“I get it—you need to invite them in instead of closing them out.”
“Right! You need to tear down all the basic assumptions that nobody thinks about but that wind up sitting there like a flashing neon sign that says, ‘Boys’ club—no girls allowed!’ ”
“That makes so much sense.”
“Well, obviously, it’s not the whole answer to getting girls into technology. You’ve got to remember there are also tiny, little contributing factors like, oh, say, puberty and self-image. It’s a start, though. If Girlsworld.com can provide girls with positive, welcoming experiences with technology and pull them into an online community of other girls who are doing the same thing, then we’ve got a shot at having a real impact. With a little luck, and a whole lot of work, we might just get it right. If we do, then maybe we can empow'er girls and make a difference.” Kat liked Dorothy Levin. She liked her a lot.
The founder and president of Girlsworld.com didn’t look much older than Kat herself. Judging from the masters’ degree from M.I.T. that hung on the wall, Dorothy was somewhere in her late twenties. She was constantly talking with her hands, in animated style that reflected a boundless energy to match her commitment. She genuinely cared about the work she did, and her enthusiasm was infectious. Kat had no trouble understanding how Dorothy had managed to wrangle a generous pot of start-up money out of everyone from venture capitalists to the National Science Foundation.
Kat and Dorothy had hit it off almost from the moment Kat walked in. The woman truly wanted to give girls a chance, and Kat got the sense that she took the same approach toward the people who worked for her.
In fact, the small company showed Dorothy’s fingerprints all over it. The whole place oozed with a sense of mission that struck a chord deep within Kat. And since most of the staff was female, the sexual politics that felt so overwhelming elsewhere promised to be almost nonexistent here. Every aspect of the place felt exactly like what Kat was looking for.
Best of all, they had an opening for a junior programmer—one that didn’t require a whole lot of prior experience.
“To be honest, the job doesn’t pay much. But we make up for it with long hours and overwork,” Dorothy was saying with a smile. “Seriously, though, there are lots of opportunities to get some great experience, and the people here are terrific.”
Kat’s ears perked up. Her skin tingled with excitement. This was beginning to sound like a job offer.
“Now, I should warn you,” Dorothy continued, “the hours really are long. We pull our fair share of all-nighters and weekends when we have to. But it’s worth it.
“I think you'd fit in well here, Kat. What do you say?”
Kat couldn’t believe her ears. It was like a dream come true.
And yet...
There was also a small voice in the back of Kat’s brain that was having second thoughts. Dorothy’s mention of long nights and weekends brought back Lynch’s concerns about Kat being too inaccessible to the team. What would happen when a crisis conflicted with her deadlines? Kat knew full well that, sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Eventually, one side of her life was going to have to take a back seat to the other.
But still... Kat had a rare opportunity here. It seemed much too good to pass up. Maybe she could figure out a way to juggle all of her responsibilities. Maybe she could find a way to make it all work.
Or maybe she was just trying to fool herself.
“Dorothy,” Kat said, “I think I’d . ..”
That was when the humming started to build.
Dorothy held up a finger to quiet Kat for a minute. “Do you hear something?” she asked.
Suddenly, the door blew itself off its hinges. The surrounding wall exploded in d hail of bricks, glass, and sound.
Instinctively, Kat threw her invulnerable body over Dorothy to shield her from the debris. She felt chunks of the rubble smash themselves to bits against her back. Not my good suit! she thought.
It happened so fast that it wasn’t until after the shower of debris subsided that Dorothy even thought to ask: “Wha—what in the ... ?”
“Sony,” Kat said. “I have a feeling this is for me.”
Kat had no idea what this was about, but one of the lessons that Mister Lynch had repeatedly drummed into her head was that finding out could wait until after she’d defended herself and survived. Kat let herself slip into automatic as she straightened and spun toward the source of the blast to assess the situation. As the dust started to clear, she was able to make out a pair of twelve-year-olds, one boy and one girl, standing just past the point where the door once stood. Another girl stood further away, in the middle of the large cubicle area outside Dorothy’s office. The shocked employees of Girlsworld.com were cringing against the walls or running for the exit.
Before Kat could react with more than confusion, Re verb struck. This time, though, it wasn’t with the sort of devastating blast that had demolished the wall, or even the kind of concussive force that had blown Rainmaker across the room. This was a more subtle gambit, but no less deadly.
Reverb thrust his hand out toward Kat, and her ears filled with a high-pitched whine that cut straight through her brain. As the screech rose even higher in pitch and vibrato, Kat clamped her hands to her ears in pain. It was no use, though. Covering her ears might have muffled the sound entering her ears slightly, but it didn’t stop the piercing vibrations from being conducted right through the bone of her skull.
Kat braced herself against the piercing agony and charged Reverb, only to be intercepted by a shuddering blow from Knockout. Knockout caught Kat in the stomach with a fist that could have driven itself through a brick wall without losing momentum. In the past, Kat had faced mortar shells without blinking, but the sucker punch sent her to the floor with the air knocked out of her.
Kat lay there, helpless and gasping. As she struggled to regain her breath and her footing, Knockout delivered a savage kick to her head that laid Kat flat with a grunt. To her utter amazement, Kat felt her lip starting to swell. But—but that can’t be! Kat thought, even as she instinctively rolled herself into a ball for protection. Kat couldn’t remember the last time she’d been injured by a simple kick.
Knockout stomped down on Kat’s lower back, directly over her kidneys.
She’s... strong, Kat thought, through the blinding pain. Stronger than me.
To make matters worse, Reverb’s sound vibrations showed no sign of easing up. Just the opposite, actually. The vibrations continued to intensify, threatening to turn Kat’s brain to jelly. Kat might have had the raw power to go toe to toe with a monster truck, but she was as vulnerable to strokes and aneurysms as anyone else.
Who are these guys?! she thought.
Kat knew that she needed to gain some distance. Distance would give her the time she needed to catch her breath, if only for a minute, before bouncing back to launch a counterattack. The problem was that every time she tried to get up, Knockout immediately sent her back down.
And the vibrations were just getting worse.
It was getting harder to think. A dark haze was forming around the edges of her field of vision. Whatever she was going to do, she needed to do it now.
Can’t go up ..., she thought, but maybe ...
Kat rolled over onto her back. Knockout raised her foot for another kick, but before she could bring it down, Kat slammed her fists and feet against the floor with all of her considerable might. The floor was still heavily reinforced from the days when the building served as a warehouse. In those days, every square foot of the floor had to be able to hold several hundred pounds. However, Kat was stronger than that. The reinforced beams within the floor didn’t stop it from buckling and giving way under the force of Kat’s pounding. Before her adversaries knew what was happening, the floor beneath Kat was gone, and Kat was tumbling down through the hole it left behind.
Directly below, in the offices of Mandl & Pemikoff Actuarial Services, a bespectacled man in a white shirt and bowtie was p
oring over a mass of ledgers and statistical tables. Kat landed smack in the middle of his desk, shattering it into splinters. She lay there, sprawled in the debris that was once his desk, panting.
The bespectacled man looked down at Kat. He looked around at his scattered papers and the fragments of his desk. He looked back at Kat again and then up.
“Thank you,” he murmured to Heaven.
Knockout reacted quickly, jumping to follow Kat down through the hole. But to her surprise, she never made it. In mid-leap, a gale-force wind caught Knockout unawares. The windstorm picked her up like a leaf and hurled her through the glass of a nearby window. In a glistening shower of crystal shards. Knockout sailed out the window and plummeted toward the ground, four stories below.
The sudden appearance of the wind would have been surprising enough. But the most bewildering thing about it was that it had originated indoors.
“Cavalry’s here,” said Burnout. He leaned his head toward Rainmaker and, as an aside, added, “No offense.”
Sarah replied without taking her eyes off Gen14. “On behalf of the entire Apache nation,” she said, “none taken.”
The four heroes stood near the entrance to the outer office. Usually, the group had an upbeat air about them, but there was no sign of that now. Burnout and Rainmaker stared grimly at the remaining Gen14 kids, each poised for battle. Freefall was still clearly shaken, standing huddled in Grunge’s arms. And Grunge just looked mad.
The air was filled with a low-pitched roar as Reverb hurled a blast toward them with the speed of sound. But they were ready for him now, and scattered to get out of the way of the offensive a split-second before he let it fly. The vibrations sailed past Gen13 and reduced a bank of computer terminals to high-tech dust.
Even as he ducked, Burnout released a ball of fiery plasma that shot toward Reverb. But Reverb was also on the move, so the attack set fire to a bulletin board instead. As Rainmaker summoned a small rain cloud to extinguish the blaze before it grew, Reverb was running toward Sidestep and the shimmering portal that she had created.
“Don’t even think it!” Grunge growled, charging after him. Grunge took a running jump toward the fleeing figure, but with inches to spare, Reverb and Sidestep slipped through the portal and were gone. The portal vanished with them, leaving Grunge to slam headfirst into a nearby desk.
Rainmaker stepped cautiously over to the broken window, holding her injured side, and looked down. As she had expected, the super-strong Knockout had survived the fall. Apart from the caved-in roof of an unfortunately parked panel truck, there was no sign of her on the street below.
“They’re gone,” Sarah said, finally letting her shoulders droop wearily.
“Good thing, too,” Burnout replied. “No way are we up for another fight so soon.” He drifted gently down through the hole in the floor and landed beside Kat. She was on her feet now, and slowly recovering. She thanked the man in the glasses as he handed her a paper cup full of water.
“You okay?” Burnout asked.
“Wonderful,” sighed the man in the glasses.
“I was talking to her.”
Kat swallowed the water. Gingerly, she probed her swollen lip with a finger. “Yes, I think so,” she replied. “My head’s killing me, but I’ll live. Thanks for the save.”
“Sorry we didn’t get here sooner. We had to track down your employment agency to find out where you were.”
“You didn’t have to do that. I left my schedule in the apartment.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a whole other story. You’re just lucky they only sent the ones who were assigned to take you out. They must not have expected the rest of us to show in time.”
“What do you mean? Who were those kids, anyway? Where’d they get so strong?”
“The questions are going to have to wait,” said Rainmaker. The papers that had been scattered in Kat’s fall started to swirl around the office as Rainmaker descended with Grunge and Freefall on a cushion of wind. “The rest of them could be back any minute. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“ ‘Rest of them?’ There’s more?” Kat asked.
“Come on,” Rainmaker said, wincing as she handed Kat the shoulder bag that she had retrieved from the office above.
“And what happened to you?”
“Later,” Sarah replied. “We’ll fill you in after we get somewhere safe.”
Sarah took her arm, and started to lead Kat toward the exit. Kat craned her head around to stare up through the hole at the Girlsworld.com office with helpless longing. “But.. . but. ..,” she pleaded.
She didn’t bother finishing the sentence, though. She recognized that her friends knew more about the situation than she did. And she knew they were right.
Kat’s heart sank with the realization. The opportunity had seemed so perfect for her. She wanted it so badly. But it looked like a normal life just wasn’t in the cards for her right now.
Or maybe ever.
CHAPTER 10
Manhattan’s East Village was one of the city’s more eclectic neighborhoods. For decades, the area did not have a name of its own, and was simply considered part of the Lower East Side, a slum neighborhood that was home to a true melting pot of Asians, Latinos, Jews, Italians. and any other immigrant group that couldn’t afford better living conditions elsewhere. However, as space grew scarce in the neighboring, bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, spiky-haired hipsters with multiple piercings began to spill over in search of more affordable rents. The irony, of course, was that, over time, the increased interest in the East Village led to gentrification and bargains becoming as scarce as in Greenwich Village proper.
Still, thanks to rent control laws that kept the cost of living reasonably affordable for long-time residents, the rising rents didn’t drive out the older generation completely. The result was that the neighborhood had become a quirky blend where white-haired old-timers walked the streets side-by-side with teens and twentysomethings sporting leather outfits and dyed purple hair.
In the heart of the East Village was the Hometown Tavern, a small, dingy bar that was located just below street level in one of the apartment buildings on Saint Mark’s Place. Sandwiched among used record stores and alternative fashion salons, the smoky bar was clearly intended to cater to an older crowd. In contrast to the strobe lighting and molded plastic that characterized the sur-
rounding establishments, the Hometown looked like nothing more or less than a typical low-end neighborhood bar, with a few simple wooden tables, a dart board, and a jukebox whose selections ran the gamut from big band oldies to more recent hip hop hits.
Bobby glanced casually around the room. “Not exactly our usual kind of hangout.”
“That’s pretty much the point,” Sarah muttered. “These kids know way too much about us. We can’t risk going to any of the places where we usually hang.”
Grunge fingered his glass with distaste. “Or risk ordering a brew? C’mon, we’ve gotta be able to do better’n ginger ale.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t think to grab your fake ID from the apartment when we were running for our lives.”
Gen13 huddled around a table in the back of the Hometown Tavern, looking deflated. The day hadn’t been one of the team’s greatest triumphs ... and it showed. Thanks to a quick stop at a nearby drug store, Kat had been able to help Sarah tape up her damaged ribs in the ladies’ room, and some aspirin helped to dull the pain a bit. Still, Sarah was hurting. In fact, everyone was hurting, to some degree, from the injuries they’d sustained in their battles with Gen14. No one looked comfortable in the hard, wooden chairs that the bar had provided, and all of them wore facial expressions that showed just how demoralized they felt. None of them had been given the chance to take a shower or tend to their bumps and bruises. Only Kat had changed her clothes, replacing her shredded suit with an “I V NY” t-shirt and a pair of biker shorts that she had bought from a sidewalk vendor and put on in the Ladies’ room at the bar. It wasn’t a
look that would win her any fashion awards, but it would draw less attention than the tattered remains of an outfit that looked like it had been through a war.
“So, what now?” Bobby asked. “We just try to stay out of sight? We never go back home, or to anyplace we’ve set foot in before?”
“Not never,” said Kat. “Just until we get this thing settled.”
“Yeah, but how long’s that going to be?” Bobby heaved a disgusted sigh. “Same old, same old.’’
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like. After all that time on the run, we finally get to stop hiding from I.O. We get a nice place, a little downtime. And then, just when we’re starting to chill... Boom! Here we are, right back in the same kind of place all over again. This gig is getting old.”
“I can’t believe we got whipped by a bunch of kids,” Grunge mumbled.
“This is not the same place all over again,” Sarah said to Bobby. “This isn’t like running from I.O. Things are different now ...”
“Yeah?” said Bobby. “Like how?”
“Like we’re older now. We’re more experienced than we were when we started out. And this time, at least, we’re not stuck fighting someone with the resources of the whole U.S. Government.”
“Really? How do you know?” Bobby challenged. “We don’t know where those kids came from. Maybe we are fighting the whole U.S. Government.
“All I know is that here we are again, back on the run. Adios, New York. Next stop, Montana!”
“Look,” said Kat. “Nobody’s going to Montana. We are not running away. But we’ve got to face facts. Those kids outnumber us. They’re much more powerful than we are. They’re well-organized. And so far, they haven’t shown any hesitation about hurting us or anyone who gets in their way.”
“Plus,” Sarah added, counting off her points on her fingers, “they know who we are. They know where we live. They know so much about us that they already planned out who was going to fight whom before they showed up.” .
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