Max was dredged out of sleep by the sound of hurried footsteps and his dads' low, urgent voices. He blearily blinked his eyes open, noting that no light was coming in through his second-story bedroom windows. Something must have happened, he realized, instantly on the alert.
He could feel his heart racing with anxiety as he jumped out of bed and crossed the short distance to the door that led into the hallway. Something big must have happened. There were nights when one or both of Max's dads might stay at HQ overnight, if they had a lot of paperwork to file or a city-wide event that was coming up. Adrian too stayed out overnight plenty of times, if not for official or unofficial patrol duty, simply walking around the city with Nova while most of the world slept. But it had long ago been established that when any of them were home for the night, they were off-duty from being superheroes. There were enough late-shift call operators and patrol units—and certainly enough civilian vigilantes—to handle any disturbances that happened while Captain Chromium, The Dread Warden, and Sketch were unavailable.
Max opened the door and saw Simon dashing down the stairs. "Pops!" Max called out. "What's going on?"
Simon looked up at him, a hint of guilt crossing his features. "Sorry, buddy. We didn't mean to wake you. Something's come up."
"I can see that." Max followed his dad down to the foyer, and then into the kitchen, where Simon retrieved his uniform from its spot in the broom closet. "What came up?"
Simon faced him, face stricken. "Flamethrower. Attacked one of the all-night diners down on Thirty-Fifth Street. A couple fire crews were on the scene pretty quickly, along with Whiplash and Rumble, but… he killed the manager on shift."
Max's heart sank. "Did they catch him? Are you heading over to HQ?"
"No," the answer came from behind him, and he turned around to see Hugh rushing into the room, reaching around them into the closet and grabbing his blue body suit. "We're heading to the scene of the crime. We asked to be notified if there was any more Flamethrower activity, seeing as he's the first self-proclaimed villain since the defeat of the Anarchists. We need to put a stop to this before it gets out of hand."
"Sounds like it's already out of hand," Max commented, slipping on his shoes.
"Where do you think you're going?" Hugh asked, noticing the subtle action.
"With you," Max said innocently.
Both of his dads shook their heads. "Stay here," Hugh instructed. "There's no need for you to go."
"But I'm an investigator," Max persisted. "I can look around for clues, see what similarities I notice between this attack and the first one…"
"You're not on this case," Hugh reminded him. "I'm sure Flashpoint's team is doing just fine with the investigation."
Max scowled, still annoyed that his own team hadn't been chosen for the Flamethrower investigation. He supposed it made sense, as his team was one of the less-experienced investigative teams, and Flamethrower was the biggest case they'd had in years. Still, though. He'd been there the day the first attack happened. Not only that, but they had Yearbook on their team. Sampson Cartwright's impeccable ability to recall the name and face of every person he'd ever met—well, within the last three years, at least—was sure to be useful in a task like that.
His dads had donned their superhero clothing and were heading toward the front door. "What am I supposed to do?" Max complained, hating how his voice bordered on whiny, like a little kid's. "I'm not going to be able to go back to sleep."
"Use the time to do some research into your case," Hugh suggested. "Aren't you still working on finding the convenience store robbers from last week?"
Max sighed. Last week, his team had been assigned the task of tracking down the small masked prodigy who'd allegedly held bladed fingertips up to a convenience store employee's neck while her skittish companion, wearing bulky headphones under a white pillowcase that obscured his features, had emptied the cash register. Obviously, it would be important to find and apprehend the perpetrators before they did it again, but the fact that they hadn't actually hurt someone, compiled upon the fact that they kind of sounded like kids who could easily be caught by a non-Renegade police force or a vigilante, made him just not all that interested in finding them. Especially when there was someone like Flamethrower still out there.
His dads weren't waiting for an answer; they had already shot out the front door and down the long flagstone walkway to the street, where Max guessed a Renegade transport van might be waiting to pick them up. He huffed and headed downstairs, hoping Adrian was awake so they could talk. He was pretty sure Adrian would understand his point of view.
But his brother's bed was empty, the TV screen black, no light peeking out from under the door to the art studio. Of course, Max thought bitterly. Adrian probably also had rushed to the scene of the Flamethrower attack, maybe even before Hugh and Simon had. Knowing him, he'd probably donned his Sentinel armor and made it to the scene of the crime while it was still happening.
I could go over there too, he thought halfheartedly, but discarded the idea quickly. He didn't have springs on the bottom of his feet or a transport vehicle, and Thirty-Fifth Street was a good four miles away at least.
Max reluctantly returned to his own room, turning on the light and plodding over to retrieve his laptop from the desk. This proved easier said than done, as the laptop was buried beneath a messy pile of papers, coins, and assorted craft items, as well as Max's glass model of a playground in City Park, which he'd taken into his room for repairs the other day and hadn't gotten around to putting it back where it belonged yet. His original city, the one he'd had when he lived in the quarantine, had been entirely made of glass, each piece hand-drawn by Adrian on the glass walls of the quarantine, and fused into place by Max, using his power of matter fusing. That city had been smashed to smithereens the night the quarantine fell, and had later disappeared entirely when Adrian neutralized himself to eliminate the villain known as Phobia. It had taken a few months before Max had decided he wanted to build a new city, similar but different from the old one. Most of the structures themselves were still created by Adrian, but Max had crafted several accessories on his own using supplies from the craft store. Additionally, now that Max no longer had any powers, he had to glue broken pieces back together rather than fusing them. Luckily, Cyanide's quick-drying adhesive worked wonders on just about any substance.
Max smiled to himself as his eye caught on the yarn-and-ruby bracelet he was still wearing, another product held together with Cyanide's adhesive. His dads and Adrian had noticed it the night he'd come home wearing it, but none of them had said anything about it, possibly assuming he'd made it over at the Tuckers' house. He wondered if Maggie was still wearing hers. He wondered if her family—or, well, whoever she lived with—had asked her where she'd gotten it.
Who did Maggie live with? Max gently moved the playground over to a slightly less-messy part of the desk, then lifted the stack of papers and set it on the floor, extricating the laptop. She'd told him she had lived at the Prodigy Children's Home for about eight years, and he assumed she'd commandeered one of the dorm-style rooms at HQ once she'd become a Renegade. But now that she was no longer a Renegade, where did she live? Had some long-lost relative come for her after the Supernova, no longer afraid of her prodigious abilities now that they themselves were prodigies too?
Max scowled as he booted up the computer, hoping for Maggie's sake that that wasn't the case. He didn't know anything about Maggie's history or her birth parents, but he knew that if his birth parents were still alive and suddenly decided they wanted him now that he was no longer "dangerous", he'd be running as fast as he could in the opposite direction. Parents who didn't want their kids in the past certainly didn't deserve them now.
Max logged in to the computer and pulled up the prodigy database, a system that was still expanding practically hourly as more and more people's abilities became known and catalogued. Max still remembered some of the heated discussions he'd overheard in the months following the Supernova, as the Renegades wrestled with figuring out what was going to become of their organization in a world in which everyone was a prodigy. Nova had been in favor of abolishing the prodigy database entirely, arguing that it would give the Renegades too much power if they had a list of what every single person in the world could do. Hugh had argued that maintaining the database would help with catching criminals and ensuring proper identification, much like people before the Age of Anarchy had had social security numbers and credit cards and apparently something called social media pages, where they'd posted everything from pictures of themselves as babies to notifications about what they'd eaten for breakfast that morning, all for the world to see. It had been Kasumi who had come up with the compromise—maintain the database, but allow it to be accessible to the general public.
Unfortunately, allowing the database to be accessible to the general public came with a price—the only information allowed to be listed now was name, alias, superpower, gender, living or deceased, and approximate age range. Completely pointless when it came to actually investigating people. Max halfheartedly typed in Flamethrower to the query search. Six results popped up, and in spite of himself, Max had to laugh. For someone who wanted to be Gatlon City's newest supervillain, he sure hadn't picked the most original name.
Max knew that Flashpoint's team had certainly already perused each profile, probably at length, but he couldn't resist delving in and taking a peek for himself, just in case they'd missed something. He hadn't seen the face of the Flamethrower who'd been at the sandwich shop, but he knew he could immediately eliminate the two female prodigies on the list, as well as the one whose power was creating harmless blue and pink flames for visual effect.
Of the three remaining Flamethrowers, one of them was in his sixties, one in his thirties, and one a teenager. The database wasn't allowed to list origin stories or dates that prodigies had received their powers, but it did specify when each piece of data had been entered, and only the teenager was a recent entry.
This is stupid, thought Max. Did he really think he'd find something the experienced team of investigators had missed?
Unless…
Max cleared the search and typed in "fire manipulation" instead. Instantly, thousands of results appeared, and he groaned. He filtered the search by male and living, but those qualifiers didn't filter the search down as much as he'd hoped.
Maybe I should just focus on my actual case, he thought dejectedly, clearing the search and typing bladed fingertips instead. The results were smaller this time, and shrank even more when he narrowed the age range to 10-20.
Blade. Given Name: Amil Zahra (M, 10-20). Uses fingertips to carve intricate designs into wood and metal surfaces. (Living)
The Fisherman. Given Name: Peter Marsh (M, 10-20). Can spear a fish with his pointer finger, which can transform into an elongated blade. (Living)
Axblade. Given Name: Keyland Borchi (F, 10-20). Can cut down trees by pressing fingertip to a tree's trunk. (Living)
Dagger. Given Name: Yasmin Wong (F, 10-20). All ten fingers are sharp blades from the knuckle to the tip. (Living)
Max stopped there. Sharp blades from the knuckles to the tip? That definitely sounded like his suspect.
Encouraged by the lead, Max copied Dagger's information down onto one of the random papers strewn across his desk, then thought better of it and entered the information into the newly added Notepad feature of his communication band. He would start gathering more information on Dagger when he went into Headquarters tomorrow.
He checked the time before closing down the laptop. It was nearly five in the morning. Maybe he would catch a few more hours of sleep, then head over to HQ around eight or nine. He'd see if he could do any more research on Dagger—any information the Renegades had held on prodigies before the Supernova was still stored on the Renegades' private servers, so if Dagger had been around for more than three years, there was a chance that he could find some more information on her.
He'd only have a couple hours to do that, though, because at noon, he was meeting Maggie at City Park. He felt briefly guilty for the way his eagerness to see Maggie again took precedence over his excitement over finding a lead on his case. This was his job. He'd wanted to be an actual active Renegade for as long as he could remember. He should be taking his duties seriously, putting them as his priority over everything else. Especially if he ever wanted to be allowed to investigate the bigger cases.
But he and Maggie had planned out their meet at the park the day he'd shown her the watch factory, the day they'd made the bracelets. He had no way of contacting her to cancel the date—well, not like it was a date date, but the meeting—and he certainly wasn't about to just not show up.
It would be okay. In all honesty, there probably wouldn't be all that much information about Dagger available, and he'd be done with his investigations in under half an hour. And if he wasn't—well, maybe he could persuade Maggie to help him with the investigations.