“Phantom is dead,” Alex said. His voice had no emotion attached to it. He didn’t even know what he was supposed to be feeling.
Gage and Mallory stared at him, both silent. Finally Mallory spoke.
“Then that feeling in my palm—our marks are really gone.”
“She’s dead because of me,” Alex said, staring past them. “It’s my fault.” Even as he spoke the words, he wasn’t sure he was saying them loud enough for anyone to hear. Everything felt fuzzy. All he could think was that he’d finally lived up to his potential as a killer, as a weapon. What must his parents have been thinking at that moment? Was his mother proud?
“It was an accident,” Mallory said. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“Their response to this will be brutal. They’ll go insane.”
“We can’t go back to the lake house.” Mallory shook her head slowly. “Shade’s going to rip apart Photon’s head trying to find us.”
“I can’t even check in on the cameras and alarms,” Gage said. “My electronic tablet was damaged while I was fighting against Legion and his clones.”
“Gage, what about the Gloom Key?” Alex asked. “It’s still there, right?”
“Hidden in a cooler in the rafters of the garage. But honestly, if your Cloak marks disappeared, I don’t even know if it’s functioning now. It ran on Phantom’s energy.”
“All our notes,” Alex said. “All our stuff.”
“I guess we can officially say that rescuing the Rangers was not the answer to any of our problems,” Mallory murmured. “Everything’s gone wrong.”
“It’s going to get worse. What do we know about the Guild of Daggers?”
Gage and Mallory both looked puzzled.
“The who?” Mallory asked. “Wait, aren’t they—”
“The group that Cloak was visiting when we snuck into the underground base to steal the components to the Gloom Key,” Gage said, picking up on her thought. “They’re some sort of organized crime syndicate in New York. Not as old or powerful as Cloak, but just as secretive. I think there are a few superpowers between them, but they’re mostly mob and Mafia families. I only know that because of information I picked up here and there at the base. Why?”
“Cloak is working with them on something.”
“On what?” Mallory asked.
“I don’t know,” Alex said, rubbing his temples. “Weapons and plans. Once they have the city, they’re going to take over the rest of the country. We were talking right at the end, right before everything went terrible and I . . .”
He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Phantom’s death has severely hindered Cloak’s ability to move around,” Gage offered. “Not to mention it’s severed their connection to the Gloom. Really, this is a key strategic victory.”
Gage stopped talking when he realized that nothing he was saying was helping.
Alex felt sick.
“Bathroom?” he asked, getting to his feet.
Mallory pointed to the door. “Take a right. It’s the first door on the left.”
He rushed out, a little wobbly on his feet, and found himself in an open den with a staircase leading down on one side. A few steps later he was in the bathroom, where he fumbled with the light switch. He didn’t throw up, but his body and head hurt. Before he knew what he was doing, he had his face underneath the faucet, letting cold water run over it.
When he finally calmed down a little, he wiped his face with his sleeve and stared into the mirror. His fingers traced the red cut that started on his cheek, just below his right eye, and disappeared into his wavy brown hair. His head was reeling. Scenes from the day kept flashing in his mind. He wanted to hit reset. He needed a do-over. And more than anything, he needed someone to tell him what to do. That things would be okay. That they had a plan.
For the first time since leaving Cloak, he unquestionably missed his parents. Not the ones who had trained him and had fought against him earlier that day, but the parents who smiled when he’d made them proud. The ones in the picture his father had given him on his twelfth birthday. That Volt and Shade were all grins. They were the parents who’d sat on the end of his bed at night and told him stories about the glory of his destiny and his ancestors. His thoughts went back to when he’d first developed his powers. He’d woken up—still just a Gamma, one of the unpowered children of Cloak—and discovered that his vision had been tinted blue. Freaking out, he’d made his way down to the bottom floor of the underground base where his parents lived, a place that normally he’d need to be escorted to or from. His mother had been unhappy that he’d broken the rules but had let him into their apartment. As he stammered, trying to explain to her that something was wrong with him, she’d tapped her fingernail against the side of her coffee mug, a sign of annoyance. Alex had stared at the mug, hating it as he spoke. And then suddenly, it sparked a bright blue and flew across the room, shattering against one of the walls.
Shade had looked shocked for only a few breaths before a smile spread wide across her face. She’d run to Alex, scooping him up in her arms and holding him tightly.
“My darling son,” she’d whispered into his hair. “You’ve finally gotten your powers. You’re one of us.”
Alex had felt so safe and happy and proud.
In the bathroom, he tried to hold on to that feeling, that one good memory, but his thoughts insisted on straying. Kirbie pinned to the ground by Phantom’s powers. Photon, Julie, and his mother all attacking at the same time. Gage’s arm, snapped. An explosion of telekinetic power, and the slightest nudge of his thoughts to ensure that Julie rammed into Phantom. It was this last detail that caused his chest to tighten and clench. In the heat of battle, he’d directed the girl with all the spikes sticking out of her into his enemy to free his teammate.
He told himself over and over again as he stared into the mirror that Phantom’s death had been an accident. He’d only meant to free Kirbie and hopefully escape with their lives. But there was a voice of doubt in the back of his head that kept asking questions he didn’t have answers to. Had he thought that Julie would transform back to flesh and blood before hitting Phantom? Or maybe that Phantom would disappear or dodge? Or had he known in some horrible place within himself that sending Julie careening toward Phantom would result in injury, even death? It was only logical. It was an obvious risk. But he’d done it anyway.
He worried that he had not escaped the darkest parts of his past. That killing ran in his blood. He’d done what his mother had taunted him about not being able to do. Even if he blamed the attack on instinct, all that meant was that he couldn’t trust his own nature. He couldn’t trust himself.
He felt helpless.
There was a knock on the bathroom door.
“Alex,” Gage said softly. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah,” Alex lied.
“Misty’s up. I think it would help if she saw you. I’m . . . I don’t think I was helping when I talked to her.”
“Sure. I’ll be out in just a second.”
Alex tried to compose himself as best he could. Misty needed him. The team needed him. Now more than ever. He had to put on a brave face for them. Things would only get worse from here. The Cloak Society would become vengeance incarnate.
The sound of sobbing could be heard from outside the bedroom door. Alex stopped. His heart sank. He knocked on the door. From inside there was shuffling, followed by some sniffles, then Misty’s voice.
“Come in.”
Alex found Misty and Mallory sitting side by side on the end of the bed together. Mallory gave him a small smile as he entered, but Misty turned her face away. Even without a clear view of her, he could tell that she’d been crying. Her cheeks were all puffy and red.
Alex pulled a chair over and sat across from the two girls.
“Uh, so . . . ,” he began, “are you okay?” He felt stupid asking. Of course she wasn’t.
Tears immediately began to fall from Misty’s eyes. She pretended they were
n’t there, looking away from Alex. Her chin quivered a little.
“Misty . . . ,” Alex said, but the sound of his voice was apparently a trigger for her, and she fell back on the bed, burying her face into a pillow.
“She was a bad person.” Her voice was muffled. “But she was my aunt. I saw her all the time and now she’s dead.”
Alex looked at Mallory, who shrugged back at him, not knowing what to do. Misty started crying harder. He thought about finding Kirbie, but he doubted that anything anyone could say to Misty would make her feel better at that moment. How was he supposed to know how to comfort her when he was barely able to comfort himself? They had never trained for this.
He looked around the room, exasperated, trying to find something, anything to console her with. His eyes landed on a stack of multicolored construction paper on a desk in the corner of the room. He used his powers to drift it over to them, until it was in his hands.
“Misty,” he said, “what kind of animal do you want?”
She sat up, confused at first. Then she understood.
“I don’t care. Just something pretty.”
Alex stared down at the paper, pulling a few sheets into the air with his thoughts. Simultaneously, they all began to fold, and then suddenly there was a swan, and a crane, and a butterfly floating around Misty’s head. But Alex didn’t stop. Sheet after sheet flew into the air, creasing and folding and tucking. He racked his brain for every pattern he’d ever seen or used in his precision training with his mother. When he ran out of dragonflies and birds and pterodactyls, he switched to things that couldn’t fly—frogs, giraffes, flowers, and stars. He kept folding and folding until there was no more paper. Only then did he really look up. All around the room origami shapes hung in the air. Dozens of them, floating and bobbing on little clouds of telekinetic power.
Misty smiled a little bit. She reached over to put her hand on Mallory’s, then jumped.
“Mal, you’re freezing.”
Mallory looked confused for a moment. Her eyes had been drifting among the paper designs.
“Oh, sorry,” Mallory said, little white puffs of breath accompanying her words. “I just got a little caught up in everything.”
There were tiny crystals of ice around her eyelashes, perfect frost flakes shimmering in the light. As she concentrated, they melted.
11
STARLA
They regrouped downstairs. Bug and the Junior Rangers lounged around in the living room, a big area with cream-colored carpet and brown, overstuffed leather furniture. Through a window, Alex could see Lone Star in a chair on the back porch, huddled in the corner, as far out of sight as possible. He looked defeated.
When Alex walked in, he felt as though all the sound had been sucked out of the room. Everyone stared at him, and he looked down at the floor uncomfortably, trying to figure out if he should say a few words to address what he was sure everyone was thinking about. Luckily, a rising argument from down the hallway started to drift into the living room, capturing everyone’s attention. He didn’t recognize the voice that spoke.
“This city’s about one disaster away from crowning the New Rangers as absolute rulers, and it seems like every local government body is onboard with them. Whatever’s happened since you’ve been gone happened by design, and I’m guessing you know more about it than I do.”
“That’s Carla, Lone Star’s sister,” Mallory whispered to Alex. “Apparently she works with the district attorney in the city.”
“You should ask Amp and Alex to walk you through it.” Lux’s voice filtered out from the hallway. “They know the information inside and out. They probably have a better idea of what Cloak’s going to do now than we ever could.”
“I am not trusting the fate of the city to the imaginations of a handful of kid superheroes and possibly reformed supervillains,” Carla spat.
The door in the hallway flew open, and Carla stepped out. It was the first time Alex had gotten a good look at her. She was in her midthirties, he guessed. She wore a dark-navy suit, her strawberry-blond hair cropped short around her head—maybe even shorter than his own unkempt hair. She didn’t look much like her brother, exactly, but there was something similar about the way they presented themselves. She might not have had Lone Star’s height or stature, but she stood in front of Alex with a look of determination and self-assurance.
Carla locked eyes with Alex and his fellow former Cloak members. Her frown deepened as she shook her head.
“I apologize if you heard me say a few harsh things just now,” she said, stepping forward. “You can imagine that emotions are running a little high. I never meant to question how much any of you have contributed to this city. And from the brief rundown I got from Lux, it sounds like I owe you for saving my brother. I’m Carla, by the way. As you probably already know, my relationship with Victor—I’m sorry, with Lone Star—is highly classified information.”
“I didn’t even know about her,” Lux said quietly. “It was a matter of protection. The last thing Lone Star wanted was for one of our enemies to hurt our loved ones to get to us.”
“The rest of my family is on an emergency trip to the in-laws until everything blows over,” Carla said. “I have a lot of explaining to do once they get back.”
“Do you have powers?” Alex asked. A glimmer of hope welled up in him that they might have stumbled across a new Lone Star.
“Only in the sense that I’ve managed to figure out how to convict all the criminals dropped off on our doorstep by flying men and women in tights and spandex over the last few years. Some of us have to keep our feet planted in the real world.” She cocked her head toward the window. “He wanted to call me ‘Starla’ and market us as a brother-sister crime-fighting duo when we were kids.”
One by one they introduced themselves. When Misty spoke, Carla’s eyes narrowed.
“I’ve seen you on the news. There’s a billboard with your face on it near my office. I know the woman claiming to be your mother. Is she?”
“She’s my mom,” Misty said quietly. “I haven’t seen her for a long time, though. She always lived in the city, and I always lived underground. She’s a part of Cloak, but she doesn’t have any superpowers.” Her voice got quiet. “A billboard?”
“I never did like her,” Carla muttered.
Misty stared down at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Carla said. “I didn’t mean—You all must be hungry. I’ll order—No, we probably don’t want people coming around. I’ll see what I can find in the kitchen. You can make yourselves at home. My children’s rooms are upstairs, but some of you will have to sleep on the couches down here. I can’t say I was prepared for anything quite like this.”
She seemed happy to excuse herself, leaving Lux to face her younger teammates. She looked weary. Haggard.
“You’re not feeling any . . . stronger?” Bug asked.
She shook her head, glancing out at Lone Star. She moved toward the back door but then stopped, sinking instead into an oversized chair. The room was quiet again.
“Listen,” Lux said. “I don’t want you to take anything Carla said to heart. No one’s questioning your loyalty or anything.”
She spoke as if she was talking to everyone, but her eyes were on Alex.
“I guess if I were in her shoes, I probably wouldn’t trust us either,” he said.
“It’s almost funny,” Lux said. “You’re probably more like the founding Rangers than any of us.”
Everyone looked to her in confusion. At first she seemed a little worried, opening her mouth to speak but not actually saying anything. Then, she got a curious expression on her face and turned to Alex and his fellow ex-Cloak members.
“How much do you all know about the history of Cloak and the Rangers?”
It was just one question, but at the same time, every question. It was something he’d never really had to think about before. He’d grown up in the shadow of Victory Park—the Rangers of Justice had always been their ult
imate enemies. They were the force that stood in the way of Cloak’s rule, perhaps the only people who had the power to do so. That’s all he’d ever needed to know. Beyond that, he knew that the Rangers had first banded together before he’d been born. They’d cleaned up Sterling City, and their presence had helped to turn it into the metropolis it was today. Or it least that it had been.
“The Cloak Society is made up of people unafraid of breaking laws to get what they want,” Gage said. “The world calls them supervillains. The Rangers of Justice are the law enforcers called heroes. It’s only logical that two such forces would clash. Philosophically speaking, I’m not even sure one could exist without the other.”
“How does that make sense?” Kyle asked. “I mean, if we stop Cloak, we’ll still be Rangers.”
“You can’t have heroes without villains. And there will always be someone else,” Gage said, glancing at Alex. “We’ll need to brief them on the Guild of Daggers when you’re feeling up to it.”
“Then they didn’t tell you,” Lux said. “I can understand why. I mean, we hadn’t told the Junior Rangers yet.”
“Told us what?” Kirbie asked.
Lux paused. She took another look at Lone Star outside, then a deep breath.
“How did the Rangers of Justice form?” she asked.
“Bastion,” Amp said. “He was the first Ranger almost three decades ago. When he saw that crime in America was on the rise and that villains with dangerous powers were becoming more and more common, he gathered together forces of good from across the country. In the name of truth and peace, they formed the Rangers of Justice. Eventually, they settled in Sterling City. Bastion died fairly young. He was sick. Leadership was passed down over the years to my father, the Guardian, and after Victory Park, to Lone Star.”
Alex could tell that this was something Amp had probably heard a million times. When he spoke, it was like he was reading from a teleprompter.
“That’s exactly what Bastion wanted the public to believe,” Lux said. “That people with astounding powers banded together in the name of justice. Who wouldn’t read that story and champion their cause?”