Supernova, page 23
“We trust you,” said Leroy. “You are the one who stole back Ace’s helmet, from the Renegades’ own vault, no less.”
“Oh!” said Honey. “Speaking of things stolen from the Renegades, do you think you’ll be needing this back?” She reached for her collar and pulled a black medallion from the bust of her dress. The Vitality Charm.
Nova felt a surge of apprehension as she scrutinized the design impressed into the black iron. Though it had protected her from Agent N, a part of her had hoped she would never have need of it again.
She said nothing, though, as she slipped the chain over her neck and tucked the charm beneath her shirt.
“Let’s reconvene in a few hours,” she said. “I’ll need to know what each of you can do, to see if your abilities might be useful as I develop a plan.”
“Your old fears have returned, little Nightmare,” Phobia added, his voice low, but not low enough. “They are stronger now than ever before. A nearly petrifying fear of failing … again.”
Nova peered into the bottomless pool of shadows beneath Phobia’s hood. His attempts to psychoanalyze her usually filled her with irritation. It felt like a violation of her privacy, for him to be poking around in her head that way, searching for her deepest fears, uncovering her best-kept secrets.
But it didn’t seem to matter so much this time. She was afraid to fail again. She was afraid to let everyone down—not just Ace and the Anarchists and this unexpected new group of allies, but also Adrian and the friends she’d made at the Renegades.
Yes, friends. The word was foreign and almost unbelievable, but she had faced the truth in that prison cell. The realization was too stark and painful to ignore. She had fallen in love with these people, who had taken her in and trusted her. And yet she betrayed them. To know that they would go on despising her for the rest of their lives left her feeling almost as hollowed out as the knowledge that Ace would never again look at her with beaming pride.
“Yeah, I am afraid that I’m going to fail again,” she said, still peering into the nothingness of Phobia’s face. “But one cannot be brave who has no fear.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THERE HAD BEEN many times since Adrian and his dads first moved into the old mayor’s mansion that Adrian had the nagging thought that it was far more space than the three of them needed. Not only because there was a formal parlor, formal dining room, and four guest rooms that had yet to welcome a single guest, but also because three grown men simply had no use for seven—count them—seven bathrooms.
Each one, of course, came equipped with a mirror. And that wasn’t even considering the mirrors in closets or the one hung over the fireplace mantel in the parlor, and probably some he hadn’t even thought of yet. It seemed reflections were everywhere he looked these days.
Adrian unscrewed the mirrored medicine cabinet from the wall of the third bathroom on the main floor, thinking for the umpteenth time that he hadn’t given enough credit to Narcissa Cronin’s power when he first met her at Cloven Cross Library. Sure, traveling through mirrors had seemed like a neat party trick, but now he was beginning to fully appreciate what a useful ability it could be.
There were mirrors everywhere.
It was almost like having a skeleton key to nearly any door in the world.
It drove him nuts every time he stopped to think about it. He had been in the same room with Nightmare that day at the library. She had been right in front of him, and he had been completely oblivious. It made him sick to think how she must have been laughing behind his back.
Realizing what a tedious job it was going to be to get rid of all the mirrors in the house, he’d been tempted to simply smash them to bits, or maybe just drape them with heavy cloths. But he didn’t think his dads would be too happy coming home to a house full of glass shards, and he didn’t know enough about Nightmare’s mirror-walking ability to know if a heavy cloth would be enough to keep her out.
And so, they had to be taken down.
The final screw fell into his palm and he pried the cabinet from the wall. He hadn’t bothered to remove the toiletries inside and he heard them sliding and crashing into one another as he carried it down the hall, down the steps, and into his basement bedroom. Past his bed and TV, past the desk where he had spent hours sketching in notebooks and, more recently, giving himself tattoos, and into the room that had once been deemed his art studio.
The room that had of late been converted into a living jungle.
He hadn’t entered the room in the days since Nova’s arrest. It held too many memories that were soured by his belief that Nova was his most loathed enemy. Memories of her head tucked against his shoulder, her face tranquil in sleep. Memories of her surprise when she saw the mural Adrian had painted on these walls, then watching her unspeakable awe as he brought the trees and vines and exotic flowers to life.
Since that night, the jungle had begun to fade, just as Turbo was. Adrian’s power didn’t include immortality. His creations would wilt and die, just like things in real life. Faster, actually, than things in real life. Now, when he entered this room, the one-time aromas of perfumed flowers had been replaced with the smell of decay and rot. The vibrant colors of the flowers faded to grays and browns, their silky petals drooping and papery crisp. The vines that hung from overhead tree branches became brittle to the touch, and a number of them broken, disintegrating on the mossy ground that was, itself, dying to reveal the plain concrete floor underneath.
Only the statue that stood at the far end of the room appeared untouched—but then, it had never been alive to begin with.
Adrian set the mirror against the wall with the others that he had already removed. He figured that if Nightmare did come through one of them, she’d be so confused by the dying flora that she’d think she took a wrong turn in mirrorland, or however that worked.
As an added precaution, he set up a couple of booby traps throughout the room that would alert him to an intruder—including a net that would fall down from the tree canopy and trap her inside. He really hoped she would set that one off. It would serve her right, he thought, remembering the bazooka-like gun she’d once used to trap him, as the Sentinel, inside a similar net.
Just thinking of their battle at the parade set his teeth on edge. Nightmare had embarrassed him enough times. Though he was happy—overjoyed, really—that Nova wasn’t the villain after all, he was more frustrated than ever to know that the real Nightmare continued to be one step ahead of him.
“Okay,” he muttered, surveying the mirrors and the traps he’d set. “Five down. Just thirteen more to go.”
He was passing through the foyer when the creak of a floorboard overhead made him freeze.
Hot adrenaline rushed through his veins as he listened for any more signs of life in the old mansion, but there was only silence. Pulling his marker from his back pocket, he crept toward the staircase, his heartbeat suddenly the loudest thing in the house.
With a faint memory of his mom once scolding him for scribbling with his crayons on the wall of their apartment, he took his marker and started to draw a quick weapon on the white wainscoting. Not a gun—he’d always been a terrible shot. Instead, he drew what vaguely resembled a fireplace poker, with a vicious spike at each end. He exhaled as he pulled the weapon from the wall, clutching it in one hand and keeping his marker at the ready in the other. Hopefully it would keep him from having to resort to his Sentinel powers. The last thing he wanted to do was release a fireball inside his own house.
He started up the steps, knowing where to place his feet to prevent the stairs from creaking as he ascended. Pausing just shy of the landing, he scanned the hallway to the right, but all he could see were shadows and closed doors.
The double doors to his dads’ room were parted, and unable to remember if they’d been open before, he slipped inside. There was a sweater thrown over the back of a chair. Some books and newspapers left on a nightstand. Knowing there was a full-length mirror in the walk-in closet, Adrian prepared himself to see his own reflection moving among the suits and boots and capes, but the sight still made him jump. He doubted he would ever look at a mirror the same way again.
Nothing seemed out of place.
He shut the closet door, then drew a small bell to hang around its door handle, so that if Nightmare came in through that mirror and tried to open the door, he would know immediately. He did the same on the door to the master bathroom, not yet having removed the mirrors above the double sinks, then stopped again to listen.
Silence.
He was beginning to think that maybe he’d only imagined the noise before when there was a thud from the hallway.
Gripping the poker, he raced out of the master suite and noticed the light spilling out from beneath the door to the office. He was sure it had been dark before.
Pulse racing, he inched toward the door and wrapped his hand around the knob.
He braced himself.
Then he threw the door open, weapon at the ready.
His attention landed on the large window behind the desk. The sash had been thrown open and the curtains were fluttering from the nighttime air. The sound of rain outside was suddenly deafening. With a curse, he crossed to the window, searching the lawn for signs of movement, scanning the side of the house for the shadow of a girl who was quite adept at scaling buildings.
Footsteps sounded behind him, barely heard over the downpour.
He spun around just as the figure, dressed in her signature black, darted into the hallway.
“Hey!”
Adrian chased after her. She ran into the master bedroom, slamming the door shut between them. Growling, he shoved it open, preparing to throw the weapon, javelin style, at the same time the tattoo on his right arm began to glow molten white, readying an energy beam to incapacitate her.
The bell chimed as Nightmare, a dozen steps ahead of him, yanked open the closet door. She held what appeared to be a bundle of files tucked under one arm. She didn’t look back as she sprinted forward.
It took Adrian a split second to decide—energy beam or spear?
He could kill her. He could end her now.
The second passed. He lifted his right arm, fist squeezed tight, and aimed.
A piece of paper fluttered from her hold as she launched herself through the mirror at the back of the closet, in the same moment the beam of light blazed from the diode that had risen up from his flesh.
The beam struck the glass. It shattered, the impact sending shards flying across the carpet, into the clothes on the racks, some no doubt landing inside his dads’ neatly organized shoes.
Adrian cursed and, for good measure, threw the poker, too. It hit the backing of the mirror, puncturing a hole through it and sticking there.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he muttered, letting the laser diode sink back into his skin as he ran both hands over his hair. Stomping into the closet, glad to be wearing shoes as bits of glass crunched beneath him, he wrapped his hand around the weapon, but then thought better of it. This would at least explain how the glass had broken.
Huffing, he stooped and picked up the piece of paper Nightmare had dropped, wondering what could have brought her snooping through their house again. He expected blueprints of headquarters or research findings on Agent N or a list of home addresses of all the Renegades currently active in the organization.
Just the thought of the mirror walker knowing where his friends lived made him shudder.
But when he flipped the paper over, he was surprised to see that it wasn’t any of those things.
It was a drawing.
He squinted at the illustration, done in a combination of markers and crayon. It was one of his childhood conceptions of the monster who had, for years, haunted his nightmares. His mom had told him that one way to combat bad dreams was to draw them out—that doing so could teach your brain that they were only figments of your imagination, and nothing to be afraid of.
He had drawn the monster more times than he could count, and it had never made the nightmares any less real.
Crushing the drawing in his fist, he retraced his steps back to the office to see if he could figure out what else Nightmare had taken. Surely this drawing was a fluke—something she just happened to grab along with whatever prize she had really come for.
But all the drawers in the desk and filing cabinet were closed. The stacks of papers neat and tidy. Nothing pulled from the bookshelves.
Nothing, that is, except a single box that usually lived tucked away in the corner of the bottom shelf, but now sat on the carpet. Adrian knelt beside it and began rummaging through the papers that remained, all drawings from his childhood that his dads had cared enough to save.
Why would Nightmare care about these?
He reached the bottom of the box, and a thought struck him.
A terrible thought.
His palms grew sweaty as he flipped through the papers again, hoping he was mistaken. Hoping maybe they were kept somewhere else, that they’d never been in this box to begin with.
But no—they were gone.
Nightmare had taken his comics. The three issues of Rebel Z he’d made as a kid, about a boy who develops superpowers after a mad scientist tampers with him, and later uses those powers to transform himself into a powerful hero.
The Sentinel.
Adrian sat back on his heels, massaging his forehead. She knew. He couldn’t begin to guess how she knew, but she would have evidence enough in the pages of those comics. Enough to try to blackmail him, or out his secret to the world.
In the midst of the dread that clawed its way into Adrian’s thoughts, something else occurred to him.
Standing, he considered the open door to the office. She must have been hiding behind it. He must have passed right by her when he’d rushed to the window.
Close enough to touch.
His gaffe was so obvious in hindsight that thinking of his vulnerability made him slightly nauseous. In all the times he’d fought against Nightmare, never once could he recall her missing an opportunity to disarm her opponent, to get the upper hand.
And this time, she’d definitely had an opportunity to render him unconscious.
So then … why hadn’t Nightmare taken it?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BEFORE SHE WAS arrested, Nova had felt like every time she stepped into Renegade Headquarters, she could be walking to her doom. Surely they had figured her out by now. Surely this time they would be waiting to put her in chains.
And so it was with the most peculiar lightness that she pushed past the revolving glass doors the day after she was released from Cragmoor Penitentiary. Somehow, the worst had happened. She was found out. She was arrested and sent to prison. Her secrets were revealed. And yet, she emerged unscathed.
Her lies felt more secure now than they ever had. With not only an alibi but a scapegoat—Narcissa Cronin, having assumed the role of her alter ego—Nova felt like the weight of paranoia and constant suspicion was lifted from her.
For the first time in a long while, she almost felt like she belonged at HQ. Like she had earned the right to be there.
“Insomnia!” yelled Sampson Cartwright, the non-prodigy greeter who ran the information desk. He waved as Nova strolled by. “Glad to have you back!”
She smiled and returned the wave a little self-consciously, though she knew that Sampson was one of the most genuine people on the staff. It warmed her to think that maybe some people here, other than Adrian and the team, might actually have missed her.
She was met with a mix of emotions on the faces of Renegades and staff as she made her way to the elevators. Some watched her with open suspicion, not ready to believe in her innocence. Others sent her a look that was somewhere between a friendly grin and a grimace, laced with guilt for her false arrest. A few patrol units she barely knew offered her enthusiastic high fives. Others warily avoided making eye contact.
Nova was nearly to the elevators when she heard her name being shouted across the lobby. She turned to see Ruby bounding toward her.
“I’m so sorry!” Ruby yelled, yanking Nova into an embrace. “I’m so, so, so, so sorry!” Pulling back, she gripped Nova’s shoulders, and Nova couldn’t tell if her eyes were glossy from unshed tears or mere jubilation. “I’m so incredibly happy you’re not Nightmare, but I also feel like a terrible human being for having believed otherwise. We should have at least let you explain before … Well, I’m just really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said Nova. And she meant it. Ruby had believed that she was the notorious villain who once fought against them on the rooftops over the parade. She couldn’t exactly be offended. “It’s all in the past. I’m back now.”
“And we are overjoyed,” said Oscar, appearing beside them and holding up a fist, which Nova happily bumped. “I’ve got to admit, I’ve grown rather fond of you and your no-nonsense, badass ways. And I’m really sorry, too, by the way.”
“No more apologies. It’s fine. Anyone would have done the same in your position.”
Nova’s attention caught on the third member of their group. Though Danna had followed Ruby and Oscar, she stayed back a few steps, her arms crossed, her jaw set.
Clearly not about to apologize.
Nova had prepared herself for this, though. Of everyone she would have to persuade of her innocence, she knew Danna would be among the most difficult. Her accusation had landed Nova in jail in the first place. Nova still wasn’t sure what Danna had seen; she knew only that her testimony must have been shaky enough to allow for doubt once Narcissa showed up in Nightmare’s mask, helmet in hand.
And so, despite Danna’s cool demeanor, Nova beamed at her, as wide and chipper as she could. “Danna, we were so worried about you. Being stuck in swarm mode for that long … I know it must have taken a toll on you, but I’m really glad to see you’re okay.”
Danna’s expression thawed … but only a little, and only on the surface. The look in her eyes remained speculative. “Thanks. I’m glad there aren’t any hard feelings.”
