Dreadnought (Nemesis, #1)

by April Daniels

The kind of place you get an instinct for finding if you grow up a certain way, the way that teaches you how to hide.

The cement is cold where I sit on it, and I am utterly alone. For the first time this week, I’m happy.

The dirty little secret about growing up as a boy is if you’re not any good at it, they will torture you daily until you have the good graces to kill yourself.

now they’re mainly a community unto themselves, studiously ignored by mainstream science, which tends to mutter and grumble every time the “speculative technology” is mentioned.

They’ll find some way to make you unhappy with your body sooner or later, so until then, enjoy it.

the best thing that ever happened to me came out of someone else—someone important, someone almost universally loved—getting killed.

“How?” asks Valkyrja, with ice like a Viking’s nightmare in her tone.

It is a girl’s rage, and it is right. It is necessary.

Fifteen years trapped. Seven of those, aware of my prison and screaming inside.

Teach me to man up by beating me down.

This scalding outrage cools and hardens to something stronger than diamond, and infinitely more precious. Resolve.

What started as something that was almost an affirmation (everyone is noticing I’m a girl!) has now become tedious (and now they won’t get over it!).

She’s got me in her orbit and I’m just following her along.

Before, it seemed like half the time I didn’t have feelings as much as I had a script of how I thought I was supposed to feel, and I just followed the script.

I stopped expecting her to help me years ago.

Not because I wouldn’t forgive him; because he will always be too proud to let himself be forgiven.

Sometimes rescue work is mostly about sifting through the corpses.”

Making sure you don’t cry is a just skill like anything else, and I’ve had a lot of practice.

The justifications, the optimistic scenarios, come naturally to me. Because it’s a skill set. And I’ve had practice.

Elsewise, I’m just a freak with a gun, and then where would I be?”

“Whitecapes are happy to draw neat little lines that make neat little boxes and act like they’re Justice with her scales, but the moment someone doesn’t fit into their cute little grid, suddenly they don’t quite care about what’s fair or not, do they?”

It’s like I can see both sides of the argument with perfect clarity, but I can’t see what my own opinion should be.

Once they whipped up a batch of this super serum, they needed someone to try it out on, so they did whatever white men do when they have a dangerous, unpleasant job that wants doing—they looked around for some brown people and volunteered them.

“So you like me.” “I haven’t shot you yet, so it does stand to reason.”

In my experience, apologies are weapons.

Reading about Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet is an intensely surreal kind of frustration when you know you should be tracking down a supervillain instead.

Is this what a bully sounds like when he’s scared?

“That is the most boring slur I have ever heard.”

“Ain’t no peace without justice, hun,” says Calamity.

He didn’t call me “son” very often before my change, but now he can’t get enough of it, like if he denies I’m a girl enough, he can make it untrue.

Here I was, glowering in peace, and this…this insufferable jackass decided to insert himself into my life and pass judgment on all its events and my feelings.

So much time lost, so much of my childhood gone, because nobody ever asked the right questions.

I’d love to be able to play by the rules, but the people who make the rules are crooked, so that’s not a choice we get to make right now.

There’s too much self-loathing bottled up inside me. It gets in the way, keeps me from seeing myself, and what I really want.

Sometimes we make choices, and we don’t realize they’re permanent until it’s too late.”

Once upon a time, Graywytch casting a spell on me would have been terrifying. Then I fought Utopia and learned what real fear is like. This is petty.

“I ain’t dead yet,” snarls Calamity. “Point me to some explosives, I mean to return a favor.”

I’m not going to die on my first day of freedom.

Two lies, both true.

If this body is my physical ideal, then it’s my ideal, and right now that means I’m going to eat as much as I want. Who cares if I stop looking like a supermodel? I just saved the whole goddamn world.