Zeroes

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Nothing they hadn’t figured out for themselves. And I didn’t know anything about a bank job!”

  “Right.” He rubbed at his face. “And you’d never rat on your old man.”

  For a moment he seemed to be drifting off.

  “Dad,” Kelsie said with the sharp tone she used when he was high. “What else did this kid say?”

  “He said you still miss your mom.”

  She just stared at him. The words seemed to echo in the emptiness of the stadium. The two of them didn’t talk about her mother. Ever.

  And right now, right after, seemed like a bad time to start.

  “What else?” Kelsie managed after a while.

  “He was talking like Nic had set us up, to get out of this drug charge a few months back. The cops let him go and nobody could figure why. And Nic only came to town this year. Nobody trusts him or his crew yet.”

  “And yet you were robbing a bank with him?”

  “I owed them money.” Her father sounded hollowed out, defeated. “But while the kid was talking, it all clicked into place. How I didn’t really trust Nic, and how everything had gone wrong with the job. And then there were flashing lights outside, and I knew we’d been set up.”

  Kelsie shook her head. This wasn’t her father talking. He was so easygoing; he wasn’t paranoid even when there were people out to get him.

  “So you shot him?”

  “No! But I was yelling at Nic, and I used his name in front of all those people. That’s when he pointed his gun at me. But Hank had my back.”

  It took Kelsie a moment to understand, but then a grim shiver of relief traveled down her spine. “They shot each other.”

  Her dad turned to stare at her. “Of course. You didn’t think I’d hurt someone, did you? Geez, Kels.”

  She felt a faint smile on her lips. “I also never thought you’d rob a damn bank.”

  “Me neither,” he sighed. “And it doesn’t make sense anymore, what the kid said. I mean, cops setting up a bank robbery? Just to get me?”

  Kelsie nodded. If the Cambria police were aware of her father at all, he was probably in last place on their most-wanted list.

  “So Nic was the guy you owed money to?”

  “His uncle, Alexei Bagrov.” Her father’s gaze traveled the empty stadium. “He’s going to kill me. He’s going to find me and kill me.”

  “Not if we get you out of town,” Kelsie said, but it came out flat. Her father barely kept it together here in Cambria, where he knew everyone and most people liked him. He’d never survive in a strange city, pursued by both cops and gangsters.

  She glanced around the stadium. It was completely empty now, apart from the two of them. The lawn mower sat alone in the middle of the field, its engine open to the elements.

  She wondered if this was the last time she’d be with her dad like this. She pushed her hand into his, linking fingers and squeezing. Dad squeezed back.

  “You gotta do me a favor, Kels. Go see Fig. He owes me a couple grand.”

  “Of course. That’s enough to leave town, right?”

  He looked away. “Just find Fig.”

  She nodded mutely, looking at her hands. Love and anger fought inside her with no outlet, no crowd to soak up what she felt.

  “Okay,” she said. “How do I get in touch with you?”

  “I’ll call.” He put his arm around her shoulders, trying to smile. “You should stay with friends for a while. The police will be looking for me at home. And so will Bagrov.”

  Kelsie went cold despite the summer heat swelling up from the concrete stands.

  Of course. If gangsters were after her dad, then they’d be after her, too. She felt sick and dizzy just thinking about it.

  “But where will you stay, Dad?”

  “I’ve got a few holes I can disappear into.” He gave her that smile again. It was less convincing every time. “Promise me you won’t go home until I got a way to fix this, okay?”

  Hope twisted in her stomach. Maybe for once he had a plan. “Okay, I promise. But be careful.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Dad gave her a light punch to her shoulder, the way he always did when he had to leave home. Like he was heading out to some poker game.

  When he got to his feet, Kelsie realized that she didn’t want him to leave yet. She wanted to sit in the empty stadium and pretend a baseball game was going on below.

  “That kid,” he said, gazing into the middle distance. “Someone must have told him exactly what to say. Someone was out to get me, Kels.”

  She didn’t disagree. Even Dad’s friends spent most of the time angry at him.

  Which meant there was even more to worry about than the cops and the gangsters Dad owed money to. Somebody else was after them. Some kid playing games with their lives.

  “I’ll talk to Fig tonight,” she said. “See if anyone knows anything.”

  Her father smiled, his hand heavy on her shoulder. “Thanks, Kels. Sorry your old man’s such a screwup.”

  She managed a smile. She didn’t have the strength to argue.

  CHAPTER 25

  SCAM

  ETHAN HAD THE DISTINCT IMPRESSION his life was getting worse.

  Not only did he have pissed-off drug dealers after him for stealing their bag of cash (and their car, come to think of it), he also had a homicidal bank robber (who was on the loose now, thanks to Chizara) hating him for messing up a heist. And then there were the cops wanting to grill Ethan about being buddies with said bank robber. On top of which he hadn’t slept for thirty-something hours.

  But worst of all, he had Glorious Leader giving him orders again, and taking his bag full of cash. Hey, Scam, welcome back to the Zeroes. Say, have you heard about our new fee structure?

  What gave Nate the right to take the money anyhow? He hadn’t been driven to a creepy cottage by a guy with no neck, or forced to listen to weird ramblings about “doof-doof music.” Glorious Dickhead hadn’t liberated the duffel bag from Taylor and the Craig, and from bank robbers, and from a police station, had he?

  But here was Ethan, lying across the backseat of Nate’s beamer, knees up, feet against the door, with no bag of cash to make up for the horror show of the last twelve hours. He wasn’t even allowed to sit up like a normal person—Nate hadn’t let them leave until Ethan was lying on the backseat, staring up at the car’s ceiling and cursing the voice for ever calling his former friends for help.

  Nate had acted like he was doing Ethan a favor, shipping him off to a hiding place. But he only cared about their powers staying secret. So why hadn’t he come up with a rescue plan that didn’t involve mass destruction of police property?

  Chizara was overkill on two legs. Ethan’s mother had a saying for the petty criminals she prosecuted: All they had were hammers, so everything looked like a nail. Chizara’s problem was worse. She was a chain saw who thought she was a scalpel.

  No doubt the police would love to hear how Crash had nuked the CCPD, and how it was all Glorious Leader’s idea. The voice would give that story a righteous telling, if Ethan ever let it.

  He rubbed at his face, which hurt from his jaw all the way up to his ears. Too much talking and too little sleep. Too much letting the voice yank his throat and his tongue. What he needed was a week in his bedroom with a stack of movies and a ton of easy-to-chew junk food.

  All Ethan had wanted last night was to get home. If only he’d chosen some raver to bum a ride from, he would’ve been in his own bed before dawn. He’d probably still be asleep now, instead of hiding in the back of a car from a truly epic assortment of pursuers. A really comfortable car, sure, but not when you were lying across the backseat, heading for . . .

  Wait, where was he heading?

  Wait. Who was driving?

  Ethan lurched up, scrambling for a grip on the front passenger seat. He hauled himself into a sitting position. Who the hell was that in the driver’s seat?

  Ethan’s exhausted brain refused to click.

  “Uh . .
. ,” he started.

  The guy turned and gave him an annoyed look. “Keep your head down, will you? There’s cops everywhere.”

  Ethan flopped back onto the car seat. Of course. The guy had given him the same I hate you, Scam look that Nate’s crew all practiced daily. So it had to be him, the guy who was hard to remember.

  Ethan lay there, trying to keep that fact in his mind: Anonymous was driving the car. There was something freaky about it, like being taken to another dimension. Ethan had no idea where they were going, or how long they’d been driving. Were they even still in Cambria?

  What if the guy just dumped him by the side of the road a thousand miles away? Would Nate and the others even realize Ethan was gone? Or would he drop down the same memory hole as what’s-his-name?

  He had to focus, to get this guy on his side and find out where they were going. Even if his jaw already hurt like crazy.

  Come on, tell this guy something he wants to hear.

  “Sorry, Thibault,” the voice said. “I must have dozed off.”

  At the sound of his own name, the guy jerked around to look at Ethan. The car swerved a little, shoving Ethan headfirst into the door. His head made a thwack against the handle, the impact reverberating all the way through to his sore teeth.

  “Whoa,” said the guy, turning back to the road. “Sorry. I don’t drive a lot.”

  The car straightened out. Ethan reached up to rub the top of his bruised head.

  “Yeah, I can tell, Thi—” Ethan began, but he couldn’t work out how to say the guy’s name. It had sounded French or something when the voice had said it.

  He tried to visualize it in his head, as letters. Nope. Couldn’t do it.

  The guy chuckled. “What? Can’t talk without help?”

  “I can talk fine. Do you always swerve off the road when someone says your name?”

  A shrug. “I was surprised you remembered, is all. But that wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Just trying to be polite.” It was hard talking to the guy, especially without eye contact. Ethan’s brain kept drifting away to the buildings slipping past the car windows.

  “If you want to be polite, don’t do that thing with me. No voice. Okay?”

  “Happy not to.” As Ethan reached up to rub his jaw again, he realized there was blue ink smudged into his palm. Right. Nate had made him write something there before they’d left.

  It was the guy’s name—Thibault. He tried to remember his one semester of French. The voice had been great at the oral exams. The written tests, not so much.

  “Teebo?”

  Thibault grunted. “Close enough.”

  The car slowed, rounding a corner, and then accelerated again.

  Ethan squirmed around behind the passenger’s seat, where he could keep his gaze on Thibault’s profile. Even so, his eyes kept trying to slide away, like the guy was visual oil.

  Ethan had to keep talking, or he’d forget who the guy was again and have another jolt of realizing he didn’t know who was driving. Maybe he’d already had a whole series of mini freak-outs on this ride and had forgotten them all. As if the beamer’s backseat was his own private hell.

  He racked his brain for what the voice would say in this situation. Something charming.

  “I like your shirt,” he said.

  The guy—Thibault, damn it—just glanced back at Ethan and rolled his eyes.

  Crap. How did normal people keep up this conversation thing? Listening to the voice, it always seemed to Ethan like small talk was a bunch of horseshit. Why did everyone waste so much time on it?

  He needed to say something real.

  “Listen,” Ethan said, then paused to check his hand. “Teebo, about last summer—”

  “Are you using your voice?”

  “No!” Seriously. This was like a conversation with his mother. “Can’t you tell by now?”

  “I can tell, Scam. But . . .” Thibault shrugged. “I just figure your voice could sound like you, if it wanted.”

  Ethan thought about this for a moment. “It’s not that smart. It just knows what I want, and what people need to hear for me to get it.”

  “Well, what I want is for you to not use it,” Thibault said. “See the problem? It could try to trick me.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Ethan pressed a fist to his jaw, trying to push out some of the ache. He’d never thought about the voice pretending to be him, the real him. The thought was pretty scary, actually. “I won’t let it do that, okay? I promise I won’t use it on you.”

  “Are you sure? You seem to lose control sometimes.”

  “Well, kind of.” Ethan frowned. “Wait. How do you know so much about it anyway?”

  Thibault glanced back, smiling. “I know a lot about you guys. Especially you, Scam.”

  “Holy crap. Do you, like, spy on us?”

  Thibault paused a moment, then said, “So what about last summer?”

  Ethan’s brain sputtered for a moment, wanting to hold on to what the guy had said just a second ago. It seemed important to remember. But the change of subject had knocked it out of his head, and he had to keep talking or completely forget what was going on.

  “Yeah, last summer, when I dissed everyone. I’m sorry about that. I don’t even know what I said, but Nate was being a pain, and I got really angry.”

  “You were a jerk, is what you were.”

  “Yeah, the voice . . .” Ethan shook his head. “I was a jerk. And I’m sorry.”

  The car eased to a stop at a traffic light. Thibault turned again to look at him. Ethan tried to give him a smile.

  “Say that again,” Thibault said.

  “I’m sorry about what I said last summer. Whatever it was.”

  Thibault was quiet a moment, still watching.

  “You’re not using your voice,” he said at last, like it was a fact.

  “Nope. This is me talking.”

  “And you really don’t remember what you said to me?”

  “I don’t remember half the stuff I say! It’s like listening to the conversation at the next table, right? You can hear what they’re saying, but most of it doesn’t make enough sense to stick in your mind.”

  After a moment of silence, the traffic around them began to move again, and Thibault turned away.

  “Sucks to be you,” he said.

  He was right about that.

  CHAPTER 26

  ANONYMOUS

  IN THE ELEVATOR UP FROM the parking lot, Thibault felt Ethan’s attention finally settle on him, sharp and focused. Elevators were good that way. Only a few square yards, nothing to look at but each other.

  The lobby would be the tricky part.

  “This place is pretty fancy,” Thibault said. “And you look like a hobo.”

  Ethan glanced down at his shirt. A decent shirt, which was unusual for him, but sweaty and crumpled.

  “I’ve never been inside a nice hotel.”

  “Just walk straight across the lobby,” Thibault said. “Anyone looks at you funny, just remember: You belong here.”

  “Remember?” Ethan asked. “But isn’t your superpower making people forget?”

  Thibault sighed. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  The doors slid open onto the Hotel Magnifique’s spacious lobby, its marble floor a shiny lake with a thick, scroll-patterned carpet on the far bank.

  They stepped out. The uniformed staff stood in the soft glow of their screens behind reception. Thibault knew them all by name, and he was glad to see that Janessa wasn’t on this shift. She was a stickler about trespassers.

  A couple of guests were getting checked in, and a few people lounged in the armchairs. A small group waited by the main door while the bellman, Tom Creasy, called for a cab out on the turnaround.

  No cops, or anybody who looked like a drug dealer, so Ethan was safe from arrest or a beat-down. Which meant that he was really coming up to Thibault’s room, invading his home.

  Where was a revenge-crazed drug dealer when you
needed one?

  A few yards from the elevator, Thibault felt himself fading from Ethan’s awareness. Shimmers of attention crisscrossed the open space like spiderweb threads, linking the crowd. Each group felt the flash of the others’ conversations, reveled in the spark of shared laughter. But of all those simple human connections, none touched Thibault at all.

  It was a seriously dick move on the part of the universe: Of everyone in this room, only he could see all those glimmers of awareness, feel them in his gut and as electricity on his skin. But the glimmers never found him in return, not in any group bigger than a half dozen people.

  That was what made him Anonymous.

  Ethan, on the other hand, was lit up like a disco ball. He’d become the center of his own little web, throwing out a thousand strands of nervous awareness. Feeling out of place was a great way to get noticed.

  The desk staff were looking now, the tendrils of their attention reaching across the lobby. They spared Thibault a glimmer of notice, which he chopped away with a flat hand. He’d learned as a little kid how hard it was to keep people’s attention, but disappearing was always easy.

  He grabbed a notepad and pen from the concierge’s desk, scrawled his room number—PH2—and the words Bellwether says go here.

  Ethan had drifted to a halt and was staring at the lobby’s giant flower-and-twig arrangement. Five seconds’ separation in the crowd, on top of all this unfamiliar luxury to gawk at, had erased any memory of Thibault.

  “Scam!”

  Ethan jerked back at the sound of his code name, then managed a puzzled look.

  “Oh. You’re that guy, right?”

  “Read this,” said Thibault.

  Ethan took the note, saw Nate’s code name. “Wait. This is a training exercise?” He had the sense to keep his voice low.

  “You got it.” Thibault pushed Ethan toward the main elevator bank. The guy was still walking too slowly, staring at everything with his mouth open, radiating a strong signal of not belonging. Useless.

  To be fair, Thibault had lived in the Magnifique for three years now. He barely saw the place anymore, but back in the early days everything had screamed money and privilege and What are you doing here, young man? Even the cool, soft light felt expensive, falling through the draped windows onto the fat leather armchairs. The giant mirrors made it hard to tell exactly how big the lobby was, as if the luxury went cascading out into infinity around you.