Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

through.
    As soon as I was in I helped Megan up and out of the shaft. She hesitated before taking my hand, then once she was out she walked past me without a word. She seemed to have gone back to being cold toward me, maybe even a little mean.
    I knelt beside the hole back into the elevator shaft. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something very strange had just happened. First the guard hadn’t seen us, then Megan went from opening up to me to totally closing off in seconds flat. Was she having second thoughts about what she’d shared with me? Was she worried I’d tell Prof that she didn’t support killing Steelheart?
    “What
is
this place?” Megan said from the center of the small room. The ceiling was low enough that she almost had to stoop—I would definitely have to. She unwrapped her scarf, releasing a puff of metal dust, grimaced, and then began shaking out her clothing.
    “No idea,” I said, checking my mobile and the map Tia had uploaded. “The room’s not on the map.”
    “Low ceilings,” Megan said. “Security door with a code. Interesting.” She tossed her pack to me. “Put an explosive on the hole you made. I’ll check things out here.”
    I fished in the pack for an explosive as she cracked open the door that didn’t have the security pad and then stepped through.I attached the small device to the hole I’d made, then noticed some exposed wires in the lower part of the wall.
    I followed them down and was prying up a section of the floor when Megan came back.
    “There are two other rooms like this,” she said. “No people in them, small and built up against the elevator shaft. Best I can figure, this is where furnace equipment and elevator maintenance is supposed to be, but they hid some rooms here instead and took them off the building schematics. I wonder if there’s space between other floors—if there are rooms hidden there too.”
    “Look at this,” I said, pointing at what I’d discovered.
    She knelt beside me and eyed the wall and the wiring.
    “Explosives,” she said.
    “The room’s
already
set to blow,” I said. “Creepy, eh?”
    “Whatever is in here,” Megan said, “it must be important. Important enough that it’s worth destroying the entire power plant to keep it from being discovered.”
    We both looked up at the computers.
    “What are you two doing?” Cody’s voice came back onto our feed.
    “We found this room,” I said, “and—”
    “Keep moving,” Cody said, cutting me off. “Prof and Abraham just ran into some guards and were forced to shoot them. The guards are down, bodies hidden, but they’ll be missed soon. If we’re lucky we’ll have a few minutes before someone realizes they’re not on their patrol anymore.”
    I cursed, fishing in my pocket.
    “What’s that?” Megan asked.
    “One of the universal blasting caps I got from Diamond,” I said. “I want to see if they work.” I nervously used my electrical tape to stick the little round nub on the explosives we’d found under the floor. In my pocket I carried its detonator—the one that looked like a pen.
    “By the map Tia gave us,” Megan said, “we’re only two roomsover from the storage area with the energy cells, but we’re a little below it.”
    We shared a glance, then split up to scour the hidden room. We might not have much time, but we needed to at least
try
to find out what information this place contained. She pulled open a filing cabinet and grabbed a handful of folders. In an instant I was up and opening desk drawers. One had a couple of data chips. I grabbed them, waved them at Megan, then tossed them in her bag. She threw the folders in, then searched another desk while I raised a hand to the right wall and made us a hole.
    Since the hidden room was halfway between two floors, I wasn’t certain how that related to the rest of the building. I made a hole in the wall in the direction we wanted to go, but I made it near the ceiling.
    That opened up into a room on the third floor, but near the floor. So there was some overlap between our hidden room and the third floor. With a glance at the map, I could see how they’d hidden the room. On the schematics the elevator shaft was shown as slightly bigger than it actually was. It also included a maintenance shaft that wasn’t actually there—and that explained the lack of handholds in the elevator. The builders assumed the maintenance shaft would provide a way to service the elevator, not knowing that the