Nova shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I wanted to.”
“What happened when you were six?” asked Adrian.
She met his gaze, and the memory was right there. The dark closet. Evie’s crying. The man’s remorseless stare.
“I had a dream,” she said. “I dreamed there were these tiny little squiggly dinosaurs that kept trying to bite my toes and when I woke up, I thought, that’s it. Never again.”
Oscar and Ruby laughed, but Adrian’s gaze only softened. “What a nightmare.”
She shivered.
“Your parents must be saints,” said Oscar, pulling her attention toward him. “To put up with a kid that never slept? I hope you were good at entertaining yourself.”
His words struck her in the chest. She flinched, and Oscar blanched, his eyes widening in horror. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”
The unexpected apology caught Nova off guard, and the sting of his words was quickly replaced with suspicion. Did they know? How did they know?
“Your papers mentioned, um…” Oscar rubbed the back of his neck.
Adrian cleared his throat. “You live with your uncle now, right?”
Nova’s gut clenched again, even though she knew Adrian’s question had been well intentioned. An attempt to draw all their thoughts away from the single explanatory line they must have read when they reviewed her fake papers. Both parents were killed by an unknown villain gang during the Age of Anarchy. Currently resides with Peter McLain, paternal uncle.
“Uh, yeah,” she stammered. “He took me in after…” She swallowed. “They died a long time ago.”
“How old were you?” Ruby asked, her voice soft, though her attempts to be calming only made Nova’s hackles rise.
She fixed her gaze on Ruby. “Six.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Adrian tilt his head curiously.
Six when her parents died. Six when she stopped sleeping.
How had this edged so treacherously close to the truth?
Without looking at him, Nova pulled herself to her feet. “I’m going to go scout out the roof. We might have a better view of the alley from up there.”
Ruby and Oscar traded looks and she could tell they wanted to stop her. Or maybe apologize, though the words didn’t come, and Nova was glad for it.
She didn’t want an apology, or pity, or sympathy, or even kindness. She didn’t need those things from anyone, least of all a bunch of Renegades.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
NOVA STAYED ON THE ROOF for more than an hour, longer than she’d meant to, but when she realized she was expecting one of the Renegades—no, expecting Adrian—to come check on her, it sparked a sense of stubbornness that refused to ebb long after she knew she should have gone back down to their makeshift surveillance room.
She wasn’t waiting for him. Why would she?
Even as she stood on the roof, watching the silent stone facade of the library, the stillness of its black windows, the occasional car that breezed past on the street, she could feel the words heavy on her tongue, waiting for their chance to come out.
Why did you stop sleeping? he would ask.
And against every ounce of logic inside her, she would answer.
I fell asleep—the very last time I ever slept. And when I woke up, there was a man with a gun. He killed them both. He killed my sister. He tried to kill me. And the Renegades didn’t come …
After that, every time I tried to sleep I would hear it happening all over again, until, eventually, I stopped trying.
That was her origin story. The whole of it.
And it was none of Adrian’s business, or anyone else’s for that matter.
She couldn’t understand why talking about it had made her so defensive or given her such a strong compulsion to tell them the truth of her power and where it had come from. She’d never told anyone, not in so many words, though she thought Ace understood the gist of it, and of course all the Anarchists had figured out that she wasn’t one for sleeping not long after she’d moved into the cathedral. But she’d never had any cause to actually tell someone the story. She’d never really wanted to.
Why would she now?
Instead, she paced. Back and forth across the rooftop, enjoying the fresh air on her skin. Though she’d worn leggings and a simple T-shirt, civilian clothing, as instructed, she’d opted to wear the uniform boots she’d picked up at headquarters earlier that day. She figured she might as well use this reconnaissance mission to start breaking them in, though now she could tell it wasn’t necessary. They were, in fact, ridiculously comfortable, and a part of her hated the Renegades for winning even at this.
Finally, when she felt sure that any compulsion to give out unnecessary information was gone, Nova made her way back down to the fourth floor.
Ruby and Oscar had fallen asleep. Oscar had not moved from his spot on the pillows, and Ruby was now lying with her head beside his, but her body perpendicular, so they made a kind of right angle on the floor with nothing but their heads nearly touching. It seemed almost as though Ruby had gone out of her way to place herself in a position that wouldn’t suggest anything beyond the fact that she was tired and Oscar was hogging the pillows.
Though she could have moved her pillow to the other side of the blanket. If she’d wanted to.
Stepping over Ruby’s legs, Nova approached Adrian. He had pulled the desk in front of the window and now sat with his feet dangling over the side, with a sketchpad on his lap. He was drawing the library with quick, hasty lines, focusing mostly on the dark shadows that spilled from the alley.
Nova climbed up onto the desk and sat beside him, her toes tapping against the glass.
“You all right?” Adrian asked, without looking up.
“Fine,” said Nova. “The view from the roof looks pretty much the same as the view from here.”
“I know. I scouted it out yesterday morning.”