Swarm (5 page)

They were right on the edge of out of control. Familiar faces from her Ivy Street clubbing days and a bunch of new people too. She was ready for them. Tonight she'd blend her music and her power to create the most awesome dance party Cambria had ever seen.

The boom frames on the big speakers beside her rattled, sending the bass like a heartbeat through the floor of her DJ platform. She let the energy fill up the room like a flood, carrying her away.

She amped the bass, then flipped her bulky headphones off one ear to hear the whooping and hollering.

She leaned against the wave of eagerness from the crowd.
She needed this. It was only here, in the DJ booth, that she could forget about the stupid mess of her life. The flashbacks to last summer stopped when the vinyl was spinning.

She bent over her turntables, matching the next track's tempo to the remixed pop song already playing. Then she reached out into the crowd and cross-faded between decks. . . .

In one voice, the crowd roared.

The savage delight of their reaction was that of an animal let off the leash. The wilder they got, the wilder Kelsie felt. The farther she went out on a limb, the more they wanted to follow. Her spine was a hot white spotlight shining right out through the top of her skull.

Dad would've been so proud. He'd barely recognize her, up here in the DJ booth five feet above the dance floor. Close enough to be part of the crowd, but separate, too. Working the room with her music and magic.

A thought stabbed through her—if only she'd gotten him help years ago.

The energy in the room darkened, Kelsie's loss spilling across them. She eased back, counting out a long breath. The panic attacks had begun the night Dad died. She was getting better, though, with the Zeroes' help. Her roomie—Thibault, that was his name—was teaching her the Middle Way.

When she'd started DJing two months back, the crowd kept carrying her off, and she'd forget that she was supposed
to control the music. Songs had stuttered or faded out into embarrassing pauses.

Tonight she wouldn't miss a beat. She'd make the Zeroes proud, and pay them back for taking her in. She was one of them, even if she hadn't been practicing her power as long.

Chizara's lights swung toward the middle of the dance floor and landed on a couple. A girl and guy eye-banging each other as they danced, oblivious to everyone else. Kelsie felt a pang of envy. They were lost in their own world. She wondered if she would ever be part of something so private and intense.

But it was weird. Around the couple the crowd was growing restless and shaky. Like they sensed something they couldn't be part of. The intensity in the room became rough and unpredictable, and someone stumbled across the dance floor. Suddenly nobody seemed to know what to do with their bodies.

Kelsie gasped, feeling the crowd's shakiness reach out for her.

She could fix this. Something light and simple would drag them back from the edge, the kind of thing that got played during time-outs at a basketball game.

Kelsie reached for the crate of vinyl, but something weird happened—she couldn't recognize the first album she pulled out. The artist and track names were in some kind of alien scrawl. The pictures turned to slush, spreading across the crate and infecting every cover until they were all unreadable.

Beside her the decks seemed to turn into mouths with sharp pointed teeth. She leaped back before they could snap off her hands.

“Oh my God!”

Her confusion crashed against the weird tides of energy on the dance floor, forming a feedback loop of pure panic. The music from the speakers jolted—two mismatched beats colliding, like a dogfight breaking out.

Out on the dance floor the crowd became an angry sea, and the music turned to screams. The Dish filled with a monstrous shape where the dance floor had been.

Kelsie was alone up here, and all the darkness in the world was spread out below.

She couldn't recognize anything—or anyone.

THE MUSIC SKIDDED, TWO SONGS
tangling, Kelsie making a rare mistake.

Flicker was on her knees, feeling among the cans in the refrigerator, fingers searching for cold aluminum. None of the beers felt like they'd been inside for more than a minute or two. Best to close the door and let the fridge do its thing.

“It's warm, sorry,” she said, standing up and handing the guy a can. She slid her vision into his eyes, saw that he was handing her a ten, and gave him a five from the cash drawer stuffed full of money from that rich guy a minute ago.

What an asshole. Compensating much?

She bounced her vision around the bar—nobody was staring at her, waiting for a drink. But the eyeballs out on
the dance floor were twitching, everyone a little unsteady on their feet. Pre-Christmas jitters, maybe?

She searched for Anon's red leather jacket, something familiar to hold on to.

Wait—Anon wasn't his real name.

Weird. She'd lost it somehow. By reflex her fingers went to the bracelet around her right wrist. Braille letters were punched into the band of leather. They settled slowly into meaning.

T-H-I-B-A-U-L-T.

Flicker played the sound of it in her mind, liltingly French.

When she'd picked braille back up a month ago, it had slid back into her fingers, feeling easy and right. It was a handy way to leave notes for herself, since her boyfriend's involuntary superpower happened to be erasing memories.

The air shook again, interrupting Flicker's thoughts. More mismatched tempos blared from the speakers, like a collision of two marching bands in a parade.

Shit. It wasn't like Kelsie to keep blowing transitions like this. And the two beats were
still
flailing against each other.

Flicker cast her vision out into the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of the DJ platform.

But everything looked
wrong.
 . . .

Dancers usually stared down at their feet, or up at the light show, or at attractive strangers. But the eyes out there were
darting around in a panic, like someone trying to find a snake in their bedroom.

Over the juddering music, Flicker heard anxious cries of confusion building. She could almost
smell
the fear of the crowd.

And the dancing had turned to flailing . . . like something out of a demented puppet show. Limbs and torsos jerking around, pulled by invisible lines of force. Like everyone's brains had been glitched somehow and they'd forgotten how to use their own bodies.

She caught a glimpse of Kelsie on the DJ platform, huddled in a corner by her records, arms wrapped around her knees. Chizara stared at her light-booth controls, confused and terrified. The lights were swinging through the same patterns again and again, stuck in a loop as random as the music.

Whatever this was, it had hit everybody, which meant it must also be affecting . . .

Flicker cast her vision around, looking for him. He was wearing something special tonight. Right—a red leather jacket.

She found it a moment later, on the dance floor with all those hideously jerking bodies. His movements looked just as wrong, glitchy and uncoordinated.

But the worst thing was his face. He was a fake.

What was he
supposed
to look like? Flicker ransacked her
memory. His eyes, his chin, his smile? All those carefully memorized features looked wrong to her too. They matched this impostor out on the dance floor, but not her own inner sense of
rightness
.

And she'd forgotten his name. Not just the tricky real one—his code name too.

Flicker's fingers went to her wrist, searching the band of leather. But again her mind failed her, the dots refusing to resolve into letters.

Braille was gone too.

Something in this club was messing with her brain—with
everyone's
brain.

She had to get out.

Flicker switched off her vision, turned from the seething dance floor, and ran the length of the bar. She jumped the boxes she'd stacked there this afternoon. Which meant her memory wasn't broken, just her ability to
recognize
.

She rolled under the flip-down door of the bar, shouldered the push bar of the emergency exit, and tumbled through, into the back alley full of garbage bags and broken glass. The smell of piss and old cigarettes hit her like a fist, but something clicked back into place inside her brain.

“Anon,” she said with relief. “Thibault.”

Even better, she saw his face. The pale half-moon of his ear peeking out from beneath dark hair, the line of his jaw when he smiled.

Here outside the Dish, she was herself again.

Nate was out in front working the door, maybe beyond the reach of whatever was happening inside. And clear of Crash's Faraday cage.

Flicker pulled out her phone, held down the home button for voice control.

“Call Glorious Leader.”

“SOMETHING'S HAPPENING.” FLICKER'S VOICE WAS
tight, panicked. “It's bad.”

Nate frowned, still scanning the line of waiting people. Another twenty exactly. He'd been about to let them in and bump the crowd.

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone's moving wrong. And I can't think straight.”

“Wait. What?”

“Crash and Mob are freaking out,” Flicker went on breathlessly. “It was hitting me too. I couldn't even remember Anon!”

“Isn't that—”

“No, not just the usual. I couldn't
recognize
him.”

Nate turned and faced the door to the club. It sounded like Flicker had overdosed on too many dancing eyeballs. A smaller
version of this had happened the first night of the Dish.

“Stay behind the bar,” he said. “I'm coming in.”

“Don't! I'm out back—had to leave.” He heard Flicker's breathing slow as she got under control again. “Seriously, Nate, it's not just me. Something's going wrong in there. Like, our powers got tangled up or something. Or Mob's got everyone in some kind of weird-ass feedback loop.”

Nate shook his head, refusing to believe. Nothing had changed from last month or the month before. This was a
controlled
experiment.

“Someone's going to get killed!” Flicker cried.

“Okay. Just stay where you are.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.” Nate slipped his phone back into his pocket, wondering what had gone wrong. The other times Flicker had overdosed herself with a crowd's vision, she might've been dizzy, but she'd known what was happening.

He turned. “Craig? Don't let anyone in till I tell you.”

“You got it, Mr. Saldana” came the firm reply. For a moment Nate considered bringing the Craig along for protection. But if someone's power was really going haywire in there, he didn't want those massive limbs flailing around.

Nate opened the door.

Inside the Dish, the crowd had been shattered into a thousand pieces. There was no unity, no form, no connection. Even the weblike structure of a leaderless rabble was missing.

The music was a train wreck, two songs playing at once, and the dancing had descended into a horror of twitching limbs. Mob was huddled on her platform, terrified.

Fear was the only force that bound the room together. Nate could feel it in his bones, panic and confusion, along with something deeper and more cutting—loss of self, of meaning.

The source of the nightmare was easy to spot. In the center of the dance floor a couple whirled around each other. A guy with a half-shaved head and a girl in a frilly skirt, a white-hot beam of attention streaming between their eyes.

Nate had never seen a bond so intense, so brilliant. It scythed out into the crowd as the couple spun, keeping everyone else severed and detached. As if the pair had sucked up every glimmer of connection in the room and focused it between themselves.

They had powers.