Runaways

by Christopher Golden

  Gert took out her cell phone—one of those burners you could get at any convenience store, no service plan, virtually untraceable. If they worked for drug dealers, there was no reason they couldn’t also work for full-time runaway orphans and part-time vigilantes. She thumbed the phone and then turned her back on Nico and Karolina. The club’s door opened again, and the music raged for a few seconds before it swung shut. Karolina longed for the freedom of the dance floor.

  Raised voices off to her left drew her attention. Two girls and a guy stood there.

  “I’m totally serious,” said one of the girls. Her huge hoop earrings swung as she turned side to side to glare at her companions. “You don’t believe me?” The girl held a cell phone in front of her, one of the oversize ones. It had a hot-pink case and the screen was badly cracked. “This is her phone. I swear to God, I heard her talking to somebody on it when she walked by. She went across the street and was, like, leaving or whatever…maybe calling an Uber…then she yelled and I saw them drag a bag over her head and just, like, hurl her into the back of a car. Tinted windows, all that stuff.”

  “Did you get the license plate?” the other girl asked.

  “No. I was busy freaking out.”

  “You’ve gotta call the cops,” said the guy with them, finally speaking up. “Lots of weird crap going on around here. You gotta call them.”

  The first girl stared at the broken phone in her right hand. “I got my prints all over it. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Just call,” said the second girl.

  “You two will stay with me?”

  The guy shrugged. “Sure. Don’t know what help we can be. We didn’t see anything till you came running over. But we won’t leave you out here by yourself.”

  Twenty feet away, just outside the club’s door, Nico stepped up beside Karolina. “You hearing this?”

  “Are these the same people you heard talking about the Pride?”

  “Yeah. Well, two of them were out here smoking with the others. But the girl with the phone is new.”

  Karolina started walking toward them, but Nico halted her. Behind them, Gert sighed heavily as she turned to face them.

  “Chase isn’t answering,” Gert said, stuffing her phone back into her pocket. “I’m sure he and Molly are okay, right? I mean…” Her words trailed off as she noticed something was amiss. “What’s going on?”

  Nico gestured toward the girl with the shattered phone, who had begun pacing furiously as she used her own phone to call the police. “A girl got abducted right down the street.”

  “After what you overheard before, it seems like she’s far from the first one,” Gert said.

  Karolina exhaled, trying not to wonder if her parents were alive. “The Pride or not, we’ve got to do something.”

  “And we can’t wait for the police,” Gert said. “If someone’s grabbing kids off the street at these clubs and this girl is just the latest…”

  “Yeah,” Nico said. She strode over to the frantic girl, the other strangers looking on. Karolina and Gert followed but hung back a few paces.

  “Hey, can I see that?” Nico asked, gesturing toward the abducted girl’s phone.

  The two smokers frowned. The frantic girl blinked as if Nico had just apparated out of thin air from Hogwarts, then glanced down at the supposedly broken phone in her hand. “Who are you supposed to be?”

  “Someone who wants to help,” Nico said, holding out her hand. “We heard what you were saying just now and I need that phone.”

  The guy with them had seemed halfway disinterested a moment ago. Now he stiffened, like his white-knight powers had just kicked in. He stepped between Nico and the frantic girl. “I don’t think so. She’s calling the cops, and that phone is evidence. Nobody’s touching it till the police get here.”

  The frantic girl had half-turned from them. She had the missing girl’s phone in one hand and her own cell in the other, thumb-dialing 911. Nico exhaled loudly and glanced at Karolina, who knew what had to happen next.

  “Lighting up,” Karolina said.

  With a flourish of her hands, she summoned a burst of colorful light so bright that the strangers all cried out and tried to shield their eyes. The glare had blinded them all for a moment, and the aftereffects would linger for half a minute or so.

  “Time to go,” Gert said.

  Nico was already in motion. Karolina glanced around to make sure nobody else would interfere even as Nico snatched the missing girl’s phone from the hand of the only witness to her abduction. It felt arrogant to Karolina, thinking they could accomplish what the police could not, but more and more they had found that to be reality. When it came to helping kids and teenagers (like themselves) in trouble, the Runaways certainly had a better batting average than the LAPD.

  The girl shouted for them to give the phone back, but Karolina and the others were already running. Gert had the shortest legs, but she could put on the speed when she needed to, and by the time they reached the alley beside the dance club she had outpaced both Karolina and Nico. They raced along the alley, darted through the parking lot of an auto body shop, and ran into the next street over. Inside the auto body shop, a guard dog started barking his head off, but by then Karolina and the girls were turning a corner at the next block.

  “We good?” Nico asked.

  Karolina and Gert paused and craned their necks to look back the way they’d come, but there was no sign of pursuit.

  “Seems okay,” Gert said.

  “Those guys are still trying to get their vision to clear,” Karolina said. “I just wanted to make sure nobody else had decided to follow.”

  Nico walked past the faded pink facade of the Flamingo, a 1950s diner with a self-consciously art deco style. The interior of the place was dark except for the glow of a neon cheeseburger on the wall. Karolina wished the place was open—the mere thought of french fries made her stomach grumble. But the instant the thought entered her mind, she realized how selfish it was. A girl had been grabbed off the street and her life was likely in danger.

  What the hell’s wrong with me? she thought. But she knew the answer. The Runaways were in crisis so often that it had begun to seem normal. A shudder went through her as she realized just how alarmingly twisted that was. None of this should seem normal.

  “Okay, Nico,” she said with new urgency. “You’ve got the phone. Now what?”

  “Hold this,” Nico replied, handing Gert the phone. She reached into the pocket sewn into her skirt and took out a small folding knife.

  Karolina and Gert both winced when Nico reopened the little cut she’d made earlier. As the blood started to flow, the Staff of One emerged from her chest again. No matter how many times Karolina saw it, she’d never get used to the sight of the long staff, with the strange sphere at its head topped with a large ring, surging from within Nico, as if either she was a phantom or the staff was.

  Holding the staff, Nico looked at the phone in Gert’s hand. In those moments, the young witch always looked older, confident, and mature. She raised the staff, and when she spoke, her voice had that eerie weight that had become familiar to them all. The words were magic. An incantation. A spell.

  “Find Your Voice,” Nico said.

  The phone lit up. The screen was spiderwebbed with a thousand little cracks, but it lit up immediately. The GPS app illuminated the darkness on the sidewalk in front of the tacky diner. Karolina looked over Gert’s shoulder and saw a red dot on a map of the neighborhood. If the phone was the blinking blue dot—and she was sure it must be—then they were only half a mile or so from the location of the phone’s owner.

  “The red dot is the missing girl?” Gert asked.

  Nico stood beside her, the three of them staring at the broken screen. “That’s the general idea. Lead the way, Gert. As long as that red dot stays on the screen, she’s still alive. Let’s find her before it winks out.”

  With Gert navigating, the three of them hurried across the street, walking quickly
at first and then quickening to a run. Half a mile, that was all. Just half a mile, and the red dot still glowed on the screen. But for how long?

  “You’re brilliant,” Karolina said as they ran.

  Nico beamed. “I have my days.”

  Gert handed the hexed phone to Karolina and plucked her own burner from her pocket. “You navigate for a minute,” she said as they kept running. “I’m going to try Chase again. Whatever we’re rushing into, here, we ought to have backup.”

  Karolina felt the phone in her hand. Its outer shell was scuffed and cracked, and the screen had shattered so badly that it had little bits missing, but their blue dot kept blinking as they turned a corner, closing in on the red dot. The red dot kept gleaming, the abducted girl still alive. Yet with every step, Karolina felt dread closing around her heart, and when she glanced at Nico and Gert, she saw the same dread on their faces.

  It couldn’t be true, could it?

  The Pride, back in L.A.? Their parents, alive?

  Karolina had never realized hope and fear could feel so much alike.

  Chase stood inside a cavernous space, full of stalagmites and rock walls and yet also somehow elegant. Even as the word occurred to him, it seemed both strange and appropriate. In the midst of the cavern there were carved stairways and rows of vidscreens, computers, and other tech. There were statues and tapestries and detailed woodwork only a few feet from strange vehicles and deactivated service robots. He’d landed the Leapfrog on a raised stone table he’d immediately christened “the lilypad” in his mind, which seemed to have been made specifically for such a vehicle to land or dock. Now he walked up a wide set of steps, just half a dozen stairs, and found himself staring at a shadowy gallery lined with portraits of the six families that had made up the Pride, each with its own individual lighting.

  No. Not the families, he thought. The portraits were of the Pride themselves. The parents only, not their children. His face, the faces of the other Runaways—they were nowhere to be seen.

  “This! Is! Awesome!” Molly Hayes cried.

  Chase turned and saw her thrust her arms triumphantly in the air. She spun around, taking it all in, and then turned to stare at him, grinning and wide-eyed.

  “This is real, right? I mean, we can stay here? You said you found our parents’ old hideout, and I know they were bad guys. But we’re good guys, Chase, and we need a Super Hero headquarters, and this place is perfect! More than perfect!”

  She paused, frowning thoughtfully. “Wait, there are bedrooms, right? I could have my own room?”

  Chase laughed. “I scoped the place out, Mol. I didn’t want to take you guys here until I’d made sure there weren’t any surprises lying around. No monsters or time-traveling dinosaurs to eat our faces—”

  A loud, damp huff sounded over by the Leapfrog. Chase flinched. Even after all this time, he could not get used to having Old Lace with them, and even if he could make himself comfortable around a genetically engineered nine-foot dinosaur, it would’ve been harder without Gert around. Her parents had brought Old Lace from the future as a gift and the dinosaur shared a psychic bond with her. When they’d all first gotten together, Gert had been set on them all having Super Hero—style code names—and in a particularly antagonistic state of mind, she’d chosen Arsenic for herself. Poison. So when they’d found the dinosaur, she’d fallen back on the title of some old movie, Arsenic and Old Lace.

  None of them used the Super Hero code names anymore. There’d been too much ugliness and death, too much fear, and if they’d ever felt like heroes, they certainly didn’t anymore. But for the dino, Old Lace had stuck.

  “Sorry, girl,” Chase said. “No offense.”

  Old Lace sniffed the air, glared sideways at him, and then started prowling the cavern, investigating with her nose the way a dog might. To Gert, she had become the equivalent of a faithful house pet, and Molly seemed to feel the same way, but Chase decided he would keep better track of her location until the team was reunited.

  “So?” Molly said, one hand on her hip, green eyes shining. “Do I get my own room?”

  “Like I was saying—”

  “I mean, I could share with Karolina. Or with Gert or Nico. Probably not Gert, though, ’cause she’ll have Old Lace in there a lot, or she’ll be wanting to hook up with you behind closed doors. Which, let’s just say, gross. No offense, but…”

  She visibly shuddered.

  “Hey—” Chase began.

  “I said ‘no offense.’”

  “Saying ‘no offense’ doesn’t actually stop someone from being offended. It’s just giving yourself permission to be offensive.”

  Molly sighed theatrically and strode over to him. She took his left hand in both of hers and gazed with sympathy into his eyes. “It’s not you, Chase. I’m sure you’re perfectly fine as boys go. Though you could stand to shower more often and change your socks every day.”

  “Is this you trying to make me feel better, or…”

  She hit him. Gently, considering she could have broken all of his bones. All of them.

  “Ow!”

  Rolling her eyes, she dropped his hand. “Don’t be a baby. I’m just saying that kissing boys is gross. Boys, as in the universe of boys, not just boys named Chase. More importantly, I can have my own room if I want one, but if I wanted to share with someone—”

  “I’m sure one of the other girls would be fine with that.”

  “—because it’s a new place, y’know? And underneath the La Brea Tar Pits, which is kind of creepy. And it’s big. Full of gadgets and rocks and probably evil experiments from the Pride, and—”

  “I get it, Molly,” Chase said. He crouched so he could be eye to eye. “You’ll be fine. I promise. With our parents gone, we could live down here for a long time. There’s plenty of food stored away, totally sweet living quarters, and tech that will make it much easier for us to help the people we want to help.”

  “Boring.” She dropped his hand.

  “It’s not boring at all. We can learn way more about what our parents were up to. And—”

  “Boring.”

  He laughed. “Okay. Just think of it as a way for me to entertain myself in a hideout full of girls.”

  Molly frowned. “It’s not easy, is it? Being the only boy?”

  Chase straightened up. “Some days it’s great. And Gert usually makes it great. But other times, no, it’s not easy. You guys fight a lot, and mostly about stuff that…well, that doesn’t seem to me to be worth fighting about. If I try to get involved, I get barked at. If I try to stay out of it, everyone thinks I don’t care. So I just kind of keep my head down, hack into the Pride’s computer files—which is how I found us this place—and remind myself I used to daydream about being trapped alone with a bunch of girls.”

  Molly had gone very quiet. She glanced at the floor, looking as if she couldn’t decide whether to speak or run.

  “Something on your mind?” Chase asked.

  “Just us,” she said. “All of us. We were pretty spoiled, I guess.”

  Chase grimaced. He’d lived his life as the son of geniuses. His parents had been brilliant inventors, tech-savants, and they’d expected him to be a genius, too. What they’d gotten instead had been a sloppy, sometimes lazy, entirely average teenage boy. They’d never done a good job hiding their disappointment, and usually hadn’t even tried. Chase had always dreaded the annual charity gatherings—well, what they claimed were charity gatherings before he found out about the Pride—thinking that the difference between himself and the other kids was that their parents loved them. He knew differently now. They all did. But still…

  “Spoiled?” he said, trying not to be irritated. Molly was still a kid, after all. “How do you figure that?”

  “I don’t mean our parents were all, like, fawning over us or anything. Just that none of us had brothers or sisters. I always wanted one. Didn’t matter to me if it was a brother or a sister. I’d have liked someone around who went through the same thin
gs I went through. Someone to share it with. My parents always said I was lucky to be an only child, ’cause only children got spoiled. They got all the attention, and more toys, and more everything. And I guess that was true. At least kinda true.”

  Chase didn’t smile. He didn’t try to make her sadness go away. “But you never felt spoiled.”

  Molly shook her head. “I bet you didn’t, either.”

  “You’d win that bet.”

  “Things are a little crazy now,” said Molly, the mistress of understatement. “But at least now I’ve got people around who are going through the things I’m going through. Like brothers and sisters. People to share it with.”

  Chase pulled her into an impromptu hug. Molly endured it for a few seconds, even squeezed him back. Then she giggled and said, “Careful I don’t crush you.”

  He tugged her hat—a funny animal hat with the tassels that she loved, just one from her collection—down to cover her eyes. Blindly, Molly reached out and gave him a little shove that knocked him on his butt. Chase laughed, and Molly acted all faux-angry as she pulled her hat up, but it was a nice moment. The kind of moment they never got enough of anymore, though if Chase were being honest with himself, he’d never had many of them before.

  “I surrender,” he said, putting his hands up. “I won’t do it again.”

  “Liar,” Molly retorted. But she smiled, and Chase understood. Maybe he didn’t like being the only guy in the group, but if he had to be, at least he got to be a kinda sorta big brother to a girl who’d really wanted one.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Molly made a face. “You just did.”

  “It’s a pretty simple question, but a hard one, too,” Chase said. “We’re all older than you. I think that makes it easier to adjust to all the crap we’ve been through, all the bad stuff. You seem pretty strong, Molly. Amazingly strong, and I don’t mean your mutant powers. You’re always trying to be positive, to keep us pushing forward. But here’s my question. Are you okay?”