ADRIAN WOKE UP feeling like his head had been stuffed with wool. He groaned and tried to roll onto his side, only then remembering that he was still wearing the armored bodysuit. The hard material dug painfully into his back.
Everything ached, but it was his shoulder that hurt the worst. Throbbing and burning and sticky with blood.
He couldn’t believe she had actually stabbed him. He wasn’t sure why it was so surprising, except … that just wasn’t how prodigies fought. They fought with superpowers and extraordinary skills, but that had been a plain old dirty attack.
He would have to remember for next time. Nightmare didn’t follow the same rules as the rest of them.
But then, he supposed, neither did he. Not anymore. Not when he was the Sentinel.
He managed to sit up. Though it was still daylight, the sky was darkening and the shadows from the next building had eclipsed the rooftop. He must have been unconscious for five or six hours. He was lucky she’d knocked him out up here, where it was unlikely anyone would find him. Though it was clear he’d been undisturbed, it made him uncomfortable to think of himself lying prone and vulnerable for such a long time.
Prone and vulnerable and useless.
Why hadn’t Oscar come looking for him?
No—that was a stupid question. Why would he have? Oscar didn’t know Adrian was beneath the Sentinel’s armor, and besides … Danna had been injured, and maybe Ruby too. Oscar had other matters to deal with. They would have gone straight back to headquarters. Were probably there still.
Adrian checked to be sure no one was peering down from any nearby windows, then pressed his fingers into the center of the suit’s chest piece.
The armor clunked and hissed, folding in on itself like origami, rolling inward along his limbs until the suit was no bigger than a crushed aluminum can. He tucked it into the skin over his sternum and pulled up the zipper tattoo he had inked there more than a month ago.
He started to button the front of his shirt, but his shoulder screamed at him to stop. He looked down. His shirt had a gash through the fabric, and though the compression of the suit seemed to have slowed the bleeding, one glance told him he had lost a lot of blood. His entire side was damp, the fabric of his shirt nearly black where the blood had congealed. He wondered if that was why his brain seemed to be struggling to function or if it was a result of being knocked out by Nightmare.
Perhaps it was a combination of both.
He cursed her every way he could think of as he peeled the fabric away from his skin, then cursed himself as he pulled the shirt over his head.
That girl had a bunch of low-tech gadgets and a power that only worked through skin-to-skin contact. How had she beaten him?
He grimaced, recognizing his own pathetic attempts to defend his pride. But who was he kidding? He had underestimated an opponent who should not have been underestimated. She was strong. She was clever. And most of the low-tech gadgets he’d seen her use were actually pretty impressive.
Shaking his head, he started to laugh, wryly at first, but it quickly grew with real humor, even if it was at his own expense.
So much for being the city’s next great superhero.
“Next time,” he whispered to himself. A promise.
He would keep training. He would get better. And there would be a next time.
Pulling the marker from the back pocket of his jeans, he sketched a water faucet on the rooftop’s concrete ledge and pulled the drawing into three dimensions. With a twist of the knob, cool water gushed forward.
He used the clean half of his shirt as a rag to wipe away as much of his blood as he could. The injury didn’t look quite so devastating once it was clean. His heart was still beating and his arm was working, so she couldn’t have hit anything too important.
After close inspection of the wound, he placed the tip of the marker against his skin and drew a series of stitches, gathering the skin together. Once he was finished, he capped the marker and tucked it away, turned off the water, then sat tracking his thumb around the tattoo on his left forearm. A spiral of flame in bold black ink, its edges fading away into his own dark skin.
Fire manipulation. Perhaps it wasn’t rare, but it still remained one of the most coveted powers among prodigies. Between that and the armored suit and the springs he’d inked into the soles of his feet, he’d been confident he could do anything, stop anyone.
But Nightmare had barely bat an eye.
Not just that. She’d mocked him.
With a groan, he climbed to his feet and rallied the courage to look down onto the street where the parade had passed that morning. The celebration had been replaced with a sullen quiet as cleanup crews swept away the confetti and the food wrappers along with the broken glass and destroyed parade floats and looted merchandise left behind from the Puppeteer’s attack.
Nightmare had asked the Puppeteer to throw her a rope. Were they working together? Was she an Anarchist?
It made sense, in a way. They were one of the few villain gangs who hadn’t vanished completely over the past decade, and they despised the Renegades more than anyone, especially the Council.
And that’s why she’d been up here, wasn’t it? She’d been going after the Council. She’d been going after the Captain.
Adrian pressed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. On the street below, a little girl was being dragged from beneath a tour bus, where she must have been hiding all afternoon. She was sobbing hysterically, and even from so high above, Adrian could see a string of gold thread still tied around her throat. He wondered what the Puppeteer had made her do.
His jaw clenched.
Most of the Anarchists’ identities had been known for years. Winston Pratt. Ingrid Thompson. Honey Harper. Leroy Flinn.
But Nightmare … she was new. A mystery. And a threat.
When he closed his eyes, he could see her, the slightest glint of her eyes visible in the shadow of her hood. Without expression. Without remorse. Without fear, even as she’d said those words—the words that had haunted him for years. Even now, he couldn’t be sure whether he’d imagined her saying them. That it hadn’t been part of a dream played out while he’d been unconscious.
One cannot be brave who has no fear.
He released a shuddering breath. It hadn’t been a dream. She had said them.
It couldn’t be coincidence.
“Nightmare,” he whispered, and it felt like the first time he said it. The first time he said the name and it meant something to him. She was no longer just another villain to be stopped. Another blight on their city to be dealt with. Now she was someone who might have answers. “Who are you really?”
* * *
THE DULLNESS OF HIS THOUGHTS had mostly evaporated by the time Adrian made his way back to Renegade Headquarters. He had drawn a new shirt for himself, with long sleeves to hide the tattoos, his chest and shoulder still throbbing and tender beneath the fabric.
He pushed his way through the rotating door of the main entrance and paused on the landing that looked out over the expansive lobby. It was a vast gathering space that was forever humming with activity and chatter and heavy boots thudding across the enormous R inset into the center of the floor. Renegades in gray-and-red uniforms passed doctors in lab coats and mingled with administrators in crisp suits. People rushed between the various departments, gathered in groups, stared at the screens that lined the walls as they replayed scenes from the Puppeteer’s attack again and again.
Hugh and Simon sometimes joked about how all this had started in the Dread Warden’s basement. They’d been teenagers—friends since childhood, both with extraordinary powers, both sick of watching their city being run by Anarchists and criminals. Until one night when they decided to do something about it.
As their escapades grew in boldness and publicity, four more prodigies joined the crew of vigilantes: Kasumi, Evander, Tamaya, and Adrian’s own mother, Georgia Rawles. The incomparable Lady Indomitable.
It was Evander who gave them the name that would solidify their place in history. The Renegades. Back then, as Adrian understood, they’d had no money, no headquarters, no influence. Nothing but a profound determination to change the world for the better. And they had done it all while subsisting on boxed macaroni and cheese and wearing cheap homemade costumes and taking turns sleeping on one another’s moth-eaten couches.
Though the original six were still considered the core group that had started the Renegades, their numbers continued to grow: more vigilantes joined the cause, more prodigies dared to fight against the villains who had torn their world apart.
Seeing headquarters now, it was almost impossible to imagine how it started in that basement, all those years ago. A couple of teenagers and a desire to change the world for the better.
And now—this. Eighty-two stories and eight sublevels of the world’s most comprehensive government and law enforcement facilities.
Okay, most of those floors actually didn’t have anything on them, but Hugh often talked about how glad they would be for all the extra space when they needed to expand. The tower had been built to be the main office building for an international bank or something equally dull, but now it held high-tech facilities and virtual-reality simulators, where Renegades could train both physically and mentally inside a variety of programmable situations. There was a full armory, where an assortment of weapons was kept behind a series of ever-increasingly impenetrable defenses, plus an entire floor dedicated to the storage and preservation of superpowered tools and artifacts. There were two floors dedicated to city surveillance and investigative work; the always-busy call center; prison cells for housing prodigy criminals who were too dangerous to be put into the regular city prison; lounge areas for off-duty Renegades; research laboratories; a full-service medical wing; and—their crowning glory—the Council Hall on the highest floor, where the Council passed laws and made decrees designed to strengthen the society they’d liberated from anarchy and protect the world from another collapse.
The Council acted like the only direction society could move was forward, away from those terrible years of chaos and crime, but Adrian sometimes had the feeling that the foundation of order the Renegades had built was more precarious than anyone wanted to admit.
Straightening his spine, he started down the grand staircase to the main floor and cut across to the elevators, heading for the medical wing. A few of the overhead screens switched to an image of Nightmare, waving down to the crowd from the basket of the hot-air balloon, her face eclipsed by the hood.
Renewed determination surged through Adrian at the sight of her. His mind started to replay the moment when Nightmare had stabbed him, with Ruby’s own blade, no less. He’d lost control. He’d thrown that flame, intending it for Nightmare, but he’d been blinded by rage, and he hadn’t been thinking about what might be behind her.
She called him a neophyte and she was right. It was an amateur mistake.
From the moment he heard Monarch’s scream, he knew she was badly hurt. He hadn’t been holding back, and much as he wanted to blame Nightmare for it, he couldn’t. The flames had been from his hands—the result of a power he’d barely explored. He had been cocky and careless and Danna was suffering for it.
When he reached the medical wing, he spotted Tamaya Rae—Thunderbird—through the windows of the first room. She was sitting on the edge of a bed while a healer tended to one of her black-feathered wings. She looked enraged, though all he caught were the words Puppeteer and balloon and pathetic fishing net!
He found Danna in the third room, lying on her side, unconscious. Much of her uniform had been cut away, revealing extensive burns along her left arm and torso. A mask was over her nose and mouth, probably filling her lungs with an elixir that would keep her body from transforming while she was unconscious, as sometimes happened when her brain went into fight-or-flight mode. She once told him that it happened to her a lot when she’d had nightmares growing up.
Nightmares.
Oh, the irony.
Adrian’s gut sank. He hadn’t had time to stop and see how bad her burns were during the fight, and now he was struck with the full weight of guilt from what he’d done.
Oscar and Ruby were there, too, sitting on a bench in the corner. Ruby’s head was resting on Oscar’s shoulder, and for a moment Adrian thought she might be asleep, but then her eyes peeled dazedly open. She spotted Adrian and sat up. The briefest flash of disappointment crossed Oscar’s face, but it was gone so fast Adrian thought he might have imagined it.
“Oh, now he shows up,” said Oscar, standing. “Dude, where were you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Adrian, feeling the apology down to his core. “I got your message about Nightmare and I was making my way to you guys when the Puppeteer showed up and I was stuck trying to get this group of kids to safety. There must have been a hundred of them there on a field trip. It was chaos.” He lightly scratched his wounded shoulder through his shirt, surprised by how easily the lie had come. “But I still should have been there with you. I’m so sorry. Is Danna…?”
Oscar blew out a frustrated sigh. “She got burned really bad in the fight.”
On the bed, Danna inhaled a shuddering breath. A machine on the wall beeped faster for a second, then fell again into a steady rhythm. Adrian walked closer, forcing himself to lift one of the cold compresses that had been draped over her burn wounds. Forcing himself to take in the damage he had done.
How much pain had she been in? Or had her body immediately gone into shock? Setting the compress back over her burns, he rubbed the flame tattoo through his sleeve. Though it had been healed for weeks now, he imagined for a moment that he could feel it, like the flame was alive, like it was burning his skin.
He turned back to Oscar and Ruby. “Have the healers been to see her yet?”
Oscar nodded. “Yeah. They say she’s going to be okay, but it’ll take some time. It’s really bad.”
“Danna is our eyes when we’re on patrol,” said Adrian, scratching the back of his neck. “We’ll be at a huge disadvantage without her.”
“The really weird thing,” said Ruby, “is that wasn’t even Nightmare’s doing. That”—she pointed at Danna, then drew quotes in the air—“was ‘the Sentinel.’”
Adrian flinched at the venom in her tone. The small part of him that wanted to tell his team that he was, in fact, on the roof with them that day, quickly evaporated. “Who?”
“Some guy who showed up mid-combat,” said Oscar. “Faced off against Nightmare. He had an R on his suit, but…” He shrugged. “None of us have ever seen him before.”
Adrian kept his brow tight with confusion. “The Sentinel?”
“That’s what Monarch said, before they put her under. He was a fire elemental, I think.” Oscar frowned. “But it definitely wasn’t Wildfire.”
Wildfire was the only fire elemental they currently had on the Renegades, at least in the Gatlon City branch. Adrian had gotten most of his ideas for how to handle fire manipulation from watching him in the training halls.
Ruby yawned. “I don’t think it was that Islander prodigy, either. The one who trained here last year. Magma, was it? This Sentinel guy was fully covered, head to toe. Someone caught a photo of him from street level so they’re starting to circulate it, to see if anyone knows anything.”
“He also had superior jumping,” said Oscar, “and this suit, like something straight out of a comic book. Honestly, I think he might be from research and development—like maybe some sort of new super-soldier they’ve been working on down there, and it’s too classified for them to admit it yet.”
Ruby gasped and leaned forward excitedly, like she’d just uncovered a clue. “Or he could be a villain, masquerading as a Renegade. Maybe he’s trying to hurt our reputation. Maybe it’s all part of some complicated scheme that will lead to our ultimate downfall!”
Adrian and Oscar stared at her.
Ruby shrugged. “Maybe?”
“Maybe,” Oscar agreed.
Collapsing back onto the bench, Ruby threw an arm over her eyes, as if this outburst had sapped her last bits of energy. The bloodstone on her wrist reflected the room’s light, turning her cheek a rosy red. “That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.”
“But he was fighting Nightmare at first,” said Oscar, “before he attacked Monarch. Or maybe that was a mistake. Who knows?”
“Was anyone else hurt?” asked Adrian.
“Nope,” said Ruby, with a hint of defensiveness. “We’re grand. Positively stellar.”
“Nightmare got to her,” explained Oscar. “Put her to sleep.” He reached down and pet Ruby on the head. It was one of the most awkward gestures Adrian could recall him ever making, and Oscar could be a pretty awkward guy at times.
“Tattletale,” Ruby grumbled, swatting him away. “In case anyone’s wondering, I currently feel like someone’s filled my head with concrete.”
Adrian bit back the impulse to say he knew exactly how she felt. “That makes the fourth time this year a Renegade team has come in contact with Nightmare. She can’t be working alone.”
“She escaped on the Puppeteer’s balloon,” said Oscar. “Could be a new Anarchist.”
“But,” said Ruby, thrusting a finger into the air, “she threw the Puppeteer overboard. That’s not exactly a friendly greeting.”
“That’s their thing though, isn’t it?” said Adrian. “Even when they’re supposed to be working together, they still believe in trampling the weak to make way for the strong.”
Oscar shrugged. “Makes no sense to me, but then, they are villains. Who knows how they think?”
“On the bright side,” Ruby said, opening her eyes and flashing a mischievous grin, “I got Nightmare’s gun.”
Adrian lifted an eyebrow.
“They took it upstairs to have it inspected,” said Oscar. “She fired off one dart at the Captain, came this close to hitting him in the eye.” He pinched his fingers together. “That dart is being looked at too. Maybe they’ll be able to trace it back to wherever she got it from.”
Adrian looked away. He didn’t know how much information they could garner from the gun or the dart she’d used, but it was something. It was a start.
That morning, he had cared only about proving his abilities as the Sentinel. He had been excited to show them all what he could do. He had fantasized about taking off the Sentinel’s helmet and revealing himself to his team and the rest of the Renegades.
But he hardly cared about any of that anymore. One sentence from Nightmare had changed everything.
He had to find out who she was. He had to find out what she knew.
He had to find her.