Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

plastic opposite it in the holder—a picture of a woman, but with a section removed, a bar shape that had contained her eyes and much of her nose.
    “Who was that?”
    “Somebody special,” Cody said.
    “Who?”
    He didn’t answer, snapping the badge holder closed.
    “It’s better if we don’t know, or ask, about each other’s families,” Tia said from the table. “Usually a stint in the Reckoners ends with death, but occasionally one of us gets captured. Better if we can’t reveal anything about the others that will put their loved ones in danger.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense.” It just wasn’t something I’d have considered. I didn’t have any loved ones left.
    “How is it going there, lass?” Cody asked, sauntering over to the table. I joined him and saw that Tia had spread out lists of reports and ledgers.
    “It’s not going at all,” Tia said with a grimace. She rubbed her eyes beneath her spectacles. “This is like trying to re-create a complex puzzle after being given only one piece.”
    “What are you doing?” I asked. I couldn’t make sense of the ledgers any more than I’d been able to make sense of the maps.
    “Steelheart was wounded that day,” Tia said. “If your recollection is correct—”
    “It is,” I promised.
    “People’s memories fade,” Cody said.
    “Not mine,” I said. “Not about this. Not about that day. I can tell you what color tie the mortgage man was wearing. I can tell you how many tellers there were. I could probably count the ceiling tiles in the bank for you. It’s there, in my head. Burned there.”
    “All right,” Tia said. “Well, if you
are
correct, then Steelheart was impervious for most of the fight and only harmed near the end. Something changed. I’m working through all possibilities—something about your father, the location, or the situation. The most likely seems the possibility you mentioned, that the vault was involved. Perhaps something inside it weakened Steelheart, and once the vault was blown open it could affect him.”
    “So you’re looking for a record of the bank vault’s contents.”
    “Yes,” Tia said. “But it’s an impossible task. Most of the records would have been destroyed with the bank. Off-site records would have been stored on a server somewhere. First Union was hosted by a company known as Dorry Jones LLC. Most of their servers were located in Texas, but the building was burned down eight years back during the Ardra riots.
    “That leaves the off chance that they had physical records or a digital backup at another branch, but that building housed the main offices, so the chances of that are slim. Other than that, I’ve been looking for patron lists—the rich or notable who were known to frequent the bank and have boxes in the vault. Perhaps they stored something in there that will be part of the public record. A strange rock, a specific symbol that Steelheart might have seen, something.”
    I looked at Cody. Servers? Hosted? What was she talking about? He shrugged.
    The problem was, an Epic weakness could be just about anything. Tia mentioned symbols—there were some Epics who, if they saw a specific pattern, lost their powers for a few moments. Others were weakened by thinking certain thoughts, not eating certain foods, or eating the wrong foods. The weaknesses were more varied than the powers themselves.
    “If we don’t figure out this puzzle,” Tia said, “the rest of the plan is useless. We’re starting down a dangerous path, but we don’t yet know if we’ll be capable of doing what we need to at the end. That bothers me greatly, David. If you think of anything—
anything
—that could give me another lead to work on, speak of it.”
    “I will,” I promised.
    “Good,” she said. “Otherwise, take Cody and
please
let me concentrate.”
    “You really should learn to do two things at once, lass,” Cody said. “Like me.”
    “It’s easy to both be a buffoon and make messes of things, Cody,” she replied. “Putting those messes back together while dealing with said buffoon is a much more difficult prospect. Go find something to shoot, or whatever it is you do.”
    “I thought I
was
doing whatever it is I do,” he said absently. He stabbed a finger at a line on one of the pages, which looked like it listed clients of the bank. It read
Johnson Liberty Agency
.
    “What are you—” Tia began, then cut herself off as she read the words.
    “What?” I asked,