Dreams of the Golden Age (8 page)

“That’s just it. I started to tell him all about West Corp—nothing serious, you know, just all the public record stuff. I mean, that’s all I really know.”

“But?”

“He wanted to know about the Olympiad and whether or not you had powers.”

“I don’t have powers, everyone knows that.”

“Yeah, but … he seemed to think that maybe you’d hidden it. I told him that was silly. You’ve publicly distanced yourself from superhuman vigilantes your whole life. And you know what he said?”

“That the very fact I’ve distanced myself suggests I’m hiding something.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Celia, I have to tell you, and my instincts are pretty good on this sort of thing—I started wondering if he’s got his sights on you. From a business perspective, I mean.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Thanks a lot, Mary. I owe you one.”

“Then how about giving me an early look at your annual report for last year?”

“We’ll talk. Later.” She said farewell and hung up before Mary could do any more cajoling.

The message light on her phone was flashing, and she picked up the line. “Celia, it’s Mark. I’m sending you a file. Let me know what you think.”

She checked the encrypted e-mail account she and Mark had set up for this sort of thing.

*   *   *

This new video came from a traffic camera. In color this time, a little better quality, but still no sound. Didn’t matter, because there wasn’t much to the clip anyway. The scene showed a deserted intersection, half an hour after midnight. She double-checked the location—near City Park. She knew the place.

A figure darted into the frame—straight down into the frame. A flyer, then? No—he descended at speed, landed in the middle of the intersection, absorbing the shock of impact in his knees, ending in a crouch. Straightening, he looked around, then gathered himself, pulling his arms close, bunching his legs. He launched himself into an epic leap that took him once again out of the frame of the camera, straight up. Not a flyer but a jumper. Celia was impressed in spite of herself.

She isolated a frame of film that gave the best view of his figure and features. He had a confidence in his movements that pinned him as just a bit older than teenager. He was lean and muscular and had a determined set to his angular jaw, the thin frown that jutted out under his helmetlike mask. He had a good-looking outfit, a green skin suit that showed off his physique, as was tradition, and that slick helmet. He’d put some thought into this, even if he hadn’t gotten a whole lot of publicity out of it. Yet.

But something about him wasn’t right. She took out her list of the Leyden Lab employees, the points of origin for them all. Studied the names, though by this time she had most of them memorized. She knew them all, and that was what bothered her. This new guy wasn’t the right age. Justin Raylen’s and Ed Crane Jr.’s kids were elementary school age; next oldest came the slew of them currently in middle and high school. The few descendants who hit in between that younger generation and her own hadn’t shown any sign of powers. Everyone older than Arthur was retired.

This guy didn’t match anyone on her list.

Which was impossible, or should have been impossible. She’d spent hundreds of hours and almost twenty years tracking down every single descendant of every single person who had been present in Leyden Laboratories when Simon Sito’s experiment failed. Every single person who had even a hint of potential. She’d pulled strings and broken laws to get access to adoption records, to track down secret affairs and illegitimate children. Every time a new superhero appeared, she’d been able to trace them back to one of these families, and she’d learned the secret identity of every superhuman who’d ever gone vigilante in Commerce City. She
knew.

Except for this guy.

Her hands felt cold as she picked up the phone handset and called the precinct. Once she got past the gatekeepers, Mark answered. “Captain Paulson.”

“Hi, Mark, it’s Celia. I just watched that clip you sent over.”

“And?” He sounded so eager.

She shook her head, an unconscious show of confusion. “And I don’t know who he is.”

SIX

A
NNA
and Bethy had been friends with Teia and Lew Fletcher since forever, because their mothers had been friends since forever. They’d spent a lot of time on the same playgrounds, and the two families had even taken a few beach vacations together when they were little. Anna hadn’t been aware of a lot of the dynamic when she was younger, but now she realized that her family, the rich family, had paid for the beach house, and there’d been a lot of mostly good-natured arguments between the adults about pulling their weight and being too generous to the point of charity. At the time, all she cared about was the fun they had. Teia and Lew’s mom had taught them all how to swim, which was great, but she spent a lot of the vacations sitting on the beach looking out at the water, kind of wistful and sad. Teia said something bad had happened to her mother in the far-gone past, something that she never talked about, and Anna wondered if it had something to do with the ocean. Or if it was just the hypnotic waves sweeping in and out that could make anyone melancholy.

Then Teia and Lew’s father died. They’d taken one more beach vacation after that, which hadn’t been the same at all, because they kept tiptoeing around the empty space where Morgan Fletcher should have been. After that came middle school, and they all got too busy, or that was what they all kept saying.

Lew had been the first of them to discover his powers. He might have had them since he was born, but who would notice if a brief thundershower happened every time a baby was cranky? It would be coincidence and slide by without comment. But in sixth grade, when a major storm causing flash flooding happened in exactly the Fletchers’ neighborhood—and only there—on the day of a test that Lew hadn’t studied for, he realized it wasn’t a coincidence. It was him. He told his sister because he told her everything, and Teia told Anna, because Anna’s family was filled with superhumans and she would know what to do about it. The only advice Anna could think of to give: Keep it secret. Practice controlling it, but keep it secret. Avoid attention and publicity. Attention had gotten them, especially her mother, in trouble.

As if determined to keep her twin from showing her up, Teia learned to freeze with a touch soon after. She described it as a “popping” sensation—one day, she just knew she could do it, like a lock had broken and released her power. From then on, her sodas were always cold.

After that, Anna began to suspect that supers were everywhere, she just had to know what to look for. That was how she caught Teddy disappearing when their English teacher asked for volunteers to read parts out of
Romeo and Juliet
. He always sat in the back, slouching in his seat and hiding behind the people around him as much as he could. He didn’t want to be noticed, obviously, but not because he was shy. It was because, sometimes, he
really
didn’t want to be noticed. At first he freaked that Anna wanted to talk to him at all—his eyes bugged out, looking back and forth for a place to escape. Clearly, he wanted to go invisible but couldn’t while she was looking right at him. But she explained: He wasn’t alone. He relaxed, as if the rods that had been holding him upright vanished. Later, Teddy figured out he could do more than turn invisible. The next step: turning insubstantial. He’d wanted to impress Teia and Anna with the new ability but didn’t think too far ahead when he passed through walls to follow them into the girls’ bathroom. They hustled him out quickly and gave him a lecture on being subtle.

Anna found Sam zapping flies in the courtyard during class. Like Teddy, he seemed relieved rather than angry that someone had discovered his secret. Happy that he wasn’t alone in the world with his power and wondering what came next.

That was their club. They’d found each other, and while they didn’t always get along, their desire for secrecy kept them together. Out of the whole world, they were the only ones who understood each other and what it meant to have powers.

*   *   *

After school, Anna went to the kitchen, where she knew she’d find her grandmother involved in some food-related project. Mom kept threatening to hire a cook—it wasn’t like the family couldn’t afford a cook, for goodness sake. But Grandma argued every time. She liked to cook, let her cook. Even Mom backed down from that.

“Grandma, can I talk to you?”

Suzanne looked over her shoulder. “Sure! You mind hanging out while I make cookies?”

Mind a chance to grab some cookie dough before it went into the oven? Oh hell no. Suzanne wouldn’t even complain when Anna sat on the counter, out of the way of the mixer and cookie sheets.

“Gingersnaps sound good to you?” her grandmother asked.

Of course they did. Anna barely fit on the edge of the counter anymore, without running into the cabinets overhead. But the seat gave her a sense of nostalgia. It was habit, sitting on the counter while waiting to test the cookie dough. And sometimes, when her parents weren’t around, Anna didn’t mind feeling like a kid.

Still slim in her jeans and sweater, her grandmother always seemed to be moving, bustling, promoting her charities, working in the kitchen. Suzanne’s roan hair, red fading to gray, was braided in a tail down her back. She certainly didn’t look like someone who could warm up a pot of soup by touching it or shoot fire bolts out of her hands. Or like someone who would run around after dark in a skin suit, fighting crime.

Anna had a hard time thinking of her grandmother as the superhuman crime fighter Spark, but she’d seen the pictures of a young, svelte woman in a black suit, brilliant red hair showering across her shoulders and down her back, launching jets of fire from her hands.

She’d put away the suit after Captain Olympus was killed. That period was a bit murky in the family lore. No one talked about it much. They talked about Warren, they talked about the Olympiad. They still got together with Uncle Robbie, who’d been the Bullet back in the day but had also eventually retired when arthritis began affecting his hips. But no one ever talked about how it had all ended, and Anna had been hesitant to ask. The dark cloud lingered in the distance, and she didn’t want to be the one to drag it close.

“I thought you said you wanted to talk,” Suzanne said with a smile.

“I was just thinking,” Anna said. Figuring out how to start, really. She took a deep breath and dived in. “What was it like, with the Olympiad?”

Suzanne raised a brow, cracked eggs into a bowl. “What do you mean, ‘what was it like’?”

What
did
she mean? “How’d you guys get started? How did you know you were doing the right thing? How did you not screw up and get yourselves hurt?”

Anna felt her cheeks burning; she wasn’t fooling anyone, was she? She kept her expression still—mild curiosity, that was all she’d reveal.

But Suzanne didn’t seem at all suspicious. She just shrugged and rattled on. “Oh, I don’t know. Going out, using our powers—it always just seemed like the right thing to do. Warren and I met in high school and started then. Robbie came along, then your dad about ten years after that. We were always stronger together than apart. We didn’t really think about getting hurt—you know about Warren, we didn’t much worry about him getting hurt.
Nothing
hurt him.”

Until the end. Suzanne didn’t say that.

“We started small—street crime, accidents, the usual thing you always read about in the news. The whole thing got really big when we didn’t have a choice. When the Destructor showed up, somebody had to do something. There we were.”

The Destructor had been the archnemesis of the Olympiad, had been involved in countless battles with her grandparents and father, and was the only person known to be immune to Dr. Mentis’s telepathy. He’d kidnapped her mother when she was a teenager, and she’d subsequently teamed up with him as a henchman during a particularly outrageous bout of teenage rebellion. Anna had never worked up the courage to ask Celia about it, what she’d been thinking at the time, how she’d gone from victim to villain, however briefly.

Maybe that was the problem. They didn’t have a Destructor to face off against. Not that most people would consider that a problem … But if they had a target to focus their energies on, maybe they’d stop bickering about whether or not they should publicize themselves in the
Commerce Eye.

Anna asked, before she realized the words were out of her mouth, “Why’d you quit?” She hadn’t meant to get that personal. The biographies and reports always said the same thing, that Suzanne had been broken-hearted by the death of her beloved husband. Who wouldn’t retire after that? But Anna had never heard Suzanne answer the question.

She didn’t speak right away. She might have been concentrating on the spoon she was wielding, the bowl, the dough taking shape inside it. Or it might have been a bad question. Anna began to regret asking it.

“Warren and I were a team,” she said finally, sadly. “With him gone, I didn’t see the point in going on.” Using a teaspoon, she scooped a piece of the dough and handed it to Anna. “How is that?”

Anna could hardly taste the dough, but she ate it and smiled. “It’s great.”

Suzanne returned her focus to the cookies. “There’ve been enough books and articles written about the Olympiad, you could probably find out everything you wanted to know from them.”

Anna said, “It’s not the same as hearing it from you. It’s family history. Besides, you don’t give interviews. Why not?”

“Because it’s just like you said. It’s family history and none of their business.” She set down her spatula and put a flour-dusted hand on her hip. “Any reason you want to know all this?”

Shaking her head in what she hoped was an innocent manner, Anna said, “Just curious.” There she went, blushing again. “Hey, what’s for dinner?”

“I’ve got some shrimp for stir-fry. I’ll get started just as soon as your parents get back, whenever that is. They didn’t tell me, and I don’t have any idea where they’ve gone off to.”