“We could be a superpowered duo,” she said shyly.
“Totally. That.”
Kelsie was still wearing the T-shirt and shorts Ling had given her to sleep in. Clean enough. She slipped into last night’s high-tops and grabbed the messenger bag, which had maybe a thousand bucks left in it.
She led him out of the house without a word, careful not to wake Ling or her folks.
They didn’t talk much as they walked the dozen blocks to the bus stop. Kelsie kept looking over her shoulder, in case the Bagrovs had sent someone to follow her and find her dad. Having an internet celebrity in tow didn’t help the feeling of being watched.
At a convenience store Ethan pulled out a fat roll of twenties and bought a bottle of water, a baseball cap, and the biggest pair of sunglasses on the rack. Kelsie held the cold, sweating water bottle while he tried on the glasses. He grabbed a couple of chocolate bars and tried to offer one to her, but she waved it away.
“Not sure about that disguise,” she said. “You look like you’re trying to be incognito.”
“Anything so my mom doesn’t find me. I should call her again, but not from your phone. She can track phones.” He looked kind of proud as he finished the chocolate bar and started on the second. “Where’re we headed?”
“To see my dad.”
Ethan balked. “Great. Another person who wants to kill me.”
“He doesn’t!” Kelsie said.
Ethan stared at her.
“I mean, your voice freaked him out,” she said. “But he’s never been a killer.”
“He wasn’t a bank robber till Friday.”
Kelsie let the comment slide. There were lines her dad wouldn’t cross. She had to keep believing that. And anyway, she’d tossed away most of her money saving Ethan. He owed her.
On the bus Ethan hunkered down with his head against the window. But Kelsie still had too many questions to let him sleep.
“Here’s what I don’t understand. Why us two? Out of all the people in the world, why do we get powers?”
Ethan slid his sunglasses down and gave her a careful look, like someone studying a poker hand. “Were you born in the year two thousand?”
“Yeah. September.”
“Me too. June. Could mean something.
Kelsie shook her head. “Two thousand’s just a number.”
“Yeah, but everybody made a big deal out of the new millennium. They thought all the computers would crash at midnight!”
“But they didn’t. And weren’t millions of people born that year?” Then it hit her. “Wait—there could be others. I mean, if there’s two of us in a little city like Cambria, there’d be tons of people in the whole world!”
“Maybe.” Ethan shrugged. “But maybe it’s just us, Kels. And we were put here to help each other, no matter what.”
The words made something click inside Kelsie. The thought of an ally, born to help her, who would never fail her like her father always did, sent something rushing into her. Like a crowd spilling onto a dance floor when the perfect song played. That was what she’d always been missing—someone special among the crowd.
Then she realized that Ethan had called her Kels, which only her father did.
“Wait. Was that your voice again?”
Ethan just shrugged, like he wanted to skip the whole subject. Like he didn’t want to talk about superpowers. Even though he’d just met the only person who shared this with him.
Which made no sense.
Ethan pulled his cap down low and Kelsie let the subject drop. For now.
* * *
They changed buses twice before they reached the tenements on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood had been mostly abandoned years ago when Cambria had exploded in some other direction, ignoring the city planners.
Kelsie didn’t like empty places. The broken windows and wide, still streets felt lifeless around her. Once the bus pulled away, it was like stepping into a painting. No car horns, no ringing phones or overheard conversations. No crowds, no energy, no pulse.
“This place sucks,” she said.
Ethan pulled off his hat. “At least nobody’s going to recognize me.”
Kelsie had the address in her phone, but the reception was shaky and the map trailed off at the edge of the tenements, like no one had bothered to tell the internet about this place. She felt a moment of panic. Dad’s message had said he was keeping his phone off to save battery, so she couldn’t even call him.
But then she felt it.
One point of energy in that whole empty space, pulling her forward. Like an oasis in a desert. There was a crowd here someplace. Ragged and dispersed, but definitely a crowd. Or maybe several little crowds, chasing each other around a chemical high that arced steep, sweet and spiky.
She felt herself—her power—reach out for it. Reach it and scale it until she was balanced on top of a bright pinnacle, too sudden and too steep. Like when cheap ecstasy swept through the clubs on summer weekend nights.
She let her power pull her forward, letting the synthetic elation fill her, becoming something genuine. This was something she could do that nobody else could. She could find people lost in this empty place. This was her power.
“Stay close,” she told Ethan.
But too soon the energy began to empty out from beneath her.
Kelsie felt herself spinning down, dragged under. The quick, cheap high was wearing off. Soon the crowd wouldn’t be a crowd anymore. They’d go back to their individual needs, and Kelsie would be lost again in the eerie quiet.
She started to run, not caring whether Ethan kept up with her. She had to find her dad before the crowd’s high gave out.
Five blocks later, with the feeling almost faded, Kelsie had found the place. A building like all the others, a gray two-story apartment block with boarded-up windows and doors. Broken beer bottles littered the long grass in front of it.
“How do we get in?” Ethan said.
Kelsie shook her head. Dad’s text hadn’t included instructions.
Around the side of the building they found a window where the boards flapped loose against the frame. It was too high for Kelsie to reach, so Ethan knelt and laced his fingers.
She hesitated. The climax of a few moments ago was building again. It burst upward in a narrow geyser, like an icy-cold bottle held against the space between Kelsie’s eyebrows. It was strange, crisp, distorting.
She steadied herself, placed a foot on Ethan’s hands, and pushed. Scrambling under the loose plywood, she tumbled into blackness.
Kelsie liked dark clubs just fine, but this place was different—cave dark. The darkest dance floor was lit by a thousand stars compared to this. The air smelled sickly sour, like fruit gone bad.
She waited for her eyes to adjust, and dimly the room took shape. There was trash piled against every wall. A thick layer of dust rose from the floor with every step she took.
Ethan came scrambling through, landing awkwardly beneath the window. Dust billowed out from him, like he’d set off a softly thudding bomb.
He coughed and peered into the dimness. “Where to now?”
Kelsie pointed at the floor. A path through the dust led from the window to an empty doorway, the floorboards gleaming dully in one narrow line. Beyond was a hallway, even blacker than the room.
“Yeesh.” Ethan stood up, dusted his knees. “Your dad sure knows how to hide.”
“Always has.” Kelsie was almost proud.
She pulled out her phone and shone it at the doorway. The darkness of the hallway seemed to drain away the feeble illumination.
She took a careful step through, shining light down at the path in the dust. The floorboards creaked, a soft and hollow sound beneath her feet. Ethan came shuffling behind her, his breathing audible in the silence.
Kelsie took slow steps, her skin tingling at every groan of the wood. In the building around her swirled sharp, discordant highs and crashes, all out of rhythm. She’d been right. It wasn’t one group,
but many, each huddled in its own room chasing spiky rainbows.
She let herself drift among the spires of ecstasy, looking for any familiar note . . .
Until a cold hand took her shoulder, clutching hard.
CHAPTER 55
MOB
KELSIE JERKED BACK, SPUN HER phone around.
It was a man—maybe. In the pale light his face looked like jelly. His eyes were lost in puffiness, and his jaw was covered by angry red welts. Kelsie bit back a scream.
“What’re you doing here?” the man said. The words slurred out through the few teeth left in his slack mouth.
Cratered sores traveled along his outstretched arm, like burns. And on the inside of his elbow Kelsie could see through to tendons and the dull glint of bone.
“Oh my God!” Her fear echoed out, sending a tremor through the building, through all those junkies already wary of discovery. She tried to control it, to grasp some of the icy certainty of their addiction. But she could smell the man too clearly, the rot and the putrid stink of flesh gone bad. She gagged.
When the man took a step forward, reaching for her again, Kelsie froze.
“Leave her be, Tony,” Ethan said with sudden authority.
The man grunted, a rolling, liquid sound. He dropped his arms to his sides, like a wind-up doll running out of juice. “You know me, kid?”
“Your mother sent me,” Ethan said.
It was the voice talking, Kelsie was certain, with none of Ethan’s usual hemming and hawing. He sounded so smooth and confident that her paralysis broke. She took a step back.
“My mom’s dead,” Tony slurred, his squinty eyes fixed on Ethan. Not looking at Kelsie, thank God.
“I’m in touch with her,” Ethan said.
There was a strangled gasp from Tony. “No way. Screw you.”
“She’s with your aunt Bertha,” Ethan’s voice said. “They both say they’re sorry. None of it was your fault.”
Ethan glanced at Kelsie, and somewhere way past his smooth expression she saw terror in his eyes. It was so weird to watch his power on display.
But it was working. In the glow of Kelsie’s phone, Tony’s melting face somehow showed amazement.
“They said that?”
Ethan nodded. “You were too little to know better. They shouldn’t have left you alone with your little sister. You didn’t know what a seizure was.”
A single tear oozed across pale flesh, sparkling. “That’s what I always . . . I didn’t understand.”
“They know that now, and you’re forgiven,” Ethan said, and then his voice shifted. “So, like, do you know a guy called Jerry?”
Tony hesitated, and his pale face turned to Kelsie. “You’re Kelsie, huh. Why didn’t you say so? Your dad said you might show up.”
“Oh,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Tony.”
“Sorry to spook you.” The man turned and shuffled into the darkness.
As they followed, Kelsie looked at Ethan. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me until we’re out of here,” he muttered.
Astonishment pulsed in Kelsie as they followed the man through darkness. The voice inside Ethan had reached into that man’s mind and found something old and broken buried there—and fixed it, just a little.
His superpower was some serious shit.
* * *
Her father had changed.
His face was ashen. The skin on his neck hung loose like turkey jowls. He still wore the shirt he’d had on two days ago, and he smelled worse than ever.
Tony had led them up a flight of stairs to a room lit by a slant of light from a loose board over a window. A small group of people slouched on the floor, their eyes glassy. The chemical high still simmered around them, dissipating slowly, tugging Kelsie down with it. She had to focus on her father’s face to keep from being swept under.
“I’m sorry to make you come here, sweetheart.” Dad glanced over her head at Ethan, and his expression froze.
“This is my friend Ethan,” Kelsie said carefully.
“The kid from the bank.” Dad stood, his hands in fists.
“Uh, hi, Mr. Laszlo,” Ethan said.
“You brought him here?”
“We can trust him,” Kelsie said, standing between them. “He’s not with the Bagrovs. He’s just a guy who was in the wrong place.”
“A guy who knows an awful lot about us, Kels,” Dad said.
“He was just . . .” Kelsie sighed.
She’d only tried to talk to her dad about her power once, when she was ten. He’d laughed it off, saying little kids always thought they were the most important person in the room. But she hadn’t meant that. Working a crowd never made her feel important. It just made her feel part of something bigger and stronger than herself.
Right now was definitely not a good time to try reopening the superpower conversation. But she had to get him to back off from Ethan somehow.
“All that stuff he said, he was just messing with you.”
Her father turned to Ethan. “Messing with us, when we had guns in our hands?”
“I’m real sorry, Mr. Laszlo,” Ethan said.
It sounded exactly like the kind of thing her dad would say. Real sorry.
“You should be!” Her father took a step toward him. “You got Hank killed!”
Kelsie placed a hand on her father. Somewhere upstairs, a small group had found another source of euphoric high. She felt it skyrocket through her like an elevator rising too fast. She latched onto it and drew it down into this room.
“It’s all going to be okay, Dad.”
Then Ethan’s smooth voice came from behind her. “I’m here to make amends, Mr. Laszlo. I’m going get you off the hook with the Bagrovs.”
Kelsie felt her power working, and a murmur went through the other junkies in the room. Her father’s expression finally eased—he wanted to believe. He wanted what Ethan said to be the truth. And with Kelsie’s power pulling him up and into the borrowed euphoria, he almost did believe it.
“You can help us? Really?” he said, eager as a little kid.
“I can fix this for you and Kelsie,” Ethan said, simply and firmly. Definitely the voice.
Kelsie let out a breath. She ratcheted up the ecstasy another inch, until her father was almost grinning.
He turned to her. “And you trust him?”
“I do.” She asked softly, “Dad, how do you know about this place? Who are these people?”
“They’re my customers.”
The people sitting in the dark were all like Tony, with puffy faces and melting skin. Bones that showed through.
“You did this to them? Dad, these people are sick.”
Her father’s expression changed again. But the image was loose and crumbling, like a retina burn from staring at the sun too long, the edges all falling away. Kelsie realized her phone had dimmed to save battery.
She let it go dark.
“They’re people with no place to go,” Dad said.
“Like me,” Kelsie said, trying not to feel bitter.
Dad squeezed her shoulder, and for a moment she thought he would make this better somehow. But instead he said, “Fig gave you the cash?”
“He did, but . . .” She hesitated, a hand on the messenger bag. “I had to use some of it. There’s a thousand left, maybe less.”
“A thousand?” His voice had gone dry. “I need more than that, sweetie. Maybe you can get it for me?”
Kelsie stared. Didn’t he see what she’d been through already? “What are you planning to do with it? You’re not going to buy more krokodil, are you?”
Dad’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know about krok?”
“Fig told me you were selling it for the Bagrovs. And that it kills people.”
“I take care of my customers,” Dad said stubbornly. “I’m not Alexei Bagrov.”
“Oh my God, Dad.” Her eyes went to Tony. There was no way she was going to help her dad sell anything that melted people like plastic
dolls.
She felt the crash of a nearby crowd as another high wore off. It reached out, swiped her, and rebounded, soured by her own anguish. They would be scrabbling for more drugs right away, trying to fill the void she was reflecting at them. She tried to pull herself back inside her own skin.
“Kels, I’m in a lot of trouble here. I need enough money to make my own product; then I can get right with the Bagrovs.” Dad adjusted the collar of his shirt.
That was his tell. It meant he was about to grift her, to bluff. And she’d seen the dark smear beneath his collar.
“That’s a scab on your neck. Tell me you’re not taking this shit yourself!”
“Once or twice. To show the customers it’s harmless.”
“Harmless? Look at them!”
Her father took a step back, surprised at how her cry of pain had rippled through the building.
He looked so hurt, but for the first time in her life Kelsie was too angry to feel sorry for him. She’d been raised in the family of Dad’s mismatched con-artist friends, where drugs and jail time were no big deal. The longest her father had ever disappeared was eight months for possession. He’d laughed about it, making jokes about eating three meals a day for the first time in his life. Back then it hadn’t seemed scary at all.
But now, standing in this stinking, terrible place, she knew the truth. This was death. He was going to kill himself and all these other people. And he was going to drag her down too.
“Kels—”
“Forget it, Dad! You can’t throw away your life just because you don’t want to face up to what you’ve done. You can’t have the money.”
He was silent. The whole world seemed silent right then.
She handed him the water bottle she was still carrying, the one Ethan had bought at the convenience store. Then she pulled out a fistful of bills from her bag and thrust it at him. Probably only fifty dollars, not enough for him to do any real damage.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’ll come back with food, okay? For everyone. And we’ll work out what to do next.”
He looked at her, not angry anymore. Just sad. “You’re a good girl, Kels. I’m sorry to put you in this.”
She reached out and gave him a quick hug, smelling the sweat and dirt and that sickly-sour scent that came from hopelessness and hiding in a building without running water. “Be careful, Dad, okay? I mean it.”