Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

Something about this bothers me; I don’t think we’re prepared for it.”
    “You’re looking for a reason to call off this mission anyway,” I said, annoyed at her.
    “I never said that.”
    “You didn’t need to. It—”
    I was interrupted by motion at the tunnel into the hideout and I turned in time to see Tia climbing through, wearing old jeans and her Reckoner jacket. Her knees were dusty. She stood up, smiling.
    “We’ve found it.”
    My heart leaped in my chest and sent what felt like electricity jolting through my body. “Steelheart’s weakness? You found out what it is?”
    “No,” she said, her eyes seeming to glow with excitement. “But this should lead to the answers. I found it.”
    “What, Tia?” Cody asked.
    “The bank vault.”

25
    “I first started considering this possibility when you told your story, David,” Tia explained. The entire team of Reckoners was following her down a tunnel in the steel catacombs. “And the more I investigated the bank, the more curious I became. There are oddities.”
    “Oddities?” I asked. The group moved in a tense huddle, Cody taking point, Abraham watching our tail. He had replaced his very nice machine gun with a similar one, only without quite as many bells and whistles.
    I felt pretty comfortable with him at our back. These narrow confines would make a heavy machine gun especially deadly to anyone trying to approach us; the walls would work like bumpers on the sides of a bowling lane, and Abraham wouldn’t have any trouble at all getting strikes.
    “The Diggers,” Prof said. He was at my side. “They weren’t allowed to excavate the area beneath where the bank had stood.”
    “Yes,” Tia said, speaking eagerly. “It was very irregular. Steelheart barely gave them any direction. The chaos of these lower catacombs proves that; their madness made them hard to control. But one order he was firm on: the area beneath the bank was to be left alone. I wouldn’t have thought twice about that if it hadn’t been for what you described, that Steelheart had most of the main room of the bank turned to steel by the time Faultline came that afternoon. Her powers had two parts, it—”
    “Yes,” I said, too excited not to interrupt. Faultline—the woman Steelheart had brought to bury the bank after I’d escaped. “I know. Power duality—melding two second-tier abilities creates a first-tier one.”
    Tia smiled. “You’ve been reading my classification system notes.”
    “I figure we might as well use the same terminology.” I shrugged. “I have no trouble switching over.”
    Megan glanced at me, the hint of a smile on the corners of her lips. “What?” I asked.
    “Nerd.”
    “I am not—”
    “Stay focused, son,” Prof said, shooting a hard look at Megan, whose eyes shone with amusement. “I happen to have a fondness for nerds.”
    “I never said that I didn’t,” Megan replied lightly. “I’m just interested whenever someone pretends to be something they’re not.”
    Whatever
, I thought. Faultline was a tier-one Epic, by Tia’s classification, without an immortality benefit. That made her powerful, but fragile. She should have realized that; when she’d tried to seize Newcago a few years back, she’d never had a chance.
    Anyway, she was an Epic who had several smaller powers that worked together to create what seemed to be a single, more impressive power. In her case, she could move earth—but only if it wasn’ttoo rigid. However, she
also
had the ability to turn ordinary stone and earth into a kind of sandy dust.
    What had looked like her creating an earthquake had actually been her softening the ground, then pulling back the earth. There were true earthquake-creating Epics, but they were ironically less powerful—or at least less useful. The stronger ones could destroy a city with their powers but couldn’t bury a single building or group of people at will. Plate tectonics just worked on too massive a scale to allow for precision.
    “Don’t you see?” Tia asked. “Steelheart turned the bank’s main room—walls, much of the ceiling, floor—to steel. Then Faultline softened the ground beneath it and let it sink. I began thinking, there might be a chance that—”
    “—that it would still be there,” I said softly. We turned a corner in the catacombs, and then Tia stepped forward, moving some pieces of junk to reveal a tunnel. I had enough practice by now to tell it was probably tensor-made. The