Dreams of the Golden Age

SIX

ANNA and Bethy had been friends with Teia and Lew Fletcher since forever, because their mothers had been friends since forever. They’d spent a lot of time on the same playgrounds, and the two families had even taken a few beach vacations together when they were little. Anna hadn’t been aware of a lot of the dynamic when she was younger, but now she realized that her family, the rich family, had paid for the beach house, and there’d been a lot of mostly good-natured arguments between the adults about pulling their weight and being too generous to the point of charity. At the time, all she cared about was the fun they had. Teia and Lew’s mom had taught them all how to swim, which was great, but she spent a lot of the vacations sitting on the beach looking out at the water, kind of wistful and sad. Teia said something bad had happened to her mother in the far-gone past, something that she never talked about, and Anna wondered if it had something to do with the ocean. Or if it was just the hypnotic waves sweeping in and out that could make anyone melancholy.

Then Teia and Lew’s father died. They’d taken one more beach vacation after that, which hadn’t been the same at all, because they kept tiptoeing around the empty space where Morgan Fletcher should have been. After that came middle school, and they all got too busy, or that was what they all kept saying.

Lew had been the first of them to discover his powers. He might have had them since he was born, but who would notice if a brief thundershower happened every time a baby was cranky? It would be coincidence and slide by without comment. But in sixth grade, when a major storm causing flash flooding happened in exactly the Fletchers’ neighborhood—and only there—on the day of a test that Lew hadn’t studied for, he realized it wasn’t a coincidence. It was him. He told his sister because he told her everything, and Teia told Anna, because Anna’s family was filled with superhumans and she would know what to do about it. The only advice Anna could think of to give: Keep it secret. Practice controlling it, but keep it secret. Avoid attention and publicity. Attention had gotten them, especially her mother, in trouble.

As if determined to keep her twin from showing her up, Teia learned to freeze with a touch soon after. She described it as a “popping” sensation—one day, she just knew she could do it, like a lock had broken and released her power. From then on, her sodas were always cold.

After that, Anna began to suspect that supers were everywhere, she just had to know what to look for. That was how she caught Teddy disappearing when their English teacher asked for volunteers to read parts out of Romeo and Juliet. He always sat in the back, slouching in his seat and hiding behind the people around him as much as he could. He didn’t want to be noticed, obviously, but not because he was shy. It was because, sometimes, he really didn’t want to be noticed. At first he freaked that Anna wanted to talk to him at all—his eyes bugged out, looking back and forth for a place to escape. Clearly, he wanted to go invisible but couldn’t while she was looking right at him. But she explained: He wasn’t alone. He relaxed, as if the rods that had been holding him upright vanished. Later, Teddy figured out he could do more than turn invisible. The next step: turning insubstantial. He’d wanted to impress Teia and Anna with the new ability but didn’t think too far ahead when he passed through walls to follow them into the girls’ bathroom. They hustled him out quickly and gave him a lecture on being subtle.

Anna found Sam zapping flies in the courtyard during class. Like Teddy, he seemed relieved rather than angry that someone had discovered his secret. Happy that he wasn’t alone in the world with his power and wondering what came next.

That was their club. They’d found each other, and while they didn’t always get along, their desire for secrecy kept them together. Out of the whole world, they were the only ones who understood each other and what it meant to have powers.

After school, Anna went to the kitchen, where she knew she’d find her grandmother involved in some food-related project. Mom kept threatening to hire a cook—it wasn’t like the family couldn’t afford a cook, for goodness sake. But Grandma argued every time. She liked to cook, let her cook. Even Mom backed down from that.

“Grandma, can I talk to you?”

Suzanne looked over her shoulder. “Sure! You mind hanging out while I make cookies?”

Mind a chance to grab some cookie dough before it went into the oven? Oh hell no. Suzanne wouldn’t even complain when Anna sat on the counter, out of the way of the mixer and cookie sheets.

“Gingersnaps sound good to you?” her grandmother asked.

Of course they did. Anna barely fit on the edge of the counter anymore, without running into the cabinets overhead. But the seat gave her a sense of nostalgia. It was habit, sitting on the counter while waiting to test the cookie dough. And sometimes, when her parents weren’t around, Anna didn’t mind feeling like a kid.

Still slim in her jeans and sweater, her grandmother always seemed to be moving, bustling, promoting her charities, working in the kitchen. Suzanne’s roan hair, red fading to gray, was braided in a tail down her back. She certainly didn’t look like someone who could warm up a pot of soup by touching it or shoot fire bolts out of her hands. Or like someone who would run around after dark in a skin suit, fighting crime.

Anna had a hard time thinking of her grandmother as the superhuman crime fighter Spark, but she’d seen the pictures of a young, svelte woman in a black suit, brilliant red hair showering across her shoulders and down her back, launching jets of fire from her hands.

She’d put away the suit after Captain Olympus was killed. That period was a bit murky in the family lore. No one talked about it much. They talked about Warren, they talked about the Olympiad. They still got together with Uncle Robbie, who’d been the Bullet back in the day but had also eventually retired when arthritis began affecting his hips. But no one ever talked about how it had all ended, and Anna had been hesitant to ask. The dark cloud lingered in the distance, and she didn’t want to be the one to drag it close.

“I thought you said you wanted to talk,” Suzanne said with a smile.

“I was just thinking,” Anna said. Figuring out how to start, really. She took a deep breath and dived in. “What was it like, with the Olympiad?”

Suzanne raised a brow, cracked eggs into a bowl. “What do you mean, ‘what was it like’?”

What did she mean? “How’d you guys get started? How did you know you were doing the right thing? How did you not screw up and get yourselves hurt?”

Anna felt her cheeks burning; she wasn’t fooling anyone, was she? She kept her expression still—mild curiosity, that was all she’d reveal.

But Suzanne didn’t seem at all suspicious. She just shrugged and rattled on. “Oh, I don’t know. Going out, using our powers—it always just seemed like the right thing to do. Warren and I met in high school and started then. Robbie came along, then your dad about ten years after that. We were always stronger together than apart. We didn’t really think about getting hurt—you know about Warren, we didn’t much worry about him getting hurt. Nothing hurt him.”

Until the end. Suzanne didn’t say that.

“We started small—street crime, accidents, the usual thing you always read about in the news. The whole thing got really big when we didn’t have a choice. When the Destructor showed up, somebody had to do something. There we were.”

The Destructor had been the archnemesis of the Olympiad, had been involved in countless battles with her grandparents and father, and was the only person known to be immune to Dr. Mentis’s telepathy. He’d kidnapped her mother when she was a teenager, and she’d subsequently teamed up with him as a henchman during a particularly outrageous bout of teenage rebellion. Anna had never worked up the courage to ask Celia about it, what she’d been thinking at the time, how she’d gone from victim to villain, however briefly.

Maybe that was the problem. They didn’t have a Destructor to face off against. Not that most people would consider that a problem … But if they had a target to focus their energies on, maybe they’d stop bickering about whether or not they should publicize themselves in the Commerce Eye.

Anna asked, before she realized the words were out of her mouth, “Why’d you quit?” She hadn’t meant to get that personal. The biographies and reports always said the same thing, that Suzanne had been broken-hearted by the death of her beloved husband. Who wouldn’t retire after that? But Anna had never heard Suzanne answer the question.

She didn’t speak right away. She might have been concentrating on the spoon she was wielding, the bowl, the dough taking shape inside it. Or it might have been a bad question. Anna began to regret asking it.

“Warren and I were a team,” she said finally, sadly. “With him gone, I didn’t see the point in going on.” Using a teaspoon, she scooped a piece of the dough and handed it to Anna. “How is that?”

Anna could hardly taste the dough, but she ate it and smiled. “It’s great.”

Suzanne returned her focus to the cookies. “There’ve been enough books and articles written about the Olympiad, you could probably find out everything you wanted to know from them.”

Anna said, “It’s not the same as hearing it from you. It’s family history. Besides, you don’t give interviews. Why not?”

“Because it’s just like you said. It’s family history and none of their business.” She set down her spatula and put a flour-dusted hand on her hip. “Any reason you want to know all this?”

Shaking her head in what she hoped was an innocent manner, Anna said, “Just curious.” There she went, blushing again. “Hey, what’s for dinner?”

“I’ve got some shrimp for stir-fry. I’ll get started just as soon as your parents get back, whenever that is. They didn’t tell me, and I don’t have any idea where they’ve gone off to.”

“Mom’s on her way back from a meeting at City Hall, and Dad’s in his office.”

“He’ll probably come up when she gets back, then. He can always tell the minute she’s back in the building. Did Celia call you to let you know?”

“Yeah,” Anna said, flailing a moment. Time to change the subject again, without looking like she was changing the subject. “You know how she is, always has to check up on us.”

“She just worries.”

“Or she’s a pathological control freak.” That came out a little stronger than she meant, and she tried to smile it away.

“That, too,” Suzanne said sunnily. “Just remember it’s because she loves you.”

Anna wondered sometimes. More often, she felt like a cog in Celia’s plans that had fallen out of place and didn’t particularly want to fit back in.

After dinner, she fled to her room, making excuses about needing to study. Instead, she turned out all the lights, sat on the floor below the window that looked out over the city’s west side, and closed her eyes.

Bethy was in her room, actually studying instead of just using it as an excuse to be antisocial like Anna did. Her grandmother and father were in the kitchen, cleaning up. Her mother was in the living room, lying on the sofa, resting. Anna pushed her awareness outward.

Uncle Robbie’s condo was a couple of blocks away, and he was at home. Teia and Lew, also at home along with their mother. Sam was at his family’s apartment. Everyone safe at home, as she expected. There was Teddy, at his family’s east end brownstone. She lingered at the spark that was his presence in her awareness; she could tell where he was but not what he was doing. He was stationary, which meant he could be doing anything from sleeping to watching TV to reading to showering. Not for the first time, she felt a deep envy for her father’s telepathy. He never had any questions about anyone, did he? She thought it would be worth finding out things you didn’t want to know, to learn the things you did. She thought about giving Teddy a call, or sending a text, or something, then decided against it. She’d see him at school tomorrow.

Their presences glared in her mind because she’d searched for them so often. They were always simply there, the moment she looked for them. Spotlights shining up from her mental map of the city, each with its own hue and shape, depending on whom it belonged to.

It was a comfort, knowing where everyone was, knowing they were safe, and that they would be there for her the minute she called. She didn’t know how other people got along without such reassurance. That was what cell phones were for, she supposed. But she never lost her charge.

She could find her family and closest friends without thinking of it; to find others—acquaintances, people on the fringes of her life rather than in the center—she had to work at it. If she needed to, she could find police Captain Mark Paulson, another good friend of her mother’s. Her teachers, people who worked at West Plaza whom she saw nearly every day but didn’t know well. She’d been able to track down some of the city’s superpowered vigilantes—the Block Busters, Earth Mother, Breezeway—when she needed to. Mostly to avoid them, when she and the others were out practicing.

But she had one specific person she wanted to find tonight. Since she’d met him only the one time, she didn’t know if she could. But she wanted to try.

She held a picture of the green-suited super in her mind. His costume, his voice, the slope of his chin. The way he perched on the fountain, the way he moved. Where she’d seen him last, where he might have gone next after making that epic leap.

She didn’t have any trouble ignoring most of the lights and presences she encountered on her search. If she wasn’t looking for them, they faded to the background. It was like searching for friends in a crowd: you knew what defining traits to look for, if they were tall or short or redheaded or always wore a certain leather jacket. You scanned the crowd, and those details snagged your attention. Same thing.

A spark flared in her mind. East, on the university campus. A young man, fit and agile, with a sharp gaze and calm demeanor. It was him. She’d found him.

The secret Olympiad elevator hadn’t been shut down or closed off after her talk with her father. Which meant he didn’t know about it. Or he didn’t care if she used it, which meant letting her have access to it was part of her parents’ plans, and they were watching her anyway, despite how hard she worked to avoid the building’s surveillance. She was an interesting rat in their maze. Which meant she shouldn’t use it anymore if she didn’t want them tracking her. But what choice did she have?

She could go crazy thinking of it.

Once outside, she made her way two blocks over to the main east-west bus line, the one that stopped right on the university campus, where she disembarked and walked on. Her target, the mysterious superhuman, drew her forward. Now that she’d focused on him, his presence grew brighter. She could follow the map in her mind right to his location. He was stationary, she thought. In a room—not the dorms but in one of the buildings near the auditorium. Maybe he was a student. As she closed in on him, her heart pounded. She felt strong, all-knowing. Times like this, her power thrilled her. She could do anything.

Here she was, doing something exciting and powerful. If only the others could see her.

He was close. The knowledge of his location was just there, like knowing where the corner store was, or the placement of the sofa in your own living room. The paved bike path she followed curved around a grassy lawn, past a big square cinder-block building. Even this late at night, a few students were out, keeping to the well-lit paths, walking back to the dorms from the library or coffee shops. The assumption in the family was that Anna would be a student here in a couple of years. Anna couldn’t picture it. She knew her way around because she’d grown up in the city, but the university still felt like another world.

When she passed the cinder-block building, the spark brightened—there, he was inside there. It was the university gym. A student at the front desk asked to see her ID. Startled, she patted her pockets, shook her jacket, and muttered, “Shit, I forgot it. Look, my friend Eliot’s here, I just need to talk to him a second and I’ll come right back out.”

“Eliot Majors?”

“Yeah,” Anna said, bemused.

“Okay, go on in, he’s in the weight room,” the guy said and went back to slouching over his textbook.

Late at night, the glaring fluorescent lights seemed incongruous. They made the place seem too bright, when her body felt more like going to bed. But around her, university students seemed to be at peak energy. She rounded a corner, walked past a gym where a group was playing volleyball, and followed signs to a weight room at the end of the hall.

The room was small, with whitewashed walls and hardwood floors. A variety of machines and benches sat in the middle, racks of round weights were lined up along the walls, and posters demonstrated correct positions and safety rules. Only one person was here, a young man sitting on a bench and doing curls with what looked like an awful lot of weights. It was him. Recognition flashed in his eyes when he looked at her. If not for him noticing her, she might have doubted herself—all she’d ever seen of him was his mouth and chin under his mask.

He wore a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. Without the mask, he had an angular face with broad cheekbones and a short, dark buzz cut. When he didn’t say anything, kept curling with his mouth shut and jaw set, she thought he was going to ignore her, pretending they hadn’t met.

But he paused and set the weights on the floor. “How’d you find me?”

“I told you last night, that’s what I do,” she said. “Wasn’t sure I’d be able to, since we only met that once. But I wanted to try.”

He was definitely college age, she thought, now that she could study him without the mask and costume. Older than she was. Too cool to go to prom with her, at any rate. Not that she wanted to go to prom with him …

“Okay, you found me, you know who I am, now what?”

“I don’t know who you are. Not really. You’re just a guy with a superpower. I was curious.” Really, she didn’t know what she’d expected. That he’d at least want to talk. That he’d be curious about her and the others. That he’d see what they all had in common. That he’d see it the way she did.

“I’m sorry, I’m sure you mean well, but I’m not going to get all open and sharing just because you managed to find me. I don’t want to be part of your team.”

She couldn’t blame him for that, given how the team was shaping up, or rather how it wasn’t. “That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

“You just wanted to see if you could find me.”

She looked away, fully aware that he was basically right, and that she hadn’t thought at all about what she was going to say if she actually found him. She should have just peeked around the corner, confirmed it was him, and left. She scuffed her feet. “So. Working out. That’s a good idea.”

“You might try it, if you’re going to be fighting crime and all.” He smirked at her, and she felt even more dumb.

And still, she didn’t turn around and walk out. “I also wanted to tell you … to ask … you know, if you ever need … I don’t know. Help or something.” She blushed, because the thought sounded stupid once she said it out loud.

He didn’t need her help, and they both knew it. His tone was amused when he said, “I’ll let you know. You should probably get on home.” He retrieved the weights and started the curls again.

“Yeah, right,” she muttered, turning and walking out. The guy at the front desk waved at her when she left.

The cool air outside soothed her mortified and blushing cheeks. Walking fast helped, too. She felt like an idiot. He probably thought she was an idiot. She wondered why she even cared.

Because he was powerful. Because they could use his help. And he was cute. Maybe not hot, but definitely cute.

She huffed, disgusted with herself. If she could at all help it, she was going to avoid him from here out. And since she had his full name now, and his presence firmly lodged in her mind, she’d always know where he was and she could avoid him easily.