The next morning, I decided to take up Dana—Domina—on her offer from a few days earlier to throw me into the deep end of the Y+Thems’ Devastation Chamber. After Avie and I hit the showers together—to avoid another incident with Chuck Roast—I suited up in my Ms. Megaton Man uniform while Avie dressed.

“Where’s my shoulder bag?” asked Avie.

“I don’t see it around here,” I said. “Did you leave it up in the Q-Mobile? After Bing parked on the roof, I remember you bringing your blanket down. But I don’t remember the shoulder bag. Why, did you need something from it?”

“Nothing important,” said Avie. “I’m sure it’ll be safe for the time being.”

We headed downstairs to the observation booth overlooking the Devastation Chamber. Domina, Sabersnag, Tempy, and Kiddo were already in the observation booth, and Yarn Man and Kozmik Kat were there, too. Avie took their place alongside them while I scooted down to the floor of the gymnasium.

Luckily, Chuck wasn’t around. No one had seen him since Kiddo’s turn in the Devastation Chamber a few days earlier, and none of us missed him.

“You ready?” said Domina, manning the controls. “We have a Level Three set up for you.”

I heard the door to the stairs lock securely; I heard whirring sounds in the ceiling above. I walked to the middle of the floor, checked my mark—Kav had taped a crude “Y” with masking tape—the lights dimmed. The paneled walls—scorched and scarred from previous training routines—remained closed for the moment.

I looked up and waved at Avie, who smiled and gave me the thumbs up along with Bing and Koz. The others looked more concerned.

Sabersnag’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “In this routine, you’re going to face robots shooting laser beams, flamethrowers, and missiles. If you can handle this, you’ll proceed to the next level.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I want to be surprised.”

“It’s your funeral,” he said. “Okay, here goes.”

A panel on the wall opened, and an eight-foot robot, with rotating machine gun turrets for arms, clanked out on the floor. It’s head swiveled and his Infrared targeting apparatus locked on me. The guns began unloading bullets almost immediately.

I deflected these easily enough with my elbows and forearms. Behind me, I could feel a panel in the flooring retract; a bank of flamethrowers sprang up and unfurled their igneous tongues of death. And so on.

I cut the legs out from under the robot with a sweeping kung fu kick. I caught him on the bounce, flipped him over my back, and squashed the flame throwers. I ducked just in time as missiles from one wall whizzed over me and exploded against the opposite wall. Flying drones dropped from the ceiling, their propellers alone enough to slice civilian flesh to ribbons; they soon clattered to the floor as useless debris after a few of my artless karate chops.

Two more robots, more squat that the first, shot up from dumbwaiters in the floor, lashing out with metal tentacles, grabbing my ankles and wrists. Before I knew it, I was suspended spread eagle in midair, and some kind of egg beater thing from the ceiling caught my hair and pulled it taut. I didn’t like the feeling of being pried apart, especially since my red panty-clad pudenda was facing in the direction of the observation booth. With all my might, I pulled my arms and legs together and snapped my head, bringing the squat, tentacled robots and egg beater together with such force they were smashed to smithereens. This momentarily filled the air with a million shards of metal which hung in space for a moment before they all came swirling back toward me.

I turned and saw what was pulling them: a giant U-shaped magnet had emerged from yet another wall panel. But it wasn’t trying to collect the shards; instead, its intent was to pull a giant panel off of the opposite wall at me, which it did, at tremendous velocity. I was blindsided by the thick iron slab as a second slab rose up from the floor between me and the magnet, making a Ms. Megaton Man sandwich of me. It didn’t feel great, getting crushed almost flat, but I pried myself apart long enough to use one of the slabs to cut the electrical cords to the magnet, killing it. The slabs fell flat on the floor, taking out banks of guns that had emerged. Fans from the ceiling kicked in to begin clearing the smoke.

One of the microphones up in the booth must have been on, because I heard Bing’s voice over the loudspeaker say, “Golly, that crazy gizmo really works!”

Despite the overall shabby appearance of these low-rent facilities, Professor Rex bequeathed to the Y+Thems what Yarn Man described was an exact replica of the Devastation Chamber from the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters. I had no idea what all this cost, but I imagined the sparring partners I was destroying could well have paid for my undergrad tuition and sent me on to grad school several times over.

“We’re moving to level four,” said Sabersnag over the loudspeaker.

Miniature, triangular winged planes emerged from a wall, firing tracer shells that exploded on my body with sharp stings. I had trouble smashing the first one with a swinging fist as it passed; two others evaded my grasp and hectored me for several more seconds as they quickly circled around the room. They could shoot at me perpendicularly; it was tricky timing my own sallies to knock them out, but I managed.

Then, from nowhere, a baby grand piano—yes, a baby grand piano—came catapulting out of a wall. “We used that one on Captain Megaton Man,” said Yarn Man, laughing. “It’s gotta be the oldest trick in the book.” It hit me with such force I smashed against the opposite wall. It’s ebony shell and harp-like innards shattered into pieces, but it smarted. Momentarily stunned, it took me a moment to pick myself off the floor, and I was tangled in piano string, to boot. While I was freeing myself, a giant-jawed robot, proportioned like a tyrannosaurus, lurched toward me.

“Where’d you come from?” I said. He answered with flames from his gaping maw.

I guess my hair was fireproof, because it was unfazed, even though the fireball hit me square in the face. But I could smell the burgundy dye that Tempy had touched me up with burning off. The visor protected my corneas, but I think the coffee-colored lipstick I had chosen that morning had melted off. I barrel-rolled toward the Dinobot, flattened out like I was sliding head-first into second base, and did a pinwheel kick; the next fireball was directed up into the ceiling as the Bot crashed on its back. I got to me feet, grabbed its snaky tail, and began twirling it around the room. When I let go, it smashed into another bank of missile-launchers that appeared in the meantime and was just taking aim. The explosion was terrific, and deafening.

After several more minutes of this, my ears were ringing and the ventilation fans in the ceiling couldn’t keep up. The room was too smoky to see my hands in front of me. But the vibrations stopped and I could sense the training session was over.

As the fans caught up and the smoke began to clear, I heard Domina’s voice over the loudspeaker. “You made it through all six levels, Missy. No one’s ever survived past five. We don’t have anything more to throw at you. How are you feeling?”

I stood up and brushed myself off. My uniform was unscathed, and except for a few flecks of metal in my hair, I was completely unharmed. Around me, I was shin-deep in twisted metal. Even now, little Broombots were sweeping away the carnage into dustbins that appeared out of the lower panels in the walls.

Upstairs in the observation booth, everyone gave me a round of applause for the best training session they had ever witnessed.

“About twenty-five new recruits would be going out in body bags about now,” said Sabersnag, and I’m sure he was being serious. “We threw everything at you but the kitchen sink—but you’ve made the grade, Ms. Megaton Man.”

Not to sound overconfident, but I expected no less.

“How much did I destroy?” I asked. “Can you put a dollar value on it? It seemed like a few million bucks worth of weapons alone.”

“Oh, we don’t count pennies in the Devastation Chamber,” said Domina. “It’s the one thing part of the budget we never lacked. But everything we had left in the budget for this fiscal year just went up in blaze of glory.”

I looked around and noticed Avie wasn’t in the booth. “Where’s my sister?”

Bing and Koz shrugged their shoulders.

“She got a little bored after you dispensed the fourth or fifth monster robot,” said Tempy. “She said she left something on the roof upstairs and went to get it.”

“The Q-Mobile,” I said. “Has anybody seen Chuck this morning?”

It was a rhetorical question. Domina’s eyes flashed, indicating she understood exactly what I meant—not that I waited. I darted from the Observation Booth and down the hallway, to the stairs leading up to the roof. The other Youthful Permutations and Koz and Bing trailed behind me. I ran up three flights two steps at a time and broke into the harsh daylight of the cold December morning.

The Q-Mobile was gone. Avie’s shoulder bag was lying on the tarred surface of the roof.

Some of its contents had spilled out, among them a small, framed photograph of our grandmother Seedy with Major Meltdown and Magma, his kid sidekick, for whom she had created uniforms. Also pictured was a very young Rex Rigid, before the accident that turned him into Liquid Man. Even Bing had been startled to see it.

I don’t know if it had been a gift from the Angel of Death or whether Avie had just taken it from Seedy’s workshop desk. During our visit, I had stored as many of those images in my visor’s memory bank as I could, although I understood why the physical hoto—taken in the early forties—would mean so much to Avie.

The others appeared behind me on the roof. I searched the horizon for the Q-Mobile.

“There it is,” said Kiddo, pointing south along Governor’s Island. The vehicle was speeding at a moderate clip down the Jersey coast.

“It’s probably on autopilot,” said Snag. “It’s not deviating from a straight line.

Chuck Roast had kidnapped my civilian sister—and had her all to himself.