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.