Zeroes

by Scott Westerfeld

  Nate’s training missions had shown that it took six people to form the beginnings of the Curve. It was in crowds of six or more where Crash could really wreck things, where Flicker could throw her vision half a mile, and where Anonymous truly vanished.

  But of all their powers, Nate’s was most affected by the Curve. Being a leader was pointless without a crowd to follow you.

  Nate had seven in this room. The cops didn’t stand a chance.

  “This is about a phone call you received yesterday, about eleven in the morning.” King had a printout in her hand—phone company records, not a memorized number. There was no point in pretending the call hadn’t happened.

  Besides, King would’ve recognized his voice by now.

  Nate gave her a momentary puzzled look, then nodded. “Right. That crank call.”

  “You thought it was a joke?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Of course. They said it was for someone called Scam.”

  “Scamiglia,” King read from her notepad. She took a step closer. “And it was me you were talking to.”

  “I’m so sorry, Detective. All I heard was ‘Scam.’ ” Nate shrugged. “I thought it was an old friend of mine. This guy was always playing jokes. Always lying about everything, you know?”

  At these words Ethan’s mother sat a little straighter.

  Detective King was looming over him now, so Nate let his perfect smile drop into a frown. The room cooled a little.

  His sisters felt it too, the promise of conflict, the play of dominance and focus that lit up the air like sparklers. This was a game for them, one that Nate had raised them to play. Their attention settled over him like a mantle, his to use, and cold little glares stabbed up from their dark and beautiful eyes.

  Detective King took a step back.

  “What was this friend’s name?” DDA Cooper said.

  “Ethan. But everyone called him Scam.”

  The muscles of her jaw tightened just a little. Yes, definitely his mother.

  Using Ethan’s code name was a risk. But the name made the lies of yesterday his fault—and, by extension, his mother’s.

  “Scam,” Nate said again, respecting the power of repetition. “Because he was always lying.”

  Following his lead, his sisters turned their baleful glares on the deputy district attorney.

  Detective Fuentes asked something, but Nate ignored him, shut him out of the conversation entirely. He sharpened his connection with Ethan’s mother, but softened his disapproval into an invitation for her to speak again.

  “Got any idea where he is?” she asked.

  “None.” Nate liked to think he was an excellent liar, but his words always tasted a little bit crisper when they were true. Ethan had gone off somewhere to hide, but where or with whom wouldn’t come to mind. “We hung out a lot, last year. But it’s been a while.”

  “So you haven’t seen his video?” Fuentes asked.

  Nate stared at him, as if the question made no sense, then turned back to DDA Cooper. “Is Ethan okay?”

  He drew his sisters along, and their little faces opened with concern.

  She didn’t answer at first, and the detectives looked uncomfortable. It was probably tricky having a DDA along when she was the mother of a suspect, or a material witness—or whatever Scam was.

  Fuentes cleared his throat. “Why did you claim to be a lawyer? When I get a crank call, I hang up.”

  Nate spoke directly to DDA Cooper. “We always used to joke with Scam—with Ethan, I mean—that he would wind up in jail one day. I thought he’d gotten a friend to pretend to be a cop, like it had finally happened. So I played along.”

  “You know,” Fuentes said, “misrepresenting yourself to a police officer, that’s a felony.”

  “I didn’t know who you were.” Nate looked up at the two detectives, lowering the full weight of his disdain, and his sisters’, on them. “Really, Detective King. You were asking for some lawyer called Scam, who didn’t exist. And you kept talking about ‘Terrence,’ who also doesn’t exist. The whole thing was a joke, wasn’t it? On you.”

  The two of them took another shuffle backward. They’d lost track of a kid who was both a material witness to a homicide and the missing son of a prosecutor. On top of which their department had lost a whole station’s worth of suspects, with one of their own put into a coma in the process.

  Their confidence was shaken. He could see it in the unfocused glimmers of their awareness.

  They asked more questions, but Nate held his nerve. He and his sisters nodded and smiled when DDA Cooper spoke, shook their heads when the others did. Not so much that the detectives would notice, just enough to worry their hindbrains, to urge them gently backward and out of the conversation.

  Soon they were clear across the room. Ethan’s mother had been stripped of their protection, left alone on the armchair, which had a broken spring and was never very comfortable.

  For a moment Nate felt sorry for her. Raising Ethan couldn’t be easy—you’d always wonder if the way he’d turned out was your fault.

  “I haven’t seen him since last summer,” Nate said to her. “He lost all his friends on the same day. Spouted a bunch of stuff he couldn’t take back.” He saw that she believed every word of that.

  Maybe it was better to be caught off guard like this. If he’d had time to prepare, he would have come up with stories, lies. But the perfect weapon against Scam’s mother was the truth, the one thing she’d never heard from her son’s mouth.

  “There was a group of you?” Fuentes was still trying to sound tough, though by now he was backed up against a potted fern. “Maybe one of the others might know where he is.”

  “Maybe so. But I lost touch with them all, after what Ethan said to us. He busted up the group.” It was practically cheating, sticking so close to the facts, so he added a lie: “I don’t know how to find them.”

  “Just give us names,” Detective King said, pulling out a notepad.

  Nate smiled and made up three names. Most teenagers didn’t have listed phone numbers, and people moved away from Cambria all the time. If the detectives felt like they’d gotten something from the visit, they could leave without losing face.

  This had been instructive, but he was late for his meeting with Chizara.

  “Thank you,” said DDA Cooper before she departed, extending her hand. And for a moment Nate worried that he’d connected too well. The last thing he wanted was for her to look him up again, hoping to learn more about her son.

  But he took her hand and deployed his warmest look of concern. “We didn’t part on the best of terms, but wherever Ethan is, I really hope he’s okay.”

  CHAPTER 38

  SCAM

  “RIP OUT YOUR SPINE AND make you eat it!” Ethan sent a spray of potato chips across the coffee table.

  He hadn’t meant the spray as a distraction, but that was the moment when Thibault made his fatal mistake. His tree sprite dangled a moment too long from the embezzler vine and took a fireball right in his face.

  “Die! Die! Die!” Ethan cried. This rage high felt good, like the fireballs were destroying the fact that he was being hunted. Turned out Red Scepter III was the only thing that stopped him thinking about everyone who wanted him dead or in custody.

  The sprite made one last leap for the tree branch overhead, but a fireball connected halfway up.

  “Finally!” Ethan fell backward on the couch. “I killed you good, Tee!”

  He turned, ready to gloat some more, but Thibault was staring at him, wide-eyed.

  “Oh,” Ethan said, surveying the coffee table. “Sorry about the chips.”

  “No.” Thibault still looked astonished. “I mean, yes, that was disgusting. But you remembered me!”

  “Oh, right.” Ethan had been fully into the game, all the way down in that animal level where every twitch of the wizard was an extension of his own body. But not once had he forgotten Thibault next to him. And not once had he thought about angry bank r
obbers or angry cops or his inevitably disappointed mom.

  Thibault was grinning hard, like a troop of Girl Scouts had just handed him all their cookies.

  Ethan looked back at the screen, where he’d left his wizard motionless. Poor guy was getting pecked to death. Ethan chuckled. All that mattered was his revenge on Thibault for seventeen straight losses.

  Ethan even remembered the score: seventeen kills to one now!

  “I guess we, like, bonded or something.”

  Thibault laughed. “Maybe you’re like those bacteria that get resistant to antibiotics.”

  “Gee, thanks. This is a big deal!” It felt even bigger than killing the tree sprite. “I mean, has this ever happened to you before?”

  “With Nate, once or twice.”

  “Oh, right, of course. Glorious Leader.”

  “He’d set up meetings.” Thibault dropped the controller to his lap. “Just me and him in the middle of an empty field. And the next day he’d e-mail and tell me what we talked about. Like he’d taken notes.”

  “Impressive,” Ethan said, despite feeling a stab of jealousy. Trust Glorious Leader to make it an experiment.

  “Once we went camping in the Redwoods,” Thibault said. “We got as remote as we could, and he didn’t lose me for three straight days. He’d record stuff with his phone, or take notes while we sat around the campfire. It was almost like I was a normal person.”

  Ethan squirmed. “You mean, except for being recorded.”

  “Yeah. Nate’s not normal himself, exactly.”

  “It always feels like we’re part of a game for him. Like, those training missions? I mean, seriously? Training for what? Does he really have some big plan for the Zeroes? Or is he winging it like everybody else?”

  Thibault was staring at the screen, watching the restart button pulse. “You know what’s weird? It kind of sucked, not being able to disappear. Not being able to do what I wanted, because this other person was around, expecting things. Like conversation, all that stuff.”

  “Oh, man. Small talk. I hate that.”

  Thibault shrugged. “It was too much, being normal for that long. I don’t know how you guys can stand to be seen all day.”

  “Normal doesn’t work for me, either,” Ethan said. “Talking for myself? I suck at that. The voice just knows, man. I’m trying to use it less, but never at all? I’d be toast.”

  Thibault turned to face him. “But what about all the damage it does? A guy got shot in that bank robbery.”

  “Not by me.” Ethan held up both hands in surrender. He’d just managed to forget about the bank robbery again, but Thibault had to go and remind him. “Those guys loaded their own guns. That’s the kind of people they were. Seriously, Tee, is there anything I could say to you that would make you kill someone?”

  “Don’t make me answer that,” Thibault said, and went silent. There was an intensity about him that kept Ethan quiet too.

  When Thibault finally spoke again, the words came slowly, like something bubbling up from deep in the ground.

  “You think you’ve got it made, up in your fancy hotel room. All your fancy shirts. But none of it makes up for crawling home from the hospital and walking into your own house, sick as a dog, and finding Grandma set up in your bedroom. Your stuff given away to your brothers. Mom and Dad looking past you the way everyone does, talking to the person behind you. Like they never had an oldest son.”

  Ethan stared. It was like Thibault was reciting some weird passage from a play. Almost like he was talking with another voice.

  Thibault kept going. “And the funniest part is, you think that calm place is Zen inside you. Bullshit. That’s cold rage, pushed right down where you can’t see it anymore. But you can feel it, right?”

  The room fell silent, and Ethan understood. “That’s what I said to you last summer, right? How’d you memorize it?”

  “It kept playing in my head, over and over.” Thibault flicked a potato chip across the floor. “And yeah, what you said that day almost made me kill someone. Words can do that, Ethan.”

  For a moment he wore a look of unguarded rage. At Ethan.

  “I’m sorry, Tee. I don’t even know what I was talking about. I was just so mad at Nate. . . .”

  But it made sense now why Thibault lived in a hotel. His family had forgotten about him. That was pretty messed up.

  “They really gave your room away?” Ethan asked.

  “I was at the hospital, and my grandma needed a place to stay. Once she moved in, there were six people in the house. Too many for them to remember me. The Curve, like Nate always says.”

  “That sucks,” Ethan said, suddenly glad that his power was strictly one-on-one. No crazy crowd effects like the rest of them.

  Thibault sighed. “The worst part of last summer wasn’t what you said. It was that I felt grateful for someone saying it. Like finally someone saw me. Sometimes I almost want to piss you off again, just to prove that the voice would never forget my secrets. I guess people want to be known, even when it hurts. Like dogs that crawl back to the masters who beat them.”

  “Crap.” Ethan had never felt so awful. Thibault wanted the voice to remember him, because he didn’t think Ethan could. “I’m going to remember what you just told me, Tee. Not to diss you with it! But, like, as a friend.”

  “Oh, yeah? Prove it.”

  “Okay,” Ethan said at once. “Um, how?”

  Thibault thought for a moment. “I got a bad case of Scepter breath. I need a shower and some serious toothbrush time. I’ll shut both doors, so you can’t even hear the water. And when I come out again, we’ll see what you remember.”

  Ethan swallowed. A shower was maybe ten minutes. And if he failed, if Thibault walked back in and Ethan just stared at him, then every honest thing they’d shared would evaporate.

  Worst of all, it would mean the voice was a better friend than Ethan.

  “No problem,” Ethan said casually. “Take your time.”

  Thibault gave him a look, like he expected to be disappointed. But Ethan shooed him away.

  “Fine. I will,” Thibault said. He got to his feet and headed for his room, shutting the door firmly behind him.

  “Okay,” Ethan muttered. “Just waiting for my buddy Tee.”

  He almost reached for the dropped controller, but slipping away into the game would be lethal. He stood and started pacing, keeping the blood flowing to his brain.

  “Teebo is my buddy.” Ethan pictured the guy’s intense blue eyes, his long hair, the disappointed expression he would have if Ethan forgot him. “He’s just taking a shower, brushing his teeth.”

  He stared out the window. It still gave him a buzz, seeing all of Cambria spread out below. He could see Ivy Street from up here, where the Craig was no doubt lurking, ready to crush Ethan if he saw him.

  “Not if I see you first,” Ethan muttered.

  He wondered if a penny thrown from up here would kill someone. That had always sounded like bullshit. Maybe a shoe, though.

  And for a no-neck like the Craig? A couch.

  Crap. He was supposed to be thinking about someone else, not the Craig.

  He glanced at his palm. The ink had long since been rubbed off by a sheen of Scepter sweat, but the gesture made it click in his brain.

  “Teebo!” he said aloud. “He’s gone, but he’ll be back. He had Scepter breath.”

  Ha. Scepter breath. Ethan breathed into his own hand. He had a little Scepter breath himself. But brushing his teeth would probably make him zone out.

  No problem. Just keep walking and thinking about Teebo.

  He made a tight circle around the padded armchairs in the middle of the room. Each time his attention started to slip, he’d check his hand again. The gesture kept reminding him of Teebo and everything he’d said. Tee had just told him why he’d left home. His parents forgetting him, something about his grandma. And how the voice had tortured him with it last summer.

  Ethan couldn’t forget any of this, ever
, or he was a bad friend.

  Where had Tee gone? To the store?

  Ethan came to a halt, feeling sweat trickling down the inside of his arm. What store?

  It didn’t matter. The point was that his name was Teebo, however the hell you spelled it, and he was Ethan’s best . . .

  There was a sound outside the door. Tee was back.

  Ethan crossed the living area and pulled it open.

  “Teebo!” he cried.

  But it was a young guy rolling past with a laundry cart. The guy came to a halt, looked at him, then at a clipboard hanging from the cart.

  Ethan’s heart sank. He was hiding from the law and his mom and evil bank robbers. And now he’d opened the door to a stranger.

  “Housekeeping.” The guy scratched his shaved head. “Uh, I didn’t know this room was occupied. Do you need service, sir?”

  “Um . . . ,” Ethan began, then let the voice take over. “We’re staying here by special arrangement. Mr. Penka told us we wouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “Sorry, sir.” The guy waved the clipboard. “You’re not on the list, so nobody’s going to bother you.”

  Ethan returned to his real voice. “Thank you. Um, bye.”

  He shut the door and leaned his back against it, swearing in a whisper.

  That had been a close one. But the guy had believed him. The voice wasn’t all bad, no matter what Teebo said.

  Ethan smiled. That name, it was still with him.

  A moment later Teebo appeared in his bathrobe, rubbing a towel through his hair and trying to look nonchalant.

  Right. He’d been taking a shower.

  Ethan tried to pretend he wasn’t freaked out and soaked in sweat. That he hadn’t forgotten where Tee was and stupidly opened the door to potential danger. Because remembering your best friend’s name was no big deal.

  He flopped onto the couch and said, “Hey, Scepter Breath. Want me to kick your ass some more?”