Renegade

            “What?!”

            I took an instinctive step back, eyeing the pistol still lying on the long table, preparing to run. Lee rolled her eyes. “Well obviously I’m not going to, calm down.”

            “When was this?” I sputtered, not calm.

            “Back when you got the Text. It wasn’t meant for you, and you were Reading without being approved or branded. If Rebecka hadn’t intervened, yeah, we were sent to take you out and retrieve the Text. Obviously it didn’t work out that way.”

            “Yet!” I shouted, horrified. “Wait- Beck convinced you not to kill me?”

            Lee nodded. “She said you’d want nothing to do with Conclave, you were lazy and wouldn’t commit to anything anyway. She begged us to just take your Text and leave you alone. You’d have been stuck with the brand, and we’d have a useless Text until you died somehow, but you wouldn’t cause any trouble and nobody would have to risk getting hurt.”

            I sat down in one of the chairs heavily, reeling. “Wow.”

            “She really does care about you, you know. I know breakups are hard, but she probably saved your life. And… I’m glad I didn’t have to kill you.”

            “So am I!”

            “You know what I mean,” she said, taking her gun and replacing it in her holster, “We’re kind of friends, now. I wouldn’t have known you. And it’s nice to know a Conclave person who’s not a complete zombie.”

            For a few minutes, we didn’t talk. “So what are we going to do about this…girl?” I asked, after a while.

            “Maybe we can get the item back without hurting her. It’s probably a Text, or Conclave wouldn’t be involved. If she hasn’t learned many Glyphs, if she hasn’t branded herself yet, if we can get her to surrender peacefully… if, if, if.” She sighed wearily. “Any of those go the other way… we’re looking at a fight.”

            “I don’t know the first thing about fighting. Especially someone like you,” I admitted. The prospect was frankly terrifying.

            “She won’t be like me,” Lee snorted, sounding almost offended. “She’ll be more like you. Untrained, uncontrolled. In a way, almost more dangerous than someone who knows what they’re doing.” She stood up, shook herself a little, and walked towards the door, indicating I should come too.

            “I don’t understand how that could be,” I said, following her into the hallway.

            “Have you ever played a fighting video game?”

            “Uh… yes?” I responded, taken aback by the odd question.

            “Have you ever played against someone who doesn’t know how the game works? They just slam buttons, trying random things at random times because they don’t know what does what. They might find one great move and repeat it over and over, or they might just hold a block the entire time, or any other random thing, but inexplicably you find that they beat you. More than they should, anyway.”

            “You know,” I said, reflecting on some rounds of Soul Calibur with a past girlfriend, “That’s actually true. It’s really f*****g frustrating, too.”

            “It’s because they don’t approach the fight like a fight. There’s no pattern, no tactics, and you can’t defend against it or deal with it because you’re used to people using some coherent form of moves, some strategy.” We approached the reception room, where Daphne the receptionist was sitting and doing something on her cell phone.

            “Daphne,” Lee said, to no avail. “Daphne!”

            “Jesus, what?” the receptionist squealed, putting down her phone and huffing in annoyance.

            “The boss said you have a file for me.”

            “Yeah it’s right here,” she said, deeply annoyed, “You don’t have to scream for every little thing. I mean I’m not judging you, or anything, but it’s really kind of bitchy.”

            “I’ll take that into consideration,” Lee hissed, accepting a manila folder and turning on her heel. I went to follow her, but Daphne caught my sleeve.

            “What’s up?”

            “Nothing much. You’re looking good, by the way.” She appraised my black Conclave outfit and nodded. “Much better.”

            “Yeah, I’ve lost weight. Gotta go,” I said, and left, chuckling.

            Lee was already through the light door and waiting in the Nexus hallway. “Get her number?”

            “I think I’ve got a bead on her IQ, if that’s what you mean. Where to?”

            Lee flipped open the folder, which was marked CONFIDENTIAL, and scanned the contents briefly. “Interesting,” she muttered.

            “What’s interesting?”

            “Look,” she said, and handed me the folder. Inside was a photo of a twenty-something girl, rather pretty, with dark hair and dark brown eyes, attractively plump. I assumed that after a few days with the Text, she’d be unrecognizable.

Oddly, I felt like I’d seen her somewhere before. She had one of those faces.

Several pages of police reports and notes from Conclave investigators filled the folder, missing items taken from locked stores, vanishing trespassers, a parking meter seemingly melted, and I looked for a few minutes before I saw what had surprised Lee.

            “She lives close to us!”

            “Yeah,” Lee muttered, “Two towns over. At least, that’s where she’s spending her time.”

            “What are the odds?”

            We walked towards the Nexus Mall in silence. As we stood in line for a light door, Lee shook her head. “You and I, and Beck, are the only Conclave members from this state. We’re spread very thin. For another Text to wind up in the wrong person’s hands, this close to the three of us… it’s very strange.”

            “Conspiracy?” I rolled my eyes.

            “I don’t know. Normals can’t just pop up to the Moon and raid our supply room. But why would anyone from Conclave give a Text to some random chick and turn her loose?”

            “And who was supposed to have the Text she’s playing with, if not her?”

            Lee grunted in reply as we reached the light door. “So. Feel like having a chat with a potentially dangerous young lady?”

            “I have been, for the last ten minutes,” I said, grinning. She smirked at me, pressed a couple of buttons, and we stepped into the violet light together.

*

            We stepped out through the wall of a supply warehouse, probably the storage room of a department store. Based on the smell, I assumed there were shoes.

            “Where are we?”

            “Supply room of Macy’s,” Lee whispered, peering around in the half-lit area. “It’s the middle of the day, and our girl’s been spotted at this mall several times. It’s as good a place to start as any. Let’s go.”

            We quietly made our way to an exit, emerging into a side hallway. Lee paused, looked at me, and removed one of her several necklaces. “Put this on,” she said, looking up and down the hallway. “It’s got a mild Glamour on it. As long as you’re wearing it, nobody who sees you will remember anything specific about you except for the necklace.”

            “That explains why we’re still in pajamas,” I chuckled, dropping the pendant over my head. “So how come I can still remember you, if you’ve had this on all this time?”

            “You’re branded,” she said, consulting a map of the mall. “Part of the spell on you protects your mind from supernatural interference.”

            “So if our girl isn’t branded yet, she won’t see us coming.”

            “Right.”

            “And if she is?”

            Lee shrugged. “Then she’ll notice a couple skinny kids in black, she’ll see my gun, and our Texts, and she’ll probably figure out who we are. At least the important bits.”

            “Super.”

            “We just have to hope she’s cool,” she said, sounding pessimistic. We opened another double door and stepped into the mall proper, watching crowds move around from store to store. A mass of humanity carpeted the temple-like complex.

            “Jeez, there’s a lot of people here today.”

            “Yep.” Lee squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Let’s start looking.”

*

            Twenty minutes later, I was eating a soft pretzel and feeling discouraged.

            “It’s not as though she’s supposed to be here,” I pointed out to Lee, who was standing by the second-floor railing and watching herds of shoppers drift by below. “You know? She could be anywhere.”

            “Yeah, but she could be here,” Lee snapped, not looking away from the crowd.

            “And she won’t look anything like her photo, that girl was chunky.”

            “Same hair, same eyes. She’ll probably have a Text. She may be branded. Would you shut up and look?”

            I finished my snack and slouched over to join Lee, leaning on the rail. “This is going nowhere,” I whined, impatient. I wanted to be picking out gadgets and trinkets like Lee’s, or learning how to use new Glyphs, or getting another lunch. I was bored.

            “Well, this is Conclave work, so get used to it, buddy. You know how long I had to stand around and look at s**t, before I got anywhere with those child molesters?”

            “Yeah, but- wait! Look at that!” I pointed to the front of an Abercrombie and Fitch, where a minor altercation was taking place. Lee turned to follow my gaze.

            A rail-thin, scandalously dressed, dark-haired young woman was being accosted by a security guard outside the designer clothing store, who appeared to think she had shoplifted something. As we watched, he groped for her bag, clearly trying to apprehend the goods without touching this lovely young criminal and risking a sexual harassment lawsuit.

            While he was grabbing carefully at the bag, she lifted a gleaming right hand and glanced at a slip of paper she was holding-

            -and with the mildest of silvery light shows, the guard released her, looking confused. He stared around for a moment, then looked at the girl and started talking. I whipped out my Text and whispered a short phrase, the Glyph to enhance my hearing.

            “-feel like I just forgot what I was doing,” the guard was saying. Did you… okay, I know this is a weird question, but did you see how I got here?”

            “Silly man, you probably just got distracted by some pretty girl,” the renegade Reader said, flirting shamelessly. “Feeling okay?”

            “A little dizzy,” he admitted, looking around in a daze.

            “You should probably go straight home and lie down,” she purred, touching his arm. He grinned and nodded, then turned in the opposite direction and wobbled off. My hearing faded to normal, but I’d heard enough.

            “That’s our chick,” I muttered to Lee.

            “And she’s branded,” Lee grouched. “F*****g great.”

            “So now what?”

            “Now we follow her, try to catch her alone, see if she’ll come quietly.”

            I nodded. “Okay… then what?”

            “Then… we see.”

            “Okay, cool,” I mumbled, trying to ignore my suddenly rapid heartbeat. “Cool.”

            We made for a nearby elevator, trying to keep an eye on the strutting Reader, and barely managed to spot her wandering into the Barnes & Noble. It was a large store, and had exits to the parking lot.

            “She could be making a run for it,” I breathed, trying not to attract any attention as I nudged past shoppers. “Do you think?”

            “I don’t think she’s spotted us,” Lee mused. “Or else she’s a fantastic actor. Just relax. Stay frosty.”

            “Aliens? Seriously?”

            “Whatever. S**t.”

            “What?”

            “I lost her.”

            “S**t.”

            Lee shook her head in frustration. “Alright, I’m gonna run to the doors and make sure she isn’t leaving. You check the aisles. Do not engage! If you spot her, keep your distance and wait for me to come back in. Got it?”

            “Yeah.”

            She looked directly into my eyes. “Tyler! Are you good?”

            I inhaled deeply. “Yeah. Yes. I’ve got this.”

            “I’m going up front. Be careful.” She opened her Text, muttered a somewhat longer phrase, and appeared to shimmer like a heat haze. In a second, she was barely visible. I tried to watch her fluid form moving towards the doors, but it gave me a headache.

            Right, I told myself. Check the aisles. Nice and easy.

            I missed being bored. I missed my pretzel.

            I took a couple of breaths and started a slow, leisurely walk down the center path, glancing up the various aisles as I passed them. At one point I stopped and flipped through a comic book for a few seconds, looking around my peripherals for the dark-haired Reader.

            Nobody paid even the slightest attention to me, which was more unsettling than you’d think. I wasn’t exactly big or impressive, but I was wearing a jeweled necklace, a billowing set of black pajamas, and a wide belt with a shiny book shoved in a harness. I felt like I would stand out, but everyone just kind of walked on by.

            “Cool necklace thingy,” I murmured to nobody, and kept moving.

            Normal people in periodicals.

            Normal people in Mystery.

            Unusual, but definitely mundane people in Science Fiction.

            I was starting to relax into the search when I saw her, leaning against a shelf in Romance and flipping through a paperback with a swarthy dude on the cover. Her branded hand jangled with about a dozen textured silver bracelets, and I realized she’d camouflaged the silver glyph with matching jewelry. Clever girl.

            I peeked around the corner every couple of seconds, watching her flip through a few more pages, put the book back, and select a different one which seemed to involve vampires.

            Where was Lee?

            I nearly screamed when the renegade’s cell phone sang, some cheerful fluttery tune that comes prepackaged on every phone. She answered it right away, while I hyperventilated and looked frantically for Lee.

            “Hey girl! Whats up?,,, oh, I’m just killing time at the mall. Looking at trashy romance novels… I know, right?”

            She was awfully girly for a dangerous renegade.

            “Ugh, I know… she’s so full of herself. But she’s also mad connected… you’ll see. Seriously it’s like being in a movie or something. I’ll show you later… well yeah, but you’ll get one too, don’t worry about it, she says it’s not easy to…”

            Wait a minute now. Who was she? The person supplying our renegade with a Text?

            “…seriously. I know, right? Hey listen, I’m supposed to meet her in a bit actually, I gotta let you go… all right, tee tee why ell!” She sang as she snapped the phone shut. She looked at the front screen, evidently a clock, and sighed. “Late, late, late.”

            She turned towards me and I ducked behind the shelf, not knowing what to do. Lee was nowhere, and it looked like our girl was about to head back into the mall instead of out the front door.

            F**k.

            I cursed myself for being born and stepped around the corner.

            “Excuse me, miss, I-“

            THUMP.

            The very next instant, I was blind and deaf and in an incredible amount of pain, as the girl’s spell blasted me backwards and into a shelf of the History section. It felt like someone had compressed an entire Nine Inch Nails concert into one quarter-second burst of sound and percussive force and hit me in the chest with it.

            “Ouch,” I grumbled, rubbing my eyes and struggling to stand. “Hey, I just want to talk!” I yelled. I finally pulled myself out of the bookshelf and looked around for her, panicking. I pulled my Text from its harness, sliding a thumb into the page of combat Glyphs. Saving my place.

            A couple of people were standing around, admiring the wrecked bookshelf, looking around for the source of the destruction. I waved my hands and yelled “Hey! There’s a girl with lots of bracelets on, she just attacked me, stop her!”

            Nobody paid any attention.

            Snarling at myself, I pulled off the necklace to the collective gasp of a small crowd, and I realized I must have appeared out of nowhere to them. “Listen, people, this girl with a book just attacked me, that’s who broke the shelf, where’d she go?”

            An alarmed-looking employee looked at me like I was crazy. Fair point. “Um… everyone here has books, sir.”

            “Goddamnit, she has a silver right hand, lots of bracelets, really thin, dark hair. Come on, I need to catch her!”

            “Are you a cop?”

            “Where’d she GO?!” I demanded, grabbing the guy’s apron, earning another shocked gasp. He went white and pointed towards the front doors. I dropped the guy, looped the necklace over my head again, and painfully jogged towards the front of the store, shouting at the top of my lungs.

            “Lee! She hit me hard, she’s heading for the front doors!”

            I limped around a corner and saw a flash of silver, throwing myself backwards just in time to avoid another wave of impossibly-thick bass. The corner of the shelf was ripped away, carrying a flock of shredded pages with it and crunching into a cardboard display.

            “Who are you people?!” the renegade shrieked. I declined to answer and moved along the other side of the damaged shelf, hoping to come out behind her. My left ankle was probably sprained, and I felt my limp getting worse with each step.

            “Just leave me alone!”

            I paused when I thought I was on the opposite side of the shelf from her and consulted my Text. Rippling Glyphs drew my gaze, making silent promises of power, of safety, of destruction. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to hurt this girl, but I couldn’t let her run away.

            A sudden silence made me look up, and there she was, peeking over the top of the shelf, grinning. “Bad hiding place,” she chuckled, “Cophannax!”

            A blast of pressure thumped the entire shuddering shelf into me, and I fell back into the one behind it. The shelf in front of me began teetering, leaning over dangerously, and as it fell-

            -Lee appeared out of nowhere, catching the entire mess on her shield bracer, gritting her teeth with effort. “Trick, move!”

            I didn’t need to be told twice. I scuttled towards the end of the aisle, and turned back in time to see Lee grunt and force her arm out, light flaring from the crystal on her bracer, and she hurled a ten-foot section of shelving towards the front doors with shocking force.

            Wood and books and glass crumpled and exploded, leaving shredded paper and dust falling through the air like ticker tape. I didn’t see any blood or bodies in the mess, which meant that the renegade must have dodged it somehow.

            Lee, Text in hand, backed towards me, shielding us with her bracer. “Trick, I want you to get out of here. Teleport home, this b***h has moves.”

            I coughed and fought my way to my feet, leaning heavily on my less-harmed right leg. “I can’t just leave you, she’s dangerous!”

            “I know what I’m doing, Tyler!”

            “So does she!” I countered, looking around for the Reader, testing my leg. “We were wrong, Lee, she’s not a random crazy person.”

            Lee glared around, not lowering her shield. But then-

            “You’re right. She’s not clueless. But you are!”

            “What?”

            Lee pushed me down, which hurt a lot. “Let her think you’re out of commission. Flip through your Text and find the biggest, most intimidating Glyph that pops out at you, and stay down. I’ll try to flush her out, and you blast her!”

            “I don’t know what any of this s**t does!” I griped, indicating my self-defense page. “What happens if I just untie her shoes or something?!”

            “Try something else,” she snapped, and bolted away. I heard her shout out a spell, and an answering familiar shriek told me she’d at least located our renegade. I struggled to my knees and looked at my Text and its confusing mishmash of Glyphs.

            Half of my precious sticky notes had fallen out in the mayhem, and of the ones that were left, nothing immediately useful popped out at me. Enhanced hearing, unlock a door, colorful light, the Force Glyph…

            …and I had an idea.

            I lurched to the end of the aisle and spotted the renegade, pressed up against the side of another shelf, apparently searching for Lee. Down the aisle, Lee appeared around the corner, shield first, and the renegade fired another blast of compressed sound at her.

            Lee caught the spell on her shield and deflected a lot of it directly into the coffee shop, obliterating a selection of mugs. Still, the excessive force dropped her solidly, and she didn’t appear to be moving. Before the Reader had time to cast again, I hissed a pair of syllables and reached out with my branded hand…

            …and plucked the renegade’s ill-gotten Text from her hands. With a mental flick, I threw the book to myself.

            She whirled to face me, eyes narrowed with rage, and lifted her right hand towards me. I had just enough time to be confused before yet another sound spell blasted me end-over-end into a table covered with paperbacks.

            Have you ever been hit by a big wave, while swimming in the ocean? It was like that.

            I plowed into a table leg and felt a bone in my left forearm snap, whiting out my world with sudden pain. My mind was barely functioning. How the hell had she fired that spell at me? I was still holding her Text!

            I was pinned down by the broken table, and without a working left arm I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. How had I gotten so fucked up? We’d started fighting like forty-five seconds ago!

            “You’re not very tough, are you?” The renegade taunted, striding towards me. “I saw the uniforms and s**t and figured I was toast. You’re some kind of secret society, right?” She stood over me, open hand still pointed at my face. “Seriously, what do they teach you people?”

            I was pretty sure I was about to die messily, so I did the only thing that I’d ever been much good at.

            I acted like a smartass.

            “I’m new,” I said, shrugging my good shoulder.

            “I’m not,” Lee’s voice shouted, and when the renegade wheeled around to face her, there was already a bolt of some kind of solid light hurtling towards her unprotected face.

            I’d prefer not to discuss the sound it made.

            The lithe, ruined body tumbled to the floor of the bookstore, oozing all over the carpet of fallen paperbacks. I watched it fall, then slumped back myself, still in agony but relieved that the ordeal was over.

            I wanted to throw up but I was afraid of how much it would hurt.

I looked over at the body, distantly noting something scribbled in black ink on the back of her hand… which was no longer branded.

            The Text was free to be adopted by someone else.

            “Trick! Tyler! Where are you?” Lee called over the screams and wails of the very, very confused patrons of the store. I saw her clambering over a shelf, nearly tripping over the renegade Reader’s body, and she skidded to a halt next to me.

            “Jesus f**k, are you alive?” she asked desperately, and I grinned.

            “Only mostly. Can we go?”

            Much to my surprise she actually bent down, tears in her eyes, and kissed my forehead.

            “Yeah. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

*

Reviews

[UponATyme]

AWWWWWW. SHE CARES.

There was a lot of clever banter in this chapter. It really moved things along nicely. I like that you kept the renegade nameless and, for the most part, storyless. It made it easier for me to view her as an auto-bad guy, but I still had that little cell phone conversation to remind me, once the fight was over, that this was just a girl. I wanted them to win but that cell phone moment made her just human enough that I had to consider the implications of what just happened.

Good balance.

[Ness]

I wish you didn't put on facebook that she was definitely gonna die! Haha but it was good and definitely needed to happen. I have a theory!! But I'm not gonna post it here lol. But I liked this action scene and I like that it happened in a mall/bookstore. It had all the good elements of a fight and the people around him being confused made it seem more real bc if this really happened everyone would be like, ummm what?? Haha. I also like that even though Trick's the "hero" of the story he's not just naturally an amazing fighter; that also makes him seem more real.