After the Golden Age

Celia had seen it before, but not for years. Disconcertingly, it hadn’t changed at all. There might have been some new equipment, upgraded computers and communications systems, but the hardware blended in with what had been there before. She felt sixteen again. The others walked right in; she stopped and stared.

When she was growing up, if she wanted to find her parents, she checked her father’s office first—his normal office, for his job running the normal company. She checked the command room second. She’d been frightened by it. It was slick, steel, all gleaming surfaces and intimidating equipment filled with buttons, dials, screens flashing between a dozen scenes from closed-circuit cameras all over the city. The place hummed with the constant noise of hard drives and cooling fans at work. She’d call them on the intercom, and they’d open the door for her. She’d find her parents leaning over some monitor or printout, piecing together clues from the latest crime spree or tracing the Destructor’s whereabouts. Invariably, her question of “Can I make some popcorn?” or “Can you sign this permission slip for school?” seemed to pale beside whatever they were doing.

A couple of times she’d sat at their conference table for a debriefing, telling her side of whatever kidnapping she’d been involved in, recording her story for posterity. She couldn’t remember ever sitting at the table as an equal. Or as something resembling an equal—as someone who actually had something to contribute.

Warren said, “Why did the Hawk give this to you and not us?”

“I asked him the same thing,” she said. “He said you weren’t at the top of your game anymore. That you needed to hand things off to the younger generation.”

“How do you like that?” Robbie said with a laugh.

“The younger generation? He didn’t mean you, did he?”

Celia’s face flushed. She knew this was how this conversation would go. “I would think maybe he meant Typhoon or Breezeway. Block Buster Junior. One of that crowd. I told him I didn’t have any powers. Then he said, neither did he.”

During another long silence, Celia wished for a moment she was Arthur, so she could know what the others were thinking.

—Or not.—

She glanced up and caught him looking back at her. She blushed and quickly looked away. He’d been prying. Or she’d been thinking too loud. He said that happened sometimes.

Suzanne went to the computers. “Let’s run the mayor through the database.”

The database retrieved and cross-referenced Mayor Anthony Paulson’s information, producing the standard biography and a detailed listing of policy decisions and political records. Anthony Paulson was something of a Commerce City folk hero, a hard-luck case made good, an orphaned child adopted into a middle-class family and risen through the ranks of the city’s elite through his own hard labor. His policies were moderate, he was fiscally conservative, pro-labor, pro-education, and antisocialization. He was a politician everyone could love, and the greatest buried scandal of his life involved a college liaison with an underage girl—he’d been eighteen, she’d been two days from sixteen. The scandal died a quick death—the girl was Andrea, and the couple married three years later.

“We’ve got nothing on this guy,” Robbie observed. “He’s clean as a whistle.”

“If we’re not entirely wrong,” Warren said. “There’s got to be another connection. I still think Simon Sito is behind this somehow.”

Arthur rubbed his chin, considering. “That’s our problem. We have too many explanations that are possible but unlikely.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” Suzanne said.

A photo of Paulson smiled at them from the monitor. That’s what Mark will look like when he’s older, Celia thought. Not a bad-looking man at all. He even had an intriguingly wicked glint in his eye, like he knew very well how to use the power he’d acquired.

Something in his eyes made her stomach go queasy. She’d looked him in the eye before, at the symphony gala, and the dinner at the mansion. But he’d been in a more personable state both times. This photo was from his last campaign; here, he was predatory. Celia recognized the expression. She hadn’t noticed it right away because she’d never expected it. Not in this context.

He looked like a young Simon Sito. He had that glint in his eye that the Destructor always showed before he pressed the button.

“Celia, what is it?” Mentis watched her closely.

She’d been hypnotized by that image without realizing it, gazing into that man’s eyes and falling back in time, even more so than when she stepped into the command room in the first place. She must have looked lost, staring blank-eyed at the screen.

“I don’t know. Just … thinking.” She couldn’t say it out loud. It would sound ridiculous. Sito had nothing to do with this current crime wave. He wasn’t masterminding anything anymore.

Paranoia. It was just paranoia.

Fortunately, Mentis was too polite to press the question.