Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

hidden room would actually go in that space.
    Megan and I climbed through the hole and onto the third floor. We crossed that room—a conference room of some sort—and passed through another, which was a monitoring station. I vaporized the wall and opened a hole into a long, low-ceilinged storage area. This was our target: the room where the power cells were kept.
    “We’re in,” Megan said to Cody as we slipped inside. The room was filled with shelves, and on them were various pieces of electrical equipment, none of which we wanted.
    We went in different directions, searching hastily.
    “Awesome,” Cody said. “The power cells should be in theresomewhere. Look for cylinders about a handspan wide and about as tall as a boot.”
    I spied some large storage lockers on the far wall, with locks on the doors. “Might be in here,” I said to Megan, moving toward them. I made quick work of the locks with the tensor and pulled the doors open as she joined me. Inside one was a tall column of green cylinders stacked on top of one another on their sides. Each cylinder looked vaguely like a cross between a very small beer keg and a car battery.
    “Those are the power cells,” Cody said, sounding relieved. “I was half worried there wouldn’t be any. Good thing I brought my four-leaf clover on this operation.”
    “Four-leaf clover?” Megan said with a snort as she fished something out of her pack.
    “Sure. From the homeland.”
    “That’s the Irish, Cody, not the Scottish.”
    “I know,” Cody said without missing a beat. “I had to kill an Irish dude to get mine.”
    I pulled out one of the power cells. “They aren’t as heavy as I thought they’d be,” I said. “Are we sure these will have enough juice to power the gauss gun? That thing needs a
lot
of energy.”
    “Those cells were charged by Conflux,” Cody said in my ear. “They’re more powerful by magnitudes than anything we could make or buy. If they won’t work, nothing will. Grab as many as you can carry.”
    They might not have been as heavy as I’d thought, but they were still kind of bulky. We took the rest of the equipment out of Megan’s pack, then retrieved the smaller sack we had stuffed in the bottom. I managed to stuff four of the cells in the pack while Megan transferred the rest of our equipment—a few explosive charges, some rope, and some ammunition—to her smaller sack. There were also some lab coats for disguises. I left these out—I suspected we’d need them to escape.
    “How are Prof and Abraham?” I asked.
    “On their way out,” Cody said.
    “And our extraction?” I asked. “Prof said we shouldn’t go back down the elevator shaft.”
    “You have your lab coats?” Cody asked.
    “Sure,” Megan said. “But if we go in the hallways, they might record our faces.”
    “That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Cody said. “First explosion is a go in two minutes.”
    We threw on the lab coats, and I squatted down and let Megan help me put on the backpack with the power cells. It was heavy, but I could still move reasonably well. Megan threw on her lab coat. It looked good on her, but pretty much anything would. She swung her own lighter pack over her shoulder, then eyed my rifle.
    “It can be disassembled,” I explained as I pulled the stock from the rifle, then popped out the magazine and removed the cartridge from the chamber. I slid on the safety just in case, then stuffed the pieces in her sack.
    The coats were embroidered with Station Seven’s logo, and we both had fake security badges to go with them. The disguises would never have worked getting us in—security was far too tight—but in a moment of chaos, they should get us out.
    The building shook with an ominous rumble—explosion number one. That was mostly to prompt an evacuation rather than to inflict any real damage.
    “Go!”
Cody yelled in our ears.
    I vaporized the lock on the door to the room and the two of us burst out into the hallway. People were peeking out of doors—it seemed to be a busy floor, even at night. Some of the people were cleaning staff in blue overalls, but others were technicians in lab coats.
    “Explosion!” I did my best to seem panicked. “Someone’s attacking the building!”
    The chaos started immediately, and we were soon swept up into the crowd fleeing from the building. About thirty seconds later, Cody triggered the second explosion, on an upper floor. The ground trembled and people in the hallway around