After the Golden Age

Celia didn’t know what to say. She managed to choke out, “You’re just tired. You’ve had a shock. You’ll get it back.”

“What if I don’t want it back, Celia?”

Would Analise be Analise without the part of her that was also Typhoon?

Analise picked up the glass and drank all the water out of it. She finished, wiped her mouth, and gave Celia a bitter smile. “Guess I’d better keep an ear on the radio like your parents asked.”

Head bent, she went back to the hallway that led to the command room.

Celia didn’t know what to think.

She went to the living room and the windows. From here, she could see the smoke rising from three of the fires. The two on the south end were close together, the harbor fire a ways off to the right. Pillars of black rose into the washed-out sky, pulsing as they grew and shrank, as new flames fed them or other flames were put out. A gray haze filtered the sun, bathing the city in pale orange light. News and police helicopters swarmed like moths.

The whole city could burn to the ground in hours, if no one was there to fight it.

Her phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Celia? It’s Mark. I don’t know who else to go to. You’re in the middle of this as much as I am. You seem to know more about it than I do.”

He sounded panicked, as if the Destructor was breaking down his door then and there. “Mark, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“This is all a distraction, isn’t it? Like the kidnapping plots, like all the crime sprees. Something else is at the heart of it. I think I’ve found it. There’s a place, a building, the Leyden Industrial Park.”

Celia’s nerves stretched, as if they all waited to snap at once. She stared out at the burning city.

Mark continued. “The place was supposedly mothballed fifty years ago, turned over to the city for urban development. It was slated to be demolished for the highway plan, but that got held up. Celia, the place is active. My father’s been channeling money out of his office. Embezzling.”

Embezzling. That spoke to her line of work, and the professional side of her interrupted him. “Mark, how do you know? What evidence—”

He kept talking, like he had to get it all out at once before he lost his nerve. “Phony payroll, phony contracts, grant money to nonprofits that don’t exist.” All rote stuff, downright mundane. Paulson deflected attention from such activity with smoke and mirrors—with an orchestrated crime wave. “There’s more. I found evidence of payoffs to all the robbery suspects, and the bus hijacker. The rest of the money is going to this Leyden Industrial Park.”

Pieces snapped into place, almost too neatly. If Mark had all this evidence, he could serve his father up on a platter.

If he could turn in his own father.

“Mark, we shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone.”

“I’m going there, to the Leyden building. I have to see for myself.”

“No, you should call the police.” But he was the police. “Call for backup. You don’t know what he’s doing, he could have an army in there—”

“Will you meet me there, Celia? I need to talk to you. I need your help.”

“Yes, of course,” she said without thinking.

“Meet me there in an hour.”

“Mark, hold on, you shouldn’t—”

He hung up. She growled at the phone. He was being an idiot. He only had half the pieces and couldn’t see the whole picture. He probably thought his father was running some sort of gambling or drug ring. He probably thought he could talk to Paulson, make him see reason, convince him to turn himself in. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to Paulson and arrest the guy.

If she got there first, maybe she could talk him out of it. Maybe his call to her was a suicide’s cry for help. She ran to the foyer, then hesitated, thinking of Analise in the Olympiad command room. No, her parents might need Analise where she was, able to survey the entire city and monitor police activity. They might need her more than Celia did.

Celia entered the elevator. Inside, she punched the button for the parking garage. Going down.

TWENTY-EIGHT

ON the elevator ride down, she thought about calling Arthur’s cell and leaving a message. Then realized he must already know what she was thinking, what she had planned, even across the city. The thought was both ominous and comforting. There was a time when all she wanted to was to be alone. But if she got in trouble, Arthur would know.

Michael was on-call, but not in the valet office when she reached the basement parking garage. She wasn’t about to ask him for a ride anyway.

The key card her father had given her worked on the West Corp valet office, where the keys to the fleet cars were kept. Not that she’d driven at all since Michael taught her how when she was sixteen. Assuming she found an inconspicuous car, and assuming she could drive it, and assuming she didn’t get pulled over by hyper police—