Carrie Vaughn - Dreams of the Golden Age

Mark called as she finished reading all the articles she could find on the incident. “Have you checked the news yet or do I get to be the one to tell you?” he said.

“Just reading it now. Pretty spectacular. What really happened?”

“Pretty much exactly as you read it.” He paused, and his tone changed, the overworked cop giving way to chagrined friend. “I sort of pretended to arrest Anna.”

Celia raised a brow and was grateful Mark couldn’t see her expression. “Oh?”

“I just wanted to talk to one of them. Show them that this isn’t a game, that they shouldn’t be screwing around.”

Oh, poor Anna, she must have been twisted up in knots. When he said “pretended,” how far did he get? Handcuffs? Driving her to the station? Celia had seen the girls briefly at breakfast, and she hadn’t noticed Anna being any more surly or upset than usual. The kid was burying it all down deep.

“Did it work?” Celia asked carefully, in lieu of yelling at Mark for scaring her daughter.

“Well, she’s onto us. She knows you know who they are and that you’re keeping track of them.”

Power or no, Anna was good at putting pieces together. Smart kid, and Celia was proud. “Mark—thank you. For looking out for her. For all of us.”

“It’s like you’ve always told me, we superhumans have to stick together. Take care, Celia. You sound tired.”

If all she did was look and sound tired, she was doing well, because she felt terrible.

Another week and another treatment passed. It was harder than Celia thought it would be. Mostly because she’d been so sure she could get through it without much trouble with sheer willpower, and that wasn’t how it ended up going. After the second treatment she threw up everything she’d eaten that day and slept for twelve hours straight. She didn’t want to eat. She couldn’t focus to read. She dreaded the next treatment. And the next, and the next …

Claiming a sudden cold or flu would work only a couple of times without raising more suspicions—or proving the very reality she was trying to deny, that she was very ill. During just the second round, other people than Mark tsked her sympathetically over the phone and asked if this was maybe serious and should she see a doctor. That’s what got me into this, she wanted to mutter at them.

She needed more time, just another week or so, before she came clean.

She planned a “business trip” that would allow her to vanish for a few days. She arranged fake itineraries and ticket stubs, just in case someone, namely Majors, checked. Meanwhile, she could hide, be sick, recover, and no one would know.

“And how many weeks is this going to go on?” Arthur questioned, looking over her fake itinerary. Celia decided she could recycle the itinerary several times over, “traveling” as part of an ongoing project that would fall through at the last minute. She could account for six weeks doing this, almost the whole round of chemotherapy. She began to entertain a hope that she wouldn’t have to tell anyone at all, get cured and let it all fall behind her. A silly dream. She was only making things worse.

“Just a few,” she told him, without confidence.

When she started leaving chunks of hair on her pillow, she shaved her head entirely and took to wearing the custom wig she’d had specially made to match her own hair. She penciled in her vanishing eyebrows.

“I’m worried about you,” Arthur said. And she could feel it. The emotion was strong enough to slip past his barriers.

“I know. You’re very tolerant.”

“You’re lying to the people who love you most.”

“It’s temporary. Just till the lawsuit gets cleared up.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even seem to be thinking anything. He stood at the window of her sickroom, her temporary prison, gazing out to a constrained version of the panorama available in the living room. The view here offered a mere slice of the city, not half of it, like the other one did.

“Next week,” she insisted. “The preliminary hearing on the lawsuit will happen, we’ll get it dismissed, the planning committee will finally vote, and then I’ll be able to take off as much time as I need. I’ll tell everyone then.”

“And explain to them why you’ve been lying to them for the last month?”

He made it sound terrible. Because it was terrible. “Yes,” she said.

“We’ll have this conversation again next week,” he said.

She nodded. She’d be ready, one way or another.

Celia had contrived to bring the young would-be superheroes together. Now the problem was: Where to point them? Preferably someplace that wasn’t in the middle of a car chase and wreck, and that wasn’t breaking and entering. Something quiet, involving surveillance and reporting. She had an idea about that.

On the plus side, Celia had direct access to so-called Espionage. On the downside, she had to feed Anna the appropriate information without looking like she was doing it on purpose, or Anna would never take the bait. She left her office because she was feeling lonely and restless and wanted to be close to her mother, to be in the presence of the old comforting sounds of cooking and conversation, and to meet the girls when they came home, before she locked herself away on her so-called business trip. That was the excuse, a side benefit of the plan.

In the meantime, it wouldn’t seem strange at all if Celia just happened to spread some work on the table, to leave a folder or two with some pages suggesting some directions of inquiry. Directions that someone who could walk through walls might be particularly suited to follow up on, that a mundane corporate legal team could not.

After crunching numbers, she and her staff discovered that Superior Construction wouldn’t gain anything by stopping West Corp from winning the city planning contract—because it was a shell company that didn’t have any assets invested in any development contracts. Which meant it had other reasons for stopping West Corp. Which again pointed to Danton Majors, but her lawyers still couldn’t draw that line directly. Why would Majors want to stymie West Corp? A multitude of possibilities existed, from simply publicly embarrassing the company to potentially crippling its future investment plans. West Corp was much more diversified than that, of course, and any one part of its operations failing wouldn’t cripple the company. Which made Celia think this was all a red herring. Distracting her from what? She needed to watch the magician’s other hand.

The law office that fronted the ownership of the company was the brick wall she kept coming up against, so that was the information she left casually lying out on the kitchen table. These were the strings controlling Superior Construction’s actions. Espionage might be able to follow the strings back to learn who—and why.

“SOMETHINGfishy’s going on here but I can’t figure out what,” Celia said.

Anna came home to find her parents sitting at the dining table outside the kitchen. Suzanne was fixing dinner. Smelled like Mexican, warm and spicy. She was sautéing chunks of beef in a skillet at the stove—which was off, as usual. All the heat was coming from her hand, her power, and the meat sizzled and popped in its juices. It was something Anna had watched Grandma do her whole life, but now, suddenly, she saw it from an outsider’s perspective. And it was weird, the way she held the skillet flat on one hand while stirring with the other. Everybody’s grandma cooked, yeah, but not like that. And no other kid had to sing songs to herself all the time to keep her father from knowing what she was thinking.