Warning! Spoilers for The Reckoners Trilogy are UNMARKED
Jax, like so many others, lost family and friends to the Epics, those superpowered psychopaths who have brought the world to its knees. And like many, he chose to join the Reckoners, the only people who seem to be doing anything to fight back.
After seven years in the Coop, the Texas Reckoner training facility, Jax is finally given a mission: Bring down Lux, a mobile flying city ruled by the Epic Lifeforce, which travels around the state of Texas and maintains a prosperous life for its ruler and his loyal subjects by raiding and pillaging cities on the ground.
This book provides examples of:
- Artificial Limbs: Herschel has a prosthetic leg. He and his teammates make a game of them trying to guess how he lost it.
- Bread and Circuses: Lux is a genuinely great place to live, with a standard of living even better than pre-Calamity middle-class. You just have to ignore the fact that the city is murdering countless people to make it happen.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: All four epics on Lux despise each other, but each of them is too crucial to the survival of Lux's set-up for any of the others to kill. One of Lifeforce's long term goals is to research a method of power replication that will allow him to give the others the boot. This ultimately backfires when Lifeforce 'thinks' he's cracked a method of copying his subordinate's powers and kills Cloudbreaker when she attempts to rebel; it turns out that he can copy Wingflare or Cloudbreaker, but not both at once.
- Chekhov's Gun: Or even a tank. An Abrams tank that Jax uses mostly as an additonal workbench in his lab in the Coop suddenly makes appearance in one of the final chapters of the story.
- Enemy Within: Lifeforce anthropomorphizes Calamity's corruption as a demon in his belly, constantly straining at its chains and urging him to murder or destroy. He keeps it mostly under control, and multiple people point out that he is surprisingly reasonable for a High Epic. At the end of the novel, it's revealed that the demon isn't just a metaphor in Lifeforce's mind; he has somehow passed it onto Paige, even after Calamity has left and the corruption is gone. It calls itself Deathrise, and has control over Paige from the inside.
- Fake Weakness: Wingflare claims her weakness is her allergy to pine nuts. Jax quickly calls her out on lying. His first guess at her weakness—broken bones—is wrong, but he does manage to determine her real weakness: People refusing to play games with her. She had fragile bones growing up, and her mother refused to let her play any games that might lead to her getting hurt.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Jax and Paige are self-taught experts in motivator technology.
- Gravity Master: Paige’s parents were killed by an Epic with this ability.
- Heroic BSoD: Jax has a brief meltdown after being told that Paige has been killed.
- Human Resources: Lifeforce has the power (which he gives to his soldiers) to steal life from others to heal himself. Lux is honeycombed with tunnels that are filled with captives in tubes, just waiting to be used.
- I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure:
- Zeff used this to motivate Jax and Paige during their training, as he recognizes that both are too stubbornly heroic for their own good. Whenever one makes a mistake, the other takes the penalty.
- Lifeforce tries to do something similar, but he doesn't understand Jax like Zeff. It works great to motivate Jax to escape and find another solution, not to quiet down and work with him.
- Kryptonite Factor: As always, every Epic has a weakness that shuts down their powers. However, the team doesn't worry too much about Lifeforce's weakness, since Jax has invented a weapon to erase him from existence and bypass his healing. That fails, and Jax stumbles on the weakness by accident: Silver, like the silver ring Lifeforce bought for his fiance and that she declared not good enough.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: Asher/Languish guesses that Herschel lost his leg in a situation like this. He’s right. Herschel was trapped in a snowdrift turned to steel after witnessing Steelheart’s ascension to Epichood, and he cut off his own leg to escape.
- Load-Bearing Boss: Wingflare is one in the most literal sense, as her telekinesis is what's holding the titular city two miles in the air. If she dies, Lux will fall from the sky with a force comparable to a dinosaur-killer asteroid. As such, a key part of the Reckoner's plan for taking her down is the use of a motivator fabrial to soft-land Lux once she's no longer holding it up.
- Loophole Abuse: Lifeforce has to be touching someone to steal their life. He injects their blood into his veins, and he is considered to be always touching them.
- Man of Wealth and Taste: Lifeforce considers himself to be one. He lives in a golden palace, he claims to admire and appreciate fine art and when attacked by Jax, he mostly bemoans the loss of his elegant shirt. The facade disappears once the beast inside him wakes.
- Mind over Matter: Wingflare is an obscenely powerful telekinetic, capable of levitating the entire city of Lux, her own collection of stolen capitol buildings, an army of Ravens, herself, and to protect herself from projectiles. Oh, and she does most of this so easily that the city doesn't notice any problems even when she goes to sleep.
- Mobile City: Lux, a flying city kept aloft by the telekinetic Epic Wingflare and protected from dangerous high-altitude conditions by the weather-controlling Epic Cloudbreaker.
- Moral Myopia: Lifeforce rants constantly about the beauty of Lux, how wonderful the city is for its people, and how the Reckoners are ruining the one shining light in the wasteland. He completely ignores all the people he has to murder to make it work, and his raids on the surface.
- No Ontological Inertia: Any wounds Lifeforce heals come back when his powers are withdrawn, neutralized by Languish, or negated by his weakness. He can also choose to cause this at will. This is why the Raven initiation involves killing them before healing them, and why Paige always knew that killing Lifeforce would kill her as well.
- Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: Wingflare proposes a more complicated variant of this as a game for Jax and Paige. She presents them with three plates of licorice: One is laced with pine-nut extract (which is harmless to Jax or Paige, but which Wingflare is fatally allergic to and unable to regenerate from due to her weakness), one is laced with ricin (which will kill Jax or Paige, but which Wingflare can recover from with her gifted healing), and one is just licorice. Jax has to choose who will eat from which plate: does he give Wingflare the licorice with the pine-nuts and kill her at the cost of forcing himself or Paige to eat the licorice with the ricin and die of that, or does he give Wingflare the licorice with the ricin and let all three live? As Jax figures out, it's all a trick. All three plates are just licorice, and Wingflare isn't allergic to pine nuts.
- Power Misidentification: The Reckoners spend the first half of the book thinking that Lifeforce's powerset is healing, both for himself and for others within his range. As it turns out, Lifeforce's actual power is injury manipulation: he can transfer his injuries (or grant others the power to transfer their injuries) to anyone he is currently touching. The distinction, though subtle, has several important implications.
- Power Nullifier: The Epic Languish has the ability to suppress the powers of other Epics. He uses this power to defend Lux from any Epic challengers.
- Reverse Polarity: Early on in the story, Jax and Paige discover how to reverse the polarity of motivator fabrials. A reversed motivator always produces an effect that is in some way the opposite of that motivator's normal effect, but (as Jax points out) what the "opposite" of a given effect will be is not always obvious.
- Southern-Fried Genius: Wade, a highly skilled hacker with the strongest Texas accent on the (all-Texan) team.
- Super-Empowering: Lifeforce is a Gifter who grants his immortality to all his Ravens, as well as his Epics. Normally Gifters can't give their powers to other Epics, but he's been experimenting with grafting powers, so this is presumably part of that.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Lifeforce injects countless blood samples from everyone he can get his hands on, with no regard to blood type or even the health of the donors. He mentions that he's "died" a bunch of times from various blood diseases, it just doesn't matter because he heals.
- Team Mom: Abigail’s leadership style is encouraging and caring while still being authoritative. She is understanding and gentle with team members who make mistakes and (in sharp contrast to her partner Zeff) discourages overly dangerous or strenuous training exercises.
- Training from Hell: Jax’s training under Zeff at the Coop included balancing on a post in the sun for hours at a time, learning to stay perfectly still while mice and spiders crawled over him, and being denied meals as punishment when he made mistakes.
- Token Good Teammate: Languish's power is only situationally useful, which allows him to avoid going *as* insane as the rest of Lifeforce's crew. He's much kinder than any of the other Epics on Lux, and he mainly sticks around because he's rightfully terrified of what Lifeforce will do to him if he perceives him as having betrayed him. That, and Lifeforce is keeping his former friend and crush Vera captive.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: Lifeforce claims that his aim is for Lux to be a perfect society, where citizens can have plentiful food and clothing, entertainment, and safety. However, to survive, Lux has to plunder cities on the ground, not to mention enslaved people whose only purpose is to die to keep Lifeforce and his Ravens alive.
- Wax On, Wax Off: When Jax was first brought to the Coop, he expected to be trained in stuff like guns, swordfighting, and explosives. Instead, Zeph started him off with things like standing on a post for hours at a time or remaining totally still while mice and spiders crawled all over him. Eventually, Jax snaps and demands to know what this has to do with being a Reckoner, at which point Zeph explains that ninety-nine percent of an assassin's job is not guns or explosives, but stuff like waiting in place for three days for your target to wander into your trap, never giving a sign of your presence.
- We Used to Be Friends: Languish and Lifeforce were best friends who worked retail together pre-Calamity, and used their respective powers to act as each other's bodyguards prior to founding Lux. By the time the book starts, Languish has become completely disillusioned with Lifeforce's Visionary Villain routine and resents his former friend for keeping their mutual friend Vera imprisoned in a torture dungeon over rejecting Lifeforce's proposal pre-Calamity.
