Page 88 of Renegades

“Right. Now, that one, I get. Being up all night, you’ve probably spent a lot of time looking at the stars.”

Nova looked up, to the few bright stars that could be seen dotting the sky between the buildings. There had been no ulterior motivefor learning about the night sky, only that she found it fascinating. She could remember the sky being full of stars when she was a child. They were more difficult to see these days, now that so much of the city’s power grid had been fixed.

She liked electricity, but some nights, she would have given almost anything to see the Milky Way again.

Nova was still staring at the stars when, behind her, Ruby started to mutter in her sleep—Nova heard onlyshow you a zero…and then what might have beencasserole.She looked back as Ruby rolled onto her side and curled into a fetal position, her head sliding off the pillow and onto Oscar’s outstretched arm.

“Are they…?” she asked, gesturing between their sleeping forms.

“No,” said Adrian, who was turning pages in his sketchbook again.

“But they like each other?”

“Hard to say.” He found the sketch of the library and glanced back once, his eyes softening a bit as he looked at his friends. “I’m almost positive Oscar likes her, but I think he’s too afraid to do anything about it. And Ruby… she pretends to be oblivious, but I wonder.” He thumped his pen against the paper. “So, what are you training for?”

“Hm?”

“You said you spend a lot of your time training. For what?”

She leaned back on her hands. What did she train for? To destroy the Renegades. To avenge her family’s deaths. To someday see Ace’s vision realized—a world in which all people could be free. Where the people would not be heralded over by villain gangsorthe Council. Where prodigies would not be subjected to constant injustices and cruelty, as they had been before the Age of Anarchy.

A world in which the Anarchists could return to sunlight and not fear persecution for even the slightest misstep.

“For this, I guess,” she whispered, tracing the filigree of her bracelet. “To be a Renegade.”

Adrian nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable thing to train for. “And is it everything you hoped for and more?”

Smirking, Nova looked back at Oscar and Ruby again and saw that Ruby was drooling a tiny bit. “So far, I can honestly say that it is surpassing every expectation.”

Turning back to the window, she saw that a slivered moon had risen over the library. It must have been going on two o’clock in the morning.

“What’s the significance of the bracelet?”

Nova looked down. She hadn’t realized she’d been fidgeting with it again. “Oh. It… was my mom’s.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you, by the way. For fixing it.”

“My pleasure,” he murmured. Reaching over, he took hold of the filigree between two fingers and twisted it around so he could see the empty setting. “What happened to the stone?”

She pulled her hand away, settling it on her lap. “This is how it was when I got it,” she said, picturing the bracelet abandoned on their tiny kitchen table. Ace had grabbed it as he carried her from the apartment, refusing to let another piece of David’s work fall into the hands of the gangs.

Her stomach tightened. “Aren’t you tired?” she asked.

Adrian blinked at the change of topic, but his surprise quickly turned to sheepishness. “Not too bad. I’ve worked night patrols before, plus I had one of those energy shots right before you came back down.”

“Go rest for a while.” Nova brought her legs up onto the table,sitting cross-legged and watching the street and the alley and the pitch-black windows as nothing, nothing, nothing happened. “This is what I’m here for, right?”

“I know, but… I don’t want to miss anything.”

“Miss anything of what?” said Nova, gesturing toward the library.

He frowned.

“Adrian,” she said, more firmly now. “I can handle this. If you don’t get some sleep, you’re going to be useless, so…” She gestured to the blanket.

He sighed and lifted his hands in resignation. “Fine. But you’ll wake me up the moment you see anything suspicious, right?”

She sighed, feigning exasperation. “What do you think I am, an amateur?”

Adrian stretched out on the blanket, pillowing his hands beneath his head. “Watch it, Insomnia. You haven’t even been a Renegade for three whole days yet.”

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