Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

though it had once seemed to me, depended on a lot of speculation. Draw Steelheart out with a fake Epic. Take down his bodyguards. Upend Enforcement. Kill him using a secret weakness that might be hidden in my memory somewhere.
    A fragile half plan indeed. That was why I had needed to come to the Reckoners. They could make it happen. This man, Jonathan Phaedrus, could make it happen.
    “Cody,” Prof said, turning, “start training the new kid with a tensor. Tia, let’s see if we can start tracking Conflux’s movements. Abraham, we’re going to need some brainstorming on how to imitate a High Epic, if that’s even possible.”
    I felt my heart jump. “We’re going to do it?”
    “Yes,” Prof said. “God help us, we are.”

PART TWO

14
    “NOW , y’all gotta be
gentle
with her,” Cody said. “Like caressing a beautiful woman the night before the big caber toss.”
    “Caber toss?” I said as I raised my hands toward the chunk of steel on the chair in front of me. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the Reckoner hideout, Cody on the ground beside me, his back to the wall and legs stretched out in front of him. It had been a week since the hit on Fortuity.
    “Yeah, caber toss,” Cody said. Though his accent was purely Southern—and strongly that—he always talked as if he were from Scotland. I guessed his family was from there or something. “It’s this sport we had back in the homeland. Involved throwing trees.”
    “Little saplings? Like javelins?”
    “No, no. The cabers had to be so wide that your fingers couldn’ttouch on the other side when you reached your arms around them. We’d rip ’em out of the ground, then hurl them as far as we could.”
    I raised a skeptical eyebrow.
    “Bonus points if you could hit a bird out of the air,” he added.
    “Cody,” Tia said, walking by with a sheaf of papers, “do you even know what a caber is?”
    “A tree,” he said. “We used them to build show houses. It’s where the word
cabaret
came from, lass.” He said it with such a straight face that I had trouble determining if he was sincere or not.
    “You’re a buffoon,” Tia said, sitting down at the table, which was spread with various detailed maps that I hadn’t been able to make sense of. They appeared to be city plans and schematics, dating from before the Annexation.
    “Thank you,” Cody said, tipping his camo baseball cap toward her.
    “It wasn’t a compliment.”
    “Oh, you didn’t mean it as one, lass,” Cody said. “But the word
buffoon
, it comes from the word
buff
, meaning strong and handsome, which in turn—”
    “Aren’t you supposed to be helping David learn the tensors?” she interrupted. “And
not
bothering me.”
    “It’s all right,” Cody said. “I can do both. I’m a man of many talents.”
    “None of which involve remaining silent, unfortunately,” Tia muttered, leaning down and making a few notations on her map.
    I smiled, though even after a week with them I wasn’t certain what to make of the Reckoners. I’d imagined each pod of them as an elite special forces group, tightly knit and intensely loyal to one another.
    There was some of that in this group; even Tia and Cody’s banter was generally good-natured. However, there was also a lot of individuality to them. They each kind of … did their own thing. Prof didn’t seem so much a leader as a middle manager. Abraham workedon the technology, Tia the research, Megan information gathering, and Cody odd jobs—filling in the spaces with mayonnaise, as he liked to call it. Whatever that meant.
    It was bizarre to see them as people. A part of me was actually disappointed. My gods were regular humans who squabbled, laughed, got on one another’s nerves, and—in Abraham’s case—snored when they slept. Loudly.
    “Now,
that’s
the right look of concentration,” Cody said. “Nice work, lad. Y’all’ve got to keep a keen mind. Focused. Like Sir William himself. Soul of a warrior.” He took a bite of his sandwich.
    I hadn’t been focused on my tensor, but I didn’t let on to that fact. Instead I raised my hand, doing as I’d been instructed. The thin glove I wore had lines of metal along the front of each finger. The lines joined in a pattern at the palm and all glowed softly green.
    As I concentrated my hand began to vibrate softly, as if someone were playing music with a lot of bass somewhere nearby. It was hard to focus with that strange pulsation running up my arm.
    I raised my hand