DISCLAIMER: Nothing belongs to me if you've seen it on TV. Soundtrack for this chapter: Brilliant by Ultravox; Onward by Hawkwind; Live in Roma by New Goblin.


A pink speck in the cloudless blue sky, the Sloth flew toward their destination, its engines roaring, its shadow nebulously cast on the desert sands below.

Ron broke the hundred-mile silence. "KP, you sure you're up to this?"

"Does it matter?" the young woman snapped, and immediately softened. "Sorry, Ron. You're right – I'm not in the mood for this. Especially not these nutbars. I'd rather stick my hand in a hornet's nest."

"Then go find a hornet's nest and let me handle the twins. After all, I am the Mystical Monkey Master."

"You sure are," she said, and smiled a small but genuine smile, the first one in a while. "You know how that would go."

"Now, see, you say that like the outcome was certain."

"Don't take this the wrong way, Ron, but I watched a naco outwit you last night."

"It was defective! Blame the kitchen crew, not me. At least it didn't stain the upholstery."

She laughed. "The hornets will have to wait. We're a team. We always have been."

"And we always will be," he replied, but she didn't answer. "There, down below. Looks like the place."

The building might have once been a repair shop for giant Euclid earthmovers, or a storage shed for B-52s. It looked run-down, long-abandoned: a clever façade. The Sloth's tires had barely brushed the ground when a swarm of cybernetically enhanced horned toads leaped from the sand, chromium teeth snapping, venomous spines bristling, daring anyone to disembark.

On the roof of the huge building, Ron rolled up his parachute, looked down at the little vehicle. "Looks like you called that one, KP. Those things look crazy vicious."

"No less vicious than Phobos and Deimos. Or crazy." She had her laser lipstick out, cutting a hole in the armour-plated roof. "You think they engineered those?"

"Who else would?"

"Looks too professional. Remember, they mounted cybertronic circuitry in their own brains. With kitchen utensils and power tools."

"Maybe they took their time with these." He shuddered, watching the half-machine creatures surround the Sloth. "Man, they are wound up tight. Like, I dunno, desert piranhas."

"Desert piranhas." The armour plate was showing a little more resistance than she'd expected. She sized up the circle she'd scored in the roof and brought one foot down on its edge, hard. The steel plate snapped up; she caught it, used its own momentum to fling it over the side of the building. Way wicked cheerleader skills, thought the child of Hydraia. Mom and Dad were right – no other girl on the squad could have done that, reflected the daughter of Earth. Why didn't I realize there had to be more to it than that? Did I just not want to believe I was that different?

The unasked question went unanswered.

The Chosen One and Mystical Monkey Master was still fixated on the scene below. "Which is worse, two hundred foot-long cybernetic horned toads, or one two-hundred-foot long cybernetic horned toad?"

"Let's hope we don't find out."

He pulled out a key fob, clicked a button. The Sloth's lights blinked; immediately the cyber-reptiles bristled, ready to attack. "The tweebs always said this remote control would come in handy."

"We'll fly it back up here when we're finished. The horned toads'll have to find some other entrée." She climbed carefully down into the hole. "Come on. Quickest done, quickest home."

Following her lead, Ron descended into the lair. "Maybe this time it'll go like clockwork."

The word instantly brought a frown to her face. "The last time you mentioned 'clockwork,' we ended up inside a live volcano."

"That could have been worse –"

"During an eruption."

"But we got out unscathed –"

"With Monkey Fist's magma mandrills on our heels."

"Magma mandrills. The fury of an unleashed ape… and fire besides."

"No more 'clockwork'. I mean it."

"But I've got a good feeling about this one, KP. I mean, it's just Phobos and Deimos. We'll have them back in the asylum in twenty minutes, tops."

Twenty minutes, a villainous rant and a heated brawl later, Kim peered stealthily around a gigantic fuel tank, saw no one. The path to the missile's launch pad was clear. "I'm not fallin' for that," she muttered to the Kimmunicator. "Can you get a bead on the twins, Wade? Home in on their energy signature or something? We really need to get them off our backs."

"I've been trying, Kim. Got nada. They're getting wise to our old tricks."

Old tricks. Sometimes she missed the villains of her high-school years, villains like Professor Dementor, Duff Killigan, the Seniors and, of course, Drakken and Shego. Villains with plans, with motive, with purpose. They had been far more predictable than this new breed of baddie.

On the other hand, she thought, Dementor did kill me. Her pulse pounded in her chest, the sound of her breathing filled her ears. Suddenly it seemed a lot colder than it was.

The tinny voice from the Kimmunicator returned her to reality. "That's a Bomarc." Wade sounded almost awed. "Surface to air rocket. Been obsolete for years. I didn't know there were any of them left."

"Can it actually do what they're planning to do with it?"

"That one can. There've been some modifications." Crazy or not, Phobos and Deimos were particularly ingenious when it came to missiles and rockets. Unfortunately. "And I'm definitely reading a nuclear payload. Small, but strong enough. It must be one of Canada's Bomarcs. They had a little government collapse over using nukes in 'em."

"I hadn't heard."

"It was a long time ago. The pro-nuke contingent won out. Which has brought us to this." He clicked some keys, looked at a monitor with increasing concern. "Yeah, if they launch it, bye bye New Jersey."

"Then we'll have to make the first move. Wish me luck." Tensed for action, she stepped out toward the missile.

Phobos' laser lashed out, slashed the air where Kim had been a second before, flashed again and again, cutting molten ruts in the metal floor as its target sprang, cartwheeled, backflipped, taking cover behind anything she could use, from support pylons to computer banks, gradually making her way toward the rocket.

On the digital display overhead, the countdown continued. Fourteen minutes to liftoff.

"Kim!" On the other side of the lair, Ron was engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Deimos, trying to get close enough to subdue her while avoiding a blast from the sonic disruptor that protruded from the side of her head. The metallic walls flickered with the blue light of his ch'i. "I'll handle these maniacs!"

"No you won't," snarled his opponent, seeing an opportunity. The disruptor thundered, slamming him against the wall. "These maniacs know what you can do."

Phobos appeared on a walkway overhead. "You took the Lorwardians by surprise." Her laser eye flared. "Like that."

"Hey, they started it!" Ron deftly dodged the deadly beam, a trick that had once been Kim's specialty alone. Tai sheng pek kwar has definitely improved my odds, he thought. "It's not like we asked them to invade."

""Treachery," spat Deimos. A disruptor blast dented the steel wall behind Ron, ruptured the massive fuel tank. The stifling stench of 80-octane gasoline filled the air.

"Deceit." The laser shot out; suddenly the floor was awash in flame. "Have some fire, Scarecrow," giggled the insane blonde cyborg, leering down at the conflagration.

With a whoosh of back-pack jets, her sister joined her on the walkway. "Did you ever see The Wizard of Oz?" she shouted to their terrified adversary as the blazing liquid swept toward him. "There was this witch –"

The flames were upon him. "With flying monkeys!" Summoning all the force Mystical Monkey Power could supply, Ron leaped thirty feet in the air, defying gravity, spinning in midair to dodge another laser beam. Foam sprayed down from the ceiling, spewed from micronozzles in the walls, smothering the spreading conflagration before it could reach the Bomarc.

Seeing that, he realized why Kim had asked him about the cybernetic horned toads. They're too crazy to have designed and built all this themselves. Which means we've got bigger trouble somewhere else.

He barely touched the ground before a sonic onslaught sent him spinning. For all his power, he was in retreat. Memories of last night's naco debacle rose up to haunt and annoy him.

"Not gonna spoil our revenge, monkeyman." Ron wasn't sure which of them had said that. The other continued: "No spoilers."

They glanced at each other and smiled.

Unnoticed by the twins, Kim was prying open an access panel, climbing into the Bomarc's innards. "Wade, how do I defuse this thing?"

"Cut the red wire."

"There are countless red wires." She held the Kimmunicator over the tangled mess of cables. Wade's response was exactly what she feared.

"I'll get back to you."

"Please and thank you," she babbled out of habit, looking out at the countdown screen. Eight minutes.

Fleeing a sustained laser discharge, Ron shouted up at his opponents. "I'm a little hazy on the whole revenge angle. So what was it again? Gonna blow up Albany?" He jumped backward as a sonic blast smashed down at his feet. "Got it in for – uh – Albanians?"

" No! Browns Mills, New Jersey!" shrieked Deimos. "Pay attention! We've already told you once. We went to a concert there—"

"—and they cancelled the gig." When the twins got excited, they began completing each other's sentences in ping-pong stereo. That defective telepathic link also made them more vulnerable; knock one unconscious and you got the other as well.

Unfortunately, they were extremely adept at keeping distance between themselves and their enemies, and their built-in long-range weapons were second to none.

The laser flared again. "They blamed it on the hurricane –"

The disruptor roared. " – but we knew better."

"It was because we came." Laser.

"Bigots. No cyborgs allowed." Disruptor.

"No blonde cyborgs allowed." Laser and disruptor.

"And our Ominous Minibus doesn't get many miles to the gallon, either. The trip cost us a fortune." A perfect storm of technological destruction rained down from the catwalk.

Ducking behind a particularly massive stanchion, Ron continued to taunt, between gasps for breath. Even the power of the Chosen One had its limits. "Couldn't – have cost – as much as a Bomarc – and a lair to fire it from."

The attack suddenly ceased while the twins grappled with his comment. "We didn't buy this."

"It was given to us."

"For our revenge."

"You don't say." Kim was right. Decoys. Somewhere, some evil mastermind was getting away with murder while they struggled with the cyborg loonies. He glanced up at the screen. Six minutes. He'd seen Kim slip inside the missile while the twins were preoccupied with him. Any second now she'd jump out, mission accomplished, and together they'd take care of these crazies.

Just like clockwork.

"So, uh, who gave you this –"

With a deafening roar the Bomarc ascended on a tail of flame.

"No! Kim! Get out! " Heedless of the danger, Ron ran across the lair, tried to use his ch'i to reach out and stop the rocket. During the Lorwardian battle, he had psychically lifted entire attack pods to use as weapons. An old missile should be child's play.

But the Bomarc was already beyond his range of influence, shrinking into the sky. "There were six minutes!" he wailed. "KP!"

"We always set our alarm clock up six minutes," came Phobos' reply, right behind him. "That way we're never late."

"But your girlfriend will be, if she was in there," added Deimos. "The late Kim Possible." More giggling.

Both of them were standing less than a foot away, staring happily up into the sky, transfixed by the flight of their soaring vengeance.

What he did then he wasn't proud of later. After all, they were girls. Dangerously insane, cybernetically-enhanced girls, but girls just the same. And guys shouldn't hit girls, as a rule.

But he did.

"Wade!" Kim shouted, as the view from the access panel became blue sky and clouds. "Need an answer now!"

"Kim, you're gonna need to find the circuit schematic. It should be in a small hatch on the left side of the –"

She grabbed the wad of cables, yanked with all her might. There was a flash of sparks, the smell of smoke, and the roar of the rocket engine spluttered and died. Almost instantly she felt the shift in trajectory as the crippled rocket plummeted back to earth.

"Well, that worked," Wade announced.

"How about the nuke?"

"A mere crash won't detonate it. It takes special treatment. And you've disabled the detonator along with everything else."

"Ok, time to bail," she said, more to herself than to Wade, and leaned out of the missile, only to realize, in horror, that she was already over a mile in the air. A moment from the past flashed through her mind: the night that Shego and Motor Ed had stolen her father's project, the spacecraft Kepler. Ed's giant mecha had seized her in its claws, thrown her about as far and as high as this rocket. Luckily she'd had one of Wade's experiments with her: a hair gel that doubled as an instant polymer cushion, absorbing the impact and saving her from harm.

And now she knew she would have survived it anyway. Retro-metabolism.

"I don't see anything to laugh at, Kim," said the young genius, genuinely worried by what he heard and saw on his screen. "I'm sorry. I've got nothing to suggest."

"A mile of free fall. It can't be any worse than getting hit by a train, can it?"

"Most people don't –" he swallowed, hard –" survive that."

"I'm not most people. See you in a couple of hours," she jauntily, almost insanely announced, pocketed the Kimmunicator and leaped from the missile. Fire, she recalled, could still kill her, and there was little doubt that the Bomarc would go up in flames at the crash site. At least the thing would still be in the desert when it hit.

She wondered how Ron was doing with the cyborg menace. Probably had it under control by now. Wondered if she would ever see him again. Even retro-metabolism's miraculous abilities had to have a limit. And suddenly she realized something very important, something she hoped she'd have an opportunity to consider more deeply.

Something that had almost been lost in the valley of the shadow.

Life. And the living of it.

She closed her eyes to the earth below.