Renegades

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” said Adrian, taking the sketch pad as she handed it to him. He fidgeted with the pencil, but didn’t turn the page. “But enough about me and my extraordinary artwork. What sort of hobbies do you have to occupy your extra fifty-six hours per week?”

  Nova looked across at the library. It was far past midnight and the building was dark as a tomb, its single lamppost by the sidewalk dim and flickering. Seeing it this way, the place might have been abandoned these past ten years, just as it might have been if Cronin hadn’t chosen to keep it operating even during the Age of Anarchy. Even if that philanthropic cause had been a cover for his black-market dealing … it had to count for something, right?

  “Mostly I train. And study. And … tinker.” She cast him a sideways smile. “Some of us can’t just draw up a tool and get to use it. We have to actually invent it.”

  “I invent things,” he said, tapping the eraser side of his pencil against his temple. “In my mind.”

  “It’s really not the same thing.”

  He grinned.

  “But I guess I’ve taken up lots of hobbies over the years. Not many stick, but I’m always trying to find new ways to keep busy.”

  “Like what sorts of hobbies?”

  “I don’t know. I took up knitting for a while, but never progressed beyond really ragged scarves. Then there was bird-watching, juggling, embroidery, astronomy—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Adrian, laughing. “Start over. Knitting? Seriously?”

  “It’s an undervalued art,” said Nova, managing to keep a straight face. It had, in fact, been a four-month preoccupation when she was twelve or so, but she’d been less interested in making winter accessories and more interested in the idea of being able to tote around weapons as vicious as ten-inch-long needles and no one batting an eye about it.

  “And bird-watching?” said Adrian.

  “Bird-watching, yep.” That hobby had been Leroy’s idea, who had insisted that it would help develop her patience, stealth, and observation skills. “Mostly around the bay. Did you know this area is home to over forty species of waterfowl?”

  “In fact,” said Adrian, “I was not aware of our waterfowl population, but that does seem like good information to have.”

  “You never know when it might come up in conversation.”

  He grinned again and Nova saw that his cheeks dimpled, just a tiny bit, once his smile got broad enough.

  She swallowed.

  “Okay, what else did you say? Juggling?”

  She could still hear Ingrid waxing on about the many physical benefits juggling offered—from dexterity to balance to hand-eye coordination.

  “I got pretty good at it, actually,” she said.

  “If I draw you some bowling pins, will you give me a demonstration?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about some scarves? Softballs? Flaming torches?”

  She turned her head away, in part to hide the smile she was having trouble keeping back. “We’re supposed to be on a very important mission, you know. I’d hate to be a distraction.”

  “Fine. I’ll let it go … for now. What was the other thing you mentioned?”

  “Astronomy.”

  “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 motive for 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 only show you a zero … and then what might have been casserole. 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 gangs or the 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.”

  She turned back to the window. In the glass, she could see her own reflection, and she was caught off guard by the faint smile still playing around her lips. She settled her focus on the library, and said the words she thought Adrian would believe without question—what any Renegade would hear as the absolute truth.

/>   “Yeah, but some days I feel like I’ve been a Renegade my whole life.”

  Nova shut her eyes to hide the laughter in them. It sounded so painfully ludicrous, but she was proud of her delivery. She’d almost convinced even herself.

  She waited for some smart comment to be shot back her way, but none came.

  She frowned. Waited some more.

  And heard only heavy breathing.

  Nova glanced back over her shoulder. Her jaw fell.

  He was already asleep.

  “Ugh. You would be one of those.” Sighing, she wrapped her arms around her legs, settled her chin on her knee, and stared out into the dark world beyond this abandoned office. She had always been astonished by people who could fall asleep fast, like there was nothing to it. Like their spirits weren’t burdened with suffering and resentment. Like their hearts and minds could so easily be at peace.

  After a while, she dared to look back at Adrian—just to make sure he really was asleep. She frowned as her gaze alighted first on the steady rise and fall of his chest. Her attention swept down his lean body to casually crossed ankles, then back up to his face. He had removed his glasses and set them, neatly folded, beside the wall. His face was different without them. More open and tranquil, though that could have been as much because of the sleep.

  She knew it was a stereotype, but the glasses really did give him an air of studiousness. Of artistry. Without them, he looked like … well, like a superhero.

  A really good-looking superhero.

  Nova flushed, suddenly mortified at the direction of those thoughts, and hastily turned back to the window, vowing not to stare at him for another second.

  The vow was harder to keep than she ever would have admitted, but keep it she did. Listening to the sounds of deep breathing. The occasional rustle of fabric and peaceful sigh as her companions slept and shifted and slept some more. In the city, a distant siren. A motorcycle roaring to life a few blocks away.

  It wasn’t the shortest night of her life, but it wasn’t the longest, either.

  She searched for any sign of activity inside the library, but there was nothing but stillness and darkened windows. Which was good. Ingrid and the Librarian would have had all the previous day to clear the library of incriminating evidence. There was nothing to do now but wait until morning, when Nova could encourage the Renegades to go inside and the Librarian could prove that he had nothing to hide, thereby putting an end to this investigation.

  Nova was getting anxious to get it over with. She had other things to be doing than sitting with a patrol unit on a hopeless surveillance assignment. She had things to investigate at headquarters—secrets to uncover, weaknesses to ascertain, and she wasn’t going to get any of that done here.

  Eventually, the sky overhead began to shift from black to navy to sapphire, a progression she was intimately familiar with. The window was facing north, so she had no hope of seeing the sunrise, but she sensed it in the gradual lightening of the clouds and the way shadows began to stretch long down the street, and how all at once the windows of the library began to glimmer with morning light.

  At eight o’clock sharp, the CLOSED sign in the window was flipped over to OPEN. Nova couldn’t see who had turned it—Narcissa, or Gene Cronin himself?

  Nine minutes later, the first patron arrived, an elderly woman carrying a basket full of thick paperbacks, her head tucked beneath a plastic hood, even though there were no rainclouds in the sky.

  Nova climbed down from the desk and nudged Adrian with her toe. “Hey, Sketch.”

  It was Ruby who woke first, startling when she found herself restrained by Oscar’s arm across her waist. She moved it off of her and sat up, brushing her black-and-white hair aside. Oscar and Adrian woke up moments later—Adrian jolting upward the moment he spotted Nova and remembered where they were.

  “Did something happen?” he said, his hand fumbling across the floor until it landed on his glasses. He unfolded them and slipped them back onto his face, blinking up at Nova. “Did you see something?”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning against the desk. “The library opened. An old woman just went in carrying a bunch of books, but … I have a feeling she might have been hiding a machine gun under her jacket.”

  Adrian blinked up at her and she noticed he had a speck of white caught in the lashes of his left eye—what her mother had used to refer to as “sleep dust.” Nova had the most peculiar urge to lift up his glasses and run her thumb across the lashes to clear it away.

  “She’s being sarcastic, right?” said Oscar, rolling a kink from his shoulder.

  Nova glanced at him. “Yes.”

  A cacophony of giggles from outside drew them all to the window. On the street below a crowd of young children had just arrived via three minivans and were being paraded into the library. Perhaps a day-care retreat or a school field trip.

  They stared until the last of the children and their teachers had disappeared through the large main doors.

  “Well,” said Ruby, slapping her hands together. “We didn’t really expect to catch anything on our first night, did we? I mean, who knows how often his illegal dealings go down.”

  Nova shifted her attention between the three Renegades. “Is this really our plan? To stake this place out every night for all eternity? What if we never catch anyone? What if his black-market clients don’t use the alleyway, but go in through some other entrance? He could have a secret underground tunnel for all we know. Or—just a thought—what if he’s not actually dealing in black-market guns and this is a waste of time?”

  “It’s too early to determine any of that,” said Adrian.

  “So how long do we keep doing this before we try something else?” Nova pressed.

  Adrian opened his mouth, but hesitated.

  “Well,” started Ruby, “longer than one night, at least.”

  Nova gestured at the window. “Look, I know I’m the new guy here, and maybe I don’t have all the information to be making this call, but I really don’t think we’re going to learn anything from an abandoned office building, staring at a closed public library every night. I think the only way we’ll know if illegal activity is happening in there is to actually go inside.”

  Adrian shook his head. “The Council was very specific. We can’t do a search without first having some evidence of criminal activity.”

  “So let’s go inside and get some evidence. It’s a library. It’s open to the public. It’s not breaking any rules if we go…”

  She trailed off, her eye catching on a lone figure on the street below. Her breath hitched.

  She quickly pulled her attention away, but it was too late. Adrian followed the look, his lips parting in surprise.

  “Jackpot,” he whispered.

  “What? What is it?” said Ruby as she and Oscar pressed closer to see.

  “See that woman down there?” said Adrian, his eyes tracking her as she crossed the street and ducked into the shadow of the library. “I’m almost positive that’s Ingrid Thompson. The Detonator.”

  Nova swallowed, staring at Ingrid as she paused on the front stoop of the library and looked back, in what was probably intended to give the Renegades a good look at her, but that also served to make her look extra suspicious as she slipped inside.

  Adrian lifted his communicator band to his mouth. “Sketch to the Council. We’ve just witnessed an Anarchist, the Detonator, entering the Cloven Cross Library. There are civilians inside. An extraction team is requested. We’ll hold the area.”

  “An extraction team?” said Nova, gaping at him as she tried to muddle through what Ingrid could be thinking. The last thing she was supposed to do was give actual evidence that Gene Cronin was dealing on the black market—and seeing an Anarchist enter the library may not be evidence, but it wasn’t going to help the case for his innocence, either.

  But Ingrid must have a plan. She knew Nova was up here. Did she still want Nova to bring the team inside?

  “The extractio
n team will go in after the Detonator, and maybe the Librarian too,” said Adrian. “They’ll probably bring backup. The Detonator hasn’t been active in almost ten years, but she had a reputation for being pretty volatile back in the day.”

  Inhaling sharply through her nostrils, Nova looked down at the closed library doors. Whatever Ingrid was thinking, she would have planned on there being only three Renegades on this mission. Whatever she was planning, an extraction team probably wasn’t on the agenda.

  “We should go in,” she said.

  Ruby looked at her. “What?”

  “The Detonator makes bombs, right? She could blow up that whole place in seconds. What if … what if she gets into a fight with Cronin or something else sets her off? There are children in there. We can’t risk anyone getting hurt!”

  The others exchanged looks, significantly more anxious now than they had been even seconds ago.

  “We’re supposed to call for backup,” said Adrian, but his words carried little conviction. “We’re not supposed to engage.”

  “That was when it was just us and the Librarian,” said Nova. “But things have changed. Now there’s an Anarchist involved. What if this is our only chance to catch them both, red-handed?”

  Adrian looked at each of them in turn, his brow setting in determination. “Making sure the civilians are safe is our top priority…”

  “But if we go in there and start ordering people outside,” said Oscar, “that’ll just tip the Librarian off that we’re on to him.”

  “And probably scare off the Detonator too,” said Ruby.

  Adrian peered down at the library for an agonizingly long minute, as if mesmerized by the sunlight glinting off its windows. “The civilians are our top priority,” he repeated. “We’ll find the Detonator and the Librarian and hold them until help arrives. No violence if we can help it, and no need to cause a panic.” He looked up, his jaw set.

  “Now we’re talking,” said Oscar, a wisp of gray smoke curling around his fingers as he grabbed the head of his cane. “Let’s go be superheroes!”