Cape Issue [a Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel Story]

Chapter 2: New Paths, Old Avenues

The word "terrorist" cannot be used lightly. Kamala had been called one ever since she was little; there was no age in modern America where a brown-skinned Muslim girl was too young to be called a suspected terrorist and excluded from a space. Schoolmates excluded like it was a sport, and sports was just one of the activities often excluding Kamala Khan of Grove Street, depending on the political climate and how politicized her identity was at a time. The adults who those children grow up to be, even if not always in a literal sense, marched down her home street, wielding blazing torches, and showing terrifying faces as they shouted and they were amassed right in front of her. Kamala was terrified of what they were planning to do to the crowd, and she was terrified of what they had already done to Grove and who-knew-elsewhere. The terrifying gathering waved a terrifying flag of three lines, where the first was the thickest, most prominent one. They were known to her as the nativist, exceptionalist, and supremacist group Prominence and they were terrorists to her in every sense of the word. They were, even if someone called them just a protest; it was what they protested that proved it to her.

"We will not be replaced! This street has honored real American history forever! Don't like it? Don't sell on it!" said one terrorist with a megaphone.

"Yeah!" cheered his fellow men; the newer gathering was exclusively men.

"Don't even walk on it!"

"Yeah!"

"And don't tear down its good name!"

"YEAH! CHRIS-TOPHER COLUMBUS! CHRIS-TOPHER COLUMBUS!"

The larger crowd didn't take part in their chant. They just stared down the smaller one filled with hate and Kamala was one of the deepest wells of contempt because the last thing they might be called was "terrorist", but she as a young girl had to endure the accusation for being Brown and taking up space somewhere she was legally forced to attend.

The worst feeling she felt, besides the inherent fear and contempt, was that she couldn't do anything about it at that moment. She was stuck in the larger crowd, far away from the marching interlopers. The doldrums of the sudden stop after space travel were gone from her mind and she was caught up to the moment, but the moment saw her trapped by circumstance.

There was one bare sense of relief when Devil Dinosaur stomped towards the torch-wielders, took a big inhale, and blew out all the torches in one equally exhaustive exhale. The fire had not only gone out over the crowd, but inside it as well. The casual, polo-shirt-wearing terrorists were also terrified of a red Tyrannosaurus Rex. They were predators in different senses – the larger and redder one was just a more natural kind than the other and the other was a perversion of nature. Prominence was still there, but, about two dozen men, deprived of their fiery scare tactic, versus a towering, growling dinosaur? It made Prominence less prominent, at least.

Neither Dio nor Calogero looked towards Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. They were looking every other way.

"Fadi? Getting that bell yet?" asked Calogero into a flip phone.

That name was so familiar. No. Immediately familiar! Fadi Fadlalah! 'Wait, how does he know Amulet?' Kamala didn't know if the feeling bubbling up was intensifying trust or distrust. It had to go either way. She was alert and felt pent in with Dio and Calogero on both sides of her.

"Who are you talking to?" she asked.

"A hero who's already in costume, don't worry about it," Calogero whispered back.

"Cal!" Dio whispered to him, but with more severity.

"I didn't say anything!" Calogero protested.

He'd said enough. 'They most definitely know I'm Ms. Marvel. Is it just them? Who told them? Fadi? Nakia? Bruno? All three of them know who I am, but I don't think they'd go around telling people. Oh God... did people figure out the whole Kamala's Law thing? Did everyone figure it out while I was gone?!'