After the Golden Age

“Don’t shoot, you’ll hit the machine!”

They’d raised their weapons; Paulson had stopped them. At least something had played out in her favor.

She jumped onto the lab table. If she’d thought about it, she wouldn’t have done it. It was too far, too crazy. But she didn’t think. She jumped again—toward the radiation emitter.

She only had to knock some of the cables off, or break the glass focal points, assuming they were breakable, or throw it out of alignment. Mysterious devices always had alignments they could be thrown out of. Her heart was beating too hard, her blood rushing too fast for her to worry about what would happen to her after she crashed into the thing.

She landed awkwardly, scrabbling at narrow handholds, kicking to keep her balance. For all its bulk, the machine was delicate, spindly almost, balanced on a single-wheeled column. The column spun, the whole thing rolled, and cables came unplugged in her hands, emitting sparks and crackles. Lab workers scattered, and Celia managed to slide to the floor, stumbling but keeping her feet and clutching the machine for balance. It gave a few more sickly sputters for good measure. Static prickled along her arms. She let go, brushing her hands and wincing.

That would delay the plan. Probably even long enough for those with experience in battling evil masterminds to get here.

She assumed the Olympiad would show up. They always did, somehow.

Please, Arthur. Get here quick. God only knew if he’d pick up on her thought. Could he hear her across the city? Only if he was listening? Or would her thoughts pull at him like a fish hook? After they’d slept together, did her thoughts feel any different to him?

The two henchmen tackled her. She went limp and let them, offered no resistance, gave them no reason to start pounding her with the butts of their weapons. Or start shooting. They each took a shoulder and shoved her to the floor, facedown, then pried her arms back. It felt like they used duct tape to bind her wrists together. When they’d finished, they hoisted her to her feet.

“You do have a death wish,” the mayor observed. “You weren’t lying when you testified at Sito’s trial.”

Nobody trusted her. Not even the bad guys. She didn’t glare. She wasn’t even angry. She’d accomplished something: She’d learned what Paulson was planning, and she’d delayed him. Apart from that, let him think she was crazy. That was easy enough for most people to do.

She gave him a great, smug grin, like she didn’t care, like she thought he was an ass. And on one level she didn’t care, because this wasn’t about her. It had never been about her. When she was seventeen and thought everything should have been about her, that was when she grew angry. But now, she knew better. Commerce City ran on the blood of all its people.

His frown grew deeper, emphasizing the lines of his face, making his cheekbones hollower, and for a moment she saw in him his father, Simon Sito. She saw a bitter old man bent on chaos. Paulson’s rhetoric about the greater good aside, whatever he did would result in chaos. And she’d stopped him.

“Put her over there.” He pointed to a chair, out of the way by a bank of computers. The henchmen pulled her off her feet, dragged her over, and slammed her into it, jamming her bound arms behind the back. Her shoulders ached. Paulson regarded her with a sense of smug triumph. “Good thing I have an updated model.”

He shoved the now-broken model—a mere prototype?—out of the way.

“This is the wide area broadcast version.” He pointed up, to the end of the warehouse, where a similar device but newer looking—sleek, modern—was mounted on a platform, suspended from the roof. Instead of the focusing materials on the narrow end, however, it had a parabolic dish that would beam out radiation to as great an area as possible.

One of the lab people pulled a large knife switch on the wall. A panel in the roof slid open and, with a mechanical whine, the platform rose. Cables trailed from it, along the ceiling, secured to the wall, and leading finally to the computer banks.

He wasn’t going to use the machine on his underlings, or his political opponents, or the prisons. That wasn’t his plan.

“You’re going to use it on everyone. The whole city.”

“Think of it: every citizen working for the common good. Everybody feeling a deep emotional connection to every other citizen. There’d be no more crime, no more selfishness—”

The communist ideal obtained through the wonders of modern technology.

“What about free will?”

“What about it? What has free will done for you in your life, except brought you trouble and heartache? Commerce City doesn’t need free will, it needs direction.”

“Your direction,” she said.

“Of course. Who else has the vision to lead this city? Your grandfather might have had it, once. But your father surely doesn’t.”

The place, the situation he described, was no longer Commerce City. Celia could act like she didn’t care—that holdover from her teenage personality filled her so easily. Maybe she hadn’t changed so much after all. But in the end, she did care about at least one thing. There was a reason she’d never moved away.

“You just did it, you know,” she said.

“Did what?”

“Told me your plan.”

“So what? You’re tied up.”

Celia couldn’t pretend not to be appalled. She had run out of tricks, and she’d run out of attitude. “My parents will stop you. The Olympiad will stop you.”

“Oh, they will? Because they always stop the villain? They may try, and they might even believe they’re doing the right thing. But they’ll have to realize that I’m the one working for the greater good here. And they’ll have to get through you to get to me.”

“That’s never worked for anyone else.”

“I’m not anyone else, am I?”

She wriggled her hands, strained her arms, but the tape held tight, pinching her skin in the process. This was wrong, all wrong, like some kind of tabloid headline gone astray. The son of the Destructor and the daughter of Captain Olympus—but Paulson didn’t know. She had to assume that the mayor had never learned who his father was. He was as wrapped up in the history of this experiment as she was.

She shook her head. “You’re just like everyone else. I’ve heard this all before. I’ve seen it all before. No one who’s ever tried to destroy Commerce City like this has ever succeeded.”

“I’m not trying to destroy the city—”

“But you might succeed anyway. Your father would be so proud. He was always trying the direct approach.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your biological mother was a technician in this lab fifty years ago. She was present when the accident happened. Your father, Simon Sito, was also present. It begs the question: What mutation did their genes pass on to you?”

He laughed nervously. “I think you’ve just crossed the line into madness.”

“I looked up the adoption records.”

He stopped his pacing, his gloating over his accomplishment, and stared at her. She might have played the card too early. Distracted him at the wrong moment. But she had to buy time. She had to trust that someone would come get her. Her lack of fear, all the times she’d been in situations like this and been able to hide her fear—it hadn’t been out of indifference, or boredom.

She’d always believed her family would rescue her.

Nothing to do but keep on. “Haven’t you ever wondered about your real parents? Haven’t you ever wanted to find the records? You’re the mayor, you could have seen the files whenever you wanted.” When he didn’t reply, she kept on. “You’re like me. You inherited the mutation from both sides of the family. But what did it do to you? You have to ask yourself that now, don’t you? What has the mutation done to Mark?”

He went to the table, found the roll of duct tape, and cut off a piece. Returning to her, he slapped it over her mouth. Didn’t bother securing it all the way. It didn’t matter—she couldn’t open her mouth at all.

She couldn’t gasp through her nose; she tried catch her breath and to stay calm. Maybe she could scoot the