Nova grunted. “I’ll think about it,” she said, shoving open the door. “And don’t call me that.”
Leroy only smiled.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ADRIAN TOSSED HIS FEET onto the coffee table, a bowl of cereal cradled in his lap. It was his standard fare when his dads worked late, which happened more often than not, and after the day they’d had, he didn’t expect them home anytime soon.
Grabbing the remote, he turned on the late-night news. Shaky footage of the parade appeared on the TV screen—a video of the Puppeteer’s harlequin balloon drifting through the streets of downtown Gatlon while crowds screamed and stampeded to try to get away. The voice from an off-screen reporter was quoting the statistics. The numbers had grown since he heard them that afternoon and now they were saying there were sixty-eight casualties, with fifty-one civilians still receiving treatment at Gatlon City Hospital and two Renegades, including Council member Tamaya Rae, being treated for injuries at Renegade Headquarters. Luckily, there were no fatalities. The perpetrator, Anarchist Winston Pratt, known to most as the Puppeteer, was in custody …
Adrian turned his gaze away from the footage and settled his hand on the sketchbook beside him. He opened the cover and used his thumb to flip through the pages until he found his most recent batch of drawings, those he’d doodled hastily as soon as he got home, while the idea was still fresh.
Crunching his way through a mouthful of cereal, he lifted the sketchbook to eye level, inspecting the drawings.
Concepts for a new tattoo.
He hadn’t planned on giving himself any more, but then, he’d thought every tattoo would be the final one, and less than two months into this experiment he already had three inked into his skin.
But he’d learned a lot about his abilities up on those rooftops, facing off against Nightmare. Or, he’d learned a lot about the Sentinel’s abilities.
There was potential there. Great potential—he knew it. The armor had worked precisely how he’d hoped it would, offering both flexibility and protection, even if Nightmare had managed to find a vulnerability in the suit.
And the springs on his feet had worked like a charm. The first time he’d launched himself from street level up to a ledge three stories high, he’d felt almost as if he’d taken flight.
But the fire … the fire was problematic.
It had seemed like a great idea when he’d done it. Had, in fact, been the first tattoo he’d given himself, before he’d even known for sure that it would work. Before he could be certain that the gift of his drawings could transfer into a permanent tattoo and imbue his body with a brand-new, entirely real superpower.
Everyone wanted fire manipulation. It was a classic, and it came with so many applications, from lighting birthday candles to torching an entire warehouse stocked with illegal narcotics.
Not that he’d ever stumbled across such a warehouse, but if he did, he liked knowing he could do something about it.
But fire was also unpredictable. It was a force of nature—wild and erratic.
What Adrian needed was something clean and orderly. Something that could be systematically aimed and fired, even by him, who was admittedly not the best shot in the Renegades. He needed something that would be a lot less likely to strike one of his own teammates.
His first thought had been some sort of gun appendage built into the armor, but then he’d remembered a girl who had come to be trained at headquarters a few years back—a prodigy who could shoot narrow beams of energy out of a node in the center of her forehead, hitting any target with percussive force. People had mostly referred to them as lasers, but that’s not what they were. Adrian wasn’t actually sure what they were, but he did know that they hit with enough force to stun an opponent and sometimes even knock them unconscious, without leaving any of the evidence a bullet might have left. No shell, no casing, no open wound.
It was perfect.
The trick was for him to figure out how to incorporate such an ability into the Sentinel’s armor … and what sort of tattoo would convey such a power. He often found it ironic that he could make absolutely anything come to life when he drew it, if only he could first convince himself that it would make sense in reality. He had to be strategic. Practical.
Springs on the soles of his feet. A swirl of flame on his forearm. A zipper on his sternum that could be opened to release the armored suit.
And now, a laser diode, of sorts. A long, narrow cylinder, this time on his right forearm, that would emerge on the Sentinel’s gauntlet, already charged and ready to fire …
He set down the sketchbook and crunched through another spoonful of cereal.
“… and yes, the Puppeteer was caught in the end, but I just don’t think it’s acceptable that so many bystanders were harmed before he was stopped.”
Adrian’s eyes skipped back to the television, where two men and two women, all finely coiffed, were sitting around a table inside the news studio.
“Exactly!” said one of the men, leaning over the table and pointing an accusatory finger toward the woman who had spoken, even though he seemed to be in agreement with her. “It’s not acceptable. This was a heavily attended public event. Where was the security? And why did it take the Council so long to respond to this threat? It’s their job to protect us, but today they seemed more concerned with bad publicity than they did with stopping this madman.”
“Now, in the Council’s defense,” said the second man, raising both hands in a calming gesture, “we do have witness reports telling us that within the first few minutes of the attack, Captain Chromium managed to rescue seven young children from the Puppeteer’s control, while the rest of the Council and a number of off-duty Renegades ushered literally hundreds of civilians to safety inside nearby buildings and parking garages.” He lifted a silencing hand as the other man tried to interrupt. “And this aligns with what the Council has been telling us from the day the Renegades became an official entity—that they will always focus on protecting innocent lives first, and engaging in an attack second. They followed their protocols today, and I have to admire them for it. It couldn’t have been easy, especially when the Puppeteer was making himself such an obvious target.”
Adrian lifted the bowl to his mouth, slurping at the pink-tinged milk.
“Yes,” said one of the women, “but how many injuries could have been prevented if they’d just stopped him?”
The man shrugged. “And what if one of those civilians they took to safety had ended up dead? We’ll never know.”
“What we do know,” said the first woman, “is that—casualties aside—Winston Pratt probably would not have been captured today at all if it wasn’t for that would-be assassin tossing him out of his own balloon. Can we please talk about the elephant in the room here?” She spread her arms wide, her face contorted in disbelief. “Nightmare! Who is she? Where did she come from? We don’t know the first thing about her, except she almost assassinated Captain Chromium today, she took down Thunderbird, and she eluded a Renegade patrol unit in a one-on-three fight. Isn’t anyone concerned about this?”
“I am,” said the man beside her. “But what concerns me even more than this solo attack—if it was a solo attack—is that, for all we know, this could be a sign that more prodigies are going to start coming out of the woodwork, bent on destruction and mayhem all over again. It shows that the Renegades may not have the city under control like they want us to think they do. That new, villainous prodigies are still going under the radar. And if that’s the case, I’d like to hear from the Council about what they plan on doing about these threats.”
“Hopefully,” said the woman beside him, “they have a better plan going forward than they had today!”
Scowling, Adrian grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. He leaned back into the sofa cushions and took another bite of cereal. In the sudden silence, the crunching became absurdly loud, the demolition of small artificially flavored rice puffs filling the entire living room.
&nb
sp; It was uncanny how much the news anchor’s questions mirrored those that had been revolving through his head all day.
Nightmare. The great mystery. And they didn’t even know the greatest mystery of all, those words that he could not quiet.
One cannot be brave who has no fear.
Swinging his feet down to the carpet, Adrian set the bowl on the coffee table and grabbed his sketchbook.
The wooden floorboards of the house creaked beneath him as he padded into the main foyer and up the oak staircase to the second floor. It was an old, stately home. Had, in fact, been the mayor’s mansion, back when Gatlon City had a mayor. The mayor and his family and even some of the staff had been murdered in this very home in the early days of the Age of Anarchy. When he was younger, Adrian had been convinced their ghosts still haunted the upper floors, which was why he begged to be able to convert the basement into his bedroom. Though he no longer believed the spirits of the dead were still hanging around, he often felt a chill of apprehension when he went up to the second floor, where the master suite and a series of guest rooms branched off a central hallway. He rarely had cause to come up here, though. The basement, the kitchen, the living room—those were his domains.
But what he needed to see now was up here, in his dads’ shared home office.
Reaching the landing, he flicked on the hallway light, illuminating the dark wooden doors, the intricate crown moldings, the faded oriental carpets that ran the length of the narrow corridor.
The house had been in terrible shape when his dads decided to move in. It had been a prime target for looters during the Age of Anarchy, but Simon felt it had too much history to be allowed to succumb to eternal abandonment. It was a symbol of a different time—a peaceful, civilized time, when society had order and rules and leadership.
So they’d all moved in and had been restoring it ever since. Adrian could hardly remember how bad it had been back in those early days, when he’d been mortified at the thought of actually living there, with its piles of trash and cigarette butts, stripped wires left dangling from punctured holes in the walls, thick cobwebs and scrawled graffiti on every surface. But before long, his dads’ dream became his, too, and by now he’d done almost as much to restore the place as they had. At least his skills lent themselves easily to the project. When a shutter was broken or a balustrade destroyed, it was easier for Adrian to simply draw them a new one rather than track down an artisan who could mimic the work. The result was that Adrian felt as much pride in the house as he could imagine any of them did, even if he still found himself avoiding the rooms where the murders had taken place.
With his sketchbook tucked beneath one arm, he placed his fingers against the door to the home office and nudged it open. The hinges creaked. The hall light cut through the thick shadows. Reaching into the room, Adrian pressed the top button of the vintage press-button light switch, one of the few that was still original to the home. The chandelier brightened, five small amber lampshades making the room glow in subtle shades of gold.
The desk at the room’s center was a mess, the bookshelves behind it equally chaotic. Organizing the room never seemed to become a priority when there was a city to run, and any free time his dads did stumble into was almost always dedicated toward working on the house.
Adrian ignored the random stacks of paper, files and folders, mail and magazines and newspapers. He went straight to the bookshelf, where a series of dusty photo albums were sandwiched between an outdated geographical dictionary and a broken radio.
He settled his hand on the spine of an album covered in a maroon slipcover and pulled it from the shelf. The rest of the albums tipped inward, thudding against one another as Adrian sat down on the large area rug. Stacking the album on top of his sketchbook, he flipped past the first few pages. Though it had been years since he’d looked through this album, he still had most of the photos memorized.
A grainy image of his third birthday party, where he sat in the midst of a pile of boxes and shredded newspapers that had been used as wrapping paper, his mom and Kasumi grinning in the background.
A photo of him balanced on his mother’s hip as she stood in front of a collection of bags and boxes overflowing with canned vegetables and boxes of dried pasta. The rest of the original Renegades were all there, too, except for Simon, who had probably taken the photo. Adrian recalled the story of that day, how they had successfully liberated all that food from a warehouse run by one of the villain gangs, who were selling it to hungry civilians at egregious prices.
His mother stopped appearing in the photos after that, and with just a few page turns later, Adrian himself went from a chubby-faced toddler to a skinny eight-year-old kid. His dads standing behind him, hands on his shoulders, grinning proudly. He looked happy that day, though it was hard to recall just how he had felt. It was the day they’d officially adopted him, more than a year after his mother’s death. The wounds hadn’t healed, but something about completing the paperwork had left him feeling like he was no longer floating away, untethered to any family, detached from any sense of belonging. At the time, it had felt immeasurably important.
In hindsight, Adrian recognized that there really weren’t any official adoptions. Evander Wade was the one who drafted up the adoption certificate, as there was no legislation in place for that sort of thing. His dads were making up the laws as they went. But maybe they sensed Adrian’s anxiety over not having a family to call his own, even if they had taken him in from the start. Maybe they’d known what a few signatures and an official-looking stamp would mean to him.
Adrian flipped past the photos from the adoption celebration, past even that official-looking certificate tucked between pages. A couple more birthdays, a few holiday celebrations, though photographic records became a lesser priority as Adrian aged, and there was virtually nothing from his teen years, which was fine by him. He wasn’t really looking for a stroll down memory lane, anyway.
Finally, he found what he was looking for. A shred of newsprint folded up tight and tucked into a plastic page protector near the back of the album. He worked the page out from the sheet. The paper had the faintest hint of yellow to it, which struck him as peculiar. Certainly it hadn’t been that long ago—long enough for age to take a toll on the scraps that had been saved. There were days when it felt like it had just happened.
Though, there were also days when it felt an entire lifetime ago.
Adrian nudged up his glasses and unfolded the square of paper, cut from the Gatlon Gazette—the only local newspaper that had continued to operate throughout the Age of Anarchy, though there had been years in which journalists were pressured by the gangs to report on some activities in a not-entirely-honest manner.
Nevertheless, this article Adrian had every reason to believe was full of truth.
A black-and-white photo showed a picture of her in all her superhero glory—her white-booted feet hovering over the ground, her golden cape whipping in the air, her familiar bright smile as she gave the cameraman an A-OK sign. All in such drastic contrast to the headline at the top, printed in harsh block letters.
LADY INDOMITABLE FOUND DEAD, KILLER UNKNOWN
Adrian had not expected the words to affect him so strongly all these years later. He had read this article so many times, he didn’t think it would still hurt to see it. He had come to terms with his mother’s death. He had adjusted to life without her. He had accepted that whatever villain had murdered her had almost certainly been killed on the Day of Triumph, and he would have to be content with that small bit of justice, even if the mystery of her death was never solved.
But that had all been before Nightmare had taunted him with those words. That phrase that meant so much more to him than to anyone else. Had she known?
But … how could she have?
Adrian scanned the columns of the article until he found the paragraph he was looking for.
An autopsy revealed broken bones and a fractured skull consistent with having fallen seven stories
to the concrete alleyway, and the coroner has stated that this is without doubt the cause of death. Though no additional signs of foul play on the body or at the crime scene have been found, the death being a potential suicide was quickly ruled out due to one piece of evidence: a plain white note card tucked into Lady Indomitable’s belt and printed with the ambiguous phrase: “One cannot be brave who has no fear.”
Adrian peeled his attention from the page and stared blankly at the back of the desk.
Someone had killed her. Almost certainly a villain, someone who had managed to circumvent her own superpower—because how does one fall seven stories to their death when they can fly?
He shut his eyes, and though it had been years since he’d had nightmares about his mother’s body, his imagination supplied the vision all over again. Broken bones. Fractured skull. Though this article didn’t mention it, he had heard rumors that when she’d been found, her eyes had been open, her face contorted in a silent scream.
A chill swept down his back.
One cannot be brave who has no fear …
What did it mean that Nightmare knew those words? She herself seemed far too young to have been involved with the murder, but was it possible the murderer was still alive? Did Nightmare know who it was? Was she in league with them?
But if she had really joined the Anarchists, then didn’t it make sense that his mother’s murderer might be one of them?
He shoved the album onto the floor and stood, rubbing the back of his head. His feet began to pace, his eyes unseeing as he padded back and forth across the office.
He knew the Council was sending someone to search the Anarchists’ stronghold for any signs that they were working with Nightmare, or that more of their members were involved in the attack on the parade. Maybe to arrest Cyanide as an accomplice. A patrol unit would be investigating them tonight, maybe even at this very moment. An “experienced team.”
But he was the only one who knew about this connection to a cold case. The ten-year-old murder of Lady Indomitable. An original Renegade. His mother.
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