“Obviously,” agreed Nova.
“As the story goes,” he said, “my mom was down in the basement of our apartment building doing laundry when one of our neighbors fell asleep and her cat knocked over a candle she’d left burning. The whole place went up in flames in—I don’t know—minutes. I was in my bedroom and I heard people screaming, and then I saw the smoke, but I was petrified, and besides, I’m not exactly fast, right?” He shook his cane. “So by the time I got the courage to try to get out of the apartment, the fire was coming up the stairs and I didn’t know what to do. So I just froze in the hallway, watching the smoke until it was so thick I could hardly see, and couldn’t breathe. I passed out, and that’s how the Renegades found me.”
“The Renegades?” said Nova.
“Who else? Tsunami, to be specific. She’s the one who put out the fire, then she handed me off to Thunderbird who flew me over to the hospital, but they didn’t have much hope I’d make it. I didn’t have a pulse by that point. But while they were all mourning the death of this kid, I was having a dream.” His voice darkened, taking on an air of importance. “I dreamed that I was standing on top of our apartment building and I was breathing in—this long, long breath that went on and on. It was such a deep breath that it pulled all the smoke right out of the air and into my lungs. Finally, I stopped breathing in, looked up at the sky, and exhaled. And that’s when I woke up.”
“In the hospital?” said Nova. “Or the morgue?”
“The hospital. It had only been about ten minutes since they’d brought me there—plenty of time to declare me legally dead, but still. My mom was there, too, and she saw me exhale, and this big cloud of smoke came out of my mouth.” Oscar puckered his lips and blew. A gray cloud burst across the surface of the window. “And here we are.”
Nova cocked her head. “So … your power. It doesn’t have anything to do with…” She gestured at the cane, and though Oscar wasn’t looking at her, he tapped the cane against the floor a few times in acknowledgment.
“Nope,” he said. “This I was born with. I mean, not the cane. But my bones don’t grow like a normal person’s. Some rare bone disease.” He grinned back at Nova. “Probably the best thing that ever happened to me, though, right? Just think—if I’d been faster, I might have gotten out of that apartment building just fine, and I’d be stuck with all the other spry, non-prodigy suckers out there.”
“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?”