Dreams of the Golden Age

SIXTEEN

“SOMETHING fishy’s going on here but I can’t figure out what,” Celia said.

Anna came home to find her parents sitting at the dining table outside the kitchen. Suzanne was fixing dinner. Smelled like Mexican, warm and spicy. She was sautéing chunks of beef in a skillet at the stove—which was off, as usual. All the heat was coming from her hand, her power, and the meat sizzled and popped in its juices. It was something Anna had watched Grandma do her whole life, but now, suddenly, she saw it from an outsider’s perspective. And it was weird, the way she held the skillet flat on one hand while stirring with the other. Everybody’s grandma cooked, yeah, but not like that. And no other kid had to sing songs to herself all the time to keep her father from knowing what she was thinking.

What a messed-up family. And nobody even saw it.

Paperwork, file folders, and spreadsheets were fanned over the table, and Celia was bent over them, chewing on the end of a pencil. Arthur sat next to her, leaning back, hands resting folded on his lean chest, looking amused. He always looked amused. It was his mask, so that he never had to let on if he was horrified by what he read in the minds around him.

“Smells good,” Anna said to Suzanne.

“Thank you, Anna. Can you give me a hand? Get out the cheese and lettuce from the fridge?”

Anna dropped her bag by the wall and went to help.

“And how was school?” Arthur asked.

“Fine.”

“Of course it was,” he said wryly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged. “It always is, and why not?”

She blushed. He knew something, he always knew something.

Her mother huffed at them both. She looked tired, Anna thought, and remembered their conversation from a week or so back. She was busy, of course she was busy. But there seemed to be more going on. Her short red hair, same bloody color as Anna’s, was disheveled, as if she’d been running her hands through it, and her face was pale and puffy. Suddenly, her mother didn’t look right at all. Just tired, she’d say if Anna asked what was wrong.

“What’s fishy?” Anna asked instead.

“Hmm?”

“You said something was fishy.”

“Oh. West Corp’s getting sued.”

Anna stopped and stared. “What?”

Celia shook her head. “Don’t worry, we get sued all the time. Usually it gets cleared up before ever going to court. But this suit was brought very publicly and very frivolously. I just have to figure out what the ulterior motive is.”

Suzanne directed Anna to chop lettuce and shred cheese for burrito toppings, and she did so, slowly, listening with interest to her mother’s arcane explanation. “Why sue?” she asked.

“Oh, lots of reasons. They assume West Corp has deep pockets, they want to embarrass the company, they want to embarrass me, they want to delay the planning committee vote, they want to distract us from something else entirely. All of the above.”

“How do you find out? How do you stop them?”

“Hmm, developing an interest in corporate politics?”

Heaven forbid. “Just asking.”

“We look to see if there’s anything suspicious in the public record, if there’s anything obvious they’ve done that attention would need distracting from. If they have any plans brewing that would be served by throwing roadblocks in front of West Corp. Trouble is, there’s not much on this company at all. Like they exist on paper and nowhere else. So I may have to turn to gossip and find out if anyone’s heard anything.”

Anna’s mind had started turning over a plan. She remembered what Eliot had said about someone trying to take over the city, not through terror and violence but through business and politics—the Executive. Maybe this thread was part of that web. Blocking West Corp certainly sounded like someone trying to influence the city’s workings. All Anna had to do was follow that thread. Maybe Espionage could take that on. Except that she still wasn’t talking to Teddy for ditching her in the face of danger. And she’d given up the whole vigilante thing because she was hopeless at it.

But this was personal. And if she didn’t want to talk to Teddy, maybe Eliot would help her.

“Enough business,” Suzanne announced. “Food’s up.”

While Arthur helped Suzanne with the food, Anna contrived to help Celia clear off the table and got a look at some of the pages, including the name of the company that was suing West Corp: Superior Construction, with an address in a downtown skyscraper.

Suzanne called for Bethy, who ran in and launched into a bunch of chatter about homework, and Anna finally realized that Bethy didn’t talk so much about her homework and math quizzes because she was worried, but because she actually liked math. Definitely taking after their mother. Anna almost felt better, knowing that at least one of them would be able to take over the business.

“You guys remember I’m leaving on that trip tomorrow, right?” Celia said. “Don’t destroy the place while I’m gone.”

Anna smirked, because the instruction was perfunctory, the kind of thing she’d said when they were nine. She was trying to be funny.

“What’s the trip for?” Bethy asked.

“I’m checking out a real estate development in Clarkeville for investment potential. Never trust the brochures, you know. It’ll only be for a couple of days.”

“Well, have fun. Take pictures,” Bethy said cheerfully.

“Will do.”

Everything was normal, nothing to worry about. Her father wasn’t looking up from his food.

“Be careful and hurry home,” Suzanne said.

“I always do,” Celia replied.

That night, Anna grabbed her backpack full of gear and went looking for Eliot. He’d never bothered e-mailing her, which pissed her off, and it was time to call him on it. While riding the late bus to the campus, she followed his progress on her mental map from the gym to Pee Wee’s and hoped he would stay there long enough for her to catch up with him. He did. She swung open the front door, stomping in out of the cold—and Eliot was sitting in a booth with a girl. A cool college girl with dyed purple hair and a ring in her nose. They had books and papers spread over the table, and they were smiling at each other. Study date or something.

Anna felt like throwing up right there, she was so mortified. Eliot hadn’t e-mailed her because why would he? Why would he find her, a lowly high-school kid, even the least bit interesting? Worst of all, he looked up and caught her eye right before she turned around and stomped back out.

She was across the street and halfway to the bus stop when she heard him shouting.

“Hey! Hey, Rose, wait up a second.” His footsteps pounded.

She slowed, then stopped. Reluctantly. It would have been more dignified to keep on walking. She didn’t need him.

“Rose.” When she didn’t turn, he stepped around until he faced her. Him and his smug college boy expression. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Why didn’t you e-mail me?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I didn’t have anything to e-mail about.”

That wasn’t the point … She stopped short of stamping her foot in frustration, which would have made her feel like she was about six years old. That was something Bethy would do. “Well, I’ve got something, and how was I supposed to tell you about it?”

“Seems like you’re doing just fine,” he said.

She maneuvered around him. “You’re busy. This can wait.”

“No, seriously, we’re just brushing up for a chemistry test, it’s not important. What have you got?”

She didn’t have anything, now that she thought about actually trying to explain it. “It may be nothing. But you know about the planning committee? The downtown development project?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been in the news.”

“There’s some weird stuff going on behind the scenes—one company trying to block another from having any influence. It reminded me of what you said about the Executive, and I thought this might be something he’d try.”

“What’s your proof?”

“We have to go find the proof, but I can’t do it on my own. There’s a company, Superior Construction. It’s a front, and we need to find out who’s really running it. Actual evidence. The trail stops at a law firm. I want to find out who hired the lawyers to front the company.”

“Corporate espionage.”

“Yeah, kind of.” “Espionage” made her wonder if she ought to call Teddy and get his help as well—this was exactly his thing. But no, she decided, that would take too much time. Eliot was here, ready to help, better to get it done now. She pulled a page from her pocket. “Here’s the name and address of the firm, McClosky and Patterson. They’re in one of the downtown offices. I couldn’t find much about them online, just a plain business page.”

“Horizon Tower—I know that building,” Eliot said. “Lots of good ledges. I can get us right to their floor. You think if we find out who hired them, we’ll find the Executive?”

“It’s just an idea.”

“No, I like it. It won’t even take long, just a quick look through filing cabinets.”

“And hope the place doesn’t have good alarms.”

His grin turned sly. “We’ll worry about that when we get there. Let me just go tell Becca that something came up.”

Punk jacket and a nose ring and her name was Becca? Anna waited, watching her breath fog, telling herself over and over that this was a good idea. It was almost a date, even.

No it wasn’t.

He returned quickly, backpack over his shoulder.

Anna asked, “Do you need to go get your suit?”

“Already in the bag.”

Anna suddenly didn’t feel so weird, if she wasn’t the only one doing that. “You want to take the bus?”

They set off side by side, walking along the street by the quad.

“Is that how you do your superheroing? You take the bus?”

“Hey, it works,” she shot back.

“Why don’t we take my car.”

“Can you get around without the traffic cameras IDing your plates?”

“Believe it or not, I’ve been doing this at least as long as you have.”

“Probably longer,” she muttered, and Eliot did her the courtesy of not responding to that. He steered her around the block to a student parking lot. She searched the rows, guessing which one was his—one of the beaters or one of the fancy, obviously parent-bought-and-gifted models? One of the latter, it turned out: a two-seater coup halfway to being an out-and-out sports car, all silver and streamlined. It had local plates.

“Nice,” she observed. So, he was rich, or came from a rich family.

“Thanks,” he said, his tone mirroring hers. Which meant he knew exactly what the car said about him.

If he’d grown up in Commerce City instead of Delta, he probably would have gone to Elmwood. They’d have grown up together, a couple of rich kids in their rich kid world. She probably would have avoided him. He unlocked the car and gestured her to the passenger seat. Leather interior, natch.

He guided the car out of the parking lot and onto one of the westbound arteries. If she thought hard about it, she’d acknowledge that she’d just gotten into a strange man’s car and she hadn’t told anyone where she was going. Horror movies started this way. No superhero code of honor was going to save her if he turned out to be a psychopath. She couldn’t say why she was pretty sure he wasn’t a psychopath.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked finally. “How’d you get powers?”

“Born with them, near as I can figure,” he said. “I didn’t get struck by lightning or anything. They didn’t show up until I was about fourteen. I’ve mostly kept secret about them. You and your friends are the only other superhumans I’ve met.”

He turned off the main boulevard after a few blocks. The side streets weren’t so busy, and surveillance coverage wasn’t so pervasive. “What about you?” he asked.

“Me, too. I mean, my power didn’t show up until a few years ago. I had to experiment with it for a long time. I’ve really only started using it in the last year.” She didn’t say a word about inheriting her powers, that she was part of the famous West family, that her father was the world’s most powerful telepath. “You haven’t told anyone? Siblings, parents, anything?”

His smile turned pained. “No. I don’t think they’d understand. My mother isn’t around much—she’s a concert pianist and travels a lot. My father—he’s kind of a control freak. If he knew what I could do, he’d find a way to monetize it, never mind how I felt. It’s kind of a cliché, isn’t it? Big wheel corporate tycoon, never had time for his kids who now resent him. I ought to be grateful. If he kept better tabs on me I wouldn’t be able to do this.”

“Oh, you’d find a way.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yeah.”

“I take it you haven’t told anyone, either. Outside of your friends, I mean.”

It would have been easy to tell him everything—so nice, to be talking to someone who understood. If she revealed enough clues he’d figure it out on his own. She’d have to tread carefully.

“No, I haven’t told my family. I don’t even know why. My mom’s kind of the same, corporate control freak. She’d be way too interested. Same with my dad. But I think … I’m sure they know something’s up. I mean, this is Commerce City, if your kid is sneaking out in the middle of the night, she might just have superpowers. But at this point I don’t know what to tell them, so I just keep quiet.”

Away from campus, the buildings climbed higher, becoming a forest of glass and concrete. The sky above was a hazy patchwork.

She asked, “Did you want to come to Commerce City for college because of its superheroes?”

“Sure. You guys have the tradition. I was hoping to meet some of them. You, I mean. And, well, here we are.”

She wondered what her parents would say if she told them she wanted to go to college in Delta and get away from Commerce City. She wondered if she would still be able to pinpoint their locations from that far away.

“This looks good.” He found an alley leading to a loading dock a block away from their target. It was even legal parking, since the No Parking signs were business hours only. “Ready to suit up?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He had a cover for the car, which would camouflage it. The thing did stand out, but under the dark canvas it seemed more like part of the scenery. He wore the leggings of his skin suit under his jeans, which meant he was pretty hard-core—always ready to leap to the rescue. He had to switch shirts, and she tried not to stare at his muscular chest. The guy did work out, after all. Probably knew all kinds of martial arts. She should have done karate instead of soccer.

She should also maybe think about getting a real uniform, if she was going to keep doing this. The dark coat and ski mask looked silly next to him.

“You come up with a name yet?” Anna asked.

“What do you think of Leapfrog?”

“Kind of lame,” she said.

“Yeah, then no.”

“You have to get your picture in the paper if you want someone to come up with a cool name for you.” Though that didn’t always work out. A few years ago, a vigilante with superspeed showed up busting crime in torn jeans, a T-shirt, and a cloth mask. The papers called him Blue Collar because of the clothes, never mind what his powers were. They’d be likely to call Eliot Greenie, assuming the pictures they got were in color.

Keeping to shadows, they made their way to Horizon Tower, the fifty-story skyscraper housing the law firm. The building was fifteen or so years old, and not one of West Corps’ projects, so Anna didn’t know as much about it as she would have if her mother was keeping tabs on it. The fake-bronze framing around the mirrored glass lining the exterior was already looking dated, part of a style that was hip and cutting edge at one time but had been quickly abandoned for more classic designs. Eliot was right, though—the upper floors were tiered, offering him lots of good landing and launch points. She sighed. Looked like she’d be spending another night hanging out in doorways and stairwells.

The sound of a car engine traveled up the street, and Anna grabbed Eliot’s sleeve and pulled him flat against the concrete wall around the building’s base. A white police sedan slid up the street and kept going. Didn’t see them, and probably wouldn’t see Eliot’s car under the cover.

Eliot looked up, studying the façade. No lights showed through any of the windows, and from the back they couldn’t see if anyone was keeping watch on the lobby. West Plaza had a guard at the front desk twenty-four hours a day. “Can you tell if any security guards are wandering around?” he asked.

“No. I can only find specific people, not people in general.”

“Oh. Too bad.”

Whatever.

He walked to the end of the alley, craned his neck back, and pointed. “That one. That ledge will get us to the right floor. If we can’t get in without triggering an alarm, we can leave fast enough.” And the car was a block away, so they’d have time to get away before anyone found it.

“You have a phone? Maybe I can call you and sound some kind of alarm if I see something out here.”

“Don’t you want to come?”

“How am I supposed to get inside?”

He looked at her, looked at the roof ledge, and back at her. “I’ll take you.”

“You can do that?”

“As long as you won’t get scared.”

Her heart flipped over a couple of times. “I won’t.”

“Then hold on tight.”

His arm wrapped around her middle, and he pulled her close, so their bodies lined up right next to each other and she couldn’t help but put her arms around his neck. She could smell him, feel his muscles moving under her grip. He was solid, and she had an urge to wrap not just arms around him, but also her legs, and dig her fingers into his shoulders, and clench her toes. He was so warm, and she could just curl up. She had to work really, really hard to seem completely cool and normal. Professional. Just a fellow superhero doing the superhero thing. No matter how much her insides had turned into complete goo. When his grip on her tightened, tucking in right under ribs, she thought her brain might melt.

His knees bent, he reached up with his free hand, and launched.

It felt like a roller coaster or an elevator in free fall, wind zipping past her face, whipping at the locks of hair that had escaped from her hat, chilling her hands. The ground was gone, and her legs dangled. She yelped rather than screamed—didn’t have time or breath for a scream. Her muscles clenched even tighter, securing herself to Eliot. She was trying to hold tight to a rocket. Her eyes watered, tears streaming. She didn’t even think about looking to where they were going. The world was a blur, scrolling past too quickly, and she held her breath, waiting for the landing.

It came in seconds, though she swore she had time to think in slow exquisite detail through the whole flight. But it was a jump, not flight, and as the arc of Eliot’s trajectory started downward, she opened her eyes just in time to see the upper-story patio he’d been aiming toward. The open space had tall railings along the edge to keep people from getting ideas. Eliot easily cleared the railing, and his bent knees took the brunt of the impact. Anna’s own knees went out, and she folded in a heap on the granite tiles, her fingers still wound tight in Eliot’s skin-suit jacket.

So this was what it was like having a real superpower. She took a minute to get her breath back; she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

“Hey, we’re here,” he said, chuckling. Leaning against him to brace herself, she got her feet under her, straightened, and absently smoothed out the wrinkles she put in his suit.

“You must carry a lot of girls around.” She said it as a joke, but not really. More like a hint. A question, which she hoped he would deny. When he didn’t, she tried not to be disappointed.

The patio had tables and lounge chairs designed for fashionable corporate lunches and cocktail parties. This time of night, the place was empty, the table umbrellas all packed away.

“Should we try the door?” he said, moving toward the glass entrance at the back of the patio.

Anna was turning over all kinds of plans about how they were going to get in—she didn’t know anything about picking locks except what she’d seen in movies, and breaking the glass would probably be a bad idea.

But the door wasn’t locked. Eliot swung it right open.

“Wow,” she said. “Wasn’t expecting that.”

“You’d be amazed how many places don’t lock doors on the upper floors. They figure, who’s going to break in on the thirtieth floor?”

“But this is Commerce City. People fly around here,” she said.

“Superheroes fly—and what superhero is going to engage in breaking and entering?”

“Us?”

Smirking, he held the door open and gestured her inside.

She waited for the alarms to blare, but nothing did, and she figured Eliot was right: The ground floor was alarmed and guarded, but anything this high? Not so much. Another reason the building, or at least this floor, wasn’t so well guarded: The floor was nearly empty. The doorway led to a hallway and a row of prime window offices, but beyond a partition was a typical open-plan space, only with no partitions, desks, chairs, anything. A few power cords dangled from offset ceiling tiles. An emergency light cast a faint glow from a door on the opposite wall. She wondered how many floors were empty and how much of the building was leased. That said something about the law firm; if they needed the cheap office space they could get in a mostly empty building rather than leasing posher, more prestigious space farther uptown, where West Plaza was located. At least, that was what her mother would say about it.

“The lawyers are on the next floor down. Emergency stairs are this way, I think.”

“You seem to know a lot about this building,” Anna said.

“I just pick things up, you know? Like I said, it’s got good ledges.”

“I guess the Leaping Wonder would know about ledges,” she said.

“I have got to come up with a decent name.”

He went toward the emergency light, and she followed, scanning for clues about what business might have been here in the past and what had happened to it. Not much of anything had been left behind—a few pieces of nondescript office furniture, a few extension cords pushed up against a wall. The place smelled of musty carpet and long disuse.

The next floor down wasn’t quite as desolate, but it wasn’t filled, either. A pair of hallways branched from the stairwell door and contained rows of office doors and windows. A few accounting offices, an architectural firm, all with stodgy names and minimal public faces. The lawyers were at the end of the hall.

Eliot had a set of lockpicks, it turned out, and he knew more about picking locks than what you saw in the movies.

“You came prepared,” Anna observed.

“It just seemed like a good thing to have if I was going to be running around at night.” He inserted a pair of narrow probes into the keyhole of the office door and wiggled them until the lock popped and the door swung in.

“So, you a vigilante hero or a cat burglar?”

“Trying to be a hero,” he said. “But I have some pretty wide boundaries.”

She wasn’t one to talk, considering all her heroing so far had involved breaking and entering. She didn’t have time to work through the philosophical implications.

Inside, she turned on the light with a gloved hand. The front receptionist space had a desk and a few chairs. No artwork, no magazines on a coffee table. Just the desk, chairs, and bare walls. She went through to the back office, which also had a desk and a few of chairs. At least the desk had a computer on it, and one of the walls had bookshelves containing an official-looking law library, all perfectly lined up. A diploma for a law degree from the university hung on the back wall. The name on it was Evan McClosky. Patterson’s degree didn’t seem to be hanging anywhere.

The office was sparse; it seemed wrong. Celia’s office in the penthouse was clean and spare, but it still looked lived in and used. Usually, a jacket was slung over a chair or a pen lay out of place. The shelves had books on them. This place didn’t look lived in.

Eliot rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Okay, where to dig for these files of yours?”

Anna looked for another door: a closet, access to another room, anything. But no, the place just had the two rooms, and the rooms weren’t enough.

“There aren’t any filing cabinets,” she murmured. As far as she could tell, except for the law books, there wasn’t a scrap of paper in the whole place.

“They must have everything on computer, and we’ll never get through the encryption,” Eliot said.

“No,” Anna said. “I don’t care how high tech a company is, there’s always a paper trail. People sign things, people turn in receipts, they make copies, they get forms and notices from the city.”

“You the business expert or something?”

She didn’t say anything, because she would have to talk about West Corp and what it was like growing up in the middle of the city’s largest privately held business. “It’s just common sense.”

“I suppose I can try hacking into their computer, just in case there’s something there.”

“No, you can’t,” she said and held up the monitor cable—which wasn’t plugged into anything. There was no CPU, just the monitor and keyboard for show. “This is a fake law firm.”

“That looks like a real diploma to me,” Eliot said, pointing at the wall.

“The guy’s probably a real lawyer, but the firm isn’t really doing any business.”

“So we’re dealing with a fake company fronted by a fake law firm? Now what?”

“Makes me want to hide out and see what really goes on here.” She pulled out her cell phone and started taking pictures. Not that it would do any good, but it might mean … something. She could send the pictures to her mother—anonymously, of course—and see if it meant anything to her.

In the meantime, Eliot opened and closed desk drawers. Pens and other office detritus slid on particle board, but for the most part the drawers seemed empty. Then he came to the locked drawer.

“What’s in there?”

“Let’s find out,” he said and got out the lockpicks. This one took even less time than the front door. Anna moved to look over Eliot’s shoulder.

The drawer was deep, but all that lay in the bottom was a file folder. Slim, not much in it. Eliot took it out and set it on the desk’s surface, and Anna flipped it open and scanned the scant handful of pages within.

“Anything good?” Eliot asked after a moment.

She couldn’t tell right away. The business jargon made her eyes blur at first, until she made the effort to focus. She had to look them over a couple of times.

“They’re invoices. But they’re going the wrong way. They ought to be charging Superior Construction, not paying them.” But she wasn’t reading these wrong—Superior Construction hadn’t paid the law firm to file their paperwork and front the company. The law firm was paying Superior Construction, apparently for the mere effort of existing—but why?

The last couple of pages in the file were direct deposit receipts, the payments going in, made by a company called Delta Exploratory Investments. Those were pretty big numbers in those deposits—six figures. Not just-doing-business big. Payoff? Bribery?

She showed the page to Eliot. “You ever hear of them? Could this have something to do with the Executive?”

He hesitated and pursed his lips before shaking his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

This was important. She didn’t know how, but her only task this trip was finding the next piece, not solving the whole puzzle. After glancing around the minimalist office again, she growled. “There’s no copy machine—what office doesn’t have a copy machine?” Finally, she took pictures of the documents and hoped the images came out good enough to be useful.

“You get what you needed?”

“I think so.” She tucked her phone away. “Let’s go. Make sure everything’s locked.”

They locked all the doors, turned out the lights, scanned the rooms one more time to make sure everything was in place—not hard, considering how little was there. The offices were just real enough to make a casual visitor believe it was a real business. No more effort than that had been put into the place.

Now that they were on the way out, Anna’s sense of urgency grew. They’d stayed too long already, someone would find them out. Eliot kept his cool, though, casually striding up the stairs and across the empty floor until they arrived back on the patio. The night sky opened up, and the edge of the patio loomed.

The thought of Eliot jumping off the building and diving straight down to the street below made Anna’s knees lock up. Eliot had already climbed halfway up the patio railing.

“You coming?”

She didn’t have a choice, but she couldn’t get her legs to move. “I’m not sure I can do this.” Closing her eyes, she crept forward, her steps slow, until she reached the railing—and made the mistake of looking through the bars and down the side of the skyscraper. Gasping, she took a step back.

Eliot said, “You can’t be a superhero if you’re afraid of heights.”

“I’m not a superhero, I’m just a freak with a parlor trick,” she replied.

He laughed. “We all are. It’s how you use the trick that matters. Trust me, it’ll be okay.”

He even looked like a superhero, standing above her, legs straddling the railing, with the haze-lit city skyline as a backdrop, his smile blazing under his mask and helmet. I wonder if I should ask him to prom … Maybe if she asked him to kiss her. For luck, right?

With that distracting thought, she took a deep breath and grasped the hand he reached out to her. Instead of looking down again, she stayed focused on the plastic shell of his mask. His grip around her middle was tight, and she tried not to cling to him too hard.

“Hold on,” he said and then dropped. Just stepped off the ledge. Anna squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her jaw to keep from screaming.

He bounced once, and in spite of herself she looked—he’d pushed off from the side of the building, changing direction and slowing down. They swooped toward the building across the street, and Eliot shoved off from that one as well, aiming them downward, until he landed with a controlled jolt. At the last moment, he lifted her up in both arms, holding her completely off the ground. She was pretty sure she would have smashed into the pavement otherwise. He straightened from his shock-absorbing crouch and set her on her feet.

“See? I told you it’d be okay.”

“That was … that was really cool. Thanks.” Her smile at him felt ridiculous, silly, but she couldn’t help it. She really wished her heart would stop flipping over like that.

And then she stood on her toes and kissed him, just briefly, on the cheek. For luck, after the fact. It might have been the most impulsive thing she’d ever done in her life, and she instantly regretted it. In a novel or movie, he’d kiss her back, of course. Get a steamy look in his eyes and sweep her off her feet with those strong arms. Instead, he looked back at her with a kind of bafflement. Her cheeks burned.

“I’m sorry … I just … I’m happy to be alive, I guess…”

His grin was crooked. “You’re pretty cute, Rose,” he said, in the same way he’d describe a kitten dressed up in doll clothes.

The end of the night was a letdown. Marching off in a huff would have made her feel even more childish than she already did, but her feet dragged on the way back to his car, and once they were driving, she didn’t want to take her mask off. First time for that. But the mask hid the blushing. Eventually she did, and he was already back in his mundane clothes, and they were just two normal people out for a drive again. The world somehow seemed plainer.

“Can I drive you home?”

“Back to campus is fine, I still have time to catch the last bus.” She almost apologized again for kissing him, but if he wasn’t going to say anything, neither was she.

“You don’t want to give anything away, do you?” he asked.

“Not really, no.”

By the time Eliot pulled back into the student parking lot, it was later than she thought—she’d be cutting it close for the bus, so she didn’t have much time to stand around and chat. Thank God.

She grabbed her bag and climbed from the car. “Thanks for your help.”

“Let me know what else you find out, okay?” he said.

She almost said no, that she had just about vowed to never speak to him again, But—

“I’ll e-mail you, I promise,” he said.

Nodding, she turned and jogged to the bus stop a couple of blocks away. Caught it just as it was pulling away, yelled at the driver to stop, and he actually did. Which was good, because if she’d missed the bus she’d have been tempted to go back and ask Eliot for a ride home. Never mind that she still wasn’t ready to give that much of her identity away. What was left of her dignity wouldn’t have survived.

The next morning before leaving on her trip, her mother dutifully hugged them, told them to be good, and sent them off to school. She seemed awfully sappy about the whole thing, in a way she hadn’t since they were little. She was supposed to catch her flight while they were at school.

But she didn’t go anywhere.

When they got back home, Mom was still there, in one of the penthouse’s guest rooms. Obviously hiding out and not gone at all. The compass’s pressure in Anna’s mind didn’t lie. If she’d canceled her trip, she would have just been in her office or bedroom. But she was hiding.

Something really weird was going on.

Dad was at his office on one of the building’s lower floors—keeping up the pretense that everything was normal, which meant he was in on the deception. He’d pretty much have to be. Anna waited in the living room for him to come home. She had homework, reading for English and math worksheets and all the usual crap, but she couldn’t focus on any of it. She sat in an armchair and looked out the vast living room window to the cityscape beyond. West Plaza was still, after some forty years, one of the tallest buildings in Commerce City, and from this vantage the whole city spread out like a 3-D map. The tangle of downtown architecture, the silver line of the harbor marking out the edges. From here, she should have felt above the chaos. Instead, she imagined it rising up to swallow her.

The presences she’d cataloged in her own psyche were growing. She could find her family, Uncle Robbie, and all her friends laid out like glowing spots on that map. Eliot was at the university; she was thinking about him a lot more than she probably ought to be. She couldn’t really help it. His presence was a warm, comforting glow. A fuzzy blanket in her mind. The thought embarrassed her. Even Ms. Baker, Mayor Edleston, Judge Roland, and Captain Paulson had begun to intrude on her awareness. Once she found people, imprinted on them, they never really left her.

She wondered: If one of the people she knew so well that she always knew where they were, if one of them died, what would happen? Would she feel it? Would she still be able to find them? She was scared to find out. She’d had such an easy life, she realized, that no one she cared about had ever died.

The thought gave her a chill, and she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged herself.

She knew when her father left his office and mentally followed him to the elevator, where he keyed himself to the penthouse and rode up to the private top floor. When the elevator doors slipped open and he strode through the foyer, she was waiting.

He wasn’t at all surprised to see her there, of course. Nothing she did would ever surprise him, and the thought made her suddenly angry. They regarded each other a moment, and for once she didn’t try to cloud her mind with thoughts of music or flat colors. Let him see her confusion. Let him try to calm her down.

“Where’s Mom?” she said.

Not a flicker of emotion from him. Not surprise, not chagrin from lying, not anything. Like he was some kind of mutant statue. Anna wondered how far she’d have to push him to get a reaction from him.

“She told you, she’s traveling.”

“No, she isn’t. She hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Her father raised an eyebrow, tilted his head. “How do you know?”

Oh, yes, how indeed … “I just know. Why are you guys lying, that’s what I want to know.”

“Anna, is there something you’d like to talk about?” So inhumanly calm. Though the lines around his eyes seemed more creased than usual.

If she kept pestering him, she’d never have to answer questions about herself. “Just tell me why you and Mom are lying.”

“I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

And that was that. She didn’t have anywhere left to push. She could stomp off to her room in a rage, but that would mean he’d won. She glared. “I wish I could read minds, like you.”

“Or perhaps not.”

She marched across the living room. “How about I go ask her why she’s lying to us—”

Arthur planted a hand on her shoulder, and emotion trembled through him—frustration, determination … fear. A tightly wadded-up ball of panic that flashed in his eyes and faded, but not before it pounded into her own psyche, and she couldn’t tell then if he was transmitting his own fear too strongly to control, or if her own fear was boiling over.

This is what he’s holding back all the time, she realized. He had to constantly lock himself behind that cool expression … the price for being able to read minds.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and stilled her racing heart.

“Please don’t do that,” he said. The emotion had lasted for only a flash; he was back to stone now. “She’ll tell you everything when she’s ready, I promise, but for now”—he pursed his lips, his hand tightened—“please wait.”

She didn’t know what she was going to do. Two paths opened up, one in which she confronted her supposedly absent mother, one where she didn’t, and neither option looked right. What she did know: Confronting her mother meant revealing her power. How did you follow your gut when it was telling you two different things?

Out of a sense of directionless rebellion she said, “You going to stop me?”

He could. He had the power to control minds, and if he controlled hers, would she even know it? But he drew his hand away from her.

She strode off—but not to go to her mother, and Arthur would have known what she would do as soon as she made the decision. Instead, she stormed to her room, slammed the door, and stayed there the rest of the night. She didn’t speak, because she knew he’d see it all written plain in her mind, and he wouldn’t be able to fix it any more than she could.