‘That is the worst name,’ Truc said from above. ‘We’re Makers, dude.’
‘For sure,’ Essence said. ‘But you got to admit, the girl is a Crash. Break any cities today?’
When she turned to Kelsie, her smile faded.
‘And Kelsie Laszlo. Becky with the predator tendencies. Shouldn’t you be blond?’
Kelsie held her gaze. ‘Yeah, I was. But then a guy called Quinton Wallace screwed up my life.’
The warehouse went silent, quick. Chizara felt the spike of Kelsie’s anger looping through them, mixed with their own nerves.
The white girl in dungarees, Jaycee, took a wide-eyed step backward. ‘You’re right, Essence, that is her.’
‘I never even seen one of them,’ Truc said from the edge of the catwalk. ‘And you brought her in here?’
The fear spiraled, Kelsie half-smiling in the middle of it. She was bouncing on her toes like she was ready to fight, not dance, and Chizara felt an echo of the street vibe they’d been absorbing all day. The mood was turning into something dangerous.
‘So you know about Wallace?’ she asked.
‘Everybody knows about Swarms,’ Essence said. ‘They aren’t exactly subtle.’
Kelsie held her gaze, still bouncing a little. ‘Then you must know that he wanted me to eat my friends. And that I didn’t.’
Essence nodded slowly. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘Your boss man shot him before he could turn you,’ Jaycee said. ‘What does that prove?’
‘That shooting Swarms is the right idea!’ Truc called down.
And now fear glimmered on Kelsie’s face.
Chizara raised a hand. She was about to shut the lights down, and a whole lot more. Like the permanent fusing of every circuit in their precious parade float.
But Essence spoke up first.
‘Don’t get rowdy, everyone,’ she said. ‘That’s what the predators want.’
Kelsie shook her head. ‘I don’t want that! We came here to learn. We heard that something big was happening in New Orleans.’
It was Truc who gave it away – his head turned just a little to look at the device.
Chizara reached her mind inside it again, trying to figure out its purpose. It was full of circuitry she’d never seen before, and didn’t follow the plan of any kind of machine she knew. Those giant capacitors – they weren’t designed to hold an electrical charge at all, but some completely different kind of energy.
All she could tell was that all that potential was pointed straight up, as if the device was some kind of challenge to heaven itself…
‘I have to kick that question to the boss lady,’ Essence said, pulling a phone from her coveralls. ‘Come with me, Chizara Okeke. Your baby Swarm is freaking out my crew.’
She lifted a finger, and the roller door jolted back to life. She beckoned Chizara and Kelsie to follow her toward the opening in the Faraday cage.
And as the city’s tempest of signal stormed back in, a wonderful thing happened. Chizara winced—
And everyone else winced too – everyone but Kelsie.
This was how it would feel to belong. To live among people like her. With the same power, the same way of seeing. The same every-minute-of-every-day pain.
They’d all had to pretend in front of their families. To dream up ways to make the constant flinches look normal. Chizara didn’t know most of these people’s names, and she didn’t trust them much. And yet they knew her better than anyone else in the world.
In a daze she followed Essence and Kelsie out onto the loading dock.
The signalscape of New Orleans descended like mosquitoes in a whining cloud, sinking its stingers in all over her skin. Chizara felt her mind juggling and compensating, holding up the city’s scrappy infrastructure. She felt the strength of the effort, the weight of the responsibility.
But for the first time ever, she wasn’t doing this alone.
‘Yeah,’ Essence was saying into the phone. ‘I figured you’d want to. Okay. I’ll tell them.’
The moment she was done talking, the pinprick of Essence’s phone died. Chizara had begged her friends a hundred times to shut down when they finished a conversation, and yet they always had to be reminded.
Essence lowered the phone.
‘Boss lady says welcome to New Orleans. She hopes you enjoy Mardi Gras.’
‘Is that all?’ Kelsie asked.
Essence shrugged. ‘She’s going to make contact with your pal Nataniel. Soon.’
She waved her hand, and Chizara felt the phone in Kelsie’s pocket squawk as its circuitry melted into slag.
‘Hey! What was that for?’
‘So you don’t tell your buddy what’s coming.’ Essence smiled. ‘Piper likes to make her own introductions.’
THIS WAS WORSE THAN PRISON.
There was a huge city out there, roiling with happy people, and Nate was stuck in this tranquil neighborhood. Trapped by his mug shot decorating all those FBI Most Wanted posters, and by Mrs. Lavoir’s attention shimmering from her kitchen window every few minutes.
Alone with the thirsty tendrils of his power.
He paced from room to room. Sending everyone off on separate missions had been a terrible idea.
Flicker had called from a borrowed phone to report that she had big news but couldn’t say more. Her burner was compromised – she’d called the local FBI office and Thibault’s burner as well. So both of them had ditched their phones.
Then Ethan had reported in. He was walking home the long way from WeirdCon, dodging FBI agents, or something equally preposterous.
Kelsie and Chizara weren’t answering at all. Either in trouble or just making out somewhere.
It was chaos out there without him.
Not surprising. After weeks cooped up together on the road, their powers starved of the Curve, Nate had tossed them into this boisterous cauldron, three nights before Fat Tuesday. Even here on this quiet street, gaggles of drunken tourists kept stumbling by, offering Nate a tantalizing glimpse of the party.
And now something bigger was coming his way.
Nate felt the parade before he heard it – the rattling drums, the saxophones soloing over a spare, persistent tuba riff. Between stabs of brass, ecstatic shouts and cries echoed down the dark streets.
He went down the dim, narrow hallway, lined with mocking Mardi Gras masks, and knelt close to the front windows. Still parched from his prison stay, Nate drank in the glorious coordination of the approaching crowd. Like the double Dutch champions he’d taken Gabby to see last summer, the whole procession was fused into one being.
When he heard them turn onto the Barrows’ street, a shiver went down Nate’s spine.
He peered out from the darkened front room. Yes, there was Mrs. Lavoir’s sparkling line of attention. But aimed at the parade for once, instead of at the suspicious house sitters next door.
The musicians came first, with at least a hundred marchers following close behind. According to what research he’d managed on the way here, this was a ‘second line’ parade, a traveling procession welcome to any who wanted to join.
Nate wanted to join – or take control. He wasn’t sure anymore.
He remembered long ago back in Cambria, riding one night with Flicker on his handlebars, gathering a mass of cyclists from across the city. These jazz musicians had managed the same trick, pulling in followers with music as their superpower.
But maybe it wasn’t just music.
He saw it now. The crowd was so sublimely unified, a clockwork machine. As if someone was guiding them, molding them.
But who, exactly?
An older man marched in front of the procession, his drum-major uniform sparkling yellow in the streetlights. He kept time with a large baton, and the wandering gyres of the dancing musicians’ attention grew bright when he let out short bursts on the whistle clamped between his teeth.
But he was too old to be a Zero.
Next to him was a white girl, Nate’s age, looking out of place. She w
ore black and gray, almost invisible in the darkness beside the brightly costumed marching band. She danced with small, lonely movements of her arms, a wallflower at the party.
Then something odd happened – the procession halted.
The band didn’t stop playing. The followers didn’t stop dancing. The seething energy of the crowd didn’t go slack. But without any signal given, they all came to a bouncing, drum-beating stop…
Right in front of the borrowed house.
They were waiting for Nate to come out and join them.
He knew it then without question, felt the tendrils of power reaching across the front lawn. The need building inside him – to join, to become one of the crowd, to revel with the others.
To follow.
For the first time in his life, he was being bellwethered.
He could see it now, the subtle coils wrapped around the girl in black and gray. Her style wasn’t at all like Nate’s. She was wreathed in barely visible shimmers. It wasn’t even attention, really, but something more stately and sublime.
Influence. Quiet authority. A queenly confidence that the revelers would follow her to the ends of the earth.
A certainty that Nate would come forth and join her parade.
Mrs. Lavoir’s focus was locked angrily on the noisy invaders. If he walked out now, she would realize they’d stopped by for one of the Barrows’ house sitters.
But every moment the band lingered, it only drew more attention.
In the end, the girl’s power solved his dilemma – he couldn’t keep away from her. The hunger from his weeks in prison was too great.
And she was too strong.
He grabbed one of the Mardi Gras masks hanging in the hallway. Stole into the kitchen and out, around the rear of the house. He jumped across backyard fences, putting distance between himself and Mrs. Lavoir.
But he couldn’t resist the girl’s call for long, and soon he slipped between two houses and out onto the middle of the street, half a block in front of the parade.
The Bellwether girl smiled, nodded a little.
The procession lurched into motion again, coming at him. As it grew closer, the lines of its force, boisterous and obedient, shot out like lightning bolts. And he wanted to be struck, wanted to be overtaken and drenched. This storm was finally filling the aching hole left by solitary confinement.
The music – thundering percussion, heart-kicking tuba, commanding sax – made its way into him as well, and on that dark street he found himself doing something he’d never done in those long nights at the Dish, surrounded by the fiercest energies that Crash and Mob could generate.
He danced.
The procession swept him up, carried him along. With every footstep, his hunger to stay with the girl, to join her in everything she did, grew.
Something unexpected and perfect happened then, both halves of his power uniting, completed. He felt the procession dancing behind him, hundreds of limbs strung to the twitches of his muscles. And also the safety, the anonymity, the glorious emptiness of being a conduit of Piper’s will.
This submission, even sweeter than control.
When the girl spoke, it was clear who was the better Bellwether.
‘I’m Piper,’ she said. ‘We’re going to change the world.’
‘NO IDEA WHERE NATE IS.’ FLICKER CHECKED THE HOUSE FOR EYES AGAIN – NOTHING. ‘When I talked to him, he was still here.’
‘Ditto,’ Ethan said, his voice muffled by a cushion. He was lying facedown on the couch.
Flicker sat in the big armchair, trying for some authority. The others were spread around the living room, hyped up from their day in the Mardi Gras crowds.
‘We never talked to him.’ Chizara’s voice was breathy. ‘The Zeroes we ran into melted our phones – they were Crashes. Plural!’
‘Yeah, yeah. Multiple Crashes,’ Ethan said. ‘We heard you the first time.’
‘A Crash was in charge,’ Chizara said softly.
Flicker checked next door. Mrs. Lavoir was either asleep or not home. Probably Nate had just stepped out for a little crowd magic. He’d sounded pretty stir-crazy on the phone.
‘Let’s not wait for him,’ Flicker said. Chizara was itchy enough to black out the whole neighborhood. ‘Sit up, Scam. Crash, you report first.’
‘We found a building like the Dish,’ Chizara said.
Flicker felt a moment of homesickness at the name. ‘Like the Dish how?’
‘Faraday shielded. So I figured somebody like me lived there. And when we tried to get in, the door was controlled by this weird device. It was halfway between a lock and a puzzle, like only a Crash could solve.’
Flicker, in Ethan’s vision, saw that Chizara’s face had a shine of excitement, like when she crashed something big.
Flicker tried to sound calm. ‘But you solved it, of course.’
‘It was tricky, but yeah.’ Chizara’s voice dropped, like she was telling a ghost story at a campfire. ‘And there were at least twenty of them inside.’
Ethan’s eyes went wide. ‘Twenty Zeroes?’
‘Twenty Crashes,’ Chizara said.
Flicker swallowed. That was plural.
Kelsie wasn’t chiming in. She sat in the corner of Chizara’s vision, arms crossed as if to protect herself.
Something out there had upset her. Flicker could feel it in the feedback loop, sadness mixed with a slow trickle of fear.
‘With twenty Crashes in town, how is this city even running?’ Ethan said. ‘Shouldn’t it be a smoking crater?’
Chizara glared at him. ‘Hey! I fix stuff too, you know. We fix stuff. They call themselves Makers, not Crashes.’
‘Maybe that’s why they’re all here,’ came a voice from the corner of the living room.
Flicker’s breath caught. She must have lost Anon as the others had come home, building the Curve of his anonymity.
And he wasn’t wearing the tracker anymore…
‘What do you mean, Thibault?’ she asked, making sure to say his name.
‘To make things work,’he said. ‘The city was almost destroyed more than ten years ago. And it’s still pretty messed up. Maybe all those Makers came here to help out.’
Ethan’s eyes were doing the slidey thing, drifting off to the masks on the hallway wall. But Flicker saw Thibault just long enough to see that he’d replaced the borrowed raid jacket with a black hoodie.
Ethan snorted. ‘Zeroes, helping out? Like they helped the Super Bowl?’
‘Ethan’s not wrong,’ Chizara said. ‘Those Crashes were building something, but it didn’t look like useful infrastructure for the good people of New Orleans. It was disguised as a parade float, and designed to channel a lot of energy. What kind of energy, I couldn’t tell.’
‘Now that sounds like Zeroes,’ Ethan said. ‘As in deeply scary.’
Chizara looked up. ‘They mentioned Piper, that person that Nate was talking about. She’s the boss here.’
Flicker pulled in her vision. She needed to focus. ‘After what we found in Phan’s office, I doubt she’s up to any good.’
‘Probably not,’ Thibault said, the optimism in his voice flattened.
Flicker turned to the others. ‘There was a map – the whole United States, full of pins to mark events. Most were superpowered pranks, all over the place. But some of the pins were for Zeroes getting killed. Or unlucky cops.’
‘Oh,’ Kelsie said softly. Her anxiety hummed low in the room, jarring with Chizara’s excitement.
‘Two police casualties in Cambria,’ Flicker said. ‘And a pin for Quinton Wallace.’
She went into Kelsie’s eyes, which were on Chizara. The spacey glee on her face had faltered for the first time since she’d gotten home. You could always sober Chizara up with a reference to Officer Bright, beaten into a coma at the Cambria police station.
Flicker went on. ‘But Cambria had nothing on all the pins in New Orleans. Nate was right. This place is ground zero for Zeroes mayhem. And casualties, cops and us b
oth.’
‘Eleven, to be exact,’ Thibault said.
‘So why are we the famous ones?’ Kelsie asked. ‘Everybody’s obsessed with the Cambria Five!’
Flicker tried to sound reasonable. ‘After Delgado’s funeral? All that footage of the police marching on the Dish? It’s no wonder. And Nate’s picture has been on TV nonstop since the jailbreak.’
‘Everyone knows about Quinton Wallace, too,’ Chizara said. ‘After the Desert Springs Mall, it must have been obvious exactly what he was.’
‘One of the Crashes called me a baby Swarm,’ Kelsie said softly. ‘They even used the same word for it. Like the Zeroes here knew Ren and Davey.’
‘Huh,’ Flicker said. So these Crashes had been afraid of Kelsie. That’s why she was spooked. Flicker went into her eyes, which were staring down at the floorboards.
Flicker had to lift her despair. The Zeroes couldn’t afford to spiral like this. Where the hell was Nate?
‘You already faced that, Kelsie, and you won,’ she said.
‘So far.’
Ethan chimed in. ‘I’m not worried about you, Kelsie. It’s all those other Swarms who could be out there. New Orleans is full of Zeroes, and don’t predators show up wherever there’s prey? Like lions hanging out at a watering hole!’
Flicker thought of all those red pins, and a shiver ran down her spine. Maybe this war wasn’t just between Zeroes and the FBI…
A sound tugged at Flicker’s awareness – a scrabbling at the side door.
‘Guys. Hush.’
The sound came, louder, the door opening, and a sudden shot of panic rang through the feedback loop.
She cast her vision out and found a pair of eyes coming in through the kitchen door. A border hovered around what she saw – the intruder’s vision edged with black.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘They’re wearing a mask.’
The others stood up, someone rattling a poker from the fireplace. The intruder crossed the kitchen to the hall door – swiftly, like they knew this place.
Then a figure rose up in front of them, silhouetted against the front-door glass – Thibault, his fist pulled back for a punch.
‘You guys are back? Great!’ came a familiar voice.