Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  Flying feels good. The wind pulling at my hair and snapping my cape is soothing, in a way. Up here, the world is a wet, gray carpet broken through with patches of trees and water. There are no problems in the air, nothing I need to hide from or watch carefully. My heartbeat slows, and on my eighth trip around the New Port City metro area, I finally start feeling better.

  It’ll be fine. Dad had his blowup, and now he’ll start to get over it. The more time he has to think about it and grow used to the idea, the better it will get. He’ll start to understand this is permanent, and though he may not ever like it, and I probably still will need to leave the house on my eighteenth birthday, I don’t think there is going to be another night like last night again any time soon. As long as I stay out of his way, and don’t do anything really femme around him, things will be okay.

  The justifications, the optimistic scenarios, come naturally to me.

  Because it’s a skill set.

  And I’ve had practice.

  • • •

  Dinner is quiet and strained, the way it normally is for a day or so after a big blowup, but aside from some grumbling and some snide remarks, we get through it fine. All the homework I didn’t get to yesterday is still waiting for me, and TV is one of the things I’m not allowed to do anymore (I haven’t been foolish enough to ask how long I am grounded for) so I hit the books straight away and stay with them until the sun goes down.

  Conjugation in French is a special kind of horror, on par with the sort of things you’d need to do to call up the Old Ones when the stars are right. Reading comic books is a way more fun way to learn the language, but it’s not really going to help me on tomorrow’s test, so I’m doing my best to get through this exercise on gerunds when I hear a tap on my window. There’s nobody there when I look, and I almost start to believe I didn’t hear anything after all. The Legion has my phone number, so they’re not going to do the knocking-on-windows thing again, right? Just to be sure, I get up and open the window. The moment it’s open enough to clear a body, Calamity swings down from the roof and into my room in a single liquid motion. She looks around curiously, and then turns back to me. She tips her hat.

  “Howdy, Dreadnought.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  For a moment, I’m frozen. How did—wait. I recognize her eyes now, and the way she holds her shoulders.

  “Sarah?”

  “No,” blurts Calamity. “Don’t rightly know who that is.”

  “No, you’re totally Sarah. You just have a bandanna over your face and you’re talking funny.”

  “All right, fine, shut up about it!” she whispers sharply. “You want the whole world to know?”

  “You’re the one calling me—” Her finger is on my lips.

  Calamity looks over my shoulder at my bedroom door. “Best be having this conversation outside,” she mutters. I gesture to the window like after you. She does a diving roll out the window. Her jacket flutters as she drops to the ground and lands like a cat. That kind of grace is far outside my reach for getting through the window itself, but I like to think being able to float down at whatever leisurely pace I want evens things out a bit. Her expression is hard to read behind the red bandanna, but I think she’s impressed. She frickin’ better be, anyway.

  “I’m not Dreadnought,” I say quietly.

  “I beg to differ,” she says, pointing up at the window and tracing my path of descent.

  “Dreadnought was more than his mantle. Yeah, I got his powers when he died, but that doesn’t automatically make me Dreadnought too.”

  Sarah, or Calamity, I guess, hooks her thumbs through her gun belt. “Don’t see why not. Seems that’s how it’s been working since Eden.”

  “Do you really have to talk like that?”

  “Sure do; gotta sell the persona. Elsewise, I’m just a freak with a gun, and then where would I be?”

  “New Port?” One thing our fair city does not lack for is freaks or guns.

  “That mouth on you is gonna hold you back in life, hun,” says Calamity, but I can hear the smile in her voice.

  “So what did you want to talk about?” I ask as I peek around the side of the house to make sure nobody is in the yard.

  “Well, as to the first reason, I needed to confirm I had the right girl. Seems I made the correct call there, so we can proceed directly to the second.” She leans forward a little bit. “Wanna go caping?”

  There’s a little fluttery sensation in my chest. I’ve been thinking about it, obviously. That rescue, man, that was amazing. Even after everything that happened today with David and Valkyrja, the high from saving those people is still with me as this quiet little trickle of joy in the background. So hells yeah, I want to go caping! But am I ready? Is it right? Is it a good idea? Maybe I got lucky. Maybe I’ll screw things up. Maybe I’ll find out I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I’ll get someone hurt. Or killed.

  “I’m not sure I’m supposed to,” I say at last. “I’m still using throwaway colors.”

  Calamity’s eyes narrow over her bandanna. “Throwaway colors.”

  “Yeah, like just a neutral outfit to say I’m not—”

  “I know what they are. I am less certain as to why you’d fall for all that prissy whitecape crap.”

  “Oh. You’re a…”

  “You can say it,” she says encouragingly. “Ain’t a dirty word: graycape.”

  “So, does that mean you, like—”

  “Have exceptionally strong moral fiber? Yes, it does.”

  I was going to say kill people, but somehow that seems impolite. “Then why not be a whitecape?”

  “That’s a luxury for the rich and the powerful. People working my side of the street don’t have the option of avoiding difficult moral choices.” Calamity’s voice is sharp, almost aggressive. “Not a whole hell of a lot of us can fly, so we don’t get to be above it all, like the fancy folk up at the Legion.”

  I think of Doc Impossible and Valkyrja. I think of Magma, and how he stood up for me at the meeting. Suddenly I’m feeling defensive, like Calamity is talking shit about my friends, even though I barely know them. “If you hate whitecapes so much, why are you coming to me? I’m not even any kind of cape yet, and even if I was, I like the Legion.”

  “Please. You’re better than that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Some of them have been really nice to me!” I’m wearing the shirt Doc Impossible made for me.

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed how insufferable they are? The little tin gods who abandon us when they get bored?”

  “They seem to want to help people to me,” I say. “They stopped that asteroid last year, and they went out of their way to protect my identity.”

  She rocks back on her heels a little bit, looks at me across her nose. “Shoot, maybe you haven’t seen it. Might be they’re on their best behavior around you. They’d want you on their team for sure.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Now all I can think about is Graywytch calling me a boy, and Carapace getting nervous about the idea of me being called Dreadnought, or how Chlorophyll was ready to throw me under the bus just as long as the team got what it wanted out of me. They all seemed awfully quick to want to avoid dealing with me, one way or the other. When I think about it that way, Calamity starts to make more sense.

  “Why not? You’re the new Dreadnought, ain’t you?” she says. “Mightier than a battleship and faster than a jet, if I’ve heard correctly.”

  “They…well, I’m a minor. So I can’t join yet. And…”

  “And what?” she presses.

  “Some of them seem uncomfortable about me being transgender.” It comes out almost as a mutter, and I feel like such a tool. Almost as if by not speaking up strongly I’m betraying myself, but by saying anything at all I’m betraying them.

  “There. You see?” Calamity nods sharply. “Whitecapes are happy to draw neat little lines that make neat little boxes and act like they’re Justice with her scales, but
the moment someone doesn’t fit into their cute little grid, suddenly they don’t quite care about what’s fair or not, do they?”

  “Some of them really stood up for me.”

  “Did they kick the other ones off the team?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then they’re aiding and abetting your enemy.” She steps close, and for a brief moment drops the accent. “Don’t be so fast to hop in bed with them. Trust me.”

  That seems a bit simple to me. I can’t imagine Doc Impossible or Valkyrja putting up with that kind of crap on a long-term basis, and though I don’t know Magma as well, he was on my side, too. Even knowing I’m trans, they still let me keep the provisional membership, and Doc Impossible gave me all these wonderful clothes.

  But they’ve all been teammates for years, saved each other’s lives a million times, I bet. Calamity might be right. It might be really stupid of me to expect any of them would turn on their own if it came down to a choice between me and one of their team. I really don’t know them well. Can I afford that kind of risk?

  “I dunno…” I say, which is the closest to a coherent thought on the subject I can muster up. It’s like I can see both sides of the argument with perfect clarity, but I can’t see what my own opinion should be.

  “It ain’t like you need to decide right now,” says Calamity, maybe picking up on my uncertainty. “You wanna go caping or not? You can’t tell me that after that plane rescue you’re not itching for more action.”

  There’s nothing confused about the enormous smile that breaks out across my face. “Yeah, no, that was excellent.”

  She reaches out and pulls on my sleeve. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I won’t even make fun of you for wearing prissy throwaway colors. Not too loudly, anyway.”

  The window to my room pours a little yellow square into the night. What do I have going for me here? Homework and sitting silently in my room all night so I won’t invite another screaming session. When I think of it that way, it’s not even really a decision.

  “Wait here, I need to get my suit.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took a moment to get the hang of following Calamity from a few hundred feet up so I wouldn’t be spotted. She has an expensive-looking motorcycle, with an aggressive riding posture that’s got her leaning so far forward she’s almost on her stomach, and fat road-grabbing tires. “What’s a cowgirl without her horse?” she said to me as she straddled the machine’s enormous engine. To my dismay, she obeys all the traffic laws except for the one about being sixteen and having a license. Her helmet hides her age, and she doesn’t give cops reason to pull her over. It’s as good a way of traversing the city as any for a flightless cape.

  It’s also maddening. I’m already used to jetting off at just under the speed of sound, and then cranking up past the sound barrier when I’m away from the city. Keeping my flight under the city speed limit, waiting for stoplights and even roughly following the roads has me antsy and impatient for us to get to wherever we’re going tonight. Calamity takes a turn onto a freeway on-ramp and snaps her throttle open with a howling whine I can hear all the way up here. I almost cheer with relief, but then she hits the highway speed limit almost immediately and her acceleration dies. We crawl along at a groaningly slow sixty miles an hour, cross the Anderson Bridge onto Anderson Island, follow the highway across the island and then over the Anderson-McNeil Bridge.

  Calamity pulls off the highway, and then it’s another tortuously slow crawl through surface streets until we’re at the edge of the really seedy part of McNeil Island, the middle of the three islands, two peninsulas, and curving line of mainland that make up New Port City. McNeil Island was a real solid working man’s neighborhood during the mid-twentieth century, but then the Mayo Cove shipyards went out of business, and the other industrial yards followed suit a decade later. After that, the whole island did a swan dive into urban rot. There have been some efforts to rejuvenate it, and I hear it’s better than what it was like in the ’80s and early ’90s. It’s still not a place I’d want to park a bike like Calamity’s, but she seems to know what she’s doing. She circles a block once before she pulls into a narrow alleyway between two decrepit brick buildings, kills the engine, and backs the bike into some deep shadows.

  When I land next to her, she’s unfolding a thin black tarp and throwing it over the bike.

  “Is that going to be safe here?”

  “Safe as houses. Back in the shadows and under the tarp like that, it will be two steps from invisible. I’ve locked the wheels, and it’s got a pair of GPS trackers on it.”

  When she’s satisfied her bike will be safe, Calamity takes to the roofs in a flowing series of jumps, pull-ups, and climbing. She beckons for me to follow, says we’re going to be staking out a block that’s one of the worst parts of the whole island. I follow low and close enough to talk quietly, but far enough to stay out of her way as she dances across the rooftops.

  Calamity is amazing. She runs full-speed across the roof of one building, leaps like a gazelle over an alley, and keeps going. Without breaking stride she hurdles air conditioner ducts, fire escapes, and skylights. Her feet are light and silent. She seems to barely touch the ground after she vaults off of one roof with her arms stretched out, flips her legs back over her head once, and touches down on the other side like a leaf skimming across the sidewalk.

  “Why, exactly, are you not on every varsity team at school?” I ask her after about the tenth amazing, Olympics-class feat of gymnastics performed in the dark, on wet surfaces, over concrete.

  “Nobody with anything useful to do has time for that,” says Calamity just before she leaps off the roof of a three-story building, rotates twice in the air, and lands on the roof of the two-floor brick building across a wide alley. She’s not even breathing hard.

  “How the hell does your hat not fall off?”

  “A girl needs a few secrets.” Calamity slows to a walk, does a slow lap of the roof, and comes to a rest at the corner of the building. “We’ll lay up here and wait for someone to do something stupid.”

  We’re at the corner of an intersection with a broken streetlight on one side. Across from us is an all-night liquor store, and all the windows around here have bars on them. Calamity plops down at the building’s edge, feet dangling off the roof like it’s the most comfortable spot in the world. I realize now what a soft suburbanite I am, since even with freaking superpowers I’m nervous to be hanging around here. The clouds are low and orange from reflected city lights, and a gentle mist is falling. There’s plenty of light to see, but plenty of shadows to get lost in, too.

  She pats the roof next to her. “Have a seat, partner.”

  After making sure I’m not about to sit in something unmentionable, I take a seat next to her. Or, I try to. Sitting down with a cape on is something that takes a little practice, and I end up falling off the roof, hanging in midair while I right myself, and then floating back up and settling down next to her.

  Calamity’s eyes twinkle. “You all right there, hun?”

  “Yeah. I’ve just—well, this is new to me.”

  “I imagine so.” She kicks her legs out, swinging them back and forth a little. “What’s it like to fly?”

  “It’s fun,” I say. Calamity ducks her head, as if to say go on. I take a moment to try and collect my thoughts. Flying is wholly unnatural to a human being, and yet, when I’m up there, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. It’s hard to put into words. “There’s this great feeling of speed, and weightlessness. Or, no, not weightlessness. I can feel my weight until I get into orbit—”

  “You can get into orbit?”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess I can. I have to work at it, though. I have to get up to one or two kilometers per second to get that high; I can only really go that fast when I’m at high altitude already, so, I can do it, but it takes some effort.”

  “I never thought I’d be jealous of a cape with real powers,” says Calamity.


  Is it weird to be flattered by jealousy? It’s weird, isn’t it? I’m weird.

  “Your acrobatics are pretty amazing,” I say, hoping she can’t see me blush in the dark. “My powers kinda fell in my lap. You had to work for everything you can do.”

  Calamity shrugs. “Not as much as you’d think. Don’t tell Uncle Sam, but I’m a super soldier.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, my hand-eye coordination is inhuman, my flexibility is beyond human norms, and my muscle density is fantastic. I can bench press three times my body weight without straining too hard.” She shrugs. “I’ve never had a cold or a flu.”

  All this time she’s been walking around at school like she’s nothing special, and at any moment could toss one of the varsity linebackers around like a bag of potatoes. Between me and Calamity, I’m starting to wonder how big a segment of the student body is secretly metahuman. Maybe we can form a club. “How did it happen?”

  “Born with it. Hell, everyone on my dad’s side of the family has it. Anyone who traces a direct line back to grandpa gets it.”

  “And where did he get it?”

  “Uncle Sam. Back during World War II, the government got to playing around with exotic chemistry. They were trying to create something that could call out Hitler’s Übermenschen. Uh, this was before Dreadnought showed up, obviously. Once they whipped up a batch of this super serum, they needed someone to try it out on, so they did whatever white men do when they have a dangerous, unpleasant job that wants doing—they looked around for some brown people and volunteered them. That was Granddad. They told him it was a new kind of vaccine. The serum worked, and after the war when he had kids we found out it was heritable, too.”

  “That’s…wow. How come nobody’s ever heard of this?” The government has done all sorts of sketchy things over the years, but human testing of a superweapon is screwed up even for the Pentagon.