Renegade: The Empowered series prequel story Read online

  “You’re remembering one of her lessons right now, aren’t you?” Gus asked, face so eager.

  Tanya smirked at me.

  My face was red. I felt like a dork. “Don’t we have a job to do?”

  “Glad you remembered,” Tanya said, still smirking. Gus looked disappointed.

  The job turned out to be shoplifting at a pharmacy. Petty crime was not what I’d signed up for, but I had said I wanted to help, and not just make vegetables grow better.

  Dengel’s Pharmacy had been remodeled after the Earthquake last year, you could tell because it had that sticker on the window that said “HC approved quake rebuild.” The HC had helped set up a fund in Portland to repair damaged buildings, and this one had been in an old brick place. The church next to my high school had totally crumbled. The high school had been damaged, but the HC’s “Safe school buildings for kids initiative” or whatever it was called had put in seismic supports.

  Dengel’s had a big glass window and big glass double doors. There was a new-looking stone planter outside with a tree growing out of it.

  Tanya stopped us while we stood across the street and gave us our marching orders.

  “So, here’s the deal. We need aspirin, vitamins, bandages.” She rattled off a few more things. Scissors. Gauze. Iodine.

  “Geeze, I’ll need a shopping cart for all that stuff,” I complained.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said, looking annoyed. “Besides, you only have to put the stuff in a basket. Gus will be the pickup.”

  So he could take inanimate things and make them invisible. That would be the perfect power for stealing.

  “Sounds boring,” I said, trying to act like I didn’t care, when I was worried inside.

  “Boring is good. Besides, that’s the simple part. The other part is that I’ll be scoping out behind the counter for drugs we need, medicines and stuff, and Gus will lift those first. You’ll wait outside until I come out. That will let you know that Gus did his thing, and then you can pick up your items.”

  I hung out across the street, next to a newspaper box and a phone booth, and tried not to listen to some guy beg someone on the phone, a woman probably, to take him back. The newspaper’s headline was something about the latest trouble in the Russian Reclamation Zone. “Insurrection Continues,” it said. I had my own troubles. Like committing my first crime.

  Gus disappeared before he went inside. Tanya opened the door, held it for a moment—guess the door opening by itself would be a giveaway – and then went in herself. I waited, tried to ignore the dude on the phone’s begging.

  It seemed like forever. I shifted my feet. A car went by with the windows rolled down and a guy gave me the once over, driving slow. I glared at him. He just laughed, which made me madder.

  Then the door opened at Dengel’s and Tanya came out. She nodded at me.

  I crossed the street, my heart pounding in my ears. Look calm, I told myself, but it felt like I screamed shoplifter by the way I walked. I tried to relax.

  The door grew closer. I took a deep breath, pushed it open and stepped inside.

  The counter was at the far end of the room. Mostly old people were standing in aisles, looking at medicines and stuff. They all ignored me. The woman at the checkout counter didn’t even look at me. I took another breath to slow down my racing heart.

  I picked up a basket and went to the aisle that said “pain relievers,” and began putting bottles of aspirin into it. When I had a dozen big bottles, I went and got bandages and rolls, and iodine. The basket was stuffed with stuff. I tried to keep it out of sight from the clerk, but my arms were getting tired. Okay, that had to be enough.

  So I went to the door. An old woman tottered in front of me. I put the basket down to help her on the end cap closest to the door, out of sight of the clerk, and then held open the door for her.

  She mumbled a thank you. I glanced back at the clerk. She looked at me, and then went back to something behind the counter. I stepped outside.

  My heart pounded like a jackhammer again. Sweat dribbled down my sides.

  I heard a shout inside, and the sound of something falling.

  The door opened but there was no one there. I heard footsteps pounding on the sidewalk.

  “Run,” I heard Gus say from thin air.

  Tanya still slouched by a telephone poll across the street. Like an idiot, I charged across traffic. A truck honked. I spun out of the way of a car.

  “Dumbass!” someone yelled. A cop car cruised up to the pharmacy. A police officer got out, looked in my direction.

  “Stupid,” I heard Tanya say.

  I whirled around. My eyes were wide.

  “You are just making it more obvious you’re up to no good,” she said. How could she be so calm?

  I wiped my mouth. Another police car arrived.

  “We gotta go!” I hissed.

  “No kidding,” she replied, and winked.

  We walked to the nearest side street, ducked down it. Houses lined the street.

  I looked over my shoulder. The police cruiser had turned around and driven across traffic to follow us.

  “Shit!” I started running. “Come on!” I yelled at Tanya.

  “Damn it,” I heard her mutter. She ran after me.

  I ran between two houses.

  “You are going to get us caught!” she yelled.

  The side yard wasn’t fenced. There was a field behind the houses filled with weeds. I didn’t think, I just ran, ran as hard as I could until I reached the field and the weeds. A stalk of Queen Anne’s lace brushed against my leg, and I shivered. The weed burbled in my mind. Suddenly my power opened up to me like a flower, and I could feel the field singing, a little wordless tune that lifted my heart. I reached out, and sent my power into the plants. Grow. Grow, I told them. Roots. I felt the roots beneath the soil. More seeds.

  “Stop right there!” A man’s voice boomed from a loudspeaker.

  A police cruiser was parked on the street, and the big cop stood with the door open, a mic next to his mouth. Another cop car pulled up beside his. And then another.

  I only half noticed. Tanya stood panting beside me. It was like I had a fever, the world seemed to blur. Blur until I only noticed the plants, the weeds. Police were running toward us. Tanya backed up. The weeds were tall around me, coming up to my shoulder. I slipped between them, careful not to trample any. They sang such joy in my head, it was like listening to your favorite album with the music turned all the way up.

  Tanya swore behind me.

  There was an old fence at the far end of the weedy field, poking up from a blackberry thicket.

  Blackberry brambles blocked our way. I didn’t even think, didn’t hesitate.

  I reached with my power into the blackberry patch, urged the vines to grow. My heart pounded, and my muscles felt like I’d been lifting weights non-stop all day, they were screaming. But the vines moved. Moved! There was a place where the old split rail fence was now clear of vines. I scrambled over it. I heard a cop swear behind me.

  I urged the vines to snap back into place, and grow. The world was like a cartoon now, compared to the vines. They uncoiled, and spread, spread until a huge tangle had grown up behind me.

  “We have an Empowered!” I heard the cop yell to another cop.

  “Shit!” Tanya exploded. “They’re on to you now.”

  But they wouldn’t be chasing us this way. The blackberry patch blocked their way.

  I couldn’t help myself. I was grinning like a happy fool as we slipped between houses, down a tree-lined street, and back to Hideaway.

  Tanya wasn’t so happy. She chewed me out when we had gotten back to Hideaway. But I had helped us escape. Still, she was mad enough she went to talk to the Professor, and he sat me down and explained why I needed to be discrete, and walked me through the importance of hiding, and being cagey. Then he said I’d done good to get away.

  I didn’t rub it in with Tanya, even if she’d been the one who na
med me Vine, and kept calling me that, even though I hated it. She shouldn’t have complained when I finally did like my name, and made vines.

  It was two weeks before Tanya asked me to help out again on a job. It was for lifting seeds from a garden and nursery place. Easy. They didn’t really need me, but she had me listening to the plants there, and watching things, for her, a phone in my pocket, while Gus went and shoplifted seeds. Big deal.

  But they all thought it was a big deal. Sissy, Toby, and some of their oldster friends all cheered me. They’d been helping ever since I joined them with the hydroponics and the garden. Said it was easier and more fun with me around.

  Seemed dumb, but I hummed when I worked now. I had caught myself once and stopped, but Sissy said, why stop? So from then on I hummed when I worked.

  Gus liked to draw. He drew things on cardboard signs, and left them all over Hideaway. He had this whole symbol system worked out. He would draw a seeing-eye pyramid: that meant, he was nearby. Or he’d draw blind justice, meaning he wasn’t. A plate meant he was eating. The funny thing was, no one bugged him about the signs. It was just a Gus thing. I asked him why, and he said people understood there’s different ways to talk. This was one of his ways.

  That made me think. That could come in handy, like out in the world. When I told Gus this, I figured he’d say, duh. But he didn’t. Instead, he said he was just playing around.

  I think Hideaway was the only place Gus felt free.

  Chapter 7

  The next job was about money.

  The Professor said he wanted to make us self-sufficient, but for now, we needed it. No surprise. What did surprise me was where we were stealing it from. I figured it would be someplace dangerous, like a bank, or a store, or an armored car.

  But it wasn’t.

  The Professor came to Tanya, Gus and me, and said we had something important to do.

  “Money, isn’t it?” Tanya asked.

  He nodded. How had she known? My face must have shown my surprise, because the Professor smiled at me. “Tanya keeps the books.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  She laughed at me. “I’m not just a pretty face.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her. “Who said you were pretty?”

  She winced a little, and I regretted giving her a hard time. But the words were already out of my mouth.

  I squeezed her shoulder. “You have a beautiful face.”

  She looked at me like she thought I was full of shit, but I held her gaze, nodded. She was beautiful—even with those goofy, knobby braids of hers. She was more curvy then me, I was just bigger. Heck, I was one of the tallest people here and I was only sixteen.

  “As I was saying, money.” The Professor deadpanned.

  “You didn’t say money, Tanya did,” I pointed out.

  “But I did change the subject back.”

  Gus watched the whole thing from where he was perched on the counter in the corner of the lab. His eyes were big. Was there envy there? I had no clue. He looked, well, something. But what that something was I didn’t know for sure.

  “So, where is the money?” I asked.

  “Private home.”

  That stopped me cold. “Why are we ripping off random people now? Why not a bank?”

  “For one thing, a bank is way more fortified and well defended.”

  “But this is still wrong. We shouldn’t be stealing from ordinary people.” A bank seemed different. It was a business. That was how it seemed to me then.

  I stared at Tanya for help.

  She shrugged. “Come on,” I pleaded with her. “You know that’s wrong.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me, then laughed.

  I blinked.

  “Of course,” she said. “The Professor’s not going to have us steal from some random family.”

  He nodded.

  So this had been, what? “Some kind of test?” I blurted out.

  They looked at each other, and something flashed between them. Understanding, I don’t know. They weren’t a thing—he was old enough to be either of our fathers, and I wasn’t even sure Tanya liked boys, but they’d been together longer here, and that meant something. Me, I was still the outsider half the time.

  Like this time.

  “No, we would not steal from just anyone,” the Professor said. “We are taking money back from someone who stole it from a friend, from one of us.”

  Now I really didn’t understand what was going on.

  “Toby,” Tanya said. “We are stealing it from his sister, who stole it from him.

  “You’ve totally lost me,” I said.

  “Toby and his sister split Ronald Armitage’s estate. Toby got the properties. His sister received the investments. Toby was supposed to have the cash assets, but she had him declared not mentally competent.”

  I blinked again. “So, I like Toby and all,” I said, which was true—he was playful and fun, and seemed like a loyal guy. “But he’s not all there.”

  The Professor sighed. “Toby suffers from depression, and several other issues I can’t discuss. But he’s bright, and loyal, and cares about others. His father told him about this place.” He looked around at the room. “About Hideaway, and Toby felt this could be the start of something. It was his idea—Hideaway. I just helped it become a reality.”

  “His sister doesn’t know about it?” I asked.

  The Professor shook his head. “She’d probably have it condemned if she did.”

  “Okay, so this sister has money that she stole from Toby? And we are supposed to steal it back?” I shook my head. “Why isn’t it in the bank?”

  He smiled. “Because Toby’s sister doesn’t trust the banks.”

  “Then it’s in a safe at her house, right?”

  “We think it’s in her freezer.”

  “Her freezer?” I stood, flicked back my hair from my face. “Why would someone put money in a freezer?”

  “To hide it, dummy,” Tanya interrupted.

  “I saw her take money out of her freezer.”

  Saw her—“Peeping?”

  “Duh,” Tanya said. “It’s better than a video camera, as long as you can set up a chain of people. Lucky for me, the lady has a staff.”

  Great, a staff. “So, we got security to deal with?”

  The Professor looked disappointed. “What?” I asked him.

  “Aren’t you even going to ask what sort of money she has?”

  “You mean, like twenties, or hundreds?”

  He sighed. “No, like gold coins. Silver coins. But mostly gold coins.”

  “Gold coins?” I’d never seen a gold coin. They’d been used for a while in the 1970s. But President Brown had taken us back off using gold about 1990, and a lot of it ended up being melted.

  “Still used by the black market,” Tanya said.

  I rubbed my neck. “Silver, now that I get, cause silver is a crook’s best friend.” That’s what Ruth used to say. Silver was used a lot in the “gray” as well as black markets. “So, Toby’s crazy sister has squirreled away her money in her freezer?”

  “That’s right,” the Professor said.

  He walked us through the plan. Gus was to do the actual theft, of course, with Tanya on lookout. Me, I’d provide a distraction.

  “Distraction?” I asked.

  The Professor got really serious looking, and stared at me sympathetically, long enough that I started to feel real uncomfortable.

  “You’ll have to kill a tree,” he said at last.

  A tree.

  “I don’t know how.”

  He gave me another long, searching look. “It’s just the opposite of what you do to grow weeds.”

  “But a tree isn’t a weed.”

  “It’s another plant. You need to starve it, spread rot. You’ll have time to learn.”

  Time.

  He ended up being right. More than I ever realized.

  The Professor took me to the plant room, and helped me practice my power on small
plants first, herbs, lettuce, then a potato plant. When I killed each I got sick to my stomach. He walked me through breathing and calming my stomach. How to clear my mind and focus on how my power felt. He said he just saw things before everyone else, but really, he saw things the rest of us never did. That was his genius and his power.

  There was that one other Empowered at Hideaway besides me, Gus, Tanya, Sissy, and the Professor. The one I hadn’t met yet. The Lolit. I heard Toby and the Professor talking about her before the big job. I had wondered if Toby really didn't care about his sister stealing his money. Turns out he did care, but only because it was risky for us.

  "Lolit is good to disconnect the house before Tanya's group undertakes their mission," the Professor was saying when I came into his office. They nodded at me, but kept talking. “Grown up speak” for “not yet.” I could read the signs. So I went and spun the globe across the room. Of course I listened. Mission made it sound like an army thing. I listened for any more talk about the Lolit.

  “The Lolit’s not doing well," Toby said. "I don't want her to risk it."

  Now I was even more curious about who Lolit was. Some on the Hero Council, like the twins Halo and Hazard, and the old guy giant, Titan, went by nicknames. I thought Empowered names were dumb. Why not just be yourself?

  But I let Tanya call me Vine. I had asked her like five times what her Empowered name was, and she wouldn’t tell me. I asked Gus once and he said it was up to her to tell me. That seemed unfair of her. But now I wasn’t even arguing with her about that any more.

  But Lolit, that sounded like an Empowered who could-I don't know-go all smooth or something. What would that look like?

  "She will do short sprints around the property."

  "I don't even know why she has to," Toby said. He looked like a basset hound, eyes big and droopy, so sad. He was worried. I'd never seen him worried before. It made me want to protect him, which was crazy, since he was old enough to be my grandpa, but so what? He just seemed so, vulnerable.

  He was so worried.