The Trials of Renegade X (16 page)

Riley yanks his hand away—he really doesn’t like me touching him for some reason—and looks like he’s going to throw his textbook at me. Or storm out and leave, which I think is a perfectly acceptable option. But then, instead of either of those things, he flashes Helen a bright smile. “I would actually
love
to stay for dinner, Mrs. Tines.”

What? No, he wouldn’t. He’s lying. And if he thinks him staying for dinner is going to annoy me more than it is him, he’s dead wrong.

“All right,” Helen says, not sounding like she believes him. She sets her dishtowel down, then goes upstairs to ask Amelia if she wants one serving of lard with her dinner or two.

“What was that about?” I ask him.

He grins, savoring his very minor victory. “What, you can’t take a little payback? Besides, I want to meet your dad.”

Of course he does. He and Sarah are practically in his fan club. I think they actually would be if the age limit didn’t cut off at twelve.

“So,” he says, tapping the assignment sheet with his pen again, “you don’t even know five rules, do you?”

“Look, Perkins, why don’t you just put down whatever
your
favorites are? I mean, we’re such good friends that your favorites are my favorites, right?”

“That’s not working as a team.”

“Sure it is. I’m compromising by pretending I care, and you get to talk in class about your top five idiotic ideas to live by. Plus, I already know how to work as a team, because I have a sidekick, and we work great together.”

“The point is that we can’t always choose who we get to work with. We have to be ready for anything.”

“Like working with a half villain whose sidekick you’re trying to steal?” And who has a new villain power you don’t know about, and who could accidentally fry you to a crisp if you piss him off too much?

I hear Amelia’s tromping footsteps, followed by the stairs creaking, and then she comes bounding over to us. I’m surprised she didn’t make an appearance sooner, though with her door closed, I guess she didn’t catch the scent of fresh boy hormones until now.

Her eyes light up when she sees Riley. “Who’s this?”

“He’s taken. And even if he wasn’t, I don’t hate him
that
much.”

She scowls at me. “I was just asking. You never have friends over. Not boys, anyway.” She sits down next to me at the table, uninvited.

“Beat it, Amelia. We’re working.”

“Oh, this assignment,” she says, idly kicking her leg against my chair. “Me and Kim already got ours done. We worked on it in class while Miss Monk wasn’t looking so we didn’t have to meet up.”

“Sounds like a rush job to me. You should let me look over it for you in case you screwed something up.”

She tries to share a look with Riley—as if he cares—and shakes her head. “Nice try, Damien. You’re
not
copying my homework.”

Not copying it. Just writing my name on it instead of hers. “If you’re not going to make yourself useful, then you can’t sit with us. Go back to your cave and finish filling out your quiz about which of your guy friends might secretly like you.”

She gasps, like that’s really what she was doing. Which she might have been, since I know that was this month’s quiz in
Spandex
—the stupid magazine she subscribes to that caters to teen hero girls—because I saw it when it came in the mail last week.

“The answer, Amelia, is
none of them
.” Of course, she’d have to actually have some first, but still.

Amelia kicks my chair really hard. “You’d better be nice to me,” she threatens, narrowing her beady little eyes. “You owe me, remember? And if you don’t behave, I might spill your secret. You wouldn’t want your new friend to know that you’re—” She cuts off there and flashes me an evil grin.

Riley’s gaze flicks back and forth between us, like he’s trying to figure out what she could possibly have on me.

“Amelia, I’m serious. Get out of here.”

“But I’ve just figured out what I want,” she says. “I know what you have to do for me, so that I don’t tell anyone that when no one’s watching, you like to—” She gasps as she glances over at Riley, as if just noticing him, and shuts her mouth.

I grip the edge of my chair and glare at her. Electricity tingles along my arms. “Murder my least favorite sister, you mean?” I swear she gets more annoying every day. I don’t know where she gets it from. “Because keep this up, and I won’t care how many witnesses there are.” She can’t tell a secret if she’s dead.

And even though Amelia’s obviously a big fat liar and just making things up to annoy me, Riley’s smirking anyway. Like he enjoys watching her try to one-up me or something.

“Tell me whatever stupid thing you think I owe you and then get out of here.”

“Later,” she says, still grinning at me as she gets up from the table and clomps back up the stairs.

Then my phone rings. I slip it out of my pocket and see that it’s Sarah. Calling me, not Riley, even though I’m pretty sure she’s still mad at me for what happened to his nose. “What’s up, Cosine?” I ask her, using her sidekick name on purpose to annoy Riley.

“There’s an emergency,” she says. “I’m at the jewelry store downtown. Get dressed and get over here.
Now
.”

Sarah’s camped out across the street from the jewelry store—the same one we didn’t stop a burglary at last weekend—when we get there, wearing her Cosine Kid outfit, though without the eye mask. And yes, I said
we
. Because the Invisible Douche just had to tag along, even though Sarah’s my sidekick, not his, and she called
me
.

Sarah motions for us to hide along the edge of the coffee shop she’s lurking by, in broad daylight, binoculars in hand. She scowls at me, still in my regular clothes. “I said to get dressed, Renegade.”

“I’m in stealth mode. And there wasn’t time.” Plus, my Renegade X costume was in my room, and I wasn’t about to let Riley see me go up the stairs. It’s bad enough that he was at my house at all and that he knows Amelia has something on me. I don’t need to go advertising my worst fear to him, too.

And Riley’s in jeans and a T-shirt, just like I am, but you don’t see her complaining to him.

“What’s the emergency?” Riley asks.

Sarah hands him the binoculars.

Uh,
I’m
supposed to ask her that, and she’s supposed to hand them to
me
. I grab them from him and peer at the jewelry store, even though it’s only across the street. The store itself looks closed—the lights are off and no one’s inside—but the front door hangs partway open.

“Someone broke in? In the middle of the afternoon?” Downtown Golden City isn’t exactly deserted at four o’clock on a Tuesday. Or on any day, really. There are plenty of passersby on the street and in the surrounding shops, and as I’m watching, a couple of people stop and point to the open shop door, discussing it for a minute before moving on. “You’re sure it’s not those guys from the League again?”

Riley yanks the binoculars out of my hands. He succeeds, but only because I let him.

“No one’s broken in,” Sarah says. There’s kind of a wicked gleam in her eye and she rubs her hands together. “
Yet.
”

“So, why don’t we just go close the door?” Since someone must have left it open by mistake. We can send Riley to do it, since he’s not supposed to be here and Sarah might be wrong about there not being bad guys. Or superheroes. I don’t need them calling my dad again.

Sarah shakes her head. “That would defeat the whole purpose. I didn’t hack into their security system so you could close the door.”

“You didn’t ...
what
?”

“You hacked them?” Riley asks, though he looks accusingly at
me
as he says it, as if it’s my fault somehow. Like Sarah would only do something like that under my influence.

“It’s a trap,” Sarah says. “To figure out who the bad guys are. Whoever goes in that store is obviously a thief.”

Riley gives me this look like I disgust him—more so than usual. “This is what you guys
do
?”

“Yeah, not what you expected, right? It’s okay—you can just go home.” Does he seriously think I go around luring bad guys into committing crimes? I mean, as far as I know, Sarah doesn’t do that, either. Or at least she didn’t. “Sarah, are you telling me you’re the one who broke into that store? Because last I checked, that’s illegal.”

“I only did it to catch criminals.”

“Criminals who wouldn’t have committed a crime otherwise.”

She whips around and gives me a condescending look over the top of her glasses. “But if they would commit a crime at all, that makes them bad guys. This way, we don’t have to wait for someone else to act—we can figure out who all the potential criminals are and put them in jail right away.”

Riley raises a seriously skeptical eyebrow at me, as if I had anything to do with this.

I take Sarah’s elbow and lead her a little ways along the edge of the building, so she’s not distracted by watching the jewelry store when I tell her how crazy she’s being. She shoves her binoculars at Riley and tells him to man the helm. “Look, Sarah, I don’t know what’s gotten into you—”

“I don’t, either,” she says. “But after you left on Sunday, I couldn’t stop thinking about how many criminals there are in the world and how unsafe they make it for everyone else. Don’t good people deserve to feel safe?”

“After I left?” Because I accidentally bloodied up her boyfriend and she had ne’er-do-wells on the brain, or because I may have accidentally zapped her with her personality enhancer when it was on the “worse” setting? “Define ’good’ people, Sarah.”

“People who aren’t criminals, obviously.” She rolls her eyes at me and dismisses the concerned look I’m giving her with a wave of her hand. “And anyone who would be tempted to walk into that store because the door’s open, and take something, is a threat to other people. But no one can see it yet.”

“Unless they have a
V
on their thumb, right?”
I
don’t believe that, but I remember what she said about not being able to work with me if I had one. “Then it’s plain as day.”

Sarah’s face lights up, not catching my sarcasm. “I don’t think I’ll catch any supervillains with this particular trap—as you’re always telling me, most of them have way better things to do than petty thievery—but I’m glad you understand. This is my way of branding ordinary people so everyone else knows they’re bad guys and what they’re capable of and can stay away.”

“Can you hear yourself right now? Because you sound completely insane.” Okay, maybe not
completely
. But close enough. Plus, who does she think she’s talking to? “You remember I’m half villain, right?”

“Don’t be offended. I’m not being letterist. I think all people have the potential to be criminals.”

Great. That’s much better. “Except heroes, right? Because I didn’t hear you say anything about them falling into your trap.”

She squints at me in confusion. “Why would they? Heroes stop robberies, not start them. Where have
you
been?” She laughs.

Riley wanders over to us and hands Sarah her binoculars back, slipping his arm around her shoulders. “Someone closed the door,” he informs us. “So I guess they passed the test.”

Sarah folds her arms, looking really put out by that. I can tell she wasn’t expecting there to be any good citizens in this scenario of hers. “They ruined it, you mean. I hadn’t caught any bad guys yet.”

“So the criminal population isn’t as rampant as you thought and the world is safe,” I tell her. “That’s
so
horrible.”

She sighs. “You’re right, Damien. The real criminals wouldn’t have fallen for something like this. If I want to catch supervillains, I have to kick my efforts up a notch.”

Riley glares at me.

I put my hands up. “Whoa, Sarah, that’s
not
what I said. And I don’t think you should be doing this, period.”

“I mean,” she goes on, as if she didn’t hear me, “you’re half villain and you weren’t tempted by this trap at all, were you?”

“Sarah!” What the hell is wrong with her? “Being half villain doesn’t automatically make me half criminal.” Or half evil. Or half of any other stereotype.

“Yeah,” Riley says, “I think it’s obvious you’re more than only
half
criminal.”

He’s smirking as he says it—like he thinks he’s so hilarious—but Sarah still has this serious line on her forehead, and her mouth is drawn taut. “I’m going to have to do better next time,” she says. “So, what traps
would
you have fallen for? I mean, I know you’re not the best specimen, but you still have some insights.”

“Wow. How about the trap where my best friend tells me there’s an emergency and gets me to come down here so she can try and lure innocent people into going to jail?”

“They’re not innocent. Not if they’d be tempted by robbing a jewelry store. Especially in broad daylight.” She snaps her fingers. “Maybe that was my problem! It should have been at night, even if there would be less people out. And something bigger, like a bank vault, or maybe the genetics lab. Something that might lure in actual supervillains.”