by Bob Proehl
Miquel looks at her and without another word clicks the shackle into place around his right wrist. Nothing discernible changes. She could flip the inhibitor lights off and see what happens, but the switch is upstairs and he’d be alone with his ability if the shackle didn’t work, even if only for a few seconds. She reaches up and puts both her hands on his cheeks. He flinches, expecting the torrent of her emotions to overwhelm him, but then his face relaxes. The memory of the last time they touched floods into her as she feels his soft stubble, the smoothness of his skin. She pulls him down toward her into a kiss, their first since the end of the war.
I don’t know whether to be thrilled or sad or terrified,” Viola says as the bus pulls out of the mall’s parking lot.
“The easiest way to go is all three,” Alyssa says, eating a breakfast sandwich one of the kids microwaved for her in the food court before they left. “I like to start out the morning terrified, then sink into sad around lunch. If thrilled happens, great.”
“She hasn’t been herself for seven years,” Emmeline says to Alyssa, a chiding note in her voice. She turns to Viola. “You should be thrilled,” she says. “I’m happy to see you again.” She hugs Viola, relishing the fresh-from-the-oven heat that comes off her body.
“So I’m clear,” Rafa asks, “are we not worried that Hayden disappeared?”
“They didn’t disappear,” Jerrod shouts over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. Daniel sits next to him, his feet in Jerrod’s lap. “Pretty Asian Mall Boy said he sent Hayden and what’s her name to Chicago to play fuck the police or something.”
“You thought he was pretty?” Daniel asks, sounding wounded.
“Oh, don’t,” Jerrod says, not taking his eyes off the road. There’s something game about the way they’re acting now, as if Hayden made all their performances real and now they have to work harder at being themselves but have decided to be up for the task. Emmeline likes them more this way, when they’re trying to be cool and not succeeding.
“My biggest concern is how we’re driving directly toward a giant rift in reality or whatever,” says Kristal.
“We’re not,” Alyssa says. “I mean, it isn’t. It never was.”
“Can someone explain what happened with Phoenix?” Emmeline asks. They all look at her as if she’s committed a massive faux pas, like saying she’s never heard of the Velvet Underground, even Jerrod, whose head swivel causes the bus to lurch toward the shoulder before he corrects it. “I was away during the war,” Emmeline says. “We didn’t always get the news.”
When they understand she’s serious, they practically trip over one another to tell her the story, a narrative jam session of extended and interrupted solos.
“Phoenix was one of the schools,” Rafa says. “And because of what happened to the school in New York, the schools were supposed to be off-limits.”
“People were like, yeah, we want a war, but we don’t want dead kids on TV,” says Newton the sound tech, who’s decided that nine in the morning is not too early to have a beer.
“People are bullshit,” Jerrod says.
“I was at the school in Chicago, and we weren’t hit the whole war except a couple broken windows,” says Lana. “Then they put up the black glass and started quartering Faction there because they knew the army wouldn’t bust in.”
“But that was the thing,” says Rafa. He’s holding his hands out, fingers splayed, like a magician about to pull off a trick. “Everybody was at the schools, so the army’s like, where do we even shoot? Meanwhile, our side liberates a different camp or voids out some nukes every week.”
“They’d catch our people and put them in a camp,” Kristal explains. “Then our people would bust out of the camp. Everybody they caught was someone else they had to guard.”
“They must have decided, like, I guess sending fucking storm troopers to a school is not the worst idea,” Rafa says.
“They attacked the Phoenix school?” Emmeline asks.
“No, they hit Houston,” Jerrod says.
“Yeah, why was it Houston?” Kristal asks.
“It was all acoustics,” Rafa says.
“You mean optics,” Newton says, punctuating it with a belch.
“Acoustics,” Rafa says. “They set up like an echo chamber of inhibitors with the school in the middle. Not regular ones but like, boom, one time, shorts out everybody. Army walked right in. Nobody died.”
“I remember seeing it on TV,” Lana says. “Some general saying, Look, no dead kids. Big stupid grin on his face.”
“It was a camp,” Viola says. Her voice is entirely flat, and Emmeline wonders, apart from terrible things she might have done, what Viola has seen. “They turned it into another camp. They’d tour news cameras through it like it was a zoo to show how well they were taking care of everybody. All of those kids had boots on their necks.”
This was the thing that was challenging in thinking about the Black Rose Faction: how people ended up in it and why they stayed. It was easy to ask now how anyone could commit to something like that, how they could let themselves become something so terrible. But for a time, what they were doing was arguably right. The awful things they did were justified because the other side was worse.
“So this is where it gets fuzzy,” Rafa says. “Because what the theory is, is that they found the Gates.”
“I’ve never believed that,” Lana says. “At the Chicago school, we all knew the minute anyone came in the front doors, the first thing was you wreck the Gates.”
“Except Houston was chaos and shit,” Rafa says. “By the time anybody could even get to the Gates, they were already in zip ties. So they didn’t wreck the Gates, and the army figures out what they’re for. They’ve got back doors into any of the schools.”
“Including New York,” Jerrod says.
“They think,” Newton adds.
“I don’t think they could’ve gotten into New York,” Kristal says. “Fahima would have figured something out. Like a lock or something.”
“So they decide Phoenix,” Rafa says, talking over her, eager to get to the end. “It’s sprawl and not many students, so they figure they can go in like Navy SEALs and take it out. They fire up the Gate—”
“And Phoenix fucking disappears,” Newton says. Everyone on the bus is silent. Rafa glares at him.
“Seriously?” Rafa says. “You make me do all the lead-up and then you jump in on the big finish?”
“Sorry,” Newton says without a hint of actual apology.
“Except it didn’t,” Alyssa says.
“It did,” Viola insists. “I saw the reports. I was—for a kid, I was established with the Faction by then. All of us from Bishop who they brought in early, we were lieutenants. We had access to information. The Gate ruptured, and the school collapsed into Hivespace, along with the blocks around it. There were photos.”
“Did they come from Fahima Deeb?” Alyssa asks.
“Yes,” Viola says.
“They were fake,” says Alyssa. “She faked all of it.”
“She went on the news,” Kristal says.
Rafa nods. “She busted in on every channel,” he says. “She was like, Look what you did. You ripped a fucking hole in the world.”
“That was her greatest performance,” Alyssa says. “And I was around for some Oscar-caliber shit.”
By now Phoenix floats at the edge of their vision, refusing to get any larger. Emmeline feels like the bus has been running in place for hours, Arizona 87 and the desert on either side of it cycling beneath them like the mat of a treadmill.
“It’s not that Fahima sees everything coming, because she doesn’t,” Alyssa says. “She has backup plans upon backup plans. She was using the Phoenix school as a lab before the war started. It was where she kept her secrets.” She looks at Emmeline. “It’s where she built the Chair. The t
hing you used to make everybody…like you.”
Something in the way Alyssa looks at her makes Emmeline feel guilty. “Not everybody,” she says.
“The minute the war started, the fucking night before, she moved me there to keep me safe,” Alyssa says, putting air quotes around the word safe. “She needed some place no one knew about. No one from the government and no one from Bishop. When the government took Houston, she moved all the students out of the Phoenix school and placed them in other facilities without anyone noticing. She moved in people she trusted or needed to keep safe.”
“And then she blew it up?” Emmeline asks.
“It never blew up,” Alyssa says. “It never fell into the sea or the Hive or whatever everyone said. Just because something disappears doesn’t mean it’s not still there.”
As they enter the city, Emmeline sees the shimmering wall of the tear, the membrane between the actual world and Hivespace. It forms a dome high enough to encompass the tops of every building within six downtown blocks, hitting the pavement at a steep angle. The surface of the tear is milky white with iridescent threads running throughout. It reminds Emmeline of the hand soap her mother used to buy for the downstairs bathroom, the one for guests. If you could freeze that soap into a solid but keep the fluidity of its oily refractions intact, it would look like the tear in front of them. Jerrod drives right up to it, parking across the street at an intersection so that it feels as if they have time to turn and avoid it.
“It’s shiny,” says Emmeline.
“What is it?” Lana asks.
Rafa steps forward toward it, extending his hand, then stops. He turns back to Alyssa. “It’s not going to kill me if I touch it, is it?”
Alyssa pauses, considering. “It’s mostly special effects. But it’s also a security system. It won’t kill me,” she says. “It knows me. Fahima put a chip in me so the system would recognize me. If I ever came back.”
“Your girlfriend put a chip in you?” Kristal says.
“Ex-girlfriend,” Alyssa says.
“I see why,” Kristal says.
Next to Emmeline, Viola wraps her arms tighter around herself, pressing her right ear to her shoulder.
“It’s probably easiest if I go in and let them know we’re here,” Alyssa says.
“No,” says Viola, trembling with anger. “I don’t believe any of this. This place was supposed to be lost and they’re fine? What about Half Moon? What about Houston? Is everyone there secretly okay? Did they get hidden away somewhere too and we couldn’t find them? How come no one cared enough to save them?”
Emmeline tries to hold her, and Viola shakes her off, so Emmeline settles for a hand on Viola’s shoulder. “Let’s knock and see who’s home,” Emmeline says.
Alyssa puts her hands out in front of her like she’s trying to find her way through the dark. Without a pause or a hitch in her step, she walks through the membrane and it seals behind her, no scar or flaw to mark the spot where she entered. The rest of them stand in the intersection, waiting.
“S’hot here,” Rafa says after an indeterminate amount of time. Everyone turns toward him like he’s committed a sin by breaking the silence. “But, like, a dry heat?”
The membrane ripples, then lifts from the ground like a velvet curtain. An arch opens up, revealing the street behind it. Alyssa is standing there with a pained smile. To one side, there’s a boy performing elaborate motions as if he’s pushing back the sky with his hands. To her other side, standing close enough to be almost touching, is Fahima Deeb, who Emmeline hasn’t seen since before the war. She looks broken, her shoulders slumped, her eyes rimmed in red, hijab askew so one lock of dark hair shows on her forehead.
“Look at all of you,” Fahima says. “Get in here so Albert doesn’t have to hold the door open.” The boy’s back arches, the weight of the sky bearing down. “I’ve got to tell you, this is unexpected. But everything is going according to plan.”
Contemplating the paradox of those two sentences, Emmeline steps across the membrane and into a city that by all accounts no longer exists.
Fahima could not have anticipated Alyssa reentering the story, returning to a place she swore she’d never come back to, and it has her on her heels. If I’d had more time, she thinks, but she doesn’t have an ending for the thought. They’d end up in bed? She’d call Alyssa out for the way she left? She’d fix everything? Blindsided by Alyssa’s return, Fahima can’t think of anything to ask from her.
“It all looks the same,” Alyssa says once she’s showered and dressed. She’d balked at the idea of being naked in their old apartment in any capacity, but Fahima promised to stay in the kitchen so that there was no risk of seeing anything no longer hers to see. Alyssa has found a T-shirt and jeans she’d left behind, which must have taken some digging. Fahima stows the offense at the intrusion away, currency to be used in a later argument.
“I haven’t been here much,” Fahima says. She looks around the apartment, which is essentially a dorm room. The coffeepot burbles to announce it’s done, and Fahima pours Alyssa a cup. “I mean, I’m busy. Been busy. Things in New York and sort of all over.”
“How’s that going for you?” Alyssa asks, sipping her coffee. She’s trying and failing not to sound smug, not to look at the world falling apart as proof she was right about Fahima all along.
“Not great,” Fahima admits. “Unmitigated disaster on all fronts.”
“How’s Sarah?” Alyssa asks. Sarah was the reason Alyssa stayed as long as she had. Fahima was never around, and Alyssa had been Sarah’s primary caregiver until the day she left. After that, Fahima had to bring Sarah back to Bishop to keep an eye on her. When Patrick asked where his sister had been, Fahima claimed she’d been in the building the whole time and Patrick hadn’t come to see her. That shut him right up. Back then, Patrick had some sense of shame.
“She is exactly the same,” Fahima says. “No progress, no regress. It would be sad except Sarah’s not mad about it. She knows something’s missing, but mostly she’s the same.” After a sip, Fahima adds sugar to her coffee, which tastes like the sole of an old boot. “You seeing anybody?” she asks.
Alyssa looks at Fahima and busts out laughing. “No, no,” she says, trying to get herself under control. “I have this whole thing about not dating while there’s a looming apocalypse. A couple hookups here and there, real casual. If they get clingy, I let them know about my policy re: looming apocalypse.”
“I’ve been seeing someone,” Fahima says. “Sort of.”
“It’s funny you become utterly normal in a crisis,” Alyssa says.
“I’m trying to communicate,” Fahima says. “Honesty and candor and all that stuff you used to complain I was bad at.”
“You’re still bad at it,” Alyssa says. “Let me guess: the person you’re seeing is from work.”
“I only ever talk to people from work,” Fahima says.
Alyssa nods. “So technically she works for you.”
“It’s not a control thing,” Fahima says.
“It’s always a control thing,” Alyssa says. She takes a deep breath, about to launch into a list of Fahima’s faults, then lets it out. “This coffee’s terrible.”
“I know,” says Fahima. “You want sugar?”
“That would be worse,” Alyssa says, taking another sip. “You want to tell me what you have planned for Emmeline?”
“Nothing dangerous,” Fahima says. She’s fairly sure she’s not lying.
“You told me she died at the school that day,” Alyssa says.
“I told everyone that,” Fahima says. “Everyone needed to think that.”
“You needed everyone to think that,” Alyssa says, “so you could whip her out as your trump card when the time was right.”
“So he couldn’t find her,” Fahima says. She hates having to explain anything. It’s what’s
beautiful about Omar and Ruth and the people she’s surrounded herself with since Alyssa’s been gone: none of them ask for explanations. They accept that whatever Fahima says has reasons behind it that they don’t need to know. “It was never about me using her as a weapon. It was about keeping her from Patrick.” In her head she sees the smiles on the Bloom in her apartment, an expression that was decidedly not Patrick. “Or whoever he is now,” she adds.
“You knew something was wrong with him that far back?”
“I didn’t know,” Fahima says. She wonders how much this is true. Hadn’t he told her after the riot at the school? There’s something wrong. Keep me good. Tell me when I’m going too far. She can’t pinpoint when was too far, at what point she committed to stopping him.
It was the picture, she thinks. Lexington Avenue seen from the window of the headmaster’s quarters. It wasn’t me at all who decided. It was her.
“I think Emmeline can help,” Fahima says.
Alyssa puffs up, haughty. “You’re planning on using her.”
“Of course!” Fahima shouts. “I used Carrie to get her, and I used Omar to get to Carrie, and I’m using Ruth to get over you. It’s what I fucking do. It’s how I see all of you: tools. Shitty half-broken tools I have to make do with because you’re all I have. But you don’t have to worry about it anymore because I have no use for you. You’re free to go, Alyssa. Again.” Fahima points at the door, but Alyssa doesn’t move. “No one asked you to come back.”
Alyssa closes her eyes. Fahima’s certain she’s going to walk out, out of the apartment, out of the building, out of the bubble and into the desert. Alyssa opens her eyes. A tiny smirk plays on her lips. “Her name’s Ruth?”
Fahima releases a breath she’d become unaware she was holding. “She’s nice,” she says. It feels like a belittling way to describe Ruth, but singing her new girlfriend’s praises won’t help things with her ex right now.
“I’m going to hate her,” Alyssa says.
“Probably.”