Steelheart characters

Appears from the start

An eighteen-year-old from Newcago, the steel city that used to be Chicago. As a child he was in a bank with his father when the Epic Steelheart arrived, and he is the only surviving witness to the one time Steelheart was wounded. Since then he has worked in the city's weapons factory and filled notebook after notebook with everything he can learn about Epics: their powers, their habits, and above all the specific weakness each one hides. He is a careful researcher, an indifferent shot and famously bad at metaphors. His single objective is to reach the Reckoners, the only people who kill Epics, and persuade them to go after Steelheart.

Appears from the start

The High Epic who rules Newcago. He can fly, project bursts of destructive energy and turn inanimate matter to steel, and no weapon anyone has used on him has left a mark. Ten years before the story he transformed the entire city, its buildings, streets and vehicles, into steel and declared himself emperor. Newcago is orderly, lit and fed, and absolute obedience is the price. Every Epic has some hidden weakness that cancels their invulnerability; nobody knows Steelheart's.

Appears from the start

An Epic who reduces living people to ash with a gesture. He appears in the bank in the city's first days, killing casually and without any particular purpose, and he is the first Epic David sees at close range.

Appears from the start

David's father: a stubbornly hopeful man who believed that among all the people gaining powers there would eventually be a protector, and who bought a handgun expecting one day to help one. He takes David to the bank on the morning Steelheart arrives there.

Appears from the start

An Epic in Steelheart's service who can see a few moments into his own future, which makes ambushing him close to impossible. The Reckoners' operation against him is where David first encounters the team.

First appears in chapter 2

The High Epic who keeps Newcago under an unbroken artificial night that has not lifted in ten years. He appears as a shadowy figure that solid objects pass straight through, and serves Steelheart as one of his chief lieutenants.

Also known as Jonathan Phaedrus

First appears in chapter 4

The leader of the Reckoners cell working in Newcago: a large, grey-bearded former schoolteacher who plans every operation in exhaustive detail and dislikes improvisation on principle. He supplies the team's unusual equipment, including devices that crumble solid matter to dust and a kit that closes wounds in minutes, and refuses to discuss where any of it comes from. He treats Epics as uniformly dangerous and the Reckoners' work as necessary rather than heroic.

First appears in chapter 4

A young Reckoner close to David's age, blonde, extremely capable in the field and consistently cold toward him. She handles the team's undercover work and resents both David's arrival and his enthusiasm for it.

First appears in chapter 5

The Reckoners' intelligence and research specialist: calm, precise, keeper of the team's files on Epic sightings and powers, and drinker of an improbable quantity of cola. She is the person closest to Prof and the one most likely to argue with him.

First appears in chapter 5

A Reckoner sniper from Tennessee who insists at length on his Scottish ancestry and narrates elaborate tall tales while on watch. Loud and cheerful out of the field and entirely reliable in it.

First appears in chapter 5

The team's weapons and demolitions specialist, a calm French-Canadian who handles the heavy guns. He belongs to the Faithful, who believe an Epic will one day appear who uses their powers to protect people rather than to rule, a belief the rest of the team treats with polite scepticism.

First appears in chapter 20

An Epic whose ability to generate and direct energy quietly powers the whole of Newcago, and who is kept out of public view. The Reckoners identify him as the point at which Steelheart's control of the city is most vulnerable.