“Go ahead.”
“How long have you known you’ve made the wrong choice?”
Doctor Impossible grunts. “Ouch. Ya got me.” Her cigarette flares orange in the dim light. “It’s been five years.”
“Have you ever tried to get out? Go back to being nonpartisan, I mean?”
She shakes her head. “Can’t. I made an enemy who will follow me no matter where I go or what I do. It’s not real safe for me to leave the Tower, so I do my work from here. Sometimes we make choices, and we don’t realize they’re permanent until it’s too late.”
“I’m sorry.” For what it’s worth, I really am. I’m beginning to understand why someone wouldn’t want to do this forever. I’m also beginning to understand that not once this whole time have I ever thought about tonight as the horrible thing I’ll never let happen in my life again. No, I’ve been thinking about it as the first time things got bad.
The first time.
“C’est la vie,” she says. “I’m fine. I’ve made peace with it. I just want you to know what your choices mean before you make them.”
“Um, thanks, but I don’t think I have a choice anymore,” I say. Doc Impossible looks at me, confused. “Utopia knows my real name.”
Her face twists. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, hun. That’s terrible.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Is there something we can do to keep her quiet once we beat her? Maybe offer her a nicer prison cell?”
“Unfortunately, yes, that’s about the best…we can…huh.” Doc’s face goes blank. I can see the wheels turning in her head. A half second later, she bolts up off the couch, staring off into nowhere. Her hands come up to her mouth in horror. Her voice is quiet and shaking. “Oh. I can—I can fix this.”
“You can? How?” If there’s some way to keep her from attacking me at school or something, I’m all for it.
Doc Impossible looks at me, confused for a moment before she seems to remember where she is. “I mean…well, she hasn’t come at you at home yet, so she probably won’t unless you push her. We can make her silence part of a plea deal or…I don’t know…we’ll fix this. Okay? We’ll fix it. There’s some guest condos on the fifteenth floor, you can sleep here tonight.”
“Oh, damn!” I say, getting up off the couch. “What time is it?”
“It’s about three in the morning,” says Doc Impossible absently. She seems to be making a checklist in her head, counting tasks on her fingers.
“I need to be getting home.” I slip my mask and cowl back over my face. “My parents will freak if they wake up and I’m not there.”
Doc Impossible seems more put together and confident again by the moment. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, thanks for everything. I’m probably going to cut school tomorrow to come see Calamity, is that okay?”
“Yes. Danny, be careful. Utopia is dangerous.”
“I know.”
Oh God. Do I ever know.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The wind snaps at my cape as I power across town. The lights of the sleeping city slip past and by now I don’t have trouble finding my street from one hundred feet up in the dark. From above, my neighborhood is row after row of small cottages and bungalows, their windows dark and blinds pulled.
Except the lights in my house are on.
A thousand horrible possibilities jump to mind. They could have found I was gone. Or Utopia could be holding them hostage, and waiting for me to come back. Or she might have—no, she said she didn’t like to kill, and she could have ended me. My heart rate slows as I tell myself this. I have to believe they’re not dead.
The urge to burst through the door at the speed of sound is almost overwhelming, but new instincts for caution are taking root in me. I circle the house twice from as low as thirty feet and try to see if anything is amiss. The blinds are drawn, but yellow light spills out from the windows anyway. When I check the lattice, I don’t think I see anything inside that looks unusual, but looking on the other side of solid matter can be difficult.
My bedroom light is on. They definitely know I’m gone. Crap.
Crap, crap, crap.
I hang in the air in front of my house and three stories up. Utopia was pretty banged up when she left. She’d be a fool to face me again with two broken arms, even with her inversion beam. But I have no idea how fast she can repair herself. Not this fast, right?
Then there’s the other possibility, that Mom and Dad figured out I was gone all on their own. That’s almost worse. I can’t go in the front door dressed like this, but if I go into my room through the window, then they’ll want to know how I got in the house once I got home. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way out of this.
The front door opens. A figure steps out, dark and wearing some strange draping garment. It turns to say something to my father as it leaves. The light doesn’t seem to catch the person as clearly as it should, but when it turns in profile I see a raven perched on its shoulder. Graywytch.
She’s fifty yards down the street from my house, almost to the corner of the intersection, when I slam down from the sky. My feet crack the pavement as I land, and I’ve got murder on my face. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Putting an end to this tragic farce, young man.” If Graywytch is nervous about making me angry, she doesn’t show it. “You nearly got that girl killed tonight. This needs to end. There’s still time for you to do the right thing.”
“You told them?” The sheer gall of it rips my breath away. All this talk about how the Legion protects secret identities, and then poof, she takes mine away from me.
“Talk to your parents, Daniel.” The moonlight and the light from the streetlamps don’t hit her the way they hit everything around us but through some kind of magic leaves her all in blackness except for her eyes. They are gray and very tired. “They want to help you. Goddess only knows why, but they seem to think there’s still hope you’ll step back from your perversion. Talk to them, and when you’re ready, come to me and we can discuss how to remove your powers and return you to your proper self.”
I find my voice again. I find it to be much louder than I intended. “You had no right—!”
She cuts across me. “Don’t you dare speak to me of rights. You are the purest distillation of an evil that has haunted half the human race since the priests killed the Goddess.”
“What did I ever do to you?” I shout.
“It’s not about what you’ve done. It’s about what you’ll do. Dreadnought cannot be a transwoman, I won’t allow it. The damage you could do to women once the media gets wind of you would be incalculable. Already you’ve nearly killed one of us. How many more must suffer to satisfy your sickness?”
“Snitching goes both ways. When the Legion hears about—” And then my voice disappears. I don’t mean I stop talking—I can feel the vibrations in my throat and mouth. But my voice is gone. Once upon a time, Graywytch casting a spell on me would have been terrifying. Then I fought Utopia and learned what real fear is like. This is petty.
“Hears about what?” asks Graywytch with a smirk. “Do you think I would let you tell them? Do you think I would let them believe you even if you did? This is between you and me now. There will be no more muddying the waters. No more playing on unearned sympathy. You will never be one of us. Real women—”
As if moving off the topic of the Legion has freed my voice, I find that I can shout at her, “It’s not my fault I’m trans! You think I wanted to be born this way?”
“Not really,” says Graywytch. “I don’t blame you any more than I would blame an ebola victim. Society has fed your generation so many toxic ideas about gender, it’s only natural some of you would crack. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t dangerous. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be expunged. You reify the holocaust of gender, you invade my sex, and you poison my sisters by your simple presence. You cannot possibly understand what it means to be a woman, and you rape us all when you try. If you will not surrender the mantle,
I will be forced to destroy you.”
“You wanna try?” I stalk forward. “Any time, bitch!”
“The instant resort to violence.” Graywytch seems to collapse in on herself, and the night’s shadows become somehow more solid, even alive. They rush to embrace her, and she’s gone. Her voice comes to me as if from a great distance. “How essentially male.”
“Coward! We’ll beat you!”
For a moment, I think she’s gone. When her voice comes again, it is tight with fury. “Magic leaves no fingerprints, Daniel. You will surrender your powers, or by the end of the month you will die in agony and damn the mantle if it is lost. Nobody will believe you. Nobody will help you. Nobody can. Not your parents. Not the Legion. Not your fists. Your only hope is surrender. I will leave you to think on that.”
A sudden gust of wind whips up and pulls at my cape. Dust and dead leaves swirl, and then settle. I turn to take off, intending to fly straight back to Legion Tower to settle accounts. I will break her.
“Danny?” calls Dad. “Danny, is that you?”
He’s standing under a streetlight in front of our house in boxers and a tank top, staring at me, squinting like he’s not quite sure he sees through the darkness correctly. He sounds shaken, and scared. Screw him. My feet leave the ground, but Mom’s voice halts me.
“Danny, please. Come home.”
Dammit.
My feet touch the sidewalk again. It’s a long, slow walk to my house. When I pass into the light from the streetlamp nearest our house, and they see me clearly, they draw back a little.
I pull back my mask and cowl. “Hi.”
“Get inside before somebody sees you,” snaps Dad. Good old Pop, always reliable.
We file into the house, and he bolts the door. There’s something in the air, some crackle of tension. Dad turns and looks at me, lips tight. Mom is trying to fold up into nowhere in a corner. She’s got a clear line to the kitchen door from here; I imagine she’ll duck out quickly once this gets going.
“Have a seat,” commands Dad, pointing at the couch. That’s a thing he does when he wants to show how big and tough he is.
I look at the couch. Look at him. Sigh. “Earlier tonight I saw my best friend get her arm burned off with a laser cannon, so if it’s all the same to you, can this wait until tomorrow?”
“You won’t speak to me like that, son,” says Dad.
“I’m your daughter.” I’m just as surprised as he is that I’ve found a spine at last.
Dad puts his hands on his hips, takes a deep breath, and blows it out through his nose. It doesn’t scare me the way it used to. It feels weird. “So, you stole Dreadnought’s powers when he died.”
“He gave them to me. He was dying, and he gave them to me so they wouldn’t be lost. That’s what changed my body. Not any supervillain.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” asks Mom. It takes me by surprise. She doesn’t normally talk during times like this.
“Because…” I trail off. It’s a harder question than I expected. I never really considered telling them, and I never stopped to ask myself why. After a few moments, I find an answer. It doesn’t feel like the whole answer, but it’s part of it, at least. “Because I was scared you’d try to take them away from me.” Like everything else I ever wanted to be.
“You don’t need superpowers to impress me, son,” says Dad. There’s a look on his face that’s hard to process. Something like sympathy and concern, but that can’t be right. “You don’t need them to impress anybody. You’re just fine without them. It didn’t make sense, before. All those things you were saying, all that nonsense about being a girl—it was crazy. But now I get it. Daniel, pretending to be something you’re not just so you can hold on to some power that doesn’t even belong to you, that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for your soul.”
“I’m not pretending, and it is my power. He gave it to me.”
“Graywytch said that without the powers, you’d go back to being the way you were,” Mom says.
Of course she did. “Nobody knows if that’s true or not,” I say.
“Have you tried?” asks Dad.
“Why would I want to risk it? I’m happy this way. I told you, I’m transgender, and this is the best transition I could ever hope for.”
“No, Danny. No, that’s not true,” says Dad, shaking his head. “We raised you better than that. We kept you away from all that queer stuff, we made sure you weren’t neglected. You’re not transwhatever. No more lies, son. I know you’re scared, and you feel like you’re backed into a corner. It’s okay. Just tell us the truth. We’re your parents. We love you no matter what. You don’t need powers to feel special. You’ll always be special to us.”
My eyes start to prickle. I clench my jaw. That bitch. That horrible bitch. I’ve been waiting years for him to say something like this. Seems like my whole life, all I ever wanted was for him to tell me it was okay to be who I am.
Now he is.
And it hurts like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
My vision is blurry. My throat is tight. Dad steps forward, arms wide for one of those stupid manly hugs he’s obsessed with.
“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
Dad jerks to a halt, eyes wide. We’re all surprised. His face darkens and Mount Screamer gets ready to blow again. But now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. “I am not your son!” I shout. “I have never been your son! I am your daughter! And you have never once told me that you loved me!”
“Now wait just a goddamn minute!” he shouts. “We’re trying to help you, you ungrateful little faggot! We want you to be who you really are and not some—”
“Don’t talk to me like you give a shit about who I am! I told you who I am, and you called me a liar!” I am shaking with rage, and my feet do not touch the ground anymore. “And you knew! You knew I didn’t want to be a man, that’s why you forced all that shit on me! Well, I’m never going back! I’m a girl, and they’re my superpowers, and I’m not changing back, and there isn’t a goddamn thing you can do about it!”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little selfish?” asks Mom.
The world lurches out from underneath me. “What?”
“You’ve said what you want,” she says. Her arms are crossed, her shoulders pulled up, but she’s looking me dead in the eye. “We want our son.”
“Mom, no.” My feet touch ground again, but it doesn’t feel solid. Everything is sliding away, spiraling down into chaos.
“Yes, Danny. I thought we just had to make the best of it. But you’ve been lying to us this whole time, making this huge decision that affects all of us all on your own, and not even telling us what options we had. It’s got to stop.”
“It’s my decision!” This is insane. The world has gone mad. How can this be anything but my decision?
“You’re only fifteen,” she says. “You’re too young to make this kind of choice. You need to give Dreadnought’s mantle back to the Legion, and when you’re eighteen, if this is what you really want, we can talk about it.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice down. “I’m a girl, and I always have been. The difference is now you can see it.”
“You don’t make the rules, young man!” barks Dad. “Your mother is right, you are being very selfish right now! As long as you’re going to act this way, you are not welcome in this house.”
Someone has sucked the air right out of me. I gawp at him for a moment. “You can’t do that! Mom, tell him! He can’t do that!”
Mom looks at Dad, and then back at me. She closes her eyes, and forces the words out. “I’m sorry, Danny, I really am.”
“So what’s it going to be, huh, tough guy?” asks Dad. “You gonna keep throwing this fit?”
I clench my fists, painful tight. “I am never going back.”
“Fine then.” Dad walks over to the front door and rips it open. “Leave.”
From way at the back of my skull, I watch my bo
dy turn and leave the house I grew up in. The door slams behind me.
Chapter Thirty
My eyes snap open. Daylight filters through the trees.
The nightmares came thick and deep last night. In them, I’m a monster, but I don’t know what I look like because I can’t see myself in the mirror. Everywhere around me, people are getting hurt and killed, and it’s all my fault. No one will tell me why.
The dream’s details burn off like morning fog, leaving me with a disquieted feeling. The forest on the flanks of Mount Rainier smells of pine and mud. Birds chirp and sing. A bug I don’t recognize is exploring the surface of my kneecap. Everything that happened last night comes back to me in a rush, and I consider rolling over and trying to go back to sleep. The pile of pine needles I’ve assembled isn’t all that comfortable, but there doesn’t seem to be any point in going anywhere. My stomach gurgles, giving me a good reason to get up.
Check inventory. I have one cell phone, one hypertech supersuit, and…uh, that’s it. No money. No ID. No schoolbooks. No computer. No place to stay. No food to eat. My parents really kicked me out of the house with nothing but the clothes on my back. Even sitting here, living it, it still doesn’t feel quite real.
I should have let him die. I regret that he’s still alive, and I’m ashamed that I regret that, but I’m also frustrated that I’m ashamed because it’s not like I don’t have reasons. This sucks.
Sleeping in pine needles has left me covered in patches of sap, which have helpfully picked up all the dirt they touched. A ways off, I can hear the rushing of a stream. I push myself to my feet and get some altitude, skimming treetops until I reach the water. Up close it turns out to be less a stream and more a small river. After rubbing the patches of sap off with handfuls of dirt, I take my phone out and set it on a rock. The water is grippingly cold, but it doesn’t bother me. Extremes of temperature are more interesting than uncomfortable to me now. I’m spin drying above the river, whirling so fast the world smears into green and brown blurs, when it occurs to me I should be more upset. Like, I’m out here in the woods because I’m homeless, right?
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