Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  She’s right, of course. I can’t tell the Legion what we found. Valkyrja might think I’m ready, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were pretty firm about me not doing any investigations in throwaway colors. In my head, I can see it clearly: Doc Impossible and Valkyrja and Magma looking down at me, disappointed, but nodding as if it finally makes sense. As if they’ve realized what kind of a person I really am. I won’t tell them. I can’t.

  But the horror of what I’ve seen won’t leave me. I hug myself tight around the middle and look back up at the burnt-out floor of the skyscraper, some blocks distant from us now. Utopia needs to be stopped, if only so she’ll never fire that gun again.

  Calamity reaches over and touches my shoulder lightly. “Come on, we still have a couple hours before we need to call it a night.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a bar I know.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The bar is called the Flying Dutchman, and it has no sign. It’s called the Dutchman because for a long time it moved from place to place, and the only way to find it was to know someone who knew where it’d be. Calamity explains that since then, they’ve worked something out with someone, so now it doesn’t have to move every night. The details of the arrangement are something she says we’re not supposed to be curious about. To get there, you’ve got to go to this anonymous stairwell down into the pavement along the back side of a building in the meatpacking district. Behind the door is a long hall that kinks and twists until eventually you’re at another door, one that looks like it was built to withstand a military assault. Calamity stops me before we go inside.

  “You said your suit could change colors, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then change them to something that’s not an obvious Legion hand-me-down.” Calamity gestures up and down at my suit. “You go in there looking the way you do right now, and laughter is about the best thing you can hope for.” The Flying Dutchman, Calamity has explained, is a bar for graycapes, nonpartisans, and associated hangers-on. Occasionally, the lighter shades of blackcapes show up, and plenty of baseline muscle looking to get hired on for “odd jobs” hang around the place, too. Whitecapes aren’t exactly unwelcome, except they’re totally unwelcome.

  “Uh, I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

  Calamity steps up close to me. “Do you want to catch Utopia or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then pick some goddamn colors.”

  “Hold on,” I say as I fumble my cell phone out of the little pouch on my belt line. A few moments later I’ve got it plugged into my suit and I’m booting up the color-changing app. To make it easy, I just select the whole garment and stab at one of the preselected colors, a dark green. A new blister pops up on my wrist, and I push it down. The gray camouflage melts and swirls and becomes a solid emerald across my entire body.

  “Good enough,” says Calamity. “Come on.”

  We approach the door. There’s a security camera behind a thick shield of bulletproof glass that watches us as we approach. Calamity knocks at the door, and the camera turns to center on us. After a long moment in which I start to hope they won’t let us in, thick magnetic bolts thud open and the door swings outward. We step through and find ourselves on a small landing above a short flight of stairs down into the rest of the bar. Glossy old wood is everywhere, and the light is a bit dim. An old jukebox plays music about a decade out of date. The place is not quite packed, but it’s still the largest gathering of metahumans I’ve ever seen.

  A bouncer approaches us. He’s a lot smaller than you’d think a bouncer should be. His skin moves strangely, like it’s locked in place except for short, rapid shifts, as if he’s a bad example of stop-motion animation. I get the feeling that if I punched him as hard as I could, he might feel it. Or maybe that’s just the way he carries himself. Calamity draws her pistols and hands them to him without being asked. He nods, places them in a cubby, and hands her a chit with a number on it.

  “Come on, let’s get a table,” says Calamity. I follow her down into the bar and weave between occupied tables. A lot of the people here look baseline, but a few have things like reptile eyes or glowing hair. Maybe a quarter of them are dressed in colorful outfits like Calamity or myself. We find a small table far from the bar. It’s not against a wall, but at least we’ll have a good view of both doors. I only know this because Calamity gently prompts me to sit across from her in such a way that my field of view covers all her blind spots, and hers covers mine.

  A waitress floats over to us, toes pointed toward the ground some six inches beneath her. “You ain’t been around, Calamity,” she says as she pulls out an order pad.

  “Been lookin’ into things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I’m looking for Utopia.”

  The waitress blinks. “Oh. Who’s your friend?”

  “A new girl. I’m showing her around.”

  “I’m D—” Calamity kicks me in the shin. “Emerald.”

  “Pleased to meet you, D-uh-Emerald,” says the waitress. “That’s a nice suit you’ve got there.”

  “Thanks. I’m, uh, really into cosplay.”

  “Sure thing, kiddo.” She turns back to Calamity. “Anyhow, the usual?”

  “Yeah, and for her, too.”

  The usual turns out to be a pair of Diet Cokes with straws. We sit and sip our drinks. “What are we doing here?” I ask. Calamity has obviously had practice slipping a straw under her bandanna without looking like a dork. “Putting our ear to the ground,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  It turns out putting one’s ear to the ground means sitting around doing not much, but trying to pay attention to everything. The murmur-burble of two dozen conversations at once, with music on top of that, basically makes eavesdropping impossible. A few people come by to chat briefly with Calamity, but nobody has anything important to say. It is supremely boring, and after a half hour of it, I start to get antsy.

  “How often do you do this?”

  “Eh, once a week or so.” She shrugs. “Been busy lately.”

  “Is there something we’re looking for?”

  “We’ll know when we see it.”

  The main door to the bar is over Calamity’s shoulder. It opens, and a familiar figure shuffles through. “Crap.”

  “Hey, caping ain’t all roof running and firefights, you know.”

  “No, I mean I see what we’re looking for.” I lean closer to her, drop my voice, and point. “That guy who just walked through the door is my dad.”

  “Sit back, don’t point,” she says calmly. Calamity moves her glass across the table and examines it intensely. After a moment I realize she’s looking at the reflection of the bar behind her. “Does he know?”

  “About my powers? No.”

  “Fine. Don’t look at him, and don’t draw attention.” Her voice is level and smooth, but it’s got the same kind of solid control you imagine a surgeon might use during a tricky operation. “He doesn’t happen to have superpowers of his own, does he?”

  For a wild moment, the world seems to shift under me as a whole new realm of horrifying possibilities plays out in my mind, but no. No, Dad is not the kind of guy who would keep his powers quiet. Especially not these past few years, since he lost his good job and has gotten so much louder about being “strong” and how important it is for “a man to provide for his family.” (And here, my train of thought briefly segues into a bitter accounting of all the things he has provided for me. Shame. Fear. Hearing loss.) Doc Impossible said most people with superpowers—ahem, that is, “special abilities”—use them to make a lot of money. There’s no way Dad would still be slaving away in a crummy little retail tax preparation job if he could do that.

  “No, he’s baseline.”

  “Do you have any notion why he would be here, then?”

  Not at first, but just a moment of thinking about it suggests a really awful possibility. “Oh. Oh no.”<
br />
  “Care to share?”

  “He’s looking for a cure,” I say. Calamity raises her eyebrows, inviting me to explain more. “For me being trans, I mean.”

  “He may be a long time searching.” She slips the straw back under her bandanna and takes a sip.

  “My luck isn’t that good. What if he finds a shapeshifter who can shift other people’s shapes?”

  “My, that is a nasty little mind you have,” Calamity says approvingly.

  The first whispers of panic are beginning to float around in the back of my head. “What am I going to do?”

  “First, calm yourself.” She puts her hand on my wrist. “I’ve not heard of anyone who can do that, and I doubt anyone else has, either. Even if they do exist, he ain’t gonna find them on his first night slumming. Second, they’d have to have tumbleweeds rolling between their ears to do something that would piss you off that much. Really, hun, you ain’t got much to worry about on this score right now.”

  With an almost physical effort of will, I cram the panic back down. Calamity is right. He can’t take this from me. I disappointed myself when I thought I could stand up to him, but I’m still determined not to give up the mantle. I will stay a girl until the day I die, and there is nothing he can do about it. Holding onto that thought tight, as tight as I can, helps. A little. Seeing Dad here is unpleasant in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Running around in a costume with Calamity has been an escape. Since I went back to school, I can barely show my face at home. Every night is spent quietly poking around the internet or doing homework for fear of waking the mountain again. Climbing out the window into a world where I get to be someone else, someone who isn’t scared all the time, even if that someone doesn’t have a name, has been magical. But now he’s invaded that, too. It leaves me feeling cold, and a little queasy, but I can manage. Dad hasn’t noticed us, although he’s constantly scanning the room. It’s okay. It will be okay.

  “How in the hell would he even find this place?” wonders Calamity.

  “He’s pretty smart. And, I guess, determined.”

  Dad sits at the bar, and keeps looking around and adjusting his seat. The bartender brings him a large glass of some kind of hard liquor, and Dad knocks it back like apple juice. A few minutes later, he gets up and starts trying to strike up conversations, most petering out quickly, causing him to move on to another.

  “Uh-oh,” says Calamity.

  “What?”

  “He’s barking up a mighty bad tree.” She nods at my father, who is talking to a man with biceps like my thighs and no neck whatsoever. “That’s Bosco. He’s nonpartisan, but he’s also a separatist.”

  “There are metahuman separatists?”

  “All minorities have separatists, and he’s a real nasty one. Your father doesn’t want to be talkin’ to his sort.” Calamity puts her hand on my arm again when I’m halfway out of my chair. “Easy. Might be Bosco just tells him to—aw, hell.”

  Dad is looking really happy, relieved even, and he and Bosco are getting to their feet. There are two doors in the Flying Dutchman, and they head toward the one in the rear. Calamity clamps down on my wrist to keep me from following.

  “Is he going to hurt my dad?”

  “Not immediately. We should give them a few moments to clear the door. No sense advertising that we’re following them.”

  An achingly slow thirty seconds passes, and then we stand and follow Bosco and Dad out the back exit. More than a few patrons spare us a glance as we go by, but I am so far beyond caring I can’t see it anymore. The air outside is wet and cold. The door closes behind us with a solid thuh-thump of magnetic bolts, and there is no handle on this side. We’re in an open storm drainage channel, set a little ways above the main spillway on a raised platform that’s part of a series of catwalks. Across the channel, just twenty or thirty feet distant, I see Dad following Bosco up some stairs to street level. In the sudden quiet of the outdoors I can hear him talking, excited, almost babbling, about how he is so glad he could find someone to help his son. For a brief moment I almost want to let him take his chances with Bosco.

  Calamity begins walking down the side of the canal to get to the catwalk bridge. Her gait is so fluid that even with her boots on she doesn’t clang against the metal. That’s not a trick I can duplicate, so I tap her on the shoulder and point up. She nods, and I lift into the air and put a good thirty feet between me and street level.

  With my suit turned to green, I’m more visible than I like. I press the second blister on the inside of my wrist, and my gray camouflage pattern comes back. In this darkness, that kind of stealth might be useful. In the light of the full moon, I can see everything clearly. Bosco can too, so every edge counts. As I tail them, I realize I forgot to ask Calamity what kinds of things Bosco can do. I look around for her, but she’s vanished into some deep shadow.

  Bosco is leading Dad into a vacant lot behind two low brick buildings. The fence facing one road is made of panels and beams, and Bosco holds a loose board open for Dad. Only when my father is halfway across the lot and sees the chain-link fence on the other side does he realize he’s trapped. He turns around, a kind of confused smile on his face.

  “It’s blocked,” he says.

  “I know,” says Bosco, stepping closer.

  Dad takes a half step back. “So, you can do it from here?”

  “It don’t matter,” says Bosco. “I could kill you anywhere.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Yes.

  Bosco says to my father, “I could kill you anywhere,” and the first thing that pops into my head is: Yes.

  Kill him. Please.

  I’m a horrible person.

  But so is he!

  But he’s my father, I can’t let him die.

  But he deserves it!

  I’m a horrible person, and it’s the guilt that drives me onward.

  Bosco starts laughing, and I start diving for speed. I jerk myself to a stop ten feet above them. They don’t see me, but I realize that once I’m down there, it’s almost certain Dad will recognize me. Even in the dark. Even with my cowl on. Even though he never liked to look at me once I became a girl. At that range he’ll know who I am. Crap. I can’t let him die, but I can’t let him see me. As I’m frozen with indecision, Bosco seems to grow a few inches and stalks towards Dad. The moonlight now glints off his skin like it’s polished steel and his footsteps sound heavier, sharper.

  Calamity saves the day.

  Something clatters on the ground between them, and a trilling instinct warns me to screw my eyes shut. An instant later, a bang like the end of the world washes over all three of us. I open my eyes to see Bosco and Dad both wobbling on their feet, stunned and frozen. I drop down, seize Bosco under the armpits, and pop back into the air. He’s much heavier than I expected. A few seconds later, and a few hundred feet up, he comes to his senses.

  About a half second after that, I’ve dropped him and I find myself spinning wildly on three axes, with my neck sore and the left side of my face stinging. He has somehow managed to hit me in the face hard enough that I feel it way more than I did when I got shot. I get control of myself about twenty feet before I hit the ground, and a moment later I hear the sound of something heavy hitting the ground after falling from a great height. The world still seems to spin, and I’m disoriented, which is going to be my excuse for why I just hang there in the air while he does a sprinting leap and slams into me like a truck. We land in the middle of a street and I take the worst of it, crushed between the ground and what appears to be a Bosco made of living steel.

  He finds his feet, grabs me by the front of my suit, and throws me straight through a parked van. The van detonates shattered glass in every direction and I end up crumpled against a brick wall on the other side of it. When I push myself to my feet, he’s right there to put his fist through my skull and I just manage to jerk out of the way. He goes wrist-deep into the wall.

  So, uh, maybe I ought to hit this guy—

&nbs
p; His elbow takes me in the nose and I go skidding down the sidewalk, crack over a fire hydrant. Yellow pops of pain are dancing up my back. This is really not my night.

  He’s up in the air again, coming down with both fists. I scramble sideways, pull into a roll, and he lands where I was with a night-shaking clang. Even as I get to my feet, throwing a halfhearted jab at his jaw, he’s moving into me, knocking me down.

  His punches are like enormous, cracking strikes of lightning. He’s digging a new pothole with the back of my skull. But when I get a hand between my face and his fist, I’m able to stop him cold. His knuckles clap against my palm with a sound like a gunshot, but my arm doesn’t budge more than a centimeter or so. For a moment we’re both too surprised to continue.

  “Stop hitting me,” I tell him. With a convulsive ripple of my stomach muscles, I get my knees between him and me, and he backs way the heck off before I can launch him into orbit. Okay, maybe not literally. But almost.

  “You’d attack one of your own?” Bosco says. His voice is wary, but sullen. Is this what a bully sounds like when he’s scared? He backs off, a good ten yards or so, arms loose and ready. “For a flat? What the hell is wrong you?”

  “What the hell is a flat?” Being able to fly gives you all sorts of nifty choices for getting up off the ground so it’s not super obvious you’re worried about being unsteady, and I take advantage of that, pivoting up from my heels to rest gently on my feet.

  “You must be new. Flats are them. The baseline.”

  “That is the most boring slur I have ever heard.”

  Bosco doesn’t seem to expect me to be as fast as I am, because his arms are barely starting to come up when I slam my fist into his nose with the power of a locomotive. He goes backward end over end and I stay with him and wind up for a kick. My toe catches him in the gut and he goes up.

  Once he’s up there, he’s stuck in a nice, predictable arc. Not that I planned it this way; kicking him high in the air just seemed like a good idea. To be honest, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I haven’t been in a fight since the fifth grade. It’s, uh…it’s different than I remember.