Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

station won’t be operating anytime soon.”
    “Yeah,” Cody said. I could hear the disappointment in his voice. “I just wish it had been a little more dramatic.”
    I pulled the pen detonator from my pocket. It probably wouldn’t do anything—the explosives we’d placed on the walls had probably already set off the ones in the floor. I clicked the top of the pen anyway.
    The following explosion was about ten times as strong as the previous one. Our car shook and debris sprayed out over the city, dust and bits of rock raining down. Megan and I both spun around in our seats in time to catch the building collapse in an awful-sounding crunch.
    “Wow,” Cody said. “Look at that. I guess some of the power cells went up.”
    Megan glanced at me, then at the pen, then rolled her eyes. In seconds we were racing down the street in the opposite direction of fire trucks and emergency responders, heading for the rendezvous point with the other Reckoners.

PART THREE

23
    I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.
    The construction had been set up around the tunnel into the Reckoner burrow, which was the only way in or out. It had been five days since our attack on the power station, and we’d been lying low during most of that, planning our next move—the hit on Conflux to undermine Enforcement.
    Abraham had just gotten back from a supply run. Which meant that I’d stopped being one of the team’s tensor specialists and started being their source of free teenage labor.
    I continued pulling, sweat dripping from my brow and beginning to soak through my T-shirt. Eventually the crate appeared fromthe depths of the hole, and Megan pulled it off its rollers and heaved it into the room. I let go of the rope, sending the roller board and rope back down the tunnel so Abraham could tie on another crate of supplies.
    “You want to do the next one?” I asked Megan, wiping my brow with a towel.
    “No,” she said lightly. She heaved the crate onto a dolly and wheeled it over to stack it with the others.
    “You sure?” I asked, arms aching.
    “You’re doing such a fine job,” she said. “And it’s good exercise.” She settled the crate, then sat down on a chair, putting her feet up on the desk and sipping a lemonade while reading a book on her mobile.
    I shook my head. She was unbelievable.
    “Think of it as being chivalrous,” Megan said absently, tapping the screen to scroll down more text. “Protecting a defenseless girl from pain and all that.”
    “Defenseless?” I asked as Abraham called up. I sighed, then started pulling the rope again.
    She nodded. “In an abstract way.”
    “How can someone be
abstractly
defenseless?”
    “Takes a lot of work,” she said, then sipped her drink. “It only
looks
easy. Just like abstract art.”
    I grunted. “Abstract art?” I asked, heaving on the rope.
    “Sure. You know, guy paints a black line on a canvas, calls it a metaphor, sells it for millions.”
    “That never happened.”
    She looked up at me, amused. “Sure it did. You never learned about abstract art in school?”
    “I was schooled at the Factory,” I said. “Basic math, reading, geography, history. Wasn’t time for anything else.”
    “But before that. Before Calamity.”
    “I was eight,” I said. “And I lived in inner-city Chicago, Megan.My education mostly involved learning to avoid gangs and how to keep my head down at school.”
    “That’s what you learned when you were
eight
? In grade school?”
    I shrugged and kept pulling. She seemed troubled by what I’d said, though I’ll admit, I was troubled by what she’d said. People hadn’t really paid that much money for such simple things, had they? It baffled me. Pre-Calamity people had been a strange lot.
    I hauled the next crate up, and Megan hopped down from her chair again to move it. I couldn’t imagine that she was getting much reading done, but she didn’t seem bothered by the interruptions. I watched her, taking a long gulp from my cup of water.
    Things had been … different between us since her confession in the elevator shaft. In a lot of ways she was more relaxed around me, which didn’t make that much sense. Shouldn’t things have been more awkward? I knew she didn’t support our mission. That felt like a pretty big deal to me.
    She really
was
a professional,