Maggie's legs were on fire by the time they reached the sign that read 12, indicating that they were finally on the twelfth floor of the building. The climb up all those stairs had gone on long enough to make Maggie question why she was even doing this. Sure, Max had said she'd like whatever they were going up there to see or do, but how would he know what she liked? He barely even knew her. Maybe this was a trap. He'd told her he was part of an investigative team; maybe the rest of his team was waiting up on the twelfth floor to apprehend her. How stupid had she been?

As Max reached for the door that would bring them into the main portion of the building, she surreptitiously cast a glance at the Renegade communication band curled around his arm. It was valuable enough that she'd be able to manipulate it, if push came to shove. Her gift worked best with metals and precious stones, but it extended to other small items as long as they held some kind of universally accepted value. Maggie could exert force on the band, thus moving Max's entire arm away from her if he tried to grab her. Or, maybe a better idea would be to just knock Max to the ground, and focus her telekinetic efforts on distracting the rest of the team enough to allow her to get away.

When she stepped onto the floor, however, it appeared to be vacant—nothing but a huge expanse of moldy carpet, crumbling sheetrock, and a few metal poles holding the dilapidated ceiling in place. Across the expanse, where the outer wall of the building should have been, was nothing but a gaping hole.

"Great skies," she muttered. "How did you even find this place? What in the whole entire world made you think, 'I'm going to climb up twelve flights of stairs in the dark to a big empty room with a giant hole in the side of it?'"

In the shadowy light coming in from the hole and the broken windows lining the other three walls, Max looked a bit sheepish. "I… might've seen the hole from the outside and thought it would make an interesting viewpoint."

Maggie gaped at him. "An interesting viewpoint into what?" The building was nowhere near as tall as some of the other skyscrapers in the city, and besides, they were only on the twelfth floor. Maggie could think of a whole bunch of better places to go if he was looking for a good view.

In response, Max just grinned, a dimple appearing in his right cheek. "Come on." He gestured for her to follow him across the enormous expanse of floor. The sheer vastness of the place reminded her of the one time she'd actually gone inside the artifacts warehouse at Renegades HQ, rather than just staying in the reception area like usual. It had been every bit as large as this room, though packed floor to ceiling with an assortment of objects, and she'd been so in awe of the sheer power that emanated from the room, and felt so lucky to have survived the bullet wound that should have killed her as a baby, and now to be among the elite population who had such incredible gifts…

Maggie gritted her teeth, wishing that moment had never happened. Wishing she'd shunned Callum's friendliness that day just like she had every single time up until then, so she never would have learned what it was he could do. Wishing she could stop feeling guilty for something that wasn't even really her fault.

"Maggie?" Max was standing several feet in front of her, a bemused expression on her face. She realized she'd become so lost in thought that she'd stopped walking.

She hastened to catch up. "Sorry. Just thinking about how big this place is."

"Oh, yeah!" Max looked up and around the room, seeming to take in its vastness for the first time. "I had the same reaction the first time I was here. It's crazy how big these buildings are when you really stop to pay attention. I wonder what it was used for before the Age of Anarchy."

Maggie gave the room another once-over, glad for the distraction from her thoughts. "Maybe a factory of some sort?" she suggested. "Or an office? Or… I don't know. Whoever used this space before didn't leave behind a lot of clues as to what they did here."

"It could have been empty even before the Age of Anarchy," Max reasoned. Maggie had caught up to him by now, and they were walking side by side toward the opening. Looking ahead, Maggie could see that a good chunk of the floor was missing over by where the wall had been blown out, and she wondered exactly how far out onto the damaged floor Max intended to go. The floor creaked beneath her feet suddenly, and Maggie jumped backward, instinctively reaching out and grabbing Max's arm to pull him back with her.

"What happened?" Max turned back to look at her, his bushy eyebrows knit in concern.

"Didn't you hear it? The floor was about to give out beneath us!"

Max's shoulders relaxed. "Oh. No, that was just regular creaks from an old wood floor. The floors at my house do that all the time. We can go out a little further." He paused, his eyes scanning her face. "Unless you want to just stop here? We'll have a better view out there, but if you don't feel comfortable…"

Under his gaze, Maggie suddenly became acutely aware of the fact that she was still gripping his arm. Heat rushed to her cheeks and she pulled her hand away, brushing past him over the patch of creaky floor. "I'm no scaredy-cat. As long as you don't think we have any chance of dying, I'll go all the way to the end."

"Well, we can't go quite to the end," said Max. "But we're safe at least until we reach the next pole."

They proceeded cautiously, Maggie taking the quietest steadying breaths possible and hoping Max wouldn't notice. She wasn't a scaredy-cat. She was a survivor. She could handle anything.

Once they'd made it to the pole Max had pointed out, Max opened the backpack he was wearing and pulled out a soft-looking blue blanket. He spread it out on the floor and sat down, motioning for Maggie to do the same.

Maggie gingerly took a seat next to him, stretching her legs out in front of her rather than sitting cross-legged like Max, to ensure their knees wouldn't accidentally touch. "So… what are we supposed to be looking at?"

Max pulled something else out of his backpack and held it up to his eyes. A pair of binoculars. "We're looking straight across into the windows of that building," he explained, pointing toward the building next door, the side of which was the only thing that could be seen through the hole.

Maggie let out a small laugh. "Sneaking into abandoned buildings, walking across sketchy floors that threaten to drop you twelve stories if you go too far, and now spying through windows? Maybe your next investigative suspect should be yourself."

Max laughed too. "When you put it that way, it does sound rather nefarious. And to be fair, my alias is The Bandit, so you never know. But no, we're not really spying… you'll see."

He played around with the controls on the binoculars for a few seconds, then handed the device to her and pulled a second pair out of his backpack. "You should have a pretty clear view."

Maggie pressed the binoculars up to her eyes, and aimed toward the building in front of them. At first, all she could see was the sleek metal façade. When she tilted her head ever so slightly to the right, however…

She gasped. Through the window, she saw what looked like some kind of production line. A slow-moving conveyor belt was loaded with silver blocks, which were falling one at a time into a cistern of sorts. Maggie studied the cistern, trying to figure out what its function was, until eventually, the conveyor belt of silver blocks stopped, and a large tray was lowered down into the cistern. After a moment, the tray was lifted back up, and another tray was clamped on top of it, sealing it off. The tray slid down a short metal chute and onto a second conveyor belt, where the top tray was lifted. Maggie squinted, wondering whether the binoculars had any additional zoom. She could sort of make out small silver pieces on the bottom tray—rectangular shapes, perhaps?

The tray with the silver pieces on it traveled along the conveyor belt a short distance until it stopped underneath a different robotic arm. This arm seemed to be holding some kind of very thin drill, and as Maggie watched, it bent over the silver pieces and started drilling into them. Or—engraving. It was engraving something into the silver pieces.

Maggie wanted to ask Max exactly what it was that they were witnessing, but she didn't want to miss anything about the process, so she stayed quiet as the machine finished engraving, and the silver pieces continued on to the end of the conveyor belt, where they were released from the tray to slide down another metal chute into a large box.

That seemed to be the end of the process. Maggie pulled the binoculars from her eyes and looked at Max, whose expression seemed slightly anxious and hopeful as he awaited her feedback. "What are they making over there?" she asked him.

"Watches! Well, the machines we can see aren't making the complete watches, but they're making the pieces that attach together to form the band of a fancy watch. It's a whole watch factory on the twelfth floor of that building, and we can't see the more interesting parts, like when they actually put everything together, but I thought it was kind of cool, seeing how they melt the metal and form it into the shape they want using those molds, and then engrave into it and everything."

"Yeah," Maggie agreed. "It is cool." How did such a thing exist in this city for so long without me knowing about it? The silver blocks were too far away for her to be able to perceive them using her powers, but she could tell even just by looking at them that they were extremely valuable. Maybe even pure silver. And there were so many of them! They had to make hundreds, maybe thousands of watches per day. She figured, by the description Max had given, that these watches were probably along the lines of the one she'd stolen the day she'd first met him—the one she still had yet to trade in with August. Maybe that watch even was one of the ones that had been made at this factory. If that was the case…

If Maggie could somehow get access to the watch factory, she would be so, so rich.

"Do they sell the watches?" she asked Max. "I mean, obviously they sell them, but do they have an actual store people can go into, or do they just ship them out?"

Max shrugged. "I don't know. I really don't know much about the place in general, I just remembered seeing it and thinking it was cool, and I thought you might like it because you said you might be into jewelry making. I know a watchmaking factory probably isn't quite what you had in mind, but…" He reached into his backpack once more, this time digging around at the very bottom until he produced a Ziploc bag full of small red gems, a bottle of something that looked like Superglue, and some yarn. "Ta-da! Our own jewelry making kit!"

Maggie stared at the supplies, more than just slightly perplexed. "That's a jewelry making kit?"

"Well…" Max smiled ruefully. "Again, I know it's not what you had in mind. And the jewelry's probably going to look pretty crappy. But I thought it might be fun? Just to try?" His face wore that anxious look once again, and Maggie felt her heart do a strange sort of flutter. He obviously really cared what she thought of his ideas. And for some weird, inexplicable reason, he'd planned all this out for her.

Maggie opened her mouth, wanting to ask why. Why he would go through the trouble of gathering random art supplies and packing a backpack and climbing up twelve flights of stairs just in an effort to give her, Maggie White, a fun day. Why did he care whether she had hobbies or did anything for fun? Why did he even want to hang out with her?

Maggie tentatively reached for the baggie and pulled out a handful of the tiny red stones. A quick assessment with her powers told her they were rubies, though their signature felt ever so slightly different from the rubies that had been embedded into a necklace she'd once stolen from an older lady on the street. "Where'd you get all these rubies?"

"Remember my friends Sterling and Jade, who you met at the pawn shop?"

Maggie hadn't remembered the names, but she did vaguely recall the presence of the twin boys the second time she'd encountered Max. "Yeah."

"Their older sister gave me these. She makes them."

"Makes them?"

"Yeah… You've heard of Red Assassin, right?"

Maggie dropped the gems as quickly as if they'd suddenly started burning her. "You're saying all these rubies are made out of blood?"

"I mean…" Max picked up one of the rubies, which looked very much like an ordinary gemstone. "That's where they came from, but they're not blood anymore. They're just rubies now. I'm pretty sure." For a moment he looked dubious, but then his face brightened into confidence. "Ruby made a grappling hook out of one of these suckers. She makes all kinds of weapons out of them. If they were still made out of blood, they wouldn't be strong enough to do the kinds of things they can do." He squeezed the ruby until his fingertips went white, then loosened his grip. "See? Same shape, same everything. They're just gems now."

Maggie tentatively picked one of the rubies up again, examining it with both her eyes and her powers. Determining that Max was right, she set about gathering the other gems she'd dropped. "So, what are we making with rubies and… Superglue and… yarn?" she asked skeptically.

"Bracelets," said Max, pulling a strand of yarn out of the bag. "I was thinking, first step, we twist the yarn together to make it thicker, and then we can glue the rubies around the outside. Not the most high-tech method to jewelry-making, but…" He shrugged. "I thought it might at least be cool to try?"

If any of Maggie's gang members had suggested making bracelets out of yarn, Superglue, and blood-crafted rubies, Maggie would have rolled her eyes and called them an idiot, much the way she had when Chester had wanted to play a theater-wide game of hide-and-seek, or when Yasmin had offered to create a gang logo and carve it into the backs of everyone's hands. But this was Max. This was kind, generous Max Everhart, who'd just organized everything about this day for her.

"Sure," she conceded. "Let's give it a try."

"Great." Max grinned and pulled a pair of scissors out of his backpack. "Give me your wrist."

"What?" Maggie stared at him, startled.

"So I can measure the yarn for your bracelet," he stated as if it were obvious.

"Oh," Maggie exhaled. Stop being so paranoid, she told herself. She held her arm out, and Max looped a strand of yarn around her wrist, allowing for some wiggle room. "Does that look like about the right size?"

Maggie tried to concentrate on the question, but suddenly all she could focus on was the warmth from his fingers so close to her arm, the way his hand kept ever-so-subtly bumping against her wrist as he held the yarn in place. She swallowed hard. "You might want to cut it a little bigger," she said. "Since you said we'll be twisting several strands together, right? And then do you have clasps, or will we have to tie them off?"

"Right," said Max, pulling his hand away and making the loop in the yarn nearly three times as large. "How about this? Then if we have extra we can just cut it off when we're done."

Maggie agreed, and Max proceeded to cut six strands of yarn that length. He gave three of them to Maggie and kept the other three for himself. Following Max's lead, Maggie tied her three strands together at one end, then attempted to start braiding them—which didn't work out, as she had no way of keeping the yarn tight as she did so.

Max, who was having just as much trouble with his own piece of yarn, set his down and reached for the end of Maggie's. "Here. I'll hold yours while you braid, then you can hold mine while I braid."

Maggie braided her strands quickly, eyeing the yarn until it seemed to be about wrist-sized. "I should probably try putting it on now?"

"Oh, yeah." Max took both sides of the yarn braid, and once again Maggie held out her arm. This time, she was prepared for the warm, tingly sensation that spread throughout her body at his touch, but the lack of surprise didn't do anything to stop her heart rate from increasing.

She fought to keep her face stoic as Max finished tying off her bracelet, and then as she repeated the same procedure of holding, wrapping, and tying for his. "Now we glue on the rubies?" she asked as soon as she had finished, immediately scooting backward to put some space between them.

"Yep," Max replied, uncapping the Superglue. "I was thinking we'll just put a line of glue on the bracelets and then sprinkle the rubies onto them?"

It was as good of a plan as any, Maggie supposed. She watched as Max squirted a short line of it onto part of his bracelet, immediately following it up with a sprinkling of the miniscule red gems. He waited a few seconds, then shook his wrist around. The rubies stayed. "It works!" he exclaimed triumphantly, passing the glue to her.

She followed his example, creating a line of glue around about one-quarter of her bracelet before applying the gemstones. Like Max's had done, they stayed in place.

They took turns with the glue bottle, and once they were done, Max held his arm up to admire the bracelet in the shadowy blue light. "Not bad. I bet these'll look really nice out in the sun."

Maggie felt the corners of her lips turn up in a smile. "Are you really going to wear that out in public?"

Max listed his head to the side. "Yeah. Aren't you?"

She was. She didn't care that the bracelet was messy, or that it was the kind of item that wouldn't have even garnered her notice during her daily pickpocketing rounds. It was a symbol of the first day she'd ever spent just hanging out with a friend, and that made it valuable. Not to the rest of the world, but to her.

She wasn't about to tell Max that, though. "I might," she said instead. "But somehow I think you have a higher likelihood of getting weird looks, being the boy with the ruby bracelet."

Max shrugged. "I'm already the boy with no powers, the boy who used to steal all the powers, and the boy who caused the Supernova. How many more weird looks could I get?"

Maggie remembered that for years, whenever she'd imagined talking to Max, she'd always thought that her first questions would be about the Supernova, about Ace Anarchy's helmet, about what it had felt like to have all that power, what it had felt like to give all that power away, and whether he ever regretted his decision. Now she'd been talking with Max for hours—talked with him on three separate occasions, in fact—and those questions had barely even scraped her mind. Somehow, they didn't seem all that important in this moment, sitting in an abandoned building with Max, both of them sporting homemade ruby-and-yarn-and-Superglue bracelets. Even her plans to sabotage the Hero Parade and steal Ace Anarchy's helmet seemed unimportant and far away, like they were part of a dream or a long-ago memory. The only thing she was really thinking about now was how she wanted to do something cool and special for Max.

The revelation surprised her, because never once, in her entire life, could she remember wanting to do something for another person. Oh, she'd done things for people before—she'd done a whole lot of boring cleanup work for the Renegades, and the occasional favor for her gang members. But she'd been paid for the work she did with the Renegades, and keeping her gang members satisfied was just something she had to do to ensure they all stayed in the gang. This was different. She wanted to do something for Max not because she needed to, not because anyone was paying her or because she feared repercussions if she didn't, but because she wanted to do something that would make him happy.

As happy as this day had made her.