Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  “Lives were at stake, kiddo. We don’t frown on saving people, no matter what rules get bent.”

  “It was well done,” says Valkyrja. “Perhaps your next rescue need not be under a temporary flag.”

  Doc Impossible sets down her mug. “She is fifteen, Val.”

  “As was I, when first I picked up a sword.”

  “This is the twenty-first century,” snaps Doc. “We don’t do that to children anymore.”

  “Um, do I get a vote?” I ask.

  “It’s not a vote, it’s your choice. You get to make it unilaterally,” says Doc Impossible. Then she looks at Valkyrja and says, “But I still think you’re a little young to be getting pressured into it.”

  “There is no pressure. If the call comes to her, she will answer when she is ready.” Valkyrja looks at me. “But you may be ready before your eighteenth name day.”

  A giddy, almost dizzy feeling floats through me. Do I want my own colors? Am I ready to be a real cape? I open my mouth, and what comes out is, “Um. I guess.” Oh, so articulate! A little icy spike of embarrassment cuts through my good mood. Dad likes to say that unless I can speak well, I should shut up.

  Valkyrja seems to sense how awkward I feel trying to answer that question. “Tell us of the rescue,” she says. There’s no hiding the grin now, so I take them through it, from floating in the air—although I say I was out practicing flying—to when I saw the engine explode. I tell them about how I pushed the nose up, and helped the plane start climbing again, and then how the wing broke, and I had to carry the entire airliner. I tell them about getting the nose back up a second time, and then how I wasn’t strong enough to lift the plane so I—and here I get a little confused about how to explain it.

  “Uh, I guess, it’s like I could see the momentum and I sorta…tugged it in another direction?” I say. “Does that make sense?”

  Doc Impossible and Valkyrja trade a look of confusion. “I confess it does not,” says Valkyrja.

  “Okay, uh, how to put this. I guess I can sorta see what’s…well, not ‘see’ exactly, but I have this sense of a lattice that seems behind and under reality. Did Dreadnought ever talk about his powers or say anything like this?”

  “Not that I recall,” says Doc Impossible. “He kept his powers pretty close to the vest to prevent his enemies from learning his limits.”

  “I believe he mentioned a mesh once.” Valkyrja sets her mug down and looks at me with enough interest that I’m a little uncomfortable. Not like she’s being rude or anything. In fact, it’s still a little amazing to be talking to her, and more amazing that she cares what I have to say. It’s just that I still have that poster of her up in my room, and suddenly that feels strange. “Is that what you refer to?”

  “Um. Maybe? It’s like, if you can imagine the world as a big net of light and heat, and everything in it a tangle, I can sort of sense that out, and I guess I can tug on the strings, too. It’s painful, though. I hurt myself a little doing it, to be honest.”

  Doc Impossible sits up straighter. “Does it still hurt?”

  “A bit, yeah.”

  She looks down at her mug for a moment and then says, “Would you mind if I examined you? Dreadnought never showed an ability to redirect momentum, and now you say you’ve done that, but you also injured yourself doing it. A big danger in metahuman medicine is we don’t always understand our own bodies, and sometimes by the time we’ve figured them out it’s too late to fix a serious problem. I would feel a lot better if I had a look inside of you to make sure nothing was wrong.”

  “Oh gee, I dunno. Does Graywytch really need to know about this?” The dripping sarcasm is out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about it, and when Doc Impossible tenses and her cheeks go a little pink, I almost regret it. Almost.

  “I suppose I deserved that. Still, I’m concerned something we don’t understand might be happening to you. You really need to get looked at, if not by me then by your own doctor.”

  Which, obviously, isn’t going to be an option. Hey doc, I’ve got this big, horrible bruise I can’t tell you much about, please don’t tell my parents I was here and no I won’t tell you how I got it. Yeah, that’ll fly.

  “Look, it’s already a little better,” I say. “It’ll be fine in a week or so.”

  Valkyrja sets her hand on mine. “Go with her, Danny.”

  Awkwardly, because of course I’m awkward all of a sudden, I scoot my stool back. Doc Impossible follows, and oh God, I actually turn around and wave at Valkyrja like I’m leaving the building and please somebody kill me now.

  • • •

  The elevator ride is long, and starting to get a little strained.

  Doc Impossible takes a drag on her cigarette. “She likes men.”

  Can one of my superpowers please be melting through the floor, disappearing forever, and having everyone who ever met me forget that I exist? Please? But I’m supposed to be an invincible badass now, so all I say is, “That’s disappointing.”

  Doc Impossible blows a line of smoke over her shoulder. “Tell me about it.”

  The laughs take me by surprise. I don’t want to be laughing with her, don’t want to be warming up to her again. But it happens, and it feels good to laugh, and it feels good to know I’m not the only girl who feels her chest get tight when Valkyrja walks in the room.

  “I’m happy for you,” Doc says. “The first rescue is always the sweetest. I’m glad yours got to be a good one.”

  “A good one?”

  “No fatalities. Sometimes rescue work is mostly about sifting through the corpses.”

  “Oh.”

  We get to her lab, and I wait for her to swap cigarettes for nicotine gum before we go through the airlock again. Into the tube I go.

  The sensor ring drops and does a quick pass across my body. The bruise is still there, and the center has turned a little black, but the outer edges are starting to fade to green and disappear. From outside the tube I hear a sharp bark of surprise, and then a stream of what might be (okay, what certainly is) profanity of notable creativity and enthusiasm.

  “What? What is it?”

  The intercom clicks on. “Danny, you broke three of your ribs.”

  “Oh.” Somehow, I would have expected that to be a lot more painful.

  “They’ve set themselves—which is amazing, by the way; most people’s bodies don’t do that—and on anyone else I’d say they’d be about one week into healing, but even that is a little slower than how Dreadnought normally healed.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s not the fu—freaky part,” says Doc Impossible. “Your ribs were broken from the inside. I mean inside the bones themselves. They exploded. You’ve got scars consistent with bone shard perforations in your liver, stomach, spleen, and kidney.”

  Oh. That’s new. “How did it happen?” Doc Impossible is quiet for a moment, and the sensor ring goes crazy, jumping up and down, twirling, spraying me with ten different colors of light before it settles again. “I don’t know. Maybe this has something to do with how long your transformation took. What I can say is that if you were anybody else you’d be dead. Whatever you did, don’t do it again until we understand it.”

  “How am I going to understand it if I don’t try it again?”

  Doc Impossible is quiet for a long moment and then says, “Fine. But no more airliners. Start with something small, like marbles small. Do it when nobody’s life is on the line, and you stop the moment you feel discomfort. Deal?”

  “Okay.”

  “Cool beans. Now, about your boots: they can actually heal themselves just like your suit can, but I can fab you up a new pair if you don’t want to wait. Given what you put them through, it looks like they’d take a few days to get fixed up. Your suit has a few rips in it too. You want me to recycle them both?”

  I hadn’t even known my suit could do that. “Uh, yeah, cool. That’d be great.”

  “Okay.” The tube starts to open, and Doc Impossible once
again is hidden behind a screen that’s dropped between us. “Look behind you.”

  Behind me is the wall I broke. The cracks are mostly gone, and the remainder are slowly disappearing one by one in little flashes of light. In front of that, there’s a table that wasn’t here last time. On the table are a neatly folded pair of jeans, a shirt, socks, panties, and a bra. They are still slightly warm to the touch, and have a faint odor of chemicals and plastic, but other than that they’re normal clothes.

  “I made you some civvies to wear in the meantime,” she says.

  The bra fits, which I now understand to be a minor miracle. I slip the panties on, and then the jeans. When I pick up the black shirt, it seems a little weird until I put it on and realize it’s cut for a girl. I don’t have any tops like that, and in fact have never worn one. My cracked reflection looks back at me from the window. It’s the first time I’ve seen myself entirely in girls’ clothes.

  “They should fit, unless the printer’s on the fritz again,” says Doc Impossible from behind the screen.

  “They fit,” I say so quiet I barely hear myself. Then, louder: “Yeah, they’re perfect.”

  “Cool.” The screen between us rises up into the ceiling. “Anything else you want me to make you?”

  For a moment, I don’t realize what she’s offering. She’s got an encouraging, almost embarrassed smile, and I realize she’s apologizing. Like it’s just that easy. Like it could ever be simple. There’s a brief, fiery moment where I want to throw it back in her face and spit on her, but the look on her face punctures my spite. Maybe it can be easy, just this once.

  “Um. Maybe a skirt? I’ve got these cute flats at home but they look sort of weird with jeans.”

  “Sure thing!” says Doc Impossible, and she spins her chair back to the interface on the wall behind her. The wall to my right becomes white and opaque a moment before an entire menu of skirts fills it, like the world’s biggest online shopping page. The main difference here is that every single one of those skirts is being worn by a model who looks exactly like me. Me in a dark pencil skirt with a white blouse. Me in a floor-length patterned skirt with a maroon sweater. Me in a blue dress with a purse dangling off my shoulder. A hundred versions of me, all happy and smiling and wearing clothes I’ve only daydreamed about. My throat clenches up, and that’s the warning signal to tilt my head slightly back, disguise it by pretending to be really interested in the top row, and breathe shallowly until I’m sure the threat of tears has passed. Making sure you don’t cry is a just skill like anything else, and I’ve had a lot of practice.

  Thanks, Dad, you psychotic jackass.

  After a long moment, I think I’m ready to speak again. “Can I have number 21?” I say, and I manage to keep my voice mostly steady.

  Doc Impossible taps some commands into the wall. She’s quiet, but smiling, and I wonder if she knows how much this means to me. “You can have more than one, you know. I’ve got enough stock for the matter fabber that I could part with a few outfits’ worth.”

  That almost cracks the dam, but I’m able to hold back. Now I’m sure she knows, but she’s polite enough to pretend she doesn’t. When I can talk again, I say “14, 22, and 37.”

  “Cool,” she says, and taps on her holographic keyboard some more. “Head on over to Bravo Lab—that’s the green one. The matter fabber should be done printing in a few minutes, and I’ll respec the walls to be a changing room.”

  Bravo Lab is about the same size as the medical exam room, and like she said, there’s a slot in the wall where several pieces of clothing have been dropped. They have a kind of waxy residue on them, but that’s evaporating even as I hold the first piece up to get a look at it. It’s the blue dress, and my fingers are suddenly clumsy as I turn it over and look at it from all angles. The walls are opaque now, and a few moments later they flicker and become mirrors. I strip again and get into the dress, and it feels right. It feels necessary.

  A few minutes later, I’m sitting curled in the corner with my new clothes bunched in my lap. Those old instincts to hide and clutch things furtively are still with me, it seems. That’s what safety feels like. I rest my head against the wall and enjoy the feel of my new stockings against the skin of my legs. I feel relaxed and happy and free. So wonderfully, gloriously free.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The new supersuit is exactly the same as the old one in all respects, but I still can’t help but think it feels a little snug. Maybe it stretches out once I’ve worn it a little. The emulsion smell from Doc Impossible’s matter fabricator is almost gone, at least. She gave me a small satchel to strap tight to myself that can carry all the clothes she gave me, so long as I pack them right. Valkyrja finds me on the western landing balcony, rechecking the packing for a third time because I’m so scared of something falling out. These are probably the only clothes that fit my gender that I’ll be able to get my hands on until I turn eighteen and move out on my own. The thought of losing even one of them before I get a chance to wear it scares the heck out of me.

  The glass doors slide open, and Valkyrja steps out. Her wings open, stretch once, and then come back to her sides, looser than before.

  “Hi Valkyrja.” I finish packing the blue canvas bag, strap it shut, and rise to meet her.

  “Hello, Danielle. Before you depart, I would ask you a question.”

  I slip the bag’s strap over my head, and fiddle with my cape so it won’t be tangled up in the strap. “Go ahead.”

  “Do you know how to claim your colors?” she asks.

  “Uh, I thought I would just ask for a different suit.”

  Valkyrja shakes her head. “The one you wear is the one you will fight in. Examine the inside of your left wrist. There you will find the toggle to change your colors.”

  Now that I know to look for it I notice there is a small blister there, a circle slightly raised from the material around it. I push on it, and it snaps down while another blister pops up next to it. The suit’s gray camouflage begins to run and fade, and brighter colors push themselves up through the material until my suit is navy blue with a white cape, mantle, and cowl. The first Dreadnought was an officer in the US Army Air Force, and wearing naval-themed colors really pissed his superior officers off. One wonders if he enjoyed tweaking their noses. I pop the second blister down, and the first reappears as the colors swim back to the mottled gray camouflage of my throwaway colors.

  “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” A little prick of disappointment pokes me. Doc Impossible likes to talk about how she wants me to have all the information, but then she conveniently forgets to mention I could take Dreadnought’s colors any time I want.

  “It is in the handbooks we gave you, is it not?”

  “Oh, uh.” And now I feel like a jerk. Good job, dumbass. “I’ve had a lot of homework to catch up on.”

  “Indeed,” says Valkyrja, and she either doesn’t notice my embarrassment or pretends not to. “If you choose not to carry Dreadnought’s banner, you can command your suit to display heraldry of your own design. There is a small lead on your suit, near the belt line.” I look down and, after a few moments’ searching, find it. The cord is kind of springy, and retracts back into the suit automatically when I let it go. “To access your suit’s advanced functions, insert it into the port of USB on your telephone cellular.”

  I look up at her, suspicious. My telephone cellular, she says. “You’re just screwing with me now, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you refer to.” Valkyrja’s smile is too wide not to be in on the joke. “Would you like my address for mail electronic?”

  I trade email addresses with an honest-to-Odin valkyrie, and try not to giggle too loudly. But as she slides her own phone back into the small purse hanging from her belt there’s a look on her face that makes me nervous. Compassionate, caring, but firm. Resolute, I’d call it.

  “Danny, why did you lie to us?” she asks. She doesn’t sound mad, and she doesn’t sound curious. She soun
ds like she already knows the answer and wants me to confirm it.

  My whole body tightens. “What? I didn’t lie—”

  “This body was born in 1979, but I am the sum of my mother and all my mother’s mothers; my years number nine and twelve hundred. I have heard every lie tongues can speak. Scant few can deceive me, and you are not among them. You were not practicing flying. Yet you were there. Why were you there, and why did you not tell us of it?”

  “I was just, you know, going for a fly,” I hear myself say. The city spreads out beneath us, and I stare out at it rather than look at her. Even as I say it, I know she spots the lie.

  Her voice is soft and kind. “Danny, do you feel safe at home?”

  No.

  There it is. I don’t feel safe at home. I open my mouth to say something, and as I do I realize that like my mother, I can’t give it its name. Not out loud. Not even to Valkyrja. Because if I admit it, if I call it what it is, then I can’t hide from it anymore either. It becomes real in a way I am not ready for. Might never be ready for. There will be no illusions of safety, no peaceful times alone in my room.

  There will only be times when he’s not hurting me.

  She puts her hand on my shoulder. “I can arrange for you to have quarters here. You need not return there.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I’m fine.” I’m struggling not to hyperventilate.

  “Sometimes it requires great strength and courage to ask for help.”

  My throat is tight, and I can’t look at her. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Danielle—”

  But before she can do anything I’m stepping away, pulling the cowl over my head, and blasting up into the clouds. She could follow me, but she doesn’t, and for that I am grateful. The clouds fall behind me a few moments before the sonic booms start rippling out behind me. I slow down and do a few orbits of the city. According to my phone, I still have twenty minutes before I’m expected home from school.