Settling a hand on her belt, which still held the instruments she had brought with her to Renegade HQ that morning, she stepped inside. She passed a collection of framed photographs on the wall—the McLain family, perhaps—but did not bother to inspect their faces as she headed up the staircase. The wood groaned beneath her, shattering the still silence of the house. She froze and listened. When only the sound of her own breath could be heard, she turned the corner and proceeded up the rest of the staircase. On the second floor, there was a door to her left, barely cracked open, and an open living area to her right, with a bedroom beyond it.
Nova reached out her hand and nudged open the first door the rest of the way. Inside was a bed frame with no mattress and yellowed curtain panels hung over two tall windows, one of which was fluttering around the bullet hole.
Turning, she made her way to the second bedroom—the master, judging by the small tiled bathroom attached to the closet. There was no furniture in this room, though. Only a backpack, a paper grocery bag, and a green sleeping bag in the corner with a large form curled up inside it.
Nova paused in the doorway, staring at the form and hoping it wasn’t dead. A stranger’s dead body wasn’t exactly the sort of housewarming gift she’d been hoping for. After watching for a moment, she detected a subtle rising and falling of breath.
Sighing, Nova crossed the room. She spotted a handgun lying not far from the figure and, pressing her foot onto it, dragged it back out of reach. Then she cleared her throat.
The figure didn’t move.
“Hey.”
A quiet snuffle.
Scowling, Nova crouched down and nudged the figure through the sleeping bag. The figure yelped and rolled over, then shot upward. The man had a beard of thick whiskers and ears that stuck out too far from his head. Despite the gray sprouting in his hair and the wrinkles cut through his brow, Nova had the impression he was younger than he looked, but had been aged prematurely by too many unkind years. His hand went for the spot where the gun had been, but when it landed on only the floorboards, he glanced down and spotted it tucked behind Nova.
His bewilderment turned to a sneer. “Who’re you?” he barked.
“The new tenant,” she said. “Sorry, but you’re going to have to find somewhere else to crash.”
His eyes swooped over her Renegade uniform and she could see indecision warring behind his groggy eyes. It was clear he wanted to tell her to get lost and let him go back to sleep, but most people these days opted to treat any Renegade with respect, regardless of whether or not they actually supported their rule over the city.
“What?” he said. “You people claiming this block for another one of your social projects or something?”
“Or something.” Grabbing the gun, she stepped over the man’s sleeping bag and threw open the sash of the nearest window. She tossed the gun outside. It landed with a soft thud in a patch of weeds in the back alleyway.
“Hey!” the man yelled.
Nova headed back toward the staircase. “You’ve got two minutes,” she called over her shoulder. “If you’re not gone by then, you’ll be the next thing I throw out the window.”
She was halfway through the next room when he yelled back, “You think you can throw me out a window? I’ve had mutts that were bigger than you!”
Nova paused and turned back, peering at him through the doorway. “Now you have one minute.”
She went back downstairs to finish her tour of the house, which was composed of a powder room and a small kitchen-dining-room combo in the back of the ground floor. A sliding glass door led out onto a tiny square yard, which was mostly weeds, including a particularly monstrous blackberry bush that was in the process of devouring a child’s tricycle.
Thirty-four seconds later, she heard the stairs creek and the front door slam shut.
Nova exhaled. “Home, sweet home.”
She returned to the kitchen and started digging through the cabinets. She found a box of black trash bags tucked into one corner and started filling it with bottle caps and crushed soda cans and the occasional dead cockroach that littered the floors. She hadn’t planned to stay there when she first decided to come check the place out. Rather, she’d been thinking strategically. She figured that if the Renegades were tracking her movements through the communicator band, they would expect her to return home at some point, so she might as well get it out of the way. Her plan had been to hide the bracelet here, then return to the subway tunnels to tell the others what she’d learned during her first day at HQ.