There were cries for justice, for punishment. Since people died in every country on the planet, there was going to be a huge fight over who got to put her on trial for mass murder, but all of that’s been stumped by the simple fact that she’s dead.
Except that I’m not sure that she is.
• • •
“Where does this one go?” I ask, holding up another textbook.
“They’ll have copies there; I’m leaving that behind,” says Charlie. We’re in his room, and the first snowstorm of the new year is caking up against the window. Sarah and I are helping him pack, because our little bookworm Charlie is now a bone fide high school dropout. He’s going straight on to the Invisible College, an institution we’ve never heard about, but which electrifies Charlie. His performance during the crisis has impressed the Council of Avalon, and they’ve taken an interest in his professional development.
His room is a disaster area as we pull it apart and find everything he’ll want to take with him. Charlie’s parents were not happy with me for dragging him into combat. Then they almost tripped over themselves to agree to let the Council of Avalon come take him to a private university where he’d be given a full-ride scholarship and an apprenticeship that would keep him out of trouble. Congress has already passed a sweeping new anti-magic law in the wake of Graywytch’s attack, and they’re hoping he’ll be safer out of the country until the paranoia about magic users dies down. If it ever does.
A question that has been running around in my mind pops out of my mouth: “So do you know what happened to Graywytch?”
Charlie freezes, and Sarah looks up from the pile of books she’s sorting.
“Not for sure,” he says.
“But you’ve got a suspicion.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to tell us?” asks Sarah.
Charlie crosses his room and shuts the door. “Look, you cannot repeat this, okay?”
Sarah and I trade a look. “Go on,” I say.
“I think the Council of Avalon added her to their Library,” says Charlie quietly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means they tore her soul from her body and bound it to service for all eternity. She’s as good as dead, except when somebody wakes her up to ask a question. That’s all anyone outside the Council knows about the Library, and I shouldn’t even be saying that much.”
Sarah sums up my feelings: “Holy shit.”
Suddenly, I’m not so frustrated that she never stood trial. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but at least it can’t be said she escaped punishment anymore. With that fog of horror hanging over us, we go back to inventorying Charlie’s baffling array of magical doodads and gewgaws.
“What’s this?” asks Sarah, holding up a brass and crystal device that looks sort of like a sextant on an acid trip.
“Expensive and delicate, please put it down,” says Charlie.
“Okay, but what is it?”
“I don’t think you’d understand,” he says, which is the wrong decision.
Sarah’s eyes narrow. “Oh really?”
Seeming to realize his mistake, Charlie gingerly reaches out for the device. “Uh, I’ll show you how it works.”
Sarah keeps it out of reach and plants her prosthetic hand on his chest. Yeah, he’s not getting that back for anything less than his best groveling. I kiss Sarah on the cheek.
“Stop teasing the prodigy,” I murmur in her ear, and then head downstairs. I’ve got to check on someone. Out in the front yard, snow scrunches under my feet.
“You know, you can come inside with us,” I say to the sky as I leave Charlie’s house. Valkyrja is up in the tree in the front yard, sitting easily on a branch that is thinner than her wrist. In deference to Charlie’s parents’ new (and strictly enforced) no capes around their house rule, she at least left her armor back in Legion Tower.
“What use is a sentry who stays indoors?” says Valkyrja. She scans the horizon again.
“Would you at least come down so I can talk to you?”
She nods and scoots off the branch, falling to earth in a slow, gentle descent.
“If you’re going to be following me around all the time, you could at least try to blend in when we’re doing civilian stuff,” I say.
“I gave you the terms of my atonement and you accepted them.” Valkyrja chews on her lip for a moment. “Must we continue reliving this discussion?”
She told me she had an honor debt to me, an old Norse tradition that is suddenly very important to her, and asked that she be given a chance to redeem herself. Calamity and I talked it over and offered her a spot in the Legion. She promptly declared that she would remain a member until the day she died, though her wording was on the interesting side of gory. “Yeah, until your guts are steaming on the ground, I remember. Do you have to act like you’re Secret Service, though?”
“I shouldn’t inflict myself upon them any further.”
“You’re weird. You’re not that weird.” I reach out to take her shoulder and shuffle her inside, but Valkyrja shrinks away.
“I like him.” It still throws me for a loop when those little bits of the old Karen break through. She says she was wrong, that her mother wasn’t obliterating her, but simply adding to her. Changing her. The life she thought she could have is gone forever, but there are other ways to live.
“And I think he’d forgive you if you asked.”
She shakes her head. “I cannot. Not now.”
“Why not? He’s right there,” I say, pointing up at his room, “And believe me, this stuff doesn’t get better just because you ignore it.”
Valkyrja is quiet for a moment, and then takes a breath as if she has come to a decision. “Now is not the time to broach a relationship. There is…a kindness I must ask from you. I have a task I must complete, and I have put it off too long. It will take time, and then I will return to you.”
“What kind of task?”
“A…ritual. A family tradition. I must secure my mother’s legacy. Until then, I cannot indulge distractions.”
“How long will it take?”
Valkyrja’s wings curl protectively around her. “About nine months.”
Oh.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” I ask. The other part of the question is left unspoken: do you want to do that to your daughter?
“It is the way of things. It will bring me solace.”
I won’t even pretend to understand that. “Okay. Do you need to get going?”
She nods. “Sooner is better than later.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll see you when you get back.”
She smiles with relief and clasps my hand in an old-old-incredibly-old school wristlock shake. “I shall return.”
Valkyrja spreads her wings and takes off. I watch her until she disappears behind the skeletal trees and is lost to sight.
• • •
The one thing that everybody agrees on is that those damn satellites need to go. Nobody should have the power to cast a spell over the entire planet ever again. I boost up into orbit again and start knocking them down. Red Steel sends me another email, congratulating me on my victory, and stating that because his employer turned out to be a criminal and the satellites were weapons of mass destruction, that he has generously decided he will not be seeking vengeance upon me for defying his warning. I send him a fluffy cat picture in reply.
• • •
Kinetiq is up and walking around. Slowly, and with a cane, but Doc expects them to make a full recovery. They’re settling into Legion Tower nicely. At the brief press conference I held after the fighting was over, I made sure to mention how important they were to victory, and how I’d be turning over protection of New Port to them while I recovered from what I’d been through. They couldn’t stop blushing when the cameras turned to them.
We’re up on the main lounge floor, just across the hall from the cavernous briefing room where Valkyrja killed the golem. The
city spreads out beneath us, a canyon of steel and glass.
“So have you thought about who you’re going to give the money to?” Kinetiq asks me. It’s a topic that’s been hanging over our heads. They’re clearly unhappy with the sudden influx of wealth. We nearly died taking down the guy I took this money off of. We’d be well within our rights to keep it. Kinetiq hasn’t been shy about how much they disagree, and I guess now is as good a time as any for us to decide not to avoid the issue any longer.
I shrug, and regurgitate a line I heard from Cecilia: “Until the asset forfeiture case is settled, it would be premature to spend any of it.”
“Don’t dodge the question, Dreadnought.” Kinetiq leans on their cane and pivots to face me. “Who are you giving the money to?”
Getting angry isn’t going to help. More and more I’m trying to rein in my temper. “I’m thinking that we’ll keep it.” Technically, it’s going to be a group decision, but everyone has been looking to me to make a proposal. I tried to pawn the responsibility off on Calamity, and she literally laughed in my face.
“You don’t want to do that,” says Kinetiq. “Money changes people, and never for the better. Besides that, no fortune that large can exist without the exploitation of the working class—it’s stolen money, Dreadnought. Blood money. You have a moral duty to return it to the people. How you do that, what charity you choose, that’s your choice, but you can’t keep it.”
“It’s not go-crazy money, okay? Most of the cash got hoovered up by the Feds. We’ve only got enough to repair Cynosure, and maybe a couple million left over after that.”
“Why repair it? Bust that damn thing up for scrap.”
“What good would that do anyone?”
“What good would it do anyone to keep it?” they reply, almost before I’m done speaking.
“I was thinking we’d put up a free clinic that provides the full range of transition services to anyone who asks. Or a halfway house for queer runaways who need to start a new life away from their family.” I very carefully do not look at them when I say that last part.
“Oh,” says Kinetiq quietly.
“It’s easier to do that if we own the buildings. We could put it in Legion Tower, but I’ve had to have a fight here twice already. I think it might be safer to keep our charity work separate from our capework.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I could see how that would be,” says Kinetiq. I glance over and they’re blinking rapidly.
“I was thinking, though. It might be good to have one of us stay on the island to make sure all the kids are okay. You could see to it that it’s just not another way of throwing them into the system.”
They snort. “Lay off. You made your point.”
“So you’re okay with this?”
“Yeah. I think so. I think I’d like that.”
• • •
Professor Gothic lands in New Port after almost a month spent in hiding—it’s the first flight into town since the biggest disaster the airline industry ever suffered. The Nemesis is not quite public knowledge yet, but we think it’s only a matter of time until word leaks. Most of the world’s governments already know, and are scrambling to decide what—if anything—to do about it. The Nemesis sits on the other side of the moon, watched by Garrison’s remote cameras. Cameras Doc Impossible has taken full control over, along with every other piece of his surviving outer space infrastructure.
As Cynosure makes the final turn to pass the mouth of Puget Sound and sail to the patch of water we’ve leased as a berthing point, Professor Gothic turns back from the window of one of the handful of untouched conference rooms aboard the seastead. Doc and I are sitting at one of the conference tables, watching the coastline slowly pass by.
“The status quo is untenable,” he says.
“The status is not quo, man,” says Doc. She’s slouched deep in her chair, exhausted from a seventy-three-hour death march of programming as she integrated Cynosure’s systems into her own infrastructure.
He turns from the window, brow furrowed over crimson goggles. “I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.”
Doc shrugs. “That’s okay, sometimes I just like hearing myself talk. Anyhow, you were saying?”
Gothic purses his lips, clasps his hands behind his back, very solemn. “The current state of affairs cannot continue. The Nemesis’ proximity to Earth will continue to create quantum instabilities and promote the development of alternative physics models. That it exists as a singular object and obeys the laws of gravity suggests that the fundamental skein of reality will remain intact, but beyond that, it is difficult to predict where this will take us. So we come to find we are faced with two choices. We can return the Nemesis to its three-thousand-year orbit and see the slow leeching of superpowers, magic, and hypertech from the world until it returns again. Or, we can keep it behind the moon and inevitably create a world where everyone has access to this kind of power.”
The immensity of the decision settles down on us. Doc controls the surveillance and defense platforms that oversee the Nemesis’ stable orbit on the other side of the moon. Nobody can so much as get near it without her say-so. In a very real way, the next era of human history relies on what we decide here.
“Let’s keep it,” I say.
“Oh yeah, obviously,” says Doc.
Professor Gothic looks like he swallowed a bug. “So that’s it? Just like that, we decide to upend the fabric of human civilization?”
“What, would you rather us debate in circles for a year or two?” asks Doc. “If sending that asteroid away will eventually cause hypertech to break down, then you might as well ask me to kill myself.”
“And after what happened last month,” I say, “I don’t think the world would be better if the only kind of power was money. Right now, most people just have to go along with whatever the rich and their pet governments tell them. Maybe if everyone could do the things that I could do, things would be better.”
“Or they could become catastrophically worse,” says Gothic thinly.
“We already have supervillains,” says Doc. “And even without them, we’d still have existential threats that we’d have to confront—only we’d be doing so with vastly reduced capabilities. Climate change doesn’t get easier just because we all go back down to the baseline. If things get too hot, we can move the rock to the L-point on the other side of the sun.”
“I see,” says Professor Gothic. “And you’re both quite certain?”
“Yes,” I say. Doc nods.
“Very well,” says Gothic. “Then I should like to put together an institute to study these questions as we go forward. A think tank, but one with empirical testing models and field experience. Frau Doktor Impossible, would you like to join me in this endeavor?”
“Sure,” says Doc. “Whatever floats your boat.”
“Is this how you make all of your decisions?”
“No,” she says. “Just the big ones.”
• • •
On my last day of patrol before handing the city over to Kinetiq, I come back to Doc’s condo to find most of our things in boxes, and the maidbots getting ready for the move into Legion Tower. Guts the pug senses something is up and trots up to me, whining for comfort, so I scratch him behind the ears. Doc’s in the kitchen, pouring her liquor down the sink. Empty bottles line the counter next to her.
“Hey kiddo, how’d your sendoff go?” she asks as she cracks a bottle of rum.
“It went well,” I say, though I was barely paying attention. My fingers are pinched white against a manila folder I’m holding against my chest. “Lots of people waving.”
“Cool,” says Doc. Glug glug glug goes the rum down the drain. “Hey, uh, I finally got the guts to write a software patch for my little happy juice problem. Would you…um, would you feel weird if I asked you to hold my hand while I uploaded it to myself?”
“What? No, of course I will,” I say, my heart leaping. She’s talked about this, but I haven’t dared hope that the
rough times were over so soon. If she’s serious, then this means—my eyes drop down to the papers I’m holding. Now’s the time, I know it is. If I chicken out now, I’ll be putting this off for months. But holy crap, this is scary. “Yeah, I’d be happy to help you through that. So, uh, I’ve got some good news of my own today.”
“Yeah?” Doc smiles. “Keep me in suspense, really, that’s what I need today.”
“My parents dropped their objection to my emancipation papers. So I’ve signed them and I’m free.”
Doc’s jaw drops with open delight. “Kickass! What do you want to do to celebrate?”
Oh man, I hadn’t even thought about that. My tongue fumbles for something to say as I focus on not tripping while I cross the room. “Oh, uh, I wasn’t—probably not much, it’s just a formality. But um. I did have Cecilia draw up some other papers; I was wondering if maybe you’d take a look at them? I mean, if you want to.” I set the folder down on the counter next to her.
Doc wipes her hands on a paper napkin while she regards me with curiosity. “Sure, okay.” She opens the folder and starts to read, and I try to keep my heart beating. Every twitch and flick on her face seems to shout. Curiosity. Surprise. Understanding.
“These are adoption papers,” she says quietly.
“Yeah, well. I mean, if you don’t—look, it’s not that big a deal and, I was just thinking, so, you know—”
Doc’s face falls, and so does my stomach. “Danny, I’d…I’m honored, really. But I’m not human. I don’t have a birth certificate or a social security number or anything. I’ve got incorporation papers, and that’s it. Corporations can’t adopt people. I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” My face feels numb. My chest is filled with lead. In between the space between hearing and understanding, between understanding and despair, I make one last grasp at it: “Can you hire me?”
Doc’s composure stumbles, quickly covered by a tremulous smile. “Yeah,” she says weakly. “I can hire you.” She sets the papers aside and opens her arms. “Hey, bring it in, kiddo, come here.”
And then I’m hugging my mother and she’s hugging me back, tight and protective, and finally, finally I’m home. After a while something occurs to me.
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