Zeroes

by Scott Westerfeld

  But she didn’t have time, and she needed to keep the lights working for now.

  The air-conditioning could go, though. That would take a little load off, give her a bit more clarity—which would contribute to the Ultimate Goal, wouldn’t it? And a little warmth wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  Crash marked off the parameters and released it. The bliss of dropping that cumbersome chunk of temperature sensors and fan motors lifted her onto her toes. The system groaned through all its ducts, and its white noise died to silence.

  Yeah, that would make the cops jumpy. Or sweaty, anyway.

  Smoke detection? Alarms were always handy for instant chaos, so she’d save them until she needed noise. Crash sniffed around the radio dispatch center—yes, she could isolate it so the cops still got their emergency calls.

  Like a hospital, this was a place to do no harm. Or at least not too much harm. For example, those doors to the holding cells downstairs. Lucky they’d turned out to be on a separate circuit from the locks she’d just knocked out. That would’ve been bad.

  All those PCs and servers—she looked at their swarming ant nests of data and mentally rubbed her hands. She could choose her moment with them, too, time the chaos. Blow all the lights at the same time, maybe.

  Crash swept a trash bag out of the box on the cart and walked up the hallway, reaching through the stinging bee swarm of systems for more things to sacrifice.

  Here were the stairs. She headed up them to the second floor.

  “To your left, through that half-glass door,” Flicker said.

  Loads of people up here. In case anyone was watching, she did a pretend swipe with her school ID before pushing the door open.

  Some cops were clustered around a desk, yelling about the air-conditioning, arguing about who they were supposed to contact for a fix. No one spared the cleaner more than a glance.

  “On your left,” said Flicker.

  “I see him.” The sight of Ethan—of Scam, since this was a mission—sent a new trickle of annoyance down Crash’s spine. Not like all the little itches of tech, just the ever-present need to punch him in the face.

  Two cops were with Scam, one sitting and one standing. He sat all fake casual in an office chair, his expression alternating between his own scared teenage self and that smart-ass who did the talking for him.

  Crash checked out the rest of the room—for obstacles and pathways, sure, but the wiring was the thing, the signals pouring through it and being split and transformed and channeled. Lots of people around her meant better focus, wider reach. She tried to keep her eyes open as she felt along her extending antlers, her lengthening mind fingers.

  Flicker interrupted, her voice a little nervous. “Everyone still looks pretty calm, Crash. Pretty business-as-usual.”

  “Not for long.” Crash reached into the smoke detector in the ceiling above her, careful not to knock out the whole system—there was no point if it just died quietly. She had to hold back so much of herself, and just make the tiniest adjustment to cut the connection between those two plates there . . .

  She jumped at the shriek of the alarm, loud even through her earbuds. Everyone around her ducked and covered their ears as if they’d just been dive-bombed, then stared up in shock. Hoo-ee, what a noise!

  The problem was, she could barely think now. How was she supposed to keep the rest of this place working?

  Crash steered toward the desk where Scam sat. Flicker was a tiny, tinny voice, cheering and shouting in her earbuds.

  “Whatever, I can’t hear you,” Crash murmured, stepping back as a uniformed woman rushed past, swearing a streak. Lots of men were striding around now, but Crash slipped through them, invisible because she had brown skin, and was a girl, and wore the cleaning-company apron.

  Nearly everyone in the office had their hands over their ears. Some were up out of their chairs shouting suggestions. Others kept working away at screens, hunched under the pressure of the noise. One of Scam’s detectives, the big guy, had turned away and thrown up his hands. The other, a woman, sat there waiting calmly, fingers in her ears.

  From between them, Scam’s eyes lit on Crash. His flash of recognition turned to hope, then nerves and flat-out fear as she scowled back at him. He looked away again, self-consciously casual even with his hands over his ears.

  Crash stood back to let some cops scurry for the door, then slipped between two desks, where she wouldn’t be disturbed, and started sorting out the different layers of tech. She put out her feelers through the shifting galaxy-cloud of phones, through the more stable, tethered thrumming of the computers, to the sweet simplicity of the lighting system.

  She crashed it—such a tiny treat, such a little shiver up her spine, when this giant chocolate box was open in front of her. But it was good—that whole swarm of stingers finally switching off. Her skin purred for a moment with gratitude. Shouts went up, as if the people in the office were cheering her on.

  But then an emergency lighting system kicked to life. No, no, Crash wanted none of that. She dug deeper to its source and allowed that to fail too, and the room dimmed again—only a couple of frosted windows in the far wall let in sunlight. More cops sat back from their computers and looked around bewildered.

  Scam stared at her; then he glanced at the two detectives standing there like gatekeepers in front of him. Semidarkness and a bit of noise weren’t going to shift them.

  Right, then. Stay calm. Crash’s head was beginning to spin from what she’d done and what she might still do. She knelt to reach for a small trash can, an excuse to hold on to something.

  On her knees and stable, she let her mind go, and like a small but potent tornado it swept through the building, crashing this and that, all the minor things, all the unlucky subsystems, on its way in toward the roots of the server array. She kept her face down so Scam wouldn’t see how good this felt.

  “Holy shit.” Flicker’s voice was tiny in her ears, then suddenly altogether gone. Broken cell-phone connections fluttered around Crash, like streamers from a departing cruise liner.

  Something big and important flailed and died in the basement. She’d meant not to crash that, she thought vaguely. But it was too late now.

  The storm she’d called into being had its own logic now, its own demands. Was it her or the storm itself whispering through her lips into the chaos? She couldn’t hear the words, but she felt them like fire in her bones . . .

  It’s time to do some damage.

  CHAPTER 18

  FLICKER

  “LOST HER,” FLICKER SAID FROM half a block away, the nearest to the CCPD that her phone would work at all.

  “She’ll be fine,” Glorious Leader said. “Just tell me what you see.”

  Flicker took a moment before responding. Chaos was the simple answer.

  The lights had failed completely, leaving the inner offices lit only with a bobbing flurry of tiny screens. Flashlights were all the phones were good for, now that Crash had shredded the local repeater tower.

  Everything was a blur of motion in Flicker’s head. It was dizzying, being in people’s viewpoints when they were running around in darkness, eyes twitching and jerking. Some of them were evacuating, filling the stairwells. Flicker could hear the shriek of smoke alarms from the front steps.

  Finally she found a stable pair of eyeballs, the detective seated across from Scam. That gaze went from Scam to her partner, a big guy who was striding away, shouting into his useless phone.

  “Scam’s still being watched. But things are pretty messy in there.”

  “It’s under control,” Glorious Leader said. He said this a lot during missions. “Before the phones went out, Anonymous told me he had them in sight.”

  “Right, Anonymous.” Flicker always remembered the code name, even when the rest of it slipped her grasp. “But . . . this isn’t good. I’m seeing a bunch of cops with drawn guns. Why would they lock and load for a fire alarm?”

  “Maybe they think it’s an attack.”

 
“Um, it kind of is.” Flicker cast her vision into the group with the brandished weapons. They were headed downstairs, past the ground floor and deeper. “What’s in the basement, Bellwether?”

  “Of a police station?” The clatter of computer keys. “The generator? The parking lot? Mierda. The holding cells.”

  “Wait.” She went deeper, flicking herself from head to head. She was well past her usual range, but it was crowded in the CCPD, and her power used human beings like repeater towers, leapfrogging from one pair of eyes to the next.

  She found more people down there, a huddled group of them, their eyes full of darkness as hard as stone. Her view prickled with little stars of misfiring rods and cones, the fritz and glitter that sighted people saw when completely deprived of light.

  Then, for a moment, the blackness was cut in two by a single flashlight. It searched among the looming shadows of a dozen men, found a door, then switched off again.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “There’s a bunch of people sneaking around down there. Not cops.”

  “Electronic cell doors,” Nate said, his fingers still clicking on a keyboard. “They’re designed to stay locked in a power outage. But you can’t design for Crash.”

  “Okay. But where’d a bunch of prisoners get a flashlight?”

  “From a cop,” Nate said softly. “And probably not gently. Don’t tell Crash. She’ll lose it.”

  Flicker swore. Chizara was all about discipline. She lived by the credo of “Do no harm,” always keeping away from hospitals and airports. She’d never been on a plane or a train in her life, afraid she’d let her guard down for one catastrophic moment.

  “Focus on the mission, Flick.”

  At that tone in Glorious Leader’s voice, her Zero discipline clicked back in. She pulled vision from the sparkling darkness of the basement and flitted back up to the window-lit office space on the second floor.

  It was even more chaotic now. The glimmer of drawn guns, the lancing beams of big fat police flashlights. Some of the detectives were struggling into dark blue bulletproof vests.

  “They know what’s happening down in the basement.”

  “Good. That’s a perfect distraction. Can you see Crash yet?”

  Flicker was searching for Scam’s eyeballs among the havoc, and finally she recognized his thin-fingered, freckled hands in the gloom. He was tearing up a notepad.

  “They’ve left him alone,” she said. “I think he’s destroying evidence.”

  “So he’s keeping his head. At least we didn’t do this for nothing.”

  “I guess,” Flicker said, unfolding her cane. “I’m going back. You might lose me.”

  “Stay outside. Be—” His voice crackled and spat as she walked toward the police station, and then her earbuds went silent.

  Flicker snapped her vision closer, finding her orange dress among the milling, curious crowds watching the evacuation of the CCPD. The civilians who worked in the station were streaming down the front steps, blinking as they emerged from darkness into sunlight. A local news van was pulling up, the reporters inside no doubt thrilled about this banner day of bank robbery and police station chaos.

  Flicker slipped among the crush, using her cane, her ears, and flickers of stolen vision to navigate, heading toward the front steps, which nobody had thought to block off yet.

  She hoped that saving Rat Face was worth causing all this mayhem.

  CHAPTER 19

  MOB

  MIKEY HADN’T CALLED BACK ABOUT giving her a ride.

  He was probably at work already. That was Mikey’s deal: Dance all night, work all day and maybe dance the next night too. He said it kept him young. It also kept him busy.

  So Kelsie didn’t wait long. According to her phone, the police station was fifty-three minutes’ walk.

  As she checked the route, a thought went through her head: What kind of idiot robs a bank three miles from a police station? Of all the crazy stuff her dad had ever done, this made the least sense.

  The day was heating up. She had to keep pushing the hair off her damp face. She was glad for the loose harem pants and crop top she’d worn clubbing, even if they were earning her more glances than she really needed right then. Her muscles weren’t good sore anymore. They just hurt.

  But maybe it was better that Mikey hadn’t picked her up. She didn’t like lying to him. He’d never been anything but a friend to her. Trouble was, she had no idea where to start with the truth.

  The walk gave her time to think. When she was growing up, Dad had always said he could make anything better. He meant little things, like scrapes on her knee. And some big things, like the time in fifth grade when she’d freaked out at a playground fight—all those kids chanting Kill him! Kill him! in unison, and she’d almost wanted to join in. Or how every exam at school was like drowning in a room full of other people’s fear, no matter how hard she studied.

  Those were things Dad could deal with. But this was way bigger. Her dad had robbed a bank, and now he was going to prison.

  As she drew closer to the police station, a sickly fear started crawling around in Kelsie’s gut. How many years did you get for a bank robbery that got somebody killed? What if her father had pulled the trigger? What if he never came out?

  The squawk of a police car echoed down the street, and her heart skidded two inches sideways in her chest.

  The station was just ahead. A crowd was bubbling around it, onlookers and police officers. There were people streaming out of the station doors.

  Kelsie stopped. Something was wrong.

  She’d been feeling it for blocks now, the energy of the crowd making panicked zigzags low in her stomach. She’d thought it was her own anxiety. She hadn’t realized it was out there. She sped up, taking the city blocks at a jog, heading toward the noise and panic.

  Lights flashed in the police station windows, and alarms inside screamed and wailed. But the worst of it was the rush and wash of energies—broken connections, wild emotions. She felt like she was going down a waterfall.

  Crowds were only good when they shared something. When they were united by a purpose or a beat. Then she could slip inside, be part of that something more.

  But this was even more tangled than the bank robbery. Police, journalists, passersby were all pulling in different directions, a dozen crowds all braided and knotted up, refusing to be one thing.

  As if they were tributaries cascading into a river, the spray thrown up by their collision blinded her, nearly wiped her off her feet. For a moment the world was awash with white.

  She came to a halt a block away from the station, leaning against a wall to take deep breaths. Just like her dad had taught her. In, count to three, then out. Usually this helped when she had to tune out a crowd, when she had to be just a solitary girl in the middle of it all. To be Kelsie.

  In, two, three . . . out.

  But then a jolt came down the street, a fresh shock, and Kelsie lost herself again.

  She was everywhere at once, stretched thin across the top of the bubbling energies. Fear flooded her eyes and blocked her ears. She had to pull herself out of the echoing tide, then drag everyone else with her because with this kind of panic, people might do something stupid. And her dad was still in there.

  She had to make sure her dad was okay.

  “Are you all right?” someone shouted in her ear.

  She shook her head mutely. Whatever was going on in the police station, it was getting worse.

  Someone was helping her, leading her by the elbow to a bench nearby. She leaned forward over her knees. She felt like she was made of drops of rain on a window, all the rivulets of herself blurring into something bigger. She gulped mouthfuls of air and tried not to pass out.

  In, two, three . . . out.

  When the nausea cleared, she realized the ringing wasn’t in her ears. It was her phone. She ignored it. Probably Mikey asking if she still needed that ride. Whoever had helped her to the bench was gone.

  Kelsie looked up at
the station again. Maybe the police were evacuating people from the holding cells. They’d do that if there was a fire in the station. Right?

  Her phone kept ringing. Finally she pulled it from her pocket. “Yeah?”

  “Kels?” came a ragged voice. “It’s Dad.”

  She pressed a finger to her other ear. “Dad? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  “I did something.”

  “You robbed a bank is what you did!”

  There was a pause. “You saw the news already?”

  “I was across the street! That’s what happens when you rob banks in broad daylight—witnesses.” She stared at the station. Police were everywhere, scrambling and frantic. “They’re letting you use a phone?”

  “I got out.”

  It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. “What? How?”

  “The security system must’ve failed somehow. The doors just opened up.”

  Two police ran past her in bulletproof vests. They were carrying rifles.

  Her dad was still talking. “The lights went out all at once, Kels, and a bunch of alarms went off. We all just . . . walked out.”

  “Dad, are you crazy? It’s like a war zone out here! The cops all have guns. You’ll get shot!”

  “I’m half a mile away already. Kelsie, you have to meet me.”

  She hunched over her phone, not believing any of this.

  It felt like some new force was moving through her life, as powerful and strange as the ability she’d been born with. But at least she could see her father again.