Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

and will. It’s kind of like that. My hand flew back and I launched the half-musical vibrations away, into the ceiling, which rattled and shook with a quiet hum. Steel dust fell down around my arm, showering to the ground below like someone had taken a cheese grater to a refrigerator.
    Megan crossed her arms and watched, a single eyebrow raised. I prepared myself for some cold, indifferent comment. She nodded and said, “Nice work.”
    “Yeah, well, you know, I’ve been practicing a lot. Hitting the old wall-vaporizing gym.”
    “The what?” She frowned as she pulled over the ladder we’d brought with us.
    “Never mind,” I said, climbing up the ladder and peeking my head into the basement of Station Seven, the power station. I’d never been inside any of the city stations, of course. They were like bunkers, with high steel walls and fences surrounding them. Steelheart liked to keep things under a watchful eye; a place like this wouldn’t just be a power station but would have government offices on the upper floors as well. All carefully fenced, guarded, and observed.
    The basement, fortunately, had no cameras watching it. Most of those were in the hallways.
    Megan handed me my rifle, and I climbed out into the room above. We were in a storage chamber, dark save for a few of those glowing “always on” lights that places tend to … well, always leave on. I moved to the wall and tapped my mobile. “We’re in,” I said softly.
    “Good,” Cody’s voice came back.
    I blushed. “Sorry. I meant to send that to Prof.”
    “You did. He told me to watch over y’all. Turn on the video feed from your earpiece.”
    The earpiece was one of those wraparound kinds and had a little camera sticking out over my ear. I tapped a few times on my mobile screen, activating it.
    “Nice,” Cody said. “Tia and I have set up here at Prof’s entrancepoint.” Prof liked contingencies, and that usually meant leaving a person or two back to create diversions or enact plans if the main teams got pinned down.
    “I don’t have much to do here,” Cody continued, his Southern drawl as thick as ever, “so I’m going to bother you.”
    “Thanks,” I said, glancing back at Megan as she climbed up out of the hole.
    “Don’t mention it, lad. And stop looking down Megan’s shirt.”
    “I’m not—”
    “Just teasing. I hope you keep doing it. It’ll be fun to watch her shoot you in the foot when she catches you.”
    I looked away pointedly. Fortunately it didn’t appear that Cody had included Megan in that particular conversation. I actually found myself breathing a little easier, knowing that Cody was watching over us. Megan and I were the two newest members of the team; if anyone could use coaching it would be us.
    Megan carried our pack on her back, filled with the things we’d need for the infiltration. She had out a handgun, which honestly would be more useful in close quarters than my rifle. “Ready?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “How much ‘improvising’ do I have to be ready for from you today?” she asked.
    “Only as much as needed,” I grumbled, raising my hand to the wall. “If I knew when it would be needed, it wouldn’t be improvising, would it? It would be planning.”
    She chuckled. “A foreign concept to you.”
    “Foreign? Did you not see all the notebooks of plans I brought to the team? You know, the ones we all almost died retrieving?”
    She turned away, not looking at me, and her posture grew stiff.
    Sparking woman
, I thought.
Try making some sense for once
. I shook my head, placing my hand against the wall.
    One of the reasons that the city stations were consideredimpregnable was because of the security. Cameras in all of the hallways and stairwells; I had thought we’d hack into security and change the camera feeds. Prof said we’d certainly hack the feeds to watch them, but changing those feeds to cover sneaking rarely worked as well as it did in the old movies. Steelheart didn’t hire stupid security officers, and they’d notice if their video looped. Besides, soldiers patrolled the hallways.
    However, there was a much simpler way to make sure we weren’t seen. We just had to stay out of the hallways. There weren’t cameras in most of the rooms, as the research and experiments done there were kept secret, even from the security watching the building. Besides, logically, if you kept really close watch on all the hallways, you could catch intruders. How else would people move