Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(66)

“Security door with a code.

Interesting.” She tossed her pack to me. “Put an explosive on the hole you made. I’ll check things out here.”

I shed in the pack for an explosive as she cracked open the door that didn’t have the security pad and then stepped through. I attached the small device to the hole I’d made, then noticed some exposed wires in the lower part of the wall.

I followed them down and was prying up a section of the oor when Megan came back.

“There are two other rooms like this,” she said. “No people in them, small and built up against the elevator shaft. Best I can gure, this is where furnace equipment and elevator maintenance is supposed to be, but they hid some rooms here instead and took them o the building schematics. I wonder if there’s space between other oors—if there are rooms hidden there too.”

“Look at this,” I said, pointing at what I’d discovered.

She knelt beside me and eyed the wall and the wiring.

“Explosives,” she said.

“The room’s already set to blow,”

I said. “Creepy, eh?”

“Whatever is in here,” Megan said, “it must be important.

Important enough that it’s worth destroying the entire power plant to keep it from being discovered.”

We both looked up at the computers.

“What are you two doing?”

Cody’s voice came back onto our feed.

“We found this room,” I said, “and—”

“Keep moving,” Cody said, cutting me o . “Prof and Abraham just ran into some guards and were forced to shoot them. The guards are down, bodies hidden, but they’ll be missed soon. If we’re lucky we’ll have a few minutes before someone realizes they’re not on their patrol anymore.”

I cursed, fishing in my pocket.

“What’s that?” Megan asked.

“One of the universal blasting caps I got from Diamond,” I said. “I want to see if they work.” I nervously used my electrical tape to stick the little round nub on the explosives we’d found under the oor. In my pocket I carried its detonator—the one that looked like a pen.

“By the map Tia gave us,”

Megan said, “we’re only two rooms over from the storage area with the energy cells, but we’re a little below it.”

We shared a glance, then split up to scour the hidden room. We might not have much time, but we needed to at least try to nd out what information this place contained. She pulled open a ling cabinet and grabbed a handful of folders. In an instant I was up and opening desk drawers. One had a couple of data chips. I grabbed them, waved them at Megan, then tossed them in her bag. She threw the folders in, then searched another desk while I raised a hand to the right wall and made us a hole.

Since the hidden room was halfway between two oors, I wasn’t certain how that related to the rest of the building. I made a hole in the wall in the direction we wanted to go, but I made it near the ceiling.

That opened up into a room on the third oor, but near the oor.

So there was some overlap between our hidden room and the third oor. With a glance at the map, I could see how they’d hidden the room. On the schematics the elevator shaft was shown as slightly bigger than it actually was.

It also included a maintenance shaft that wasn’t actually there— and that explained the lack of handholds in the elevator. The builders assumed the maintenance shaft would provide a way to service the elevator, not knowing that the hidden room would actually go in that space.

Megan and I climbed through the hole and onto the third oor. We crossed that room—a conference room of some sort—and passed through another, which was a monitoring station. I vaporized the wall and opened a hole into a long, low-ceilinged storage area. This was our target: the room where the power cells were kept.

“We’re in,” Megan said to Cody as we slipped inside. The room was lled with shelves, and on them were various pieces of electrical equipment, none of which we wanted.

We went in di erent directions, searching hastily.

“Awesome,” Cody said. “The power cells should be in there somewhere. Look for cylinders about a handspan wide and about as tall as a boot.”

I spied some large storage lockers on the far wall, with locks on the doors. “Might be in here,” I said to Megan, moving toward them. I made quick work of the locks with the tensor and pulled the doors open as she joined me. Inside one was a tall column of green cylinders stacked on top of one another on their sides. Each cylinder looked vaguely like a cross between a very small beer keg and a car battery.

“Those are the power cells,”

Cody said, sounding relieved. “I was half worried there wouldn’t be any. Good thing I brought my four-leaf clover on this operation.”

“Four-leaf clover?” Megan said with a snort as she

shed

something out of her pack.

“Sure. From the homeland.”

“That’s the Irish, Cody, not the Scottish.”

“I know,” Cody said without missing a beat. “I had to kill an Irish dude to get mine.”

I pulled out one of the power cells. “They aren’t as heavy as I thought they’d be,” I said. “Are we sure these will have enough juice to power the gauss gun? That thing needs a lot of energy.”