CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SHE DIDN’T WANT TO WASTE her time going all the way to the house on Wallowridge, so instead Nova buried her Renegade communicator band beneath a dead potted plant on the stoop of a small café, three blocks from the entrance to the subway tunnels. She was surprised at how easily she’d adapted to wearing it, and as she made her way through the abandoned subway station and down the dark stairs, she found herself continually checking her wrist, only to remember it wasn’t there.
The moment she was close enough to the Anarchists’ underground encampment, she knew things had changed. Clangs and thumps were echoing through the tunnels, and she passed hundreds of displaced bees, their fat bodies crawling aimlessly along the walls.
She found Honey haphazardly throwing anything within reach into her old wooden travel trunk, filling it with dresses, shoes, silk robes, cosmetics, and an assortment of dust-covered liqueur bottles.
“What’s going on?”
Honey yelped and spun to face her. “That is it, Nova. The next time you sneak up on me, I am leaving a wasp in your bed linens.” Huffing, she tucked a curl of hair behind her ear. “And we’re leaving.”
Nova gulped. “Leaving?”
“Leaving. Now, I have a lot of packing to do, so…” She flipped her fingers, shooing her away, but Nova didn’t move.
“How are you going to get that trunk up the stairs? It’ll weigh a hundred pounds by the time you get all this stuff in there.”
Honey cast a pleading look toward the ceiling. “My problem, not yours. Skat!”
Frowning, Nova turned away. She moved faster now, passing Winston’s abandoned platform without so much as a glance. When she arrived at Leroy’s train car, she heard yelling coming from within. She went inside without bothering to knock. Ingrid and Leroy were both filling boxes and tote bags with as much of Leroy’s lab equipment as would fit.
“Honey says we’re leaving?”
They both glanced at her, and Ingrid’s expression, which was already angry, now turned positively enraged. She didn’t respond, just turned her back on Nova, giving her a good glimpse of the bloodied scarf tied around her upper arm, where Nova had shot her.
“We’re leaving,” confirmed Leroy. “Pack up what you truly need, leave the rest.”
Nova shook her head, her heart beginning to thump painfully in her chest. “We can’t leave.”
“We must.”
“What about—”
“The Renegades are coming, Nova.” Leroy looked up from the box he was packing and fixed her with his black, penetrating gaze. “They could very well be on their way at this minute. I trust you know that better than anyone.”
She shook her head. “We can fight. We’ll have the advantage of a familiar field. Maybe … maybe this is our best chance to really strike out at them. We can lure them down here and then—”
“We have already considered this,” said Leroy, with a heavy sigh. “We have plans to slow them down. Diversions that will help us get out safely, before they can follow us. But it will not be enough. There are too many of them. We cannot win. We must leave.”
She stared at him, aghast. He made it sound so simple. They would just leave.
But it wasn’t that simple, and they all knew it.
Leroy’s stern face slipped into something almost sorrowful. “I know,” he whispered. “It won’t be forever.” He pointed his chin toward the door. “Now go, gather your things.”
Clenching her jaw, Nova turned and ran. She did as she was told, because that seemed easiest. She pulled her duffel bag from beneath the bed and took a moment to contemplate what she truly needed.
Nightmare’s hooded jacket and face mask. Her throwing stars and the netting bazooka. A few changes of clothes.
She looked around, but found that she had little attachment to anything else in this abandoned train car. What really mattered to her?
The bracelet her father had made, and the safety of the Anarchists. Her family.
Slinging the duffel bag over one shoulder, she jumped down from the train car. Across the way, her eye landed on an old advertisement hung on the tunnel’s wall. It was promoting a book—a thriller from some bestselling author Nova had never heard of—though the protective plastic over the poster had long ago been tagged with graffiti. The bright splotches of paint continued into the tunnel’s shadows.
She let her bag fall with a loud thud onto the tracks. She stepped up to the poster, dug her fingers around the edges, and yanked.
A narrow, cobwebbed passage disappeared into blackness. The air inside was stale and damp, and that smell brought the memories surging back. The tunnel had seemed bigger then, when she and Honey had run from the cathedral tombs, eventually landing inside the subway tunnels. It was tall enough for even Ingrid to stand up in, but so skinny that the others had been forced to go sideways through parts of it.
Nova knew that Ingrid had set off a bomb on the other end, right beneath the cathedral’s nave, preventing anyone else from finding the tunnel and following them.
This was not an escape.
But …
She had taken a single step inside when she heard an unfamiliar yell.
Her pulse skipped.
Nova pulled her foot out and slammed the poster shut, checking that all signs of the tunnel were disguised, before grabbing the bag again and running toward the screams.
She found the others gathered in front of the tiled mural for Blackmire Station, standing on the platform where Winston had set up his circus tents. Honey was giggling madly, her eyes glazed as she bent over the tracks, watching the tunnel. Leroy was crouched a few feet away, fidgeting with what looked like a hand grenade, while Ingrid and Phobia hovered near the staircase that led back toward the surface. It was an exit none of them ever used, given that the entrance at the top had long ago been enclosed with sheets of steel.