Calamity (Reckoners, #3)(38)
Most of us were perfectly willing to do it on our own, but…well, there was something comforting about knowing that Abraham had approved your gun. Besides, my Gottschalk was no simple hunting rifle. With electron-compressed magazines, hyperadvanced scope, and electronics systems that hooked into my mobile, I would be able to do only the basics on my own. It was the difference between putting ketchup on your hot dog and decorating a cake. Best to let an expert take over.
Abraham nodded to me, then waved toward his pack nearby on the floor, which hadn’t been completely unloaded. “I brought something back for you during my trip out to the jeeps.”
Curious, I walked over and rummaged in the pack. I pulled out a skull.
Made entirely of steel, it reflected the mobile’s light with its eerie, smooth contours. The jaw was missing. That had been separated from it in the blast that had killed this man, the man who had named himself Steelheart.
I stared into those eye sockets. If I had known then that there was a chance of redeeming Epics, would I have pushed forward with my insistence on killing him? Even now, holding this skull made me think of my father—so hopeful, so confident that the Epics would turn out to be the saviors of mankind, not its destroyers. Steelheart, in murdering my father, represented the ultimate betrayal of that hope.
“Oh, I’d forgotten about that,” Abraham said. “I threw it in at the last minute, because there was space.”
I frowned, then set the skull on a salt shelf overhead. I dug farther in the pack and located a heavy metal box. “Sparks, Abraham. You carried this in?”
“I cheated,” he said, snapping the trigger guard assembly onto my rifle. “Gravatonics at the bottom of my pack.”
I grunted, lugging out the box. I thought I recognized it. “An imager.”
“Thought you might want one,” Abraham said. “To set up the plan, like we used to do.” Prof would often call the team into a room to go over our plans, and he used this device to project ideas and images onto the walls.
I wasn’t nearly that organized. I turned on the imager anyway, plugging it into the power cell Abraham was using. The imager scattered light through the room. It wasn’t calibrated to this location, so some of the images were fuzzy and distorted.
It showed Prof’s notes. Scribbled lines of text, as if made in chalk on a black background. I walked to the wall and felt at some of the scribbled writings. They smudged as if real, and my hand made no shadow on the wall. The imager wasn’t like an ordinary projector.
I read through some of the notes, but there was little of relevance here. These were from when we’d been fighting Steelheart. Only one sentence struck me: Is it right? Three solitary words, alone in their own corner. The rest of the writing was cramped, words fighting with one another for space like too many fish in a tiny tank. But these sat on their own.
I looked back at Steelheart’s skull. The imager had interpreted it as part of the room and had projected words across its surface.
“How’s the plan?” Abraham asked. “I assume you have something brewing?”
“A few things,” I said. “They’re kind of random.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” Abraham said, a hint of a smile on his lips as he affixed the stock onto the Gottschalk. “Shall I gather the others into one of the rooms so we can talk about it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Grab them, but not in one of the rooms.”
He looked at me, questioning.
I knelt and switched off the imager. “Maybe we’ll use this another day. For now, I want to go for a walk instead.”
MIZZY tossed me the broken mobile as she joined the rest of us on the street outside our hideout. We kept the place hidden by slipping out through a secret door into the mostly abandoned apartment building next to us. It housed no family, only loners who couldn’t find their own to join, which we hoped would make them pay less attention to strangers like us.
“Security set up?” I asked Mizzy.
“Yup. We’ll know if anyone tries to enter the place.”
“Abraham?” I asked.
He shook his pack, which contained our data pads, our extra power cells, and the two pieces of Epic-derived equipment that Knighthawk had given us. If someone did rob our hideout, all they’d get away with were a few guns, which were replaceable.
“That was under five minutes,” Cody said. “Not bad.”
Abraham shrugged, but seemed pleased. This hideout was far less secure than others we’d used; that meant either leaving at least two of us behind to guard at all times, or coming up with a routine pull-out protocol when we went on operations. I liked the second idea far better. It would let us field larger teams in the city without worrying. Either way, we’d had Mizzy set up some sensors on the door that, if opened, would send our mobiles warnings.
I slung my rifle over my shoulder—Abraham had scuffed it up, then painted over a few portions to make it look both more battered and less advanced at the same time. That should help me not draw attention. Each of us wore a new face granted by Megan. It was early afternoon, and I found it odd how many people were about. Some hung laundry; others walked to or from the market. A large number were carrying possessions in sacks, having been ousted from the decaying side of the city and sent in search of someplace new to live. This sort of thing seemed constant in Ildithia; someone was always moving house.