Dreams of the Golden Age (20 page)

“I know it’s early to be thinking about, a few months out yet, but I was wondering, if you wanted to go to prom this spring, would you maybe want to go with me?”

For some reason, in that moment, she thought about Eliot and immediately felt guilty for it. “Um…” she stammered and tried to come up with a response, because she hadn’t thought much about prom—except when she’d met Eliot in the gym, and she didn’t really want to think about that right now. It was still months away, like Teddy said. And she honestly hadn’t thought about Teddy. Not until he put his arm around her, anyway, and now they were sitting here and she was having trouble focusing—

Judge Roland and his wife were gone, out of the house.

“Hey, they’re gone, it’s time!”

She shoved him to his feet. He looked stricken, staying rooted for a moment like he really was going to wait for an answer, but she gave him a push, and he nodded, vanishing before he’d gone two steps toward the brownstone.

She was alone in the alley, but she heard his footsteps slapping ahead into silence.

She waited, again. The air felt much colder without Teddy’s arm around her. She had to think about that, what it meant, and what her answer was going to be. They were trying to fight crime, she didn’t want to think about fancy gowns and awkward school dances.

She imagined how disappointed he’d look if she told him no, and she didn’t want that either. God, why’d he have to bring that up tonight? Couldn’t he have waited until daylight when both of them were dressed like normal people? No, he had to wait until he was dressed as Ghost, because then he had all the courage.

Tracking his progress, she followed him up the fire escape to the third floor, where Judge Roland had his home office. Teddy phased through the wall, which meant he didn’t trigger the burglar alarm, which was wired to the doors and windows. Anna held her phone closer, in case he needed her.

She’d about decided he didn’t need her help at all when her phone vibrated, and she clicked it on. “Rose, hey Rose.”

“Yeah,” she pressed the button and answered.

“There’s a safe in here, I reached in and managed to phase a bunch of papers out, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“Anything that looks like a bank deposit slip, anything that shows a lot of round numbers in a column. Lots of zeros,” she reminded him.

“It all has lots of zeros,” he said, plaintive.

She sighed. “Then just take pictures of it all. You remembered to put on your gloves, right?”

“Of course I did.”

She checked in with Judge Roland—still out and not anywhere near the town house. They were safe, with time to spare. Teddy was rushing down the fire escape, still invisible, and she mentally tracked his progress.

“Boo!” his voice burst, right next to her.

Unflinching, she glared at the place he was standing. “I can sense where you are, you know.”

He flashed visible and looked crestfallen. “One of these days I’m going sneak up on you.”

“Right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before somebody spots us.”

They took off their jackets and masks, shoved them into their packs, transforming them back into normal teenagers who probably shouldn’t have been out this late but who probably wouldn’t get called on it. Five blocks away, they found a bus, and from there went to the Internet café they’d used before. Open twenty-four hours—Anna had checked. She gratefully ordered a coffee and gripped it tight to warm up her hands.

They found a booth in back of the café and made sure not to talk too loud. She scrolled through the pictures on Teddy’s phone, e-mailed them to herself, and used one of the Internet kiosks to print out the most likely looking documents of the bunch. The images were mostly not
too
blurry.

From a distance, the pages that Teddy arranged on the table looked like homework. Anna took a glance around the café, which was doing a pretty brisk business for ten o’clock at night. The patrons were diverse, from the punk-looking guys at the counter to the scattered nondescript blue-collar types getting off one shift or another. A pair of uniformed cops occupied a booth at the far end of the shop, and Anna’s heartbeat sped up. But they weren’t paying any attention to her, and she quickly turned away.

Did this ever get less stressful? Her grandmother never struck her as someone who’d spent a significant amount of her life stressed out—so how did you be a superhero without freaking out every time you saw a cop? Yet another thing to work on.

Teddy unhappily shook his head at the spread of pages. “I have no idea if this is going to do us any good. Wow, does that much money even exist?” He pointed at the number on what must have been a retirement account statement.

Anna turned the sheet around and looked at it. The amount wasn’t that big—well, not West Corp big. Anna had a rough idea what her mother’s company was worth, and this was a drop in that bucket. But she didn’t say that. She bit her lip and didn’t say a word about how much her family was worth. Teddy was at Elmwood on a scholarship.

Compared to the average, Judge Roland made a good living, a good annual salary as a judge for the city court. She’d looked up how much he ought to be making so she’d be able to compare, and the first few bank statements and the retirement account Teddy had commented on—for a city pension fund—lined up with that. Nothing looked unusual.

Until she got to a second set of statements. Foreign bank transfers and accompanying records. Roland might have had a good explanation for having this; she didn’t know enough to be able to tell. But did one guy, even a high-ranking city judge, really ever make three six-figure money transfers in the space of two weeks? All after the date of Scarzen’s arrest?

“I think this is it.” She showed Teddy, who studied the page with a blank look. She couldn’t tell if he understood. “Trust me, this is it.”

“How do you even know this stuff?” Teddy said.

“I don’t know. Osmosis or something.” Every school day, her whole life, she’d go to her mother’s office and give her report. Used to be, she’d spend more than a scant few seconds there, trying to detach from the situation as quickly as she could. Used to be, her mother would have her work spread everywhere, printouts with arcane lists of numbers, highlighted with colors or marked with bold, and Anna would ask, “What’s that?” And Celia never said, “It’s nothing, never mind.” Celia always told her, showing her what the pages were and what they did. She never learned what a balance sheet was, she always just knew. Her and Bethy both, but Bethy was the one who’d probably follow in Celia’s footsteps and take over the business.

Anna never thought she’d actually
need
to know what a financial statement was. But suddenly she did, and she knew these looked squirrelly. Mom would know what the oddness meant. The judge had never been investigated—he’d never needed to be. He was smart enough to pay his taxes and not flaunt the windfall that exceeded his income. But a large amount of money was tucked away, waiting for retirement in another country.

She put the suspicious pages on top of the stack, shoved the whole thing into an envelope, and left the coffee shop for the
Eye
’s offices. Before handing it off to Teddy, Anna included a note in the package signed in large, anonymous block letters: “Espionage.”

Teddy looked at it. “That’s it? That’s our team name? They’ll think it’s one person, not a team.”

“Better to throw them off our track, right?” she said, grinning.

He said, “I kind of like it.”

The
Eye
’s main office was open twenty-four hours, reporters and staff working late, but after concentrating herself into a headache, Anna was able to tell Teddy where the people were and which parts of the building he had to avoid. The editor in chief was gone for the night. Her office was empty. Teddy entered through a back wall and left the package there, then retreated along darkened hallways to the back alley where Anna was waiting for him.

“I think we’re getting better at this,” Teddy said brightly as they walked back to the bus routes they’d take home.

“That’ll depend on what happens tomorrow,” she said, unconvinced. Hopeful, but not sure that the
Eye
would believe the evidence they’d handed over.

“So. Um. You have a chance to think about what I asked?”

On the contrary, she had purposefully ignored the question. She pursed her lips and considered. “Can you maybe ask me again when we aren’t running around all sleep deprived and wearing ski masks? When we’re not being Ghost and Compass Rose, I mean.”

“Yeah sure, okay, I can do that,” he said. But he had that crestfallen expression she’d been trying to avoid.

They split up and headed for home after monosyllabic farewells.

*   *   *

Anna woke up early to check the
Eye
website, Rooftop Watch, and other superhero groupie sites. She figured what was most likely: The
Eye
wouldn’t publish anything about Judge Roland’s corruption without doing some checking. So there wouldn’t be anything. But that wasn’t what happened.

“Who Is Espionage?”

That was the headline and lead story, accompanied by a photo of the note she’d written. It was a shock to see her note as front-page news. But a kinda cool shock. The scoop about the judge was there in a side article, along with various comments about the judge not responding to repeated phone calls and the word “alleged” in front of everything. The
Eye
also printed a bunch of additional information, stuff she and Teddy hadn’t delivered—so the paper had been keeping its own file on Roland for years and already had a stack of allegations. They published the new scoop because it gave them the concrete proof they needed to go public.

But the story the
Eye
was most interested in was Commerce City’s newest and most mysterious hero. The article was filled with speculation and quotes from police and professional superhero watchers, academics and psychologists. The article drew the line between this and the original evidence collected against Scarzen and suggested that maybe it was a personal vendetta. One of the commentators got close to the mark, speculating that Espionage’s power must have been geared toward “clandestine activities”—a phrase Teddy would probably latch on to. Invisibility, teleportation, and mind control were all suggested.

Nobody suggested that Espionage could be more than one person. Anna couldn’t have come up with a better disguise than that in a million years.

But there was no sign that anything was going to happen to Judge Roland. Roland reported a theft from his house to the police, but the police investigated and couldn’t find any sign of a break-in, no busted locks, not so much as a fingerprint, and Roland wouldn’t give an inventory of exactly what had been taken. He claimed only that items in his safe had clearly been tampered with. Roland’s lawyer threatened a libel suit, but the
Eye
countered with the evidence it had in hand, and the police promised to launch an investigation, and the story faded to sidebars and afterthoughts.

No instant gratification was forthcoming. But the
Eye
managed to find something to say about Espionage every day for a week. So they were famous, sort of. And once again, the attempt to do good hadn’t worked out like it was supposed to. Maybe she just ought to learn kung fu and start punching people out directly. Somehow, that didn’t appeal.

“We have to go patrolling again. Tonight,” Teddy insisted, during lunch. “Keep up the momentum.”

They were sitting in one corner, and Anna kept glancing at Teia, Lew, Sam, and a couple of other people who were sitting in another corner, laughing about something or other while eating sandwiches and pizza. Probably not superpowered stuff, because of the civilians there. And she was thinking of their nonpowered classmates as civilians. She was going insane.

“I don’t know. I’m really tired,” she said, picking at her food.

“You want to let them keep having all the fun?” His gaze darted to the corner where the sometime Trinity was having an ordinary high-school lunch.

“Teddy, that’s not the point, how many times do I have to say it.”

“We can do more, Anna, I know we can. But we have to get out there.”

He hadn’t asked her about prom again. He’d completely forgotten about it, or he really didn’t have the guts to look her in the eye and tell her he liked her. She thought about asking him about it—reminding him. But a perverse part of her didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. She didn’t want to seem that needy. It all felt so ridiculous.

“If that’s how you feel, why don’t you just go do it on your own?” she said.

“Because we’re a team.” Like it was obvious. His expression was clean, stark, not a lick of deception there. Her heart melted a bit. “Look, we head back to Hell’s Alley and I bring my paint gun like last time, since that actually worked out pretty well…” He rambled on for a little while with an even more ambitious version of the paintball-tagging scenario, while she thoughtfully chewed her sandwich. They made plans about where and when to meet, and whether they should think about putting together some better-looking outfits. Since they weren’t likely to get their pictures taken anywhere, Anna didn’t know why it mattered. But it did, so there.

If they were going to go on patrol, she thought, they needed more than a paint gun. They needed to be intimidating. They needed more power.

They finished eating and gathered up their things to leave for next period.

“So…” she said carefully, testing. “I wondered if it would be okay if I invited someone else along.”

“Who?”

“You remember the guy from the park that one time? The jumper?”

Teddy froze, like he needed a minute to process what she’d said. “Frogger? That guy? Don’t tell me you’ve been talking to him.”

“Yeah, so what if I have?”

“It’s just … we don’t know anything about him. Are you sure he’s a good guy?”

She knew exactly where Teddy was coming from on that one, but she breezed past it. “I think he can help us. We can really use someone powerful. Some muscle.” And boy, did Eliot have muscle. He
still
hadn’t e-mailed her, though.