My stomach issued a formal declaration of war against my spine, a guttural roar that announced two things: one, I was starving, and two, I was stark naked. Again. I’d mostly broken the habit after Crystal decided my preferred state of undress was a deal-breaker, right after my trust fund became a deal-maker for her. But apparently, a two-day fugue state resets all personal growth to factory settings.

  Mindy was leaning over me, her hand on my shoulder giving me a gentle, and utterly pointless, shake. Her outfit—a delicately clingy blue lace-edged top over jeans—was a stark contrast to my… well, my birthday suit. I blinked owlishly at her, my brain booting up like an ancient computer riddled with malware.

  “Quick reality check,” I groaned, my voice sandpapery. “Did I provide a free, full-frontal tour of the third floor on my way to bed? Please tell me the ‘naked-in-public’ nightmare is just a recurring feature of my psychological horror show.”

  She shook her head, a smirk playing on her lips. “Nope, it happened. What the hell happened to you? You look like you tried to out-drink a brewery and lost.”

  I groaned again, the sound a perfect summary of my existence, and sat up, yanking the cover over my waist with the speed of a man who’d just discovered his modesty was MIA. “I was in… I guess what the uninitiated would call a tinker’s frenzy? Though that feels like calling a hurricane a stiff breeze.”

  She looked confused. “A what now?”

  “It’s not an official term,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “I’m not a real Tinker; those guys build perpetual motion machines out of paperclips and existential dread. I’m just a cheap knockoff. But it’s a sort of hyper-focused fugue state. You forget petty human needs like food, water, and clothing. It’s happened before, but usually it’s a one-hour power nap, not a forty-eight-hour coma.” I looked around frantically, a sudden spike of panic cutting through the fog. “The baggies! Tell me you have the baggies! I blueprinted them, but if they get out, some actual genius might reverse-engineer them and put me out of a job!”

  She nodded and pointed to my desk, where my precious, universe-altering ziplock bags sat innocently on my laptop. I sagged in relief. My legacy was safe. For now.

  “So what’s in them that’s so important?” she asked, her eyes glinting with mischief. “Before I start making humiliating comparisons to sand or, I don’t know, particularly ambitious body hair?”

  I managed a weak laugh. It sounded like a dying engine. “Give me a few minutes to achieve basic humanity and put on some clothes, and I’ll give you the grand tour of my descent into madness. Is Abby here? And what time is it, anyway? Did I miss the apocalypse? Please say yes.”

  She took a step back, giving me a once-over that was more clinical than appreciative. “Almost six. I figured you’d be hungry. All you consumed was a couple of eggs and a bottle of water. Abby’s out in the lounge, practically vibrating with curiosity.” She smiled a little. “And you might as well just get dressed. It’s not like almost everyone on the third floor doesn’t have a detailed mental map of your anatomy now, big boy.”

  I groaned and flopped my head back into the pillow, which offered no sympathy. Then, with the resigned air of a man who has nothing left to lose, I tossed the blanket off.

  Mindy’s eyes went wide. She made a sound halfway between a gulp and a squeak, spun on her heel, and shot out of my room, carefully closing the door behind her as if containing a biohazard.

  Smartass. She totally deserved that. For the record, I’m not a ‘big’ or a ‘little’ boy; I’m statistically, gloriously average. Not that I have a large sample size for comparison. Asking the guys in the gym shower for a compare-and-contrast session tends to get you funny looks. Or phone numbers. It’s a gamble. Jerry insists I’m bigger than him, but he also claims any guy I jumped would need a colostomy bag afterward, so his metrics are questionable.

  Still, ‘big boy’? Was that an insult? A compliment? Just a statement of fact from a girl who’s seen more super-soldiers than a USO show? My brain, ever the helpful companion, began constructing elaborate, paranoid scenarios. I sighed, a sound that contained multitudes of exhaustion, and started pulling on my civvies for dinner. I could come back later and change into my school costume for the impending teamwork disaster.

  Later, I met up with Mindy and Abby, who were joined by two other girls from our floor for the march to the mess hall. One was Cynthia Green, a slender blonde who could have been Mindy’s less-icy cousin. The other was Aria Gonzalez, a shorter brunette with a waterfall of black hair who looked like she’d just stepped off the set of a telenovela, probably about to dramatically accuse someone of stealing her inheritance. I had no idea what their cape names were, and unlike Abby, they didn’t lead with them. Abby, it seemed, had a talent for making friends quickly. She’d crafted this nonthreatening, friendly, ‘shy-around-boys’ persona that was so effective it was almost sinister. Once we were in the elevator, Cynthia and Aria split off to find edible food off-campus, leaving me with my personal entourage of one increasingly powerful hydrokinetic and one probable honeypot assassin.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  “So? So?” Abby asked, her eyes wide with a curiosity that felt a little too practiced.

  I smiled, patting the pockets that held my new secrets. “The first one,” I began, like a mad scientist presenting his magnum opus to a skeptical board, “is an organic-synthetic fiber hybrid. After your and Mindy’s suggestions, I looked up carbon nanotubes. I managed to make multi-walled nanotubes almost a millimeter long. I’m not the first, but I blended them with synthetic spider silk. It’s not a big deal,” I said, which was a lie so profound it should have made my nose grow, “but now that it’s blueprinted, I can start gathering base materials and spending my life force to create stupidly durable costumes. No more wardrobe malfunctions at inopportune moments.”

  “How would it compare to geofiber?” Abby asked, her head tilted. She was good. She asked the right questions.

  I grinned. “It would blow geofiber out of the water. Then again, geofiber is the cheap, knock-off version of Alexander Morita’s original Atlas threading, which is probably in the same ballpark. The key isn’t that it’s better; it’s that it won’t cost us four million dollars and my firstborn child to hope for a suit that can stop a stray bullet. I can make it for the low, low price of several years of my life and enough calories to feed a small nation.”

  She nodded slightly, a strategist assessing a new weapon. “So why were you so excited? You were practically gibbering.”

  I shrugged. “Because I made it. And only I can. It’s going to take forever, and this stuff can’t be sewn—it’ll need to be grown to fit perfectly—but it means I can actually do my job as Mindy’s sponsored support without sending us both to the poorhouse.”

  Mindy blushed again, a fascinating reaction I filed away for later analysis. But Abby was relentless. “So what was the other thing?”

  My grin turned downright diabolical. “Bear in mind, I just looked this up online. I’m no engineer; I’m a glorified photocopier with a metabolic disorder. But that, Abby, is the world’s first functional molecular integrated circuit. Well, a bunch of them. Microvoltage regulators, a thousand terabytes of superdynamic RAM, five hundred and twelve cores each humming along at sixteen gigahertz.”

  Mindy nodded slowly. “What does that mean?”

  Abbey snorted. “It means certain tech conglomerates would perform unspeakable acts for a steady supply. That’s terrifyingly fast. Can you create a production line?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t know how to do that. I can’t make the micromanipulators needed. Yet. But it’s possible. Right now, I have it blueprinted. With the right raw ingredients, I could crap out about a dozen of those a day, assuming I don’t need to save energy for, you know, living.”

  “So what use are they?” Mindy pressed, still looking lost.

  I sighed. The eternal question. “I’m not sure yet. I was just proud of making it. It’s a very small, very powerful computer. I’m betting it’ll be useful. If nothing else, I could probably run a killer game of Solitaire.” I paused for effect. “But most importantly, I also banged together a synthetic myofibril and merged them into artificial myocytes.”

  Mindy just stared blankly.

  I couldn’t help the mad scientist grin. “Muscle cells. The tensile strength is based on multilayered nanotubes. I made both slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers. Pound-for-pound, it’s about thirty-six times as durable and eight times as strong as Ogre’s.”

  Mindy’s eyes went wide. “Sex-tape Ogre?”

  I nodded. “The very same. Now, there are issues. Power supply, control systems, the whole ‘not going Skynet’ thing… but I have the brain, and now I have the brawn! I can start the robot revolution! Hahaha!” I started cackling, because if you’re going to say things like that, you have to commit.

  Mindy gave me a look usually reserved for people who argue with street signs. But Abby snorted. “And you thought I was the one trying to be a supervillain!”

  I grinned. “I think I’d make a pretty good one. The monologuing needs work, but the aesthetic is coming along. But no, psychopathy doesn’t suit me. I was thinking improved conflict suits for normies. Or prosthetics. This isn’t widgeteer tech; it’s real. With a proper neurosim pack and trans-VR, I could see making something that gives a single soldier a real chance against mutants. Maybe even a Kaiju.” The thought was less thrilling and more horrifying. One more thing to keep me up at night.

  “But only you can make them?” Abby confirmed.

  “Right now, yes. But not forever, I hope. I’d need to find actual tech geniuses, coders, people who understand the difference between Java and JavaScript. I’ll never get the full cackling-mad-genius thing working; those guys are control freaks who do everything themselves.” I smiled a little, the manic energy fading into something more tired. “Mostly, I just want to protect the people in the real fight. Heroes, even the shitty ones… they’re still the ones between us and the things that go bump in the night. If that means I have to wear a lab coat and giant glasses and pretend to be a harmless eccentric, then so be it.”

  Mindy nodded, studying me. “So you are a real believer in heroes?”

  I nodded. “Yes and no. I’m not an idiot. I know the system is corrupt, the rankings are a joke, and more than a few capes are one bad day away from being villains. But the moment a Kaiju shows up? I’ll put on a minidress and pompoms and cheer with the best of them. It’s not about the individuals; it’s about the goddamn Kaiju.”

  Mindy looked at me oddly. “But you don’t want to be one.”

  I laughed, a dry, hollow sound. “Oh, it’s not a matter of want. It’s a matter of can’t. I grew up dreaming of it, just like every other kid. But when I awakened… let’s just say it was made abundantly clear that I would never, ever be the equal of a true Class Three. Those exact words. I have tricks. I have gimmicks. But in the end, I’m just a normie with a really, really good parlor trick.”

  As I headed towards the cafeteria lines, I heard Mindy and Abby whispering behind me. Probably debating my sanity. Or my potential for world domination. Same difference, really.