Renegades (Renegades #1)(18)
Author: Marissa Meyer
“Hopefully,” said the woman beside him, “they have a better plan going forward than they had today!”
Scowling, Adrian grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. He leaned back into the sofa cushions and took another bite of cereal. In the sudden silence, the crunching became absurdly loud, the demolition of small artificially flavored rice puffs filling the entire living room.
It was uncanny how much the news anchor’s questions mirrored those that had been revolving through his head all day.
Nightmare. The great mystery. And they didn’t even know the greatest mystery of all, those words that he could not quiet.
One cannot be brave who has no fear.
Swinging his feet down to the carpet, Adrian set the bowl on the coffee table and grabbed his sketchbook.
The wooden floorboards of the house creaked beneath him as he padded into the main foyer and up the oak staircase to the second floor. It was an old, stately home. Had, in fact, been the mayor’s mansion, back when Gatlon City had a mayor. The mayor and his family and even some of the staff had been murdered in this very home in the early days of the Age of Anarchy. When he was younger, Adrian had been convinced their ghosts still haunted the upper floors, which was why he begged to be able to convert the basement into his bedroom. Though he no longer believed the spirits of the dead were still hanging around, he often felt a chill of apprehension when he went up to the second floor, where the master suite and a series of guest rooms branched off a central hallway. He rarely had cause to come up here, though. The basement, the kitchen, the living room—those were his domains.
But what he needed to see now was up here, in his dads’ shared home office.
Reaching the landing, he flicked on the hallway light, illuminating the dark wooden doors, the intricate crown moldings, the faded oriental carpets that ran the length of the narrow corridor.
The house had been in terrible shape when his dads decided to move in. It had been a prime target for looters during the Age of Anarchy, but Simon felt it had too much history to be allowed to succumb to eternal abandonment. It was a symbol of a different time—a peaceful, civilized time, when society had order and rules and leadership.
So they’d all moved in and had been restoring it ever since. Adrian could hardly remember how bad it had been back in those early days, when he’d been mortified at the thought of actually living there, with its piles of trash and cigarette butts, stripped wires left dangling from punctured holes in the walls, thick cobwebs and scrawled graffiti on every surface. But before long, his dads’ dream became his, too, and by now he’d done almost as much to restore the place as they had. At least his skills lent themselves easily to the project. When a shutter was broken or a balustrade destroyed, it was easier for Adrian to simply draw them a new one rather than track down an artisan who could mimic the work. The result was that Adrian felt as much pride in the house as he could imagine any of them did, even if he still found himself avoiding the rooms where the murders had taken place.
With his sketchbook tucked beneath one arm, he placed his fingers against the door to the home office and nudged it open. The hinges creaked. The hall light cut through the thick shadows. Reaching into the room, Adrian pressed the top button of the vintage press-button light switch, one of the few that was still original to the home. The chandelier brightened, five small amber lampshades making the room glow in subtle shades of gold.
The desk at the room’s center was a mess, the bookshelves behind it equally chaotic. Organizing the room never seemed to become a priority when there was a city to run, and any free time his dads did stumble into was almost always dedicated toward working on the house.
Adrian ignored the random stacks of paper, files and folders, mail and magazines and newspapers. He went straight to the bookshelf, where a series of dusty photo albums were sandwiched between an outdated geographical dictionary and a broken radio.
He settled his hand on the spine of an album covered in a maroon slipcover and pulled it from the shelf. The rest of the albums tipped inward, thudding against one another as Adrian sat down on the large area rug. Stacking the album on top of his sketchbook, he flipped past the first few pages. Though it had been years since he’d looked through this album, he still had most of the photos memorized.
A grainy image of his third birthday party, where he sat in the midst of a pile of boxes and shredded newspapers that had been used as wrapping paper, his mom and Kasumi grinning in the background.
A photo of him balanced on his mother’s hip as she stood in front of a collection of bags and boxes overflowing with canned vegetables and boxes of dried pasta. The rest of the original Renegades were all there, too, except for Simon, who had probably taken the photo. Adrian recalled the story of that day, how they had successfully liberated all that food from a warehouse run by one of the villain gangs, who were selling it to hungry civilians at egregious prices.
His mother stopped appearing in the photos after that, and with just a few page turns later, Adrian himself went from a chubby-faced toddler to a skinny eight-year-old kid. His dads standing behind him, hands on his shoulders, grinning proudly. He looked happy that day, though it was hard to recall just how he had felt. It was the day they’d officially adopted him, more than a year after his mother’s death. The wounds hadn’t healed, but something about completing the paperwork had left him feeling like he was no longer floating away, untethered to any family, detached from any sense of belonging. At the time, it had felt immeasurably important.
In hindsight, Adrian recognized that there really weren’t any official adoptions. Evander Wade was the one who drafted up the adoption certificate, as there was no legislation in place for that sort of thing. His dads were making up the laws as they went. But maybe they sensed Adrian’s anxiety over not having a family to call his own, even if they had taken him in from the start. Maybe they’d known what a few signatures and an official-looking stamp would mean to him.
Adrian flipped past the photos from the adoption celebration, past even that official-looking certificate tucked between pages. A couple more birthdays, a few holiday celebrations, though photographic records became a lesser priority as Adrian aged, and there was virtually nothing from his teen years, which was fine by him. He wasn’t really looking for a stroll down memory lane, anyway.
Finally, he found what he was looking for. A shred of newsprint folded up tight and tucked into a plastic page protector near the back of the album. He worked the page out from the sheet. The paper had the faintest hint of yellow to it, which struck him as peculiar. Certainly it hadn’t been that long ago—long enough for age to take a toll on the scraps that had been saved. There were days when it felt like it had just happened.
Though, there were also days when it felt an entire lifetime ago.
Adrian nudged up his glasses and unfolded the square of paper, cut from the Gatlon Gazette—the only local newspaper that had continued to operate throughout the Age of Anarchy, though there had been years in which journalists were pressured by the gangs to report on some activities in a not-entirely-honest manner.
Nevertheless, this article Adrian had every reason to believe was full of truth.
A black-and-white photo showed a picture of her in all her superhero glory—her white-booted feet hovering over the ground, her golden cape whipping in the air, her familiar bright smile as she gave the cameraman an A-OK sign. All in such drastic contrast to the headline at the top, printed in harsh block letters.
LADY INDOMITABLE FOUND DEAD, KILLER UNKNOWN
Adrian had not expected the words to affect him so strongly all these years later. He had read this article so many times, he didn’t think it would still hurt to see it. He had come to terms with his mother’s death. He had adjusted to life without her. He had accepted that whatever villain had murdered her had almost certainly been killed on the Day of Triumph, and he would have to be content with that small bit of justice, even if the mystery of her death was never solved.
But that had all been before Nightmare had taunted him with those words. That phrase that meant so much more to him than to anyone else. Had she known?
But … how could she have?
Adrian scanned the columns of the article until he found the paragraph he was looking for.
An autopsy revealed broken bones and a fractured skull consistent with having fallen seven stories to the concrete alleyway, and the coroner has stated that this is without doubt the cause of death. Though no additional signs of foul play on the body or at the crime scene have been found, the death being a potential suicide was quickly ruled out due to one piece of evidence: a plain white note card tucked into Lady Indomitable’s belt and printed with the ambiguous phrase: “One cannot be brave who has no fear.”
Adrian peeled his attention from the page and stared blankly at the back of the desk.
Someone had killed her. Almost certainly a villain, someone who had managed to circumvent her own superpower—because how does one fall seven stories to their death when they can fly?
He shut his eyes, and though it had been years since he’d had nightmares about his mother’s body, his imagination supplied the vision all over again. Broken bones. Fractured skull. Though this article didn’t mention it, he had heard rumors that when she’d been found, her eyes had been open, her face contorted in a silent scream.