Dreams of the Golden Age (3 page)

He’d been more than a little banged up. Anna wanted him to go to the hospital. But no, he’d made it through the night, he’d be fine. He’d turned invisible to get ice packs and aspirin without his parents knowing, staying in his bedroom long enough to convince them he was sick and couldn’t go to school. Somehow, they’d bought it. They went to work, so it was just Teddy at home.

He wanted her to help him wash the blood out of his outfit.

She just about killed him for that. She didn’t wash his outfit, but they ended up spending a couple of hours talking about what had happened, what he’d done right, and how it could have gone better. Her opinion: He should wait for the team to go with him next time. One against three were terrible odds, and sometimes even an invisible kid who could walk through walls needed someone to watch his back. He had to learn to phase out when someone hit him, the way he phased through walls. She told him that, and he defended himself, saying he couldn’t focus on so many things at once. Well then, he shouldn’t be trying to fight crime yet, should he?

That should have been the end of it, but then she had that talk with her mother. Her apparently omniscient mother.

She reached the nurse’s office just as he was walking out, closing the door behind him.

“Teddy!” she called.

He flinched, eyes bugged out, looking like he was about to run.

“We have to talk.” Before he could flee, she grabbed the sleeve of his uniform jacket and pulled him to a padded bench around the corner.

The bruise on his cheek had turned an amazing purplish-gray, spreading around his eye in a crescent. Otherwise, he didn’t seem too badly hurt. He favored his shoulder, but he could still move it. It could have been so much worse. Her big fear was that he would be knocked unconscious while invisible and not rematerialize. Just stay invisible forever, and she’d be the only person who could find him, zeroing in on him with her power and tripping over his body.

“I’m surprised you even came to school today,” she said.

“I could only stay away so long.”

“But you’re okay, right? What are you doing here?” She nodded toward the nurse’s office.

He looked changed. “As soon as I showed up, one of the teachers dragged me here. They kept asking questions about trouble at home.”

“They think you’re being
abused
?”

“Look at my face.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.” She resisted an urge to brush a flop of brown hair off his forehead. Weirdly, the bruise made him look simultaneously tough and vulnerable.

“I told her I walked into a door,” he said.

“You couldn’t think of a better excuse than that?”

He huffed. “I wasn’t thinking. It’s not important. I know what I did wrong. You’re right, I have to figure out how to phase out when people are hitting me. I’ll do better next time.”

How about avoiding getting hit at all? “That’s what we need to talk about. You need to back off.”

“It didn’t go perfect but I did okay—”

“You have to back off,” Anna said. “My mother knows it was you.”

He stared. “What? That’s impossible, how could she?”

“I don’t know, but she does. It’s her thing, she’s a control freak.”

“But how does she know about
me
?”

“She keeps tabs on everybody.”

“So it’s not enough that she’s president of the richest company there is, she has to spy on everybody?”

Flustered, Anna waved him off. “I don’t know, she’s paranoid. That’s not the point right now. You need to cool it because she’s watching.”

He thought for a minute, so grim and serious she almost laughed. “I can’t back off now. It’ll go better next time, I know it will. I need more practice.”

“Crime’ll still be there in a month or two. You need more practice where someone isn’t trying to kill you.”

“But that’s just it, how am I going to get practice using my powers when there’s danger if I’m not really in danger?”

“That’s a stupid argument,” she said. “I worry about you, Teddy.”

“Well. Thanks for worrying.” Even with the giant bruise, his gee-whiz smile lit up his face. It was hard staying mad at him.

“Any time.”

The warning chime sounded, a bell tone that was meant to be soothing but managed to be annoying as it echoed through the halls, because it meant they had five minutes to get to class. Anna didn’t much want to go to class at the best of times.

She hooked her arm around Teddy’s and hauled him away from the nurse’s office. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“What if I go out with Teia or Lew? Or Sam? We can watch each other’s backs—”

“So you can get in twice as much trouble?”

He brightened. “You could go with me.”

“I’d be useless.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not useless,” he said, but the words were rote and they both knew she was right. He added, “Maybe you shouldn’t worry so much.”

Her mother’s words from yesterday’s after-school conference echoed. Math quiz, she wished. “Somebody’s got to worry, the rest of you sure aren’t.”

They arrived at the second floor, north wing corridor, and history. Her first class. Teddy had chemistry. What he really needed were some physics lessons—pressure, velocity, force of impact.

“Are you saying that you want me to quit?” he said.

“No, it’s not that. I just … you could have been killed.”

“I could get killed crossing the street—”

“That’s another stupid argument.”

“We have to keep going. We’ve started this. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

That all depended on whom you talked to. Which sounded like something her mother would say.

“Yeah,” she said. “We have to keep going.” They didn’t have a choice. They’d already come this far.

*   *   *

Tom picked Bethy up from middle school first, then Anna, who didn’t have anything after school today. She could have lied about it and taken the bus home, like she usually did when soccer was on or she had a group project. But she didn’t want to push her luck. Dad might be able to tell she was lying. Or not. That was the trouble, he hardly ever let on what he knew or didn’t. He’d just let her keep digging whatever hole she started on until she hit bedrock. And he’d just stand there, his eyebrow raised, not saying anything.

The car waited because she was late, between picking up books from her cubby and talking to friends on the way out. Tom never gave her a hard time about lingering. Bethy was in the back of the car, math book open, doing her homework. Anna shoved the book over as she slid onto the seat. “Drive on, Jeeves,” she called to the front seat.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” Tom said, his smile amused. He was a silver-haired man who’d been working for her mother for eons. Anna couldn’t imagine that, working for the same person forever. Getting old doing the same job. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, but it wasn’t that. She didn’t want to run West Corp, either. Her mother had taken over right where her father, the previous president of West Corp—
and
the famous Captain Olympus—left off. Like they were some kind of clones or something. Anna was afraid to ask if everyone expected her to do the same. She’d rather they give it all to Bethy.

Throwing her an annoyed pout, Bethy gathered up her books and papers as the car pulled away from the curb.

“You flunk your quiz?” Anna asked.

“No. A minus. Mom was right, how did she know?”

“You love math, it’s your favorite, you’ll never flunk a math quiz.”

“But I was worried.”

She could tell Bethy that everything would be perfect for the rest of her life and she’d still worry. “You’re weird, you know that?”

Bethy should have said, “No, you are,” after that, but she didn’t. Instead, she hugged her book bag to her chest and watched her sister, staring hard until Anna squirmed.

“What?” Anna said. The plea hung through a long pause.

“If you got powers, would you tell me?” Bethy asked.

She could answer with a straight face because she’d been dealing with the question her whole life. Her grandparents, her father—all superhuman, and sometimes superhumans passed on their powers.

The trick was not to respond any differently from all the other times. People were always watching her; she just had to act normal, always.

“Yes, I would.” Except she wouldn’t, because she hadn’t, because if Bethy knew, their father would be twice as likely to find out, so Bethy couldn’t know about any of it. Anna had to keep it all to herself.

“Really?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Because if I got powers, I’d tell you.”

“Do you have powers? Are you getting powers?”

“No. But I was just thinking about what I would do if I did.”

“Having powers isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know.”

“Be nice to figure that out for myself.”

“Mom’s right. You worry too much.”

“Runs in the family,” Bethy said.

Because they had a lot to worry about, in the end.

THREE

T
HE
large conference room at City Hall was filled with the worst sort of business sharks, lobbyists, developers, profiteers, and robber barons. Gathered here in the name of progressive urban development, of course. But they all had blood in their gazes and were licking their chops, figuratively.

And Celia was here among them. What did that say about her?

City government had been trying for twenty years to institute major urban redevelopment. The idea fell out of favor when a previous mayor who advocated revitalization turned supervillain on them, so Commerce City was long overdue for such a plan. Finally, though, the wheels were moving—in part thanks to Celia West’s advocacy.

The city had asked for comprehensive bids to be submitted to a planning committee. This committee would decide the tone and direction of Commerce City for the next generation. Of course, Celia had gotten West Corp involved. Along with every other construction and development company in the city wanting a piece of the pie.

A variety of consortiums and contractors had just delivered their spiels to the mayor, members of the city council, and the planning committee, which included police, fire, and safety officers. Police Captain Mark Paulson was among them. She’d asked him to join the committee specifically. Wasn’t normally his sort of thing—bureaucratic stuffiness took him off the street, where he could do real good, he was always saying. But they needed to take the long view. The work they did now would have repercussions for decades, including in the area of law enforcement. And she wanted at least one ally in the room.

The second-to-last presentation was wrapping up. Two men in suits—she thought of them as trained monkeys, doing their little dance—stood by the wall screen where they’d flashed their maps and drawn their lines and squares where their company would build freeways, outlet malls, and tract housing, if they had their way. The thing that gave them those confident smiles? The fact that everyone in their audience, whose approval they needed to move forward, was also a potential investor. Conflict of interest didn’t exist in these people’s world. They kept looking at Celia in particular like she was a bag of money waiting to burst open.

“Very impressive, gentlemen,” Mayor Edleston, who didn’t know any better, said as he nodded appreciatively. “Any questions? Any information the committee can add about what this would take in terms of permitting, legislation?” He looked to the side of the room where the people who actually got things done sat.

Celia said, “Maybe we should go ahead and move on to the final presentation.”

A silence fell, thick as snow and heavy as lead. She loved when that happened. Everyone stared at her, and her audience was suddenly entirely captive.

Today, she’d started out tired and sore, but she’d powered through it and brought out all the poise and resolve she could muster. She stood, running her hand along the edge of a file folder. She knew without looking that her dark gray dress suit didn’t have a wrinkle in it, and her short red hair and makeup were perfectly arranged. Good grooming was power. One of the little things that determined whether people would listen to you.

“We’ve seen a lot of big, ambitious plans. Lots of freeways, lots of suburbia. Looks great on paper, doesn’t it? But you can track this pattern in a dozen other cities: You build a freeway system that drains resources from the city center, you end up with an empty shell and all the problems that come with it. I want to see economic development as much as the next person, but not at the expense of the city itself. I propose that we can have an economic boom, a vibrant Commerce City, without the sprawl.”

First monkey said, “But the development our plan promotes
will
benefit the city—”

“The whole city, or your little cadre of investors?” she replied.

“
You’re
an investor—”

“That’s right. But you’re advocating an either-or situation, and I want both.”

The second monkey had returned to his seat with the other developers. He muttered to a colleague in a way that made it clear he was only pretending to whisper, “Bitch.”

Mayor Edleston shifted uncomfortably, rubbing a hand across his chin. The suits from the other development firms cleared their throats and stared at their hands. First monkey grumbled at the tabletop.

She could buy them all, and they knew it. They hated it. She was enjoying herself immensely.

“If you’ll indulge me,” she said, “West Corp has put together a plan that benefits both Commerce City’s investors and citizens, and I’d love to show it to you.” She held up a flash drive. No one even had time to go for coffee before she started in.

The city council’s IT guy plugged the drive into the video system, and a second later the wall screen displayed her graphics, dominated by the West Corp logo, the latest redesign of which included elements from the earliest logos, the crescent symbol forming the arc of a bow ready to fire a star into the heavens. The retro look of it had gone over well. The trick was, she’d been in here consulting with the IT guy half an hour before the meeting started. She knew her file worked, and it was the only file on the drive. No chance for screwups. Really, it took so little effort to appear entirely in control, entirely powerful, it was surprising so few people managed it. The IT guy handed her the display’s remote.