Sovereign

by April Daniels

  A few made a break for the marina and escaped on a pair of speedboats, but we don’t really care. The Coast Guard is on the way, and they’re not likely to make it to land without getting arrested. Most of the ones who stayed behind did so because they had broken bones or worse, and Calamity bribed them with morphine. Once Kinetiq was stabilized, Doc started taking the more seriously wounded prisoners into surgery as well.

  The mercenaries who volunteered to be nurses file past us. Calamity snicks open a utility blade and cuts the zip ties off of one, then deftly slips the tip of the blade a little ways up his nostril, just far enough to get his attention.

  “I want to remind you that both the Doctors Impossible shoot lasers out of their hands and that the fine young lady in blue over yonder is literally Dreadnought. Of course you know what I can do. So are we going to have any more trouble out of you?”

  He doesn’t meet her eyes. “No, ma’am.”

  “Get goin’, partner,” says Calamity as she straightens up and snaps the blade closed. The nurse-prisoners file into surgery and begin washing their hands. Calamity hops down from the chair and walks over to me with a bounce in her step. Her prosthetic hangs limply from her shoulder.

  “Can you believe it?” she says, “I got shot in the same goddamn arm.”

  But now that we’ve got a quiet moment after the initial rush of activity, I can see the strain in her eye. “I think things will hold here,” I tell her. “Do you want to take a walk?”

  She hesitates for a moment, so I put my hand on her good shoulder and gently maneuver her toward the door. Without further prompting she falls into step with me, ends up leaning on me by the time we’re out in the hallway. Curtains torn to ribbons flutter in shattered windows, and the thin carpet crunches with broken glass under our boots. My arm is bound up in a sling, but Doc gave me a dose of the good stuff so the pain is sort of a non-issue.

  “We did it,” I say, wrapping my good arm around her shoulder. Dart in for a kiss on her cheek. “You did it.”

  Without preamble, Sarah drops the Calamity voice and says, “We killed thirteen men today, Danny.”

  My smile curdles. “Oh.”

  “I’m not naive. I know with how rough I play…” Sarah pulls away from me, leans up against a wall. “It’s different when I can’t pretend the ambulance will show up in time.”

  “We didn’t have a choice. They forced this.”

  “I know that!” she says, not angry, but urgent. Helpless. “But, I close my eyes and I see the bodies, and—I didn’t know it would feel this way.”

  I step in close, slowly, and her posture opens, lets me in. “You’re a good person, Sarah,” I whisper. “I trust you. I love you.”

  Forehead to forehead, we stand for a moment, my fingers tracing through the hair behind her ear. The excitement of battle has faded, leaving us low. I’m glad that she lets me comfort her. It means I don’t have to think about myself.

  Calamity pulls her bandanna mask down and kisses me, hard. My arm wraps around her neck and I return every ounce of it, low moans rising from the base of my throat. After hours, or seconds, she breaks away and searches my eyes.

  “Did that help?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She pulls the bandanna back up over her nose. “Let’s go check on Codex.”

  We set off down the hall, to the room where we separated out the metahuman prisoners. I lace my fingers through Calamity’s. Her blush climbs up over the edge of her bandanna, but so does her smile. She squeezes back.

  We head into the lounge a little way down the hall. Garrison and Panzer are sitting together up against one wall, wrists tied down by Codex’s magic necklaces, ankles bound with zip ties. Codex guards them. He’s dragged one of the coffee tables over so he can face them while he fiddles with a bag of magical paraphernalia he’s spread out in front of him. Everyone reacts to the stress crash at the end of a battle differently—I make out with Calamity, and Codex gets his nerd on. Off to one side, almost as an awkward afterthought, a stolen submachine gun sits as a silent threat to anyone who gets stupid ideas.

  “What’s the word, Codex?” asks Calamity as we enter.

  He shakes his head. “My parents are going to kill me when we get home.”

  “Are you kidding?” I ask. “You saved the world.”

  “You don’t know my parents too well.” Codex looks up from a mirror with a high rim set flat on the table. There are a bunch of colored marbles on it, and he’s pushing them around, seeing how they knock off each other. “The spells are stable, their powers are muted. They’re not going anywhere.”

  “If the spell works by mimicking Garrison’s powers, then shouldn’t binding him make the other amulets not work?” I ask.

  He shakes his head and returns his focus to his work. “No, that would violate recursive causality,” he says, as if that should mean something.

  “None of this will stick, you know,” says Garrison. With his hands and legs bound and his suit all ripped up, nah, I’m not calling him by his supranym anymore.

  “Yeah, whatever, Dingus.”

  “You stupid child, you still don’t understand—everything you’ve done today, I can undo with the stroke of a pen.” His smile is thin and cruel. “My attorneys will gut you and have your skull for an ash tray.”

  “Pay him no mind, Dreadnought,” says Calamity with a warning in her tone. It hurts that she feels like she needs to keep a leash on me, but maybe I earned that.

  Still, I can’t resist twisting the knife. With a reassuring squeeze of Calamity’s hand, I smile at Garrison. “And how are they going to do that when they’re deciding if it’s even worth keeping you out of prison? Whoever you had spying on me should have done a better job of reading my mail—my federal hero license finally came through.”

  It was a close call. The license arrived while I was in jail, and Cecilia had to make some big promises—desperate promises, really—to keep it from getting instantly suspended until my trial was complete.

  Garrison’s face goes blank. I think he knows what’s coming, but it’s so fun spelling it out: “You’re about to get acquainted with my three favorite words in the world—civil asset forfeiture. When I was in the holding cell, Cecilia did an analysis of your public earning statements compared with the sort of costs that would be necessary to fund this operation, and it looks like your entire fortune is bound up in this scheme, isn’t it? That makes everything you own an accessory to kidnapping, murder, and terrorism. So we’re seizing it all. Every company you own, every account you hold, every last penny. I bet it’ll be hard to pay for lawyers when your money is all tied up in court. When you said you could make me a rich woman, you weren’t thinking you would do it this way, were you?”

  “Nothing you can prove I’ve done is illegal,” he says, but with the way his skin has gone the color of sour milk, I don’t think anyone believes him. “Spectral evidence is inadmissible. You can’t prove a thing.”

  “Once she’s done sewing up your men, the best hacker in the world is going to go have her way with your hard drives. There’s no security you can buy that will keep her out of a drive she has physical access to, and I will bet that she’ll find things you were trying to keep secret. When you get out of prison, you’re going to be a poor old man nobody remembers or cares about.”

  Garrison doesn’t shout or freak out or threaten vengeance unto the third generation or whatever. He breaks out into a cold sweat and his eyes bug. Words jam up in his throat, trip over each other as he chokes on them.

  “Why don’t you just leave us alone!” shouts Panzer. She’s at the edge of tears, and for a moment I feel bad about saying all that to her dad in front of her. “Because of you, the world’s going to keep drowning in poor people and losers!”

  Welp. Never mind.

  “Codex, you good?” asks Calamity.

  “I’m good,” he says.

  “If you’re done antagonizing the prisoners…” she says, gently pulling me toward the door.
r />   “Call if you need anything,” I say over my shoulder, and he waves without looking up.

  We’re at the door when it happens. A deep thrum of power running right through my chest, shooting down to the soles of my boot and up to the top of my skull. The world seems to go pale and blue, and then I’m falling. My guts are a greasy knot pulled tight, painfully tight, spasms in my legs, my hands, flaring every injury into a fizzing scarlet beacon. Someone is moaning in agony, and as Calamity flips me over on my back I realize it’s me.

  On the heels of that, I realize it’s Codex and Garrison too. A great wail of voices raised in misery drifts down the hallway from the triage point. The pain passes, and leaves in its wake a sense of profound disquiet. All my injuries seem worse, and I am so tired I can barely lift my head from the carpet.

  Doc’s voice crackles in my earpiece. “What the fuck? Two of my patients just coded.”

  A second later, her other body radios, “Everyone in the waiting room is down—team, talk to me!”

  “I’m up,” says Calamity. One hand is on my chest, possessive and protective, the other up at her earbud. “Dreadnought and Codex are down. Garrison too.”

  “Daddy? Daddy!” Panzer is kneeling over her father, patting his cheek with her bound hands. “What’s wrong with everyone?”

  “It’s new magic,” says Codex, hauling himself back up. He reaches into his robe vest and pulls out a slip of paper and a lighter. The paper burns with a bright green flame. “Graywytch. It’s Graywytch.”

  The worst of it seems to be passing, though my body still aches. It seems like the painkillers have been flushed right out of my system. I try to sit up, and Calamity pushes me back down. “Stay down ’til we know what we’re dealing with. Codex, I need details!”

  “The satellite system is active again,” he says after consulting his mirror for a moment. He pulls a crystal from one of his pockets and lets it dangle from a leather thong. It hangs for a moment and then rises up to point northwest. “It’s broadcasting a new spell that’s being bounced up from the surface. It’s probably coming from New Port.”

  “But what’s she doing?” asks Calamity, voice tight with urgency.

  Codex ignores her. “Doc, is everyone in the triage center down?”

  “No, I’ve got two who didn’t feel it.”

  “Do they happen to be women?” Codex and I make eye contact.

  “…yes.”

  No.

  Oh God, please no.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Wind tears at me. At Mach 3, the friction is so high I can feel my sweat evaporate the moment it rises to the surface of my skin. The Pacific Ocean flashes beneath me in the afternoon sun. My cape snaps and thumps against my chest, and I’ve got to hold my bad arm in tight to keep the sling in place.

  “Getting the first casualty reports on the news,” says Doc in my ear. “It’s bad. She’s hitting everywhere.”

  I don’t have the energy to answer. Everything is going into speed. I tear up the West Coast as fast as I’ve ever flown, but anxiety clutches at me until I feel like I’m standing still.

  Another swell of the killing spell hits, another nauseous twist of my insides. My vision blurs and goes double. I lose my grip on the lattice and begin to tumble through the air. My skin is clammy and wet inside my bodyglove. My nerves are buzzing, my chest feels empty and packed tight at the same time. When I hit the water at two thousand miles an hour, it slams into me like concrete. My arm goes white hot with pain.

  When I come to, I’m floating facedown in the ocean.

  Coughing, gagging, spitting, I haul myself into the air and push for speed again. Please don’t let that have been longer than a second or two. There’s no time.

  Passing up the coast, my suit’s nav computer vibrates, and the screen on my good wrist tells me to come right by five degrees. My course takes me over land. The line of the coast flashes by, horizon to horizon, and is gone in a matter of moments.

  Graywytch’s revenge spreads out beneath me. A highway snaps past—a pillar of smoke, a sheet of flame, then I’m over it. There’s a dozen-car pileup frozen in time—and I’m already beyond it. The blooming cloud of an airliner’s final resting place rises from somewhere near the horizon. I pass over a small town and see people in the streets. Almost every intersection has a collision.

  At my top speed, I can cover the distance from Cynosure to New Port in a little over twenty minutes. I never thought that would feel slow. Another pulse of the spell sweeps over me, and I grit my teeth and put myself on an upward trajectory before it becomes too much. Once again the spell makes me lose my grip, but I’m on a ballistic trajectory now and keep going up. I peak and begin the long, uncontrolled descent into a forest. At the last instant, I’m able to catch myself and get back in the air before I go smashing through the trees.

  A small cabin in the woods is on fire as I pass. A woman is pulling a limp man out of the burning building. That’s all I have time to see before I’m thousands of feet beyond her.

  She did it. She really did it. Graywytch told me this was coming, and I didn’t realize what she meant. When she had me strapped down to that table in the dungeon below Cynosure, she said women can only be pushed so far before they push back. And of course, her definitions of man, woman, and push are all so fucked up it could have meant anything. It could have meant anything, but it meant this:

  The flat-out murder of half the human population.

  All the signs were there, and I missed it. Her neglect of her superhero duties. Her strained alliance with Garrison. The shoddy magic she performed for him—almost as if her real concern was somewhere else, on a different project. Now that it’s happening, I can see how they all fit together: if her definition of what makes a man and what makes a woman isn’t respected anymore, she’ll simply remove men from the discussion. “Men” like me. Like anyone with a Y chromosome, I bet. More than three-and-a-half billion people, all dead, and then a mad scramble to figure out how to keep the species going.

  The moment we realized that, Calamity didn’t even have to tell me to go before I was blasting off to head north as fast as I could. With the tilt-engine out of commission and Kinetiq still in serious condition, I’m flying solo for this one. My body hurts. Every part of it. My gorge rises and I don’t have time to stop, so I vomit in midair, just point my head down and spew on whatever happens to be beneath me. I’m so tired I’m shaking in the air. My arm is one loud screaming pain that tugs at my mind incessantly.

  They’ve radioed ahead to tell the NPPD to arrest Graywytch, but if the highways and towns I’ve been flying over are any indication, downtown New Port will be such a mess it will be amazing if the cops can even get to Legion Tower on foot, much less with enough firepower to do anything about this.

  I reach the southern outskirts of the New Port metro area, and it’s worse than I expected. Columns of smoke sprout like black toadstools after the rain. Crashed cars, crashed planes, crashed helicopters. Damn near every machine in the sky has come smashing down. Most of the big trucks have run off the road too. A gas station goes up in a flare of yellow and heat as I pass; the gasoline pouring from an unattended nozzle next lying next to a dead man’s car found an ignition point.

  Ahead of me, the towers of downtown are wreathed in smoke. Another wave of the spell hits, this one faster and harder than the others. It takes me by surprise, and so I am helpless to stop myself from plowing through an office tower. Cubicle walls shatter and monitors are tossed like pillows as I tumble end over end across the length of the building and smash out a window on the other side.

  I didn’t hit anyone. Did I? I remember making an instant of eye contact with a terrified woman as I flopped past her, and coming so close to a woozy looking man that his sleeve brushed my cheek. But I don’t think I hit anyone. I hope I didn’t.

  I get myself back in the air, and there’s Legion Tower. This close into town I should be slowing down, but I keep the speed on until the last instant, smashing thr
ough the windows into the main conference room. I skid to a stop, my boots digging a pair of floor-destroying gouges as I grind to a stop.

  “Codex, are you still with us?”

  His voice is weak and raspy over the radio. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  I have to fight down another surge of nausea to get my next sentence out. “What do I do?”

  “Find her. Stop her.”

  I screw my eyes shut to focus entirely on the lattice, peer through the floor and into the level above me. Nothing. The magic should be plainly visible, but there’s nothing here. In the back of my head, I was toying with the idea of undoing the spell directly, the same way I cured my vertigo, but right now I can’t even locate the ritual room, much less begin to puzzle out how to unweave the spell. My strength gives out, and I collapse to my knees. My joints are screaming, and my insides feel disconnected, floaty and poisoned.

  “I don’t see her. What do I look for?” And now I do vomit, a half-mouthful of acid and bile. There’s nothing left in me, but I still can’t get right. My ears are ringing, my lips are numb.

  “Can’t even begin to guess,” says Codex.

  “Dreadnought, she’ll be in her library if she’s anywhere,” says Doctor Impossible. “That’s where she always disappeared to when she needed to work something big.”

  With an effort that makes my head swim I push myself back to my feet and try to get over to the elevator. Between one step and the next I forget how to walk and end up sprawled cheek-down on the floor.

  The floor that I now realize is shaking with ponderous footsteps. I roll to look back over my shoulder. A twelve-foot-tall golem of concrete and rebar looks down at me, eyes like two burning points of green fire. The monster stares down at me, cocks its head. Knives edged in green-white fire begin to push themselves up out of the concrete. I can feel the heat radiating off the blades even from down on the floor.