Let’s talk about fashion, the great equalizer. Or, in my case, the great humiliator. While the rest of my team was busy turning their armor into a walking, talking CGI festival, I was stuck playing catch-up with my own rapidly mutating physique.

  It’s a special kind of hell, watching everyone else master the software for their powered suits while you’re just trying to keep yours from splitting at the seams because your quads decided to spontaneously bulk up. My life, a constant battle between looking cool and simply containing the mess.

  The girls were artists. Mindy had her suit rippling with an active video display of crystalline frost, a moving masterpiece that probably sucked up enough processing power to run a small country. I, of course, immediately stole the eight-frame player she’d engineered for the other armors.

  Akyo was getting a custom build of Linux to run on her system, talking about driver compatibility and open-source adaptability. Because why not have an open-source operating system in a life-or-death battle? I half-expected her to get a blue screen of death mid-fight. “One moment, villain, my kernel is panicking.” I just hoped people weren't playing Tetris when they were supposed to be watching for incoming plasma fire.

  And me? My contribution to haute couture was a desperate attempt to keep my body from bursting out of its own skin. My new cultivation regimen, a delightful cocktail of radioactive waste, spiritual focus, and existential dread, was doing wonders for my physique.

  I’d grown almost an inch in two months and now looked like I’d been carved out of lightly toasted marble by a sculptor with a thing for defined obliques. At Mindy’s “suggestion”—a word that from her carries the weight of a royal decree—I’d altered my armor to be… snugger. Tighter. More “form-fitting,” which is a fancy way of saying it left absolutely nothing to the imagination and felt like being vacuum-sealed into a very expensive sausage casing.

  This necessitated a grooming routine that felt like a violation of the Geneva Convention. Shaving was a bloodbath, a topographical nightmare of nicks and curses. Waxing was an hour of pure, unadulterated agony in the communal bathroom that left me questioning every single life choice that had led me to that specific moment of sticky, painful humiliation.

  The things I do for optimal force distribution. But even I, a man who has willingly bathed in toxic sludge, have my limits. There was no way I was letting a skin-tight suit graphically outline my junk for the entire student body’s appraisal.

  So, I engineered a solution: a super-tech athletic cup. Forged from a molecularly-realigned tungsten-titanium alloy I’d specially blended in a moment of profound and specific fear. The thing was a marvel of defensive engineering; it could probably survive a direct hit from a main battle tank. The only thing it couldn’t survive was chafing. It itched like a bastard, a constant, low-level reminder of my own vanity and poor life choices.

  “So this is what you call low profile?” Abigail’s voice buzzed in my ear, crisp and clear as a bell, a minor miracle thanks to my latest stroke of genius-born-of-desperation.

  Ah, yes. The comms. My magnum opus. My ticket to a government black site.

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  It turned out my power had a fun, undocumented side-effect I’d completely missed: spontaneous quantum entanglement. When I blueprint certain semiconductors, they occasionally decide to have a deeply personal, spooky-action-at-a-distance relationship with their twins.

  Mostly, they just gossip about their vibrational frequency—basically, they complain about the heat. But with enough layers of doped gallium nitrite (courtesy of our friendly neighborhood toxic pit), silicon, carbon nanostructures, and pure spite, I’d jury-rigged a system that could carry a voice. Anywhere. Instantly. No range limit, no electromagnetic interference. It was a beautiful, terrifying thing.

  I’d created a quantum radio. In my basement. With scraps. I was simultaneously the greatest unsung communications inventor of the century and the most likely person to be “disappeared” into a deep, dark hole by a panicked three-letter agency.

  Abbey—Network, I had to remember to call her Network in costume—was running comms from a safe, non-combative distance. Which was smart. It meant she got to be the all-seeing, all-knowing eye in the sky from the comfort of a chair, while I got to be the idiot on the ground, potentially about to be dissected for my miraculous, world-changing toys.

  “What, no one can hear us,” I muttered, feeling a prickle of paranoia that had nothing to do with the upcoming fight.

  “As far as I can tell, the only person who could even have the potential to hack this would be… well… you.”

  “Are you planning on distributing comm networks with the new armor?” she asked, her tone implying she already knew the answer and was deeply amused by the existential crisis that came with it.

  I was torn right down the middle. On one hand, this was our ultimate ace, our unbeatable edge. Private, secure, instantaneous communication. On the other, this tech could save lives. Real ones. Hunter teams, Kaiju responders, even unpowered cops on the beat… they wouldn’t have to die just because their comms fried at the worst possible moment, leaving them isolated and screaming into static.

  My usual brand of selfishness is a comfortable, worn-in jacket I’ve had for years. This felt like wearing a necklace made of live grenades. Was my safety worth their lives? The cynical, self-preserving answer that has kept me alive is ‘yes, obviously,’ but actually saying it out loud, in the cold light of day, makes me sound like a much bigger asshole than I prefer to present myself as.

  “I am not sure yet,” I admitted, the words tasting like ash. “A quantum radio could land me right at the bottom of a black site. I’d rather not spend the rest of my days being probed by men in lab coats who think my personal entropy is a matter of national security.”

  She whistled slowly, causing a burst of static feedback in my ear.

  “Ouch,” Chinook cut in, her voice like gravel rolling downhill. “Seriously, though, there IS a solution to the black-bag game.”

  “What’s that? Bribes? Threats? Faking my own death again? That one’s getting old.”

  She chuckled. “Nah. Always make sure that at least two of us are sleeping with you at all times. That way, if someone does try to snatch you, they will have to get through two other alphas to do so. It’s basic security, really. A human shield, but with more cuddling.”

  My brain short-circuited. “I… what? That’s your solution? Instituting a rotating sleepover schedule to deter black-ops kidnappers?”

  “That’s not actually a terrible idea,” Mindy said, her voice all pragmatic ice. She’d clearly already moved past the absurdity and into the tactical applications.

  “You don’t have to do anything sexual, but if you move around between our rooms, that adds a huge layer of complication to any attempts to disappear you. Also, if you start to distribute the outfits to other students and they don’t find out about the comm circuits until there are plenty of them out there, no one official could touch you. The ones that have them would protect their source, and the ones that WANT them would start a riot if anyone tried to vanish their favorite widgeteer.”

  So my plan for not getting kidnapped was to either become a rotating harem lord—a rumor I was desperately trying to outrun—or start a tech-based insurrection among the student body. My life had officially jumped the shark and was now doing backflips over a tank of hungry piranhas.