Max scowled at the empty guest room after checking every room in the house for the third time. He should've expected this. He should've known Maggie would be too stubborn to let him convince her to wait until morning to go after Nova. He should've stayed awake longer after returning home with her, listening for signs of her sneaking out.
Because he was pretty sure that's what she'd done.
Obstinate, hard-headed Maggie, he thought, though he couldn't help being impressed by her determination. Whatever Nova had taken from her must've been something really special. It surprised him that Maggie would have such an item, since she didn't seem to be the sentimental type. Or maybe it wasn't sentimental; maybe it was just something she needed for some reason.
Or maybe it's something that's worth a lot of money. Something she stole. Max fought hard to dispel the thought. He didn't like thinking that Maggie might've been carrying around some valuable stolen item in her pocket, but he had to admit that it was a possibility. If the item was something that had been reported as stolen, that would explain Maggie's urgency to find Nova as soon as possible, before she had a chance to turn it in to HQ. What if it's something from the watch factory?
Max grimaced and shook his head. Fear of being incriminated wasn't the only reason Maggie might be so determined to get her item back. She probably just really hated the fact that Nova had taken something of hers. And put her to sleep, no less. Max still had a hard time processing the fact that Nova had done that. Nova usually reserved her sleep-inducing power for fights against criminals—actual dangerous people who she was trying to subdue and arrest. Once or twice, she'd used it with permission to help a stressed, anxious Renegade get some well-needed rest. But to do it to Maggie, just because, what, Maggie had tried to steal her bracelet? Or because Nova had wanted to steal Maggie's item? Max wasn't sure which version of the story to believe, and honestly in both versions the action seemed pretty out of character.
He didn't have an investigative shift until noon, but he rode to HQ with Adrian for nine o'clock. HQ was thought to be the safest place for him at the moment, and he didn't feel like bumming around at home anyway. Of course the first thing Adrian did was ask where Maggie was, and Max muttered that she must've left after waking up from her Nova-induced sleep.
Adrian gave him a sideways glance. "Are you still mad at Nova for putting her to sleep?" he asked. Not judgmental, just curious.
Max shrugged, pulling his shoulders all the way up to his ears. The honest answer was yes, he was still a little ticked off at Nova. But there were other emotions at play too. Bafflement over why she did it, curiosity and trepidation about what she took, and frustration over the fact that this incident was only serving to make Maggie and Nova dislike each other even more. If they really were sisters like he suspected, they should be ecstatic to discover that. Nova should be overjoyed to find out that Evie didn't die as a baby, and Maggie should be excited to learn that the older sister she'd only read about on paper was alive and well.
But neither one would be too happy to discover who their sister was, and that would throw a damper over the whole thing.
Nova was waiting for them when they arrived at HQ, along with Oscar, Ruby, Danna, and Narcissa. She greeted Adrian with a smile and a tender touch on the arm, but seemed to intentionally avoid looking at Max.
Max inwardly sighed. He wanted to talk to her, but didn't want to put her on the spot in front of her whole team. Not to mention the fact that the idea of confronting her put his stomach in knots. He and Nova had always gotten along great, holding a mutual admiration and respect for one another in addition to an easygoing friendship. He didn't want to make things awkward between them by expressing his irritation over her actions, or by accusing her of stealing from Maggie.
But things were already awkward, he supposed, and he really needed to get the full story to understand what had happened. "Nova?" he asked, interrupting the team's small talk about a giant burger Oscar had apparently eaten for lunch the other day. "Can we talk privately for a moment?"
Nova nodded, resignation written across her face. She'd clearly been expecting this moment.
They stepped a few feet away from the others while the rest of the team continued the conversation. "Max," Nova began. "I really am sorry."
"I know," Max waved away the apology, eager to move on to more important things. "When Maggie woke up, she was looking for something. She kept saying you took it from her."
"Oh?" Nova's face betrayed nothing. "What was it?"
"She didn't tell me. She just said it was something important. She thought you took it to get even with her for when the time she took your bracelet years ago."
Now something registered on Nova's face—surprise. "When I got arrested for being Nightmare and she kept my bracelet for herself instead of turning it over to Artifacts? Sweet rot. That was forever ago."
"Don't try to change the subject," Max chided. "Did you take something from her last night?"
"Yeah," said Nova. "My own bracelet. She'd stolen it off my wrist and was hiding it in her pocket. She refused to give it back to me, and I told her I'd put her to sleep if I had to. Which… I realized after the fact was definitely a step too far. But anyway, once she was asleep I took my bracelet back. That must've been what she was talking about."
Max studied Nova's face, trying to analyze whether she was telling the truth. It would certainly explain why Maggie had never answered his questions about what Nova took, but he didn't think it would explain Maggie's urgency to get the item back as soon as possible. The bracelet rightfully belonged to Nova and hadn't been in Maggie's possession for years. Why would she all the sudden have a desperate need for it now?
"Are you sure you didn't take anything else?" he asked.
"Max, why would I have any use for whatever random trinkets Magpie keeps in her pockets? She's the one who's into pickpocketing. Not me. And I'm definitely not petty enough to want to get even with a child over an offense that happened nearly four years ago."
Max scowled over Nova's description of Maggie as a child, but he had to admit that her defense did make sense. Maybe Maggie's furor over having been put to sleep had caused her to overreact. Or maybe, like he'd first suggested, whatever item she thought Nova had taken had just fallen out of her pocket, either when Nova took the bracelet back or when Hugh carried her to the guest room. He would make sure to take another look around the upstairs floor when he got home, to make sure he hadn't overlooked anything.
Nova rejoined her team, and a moment later the six of them headed out for patrol duty, leaving Max to figure out what he was going to do with the three hours he had before his investigative shift started. Ideally, he'd love to find Maggie, but since he didn't know where she was and her theater was quite a few blocks away, it didn't seem like the best idea at the moment.
He was still hovering in indecision when he heard a ping from his communicator wristband. It was a message from Sterling: Hey, Ruby said you're at HQ! Jade & I are in the training hall, come join us!
Max allowed a small smile to take over his face as he headed to the elevator that would bring him down into the sublevels, where the Renegades' enormous training facility was held. Spending a couple hours goofing off with his friends might be exactly what he needed.
"And he's on the chase… he's catching up… rounding the corner now… and yessss! The Silver Snake triumphs once again!" Sterling narrated his own actions as he half ran, half flew around the obstacle-ridden exercise track, culminating with a full-on tackle of his brother.
"Oh yeah? Watch this." Jade wriggled out from under Sterling and pulled a harmless-looking plant out of the small knapsack he was carrying. When he pushed it closer to his brother, the plant seemed to grow a pair of green spindly arms, one of which wrapped itself halfway around Sterling's neck, while the other delivered a sharp punch to his nose. It would've looked painful if the plant's arms had been remotely strong.
Max hid his giggles until he saw that Sterling was full-on laughing. "Dude, you know I could snap these little twigs with two fingers, right?" Sterling asked, gently prying the green vines away. "It's not much of a defense."
"I'm working on it, okay?" Jade protested. "Some superpowers require a little more creativity than others. I'm sure someday I'll be able to smash villains to the ground with my plant powers."
"That's the spirit," said Max. "Green Machine's plant powers are not to be messed with."
"Hey," said Sterling, jumping to his feet and already starting to glide toward the climbing wall. "We have what, like an hour left before Max's shift starts? What do you say we take a turn on the wall? Gotta show you my insane mountaineering skills."
Max opened his mouth to respond that that sounded like fun, but before he got any words out, a message from Hugh beeped through on his communication band. Max, come up to my office immediately. No further explanation was given.
Max showed the message to his friends, whose faces became a mirror of his own worry. "That sounds pretty serious," Jade commented. "Do you have any idea what it's about?"
He shook his head. He couldn't think of anything he'd done recently that he would be getting in trouble for, unless his dad had somehow found out about him following Maggie down the street in the middle of the night. But he didn't think that was the sort of thing Hugh would interrupt both his own and Max's work day for—unless he really was that worried about Flamethrower.
Max felt a stab of terror in his gut as a new thought came to him. Had there been another Flamethrower attack? Adrian's team was out on patrol duty. What if Flamethrower had decided to target them as a way of getting to Max?
Adrian would be fine in a fight against Flamethrower, he assured himself. Especially if he has his team with him. They all know what they're up against. They wouldn't hold back.
"Do you want us to go up there with you?" Sterling asked.
Max shook his head. If this did happen to be about running after Maggie, he didn't want his friends to hear that conversation. They'd definitely walk away with some wrong ideas. "I'll be fine," he assured them. "See you guys later."
He rode up to the fifty-ninth floor of the building, where the four Council members' lavish offices were located, each in its own wing branching off from a breathtaking lobby. There had been a decent amount of power redistribution after the Supernova, resulting in the Council no longer being the ultimate authorities over everything, but Captain Chromium, the Dread Warden, Tsunami and Thunderbird still enjoyed their luxury.
He turned down the corridor labeled Captain Chromium, and a moment later was outside his dad's door. To his surprise, when he entered the room, he found not just his dad but also Flashpoint, LiquiSquid, Dune and the Cheery Reaper—members of the investigative team that was heading the Flamethrower case. All five of them were clustered around the computer on Hugh's desk.
"Max!" Hugh beckoned him over and pointed to the screen. The moment Max saw what they were all looking at, he felt a shudder course through his entire body.
The screen was displaying an image of a tall, muscular man with vivid orange hair and a proud expression. In the picture, the man was wearing a Renegades patrol uniform, but suddenly all Max could see was a room filling with flames as the man's figure quickly became obscured by gray smoke.
This was Flamethrower.
"Do you recognize this man?" Hugh asked.
Max nodded, still shuddering at the memories the picture had brought up. "That's him. That's Flamethrower. How did you find him?"
"The Captain told us he'd received a tip that Flamethrower used to be a Renegade," Flashpoint explained. "So we combed the database for fire manipulators, and most of them were people we already knew or people who couldn't be him due to race or gender or the ways they can use their powers. But eventually this guy came up. His name's Phillip Batcher, and he became a Renegade at the last trials that were ever held. He went by Blowtorch back then, which is why we were never able to find him under his current alias."
Max let those names roll around in his head. Phillip Batcher. Blowtorch. Although Max had never been allowed to attend the Renegade trials in person due to his unfortunate propensity for unintentionally stealing the powers of any prodigy who came too close to him, they had always been televised, and he'd watched the recordings over and over—because it's not like there was much else to do in the quarantine day after day. A fire elemental from the last Renegade trials, the one Nova became a Renegade in…
The problem was, the parts of the trials that he'd watched over and over were usually the parts he found the most exciting, such as when someone was challenged and had to duel against an established Renegade. As a fire elemental, Flamethrower—or Blowtorch, as he'd apparently been called back then—would've been an easy shoo-in and wouldn't have needed to go head-to-head with anybody.
He thought he vaguely remembered a couple fire elementals during those particular trials, but he couldn't remember anything about them.
"Whose team did he join?" Max asked. "Was he part of a patrol unit?"
"He joined a team that was relatively new at the time, led by Anthill," Hugh replied. "The problem is, Anthill died during the Second Battle for Gatlon, and his two other teammates have since left Gatlon City and are no longer in contact with us. So we know Flamethrower's identity, but we still don't have very many leads toward finding him."
"Knowing his identity really does help, though," spoke up Dune, a squat man whose body appeared to be made entirely out of sand. "The more we know about a person, the more we can deduce about where they may be hiding or what they may be likely to do."
"And that's precisely what I want all investigative units to be focusing on until he's caught," said Hugh, his jaw set and face hardened in determination. "We need to exhaust every possible alley of information and take this villain down as quickly as we can."
Max's ears perked up. "All investigative units? Does this mean my team is now officially assigned to the Flamethrower case?"
Hugh sighed. "Yes, but only the computer and paperwork side of things. I'll put a few other teams on that as well. Your teams can delve through the records and share your findings with the field units."
Max's heart sank. He understood his dad's reason for not wanting him in the field, especially with this particular case. But going through old records wasn't nearly as exciting as stakeouts and espionage.
Still, the fact that he was being trusted with any part of the Flamethrower investigation was a big deal. "I'll get right on that," he promised, feeling optimistic for the first time since Flamethrower's attack on the abandoned building. If the entire Renegades syndicate was on the lookout for Flamethrower and had uncovered his identity, that could only mean one thing: Flamethrower's days of inciting fear all over the city were about to come to an end.