by C. B. Lee
Jills beeps once and then its panel rearranges itself; the case slides apart, and circuitry uncoils and refits itself. Jess has never seen anything like it; it must be incredibly advanced tech. How handy, to have a MonRobot that can shrink! Jills, now the size of a messenger bag, complete with a carrying strap, beeps again. Jess pats it and shoulders it, and then turns back to watch the fight.
M hovers, all of her panel lights flashing pink. Jess points to Jills and mouths, “Awesome,” at her, and M shakes a little, as if she’s laughing. And that’s when it happens.
Captain Orion blasts M, and it hits her with a sizzling finality. Sparks fly across her torso. M drops ten feet, faltering in the air. Her suit sparks. Jess freezes, and then watches as M manages to fly out the window despite her injury.
Captain Orion laughs and puts her hands on her hips. “And that’s how you do it! I’m going to go leave and take care of that pesky villain in a second—”
No, no, M needs time to get away.
Jess bumps into the group of girls next to her, jostling them into standing up. “Clearly he’s no match for you,” she calls out, keeping her face hidden. “I think part of the ticket package included autographs!” she adds in a slightly pitched voice.
The girls clamor and shout with her. “And photos! Please, please, please?”
Captain Orion holds her arm out for the crowd. “Why, of course, anything for my devoted fans.”
Jess watches the crowd of fans swarm the superhero. There isn’t going to be any immediate pursuit of M. Jess ducks out the exit with Jills. She just hopes they get back to the lab all right.
Jess catches a bus at the corner and, a few stops later, she’s in front of Monroe Industries. It’s Friday evening but there are still employees moving about. The robot at the front desk beeps a greeting, and Jess heads right for the elevator.
“M?” Jess calls out, stepping onto her floor. She sets down Jills, and it automatically transitions back into orb shape, hovering behind her. “Abby?” Abby usually doesn’t stay past five o’clock, because she takes Jess home, but maybe she’s still here; they haven’t talked much since Jess asked Abby out.
No response from Abby’s office.
Jills flies after her, making meeping noises.
The whole lab is in disarray; wires and electronic paraphernalia are scattered everywhere. Jess notices a scuffed floor section, so it looks as though M made it back. Jess follows the scuff marks past Abby’s office and toward M’s office where she can hear electrical crackling.
The steel door is ajar; burn marks streak across it, and the handle is melted. A broken metal glove lies on the floor.
Jess rushes forward, throwing all M’s “don’t come back here, it’s private” warnings out the window. M might be hurt.
“M! Are you okay?” Jess yells.
No answer. Jess rushes forward; the sound of her shoes echoes in the empty lab.
“M! M! I got the information! Are you hurt? Please tell me you’re okay.”
“Jess?” The voice is strained, as if desperate and in pain.
“You’re here,” Jess says as she turns the corner. An ominous rattle makes her stomach churn, but she can see M now at the end of the room. This must be where she works on the mecha-suit and also gets in and out of it.
M is on the floor. The suit crackles and sparks. M is caught between two large cables; the suit is tangled between the two arms of the machine. It looks as if M was trying to rush getting out of the suit and her injuries were too much. She’s slumped forward, barely moving. One of her fingers twitches, and her helmet is cracked wide open. Panel lights blink. Yellow. The color of relief. Joy, maybe.
“Are you okay?” Jess asks, stepping carefully around the wires and tools scattered on the floor.
“Yeah, just, I need you to disconnect that cable by entering a sequence in the computer,” M says. Her voice is familiar, and when Jess gets closer she can see why.
Abby is inside the suit.
Jess gasps. “Abby? You’re M?”
“Just help me.”
Jess types in the code Abby gives her, and the machine powers down. Abby gasps. Jess rushes to her side and disconnects the large cable that’s securing her to the main server, and then helps her remove pieces of the armor one by one.
Under it all, Abby is wearing the outfit that is definitely not workout gear. The pattern on the pants is elaborate circuitry, wired all over the skintight fabric.
Careful to keep away from the sparking circuits, Jess helps Abby to a nearby bench. .
“Thank you,” Abby says. “I’m really sorry I couldn’t tell you.”
“It’s okay. The M—it’s not a James Bond thing, is it?”
“Nah, it’s for Abby Monroe. I mean, at school I go by my mom’s last name, but, I’m actually, you know.” She sighs. “My parents are Phillip and Genevieve Monroe. Otherwise known as Master Mischief and Mistress Mischief. I’ve been running the business ever since they disappeared.”
Ch.10...
Abby has a huge bruise on her side where Orion zapped her. Jess wraps a stabilizing cloth bandage around it and then finds ice in the break room.
The story comes out in bits and pieces. Abby’s parents disappeared a few months ago, and Abby needed to keep up appearances at Monroe Industries with her father’s new MonRobot design. Monroe Industries is controlled by its board of directors—and Stone. They wanted to use the technology of the MonRobots to spy on the citizens of the North American Collective and feed that information back to the government.
Jess is still trying to wrap her head around the idea that the mild-mannered Phillip Monroe she’d seen on TV showing off a new gadget every now and then is also the colorfully costumed Master Mischief. And Genevieve Monroe, the high society heiress? The dynamic and powerful telekinetic Mistress Mischief?
“Yeah, they’re amazing,” Abby says. “They’re also missing. I know my dad told Stone he didn’t want to militarize the MonRobots—”
“What? They do household chores! They’re not—they’re not soldiers!”
“They could be, according to the board at Monroe Industries.” Abby sighs. “Anyway, I found out that the government was involved. Apparently the newest model can do… quite a lot.”
“Do people know that they can do more than just vacuum?”
Abby shakes her head. “It shouldn’t matter, because no one but my dad would have been able to activate the other features. But he and my mom have been missing for a while now.”
“Wait. You don’t actually know where either of them are? What about all the times you’ve told me it’s not of import?”
“Well, that was before I got to know you could be trusted! I thought you would just help with the filing and stuff, I didn’t expect to—”
“To what?” Jess presses.
“To like you!” Abby says. “I like you, okay?”
Jess stares, and Abby’s face turns red.
Jess still hasn’t quite reconciled M in the mecha-suit she’s come to know as a friend and Abby the girl she has a crush on and has been getting to know these past few months. She’s told M so many things about how she feels about Abby—a flurry of embarrassing comments come back to her. Oh no, she talked about Abby’s butt to M!
“How can you like me?” Jess says. “You just—you started hanging out with me after I told M I liked you!”
“Oh, come on! I told you to ask me out!”
“I didn’t know you liked girls!”
“I do!”
“Good! I do too!”
The kiss is wet and quick. Jess doesn’t know who moved first, just that Abby’s lips taste like cinnamon with a touch of scorched metal and a thrilling otherness of ozone. She opens her eyes to see Abby’s clear blue eyes staring back at her.
“Hi,” Jess says, out of breath.
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Abby moves first this time, and it’s as if she’s in slow motion. Jess notices the curve of Abby’s dark eyelashes on her cheek, the gentle slope of her nose. Then they’re kissing again, and Jess’ eyes are closed, and it’s just the warmth of her lips.
Jess’ hands hang by her side until Abby takes them and laces their fingers together. She lets Abby take the lead, breathing in the metallic sweet scent of her.
“I’ve wanted to do that for a while,” Abby says. “Ever since my house… your damn story with the girl… I really thought…” Abby blushes. “And you were so sure, and you were talking to M about how much you liked me, but then I wondered how much of it was just like… a superficial crush, and I got worried once we started hanging out you’d figure that I was really boring or something.”
“You’re not boring. Knowing you is a lot better than just the idea of you, you know. Like the whole thing you do at school with the… intimidatingly smart and glaring at everyone, but you’re a huge marshmallow underneath.”
Abby snorts. “I am not a marshmallow. You’re the marshmallow.” She pokes Jess in the shoulder.
At the mention of food, Jess realizes she hasn’t eaten since lunch. A stomach rumbles, and it’s not her own. “You need to get some rest, and also eat something. Come on, there’s a kitchen in this lab and not just a break room with a lame microwave, right?”
She starts walking before she finishes asking the question, and turns right down a corridor she’s never been in.
“Yeah, I’ve never told you about this hallway before. How’d you know it was here?”
“Lucky guess?” Jess tries an unmarked door, and it opens to a steel industrial kitchen, much bigger and better stocked than the break room where they usually have lunch. This one has a few homey touches: a crayon stick figure drawing in the familiar purple-and-reds of the Mischiefs with a younger girl between them. “Aw, this is cute. Done by you?”
“Yeah,” Abby says, her cheeks almost as red as her hair.
Jess rummages through the pantry and finds a few bricks of ramen, sets water to boil, and looks for something to add to it.
Jess opens the last cupboard on the left and finds a can of corn and a real can of Spam.
“Jess. Jess!”
“What?” Jess looks up from slicing the Spam.
“There’s no way you just happened to know where everything was.”
Jess shrugs. “Luck, I guess.”
“No, no,” Abby says, her eyes lighting up. “Look, this is a weird question but, is there anyone in your family, parents, grandparents—anyone with meta-abilities at all?”
Jess opens her mouth. “I can’t answer that question.” She drops two bricks of ramen into the boiling water and opens the refrigerator, hiding her panicked expression.
Oh, eggs. Jess takes out the carton and shuts the refrigerator to find Abby staring wide-eyed at her.
“Your parents are meta-human, aren’t they?”
Jess thinks quickly. Abby trusted her with her parents' identity She told Jess who her parents were, what’s happened to them. The whole time Jess has worked here, she was trusted with so many secrets.
“Yes, they are,” Jess says slowly. “My parents are Smasher and Shockwave.”
Abby shrieks, “Oh my God, that’s incredible—you—you—and you decided to work here? What about you? What can you do? Can you fly, like your dad? Are you super-strong like your mom? Oh, what about electro-magnetic field manipulation? I always thought that was amazing.”
“No.” The brief, happy buzz ends quickly. “I don’t… I don’t have anything.”
Abby steps forward, and Jess thinks she’ll get a sympathetic pat or a comforting hug. Instead, she kisses Jess again.
“What was that for?” Jess asks.
“You were making a face. It’s my way of saying there’s nothing wrong with you. Whether you have powers or not. You are wonderful.”
“I—I—Thank you,” Jess says. “You’re pretty great yourself.”
Abby nods, and they look at each other until Jess hears water boiling. She finishes the soup.
Jess says, “I was so worried when you got blasted. That data better be worth it.”
“Let’s take our food and go take a look at what’s on that datachip.”
They go back to Abby’s lab. Jess has eaten a lot of ramen, but never quite like this, sitting in the midst of piles of circuits and computer consoles and bits of scrap metal, with tools scattered everywhere and half-finished projects out on tables. Several desktop projectors throw holos into the air: mecha-suit blueprints and MonRobot designs. The cool blue of the circuits casts a soft glow all around them.
Abby sits cross-legged next to Jess. Her chopsticks are forgotten on the floor as she picks up her bowl and slurps from it outright.
The makeshift meal is simple, just the noodle soup with a soft-boiled egg and the delicious novelty of fried Spam, but the company makes it Jess’ favorite ramen meal ever.
They eat in companionable silence until both their bowls are empty.
“This was really good,” Abby says, with a contented sigh. “I usually just crumble up the seasoning in the bag with the dry noodles.”
Jess grins. “You ever try throwing some butter or oil on the noodle brick and then the seasoning and stick it in the toaster oven? It gets all crispy and makes a great snack, too.”
The chip is still in Jess’ jacket pocket. Jess takes it out; it’s surprisingly light in her palm, considering how much effort has gone into getting it. She hands it to Abby, expecting her to drop it into a DED to look at the data, but she merely holds it in her hand and closes her eyes.
Jess hasn’t seen much of Master Mischief’s electronic manipulation on newsholos; they mostly show the aftermath of his pranks or show him doing battle with her parents and then getting captured and handed off to the authorities.
“Don’t you need to recharge?” Glowing lines of light, flaring across her skin like luminescent veins, flow from the chip into Abby’s arm and toward her head. “My parents can only use their powers like, an hour a day or so. Didn’t you use your abilities during the exhibit—”
Abby’s eyelids flutter as she processes the information.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I must be distracting you,” Jess says.
Abby’s eyes open. “Done.”
Jess sees a flicker of that blue-white light in her pupils, and then it’s gone. “So? What was the information? Was it worth it?”
Abby’s eyes are shadowed. “I couldn’t make sense of all of it, but it’s not good. It confirms that Orion is at the center of all of this. Why else would she have…” Abby sighs.
“Here, let’s get a bigger display,” Jess mutters, waving at the electronic mess.
Jess follows Abby out of this room and to the nearest console, while Jess tries to apologize again for the distraction while Abby used her powers.
“Don’t worry about it, I’m used to working with distractions. And I don’t need to recharge all that much, I haven’t tested my limits a lot but I can operate the suit and do a bunch of other tasks for most of the day,” Abby says.
Jess is impressed. “Wow, that’s like… better than A-class. And I thought Master Mischief was cool for using his technopath abilities for an hour a day.”
“I, ah, I can do both, actually. I inherited both my parents’ abilities.” Abby blushes. Her hair is unruly and frames her face in a huge colorful cloud. It looks wonderfully fluffy, and Jess realizes she’s staring.
Abby touches her curls self-consciously. “I … yeah, I usually put a lot of product in it to keep it from going haywire like this. It’s the heat from the suit, really,” Abby says.
Jess yanks her hair out of its elastic and hands it to Abby. Her own hair falls about her face, but it’s not as much of a mess as Abby’s is right now.
Abby takes the elastic and tugs her hair into a sloppy ponytail. She closes her eyes and concentrates, and Jess watches in wonder as the machinery around them lights up.
“You’re A-class,” Jess says. “You have to be. Why aren’t you in Meta-Human Training already? My older sister is only B-class and she got snapped up when she was fifteen.”
Abby lifts her eyebrows, and a few circuits float and rearrange themselves around the broken mecha-suit. “I can’t. My parents are both villains, and the government wanted me to be a villain too. They were promised if they did this one last project I’d be allowed to apply for hero track, but then both my parents just disappeared.”
“They didn’t say goodbye? Tell you where they went?”
Abby shakes her head. “We were very close. I’m an only child; they tell me everything. All their plans, what they want to do. I mean, I help a lot with the MonRobot design, and with my powers. My own suit is for protecting my identity, and to make sure that I have enough electronics to control and use while out and about.”
Abby finishes bringing up all the documents on the screen and waves Jess over to look.
“What is all this?” Jess skims it but each file is like a wall of text. Locations, dates, logs of some sort. Someone’s files, not Orion’s; she was just reading them. Each one is annotated with insights like “not ready” and “will come around” and “needs more time.”
At second glance, they look like health charts from a hospital. She doesn’t recognize any of the names. There are photographs of grim-faced men and women who are vaguely familiar. “Who are these people? Why is Orion keeping track of them?”
“This is Fireheart.” Abby points at a bearded man. His face is gaunt.
“No way!” Jess gasps. Fireheart is one of the most terrifying villains in Middleton. “Are all of these meta-humans?”
“Yeah, and all villains. Pretty sure these are the people who’ve been going missing the past few months. Not that many people in the Collective know or care.”
Abby rattles off villain names, and then Jess startles.
