“That sounds great,” said Callum, clapping his hands together. “Manning the checkout counter can get tedious. Except, sometimes, a Renegade might not know exactly what they’re looking for, or what weapons are going to suit their specific abilities, and then we get to help them figure out the best options, and that can be really cool, too. You learn a lot about the superheroes we have here.” His eyes shone as he gestured at Nova. “I’m glad you like artifacts, too, because it could seem a little slow down here after being on patrols, and ambushing the Librarian, and fighting the Detonator, and everything you’ve done. This is going to be a much more laid-back experience, though also really fulfilling.”
“That sounds perfect.”
“Cool.” Callum lifted his thumb back toward the reception area. “Let’s get you settled in, and maybe see what sort of stuff Magpie brought us.”
“Wait,” said Nova, scanning the back wall of the vault. “What’s down there?”
“Ah, that’s the restricted collection.”
Nova’s nerves hummed. “Restricted, how?”
“As in, not available to be checked out.” Callum tucked his hands into his pockets. “Want to see?”
Nova spun back to him. “That’s allowed?”
“Oh yeah. We can’t loan this stuff out, but we still have to come back and dust it from time to time. Come on.” He led her into the last aisle.
The shelves were sparser than the rest of the vault. Heart drumming, Nova scanned the objects as Callum started rambling on about the destructive qualities of Fury Fire, and how Dark Matter’s ring could theoretically blow up the moon if put in the wrong hands, and how a prophetic pair of goggles had already caused more trouble than they were worth.
“This is … amazing,” said Nova, and she meant it. “But why isn’t all this under more security? So far I’ve just seen you, and Snapshot, and two locked doors, and”—she gestured at a camera on the ceiling—“a handful of security cameras. Where are the laser barricades? The motion triggers? The armed guards?”
“Please. We’re in Renegade Headquarters.” He spread his arms wide. “Who would try to break in here?”
She gawked at him. “Really? That’s…”
Arrogant, she wanted to say. Asinine. Completely, unrealistically overconfident.
But she reeled in her thoughts just in time. “Uh … right,” she stammered. “That’s right. Renegade HQ.” She laughed awkwardly. “Who would ever try to break in here?”
“And given that the vast majority of objects are available for rent—” Callum shrugged. “There’s no need for the added protection. The folks up in the security center keep a close enough eye on us down here.” He saluted the camera.
“I’m sure they do,” said Nova, meandering away from him. She ran her fingers over the shelves that, frankly, didn’t seem to have been dusted in recent history.
But there was no sign of Ace’s helmet.
Her shoulders drooped.
“Is the restricted section not meeting expectations?”
She spun around. Callum was watching her, holding a pair of antique aviator goggles in one hand. “Prophetic goggles,” he said emphatically. “Come on. How can that be disappointing?”
“Sorry,” said Nova. “I was just…” Inhaling a sharp breath, she confessed, “I heard a rumor that Ace Anarchy’s helmet was in here. I thought it would be cool to see it in person. And not, you know, on the Captain’s pike half a block away.”
“Oh,” said Callum, setting down the goggles. “That’s a replica, actually. The one he carries around at the parade? Total fake. The real one’s down here, but if you weren’t impressed by the goggles, you are going to be really disappointed by the helmet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you.” He breezed past her.
Nova’s eyes widened. It could not be that easy.
Halfway down the aisle, Callum paused in front of a metal cube sitting on a shelf. “Ta-da,” he said, thumping its top. The cube was roughly the size of a small microwave. “I give you Ace Anarchy’s helmet.”
Nova stared, horror and denial creeping into her thoughts. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, after the Battle for Gatlon,” said Callum, leaning his elbow on the shelf as he prepared to go into another history spiel, “the Council tried to destroy the helmet, but were unsuccessful. So to keep it from falling into the wrong hands again, Captain Chromium made an indestructible chromium box to hold the helmet for the rest of time. And here she lies. Protected. Secure. Completely inaccessible.” He patted the cube again. “And I get it. I mean, it caused so much destruction and that kind of power shouldn’t be made available to anyone, you know? But at the same time, the historian in me is a little sad that such an important relic is going to sit here, unable to be seen or studied, forever.”
Nova’s mouth went dry as she stepped closer to the box.
There should have been some fanfare here. A spotlight streaming onto the shelf. A set of ropes keeping onlookers at bay. A pedestal. But there was nothing. Just a dusty box on a dusty shelf.
Why hadn’t the Dread Warden told her this when he’d said the helmet hadn’t been destroyed, when he said it was here, in the artifacts department?
No one is ever going to use that helmet to torment the people of this city again.
His words carried new meaning now. Nova had imagined a coded safe, a security system requiring retina scans and fingerprints, even armed guards keeping watch over the helmet.
She had never imagined this.
Imprisoned in a chromium cube. Forever.
She felt a light tug at her wrist. Her bracelet was straining against her skin, as if being pulled toward the box and the helmet inside.
Nova lifted her hand. The bracelet pulled harder, until the thin filigree dug into her skin. The empty prongs that had never received the gemstone they were intended to hold stretched outward toward the trapped helmet.
“Huh,” said Callum. “Never seen that before.”
Nova dropped her arm and took a hasty step back.
Callum’s attention stayed on her wrist. “What’s that bracelet made out of?”
“I don’t know.” She clapped a hand over the bracelet to hide it from view. It was the truth. She didn’t know what the material was. As far as she was aware, it didn’t have a name, and she wasn’t about to tell Callum that it was made from solidified bands of ethereal energy only her father had been able to access.
Just like she wasn’t about to tell him that it was made from the same stuff the helmet was.
“Copper, maybe?” said Callum, scratching his ear. “Can copper be magnetized? I’ll have to look it up. Anyway.” He swirled his hand toward the box again. “There you have it. The helmet that almost destroyed the world. Ready to head back?”
Callum led her out of the vault, chatting the whole time, though Nova didn’t hear a word. She ignored the awe-inspiring objects they passed. She barely felt the mask digging into her back.
What was she going to tell Ace? What would she say to the other Anarchists? Ever since they’d learned that the helmet hadn’t been destroyed, they’d been hinging their hopes on getting it back. On giving Ace back his strength, his power.
What were they going to do now?
There had to be some way to get inside that box. Captain Chromium wouldn’t have made it impossible to access the helmet. What if the Renegades needed it someday?
She couldn’t walk up to the Captain and ask him about it, but … she did know of one other person who might have an idea.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BLACKMIRE STATION. The defunct entrance to the abandoned subway had a hole in it the size of a small car, strung across with yellow caution tape. The sidewalk was littered with rubble from the explosion and there were still visible scorch marks on the wall. This was where the Anarchists made their escape when the Renegades had gone after them, after the Detonator’s attack at the library had made it clear that their group wasn�
��t as dormant as they seemed. Though regular patrols had been set up to search the tunnels and monitor various access points, in case any of the villains tried to return to their sanctuary, there had been no sign of them. Other than Nightmare and the Detonator, of course.
The last time Adrian had gone into the tunnels, determined to find out what their connection to Nightmare was, he was wearing the Sentinel’s armor. Even now, Adrian’s fingers twitched, itching to unbutton the top of his shirt and peel open the zipper tattoo that would transform him into the vigilante. He craved the security that armor would afford him. But he ignored the urge, knowing it was little more than paranoia, and maybe a bit of habit.
The tunnels were abandoned. Wherever Cyanide, Queen Bee, and Phobia had gone, they had not been reckless enough to come back here.
He crouched in front of a DO NOT ENTER sign that had long ago been spray-painted over with a warning to anyone who might not know who was lurking down those stairs.
A circle drawn around an acid-green A.
Adrian took out his marker and drew himself a flashlight.
He stepped over the tape and flashed the beam of light over the graffitied walls and the bolts sticking up from the concrete where a turnstile had once been. The stairs beyond faded into blackness.
He listened, but if there were noises inside the subway, they were buried beneath the sounds of the city.
But there wouldn’t be any noises, he told himself, other than the rats. There were no more villains down here. No more Anarchists.
He crept down the stairs, his sneakers thudding, the beam from his flashlight darting over old concert posters, broken wall tiles, and more graffiti, so much graffiti.
He passed a mezzanine with two offshoots—one set of stairs heading to the northbound rails, the other to the south. His wristband chimed quietly as he descended toward the lower platform, probably the last alert he would get before he lost reception so far underground. He ignored the sound, as he’d been doing ever since Hawthorn threw him into the river and Max pointed out that maybe, just maybe, this was the time to let the Sentinel go. The chime wasn’t the notification he got when he was receiving a message from his teammates or a patrol assignment from the call center. Rather, it was the alarm he’d set for himself, to be notified when one of the other patrol squads was being called for an emergency situation.
Years ago, as part of an effort to ensure the safety of their recruits, it was decided that all dispatches to patrol units could be accessed in real time by all active Renegades, and that the movements of on-duty patrols could be tracked and monitored. The information was made available to any Renegade who wanted it, though they were usually kept so busy with their respective jobs that Adrian didn’t know of anyone who actually took advantage of the information. Except for himself, and then, only since becoming the Sentinel.
It was part of how he had managed to be so effective. Whenever he heard that a patrol unit was being sent to handle a particularly high-profile crime, he only had to log in to the system to see where they were being sent. If there was a chase happening, he could easily follow their movements through the city. With the spring tattoos on the bottoms of his feet, Adrian could move faster than most Renegades, excepting only those with flight or superspeed powers. That advantage alone often allowed him to reach the scene of the crime and deal with the perpetrators before the assigned Renegades showed up.
Over the last week, he’d considered turning off the notifications every time the wristband chimed at him. He was caught in a constant battle with himself. The almost irresistible yearning to involve himself in the situations, to prove both his value and his good intentions. But on the other hand, he knew it was safer to let people go on believing the Sentinel was dead, especially with the reveal of Agent N. The Sentinel was a wanted man, and he knew that once patrols were equipped with the neutralizing agent, few of them would hesitate to use it on him.
Unable to fully resist the temptation, Adrian glanced at the most recent notification, just to make sure no one was being murdered or something. But no—a patrol unit had been summoned to deal with a car theft. Definitely something his peers could handle.
He sent the alert away and silenced all other incoming notifications.
Pausing at the base of the stairs, he shone the flashlight over the walls. There was an empty vessel where a fire extinguisher had once been, and an ancient pay phone with the receiver missing at the end of its curled cord. The platform itself was littered with the bodies of dead wasps, a few stray candy wrappers, and a handful of silhouettes drawn in red chalk and labeled with official Renegade signage.
He stepped closer and scanned the nearest signs: EXHIBIT 19: PUPPETEER TENT (1/3). EXHIBIT 20: MISC. PUPPETEER BELONGINGS. EXHIBIT 21: SHELL CASING—POISON RELEASE DEVICE.
None of the objects mentioned were there anymore, only the chalk outlines and the signage to indicate what had been there before the Renegades’ investigative teams and cleanup crew confiscated it all.
Adrian’s frown deepened. He should have guessed that all of the Anarchists’ belongings would have been removed from the tunnels by now. For some reason, he’d expected that only weapons or things that indicated criminal activity would have been taken back to headquarters, but clearly he was wrong. It seemed that nothing had been overlooked.
Pacing to the edge of the platform, he peered down onto the tracks, turning his head each way as they disappeared into the tunnels. More signage. More chalk lines. And here, more evidence of the battle that had occurred. One tunnel was partially caved in as a result of the Detonator’s bombs. More dead wasps were strewn across the tracks.
Adrian knew a lot of the Renegades who had been involved in that fight. Some of them he’d known almost his whole life. They’d been lucky that no one died, but there were countless injuries, from broken bones and severe burns to lungs and throats that had been scraped raw from Cyanide’s poisons. Even now, Adrian could detect the tangy smell of chemicals hanging in the musty air.
The healers had worked overtime for weeks afterward.
And in the end, the Anarchists had gotten away. It was the proverbial salt in their extensive wounds.
Adrian sighed. He wasn’t going to find Winston Pratt’s puppet down here. He would have to talk to the cleanup crew, maybe call in a favor with the sort-and-tag team. He hoped they hadn’t already shipped a bunch of the Anarchists’ stuff to the junkyard. That wouldn’t be any fun to wade through.
He was about to turn back when his flashlight caught on one of the tags posted beside the next tunnel.
EXHIBIT N/A: NIGHTMARE?
An arrow had been drawn, pointing into the tunnel.
Pushing up his glasses, Adrian hopped down onto the tracks. A quarter of a mile later he reached a wide chamber of arched ceilings, where multiple train lines intersected and diverged. A series of narrow platforms stood on either side of the tracks, not for passengers, but perhaps maintenance crews.
Adrian hadn’t been in this part of the tunnels before. He had never been on one of the patrols sent to check that the Anarchists weren’t hoarding weaponry or recruiting new members. He had only been to visit the villain gang once, when he caught Frostbite and her squad trying to bully the Anarchists into false confessions. Though he still didn’t agree with their tactics, he couldn’t help thinking that if he had let Genissa and her crew handle things, probably the Anarchists would have been arrested that day, and the city would have been spared a lot of trauma.
It made his jaw twitch to think about.
An abandoned train car sat at one end of the chamber, still on its track as if it could roll away at any second, though the accumulation of dirt and grime on its windows made it clear that it hadn’t moved for a long time.
Adrian approached the car and read the sign on one of its windows. EXHIBIT 47: TRAIN CAR—USED BY NIGHTMARE?
Flexing his fingers and tightening them back into fists, Adrian stepped around to the door on the side. He had been so close. All that time he
had been searching for her, and if he had just questioned the Anarchists a little more, if he had dared to search their dwelling more thoroughly, he would have found this. He would have found her.
He stepped into the car, but if he’d hoped to find anything of use there, his hopes quickly evaporated. The interior was as stripped of belongings as Winston’s platform had been. All that was left behind were the Renegades’ tags—a hundred white squares pasted over the walls and floor indicating where evidence had been found. Here: a small suitcase of clothing. There: a workbench containing deconstructed weaponry in varying stages of completion. On that window: a magazine cover with a photo of Captain Chromium inundated with small puncture holes.
He tried to imagine her, a girl he had never met, who had never met him or his family, carrying so much hostility for his dad that she threw darts at magazine photos, practicing for the day when she would try to assassinate one of the most beloved superheroes of all time. What could possibly have driven her to such hatred?
Shaking his head, he turned away. The train car shifted under his weight as he descended back to the tracks. He tried to imagine living down here. The stale, damp air. The years of trash accumulated at the edges of the tracks. The cobwebs strung between the broken light fixtures. No breezes, no sunlight, no flowers or trees or animals or birds … other than the rats and the cockroaches, that is.
The only splotches of color were the graffiti tags and a line of advertising posters hung up on one wall, though their plastic covers were so dingy it was hard to make out what they were trying to sell. One promoted the opening of a new exhibit at the Gatlon Art Museum—Adrian couldn’t help but wonder how much of that priceless art had gone missing during the Age of Anarchy. Another poster offered “wedding-day skin” after sixty days of using a newly patented night cream. Beside it was an ad for time shares at a tropical resort, though someone had drawn crude images over the bikini-clad model.
Adrian tilted his head, inspecting the last poster. A book was pictured, a thriller novel with a shadowy figure silhouetted between two pine trees. The book’s tag line read, It’s not that he’s back … it’s that he never went away.
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