Carrie Vaughn - Dreams of the Golden Age

Here she was, doing something exciting and powerful. If only the others could see her.

He was close. The knowledge of his location was just there, like knowing where the corner store was, or the placement of the sofa in your own living room. The paved bike path she followed curved around a grassy lawn, past a big square cinder-block building. Even this late at night, a few students were out, keeping to the well-lit paths, walking back to the dorms from the library or coffee shops. The assumption in the family was that Anna would be a student here in a couple of years. Anna couldn’t picture it. She knew her way around because she’d grown up in the city, but the university still felt like another world.

When she passed the cinder-block building, the spark brightened—there, he was inside there. It was the university gym. A student at the front desk asked to see her ID. Startled, she patted her pockets, shook her jacket, and muttered, “Shit, I forgot it. Look, my friend Eliot’s here, I just need to talk to him a second and I’ll come right back out.”

“Eliot Majors?”

“Yeah,” Anna said, bemused.

“Okay, go on in, he’s in the weight room,” the guy said and went back to slouching over his textbook.

Late at night, the glaring fluorescent lights seemed incongruous. They made the place seem too bright, when her body felt more like going to bed. But around her, university students seemed to be at peak energy. She rounded a corner, walked past a gym where a group was playing volleyball, and followed signs to a weight room at the end of the hall.

The room was small, with whitewashed walls and hardwood floors. A variety of machines and benches sat in the middle, racks of round weights were lined up along the walls, and posters demonstrated correct positions and safety rules. Only one person was here, a young man sitting on a bench and doing curls with what looked like an awful lot of weights. It was him. Recognition flashed in his eyes when he looked at her. If not for him noticing her, she might have doubted herself—all she’d ever seen of him was his mouth and chin under his mask.

He wore a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. Without the mask, he had an angular face with broad cheekbones and a short, dark buzz cut. When he didn’t say anything, kept curling with his mouth shut and jaw set, she thought he was going to ignore her, pretending they hadn’t met.

But he paused and set the weights on the floor. “How’d you find me?”

“I told you last night, that’s what I do,” she said. “Wasn’t sure I’d be able to, since we only met that once. But I wanted to try.”

He was definitely college age, she thought, now that she could study him without the mask and costume. Older than she was. Too cool to go to prom with her, at any rate. Not that she wanted to go to prom with him …

“Okay, you found me, you know who I am, now what?”

“I don’t know who you are. Not really. You’re just a guy with a superpower. I was curious.” Really, she didn’t know what she’d expected. That he’d at least want to talk. That he’d be curious about her and the others. That he’d see what they all had in common. That he’d see it the way she did.

“I’m sorry, I’m sure you mean well, but I’m not going to get all open and sharing just because you managed to find me. I don’t want to be part of your team.”

She couldn’t blame him for that, given how the team was shaping up, or rather how it wasn’t. “That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

“You just wanted to see if you could find me.”

She looked away, fully aware that he was basically right, and that she hadn’t thought at all about what she was going to say if she actually found him. She should have just peeked around the corner, confirmed it was him, and left. She scuffed her feet. “So. Working out. That’s a good idea.”

“You might try it, if you’re going to be fighting crime and all.” He smirked at her, and she felt even more dumb.

And still, she didn’t turn around and walk out. “I also wanted to tell you … to ask … you know, if you ever need … I don’t know. Help or something.” She blushed, because the thought sounded stupid once she said it out loud.

He didn’t need her help, and they both knew it. His tone was amused when he said, “I’ll let you know. You should probably get on home.” He retrieved the weights and started the curls again.

“Yeah, right,” she muttered, turning and walking out. The guy at the front desk waved at her when she left.

The cool air outside soothed her mortified and blushing cheeks. Walking fast helped, too. She felt like an idiot. He probably thought she was an idiot. She wondered why she even cared.

Because he was powerful. Because they could use his help. And he was cute. Maybe not hot, but definitely cute.

She huffed, disgusted with herself. If she could at all help it, she was going to avoid him from here out. And since she had his full name now, and his presence firmly lodged in her mind, she’d always know where he was and she could avoid him easily.

CELIAhadn’t been able to sleep, again. She dragged herself to her desk in the morning and wanted nothing more than to lay her head on the surface and sleep some more. Her head was throbbing and that crick in her neck hadn’t gone away. Four aspirin hadn’t done the trick.

Arthur came into her office, hefting a rolled-up newspaper. “You’ll want to see this.”

It couldn’t be good. She took a deep breath and braced herself. “What do I want to see?”

He straightened the paper and set it in front of her. It seemed to hit the desk with a thunk that rattled her head; she had to squint to read. It was the Commerce Eye, harkening back to its histrionic roots with a headline blazing in inch-high letters: “Commerce City’s Newest Crime-Fighting Team Makes Its Mark!”

Celia should not have been surprised when, like some powerful exothermic reaction, the subjects of her experiment spun out of control on their own trajectories. It was the natural order of things. A better person—someone who knew what they were doing—would be pleased that the kids seemed to be not just learning to use their powers, but forming the kind of team that had made her own parents so effective. Instead, she felt nascent ulcers blooming in her gut.

The whole thing happened by chance. Analise had had her twins a year after Anna was born, then Bethy came along, so naturally they scheduled playdates. At one time Celia would have stabbed herself over the idea of doing something so predictably maternal as playdates. But it was a great excuse to dump the kids on the playground while she and Analise sat on a park bench and caught up over coffee. It was also a great excuse to watch Teia and Lew without seeming like she was scrutinizing them for the odd case of superstrength or telekinesis. Analise had superpowers, after all. Never mind that she hadn’t used them in twenty years, she still had them, theoretically. If her children had powers at all, they’d likely manifest them at puberty rather than have them from birth. Of the nearly two dozen supers Commerce City had produced, only six had manifested powers at birth. Her father had been one of those.

Arthur and Mark Paulson were the only other people who knew about the list in her safe. According to that list, a whole cluster of Leyden descendants had been born around the same time. Celia’s kids, Analise’s kids, the Stowe grandchildren, Donaldson’s grandson, a couple of others from the Masters line—cousins of Barry Quinn, aka Plasma, who had been institutionalized for schizophrenia, so Celia kept an especially close eye on them. Before this generation, supers had been scattered, appearing alone or in pairs. But this was different. It seemed like the most efficient plan in the world to secretly grant them all scholarships to Elmwood, to get them all in one place where she could better watch them. With a good education in a safe, stable environment, they would be better able to manage their powers if they had them, yes? That was what she told herself. It certainly couldn’t hurt, and maybe some good would come of it.