EAST NINETY-FOURTH AND WALLOWRIDGE was an even crummier neighborhood than Nova had envisioned. It wasn’t that she was too proud, exactly, to have the Renegades thinking she lived there. It was just—if she was going to be given a fake home, couldn’t Millie have picked something a bit nicer? Maybe one of those abandoned mansions in the suburbs or a condo with a water view or, at the very least, a place that didn’t look borderline condemned?
The home that Nova McLain apparently shared with her uncle was a row house with a brick facade sandwiched between more row houses, each with peeling paint on their window trim and tiny yards overgrown with grasses and weeds. There was trash in the street gutters, empty beer bottles on her front step, and an old tire leaning against the wall. One of the upstairs windows appeared to have a bullet hole through it, and a couple of their neighbors had their doors and windows completely boarded up.
Standing on the sidewalk, she let her gaze travel up and down the street, taking in the graffiti on the walls, the cars on blocks. It was so still and quiet that she couldn’t be sure if anyone lived there at all. If they did, they were awful caretakers.
At least they live somewhere with daylight, a voice whispered in the back of her thoughts.
Nova frowned at her brain’s intrusion into her critique of the neighborhood, but then she thought about it, and her face softened.
Actually, sunlight was a definite plus.
And at night, there would be stars.
She climbed the short stairs and stepped over the beer bottles. A brass mail slot in the door had long ago been engraved with the single word: MCLAIN.
It was the first indication Nova had seen that her fake identity might actually be tethered to someone in the real world, contrary to what Millie had told them. It made her wonder what had become of the real McLains.
Nova tested the doorknob and found it unlocked. She shoved the door open, revealing a narrow sitting room and a collection of cobwebs. She was surprised to see furniture—two dated armchairs and an entertainment console, though whatever TV or radio had been there before was long gone, replaced with a thick layer of dust. The room had once been done up in a garish paisley wallpaper, though strips of it were starting to peel.
What gave her the most pause, though, were recent footprints left across the dusty hardwood floors, making a series of back-and-forth paths between the front door and the staircase that lay straight ahead.
Settling a hand on her belt, which still held the instruments she had brought with her to Renegade HQ that morning, she stepped inside. She passed a collection of framed photographs on the wall—the McLain family, perhaps—but did not bother to inspect their faces as she headed up the staircase. The wood groaned beneath her, shattering the still silence of the house. She froze and listened. When only the sound of her own breath could be heard, she turned the corner and proceeded up the rest of the staircase. On the second floor, there was a door to her left, barely cracked open, and an open living area to her right, with a bedroom beyond it.
Nova reached out her hand and nudged open the first door the rest of the way. Inside was a bed frame with no mattress and yellowed curtain panels hung over two tall windows, one of which was fluttering around the bullet hole.
Turning, she made her way to the second bedroom—the master, judging by the small tiled bathroom attached to the closet. There was no furniture in this room, though. Only a backpack, a paper grocery bag, and a green sleeping bag in the corner with a large form curled up inside it.
Nova paused in the doorway, staring at the form and hoping it wasn’t dead. A stranger’s dead body wasn’t exactly the sort of housewarming gift she’d been hoping for. After watching for a moment, she detected a subtle rising and falling of breath.
Sighing, Nova crossed the room. She spotted a handgun lying not far from the figure and, pressing her foot onto it, dragged it back out of reach. Then she cleared her throat.
The figure didn’t move.
“Hey.”
A quiet snuffle.
Scowling, Nova crouched down and nudged the figure through the sleeping bag. The figure yelped and rolled over, then shot upward. The man had a beard of thick whiskers and ears that stuck out too far from his head. Despite the gray sprouting in his hair and the wrinkles cut through his brow, Nova had the impression he was younger than he looked, but had been aged prematurely by too many unkind years. His hand went for the spot where the gun had been, but when it landed on only the floorboards, he glanced down and spotted it tucked behind Nova.
His bewilderment turned to a sneer. “Who’re you?” he barked.
“The new tenant,” she said. “Sorry, but you’re going to have to find somewhere else to crash.”
His eyes swooped over her Renegade uniform and she could see indecision warring behind his groggy eyes. It was clear he wanted to tell her to get lost and let him go back to sleep, but most people these days opted to treat any Renegade with respect, regardless of whether or not they actually supported their rule over the city.
“What?” he said. “You people claiming this block for another one of your social projects or something?”
“Or something.” Grabbing the gun, she stepped over the man’s sleeping bag and threw open the sash of the nearest window. She tossed the gun outside. It landed with a soft thud in a patch of weeds in the back alleyway.
“Hey!” the man yelled.
Nova headed back toward the staircase. “You’ve got two minutes,” she called over her shoulder. “If you’re not gone by then, you’ll be the next thing I throw out the window.”
She was halfway through the next room when he yelled back, “You think you can throw me out a window? I’ve had mutts that were bigger than you!”
Nova paused and turned back, peering at him through the doorway. “Now you have one minute.”
She went back downstairs to finish her tour of the house, which was composed of a powder room and a small kitchen-dining-room combo in the back of the ground floor. A sliding glass door led out onto a tiny square yard, which was mostly weeds, including a particularly monstrous blackberry bush that was in the process of devouring a child’s tricycle.
Thirty-four seconds later, she heard the stairs creek and the front door slam shut.
Nova exhaled. “Home, sweet home.”
She returned to the kitchen and started digging through the cabinets. She found a box of black trash bags tucked into one corner and started filling it with bottle caps and crushed soda cans and the occasional dead cockroach that littered the floors. She hadn’t planned to stay there when she first decided to come check the place out. Rather, she’d been thinking strategically. She figured that if the Renegades were tracking her movements through the communicator band, they would expect her to return home at some point, so she might as well get it out of the way. Her plan had been to hide the bracelet here, then return to the subway tunnels to tell the others what she’d learned during her first day at HQ.
But now that she was here, it occurred to her that, if they were tracking her, it wouldn’t be enough to just stop by from time to time. She would be spending time here, like it or not, and she might as well make it … well, not comfortable. But somewhat tolerable.
She had finished her preliminary trash collection when she heard the front door squeal open again.
Groaning, she dropped the trash bag and stormed back toward the front room. “I’m telling you, this place is no longer—”
She drew up short.
Ingrid stood in the doorway, lip curled in disgust as she scanned the entryway. “Well,” she said, stepping over the threshold, “I was going to congratulate you on your improved lot in life, but I’m no longer sure this is an improvement.”
Leroy and Honey filed in behind her. Honey turned around to shut the door, but hesitated and used her toe to nudge it shut instead. She was clutching her hands at her chest, as if afraid they might inadvertently touch something and end up with tetanus.
Nova rolled her eyes. Almost a decade spent in a dank, gloomy tunnel and Honey Harper still managed to be an elitist.
“What, no Phobia?” Nova said dryly.
“He wasn’t interested in joining us,” said Ingrid. “His lack of curiosity is inhuman.”
“That,” said Honey, sneering, “or he happens to have a deep-seated fear of paisley wallpaper. No, wait, that’s me.”
Nova’s cheek twitched. “What are you doing here?”
“We were curious how your first day went,” said Leroy. He fluffed a dingy floral throw pillow and plopped into one of the armchairs. Honey gawped at him, horrified.
“I was going to come back to the tunnels after I”—she glanced around—“scouted out the place.”
“We figured.” Ingrid made a slow pass around the perimeter of the room, inspecting the drab furnishings and wallpaper. “But we didn’t think that would be such a great idea, in case you’re being followed.”
Nova frowned. “And if I am being followed, you don’t think it’s a problem that whoever’s following me would have just seen three Anarchists letting themselves in to my house?”
“Well, you’re not being followed, obviously,” said Ingrid. “Except by us. We’ve been tailing you since you left Renegade Headquarters. We would have noticed if someone else was too.”
“But you didn’t know that,” said Honey, daring to take another step into the room. “And it still seems risky for you to be coming into the tunnels so long as you’re … that.” Her eyes swept over Nova’s uniform. “We don’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to ourselves.”
“So, what?” said Nova, crossing her arms. “Am I banished from going home so long as this charade continues?”
“Come on, Nova,” said Ingrid. “It’s hardly a loss. You’re getting a whole house out of the deal.” She opened her arms, gesturing at the room around them.
“All my stuff is there,” said Nova. “My weapons, my inventions, my clothes…”
“You’re not being banished,” said Leroy. “You are always welcome to return, of course. But let’s give it a day or two, just to make sure the Renegades aren’t keeping tabs on your whereabouts. Besides…” He shrugged. “You always spent as much time above ground as possible. I don’t see this being much of an inconvenience for you.”
Nova pinched her lips together, unable to argue that point. “Fine. It’s not like I plan on spending a whole lot of time here, either. As soon as I make it past my first official mission, I’ll be spending any free time at headquarters, learning whatever I can.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Ingrid. She had completed her lap around the room and now stopped in front of the wall with the framed photographs. She took one down from the wall, revealing a bright square of wallpaper where it had hung, indicating just how much the rest of the walls had faded with time.
“Did you learn anything of interest today?” said Leroy, shifting his weight to try to get more comfortable on the lumpy cushions.
Nova tossed the trash bag onto the floor and did her best to recount the day she’d spent touring headquarters. Though she had learned very little about the experiments happening in research and development or anything at all about the Sentinel, she had at least begun to develop a tentative grasp of how the organization functioned. The hierarchy. The structure. The scope of what they were hoping to accomplish.
And it went so far beyond what she’d expected.
Sure, she knew their stance on crime and law enforcement and even on social programs. She knew the Council saw themselves as benevolent leaders attempting to solve all the problems of humanity, without any apparent grasp of how their involvement was only dooming society to helplessness and desperation.
But she had rarely stopped to think of the Renegades as a global organization, with their power continuing to grow with every prodigy who came here to be trained. Were cities around the world becoming as dependent on the rule and protection of prodigies as Gatlon was? How long before all of humanity gave up on personal freedom and responsibility? How long before they forgot what that felt like at all?
She had now seen the proof of their power with her own eyes. Not only in their technology and weapons development, but in sheer numbers as well. She knew that only a fraction of their workforce had been in the training halls when she’d toured them, and she could still feel the way her lungs hitched when she saw them.
So many prodigies, all dressed in those gray uniforms, all sporting those red Rs. Having never seen so many Renegades together at one time, it had been easy to underestimate them as a whole. But there she had witnessed a cacophony of flashes and explosions, natural elements wielded like weapons, prodigies defying gravity and physics, their bodies transforming and flying and brawling and training and on and on and on.
So much power enclosed in one space made her nerves vibrate.
So much.
The Renegades had so much. And what did the Anarchists have?
A bomb maker, a beekeeper, a poison distiller … and her.
It sounded like the start of a bad joke.
But she refused to be swayed from her cause. Seeing the inner workings of the Renegades had changed nothing, other than, for the first time in years, the Anarchists had an advantage. She would learn what secrets were being developed behind closed laboratory doors. She would learn how to undermine their systems and protocols, one way or another. She would learn who the Sentinel was and whatever the Council intended to use him for, and she would stop him before he ever had a chance.
The Sentinel.
That had been something. She was sure she had detected nervousness in Adrian when she’d brought up the soldier. She was sure he had been feigning ignorance, but she didn’t think it was just from her. She had gotten the impression that, whatever he knew, he was keeping it from Ruby and Oscar too.
Which made sense.
Surely, if any of them knew about the Council’s top-secret ventures, it would be him.
“It’s a start,” said Leroy, when she had finished accounting all she had seen and heard during her first day as a Renegade. “Have you determined your primary objectives going forward?”
“Research and development,” said Nova. “They’re very secretive there. I want to know what they’re working on, and what consequences it might have for us, and the city. Also, the Sentinel. I want proof he’s a Renegade tool, and I want to know who he is and what they plan to use him for. From there…” She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I want to know their weakest links. Maybe a direct attack on the Council was premature. Maybe there are other ways to bring the organization collapsing in on itself. Sneakier ways.”
Ingrid nodded. “If you want to blow up a building,” she said, “take out the support beams.”
Nova met her gaze. “Unfortunately, I won’t be blowing up anything for a few days, at least. The team that picked me at the trials has been assigned a specific mission. This will interest you, though.”
Ingrid raised an eyebrow.
“Starting tomorrow night, we’re running surveillance on Cloven Cross Library.”
“What?” yelped Ingrid, tossing the framed photo into a corner. Nova scowled at where it crashed against the floorboards, feeling a peculiar sense of ownership—over the house and everything in it, even over the family that was, in some alternate universe, her family. “What did they find on Cronin?”
“Nothing,” said Nova. “Yet. But they somehow traced the gun that I used at the parade back to him.” She glanced from Ingrid to Leroy. “You did get it from him at some point, didn’t you?”
“Years ago,” said Leroy, rubbing his cheek so hard the scarred flesh wrinkled and bulged around his fingers. “He used to stock that particular model a lot. I should have realized they would draw a connection back to him. That was sloppy of me.”
“They don’t have any proof of his involvement yet,” Nova insisted. “They’re just suspicious. As long as the Librarian can refrain from buying or selling anything illegal for a while, they shouldn’t be able to pin anything on him.”
“Unless they search the library,” mused Honey, toeing at a mysterious stain in the area rug. “If they find his inventory, well … that will be that.”
“They can’t search it,” said Nova. “Not without evidence of illegal activity. It’s part of their code.” She couldn’t avoid the sarcasm, even though, in this case, the Renegade code was proving to be a good thing. For them, at least. And the Librarian.
“I don’t like it,” said Ingrid, starting to pace. “If we lose access to Cronin’s network…” Her gaze smoldered. “We’re already outgunned enough.”
“Again,” said Nova. “They can’t search—”
“Oh please.” Ingrid snorted. “If they suspect he’s dealing again, they’ll find a reason to search the library, even if they have to plant the evidence themselves.”
Nova’s shoulders dropped, and she wondered whether that was true. Adrian had seemed adamant about this surveillance mission, and the importance of finding evidence that would allow the Renegades to legally search the library. Was that just a ploy? A show of goodwill to the community, a demonstration of their own due diligence, before they planted the evidence that would get them the results they wanted?
“Then … we have to warn him,” said Nova. “I can go right now. The surveillance is set to begin tomorrow night. That gives him more than twenty-four hours to clear out any weapon stock or documentation that would incriminate him. Should be plenty of time.”
“You can’t go,” said Ingrid, tapping her fingers against her hips. “It would be far too suspicious if anyone recognized you.”
“But you said—”
“I will talk to Cronin,” Ingrid continued. “I’ve worked with him more than anyone. I can’t exactly say we trust each other, but he’ll be more likely to listen to me than anyone else here. Besides, the man’s a coward. If he thinks the Renegades are on to him, his instinct will be to run and save his own skin.” She inhaled sharply. “Like he did at the Battle for Gatlon.”
Nova glanced at Leroy, who shrugged. “There is a reason he’s one of the few villains who survived that slaughter, and it certainly isn’t because of his strength or bravery.”
“But if he runs again,” said Ingrid, “I bet you anything he’ll skip town for good, and that won’t leave us any better off than if the Renegades arrested him. So I’ll make sure to motivate him in a way that helps our cause, more than hinders it.” She turned her focus back to Nova, her expression calculating. “How many Renegades are going to be involved in this surveillance mission?”
“Just four, I think. Me and the three other members of my team.”
Ingrid held her gaze for a long time before asking, “Including the Everhart boy?”
The way she said it made the hair prickle on Nova’s scalp and she found her fingers wrapping idly, almost protectively, around her filigree bracelet. “Yes,” she said. “He’s the team leader. But … from what I can tell, he’s never done any surveillance like this before. I don’t think any of the team has.”
“Of course,” said Ingrid. “But he’s the perfect candidate to conjure up a piece of incriminating evidence, isn’t he?”
Nova swallowed, wondering why that thought hadn’t occurred to her.
Leroy stood and brushed the dust from his backside. “Nova will keep a close eye on him during their mission. If he does try to plant any evidence against Cronin, she can deter him.”
“Don’t bother,” said Ingrid. “It will be better if they search the place and get it over with.”
“What?” said Nova.
“I’ll make sure there’s nothing there for them to find,” said Ingrid. “You make sure that team of yours conducts that search, say … early morning, right after the library opens. The sooner they can cross the library off their watch list, the sooner we can go about business as usual.”
“And,” added Honey, “the sooner Nova can focus on investigating all those other things at headquarters.”
Nova opened her mouth to argue, not entirely sure she would be able to persuade Adrian to search the library in the event they hadn’t seen anything suspicious. But she hesitated. This was what she was doing with the Renegades, wasn’t it? Throwing them off course. Weakening them in any way she could.
“Fine,” she said. “You give me something to work with—something suspicious that I can use to get them inside the library, just in case Adrian isn’t planning to fake the evidence himself. And I’ll make sure they search the place. But if they find anything, even one cartridge, one bullet—”
“Relax, Nightmare,” said Ingrid, grinning. “I’ll take care of everything.”