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 He went straight to the bookshelf, where a series of dusty photo albums were sandwiched between an outdated geographical dictionary and a broken radio.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.