“It’ll be okay,” Chizara said. “If we don’t find any beach parties, there’s always something happening up in Monterey.”
Kelsie closed her window and hugged herself. “Maybe put the radio on? Just for company.”
“Sure. Anything left in the snack bag?”
For the rest of the afternoon they snacked and drove and sang along to the radio. Chizara overtook a convoy of trundling RVs, and they traveled along with them, a tenuous community strung along the highway, until the RVs peeled off together at a campground.
Twenty miles after that, Kelsie pushed herself straighter in her seat. “People up ahead.”
A half-mile later a beachside parking lot came into sight, a dozen vehicles gleaming there.
Chizara slowed. “A walk on the beach sounds good.”
“Yes!” Kelsie was out of the car before it had even rolled to a stop. Chizara grinned, killed the power, and climbed out. The few signals in the air were very faint. She stretched tall and wide.
“They’re building a bonfire!” Kelsie called. Chizara joined her at the fence. Down on the beach, people were dragging chunks of driftwood toward a pit in the sand.
“Lots of coolers and sleeping bags,” Chizara said. “Looks like they’re planning an all-nighter.”
“And they’re happy.” Kelsie took a long breath of the sea air, relief all over her face.
Too happy to turn into a deadly swarm? Chizara wondered.
She swung out her hand and hooked her fingers lightly through Kelsie’s. “Okay, I guess we’re far enough for one day.”
They took their blankets and pillows and snacks down to the sand, leaving their phones, switched off, back in the car. Pacing the beach together, they found the perfect spot—far enough from the party to protect Chizara from the sting of signals, close enough for Kelsie to feel the comfort of the mob.
They explored the rock pools as the light went, and they didn’t talk about Swarm, or Davey, or Nate or the other Zeroes, or the future.
Wherever they went, Chizara turned to gaze seaward, the beach party’s tech prickling her back, slow-cruising container ships pulsing gently in the distance. But Kelsie always faced the fire and the dancing, loving the company, boosting their good time.
“It feels weird,” Kelsie said. “Just leaving the others behind.”
“I know. But a big group only makes it easier for him. They’re safer with us gone.”
“With me gone, you mean.” Kelsie stared out at sea. “He might even leave them alone once he realizes I’m not there.”
Her voice sounded hopeful, but her expression said hunted.
Swarm would never stop looking for them.
Chizara would have to text her parents tomorrow morning, after she’d slept on what to say. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she didn’t have a choice except to save this girl. Chizara’s body, her heart, wasn’t giving her an option.
Even if it meant leaving everything else behind.
CHAPTER 47
CRASH
AS NIGHT FELL, THEY PULLED together their own little pile of driftwood, and Kelsie ran along the beach to ask for a burning stick to light it with. She was gone awhile, bringing the party to a thudding crescendo that echoed across the sand. Chizara smiled out to sea, listening to the whoops and cheers.
“I bring the gift of fire!” Kelsie clambered back over the rocks. She poked the firebrand into the wood. Flames spat and sparked in the frazzled, dry seaweed at its heart.
The fire didn’t last long, and they lay down between the blankets in the privacy of the darkness and held each other, kissing a long time, intertwined in the drumbeat of the party and the empty ocean’s soft rushing.
Chizara was more ready than she’d been the night before, and everything was bigger now. It was as though Kelsie’s touch called a giant city into being around them, laced with intricate networks that purred and pressed on Chizara’s body in a million different ways, exquisitely almost painful. Together they rippled closer and closer to that city on wavelets that built to waves, lifting them higher and higher.
And at the end Crash jumped from the tip of the highest wave into the middle of the gorgeous, glittering megastructure. She let it all go, crashing through and falling with it, crying out as she did. She was one glowing spark among thousands, sinking, ecstatic, mindless, toward a cool sea waiting below.
Faint bells reached her ears as she drifted on that sea, entwined with drifting Kelsie. She opened her eyes to stars, clouds above. A cold sea breeze touched her face. Oh yes, she was here on this beach with Kelsie.
And she was full of power, like nothing she’d ever felt before. As if she’d crashed a whole city, as if Kelsie’s touch had poured a solar flare into her body.
The prickle of phones was gone, as was the nerve-scrape of the party’s Bluetooth speaker. Perfect silence.
Except for a distant whooping, and tiny bells clanging, on and on. Chizara lifted her head, looked over Kelsie to the sea.
A cloud slid off the moon and she saw it: a ship, too big, too close, and leaning at a strange angle.
No.
It had run aground on some far-off sandbank under the dark water.
As Chizara sat up, astonished, a container slipped from the stack on the deck, tumbling into the sea with a big, slow-motion, silent, moonlit splash.
“Kelsie!”
The warmth beside her stirred. “Hmmm?”
“Wake up! I think I just—” No. It was too huge to be believable.
“What are you yelling about?” Kelsie murmured, struggling to follow Chizara’s gaze. But then she stared, mouth open. “Oh my God.”
The ship had bristled with tech, but it was all dark now, the pathways cool and empty. The ringing alarms and a few safety lights—on their own circuits, isolated for emergencies—were the only things working.
“It didn’t just run aground,” Chizara gasped. “I crashed it! When I—when we were—I thought I was only crashing things in my head!”
Kelsie clambered up, wrapping the blanket around herself and peering over the rocks at the party. “They’re all freaking out. I’ll go calm them down.”
She staggered away across the sand. Chizara pulled on shirt, socks, pants.
Didn’t I tell you to do no harm, Chizara Adaora Okeke?
You did, Mom, you did.
And what’s that out there, then?
Kelsie was headed back.
“Their phones are all bricked, Zara,” she called. “They can’t get help for the ship, and their cars won’t start. They think it’s some kind of apocalypse! Did you see that oil slick?”
She was right. The ship’s fuel was spreading out in the moonlight, flattening the waves.
Do no harm.
“The crew out there, I can feel them,” Kelsie said. “They’re panicking.”
“Everything’s down,” Chizara said. “Can you calm them?”
Kelsie shook her head. “Too far. Can you fix anything?”
Chizara closed her eyes and splayed a hand at the ship, felt the distant pathways of wiring, the darkened spires of antennae and radar, the dead generators and stilled pumps, the six giant engines cooling.
The fixing power was huge inside her, but she could never rebuild as much as she crashed. And she’d never given a cargo ship a second glance. It was an alien complex of pumps and valves and electronics.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” she said.
“But you can fix a phone,” Kelsie said in a shivery voice. “We should call someone.”
Chizara nodded, gathered up Kelsie’s clothes from the blanket, and pushed them at her. “And then we need to go.”
Kelsie stared at her. “Where?”
“Home. Back to Cambria.”
“But . . . what about Swarm?”
Yes, Swarm was there. But so were Mom and Dad, and Ik and Bin. If Chizara was going to die, she wanted to die near them, with her life still making sense around her, not out on some lonely road, in a stolen car, r
un down by a killer. Here in this glorious postcrash silence, in the vastness of the power inside her, it was all perfectly clear.
“I can’t be out here,” she said. “I’m too dangerous.”
“But . . . he’ll kill you,” Kelsie said.
“No. We’ll fight him.” Chizara picked up one of the blankets and viciously shook the sand out of it. “But it isn’t safe for us to be together like this. It feels amazing, but look what it does!” She nodded at the listing container ship. “It’s . . . it’s irresponsible! Selfish! It wrecks things.”
Kelsie huddled in the other blanket, dressing inside it, self-conscious now.
“That’s what he said,” she murmured. “Swarm. That love is bad.”
“Losing control is what’s bad!” Chizara kicked sand over the coals, not wanting to add a brushfire to the night’s disasters. “I can’t let myself.”
It hurt too much to go on, and Chizara turned away to cross the rocks, heading for the car.
A girl from the party was running toward her. “Is your phone working?”
“No, but yours is.” Chizara flicked a finger at the dead phone the girl was holding, and it chirruped back to life.
The girl just stared. “What is this? Did you see that boat? It’s like the end of the world or something!”
Chizara shook her head, stamping away across the sand. “Human error. That’s all.”
She only had to brush the Mazda with a half thought to bring it back to life. She threw the bedding and bag in the trunk.
Kelsie climbed into view, shrugging on her jacket, trailing the blanket behind her up the path. She looked so forlorn that Chizara’s righteous anger died, and she put her arms around her. Kelsie’s sandy hair scratched her face.
“Zara, it’s not your fault,” Kelsie said in a fragile voice.
“It is, because I know better.” Chizara stood back and looked at Kelsie, both their eyes welling. “I can’t do this. Not with you. Not with anyone. Life’s just going to be different for me.”
Kelsie reached up and brushed Chizara’s tears away with her thumbs. “That’s what I always thought. But with you, it’s different. Like we make our own crowd.”
“I know. But I can’t control myself!”
Kelsie blinked back her own tears. “Then we’re all dead anyway.”
Chizara stepped back. “What?”
“If we can’t learn to control our powers, one day I’ll be a Swarm.” Kelsie threw her blanket into the trunk and slammed it closed, then spread her hands matter-of-factly. “I’ll turn on you, and others, too.”
Stunned, Chizara almost let the Mazda’s electronics crash.
“So keep practicing, okay?” Kelsie said, her eyes sympathetic but her voice hard. “Now take me back to the Dish. I’ll pick up some more stuff and go to Ling’s place. Then maybe get a bus out of town. Go and find my mother.”
Chizara nodded. Any plan was good if it took them away from the sight of the crashed ship, that reminder of what could happen if she ever lost herself in rapture with Kelsie again.
They got into the car, which now felt too intimate for the two of them, too small for Chizara’s power.
She switched her phone on, and the fairy hand of connection, soft and painless in her postcrash state, pulsed into being. As soon as the icons appeared, she called 911.
CHAPTER 48
SCAM
THE DISH LOOKED QUIET FROM the outside. No lights, definitely no music. Nothing.
Crap, where was everyone? It was like being ten again, the day he’d found out the whole class had been invited to Dean Yuen’s birthday—everyone except him.
None of the Zeroes had answered their phones all day. Ethan understood the whole together-we’re-a-target thing, but seriously, would a single text bring Swarm down on them all?
Surely Nate had a plan by now. Something better than We’ll just show him how awesome the Zeroes are, and he’ll totes want to join the club! It hadn’t worked on Ren and Davey. No way was it going to work on a guy who could turn a crowd into a killing machine.
Or maybe the Zeroes were already dead. Maybe Swarm was picking them off one by one, and Ethan was the only one left alive now.
He shivered and stared at the Dish. He would’ve heard about that, right? A string of murders would’ve made the news, or his mom would’ve told him. She always called him when there was any kind of local crime wave. Supposedly to check that he was okay, though lately it felt like she was also checking to see if he was involved.
Ethan circled around the back of the building, his thumb on his phone, ready to hit 911 at the slightest evidence of Swarm. He quietly let himself in through the back door.
“Hello?” he called into the dark.
Nothing.
He edged along the wall until he found a light switch. In the weak light of the bare bulbs, the Dish’s dance floor looked forlorn. No dancers, no light show, nothing but a . . . mattress? And a futon?
Whoever had slept here, they’d left in a hurry. The sheets were tangled and trailing on the floor. It definitely hadn’t been Teebo, then. He’d never leave his sweater wadded like . . .
Ethan froze. That was Chizara’s sweater. Kelsie’s Disney On Ice quilt. Here together, on the dance floor, inside Chizara’s custom-built Faraday cage. Which meant that this was Kelsie and Chizara’s bed, and Jess was right.
How could he have wasted all that time thinking Kelsie liked him?
That was hope for you—it made you stupid. Well, from now on Ethan Thomas Cooper was living on the dark side. Wall-to-wall pessimism was way easier than the constant letdowns. Like his dad used to say: Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.
Ethan hated when Dad was right.
He went upstairs to check Tee’s room: nobody home. Off canoodling with Flicker, probably. Didn’t any of these lovebirds care that they were all being hunted by a Zero killer?
And where the hell was Nate? He should be fixing all this!
The thought of Swarm made the Dish seem extra empty. What if the guy showed up right now, with a big crowd ready to rip Ethan to pieces?
He headed back down to the dance floor and straight for the back exit. But as he reached for the handle, the door opened on its own.
“Don’t kill me!” he cried out.
“Wasn’t going to,” Kelsie said. She stared at him like he was a stranger.
He’d never felt more awkward than he did right then, standing between the girl he was crushing on and the love nest she’d shared with someone else.
He peered into the darkness behind her. “It’s just you?”
“Yeah.” She looked past him, winced at the sight of the dance floor. “Mind helping me get my mattress upstairs?”
Ethan minded a lot, but there was no way to refuse without being weird about it. And technically, he had no right to be weird at all, because he hadn’t even manned up enough to tell Kelsie he liked her in the first place.
“Um, sure.”
He followed her onto the dance floor, where she pulled off the tangled sheets and kicked them into a forlorn pile. Together they tipped the mattress on its side and began dragging it toward the stairs. Kelsie looked sad and small at the other end of the load.
Things with Chizara weren’t going great, seemed like—not that Ethan’s intuitions about Kelsie had much of a track record. In any case, he didn’t want to hear about it.
Which was sucky of him. He knew he should be concerned for Kelsie. He should be supportive and understanding and all that friendship crap. He should not be a dick about it.
Maybe if they talked about something more romance-neutral.
“Any idea what Nate’s anti-Swarm plan is?”
“Running, I guess,” she said. “And avoiding each other.”
They reached the stairs, and Ethan took the back end, the mattress going bump, bump, bump on each step. Just what he wanted to hear, a whole bunch of suggestive mattress thumping.
“That’s not a very Glorious strategy,” Et
han said loudly over the sound.
“He’s still messed up by what happened at the mall.” Kelsie dragged the mattress up and over the final step. “He’s not used to losing.”
Ethan exhaled a long sigh. The Desert Springs Mall seemed like a year ago. Weird how a romantic disaster could replace witnessing a mob killing at the top of Ethan’s current trauma list.
They made it to Kelsie’s room and tipped the mattress onto the bed frame. Then she started dropping stuff into a bag that was already on the floor. Random things: a shirt, a chipped beer mug.
“You packing?” Ethan asked.
“Again,” Kelsie replied.
“Where’re you going?” Ethan regretted the question as soon as he asked it. She was probably running away with Chizara. Or moving in.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh.” Things really weren’t going well.
And then, suddenly, Kelsie was crying. She dropped down to sit at the edge of the bed, a rolled-up T-shirt still in her hand.
Ethan lowered himself to the mattress beside her, feeling awkward. He carefully put an arm around her shoulder, ignoring the unkind glimmer of hope that went through him. He was a good friend, not some opportunistic butthead.
“What’s wrong, Kels?”
“He was right,” she said through a sob. “He told me couples ruin everything. Me and Zara, we’ll just wind up splitting the group!”
“Nate said that? That’s stupid. He’s just jealous because he had that crush on Flicker and—”
“Not Nate.” Kelsie wiped her face. “Swarm.”
Ethan blinked. “Um . . .”
“He said romance divides a group against itself. Couples slice up connections.”
Ethan pulled his arm back. “Okay. Is this, like, the same Swarm from the mall? The guy who kills Zeroes?”
She nodded. “He came looking for me.”
“And you spoke to him? He didn’t crowd-smash you into tiny pieces?”
“Ethan—”
“And you guys held a parley to, what, share romantic insights?”
“It wasn’t like that. He told me how he got like he is, which was sad, actually.” Kelsie looked up at him. “But the main thing is, he told me Ren was right. I’m a baby Swarm. One day I’ll level up.”