The Betrayal of Renegade X (Renegade X, Book 3) (43 page)

The elevator stops. There’s a ding, and then the doors open. I step into the fourth-floor hallway, and Amelia makes a big point of doing the same.

“
Amelia
. Get back on the elevator. I don’t have time for this.” We’re at what looks like the end of the hall, which branches off in different directions. I can hear the sounds of fighting in the distance to the right.

“Who knows how many superheroes there are? You can’t face them alone. You need me.”

I hold up my hands and make electricity wash over them. “Yes, I can. What are you going to do, throw eggnog on them? And anyway, Riley’s around somewhere. Just get back in there and call Mason”—I shove Riley’s phone into her hands—“and tell them to get over here.”

She starts to scroll through Riley’s contacts, actually listening to me for once—or half listening, since she stays put in the hallway—but then we both jump as the stairwell door next to us flies open.

Mason comes tearing out of it. He’s out of breath, like he’s been running a long time. And despite the way his face is red from exertion, he looks kind of green. Like he’s about to be sick. His eyes go wide when he sees us, and he tries to push past me into the elevator.

“Whoa.” I reach out to stop him, and Amelia moves to block the doors. “What happened? Where’s Riley?”

“They were shooting at us! They were
superheroes
, and they were
shooting
at us!”

“That doesn’t answer my question!”

“Slap him,” Amelia says. “That always works in the movies.”

I grab Mason by the collar with one hand and make the other go all electric. “Tell me what the hell happened!”

Mason lets out a whimper and tries to twist out of my grasp.

I hold my electric hand closer to his face.

His words come out all jumbled together, so that it takes me a second to realize what he said. “Ry-got-hurt-and-I-couldn’t-do-anything-and-we’re-running-out-of-time-and-I-can’t-be-here!”

“Wait, he what? And you left him?!”

“They were shooting at us!” There’s a bright flash as Mason suddenly uses his power.

I let go of him, instinctively putting my hands to my face to cover my eyes. I can’t see anything, just bright blobs of color. Amelia cries out at the same time, so I’m guessing she can’t see anything, either.

“Mason, what happened to Riley?
Mason?!
”

“He’s gone,” Amelia says. “He pushed past me to get into the elevator, and then I heard it start moving.”

My blood runs cold, and my stomach flops. I can’t believe this. “We have to go up there.”

“What about Kat and Sarah?”

“They can hold off those superheroes for a little longer.” I hope. But there’s no way Amelia could fight her way to them, and I can’t be in two places at once.

“What about the lasers?”

“We’ll get to them in time.”

“But—”

“Riley’s hurt. I don’t know what happened, but we’re
not
leaving him.”

“Okay.”

I rub my eyes, trying to make the blobs go away. My vision’s getting a little better. “Where are you? Can you hit the button?”

Amelia hesitates. “The elevator’s
really
slow, and Mason’s already on it. He must be going to the lobby, so he can get out of here. That means it would take forever to come back.”

Damn it. “But I can’t...”

“I’m coming over to you. Don’t zap me.”

A whole flight of stairs. And I can hardly see. But Riley’s hurt. The superheroes were
shooting
at them, and now he’s hurt.

Amelia’s hand reaches for me, then grabs my arm. “Come on. He didn’t get me too bad—I can mostly see stuff again.”

“I’m too slow. Slower than waiting for the elevator. I can’t—”

“You have to!” She takes a deep breath. “If I was better at fieldwork, I could go up there by myself, but you’re right—I’m not good at it.”

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

She drags me toward the stairs and opens the door. “But it’s true. I got us caught during our mission, and if I hadn’t, none of this would have happened.”

I laugh. “My Grandpa would have told me about it eventually. He wanted me to join—that’s part of why he made the Truth in the first place.”

We get to the stairs. My vision’s mostly cleared up, though there are still a few spots. I shake off Amelia’s arm and look up. The stairs spiral around with a landing at each corner. I can’t actually see the top, and it has nothing to do with the spots in my eyes. “This is impossible. The elevator will be faster, even if we have to wait.”

“Come
on.
” Amelia grabs my arm again.

I jerk away from her. “The last person who touched me while I was on the stairs got zapped, so hands off.”

She screws up her face and glares at me. “I know I don’t have a cool power, and I can’t, like, shoot people like you can. I’m not good at fieldwork, and I’ll probably never be good enough to join the League like Mom and Dad, but I can do
this
! I can make you go up these stupid stairs, and I don’t care if you zap me!” Her nostrils flare in and out, and she wraps her arms around one of mine and
pulls
.

I go up one step, then another. My heart’s racing, partly because of my fear of heights, but mostly because I know I don’t have time for this. I make the mistake of looking up again, and a spark of electricity runs through me.

Amelia winces, but she doesn’t lose her grip. She continues walking backwards up the stairs, as if it’s no big deal. “Just look down at the step in front of you. Pretend there’s just the one. One step up from the ground isn’t very high. Just keep imagining that each step is the first one.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“You’re not going to fall, okay? I’m
not
letting go, no matter what.”

“So then we’ll both fall.” But we’re halfway to the first landing already, so maybe this is working.

“Neither of us is going to do that. You’re on the ground, remember? Just one step up.”

I grit my teeth. I hate this. My best friend is hurt, and I don’t even know how badly, but Mason looked pretty freaked out, and he said it was bad enough that there was nothing he could do. Which could mean anything. It could mean something very,
very
bad. And I hate that Amelia’s seeing me like this. “You’re wrong, you know,” I tell her. “You have a pretty cool power.”

“Not as cool as flying. Or turning invisible. Or even having lightning.”

“Gee, thanks.” I don’t raise my foot quite high enough, and my toe scuffs against the edge of the next step, throwing me off balance a little. There’s a split second where I
know
I’m going to fall, and it feels like my heart stops, like everything stops, but then Amelia pulls me forward.

The ground is flat, and I realize we’re at the first landing.

“We’re almost there,” Amelia lies. She speeds up as we get to the second set of stairs, dragging me with her.

“You have a cool power, and maybe you did botch our mission, but you also managed to steal the key and get into the back room. So you can’t be as bad at fieldwork as you think.”

“Yeah, right. We both know I’m not that great at it.”

“Okay, but you’ve got potential. And... maybe if I’d been helping you instead of standing around texting, things would have gone differently.” I kind of mumble that part, and I keep my eyes on my feet, and not just because it’s helping me not freak out too much.

“You want to know something?” Amelia says. “I don’t even know if I like fieldwork. And I’m never going to be good enough to join the League. I’ve wanted to forever, but I didn’t really think about what it would mean. And I thought I’d get flying power, and that I’d just be able to do stuff.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“You’re slowing down. Come on.” She picks up the pace, keeping her death grip on my arm and forcing me to keep up.

“I wasn’t a very good partner to you.”

“Or a good brother.”

I guess I deserve that. “I shouldn’t have lied.”

“Second landing,” Amelia says. “One more to go.”

I nod. I don’t want to think about how many stairs that means are below us, or what it would mean to fall right now. “But my grandpa asked me to keep the Truth a secret. I couldn’t betray him.”

Amelia scoffs at that. “And what about having a whole
brother
I didn’t know about?”

“It wasn’t really any of your business.”

“But it hurt when I found out you lied about him. Like you don’t trust me.”

I’m about to say that I don’t, but it seems kind of contradictory, what with me trusting her to lead me up the stairs and all. “Mom had him after she kicked me out. She used some weird growth formula on him, so even though he looks like he’s Alex’s age, he’s actually not even six months old. He’s all villain, and he even looks like her. She didn’t want me, and now she has a replacement. It’s not exactly something I go around telling people.”

“I only spent a couple minutes with him, but he’s really terrible. You’re way better than him, and if your mom doesn’t know that, then she must have something wrong with her.”

“Mom got married. Xavier has both his parents around, and I never thought I cared about stuff like that, but maybe I do. I only ever have one or the other. And now it’s like she has this completely new family, and I’m not part of it. She doesn’t
want
me to be part of it.”

“You have a family she’s not part of, too. A much bigger one, and we would never act like she does. I know I got mad when you left, but you’re still my brother, and I didn’t really mean it when I said I’d never forgive you. It just really hurt when you left. I couldn’t say anything to make you stay, and then you walked out, and—”

Amelia slips as she steps backward onto the third landing, like she lost track and wasn’t expecting the ground to be flat. It throws me off balance, and I lose my footing. A jolt of adrenaline rushes through me, and before I can stop it, a burst of lightning races across my skin.

Amelia cries out in pain, but she doesn’t let go.

I can feel myself falling backward. Then Amelia recovers and pulls me up.

We’re at the top, both of us out of breath and kind of freaked out. Now that we’re safe, she drops my arm and rubs her hand. She checks her phone. “We made good time. You
almost
went up the stairs like a normal person. Faster than if we waited for the stupid elevator, and who knows if it would have even come straight up.”

“You’re not useless, Amelia. You know that?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” She rolls her eyes at me, but her cheeks turn a little pink at the compliment.

T
HE FIFTH FLOOR LOOKS like a war zone. Or at least what we can see of it. There’s a cave-in a little ways down the hall. It looks like a beam from the roof collapsed, along with the wall next to it. There’s debris all over and dust in the air. Whatever happened, the superheroes must be stuck on the other side, because there’s no sign of them, and they didn’t follow Mason down the stairs.

But there’s no sign of Riley, either.

“Oh, my God,” Amelia says, gasping at all the rubble. “Do you think—”

“
No.
Don’t even say it.” He has to be okay. He has to
be here
, and he has to be okay. Because if he was on the other side, with those superheroes, or if he was under the beam when it collapsed...

Something flickers on the floor by the cave-in. There’s a body—no, a person—propped against the wall, trying and failing to stay invisible. “Perkins?!” I rush over to him and kneel down on the floor.

“X?” His voice is faint, and he says it like he doesn’t believe it, like he might just be delirious and imagining anyone else is here. His right leg is pinned under a giant chunk of debris.

“What happened?”

“My leg hurts. I can’t move.” His face is really pale, and it’s obviously taking a lot of effort to talk. “Did you find the machine?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be okay.” Except for the fact that Kat and Sarah are trapped in a fight with some superheroes and haven’t turned the lasers off yet and the Truth is still on its way. But other than that, everything’s just fine.

“The superheroes were shooting at us, and then the ceiling was coming down. Mason pushed me to get past. I fell, and then I was on the ground and my leg hurt. The superheroes couldn’t get through—I think they went to find another way down. But I couldn’t move, and Mason
left
. He just left.”

“I know. We ran into him.” I should have killed him.

“He pushed you?” Amelia says, her eyes wide.

“He panicked.” Riley coughs from all the dust and then winces.

“Not as much as he’s going to panic the next time I see him.” I half expect Riley to argue against that, to try and defend Mason even after what he did, but thankfully he doesn’t.

“What are we going to do?” Amelia gets out her phone and frowns at the time. “The villains will be here any minute.”

“What?” Riley asks. “What about the lasers?”

“Sarah and Kat are trapped in a hotel room,” Amelia says. “They haven’t gotten to the lasers yet.”

I glare at her. “Amelia. Shut up.”

“What? It’s
true
.”

I jerk my head toward Riley, trying to silently communicate to her that he doesn’t need to hear all that.

“They’re what?” Riley sucks in a breath in surprise and ends up coughing again. His eyes water from the pain. “X, you have to get out of here.”

“I’m not abandoning you.” Those superheroes will be back, plus Riley doesn’t look too good. I move to inspect the debris that’s on his leg. There’s a big chunk from the ceiling, but thankfully the beam missed him, and the chunk’s not
too
big.

Okay, it’s kind of really big, and it looks really heavy, and I don’t have super strength.

“Amelia. You’re going to have to use your power to move this thing.”

“
That?
” Amelia gapes at the chunk of rubble. “I can’t call that!”

“Yes, you can.”

She’s shaking her head. “I can only summon up small things. I tried to use my power to call a dining chair into the kitchen the other day, so I could reach the top shelf in the cupboard, but it just shuddered really hard and fell. I can’t—”