Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

enormously powerful. I think we might find something, though, particularly since the vault itself was metal and would work as a primary insulator.” She glanced over her shoulder and caught me looking at her. “What?” she demanded.
    “Nerd,” I said.
    Uncharacteristically, she blushed furiously. “I pay attention to Steelheart. I wanted to be familiar with his powers, since we were coming into the city.”
    “I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” I said lightly, stepping into the vault and raising my tensor. “I just pointed it out.”
    Never has getting glared at felt so good.
    Prof chuckled. “All right,” he said. “Cody, Abraham, David, vaporize the fronts of the safe-deposit boxes but
don’t
destroy the contents. Tia, Megan, and I will start pulling them out and going through them for anything that looks interesting. Let’s get to work; this is going to take a while.…”

26
    “WELL,” Cody said, looking over the heap of gemstones and jewelry, “if this achieved nothing else, it at least made me rich. That’s a failure I can live with.”
    Tia snorted, picking through the jewelry. We four, including Prof, sat around a large desk in one of the cubicles. Megan and Abraham were on guard duty, watching the tunnel into the bank chamber.
    There was a hallowed feeling to the room—like I somehow had to show respect—and I think the others must have sensed it too. They spoke in low, muted voices. All except Cody. He tried to lean back on his chair as he held up a large ruby, but—of course—the steel chair legs were fused to the steel floor.
    “That once might have made you rich, Cody,” Tia said, “but you’d have some trouble selling it now.”
    That was true. Jewelry was practically worthless these days. There were a couple Epics who could create gemstones.
    “Maybe,” Cody said, “but gold remains a standard.” He scratched his head. “Not sure why, though. You can’t eat it, which is all most people are interested in.”
    “It’s familiar,” Prof said. “It doesn’t rust, it’s easy to shape, and it’s hard to fake. There aren’t any Epics who can make it. Yet. People need to have a way to trade, particularly across kingdom or city boundaries.” He fingered a gold chain. “Cody’s actually right.”
    “I am?” Cody looked surprised.
    Prof nodded. “Whether or not we take on Steelheart, the gold we’ve recovered here can fund the Reckoners for a few years on its own.”
    Tia set her notebook on the desk, tapping it absently with her pen. On the other mortgage cubicle desks we’d arranged what we’d found in the vault. About three-quarters of the boxes’ contents had been recoverable.
    “Mostly we have a lot of wills,” Tia said, opening a can of cola, “stock certificates, passports, copies of driver’s licenses …”
    “We could fill a whole city with fake people if we wanted,” Cody said. “Imagine the fun.”
    “The second-largest grouping,” Tia continued, “is the aforementioned pile of jewelry, both valuable and worthless. If something in there affected Steelheart, then by pure volume this is the most likely group.”
    “But it’s not,” I said.
    Prof sighed. “David, I know what you—”
    “What I mean,” I interrupted, “is that jewelry doesn’t make sense. Steelheart didn’t attack other banks, and he hasn’t done anything—either directly or indirectly—to forbid people from wearing jewelry in his presence. Jewelry is common enough among Epics that he’d have to take measures.”
    “I agree,” Tia said, “though only in part. It’s possible we’ve missed something. Steelheart has proven subtle in the past; perhaps he has a secret embargo on a certain type of gemstone. I’ll look into it, but I think David’s right. If something
did
affect Steelheart, then it’s likely one of the oddities.”
    “How many of those are there?” Prof asked.
    “Over three hundred,” Tia said with a grimace. “Mostly mementos or keepsakes of no intrinsic value. Anything among them could be our culprit, theoretically. But then there’s a chance it was something one of the people in the room was carrying on them. Or it could be, as David seems to think, something about the situation.”
    “It’s very rare for an Epic’s weakness to be influenced just by proximity to something mundane,” I said, shrugging. “Unless an object in the vault emitted a kind of radiation or a light or a sound—something that actually reached Steelheart—the