Thibault piled the plates on the room service tray. “Too late for that.”
A bright spike of attention hit him from Ethan’s narrowed eyes. One way to heat up a connection was to bug the hell out of someone—Thibault had always teased his little brothers to keep them focused.
“Thanks for your positive feedback, Tee.”
“I’m serious.” Thibault wiped his fingers on a napkin and added it to the pile. “Well, not about needle and thread. But sooner or later, you’ll have to control your voice.”
Ethan stopped pacing. “Easy for you to say. You and Nate and Flicker all have powers you can—”
Thibault held his hand up.
“We already had this conversation?” said Ethan.
Thibault pointed to the hand, the agreed signal. For some reason, gestures stuck with Ethan better than words.
“None of our powers is easy to deal with,” Thibault said. “Especially growing up. I mean, how young were you when the voice hit?”
Ethan shrugged. “It started talking before I did.”
“Before you did?”
“Yeah. If I wanted something, I just opened my mouth and noises came out. I thought everyone did that. I thought that’s what talking was.”
Ethan’s gaze drifted to the window. Thibault waited for their connection to fade, but it held, a bright thin beam between them, almost too intense.
“It took a long time to understand words, even the ones coming out of my own mouth. Maybe I’m kind of stupid—but hey, why did I need to understand them? The voice took care of everything. I just watched.”
Thibault stopped cleaning up and sat down. He’d known that the hooks of the voice went deep into Ethan, but not this deep. Deeper than language.
“So how did you learn how to talk for yourself?”
“Took a while to figure out that I even had my own voice.” Ethan wore a wry smile on his lips, as if learning to speak was a scam he’d pulled. “But the voice doesn’t work when I’m alone. And you know how little kids babble to themselves? I had to figure out why it felt different when the voice wasn’t handing words to me.”
Ethan looked up, and the connection between them was so strong and bright and steady, Thibault knew Ethan had never told this to anyone else.
“So the voice taught you to talk, but it got in the way, too.”
“Yeah, it made it too easy. Still does. At school they think I’m dyslexic or whatever—I’m great at oral exams but I bomb all the written tests.” Ethan laughed, like this was a big joke on the teachers. “For a while I thought I could make myself as smart as the voice was. I’d listen real hard when it talked, and then look up words in this big dictionary they had in the library, on a wooden stand. But then . . .”
Ethan squirmed and the connection sputtered.
“Then what?” said Thibault.
“There was this teacher. He was always picking on me. And one day he told me I was lazy one too many times. So I let the voice loose on him. It said he was only mean and bitter because his mom was schizophrenic. The whole room went quiet, everyone shit-scared. But he went on with the class, real serious, and he never bugged me again. So I thought that word, ‘schizophrenic,’ must be awesome. I looked it up—once I worked out how to spell it.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“Yeah. It turned out schizophrenics were people like me. With voices in their heads. If that’s not me, nothing is.” Ethan stared out the window again. “So I stopped looking up words. And a week later they got rid of that big dictionary, because the internet was better. But I was like, great, that stupid book’s gone that told me I’m crazy. Maybe no one else has to know.”
“Man. That sucks.” Thibault’s fateful book had been a tattered paperback, Zen for Beginners, picked up at random from a secondhand bookstore. In it he’d found the Way all laid out for him. Fifteen hundred years of wisdom that stared straight into the void, that made nothingness okay.
Which made Thibault okay, because he was definitely nothing. The Buddhist śūnyatā, emptiness personified.
But when Ethan had found himself in a book, it hadn’t been among the koans of the Way. Instead he’d stumbled on “schizophrenic” and mistaken it for satori. And he’d been scared of himself ever since.
“Ethan. I don’t think you’re schizophrenic.”
“Really?” Ethan turned to face Thibault, hopeful, scared.
“Really. These things we have, they aren’t mental issues; they’re powers. Like superheroes have.” Thibault almost laughed—he’d never said the word out loud before.
“You think?”
“Sure. We just suck at them right now.”
“Zeroes, not heroes,” Ethan muttered, his attention scattering. People lost focus like this when they were in pain, as if they were trying to melt out of sight. Like everyone had a little slice of Thibault’s power in them.
And hell, maybe the kindest thing would be to make that happen. All Thibault had to do was swipe his hand across his face and leave the room, and Ethan’s memory of this conversation would fade.
But this was the first time they’d said anything really meaningful to each other. Thibault couldn’t just throw it away.
“I should e-mail Nate about that video.”
Ethan nodded. “Yeah, you should. Because you might have a nice place to stay, but I gotta live with my mom. And she’s going to tear me a new one if I don’t get home soon.”
Thibault met his gaze. Their connection was still there, but it was built of fear and exhaustion. First thing in the morning and he already felt tired.
He reached for his laptop. “Sure thing. Maybe if we get Glorious Leader’s ass in gear, he’ll come up with a plan to get you out of here.”
CHAPTER 36
CRASH
CHIZARA TRIED NOT TO SEEM too cheerful at work that morning. She was supposed to be recovering from a migraine, not reveling in newfound powers.
But she worked hard, all focus and attention. And it almost surprised her when her new talents didn’t flare up and fix these blenders and radios, when she could see so clearly what had to be done. But no, she had to go hunting for tiny replacement lightbulbs in Bob’s collection out back, or clean out a toaster’s workings with an old toothbrush. Maybe these burned-out filaments and bread crumbs were too big for her power to wrestle into shape. Too gargantuan compared to microscopic circuits.
There was no stress working with clunky machines like this, but yesterday’s glories had raised a possibility: Maybe toaster repair wasn’t why she’d been put on this earth. Maybe her true work was waiting for her someplace else, someplace not so safe and pleasant, which offered the challenges of dealing with Nate and the others.
It was a thrilling but scary thought, and Chizara was glad to have this job, this shop, these simple responsibilities to shelter in.
After their lunch of Mom’s leftovers, Bob asked her to replace the power cord on an old TV. The customer’s terrier, left alone in her apartment one day, had chewed through the cord.
“Tell me the dog didn’t electrocute itself.”
“Oh, he was smart,” Bob said. “He pulled it out of the wall first.”
It was a long cord, so it was easy to cut around the bite marks, strip the wires, screw them into the plug, then screw the plug back together.
At the first flicker of light on the screen, Chizara braced herself for the trickle of wifi. So many televisions were networked, as if everyone was dying to read their e-mail on a TV screen. But this one was charmingly old and dumb. It emitted nothing but a brassy flourish of breaking news from Cambria Local and the earnest face of Molly Roswell.
“. . . has been placed into an induced coma after being assaulted in yesterday’s prisoner escape at the North Bride Street headquarters. Police are still unsure what caused the computer malfunction and security breach.”
Molly kept talking, but for a moment Chizara couldn’t parse the words.
“That was some weird stuff,” said Bob, looking up from a
circuit board. “You hear about it?”
Chizara nodded slowly. The purring had gone from her bones.
“Some.” Her voice came out flat. “I saw the newspaper this morning.”
A picture hovered over Molly Roswell’s right shoulder—a policeman in full dress uniform. He was smiling, and his name was Reggie Bright.
Chizara tried to listen, but the words kept not making sense: medically induced coma, family man, beaten while trying to prevent prisoners . . .
And then, with cruel suddenness, Molly Roswell moved on to a story about homeowners insurance. Bob kept looking up from his soldering iron, as if statistics about grease fires were just as dramatic, just as meaningful.
Chizara was scared to open her mouth in case a huge, anguished howl came out. A man, a family man, someone’s father, was in a coma because she’d lost control. Because of that glitch with the holding cells they’d all shrugged off at Nate’s yesterday, unaware that a man had been beaten half to death.
Or had the rest of them known?
She pulled the television’s plug from the wall, and the screen winked into darkness.
“Stretch break,” she managed, and walked to where her bag rested on the bench. Her phone was in there, the one she’d been so pleased about fixing. Well, fix this, girl. What good was repairing phones and game consoles if you screwed up so bad that someone wound up in a coma?
A walking massacre.
Chizara made it down the hall and out the back, shut the rusty door behind her, and crouched against the outside wall. She switched her phone on and waited with a hand over her eyes while it woke itself up and made its connections, stabbing at her brain. All that “porn-face” stuff of Scam’s, that meant nothing next to this new horror.
She called Nate.
“Chizara? Are you okay?” He sounded dead serious.
“So . . . you knew?”
There was a silence on the other end—he was thinking about his answer, considering how best to say it. Disgust and plantain welled up in Chizara’s gut, and she thumbed end call. She was almost sick, right there in the alley. The Zeroes had ruined a man’s life, just to save Scam from his own big mouth.
Her mom’s voice rang in her head. Any kind of gift, you can use it wisely or stupidly. Whether it’s strength or a good brain, or some strange thing like you’ve got, Chizara. Just ask yourself every time you use it: Is this going to hurt anyone? Is this going to do any harm?
And Chizara had asked herself those questions, she really had. But then the thing had gotten so big, with the police station so crowded, and all those networks tangling in her mind. How was she supposed to stop her power when it got that big?
Of course, there had been a moment when she’d had a choice, to hold back or let it roll through her. Kneeling by the detective’s desk, realizing that smoke alarms and card key readers wouldn’t be enough. Thinking, with a whiff of exhilaration, Time to do some damage.
It was moments like those that killed people, removed husbands, fathers, from the world. Permanently, unforgivably. Doing some damage. Having some fun.
The Zeroes protecting their own. Nate had made it sound so noble.
Well, it wasn’t noble. It was just playing with too much power, like child soldiers with AK-47s in their hands. It wasn’t glorious, or beautiful, or any of those things she felt when her power had hold of her.
She was a demon, just like Scam had said.
The phone went off, blaring pain into her hand. Glorious Leader.
She almost threw it at the wall. But her need to yell at him was as strong as her anger.
“What?” she spat, holding the phone as close to her ear as she could bear.
“I’m coming to see you. We’re going to talk this through.”
“Talk it through? You can’t talk something like this through—a man’s in a coma, and we’re responsible! How much less conversational can something get?”
“I’ll be on my way in five minutes, Chizara. Where are you?”
“I’m at work, Nate. I’ve got another hour to go, and I’m going to work that hour, not lie to my boss and sneak out for some stupid mission that puts someone in a coma. This is the end of missions for me, Nate. The end of your ‘training.’ The Zeroes just got evil!”
“We didn’t know this would happen.”
“But you knew yesterday, right? And you didn’t tell me.”
“I knew he was in a coma. But it’s medically induced, to help him stabilize.”
“He’s so bad off, it’s better to be unconscious? And instead of mentioning it, you fed me lunch? Why? In case you needed me to crash something else before I heard?”
“I was hoping for a better outcome.”
The coldness of that! Her breath, snatched away, came back with a little laugh of disbelief. Who was the demon here?
“Oh, Nate, you’re going to make a great politician.”
“Can we just talk? Can I come and meet you after work?”
“Do what you want. Just make sure you walk, or ride a bicycle or something. Get some beat-up cab. You show up in this neighborhood in one of your fancy cars, people’ll think you’re a dealer moving in. And I won’t tell them otherwise.”
She slapped the phone off, biting her lip hard to keep herself mad. Righteous anger was so much better than that about-to-cry feeling. She got up and paced the alley, sucking in deep breaths, huffing them out, preparing to go back inside and be normal, get her job done, learn something new about old tech. Something mechanical, made out of dumb materials that did what they were told.
This was what she was going to stick to from now on, unless she could read all the consequences, right to the end, and see that nobody got hurt in any way.
She dragged open the door and went back inside.
CHAPTER 37
BELLWETHER
THE CALL ENDED WITH A loud click, as if Chizara had thrown her phone against a wall. Or maybe her anger had crashed it.
Nate frowned. Hadn’t she destroyed her phone yesterday?
Maybe she’d bought a new one already, which was too bad. He’d planned to buy her a replacement on his way over, a little reminder that being part of the team had its benefits. That the Zeroes took care of their own.
Not that any gift would repair the damage done yesterday.
Nate texted his father’s secretary, canceling lunch. Papi would be annoyed, but not as annoyed as if Chizara had a crisis of conscience and confessed to the police. On the radio they were calling yesterday’s events terrorism. Which was ridiculous, but it made all the relevant jail terms about ten times longer.
The irony of this disaster was that the training exercises had helped Chizara most of all. Nate had watched her abilities sharpen, evolving from a blunt object into an instrument of specificity and finesse. And her confidence had grown, her sense that she was entitled to wield such power.
Until now.
So what if she’d slipped a little? Nate doubted that the Cambria Police Department had any earthshaking investigations under way. As he’d always told Chizara, every crash she conjured was simply a reminder to back up that data. Anyone who didn’t deserved what they got.
If only Chizara hadn’t opened those cell doors. Or if the escapees had managed not to put anyone in a coma on the way out. Was that so much to ask? Now Chizara was in danger of losing all the focus she’d gained yesterday, of throwing it all away to wallow in guilt and shame.
And after all that effort, Ethan’s video had still made it out into the world. Sonia Stoller, a.k.a. “Sonia Sonic,” must have sent it to herself before handing her phone to the cops. Maybe next time Chizara should just crash the whole internet.
Nate filed that thought away.
He found his sisters in the front room, playing with his old set of Formula One cars. They had made a track with strips of cloth from Mamá’s sewing scraps and built a grandstand from shoe boxes, full of dolls.
Gabby, always the instigator, was lofting a bright green Lotus Renault throu
gh the air. “I’ve lost control! Run!”
She took it spinning into the grandstand, neatly decapitating a Misterioso, Jr., doll. The other sisters managed the fleeing of dolls from the stand.
“I’m on fire!”
“Me too!”
“We’re all doomed !”
He cleared his throat, and they looked up guiltily from the carnage.
“I’m going out.” Nate took the keys to the Audi from the bowl beside the door. It was one of their best cars, and had just been washed. If anyone in the Heights took offense at shiny chrome, Nate knew how to deal with that. “Tell Mamá I’ll be back for dinner.”
“Okay,” Gabby said, then made a rumbling explosion sound as the Renault crashed against a couch leg.
When Nate opened the front door, he found himself face-to-face with three adults. The man wore a cheap suit and fedora, and the two women were both in gray business wear.
Cops, and much sooner than he’d expected. Nate wasn’t ready for this. They looked a little surprised themselves at the door having opened without a knock.
Nate gathered himself. “May I help you?”
“I’m Detective King,” one of the women said. “This is Detective Fuentes and Deputy District Attorney Cooper.”
Cooper. Ethan’s last name. This had to be the dreaded mother.
Detective King smiled warmly. Apparently it wasn’t too suspicious, being a bit nonplussed when a pair of detectives and a DDA showed up at your door.
“We’re looking for a Mr. Nataniel Saldana.” She said his name with a decent accent.
Nate managed to smile back, trying not to think of terrorism charges erasing his future.
“That’s me. Please come in. After I see your badges, of course.”
* * *
He kept the visitors in the front room. Mamá was working in the back garden this afternoon and wouldn’t be inside anytime soon. A citizen for twenty years, she still got nervous in the presence of authorities, which was the last thing Nate needed.
More important, his sisters were here. He pulled them from their game and arranged them along the couch, forcing the two detectives to stand. He and DDA Cooper had the two chairs, so the real conversation would be between them. More important, the presence of his sisters gave him an audience to work with.