Dreams of the Golden Age (Golden Age 2)

As if determined to keep her twin from showing her up, Teia learned to freeze with a touch soon after. She described it as a “popping” sensation—one day, she just knew she could do it, like a lock had broken and released her power. From then on, her sodas were always cold.

After that, Anna began to suspect that supers were everywhere, she just had to know what to look for. That was how she caught Teddy disappearing when their English teacher asked for volunteers to read parts out of Romeo and Juliet. He always sat in the back, slouching in his seat and hiding behind the people around him as much as he could. He didn’t want to be noticed, obviously, but not because he was shy. It was because, sometimes, he really didn’t want to be noticed. At first he freaked that Anna wanted to talk to him at all—his eyes bugged out, looking back and forth for a place to escape. Clearly, he wanted to go invisible but couldn’t while she was looking right at him. But she explained: He wasn’t alone. He relaxed, as if the rods that had been holding him upright vanished. Later, Teddy figured out he could do more than turn invisible. The next step: turning insubstantial. He’d wanted to impress Teia and Anna with the new ability but didn’t think too far ahead when he passed through walls to follow them into the girls’ bathroom. They hustled him out quickly and gave him a lecture on being subtle.

Anna found Sam zapping flies in the courtyard during class. Like Teddy, he seemed relieved rather than angry that someone had discovered his secret. Happy that he wasn’t alone in the world with his power and wondering what came next.

That was their club. They’d found each other, and while they didn’t always get along, their desire for secrecy kept them together. Out of the whole world, they were the only ones who understood each other and what it meant to have powers.

* * *

After school, Anna went to the kitchen, where she knew she’d find her grandmother involved in some food-related project. Mom kept threatening to hire a cook—it wasn’t like the family couldn’t afford a cook, for goodness sake. But Grandma argued every time. She liked to cook, let her cook. Even Mom backed down from that.

“Grandma, can I talk to you?”

Suzanne looked over her shoulder. “Sure! You mind hanging out while I make cookies?”

Mind a chance to grab some cookie dough before it went into the oven? Oh hell no. Suzanne wouldn’t even complain when Anna sat on the counter, out of the way of the mixer and cookie sheets.

/> “Gingersnaps sound good to you?” her grandmother asked.

Of course they did. Anna barely fit on the edge of the counter anymore, without running into the cabinets overhead. But the seat gave her a sense of nostalgia. It was habit, sitting on the counter while waiting to test the cookie dough. And sometimes, when her parents weren’t around, Anna didn’t mind feeling like a kid.

Still slim in her jeans and sweater, her grandmother always seemed to be moving, bustling, promoting her charities, working in the kitchen. Suzanne’s roan hair, red fading to gray, was braided in a tail down her back. She certainly didn’t look like someone who could warm up a pot of soup by touching it or shoot fire bolts out of her hands. Or like someone who would run around after dark in a skin suit, fighting crime.

Anna had a hard time thinking of her grandmother as the superhuman crime fighter Spark, but she’d seen the pictures of a young, svelte woman in a black suit, brilliant red hair showering across her shoulders and down her back, launching jets of fire from her hands.

She’d put away the suit after Captain Olympus was killed. That period was a bit murky in the family lore. No one talked about it much. They talked about Warren, they talked about the Olympiad. They still got together with Uncle Robbie, who’d been the Bullet back in the day but had also eventually retired when arthritis began affecting his hips. But no one ever talked about how it had all ended, and Anna had been hesitant to ask. The dark cloud lingered in the distance, and she didn’t want to be the one to drag it close.

“I thought you said you wanted to talk,” Suzanne said with a smile.

“I was just thinking,” Anna said. Figuring out how to start, really. She took a deep breath and dived in. “What was it like, with the Olympiad?”

Suzanne raised a brow, cracked eggs into a bowl. “What do you mean, ‘what was it like’?”

What did she mean? “How’d you guys get started? How did you know you were doing the right thing? How did you not screw up and get yourselves hurt?”

Anna felt her cheeks burning; she wasn’t fooling anyone, was she? She kept her expression still—mild curiosity, that was all she’d reveal.

But Suzanne didn’t seem at all suspicious. She just shrugged and rattled on. “Oh, I don’t know. Going out, using our powers—it always just seemed like the right thing to do. Warren and I met in high school and started then. Robbie came along, then your dad about ten years after that. We were always stronger together than apart. We didn’t really think about getting hurt—you know about Warren, we didn’t much worry about him getting hurt. Nothing hurt him.”

Until the end. Suzanne didn’t say that.

“We started small—street crime, accidents, the usual thing you always read about in the news. The whole thing got really big when we didn’t have a choice. When the Destructor showed up, somebody had to do something. There we were.”

The Destructor had been the archnemesis of the Olympiad, had been involved in countless battles with her grandparents and father, and was the only person known to be immune to Dr. Mentis’s telepathy. He’d kidnapped her mother when she was a teenager, and she’d subsequently teamed up with him as a henchman during a particularly outrageous bout of teenage rebellion. Anna had never worked up the courage to ask Celia about it, what she’d been thinking at the time, how she’d gone from victim to villain, however briefly.

Maybe that was the problem. They didn’t have a Destructor to face off against. Not that most people would consider that a problem … But if they had a target to focus their energies on, maybe they’d stop bickering about whether or not they should publicize themselves in the Commerce Eye.

Anna asked, before she realized the words were out of her mouth, “Why’d you quit?” She hadn’t meant to get that personal. The biographies and reports always said the same thing, that Suzanne had been broken-hearted by the death of her beloved husband. Who wouldn’t retire after that? But Anna had never heard Suzanne answer the question.

She didn’t speak right away. She might have been concentrating on the spoon she was wielding, the bowl, the dough taking shape inside it. Or it might have been a bad question. Anna began to regret asking it.

“Warren and I were a team,” she said finally, sadly. “With him gone, I didn’t see the point in going on.” Using a teaspoon, she scooped a piece of the dough and handed it to Anna. “How is that?”

Anna could hardly taste the dough, but she ate it and smiled. “It’s great.”

Suzanne returned her focus to the cookies. “There’ve been enough books and articles written about the Olympiad, you could probably find out everything you wanted to know from them.”

Anna said, “It’s not the same as hearing it from you. It’s family history. Besides, you don’t give interviews. Why not?”