Steelheart

33

“I don’t really think of myself as an Epic,” Edmund said, leaning forward across the makeshift table. We’d made it out of a box and a plank, and we sat on the floor to eat at it. “I was captured and used for power only a month after my transformation. Bastion was my first owner’s name. I’ll tell you, was he unpleasant after we discovered I couldn’t transfer my power to him.”

“Why do you suppose that is?” I asked, chewing on some jerky.

“I don’t know,” Edmund said, raising his hands in front of himself. He liked to gesture a lot when he talked; you had to watch yourself, lest you get an accidental ninja punch to the shoulder during a particularly emphatic exclamation about the taste of a good curry.

That was about as dangerous as he got. Though Cody stayed near, his rifle never too far from him, Edmund hadn’t been the least bit provocative. He actually seemed pleasant, at least when he wasn’t mentioning our inevitable gruesome deaths at Steelheart’s hands.

“That’s the way it has always worked for me,” Edmund continued, pointing at me with his spoon. “I can only gift them to ordinary humans, and I have to touch them to do it. I’ve never been able to give my powers to an Epic. I’ve tried.”

Nearby, Prof-who had been carrying some supplies past-stopped in place. He turned to Edmund. “What was that you said?”

“I can’t gift to other Epics,” Edmund said, shrugging. “It’s just the way the powers work.”

“Is it that way for other gifters?” Prof asked.

“I’ve never met any,” Edmund said. “Gifters are rare. If there are others in the city, Steelheart never let me meet them. He wasn’t bothered by not being able to get my powers for himself; he was plenty happy using me as a battery.”

Prof looked troubled. He continued on his way, and Edmund looked to me, his eyebrows raised. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, equally confused.

“Well, anyway, continuing my story. Bastion didn’t like that I couldn’t gift him, so he sold me to a fellow named Insulation. I always thought that was a stupid Epic name.”

“Not as bad as the El Brass Bullish Dude,” I said.

“You’re kidding. There’s really an Epic named that?”

I nodded. “From inner LA. He’s dead now, but you’d be surprised at the stupid names a lot of them come up with. Incredible cosmic powers do not equate with high IQ … or even a sense of what is dramatically appropriate. Remind me to tell you about the Pink Pinkness sometime.”

“That name doesn’t sound so bad,” Edmund said, grinning. “It’s actually a little self-aware. Has a smile to it. I’d like to meet an Epic who likes to smile.”

I’m talking to one, I thought. I still hadn’t quite accepted that. “Well,” I said, “she didn’t smile for long. She thought the name was clever, and then …”

“What?”

“Try saying it a few times really quickly,” I suggested.

He moved his mouth, then a huge grin split his mouth. “Well, well, well …”

I shook my head in wonder as I continued eating my jerky. What to make of Edmund? He wasn’t the hero people like Abraham and my father were looking for, not by a long shot. Edmund paled when we talked of fighting Steelheart; he was so timid, he often asked for permission to speak before voicing an opinion.

No, he wasn’t some heroic Epic born to fight for the rights of men, but he was nearly as important. I’d never met, read of, or even caught a story of an Epic who so blatantly broke the stereotype. Edmund had no arrogance, no hatred, no dismissiveness.

It was baffling. Part of me kept thinking, This is what we get? I finally find an Epic who doesn’t want to kill or enslave me, and it’s an old, soft-spoken Indian man who likes to put sugar in his milk?

“You lost someone, didn’t you?” Edmund asked.

I looked up sharply. “What makes you ask?”

“Reactions like that one, actually. And the fact that everyone in your team seems to be walking on crumpled tinfoil and trying not to make any sound.”

Sparks. Good metaphor. Walking on crumpled tinfoil. I’d have to remember that one.

“Who was she?” Edmund asked.

“Who said it was a she?”

“The look on your face, son,” Edmund said, then smiled.

I didn’t respond, though that was in part because I was trying to banish the flood of memories washing through my mind. Megan, glaring at me. Megan, smiling. Megan, laughing just a few hours before she died. Idiot. You only knew her for a couple of weeks.

“I killed my wife,” Edmund said absently, leaning back, staring at the ceiling. “It was an accident. Electrified the counter while trying to power the microwave. Stupid thing, eh? I wanted a frozen burrito. Sara died for that.” He tapped the table. “I hope yours died for something greater.”

That will depend, I thought, on what we do next.

I left Edmund at the table and nodded to Cody, who was standing by the wall and doing a very good job of pretending he wasn’t playing guard. I wandered into the other room, where Prof, Tia, and Abraham were sitting around Tia’s datapad.

I almost went looking for Megan, my instincts saying she’d be standing guard outside the hideout, since all of the others were in here. Idiot. I joined the team, looking over Tia’s shoulder at the screen of the enlarged mobile datapad. She was running it from one of the fuel cells we’d stolen from the power station. Once Edmund had withdrawn his abilities, the city power had gone out, including those wires that sometimes ran through the steel catacombs.

Her pad showed an old steel apartment complex. “No good,” Prof said, pointing to some numbers at the side of the screen. “The building next to it is still populated. I’m not going to have a showdown with a High Epic when there are bystanders so close.”

“What about in front of his palace?” Abraham asked. “He won’t expect that.”

“I doubt he’s expecting anything in particular,” Tia said. “Besides, Cody’s done some scouting. The looting has started, so Steelheart has pulled Enforcement in close to his palace. He’s really only got infantry left, but that’s enough. We’ll never get in to make any preparations. And we’re going to need to prepare the area if we’re going to face him.”

“Soldier Field,” I said softly.

They turned to me.

“Look,” I said, reaching over and scrolling along Tia’s map of the city. It felt downright primitive compared to the real-time camera views we’d been using.

I got the screen to an old portion of the city that was mostly abandoned. “The old football stadium,” I said. “Nobody lives nearby, and there’s nothing in the area to loot, so nobody will be around. We can use the tensors to tunnel in from a nearby point in the understreets. That will let us make preparations quietly, without worry that we’re being spied on.”

“It’s so open,” Prof said, rubbing his chin. “I’d rather face him in an old building, where we can confuse him and hit him from a lot of sides.”

“That will still work here,” I said. “He’ll almost certainly fly down into the middle of the field. We could put a sniper in the upper seats, and could carve ourselves a few unexpected tunnels-with rope lines-down through the seats into the stadium’s innards. We could baffle Steelheart and his minions by putting tunnels where they aren’t expected, and the terrain will be unfamiliar to his people-far more so than a simple apartment complex.”

Prof nodded slowly.

“We still haven’t addressed the real question,” Tia said. “We’re all thinking it. We might as well talk about it.”

“Steelheart’s weakness,” Abraham said softly.

“We’re too effective for our own good,” Tia said. “We’ve got him positioned, and we can bring him out to fight us. We can ambush him perfectly. But will that even matter?”

“So it comes to this,” Prof said. “Listen well, people. These are the stakes. We could pull out now. It would be a disaster-everyone would find out we’d tried to kill him and failed. That could do as much harm as killing him would do good. People would think that the Epics really are invincible, that even we can’t face someone like Steelheart.

“Beyond that, Steelheart would take it upon himself to personally hunt us down. He is not the type to give up easily. Wherever we go, we’d always have to watch and worry about him. But we could go. We don’t know his weakness, not for certain. It might be best to pull out while we can.”

“And if we don’t?” Cody asked.

“We continue with the plan,” Prof said. “We do everything we can to kill him, try out every possible clue from David’s memory. We set up a trap in this stadium that combines all of those possibilities, and we take a chance. It will be the most uncertain hit I’ve ever been part of. One of those things could work, but more likely none of them will, and we will have entered into a fight with one of the most powerful Epics in the world. He’ll probably kill us.”

Everyone sat in silence. No. It couldn’t end here, could it?

“I want to try,” Cody said. “David’s right. He’s been right all along. Sneaking about, killing little Epics … that’s not changing the world. We’ve got a chance at Steelheart. We have to at least try.”

I felt a flood of relief.

Abraham nodded. “Better to die here, with a chance at defeating this creature, than to run.”

Tia and Prof shared a look.

“You want to do it too, don’t you, Jon?” Tia asked.

“Either we fight him here, or the Reckoners are finished,” Prof said. “We’d spend the rest of our lives running. Besides, I doubt I could live with myself if I ran, after all we’ve been through.”

I nodded. “We do have to at least try. For Megan’s sake.”

“I’ll bet she would find that ironic,” Abraham noted. We looked at him, and he shrugged. “She was the one who didn’t want to do this job. I don’t know what she’d think of us dedicating the end of it to her memory.”

“You can be a downer, Abe,” Prof said.

“The truth is not a downer,” Abraham said in his lightly accented voice. “The lies that you pretend to accept are the true downer.”

“Says the man who still believes the Epics will save us,” Prof said.

“Gentlemen,” Tia cut in. “Enough. I think we’re all in agreement. We’re going to try this, ridiculous though it is. We’ll try to kill Steelheart without any real idea what his weakness is.”

One by one, we all nodded. We had to try.

“I’m not doing this for Megan,” I finally said. “But I’m doing it, in part, because of her. If we have to stand up and die so that people will know that someone still fights, so be it. Prof, you said that you worry our failure will depress people. I don’t see that. They’ll hear our story and realize that there’s an option other than doing what the Epics command. We may not be the ones to kill Steelheart. But even if we fail, we might be the cause of his death. Someday.”

“Don’t be so sure we’ll fail,” Prof said. “If I thought this was suicide for certain, I wouldn’t let us continue. As I said, I don’t intend to pin our hopes of killing him on a single guess. We’ll try everything. Tia, what do your instincts say will work?”

“Something from the bank vault,” she said. “One of those items is special. I just wish I knew which one.”

“Did you bring them with you when we abandoned the old hideout?”

“I brought the most unusual ones,” she said. “I stowed the rest in the pocket we made outside. We can fetch them. So far as I know, Enforcement hasn’t found them.”

“We take everything and spread it all out here,” Prof said, pointing at the steel floor of the stadium, which had once been soil. “David’s right; that’s where Steelheart will probably land. We don’t have to know specifically what weakened him-we can just haul it all over and use it.”

Abraham nodded. “A good plan.”

“What do you think it is?” Prof asked him.

“If I had to guess? I would say it was David’s father’s gun or the bullets it shot. Every gun is slightly distinctive in its own way. Perhaps it was the precise composition of the metal.”

“That’s easy enough to test,” I said. “I’ll bring the gun, and when I get a chance I’ll shoot him. I don’t think it will work, but I’m willing to try.”

“Good,” Prof said.

“And you, Prof?” Tia asked.

“I think it was because David’s father was one of the Faithful,” Prof said softly. He didn’t look at Abraham. “Fools though they are, they’re earnest fools. People like Abraham see the world differently than the rest of us do. So maybe it was the way David’s father viewed the Epics that let him hurt Steelheart.”

I sat back, thinking it over.

“Well, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to shoot him too,” Abraham said. “In fact, we should probably all try it. And anything else we can think of.”

They looked at me.

“I still think it’s crossfire,” I said. “I think Steelheart can only be harmed by someone who isn’t intending to hurt him.”

“That’s tougher to arrange,” Tia said. “If you’re right, it probably won’t activate if any of us hit him, since we actually want him dead.”

“Agreed,” Prof said. “But it’s a good theory. We’d need to find a way to get his own soldiers to hit him by accident.”

“He’d have to bring the soldiers first,” Tia said. “Now that he’s convinced there’s a rival Epic in town, he might just bring Nightwielder and Firefight.”

“No,” I said. “He’ll come with soldiers. Limelight has been using minions, and Steelheart will want to be ready-he’ll want to have his own soldiers to deal with distractions like that. Besides, while he’ll want to face Limelight himself, he’ll also want witnesses.”

“I agree,” Prof said. “His soldiers will probably have orders not to engage unless fired upon. We can make certain they feel they need to start fighting back.”

“Then we’ll need to be able to stall Steelheart long enough to set up a good crossfire,” Abraham said. He paused. “Actually, we’ll need to stall him during the crossfire. If he assumes this is just an ambush of soldiers, he’ll fly off and let Enforcement deal with it.” Abraham looked at Prof. “Limelight will have to make an appearance.”

Prof nodded. “I know.”

“Jon …,” Tia said, touching his arm.

“It’s what must be done,” he said. “We’ll need a way to deal with Nightwielder and Firefight too.”

“I’m telling you,” I said, “Firefight won’t be an issue. He’s-”

“I know he’s not what he seems, son,” Prof said. “I accept that. But have you ever fought an illusionist?”

“Sure,” I said. “With Cody and Megan.”

“That was a weak one,” Prof said. “But I suppose it gives you an idea what to expect. Firefight will be stronger. Much stronger. I almost wish he was just another fire Epic.”

Tia nodded. “He should be a priority. We’ll need code phrases, in case he sends in illusory versions of the other members of the team to confuse us. And we’ll have to watch for false walls, fake members of Enforcement intended to confuse, things like that.”

“Do you think Nightwielder will even show?” Abraham asked. “From what I heard, David’s little flashlight show sent him running like a rabbit before the hawk.”

Prof looked to me and Tia.

I shrugged. “He might not,” I said.

Tia nodded. “Nightwielder’s a hard one to read.”

“We should be ready for him anyway,” I said. “But I’ll be perfectly fine if he stays away.”

“Abraham,” Prof said, “you think you can rig up a UV floodlight or two using the extra power cells? We should arm everyone with some of those flashlights as well.”

We fell silent, and I had a feeling we were all thinking the same thing. The Reckoners liked extremely well-planned operations, executed only after weeks or months of preparation. Yet here we were going to try to take down one of the strongest Epics in the world with little more than some trinkets and flashlights.

It was what we had to do.

“I think,” Tia said, “we should come up with a good plan for extraction in case none of these things work.”

Prof didn’t look like he agreed. His expression had grown grim; he knew that if none of these ideas let us kill Steelheart, our chances of survival were slim.

“A copter will work best,” Abraham said. “Without Conflux, Enforcement is grounded. If we can use a power cell, or even make him power a copter for us …”

“That will be good,” Tia said. “But we’ll still have to disengage.”

“Well, we’ve still got Diamond in custody,” Abraham said. “We could grab some of his explosives-”

“Wait,” I said, confused. “In custody?”

“I had Abraham and Cody grab him the evening of your little encounter,” Prof said absently. “Couldn’t risk letting him say what he knew.”

“But … you said he’d never …”

“He saw a hole made by the tensors,” Prof said, “and you were linked to him in Nightwielder’s mind. The moment they saw you at one of our operations, they’d grab Diamond. It was for his safety as much as our own.”

“So … what are you doing with him?”

“Feeding him a lot,” Prof said, “and bribing him to lie low. He was pretty unsettled by that run-in, and I think he was happy we took him.” Prof hesitated. “I promised him a look at how the tensors work in exchange for him remaining in one of our bolt-holes until this all blows over.”

I sat back against the wall of the room, disturbed. Prof hadn’t said it, but I could read the truth from his tone. The emergence of knowledge of the tensors would change the way the Reckoners worked. Even if we beat Steelheart, they had lost something great-no longer would they be able to sneak into places unexpectedly. Their enemies would be able to plan, watch, prepare.

I’d brought about the end of an era. They didn’t seem to blame me, but I couldn’t help feeling some guilt. I was like the guy who had brought the spoiled shrimp cocktail to the party, causing everyone to throw up for a week straight.

“Anyway,” Abraham said, tapping the screen of Tia’s datapad, “we could dig out a section under the field here with the tensors, leave an inch or so of steel, then pack the hole with explosives. If we have to punch out, we blow the thing, maybe take out some soldiers and use the confusion and smoke to cover our escape.”

“Assuming Steelheart doesn’t just chase us down and shoot the copter out of the sky,” Prof said.

We fell silent.

“I believe you said I was a downer?” Abraham asked.

“Sorry,” Prof replied. “Just pretend I said something self-righteous about truth instead.”

Abraham smiled.

“It’s a workable plan,” Prof said. “Though we might want to try to set up some kind of decoy explosion, maybe back at his palace, to draw him off. Abraham, I’ll let you handle that. Tia, can you send a message to Steelheart through these networks without being traced?”

“I should be able to,” she replied.

“Well, give him a response from Limelight. Tell him: ‘Be ready on the night of the third day. You’ll know the place when the time comes.’ ”

She nodded.

“Three days?” Abraham said. “Not much time.”

“We really don’t have much we need to prepare,” Prof said. “Besides, anything longer would be too suspicious; he probably expects us to face him tonight. This will have to do, though.”

The Reckoners nodded, and the preparations for our last fight began. I sat back, my anxiety rising. I was finally going to have my chance to face him. Killing him with this plan seemed almost as much a longshot as ever.

But I would finally get my chance.