“Yes, sir,” Anna replied.
Sam complied, and Ms. Baker slid their car to the curb behind the sedan. The boys all piled out and ran up the block. Anna hung back to walk with Teia and her mother. The cops just waved them all on through. Dr. Mentis must have talked them into making this easy. Anna started to get excited in spite of herself. This—the crowds, the orders delivered through a scratching bullhorn, the rabid sense of anticipation—must have been what it was like in the old days.
“This is the most fucked-up field trip I’ve ever chaperoned,” Ms. Baker said, shaking her head.
“Mom!” Teia exclaimed.
Her mother rolled her eyes. “Oh, hon, calm down.”
Anna sidled close to Teia and said, “Your mom seems to be taking this very calmly.”
“Yeah, that’s because it turns out my mom was Typhoon. Should have known, right?”
“What? Holy shit!”
“Tell me about it.”
Anna took a surreptitious glance at Analise Baker. Aka Typhoon? She tried to picture it—plenty of photos of the superhuman existed: an athletic black woman with hair in cornrows tucked back by a sleek blue-green mask that matched her liquidlike skin suit. She’d been one of the premier supers in her day, but she’d vanished from public view when a warrant was issued for her arrest on suspicion of murder, after one of her tidal waves drowned a cop. The debate about whether that drowning was accidental or intentional still raged. The Ms. Baker Anna was walking next to now was … old. As old as her own mother, and kind of soft, with short halolike hair tied back with a red headband. And she didn’t have any powers, not that anyone knew about. Did she? Typhoon could telekinetically control water and summon rain—storms, in fact, much like Lew did. And Teia’s manipulation of ice was just another form of controlling water, wasn’t it? Teia was right, they should have guessed.
“Why didn’t you ever go public?” Anna asked, blushing at the rudeness of it.
“Because that was a long time ago and it all happened to another person.”
“Well … thank you. For coming out now, to help get Mom back.”
Analise shook her head and seemed sad, full of regret. “I won’t be able to help. I’m here to look out for my kids.”
Anna didn’t press further. She glanced up in time to see a green-garbed figure sailing overhead, as if leaping from one ledge to Horizon Tower’s familiar thirtieth-floor patio. And how had he found out about this? She expected to feel an embarrassed flush at the thought of talking to Eliot again. But she didn’t have time for that right now.
Arthur and Captain Paulson were waiting at the front of the building. A dozen police cars and a SWAT van fanned out in the street, and the place hummed with the tension of a coming battle. Radios crackled with static and orders, and uniformed men and women arrayed themselves like soldiers before a giant.
“You should have stayed home,” Arthur said.
Anna said, “You’re going to need help. They have their own superhumans. People nobody knows about, who’ve never gone public before now.”
“And I’m betting they’re not on Celia’s list,” Analise said, crossing her arms.
Anna furrowed her brow. “List, what list?”
“Never mind,” Paulson said. “There’s a team of supers holed up in there, and I want them out. You guys have any ideas before my people bust in there?”
For the first time, Anna had a chance to study the building. It looked different in daylight, the glass and bronze of it reflecting light and the overcast sky. On the ground floor, solid steel walls were bolted down in front of every available access point, instead of the glass doors, windows, and shop fronts that should have been there. The place was locked down.
“You’ve noticed the building’s modifications,” Arthur observed. “A squad of hired security are waiting inside.”
“You can sense them?” Anna asked.
“If whatever’s blocking our powers is in there, I imagine we’ll be able to tell exactly how far the range of it is when we start ascending. I can take out the security contingent, but that won’t do us any good if we can’t find a way in.”
“And I’d like to avoid a firefight,” Paulson said. He suddenly seemed old, his hair finally more salt than pepper, his frown sagging. His intense glare focused on the building like it was his enemy.
This was their chance. This was why they had to be there. Anna said, “Teddy … I mean Ghost, can you go in and check things out? Maybe figure out how to open those doors?”
“I’ll still trip anything like an infrared detector if they’re set up for that. But sure, I’ll give it a try.”
“Radio’s on?”
He fiddled with the bud hooked over his ear and smiled. “Yup.”
“Good luck.”
He smiled, took off running, and vanished on his third stride.
Paulson whistled low. “You never get used to something like that, do you?”
Anna didn’t know if the radio would still work while it was invisible. She didn’t want to try it until she knew he was in a safe place, so she held her hands over her ears and listened.
A click sounded in her earbud—the channel switching, and Bethy came on. “Anna? I’m trying to dig up information on the building, like some kind of floor plan, but I’m not having any luck. It’s like nothing was ever filed on it.”
“If you can find anything on how to … I don’t know, shut down the power maybe? The front of the building has these steel doors we have to open.”
Bethy blew out a breath that hissed over the speaker. “I’ll try. This computer is crazy powerful—did you know I can hack into classified city records from here?”
“I’m not surprised.”
Another click, and Teddy spoke in a whisper. “Rose, there’s like thirty guys here. They all have guns, like they’re expecting a war or something.”
“Then please stay quiet and out of sight!”
“I’m fine. But the controls for the doors—I think they’re on an upper floor, with the rest of the bad guys. I think the whole building might be set up with defenses.”
Anna glanced at her father. “Did you get that?”
“I did. Captain Paulson, perhaps we can use helicopters to reach the upper stories?”
“My spotters say there’s some kind of weaponry on the roof and patios. It’ll take time to get past all that, and I don’t want to spook these guys too bad.”
Arthur said, “Oh, it’s too late for that. What we have to do now is show them they can’t beat us.”
Nearby, Teia was cracking her fingers. “Blaster, you think we can take this?”
For the first time in months, Sam seemed uncertain, his lips pursed and his gaze darting across the dozens of square feet of steel they had to get through. “I don’t know. Maybe if we focus everything on one spot. Can steel even freeze?”
“Anything can freeze if you get it cold enough.”
Anna whispered into her microphone, “Ghost, I think we’re going to try breaking in. You’d better get out of the way.”
“Okay. I found some stairs, I’m going to scout ahead and let you know what I find.”
Lady Snow and Blaster approached the blast doors.
Teia held her hands apart as if she were lifting a giant beach ball, gathering her power to her like it was something light and airy. Frost began to dust her sleeves, her mask, the tips of her escaping hair. Her breath fogged in a space around her that had become a deep, cold winter. The air shimmered with ice crystals. Bringing her hands together, she crouched in front of the door and slammed her hands to the concrete.
A noise cracked across the street, the sound of falling icicles amplified. A reflective sheen spread out from her, covered the pavement, crawled up the blast door and surrounding wall. The sheet of ice hardened, frosted, and a wall of cold pressed out from the building as even the air froze. Teia seemed immune to the drop in temperature. Anna wondered how cold the doors actually were now; the frost formed streaks across the surface, looping patterns, feathered tendrils, beautiful crystalline shapes.