Renegades (Hotbloods #3)

I was just glad I couldn’t see the rest of the trainees watching us. I didn’t need the distraction of their hostile faces, waiting for me to fail.

A circle of enemy soldiers came at us, hemming us in. Navan zigzagged between them, focusing on protecting me from their weapons, but one broke through his defenses and hurtled toward me. I dropped to the ground, managing to duck under the soldier hologram’s sword stroke and trip it over its own feet. It reached out for my arm as it fell, but I managed to dodge it. Before I could go another round with the hologram, Navan swooped in behind me, gripping my arm and pulling me away. I opened my mouth to tell him it was okay, that I had this hologram under control, then watched in horror as a soldier emerged from behind him and plunged a knife into his back. A look of shock rippled across Navan’s face as his vest lit up red.

In a flicker, the enemy and the knife vanished, the scenery shifting back to black screens, the rubble and texture disappearing beneath my boots. The sky faded away to a plain white ceiling. At the far side of the training room, my teammates were watching through the glass of the observation chamber. They couldn’t have looked more unimpressed if they tried.

Navan had fallen, while the puny Kryptonian was the last one left standing—though they’d all seen she didn’t deserve to be.

I sighed. The simulation was over.





Chapter Two





“Why did you do that?” I asked Navan as I hurried across the black landscape, picking up all the knives I had dropped and using the gloves to quicken the job.

He raised a brow. “Do what?”

“Why did you sacrifice yourself for me?” I replied, feeling disgruntled that he had forfeited his own success to save me from a situation that I had under control. I slotted the last of the throwing knives back into my bandolier, and we headed over to the far side of the room, where an exit sign glowed above the doorway.

“You needed help,” he said.

“I didn’t need help. I shoved the soldier out of the way. You thought I was falling, but I wasn’t—I was fine,” I insisted, trying to rein in my emotions. I was sore from days of training, and irritable from lack of sleep. I wouldn’t be nearly as bothered by this if I didn’t feel like a broken husk of myself.

“What did you plan to do with him on the ground?” Navan asked.

“I’m not sure, but I’d have thought of something.”

“And by the time you’d thought of something, you’d have been dead,” Navan said pointedly. “Look, Riley, you already have the makings of an incredible soldier, but you’re starting at a disadvantage compared to the rest of us. Most of us have been practicing Aksavdo and training with weapons since we were kids. I know I need to leave you to your own devices a bit more, but I can’t help stepping in when I see you in trouble.”

“And I think you need to stop doing that,” I said, the disapproving faces of the other trainees flashing through my mind. “The others already think I’m weak and stupid, and you saving me all the time is making it worse. I appreciate you looking out for me, but you need to let me mess up. Let me figure out where I’m going wrong, so I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

Navan sighed. “I just don’t want you getting hurt.”

“It’s a simulation, dude. How much harm can it do? Plus, I’m already in pieces after the assault course and training grounds. There’s nothing these simulations can do to me that I haven’t already suffered through. And what are you going to do if we find ourselves on an actual battlefield, where there are real risks and real lives at stake? You can’t be running around playing the hero and watching my back all the time. That is likely to get people killed.”

“The goal is to make sure you never see a real battle, remember?” Navan said.

Before I could respond, the throng of trainees descended from the stairwell that led up to the observation chamber, the hum of their chatter echoing through the hallway beyond as they streamed out toward the armory. Navan pushed open the door to the training room, leading me into the corridor, and we followed.

A few of our teammates looked back at us with cold stares—well, at me. Navan wasn’t doing himself any favors by fraternizing with the puny Kryptonian, but they didn’t seem to have the balls to snub him directly. It was just me they had no problem ostracizing.

When we reached the armory, I wandered over to my locker and waved my bracelet over the lock. We had each been given a bracelet when we’d started our training; it contained our food tokens and let us into otherwise restricted areas. The bracelets also ensured we were assigned to the correct weapons, and they recorded our daily training performance, which could be viewed if we flashed our bracelets in front of the performance log. The bracelets themselves were made of a strange metal that almost looked like hematite, with a small ruby in the center. It was this small jewel that seemed to hold all of our personal data.

The locker sprung open, revealing the drawers where my knives and other items belonged. Slipping awkwardly out of my military attire, I pulled on the white t-shirt and navy-blue trousers I had left in my locker and instantly felt more comfortable.

“I’m serious about what I said before. You can’t fight in a real battle,” Navan said, once the rest of the coldblood trainees had left, their laughter ringing down the hallways.

I sat down on a nearby bench and leaned my head back against the wall. I was hot and sweaty, and my stomach was grumbling. “Yeah, I know that. I don’t exactly want to fight in a real battle either. But what if things don’t go according to plan? I want to be prepared, in case I don’t have a choice. If Queen Gianne’s soldiers ambush us, or Queen Brisha orders it, I might have—”

He shook his head. “Nope. Not while I have breath in my lungs. A real battle is nothing like these simulations. You would be dead in an instant, Riley. Your knives are exceptional, but they won’t protect you in a true battle.” He sat down next to me. “Plus, the training will never prepare you for the psychological damage that taking the life of another person causes. Nothing can prepare you for that.”

I glanced at him, surprised by the emotion in his voice. His expression was hard to read—he was good at hiding his suffering from me—but I sensed a well of pain flowing behind his gray eyes. He had described some of that pain to me before, but in that moment, I felt I had only scratched the surface. To be honest, it seemed he could distance his mind without a problem once his temper took hold. He had killed Jethro easily enough, and he’d spoken openly about how it had felt to murder his best friend… but the flicker of regret in his voice told me that killing had been hard for him once. Was there someone else he had killed, earlier in his life, whose death had caused him untold damage?