I knelt beside the pillar. A mound of silvery rubble covered everything in front of me, but I had my tensor. The others continued talking, but I stopped paying attention, and their words became nothing more than a low hum in the background. I put on my tensor, then reached forward and—very carefully—began vaporizing bits of rubble.
It didn’t take long; the bulk of it was made of one large piece of ceiling panel. I destroyed it, then froze.
There he was.
My father lay slumped against the pillar, head to the side. The bullet wound was frozen in the steel folds of his shirt. His eyes were still open. He looked like a statue, cast with incredible detail—even the pores of the skin were clear.
I stared, unable to move, unable to even lower my arm. After ten years, the familiar face was almost crushing to me. I didn’t have any pictures of him or my mother; I hadn’t dared go home after surviving, though Steelheart couldn’t have known who I was. I’d been paranoid and traumatized.
Seeing his face brought that all back to me. He looked so … normal. Normal in a way that hadn’t existed for years; normal in a way that the world didn’t deserve any longer.
I wrapped my arms around myself, but I kept looking at my father’s face. I couldn’t turn away.
“David?” Prof’s voice. He knelt down beside me.
“My father …,” I whispered. “He died fighting back, but he also died protecting Steelheart. And now here I am, trying to kill the thing he rescued. It’s funny, eh?”
Prof didn’t respond.
“In a way,” I said, “this is all his fault. Deathpoint was going to kill Steelheart from behind.”
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Prof said. “Deathpoint didn’t know how powerful Steelheart was. Nobody knew back then.”
“I guess that’s true. But my father was a fool. He couldn’t believe that Steelheart was evil.”
“Your father believed the best about people,” Prof said. “You could call that foolish, but I’d never call it a fault. He was a hero, son. 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 first. He quietly had his people gather those records and analyze them so he could try to figure 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 difficulty 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 find 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 affect 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 finished, following him in. “Some of it will have been transformed—the wave that created the transfersion was enormously powerful. I think we might find 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.…”
26
“WELL,” Cody said, looking over the heap of gemstones and jewelry, “if this achieved nothing else, it at least made me rich. That’s a failure I can live with.”
Tia snorted, picking through the jewelry. We four, including Prof, sat around a large desk in one of the cubicles. Megan and Abraham were on guard duty, watching the tunnel into the bank chamber.
There was a hallowed feeling to the room—like I somehow had to show respect—and I think the others must have sensed it too. They spoke in low, muted voices. All except Cody. He tried to lean back on his chair as he held up a large ruby, but—of course—the steel chair legs were fused to the steel floor.