“That was great,” Ricky says with biting sarcasm. “Look at my leg!” He winces, pointing at the tear in his jeans.
“Barely a scratch.” Sasha rolls her eyes.
“I’m totally bleeding.”
“We’ve got medi-gel back at the hideout,” Emma says wearily as she watches the train disappear over the horizon. It’ll arrive in Middleton soon, damaged car and all, and it’s going to be all over the news. She sighs. The plan had been for a quiet, unnoticeable reprogramming of all the MR-D4Rs on that train. Now the Authorities are going to be on the lookout for any further tampering. “Why did you bring the explosives?”
“Oh, it was a good thing I did,” Ricky snaps. “Otherwise all those MonRobots would have woken up, and we would have been toast!”
Sasha stands up, spits dust, and coughs. She glares at Ricky. “That was overkill. All we needed to do was get off the train and then get Bells free—”
Emma’s adrenaline is fading, and her heart rate is returning to normal, but the cold, uneasy feeling of failure only grows. It seemed that everything that could go wrong, did. They’re lucky no one got seriously hurt. “We need to go,” she says. “The Authorities will be here once that train arrives in Middleton and they start investigating. Cal, you’re still good to bring back Bells’ motorcycle?”
Cal pulls their goggles down, gives her a thumbs up, and waddles over to the fallen motorcycle.
“Tanya, Sasha—”
“On it,” Tanya says, with a quick nod at her twin. She doesn’t bother with finger snaps, just jerks her head. Sasha disappears first, then Ricky. “Ready, Bells? I can aim for you to land right on the couch.”
Bells gives her a weak smile. “Thanks, but I’ll ride back with Emma. Can you help me to the car?”
He appears to be lightheaded, but otherwise awake and oriented. Emma isn’t sure how long he’ll need to recover. Bells’ energy exhaustion once left him unconscious for three harrowing days. Emma won’t easily forget going wild with worry, checking and double-checking every few minutes to see if he was still breathing, keeping him comfortable. He doesn’t seem nearly as exhausted as the last time Emma saw him use his power to this extent. He even cracks a smile as Emma and Tanya help him to his feet, and they all wobble to the car together.
Waving goodbye, Cal speeds off on the bike.
“I’ll see you back there,” Tanya says. “And don’t worry about what Ricky said. It was a good plan. You couldn’t have known that the MR-D4Rs would wake up.” She smiles, pats Emma on the arm, and disappears.
Now it’s just Emma and Bells and the vast, open desert.
Emma turns on the engine and pauses to look at Bells. “You didn’t have to ride with me, you know. It would have been much faster to just have Tanya teleport you.”
Bells shrugs. “Sitting on the couch resting or sitting in the car resting with you— come on, it’s not even a contest.” His hand finds hers.
The simple touch reassures Emma and some of her nervousness melts away. “That was awful, though.” The failure still weighs upon her, heavy and suffocating. “You could have almost—” Emma doesn’t even want to think about losing Bells.
“It’s okay, Em. Like Tanya said, you couldn’t have predicted that.” Bells gives her a puzzled look. “I don’t know what happened, but we’re all okay, and you all definitely reprogrammed a bunch of those robots, so it all worked out. Four out of five cars. Eighty percent. High marks!”
Bells grins at her, as if the mission was a test she passed. Thinking of it as a test is even worse. Emma gets full marks on all her tests! She’s an honors student and in college prep and is going to bring back the space program so she needs fantastic grades. It’s definitely not good enough for Emma’s perfectionist standards. And the whole thing was supposed to be under the radar. Emma wants to bang her head against the steering wheel. How did this go so wrong so fast? Her very first mission as a Resistance leader, and everyone was counting on her, and it all failed.
“Hey. Look at me. C’mon, Em.”
Emma glances up at him; his warm brown eyes meet her own. Today he’s wearing his hair in short dreadlocks that sweep over a side-shave. Even without the dramatic hair colors, his style is still so very Bells— Bells, her best friend, whom she’s known since she was five and today almost lost.
“You’re doing that thing in your head again. It’s fine,” Bells cajoles.
“You’re just saying that because you love me.”
She’s teasing, but Bells only gives her a sincere look.
“I do,” he says and leans over, and here’s the kiss she was expecting, soft and sweet on her lips. Bells kisses her again on her forehead, and then wraps his arms around her.
Emma closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and inhales deeply, pressing her face into Bells’ neck. She can still smell the acridity of burnt metal and chemicals, but here, close, is the light clean scent of Bells’ skin and coconut soap. Emma wants to hang on to this moment forever, nestled in the warmth of his arms.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Bells grins at her again, and this time Emma smiles back.
“My girlfriend is obviously the best mastermind of all plans. This one just went a little sideways, but it all worked out.”
“Thanks,” Emma says. The word girlfriend feels heavy with expectation; it seems to hang in the air, like a pressure she doesn’t quite understand. Emma pushes the thought to the back of her mind and focuses on the warm sunlight on her face and the way the car jitters on the dirt road as they drive to the hideout.
Lines of cracked asphalt and melted tar cross the desert, and occasional buildings stand like ships in a wide, desolate ocean of orange and red rock and parched earth. They haven’t been in use for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Emma wonders if these places were abandoned long before the Disasters; she knows from her history that there wasn’t much here besides Vegas and a long-forgotten park. The area wasn’t developed enough to have its own nuclear power station, which made the Nevada region one of the ideal places for the Collective to rebuild after the X29 solar flare of 2128 caused many nuclear power stations all over the country to fail.
“Do you think the people who made this road thought it would survive this long?” Emma asks.
“I don’t think they thought about it.” Bells gazes out the window. The fading afternoon sunlight dances across his dark skin. “This road, at least.”
Emma agrees. The roads are just trails now, used by foxes and other animals roaming the Unmaintained lands. Did those people think that the road would fade from memory as cities rose and fell in the distance? Did they, as Bells suggested, simply go about their lives, not knowing that the footprints of their fossil-fuel-burning vehicles would remain until the desert slowly swallowed them?
Beyond the glimmer of the maglev track, the buildings of Andover appear. The city was founded far from its namesake in a desperate attempt by those who moved here to give their new home a sense of familiarity. The lone highway from Andover to the sparkling hub of Las Vegas stands out in stark contrast against the scatter of desert scrub. It’s neatly lined and painted; advertisements and billboards block all view of the Unmaintained lands. There’s no reason to leave the road when you can go from Andover to Vegas on a single solar charge, and from there, the rest of the country is just a train ride away.
Emma is hit with a pang of longing. She feels every bump and rock in the trail, driving this rusty, salvaged vehicle. She misses her old car, her first car, the cherry-red color, her custom programming, and all the high-tech features that came with it. Mama offered to buy her another one, even another red one, but Emma didn’t see the point of getting attached to another car. The crash is still vivid: the rogue MonRobots chasing them, her friends screaming for her to run, her beloved car tangled and wrecked beyond repair.
She shudders, trying not to let the memory take over. She inhales. Exhales. Looks at the bright blue sky. Concentrates on the feel of the stiff seat under her, on the car shaking as they move along.
“Hey.” Bells looks at her. “You’re making the face.”
“What face? I’m not making any face. This is my driving face.”
“This is your driving face.” Bells stares out the window in intense concentration and scrunches his eyebrows together. “Okay, I feel like that joke would have landed better if I actually did have the energy to shift my face, but you know what I mean. You’re overthinking something. Come on, there’s no point in worrying about that right now.”
Emma takes a deep breath. He knows her too well.
“Maybe we aren’t cut out for this.” Maybe I’m not cut out for this, she doesn’t say. But there is no Resistance except what they’ve started, and they have to be everything. And Emma understands that in the vast history of civilization there have been many revolutions, but that’s all pre-Collective history. Sure, they’re taught some of it at school—a sanitized, bare-bones summary of the people who came before—but the histories and details of the wars fought before the country was forged anew are all gone— lost, banned, destroyed. Some records survive, few and scattered, but what lasts are collections of old books and movies, and, even then, that selection depends on the tastes of those who preserved them. All Emma knows about resistance are the stories they’ve seen in the banned films— ragtag groups of lone rebels fighting against huge, impossible empires and bringing them down with nothing more than hope and a mentor to guide the way.
Maybe that’s what they’re lacking, someone who’s done this before, who’s been fighting since the beginning. But all the adults at the Villain's Guild seem content to hide and even when they finally were spurred to action, it took weeks and weeks of arguing and fighting to agree on a single item.
The Sidekick Squad did a lot of trawling the Net and looking for secret algorithms, clues and crumbs of a hidden organization that was only rumored to exist. It took forever to find what they thought was the Resistance but actually was just a group of people who loved watching pre-Collective films. It was worth it, though, since those members became their first recruits into the new Resistance once they learned the truth. It made Emma realize why the films are banned; the themes of fighting against corruption, of a small group defeating the odds against a large one, all spur hope and change. The films and shows that the Collective produces share open-and-shut plotlines: superheroes saving people from villains, families in their day-to-day life, teenagers at school, but never a government, never questioning or changing the system.
Emma grips the wheel. They have to succeed. There’s too much at stake.
“We’re still learning,” Bells says. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“I just feel like we should be doing more, taking the League head-on, like my plan that no one wants to do: showing up in the middle of a live broadcast and telling everyone what’s going on! That’s what we need.”
“That would make us targets immediately.” Bells gives her a contemplative look. “But it’s a good idea.”
Emma sighs. “Maybe not. We can see how well my last idea turned out.”
It’s almost dark by the time they get back. Bells has fallen asleep; Emma’s eyelids drag. The uphill drive entails coaxing the car on the last of its charge to push way up the canyon and onto the plateau. Here, there are no longer any roads at all. The sandstone is so compacted that the car doesn’t leave any tracks. Emma snorts, remembering when they parked so far away and hiked hours just to get to the cavern entrance, hoping to find the Resistance.
They’ve come a long way since then.
There’s a gnarled and burnt Joshua tree right in their path, but Emma keeps charging ahead, clipping a particularly large rock with a loud smack.
Bells jolts awake, blinks at the tree in their path, and yawns as they plow through it, distorting the hologram and scattering pixels of light everywhere. “Cool, it didn’t even flicker,” he murmurs. “That’s gotten so much better since we started.” He stretches and smiles at her. “I wanna eat, like, a mountain of french fries.”
Emma laughs. “Thomas and Kyle said they’d have dinner ready by the time we get back. I think french fries might be on the menu.”
“Might” was a severe understatement. Emma made sure they were in today’s dinner plans. Thomas loves cooking; he jumped at the idea of using the oven they just installed for the french fries. Emma requested them for today, when she knew Bells would need calories to recover properly. Thomas and Kyle, the original leaders of the illicit ring of pre-Collective media enthusiasts, had been more than happy to work with Emma’s vision for them to become the hub of the new Resistance. The hideout is a lot cozier since the older married couple moved in to maintain it full time, giving it an air of domesticity it badly needed. Emma still thinks it’s not quite her idea of a bustling headquarters, but it’s come a long way from being a humble hideout for watching banned media. There’s an entire new section for Thomas and Kyle’s living quarters, rooms for the twins and Ricky, guest rooms in case anyone needs to crash overnight, a kitchen, and even a little underground herb and vegetable garden, courtesy of technology from Bells’ family.
The past three weeks were a nonstop whirlwind what with retrofitting the hideout and trying to recruit new members. It was difficult at first, when no one knew where to start.
Emma’s first plan was extremely ambitious: a nation-wide exposé of the League’s true nature. They’d start small, with graffiti declaring “THE LEAGUE IS A LIE” to ignite the sparks of the Resistance movement and then spread the story by word of mouth, city by city. It would become an unstoppable piece of knowledge, growing and growing until everyone was questioning the Collective and the League they stood behind.
The plan, however, once Emma got it started, seemed meek compared to what they needed to do. The newest members bring them to fifteen here in Nevada. Their contacts in the Colorado region say that their group is up to eight, and they haven’t connected with any other chapters yet.
Things are moving too slowly for Emma. They should already be seeing measurable, significant results. But the so-called “heroes” of the League are still celebrated across the nation; their staged, costumed antics with the League’s designated villains dominate the news. They still sponsor countless products; their every hairstyle or fashion statement is the newest topic for every message board. Chatter about them consumes every moment of the entire Collective. And Emma knows why: to distract the public and keep them occupied with meaningless, contrived nonsense while the real crimes happened right under their noses. Captain Orion, the Commander of the League, the nation’s most famous and revered hero captured on live video kidnapping and experimenting on meta-humans— that damning evidence should be enough to change the public’s mind, but the League easily spun the story, making Orion out to be a villain with her own evil plot. With Lowell Kingston in power—and determined to keep the League under his thumb, keep the country involved in overseas conflict and the public eye away from his corruption—the Collective is a far cry from the egalitarian, peaceful society that it claims to be, the herald of a new age rising from war and disaster.
Emma sighs and parks the rust-bucket of a car. She knows there’s no easy solution, yet she can’t help but feel frustrated. So far all they’ve done is paint the words “THE LEAGUE IS A LIE” on various walls downtown. The new members are really into the graffiti, but Emma wants to do more. Her brain buzzes with the need for action. Emma’s plans range from the extremely practical (shopping lists and supplies for the hideout) to the very ambitious (stop the production of the MR-D4Rs), but the mission that would really kickstart their fight only came together after Bells convinced his friends from Meta-Human Training to join their cause. Emma’s plans went from vague to concrete once she had an idea of what they could do together, and she came up with the mission to reprogram the MonRobots on the supply train. She thought this would be their big moment, their first huge successful mission, with Emma at the lead.
Instead, she’s a huge failure.
Emma pulls the sheet of cam-foil from the trunk with more force than necessary while Bells clambers out. He doesn’t say anything, but she can feel his eyes on her as she drapes the foil over the car, tucking it carefully so the elements won’t displace it. She pats her pocket and is confused when she can’t feel the tablet she’d stuffed in there before the mission. Oh no! What if it fell out at the track? Or worse, on the train now stopped in Middleton? Brendan’s clever design would be immediately recognized as contraband or unregulated tech, and if they searched the hard drive—
“I got it.” Bells holds up the tablet. He taps the old-school touch screen and activates the camouflage program. The cam-foil flickers to life, bending the light around the car until, at a passing glance, it could be mistaken for boulders and cacti.
They’ve been using tablets instead of the data exchange devices that are issued to every citizen in the Collective. Sometimes Emma misses the ease of using the communication device and connecting to the Net, but the DEDs were a homing beacon, tracking their identification and location all the time. They can’t use that tracked system anymore. With Brendan’s design and Abby’s programming, the clunky tablets work well enough, as long as they’re within range, to send simple messages and operate custom programs like the cam-foil.
Emma and Bells walk the familiar trail until she hears the barely discernible echo under their feet. Emma sweeps aside the dust, uncovers the keypad, and presses her hand to it. It clicks, and a door swivels open to reveal quiet darkness.
The rickety ladder is something that Emma didn’t factor into her plan for Bells-in-recovery to handle, because in every version of the plan, he is teleported to the safety of the hideout, where he can wrap himself in blankets and eat fries while he watches his favorite detective show. Bells takes his time climbing down the ladder, and Emma holds him steady.
“Tanya should have teleported you back,” Emma grumbles as they slowly make their way down the tunnel.
Bells doesn’t respond immediately; there’s nothing but the dry whisper of air sweeping past them and the crunch of their feet on the dirt. “I could have gone that way,” Bells says slowly. “I’m fine, really.”
“Uh huh,” Emma says, awkwardly attempting to hold him up. She’s not as tall as Bells’ shoulder, so it’s difficult for him to lean on her, but she tries anyway. “So where on the scale of, like, from changing your hair to turning into a giant bulletproof rock person, which took you out for three days—”
“And I won’t forget that,” Bells says solemnly. “But I’ve gotten so much stronger, you know? And yeah, I could only hold the shift for the track for six minutes, but a month ago I wouldn’t have been able to walk around like this after.” He grins at her. “Maybe I just wanted to hold your hand.”
Emma snorts but relaxes, and they walk the length of the tunnel hand in hand. Emma knows every dip and bend in the stone halls by heart, knows this walk should only take a few minutes at this speed, but she stretches it out. Those feelings of doubt and insecurity, her failure as a leader— those are all waiting for her once they rejoin the others. But for now, she’s content, holding Bells’ hand and walking forward with him. The future can wait, just a bit.