After the Golden Age

“Your detective is having a very hard time admitting to himself that he was wrong.”

“I don’t need telepathy to know that.”

“No, indeed. Are you all right?”

She checked herself, wondering how much of her tiredness was genuine physical fatigue or overwhelming annoyance. Or traumatic stress.

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t have to stay at West Plaza anymore, if the robbery’s already happened.”

“Your mother would probably appreciate you staying for dinner.”

He was right, she was sure, but she wanted to run away all the same. “Do my parents think I had anything to do with this because I guessed right?”

“I honestly don’t know. I haven’t spoken with them since the robbery.”

“But they might think it, a little bit.”

“Celia, it’s amazing how little people control what they think sometimes. I can assure you, though, that your parents love you. Without reservation. They always have.”

She chuckled. “Makes me pretty pathetic, doesn’t it? Twenty-five years old and still pissed off because I think my parents don’t love me.”

“Celia, go home. Get some rest. I’ll let your parents know you’re all right. Mostly.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, after he’d turned his back and walked away. She had to have faith that even if he hadn’t heard her, he’d felt the sentiment.

TWENTY

THIS project rang too many alarm bells in her mind. Far from reaching a conclusion, the clues had branched. She had too many questions, now.

The next morning, attaché and growing collection of notes in hand, she headed back to West Plaza. She was going to do the unthinkable: ask her parents for a crack at the Olympiad mainframe. Maybe their database could make sense of the list of lab equipment, cross reference it with their information about the Destructor. In the afternoon, she planned to knock on Janet Travers’s front door. Maybe an eighty-year-old retired lab tech had the inside scoop.

One nice thing about getting fired: she wore jeans and a blouse softened by too much washing. And sneakers. She was the height of comfortable, ratty chic.

She only had two blocks to go between her apartment building to the bus stop and walked that stretch nearly every day without thinking of it because it was a quiet neighborhood, narrow, older streets lined with family grocers and small restaurants.

No reason the sidewalk should open under her feet.

The grating simply dropped. Yelping, she fell with it, she thought into the storm sewer, to concrete and breaking bones. But she landed on something soft, a cushion that protected her—an industrial-size, wheeled laundry hamper, like a hotel would use, filled with foam cushions.

A lid slammed closed over her and the light from above disappeared. A motor started, then movement. Lying on her back, she pushed up on the lid of whatever box she’d been closed in. It rattled but didn’t open. She kept pounding on it anyway, and screaming, because what else could she do?

She hadn’t been so afraid in a long time. She hadn’t been the victim of such an effective kidnapping in a long time.

Movement stopped. She gasped, startled, and then held her breath.

The lid opened.

She sat up, flung herself over the edge of the hamper, and skidded onto the concrete floor, unable to keep her feet.

She’d been brought to a room, pitch-black. She couldn’t see the walls, and only knew it was a room by the way her gasps echoed off walls that were too close. The whole journey, from falling through the sidewalk to ending up here had taken less than a minute. Her superhuman guardians—still in place, after all her complaints—would hardly have time to recognize she’d disappeared, much less be able to find her.

A light, white and muted, came to life. A propane lantern sat on a card table. A man, dressed all in black, his face in shadow, also sat on the table.

“Celia West,” he said in a flat voice. “You really should vary your route. I thought the daughter of Captain Olympus and Spark would know better.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing hysterically. She waited for the rant to follow—when the villain announced his ominous plan to hold her hostage, to manipulate the Olympiad, to threaten her.

He just watched her.

“You finally got me,” she said. “What now?”

“I wasn’t behind those other kidnapping attempts,” he said. “I’m competent. I succeed on the first try.”

This wasn’t the Strad Brothers, not by a long shot.

“What—what are you going to do with me?”

“Talk. That’s all. Do you know me?”

She stepped a little closer. If he’d lean in, let part of his face show in the aura of the lantern, she might see him. But she didn’t want to get close enough for him to touch her, grope her, strangle her—

He set something on the table beside him. He’d kept it hidden behind his back. As he produced it, he leaned forward, and she saw his face: older but fit, frowning but with the wrinkles of laugh lines around his eyes, as if he waited to see how she’d react to a joke.

Her voice almost failed her. “Damon Parks.”

The West Plaza security guard.