Renegades (Renegades #1)(3)
Author: Marissa Meyer
Too late she remembered—
Evie.
She’d left Evie out there.
She’d left Evie.
A shuddering gasp was met with a horrified cry, though she tried to swallow both of them back. Her hand fell on the closet door and she tried to gauge how fast she could get out to the living room and back, if there was any chance of snatching the baby up without being seen …
The front door creaked, paralyzing her.
She pulled her hand back against her mouth.
Maybe he wouldn’t notice Evie. Maybe she would go on sleeping.
She listened to slow, heavy footsteps. Squealing floorboards.
Nova was shaking so hard she worried the noise of her clattering bones would give her away. She also knew it wouldn’t matter.
It was a small apartment, and there was nowhere for her to run.
“The Renegades will come,” she whispered, her voice little more than a breath in the darkness. The words came unbidden into her head, but they were there all the same. Something solid. Something to cling to.
Bang.
Her mother’s blood on the door.
She whimpered. “The Renegades will come…”
A truth, inspired by countless news stories heard on the radio. A certainty, patched together from the words of gossiping neighbors.
They always came.
Bang.
Her father’s body crumpling in the hall.
Nova squeezed her eyes shut as hot tears spilled down her cheeks. “The Renegades … the Renegades will come.”
Evie’s shrill cry started up in the main room.
Nova’s eyes snapped open. A sob scratched at the inside of her throat, and she could no longer say the words out loud.
Please, please let them come …
A third gunshot.
The air caught in Nova’s lungs.
Her world stilled. Her mind went blank.
She sank into the mess at the bottom of the closet.
Evie had stopped crying.
Evie had stopped.
Distantly, she heard the man moving through the apartment, checking the cabinets and behind the doors. Slow. Methodical.
By the time he found her, Nova had stopped shaking. She couldn’t feel anything anymore. Couldn’t think. The words still echoed in her head, having lost all meaning.
The Renegades … the Renegades will come …
Doused in the stark lights from her bedroom, Nova lifted her eyes. The man stood over her. There was blood on his shirt. Later, she would remember how there had been no regret, no apology, no remorse.
Nothing at all as he lifted the gun.
The metal pressed against her forehead, where her mother’s blood had cooled.
Nova reached up and grabbed his wrist, unleashing her power with more force than she ever had.
The man’s jaw slackened. His eyes dulled and rolled up into his head. He fell backward, landing with a resounding thud on her bedroom floor, crushing her dollhouse beneath his weight. The whole building seemed to shake from his fall.
Seconds later, deep, peaceful breathing filled the apartment.
Nova’s lungs contracted again. Air moved through her throat, shuddering. In. And out.
She forced herself to stand and rub the tears and snot from her face.
She picked up the gun, though it felt awkward and heavy in her hand, and slipped her finger over the trigger.
She took a step closer, one hand gripping the doorframe as she left the sanctuary of the closet. She wasn’t sure where she should aim. His head. His chest. His stomach.
She settled on his heart. Got so close to him she could feel his shirt brushing against her bare toes.
Bang. Her mother was dead.
Bang. Her father.
Bang. Evie …
The Renegades had not come.
They weren’t going to come.
“Pull the trigger,” she whispered into the empty room. “Pull the trigger, Nova.”
But she didn’t.
“Pull the trigger.”
She couldn’t.
Minutes, maybe hours later, her uncle found her. She was still standing over the stranger’s sleeping form, ordering herself to pull the trigger. Hearing those gunshots over and over every time she dared to close her eyes.
“Nova?” A plastic bag dropped to the floor, taking a plastic medicine bottle with it. Nova startled and turned the gun on him.
Uncle Alec didn’t even flinch as he crouched before her. He was dressed as he always was—the black-and-gold uniform, his dark eyes barely visible through the copper-toned helmet that disguised most of his face. “Nova.… Your parents.… Your sister.…” He looked down and reached for the gun. Nova didn’t resist as he took it from her. His attention turned to the man. “I’d always thought you might be one of us, but your father wouldn’t tell me what it was you could do.…”
He met Nova’s eyes again. Pity and, perhaps, admiration.
With that look, Nova fell apart, throwing herself into his arms. “Uncle Alec,” she wailed, sobbing into his chest. “He shot them … he … he killed…”
He picked her up, cradling her against his chest. “I know,” he murmured into her hair. “I know, sweet, dangerous child. But you’re safe now. I’ll protect you.”
She barely heard him over the noise in her head. The tumult pressing against the inside of her skull. Bang-bang-bang.
“But you can’t call me Alec anymore, not out there. All right, my little nightmare?” He smoothed her hair. The handle of the gun bumped against her ear. “To the rest of the world, I’m Ace. You understand? Uncle Ace.”
But she wasn’t listening. And maybe he knew that.
In the midst of her cries, he squeezed her tight, aimed the gun at the sleeping man, and fired.
CHAPTER ONE
TEN YEARS LATER
THE STREETS OF DOWNTOWN GATLON were overflowing with fake superheroes.
Kids ran amok in orange capes, screeching and waving Blacklight-branded sparklers over their heads, or shooting one another with Tsunami-themed squirt guns. Grown men had squeezed themselves into blue leggings and painted shoulder pads to look like the Captain’s armor, and now sat clinking glasses together inside the roped-off beer gardens that dotted the main street. Gender-swapping was a big thing this year, too, with countless women having shown up in risqué versions of the Dread Warden’s signature bodysuit, and plenty of men having strapped cheap replicas of Thunderbird’s black-feathered wings to their backs.
Oh, how Nova despised the Renegade Parade.
The street vendors weren’t any better, hawking everything from cheesy light-up wands to tiny plush versions of the famous Renegade quintet. Even the food trucks were celebrating the day’s theme, with Captain Chromium funnel cakes and Tsunami fish’n’chips baskets and one sign advertising DREAD WARDEN’S FAVORITE POPCORN CHICKEN—GET SOME NOW BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS!
If Nova had had an appetite to start with, she was sure she would have lost it by now.
A great cheer rose up through the crowd and the noise of a marching band broke through the din. Trumpets and drums and the steady thumping of hundreds of synchronized musicians moved through the street. The music grew louder, bearing down on them now. Cannons blasted overhead, dousing the crowd with confetti. The children went nuts. The adults weren’t much better.
Nova shook her head, mildly disappointed in humanity. She stood at the back of the crowd, unable to see much of the actual parade, which was fine by her. Arms crossed defensively over her chest. Fingers drumming an impatient rhythm against her elbow. Already it felt like she’d been standing there for an eternity.
The cheering turned suddenly to loud, exuberant boos, which could only mean one thing. The first floats had come into view.
It was tradition for the villain floats to go first, to really get the crowd riled up, and to remind everyone what it was they were celebrating. Today was the ninth anniversary of the Battle for Gatlon, when the Renegades had taken on the Anarchists and the other villain gangs in a bloody fight that had ended with dozens of deaths on both sides.
The Renegades had won, of course. Ace’s revolutionaries were defeated and the few villains who didn’t perish that day either crawled away into hiding or left the city entirely.
And Ace …
Ace Anarchy was dead. Destroyed in the explosion that leveled half of the cathedral he had made his home.