There was no activity in the alley. There was no activity anywhere. Even the ticket booth of the movie theater was dark.
Ingrid and the Librarian had had more than twenty-four hours to prepare for the Renegades’ visit. That should have been plenty of time for him to cancel any illegitimate business dealings and make sure nothing incriminating was left lying around.
“What do you think?” said Adrian, appearing at her side.
Nova kept her attention on the street below. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“Villains,” Oscar said. “Doing villainous things.”
Nova sent him an unimpressed look.
“Anything that could be qualified as suspicious activity,” said Adrian, pulling her gaze toward him. He returned the look with a shrug. “I figured, if this is a cover for illegal weapon sales, or anything else, then all of that activity would happen through the back doors, right? And it probably wouldn’t happen during normal business hours.” His frown deepened. “I don’t think, anyway.” He nodded toward the alley. “If we see someone coming or going, especially if we recognize them, or if they leave with something that looks like it could be weapons, then we’ll tail them and see what we can find out.”
Nova smothered the start of a smile. Twice she had come here with Ingrid to offer trades for equipment they needed, and both times it had been in the middle of the day and they had entered through the front doors, like any other patron. Gene Cronin had a system set up for his side business—a handful of specific books tucked in among the stacks that acted as a code word to the receptionist when brought up to the desk together. It was a discreet way to indicate they weren’t there for reading material.
But if the Renegades wanted to believe that all illicit activity happened through back doors under the cover of nightfall, so be it.
“So we’re just going to watch those doors all night?” she asked.
“Pretty much.” He grimaced. “I figured we’d go in shifts. I thought you could go last, since you’ll be the least likely to fall asleep.”
Least likely. Like it still might be a possibility.
Nova stepped away from the window. Adrian nodded at Oscar, who took his place as the first lookout.
“Is the Librarian a villain?” asked Oscar, staring across the street. “I mean, like, with superpowers? Or is he just a bad guy?”
“He’s a prodigy,” said Adrian, “but I’m not sure exactly what he does. Nothing violent, I don’t think.”
“Knowledge retention,” said Nova. The others turned to look at her and she started. “Is … what I’ve heard,” she added lamely. “I think that’s why they call him the Librarian. Not just because he, you know, runs a library, but supposedly he remembers everything he reads, word for word. Forever.”
“Makes sense,” said Ruby, opening a bag of candy.
Allowing herself to relax once the attention of the group moved away from her, Nova sat cross-legged and stared at the pile of snacks they’d brought. Red licorice ropes, jelly beans, peanut butter cookies, and an assortment of canned energy shots.
“This is the first time you’ve all done this, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” said Ruby, grabbing a handful of jelly beans, picking out the purple ones and dumping them back in the bag, before throwing the rest into her mouth at once.
Nova gestured at the spread. “This is a sugar crash waiting to happen. Didn’t anyone think to bring … I don’t know, carrots? Or some nuts or beef jerky … or you know, something with nutrients?”
Ruby blinked at her, then looked blankly at Oscar. Neither spoke.
“I could run to the store,” said Adrian. “There’s a corner store three blocks away. If you need something…”
Realizing that he was looking at her, Nova shook her head. “It won’t matter to me, but…” She waved her hand through the air. “Never mind. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take over whenever the rest of you pass out, which I’m betting will be sooner than later.”
“Shows what you know,” said Oscar. He was leaning against the window frame, tapping the end of his cane against the floor. “I’ve got the stamina of a triathlete.”
Nova’s eyebrow lifted.
“He didn’t mean it that way,” muttered Adrian.
“Didn’t I?” said Oscar, with a suggestive glance in his direction.
Adrian snapped his fingers at him. “Eyes on the window.”
Nova glanced from Oscar to Ruby. It was the first time she’d seen them in civilian clothing—he in a checkered-blue dress shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and she in a T-shirt with the SUPER SCOUTS logo scrolled across the chest, a fan-comic from overseas that was immensely popular, but that Nova had never actually read. As Red Assassin, her black-and-white hair was always pulled back high on her head, but tonight it was down in loose pigtails that made her look adorably harmless. What was most striking, though, was the thick white bandage wrapped around her upper arm, disappearing beneath her sleeve. Nova wondered if Ruby had been injured during their fight at the parade, though Nova was sure she hadn’t wounded her.
Adrian, too, was dressed casually, almost exactly as he had been at the parade. Red sneakers. Blue jeans. A dark long-sleeved T-shirt. There was nothing particularly fashionable about the outfit, but it fit him well, hanging in just the right way to suggest toned muscles underneath.
She looked away quickly, annoyed that the thought had occurred to her.
“We brought games,” said Ruby, when the silence tipped toward uncomfortable. She riffled through a backpack and pulled out a deck of cards and a box of dominoes. The tiles inside clacked noisily as she set it down on the blanket. “Anyone?”
When a quiet lack of enthusiasm greeted her, she shrugged and grabbed the deck of cards instead. “Fine. I’ll play solitaire.”
Nova watched her lay out a row of cards. “So. This is the life of a superhero.” She glanced up at Adrian. “No wonder everyone wants to be one of you.”
He met her look with a smile and lowered himself onto the other corner of the blanket. “Everyone wants to be one of us,” he corrected. “And yes. We are living the dream.”
“Okay,” said Oscar, propping one foot up on the windowsill. Without looking back, he lifted his hand in the shape of a pistol and shot an arrow of white smoke in Nova’s direction. It struck her chest and dispersed. “Origin story. Go.”
“Excuse me?” she said, waving away the remnants of odorless smoke that wafted toward the ceiling.
“You know,” he said, glancing back. “When someone decides to write the highly dramatized comic-book version of the story of Insomnia, where will it start?”
“He wants to know where you got your power,” said Ruby, slapping down a new card.
“Was it the result of some personal trauma?” said Oscar. “Or human experimentation or alien abduction?”
“Oscar,” said Adrian, warning, and Oscar turned his attention back to the window.
“Just making small talk,” he said. “We should know more about her than just her ability to turn an ink pen into a receptacle for blow darts.”
“We know she can clean the floor with the likes of Gargoyle,” said Ruby.
“And that she can give sass to Blacklight in the middle of an arena full of screaming fans,” added Adrian. He grinned at Nova, who looked away.
“Fine, I’ll go first,” said Oscar, and though she couldn’t see his face, Nova had the impression that this was where he’d wanted to take the conversation from the start.
“By all means,” she said, leaning back on her palms. “Origin story. Go.”
Oscar inhaled a long breath before proclaiming, quite dramatically, “I died in a fire when I was five years old.”
When he said nothing else, Nova glanced at Adrian to see if there was a joke she’d missed, but Adrian merely nodded.
“So…,” started Nova, “you’re a smoke-controlling zombie?”
She saw Oscar’s grin in the reflection of the window. �
��That would be awesome. But no. I’m not dead anymore, obviously.”
“Obviously,” agreed Nova.
“As the story goes,” he said, “my mom was down in the basement of our apartment building doing laundry when one of our neighbors fell asleep and her cat knocked over a candle she’d left burning. The whole place went up in flames in—I don’t know—minutes. I was in my bedroom and I heard people screaming, and then I saw the smoke, but I was petrified, and besides, I’m not exactly fast, right?” He shook his cane. “So by the time I got the courage to try to get out of the apartment, the fire was coming up the stairs and I didn’t know what to do. So I just froze in the hallway, watching the smoke until it was so thick I could hardly see, and couldn’t breathe. I passed out, and that’s how the Renegades found me.”
“The Renegades?” said Nova.
“Who else? Tsunami, to be specific. She’s the one who put out the fire, then she handed me off to Thunderbird who flew me over to the hospital, but they didn’t have much hope I’d make it. I didn’t have a pulse by that point. But while they were all mourning the death of this kid, I was having a dream.” His voice darkened, taking on an air of importance. “I dreamed that I was standing on top of our apartment building and I was breathing in—this long, long breath that went on and on. It was such a deep breath that it pulled all the smoke right out of the air and into my lungs. Finally, I stopped breathing in, looked up at the sky, and exhaled. And that’s when I woke up.”
“In the hospital?” said Nova. “Or the morgue?”
“The hospital. It had only been about ten minutes since they’d brought me there—plenty of time to declare me legally dead, but still. My mom was there, too, and she saw me exhale, and this big cloud of smoke came out of my mouth.” Oscar puckered his lips and blew. A gray cloud burst across the surface of the window. “And here we are.”
Nova cocked her head. “So … your power. It doesn’t have anything to do with…” She gestured at the cane, and though Oscar wasn’t looking at her, he tapped the cane against the floor a few times in acknowledgment.
“Nope,” he said. “This I was born with. I mean, not the cane. But my bones don’t grow like a normal person’s. Some rare bone disease.” He grinned back at Nova. “Probably the best thing that ever happened to me, though, right? Just think—if I’d been faster, I might have gotten out of that apartment building just fine, and I’d be stuck with all the other spry, non-prodigy suckers out there.”
“Right,” said Nova. “Not dying of carbon monoxide poisoning when you were five years old would have been awful.”
“See?” Oscar looked pointedly at Adrian. “She gets it.”
Adrian rolled his eyes.
“And when you tried out for the Renegades…,” started Nova, leaning forward. “Nobody thought this was … a problem?” She nodded to the cane.
Oscar snorted with pride. “Sure they did. To date, I hold the record for most challenged contestant at the trials. And yet, here I am.” He gestured at Ruby. “She was challenged during her tryout too. In fact, it’s sort of becoming a theme around here.”
“Let me guess,” said Nova, cupping her chin in her palm and inspecting the top of Ruby’s bleached hair as she bent over her cards. “Your origin is that … you stumbled across a cache of ancient magical artifacts in a dusty antique shop somewhere, including a ruby hook and dagger, which imparted you with mystical fighting abilities from some long-forgotten culture.”
Ruby laughed. “Um, no, but that might be what I start telling people. It’s certainly less traumatic than the truth.”
“Oh?”
Ruby turned over the last card, checked that she had nowhere to place it, and started gathering them all back up into her palm. “Before society collapsed, my grandmother was a well-respected jeweler. She’d been running this shop in Queen’s Row for forty years when the Anarchists took over, and it was one of the first places that got raided after all the credit cards stopped working and everyone was panicking and thought we’d go back to bartering for gold and jewels. You know, before they realized that food, water, and guns were the actual valuables in a world like that. After a few days of looting, everything was gone, except what my grandma had stashed in her safe. So she took out every gem and diamond she had left and started hiding them where she didn’t think they’d be found, including a bunch in secret places around our house.”
“You lived together?” asked Nova.
“Oh yeah, she’s lived with us since before I was born. Grandma, me, my parents, and my brothers.”
“You have brothers?” said Nova.
“Two of them,” said Ruby, fixing a look on her. “But it’s not really relevant to this story.”
“Sorry.”
“So anyway, she hid these priceless gems all over the house—in little holes in the walls, secret compartments in our dressers, things like that. And they all sat there for twenty-plus years while my family tried to figure out how to survive, and eventually my brothers and I were born, and side note—yes, we all have really annoying gem-themed names, thanks Grandma. Well, one night we were playing hide-and-seek and I hid behind the grate on our fireplace and happened to find this little bag full of rubies that had been tucked up inside the chimney. I’d heard about the jewelry store and the raids and everything and didn’t really know what to do with them, so I just put them back. Until a few months later … Do you know how, not long before the Day of Triumph, some of the villain gangs started figuring out how to make trades internationally and that’s when gold started to become valuable again? Well, my grandma was one of the first people they turned to. One night our house got raided by villains looking for anything that might have been missed before.”
“Which villains?” said Nova, having asked the question before she realized she was about to. “What gang?”
“The Jackals,” said Ruby, shuddering. “I’ll never forget those creepy masks.”
Nova pressed her lips together. She’d seen photos of the Jackals taken before the Day of Triumph. They had been one of the few villain gangs to wear a cohesive uniform—all black clothes with signature masks painted to look like the animals they’d been named for.
She wasn’t sure why she felt disappointed, but Nova realized that a part of her had been expecting Ruby to say that her family had been assaulted by the Roaches, the same gang that had sent the hitman after Nova’s family. The gang Ace had slaughtered in retaliation. They had been one of the largest and most powerful gangs in Gatlon City, so it wouldn’t have surprised her if they’d been the tormenters of Ruby’s family. Some said they even got their name from the Renegades themselves, when one of the early vigilantes complained that no matter how many of those villains they stamped out, they could never seem to get rid of them all.
There had been a tiny, faint wish that she and Ruby might share this mutual, long-dead enemy.
She curled her knees against her chest, digging her fingertips into her legs.
What a stupid thing to wish for.
“We didn’t have much by that point, as most everything valuable had been bartered off,” said Ruby, “but they started tearing the house apart anyway. While they were busy threatening my dad, I ran upstairs to the fireplace and took out the rubies—which in hindsight is probably the stupidest thing I could have done, because they might not have even found them up there, but I was four, so what did I know? And then…” She inhaled, as if this were the painful part to talk about it. “I dumped them into my mouth and I swallowed them.”
“Of course you did,” said Nova.
“In one fell swoop.” Ruby cupped one hand and mimed throwing a handful of rubies into her mouth and swallowing, not unlike how she’d gobbled down the jelly beans earlier. “I’m not really sure what possessed me to do it, other than how I just couldn’t stomach the idea of the Jackals walking away with anything more than they’d already taken. The trouble was, one of the Jackals saw me do it. He grabbed me and started demanding that I cough them up. Or, vomit t
hem up, I guess. But I wouldn’t do it. So…” For the first time since the start of her story, Ruby’s face darkened with anger. “He stabbed me.”
Nova’s eyes widened.
“Once in my arm,” said Ruby, glancing down at her bandaged arm. “Twice in my chest. Once right here.” She pointed at a spot near her stomach. “I knew he was going to kill me. But then … well, here.” She unclipped the end of the bandage and began to unwrap it from her arm, uncovering her flesh just enough that Nova could see a deep and, apparently, very recent wound. It began to bleed as soon as the bandage was removed, the red blood dripping down into the crease of her elbow, trickling toward her fingers.
Until …
Nova’s lips parted and she leaned closer, mesmerized, as the blood began to harden into sharp, symmetrical formations that jutted upward from the wound.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” said Ruby, “but I started to fight back. I ripped off the Jackal’s mask and stabbed him in the eye.”
Nova’s jaw dropped even more.
“Which sounds really brave in hindsight,” added Ruby, “but all I remember is how terrified I was. It was more instinct than anything else. But it worked—the Jackals ran off after that and they never came back.”
Ruby swiped her other hand across the gash, snapping the crystals off at their base with a quiet crack. She tossed them into the corner, where they shattered amid the piles of paper and debris.
“I’ve bled rubies ever since. They’ll form on new wounds for a little while, but those tend to heal pretty fast. Whereas the places where he stabbed me…” She started to wrap the bandage around her arm again, securing it tight. “They never stop bleeding. They never healed.”
Nova stared at the glistening gems on the floor, then back at Ruby. “What about the alias?” she asked. “Smokescreen and Sketch make perfect sense, and I get the Red part, but … Assassin?”
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