Runaways

by Christopher Golden

  Old Lace gave a warm chuff of breath from her nostrils as if in agreement.

  “I love you so frickin’ much,” Gert said, cupping a hand behind Old Lace’s head. She had no ears to scratch behind and no fur to ruffle, but she did tend to preen a bit when Gert stroked the back of her head.

  Old Lace let out a satisfied hrrrmmm.

  “A lot of changes today,” Gert whispered, pressing her forehead against Old Lace’s snout. “But we’ll get through it together.”

  The dinosaur flinched backward, snapped her head to one side, and narrowed her eyes. Gert turned to see that Zeke had poked his head through the open door of his guest room. Now he stepped into the corridor.

  “Sorry. Not spying. I just heard your voice out here and wondered what was going on.”

  Gert put a hand on Old Lace’s back to reassure her that everything was okay, although she knew the dinosaur would feel her emotions if she were to become alarmed or afraid.

  “We wanted to check on you,” Gert said. “I thought you’d be sleeping, but when I saw the open door I wondered if you’d gone looking for the bathroom or something.”

  Zeke smiled. Even with his bruises and the swelling on one side of his face, the smile still made butterflies take flight in Gert’s chest. Down, girl, she thought. You have a boyfriend. It was stupid. No matter how charming Zeke might be, or how cute, she didn’t know him. There were a million cute guys in L.A., and she didn’t even like people. Half the time, she didn’t even like Chase, as much as she loved him.

  Wait, you love him? The thought made her flush.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  Old Lace perked up curiously at her best friend’s sudden discomfort.

  “Not at all. Just tired,” Gert said. “I’ve got to get some sleep, but is there anything you need?”

  Zeke’s smile vanished, his charm fading. “You mean besides a mom who isn’t evil?”

  The words dredged up painful emotions in Gert. She did her best to bury the worst of it, the sense that somehow she deserved whatever happened to her, that every breath she took must be tainted by the things her parents had done. She wondered if the other Runaways felt the same, wondered if they worried that they’d never live a day that didn’t feel ruined before the sun had time to rise.

  Old Lace sighed and began to prowl back along the corridor. She wanted to leave.

  “You’ll get out of her shadow,” Gert told Zeke, though she wasn’t sure she believed it. “We’ll get your friends back and then all three of you can start fresh.”

  “With our parents dead or in prison,” he said, absently touching the tender, bruised place on his ribs.

  “Whatever happens is on them. Not you.”

  Zeke sighed. He turned to go back into the room they’d given him, but then glanced up at her. “Chase hooked me up with something for the pain, but I assume you don’t have anything stronger? Percocet or Vicodin or something?”

  “Must’ve left it in my other shorts,” Gert said solemnly.

  He laughed, then winced at the pain the laughter caused him. “Fair enough,” he said. “Sleep will have to do it. It’s just hard to turn my mind off. Between the beating I took and worrying about Tess and Carlos—”

  “I don’t have any pain pills,” Gert said, cutting him off, “but if it’s sleep that’s the issue, I’m pretty sure there’s some melatonin in my stuff on board the Leapfrog. Old Lace and I would be happy to get it for you.”

  Zeke leaned against the doorframe. “This life is so weird. Sure, Gert. I’d love it if you and your dinosaur would get me something to help me sleep. That’s not at all a weird thing to say.”

  She smiled.

  “Go lie down. We’ll be back.”

  Zeke thanked her. As Gert walked away, she felt a powerful sympathy for him, but at the same time she wanted only to curl up in her new bed—a real bed of her own was something she had been dreaming about for a long time. She’d had enough of running around, enough of hiding. Sometimes she thought that it would have been better if they’d never learned the truth about their parents, even if that meant the Pride could have continued to do all the hideous things they’d been doing for so many years. She hadn’t been happy, exactly, back in those innocent, ignorant days, but at least she’d felt safe. At least she’d felt protected. But every time she caught herself succumbing to the allure of the past, she remembered seeing her parents participate in the murder of a teenaged girl, and she knew that wishing for her ignorance back meant wishing the Pride had been able to continue doing that.

  As Old Lace padded along beside her, Gert grew less tired and more angry. Who the hell did the Nightwatch think they were, coming into L.A. and trying to take it for themselves? The Runaways had stopped the Pride—their own parents! They sure as hell weren’t going to let somebody else pick up where the Pride had left off.

  She moved through the quiet base with a fresh sense of purpose. Chase wasn’t there when she reached the Leapfrog, but that was all right. She wanted time to herself right now. Or time for herself and Old Lace. Somehow her exhaustion had given way to a clarity she hadn’t felt in a long time, and Zeke’s story had given her that.

  Intending to thank him, she got her backpack, found the melatonin, and threaded her way back through the base to his room. This time the door was closed, and Gert knocked softly before opening the door, only to discover that Zeke hadn’t needed the melatonin after all. He’d fallen fast asleep, sprawled across the bed, still in his bloody clothes.

  The guy looked peaceful.

  But with the fresh purpose ignited in her, Gert knew that, for her, both sleep and peace would be difficult to come by tonight.

  Chase felt like he had sand in his eyes and his bones were made of lead. He was only eighteen years old, so pulling an all-nighter ought to have been easy enough, at least according to a thousand crappy movies and TV shows he’d seen. Admittedly there had been plenty of nights he’d stayed up later than this playing video games and barely felt the weariness of the hour. But it had been a long-ass day, and programming the tech-sentries for the base didn’t inspire him the way, say, exploring a haunted radioactive space station on his Xbox did.

  Plus the whole thing felt weird. He’d been thrilled when he had cracked the encrypted file that let him locate this Pride base. The secrecy had been exciting. He’d snuck over here a few times to explore and had planned to do some more preparation before revealing the place to the other Runaways. Sunstroke crashing their S.H.I.E.L.D. squat had sped up his schedule, but it had still felt nice to be able to give this place to his friends. For once, he felt like the hero of the day, like he’d done something tangible to help them, not just in a fight but with their lives. Chase had christened their old place—where they’d hid out when they’d first run away from their parents—the Hostel. He figured this was the Hostel now, although he’d yet to use that word in front of anyone else.

  A strange, unsettling feeling had been pinging around in the back of his head since he’d first discovered the place. It had been low-level at first, background noise, but now that the excitement of secrecy and revelation had passed and everyone had a bed to sleep in, it had returned.

  He slid his chair from one array of computer screens to the next. The files here were still mostly encrypted, but the executive functions—things like security—felt familiar and intuitive. It had taken him some time to sort out the coding for different floors and corridors, but now that he had, activating the motion sensors and alarms in the specific locations he wanted would be simple enough. The others would pat him on the back for that intuition, but as usual, the real brilliance had belonged to his parents. The new Hostel’s systems had been designed by them, and Chase relied on a lifetime of watching them work to sort it all out.

  Maybe that’s it, he thought. They’re haunting you.

  And they were. His parents weren’t actual ghosts looming in the shadows, but they were here, in every bit of computer code, in every one of the Hostel’s def
enses and tech systems. It felt intimate, as if they were still with him. If anyone had asked, even Gert, he’d have said he didn’t miss them—that the evil they’d done made him hate them. And he did hate them, wished he could scream in their faces and rage at them for their lies and their sins. Yet somehow he still yearned for their voices.

  Chase’s fingers froze above the keyboard and he slumped his shoulders. Just a few more minutes and he could get some rest. Maybe in the morning he could figure out how to be happy again that he’d found this place. Tonight he wanted to be anywhere else.

  Tap tap. Tik tik tik. That was it. The motion sensors were activated outside Allis’s and Zeke’s rooms. Alarms would sound if they stepped into the hallway before eight a.m., at which point Chase knew Nico would be awake, even if the rest of them were sleeping. Nico didn’t sleep much these days.

  He stretched, slid his chair back, and logged out of the Hostel’s security system. The quiet in the cavern seemed to swallow him up, and it creeped him out so much that he wondered if Gert might still be awake. Half the time they were together it felt like the old days, when most of their interactions had been him saying something stupid and her verbally smacking him for it. She felt like his life preserver. She’d become not just his girlfriend but his best friend. He didn’t know what he’d do without her.

  Music played low at the other computer array. Old music from the Cure that seemed good company this late at night, somehow cheerful and sad at the same time. He slid his chair back over, remembering the way he’d always done the same thing in his parents’ lab when they’d let him hang out in there and watch them work. He liked the sound of the chair’s wheels on the floor.

  With a few taps, he woke the multiple screens, then killed the music. The silence yawned around him and he shivered, stood, and rubbed his tired eyes.

  The computer started to buzz, a steady intermittent noise that made him frown and swear under his breath. A quick glance back at the other computer array assured him that this wasn’t the motion sensor alarm he’d just programmed.

  The rhythmic buzz drilled into his brain.

  “Well, that’s not irritating at all,” he muttered, sitting back down and staring at the computer array.

  Something twitched at the bottom of the left-hand computer screen. He clicked on the spot, bringing up a banner than ran along the length of it, nearly twenty small icons. Some were familiar and others he’d never seen before. One of those bounced in time with the buzzing, hopping slightly higher on the screen, pulsing. The icon looked like a stylized metal gate, the sort of thing one might find in front of a haunted house, but broken diagonally with the two parts slightly misaligned. Chase double-clicked, launching an app called Gatecrashers, which blossomed into unusually clear surveillance footage.

  Maybe because he was so tired, it took him a few seconds to realize the video unfurling on the screen was live. A small red light blinked in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, somehow adding to the impression that the events were happening that very moment.

  Chase frowned, used the mouse to find the audio, but found that it was working fine. Like most surveillance video, this was silent. Even without sound, though, he could make out what was happening. Someone had smashed in the front doors of the Hamilton F. Deeley Museum of Fine Art, and they’d done it without any subtlety at all. The cops would be on their way, would get to the museum in minutes. Chase started to move the cursor over to close the window, but two things stopped him. The first was the question of why anyone with the ability to smash in the doors like that would be stupid enough to do it so brazenly. The second was why the Pride would have a dedicated app in their system that would alert them of a crime like this, something the police would take care of.

  The answer came a second later, when someone stepped out of the ruined museum doorway, some guy in blue-and-red armor obviously ripped off from Stark or Stane International. But it wasn’t the armored guy that tipped Chase off—it was the guy who emerged behind him.

  “Sunstroke,” he muttered.

  He had no idea how the asshole had gotten out of jail so fast—unless the cops had never taken him into custody in the first place—but there he was. Which meant that the armored guy must also be part of the new Masters of Evil…and that whatever they were up to, the Crimson Cowl was behind it.

  Gatecrashers, he thought. His parents had created an app that informed the Pride when someone in L.A. was committing a crime that they hadn’t authorized.

  Three o’clock in the morning, and suddenly Chase wasn’t tired anymore.

  As he raced off to wake the others, he hoped they would feel the same.

  A couple of hours before dawn on what felt like the longest night of her life, Nico sat in the back of the Leapfrog and tried to find some music to wake them all up. All kinds of music had been loaded into the Frog’s onboard system, and plenty more since Chase had been her pilot, mechanic, and owner. She found some nineties post-punk that was appropriately head-banging and the music blared loudly.

  Karolina shushed her, and Nico looked over to see Molly curled up in her seat, half-asleep and wincing, covering her ears. Nico turned the music down but not off. Understandably, Molly wanted to keep sleeping, but they all needed to be awake and alert for this.

  “So on a scale of one to furious,” Karolina asked, leaning toward the cockpit, “how pissed was Gert, do you think?”

  Chase guided the Frog into its next leap, a long glide to the top of a fifteen-story office tower. It was cloaked as always—if the stealth mode held. He glanced back at them, dark circles under his eyes from exhaustion.

  “Seriously?” he said with a scowl. “What do you think?”

  Nico rolled her eyes. “Either of you have a better idea?”

  Neither of them did.

  “Someone had to stay behind,” Nico went on. “Chase pilots the Frog and at least has some gizmos to whip out if he needs to blast something or someone. The rest of us have powers. Old Lace might be able to bite someone’s face off, but we couldn’t leave Zeke and Allis in the new Hostel by themselves.”

  Chase glanced over his shoulder at Karolina. “In answer to your question—pretty frickin’ pissed.”

  “Eyes front,” Nico said. “Don’t crash.”

  “Yes, Oh Fearless Leader.”

  Nico sighed. She wasn’t fearless, and she’d never wanted to be leader. She couldn’t help it if she was the best person for the job.

  “Why are we even doing this?” Karolina asked. Her usual cheerful mood apparently vanished when she’d only had half an hour’s sleep. “This is a job for the Avengers or somebody. Definitely not us. This is not what we do, Nico. Sunstroke attacked us, not the other way around. We didn’t go out looking for him. We’re talking about the Masters of Evil here, or some variation anyway. Maybe we can take one of them, but we don’t even know how many of these guys the Crimson Cowl has with her.”

  “Hey, have a little more faith in us,” Chase said, as the Frog leaped again.

  “That’s not the point.”

  Nico shut off the music. She loved Karolina and trusted her, but she wished her friend would have a little faith in her.

  “You know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “First, the Avengers aren’t here, are they? Chase, you’ve got the surveillance feed from the Hostel’s computer linked up there, right? You see any Avengers showing up at the museum?”

  “Not so much as a Hawkeye. Though, to be fair, Wonder Man’s the only one who does a lot in L.A.,” Chase said. “Wait, is Wonder Man even alive?”

  “That’s always the question, isn’t it?” Karolina muttered. “My parents did a film with Simon Williams once. I never met anyone more in love with himself.”

  “Second,” Nico continued, ignoring their tangent, “do you not remember why the Masters of Evil are here to begin with? Why the Crimson Cowl is making her move?”

  “Of course I do. We talk about it every day. The Pride is gone. Evil rushes in to
fill the void. Blah blah blah. I get it, but not everything that happens in L.A. is on us now, Nico. We’re not Super Heroes. And even if we were, we can’t do anyone much good if the Masters of Evil kill us all. How many times do we want to risk our lives for this city?”

  Molly made a little raspberry, sticking her tongue out, revealing that she hadn’t been quite as asleep as they’d thought.

  “They’re not going to kill us,” she said, sitting up and tugging her hat down further on her head. “I’m gonna whup their asses.”

  “Molly—” Karolina began.

  The girl turned to her, eyes clear and intelligent. “I know, Kay. Punching doesn’t solve everything. I also know that as strong as I am, there will always be someone stronger. We live in a world with at least one Hulk, so duh. But the police aren’t going to be able to stop them, and the Avengers aren’t here. I don’t care about some stupid paintings—I don’t know why the Losers of Evil want to rob a museum. It’s, like, the twenty-first century. Who does that? But you know they’re planning something bigger than that or Sunstroke wouldn’t have tried to steal our secret S.H.I.E.L.D. base. So yeah, I want to stop them. If we don’t at least try, we might as well go back into foster care like regular orphans.”

  The Leapfrog jostled a bit as it landed on another building, then swayed as it leaped again.

  Nico stared at Molly. “Y’know—”

  “I know,” Molly said.

  “What do you know?”

  “That eleven is a weird age. You’ve said it before.”

  Karolina nodded slowly. “It’s true. You’re a kid, and—no offense, I love you, but you can be pretty grumpy—”

  “And pushy—” Chase said from the cockpit.

  “—but sometimes we forget that you’re not a little kid.”

  Molly huffed. “I’m almost twelve.”

  “Going on thirty-five,” Nico added. “And way sharper and smarter than we give you credit for.”