‘Congratulations, you found a psychic,’ the girl replied. ‘I’m Madame Deidre. Let me guess. Sonia Sonic?’
Sonia gasped. ‘Holy crap! That was amazing.’
‘Nah. I read your blog. I’m DeeDee in your forum.’ She turned to Ethan. ‘And you must be…Raphael?’
‘Ha! Wrong.’ Ethan turned to Sonia. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
‘Um, Ethan.’ Sonia looked him up and down. ‘I think she’s right.’
‘Oh. The costume.’
‘Retro,’ Deidre said, and gestured them inside. A small, round table waited in the center of the room. It was a cramped space, lit by a couple of table lamps. Big-eyed puppets hung from the ceiling, with straw poking out of their sleeves. There was a bench along one side with a collection of bones and feathers and stuff Ethan didn’t have names for. And it smelled like wet fur. Ethan tried not to breathe.
‘What year were you born?’ Ethan asked.
‘Two thousand,’ Deidre said. ‘Which is why you chose me, isn’t it?’
Good answer. But he didn’t buy that she knew everything. She was a weird-hunter, after all. They all knew about the 2000 rule. Maybe she was just trying to get people to think she had a power.
There was nothing like having a lying voice living inside you to make you a skeptic.
‘Shouldn’t you have a crystal ball or something?’ he asked.
‘Props are for fakers,’ Deidre said. ‘Shall we get started?’
Ethan took a breath. Then he pulled out all the money in his pocket, piled it on the table, and told Madame Deidre exactly what he’d told the others.
‘This is all my cash – three hundred bucks and change. It’s all yours if you say the exact words I’m dying to hear.’
Yep, Sonia’s plan was that simple. Easy money for one tiny little answer. Surely any Scam worth her salt would be thinking to her voice right now, Three hundred bucks? Tell the guy in the turtle costume what he wants to hear!
And, of course, the answer Ethan craved was, Hey, I’m a Scam too!
Nobody else would say those words in a million years of guessing. It was sheer elegance in its simplicity. Sonia was a freaking genius.
Deidre smiled. ‘You’re on. But it may take a second.’
When she closed her eyes, Ethan and Sonia exchanged glances.
Deidre had to be fake. The voice didn’t take time. And what kind of psychic said ‘You’re on’?
They waited. Ethan tried not to gaze at the seriously disturbing puppets hanging from the ceiling. One looked just like his old gym teacher at Cambria Junior High.
‘Shit,’ Deidre said at last. ‘It’s not coming to me.’
‘Ha.’ Ethan reached for the money, disappointed and also relieved.
‘But I do have something to tell you,’ Deidre added. ‘You will get everything you want. And yet you’ll lose the very thing that makes you special.’
‘That’s pretty generic,’ Ethan said. ‘And what does it even mean?’
‘Everything,’ Deidre said. ‘Or nothing. The choice is yours.’
Ethan groaned. They’d bombed out again.
‘Yeah, no. That’s not what I wanted to hear.’ He shoveled the money back into his pocket, except for one twenty-dollar bill. Even fakers needed to eat.
But when he offered it, Deidre held up her hands.
‘Keep it, Turtle Boy,’ she said. ‘Any friend of Sonia Sonic’s is a friend of mine. Besides, I’ve got a feeling you’ll need it soon enough.’
Ha. Off target again. He was a Scam – apparently the one and only Scam. He could get money anytime.
And maybe this fortune-teller racket was where he could go for the big bucks. If this girl could make a living spouting nonsense like that, imagine what the voice could rake in.
Deidre reaffixed her veil and stood. She ushered them to the door. As Sonia moved to step past, Deidre hugged her.
‘Your blog will do great things,’ Deidre said.
‘Really?’ Sonia asked.
Deidre shrugged. ‘Maybe. Blogs aren’t really what they used to be. And Twitter’s all trolls now.’
‘I know, right?’ Sonia said.
Ethan waved Deidre off as she tried to hug him, too.
A moment later he and Sonia were back in the alley, which no longer seemed creepy at all.
Sonia said, ‘That was—’
‘Totally crap,’ Ethan supplied. ‘It’s like she wasn’t even trying.’
‘She was awesome!’ Sonia argued. ‘But no, I guess she wasn’t another Scam.’
Ethan shook his head. ‘Not with a capital letter, no.’
‘Like I said yesterday, is being unique so bad?’
Ethan shrugged. ‘Being alone blows.’
‘You’re not alone, Ethan.’ Sonia looked at him. Really looked at him, in a way that made him nervous. ‘You’ve got me.’
Ethan tried to laugh it off, but Sonia stared him down.
‘Um,’ he said after a nervous moment of silence. ‘Got to get back. Time for whatever sucktastic plan Glorious Leader has come up with.’
Sonia blinked. ‘You mean Nate, right?’
‘You’ve met the guy – you tell me.’
Sonia laughed and Ethan joined in. For a moment he felt like there was someone on his side. Someone he could joke around with, someone to distract him from how serious his situation was, while still hoping in her heart that he’d make it out okay.
He wished he could say the right thing to make Sonia stay with him forever. But he didn’t want to use the voice. And the voice was the only surefire way Ethan knew to say anything.
So, yet again, Ethan Thomas Cooper’s life was set in suck mode.
‘Hey, um,’ he finally said. ‘In case I don’t get another chance, I wanted to say thanks. For helping me. It was a really smart plan.’
‘But it didn’t work,’ Sonia sighed. ‘And it took me all night to come up with it.’
Ethan grinned. ‘You thought about me all night?’
‘Well, I thought about omniscient superpowers in general,’ Sonia said. ‘But as we now know, that’s pretty much just you.’
She punched him again.
‘Anyway, we’re friends, right?’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to help each other out.’
Ethan felt a little part of himself die. He had enough friends already, and mostly they didn’t particularly like him.
‘Sure,’ he said, trying to think of something friendly to say. ‘Listen, if you ever run into my sister back in Cambria, or my mom, can you tell them that…I love them.’
Sonia got very still. ‘That sounds pretty final, Ethan. Are you guys hitting the road again?’
‘No. But it could all go sideways tomorrow.’ Ethan shrugged. ‘You can never be sure what’s—’
But then he stopped talking, because Sonia was kissing him, and not at all like a friend.
AFTER THE GIRL LEFT, HE STAYED FOR A LONG TIME AT THE EDGE OF THINGS, FIGHTING AGAINST THE PULL OF THE NOWHERE.
The girl had been right – this vast crowd was dangerous. A whirlpool that could suck him in. Here at Mardi Gras, people were after their own little slice of anonymity. The right to drink and dance and misbehave, and have it all forgotten the day after tomorrow. To leave the world behind without a care.
The force of all that willful oblivion threatened to pull him away. But a spark of certainty held the boy firm – a promise he’d made. He was meant to stay in the world. He had a purpose here.
If he could only remember it.
He couldn’t remember his own name, was the problem. The only name he knew was the one that had kept him from following the Anonymous girl into the Nowhere.
‘Flicker,’ he kept saying.
Until finally the answer came.
‘Thibault?’
And he was tumbling backward away from the cliff edge, falling back against another body, becoming himself again.
She wrapped him up in her arms, in her familiar scent.
‘Where did you go?
’ Her mask was half pushed up, and tears streaked her face.
‘Flicker,’ Thibault said again, dazed. He looked around at the street corner. ‘I was here the whole time.’
She pulled back and struck his chest once with an open hand. He’d never felt more in his body. ‘You were gone, Thibault! You’re lucky I found you!’
‘You found me,’ he repeated softly.
‘I’ve been looking for hours! Stumbling around, feeling for you, smelling for you, everyone thinking I was drunk off my ass. It was worse than in those woods – I thought you’d left me again.’
‘There was a girl,’ Thibault said.
She drew a racking breath, thought a moment, like she half remembered. ‘Tell me what happened.’
He put his arms around her, steadying himself as much as Flicker. ‘She was Anonymous, like me. I had to follow her—’
‘Bullshit,’ Flicker interrupted. ‘What you have to do is keep yourself here. It didn’t cross your mind that another Anon might be dangerous?’
Thibault shook his head. It hadn’t occurred to him at all.
‘I’m back. I’m here. It’s okay.’ He kissed the top of her head. He didn’t even know how frightened he should be. What had just happened?
He looked over his shoulder, trying to fix the memory in his mind.
Rien – that was her name. But there was no sign of her, just the swirling Mardi Gras crowds in their gaudy costumes and their masks, some eerie, some beautiful, some grotesque. A nightmare world of pretend.
He closed his eyes. ‘She was just about to tell me something. Piper’s plan. The purple and the gold. What everything meant.’
Flicker pulled closer. ‘She works for Piper?’
Memories were falling back, but in fragments. ‘She used to. But whatever Piper’s planning has her freaked. Bad enough that she…’
‘That she might help us stop it?’ Flicker provided.
Thibault shook his head, remembering the shudder in Rien’s voice, like when he himself talked about Quinton Wallace. ‘It freaked her out enough that she went away. She’s gone.’
‘Gone? Like what happened to you?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t see her anywhere.’ He took Flicker by the shoulders. ‘If Piper’s plan is that scary, we should get back to finding Verity!’
‘We found her. Nate texted – we’re going in tonight. And there’s something else I should tell you…’
Her voice trailed away, and Thibault steered them into a little park, a tiny pocket of less chaos than the street.
‘I saw the guy from the cemetery,’ she said. She was holding his elbow tight, like they were walking along the roof edge of a tall building. ‘The one the feds wanted. I talked to him, and it turns out he’s a reversed me.’
‘He’s a Flicker too?’ Thibault came to a halt. ‘The kid who turned beautiful?’
‘Yeah.’ She made a face up at him. ‘Can you believe I level up into…a raging beauty?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
A laugh burst out of her, and she turned away, shaking her head.
But this was Flicker, after all. He could still see her addressing the Zeroes before that last battle at the Dish. Magnificent and in command.
‘Ridiculous, right?’ she muttered. ‘Let’s sit down. I need to get my head straight before we go back and deal with Nate.’
As they sat on the bench, Thibault realized something.
‘We both just met someone with our own power. First time ever, exact same day.’
‘Huh. What are the odds?’
He looked around at the swirling crowd. How many more of them were Zeroes? ‘It’s not random. It’s Mardi Gras. Nate was right about coming here.’
‘I guess. But only because we need to knock this evil Bellwether on her ass.’
Thibault nodded. ‘You should have seen Rien when she tried to tell me about Piper’s plan. She had so much guilt about helping, it was enough to suck her away into the Nowhere.’
‘More proof that Piper has to be stopped,’ Flicker said.
‘Will Nate believe that?’
‘I don’t know. Half the time he sounds like he’s in love with her. And being in prison didn’t help his opinion of non-powered humanity.’ Flicker sat up straighter on the park bench. ‘But we have to stop her, with or without him.’
Seeing her fierce expression, Thibault grinned. ‘You know, I wouldn’t mind seeing you level up.’
She half pulled away. ‘I thought surface appearances weren’t your thing, Zen Boy.’
‘They aren’t,’ he said. ‘But it’s not like you’ll turn into some corporate pop star. More like an avenging angel – flaming sword, turning people into pillars of salt.’
She laughed, leaning back in to him. ‘I can’t even tell if that’s a compliment!’
‘Trust me, it is.’ He stood. ‘Come on. Let’s go see what Nate’s planning for tonight.’
‘NO PHONES IN THERE,’ CHIZARA SAID. HER SENSES COILED AROUND THE RUINED POWER STATION. ‘No wifi, either.’
‘Maybe the FBI has a pet Crash,’ Nate said. ‘Someone who’d spot an abandoned building blaring with tech. So Piper keeps it dark.’
Chizara shrugged. ‘Or maybe she’s just a good boss. Doesn’t want her Makers dealing with all the noise.’
Nate lowered the binoculars and looked at her.
She shrugged. ‘You’re an okay boss too, Nate.’
She turned from him and sent her power at Piper’s headquarters again. No pesky phones, but so much glorious old tech in there – all of it scaled for giants! Deactivated turbines and coal chutes, the great yards of transformers on the far side. Even lifeless, the ancient shapes of it hulked in her mind. She would love to explore those ghost-systems, reverse engineering how they had all fit together in the olden days.
‘We could have the wrong place,’ Ethan said. He’d been twitchy all evening, like he had somewhere better to be.
‘No, this is it,’ Chizara said. ‘There’s a trickle of juice running through the wires. They’ve got lights, and maybe intercoms.’
‘And a ton of people,’ Kelsie said.
‘A hundred, at least,’ Chizara breathed. Even from this range she could see a galaxy of hearts inside.
‘Want me to go ahead?’ Thibault spoke up, appearing out of the shadows. ‘I could scout around.’
‘She knows about Stalkers,’ Flicker said. ‘We stick together. And keep your phones off!’
The Zeroes slipped through a ragged fence into the weedy concrete lot beside the power plant. It was full of moonlit scooters and bikes, junked cars, and a few newer vehicles. Perfect cover for sneaking.
‘Think these all belong to Piper’s crew?’ Ethan whispered.
‘I could crash them, just in case,’ Chizara said. ‘Just like I’m going to wreck that machine of hers.’
‘Don’t wreck anything till we find out what her plan is,’ Nate said firmly.
‘Like we haven’t heard enough!’ Chizara hissed.
The empty satellite-dish box had been plenty for her. Piper planned on projecting powers, either fueled by or pointed at the massive Mardi Gras crowds. That couldn’t be good. Flicker’s pretty boy had talked about starting from scratch – great for making cakes, not so much for industrial society. And Anon’s quotes from his mystery friend had sounded apocalyptic.
What more evidence did Nate need?
‘Once we have Verity, we can find the truth,’ Nate said. ‘Until then, do no harm.’
Chizara rolled her eyes. Using her own words against her was a cheap shot. Well, she could always crash the damn machine without Glorious Leader’s permission.
‘Okay, I’m getting some eyes,’ Flicker said when they were halfway across the lot. ‘Everyone’s hard at work. They’re organizing everything on paper. Clipboards, checklists, very old-school.’
Chizara had to smile. No noisy devices.
Maybe if she’d been born here in New Orleans, she’d be in there right now, working in electronic pe
ace and quiet…
No. She didn’t believe in tearing everything down just to get your way. What Piper wanted was anarchy and chaos.
‘We need to see if Verity’s okay,’ Nate said. ‘Give Flick a location, Crash.’
Chizara came to a halt, pressed her power harder.
‘It’s weird. I can’t feel the tracker anywhere. Maybe one of the Makers noticed it? But there’s also couple of blank spots in the building – on the second floor near the front. They could be power-shielded. Flicker?’
‘I see what you mean. Can’t get inside them, so they must be shielded. But I found Piper.’ Flicker came to a halt, concentrating. ‘In the front of the building. Ground floor. She just looked up at your parade float. Like a big truck covered with Mardi Gras bunting?’
‘That’s the one,’ Chizara said, her eyes closed. She felt it in there too.
The machine was powered down, but she could sense it hulking behind all that brick and mortar, waiting to be activated. The traceries of juiceless wiring, the aluminum curves and the steel feed horn of the transmitter dish.
A little closer and she could pull its guts to pieces.
‘It’s got a big sign on it,’ Flicker said. ‘ “Krewe de New World Order.” Piper’s not into subtlety, is she?’
‘That’s how we get in.’ Nate was pointing at a ground-floor window covered with a metal grate. ‘Think we can pry it off?’
‘No problem,’ Thibault said.
Chizara shook her head. ‘Don’t touch it.’
All the windows had sizzling lines of current around them. Some kind of sensor…
A motion alarm? High voltage? Unknown Crash magic?
The nearby door had a fancy lock – standard biometrics, so that non-Crash members of Piper’s crew could use their fingerprints to get in. But the windows were simply designed to keep people out.
‘It’s going to take some work,’ she said.
‘Is there time for a pee break?’ Ethan asked.
‘Scam,’ Flicker said.
‘I know, I know. Should’ve gone back where we parked the pickup.’
Their conversation blurred to nonsense in the background as Chizara pushed her mind into the window alarms, mapped out their tricks and traps.
Nexus Page 23
