Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(67)

“Those cells were charged by Con ux,” Cody said in my ear.

“They’re more powerful by magnitudes than anything we could make or buy. If they won’t work, nothing will. Grab as many as you can carry.”

They might not have been as heavy as I’d thought, but they were still kind of bulky. We took the rest of the equipment out of Megan’s pack, then retrieved the smaller sack we had stu ed in the bottom.

I managed to stu four of the cells in the pack while Megan transferred the rest of our equipment—a

few

explosive

charges, some rope, and some ammunition—to her smaller sack.

There were also some lab coats for disguises. I left these out—I suspected we’d need them to escape.

“How are Prof and Abraham?” I asked.

“On their way out,” Cody said.

“And our extraction?” I asked.

“Prof said we shouldn’t go back down the elevator shaft.”

“You have your lab coats?” Cody asked.

“Sure,” Megan said. “But if we go in the hallways, they might record our faces.”

“That’s a risk we’ll have to take,”

Cody said. “First explosion is a go in two minutes.”

We threw on the lab coats, and I squatted down and let Megan help me put on the backpack with the power cells. It was heavy, but I could still move reasonably well.

Megan threw on her lab coat. It looked good on her, but pretty much anything would. She swung her own lighter pack over her shoulder, then eyed my rifle.

“It can be disassembled,” I explained as I pulled the stock from the ri e, then popped out the magazine and removed the cartridge from the chamber. I slid on the safety just in case, then stuffed the pieces in her sack.

The coats were embroidered with Station Seven’s logo, and we both had fake security badges to go with them. The disguises would never have worked getting us in— security was far too tight—but in a moment of chaos, they should get us out.

The building shook with an ominous

rumble—explosion

number one. That was mostly to prompt an evacuation rather than to inflict any real damage.

“Go!” Cody yelled in our ears.

I vaporized the lock on the door to the room and the two of us burst out into the hallway. People were peeking out of doors—it seemed to be a busy oor, even at night.

Some of the people were cleaning sta in blue overalls, but others were technicians in lab coats.

“Explosion!” I did my best to seem

panicked.

“Someone’s

attacking the building!”

The chaos started immediately, and we were soon swept up into the crowd

eeing from the

building. About thirty seconds later, Cody triggered the second explosion, on an upper oor. The ground trembled and people in the hallway around us screamed, glancing at the ceiling. Some of the dozen or so people clutched small computers or briefcases.

There wasn’t actually anything to be frightened of. These initial explosions had been set in unpopulated

locations

that

wouldn’t bring down the building.

There would be four of those early blasts, and they’d been placed to shepherd all the civilians out of the structure. Then the real explosions could begin.

We made a hasty ight through hallways and down stairwells, being careful to keep our heads down. Something felt odd about the place, and as we ran I realized what it was. The building was clean. The oors, the walls, the rooms … too clean. It had been too dark for me to notice it when we were making our way in, but in the light, it seemed stark to me. The understreets weren’t ever this clean. It didn’t feel right for everything to be so scrubbed, so neat.

As we ran it became clear that the place was big enough that any one employee wouldn’t know everyone else who worked there, and though our intelligence said that the security o cers had the faces of all employees in portfolios that they checked against security feeds, no one challenged us.

Most of the security o cers were running with the growing crowd, just as worried about the explosions as everyone else, and that dampened my fears even more.

As a group we ooded down the last ight of stairs and burst out into the lobby. “What’s going on?”

a security o cer yelled. He was standing by the exit with his gun out and aimed. “Did anyone see anything?”

“An

Epic!”

Megan

said

breathlessly. “Wearing green. I saw him walking through the building throwing out blasts of energy!”

The third explosion went o , shaking the building. It was followed by a series of smaller explosions. Other groups of people ooded out of adjacent stairwells and

from

the

ground-oor

hallways.

The guard cursed, then did the smart thing. He ran too. He wouldn’t be expected to face an Epic—indeed, he could get in trouble for doing it, even if that Epic

was

working

against

Steelheart. Ordinary men left Epics alone, end of story. In the Fractured States that was a law greater than any other.

We burst out of the building and onto the grounds. I glanced back to see trails of smoke rising from the enormous structure. Even as I watched, another series of small explosions went o in an upper row of windows, each one ashing green. Prof and Abraham hadn’t just planted bombs, they’d planted a light show.