Swarm (8 page)

“Seriously?
Dolls?
You could have killed someone!”

“Don't be so dramatic.” She gave Chizara a makeup-laden eye roll. “What were you planning to do, just let them dance all night?”

“Yes!” Chizara cried.

As they spoke, Thibault made his way around to the passenger side.

The guy looked bored. “Let's call it even. We messed with you, you messed with us. I mean, what do you think it feels like, getting shut down right in the middle?”

“Yeah, you couldn't have waited another minute?” the girl said. “We'd have given your dolls back.”

Chizara glared at them. “What were you even
doing
?”

“What do you
think
?” the girl said. “Do people not know about the birds and the bees in this shitty town?”

Chizara stared at them. “That was sex?”

“That was foreplay,” the guy said. “Wait till you see the news tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, lotta dolls going to be crying. Sniff.” The girl dabbed at her eye with the back of her wrist. “Now, are you going to start this engine, or do I have to knock your universe silly?”

Chizara stood tall. “You don't have a crowd to work with.”

The girl smiled, tapped her head. “I keep that juice stored up, right here. Just like you do. And if you force me to prove it, I'll make your crazy permanent.”

That
didn't sound good, and Chizara looked like she wasn't going to move.

Thibault crept closer, ready to grab the girl from behind if she tried anything.

The guy turned around and looked straight at him. “And that goes for you, too.”

Thibault froze.

Chizara stood aside, waved her hand. Something clicked under the hood and then the engine shrieked to life.

“Thanks for playing!” the girl shouted.

The guy spun the wheel expertly, pulling the Ford out of
the alley. With a rattling engine fart it shot off toward Hill Street. It bucked like a nervous show pony at the corner and swerved out into the traffic.

“Oregon plates,” Thibault said.

Chizara grabbed his arm and pulled him along the street.

“We should follow them. You got any money for a cab?” She skidded to a halt. “Oh, right. You never need cash. And my bag's back at the Dish. Damn it.”

“Wait. I do have some.” Thibault pulled the bills from his pocket and gestured after the car. “The money that guy threw on the bar.”

Chizara stared down at it, then met his gaze. “Um, okay. But that's not money.”

He looked down. He was holding out a fan of white rectangles. The paper was the right size and shape for bills, but it was blank.

He flipped them over and back—they stayed blank. “They were twenties, I swear. That guy slapped them down on the bar in a big wad. He was spending like it was . . . play money.”

Chizara just stared at him.

“You had the UV lights going. I
saw
the security stripes!”

She nodded. “So it's not just her.”

“They've both got powers,” Thibault said.

KELSIE PACKED AWAY HER VINYL
with unsteady hands.

Nate had bought it all for her, laying down a cool two grand in a record store in San Francisco, like money was nothing. That Justin guy had sourced the turntables from a retro website. They were secondhand, finicky and temperamental, the most beautiful and demanding things Kelsie had ever owned. Before tonight they had looked exactly like hope, like an end to everything unloved and lopsided in her past.

But now the Dish was a wreck. Strings of lights that had spanned the walls lay in glittering pieces on the floor. The few chairs in the club had been smashed, including an old couch of Dad's. Crushed beer cans and broken plastic cups were everywhere. Ethan was dutifully collecting them in a garbage bag.

Everywhere was evidence that people had fled, leaving behind coats, sweaters, phones—thrown off or forgotten in the terror. Even with only four Zeroes in the Dish, Kelsie could feel the feedback loop of shock. The invasion of new powers had shaken everything they'd built—the safe haven where they could hone their skills, the trust of their crowd.

“Let's go over this from the beginning,” Nate called to everyone from one of the last unbroken bar stools. “From when they showed up here—”

“They were at the Office-O first,” Ethan said, pausing with a crushed beer can in his hand.

Nate turned to him. “When?”

“Just before I came back. I had to print more flyers, and those two were there. I gave them one.”

“So inviting Sonia Sonic wasn't enough,” Flicker said. She was pacing in front of the bar, her worry a cold shiver on the group's spine.

“I didn't know they had powers!” Ethan cried, and then his voice dropped. “But they were acting kinda weird.”

“Weird how?” Nate asked.

“They said they didn't have money, but then they paid for everyone's shipping. Like, they yelled to people on the street, telling them to come in and get free stuff!”

Flicker broke in. “And the guy bought beer for the whole bar.”

“So why throw money around?” Nate asked. “To get the crowd churned up?”

Even with only four of them there, Kelsie felt his methodical focus in the energy of the room. She grabbed hold of it gratefully, pushed it through to the others. Nate really could be glorious—smart and attentive to everything you told him, like you mattered more than anyone else in the world.
What kind of speakers do you need? How sprung should the dance floor be?

Of course, other times he was more like the ruler of some tiny country, making speeches and building statues of himself.

The door of the Dish burst open.

It was Chizara, bright-eyed and panting, like she'd run a mile. The Zeroes' feedback loop blossomed with her bright, loose energy, and Flicker ran to wrap her arms around—

Thibault
, Kelsie reminded herself. She'd been doing so well remembering him, but now everything in her mind slipped and spun, not connecting right.

“Did you catch them?” Nate asked.

“I stopped their car,” Chizara panted. “But that girl threatened me with a lobotomy if I didn't let them go.”

“We were going to follow them in a cab,” Thibault said, pulling free of Flicker's embrace. “But all we had was this.”

He pulled a sheaf of blank paper from his pocket.

Everyone stared at him, uncomprehending.

Kelsie eased back their group focus, letting Thibault's energy in. When she'd first joined the Zeroes, she'd thought he was a cold spot in the room. But he had a mellow, solid presence, once she'd learned to feel for it.

“This is from the money he threw down on the bar,” he said. “Away from
him
, it was just blank paper.”

“Whoa,” Flicker said. “It looked real. And I saw it through
everybody's
eyes.”

Nate stood. “Money. The ultimate shared hallucination.”

Somehow Nate always managed to sound like he was hosting a nature documentary.

“Say what now?” Ethan asked.

“Money is a social construct,” Nate said. “It needs a crowd's agreement to make it work, to turn paper into something valuable. Haven't you ever found it weird that pieces of paper are valuable, just because of the numbers printed on them?”

“Um, no,” Ethan said.

But Kelsie was nodding.

Money had always seemed like a game to her and her father, except when they were out of it. Even then, Dad had usually found a way to get more—at any moment, he had a bunch of cons going. Their friend Fig had said that Jerry Laszlo worked harder at conning people than if he'd had a regular job.

“Oh, wait,” Ethan said, looking pale. “This is not good.”

“It's
fascinating
,” Nate said. “And that's why he offered to pay for everyone's shipping, and drinks! If his power's like ours, he's only rich when there's a crowd around him!”

“Crowd funding,” Thibault said drily. “We should call him Kickstarter.”

“Or Coin,” Nate said.

“They're just
jerks
.” Chizara rolled her eyes. “And you want to give them superhero names?”

“Uh, I think we've got a bigger problem than his name,” Ethan said. The energy in the room spasmed, focusing on him. He looked like he'd been busted cheating on an exam. “Because I totally bribed some cops with a bag full of that money.”

Nate stared. “You . . . what?”

“Did you just say you
bribed cops?
” Chizara cried.

“Technically, it was the voice that bribed them,” Ethan said. “And
technically
I didn't bribe them at all. I just handed them a bag of blank paper in exchange for going away.”

“Oops,” Flicker said.

“The cops were all smooth about it. They didn't even look in the bag!” Ethan's fear was pulsing through the group, setting off an alarm in Kelsie's head. “But the moment they try to buy doughnuts, they're going to be
pissed 
!”

Nate held up a hand, and everyone went quiet.

“What are they going to do, report us?” he said. “They took a
bribe
. We can pay them real money later.”

“Easy for you to say!” Ethan cried. “You've never had cops on your tail!”

“Except for the time your mother brought two detectives to my home, after you called me from a police station asking for
help
.” Nate turned away, and Kelsie felt him shutting out Ethan's ragged, anxious energy. “What's more important is that
we just discovered two more powers in the world, and we let them get away!”

“Not for long,” Thibault said. “They're planning something tomorrow. Something worse than this.”

The feeling of being invaded flowed through Kelsie again. She wanted to lash out, punch someone, protect her territory.

“Don't they care about keeping their powers secret?” she asked.

“I'm not sure they care about anything,” Chizara said. “Except each other, and that eye-banging thing they do.”

“When they got started on the dance floor, everything looked wrong,” Kelsie said. “My records, my turntables. I couldn't even recognize our crowd.”

“I couldn't understand my lighting system.” Chizara shook her head slowly. “Everything I built was like someone else had put it together and I didn't know how it worked.”

“I couldn't recognize Flicker.” Thibault reached out to curl his fingers through hers.

“Ditto,” Flicker said. “And I couldn't read braille anymore. Or remember your name.”

“I think her power was leaking a little at the Office-O,” Ethan said. “Sonia was staring at her phone funny, and I couldn't recognize my own voice. Like, my
real
one.”

“Wait,” Chizara said. “They used a power on you, and you led them
here
?”

Chizara's anger spiked through the Zeroes. Kelsie tried to steady them, but her own anger spilled into the loop.

Nate stood up and cleared his throat, and that steadied everything. “So her power is like Thibault's. He disappears by disrupting attention, cutting himself free of the social web. Maybe she cuts those connections for a whole crowd instead of just herself.”

“But she doesn't cut them,” Thibault said. “She
steals
them. It's like she sucks away all the attention in the room, focuses it between her and him.”

Kelsie said, “It's not attention she steals. It's more personal.”

“Right,” Nate said, picking up the thread. “Your turntables. Chizara's lights. Ethan's voice. For Anon and Flicker, each other. She takes your understanding of what's important to you—maybe even your
love
of it—and makes it hers.”

“Which is why people go crazy,” Flicker said. “She glitches your connection to the thing you love.”

“Good name,” Ethan muttered. “She's a total Glitch.”

“Yeah, perfect,” Chizara said. “Now that she has a code name, problem solved!”

Nate paced slowly. “Opposites attract. Coin takes something worthless and makes it valuable. And Glitch takes whatever's most valuable to you and makes it meaningless. But what do they get out of it?”

“The birds and the bees,” Chizara said. “Her words, not mine.”

Nate stared. “You mean it's just sex? Like, for
fun
?”

Kelsie felt her anger at Glitch and Coin turn, kicking out jaggedly into the group. “
Fun
is why most people come to nightclubs, Nate. Experimenting on people is not a normal thing!”

She felt bad as soon as she said it. Nate was all about control. So for him, experimenting with their superpowers probably seemed like the responsible thing to do.