The Unstoppable Wasp

by Sam Maggs

  Well. It was her job. And she was good at it.

  “And at myself,” Nadia conceded. “For not being able to convince Monica to join G.I.R.L., to science for good.”

  Dr. Sinclair nodded, a sympathetic smile on her face. “But you know that you can’t hold yourself responsible for other people’s decisions, even if you judge them to be poor decisions, right?”

  “Right. Boundaries!” Nadia looked at the clock and immediately leapt off the squooshy couch. “Oh! I’ve kept you overtime again!”

  With a laugh, Dr. Sinclair stood to let Nadia out of her sun-drenched office. “It’s okay. I like all the science facts. I feel like I learn something new every session.”

  “Me too.” Nadia rushed forward and wrapped her therapist in a hug. “But I have a surprise party after this I can’t be late for.”

  “A surprise party?” Dr. Sinclair squeezed Nadia’s shoulder affectionately, then pulled away. “For whom?”

  Nadia grabbed her backpack off the couch and swung it over her shoulder, unlocking her phone. “Oh, it’s for me,” she answered, already half-distracted.

  Dr. Sinclair laughed. “Not much of a surprise then, I guess. It’s not your birthday…?”

  “No, no,” Nadia confirmed. “It’s my name day. It’s like a Russian birthday but for everyone named Nadia.* My friends think they’re being very sneaky, but, you know…”

  “You’re a literal bug,” offered Dr. Sinclair.

  “I’m a literal bug!” Nadia agreed, with enthusiasm. “Thank you for listening, as always. Same time next week?”

  “Same time next week. You’re up to date on your prescriptions?”

  Nadia waved and nodded as she bounded out of the room and into reception. “Enough for the next three months!”

  Nadia burst out of the front door of her therapist’s office and into the brisk fall sunshine, popping in her earbuds as she walked. Therapy was still new to Nadia, but she found that she liked it. Well, maybe “liked” wasn’t quite the right word, though Nadia at least tried liking every new thing she did.

  Therapy was interesting and challenging, gut-wrenching and exciting, helpful and devastating, sometimes all at once. An hour in Dr. Sinclair’s office could be uplifting and painful in equal measure, but it almost always helped. Nadia had been hesitant at first, but therapy was key to helping her put forth the best version of herself. And frankly, she hoped every Super Hero had a therapist, because they saw a lot of really weird stuff.

  Mostly, though, Nadia relied on therapy to help her manage her bipolar disorder. Though she had never met her father, Nadia knew that they had many things in common. They both lived for the pursuit of knowledge. They both loved the original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne. They were both insect-based Super Heroes. And they were both prone to extremes that sometimes put those around them—and themselves—at risk.

  Nadia was lucky. She had people in her life who loved her, and who recognized the symptoms. Nadia’s stepmom, Janet, had even introduced Nadia to Dr. Sinclair, a therapist who specialized in Super Heroes. She had come recommended to Janet by Silk—clearly the coolest of all the spider-people, in Nadia’s opinion. Truth be told, Silk was the only spider-person she got along with, really.

  Not that it was difficult. It was a truth universally acknowledged that wasps and spiders didn’t mix, in most cases. Also, why were they all so sticky?

  As she walked toward the nearest bus stop, Nadia hummed to herself. She walked in time to the music, her short brown bob and bangs swinging to the beat. Things were looking up.

  Sure, Nadia had a lot going on right now. Monica had escaped, and A.I.M. was still out there. She was trying to keep on top of G.I.R.L. and her mental health. She really wanted to be a good friend and a good stepdaughter. And, you know, she was trying to learn how to be a Cool American Teen, too—whatever that meant. But Nadia was figuring it all out. She was happy to forget about all the tough stuff in her past and focus on all the tough-but-exciting things in front of her.

  After all, she was the Unstoppable Wasp, and it was her name day. Could it really get any better than that?

  * A really cool electrostatic generator that uses static electricity to make your hair stick straight out from your head. Looks like a big lowercase i.

  * Nadia’s name was the only gift her mother had ever been able to give her, and Nadia thought it was quite a nice name, too. Nadia means “hope,” and if there was one thing that had propelled Nadia forward in all things, it was certainly hope.

  Nadia stepped through the doors of Pym Laboratories as they slid open. Instead of the familiar bustle of personnel that seemed present at all hours, she found it suspiciously empty.

  Or it would have been suspicious, if she hadn’t known exactly what was going on. Nadia took the elevator to the fourth floor and stepped out onto the landing she never, ever got tired of seeing. The massive Genius In action Research Labs logo hung proudly from the wall, visible the second you stepped off the elevator.

  The program had been Nadia’s dream from the instant she discovered that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s official list of the world’s smartest people didn’t bother including a woman until the twenty-seventh spot. Twenty-seventh!

  Nadia knew that was nonsense for a number of reasons, one of which was that she had personal experience with several of the people on that list, and she knew for a fact that she was smarter than they were. (Bruce Banner? Please. He wasn’t even the smartest Hulk.)

  Aside from the inherent issues with using a standardized test to determine intelligence (a terrible method for determining intelligence, by the way—creativity is intelligence, and filling out tiny bubbles is not creative), it was also clear that S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn’t even bothering to seek out people to take the test unless they were men who were already inner-circle.

  The world doesn’t need to be told that Tony Stark is smart. The world needs to be told that the sixteen-year-old girl in the tiny Brooklyn apartment she shares with her dad and who gets beat up every day on her walk home from school is actually secretly building a teleporter, and she got it to work. And that is the truth.

  Nadia became determined to find the smartest girls in the world so they could form their own lab, together. She started with the immediate New York City area, because that’s where she was located, flying long-distance was taxing, and she didn’t have her driver’s license. Yet.

  But she was working on it.

  She’d already managed to find the four best lab partners in the entire world, anyway, and they were all right here in G.I.R.L. HQ, right behind these doors, ready to surprise Nadia with streamers and balloons and…would there be cake?

  Ooh. Nadia really liked cake.

  She took a deep breath, thinking very hard about a convincing “surprised” face as she swiped her key card and the sliding lab doors opened.

  “Surprise!”

  The sound of her friends’ voices echoed off the hard surfaces of the lab tables and state-of-the-art equipment in the most beautiful cacophony. Nadia slapped her hands onto her cheeks and pulled her mouth into a perfectly formed Oh! of feigned shock.

  “Oh my goodness!” Nadia said, her hands still on her face. “I am so surprised!”

  An entire lab’s worth of girls stared at Nadia for a moment in silence, the streamers and confetti still gently floating to the floor.

  “She totally knew.” Taina rolled her eyes and rolled her way over to the cake. “I’m cutting this now.”

  “I didn’t know!” Nadia insisted, rushing forward to look closer at the cake. Taina was already jamming a fork into the first slice. The slice (including a D from HAPPY NAME DAY, NADYA, which, close enough) revealed the cake’s flavor: funfetti. Obviously.

  “Sure,” Priya said, but Nadia could tell by the way she rolled her eyes at the ceiling that she didn’t buy it.

  “Nadia, you are many things,” said Ying, swinging her legs down off the cake table, skillfully avoiding getting any white icing on her signature all-black athleisure ensemble. �
�But why don’t you leave the deception to me?”

  Shay elbowed her girlfriend. “We can’t all be super-spies.”

  “She was actually trained to be a super-spy,” Ying corrected. Shay quieted Ying down by popping some funfetti directly into her mouth. Ying shrugged and chewed.

  Shay wasn’t wrong, but neither was Ying. Nadia’s childhood wasn’t exactly what you would call traditional. In fact, pretty much everything after her parents’ wedding was utter chaos, if Nadia was honest with herself. Hank Pym, who would later be better known in some circles as the original Ant-Man, had married Maria Trovaya, a brilliant Hungarian scientist fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain. While on their honeymoon, Maria was kidnapped by Red Room agents and later killed.

  Right after she gave birth. To Nadia.

  Hank hadn’t even known that Maria was pregnant.

  Nadia had been born and raised in the Krasnaya Komnata—the Red Room, a secret intelligence facility created by the KGB to train girls who would become the best spies in the world. Most people are more familiar with it as the Black Widow Ops Program; but what people usually don’t know is that there is more than one way to become a Widow.

  Some girls like guns. Others like gears. Nadia was the latter.

  Her handlers thought that her gift for science was genetic. They encouraged Nadia to study constantly. But Nadia knew that her skills weren’t inherited; they came from her and her alone. It wasn’t like the shape of her head made her brain better at math, no matter how much they’d wanted her to believe it.

  Nadia worked hard. She made progress. Then she found a way to work harder. The only Red Room handler she’d ever liked—the only one who almost treated her like she was her own person and not just a product of parents she never knew—was a man with a silver arm. Nadia could still recall the big red star on his shoulder, though she couldn’t remember her own mother. The man with the silver arm encouraged her to keep reading.

  So she’d studied. And she’d learned. And then she’d studied some more. (She later learned his name was Bucky Barnes, and he would escape the Krasnaya Komnata and become a good guy, too!)

  Of course, there was your traditional Red Room training. No one escaped a supersecret instructional spy facility without learning how to take down a man twice their size while also executing clean fouettés into a perfect double pirouette (Nadia’s favorite combination to this day), sometimes simultaneously.

  Nadia used her studies in science and her ballet training to help her in combat exercises; after all, it was a lot easier to take down a man twice your size if you knew how to properly destabilize his center of gravity, and strong ankles never hurt your chances.

  The Red Room handlers didn’t want their charges to get too close; to say they fostered an atmosphere of competition instead of cooperation would be an understatement. But Nadia liked people, and she especially liked Ying, another scientist of the Red Room who excelled in biochemistry. Nadia and Ying hid their friendship, hoping they wouldn’t be separated or used against each other.

  They were, eventually. But that came later.

  When Nadia finally managed to obtain a Pym Particle on the black market, she knew she’d found her way out. Reverse engineering her father’s research, Nadia learned how to use the particles to shrink—and promptly shrank her way out of the Red Room and on to freedom.

  It wasn’t an easy journey from Siberia to New York City. But she’d made it.

  And that’s where Nadia met her family for the first time.

  Well, it’s possible that “met” isn’t exactly the right word. Maybe…“assembled”?

  Nadia had absolutely been a proactive part of putting her current family unit together. When she’d heard about the great injustice of the S.H.I.E.L.D. list (twenty-seventh?! Are you serious?!), Nadia set out almost immediately to scour the boroughs for the smartest G.I.R.L. squad she could find.

  The trick, it turned out, was recruiting them without immediately scaring them off. Look, Nadia was enthusiastic. She’d made a little explanatory holo-video and everything. She thought it was very convincing and also very charming and even a little bit funny, too? But Nadia was raised in an espionage facility, so she had to admit her sense of humor was maybe a little warped.

  And don’t even start on her pop culture knowledge (or lack thereof). Ms. Marvel has always been appalled at how little Nadia knew about life outside of a brainwashing facility. But who has time to catch up on a bazillion TV shows when they all seem to be about the same white man who hasn’t shaved in several weeks? If you’ve seen one…

  First, Nadia had tracked down Taina in Washington Heights. Nadia found her tinkering with a robotic goalie she was using to help her older sister play street hockey. Tai and her older sister Alexis lived with their abuelita, which Nadia now knew was what Puerto Rican girls called their babulyas.*

  Tai was the best engineer Nadia had ever met, and she’d grown up with a lot of world-class engineers. Nadia suspected Tai’s love for robotics came in part from being born with cerebral palsy; she always had a mechanical aid around and considered herself quite cyberpunk as a result. Nadia and Tai were different in a lot of ways. Nadia tried to like everything; Tai liked almost nothing at first brush, but was known to come around. Still, neither of them had ever let perceived limitations stymie their potential. Nadia felt so lucky to have Tai as a lab partner, but even luckier to call her a friend.

  Then there was Priya. She lived in Queens, but Nadia found her in Times Square, working at her family’s gift shop. Priya’s parents were Indian immigrants and wanted to give Priya every opportunity to find success. Which sometimes came into direct conflict with Priya’s desire to, you know…be Cool. Even so, Priya had an incredible drive of her own—it just often manifested a little differently than the other G.I.R.L.s’.

  Nadia understood a little bit of what it was like to be under so much pressure you felt you might buckle, but knew that Priya’s situation was entirely unique. She was nervous about her parents finding out that she had a remarkable gift for biology—truly, she was extraordinary. But she didn’t want the anxiety that would inevitably come from her parents on the discovery of such an aptitude. But when Nadia saved their shop from an attack, and Priya saw the incredible power of science in action, she joined the lab, hoping to do good for the world.

  Also, one time Priya inhaled a bunch of gas working on one of her experiments in plant genetics, and then she could communicate with and control plants.

  So, that was certainly A Thing now.

  Next, Nadia headed to Brooklyn and found Shay literally exploding out of her fourth-story bedroom window after an experiment with a prototype teleporter went awry. Happens to the best of us, really.

  Shay had been going through some hard times: Her mom left for Los Angeles to become an actress, and her dad, though amazing (truly worthy of the #1 DAD! mug in Priya’s family’s shop), worked long, stressful hours to support them both. Shay had been getting bullied at school and, like Nadia, needed a place where she could be herself. Somewhere she could work on her teleporter in peace. Somewhere like G.I.R.L.

  Finally, there was Ying, who wasn’t so much recruited as she was rescued. When they’d reunited for the first time since Nadia had escaped the Red Room, it was actually because their handlers had done the thing that Nadia had feared most: used their friendship against them. They’d sent Ying to track Nadia down, and threatened to explode her with a bomb in her brain if Ying didn’t bring Nadia back.

  Fortunately, Ying found Nadia with a squad of girl scientists who were able to remove the bomb from her head, severing Ying’s connection to the Red Room forever. Now Ying also had a spot in the lab—and in Shay’s heart. Nadia had always found public displays of affection entirely unnecessary, but with Shay and Ying she found it almost cute. Sometimes.

  And here they all were, in G.I.R.L. HQ at Pym Labs, pretending to surprise Nadia, who’d brought them all together. And frankly, Nadia was touched. This was the kind of public display of
affection Nadia understood. Supported, even.

  Especially because it involved funfetti.

  “Okay, yes, I knew about the surprise,” Nadia admitted with a wry smile. “But that doesn’t mean I appreciate it any less! Did you fix whatever’s been wrong with Shay’s teleporter?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it—” started Shay.

  “Except sometimes socks go into it and never come out again,” finished Ying.

  Priya nodded. “Like my favorite thigh-high ones with the cat ears.”

  “I don’t care literally at all about fashion, but I did love those cat socks,” Tai added.

  Nadia laughed. “You probably just calibrated the quantum oscillators wrong. Remember when Priya tested it that one time and rematerialized with her ponytail on the other side of her head?”

  “Okay, are we going to get into science mistakes?” Shay pointed her fork at Nadia. “Because we can get into it—”

  “Remember the time you accidentally stained Priya’s whole left arm with that weird chemical?” Tai jabbed Ying.

  “It was an accident! It washed off!” Ying protested. “Remember that time you went off to fight Mother* all by yourself?”

  Nadia threw her hands up in front of her in defense. “I was trying to be, you know, tough! And I made a pretty good ‘fearless leader’ speech before I left!” She pointed to a note still taped to the wall next to the G.I.R.L. squad sign: Never stop doing science and being amazing.

  “Sweet,” Priya agreed. “But bafflingly stupid.”

  They all laughed. They’d all messed up, a few times, but it didn’t change how they felt about each other.

  “How was therapy?” Shay asked around a mouthful of cake, careful not to get any frosting on her purple suitcoat, complete with tails and a black-and-white bowtie. Shay was always dressed well, but Nadia recognized this as a clear “special occasion” outfit choice. When she wasn’t busy with making theoretical physics non-theoretical, Shay was a thrift-shopping alterations-making mastermind.