The Council acted like the only direction society could move was forward, away from those terrible years of chaos and crime, but Adrian sometimes had the feeling that the foundation of order the Renegades had built was more precarious than anyone wanted to admit.
Straightening his spine, he started down the grand staircase to the main floor and cut across to the elevators, heading for the medical wing. A few of the overhead screens switched to an image of Nightmare, waving down to the crowd from the basket of the hot-air balloon, her face eclipsed by the hood.
Renewed determination surged through Adrian at the sight of her. His mind started to replay the moment when Nightmare had stabbed him, with Ruby’s own blade, no less. He’d lost control. He’d thrown that flame, intending it for Nightmare, but he’d been blinded by rage, and he hadn’t been thinking about what might be behind her.
She called him a neophyte and she was right. It was an amateur mistake.
From the moment he heard Monarch’s scream, he knew she was badly hurt. He hadn’t been holding back, and much as he wanted to blame Nightmare for it, he couldn’t. The flames had been from his hands—the result of a power he’d barely explored. He had been cocky and careless and Danna was suffering for it.
When he reached the medical wing, he spotted Tamaya Rae—Thunderbird—through the windows of the first room. She was sitting on the edge of a bed while a healer tended to one of her black-feathered wings. She looked enraged, though all he caught were the words Puppeteer and balloon and pathetic fishing net!
He found Danna in the third room, lying on her side, unconscious. Much of her uniform had been cut away, revealing extensive burns along her left arm and torso. A mask was over her nose and mouth, probably filling her lungs with an elixir that would keep her body from transforming while she was unconscious, as sometimes happened when her brain went into fight-or-flight mode. She once told him that it happened to her a lot when she’d had nightmares growing up.
Nightmares.
Oh, the irony.
Adrian’s gut sank. He hadn’t had time to stop and see how bad her burns were during the fight, and now he was struck with the full weight of guilt from what he’d done.
Oscar and Ruby were there, too, sitting on a bench in the corner. Ruby’s head was resting on Oscar’s shoulder, and for a moment Adrian thought she might be asleep, but then her eyes peeled dazedly open. She spotted Adrian and sat up. The briefest flash of disappointment crossed Oscar’s face, but it was gone so fast Adrian thought he might have imagined it.
“Oh, now he shows up,” said Oscar, standing. “Dude, where were you?”
“I’m sorry,” said Adrian, feeling the apology down to his core. “I got your message about Nightmare and I was making my way to you guys when the Puppeteer showed up and I was stuck trying to get this group of kids to safety. There must have been a hundred of them there on a field trip. It was chaos.” He lightly scratched his wounded shoulder through his shirt, surprised by how easily the lie had come. “But I still should have been there with you. I’m so sorry. Is Danna…？”
Oscar blew out a frustrated sigh. “She got burned really bad in the fight.”
On the bed, Danna inhaled a shuddering breath. A machine on the wall beeped faster for a second, then fell again into a steady rhythm. Adrian walked closer, forcing himself to lift one of the cold compresses that had been draped over her burn wounds. Forcing himself to take in the damage he had done.
How much pain had she been in? Or had her body immediately gone into shock? Setting the compress back over her burns, he rubbed the flame tattoo through his sleeve. Though it had been healed for weeks now, he imagined for a moment that he could feel it, like the flame was alive, like it was burning his skin.
He turned back to Oscar and Ruby. “Have the healers been to see her yet?”
Oscar nodded. “Yeah. They say she’s going to be okay, but it’ll take some time. It’s really bad.”
“Danna is our eyes when we’re on patrol,” said Adrian, scratching the back of his neck. “We’ll be at a huge disadvantage without her.”
“The really weird thing,” said Ruby, “is that wasn’t even Nightmare’s doing. That”—she pointed at Danna, then drew quotes in the air—“was ‘the Sentinel.’”
Adrian flinched at the venom in her tone. The small part of him that wanted to tell his team that he was, in fact, on the roof with them that day, quickly evaporated. “Who?”