smart,” I said.

I didn’t mention that part of the reason I had to study so hard was because I needed to know the answer to each and every question perfectly. Only then could I ensure that I would get the exact number of questions wrong to remain in the middle of the pack. Smart enough to stay in school, but not worthy of notice or attention.

“Besides,” I continued. “The people I knew who were really smart, they learned because they loved it. I didn’t. I hated studying.”

“You read the encyclopedia. A few times.”

“Looking for things that could be Epic weaknesses,” I said. “I needed to know different types of metal, chemical compounds, elements, and symbols. Practically anything could be a weakness. I hoped something would spark in my head. Something about him.”

“So it’s all about him.”

“Everything in my life is about him, Megan,” I said, looking at her. “Everything.”

We fell silent, though Diamond continued blabbing on. Abraham had turned to look at me. He seemed thoughtful.

Great, I realized. He heard. Just great.

“That will be enough, please, Diamond,” Abraham said. “That weapon really won’t work.”

The weapons merchant sighed. “Very well. But perhaps you can give me a clue as to what might work.”

“Something distinctive,” Abraham said. “Something nobody has seen before, but also something destructive.”

“Well, I don’t have much that isn’t destructive,” Diamond said. “But distinctive … Let me see.…”

Abraham waved for us to keep searching. As Megan moved off, however, he took me by the arm. He had quite a strong grip. “Steelheart takes the smart ones,” Abraham said softly, “because he fears them. He knows, David. All of these guns, they do not frighten him. They won’t be what overthrows him. It will be the person clever enough, smart enough, to figure out the chink in his armor. He knows he can’t kill them all, so he employs them. When he dies it will be because of someone like you. Remember that.”

He released my arm and walked after Diamond.

I watched him go, then walked over to another group of weapons. His words didn’t really change anything, but oddly, I did feel myself standing a little taller as I looked at a line of guns and was able to identify each of the manufacturers.

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. Câlice!”

“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.

“We’re … not sure why it does that,” Diamond admitted. “Or even how. The technology changes the bullet into a charged explosive.”

I felt a shiver, thinking about the tensors, the jackets-the technology used by the Reckoners. Actually, a lot of the technology we now used had come with the advent of the Epics. How much of it did we really understand?

We were relying on half-understood technology built from studying mystifying creatures who didn’t even know how they did what they did themselves. We were like deaf people trying to dance to a beat we couldn’t hear, long after the music actually stopped. Or … wait. I don’t know what that actually was supposed to mean.

Anyway, the lights given off by that gun’s explosion were very distinctive. Beautiful, even. There didn’t seem to be much debris, just some green smoke that still floated in the air. Almost as if the building had been transformed directly to energy.

Then it hit me. “Aurora borealis,” I said, pointing. “It looks like the pictures I’ve seen of it.”

“Destructive capability looks good,” Megan said. “That building was almost completely knocked down by one shot.”

Abraham nodded. “It might be what we need. However, Diamond, might I inquire about what you mentioned earlier? You said it didn’t work.”

“It works just fine,” the merchant said quickly. “But it requires an energy pack to fire. A powerful one.”

“How powerful?”

“Fifty-six KC,” Diamond said, then hesitated. “Per shot.”

Abraham whistled.

“Is that a lot?” Megan asked.

“Yeah,” I said, in awe. “Like, several thousand standard fuel cells’ worth.”

“Usually,” Diamond said, “you need to hook it up by cord to its own power unit. You can’t just plug this bad boy into a wall socket. The shots on this demo were fired using several six-inch cords running back to a dedicated generator.” He looked up at the weapon. “I bought it hoping I could trade a certain client for some of his high-energy fuel cells, then be able to actually sell the weapon in working condition.”

“Who knows about this weapon?” Abraham asked.

“Nobody,” Diamond said. “I bought it directly from the lab that created it, and the man who made this video was in my employ. It’s never been on the market. In fact, the researchers who developed it died a few months later-blew themselves up, poor fools. I guess that’s what you get when you routinely build devices that supercharge matter.”

“We’ll take it,” Abraham said.

“You will?” Diamond looked surprised, and then a smile crossed his face. “Well … what an excellent choice! I’m certain you’ll be happy. But again, to clarify, this will not fire unless you find your own energy source. A very powerful one, likely one you won’t be able to transport. Do you understand?”

“We will find one,” Abraham said. “How much?”

“Twelve,” Diamond said without missing a beat.

“You can’t sell it to anyone else,” Abraham said, “and you can’t make it work. You’ll be getting four. Thank you.” Abraham got out a small box. He tapped it, and handed it over.

“And we want one of those pen exploder things thrown in,” I said on a whim as I held my mobile up to the wall and downloaded the video of the gauss gun in action. I almost asked for one of the motorcycles, but figured that would really be pushing things.

“Very well,” Diamond said, holding up the box Abraham had given him. What was that, anyway? “Is Fortuity in here?” he asked.

“Alas,” Abraham said, “our encounter with him did not leave time for proper harvesting. But four others, including Absence.”

Harvesting? What did that mean? Absence was an Epic the Reckoners had killed last year.

Diamond grunted. I found myself very curious as to what was in that box.

“Also, here.” Abraham handed over a data chip.

Diamond smiled, taking it. “You know how to sweeten a deal, Abraham. Yes you do.”

“Nobody finds out that we have this,” Abraham said, nodding toward the gun. “Do not even tell another person that it exists.”

“Of course not,” Diamond said, sounding offended. He walked over to pull a standard rifle bag out from under his desk, then began to get the gauss gun down.

“What did we pay him with?” I asked Megan, speaking very softly.

“When Epics die, something happens to their bodies,” she replied.

“Mitochondrial mutation.” I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, when we kill an Epic, we harvest some of their mitochondria,” she said. “It’s needed by the scientists who build all this kind of stuff. Diamond can trade it to secret research labs.”

I whistled softly. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking troubled. “The cells expire after just a few minutes if you don’t freeze them, so that makes it hard to harvest. There are some groups out there who make a living harvesting cells-they don’t kill the Epics, they just sneak a blood sample and freeze it. This sort of thing has become a secret, high-level currency.”

So that was how it was happening. The Epics didn’t even need to know about it. It worried me more deeply, however, to learn about this. How much of the process did we understand? What would the Epics think of their genetic material being sold at market?

I’d never heard of any of this, despite my research into Epics. It served as a reminder. I might have figured a few things out, but there was an entire world out there beyond my experience.

“What about the data chip Abraham gave him?” I asked. “The thing Diamond called a deal sweetener?”

“That has explosions on it,” she said.

“Ah. Of course.”

“Why do you want that detonator?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It just sounded fun. And since it looks like a while till I’ll get one of those bikes-”

“You’ll never get one of those bikes.”

“-I thought I’d ask for something.”

She didn’t reply, though it seemed as if I’d unintentionally annoyed her. Again. I was having a tough time deciding what was bothering her-she seemed to have her own special rules for what constituted being “professional” and what didn’t.

Diamond packed up the gun and, to my delight, tossed in the pen detonator and a small pack of the “erasers” that worked with it. I was feeling pretty good about getting something extra. Then I smelled garlic.

I frowned. It wasn’t quite garlic, but it was close. What was …

Garlic.

Phosphorus smelled like garlic.

“We’re in trouble,” I said immediately. “Nightwielder is here.”