He drew her closer, spoke softer: “Yeah, but real is real.”
Their lips met, and the shiver came again. It traveled deep inside her, reaching all the places where she was pressed against Anon. Her legs, her lips and tongue, her skin. Even her breath trembled in her mouth.
When they pulled apart, it took a moment to speak again.
“Whoa,” she finally said. “Was that the first time? Our first kiss, I mean?”
“The first one like that,” he said, sounding breathless and a little amazed.
She smiled. Close enough.
CHAPTER 64
BELLWETHER
THE ANONYMOUS FILE WAS MISSING. Gone.
Nate stared at the space where it should have been, the compartment in the home theater riser where all the wires and cable were stuffed out of sight. He couldn’t remember putting it back here after the last meeting, or even taking it out in the first place.
There’d been a lot going on, with Mob joining the group and a mission to plan. And anything that had to do with Anonymous could slip your mind.
Nate looked underneath the seats. Nada.
What if he’d left it somewhere around the house? For his parents to find, or the housekeeper?
He pulled Chizara’s folder from the compartment and headed for the kitchen, where his sisters were decorating a cake for their Wednesday youth group. Gabby had drawn a Sacred Heart in icing, which looked more like a strawberry wearing a crown of thorns.
“I need you three to look for something.”
Gabby didn’t look up. “We’re making a cake, hermano.”
“I can see that. But it’s twenty bucks for whoever finds what I’m missing.”
That got their attention, and he held up his file on Crash.
“Like this, but much thicker.”
They looked down at the half-decorated cake, then back at him. He gave himself to greed—thoughts of candy, of dolls, of everything twenty dollars could buy—and that little nudge broke the stalemate. They were off in a flurry of shouts.
In the afterglow of using his power, Nate wondered if Kelsie could have managed a trick like that. Did she command the crowd, or did it command her? Or was she like a rider on a horse, guiding a more powerful creature with the cut of spurs?
It occurred to him that it was time to start another file.
On the way to his room he was distracted again—the doorbell. Nate checked through the living room windows and swore.
DDA Cooper was outside. Detectives King and Fuentes weren’t with her, so she was here as Ethan’s mother, not as a district attorney.
Letting her in was a bad idea. But she would only come back again later, and maybe next time his parents would be home.
Nate opened the door.
* * *
They settled in the living room, just the two of them. The girls were still searching the house, so gathering any sort of crowd was impossible.
One-on-one would have to do.
“How can I help you, DDA Cooper?”
“You know why I’m here,” she said. “My detectives might not have enough to bring you in for questioning, but you know more than you’re saying.”
Nate hesitated. At the door she’d looked tired and distraught. But now she sat straight in her chair, as if administering a punishment.
“I don’t know where your son is, ma’am.”
She was silent a moment, measuring that statement.
“But you know something.”
Nate looked up and found certainty in her eyes. She wasn’t going away without some kind of information. But admitting he’d lied to investigators wasn’t a possibility. That was a felony, and she was a prosecutor.
This called for a new direction altogether.
“After you left, I started looking for him,” he said.
She pulled out a notepad. “Where exactly? Give me places.”
“Well, not actually looking for him.” Nate was paralyzed a moment, but then it came to him. “I found that bank video. I figured he must be loving that, you know?”
She just stared at him.
“The way he talked back to those bank robbers?” Nate continued, letting the words come to him. “Everyone in the world seeing how clever he was. How he always knows exactly what to say.”
Her cool expression faltered a little. The video must have been baffling, her son knowing the name of a bank robber’s daughter—but also weirdly familiar. Surely she’d heard Scam spout inexplicable knowledge before.
“You still haven’t told me where you looked for him,” she said.
“Online. There were thousands of comments on that video.” Nate never read comments, which were pointless, leaderless babble, but he was certain there was no shortage of them under Sonia’s video. “All those people saying, ‘What cojones on that little—’ Oh, sorry.”
DDA Cooper gave a shake of her head. “What does this have to do with finding Ethan?”
“I figured he’d want to read all that. He always loved people seeing him mouth off. So I left a comment myself. Nothing big. Just, ‘Hey, it’s your old buddy Nate. Where the hell are you?’ ”
“And he responded?”
Nate nodded. “About an hour later.”
“This was on Sonia Sonic’s blog?” she asked, pulling out a notepad.
“No.” That would be too easy to check. “One of the sites that linked to it.”
DDA Cooper was uncertain whether to believe him, but she wanted to. “He left a message on my phone, saying he’d be home soon. Did he mention that, or say where he was?”
Nate sighed. “No. He said the whole bank thing was a joke of some kind. And how he was scared, because of those criminals escaping. He figured the bank robbers were looking for him. He didn’t think it was smart to come home yet.”
Nate realized he was practically telling the truth.
“What site was this? Maybe we can trace him.”
“I really don’t remember. And his comments disappeared the next day. He must have gotten scared and deleted them.” He shrugged. “So I deleted mine, too. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.”
DDA Cooper was staring now, as if the proof of Nate’s story had disappeared a bit too conveniently. Which was fine, as long as she had a glimmer of hope that it might be true.
As long as she spent the next few days scouring blogs, instead of showing up at Nate’s house again.
“If you’re lying about this—” she began.
“I think he wants to come home,” he interrupted, letting the truth fill his words. The truth that Ethan would be home eventually, and that he, Nate, felt sorry for her.
“When?”
“Soon,” Nate said. Then he made a decision—more truth. “This weekend, in fact. He said there was something he had to do first, to put all this video nonsense to rest.”
“Put it to rest?” She shook her head. “What kind of joke was it, anyway? I mean, the way he was talking in that bank. Like he knew those men. He used their names. My detectives think he must have been in on it!”
Nate shook his head. “I’ve watched that video a hundred times, trying to figure it out. He must have heard the robbers talking to each other. And then he decided to be a smart aleck.”
Something in those words clicked. An exhausted smile came over her face. “That sounds like Ethan. He’s always pulling things out of thin air.”
Nate stared at her, wondering what it was like to raise Scam. Did his parents think he was a genius? A psychopath? Possessed?
It couldn’t have been much fun. Ethan always refused to talk about his power’s first appearance.
“He would say weird stuff to us, too,” Nate said. “Like he knew things about us that he couldn’t have.”
DDA Cooper’s gaze was fixed on some distant point. She looked more exhausted every minute. “When he was little, we thought he was a genius. He spoke in complete sentences at two.”
Nate nodded attentively. Two years old? Flicker had been almost ei
ght when she’d started seeing through her sister’s eyes, and Thibault had managed to live with his family until three years ago.
Nate wondered if DDA Cooper would mind him taking notes. Probably.
“But then it changed?” he asked, giving her the full wattage of his attention, wishing there were a crowd here to focus it.
“Right when he turned four, he started to have episodes. One moment he was his usual self—smart, articulate. But then he’d try to repeat the same words, and he would babble them, like a toddler again.”
“Did he seem . . . different? I mean, when he was stumbling for words. Like he was a different person?”
She looked up at him, the spell broken by the oddness of the question. Or perhaps because the answer was yes.
“Sorry, someone’s calling,” Nate said, before she could ask what exactly he meant. He pulled out his phone, set it to record audio, and laid it facedown beside him. “No one important.”
She leaned forward. “I need to find my son. He’s been missing for days. If there’s anything you can do . . .”
“I’ll try to find that blog again, and leave more comments. This time I’ll let you know the moment I hear from him. I promise.”
She stared at him, mistrust warring with hope. But she pulled out a business card and handed it to him. “Call me right away.”
Nate accepted the card, then gave her his most solemn expression. “Is it okay if I mention you? To remind him that he has a home to go to.”
She sighed. “Things haven’t always been perfect at home. His father left us when he was little.”
Nate wondered if Scam’s voice was responsible for that, spouting the wrong truth in the middle of some tantrum. A childhood version of last summer.
He knew he should send Ethan’s mother on her way now. It would be too easy to slip up, to give himself away. To make her want too much from him.
But this was a golden opportunity to find out more about Ethan’s upbringing, and how his power had manifested.
“Maybe if I mentioned his sister,” Nate said. “Seems like he misses her a lot. Is she deployed right now?”
DDA Cooper nodded, still unsure about opening up. But Nate was a connection to her son, a lifeline for her hope, and she had nowhere else to turn.
“He worships Jessie,” she said softly. “Since they were little, she’s the only one that could ever make him tell the truth.”
Nate glanced at his phone, hoping the battery would hold. Then he leaned forward and listened, a list of questions already forming in his mind.
CHAPTER 65
CRASH
“ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS?” Ikem asked.
Chizara and her little brother stared up at the main entrance to Cambria County General Hospital. Chizara’s head was already aching from all the tech.
She hadn’t been inside a hospital since she was born. All those years of being careful when she ran, of making sure not to so much as twist an ankle. She’d been lucky—everyone had been lucky—that she’d never broken a bone or come down with any serious illness. So much could go wrong inside this broad white building . . .
A massacre waiting to happen.
Ikem might not know how much this hurt, but he knew enough to look frightened. “Why do you have to do this, anyway?”
“I have to prove that I can train myself. That I don’t need Nate and his crew to get stronger.”
“But what if you can’t control it, Zara? You could crash the whole place.”
“I’ll warn you before I get anywhere near that.”
Ikem reached out and took her hand. “Let’s get it over with, then.”
Hand in hand they went slowly up to the glass automatic doors. As they passed through, the weight of the electronics bore down, until Chizara could barely see the vast white space, the staff striding about, that man in the wheelchair.
She bit her lip. This was what she’d come for, wasn’t it? To test herself against a mass of tech like this.
“You okay?” Ikem asked. “You’re, like, crushing my hand.”
“I know,” she said. “And I’m not going to let go. Couldn’t do this without you.”
“So, you’re ready to go up those stairs?”
Chizara swallowed a rush of panic, then nodded.
Halfway up the first flight, the pressure closed down behind her and cut off her escape. She heard herself whimper, and sweat broke out all over her skin.
“Keep going,” Ikem said. “He’s only one floor up.”
Chizara put out a shaky hand to the rail. “Uh-huh. I remember.”
He helped her creep up to the landing, make the turn. A patient and an orderly on the way down stopped and stared.
“It’s her therapy,” Chizara heard Ikem say. “She’s scared of people.”
“You’re doing great,” the orderly said, peering over her spectacles.
Chizara managed a smile that practically creaked. It was like all the plates from all the restaurants in the whole world were stacked up, really badly, on top of her. And if she wobbled even the littlest bit . . .
When they were alone again, Ikem said, “You look terrible, Zara. Let’s get out of here.”
“No—I’m holding it all. There’s just so much!” She probed the labyrinth around her, the sensors, the diagnostic machinery, the forests of surgical aids in the operating rooms downstairs, the miniature pumps shunting fluids into and out of people’s bodies. “So many machines, all talking to each other . . .”
“You sound like a stoner!” Ikem hissed.
She straightened up, and he grabbed her hand again. He was a good brother, she thought sloppily, sentimentally, before her mind rushed back to coping with the onslaught of intricate pain, elaborate light, filigreed power. She was so close to buckling and letting the whole massive weight come crashing down around her.
But it wasn’t going to happen. Yes, she was in the middle of a major hospital. Yes, she was about to break every bone in her brother’s hand. Yes, she could hardly see straight. But she was still walking, could still read the signs: PEDIATRICS, PULMONARY, ENDOSCOPY—
“There it is,” she muttered.
INTENSIVE CARE UNIT.
“So many flowers,” Ikem whispered.
“Like a funeral,” Chizara said.
A policeman stood outside the double doors, beside the mountain of flowers piled across two tables. Beyond him a hundred machines beat and blinked in the ICU. The pain felt like it would melt Chizara’s bones.
Her voice came out soft but steady. “Are these all for Officer Bright?”
The officer took in her trembling hands, her sweaty skin, and nodded.
“Did they run out of room inside?” said Ikem in an awed voice.
“Can’t put flowers in the ICU,” the man said. “Germs breed in the water.”
Chizara nodded, then led Ikem to the glass doors. Peering through, all she could see was a nurse passing, blinking equipment, a man with a tube running into the back of his hand.
Chizara reached her mind out to all the glowing machines clustered around each ICU bed—the monitors and drips, the pumps and ventilators and dialysis machines. All the equipment was running perfectly, but none of it could heal cells, could mend organs. The most she could do was not interfere, just sweat and tremble and not let a single chip blink out, a single power-carrying filament fail.
But she was tiring. She could feel it. She didn’t have much longer.
In a little room off to one side, a woman sat dazed, tearless. A policewoman was holding her hand and talking to her.
Through everything else Chizara felt those needles of guilt. She took a deep breath, trying not to get distracted.
But then she saw them.
On a couch opposite their mother sat three children in a row.
A realization slipped into Chizara, the finest, sharpest blade skipping across the tendons of her will. Officer Bright’s kids weren’t out exploring the hospital corridors, entertaining themselves, getting up to
mischief. They were sitting there staring at nothing, hoping their father would come back to them.
Through the blur of welling tears, the lights in the ICU flickered. Her bleak thoughts shook all those delicate systems, and two small, sharp alarms went off on the other side of the doors. Here in the corridor, the air-conditioning coughed and struggled.
“Zara!” hissed Ikem at her ear.
Chizara blinked hard. Her brain began to scramble. A tsunami built on the horizon.
A nurse ran past. Someone shouted. Officer Bright’s wife woke from her daze, and the kids looked around frightened.
“No,” Chizara whispered. Not this.
Stepping away from the door, she reached deep, deeper than she ever had before, groping for resources she wasn’t sure she had.
She all but flattened herself, forcing her mind under the great teetering weight of the tech. She spread herself out in a million directions and lifted, everything straining nearly to snapping, from her core out to her fingertips. She pushed back the swelling wave of disaster, pushed herself up into the pain until she nearly howled with it.
But she didn’t howl. Just hold it up, Chizara. Hold it all up, for as long as it damn well takes.
One of the alarms shut off . . . then, at last, the other. The air-conditioning recovered its rhythm and purred on.
Chizara took Ikem’s elbow, spoke low: “Get me out of here.”
“Should we run?”
“Slow and steady, so I don’t lose my grip.”
* * *
As they walked back into fresh air, the load lifted off Chizara, transforming from ravening demons to a massed choir behind her.
She let go of Ikem’s hand and put her face up to the breeze.
“I am never, ever doing anything like that again.” Ikem backed away ahead of her. “I thought you were going to die! Or break that whole building!”
She glanced over her shoulder at the hospital. It still pulsed with a thousand machines. But it didn’t hurt anymore, at least not from out here.
“You think you were scared?” she asked, but Ikem had already turned and bounded down the footpath toward the street.
She turned and followed him down the street toward the strip mall—she’d promised him ice cream after this.