After the Golden Age (Golden Age 1)

“I don’t know,” Celia said, and she didn’t. At the moment, Mark was out in the city somewhere, dealing with the bombings, with the fires and chaos. Saving the city. “Are you okay? I mean, really okay. I know you want to be out there—”

“No,” Analise said. “I should. I should want to, but … Do you have a glass of water? Is there a glass of water somewhere?”

“The kitchen.”

Analise stood and ran from the command room. Celia followed more slowly. She still had a headache.

When she arrived in the kitchen, Analise was filling a glass from the faucet. When it was full, she set it on the counter by the sink and glared at it. Both hands braced on the edge of the counter, her back bent, her face puckered in concentration, she watched the glass like she expected it to get up and dance.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Analise said, with a strange calm. “I ought to be able to make that water jump out of there. I ought to be able to soak the whole kitchen with it. I can’t do it.”

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.