Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(56)

Prof’s smile was lit by the pale glowing chalk lines. “Not any longer. There are some seeds of it here, though.”

I felt a sharp sinking feeling.

“But, I mean …”

Prof glanced at me, then laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did a great job, son. All things considered.”

“What was wrong with it?” I asked. I’d spent years … really, my entire life on that plan, and I was pretty con dent in what I’d come up with.

“Nothing, nothing,” Prof said.

“The ideas are sound. Remarkably so. Convince Steelheart that there’s a rival in town, lure him out, hit him. Though there is the glaring fact that you don’t know what his weakness is.”

“Well, there is that,” I admitted.

“Tia is working hard on it. If anyone can tease out the truth, it will be her,” Prof said, then paused for a moment before he continued.

“Actually, no—I shouldn’t have said that this isn’t your plan. It is, and there are more than just seeds of it here. I looked through your notebooks. You thought through things very well.”

“Thank you.”

“But your vision was too narrow, son.” Prof removed his hand from my shoulder and walked up to the wall. He tapped it with his imitation chalk stylus, and the room’s text rotated. He didn’t appear to even notice, but I grew dizzy as the walls seemed to tumble about me, spinning until a new wall of text popped up in front of Prof.

“Let me start with this,” he said.

“Other than not speci cally knowing Steelheart’s weakness, what’s the biggest aw in your plan?”

“I …” I frowned. “Taking out Nightwielder, maybe? But Prof, we just—”

“Actually,” Prof said, “that’s not it.”My frown deepened. I hadn’t thought there was a aw in my plan. I’d worked all those out, smoothing them away like cleanser removing the pimples from a teenager’s chin.

“Let’s break it down,” Prof said, raising his arm and sweeping an opening on the wall, like he was wiping mud from a window. The words scrunched to the side, not vanishing but bunching up like he’d pulled a new section of paper from a spool. He raised his chalk to the open space and started to write.

“Step one, imitate a powerful Epic.

Step two, start killing Steelheart’s important Epics to make him worried. Step three, draw him out.

Step four, kill him. By doing this you restore hope to the world and encourage people to fight back.”

I nodded.

“Except there’s a problem,” Prof said, still scribbling on the wall. “If w e actual y manage to kill Steelheart, we’ll have done it by imitating a powerful Epic.

Everyone’s going to assume, then, that an Epic was behind the defeat.

And so, what do we gain?”

“We could announce it was the Reckoners after the fact.”

Prof shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. Nobody would believe us, not after all the trouble we’ll need to go through to make Steelheart believe.”

“Well, does it matter?” I asked.

“He’ll be dead.” Then, more softly, I added, “And I get revenge.”

Prof hesitated, chalk pausing on the wall. “Yes,” he said. “I guess you’d still have that.”

“You want him dead too,” I said, stepping up beside him. “I know it.

I can see it.”

“I want all Epics dead.”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I’ve seen it in you.”

He glanced at me, and his gaze grew stern. “That doesn’t matter. It i s vital that people know we were behind this. You’ve said it yourself —we can’t kill every Epic out there. The Reckoners are spinning in circles. The only hope we have, the only hope that humankind has, is to convince people that we can ght back. For that to happen, Steelheart has to fall by human hands.”

“But for him to come out, he has to believe an Epic is threatening him,” I said.

“You see the problem?”

“I …” I was starting to. “So we’re not going to imitate an Epic?”

“We are,” Prof said. “I like the idea, the spark of that. I’m just pointing out problems we have to work through. If this … Limelight is going to kill Steelheart, we need a way to make certain that after the fact, we can convince people it was really us. Not impossible, but it is why I had to work more on the plan, expand it.”

“Okay,” I said, relaxing. So we were still on track. A false Epic … the soul of my plan was there.

“There’s a bigger problem, unfortunately,” Prof said, tapping his chalk against the wall. “Your plan calls for us to kill Epics in Steelheart’s administration to threaten him and draw him out.

You indicate that we should do this to prove that a new Epic has come to town. Only, that’s not going to work.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s what the Reckoners would do,” Prof said. “Killing Epics quietly, never coming out into the open? It’ll make him suspicious.

We need to think like a real rival would. Anyone who wants Newcago would think bigger than that. Any Epic out there can have a city of his own; it’s not that hard.