Subterfuge

Chapter 21

"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.