Dreadnought (Nemesis, #1)

by April Daniels

Obviously I can’t tell anyone about this. If it got back to Dad, he’d kill me. He’s obsessed with “making a good man” out of me. “You’re a man now,” he says as his justification for friggin’ everything. He wants me to be strong and boisterous and popular. It’s bad enough I’m quiet and like to be alone, bad enough I don’t like sports even after he forced me to join the football team, bad enough I couldn’t care less about cars. If he found out I might be a girl…well, I don’t really want to think about what might happen. 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. The posturing and the dominance games are almost inescapable. It’s hard to walk from one end of school to the other without getting shoulder-checked in the halls. Locker rooms are a forgotten circle of Hell. God forbid anyone ever catch you sketching flowers in class, or reading a book that’s “for girls.” Maybe for people who really are boys, that stuff works. Maybe it fits for them. But I don’t get to fit. Not anywhere. The one thing I must never do is try to fit in with the girls. I don’t know what would happen if I tried, but I have a screaming animal instinct that tells me not to even consider it. When I turn eighteen, if I haven’t killed myself yet, I’m going to move out of the house and go on hormones. Maybe save up for surgery. But for now, what I have is nail polish.

Oh. Great. A superhero fight. Just friggin’ wonderful. Yeah, yeah, superheroes are super cool and all that, but it’s insanely dangerous to be near them when they’re fighting. They can’t always keep the bad guys from hitting bystanders.

“What’s your name, anyhow?” “I’m Danny.” Calamity is silent for a long time. “Well, Danny.” She reaches up and taps a curly wire leading to an earbud taped into her ear. “The cops say they’ll be here in a few moments, so we’d best be leaving.” “Why?” “If the police find you here, they’ll want you to testify against a supervillain.” Calamity shrugs. “I’ll not claim expertise on how things work from where you’re from, but in my experience of the world, that is a poor choice of behavior. Might be you decide to keep your mouth shut. Might be Utopia doesn’t take the chance. Best be leaving.” When she puts it that way, I’m throwing all my crap into my bag and running next to her as she sprints for the parking garage’s rear.

Dreadnought wasn’t just unprecedented, he was the harbinger of a new wave of metahumans more potent than anything that had come before. For a short while it seemed like a major new player took the stage every month or so. All efforts to find the source of this new glut of powerful metahumans failed. Atomic radiation, ancient curses, exotic chemistry, eldritch magic—the variety of origin stories was as broad as the variety of people they happened to. Despite an aggressive search, no common cause was ever identified.

“Don’t you worry.” He draws himself up, as tall and proud as he can, like he’s about to be magnanimous. “We’re going to make this right. I love you. You’re my son.” I take a half step back. “Well…not anymore.” “We’ll go to doctors. We’ll get this looked at,” he says. Dad doesn’t sound like he’s all here anymore. He’s not really looking at me. He’s looking past me, toward some kind of pathetic optimism where he doesn’t have to deal with who I really am.

Yikes

Something caught my eye on the way in. These are the more distinctly feminine shoes. I find a pair in my size and clutch them to my chest, blushing. Flats, glossy black with straps. Super cute. I’ve always wanted some. Mom is pretty smart. If I show these to her, she might start putting things together. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Screw it. I really want these shoes. “Danny, I want you to try these on,” she says when I come around the corner again. My voice is quiet when I say, “I want these. They’re on sale.” “Oh, those are nice,” says Mom, and then an instant later I see her realize what Dad will think of them. A moment after that, she looks at me, puzzling. I’m sitting on the knife edge of hope, waiting for what she’ll say next. “But…oh. Yes, you can have those.” My smile is huge, as wide as it goes. I hug her, and she hugs me back and I love her so, so much. “Thanks, Mom.”

A few minutes later, I’m ten stories high, zipping across the city toward the glittering night skyline. I’ve been up high before in tall buildings and airplanes, but nothing really prepares you for being a hundred feet in the air with nothing between you and the ground but a long scream. The barrel rolls come naturally, and soon I’m laughing. Things are getting better all the time.

The place is wall-to-wall hypertech, the superscience that brings us wonders from a thousand possible futures, devices that are decades or centuries beyond what baseline tech can manage. Nobody really knows what makes hypertech possible. What’s obvious is that some people, most of whom don’t show any indication whatsoever of being metahuman, seem to have a knack for the development and manufacture of technology far in advance of what’s normally considered the state of the art. The only reason we’re not all living in space stations orbiting a neutron star or something like that is because hypertech has—well, it has problems. The biggest is probably that it’s amazingly hard to replicate, to the point where the government has officially given up trying to get mass production working. (Nobody believes them when they say that, though. The Pentagon uses as much hypertech as they can get their hands on, but it’s all custom-made gear that’s hard to replace.) At first, some hypertech developers tried to explain their work, but it never clicked with the mainstream. Experiments failed when universities tried to replicate them, functioning devices sometimes contradicted known laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera, and so 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. Every hypertech artifact has to be more or less handcrafted, often out of components which...

Her lips press thin, but then she shrugs. “Just because we’re doing superscience doesn’t mean we run without an ethics review board, kid.”

“You’re really tied to that nicotine, aren’t you?” I say as I step into my pants. “Yep,” she says. “That stuff will kill you, you know.” “Danny, I’m in the super science racket, and I’m not nonpartisan—uh, that means someone who doesn’t take a side in our little fraternity of extraordinarily empowered social rejects.” She circles a finger in the air to indicate the whole of Legion Tower. “If you pick a side, you’re going to make enemies. If a lab accident doesn’t get me, one of them will. I won’t have time to get cancer.”

“Did I…do something?” I ask. Oh God, what if I messed this up already? Doc Impossible seems to sag a little. “No. It’s just…Dreadnought was really important to him. And, to tell you the truth, Carapace wasn’t super excited to learn who’d gotten the mantle. I’m sorry. You really deserve more time to get used to this before you have to deal with that kind of thing. Capes in private are…” “Weird?” “That doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

You’ve seen aerial couriers downtown, right?” “Of course.” Every major city has a few people who can fly who make their living zipping time-sensitive materials from one end of the city to the other. Once you get ten feet in the air, there’s no such thing as a traffic jam. Until now, I’d never really stopped to think about why they’d be doing that instead of fighting crime. It seems normal; they’re just able to fly around town, right? It’s like being really good with a bike, but a little cooler, is all. “Right. Courier work is real popular with anybody who has a mobility power. High pay, short hours, and dead easy work that lets you spend most of your week doing whatever you want to do without worrying about money. A lot of fire departments will pay more than you’d think for people whose powers would help them with search-and-rescue work. Hell, one in a hundred of those guys doesn’t even need to breathe. They don’t do much to draw attention to themselves, but they’re there. That’s what a normal person who wants to help people with their power does: they join a government, or a nonprofit, or even just a company that’s not evil.”

“Dreadnought was very important to the status quo. It would mean a lot to us, and to the city, if you were willing to take his place once you’re old enough. We’ve been real lucky that all the other people who have worn the mantle wanted to be whitecapes, but there’s nothing that says you have to. You have zero obligations here, do you understand? This isn’t like political power—you didn’t fight for this; it was dropped in your lap. So all those great responsibilities that come with great power, those are only yours if you want them to be. It’s not fair to demand more of you, and worse, it’s not safe. This is a hard life. Someone as strong as you, if suffering from mental and emotional trauma, could quickly become dangerous. So a lot of people are going to want you to be a whitecape, but only you can decide if that’s right for you.”

“You’re fifteen. Right now, you see the fights, and the excitement, and the power. And all of that is sexy as hell. I know, believe me, I know. But trust me, the world is not always going to look the same to you as it does now.” “I know—” “Listen to me!” Her fingers dig into my knees a little more than I’d expect of merely human hands, and I lean away from her sudden vehemence. “Someday, you might get tired of needing to know where the nearest safe house is at all times. Someday, you might be sick of needing to take vacations in disguise. You might want to buy a house and be able to invite casual friends over and not lie to them about who you are. You might want to be able to make plans that don’t involve being on call for combat duty for the rest of your life. You might fall in love with someone who can’t protect themselves from the kind of people you’re going to piss off if you put on a cape. You have a family now? They’re going to have to go into a witness protection program if you start caping. They might to have to go underground if your identity is compromised. Do you understand? It means living under siege. We’re not all roommates in this tower because we can’t stand to be apart from each other. We live here because it’s safe here. We go anywhere else in the world, except maybe to another team’s HQ, and we have to be ready to throw down at a moment’s notice. Once you choose this, it is really hard to walk it back. If your identity gets blown, it’s basically impossib...

“I guess I just thought that I was finally a real girl.” “Hey! None of that!” She takes me by the shoulders. “You think it’s a uterus that makes a woman? Bullshit. You feel like you’re a girl, you live it, it’s part of you? Then you’re a girl. That’s the end of it, no quibbling. You’re as real a girl as anyone. And you really need to learn to express your anger better.”

Mom took me to a fancy bra store the other day, and there were posters everywhere of these women that, well, nobody looks like that in real life, right?” “Except you, and a few genetic lottery winners.” “Yeah. So my ideal self—” Doc Impossible chuckles. “Is a photoshopped underwear model, I see.” “I guess it sounds a little stupid to be upset over being pretty—” “Yes! Yes it does. You think you’re immune to advertisements? That’d be a hell of a superpower, but even if Dreadnought were immune to mind control—and he wasn’t—you’ve spent your entire life swimming in the stuff.” Doc Impossible turns back to the test results—at least the wall I broke wasn’t one she was working on—and starts sliding files and images into a new folder with a few flicks of her fingers. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. They’ll find some way to make you unhappy with your body sooner or later, so until then, enjoy it. Keep it in perspective.

“You can take your provisional membership and shove it,” I say, standing up. It’s a bit sad these chairs have silent wheels because I would have really loved to scrape some chair legs over the ground just now. “But I’m keeping the suit. And I’m keeping the mantle.” “That is not your decision to make, young man,” says Graywytch. “Then come take it!” I shout at her. A few of them are taken aback. I don’t think they’re used to being threatened by kids, but I can see the realization sinking into them: they can’t steal this from me. I’m sure fighting them would be way harder than I expect, but I have the powers of freaking Dreadnought, and even if they won, nobody knows how the mantle transfer works. “That’s what I thought.”

The sunlight catches her cheek, and for the first time I see the whole person. Maybe it’s because your mother is always Mom to you, or maybe it’s because I was in denial, but finally it hits me: Mom is just as much his captive as I am. She’s not just the quieter parent, the more reasonable one. She’s the trustee trapped between the warden and the other prisoner. Immediately upon the heels of this understanding is another: I must not say this out loud. To say it out loud is to name it, and to name it is to give it irresistible power. That power will mean it can no longer be ignored. The polite fictions and convenient blind spots won’t work anymore. Something will have to change. And I know, with a certainty that fills me with dread, this is something she will not do. If I say the name of this thing he’s done to her, she will fight me. She will join him, because she’ll have to. Because she’ll have to destroy me or else admit I was right… And then. Dot. Dot. Dot. And then somehow, it gets worse.

“It’s just…well, I suppose this is all a big change for you.” “Only because other people make it a big change,” I say as I wipe my hands. “Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.” She grabs a fistful of paper towels and wipes her hands quickly, then holds one out to shake. “I’m Sarah.” “Danny,” I say, shaking her hand. The warning bell rings and we head for class. She goes the other direction from me, but turns back to say, “Welcome to being a girl. Don’t mind the boys. You’ll get used to them.”

he’ll get over my shocking insistence upon having boobs in public,

😂

I’m a girl. That’s not going to change.” “You don’t know that. We might find—” “It won’t change because I don’t want it to.” Mom steps back a little. “I thought you understood that.” “Why would you think that?” she asks. “Because you bought me those things. Because…” My throat clenches up and my eyes prickle with tears. Because we had such a nice day out together. Because I felt closer to you that weekend than I ever have before. Because I thought you loved me, and could see I was happy now. I have all the things I need to say, but none of the strength to say them.

“Um, do I get a vote?” I ask. “It’s not a vote, it’s your choice. You get to make it unilaterally,” says Doc Impossible.

From outside the tube I hear a sharp bark of surprise, and then a stream of what might be (okay, what certainly is) profanity of notable creativity and enthusiasm.

“Danny, why did you lie to us?” she asks. She doesn’t sound mad, and she doesn’t sound curious. She sounds like she already knows the answer and wants me to confirm it. My whole body tightens. “What? I didn’t lie—” “This body was born in 1979, but I am the sum of my mother and all my mother’s mothers; my years number nine and twelve hundred. I have heard every lie tongues can speak. Scant few can deceive me, and you are not among them. You were not practicing flying. Yet you were there. Why were you there, and why did you not tell us of it?” “I was just, you know, going for a fly,” I hear myself say. The city spreads out beneath us, and I stare out at it rather than look at her. Even as I say it, I know she spots the lie. Her voice is soft and kind. “Danny, do you feel safe at home?” No. There it is. I don’t feel safe at home. I open my mouth to say something, and as I do I realize that like my mother, I can’t give it its name. Not out loud. Not even to Valkyrja. Because if I admit it, if I call it what it is, then I can’t hide from it anymore either. It becomes real in a way I am not ready for. Might never be ready for. There will be no illusions of safety, no peaceful times alone in my room. There will only be times when he’s not hurting me.

Sarah, or Calamity, I guess, hooks her thumbs through her gun belt. “Don’t see why not. Seems that’s how it’s been working since Eden.” “Do you really have to talk like that?” “Sure do; gotta sell the persona. Elsewise, I’m just a freak with a gun, and then where would I be?” “New Port?” One thing our fair city does not lack for is freaks or guns.

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.

How come nobody’s ever heard of this?” The government has done all sorts of sketchy things over the years, but human testing of a superweapon is screwed up even for the Pentagon. “It’s all still top secret. There were some glitches; all the test subjects died within six months except Granddad. But that’s only for the people who were directly treated with the serum. If you get it through your parents, it only carries a fifty-percent risk of leukemia within ten years of exposure. When I was born, I had three brothers. Now I have one.” “Jesus Christ!” “Ain’t nothing to worry your mind about.” She sets her arm on my shoulder. “I’ve been in remission for ten years, and I get a blood screen every other month.” The complications I’ve been dealing with seem petty and insignificant all of the sudden. I want to say something profound and insightful. What I come out with is, “That sucks.” “Eh, you get used to it. You won’t be telling nobody about this, by the way.” She says this with the kind of vehemence that lets me know that, superpowers or not, this isn’t a subject I want to make her angry about. “We know the serum’s effects are heritable. The Feds don’t, and we aim to keep it that way. They’ve done enough to my family already.”

“He is not blessed with an overly positive reputation among the girls I know at school,” she says. “What do you mean?” The accent drops. “I mean he’s a frickin’ creeper! You never noticed?” “No?” “Yeah. There ain’t a skinny girl in our year he hasn’t made a pass at. Ain’t nothing wrong with flirting, but he don’t even shower first. He does nothing to pretty himself up, and then he’s always sulky when someone brushes him off. Maybe that kind of thing is hard to see when you’re a boy—” “I was never a boy,” I say, sharper than I intend to. “I mean, I was always a girl. But now people can see it.” Calamity shrugs. “Fair enough,” she says, like I corrected her about my hair color. “But he couldn’t see you were a girl, either. So he didn’t treat you like one.”

Calamity is rigid under my hands. I’m carrying her by her armpits, and since we left the ground she hasn’t stopped praying under her breath. We glide into the building and I gently set her down before touching down next to her. “There,” I say. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” “Maybe we can find another way down.” Sarah is not doing the old-timey voice right now.

“What are we looking for?” I ask. “This was your brilliant notion,” says Calamity. “You tell me.” “Um. Well, let’s see what she was doing up here.” Deeper into the building, past shattered cubicles and blasted walls, we start seeing evidence of workshops and laboratories. The rubble is inches thick on the ground, but in the few clear spots we can see sooty linoleum on the floor. The twisted mass of something that might have once been an MRI machine lies broken on the ground. My heart sinks. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a big flashing sign saying THIS WAY TO THE CLUES.

He’s nonpartisan, but he’s also a separatist.” “There are metahuman separatists?” “All minorities have separatists, and he’s a real nasty one.

“You must be new. Flats are them. The baseline.” “That is the most boring slur I have ever heard.”

“Danny, I know I was pretty harsh on the Legion, but I see this kind of crap every other week. They don’t bother with small stuff like Bosco beating up a baseline every now and then.” “They wouldn’t—I mean—they’ve got to have their reasons, don’t they? Maybe it’d cause too much chaos or something. They need to keep the peace, right?” Even to myself, that sounds lame. “Ain’t no peace without justice, hun,” says Calamity. “I don’t care why they sit up there in their little tower and let bullies like Bosco run around free. I just care that they do.” “I’ll ask them,” I say. “Maybe I can change their mind.” She nods, and we keep walking. A moment later she says, “Danny, promise me, if you ever do join up with them, like, full-time, that you won’t forget tonight. You won’t forget us small fry.” “It’d be pretty hard to forget you, Calamity.” For a moment I’m scared I’ve offended her. She straightens up, looks at me funny. Finally, just as I’m about to apologize, Sarah says, “Thanks.”

On the train, a man old enough to be my father—and right then, even that was enough to hate someone—leaned forward and said, “Smile dear, it can’t be that bad.” For a moment I was stunned. A boiling fury consumed me. 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. For a few seconds there, I seriously considered the merits of kicking him through the side of the train and down onto the streets below. But I didn’t, which I’m sure I’ll be glad of later.

By the time I finish the final draft of an essay about Mistress Malice’s campaign for world domination (short version: with over a quarter million confirmed dead including 39 heroes and 182 fighter pilots, Mistress Malice remains the undisputed heavyweight champion of supervillains, even almost 60 years after her death),

If Utopia is pulling off other robberies, she’ll need lackeys. Supervillains ain’t known for doing their own menials. Someone’s got to drive the getaway van.

“What are we going to do with that?” “Us? Nothing. But my ex might be able to do a thing or two about this.” “How?” She shrugs. “He’s a wizard. He’s going to do wizardy things.”

Technology can be explained. Even hypertech sort of makes sense most of the time. Magic is something else, though. Magic is things like witches spinning thread out of moonlight, and using that to weave a cord for binding lies. It’s dangerous and unpredictable and not easy to replicate. Supposedly it’s more common in parts of Europe and a lot of India, but even there it’s a relic of the past.

“Do you even want to be a cape?” That’s a very good question. At first, I sort of assumed I would be. But then. Well. But then. But then my parents found out I was a girl. But then I met the Legion. But then David torched our friendship. Running around hunting Utopia is fun and all, and yeah, I promised I’d find a way to honor Dreadnought, and taking down the supervillain that killed him is a good way to do that, but Calamity has a point. I’ve been able to choose permanent colors—not even Dreadnought’s colors, just anything—for more than a week now. And I haven’t. And maybe I never will. So I don’t say anything because I don’t have any answers, and after a moment it gets weird. “Hey, look, I didn’t mean anything by that,” says Sarah. It’s a little weird talking to Sarah when she’s got the Calamity outfit on but she’s not doing the voice. “It’s okay.” Like a bubble rising from the depths, the question forms and is out of my lips before I really think about it. “Is it selfish that I kinda just want to be Danielle right now?” “No. I don’t think so.”

We have to do this on our own, because there is nobody else. 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. So are you with me, or am I riding alone now?”

“We ain’t running,” she says. Her voice is hard and steady. “Are you insane?” I hiss. Glancing over, I can’t see Utopia anymore. She’s dropped down into the fire, probably to finish off the Artificer. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Calamity is already on her feet, seeing what she can salvage from the twisted ruin of her motorcycle. “Why? Utopia didn’t show up here by accident; Gerald must have warned her we paid him a visit, then she got the same notion we did. Since she’s gone to all the trouble of keeping us from needing to track her down, it seems a mite bit inconsiderate to let that pass without so much as a how-do-ya-do.” I throw my hand out at the inferno. “She just blew up an entire factory!” Calamity snaps her hat by its brim to shake the dust off and sets it on her head. “I did notice that just now.” “We are not ready for this kind of fight.” I step over to grab her, and in a single fluid move she has somehow locked my wrist against my elbow and thrown me clear over her shoulder. I land and slide for a yard or two. “You get along home if you want to, but that woman just killed our last lead.” Calamity begins unloading her pistols and stowing the ammo in her pockets. “Without the Artificer we’ve got no prayer of heading off what she’s got planned. So if you want to avenge the guy who gave you that mantle, now is your one and only chance. But if you wanna quit the moment it gets hard, then I’ll not cry to see the back of you.” I get to my feet. “We don’t even know ...

“She knows who I am!” I’m pacing, hugging myself, holding back from the edge of terror. Calamity’s answer is immediate: “Let’s kill her.” “No! We’re not killing anybody!” “We can hardly let her go or drop her off with the cops if she knows your name. Ain’t got no real good options here, do we?”

“I want to help people.” “And that is beautiful, and you’re amazing.” She takes my hand and squeezes it. “But there are a million things you could do to help people that don’t involve pissing off superpowered psychopaths. You could be the best firefighter in the history of fire. You could be a one-woman space program and explore Mars for us. Every single person who has put on the mantle and used it to fight has been killed in action. Every one of them. It is a job with a one hundred percent mortality rate. You could be anyone you want to be, do anything you want to do. Why do you want to get murdered?” “I don’t! I just…I got pushed around a lot when I was little. Even after it eased up when I hit my growth spurt, I still don’t feel safe at school unless I’m hiding in a corner where nobody goes. But now, I’ve got these powers so nobody”—my father looms in my mind’s eye—“can push me around anymore. And I don’t want to let them hurt anyone else, either.” “Damn,” says Doc Impossible quietly. “What?” “That’s one of the classics, all right. You might be in the right place after all.” She smiles. “God help you, kid.”

“Doc, can I ask you kind of a personal question?” “Go ahead.” “How long have you known you’ve made the wrong choice?” Doctor Impossible grunts. “Ouch. Ya got me.” Her cigarette flares orange in the dim light. “It’s been five years.” “Have you ever tried to get out? Go back to being nonpartisan, I mean?” She shakes her head. “Can’t. I made an enemy who will follow me no matter where I go or what I do. It’s not real safe for me to leave the Tower, so I do my work from here. Sometimes we make choices, and we don’t realize they’re permanent until it’s too late.”

You will never be one of us. Real women—” As if moving off the topic of the Legion has freed my voice, I find that I can shout at her, “It’s not my fault I’m trans! You think I wanted to be born this way?” “Not really,” says Graywytch. “I don’t blame you any more than I would blame an ebola victim. Society has fed your generation so many toxic ideas about gender, it’s only natural some of you would crack. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t dangerous. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be expunged. You reify the holocaust of gender, you invade my sex, and you poison my sisters by your simple presence. You cannot possibly understand what it means to be a woman, and you rape us all when you try. If you will not surrender the mantle, I will be forced to destroy you.” “You wanna try?” I stalk forward. “Any time, bitch!” “The instant resort to violence.” Graywytch seems to collapse in on herself, and the night’s shadows become somehow more solid, even alive. They rush to embrace her, and she’s gone. Her voice comes to me as if from a great distance. “How essentially male.” “Coward! We’ll beat you!” For a moment, I think she’s gone. When her voice comes again, it is tight with fury. “Magic leaves no fingerprints, Daniel. You will surrender your powers, or by the end of the month you will die in agony and damn the mantle if it is lost. Nobody will believe you. Nobody will help you. Nobody can. Not your parents. Not the Legion. Not your fists. Your only hope is surrender. I will leave you...

Holy shit. She's perfectly willing to screw over the entire world next time a Mistress Malice level threat shows up just to prove how much of a TERF she is.

“I have never been your son! I am your daughter! And you have never once told me that you loved me!” “Now wait just a goddamn minute!” he shouts. “We’re trying to help you, you ungrateful little faggot! We want you to be who you really are and not some—” “Don’t talk to me like you give a shit about who I am! I told you who I am, and you called me a liar!”

“You’re only fifteen,” she says. “You’re too young to make this kind of choice. You need to give Dreadnought’s mantle back to the Legion, and when you’re eighteen, if this is what you really want, we can talk about it.”

Seems like Graywytch neglected to mention that giving up the mantle of Dreadnought imvolves death. I can't say I'm surprised.

“Your mother is right, you are being very selfish right now! As long as you’re going to act this way, you are not welcome in this house.”

We already knew he an a transphobic asshole, and now we know he's a hypocrite too. You can't throw around 'I love yous' and follow them up 'but get out if you're something I don't like.'

People think the world looks small when you get up high, but that’s not true. It looks huge. The horizon leaps away from you, further and further the higher you go. The world is gigantic from up here.

Now, if we’re done with show and tell, could you maybe go see if my people are dead or not?”

Well, excuse me for wanting to know what the fuck I'm walking into, asshole.