Disclaimer: if it was on TV, it's not mine. Soundtrack for this chapter: You Make Me Real by Brandt-Brauer-Frick; Caves (Jeskyne) by Uz Jsme Doma. All hail shuffle play!


"How'd you find this place?" Shego was pacing her invisible cell, a caged panther tensed to escape.

"Tracked your hovercar's energy signature." Kim was also investigating the forcefield, touching it here and there, noting the ever-so-slight dimming of the lights every time she did so. An idea was beginning to develop. "After that, it was guesswork."

"Why'd you find this place? You gonna shadow us the rest of our lives?"

The question took her off guard. "I – I – Drakken broke into the hospital, stole you from GJ. Did a lot of damage in the process. Your own record isn't looking too good, with that dirty bomb –"

"You thought we might be back in the world domination business."

"Yeah." She was ashamed to admit it.

"They framed me. Whether you believe me or not, that's true."

"Well, you're obviously not friends with the landlord." Whoever he may be.

"On the nose, cupcake. I owe these people something. Remember Cyrus Bortel?"

She nodded.

"He built a tracking device for me."

So she'd been right about the thing in the hovercar. "Bortel built it? It must have cost you a fortune."

"Before he agreed to the commission, he asked me if I was still in the Billionaire's Club."

"Are you?"

Her answer was a shrug, a frown. "It's to a Geiger counter what an atomic clock is to a sundial. Homes in on the weird residual radiation Comrade Neon-noodle leaves behind."

"Whoa. You lost me."

"The man responsible for that so-called 'dirty bomb.' He's here, somewhere. He set me up. Left me for dead. And I've got something for him." She tapped her leg pouch. "They didn't even search us before they threw us in here. Guess they figured we weren't getting out."

"So payback's the sitch. Again."

"It's all that counts." She gestured toward her husband, who was lost in his own morose thoughts. "He could have built these things for me, but he was too busy hiding from the bad guys."

"Not in front of her, Shego!" Drakken spluttered in anger. "We've already been over this. A dozen times. I was –"

"Concerned about me," she sarcastically simpered. "Yeah, I know."

Unexpectedly, Drakken stood his ground, yelled back at her through the invisible screen. "I don't think you do. I don't think you know at all!"

In shocked silence, Kim watched the nascent argument become a full-blown shouting match, lurching from subject to subject without reason or pattern. In moments the original insult had been lost beneath layers of complaints, annoyances, hints and allegations.

"By the way," jeered the green woman, "Dementor did mutagenic plants a long time before you did!"

This had to stop. Kim tried to change the subject. "Speaking of Dementor, we caught him and some other mad scientist trying to break into –"

"Dementor did mutagenic plants a long time before you did," mocked the blue man. Unconsciously, he'd generated a dozen vines, each poised like snakes about to strike. "So what? Do you think I care? Mine worked." The vines lashed in rage.

"Dementor's a real scientist. So is Bortel."

"Sticks and stones may break my bones –"

"Not just a thief. A thief by proxy."

"My plants brought down the whole mecha army –"

"I was there, remember? So you tore up some robots. Big deal. If you're always so concerned about my safety, where were you when Warhok blindsided me?"

"That's not fair, Shego. I was still—"

"You know who bailed me and Kimmie out?"

Kim shook her head, her eyes silently begging Shego to stop.

The green woman pretended not to see her, remorselessly continued her verbal onslaught. "The buffoon."

Drakken grimaced. "Nice. Thanks for the support, Sherri. Thanks for the encouragement."

"Any time, Drewbie. You're even afraid of Stoppable's rodent. No wonder the mutagen made you a pansy."

"It's a giant hogweed, not a pansy," spat the scientist. "Heracleum mantegazziani. I know what kind of plant I started with!"

"So do I. A pansy."

Something inside Kim snapped. "Stop! Just stop. Listen to yourselves. You sound like children. We're trapped in here. We don't know who's behind this, or what they might be planning. We don't know what they've done with Ron." Every word was louder, crashing toward a crescendo. "And you're screaming at each other about what kind of flower that is! Is that what you call a marriage?"

Drakken wasn't sure he'd heard that right. "Is that – what?"

She was unable to meet their gaze. Her breathing was fast and shallow, her fists clenched so hard the knuckles were white. "I'm – I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" The green woman glanced worriedly at her husband. He shook his head, a baffled expression on his face; this was light-years out of his league.

"Sorry. That's so none of my business. I'm – I'm worried. About Ron." She looked up and her eyes met Shego's; the older woman was surprised by the distress she saw there. "I'm worried about Ron," she repeated, and Shego knew that was true. Not because of the current situation. Something else entirely.

"Aah…is she all right?" whispered Drakken. "This would be a really bad time to crack up."

Shego ignored him. "Princess…Dr. D. and I are, uh, a special case." Oh God, she thought, I'm in some sort of twisted Afterschool Special, giving life advice to Kim Possible. Like a big sister or something. Like her mother. "That is, you can't judge every marriage by our example. Think of your parents. Mr. and Mrs. Dr. P. Or your boyfriend's folks. They, uh, they don't, uh, act like us." I'm rambling. Dealing with her was so much easier when I could just knock her out. "I guess…I guess we like it this way," she said, and the words were a revelation. "I guess it's… how we get along."

"It's just the way we are," added the blue man. "You know, sort of, uh, aah, creepy. And cooky. Mysterious and –"

"Let's drop that right now," Shego hastily interjected, "before the finger-snapping starts."

"I'm just saying," he muttered, and wished he hadn't. It made him sound like Possible's buffoon boyfriend.

Where was the buffoon, anyway?


Ron had assumed the lotus position, head bowed, eyes closed, clearing his mind before assaulting the forcefield that imprisoned him. During the Lorwardian invasion, his mystical Monkey Power had amplified his strength, increased his endurance and resilience, overcome gravity. With the subtleties Sensei had taught him in his months at Yamanouchi, even this invisible barrier could be broken. It was a simple matter of bringing his thoughts to a single, searing, concentrated focus before he struck.

That was the problem.

The focus wouldn't come.

Instead, a thousand questions demanded answers. Where was Kim? Who had captured her? What were they planning to do? The very things his escape would prevent were preventing his escape. "Man, I hate irony," he mumbled to himself, not for the first time.

And how many times was she going to change majors, anyway? When were they going to get on with their lives?

Behind closed eyes, concerns. Worries. Fears.

"Meditation," said a gravelly, unfamiliar voice. "A valuable discipline for the soldier."

He opened his eyes. On the other side of the forcefield stood a man in a radiation suit. "I am Andrei Dmitriyevich Asafiev," said the stranger. "And you, of course, are the legendary Ronald Stoppable, one of the saviors of the earth. The Leader sent me to retrieve you. But first, we must talk."

"Where's Kim? Redheaded girl. She was with me when you –"

"She is unharmed. You will join her very shortly, along with our other prisoners. This secret installation is suddenly not so secret anymore."

"What's with the suit?" A trace of panic crept into his voice. "Is there a leak?"

"No. No leaks." The man chuckled. "It's for your protection, not mine. I am radioactive. Even at my lowest output, there is danger. Hence the suit. Without it, there is inevitably contamination."

Disbelief and then dark realization dawned in Ron's eyes. "The wireless charger."

"Very good. Yes, I stole it. On the Leader's orders."

"You killed those people."

"Everyone dies. It is nothing. Even I must die someday, though the Scientists' Union claims my halflife is in the thousands of years. The sun may well fail before Asafiev does."

"I blamed Shego for it." Kim was right, he thought. And I argued with her about it. "I thought – I thought she was a terrorist."

"Oh, she tried to steal it. Don't browbeat yourself. She is no hero. She fought me for it, and lost. I have vowed before God that should she come before me again as an enemy, it will be the last time. But she is part of the reason I wanted to speak to you here, without the others."

"Let's talk, then."

"I received my powers at the hand of God. The incident that should have killed me did not. A way of escape was provided. Shego, too, survived a cataclysmic event and gained her powers as a result. This was nothing less than Providence."

"O-kay…" Ron wondered where this was going. Nowhere good, he was sure. He seemed to have a talent for finding such conversations. Probably an unwanted side effect of the Ron Factor. Someday, maybe, they'd invent a cure for that. If he lived long enough.

"She is an anarchist at heart," continued the Russian. "Wantonly destructive. I was a Spetsnaz assassin before the incident. You would consider both of us evil, I'm sure, but the hand of God was with us. How do you explain that?"

He had no answer. Ron was beginning to wish he had never made the acquaintance of Andrei Dmitriyevich Asafiev.

"Then there are your own abilities, second only to my own. I have watched the satellite footage countless times. Your triumph over the Lorwardians was absolute. I congratulate you on that necessary thoroughness. Yet you are proudly nonconformist, decadent, a product of corrupt Western values. The Lorwardians would have eliminated the defiant element, created a unified planet-wide society. Order. Law. Perfection." A pause. "You were allowed to destroy them. Why has God shed this power on you, Ron Stoppable?"

"Yeah, ah, doesn't it say somewhere that it rains on the just and unjust alike?"

"You paraphrase Matthew 5:45."

"Right, yeah, paraphrase. I'm not so good with the New Testament." Or the Old Testament. Sure wish I'd paid more attention to Rabbi Katz. Water under the bridge now. "I don't think God is so concerned with our powers. More with what we do with them."

"Interesting. No doubt we will find out –" The lights throughout the base flickered violently. "Now what?"

Ron tensed, seeing an opportunity. If the power goes down, I get one chance at this. "Maybe God is sick of your theology."


Gregori Shchedrin watched in astonishment as Adrena Lynn worked. He had never dreamed that anyone could assimilate fourth-dimensional topological equations instantly, or construct complex devices with such speed. The woman was a natural physicist, a savant. This was as much as a superpower as Shego's plasma blasts or Asafiev's radiation. A miracle.

So why had she spent her youth trying to be a media star?

She indicated the central pole of the chronoton attenuator. "Why are you using so much power here, Gregori?" She corrected herself. "Comrade Shchedrin."

"Gregori is fine, Adrena. As the power goes, we cannot maintain the chronotonic polarization field without it. If the field goes, the device is without direction. Left on their own, chronotons will inevitably cluster around catastrophic events in the timeline of the traveller."

She was surprised. "Any reason for that?"

"We think it is because of the temporal waves catastrophes generate. It is the difference in throwing a pebble into a pond, or throwing in a grenade." He motioned her to a table; together they studied the fragmentary schematics they had recovered from the island lab. "There is so much missing. Who knows what was here" – he pointed to a burned hole – "or here. But the wireless charger helped us considerably."

"Whoever built the original didn't have a wireless charger. And theirs worked. Any idea what they had planned to do with it?" She lowered her voice. "I'm sure they didn't intend to bring him here."

"No," Shchedrin muttered, "they didn't." He looked furtively, fearfully around. His crew was all on the other side of the lab, working on a different component of the machine. "You won't believe it. It's insane."

"Try me."

"Jack the Ripper."

"What? Why would anyone in the world want to –?"

"We don't know. We found a journal. A lot of – what is the word? – drivel about 'bringing back the dead as they were before they died.' Someone was absolutely in love with that phrase. And Jack the Ripper. They were convinced that he would help them in some way. Some enemy they planned to loose him on. And there was someone the builder was desperate to impress with this bezumnyĭ scheme. The journal's as damaged as these schematics. More so."

"Sounds like the author might have been damaged."

Shchedrin chuckled, the first laugh he'd had in weeks.

Just before the power dipped and spluttered, crashing computers, blowing out sensitive circuits. Something that should have been impossible.

The flickering fluorescents cast sinister highlights on Shchedrin's angry face, as he and his crew tried to recover from the brownout. Impossible? Or –

In the chaos, no one was watching Adrena Lynn. No one saw her plug her cell phone into something she had cobbled together that afternoon, bit by bit, there on the cluttered workbench.

A small something. The sort of thing someone could possibly make out of a CD player's guts and some automobile wiring.

It didn't have the wide reach of the one she'd built all those years ago, around Paul's video camera. It was designed to hack into the base's network and send its simple message to a single reception point.

There was one person she knew could get her out of this.


Kim Possible stood in the center of her invisible cell, triggered the force bubble of her Battlesuit again. "Someone is way too clumsy. Or overconfident." The bubble expanded, crackling against the imprisoning field. "This is how we're getting out."

Shego was unimpressed. "You've already tried that. They're driving the field generators with the wireless charger. Way more juice than your fancy-schmansy suit can produce."

"You bet," said Kim, cranking the field another notch. She could feel the Battlesuit's cybertronic circuitry overheating, but it was a chance she'd have to take. "I'm sure that thing can spit out more juice than my suit. Wonder how much their infrastructure can take? This base must have been built long before they got the charger. Let's put it to the test."

Understanding illuminated Shego's features; a second later green plasma illuminated the room, the violet light swallowing up blast after blast. "Dr. D! She's right. Go for broke. Shoot the works."

He was already lost to sight within the network of flowering vines straining against the field, vines that had once shattered Lorwardian battle alloy. "Ahead of you, hon."

The endearment put a little smile on Shego's face. Not that she'd let him know it.

Overhead the lights flashed and flickered. There was the smell of hot copper, of burning insulation.

"Pour it on!"cried Kim, not sure how much more the Battlesuit could take. "Has to be…a breaking point…"


The lights flickered again; in that moment Ron lashed out, striking the invisible wall with the full supernatural force of tai shing pek kwar. Across the base breakers blew, fuses exploded. For a full second there was darkness, then the feeble emergency lights came up.

But the forcefield was down. Ron Stoppable was free.

And facing Andrei Asafiev.