Steelheart (20 page)

My heart beating more quickly, I scanned through the manual’s contents until I found it. UV fingerprint scanner with attached video camera. I skimmed the instructions. Now, if I could just get it out of the case.…

The woman took out a device and inspected it. It wasn’t the fingerprint scanner, so I didn’t pay attention. I snatched that scanner the second she looked away, and then I pretended to just be fiddling with it, trying my best to look idly curious.

In the process I got it turned on. It glowed blue at the front and had a screen on the back—it worked like a digital camcorder, but with a UV light on the front. You shined the light over objects and
recorded images of what that revealed. That would be handy if doing a sweep of a room for DNA—it would give you a record of what you’d seen.

I turned on the record function. What I was about to do could easily get me killed. I’d seen men murdered for far less. But I knew Tia wanted stronger proof. It was time to get her some.

I turned the UV light and shined it on Nightwielder.

NIGHTWIELDER
spun on me immediately.

I turned the UV light to the side, my head down as if I were studying the device and trying to figure out how it worked. I wanted it to seem like I’d shined the light on him by happenstance while fiddling with it.

I didn’t look at Nightwielder. I
couldn’t
look at Nightwielder. I didn’t know if the light had worked on him, but if it had and he so much as suspected that I’d seen, I’d die.

I might die anyway.

It was painful not to know what effect the light had produced, but the device
was
recording. I turned away from Nightwielder, and with one hand I tapped some buttons on the device as if trying to make it work. With the other—fingers trembling nervously—I slid out the data chip and hid it in the palm of my hand.

Nightwielder was still watching me. I could feel his eyes, as if they were drilling holes into my back. The room seemed to grow darker, shadows lengthening. To the side, Diamond continued chatting about the features of the device he was demonstrating. Nobody seemed to have noticed that I’d drawn Nightwielder’s attention.

I pretended not to notice either, though my heart was pounding even harder in my chest. I fiddled with the machine some more, then held it up as if I’d finally figured out how it worked. I stepped forward and pressed my thumb on the wall, then stepped back to try to see the thumbprint show up in the UV light.

Nightwielder hadn’t moved. He was considering what to do. Killing me would protect him if I’d noticed what the UV light did. He could do it. He could claim that I’d impinged on his personal space, or looked at him wrong. Sparks, he didn’t even need to give an excuse. He could do what he wanted.

However, that could be dangerous for him. When an Epic killed erratically or unexpectedly, people always wondered if it was an attempt to hide their weakness. His minions had seen me holding a UV scanner. They might make a connection. And so, to be safe, he’d probably have to kill Diamond and the Enforcement soldiers as well. Probably his own assistants too.

I was sweating now. It felt awful to stand there, to not even be facing him as he considered murdering me. I wanted to spin, look him in the eyes, and spit at him as he killed me.

Steady
, I told myself. Keeping the defiance from my face, I looked over and pretended to notice—for the first time—that Nightwielder was staring at me. He stood as he had earlier, hands behind his back, black suit and thin black necktie making him look all lines. Motionless gaze, translucent skin. There was no sign of what had happened, if indeed anything
had
happened.

Upon seeing him I jumped in shock. I didn’t have to feign fear; I felt my skin grow pale, the color drain from my face. I dropped the fingerprint scanner and yelped softly. The scanner cracked as
it hit the ground. I immediately cursed, crouching down beside the broken device.

“What are you doing, you fool!” Diamond bustled over to me. He didn’t seem very worried about the scanner, more about my offending Nightwielder somehow. “I’m so sorry, Great One. He is a bumbling idiot, but he’s the best I’ve been able to find. It—”

Diamond hushed as the shadows nearby lengthened, then swirled upon themselves, becoming thick black cords. He stumbled away and I jumped to my feet. The darkness didn’t strike at me, however, but scooped up the fallen fingerprint scanner.

The blackness seemed to pool on the floor, writhing and twisting about itself. Tendrils of it raised the scanner up into the air in front of Nightwielder, and he studied it with an indifferent gaze. He looked to us, and then more of the blackness rose up and surrounded the scanner. There was a sudden
crunch
, like a hundred walnuts being cracked at once.

The intended message was clear. Annoy me, and you will meet the same fate. Nightwielder neatly obscured his fear of the scanner, and his desire to destroy it, behind the guise of a simple threat.

“I …” I said softly. “Boss, why don’t I just go to the back and keep working on that inventory, like you said?”

“What you should have done from the first,” Diamond said. “Off with you.”

I turned and scrambled away, hand held to my side, clutching the data chip from the UV scanner. I hurried my pace, not minding how I looked, until I was running. I reached the boxes and the relative safety of their shadows. There, close to the floor, I found a completed tunnel burrowed through the back wall.

I lurched to a stop. I took a breath, got on my hands and knees, and scrambled into the opening. I slid through the seven feet of steel and came out the other side.

Something grabbed my arm and I pulled back by instinct. I looked up, logic fleeing as I thought of how Nightwielder had made
the shadows themselves come alive, but was relieved to see a familiar face.

“Hush!” Abraham said, holding my arm. “Are they chasing?”

“I don’t think so,” I said softly.

“Where’s my gun?”

“Um … I kind of sold it to Nightwielder.”

Abraham raised an eyebrow at me, then towed me to the side, where Megan covered us with my rifle. She was the definition of professional—lips a terse line, eyes searching the tunnels nearby for danger. The only light came from the mobiles she and Abraham wore strapped to their shoulders.

Abraham nodded to her, and there was no further conversation as the three of us made our escape down the corridor. At the next intersection of the catacombs, Megan tossed my rifle to Abraham—ignoring that I’d put my hand out for it—and unholstered one of her handguns. She nodded to him, then took point, hurrying ahead down the steel tunnel.

We continued that way, no talk, for a time. I’d been hopelessly lost before, but now I was turned around so much I barely knew which direction was up.

“Okay,” Abraham finally said, holding up a hand to wave Megan back. “Let’s take a breather and see if anyone is following.” He settled down in a small alcove in the hallway where he could watch the stretch behind us and see if anyone had followed. He seemed to be favoring the arm opposite the shoulder that had been shot.

I crouched beside him and Megan joined us.

“That was an unexpected move you made up there, David,” Abraham said softly, calmly.

“I didn’t have time to think about it,” I said. “They heard us working.”

“True, true. And then Diamond suggested you go back, but you said you wanted to stay?”

“So … you heard that?”

“I could not have just mentioned it if I hadn’t.” He continued looking down the hallway.

I glanced at Megan, who gave me a frosty stare. “Unprofessional,” she muttered.

I fished in my pocket and brought out the data chip. Abraham glanced at it, then frowned. He obviously hadn’t stayed long enough to see what I was doing with Nightwielder. I tapped the chip to my mobile, downloading the information. Three taps later, it started displaying the video from the UV scanner. Abraham glanced over, and even Megan craned her neck to see what it was showing.

I held my breath. I still didn’t know for certain if I was right about Nightwielder—and even if I was, there was no telling whether my hasty spin of the scanner had captured any useable images.

The video image showed the ground, with me waving my hand in front of the lens. Then it turned on Nightwielder and my heart leaped. I tapped the screen, freezing the image.

“You clever little slontze,” Abraham murmured. There, on the screen, Nightwielder stood with half his body fully corporeal. It was difficult to make out, but it was there. Where the UV light shone, he wasn’t translucent, and his body seemed to have
settled
more.

I tapped the screen again and the UV light panned past, letting Nightwielder become incorporeal again. The video was only a second or two, but it was enough. “UV forensics scanner,” I explained. “I figured this was the best chance we’d get to know for certain.…”

“I can’t believe you took that chance,” Megan said. “Without asking anyone. You could have gotten
all three
of us killed.”

“But he didn’t,” Abraham said, plucking the data chip from my hand. He studied it, seeming oddly reverent. Then he looked up, as if remembering he’d been planning to watch the hallway for signs of people following. “We need to get this chip to Prof. Now.” He hesitated. “Nice work.”

He stood up to go, and I found myself beaming. Then I turned to Megan, who gave me an even colder, more hostile look than she had earlier. She rose and followed Abraham.

Sparks
, I thought. What would it take to impress that girl? I shook my head and jogged after them.

WHEN
we returned, Cody was off on a mission to do some scouting for Tia. She waved toward some rations on the back table of the main room, awaiting devourment. Devouration. Whatever that word is.

“Go tell Prof what you found,” Abraham said softly, walking toward the storage room. Megan made her way to the rations.

“Where are you going?” I asked Abraham.

“I need a new gun, it seems,” he said with a smile, ducking through the doorway. He hadn’t chided me for what I’d done with his gun—he saw that I’d saved the team. At least I hoped that was how he viewed it. Still, there was a distinct sense of loss in his voice. He’d liked that gun. And it was easy to see why—I’d
never
owned a weapon as nice as that one.

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.”