No more convoluted loyalties. No more uncertain agendas. No more secrets, no more lies.
She was an Anarchist—a villain, if that’s what it made her.
She was Nightmare.
She slammed the trunk shut. “Give me one hour,” she called to Leroy. “Drive around until then, just in case we were followed.”
“Do you think I’m an amateur?” Cyanide smirked, one elbow hanging out of the window. “I’ll be here.”
Nova waited until he sped away, tires squealing through the garage. She tugged down her sleeve to make sure the star was covered again, and then she ran.
She stayed in the shadows and the stairwells, checking around every corner, confirming that the streets were clear, the alleys empty. Soon she was standing outside a little-used back entrance to Renegade Headquarters, where deliveries were made and foreign dignitaries were brought inside when they were worried the tourists and journalists would make too much fuss over them. There was a security camera two stories up, but it was angled at the doorway—the building’s most vulnerable entrance.
Nova would not be going in through any doors.
She lurked beside a dumpster long enough to be sure no one had seen her approach, then tilted her head up and assessed the climb. The sides of the building were smooth, but there were enough ledges around the windows that she would have footholds when necessary.
It would be difficult to scale, but nothing she couldn’t handle.
She pressed the switch on the back of the gloves, sending a jolt of electricity through the material. Suction cups emerged on her palms and fingertips. Nova reached overhead and pressed her hand against the building’s side. The gloves took her weight and she started to climb.
As she passed the third story, the fourth, the tenth, the buildings around her began to drop away. She scanned their rooftops and water towers and began to feel exposed, but she knew, logically, that she had little to worry about. The funny thing about living in a city full of skyscrapers was that no one ever looked up.
Besides, the sense of vulnerability was something she’d begun to get used to. Nova had been paranoid from the moment she’d stepped foot into the arena for the Renegade trials. She had been painfully aware of the narrow ledge she was teetering on from the start.
There was a part of her—possibly a big part—that felt more relieved than anxious as she reached the twenty-sixth floor, the first of many that remained unused, and only one floor up from the security offices. No matter what happened here tonight, she would no longer have to lie.
Planting her feet on a windowsill and securing her hand against the exterior wall, Nova reached for the window breaker hooked over her belt. She fit the cylinder into the bottom corner of the window and pressed the lever, releasing the spring-loaded spike.
The window shattered. Tiny bits of glass rained across the sill and toward the street, sounding like wind chimes as it clinked onto the concrete below. Nova used the breaker to brush away the remaining sharp edges and ducked inside.
The floor was as empty now as it had been when she’d scoped it out earlier that day after inspecting the blueprints she’d taken from Adrian’s house. There were no cameras installed here. No sensors. No alarms.
She jogged to the stairwell and slipped down to the twenty-fifth floor. The door opened on a plain beige hallway that was roped off just outside the stairwell, with a sign that read SECURITY PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
Nova stepped over the rope and crept down the hall. It was lined with closed doors and ID tag scanners. She didn’t slow when she heard footsteps coming from the next hallway, though she was surprised when an unfamiliar woman turned the corner. Rather than the gray Renegade uniform, she was wearing a smart navy suit with an ID tag clipped to the breast pocket.
An administrator, Nova guessed. Not a prodigy.
The woman froze when she saw Nova, her eyes widening.
Nova ripped off one of the gloves and leaped for her. The woman sucked in a breath, but her scream never came. The second Nova’s fingers touched the woman’s neck, her power rushed through her. With a strangled moan, the woman slumped forward into Nova’s arms.
Nova deposited her in an alcove beneath a drinking fountain and snagged the ID tag.
She moved faster now, almost running until she came to the room that had been labeled as the security center on the blueprints. She held the woman’s tag against the scanner and it blinked green. Nova turned the handle and pushed open the door.
She was greeted by a wall of monitors showing a hundred different views of headquarters, and two empty chairs.
Nova stepped into the room.
Something whipped out from behind the door, stabbing her in the thigh. Nova cried out as the barb ripped out of her, leaving a gash in her pants. She buckled to one knee, feeling like her leg had just had a bite taken out of it. Within seconds the flesh around the wound started to burn, as a trail of blood dribbled to the floor.
“Are you messing with me?”
She looked up. Standing over her, Stingray slammed the door shut, his face twisted in disgust.
“You give Sketch and his loser friends all that trouble, and this is all you’ve got? I saw you on the cameras the second you stepped into the stairwell.” He gestured toward the bank of screens. “What a waste. Thought you were supposed to be some hotshot villain.” Sneering, he crouched at her side. “At least we’ve got a few minutes to kill before that paralysis wears off. Might as well see who we’ve got here.”
He reached for her mask. Nova ground her teeth, resisting the urge to pull away as his clammy fingers dug beneath the sides of the metal.
His fingertips brushed her jawline, and that was all she needed. Skin touching skin.
Realization spread over Stingray’s face. The amateur mistake he’d just made. Then he tipped onto his side with a heavy thump.
With him unconscious, Nova returned her attention to her wound. She pressed one palm over it and her hand pulled away damp with blood.
Injured and in pain, yes, but she wasn’t paralyzed like Stingray believed.
She rubbed the blood off on the side of her pants and dug a hasty bandage and some healing salve from the kit at her belt, securing it tight around her leg. She could feel the warm press of the Vitality Charm trapped between her jacket and her sternum.
Poison, disease, and evidently venom like Stingray’s too. The Renegades had been fools to stash the medallion away in their vault, without any appreciation. It was just one more example of their arrogance.
With the wound attended to, she turned her attention to the screens.
She spotted Frostbite guarding the main entrance, and Aftershock patrolling the back half of the ground floor. It took longer to find Gargoyle, but finally she spotted him making his rounds near the laboratories on the mezzanine level.
None of them appeared concerned, which was a relief. Stingray must have been confident enough in his ability to take down Nightmare. He hadn’t bothered to alert the rest of his team.
Removing his wristband, Nova stuffed it into her belt, then stepped over Stingray’s sleeping body. Nova approached the controls. She had studied the installation paperwork at length, the coding, the backup software, the fail safes, the alarms. She had planned for various scenarios until her eyes crossed.
In the end, it took just under eight minutes to disable the cameras throughout the building. She shut them all down, sending the system into dead air.