One of the side doors on the tilt engine slides open and the jet tips up on one wing.
“Oh no,” leaks out of me as I realize what she and Doc are planning. “No, no, no!”
“Hells yeah!” shouts Calamity. She wraps an arm around me and charges the hole. We leave the sky bridge.
For a frozen moment of terror we hang in space.
The tilt-engine roars beneath us, and we’re falling through the door, deck and ceiling rotating about us even as we drop through the cabin to the other side. The door slams shut, and we both tumble against the back wall as Doc jerks back on the control yoke and pulls us into a spinning vertical climb.
“Strap in,” she shouts as the world spins outside the small windows. Calamity and I claw our way into the jump seats and pull the harnesses around our shoulders. The very instant I get mine latched shut Doc kicks in the afterburners, and we are leaving.
“Kinetiq, break off and get out of there. We’ve got her,” Doc is saying through the radio. Everything is suddenly calm. The jet judders and vibrates with the muted roar of engines, but we’re level and stable. Doc twists in her seat to look back through the cockpit door. “Are you okay?”
“I…” I’m suddenly dizzy. “I think so.”
Doc nods, concern and anger mixing on her face. I am so worthless. This was so stupid. Nobody’s ever going to trust me again.
And I still don’t have my powers.
Chapter Seventeen
At Mach 2, it only takes about thirty minutes to get back to New Port. Thirty minutes is a long, long time when you’re so mortified you wish you could pull your head down into your chest like a turtle. I’m blushing so hard it feels like if any more blood goes into my cheeks, they’re going to pop. Eyes fixed rigidly at the floor. Jaw clamped shut.
People ask me questions, and I barely hear them, barely want to hear them. Shake my head no to everything, hunch down into my arms crossed over my stomach. At some point, Calamity takes her jacket off and lays it across me, and I almost start weeping. With my forehead against the bulkhead, I bury my face in my hands and try to forget I exist.
Please, Sarah, just ignore me. Just pretend I’m not here. You’re better than me and you always have been and you don’t need to pretend I’m not pathetic because I’m pretty sure we all just proved that I couldn’t pull my weight when it really counted.
I begged her. I looked Graywytch in the eyes and I begged her.
This isn’t who I wanted to be. I thought I had changed, that I was strong now. But I’m a coward. And now I know I always will be.
I hang my head and screw my eyes shut and wait for this to all be over. One way or the other.
My scalp stings, and a nasty headache finds me as the horizon outside the window dips and we come in for a sharp landing. The ground comes up, up, up and then past as we’re touching down inside a deep pit. Above us, the roof winches close, and when the massive doors meet, a hologram will flicker to life and make this all seem like an empty gravel field in one of the disused industrial parks at the outskirts of the New Port metropolitan area.
This used to be a facility owned and operated by a hypertech merchant called The Artificer. Since he’s dead and nobody was using the place, Doc moved in and set it up as a safehouse/airfield. When Utopia killed The Artificer, she used her inversion beam, which mangles the underlying structure of reality. I had to spend weeks tying up the frayed strings of the lattice one by one before any of the equipment in here would work properly for any length of time. Once I was so proud of it, but now I couldn’t care less. My fingers won’t stay away from my collar for long. I need to get this thing off, and then hope my powers come back.
What if they don’t?
My fingers move away from the collar.
We touch down, and the engines die. For a moment there’s only silence as Doc shuts down the flight systems and starts the automated ground crew into action.
“We’re home,” says Calamity, subdued in the aftermath of an adrenaline high.
My voice is barely a whisper. “Yeah.”
Doc pops her hatch and hops out of the jet. Calamity and I are still unlatching our harnesses when Doc wrenches open the side door and drags me from the jet and into a tight, trembling hug that knocks her glasses askew. After a moment, I hug her back.
“Danny, I’m so sorry.”
“It was my fault,” I mumble into her shoulder.
Doc takes me by the shoulders and looks me dead in the eye. “Don’t you ever start thinking that way. What they did is not your fault. In any way.”
I can’t maintain eye contact.
“Danielle, I mean it. They chose to hurt you. That’s on them.” Her voice gets hard. “And we’re going to make them pay. Come on, I need to get you cleaned up.”
She puts an arm around my shoulder and helps me limp to the section of cots and dressers we have set up for overnight stays. Every step twists pebbles of broken glass in my feet. When Doc sees my bloody footprints, she cries out, “Why didn’t you tell me your feet were cut?”
“I didn’t want to be any more trouble,” I mumble, mortified. Footsteps behind me, and then another Doc Impossible is there, identical in every way to the first, and they each get an arm under my shoulder and a hand under my thigh and carry me the rest of the way. I can’t stop looking between them, surprised. Doc never uses more than one body at a time. It’s against her android rules, the self-imposed rules she follows to act more human. Calamity falls in behind us, curiously silent. She probably wants her jacket back.
The Doctors Impossible set me on a cot and click a lamp on. One of them pulls a crash cart up and starts running leads to my arms and chest. The other fusses with the stinging place in my hair that’s matted with blood. Electric clippers are produced from somewhere and she starts mowing a row in my hair.
“Do you have a headache?”
“Yes.”
“Where?” They’ve gone clinical, and it’s more of a relief than I can describe.
“Sort of all over. Well, the sides.”
“Are you dizzy?”
“No.”
“Nauseous?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Don’t freak out, but you’ve been shot in the head. Just a graze, but there’s the chance of a concussion.” She holds up her hand, and the skin on her palm slides open, a lens peeking out. It lights up and she shines bright light into both my eyes, asks me to track it up and down and side to side. “I want to do some tests with you, okay?”
“Sure,” I say, a little stunned. A third Doc Impossible has arrived now, this one forgoing her traditional lab coat for a full-body ensemble of carapace armor and an automatic shotgun. She paces restlessly around the perimeter of the living area.
Calamity stands off to one side. She’s got her arms crossed, then in her pockets, then crossed again. She’s looking anywhere but at me. I watch her trying to figure out the polite way to ask for her jacket back so she can finally get out of here, and feel sick.
One of the Docs tending to me notices, and stands up to pull a privacy screen on wheels from against the wall and make a little cubicle around my bed. “Sorry, Calamity, I’ve got to examine her.”
The Doc next to me gently takes the jacket from me and hands it off to her counterpart who passes it to Calamity behind the screen. One of them hands me a blanket to wrap around my shoulders in its place.
“Uh, do you need me to stick around?” Calamity says.
I shake my head. Please, just go.
The Doc with me sees this, and the one who has her back to me says, “I think Danielle needs to be alone for a little bit. We’ll call if there’s anything else.”
“I…okay. Sure. Yeah. Sure,” says Calamity. I hear her boots clicking and hang my head. She’ll never talk to me again, obviously.
“Sarah,” calls out one of the Docs. “Thank you. Really.”
After a long moment, Calamity replies, “Anytime.”
The door to the stairs open and then shut
again.
“She thinks I’m a total loser,” I say.
“I can pretty much guarantee you you’re wrong about that, kiddo,” mutters the Doc picking broken glass out of my feet.
“I am a loser. I don’t even have my powers anymore.”
The Doc doing the scalp wound leans down, tilts my chin toward her with a finger. “Danny, nobody who matters only cared about your powers.”
My shoulders curl in. “I can’t be Dreadnought anymore.”
“We don’t know that,” she says firmly. “Do you know how he took them away?”
“No. It was…one moment they were there. Then they weren’t.”
One of them is writing this down on a clipboard. “He didn’t touch you or shoot you with anything?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Okay, so he’s not a drainer. This collar they put on you, could that have something to do with it?” The one with the clipboard is asking the question, but it’s the one dealing with my scalp wound who runs her finger over the collar. It’s weird, seeing Doc in full android mode. With the staples finished, the Doc at my head sets the stapler aside and begins running a neurological scanner that looks like a flashlight across the surface of my scalp.
“Maybe. I’m…I’m kind of scared to find out.” Graywytch’s torture brought the lattice into sharp relief in my head, but I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t engage with it. What if I’m broken? Part of me wants this collar off yesterday. But a bigger part was hoping I could avoid the issue for a while. Luckily, I grew up in a house full of shouting, so if there’s anything I know how to do right, it’s avoid the issue. “Um, if you don’t mind me asking, why are there three of you?”
They don’t answer for a while. The one next to me sprays my scalp with something cold, and the pain in my scalp recedes into a chilly numbness. As the silence curdles, the one with the clipboard says, “I got tired of people I care about getting hurt because I was too scared to stop pretending I’m human. I’m not. It’s time to stop playing.”
“Oh.” I reach out and take one of her hands. “Thank you.”
Their faces get troubled. “Danielle, I am so sorry.”
“For what?”
The tactical Doc has her back turned, but she’s gone very still. The one running the scanner across my scalp stops working. “They had you for days,” says clipboard Doc. “It should never have taken me so long to realize something had happened. I…” Doc’s face cracks into tears. “I’m sorry. I was drunk. Even after Charlie came to tell me something was wrong, it took me hours to sober up. And…and look what they did to you.” She’s not working on my wound anymore. Doc sets the scanner aside, folds her arms around my shoulders, hugs me. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say softly.
“It’s not!” snaps Doc. “You deserved a better friend than me.”
“You got me out. That’s what matters. It’s not like I’ve never dropped the ball before.”
Doc’s mouth twists up in a bittersweet smile. “You’re really something else, kid.”
“Yeah, well. Nobody’s perfect. I’m sorry for that crack about you helping me find something at the bottom of a bottle.”
Doc wipes her eyes. “I’m sorry for being a drunk.”
We sit there together, staring at the wall. Staple Doc picks up the scanner and finishes up—I don’t have a concussion after all, which is one bit of luck in an otherwise terrible week—before she wanders off to work on getting the tilt-engine ready to fly again. Tactical Doc sets off with a purpose, says something about false positives on the motion sensors. The remaining Doc sits down in front of the medical computer I’m hooked up to and starts running tests on my heart and nervous system.
Whenever I look at her in the lattice, it’s obvious she’s not human. Her bones are basically fancy plastic. Her brain is synthetic gel. She’s got a power cell next to her heart, which is itself made of a weird mix of hypertech materials I can’t identify. Doctor Impossible is emphatically not human. There’s a contradiction here. One I’ve mulled over sullenly a few times in the past months as her addictions got the better of her and made life difficult time and again. Finally, I work up the courage to ask.
“Doc, do you mind if I ask why you’re an alcoholic?”
She shrugs. “It’s bad form for a psychologist to self-diagnose, but I’d have to say that it’s a coping mechanism for my inability to process the guilt from having murdered some of my friends. And from—” She stops for a moment. “From other frustrations.”
That video of her—or maybe Utopia, since we never did figure out if Doc was conscious of what she was doing or if she was possessed—shooting Chlorophyll in the head plays through my mind again and I flinch. “No, I mean…why can’t you just edit that out of you?”
“Oh.” Doc looks at her toes. “Yeah, I guess I owe you that much.”
“I mean, if it’s private—”
“Danny, would you think less of me if I told you I was scared?”
“No, no of course not.”
“Good, because I’m fucking terrified,” she says. “At least once a week, I sit down with my configuration files to write a patch, and every time, I say today’s the day. I’m gonna get better. And then I see that they go all the way down, and I freeze up again. I could make myself an entirely different person. Mom had a backdoor into me once before. My neural net is modeled after hers—it’s not just a metaphor when I say I’m her daughter. I think like her, and sometimes the things I think scare me. How do I know that I can trust myself to make more changes? How do I know that in editing my code, I won’t make myself more like her, and say I’m doing it to become better?”
“I’ll make you a deal,” I say.
Doc pushes back from the computer to swivel on her chair and face me. “Yeah?”
“We get my powers back, and when you’re ready to patch yourself, I’ll sit with you, and if it looks like you’re turning evil, I’ll totally kick your ass for you.”
We start to laugh, and right now, despite it all, I feel okay.
“Can we cut this collar off of me now? I think I’m ready.”
The tactical riot party version of Doc appears around the privacy divider with a power tool that looks like the unholy child of a pipe grinder and a surgical saw. “Sure thing. No time like the present, kiddo.”
One of the Docs holds my hand while the other tilts my head over and then very carefully cuts through one side of the collar. I tilt my head the other way, and she slices through the other side as well. The two sides come off cleanly, and she sets them aside.
“Well?”
I close my eyes. For a moment I’m scared to reach for the lattice, but—
It’s there. Oh thank God, it’s there. With a flex of my will I engage with it and float a few inches up off the bed. I open my eyes and Doc is smiling. But not the pure, sweet joy I’d expect. Her smile is hard. It’s mean. I like it.
“Good,” she says. “You can still fight.”
“That’s nice to hear,” says Kinetiq as they enter the living area. They’ve got a sheen of sweat on their face from the long flight. A few shining burns on their bare arms have gone an angry red, but they don’t seem to notice or care.
I flit over to them and give them a hug. “Thank you,” I say.
Kinetiq smiles and runs a thumb across the staples in my scalp. “Nice train tracks. You want to shave the rest off and get a mane like mine? You’d look super badass with these in.”
I laugh, and now I’m not sure why I was scared that everyone would suddenly hate me. Fast rebounds are something I’m good at. Something I’ve needed to practice a lot. As much as I hate my parents for what they did to me, I don’t mind knowing how to compartmentalize and move on. “Maybe later.”
“We can talk about that once we’ve figured out how we’re going to take down Garrison and Graywytch,” says Doc.
My insecurities make one last valiant stand against the relentless forces
of optimism: “What if he mutes my powers again?”
Doc shakes her head. “Everything has a countermeasure. You’ll be ready for him next time. And there will be a next time—they didn’t just hurt you, Danny, they made you look weak. We can’t tolerate that.”
“She’s right,” says Kinetiq. “You look like a target now. Gotta make an example out of him; it’s the only way.”
“Fine,” I say. “So we take him out. How? He can turn off our powers if we get close enough to do anything.”
One of the Docs comes over from the freestanding dresser with a spare set of clean clothes. “Well, first, you get dressed. I’ve spotted Charlie on the CCTV perimeter about a half-mile out, so when you’re ready, we’re going to have to go over everything that happened while you were their prisoner. That will help us figure out what our next step will be.”
So I get dressed. The Docs smear antiseptic on the burns around my neck and bandage them, wrap my feet up too. By the time I’m all cleaned up, Charlie is staggering across the hangar, bent under the weight of a backpack crammed tight with books and magical equipment, a bike helmet dangling from his fingers.
The backpack goes down with a thud, and he arches up on his toes to stretch out his back. “You couldn’t have built this place closer to the bus stop?”
“Get a car,” I tell him.
Kinetiq picks up Charlie’s bag and hauls it over to a workbench Doc has set up for him. She ran some scans on the collar and found that there wasn’t any technological mechanism that she could identify suppressing my powers. There was, however, a glass slide, like something you’d use in a microscope but much thicker, inset on one of the inner edges. It was thickly etched on both sides with symbols we didn’t understand. Charlie’s here to see if he can figure out what this thing is and how it works.
“Sure, because gas money and insurance are exactly what I want to blow my allowance on,” he says, one arm across his chest, the other pulling it tight to his shoulder to stretch. “Are you okay?”
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