Dreams of the Golden Age

by Carrie Vaughn

  It came in seconds, though she swore she had time to think in slow exquisite detail through the whole flight. But it was a jump, not flight, and as the arc of Eliot’s trajectory started downward, she opened her eyes just in time to see the upper-story patio he’d been aiming toward. The open space had tall railings along the edge to keep people from getting ideas. Eliot easily cleared the railing, and his bent knees took the brunt of the impact. Anna’s own knees went out, and she folded in a heap on the granite tiles, her fingers still wound tight in Eliot’s skin-suit jacket.

  So this was what it was like having a real superpower. She took a minute to get her breath back; she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

  “Hey, we’re here,” he said, chuckling. Leaning against him to brace herself, she got her feet under her, straightened, and absently smoothed out the wrinkles she put in his suit.

  “You must carry a lot of girls around.” She said it as a joke, but not really. More like a hint. A question, which she hoped he would deny. When he didn’t, she tried not to be disappointed.

  The patio had tables and lounge chairs designed for fashionable corporate lunches and cocktail parties. This time of night, the place was empty, the table umbrellas all packed away.

  “Should we try the door?” he said, moving toward the glass entrance at the back of the patio.

  Anna was turning over all kinds of plans about how they were going to get in—she didn’t know anything about picking locks except what she’d seen in movies, and breaking the glass would probably be a bad idea.

  But the door wasn’t locked. Eliot swung it right open.

  “Wow,” she said. “Wasn’t expecting that.”

  “You’d be amazed how many places don’t lock doors on the upper floors. They figure, who’s going to break in on the thirtieth floor?”

  “But this is Commerce City. People fly around here,” she said.

  “Superheroes fly—and what superhero is going to engage in breaking and entering?”

  “Us?”

  Smirking, he held the door open and gestured her inside.

  She waited for the alarms to blare, but nothing did, and she figured Eliot was right: The ground floor was alarmed and guarded, but anything this high? Not so much. Another reason the building, or at least this floor, wasn’t so well guarded: The floor was nearly empty. The doorway led to a hallway and a row of prime window offices, but beyond a partition was a typical open-plan space, only with no partitions, desks, chairs, anything. A few power cords dangled from offset ceiling tiles. An emergency light cast a faint glow from a door on the opposite wall. She wondered how many floors were empty and how much of the building was leased. That said something about the law firm; if they needed the cheap office space they could get in a mostly empty building rather than leasing posher, more prestigious space farther uptown, where West Plaza was located. At least, that was what her mother would say about it.

  “The lawyers are on the next floor down. Emergency stairs are this way, I think.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this building,” Anna said.

  “I just pick things up, you know? Like I said, it’s got good ledges.”

  “I guess the Leaping Wonder would know about ledges,” she said.

  “I have got to come up with a decent name.”

  He went toward the emergency light, and she followed, scanning for clues about what business might have been here in the past and what had happened to it. Not much of anything had been left behind—a few pieces of nondescript office furniture, a few extension cords pushed up against a wall. The place smelled of musty carpet and long disuse.

  The next floor down wasn’t quite as desolate, but it wasn’t filled, either. A pair of hallways branched from the stairwell door and contained rows of office doors and windows. A few accounting offices, an architectural firm, all with stodgy names and minimal public faces. The lawyers were at the end of the hall.

  Eliot had a set of lockpicks, it turned out, and he knew more about picking locks than what you saw in the movies.

  “You came prepared,” Anna observed.

  “It just seemed like a good thing to have if I was going to be running around at night.” He inserted a pair of narrow probes into the keyhole of the office door and wiggled them until the lock popped and the door swung in.

  “So, you a vigilante hero or a cat burglar?”

  “Trying to be a hero,” he said. “But I have some pretty wide boundaries.”

  She wasn’t one to talk, considering all her heroing so far had involved breaking and entering. She didn’t have time to work through the philosophical implications.

  Inside, she turned on the light with a gloved hand. The front receptionist space had a desk and a few chairs. No artwork, no magazines on a coffee table. Just the desk, chairs, and bare walls. She went through to the back office, which also had a desk and a few of chairs. At least the desk had a computer on it, and one of the walls had bookshelves containing an official-looking law library, all perfectly lined up. A diploma for a law degree from the university hung on the back wall. The name on it was Evan McClosky. Patterson’s degree didn’t seem to be hanging anywhere.

  The office was sparse; it seemed wrong. Celia’s office in the penthouse was clean and spare, but it still looked lived in and used. Usually, a jacket was slung over a chair or a pen lay out of place. The shelves had books on them. This place didn’t look lived in.

  Eliot rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Okay, where to dig for these files of yours?”

  Anna looked for another door: a closet, access to another room, anything. But no, the place just had the two rooms, and the rooms weren’t enough.

  “There aren’t any filing cabinets,” she murmured. As far as she could tell, except for the law books, there wasn’t a scrap of paper in the whole place.

  “They must have everything on computer, and we’ll never get through the encryption,” Eliot said.

  “No,” Anna said. “I don’t care how high tech a company is, there’s always a paper trail. People sign things, people turn in receipts, they make copies, they get forms and notices from the city.”

  “You the business expert or something?”

  She didn’t say anything, because she would have to talk about West Corp and what it was like growing up in the middle of the city’s largest privately held business. “It’s just common sense.”

  “I suppose I can try hacking into their computer, just in case there’s something there.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said and held up the monitor cable—which wasn’t plugged into anything. There was no CPU, just the monitor and keyboard for show. “This is a fake law firm.”

  “That looks like a real diploma to me,” Eliot said, pointing at the wall.

  “The guy’s probably a real lawyer, but the firm isn’t really doing any business.”

  “So we’re dealing with a fake company fronted by a fake law firm? Now what?”

  “Makes me want to hide out and see what really goes on here.” She pulled out her cell phone and started taking pictures. Not that it would do any good, but it might mean … something. She could send the pictures to her mother—anonymously, of course—and see if it meant anything to her.

  In the meantime, Eliot opened and closed desk drawers. Pens and other office detritus slid on particle board, but for the most part the drawers seemed empty. Then he came to the locked drawer.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Let’s find out,” he said and got out the lockpicks. This one took even less time than the front door. Anna moved to look over Eliot’s shoulder.

  The drawer was deep, but all that lay in the bottom was a file folder. Slim, not much in it. Eliot took it out and set it on the desk’s surface, and Anna flipped it open and scanned the scant handful of pages within.

  “Anything good?” Eliot asked after a moment.

  She couldn’t tell right away. The business jargon made her eyes blur at first, until she made the effort
to focus. She had to look them over a couple of times.

  “They’re invoices. But they’re going the wrong way. They ought to be charging Superior Construction, not paying them.” But she wasn’t reading these wrong—Superior Construction hadn’t paid the law firm to file their paperwork and front the company. The law firm was paying Superior Construction, apparently for the mere effort of existing—but why?

  The last couple of pages in the file were direct deposit receipts, the payments going in, made by a company called Delta Exploratory Investments. Those were pretty big numbers in those deposits—six figures. Not just-doing-business big. Payoff? Bribery?

  She showed the page to Eliot. “You ever hear of them? Could this have something to do with the Executive?”

  He hesitated and pursed his lips before shaking his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  This was important. She didn’t know how, but her only task this trip was finding the next piece, not solving the whole puzzle. After glancing around the minimalist office again, she growled. “There’s no copy machine—what office doesn’t have a copy machine?” Finally, she took pictures of the documents and hoped the images came out good enough to be useful.

  “You get what you needed?”

  “I think so.” She tucked her phone away. “Let’s go. Make sure everything’s locked.”

  They locked all the doors, turned out the lights, scanned the rooms one more time to make sure everything was in place—not hard, considering how little was there. The offices were just real enough to make a casual visitor believe it was a real business. No more effort than that had been put into the place.

  Now that they were on the way out, Anna’s sense of urgency grew. They’d stayed too long already, someone would find them out. Eliot kept his cool, though, casually striding up the stairs and across the empty floor until they arrived back on the patio. The night sky opened up, and the edge of the patio loomed.

  The thought of Eliot jumping off the building and diving straight down to the street below made Anna’s knees lock up. Eliot had already climbed halfway up the patio railing.

  “You coming?”

  She didn’t have a choice, but she couldn’t get her legs to move. “I’m not sure I can do this.” Closing her eyes, she crept forward, her steps slow, until she reached the railing—and made the mistake of looking through the bars and down the side of the skyscraper. Gasping, she took a step back.

  Eliot said, “You can’t be a superhero if you’re afraid of heights.”

  “I’m not a superhero, I’m just a freak with a parlor trick,” she replied.

  He laughed. “We all are. It’s how you use the trick that matters. Trust me, it’ll be okay.”

  He even looked like a superhero, standing above her, legs straddling the railing, with the haze-lit city skyline as a backdrop, his smile blazing under his mask and helmet. I wonder if I should ask him to prom … Maybe if she asked him to kiss her. For luck, right?

  With that distracting thought, she took a deep breath and grasped the hand he reached out to her. Instead of looking down again, she stayed focused on the plastic shell of his mask. His grip around her middle was tight, and she tried not to cling to him too hard.

  “Hold on,” he said and then dropped. Just stepped off the ledge. Anna squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her jaw to keep from screaming.

  He bounced once, and in spite of herself she looked—he’d pushed off from the side of the building, changing direction and slowing down. They swooped toward the building across the street, and Eliot shoved off from that one as well, aiming them downward, until he landed with a controlled jolt. At the last moment, he lifted her up in both arms, holding her completely off the ground. She was pretty sure she would have smashed into the pavement otherwise. He straightened from his shock-absorbing crouch and set her on her feet.

  “See? I told you it’d be okay.”

  “That was … that was really cool. Thanks.” Her smile at him felt ridiculous, silly, but she couldn’t help it. She really wished her heart would stop flipping over like that.

  And then she stood on her toes and kissed him, just briefly, on the cheek. For luck, after the fact. It might have been the most impulsive thing she’d ever done in her life, and she instantly regretted it. In a novel or movie, he’d kiss her back, of course. Get a steamy look in his eyes and sweep her off her feet with those strong arms. Instead, he looked back at her with a kind of bafflement. Her cheeks burned.

  “I’m sorry … I just … I’m happy to be alive, I guess…”

  His grin was crooked. “You’re pretty cute, Rose,” he said, in the same way he’d describe a kitten dressed up in doll clothes.

  The end of the night was a letdown. Marching off in a huff would have made her feel even more childish than she already did, but her feet dragged on the way back to his car, and once they were driving, she didn’t want to take her mask off. First time for that. But the mask hid the blushing. Eventually she did, and he was already back in his mundane clothes, and they were just two normal people out for a drive again. The world somehow seemed plainer.

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “Back to campus is fine, I still have time to catch the last bus.” She almost apologized again for kissing him, but if he wasn’t going to say anything, neither was she.

  “You don’t want to give anything away, do you?” he asked.

  “Not really, no.”

  By the time Eliot pulled back into the student parking lot, it was later than she thought—she’d be cutting it close for the bus, so she didn’t have much time to stand around and chat. Thank God.

  She grabbed her bag and climbed from the car. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Let me know what else you find out, okay?” he said.

  She almost said no, that she had just about vowed to never speak to him again, But—

  “I’ll e-mail you, I promise,” he said.

  Nodding, she turned and jogged to the bus stop a couple of blocks away. Caught it just as it was pulling away, yelled at the driver to stop, and he actually did. Which was good, because if she’d missed the bus she’d have been tempted to go back and ask Eliot for a ride home. Never mind that she still wasn’t ready to give that much of her identity away. What was left of her dignity wouldn’t have survived.

  * * *

  The next morning before leaving on her trip, her mother dutifully hugged them, told them to be good, and sent them off to school. She seemed awfully sappy about the whole thing, in a way she hadn’t since they were little. She was supposed to catch her flight while they were at school.

  But she didn’t go anywhere.

  When they got back home, Mom was still there, in one of the penthouse’s guest rooms. Obviously hiding out and not gone at all. The compass’s pressure in Anna’s mind didn’t lie. If she’d canceled her trip, she would have just been in her office or bedroom. But she was hiding.

  Something really weird was going on.

  Dad was at his office on one of the building’s lower floors—keeping up the pretense that everything was normal, which meant he was in on the deception. He’d pretty much have to be. Anna waited in the living room for him to come home. She had homework, reading for English and math worksheets and all the usual crap, but she couldn’t focus on any of it. She sat in an armchair and looked out the vast living room window to the cityscape beyond. West Plaza was still, after some forty years, one of the tallest buildings in Commerce City, and from this vantage the whole city spread out like a 3-D map. The tangle of downtown architecture, the silver line of the harbor marking out the edges. From here, she should have felt above the chaos. Instead, she imagined it rising up to swallow her.

  The presences she’d cataloged in her own psyche were growing. She could find her family, Uncle Robbie, and all her friends laid out like glowing spots on that map. Eliot was at the university; she was thinking about him a lot more than she probably ought to be. She couldn’t really help it. His presence was a warm, comforting
glow. A fuzzy blanket in her mind. The thought embarrassed her. Even Ms. Baker, Mayor Edleston, Judge Roland, and Captain Paulson had begun to intrude on her awareness. Once she found people, imprinted on them, they never really left her.

  She wondered: If one of the people she knew so well that she always knew where they were, if one of them died, what would happen? Would she feel it? Would she still be able to find them? She was scared to find out. She’d had such an easy life, she realized, that no one she cared about had ever died.

  The thought gave her a chill, and she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged herself.

  She knew when her father left his office and mentally followed him to the elevator, where he keyed himself to the penthouse and rode up to the private top floor. When the elevator doors slipped open and he strode through the foyer, she was waiting.

  He wasn’t at all surprised to see her there, of course. Nothing she did would ever surprise him, and the thought made her suddenly angry. They regarded each other a moment, and for once she didn’t try to cloud her mind with thoughts of music or flat colors. Let him see her confusion. Let him try to calm her down.

  “Where’s Mom?” she said.

  Not a flicker of emotion from him. Not surprise, not chagrin from lying, not anything. Like he was some kind of mutant statue. Anna wondered how far she’d have to push him to get a reaction from him.

  “She told you, she’s traveling.”

  “No, she isn’t. She hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  Her father raised an eyebrow, tilted his head. “How do you know?”

  Oh, yes, how indeed … “I just know. Why are you guys lying, that’s what I want to know.”

  “Anna, is there something you’d like to talk about?” So inhumanly calm. Though the lines around his eyes seemed more creased than usual.