The chains clanked as she stepped into the cell. Dark. Cold. Devoid of comfort. It felt a little bit like stepping back into the subway tunnels, but this time, there would be no reprieve from the endless gloom.
Her feet crossed the threshold, and a set of bars slid shut behind her with a reverberating thud. She turned and took in the horizontal metal grate, probably iron. Then a second series of bars, these vertical, slammed down over the first. She gulped. Carbon fiber, she guessed, probably an extra precaution for any inmates who could manipulate metal. Then she heard a hum and saw a faint flicker of red light along the edges of the cell. Her eyebrows lifted. Lasers, too?
Sweet rot.
It seemed hilarious, all of a sudden, that Nova had dreamed of breaking into this place. She’d not only dreamed of rescuing Ace from here, she’d actually thought she could succeed. She hadn’t known how, but failure hadn’t seemed like an option.
Now she realized how useless all her plotting had been.
They were never going to rescue Ace.
Just like no one was ever going to rescue her.
As soon as the cell was secured, an internal device on her chains clinked and the cuffs fell from her wrists, landing in a pile at her feet.
The noise of cogs and gears echoed around her and the cell began to rise upward. The guards dropped away below and all she could see beyond the bars was the cell block’s exterior wall. Thick stone and mortar.
Though she knew that there were other cells suspended in the air only a few feet away from her own, it made no difference that they were there, or whether or not they were occupied.
She was alone.
She had only ever felt truly alone one time in her life—in the moments that followed the murders of her parents and Evie. After she put their killer to sleep, she had stood over his unconscious body, gripping the gun still hot from his own hand, ordering herself to kill him. Kill him. Kill him. She had been alone then, and she had known it. No family. No one to take care of her. No one to help her be brave. No one to help her through this.
Until Ace had come and she had remembered—no, she wasn’t alone. She still had family. She still had Uncle Ace, and it was all she had, and she had grasped on to that small piece of comfort as tightly as her trembling little fists could.
Now Nova surveyed her cell. Gray walls, made of what material she couldn’t guess, but something told her it might be chromium. There was a sleeping pad as thick as a pencil in one corner. A washbasin against the wall, and a toilet with a small holding tank in the corner. It was so cramped that her feet would be on the mattress pad as she did her business.
Not knowing what else to do, Nova sat down on the mat and tried to think of all the choices she had made that had brought her here. All the mistakes. The failures.
She had tried to assassinate Captain Chromium. She was an Anarchist and a villain. Not long ago, she would have assumed the punishment would be life imprisonment, but she still recalled what the Captain had said the morning after her attack on headquarters. Soon, the Renegades would be revealing Agent N to the public, and part of their grand presentation would include the “public neutralization of all prodigies who have been heretofore convicted of villainous behavior.” Surely, at this point, that would include her, too.
She knew the Renegades had been testing Agent N on Cragmoor inmates, at their our discretion. No judge or jury had approved the permanent removal of their powers. The Renegades had no need of such antiquated practices—they did what served them best. Who cared what happened to a few criminals, anyway? Who cared if they were treated like nothing but disposable lab rats?
Her emotions were a jumble of anger and resentment that clouded what might otherwise have been sorrow.
Nova realized, in the midst of her self-pitying musings, that the fingers of her right hand had wrapped around her left wrist, gripping so tight that the tips of her left fingers were beginning to tingle from lack of circulation. Swallowing, she lowered her head and released her stranglehold. Her skin carried a ring of white where she’d been holding it, thicker than the faint