Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

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 Abrahamfell. 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,