Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(30)

The room I stepped into was unexpectedly large. Big enough for the team to have laid out their equipment and several bedrolls without it feeling cramped. There was a large table made of metal that grew right out of the oor, as well as benches at the walls and stools around the table.

They carved it there, I realized, looking at the sculpted walls. They made this room with the tensors.

Carved furniture right into it.

It was impressive. I gawked as I stepped back and let Abraham help Megan out of the tunnel. The chamber had two doorways into other rooms that looked smaller. It was lit by lanterns, and there were cords on the oor—taped in place and out of the way—leading down another small tunnel.

“You have electricity,” I said.

“How did you get electricity?”

“Tapped into an old subway line,” Cody said, crawling out of the tunnel. “One that was half completed, then forgotten about.

T h e nature of this place is that even Steelheart doesn’t know all of its nooks and dead ends.”

“Just more proof the Diggers were mad,” Abraham said. “They wired things in strange ways.

We’ve found rooms that were sealed completely but had lights left on inside, shining for years by themselves. Repaire des fant?mes.”

“Megan tells me,” Prof said, appearing from one of the other rooms, “that you recovered the information, but that your means were … unconventional.” The aging but sturdy man still wore his black lab coat.

“Hell

yeah!”

Cody

said,

shouldering his rifle.

Prof snorted. “Well, let’s see what you recovered before I decide if I should yell at you or not.” He reached for the backpack in Megan’s hand.

“Actually,” I said, stepping toward it, “I can—”

“You’ll sit down, son,” Prof said, “while I have a look at this. All of it. Then we’ll talk.”

His voice was calm, but I got the message. I pensively sat down beside the steel table as the others gathered around the pack and began rifling through my life.





12

“WOW,” Cody said. “Honestly, lad, I thought you were exaggerating. But y’all really are a full-blown supergeek, aren’t you?”

I blushed, still sitting on my stool. They had opened the folders I’d packed and spread out the contents, then moved on to my notebooks, passing them around and studying them. Cody had eventually lost interest and moved over to sit by me, his back to the table and elbows hitched up on it behind him.

“I had a job to do,” I said. “I decided to do it well.”

“This is impressive,” Tia said. She sat cross-legged on the oor. She had changed to jeans but was still wearing her blouse and blazer, and her short red hair was still perfectly styled. Tia held up one of my notebooks. “It’s rudimentary in organization,” she said, “and doesn’t use standard classi cations.

But it is exhaustive.”

“There

are

standard

classifications?” I asked.

“Several di erent systems,” she said. “It looks like you’ve got a few of the terms here that cross between the systems, like High Epic—though I personally prefer the tier system. In other places, what you’ve come up with is interesting. I do like some of your terminology,

like prime invincibility.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I felt a little embarrassed. Of course there were ways of classifying Epics. I hadn’t the education—or the resources—to learn such things, so I’d made up my own.

It was surprising how easy it had been. There were outliers, of course —bizarre Epics with powers that didn’t t any of the classi cations —but a surprising number of the others showed similarities. There were always individual quirks, like the glimmering of Refractionary’s illusions. The core abilities, however, were often very similar.

“Explain this to me,” Tia said, holding up a different notebook.

Hesitantly, I slid off my stool and joined her on the oor. She was pointing toward a notation I’d made at the bottom of the entry for a

particular





Epic

named

Strongtower.

“It’s my Steelheart mark,” I said.

“Strongtower shows an ability like Steelheart has. I watch Epics like that carefully. If they get killed, or they manifest a limitation to their powers, I want to be aware of them.”

Tia nodded. “Why didn’t you lump the mental illusionists with the photon-manipulators?”

“I like to make groupings based on limitations,” I said, getting out my index and ipping to a speci c page for her. Epics with illusion powers fell into two groups. Some created actual changes in the way light behaved, crafting illusions with photons themselves. Others made illusions by a ecting the brains of the people around them.

They really created hallucinations, not true illusions.

“See,” I said, pointing. “The mental illusionists tend to be limited in similar ways to other mentalists—like

those

with

hypnotism powers, or mind-control e ects. Illusionists that can alter light work di erently. They are far more similar to the electricity-manipulation Epics.”