We step onto the convention floor and get slammed by an almost palpable wall of noise. A thousand conversations burbled through with video playback and all sorts of distant music clashing in the background. It’s difficult to get a sense of the size of the place at first. Right away, colorful tech demos and flashy ads grab at my eyes. The convention space is cavernous, the ceiling vaulted way up high. A few people sail through the air rather than making their way through the maze of booths, so I pop up about twenty feet to get the lay of the land.
Everything a superhero could possibly want to buy is spread out beneath me. Rows and rows of booths and pavilions stretch across the floor, draped with glowing holograms and shifting signs beckoning capes to try their wares.
Bystander insurance. Hypertech components. Mystical ingredients. Training DVDs and seminar packages. An entire row dedicated to earbud radios. A row of government booths offering liaison contracts and operating licenses for capes who want to take their work to the international scene. Weapons, handcuffs, and a dozen kinds of grappling hooks.
There’s an entire block of costume fitters, tailors, and designers. Some have fancy hypertech fitting booths, with lasers to take a person’s exact dimensions for a truly skintight fit. There’s a booth wreathed in shadows and fog, where a gnarled old witch sits behind trays of enchanted jewelry to accent and supplement a mystically inclined superhero’s arsenal. And there are plain old tailors with pins crimped between their teeth, holding measuring tapes up to capes who stand on stools in front of mirrors.
It’s the goddamn promised land.
I shoot back down to land next to Doc as she steps into the light and noise, and I’m practically shaking with excitement.
“Why don’t they have this every year?” I ask. The thought that I’ll have go two years without seeing this again is suddenly loathsome.
“There’s not enough of a market to support an annual event,” says Doc, popping a small lollipop into her mouth. She’s trying to quit smoking, which she could do with a few seconds of concentration if she were willing to edit her own configuration files, but she’s not. She says it doesn’t count unless she does it the human way. “What do you want to see first?”
We do a whirlwind tour of the convention floor, trying to get a feel for where we want to return for some serious shopping. One of the vendors is selling a set of matched revolvers with built-in laser sights that would be perfect for Calamity, and a pang goes through me. I invited her to come, but she brushed me off. This is nothing but a whitecape circle jerk, she said, and waved me away with her prosthetic hand. Ever since she lost her arm, she’s been different. Distant. Harder. Less willing to trust. Being wounded meant more than becoming one-handed for her, but she’s vague about the specifics. When I asked, all she would say is that even hypertech can’t fix everything.
I buy the guns and have them sent to my room.
All throughout this, people are calling out to me, shaking my hand, introducing themselves. Even capes think it’s cool to meet Dreadnought, I guess. It feels sort of weird, like I haven’t earned this, but I smile and try to remember everyone’s name. Nobody seems to mind that I’m hanging out with Doc Impossible.
We’re at an intersection, looking at the schedule of panels to see if there are any talks we want to attend. The panels here have titles like Whitecapes Who Aren’t White: Modern Challenges for Superheroes of Color and Passing The Torch: When Capes Get Old. I’m trying to decide between #CapesLikeUs: Do Superheroes Belong on Social Media? and Are Graycapes a Menace, an Asset, or Both? when Doc tugs at my cape and points. The crowd is parting, and a living legend steps up to us.
Red Steel is about six-and-a-half feet tall. His black hair has been shot through with silver, and he’s got wrinkles like oak bark, but he still carries himself with the confidence of a man a quarter of his age. He’s wearing the classic Cossack pants and silk shirt he made his debut in, but the red in his shirt isn’t the scarlet of socialism triumphant. It’s the dark rust of a dream denied. Since the fall of Communism, he’s made his way as a high-end mercenary, living off the worst parts of the capitalism he spent his life fighting.
“Holy shit,” I mutter.
“So you are the new Dreadnought,” he says. His voice is deep and carries just a touch of his Russian accent.
“Uh, yeah, that’s me.” People are stopping to watch. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised he’d seek me out, but I still feel very small all of the sudden. This guy is the real deal, way more than I am. Red Steel has fought every Dreadnought since the first. We keep dying. He’s still standing. Often enemies, sometimes allies, the story of Dreadnought can’t be told without talking about Red Steel. I hold out my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Red Steel chuckles and shakes my hand. He’s got a grip like a power vice. His gaze is sharp, and I realize I’m being tested. I squeeze back, hard. Hard enough that if he wasn’t who he was, I’d turn his hand to mush. He nods.
“I wonder what we shall fight about, you and I?”
My stomach flops over. “I’m sorry?”
“I fight Dreadnoughts, little girl,” he says. “All of them. Or did you think you were somehow different?”
“Oh, uh, well, just don’t do anything bad in New Port, then.”
Red smiles. “We shall see, yes?” He nods at Doc Impossible. “Doctor.”
“Red,” she says, voice clipped.
Red Steel turns and walks away, the crowd parting before him like waves before a ship’s prow.
“Well that was cool,” I say.
“Danny, he threatened you.”
“So? I can take him.”
“Maybe,” says Doc. “He’s more experienced than you. I’ll send you his dossier.”
“Already read it.” I’m a superhero fangirl. Of course I read all the intelligence reports about other capes that Uncle Sam is willing to give me.
We poke around the convention floor a bit longer and then wander over to the food court in the next hall over. I’m staking out a table while Doc grabs the food when a familiar voice booms out at me across the crowded floor.
“Danielle! Over here!” He’s enormous, easily seven feet tall and nearly half as broad. He waves over the heads of the crowd.
“Hi, Magma!” I call as I pop up into the air and fly over. Magma is leaning on a cane, and his cheeks seem sunken under his wiry brush of a beard. The nerve gas Malice hit him with last year didn’t do him any good, and he’s had to retire. He went off on a soul-searching trip after he finally got out of the hospital, and from what I’ve heard, it’s kind of amazing he made it down here. “How have you been?”
“I’m getting along, I’m getting along,” he says. “How’s caping suiting you?”
“It’s amazing. I feel good.”
“Excellent,” says Magma, smiling. “I figured you’d do well. Here, let me introduce you to—” He turns and beckons to someone over the crowd. He starts forward, cane and step, cane and step. “Aloe, Aloe come over here. I want to introduce you to Dreadnought.”
Magma brings me to a table, and as we get close a devastatingly beautiful woman stands and makes her way over to us. She’s green. Every part of her—skin, hair, lips, eyes, everything but her clothes and her teeth. All shades of green. I know who she is immediately, and it takes effort not to tense up. I’ve read her dossier too. She’s a nasty piece of work.
“Aloe, I’d like you to meet Dreadnought.”
“Wait, aren’t you a—?” I start.
“Supervillain?” she says with an arched eyebrow. “Yes. I’m reformed.” We shake hands. Her palm is cool and dry.
“Aloe and I met when I went to look in on Chlorophyll,” says Magma. “She was already on parole and going straight, so we decided to give it a shot.”
Aloe purses her lips, and I get the feeling she doesn’t agree with that interpretation of events. But then she leans against him and goes up on her tiptoes so he can bend down and kiss her. When they part, I look closely at Magma’s eye
s. The reports say you can tell who she has mind-controlled because their pupils often don’t match, one dilated more than the other. She notices me staring and starts to giggle.
Magma frowns. “Danny, she’s gone straight. She wouldn’t do that kind of thing anymore.”
“Just being safe, big guy.” I glance at Aloe. “No offense.”
“None taken,” says Aloe. “You saved my brother. That counts for a lot.”
“How is Chlorophyll?”
“Oh, he’s here with us,” she says, turning to look at the table she came from. “Hey, honey, come over here, I want to introduce you to someone.”
Through a brief gap in the crowd, I glimpse a man as green as his sister get up from a table and come over to us. Chlorophyll looks much the same as the last time I saw him. The scar on his forehead and the bald spot in his hair don’t even stand out that much. But his body language is all wrong. The Chlorophyll I knew was all languid grace and open gazes. This man has his shoulders drawn in tight, and he clutches a coloring book in one hand, a box of crayons in the other.
“Scott, hon, this is Dreadnought.”
“Hi,” says Chlorophyll. “Have we met?”
It feels like I’m listening to someone else answer with my voice. “Yes, briefly.”
“Oh.” Sorrow, frustration, rage. It all flits across his face between one moment and the next, there and gone. “Sorry, I don’t remember you. I don’t remember lots of things from before. Before I got hurt, I mean.”
Aloe puts her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay.” He looks over at her, his expression grateful and relieved.
Utopia shot Chlorophyll in the head while she wore Doc Impossible’s body like a puppet. To be honest, I didn’t like him when we first met. I thought he was too keen to use me and not interested enough in standing up for me. But right here, right now, I wish Utopia was on the loose again, just so I’d have an excuse to beat the shit out of her one more time.
“Do you want to see my coloring?” he asks me.
“Sure,” I say.
He opens the coloring book and shows me his work. “The doctors say this is good for me.”
“It’s very nice.” It looks like a five-year-old did it.
“Thanks.”
“Danny, where the hell are you?” Doc’s voice asks from inside my ear. I’ve got an earbud radio I wear all the time now. It’s actually superglued in there, only comes out once a week for cleaning, and is all but invisible from the outside.
I put a finger to my ear. “I’m about three tables closer to the door from where you left me. Come on over.”
Doc makes her way through the crowd, and it all goes straight to Hell.
Chlorophyll looks up, and the crayons slip out of his hand and spill across the ground.
“It’s her.” He starts to shake. “She’s the one who hurt me.”
“Oh shit,” says Doc, going pale.
Magma’s face darkens. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Don’t let her hurt me again!” says Chlorophyll.
Aloe steps between them, her back to her brother, arms spread to defend him. “Get away from us!”
I am such an idiot.
Doc spins on her heel and starts to push back through the crowd.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” asks Magma as he hobbles after Doc Impossible.
She glances back over her shoulder, seems torn between waiting for him and leaving as fast as she can. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was over—”
“You shouldn’t even be here!” Magma says.
“Hey, wait, Doc has every right to be here,” I say, catching up.
“Danny, don’t,” says Doc with a warning look. “Magma, I’m sorry. Really.”
“Apologies don’t mean much for things like this,” says Magma. “He wakes up screaming half the nights, did you know that?”
Doc mutters something else and disappears through the ring of curious onlookers. Magma watches her go with an expression like looming thunderclouds.
I hit him in the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him a little. “What the hell was that about? She didn’t do anything wrong!”
“She lied, Danny,” says Magma. “She lied to us about who she was, about what she was, and she didn’t tell us Malice was still alive. If she had, maybe—things might have worked out differently.”
My chest feels all clenched up. This is all wrong. It’s not supposed to go this way. “She was scared.”
“We trusted her!” he snaps. “All that time we trusted her, all that time we let her be one of us. She stopped wanting to do fieldwork, and we let her stay on. She stopped wanting to leave the tower, and we let her stay on. We never asked why. We never told her she wasn’t pulling her weight, because we trusted her. Because we thought we understood what she was going through, we thought we understood why. She lied to us, Danny! For years. To our faces.”
The hard, hot nugget of defiance in my chest that tells me I can never back down again flares up. I square my shoulders and look Magma dead in the eye. “Dreadnought knew.”
“What?” Magma seems caught off guard.
“Dreadnought, the last one. He knew.”
He shakes his head. “How do you know that?”
“I can see things, like the underside of reality, all the strings holding it together,” I say. “When I look at you in the lattice, I see your bones, and where your nerves are all clotted up with damage. When I look at her, it’s obvious she’s an android. I only met her a few times before she told me, and I never had a reason to check her out in the lattice, but Dreadnought lived in the same building as she did for, what, five years? There’s no way he didn’t realize what she was. He kept her secret because he knew it wasn’t his secret to tell.”
Magma is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks again, his voice is calmer, but no less firm. “Then he made a mistake, and Carapace and Valkyrja paid with their lives.”
“That’s not—”
“You’re right. It isn’t. Death isn’t fair. I’m not going to tell you who to work with, Danielle. And if you still want to talk, I am always here to listen. But me and her? We’re finished, and I need you to respect that.” Magma turns to head back to Aloe and Chlorophyll. She’s hugging her brother tight as he shakes, whispering into his ear as he presses his face into the crook of her neck.
We’ve drawn quite the crowd. I feel the weight of eyes on me.
“What the hell are you all looking at?” I snap at the onlookers. Most decide to find something else to pay attention to. I pop up into the air and scan for Doc Impossible. She’s over at the exit to the rest of the hotel, sucking on a cigarette like her life depends on it.
I set down next to her. “Doc, look, maybe we can go over there and—”
“Danny, let it be, okay?”
“But I only wanted—”
Doc explodes. “We’re not all friends anymore, Danny! It doesn’t work that way!” She seems to sag, goes to take another drag on her cigarette and discovers she’s broken it between her fingers. “I wish it did, but you aren’t going to fix this. Let it die.” She drops the broken cigarette on the floor and grinds it out with the toe of her boot. “I’m going back to my room. Do whatever you want.”
“Doc, wait—”
“Go…go have fun, Danny,” Doc calls over her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
She leaves me there feeling very young and very alone.
Chapter Three
I try to have fun. I really, genuinely try. Wandering up and down the aisles, looking at everything for sale, I hope to get back in the mood. I’m paid a ridiculous amount by the city government of New Port, and I had about fifty thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket on the way down here. But now it’s difficult to care. Everything is sour now. I end up back in the eating area, sitting at a table with a stack of catalogs for superhero gear, resting my chin on my palm and flipping pages.
Someone sits down across from me.
“I kind of want to be alone right now,” I say without looking up.
“Oh man, I am so disappointed about that,” says a voice I know, and I look up and wilt. Crap. I totally forgot. “I was really looking forward to meeting the first transgender superhero.”
Kinetiq sits with their arms crossed on the table in front of them and their lips pressed tight. Kinetiq is genderqueer, a nonbinary person who is neither male nor female. They’ve got their long black hair shaved like a horse’s mane, and their Kevlar vest is strapped down tight over a chest binder. Their arms are bare except for a pair of fingerless gloves.
“Oh shit.”
“Hell yeah, ‘oh shit,’” they say.
“I forgot, I’m sorry.” I’d promised them that when I went on The Late Show that I’d mention that I wasn’t the first transgender superhero, as a lot of cis people seem to think I am. I’m just the most famous. In fact, trans people who get superpowers are way more likely to become superheroes than cis people who get powers, because we tend to already be alienated from mainstream society, so the sacrifices of being a hero mean less to us. But my nerves had paralyzed me, and it completely slipped my mind until I was leaving the set.
“Oh, well then, I guess that’s all okay,” says Kinetiq. “Or, wait. No, it’s not. At all.”
“I’m sorry. Really.”
“I don’t care about your apology, Dreadnought. I care about the oxygen you keep sucking out of the room. We were finally getting somewhere, and then you come in and bigfoot the whole movement!”
“It’s not my fault that the press is interested in me,” I mutter.
“No, but it is your fault that you don’t use your platform to increase visibility for the rest of us!”
“Look, I know I screwed up, but I am really not in the mood for this right now.”
“That’s a real tragedy.” They hold a hand up to their ear. “You hear that? My heart is breaking.”
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