The "military-grade" adhesive felt like cold slime against my skin.

  I stood by the open window, the night air of Bay City chilling my bare shoulders as Yuna and Piper performed their final inspection. The Scintilla suit hadn't changed in design - it was still the same three strings that made a dental floss bikini look like a parka - but the tension was tighter.

  "it's reinforced with a bio-synthetic resin based on what Piper slimed me with," Yuna explained, her fingers hovering near my chest as she checked the seal of the silver mesh against my nipples. "Even if you hit a power line at full tilt, the friction won't budge it. You're solid, Kurumi."

  "You said that last time," I muttered, adjusting the silver veil over my face. "And the time before that. I'm starting to think you just want to see how many people I can flash before I get a dedicated heroine board."

  "Too late for that," Yuna smirked, though her eyes softened. She stepped in close, her hands sliding up my bare arms to rest on my shoulders. "Be careful out there."

  She didn't wait for a reply. She leaned in and kissed me - a firm, possessive procedure that tasted like the energy drinks she'd been pounding all night to stay awake for the comms. It was a reminder of the arcade, a silent promise that the "Double Date" wasn't a one-time fluke.

  Before I could even catch my breath, Piper moved in from the other side. She tucked a stray strand of my hair - now silver due to the veil - behind my ear, her smile sweet but her eyes worried. "Come back in one piece, okay? We still have so much more to explore."

  She kissed me softly, her lips lingering against mine just long enough to make my stomach do a slow roll.

  "I'll be back," I promised the girls, feeling more empowered - and more nervous - than ever. I stepped onto the ledge and vanished into the dark, a streak of silver lightning against the soot-stained sky.

  ---

  The salt air was thick and smelled of rotting kelp and diesel. I crouched on the rusted arm of a shipping crane, a hundred feet up in the air, my silver suit humming as I drank in the static from the nearby transformers. The docks were eerily quiet, the only sound the rhythmic slap-slap of the dark water against the pilings.

  I was mid-scan when the air behind me suddenly spiked in temperature.

  "Look who I just found," I heard in an Irish lilt.

  I spun, my hands sparking with silver lightning. Fiona O'Shea - the Celtic Ember - was standing on the narrow catwalk behind me. She looked formidable in her green combat vest and leather-paneled kilt, her red hair tied in that signature warrior's braid.

  "Fiona," I hissed, lowering my hands. "What are you doing here? Don't tell me that S-Korp hired you to watch their shady activities?"

  "I could ask you the same, Scintilla," she snapped, stepping closer as her eyes raked over my scantily clad form with a mix of pity and irritation. "Still haven't found a tailor, I see? Or is 'Nearly Arrested for Indecency' your actual brand?"

  "Shut up and look." I pointed toward the pier. "S-Korp is moving high-value cargo tonight. I eavesdropped on one of their guards earlier this week. They're kidnapping people, Fiona. Kidnapping regular people - citizens off the street."

  Fiona's scoff died in her throat as she looked down. "Kidnapping? S-Korp is a major security firm, one of the key companies that makes up HeroHub. They wouldn't risk-"

  "Look!"

  Below us, a ghost ship emerged from the fog. It was a medium-sized military-grade ship, painted in a jagged black-and-gray maritime camouflage scheme that swallowed the moonlight. No lights, no transponder. It drifted toward the pier with surgical precision.

  A moment later, six black tactical vans rolled onto the dock. My heart sank as the back doors of the middle four opened. Hooded figures, their hands zip-tied, were marched out by guards in heavy tactical gear. I counted twelve prisoners - men and women, stumbling in the dark as they were herded up the gangplank.

  Fiona's face went pale, then a dangerous, burning red. "The bastards," she whispered. "They're herding them like cattle."

  "We can't take the ship," I said, checking my comms. "Base, are you seeing this?"

  "I see it," Yuna's voice crackled. "The ship is already casting off. If you jump it now, you're trapped at sea with probably fifty armed guards. Hit the vans. They'll probably head out to a secondary site. I'll bet one of them still has the manifest."

  The ship cast its lines and slipped back into the fog as quickly as it had arrived. The vans split into pairs, peeling away in three different directions.

  "Let's take the last pair," I told Fiona. "They look like they're headed toward the Industrial Sector."

  Fiona nodded, her earlier hostility replaced by a grim professionalism. "Fine. But if you lose your top again, don't expect me to fix it this time."

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  ---

  We shadowed the vans into the "Rust Belt" - a long-abandoned ten mile stretch of warehouses and office buildings that were lucky if they had more than three bricks standing on top one another. Leaping ahead of the vans, I waited until the right moment, then dropped from a bridge - slamming onto the roof of the lead van with a thunderous crunch. Three guards piled out, the fourth hung up, his door jammed as he fought with his seat-belt.

  "Shoot to kill," he shouted through the window as he fought with the door.

  I didn't give them the chance. I blurred forward, a twin-palm strike catching the first two guards square in the chest. They flew backward, off the bridge and disappeared into the night, followed a few seconds later by splashes as they hit the water far below. The third guard, a brawny guy with a riot shield, lunged at me. I ducked a swing and we engaged a rapid-fire series of blows. He was fast, blocking my sparks with the insulated shield, but I managed to vault over his head, delivering a spinning heel kick to his temple that sent him sprawling.

  Finally, the leader tore himself free from the van. He was a brick of a man, carrying a heavy, pulsing baton in one hand.

  "You're done, little girl!" He roared at me, his anger echoing off the water far below us.

  He swung and the baton hummed with a high-frequency whine that made my teeth ache. I dove under the first arc, my hands glowing with a silver static. I surged forward, aiming a jab at his ribs, but he parried with the handle of the baton, the kinetic discharge knocking me three feet backward.

  We traded blows for a solid minute - a frantic dance of silver and shadow. I ducked another horizontal swing that would have taken my head off, but as I tried to counter, my boot slipped on a patch of oil.

  I recovered, but not fast enough. He brought the baton down in a jagged, diagonal strike. I twisted, trying to roll with it, but the end of the baton clipped me hard across the left shoulder.

  I didn't break bone, but the vibration was catastrophic. A high-frequency *Bzzzzzzt* rippled through my body.

  I felt the bio-synthetic resin - the "military grade" glue - react instantly. It didn't just fail; it liquefied.

  "Oh ... oh no," I gasped.

  The tension in the silver strings snapped with the sound of a breaking guitar string. My hip-clasps slid down my legs. The strings detached from my collar and fell away in a pathetic heap. In the middle of the alley, I was suddenly, catastrophically nude - wearing only a veil, a collar, and a pair of thigh-high chrome boots.

  The guard froze, his baton still humming, his jaw dropping as he took in the full view of his opponent.

  "YUNA!" I screamed into the comms. "IT DISSOLVED! EVERYTHING DISSOLVED! I AM NAKED!"

  The guard shook off his shock and lunged, but my rage was absolute. I took his swing on my other shoulder, gritting against the pain, and grabbed his tactical vest with one hand, driving a strike into his solar plexus as hard as I could, channeling every drop of my electricity. He hit the van so hard the metal buckled around his head.

  I dove into the back of the van, grabbing a discarded tablet and a thumb drive from the dashboard. "Yuna, I need a copy of this drive, now!"

  "On it," Yuna's voice came over the comms. "Dropping Eye-Bee into position - plug it into him and I'll upload a copy to a server I own, then you can give the drive to the Hero-Brat as a peace offering." The drone buzzed down out of the sky, turning and extending a port as I quickly plugged the drive in.

  "Copying now," Yuna said and I could hear Piper's whispered voice in the background along with the sound of frantic typing. "Five more seconds. ... Got it! Pull the drive."

  I yanked the drive from Eye-Bee just as Fiona rounded the corner. She stopped dead. Her eyes widened until I thought they'd pop out.

  "Holy ... holy mother of God," Fiona stammered, her face turning a shade of purple I didn't know humans could achieve. "Scintilla? What is wrong with you? There was absolutely no need to go full 'birthday suit' just to win a fight!"

  "It was the baton!" I shield, my face burning hotter than the sparks still dancing on my fingertips. "It melted the glue of my suit! Just ... here. Take the drive."

  I tossed the thumb drive at her. She caught it out of the air with practiced ease, but she didn't leave. Her eyes were focused on the van behind me, her chest heaving as she processed the sheer insanity of the last ten minutes.

  Then, she did something I never expected.

  Fiona stepped forward, her face a mask of intense, focused concern. Before I could scramble deeper into the van, she reached out and grabbed me by the back of my neck. Her hand was calloused and warm, and before I could even gasp, she pulled me forward and smashed her lips against mine.

  It wasn't a sweet kiss. It was a chaotic, spicy explosion of Irish temper and combat adrenaline. It tasted like ash and ozone and, for a split second, I felt her fingers tangle in my hair, pulling me closer against her rough tactical vest as one hand cupped my bare ass.

  Then, the reality of the situation - and the fact that she was currently making out with a completely nude vigilante on an abandoned bridge next to the wreckage of two mysterious vans and eight downed guards - finally hit her brain like a bucket of ice water.

  She shoved me back so hard I hit the van's interior wall with a thud.

  "GAH! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!" Fiona shrieked, her voice jumping up two octaves as she scrambled back, her face turning a shade of red darker than her hair. She wiped her mouth with the back of her glove as if she'd been poisoned. "Why are you just ... just standing there like that? You're a deviant! A shameless, mysterious, silver-haired deviant!"

  "You're the one who kissed me!" I yelled back, clutching the silver rags - all that remained of my Scintilla costume - to my chest in a state of utter shock.

  "It was a combat reflex! An involuntary chemical reaction to the victory!" Fiona roared, pointing the thumb drive at me like a weapon. "I'm going to HeroHub, I am filing a report, and I'm going to tell them that you used an illegal pheromone-shifter or something! Because there is no other explanation for why you're ... why you're ..."

  She gestured vaguely at my entire body, her eyes squeezed shut as if trying to erase the last thirty seconds from her memory.

  "Just go home! Put on a blanket! If I see you on the news like this, I'm retiring to a convent in the Highlands!"

  She vanished in a burst of flame, leaping off the bridge and toward the distant rooftops without a single backward glance, nearly hitting the bridge in her haste to get away.

  I stood there for a moment in the silence of the bridge, naked and shivering, clutching my ruined suit to my chest.

  "Yuna," I whispered into the comms.

  "Yeah?" Yuna's voice sounded suspiciously like she was trying not to laugh.

  "I'm headed home. And I'm going to kill you. Twice."