Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(25)

Idiot, I thought, heading up the metal stairway toward my apartment. They’d wait to see if I got out anything incriminating before grabbing me. Hopefully.

Climbing steps like that, with my back to the enemy, was

excruciating. I did what I always did when I grew afraid. I thought of my father falling, bleeding beside that pillar in the broken bank lobby while I hid. I hadn’t helped.

I would never be that coward again.

I reached the door to my apartment, then ddled with the keys. I heard a distant scrape but pretended not to notice. That would be the sniper on top of the playground equipment nearby, repositioning to aim at me. Yes, from this angle I saw for certain.

That playground piece was just tall enough that the sniper would be able to shoot through the door into my apartment.

I stepped inside my single room.

No hallways or anything else, just a hole cut into the steel, like most dwellings in the understreets. It might not have had a bathroom or running water, but I was still living quite well, by understreets standards. A whole room for a single person?

I kept it messy. Some old, disposable noodle bowls sat in a pile beside the door, smelling of spice. Clothing was strewn across the oor. I had a bucket of two-

day-old water sitting on the table, and dirty, beat-up silverware sat in a pile beside it.

I didn’t use those to eat. They were for show. So was the clothing; I didn’t wear any of it. My actual clothing—four

sturdy

out ts,

always clean and washed—was folded in the trunk beside my mattress on the oor. I kept my room messy, intentionally. It actually itched at me, as I liked things neat.

I’d found that sloppiness put people o guard. If my landlady came snooping up here, she’d nd what she expected. A teenager just into his majority blowing his earnings on an easy life for a year before responsibility hit him. She wouldn’t poke or prod for secret compartments.

I hurried to the trunk. I unlocked it and pulled out my backpack— already packed with a change of clothing, spare shoes, some dry rations, and two liters of water.

There was a handgun in a pouch on one side, and the smoke grenade was in a pouch on the other side.

I walked to my mattress and unzipped the case. Inside was my life. Dozens of folders, lled with clippings from newspapers or scraps of information. Eight notebooks lled with my thoughts and ndings. A larger notebook with my indexes.

Maybe I should have brought all of this with me when going to watch the Fortuity hit. After all, I’d hoped to leave with the Reckoners.

I’d debated it but had eventually decided that it wouldn’t be reasonable. There was so much of it, for one thing. I could lug it all if I needed to, but it slowed me down.

And it was just too precious. This research was the most valuable thing in my life. Collecting some of it had nearly gotten me killed— spying on Epics, asking questions better left unasked, making payments to shady informants. I was proud of it, not to mention frightened about what might happen to it. I’d thought it safer here.

Boots shook the metal landing of the stairway outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw one of the most feared sights in the understreets:

fully

geared

Enforcement o cers. They stood on the landing, automatic ri es in their hands, sleek black helmets on their heads, military-grade armor on their chests, knees, arms. There were three of them.

Their helmets had black visors that came down over their eyes, leaving their mouths and chins exposed. The eye shields gave them night vision and glowed faintly green, with a strange smoky pattern that swirled and undulated across the front. It was trans xing, which was said to be the point.

I didn’t need to act to make my eyes go wide, my muscles taut.

“Hands on your head,” the lead o cer said, ri e up at his shoulder and the barrel trained on me.

“Down on your knees, subject.”

That was what they called people, subject. Steelheart didn’t bother with any kind of silly pretense that his empire was a republic or a representative government. He didn’t call people citizens or comrades. They were subjects of his empire. That was that.

I quickly raised my hands. “I didn’t do anything!” I whined. “I was just there to watch!”

“HANDS UP, KNEES DOWN!” the officer yelled.

I complied.

They entered the room, leaving the doorway conspicuously open so that their sniper had a view through the door. From what I’d read, these three would be part of a five-person squad known as a Core.

Three regular troops, one specialist —in this case a sniper—and one minor Epic. Steelheart had about fifty Cores like this.

Almost all of Enforcement was made of special-operations teams.

If there was any large-scale ghting to be done, something very dangerous,

Steelheart,

Nightwielder, Fire ght, or maybe Con ux—who was head of

Enforcement—would deal with it personally. Enforcement was used for the smaller problems in the city, the ones Steelheart didn’t want to bother with himself. In a way he didn’t need Enforcement.

They were like a homicidal dictator’s version of valet parking attendants.

One of the three soldiers kept an eye on me while the other two ri ed through the contents of my ma ttress. Is she in here? I wondered. Invisible somewhere? My instincts, and my memory of researching her, told me she’d be near.