Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(34)

“No, no,” I said, turning to face them, my back to the dark, smoldering expanse of Steelheart’s palace. “That’s the rst part of the plan. We make Steelheart think a powerful Epic is coming here to challenge him.”

“How would we do that?” Cody asked.

“We’ve already started,” I explained. “Now we spread word that Fortuity was killed by agents of a new Epic. We start hitting more Epics, leaving the impression that it’s all the work of the same rival. Then we deliver an ultimatum to Steelheart that if he wants to stop the murder of his followers, he’ll need to come out and fight.

“And he wil come. So long as we’re convincing enough. You said he’s paranoid, Prof. You’re right.

He is—and he can’t stand a challenge to his authority. He always deals with rival Epics in person, just like he did with Deathpoint all those years ago. If there’s one thing that the Reckoners are good at, it’s killing Epics. If we hunt down enough of them in the city in a short time, it will be a threat to Steelheart. We can draw him out, choose our own battle eld. We can make him come to us and walk right into our trap.”

“Won’t happen,” Megan said.

“He’ll just send Fire ght or Nightwielder.”

Fire ght and Nightwielder, two immensely powerful High Epics who

acted

as

Steelheart’s

bodyguards and right-hand men.

They were nearly as dangerous as he was.

“I’ve shown you Nightwielder’s weakness,” I said. “It’s sunlight— ultraviolet radiation. He doesn’t know that anyone is aware of it.

We can use that to trap him.”

“You haven’t proven anything,”

Megan said. “You’ve shown us he has a weakness. But every Epic does. You don’t know it’s the sunlight.”

“I glanced through his sources,”

Tia said. “It … it really does look like David might have something.”

Megan clenched her jaw. If this came down to me convincing her to agree to my plan, I was going to fail. She didn’t look like she’d agree no matter how good my

arguments.

But I wasn’t convinced I needed her support, regardless of what Prof said. I’d seen how the other Reckoners looked to him. If he decided this was a good idea, they’d follow. I just had to hope that my reasoning would be good enough for him, even though he’d said I needed to convince Megan.

“Fire ght,” Megan said. “What about him?”

“Easy,” I said, my mood lifting.

“Firefight isn’t what he seems.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll need my notes to explain,” I said. “But he’ll be the easiest of the three to take down—I promise you that.”

Megan made a face as if she were o ended by this, annoyed that I wasn’t willing to engage her without my notes. “Whatever,” she said, then made a gesture, spinning the room around in a circle and sending me stumbling again, though there was no momentum.

She glanced at me, and I saw a hint of a smile on her lips. Well, at least I knew one thing that broke through her coldness: nearly making me lose my lunch.

When the room stopped rotating, our view pointed upward at an angle. Every part of me said I should be sliding backward into the wall, but I knew it was all just done with perspective.

Directly ahead of us a group of three copters moved through the air low, just above the city. They were sleek and black, with two large rotors each. The sword-and-shield emblem of Enforcement painted in white on their sides.

“It probably won’t even come to Fire ght and Nightwielder,” she said. “I should have brought this up first: Enforcement.”

“She’s right,” Abraham said.

“Steelheart is always surrounded by Enforcement soldiers.”

“So we take them out rst,” I said. “It’s what a rival Epic would probably do anyway—disable

Steelheart’s army so they could move in on the city. That will only help convince him that we’re a rival Epic. The Reckoners would never do something like take on Enforcement.”

“We wouldn’t do it,” Megan said, “because it would be pure idiocy!”

“It does seem a little outside our capabilities, son,” Prof said, though I could tell I had him hooked. He watched with interest. He liked the idea of drawing Steelheart out. It was the sort of thing the Reckoners did do, playing on an Epic’s arrogance.

I raised my hands, imitating the gestures the others had been making, then thrust them forward to try moving the viewing room toward Enforcement headquarters.

The room lurched awkwardly, tipping sideways and streaking through the city to slam into the side of a building. It froze there, unable to continue into the structure because the spynet didn’t look there. The entire room quivered, as if desperate to ful ll my demand but uncertain where to go.I toppled sideways into the wall, then plopped down on the ground, dizzy. “Uh …”

“Y’all want me to get that for you?” Cody asked, amused, from the doorway.

“Yeah. Thanks. Enforcement

headquarters, please.”

Cody made the gestures and raised the room up, leveled it out, then spun it about and moved it over the city until we were hovering near a large black box of a building. It looked vaguely like a prison, though it didn’t house criminals. Well, just the state-sanctioned kinds of criminals.