Runaways

by Christopher Golden

  Stunned, the girl seemed caught between wanting to shout and wanting to collapse. Karolina took her by the hand. “Come with us if you want to live.”

  The girl’s mouth opened. She took a quick glance over her shoulder at the violence still unfolding, and then she looked at Karolina and laughed.

  “Really?” she said. “Terminator quotes? That’s the best you can do?”

  Nico took the girl by the elbow. “How about we run?”

  “Running’s good!” the girl replied.

  Then all four of them were rushing back along the corridor, squeezing through that rust-frozen door, and hustling up long flights of steps toward the surface. Gert handed the girl her hexed and shattered phone and tugged out her own, trying to call Chase.

  “No service, no service, no service,” she said, almost a chant of its own.

  “We need him. We need the Leapfrog,” Nico said.

  “She knows,” Karolina chided.

  “What is a Leapfrog?” the rescued girl asked.

  The second they emerged onto the upper level’s train platform, Gert’s phone vibrated with a string of text messages that hadn’t reached her underground, all of them from Chase worriedly asking if she was all right.

  “Two bars!” Gert announced triumphantly.

  She called Chase. He answered before it could even ring and she started shouting the address at him. Gert had texted him updates while they’d been following the hexed phone’s GPS, so he was close.

  Voices shouted up from below. Hooded Pride wannabes or weird super-powered teleporting bastards? They couldn’t be sure, but either way they were being pursued.

  “Make it quick!” she shouted to Chase on the phone.

  Then they were rushing up the last flight of stairs. Gert stuffed her phone back into her pocket and turned to the girl they’d saved. “What’s your name?”

  “Allis,” she said, red hair covering half her face. Her eyes were wide with shock and she stumbled a little. Karolina caught her by the arm and helped her keep climbing the stairs.

  “I’m Allis,” she repeated.

  “You’re safe, Allis,” Karolina said. “I’ve got you.”

  Something passed between them, almost like they’d met before. Gert also studied Allis for a moment and thought she did seem sort of familiar, but in a good way, like maybe they’d gone to kindergarten together or something. Gert didn’t have time to sort it out, because by then Nico had reached the top.

  “Go, go!” Nico said, holding the door for them.

  They raced into the street, shouts still coming up from below. Karolina and Nico dragged the rusty accordion gate back across the doorway and Karolina started using her powers to fuse it shut. Gert whipped her head back and forth, but saw no sign of the Leapfrog.

  “Chase!” she shouted to the night sky.

  As if in reply, the Frog appeared, bounding over the fence from the empty lot across the street. The hatch hissed open even before it landed, and as the Leapfrog settled to the street, Gert ran for it. Molly leaped from the open hatch, fists up like an old-time boxer, ready for a fight. With the shouts from behind her, Gert realized she might get it.

  “Who do I hit?” Molly asked as Gert reached her.

  “Sit tight, kiddo. You might get your chance.”

  They stood together, watching the subway entrance as Karolina helped Allis onto the Frog, with Nico bringing up the rear. Disappointed, Molly lingered another moment until Gert scooted her inside. A hooded figure smashed against the inside of the rusty subway gate, but as Gert watched, the guy in the hood began to scream as he was enveloped by a growing sheath of ice.

  That’s it, she thought. I’m out.

  But as she turned to jump on board, she saw another figure hurrying toward the Leapfrog from a graffitied bus shelter half a block away. Dark hair, ragged on one side but shaved on the other, the guy looked maybe sixteen or seventeen, but it was hard to tell the way he was staggering, and with his face swollen and bloody. He had one hand on his abdomen and with the other he reached out.

  “Please!” he called. “Don’t go!”

  From inside the Frog, Gert’s friends were shouting at her. Time to go. They didn’t know what they might be up against fifteen seconds from now and didn’t want to find out. But the bleeding kid tried to break into a run and instead he went sprawling onto the street. Gert dashed to him.

  She knelt by him, took his arm, helped him up.

  “We’ve got to go,” she said.

  He glanced up at her. His eyes looked purple in the dark, and they were pleading with her.

  “Don’t leave me. Please. You’ve gotta help…”

  He started to pass out. Gert panicked, propped him up, and started to drag him. She shouted for Nico, but before she could even get the name out, she felt the burden lifted from her.

  “Get his feet,” Molly said, taking the stranger under the arms.

  She looked ridiculous, this eleven-year-old somehow toting a much bigger guy across the pavement toward the open hatch of the Leapfrog. Gert grabbed the boy’s ankles and together they hustled him to the Frog and hoisted him inside. Someone shouted from behind them and she looked back to see a face behind the rusty subway gate. Ice had covered most of it, and now the ice shattered and the gate began to screech as it was dragged back.

  “Move it, Gert!” Nico snapped, grabbing her wrist and yanking her inside.

  The hatch closed. Gert hadn’t even taken a seat when Chase put the Frog in gear, and then they were leaping away. She fell into her seat, struggled with the belt, and when she finally looked up, everyone but Chase was staring at the bloody boy sprawled unconscious on the floor at their feet. Instead of just rescuing Allis from ritual murder, they’d picked up a spare, but Gert knew none of them would argue. This was what they did, saving kids who were in danger, getting them off the streets.

  “Great,” Nico said. “Now what are we supposed to do?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Chase said happily. “We’re going home.”

  “Home?” Karolina asked.

  Molly crossed her arms, a satisfied expression on her face. “Chase and I have a surprise for you.”

  Gert perked up. She glanced toward the cockpit, where Chase focused on piloting the Frog. Whatever this surprise was, he hadn’t shared it with her, and she was supposed to be his girlfriend.

  That’s the point of surprises, she reminded herself.

  Yet somehow it still bothered her. Gert didn’t like people in general very much, mostly because people kept secrets. She preferred animals—they had nothing to hide. People, though…people have their secrets. She glanced around at her friends and wondered if any of them were as untrusting of surprises as she was.

  Secrets, after all, had gotten them all into their current situation.

  Secrets had ruined their lives.

  Gert didn’t like surprises at all.

  Karolina usually preferred to fly under her own power. The Leapfrog made her nervous. She didn’t like being cooped up inside the machine, and it always seemed a bit uncanny to her that the ride could be so smooth when you were on board the vehicle, and yet from outside it looked so ungainly as it hopped and glided over the city.

  “This is…” Allis whispered, staring around at them all in amazement. “I mean, thank you, of course. Oh my gosh, if you hadn’t shown up when you did, those freaks were going to kill me. They were actually going to kill me, weren’t they?”

  Nico leaned back in her seat. “Yes, we think they were.” The Staff of One had vanished again, reabsorbed into her body, although Karolina hadn’t seen it happen.

  Allis put a hand over her mouth like she might puke, but after a moment she took a deep breath and just nodded.

  “You guys saved my life,” she said in airy wonder. She tucked a lock of straight, shoulder-length red hair behind her ear. “If not for you all…” Allis shuddered. “Who are you, anyway? What were you doing there? I’m Allis.…Did I say that already?”

  Karo
lina smiled gently at her. “You did. And you’re safe, Allis.”

  “What’s your name?” Allis asked.

  Nico shifted forward. “Maybe we should hold off on that for the moment—”

  “Karolina. My name is Karolina.”

  Allis smiled. “It’s nice to meet you.” She glanced around the ship. “All of you.”

  Nico rolled her eyes, then pointed at the boy Gert and Molly had hauled aboard. “What about this kid, Allis? Have you seen him before? Maybe he was abducted too and got away?”

  Allis frowned. “I think I’d remember that hair.”

  “I guess we’ll find out who he is when he wakes up,” Gert said.

  They all fell silent for a few moments. Karolina stole several glances at Allis, worried the girl might be in shock. Allis had blood on her wrists where the cuffs had chafed, and for the first time Karolina noticed the bruising around her left eye and some blood in her hair.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, gesturing toward that blood. “Your head?”

  Allis touched the spot and winced. “Just a bump, I think. I don’t think I need stitches or anything. But I might have a concussion.”

  Nico studied her. “Is there somewhere we should take you? There’s no reason you have to come with us. We could drop you home…or with the police, to make a report, although you can’t say anything about us.”

  “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything,” Gert corrected, her green eyes narrowed.

  Allis hugged herself. “You guys saved me. If it’s gonna get you in trouble, I won’t say a word. Anyway, I have zero interest in seeing the police. They’d only try to make me go home, and I can’t do that.”

  She hesitated, glancing around. “I won’t do that. You can judge me all you want—”

  “Judge you?” Chase said from the front. “Trust me, you’re not going to get any judgment from this group.”

  Karolina smiled. “You’re a runaway?”

  Allis seemed ashamed, but she nodded.

  Karolina took her hand. “You’re safe with us.”

  “I hate to break up the affirmations back there,” Chase said, “but without being rude, can one of you blindfold Allis while we’re arriving?” He glanced over his shoulder at the newcomer. “‘Secret headquarters’ and all.”

  Super serious, Allis nodded. “Of course.”

  Nobody had anything to blindfold her with, so after a few seconds Molly took off her hat and handed it over. Allis pulled it on and drew it low over her eyes. It looked ridiculous but it did the trick, and they all sat there as the Leapfrog made a final jump. It swayed a bit when the thrusters kicked in, letting them descend slowly instead of just dropping.

  Molly was peering out a window. “See the giant elephant? How cool is that?”

  Chase clicked his tongue. “Molly, hush with the spoilers. Secret headquarters, remember?”

  Karolina unlatched her seat belt and moved over beside Molly, stretching out her long legs. The Leapfrog would be running in stealth mode, pretty much invisible from the outside, but that didn’t prevent them from looking out from within. Karolina blinked in surprise as they descended past the fake mastodons outside the La Brea Tar Pits museum, and then she gasped in surprise as they dropped down through the tar itself.

  “Chase, what are you doing?” Gert asked.

  He didn’t reply, but a moment later they’d somehow emerged from the black morass and were inside a huge cavern. As the Leapfrog landed, lights began to blink on throughout the cavern and computer screens winked on. Elegant tapestries hung on the cavern walls and there were arched doorways leading out of this main chamber, like something out of a medieval castle—if it weren’t for the stalagmites jutting up from the ground at the edges of the room. It had been turned into someone’s hideout, but this was nothing like the S.H.I.E.L.D./Hydra secret base they’d had to flee earlier in the day. This was something beautiful and mysterious.

  “Holy crap,” Nico muttered, looking out the opposite window. “This is some James Bond villain’s secret lair, right?”

  “Not exactly,” Chase replied, as the Leapfrog’s hydraulics hissed and the vehicle settled on its legs.

  On the floor of the Frog, the unconscious, bloody boy groaned and began to stir, but did not wake.

  Allis took off Molly’s hat and handed it back to her. “Wait a second. Are you guys squatting in a Super Villain’s lair? That’s nuts!”

  “It’s ours now,” Molly said, tugging her hat back on.

  “Come on, Bruiser,” Gert said to the younger girl, “you can do better than that. What is this place?”

  Karolina barely heard the question. Her eyes had locked onto a raised area, tucked away in a recession off to the right of their landing pad. Lights had flickered on as if in welcome and now she saw there were paintings there, a kind of intimate portrait gallery—and even from here she could make out one of the portraits, and knew who must be featured in the others.

  “Mom,” she whispered.

  The Leapfrog’s hatch popped open and Karolina was the first to jump out. Allis and the unconscious kid were forgotten as she rushed across the cavern. There were no streaks of color around her, no pastels painting the air. This was just Karolina, a girl who’d once loved her parents and then learned they’d been horrible people all along. A girl who’d once felt loved by her parents and then learned they’d only ever cared about fame and youth and only wanted her for her publicity value. But she couldn’t forget the way they’d made her feel in the days before she’d learned the truth, in the years when she’d believed she’d had the perfect family.

  She slowed as she went up the steps toward that little portrait gallery. She forced herself to scan the other paintings, to look at the portraits of the Wilders and the Steins, the Hayeses and the Minorus, the Yorkes…Yorkeses? Whatever Gert’s parents would’ve been called. Finally she let herself stand in front of the painting of the Deans, her mother and father, and she felt herself begin to shake. Tears sprang to her eyes and she wiped them away, furious with herself for crying over them and furious with them for making her cry. They weren’t worth it.

  But her childhood? The beautiful thing her life had been in the time before the truth?

  That was worth crying over.

  “Hey,” Nico said softly.

  Karolina turned. Nico ought to have been investigating, checking out the lair and its computer files and even the space they had available to them here. Or she should have been studying the portrait of her parents, because for all her goth glory and black candle burning and teen brooding, she’d loved them. Instead, she took Karolina’s hands in her own.

  “You okay?” Nico asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Karolina replied, pushing a veil of blond hair away from her eyes.

  Nico blinked, and then laughed. Karolina laughed with her, because what else were they supposed to do? Shaking her head in disbelief that anyone’s life could be so completely insane, Karolina hugged her. Nico had that tough exterior, but she hugged back.

  “At least we’ve got a place to stay,” Nico said. “And enough room that we won’t end up killing each other.”

  “Hey!”

  They both turned to see Molly standing in the center of the cavern, just a few feet in front of the raised platform where the Leapfrog had landed. She had her hands on her hips as if she were their mom and they’d just tracked mud through the house.

  “What’s the matter with you guys?” Molly asked. She threw up her hands, then turned and gestured theatrically toward Chase and Gert, who were hugging blissfully a few feet away. “You should be, like, jumping for joy or something. Or at least giving Chase a round of applause. We’ve hidden out in sewer-stinking warehouses and a movie theater full of rats and the basement of that apartment building the night before they tore it down, and then the S.H.I.E.L.D. base that we had to run from just today, and here’s Chase, and he found us a secret lair that belonged to our parents—”

  “I’m confused,” Karoli
na interrupted. “Our parents only had that underwater lair that blew up—”

  “Shut it!” Molly snapped, holding up a hand. “I’m talking now. Chase found this place and it’s ours. Like, really ours, because it belonged to our parents and they’re all dead, so it’s ours. Someplace that can be home. And I know it’s weird and sad and everything, but still! How about some whooping and celebrating and hugs for Chase?”

  Karolina and Nico looked at one another, then around at the bizarre secret headquarters. The girl, Allis, stepped out of the Leapfrog with the mystified expression of someone who knew she didn’t belong, and her eyes went wide as Karolina and Nico threw their arms in the air and began to whoop and celebrate as Molly had demanded. Laughing, Karolina raced down the steps and across to Molly, scooping the smaller girl up in her arms and swinging her in dizzying circles.

  Nico crashed into Chase and Gert, hugging them both with an air of general silliness that caused Gert to shove her away, lip curled in feigned revulsion. Nico only laughed and hugged Chase, then kissed him on the cheek, which caused him to blush and glance stupidly around as if he’d just woken from a dream.

  “I’ll do the kissing, if you don’t mind,” Gert said, adjusting her glasses with an irritated-librarian look.

  Karolina laughed, threw her arms up and used her powers to cast glittering rainbow sparks in the air, all of them bursting like mini-fireworks. Then she ran to Chase and imitated Nico, kissing him on the cheek.

  “Really,” she said, quietly serious in his ear. “Thank you. It’s a huge relief.”

  Gert stood beside them, arching an eyebrow. “Kay.”

  Karolina rolled her eyes at her friend’s jealousy, then ducked her head in and kissed Gert on the cheek as well. “You heard Molly. Hugs and celebration.”

  Gert grinned and slid an arm around Chase. “You did good, boy.”