“You comfortable back there?” Sarah asks over her shoulder.
I wrap my arms around her waist and lay the side of my head on her shoulder. “Yeah.”
With a throaty roar, the bike wakes, and we leap out of the garage and onto the street. We tip way over when we take a corner, and for a moment I’m sure we’ll crash, some fragmentary instinct from my pre-Dreadnought days causing me to bunch up with anxiety. Sarah laughs and guns it.
She weaves us through side streets until we hit the highway and climb the onramp with a grumbling roar. Wind whips at my bare legs. The engine is warm between our thighs, and vibrating with power. Cars tear by us in the other direction just a few arm-spans away, and to the left and right of us, the last of the morning rush hour streams into downtown New Port.
Sarah is firm and unwavering in my arms. She takes a hand off the bars to stroke my hand, and I close my eyes and enjoy the strength of her against my chest and stomach.
I let myself forget I’m Dreadnought. It doesn’t matter that I’m more used to seeing this road from the sky. When I shove all of that out of my mind and see the city from her eyes, it’s like a whole new world opens up to me. To us. Here we are, the road hissing beneath our tires, wind tugging at our shoulders, the engine running flat out and barely making sixty-five. I’ve never flown faster.
We peel off the highway exit to downtown, duck and bob through morning traffic, and pull into the northern parking lot at Victory Park. Sarah kills the engine and makes to get off the bike, but I’ve decided I like it here so I anchor myself in the lattice and sigh contentedly. Sarah pushes against me with as much effect as she’d get from leaning on a cement wall, and I sigh again, squeeze her a little bit.
“All right, you brat, release me,” she says around her chuckle. With great and dramatic magnanimity, I peel myself off Sarah and allow her to dismount. Sarah locks the helmets to her bike with a cable, and then we head into the park. I wrap my arm around hers and lean into her, head on her shoulder.
Victory Park is a broad strip of green in the heart of downtown. It goes right up to the water of Puget Sound and is lumpy with rolling hills. Ancient oak trees splash the ground in shade during summer, but today their knobbly fingers scrape a white sky. Sarah and I head toward one of the hills that is most densely wooded. We find a soft depression between two ridges, carpeted in dead grass and fallen leaves under the shifting, clicking branches of a tree older than the city.
We sit down together, backs to the broad oak trunk. Her fingers find mine and lace through them. Down the hills a ways we can barely see the Sound, glinting in the morning sun beyond the trees. I lay my head against her and close my eyes.
After a moment, Sarah says, “Uh, do you mind if I take my prosthetic off?”
“No,” I say, sitting up. “Do you need help?”
“I got it,” she says, releasing my hand and reaching over to her left shoulder. She reaches up inside her t-shirt and finds a catch. Two more thick clicking noises, and her dark gray prosthetic slides cleanly away from her body. The attachment point at the socket is already being covered up by the automatic contraction of the synthetic shoulder muscle bundles. Sarah carefully places her prosthetic off to the side and leans back into me. Her smile is a little crinkled, a little unsure.
“You’re beautiful, you know that, right?” I tell her. And she is. There’s something about her hard, athletic lines that makes things spin inside my chest.
Sarah blushes. We scoot closer together, and I pull her remaining arm around my shoulder, sit halfway in her lap.
“So you’re not angry at me?” she asks in a small voice.
“No! Of course not. I’m sorry I freaked out when we got back to the hangar. I’m…I was ashamed of getting captured. And you’re so great at this stuff, and—”
“But I’m not! I nearly got you killed again.” She stares at the shaved part of my head and the zipper row of staples I’m sporting.
“Wait, again? I mean, you didn’t, not today. But what are you talking about?”
Sarah shakes her head, like she can’t believe I’m so dumb. “You were right. We never should have gone into that warehouse. Going after Utopia on our own was stupid. But I—I didn’t want to back down in front of you. And I didn’t want to admit you were right about the Legion.” She looks away. “And I keep screwing up. That’s why—I thought you didn’t want me around anymore.”
“Whoa, hey, no,” I say. I reach around to hug her with both arms, but she leans away. “I would never—I always want you out there with me.”
“Why?”
It doesn’t compute. My mouth makes noises in the general direction of an explanation, but struggles to put together a coherent sentence. Finally, I manage: “Sarah, you’re a better superhero than me.” She blinks with surprise. “When I’m in a really bad spot, when things are falling apart and I’m about to lose it, I think what would Calamity do? And that gets me through it.”
Sarah smiles like the sun after a storm. “Really?”
“Absolu—”
She tackles me with her mouth, lays me out against the ground. We go rolling over a few times and come to rest with me on top of her, lips and tongues grasping at each other.
We finally come up for air. I’m laying across her chest, her breast under my hand. I blush, but she smiles. Staring down into brown eyes that draw me in, set me right. Sarah runs her hand down my back.
“I’m sorry about Mom doing the heart thing,” she says.
“It’s all right. She’s just protective.”
“That’s a generous word for it,” says Sarah, rolling her eyes.
“Is it?” I ask, lying down across her, head cupped in the hollow of her neck. “She’s concerned. I wish my mom had been that hardcore about looking after me.”
Sarah doesn’t say anything for a moment. Her arm tightens around my waist. “Yeah. Mom’s all right.”
“This is nice,” I say after a while.
Sarah murmurs agreement, deep and rumbly against my cheek. “It’s not every day beautiful girls fall out of the sky and ask me to kiss them.”
“Would you like that to be an everyday thing?” I ask. “Because I can arrange that.”
Sarah laughs, and it’s glorious, and I will never get tired of that sound. My eyes slide closed. Her shampoo smells like coconuts. For the first time in what seems like years, I feel safe. Sarah is warm and solid beneath me, and her arm strokes up my back, down my back. My body is heavy. I put up a languid smile, and then I’m…
Chapter Nineteen
My room is barren. Something is coming. I’m hiding on my bed. Not under or behind, just on top. It feels like that’s the only place to hide, even though I know it’s not any good.
The door bangs like gunshots. Once, twice, an ogre bellowing on the other side. I don’t want to open the door, but I know I have to. From my spot on the bed I reach out, and the door is opening, and then my father has me by the shirt collar and is dragging me away. The noise is indescribable. My ears are bleeding.
Into the cage I go. The walls are solid iron, or maybe rusty old bars, or maybe both, or maybe something else, and I’m up against the bars, up against the window, and I’m screaming, screaming for help.
Pricklepins on my legs, and there are the beetles I was expecting. I know they’re Graywytch. I know they’re going to eat me from the inside out. Up against the door again, screaming through the window.
My mother and Doctor Impossible stand with their backs to me. “I told you he wasn’t worth it,” says my mother.
“Mom!” I’m screaming. “Mom, please! Let me out of here!”
They start walking away.
“Mom! Come back! Mom, please!” They don’t care. They don’t listen.
The beetles are chewing now, have gotten into me. My lips squeeze tight to keep them out, but they chew their way through. It burns. It stings. They swarm up my legs and over my body, and they’re prickly and sharp on my tongue as they go down, down inside me.
/>
When I reach for the lattice, I find beetles crawling across it. Twitching antennas, chewing mandibles. They center in my chest, and they grab hold of my power, and they start eating, eating it all up. My chest—my male chest that I thought I was rid of forever—starts to warp and bend and bubble up like a blister, glowing with the light of my stolen power, and it begins to burst and—
Chapter Twenty
Sarah’s hand fastens around my ankle. My body is wire-tight with terror. I take another breath and I realize I’m screaming, floating, my body curled up protectively around my chest in midair.
“Danielle! Wake up!” Sarah is hanging from my ankle, her toes just barely scraping the ground. When I go to tell her I’m awake, all that comes out is a messy cry of fear. My body is slick with icy sweat. “It’s just a dream; you’re okay,” she says.
My voice is steadier this time. I can almost get the word okay out in one piece. My heart is going flat out, tripping over itself, skidding around the corners, a headlong mad dash scramble away, away, gotta get away.
“Come back down here,” says Sarah. “Please, come back down.”
Getting out of the air is hard. It’s like peeling my fingers off a bar I’ve been hanging onto for dear life, but slowly, with dips and jerks, I bring us back down to the ground.
Sarah sweeps me into a one-armed hug and squeezes me tight with her shoulder and chin. “You’re okay. It’s okay.”
“No, I’m not,” I say, and I start crying, and I can’t stop. I put my face into her shoulder and let go, sob and weep until there’s nothing left in me. I’m dimly aware of Sarah telling someone else that I’m okay, that I had a nightmare while we were napping, and I keep my face hidden. The last thing I need is this popping up on YouTube, and right now I resent that more than anything else in the world. But whoever came to check on my screaming leaves without a hassle, and Sarah turns her attention back to me. With kisses and stroking rubs down my back she helps me put myself back together.
I go limp, my cheek resting on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, I should have known that would happen,” I say quietly.
Sarah shakes her head, hums a negative sound that vibrates in my chest. “Does this happen often?”
“Not that bad, usually,” I say. “But, yeah.”
Sarah makes sympathetic noises deep in her throat, and I am almost pathetically grateful. God, what did I do to deserve someone like her? She doesn’t push me away. She doesn’t politely tolerate me. She hugs me close, and with her helping me along I feel better faster than I expect. The hard knot of terror and sorrow fades, in its place I have an airy joy that makes me feel weightless. I’m not alone. Not anymore. I’ve got Sarah.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she says after I’m calmed down. “I think we both skipped breakfast.”
“It’ll have to be takeout,” I say. “I don’t want to deal with being famous in downtown right now.”
Before Sarah can reply, her phone rings. “Sure thing,” she says, digging the phone out of her jacket one-handed. “Hello? Yeah, she’s—shit, sorry. Yeah, she’s fine. We’re at Victory Park. No, I don’t—okay, we’re on our way back. Yes. Yes. It’s a .38 Detective. No, JHPs. Not when I’m in civvies, I don’t. Okay.”
“Who was that?” I ask as I slip the riding jacket on.
“Doc Impossible.”
I wince. “Oh shit. I forgot to tell her where I was going.”
Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. This isn’t a normal week.
“I gathered,” says Sarah, slipping her phone away. “Help me put my arm back on, and we can brainstorm how you’re going to make it up to her.”
Sarah’s arm slips back into its socket with a shunk-and-clicking noise. We wind our way back out of the park, hand in hand, and peel out of the parking lot with my arms around her waist. We snag a couple bags of gyros from a drive-through place she likes and tuck them in the cargo pod on the back of the bike before shooting back down the highway to the industrial park at the outskirts of town.
The topside of what’s now our hangar used to be an abandoned factory. Now it’s the melted-down, slagged-out remains of a factory, and Doc is standing near the main door, sucking on a cigarette like it’s her job.
Sarah pulls into the parking spot we’ve got set up a ways from the main ruins. It’s between two hillocks of gravel with a desert-pattern camouflage net strung between them, all but invisible from the sky. She pops the cargo pod and we each grab a bag of takeout before starting the long walk to the hangar entrance. Doc drops the cigarette and twists it out beneath her toe. As we get close, Doc’s eyes track down to my hand clasped in Sarah’s.
“Oh, fucking finally.”
She turns to head back down into the hangar, and we follow her, our cheeks a matching shade of red.
The chewing out I’m expecting doesn’t start until halfway down the stairs. And it’s way, way lighter than what I anticipated. “You need to tell me where you’re going. At least until this whole thing is over with.”
Her voice is heavy with relief, tinted with anger. And almost shaking with fear.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. She nods.
“I need to replace your earbud radio too,” she says as we exit the stairs into the main hangar space.
A new wave of mortification falls over me. I’m so used to always being in contact now, I completely forgot she couldn’t reach me unless I took my phone.
We cross the hangar, and the cement is cold under my bare feet. Her other two bodies are mounting a particle cannon under the nose of her tilt-engine. At the collection of cots and divider screens that passes for the living area in here, Doc hands me my backup suit and stands on the other side of the screen while I slip it on. Then she grabs my chin and tilts my head over to look at my ear where the radio was torn out.
“This side is too irritated to risk gluing it back in. We’re going to have to put it in your right ear instead.”
“Okay,” I barely have time to say before Doc is squirting antiseptic glue down my ear, then wiping the excess away and shoving a tiny earbud radio as deep into the canal as it will go. After a few seconds of holding it, she lets go and starts snapping her fingers next to my ear.
“Yeah, it’s working,” I say.
And with that, Doctor Impossible lets go of a visible load of stress. Man, I am such an asshole sometimes. Of course she would freak out if I left without saying where I was going. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She shakes her head, puts the back of her hand up to her mouth. “I don’t mean to overreact. It’s important, is all.”
“We’re going to get them, Doc. Don’t worry.”
That comforting core of determination returns to her expression. “You’re damn right we are.”
We gather around a beat-up old coffee table set between two flea market couches. Kinetiq scoots right up to the coffee table and sits cross-legged. Charlie wanders over from the workbench he’s claimed as his own, and Sarah and I pass out food before sitting practically in each other’s laps. Over the first few bites I bring Sarah up to speed on what happened. Her face gets dark, and she’s got one hand clamped on my knee like she’s scared someone’s going to pick me up and put me in their pocket.
To be honest, it’s a little surreal how angry everyone is on my behalf. I’m not used to people giving a shit, and I sort of wish they’d knock it off. The grand shows of concern are new and uncomfortable. Can we please pretend all this never happened?
Doc comes over and pockets her cell phone before grabbing a gyro and digging in. “Cecilia is on her way. We’re going to explore legal strategies for the counterattack.”
Sarah snorts. “You need a lawyer to do capework?”
Oh boy, here it comes. The law and order debate. Get more than three capes in a room together for the first time, and sooner or later we’ve got to hash out this hoary old argument. It looks like today’s the day. Joy.
Doc looks at me. “Hey, Danny, how many warrants are there out for your arr
est?” she asks around a mouthful of chicken and lettuce.
“None,” I say between dainty little bites.
“Funny how that works out,” says Doc. She takes another bite, and is obviously not of the defiantly-femme school of table manners. She’s wearing a napkin like a bib and it’s getting a workout.
“Don’t get too cocky,” says Kinetiq. They take a sip of a soda from out of Doc’s fridge. “The cops are not your friends. Sooner or later, you’ll see.”
“So we should give them reasons to come after us?” asks Charlie with a raised eyebrow. “That’s…um, insane? Yeah, that’s the word I want.”
“Ain’t about givin’ them reasons,” mutters Calamity, who has suddenly displaced Sarah. “They ain’t never had trouble findin’ their own. Way I see it, you can set your mind to doin’ the right thing, or the legal thing. Sooner or later, you gotta choose.”
“Right on,” says Kinetiq with vehemence.
“What about rules of evidence?” asks Doc. “What about making sure the perps get convicted?”
Kinetiq shrugs. “I don’t really care about that. The American prison system excels at a lot of things, but justice isn’t one of them.”
“So when a serial killer gets out because you fouled up the crime scene, what then?” I ask.
“If I was a Sherlock—” Cape slang. Go ahead and guess what it means. “—that might be an issue,” Kinetiq says. “But I’m not. I do crisis containment.”
All eyes land on Calamity. She’s suddenly really interested in her food. After a moment, she mutters, “Sometimes you can only mail a wiretap recording to the detective in charge and hope for the best.”
“Oh, so suddenly the police serve a purpose!” says Doc brightly.
“Ain’t never said they didn’t—look, do we gotta talk about this over lunch?”
“No, we don’t,” I say with a pointed glance at Doc. She looks up and away like the picture of innocence. “Charlie, have you had a chance to figure anything out about how that collar worked?”
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