Swarm (17 page)

“And Kelsie, our DJ,” Nate finished.

Kelsie's smile reverberated through the group. She'd spliced her power onto Nate's to bring everyone to a happy place.

Sometime soon Chizara had to give her some tips on resisting Glorious Leader, just so she didn't turn into his power-boosting puppet.

“Why don't you come in?” Nate said to Jess. “Ethan's been a huge help in getting this nightclub off the ground. You're going to be proud of him.”

“Um, okay.” Jess looked at her little brother. “Since when did you work at a nightclub?”

“I don't just work here,” Ethan said in his own raggedy voice. “I'm, like, a founding member. In charge of publicity.”

“You're sixteen!” Jess looked around at them all. “None of you are twenty-one. This club is totally illegal.”

“Technically, it's more of a monthly private party,” Nate said. “And that money was a donation to the policemen's fund.”

He turned and walked into the club, pulling the group in his wake, like they all had fishing lines attached to the base of their spines. Mob and Bellwether together were hard to resist.

As she crossed the threshold, Chizara relaxed a little, the Faraday cage working its magic on the phone signals.

“Check out this dance floor.” Nate strode into the middle and spun around, like he was on the mountaintop in
The Sound of Music
. “We built it especially for the club. Employed a lot of locals.”

The work lights were up, revealing the Dish as a dusty, dark theater with metal-mesh walls. But with Nate radiating enthusiasm, there was a definite magic about the place.

Suddenly Chizara found herself eager to get in the light box and fling some watts around the room. How had she ever doubted that this space, this
home
, was worth protecting?

“You should come next month and see it in action,” Nate said.

Chizara had to keep herself from nodding in agreement.

“I'll be shipping out.” Jess was obviously trying to stay pissed at her brother. “And I know what a club going off looks like.”

She turned slowly, stopping when she saw the bar.

“You sell alcohol? Well, I can see why you were worried about dying.” Jess turned to Ethan. “Because Mom
will
kill you if she finds out about this.”

“You're not going to tell her, are you?” Ethan squeaked.

Jess's face was like a cartoon of the conflict in the room—the righteous big sister with the supreme self-confidence of a soldier, fighting the tide of Mob's and Bellwether's combined powers.

“I
should
tell her about all this, especially since you're paying off cops.” Jess slumped a little. Fighting the whole room's enthusiasm had to be exhausting. “Still, this is the most ambitious thing I've ever seen you do.”

That was probably true, though Chizara figured it was a low
bar. What else ambitious had he done? Maybe stealing thirty thousand dollars last summer, but that had been an accident.

Ethan was beaming from the praise, though. A smile slowly replaced the panicked expression he'd worn since his sister's appearance, and his hand reached out and took Kelsie's.

A bunch of stuff happened then:

Jess saw the handhold, and amusement crossed her face.

Ethan smiled back at her and leaned pointedly into Kelsie's shoulder.

Kelsie looked from brother to sister and then back to brother—he was giving her a dopey grin now. She stepped away from him, putting herself shoulder to shoulder with Chizara.

Everyone saw it. And because they were all connected, everyone felt it too: the stomach twist of Mob's puzzlement. Even the politician's smile on Glorious Leader's face froze.

Jess's smile evaporated too, replaced by the wariness of a combat veteran sniffing out an ambush.

“Wait a second,” she said. “What the hell is going on here?”

“Um” was all Nate could manage at first; then he rallied. “What do you mean?”

“This club. Since I walked in here, my head's been jerked around. It's like some kind of psy-ops shit is going down!”

Chizara didn't know what
psy-ops
meant, but she had an idea.

Then Glorious Leader did exactly the wrong thing. He spread his hands magnificently and doubled down. Chizara felt the force of his will flooding the room.

“Our humble party space isn't really equipped for psychological warfare,” he said. “More for dancing.”

But his laugh sounded hollow in the empty club.

Mob wasn't with him anymore. She was looking at Ethan, her power sputtering with uncertainty.

“Shit.
You're
doing this,” Jess said, staring straight at Nate. Then her eyes went to her brother. “You were telling the truth about powers, weren't you? Which means that you . . .”

She looked at Kelsie, then took a few quick steps backward—and bumped straight into Anonymous.

Jess spun around. “Holy crap. Another one?”

Anon looked stunned for a moment, then made a chopping gesture, stepping deeper into the corner. Chizara's awareness of him fizzled.

Jess turned back to the group.

“Do
all
you little fuckers have superpowers?”

No one answered. Ethan must have told her about the voice. And about Mob, too, it seemed.

Again Chizara saw the Zeroes from the outside, from beyond the loyalties and friendships. They manipulated people. They experimented with crowds. They broke things.

They were pretty evil, really.

All Nate's charm had gone from the room.

“
Come on, little brother.” Jess stepped warily back into the group and took his arm. “We're getting out of here. These people have been messing with your
mind
.”

“No they haven't—” But he was being dragged across the dance floor, and against her strength he didn't have a chance. Out they went, the door slamming behind them.

Chizara stared at the others. Kelsie sent her a confused look, but no one else would meet anyone's eye.

The silence was broken by the scrape of a bar stool. The pop of a beer can.

“Why do you guys keep telling your families about your powers?” said a voice. Anon, by the bar.

“Because it helps,” Flicker said gently, taking the can from his hand. “In the long run.”

Slowly the rest of them drifted to the bar and settled on stools. For a while no voices distracted Chizara from the phones in their pockets gently searching for a network that the Faraday cage wouldn't let them find.

“Ethan and his sister will figure things out,” Nate finally said. “Or she'll ship back to Afghanistan and have more important things to worry about.”

“You think she'll tell their mom?” Kelsie asked. She looked nervously at the door of the club. “She's a prosecutor, right?”

Chizara put a hand on her shoulder. “It's okay, Kels. Cops aren't going to start streaming in.”

Nate nodded. “Jess was right when she said that the Dish
is the biggest thing Ethan's ever done. She's not going to take it away from him.”

Chizara felt his confidence leaking back into the room, but she wasn't certain. There was no telling what Jess would do next.

And even if she didn't spill Ethan's secrets, they still had to worry about Internal Affairs, a crazed killer on their trail, and a whole new bunch of Zeroes bubbling up across the world.

“IS THAT HOMEWORK?”

“Yeah, always.” Nate turned from his laptop screen to face the door of his room. Gabby stood there, wearing a pink tutu and a look of genuine outrage.

“But it's Christmas break!” she cried. “High school is messed up.”

He smiled at her. “Sucks to be old.”

Gabby waited there, not daring to come in without an invitation. She looked bored and restless, and Nate had hardly seen her since Glitch and Coin had arrived in town, so he said, “Come in.”

He shut his laptop on an image of a riot in Seattle.

“Feeling better?” Gabby asked.

“A little,” Nate said. All day he'd pretended to be sick, dodging
the family's holiday preparations to search for upcoming events. Christmas Eve was tomorrow. He didn't have much time to figure out where Glitch and Coin's “honeymoon” would be.

The easy part was finding the trail of mass hysteria they'd left from Portland to Cambria. They'd hijacked concerts, movies, even a high school play. And they'd never hidden themselves. It was more like they were
trying
to be found, which made Nate wonder if a killer was chasing them at all.

Though maybe Chizara was right, and they were in love with their own love story. Like Bonnie and Clyde, wanting to leave a mark before they were extinguished.

The problem was, nothing suggested where they'd be headed next. Would their honeymoon involve a college football game? A midnight mass?

But Glitch had mentioned the desert. Crowds gathered in the desert for what? Balloon races? Burning Man?

“I got you the best present ever,” Gabby said. “So you
have
to get better.”

“I'd never be sick for Christmas, silly,” Nate said with a smile. His sisters always competed over who could get the biggest reaction from him on Christmas. So far, no one had beaten Gabby's silver business-card case of two years ago.

“I think you'll like my present too,” he said. He'd gotten all the girls
lucha libre
costumes, handmade in Mexico.

“Mamá wouldn't take us anywhere decent to shop,” Gabby went on. “She says malls are too loco this year.”

Damn. If their mother had started to notice that crowd behavior was changing, no wonder the US government was getting involved.

“She's right,” he said. “Christmas crowds are big, and you are small.”

“Pfft.” Gabby made a muscle pose. “I'm big! My friend Engrácia got to go all the way to the Desert Springs Mall to shop. It has three hundred stores!”

“Whoa. You could get me a present at each one.”

“You wish. Engrácia had to line up all night to get in at five a.m., but she said it was worth it! It just opened last month.”

Nate leaned back, staring at his sister. “Sounds really . . . crowded.”

“Yeah. They have early-bird sales every day. But it's all the way in Arizona.”

“Like, the desert?”

Gabby nodded, and Nate turned to his computer.
“Mierda.”

“How come you forget English when you swear?” Gabby asked.

“It's a bad habit I got from Flicker.” He lifted the screen again and opened up a new window. “Did you say Desert Springs Mall?”

“Uh-huh. Are you going to get me a present there?”

“Maybe.” Images spilled across Nate's screen—a shiny new mall out in the desert, a giant three-story fountain in the middle, fireworks every morning at opening time. And lots of
exhausted-looking customers lined up outside, with sleeping bags and camp stoves.

A Christmas Eve riot waiting to happen. Almost a straight shot east of Cambria, about eight hours' drive at legal speeds.

Nate looked at the clock—almost ten p.m.

Which meant the Desert Springs Mall was opening in six hours.

“Thanks, Gabby,” he said, reaching for his phone. “But I gotta go. You just reminded me: I need to do some shopping with my friends.”

“WHO'S SNORING?” NATE DEMANDED, HIS
hands tight on the wheel.

He was pushing the Mercedes at ninety miles an hour, his eyes locked on the moonlit road ahead. He'd been driving all night, and the snoring sound was making his eyes heavy.

“It's Thibault,” Flicker's tired voice came from the backseat. “For the third time.”

“Huh.” Did Anon's power work while he was asleep? Or was Nate's brain just too exhausted to remember anything?