Page 42 of Renegades

The pain did not go away, but when Ace was there, it seemed to lessen, little by little.

Then, one day, he told her the truth of what had happened to her family.

Nova had been inspecting some reliquaries she’d found in one of the smaller chapels when Ace found her and sat her down on a worn wooden bench. He told her that one of the villain gangs—the Roaches—had demanded that her father craft them a collectionof weapons using his gift. They had threatened David’s wife and daughters if he didn’t meet their expectations.

When her papà began to fall behind on their requests, he went to the Renegades and begged for protection. Captain Chromium himself had promised that no harm would come to him or his family, but only so long as he stopped making weapons for their enemies.

And so her dad did stop. And the Roaches, in retaliation, sent a hitman after him and his family.

Only, the Renegades hadn’t kept their word. Captain Chromium hadn’t kept his word. They were not there to protect David’s family when they needed their protection the most.

When Ace finished telling this story, he handed Nova a cup of cold milk and two vanilla wafer cookies taken from plastic packaging that crinkled deafeningly loud. Nova, six years old and so small her feet didn’t touch the stone floor as she sat on the bench, ate the cookies and drank the milk without comment. She remembered not crying. She remembered that in that moment, she had not felt sad.

She had felt only anger.

Blinding, breathless rage.

As he stood up to leave so she could come to terms with the truth of her family’s deaths, Ace had said simply, practically—“The Roaches were forty-seven members strong. Last night, I killed them all.”

That was the one and only time they spoke of her family’s deaths. What was done was done. The gang had killed Nova’s family. Ace had killed the gang. Justice was served.

Except for the Renegades, who had failed to keep their promise.

Two months after that, Nova’s life was overturned again.

On the Day of Triumph, Nova had been told to stay in the tombs. She sat in the darkness, listening to the screams and thunder of thebattle, feeling the rumble and crash of the earth and walls around her. It went on for hours.Ages.

Honey found her first. Or her bees did, and they led Honey to her. They escaped into a secret passageway, small and damp, smelling of soil and musty air, lit only by the small flashlight Nova had brought with her into the tombs. Honey’s distress kept Nova from talking for a long time, but when the passage finally spilled them into an abandoned subway station, Nova dared to ask what had happened.

She received only three words in reply.

The Renegades won.

***

“HEREWEARE.”

Nova jolted from her thoughts. Goose bumps had erupted across her skin as her memory repeated that day.

She sat up straighter and peered through the windshield. Leroy had parked on the shoulder of a quiet, narrow road just off the shore of Harrow Bay. Rocky outcroppings and foaming waves caught the light of a hesitant moon, and she could see a handful of docks stretching into the water. Most of them were bare, but a few had small fishing boats moored alongside them, their sides thunking hollowly against the pier.

She turned in her seat. To her right was a tall cliff studded with scraggly plants that clung desperately to its side and a burial ground of white driftwood at its base. Behind them, the dark road curved inland and disappeared.

No houses. No apartments. No warehouses. No buildings at all.

“Charming,” she said.

Leroy killed the engine. He was turned away from her, gazingout toward the water. “I don’t much care for the ocean,” he said solemnly. “Seeing it always fills me with regret.”

“Regret?” Nova studied the choppy waves. “Why?”

“Because if I had learned to sail, then I could leave this place. In a boat, one could go anywhere.”

“You have a car,” said Nova, glancing sideways at him. “You could drive away if you wanted to.”

“It’s not the same.” Leroy turned—not to face her, but to stare at his own crooked fingers on the steering wheel. “There’s not a civilized place in this whole world where I wouldn’t be recognized, and the others too. Our reputations would precede us wherever we went. So long as anarchy is synonymous with chaos and despair, the Anarchists will always be synonymous with villains.” He cocked his head to the side and this time he did look at her, though it was so dark in the car she could only catch faint spots of moonlight reflected in his eyes. “But not you, Nightmare. No one knows who you are. You could leave us, you know. You could go anywhere.”

She scoffed. “Where would I go?”

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