Reckoners 01 - Steelheart

the
girders
could be an illusion. Would a distant blast have really knocked those down?
    What if that was Firefight, though, wearing Megan’s face so that if I touched her I’d feel something real? I raised my father’s gun and sighted on her bloodied face. I hesitated, heart pounding in my ears. Surely Nightwielder could hear that pounding. It was all that I could hear. What would I do to get to Steelheart? Shoot Megan?
    She’s not real. She can’t be real
.
    But what if she is?
    Heartbeats, like thunder.
    My breath, held.
    Sweat on my brow.
    I made my decision and leaped from the foxhole, bringing up the rifle in my left hand—light shining forward—and the handgun in my right. I let loose with both.
    On Nightwielder, not Megan.
    He spun toward me as the light hit him, eyes wide, and the bullets ripped through him. He opened his mouth in horror and blood sprayed out his back. His
solid
back. He dropped, turning translucent again the moment he got out of the direct line of my flashlight. He hit the ground and began to sink into it.
    He only sank halfway. He froze there, mouth open, chest bleeding.He solidified slowly—it was almost like the view from a camera coming into focus—half sunken in the steel floor.
    I heard a click and turned. Megan stood there, a gun in her hand. A handgun, a P226 just like she preferred to carry. The other version of her, the one trapped by rubble, vanished in a heartbeat. So did the girders.
    “I never did like him,” Megan said indifferently, glancing toward Nightwielder’s corpse. “You just did me a favor. Plausible deniability and all of that.”
    I looked into her eyes. I knew those eyes. I
did
. I didn’t understand how it was happening, but it was her.
    Never did like him …
    “Calamity,” I whispered. “
You’re
Firefight, aren’t you? You always were.”
    She said nothing, though her eyes flickered down toward my weapons—the rifle still held at my hip, the handgun in my other hand. Her eye twitched.
    “Firefight wasn’t male,” I said. “He … she was a woman.” I felt my eyes go wide. “That day in the elevator shaft, when the guards almost caught us … they didn’t see anything in the shaft. You made an illusion.”
    She was still staring at my guns.
    “And then, when we were on the cycles,” I said. “You created an illusion of Abraham riding with us to distract the people following, to keep them from seeing the real him flee to safety. That’s what I saw behind us after he split off.”
    Why was she looking at my guns?
    “But the dowser,” I said. “It tested you, and it said you weren’t an Epic. No … wait. Illusions. You could just make it display anything you wanted. Steelheart must have known the Reckoners were coming to town. He sent you to infiltrate. You were the newest of the Reckoners, before me. You never wanted to attack Steelheart. You said you believed in his rule.”
    She licked her lips, then whispered something. She didn’t seem to have been listening to anything I said. “Sparks,” she murmured. “I can’t believe that actually worked.…”
    What?
    “You checkmated him …,” she whispered. “That was amazing.…”
    Checkmated him? Nightwielder? Was that what she talking about? She looked up at me, and I remembered. She was repeating one of our first conversations, following her shooting Fortuity. She’d held a rifle at her hip and a handgun out forward. Just like I had done to gun down Nightwielder. The sight seemed to have triggered something in her.
    “David,”
she said. “
That’s
your name. And I think you’re very aggravating.” She seemed to only just be recalling who I was. What had happened to her memory?
    “Thank you?” I said.
    A blast rocked the stadium and she looked over her shoulder. She still had the gun pointed at me.
    “Whose side are you on, Megan?” I asked.
    “My own,” she said immediately, but then she held her other hand to her head, seeming uncertain.
    “Someone betrayed us to Steelheart,” I said. “Someone warned him we were going to hit Conflux, and someone told him we were hacking the city cameras. Today someone’s been listening in on us, reporting to him what we’ve been doing. It was you.”
    She looked back at me, and didn’t deny it.
    “But you also used your illusions to save Abraham,” I said. “And you killed Fortuity. I can buy that Steelheart wanted us to trust you, so he let you kill off one of his lesser Epics. Fortuity was out of favor anyway.