But tonight, she couldn’t shake the memory of the parade. Those moments when she’d been on the rooftop. When Captain Chromium had been in her sights.
She could have done it. She, Nightmare, Nova Jean Artino, could have been the one to take out the invincible Captain Chromium.
But she’d hesitated. It had taken her too long to pull the trigger, and she’d blown it.
Never again.
She returned to the line she’d chalked across the tracks and loaded a dart back into the chamber of the gun. Not the gun she’d had on the rooftop that day—Red Assassin snatched that one right out of her hands and she never had a chance to recover it—but another found in Ingrid’s collection.
She lifted the gun into her arms. Peered down the sights. Lined up the first target.
She fired.
Again.
And again.
And again, until each of the darts had been unloaded.
She exhaled and went to collect them. Only when she’d gotten close enough to the targets could she evaluate how well she’d done.
Bull’s-eyes across the board. A dozen darts stuck into the pupils of a dozen magazine clippings—each one a glossy photograph of the Captain’s charming face.
She didn’t even smile as she yanked the darts out. This was just target practice. She’d failed when it had actually mattered. When she could have made a difference.
All revolutions come with death. Some must die so that others might have life. It is a tragedy, but it is also a truth.
She could still remember Ace telling her this when she was younger, when she’d asked him why so many had to die so they might have freedom. At the time she couldn’t fathom the hatred and violence that had been directed at prodigies in the centuries prior to the Age of Anarchy, but even then, even to her six-year-old mind, Ace’s passion had been contagious.
So few people really understood what Ace had been trying to accomplish. He hadn’t wanted the world to become what it did. Sure, there had been a lot of brutality and destruction when he first took over, but he was right—there always is during a revolution. Ultimately, he’d wanted a world in which prodigies were no longer oppressed and frightened, belittled and tormented. He’d wanted a world where they could all be free to live their own lives according to their own devices.
It was all the other power-hungry people, villains and non-prodigies alike, who had started to vie for control. Who had run amok in a world without rules.
Nova didn’t want to go back to the Age of Anarchy. She didn’t want innocent people to be slaughtered like her family had been. She just wanted the freedom that Ace had envisioned for her and those like her. She wanted the Renegades and the Council to leave her alone, to leave all the Anarchists alone.
Hell, she wanted the Council to leave all of society alone. Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing by being the end-all, be-all of the ruling elite, but society was barely getting by and they had too much pride to admit they weren’t what the people needed.
What the people needed was to learn to take care of themselves, but that would never happen so long as superheroes were running things.
She was making her way back up the tracks when the ground shook beneath her. Nova stumbled, planting a hand on the wall to stabilize herself. Bits of dust and chunks of loose concrete tumbled down the sides of the tunnel in small rivulets. The tracks vibrated under her feet, and for a moment Nova had the uncanny and horrifying thought that a train was coming—and she had nowhere to go.
The trembling stopped. A few more shudders passed underfoot before the earth stilled and quieted again.
Nova glanced down the tunnel, wondering whether it had been an earthquake—one buried deep underground, perhaps even a hundred miles away. Nothing to be concerned with. Surely these ancient tunnels had withstood far worse.
But then the silence was again broken, this time by a crash. The acoustics of the tunnels made it impossible to guess how far away the sound had come from, but it filled Nova with one certainty.
The Renegades were back.
She grabbed the gun and loaded a dart into the chamber, stashing the others into a pouch at her belt. Though Leroy hadn’t yet filled them with poison, she figured she could still find a way to make them useful.
She raced back in the direction of the platforms and tunnels where their train cars dwelled. As she neared the main platform, she forced herself to slow. She didn’t have her hood or mask to disguise herself as Nightmare, and she knew it would be foolish to give up her identity to the Renegades now.
As she rounded a corner, the walls began to shake again, which was followed by another crash—louder and closer this time.