Someone was calling her name.
“Kim Possible…”
She reached for but couldn’t find her covers.
“Kim Possible Report to the chief’s office.”
Kim sat up. She had fallen asleep while studying for her Latin test. Books lay open on the table in front of her; something was stuck to her cheek… paper. Someone was calling her name…
“Kim Possible Report to the chief’s office.”
She looked over at the clock. She was late! The chief wanted her to meet someone important today and she was late! Frantically, Kim brushed her hair and splashed cold water on her face. She checked her reflection and smoothed the brightly colored top and pleated skirt that was regulation wear for all trainees. Satisfied that her appearance was acceptable, she ran for the chief’s office.
Pausing outside the partially open door to check her hair and uniform once more, she heard a man’s voice from the office. It was odd because all the staff, instructors and students were female. The man’s voice was disdainful and his words chilled her to the bone.
“So where is your little slut?”
“Don’t be vulgar.” Came the chief’s reply. She was sitting in her chair facing the door but distractedly looking to one side. The other speaker was out of Kim’s line of sight.
“I’m not the one corrupting children under the guise of national security, so I believe I will be as vulgar as I choose.”
“Corruption is such an unpleasant word, I prefer… molding.”
“Running little girls around in cheerleader’s outfits and screwing up their minds is not molding, it is disgusting. I’m surprised only that I have not seen any videos of your so called ‘training’ for sale on the internet.”
“Don’t be crude, Gemini, this program isn’t like that at all. Everything here is above board and innocent.”
“You might be able to fool your government backers with that line of crap, but I’m your brother, your older brother and I can see through your lies.”
The chief rose out of her chair and shouted, “Four minutes doesn’t count!”
“Look me in the eye.” He shouted back, standing to loom above the chief, “Look me in the eye, my dear sister, and tell me that what you’re doing to your little guinea pigs is innocent.” He sneered. “Tell me that chemically altering their brains and bodies to make them your willing slaves is innocent.”
“Well…” The chief replied with a leer, “Maybe innocent isn’t the right word...”
Kim’s world spun out of control.
Shego sat cross-legged on the chair in her room studying the sleeping form of the exhausted red head on her bed. The last few hours had been full of revelations most of them unpleasant.
After teaming up to evade the cops it had seemed reasonable to invite the cute gymnast up to her apartment to wind down and see what might develop. Things had started off pretty well but something had snapped inside the girl and she had become frighteningly unstable. Even in sleep the red head was restless, tossing and occasionally moaning. Shego suspected the girl was strung out on something and gathered up the red head’s personal affects for a quick perusal.
The pale woman did not find the drugs or paraphernalia she had expected but the eclectic collection of super spy gadgets and mundane items was puzzling. Rocket skates, a hairdryer/grappling gun and a goo-spitting lipstick case shared space with physiology text books, the usual toiletries, a stuffed animal, a picture of a young boy holding a shaved rat and a weird Blackberry.
“beep-beep-BE-beep.” The kid’s Blackberry thing was ringing. Shego reached over to turn it off, the girl was exhausted and needed her sleep, but when she picked it up she found herself looking at a live picture of a slightly over weight teenager, “Hi Shego.” He said brightly, putting down a fast food soda container.
Shego studied the wide-eyed freckled face on the screen for a moment before glancing over at the gadget filled backpack. She looked back into the live feed, past the fast food wrappers and general clutter and took in the electronics and contraptions in various stages of development…“Let me guess…” she said mockingly, “You’re ‘Q’”
“Uhmmm… Kind of.” The young man looked nervous, “is Kim with you?”
Shego considered lying to the kid but she really wanted to know more about what was going on and he might have a few of the answers. Besides, since he knew her name, he probably already knew that the kitten was here. She answered cautiously, “Yes but she’s indisposed right now.”
“Sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“Good!” He turned to one of the keyboards that surrounded him and continued, “here’s what I need you to do, Put the Kimmunicator next to her, somewhere near exposed skin and I’ll…”
“First of all, Q-bert, I don’t know what a Kimmunicator is. Secondly, I’m not waking the kid up, she needs her sleep. Third, I don’t think I’m going to be jumping up at your command and putting on a skin show for some perverted little nerdlinger.” She kept looking over the strange Blackberry, trying to find the off switch.
“One: You’re holding the Kimmunicator in your hands. Two: I don’t want to wake her up. Three: I already have lots of naked pictures of Kim; what I need right now is a blood sample.”
“Blood sample? Is she diabetic? That would explain some of the things that happened last night…”
“Mood swings?”
“Yes.”
“Confused…? Violent…? Distraught…?” Wade paused and cleared his throat, “Uh-hmm… Horny?”
The thief stared at him for a moment, looking for a smirk and finding none, “Yes, to all of them. What’s going on?” Shego voiced her worst fear, “Is she on drugs?”
“No… Well, maybe… I don’t know.”
“Which is it?”
“She isn’t on drugs voluntarily, but it is probable that she has been drugged in the past and it is affecting her.”
Shego sat back and thought for a moment, “Does this have anything to do with…” she paused at the look of caution he gave her, “…a certain international spook organization?”
He nodded, “She was recruited her at age twelve, one of twenty teenaged girls on track to become the nation’s next generation of super spy.” He turned to another keyboard and his fingers began flying across it, “This data indicates that they used drugs and hypnosis to condition the recruits to fixate on a specific authority figure. We’re not talking about obedience; we’re talking about deep-rooted obsession. They also used drugs to destabilize the girls’ body chemistry so that after an adrenaline high they would need special treatments or else they would lose all control of their emotions and be driven mad by the overload.”
“Why in hell would they do that to somebody?”
“So that if one of them wanted out and tried to blow the whistle they would lose all credibility by going insane over the course of a few days.” He looked grim, “of the other nineteen that were recruited, eleven are dead, one is missing and seven are institutionalized.”
“Why isn’t Kitten insane then… or is she?”
“Kim seems to have found a way to treat herself by focusing on… Ummm…” Wade paused, blushing. “physical release.”
“You’re saying that they’ve messed up her brain to the point that if she gets emotionally stimulated she’ll go crazy and she prevents this by screwing whoever happens to be close by?”
“Uh, usually it’s Ron.”
“Ron is her boyfriend?”
“Not exactly, more like a sidekick,” he glanced over at a side display, “he’s also the guy who will be ringing your doorbell in about five minutes.” He had the decency to look sheepish. “I’m sending you all of the data I have right now. We have to be really careful because there are tracers and flags all over this stuff…” He began typing on two of his keyboards at the same time and paused as though he had found something, “Your ‘Jade’ account on Craig’s list is pretty safe, and I’ve added a few security measures of my own so as long as you don’t send it to anyone else it should be safe for you to go over.”
The kid was making her dizzy, “Do you work for them?”
“I work for Kim.” He said firmly, “Now, please put the Kimmunicator next to her so I can get a blood sample?”
Shego opened the door.
“KP, you would not believe how impossible it is to find hair gel in Milton Keynes.” The voice was strident and put upon; it came from behind a large unstable stack of boxes and suitcases. “First of all no one understands Spanish and secondly they all look at you like you’re stupid or something.”
The stack moved precariously into the apartment. “A little help here?”
A pink thing climbed out from behind the boxes and began to scale the side. Seeing Shego it shrieked and dove back behind the quivering stack. The pale woman heard chittering and the voice rose in frustration, “What do you mean it’s not Kim? Wade said she was here!”
“Milton Keynes,” Shego said dryly, “is in England. I’m guessing this explains both the communications difficulty and the dirty looks.”
The load of boxes and packages gave up and spilled to the floor revealing a well-built young man with an honest face, an air of buffoonery and a bad hair cut.
“You’re not Kim.” He said, pointing at Shego.
“And you’re more clever than your vacant expression and comments about Milton Keynes would indicate.”
He looked at her through suspiciously narrowed eyes, “Is Kim here?”
“She’s asleep in the back room.”
“I better go make sure it’s really her.” He said, heading for the bedroom.
“You’ll wait out here.” Shego took his arm and held him firmly in place.
“KIM!”
“You’ll wait out here quietly until she wakes up on her own.” Shego said in her most threatening sotto voce.
“I’m Kim’s best friend, and I’m sure she’ll want to see me.” He sputtered at her, “Who are you?” he asked accusingly, “you’re just some freaky green woman…” his voiced trailed off as Shego ignited her free hand. “…who can make fire from her hands? That… is… so… COOL!”
Kim tossed and turned on the bed, entangled in the sheets. Despite the cool temperature of the apartment, she was sweating profusely. Occasionally over the course of the past twelve hours she had called out, sometimes to curse her chief, sometimes to beg for forgiveness and sometimes incoherently. Brief periods of wakefulness were filled with frenzied sexual advances.
Shego had spent most of the time reading through the information the nerd had forwarded to her. Everything she read twisted her stomach just a little bit more. She stood up and walked over to Ron who was keeping vigil near Kim’s bedside. The blonde boy looked at the pale thief with desperate worry on his face, even his pet was subdued.
“She needs it.” He pleaded again.
“I’ve already told you, I’m not letting you get your sick jollies off some poor girl who doesn’t even know her name right now.” She hissed at him, “I’m not sure I even believe any of this crap! I know I don’t want to believe it… What would Global Justice want with a bunch of hormone driven teenaged girls anyway?”
“Please!” he whispered pitifully, “You have to let me help her!”
Shego glanced sharply at the boy and was surprised to see tears glistening in his eyes.
“You think I enjoy this?” He wiped his face absentmindedly with the heel of his hand, and turned to look at Kim, “Do you know how long I’ve been in love with her?” His voice was horse, “The first time she came to me, I thought… all my dreams were coming true. I thought… she finally figured out that I was the right guy for her. Then, I’m kissing her and I realize… Kim isn’t even in there... It’s not her…”
Ron leaned over and moved a clump of damp red hair out of the fevered girl’s face, “The next time she came to me… I pushed her away.” Tears flowed freely down his cheeks, but he didn’t seem to notice. “She ended up screwing some guy she didn’t even know. Some stranger she passed on the street, she could have caught anything from him, could have gotten pregnant, could have been killed… by a stranger… because I wasn’t there for her.”
He cradled one of Kim’s hands between his own, “Do you know how it feels to love someone and know they’ll never love you the same way?” He turned to look at the pale woman, “well let me tell you something! It’s a thousand times worse when the person you love gives you the most precious thing in the universe and you find out it doesn’t mean a damn thing to her.”
He locked eyes with the older woman, “She needs something. I can give it to her and… for a little while; I can pretend that it… that I… am important to her.”
Shego dropped her gaze first. With one more concerned look for the delirious red head and a warning glance at her blonde paramour, she reluctantly left the room and quietly closed the door.