Carrie Vaughn: Dreams of the Golden Age

CELIAWest sat alone in her office, a corner suite in the family penthouse at West Plaza. She kept her wide, preternaturally slick desk neat, the few files stacked in a corner, pens lined up, computer screen conveniently placed, laptop dock accessible. Everything else was put away in drawers and filing cabinets. Anyone standing before her wouldn’t be able to tell a thing about her, except that she kept her office tidy. People might make assumptions based on that. They might even be right about some of them.

On the computer, she clicked on an encrypted file she’d been sent.

A video played, dark and grainy feed from a security camera outside a jewelry store on the south side of downtown. The camera looked down at the front doors from a corner of the building, creating a foreshortened image, as if the walls had shrunk. Time stamp read 1:23 a.m. A trio approached: men in ski masks, overcoats, baggy jeans, shit-kicking boots. Hoodlums of one flavor or another. One carried a backpack, one carried a baseball bat, the third a crowbar. Standard smash and grab.

Before they could get started on the window and grating, though, a masked vigilante walked into the frame. Words were probably exchanged, but the camera didn’t record audio.

The vigilante was just a kid. Male, tall in that impossibly lanky way of teenage boys. All limbs and chaotic movement. He wore a black T-shirt and sweatpants and a homemade mask, probably a bandana with eyeholes cut out, covering most of his hair and the top half of his face. His chin was smooth, youthful. He stood with his fists clenched at his sides, bouncing a little on worn sneakers. He was nervous, excited—this was obviously a first outing. Too young and stupid not to know he couldn’t save the world.

The robbers didn’t have any patience for this. They stood back a moment, glancing at one another as if confirming this was really happening. Then the guy with the baseball bat stepped forward and swung, aiming for the kid’s head.

The vigilante vanished. Blinked out of existence, there … and then not.

Celia used the laptop’s touch pad to back up the video and leaned forward to watch the scene again. The average person might think the trick was a special effect, some editing cut made on the video. But the frame didn’t skip, nothing else in the image changed. The boy was there one frame, gone the next.

The guy with the baseball bat stumbled, thrown off balance when his blow didn’t connect. All three crooks looked around in obvious confusion. Then the baseball bat jerked out of the guy’s hands, swung apparently of its own volition, and caught its former owner on the chin. He fell back and lay writhing on the concrete sidewalk.

The kid hadn’t vanished, then—invisible, along with what he was wearing.

The other two lunged at the bat hanging in midair. The bat fell—wisely, the kid dropped it and wasn’t there when the two crooks attacked the spot he should have been. One of them bent double, from what looked like a kick in the crotch. The other stumbled at a strike to his knees. Kid wasn’t doing too badly, really.

It couldn’t last, however much Celia might want it to. The guy with the crowbar might have just gotten lucky, but he swung in a likely spot, and connected. The kid flickered back to visibility, cringing and holding his shoulder. Pain, maybe any distraction, interrupted his powers. He had to focus to stay invisible.

Now that he had a target, the guy with the crowbar punched him, fist connecting to cheek. The kid’s head whipped around, and he stumbled, his chest heaving to catch his breath. Still visible—he hadn’t pulled himself back together.

Celia had a sinking feeling about how the rest of this was going to go, but the kid turned out to be smarter than she expected. He picked up the bat and shoved it through the bars of the security grating to smash the window of the jewelry store. Celia could tell the alarm went off by the way the crooks flinched. The two still standing hauled up their fallen partner and ran. The kid hesitated a moment, rubbing his face where he’d been struck, shaking his head as if to clear it. He looked down the street—at the approaching police sirens, Celia guessed. He disappeared, turning invisible again before presumably running away. Preserving his secret identity.

As a first outing for a vigilante went, it wasn’t an unmitigated success, but it wasn’t a disaster, either. More interesting to her, though—he was a new guy. She didn’t know who he was. But she had a good guess.

Celia kept a file folder in a locked safe that lived underneath her desk. Inside the folder was a list of a dozen names. The people the names belonged to were all dead, but most of them had descendants who lived on, and she kept a list of those names as well. A third generation was coming up. If she traced down the family trees of that original list of names, she’d find the invisible kid. She wondered what he called himself—not the Invisible Kid, she was pretty sure.

And there it was—several teenage boys on the list, all but one of whom she was already tracking. The remaining one had a question mark by his name: Theodore Donaldson. Grandson of Lawrence Donaldson, whose son hadn’t exhibited any sign of superhuman abilities, which didn’t mean anything. The trait often skipped generations, as she very well knew. But his son …

She crossed out the question mark, wrote a note, and put the file back in the safe. Then she picked up her phone and made a call. A standard receptionist voice answered.

“I’d like to speak to Captain Paulson, please,” Celia said.

“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting now.”

“Tell him it’s Celia West.”

The receptionist didn’t say anything to that, which made Celia smile. That one name had so much power didn’t seem right, somehow. How had it come to this, again? Once upon a time, she’d just wanted to stay anonymous.

“Captain Paulson will speak to you now,” the receptionist said curtly, maybe even offended. Gatekeeper duties overridden. Sorry, honey.

Mark’s voice came on the line. “Celia?”

“Hi, Mark. I watched that video you sent over.”

“Yeah? What did you think?”

“I think he’s one to keep an eye on.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“Let’s give the kid some room, okay?”

“Celia—”

“Did you catch the three crooks?”

“No, but we’re canvassing the neighborhood and we’ve got a few leads.”

“You canvassing for the kid, too?”

The police captain sighed. “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation with you.”

“Why don’t you drop it and let me keep an eye on him? You wouldn’t have sent me the video if you didn’t want me to know about him, right?”

“I just thought you might have a name.”

“I can get it if we need it. But let’s see what he does next. This may have shaken him up, he may back off.”

“Not likely—I know how these guys operate.”

“So do I, Mark. Better than you.”

“Yeah. Well.” He cleared his throat, avoiding an uncomfortable change of subject. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything through the grapevine?”

“You know I’m always here for you,” she said.

“That’s exactly what I need, for people to think I’m in the pocket of the president of West Corp.”

“No, they’ll know better than that. Take care of yourself, Mark.”

“You, too.”