Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

Probably shouldn’t. We don’t need to know. Either way, you should practice.” Cody shook his head and took off the tensor, tucking it into his pocket. “What I’d have given for one of these before.…”
    The other pieces of Reckoner technology were awesome too. The jackets, which supposedly worked a little like armor, were one.Cody, Megan, and Abraham each wore a jacket—different on the outside, but with a complicated network of diodes inside that somehow protected them. The dowser, which told if someone was Epic, was another piece of such technology. The only other piece I’d seen was something they called the harmsway, a device that accelerated a body’s healing abilities.
    It’s so sad
, I thought, as Cody fetched a broom to clean up the dust.
All of this technology … it could have changed the world. If the Epics hadn’t done that first
. A ruined world couldn’t enjoy the benefits.
    “What was your life like back then?” I asked, holding the dustpan for Cody. “Before all of this happened? What did you do?”
    “You wouldn’t believe me,” Cody said, smiling.
    “Let me guess,” I said, anticipating one of Cody’s stories. “Professional footballer? High-paid assassin and spy?”
    “A cop,” Cody said, subdued, looking down at the pile of dust. “In Nashville.”
    “What? Really?” I
was
surprised.
    Cody nodded, then waved for me to dump the first pile of dust into the trash bin while he swept up the rest of it. “My father was a cop too in his early years, over in the homeland. Small city. You wouldn’t know it. He moved here when he married my mother. I grew up over here; ain’t never actually been to the homeland. But I wanted to be just like my pa, so when he died, I went to school and joined the force.”
    “Huh,” I said, stooping down again to collect the rest of the dust. “That’s a lot less glamorous than I’d been imagining.”
    “Well, I did take down an entire drug cartel by myself, you understand.”
    “Of course.”
    “And there was the time the president’s Secret Service were shuttling him through the city, and they all ate a bad mess of scones and got sick, and we in the department had to protect him from an assassinationplot.” He called over to Abraham, who was tinkering with one of the team’s shotguns. “It was them Frenchies who were behind it, you know.”
    “I’m not French!” Abraham called back. “I’m Canadian, you slontze.”
    “Same difference!” Cody said, then grinned and looked back at me. “Anyway, maybe it wasn’t glamorous. Not all the time. But I enjoyed it. I like doing good for people. Serve and protect. And then …”
    “Then?” I asked.
    “Nashville got annexed when the country collapsed,” Cody explained. “A group of five Epics took charge of most of the South.”
    “The Coven,” I said, nodding. “There’s actually six of them. One pair are twins.”
    “Ah, right. Keep forgetting that y’all are freakishly informed about this stuff. Anyway, they took over, and the police department started serving them. If we didn’t agree, we were supposed to turn in our badges and retire. The good ones did that. The bad ones stayed on, and they got worse.”
    “And you?” I asked.
    Cody fingered the thing he kept at his waist, tied to his belt on the right side. It looked like a thin wallet. He reached down and undid the snap, showing a scratched—but still polished—police badge.
    “I didn’t do either one,” he said, subdued. “I took an oath. Serve and protect. I ain’t going to stop that because some thugs with magic powers start shoving everybody around. That’s that.”
    His words gave me a chill. I stared at that badge, and my mind flipped over and over like a pancake on a griddle, trying to figure out this man. Trying to reconcile the joking, storytelling blowhard with the image of a police officer still on his beat. Still serving after the city government had fallen, after the precinct had been shut down, after everything had been taken from him.
    The others probably have similar stories
, I thought, glancing at Tia, who was busy working away, sipping her cola. What had drawn her to fighting what most would call a hopeless battle, living a life of constant running, bringing justice to those the law should have condemned—but could not touch? What had drawn Abraham, Megan, the professor himself?
    I looked back at Cody, who was moving to close his badge holder. There was something tucked behind the