Zeroes

  “Maybe your friends will save us,” Kelsie said.

  Ethan shook his aching head. “How would they even find us? Besides, they bailed on me, Kelsie. They hate me.”

  “I don’t think they do,” Kelsie said. “I was in that room with you all. And what they feel for you isn’t hatred.”

  Ethan groaned. “I have this feeling you’re going to tell me what they do feel, and it’s going to be even worse. Like contempt, or pity, or some word I don’t even know.”

  “Maybe individually they’re still mad at you,” she said, her voice softer as the last light of sunset faded in the room. “But groups are bigger than their members. Sometimes they’re a little wiser. So yeah, together I think they feel . . .”

  Ethan waited, trying not to listen to Jerry breathe. But Kelsie had stalled.

  “For Pete’s sake, what?” he asked. It turned out he really wanted to know what the Zeroes thought of him. “What do they feel about me?”

  “Hopeful,” she said. “They have hope for you.”

  Ethan closed his eyes, and a pain that had been burning inside him since last summer lifted just a little. He realized something that he’d hidden from himself since then. He wanted to be a Zero, damn it. Wanted to hang out with all those stupid freaks, enacting Glorious Leader’s nutso plans, pretending to be superheroes instead of knuckleheads who should be locked away.

  But it didn’t matter now, because sometime after nine o’clock tonight he and Kelsie and Jerry were all going to be turned into pink mist and then buried forever where no one would ever find their shattered bones.

  “Hope,” he said. “Gee, now you tell me.”

  In the darkness he barely saw Kelsie shrug.

  “I thought you should know,” she said.

  CHAPTER 74

  FLICKER

  “STILL NOTHING.” FLICKER LEANED BACK into the BMW’s passenger seat, giving her vision a rest. “These buildings are all empty.”

  “Thank God it’s the Fourth of July,” Nate said. “We could never do this on a workday.”

  Flicker pressed her fingers into her temples. True, it was a lot faster reaching into an empty warehouse than going floor by floor, room by room. But it also took real brain effort to stretch her awareness across those parking lots, searching for eyeballs that weren’t there.

  “We should go downtown, Nate. Anon said that’s where they took the money.”

  “Can you handle all those eyes? Those fireworks are less than an hour from now, and the crowds have been building up since noon.”

  “More people is better. I’ll have more range.”

  “Yeah, but Ivy Street on a Saturday night overloaded you. What will half a million people do?”

  Flicker shrugged. “They were drunk, and going crazy thanks to Mob and her bag of cash. I’ll be fine.”

  She heard his fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

  “Look at it this way,” she said. “I’m not lying in the trunk of a mobster’s car with who-knows-what about to happen to me. Worst I can get is a headache!”

  “We don’t know that. I don’t want you to break yourself.”

  The concern in his voice made her smile. If it were anybody else—Ethan, Anon, even Chizara—he’d be telling her to push her power to the limit. Damn the torpedoes and bring on the human test subjects.

  “You’re sweet, Glorious Leader. But we need to find Scam and Mob.”

  “Okay, I’ll head into town. Just take one more look, Flick. I don’t want to miss anything out here.”

  Flicker let her vision loose again, searching for eyes. The drivers were easy to ignore, whipping past much faster than Nate’s crawl, their eyes on the road. She didn’t find anyone in the darkness of a trunk, or with a hood over their head.

  Out this far there were almost no pedestrians, and the factories, warehouses, and auto-repair places were all closed for the Fourth. No one but security guards watching TV, and homeless people.

  “Nada,” she said. “Let’s move, Bellwether.”

  The car’s acceleration pressed Flicker back into her seat, and a tremor of excitement started to build in her stomach. Finally she was going to see what happened with a real crowd around her.

  “You’ll tell me if it gets too much?” Nate asked.

  “I’ll be okay. The day I found Anon’s hotel, I was smack in the middle of downtown, flitting all over the place.”

  “Right, about that.” Nate’s voice shifted—he’d turned to face her. “You never told me how you found him.”

  “Nope. And I’m not giving you ideas about how to find his next place either. Just drive.”

  “I’m driving. Fast!” Nate said, and she felt a swerve as he changed lanes. “But I’m impressed that you found him when I never did. I assume your power had something to do with it?”

  She laughed. “Not telling. Boyfriends beat Bellwethers.”

  “Boyfriend?” Nate’s voice was steady, hard to read. “So this is serious.”

  “Yeah, it is. I mean . . .” A glimmer of vision flashed past on the roof of a nearby building, but it was just someone with a six-pack who’d found a distant view of the fireworks. “It’s hard to tell how serious, exactly. Because I’m never quite sure how things are . . . progressing.”

  An awkward silence. That thing Ethan had always said, about Nate being like her big brother, was sometimes way too true. And the much worse thing, the one the voice had said last summer, was always lurking around the corner. If only because the voice had said it out loud.

  For a distraction Flicker put herself in Nate’s eyes.

  Whoa. This was much faster than she’d ever seen him drive before. It was nice to know that Mob and Scam were more important than Glorious Leader’s spotless record.

  “Must be weird, forgetting,” Nate said. “He’ll always know more about you than you know about him.”

  “That’s not his fault. He’s not trying to keep things from me.”

  “Sure. But if he wanted to, he could tell you one thing one day, something completely different the next.” Nate’s voice grew softer. “Depends on whether he’s a good guy.”

  Flicker reached out and took Nate’s right arm.

  “He’s a good guy. I wouldn’t feel this way otherwise.”

  “So you trust your heart.” Nate’s voice was raspy.

  But his gaze was steady on the road, and the spires of downtown were rising up before them. This wasn’t jealousy, Flicker was almost certain. This was concern.

  “Not just my heart,” she said. “I trust him.”

  The car was slowing. In Nate’s vision, a river of brake lights streamed away, a titanic traffic jam of people headed in to see the show.

  “Hold on to something,” he said. “It’s about to get bumpy.”

  “Wait, what—” she started to say, but the BMW was already leaving the highway.

  The car slipped past the shoulder and went skidding down the highway embankment. Flicker found herself clinging to the dashboard, her teeth rattling in her head. Nate’s vision was too shaky to hold, and she let herself go blind for a moment.

  A smack went through the whole car.

  “What the hell was that?” she cried.

  “One of those barriers,” he said, just as the beamer’s tires hit pavement again. “Those things that discourage you from doing what I just did.”

  She went back into his eyes. They were down on the old service road, zooming along much faster than the cars above them on the highway.

  “Whoa, Nate.” She was seriously impressed. He was driving like a maniac, even though the cops were looking for his car.

  “Get ready,” Nate said. “Your head’s going to be busy soon.”

  But Flicker had already felt it, the edges of the crowd. That host of vision, that ocean of eyes. It swept closer, and her mind began to sizzle.

  She squeezed his arm tighter.

  “Let me know if it’s too much,” he said.

  “I’m good.”

  It was b
etter than good—it was swimming in omniscience, in an all-seeing buzz of overloaded vision. Her mind was full of bright shimmers: people staring at the city lights, the sunset, the glowing screens of their phones. Kids waving sparklers and glow sticks in front of their eyes.

  But even in these great numbers, the crowd didn’t have the wild, convulsive intensity that had infected Ivy Street. Maybe this crowd was more sober, or maybe without Mob to turn them into a mad, pulsating gyre, it wasn’t going to be so dizzying.

  “Get as close as you want,” she whispered, letting her vision flit and dart.

  The mobsters wouldn’t be holding prisoners in the street, so she shot up into the skyline. The windows were full of eyes—offices with views of the fireworks were throwing parties tonight, and of course the hotels were all full.

  Flicker flashed through a thousand eyes a minute, searching for anyone in a small dark room, shoved into a closet, or staring down the barrel of a gun.

  But they were all gazing at the horizon, where the fireworks would flash and tumble, and of course at the Parker-Hamilton Hotel. People were staring at the doomed building from every angle, and Flicker spun her vision in a circle around it, like walking around a dollhouse.

  Okay, that was weird. The vast crowd should have been empty in the middle, a doughnut shape, with all those thousands of eyes staring in toward the hotel, but no one looking back out. And yet something niggled at Flicker’s awareness from that hollow center.

  Workmen putting the final touches to the demolition?

  Wasn’t it a little late for that?

  Flicker stretched herself into the Parker-Hamilton and found three lonely pairs of eyeballs inside. It was dark in there, and for a moment she couldn’t see a thing, as if she’d walked into a cinema from bright sunshine.

  She made out naked wires hanging from the ceiling, dust in the air, and bare walls. Everything stripped away from the doomed hotel.

  Then she caught a glimmer of a familiar silhouette.

  “Scam,” she breathed.

  The car slowed a little. “You see them? Which way?”

  “Straight ahead,” Flicker said, her mouth suddenly dry. “Don’t slow down. We haven’t got much time.”

  CHAPTER 75

  CRASH

  “YOU’RE GONNA MISS A GREAT par-tee!” sang Ikem from the front door.

  Chizara sang back, “I’m gonna miss a great big heeeaaad-ache!”

  She’d already unplugged the home entertainment system. She was lounging on the sofa with a big bowl of popcorn and a book.

  “Leave your sister alone,” said her dad, passing through. “You know how it is with her. She doesn’t like crowds.”

  “But it’s going to be so great!” Ikem’s eyes shone. “All those fireworks! The big ka-blam at the end! And then it’ll all go dark for a second, and then they’ll switch on the mega lights and press the button and down she comes, the whole hotel!” He waved his arms and made crashing noises.

  “Sounds fantastic,” Chizara said levelly. “But not worth having my brain chewed on by sixty bazillion phones and cameras and pedometer watches and all those freaking—”

  “Come on, Ikem! Obinna!” Dad called from the driveway. “We’re getting in the car now. You ready, Mama?”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Mom, dressed up American for this family outing, hurried into the living room, fastening an earring. She swooped on Chizara and kissed her. “Don’t open the door to any crazy Fourth of July party people, all right?”

  “Have a great time. Enjoy all the ’splodey things.”

  “Oh, I can hardly wait. Good night!”

  The car started up with a painful tweak of electronics, then pulled out of the carport and drove away. Chizara breathed a sigh of relief and reached out into the house.

  Damn, Ikem had left that game on upstairs. Should she just put up with that little itch, or should she go up and turn it off and make the house as perfect as possible?

  She went back to her book. It was a good book—she kept getting lost in it and forgetting the popcorn was there. Half an hour later she’d only grazed through half the bowl.

  But as evening came on, the itch got to be too much for her. She went upstairs. In the boys’ room, the game lay calling out to connect with another console. It was fully charged, so she pulled the plug on it and powered it down.

  There. If only it could always be like this, nothing but a few of the neighbors’ e-things beeping and bopping off in the distance.

  She ambled back toward the stairs, past her own room. Her phone lay switched off on her bedside table just inside the door, and the sight of the little black rectangle made her pause. How had the exchange gone this afternoon? Did Kelsie have her father back?

  Chizara hoped so. She hoped nobody’d gotten hurt—she gave a shiver, remembering the hospital groaning with tech, the pile of flowers, Officer Bright’s children staring at nothing.

  She picked up the phone and walked on to the top of the stairs. The first detonation of the fireworks across town gently shook the air. She walked through to her parents’ room, went to the very edge of the window, and squinted sideways.

  Sure enough, in the distance, between the double towers of the Cambria Central Bank, a peacock tail of blue and gold lights was spreading on the sky. As she watched them fade, the delayed thud of the explosion shook the floor, and she felt a sudden dread for Kelsie and Scam, going in to face those gangsters.

  Switching the phone on was like stabbing herself in the forehead with a fork. Even as she rubbed the pain away, the device pulsed more pain out into her hand, beeping an alert.

  A voice message. From Glorious Leader.

  “Chizara? This is Nate.” It didn’t sound like Nate. And no code names?

  She could hear his voice clearly in the quiet room with the phone a foot from her ear. He was in the enclosed space of a car, in traffic.

  “I need you to get downtown to the Parker-Hamilton as soon as you possibly can. You know how they’re going to demolish it tonight? You’ve got to stop that happening.” His voice was harsh and dry. “Scam and Mob and her father are inside, and if I can get through these damn crowds, I’ll be in there too. Please, Chizara. I don’t know how else to stop this.”

  She was already running—back to her room for her keys and backpack, downstairs for her shoes, outside and slamming the door behind her.

  There was no point running, but she ran. She would never get there in time—but she couldn’t sit at home and do nothing, either. She thought better on her feet.

  What you need, girl . . . She sped along the block, slowed to take the corner, charged toward the shopping mall. Beyond its bulk, red fountains of sparks lazily rose and fell in the downtown sky.

  What you need is a car.

  Well, there weren’t many of those around. Most people had taken them halfway into town, just like her mom and dad had done, to catch the special Fourth of July shuttle buses to the show.

  And if she did find one, what to do without keys? She didn’t know how to hot-wire a car. She didn’t even know how to break into one.

  She slowed as a thought hit her. A shot of that fixing power would help.

  What, break something, crash something? Just so I can—

  She was already scanning the smaller shops, looking for something big to crash. If she found a car new enough, computerized enough, surely the fixing juice could do something?

  Here was the mall, closed and empty of people, but abuzz with lights and, inside, with systems at rest.

  Panting, she peered in the padlocked front doors. Yes, empty—not even cleaners. They’d be in town too, with their families. The fireworks’ pops and thuds were coming thicker and faster. The display only went for half an hour. Chizara didn’t have time to think up another plan.

  She held on to her head with both hands and reached in, past the mini systems ticking over in their sleep in the individual shops, to the central generators and transformers, timers, master switches for lighting gri
ds, dormant air conditioners, security alarms, and cameras.

  The farther she stretched into their spinning complexity and power and sheer connectedness, the heavier she felt their weight on her shoulders.

  And then, with a deep breath, Chizara let it all go. She stopped holding them up, abandoned her duty, went against everything Mom had ever said about this power of hers.

  Do no harm? Forget that. Harm everything. Bust everything in there down to the last LED.

  The release was fabulous. She felt like a toddler knocking down the biggest, most complicated block tower ever built, like a revolutionary in a palace slicing through the cord holding up a giant, multibranched, crystal-hung chandelier, watching it fall and shatter on the marble floor.

  But she didn’t have time to enjoy the crash of every crystal. She reeled away from the mall, amazed that her own hands weren’t lit up like glow sticks, that she hadn’t exploded like a firework herself. She staggered along the sidewalk until she could break into a run again.

  Her reach was gigantic now, extending deep into the electronic forest of the neighborhood around her. And she could hang on to everything, hold everything up, keep it moving. She was the world’s best juggler, juggling stars and roaring chain saws and balls of fire.

  It felt wonderful to run, tossing all this stuff into the air around her. She could run and run until dawn if she needed to.

  But even at this speed, she’d never reach the Parker-Hamilton in time.

  Cars were parked on either side of the street, crowded together. This was the tail end of the parking for the shuttle bus.

  She slowed down and pulled her senses in closer, poking and prodding at the vehicles nearby.

  “Speak to me!” she whispered at this pickup, that hatchback, this Volkswagen van. None of them spoke; they were all too old, too mechanical, too low-tech. Those big manual ignition switches were useless.

  But then a Camaro up ahead made a clunking noise, and its brake lights flashed.

  Chizara checked around for someone with a key fob. The street was empty.