This new Zero was shaking Piper’s certainty.
Nate stepped forward, reaching to pull the two apart. But when his hand grasped the boy’s arm…something awful happened.
Nate saw it – the truth of Piper’s plan.
The economy foundering as money became worthless paper. The finely tuned machinery of exchange and production breaking down. Cities crumbling, their food supplies choked off in midwinter. Millions dying in the February cold.
It was agony to see it all so clearly, and to realize that he was playing a vital part.
Worse, Nate saw how he’d fooled himself into going along, into thinking all those people were expendable. Because from the earliest days of his power, since he’d first realized how completely he could charm and influence and beguile, other people had always been expendable to him.
His friends at school. His family. Even the Zeroes. Nate had played them all, and now he was being played himself.
He pulled away and stared at Piper. She stood there, still grasping Oliver’s arm, looking awed.
‘You saw it too,’ Nate said. ‘You know what this plan of yours will do!’
‘With gorgeous clarity.’ She gathered herself, smiled, and shoved Oliver backward, hard. He tumbled from the float and into the crowd. ‘Hit him, Troy.’
Troy laughed and threw two handfuls of beads where the boy had fallen. As the crowd fell on him, Nate felt something ripple through them, a familiar hunger that set his teeth on edge. But the noise in his head was too great to recognize it.
‘Get Glitch up here,’ Piper called, ‘in case he comes back.’
Nate turned to her. ‘But you can’t still…All those people are going to die!’
She focused all her radiant attention on him. ‘Don’t go soft on me, Nate. Today we fix this stupid planet!’
For a moment he felt it again. The comforting belief that her new world, built for people like him, had to be better than the old one. That all those ancient arrangements of power and money and law were meaningless in this age of Zeroes.
But then he remembered Davey, torn to pieces…
No one was expendable.
‘I have to stop you,’ Nate said.
He raised his hands high, trying to find some purchase among the confused and tangled skeins of attention flowing from the crowd. He could convince her. Charm her. Bellwether her.
Piper sighed, shook her head sadly.
And from the first seconds of the battle, Nate knew that he would lose.
‘AT LEAST YOU TRIED, BELLWETHER,’ FLICKER WHISPERED.
Nate went down, his vision fading to blackness in her head.
Flicker made another attempt to stand, using the brick wall against her back for leverage. But her legs were weak, her mind still overwhelmed from seeing Beau’s beauty through so many eyes.
The crowd around her rumbled with confusion, their emotions tossed and twisted by the Zeroes battling on the float. Oliver and Kelsie had left her a block away from the action, trapped by the human mass against the wall of an old building. How the hell was she supposed to help from here?
Flicker spread her vision across the crowd – eyes were swinging toward Beau again. In this chaos, his beauty gave people something to focus on.
And once Piper had the crowd unified and connected to her machine again, she would push the button.
‘Here, let me help,’ someone said – a girl’s voice. A hand helped Flicker to her feet.
‘Thanks.’
‘You were with him, weren’t you?’ the girl asked, still holding her hand. ‘Thibault Durant. When he went to Piper’s lair last night.’
Flicker spent a moment looking, but none of the nearby eyes saw anyone around her.
Then – a glimmer of dirty black hair, gone a second later.
‘You’re…her.’
‘Rien.’ The voice came from right next to Flicker, along with an unwashed smell.
The Anonymous girl that Thibault had found.
‘I wanted to help you guys last night,’ Rien said. ‘But then Piper and her crew came out, and I ran.’
‘You can help us now,’ Flicker said. ‘She’s going to—’
‘I know. But in this crowd, it’s hard not to fade.’ Rien drew nearer, her breath rasping with every word. ‘You have to stop her.’
‘I can barely stand.’ As more eyes gathered on Beau, Flicker retreated inside her own head. ‘And I can’t even use my power with that guy being so fucking pretty.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Rien said. ‘You can be as pretty as him. Steal all that attention!’
Flicker didn’t answer. Beau had made it sound so easy. But the idea that she, Riley Phillips, could make herself into some kind of retina-scalding beauty…
‘That’s not my style,’ she said.
‘Girl, this isn’t about your self-image,’ Rien snapped, squeezing Flicker’s hand too tight. ‘This is about stopping Piper. Turn your power inside out. Now!’
‘I don’t know how!’ But Flicker remembered Beau’s words:
Stop throwing your vision into other people. Instead, draw their vision toward you.
And what had Thibault said about avenging angels?
‘Just do it,’ Rien said. ‘That boy’s getting awfully fine.’
‘Well, shit.’ Flicker stood straighter. ‘Guess I don’t have any choice but to be awesome.’
She flexed the muscles of her power – the stations of her will that sent her vision outward – and gathered the dregs of her resolve.
And began to turn herself inside out.
‘ALMOST THERE!’ THIBAULT CRIED.
He’d seen it from blocks away, all that attention focused in a single direction. The crowd surging – wanting, needing to get closer to something around the corner.
‘Can you crash it yet, Chizara?’ Ethan shouted above the noise.
‘No!’ she yelped. Since they’d entered the thronged streets of Mardi Gras, Chizara had been wincing like her brain was being crushed.
‘This way.’ Thibault pushed forward.
The others probably couldn’t hear him. In this multitude, the Curve was strong enough to wipe him from their awareness. Enough to erase him completely if he wasn’t careful, wasn’t mindful about keeping himself present.
The massive crowd fizzed and roared ahead. Whatever was grabbing everyone’s attention had a brutal pull. It made Nate’s greedy power look like gentle persuasion.
The moment they rounded the corner, Thibault’s gaze was snared like everyone else’s, bent around and lifted, hopelessly stuck—
The boy seemed to hover above the crowd. His beauty was a spear through Thibault’s chest. Perfectly self-assured, without swagger or ego. Visibly, transcendently good. Entirely at peace with himself.
And beautiful.
It took Thibault a moment to realize that the boy was on a parade float. Purple, green, and gold. Krewe de New World Order.
‘That’s Piper’s machine!’ he cried, pointing. ‘Shut it down!’
Chizara squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head. ‘I can’t feel it. There’s too much noise! Too many phones!’
‘Damn,’ Ethan said. ‘Maybe we should just go punch Piper!’
‘Keep trying, Crash,’ Thibault yelled. ‘I’ll run ahead and see what I can do!’
He dove into the crowd, wriggling through, always at the edge of erasure. Their attention, their focus on the beautiful boy, grew thicker, stronger, with every second.
Surely Piper was about to start up her device.
The crush grew worse as he neared the float. He’d never get through. These people couldn’t see him – they kept digging their elbows into his already bruised ribs.
But then something shifted in the air above him. The focus of the crowd swung around.
Thibault turned. He looked up and followed the sheaf of attention that was falling the other way. They were all looking at someone else…
A girl was being lifted up on people’s shoulders. A girl full of glamour, and fearsomeness, and
authority. He’d never seen anyone like her, never wanted so badly to be near someone. His whole body ached with it, and he pressed forward with the rest. He needed to be near her, needed to see the eyes hidden behind those dark glasses…
‘She’s mine!’ he cried out from his very depths.
Because it was Flicker up there.
Shock threw him from the vision. And for a moment, before her power grabbed hold of his brain again, he saw the reality behind the transformation: his girlfriend superimposed on this inhuman beauty.
Then she was an angel again, and two agonies warred inside him – jealous rage, now that everyone saw a truth that had been his alone, and loss, because like a titanic fool he had walked away from her.
He let out a moan of pain, covetous and unworthy.
Faintly, Thibault registered how absurd it all was. This was just Flicker twisting her power around, fueled by the massive crowd. All this glamour was for one simple reason – to create a distraction.
She didn’t want his worship. She wanted him to stop Piper.
He reached up and sliced his own attention away, breaking her spell. Then he turned and fought against the crowd. It surged away from the float now, relieving the press of bodies, making way for him. He was nearly there.
But a familiar black-clad figure was scrambling to a vantage point halfway up the throne.
‘Glitch,’ he whispered.
She turned, and flung out an arm—
Power arced out of her on a wave of confusion. Thibault’s world whipped sideways in meaning, and a thousand bewildered cries rose around him.
But he knew the target. He turned and saw Flicker’s glory wrench and sputter. She fell to the street as the crowd that had lifted her melted, addled, crying out in fear.
Thibault turned back toward the float, his rage lighting it in hyperreal detail.
Glitch smirking, like she expected applause.
Verity on the float, straining in her seat, desperation on her face.
Piper in a triumphant stance, with Nate sprawled at her feet!
The crowd’s attention began to coalesce again. Drawn back toward the beautiful boy, high up on the float, his face awe-inspiring perfection again.
Thibault pushed forward, his teeth set in anger.
He didn’t have much time. And he was ready to hurt someone.
‘CRASH THAT THING!’ ETHAN CRIED. ‘QUICK!’
Chizara growled, eyes shut in concentration as they forced their way through the melee toward the float.
She couldn’t let her gaze glom on to that angel boy and his wondrous face, or she wouldn’t be able to think of anything else.
Like the fact that Flicker had been a goddess about ten seconds ago, a phoenix of brain-rattling beauty, only to be struck down by Glitch.
Chizara sought out a space inside herself, trying to ignore the madness of everything happening, the shrieking galaxy of phones. The desperate wondering: Where’s Kelsie? What’s this crowd doing to her?
What will she do to this crowd?
Crash reached out through the phone pain, through the roar of the city, grasping at the workings of that transmitter.
But the machine felt dead, like an abandoned car with the barest trickle of juice in its battery. She forced her Crash power hard at the thing and felt a familiar dullness, that barrier of mesh inside the swags of glittery bunting.
Damn. The device inside the float was power-shielded.
Her eyes flew open, and there was Piper, lifting her hands above the control panel, a smug smile on her face.
‘I can’t crash it!’ Chizara cried.
‘Keep trying!’ Ethan yelled. ‘Maybe I can help Thibault!’
He ran off, leaving her wondering…Teebo?
The name slipped away into the noise around her, because everyone was calling up to the beautiful boy on his throne. No one was watching Piper. No one cared that she was about to blow their world apart.
And Chizara realized…
There was only one way to stop this.
Resisting the beautiful boy’s enchantment with an effort that made her eyes ache, Chizara riveted her gaze on Piper. And reached out toward her.
There was no choice.
It took all the finesse, every scrap of precision Chizara possessed, to slide her power through the incoming barrage of signal. She slipped past everyone’s phones and cameras, past the scream of hotel wifi and storefront tech nagging her from all around.
She focused, and it was like being deep underwater, all the street noise gone silent, with only glimmers of phosphorescent fish pulsing in the darkness.
A cloud of heart fish. Brain fish.
She had to do this. She had to become everything her mother had warned her against.
Piper reached out for the controls.
Chizara made her move.
It was a small move, the smallest she knew how to make. Across the twenty yards that separated them, Chizara singled out Piper’s heart and brain where they hovered.
Pulse-pulse.
Flash-flash.
She pinched them out. It took no more energy than blinking. She snuffed that brain and heart out into the oceanic darkness.
It was so ordinary, watching Piper fall. Her head went limp and rolled backward, her body slumping next to Nate’s.
A moment ago, Flicker’s collapse had lit a wild anger in Chizara. But this tumble made horror blossom. What she’d done was evil, wrong, and there was no way back from it. No way to uncrash hearts and brains.
Just like Ethan’s voice had predicted two summers ago…
She was a demon now.
THIBAULT SAW PIPER DIE IN FRONT OF HIM.
Her hand fell limp and bounced from the edge of the control panel. The smug expression went from her face, the glitter of focus from her eyes. She slumped sideways, rolling onto Nate’s unconscious form.
But she wasn’t just unconscious. He knew at once.
Just like Craig’s lifeless body outside the Dish, but this time Thibault had seen it happen. Had watched Piper disconnect from the lacework of humanity.
A girl in a suit and tie clambered down from the rightmost seat of the float. She knelt beside the empty husk. ‘Piper? Ren! Something’s wrong!’
Thibault turned, and his anger rushed back.
Ren – Glitch – who’d tossed Flicker aside like a piece of trash, was making her way down from halfway up the throne.
Thibault didn’t even think. He threw himself forward, scrambling across the float. As Ren reached the controls, where the other girl was still cradling Piper’s head, he reached out and grabbed them both.
They both looked up, startled as he appeared from nowhere, but Thibault didn’t give Ren time to use her power.
He flung himself, flung all three of them away from this disaster, far out into the void, where they could do nothing, harm no one.
Farther away than he’d ever gone.
AS KELSIE FELT PIPER DIE, THE LEASH SLIPPED FROM THE SWARM.
It was a small thing at first, that loss of one Charismatic, with so much going on. Priceless gems underfoot. The dueling angels at opposite ends of the street. The waves of clarity and charisma and glitchiness and honesty that billowed out from the float in turn. And underneath it, the hunger that threatened to break out and consume them all.
Kelsie – what was left of her – was stretched so thin, her will at the breaking point. And as Piper was snuffed out, it was clear that only her hold on the crowd had been keeping it together.
Swarm was rising now.
Then someone yelled, ‘It’s the cops!’
‘Perfect timing,’ Swarm murmured to herself.
Black flak jackets with white letters across the front and back surged into the crowd, heading for the float. Their training kept them distinct from the throng, so far.
But Swarm could easily make them part of her.
Agent Phan was shouting through a bullhorn, telling everyone to clear the way. His tenor of authority stilled the cro
wd for a moment, steadied them with some distant memory of civilization.
But Swarm reached out and took her followers back, blended these newcomers into the mass.
The buzz was building, her body extending up and down the street. But even at the edges of the swarm, there wasn’t room for running. Not enough space for the trick of furious motion that Quinton Wallace had taught her at the Desert Springs Mall.
So much struggle, compressed into such a small area. But maybe this packed parade route was just the core of her swarm, and she could spread out to take the whole city…even more.
‘Kelsie,’ came a voice.
Swarm looked down at a bloodied face. A guy the crowd had fallen upon a moment ago. Gems sparkled on the ground around him.
‘Take my hand,’ he pleaded. ‘You don’t want this.’
Meaningless words, but some human reflex made her reach out, and his fingers brushed hers.
And Swarm understood with perfect clarity – she did want this.
She didn’t want to be on the run anymore. Or held in some prison, alone forever in a cell. Her fear of that arced and spat, sending anger through the crowd. She wanted multitudes around her, always, forever.
The crowd vibrated beneath her. The bloody-faced guy clung to her, pumping certainty into her veins.
This was what she’d always been…love at its most terrible and pure.
Swarm looked out across the horde – her new body, her destiny – and smiled.
Then her heart skipped a beat, and she gasped.
It happened again, something twisting sideways. The faintest wrong flutter in her chest, as if two fingers had pinched her heart.
‘Zara?’ she whispered.
Zara was going to stop this. By killing her.
Swarm drew back in incomprehension, but Kelsie shut her eyes. Thankful.
Do it. Don’t let me take them all.
Then Oliver – she knew his name again – squeezed her hand harder. Something pushed into her,a new sliver of understanding.
What if Swarm could be bargained with? Satisfied and then put aside, as long as she took a Zero into herself? She could save all these people.
And she only had to sacrifice one.