When her papà began to fall behind on their requests, he went to the Renegades and begged for protection. Captain Chromium himself had promised that no harm would come to him or his family, but only so long as he stopped making weapons for their enemies.
And so her dad did stop. And the Roaches, in retaliation, sent a hitman after him and his family.
Only, the Renegades hadn’t kept their word. Captain Chromium hadn’t kept his word. They were not there to protect David’s family when they needed their protection the most.
When Ace finished telling this story, he handed Nova a cup of cold milk and two vanilla wafer cookies taken from plastic packaging that crinkled deafeningly loud. Nova, six years old and so small her feet didn’t touch the stone floor as she sat on the bench, ate the cookies and drank the milk without comment. She remembered not crying. She remembered that in that moment, she had not felt sad.
She had felt only anger.
Blinding, breathless rage.
As he stood up to leave so she could come to terms with the truth of her family’s deaths, Ace had said simply, practically—“The Roaches were forty-seven members strong. Last night, I killed them all.”
That was the one and only time they spoke of her family’s deaths. What was done was done. The gang had killed Nova’s family. Ace had killed the gang. Justice was served.
Except for the Renegades, who had failed to keep their promise.
Two months after that, Nova’s life was overturned again.
On the Day of Triumph, Nova had been told to stay in the tombs. She sat in the darkness, listening to the screams and thunder of the battle, feeling the rumble and crash of the earth and walls around her. It went on for hours. Ages.
Honey found her first. Or her bees did, and they led Honey to her. They escaped into a secret passageway, small and damp, smelling of soil and musty air, lit only by the small flashlight Nova had brought with her into the tombs. Honey’s distress kept Nova from talking for a long time, but when the passage finally spilled them into an abandoned subway station, Nova dared to ask what had happened.
She received only three words in reply.
The Renegades won.
* * *
“HERE WE ARE.”
Nova jolted from her thoughts. Goose bumps had erupted across her skin as her memory repeated that day.
She sat up straighter and peered through the windshield. Leroy had parked on the shoulder of a quiet, narrow road just off the shore of Harrow Bay. Rocky outcroppings and foaming waves caught the light of a hesitant moon, and she could see a handful of docks stretching into the water. Most of them were bare, but a few had small fishing boats moored alongside them, their sides thunking hollowly against the pier.
She turned in her seat. To her right was a tall cliff studded with scraggly plants that clung desperately to its side and a burial ground of white driftwood at its base. Behind them, the dark road curved inland and disappeared.
No houses. No apartments. No warehouses. No buildings at all.
“Charming,” she said.
Leroy killed the engine. He was turned away from her, gazing out toward the water. “I don’t much care for the ocean,” he said solemnly. “Seeing it always fills me with regret.”
“Regret?” Nova studied the choppy waves. “Why?”
“Because if I had learned to sail, then I could leave this place. In a boat, one could go anywhere.”
“You have a car,” said Nova, glancing sideways at him. “You could drive away if you wanted to.”
“It’s not the same.” Leroy turned—not to face her, but to stare at his own crooked fingers on the steering wheel. “There’s not a civilized place in this whole world where I wouldn’t be recognized, and the others too. Our reputations would precede us wherever we went. So long as anarchy is synonymous with chaos and despair, the Anarchists will always be synonymous with villains.” He cocked his head to the side and this time he did look at her, though it was so dark in the car she could only catch faint spots of moonlight reflected in his eyes. “But not you, Nightmare. No one knows who you are. You could leave us, you know. You could go anywhere.”
She scoffed. “Where would I go?”
“Anywhere you like. That’s the beauty of freedom.”
He smiled, but it was a sad look, one full of that regret he’d mentioned.
Nova swallowed. Freedom.
She knew he was right. The thought had, in fact, crossed her mind a thousand times. No one knew what Nova Artino looked like, or even that she was still alive. No one knew that she had been raised by the Anarchists. No one knew that she was Nightmare.
“What are you saying?”
“We are here because you say you want to infiltrate the Renegades, so someday we might destroy them,” said Leroy. “And no one would be happier than I to see that come to fruition. But I cannot in good conscience go through with this without giving you an alternative. After tonight, you will have a new name, a new identity. You could leave Gatlon City. Or … you could stay. Get a job and an apartment. Start a real life, like everyone else is trying to do. You would have plenty of company if you made that choice.”
Nova shifted in the seat, crossing her arms over her chest. “And what? Leave you guys to defeat the Renegades without me? In your dreams.”
Leroy shook his head. “There will be no defeating them without you and what you might be able to learn. What you might be able to change.” His voice quieted. “I have little hope of ever seeing the freedom we once fought for. Killed for. But you did not choose this life, Nova. Not like we did. You could still choose differently.”
Jaw clenching, Nova stared at one of the boats. Swaying back and forth, a ceaseless, steady rocking.
“The Anarchists are my family,” she said. “The only family I have left. I won’t be free until you are. I won’t rest until the Renegades are punished. For how they treat you. For how they betrayed my family. For what they did to Ace.”
Leroy fixed her with a studious look. “And if revenge does not bring you joy?”
“It’s not joy I’m looking for.”
Reaching around the steering column, Leroy switched off the headlights and pulled the key from the ignition. “Then let’s see if we can’t find what you are looking for.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HER THOUGHTS SPUN as she followed Leroy along the dark road’s narrow shoulder. Their conversation in the car was still tumbling through her thoughts. Was she doing this for them? For Ace or Evie or herself?
Or was she doing it for all of humanity? All the people who were too blind to see how they would be better off without the Council. Without the Renegades.
Maybe, she told herself, it can be both.
She wasn’t sure when she’d started to think of the Anarchists as her family. Certainly not during those initial months when she had loved only Ace, and thought only of her parents and her sister and herself. Though they had all occupied the same spaces within the cathedral, she had seen the Anarchists more like phantoms passing her in the nave or arguing in the cloister. There had been more of them then. Many died during the battle, some that she never even knew the names of. And by and large, they all ignored the foundling child Ace had dragged back with him. They were not mean to her—Ace would not have tolerated that—but they didn’t go out of their way to be kind, either.
Once they were relocated to the tunnels, though, that began to change. There were so few of them left, all suffering the same defeat. It bonded them tighter than they had been before, even to little Nova. Suddenly, the remaining Anarchists took an interest in her.
Leroy learned about her interest in science and started to teach her chemistry, allowing her to play with his lab equipment and test out different concoctions. Ingrid trained her how to fight, with bare hands and whatever weaponry they could scrounge or barter for. Honey, afraid they were going to end up raising another savage like Winston, made it her purpose to guide Nova into being a lady … or at least the sort of lady wh
o knew how to mix a proper martini and apply eyeliner without stabbing herself with the pencil. As for Winston, for a while he became Nova’s only playmate, telling her fairy tales with shadow puppets and teaching her the fine art of hide-and-seek, where their new home offered endless hiding places.
And Phobia was … well. Phobia was Phobia.
He had never warmed to her, but then, he never seemed to warm to anyone else, either, so Nova learned even at a young age not to take his indifference personally.
Leroy approached a small, weary-looking dock. Nova could see the water foaming beneath them as they made their way over the rickety boards, damp with ocean spray. The air smelled of salt and seaweed and dead creatures washed up on the shore.
A single boat was moored at the end of the dock—twenty feet long, with nearly the full length of it taken up by an enclosed cabin. Its sides were speckled with barnacles and its flat roof was loaded with wooden travel trunks and a single rusty bicycle. A plastic chair sat on the small deck at its bow beside an empty wine bottle and a withered tomato plant sticking up from a repurposed milk jug.
There was no light coming from inside the boat and Nova wondered if they were expected.
Leroy reached over the edge of the dock and knocked on one of the dark windows.
From inside the boat, Nova heard the sounds of footsteps and the creak of old timbers. The same window that Leroy had knocked at thunked open a few inches, letting a warm yellow glow spill out onto the dock, and Nova realized that no light had gotten through before because the windows were all painted opaque black.
A pistol jutted out from the open window. “Who’s out there?”
“It’s only me, Millie,” said Leroy. “We’ve come for those papers.”
The gun shifted to the side and a woman’s eye peered out through the opening, small and surrounded by wrinkles. She scrutinized them both. “Where was I the first time I ever met Leroy Flinn?” she said, her voice dripping with suspicion.
Leroy did not hesitate. “Rummaging through the supplies in the art department at the university. Searching for precision knives and laminate, if I’m not mistaken.”
The woman grumbled under her breath and slammed the window shut.
Nova glanced at Leroy from the corner of her eye.
“She had a run-in with a face-changer a while back,” he whispered. “Almost put her out of business. She’s been a bit paranoid about it ever since.”
The door at the end of the cabin swung open and the light from inside cut across the water. “Come in, then,” the woman said. “Quick now, before anyone sees you.”
Nova glanced around. There was nothing but cliffs and empty road and the ocean in every direction. Leroy’s lone yellow car was the only sign of civilization in sight.
Leroy stepped over the rail onto the deck and slipped into the cabin of the houseboat. Nova followed, shutting the door behind her as she looked around.
The cabin was narrow and crammed so full of stuff that Leroy had to turn sideways to fit down the aisle, following the woman as she made her way to the back of the boat. Open shelving covered the walls, sporting everything from cleaning supplies to cans of food to more wine. A wood stove in the far corner was the source of the light and an encompassing warmth that tipped just slightly toward oppressive. To her left, the wall was lined with more shelving units and storage crates of all shapes and sizes, many stacked with dishes, pottery, and piles of neatly folded towels. To her right, an assembly of old printers and computer monitors, scanners and an office copy machine, a laminator, boxes of blue latex gloves, and stacks and stacks and stacks of paper of all different colors and thicknesses. A maze of string crisscrossed overhead, down the full length of the cabin, hung with drying laundry and a variety of paper documents.
“Millie,” said Leroy, pausing behind the woman as she set the gun down on top of a filing cabinet and started to remove a few sheets of paper from one of the lines, “I’d like you to meet Nova. Ace’s niece.”
“I know who she is,” said Millie, thunking the edges of the papers together to level them, then pulling an empty folder from a desk drawer and sliding them inside. “Welcome aboard, Nova McLain.”
“Um. Artino, actually.”
Millie peered around Leroy and held the packet toward her. “Not anymore.”
Taking the packet, Nova flipped open the folder and looked at the top sheet. It was a birth certificate, as simple and unembellished as those created during the Age of Anarchy tended to be. With few doctors’ offices left to perform deliveries, many women gave birth at home with the help of a midwife, who may or may not have had professional training, who may or may not have cared to complete any sort of paperwork afterward, especially when there were no governmental departments expecting such paperwork to be submitted. Nova knew that both she and Evie had been delivered at home, but as far as she knew, her parents had never gotten a certificate for either of them.
This document, though, looked as professional as the ones that came from the era, stamped and signed by a one Janice Kendall, midwife. It included signatures from her imaginary parents, Robert and Joy McLain. It included her birthday, and it actually was her birthday—May 27—perhaps so Nova would be less likely to give the false date should anyone ask for it.
And, printed in neat handwriting in the center of the page, was her name.
Almost.
Nova Jean McLain
“Do I look Scottish?”
“Your father was Scottish,” said Millie, opening the bed of a scanner and pulling out a sheet of paper. “You take after your mother.”
Nova opened her mouth to refute—her dad was Italian, her mom Filipino, and she liked to think she was a strong mix of them both—but she stopped herself. What did it matter what the world thought her name was, or where she got her blue eyes or her black hair? What did it matter if anyone thought her parents were Robert and Joy … whoever they were.
She couldn’t walk into the Renegades trials with the name Artino, and Nova Jean McLain was as good a secret identity as any.
She lifted the birth certificate. The next page was the required application to participate in the Renegade trials. It had been filled out using an old typewriter.
Name: Nova Jean McLain
Alias: Insomnia
Prodigious Ability (Superpower): Requires no sleep or rest; maintains full wakefulness at all times without any decline in aptitude from sleep deprivation.
“Insomnia,” Nova muttered. It wasn’t exactly the sort of name that would strike fear in the hearts of her enemies, but it wasn’t bad, either. She wondered if Leroy had come up with it, or Millie.
“There’s a spot on the last page for your signature,” said Millie, holding out a ballpoint pen. “Don’t sign the wrong name, now.”
Nova took the pen without looking up. Outside, the waves drummed a steady, crashing melody against the side of the boat. “I live on East Ninety-Fourth and Wallowridge?” She frowned. “Are there even habitable homes in that area?”
“Would you rather I put ‘subway tunnel off the defunct Mission Street station’?” said Millie.
Nova glanced up. “I just don’t want anyone to come investigating me and find out the residence in my paperwork is actually some convenience store that burned down twenty years ago or something.”
Millie cast an annoyed look at Leroy, who returned a placating smile.
“I am not an amateur,” she spat. Bending over a nearby desk, she started to sort the scattered pens, sticky notes, and razor blades into a collection of tin cans. “Should anyone come looking for you, they will find a two-bedroom row house that has been owned outright by Peter McLain for more than forty years.”
“Who’s Peter McLain?”
“Your uncle,” she said. “On page three, you’ll find a two-hundred-word personal essay on how grateful you are that he took you in after your parents’ untimely deaths.”
“Okay, but who is he really?”
“No one. A figment of my imagina
tion. A phantom, existing only in paperwork. Don’t worry—all the paperwork will match up. As far as anyone knows, the house really is owned and occupied by Mr. McLain, and now his niece.”
Nova glanced at Leroy, but he was watching Millie. “The application required personal references, I believe? What did you find for those?”
“A grade-school teacher who thought Nova was a delightful student to have in her class,” said Millie, “and an old boss who saw it as a horrible loss when Nova chose to leave his employment, but who is thrilled to see her pursuing her dream of becoming a Renegade.”
“An old boss?” Nova flipped to the next page, where she saw that Nova Jean McLain had been working at Cosmopolis Amusement Park up until a month ago. “I’m a ride operator? Come on. A chipmunk could do that job.”
“Both references,” continued Millie, as if Nova hadn’t spoken, “are legitimate sources. True working civilians in this community who have graciously agreed to praise Miss McLain quite highly should they receive further inquiry about her.” Her gaze slipped toward Leroy. “Of course, you’ll be paying them for the honor.”
“Naturally,” said Leroy, looking down at the application. “Winston used to operate a side business out of Cosmopolis Park. I think he might have known this gentleman.”
Millie nodded. “His personal dealings fared much better under anarchy than the Council. It was not difficult to persuade him to this cause.”
Nova’s gut tightened as she read through the application, and she didn’t think it was from the constant swaying of the houseboat. It felt like there were too many holes in this hastily constructed life. An uncle she’d never met. Parents she felt no connection to. A teacher and an employer, a house and a job, and any one of them could be proved false if someone only bothered to dig a little deeper.
She had to remind herself that everyone born in the Age of Anarchy had holes missing in their records. All those things that had kept society organized before had been stripped away—from medical records to school enrollment, tax forms to bank statements. There was none of that. Only people trying to survive. To go on with life as best they could.
Renegades Page 13