Page 86 of Renegades

I fell asleep—the very last time I ever slept. And when I woke up, there was a man with a gun. He killed them both. He killed my sister. He tried to kill me. And the Renegades didn’t come…

After that, every time I tried to sleep I would hear it happening all over again, until, eventually, I stopped trying.

That was her origin story. The whole of it.

And it was none of Adrian’s business, or anyone else’s for that matter.

She couldn’t understand why talking about it had made her so defensive or given her such a strong compulsion to tell them the truth of her power and where it had come from. She’d never told anyone, not in so many words, though she thought Ace understood the gist of it, and of course all the Anarchists had figured out that she wasn’t one for sleeping not long after she’d moved into the cathedral. But she’d never had any cause to actuallytellsomeone the story. She’d never really wanted to.

Why would she now?

Instead, she paced. Back and forth across the rooftop, enjoying the fresh air on her skin. Though she’d worn leggings and a simple T-shirt, civilian clothing, as instructed, she’d opted to wear the uniform boots she’d picked up at headquarters earlier that day. She figured she might as well use this reconnaissance mission to start breaking them in, though now she could tell it wasn’t necessary. They were, in fact, ridiculously comfortable, and a part of her hated the Renegades for winning even at this.

Finally, when she felt sure that any compulsion to give out unnecessary information was gone, Nova made her way back down to the fourth floor.

Ruby and Oscar had fallen asleep. Oscar had not moved from his spot on the pillows, and Ruby was now lying with her head beside his, but her body perpendicular, so they made a kind of right angle on the floor with nothing but their heads nearly touching. It seemed almost as though Ruby had gone out of her way to place herself in a position that wouldn’t suggest anything beyond the fact that she was tired and Oscar was hogging the pillows.

Though she could have moved her pillow to the other side of the blanket. If she’d wanted to.

Stepping over Ruby’s legs, Nova approached Adrian. He had pulled the desk in front of the window and now sat with his feet dangling over the side, with a sketchpad on his lap. He was drawing the library with quick, hasty lines, focusing mostly on the dark shadows that spilled from the alley.

Nova climbed up onto the desk and sat beside him, her toes tapping against the glass.

“You all right?” Adrian asked, without looking up.

“Fine,” said Nova. “The view from the roof looks pretty much the same as the view from here.”

“I know. I scouted it out yesterday morning.”

Her lip twitched and again she wasn’t sure what was more annoying—that he hadn’t followed her to ask about her parents, or that she still sort of wished he had.

“So, other than squiggly dinosaurs and bracelet clasps”—she glanced at the sketchpad—“what sort of things do you like to draw?”

He hummed in thought, sketching in a blur of shrubbery around the library’s foundation. “I draw a lot of tools and weaponry for the Renegades. Armor pieces. Handcuffs. Things that might come in handy when we’re out patrolling. Not just for our team, but for everyone. It’s really made a big difference in the things we can accomplish.”

“I bet it has,” said Nova, trying to keep any resentment out of her tone.

“But when I’m left to my own devices,” said Adrian, “I like to draw the city.”

“The city?”

He set down the pen and turned back the pages of his notebook. A number of them were blank and she wondered if there had beendrawings there before—drawings that had since been brought into reality—until he arrived at a series of dark, detailed images. Unlike all the marker drawings she’d seen, these were done in charcoal. He handed Nova the sketchbook and she took it delicately, feeling her breath hitch.

The first image was of the beach at Harrow Bay, shadowed by the monumental Sentry Bridge. A couple was seated on the rocky shore, sharing a newspaper as they huddled beneath a single raincoat.

She turned the page and saw Ashing Hill—a neighborhood of cobbled-together shacks and ruddy houses that had been a hot spot for drugs and crime during the Age of Anarchy. Probably still was, for all Nova knew, but in this picture Adrian had captured three children harvesting bouquets of dandelions and clovers from the edges of the overgrown sidewalk.

She flipped on, seeing a street musician strumming a guitar on the corner of Broad Street, two huge dogs curled around his ankles. Then a sketch of the ticket booth outside the old Sedgwick Theater, most of the lightbulbs burned out on the sign and the posters on the wall still promoting a musical act from years ago. Then a view of the crowded flea market on North Oldham Road, where people came from all over the city to sell everything from hand-crocheted baby mittens to broken clocks to garden-grown zucchini.

Nova turned another page and paused.

She was staring at a scene of a shadowed glen surrounded by a low stone wall and thick, crowded trees. In the center of the glen stood a single statue, half covered in moss. It was an elegant figure, covered head to toe in a long cloak, with a hood that fell so far forward as to completely cover its face. All that could be seen of the person within the cloak was their hands, which were held just slightly apart in front of the figure’s stomach, as if they were holding an invisible gift.

Nova exhaled and flipped past the drawing. She reached the end of the notebook and started to turn back through the pages again. “These are extraordinary.”

“Thank you,” Adrian murmured, and though he must have known they were extraordinary, she still detected a hint of self-consciousness in his voice.

“Could you bring these to life?” she asked. “If you wanted to?”

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