Steelheart (The Reckoners #1)(78)

He stood up to, and killed, Deathpoint—an Epic who had been slaughtering wantonly. If, in doing so, he let Steelheart live … well, Steelheart hadn’t done terrible things at that point. Your father couldn’t know the future. You can’t be so frightened of what might happen that you are unwilling to act.”

I stared into my father’s dead eyes, and I found myself nodding.

“That’s the answer,” I whispered.

“It’s the answer to what you and Megan were arguing about.”

“It isn’t her answer,” Prof said.

“But it’s mine. And maybe yours too.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze, then went to join the rest of the Reckoners, who were standing near the vault.

I’d never expected to see my father’s face again; I’d left that day feeling like a coward, seeing him mouth the plea for me to run and escape. I’d lived ten years with a single dominating emotion: the need for vengeance. The need to prove I was not a coward.

Now, here he was. Looking into those steel eyes, I knew my father wouldn’t care about vengeance.

But he’d kill Steelheart all the same if he had the chance, to stop the murders. Because sometimes, you need to help the heroes along.

I stood up. Somehow I knew, in that moment, that the bank vault and its contents were a false lead.

That hadn’t been the source of Steelheart’s weakness. It had been my father, or something about him.

I left the corpse for the moment, joining the others. “… very careful as we open the vault boxes,” Tia was saying. “We don’t want to destroy what might be inside.”

“I don’t think it will work,” I said, drawing all of their eyes. “I don’t think the vault contents are to blame.”

“You said Steelheart looked at the vault after the rocket blew it open,” Tia said. “And his agents worked very hard to obtain and hide any lists of what was in here.”

“I don’t think he knew how he got hurt,” I said. “A lot of Epics don’t know their weaknesses at rst. He quietly had his people gather those records and analyze them so he could try to gure it out.”

“So maybe he found the answer there,” Cody said with a shrug.

I raised an eyebrow. “If he’d found out this vault contained something

that

made

him

vulnerable, do you think this place would still be here?”

The others grew silent. No, it wouldn’t still be there. If that had been the case, Steelheart would have

burrowed

down

and

destroyed the place, no matter the di culty in doing so. I was increasingly certain that it wasn’t an object that had made him weak; it was something about the situation.

Tia’s face looked dark; she probably wished I’d mentioned this before she spent days excavating. I couldn’t help it, though, since nobody had told me what she was doing.

“Well,” Prof said. “We’re going to search this vault. David’s theory has merit, but so does the theory that something in here weakened him.”

“Will we even be able to nd anything?”

Cody

asked.

“Everything’s been turned to steel.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to recognize much if it’s all fused together.”

“Some things might have

survived in their original form,”

Megan said. “In fact, it’s likely that they did. Steelheart’s transfersion powers are insulated by metal.”

“They’re what?” Cody asked.

“Insulated by metal,” I repeated.

“He exerts a kind of … ripple of transfersion that travels through and changes nonmetal substances like sound travels through air or waves move through a pool of water. If the wave hits metal— particularly iron or steel—it stops.

He can a ect other kinds of metal, but the wave moves more slowly.

Steel stops it entirely.”

“So these safe-deposit boxes …,”

Cody said, stepping into the vault.

“Might have insulated their contents,”

Megan

nished,

following him in. “Some of it will have been transformed—the wave that created the transfersion was enormously powerful. I think we might

nd something, though,

particularly since the vault itself was metal and would work as a primary insulator.” She glanced over her shoulder and caught me looking at her. “What?” she demanded.

“Nerd,” I said.

Uncharacteristically, she blushed furiously. “I pay attention to Steelheart. I wanted to be familiar with his powers, since we were coming into the city.”

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,”

I said lightly, stepping into the vault and raising my tensor. “I just pointed it out.”

Never has getting glared at felt so good.

Prof chuckled. “All right,” he said. “Cody, Abraham, David, vaporize the fronts of the safe-deposit boxes but don’t destroy the contents. Tia, Megan, and I will start pulling them out and going through them for anything that looks interesting. Let’s get to work; this is going to take a while.…”