Sovereign

by April Daniels

  Calamity raises her left arm and shoots a grapnel that trails cable out of her prosthetic hand. The cable finds purchase across the open yard, and she flies out of cover as the cable whizzes back into her arm. She lands next to him in a roll, and as the limp cable whips back into her arm across the mud, she snatches it up and wraps it twice around Crenshaw’s throat.

  “Best be tapping out soon, partner!” she shouts as she jerks the cable tight.

  Crenshaw struggles a little more, so she bangs his head against the ground once, twice, and finally he goes limp. Before he can come to, Calamity reaches into her tactical vest and pulls out a syringe. She jerks the safety cap off with her teeth, then plunges the thick needle through his jacket into the meat of his shoulder. That’s what she does instead of beating the bad guys into a hospital bed. If I could manage to get through a fight without shattering everything fragile I was carrying, I’d probably use those little tranquilizers too.

  “That ought to keep you,” she says as she lets the cable go slack. Crenshaw inhales deeply, but doesn’t stir from the deep sleep he’s fallen into.

  “Good work,” I say, setting down next to her.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” says Calamity as she gets to her feet and brushes off her hands.

  “Oh great! We’re doing this again.” All that earlier relief from when she took charge has vanished. It seems like nothing is ever right between us these days. For a while there after the battle with Utopia, it seemed like we were going to be close. Very close. But then…I don’t know, then it kind of fell apart. I was off making my first rounds as Dreadnought, getting to know my new life, and she was trapped in Legion Tower or at home, going through a series of surgeries to get ready for her prosthetic arm. That’s when we started to lose contact and drift apart. She stopped answering my calls, and then I stopped calling. It wasn’t until a few months later when we ran into each other on a midnight roof that I even knew she was still caping.

  What makes it worse is that sometime in the nine months since we fought Utopia, Calamity hit a growth spurt and is now a good two or three inches taller than me, and that’s flipped a switch in my brain for how I see her. She has gone from being kind of cute to urgently, painfully hot. The way she holds her shoulders, straight and high. The way her eyes are the color of liquid chocolate. Sometimes she catches me staring, and I think sometimes I catch her staring, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

  “You almost got yourself killed,” says Calamity.

  “I almost die on a monthly basis, what makes tonight so special?”

  “Dammit, Dreadnought; this ain’t funny!” Whoa, wait a minute, that’s real fear in her eyes. It doesn’t work this way.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying not to sound insincere.

  “I thought once you’d had a chance to grow into your powers you’d get over doing shit like this,” she says, which is the exact wrong thing to say.

  “Oh, piss off!” I snap. “I don’t need you tell me what to do with my powers!”

  We’re saved from the fight getting worse by the arrival of Detective Phạm, who charges into the construction site at the head of a SWAT team. They all point guns at Calamity.

  “Calamity, freeze! You’re under arrest!” shouts Detective Phạm.

  “Funny. I don’t feel arrested.”

  “Dreadnought, step away from the vigilante!”

  “Why?” I ask. “Are you afraid your bullets might mess up my hair?”

  Calamity drops a few black pellets out of her jacket, and an instant later they’re all hissing thick white smoke. Visibility drops like a curtain, and Calamity’s grapnel fires.

  “See you around, partner,” she says, and then there’s the sound of cable whizzing and her jacket flapping as she flits away into the night.

  Well, I’ll give the cops some credit: they don’t fire after her. We’re in one of the most densely packed cities in the country, and those bullets would have to come down somewhere. Phạm speaks rapidly into her radio, and in the distance sirens answer her. They’re going to try to chase her with cars, and will probably call in some helicopter support. It won’t work. It never does.

  It takes some time for the smoke to clear, and while that’s happening the cops are rushing around setting up a new perimeter and calling in some paramedics to get Crenshaw laid out on a stretcher.

  “What’d she do to him?” asks Phạm as she slides her gun back into her shoulder holster. Crenshaw is completely out of it, flopping limply and drooling as the medics load his stretcher into the back of their truck.

  “It’s a hypertech sedative,” I say. “Puts him down for eight hours with no side effects.”

  Phạm nods, then seems to remember something. “Danny, you shouldn’t be working with her.”

  “Why not? I need all the help I can get.”

  “She’s unlicensed and working off-contract. That makes her a criminal.”

  “So what?”

  “So? So that’s kind of a problem for us. You may have noticed that we’re cops?” She taps the golden shield on a chain around her neck. “See the badge?”

  “Oh yeah, speaking of which, one of your boys shot me about six times tonight. The MRU really needs to get their shit together…”

  Phạm and I head back to the main command post. She’s lodged her formal protest about my continued association with Calamity, but we both know that’s all it is: something done for form’s sake so everyone can say they were doing their job. Calamity isn’t the only vigilante in New Port, and if the cops seriously tried to crack down on unlicensed superheroes the crime rate would jump overnight. They say that’s because it would divert manpower away from regular police work; we say it’s because there are lots of crimes they just can’t handle. It’s no different than how things work in other big cities, except maybe a little more intense. New Port has always had more than its share of weirdos in tights and super-powered narcissists with god complexes.

  There’s some paperwork the police want me to do, and I sit down to do it without grumbling, because that’s a fight I’ve lost enough times to not bother anymore. After it’s done, I briefly consider asking for permission to fly back down to Antarctica to catch the rest of the convention, but decide against it. The answer will be no. Every time I work with the cops, I have to stick around for the next forty-eight hours in case their investigators decide to ask me any questions. Even though I specifically arranged for this week off, and even though it was Graywytch who wasn’t answering her phone, I’m the one who threw the punches, so I’ve got to stick around.

  Frustration knots in my chest. Two years until the next World Convention. Goddamnit, Graywytch. You’re going to pay for this.

  With nothing better to do, I decide to go back to the condo I share with Doc Impossible.

  I take to the air and head towards the condo towers in outer New Port. Below me, tiny cars wait at tiny stoplights, and minuscule people pass through yellow circles of streetlamps. I tap my forearm to activate the screen and bring Doc up on speed dial. She answers a few moments later, still drunk. Maybe more so than when I left her.

  “Hello…Danny? Danny?”

  “Hi, Doc.”

  “How was the fight?”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m going to stay in New Port tonight. I’ve got to be available to the detectives.”

  “Oookay. You’re going to miss the after-party.”

  I laugh. “That’s fine. Cecilia would kill me if pictures of something like that got on to the web.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Something in her tone makes me worried. Doc was in a really bad way after the battle with Utopia. She held it together just long enough for us to move into a condo on the outskirts of downtown, and then fell into a bottle for six months. A human woman would have died from all the alcohol she put into herself. The low point was probably the day I came home and found out she’d cut the word machine into her face with a razor. After what happened today with
Magma and Chlorophyll, I’m becoming concerned about a relapse. “Doc, are you going to be okay?”

  “I’m not a drunk. I’m just drunk at the moment. It’s fine.”

  “Just promise me you’ll be sober when you fly up again. I don’t want to have to look for a new lawyer.” Making it a joke works sometimes, but not always.

  “Of course!” blurts Doc, her voice frightened. “Of course. I would…you know I never want to hurt you, right?”

  “I know, Doc,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s fine. Have fun.”

  “Okay, Danny. I just want you to know, you know, right? That I wouldn’t betray you?”

  “I know, Doc.” Shit, she’s really fallen down the hole. Magma, you asshole. You didn’t have to yell at her like that. And just when she’d started to get better too. Now there’s nothing I can do but wait to see if she stays down there this time. I hope not.

  “I care about you,” she says, like she’s not sure I know it already.

  “I care about you too. Get some sleep.”

  “Sure, sure. G’night.”

  “Night.” I cut the line, and feel mingled shame and relief at getting out of the conversation before it got any worse. She’s not a bad person, exactly, it’s just that sometimes she’ll be drunk for weeks on end and forget to pay the electricity bill, or something like that. It can be difficult to live with her, but if I didn’t, I’d be completely alone. I’m not sure I could deal with that right now.

  Doc’s condo is one of four on the top floor of a middle-quality condo tower. It seems like kind of a down-rent place for a pair of professional superheroes to live until you realize that she owns the other three units on the top floor and all the condos on the floor below us too. Buying up a whole lot of units is the only way to ensure the kind of security and privacy that a superhero, or even a former hero for that matter, needs.

  As I approach the tower, my stomach flips over when I notice the lights in Doc’s condo are on. When we were leaving for Antarctica, I know we turned everything off. I look into the lattice, to see if anything jumps out at me, any cloaked bad guys or hidden power sources. Nothing on the outside. The walls are thick enough and I’m far enough away that I can’t see too clearly inside.

  When I tap down on the patio outside the sliding glass door, I find a girl sitting in our living room, reading a book. She’s sitting forward on the couch, and is wearing a strange, almost poofy white backpack. She looks up when I slide the glass door open.

  “Oh good, you’re here.” The girl stands up to meet me. She’s Asian, and fairly tall. Her clothes are all wrinkled and dirty, and her hair is lank and messy.

  “You have ten seconds to convince me not to call the police,” I say with all the ice I can muster. Most people flinch a little when I hit them with something like that, but this girl doesn’t even seem to notice. Cecilia warned me I might have to deal with stalkers, but until this moment I never really took her seriously.

  “I’m sorry I broke in. My name is Karen,” she says. What I took to be a strange backpack unfurls a little. It’s not a backpack at all. She has wings. “Valkyrja was my mother, and I really need your help.”

  Chapter Eight

  A long few seconds pass.

  “Okay,” I say. “What do you need?”

  Karen sags with relief. “Really?”

  “Sure. Valkyrja was nice to me.” I gesture at her wings. “And you’re obviously not lying about being family.”

  Her eyes flick away from me for a moment. “…Yeah. Well. Thank you anyhow.”

  “Don’t worry about it. So what do you need my help for?”

  Karen fidgets with her fingers, doesn’t meet my gaze. “Um…do you have anything to eat?”

  I nod. “Yeah, I’ll put a pizza in the oven.” I walk past her and into the kitchen. The stove is of course one of those ultramodern pieces with more buttons on it than Apollo 11, but it’s not hypertech, just overly fancy. I don’t know what half of them do, but after weeks of trial and error I have figured out preheating.

  “Thank you,” she says quietly. “I know it’s a lot to ask, especially when I just showed up here and—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been where you are.” It feels weird to say I was homeless. That only lasted for one night. Technically I still meet the definition since Doc is just letting me crash with her, but it seems dramatic to try and say I’m full-on homeless. But Karen obviously has nowhere else to go; her cheeks are slightly hollow and she’s having trouble focusing her gaze.

  “I kind of doubt that,” she says.

  I look up. “Well, maybe not as long as you, but I got kicked out—”

  “Uh, not that,” she says, blushing. “Never mind. Thank you. Really.”

  “All right. So. Uh, I don’t mean to be rude, but when was the last time you had a shower?”

  “Two weeks. I think. It’s getting hard to keep track of time.”

  “This will take some time to bake. Why don’t you go get washed up? The bathroom is down that hall and to the left. Guest towels are in the cupboard to the lower right of the sink.”

  “Thanks,” she says quietly. Karen picks up her book and heads into the bathroom. A few moments later, the shower turns on.

  Valkyrja never mentioned a daughter. Not that we talked very many times before she was killed, but it surprises me she had a daughter around my age walking around and never mentioned it. Or that someone living her lifestyle wouldn’t have a life insurance policy or something set up to take care of her kid when she was gone. Well, I’m sure Karen will explain. Valkyrja wasn’t the kind of person to hurt her own child.

  While Karen is in the shower, I go into my room, shut the door, and strip out of my dirty uniform.

  My supersuit is a surprisingly thin, surprisingly heavy gel computer matrix sandwiched between an underlayer with all sorts of comfort and health functions and an outer layer that changes color, insulates against heat and electricity, and serves as armor. Not armor for me; I don’t need it. Armor for the rest of the suit. Gel computers are tough, but not invincible, and I lose a lot of my best support functions if the computer goes down. For example, the fight against Mr. Armageddon got about twice as hard once my satellite phone was knocked out of commission.

  Over where the suit covers my chest there are a few black scorch marks where the lightning and fire hit me. I drop the suit on its charging pad in the corner of my room and open my closet to pull out the spare. It can take up to 48 hours for the self-repair functions to fix everything, so I’ve started keeping more than one around, just in case. I hang the fresh suit on the hook near my door and then strip off my underwear, which is all specialized microfiber stuff designed especially for wearing under my suit to make sure there’s no rubbing or chafing or anything. Believe it or not, that’s the one thing my skin is still all too human about.

  I throw on some normal panties and a bra, and a gray t-shirt and blue shorts over that, then head back out into the apartment. I take a seat in the living room, click some music on from the hidden speakers, and wait for Karen to finish her shower.

  • • •

  Karen attacks her food like it kicked her dog. My own appetite is stronger than normal after the flight up from Antarctica, and between us we murder the pizza in record time. Then we’re sitting in the living room, plates set aside, and she’s obviously working herself up to saying something.

  “Are you feeling better?” I ask.

  “Yes, thank you.” She twists her fingers through her hair, which lies damp and heavy down the front of her shoulder. “Um, yeah, so, anyway. I kinda need your help with something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Uh, shit, this is hard to explain. So. Crap. So, uh, this spring my wings grew in overnight.”

  “That must have been an interesting morning.”

  “Yeeeah. ‘Interesting.’ We didn’t know what was happening. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. We thought it was just a random mutation or somethin
g. Before I learned how to fly with them, we were considering amputating them. Then the dreams started, these really vivid dreams about places I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met. But then I’d see something on the news or in a book about them, and I’d realize they were true.”

  Karen stops. Opens her mouth again, closes it. Finally, she says in a shaking voice, “Do you have any liquor?”

  “Ah, that seems like a bad idea.”

  “But do you?”

  “I mean, well, Doc does. But—”

  “Please.” Her fingers gnarl into fists. “She’s loudest when I’m sober. This is Hell.”

  It’s probably a bad idea, but I’m not stern enough to say no. Karen is desperate in a way I haven’t felt since I transitioned. Before I can think of a good reason to say no, I’m standing up to get her a drink. Doc doesn’t bother to hide her liquor or lock it up.

  I set the bottle and a glass down in front of Karen, and she unscrews the cap and pours herself a brimming glass of rum. She drinks half the glass like Kool-Aid, grimaces, almost chokes.

  “So the dreams got worse,” she says, voice rough. “And then I started having them when I was awake too. I started remembering what New Port looked like in the ’60s, or what New England was like before the Revolution. I can remember the smell of a log fort at the head of a fjord from eight hundred years ago. Eventually I figured out that these were coming from Valkyrja. My wings grew in the night she died. It didn’t make any sense.” She takes another long drink. Karen looks at me with hollow eyes and says, “And then I remembered giving myself up for adoption. Like, it was my memory. But it isn’t. I can recognize the baby. I can recognize myself in the memory. That’s how I found out who my birth mother was.”