Carrie Vaughn - Dreams of the Golden Age

She didn’t suppose he’d at all coordinated with the bunch in the stairwell …

“What do you think you’re doing?” Majors said, laughing. “You think you’re just going to grab her and jump off the roof with her?”

“Sure,” the vigilante said. “Why not?”

Her eyes widened in alarm. She’d rather stay tied to the chair for the time being. Maybe she could talk him out this. Mindwall, she’d noticed, had edged to the wall, where he crouched in a vain effort to hide. No offensive capabilities, scared to death. Good.

The whump and crash of another large explosion rattled through the space, closer this time. A couple of ceiling panels shook loose and fell to the floor.

“What was that?” Steel gasped, unnecessarily.

The woman, Sonic, ran into the open space. “Danton, they’ve broken through! They’re on this floor! They survived!”

“Then stop them!”

What followed sounded like nothing so much as a ray gun, a patter of high-pitched whines searing down the hallway. Blaster’s laser bolts. When Sonic and Shark appeared from around the corner, they ducked and dodged like a couple of kids fleeing a snowball fight. It was almost amusing.

“What are you doing ?” Majors yelled at them. He was losing control of the situation, and he knew it.

“We can’t get close, it’s the kid with the ray beam—”

“I don’t care ! Sonic: Knock them down! ”

The two supers turned to hold their ground, Shark crouching and Sonic taking cover behind him. He clapped his hands over his ears, and Majors and the rest of his people did likewise—Steel managed to retract his swords first, alas.

The woman leaned around, cupping her hands around her mouth and letting out a noise that didn’t seem like it could ever come from a human. Almost an electronic squeal, Celia felt it in her bones more than heard it with her ears. As the vibrations rumbled up through the floor, her gut turned over, and she grew more nauseated. The steel frame of the skyscraper itself seemed to be vibrating on some fundamental resonate frequency. The whole building was going to turn to powder if this kept up.

Celia debated pulling her hands out of her bindings to cover her ears, to give away that her rescuers were already in the room and she’d been freed. Hell, she could probably just run. And go where?

Things happened very quickly, too quickly for Celia to decide on an action, one way or another. First: The windows shattered. Starting with a ringing sound, ethereal church bells, the glass bowed, cracked, maybe only on this floor, maybe across the entire building. The cracks multiplied into a frosted sheen while Sonic’s wailing continued to pound them, until the entire wall of glass burst outward in a shimmering crest of glinting shards. Sheets of glass would be raining down onto the streets below.

The otherworldly screeching stopped as even Sonic looked back, surprised at what she’d done.

The man in green took that moment to leap at her, jumping at an angle, bouncing off the ceiling, aiming his legs in a piledriver kick at her chest. She spun but couldn’t dodge; he caught her on the shoulder. Strongman Shark was right there, grabbing the kid and literally drop-kicking him across the room, booting him in the chest. He hit the wall near Celia and rolled to the floor, groaning.

The cavalry arrived then, a whole swarm of them rushing in, spreading out, shouting.

So was this the signal for her to run, or was it something else?

God, the kids looked like a real superhero team: Sam kept blasting, focusing a rain of lasers on Shark to throw him off balance, unable to go on the offensive. Shark bent to the attack as if he leaned into a hailstorm. As for storms, the shattered wall gave Lew access to a blast of wind and driving rain, adding to the confusion. Teia had her hands to the wall, and a sheet of ice grew away from her, toward Sonic, until it curled away from the wall and around the enemy super, creating a column of ice around her, trapping her. Sonic shattered it quickly with a short burst of sound, but by that time the floor had grown icy as well, and when she tried to run, she slipped and fell hard.

The others had flowed into the room by that time: Mark Paulson, amazingly enough, along with a couple of his SWAT guys, guns to their sides in this chaotic environment; Analise—and what the hell was she doing here?—and Celia wondered if her flash on Typhoon really had been her imagination; Arthur, thank God, and just seeing him made Celia smile. The expression on his face wrenched her heart—he was looking at her, but he couldn’t see her, not really, not without his power. She hoped he could tell just by looking at the surface of her how happy she was to see him. And then Anna. Anna was here, small and pale, mouth twisted in a worried, panicked frown, her red hair wet and plastered around her face. She’d lost her stocking cap and mask somewhere along the way.

Go away, Celia wanted to scream at her. Hide, please hide.

Instead, Anna looked across at the superhuman in green, who was picking himself up off the floor, stretching a no-doubt bruised back and shoulders.

“ Eliot? ” Anna exclaimed, loud enough to echo across the room.

Everyone hesitated, turning to stare at the unknown man. Danton Majors himself, who had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, maybe in preparation for wading into the fight, stared at the kid with a kind of disbelieving intensity that made the rest of them pause. A tension spiked that hadn’t been there even with all the fighting and combat.

“ What? ” Majors said darkly. Poor Anna stood frozen, obviously unsure of what she’d done. Despite the new drama unfolding before her, Celia couldn’t look away from her daughter. There’d been a moment when she believed she would never see Anna again, and that moment pulled at her gut like fishhooks.

Majors and the man in green faced each other, and the man in green took off his helmet and mask. He was a good-looking guy, with dark hair and an intense gaze, cute and boyish—and obviously Danton Majors’s son. They had the same eyes.

“What—” Majors said, and stopped, too shocked to continue. And what shocked him? Eliot Majors’s appearance here, his opposition to Danton, or the basic fact of his possessing superhuman powers? Might have been all three; Celia couldn’t tell.

“Didn’t expect to see me here, did you, Dad?” He laughed a little, which sounded like relief. “Well, here I am. Superhuman. Just like you always wanted.”

Oh, to peel back that history … it was like looking into a fun house mirror.

Danton finally shrugged, letting his hands drop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He almost sounded forlorn.

“Because I knew you’d try to turn me into that!” He pointed at the quartet in the matching skin-suit uniforms, Majors’s personal superhero team. Delta’s finest, no doubt, chosen and cultivated by the entrepreneur to be so.

Celia realized something: Danton Majors had accused her of manipulating the city and its superhumans because that was what he’d done in Delta. He couldn’t imagine her doing anything else with her wealth and power and connections. And he figured there was room for only one of him in the world.

“Eliot. You need to stay out of this. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I was trying to help,” the man in green—Eliot—said. And exactly how much had Anna been hanging out with this guy? “I know you came to Commerce City to stop the Executive. I wanted to help. Prove to you a lone hero can do some good without you, without the team. But … I think you’re wrong, Dad. I think you’re wrong about what’s been going on and about who here really needs to be stopped. When we started looking for clues about the Executive, we didn’t find Celia West. We found you.”