Steelheart

by Brandon Sanderson

  She was using that nickname of hers for me again. It actually seemed like a good sign, as she only seemed to use it when she was less annoyed at me. It was kind of affectionate, wasn’t it? I just wished the nickname hadn’t been a reference to something so embarrassing. Why not … Super-Great-Shot? That kind of rolled off the tongue, didn’t it?

  We climbed the rest of the way in silence. Megan turned our audio feed to the rest of the team back on, which seemed an indication that she thought the conversation was over. Maybe it was—I certainly didn’t know what else to say. How could she possibly think that living under Steelheart was a good thing?

  I thought of the other kids at the Factory, of the people in the understreets. I guessed that many of them thought the same way—they’d come here knowing that Steelheart was a monster, but they still thought life was better in Newcago than in other places.

  Only they were complacent—Megan was anything but that. She was active, incredible, capable. How could she think like they did? It shook what I knew of the world—at least, what I thought I knew. The Reckoners were supposed to be different.

  What if she was right?

  “Oh sparks!” Cody suddenly said in my ear.

  “What?”

  “Y’all’ve got trouble, lad. It’s—”

  At that moment the doors to the elevator shaft just above—the ones on the third floor—slid open. Two uniformed guards stepped up to the ledge and peered down into the darkness.

  22

  “I’M telling you, I heard something,” one of the guards said, squinting downward. He seemed to be looking right at me. But it was dark in the elevator shaft—darker than I’d thought it would be, with the doors open.

  “I don’t see anything,” the other said. His voice echoed softly.

  The first pulled his flashlight off his belt.

  My heart lurched. Uh-oh.

  I pressed my hand against the wall; it was the only thing I could think to do. The tensor started vibrating, and I tried to concentrate, but it was hard with them up there. The flashlight clicked.

  “See? Hear that?”

  “Sounds like the furnace,” the second guard said drily.

  My hand rattling against the side of the wall did have a kind of mechanical sound to it. I grimaced but kept on. The light of the flashlight shone in the shaft. I nearly lost control of the vibration.

  There was no way they could have missed seeing me with that light. They were too close.

  “Nothing there,” the guard said with a grunt.

  What? I looked up. Somehow, despite being only a short distance away, it seemed they hadn’t seen me. I frowned, confused.

  “Huh,” the other guard said. “I do hear a sound, though.”

  “It’s coming from … you know,” the first guard said.

  “Oh,” the other said. “Right.”

  The first guard stuffed the flashlight back into place on his belt. How could he have missed seeing me? He’d shined it right in my direction.

  The two backed away from the opening and let the doors slide shut.

  What in Calamity’s fires? I thought. Could they have actually missed us in the darkness?

  My tensor went off.

  I’d been preparing to vaporize a pocket into the wall to hide in—get us out of their line of fire if it came to that. But because I wasn’t focusing the blast, I took a large chunk out of the wall in front of me, and in an instant my handhold disappeared. I grabbed at the side of the hole I’d made, barely finding a grip.

  A burst of dust fell back over me and cascaded over Megan in an enormous shower. Holding tight to the side of the hole, I glanced down to find her glaring up at me, blinking dust from her eyes. Her hand actually seemed to be inching toward her gun.

  Calamity! I thought with a start. Her scarf and skin were dusted silver, and her eyes were angry. I don’t think I’d ever seen an expression like that in a person’s eyes before—not directed at me at least. It was like I could feel the hate coming off her.

  Her hand kept inching toward the handgun at her side.

  “M-Megan?” I asked.

  Her hand stopped. I didn’t know what I’d seen, but it was gone in a moment. She blinked, and her expression softened. “You need to watch what you’re destroying, Knees,” she snapped, reaching up to wipe some of the dust off her face.

  “Yeah,” I said, then looked back up into the hole I was hanging onto. “Hey, there’s a room here.” I raised my mobile, shining light into it to get a better look.

  It was a small room—a few orderly desks outfitted with computer terminals lined one wall and filing cabinets ran along the other. There were two doors, one a reinforced metal security door with a keypad.

  “Megan, there’s definitely a room here. And it doesn’t look like there’s anyone in it. Come on.” I pulled myself up and crawled through.

  As soon as I was in I helped Megan up and out of the shaft. She hesitated before taking my hand, then once she was out she walked past me without a word. She seemed to have gone back to being cold toward me, maybe even a little mean.

  I knelt beside the hole back into the elevator shaft. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something very strange had just happened. First the guard hadn’t seen us, then Megan went from opening up to me to totally closing off in seconds flat. Was she having second thoughts about what she’d shared with me? Was she worried I’d tell Prof that she didn’t support killing Steelheart?

  “What is this place?” Megan said from the center of the small room. The ceiling was low enough that she almost had to stoop—I would definitely have to. She unwrapped her scarf, releasing a puff of metal dust, grimaced, and then began shaking out her clothing.

  “No idea,” I said, checking my mobile and the map Tia had uploaded. “The room’s not on the map.”

  “Low ceilings,” Megan said. “Security door with a code. Interesting.” She tossed her pack to me. “Put an explosive on the hole you made. I’ll check things out here.”

  I fished in the pack for an explosive as she cracked open the door that didn’t have the security pad and then stepped through. I attached the small device to the hole I’d made, then noticed some exposed wires in the lower part of the wall.

  I followed them down and was prying up a section of the floor when Megan came back.

  “There are two other rooms like this,” she said. “No people in them, small and built up against the elevator shaft. Best I can figure, this is where furnace equipment and elevator maintenance is supposed to be, but they hid some rooms here instead and took them off the building schematics. I wonder if there’s space between other floors—if there are rooms hidden there too.”

  “Look at this,” I said, pointing at what I’d discovered.

  She knelt beside me and eyed the wall and the wiring.

  “Explosives,” she said.

  “The room’s already set to blow,” I said. “Creepy, eh?”

  “Whatever is in here,” Megan said, “it must be important. Important enough that it’s worth destroying the entire power plant to keep it from being discovered.”

  We both looked up at the computers.

  “What are you two doing?” Cody’s voice came back onto our feed.

  “We found this room,” I said, “and—”

  “Keep moving,” Cody said, cutting me off. “Prof and Abraham just ran into some guards and were forced to shoot them. The guards are down, bodies hidden, but they’ll be missed soon. If we’re lucky we’ll have a few minutes before someone realizes they’re not on their patrol anymore.”

  I cursed, fishing in my pocket.

  “What’s that?” Megan asked.

  “One of the universal blasting caps I got from Diamond,” I said. “I want to see if they work.” I nervously used my electrical tape to stick the little round nub on the explosives we’d found under the floor. In my pocket I carried its detonator—the one that looked like a pen.

  “By the map Tia gave us,” Megan said, “we’re on
ly two rooms over from the storage area with the energy cells, but we’re a little below it.”

  We shared a glance, then split up to scour the hidden room. We might not have much time, but we needed to at least try to find out what information this place contained. She pulled open a filing cabinet and grabbed a handful of folders. In an instant I was up and opening desk drawers. One had a couple of data chips. I grabbed them, waved them at Megan, then tossed them in her bag. She threw the folders in, then searched another desk while I raised a hand to the right wall and made us a hole.

  Since the hidden room was halfway between two floors, I wasn’t certain how that related to the rest of the building. I made a hole in the wall in the direction we wanted to go, but I made it near the ceiling.

  That opened up into a room on the third floor, but near the floor. So there was some overlap between our hidden room and the third floor. With a glance at the map, I could see how they’d hidden the room. On the schematics the elevator shaft was shown as slightly bigger than it actually was. It also included a maintenance shaft that wasn’t actually there—and that explained the lack of handholds in the elevator. The builders assumed the maintenance shaft would provide a way to service the elevator, not knowing that the hidden room would actually go in that space.

  Megan and I climbed through the hole and onto the third floor. We crossed that room—a conference room of some sort—and passed through another, which was a monitoring station. I vaporized the wall and opened a hole into a long, low-ceilinged storage area. This was our target: the room where the power cells were kept.

  “We’re in,” Megan said to Cody as we slipped inside. The room was filled with shelves, and on them were various pieces of electrical equipment, none of which we wanted.

  We went in different directions, searching hastily.

  “Awesome,” Cody said. “The power cells should be in there somewhere. Look for cylinders about a handspan wide and about as tall as a boot.”

  I spied some large storage lockers on the far wall, with locks on the doors. “Might be in here,” I said to Megan, moving toward them. I made quick work of the locks with the tensor and pulled the doors open as she joined me. Inside one was a tall column of green cylinders stacked on top of one another on their sides. Each cylinder looked vaguely like a cross between a very small beer keg and a car battery.

  “Those are the power cells,” Cody said, sounding relieved. “I was half worried there wouldn’t be any. Good thing I brought my four-leaf clover on this operation.”

  “Four-leaf clover?” Megan said with a snort as she fished something out of her pack.

  “Sure. From the homeland.”

  “That’s the Irish, Cody, not the Scottish.”

  “I know,” Cody said without missing a beat. “I had to kill an Irish dude to get mine.”

  I pulled out one of the power cells. “They aren’t as heavy as I thought they’d be,” I said. “Are we sure these will have enough juice to power the gauss gun? That thing needs a lot of energy.”

  “Those cells were charged by Conflux,” Cody said in my ear. “They’re more powerful by magnitudes than anything we could make or buy. If they won’t work, nothing will. Grab as many as you can carry.”

  They might not have been as heavy as I’d thought, but they were still kind of bulky. We took the rest of the equipment out of Megan’s pack, then retrieved the smaller sack we had stuffed in the bottom. I managed to stuff four of the cells in the pack while Megan transferred the rest of our equipment—a few explosive charges, some rope, and some ammunition—to her smaller sack. There were also some lab coats for disguises. I left these out—I suspected we’d need them to escape.

  “How are Prof and Abraham?” I asked.

  “On their way out,” Cody said.

  “And our extraction?” I asked. “Prof said we shouldn’t go back down the elevator shaft.”

  “You have your lab coats?” Cody asked.

  “Sure,” Megan said. “But if we go in the hallways, they might record our faces.”

  “That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Cody said. “First explosion is a go in two minutes.”

  We threw on the lab coats, and I squatted down and let Megan help me put on the backpack with the power cells. It was heavy, but I could still move reasonably well. Megan threw on her lab coat. It looked good on her, but pretty much anything would. She swung her own lighter pack over her shoulder, then eyed my rifle.

  “It can be disassembled,” I explained as I pulled the stock from the rifle, then popped out the magazine and removed the cartridge from the chamber. I slid on the safety just in case, then stuffed the pieces in her sack.

  The coats were embroidered with Station Seven’s logo, and we both had fake security badges to go with them. The disguises would never have worked getting us in—security was far too tight—but in a moment of chaos, they should get us out.

  The building shook with an ominous rumble—explosion number one. That was mostly to prompt an evacuation rather than to inflict any real damage.

  “Go!” Cody yelled in our ears.

  I vaporized the lock on the door to the room and the two of us burst out into the hallway. People were peeking out of doors—it seemed to be a busy floor, even at night. Some of the people were cleaning staff in blue overalls, but others were technicians in lab coats.

  “Explosion!” I did my best to seem panicked. “Someone’s attacking the building!”

  The chaos started immediately, and we were soon swept up into the crowd fleeing from the building. About thirty seconds later, Cody triggered the second explosion, on an upper floor. The ground trembled and people in the hallway around us screamed, glancing at the ceiling. Some of the dozen or so people clutched small computers or briefcases.

  There wasn’t actually anything to be frightened of. These initial explosions had been set in unpopulated locations that wouldn’t bring down the building. There would be four of those early blasts, and they’d been placed to shepherd all the civilians out of the structure. Then the real explosions could begin.

  We made a hasty flight through hallways and down stairwells, being careful to keep our heads down. Something felt odd about the place, and as we ran I realized what it was. The building was clean. The floors, the walls, the rooms … too clean. It had been too dark for me to notice it when we were making our way in, but in the light, it seemed stark to me. The understreets weren’t ever this clean. It didn’t feel right for everything to be so scrubbed, so neat.

  As we ran it became clear that the place was big enough that any one employee wouldn’t know everyone else who worked there, and though our intelligence said that the security officers had the faces of all employees in portfolios that they checked against security feeds, no one challenged us.

  Most of the security officers were running with the growing crowd, just as worried about the explosions as everyone else, and that dampened my fears even more.

  As a group we flooded down the last flight of stairs and burst out into the lobby. “What’s going on?” a security officer yelled. He was standing by the exit with his gun out and aimed. “Did anyone see anything?”

  “An Epic!” Megan said breathlessly. “Wearing green. I saw him walking through the building throwing out blasts of energy!”

  The third explosion went off, shaking the building. It was followed by a series of smaller explosions. Other groups of people flooded out of adjacent stairwells and from the ground-floor hallways.

  The guard cursed, then did the smart thing. He ran too. He wouldn’t be expected to face an Epic—indeed, he could get in trouble for doing it, even if that Epic was working against Steelheart. Ordinary men left Epics alone, end of story. In the Fractured States that was a law greater than any other.

  We burst out of the building and onto the grounds. I glanced back to see trails of smoke rising from the enormous structure. Even as I watched, another series of small explosions went off in an upper row of windows, each one flashing green. Prof an
d Abraham hadn’t just planted bombs, they’d planted a light show.

  “It is an Epic,” a woman near me breathed. “Who would be so foolish …”

  I flashed a smile at Megan, and we joined the flood of people running to the gates in the wall surrounding the grounds. The guards there tried to hold people in, but when the next explosion went off they gave up and opened the gates. Megan and I followed the others out into the dark streets of the city, leaving the smoldering building behind.

  “Security cameras are still up,” Cody reported on the open channel to everyone. “Building is still evacuating.”

  “Hold the last explosions,” Prof said calmly. “But blow the leaflets.”

  There was a soft pop from behind, and I knew that the leaflets proclaiming that a new Epic had come to town had been blasted from the upper floors and were floating down to the city. Limelight, we were calling him—the name I’d chosen. The flyer was filled with propaganda calling Steelheart out, claiming that Limelight was the new master of Newcago.

  Megan and I were to our car before Cody gave the all clear. I climbed in the driver’s side, and Megan followed through the same door, shoving me over into the passenger seat.

  “I can drive,” I said.

  “You destroyed the last car going around one block, Knees,” she said, starting the vehicle. “Knocked down two signs, I believe. And I think I saw the remains of some trash cans as we fled.” There was a faint smile on her lips.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” I said, thrilled by our success as I looked back at Station Seven rising into the dark sky. “Those trash cans were totally asking for it. Cheeky slontzes.”

  “I’m triggering the big one,” Cody said in my ear.

  A line of blasts sounded in the building, including the explosives Megan and I had placed, I guessed. The building shook, fires burning out the windows.

  “Huh,” Cody said, confused. “Didn’t bring it down.”

  “Good enough,” Prof answered. “Evidence of our incursion is gone, and the station won’t be operating anytime soon.”