Page 82 of Renegades

“Who else? Tsunami, to be specific. She’s the one who put out the fire, then she handed me off to Thunderbird who flew me over to the hospital, but they didn’t have much hope I’d make it. I didn’t have a pulse by that point. But while they were all mourning the death of this kid, I was having a dream.” His voice darkened, taking on an air of importance. “I dreamed that I was standing on top of our apartment building and I was breathing in—this long, long breath that went on and on. It was such a deep breath that it pulled all the smoke right out of the air and into my lungs. Finally, I stopped breathing in, looked up at the sky, and exhaled. And that’s when I woke up.”

“In the hospital?” said Nova. “Or the morgue?”

“The hospital. It had only been about ten minutes since they’d brought me there—plenty of time to declare me legally dead, but still. My mom was there, too, and she saw me exhale, and this big cloud of smoke came out of my mouth.” Oscar puckered his lips and blew. A gray cloud burst across the surface of the window. “And here we are.”

Nova cocked her head. “So… your power. It doesn’t have anything to do with…” She gestured at the cane, and though Oscar wasn’t looking at her, he tapped the cane against the floor a few times in acknowledgment.

“Nope,” he said. “ThisI was born with. I mean, not the cane. But my bones don’t grow like a normal person’s. Some rare bone disease.” He grinned back at Nova. “Probably the best thing that ever happened to me, though, right? Just think—if I’d been faster, I might have gotten out of that apartment building just fine, and I’d be stuck with all the other spry, non-prodigy suckers out there.”

“Right,” said Nova. “Not dying of carbon monoxide poisoning when you were five years old would have beenawful.”

“See?” Oscar looked pointedly at Adrian. “She gets it.”

Adrian rolled his eyes.

“And when you tried out for the Renegades…,” started Nova, leaning forward. “Nobody thought this was… a problem?” She nodded to the cane.

Oscar snorted with pride. “Sure they did. To date, I hold the record for most challenged contestant at the trials. And yet, here I am.” He gestured at Ruby. “She was challenged during her tryout too. In fact, it’s sort of becoming a theme around here.”

“Let me guess,” said Nova, cupping her chin in her palm and inspecting the top of Ruby’s bleached hair as she bent over her cards. “Your origin is that… you stumbled across a cache of ancient magical artifacts in a dusty antique shop somewhere, including a ruby hook and dagger, which imparted you with mystical fighting abilities from some long-forgotten culture.”

Ruby laughed. “Um, no, but that might be what I start telling people. It’s certainly less traumatic than the truth.”

“Oh?”

Ruby turned over the last card, checked that she had nowhere to place it, and started gathering them all back up into her palm. “Before society collapsed, my grandmother was a well-respected jeweler. She’d been running this shop in Queen’s Row for forty years when the Anarchists took over, and it was one of the first places that got raided after all the credit cards stopped working and everyone was panicking and thought we’d go back to bartering for gold and jewels. You know, before they realized that food, water, and guns were the actual valuables in a world like that. After a few days of looting, everything was gone, except what my grandma had stashed in her safe. So she took out every gem and diamond she had left and started hiding them where she didn’tthink they’d be found, including a bunch in secret places around our house.”

“You lived together?” asked Nova.

“Oh yeah, she’s lived with us since before I was born. Grandma, me, my parents, and my brothers.”

“You have brothers?” said Nova.

“Two of them,” said Ruby, fixing a look on her. “But it’s not really relevant to this story.”

“Sorry.”

“So anyway, she hid these priceless gems all over the house—in little holes in the walls, secret compartments in our dressers, things like that. And they all sat there for twenty-plus years while my family tried to figure out how to survive, and eventually my brothers and I were born, and side note—yes, we all have really annoying gem-themed names,thanksGrandma. Well, one night we were playing hide-and-seek and I hid behind the grate on our fireplace and happened to find this little bag full of rubies that had been tucked up inside the chimney. I’d heard about the jewelry store and the raids and everything and didn’t really know what to do with them, so I just put them back. Until a few months later… Do you know how, not long before the Day of Triumph, some of the villain gangs started figuring out how to make trades internationally and that’s when gold started to become valuable again? Well, my grandma was one of the first people they turned to. One night our house got raided by villains looking for anything that might have been missed before.”

“Which villains?” said Nova, having asked the question before she realized she was about to. “What gang?”

“The Jackals,” said Ruby, shuddering. “I’ll never forget those creepy masks.”

Nova pressed her lips together. She’d seen photos of the Jackals taken before the Day of Triumph. They had been one of the few villain gangs to wear a cohesive uniform—all black clothes with signature masks painted to look like the animals they’d been named for.

She wasn’t sure why she felt disappointed, but Nova realized that a part of her had been expecting Ruby to say that her family had been assaulted by the Roaches, the same gang that had sent the hitman after Nova’s family. The gang Ace had slaughtered in retaliation. They had been one of the largest and most powerful gangs in Gatlon City, so it wouldn’t have surprised her if they’d been the tormenters of Ruby’s family. Some said they even got their name from the Renegades themselves, when one of the early vigilantes complained that no matter how many of those villains they stamped out, they could never seem to get rid of them all.

There had been a tiny, faint wish that she and Ruby might share this mutual, long-dead enemy.

She curled her knees against her chest, digging her fingertips into her legs.

What a stupid thing to wish for.

“We didn’t have much by that point, as most everything valuable had been bartered off,” said Ruby, “but they started tearing the house apart anyway. While they were busy threatening my dad, I ran upstairs to the fireplace and took out the rubies—which in hindsight is probably the stupidest thing I could have done, because they might not have even found them up there, but I was four, so what did I know? And then…” She inhaled, as if this were the painful part to talk about it. “I dumped them into my mouth and I swallowed them.”

“Of course you did,” said Nova.

“In one fell swoop.” Ruby cupped one hand and mimed throwing a handful of rubies into her mouth and swallowing, not unlike how she’d gobbled down the jelly beans earlier. “I’m not really sure what possessed me to do it, other than how I just couldn’t stomach the idea of the Jackals walking away with anything more than they’d already taken. The trouble was, one of the Jackals saw me do it. He grabbed me and started demanding that I cough them up. Or, vomit them up, I guess. But I wouldn’t do it. So…” For the first time since the start of her story, Ruby’s face darkened with anger. “He stabbed me.”

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