Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(73)

I sni ed. “If the Epics are an example of what we’d do with power, then it’s better if we never get any.”

She fell silent. A few moments later I heard another odd sound.

Whistling.

I turned and was surprised to see Cody walking down the corridor.

He was alone, and on foot, which meant he’d left the industrial scooter—which had pulled the crates of supplies—in the hangar.

He had his gun over his shoulder and wore his baseball cap embroidered with the supposed coat of arms of his Scottish clan. He tipped the cap to us.

“So … we having a party?” he asked. He checked his mobile. “Is it time for tea?”

“Tea?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you drink tea.”

“I usually have some sh sticks and a bag of potato chips,” Cody said. “It’s a British thing. Y’all are Yanks and wouldn’t understand.”

Something seemed o about that statement, but I didn’t know enough to call him on it.

“So why the dour expressions?”

Cody asked, hopping up beside us on the crates. “You two look like a pair of coon hunters on a rainy day.”

Wow, I thought. Why can’t I come up with metaphors like that?

“Prof and I got into an argument,” Megan said with a sigh.

“Again? I thought you two were past that. What was it about this time?”

“Nothing I want to talk about.”

“Fair enough, fair enough.” Cody got out his long hunter’s knife and began trimming his ngernails.

“Nightwielder’s been out in the city. People are reporting him all over, passing through walls, looking in on dens of miscreants and lesser Epics. It has everyone on edge.”

“That’s good,” I said. “It means Steelheart is taking the threat seriously.”

“Maybe,” Cody said. “Maybe. He ain’t said anything about the challenge we left him yet, and Nightwielder is checking in on a lot of regular folks. Steelheart might suspect that someone’s trying to blow smoke up his kilt.”

“Maybe

we

should

hit

Nightwielder,” I said. “We know his weakness now.”

“Might be a good idea,” Cody said, shing a long, slender device out of his hip pack. He tossed it to me.“What’s this?”

“UV ashlight,” he said. “I managed to nd a place that sold them—or, well, bulbs anyway, which I put in the ashlights and xed us up a few. Best to be ready in case Nightwielder surprises us.”

“Do you think he’ll come here?” I asked.

“He’ll start in on the steel catacombs eventually,” Cody said.

“Maybe he’s started already.

Having a defensible base means nothing if Nightwielder just decides to phase through the walls and strangle us in our sleep.”

Cheery thoughts. I shivered.

“At least we can ght him now,”

Cody said, shing out another ashlight for Megan. “But I think we’re poorly prepared. We still don’t know what Steelheart’s weakness is. What if he does challenge Limelight?”

“Tia will nd the answer,” I said.

“She has a lot of leads in discovering what was in that bank vault.”

“And Fire ght?” Cody said. “We haven’t even started planning how to deal with him.”

Firefight, the other of Steelheart’s High Epic bodyguards. Megan looked at me, obviously curious as to what I’d say next.

“Fire ght won’t be a problem,” I said.

“So you said before, when you pitched this whole thing to us. But you ain’t said why yet.”

“I’ve talked it over with Tia,” I said. “Fire ght’s not what you think he is.” I was reasonably con dent about that. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Cody raised an eyebrow but followed as I crawled back up the tunnel. Prof already knew what my notes said, though I wasn’t certain he believed. I knew he was planning a meeting to talk about Fire ght and Nightwielder, but I also knew that he was waiting on Tia before moving too far ahead in the plan. If she didn’t come up with the answer to how to kill Steelheart, nothing else would matter.

I didn’t want to think about that.

Giving up now because we didn’t know his weakness … it would be like nding out that you’d drawn lots for dessert at the Factory and been only one number o . Only it didn’t matter, because Pete already snuck in to steal the dessert, so nobody was going to get any anyway—not even Pete, because it turns out that there had never been any dessert in the rst place. Well, something

like

that.

That

metaphor’s a work in progress.

At the top of the tunnel I led Cody to the box where we kept my notes. I ipped through them for a few minutes, noting that Megan had followed us up. She had an unreadable expression on her face.

I grabbed the folder on Fire ght and brought it over to the desk, spreading out some pictures. “What do you know about Firefight?”

“Fire Epic,” Cody said, pointing at a photo. It showed a person made of ames, the heat so intense the air around him warped. No photo could capture the details of Fire ght’s features, as they were composed of solid ames. In fact, each photo I pulled out showed him glowing so brightly that it distorted the picture.