Reckoners 01 - Steelheart
it.
I didn’t use those to eat. They were for show. So was the clothing; I didn’t wear any of it. My actual clothing—four sturdy outfits, always clean and washed—was folded in the trunk beside my mattresson the floor. I
kept
my room messy, intentionally. It actually itched at me, as I liked things neat.
I’d found that sloppiness put people off guard. If my landlady came snooping up here, she’d find what she expected. A teenager just into his majority blowing his earnings on an easy life for a year before responsibility hit him. She wouldn’t poke or prod for secret compartments.
I hurried to the trunk. I unlocked it and pulled out my backpack—already packed with a change of clothing, spare shoes, some dry rations, and two liters of water. There was a handgun in a pouch on one side, and the smoke grenade was in a pouch on the other side.
I walked to my mattress and unzipped the case. Inside was my life. Dozens of folders, filled with clippings from newspapers or scraps of information. Eight notebooks filled with my thoughts and findings. A larger notebook with my indexes.
Maybe I should have brought all of this with me when going to watch the Fortuity hit. After all, I’d hoped to leave with the Reckoners. I’d debated it but had eventually decided that it wouldn’t be reasonable. There was so much of it, for one thing. I could lug it all if I needed to, but it slowed me down.
And it was just too precious. This research was the most valuable thing in my life. Collecting some of it had nearly gotten me killed—spying on Epics, asking questions better left unasked, making payments to shady informants. I was proud of it, not to mention frightened about what might happen to it. I’d thought it safer here.
Boots shook the metal landing of the stairway outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw one of the most feared sights in the understreets: fully geared Enforcement officers. They stood on the landing, automatic rifles in their hands, sleek black helmets on their heads, military-grade armor on their chests, knees, arms. There were three of them.
Their helmets had black visors that came down over their eyes,leaving their mouths and chins exposed. The eye shields gave them night vision and glowed faintly green, with a strange smoky pattern that swirled and undulated across the front. It was transfixing, which was said to be the point.
I didn’t need to act to make my eyes go wide, my muscles taut.
“Hands on your head,” the lead officer said, rifle up at his shoulder and the barrel trained on me. “Down on your knees, subject.”
That was what they called people,
subject
. Steelheart didn’t bother with any kind of silly pretense that his empire was a republic or a representative government. He didn’t call people
citizens
or
comrades
. They were subjects of his empire. That was that.
I quickly raised my hands. “I didn’t do anything!” I whined. “I was just there to watch!”
“HANDS UP, KNEES DOWN!” the officer yelled.
I complied.
They entered the room, leaving the doorway conspicuously open so that their sniper had a view through the door. From what I’d read, these three would be part of a five-person squad known as a Core. Three regular troops, one specialist—in this case a sniper—and one minor Epic. Steelheart had about fifty Cores like this.
Almost all of Enforcement was made of special-operations teams. If there was any large-scale fighting to be done, something
very
dangerous, Steelheart, Nightwielder, Firefight, or maybe Conflux—who was head of Enforcement—would deal with it personally. Enforcement was used for the smaller problems in the city, the ones Steelheart didn’t want to bother with himself. In a way he didn’t need Enforcement. They were like a homicidal dictator’s version of valet parking attendants.
One of the three soldiers kept an eye on me while the other two rifled through the contents of my mattress.
Is she in here?
I wondered.
Invisible somewhere?
My instincts, and my memory of researching her, told me she’d be near.
I just had to hope she was in the room. I couldn’t move untilCody and Megan fulfilled their part of my plan, though, so I waited, tense, for them to do so.
The two soldiers pulled notebooks and folders out from between the two pieces of foam that made up my mattress. One flipped through the notes. “This is information on Epics, sir,” he said.
“I thought I’d be able to see Fortuity fight another Epic,”
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