“Celia, go home. Get some rest. I’ll let your parents know you’re all right. Mostly.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, after he’d turned his back and walked away. She had to have faith that even if he hadn’t heard her, he’d felt the sentiment.
TWENTY
THIS project rang too many alarm bells in her mind. Far from reaching a conclusion, the clues had branched. She had too many questions, now.
The next morning, attaché and growing collection of notes in hand, she headed back to West Plaza. She was going to do the unthinkable: ask her parents for a crack at the Olympiad mainframe. Maybe their database could make sense of the list of lab equipment, cross reference it with their information about the Destructor. In the afternoon, she planned to knock on Janet Travers’s front door. Maybe an eighty-year-old retired lab tech had the inside scoop.
One nice thing about getting fired: she wore jeans and a blouse softened by too much washing. And sneakers. She was the height of comfortable, ratty chic.
She only had two blocks to go between her apartment building to the bus stop and walked that stretch nearly every day without thinking of it because it was a quiet neighborhood, narrow, older streets lined with family grocers and small restaurants.
No reason the sidewalk should open under her feet.
The grating simply dropped. Yelping, she fell with it, she thought into the storm sewer, to concrete and breaking bones. But she landed on something soft, a cushion that protected her—an industrial-size, wheeled laundry hamper, like a hotel would use, filled with foam cushions.
A lid slammed closed over her and the light from above disappeared. A motor started, then movement. Lying on her back, she pushed up on the lid of whatever box she’d been closed in. It rattled but didn’t open. She kept pounding on it anyway, and screaming, because what else could she do?
She hadn’t been so afraid in a long time. She hadn’t been the victim of such an effective kidnapping in a long time.
Movement stopped. She gasped, startled, and then held her breath.
The lid opened.
She sat up, flung herself over the edge of the hamper, and skidded onto the concrete floor, unable to keep her feet.
She’d been brought to a room, pitch-black. She couldn’t see the walls, and only knew it was a room by the way her gasps echoed off walls that were too close. The whole journey, from falling through the sidewalk to ending up here had taken less than a minute. Her superhuman guardians—still in place, after all her complaints—would hardly have time to recognize she’d disappeared, much less be able to find her.
A light, white and muted, came to life. A propane lantern sat on a card table. A man, dressed all in black, his face in shadow, also sat on the table.
“Celia West,” he said in a flat voice. “You really should vary your route. I thought the daughter of Captain Olympus and Spark would know better.”
She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing hysterically. She waited for the rant to follow— when the villain announced his ominous plan to hold her hostage, to manipulate the Olympiad, to threaten her.
He just watched her.
“You finally got me,” she said. “What now?”
“I wasn’t behind those other kidnapping attempts,” he said. “I’m competent. I succeed on the first try.”
This wasn’t the Strad Brothers, not by a long shot.
“What—what are you going to do with me?”
“Talk. That’s all. Do you know me?”
She stepped a little closer. If he’d lean in, let part of his face show in the aura of the lantern, she might see him. But she didn’t want to get close enough for him to touch her, grope her, strangle her—
He set something on the table beside him. He’d kept it hidden behind his back. As he produced it, he leaned forward, and she saw his face: older but fit, frowning but with the wrinkles of laugh lines around his eyes, as if he waited to see how she’d react to a joke.
Her voice almost failed her. “Damon Parks.”
The West Plaza security guard.
Beside him, on the table, his hand rested on a leather gauntlet with a silhouette stitched in gold onto the back of the hand: a hawk in flight, wings stretched back, ready to strike. The History Museum’s permanent exhibit on vigilante crime fighters had one of those gloves on display.
“Oh my God,” she murmured.
“I knew you were smart,” he said.
“I don’t understand.” Her heart raced, making her dizzy. She had to focus on every breath.
“I have some information for you.”
“What, me? But why—I mean, you’re the Hawk; if you have information, why don’t you do something about it?”
“Because I’m retired.”
“Then you should give it to my parents, the Olympiad—”
He shook his head. “They won’t admit it, but they’re not at the top of their game anymore. It’s time they pass the job to the younger generation, like I did.”
“But I’m not the younger generation. I’m not heir to anything, I don’t have any powers—”
“Neither do I.”
That came like a punch in her gut. A judgment. Proof positive that not having powers wasn’t an excuse for anything. “I can’t take on that mantle.”
“You’ve been looking for a connection between these robberies. Between the gang members who committed them.”
“Not
“And you think there’s a connection—maybe even a mastermind—Simon Sito, maybe?”
“I don’t know. If it is, he’s changed his MO.”
“But you’ve been digging.”
Celia didn’t have to wonder how much he knew about what; as Damon Parks, working at West Plaza’s front desk, he probably saw a hell of a lot more than anybody realized. He’d have seen the logs; he knew she had a key card to the West Corp archives. He was good at his job. Both of them.
“I’ve been digging into Sito’s case, not the current crime wave. If there were a connection between them, somebody should have found something by now.”
“Fair enough. So maybe it isn’t Sito.”
He reached behind him. On the table, in the dark, lay a manila folder. He offered it to her, and she accepted. Inside, she found dozens of newspaper clippings. She’d expected something more high-tech: stolen spreadsheets, classified files. Not data available from vending machines on every corner of the city.
In all of the articles he’d cut out, he’d highlighted names. She recognized a couple, and she was sure if she checked they would belong to gang members arrested during the recent robberies and kidnapping attempts.
“Not quite retired,” she said, eyeing him. “You’ve been busy.”
“This is just a hobby,” he said.
The headlines of all the articles were some variation of GOVERNOR SNYDER ISSUES PARDONS.
She looked through the clippings again, to be sure she hadn’t missed something. “That’s the connection? All the gang members were convicted felons who received executive pardons?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a coincidence. They all got out on the same day and hatched the plan together.”
“Everything you’ve seen, everything you know, do you honestly believe that?”
She didn’t, not for a minute. “What are you saying? That Governor Snyder is the mastermind?”
