Carrie Vaughn - After the Golden Age

Pieces snapped into place, almost too neatly. If Mark had all this evidence, he could serve his father up on a platter.

If he could turn in his own father.

“Mark, we shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone.”

“I’m going there, to the Leyden building. I have to see for myself.”

“No, you should call the police.” But he was the police. “Call for backup. You don’t know what he’s doing, he could have an army in there—”

“Will you meet me there, Celia? I need to talk to you. I need your help.”

“Yes, of course,” she said without thinking.

“Meet me there in an hour.”

“Mark, hold on, you shouldn’t—”

He hung up. She growled at the phone. He was being an idiot. He only had half the pieces and couldn’t see the whole picture. He probably thought his father was running some sort of gambling or drug ring. He probably thought he could talk to Paulson, make him see reason, convince him to turn himself in. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to Paulson and arrest the guy.

If she got there first, maybe she could talk him out of it. Maybe his call to her was a suicide’s cry for help. She ran to the foyer, then hesitated, thinking of Analise in the Olympiad command room. No, her parents might need Analise where she was, able to survey the entire city and monitor police activity. They might need her more than Celia did.

Celia entered the elevator. Inside, she punched the button for the parking garage. Going down.

ON the elevator ride down, she thought about calling Arthur’s cell and leaving a message. Then realized he must already know what she was thinking, what she had planned, even across the city. The thought was both ominous and comforting. There was a time when all she wanted to was to be alone. But if she got in trouble, Arthur would know.

Michael was on-call, but not in the valet office when she reached the basement parking garage. She wasn’t about to ask him for a ride anyway.

The key card her father had given her worked on the West Corp valet office, where the keys to the fleet cars were kept. Not that she’d driven at all since Michael taught her how when she was sixteen. Assuming she found an inconspicuous car, and assuming she could drive it, and assuming she didn’t get pulled over by hyper police—

She found a dark blue sedan, automatic transmission, and matched the license plate to the keychain. Settling into the driver’s seat, she reacquainted herself with the controls and dials. She could do this, she could do this. Key in ignition, turn, shift gears, press gas pedal.

The engine revved, but the car didn’t move.

Then she remembered to release the parking brake.

So slowly the speedometer barely registered, she pulled out of the parking space and up the ramp leading to street level. Once on the street, she pressed the gas a little harder—if she drove five miles an hour the whole way, she’d take all day to get there. She sat leaning forward, her back rigid and away from the seat, clinging to the steering wheel and peering fervently through the windshield.

Fortunately, with the city blowing up around them, not too many other people were on the road. She had little traffic to contend with, and the cops were all in areas of the city where bombs had gone off.

Carefully, she drove northeast.

The warehouse district was an area of wide streets and cavernous buildings. This was a whole other city, the opposite of the one she looked down on from her parents’ living room. Here, she was an ant staring up at concrete walls that went on in all directions. She was trapped at the bottom of a canyon.

Slowing down, she looked for street signs, made out address placards bolted to the sides of buildings—some of them rusted and illegible. She found the right street and was afraid she’d spend the afternoon driving back and forth along its length, looking for the right building.

She shouldn’t have worried.

A shroud of smoke covered the city, along with a smell like a furnace, making the sky like dusk, dark enough that she could see her destination lit up like a storm cloud. Crackling electrical lights glowed through clerestory windows like faint bursts of lightning. Something was happening inside a building that was supposed to be abandoned and crumbling to ruin. That had to be the place.

It had taken her too long to get here. Mark would be here any minute. She couldn’t let him face down his father. No one should have to do that, no matter how great they were or how great their father was. She drove around the block and when she didn’t see his car, she parked, got out, and waited on the corner.

Twenty minutes later, twenty minutes of pacing the sidewalk and wondering about the crackling electric hisses that occasionally whispered from the warehouse, and wondering if maybe she shouldn’t be standing in plain sight, Celia began to think she’d been too late after all. Mark had been smart enough to not park right in front of the building and hid his car on one of the side streets.

Maybe he’d already gone inside.

Maybe she should try to talk to Paulson herself. And say what? You’re a jerk, just like your father?

Actually, that had its appeal.

She could just sneak in and take a look. If she saw Mark in there, if he was in trouble, she’d call Arthur, the police, and Analise at Olympiad HQ and get help. If they weren’t too busy keeping the city from burning down.

Celia approached the front door. Glancing nervously at the windows high on the warehouse walls, she hoped no one was watching. They looked too frosted to see out of.

What she took to be the front doors, double steel slabs that swung open, had chains looped through the handles, secured with a padlock. Just what she’d expect to find on a shut-up building. She walked around. In the back she found a loading dock, and a sliding steel door that was not only unlocked, but open a crack. She climbed up on the ledge and squeezed through.

She entered a dark receiving area, a block of bare concrete, cold and musty, with an air of abandonment. Continuing through it, she stepped softly, aware of the numbers and depth of the shadows, and how much danger might be waiting for her.

She reached the door in the back of the warehouse area. Standard size, simple knob, unlocked. It led to a hallway. She passed a few doorways with frosted windows showing dark interiors. Ahead, though, a light with a bluish tinge showed. Voices murmured. Mark, was Mark in there?

The rectangle of light before her beckoned. Pressing close to the wall, she crept forward until she reached the frame, where she could peer into the main room.

This was it. This was the lab where Sito performed his great experiment, where the accident happened, where a dose of radiation bathed a dozen technicians and instigated mutations that no one had expected or understood.

And now, Anthony Paulson was trying to re-create it.

She looked into the cavernous heart of the building. The ceiling reached up three stories, and the tile floor stretched fifty yards across. Most of the space was empty. All activity congregated in the middle, in an area that could have fit in any of the rooms she’d passed. She expected dust, the stale smell of air that had been locked behind walls. But the air was fresh—the hum of fans and filters edged the background noise. Floodlights blazed down on a clean room, spotless lab benches, cabinets, tables, monitoring equipment. In the center of it all stood a device mounted on a wheeled pedestal. A hundred wires looped from point to point, from a box underneath that might have been a battery or a power relay, to bolts protruding from steel rings looped around a cylinder that made up its bulk. The thing looked like a cannon, tapered at one end, where a series of glass or crystal nodes reached out, aimable and threatening. Toward the back, coils of copper wire glowed, like the interior of a toaster grown too hot.