Dreams of the Golden Age (35 page)

Braced against the railing, Paulson was shaking his radio, not getting a signal. “Damn it. This whole situation is ridiculous. You”—he slapped one of his SWAT guys on the shoulder—“go back downstairs, get the tech guys to shut off power to the whole building. It’s probably not even on the grid, so tell them to go into the basement and look for generators. And watch for traps.” Paulson sighed, and the wrinkles on his worried brow seemed even deeper. “If I’d known we had a fortress sitting in the middle of the city all this time, I’d have shut it down.”

“Save it for later, Captain. Let’s keep moving.”

“My heart is not going to thank me for this,” he muttered.

“If you need to stay—”

“No. I’m fine. Let’s go.”

About ten floors up, the stairs gave out. One minute Anna stood on solid floor; the next, the floor had dropped, the individual stairs collapsing into a seamless ramp that curved endlessly downward. Letting out a yelp, she rolled a few feet before managing to grab the railing.

The chaos seemed to go on for a long time. Startled shouts echoing, the scraping as one of the SWAT guys, thrown off balance by his gear, tumbled all the way down. Arm wrapped around the railing, clinging, Anna was able to survey the damage. Even the landings had tilted, offering no safe haven on the now impossible stairs. Paulson had slipped down to the next flight before stopping himself; Teia and Lew clung to each other. Analise had already been hanging on the railing and managed to stay upright, bracing now to keep from falling. Arthur had stabilized by pushing up against the wall.

“Is everyone all right?” Arthur called. Which was weird—he should have been able to just know, reaching out to them with his mind. Which meant—

She looked for Teddy and couldn’t find him. Even if he’d been far ahead of the rest of them, even invisible, she should have been able to sense him. But she just couldn’t tell. She closed her eyes, and the world became a blank, all her friends and family invisible to her. She opened them again quickly, lest the vertigo of it overtake her. “Dad, I think we’re within range of that telepathic block.”

“Yes, I’d noticed. This is your chance to think all those terrible thoughts you work so hard to hide when I’m around.”

She stared. “I don’t think horrible thoughts. Much.”

His smile was wry. He was close enough to reach out, brush her cheek. “You had some dust on you,” he said.

“Dad, are you scared?”

He thought a moment, looking up the endless turning of stairs to their unknown goal. “I’m cautious. The block shows how close we’re getting.” He must have seen some look of consternation on her face. “If I stopped to think of it, I would be scared, so we can’t stop. We must find your mother. We’ll be scared later, all right?”

The trek up the stairwell became a mountain climb, stepping carefully and hoping the soles of their shoes gripped, clinging to the railing and hauling themselves up, hand over hand. Anna’s father got in front of her, sandwiching her between him and Paulson, as if that would keep her safer. She glanced up once and spotted Teddy in the lead, looking back to catch her gaze. He offered a grim smile before turning to run ahead and flashing to invisibility.

Paulson got rid of his suit jacket, and damp circles of sweat showed at his armpits. Arthur kept his trench coat on, like it was part of his uniform.

The worst trap came on the twenty-fifth floor, so close to their target Anna had already felt the first flash of elation at impending success. Almost there. They’d find Mom, catch the bad guys, and be home in time for dinner. Never mind that the details still hadn’t completely clarified.

This time, Sam stopped them, managing to look anxious even under his mask. The brash fighter had turned into a grim campaigner.

“Hissing again,” Sam said. “You guys hear it?”

“More gas?” Arthur said. “I’m starting to smell it, sulfury…”

“Oh, God,” Analise said, pure dread in her tone. “That’s propane. Something’s on fire.”

They looked up. A light was coming toward them, yellow flickering to orange, wavering with heat. The sound was like distant jet engines coming on, one by one. With each hiss and flare, a flame shot from a projection on the wall—not part of the girders and bolts in the building’s framework as they’d been disguised to appear, but nozzles and ignition systems, shooting out gas, lighting it, filling the stairwell with fireballs.

Waves of heat roiled toward them, and the paint and drywall were scorching, bubbling. The fire was scouring the stairwell.

“Move,” Paulson shouted. “Get to that door, get inside.”

Teia was already there, both hands around the doorknob, yanking on it, rattling it. “Locked!” she called back.

“Teddy!” Anna shouted. “Teddy, ghost through the door and unlock it!”

Lew shouted back, “He went scouting ahead, I don’t think he’s here!”

Anna cursed. Well, at least he’d be safe from this. Weirdly, she thought of prom. Wondered if he’d ask anyone else, after she was roasted. So simple a trap in the end. They’d be burned to cinders before even reaching the thirtieth floor. She was too stunned to even be afraid.

The lead SWAT guy pushed past the teens to make his way to the door, drew a pistol to fire a shot at the doorknob, when Paulson yelled, “Do
not
fire that gun in a roomful of propane, Mitchell!”

The guy winced, chagrined, and put his gun away.

Teia said, “Sam, maybe you can blast the door—”

“My lasers have the same problem as the gun!” he said, frustrated. Teia let out a string of curses.

With unnatural calm, Arthur reached up to put a hand on Analise’s shoulder. The woman flinched away; her eyes were round with terror.

“Analise, there are water pipes in the walls, yes? Connected to the sprinkler system. Are they active, and can you reach them?”

“I should have known,” she murmured. “I thought, we’re in a fucking building downtown, two miles away from the harbor, Typhoon wouldn’t be any damn use here anyway. But no.”

Arthur repeated, “Analise—”

The woman squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head in fierce denial, clinging to the railing with both hands.

The steel rail was starting to get hot.

“Hang on!” Teia shouted. “I got this!” She gripped the rail, her arms braced, her whole body tensed with effort. A trail of leafy frost edged away from her hands, then shot out in speeding, winding patterns of ice around the railing, crawling both up and down. The air grew cold, then it grew colder. The frost reached Anna’s hands, but she didn’t dare let go. Her breath fogged, and the cold stung her face.

Teia reached up, blasting a sheet of frozen air particles up the center of the stairwell, past the upper landings, toward the oncoming wall of fire. The approaching jets of flame sputtered, and for a moment, Lady Snow had the advantage, sending wave after wave of cold toward the fires, which fought to stay lit, to continue progressing downward like some burning avalanche.

A drizzle began falling down the stairwell, a mist of droplets as Lady Snow’s cold met the fire, vaporized, and became rain. The next set of jets lit, and the droplets turned to fog, more frost dripped off the railings, and the heat won out.

Drenched with water, Teia shouted out in frustration. The air was steaming.

Arthur said, commanding, “Analise. Typhoon. You
must
do this.”

“I can’t!”

“Then we burn.”

Anna had never heard her father sound so … otherworldly. Cruel, that was it. She had to keep reminding herself, this was Dr. Mentis now. The hero thing, it wasn’t just a costume you put on and took off. This was what people meant when they called it a persona.

Growling through set teeth, Analise turned away and braced against the railing, looking eerily like her daughter when she did. Her back tensed, her shoulders bowed and trembled, as if a great weight settled onto them.

Anna had crept closer to Arthur, who somehow found her hand and gripped it.

The rain began to fall in earnest. What had been a mist turned to drops, then sheets.

The sprinkler system must have been shut down—not surprising, considering the booby trap that had been put in place. But the pipes behind the walls still held water, and sprinkler heads still projected into the stairwell, giving the building a semblance of normality.

Analise pushed off from the railing to lean against the opposite wall, clawed her fingers as if she would break through the drywall with her bare hands, tipped back her head, unmindful of the water falling on her.

Suddenly, the sprinkler heads burst, and jets of water sprayed out to compete with the blasts of fire. The stairwell filled with falling water. Not just rain, but a powerful waterfall. Water ran in a river down the sloping ramp. The fires sputtered, struggling to keep the gas jets lit, and finally the flames died.

Analise fell, and Arthur caught her, leaning her against the wall and murmuring in a comforting tone as the sprinklers and pipes ran dry and the rain stopped.

“I thought it was gone,” she said, her eyes shut and head bowed.

“No, you only put it away for a time,” Mentis said.

He might have used his powers on her, gone into her mind and tweaked whatever mental dam was keeping her from reaching her abilities. Anna thought that was possible—until she remembered that his powers were blocked. If she had stopped using her power because she was afraid it had killed someone, the only thing that could bring it back was saving someone. Saving all of them.

From a flight above, Teia and Lew stared down, amazed. Maybe a little terrified.

Analise held her hand up. Water dripped, pooled in her cupped palm. Brow furrowed, she studied it a moment. The surface of the tiny pool trembled, and the vibrations increased until the water contracted, collected together into a spherical drop, which rose an inch from her hand before splashing back against her skin, scattering.

Sighing, she closed her eyes. Rubbed water from her face, not that it did any good. They were all soaked and dripping. But at least they hadn’t cooked. When Analise looked up, Teia was sliding down, skating on the wet stairs while balancing against the railing, and pulled up short before crashing into her mother’s arms.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Teia muttered into her mother’s shoulder.

“Same reason you didn’t tell me, baby,” Analise said back. “I didn’t even tell Dad.” They hugged, and Lew slipped down to join them, and they might have stayed like that all day.

Arthur absently reached out to rest a hand on Anna’s shoulder. She didn’t know what to say.

“We’ll find her,” Arthur said. Which was exactly what she’d been thinking.

“I thought you said your powers were blocked.”

“And somehow, I knew just what you were thinking anyway.”

“Sorry to interrupt. But we have to keep moving,” Paulson said, nodding up the stairs.

They hauled themselves up the slope, a task made more difficult by the water running down the concrete. But they made good time, clinging to the railings, because they had no desire to see what the next booby trap involved.

Anna didn’t let herself think for a minute that she couldn’t do this. She didn’t have a choice, and that was that.

“I’m perversely encouraged,” Arthur said at one point. “This wouldn’t be so difficult if we weren’t close.”

“We’re going to get up there and be totally exhausted and no good for a fight,” Paulson muttered.

“Plenty of time to worry about that when we get there,” the telepath replied.

“Holy crap, what happened?” Teddy said, his bodiless words echoing ahead of him before he flashed to visibility and pitched up against the railing on the thirtieth floor. He stared down at the dripping walls and the sopping wet mess of them.

“Geez, kid, you have got to stop doing that,” Paulson said, holstering the gun he’d drawn from his belt.

“Sorry,” Teddy said. “But what happened?”

They all looked at Analise, who shook her head. “I’m a really bad plumber, it turns out.”

Teddy looked blank, but Teia giggled.

“Ghost, you’ve been to the thirtieth floor? What did you find?” Mentis ordered.

Wide-eyed, he nodded quickly. “There’s five of ’em. The two who tried to snatch Anna are guarding the doorway. Two more guys in skin suits are watching Ms. West. And a guy in a suit, he looks like he’s in charge. Ms. West is there, she’s tied to a chair.”

“You’ve seen her, she’s okay?” Anna gasped. He’d seen Mom, she was okay, she was close, and they would find her. These last few minutes of waiting before they could rescue her were going to be impossible.

Teddy nodded. “She looks really pissed off.” That sounded like Mom.

Arthur said, “What’s she bound with, cuffs or straps?”

“Straps. Knots, I think.”

“Right. I need you to go back and loosen them—don’t untie them entirely, we don’t want to show our hand. But enough so she can slip out when the time is right. Then get out of the way and wait for us.”

“Got it,” he said, entirely too eagerly. Must be nice, being able to turn invisible to avoid danger.

“Can you unlock the door for us?” Sam said.

“No, it’s got a code lock on it or something.”

“Then can I please blast it?” Sam called over his shoulder.

“Give Ghost a few minutes to get out of the way and get to Celia. Then yes, you can blast it,” Mentis said.

Once he blew up the door, a battle would start. After that, there’d be little enough Anna could do, compared to her friends who could do so much. But that didn’t matter, because they were all here for the same reason: find Mom, get her out safe.
That
was Anna’s task.

Teddy vanished through the door again.

TWENTY-THREE

T
HE
minions returned and huddled in conference with Majors—out of Celia’s hearing, of course. Alas. Not that she would have been able to do anything with any information she gleaned. She kept glancing at the mentalist, Mindwall, wishing she could interrogate him on the extent of his power. Wishing she could knock him unconscious by sheer force of will. But no, that was Arthur’s ability.

Arthur. She relied on him for so much. She’d taken him entirely for granted, and now she had plenty of time to review in painstaking detail all the mistakes she’d made in her adult life. Little mistakes, inconsequential. A missed birthday here. A failure to listen to her children sufficiently well. An obsession with details she might have been better off letting go. Celia had given herself a pass because those mistakes all paled when compared to the drama of her childhood. Except for the latest mistakes: She really should have told everyone about the leukemia. And when she told Arthur that he was right, assuming she got out of this in one piece, he wouldn’t even say
I told you so.