Zeroes

by Scott Westerfeld

  The screen said: Glorious Leader.

  Chizara held the phone at arm’s length for a few seconds, rubbing her scalp with her other hand. What did Nate want? Another mopey nostalgia session about the Zeroes with her and “Flicker”?

  She tapped the message open.

  Our old buddy Scam is a guest down at CCPD. Any chance you could help us get him out?

  Chizara laid the phone on a ledge of brickwork and walked a few steps away from it, crossing from sun shadow into signal shadow to give herself room to think.

  “Our old buddy”? That was Nate trying to be chummy and ironic, which worked great when he was right there in front of you, his power focused and amplified. But now?

  Why should she care one way or another what mess that little turd “Scam” had gotten himself into? Why should any of them care?

  And this was a workday. Nate wouldn’t understand that—he didn’t have to get a job over the summer, did he? And Bob had so much for her to fix right now. That nice antique toaster that lady had brought in, and the little transistor radio that Chizara wanted to see the insides of.

  And yet . . . the Central Cambria Police Department. Her mouth was watering. An engraved, personalized invitation to check out some serious tech up close, and maybe bring some of it down—to do exactly what she spent her whole life holding back from. Not too much, of course—no one would get hurt or anything, if she was careful. And she always was careful, right?

  The phone buzzed again, and she darted back across the alley to grab it. Another text from Nate: Flicker was on her way into town, and so was “Anon.”

  Right, Anon. She knew that guy. She couldn’t quite dredge up his face, but he came along on Zero missions sometimes, didn’t he?

  Chizara shook the thought of him out of her head. Damn, they were really going in. Riley would be doing her Flicker thing, with her vision spilling through the building. And the CCPD! Chizara scratched her scalp all over, baring her teeth from all the itches and indecisions.

  She ambled back toward the shop. How could she spin this to Bob?

  Well, she’d already said she had a headache. It had gotten her out of school plenty of times. Why not work, too?

  But she didn’t want to lie. . . .

  Of course, it wasn’t exactly lying. Lots of things gave Chizara a headache.

  Whatever she was going to do, she had to hurry, to get downtown before the others fixed this without her. The thought of that, of missing out completely on an inside look at CCPD, made Chizara’s mind up. She replied OK and stuck the phone back in her pocket without turning it off. It pulsed there, a literal pain in the ass, but she was going to need it soon.

  At the shop’s dented metal door, she pulled her face into a squint and hunched one shoulder. She went in, making herself walk a bit unsteadily up the little passageway past the bathroom, even dragging her shoulder against the wall.

  “Hey, Bob?”

  He grunted. He was powering up the laptop. Any second now it would start feeling around for wifi.

  “I’m getting warning signals in my eyes,” she said. “Just checked my phone, and I guess that set me off. And the sunlight out there.”

  Bob looked up at her. The laptop squealed and scratched at Chizara’s skull, looking for connections. It was fixed, all right. Plus her own phone vibrated right then—that would be Riley, opening up a conference call. Nate’s training protocols were suddenly back in Chizara’s head.

  “Thought you had meds for those migraines.”

  “I do. I can see them, right there on top of the refrigerator at home.” Some detail always made a lie more convincing.

  “You ain’t gonna make it, are you?” Bob knew she lived too far away to outrun an oncoming migraine. “You want to hide out in the supply closet for the afternoon? Nice and dark in there.”

  “If I catch a bus, I’ll be fine.” She picked her bag up from the bench, pawed in it for her sunglasses case.

  “Call me if you get stuck, okay? And it’d be good to have you back in tomorrow, the way stuff’s piling up.” They both eyed the “in” shelf, crowded with broken appliances.

  “I know. I’m sorry to leave you in a hole, Bob. I’ll be back tomorrow for sure.”

  “Move it, girl. Catch that bus.” He really was a nicer boss than she deserved.

  Chizara scuttled out through the shop, past the pinpoint of irritation that was Bob’s little wireless security camera. She stepped out into the sunny street and hobbled along for as long as the camera could see her through the glass. Then she dropped the hunch and the squint and sprinted toward downtown.

  CHAPTER 16

  CRASH

  AS SHE RAN CLEAR OF the strip mall, Chizara tried not to remember, but it ran through her mind anyway: Scam, the cornered rat in Nate’s home theater—the debriefing room—taking the Zeroes down. He’d moved from one to the next, each of them crumpling from what came out of his mouth.

  Yeah, but what can he say to me? Chizara had wondered. What awful secrets do I have?

  She ran faster, trying to leave the memory behind. CCPD, she reminded herself. She’d always wanted to crack that place. Even just to get in close and check it out. And now Scam was handing her an excuse not only to see what made it tick but to see what happened when it unticked.

  It was going to hurt—a bunch—but it’d be worth it to get a look at what was inside.

  The only real drawback was rescuing Scam, rat Scam, a.k.a. Ethan.

  You should see your face when you crash things—

  “Shut up!” Chizara ran faster still. It was good to be outside, away from Bob’s screeching laptop. Sure, there were networks in the apartment buildings on either side of the street, but they were behind walls and mostly up high. There were also phones and GPS systems in the vehicles cruising past, but there wasn’t too much traffic yet. It would all get worse the closer she got to downtown; she could feel them foaming against her face even now, all those connections.

  You think you’re so in control, Scam had said.

  She was in control. There was no way he could undo her.

  But you love to break shit, Chizara. Melting a million phones, zapping a roomful of computers? You get off on it.

  “Shut up, I told you!” She slowed to a walk, dug earbuds out of her bag, pulled out her phone, and plugged herself into the conference call.

  And there was Flicker’s voice: “. . . right on the front steps with everyone walking past, staring at me.”

  “This is Crash.” Chizara used the stupid code name automatically.

  “Crash?” That was Nate. She had to remember to call him Bellwether, even if Glorious Leader was what they called him behind his back. “Excellent! Are you downtown yet?”

  “Passing Ivy Street now. What’ve you got, Flicker?” The code names fell into place. And the attitude: calm, sharp, a bit smart-assed, maybe. “What’s up with our old friend?”

  “He’s sitting across the desk from two detectives,” said Flicker. “The way they’re looking at him, they’re dying to lock him up.”

  “Then why don’t we just let them?” Chizara had a vision of Ethan, vicious and triumphant: You’re a demon. You’re a walking massacre waiting to happen!

  “Well, that’s a good question,” said Flicker in her ear. “And yet here I find myself on the steps in front of the CCPD, and you’re running to help.”

  What had the little rat said to Flicker? Something about Nate and her hooking up. Chizara hardly remembered. The words “walking massacre” had wiped out all Scam’s other insults.

  She was in control. And none of them knew how hard that was.

  Among the buildings of downtown, with a million microprocessors and networks all around her, she felt the irritations cluster on her skin, burrowing into her bones. Alongside her, in the traffic rolling along Clark Street, another swarm hummed and stung. Each shop had its clutch of appliances and alarms, and each office’s LAN overlapped and tangled with the others’, then fed into the rumbling stream of
buried fiber-optic cables. All this gnawed slowly but determinedly at Chizara’s brain.

  Underneath that were everyone’s phones. The crowd here was whiter and wealthier than in the Heights, and everyone seemed to have a networked phone—some carried an extra one, or a tablet or a sleeping laptop. The itches built and built, and she tried not to cringe under the attack. She gritted her jangling teeth and squashed down the temptation to slap people. Why did they need so much painful stuff?

  “I’m turning onto North Bride,” she said. “I can see the place.”

  The CCPD building sat there like a big wedding cake, every tier full of sweet, forbidden, maddening mysteries.

  “Ha, and I can see you. Cross over now, and you see next to Ted’s Donuts? The cop shop’s side entrance is in that alleyway. Because you’re a cleaner. From Ultraclean Office Services.”

  “You worked all that out already?” Chizara stood at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. For a moment she wondered if this mission were a setup. Some elaborate ruse of Glorious Leader’s to get the Zeroes back together, with Flicker, as always, tagging along.

  “I was at my shrink’s, down the street,” Flicker said. “I’ve got eyes everywhere. Hey, Bellwether, is what’s-his-name inside? You know . . . that guy?”

  “Anonymous.” Nate sounded long-suffering. “Yes, he’s there. Speak up, Teebo, if you can.”

  “Sure I can,” said a deep voice, one she didn’t recognize. “It’s pretty busy. There’s no chance of anyone noticing me.”

  Chizara frowned. Teebo, right. But the guy’s real name wasn’t spelled that way—it had a whole lot of silent letters, like some Nigerian names. But he was . . . French?

  Pedestrians built up around Chizara at the crosswalk, half of them fiddling with their phones, unable to endure five undistracted seconds. All that wireless fizzed in her muscles. Her own phone in her back pocket was making her butt bones ache.

  The doughnut-fat smell from Ted’s hit her from half a block away. “What am I doing once I get inside?”

  “Chaos production,” Nate said. “Distraction. Knocking things out, carefully.”

  A demon with porn-face. Like you’re having the biggest orgasm in the—

  “Do I get to knock Scam out?”

  “Let’s stay focused on hauling him out of there,” Nate said. “We don’t want his voice deciding to tell the cops about the rest of us.”

  Chizara’s step faltered. Right. It would be just like Scam to blurt out everyone else’s secrets to take the heat off himself.

  She turned into the alleyway, trying to look as if she wasn’t under siege, wasn’t as excited as all hell. She tried to breathe normally and not shake under the electronic onslaught.

  A few uniformed police officers and a dozen or so ordinary people were cutting through from Usher Street. But mostly she was aware of the big, messy, complex fact of the CCPD right there beside her, with all its pulsing temptations. This was going to hurt so much. It was already hurting. Her whole skeleton was beginning to ache.

  All of Nate’s training exercises were coming back to her. They had taught her to not panic, to put off the satisfaction of bringing systems down. To endure the pain and to wrap herself in barefaced confidence and calm as she walked in places where she wasn’t meant to be.

  She knew how to control this excitement, to go beyond the joy of crashing to the brainier thrill of being in among the systems, in the flow. She could shut off the yowling-with-pain part of her while she traced the paths and discovered the nodes, worked out the interrelations and the triggers—calculated how much buzz she was allowed, how much fun, how much relief.

  As Nate said, there was an Ultimate Goal to every mission, and each person on the team was putting their talents to serving that. You couldn’t just indulge yourself.

  The other trick was knowing how the people would react when their toys started to fail. The human brain was where the real crashes happened.

  “That door coming up on your left, Crash.”

  “I see it.” It had creeped her out the first few times Flicker had looked through her eyes, but now it felt natural.

  She walked past the door and leaned against the wall, one foot casually propped on the brick. The blurred signals of the building throbbed and tantalized her through bricks and mortar.

  “What’s inside, exactly?”

  “On your left there’ll be an Ultraclean cart. You can stop there and get ready. There’s an apron on the handle. Maybe look for some rubber gloves and garbage bags? Don’t take the whole cart; it’ll only slow you down.”

  “Apron, gloves, bags. And then?” Chizara closed her eyes and screwed up her face to hear Flicker through the grinding of the CCPD systems.

  “Go up the first stairs you find. Nothing but card-key locks in your way. They’ve got Scam on the second floor, right in the middle of a bunch of cops.”

  “That sounds tricky.” Just standing here was tricky enough.

  “Don’t worry. It’s crowded and noisy, and there are lots of overflowing trash bins that need to be emptied.” Riley sounded so calm and certain. Of course, the whole building wasn’t sinking ice picks into her head.

  “Okay.” Chizara took a breath, watched a white cop come out through the door. “And once I find him?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Nate cut in. “Lights, computers, fire alarms—give them something bigger to worry about than Scam. Then you both can just walk out. He’s not under arrest, as far as we know. Anonymous will help you.”

  “Not that I’ll notice, right?” You only ever found out later that Anon had done something vital. “Tell me the escape route, Flicker. I need the whole plan from A to Z.” Crash had fried her own phone in the middle of a mission more than once, and she didn’t want to be left hanging.

  “The main stairs are in the middle of the building. They’ll take you down to reception and out the front door.”

  “Got it.” For show, Chizara took out her old school ID and swiped it across the card reader. At the same time she reached through the magnetic sensor, in and in and farther in, in a microsecond’s flash, to the vigilant source waiting for a signal to read. With her mental fingertip she knocked it out, like flicking away a stick beneath a spinning plate. The fall, and the crash, sent a small, clean, hot, good feeling in through all her tangling pains.

  Porn-face, that little shit had called it. A massacre waiting to happen.

  The door clicked. Chizara pushed, and it opened. She stepped out of being Chizara and into being Crash, and strolled straight into the CCPD as if she had a perfect right to be there.

  CHAPTER 17

  CRASH

  IT FELT JUST LIKE THE Zeroes’ training missions, all those exercises where Nate had tested the limits of their powers. But on this mission, for the first time, there was a real Goal.

  Crash stood by the cart, tying her cleaner’s apron, trying to look like someone gearing up for another dreary workday. At her very center the mission calm formed a solid core. But outside of that she was more awake than she’d ever been, concentrating hard through the excitement—she was here, in the CCPD. And her outermost layer was all scalded flesh and howling bones, wanting to bend and groan, wanting to curl up on the floor under the pressure.

  The tech was part of her. It was extra nerves pushing out beyond her skin’s limits. It was enormous, heavy, intricate antlers coming out of her head. The CCPD was way more wired up than any of the malls or shopping centers Nate had set their training exercises in. A thousand network connections were dotted through the place, lamps hanging burning from the antlers, planes in holding patterns shouting, Crash me, crash me!

  All the phones in the building formed a swirling galaxy of glowing coals in her mind. They waved around in people’s hands, darted about in pockets, lay ignored on desks and in drawers and purses. Each one was a tiny claw clamped on her brain, each sending out a signal, painfully high-pitched. All of it itched in her skin and jerked in her muscles.

  As she pulle
d on the disposable gloves, her hands shook from the effort of holding back, of not tearing down the wall between herself and silence, painlessness—the perfect peace of a big crash.

  She accessed her mission-calm center again, tried to keep control. The cameras had to go, along with what they’d already captured of her and of Scam. She focused on the little eye staring down at her from one corner of the hallway, felt around behind it for the strands that led to the pulse of other cameras like it, to the chips that held the gathered images. In the middle of the noise storm, the itch storm, she allowed herself the tiny relief of letting just that mini system drop, getting that mini itch scratched.

  There. Neatly done. Now the cops would only have the memories in their own heads, or—

  “Have they taken Scam’s photo?” she muttered.

  “A mug shot?” came Flicker’s voice. “He’s not handcuffed, so I doubt it. But don’t take too long. Those two detectives don’t look happy with him. On your right, Crash. There—straight up that hallway.”

  Crash didn’t move and didn’t reply. Flicker would see why in a second: There was a fizzle of phones and radios outside the alley door, which meant cops coming in. At the moment they were probably waving their cards at the blank reader. In a second they’d realize that the lock wasn’t working and push on through.

  She waited by the cart, stealing these moments to acclimatize a little more. It was a gorgeous, painful mess in here.

  When the cops came through the door, one of them nodded to Crash, and she nodded back world-wearily.

  “I see you!” giggled Flicker. “You totally look like a cleaner!”

  Maybe to you, white girl, thought Crash drily. The cops continued on up the hallway while she pretended to check things on the cart, trembling from the close encounter. She was a little out of practice.

  So Glorious Leader wanted chaos? It was already chaos in here, everything she’d dreaded and dreamed of. New buildings like Cambria Town Hall, she could figure those out at a glance: All the cabling had been done in one hit, and everything was brand-spanking-new and rationally organized. The CCPD was different, its nervous system stuffed into a heavy last-century skeleton where no one wanted to drill through the masonry. Everything had been forced to make way for everything else over years of departmental reorganizations and technological shifts. The IT was thrillingly massive, but it was a jumble. New systems were spliced and piggybacked onto old—the server array stashed near the holding cells downstairs was like a museum of computing, legacy machines lined up there pumping stuff back and forth so slo-owly! If only she had time, and quiet, and no pain, no maddening muscle itch, she could browse through everything and work out some really subtle strategy.