Dreams of the Golden Age

  If she kept pestering him, she’d never have to answer questions about herself. “Just tell me why you and Mom are lying.”

  “I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

  And that was that. She didn’t have anywhere left to push. She could stomp off to her room in a rage, but that would mean he’d won. She glared. “I wish I could read minds, like you.”

  “Or perhaps not.”

  She marched across the living room. “How about I go ask her why she’s lying to us—”

  Arthur planted a hand on her shoulder, and emotion trembled through him—frustration, determination … fear. A tightly wadded-up ball of panic that flashed in his eyes and faded, but not before it pounded into her own psyche, and she couldn’t tell then if he was transmitting his own fear too strongly to control, or if her own fear was boiling over.

  This is what he’s holding back all the time, she realized. He had to constantly lock himself behind that cool expression … the price for being able to read minds.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and stilled her racing heart.

  “Please don’t do that,” he said. The emotion had lasted for only a flash; he was back to stone now. “She’ll tell you everything when she’s ready, I promise, but for now”—he pursed his lips, his hand tightened—“please wait.”

  She didn’t know what she was going to do. Two paths opened up, one in which she confronted her supposedly absent mother, one where she didn’t, and neither option looked right. What she did know: Confronting her mother meant revealing her power. How did you follow your gut when it was telling you two different things?

  Out of a sense of directionless rebellion she said, “You going to stop me?”

  He could. He had the power to control minds, and if he controlled hers, would she even know it? But he drew his hand away from her.

  She strode off—but not to go to her mother, and Arthur would have known what she would do as soon as she made the decision. Instead, she stormed to her room, slammed the door, and stayed there the rest of the night. She didn’t speak, because she knew he’d see it all written plain in her mind, and he wouldn’t be able to fix it any more than she could.

  SEVENTEEN

  “ANNA knows,” Arthur said.

  Late at night, he came to stay with her in the guest room. Nurse her, more like. She was too cranky and in pain to sleep, so she propped up a laptop on pillows next to her, thinking maybe she could get some work done. She couldn’t just lie there, could she? But she was having trouble focusing on the screen. Reading a single e-mail seemed to take an hour, so she ended up just staring at the device, pretending, too woozy to do anything else.

  However angry Anna might be with her on general principle, Espionage came through, using an anonymous e-mail address to send a pack of information on the McClosky and Patterson firm. Now if only Celia could concentrate enough to read. But she was supposed to be delegating, so she forwarded the packet on to her law team. The initial court hearing was in a couple of days; the info had arrived just in time.

  Her little nudge had worked, and she resisted feeling guilty about it. She was a terrible mother, just awful. Either that, or she was successfully encouraging her daughter in her current interests. Sure.

  She was frustrated and depressed. “One day at a time” had turned into “one hour at a time,” and Celia could imagine a point when it would become “one minute at a time,” just trying to breathe enough to make it to the next day. She’d recover soon enough. She had to. She refused not to. But for this particular round of treatment, she would just lie here, weakly fuming.

  “Anna knows what?” she murmured.

  “She knows that you haven’t really gone away. That you’ve been here the whole time.” He sat on the edge of the bed, delicately, like he was afraid of disturbing her. She wanted him to hold her but was afraid that his touch would hurt. So he kept back.

  “How could she possibly know? What is she doing, hacking into the building’s security cameras? Spying on me?” But she stopped, stared a moment, and the pieces fell into place. A roiling sense of discovery. “It’s her power, it’s mental. Telepathic, like you.” Squeezing his hand made her ache, but she did it anyway, because his touch was more important than pain right now. “How long have you known?”

  “About three years. It seems to have started then. She’s only really been learning how to use it in the last year. It’s not precisely telepathy, more like what I’d call psycholocation. She knows where people are.”

  Celia put her head in her hands. So many pieces falling into place.

  Arthur went on. “I’ve been waiting for her to say something, encouraging her to talk about it. But she’s only retreated, burying it all deeper and deeper. She’s gotten very good at blocking me. If I didn’t know her so well already I wouldn’t be able to read her at all.”

  “You sound proud of her,” Celia said.

  “I am. She … I think she wants to see if she can do this on her own. She wants to live up to some kind of ideal she’s invented for herself. Sounds like someone else I know, eh?”

  “This is my fault, isn’t it? I’m a terrible mother.” She snuggled closer to Arthur, and he took the cue, putting his arms around her, holding her. The pain faded.

  “No, you aren’t,” he said dutifully. “Celia, she’s going to continue asking what’s going on. I don’t know what to tell her. I can only put her off for so long. It’s not really fair to her, when I keep asking her to share her secrets. Suzanne is worried, but she’s very sensitive about giving you space. No one wants to pressure you, but the fear is there.”

  She thought for a long time. Thinking had become difficult. “My parents never kept secrets from me. I always knew who they were and what they were doing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell her. I’ll tell everyone. Let me get through the court hearing. Let me get well again, and I’ll tell.”

  “I love you, Celia.”

  “I don’t deserve you, Arthur.” The guilt crept into her voice because she was too weak to hold it back.

  He touched her face, tipped her head back, kissed her lightly, knowing exactly how much pressure he could use before she started hurting. His love washed through her like a drug, one that burned fiercely but left strength behind it instead of weakness. She could change the world with him standing beside her. All his love said that yes, she did deserve it. Somehow.

  * * *

  When Anna was about six and Bethy was three, Anna fell. Celia had been carrying Bethy and, arms full of squirming little girl, didn’t see exactly what happened, but they’d been descending the stairs outside the Natural History Museum on a summer outing, and Anna was running too fast. Celia called to her to slow down, but Anna didn’t listen. Celia hadn’t really expected her to, but the calling out had been an instinct. You did it because at least then you’d tried. The alternative was keeping the kids on leashes, and while Arthur joked about her being controlling, she wasn’t that bad, she hoped.

  So Anna fell, probably tripped, and just for a moment, she flew. For that split second, Celia would swear she saw her daughter suspended in air, weightless as no person ever could be, sailing in defiance of gravity, and her heart lodged in her throat, not because her daughter had tripped, but because this was it, the thing that would change their lives, the power she’d been searching for and hoping she wouldn’t find.

  But no, Anna hadn’t really flown. Her momentum had simply carried her down the rest of the stairs and onto the sidewalk below, and Celia’s perception of time had slowed during that fraction of a second. Postcrash, the kid had screamed like a banshee, bystanders came running and gave Celia that look that people always gave the mothers of screaming children, the this-must-be-your-fault look, until it became clear that it was just an accident, one of those things that happen to little kids. By that time Bethy was screaming because Anna was screaming, and Celia managed to ignore them both long enough to call the car and rush to the hospital.

&nbs
p; Broken arm. Anna had stuck her hand out, cracking the bone on impact, and that was another power Celia could check off the list—Anna didn’t have her grandfather’s invulnerability to injury. But for the first time, Celia wished both her children had that superpower, suddenly envying her own grandmother for never having to worry about the young Warren West breaking himself in a fall.

  Anna was very proud of the purple cast she had to wear for the next five weeks. Celia decided that maybe she wouldn’t worry so much about whether the kids had powers. They would fall, they would fly, they would run as fast as they could, they’d have good days and bad.

  When the girls hit puberty, the watching started again, but the anomalies Anna displayed had more to do with being a teenager than being superhuman. And after all was said and done, the power she ended up with had no external manifestation. It was undetectable.

  Celia couldn’t win this game.

  * * *

  After just a couple of days of being sequestered on her “trip,” Celia returned to her office Monday morning and swore she found a layer of dust on her desk, and her computer was cold. Everything she’d worked for, everything she’d done to keep West Corp alive and growing after her father’s death was slipping away.

  This was an exaggeration. But her strength had become precious. She felt that the least shock would destroy her, and her life’s work seemed fragile. She’d look away, and it would vanish.

  She had an hour or so to review the information for the case before heading to court. The evidence Anna had been able to dig up was … interesting. Blurry pictures of check stubs and invoices that on their own didn’t mean anything, but when lined up revealed a financial smokescreen. It proved McClosky and Patterson was a front, but Celia’d already suspected that. The data also offered a new name, the next step on the trail: Delta Exploratory Investments was a holding company, one she’d actually heard of, and one whose line of ownership was much easier to track because it wasn’t just a front. She dug into her own notes, the thick file folder full of research about the other companies making bids on the city development project, and there it was: Delta Exploratory was the company through which Delta Ventures, Danton Majors’s company, had made its own bid. This gave her a straight line between the lawsuit and Majors. Her lawyers had built a powerful case for their defense. They weren’t just hopeful, they were smug.

  Maybe Anna really had been paying attention all those afternoons she’d spent in Celia’s office, just hanging out. She’d brought them exactly what they needed. God, she wanted to hug the kid right now.

  A phone call to Mark confirmed that a patrol had spotted two of the young new supers out and about a couple of nights ago—descriptions matched Anna and the stranger, the jumper whom none of them could identify. Him, and not Teddy? And how the hell did Anna know this guy? It made her question her assessment that he must have been a stranger. It made her worry about Anna more, not less.

  If she trusted Anna this far, she had to trust her daughter’s instincts about this as well. But it wasn’t easy.

  Out in the kitchen, the girls had finished breakfast and were gathering their things to head to school. The usual, perfectly normal weekday morning chaos of the house. Celia paused, just to listen—Suzanne clearing away juice and cereal, the girls arguing back and forth about who put whose uniform sweater where, and where their books were. Bethy was already at the elevator. Anna was moving more slowly, lingering by the kitchen table, rearranging books in her bag. The school uniform made her look younger, and Celia had to remind herself that she was almost an adult. Almost full grown.

  “Hi,” Celia said. Then just stood, watching.

  Anna looked at her sidelong. “Hey, Mom.”

  Whew, deep breath, stay calm. “If you have time after school today—do you think we could have a talk?”

  Her daughter froze, just for a moment. And what must she be thinking? She seemed to shake herself back to the moment. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  “Good,” Celia said. Her relief was physical, the tension of weeks draining away. “Looking forward to it.”

  Anna flashed a nervous smile. “That hearing about the lawsuit’s today, right? How do you think it’s going to go?”

  “I think it’s going to be just fine. I expect the whole suit to get thrown out. We got some last-minute information that really pushed our case over the top.” Thank you. After school today, she’d be able to just say thanks.

  “Good. That’s good,” Anna said, totally straightforward. She’d learned her poker face from her father, after all. “Well, good luck with it all.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  “Don’t forget,” Anna said, “you promised a vacation when you’re done with all this lawsuit stuff. I’m holding you to it.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Anna, we’re going to be late!” Bethy shouted from the next room.

  “I’ll see you this afternoon,” Anna said, waving as she peeled into the foyer to the elevators.

  Anna was going to be just fine. Maybe Celia wasn’t a terrible mother after all.

  “Vacation,” Suzanne said, wandering in from the kitchen. “I like the sound of that.”

  Celia smiled. “Yeah, so do I.”

  “Is everything okay?” her mother asked, gaze narrowed.

  “No,” Celia said, before she could edit herself. It just popped out. Then she realized that saying no was a relief. No, everything was not okay. She’d said it, it was out there. Good. “I have to be at court in an hour, and you know how I feel about court appearances.”

  “And who can blame you?” Suzanne said, putting on a cheerful face. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  Celia sighed. She’d made it this far, she could get through today as well. Onward.

  * * *

  For a long time, Celia had hated courtrooms.

  She still had bad dreams—hard to call them nightmares, when they were vague and nerve-racking rather than terrifying—about the trial of Simon Sito, the Destructor, where she’d been called as a witness and her brief foray into juvenile delinquency as one of the defendant’s hench-idiots had been exposed to the world. The revelation destroyed her budding relationship with Mark Paulson, damaged her friendship with Analise, and cemented her reputation in the city as the completely useless bag of flesh who’d failed her amazing parents, the Olympiad. Yet oddly enough, her testimony started to repair her relationship with her parents. They stood by her during those rough weeks. Arthur stood by her.

  Courtrooms were fraught. On one hand, they were a symbol of bureaucratic tediousness. On the other, they destroyed—and repaired—lives. On the whole, she preferred that her confrontation with Danton Majors was going to take place in the formal, controlled atmosphere of a courtroom rather than come to a head in the kind of showdown that her parents would have faced back in the day, bolts of fire and laser beams blasting destruction across the sky. Courtrooms were always better battlefields, and she’d come to embrace them. Even though they still gave her hives. They smelled like paper and cheap floor polish.

  Midmorning, Celia led her team into this particular courtroom like a general at the head of her army. Motions and countersuits, all lined up. She was high on painkillers and caffeine, but no one needed to know that. If this went as planned, she wouldn’t have to say a word. Just sit there looking serene and in control. Bored, even, if she could manage it. Without actually looking sleepy, which she might not be able to manage. Security wouldn’t let her bring one more cup of coffee into the courtroom, alas.

  Danton Majors was in the gallery, seemingly out of innocent curiosity, but she thought he might look a tiny bit worried. He sat a little too still, and his gaze was a little too focused. He glanced toward her when she came in, and his reply to the bright smile she gave him seemed somewhat pained. One of his aides from the committee meetings had accompanied him, a young man—another monkey in a suit. Protégé, lawyer, secretary? Bodyguard? Or did Majors just like having m
inions around?

  On the plaintiff’s side of the courtroom, Superior Construction made a good show of appearing to be legitimate. The central figure, a large man in a light gray suit, was the on-paper owner of the company. The gray-haired shark to his left was McClosky, of McClosky and Patterson. Celia’s team had learned that Patterson had retired five years ago, and McClosky maintained the skeleton of the law firm for exactly this sort of purpose—fronting shells, corporate smoke and mirrors. Right now, McClosky only had one client: Delta Ventures.

  More men in suits accompanied them, giving every sign of presenting a strong front. Aides, clerks, additional staff, whatever. Records would show they’d been hired in the last month, about the time the initial suit was filed. Nothing in the up-front admissible evidence would show any double-dealing. Which was why Celia’s investigation had gone through back channels: payroll tax filings, building permits on record. Walk through the door of Superior, you’d find nothing but bare wooden struts holding up the pretty front.

  This was all theater, anyway.

  A bailiff called them to attention, and the judge entered. She was a no-nonsense woman who would get through this quickly and without fuss, Celia hoped. She declared the session opened, called opposing attorneys to the bench, gave instructions, papers were exchanged, quiet conversations held. The performance continued.

  Her team was the best money could buy, but the secret to a successful business was that you couldn’t actually buy the best. You had to earn their loyalty by winning them over. By bestowing your own loyalty, by promising them you’d look after them, protect them, and then making good on the promise. Make it infinitely worth their while to do their very best work for you. Money had very little to do with those considerations in the end. Celia’s employees worked hard for her because they loved working for West Corp. They respected her. She worked hard to earn their respect. When her lawyers prepared their arguments and countersuit, they weren’t just doing it for her, they did it out of pride in the company. They felt like they had a stake in it all. Of course they worked hard.