Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  I stay tight with her, only fifty feet up and thirty back, all the way down to Lacey. She pulls off the freeway, and drives through the surface streets until we’re at the apartment block Charlie found with his spell. It’s a long, low two-story building in the shape of a squared-off crescent. Along the inside of the C is a walkway with occasional staircases. Everyone’s front door faces into the central courtyard area, which could really use some grass but is covered in concrete. Cheaper, maybe. Calamity pulls in to the parking lot off to one side of the complex and wedges her bike into an open space between the last parking spot and some shrubs. I tap down lightly next to her.

  “You possessed of any ideas for which one of these is his?” she asks me.

  “I was thinking we’d just look in their windows.”

  “Shoot. Better than nothing. Come on. I’ll take the ground floor, you do the second.”

  This is not as easy as we’d hoped it would be. More than half of the windows have their blinds closed, and in one tense moment, Calamity almost gets caught in the open by an inattentive resident who’s wandered outside to get better cell reception while she’s trying to squint through his window. For what feels like ten minutes but is probably more like thirty seconds she gets close and stays in his blind spot as he meanders around the yard, until I can get a clear path to drop down and hoist her into the air. We make three passes of the entire building, checking off which apartments we’ve confirmed our guy doesn’t live in, and focusing on the others.

  It’s getting late. We skipped study hall, but we’ve almost burned through the time that bought us. In a whispered conversation we agree to one last round, and then we’ll have to pack it in and try again later.

  We slip over a fence into one of the tiny back yards, and come face to face with the guy we’re looking for. He’s standing in sweats and flip-flops, with a cigarette half raised to his lips.

  We all stand there blinking in surprise for a moment.

  Then it’s running, shouting, fighting, tackling, and we’ve got his face pressed into the carpet in his living room. He sucks in a breath to scream. I clap my hand over his mouth, and he tries to bite me. It’s kind of adorable, actually. He squirms and struggles but with my legs clamping his arms to his sides he might as well be trussed up with steel cable for all the good it’s doing him. Calamity pats him down and pulls his phone from his pocket.

  “I’m bulletproof and I can juggle dumpsters,” I say quietly. “Give it up. We just want to talk. If I take my hand off your mouth, are you going to be quiet?”

  He nods. The moment my hand clears his lips he begins to shout. I muzzle him again. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to take you ten thousand feet straight up and let you scream to your heart’s content, okay?” He goes still. “Can we just talk, please? I need you to tell me all about Utopia.”

  When he nods again, I take my hand off his mouth, and this time he doesn’t scream. His voice is a shaking whisper. “Please, just leave me alone! I don’t know who you’re talking about!”

  Calamity holds up his cell phone. “Is that why you know Utopia is a person and not a place, and also have her listed in your contacts?”

  He starts to open his mouth, and then seems to think better of it.

  “Start talking.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  His name is Gerald and he just wanted to be special. Huddled on the couch across from me, clutching the mug of water Calamity brought him, he doesn’t seem like the type to go in for being a supervillain’s henchman. He’s got a round face and a scrawny neck. His hair is short and bristly, and his fingertips are ragged where he’s chewed the nails too close. Regret is stamped all over his face, and if he didn’t have what we needed I’d be out the door right now because I hate doing this to him. There’s something about him that’s tugging at me. Something familiar.

  “I don’t know how she found me,” Gerald says. “One day I came home, and here she was. She kinda waved her hand and I couldn’t move or say anything. She said she knew what I wanted, and she could give it to me. I just had to help her out with a few things.”

  I’m sitting across from him on a cheap folding chair. The furniture around here isn’t exactly high-end. “What is it you wanted?”

  Gerald looks down at his hands for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is so soft I barely hear him. “She said she could give me superpowers.”

  Calamity is leaning against the arm of the couch farthest from him, ankle over ankle, hand clasped on her wrist. She rolls her eyes. “Groupie.”

  Gerald scowls. “I know I’m not the brightest stick in the pile—” Calamity snorts. “Crap. Sharpest stick, brightest bulb. The point is, I know I’m not that smart, and my health has never been very good. I didn’t graduate college but I’ve got so much student debt I can’t go back to school. That’s how it goes for people like me, okay?” He crosses his arms over his stomach and seems to sink in on himself. Gerald seems to be in his thirties, and he’s getting interrogated by girls half his age, either one of whom could take him apart without much effort. That must sting. “My whole life I’ve been middle of the pack or falling behind. Utopia said she could change that. If I had powers, I could get a good job, or sponsorship from a cape team somewhere. I could be somebody. You don’t know what it’s like living the way I do, how nobody sees you and nobody cares.”

  Something clicks, and I realize what it is about Gerald that seems so familiar. He’s the man I was scared I would grow into. “Yes, I do,” I say.

  “No, you don’t!” he spits. “Look at you. You’re stronger than you have any right to be, and you say you can fly? You don’t know anything about me.” His shoulders slump. “The world has been handed to you, and I’m stuck in the gutter.”

  “Returning to the subject at hand,” says Calamity with a significant glance at me. “What is it Utopia had you doing?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Now that is a point worth contesting,” says Calamity. She uncrosses her legs and brushes her jacket back. Grenades, knives, and an enormous black revolver leer out at him.

  Gerald goes pale—well, paler—but he clenches his fists on his knees and holds firm. “You can’t possibly understand how important this is. I’m not going to let you bully me.”

  “Oh sure, because you’re the victim here.” Calamity leans over and smacks him upside the head, hard.

  “Hey, easy,” I say, raising my hand to stop her.

  “Oh, fer Christ’s sake, you’re not buying this sob story, are you?”

  “I think he’s telling the truth,” I say, and Gerald unclenches for a moment until I continue, “but that doesn’t mean we’re leaving without what we came for. You need to tell us what she had you doing.”

  “No,” says Gerald. “I don’t care what you do to me, I’m not screwing this up.” The way he’s standing up to us is kind of impressive, in its own way.

  “You can talk to me, or we can go to the Legion Pacifica.” This is mostly a bluff. There’s no way I’m going to tell them I’ve been caping unless I absolutely have to. It’s not worth the risk.

  “Chlorophyll’s got pollens and flowers that can make you talk,” says Calamity. He does? That’s news to me. I just thought the Legion would, I dunno, be better at this than we are. “So you can spill now and keep your little scraps of dignity, or you can tell him every secret you’ve ever had. And THEN they’ll hand you over to the cops.”

  A plaintive whining noise starts to leak out of Gerald, and he begins to rock back and forth on the couch. Welp. There goes my sympathy, torn away like a fart in a hurricane.

  Calamity pulls some handcuffs out of an inner pocket. “He ain’t talking. Let’s take him to Chlorophyll.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything!” Gerald scooches away from her. “She just had me drive the truck.”

  “What truck?” I ask.

  “She had…pickups to make.” He takes a breath. The weight of his confession seems to settle down on him, and almost push
him deeper into the couch. “I would stay with the truck and make sure nobody was around.”

  Calamity and I trade a glance.

  “Can you tell us more about them?” It’s an open-ended question on purpose. Back when we had cable, I saw this show about interrogation tactics, and right now I am furiously trying to remember more details, but the one thing I know for sure is you’re supposed to ask open-ended questions.

  “Sometimes she would have me move boxes, real heavy boxes, from one place in the city to another. But she must have more than one driver, because sometimes the boxes weren’t where I left them and I’d have to go pick them up somewhere else.”

  “Mm-hmm. And these heavy boxes, did she seem to already own them?”

  “Well…maybe not exactly own them,” mutters Gerald.

  Calamity pulls out a notebook. “Dates and addresses. Start talking.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Calamity closes her notebook, stands up, and stomps hard on his shoe. Gerald yelps and grabs his foot. “Did that help? I can do it again,” she says.

  “Take it easy,” I say.

  “This chickenshit is just gonna whine and pout until we go away unless he knows we’re for real,” snaps Calamity. She rounds back on Gerald. “Talk. Now!”

  “I really don’t know! Uh, two nights ago, out in South Hill!”

  “And?”

  “Monday! We did something last Monday. In Puyallup.”

  “I’m going to need you to be specific.”

  “I don’t know, I swear!”

  “Was your phone with you?” asks Calamity, snatching it up off the coffee table.

  “Yes, yes it was. Why?”

  “Do you keep your GPS turned on?” she asks, but isn’t really listening for an answer. A few seconds later, she nods sharply. “Hold on.” Calamity reaches into one of the little pockets on her tactical vest and pulls out a small slab of plastic, sort of like a USB flash drive. She plugs it into the phone and a green light winks on and starts blinking. When it’s solid she pulls the drive and tosses the phone back to Gerald.

  “This should be enough to tell us where and when the burglaries were,” she says to me.

  “Excellent. Did she say when she’s going to pull off whatever she’s planning?” I ask Gerald.

  He’s been cringing on the couch, quiet, like he was hoping we’d forget about him in the whole thirty seconds it took to download his phone’s data. “No, I didn’t ask! I didn’t want to upset her.”

  “It’s a wonder to me you haven’t gotten further in life with that kind of courage and curiosity at your command,” says Calamity.

  “Go to hell,” Gerald mutters.

  “We need more than that, Gerald,” I say. “We need to know what she’s planning and when it’s going to happen.”

  “No! If you stop her, she won’t be able to hold up her end of the deal!”

  Calamity sighs. “You are aware she’s a murderer, right?”

  “I’m…I’m sure she—”

  “‘Has her reasons,’ yeah, sure.” Calamity leans in close. “What makes you think she wasn’t planning to kill you?”

  His eyes open up round. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She said she could get me my powers at the end of next week. That’s all I know, honest.”

  • • •

  “Are you going to be able to do anything with that data?” I say as we get back to the bike.

  “Oh yeah,” says Calamity. “From the list of places they robbed, we’ll start putting together an inventory of whatever it is they stole. And even better, we’ve got a time frame now.”

  “So? We still don’t know what she’s planning.”

  “Not yet, no, but the timing on these things can be mighty important.” Calamity shrugs. “Might be there’s new reactor coming online somewhere, or a new satellite getting put in orbit, or an important vote in the EU. If we compare what she’s stolen to what’s happening in the next week, we might have some idea what she’s trying. I happen to know a man who is right perfect for this kind of puzzle. Once we’ve got enough to take to him, we’ll pose him a tricky question and see what his answer is. After that, it’s only a matter of finding the best monkey wrench to throw into this particular set of gears.”

  “Excellent.” Shit, we’re really doing this, aren’t we? It feels like I’m someone else. Someone competent.

  “I’m gonna go home and crunch the numbers. It’s going to take some time, and I’ve still got a lot of homework I need to do. We’ll link up tomorrow and start running down leads, okay?”

  One of the residents does a double take as she walks past us with a full garbage bag in each hand. I wave at her and smile. She smiles back uncertainly and keeps walking. “Sounds good. Meet me at my place at ten?”

  “Sure.” Calamity takes off her hat and pops open the storage blister on the back of her bike.

  “That was nice good cop, bad cop we did back there.”

  Calamity freezes with her helmet halfway to her head. She looks blank and confused. “We were doing what now?”

  • • •

  We spent too long with Gerald. I end up tickling the sound barrier to get back home before my curfew kicks in. I’m still in my supersuit, so I go straight for the rear of the house and slide my window open. Taking my suit off is easier than a snug, full-body garment has any right to be, but I still make enough noise as I step out of it for my mom to hear me. Should have done it in midair.

  “Danny?” She taps lightly on the door. “Are you in there?”

  “Uh, don’t come in, I’m changing.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Yeah, I got in a few minutes ago.”

  “That’s strange.” She wanders off, muttering about losing track of things. A few minutes later I wander downstairs. Mom is in the dining room, papers from her latest freelance gig spread out in front of her. A mug of tea steams by her elbow, and when she looks up it takes her a moment to come back from far away. “I don’t remember getting you that shirt,” she says. I’m wearing one of the outfits Doc Impossible made for me.

  “A friend gave it to me.”

  Mom looks surprised. “Oh, who? David?”

  “Uh, no. We don’t really talk since, well, he doesn’t like that I’m transgender.”

  “Oh.” Her face clouds. “I’m…I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks. Did Dad go into the office or something?”

  “I think so,” says Mom. “Tax day is only a month away now.”

  That’s a relief, at least. If I play my cards right I might not have to see him today at all. “I’m gonna grab a snack; do you want anything?”

  “No, I’m still in the middle of this.” She’s already sunk back into her paperwork.

  In the kitchen I slice up some cheese and put some crackers on a plate. Mom clears some space for me at the table and I set it all down with a glass of water on the side. When Dad’s not home I like to do homework in the dining room, so I go get my books and notepaper. It’s hard to focus. My mind keeps flitting back to what Calamity and I are going to do tonight, but I’ve got a test tomorrow so I need to get this knocked out before I go caping again. I open my math book and gird myself to do battle with binomial equations.

  Halfway through the crackers and not nearly far enough along through my homework, Mom speaks, her voice quiet, almost musing. “I used to wonder what you’d be like if you were a girl.”

  I look up. “Really?”

  “Yes.” She seems surprised to hear herself talking about it. “When you were little, you once asked me if you could be a princess.”

  “I don’t remember that.” Except now I’m starting to think I do.

  “You did. You never went through a cooties phase, either. You got along so nicely with girls from your class.”

  That, I do remember. I also remember how I slowly began to drift away from them. Or did they push me out? It’s not clear. There are so many things that ha
ppened in middle school that I can’t remember anymore. I’ve buried them so deep, I don’t think I’ll ever find them again. Not that I really want to, of course.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from far away.

  “Because,” says Mom. “Because you seemed like a happy little boy. It never crossed my mind that you could be anything else.”

  “I was too scared to say anything.” My pencil feels clumsy in my hand. My throat is tight. So much time lost, so much of my childhood gone, because nobody ever asked the right questions.

  Mom nods like it makes sense, like any of this makes sense, and dives back into her reading. Or, no. Tries to. A few minutes later she looks up. “Danny, are you really happy like this?”

  The answer comes immediately. “Yes.”

  “You’re not going to consent to hormone shots.” It’s not a question.

  “No.” We both know that’s the end of the line. I’m fifteen, which is old enough to put up a fight. My situation is too strange, too exotic, for the doctors to have any firm ethical guidelines. I doubt any of them would risk doing something that could get them sued once I turn eighteen.

  And that’s before we get to the part where I’m an invincible superhuman.

  She stares into her mug of tea. “I feel like I’ve lost my son.”

  “Mom, you never had a son.”

  Mom seems to crumple. “We tried so hard, Danny. Is it something I did wrong?”

  “Jesus, no! Mom, it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not a bad thing.”

  “Are you sure? I just…it’s going to be so hard for you. I think of what…trans?…transgendered people go through, and I don’t want that for you. I’m scared of what will happen to you, Danny.”