And she only had to sacrifice one.
Kelsie looked up at the beautiful boy, the center of everyone’s attention. Of course it had to be him. Just one life to save the rest.
Her hunger guided them.
And she was lifted up.
ETHAN’S EYES WERE VIBRATING.
He knew this feeling. He’d been like this before, at Officer Delgado’s funeral, when he and his mom and every cop in Cambria had been…
Swarmed.
He swept up onto the float, carried along in the press of jittering bodies, a buzzing darkness crowding out every thought. Ahead of him the crowd was already climbing the spire in the middle, up to that throne, reaching for the figure who shuddered, blinding bright and beautiful up there.
They reached him, a maelstrom of hands and screams and teeth. To Ethan’s swarmed ears, it sounded beautiful. Blood rained down across the float, pieces of costume and bits of flesh.
A mask was flung, spinning away.
In a few ravenous moments they consumed the angel boy.
A moment later Ethan’s eyes stilled in his head. People stood all over the float, released again. They were staring at their hands, looking at all the blood, stunned for the moment.
A familiar figure lay in front of Ethan.
‘Nate?’ he asked.
He knelt, checked for a pulse. But it was impossible to feel anything over the thudding of his own heart. The crowd was panicking now, starting to stream down from the float. A guy in a sparkly mirror suit pushed past Ethan and jumped into the throng.
‘Turn off the machine!’ came a ragged voice.
Ethan turned. It was Verity, still handcuffed to her chair. Some kid with a bloody face was lowering Kelsie into the middle seat. She looked dazed, her eyes rolled back in her head.
Was another dose of Swarm coming?
‘Nexus is still full of power!’ Verity cried. ‘Shut it down!’
‘Okay, okay!’ Ethan replied, and turned to face the controls.
Another body was slumped beside the panel – Piper.
And that was when he knew that Nate had to be alive. Because Piper looked completely different from him. She was just…gone. Her face too pale, her body too still.
There was a big red button in the middle of that panel. Clearly not the right one to push. Around it was a constellation of switches and gauges, but nothing was marked.
The sound of the crowd around him was changing again.
‘What now?’ he looked up.
But he knew that buzz sweeping across the throng. An army of bees. And out in the crowd, freaky rattling eyeballs and chattering teeth. He hated that look.
‘It’s happening again!’ Verity cried.
‘I can see that!’ Ethan yelled.
Beside her, Kelsie was waking up, getting that evil look on her face again. The guy on the chair beside her was holding her hand, as if he could argue her out of becoming a Swarm and tearing them all to pieces.
Verity strained in her seat, trying to free her wrists. Ethan felt sick. It was the exact way Davey had died. But this time Beau was only the first of many.
‘Nate!’ Ethan cried. ‘Wake up! Help me figure out these controls!’
He slapped Nate’s face – no response.
Ethan felt the vibration filling his bones, spreading into his mind.
Happy thoughts! Happy thoughts!
He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t angry. No reason to join a swarm!
Yesterday had been the best day of his whole freakin’ life. Sonia Sonic had kissed him! She was the coolest girl he knew.
And she had kissed him.
Happy sunshine thoughts!
But the however many thousands of people around the float didn’t seem to feel that way. The buzzing spread in all directions, the crowd lifting up like a tsunami again, climbing on top of one another.
Beneath him, the float rocked and shuddered. People were mounting the sides, hauling themselves up by the metal rails. The surface tipped, like a ship in a storm. Verity was screaming.
They all should have gone to Mexico. Whatever Piper’s plan had been, it probably wouldn’t have worked out this badly.
But that wasn’t a happy thought! He had to keep thinking—
‘Sonia,’ he gasped.
She was climbing the railing at the front of the float. Her teeth chattered and her eyes rolled sightlessly.
Typical, he was going to be killed by the first girl he’d ever really kissed. Who was dressed like a penguin.
Ethan struggled to stand. To run…somewhere.
The float heaved again, tipping Ethan forward. He threw out his hands to stop his fall – the control panel came up at him.
‘Uh-oh,’ Ethan said.
He watched his outstretched hands fall upon the big red button, and then his brain exploded across the universe.
KELSIE LASZLO
All at once, an overwhelming tsunami of noise hit Swarm’s body.
It vibrated up her spine, echoing in her ears, shuddering in her temples. It squeezed her lungs until she was gasping for air. The relentless force of it rolled on and on, flattening her, turning her bones to paste. So vast and loud that she was lost in the noise of it.
This was her chance to make them all into a single swarm. One body. One beast.
All of humanity. Forever.
But in that murderous ecstasy she felt something else.
A small voice inside her – Beau. She remembered the crowd of lost souls inside Quinton Wallace, all the Zeroes he’d killed. All those lives consumed.
And now a small glittering particle of Beau was inside her, too.
Also forever.
A sadness swept over Kelsie. She’d done what she had sworn never to do, and there was no escaping that.
But that sadness formed the kernel of her fight to remember herself. To remember that she had friends, had Zara. Had a mother and two little brothers.
She could deny the Swarm inside her and make her own choice. She could forgive herself, and keep the struggle going for another minute, another day.
Kelsie chose to fight.
CHIZARA OKEKE
They all felt it happen. But only Chizara knew what it meant.
She’d been so close to doing the unthinkable, with her power wrapped around Kelsie’s heart, ready to prevent a slaughter, to make up for being a demon…
But then the shielding around the guts of Nexus split apart. A glorious maelstrom of complexity erupted, blazed with the force of a celebration a million strong, crashing against the exosphere, flashing down again. With the suddenness of a big bang, the transmitter flung three powers out across the world, from the Zeroes sitting on the float’s three chairs.
Verity. Clarity. Mob.
A lightning storm of signal encased the globe, struck everywhere, changed everything.
It was massive, the speed of it, the force.
All Chizara could see, all she could feel, was the lightning storm. How had Essence and her crew made this thing? It was so powerful it should have blasted itself apart with its own strength. What gigantic, monstrously subtle genius!
Chizara saw what it had been designed to do, and the supervillain part of her could only laugh. It was meant to pull the world apart, impoverishing billions, creating chaos. Crashing banking systems, blowing apart a thousand police stations. Melting the very concept of money. Shredding even the memory of lies.
The scale of it was beautiful. As was the fact that the geyser of energy carried her mind along, so she could see the world wrapped in powers.
But a different set of powers than intended.
Instead of Verity, Coin, and Crash…
…Verity, Clarity, and Mob rained down.
They came out of the sky in a lacework of lightning, connecting separately, multitudinously, to everything, to everyone. Divided into electric mist to touch everyone in the crowd around her, activating who-knew-what in everyone’s bodies and brains. Across the city, the continent, the world, the whole
of humanity lit up and changed before her mind’s eye.
Chizara herself changed – she felt the zap and rattle of the transformation, the pains and pleasures of being crashed and rebooted.
Soon enough, when this eon passed, she’d know what was happening to her, to the world. But for now, this front-row seat at the change itself, the god fingers reaching down from the fire-splashed heavens, the angel touch lighting up parts and paths too tiny for humans to yet have the means to see – that was all that existed, all she cared about, all she ever wanted.
THIBAULT DURANT
The three of them floated there, nameless, knowledgeless. Any farther and they’d melt away into the darkness. No way back – no need, no desire.
Good-bye, Flicker.
That last twitch of her name kept the boy’s eyes open. Staring through the scrim of stars, across the distance between him and the broken world. And a nagging thought kept him from slipping away: He’d stolen Ren and this other girl, taken them without consent into the Nowhere.
They deserved it! he roared at himself, but rage sounded puny and petty out here. He had to take them back.
And as he pushed closer to reality, he could see that it was busy falling apart.
Some vast force was spreading from this machine, shaking everything down to its foundations. The bones of the old world were crumbling.
Everything was different now.
Piper had won. Or maybe, against all logic, the Cambria Five had thwarted her. But whatever had happened, there would be new battles to fight now.
The boy murmured a proverb:
‘Let go over a cliff, die completely, and then come back to life.’
And he steeled himself for more.
He had no choice but to take up his earthly existence again. Running away didn’t fix anything, and there were always, always, always things that needed fixing. So all he could do was revel in any human connection that came his way – Flicker, he said again – and be ready to accept a world whose gaze might never meet his, from now until the end of his days.
And hey, what if this new world was one worth returning to?
NATANIEL SALDANA
Something jolted him awake, like an earthquake in the middle of the night.
For a moment Nate didn’t understand. Then his eyes opened, and he saw Nexus spewing a glorious fountain of crowd stuff into the sky. The energies of a million people stored and compressed and then sent heavenward…
Earthward, really. The fountain arced against the dome of the sky, spreading out in all directions.
Piper had humbled him again.
From the first moment, she’d shown him how small he was. A boy from a small city, with small plans. A small crew who barely tolerated each other.
But this new humbling was something else entirely. A world-changing event. Piper bending reality to her will.
Until Nate realized—
Piper’s plan had come undone. She lay beside him, unmoving, and all around was chaos. Blood and bodies and tumult. Even the triumvirate wasn’t the one she’d planned.
Verity was still in her seat, but some new boy with a bloodied face was to her left…and in the third seat?
Kelsie. One of his Zeroes.
A third of the Krewe de New World Order was his.
Nate smiled, deciding to call that a victory.
RILEY PHILLIPS
The world had fifteen billion eyes, and Flicker could see through all of them.
Every.
Single.
One.
And it was pretty fucking awesome.
She was done being a sidekick, stuck in Nate’s shadow. Done worrying about stepping on toes. Done with using only one side of her power.
Terrorist or avenging angel, good or evil twin, love of Thibault’s life or the chain that kept him bound to this heartless, broken world – she could be everything at once.
Because she was pretty fucking awesome too.
‘ETHAN, CAN YOU HEAR ME?’
It was Sonia’s voice. It sounded very far away. Like he was underwater.
He rolled onto his back. Why did he always end up facedown on the ground? And what the hell had happened?
It felt like an explosion had gone off in his brain.
‘Ethan!’
Sonia kept saying his name over and over. He tried to signal that he was okay, that if she would just let him rest here for a minute, everything would be fine. He’d get up and walk away. Before Phan found them. Before Piper zapped them all with juiced-up superpowers.
Wait, had that already happened?
He sat up gingerly. He seemed to be in one piece.
‘You’re alive,’ Sonia said.
He nodded – he was alive. Especially his brain, which was on fire.
Sonia looked great in her penguin costume. She always looked great. Smartest, most switched-on girl he’d ever meet. He knew that for sure.
He knew a lot of things for sure. It was the weirdest feeling, knowing everything and being certain about it.
He knew that all over the world, thousands of bankers, fund managers, and financiers were having the same revelation right now. A need to tell the truth had shaken them hard, and all at once they were deciding to spill the beans about their companies’ crooked schemes.
Ethan also knew that, starting today, countless tech heads would focus less on making clever gadgets and more on creating decent communities. Suddenly people could feel the feedback loops online, in that gut-level way Kelsie felt crowds, so taking hatred and bullying out of those loops would be a priority from here on out.
He also knew that blasts of clarity were hitting people the world over, making billions of small repairs in families and workplaces and sports teams and marching bands and classrooms and small towns and political parties and big cities that would, over the next few decades, bubble up into real change.
Best of all, he knew the feds would never lock him up.
Crap. That was a lot to know. Maybe his brain really had exploded. What the hell did Ethan Thomas Cooper know about banking or tech or politics?
He tried to open his mouth to ask Sonia, but his mouth still wasn’t working.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
The world had changed. Nexus had spat out truth, clarity, and a big loving dose of Kelsie Laszlo.
But here around them, all was silent.
He looked around. Nobody was moving.
‘Are they all dead?’ Sonia whispered.
Ethan shook his head. Only Piper and Beau were dead. This street might look like the end of a very long slasher film, but all those people were just resting. Pretty much everyone in the world was going to sleep well tonight.
‘Okay, good,’ she said. ‘I was worried. I think I love you.’
Sonia’s eyes went wide with horror.
‘Oops, I didn’t mean…’
Ethan could only chuckle. He knew that too – that he and Sonia loved each other.
He pointed at Verity, but Sonia didn’t understand. Not yet.
With Verity’s power projected around the world, nobody was going to lie for…three months, ten days, and sixteen hours. At that moment, Ethan somehow knew, a kid named Guo Huateng was going to tell his mom that he’d done his homework, when he hadn’t. Inside eight months, lying would make a comeback worldwide. But those months of the unvarnished truth would make everyone think a little harder before they rained bullshit on the world again.
Damn, Ethan thought. He really did know a lot.
Too bad Piper would never get to see the new world she’d helped make. That new world was pretty awesome.
With enough clarity, the truth wasn’t such a bad thing to hear. Especially when everyone had a Kelsie Laszlo-DJed dance party in their head, all day long.
‘Let’s get you out of here,’ Sonia said.
She dragged him up by an elbow until he was standing – unsteadily – on his feet. She pulled him down from the float and through the crowd. Sleeping people were everywher
e.
It was so peaceful.
Even when they all woke up, the world wasn’t going back to the shitshow it had been. A lot would change in those long months of honesty and clarity and Kelsieness. Corruption disrupted. Governments overturned. Laws changed.
But much more important were the small groups that would form during those months of truth and clarity. Crews of five to seven people that would last long after the other echoes of Nexus had faded, and would help to build a world where no one was excluded or misunderstood. Where no one reacted out of brain-clouded fear.
Ethan recalled – or maybe just knew, because he knew everything now – a Martin Luther King quote, that all evil needed to succeed was for good people to do nothing. And he realized that it also worked the other way around.
All that good needed to succeed was for evil to take a few months off.
The problem was, that had never happened before.
Around the corner from the float, he and Sonia found people who were awake. Not just awake – they were slow dancing.
Ethan grinned. All these people, hanging on to each other, holding each other, a big happy crowd beast. Not what Piper had planned, exactly. But the best outcome Ethan could imagine, and suddenly he could imagine a lot.
He turned to Sonia. She was grinning too.
He kissed her lightly, and Sonia squeezed his arm. She pushed him further along the street. When he realized that she was guiding him toward a diner, he gave her a questioning look.
‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘You, not talking? You must need food.’
Did he?
Ethan knew a lot now, with the barrier between his omniscient voice and his brain blown away by Piper’s machine (huh, so that was what had happened), but until the smell of hash browns hit him, he hadn’t realized how hungry he was.
Like Sonia knew him better than he knew himself.
The staff ignored them as they entered the diner. They were all pressed up against the windows, staring out at the change in the crowd. From the boisterous chaos of Mardi Gras to people slow dancing.
Nothing to worry about. The party would be back on by sundown, more rambunctious than ever.
Ethan found a booth with red vinyl seats and a table fixed to the wall. Perfect. He sat down and spread his hands on the freshly cleaned Formica.
Nexus Page 31
