Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(14)

“Hey!” I said, crawling out after her, bits of safety glass falling from my clothing. I jumped to the ground and dashed to the end of the alleyway, cutting to the side just as the survivors from the explosion started firing again.

She can shoot like a dream and she carries tiny grenades in her top, a bit of my addled mind thought. I think I might be in love.

I heard a low rumbling over the gun re, and an armored truck pulled around the corner ahead, roaring toward Megan. It was huge and green, imposing, with

enormous headlights. And it looked an awful lot like …

“A garbage truck?” I asked, running up to join Megan.

A tough-looking black man rode in the passenger seat. He pushed open the door for Megan. “Who’s that?” the man asked, nodding to me. He spoke with a faint French accent.

“A slontze,” she said, tossing my ri e back to me. “But a useful one.

He knows about us, but I don’t think he’s a threat.”

Not

exactly

a

glowing

recommendation, but good enough.

I smiled as she climbed into the cab, pushing the man to the middle seat.

“Do we leave him?” asked the man with the French accent.

“No,” said the driver. I couldn’t make him out; he was just a shadow, but his voice was solid and resonant. “He comes with us.”

I smiled, eagerly stepping up into the truck. Could the driver be Hardman, the sniper? He’d seen how helpful I’d been. The people inside reluctantly made room for me. Megan slipped into the back seat of the crew cab beside a wiry man wearing a leather camou age jacket and holding a very nice-looking sniper ri e. He was probably Hardman. To his other side was a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length red hair. She wore spectacles and business attire.

The garbage truck pulled away, moving faster than I’d have thought possible. Behind us a group of the thugs came out of the alley, ring on the truck. It didn’t do much good, though we weren’t out of danger quite yet. Overhead I heard the distinctive sound of Enforcement copters. There would probably be a few high-level Epics on the way too.

“Fortuity?” the driver asked. He was an older man, perhaps in his fties, and wore a long, thin black coat. Oddly, he had a pair of goggles tucked into the breast pocket of the coat.

“Dead,” Megan said from behind.

“What went wrong?” the driver asked.

“Hidden power,” she said. “Super re exes. I got him cu ed, but he slipped away.”

“There was also that one,” the guy in the camo jacket—I was pretty sure that was Hardman— said. “He came up in the middle of it all, caused a wee bit of trouble.”

He had a distinctive Southern accent.

“We’ll talk about him later,” the driver said, taking a corner at high speed.

My heart started to beat more quickly, and I glanced out the window, searching the sky for copters. It wouldn’t be long before Enforcement was told what to look for, and the truck was rather conspicuous.

“We should have just shot

Fortuity in the rst place,” said the man with the French accent.

“Derringer to the chest.”

“Wouldn’t

have

worked,

Abraham,” the driver said. “His abilities were too strong—even attraction could only do so much.

We needed to do something

nonlethal rst—trap him, then shoot him. Precogs are tough.”

He had that part right, probably.

Fortuity had possessed a very strong danger sense. Likely the plan had been for Megan to cu him and maybe lock him to the lamppost. Then, when he was partially immobilized, she could have rammed her derringer into his chest and red. If she’d tried that rst, his power might have warned him. It would have depended on how attracted he was to her.

“I wasn’t expecting him to be so strong,” Megan said, sounding disappointed with herself as she pulled on a brown leather jacket and a pair of cargo pants. “I’m sorry, Prof. I shouldn’t have let him get away from me.”

Prof. Something about that name struck me.

“It’s done,” the driver—Prof— said, pulling the garbage truck to a jarring halt. “We ditch the machine. It’s been compromised.”

Prof opened the door and we piled out.

“I—” I began to say, planning to introduce myself. The older man they called Prof, however, shot me a menacing glare over the hood of the garbage truck. I cut myself short, choking on my words.

Standing in the shadows, with his long jacket and that grizzled face, hair peppered with grey, that man looked dangerous.

The Reckoners pulled a few packs of equipment out of the back of the garbage truck, including a massive machine gun that Abraham now toted. They led me down a set of steps into the understreets. From there the team hustled through a set of twists and turns. I did a pretty good job keeping track of where we were going until they led me down a long ight of stairs, several levels deep, into the steel catacombs.

Smart people stayed away from the catacombs. The Diggers had gone mad before the tunnels were nished. The ceiling lights rarely worked, and the square-shaped tunnels through the steel changed size as you progressed.

The team was silent as they continued down the passages, turning up the lights on their mobiles, which most wore strapped to the fronts of their jackets. I’d wondered if the Reckoners would carry mobiles, and the fact that they wore them made me feel better about mine. I mean, everyone knew that the Knighthawk Foundry was neutral, and that mobile