On the Day of Triumph, Nova had been told to stay in the tombs. She sat in the darkness, listening to the screams and thunder of the battle, feeling the rumble and crash of the earth and walls around her. It went on for hours. Ages.
Honey found her first. Or her bees did, and they led Honey to her. They escaped into a secret passageway, small and damp, smelling of soil and musty air, lit only by the small flashlight Nova had brought with her into the tombs. Honey’s distress kept Nova from talking for a long time, but when the passage finally spilled them into an abandoned subway station, Nova dared to ask what had happened.
She received only three words in reply.
The Renegades won.
*
“HERE WE ARE.”
Nova jolted from her thoughts. Goose bumps had erupted across her skin as her memory repeated that day.
She sat up straighter and peered through the windshield. Leroy had parked on the shoulder of a quiet, narrow road just off the shore of Harrow Bay. Rocky outcroppings and foaming waves caught the light of a hesitant moon, and she could see a handful of docks stretching into the water. Most of them were bare, but a few had small fishing boats moored alongside them, their sides thunking hollowly against the pier.
She turned in her seat. To her right was a tall cliff studded with scraggly plants that clung desperately to its side and a burial ground of white driftwood at its base. Behind them, the dark road curved inland and disappeared.
No houses. No apartments. No warehouses. No buildings at all.
“Charming,” she said.
Leroy killed the engine. He was turned away from her, gazing out toward the water. “I don’t much care for the ocean,” he said solemnly. “Seeing it always fills me with regret.”
“Regret?” Nova studied the choppy waves. “Why?”
“Because if I had learned to sail, then I could leave this place. In a boat, one could go anywhere.”
“You have a car,” said Nova, glancing sideways at him. “You could drive away if you wanted to.”
“It’s not the same.” Leroy turned—not to face her, but to stare at his own crooked fingers on the steering wheel. “There’s not a civilized place in this whole world where I wouldn’t be recognized, and the others too. Our reputations would precede us wherever we went. So long as anarchy is synonymous with chaos and despair, the Anarchists will always be synonymous with villains.” He cocked his head to the side and this time he did look at her, though it was so dark in the car she could only catch faint spots of moonlight reflected in his eyes. “But not you, Nightmare. No one knows who you are. You could leave us, you know. You could go anywhere.”
She scoffed. “Where would I go?”
“Anywhere you like. That’s the beauty of freedom.”
He smiled, but it was a sad look, one full of that regret he’d mentioned.
Nova swallowed. Freedom.
She knew he was right. The thought had, in fact, crossed her mind a thousand times. No one knew what Nova Artino looked like, or even that she was still alive. No one knew that she had been raised by the Anarchists. No one knew that she was Nightmare.
“What are you saying?”
“We are here because you say you want to infiltrate the Renegades, so someday we might destroy them,” said Leroy. “And no one would be happier than I to see that come to fruition. But I cannot in good conscience go through with this without giving you an alternative. After tonight, you will have a new name, a new identity. You could leave Gatlon City. Or … you could stay. Get a job and an apartment. Start a real life, like everyone else is trying to do. You would have plenty of company if you made that choice.”
Nova shifted in the seat, crossing her arms over her chest. “And what? Leave you guys to defeat the Renegades without me? In your dreams.”
Leroy shook his head. “There will be no defeating them without you and what you might be able to learn. What you might be able to change.” His voice quieted. “I have little hope of ever seeing the freedom we once fought for. Killed for. But you did not choose this life, Nova. Not like we did. You could still choose differently.”
Jaw clenching, Nova stared at one of the boats. Swaying back and forth, a ceaseless, steady rocking.
“The Anarchists are my family,” she said. “The only family I have left. I won’t be free until you are. I won’t rest until the Renegades are punished. For how they treat you. For how they betrayed my family. For what they did to Ace.”
Leroy fixed her with a studious look. “And if revenge does not bring you joy?”
“It’s not joy I’m looking for.”
Reaching around the steering column, Leroy switched off the headlights and pulled the key from the ignition. “Then let’s see if we can’t find what you are looking for.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HER THOUGHTS SPUN as she followed Leroy along the dark road’s narrow shoulder. Their conversation in the car was still tumbling through her thoughts. Was she doing this for them? For Ace or Evie or herself?
Or was she doing it for all of humanity? All the people who were too blind to see how they would be better off without the Council. Without the Renegades.
Maybe, she told herself, it can be both.
She wasn’t sure when she’d started to think of the Anarchists as her family. Certainly not during those initial months when she had loved only Ace, and thought only of her parents and her sister and herself. Though they had all occupied the same spaces within the cathedral, she had seen the Anarchists more like phantoms passing her in the nave or arguing in the cloister. There had been more of them then. Many died during the battle, some that she never even knew the names of. And by and large, they all ignored the foundling child Ace had dragged back with him. They were not mean to her—Ace would not have tolerated that—but they didn’t go out of their way to be kind, either.