Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(103)

I felt a flood of relief.

Abraham nodded. “Better to die here, with a chance at defeating this creature, than to run.”

Tia and Prof shared a look.

“You want to do it too, don’t you, Jon?” Tia asked.

“Either we ght him here, or the Reckoners are nished,” Prof said.

“We’d spend the rest of our lives running. Besides, I doubt I could live with myself if I ran, after all we’ve been through.”

I nodded. “We do have to at least try. For Megan’s sake.”

“I’ll bet she would nd that ironic,” Abraham noted. We looked at him, and he shrugged. “She was the one who didn’t want to do this job. I don’t know what she’d think of us dedicating the end of it to her memory.”

“You can be a downer, Abe,”

Prof said.

“The truth is not a downer,”

Abraham said in his lightly accented voice. “The lies that you pretend to accept are the true downer.”

“Says the man who still believes the Epics will save us,” Prof said.

“Gentlemen,” Tia cut in.

“Enough. I think we’re all in agreement. We’re going to try this, ridiculous though it is. We’ll try to kill Steelheart without any real idea what his weakness is.”

One by one, we all nodded. We had to try.

“I’m not doing this for Megan,” I nally said. “But I’m doing it, in part, because of her. If we have to stand up and die so that people will know that someone still ghts, so be it. Prof, you said that you worry our failure will depress people. I don’t see that. They’ll hear our story and realize that there’s an option other than doing what the Epics command. We may not be the ones to kill Steelheart.

But even if we fail, we might be the cause of his death. Someday.”

“Don’t be so sure we’ll fail,” Prof said. “If I thought this was suicide for certain, I wouldn’t let us continue. As I said, I don’t intend to pin our hopes of killing him on a single guess. We’ll try everything.

Tia, what do your instincts say will work?”

“Something from the bank

vault,” she said. “One of those items is special. I just wish I knew which one.”

“Did you bring them with you when we abandoned the old hideout?”

“I brought the most unusual ones,” she said. “I stowed the rest in the pocket we made outside. We can fetch them. So far as I know, Enforcement hasn’t found them.”

“We take everything and spread it all out here,” Prof said, pointing at the steel oor of the stadium, which had once been soil. “David’s right; that’s where Steelheart will probably land. We don’t have to know speci cally what weakened him—we can just haul it all over and use it.”

Abraham nodded. “A good plan.”

“What do you think it is?” Prof asked him.

“If I had to guess? I would say it was David’s father’s gun or the bullets it shot. Every gun is slightly distinctive in its own way. Perhaps it was the precise composition of the metal.”

“That’s easy enough to test,” I said. “I’ll bring the gun, and when I get a chance I’ll shoot him. I don’t think it will work, but I’m willing to try.”

“Good,” Prof said.

“And you, Prof?” Tia asked.

“I think it was because David’s father was one of the Faithful,”

Prof said softly. He didn’t look at Abraham. “Fools though they are, they’re earnest fools. People like Abraham see the world di erently than the rest of us do. So maybe it was the way David’s father viewed the Epics that let him hurt Steelheart.”

I sat back, thinking it over.

“Well, it shouldn’t be too hard for me to shoot him too,” Abraham said. “In fact, we should probably all try it. And anything else we can think of.”

They looked at me.

“I still think it’s cross re,” I said.

“I think Steelheart can only be harmed by someone who isn’t intending to hurt him.”

“That’s tougher to arrange,” Tia said. “If you’re right, it probably won’t activate if any of us hit him, since we actually want him dead.”

“Agreed,” Prof said. “But it’s a good theory. We’d need to nd a way to get his own soldiers to hit him by accident.”

“He’d have to bring the soldiers rst,” Tia said. “Now that he’s convinced there’s a rival Epic in town, he might just bring Nightwielder and Firefight.”

“No,” I said. “He’ll come with soldiers. Limelight has been using minions, and Steelheart will want to be ready—he’ll want to have his own soldiers to deal with distractions like that. Besides, while he’ll want to face Limelight himself, he’ll also want witnesses.”

“I agree,” Prof said. “His soldiers will probably have orders not to engage unless red upon. We can make certain they feel they need to start fighting back.”

“Then we’ll need to be able to stall Steelheart long enough to set up a good cross re,” Abraham said.

He paused. “Actually, we’ll need to stall him during the cross re. If he assumes this is just an ambush of soldiers, he’ll y o and let Enforcement deal with it.”