Dreams of the Golden Age

TWO

ANNA rushed out of the sleek black town car before Tom could walk around to open the door for her. Bad enough that everyone would see the limo dropping her off. She could try to lessen the association, keep some of her dignity. Usually, she took the city bus to school, to try to blend in. She didn’t like being noticed.

It would be easier if she could act like one of the richest girls at school, showing off ultra-expensive phones and gadgets, driving her own sports car, wearing diamond studs with her school uniform. Other girls did that, forming their own cliques based on brand names and spending in excess rather than on any real friendship, and Anna did everything she could to separate herself from that. She got enough attention as it was, being Anna West-Mentis, daughter and granddaughter of superheroes, and of wealth and influence. And when would she develop superpowers and don a mask to fight crime?

Someday. Someday soon. But no one would know because she wasn’t going to tell them. She was going to do it on her own terms, and she didn’t want everyone—and with her family involved that meant everyone—watching.

Bethy was still in the middle school, and Tom would drop her off a block up the road at the next building. She didn’t seem to care what people thought of her or the company car or the superfamily in West Plaza. At least not yet. She got straight A’s and shrugged off the attention, while Anna felt like she was constantly walking through minefields.

Anna had to talk to Teddy before class started, and he wasn’t where he should have been, on the front steps or in the fountain courtyard with the rest of their friends—Teia, Lew, Sam. The certainty of her power confirmed their presence. She imagined it as a compass in the back of her mind, exerting pressure as it pointed the way. She could find people. She wanted to find Teddy, and she knew exactly where he was: in the nurse’s office, which couldn’t be good. The news websites had a story on him today—someone had leaked a still image from the security footage at the jewelry store. Anna had hoped this would pass under the radar of anyone who cared. Fat chance, it turned out. Seriously, what was the point of having a secret identity if you got your picture in the paper on your first outing?

She put her head down and marched, hoping to get inside quickly, but didn’t make it past the front steps.

“Oh my God, Anna, what’s up with Teddy?”

Reluctantly, she stopped to answer. Izzy, the girl who’d called her, was tall and loud and way too nosy. One of the girls with a sports car who wanted to be noticed. Anna decided to play dumb. “Why? What’s the matter?”

“He looked like he got hit by a truck. Is that why he wasn’t in school yesterday?”

“I can’t say anything until I’ve talked to him.”

“But—”

Anna walked off and through the front doors.

Elmwood prided itself on not looking like a school but more like some hundred-year-old English manor, with carpeted halls, polished wood doors, manicured courtyards, and so on. Like they weren’t students at a school but guests in someone’s mansion. But who made guests take midterms? It was all vaguely ridiculous.

She would have reached the end of the corridor without interruption, but Teia and Lew had moved inside from the courtyard and were waiting to ambush her. They’d probably been watching for her. She’d have avoided them if there was another way out of the corridor and to the nurse’s office. They were twins; Lew’s brown skin was a shade or two darker than Teia’s, but they had the same round dark eyes and sharp features. Teia wore her curly hair back with a headband, making a halo around her face. Lew kept his cropped short. They both blocked her path and studied her like they were about to dissect her.

“What happened to Teddy?” Teia whispered as Lew took her arm and pulled her into a corner. Unlike Izzy, they were in on the whole thing and wouldn’t let her just walk away.

“He did it, didn’t he?” Lew said. “He went out on patrol. He really did it.” His eyes gleamed with excitement. Maybe even with envy.

“And then got the shit beat out of him,” Teia said.

Anna sighed. “And he got his freaking picture in the paper.”

“I know!” Teia exclaimed. “It’s great!”

“Be quiet!” Anna hissed. They were supposed to be keeping this secret. “I have to go talk to him before class starts.”

Lew pointed a thumb over his shoulder and said, “He got called to the nurse’s office—”

“I know that. Can I go now?” She pulled her arm out of his grip and marched on.

“Anna—” they called after her, but she ignored them.

Yesterday, Teddy had called her before school and begged her to come help. He’d had a run-in the night before. She thought he was crazy for going out at all, for thinking he could battle crime, right wrongs, whatever, all by himself. That was why they were practicing as a team, but he just couldn’t wait, could he? Over the phone he kept insisting that the expedition had been successful. He’d stopped a real-live, honest-to-God robbery. He’d just gotten a little banged up was all, and he didn’t want his folks to know. She’d taken the bus to his town house, where he’d been hiding in the garden shed out back.

He’d been more than a little banged up. Anna wanted him to go to the hospital. But no, he’d made it through the night, he’d be fine. He’d turned invisible to get ice packs and aspirin without his parents knowing, staying in his bedroom long enough to convince them he was sick and couldn’t go to school. Somehow, they’d bought it. They went to work, so it was just Teddy at home.

He wanted her to help him wash the blood out of his outfit.

She just about killed him for that. She didn’t wash his outfit, but they ended up spending a couple of hours talking about what had happened, what he’d done right, and how it could have gone better. Her opinion: He should wait for the team to go with him next time. One against three were terrible odds, and sometimes even an invisible kid who could walk through walls needed someone to watch his back. He had to learn to phase out when someone hit him, the way he phased through walls. She told him that, and he defended himself, saying he couldn’t focus on so many things at once. Well then, he shouldn’t be trying to fight crime yet, should he?

That should have been the end of it, but then she had that talk with her mother. Her apparently omniscient mother.

She reached the nurse’s office just as he was walking out, closing the door behind him.

“Teddy!” she called.

He flinched, eyes bugged out, looking like he was about to run.

“We have to talk.” Before he could flee, she grabbed the sleeve of his uniform jacket and pulled him to a padded bench around the corner.

The bruise on his cheek had turned an amazing purplish-gray, spreading around his eye in a crescent. Otherwise, he didn’t seem too badly hurt. He favored his shoulder, but he could still move it. It could have been so much worse. Her big fear was that he would be knocked unconscious while invisible and not rematerialize. Just stay invisible forever, and she’d be the only person who could find him, zeroing in on him with her power and tripping over his body.

“I’m surprised you even came to school today,” she said.

“I could only stay away so long.”

“But you’re okay, right? What are you doing here?” She nodded toward the nurse’s office.

He looked changed. “As soon as I showed up, one of the teachers dragged me here. They kept asking questions about trouble at home.”

“They think you’re being abused?”

“Look at my face.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.” She resisted an urge to brush a flop of brown hair off his forehead. Weirdly, the bruise made him look simultaneously tough and vulnerable.

“I told her I walked into a door,” he said.

“You couldn’t think of a better excuse than that?”

He huffed. “I wasn’t thinking. It’s not important. I know what I did wrong. You’re right, I have to figure out how to phase out when people are hitting me. I’ll do better next time.”

How about avoiding getting hit at all? “That’s what we need to talk about. You need to back off.”

“It didn’t go perfect but I did okay—”

“You have to back off,” Anna said. “My mother knows it was you.”

He stared. “What? That’s impossible, how could she?”

“I don’t know, but she does. It’s her thing, she’s a control freak.”

“But how does she know about me?”

“She keeps tabs on everybody.”

“So it’s not enough that she’s president of the richest company there is, she has to spy on everybody?”

Flustered, Anna waved him off. “I don’t know, she’s paranoid. That’s not the point right now. You need to cool it because she’s watching.”

He thought for a minute, so grim and serious she almost laughed. “I can’t back off now. It’ll go better next time, I know it will. I need more practice.”

“Crime’ll still be there in a month or two. You need more practice where someone isn’t trying to kill you.”

“But that’s just it, how am I going to get practice using my powers when there’s danger if I’m not really in danger?”

“That’s a stupid argument,” she said. “I worry about you, Teddy.”

“Well. Thanks for worrying.” Even with the giant bruise, his gee-whiz smile lit up his face. It was hard staying mad at him.

“Any time.”

The warning chime sounded, a bell tone that was meant to be soothing but managed to be annoying as it echoed through the halls, because it meant they had five minutes to get to class. Anna didn’t much want to go to class at the best of times.

She hooked her arm around Teddy’s and hauled him away from the nurse’s office. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“What if I go out with Teia or Lew? Or Sam? We can watch each other’s backs—”

“So you can get in twice as much trouble?”

He brightened. “You could go with me.”

“I’d be useless.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not useless,” he said, but the words were rote and they both knew she was right. He added, “Maybe you shouldn’t worry so much.”

Her mother’s words from yesterday’s after-school conference echoed. Math quiz, she wished. “Somebody’s got to worry, the rest of you sure aren’t.”

They arrived at the second floor, north wing corridor, and history. Her first class. Teddy had chemistry. What he really needed were some physics lessons—pressure, velocity, force of impact.

“Are you saying that you want me to quit?” he said.

“No, it’s not that. I just … you could have been killed.”

“I could get killed crossing the street—”

“That’s another stupid argument.”

“We have to keep going. We’ve started this. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

That all depended on whom you talked to. Which sounded like something her mother would say.

“Yeah,” she said. “We have to keep going.” They didn’t have a choice. They’d already come this far.

Tom picked Bethy up from middle school first, then Anna, who didn’t have anything after school today. She could have lied about it and taken the bus home, like she usually did when soccer was on or she had a group project. But she didn’t want to push her luck. Dad might be able to tell she was lying. Or not. That was the trouble, he hardly ever let on what he knew or didn’t. He’d just let her keep digging whatever hole she started on until she hit bedrock. And he’d just stand there, his eyebrow raised, not saying anything.

The car waited because she was late, between picking up books from her cubby and talking to friends on the way out. Tom never gave her a hard time about lingering. Bethy was in the back of the car, math book open, doing her homework. Anna shoved the book over as she slid onto the seat. “Drive on, Jeeves,” she called to the front seat.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” Tom said, his smile amused. He was a silver-haired man who’d been working for her mother for eons. Anna couldn’t imagine that, working for the same person forever. Getting old doing the same job. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, but it wasn’t that. She didn’t want to run West Corp, either. Her mother had taken over right where her father, the previous president of West Corp—and the famous Captain Olympus—left off. Like they were some kind of clones or something. Anna was afraid to ask if everyone expected her to do the same. She’d rather they give it all to Bethy.

Throwing her an annoyed pout, Bethy gathered up her books and papers as the car pulled away from the curb.

“You flunk your quiz?” Anna asked.

“No. A minus. Mom was right, how did she know?”

“You love math, it’s your favorite, you’ll never flunk a math quiz.”

“But I was worried.”

She could tell Bethy that everything would be perfect for the rest of her life and she’d still worry. “You’re weird, you know that?”

Bethy should have said, “No, you are,” after that, but she didn’t. Instead, she hugged her book bag to her chest and watched her sister, staring hard until Anna squirmed.

“What?” Anna said. The plea hung through a long pause.

“If you got powers, would you tell me?” Bethy asked.

She could answer with a straight face because she’d been dealing with the question her whole life. Her grandparents, her father—all superhuman, and sometimes superhumans passed on their powers.

The trick was not to respond any differently from all the other times. People were always watching her; she just had to act normal, always.

“Yes, I would.” Except she wouldn’t, because she hadn’t, because if Bethy knew, their father would be twice as likely to find out, so Bethy couldn’t know about any of it. Anna had to keep it all to herself.

“Really?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Because if I got powers, I’d tell you.”

“Do you have powers? Are you getting powers?”

“No. But I was just thinking about what I would do if I did.”

“Having powers isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know.”

“Be nice to figure that out for myself.”

“Mom’s right. You worry too much.”

“Runs in the family,” Bethy said.

Because they had a lot to worry about, in the end.