Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(48)

I decided not to use that one on Megan.

They didn’t have any weapons on them that I could see, though there were some odd devices on the sides. Maybe energy weapons?

They didn’t seem to t with much of what Diamond had here, but then again, what he had was pretty eclectic.

Megan walked past me and I raised a nger to point at the motorcycles.

“No,” she said, not even looking.

“But—”

“No.”

“But they’re awesome!” I said, holding up my hands, as if that should have been enough of an argument. And, sparks, it should have been. They were awesome!

“You could barely drive some lady’s sedan, Knees,” Megan said.

“I don’t want to see you on the back

of

something

with

gravatonics.”

“Gravatonics!” That was even more awesome.

“No,” Megan said firmly.

I looked toward Abraham, who was inspecting something nearby.

He glanced at me, then over at the bikes, and smiled. “No.”

I sighed. Wasn’t shopping for weapons supposed to be more fun than this?

“Diamond,” Abraham called to the dealer. “What is this?”

The weapons merchant began waddling over. “Oh, it’s wonderful.

Great explosions. It …” His face fell as he neared and saw what Abraham was actually looking at.

“Oh. That. Um, it is quite wonderful, though I don’t know if it would suit your needs.…”

The item in question was a large ri e with a very long barrel and a scope on top. It looked a little bit like an AWM—one of the sniper ri es the Factory had used as a model in building their products.

The barrel was larger, however, and there were some odd coils around the forestock. It was painted a dark black-green and had a big hole where the magazine should have fit.

Diamond sighed. “This weapon is wonderful, but you are a good customer. I should warn you that I don’t have the resources to make it work.”

“What?” Megan asked. “You’re selling a broken gun?”

“It’s not that,” Diamond said, tapping the section of wall beside the gun. An image displayed of a man set up on the ground, holding the ri e and looking through the scope at some run-down buildings.

“This is called a gauss gun, developed using research on some Epic or another who throws bullets at people.”

“Rick O’Shea,” I said, nodding.

“An Irish Epic.”

“That’s really his name?”

Abraham asked softly.

“Yeah.”

“That’s horrible.” He shivered.

“Taking a beautiful French word and turning it into … into something Cody would say. Calice! ”

“Anyway,” I said. “He can make objects unstable by touching them; then they explode when subjected to any signi cant impact. Basically he charges rocks with energy, throws them at people, and they explode. Standard kinetic energy Epic.”

I was more interested in the idea that the technology had been developed based on his powers.

Ricky was a newer Epic. He wouldn’t have been around back in the old days when, as the Reckoners had explained, Epics had been imprisoned and experimented on. Did this mean that kind of research was still going on? There was a place where Epics were being held captive? I’d never heard of such a thing.

“The gun?” Abraham asked Diamond.

“Well, like I said.” Diamond tapped the wall and the video started playing. “It’s a type of gauss gun, only it uses a projectile that has been charged with energy rst. The bullet, once turned explosive, is propelled to extreme speeds using tiny magnets.”

The man holding the gun in the video ipped a switch and the coils lit up green. He pulled the trigger and there was a burst of energy, though the thing seemed to have almost no recoil. A splash of green light spat from the front of the gun’s barrel, leaving a line in the air. One of the distant buildings exploded, giving o a strange shower of green that seemed to warp the air.

“We’re … not sure why it does that,” Diamond admitted. “Or even how. The technology changes the bullet into a charged explosive.”

I felt a shiver, thinking about the tensors,

the

jackets—the

technology used by the Reckoners.

Actually, a lot of the technology we now used had come with the advent of the Epics. How much of it did we really understand?

We were relying on half-understood technology built from studying mystifying creatures who didn’t even know how they did what they did themselves. We were like deaf people trying to dance to a beat we couldn’t hear, long after the music actually stopped.

Or … wait. I don’t know what that actually was supposed to mean.

Anyway, the lights given o by that gun’s explosion were very distinctive. Beautiful, even. There didn’t seem to be much debris, just some green smoke that still oated in the air. Almost as if the building had been transformed directly to energy.

Then it hit me. “Aurora borealis,”

I said, pointing. “It looks like the pictures I’ve seen of it.”

“Destructive capability looks good,” Megan said. “That building was almost completely knocked down by one shot.”