Dreams of the Golden Age

NINETEEN

CELIA woke up tied to a chair, because of course she did. If she lost consciousness in the course of a kidnapping, she woke up either tied to a chair or strapped to a sleek metal table that was part of some fearsome device of unknown purpose. The chair was always better, because it meant she was dealing with ordinary criminals with ordinary motivations and imaginations and probably not much of those. The metal table and fearsome device meant a mad scientist, someone with ambition and imagination. When the Destructor kidnapped her, she ended up strapped to a metal table under a mysterious device full of copper wires and glass domes, believing that whatever torture he had planned for her was undoubtedly worse than death.

This was a chair. She was upright. The nylon straps binding her wrists and ankles to the arms and legs of chair were tied in knots, improvised. This was a standard kidnapping and nothing to be worried about. Probably.

—Arthur, you can come looking for me now. Anytime.—

He didn’t respond. That didn’t mean anything. He might not be looking for her yet. She’d just keep thinking about him until he did start looking for her. Not hard to do. —Please, Arthur. I love you.—

Near as she could tell, her wig was still in place. The itch made it feel like it was still in place, so she’d probably been upright most of the time, the two goons carrying her between them. Her captors hadn’t blindfolded her, which meant they assumed she was powerless and that nothing she could observe would hurt them. Fair enough. She was in what looked like the unfurnished floor of an office complex, a wide-open space waiting for the partitions that would create a farm of cubicles. Evenly spaced posts held wiring and outlets, and along one side of the space was a wall of windows. They were high enough up, and she was far enough away from the windows, that all she saw was gray sky through the tinted glass. The décor was aggressively corporate: gray Berber carpeting, off-white walls, fluorescent lighting with an almost imperceptible flicker. The kind of thing you wouldn’t notice unless you had to work under it for eight hours a day. A few orphaned desks and office chairs stood here and there. Her own chair was isolated. Air-conditioning hissed through a vent somewhere. She was alone, facing away from any doors.

All she had to do was wait, practicing calm, so when her captors finally showed themselves, she wouldn’t flinch. She wouldn’t show the least bit of surprise, and certainly not fear. The old skills came back, even though she hadn’t done this in twenty years. The old habit, being the unresponsive captive, not giving them the fear they wanted. To keep that power for herself. She could be superior, even tied to a chair, looking up at them, whoever they were.

The question of why they’d kidnapped her would have to come later. That was fine, she could wait. She passed the time by studying the ceiling and seams along the walls, looking for where any secret cameras might be hidden. A small black globe in the corner of the far wall got her bet. A three-sixty fisheye in there could survey the whole room. She stared at it a moment, willing some awareness of her to whoever was watching, then looked away. Shifted to get some feeling back into her muscles and hoped she looked bored.

Her captors left her sitting there for at least an hour after she regained consciousness. She could be bored, or worried, and she refused to show them worried. She saved that for Arthur. —This is getting less fun. I have no idea who these people are. Can you hear me?—

No answer.

They might have gotten him, too. He might be unconscious, unable to hear her. But no, that was impossible, because no one could sneak up on Arthur, ever. No one ever got the jump on him. He was fine, just fine. Maybe he was distracted, and at that her thoughts spun out of control, because the only thing she could think of that would distract him from looking for her would be if something had happened to the girls. Maybe he was busy looking for the girls because if she could be targeted, so could they. Please, let nothing have happened to Anna and Bethy …

Voices approached, and she flinched, startled, exactly like she didn’t want to do. But she focused on her approaching captors, and she wasn’t worried or scared. She had progressed to a slow-burning fury. She heard low voices, footsteps padding on carpet, a door closing, maybe to an adjoining conference room. They approached from behind, and she suppressed a chill along her spine. They were watching her, studying her, and she had to not care. She’d done this before, she’d be fine. She settled an expression of cold superiority on her features. She would bury them at the first opportunity, oh yes.

Finally, they moved forward, around her chair to stand fanned out before her. There were five of them. The man and woman who had kidnapped her entered first. Two more men, young toughs with a polish that made them at home in the office setting. They’d have been out of place in a back alley brawl, but here they were sharks.

The fifth, standing in the middle of the group, was Danton Majors. His suit jacket and tie were gone, his expensive starched shirt was unbuttoned, revealing the top edge of what looked for all the world like a shimmering black skin suit.

“Danton Majors.” A statement. She wasn’t at all surprised.

“Celia West,” he said, crossing his arms, gazing down on her with a triumphant sneer. “Welcome.”

She looked at the straps binding her wrists and snorted. “I can’t swing you an invite to the country club, if that’s what you’re wanting.”

The curl on his lips twitched to a frown. “Be amusing as long as you can. I’m here to do business.”

She studied his four companions. Their positions in relation to Majors were deferential, to the side and a little behind. The two sharks she recognized as assistant types he’d brought to the planning meetings; they’d fit in to that setting well enough she’d hardly noticed. One of them had been the assistant in the courtroom with him. The other two were equally confident, as if they had no doubt that they were the superior beings, and they all looked at her as if they’d caught difficult prey. They stood with an alert readiness, like sprinters preparing for a race—that stance she knew all too well. They were superpowered.

But they weren’t from Commerce City. They were all from Delta, she bet. She didn’t know them or their histories. She looked at each of them, amazed.

“All right,” she said calmly. “Which one of you is blocking Dr. Mentis?”

They all, except Majors, glanced at the man who’d initially kidnapped her, dark haired and thin faced, lithe and intense in his business suit. So they had a mentalist. Problematic, not impossible. She caught the flicker of uncertainty in their eyes. Not quite fear, but close. Majors had probably told them this would be easy. The mentalist unfolded his arms, frowned.

“Are your powers active or passive?” she continued, regarding the mentalist, poking. “Can you actively influence other people’s minds, or just block another mentalist’s powers?”

“Enough,” Majors said, as Celia expected he would. She could guess the answer on her own—they’d had to physically take her off the street and drug her. This guy couldn’t do anything but block. Still, it meant Arthur wouldn’t be able to find her. Not right away. Anna wouldn’t be able to find her, either, and that meant Anna probably knew she’d been taken. She would tell Arthur. Help was on the way, and Majors and his team wouldn’t know that.

This was all going to be okay.

Majors came to stand before her, just a bit too close, so she had to crane her neck back to see him, so she could feel the body heat coming off him. “We need to talk.”

She said, “I have an office, and it’s a lot more comfortable than this. I’d have been happy to schedule you in.”

“Oh no, not like that. This is bigger than that.”

“It always is,” she muttered.

“You can’t be allowed to continue on your current path,” he said. Matter-of-fact, condescending. The kind of tone that indicated he wasn’t used to being argued with. His henchmen arrayed behind him supported his claims.

“What path?”

“West Corp. You’re going to sell West Corp to me. You won’t be able to use it as your base of power anymore. I’ll break up the company, sell off its subsidiaries, and no one can ever use its power and influence again.”

This both confused her, and not. What did West Corp have to do with any of this? They’d grabbed her to use as bait in some other scheme, she was being held hostage for some kind of leverage. That was how it always worked.

On the other hand, West Corp was everything, wasn’t it? And she was West Corp. Something else was going on here, some subtlety that Majors was assuming, that she wasn’t picking up on.

“I’m the third generation of my family to run this company, and you think I’m just going to sell it? Are you crazy?”

“And after you sell the company to me, you’ll leave Commerce City forever. I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay.”

She stared. The former suggestion seemed laughable. This one landed in her gut with a punch. Her shock faded to a cold resolve. “I don’t think so.”

“I’m not giving you a choice, Ms. West. You’re too dangerous, and you’ve manipulated this city’s affairs for your own ends for too long. It’s time you step aside.”

A burst of laughter escaped, and she clamped her jaw shut to quell it before continuing. “I’m dangerous? What have I done?”

“I’d heard rumors, but I wasn’t sure, so I came to Commerce City to watch. We all did. And now we’ve seen how you work. Commerce City’s judiciary is in your pocket. I don’t know why I thought I could have used the courts to expose you. You control City Hall, the police, the newspapers—and no one’s the wiser because you put on this respectable public face. No one can see it, not even the superheroes, because you’ve used your reputation, your identity as the daughter of the Olympiad to reassure people that you’re not a threat, oh no, you only have their best interests in mind. It’s for the public good!”

This astonished her more than anything; she’d hated her parents’ superhero identities when she was growing up. She’d hated being the daughter of the Olympiad. It had gotten her into too many situations just like this. She hated being judged by their standards, which she could never hope to reach, plain and powerless as she was. Identify with them? She’d fled. The picture he painted of her—ambitious, manipulative, amoral—was so weird. She could only look up at him, confused.

He was on the verge of frothing, angry like he’d been personally insulted. “But we know what’s really going on. Who you really are.”

“And who am I?” she said softly, as if afraid to shatter some precious object.

“You’re the Executive.”

A code name. A secret identity. A superhero name, and with it a power. It was strange, twisted, and marvelous. She wondered what her father would think. He would smile, she decided.

“I see,” she said. “I’m the archvillain. And you’re here to save the city from me, like the heroes of old. That makes you the good guys, is that what you’re saying?” She pointedly looked at the straps binding her arms to the chair.

“I had to convince you how serious I am. In all good conscience I can’t let you leave here unless you agree to abandon your activities. If you don’t, I’ll deliver you to Elroy Asylum. I’ll tell them you’ve snapped, and I can make sure they believe me.”

She’d fallen down some kind of rabbit hole into an alternate universe. She was being subjected to some mad scientist’s strange mental experiments in nightmare manipulation. It was the only explanation. She could only respond with wonder, and calm, because what good would panic do? Telling him he was insane seemed too obvious a reaction. Too close to the standard hostage playbook. No matter that Arthur couldn’t hear her, she thought at him anyway. —Arthur, I really need help right now. Help.—

“How do you expect to convince me, Mr. Majors? Or do you have some other fancy nickname I should be calling you? Commander Arrogant? Ego Man?”

One of the henchmen quickly choked off a snigger. She thought it was Shark #2 and gave him a smile.

“You don’t have to call me anything, Executive. You have a family—do you care about them?”

Calm, ever calm. “I do.”

“I had to ask. I couldn’t assume that they’re anything more than extra pawns in your game, your personal pet superhumans. If you won’t cooperate, we have other ways of pressuring you. Like you said, it’s a family business. We’ll go after them next.”

“Oh, you can try.”

“I really don’t expect you to agree to my demands on my first request,” he said. He’d begun pacing, and his henchmen stepped back to make room. Perversely, this made her want to agree to everything, just to throw him off. Turned out he had a script and wasn’t really paying attention to her at all. “If you could see reason, you wouldn’t have done any of this to begin with. So I won’t insult you by expecting you to see reason now.”

“You just keep going, this is getting better and better,” she said.

“I can’t trust the courts and police here to see what you really are—they all take orders from you. I’m sure most of the superhumans do as well. So all I have are threats.”

“How very noble of you,” she said, deadpan.

He stopped, glared at her. “You’ve forced me to this.” He seemed agitated, like he’d expected her to be frightened and was frustrated that she wasn’t. They always were.

“Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that.” She was way too tired for this, and her stomach had started squirming. Vomiting all over their nice empty office would be gross, but it would serve them right. But no, she had to stay well and alert. As well as she could, anyway.

“Sonic, Shark, bring her daughters here. Then we’ll have this conversation again.”

“Shark?” Celia questioned, raising an eyebrow at him. She’d been calling him that to herself as a joke. “And what you do, bite people?” Nobody answered.

The mentalist said, “We’re not going to hurt them—”

Majors cut him off with a gesture. “Of course not. But we need to have some kind of leverage.”

Celia’s imagination spun out because she’d had too much experience with men like Majors and their plans. He could find plenty of ways to threaten Celia without physically hurting the girls: take them away, hold them hostage for the rest of their lives, brainwash them, turn them against her. Convince them to convince her. Make her hurt them. His mistake: seeing them as pawns. Her girls were better than that.

“I’d rather you kept your hands off them,” she said, and was pleased to hear an edge in her voice. A supervillainy edge, even. You meddle with powers beyond your ken, puny mortal …

Majors smiled like he thought he’d gotten claws into her. “You see? I’ll get through to you. Soon enough you’ll understand that this is for the best.”

He nodded at the others, who moved into action. They began stripping, peeling off jackets, shoving down trousers, and unbuttoning shirts. They all wore skin suits of some sleek, shimmering black material. She guessed the fabric had some kind of reflective, antitracking properties. It might even have been bulletproof. At least that was how she’d have done it. The woman put her hair up with a clip, a couple of the guys put on gloves, they stretched muscles and cracked joints in an obvious show of preparation. When they all lined up with Majors, still mundanely clothed, they looked as badass a team as Celia had ever encountered.

She raised a skeptical eyebrow at them. They made an effort to ignore her, but they had to make the effort.

Majors said, “Mindwall, you’ll have to stay so her pet telepath won’t find her.”

“I’ll give you as much protection as I can,” Mindwall told the others.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be back before you know it,” the woman said.

“Pet telepath?” Celia said to Majors. “Really?”

He chuckled. “What else should I call him?”

“The father of my children?” she said to the departing team, heading toward the elevators. “You might want to keep that in mind. Just saying.”

“Can we gag her?” the remaining shark said.

After thinking a moment, Majors said, “No. I want her to be able to say she’s changed her mind.”

They settled in to wait. Majors retired to a chair across the space. He sat facing her, his arms crossed, studying her. She wondered what he was discovering. She just looked back, her expression still. Maybe she’d learn something about him, if they kept up the staring contest long enough. Like whether he had superpowers, and if so, what were they. He probably did, to be able to head up a superpowered team like this. Or he might have just been the money, the organizer. So, Delta had superhumans. Majors had to win this battle, or he wouldn’t be able to keep that secret for much longer. That was all she really needed to know, that his threat came out of fear. Frankly, she didn’t much care about Majors in the long run. She knew his type, and his type made mistakes. He needed her alive, so she was okay for the time being. A solution to this would present itself.

The second shark planted himself in a guard position behind her. Her skin crawled, sensing his presence without being able to see him. He was probably some kind of heavy, with a combat-related power. A kinetic strike or superstrength. She wondered if he had a temper to match. The superstrong ones often did. Like her father, who’d have made short work of Majors.

The mentalist wasn’t happy, pacing along the side of the room, just out of sight of the stretch of windows. She couldn’t tell if he was frustrated because the group had separated, or because he disagreed with Majors’s decisions. Maybe this was a weak point in the group. She didn’t have the first clue how to get around his telepathic block. Setting him against Arthur would be placing the irresistible force against the immovable object. Knocking him unconscious would probably do the trick. Simple, really. Too bad she was tied to a chair.

This was not how she wanted to be spending her afternoon.

The second part of any kidnapping was the waiting. The kidnappers made demands, everybody had to wait while the demands were delivered, then wait for a respectable amount of time to pass while negotiations continued. Celia, meantime, waited for rescue, which could happen quickly if the kidnappers weren’t that clever. Or she could be here awhile.

The chair was a standard padded task chair, comfortable for what it was, with plenty of lumbar support. But no headrest, nothing to lean on if she tipped her head back. She wanted to lie back and maybe take a nap. Kidnappers always hated it when she was able to sleep during her own kidnapping.

She dozed off anyway, but it wasn’t comfortable, and she jerked awake when she started to slump forward and tugged against her bindings. Her nose had started running, and she awkwardly wiped it on her shoulder. No dignity. That was fine, she didn’t need dignity to get out of this.

A phone rang. Celia instinctively looked around at her own pockets, but they’d taken her purse and her phone. The noise came from Majors. He retrieved the device from his pocket. Even halfway across the space, Celia heard a panicked voice on the line. Majors’s expression darkened.

“Fine,” he said, when the explanation had stopped. “Just get back here. We’ll deal with it.” He put the phone away and looked over her shoulder, taking in his remaining henchmen. He told them, “There’s a problem.”

Celia smiled.