Free Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn Page B

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