And it had worked.

Her parents had met at Elmwood Academy. They’d discovered each other, shared their abilities, learned how to use them. Taught each other. For good or ill, the Olympiad had been born at Elmwood. Maybe, for good or ill, it would happen again. Celia wanted to see, and she’d turned the school into her petri dish without anyone knowing.

Arthur would stop her, she kept thinking. If she ever went too far, Arthur would tell her. He hadn’t yet, so she kept watching, and waiting.

Finally, here it was, and she could stop waiting.

The Eye’s story even had a picture, a major coup for a newspaper covering new vigilantes, who usually kept to the shadows and loathed publicity. Not these guys. In the photo, three of them stood in the middle of a downtown street, hands on hips and chins lifted proudly. They were in shadows—the picture had been taken without a flash, which made them seem like ghosts—masked and shrouded in costumes so their identities weren’t apparent. But they were definitely posing, and they were obviously a team, all in black shirts and jeans and jaunty masks made with bandanas with cut-out eyeholes. The first formal superhero team in twenty years was what it looked like.

She was absolutely sure that when she studied those figures, she’d find Anna under one of the masks. But she didn’t. In fact, she had a pretty good idea who these kids were. She continued on to the story.

The fire at the south side tenement block would have been a tragic disaster, if not for the arrival of the three superhuman heroes—

Celia looked up from the page. “They went after a burning building their first time out? Very traditional.”

“Indeed. Keep reading.” Arthur seemed to be enjoying this. He wouldn’t have been if Anna had been one of the trio. But then, he probably would have known about it ahead of time. And he wouldn’t have told Celia. Was it too late to lock Anna in her room for the rest of her life?

The article was breezy and admiring. Our young crime fighters, it called the trio, arrived shortly after the firefighters. While the firefighters were busy attaching hoses to water supplies, raising ladders, and whatever else firefighters did at the scene of burning buildings, the heroes had gotten to work: One had caused a rainstorm that soaked the fire, another had frozen the building to keep the fire from spreading, and the third had had some kind of explosive power that broke down walls and allowed people to escape. The fire department mostly stood around watching. Of course, someone called the newspaper, and the reporter and photographer arrived to snap pictures of the team before a backdrop of smoking brick façade. No one had died, no one had been hurt. They’d been smart, staying out of the building, stopping the fire first and not trying to rescue people directly from the blaze.

But she wished they hadn’t done it at all. They weren’t ready, not yet.

“Just trying to help,” said one of the intrepid heroes, before the team disappeared into the night.

These stories never changed, not once in her whole life.

“Lady Snow, Stormbringer, and Blaster,” Celia read off the names the vigilantes had given themselves.

“Teia and Lewis Fletcher and Sam Stowe, aren’t they?”

Sam Stowe was sixteen, one of the many grandchildren of Gerald Stowe. The Stowe family had produced more superhumans than any of the others from the laboratory accident—his oldest grandson was Justin Raylen, aka Breezeway, and his second daughter, Margaret Lee, had a career as the vigilante Earth Mother before retiring to have kids. Margaret’s son Cody was ten now. She wondered if any of the Stowes had ever sat down and figured out just how many cousins donned masks and fought crime. Probably not, that was what the masks were for. But Raylen had gone public years ago; Margaret Lee and other Stowes with powers had to be wondering. At some point, someone else had to make the genetic connections that Celia was keeping secret in her files.

And then there were the other two in the photo. Out fighting fires at age sixteen, just like their dead father. They might have waited specifically for a fire to come along, so they could swoop in for a rescue in some kind of tribute to him. They must have thought they were following in his footsteps, not their mother’s. God.

Celia sat back and sighed. “I need to call Analise.”

“Probably,” Arthur said. “If she doesn’t call you first.”

She studied the picture further, looking for other figures hiding in the shadows. Theodore Donaldson, maybe. Anna, who was sneaking out at night to do God knew what. She closed her eyes, squeezed the bridge of her nose, futilely willing the headache to go away.

Arthur sat on the edge of her desk. “Celia, are you all right?”

“I just … it’s just shocking to see the picture. They’re so young.” Ridiculously young.

“I thought this was what you wanted.”

“I wanted them to meet each other, to practice with each other so they wouldn’t feel lost, so they wouldn’t grow up alone, like you and Robbie and Analise and my parents did until you all met each other.”

“You hoped they would work together.”

A superhero team, even better than the Olympiad had been. “Yes, eventually. Not before they’ve even graduated.”

“But the experiment is out of your control now. Alas.” He was laughing at her, quietly, at least. Nothing overt, just a wry smile and a flash in his eye.

She leaned back in the chair. Was she getting a migraine? Was this what a migraine felt like? When she finally opened her eyes again, Arthur wasn’t smiling. That worried tension in his mouth had returned.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ve been working too hard. I need a vacation.”

Tags: Carrie Vaughn Golden Age Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net