Carrie Vaughn - After the Golden Age

A half-dozen people worked, some of them studying equipment, making adjustments and scribbling observations onto clipboards. Another half-dozen, burly men wearing dark clothing and brooding expressions, stood at the periphery, armed with machine guns. She recognized Paulson’s ubiquitous aides and bodyguards among them. More pardoned convicts? Loyal henchmen?

She found nothing unexpected here. Nothing particularly impressive. Nothing she hadn’t seen before. Like father like son. This might as well have been the Destructor’s Psychostasis room.

Or this might have been a scene from fifty years ago. She could almost see it, in the black and white of newsreel footage. Her imperious, bearded grandfather standing to the side, cane in hand, observing; a young Simon Sito bustling around the equipment, perhaps rubbing his hands together in anticipation; and a dozen scientists and techs, innocent, just doing their jobs—George Denton, Anna Riley, Emily Newman, Janet Travers. Young faces from personnel files, come to life in Celia’s imagination. History changed here, and none of them ever knew it.

She didn’t see Mark.

“Ah, at last. Ms. West, I’ve been expecting you.” His voice echoed, a rich tenor used to giving speeches to filled auditoriums. Anthony Paulson emerged from behind a bank of computer servers and strolled toward Celia. The sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up, the collar undone, tie missing. A couple of the lab people glanced up, frowning.

Celia blinked, stunned, a deer staring down the barrel of a hunter’s rifle. She’d been quiet, she’d stayed hidden, she hadn’t made a sound—Paulson must have been watching the door. He’d left that loading dock door open just for her, and made sure she found her way down exactly that hallway.

She turned to run. Behind her, two gunmen stepped out of formerly shut rooms, barring her escape. They moved toward her, threatening with their weapons, herding her through the door and into the warehouse, into the glaring lights.

Flanked by her captors, she approached Paulson.

Mark told him he’d called her. Mark told him she was coming, that was the only way he could have known to look for her. Still, she said, cautiously, “How?” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Paulson raised his hand, showing her the mini digital player he held. He touched a button, and Mark’s voice played back at her:

“Celia? It’s Mark. I don’t know who else to go to. You’re in the middle of this as much as I am. You seem to know more about it than I do … This is all a distraction, isn’t it? Like the kidnapping plots…”

God damn it! She fell for that stupid, idiotic trick again . She stamped her foot and growled, rolling her eyes to the ceiling and mentally beating herself up.

Paulson said, “I’ve been recording Mark’s phone calls for some time now. He made this one to Chief Appleton an hour or so ago. I had my people doctor it up a little for you. Fortunately—for me—the good chief has his hands full with other business right now and can’t spare anyone to send over here.”

Celia shut down her emotions and recalled the bitter teenager who would have sought out this situation. People like Paulson, like Sito, expected people like her to be cowed by their power and intelligence. They expected that a bright-eyed young woman would want everything they had to give—or that she could be frightened into putting herself in their control.

They expected her to care.

That was the trick: be blasé enough that nothing they did affected her. She crossed her arms, turned her back to the gunmen, and faced Paulson. She locked a careless smirk on her face and raised an eyebrow. She watched him like this was all some silly joke. Stayed quiet, because she couldn’t think of anything witty to say.

She kept herself from looking at the gunmen. They weren’t going to kill her. Paulson needed her or he’d have had her killed already. One of them reached for her shoulder. She sensed him approach, timed it, and stepped forward before he could touch her. Heart racing, stomach knotting, she walked toward the lab area and the machinery.

“What are you going to do with me?” She wanted to laugh. Almost, she let herself laugh.

“Nothing special,” Paulson said. “Human shield. Keep your parents out of my way.”

The usual reason, which meant he wasn’t any different than the others. She was only ever a tool to them. Which was a good thing—no one ever expected a tool to fight back.

“Huh,” she said, like she thought this was an interesting but irrelevant conversation, and turned her attention to the tower of glass, wires, and steel. “So this is it? Sito’s machine?” she said, gazing at the device as if it were a piece of incomprehensible art in a museum. “You know what it does, right?”

Paulson said, “Do you know what it does? Exactly how much do you know?”

“I have a guess. Did you have to rebuild it, or was it intact?”

“It had been stored—wrapped in plastic and shoved in a closet. The place hadn’t been touched. It’s like someone expected to come back to it.”

But no one ever had. Sito’s depression and madness consumed him, the other techs had signed nondisclosure agreements. Had her grandfather saved the lab? Had he suspected how the device had worked?

“Hmm,” she murmured, by way of polite observation.

“Ms. West, I’m curious. What do you think this does?” He watched her, gaze sharp, smile amused. His intensity burned; she felt like a mouse to his cat.

Calm, stay calm. “You know, I could make the argument that all this really belongs to me, as Jacob West’s direct descendant.”

“I heard that your father disinherited you. Or that you disinherited yourself.”

She gave a noncommittal shrug. “People hear lots of things.”

“Be that as it may, I claim salvage rights on behalf of the city.”

“You’re not doing this for the city.”

“Oh? Really?”

She tested her range, strolling a couple more steps toward the machine, moving partway around it, looking it up and down, purely out of curiosity. The gunmen didn’t move to stop her. All three men watched her closely, but she might as well have been a bug in a jar for their lack of apparent concern.

No one was afraid of her; she didn’t have any powers. But she wouldn’t flinch. That was her talent. That, and recognizing people under their masks.

“No one ever does anything like this except for themselves.” She offered him a sad smile, full of condescension.

“You sound so sure.”

“You’ve killed people to get what you want. The good guys don’t do that.” She made it an observation of fact, not a judgment call. Like she didn’t care that he’d killed.

“Weber, hand me that folder. Yes, that’s the one.”

One of the people in a lab coat brought Paulson a thick file from the top of a filing cabinet. The brown pressboard folder looked familiar; Celia had been looking through similar folders all week. The texture of files from that era was distinct.

Paulson passed the folder to her. “Take a look at this.”

She opened the file, balancing the spine in her left hand. Stacks of pages were fastened to both sides. She flipped through, taking in random lines and data. Charts, graphs, diagrams, rows of jagged lines labeled with numbers, black-and white-photographs.

The top page of text read, “Use of Directed Radiation to Induce Neurophysiological Responses, with the Intent of Encouraging Specified Emotional Traits in Human Subjects.”

The early West Corp logo, before the last couple of redesigns—the crescent moon as the arc of a bow and an arrow tipped with a star preparing to launch—was printed on the bottom of the page.