Every good thought I ever had about myself shrivels up and dies. I think I’m going to vomit.
They’re not just upset with me, they’re terrified. Of me. Of what they think I’ve done.
Of what you tried to do, whispers a little voice in my head. Of what you wanted to do. If Calamity hadn’t stopped you…
The wind goes out of me with a whoosh. I find myself rising, and the Channel 2 reporter lets out a little squeak of terror.
“No, I…I didn’t—I would never hurt any of you,” I say, and become dimly aware that Cecilia is hauling on my cape, trying to force me back into my chair. The hearing dissolves into noise and chaos. A lot of people leave, whey-faced and throwing nervous looks at me.
When order is restored, the arraignment barrels on to its inevitable conclusion. The judge makes his decision, and it’s not as bad as it could be, but it’s still pretty bad. Bailiffs come to take me away.
Bail is set at ten million dollars.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Metahuman Containment Cell is deep in the subbasement of the New Port Police Headquarters building. Down a long, mildew-and-moisture-chic hallway, there’s a vault like you’d find in a large bank.
Cecilia fought tooth and nail to keep me out of this cell. She said it was a deathtrap, said the last person they put in there was murdered, said I had enemies who would come after me and put the lives of officers and civilians at risk. None of those arguments worked.
They’ve taken my suit and cape. I’ve got to wear jailbird orange until the trial. Or, I suppose, until someone raises ten million dollars for me. Which will happen approximately never. As well paid as I am, Doc and I don’t have even close to that much money between us, and virtually all the money we do have has been sunk into real estate and hypertech supplies. Being an A-level superhero is expensive, so we’ve never had more than a few thousand dollars ready cash between us.
With my hands hanging together in front of me in clinking steel bracelets, I am escorted by a phalanx of MRU officers down the hall. They’re going to throw me in another hole, and it takes everything I’ve got not to snap my cuffs and bolt. I’ve got to play along. If I freak out now I’ll play right into Graywytch’s hands. Nobody will ever trust me again if I don’t cooperate.
Detective Phạm is waiting for me near the vault door. She looks haggard, drawn. The phalanx halts while one of their members begins the elaborate unlocking procedure to start opening the door.
“Danielle, I’m sorry it went this way,” she says.
“Me too.”
She pulls a silver cross on a delicate chain out of her pocket and holds it out for me. “Prisoners in solitary are allowed to have a religious token. Here.”
I don’t know how to react politely to that. It’s almost like she’s stuck her foot in the door and asked me if I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. Detective Phạm doesn’t seem any more comfortable about this either, the barest hint of blush forming at the edge of her cheeks.
“Um, thanks, Detective, but I’m an atheist.”
“Really?” she asks. “Your friend Sarah was really insistent that you’d want it. She said she and Charlie worked hard on finding the right one for you.”
That sure has hell catches my attention, and I freeze my face before I give anything away. How much does she know? And then coming directly on the heels of that, the blissful, glorious realization that Sarah escaped from the police. I hold out my cuffed hands and Phạm drops the necklace into my cupped palms. A little bit of work gets the cross settled around my neck, and I get the barest sense of a static charge as it comes to rest under my shirt. When I look at it in the lattice, I see the cross is squirming and alive with magic, and that the spell extends around my whole body, like a plastic bubble shell. It makes me feel a little bit better. At the very least, I’ll be able to keep my powers if Graywytch and Garrison decide to teleport in and try and slit my throat.
The vault door lets out a huffing blurt of steam and begins to crank open. “That’s enough, Detective,” says one of the MRU goons.
Phạm nods and turns to leave. “Hang tight, Danny,” she says as she leaves.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere,” I say, and that startles a laugh out of her.
The MRU is all looming black gasmasks and high-powered riot prods. A few have heavy shotguns that are probably loaded with some ungodly expensive discarding sabot depleted uranium slug rounds or something. One of them nudges me into the vault with the butt of his prod, and I think of all the times I showed them up, and start to wonder if rumors about cops tormenting inmates are true. I guess I’ll find out.
The centerpiece of the cell is a firm pad like a medical bed attached to a big metal X-rack with magnetic-clamp shackles for the ankles and wrists. They push me onto the cross and lock my ankles down with heavy thuds. A metal ring clamps down across my neck. They twist the adjustment knobs to make the thing small enough for me to fit in properly. When they undo my handcuffs, everyone’s ready to jump in and tase, gas, and shoot me. Once, I’d have found that funny, but now everything feels like lead sheets pushing down on me. My chest feels funny and light. I can breathe, but it doesn’t feel like it’s doing any good. The magnetic shackles thunk closed around my wrists, and I screw my eyes shut and try to keep it together.
“Are you gassing the room already?” I ask them between deep breaths.
Two of the cops look at each other. “You’ll know it if we gas you,” one of them says.
“Are these shackles really necessary? I’ve been cooperative.” My lips are beginning to buzz faintly. My skin feels cold.
The MRU cops don’t reply. One of them pulls a cord down from the ceiling and strips the sterile wrapping off an IV needle that he attaches to the thin tube. The needle bends against my skin, and the cop pulls it off and tosses it to the floor. “You’re going to be fed intravenously, or not at all,” she says. “We know you can take blood tests, so let this needle through your skin or starve.”
Once they’ve got the feeding line hooked up, there’s a really embarrassing moment involving a catheter that was inserted earlier by the jail medics upstairs. As it was explained to me, once a prisoner goes in the stocks, she doesn’t come out again for any reason except a court date, a transfer to Yucca Mountain, or a judge’s order.
The officers file out of the vault and the door grinds shut behind them. Then it’s just me, alone, in the big, steel room. The florescent light flickers irregularly.
I can’t breathe. Like, at all. My lungs pump and air moves, but I can’t get any use out of it. I yank at the shackles in desperation, and they hum and groan as the magnetic field fights back. My still-fragile bones groan in complaint, and I can’t go at it as hard as I’d like. In the shape I’m in, I don’t think I can break this steel, not spread-eagled without any leverage.
The X begins to click and hum. It tilts with a clanking rattle until I’m lying on my back. Then the lights go out and are replaced by a dim red night-light that’s probably just bright enough for the low-light level cameras to get a clean picture.
“I can’t breathe,” I tell them. “Please let me out.”
I move on to less polite requests. It does nothing. They can’t hear, or don’t care. My heart is going like a rabbit. My head is swimming. Eventually, a little voice in the back of my head tells me to remember that first aid merit badge I got, the only one I earned before dropping out of Boy Scouts. I’m hyperventilating. With an effort of will I take a big, deep breath and hold it. Hold it. Let it go slowly.
That helps, so I do it again. Again. By the tenth breath, my heart has slowed and my lips aren’t numb anymore.
But I’m still in a hole.
• • •
I turn around.
And they recoil.
I turn around…
…and they recoil.
They’re scared of me. Over and over in my head, I relive the moment when I realize that they’re all scared of me. Th
e people I fight for. New Port is my home. These are my people, and I’d die for any one of them. Only now do I realize they might not let me. I might lose their trust forever.
I don’t understand. It’s not fair.
But it’s completely fair. Idiot. You let them see too much. What did you think was going to happen? Of course they were always going to hate you. You can’t do anything right.
The morphix has faded. Aside from slow, even breaths, I hold very still. As long as I don’t move, the tears in the muscles and the cracks in my bones won’t hurt. Not too much, anyway. With only dim light to see by, I focus entirely on the lattice and examine my own injuries in sick fascination. It’s kind of amazing I could even stand upright long enough to get in this cell.
But of course, I deserve it. Dreadnought gave me his powers, said the world needed me, and I became this. I became something that scares people. How did that happen? It seemed like that’s what I was supposed to do. Like it was right. Like it was necessary.
But it wasn’t, was it?
• • •
Is there something in the IV? My head feels thick, drowsy. I ask if I’m being sedated, and I get no reply. Sleep comes with strange, twisting dreams that evaporate when I’m awake. Dreams where I’m alone, on the outside. Where people are scared of me and want me to leave. Where everything hurts, and everything is cold.
• • •
Someone is in the room with me. They stand behind me where I can’t get a good look at them. In the lattice, they’re only a shimmery smear that sets a glass pendant on my chest and runs a knife across my throat. Graywytch hisses with frustration and steps back into the portal she entered through and disappears.
• • •
With the intravenous drip in my arm, I don’t get hungry. It’s hard to tell when I’m awake. When the door hisses steam and begins to open I am startled out of a stupor. The X-rack cranks back to a vertical position as some MRU cops troop in. It’s hard to tell if they’re the same ones, since they’re all wearing bulky tactical gear and gas masks.
Two of the cops begin unhooking the tubes and unlatching my shackles.
“You made bail. You’ll need to reclaim your belongings before you leave,” one of them says. For a dizzy moment I wonder if this is a dream. It’s only been a couple hours. There’s no way we could get ten million dollars that fast.
Once again flanked by a squad of police who don’t seem to acknowledge that their guns would be little more than expensive comfort blankets if I was uncooperative, we head upstairs. The moment we get above ground I realize it’s been more than just a few hours. Outside the window it looks like high noon. After another uncomfortable moment with the jail medic, they take back their jumpsuit and sign my stuff back out to me—it goes quickly since that really only means my suit and underwear.
With my suit back on, I check the clock and see it’s only been about fourteen hours since I was arraigned. Then I see a calendar and realize, no, it’s been two days, which explains why I can walk without limping. I’m probably not up to full strength yet, but I’m battle ready, and that’s what really matters.
Another tedious police escort brings me to the front of the station, the publicly accessible area. As we’re coming around a corner I hear raised voices.
“That’s your plan?” It’s Magma. He sounds at the edge of shouting. “You’re taking children into combat now?”
“They’re capes.” That’s Doc, with a hard defiance in her voice I haven’t heard before. “They know the risks.”
“They know the—this isn’t going up against some two-bit diamond heist crew, Doc! What happened to your impassioned opposition to minors in the field, huh?”
“You think I like stealing her childhood? She’s who we have, that’s all there is to it.”
Magma lets go of a full-throated roar: “Whose fault is that?”
The cops and I come around the corner and see Magma and all three Docs squaring off in the waiting room. A bunch of uniforms stand around wide-eyed and mute, unsure about what they can do to stop the developing superhero screaming match. But Magma’s reformed supervillain girlfriend, Aloe, is on the ball and puts a hand on his arm as soon as I step into view.
He bites down on a further explosion, but Doc is already rolling with her counter-attack: “I am done letting you use my rape against me, you oversized hunk of shit!”
Magma snaps his attention back to Doc, reels back like he’s been physically slapped. “Doc…I didn’t…”
“Fuck you, Magma,” spits Doc, red and wet in the face. “It’s not always about your—” One of her bodies sees me, and they all shut up and go stiff. That’s about the time everyone else notices me walking in on the loud family fight as well. Magma, Doc, Aloe, and a few dozen cops all stare at me, and it’s quickly apparent Doc and Magma are both charting new maps for previously unexplored realms of mortification.
“Do you guys wanna finish this up? I can go back to my cell,” I say, hooking a thumb over my shoulder.
“Danny, are you okay?” asks the Doc who has kept herself together the best. The other two are hastily wiping their eyes and trying not to melt through the floor with embarrassment.
“No.” Whoops, that wasn’t what I meant to say. “I mean, it’s been a bad week.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” says Magma, turning away from Doc. “I want you to know that the community is behind you, 100%.”
“Or at least the parts of it that matter,” says Aloe with a smile. “We didn’t have much trouble raising your bail money.” And there’s a twinkle in her eye that makes me think that most of the money they ‘raised’ was simply cash that the Federal prosecutors hadn’t managed to recover when they convicted her. Not that I’m in any position to be picky right now.
By mutual, unspoken accord we’ve been slowly drifting together, our voices dropping to a quieter level. If the conversation is not private, at least it is something approaching discreet. Doc and Magma are stiff and uncomfortable standing so close to each other, but I’ll take that over more shouting anytime. The uniforms in the lobby go back about their business with a mingled air of relief and disappointment. A few, though, are still watching me the way a deer might watch a wolf.
“Thanks,” I say to Aloe. “But, uh, I think maybe you’re looking at the wrong girl right now. I’m not really sure I should be a superhero anymore.”
“What?” yelps Magma. I swear to God. He yelps. “Why? You’re a natural. How about you just take some time off, let us figure this one out? You don’t need to be hasty. About anything.”
The feel of Graywytch’s neck under my hands comes back to me, how soft it was, how I could make out her sliding muscles and tendons beneath the skin. (Did she try to kill me last night, or was that a dream? My guilty conscience trying to make it better?) Sharp on its heels, the image of the courtroom, and how scared they were of me. “I’m not sure I’m doing it for the right reasons anymore. Kinetiq is who you should talk to. Or hell, call in Northern Union.”
“Danny, if you want to retire I will respect that,” says Doc softly. “But we should get out of this fight before you make those kinds of decisions. I tried calling the Union, but Graywytch got to them and they’re refusing to budge without more evidence. It’ll be too late before they move on this. And if you back down now, blackcapes will be gunning for you for the rest of your life.”
“There are ways to hide her, Doc,” says Magma. “And she’s right, even if the Union won’t budge, there are other capes.”
“Who are you kidding?” says Doc. “Short-notice ad hocs are almost impossible these days, and you know it. Especially with Graywytch poisoning the well.”
“We failed Danielle before,” Magma says to Doc, and he even manages not to snarl. “Don’t let that happen again.”
“Danielle is right here, and she can make her own decisions,” I say. “My record is fourteen and one. If a blackcape is stupid enough come after me, I’ll put as many of them in hospital beds as I need
to make my point. But I don’t think—maybe looking for trouble isn’t something I should do anymore.”
Doc and Magma both look unhappy. Aloe seems quietly impressed. Then, a moment later, she seems like she’s uncomfortable. It starts slowly at first, a confused crinkle in her brow, and then widening eyes and labored breathing. She’s suffocating.
“Honey, wh—what’s…” Then Magma is feeling it too. His hand goes to his collar, tears off the top button, and the huge man begins to sway.
Doc and I trade looks. We’re both reaching the same conclusions, and we’re both horrified. One of her bodies begins twitching, seems to spasm and reboot.
“What?” grunts Aloe as she collapses.
Magma is on hands and knees barfing. The vomit splatters the linoleum, bubbles and melts it, the sudden fog smelling of sulfur. Cops shout out in alarm, and Doc goes into crowd control, pushing as many baseline humans back, back as she can.
Before it can get any worse, I undo the neck fastenings of my suit and pull out the cross that Charlie made. The moment I force Aloe’s fingers closed around it, she sits back on her haunches and takes a heaving, convulsive breath.
“The hell is going on?” she says between heaves of fresh air.
Prickles of ice are running up and down my spine. This is why Garrison wanted me out of the picture for a few days. He’s already activated what remains of his satellite network and started the takeover. When I try to look into the lattice, it’s gone again. I hope Charlie can make more of those counter-spell amulets, or we’re all extra screwed.
As quick as I can, I explain to Aloe what the cross is and why it works. She passes it to Magma, and he stops vomiting long to draw breath and uncross his eyes. When he’s steadied himself, he passes it back to her, and arm in arm they begin shuffling out of the police station. They’ll have to share until I put a stop to this. And it’s going to have to be me. Me and Doc and the rest of our little baby Legion. People who rely on their powers to survive are going to start dying now. Suddenly there is no more time for arguments.
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