Supernova, page 5
The threat on the glass blurred before her.
48 HOURS
OR EVERYONE WILL KNOW
CHAPTER FIVE
ADRIAN WAS CONTEMPLATING invisibility. As superpowers go, it was one with infinite uses, particularly when one spent a great deal of time sneaking and spying, as he tended to do these days. His dad Simon—the Dread Warden—could turn invisible. So could Max, having absorbed some of Simon’s ability when he was a baby, although he could only go invisible for short periods of time. There was one Renegade who had trained in Gatlon City a number of years ago who was always invisible, which Adrian had found slightly disconcerting when they’d been around. (To this day, he still wasn’t sure of their gender, and their alias, the Wraith, didn’t offer any clues.) But they had been sent to a syndicate across the ocean and Adrian hadn’t given much thought to them or their power since.
He was giving it plenty of thought now.
Because of all the powers he had given himself using tattoos inked into his body, none of them offered much in the way of stealth. Quite the opposite—the armor that burst forth from the zipper tattooed over his sternum was big and bulky, shiny and reflective. It made him feel invincible when he wore it, but also very, very visible.
He couldn’t quite picture the sort of tattoo that might allow for full invisibility, though. He figured such a tattoo would have to cover him nearly from head to toe to be effective, but maybe he needed to think outside the box. Maybe he just needed inspiration.
He wondered if Nova would have some ideas, except she didn’t know about the Sentinel or the tattoos and he wasn’t sure how to go about telling her, or even if he wanted to, especially given the outward loathing she demonstrated for his vigilante alter ego.
But standing on a ledge outside a hospital window, five stories in the air, in broad daylight in his heavy, glinting armor, he decided it was time to start considering other means of sneaking in to see Max. And invisibility would have made it so much easier.
Plastered against the building’s side, he angled a small handheld mirror toward the window, following the movements of a nurse as she checked Max’s vital signs and noted information onto a tablet. She adjusted something on an IV drip beside the bed, smoothed the blanket across his thin shoulders, signed her initials on a sheet of paper by the door.
Finally she left, leaving the door barely cracked behind her.
The moment she was gone, Adrian crouched and dug his gloved fingertips beneath the window. It opened as easily and silently as it had the last two times.
He stepped inside, cringing at the loud thump of his boots. He pressed a finger to the breastplate, retracting the armor into the pocket beneath his skin. On much quieter feet now, he crossed the room and shut the door the rest of the way. There was no lock, but the movements of the nurses were kept to a tight schedule, and by now he was familiar enough with their methods to know that no one would be back to check on Max for a couple of hours.
And, sadly, the kid couldn’t expect many visitors. Having been quarantined inside Renegade HQ for most of his life, he had no friends or acquaintances beyond the Renegades, and there were only two Renegades who could be near Max without him absorbing their powers into himself.
Captain Chromium was one. He was invincible to everything, even the Bandit.
And Adrian was the other—though no one other than Max knew about it.
After he’d discovered the Vitality Charm and what it could do, Adrian had been inspired to design a tattoo that could offer the same measures of protection, even against a power like Max’s. And it had worked. He could finally be near his little brother without a glass barrier dividing them.
But until he found a way to explain the tattoos to everyone, especially his dads, he had to keep even this tattoo a secret. And now that the Vitality Charm was missing, he couldn’t use that as a foil for visiting the kid.
But there was no way he could stay away completely.
He just had to be careful about it.
With the door shut and the blinds closed, he stepped to the side of the bed and peered down at his little brother. At least, he thought of Max as his brother, and he’d thought of him that way since the first day he’d met the kid. His dads had rescued Max as a baby, after his biological parents—members of the Roaches—had tried to throw him into a river. Max had probably already absorbed their powers by that point, and no doubt the rest of the gang would have threatened expulsion if they didn’t get rid of the little bandit before he did any more damage. To a lot of prodigy parents, Max would have been seen as a threat long before he was seen as a child worth loving. For months after, Max had lived with a civilian foster family who cared for him until Hugh and Simon could figure out what to do. From the start, Hugh had felt it was important for him to be kept close, not just because he was a prodigy who deserved to be surrounded by other prodigies, but also because to have him out on his own could make him either a target for the villains or a weapon that they could someday use against the Renegades.
Which is when they’d started to consider a quarantine.
Construction had begun almost as soon as the Battle for Gatlon was won, and some months later, Adrian had met his foundling baby brother on the other side of a glass wall. He was walking by then, toddling around the wide-open space, exploring the mess of blocks and train sets Hugh kept bringing for him.
Adrian had used a red marker to draw his best shark on the glass wall—not a living creature, but a toy that Max could play with. The drawing was rudimentary and rough, but it had quickly become the kid’s favorite toy.
Adrian had loved him immediately.
Pulling a plastic chair beside the bed, Adrian slumped into it and inspected Max’s face, almost ten years older than that innocent baby, and about a hundred years wiser. He told himself the kid was less pale than the night before, though it might have been wishful thinking. His breath was as steady as ever. His hair as messy. A faint shade of blue was cast across his eyelids, making his skin appear to be made of rice paper.
He had always been small for his age, and now he looked like he could fade right into the white sheets of the hospital bed.
Adrian tried not to think like that, though. It might have felt like Max had been lying here for weeks, but it wasn’t true. Adrian had to forcefully count out the time that had passed.
Three days. Three nights. Some people were in comas for years and managed to pull out of it.
Besides, Hugh had spoken with the doctors, and they claimed that Max was actually improving at a startling rate, especially when one considered how few people would have survived to begin with. The spear had gone clean through his abdomen, just below his rib cage. They partly credited his survival to the ice that had hardened over the wound, stanching the blood both internally and externally—a power he’d absorbed from Frostbite during the battle.
If it had been possible for a healer to tend to him, he might have been back on his feet in a week or two, good as new but for a couple gnarly scars.
He couldn’t be tended to by the healers though. In fact, any prodigy remotely associated with the hospital had been instructed to stay away from the room, even the entire wing, where Max was being cared for.
Nevertheless, he had been put under the care of the best civilian doctors the hospital had to offer, and he did seem to be recovering. They were tentatively optimistic.
Those were the words they kept using, that Hugh had parroted back to Adrian and Simon. Tentatively optimistic. It was something, but it wasn’t enough.
If only Adrian had captured Ace Anarchy sooner. If he’d gotten Max’s message. If he’d been just a little faster getting back to headquarters. He could have stopped Nightmare. He could have saved Max.
“Don’t worry, kid,” he whispered. “I’ll find her. I’ll make her pay for this.”
Then he inhaled deeply and started to tell Max everything he and the team had discussed. His suspicions that Nightmare could be a spy within the Renegades, and the evidence that seemed to confirm the theory. He wished he had a suspect in mind, but the only Renegade who struck him as villainous enough was Genissa Clark, and she couldn’t be Nightmare for obvious reasons.
Part of the problem was that powers were public record, and no one in the Renegades had an ability like Nightmare’s: to put people to sleep through touch. The closest thing Adrian could find were records of a prodigy who went by Lullaby and had the gift, enviable only to new parents, of singing restless children to sleep with her soothing voice. Lullaby, however, had never been a Renegade, just a prodigy who was a popular babysitter for parents who wanted to stay on patrols.
Which meant that Nightmare was hiding her ability from the rest of them. He thought it was likely that she was posing as one of their civilian contractors. About 10 percent of the Renegade’s workforce were not prodigies, including plenty of the lab personnel and administrators.
It made sense, actually, that it would be one of them. They didn’t have to pass trials. Though they would have undergone some rudimentary background checks …
Still, it seemed like as good a place to start as any.
“Thanks, Max,” he said, leaning back in his chair as his words and ideas faded out. “Talking this out with you was actually really helpful.”
Though Max couldn’t respond, it did comfort Adrian to work out his thoughts this way. Max had often been a sounding board for him, with ideas and perspectives that were mature beyond his years.
Adrian didn’t know what he would do without him.
A noise caught his attention and Adrian’s head jerked upward. He could hear voices coming toward the room, and one boomed louder than the others.
Hugh Everhart, aka Captain Chromium, aka his dad.
Cursing, Adrian sprang to his feet and shoved the chair back to its place in the corner.
Again. Invisibility. He really had to work on it.
He climbed onto the windowsill and slipped around to the ledge on the outside of the building’s facade, a perch that was beginning to feel all too familiar. Except he’d never been out there before when he wasn’t wearing the Sentinel’s armor. It was shocking how different the sensation was. How vulnerable he felt with the gusts of wind buffeting his skin and the rough stone of the building’s wall scratching against his palms. He wasn’t afraid of heights, but it was impossible not to imagine what would happen if he fell and his body struck the pavement five stories below.
He dared to glance down and saw, with a small shred of relief, that he would actually land in a flower bed. Not as great as, say, a trampoline, but still better than pavement.
Hugh’s booming voice reached him, though it was barely audible over the wind whistling past his ears. Was it his imagination, or had he heard his dad mention the Sentinel?
One side of his mouth twitched down. Adrian shook his wrist, flicking out the marker that he kept inside a pocket of his sleeve. He uncapped it with his teeth and started to sketch onto the building’s wall, but the textured stone was too rough for the marker to complete any clean lines, and bits of debris kept sticking to the felted tip. Scowling, he bent forward, ignoring the sheer drop mere inches behind his heels, and drew instead on the thigh of his jeans.
He had learned, over the years of being Sketch, the Renegade who could turn any drawing into reality, that complex, detailed drawings might be impressive, but it was the simple ones that tended to work the best. He could have drawn some sort of high-tech hearing aid with a radio antenna and background-noise dulling capabilities, but why muck around with all that? Instead, he drew an old-fashioned ear trumpet, pointed at one end and open wide at the other to take in sound waves and funnel them toward his ear canal. It was something the elderly might have used hundreds of years ago, and it didn’t exactly make him feel too sexy to pull the drawing from the denim fabric and hold it up to his ear.
But it worked. Suddenly, his father’s voice was coming through as if he were standing right beside him.
“—a great debt,” Hugh was saying, in a calmer tone than when he’d first entered the room, “which is putting us in a hell of a position. You’re sure he would have died if the Sentinel hadn’t gotten him here so fast?”
“Nothing is certain,” said another male voice—Dr. Sutner, Adrian recognized. The civilian doctor who had taken on Max’s care when none of their on-staff prodigy healers could get close to him. “He might have pulled through on his own, especially with the ice stanching the bleeding. But…” He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.
Adrian felt a tinge of warmth in his chest to know that he had done something right, at least. He had been tempted that night—so very tempted—to go after Nightmare when she had run. But he had chosen Max instead. He had chosen to try to save his little brother rather than exact vengeance on his attacker.
Vengeance could wait.
“Well … if I ever meet him, he’ll have my gratitude,” said Hugh, though there was a heaviness in his words. “Even if he does need to be stopped.”
“Stopped, Captain?” said the doctor. “But … isn’t he working for you?”
“Of course not. He’s a vigilante—he hasn’t followed our code from day one.”
“Right. Yes. The media says that. I’d just assumed…” Dr. Sutner trailed off.
“He’s not a Renegade. He’s not one of us.” Hugh’s voice took on an edge of resentment. “Maybe he’s done some good for us, but … it’s hard not to criticize his methods. He should have joined the organization, rather than going off on his own. It’s given people a lot of ideas about heroics and crime fighting, and that’s dangerous when it isn’t left in the hands of the professionals. People have been getting hurt, and it’s going to get worse.”
Adrian wished he could break out his mirror so he’d be able to see his dad’s expression, but he couldn’t use both the mirror and the ear trumpet. Still, he had a feeling he could tell what his dad was thinking. There had been a lot of talk about the Sentinel’s capture of the world’s most revered villain. It felt a little unjust, as Oscar, Ruby, and Danna had all helped him do it and should have gotten part of the credit. But after finding out that Adrian was the Sentinel, it had been Ruby’s idea to leave the Renegades a note for when they came to get Ace Anarchy. It had read,
CONSIDER THIS A
PEACE OFFERING.
—THE SENTINEL
That way, as Ruby explained, they would know that the Sentinel was on their side. That he wasn’t a villain. That they needed to stop hunting him.
Despite her good intentions, though, the note only seemed to have irritated the Council more. People thought that maybe the Sentinel was mocking them by tracking down their worst enemy, an enemy the Renegades had long believed dead. On top of that, the rise in vigilantism had skyrocketed these past months, as news of the Sentinel’s victories over criminals had spread. People were beginning to feel like the Renegades and their code weren’t enough. There needed to be more drastic measures taken if they were ever going to stop the spread of crime in their city.
It would have been flattering, except not everyone was made to be a superhero, and plenty of good intentions had led to civilians being severely wounded. One ambitious man had nearly been killed while trying to stop a carjacking, and an innocent woman had been shot in the arm when an enthusiastic vigilante had wrongly assumed that she was trying to break into his neighbor’s apartment. (In reality, the neighbor had asked her to dog-sit for a few days.)
The more people tried to take matters into their own hands, the more stories like that emerged.
It wasn’t that Renegades never made mistakes, but for the first time since Adrian had donned the Sentinel’s armor, he was beginning to understand why the Council placed so much importance on their code.
“Your staff knows to keep an eye out for him?” said Hugh, drawing Adrian’s attention back to their conversation.
“Just like you asked. There’s been no sign. Though … if he were to come to the hospital, we probably wouldn’t recognize him.”
“I know, but I just have a feeling he will … It’s common heroic behavior, to want to see the people you’ve rescued. I see it in Renegades all the time, how they want to maintain connections with the ones they’ve been personally involved in helping. Something tells me the Sentinel will try to see Max again.”
“Which begs the question, Captain,” said the doctor, sounding a bit hesitant. “How was he able to bring Max all the way here without being affected by the boy’s powers?”
Hugh was silent for a long time, though Adrian sensed it was more because he was debating what information to reveal, rather than mulling over the question itself. Finally, he admitted simply, “We don’t know. There are a lot of things about him that we don’t know. I guess what we do know is that in the course of one night, he managed to capture Ace Anarchy and save my son’s life. In spite of everything … how dangerous he is, how misguided … I can’t help but hope that someday I might have a chance to thank him.”
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS NOVA’S first time returning to the weapons and artifacts department since the night she’d stolen Ace’s helmet. Her insides were knotted as she rode the elevator up to the warehouse endearingly known as the vault. Her Renegade uniform felt like it was strangling her, the fabric tightening around her limbs, digging into her ribs and throat until she could barely move.
The words on the mirror were etched into her thoughts, and there was a part of her, a big part, that wondered if maybe Honey was right. Maybe it was time to give up. She didn’t really think she could save Ace, did she? Especially not before she was discovered. And now to have some unknown jerk stalking and threatening her made her wonder if it was all worth it.
Though she toyed with her own fate often enough, she loathed the idea that someone else now held her fate in their hands. That simply wouldn’t do.
She had gone over a lot of scenarios in her mind the night before, most of which ended in her discovering who the blackmailer was and dousing them with one of Leroy’s most painful concoctions. Because the idea of giving in to their demands, even if just to placate them temporarily, disgusted her. She was an Anarchist. She was one of the most feared villains of Gatlon City.
