“I can’t just leave,” she said.
“Wait,” Scam said. “You’re leaving without me?”
Nate turned to him. “If your voice gave up, that means there isn’t time. You know that, Ethan. Now use it one last time and get her to come with me!”
For a moment Ethan stared at him, astonished. But then he nodded, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.
But nothing came out. Mob wasn’t going anywhere.
She had knelt by her father. “Thanks for saving me, Dad, back then. Sorry I couldn’t return the favor.”
“Kelsie,” Nate said, trying to focus himself at her. “We have to run—now. If we’re going to die, let’s die on the stairs.”
But his power wouldn’t focus. The crowd was too far away to help him.
Jerry Laszlo looked up at his daughter. “You were always proof of miracles.”
Outside, a mass of voices started counting down from twenty, and Mob spread her arms toward the ceiling, the numbers rippling through her body like a pulse.
CHAPTER 78
CRASH
NOW ALL THE SKY WAS alight, the explosions coming thick and fast, shaking Chizara’s car, shaking the whole city around her.
This had to be the buildup to what Ikem had called the “big ka-blam.” He’d said there’d be a minute’s silence after the fireworks before floodlights came on and the countdown started. She had a little over a minute.
In the stolen car she shot through the empty streets lit lurid by the gold, the fuchsia, the emerald, the silver-white of the fountains and flowers and starbursts overhead.
She felt ahead furiously, sifting through the piles of tech downtown, searching with her mental tweezers for the demolition charges.
How did it even work? When you blew up a tower like the Parker-Hamilton, was it one big bomb in the middle, or a bazillion little ones, dotted through the building? She had to do this right.
She almost saw the roadblock too late. Not just hollow plastic barriers she could have punched the Camaro through, but a string of flesh-and-blood traffic cops.
She slammed on the brakes. The car swung with a scream of rubber and skidded to a sideways stop, rocking as she shed her seat belt. Startled cops backed up against the barriers. Chizara jumped out, vaulted the roadblock.
“Hey, what the hell!”
“You can’t just leave that here—”
But Chizara was already running along the near-empty street beyond.
She had to get in range, and soon, or Nate was dead, and Ethan, and the new girl, and the new girl’s dad. That couldn’t happen. It wasn’t an option.
The ground shook with explosions. Ahead—blocks and blocks away!—the fireworks gushed up into the darkness, all colors, all shapes.
This was definitely the big ka-blam—they were throwing everything against the sky. Chizara raced on, feeling ahead through the electronic noise. There wasn’t room for fear; she needed every drop of adrenaline for running, for hunting. If she could only get a clear signal, see through all this e-garbage in the way.
Networks beat at her from the buildings all around; buried fiber-optic lines burned underfoot. And up ahead around the Parker-Hamilton, so many more devices seethed. What had the news report said, that one out of every three Cambrians was here? And every one of them held a phone, snapping photos and videos, tweeting, messaging, Instagramming, sending out a million darts into the flame-swept sky.
The last of the fireworks fell and faded slowly to black, leaving only feeble streetlight to guide her. Did she have the whole minute Ikem had promised, or only seconds?
She sped up, pushing past what she’d thought was her limit. The sudden quiet was horrible. Her fear flared, and she had to swallow it, gasp it away as she ran.
White light punched up into the rolling firework smoke.
Crowd roar hammered along the street.
A sob of terror escaped Chizara, but still she ran, and the light stayed steady. That hadn’t been the final explosion, just the floodlights coming on. But soon—
Now the crowd’s tech was clawing her face and front, every camera lifted, a hundred thousand glowing rectangles. A galaxy of pain.
She ran against the weight of it, her body peeled back to springs and wire and a core of nauseous burning. Give in! Go crazy! shrieked the gnawing tech, but she had to see beyond it, feel around it, push through.
It was worse, much worse, than the CCPD’s big punch-in-the-guts systems. This was death by ant bites, a trillion mandibles sinking into her flesh at once. If she hadn’t crashed that mall, she couldn’t have stood this, wouldn’t have had the strength.
She burst out onto a slope packed with spectators. Plunged right in, pushed forward.
“Hey!”
“Watch it!”
She didn’t care. She forced her way on.
The ant bites kept coming, but the crowd gave her huge range. Her skull felt hollow with it, like she’d just sniffed crushed peppermint leaves. Ahead she sensed a vast, sweet blank space where the doomed hotel stood, empty, useless, scoured of phones and wifi.
Now the tech-peppered crowd was too thick to move through, no matter how hard Chizara pushed.
“Twenty!” they shouted around her. “Nineteen!”
She looked up in horror. The Parker-Hamilton loomed ice white in the mega floodlights. But one face had been left dark, except for bright numbers projected there, counting down the seconds.
Chizara closed her eyes and fought to focus. Deep in the empty hotel she groped after a ghost of a network, a sparse drapery of wires through the steel-and-concrete skeleton.
Countless little bombs. And she had to crash them all.
“Ten!” shouted the crowd, a monstrous, ignorant voice. “Nine! Eight!”
Too fast. The seconds were going too fast.
She couldn’t do the tweezer thing. She couldn’t be subtle. She’d just have to dump the whole damn city—she could see so far, could break so much!
But she had to keep control—
“Five! Four!”
Chizara lifted her arms and spread them wide, like a demon queen throwing down a curse. She reached beyond the boiling mass of ant tech around her, protecting the phones so people wouldn’t panic.
“Three!”
She sank down into the power grid, shook free everything feeding into the lattice of wires charged with bringing the old hotel down.
“Two!”
Through that fresh hole she’d made in the pain, she saw the demolition setup: the timer, the board, the remote trigger, the sensors scattered like stars through the stripped building. Each star was taped, with its charge, to a load-bearing pillar, ready to blow it to rubble, to bring the massive concrete floors pancaking down on the four people inside.
“One!”
Chizara cut it all off at the root, and with her mental fingertips pinched out the backup generator before it could cough into life.
The crowd cried, “Zeroooo!”
And then . . . nothing.
Beyond the squeal of the phones, no voices. And no bombs.
Chizara raised her head, opened her eyes to darkness.
Oops, she hadn’t meant to kill the floodlights.
And that wasn’t all she’d killed—a great swath of the city lay snuffed out all around—no streetlights, no window lights, the skyscrapers standing dark.
Only the hundred thousand phones glowed, recording each other’s hopeful glows and the darkness beyond them, recording the glorious silence, recording Chizara’s triumph.
The magnificence of what she’d done, the magnificence of what she was, hit her smack in the funny bone.
Laughter billowed up from the pit of her stomach, where the ant tech had chewed the hardest. It scrabbled in her lungs, gathering breath. And then it burst up out of her throat into the silence, and the darkness, and the doubtfulness all around.
“MwahahahaHAAAA!”—like a movie villain.
People fell back from her. Some looked nervous in the fain
t phone glow. Most kept their cameras raised, still expecting the big event.
Chizara spun on her heel, double punching the air.
“Not going to happen, suckers!”
She pushed uphill through the assembled shadows, staggering, cheering, laughing. The crowd was a field of grass, and she could see how every blade lay around her, where every drop of dew sparkled. Phones and cameras were no more than gnats now, no more than dust motes swirling in a sunbeam.
And she was the sunbeam—she was the sun, the source! She was full to bursting with post-crash power. She could see everything, feel everything, hold everything up forever if she wanted, let go anything she chose.
Mega- or nanosized, she was master of it.
She was a freaking Zero, man!
CHAPTER 79
SCAM
ALL OF CAMBRIA WAS DARK. Inside this hotel stairwell was even darker.
And Jerry Laszlo was heavy.
“Landing coming up,” Ethan grunted.
“Got it!” Nate’s voice came from his right. It took both of them to hold up Kelsie’s dad, who had been beaten too badly and tied up too long to walk.
In front of them, Kelsie lit the landing with the light from Nate’s phone. It made her pale hair luminous and turned the rest of her into a dancing silhouette.
She kept glancing back at her dad.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Jerry let out a groan. Every movement seemed to hurt him.
Ethan didn’t know if Crash’s crash was permanent or only a temporary reprieve. He didn’t plan on sticking around to find out.
He and Nate had formed a kind of yoke, their arms wrapped under Jerry’s shoulders to lift him upright. Ethan had his left hand on Nate’s right collarbone and Nate had a firm grip on Ethan’s neck. It was the most teamlike Ethan had ever felt with Glorious Leader.
But he wasn’t sure it was enough. They still had a half dozen landings to go before safety.
“I hate,” Ethan puffed, “this hotel.”
He’d never been so scared in his life. This was worse than waiting helplessly to die, because he had a chance now. Any second he wasted might be the one that vaporized him.
They hit the next landing and careened toward another flight of stairs. Ethan went wide while Nate spun practically on the spot. By now it was almost routine. Make the landing, spin, head for the next.
There was garbage everywhere, and more than once Ethan slipped on some scrap of old wire or who-knew-what. But he stayed upright, maybe out of pure desperation.
Then he heard a rumbling, booming noise begin outside.
“Oh, crap,” Ethan shouted. “What’s that?”
“It’s the crowd,” Kelsie shouted over her shoulder. “They’re chanting.”
“What? Why are they chanting?”
Kelsie didn’t answer, but a second later Ethan heard it over the scuffle of their footsteps.
“Blow it up! Blow it up!”
“Assholes,” Ethan said.
But of course the people who had come for the Fourth of July fireworks were crying out for the destruction of the Parker-Hamilton and everything inside it. And no doubt the demolition experts out there were furiously poking at wires, checking connections, rebooting control systems, and generally trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
“We gotta keep moving,” Ethan puffed, rounding another corner of the staircase. “This place could still blow.”
“Crash knows what she’s doing,” Nate confirmed.
Ethan had to laugh. “Since when? Since when do any of us know what we’re doing?”
“Scam, seriously. She just saved our asses.”
Ethan didn’t argue, just saved his breath for moving.
Jerry was whispering a litany of gratitude and grief. Nate kept trying to reassure the old guy, reminding him to keep going, not to fall into dead weight. But the group was too small for Nate’s power to do much.
Ethan doubted there was any power on earth that could convince Jerry to work any harder. He was in a bad way. If they didn’t get the old guy to a hospital soon, he might not make it through the night.
The chanting of the crowd grew stronger as more and more people joined in.
Kelsie said, “I can feel them. They’re all so freaking happy. Like, delirious. They want us to blow up so bad.”
“Can’t you make them, like, not want to explode this building?” Ethan asked. “It’s getting on my nerves.”
“I can only guide their energy, not change what they are!”
“Nate?”
“Too far away,” Nate gasped.
Kelsie added, “And there’s so many of them!”
She swung the phone’s light toward the next landing, and Ethan stormed forward. He was suddenly grateful that Nate always bought the best of everything, because that phone worked better than a lot of flashlights Ethan had owned. It lit the stairwell into sharp contrasts.
“Hey, Nate?” Ethan huffed.
“Yeah?”
“In case we all die in a fiery inferno of death”—he paused for breath—“I just want to say thanks for coming for us. Even though you were going to leave me in there.”
“Only to save Mob,” Nate replied in a gasp. “Otherwise . . .”
“Right, sure,” Ethan said. “And hey, we made it. I guess I owe you one.”
“Sorry about last summer,” Nate said. “I was wrong.”
For a moment Ethan didn’t understand. They’d just reached a landing with a giant 2 painted on the wall. They were almost out. Ethan’s lungs were burning and he was gasping for breath, and Kelsie was a shadow in front of them, carved from the bouncing, lurching phone light.
But it had really happened—Nate had just said he was wrong last summer. In that moment just before the spray of words that had busted up the Zeroes, when Nate had told him . . .
You aren’t like us, Ethan. Your power’s twisted, somehow. It hates crowds, and it doesn’t grow with the Curve. It’s mean and small and selfish. You’ll never be a superhero. You’ll always be a scam.
Nate had said it with a kind of perfect certainty, almost like he’d borrowed the voice for one blinding moment. And the fact that it was true—that Scam was different and cursed and alone—had made him want nothing more than to destroy them all.
It was the last flight of stairs, and Ethan was pretty sure they’d all fall and break their necks, but at least if they died now, he’d lived long enough to hear Glorious Leader admit that he was wrong.
Ethan’s knees buckled before he realized they were on the ground floor. His feet were still trying to find the next step down.
The phone light swung wide as Kelsie located an exit. “Over here!”
She lit the floor in front of them. Jerry dangled between Ethan and Nate, barely touching the ground.
Then they were outside. Ethan had never been so glad for Cambria’s sea air. His lungs ached all the way to his stomach. He’d been breathing dust for two hours.
Nate was still pushing them forward, covering the distance between them and the waiting crowd. A couple of hundred yards and a ten-foot chain-link fence.
Ethan gasped.
By the time they got Jerry to the fence, Kelsie already had her shoes off and was climbing, toes and fingers clinging to the wire.
“Help!” she was shouting. “Help us!”
Ethan was too beat to ask who she thought would hear. The crowd was still chanting on the other side, wrapped up in the dangerous delight of the explosion they yearned for. A few people cast Kelsie confused glances, but that was it.
Nate let go of Jerry, and the old man sagged down on Ethan’s shoulder. The weight dropped Ethan to his aching knees.
Kelsie had reached the top of the fence. She was teetering like a high-wire artist. Ethan wanted to shout up to her to be careful, but his lungs were burning.
“Look!” Kelsie was pointing. “There’s a first-aid station.”
Ethan set Jerry down and struggled to his feet to peer a
cross the heads of the crowd. He could see it too. The top of a white tent with the District Ambulance logo billowing from its point.
Nate called up at Kelsie. “Throw me my phone! I’ll tell the others to meet us at the northwest corner of the fence.”
The phone tumbled down to his waiting hands.
“Nate!” Kelsie cried. “Can you focus the crowd on me?”
Nate looked up from the screen. “Um, I guess? What are you going to do?”
“Something I saw one time. Don’t worry, it’s easy!”
“Okay. Yell as loud as you can!”
Ethan stared up at Kelsie. She hooked a heel over the other side of the fence. The moon lit the dreamy, elated expression on her face.
She sang out, a high, clear cry that arced above the hubbub of the crowd.
More faces turned toward her, lifting up expectantly.
Nate was doing something with his hands, like drawing an invisible net in toward himself. His eyes were open, but blank and focused in the middle distance—seeing something invisible and strange.
Their little corner of the massive crowd grew still, but Scam could feel the excitement build as more and more of them looked up to see Kelsie balanced on the fence.
The crowd rippled into a new shape, a tide of attention turning her way.
Then all at once she jumped.
CHAPTER 80
MOB
SHE WAS FALLING.
She’d been falling for a week, from the moment she’d spotted her dad in a car outside the Moonstruck Diner. Now she pitched forward and fell from the fence into the crowd.
And they caught her. They always caught her.
They heaved her over their heads. Hands lifted and held and pushed her. Hands turned her so she pointed at the first-aid station like a spear. She crested that wave in full crowd-surfing mode, arms splayed, facing the sky.
Most of Cambria had come to watch the fireworks. This crowd was bigger than any dance party she’d ever been to, and more united. Less like the dumb-animal mob she was used to. Keen and driven.
She knew that that sharpness had something to do with Nate. He was working the crowd, lending his focus to her strength.