Carrie Vaughn - Dreams of the Golden Age

“You don’t want to give anything away, do you?” he asked.

“Not really, no.”

By the time Eliot pulled back into the student parking lot, it was later than she thought—she’d be cutting it close for the bus, so she didn’t have much time to stand around and chat. Thank God.

She grabbed her bag and climbed from the car. “Thanks for your help.”

“Let me know what else you find out, okay?” he said.

She almost said no, that she had just about vowed to never speak to him again, But—

“I’ll e-mail you, I promise,” he said.

Nodding, she turned and jogged to the bus stop a couple of blocks away. Caught it just as it was pulling away, yelled at the driver to stop, and he actually did. Which was good, because if she’d missed the bus she’d have been tempted to go back and ask Eliot for a ride home. Never mind that she still wasn’t ready to give that much of her identity away. What was left of her dignity wouldn’t have survived.

The next morning before leaving on her trip, her mother dutifully hugged them, told them to be good, and sent them off to school. She seemed awfully sappy about the whole thing, in a way she hadn’t since they were little. She was supposed to catch her flight while they were at school.

But she didn’t go anywhere.

When they got back home, Mom was still there, in one of the penthouse’s guest rooms. Obviously hiding out and not gone at all. The compass’s pressure in Anna’s mind didn’t lie. If she’d canceled her trip, she would have just been in her office or bedroom. But she was hiding.

Something really weird was going on.

Dad was at his office on one of the building’s lower floors—keeping up the pretense that everything was normal, which meant he was in on the deception. He’d pretty much have to be. Anna waited in the living room for him to come home. She had homework, reading for English and math worksheets and all the usual crap, but she couldn’t focus on any of it. She sat in an armchair and looked out the vast living room window to the cityscape beyond. West Plaza was still, after some forty years, one of the tallest buildings in Commerce City, and from this vantage the whole city spread out like a 3-D map. The tangle of downtown architecture, the silver line of the harbor marking out the edges. From here, she should have felt above the chaos. Instead, she imagined it rising up to swallow her.

The presences she’d cataloged in her own psyche were growing. She could find her family, Uncle Robbie, and all her friends laid out like glowing spots on that map. Eliot was at the university; she was thinking about him a lot more than she probably ought to be. She couldn’t really help it. His presence was a warm, comforting glow. A fuzzy blanket in her mind. The thought embarrassed her. Even Ms. Baker, Mayor Edleston, Judge Roland, and Captain Paulson had begun to intrude on her awareness. Once she found people, imprinted on them, they never really left her.

She wondered: If one of the people she knew so well that she always knew where they were, if one of them died, what would happen? Would she feel it? Would she still be able to find them? She was scared to find out. She’d had such an easy life, she realized, that no one she cared about had ever died.

The thought gave her a chill, and she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged herself.

She knew when her father left his office and mentally followed him to the elevator, where he keyed himself to the penthouse and rode up to the private top floor. When the elevator doors slipped open and he strode through the foyer, she was waiting.

He wasn’t at all surprised to see her there, of course. Nothing she did would ever surprise him, and the thought made her suddenly angry. They regarded each other a moment, and for once she didn’t try to cloud her mind with thoughts of music or flat colors. Let him see her confusion. Let him try to calm her down.

“Where’s Mom?” she said.

Not a flicker of emotion from him. Not surprise, not chagrin from lying, not anything. Like he was some kind of mutant statue. Anna wondered how far she’d have to push him to get a reaction from him.

“She told you, she’s traveling.”

“No, she isn’t. She hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Her father raised an eyebrow, tilted his head. “How do you know?”

Oh, yes, how indeed … “I just know. Why are you guys lying, that’s what I want to know.”

“Anna, is there something you’d like to talk about?” So inhumanly calm. Though the lines around his eyes seemed more creased than usual.

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.

“ANNAknows,” 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.