Swarm

Swarm is a young adult science fiction novel by the writer Scott Westerfeld, published in 2016. It is the second book of the Zeroes trilogy, after Zeroes.

The six teenagers at the centre of the series have abilities that work on crowds and through them, and by the time this book opens they have already used them against bank robbers, drug dealers and organised criminals. What they want now is to lie low and get their new and entirely illegal nightclub off the ground.

The quiet does not hold. Two strangers come to town, bringing a completely different sort of crowd-based chaos with them, and on their heels comes a power more dangerous and more sinister than anything the group has met. Each of the Zeroes is affected in their own way: one is crippled by a killing-crowd sensation and has to ask whether she is evil at her core, one is forced to watch the worst that a crowd can do, and others find their consciences and their loyalties tested.

The group also loses the thing that holds it together, because the member who has always been able to lead them finds his influence gone with the others under threat, and the novel follows them into the fight against the new enemy without it.