"And you are… captured!" Jade triumphantly slid his game piece across the board to intersect with Max's piece, scooping Max's piece up with his other hand and placing it in the corral with the rest of the pieces he'd taken during the game. "Ha! Yes! I win!"

"Finally," Sterling groaned good-naturedly, rolling over on the bottom bunk so he could see Jade and Max better. "You're done. Right?" All of his pieces had been taken within the first ten minutes of the game, so he'd spent the last half hour just waiting around for one of the other two to be eliminated.

"Yeah, we're done," Max admitted, making a face at Jade as he scooped up a handful of the tiny pieces and started pouring them back into the drawstring bag they'd come in. "Green Machine wins once again."

Jade smirked proudly and pumped his fist in the air. "I do believe I'm still the undefeated champion."

"Yeah, yeah." Sterling rolled off the bed and helped Max and Jade gather up the escaped game pieces, which were trying to burrow their way into the carpet to be stepped on by unsuspecting feet; the action cards, which had been spread all across the floor; and the board itself, which needed to be taken apart into its four pieces before it could be put back in the box. "But you were playing as the Anarchists, so is that really a good thing?"

"Hey, the Anarchists weren't all bad," Jade asserted, shifting the deck of cards into a stack and placing a rubber band around them. "Rather be them than the villain gangs." He nodded to the pieces Max had been using.

"The villain gangs probably weren't all that bad either," Max pointed out, adding his pieces to the bag that held Jade's.

His friends gaped at him. "You're saying that your Roach parents who threw you off a bridge weren't all that bad?" Sterling asked incredulously.

Max shrugged. "I mean, I'm not saying everyone was decent, but from what I've heard, the Age of Anarchy was not a nice time to live through. A lot of those people were probably just doing what they thought they had to in order to survive." He'd been thinking about this a lot lately. Ever since he'd met Maggie. Despite finding out that Maggie's theft of Nova's bracelet after Nova's arrest was the reason Nova referred to her as a thief, Max wasn't entirely convinced that Maggie's thieving ways were behind her. But he also knew that she had no family and had always been evasive about where she lived. If Maggie was still stealing, it wasn't just for the heck of it.

Sterling listed his head to the side. "I mean… I guess," he relented. "Still, the Renegades are the clear best, no comparison." He scooped up his own pieces and placed them in the bag.

"I'm actually kind of surprised the game isn't rigged to have the Renegade player win every time," Max commented, placing the bag, cards, and game board back into the box labeled Battle for Gatlon. "I mean, this game was made before the Supernova, and society in general was pretty anti-villain back then."

"Yeah, but then it'd be no fun," Jade pointed out. "Playing a board game where one person is always going to be the undisputed winner, no matter what? Boring!"

"You've got a point there," Max relented. He set the lid back on the box and pushed the entire box under Ruby's bed, which was where his friends and their older sister stored their assortment of board games and knickknacks. There was barely enough floor space in the room for Max and Jade to sit between the two beds, which was why Sterling was lying on his bed instead of joining them on the floor. Despite the cramped quarters, though, Max enjoyed spending time in this room. It brought back fond memories of his first few weeks out of the quarantine, his first times hanging out with Sterling and Jade, his first taste of what it would be like to live with a family.

"What do you guys want to do next?" Sterling asked. "Do we have time to head over to the park and kick around a soccer ball?"

Jade consulted his wristband and shook his head. "Mom's gonna want us to eat dinner before patrol duty, so that plus the time it'll take to actually get to the park and back, we'd be left with ten or twenty minutes, tops."

"Where are you guys patrolling tonight?" Max asked.

"Over by the flea market on North Oldam Road. Flamethrower seems to be targeting small businesses, so the patrol units are canvassing the areas of the city where he's likely to show up." Jade shrugged. "Of course, there've only been two attacks so far, so I don't know if we can start deducing a pattern so quickly."

"I think the idea is more to have us spread out all over the city," Sterling countered. "Which has pretty much always been the idea, because even disregarding Flamethrower, you never know where a crime might occur." He turned to Max. "Do you have any new leads on your convenience store robbers?"

"I think I know the identity of one of them, but I haven't managed to track down where she currently lives," Max explained. "The report said that one of the robbers had knife blades as fingers, and seemed pretty young. There's a twelve-year-old girl named Dagger who fits that description, but I haven't had any luck in finding her."

"A twelve-year old?" Jade shrieked. "You're trying to apprehend and arrest a twelve-year-old?"

"A twelve-year-old who held her bladed fingers to someone's throat, yeah," said Max defensively. "What, we're not going to imprison her or anything. We just need to bring her in for a trial and let her know she can't be threatening people's lives like that."

And then what? He wondered. He assumed the Renegades would just let her go, under the assumption that the trial would have scared her enough that she wouldn't want to keep up her criminal behavior. But what if criminal behavior was all she knew how to do? If they just dumped her right back out into the same place she'd been before, wouldn't she be most likely to just go right back to the same old lifestyle?

"Hang on," said Sterling. "Did you say this girl has bladed fingers?"

Max sighed. His friends may be superheroes themselves now, but that didn't stop them from becoming enamored with every new power they heard about. "Yes, each of her fingers is like a small knife," he explained. "And as far as I can tell, she has no way of covering them up or changing them to actual flesh, so that must make everyday life pretty difficult for her."

"I think I've seen her!" Sterling exclaimed excitedly.

Max gaped at him. "You have?"

"Yeah, last year at the Hero Parade. Remember, Jade? I pointed her out to you?"

Jade shook his head. "You pointed out that dude who had snakes coming out of his sleeves."

"Yeah, but I also pointed out the knife girl, remember? Oh, wait… maybe that was when you'd gone off to talk with that cute girl."

"Sounds about right," Jade replied with a grin. "Hey, speaking of cute girls… Max, whatever happened with you and that girl we met at the pawn shop? The one you took out to lunch?" He raised his eyebrows suggestively and Max felt his cheeks warm up.

"Nothing," he said. "I mean, we're friends… ish… we've hung out a couple times… but… anyway, we're getting off track. Sterling, tell me about the girl with the bladed fingers."

"I think it's the same one you're talking about." Sterling scrunched up his face in concentration. "She had black hair, pale skin, about this tall…" he held his hand up to his chest. "She was with this older girl. That's the one I noticed first, actually. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and thought she was one of the floats, because her head was, like—" He glanced around the room. "As big as the bunk bed, at least, and kind of hovering over the crowd. I was wondering how one of the floats had gotten into the crowd, so I looked closer, and that's when I realized she was just a regular prodigy. And then I saw the girl next to her and noticed she had bladed fingers."

"Huh," said Max. "And they were definitely there together? Not just random people who happened to be standing next to each other?"

"I'm pretty sure they were together. Hey, do you think you could track down the knife girl if you track down the balloon head one?"

"That's what I'm thinking." Max grinned, feeling the surge of adrenaline he always got when he found a new lead on a case. He glanced over at the small tablet, plugged in and charging on the dresser. "Mind if I use that?"

Jade handed it to him, and Max immediately navigated to the prodigy database, where he typed in balloon head and filtered the search to include only females. The first result that popped up was Eminya Reinal, alias Balloon Girl, whose power was the ability to inflate her head and levitate several feet above the ground. "That's got to be her," Sterling confirmed. "See if you can find out anything else about her."

Max had already noticed the date Eminya's powers had been logged into the system—a good eight years ago. She'd been a prodigy before the Supernova, and her age range—20 – 30—put her as a prime candidate for someone who may have once tried out to be a Renegade. Come to think of it, Max vaguely remembered someone with a talent like that trying out the last year the Renegades had held trials—though he was pretty sure she hadn't made it. "I'll look her up in the Renegades' secure database next time I go into HQ," he told his friends. "If she ever tried out to be a Renegade, they'll have loads of information about her. And…" he trailed off, a realization hitting him. "the Rejects!"

Sterling and Jade stared at him, nonplussed. "The what?"

"The Rejects. Narcissa—Mirror Walker—she used to be part of this gang called the Rejects. All the prodigies who were rejected by the Renegades back when the Renegades used to hold trials to determine who could get in. A lot of them left Gatlon City after the Supernova, but I don't think all of them did. Maybe she was once one of them. Maybe Mirror Walker knows her."

Sterling shrugged. "Sounds like kind of a long shot, but I suppose it's possible."

"I'll look into it," Max promised. "I'll look her up at Headquarters, and ask Narcissa next time I see her."

"Great," said Jade. "So, now that we have all that out of the way, let's move on to the important question." He motioned to Max's left wrist. "Why are you wearing a bracelet?"

"I was wondering that too," Sterling agreed. "I saw it the other day, but I forgot to ask about it, and now you're still wearing it, so… what's the significance?"

Max looked down at the ruby bracelet he'd made with Maggie. He'd gotten so used to wearing it, he hardly thought about it anymore. "I… made it," he told them. "Ruby gave me the gems, and I used one of Cyanide's adhesives to stick them onto the yarn."

"I figured you'd gotten the rubies from Ruby," said Jade, rolling his eyes. "But why? Are you trying to start some new fashion statement or something?"

Max could feel his cheeks start to heat up again as he explained, "One of my friends said she was interested in jewelry making, so I made some jewelry with her. We made these."

Sterling and Jade exchanged identical mischievous grins. "Was it the girl from the pawn shop?" Jade asked.

Max willed his cheeks not to go any redder as he replied, "Yes, it was Maggie."

"Oooooh!" his friends chorused. "Getting pretty serious, huh?" teased Sterling.

"It's not like that," Max insisted. "We're just friends."

Jade raised his eyebrows skeptically. "But let's face it, you totally like her."

Max didn't reply. He couldn't explain exactly how he felt about Maggie. He liked talking with her. He liked being around her. It felt good to see her smile and know that he was the cause of that. And he'd felt a strange sort of pull toward her since the first time he'd met her.

Did that mean he liked her? Liked her in the way the twins were implying?

"I don't know," he admitted. "I like hanging out with her, at least."

"She's not too bad-looking either," Sterling commented. "A little short for my taste, but that works well for you."

Max scowled at the good-natured jab about his height. "I don't think a person's height is the most important thing to consider in a relationship."

Sterling shrugged. "It makes a difference, though. As much as everyone wants to think they're not biased based on looks, it's human nature."

"If I was a face-changer," said Jade, "I'd first go out just looking like myself, or maybe a little uglier, and I'd survey all the girls about what their ideal guy would look like. Then I'd create a face based on all of their combined feedback, and all the girls would fall in love with me."

"Wow, that's just great, Jade," said Max sarcastically. "Pretending to be someone you're not is the perfect way to start a relationship."

Jade laughed. "I'm just kidding. But seriously, I wonder if any face-changers have ever done that."

Neither Max nor Sterling had a chance to answer, because just then, there was a knock at the bedroom door. A moment later, it creaked open to reveal the smiling face of Jade and Sterling's mom. "Dinner's almost ready," she told the boys. "Why don't you take the desk chair out to the kitchen with you. Oscar's coming over too, so there'll be eight of us tonight."

Max smiled at her as he and his friends all stood up. "Sure thing, Mrs. Tucker." The first few times he'd hung out with Sterling and Jade after moving into the Mayor's Mansion with his family, he'd felt a little guilty when their mom had invited him to stay for dinner, not wanting to eat too much of the food that rightfully belonged to Sterling, Jade, Ruby, their parents, and their grandmother. But the Tuckers had always encouraged him to eat as much as he wanted, reassuring him that they thought of him as family and that he was always welcome to fully participate in whatever they were doing. Max loved the Tuckers, especially Mrs. Tucker, who was the closest thing to a mom he'd ever had.

"Smells delicious," he commented, breathing in the aroma of something home-cooked and meaty. He grinned at his friends. "You guys are going to have plenty of fuel in you tonight for catching bad guys."

"Yep," said Jade with a grin. "We'd better eat up. If we're lucky, we might even manage to catch ourselves a Flamethrower."