Dreams of the Golden Age (36 page)

Maybe Majors was right, and she should have let the company go a long time ago. Let the big picture fend for itself while she focused on what was important: Arthur and the girls.

No. Those thoughts were a trap, because while she didn’t have powers of her own, she was still her parents’ daughter. She had the power to make Commerce City better and an obligation to use it. Dr. Mentis of the Olympiad understood. So did Anna, or she wouldn’t have spent all these weeks sneaking out on her adventures.

An explosion sounded, the
whump
of a fireball in a distant corridor, the hiss of gas and burning, and a group of people shouting in panic that seemed to echo through the building’s foundations and floor. No …

Majors turned back to her, his face drawn into a very serious, very pitying frown. “Remember, you could have stopped this.”

“You’re a psychopath,” she said. “I know your kind.”

“You don’t know anyone like me,” he declared.

She smiled, because she could list the names of all the villains who were just like him, who’d kidnapped her or tried to. Who’d failed, no matter how confidently they’d stood before her and ranted that they were different. The feeling of déjà vu was oppressive.

The sounds continued, changing in ways Celia couldn’t interpret. The blast of a blowtorch, shouted denials, then … rain? Falling water? Whatever it was, the shouting stopped, which could either be good or bad.

Typhoon …

Which was only her mind playing tricks on her. A memory from the old days intruding.

“That’s it, right?” Steel, the thug behind her, asked Majors. They’d all gone very quiet, listening. “They’re done?”

“We’ll wait a few minutes and send Shark in to check. But I’ve studied all the vigilantes who might have come to help her, and none of them could escape those traps.”

Just keep blustering.
She desperately hoped he was wrong. Tried to imagine a world where he wasn’t, and her rescuers just met disaster. Tried and failed. She could not imagine herself
not
getting rescued, and wasn’t that an odd thought? Did Majors know that she’d never not been rescued?

Celia flinched back when she felt a tickling pressure on her left wrist. A tugging at the nylon strap binding her. Then a voice whispered close her ear. “Ms. West, it’s Teddy Donaldson. I’m invisible.”

Of course he was. She sat very still and kept a smile of relief off her face. When really, she wanted to laugh. The nylon jerked a few times, seemingly of its own accord—a strange thing to see—until the knot loosened. The boy was clever enough to leave the strap there but tied loosely enough for her to easily slip her hand free. He quickly did the same to the right hand and then her feet, leaving them entirely free of the straps.

“When we give the signal, make a run for it,” he whispered.

Now
this
was a rescue. She’d been freed right under Steel’s nose and no one was the wiser.

A tiny breath of a draft marked Teddy’s passing. Steel looked over, as if he’d caught some motion out of the corner of his eye. But he shrugged it off.

Celia wished she could have talked to Teddy, or that he’d leaned close enough for her to whisper a reply: Take out Mindwall. With the mentalist out of commission, Arthur could likely incapacitate the whole room and they could stroll out of here. If only …

She took a deep breath to settle her nerves and waited. Everything was going to be all right, and very soon.

The shadowy figure in green chose that moment to step into the open. The vigilante was tall, impressively fit, his arms and thighs leanly muscled under the skin-suit fabric. He stood in a pose of strength, shoulders back, hands clenched at his sides. His mouth and jaw were visible under the sleek helmet and mask he wore. He was clean shaven and seemed young.

Majors and his people jumped like they’d been hit with a static shock. And Celia found out how Steel got his name when a metallic scraping wrenched from his raised arms, which had become elongated, flattened, and edged with vicious-looking blades. The man’s arms had become mutated, living swords, and he held them out and bent, ready to wield.

She didn’t want her daughters anywhere near that man and hoped Arthur had the good sense not to bring them. The thought of the man standing guard behind her suddenly became that much more terrifying. All he’d have to do was drive one of his arms through her back …

The green-suited super didn’t seem the least put off by the display, almost like he expected it. He announced, “Danton Majors, I need you to release Ms. West and surrender immediately.”

Majors grunted. “Who the hell are you?”

The young super hesitated, as if trying to figure out what to call himself, but he set his jaw and brushed the question away. “I’m a concerned citizen. You’ve broken a lot of laws here, Mr. Majors.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

The vigilante quirked a smile, tilted his head. “Just let her go.”

“No,” Majors said. His grin turned ugly, and he glanced over his shoulder. “Steel?”

The superhuman cocked back his bladed arms and ran forward.

Even Celia knew you never ran head-on at a strange superhuman without knowing anything about their powers. Seriously.

The mystery man leapt out of the way. He literally jumped, his power taking him across the room in a single stride. He bounced feetfirst against the wall, landed on the floor nearby in a crouch, and looked back at his opponents. Meanwhile, Steel had stabbed his right arm into the floor where the stranger had been standing, tearing through the carpet. Snarling, he wrenched his arm free. The man went after his quarry again, still running, as if moving fast enough would allow him to catch the jumper. This time, Steel slashed instead of stabbed, but the vigilante deftly sprang out of the way, bouncing across the room like some kind of insect. This time, he landed near Celia.

She didn’t suppose he’d at all coordinated with the bunch in the stairwell …

“What do you think you’re doing?” Majors said, laughing. “You think you’re just going to grab her and jump off the roof with her?”

“Sure,” the vigilante said. “Why not?”

Her eyes widened in alarm. She’d rather stay tied to the chair for the time being. Maybe she could talk him out this. Mindwall, she’d noticed, had edged to the wall, where he crouched in a vain effort to hide. No offensive capabilities, scared to death. Good.

The whump and crash of another large explosion rattled through the space, closer this time. A couple of ceiling panels shook loose and fell to the floor.

“What was that?” Steel gasped, unnecessarily.

The woman, Sonic, ran into the open space. “Danton, they’ve broken through! They’re on this floor! They survived!”

“Then stop them!”

What followed sounded like nothing so much as a ray gun, a patter of high-pitched whines searing down the hallway. Blaster’s laser bolts. When Sonic and Shark appeared from around the corner, they ducked and dodged like a couple of kids fleeing a snowball fight. It was almost amusing.

“What are you
doing
?” Majors yelled at them. He was losing control of the situation, and he knew it.

“We can’t get close, it’s the kid with the ray beam—”

“I don’t
care
! Sonic:
Knock them down!
”

The two supers turned to hold their ground, Shark crouching and Sonic taking cover behind him. He clapped his hands over his ears, and Majors and the rest of his people did likewise—Steel managed to retract his swords first, alas.

The woman leaned around, cupping her hands around her mouth and letting out a noise that didn’t seem like it could ever come from a human. Almost an electronic squeal, Celia felt it in her bones more than heard it with her ears. As the vibrations rumbled up through the floor, her gut turned over, and she grew more nauseated. The steel frame of the skyscraper itself seemed to be vibrating on some fundamental resonate frequency. The whole building was going to turn to powder if this kept up.

Celia debated pulling her hands out of her bindings to cover her ears, to give away that her rescuers were already in the room and she’d been freed. Hell, she could probably just run. And go where?

Things happened very quickly, too quickly for Celia to decide on an action, one way or another. First: The windows shattered. Starting with a ringing sound, ethereal church bells, the glass bowed, cracked, maybe only on this floor, maybe across the entire building. The cracks multiplied into a frosted sheen while Sonic’s wailing continued to pound them, until the entire wall of glass burst outward in a shimmering crest of glinting shards. Sheets of glass would be raining down onto the streets below.

The otherworldly screeching stopped as even Sonic looked back, surprised at what she’d done.

The man in green took that moment to leap at her, jumping at an angle, bouncing off the ceiling, aiming his legs in a piledriver kick at her chest. She spun but couldn’t dodge; he caught her on the shoulder. Strongman Shark was right there, grabbing the kid and literally drop-kicking him across the room, booting him in the chest. He hit the wall near Celia and rolled to the floor, groaning.

The cavalry arrived then, a whole swarm of them rushing in, spreading out, shouting.

So was this the signal for her to run, or was it something else?

God, the kids looked like a real superhero team: Sam kept blasting, focusing a rain of lasers on Shark to throw him off balance, unable to go on the offensive. Shark bent to the attack as if he leaned into a hailstorm. As for storms, the shattered wall gave Lew access to a blast of wind and driving rain, adding to the confusion. Teia had her hands to the wall, and a sheet of ice grew away from her, toward Sonic, until it curled away from the wall and around the enemy super, creating a column of ice around her, trapping her. Sonic shattered it quickly with a short burst of sound, but by that time the floor had grown icy as well, and when she tried to run, she slipped and fell hard.

The others had flowed into the room by that time: Mark Paulson, amazingly enough, along with a couple of his SWAT guys, guns to their sides in this chaotic environment; Analise—and what the hell was she doing here?—and Celia wondered if her flash on Typhoon really had been her imagination; Arthur, thank God, and just seeing him made Celia smile. The expression on his face wrenched her heart—he was looking at her, but he couldn’t see her, not really, not without his power. She hoped he could tell just by looking at the surface of her how happy she was to see him. And then Anna. Anna was here, small and pale, mouth twisted in a worried, panicked frown, her red hair wet and plastered around her face. She’d lost her stocking cap and mask somewhere along the way.

Go away,
Celia wanted to scream at her.
Hide, please hide.

Instead, Anna looked across at the superhuman in green, who was picking himself up off the floor, stretching a no-doubt bruised back and shoulders.

“
Eliot?
” Anna exclaimed, loud enough to echo across the room.

Everyone hesitated, turning to stare at the unknown man. Danton Majors himself, who had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, maybe in preparation for wading into the fight, stared at the kid with a kind of disbelieving intensity that made the rest of them pause. A tension spiked that hadn’t been there even with all the fighting and combat.

“
What?
” Majors said darkly. Poor Anna stood frozen, obviously unsure of what she’d done. Despite the new drama unfolding before her, Celia couldn’t look away from her daughter. There’d been a moment when she believed she would never see Anna again, and that moment pulled at her gut like fishhooks.

Majors and the man in green faced each other, and the man in green took off his helmet and mask. He was a good-looking guy, with dark hair and an intense gaze, cute and boyish—and obviously Danton Majors’s son. They had the same eyes.

“What—” Majors said, and stopped, too shocked to continue. And what shocked him? Eliot Majors’s appearance here, his opposition to Danton, or the basic fact of his possessing superhuman powers? Might have been all three; Celia couldn’t tell.

“Didn’t expect to see me here, did you, Dad?” He laughed a little, which sounded like relief. “Well, here I am. Superhuman. Just like you always wanted.”

Oh, to peel back that history … it was like looking into a fun house mirror.

Danton finally shrugged, letting his hands drop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He almost sounded forlorn.

“Because I knew you’d try to turn me into that!” He pointed at the quartet in the matching skin-suit uniforms, Majors’s personal superhero team. Delta’s finest, no doubt, chosen and cultivated by the entrepreneur to be so.

Celia realized something: Danton Majors had accused her of manipulating the city and its superhumans because that was what he’d done in Delta. He couldn’t imagine her doing anything else with her wealth and power and connections. And he figured there was room for only one of him in the world.

“Eliot. You need to stay out of this. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I was trying to help,” the man in green—Eliot—said. And exactly how much had Anna been hanging out with this guy? “I know you came to Commerce City to stop the Executive. I wanted to help. Prove to you a lone hero can do some good without you, without the team. But … I think you’re wrong, Dad. I think you’re wrong about what’s been going on and about who here really needs to be stopped. When we started looking for clues about the Executive, we didn’t find Celia West. We found you.”

Danton bared his teeth. “You don’t understand anything, not at all! Get out of the way and let me deal with this!”

A roomful of people was poised to jump, if only they knew which way to go. Steel was twitching toward Eliot—but surely Majors wouldn’t want him to attack his own son. Arthur and the others seemed to be choosing their targets.

As enthralling as this was, Celia had had quite enough. It was time to go home. “Danton Majors, you should have gagged me when you had the chance,” she said.

“What?”

She yelled, “Take out the skinny guy, he’s the mentalist blocking Arthur!”