Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(33)

“I knew he was watching us,” I said, “but I hadn’t realized that the cameras were so … extensive.”

“Fortunately,” Tia said, “we’ve found some ways to in uence what the network sees and hears. So don’t worry about Steelheart spying on us.”

I still felt uncomfortable, but it wasn’t worth thinking on at the moment. I stepped up to the edge of the roof, looking down at the street below. A few cars passed, and the imager relayed the sounds of their driving. I reached forward and placed my hand on the wall of the room—seemingly touching something invisible in midair. This was going to be very disorienting.

Unlike the tensors, room imagers I’d heard of—people paid good money to visit imager lms. My conversation with Cody left me thinking. Had we learned how to do things like this from Epics with illusion powers?

“I—” I began.

“No,” Megan said. “If he has to convince me, then I’m driving this conversation.” She stepped up beside me.

“But—”

“Go ahead, Megan,” Prof said.

I grumbled to myself and stepped back to where I didn’t feel I was on the verge of a multistory plummet.

“It’s simple,” Megan said.

“There’s one enormous problem in facing Steelheart.”

“One?” Cody asked, leaning back against the wall. It made him look like he was leaning against open air. “Let’s see: incredible strength, can shoot deadly blasts of energy from his hands, can transform anything nonliving around him into steel, can command the winds and y with perfect control … oh, and he’s utterly impervious to bullets, edged weapons,

re,

radiation,

blunt

trauma,

su ocation, and explosions. That’s like … three things, lass.” He held up four fingers.

Megan rolled her eyes. “All true,”

she said, then turned back to me.

“But none of that is even the rst problem.”

“Finding him is the

rst

problem,” Prof said softly. He’d set out a folding chair, Tia as well, and the two were sitting in the center of the imaged rooftop. “Steelheart is paranoid. He makes certain nobody knows where he is.”

“Exactly,” Megan said, raising her hands and using a thumbs-out gesture to control the imager. We zoomed through the city, the buildings a blur beneath us.

I wobbled, my stomach ip—

opping. I reached for the wall, but I wasn’t certain where it was, and stumbled to the side until I found it. Abruptly we halted, hanging in midair, looking at Steelheart’s palace.

It was a dark fortress of anodized steel that rose from the edge of the city, built upon the portion of the lake that had been transformed to steel. It spread out in either direction, a long line of dark metal with

towers,

girders,

and

walkways. Like some mash-up of an old Victorian manor, a medieval castle, and an oil rig. Violent red lights shone from deep within the various recesses, and smoke billowed from chimneys, black against a black sky.

“They say he intentionally built the place to be confusing,” Megan said. “There are hundreds of chambers, and he sleeps in a di erent one each night, eats in a di erent one for each meal.

Supposedly even the sta doesn’t know where he’ll be.” She turned to me, hostile. “You’ll never nd him.

That’s the first problem.”

I swayed, still feeling as if I were standing in midair, though none of the others seemed to be having trouble. “Could we …,” I asked nauseously, looking back at Abraham.

He chuckled, making some

gestures and pulling us back to the top of a nearby building. There was a small chimney on it, and as we “landed” the chimney squished at, becoming two-dimensional on the oor. This wasn’t a hologram— so far as I knew, nobody had mimicked that level of illusion power with technology. It was just a very advanced use of six screens and some 3-D imaging.

“Right,” I said, feeling steadier.

“Anyway,

that would be a problem.”

“Except?” Prof asked.

“Except we don’t need to nd Steelheart,” I said. “He’ll come to us.”“He rarely comes out in public anymore,” Megan said. “And when he does, it’s erratic. How in Calamity’s res are you going to —”“Faultline,” I said. The Epic who had made the earth swallow the bank on that terrible day when my father had been killed, and who had later challenged Steelheart.

“David has a point,” Abraham said. “Steelheart did come out of hiding to ght her when she tried to take Newcago.”

“And when Ides Hatred came here to challenge him,” I said.

“Steelheart met the challenge personally.”

“As I recall,” Prof said, “they destroyed an entire city block in that conflict.”

“Sounds like quite the party,”

Cody noted.

“Yes,” I said. I had pictures of that fight.

“So you’re saying we need to convince a powerful Epic to come to Newcago and challenge him,”

Megan said, her voice at. “Then we’ll know where he’s going to be.

Sounds easy.”