A twinge in her neck made her rub the muscle of her shoulder, and she sighed. She wanted to go home and take a nap. Not that she had time for a nap, but she might not have a choice.
“You okay?” Mark asked.
“Tired. That’s all.”
“Not like you haven’t been busy or anything, arranging the fate of the city.”
“You make it sound sinister.”
“Well, if you put it like that, maybe.”
It wasn’t a very good joke. “I’ll talk to you later, Mark.”
“Take care, Celia.” He waved her off and returned to the bowels of City Hall.
FOUR
ANNA had planned for the night when she would have to sneak out of West Plaza without anyone finding out.
Teddy and the others convinced her that they needed to practice more if they were really going to do this. They’d practiced some already—they put together a “study group” with the five of them, made excuses to their parents, hid themselves in Teddy’s backyard or other unobserved corners around school where they could test their powers without drawing attention or doing damage. But those sessions had always been in daylight, and they’d always, by necessity, been small. Unambitious. The others were getting restless. So now they were going big: gathering at City Park in the middle of the night, in costume, to finally let loose. Anna was sure they were all secretly hoping for the appearance of a swarm of muggers they could take down.
What all this meant was Anna finally had to try out her plan to get out of the building.
West Plaza had more security and surveillance than any other building in Commerce City, and that included the jail and the criminal wing of Elroy Asylum. Anna figured most of it was left over from the old days when her grandparents were the city’s greatest superheroes, and the plaza was the headquarters of the Olympiad.
But the Olympiad had disbanded years ago, before Anna was born. As far as she knew, her parents had dismantled most of the equipment from then—but they’d kept the building’s security up-to-date. Why, Anna couldn’t say. She’d know it if they were doing some kind of vigilante gig and needed all that tech. They weren’t, because they were always exactly where they said they were going to be, and that usually meant at work during the day and home at night. More likely, her mother was just that paranoid. That meant she watched the elevators, the entrances, the lobby, the corridors, and could track everyone coming and going not just from the penthouse but from the entire building. Which made sneaking out something of a challenge.
The building had dozens of standard, publicly marked exits, including emergency stairs—also under surveillance. Not that she could walk down West Plaza’s hundred flights and still be good for anything by the time she reached the bottom. For weeks she’d studied building plans, blueprints, and superhero fan websites like Rooftop Watch that speculated about how the Olympiad used West Plaza to hide its headquarters. She’d worked up harebrained schemes to smuggle herself out in boxes, or to bribe the security staff that worked the front desk. She hadn’t implemented any of them because they were pretty much all crazy. Best thing would be to use the study group excuse again and tell her parents she was going to the library, but she couldn’t very well say she was going to go study with friends at midnight.
She refused to tell them what she was really doing. She didn’t want them to know she had powers, and her mother was already too close to the truth with her guess—it had to have been a guess—about Teddy. Her mother, father, grandmother, everybody would try to pin some kind of legacy on her, and Anna didn’t want that.
Besides, how disappointed would they be when they found out how little she could actually do with her so-called power?
Eventually, she’d discovered one of the Olympiad’s old secret elevator chutes. It didn’t lead to the penthouse, which might have been why her mother missed it. Instead, it ran along one of the staircases in the middle of the building and let out in the basement. It might have been a contingency, a way to traverse the building if the penthouse and headquarters had been compromised. It wasn’t sealed up like the command room and other Olympiad elevators, and it didn’t seem to have any cameras watching it. No alarm triggers.
At first, she’d been terrified to try it. The mechanism controlling the car was probably fried after going unused for so long. But no—it wasn’t electrical. Another contingency, if power to the building was ever cut off. It ran on a kind of spring-loaded clockwork, with an automatic mechanical safety break. It couldn’t fail. She experimented with it before climbing into the narrow, two-person car herself. Riveted steel, undecorated, with no-slip rubber matting on the floor. The rubber had dried out over time and was hard, cracked. She pressed the lever, pointed it down, and the car slid smoothly on its rails to the basement and a hidden door. One that wasn’t covered by security cameras.
She still brought her cell phone, just in case she had to call for a rescue. But she didn’t. She got out of the building just after midnight. Her phone didn’t ring, and no one came after her. Mom and Dad were in their bedroom, probably asleep. Their presences glowed in her awareness, tugging at that sixth sense that was her power. If Mom had been in her office, Anna might not have risked sneaking out. But no one knew she’d left; she was safe. The others were already at the park, so she had to rush. She took the last bus to travel the few blocks to City Park; Sam had a car and could take everyone back home.
The bus stopped at the corner, and the driver looked at her funny when she got off. Girl in the park at midnight—yeah, what did he think she was going to do? Tugging her knit cap more firmly over her ears and wrapping her coat around her, she made her way along a jogging trail to the center of the park.
City Park was supposed to be dangerous at night, people had been telling her that her whole life. That was half the reason they wanted to practice here in the first place, not just because it was wide open and unpopulated, but because they had a chance of actually seeing crime. Maybe they could stop it. Or try to stop it, rather.
Teddy and Lew were already at it. Lew had a paintball gun, and Teddy, in full costume, or what currently passed as his full costume—sweats, T-shirt, a bandana with eyeholes cut into it over the top half of his face—was letting Lew hit him, paint spattering in flower patterns all over him. Then going invisible. The hits looked like they hurt. Lew wore a blue cloth mask tied around his eyes, making him look more like a pirate than a superhuman vigilante.
Wearing a matching blue mask, Teia was sitting, along with Sam, on a bench under a maple tree, watching, looking bored. Anna joined them, and they scooted over to make room for her. Teia was a shadow under the tree, dark skin and dark clothes. Sam had his arms crossed and he smirked. A tanned white guy, he wore a bandana mask like Teddy and a red leather jacket as his costume. A pretty slick look, she had to admit. He was only sixteen, but he was the strongest of the bunch, the only one with any kind of training, even if that meant tae kwon do classes that he stopped taking when he was thirteen. He had muscled shoulders and an athletic, physical presence. He fidgeted a lot. Sometimes he’d snap his fingers absently and throw sparks off his skin.
They were badass, which seemed to be the point for them, mostly. To her, this all still felt like playing house. None of this felt real. That was why Teddy went out the other night, to finally try to do this for real. They’d talked about it long enough. And she understood how they all felt, she really did. But they weren’t ready.
“It’s sort of entertaining,” she observed finally.
“If you like watching grass grow,” Teia said. She called out, “Hey Teddy, the whole point is if you’re invisible, you won’t get hit.”
Anna said, “Use the code names, someone might hear us. There’s no point in wearing masks if we don’t use the code names.”
Teia—Lady Snow, rather—rolled her eyes. “Fine. Hey, Ghost—how about you try not getting hit?”
Teddy paused, huffing for breath. “But I need to learn to stay invisible. To fight through the pain.” He pumped a fist.