After the Golden Age

She found a dark blue sedan, automatic transmission, and matched the license plate to the keychain. Settling into the driver’s seat, she reacquainted herself with the controls and dials. She could do this, she could do this. Key in ignition, turn, shift gears, press gas pedal.

The engine revved, but the car didn’t move.

Then she remembered to release the parking brake.

So slowly the speedometer barely registered, she pulled out of the parking space and up the ramp leading to street level. Once on the street, she pressed the gas a little harder—if she drove five miles an hour the whole way, she’d take all day to get there. She sat leaning forward, her back rigid and away from the seat, clinging to the steering wheel and peering fervently through the windshield.

Fortunately, with the city blowing up around them, not too many other people were on the road. She had little traffic to contend with, and the cops were all in areas of the city where bombs had gone off.

Carefully, she drove northeast.

The warehouse district was an area of wide streets and cavernous buildings. This was a whole other city, the opposite of the one she looked down on from her parents’ living room. Here, she was an ant staring up at concrete walls that went on in all directions. She was trapped at the bottom of a canyon.

Slowing down, she looked for street signs, made out address placards bolted to the sides of buildings—some of them rusted and illegible. She found the right street and was afraid she’d spend the afternoon driving back and forth along its length, looking for the right building.

She shouldn’t have worried.

A shroud of smoke covered the city, along with a smell like a furnace, making the sky like dusk, dark enough that she could see her destination lit up like a storm cloud. Crackling electrical lights glowed through clerestory windows like faint bursts of lightning. Something was happening inside a building that was supposed to be abandoned and crumbling to ruin. That had to be the place.

It had taken her too long to get here. Mark would be here any minute. She couldn’t let him face down his father. No one should have to do that, no matter how great they were or how great their father was. She drove around the block and when she didn’t see his car, she parked, got out, and waited on the corner.

Twenty minutes later, twenty minutes of pacing the sidewalk and wondering about the crackling electric hisses that occasionally whispered from the warehouse, and wondering if maybe she shouldn’t be standing in plain sight, Celia began to think she’d been too late after all. Mark had been smart enough to not park right in front of the building and hid his car on one of the side streets.

Maybe he’d already gone inside.

Maybe she should try to talk to Paulson herself. And say what? You’re a jerk, just like your father?

Actually, that had its appeal.

She could just sneak in and take a look. If she saw Mark in there, if he was in trouble, she’d call Arthur, the police, and Analise at Olympiad HQ and get help. If they weren’t too busy keeping the city from burning down.

Celia approached the front door. Glancing nervously at the windows high on the warehouse walls, she hoped no one was watching. They looked too frosted to see out of.

What she took to be the front doors, double steel slabs that swung open, had chains looped through the handles, secured with a padlock. Just what she’d expect to find on a shut-up building. She walked around. In the back she found a loading dock, and a sliding steel door that was not only unlocked, but open a crack. She climbed up on the ledge and squeezed through.

She entered a dark receiving area, a block of bare concrete, cold and musty, with an air of abandonment. Continuing through it, she stepped softly, aware of the numbers and depth of the shadows, and how much danger might be waiting for her.

She reached the door in the back of the warehouse area. Standard size, simple knob, unlocked. It led to a hallway. She passed a few doorways with frosted windows showing dark interiors. Ahead, though, a light with a bluish tinge showed. Voices murmured. Mark, was Mark in there?

The rectangle of light before her beckoned. Pressing close to the wall, she crept forward until she reached the frame, where she could peer into the main room.

This was it. This was the lab where Sito performed his great experiment, where the accident happened, where a dose of radiation bathed a dozen technicians and instigated mutations that no one had expected or understood.

And now, Anthony Paulson was trying to re-create it.