Steelheart (39 page)

He walked off down the tunnel, leaving me to wonder.

•  •  •

“That’s it. Y’all can turn around now.”

I turned, adjusting the pack I was toting on my back. Cody, balanced on a ladder above me, lifted the welding mask from his face and wiped his brow with the hand not holding the torch. It was a few hours after I had carved out the pocket under the field. Cody and I had spent those hours carving smaller tunnels and holes throughout the stadium, with Cody spot welding where support was needed.

Our most recent project was making the sniper’s nest that would be my post at the beginning of the battle. It was at the front of the third level of seats on the west side of the stadium, at about the fifty-yard line, overhanging the top of the first deck. We didn’t want it to be visible from above, so I’d used the tensor to carve away a space under the floor, leaving only an inch of metal on top, except for two feet right near the front for my head and shoulders to poke out so I could aim a rifle through a hole in the low wall at the front of the deck.

Cody reached up from his perch on the ladder and jiggled the metal framework he had just welded to the bottom of the area I had hollowed out. He nodded, apparently satisfied it would support me when I lay in wait there in the sniper’s nest. The floor of that section of seating was too thin to hollow out a hole deep enough to hide in; the framework was our solution to that problem.

“Where to next?” I asked as Cody climbed down the ladder. “How about we do that escape hole farther up in the third deck?”

Cody slung his welding gear over his shoulder and cracked some kinks out of his back. “Abraham called to say he’s going to take care of the UV floodlights now,” he said. “He finished packing the explosives under the field a while ago, so it’s time for me to go weld down there. Y’all can handle the next hole on your own—but I’ll help you carry the ladder there. Good job on these holes so far, lad.”

“So you’re back to
lad
?” I asked. “What happened to
mate
?”

“I realized something,” Cody said, collapsing the ladder and tilting the top to one side. “My Australian ancestors?”

“Yeah?” I lifted the lower end of the ladder and followed him as he walked from the first deck of seats into the stadium innards.

“They came from Scotland originally. So if I want to be
really
authentic, I need to be able to speak Australian with a Scottish accent.”

We kept walking through the pitch-black space beneath the stands that was kind of like a large, curved hallway—I think it was called a concourse. The planned lower end for the next escape hole was in one of the restrooms down the hall. “An Australian-Scottish-Tennessean accent, eh?” I said. “You practicing it?”

“Hell no,” Cody said. “I’m not crazy, lad. Just a little eccentric.”

I smiled, then turned my head to look in the direction of the field. “We’re really going to try this, aren’t we?”

“We’d better. I bet Abraham twenty bucks that we’d win.”

“I just … It’s hard to believe. I’ve spent ten years planning for this day, Cody. Over half my life. Now it’s here. It’s nothing like what I’d pictured, but it’s here.”

“You should feel proud,” Cody said. “The Reckoners have been doing what they’ve been doing for over half a decade. No changes, no real surprises, no big risks.” He reached up to scratch his left ear. “I often wondered if we were getting stagnant. Never could gather the arguments to suggest a change. It took someone coming in from the outside to shake us up a wee bit.”

“Attacking Steelheart is just a ‘wee bit’ of a shakeup?”

“Well, it’s not like you’ve gotten us to do something
really
crazy, like trying to steal Tia’s cola.”

Outside the restroom, we set the ladder down and Cody wandered over to check on some explosives on the opposite wall. We intended to use them as distractions; Abraham was going to blow them when needed. I paused, then pulled out one of my eraser-like blasting caps. “Maybe I should put one of these on them,” I said. “In case we need a secondary person to blow the explosives.”

Cody eyed it, rubbing his chin. He knew what I meant. We’d only need a secondary person to blow the explosives if Abraham
fell. I didn’t like thinking about it, but after Megan … Well, we all seemed a whole lot more frail to me now than we once had.

“You know,” Cody said, taking the blasting cap from me, “where I’d
really
like to have a backup is on the explosives under the field there. Those are the most important ones to detonate; they’re going to cover our escape.”

“I suppose,” I said.

“Do you mind if I take this and stick it down there before I weld it closed?” Cody asked.

“No, assuming Prof agrees.”

“He likes redundancy,” Cody said, slipping the blasting cap into his pocket. “Just keep that pen-dealy of yours handy. And
don’t
push it by accident.”

He sauntered back toward the tunnel under the field, and I took the ladder into the restroom to get to work.

I punched my fist out into open air, then ducked as the steel dust fell around me.
So that’s how he did it
, I thought, flexing my fingers. I hadn’t figured out the sword trick, but I was getting good at punching and vaporizing things in front of my fist. It had to do with crafting the tensor’s sound waves so that they followed my hand in motion, creating kind of an … envelope around it.

Done right, the wave would course along with my fist. Kind of like smoke might follow your hand if you punch through it. I smiled, shaking my hand. I’d finally figured it out. Good thing too. My knuckles were feeling pretty sore.

I finished off the hole with a more mundane tensor blast, reaching up from the top of my ladder to sculpt the hole. Through it I could see a pure black sky.
Someday I’d like to see the sun again
, I thought. The only thing up there was blackness. Blackness and Calamity, burning in the distance directly above, like a terrible red eye.

I climbed up off the ladder and out into the upper third deck. I
had a sudden, surreal flash of memory. This was near where I’d sat the one time I’d come to this stadium. My father had scrimped and saved to buy us the tickets. I couldn’t remember which team we’d played, but I could remember the taste of the hot dog my father bought. And his cheering, his excitement.

I crouched down among the seats, keeping low just in case. Steelheart’s spy drones were probably out of commission now that the city was without power, but he might have people scouting the city and looking for Limelight. It would be wise to remain out of sight as much as possible.

Fishing a rope out of my pack, I tied it around the leg of one of the steel seats, then sneaked back to the hole and down the ladder, returning to the bathroom below the second deck. Leaving the rope hanging for a quicker escape than the ladder would allow, I stowed the ladder and my empty pack in one of the stalls and walked out toward the seats.

Abraham was waiting there for me, leaning against the entryway to the lower seating with his muscled arms crossed, his expression thoughtful.

“So, I take it the UV lights are hooked up?” I asked.

Abraham nodded. “It would have been beautiful to use the stadium’s own floodlights.”

I laughed. “I’d have liked to see that, making a bunch of lights work that had their bulbs turned to steel and fused to their sockets.”

The two of us stood there for a time, looking out at our battlefield. I checked my mobile. It was early morning; we planned to summon Steelheart at 5:00 a.m. Hopefully his soldiers would be exhausted from preventing lootings all night without any vehicles or power armor. The Reckoners usually worked on a night schedule anyway.

“Fifteen minutes until projected go time,” I noted. “Did Cody finish the welding? Prof and Tia back yet?”

“Cody completed the weld and is moving to his position,” Abraham
said. “Prof will arrive momentarily. They were able to procure a copter, and Edmund has gifted Tia the ability to power it. She flew it outside of town to park it, so as to not give away our location.”

If things went sour, she’d time her flight back in so that she could sweep down and pick us up as the explosives went off. We’d also blast a smokescreen from the stands to cover our escape.

I agreed with Prof, though. You couldn’t outfly or outgun Steelheart in a copter. This was the showdown. We defeated him here or we died.

My mobile flashed, and a voice spoke into my ear. “I’m back,” Prof said. “Tia’s set too.” He hesitated a moment. “Let’s do this.”

SINCE
my post was right up against the front of the third deck, if I’d been standing I could have looked down over the edge toward the lowest level of seats. Huddled in my improvised hole, however, I couldn’t see those—though I had a good view of the field.

This put me high enough to watch what was going on around the stadium, but I also had a route to ground if I needed to try firing my father’s gun at Steelheart. The tunnel and rope farther up the deck would get me there quickly.

I’d drop down, then try to sneak up on him, if it came to that. It would be like trying to sneak up on a lion while armed only with a squirt gun.

I huddled in my spot, waiting. I wore my tensor on my left hand, my right hand holding the grip of the pistol. Cody had given me a replacement rifle, but for now it lay beside me.

Overhead, fireworks flared in the air. Four posts around the top of the stadium released enormous jets of sparks. I don’t know where Abraham had found fireworks that were pure green, but the signal would undoubtedly be seen and recognized.

This was the moment. Would he really come?

The fireworks began to die down. “I’ve got something,” Abraham said in our ears, his light French accent subtly emphasizing the wrong syllables. He had the high-point sniping position and Cody had the low-point sniping position. Cody was the better shot, but Abraham needed to be farther away, where he could be outside the fight. His job was to remotely turn on the floodlights or blow strategic explosives. “Yes, they’re coming indeed. A convoy of Enforcement trucks. No sign of Steelheart yet.”

I holstered my father’s gun, then reached to the side to pick up the rifle. It felt too new to me. A rifle should be a well-used, well-loved thing. Familiar. Only then can you know that it’s trustworthy. You know how it shoots, when it might jam, how accurate the sights are. Guns, like shoes, are worst when they’re brand-new.

Still, I couldn’t rely on the pistol. I had trouble hitting anything smaller than a freight train with one of those. I’d need to get close to Steelheart if I wanted to try it. It had been decided that we’d let Abraham and Cody test out the other theories first before risking sending me in close.

“They’re pulling up to the stadium,” Abraham said in my ear.

“I’ve lost them.”

“I can see them, Abraham,” Tia said. “Camera six.” Though she was outside of the city in the copter, with Edmund’s gifted abilities to power it, she was monitoring a rig of cameras we’d set up for spying and for recording the battle.

“Got it,” Abraham said. “Yes, they’re fanning out. I thought they’d come straight in, but they’re not.”

“Good,” Cody said. “That’ll make it easier to get a crossfire going.”

If Steelheart even comes
, I thought. That was both my fear and
my hope. If he didn’t come, it would mean he didn’t believe that Limelight was a threat—which would make it far easier for the Reckoners to escape the city. The operation would be a bust, but not for any lack of trying. I almost wanted that to be the case.

If Steelheart came and killed us all, the Reckoners’ blood would be on my hands for leading them on this path. Once that wouldn’t have bothered me, but now it itched at my insides. I peered toward the football field but couldn’t see anything. I glanced back behind me, toward the upper stands.

I caught a hint of motion in the darkness—what looked like a flash of gold.

“Guys,” I whispered. “I think I just saw someone up here.”

“Impossible,” Tia said. “I’ve been watching all the entrances.”

“I’m telling you, I
saw
something.”

“Camera fourteen … fifteen … David, there’s nobody up there.”

“Stay calm, son,” Prof said. He was hiding in the tunnel we’d made beneath the field, and would come out only when Steelheart appeared. It had been decided that we wouldn’t try blowing the explosives down there until after we’d tried all the other ways to kill Steelheart.

Prof wore the tensors. I could tell he hoped he wouldn’t have to use them.

We waited. Tia and Abraham gave a quiet running explanation of Enforcement’s movements. The ground troops surrounded the stadium, secured all the exits they knew about, then slowly started to infiltrate. They set up gunnery positions at several points in the stands, but they didn’t find any of us. The stadium was too large, and we were hidden too well. You could build a lot of interesting hiding places when you could tunnel through what everyone else assumed was un-tunnel-through-able.

“Tap me into the speakers,” Prof said softly.

“Done,” Abraham replied.

“I am not here to fight worms!” Prof bellowed, his voice echoing through the stadium, blasted from speakers we’d set up. “This is the bravery of the mighty Steelheart? To send little men with popguns to annoy me? Where are you, Emperor of Newcago? Do you fear me so?”

The stadium fell silent.

“You see that pattern the soldiers set up in the stands?” Abraham asked over our line. “They’re being very deliberate. It’s intended to ensure they don’t hit one another with friendly fire. We’re going to have trouble catching Steelheart in a crossfire.”

I kept glancing over my shoulder. I saw no other movement in the seats behind me.

“Ah,” Abraham said softly. “It worked. He’s coming. I can see him in the sky.”

Tia whistled softly. “This is it, kids. Time for the real party.”

I waited, raising my rifle and using the scope to scan the sky. I eventually spotted a point of light in the darkness, getting closer. Gradually it resolved into three figures flying down toward the center of the stadium. Nightwielder floated amorphously. Firefight landed beside him, a burning humanoid form that was so bright he left afterimages in my eyes.