Sovereign

by April Daniels

  “I am now.”

  Charlie looks abashed. “Danny, I had no idea—”

  “It’s not your fault,” I say quickly.

  “I should have known there was something up with her. She was barely paying attention.”

  “It’s fine, really,” I say, eager to move away from the topic. Karen is the last person I want to talk about right now.

  “All right. So what’s this text I got about a talisman?”

  We head over to the worktable, and I show him the collar. Kinetiq looks at it and sniffs. “This is what muted your powers?”

  “Yeah. It heated up a lot when Graywytch was torturing me too.”

  Charlie’s already into it, eyes intent with focus. He picks up one half of the collar and looks at the cut. “It’s a composite. This is steel, right?”

  I examine it in the lattice. “And aluminum too.”

  “Right. Uh, Danny, this might suck, but I’m gonna need you to tell me everything that happened out there. Everything.”

  One of the Docs has wandered over as well, and I feel everyone’s eyes land on me.

  “Fine,” I say. “Everyone grab a chair.”

  Story time! As I talk, I try to detach, the way I used to at home. The trick is to get safely dead inside and pretend I’m talking about someone else, something else, something that doesn’t matter. I tell them how Karen pitched the idea to me, how we flew down south. About Princess Panzer, and how Garrison gave me his Sales Pitch of Evil.

  At this, Kinetiq speaks up. “Did he say anything about will to power, or anything related to an ethnic or cultural purity?”

  “Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Anything about the leader principle, or a great rebirth of some bygone era? Maybe a golden age, either in the past or promised in the future?”

  “No. They were pretty down on equality, and said they wanted to create a hereditary dictatorship—”

  “One dictatorship? Worldwide? Or multiple smaller dictatorships, with Cynosure acting as the model?”

  “Uh, they weren’t clear on that.” I sift through my memories, try to squeeze out more detail. “Maybe the multiple dictatorships? They said they were going to build more islands. And it didn’t sound like they wanted to rule the world directly, just that they wanted all the world governments to be obedient and give them special rights and pay them extortion money.”

  “What about a cathedral?”

  I blink, surprised. “Well, he didn’t, but a rich guy with powers I busted a few days ago wouldn’t shut up about it, and I’m pretty sure Garrison had Graywytch kill him in his cell so he couldn’t talk.”

  “Likely not a true fascist, then. Probably a neoreactionary.” They shrug. “It’s a different flavor of shit, is all. They’re both authoritarian ideologies, but their emphasis is different. Fascists are a populist movement, deeply wrapped up in racism and misogyny and other forms of bigotry—essentially, it’s about hating anyone who’s different and enforcing a right-wing style of conformity on everyone. Neoreactionaries, on the other hand, are elitists who are all about bringing back the age of kings, and think that ‘common people’ should know their place and let themselves be ruled. They’ll use fascists as foot soldiers, but they don’t really care about things like ethnic purity among the labor classes, except as a bargaining chip to keep their toadies happy. They’re still super racist, though.

  “Naturally, the neoreactionaries see themselves as the ruling class that everyone should kiss up to. ‘The Cathedral’ is the weaksauce conspiracy theory they use to explain why their incredibly stupid ideas aren’t more popular.”

  Doc looks sideways at them. “You spend a lot of time parsing their buzzwords, do you?”

  “Gotta know the enemy,” says Kinetiq. They tap the circle-A button pinned to the shoulder strap of their body armor. “It ain’t just the gentrification of the Bay that makes me hate Silicon Valley, you know. Lots of neoreactionaries and fascists are mixed up with the big money boys.”

  “I don’t think Graywytch is one of them,” I say. “Not politically, anyhow.”

  Doc nods. “Yeah, Myra’s basically a communist. I can’t imagine how much they had to offer to get her to agree to work for a bunch of right-wing STEMlords.”

  “Maybe she’s getting something else out of it,” says Charlie.

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “I dunno. But payment in kind or through favors is a common way to do business among practitioners. Can you tell me more about how they’re trying to lock down who gets superpowers?” I give him details, and describe what I can remember of the satellite constellation. His eyebrows go up, and then go up further. “You’re serious? She’s mixing magic with hypertech?”

  “Yeah. Is that unusual?”

  “It’s illegal,” he says emphatically. “If Graywytch is seriously doing this she’s…well, the term ‘death wish’ comes to mind.”

  “You mentioned Phase One?” prompts Doc.

  “Yeah. That’s what they’ve already got in place. It lets them pick and choose who gets superpowers, or decide if anyone gets them at all. From what they showed me, it sounded like with more time to develop their techniques, they could start mass producing supervillains.”

  “What’s Phase Two, then?” asks Kinetiq.

  “That’s what Graywytch was testing out on me,” I say with a suppressed shiver. I explain the details of the experiments, and how she’d almost managed to pull the mantle out of my chest before I was rescued. “I think Phase Two is being able to depower people who stand up to them, and then turn around and sell the stolen powersets to their cronies. Or hell, they might just start kidnapping metahumans and draining them for profit.”

  “That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to,” says Doc Impossible. “Capturing a superhero is hard. Unless Garrison wants to be personally involved in every op, that doesn’t seem like a viable plan.”

  “There’s still Phase Three,” I say quietly. “They didn’t explain it, but I’ve been thinking about it. They’ve already got satellites that can project a spell across the whole planet. And that collar let Garrison’s power keep my abilities suppressed even when he wasn’t there.”

  Doc and Charlie get there at the same time. “He’s going to turn off everyone’s powers,” says Charlie.

  “Maybe magic and hypertech too,” I say. “He seems like the meticulous type, I don’t think he’d leave any way to fight back unaccounted for.”

  “Welp,” says Doc, reaching into a lab coat pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  “How long do you think we have?” asks Kinetiq.

  “They were going to make an announcement in a week or two. That’s probably just Phase One, though.”

  “Can’t be much longer than that,” say Charlie. “Once the Council hears about this, they’ll look into it, and it won’t be long before they figure out Graywytch is breaking their laws. They’ll come after her and Garrison hard. I mean spinning hurricanes out of the clear blue sky hard. She has really screwed herself.”

  “If Garrison’s powers work on magic, she won’t have to worry about the Council,” says Doc.

  “Oh.” Charlie’s a smart guy. The fact that he needed this pointed out to him before we see the light go on over his head says more about how scary the Council of Avalon is to him than anything he could have said out loud. He finishes scribbling a last note in his notebook. “All right, I think that’s enough for now. I might have more questions—actually, here’s one, where’s Calamity?”

  My stomach flops over. Right. “Uh, she stepped out,” I say.

  “Let’s get her back here; she needs to hear this.”

  Doc and Kinetiq trade a look I only see out of the corner of my eye. Without saying anything, they both stand and leave. “I, uh, don’t think she’d be interested. She wasn’t impressed that I got captured, and team jobs aren’t really her thing.”

  “You’re sure? We could really use her help.”

  “Look
, Charlie, she was embarrassed for me,” I say, blushing. “I was pretty pathetic back there, and she probably thinks I’m a loser now.”

  “I can pretty much guarantee you you’re wrong about that,” he says. He closes his notebook and sets it aside. “Danny, you realize how incredibly weird Sarah is, right?”

  “She’s not—”

  “To you. She’s not weird, to you. Because you can fly and go on talk shows. But to the rest of us, yeah, it’s a little strange that her hobby is beating up drug dealers.”

  “So she’s…different. So what?”

  “So she’s not really good at normal people things.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s no crime,” I mutter at my chest. “Neither am I.”

  “I noticed,” says Charlie, making a heroic effort not to roll his eyes that nonetheless falls short. “Danny, when she and I were together, we never went out on a date. She doesn’t do dates.”

  Blood is thundering in my ears. My heart rate has gone from 60 to 100 in a second and a half. “So?” I hear myself ask.

  “So when she likes someone, she asks them to go caping with her.”

  “…oh.”

  About thirty seconds later, I’m hitting the sound barrier.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I am a towering moron. A champion of idiocy. They’re going to build a monument to the great clueless minds of history, and my face is going to be on it. My guts are so tight with anxiety that I overshoot Sarah’s house by three or four miles and have to circle back. Coming in low and slow over her neighborhood, I scan the streets to try and remember where exactly her house is. There! The ranch set back from the road, with the oversized backyard. As I’m coming around for a landing, I see her.

  Sarah’s backyard is huge. It takes up the entire lot behind their house, clear over to the next road. It’s surrounded with tall hedges and trees for privacy, and one significant corner of it is riddled with bare wooden posts of various heights. If you’ve ever seen a kung fu movie where they train to fight by jumping from one post to the next without slipping, you get the idea. Sarah does a handspring off one. At the top of her arc, she twists in midair and throws a knife. It thunks into a wooden target a half-instant before she alights softly on another post with one foot.

  She’s amazing. Her brown hair is pulled back tight in a ponytail, her tank top is dark with sweat, and she’s beautiful. While balancing on one foot—rock still, as stable as most of us are with both—she rolls her shoulder where the prosthetic interfaces with her body. From the shoulder down her left arm is a charcoal gray machine. Electric muscles bunch and flex under a metarubber coating. The arm was enough for her to drop out of school, just to avoid the questions that might compromise her identity. In only a few months, it’s become so much a part of her that sometimes I forget she didn’t always have to wear a prosthetic.

  I’m careless. My shadow flits across her, and she looks up sharply. We lock eyes and her face darkens. No. Oh, please no, don’t let me have fucked this up. Sarah hops down from the post she’s on, a twelve-foot drop straight down, and lands like she’s only skipped a stair. A moment later I touch down a little ways off from her, and I’m dimly aware of the grass between my toes and against my bandages. Her good arm crosses her stomach, grabs onto her prosthetic. Shoulders in, turned away from me. But there’s something on her face, and I want it to be hope. My heart is charging in my chest, blood roaring in my ears. There’s probably some suave, charming way to defuse this, but I can’t find it.

  What comes out is, “Are you straight?”

  Sarah tightens a little. Her mouth gropes for a reply. “…I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to kiss me?”

  She nods. “Uh-huh.”

  And then we’re stumbling towards each other, and we collide, actually knock heads, but we’re kissing, and I’m laughing and that makes it harder to kiss, which makes it funnier until she gets a hand around my back and snugs me up against her and yes.

  Yes.

  I’ve never kissed anyone before. It’s not what I expected. But it happens so easily. It’s nice. Calming. Far too soon Sarah pulls away and looks up the yard to her house. “My mom is home. Let’s go to the park.”

  I cup a hand to her cheek and pull her gaze back to me. “Sarah, thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t—I was embarrassed. Thank you for coming to get me.”

  Some distant confusion comes over her, but she leans in and kisses me again. “Anytime. Come on, I need to get changed, and then we’ll go.”

  Hand in hand we trot up her sloping backyard to the rear of the house, entering through the kitchen. Sarah’s mom, Anita, a fit woman in her forties with short black hair, is slicing vegetables for a stew when we come in.

  “Hi, Mrs. Castillo,” I say with a nervous thrill when she sees me holding hands with her daughter.

  “It’s nice to see you, Danielle,” she says. “I hear you got in some trouble recently.”

  “Uh, yeah. Sarah really helped me out.”

  Mrs. Castillo smiles and says, “I’m glad.”

  “We’re going to the park,” says Sarah as she edges past her mother and deeper into the house. “I’ll get my things,” she says to me, and then disappears into her room. I take a seat on one of the stools on the living room side of the counter, trying to look cool, like it’s totally normal, like my head isn’t spinning. Less than four hours ago I was in a cell waiting for my final torture and probable execution. Now I’m sitting in Sarah’s (can I call her my girlfriend?) house, waiting for her to get ready to go (can I call this a date?) to the park.

  This is only the second time I’ve been here. The first time was shortly after the battle with Utopia, when Sarah lost her arm. It was so uncomfortable, with a thick fog of regret and sorrow hanging over everything, that I never came back.

  As far as houses go, it’s just slightly off normal. Like, the kitchen is pretty standard, very neat and well squared away, but instead of drawings or report cards tagged to the refrigerator, there are old paper targets. One of them has a tight grouping of five shots in the ten ring and a blue crayon scrawl that says SARAH, AGE 7. The lattice tells me there are at least five hidden guns in this room alone.

  “So, Danielle, I couldn’t help but notice that you arrived from the backyard,” says Mrs. Castillo, and I wince. Crap.

  “Uh, yeah, sorry,” I say. “I forgot.”

  “I understand. It sounds like you’ve had a hard week. But I need you to be sure to remember our rules here. No powers that can be seen from the street.” And, I belatedly realize, descending from the heavens certainly counts.

  “Right. Right, I’m sorry,” I say quickly, twisting on my stool to look down the hall and see if Sarah is coming back.

  Mrs. Castillo sets down her knife. I hear her footsteps as she crosses the kitchen, and I turn back in time to get a front-row seat to Sarah’s mom plunging her hand deep into my chest. There’s no pain, no tearing of skin, only a buzzing cold fullness as her hand phases straight through my flesh, all the way up to her wrist. Her fingers clasp around my heart, every beat a new moment of pressure.

  “Danielle. Please pay attention,” she says. “I take my family’s safety very seriously. Do you understand?”

  My jaw jumps a few times before I can engage my vocal cords and choke out a breathy, “Y-yes!”

  “Good. So what aren’t you going to do anymore?”

  “No flying.”

  Mrs. Castillo shakes her head. “No, the rule is no powers. None that can be seen from the street, right?”

  I nod frantically. “Right, right, no powers.”

  “So how are you going to come back here next time?”

  “Uh, uh, taxi! I’ll take a taxi.”

  Mrs. Castillo smiles. “Good. That’s good.” Her hand unclenches from around my heart and emerges from my chest coated in a wet scarlet glove of blood. She takes a paper towel and cups it under her hand to catch the blood while she crosses back to the sink to wash up. “I’m glad to have you over anyt
ime, Danielle. Sarah has been so lonely lately. I’m happy you two are growing close.”

  “R-right.”

  “Jesus, Mom,” mutters Sarah as she comes around the corner. She’s wearing her motorcycle riding gear—the civilian, non-capey version—and has a spare bike jacket thrown over her shoulder. With stiff, robotic movements I rise from the stool and start walking toward the garage door. Sarah catches the look on my face and glances back at her mother.

  “Have a good time!” says Mrs. Castillo.

  When the garage door closes behind us, Sarah holds out the jacket for me with a twinkle in her eye. “She did the heart trick, didn’t she?”

  “If that’s what you call it,” I say.

  “Did I forget to mention that my mother is a reformed supervillain?” asks Sarah, perched at the edge of laughter.

  With trembling slowness, I turn to meet her eyes. Not even a drop of pity from her. “That might have slipped your mind, yeah.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.” Sarah steps around me and sets the jacket on my shoulders. “This is my old riding jacket. It’s too small on me, but I think it’ll fit you perfectly.”

  It doesn’t. But it’s close, and it faintly smells of her, so I slip my arms through the sleeves and pull the zipper all the way up. Sarah hands me a spare helmet—more to avoid getting pulled over than because something as minor as a traffic accident could hurt me—sets her own visored helmet down on her head.

  The bike we’re riding isn’t the Calamity bike, with the fat, sticky racing tires and riding posture that’s practically horizontal. It’s a little blue Honda upright, with a modest engine, wire spokes, and a narrow leather saddle. It’s exactly the sort of thing a young woman might get for her first bike, and for once, I connect the dots ahead of time and realize that this is probably the bike that Sarah rides to wherever she stashes the Calamity gear so that her mom doesn’t give her trouble about bringing vigilante heat back to the house.

  The garage door goes up as I’m gingerly swinging one leg over the back of the bike.