“By the marina,” said Leroy, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
Nova scanned the buildings they passed. They’d left downtown and were making their way through the industrial district, where warehouses and storage yards had once been full of shipping crates ready to be loaded onto cargo ships or distributed to the rest of the country by endless trains and semitrucks. Though international trade was gradually returning to the city, most of these buildings were still deserted, home only to rats and squatters who, for whatever reason, weren’t eligible for Council-sanctioned housing. That, or they preferred to make their own choices about where and how to live their lives, whatever the cost.
Through gaps in the warehouses and defunct factories she caught glimpses of Harrow Bay, sparsely lit by a handful of boats on the water. Her eyes traveled to the horizon which blended almost seamlessly with the black sky. Though they were still in the city, the light pollution was dimmed out here enough that she could see a scattered sprinkling of stars and she found herself scanning for constellations she recognized. The Fallen Warrior. The Great Cypress. The Hunter and the Stag.
As a child, Nova had been fascinated by the stars. She would make up entire stories about the celestial beings represented in those constellations. Back then she’d even convinced herself that all prodigies, like herself and her dad and Uncle Ace, had in fact been born of the stars, and that’s how they’d gotten their superpowers. She’d never figured out exactly how that had come to be, but it had seemed to make perfect sense in her youthful logic.
She wasn’t sure what was more amazing—her childhood theory on how prodigies came to be, or the truth. That each of those stars was its own sun, thousands of light-years away. That to look at a star was to look back in time, to an age in which there were no prodigies at all.
Leroy turned a corner and the car passed over a series of train tracks before tipping down a long, steep hill toward the marina.
“How do you know this woman again?” asked Nova.
“Oh, I don’t, not really. But then—how much do we really know anyone? Can we say with absolute certainty that we even truly know ourselves?”
Nova rolled her eyes. “And again. How do you know her?”
Leroy grinned and jerked the wheel to one side. Nova stiffened and glanced out the window, but couldn’t see whatever it was he was swerving around. A second later, he had righted the car in his lane. “She was a member of the Ghouls,” he said, citing one of the villain gangs who had risen to power during the Age of Anarchy, one that had formed an alliance of sorts with the Anarchists. “I used to trade her disappearing inks for false documentation. Still do, when it’s needed.”
“She’s a prodigy, then.”
Leroy hummed his confirmation.
“Any powers I should know about?” Even when meeting a supposed ally, Nova liked to be prepared.
“Psychometry. Nothing dangerous.”
Psychometry. The ability to see into an object’s past.
“Well,” Leroy added with a chuckle, “nothing dangerous so long as you don’t get crushed beneath all her stuff. You’ll see when we get there. She told me once that it’s difficult to give things up, once you know what they’ve been through.”
“I’m not afraid of stuff,” said Nova, “as long as we can trust her.”
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” said Leroy. “But outside of family, she’s as close to trustworthy as we’re going to get. And”—he sighed—“I don’t believe we have any other choice.”
Nova settled deeper into the seat, staring at the weathered boathouses that blurred past.
Her mind settled on that one ephemeral word.
Family.
She had had a family once. Mom. Papà. Evie. When they were taken from her, she believed she’d lost everything. So much of her childhood was lost in a haze of pain and loss, mourning and anger, betrayal and a sadness so raw there were entire days in which she couldn’t summon the energy to eat, or even cry. Entire nights in which shadows terrorized her, becoming murderers and monsters.
There had been but one source of light in those first months. The only real family she had left.
Uncle Ace.
He had held her close so she couldn’t see the bodies of her family as he took her away from the apartment, stopping only to grab the unfinished bracelet her father had been working on. He hadn’t let her go until they arrived at the cathedral, what he and the Anarchists had called home in those days. It was the largest church in the city, which Ace had claimed long before Nova was born. At first, she found it haunting and eerie, with the lofted ceilings that echoed every footstep, the bell tower that had long ago fallen to silence and cobwebs, the paintings of dead saints that watched her pass with condemning eyes.