Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

rifle.”
    She snorted. “And what handgun
would
you pick, given the choice?”
    “Jennings .44.”
    “A Spitfire?” she asked, incredulous. “Those things shoot about as accurately as tossing a handful of bullets into a fire.”
    “Sure. But if I’m using a handgun, that means someone is in my face. I might not have a chance for a second shot, so I want to down them fast. At that point accuracy doesn’t matter, since they’re so close anyway.”
    Megan just rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You’re hopeless. You’re buying into assumptions. You can be just as accurate with a handgun as you can with a rifle, and you can use it at more immediate ranges. In a way, because it’s harder,
truly
skilled people use the handgun. Any slontze can hit with a rifle.”
    “You did
not
just say that.”
    “I did, and I’m driving, so I get to decide when the argument is over.”
    “But … but that makes no sense!”
    “It doesn’t need to,” she said. “It’s a brick made out of porridge.”
    “You know,” Tia said in our ears, “you two
could
just each carry both a rifle
and
a handgun.”
    “That’s not the point,” I said at exactly the same time that Megan said, “You don’t understand.”
    “Whatever,” Tia answered. I could hear her sipping cola. “Ten minutes.” Her tone said she was bored with our arguing. She, however, couldn’t see that both of us were grinning.
    Sparks, I like this girl
, I thought, eyeing Megan. Who seemed to think she’d won the argument.
    I tapped the mute-all button on my mobile. “I’m sorry,” I found myself saying.
    Megan raised an eyebrow at me.
    “For doing what I did to the Reckoners,” I said. “For making everything go a different way than you wanted it to. For dragging you into this.”
    She shrugged, then tapped her own mute button. “I’m past it.”
    “What changed?”
    “Turns out I like you too much to hate you, Knees.” She eyed me. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
    I wasn’t worried about my head. My heart, on the other hand, was another matter. A wave of shock ran through me. Had she really just said that?
    Before I could melt too far, however, my mobile flashed. Prof was trying to contact us. I tapped it with a quick snap.
    “Stay sharp, you two,” he told us. He sounded a little suspicious. “Keep the lines up.”
    “Yes sir,” I said immediately.
    “Eight minutes,” Tia said. “The convoy has taken a left on Frewanton. Turn right at the next intersection to continue on an intercept course.”
    Megan focused on her driving, and so—to keep
me
from focusing too much on
her
—I went over the plan a few times in my head.
    We’re going to do this one simply
, Prof had said.
Nothing fancy at all. Conflux is fragile. He’s a schemer, an organizer, a string puller, but he has no powers that will protect him
.
    We pull up close to the motorcade, and Abraham uses the dowser to determine if a powerful Epic is really in the car. The van pulls forward in front of the convoy; we throw open the back doors, where Cody stands in costume
.
    Cody raises his hands; Abraham fires the gauss gun from behind. In the confusion, we’ll hope it looks like he launched the bolt from his hand. We hit the entire limo, leave nothing but slag, and then flee. The surviving motorcycle guards can spread the story
.
    It
would
work. Hopefully. And without Conflux gifting his abilities to high-level Enforcement soldiers, the mechanized armor, the energy weapons, and the copters would all stop working. Fuel cells would run dry, and the city would run out of power.
    “We’re getting close,” Tia said softly in our ears. “The limo is turning right on Beagle. Prof, use the beta formation; I’m pretty surethey’re heading uptown, and that means they’ll turn onto Finger Street. Megan, you’re still on target.”
    “Got it,” Prof said. “I was heading that way.”
    We passed an abandoned park from the old days. You could tell because of the frozen weeds and fallen branches transformed to steel. Only the dead ones had been changed—Steelheart couldn’t affect living matter. In fact, his pulses had trouble with anything too close to a living body. A person’s clothing often wouldn’t be transformed, but the ground around them would change.
    That kind of oddity was common in Epic powers; it was one of the things that didn’t make scientific sense. A dead body and a living one could be very similar, scientifically. But one could be affected