Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  “Mom, that stuff doesn’t matter,” I say. She doesn’t look like she believes me. I need a way to make her understand. “If it happens or not, whatever it is I’ll live with it. What about the stuff that was happening to me when I was trying to be a boy?”

  Mom leans back in her chair. “It wasn’t so bad, was it? You were growing up so well.”

  “It was torture! You know what I was doing when Dreadnought—when that supervillain attacked me?” I don’t believe it. It’s like she’s willfully misunderstanding it. They never take my word for it; why can’t they take my word for it? “I was painting my toenails behind the mall because that’s the only way I could keep sane. Does that seem normal to you, Mom? Does that seem healthy?”

  “I just…I don’t see you as a girl,” she says. “Even now, even looking like that. You were going to be such a fine young—”

  “I was going to die.” The pencil snaps between my fingers, one end cartwheeling off across the table and onto the floor. “And I am a girl. Even if you don’t see it.”

  The chair scrapes the floor as I stand up. My homework crinkles as I slam my books closed, scoop them up in my arms, and head up to my room.

  Do I want her to call out after me? I don’t know.

  She doesn’t.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sarah calls in sick on Tuesday and doesn’t show up to school. Over the next few hours, several industrial sites in the Pacific Northwest get phone calls from a “reporter” asking about what they lost during their recent burglaries. She dragoons me into the effort as well, sending me a list of phone numbers to call over lunch. I don’t get much to eat, but I send what I find back to her. I get a text message around dinnertime: I’ve got the list. We need to double-check some things, but we’re close. Be ready by ten.

  As the day dims toward night, our inventory of stolen goods begins to firm up. Exotic coolants and ceramic heat sinks. Optically flat mirrors and several very expensive motion picture camera lenses. A thousand gallons of low-viscosity hydraulic fluid. Somehow Sarah tracks down news about some bulk industrial good shipments that got hijacked, and so we add eight tons of a nickel-chromium steel alloy and five tons of assorted industrial ceramic tiles to the tally. The list goes on and on. Utopia is gathering a grab bag of high-end industrial and commercial electronics goods, with no obvious unifying theme.

  Calamity throws pebbles at my window to tell me it’s time. We slip over the back fence into the alley and make our way to where her bike is parked in a pool of shadows. The night is crisp and clear, and the dim stars are pinpricks in the sky. We’re headed to the most recent place Utopia hit, hoping to find some clues about what was boosted.

  The capacitor manufacturing plant is part of a light industrial park that’s surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence with coils of razor wire over the top. The fence isn’t the kind that can even slow us down, and we can see the place where it didn’t slow the thieves down, either. The wire in the fence is covered in black rubber everywhere except for part of a perfect circle that intersects the ground and leaves a man-sized hole. Here, the fence has been roughly patched over by a square of naked wire mesh fastened to the two posts on either side.

  Calamity bends over to examine the place where the fence was cut. “Look at the wires here.”

  They look like they’ve been perfectly sheared. No tool marks, no tear or stretch in the rubber. The wire simply comes to a stop, smooth, naked, and gleaming. It’s like that all around the circle.

  “Ain’t no regular clippers did this.”

  “So we’re on the right track. Let’s take a look inside.”

  Calamity steps up to me. “Hoist me over.”

  I lace my fingers together like a stirrup and she sets her boot in my hands. It’s a little tricky figuring out how much muscle to put into the lift, and she ends up going twenty feet high to clear a twelve-foot fence. This gives her enough altitude to perform half an acrobatics routine on the way down, though, so it works out okay. Thankfully, the place seems to be deserted on the weekends. We slip across the empty parking lot and press ourselves up against the long, low building of the main manufacturing floor. Sliding along the nondescript brown wall, we come to a side entrance still blocked with police tape. Calamity takes off her hat, gets down on her belly, and shimmies along the wall so she can look in the glass door with her head against the ground.

  “It’s clear,” she says after a long moment.

  Back on her feet, she pulls something out of her jacket that looks like a tiny toy gun with a pair of thick wires poking out the front. She jams them into the lock, squeezes the trigger a few times, and we’re in.

  “Lockpicking with actual lockpicks is for eccentrics, hobbyists, and morons,” she says.

  “You’re not an eccentric?”

  “Hush.”

  Inside the building, we find a front office, the assembly floor, and a storeroom for completed capacitors. The lights are off and it’s a little dim. The floor is carpeted in that thin, hard stuff that doesn’t cost too much and is easy to clean. The door to the storeroom has had its lock cut out. Again, a perfect circle with smooth edges. Without the lock, the heavy security door swings freely. “I’m going to have a looksee in here,” says Calamity. “You see about any missing files in the office.”

  In the office, there are several rows of filing cabinets. The key is in the top drawer of one of the desks. I start flipping through the files, trying to find anything obviously empty or missing. There’s a file here that catches my eye: a shipping manifest for some Cerita power couplings, with a handwritten note in red ink reminding someone to include them among the losses from the recent theft. Something about that trips my memory, but I can’t remember where I’ve come across that name before. I take the file and make a photocopy of it for Calamity.

  “Wackachicka wackachicka wackachicka wackachicka…”

  Calamity pops her head out of the storage room. “What in the hell are you doin’?”

  I pause like a deer in headlights between a wacka and a chicka. “A cheesy ’70s investigation montage?”

  “Damn it, D—girl!” She stalks down the short hallway and slips into the office. “Caping is a mite bit more serious than that.”

  “Oh come on, you talk all old-timey and you call yourself Calamity.”

  “That is a persona!” says Sarah. She snatches her hat off and throws it to the floor. “It is a vital element of the form, one that you have ignored for too long. I don’t even know what to call you when we’re out like this!”

  I shrug as I take the copy out of the machine and fold it up. “‘Hey you’ is working fine so far.”

  Sarah throws up her hands. “Do you even want to be a cape?”

  That’s a very good question. At first, I sort of assumed I would be. But then. Well. But then. But then my parents found out I was a girl. But then I met the Legion. But then David torched our friendship. Running around hunting Utopia is fun and all, and yeah, I promised I’d find a way to honor Dreadnought, and taking down the supervillain that killed him is a good way to do that, but Calamity has a point. I’ve been able to choose permanent colors—not even Dreadnought’s colors, just anything—for more than a week now. And I haven’t. And maybe I never will. So I don’t say anything because I don’t have any answers, and after a moment it gets weird.

  “Hey, look, I didn’t mean anything by that,” says Sarah. It’s a little weird talking to Sarah when she’s got the Calamity outfit on but she’s not doing the voice.

  “It’s okay.” Like a bubble rising from the depths, the question forms and is out of my lips before I really think about it. “Is it selfish that I kinda just want to be Danielle right now?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” Sarah bends down, picks her hat up, and fiddles with the brim. “I think we’ve already gotten everything we’re going to get from here. In fact, I was just being thorough. We probably have enough for my contact to go on already. Do you, um…do you wanna go buy makeup?”
>
  “I don’t have any money.”

  With that bandanna over the lower part of her face, Sarah’s eyebrows become much more expressive. “My bike cost seventy thousand dollars, and my guns are eleven hundred each. You think I can’t afford a tube of lipstick?”

  “Where the hell do you get that kind of money?”

  Sarah shrugs. “I rob drug dealers.”

  “Oh.”

  • • •

  About an hour later we’re back in our street clothes and facing down the makeup aisle in a twenty-four-hour drug store. Racks of foundation and concealer stretch from the floor to the ceiling. Row upon row of mascara, lipstick, nail polish, and eye shadow are arranged in neat ranks. It’s a little overwhelming, and even though I’m not scared, exactly, to be seen in a makeup aisle like I used to be, it’s still a bit strange to be standing here, openly shopping.

  “What kind of makeup do you like?” asks Sarah.

  “I have no idea. I used to just grab the first nail polish that looked pretty and get out.”

  “Okay, so let’s get you some foundation and mascara to start. Maybe some lip gloss, too.”

  “Not lipstick?”

  Sarah shakes her head. “Maybe. Lipstick is a little heavy. Unless you’re going to a formal event, or there’s a particular look you’re going for, it will seem out of place.” About this time, I realize I’ve never seen Sarah actually wear makeup, and yet she speaks as an authority on the subject. When I say as much, she shrugs. “I am the only daughter in a family of boys, and if you think my mother didn’t force me to learn about this stuff, then you are out of your goddamn mind.”

  A little stab of envy goes through me. That one day shopping with Mom seems cheap and flimsy in comparison.

  Picking the correct foundation turns out to be a lot more involved than I thought it would be. There’s a special lamp that’s supposed to give the right kind of light for color matching, and I’ve got to hold different shades up against the inside of my arm to see which ones match my skin tone the best. Of course, before I can do that I’ve got to decide between liquid and powder foundation, and really, I have no idea which is better. When I reach for a tube of black mascara, Sarah shakes her head, and points me toward some dark brown instead. Because I’m blonde, I’m told, black mascara would stand out strongly against my coloration, which is useful for achieving certain looks but not something I want to tie myself to, at least not until I know what I’m doing.

  It’s like this all the way down to the smallest detail. There’s nothing simple about makeup, and she assures me that I’ll want to practice putting it on a few times in private before I leave the house with any of it on, because apparently it takes considerable skill to put the stuff on and make it look nice. Then she says I might not even need it, and I nod and say its one of my superpowers to be impossibly beautiful, but it still looks like fun to get made up. Sarah sputters for a little while.

  Eventually we get a basic makeup set selected, with enough everyday colors and enough experimental stuff to keep me busy for weeks or months. A bottle of liquid foundation, two mascaras, two tinted lip balms, some eyeliner and multipack of eye shadow comes out to about forty dollars, which seems terrifyingly high until Calamity says she’s glad we got the stuff while it was on sale. She swipes her debit card like it’s no big deal to drop that much money on a lark, and then all that stuff goes in a bag, which she hands to me. My throat is a little tight, and when I hug her there’s an instant of tension in her shoulders before she relaxes and hugs me back.

  “Thank you, Sarah.”

  “You’re welcome, Danny.”

  We step apart and her cheeks are a little pink. “Crap, was that—I mean, well, girls seem to hug so much…” My tongue is tripping all over itself.

  Her cheeks graduate to a full-on blush and she laughs. “It’s fine, Danny. Let’s get out of here.”

  We get some food at a diner, and this is something I can afford so I insist that she lets me treat her. She spends the meal smiling deeply, staring out the window and flicking occasional glances my way. It’s nice having a friend.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Calamity taps on my window almost exactly at 10 p.m. on Wednesday. My nerves are so strung tight waiting for this final, enormous phase of our investigation that I actually jump up from my chair and stay hanging in midair for a moment. When I slide the window open, her eyes sparkle above her scarlet bandanna.

  “Nervous?”

  “Yeah. Hold on, let me get changed.” I seize the bottom of my sweatshirt and pull it up over my head. Underneath, I’ve got my suit on already, but Calamity’s eyes are very wide. “Warn a gal before you do that.”

  We’re good at leaving my back yard without any noise now, and we wait until we’re most of the way down the alley before we say anything else. I notice for the first time that somehow all the streetlamps in this alley are out. When I examine them in the lattice, I see they have been shattered. Almost as if someone with a silenced pistol came through here and shot them all.

  “So tonight’s the night?”

  “Tonight is a night. Gonna come calling on a business partner of mine, fella going by the name of the Artificer. He’s a grayish sort of hypertech merchant. We tell him what we know about the robberies and the time frame, then maybe he can tell us what she’s planning. Probably won’t be too exciting. I was thinking we’d do a little patrolling after we talk to him.”

  “All right. Cool. Lead on.”

  Calamity drops the helmet over her head and cranks her bike to life. A few minutes later I’m following her down the highway, headed east. We pass out of New Port and through a few suburbs until finally we get to an industrial park.

  It’s a dozen or more square miles of gravel with corrugated metal hulks sleeping between pools of sodium-orange light. We go around two and a half sides of a trapezoid and down a long, rutted, weed-grown gravel road before we find our entrance. Calamity pauses to open an unlocked and unguarded gate, then shuts it behind her. Without anyone around to see, I drop down to fly next to her as we head deeper into the gravel field, passing between two shuttered factories and under pipes that link them. In the distance, a few of these old buildings still blurt gouts of steam into the air as trucks back up to their loading docks, but that’s literally miles away, behind hills of gravel and forests of holding tanks.

  Calamity kills the engine and pulls her helmet off. Her motorcycle ticks and clicks in the cold night air. “This is it. I called ahead, so we shouldn’t get shot at, but just in case we are, try not to get hit. He’s got things that could even put a dent in you.”

  It takes a moment for my mouth to catch up with my brain. “Jesus Christ, what the hell are we walking into?”

  Calamity draws a pistol and begins swapping out jelly rounds for hollowpoints. “He’s a mite bit eccentric, but he only tried to kill me the one time. We’re square. Square-ish. It’ll be fine.”

  “That’s why you’re loading lethal rounds, because this is fine?”

  “Only in one gun. Nice to have options.” She snaps the cylinder closed. “Let’s go.”

  We walk toward the shuttered factory. There are no lights on in this area, no sodium orange to keep the night away, and so the Artificer’s factory seems like a hulking black void in the silver moonlight. When we’re within thirty yards, I start to hear a low buzzing noise. My hair begins to prickle and float. A white spotlight clacks on and pins us to the ground.

  “That’s far enough, children,” says a voice. It’s coming through a speaker somewhere, loud and humming with static. “Identify yourselves.”

  “Oh, you know who it is, Art,” says Calamity. “Quit fooling and let us in.”

  “I know who you are, Calamity. I’ve not seen your friend in the throwaways. What’s your name, girl?”

  Crap. “Um, I’ve been going with Emerald.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Uh, hold on.” I push one of the blisters on my suit down, and it shifts to the gr
een I’ve been using.

  The voice is silent for a long moment. “Adorable.” He means it as an insult.

  “Told you ya needed to own your colors,” Calamity mutters under her breath.

  “You may enter.” The spotlight clacks off and leaves us in absolute darkness, our night vision erased. A white rectangle of light appears as a door opens inward, and we step forward. Inside, the building is almost completely black except for a line of soft white track lights, tracing a path to an elevator across the empty space to another door. As we cross the factory, our footsteps echo back at us. The second door opens, and we step into an elevator. I suppose I was expecting it to travel halfway to the Earth’s core or something, but it only goes down what feels like one level or so before the door opens again. We enter another huge space, but this one is well lit.

  Holo-projectors and flat screens throw pale glows on the cement floors, and bright white banks of LEDs hug the ceiling. Huge dynamos and racks upon racks of computer servers dominate the walls to either side. Deeper into the Artificer’s lair—and this place is so obviously meant to be thought of as a lair—I can see individual experiments in progress. A half-refurbished matter fabber sits in a corner, its guts splayed out on the ground. Its functioning sister is humming quietly, steam leaking from its sealed production cubby.

  The Artificer is standing at the foot of a small set of stairs leading down from the elevator into the main part of the room. “Calamity, you had better be prepared to pay your bill,” he says as we come down the steps. “I refuse to be strung along any further, young lady. No more ammunition until you settle your debts.”

  “Don’t let your horses lead you, Art. Here’s your money.” She reaches into her jacket and pulls out a fat brick of twenty-dollar bills. She holds it up and he snaps it out of her hand, rubs his thumb down the edge to make sure they’re all the same denomination.

  “I’ll count this later,” he says.

  “Your trusting nature in these cynical times is a balm to my wounded soul.”