Carrie Vaughn - Dreams of the Golden Age

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.

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.