Sovereign

by April Daniels

  So now I’m in one of the medical beds in the safehouse. Again. I’m really starting to hate the feel of these kinds of pads—they’re not even really mattresses.

  The world continues to spin, though it’s bearable as long as I don’t provoke it. Doc can’t figure out what’s wrong with me. She wants Charlie to take a crack at it, but Calamity and I agree that he needs to get to work on hacking Graywytch’s magic. That’s all we seem to agree on right now.

  After—I can’t speak to Sarah. Not right now. And she seems to feel the same way. Why is this so difficult? Why can’t she understand?

  Doc finishes her last scan and sets the devices aside on a crash cart before pulling up a chair. Curled up on my side, I watch her, trying to make my face convey just how skeptical I am about the idea of hashing this out right now.

  “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?” she says.

  “No.”

  “Is there anyone you do want to talk to?”

  “No,” I say, with a slight edge to my voice.

  “Calamity says you went a little apeshit back there.”

  “Graywytch was trying to murder my friends.”

  “So you took her through a bookcase.” Doc frowns thoughtfully and nods. “Fair enough. What about the part that came after that?”

  “What part?”

  Doc doesn’t roll her eyes. That, more than anything, is what finally gets through to me that she’s really not kidding about this.

  “You know the part I mean, Danielle,” she says. I’ve got nothing to say to that. “It’s okay to be angry,” she says. “You’ve got more right than most people to be mad at the world. Especially this week. But you can’t let it change you.”

  It hurts to hear her say this. It hurts in ways I can’t feel properly because I don’t really understand them. A sort of twisting, inward feeling, deep in my chest, and a clench high in my gut. So I do what I’m always doing these days: I try to hit back.

  “What if it’s not changing me, Doctor? What if this is who I really am and you all need to get over it? She deserves to die.”

  Doc looks down at her folded hands for a moment. “Look, kiddo—we’re superheroes. Violence is part of the job. But that doesn’t mean we execute people without a trial. We take them alive, every time. And if we can’t, we’d better have a damn good reason for why not. Better than anything you’ve had today.”

  “The other Dreadnoughts killed people.”

  “That’s true.” She nods. “But I guarantee you they never did it because they thought it’d make them feel better.”

  “That’s not—!” I sit up to spit indignant denials at her and regret my decision immediately.

  “It is, Danny. And I think we both know it. There might come a day when you need to kill someone; I think we can both admit that. But when that happens, it’s forever. The other guy is dead, so he doesn’t care anymore—but you’ll have to carry that for the rest of your life. When you kill, it had better be in battle. It had better be someone who is still a threat. It had better be when you don’t have a choice, when seconds count and lives are on the line. Because I know you, Danielle, and you’re too good a person to be happy with a murder on your conscience.”

  There’s that word I’ve been avoiding. My voice comes out quieter than I’d like when I reply. “You said I had to take them down. That we couldn’t tolerate what they did.”

  “That’s right, I did. But I was thinking more along the lines of putting her in prison and then making funny faces at her from across the glass. You’ve been through hell; I get it, and if I had anyone else who could do your job, I’d use them instead and get you into therapy pronto. Not because I think you can’t hack it, by the way, but because even you have limits, and I don’t like seeing you get hurt. It’s clear to me now that you’re in way more trouble than I thought you were. If I had known you were in this kind of pain, I would have never sent you on that mission. But we don’t have a deep bench here, so I need you to be strong enough to keep a grip on yourself, at least until we’re out of this fight. Can you do that for me?”

  With great effort, I roll over to put my back to her. “Just leave me alone.”

  Her answer is immediate: “I kind of can’t. Not about this.”

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like being Dreadnought?” I snap at her. “You don’t even want to be a cape—but this is the only thing I’ve ever been any good at, and she tried to take it away from me!”

  “So be good at it. Take some time to think about this. We’ll talk before you go out again.” Doc gets up, leaving the sound of her stool gently spinning as she walks away across the hangar.

  Before I go out again. What is that, a sick joke? I can’t go out, not like this. Not until the spell wears off. Or until Charlie finishes his research and has time to fix me. God, I spend so much time waiting for other people to come along and save me. I hate this. I hate myself.

  And there I sulk for an embarrassingly long period of time before it occurs to me that I can try to fix this on my own. Looking into the lattice is hard right now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it. And I was able to undo a little bit of what was going wrong in Karen’s head. Maybe the magic screwing me up is weaker than that, and I can actually fix this.

  Carefully, very carefully, I slide my mind back into the lattice. The world shivers under me, and a new wave of nausea sweeps through me. But I’m in. It doesn’t take long to find the magic. There, in my inner ears, in the fluid chambers that tell me which way is down, there are flitting little yarn tangles of nothingness. Every shift of the fluid is magically enhanced to a great big sloshing, and even when I’m still, the fluids tremble and bounce randomly, teased into motion by the nonsense inputs of the spell.

  Very, very slowly, I reach out to the lattice and gently pick at the strands of the charm.

  There’s a lot of things I can do with the lattice besides fly and punch things. (Though those are two of my favorite things.) But magic is still more or less an unknown frontier for me. Tweaking the lattice beyond my basic powerset is a dangerous hobby in the best of times, with sprains and broken bones as a constant risk for failure, but this will be worse because I don’t even know how magic actually works. Working on Karen was the first time I tried to counteract magic with my powers, and it nearly gave her an aneurysm. Doing this inside my own head has the feel of digging up an armed landmine with only a bayonet. While drunk. I don’t see that I have much choice, though. I need to be able to fight. Hell, I need to be able to walk.

  Someone pushes aside the privacy screen and sits down on the stool. I crack an eye open. It’s Calamity—no, she’s not wearing her hat and her bandanna is down, so this is Sarah.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi.”

  Sarah shifts nervously. “Um, I think we might consider keeping Dreadnought and Calamity separate from Danielle and Sarah. At least when I have to be a hardass. Deal?”

  I reach out a hand, and when she takes it I give her a gentle squeeze. “Deal.”

  Her whole posture relaxes, and a woozy smile of relief blooms on her face. I think she thought I would honestly dump her for telling Doc what happened back there. Not even I’m that stupid. But then again, maybe she doesn’t understand how amazing she is. Maybe being a chokingly beautiful, untouchable badass is normal to her.

  “I’m trying to fix my head,” I tell her. “I’ll need to concentrate for a while. Can you stay with me?”

  Sarah scoots the chair closer, takes my hand, clasped between her own, into her lap. “What are you doing?”

  “I can see the magic from Graywytch’s trap. I’m going to see if I can pick it apart in the lattice.”

  Sarah’s forehead crinkles. “Oh. Um, what?”

  She doesn’t really like it when I giggle at that, but I smooth it over quickly. “I’m sorry, I forgot I’ve been vague about my powers. You remember how I can see the backside of reality? I can sort of see magic too.”

  “If you say so.�
��

  “There are these strings that make up everything. Like,” and here I go quiet for a moment while I shove down the nausea long enough to look at her arm, I mean really look at it. “Oh. Uh, damn. I didn’t know your prosthetic goes all the way into the spine.”

  “You can see inside me?” she asks quietly.

  “Yeah. You’re beautiful.”

  Sarah blushes and smiles. I like making her blush like that. I need to think of more ways to do it.

  With that pleasant image in my head, I close my eyes and focus on dissolving this magic, one hesitant pull at a time. A little bit, a little bit more. It’s slow going, and I need to stop to take plenty of breaks. A grinding ice-pick feeling has started in one of my sinuses, but the pressure abruptly disappears.

  “Danny, your nose is bleeding,” says Sarah. Still in the lattice, I switch my gaze “down” and check it out. Just a burst vessel in my nose, nothing to worry about.

  “It’s fine,” I say, keeping my eyes closed. Just a few more, I’m almost there. And then, all at once, I pull on one last strand, and the whole thing springs in on itself and evaporates.

  The fluid in my ears begins to settle and the world finally wobbles to a stop. With a sigh of relief I sit up. “Good as new, I think.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “One way to find out,” I say, swinging my legs off the exam bed. I hop off—and stay hanging in the air. “Yeah, I think I’m good.”

  Sarah takes my hand again and pulls me through the air to her. Our lips meet, and then she rests her forehead against mine. “When this is over, do you want to go see a movie with me?” she asks quietly.

  “Uh, sure. You don’t want to go caping instead? You know, just hang out on the roofs like we used to?”

  Sarah considers for a moment. “I like caping. But I’ve never been on a real date.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Her smile makes my heart flip over, and it would be so easy to stay here, floating, forehead to forehead. But there’s work to do, so far too soon, Sarah pulls her bandanna up, drops my hand, and becomes Calamity again.

  Time to get back to work.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  While I’ve been fiddling around inside my head and making out with Sarah, Charlie has been hard at work. Graywytch’s grimoire is splayed out across the workbench, and he’s cross-referencing with two of his own books.

  “What’s the word, Codex?” asks Calamity as we walk up. Well, I’m walking. She moseys.

  Charlie puts his finger on one passage and flips through a few more pages in another book. “Aaaahhh…hold on…yeah, yeah, it’s safe to start knocking his satellites out of the sky.”

  “Are you sure?” asks Doc.

  He taps one of the books he’s been flipping through, a leather-bound volume with handwritten pages. “Yes. We snagged her current project book—that’s the notebook she uses to keep her project’s details straight—and none of these incantations leave room for booby traps, which would have to be baked into the main spell to avoid having them interfere with each other. If the satellites do have defenses, they won’t be magical, I can say that much.”

  “Cool!” I say. “Let’s do it!”

  Doc and I put our heads together and calculate a flight plan. By the time everything’s settled, it’s on toward dusk. Like I mentioned earlier, orbital flight is really complicated, so I need to wait for a launch window before I take off. Stars start to prick out of the gauzy purple sky, and the countdown timer displaying on my wrist just passed two minutes and dropping.

  The door opens and out comes Doc Impossible. With effort, I keep my face neutral. I don’t need another lecture about how terrible I am right before I risk my life to save the world.

  Doc holds out a pair of goggles. They’re low-profile, like swimmer’s goggles, rounded at the edges with a hefty strap that looks like it would hug a skull quite nicely. “I just finished these up. They’re a telemetry HUD so you can spot your flight track without your glove holograms. It should let you push a satellite and watch where you’re going at the same time. Keep the holograms ready for backups, though.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and a tension in my chest releases. I’m even smiling. When I slip the goggles on, they blink to life and hook up with my suit’s computer. Above me, a line of golden nav-gates float in the air, tracing a line up, up into space and towards my first rendezvous.

  “This is a solo mission,” says Doc. “Defend yourself if you have to, but remember—”

  “I got it, Doc.” Shit, she’s really stuck on this, isn’t she? I search for something to say to reassure her. “It’s going to be fine. There’s lots of room to run in space.”

  Doc smiles, relieved. “Good. Good.”

  Not that I intend to run from a fight, of course. Dreadnought doesn’t run. She wins. And I need to get back to winning.

  The launch window timer hits zero, and with a last wave goodbye, I push off from the ground. The industrial lot falls away, the city falls away, the state falls away. When I’m high enough, my suit vibrates in my ankles to tell me I’m above the noise ordinance ceiling, and I really kick into it hard. Sonic booms string out behind me, wisps of condensation slithering across my shoulders, down my back, until I’m dragging long, white contrails in the sky with my boots. Time to take a deep breath. I won’t get another for the next five hours if this mission goes right.

  The wind’s roar dwindles and dies with the atmosphere. The horizon is a fuzzy blue curve that gradually falls away until entire continents and oceans spread out beneath me.

  Doc is feeding me real-time navigational data to steer me to the closest of Garrison’s satellites. I follow the holographic nav-gates projected against the lenses of my goggles into a twisting climb that brings me onto a new orbit. The nearest satellite is only nine hundred miles away—I’m practically scraping paint off of it already in astronautical terms.

  I’m coming up on it from the retrograde position—essentially, I’m chasing it down from behind—which is the safe way to approach something else in orbit. Otherwise you get closing speeds in the dozens of thousands of miles per hour, and my reaction times are only barely superhuman, certainly not enough to avoid disaster at those kinds of speeds. It’s not just satellites, either, but bits of space debris that travel along with them, old bolts and splinters of metal and even things like cans of paint and lost blankets. They all hit like cannon shells and the last time I ran into one of those on an orbital jump it snapped my arm like a dry branch.

  There’s the satellite, up ahead of me now. Only fifty miles out, a pale gray dot slightly more defined than the other pale dots up here. My goggles automatically wrap it in glowing brackets and zoom in a picture-in-picture window to verify that it’s the one I’m going after.

  It’s pretty big—think slightly smaller than a city bus, with the usual solar arrays unfolded and pointed at the sun, a cylinder for the main body, some antennas hanging off it, all very normal.

  Well, except that at one end is a huge crystal dome, sort of like the giant golf ball building at Disney World, and inside sits what appears to be a miniature Stonehenge. There’s even what looks like real grass turf along the bottom of the dome. The stones are all deeply carved with geometric patterns and they seem to catch the light reflecting off Earth, channeling it into gleaming lines of blue power swirling from pattern to pattern, stone to stone.

  Right, that’s the one. With a last burst of acceleration I bring myself up close and set up to push this thing out of orbit. The eastern US is passing below me now, a yellow field of stars blanketing the ground, right up to where it stops in a hard line at the Atlantic Ocean. The plan is to push the satellite down with a short, sharp deceleration that will burn most of it up in the atmosphere and drop the rest in the ocean. Then I’ll hopscotch all over low orbit doing the same thing again and again until Garrison’s entire fleet is knocked out.

  The skin of the satellite is cold, so cold I can feel it through my gloves, so cold it�
��s uncomfortable even for me to touch it. The way orbital mechanics work means that best place to do this from is the “front” of the satellite, where I can kill its speed while pushing it down at the same time. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest place to push it from. This thing is so heavy and it’s moving so fast that it’s going to take every pound of thrust I’ve got to drop its speed fast enough to hit the mark I need to hit to get it on a steep enough path to burn up properly. That’s without directly channeling its momentum through my own pattern in the lattice, of course. I’ve gotten a lot better at that sort of thing since I shattered my ribs trying to catch an airliner, but the amount of momentum that satellite carries is a step or five above something as minor as a falling jet. I think I’ll skip the broken ribs today and stick to shoving for now.

  For the first few moments, it’s like pressing up against a granite cliff. This thing is moving and I can’t feel any change in velocity whatsoever. Crap, this plan might need to go in stages if they’re all going to be this hard.

  As if sensing my thoughts, my HUD turns green and a chibi illustration of Doc pops up in my field of view; she’s got a huge anime smile and a word bubble floating above her head that says, “Atta girl! You can do it! Fuck that shit up!”

  Okay, maybe I need to cut Doc some slack.

  Now the momentum is dropping enough that I can sense the difference in the lattice and then a few moments later, with my hands. The whole satellite begins to twist under my palms and sink away from me as Earth’s gravity brings it down for a big, burning hug. I stay with it long enough to give it a nice hard boost into the atmosphere, and then squirt back up to a stable orbit of my own.

  Garrison’s satellite is dropping more and more vertically now, twirling away like I dropped it down a well. In a matter of moments I’ve skimmed far past it, my own orbit carrying me thousands of yards further along. I turn away and start the flight to my next waypoint. Multibillion-dollar acts of vandalism are not how I thought I’d save the world this month, but being a superhero is a weird gig sometimes.