Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

said that this isn’t your plan.It is, and there are more than just seeds of it here. I looked through your notebooks. You thought through things very well.”
    “Thank you.”
    “But your vision was too narrow, son.” Prof removed his hand from my shoulder and walked up to the wall. He tapped it with his imitation chalk stylus, and the room’s text rotated. He didn’t appear to even notice, but I grew dizzy as the walls seemed to tumble about me, spinning until a new wall of text popped up in front of Prof.
    “Let me start with this,” he said. “Other than not specifically knowing Steelheart’s weakness, what’s the biggest flaw in your plan?”
    “I …” I frowned. “Taking out Nightwielder, maybe? But Prof, we just—”
    “Actually,” Prof said, “that’s not it.”
    My frown deepened. I hadn’t thought there
was
a flaw in my plan. I’d worked all those out, smoothing them away like cleanser removing the pimples from a teenager’s chin.
    “Let’s break it down,” Prof said, raising his arm and sweeping an opening on the wall, like he was wiping mud from a window. The words scrunched to the side, not vanishing but bunching up like he’d pulled a new section of paper from a spool. He raised his chalk to the open space and started to write. “Step one, imitate a powerful Epic. Step two, start killing Steelheart’s important Epics to make him worried. Step three, draw him out. Step four, kill him. By doing this you restore hope to the world and encourage people to fight back.”
    I nodded.
    “Except there’s a problem,” Prof said, still scribbling on the wall. “If we
actually
manage to kill Steelheart, we’ll have done it by imitating a powerful Epic. Everyone’s going to assume, then, that an
Epic
was behind the defeat. And so, what do we gain?”
    “We could announce it was the Reckoners after the fact.”
    Prof shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. Nobody would believe us, not after all the trouble we’ll need to go through to make Steelheart believe.”
    “Well, does it matter?” I asked. “He’ll be dead.” Then, more softly, I added, “And I get revenge.”
    Prof hesitated, chalk pausing on the wall. “Yes,” he said. “I guess you’d still have that.”
    “You want him dead too,” I said, stepping up beside him. “I know it. I can see it.”
    “I want all Epics dead.”
    “It’s more than that,” I said. “I’ve seen it in you.”
    He glanced at me, and his gaze grew stern. “That doesn’t matter. It is
vital
that people know we were behind this. You’ve said it yourself—we can’t kill every Epic out there. The Reckoners are spinning in circles. The only hope we have, the only hope that humankind has, is to convince people that we
can
fight back. For that to happen, Steelheart has to fall by human hands.”
    “But for him to come out, he has to believe an Epic is threatening him,” I said.
    “You see the problem?”
    “I …” I was starting to. “So we’re not going to imitate an Epic?”
    “We are,” Prof said. “I like the idea, the spark of that. I’m just pointing out problems we have to work through. If this … Limelight is going to kill Steelheart, we need a way to make certain that after the fact, we can convince people it was really us. Not impossible, but it is why I had to work more on the plan, expand it.”
    “Okay,” I said, relaxing. So we were still on track. A false Epic … the soul of my plan was there.
    “There’s a bigger problem, unfortunately,” Prof said, tapping his chalk against the wall. “Your plan calls for us to kill Epics in Steelheart’s administration to threaten him and draw him out. You indicate that we should do this to prove that a new Epic has come to town. Only, that’s not going to work.”
    “What? Why?”
    “Because it’s what the Reckoners would do,” Prof said. “Killing Epics quietly, never coming out into the open? It’ll make him suspicious.We need to think like a
real
rival would. Anyone who wants Newcago would think bigger than that. Any Epic out there can have a city of his own; it’s not that hard. To want Newcago, you’d have to be ambitious. You’d have to want to be a
king
. You’d have to want Epics at your beck and call. And so, killing them off one by one wouldn’t make sense. You see?”
    “You’d want them alive so they’d follow you,” I said, slowly understanding. “Every Epic you kill would lessen your power once you actually took