Dreams Of The Golden Age Part 18

FIFTEEN.

CELIA read the screaming headline on the Rooftop Watch website: "Five-Hero Smashup in h.e.l.l's Alley!" with a subheader: "Trinity and Espionage Team Up?" The only picture the site had been able to get showed the aftermath, a soaking-wet street and a smashed SUV, reminiscent of the old days when Typhoon patrolled regularly. An "unnamed police source" revealed details, naming who'd been involved in stopping the high-speed car chase. Whether by chance or design, all of Commerce City's newest heroes had come together, then scattered before police could stop them for questioning, or before any reporters could get pictures or interviews. All in all, a cla.s.sic superhuman outing.

Mark called as she finished reading all the articles she could find on the incident. "Have you checked the news yet or do I get to be the one to tell you?" he said.

"Just reading it now. Pretty spectacular. What really happened?"

"Pretty much exactly as you read it." He paused, and his tone changed, the overworked cop giving way to chagrined friend. "I sort of pretended to arrest Anna."

Celia raised a brow and was grateful Mark couldn't see her expression. "Oh?"

"I just wanted to talk to one of them. Show them that this isn't a game, that they shouldn't be s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around."

Oh, poor Anna, she must have been twisted up in knots. When he said "pretended," how far did he get? Handcuffs? Driving her to the station? Celia had seen the girls briefly at breakfast, and she hadn't noticed Anna being any more surly or upset than usual. The kid was burying it all down deep.

"Did it work?" Celia asked carefully, in lieu of yelling at Mark for scaring her daughter.

"Well, she's onto us. She knows you know who they are and that you're keeping track of them."

Power or no, Anna was good at putting pieces together. Smart kid, and Celia was proud. "Mark-thank you. For looking out for her. For all of us."

"It's like you've always told me, we superhumans have to stick together. Take care, Celia. You sound tired."

If all she did was look and sound tired, she was doing well, because she felt terrible.

Another week and another treatment pa.s.sed. It was harder than Celia thought it would be. Mostly because she'd been so sure she could get through it without much trouble with sheer willpower, and that wasn't how it ended up going. After the second treatment she threw up everything she'd eaten that day and slept for twelve hours straight. She didn't want to eat. She couldn't focus to read. She dreaded the next treatment. And the next, and the next ...

Claiming a sudden cold or flu would work only a couple of times without raising more suspicions-or proving the very reality she was trying to deny, that she was very ill. During just the second round, other people than Mark tsked her sympathetically over the phone and asked if this was maybe serious and should she see a doctor. That's what got me into this, she wanted to mutter at them.

She needed more time, just another week or so, before she came clean.

She planned a "business trip" that would allow her to vanish for a few days. She arranged fake itineraries and ticket stubs, just in case someone, namely Majors, checked. Meanwhile, she could hide, be sick, recover, and no one would know.

"And how many weeks is this going to go on?" Arthur questioned, looking over her fake itinerary. Celia decided she could recycle the itinerary several times over, "traveling" as part of an ongoing project that would fall through at the last minute. She could account for six weeks doing this, almost the whole round of chemotherapy. She began to entertain a hope that she wouldn't have to tell anyone at all, get cured and let it all fall behind her. A silly dream. She was only making things worse.

"Just a few," she told him, without confidence.

When she started leaving chunks of hair on her pillow, she shaved her head entirely and took to wearing the custom wig she'd had specially made to match her own hair. She penciled in her vanis.h.i.+ng eyebrows.

"I'm worried about you," Arthur said. And she could feel it. The emotion was strong enough to slip past his barriers.

"I know. You're very tolerant."

"You're lying to the people who love you most."

"It's temporary. Just till the lawsuit gets cleared up."

He didn't say anything. He didn't even seem to be thinking anything. He stood at the window of her sickroom, her temporary prison, gazing out to a constrained version of the panorama available in the living room. The view here offered a mere slice of the city, not half of it, like the other one did.

"Next week," she insisted. "The preliminary hearing on the lawsuit will happen, we'll get it dismissed, the planning committee will finally vote, and then I'll be able to take off as much time as I need. I'll tell everyone then."

"And explain to them why you've been lying to them for the last month?"

He made it sound terrible. Because it was terrible. "Yes," she said.

"We'll have this conversation again next week," he said.

She nodded. She'd be ready, one way or another.

Celia had contrived to bring the young would-be superheroes together. Now the problem was: Where to point them? Preferably someplace that wasn't in the middle of a car chase and wreck, and that wasn't breaking and entering. Something quiet, involving surveillance and reporting. She had an idea about that.

On the plus side, Celia had direct access to so-called Espionage. On the downside, she had to feed Anna the appropriate information without looking like she was doing it on purpose, or Anna would never take the bait. She left her office because she was feeling lonely and restless and wanted to be close to her mother, to be in the presence of the old comforting sounds of cooking and conversation, and to meet the girls when they came home, before she locked herself away on her so-called business trip. That was the excuse, a side benefit of the plan.

In the meantime, it wouldn't seem strange at all if Celia just happened to spread some work on the table, to leave a folder or two with some pages suggesting some directions of inquiry. Directions that someone who could walk through walls might be particularly suited to follow up on, that a mundane corporate legal team could not.

After crunching numbers, she and her staff discovered that Superior Construction wouldn't gain anything by stopping West Corp from winning the city planning contract-because it was a sh.e.l.l company that didn't have any a.s.sets invested in any development contracts. Which meant it had other reasons for stopping West Corp. Which again pointed to Danton Majors, but her lawyers still couldn't draw that line directly. Why would Majors want to stymie West Corp? A mult.i.tude of possibilities existed, from simply publicly embarra.s.sing the company to potentially crippling its future investment plans. West Corp was much more diversified than that, of course, and any one part of its operations failing wouldn't cripple the company. Which made Celia think this was all a red herring. Distracting her from what? She needed to watch the magician's other hand.

The law office that fronted the owners.h.i.+p of the company was the brick wall she kept coming up against, so that was the information she left casually lying out on the kitchen table. These were the strings controlling Superior Construction's actions. Espionage might be able to follow the strings back to learn who-and why.

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 sauteing 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 n.o.body 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sume West Corp has deep pockets, they want to embarra.s.s the company, they want to embarra.s.s 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 skysc.r.a.per.

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 p.i.s.sed 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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."