Dreams of the Golden Age

TWENTY-ONE

THEIR plan to snatch the girls had obviously gone horribly, spectacularly—and, Celia hoped, hilariously—wrong. She wished she could have seen it, especially if it involved Sam Stowe’s laser blasts. Or maybe an invisible Teddy Donaldson pantsing them both. The possibilities were endless and gorgeous. At any rate, the two hench-fiends had been thwarted and were returning home. The girls were safe.

“How can they be on to us already?” said the mentalist in response to Majors’s bad news. “There’s no way she could have warned the telepath—we were supposed to have hours of lead time before anyone found out.”

“The telepath must be stronger than we thought,” Majors said thoughtfully. “Even with you blocking, he must have known as soon as we took her.” The man looked sidelong at her, reassessing.

No, Celia thought. Anna was the one who realized what had happened immediately. The mental block must have erased Celia from her daughter’s awareness, and she raised the alarm. Which meant things around here were going to get noisy in short order. She directed a placid smile at Majors.

“Don’t think this means you’ll be rescued anytime soon,” he shot back at her.

“You believe I’m this powerful archvillain—don’t you think I had a plan in place for just this event? My people are coming, Majors.”

“Your people are deluded.”

She turned to Mindwall, who kept throwing worried glances toward the windows. “And what are yours?” she said.

“This building is a fortress. Unless they can fly—and I know they can’t—they’ll never get here. I hope you enjoy your stay at Elroy Asylum.”

“Hmm, I’ve been wanting to take a vacation. But I was hoping for a beach.”

He was just like every other two-bit hack who’d ever kidnapped her in the old days. Expecting her to be fearful and cowering in the presence of his awesome might, he was instead discomfited by her amusement, by her lack of concern. Instead of ignoring her as he should, he struggled to impress her with his strength. The more he struggled, the more foolish he appeared. They never pinged to this.

His expression turned cruel. “Every elevator shaft is trapped. All the staircases have countermeasures. The exterior of the building has antiaircraft weapons that will target anything larger than a human body. No one reaches this space without my permission. But if you give up now, if you agree to sign over West Corp, I can end it all. This doesn’t have to be a battle.”

—Arthur, I wish you could hear me, so I could warn you.—

“You don’t know a damn thing about Commerce City, do you?”

An explosion sounded, a rumble from street level resembling the force of heavy-duty construction. Majors stalked to the window and looked down. The mentalist fidgeted, acting like he wanted to flee. Celia imagined saying “boo” might set him off.

“Should I go check it out?” said the thug, Majors’s remaining guard.

“No,” Majors commanded, returning from the window. “Sonic and Shark should be back any second. They can scout it out. Steel, you watch her.” The thug leered at her.

“Steel? Is that supposed to be the noun or the verb?”

His smile vanished.

“Ignore her,” Majors commanded. “She’s baiting you.”

A flash of motion to Celia’s left caught her attention. She resisted focusing on that space to avoid drawing Majors’s interest. Letting her vision go soft, she kept her head still while looking out the corner of her eye.

A figure crouched at the edge of the wall, lurking just at the doorway. Obvious, not real good at staying out of sight. But the others were too preoccupied to notice, and the mentalist’s powers obviously had no active component—he didn’t have a clue that the room held an extra person. The newcomer had a mask and a dark green skin suit—the strange super, the one she couldn’t ID. Just like the rest of them. She should have known he’d turn up here. At least he wasn’t working for Majors.

This rescue was going to get very complicated.

She decided to help Majors stay distracted. Plus, she wanted to see how far she could push him before he really got pissed off. Arthur would say that was her old self-destructive inner teenager talking. Some habits died hard, didn’t they?

“What is this really about?” Celia demanded. “Are you pissed off at me taking over a city you don’t even live in, or are you just mad you haven’t been able to do it yourself?”

Majors paused his pacing, and Celia turned out to be right about him: He was so assured of his own righteousness, he’d be happy to explain himself to her, to demonstrate the justice of his cause.

“You’re well known, even in Delta. But I see through you, I see what you’re really doing. We’re here to save Commerce City from you—from itself and its own misguided worship of you.”

What an astonishing picture of her he painted. Had he actually read the Commerce Eye?

“So what’s your power?” Celia asked. “I’m very curious—you know enough about superhumans to be able to identify them, gather them together. I’m just wondering how you did. How you knew. Where did you all come from? Do you even know how you got your powers?” She directed this last at the mentalist.

“I was born with them,” he said. “We all were.”

“Mindwall, be quiet,” Majors ordered.

“Ah,” she said. If a lab accident could create all of Commerce City’s superhumans, no doubt a similar series of events could do the same elsewhere. Or a previously unidentified descendant of the Layden Labs experiment had moved to Delta and been very prolific. She should be able to follow up and find out. Assuming she got out of this. The possibilities turned circles in her mind.

“Mindwall. It must have been tough, growing up. Knowing you were different but not knowing exactly why. How do you even discover a power like yours? Did you know any telepaths, any other mentalists? By the way, do you know who else could block telepathy? I mean, I don’t know if he could actively block, but Dr. Mentis was never able to read his mind. The Destructor, Simon Sito. You’re not related to him by any chance, are you?”

Majors rounded on her. “Shut up, or I’ll gag you.”

“Yeah, we usually get to that point in the kidnapping right about now.”

She’d thrown out a connection with the Destructor as a lark, but now she wondered. Not all of Sito’s time as Commerce City’s most dangerous supervillain was accounted for. Had he spent time in Delta? The mentalist—Mindwall, really?—was sweating, his face puckered in horror. Odd guy out, she was guessing, just like Dr. Mentis. Nobody ever trusted mental powers.

“Danton? We’re back,” a woman’s voice called from the hallway. The figure in green must have gotten out of the way in time.

The two strode in looking flustered and a bit singed around the edges. Which meant Suzanne had gotten involved, and wouldn’t that have been something to see. Celia would have to make a crack about them getting beaten down by the grandma.

The man had a bruise covering his cheek, and his scowl was marred by a split lip. “The building’s surrounded by cops.”

“I don’t care about the cops, how many of their superhumans are here?” The man and woman, Shark and Sonic, glanced at each other, neither one answering. So they didn’t know. Danton clenched his hands; he was starting to lose it. “Well, somebody blew something up down there.”

Sonic, eager, bounced in preparation of running. “We’ll go see—”

“No. Shark, you go see. Call me when you know something. After that, we let the traps take care of it. When—if—they get within range of Mindwall’s blocks, then we’ll finish them.”

“What is the range of Mindwall’s blocks?” Celia asked casually. Just to see if they would brag.

They didn’t. And the guy in green stayed quiet and out of sight. If all he could do was jump real high, he couldn’t really help anyway.

The waiting was the hardest part of being kidnapped. Especially when she knew something was happening and she couldn’t do a thing about it, tied to a chair. She sweated under her suit jacket and couldn’t scratch. Just fidget to get the kinks out of her muscles and wiggle her fingers and toes to keep them from falling asleep. The moment had the feeling of a chess game, about three moves before checkmate. The pieces all slipping into place and nothing left to do but regret the moves you didn’t make.

“You can stop this all right now,” Danton Majors said, stepping around to the front of her chair, leaning over her. “I’ve got the documents ready to go, all you have to do is sign, and you can walk out of here and stop this.”

His leaning over her was an obvious dominance posture that was meant to leave her cowering, cringing away from him, ducking her face to avoid him breathing on her. She let him breathe on her and never blinked.

“I don’t sign anything without having my lawyers examine it first.”

“Your lawyers don’t need to examine this.”

She clicked her tongue. “It’s always the fucking con artists who say that. Blow up the whole building around me if you want, I’m not signing.”

Majors’s phone beeped, and he answered it, stepping away from Celia. Listened for what seemed a long time. He glanced sidelong at Celia. “Right. You’ve got a look at the surveillance? Holding the ground floor was a long shot anyway … so they’re in the stairwell now … How many of them? Cops? Okay. And kids? The teenagers—how many of them?” His grin was evil. “Anna West-Mentis is there, too? And Dr. Mentis? All right, then. Just watch, and keep me updated.”

He put the phone away. “They won’t make it this far. They’ll probably be hurt in the process. Badly hurt. You can stop that.”

The nausea in her gut choked her. What were Arthur and Anna even doing, walking into a combat zone where their powers wouldn’t do any good? They should know better than that. Celia kept her smile smug, her gaze terror-free. “You’re the one with your finger on the trigger.”

“You’ve lost, Celia West.” He rounded on her, fist clenched. “You’ve lost!”

At this point, not saying anything would enrage him more than any snippy comeback. So she sat there, silent, gazing on him with as much pity as she could muster.