‘Hmm,’ Chizara said. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’
Last night she had checked every corner, every join in the mesh. She’d gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. It was signal-tight all over.
But what if the mesh was broken?
‘Do you have anything to dig at the walls with?’ she asked. ‘Maybe we can cut one of these lines of metal.’
Both boys stared at her, reached into their pockets, then shrugged.
Useless.
Chizara scanned the room. Water bottles, their shoes and clothes.
Everything was too soft, except…
‘Ethan. Give me your belt.’
‘Um. Why?’
‘The buckle.’ She held out a hand. ‘I need something hard.’
He rolled his eyes, but pulled the belt out of its loops.
‘If my pants fall down—’
‘Then you will hold them up.’ Chizara squeezed two fingers through the buckle, like it was a tiny set of brass knuckles.
She rapped the wall with them.
Solid.
But beside the door was a spot she’d noticed the night before, where the mesh protruded a little. Whoever had spread it out hadn’t pushed it deep into the plaster, just painted it over.
Chizara smiled. Bob would not approve.
She started whacking the spot with the buckle, chipping away paint until the metal itself was exposed. What was this stuff? Reaching her power into it, she didn’t recognize the alloy. Probably something that the Makers had whipped up themselves.
She felt a pang of envy – she still had so much to learn.
Whatever the metal was, it was strong. Ten minutes later her knuckles ached and the buckle looked bent. But the mesh showed no signs of fraying.
Thibault stepped up beside her. ‘Let me try.’
He started pounding away.
It was weird, how clear Thibault seemed here in the cage. All their missions, all their interactions, the sign on his door at the Dish – ANON EXISTS HERE – it was all so sharp and detailed in her memory. This must have been what Nate had been seeking when he took Thibault camping: a place where the city noise wouldn’t blur the guy into the background…
He was actually kind of handsome, in a brooding-too-hard way. Chizara could understand what Flicker saw in him, like she’d never seen before.
He kept on with the belt buckle. Why didn’t anyone come to tell them to stop banging? Was Piper’s army all out enacting the final plan?
Maybe it was already too late.
‘Got it!’ Thibault finally cried.
She pushed him aside and looked close. Two of the little hexagons had been broken, their shared side hacked cleanly in half.
Chizara closed her eyes and pushed all her power at the break.
Nothing.
‘Damn it.’
‘Too small?’ Thibault asked.
‘Hang on.’ She threw herself at it again, and saw why. ‘Right. This mesh is only a part of the shielding. There’s another mesh behind it, and another behind that.’
A triple-decker sandwich between thick layers of plaster and paint. Together the hexagons set up a pattern in the wall itself, a resonance that went beyond any single stretch of wire.
‘This is pointless,’ she said. ‘We’d have to hack out a chunk of wall the size of a fist!’
She tore the belt from Thibault’s hands and tossed it at Ethan.
He let it fall to the floor. He was staring up at the ceiling.
‘Hey, do that again,’ he said.
‘Do what?’ she snapped.
‘Get mad.’
Chizara stared at him. She was plenty mad now. Enough to punch someone. Especially an annoying white boy telling her what to do.
‘You did it again!’ he said, still looking up. ‘The light, it flickered a little when you got mad.’
Chizara let out a sigh. ‘No kidding, Ethan. The light’s on this side of the power shielding. It’s the one thing I can use my power on.’
The lightbulb was there, in the corner of her awareness. The faintest whine, like a mosquito on the other side of a large room.
‘I can crash it if you want,’ she went on. ‘Shall we all sit here in the dark?’
‘No thanks.’ Ethan knelt to pick up his belt, then passed it through the loops around his waist, looking thoughtful. ‘So the electricity comes from outside the cage, right? Through a wire?’
Chizara gritted her teeth. ‘Yes, Ethan. That. Is. How. Lights. Work.’
She was about to explain further that water was wet and gravity made things go down, and ask whether there was anything else he needed explained, except that suddenly her anger was fading.
Was Ethan actually making sense?
‘Remember how we had that landline in the Dish?’ he went on. ‘Because the Faraday cage blocked our phones, but it couldn’t block a telephone wire.’
Have you checked everything, Chizara? Bob’s voice said in her head.
Maybe she hadn’t.
‘Are you asking me,’ Chizara said slowly, ‘if I can send my power…down a wire?’
Ethan started to answer, but she waved him silent.
Of course. Zero powers were like signals, which was why Essence and her crew had figured out how to broadcast them on a satellite dish. So why not transmit them the old-fashioned way?
On a freaking piece of wire.
‘Were you using the voice just then?’ Thibault asked. ‘Tricking it into saying something useful?’
‘No.’ He frowned, put a gentle finger to the lump on his forehead. ‘My head feels funny. But that was me talking.’
‘Huh.’ Thibault exchanged a look with Chizara. ‘You think you know someone…’
Chizara stared up at the light. She reached her power up to take hold of the almost-inaudible buzz of its little filament. It found the wire there, a slender, simple line of copper – perfect simplicity. The sort of thing she hadn’t ever noticed before she’d become strong enough to sense nerves and muscle twitches.
She pushed upward, her awareness sliding through the copper tendril like a snake up a drainpipe, coursing alongside the sizzle of electricity flowing to the lightbulb. She felt that sizzle in her spine. She felt the deadening hexagons surrounding the wire, but there was still that hair’s-breadth path through.
The hexagons fought her, pressing her power inward, squeezing it down into the minuscule wire.
And there she was on the other side, in the blare of the city, in the roar of the world. Her power flashed from circuit to circuit, finding its way to the lock on their cell door. To the keypad – pfft, no problem. To the iris scanner, which was only a little trickier.
‘Get your shoes on, Ethan,’ she said. ‘We might have to run.’
THE CROWDS WERE GLORIOUS.
People were packed onto every sidewalk, every balcony, every rooftop. They leaned out of the windows of bars and restaurants. Stood on parked cars and hung from lampposts. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, all beaming with drunkenness and glee.
And this was just a side street – the Krewe de New World Order float hadn’t reached the main parade route yet. It was pushing slowly through the Mardi Gras throng, forcing its way toward ever-larger crowds.
Parade marshals had stopped them a few times, looking annoyed and asking for permits. But sweeping aside these functionaries was the easiest of Nate’s tasks. Sitting up here on the front of the float, he had the authority of multitudes flowing through him.
His main job was sculpting the attention of the crowd. Guiding it into the satellite dish. It acted as a receiver as well as a projector, sucking in all that raw power and storing it in the guts of Nexus – ready to be used.
The float was a gaudy, unlikely engine of apocalypse.
Beau sat on his high throne, wearing a mask that hid his face. Piper had told him to wait till she was ready before revealing himself.
Troy sat in the center of the triumvirate, behind the satellite dish full of beads. He sparkled in his mirrored suit
as he flung beads into the crowds, who fought wildly for the false gems even after the float had passed.
His power wasn’t fleeting, like Davey’s had been. He’d learned to create lasting illusions of value into people’s minds. It was Coins like him who would mint the currencies of the new world.
Verity sat on Troy’s right, in judge’s robes. Her anger was obvious, but the handcuffs that kept her in the chair were hidden by her costume.
On Troy’s left was Essence, in a stockbroker’s power suit and red tie. She had the biggest job – crashing the machinery of power itself. The military and surveillance hardware of the world’s governments, the banking and trading systems, the databases of wealth and debt and ownership. She was going to wipe the slate clean.
Piper wanted to replace all of it with her own rules. Her own systems, with Zeroes at the center of everything.
Whenever a flicker of doubt went through Nate, he looked back at her in the control seat. In this vast crowd, Piper was incandescent, filling him with certainty that her plan was the best way forward.
At the very least, her upending the world meant that Nataniel Saldana would never go to prison again. No Zero ever would.
The float came to a jolting halt.
Nate stood up for a look. A crowd of costumed people was in the road, all of them holding up their phones. They were ignoring the gemstones raining from Troy’s hands. Instead they were shooting video, their phones scanning every face on the float.
And they were blocking the way, keeping the Krewe de New World Order from the main parade route three streets over.
What the hell?
Then Nate saw a bolt of bright magenta hair sticking out of a penguin costume, and he realized who they were.
‘Sonia Sonic,’ he said. ‘And her fucking weird-hunters.’
SHE COULD SEE ANYTHING. EVERYTHING.
She had a thousand eyes. More.
Flicker was everywhere at once, shooting down the alleys and sidewalks, perching up on terraces. Staring at the bottoms of empty glasses and lingering on bare skin.
Dizzily, omnipresently, wildly searching for the words KREWE DE—
‘Got her,’ she said. ‘Turn right up here.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Oliver said. He’d taken over driving when Kelsie had started to feel the crowds.
Flicker brought her vision closer, swung around to look at the car from all directions.
They were hemmed in, half a mile from Bourbon Street. And a policeman a block away had just noticed the vehicle intruding into the pedestrian-only zone.
‘Time to bail,’ she said.
‘Here?’ Oliver asked. ‘And just leave your car?’
‘Who said it was ours?’ Flicker said with a laugh. This was the most serious situation she had ever been in, but she kept giggling. She could see so much.
Kelsie, in the backseat, was quiet, the sheer multitudes overwhelming her. But at least they were a happy crowd – so far.
‘I wanted to catch Piper before now,’ Oliver said. ‘Wild crowds like this aren’t good for clarity. I’ll have to get right up next to her.’
‘We’ll get you there,’ Kelsie said, but her voice sounded shaky.
As they emerged into the throng, Flicker sent her vision searching again – found the float, a purple, green, and gold island in a sea of humanity. It was trapped there, held hostage by a hundred weird-hunters.
‘Good job, Sonia,’ Flicker murmured.
But was that…Nate?
He stood on the front of the float, trying to charm the weird-hunters to one side. He was helping Piper.
No. It had to be a trick he was playing on her, a ruse to gain her trust.
But there was Verity as well, looking miserable beside a boy in a glittering suit. If she was there, then how was Nate hiding his intentions?
Flicker almost stumbled.
‘What is it?’ Kelsie asked. ‘Are we too late?’
‘No. But I think Nate’s gone over to the dark side.’
‘Piper can be very persuasive,’ Oliver said.
Flicker swore, pushing them both forward faster. In an unwelcome flash of clarity by the aquarium, she’d known that one day it would come down to a struggle between them, her versus her old friend. Her big brother, like Ethan used to say.
What broke her heart was that it had happened so soon. And with him in the service of someone else.
She jumped into Piper’s head – her eyes were focused on a control panel. A throttle, switches, a big button in the middle. Some kind of gauge with a needle edging its way up to maximum.
Flicker had no intention of seeing what happened when it got there.
She scanned the streets ahead. ‘We’re only a block away. The alley to our left goes through!’
She shot back into Piper’s vision. Her eyes were on the gauge. On that big red button. Shit.
‘Run!’ she cried.
Piper was turning around, looking up – someone was perched on a high throne, lording over the rest of the float, wearing a garish mask.
When Piper waved at him, he pulled it off.
It was Beau. But only for a moment.
As the eyes of the crowd swung to him in their thousands, he transformed. His complexion cleared, glowed. His hair thickened and grew so glossy that her fingers tingled, wanting to run through it. His jawline firmed, his cheekbones were higher. His glory drew more regard, showering him with more attention, redoubling his glamour.
Flicker sagged to the ground, overwhelmed, for a moment unable to retreat inside her own head. Unable to escape the numberless eyes gazing upon him.
‘What’s wrong?’ Kelsie shouted.
Flicker tried to stand again, failed. ‘It’s Beau. That pretty boy. He’s pulling all the crowd’s energy into Piper’s machine!’
‘What do we—’
‘Go stop her. She’s about to push the button!’
‘LEAVE YOU?’ KELSIE CRIED. ‘BUT WE’RE ALMOST—’
Then it hit her, too.
A moment ago the celebration had been a fractured mix of crowds – Sonia’s weird-hunters, Piper’s crew on the float, gaggles of drunken frat boys hanging from terraces, countless other friend mobs in clumps along the sidewalks…
But Beau’s power had changed all that. When his radiance was unleashed, all the groups connected and focused. On him.
They all wanted him. Straight, queer, bi, none of the above – it didn’t matter. Kelsie felt it in her bones, desire sweeping across the crowd. A brushfire of lust lit her up from head to toe.
For a moment, the wanting made her think of Chizara. Of bodies and hearts mingling, hot and certain. But this was sharper, grasping, almost the opposite of love.
It was greed…
Exactly what she’d felt in the Desert Springs Mall. Hunger. Need. Being overwhelmed by something bigger than herself – something starving.
She fought it, gritting her teeth, pressing her palms to her eyes.
Someone took her arm, and clarity flowed into her, displacing some of the desperation.
Kelsie remembered who she was.
‘Thanks, Oliver,’ she said.
‘I’ve got you,’ he said. ‘But we need to get closer.’
As he steered her through the crowd, Kelsie was bumped and jostled. She stumbled and was pulled upright. Every affront nudged her closer to anger, but she was Kelsie Laszlo. Not Swarm.
She had Zara. She had friends.
‘Will Flicker be okay back there?’ she asked.
‘Seems like she can take of herself. And we have to get to Piper.’
‘But it’s getting worse as we get closer!’
He squeezed her arm, and another rush of his power came. Kelsie felt that sense of relief again – seeing herself, like reaching air after a long time underwater.
But the same clarity also showed Kelsie the future, that every day would be like this. Making the choice not to lose herself, over and over and over again. Every minute for the rest of her life.
> She would always have Swarm inside her. Waiting.
Unless she surrendered. It would be so easy to take the path of greed and violence. The crowd wanted to possess, to destroy, to have.
She wanted that too.
Sometimes clarity was a bitch.
‘Maybe the safest thing would be to knock me out,’ she said. ‘I could swarm this whole crowd!’
‘They need you, Kelsie,’ Oliver said. ‘If we shake Piper’s confidence in her plan, they could turn into a mob.’
‘But I—’
‘We’re almost there.’
Kelsie took a breath. This close to the float, there were gems strewn on the street, strings of emeralds and rubies and gold. Shiny enough to distract people from Beau, to make them fight.
Their greed flowed into her, their anger. Maybe they deserved to be swarmed, to cut each other into pieces…
The float loomed, the achingly beautiful boy shining overhead.
‘I’m going up to talk to Piper,’ Oliver said. ‘Keep them from losing it!’
‘Wait—’
He let go of her arm, placed one foot against the side of the float. Hauled himself up by the rails, and then he was gone, along with his power.
Recognition was gone. Certainty was gone.
A moment later, Kelsie was gone.
‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ CAME PIPER’S CRY.
Nate spun around – a dark-skinned kid with a peach-fuzz beard was climbing onto the float. He somehow ignored Beau’s radiance, heading straight for Piper. Nate moved to intercept.
Piper waved him off.
‘An old friend.’ She turned to the boy and laughed. ‘A little late to join me, isn’t it, Oliver?’
‘I’m not here to join you,’ the guy said. ‘I’m here to show you what this really means.’
‘Better late than never, I suppose,’ Piper said. ‘I’ve missed this.’
She held out her hand. Oliver took it.
Nate felt the change right away. Something shifted in Piper’s hold over the crowd around the float, a moment of uncomfortable self-awareness.
What were they all doing here? It was like being at a masquerade and the masks had all come off too soon – the lights too bright, the guests too sober.