Nova stepped away from the window. Adrian nodded at Oscar, who took his place as the first lookout.
“Is the Librarian a villain?” asked Oscar, staring across the street. “I mean, like, with superpowers? Or is he just a bad guy?”
“He’s a prodigy,” said Adrian, “but I’m not sure exactly what he does. Nothing violent, I don’t think.”
“Knowledge retention,” said Nova. The others turned to look at her and she started. “Is … what I’ve heard,” she added lamely. “I think that’s why they call him the Librarian. Not just because he, you know, runs a library, but supposedly he remembers everything he reads, word for word. Forever.”
“Makes sense,” said Ruby, opening a bag of candy.
Allowing herself to relax once the attention of the group moved away from her, Nova sat cross-legged and stared at the pile of snacks they’d brought. Red licorice ropes, jelly beans, peanut butter cookies, and an assortment of canned energy shots.
“This is the first time you’ve all done this, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” said Ruby, grabbing a handful of jelly beans, picking out the purple ones and dumping them back in the bag, before throwing the rest into her mouth at once.
Nova gestured at the spread. “This is a sugar crash waiting to happen. Didn’t anyone think to bring … I don’t know, carrots? Or some nuts or beef jerky … or you know, something with nutrients?”
Ruby blinked at her, then looked blankly at Oscar. Neither spoke.
“I could run to the store,” said Adrian. “There’s a corner store three blocks away. If you need something…”
Realizing that he was looking at her, Nova shook her head. “It won’t matter to me, but…” She waved her hand through the air. “Never mind. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take over whenever the rest of you pass out, which I’m betting will be sooner than later.”
“Shows what you know,” said Oscar. He was leaning against the window frame, tapping the end of his cane against the floor. “I’ve got the stamina of a triathlete.”
Nova’s eyebrow lifted.
“He didn’t mean it that way,” muttered Adrian.
“Didn’t I?” said Oscar, with a suggestive glance in his direction.
Adrian snapped his fingers at him. “Eyes on the window.”
Nova glanced from Oscar to Ruby. It was the first time she’d seen them in civilian clothing—he in a checkered-blue dress shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and she in a T-shirt with the SUPER SCOUTS logo scrolled across the chest, a fan-comic from overseas that was immensely popular, but that Nova had never actually read. As Red Assassin, her black-and-white hair was always pulled back high on her head, but tonight it was down in loose pigtails that made her look adorably harmless. What was most striking, though, was the thick white bandage wrapped around her upper arm, disappearing beneath her sleeve. Nova wondered if Ruby had been injured during their fight at the parade, though Nova was sure she hadn’t wounded her.
Adrian, too, was dressed casually, almost exactly as he had been at the parade. Red sneakers. Blue jeans. A dark long-sleeved T-shirt. There was nothing particularly fashionable about the outfit, but it fit him well, hanging in just the right way to suggest toned muscles underneath.
She looked away quickly, annoyed that the thought had occurred to her.
“We brought games,” said Ruby, when the silence tipped toward uncomfortable. She riffled through a backpack and pulled out a deck of cards and a box of dominoes. The tiles inside clacked noisily as she set it down on the blanket. “Anyone?”
When a quiet lack of enthusiasm greeted her, she shrugged and grabbed the deck of cards instead. “Fine. I’ll play solitaire.”
Nova watched her lay out a row of cards. “So. This is the life of a superhero.” She glanced up at Adrian. “No wonder everyone wants to be one of you.”
He met her look with a smile and lowered himself onto the other corner of the blanket. “Everyone wants to be one of us,” he corrected. “And yes. We are living the dream.”
“Okay,” said Oscar, propping one foot up on the windowsill. Without looking back, he lifted his hand in the shape of a pistol and shot an arrow of white smoke in Nova’s direction. It struck her chest and dispersed. “Origin story. Go.”
“Excuse me?” she said, waving away the remnants of odorless smoke that wafted toward the ceiling.
“You know,” he said, glancing back. “When someone decides to write the highly dramatized comic-book version of the story of Insomnia, where will it start?”
“He wants to know where you got your power,” said Ruby, slapping down a new card.
“Was it the result of some personal trauma?” said Oscar. “Or human experimentation or alien abduction?”
“Oscar,” said Adrian, warning, and Oscar turned his attention back to the window.
“Just making small talk,” he said. “We should know more about her than just her ability to turn an ink pen into a receptacle for blow darts.”
“We know she can clean the floor with the likes of Gargoyle,” said Ruby.
“And that she can give sass to Blacklight in the middle of an arena full of screaming fans,” added Adrian. He grinned at Nova, who looked away.
“Fine, I’ll go first,” said Oscar, and though she couldn’t see his face, Nova had the impression that this was where he’d wanted to take the conversation from the start.
“By all means,” she said, leaning back on her palms. “Origin story. Go.”
Oscar inhaled a long breath before proclaiming, quite dramatically, “I died in a fire when I was five years old.”
When he said nothing else, Nova glanced at Adrian to see if there was a joke she’d missed, but Adrian merely nodded.
“So…,” started Nova, “you’re a smoke-controlling zombie?”
She saw Oscar’s grin in the reflection of the window. “That would be awesome. But no. I’m not dead anymore, obviously.”