Sovereign

by April Daniels

  Codex throws his hand out and catches me by the shoulder before I enter the library.

  “There could be traps.”

  “Claymores don’t really bother me.”

  “Would having all your blood instantly turn to pus bother you? Because it’d really suck for me.”

  With great care, I set my foot back down.

  Codex whips off his backpack and rummages through it. He comes back up with a magnifying glass that he’s gone at with a home engraving set. Spidery runes and looping whorls trace the outer side of the lens. He looks through the lens, and with his free hand he throws a handful of sand through the doorway.

  “The walkway is clear, I think,” he says.

  “You think?”

  “It’s magic, Dreadnought,” Codex says tightly. “There’s no one way to do things, and she’s better at this than me.”

  He nerves up to take a step through the doorway. He doesn’t die, which I take as a good sign. Codex and I cross the bridge to the reading nook set up in the center of the library, a long, low wooden table in front of an old leather couch. There’s also a lectern with quill and ink nearby.

  “How do we know which books are the important ones?” I ask. There’s got to be tens of thousands in her collection. This could take all year.

  Codex shrugs. “Look for the ones that seem like they’ve been referred to recently—but don’t touch them!” He goes over to the shelf nearest the couch. “I think they’ll be in here—these volumes aren’t organized in any order I recognize, and the shelf is only half-full. These are probably what she’s currently reading. If it’s not one of these, we might need to find her laboratory and see if she keeps the notes there.” Codex gets another handful of sand out of his pack and rolls up the bottom of his balaclava. With a hard blow he puffs sand across the books. When he looks at them with his magnifying glass, one volume in particular prompts him to hiss with a sharp intake of breath.

  “Found something?”

  “You ever disarmed a bomb?” he says, just barely turning his head.

  “No.”

  “Neither have I, so shut up.” He rolls the balaclava back down and squats on his haunches for a long moment. After some determined thinking, he reaches into his pack again and comes back up with a glass mason jar and a straw. When he unscrews it, I smell vinegar. With a finger stopping up the top end of the straw, Codex takes a few drops worth of vinegar out of the jar and flicks it at the book. The vinegar hisses and bubbles away into steam. “Shit.”

  “Do we need to back off?”

  “I don’t think so. But I might need your help here in a moment.” He screws the lid back on the jar and makes it disappear. Out comes a bowl and a candle that, even from here, reeks of blood. “Come over here.”

  He lights the candle and sets it in the bowl, and then backs quickly away. The flame turns crimson and begins leaking a thick, white smoke.

  “When I tell you to, I need you to very gently blow that smoke onto the book.”

  He’s still backing up. Still backing up. He’s outside of the room and ducking out of sight.

  “Codex, what’s this going to do?” I ask.

  His voice comes a ways down the hallway. “I’m almost sure it will disarm the trap.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “It will trigger the trap.”

  “And that’s going to turn my blood to pus?”

  “That was more a colorful example than a prediction,” he calls. “It’s fine. I’m sure you’ll be—no, Calamity, don’t come any closer!”

  “Why do I have to do this? It’s your spell!”

  “Suck it up, Dreadnought,” shouts Calamity from far down the hall.

  “Go ahead and blow on it—gently, now!” says Codex.

  I do. There’s a flash, a bang, and I slam twenty feet across the room, go spanging off a metal guardrail and spin hard into a bookcase. As a half-ton of paper and ink rains down on me, I can’t stop giggling. My face is numb yet somehow burning, and even behind closed eyes the explosion was so bright it hurt to see.

  All right, status check:

  Eyes? Check.

  Pat my face for wounds—shit, that stings!

  No blood on my glove though.

  Lattice is good. Body is good. I’m good.

  Try again, Graywytch.

  “Dreadnought, talk to me!” shouts Calamity.

  “I’m up! I’m up,” I say as I climb to my feet. The ground wobbles out from beneath me, and I collapse across the aisle, catching myself on a guardrail. “Uh, gimme a moment.”

  Clutching at the lattice should steady me, but instead gives me the most bizarre frisson of vertigo as the world seems to spin.

  The others are coming into the library now. Calamity jogs around two sides of a square to get to me as I peel myself off the rail.

  “You all right, partner?”

  “Hold on, something’s wrong with my balance.”

  “You need to evac?”

  “I’ll be fine once I find something expensive to vomit on.”

  Walking is an adventure, and flying is out of the question. With an arm under my shoulder, Calamity helps me make my way to the others. I was really hoping I’d stop being the one who needed to be carried through an op, but on the other hand, this does mean I get to lean up against Calamity as much as I want, so really we’re coming out even here.

  Calamity and I manage to three-legged walk ourselves across the bridge to the center reading area where Codex is poring over the books on the reading table. Kinetiq is standing guard, posture loose, eyes everywhere. They glance behind us and suck in a breath.

  Calamity and I turn around, and Graywytch is there, resplendent in robes that seem to bounce and sway like smoke. One moment it was just the four of us, and then the next she’s standing on the bridge we just walked across like she’s been there all along.

  Calamity points a .357 magnum at Graywytch’s forehead and thumbs back the hammer. “Hands. Now.”

  Kinetiq provides all necessary bravado: “You’re out of the Legion, and we’re jacking your shit!”

  Graywytch says something, but I don’t hear it through the discomfort that shoots through my head upon seeing her. Luckily, the uncomfortable feelings are smothered by the low rumbling thunder of rising anger.

  Anger’s good. I can do anger.

  I bite down hard on the lattice, ignore the vertigo, and go at her, full power. Graywytch slides apart like a puff of fog, nothing but vapor left behind as I wobble through her and just barely pull back before crashing face-first into a wall of books.

  Calamity’s guns are barking at a shadow, there and gone. Wide sweeps of blue light erupt from Kinetiq’s hands as they hose the whole place down with refracted light. For an instant, Graywytch is spotlighted, surprised and exposed, but then she shakes her billowing sleeve and wraps it about her face, sinks down, down and out of sight just as Calamity’s bullets start cracking into the furniture beyond her.

  “Rotate your spectrum!” snaps Calamity as she falls back to the center.

  “On it,” says Kinetiq, and the light erupting from their hands starts to pulsate through the entire rainbow.

  Graywytch steps from nowhere and shoves a knife into Calamity’s back. A lifetime of movies has me primed to expect the world to slow down and go quiet, but it doesn’t. Everything is happening so damn fast. Kinetiq whirls to blast Graywytch with a short-range beam even as Calamity twists away from the knife and throws a sharp elbow at her head.

  “No!” I’m still not flying worth a damn, but I manage to put thirty relatively straight feet behind me in a heartbeat, and my outstretched fingers snag on Graywytch’s robes, jerk her away and over the edge of the walkway. She tumbles down into a shadow and disappears.

  I whirl back to my friends, and the world keeps going, and I almost fall to the floor before I catch the guardrail. “Calamity!”

  “I’m still here, keep fighting!”

  “I’ve got the book, we should leave,�
� says Codex as he slings his backpack into position.

  “You ain’t even had time to read it!” says Calamity. “It might be the wrong one.”

  “We’re fighting a world-class practitioner on her home turf,” he says, voice tight, “which is the most colorful suicide I can imagine. We. Need. To. Leave.”

  “He’s right, of course,” says Graywytch, from everywhere and nowhere at once. “You don’t stand a chance.” There’s one exit from this room; a set of steel bars slams down across it. “But you’re not leaving. You’re surrendering.”

  “Get out here, coward!” I shout. “You’re fucking dead!”

  “How typically male,” she says. The air reeks of ozone, and fingers of groaning electricity reach out for us.

  Codex is throwing a rough and dirty circle of salt down on the ground and shouting at us to all turn widdershins, whatever that means. She must have some way of jumping a charge past the insulation of my suit, because a bolt of electricity sparks me good, jolting my chest and making my wrist snap with pain where the charge exits me to pass into the railing. Calamity cries out, and as much as it makes me feel like I’m getting turned inside out, I focus on the lattice and try to spot some fragment of Graywytch behind whatever illusions she uses to hide from us. Kinetiq calls the lightning to their arms and wraps it into a twisting braid of crackling, buzzing electricity that they throw up at the skylight.

  The skylight cracks and goes dark, plain ceiling tiles behind the glass, the illusion shattered. The room is plunged into darkness for a moment, and then emergency lights kick on and throw everything into harsh glare, dark shadows. Smoke wafts heavy in the air from the burnt ceiling.

  I’ve got to keep my hands locked to the rail—and hope there’s no more electricity to come—to make it back across the bridge, but I manage it. Codex has finished throwing a broad circle of salt on the ground and Calamity is reloading her guns and snapping the cylinders shut.

  “How bad am I bleeding?” she asks.

  “Not much,” says Kinetiq after a quick glance.

  “Dreadnought, get in the circle,” says Codex as I cover the last few yards in a stumbling lurch.

  “Oh child, you don’t honestly expect something like that to be of any use, do you?” says Graywytch. There’s a hiss and a pop in the air, and Codex grunts, claps his hands to his mouth. “My patience is not unlimited, children. I have stayed my hand thus far out of concern for my collection; that will not last forever. Surrender now, and some of you may even get to leave.”

  A few books from the upper shelves slide themselves out of their spots in little trails of dust. She must not care about them that much, or maybe they were decoys, but whatever the case, they open up and fall apart. Every sheet of paper neatly pulls away from the binding. A fluttering swarm of loose leafs circle the room above us. The flock stops and hangs in the air for a moment, the papers all go flat and hard.

  “Oh shit,” says Codex, voice thick.

  The sheets dive at us like spinning razors. Calamity tumbles away as they tha-thu-thunk inches deep into the hard floor. Kinetiq’s got a field of superheated air above them that incinerates a few, and Codex, well, Codex’s got me laying across him, shoulders hunched against the razor gale.

  They cut against my back, my legs, my shoulders. They barely break the outer seal on my suit and cape, but Codex gets one in the leg where his calf stuck out between my own. A spurt of crimson, and he hisses in pain. The razor hail stops, and as soon as I’m sure there’s nothing else coming down I let him scoot out from under me to clamp his hands on the wound.

  “Graywytch!” shouts Calamity. “You listen here! That door is coming open and we are walking out with whatever we care to take, and that’s my final offer!”

  Real, genuine laughter is coming from all around us. My eyes are screwed shut as I throw everything I have into scanning for some sign of where she’s hiding. My stomach roils and my head feels like it’s about to slip off my neck. Forget about finding subtle hints; I can barely make sense of the lattice at all in this condition. The rumbling thunder of my rage cracks open, hot and piercing.

  “That’s your offer?” says Graywytch through peals of laughter. “Your offer? I thought you, at least, knew what you were about, Calamity.”

  “Kinetiq?” says Calamity, loud enough for all to hear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Starting from the top shelf, incinerate every bit of paper in this room.”

  “No!” shrieks Graywytch, all humor lost as Kinetiq claps their hands together and makes a thermal cannon. Hungry, rushing currents of heat swirl away from the beam of superheated energy bursting from their palms. They sweep it across the top shelf of one side of the room, books that look decades, maybe centuries old going up in ecstatic bursts of yellow cinders.

  While that’s happening, I’ve gone stumbling over the rail, ass-over-skull, into a heap in the slate floor below. Just for a moment, when the horror of how Calamity’s ruthlessness was sweeping across her, Graywytch’s illusion faltered, fell. I saw her.

  As I pull myself to my feet, hand over hand against a bookcase, Calamity calls down another ultimatum.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done!” shouts Graywytch. “No idea!” A barely audible whine begins to rise, and the air smells of thunder, but I’m going to stop this before she launches another attack.

  I take a moment to exhale, gather my strength, and heave aside the vertigo as I bite down on the lattice as hard as I can. Zero to crash in the blink of an eye.

  There it is. That perfect still moment. Me, bursting through the wall of books, paper falling from me in shredded waves. Graywytch, her eyes locking on me in sudden fear. This is something I’ve dreamed of for months. Maybe not this way, and not this fight, but this moment, this moment when she realizes that there are some people she shouldn’t push, some fights she shouldn’t have picked, has danced in front of me, a golden hypothetical begging to be made real.

  The frozen moment ends, and I crash upon her, bone-to-bone, flesh-to-flesh, and we keep going, through the next bookcase, shattered wood and a blizzard of destroyed manuscripts. There are four distinct snaps, wet and satisfying.

  We tumble apart against the floor. She skids one way, and I end up spilling the other. The world is jumping, spinning away from me. This time, I really do vomit. But I’ve hurt her.

  One hand over the other, I crawl to where Graywytch is still gawping at the sheer amount of pain a human body can experience. My stomach roils, and the world spins about me; I don’t think I could call on the lattice right now even if I wanted to.

  But I don’t have to, not for this. She makes a puppy-like effort to shove me off her and away, but I bat her arms aside and fasten my hands around her neck.

  And squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

  We make eye contact, and right at that moment there’s an instant of quailing, a mote of hesitation in my fingers. Is this right—yes! Yes goddamnit! She deserves this! I deserve this!

  So I squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

  No. I deserved so much more than this. I deserved so much more from you. But you treat me like shit, you tell me I’m worthless. Make me hate myself, make me a coward. Make me weak.

  Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

  You hold me down and torture me. For years! And nobody stops you. Nobody cares. And all I can do is run, run, run, until I’m small in everyone’s eyes. In my eyes.

  (Someone’s calling my other name; I don’t pay attention.)

  Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

  Well, not anymore! Not today! Today you get what you deserve. I’m not running anymore. Never again. You made me weak! YOU MADE ME WEAK—

  Something tugging at my cape, hauling me back. “Dreadnought, that’s enough!” Calamity is shouting.

  “No!” The lattice squishes away from me when I try to grab it, a new cloud of nausea slipping in from the edges. Graywytch’s face is crimson shading to purple, and with a shaking hand, she twists a ring and disappears—air rushing in with a
thump to fill the vacated space.

  “I had him!” I shout twisting away from Calamity. “I fucking had him!”

  She looks confused. “Who?”

  “Graywytch! I almost—Goddamnit, Calamity! I was this close to ending it!”

  “I’ll run ’er down for you,” she says in an even voice. “Get on upstairs and start working on those bars across the door. We need an exit in case she gets a second wind.”

  “I can do this,” I say, shaking with frustrated rage.

  “Dreadnought!” Calamity snaps the moderation out of her tone. “Upstairs. Now.”

  Calamity isn’t my commanding officer or anything so grandiose. But she does call the shots; we all agreed on that. Capes listen to their shot-caller. It’s how things work, no matter how much I wish I could ignore her right now.

  Goddamnit, Sarah.

  I thought you understood.

  One hand over the other, I start climbing the bookcase. It’s hard, with the world swaying and dipping at every random moment, and my fingers get tight and trembly before I’m able to slip one arm over the edge of the walkway and start levering myself up. The floor twists and bobs below me, and when I tip over the guardrail to collapse on top of the bridge, I have to take a moment to let the world stop spinning before I can even think about making it to my feet again.

  Below me, gunfire. Two shots. Some scuffling. Kinetiq dives into the maze in a burning corona of power, flashes of their power lighting up a thick fog that appeared sometime during my (very slow) climb.

  Lying there, panting, I listen to the rest of my team harry Graywytch, press her, push in for the capture. I clench a fist and slam it into the floor in frustration—the tile shatters magnificently, but the wobbly spins aren’t worth it.

  What I miss while I’m lying on the ground: Codex finds the book he needs. The bars come down. Graywytch gets away. We don’t talk much on the flight home.

  Chapter Twenty-Two