The mood in the Green Room wasn’t exactly positive.
My arm still ached, even though Bee had made me go Rainy Day to try healing myself. It had helped. Not much, but at least I wasn’t bleeding any more. The bullet was still in there, though, and I could barely move my arm. Whatever The Agent had hit me with in Fanfic’s Craighead, it was real, and I hadn’t had superhero damage to protect me. I probably should have gone to a hospital.
Instead, I was moping.
I lay on the conversation pit couch while Bee stood near the static-filled computer monitors. “They’ve been like this since before I got back. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s not a good sign. I think Rocko’s finally cut us off. Maybe we went too far for them.”
“You think?” I mumbled. My head still felt foggy; as I shook it in a vain attempt to clear it, my face started heating up. “Sorry.”
“You’re good. What happened after I left?” Bee asked. She was out of her Fursona costume. Parts of it covered the floor, though the Kaiju head sat on the coffee table, half-stitched back together. I winced; that kid was way too powerful for a toddler.
The fight was easy to explain, but when I got to the end, Bee asked so many questions about Stella-Lunar and The Agent’s betrayal that I couldn’t keep my answers straight. Eventually, I cut in with a question of my own. “Do you know who else got out?”
“Theseus, Gourmet, and Foamy Flash did. I haven’t heard from Lady Lockless, so I can only assume the worst with her.”
“No, she did. Fanfic pulled me through the door, and it was closed earlier. Lady Lockless would have had to open it for her,” I speculated.
“Okay, so Lady Lockless is out there somewhere, too. I think a couple of supers got out of Yorkston. They said that it was mostly prisoner-taking. That makes sense; dead supers don’t look good for anyone, and if they can convert some of the PEL supes into pro-Ilneat ones, that’s a big win for them. Not that they need it. The Pro-Earth League’s pretty much done. There’s only one super still fighting,” Bee said.
“Florida Man?”
“Florida Man. The predictions that he’d run out of energy seem unfounded. Every time he slows down, another Red Bull and Vodka appears nearby. His blood alcohol content has to be through the roof, and the news is speculating that he’s approaching heart attack levels of caffeine. But he’s not accomplishing anything, either.”
Alright. Okay. This wasn’t the worst-case scenario. I still had Bee. We still had the Green Room—I glanced at the sealed door to Rocko’s Studio, half-expecting some ridiculously overpowered hero to come surging through it. There were still a few other supers we could rely on. Mrs. N. Our Superpower Ethics partners. Maybe a couple others. But it wouldn’t be enough to stop the ebbing tide here.
A dozen questions kept bouncing around in my head. How had the Ilneats all escaped? What was The Agent thinking, going after Stella-Lunar? Had she survived? What exactly went wrong in Yorkston? Would the remaining PEL supers keep fighting, or were they done? I didn’t have answers to any of them.
The muted TV changed.
I stared at a set of narrow black eyes that darted from one side of the camera to the other, and to the wide, sharp teeth opened in a fake-looking smile. The gorilla/otter hybrid sat at a desk—not the one I was used to seeing them at, though. Behind them, I could only see a steel wall and stars—more bright and crisp than I’d ever seen them before.
I lunged for the remote and unmuted the television.
“—current Director of the Ilneat Network in the Earth system. In the last four hours, the Network has been forced to pull its Ilneat employees out of the Hot Zones in several major cities due to an employment dispute by several heroes and villains in our employ,” Rocko said. The Ilneat stared at the camera woodenly, a single cigar burning in one of their hands.
“Due to this egregious breach of contract, which put several of our Ilneat employees in harm’s way, we have no choice but to…” They paused for a moment, looking over the camera for the first time, then back down. “…terminate the following contracts, effective immediately:
“The Narrator, Harriet Nathans; Fanfic, Halie Nathans; McHammer, Karl O’Brian; Florida Man, Robert P. Goode; Gourmet, Jessica Andonte; Theseus, Tanner Brown…”
The list went on, but I barely heard it. Instead, I looked at Bianca. Her face looked as blank as mine felt. The Ilneats were outing every hero and villain who’d participated in the attacks. That included us. I ran through the list of people who knew either Anika DuPont or Magical Girl Understudy, trying to do some damage control.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Mindstorm, Rebecca Rogers; Flare; Calvin Bearson; Magical Girl Candi Crush, Sabrina Short; Magical Girl Understudy—“
As Rocko said my name, I hammered out a quick text.
I didn’t expect a response from Su-Bin. Not right away; she was probably neck-deep in APPEAL stuff. But she was my friend, and she deserved to know that I at least felt bad about deceiving her.
As for the fight? It was over. Maybe now Mom would let me drop out, and I could go back to Riverside and pretend none of this had ever happened. That didn’t seem likely, given that the whole world knew I was Magical Girl Understudy now and that I’d tried to overthrow our alien overlords. But I could dream. I could dream about a lot: being able to go back home, find a job in the diner or as a receptionist at the drill works, and just disappear. That wouldn’t be so bad.
I’d had my fifteen minutes of fame. Tranquility could keep fighting for a better world, or Mrs. N, but that didn’t mean it was going to happen. Not when so many powerful people wanted to keep things the way they were. And the status quo wasn’t so bad, right?
Besides, Bee could come too. We’d get a double-wide down the street from Mom and Dad’s and just…be for a while instead of putting the weight of the world on our shoulders. People could survive without Magical Girl Understudy and Fursona, especially now. We’d failed, and it was time to move on to whatever we could salvage of our lives.
----------------------------------------
I was so caught up in my thoughts that I didn’t realize the TV was off until Bee tapped my shoulder.
I blinked. She had her backpack stuffed full with the Justice-Roo and Eagle-Sona fursuits, a second bag with a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush, and her half-fixed Kaiju-Sona suit laid out on the Green Room’s floor. “Annie, focus. This place isn’t going to be safe in about fifteen minutes. We’ve gotta move.”
“Where?” I asked. “Riverside?”
“I don’t know,” Bee said. She sounded high-pitched and nervous, like when we first met, and I could smell the anxiety pouring off her sweat. “I’ve got ideas, but they’re not good, and I don’t think going to Riverside or Tortuga West is the right plan, but we should tell our families that shit’s getting real once we’re somewhere safe. I was thinking we would get out of Tokyexico City first and then regroup, maybe in one of the mountain towns we passed on the way to your place, but I’m not really sure. Or we could see Mrs. N. Anything. But we have to leave.”
She was right. We couldn’t stay here. I shook myself out of my daydream, arm still aching, and jogged out of the Green Room and into Walnut Tower, Room 1301. I had so much stuff here, but what to take and what to leave?
The textbooks were a no-brainer. They stayed. So did the unused make-up stuff; I wouldn’t need it if I was on the run. I opened my drawers and grabbed a few changes of underwear, then dumped some t-shirts on top of them without looking at the details. What they looked like didn’t matter. Bee was right. We had to go fast. Two sets of jeans, a winter jacket, gloves, hat, done. It wasn’t anything like packing to go to school two Augusts ago. Nothing was folded; it just got dumped into the suitcase.
A flash of black, green, and yellow caught my eye from the closet—Mom’s costume. Whether I wanted to wear it or not, Dark Girl Shock and Awe had to come with me. Mom’s identity wasn’t out, and I needed to keep it that way. Plus, Shock and Awe wasn’t associated with Understudy—at least not yet. I dumped the costume into my suitcase and zipped it up.
Toothbrush, hairbrush, deodorant. Bee hadn’t taken her perfumes—not even the green apple one—so I only packed the basics. And the Diary of Golden Goose. It felt too important to leave behind.
“Okay, ready,” I said, rolling my bag into the kitchen.
“Tunnel elevator!” Bee shouted from the Green Room.
I dragged my bag one-handed into the Green Room, transformed back to Understudy, and hurried to catch up with the backpack-wearing Kaiju. “Not your car?”
“Nope. We’re gonna have to leave the Civic here. Maybe when things calm down, we can grab it, but too many people know it’s Bianca’s. The tunnels should be pretty empty. Let’s exit at Roth Arena and head toward the Wall from there.”
“Sure.” I pushed the button, and the elevator arrived, then dropped like a rock as soon as we were inside. Bee white-knuckled her backpack straps the whole way down; I could feel her tension even through her fursuit’s plushie scales. When the elevator finally screeched to a stop at the exit to the tunnel network below Tokyexico University, I reached out and squeezed her clawed hand with my good one. “We’ll be okay.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said sadly. “We were supposed to play Blue tomorrow.”
I stared at her for a second as she started power-walking down the tunnel. Then I burst out laughing. A moment later, so was she. “It’s so stupid, Annie. That’s all I can think about, and it’s the least important thing, but I can’t get it out of my head.”
I didn’t have a response, so instead, I just kept walking. She followed, half a step behind, as we pushed through the tunnel we’d taken to get to the job fair last year. That probably wouldn’t be happening again—not with half of TUSSA and most of the SSS out of the picture.
When we finally emerged outside of Roth Arena, it was dark out. I looked back at the campus, breathing a sigh of relief. Even though we’d—so far, at least—disappeared, my throat was still tight, and my heart wouldn’t stop pounding. I stared back in the direction of Walnut Tower. I’d miss having a proper hideout, and even having access to Rocko’s Studio.
A flash of light filled the air as a beam reached out from somewhere in the city. It touched the top of Walnut Tower, then stopped. I braced myself for a shockwave—for anything—but nothing happened. No explosion, no laser sound. Then, another beam arced into another building on campus, and the same thing happened: nothing. But even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread. That something bad would have happened if we’d been there.
“Come on,” Bee said. “Whatever that was, we can’t stay here, either. We’re on the run, so let’s run.”
She was right. As she hurried off into the darkness, I followed her. Things were moving too fast, but one thing was for sure: we were fugitives—two women driving a car toward the cliff’s edge.