Swarm

  But the worst thing was his face. He was a fake.

  What was he supposed to look like? Flicker ransacked her memory. His eyes, his chin, his smile? All those carefully memorized features looked wrong to her too. They matched this impostor out on the dance floor, but not her own inner sense of rightness.

  And she’d forgotten his name. Not just the tricky real one—his code name too.

  Flicker’s fingers went to her wrist, searching the band of leather. But again her mind failed her, the dots refusing to resolve into letters.

  Braille was gone too.

  Something in this club was messing with her brain—with everyone’s brain.

  She had to get out.

  Flicker switched off her vision, turned from the seething dance floor, and ran the length of the bar. She jumped the boxes she’d stacked there this afternoon. Which meant her memory wasn’t broken, just her ability to recognize.

  She rolled under the flip-down door of the bar, shouldered the push bar of the emergency exit, and tumbled through, into the back alley full of garbage bags and broken glass. The smell of piss and old cigarettes hit her like a fist, but something clicked back into place inside her brain.

  “Anon,” she said with relief. “Thibault.”

  Even better, she saw his face. The pale half-moon of his ear peeking out from beneath dark hair, the line of his jaw when he smiled.

  Here outside the Dish, she was herself again.

  Nate was out in front working the door, maybe beyond the reach of whatever was happening inside. And clear of Crash’s Faraday cage.

  Flicker pulled out her phone, held down the home button for voice control.

  “Call Glorious Leader.”

  CHAPTER 8

  BELLWETHER

  “SOMETHING’S HAPPENING.” FLICKER’S VOICE WAS tight, panicked. “It’s bad.”

  Nate frowned, still scanning the line of waiting people. Another twenty exactly. He’d been about to let them in and bump the crowd.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone’s moving wrong. And I can’t think straight.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Crash and Mob are freaking out,” Flicker went on breathlessly. “It was hitting me too. I couldn’t even remember Anon!”

  “Isn’t that—”

  “No, not just the usual. I couldn’t recognize him.”

  Nate turned and faced the door to the club. It sounded like Flicker had overdosed on too many dancing eyeballs. A smaller version of this had happened the first night of the Dish.

  “Stay behind the bar,” he said. “I’m coming in.”

  “Don’t! I’m out back—had to leave.” He heard Flicker’s breathing slow as she got under control again. “Seriously, Nate, it’s not just me. Something’s going wrong in there. Like, our powers got tangled up or something. Or Mob’s got everyone in some kind of weird-ass feedback loop.”

  Nate shook his head, refusing to believe. Nothing had changed from last month or the month before. This was a controlled experiment.

  “Someone’s going to get killed!” Flicker cried.

  “Okay. Just stay where you are.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.” Nate slipped his phone back into his pocket, wondering what had gone wrong. The other times Flicker had overdosed herself with a crowd’s vision, she might’ve been dizzy, but she’d known what was happening.

  He turned. “Craig? Don’t let anyone in till I tell you.”

  “You got it, Mr. Saldana” came the firm reply. For a moment Nate considered bringing the Craig along for protection. But if someone’s power was really going haywire in there, he didn’t want those massive limbs flailing around.

  Nate opened the door.

  Inside the Dish, the crowd had been shattered into a thousand pieces. There was no unity, no form, no connection. Even the weblike structure of a leaderless rabble was missing.

  The music was a train wreck, two songs playing at once, and the dancing had descended into a horror of twitching limbs. Mob was huddled on her platform, terrified.

  Fear was the only force that bound the room together. Nate could feel it in his bones, panic and confusion, along with something deeper and more cutting—loss of self, of meaning.

  The source of the nightmare was easy to spot. In the center of the dance floor a couple whirled around each other. A guy with a half-shaved head and a girl in a frilly skirt, a white-hot beam of attention streaming between their eyes.

  Nate had never seen a bond so intense, so brilliant. It scythed out into the crowd as the couple spun, keeping everyone else severed and detached. As if the pair had sucked up every glimmer of connection in the room and focused it between themselves.

  They had powers.

  As the beam of their connection cut across him, Nate felt it a hundred times worse, like a blow. The certainty of where he stood—here in the Dish, among his friends—began to falter. Everything seemed unreal, as if the nightclub, the crowd, even his own body had been replaced by counterfeits. Everything he knew was ashes.

  He raised his hands to take control—but his confidence crumbled inside him. The dazzling line of attention between the couple was too bright, too strong for him to seize the crowd away.

  For that matter, did he possess any power at all ?

  Suddenly the notion seemed absurd, that he could bend people toward himself, take a crowd’s attention and focus it on any goal. In the presence of this radiant pair, it seemed impossible.

  He was a nobody. And this place he and his friends had made had turned into a hell of jerking, terrified bodies.

  “No,” Nate said. This place was his. He knew every inch of it.

  There was a fuse box across the dance floor, behind Chizara’s lighting booth. From there he could shut off the lights, the sound, everything, and bring this nightmare to a halt.

  This was his crowd, his club, his experiment. And if he couldn’t keep control of it, then he would send it crashing into darkness.

  That certainty propelled him across the dance floor. The crowd was blown apart, disconnected and detached, like the losing side in a bar brawl. For the first time in his life, Nate found himself bumped and shoved, threatened by flailing limbs and frenzied bodies.

  As he reached the fuse box and swung it open, the last few embers of his confidence sputtered. He felt like a little kid in front of a fire alarm, with no right to pull this handle.

  His focus was flowing out of him, his ego sucked away into the gyre of the couple whirling in the middle of the dance floor. This was their room, their crowd, their music making the air shudder around him.

  He was worthless, a fraud.

  They had taken everything from him.

  With his last shred of certainty he reached for the big red lever and pulled, plunging the Dish into darkness.

  CHAPTER 9

  CRASH

  EVERYTHING WENT DARK, NOT JUST in the Dish but in Chizara’s mind. All those glowing lines of current she’d built winked out. All those pulses of energy stilled. Only faint traceries of empty veins were left, vague maps she was no longer responsible for.

  She was Crash, but she hadn’t crashed this. Someone had cut the power to the whole building.

  And cut the power to the mob, too. That awful ravening roar had given way to shouts of fear in the sudden darkness. Chizara nearly cried out herself, with relief. She had her mind back, her confusion having switched off with the lights.

  She ran her fingers over the control board. She recognized every switch and slider by feel. Order was restored.

  But not out on the pitch-black dance floor. The crowd was in motion, pressing against the base of the lighting booth, setting it shaking beneath her feet. Then the rush went the other way, and there were noises of glass smashing, screams, and names called out in the dark.

  What had happened to the Dish, her refuge? This was supposed to be a safe place, where the Zeroes could do no harm.

  Chizara remembered the tremors s
he’d felt after crashing Sonia’s phone. Then this earthquake, a thousand times stronger. Had Kelsie fed some kind of panic loop into the crowd?

  Chizara fumbled for the light-box door, wrenched the catch open, and felt her way carefully down the stairs.

  Phone lights were flicking on, showing a fallen lighting truss, overturned stools and tables. Tears of shock and terror, even blood—a big cut down that guy’s arm, a girl pinned under the truss, screaming as people climbed over it.

  “Go around!” she shouted, pointing past the truss toward the main entrance. A few of them obeyed, and started to guide the others, and Chizara edged toward the DJ platform.

  She climbed up, pulled out her phone for light, and found Kelsie huddled, wide-eyed, against the crates of vinyl records.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not sure.” Kelsie stared out into the distressed dancers.

  “What happened?” Chizara bent and took hold of Kelsie’s shoulder. “Did you have some kind of seizure or something?”

  Kelsie stared at her. “You think I did this?”

  “The music went wrong first, then—”

  “It didn’t start with the music. We had them going great, but then . . .” Kelsie stared at her hands. “I couldn’t recognize anything. Not my decks, not the records, nothing!”

  “It wasn’t you,” came a voice from the darkness.

  Chizara swung the light. “Nate!”

  “There were two of them.” He swept the beam from his own phone over the crowd. “Dancing in the middle of the floor.”

  “Wait,” Kelsie said. “I felt them. The ones who were totally into each other?”

  “And using powers. Something that cut through everyone’s connections. I could see it.”

  “What?” Chizara said. “You mean Zeroes did this—on purpose?”

  “Won’t know until we find them. If I turn the fuse box back on, can you get the work lights up?” Nate asked. “No music, no spinning spots. Just stop this panic!”

  Chizara nodded. “Work lights only.”

  Nate headed off into the darkness, and Chizara took Kelsie’s hand. “So, other Zeroes have finally come to town. Sorry I blamed you.”

  “No, I totally lost control.”

  “Me too. Whatever they are, they’re powerful.”

  “They broke the crowd into little pieces.”

  “It’s okay. We’ll fix it.” Chizara felt along the dead pathways around the room, getting ready for the electricity to flow again, but also trying to spot the two new Zeroes.

  Now that the terror was over, she was pissed. How dare they come in here and—

  A chunk sounded in Chizara’s mind as the room tried to reignite around her. She held the power back from the DJ system, from all the fancy lighting tech, and let it through to the room lights.

  For a moment everyone’s faces were naked in fear and confusion, mouths agape in the stark, ordinary light. But then they saw where they were, the shape of the room, where the exit was. Some recognized friends, and everyone started pulling themselves together.

  Nate jumped onto the old theater’s stage and stood, arms wide, calming the crowd. “Sorry, everyone. We’ve obviously had a technical malfunction.”

  The hubbub quieted. Gratefully, Chizara submitted to his Glorious Leader charm, and she felt Kelsie’s hand relax in hers.

  “But it’s all under control now,” Nate went on. “Just make your way toward the exits, please—take it slow, so no one gets hurt.”

  Then he signaled across the room to Chizara and Kelsie, and pointed.

  “Yep, that’s them,” Kelsie said.

  A tall white guy with a half-shaved head was shoving people out of his way. His girlfriend was tiny, but just as pushy.

  “They look pissed about getting shut down,” Kelsie said.

  “Not as pissed as I am. All that energy we had going with the crowd, they stole it. Sucked it away like, I don’t know, dance-mob vampires.”

  Nate was still onstage, keeping everyone calm. But he was watching the pair with fascination. He probably wanted to quiz them on how their power worked and ask them to join up.

  Chizara just wanted to kick their asses.

  “I’m going after them.” She pulled away.

  “You sure?” Kelsie called out, but Chizara had already plunged into the crowd, slipping through the still-addled mob.

  The crush grew heavy around the entrance, and the two were way ahead of her.

  “Hey,” Chizara shouted. “Stop those two! They did this!”

  Terrified faces turned to gawk at her.

  The girl turned too, tugged on the guy’s hand.

  “We know what you did!” Chizara cried.

  The guy didn’t look guilty at all, or even nervous, like he’d just been busted for using a superpower. He only rolled his eyes, picked up his girlfriend, and pushed harder for the door. She flopped over his shoulder as if unconscious.

  “Please,” he cried out. “My girlfriend’s hurt—let us through!”

  Calmed and made orderly by Nate, the crowd opened up before them.

  “Oh, come on,” Chizara cried. “Really?”

  The girl, her open eyes two slits, blew a kiss back to Chizara.

  “Craig! Stop those—”

  The kiss hit, and the walls towered and tipped sideways. Since when were all these people a different species from her? And why was the sky covered with that sparkling metal mesh?

  Chizara almost puked at the awful strangeness of it.

  It took a shaky, dreadful moment for the weirdness to pass. No one around her looked confused. The girl had blown her reality-twisting kiss pinpoint-straight at Chizara.

  And the couple were almost out the door, the crowd closing behind them.

  Chizara set her jaw and kept shoving forward.

  Long seconds later, she reached fresh air. It screamed with signals, everyone’s phones springing awake, a cloud of angry wasps storming her.

  Through the pain, a familiar mass of muscle loomed. “Craig! Lift me up!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The Craig’s meaty hands clamped her hips and lifted. From two feet above everyone else, she scanned the crowd. Nothing.

  Then some white guy grabbed her arm. “That way, Crash!”

  She stared down at him.

  Right. Flicker’s boyfriend—forgettable guy.

  He pointed across the road. The tall guy and his girlfriend were darting into an alley between the used-car lot and an abandoned tire warehouse.

  “Okay, Craig, I got ’em!”

  Chizara’s feet hit the ground. Flicker’s boyfriend was already ahead of her. She overtook him at the corner, and she would overtake those other two as well.

  The crowd and their painful phones fell behind as she ran full tilt, anger powering her on.

  CHAPTER 10

  SCAM

  SOMEWHERE IN ALL THE CHAOS, Ethan had been shoved into a wall.

  Which was good, because it was the only thing that kept him standing. He leaned there, gasping, trying to remember how to breathe. Wishing his eyeballs would stop rolling around in his skull. He had a nauseous, dizzy sense that his limbs had been rearranged.

  “My freaking hand !” someone screamed beside him.

  The Dish had been transformed. No music, only shouts and sobs. And instead of Chizara’s light show, the place was lit with the stark white bulbs they used for cleaning up.

  There was a stranger beside him. No, it was Sonia, a magenta streak falling across the center of her face. She was holding her right wrist, and she was trembling.

  Shock. That was what it was. That was why Sonia was shaking. Why he couldn’t focus his eyes.

  Nate was on the stage, telling everyone to calm down, but it was only halfway working. People staggered across the dance floor like they couldn’t understand their own bodies. Elbows and knees everywhere. One guy was crawling, like he didn’t trust himself to walk. His nose was bleeding onto the floor.

  “You okay?” he managed,
but he wasn’t sure Sonia could understand him. His voice felt weird and jerky, like he was saying someone else’s words. Like that moment outside the Office-O.

  “I think I sprained my wrist.” Sonia’s face was pale. “What the hell just happened?”

  “I have no idea!” He looked at the DJ booth. Kelsie was up there, huddled in a corner.

  She needed help, but he had to ditch Sonia first. He let the voice fly, wishing Sonia would leave him alone.

  “You should get to a hospital.”

  “Hospital? For a sprain?”

  “If it swells up, you could get permanent nerve damage.”

  “Seriously?” She stared at her hand, probing it gingerly.

  The voice got all concerned. “It could ruin your typing forever.”

  “This sucks. First my phone breaks, and now this. I should sue you guys!”

  Ethan swallowed. Maybe the whole permanent-nerve-damage line was overkill. It’d be bad enough if Sonia posted about a crowd freak-out at the Dish. But if she took them all to court . . .

  The voice picked up his uncertainty and went dumb. But Nate’s spiel was working, and people were moving toward the door in an orderly way. Sonia drifted along with them, glaring at her hand.

  Ethan ducked into the crowd and headed for the light booth. He had to make sure Kelsie was okay.

  The weirdness hadn’t completely gone. Every step Ethan took felt like it was in the wrong direction. As if someone had imposed a completely different floor plan on the building.

  Black spots filled his eyes, swimming in formation every time he moved his head. But he could see Kelsie on the floor of the DJ booth, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  Had she caused this whole crowd disaster with some kind of feedback loop?

  He climbed up to the booth. “You okay, Kels?”

  “Ethan,” she said slowly, like recognizing him took effort. “Did you see them?”

  “See who?”

  “There were people in here, with powers. They took our crowd away, sucked it dry.”

  Just the words made Ethan feel like he was going to puke again—new powers with evil intent. But at least it hadn’t been Kelsie.