After the Golden Age

by Carrie Vaughn

  “That’s good. I’m glad.”

  The cab honked its horn, so Celia waved a farewell and turned to the door.

  Another piece of the old life fell into place, but at a slightly different angle, or with a subtle change in color. Like the redecorated kitchen. All she had to do was go away for a few years, and she came back to a world that looked a little friendlier than it had before. That was all it took.

  TEN

  CELIA was riding the bus to Smith and Kurchanski when one of Bronson’s lackeys called her cell.

  “Bronson wants you here right away.”

  “Why? What happened?” Jury selection had been a complicated, contentious process—the lawyers faced not just the problem of finding jurors who didn’t have a strong opinion about Simon Sito, but of finding ones not likely to be intimidated by the presence of the Destructor in the courtroom. It was over now, a jury had been seated, and the trial was due to start. Celia worried that something had happened to stall that.

  “He wouldn’t say, he just said he wants to see you immediately. When can you get here?”

  She looked at her watch, looked out the window to the route the bus was taking. She was going the wrong way. “Give me half an hour.”

  “You can’t get here sooner?” The guy sounded like he was having a seizure. Bronson probably held him personally responsible for not being able to teleport her to his office instantly.

  She hung up on him, then called work to tell them she’d be late.

  Exactly a half hour later, she knocked on the door of Bronson’s office.

  “Who is it?” His voice was rough, exhausted.

  “Celia West.”

  “Get in here, close the door.” She did so, shutting it quietly behind her, not willing to let go of the doorknob. She wanted to be able to escape.

  “Look at this.” Bronson, sitting behind his desk, offered her a sheet of paper.

  She stepped forward to take the page from him, moving softly, gently, as if that would calm Bronson and make whatever was wrong less terrible. “What is it?”

  “The witnesses the defense wants to call. Read it over.”

  The page held a list of about a dozen names, in alphabetical order. Mostly doctors, testifying to Sito’s insanity. The very last name, though, was Celia West.

  She flushed, her cheeks burning. She felt like she was going to faint. Or throw up. She set the page down and dropped her arms to her sides, so Bronson wouldn’t see her hands shake.

  “Why would they do that?” she said. “What could they possibly—”

  “Come on, you know. They’re going to discredit you, that’s what this is about. Discredit every piece of evidence you’ve touched by blowing your story wide open.”

  “They can’t, the record’s sealed—” Her voice was shaking, and she wished it wouldn’t.

  “They can. Yeah, it’s sealed, but you can bet Sito told his lawyers all about you. All they have to do is bring it up. Even if the testimony gets thrown out, it’s still there. What was it you said? They’re using you to get to your parents.”

  Mechanically, she shook her head. She’d leave town. She’d go into hiding. Get Dr. Mentis to induce a coma so she’d sleep through the whole trial—“I can’t do it, I can’t get up there and let them do this.”

  “I’ve already lodged a complaint. That’s why we get to look at all this stuff beforehand. You were one of Sito’s more prominent victims. That was what made the papers, and no judge would expect you to face that guy in court. But I thought you should get a heads-up. If this leaks to the press at all, someone else will dig up your record like I did. Consider yourself warned.”

  She couldn’t be Celia West without that record, without her parents, without the publicity. She should have figured that out by now. “Thank you.”

  White-faced, still shaking, she left and tried to have a normal day.

  By midday, someone had leaked the defense’s witness list. It came out in special news flashes all afternoon.

  Everyone had an opinion about it. Most of the opinions expressed outrage that the defense would stoop so low. The thought was the defense was going to use what Sito had done to Celia as yet more evidence of his insanity. But they didn’t know the truth.

  Mark and Analise, in separate phone calls, told her that no judge would make her testify.

  “They can’t do it,” Mark said with inspiring vehemence. “That’s ludicrous. If anything, you should be testifying for the prosecution. Why isn’t Bronson putting you on the stand?”

  She couldn’t tell him. She just kept saying, “I don’t know,” and sounding scared. He threatened to rush to her office and take her home then and there, but she talked him out of it. He promised to bring her Thai food for supper instead.

  When Analise offered to bring her supper, Celia had to turn her down. “Mark’s bringing food.”

  “Hm, good for him. Wait a minute, he’s a cop. Can’t he make the judge keep you from testifying or something?”

  “I don’t think it works like that. The DA’s already filed a protest. That’s all we can do.”

  “They’ll listen to him, right?”

  Wrong. All the defense had to do was present evidence that Celia wasn’t the squeaky-clean victim everybody thought she was, and the judge wouldn’t be able to wait to haul her onto the stand. But she couldn’t tell Analise that any more than she could tell Mark.

  “I don’t know.” Feigned ignorance made a hell of a shield to hide behind.

  She received her subpoena by courier that afternoon.

  * * *

  She felt grateful that she had work to bury herself in. City Hall had deeds and street plans going back far enough to track down Leyden Park. This was the part of her job she liked, hunting down the elusive clues, tracking her quarry, and pouncing on the target. Since she didn’t have superpowers, she had to settle for battling evil from behind a desk.

  The Leyden Park building still existed, but it was vacant. It was located in an industrial neighborhood northeast of town, an area populated by oil refineries and chemical plants. A wasteland. No one would notice an empty warehouse building there. Demolishing it wasn’t worth the expense, since the demand for the land it was on was low. At least until now. The site was marked as one of the areas Mayor Paulson’s superhighway would pass through. His office had recently ordered surveys of the land.

  Based on the date, the building had apparently been abandoned, written off as a capital loss and donated to the city, shortly after the accident that had put Sito in the hospital. All Celia had to do was find the original deed, and the original owner who’d hired Sito and sponsored the failed experiment. Never mind that the original deed seemed to be missing.

  Celia went to the clerk and recorder’s office and talked to the front-line assistant. The woman looked harried, and Celia tried to be polite.

  “I’m trying to trace an original title deed for the DA’s office. It’s for this property.” At least she’d been able to track down the address.

  “Have you checked with records?”

  “I just came from there. The information seems to be missing, and they thought you might have some other ideas.”

  The woman heaved a long-suffering sigh. “It’s probably misfiled. Which means we may never find it … unless you feel like cleaning out the place?”

  Celia liked digging for information, but not that much. “What about the property tax records? Even if we can’t find the deed, we should be able to find out who was paying property tax on the building back then, right?”

  The woman brightened. “I think I can help you with that.”

  In a back corner of the office sat an ancient microfiche machine and a row of filing cabinets. The woman chatted as she opened drawers and scanned file-folder tabs. “They put everything on microfiche about twenty years ago. Now they want everything on computer. Because no one can find the time or energy to transfer the microfiche to digital files, we have to keep both. You’re lucky you’re not tryin
g to find something that got entered during the transition. Then, it could be anywhere.”

  Celia waited patiently, but she tapped her foot.

  The clerk thumbed through one of the file folders, then thumbed through again. “Hm. It should be right here—”

  It was enough to make Celia think that someone had taken the data, that someone was hiding something.

  “Oh, here it is!” The clerk pulled a folder from a file bin on top of the cabinet, near the machines. “Someone else was looking at it and didn’t get around to putting it back. Ah, that’s why.”

  She showed Celia the label on the file folder, which read CITY URBAN RENEWAL. “That building of yours must be in one of the areas they want to put the highway through. The mayor’s people are in here all the time looking up property assessments. I’ll find your building in a minute.”

  She sat down at the reader with a sheet of microfilm and started searching. While grateful for the clerk’s helpfulness, Celia almost offered to work the machine herself; bringing the little squares of film into focus was taking forever.

  “There it is,” the woman finally said. She pressed a button, and the machine’s printer whirred and spat out a sheet of paper. The clerk handed the page over proudly.

  Celia studied it. She had to read it three times, convinced her eyes weren’t focusing right. There was the right property, Leyden Industrial Park, and the right address, and this was the data for the year that Sito’s accident had happened. Everything was right.

  West Corp had paid the site’s property tax for that year.

  ELEVEN

  THIRTY laps. She could swim thirty laps without thinking about it. It would wear her out enough to make sure she slept well that night without exhausting her. Then she wouldn’t lie awake dreading impending testimony that was still a week away, at least.

  She was going to be swimming a lot of laps in the foreseeable future.

  By the end of the session, she had the pool to herself, which was nice. The only noises were hers, and if she didn’t see anyone spitting she could pretend like the water really was clean.

  The lifeguard had stepped away for a moment. He knew her as a regular, knew she wasn’t likely to suddenly drown, and must have taken the opportunity for a break while no one else was around. She could pretend she had the whole building to herself.

  When she found the locker room empty as well, her neck prickled. Closing wasn’t for another three hours. She’d have heard any announcements in that regard over the PA. She pulled her towel tightly around her, skipping the showers, and going straight to the lockers. She could shower at home. She wanted to get out of here.

  Three men in ski masks were waiting for her, standing by the bank of bright orange lockers, terribly out of place. She didn’t scream, didn’t panic. Just turned around and walked out again.

  A fourth man blocked the passage that led to the pool.

  This is not happening. Even worse than getting kidnapped was getting kidnapped soaking wet, wearing only a swimsuit.

  The men closed in, moving toward her from either side. Two of them held handguns. She hadn’t noticed the weapons at first; they were black and blended in with the gloves and jackets.

  She looked for anything that might double as a weapon. The hand dryers were heavy enough to clock someone, but were bolted to the wall. She could break the mirror, use a shard as a knife. And what would she use to break the mirror, her elbow? Action-hero Celia?

  If they just wanted to kill her, they’d have shot her already and it would have only taken one of them. She just had to take a deep breath and wait for rescue. Again.

  The subtle, gurgling noise was barely noticeable—it might have been a shower left running. But the kidnapper in front of her took a step, and his boot splashed. He was standing in an inch of water. It lapped over Celia’s toes, and was pouring in faster. The floor outside the row of shower stalls had a drain in it. The locker area had two more drains. Water started backing up from all of them.

  “Come on!” the one in the front said, grabbing her arm.

  By then, the water was ankle deep and still rising. No longer just covering the floor, it flowed toward them, in opposition to the law of gravity.

  The kidnappers crowded her out of the women’s locker room, to the pool annex, and toward the door to the men’s locker room. That must have been how they snuck in here, and how they planned on spiriting her away.

  A tidal wave, a wall of water, rose up from the swimming pool and fell toward them. It might have had a mind of its own, the way it homed in on them.

  In fact, Celia was sure it did. Typhoon.

  She turned her back to the wave and hunched over, not hoping to keep her feet but trying to protect herself. It slammed into her—and it slammed into the kidnappers. They screamed, she noted. She thought she hit the wall. She hit something, then she was floundering, splashing across the cement of the pool deck, which scraped her up as she tumbled.

  The water carried her toward the pool, then set her down at the edge as it spilled away, over the side, back where it came from. The four kidnappers ended up dunked in the middle; every time they tried to swim for the edge, a wave surged over them. The surface of the water churned and thrashed, like the ocean in a storm, and they were using all their effort to keep their heads clear.

  Typhoon leaned on the wall near the annex by the locker rooms, arms crossed, admiring her handiwork with a satisfied glare. Her suit shone with condensation, her mask was slick and gleaming, and her hair was swept back, like an extension of her costume. Celia only recognized Analise because she knew what to look for.

  Celia stayed sitting on the pool deck, catching her breath, and glowering. Good thing she’d still been wet when this happened. It would have been just her luck to have dried off and dressed, then gotten picked up by one of Typhoon’s waves.

  “You okay?” Typhoon said. Her tone was cautious.

  Celia supposed she expected a thank you. It had been too much to hope for, to get out of here without talking to anyone.

  She said, “How is it I always get caught in whatever offensive you guys use to take out the bad guys?”

  “Nonlethal force. You don’t have to be too careful about bystanders.” She shrugged. “And you always seem to be standing in front of the target.”

  “They put me there.”

  “Kinda dumb of them, trying to kidnap you at a swimming pool,” she said.

  “Not really. They knew to find me here. You’re the only one who could have soaked them like that, and what are the odds you would have been within easy range to get here and—”

  What were the odds, indeed? The familiar hint of anger crawled through her heart and tightened her gut. “You’ve been watching me. Following me.”

  Typhoon looked like she was going to deny it—she set her jaw in a scowl and returned Celia’s glare. But she waited too long to say anything.

  Finally, she said, “We all have. We’ve been taking turns.”

  Celia’s voice caught, and she had to swallow the lump in her throat before trying again. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me you were … were babysitting me?”

  “It wasn’t babysitting. You were bait. We were hoping they’d try for you again, and we could catch them. If you knew, you’d have acted differently. Word might have gotten out, and they might not have tried.”

  The four in the pool looked caught, to say the least. There was her hidden talent. Celia West: Bait Girl. Hostage Lass. The Captive Wonder.

  The police arrived then, right on schedule, a dozen of them stomping out of the locker rooms, guns out and pointed at the would-be kidnappers.

  Of course, Mark was with them. How could he not be? She didn’t want him here. She didn’t want him to see her angry.

  Before any well-meaning officers could try to help her, she got to her feet. Her towel was gone—probably a sodden mess washed up in a corner somewhere. Never mind. She’d stand under the wall dryer if she had to.

&nb
sp; “Celia!” Mark called and ran to her. She took a deep breath and was calm by the time her counting reached seven. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, her voice flat. “Just a little shaken up.”

  He held her arms, studied her, then kissed her forehead. She let him, but her skin crawled. She just wanted to get out of here.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Really. I’m sorry, I’m not thinking straight.” She tried a brave smile. He was trying to be nice. Being very gentlemanly, really.

  The surface of the water had settled; the kidnappers dog-paddled awkwardly to the ladder, and the cops fished them out. Typhoon gave Mark a haphazard salute.

  “I’m out of here, boys. ’Til next time.” She ducked out through the locker room. She’d be out of the building and out of her costume in minutes.

  “She sure got here quick,” Mark said.

  “They’ve been following me. My parents, the other supers—they thought this would happen again.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  “I’m … never mind.”

  “Give me ten minutes. I’ll drive you home.”

  Then he’d want to stay with her. She had to think of a way to tell him no without hurting his feelings.

  She found a dry towel, dried off, and changed while Mark arrested the kidnappers. She finished before him, and went to wait in the front lobby of the rec center.

  Meeting Arthur Mentis on the way in was almost the last straw. Presumably he was here to scan the kidnappers before they could get their thoughts in order. He saw her; she couldn’t hide. Not that he had to see her to see her.

  She turned her back to him, as if that would make him disappear, or hide her thoughts from him.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll leave you alone,” he said, continuing through the lobby to the pool area.

  Almost, she called out to him. Almost, she begged him to wait. She could tell him how she was feeling; he’d understand.

  But he kept walking, and she kept her mouth shut.

  Mark brought her dinner to her place. It took three hours to convince him to leave. He couldn’t understand that what she most wanted—the best way to handle days like these—was to get back to normal as quickly as possible. No coddling, no special treatment. Just normal. Was it so hard?