“Your friend?” DDA Cooper stared at Thibault, her attention bright and sharp for a moment. He knew he looked bad, shocked and guilty. “Is that blood on you, son?”
Thibault looked down. A smear of red on his shirt, from when he’d fallen on Wallace, made his head swim, but he managed to reach up and snip away DDA Cooper’s attention.
She turned back to Ethan. “Come on. It’s not safe here.”
She started to drag him away, pushing past Thibault like he was just another bystander.
And not a cold-blooded murderer.
Horror yawned in him. With a tiny movement of a finger he’d snuffed out everything Quinton Wallace had ever been. It shouldn’t be that easy, just to point at a person and blast them out of the world.
And his power was going to let him get away with it. He could walk out of town right now if he wanted, away from this or any other crime. His knees almost buckled under the weight of that license.
Thibault could erase anyone without consequence, just as he’d erased himself from his family’s memory.
But a spindly lifeline of attention was wavering his way.
“Mom, please. My friend needs me.”
My friend. Thibault fell on the words gratefully—he had friends to keep him from walking away from what he’d done.
Ethan’s mother came to a halt, but only because a pair of cops in dress blues had blocked their way.
“What is it, Detective King?” she asked.
King nodded at the scrum of cops arresting Nate. “Have you seen the suspect, ma’am?”
“No, who is it?”
“Nataniel Saldana,” the male detective said. “Same guy your son called after the bank job last June.”
DDA Cooper looked at Ethan, then back at the detectives. “Are you sure?”
“It’s Saldana, all right,” King said.
All three of them stared at Ethan, who opened his mouth. Thibault knew that expression, the expectant look in the eyes—waiting for the voice to step in and save him.
But Ethan’s mom was faster.
“Don’t you dare,” she said. “What do you know about this?”
“Um, nothing!” Ethan blurted in his real voice.
His mother’s eyes narrowed. “This morning, you said your friends had big plans today.”
“Yeah, like, party plans.”
“Ethan, your friend just shot someone! The time to stop lying is now.”
“Nobody meant this to happen!” Ethan cried. “It just—”
“Ethan, I swear to God I’ll have these detectives arrest you!”
Not again. No one else is taking the blame.
This is on me.
Thibault touched his fingers to Swarm’s blood on his shirt, rubbed a streak across his forehead, and stood right in front of DDA Cooper.
“Forget about your son,” he said. “It was me.”
CHAPTER 61
ANONYMOUS
DDA COOPER STARED AT HIM, her eyes tracing the stripe of blood, horror building in her face.
The shame inside Thibault gaped wider, and he remembered the roar of the gun in his hand, the sick satisfaction of obliterating an enemy, of answering savagery with even greater violence. Her eyes began to dull—it was working.
As he reached out to grab Ethan’s arm, Thibault felt his power lurch, the force of his self-disgust slicing at the web of connections around them. The lines of the three adults’ attention trembled and frayed, until they were staring at each other, confused.
“Detectives,” Ethan’s mother said. “I need to find my son.”
“He was at the funeral?” King asked.
DDA Cooper looked uncertain for a moment and said, “I think so. Please help me.”
And all three turned away and plowed toward the center of the turmoil.
Ethan stared at Thibault.
“Whoa.” His focus stayed rock steady. “Did you do that?”
“I did.” Sight lines were sliding off Ethan, falling away on all sides. “They can’t see you at all.”
“Dude. You rule!”
Thibault shook his head. This didn’t feel like a victory. More like he was sinking into oblivion and dragging Ethan with him.
“Come on. We have to get back to the others.” He had to stay connected with something. His friends were all he had left.
“But, Thibault, you leveled up!”
Thibault gave him a brief smile—Ethan had said his name with the right accent, in his own voice, for the first time ever.
“I remember everything now!” Ethan crowed. “That day I was stuck in your hotel room. All those Red Scepter games!”
Thibault looked down at his hand gripping Ethan’s arm. “I got blood on you. Sorry.”
“But you beat Swarm,” Ethan said, as if it had been just some boss fight in Red Scepter. He waved his hand in front of a passing cop’s eyes. The man knocked it away in annoyance but kept striding without giving Ethan a second glance. “This is so weird.”
“I’m telling you,” Thibault said, “you don’t want to live here. Let’s get back to the Dish.”
Ethan started to walk but then pulled up, pointing. “Oh crud—Ang and Murillo.”
Deeper in the scrum of police, two cops were staring straight at the Dish’s battered facade. It took Thibault a moment to recognize them—from almost a week ago when Ethan had handed them a bag of money.
“They know Nate, too,” Ethan said. “He talked to them at that stupid hockey game!”
Thibault felt himself sinking again. “They’re going to connect the Dish to all this.”
“But we bribed them to stay quiet!” Ethan said.
“That money covered an illegal nightclub,” Thibault said. “Not a terrorist attack at a police funeral.”
One of the two officers pointed up at the club, and they fell into what looked like a heated argument.
“We’re screwed,” Ethan said.
Shame hit the hollow of Thibault’s stomach. It wasn’t just Nate taking the blame anymore. Ang and Murillo could implicate Ethan, and everyone else at the Dish. Sonia’s post had pictures of Chizara and Kelsie running tech, of Flicker tending bar.
Thibault could walk away from this murder, but he’d brought the whole world down on his friends.
“Move it, Tee.” Ethan was pulling him along. “We have to warn them!”
Thibault floundered after him, unable to speak. He felt as if he’d never speak again, his voice drawn away deep inside him, and all other sound with it.
There stood the Dish, in the middle of a great silence.
Thibault might as well have burned it down.
The dump truck loomed as they drew near, the passenger window frosted around a bullet hole, the windshield shot away. The dumping bed was tilted, making it possible for someone to clamber out across the tailgate—
Flicker, her hands streaking the metal crimson, the front of her bright orange dress soaked with blood.
She’d been shot? The silence thickened around Thibault, his attachments to reality fraying.
Then Ethan wrenched himself from Thibault’s grip, tearing away another thread of connection. Flicker was calling to Ethan for help, but still there was no sound. She dropped to the ground, steady on her feet.
Maybe it wasn’t her blood. . . . Thibault felt a scrap of hope.
But then Flicker looked up, and behind her came Chizara and Kelsie. And heaped against the tailgate by the truck bed’s angle and gravity, something hulking and still.
A body.
The solid, reassuring presence that had been Craig, now cut off forever from the web of humanity. No glimmer of attention came from his eyes. No connection to the lacework of grief and shock among the others.
Thibault felt himself disconnecting too, moving past horror and shame until everything paled, bleached, faded around him. This wasn’t leveling up. It was something more vast and awful—and at the same time insignificant, one inglorious human winking out.
His real name floa
ted out of his reach—it had never mattered, and he let it go. He was stretching taut and thin. Now holes were opening up in him, spreading, until he shimmered like a cobweb across the face of the universe.
Something to be casually brushed aside.
Anonymous rose, too insubstantial even to be grateful, into the Nothing that had always waited for him.
CHAPTER 62
FLICKER
FLICKER FELT A PIECE OF herself tearing away.
The feeling came from nowhere and everywhere—the dread of this awful day taking form, reaching out, pulling her heart from her chest.
More noises then—Kelsie crumpling against the truck, Chizara grunting, barely catching her.
For a moment Flicker thought Kelsie had been hit by a stray bullet, but she’d heard no shots, just police sirens, shouts, helicopters overhead.
“Did you feel that?” she asked Ethan.
“Like someone punched my brain?”
From Kelsie, a murmur: “Someone just left.”
An aftershock, maybe? When that pair of shots had rung out a few minutes ago, a cry had come from Kelsie, and she’d fallen to the bed of the dump truck, repeating, Swarm’s dead!
Flicker had thrown her vision out into the throng and found Quinton Wallace moments later—shot in the head and in the back. By then the police were waking up, rising from the ground with their eyes casting about in confusion, no longer vibrating with the wild energies of the swarm.
Now, a block away from the Dish, cops milled thickly around someone pinned to the ground. Metal flashed—handcuffs coming out. A few yards away lay Swarm’s dead body.
Flicker tried to get her vision into the center of the pack, but it was all a flurry of motion and violence.
“Craig!” Ethan shouted up at the tailgate. “Guys. He’s not moving!”
Flicker’s vision came reeling back. Shit—Ethan didn’t know. He hadn’t hunkered long minutes in the truck bed, blood pooling underfoot. Listening to Kelsie fight with all her soul against becoming one with the swarm. Waiting for those zombie cops to rise up and come scrabbling across the tailgate.
“Ethan. He’s dead.”
Ethan went silent, and Flicker didn’t have time to find eyes on him.
Kelsie was still mumbling nonsense. “When Swarm died, they disappeared. Hundreds . . . and one more, just now.”
None of it made sense. But Flicker still felt that last aftershock, an icicle through her heart.
“They were inside him, the people he killed,” Kelsie said, muffled by Chizara’s embrace. “Regular people, Davey, other Zeroes. And now they’re all gone.”
“Hang on, Kelsie, please,” Chizara said. “I’m trying to keep from crashing this whole block!”
“He’s dead ?” Ethan cried.
Flicker took hold of him. “What happened out there? Who shot Swarm?”
“I think it was Nate.”
Another piece of Flicker’s heart broke. “Nate shot him?”
“It must have been. The cops took him down, hard.” Ethan gripped her arm, started pulling. “We have to get out of sight. They could be here any minute!”
“Why would they come here?” Flicker demanded.
“Ang and Murillo know Nate! The Dish is in the middle of all this, they know it’s his club, and he just shot someone!”
It churned through her brain again. Nate killed a Zero.
She let herself be pulled along, remembering his stone-cold confidence at the Dish yesterday. I’ll handle it.
When he hadn’t jumped down into the truck to escape, she’d thought Nate had simply given up. But he’d had a plan. The most basic, awful plan: kill a Zero, along with the hundred stolen souls he was freighted with.
“You get why he did it, right? Someone had to,” Ethan argued with Flicker’s silence. He was pulling her toward the alley behind the Dish, and she heard Chizara and Kelsie behind them. “I mean, he must’ve planned this all along—charm his way in close, grab a gun, blow the guy away!”
Blow the guy away—like Swarm had been dead leaves. He was a killer, but also a Zero like the rest of them, born with more power than he knew how to control.
The smell of garbage bags and old cigarettes hit, and the sirens and shouts grew muffled by high brick walls.
“Okay, nobody can see us,” Ethan said. “How do we rescue Nate?”
“Rescue him?” Flicker sent her vision questing out into the chaos.
Among the flashing emergency vehicles, two officers were yanking Nate to his feet. He strained to look back at the Dish—his hair mussed, his face blank, pale where it wasn’t bleeding.
They were dragging him toward a police van.
“Too late,” she said. “They’re taking him away.”
“We can’t let them!” Ethan cried. “You should’ve heard the theories my mom was coming up with—terrorism, or a gas attack! They’ll put him in a supermax!”
“I can crash every engine out there.” Chizara had an edge in her voice, like she was dying to. “Just say the word.”
Shit, thought Flicker. They were talking like she was the leader now. They’d seen how pathetic her plans were. Defeat the Swarm with lights, music, a happy crowd—
When brute force, deadly force, had been the answer.
Focus on the present. Fix this.
She let her vision swell, taking in every set of eyes within her range, block after block of policemen, gawkers, drivers caught in traffic, even people peering down from news helicopters.
It almost burst her head, but it made the answer clear.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Flicker said.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Ethan yelled. “We have to go and—”
“There are a dozen cameras pointed at him. They know his face, and your mom knows his name. If we bust him out, he’ll be a fugitive, a wanted man, forever.”
Ethan’s grip tightened. “That’s better than doing twenty years for murder!”
“We already tried to take on six hundred cops today,” Flicker said. “And we failed.”
“But we can’t just . . .” Ethan’s voice faltered. “Nate would never let one of us get taken away!”
Flicker leaned a shoulder against rough brick, too exhausted to stand. But she spoke with all the certainty she could muster.
“Nate would do the smart thing. Even if it sucked.”
“Damn it,” Chizara said. “He probably would.”
Flicker watched them put Nate in the van, and she felt it again, that tearing away. More like she’d lost her true love than a friend. Too much to bear.
Around Nate the crowd was loosening. A few cops in dress uniform moved slowly off in the direction of the funeral they’d abandoned. Others bunched in the middle, making radio calls and running yellow tape around Swarm’s body. Normalcy was returning, which meant they had to move fast.
But she had to watch as Nate was pushed inside the van, and the door slammed closed. It crept through the milling crowd and out of sight.
“Okay,” Flicker said, pushing herself from the wall. “We have to run. But we need a few things in the Dish.”
CHAPTER 63
FLICKER
“MONEY?” CHIZARA ASKED. “THAT’S WHAT we came for?”
Flicker knelt by the boxes of cleaning supplies, digging for the roll of singles Nate kept so the Dish never ran out of change. His texts had seemed so random yesterday, but they were coming into focus now.
“Yeah, we gotta run!” Ethan cried from the alley door.
Flicker didn’t answer. If they thought cash wasn’t important, they didn’t understand how bad this was.
Kelsie spared her the trouble of explaining.
“We need money, guys,” came her small voice from beside Chizara, across the bar from Flicker. “We’re not just running away from the Dish. We’re leaving Cambria—forever.”
“Wait,” Ethan said. “Which kind of forever?”
“The only kind.” Kelsie’s voice was soft, but it echoed ac
ross the empty Dish dance floor. “None of us can go home.”
“Why not?” Chizara said. “Those dirty cops know Ethan and Nate, but they never met the rest of us.”
“His sister did,” Kelsie said.
“Crap. She’s right.” Ethan’s real voice cracked a little. “The second Jess sees Nate’s face on TV, she’ll spill.”
Flicker’s fingers found it—a fat roll of rubber-banded bills. Enough for a couple of tanks of gas, at least. They’d have to risk Ethan’s voice for everything else.
This was going to be one hell of an uncontrolled experiment.
“Jess said if anything weird happened, she’d tell Mom everything! Even about our superpowers!” Ethan was hyperventilating. He needed a task to focus on.
“Scam,” Flicker said. “There are some burner phones in the supply closet. Under the paper towels. Get them.”
As he stormed away, Flicker realized why Nate had planned for this escape—because he planned for everything.
How was she supposed to replace someone who was born to lead?
“I’ll grab you a tee and one of my skirts,” Kelsie said. “You can’t go outside covered in blood.”
Flicker nodded. “Two minutes.”
Her hands were sticky too. She moved toward the sink behind the bar.
Chizara was pacing now. “I can’t just leave again! After everything that happened today, why would the police care about some kids throwing illegal parties?”
“They’ll take a hard look at this club because of Nate.” Flicker ran water and started to scrub. “They’ll see thousands spent under the table on electronics. They’ll see a Faraday cage to block surveillance, because every nightclub has one of those. And reinforced metal doors and windows, enough to withstand a siege from a SWAT team. Does that sound like a party to you?”
There was a charged silence as Chizara tried to resist the awful logic of the situation. Flicker had spooked herself, and she cast her eyes outside to see if the police were coming already.
Not yet. Confusion still reigned out there. The media was arriving in hordes, trying to untangle the story. Onlookers gathered, pressed against the line of police tape to gawk at the tape outline of Quinton Wallace’s body on dark asphalt.
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