Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

to myself and stepped back to where I didn’t feel I was on the verge of a multistory plummet.
    “It’s simple,” Megan said. “There’s one enormous problem in facing Steelheart.”
    “One?” Cody asked, leaning back against the wall. It madehim look like he was leaning against open air. “Let’s see: incredible strength, can shoot deadly blasts of energy from his hands, can transform anything nonliving around him into steel, can command the winds and fly with perfect control … oh, and he’s utterly impervious to bullets, edged weapons, fire, radiation, blunt trauma, suffocation, and explosions. That’s like …
three
things, lass.” He held up four fingers.
    Megan rolled her eyes. “All true,” she said, then turned back to me. “But none of that is even the first problem.”
    “Finding him is the first problem,” Prof said softly. He’d set out a folding chair, Tia as well, and the two were sitting in the center of the imaged rooftop. “Steelheart is paranoid. He makes certain nobody knows where he is.”
    “Exactly,” Megan said, raising her hands and using a thumbs-out gesture to control the imager. We zoomed through the city, the buildings a blur beneath us.
    I wobbled, my stomach flip-flopping. I reached for the wall, but I wasn’t certain where it was, and stumbled to the side until I found it. Abruptly we halted, hanging in midair, looking at Steelheart’s palace.
    It was a dark fortress of anodized steel that rose from the edge of the city, built upon the portion of the lake that had been transformed to steel. It spread out in either direction, a long line of dark metal with towers, girders, and walkways. Like some mash-up of an old Victorian manor, a medieval castle, and an oil rig. Violent red lights shone from deep within the various recesses, and smoke billowed from chimneys, black against a black sky.
    “They say he intentionally built the place to be confusing,” Megan said. “There are hundreds of chambers, and he sleeps in a different one each night, eats in a different one for each meal. Supposedly even the staff doesn’t know where he’ll be.” She turned to me, hostile. “You’ll never find him.
That’s
the first problem.”
    I swayed, still feeling as if I were standing in midair, thoughnone of the others seemed to be having trouble. “Could we …,” I asked nauseously, looking back at Abraham.
    He chuckled, making some gestures and pulling us back to the top of a nearby building. There was a small chimney on it, and as we “landed” the chimney squished flat, becoming two-dimensional on the floor. This wasn’t a hologram—so far as I knew, nobody had mimicked that level of illusion power with technology. It was just a very advanced use of six screens and some 3-D imaging.
    “Right,” I said, feeling steadier. “Anyway, that
would be
a problem.”
    “Except?” Prof asked.
    “Except we don’t need to find Steelheart,” I said. “He’ll come to us.”
    “He rarely comes out in public anymore,” Megan said. “And when he does, it’s erratic. How in Calamity’s fires are you going to—”
    “Faultline,” I said. The Epic who had made the earth swallow the bank on that terrible day when my father had been killed, and who had later challenged Steelheart.
    “David has a point,” Abraham said. “Steelheart
did
come out of hiding to fight her when she tried to take Newcago.”
    “And when Ides Hatred came here to challenge him,” I said. “Steelheart met the challenge personally.”
    “As I recall,” Prof said, “they destroyed an entire city block in that conflict.”
    “Sounds like quite the party,” Cody noted.
    “Yes,” I said. I had pictures of that fight.
    “So you’re saying we need to convince a powerful Epic to come to Newcago and challenge him,” Megan said, her voice flat. “Then we’ll know where he’s going to be. Sounds easy.”
    “No, no,” I said, turning to face them, my back to the dark, smoldering expanse of Steelheart’s palace. “That’s the first part of the plan. We make Steelheart
think
a powerful Epic is coming here to challenge him.”
    “How would we do that?” Cody asked.
    “We’ve already started,” I explained. “Now we spread word that Fortuity was killed by agents of a new Epic. We start hitting more Epics, leaving the impression that it’s all the work of the same rival. Then we deliver an ultimatum to Steelheart that if he wants to stop the murder of his followers, he’ll need to