The car rumbles into the turn, tipping precariously to the right as it careens just a little too close to the edge. The movement threatens to send the creaky vehicle off the cliff along with the headstrong driver and nervous passengers. Someone much more practical wouldn’t have taken the turn so wide, wouldn’t have been going downhill at such a terrifying speed, wouldn’t have dared defy the law of gravity. A cautious, responsible driver and citizen educated by the Manual Driving Authority of the North American Collective would have never risked it.
Emma Robledo is neither cautious nor responsible.
She laughs, whooping wildly and pumping her fist into the air. Her stomach drops as the car flies down the dirt trail, and she speeds through the next few turns. The road is all downhill from here. Dust flies in the wind, and the kiss of adventure is in the air. She pushes her heart-shaped sunglasses to the top of her head; excitement pulses through her as steadily as the rhythm of her beating heart. Today is the day. Today, the Resistance will take action against the League. Their little contingent is small, but they’re ready. Emma’s more than ready. She’s been planning this for weeks.
The steering wheel is warm under her calloused hands. She steps on the accelerator, pushing the car to go even faster, and jerks the steering wheel sharply, pulling the car out of the turn. The sun beams on the desolate wilds of the Unmaintained lands ahead of her; the desert seems wide open with possibility. Ahead of them, wavering in the heat, a single, shining, maglev track reflects the afternoon light. It seems out of place in the expanse of the desert as it cuts through the red and gold sandstone and the endless scatter of cacti and creosote bushes. The high-speed hovertrains that connect the otherwise-isolated cities of the North American Collective are lifelines, carrying everything from travelers to food to supplies across the barren wastes.
Today’s manifest? Three-hundred-forty-seven MonRobots, all of them from the new MR-D4R series, right off the factory line.
Emma shudders, trying to block the memory of running for her life from the cold, silvery gleam of the relentless robots. Unlike the earlier chore-assistant series from Monroe Industries, the MR-D4Rs are fully furnished with a “security” program. Emma’s seen firsthand what harm the new bots can do. Now there’s one in almost every household— a sleeping robotic force that could awaken anytime and be used against anyone the League deems a problem.
A gleam flashes on the horizon. The train is approaching. They have mere minutes.
Everything is going according to plan.
“We’ll be there right on schedule!” Emma announces.
“Slow down!” Ricky screeches. “Why did we have to drive? We could have just had Tanya teleport us right onto the train.”
“How many times did I explain that I can only teleport things to places I’ve been be-fooore—”
Tanya’s voice trails off as Emma jerks the wheel sharply again to pull the car out of another curve just before it veers into the canyon.
“Sorry, I meant Sasha could teleport us, but you’ve both totally been on a hovertrain before,” Ricky says.
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Invisibility, let’s just teleport to any random hovertrain, sure—”
“Robledo, slow down; you’re gonna get us all killed!” Ricky’s high-pitched shriek is muffled as Cal elbows him.
Emma rolls her eyes. She’s driven down this canyon road from their hideout so many times during the practices for this mission, with weights substituting for passengers, that she could drive it in her sleep.
Emma steps on the pedal, pushing the car to accelerate even faster, deftly turning the wheel with each twist in the road. The little solar-powered car isn’t built for this speed, or to be driven manually, but with enough modifications it’s become the perfect mission vehicle.
Ricky’s voice carries so loudly that Emma thinks people could hear them in Vegas. “Why are we going even faster? Honestly, there’s no need. If I were driving…”
In the mirror, Emma can see Ricky tossing back his dusty brown hair and grinning as he launches into a story involving a car and a slow chicken while Sasha and Tanya give him identical, unimpressed looks. The two Black girls are dressed for the mission in comfortable clothing, but took Emma’s suggestions in entirely different directions: Tanya’s wearing formfitting athletic gear that manages to convey her eclectic, colorful style, and Sasha’s outfit echoes her punk music taste with band logos and geometric symbols scattered all over her shirt and pants. Neither outfit is inconspicuous, but Emma did say to focus on comfort.
“I believe Emma is using the momentum of the vehicle and accelerating during turns to get us to our destination as quickly as possible,” Cal says, adjusting their goggles on their face. The goggles leave little round depressions on their dark-olive-toned cheeks, which dimple when they smile at Emma. “You’re doing great, Emma. Don’t listen to Ricky.”
Doubt seeps in, dulling Emma’s adrenaline rush. Was her plan too ambitious? No, she assures herself. The plan is foolproof. This part had gone perfectly in her practices. Then again, the weights didn’t talk. She’d imagined their first mission would flow like clockwork with all of them on the same page and no one questioning her plans. But Emma also imagined it differently: Jess giggling with delight at every turn, Abby’s steady voice encouraging Emma, and Bells— Bells would touch her shoulder and give her that small smile, the one that’s just for her.
Emma tightens her grip on the wheel. Her old friends wouldn’t question her; they’d support her. But Jess and Abby are still at the Villain’s Guild hideout, trying to sort out the next course of action with the adults. But most of them were content to hide and did not want to challenge the Heroes’ League of Heroes or do anything about the militarized MR-D4Rs being sold across the country.
Part of Emma’s plan is to build the Resistance into a force to be reckoned with, whether or not the Villain’s Guild and the other meta-humans in hiding were ready. Emma didn’t ask for permission to begin fighting back; she just did what she did best— led the way. It’s taken a grueling few weeks to convert the old movie-watching club’s hideout into a true base of operations, but every moment has been worth it, from bringing in Bells’ friends from Meta-Human Training to the recruits drawn in by coded clues left on message boards and conspiracy forums to the original members of the pre-Collective-film enthusiasts group.
Emma misses Jess and Abby fiercely, but they all have jobs to do, Bells especially. His part in this mission is the most dangerous, and if they don’t get there in time…
Ricky’s nasal whine continues. “My plan was great. We don’t even need to use any cars or bikes, just get Sasha to teleport us there—”
“I’m Sasha. You clearly can’t tell us apart or understand how our powers work. Since neither of us has touched any of those new robots before, we can’t—”
“Right, but, uh— Tanya could have easily gotten us onto the train—”
“The one that’s moving two-hundred miles per hour? The one that’s changing location every second, also that, might I remind you, I’ve never been on?”
“Can everyone just shut up and let me concentrate?” Emma grips the wheel. The conversation stops immediately.
A gust of wind—no, not wind, Emma knows that flicker—rushes up to the car. A slight green-blue gleam—holographic cam-foil—fades to reveal Bells on his motorcycle. He waves and then slides up his helmet’s panel to smile at Emma.
That smile— that’s what settles her nerves and quells the doubt rising in her. Emma takes a deep breath.
“This is going to be awesome!” Bells calls out, pumping his fist in the air. “I’ll see you down there!” He rolls the motorcycle backward and pops a wheelie, making Emma laugh. Her stomach drops as the car flies down the dirt trail, and she speeds through the next few turns after Bells.
Bells flicks at his shoulder to reactivate his cam-foil, then fades into the desert air. Emma does the same for the car as Bells races ahead of them. Emma can tell he’s gaining speed from the cloud of dust kicking up behind the glimmer until he’s just a streak of dust alongside the maglev track. She revs the car and looks over her shoulder, past Ricky’s anxious face, past Sasha and Tanya whispering softly to one another, past Cal’s earnest gaze. The track is still empty, but any second now—
There! A flash of silver. The train streaks across the desert; its shadow is barely a blur as it rushes along its magnetic track. The air between the train and the track glitters and hums, and soon Emma is racing alongside it. She’s going as fast as she can, but there’s no way a solarcar can catch up to a hovertrain. The whole length of the train zooms past her in a few seconds.
Bells and his motorcycle suddenly pop into visibility where the track curves before heading north to Middleton. In this visible moment, he’s in disguise for the benefit of the cameras mounted on the outside of the train. The man whose shape he’s shifted into is no one, really, a very carefully crafted “no one,” designed to be forgettable and unplaceable.
Bells scrambles off his bike and grabs the track just before the train reaches him.
His eyes shut, and he disappears.
The gleam of activated cam-foil merely hides someone from view by mimicking the light refracted around them. But this is very different. Bells isn’t gone or in disguise. He is the track now. Bell’s shapeshifting abilities can affect not only himself, but anything he touches. At this moment he’s changing the entire nature of this section of the track, removing its magnetic properties. It’s amazing, what Bells can do; they haven’t tapped the limit of his potential.
The train creaks and comes to a stop, hovering in place where the maglev tech is still live. Bells must have engaged the brakes.
Emma slows down. “Radios on,” she says, double-checking that hers is working.
Ricky makes a face. “You don’t have to remind us of every little detail.”
“Yours isn’t on,” Sasha says, flicking the small device clipped to his sleeve.
“Get going!” Emma jerks her head at the train.
Ricky shrugs, flips his screwdriver in the air, and catches it. “I was going to turn it on. You can’t do this part without me, anyway.” He winks at everyone and then turns invisible. His footprints are barely perceptible as he runs toward the train.
This is the most dangerous part of the plan, when the cameras inside and outside the train are still active. They only have six minutes total; that’s how long Bells can hold a shift of this magnitude.
Emma, Cal, and the twins wait with bated breath. The side door opens; Ricky’s inside. Emma watches the seconds count down. Ricky should be going through each car now, turning off the cameras—
“Cars one and two are out,” Ricky says over the radio.
“Go, go, go!” Emma doesn’t realize she’s shouting until Cal and the twins are both out of the car and racing toward the train.
“We’ll see you at the end of the train, Emma,” Tanya shouts, then disappears inside with the others.
The train is short, only five cars, each of them filled with MR-D4Rs. Through the windows, Emma can see Cal give her a thumbs up as they sprint to the next car in the train. Abby’s program takes forty seconds to rewrite the code of each MonRobot within range— twenty feet, roughly the length of a freight car. They’ve practiced this over and over again. The plan was simple enough: In each car, invisible Ricky would shut down the camera while Cal, Sasha, and Tanya would follow, running the program and then racing ahead to the next car to do it again. It’d taken Emma several tries to come up with the most time-efficient plan, but she’s still worried. Even their fastest time during practice—five minutes and fifty-six seconds—was cutting it close.
Driving beside the train, Emma revs the engine and listens intently for updates. The wind whistles past her, and the next forty seconds crawl by in excruciating silence.
“One down,” Cal says, and Emma can see them running forward, past Sasha toward the end of the train, as Tanya is running for her next car.
“Two down.”
In every car, they leave another batch of MR-D4Rs without the sleeper program. Emma makes it to the end of the train in no time and swerves to park across the track. She grips the steering wheel, watches the clock, and replays her plan in her head. Now they just have to get in the car and away before the track activates again. If any of them are still on the train, there will be a lot of questions when it arrives in Middleton. Tanya can only teleport one thing at a time, and that’s going to be Bells. He’ll be exhausted and when he lets go of the shift, he’ll just be lying there on the track when the train comes back to life. Tanya will have a split second to teleport him out of danger.
Emma doesn’t want to think about what might happen if they miss that second.
Emma glances at the magnetic track as her anxiety spikes. The metal has a faint, iridescent green glimmer. That must be Bells, completely incorporated into the track. Bells, risking his life for her plan.
It’s going to work.
“Okay, okay.” Emma listens for each update. Seconds seem to stretch into hours, and all Emma knows is the frantic beating of her heart while she thinks about Bells. She second-guesses herself. Maybe rushing into this was a bad idea. Maybe they should have waited until Jess and Abby were able to get the rest of the meta-humans at the Villain’s Guild to help—
“Four down,” says Tanya.
No time to think about that now. They’re almost finished.
Ricky pops into visibility in the last car and smirks at her. “See? We totally didn’t need ten practice runs. I had this down. All the cameras in all five cars, done. They didn’t know what hit them. I mean, literally. Anyone watching those feeds would be suuuper confused.” He saunters out of the train and hops into the seat next to Emma. “Did we bring any snacks?”
Watching the train fervently, Emma elbows him. They’re almost out of time. She glances at the track. It’s still glimmering green, but it’s definitely flickering.
“Last one,” Cal says as they enter the last car. Through the broken door, Emma can see them fumbling with the transponder, one person standing amidst rows of MR-D4Rs, waiting silently with their chrome bodies reflecting each other like mirrors. Their rectangular edges shine with a hard, sharp glint. Emma shudders, thinking of the stark difference between this new design and the rounded bodies of all previous MonRobots.
A terrifyingly loud clatter rattles over the radio.
“What was that!?” Emma yells.
“Dropped the transponder! I’m resetting it, but the light isn’t turning on—”
Emma curses, glancing at the timer mounted on the car’s dashboard. “We don’t have enough time. Bells is about to lose the shift! We’ll have to leave now and get Bells— let’s go! Get off the train!”
A sharp electronic whir starts—the noise that haunts Emma’s recurring nightmares—and she freezes.
Tanya screams. “One of the bots turned on! Cal!”
Next to her, Ricky is cursing, yelling wildly, but Emma doesn’t hear. All she can see are rows and rows of MR-D4Rs lighting up, and one of them buzzes as it scans—
It’s as if she’s underwater and she can’t move, but she has to. Her friends are in danger; Bells is in danger—
The world comes back in a roar of noise and confusion, and Ricky is gone, rushing into the car and holding aloft another device that Emma vaguely recognizes from an earlier, scrapped plan— the bomb. It was one of the initial ideas about destroying the robots, but they’d decided to reprogram instead. Why did Ricky bring it?
The MR-D4Rs are activating one by one in that unsettling whirr and Emma knows what’s coming next when the first one intones, “Sasha Pierce, you are in violation of the Meta-Human Restriction Act…”
Emma doesn’t wait to hear the rest. She knows they’re all fugitives.
“Get off the train! We’ve got thirty seconds!” Ricky is yelling, pushing the others, and they’re running, running—
Emma sees the three of them running right for her and the open car door and realizes: Ricky’s explosive will stop the bots but not the train—
Bells doesn’t have thirty seconds.
She jerks the wheel sharply, turns around, and accelerates, speeding the car through the last bit of distance between the last train car and Bells’ section of the track.
Emma’s aware of shouting behind her and she calls out, “Just run!” through the radio. All she can think is, Bells is in danger, Bells is going to come back from his shift, vulnerable, with a train heading right toward him—
“Tanya! Now!” Emma pleads over the radio. If she can teleport Bells—
Tanya voice is high pitched. “I can’t concentrate! You have to get out of the way! We all have to get off the train before—”
The track rapidly loses its green color, and then there’s a little pop and Bells’ form is lying prone on the track. Emma doesn’t think, just throws herself out of the car and races toward Bells. Her feet barely find purchase in the parched earth, but she runs as fast as she can.
Too late. The train roars to life—
Emma wraps her arms around Bells’ torso, trying to drag him free. He makes a noise of protest. “Come on, Bells, we gotta—” Emma mutters, but she’s not strong enough.
The lights of the train are on. There is no time.
Emma gives up trying to lift Bells and grabs him by the side and rolls both of them off the track into the dirt just as the train whips past them. The wind knocks Emma backward, and then there’s the roar of an explosion.
Emma’s ears are flooded with the noise, and for a seemingly infinite moment she can only hear a sharp, ringing sound and then it’s all gone. There’s nothing but the lingering heat and the smoke trailing behind the speeding train and its wrecked car, racing toward the horizon, leaving behind six stunned teenagers.
Sasha coughs, rubbing her eyes. Next to her, Tanya shakes dirt out of her braids, and Cal’s goggles are all askew. Ricky is half buried in the sand.
Emma exhales, then coughs. “Well, that went well.”