Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

tensors, unless controlled precisely, always created circular tunnels, while the Diggers had created square or rectangular corridors.
    This tunnel burrowed through the steel at a slight decline. Cody walked up, shining his light in. “Well, I guess now we know what you and Abraham have been working on for the last few weeks, Tia.”
    “We had to try several different avenues of approach,” Tia explained. “I wasn’t certain how deep the bank room ended up sinking, or even if it retained structural integrity.”
    “But it did?” I asked, suddenly feeling a strange numbness.
    “It did!” Tia said. “It’s amazing. Come see.” She led the way down the tunnel, which was tall enough to walk through, though Abraham would have to stoop.
    I hesitated. The others waited for me to follow, so I forced myself forward, joining Tia. The rest of them came along behind, our mobiles providing the only light.
    No, wait. There was light up ahead; I could barely make it out,around the shadows of Tia’s slender figure. We eventually reached the end of the tunnel, and I stepped into a memory.
    Tia had set up a few lights in corners and on tables, but they did little more than give a ghostly cast to the large, dark chamber. The room had settled at an angle, with the floor sloping downward. The skewed perspective only enhanced the surreal sensation of this place.
    I froze in the mouth of the tunnel. The room was as I remembered it, shockingly well preserved. Towering pillars—now made of steel—and scattered desks, counters, rubble. I could still make out the tile mosaic on the floor, though only its shape. Instead of marble and stone it was now all a uniform shade of silver broken by ridges and bumps.
    There was almost no dust, though some motes dodged lazily in the air, creating little halos around the white lanterns Tia had set up.
    Realizing that I was still standing in the mouth of the tunnel, I stepped down into the room.
Oh sparks …
, I thought, my chest constricting. I found my hands gripping my rifle, though I knew I was in no danger. The memories were coming back in a flood.
    “In retrospect,” Tia was explaining—I listened with only half an ear—“I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it so well preserved. Faultline’s powers created a kind of cushion of earth as the room sank, and Steelheart turned almost all of that earth to metal. The other rooms in the building were destroyed in his assault on the bank, and they broke off as the structure sank. But this one, and the attached vault, were ironically preserved by Steelheart’s own powers.”
    By coincidence we’d entered through the front of the bank. There had been wide, beautiful glass doors here; those had been destroyed in the gunfire and energy blasts. Steel rubble and some steel bones from Deathpoint’s victims littered the ground to both sides. As I stepped forward I followed the path Steelheart had taken into the building.
    Those are the counters
, I thought, looking directly ahead.
The oneswhere the tellers worked
. One section had been destroyed; as a child I’d crawled through that gap before making my way to the vault. The ceiling nearby was broken and misshapen, but the vault itself had been steel before Steelheart’s intervention. Now that I thought about it, that might have helped preserve its contents, because of how his transfersion abilities worked.
    “Most of the rubble is from where the ceiling fell in,” Tia said from behind, her voice echoing in the vast chamber. “Abraham and I cleaned as much out as we could. A large amount of dirt had tumbled through the broken wall and ceiling, filling one part of the chamber over by the vault. We used the tensors on that pile, then made a hole in the corner of the floor—it opens into a pocket of space underneath the building—and shoved the dust in there.”
    I moved down three steps to the lower section of the floor. Here, in the center of the room, was where Steelheart had faced Deathpoint.
These people are mine.…
By instinct, I turned to the left. Huddling beside the pillar I found the body of the woman whose child had been killed in her arms. I shivered. She was now a statue made of steel. When had she died? How? I didn’t remember. A stray bullet, maybe? She wouldn’t have been turned to steel unless she’d already been dead.
    “What
really
saved this place,” Tia continued, “was the Great Transfersion, when Steelheart turned everything in the city to steel. If he