Page 57 of Renegades

Her eye caught on Adrian Everhart.

He was standing behind his team’s table, both hands planted on the tablecloth, his fingers drumming anxiously as he watched the duel. He met her gaze with an intensity that had been lacking at the parade.

Her pulse skipped.

Licking her lips, she scanned the random assortment of objects scattered across his table.

She pointed. “That.”

Adrian glanced down, lifting his hands as if he thought they might be concealing something.

“The cannon!”

Uncertain, Adrian picked up the small cannon figurine.

Wrapping her forearm up in the banner and hoping with everything inside her it would be strong enough to hold her weight, Nova started to run.

Gargoyle turned back, curious, as Nova made a full turn around the ring, then kicked off and pulled herself a few feet higher on the banner. The Gargoyle ducked as she neared him, but she wasn’t going for an attack. Instead, Nova stomped both feet down hard on his shoulder and used the leverage to swing herself outward from the ring. “Now!”

Adrian lobbed the miniature cannon at her as Nova swung past their table. She caught it in her free hand, then slid down the banner and somersaulted back into the ring.

Gargoyle’s laughter boomed through the arena. “What does that thing shoot—marbles? Oh, I’m terrified! Please don’t hurt me!”

The crowd hollered in response.

Crouching near the center of the ring, the banner clutched in one fist and the cannon in the other, Nova grinned. “If you’re so brave, why don’t you come a little closer and find out?”

Gargoyle shook his head, smirking. “Careful what you ask for.”

Then he was running at her again.

Nova jogged backward on the balls of her feet, the banner fluttering at her side.

At the last moment, she tossed the cannon between them. It rolled into Gargoyle’s path, directly beneath one of his large feet. He stepped on it and the wheels shot out from beneath him, sending him off-balance. He yelped. One hand swiped toward Nova as he stumbled and she darted out of his reach. Spinning to the side, she lifted the banner overhead.

Gargoyle struck the paper like a flailing bull and Nova leaped up onto his back, wrapping the paper around his head to blind him.The other half of the banner was torn from the second column and Gargoyle tripped and fell, the momentum from his own charge sending him rolling onto his side. He landed in a heap, inches from the edge of the ring while his massive hands pawed at the paper blindfold.

Nova sprang up onto the mountain of his chest and grabbed one of his hands. It came away from his face holding a ball of scrunched paper. Confused and disoriented, his one revealed eye glared up at her as she used all her body weight to force his hand down onto the fake grass at his side.

The horn blared.

Gargoyle jerked his hand away as if the grass had burned him. He sat up, throwing Nova off him. She landed with a grunt on her side, well outside of the ring, but she didn’t care. She was already laughing as she peered up at the giant who was staring in dismay at the implant of his own hand in the grass.

“Rock paper scissors,” she said, hauling herself to her feet and brushing off her pants. “Paper beats rock.”

She strolled past him, ignoring Frostbite and her team and instead focusing on Adrian Everhart. The boy from the parade. The one who had fixed her bracelet.

He held her eyes as she approached and the way he looked at her made her victory feel newly, inexplicably real. It wasn’t entirely a look of shock, though there was a bit of that. But there was something dumbfounded and impressed and proud there, too, and it made her heart swell.

She’d been challenged by a Renegade—attrials—and she’d won.

But before she reached the table, she was attacked from both sides. Two sets of arms wrapped around her and someone squealed in her ear.

Instinctively, Nova dropped to the ground, grabbed their ankles, and yanked upward.

The two Renegades hit the ground hard. The boy groaned pitifully. The girl gaped up at the arena ceiling, mouth shuddering open and closed as she struggled to find her breath again.

Nova snarled, recognizing Smokescreen and Red Assassin. She didn’t have any weaponry to defend herself against them, but she spotted the ruby gem attached to Red Assassin’s wrist and reached for it, considering a dozen different ways she could use it to her advantage—

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