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Ying was standing with one foot each on two downed agents, tossing a third into the air and toward a wall as Nadia approached. Nadia zipped through the open door and directly into the cold room, a cacophony of whirring fans and buzzing servers greeting her tiny ears. In the center of the room, Priya was trying to dash around Monica to flip the main circuit breaker.
This—this is what happened when the G.I.R.L.s worked together. Nothing could stand in their way.
Nadia flew straight for Monica’s head, catching herself in her hair—Eugh, giant dandruff, eugh—and swinging forward to land on Monica’s nose. Nadia could see Monica’s hand swinging up in slow motion to swat at her.
Nadia slammed her fist into the bridge of Monica’s nose. Monica went flying back into a bank of servers, sparks and wires flying. Nadia pushed off and flipped backward through the air, landing sideways on one of the server blocks. She ran toward her friends, leaping from server to server, careful to avoid any wiring that could trip her up. As Nadia raced forward, as if in slow motion, she saw something familiar attached to a server on her left—a quantum oscillator. Modeled exactly after the ones she’d been working with Shay to perfect in Pym Labs.
She’d been frustrated before. Now Nadia was mad.
Nadia took to the air and kicked her legs out in front of her just as another A.I.M. agent ran through the door, making a beeline for Priya. In an instant, Nadia expanded to her usual size, her feet ramming directly into the agent. Hit by the girl equivalent of a speeding car, the bucket-he
ad slammed into the nearest block of servers and slumped to the floor.
Nadia looked at Priya—and found herself yanked backward, a gloved arm tight around her neck. She went to shrink, but found her button-pushing hand restrained by the agent’s other arm. Letting out a frustrated yell, Nadia pushed her weight back onto the A.I.M. agent and ran her feet up the wall in front of her, using the momentum to flip over his head, breaking the agent’s grip. She landed behind him and used her fists to punch out the backs of both of his knees. The man hit the ground with a groan. Nadia hit him with a Sting just to be sure he wasn’t getting up again.
Nadia spun toward the door to see Ying blocking three agents from entering at the same time. She watched Ying jab a man in the throat, and he dropped like a brick—but there were still two to go. Her hand now free, Nadia released her Pym Particles with a press of her thumb and zoomed toward the A.I.M. lackey nearest her. They weren’t wearing their flamethrowers—Monica must have told them not to endanger the servers more than was absolutely necessary.
That worked very well for Nadia.
Dodging both bucket-heads, Nadia landed on her friend’s shoulder. “Ying,” Nadia said, using her comms to make up for the sound-wave distortion. “Love Duet?”
Ying’s dry chuckle came through loud and clear through Nadia’s helmet. “Why the heck not?”
Nadia grinned. She didn’t like hurting people. But she did love saving the day. “You go left, I’ll go right.” She felt her friend nod.
In the Red Room, fighting and ballet were two halves of the same whole. They had a lot more in common than one might assume. Ying had told Nadia “dance fighting” was a thing in some movies, which did make sense. But it was a very literal correlation in the Red Room. The Love Duet was always Nadia’s favorite number in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. She and Ying had been particularly good at it, especially when she was allowed to be Odette to Ying’s Siegfried. Nadia had always been better at the turns and the leaps; Ying preferred the supporting role, holding Nadia steady as she flew up into the air in lifts and holds.
The same applied in battle.
Nadia leapt off Ying’s shoulder, exploding into the air directly next to the A.I.M. agent on her right, sending him stumbling back as Ying ducked, spun, and kicked, relieving the other agent of his connection to the ground. Ying held out her arms and Nadia tucked her waist between them. At the exact same moment Nadia jumped from the floor, Ying hoisted her friend upward. Nadia fanned her legs out, kicking in a circle—hitting the right agent on the way up, and bashing the left agent on the way down. Both agents both dropped, unconscious. A perfect pas de deux.
Ying set Nadia down gently. The two spared a second for a high-five as Nadia checked out the door. Clear—for the moment.
Worried for her other friend, Nadia rushed over and grabbed Priya. She could feel how weak her friend already was.
“Are you okay?!” Nadia asked Priya. “You have a lot of plants going—”
“Can’t for much longer,” Priya said through gritted teeth. She slouched to a seated position. “Brain melting.”
“Okay,” Nadia said, though she did not in that moment feel okay. “Okay. We can do this. Take Ying and Margaret—” Wait. Nadia’s head snapped up. Margaret. Where was Margaret?
“Looking for this?” asked a voice behind her. Nadia spun. Monica had come around after Nadia’s face punch and was pulling herself out of the mess of servers, looking a little worse for wear.
She had something in her hand. Pinched between two fingers, in fact. And if Nadia just squinted, she could see a tiny, struggling figure.
Margaret.
“Waiting for your backup?” Monica taunted. She shook Margaret a little too hard for it to be a joke. Five more A.I.M. agents marched into the server room, Ying among them in cuffs. Nadia smiled. It would take five grown men to hold back one Ying.
Monica laughed. “VERA belongs to A.I.M. And so do her users, in just a few minutes. You tried,” she said with a shrug, “but you failed. There’s no one coming for you now.”
Nadia looked everywhere she could for an exit, a strategy, a plan of any kind—but she was outnumbered. Inside the building and out. She had no other options. Her friends were captured; even Margaret had been bested. That’s what you get for using your super suit as a newbie. Nabbed by Monica Rappaccini. So embarrassing. So frustrating. So buzzing.
So…buzzing?
But there was buzzing. Lots of it. Loud, and getting louder. Nadia looked around the room in a panic. Were the servers about to blow? Monica and the A.I.M. agents looked just as confused. But it wasn’t coming from inside the room. It got louder, and louder, and—
“Sorry—were you saying something about backup?” Dedushka stepped through the door to the server room. Nadia was so shocked to see Jarvis in a combat situation that she almost missed Janet and Bobbi following in their full Super Hero attire. Janet flipped out her wings; Bobbi whipped out her battle staves; Jarvis tightened his ascot. Behind them, a swirling portal yawned, projected from a miniaturized teleportation device on the floor—Ying must have dropped it from her hidden pocket intentionally before being cuffed. As Nadia watched in surprise, Shay crossed the portal’s event horizon, pushing Tai in her chair. Tai’s hands were too busy to push herself, manipulating a handheld remote control.
