“How will the Cowl know where to find them?” Chase asked.
“We’ll tell her,” Molly said. The duh was implied in her tone.
Karolina had drifted to the back of the viewing area to stand next to Allis. They were talking quietly, privately, but it looked like Karolina was concerned about her, which Molly thought was annoying, considering Allis had never left the Leapfrog and the rest of them had been in danger pretty much the whole time, not to mention that Nico might be dead.
Molly shuddered. Her lower lip trembled as a wave of emotion went through her. I can’t believe I just thought that. I’m a horrible person. She loved Nico, and desperately needed her to be all right. Guilt washed over her and she lowered her head, barely listening to the rest of the conversation.
“So how do we find the Crimson Cowl and the rest?” Chase asked. “Whirlwind and Sunstroke and whatever the Iron Man knockoff was calling himself—”
“Blue Steel,” Molly whispered.
“No idea, Chase,” Gert said. “I figured with all of the Pride’s files and your computer wizardness, you could track them somehow.”
They all fell into a thoughtful silence. Molly glanced around at her friends—at Gert and Chase, Karolina and Allis—and she knew her great idea might have just died. It had gotten them all excited for a minute, but unless Chase could find a way to track the Cowl down, they had no next step. Her joy leaked out like helium from a punctured balloon, and she walked up to the wall of not-Zeke’s cell and stared through the not-glass at the not-boy curled up on the cot within.
Come back, Nico, she thought. Gert could lead, Molly didn’t doubt that. But until they knew their next step, there was nowhere to lead them.
“Someone has to keep watch here,” Gert said. “I know we have surveillance cameras, but if Nico suddenly pops back into our reality, I want someone to be here for her.”
“I’ll stay,” Molly said.
“No. I’ll take the first shift,” Gert said. “Get something to eat and get some rest.”
“Except Chase,” said Chase.
“Except Chase,” Gert echoed with a gentle smile. “Sorry, babe. Find me some Masters of Evil.”
“Losers of Evil,” Molly muttered.
Gert nodded. “Yep. Them.”
Chase saluted, blew Gert a kiss, and spun on one heel to march out of the detention block. Allis and Karolina followed. Molly considered offering to stay with Gert, but now that the subject of food had come up, her stomach growled.
“Okay,” Molly said, with one last glance at the unconscious not-Zeke inside the cell. “Shout if something needs punching.”
She turned to go, but Gert stopped her with a hand on the shoulder. Molly turned to see her friend’s brows knitted in concern. Karolina always said it was bad to knit your brows, that it made women get early wrinkles, but Molly thought this might be a bad time to bring it up.
“Mol,” Gert said, “you know there’s more to you than just punching, right?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“You’re smart…and funny and…”
“Thanks, Gert, but…this isn’t about me going to school, is it?”
“Not at all. Although I still think having us tutor you would be—”
Molly turned and marched off the way Chase had, wide awake now. “Give me a shout when it’s time for the punching.”
Karolina pulled away from Allis, their rough, urgent kisses tingling on her lips. She felt almost mesmerized, flushed and excited, her thoughts awhirl. Allis reached for her but Karolina shook her head and sat up, turned her back and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. They were fully dressed, but the way Karolina’s heart thundered and with the magnetic pull she felt toward the girl, she knew their clothes wouldn’t stay on very long if she didn’t get up now.
“What is it?” Allis asked. “Did I—”
“It’s Nico.”
She could practically feel Allis deflate beside her.
“Oh.”
“Not like that,” Karolina said, although it was halfway to a lie. Anybody could see Nico was gorgeous. A person would have to be dead not to have at least a little crush on her. But Karolina had never felt this way about her.
“I’m an idiot,” Allis said. “You’re worried about her. We should be focused on that and I’m being totally insensitive.”
Karolina smiled and glanced over her shoulder. She reached back and twined her fingers with Allis’s. “Not totally. I mean, a smidge, yeah, but we can make the argument that a distraction is just what a person needs when they’re worried.”
Allis glanced away, tightening her grip. “I hope I’m more than just a distraction.”
Karolina arched an eyebrow and twisted around on the bed to kiss her again, just briefly.
“So do I,” she said playfully. “But for now, we should talk. Get to know each other better.”
Allis sat up and crossed her legs, and suddenly it was an innocent girls’ sleepover. “I want to know everything about you.”
Karolina faltered. Did Allis really want to know everything? The girl had handled the reality of the Runaways and the Pride. She’d fallen into step with them as if she’d always been one of them and had wielded a plasma gun while they were trying to break Carlos and Tess out of the Nightwatch’s penthouse. Clearly, she could handle all kinds of crazy that would send a million other girls running. But what if Karolina really did tell her everything? How would Allis feel if she knew the girl she’d been kissing didn’t have super powers at all, that she could do these things because her parents came from another world? What would Allis do if Karolina told her she was an alien?
“Hey,” Allis said. “I saw that. Your eyes went all sad. What’s going on in that head?”
“Y’know what?” Karolina replied, stretching out beside her again. “I changed my mind. Let’s stick to the kissing for tonight.”
Allis pushed her fingers through Karolina’s hair and smiled as their lips touched. She made a little happy sound in her chest, like the purr of a cat.
“Turns out I’m a pretty good distraction,” she said.
Karolina didn’t answer with words.
Chase would rather have been playing video games. Ever since the truth about their parents had come out and he’d learned that some of his friends had super powers—or other talents that seemed close enough—his feelings of inadequacy had been magnified. It had been bad enough as a kid with genius parents, but in those days he’d been able to retreat to his room and sit around in yesterday’s T-shirt with a game controller in his hands. He’d numb himself, and when he finally came up for air, he’d order pizza and all would be right with the world. Then his life had changed and he’d become one of the Runaways, and the feeling that he was insufficient—that he couldn’t pull his own weight—only grew worse. In time he’d realized that he did contribute, and only recently he’d begun to really accept how good he was with machines and computers. It felt worthy. Valuable. It felt like they needed him.
But now they needed him a lot, and years spent lazing around in his underwear made it hard to adjust. Everyone else could get some rest now, have a snack, take some downtime, but Chase Stein—him, of all people—had to do his homework.
I’d better get a pizza when this is done, he thought.
Although there were other things he liked better than pizza. A memory of being in bed with Gert flashed through his mind and he smiled. Suddenly being the guy they could all rely on seemed much more worthwhile.
He sat in the cavern, sliding between one computer array and the other. At one station, he was searching the Pride’s extensive computer files for any reference to the Kurdogrim and the Nightwatch, hoping to find something useful that would help them defeat this Abernathy guy Gert and the others had been talking about when they’d Leapfrogged away from the Nightwatch’s trashed penthouse. Unfortunately, all the references the computer turned up were for heavily encrypted files. He’d broken a lot of the Pride’s encryptions and he was sure he’
d break these eventually—but they didn’t have time for eventually.
Chase rolled his chair over to the other computer array. Several screens flashed through city surveillance cameras. He’d plugged in search parameters, scanning all references to any of the members of the Masters of Evil, using keywords and images for the Crimson Cowl, Whirlwind, Blue Steel, and Sunstroke. Given the chaos at the museum last night, the number of search results was substantial. Chase’s head hurt just from skimming through the names of the search hits and the images. A small ding sounded every time the video surveillance footage showed one of them. The issue that came up was, of course, that the Cowl could teleport and all three of the others could fly, so once they’d departed the museum fiasco, they’d left no trace—not that he’d found yet, anyway.
Aloha, he thought. The pizza place he liked best in all of Los Angeles was at least a twenty-minute Uber, even at this time of night, but they had an aloha pizza that made him want to weep with joy at every bite. Pulled pork, barbecue sauce, three cheeses, and a thick-but-firm crust like nowhere else on earth. Worth going out for, because no way could he have them deliver to the Runaways’ new secret base under the La Brea Tar Pits.
Chase stared at the computer array, at the surveillance videos that flashed by on the various screens, and then over at the other array, where the Pride’s encrypted secrets about the Nightwatch seemed to mock him. It seemed like after a good run of being reliable, of being the guy who’d found them one place to crash after another, and now this new Hostel, who’d kept them safe and sheltered and sometimes fed, he was about to become the old, less-useful Chase again. Part of him hated it, and part of him wanted to fall into the lazy embrace of his old self.
“Crap,” he whispered in that vast cavern.
As he felt the temptation to surrender, he started to go back through some of his favorite games in his mind, trying to decide which one would bring him the most comfort.
Ding.
Chase glanced up at the array. In the center screen, he saw Sunstroke. Just a glimpse at the edge of the camera frame. The bastard had flown down and landed on the curb at the corner of an alley, then hurried into the alley itself. Chase selected that screen and backed up the video, watched Sunstroke land again, then paused and stared at the frozen image. His eyes narrowed as he sat forward, curious because he recognized the building behind Sunstroke, even recognized that alley mouth. He glanced at the time code on the surveillance video, pulse quickening. He’d worked it out—he’d found them.
Only he hadn’t.
The Pride had been in control of crime in Los Angeles, which meant they had a lot of nasty tentacles inside the police department, too. Setting up access to the city’s surveillance system had been simple enough for them, and it had taken Chase no time at all to program this search using an advanced visual recognition program. The trouble was he’d set it to run backward from the most recent sighting, which meant the one he was looking at now had been two days ago, and he knew where Sunstroke had been headed—to the Los Hermanos Hospital, the abandoned insane-asylum-slash-S.H.I.E.L.D.-slash-Hydra base where the Runaways had been squatting. The video was from the day Sunstroke had attacked them.
“Useless,” Chase muttered.
Sighing, he leaned back in the chair and stared at that frozen image. Sunstroke had screwed them out of a pretty decent base. Not as cool as this one, granted, but it was closer to the place with the aloha pizza. Plus he had left a cache of his favorite video games behind at the nuthouse. Now it was too risky to retrieve them.
“Dick,” he said, still staring at that image of Sunstroke. “I wish we’d never called the cops.”
The next time he saw Sunstroke, he intended to fire up the new Fistigons whether they were ready or not and blast the asshole through a wall. How the Crimson Cowl had gotten him out of police custody so fast was no mystery. With that Cowl, the woman could teleport. She must’ve popped into his jail cell and just zapped him right out of there.
Chase frowned, staring at that frozen image of the guy who’d cost him his favorite games. There were surveillance cameras all through the police station. If the Crimson Cowl had appeared there, the video would have shown up with the search he was currently running using the Pride’s crime-monitoring program. In fact, Sunstroke would have shown up when they’d brought him into the station to begin with, but Chase had seen no sign of any such video. Which meant…
“I’m an idiot.”
To be fair, they’d all been idiots, too distracted by the Nightwatch’s desire to replace the Pride to focus on the Crimson Cowl.
Chase smiled. Maybe he was going to get his video games back after all.
Molly headed for the kitchen. She’d noticed blueberry Pop-Tarts in a cabinet there. Her dad had liked to sneak a Pop-Tart once in a while, so Molly thought the box in the kitchen must have been his, once. They’d be pretty old now, definitely past their sell-by date, but they did come sealed inside those little silver bags, so maybe they’d still be edible once they were toasted. Maybe. She wanted to find out.
Molly didn’t miss her father. She always told herself that she didn’t miss her parents at all. They’d pretended to be nice and good and they’d turned out to be total jerks. But she had so many memories of them when they were pretending, so many memories that were nice and good, including the times her mom would go up to bed early and her dad would let her stay up and watch TV with him and they would both sneak late-night blueberry Pop-Tarts. Her dad had liked them extra toasted, but Molly liked hers just warmed up, not crunchy, and he would always take hers out early so it would be just the way she liked it, even though it meant he had to put his own Pop-Tart back into the toaster. Sometimes—like now, when she was tired and hungry and scared that Nico might not come back—she liked to tell herself that in moments like that her dad hadn’t been pretending. That the nice moments had been real.
She needed that.
Even more than she needed a Pop-Tart.
When Nico popped back into reality, Gert spent the first few seconds blinking and staring, just to make sure she was real. She’d sat herself down several minutes earlier to try to get comfortable while she stood watch, and now she leaped up again.
“Wow,” she muttered to herself. Then she launched herself forward and slapped the see-through partition. “Nico! Is that you?”
Gert slapped the partition again, bouncing on her heels. Nico was back, but was she alive? Was she breathing? She lay on the floor of the cell in a tangle of limbs, like a doll cast aside by some bratty kid. Gert couldn’t make out whether or not her chest rose and fell. All she could see was the wild mess of her hair. Only part of the left side of Nico’s face was visible, but her makeup looked smudged and streaked.
Damn it, is she alive?
Gert had to go inside. Even if Nico had survived, if Zeke had helped her somehow, she’d need help. A row of fat red buttons was arranged inside a metal box on the wall. Each button was an emergency release on one of the cell doors, and Gert stared at the one that would unlock Zeke’s cell. She raised her hand, let it hover near the button.
Zeke hadn’t stirred. Nico had come back, yeah, but what if the Zeke inside the cell still had a Kurdogrim inside him? Gert was alone here. What if the figure lying on that cot with his back to her was a monster hiding inside a human being? They’d theorized that if Nico reappeared it would be because Zeke had brought her back, that he’d be inside his own body again, but she couldn’t be sure.
The intercom panel was on the wall a dozen feet away, at the entrance to this viewing area outside Zeke’s cell. She needed to call for backup, get Chase or Karolina or Molly down here, have them bring Old Lace with them, but every second might be another second that Nico spent dying.
Something shifted inside the cell. Gert stared, wondering for a moment if she’d imagined it, and then Nico moved again. Dragged herself closer to the base of the cot, pulling herself into a fetal position. Where she’d been lying, blood streaked the floor.
“No,” Gert said, hating herself for the moments she’d already wasted.
She hit the red button. The door swooshed open and she rushed in, calling to Nico. She dropped to her knees beside her friend, so many fears clashing in her thoughts. On the cot, Zeke shifted, groaned, turned and sat up quickly.
Gert jumped away from them. On her feet, she raised her fists and dropped into a combat stance.
“Zeke, is that you?” she demanded, ready to kick his ass. She might not have super strength, but she’d learned how to throw a punch.
He groaned again. “Who do you think?” he asked, and then he met her gaze, saw the suspicion there, and his face lit with understanding. “Ah, right. Sorry. Yes, it’s me. The Kurdogrim’s gone for now. How’s Nico? Is she talking?”
Gert scowled.
“I don’t know!” she snapped as she dropped to her knees again. The wound in Nico’s chest had been bleeding copiously, so it made sense that her shirt was soaked with blood. The sword had punched all the way through her, but now that Gert was so close she saw that Nico was breathing evenly. A little fast, but evenly.
“Nico,” Zeke said, slipping off the bed to join Gert on his knees. “You still with us?”
Gert shook her shoulder gently. Nico moaned and batted at her hand, but when Gert tried again, she rolled onto her back, face scrunched in pain.
“Stop,” Nico rasped.
Gert barely heard her, distracted by the rip in the front of Nico’s shirt. She could see a portion of the wound. Blood caked its edges but it was closed, healed over with gleaming pink skin. You did it, she wanted to say to Zeke, as her heart leaped. You really did it!
“Nico,” Gert said. “Can you hear me? Are you going to be okay?”
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