“Shit.” Flicker turned off the tap. “You should see the texts the police brass are sending each other. CCPD can’t investigate what happened, because every cop in Cambria was involved.”
“Of course.” Ethan was back from the supply closet. “They’ll call in the Feds!”
“They know it’s the same thing that killed Delgado, and that hit the Desert Springs Mall. And . . .” Flicker tried to keep her voice steady. “They’re talking about the police station meltdown last summer.”
“No way,” Chizara said. “Why?”
“Because that’s how my mom knows Nate!” Ethan cried. “She tracked him down after I called him from the police station.”
“God,” Chizara said. “Everything we’ve ever done has made this worse.”
“Pretty much.” Flicker shut her vision down, trying to process it all. “Ethan called Nate from the cop shop, and Nate called the rest of us minutes later. Even Kelsie’s in his phone records now.”
“We’re all connected.” Kelsie’s feet were thumping down the stairs.
“Which means we’re all leaving.” Flicker fished her phone out of her pocket and put it on the bar. “We can’t take these. They’re just tracking devices now.”
“I’ll nuke them,” Chizara said, her voice hollow. “Get rid of our texts and photos, at least for now.”
As Kelsie’s footsteps approached, Flicker turned away from Ethan’s voice and pulled off her dress, trying not to get blood in her hair.
A whiff of burned microchips filled her nostrils.
Flicker sighed as she took the shirt from Kelsie and put it on. All that time spent training her voice-recognition software, gone in a puff of Crash juice.
“You’re really coming, Zara?” asked Kelsie softly. “Leaving those two perfect little brothers behind?”
“Daughter takes unexplained road trip, or Homeland Security arrest, her in front of said brothers.” Chizara’s voice was flat. “I know which my mom would prefer.”
“Me too,” Kelsie said.
All dressed now, Flicker cleared her throat. “Crash, can you find us a working car?”
“On it.”
Flicker checked her bag. Yes, her folding cane was in there, along with an extra pair of dark glasses. Lots of credit cards that were useless now. Unless she handed them to someone headed in another direction, just to give the Feds some false leads.
“We’re going to rescue Nate soon, right?” Ethan said from the front window.
“We’ll get him out some way.” Flicker put all the certainty she had left into the words. “Without him we wouldn’t have survived today.”
“Same goes for the Craig,” Kelsie added softly.
“Oh, crap.” Ethan started to hyperventilate again, as if he’d managed to forget already.
Flicker hadn’t—she still smelled his blood, and felt it under her fingernails.
The empty feeling hit again, the one that kept cutting through her. Because this was all her fault. She was the one who’d decided to confront Swarm, when they all should have run the moment he showed up.
“Found a ride,” Chizara said. “Just this side of Hill Street. Is the way clear?”
Flicker sent her vision searching behind the club and found no police barriers. Just onlookers and gawkers, and the slow return of normal traffic.
“Clear enough,” she said.
Kelsie was right next to her, a featherlight touch.
“You’re doing good,” she said softly. “Just as glorious as Nate.”
Through all her exhaustion Flicker felt a shred of solace from the words. And yet, as she made her way to the alley door, she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that she’d forgotten something.
Something really important.
There was an absence in her, a gap where a vital spark had lived and was missing now. A nothingness that couldn’t be explained, not even by Nate’s arrest or the awful fact that Craig was dead.
Unbidden, her right hand went to her left wrist and found a bracelet there. She felt braille dots, punched into the leather.
T—H—I—B . . .
Nonsense letters. Where the hell had this bracelet come from? Flicker pulled it from her wrist and dropped it on the floor.
She tried to send her vision out into the alley but found no eyes.
“All clear,” she said.
The door yawned open, and the four remaining Zeroes left the Dish forever.
© Niki Bern
SCOTT WESTERFELD is the author of the worldwide bestselling Uglies series, and the Leviathan series, the first book of which was the winner of the 2010 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Fiction. His other novels include the New York Times bestseller Afterworlds, The Last Days, Peeps, So Yesterday, and the Midnighters trilogy. Visit him at ScottWesterfeld.com or follow him on Twitter at @ScottWesterfeld.
© Steven Dunbar
MARGO LANAGAN has been publishing stories for children, young adults, and adult readers for twenty-five years. Her work has won numerous awards, including four World Fantasy Awards. Two of her books have been Michael L. Printz Honor books, and she has been short-listed for the Hugo and Nebula awards and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the young adult division. Visit Margo at her blog, amongamidwhile.blogspot.com, or follow her on Twitter at @margolanagan.
© Vicki Skarratt
DEBORAH BIANCOTTI has written two short-story collections, Bad Power and A Book of Endings. She’s been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award and the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. You can find her online at deborahbiancotti.com or on Twitter at @deborah_b.
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ALSO BY SCOTT WESTERFELD
Zeroes
Afterworlds
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
Extras
Leviathan
Behemoth
Goliath
The Manual of Aeronautics:
An Illustrated Guide to the Leviathan Series
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Text copyright © 2016 by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti
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ISBN 978-1-4814-4339-5 (hc)
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Scott Westerfeld, Swarm
(Series: Zeroes # 2)
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