Sovereign

by April Daniels

  My gut turns to lead. I bite the words out by syllables: “I am not a blackcape.”

  “Not today. But if you don’t take what I’m saying seriously, you’ll be one sooner than you think. What happened in court must have been terrible, and you’re right that this is exactly Graywytch’s style. But it’s no excuse. What you did today can never happen again. You need to learn to handle your shit, kiddo.”

  The hard ball of resentment in my gut explodes. “I have been handling myself, and I’ve been doing it without you!”

  Doc’s jaw clenches, but not like she’s angry. “I’m sorry for how I’ve been, but—”

  “I don’t need you to take care of me. If I need help finding the bottom of a bottle, I’ll give you a call.”

  Doc rocks back on her heels like she’s been slapped. Her mouth hangs open, but nothing comes out. For an instant I feel bad, but I grind that down and turn to leave. I slam into the sound barrier just a few seconds after leaving the balcony. To Hell with the city’s noise ordinance.

  In a few moments I’m over the Pacific and climbing hard. This kind of airspeed is a frozen wall being pressed against my face, and I tell myself that the ice forming at the corners of my eyes is just wind getting to me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mach 3.3. That’s how fast my suit’s nav computer says I’m going before my grip on the lattice fails and I’m punted into the wind like a leaf on a freeway. Flying that fast at sea level is hard. It’s tiring, and it wears on my focus. Once I get past my limit, my mind tends to butterfinger the lattice, and whoops, there goes my controlled flight. I become a ballistic body, tumbling through the air. Today I manage to catch myself before I smack into the ocean at two thousand miles an hour. I flip onto my back and do lazy backstroke arms at a mere eighty miles an hour or so. I needed this. A good fly over the ocean sets me right every time. I nose up for some altitude and head back to New Port.

  When I’m entering the city airspace I text the police that I’m starting my patrol early and drop down among the towers downtown. Patrol is easy. I fly low and slow through New Port, focusing especially on downtown where there are more people to see me. The whole point is to let people know I’m around. Civilians feel safer, and bad guys think maybe that daylight diamond store robbery wasn’t such a hot idea after all. If I stumble across something happening, I can get involved, but mainly I wait around for a call from Detective Phạm or the chief of the fire department. Because I’m a minor, I can only do this for twenty hours a week, but in a few years my contract will be renegotiated, and I’ll be out here full time.

  The hard flying has burned the hottest part of the rage out of me. The ashes are a low, warm throb behind my heart.

  I spend a few hours gliding around downtown, taking pictures with tourists, that sort of thing. For a hopeful moment I think I’ll have a little bit of excitement with an armed robbery, but they surrender immediately so all I get to do is sign autographs for the perps while we wait for the cops to come arrest them. We take a group selfie as the police are rolling up, and then I’m back on patrol.

  But, you know, it’s nice. Patrol is nice. People wave at me, and I wave back, and I don’t think about anything else. About Graywytch being horrible or about how much it hurts that Doc took her side. Especially not about my parents making a grab at my money, like they even wanted me to keep the powers that make my paychecks possible. The more times I drop in on people and have little conversations with them—give directions, answer questions, do quick favors—the better I feel. The warmth behind my heart fades down to the very edge of feeling. My smile isn’t tacked on anymore.

  My suit buzzes with a call from Detective Phạm. I put a finger to my earbud radio and answer the call. “Hey, Detective, what’s up?”

  “Danny, I need you to come down to police headquarters.” The bottom drops out of my stomach. Graywytch didn’t call the cops on me, did she? That would be—I don’t want to think about how bad it would be if they reacted the way Doc did. But then she continues, “That perp you collared a couple nights ago was found dead in his cell two hours ago.”

  Can I be relieved by that? Is that okay to feel? Immediately on the heels of that relief, concern begins to pool in my chest. People aren’t supposed to die when I hand them over to the cops. “Yeah, sure, I’m on my way.”

  I open the phone app in my suit and bring up Sarah’s phone number. My finger hovers over the call button for a moment. I shut the app without calling anyone. After this morning, it was hard work to get back into a good mood. Calamity mixes me up and gets me flustered every time. Not worth it. Not today.

  It only takes me a few moments to cross downtown and come into a shallow spiral, landing on the roof. The statue of Atlas over the main entrance is lit up, his face stern and the shadows hard in the white spotlighting that’s come up as the sun goes down. Above us, the first stars begin to peak through the blue velvet of the evening sky.

  Detective Phạm is waiting for me there, her face drawn and serious. The roof lights throw an X of shadows out from her legs.

  “Thank you for coming, Dreadnought,” she says. “I need to ask you some questions about the night you captured Crenshaw.”

  “I put everything in my report,” I say.

  “I know, but he was killed in the M-double-C—”

  “What?” The MCC is the Metahuman Containment Cell. It’s the world’s most expensive drunk tank. Built like a bank vault, with magnetically active shackles for the wrists and ankles that even I would have difficultly pulling out of, it’s designed to be airtight with the ability to administer a variety of sedatives, either as a gas or through an IV drip, and is the only place the cops can safely store someone with superpowers. Whenever it is occupied, there is a fully armed MRU team on guard twenty-four hours a day, as much to protect the (still legally innocent) prisoner as to keep them locked up. It’s a big deal, is what I’m driving at. Someone getting killed in there is…bad. Really bad.

  “That’s why I need to ask you questions. The homicide division is going nuts over this, and the MRU is looking for someone to point a finger at,” says Phạm. She pulls a notebook out of her jacket, clicks open a pen.

  One of the things I’ve learned in the last nine months is that seeing how city governments really work is super depressing. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, because it gets worse: we rent out the M-double-C to departments all over the Northwest; just having the option to send someone here costs ten thousand a year. If we can’t guarantee the safety of the inmates other departments stash with us, we stand to lose almost a half-million dollars out of the department’s annual budget in lost rental fees alone. And there’s a city council election coming up too, so this is going to be the worst pissing match I’ve ever seen. You and I need to be ready for it.”

  A creeping anxiety takes hold of me. “Wait, how could we possibly be to blame for this?” I ask.

  Phạm shrugs. “Who is to blame and who gets blamed aren’t always the same thing. So let’s go over what happened from the beginning.”

  I suppress a sigh and begin the story from when I arrived in New Port. It’s nothing I haven’t told the cops already before, and in writing, but Phạm has a bunch of extra questions about everything. Every one of my answers gets scribbled down again.

  We’re almost done now, and she asks, “When you were apprehending him, did Crenshaw say anything about any enemies he might have?”

  I close my eyes and try to think back to that night. We’re in the restaurant at the top of the tower. There are flames crackling quietly somewhere nearby. Civilians whimpering.

  …and Crenshaw sounds like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

  To be honest, I don’t really pay attention to what supervillains say very much anymore. It’s always misunderstood genius this, you’ll regret the day that. Supervillains are, as a rule, drama queens. It gets old. I shake my head. “I’m sorry, we didn’t talk—no, wait, he said something about a
cathedral?”

  Phạm flips to a fresh page in her notebook. “Okay, which cathedral?”

  “Hell if I know. He said it was brainwashing me, and everyone else too.”

  She raises her eyebrows at me. “Seriously?”

  “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”

  With a grunt of annoyance Phạm closes her notebook and slips it back in her jacket pocket. “We already knew he was nuts.”

  “How did he die?” asks Calamity.

  Phạm’s hand jerks toward her gun, and I’m tensing for takeoff. Calamity is crouched on top of the roof access hut, just a few yards off from us, and neither of us heard her arrive.

  “I knew you were ballsy; I didn’t think you were stupid,” says Phạm, drawing her weapon. She doesn’t point it at Calamity, just keeps it down by her leg. “You realize we’ve got like thirty warrants out for your arrest, don’t you?”

  “I’m known to be industrious,” says Calamity. Her left hand—the mechanical one—flexes. “But you haven’t told us how Crenshaw died.”

  Phạm turns to me. “Dreadnought, did you call her down here?”

  “No,” I say, glancing between Phạm and Calamity.

  “How’d you know to come down here?” Phạm asks her. Calamity doesn’t say anything. Detective Phạm gets tight with anger: “Have you been bugging my phone?”

  Calamity keeps her silence. Tilts her head.

  “Dreadnought, arrest Calamity,” says Phạm.

  “Um, no?” I say. “That’s not going to happen, like, ever.”

  Her eyes stay locked on Calamity while she chews that over. “That’s fine, I just had to ask,” she finally says. “And I won’t be able to lie about you refusing, if anyone puts the question to me.”

  Liaison officer, I am coming to realize, does not mean advocate, in much the same way that mother didn’t mean it, either. She must be extra scared by this Crenshaw stuff if she’s letting slip that she doesn’t have my back when it comes down to it. Or maybe she thinks I won’t notice what she just said because I’m a kid. Maybe she didn’t grow up in the kind of house where people learn cynicism alongside how to tie their shoes.

  “She’s got a point, though,” I say. Phạm breaks away from death-glaring at Calamity to look at me quizzically. “How did Crenshaw die?”

  “His throat was slit,” she says. “He was still in his manacles. CCTV shows nobody going in or out, but there’s one frame with a blurry smudge of someone inside his cell with him. Our perp might be metahuman, so you’ll need to be ready to serve an arrest warrant when we have one.”

  “Wouldn’t the MRU want to do that?” I ask. They don’t like me doing their jobs for them in the best of times. If they let a suspect get murdered under their noses, they’re definitely not going to want me swooping in to make them look even worse.

  Phạm glances at Calamity before she answers. “There might not be an MRU by the time we have an arrest warrant. That’s the kind of shakeup that’s coming, and that’s why you really can’t be associating with criminals right now.”

  “You’re going to bruise my tender and vulnerable feelings, Detective,” says Calamity.

  “Get the fuck out of here before I drill you, kid,” snaps Phạm. She doesn’t point her gun at Calamity. Not quite. But her fingers get awfully tight around the handle.

  Calamity rises from her crouch and leaps off the backside of the roof access hut. A tap of boots, the flutter-snap of her jacket, and she’s over the edge of the building. She fires her grapnel and vizzes away on a cable.

  “I hate you so much,” mutters Phạm under her breath. She doesn’t know how sharp my hearing is. After Calamity is well gone, she turns back to me. “If you think of anything else Crenshaw said to you when you were fighting, let me know. But other than that, stay out of this one until I call for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it. And don’t let Calamity stick her oar in, either.”

  “Detective, she and I don’t really—”

  “Save the bullshit for someone who’s buying, Dreadnought.” Phạm slides her gun back into her shoulder holster. “I’m trying to protect you here. Those new caping contracts the City Council offered you haven’t even been written down yet, and this is exactly the sort of thing that gets promises rescinded, do you understand?”

  I straighten in surprise. If the City Council takes back their offer to sign three new cape contracts, I’ll never be able to get Kinetiq a job up here. Hell, I might not even be able to get control of the Legion back. I could get fired. “They’d do that?”

  “They’d do worse to win an election,” says Phạm, “and there’s a smell in the air that’s got everyone with any sense ducking for cover. Go home and keep your nose clean. I’ll call you if there’s any news.”

  “Right.” When I turn to leave, she calls my name.

  “I saw what happened today at the courthouse on the news,” she says. She looks concerned. “I’m really sorry you had to go through that.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll see you later, Detective.”

  And then I’m up. A few moments later, as I expected, someone is shining a laser in my eyes. I’ve been shot in the face with actual laser cannons without much more than a bad sunburn to show for it, so I’m not worried about going blind, but it’s still pretty annoying. I angle down and come around the back of an office tower a couple blocks away from the police headquarters. Calamity is on the roof, tucking her laser away in one of the infinite pockets inside her long duster.

  “You’ve got my phone number,” I say as I land.

  “Where’s the skill in that?” says Calamity.

  “You really shouldn’t tease the cops like that.”

  “They’re big kids, they’ll get over it. Anyhow, we got bigger fish on the pan,” she says, eyes bright with excitement. “To wit—who would want to murder Crenshaw?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not getting involved; that’s Homicide’s job.”

  “You ain’t a cop, Dreadnought,” says Calamity.

  “Politics matter, Calamity,” I say, holding onto my calm with both hands. Why does she have to be so difficult about everything? Why can’t she just let something go for once in her life? Why does it always, always have to be the hard way? Just as I feared, even being near her is knotting my guts back up. It drives me mad, the way she’s so arrogant, self-righteous, stubborn, and way too hot! “If I want to take over the Legion, I can’t get mixed up in this.”

  Calamity rocks back on her heels, hands in her jacket pockets. “Do you even listen to the song they’ve got you singing?”

  Between the fiasco at the courthouse, and Graywytch’s insufferable smugness, and Doc’s weird freakout, I’m at my limit. “I’ve had enough shit for today, Sarah,” I spit, low and hot. “Go have fun committing more felonies, but I swear to God if you fuck this up for me I will never talk to you again!”

  Her eyes widen, her hands come out of her pockets. “Danny—”

  But I’m rolling now, and I can’t stop. “The Legion matters. What I’m trying to do matters. And all goddamn week people have been stomping over everything I’ve tried to do. The convention, my emancipation, and now even the new cape contracts I’m trying to open up—they’re all getting burned down as I watch, and I am sick of it!”

  Calamity goes blank. Turns and starts walking to the edge of the roof. Ten thousand tons of cold regret smash down on me. Maybe I’m a horrible person after all. I reach out like I can grab the words and yank them back.

  “Calamity, wait. I’m sorry,” I say. Stupid, I’m so stupid. “I’ve had a really bad day. I’m sorry.”

  She stops walking. “Is that what you think I’m trying to do here, Danielle? You think I want to stomp on you?”

  “No. No, I’m sorry.”

  Sarah—and she is Sarah now—turns back, her arms folded against her stomach. “You’re not—we’re changing. I don’t like it.”

  “I…I don’t know what to say.” I run my hand through
my hair, frustration tugging at my insides. She stops taking my calls, and now she’s, what, missing me? Upset that I’ve got responsibility now? Or something else? Maybe I am changing. Maybe I’m…no, Doc is wrong. I’m not a bad person. That was what my father wanted me to think, but it was a lie. I’m a good person. Aren’t I? “Things have been weird.”

  “Is this how being a hero is?” asks Sarah, from that weird space where she’s half-Calamity. “Steppin’ aside. Letting the law act like it owns justice?”

  “I screwed over a friend of mine by accident,” I say. “And I need these contracts, at least one of them, to make it right. I can’t risk that. Not over someone like Crenshaw. Please, just don’t mess this up. I’m sorry I yelled. It’s…being me is hard right now.”

  Sarah stares off to the side, at some middle distance where a decision is being made. She nods. “Okay. But I’m keeping my ear to the ground. If something falls in my lap—you can’t ask me to ignore that. You can’t ask me that.”

  “I won’t. I don’t,” I say. Her shoulders relax. She nods and lets her arms drop back down to her sides. I feel like we’ve edged back from a precipice.

  My suit buzzes with a text. I swipe a finger down my forearm and the screen swims to life out of the material of my bodyglove. It’s from Charlie, asking if I’m coming over tonight.

  “Got a line on something?” asks Calamity, perking up.

  “Yes, actually. Valkyrja’s daughter is in town, and she’s got a problem I’m helping her out with. Do you want to come along?”

  “Valkyrja had a daughter.” Not quite a question. Not quite a statement. That damn bandanna over her face hides a lot of her expression, but her cheeks shift like her lips are twisting. She takes a step backward.

  “Yeah, her name’s Karen. She’s pretty cool.”

  Calamity hunches her shoulders and turns away. She starts walking toward the edge of the building. “You go on ahead there, Dreadnought. I wouldn’t want to get in the way.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re not going to—”