“Assuming Steelheart doesn’t just chase us down and shoot the copter out of the sky,” Prof said.
We fell silent.
“I believe you said I was a downer?” Abraham asked.
“Sorry,” Prof replied. “Just pretend I said something self-righteous about truth instead.”
Abraham smiled.
“It’s a workable plan,” Prof said. “Though we might want to try to set up some kind of decoy explosion, maybe back at his palace, to draw him off. Abraham, I’ll let you handle that. Tia, can you send a message to Steelheart through these networks without being traced?”
“I should be able to,” she replied.
“Well, give him a response from Limelight. Tell him: ‘Be ready on the night of the third day. You’ll know the place when the time comes.’ ”
She nodded.
“Three days?” Abraham said. “Not much time.”
“We really don’t have much we need to prepare,” Prof said. “Besides, anything longer would be too suspicious; he probably expects us to face him tonight. This will have to do, though.”
The Reckoners nodded, and the preparations for our last fight began. I sat back, my anxiety rising. I was finally going to have my chance to face him. Killing him with this plan seemed almost as much a longshot as ever.
But I would finally get my chance.
34
The vibrations shook me to the soul. It seemed that my soul vibrated back. I breathed in, shaping the sound with a thought, then thrust my hand forward and sent the music outward. Music only I could hear, music only I could control.
I opened my eyes. A portion of the tunnel in front of me collapsed into fine, powdery dust. I wore a mask, though Prof continued to assure me the stuff wasn’t as bad to breathe as I thought.
I wore my mobile strapped to my forehead, shining brightly. The small tunnel through the steel was cramped, but I was alone, so I was able to move as much as I needed to.
As always, using the tensor reminded me of Megan and that day when we’d infiltrated the power station. It reminded me of the elevator shaft, where she’d shared with me things it seemed she hadn’t shared with many. I’d asked Abraham if he’d known she was from Portland, and he’d seemed surprised. He said she never spoke about her past.
I scooped the steel dust into a bucket, then hauled it down the tunnel and dumped it. I did that a few more times, then got back to digging with the tensor. The others were hauling the dust the rest of the way out.
I added a few feet to the tunnel, then checked my mobile to see how I was doing. Abraham had set up three others above to create a kind of triangulation system that let me cut this tunnel with precision. I needed to go a bit more to the right, then I needed to angle upward.
Next time I pick a location to ambush a High Epic, I thought, I’m going to choose one that’s closer to established understreet tunnels.
The rest of the team agreed with Abraham that they should wire the field with explosives from below, and they also wanted a few hidden tunnels leading up to the perimeter. I was pretty sure we’d be happy to have those when we faced Steelheart, but building all of it was getting very tiring.
I almost regretted that I’d shown so much talent with the tensor. Almost. It was still pretty awesome to be able to dig through solid steel with just my hands. I couldn’t hack like Tia, scout as well as Cody, or fix machinery like Abraham. This way, at least, I had a place in the team.
Of course, I thought as I vaporized another section of the wall, Prof’s ability makes mine look like a piece of rice. And not even a cooked one. I was basically only useful in this role because he refused to take it. That dampened my satisfaction.
A thought occurred to me. I raised my hand, summoning the tensor’s vibrations. How had Prof done it to make that sword? He’d pounded the wall, hadn’t he? I tried to mimic the motion, pounding my fist against the side of the tunnel and directing the burst of energy in my mind from the tensor.
I didn’t get a sword. I caused several handfuls of dust to stream out of a pocket in the wall, followed by a long lump of steel that looked vaguely like a bulbous carrot.
Well, it’s a start. I guess.
I reached down to pick up the carrot, but caught sight of a light moving up the small tunnel. I quickly kicked the carrot into the pile of dust, then got back to work.
Prof soon moved up behind me. “How’s it going?”
“Another couple of feet,” I said. “Then I can carve out the pocket for the explosives.”
“Good,” Prof said. “Try to make it long and thin. We want to channel the explosion upward, not back down the tunnel here.”
I nodded. The plan was to weaken the “roof” of the pocket, which would lie just below the center of Soldier Field. Then we’d seal the explosives in with some careful welding by Cody, directing the blast the direction we wanted it to go.
“You keep at it,” Prof said. “For now I’ll take care of carting off the dust for you.”
I nodded, grateful for the chance to just spend more time with the tensor. It was Cody’s. He’d given it up for me, as mine was still a ripped, zombie-droopy-eyed mess. I hadn’t asked Prof about the two he carried. It didn’t seem prudent.
We worked in silence for a time, me carving out chunks of steel, Prof carting off the dust. He found my carrot sword and gave me an odd look. I hoped he didn’t see me blush in the faint light.
Eventually my mobile beeped, telling me I was nearing the right depth. I carefully crafted a long hole at shoulder level. Then I reached in and began creating a small “room” to stuff the explosives into.
Prof walked back, carrying his bucket, and saw what I’d done. He checked his mobile, looking up at the ceiling, then rapped softly at the metal with a small hammer. He nodded to himself, though I couldn’t tell any difference in the way it sounded.
“You know,” I said, “I’m pretty sure these tensors defy the laws of physics.”
“What? You mean destroying solid metal with your fingers isn’t normal?”
“More than that,” I said. “I think we get less dust than we should. It always seems to settle down and take up less space than the steel did-but it couldn’t do that unless it was denser than the steel, which it can’t possibly be.”
Prof grunted, filling another bucket.
“Nothing about the Epics makes sense,” I said, pulling a few armfuls of dust out of the hole I was making. “Not even their powers.” I hesitated. “Particularly not their powers.”
“True enough,” Prof said. He continued filling his buckets. “I owe you an apology, son. For how I acted.”
“Tia explained it,” I said quickly. “She said you’ve got some things in your past. Some history with the tensors. It makes sense. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. But it is what happens when I use the tensors. I … well, it’s like Tia said. Things in my past. I’m sorry for how I acted. There was no justification for it, especially considering what you’d just been through.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” I said. “What you did, I mean.” The rest was horrible. I tried not to think about that long march with a dying girl in my arms. A dying girl I didn’t save. I pushed forward. “You were amazing, Prof. You shouldn’t just use the tensors when we face Steelheart. You should use them all the time. Think of what-”
“STOP.”
I froze. The tone of his voice sent a spike of shock down my spine.
Prof breathed in and out deeply, his hands buried in steel dust. He closed his eyes. “Don’t speak like that, son. It doesn’t do me any good. Please.”
“All right,” I said carefully.
“Just … accept my apology, if you are willing.”
“Of course.”
Prof nodded, turning back to his work.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “I won’t mention … you know. Not directly, at least.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“Well, you invented these things. Amazing things. T
he harmsway, the jackets. From what Abraham tells me, you had these devices when you founded the Reckoners.”
“I did.”
“So … why not make us something else? Another kind of weapon, based off the Epics? I mean, you sell knowledge to people like Diamond, and he sells it to scientists who are working to create technology like this. I figure you’ve got to be as good at it as any of them are. Why sell the knowledge and not use it yourself?”
Prof worked in silence for a few minutes, then walked over to help me pull dust out of the hole I was making. “That’s a good question. Have you asked Abraham or Cody?”
I grimaced. “Cody talks about daemons or fairies-which he claims the Irish totally stole from his ancestors. I can’t tell if he’s serious.”
“He’s not,” Prof said. “He just likes to see how people react when he says things like that.”
“Abraham thinks it’s because you don’t have a lab now, like you used to. Without the right equipment, you can’t design new technology.”
“Abraham is a very thoughtful man. What do you think?”
“I think that if you can find the resources to buy or steal explosives, cycles, and even copters when you need them, you could get yourself a lab. There’s got to be another reason.”
Prof dusted off his hands and turned to look at me. “All right. I can see where this is going. You may ask one question about my past.” He said it as if it were a gift, a kind of … penance. He had treated me poorly, in part because of something in his past. The recompense he gave was a piece of that past.
I found myself completely unprepared. What did I want to know? Did I ask how he’d come up with the tensors? Did I ask what it was that made him not want to use them? He seemed to be bracing himself.
I don’t want to drag him through that, I thought. Not if it affects him so profoundly. I wouldn’t want to do that any more than I would have wanted someone to drag me through memories of what had happened to Megan.
I decided to pick something more benign. “What were you?” I asked. “Before Calamity. What was your job?”
Prof seemed taken aback. “That’s your question?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure you want to know?”
I nodded.
“I was a fifth-grade science teacher,” Prof said.
I opened my mouth to laugh at the joke, but the tone of his voice made me hesitate.
“Really?” I finally asked.
“Really. An Epic destroyed the school. It … it was still in session.” He stared at the wall, emotion bleeding from his face. He was putting a mask up.
And here I thought it had been an innocent question. “But the tensors,” I said. “The harmsway. You worked at a lab at some point, right?”
“No,” he said. “The tensors and the harmsway don’t belong to me. The others just assume I invented them. I didn’t.”
That revelation stunned me.
Prof turned away to gather up his buckets. “The kids at the school called me Prof too. It always sticks, though I’m not a professor-I didn’t even go to graduate school. I only ended up teaching science by accident. It was the teaching itself that I loved. At least, I loved it back when I thought it would be enough to change things.”
He walked off down the tunnel, leaving me to wonder.
• • •
“That’s it. Y’all can turn around now.”
I turned, adjusting the pack I was toting on my back. Cody, balanced on a ladder above me, lifted the welding mask from his face and wiped his brow with the hand not holding the torch. It was a few hours after I had carved out the pocket under the field. Cody and I had spent those hours carving smaller tunnels and holes throughout the stadium, with Cody spot welding where support was needed.
Our most recent project was making the sniper’s nest that would be my post at the beginning of the battle. It was at the front of the third level of seats on the west side of the stadium, at about the fifty-yard line, overhanging the top of the first deck. We didn’t want it to be visible from above, so I’d used the tensor to carve away a space under the floor, leaving only an inch of metal on top, except for two feet right near the front for my head and shoulders to poke out so I could aim a rifle through a hole in the low wall at the front of the deck.
Cody reached up from his perch on the ladder and jiggled the metal framework he had just welded to the bottom of the area I had hollowed out. He nodded, apparently satisfied it would support me when I lay in wait there in the sniper’s nest. The floor of that section of seating was too thin to hollow out a hole deep enough to hide in; the framework was our solution to that problem.
“Where to next?” I asked as Cody climbed down the ladder. “How about we do that escape hole farther up in the third deck?”
Cody slung his welding gear over his shoulder and cracked some kinks out of his back. “Abraham called to say he’s going to take care of the UV floodlights now,” he said. “He finished packing the explosives under the field a while ago, so it’s time for me to go weld down there. Y’all can handle the next hole on your own-but I’ll help you carry the ladder there. Good job on these holes so far, lad.”
“So you’re back to lad?” I asked. “What happened to mate?”
“I realized something,” Cody said, collapsing the ladder and tilting the top to one side. “My Australian ancestors?”
“Yeah?” I lifted the lower end of the ladder and followed him as he walked from the first deck of seats into the stadium innards.
“They came from Scotland originally. So if I want to be really authentic, I need to be able to speak Australian with a Scottish accent.”
We kept walking through the pitch-black space beneath the stands that was kind of like a large, curved hallway-I think it was called a concourse. The planned lower end for the next escape hole was in one of the restrooms down the hall. “An Australian-Scottish-Tennessean accent, eh?” I said. “You practicing it?”
“Hell no,” Cody said. “I’m not crazy, lad. Just a little eccentric.”
I smiled, then turned my head to look in the direction of the field. “We’re really going to try this, aren’t we?”
“We’d better. I bet Abraham twenty bucks that we’d win.”
“I just … It’s hard to believe. I’ve spent ten years planning for this day, Cody. Over half my life. Now it’s here. It’s nothing like what I’d pictured, but it’s here.”
“You should feel proud,” Cody said. “The Reckoners have been doing what they’ve been doing for over half a decade. No changes, no real surprises, no big risks.” He reached up to scratch his left ear. “I often wondered if we were getting stagnant. Never could gather the arguments to suggest a change. It took someone coming in from the outside to shake us up a wee bit.”
“Attacking Steelheart is just a ‘wee bit’ of a shakeup?”
“Well, it’s not like you’ve gotten us to do something really crazy, like trying to steal Tia’s cola.”
Outside the restroom, we set the ladder down and Cody wandered over to check on some explosives on the opposite wall. We intended to use them as distractions; Abraham was going to blow them when needed. I paused, then pulled out one of my eraser-like blasting caps. “Maybe I should put one of these on them,” I said. “In case we need a secondary person to blow the explosives.”
Cody eyed it, rubbing his chin. He knew what I meant. We’d only need a secondary person to blow the explosives if Abraham fell. I didn’t like thinking about it, but after Megan … Well, we all seemed a whole lot more frail to me now than we once had.
“You know,” Cody said, taking the blasting cap from me, “where I’d really like to have a backup is on the explosives under the field there. Those are the most important ones to detonate; they’re going to cover our escape.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Do you mind if I take this and stick it down there before I weld it closed?” Cody asked.
“No, assuming Prof agrees.”
<
br /> “He likes redundancy,” Cody said, slipping the blasting cap into his pocket. “Just keep that pen-dealy of yours handy. And don’t push it by accident.”
He sauntered back toward the tunnel under the field, and I took the ladder into the restroom to get to work.
I punched my fist out into open air, then ducked as the steel dust fell around me. So that’s how he did it, I thought, flexing my fingers. I hadn’t figured out the sword trick, but I was getting good at punching and vaporizing things in front of my fist. It had to do with crafting the tensor’s sound waves so that they followed my hand in motion, creating kind of an … envelope around it.
Done right, the wave would course along with my fist. Kind of like smoke might follow your hand if you punch through it. I smiled, shaking my hand. I’d finally figured it out. Good thing too. My knuckles were feeling pretty sore.
I finished off the hole with a more mundane tensor blast, reaching up from the top of my ladder to sculpt the hole. Through it I could see a pure black sky. Someday I’d like to see the sun again, I thought. The only thing up there was blackness. Blackness and Calamity, burning in the distance directly above, like a terrible red eye.
I climbed up off the ladder and out into the upper third deck. I had a sudden, surreal flash of memory. This was near where I’d sat the one time I’d come to this stadium. My father had scrimped and saved to buy us the tickets. I couldn’t remember which team we’d played, but I could remember the taste of the hot dog my father bought. And his cheering, his excitement.
I crouched down among the seats, keeping low just in case. Steelheart’s spy drones were probably out of commission now that the city was without power, but he might have people scouting the city and looking for Limelight. It would be wise to remain out of sight as much as possible.
Fishing a rope out of my pack, I tied it around the leg of one of the steel seats, then sneaked back to the hole and down the ladder, returning to the bathroom below the second deck. Leaving the rope hanging for a quicker escape than the ladder would allow, I stowed the ladder and my empty pack in one of the stalls and walked out toward the seats.
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