Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(76)

Anyway, she was an Epic who had several smaller powers that worked together to create what seemed to be a single, more impressive power. In her case, she could move earth—but only if it wasn’t too rigid. However, she also had the ability to turn ordinary stone and earth into a kind of sandy dust.

What had looked like her creating an earthquake had actually been her softening the ground, then pulling back the earth. There were true earthquake-creating Epics, but they were ironically less powerful—or at least less useful. The stronger ones could destroy a city with their powers but couldn’t bury a single building or group of people at will. Plate tectonics just worked on too massive a scale to allow for precision.

“Don’t you see?” Tia asked.

“Steelheart turned the bank’s main room—walls, much of the ceiling, oor—to steel. Then Faultline softened the ground beneath it and let it sink. I began thinking, there might be a chance that—”

“—that it would still be there,” I said softly. We turned a corner in the catacombs, and then Tia stepped forward, moving some pieces of junk to reveal a tunnel. I had enough practice by now to tell it was probably tensor-made. The tensors, unless controlled precisely, always created circular tunnels, while the Diggers had created square or rectangular corridors.

This tunnel burrowed through the steel at a slight decline. Cody walked up, shining his light in.

“Well, I guess now we know what you and Abraham have been working on for the last few weeks, Tia.”

“We had to try several di erent avenues of approach,” Tia explained. “I wasn’t certain how deep the bank room ended up sinking, or even if it retained structural integrity.”

“But it did?” I asked, suddenly feeling a strange numbness.

“It did!” Tia said. “It’s amazing.

Come see.” She led the way down the tunnel, which was tall enough to walk through, though Abraham would have to stoop.

I hesitated. The others waited for me to follow, so I forced myself forward, joining Tia. The rest of them came along behind, our mobiles providing the only light.

No, wait. There was light up ahead; I could barely make it out, around the shadows of Tia’s slender gure. We eventually reached the end of the tunnel, and I stepped into a memory.

Tia had set up a few lights in corners and on tables, but they did little more than give a ghostly cast to the large, dark chamber. The room had settled at an angle, with the oor sloping downward. The skewed perspective only enhanced the surreal sensation of this place.

I froze in the mouth of the tunnel. The room was as I remembered it, shockingly well preserved. Towering pillars—now made of steel—and scattered desks, counters, rubble. I could still make out the tile mosaic on the oor, though only its shape. Instead of marble and stone it was now all a uniform shade of silver broken by ridges and bumps.

There was almost no dust, though some motes dodged lazily in the air, creating little halos around the white lanterns Tia had set up.

Realizing that I was still standing in the mouth of the tunnel, I stepped down into the room. Oh sparks …, I thought, my chest constricting. I found my hands gripping my ri e, though I knew I was in no danger. The memories were coming back in a flood.

“In

retrospect,”

Tia

was

explaining—I listened with only half an ear—“I shouldn’t have been surprised to

nd it so well

preserved.

Faultline’s

powers

created a kind of cushion of earth as the room sank, and Steelheart turned almost all of that earth to metal. The other rooms in the building were destroyed in his assault on the bank, and they broke o as the structure sank. But this one, and the attached vault, were ironically preserved by Steelheart’s own powers.”

By coincidence we’d entered through the front of the bank.

There had been wide, beautiful glass doors here; those had been destroyed in the gun re and energy blasts. Steel rubble and some steel bones from Deathpoint’s victims littered the ground to both sides. As I stepped forward I followed the path Steelheart had taken into the building.

Those are the counters, I thought, looking directly ahead. The ones where the tel ers worked. One section had been destroyed; as a child I’d crawled through that gap before making my way to the vault. The ceiling nearby was broken and misshapen, but the vault itself had been steel before Steelheart’s intervention. Now that I thought about it, that might have helped preserve its contents, because of how his transfersion abilities worked.

“Most of the rubble is from where the ceiling fell in,” Tia said from behind, her voice echoing in the vast chamber. “Abraham and I cleaned as much out as we could. A large amount of dirt had tumbled through the broken wall and ceiling, lling one part of the chamber over by the vault. We used the tensors on that pile, then made a hole in the corner of the oor—it opens into a pocket of space underneath the building— and shoved the dust in there.”

I moved down three steps to the lower section of the oor. Here, in the center of the room, was where Steelheart had faced Deathpoint.

These people are mine.… By instinct, I turned to the left.

Huddling beside the pillar I found the body of the woman whose child had been killed in her arms. I shivered. She was now a statue made of steel. When had she died?

How? I didn’t remember. A stray bullet, maybe? She wouldn’t have been turned to steel unless she’d already been dead.