‘Okay,’ said Edie, but she didn’t look convinced. ‘It’s true, she was drinking hard back then. She saw things a particular way. But after she sobered up, she wanted to move on, you know?’
Kelsie nodded, but wondered exactly what that meant.
‘She’s part of something now,’ Edie said. ‘Call themselves the Clarity Circle. It’s a…spiritual group.’
‘A cult?’ Kelsie asked. Cults were the worst kind of group, and they loved to prey on former alcoholics, Fig always said.
Edie waved that suggestion away. ‘Not as far as I know. They preach truth and recognition, stuff like that. Zoe loved their meetings. Made her feel whole, she said. Like she’d found something she’d lost.’
Kelsie nodded slowly. She knew that feeling. ‘Where can we find them?’
‘They used to meet up in a community hall somewhere here in town, every Monday afternoon,’ Edie downed her drink. ‘Don’t know if they still do. Not my scene.’
The rest of Easy Vice was back on stage, tuning their instruments.
‘Can I ask something?’ Kelsie said. ‘You guys are so good together. How could she give this up?’
Edie’s face softened. ‘Because of you, child. Everything she did after your dad left, it was because of you. She was punishing herself.’
Kelsie wanted to ask Edie more about when she was a kid. What Zoe and her father had seen in each other. How long they’d been together. But her throat was too tight.
‘If you go see Zoe, take care,’ Edie said. ‘Your mother loved you. But it’ll be a big shock for her.’
She turned for the stage, and Kelsie watched her go, tears welling in her eyes. A feedback loop began to build, carrying her sadness across the crowd.
Chizara took her hand. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’
‘IT’S OKAY, KELS,’ CHIZARA SAID. ‘WE CAN FIND HER NOW.’
‘I know.’ Kelsie’s voice was steady, but tears still trickled down her cheeks. ‘It’s just…a lot. She gave up everything because of me.’
‘Moms do that,’ Chizara said.
The party swirled down every street, but she could see Kelsie’s tears muffling the mood nearby, like a rain cloud tethered to them.
The feeling sank into Chizara’s bones as they walked. She didn’t want to think about moms. Or dads. Or little brothers. Or coming home to the smell of egusi soup.
It was tough being back in a crowded city. Everyone had their phone out, snapping and uploading pictures. Chizara didn’t have much juice left to fend off the stings. She’d crashed the Las Vegas Strip more than a week ago.
At least New Orleans was pretty basic, electronically. More than ten years after Katrina, the infrastructure still had an improvised feel. Anything new and shiny stuck out a mile.
And she had great range here, with these crowds filling the nighttime streets. Their bee swarms of phones showed her the avenues and squares in bright outline, thinning out into the residential districts. The place was a glittering quilt, thickly sewn with biting sequins.
A flurry in the crowd ahead made her jump. Drums were pounding.
‘What is that?’ Kelsie said.
There was a lot of shouting. Plumes of crimson feathers stuck up from the throng, the top of a headdress. People were craning to see, grinning.
The drums came closer, and the shrill rattle of tambourines. The crowd tightened around them until Chizara couldn’t take a step in any direction.
A second, turquoise headdress reared up. She tried to read the crowd’s mood, but it was a confusion of crush-panic and excitement.
At least it had washed away Kelsie’s sadness.
Chizara could hardly tell what she was feeling. Were her emotions her own, or were someone else’s being forced on her?
Were there Bellwethers up ahead? Mobs? Swarms? Glitches?
The crush was pushing her and Kelsie backward, up against an iron fence. The two sets of plumes came together, half crimson and half turquoise. Two armies of percussionists beat their rhythms out against each other, the noise bouncing off building fronts.
Kelsie hoisted herself up the fence to look out over the crowd.
‘They’re facing off!’
‘Who? Is it some kind of crowd battle?’
‘I can’t – there’s so many—’
‘Any powers?’
‘Not sure,’ Kelsie laughed, motioning with her free hand, as if pushing Chizara’s fear out of the way. ‘But it’s awesome.’
Chizara tried to let go of her anxiety, but she hated being trapped here, her body unable to move, her brain pin-stuck with phones and cameras. Everyone was taking pictures of the confrontation.
But much worse were the jiggling, pulsing sparks of heartbeats all around her. A thousand fragile lives like fireflies dithering over a dark field.
She reached for thoughts of the Nevada desert – flat, empty, signal-free – to keep herself calm.
Shouted chants went back and forth. The crowd whooped and hollered around the combatants. The drums and tambourines joined with the phone signals to grip Chizara’s head.
‘I think it’s just Mardi Gras stuff!’ Kelsie called down from her perch. ‘Don’t you love those drums?’
Helplessly Chizara listened for something to love about the drums. Could she trust Kelsie’s joy washing through her, looping through the crowd around them?
‘Zara, you should see these guys’ costumes – so many feathers! And the beads!’
Kelsie’s face was the brightest Chizara had seen it since back at the Dish, cueing her next track, guiding the crowd with music. Of course this crowded carnival was her idea of heaven. And the tumult had washed away her uncertainty, her anguish and anger about her mother.
But did Kelsie have to be up so high, where the whole crowd could see her? They were still fugitives.
A big cheer erupted in front of them.
‘It was a battle!’ Kelsie cried, laughing again. ‘The red guy’s letting the blue one through! That’s what it was all about – territory!’
The crowd began to loosen, and she jumped down.
‘So no Zero powers?’ Chizara asked. ‘Just a normal day at Mardi Gras?’
‘No such thing.’ Kelsie was still surveying the throng. ‘I love this town. It’s all about bringing crowds together. Traditions that pull people together, give them a reason to dance and sing.’
Chizara shrugged. ‘I guess.’
‘The parades, the music.’ Kelsie smiled. ‘Of course Zeroes would all come here.’
‘I’d rather be elsewhere.’ Chizara took Kelsie’s hand and pulled her through the crowd’s jigging phones and cameras, all those heartbeats and brain sparks. ‘We’re looking for your mom, remember? Or the FBI, or more Zeroes. Anything that’s not another parade – or whatever that was.’
She dragged Kelsie into a quieter cross street, where the balconies were hung with planters. The familiar patterns of domestic tech eased Chizara’s pain, the row houses forming a barrier against the eddying background of New Orleans’s carnival crowds.
Kelsie was her bouncing self again. ‘I think we’re going to learn a lot here.’
Chizara groaned. ‘I wish education wasn’t so painful.’
Kelsie gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘You need to wind down. Come on.’
She led Chizara farther from the crowd, in among darkened warehouses. They were mostly abandoned, the arteries of dead tech slumped and dangling inside them. Their walls were striped with faded muddy watermarks from bygone floods. Windows were broken or boarded up, and rusted padlocks hung on gates and doors. Half the streetlights here were broken.
‘Look at all this,’ Kelsie said, doing a spin in the middle of the road. ‘Empty. Cheap. But so close to Bourbon Street. Perfect for setting up another Petri Dish, right?’
‘I’m not sure that’s a good—’ Chizara scanned the area ahead, frowning.
Something was wrong. A chunk missing from the horizon.
Yes, there it was – a blank spot
, a hole in the crazy quilt of signals. At the end of the block was an old warehouse with no electronic pulses coming from it. Not so strange in this half-derelict neighborhood, except that the building was also blocking the city behind it. And sitting beside one of the loading-dock doors was a piece of bright circuitry that didn’t belong.
‘Hmmm,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Looks like you aren’t the first Zero with that idea. Turn off your phone.’
Kelsie followed Chizara’s gaze, staring with widened green eyes. ‘Why?’
‘Because that warehouse is a Faraday cage.’
‘You mean like at the Dish? You think some Crash lives here?’
Chizara shrugged. ‘I can’t sense inside. Let’s get closer, in case you can feel a crowd in there.’
Kelsie mercifully powered down her phone as they walked up the street, keeping to the shadows. A cold wind came off the river, and the darkness was suddenly freighted with dread.
‘You know, it could be a government lab,’ Kelsie muttered. ‘For experimenting on Zeroes.’
‘Doesn’t feel like it.’ The shiny tangle of electronics at the loading dock was an invitation, created by a kindred spirit.
‘There are people inside,’ Kelsie said softly. ‘Fifteen? Twenty?’
The grimy brick building loomed, its windows starred by thrown rocks. And there, hidden inside an old junction box, the pretty, intricate thing called to Chizara.
‘They’re busy, all working hard,’ Kelsie whispered as they hunkered beneath the lip of the loading dock. ‘Focused and loving what they’re doing. If this was the Dish, I’d say they were getting ready for a rave.’
‘Twenty Zeroes?’ Chizara wondered what could be done with that much power. More than just mischief and mayhem.
Something larger. World-changing, maybe.
But they didn’t all have to be Zeroes, did they? Even at the Dish they’d had Craig helping out.
Chizara scanned the surrounding warehouses for any spark of a phone, or the ghostly smudges of organic electricity: beating hearts, brains full of firing synapses. Nothing. ‘Anybody watching us?’
‘Not that I can sense,’ Kelsie said. ‘But maybe we should get Flicker here.’
‘I’m not waiting around.’ Chizara pulled herself up onto the loading dock. Beside a thick roller door painted charcoal gray sat the junction box. The other doors were all welded shut.
There was no other way into the signal void, that refuge from the city’s constant needling attacks. Except through the junction box, sizzling with power, alluring in its intricacy.
Chizara gave a soft, astonished laugh.
‘What’s funny?’ Kelsie hissed.
‘This thing.’ She pointed at the box. ‘It’s a puzzle.’
Kelsie stared at it. ‘It looks broken. Like it’ll electrocute you if you’re not careful.’
‘It’s hooked up to the roller door. It feels like a lock, or more than a lock. A test.’
‘Or maybe a trap?’
Chizara felt around inside the circuitry, deeper and deeper. ‘No, it’s a challenge. A special treat for Crashes. This might take a minute.’
Kelsie laced her fingers tight among Chizara’s. ‘Are you sure? What if this is the feds? Or just straight-up bad guys?’
But Chizara barely heard her – she’d already dived into Lockworld.
She felt right at home, and at the same time everything was brand-new. It was like negotiating the cramped, labyrinthine innards of an Egyptian pyramid, carrying a spirit lamp and fighting off rats and demigods along the way. She had to hold some parts aside, break other pieces and repair them behind her, crash and fix simultaneously, split her efforts along two routes, then a third…
She was vaguely aware of sweat trickling down the small of her back, of Kelsie’s worried whispers, of every muscle in her body rigid with concentration, with anticipation, with the effort of ten-dimensional thinking.
Maybe not thinking at all, so much as being this lock.
She had passed the point of no return, the puzzle teaching her more, asking more of her, with every gleam and surrender of its circuits.
At the heart of the thing, she saw the traps they’d laid. She built a great antlered flowchart in her mind, showing everything that could go wrong. Every way the lock could try to trick her, fool her, sting her.
Finally she turned her head to stare at the big steel door, and sprang the final release.
The roller door jolted to life, rumbling upward. Kelsie made to leap away, but Chizara’s grip held her firm.
‘I did that.’ She was cold all over, exhausted. ‘Do they know we’re here?’
‘They must. They feel surprised.’ Kelsie moved her head like she was twitching an insect off herself. ‘Let’s just get out of here and tell the others what—’
But Chizara was walking toward the door. ‘Whoever did this wants to meet another Crash. No one else could figure that lock out.’
‘That’s what I’m scared of, Zara!’ Kelsie squeaked.
Chizara raised her hand to Kelsie’s mouth and stared into her eyes.
‘What do you feel? What do their emotions tell you?’
Kelsie hesitated. ‘They’re curious. And really impressed.’
‘They should be.’ Chizara stepped into the darkness, pulling Kelsie with her.
The door rolled closed behind them. The Faraday cage resealed, and a fantastic silence fell. Chizara had that floaty feeling she used to get whenever she entered the Dish, the weight of the city’s blather lifting from her shoulders.
It was dark, and cool. Her footsteps echoed – the whole warehouse was one open space.
‘People all around us,’ Kelsie breathed.
Chizara nodded, her mind probing the darkness.
Heartbeats. A few high up, as if they could levitate. And, everywhere, equipment like she’d never seen. A theme park of electronic tools and components, laid out neatly in places, or piled up, glittering like a dragon’s treasure.
And in the middle of the vast space stood something tall and metal and very weird. Something that was asleep for the moment, but Chizara felt strange, huge capacitors waiting, hungry.
Bringing that thing to life would take a lot of power.
‘Okay, we’re here,’ Kelsie announced to the darkness. ‘Where the hell are you?’
For a moment there was no answer.
Then a wall of bright white seared Chizara’s eyes, banks of spotlights hitting her from all directions.
‘YOU BROKE MY LOCK,’ A BOY’S VOICE SAID.
A snicker ran through the crowd behind the dazzle.
Chizara squinted from behind her raised hand, trying to see something in the glare. She made out silhouettes, people on walkways along the walls, hanging from ladders around the
huge device in the middle of the warehouse.
This was another test – a much easier one.
Chizara waved a hand, and the bank of spotlights faded a little.
There were at least twenty of them.
A New Orleans mix – more dark skin than white, a few Asian kids – but all teenagers. No adults like the Craig helping out here.
What powers did they all have? Was there a Bellwether in charge? A council of Bellwethers?
What about a Sight-caster? No one was wearing dark glasses. But maybe Flicker’s blindness was just a weird coincidence.
The Cambria Five didn’t know much about the world.
‘Thanks for that lock,’ she said. ‘It was fun.’
The girl standing closest to them eyed her coolly. She was light-skinned, her hair short and natural, like Chizara’s. She wore work coveralls, tools heavy in the pockets.
‘You worked it pretty fast,’ she said.
‘Real fast!’ A white girl in paint-stained dungarees was springing down a ladder and across the concrete. ‘No one’s made it through the Madbolt that quick since Truc built it. Where you been all our lives?’
She stopped short of
Chizara, hands on her hips, looking her up and down with grudging admiration.
‘We know where she’s been, Jaycee,’ came down from a catwalk above. A pale Asian guy with a long ponytail called down. ‘Knocking over police stations back when you were pranking your high school graduation. My poor little Madbolt didn’t stand a chance.’
So that was Truc, who’d spoken first. Chizara tried to read his expression. Was all this praise sarcastic or admiring?
Whatever it was, at least she didn’t have to introduce herself. Everyone knew about the Cambria Five – the least-secret gang of Zeroes in the land.
‘Graduation was last year,’ Jaycee said. ‘More recently, I did kinda let everyone into the Super Bowl for free.’
‘Not on your own,’said a young male voice from the shadows. ‘All you did was crash the ticket readers.’
‘Quit your squabbling,’ said the black girl in coveralls. ‘This girl took down a supermax. That took teamwork. Loyalty. Cojones. Maybe you two could learn from her.’
A little ‘ooooh’ went though the crowd.
She was their leader. But tools weighted her coverall pockets.
Was a Crash in charge of this crew?
They were certainly builders here. With the lights on, Chizara could see the strange device in the center of the warehouse. It was covered with metallic bunting in Mardi Gras colors – purple, green, and yellow – and the whole thing was built onto a truck, like a parade float.
Somehow that only made it more ominous.
The girl looked like she was waiting for a comeback.
‘You know my name,’ Chizara said. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Essence.’ The girl bowed a little.
‘Well, Essence, the Madbolt was interesting.’ Chizara gestured at the machine in the middle of the warehouse. ‘But nothing compared to that thing. What the hell are you making?’
For a moment, all eyes went to the device, and their faces filled with pride, satisfaction. Ownership.
A realization pulsed at the corners of Chizara’s awareness.
But Kelsie said it first:‘Oh my God,Zara. They’re allCrashes.’
Chizara’s mouth dropped open, and laughter spread through the room.