Swarm (42 page)

He was taking the rap.

“No, wait!” Thibault shouted. “You can't—”

“On the ground!” a dozen voices cried, at the roaring edge of panic.

Nate sank to his knees, his expression splendidly confident that none of them would dare pull a trigger.

But the cops were scared and confused, their focus fitful, like the swarmed people at the mall—and they were afraid. In a clattering storm of safety catches, more pushed forward to get guns on Nate. Bumped from behind, Thibault stumbled and fell across Wallace's body. He tried to scramble off the bloodied blazer, away from the ghastly head wound, but the cops were in a fever now, too dense a crowd to see Thibault at all.

Their frenzy overwhelmed Nate's power, and they piled in on him. Through the milling legs Thibault glimpsed his friend on the ground, his cheek scraping on asphalt as they held him down. A kick went into his side.

There were still a dozen guns on him.

“Flip yourself back, Nate! Disappear!” Everything sounded soft and foggy through Thibault's gunshot-deafened ears, and there was Quinton Wallace's ruined face staring up at him.

But much worse, it was gone—that moment when Nate, his power inverted, had joined Thibault in anonymity. Had actually
seen
him. Had
remembered
him, right here in the middle of a crowd. Thibault had met the gaze of another Anonymous . . .

Who was about to be killed, if Thibault didn't do something.

He still had the gun. If he shot it in the air, would that break their fever, or at least give them a new target? Thibault
dragged himself up and charged at the unseeing cops. “Leave him alone!”

“Shut the hell up, Tee.” Ethan was holding him back by his belt, the effort popping a button on the too-tight jacket he was wearing.

“Scam,” Thibault said. “You can see me?”

“Dude, you just fired a gun—
everyone
saw you.” Ethan peeled Thibault's fingers from the cooling weapon and dropped it on Wallace's body with a thud. “And we're buddies. Come on.”

“But Nate! They're going to—”

“We can't help him now. Can't even see the guy under all those cops!”

Ethan pulled Thibault, stumbling, through a solid nightmare of blue-dressed officers, jabbed by their fists and shoulders as they strained to glimpse what was going on in the middle of the pile:

Nate, kicked and crushed, taking the blame for what Thibault had done.

“Keep moving!” Ethan called over his shoulder. “We need to get to the Dish. Get the others and rescue Nate together—”

“Ethan!” A woman grabbed Ethan by the shoulders. “You're okay!”

She wore a narrow black skirt suit and a dark cloche hat. Deputy District Attorney Cooper, a.k.a. Ethan's mom, breathless and worried.

“I'm getting you out of here! This was some kind of attack. Hallucinogens, or maybe—” She stared through the crowd beyond them at the blood pooling out from Wallace's body.

“Mom, it's under control.” Ethan's real voice was all doubt and nerves. “I gotta help my friend here.”

“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
.”

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 floated 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.

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.