We walked for what felt like several hours, but the passage of time had become a foreign entity without the convenience of phones or even sunlight. Occasionally, I pestered Atticus about when he thought he might be able to use his shadows to transport us somewhere less bleak and smelling of mold. He never had answers beyond, "I'll let you know."
To stave off boredom, and because he knew I meant to interrogate him anyway, we traded questions throughout our journey, mine serious and his, more often than not, frivolous.
"Why didn't you teleport us farther away in the first place? Out of the city, perhaps?" I asked, to which he replied that these tunnels contained his closest emergency escape point to the Guild, and that I should feel lucky to have made it even this far, given how drained he'd been from holding over a dozen Supers at his mercy.
That answer was... annoying, if not understandable.
He considered his own question for a great many moments before settling on, "Do you have a dog, or a cat?"
I spun on my heel from my spot in front of him and continued to walk backwards. "You can't be serious. Don't you have anything more important to ask? My darkest secret? My default password? My social security number? Anything."
A half amused grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. "Dogs... or cats?"
Some people lacked sense. "What makes you so confident I have either?"
"There's no lint roller in existence that can pick up every trace of fur left on your clothes, unfortunately. I've noticed light colored stray hairs clinging to you on more than one occasion. Less so, recently."
No doubt because I moved into the Guildhall and hadn't been home as often. Not for the first time, I wasn't sure I cared for his powers of observation.
"Fine," I said, reluctantly stopping myself from gaslighting him for the sake of it. "You're right. I have a dog."
He nodded, as though the information could possibly interest him. "Your turn. And don't fall."
I rolled my eyes. "I'm not going to-"
My heel caught on a damaged bit of track he no doubt foresaw and I careened backwards for only a few panic-filled seconds. Atticus waved a hand and set me to rights effortlessly before I had the chance to hit the ground, and although he hid it well, I thought he might have been a bit smug.
"I am not clumsy," I felt the need to clarify. "That was all Charlie's fault."
"Who's Charlie?"
"It's not your turn to ask a question, is it? You might have already had that answer, if you had not been so busy asking about my birthday and favorite color." I made a disgusted face. "Anyway, my turn. How did you come to steal the Constable's powers?"
"That's a far more boring story than I'm sure you're imagining."
"I don't care. It's my turn. Tell me anyway."
Sighing, he obliged, "I had just joined the Guild. You wouldn't know this, but if you join as a Super, you're placed into one of five categories. The flashy hero-types are, of course, the face of the Guild. They fight crime for the cameras, they do the press tours. That sort of thing. The next group is comprised of spies, and they exist out of the public eye, for obvious reasons. Then there are the one's with less flashy abilities that still allow them to aid the Guild undercover, like-"
"Mind reading," I said, thinking at once of Ren, and then Windless and her sister who could detect and alter people's emotions without the affected party realizing.
"Yes, exactly like Ren. He's been around the Guild awhile. Not the worst sort, considering who he works for. Our fourth group contains the jailers to the underground thaumaturge prison. And, finally, we have... the other side to our press relations. The Supers who fill in for villains when we have a shortage."
"WHAT?" I choked. "No. No! You're joking. Even the Guild wouldn't go that far. Why? What would be the point?"
My stunned reaction seemed to be exactly what Atticus was looking for. His eyes crinkled with repressed mirth. "Without supervillains we wouldn't even need a Guild of superheroes. We could simply use the police, isn't that right? It's not in their best interests to lock everyone up. They need just enough mayhem to keep the public scared and continuously donating money to the Guild coffers. Better than actual, genuine supervillains are villains made by them who they can control. They strategically lose fights in glorious fashion to make our heroes truly shine. It's a business. That's all. Being a mimic, I made the perfect fake villain. A chameleon they could alter and rebrand at will. I was a dozen different villains, each with their own costume and backstory, after they trained me up a bit, of course.
"As for your initial question, though, the Guild had me mimicking the power of an already imprisoned supervillain by the name of Muerto, who could use his own blood to do just about anything his imagination allowed. He could crystallize it into a blade that extended out of his arm, shoot tiny blood bullets out of his fingertips. That day, it had been the Constable's turn to show off. A few minutes of choreographed fighting until he eventually was supposed to subdue me. Things went wrong. A bit of shrapnel from one of my mimicked blood bullets that hit a building ricocheted and hit him in the back of the head. His telekinesis had been the only thing keeping him airborn, so when his consciousness lapsed he dropped out of the sky, and I dived after him. My borrowed power at the time would have done nothing to prevent me being flattened across the earth, but I was young and stupid and confident I could reach the Constable in time to take his powers and float us to safety. Luckily, I was right. Less luckily, I'd never touched another Super for so long before. As you know, none of my family carry the Super gene, so I didn't know that by holding him for so long, by flying us back to the Guildhall to get him treatment, that I would do more damage than merely imitating his ability.
"When he finally awoke, he awoke powerless."
At a loss for words, somehow all I could think to do was pick my jaw up off the ground and say, "You think that story is boring?"
His responding smile was tight. "So who's Charlie?"
"I can't believe you're still on about that." His prolonged silence pressured me to answer. I cleared all emotion along the path from my brain to my mouth. Kept things matter of fact. "My brother. Charlie's my brother."
"I didn't know you had a brother. Leigh never mentioned it."
"Spoke to her a lot about me, did you?" I needled, and looked away when he appeared plainly unabashed, sobering for the answer I didn't want to give. "She wouldn't have. He's dead. Really, actually dead, unlike you. It's awkward to bring that sort of thing up. I have a step-sister, too. Alexia. You met her, sort of. But really, she's just a sister. I've known her since she was a toddler and she grows more annoying every single day."
"I remember. The school. Leigh has posted many photos with her."
I wordlessly signaled for a short reprieve from our forced march. I slid into a sitting position against a nearby wall, taking small sips from our shared water bottle. "The second I deduced that you were Nightshade, I knew you had to be using Leigh's social media to find me. Nice to know I'm right, I guess. Always knew her influencer thing would cause me nothing but trouble."
"My next question," Atticus began, sitting beside me and accepting the canteen. "How long did you suspect me?"
"I should have figured it out sooner. It's your own poor luck that the one person you successfully kidnapped happened to know your sister, to whom you share a rather strong resemblance. I thought you seemed familiar for awhile, though. I suppose it didn't cross my mind until we met at the Gala, because, you - you were meant to be dead. One rarely pauses to consider if the dead are out there committing crimes across the city. My own prejudice, of course. Next time I won't be so closed minded."
My weak half-joke was rewarded with the slight quirk of his signature half-grin. "You were foolish not to have turned me in to the Guild."
"I'll take a 'thank you' for that, actually."
"Why didn't you?"
I bumped my shoulder good-naturedly into his. Somehow it felt natural to do so. Easy. "It's not your turn to ask a question, evildoer. You made these rules. The least you can do is stick to them."
A spark of warmth filled his voice. "Of course. How rude of me. I implore you to forgive me my boorish manners this once. I wouldn't want you to threaten to stab me again."
He alluded, of course, to my warning in the forest during my first abduction.
"I only threatened to stab you in the first place because you kept purposefully irritating me by calling me 'darling'. Ew. Gag."
"What else was a terrible villain to do to make sure I stayed on your bad side?"
I exhaled an amused scoff through my nose and snatched back the water. "Whatever. I didn't sell you out because I couldn't be certain it was you for the longest time, and I feared that if I started throwing around wild accusations to get to the bottom of things faster that you would either deny it and Leigh wouldn't believe me, or you wouldn't deny it and would have no reason to keep playing nice, once your cover was blown."
"She would have believed you," he said confidently.
I twisted my torso to face Atticus in order to better debate the matter. "You're her brother," I pointed out, obviously.
"She barely knows me," he replied without a hint of self pity or dishonesty. "Six years is a long time to be away, and you're her best friend. She would have believed you out of the two of us. With all the time we spent talking in the woods and now, I think I, also, might know you better than I know her or the rest of my family. They certainly don't know this part of me, the notorious villain that wreaks havoc across the city and is a general insurance nightmare."
I wasn't sure if his announcement made me feel glad for myself or sad for him. Maybe both.
This. This was what I stole from him by forcing his hand at the Guildhall, the chance at a loving family, of finally freeing himself of the burden of isolation. How could I possibly make that right?
I found his hand in the darkness and squeezed once. "I'll lie for you. If - when we figure out what's going on in the outside world, and presuming they don't suspect that I stole the files and my integrity has no reason to be questioned, I'll be your witness. No one will have any grounds to stand on if they want to accuse you of being Nightshade. I'll say we were imprisoned together by the 'real' Nightshade. You can't be in two places at one time. Whatever it takes. We can both make it out of this."
Gently, he extricated his hand and patted my knee. "I think you have Stockholm Syndrome."
That earned him a startled laugh. "Maybe."
"Your turn to ask a question, remember?"
"Hmm." I paused to clear my head, rifling through the million things I wanted to know about him, both important and less so. "The other guy. The ice guy. How did you get his powers?"
"Frost," Atticus reminded me. "A few weeks later, after they concluded that I stole the Constable's powers forever, they wanted to see how I managed it, and to what extent I could do that again. If I took someone else's power permanently, would the Constable get his back? Those were some of the many questions asked, so they brought Frost and a few others up from the prison for what they initially planned to be a series of tests, but wound up being only one. Powers can't always be used in the underground prison, so they weren't sure it would work if I went down there myself for the task. I was to touch Frost, an imprisoned villain, for as long as I had touched the Constable, and we would all see what happened. Of course, you and I know that I absorbed Frost's powers permanently, and the Constable never regained his. Then..." he trailed off, his eyes gone distant, replaying events I couldn't imagine.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," I said, and found I meant it without a hint of resentment. Truly, I did not want to accidentally cause additional damage to what I was realizing was an already very troubled person, one I thought I might genuinely care about, against all odds.
"It's alright," he said, but, in my gut, I didn't think it was. His eyes stayed low to the ground, and he sounded nostalgic, sadly so. "How about I tell you this story after you get some sleep? You've been awake for almost two days. Take the sleeping bag. I'll keep first watch."
Just like that, he rose to his feet, leaving the backpack with me, and went to stand vigil in the dark several feet away. I made no attempt to stop him, for I saw in him what I myself had desired the previous night: enough time to myself to order my thoughts without outward interference.
"Good night," I called at his back, expecting no response, only for him to usurp my expectations for the millionth time.
"Night, darling."
"I really will stab you."