Swarm

by Scott Westerfeld

  She felt the swarm press in on all sides, warming her. Welcoming her. She could feel him harmonizing them. All the dance beats she’d ever used to tune a crowd were clumsy versions of this perfect chord.

  There was no Kelsie Laszlo anymore, just Mob. And she was glad for it.

  She felt Swarm’s hunger rising, and it was her own hunger, the dark union between them finally come.

  Her eyes fell on the face next to hers, and chose him. He dropped from the perfect communion, blinking, stilling, becoming prey.

  Mob gazed at him. Her victim looked back, utterly confused.

  Her mouth watered and her body was locked, ready. This next part would take her over the line, into glory.

  The last trace of Kelsie Laszlo inside her let out a cry of panic—she had chosen Fig.

  But the swarm buzzed away that scrap of hesitation. She didn’t want Fig to run. She didn’t want him to be saved.

  She wanted to taste his fear.

  He cried out at her, but she was beyond language. Words were nothing beside her connection to the whole.

  Fig tried to save her. He grabbed her arm and tried to barrel through the people between them and the stairs. He was fit, and he was fast, but he didn’t stand a chance, not dragging her along. The crowd brought him down, and his grasp slipped from her hand.

  Fig threw them off like a bucking horse. He clawed his way forward as the crowd ripped at his clothes. Someone was kicking him. It slowed him down. But he still didn’t stop.

  Good. The longer this took, the better.

  The swarm had time. Mob didn’t need to help—she was all of them, and could feel every foot and fist and fingernail like they were the endings of her own nerves.

  She felt a flood of joy wash across the room, the swarm’s elation as they beat and slapped and kicked at Fig.

  A last surge of desperation went through him, and he sprang up as if out of water, arms swinging, knocking the smaller attackers back.

  He spun and reached for Kelsie, still ready to save her.

  But when he saw her rapturous expression, the fight faded in him, replaced with a brilliant flavor of horror. She watched in joy as the swarm covered him again.

  Then there was a hitch in the kill, a distraction in the room. Someone on the stairs. Mob peered through the buzzing to find a man in uniform, screaming into his radio.

  “Request assistance at—”

  And then Swarm’s voice: “Another hero. Perfect.”

  Mob felt a twinge in the mob at this change of plan, and through that gap came a shred of relief that Fig was saved.

  But then a fresh, searing ecstasy spread through the room. The swarm surged forward at their new target, seeking handholds on his uniform. Something to rip and ruin. Flesh, skin, hair. They tore him open and had at his slippery heart, squeezing it in their fists.

  Until he belonged to them, part of the swarm now. He had died at their hands, in their arms. Kelsie felt the bloated satisfaction as they consumed who he had been. She felt the tenderness of his annihilation, and she fed that out into the mob.

  Her mob, hers and Swarm’s.

  CHAPTER 51

  FLICKER

  “NATE ISN’T HERE, BUT LET’S start,” Flicker finally said, her voice echoing in the empty Dish.

  All their bleary gazes went to her sitting up on the bar. They were looking for guidance, for certainty. For any way out from under the pall of Kelsie’s sadness and guilt.

  “Not fair,” Ethan said. “We have to get our butts here at dark-and-rainy o’clock, and Glorious Leader just gets to sleep?”

  “His phone’s probably switched off.” Flicker tried to sell it with a shrug, but they all knew that Glorious Leader himself was switched off. At least for now.

  But she was here, and she would lead them.

  Somebody had to step up and be glorious.

  “Last night, Swarm came at Kelsie,” she began. “Luckily, she got away.”

  “I didn’t,” Kelsie murmured. She was curled up by the wall where the bar ended.

  Flicker hesitated. Kelsie still hadn’t told the whole story of last night, except to say that a cop had been killed. She’d called Flicker at midnight in shock, and it had taken all night to calm her down and then get the others here to the Dish.

  “Well, you’re here with us,” Flicker said. “That’s better than being with Swarm. Or dead.”

  Kelsie didn’t answer, and Flicker quickly scanned the others’ viewpoints—Ethan’s fluttered with nervous blinks. Maybe that last word had been a bad idea.

  God, this must be so easy for Nate, being able to see and feel the effect of everything he said.

  “Why are we all here together?” Ethan asked. “I thought we were supposed to stay separate! And, you know, not in our much-publicized headquarters!”

  “It’s six thirty a.m., two days after Christmas, Ethan. The streets are completely empty. No crowds anywhere in town.” Flicker turned to face the rest of them, trying to keep doubt from her voice. “If he shows up now, we can take him, easy.”

  Nothing but silence. She’d been hoping for some kind of joke about kicking Swarm’s ass, but they were all too scared and exhausted.

  And she was about to make things worse, but there was no way around it.

  “Swarm killed a cop last night.”

  “He had help,” Kelsie said softly.

  “He used Kelsie.” Flicker plowed ahead. “And he found her even when she was the only Zero around. So keeping apart isn’t going to be enough. We can’t wait for him to choose his time and place. We have to fight him on our terms.”

  “Do we even have terms?” Ethan asked. “Like, ‘Hey, Swarm, meet us alone in a dark alley? Far away from any random people, so we can kick your butt!’ ”

  “Ethan’s got a point,” Chizara said. “This guy always shows up with a crowd.”

  Flicker hesitated. If Chizara was agreeing with Ethan, things were bad.

  “Like I told you guys last time,” Ethan said, “we all should run away. Live someplace no crowd ever goes. I call dibs on Alaska!”

  “I tried leaving Cambria,” Chizara said. “It did not go well.”

  Flicker hopped into her eyes, which were on Kelsie. But Kelsie wasn’t meeting anyone’s gaze.

  “You all know what I mean,” Chizara went on. “We barely keep it together here in our hometown, a place we understand. Out there, the unknown can sneak up on you, make you lose control.”

  Then she was looking at the floor.

  What had happened on Crash’s little road trip with Mob? Flicker hadn’t checked the news for technical disasters yet. That was another thing Nate would have done already.

  “Our powers can do plenty of damage right here,” Thibault said.

  Flicker went into Scam’s eyes, and before they slipped from Thibault, she saw just how pale and harrowed he was. The memory of yesterday morning with his family came flooding back—his poor mom, his confused brothers, his father’s anger at it all.

  It had been so awful, she kept pushing it away. But she owed it to Thibault to remember every moment. His family never would.

  “It doesn’t matter where I go,” Kelsie said. She was staring at a crack in the floor. “Even if Swarm never finds me, I could do it again on my own.”

  “That’s not true,” Flicker said. “You didn’t want to kill that cop.”

  “No, I wanted to kill my dad’s best friend! The cop just interrupted us!”

  Kelsie looked up, and Flicker saw her own horrified expression.

  “Swarm let me choose who to kill,” Kelsie went on. “And I chose Fig, a friend, because I knew how scared he’d be, seeing me helping! I knew his was the fear that would taste best!”

  Kelsie flooded the Zeroes with emotion again—not despair or horror this time, but an exquisite mix of hunger, desire, ecstasy.

  A gasp went around the group, and as the elation faded, Flicker felt sick.

  What had she done? Bringing them together while Kelsie was still s
uch a mess was a terrible idea, especially without Nate here to guide the group.

  Where the hell was he?

  “Those poor people will always remember what happened, what they did to that cop,” Kelsie said. “A lifetime of nightmares, probably a lifetime of prison, too. I’m only free because Swarm let me go.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Ethan said. “The people at the mall aren’t getting charged with anything.”

  Kelsie turned to stare straight at him, and Ethan looked scared of her. “Those were nice middle-class people. This was alcoholics and addicts, and a cop died. There’s not going to be some get-out-of-jail story about magic gas!”

  And they’d gone full circle, Kelsie’s guilt blanketing the room again with its desolate weight.

  “You guys have to stay away from me. I’m a Swarm waiting to happen.”

  Flicker felt the room shifting, as Kelsie’s self-hatred threatened to spill out into the rest of them. She couldn’t let that happen. They needed to trust Kelsie for the plan to work.

  Flicker channeled her inner Glorious Leader and said, “You’re a Zero, Kelsie. That means you don’t have to fight this on your own. Together we’re going to take this guy down.”

  A tremor went around the nightclub, as if Kelsie was clamping her fear down to a nervous, lurking shiver.

  “How?” came Thibault’s voice.

  “Not by running away,” Flicker said. “We’re going to face him, right here, tomorrow night. And we’re going to win.”

  No one answered. She couldn’t even see their faces. They were all looking at her, not at each other.

  But at least they were listening, waiting to hear her plan.

  “He killed Davey with that mall crowd—people who’d waited up all night. They were tired, annoyed, greedy. The kind of crowd that tramples people without any help from superpowers. And last night he killed with people whose refuge had been invaded. Who were fragile to begin with.”

  “A lot of addicts are really strong,” Kelsie said. “But not that night. Not after he came in smashing a bottle of whiskey on the floor.”

  “My point is this,” Flicker said. “Swarm doesn’t use happy crowds to kill people. He feeds on anger, fear.”

  “So we hit him with, what, a parade of clowns?” Chizara asked.

  “Clowns?” Ethan cried out. “She just said fear is bad.”

  Flicker shook her head. “No, not clowns, or rainbows, or unicorns. We hit him with the crowd we’ve been training with for the last three months. A crowd we know how to make happy.”

  “Huh,” Chizara said. “You mean we hit him with the Dish?”

  “Exactly. We face him in our own home, where we control the lights, the music, and the beer. That’s how we win.”

  For a moment Flicker had them all. She could feel it in the room—even Kelsie believed in this plan, or at least she wanted to.

  Then Ethan cleared his throat. “But why would he show up here, where we want him, on exactly the right night? He can pick us off anywhere, anytime!”

  When Flicker hesitated, it was Kelsie who spoke up.

  “That part’s easy,” she said. “We do what Davey and Ren did. We make him mad at us.”

  CHAPTER 52

  SCAM

  IN CAMBRIA, WINTER WAS NEVER cold enough for ponds to freeze over. So once a year the county built an ice-skating rink beside Main Square. The rental skates were crappy, the music was cheesy, and the hot chocolate was powdered.

  But for some reason this was where Sonia wanted to meet Ethan.

  She probably knew the place would annoy him. For a start, he hadn’t skated since he was a kid. And second, nothing said trying too hard like skating backward to “Jingle Bell Rock.”

  But Flicker’s plan meant he had to go. For the Zeroes to stand a chance against Swarm, they had to have the biggest, happiest party ever, and Swarm had to be goaded into coming to it. And for that they needed something better than handing out flyers on a street corner.

  They needed Sonia Sonic.

  When Ethan got to Main Square, however, he started to feel queasy. He hadn’t been in a real crowd since that morning at the mall. Right now the skaters reminded him of the frenzied zombies at the outer edge of the swarm. He thought of Davey, ripped apart like a Christmas turkey.

  Ethan stood, sweating in the cold winter air. Sonia was late, of course, leaving him waiting with his stomach in knots. He had an awful sensation, like the back of his neck was trying to crawl up to his scalp. His whole body was on the alert for Swarm.

  “It’s just a bunch of ice-skating idiots,” he muttered. “Full of Christmas freaking cheer.”

  But how could he be sure? The other Zeroes had their magic insight into crowds, but Ethan would never see Swarm coming. They’d all turn into a flash mob of ravening zombies without any warning.

  And about the only thing he could imagine worse than running from zombies was running from zombies with ice skates on.

  He edged toward the rink. A twenty-foot Christmas tree towered beside it, a white star standing out against the dusk. A bank of lights swept red and green beams across the ice. Frank Sinatra crooned through tinny speakers. A food stand steamed near the gate, but it didn’t serve beer. Which sucked. Ethan could have done with some liquid courage right about now, if the voice could have managed it.

  His phone blipped. Sonia. Crap, she was already out there somewhere on the crowded ice. So the only way to deliver his message was to strap some knives to his feet and give up any hope of outrunning a swarm.

  Well, this was just perfect.

  Ethan waited in line, paid his sixteen bucks for a pair of worn-looking rental skates, and struggled into them. He imagined being knocked to the ice by an evil horde and trying to defend himself by slashing at their hands with the old, blunt blades on his feet.

  He wobbled out onto the ice, clinging to the rail. He had to shrink aside to avoid skaters moving three times as fast as him.

  It was hard to search for Sonia when he was barely managing to stay upright. Why did he have to be the one to talk to her anyhow? She hated his guts, and Ethan was sick of people hating him all the time.

  With one hand on the rail he managed to turn and examine the crowd. Her hair should be easy to spot, unless she’d dyed it again. Of course, it would probably be fluorescent green or flaming Christmas crimson or whatever, so she might still stand out from the rest of the skaters.

  It took five long minutes to locate her. The compression sleeve on her right wrist was covered in glitter stickers. Her hair was tucked into a slouchy beanie, the bleached white of her bangs changing colors with the lights. It was pretty striking, if he was honest. She skated gracefully, while Ethan clung to the rail and pulled himself along one-handed.

  “Sonia!”

  She saw him, waved her sparkly hand, and one smooth circuit later swept up behind him.

  She pulled him into motion. “You made it!”

  She looked happy to see him. Ethan didn’t like that look. It was usually followed by a rapid shift to disappointment.

  “Why’d you choose a skating rink?” he bleated. “I can’t skate!”

  “I see that.” Sonia grinned. She didn’t look disappointed yet, even though he was clearly the worst skater on the ice.

  “Can we sit down?” he tried. “I need to talk to you.”

  “You want to talk to me, keep skating,” Sonia said.

  Crap. Ethan just wanted to deliver his message and go. But talking while staying upright was one thing too many. The voice could handle the talking part, but Sonia was a complicated case. She was wise to the voice, even if she didn’t quite understand it yet. She’d work it out eventually, just like Mom and Jess and the Zeroes had. And if he wanted to delay that discovery, he had to watch his step.

  “Slice with your feet,” Sonia said. “Try it with me. First, right.”

  She linked her good arm through his and Ethan leaned into his wobbling right foot. Or rather, Sonia leaned and Ethan followed because he was ho
lding on to Sonia. But together they slewed rightward.

  “Now left,” Sonia reminded him, as if there were any other option.

  Ethan tilted left.

  “Great!” Sonia said. “Now without leaning on me so much. You’re kind of heavy.”

  “Sorry.” He eased off.

  His ankles still wobbled like deboned chicken bits, but he hadn’t fallen over yet. And he’d forgotten, mostly, about the ever-present risk of being swarmed.

  “How’s your girlfriend, the DJ?” Sonia asked.

  The question made Ethan’s knees shake. Kelsie was a basket case, more convinced than ever that she could go Swarm at any moment. The others were pretty worried too.

  But not Ethan. To him Kelsie was still Kelsie. Even if . . .

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Really?”

  “Totally. For one thing, she’s into girls.”

  “Oh.” Out the corner of his eye he saw a smile creep onto Sonia’s face. At his pain, Ethan figured.

  He seriously did not want to talk to Sonia Sonic about his defunct love life. On top of everything else, the voice had gone and made him look like a dick, sending Kelsie out into the night alone, and vulnerable enough to wind up at an AA meeting. Add one Swarm, and you had an epic disaster.

  At least he was skating half decently. Enough to deliver his message. “Sonia, I need a favor.”

  “A bigger favor than teaching you to skate?”

  “Definitely.” Ethan kept his eyes on the skates in front of him, matching Sonia’s rhythm. “We need you to post about a party at the Dish tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, so now I’m useful to you guys?”

  Ethan sighed. He’d known he wouldn’t get through this meeting without using his power, but he was reaching for it sooner than he’d hoped.

  Come on, voice, get to the point, he thought, and the words came leaping out of his lungs. “All those photos you got sent? Of the Dish the night everything went haywire? That was a hit job on us.”