“Right,” said Nova. “Not dying of carbon monoxide poisoning when you were five years old would have been awful.”
“See?” Oscar looked pointedly at Adrian. “She gets it.”
Adrian rolled his eyes.
“And when you tried out for the Renegades…，” started Nova, leaning forward. “Nobody thought this was … a problem?” She nodded to the cane.
Oscar snorted with pride. “Sure they did. To date, I hold the record for most challenged contestant at the trials. And yet, here I am.” He gestured at Ruby. “She was challenged during her tryout too. In fact, it’s sort of becoming a theme around here.”
“Let me guess,” said Nova, cupping her chin in her palm and inspecting the top of Ruby’s bleached hair as she bent over her cards. “Your origin is that … you stumbled across a cache of ancient magical artifacts in a dusty antique shop somewhere, including a ruby hook and dagger, which imparted you with mystical fighting abilities from some long-forgotten culture.”
Ruby laughed. “Um, no, but that might be what I start telling people. It’s certainly less traumatic than the truth.”
“Oh?”
Ruby turned over the last card, checked that she had nowhere to place it, and started gathering them all back up into her palm. “Before society collapsed, my grandmother was a well-respected jeweler. She’d been running this shop in Queen’s Row for forty years when the Anarchists took over, and it was one of the first places that got raided after all the credit cards stopped working and everyone was panicking and thought we’d go back to bartering for gold and jewels. You know, before they realized that food, water, and guns were the actual valuables in a world like that. After a few days of looting, everything was gone, except what my grandma had stashed in her safe. So she took out every gem and diamond she had left and started hiding them where she didn’t think they’d be found, including a bunch in secret places around our house.”
“You lived together?” asked Nova.
“Oh yeah, she’s lived with us since before I was born. Grandma, me, my parents, and my brothers.”
“You have brothers?” said Nova.
“Two of them,” said Ruby, fixing a look on her. “But it’s not really relevant to this story.”
“Sorry.”
“So anyway, she hid these priceless gems all over the house—in little holes in the walls, secret compartments in our dressers, things like that. And they all sat there for twenty-plus years while my family tried to figure out how to survive, and eventually my brothers and I were born, and side note—yes, we all have really annoying gem-themed names, thanks Grandma. Well, one night we were playing hide-and-seek and I hid behind the grate on our fireplace and happened to find this little bag full of rubies that had been tucked up inside the chimney. I’d heard about the jewelry store and the raids and everything and didn’t really know what to do with them, so I just put them back. Until a few months later … Do you know how, not long before the Day of Triumph, some of the villain gangs started figuring out how to make trades internationally and that’s when gold started to become valuable again? Well, my grandma was one of the first people they turned to. One night our house got raided by villains looking for anything that might have been missed before.”
“Which villains?” said Nova, having asked the question before she realized she was about to. “What gang?”
“The Jackals,” said Ruby, shuddering. “I’ll never forget those creepy masks.”
Nova pressed her lips together. She’d seen photos of the Jackals taken before the Day of Triumph. They had been one of the few villain gangs to wear a cohesive uniform—all black clothes with signature masks painted to look like the animals they’d been named for.
She wasn’t sure why she felt disappointed, but Nova realized that a part of her had been expecting Ruby to say that her family had been assaulted by the Roaches, the same gang that had sent the hitman after Nova’s family. The gang Ace had slaughtered in retaliation. They had been one of the largest and most powerful gangs in Gatlon City, so it wouldn’t have surprised her if they’d been the tormenters of Ruby’s family. Some said they even got their name from the Renegades themselves, when one of the early vigilantes complained that no matter how many of those villains they stamped out, they could never seem to get rid of them all.
There had been a tiny, faint wish that she and Ruby might share this mutual, long-dead enemy.