Steelheart (28 page)

Megan glanced at me, the hint of a smile on the corners of her lips. “What?” I asked.

“Nerd.”

“I am not—”

“Stay focused, son,” Prof said, shooting a hard look at Megan, whose eyes shone with amusement. “I happen to have a fondness for nerds.”

“I never said that I didn’t,” Megan replied lightly. “I’m just interested whenever someone pretends to be something they’re not.”

Whatever
, I thought. Faultline was a tier-one Epic, by Tia’s classification, without an immortality benefit. That made her powerful, but fragile. She should have realized that; when she’d tried to seize Newcago a few years back, she’d never had a chance.

Anyway, she was an Epic who had several smaller powers that worked together to create what seemed to be a single, more impressive power. In her case, she could move earth—but only if it wasn’t
too rigid. However, she
also
had the ability to turn ordinary stone and earth into a kind of sandy dust.

What had looked like her creating an earthquake had actually been her softening the ground, then pulling back the earth. There were true earthquake-creating Epics, but they were ironically less powerful—or at least less useful. The stronger ones could destroy a city with their powers but couldn’t bury a single building or group of people at will. Plate tectonics just worked on too massive a scale to allow for precision.

“Don’t you see?” Tia asked. “Steelheart turned the bank’s main room—walls, much of the ceiling, floor—to steel. Then Faultline softened the ground beneath it and let it sink. I began thinking, there might be a chance that—”

“—that it would still be there,” I said softly. We turned a corner in the catacombs, and then Tia stepped forward, moving some pieces of junk to reveal a tunnel. I had enough practice by now to tell it was probably tensor-made. The tensors, unless controlled precisely, always created circular tunnels, while the Diggers had created square or rectangular corridors.

This tunnel burrowed through the steel at a slight decline. Cody walked up, shining his light in. “Well, I guess now we know what you and Abraham have been working on for the last few weeks, Tia.”

“We had to try several different avenues of approach,” Tia explained. “I wasn’t certain how deep the bank room ended up sinking, or even if it retained structural integrity.”

“But it did?” I asked, suddenly feeling a strange numbness.

“It did!” Tia said. “It’s amazing. Come see.” She led the way down the tunnel, which was tall enough to walk through, though Abraham would have to stoop.

I hesitated. The others waited for me to follow, so I forced myself forward, joining Tia. The rest of them came along behind, our mobiles providing the only light.

No, wait. There was light up ahead; I could barely make it out,
around the shadows of Tia’s slender figure. We eventually reached the end of the tunnel, and I stepped into a memory.

Tia had set up a few lights in corners and on tables, but they did little more than give a ghostly cast to the large, dark chamber. The room had settled at an angle, with the floor sloping downward. The skewed perspective only enhanced the surreal sensation of this place.

I froze in the mouth of the tunnel. The room was as I remembered it, shockingly well preserved. Towering pillars—now made of steel—and scattered desks, counters, rubble. I could still make out the tile mosaic on the floor, though only its shape. Instead of marble and stone it was now all a uniform shade of silver broken by ridges and bumps.

There was almost no dust, though some motes dodged lazily in the air, creating little halos around the white lanterns Tia had set up.

Realizing that I was still standing in the mouth of the tunnel, I stepped down into the room.
Oh sparks …
, I thought, my chest constricting. I found my hands gripping my rifle, though I knew I was in no danger. The memories were coming back in a flood.

“In retrospect,” Tia was explaining—I listened with only half an ear—“I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it so well preserved. Faultline’s powers created a kind of cushion of earth as the room sank, and Steelheart turned almost all of that earth to metal. The other rooms in the building were destroyed in his assault on the bank, and they broke off as the structure sank. But this one, and the attached vault, were ironically preserved by Steelheart’s own powers.”

By coincidence we’d entered through the front of the bank. There had been wide, beautiful glass doors here; those had been destroyed in the gunfire and energy blasts. Steel rubble and some steel bones from Deathpoint’s victims littered the ground to both sides. As I stepped forward I followed the path Steelheart had taken into the building.

Those are the counters
, I thought, looking directly ahead.
The ones
where the tellers worked
. One section had been destroyed; as a child I’d crawled through that gap before making my way to the vault. The ceiling nearby was broken and misshapen, but the vault itself had been steel before Steelheart’s intervention. Now that I thought about it, that might have helped preserve its contents, because of how his transfersion abilities worked.

“Most of the rubble is from where the ceiling fell in,” Tia said from behind, her voice echoing in the vast chamber. “Abraham and I cleaned as much out as we could. A large amount of dirt had tumbled through the broken wall and ceiling, filling one part of the chamber over by the vault. We used the tensors on that pile, then made a hole in the corner of the floor—it opens into a pocket of space underneath the building—and shoved the dust in there.”

I moved down three steps to the lower section of the floor. Here, in the center of the room, was where Steelheart had faced Deathpoint.
These people are mine.…
By instinct, I turned to the left. Huddling beside the pillar I found the body of the woman whose child had been killed in her arms. I shivered. She was now a statue made of steel. When had she died? How? I didn’t remember. A stray bullet, maybe? She wouldn’t have been turned to steel unless she’d already been dead.

“What
really
saved this place,” Tia continued, “was the Great Transfersion, when Steelheart turned everything in the city to steel. If he hadn’t done that, dirt would have filled this room completely. Beyond that, the settling of the ground probably would have caved in the ceiling. However, the transfersion turned the remaining things in the room to steel, as well as the earth around it. In effect he locked the room into place, preserving it, like a bubble in the middle of a frozen pond.”

I continued forward until I could see the sterile little mortgage cubicle I’d hidden in. Its windows were now opaque, but I could see in through the open front. I walked in and ran my fingers along the desk. The cubicle felt smaller than I remembered.

“The insurance records were inconclusive,” Tia continued. “But there
was
a claim submitted on the building itself, an earthquake claim. I wonder if the bank owners really thought the insurance company would pay out on that. Seems ridiculous—but of course, there was still a lot of uncertainty surrounding Epics in those days. Anyway, that made me investigate records surrounding the bank’s destruction.”

“And that led you here?” Cody asked, his voice coming from the darkness as he poked around the perimeter of the room.

“No, actually. It led me to find something curious. A cover-up. The reason I couldn’t find anything in the insurance reports, and why I couldn’t find any lists of what was in the vault, was because some of Steelheart’s people had already gathered and hidden the information. I realized that since he had made a dedicated attempt to cover this up, I would never discover anything of use in the records. Our only chance would be to come to the bank, which Steelheart had assumed was buried beyond reach.”

“It’s a good assumption,” Cody said, sounding thoughtful. “Without the tensors—or some kind of Epic power like the Diggers had—getting here would have been near impossible. Burrowing through fifty feet of solid steel?” The Diggers had started out as normal humans and had been granted their strange powers by an Epic known as Digzone, who was a gifter like Conflux. It … hadn’t gone well for them. Not all Epic powers were meant to be used by mortal hands, it appeared.

I was still standing in the cubicle. The mortgage man’s bones were there, scattered on the floor around the desk, peeking out from some rubble. All of it was metal now.

I didn’t want to look, but I had to. I
had to
.

I turned around. For a moment I couldn’t tell the past from the present. My father stood there, determined, gun raised to defend a monster. Explosions, shouts, dust, screams, fire.

Fear.

I blinked, trembling, hand to the cold steel of the cubicle wall. The room smelled of dust and age, but I thought I could smell blood. I thought I could smell terror.

I stepped out of the cubicle and walked to where Steelheart had stood, holding a simple pistol, arm extended toward my father. Bang. One shot. I could remember hearing it, though I didn’t know if my mind had constructed that. I’d been deafened by the explosions by then.

I knelt beside the pillar. A mound of silvery rubble covered everything in front of me, but I had my tensor. The others continued talking, but I stopped paying attention, and their words became nothing more than a low hum in the background. I put on my tensor, then reached forward and—very carefully—began vaporizing bits of rubble.

It didn’t take long; the bulk of it was made of one large piece of ceiling panel. I destroyed it, then froze.

There he was.

My father lay slumped against the pillar, head to the side. The bullet wound was frozen in the steel folds of his shirt. His eyes were still open. He looked like a statue, cast with incredible detail—even the pores of the skin were clear.

I stared, unable to move, unable to even lower my arm. After ten years, the familiar face was almost crushing to me. I didn’t have any pictures of him or my mother; I hadn’t dared go home after surviving, though Steelheart couldn’t have known who I was. I’d been paranoid and traumatized.

Seeing his face brought that all back to me. He looked so … normal. Normal in a way that hadn’t existed for years; normal in a way that the world didn’t deserve any longer.

I wrapped my arms around myself, but I kept looking at my father’s face. I couldn’t turn away.

“David?” Prof’s voice. He knelt down beside me.

“My father …,” I whispered. “He died fighting back, but he
also died protecting Steelheart. And now here I am, trying to kill the thing he rescued. It’s funny, eh?”

Prof didn’t respond.

“In a way,” I said, “this is all his fault. Deathpoint was going to kill Steelheart from behind.”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” Prof said. “Deathpoint didn’t know how powerful Steelheart was. Nobody knew back then.”

“I guess that’s true. But my father was a fool. He couldn’t believe that Steelheart was evil.”

“Your father believed the best about people,” Prof said. “You could call that foolish, but I’d never call it a fault. He was a hero, son. He stood up to, and killed, Deathpoint—an Epic who had been slaughtering wantonly. If, in doing so, he let Steelheart live … well, Steelheart hadn’t done terrible things at that point. Your father couldn’t know the future. You can’t be so frightened of what
might
happen that you are unwilling to act.”

I stared into my father’s dead eyes, and I found myself nodding. “That’s the answer,” I whispered. “It’s the answer to what you and Megan were arguing about.”

“It isn’t her answer,” Prof said. “But it’s mine. And maybe yours too.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze, then went to join the rest of the Reckoners, who were standing near the vault.

I’d never expected to see my father’s face again; I’d left that day feeling like a coward, seeing him mouth the plea for me to run and escape. I’d lived ten years with a single dominating emotion: the need for vengeance. The need to prove I was not a coward.

Now, here he was. Looking into those steel eyes, I knew my father wouldn’t care about vengeance. But he’d kill Steelheart all the same if he had the chance, to stop the murders. Because sometimes, you need to help the heroes along.

I stood up. Somehow I knew, in that moment, that the bank vault and its contents were a false lead. That hadn’t been the source
of Steelheart’s weakness. It had been my father, or something about him.

I left the corpse for the moment, joining the others. “… very careful as we open the vault boxes,” Tia was saying. “We don’t want to destroy what might be inside.”

“I don’t think it will work,” I said, drawing all of their eyes. “I don’t think the vault contents are to blame.”

“You said Steelheart looked at the vault after the rocket blew it open,” Tia said. “And his agents worked very hard to obtain and hide any lists of what was in here.”

“I don’t think he knew how he got hurt,” I said. “A lot of Epics don’t know their weaknesses at first. He quietly had his people gather those records and analyze them so he could try to figure it out.”

“So maybe he found the answer there,” Cody said with a shrug.

I raised an eyebrow. “If he’d found out this vault contained something that made him vulnerable, do you think this place would still be here?”

The others grew silent. No, it wouldn’t still be there. If that had been the case, Steelheart would have burrowed down and destroyed the place, no matter the difficulty in doing so. I was increasingly certain that it wasn’t an object that had made him weak; it was something about the situation.

Tia’s face looked dark; she probably wished I’d mentioned this before she spent days excavating. I couldn’t help it, though, since nobody had told me what she was doing.

“Well,” Prof said. “We’re going to search this vault. David’s theory has merit, but so does the theory that something in here weakened him.”

“Will we even be able to find anything?” Cody asked. “Everything’s been turned to steel. I don’t know that I’ll be able to recognize much if it’s all fused together.”

“Some things might have survived in their original form,” Megan
said. “In fact, it’s likely that they did. Steelheart’s transfersion powers are insulated by metal.”