The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  Emmeline laughs, a tiny huff that brushes Carrie’s neck. “You’ll never be done with excitement, Carrie,” she says. Carrie laughs, too. As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, it’s true.

  Rafa, Jerrod, and Kristal cram in, along with the rest of the crew from the bus. It’s disorienting to see them again, and it forces Carrie to realize that while she’s thinking she’s in Chicago and they’re in Phoenix, neither of those things is true. She’s spent too much time covering distances, and now distance doesn’t mean anything. Time might not either.

  “Tell me you two are at least fucking,” Rafa says to Hayden and Carrie. Bryce’s head swivels toward Carrie, waiting for the answer.

  “That’s no one’s business,” Hayden says.

  “It’s band business!” Rafa wails. “I have told you all about every fuck I’ve had since we’ve been in this band.”

  “Not that we ever asked,” Jerrod says.

  “The point remains,” Rafa says.

  “Rafa, let it go,” says Kristal. Carrie is grateful for the intervention.

  “Is this everyone?” Fahima asks Emmeline.

  “For this part.”

  “What about your assistant?” Hayden asks Fahima. “If we’re going to war, it’d be good to have a guy who can be a whole platoon.”

  It’s the first time anyone’s said war aloud, and the word changes the atmosphere. Once it’s spoken, there’s no more space for reunions, gossip, or jokes.

  “Omar is…” Fahima struggles to find the next word. The plump, pretty blonde puts her hand on Fahima’s shoulder.

  “The Omars are compromised,” she says. “Anything he hears, they might hear.”

  “We already had a war,” Emmeline says. “It didn’t work. This is going to be something else.”

  Reading Avi Hirsch’s notes and articles, Clay constructs a narrative that begins with a boy walking into a church. There’s a video on Avi’s computer of Owen Curry strolling into a black church in the Chicago suburbs as if it belonged to him. Nothing in Avi’s notes suggests a reason Curry targeted that church. If anything comes across in reading Avi’s notes, it’s how little he understood Curry and how desperately he wanted to. Without a motive, there’s only a boy walking into a church and using his ability to wipe it out of existence.

  Whatever his reasons, Owen Curry set events in motion. His actions convinced Kevin Bishop to bring his people out of hiding. Having a name hung on them made Resonants an issue people had to decide about, and, against what Bishop hoped, those decisions came from a place of fear. They built cages and put Resonants in them. Smarter and more cynical, Fahima Deeb saw what was coming and made ready. When war was inevitable, she changed the world so her side could win. She changed Clay and Dom, ripping them out of their average lives and putting them at the center of a story that’s brought Clay to the front steps of another church.

  Opened days after the Pulse, Chicago’s first Bishop school is housed in a megachurch on North Avenue. It’s not like the church Owen Curry destroyed, whose first stones were laid by freed slaves who came north thinking things would be better and found them too much the same. This church was built with money obtained by squeezing the poor and faithful, persuading people to give because it hurt. The megachurch operated as a house of God for a few years before the nexus of faith and money came apart and the men who ran it bagged up what they could carry and split. It was vacant when the Bishop Foundation bought it, too unwieldy for practical use. The building was called into service to be a place of faith in something no less nebulous than an omnipotent god: a belief in the future and the moral arc of history. The idea that things would get better and could be made better, that their abilities combined would be enough to build a stronger world.

  Clay wishes he could have been a student at the Bishop schools when they were trying to instill that belief. His ability has always been tied to conflict and war, which makes him wonder if that ability is tainted. There was a sigh of relief in the tiny office in Haven when Fahima explained that there was a monster who made things this way, but though it was comforting to have someone to blame, Clay didn’t buy it. It was bullshit the way the moral arc was bullshit—it was negative faith. It’s one thing to say the bad man made things bad. It’s a bigger jump to assume that absent that, things would be good.

  After this, there’ll be things we need to prove, he thinks. We told ourselves that after the war we’d be better.

  This school is now a training facility for the Black Rose Faction, a shift so pronounced that Fahima Deeb ordered Bishop’s name removed from the building, which no one got around to doing. The sign out front says it’s the Kevin Bishop School for Resonant Education. It was built as a church and dressed up as a school, and now it’s a fortress.

  A boy walks into a church, Clay thinks. Maybe.

  They’re in an apartment kitty-corner from the church. The couple who live here are letting them use it; their abilities are artistic, creative, and beautiful but for today only quaint. They reason that this is the best way they can help. Waylon’s trying to get an estimate on the power levels and training status of the junior Faction members inside. He hoped a line of sight on the building would help, but he’s getting nothing. Whatever the specifics, the general situation is not good. “There’re more of them than there are of us,” he says. “I can’t figure out how many are students and how many are real threats.”

  “A college team’s not the NBA, but a college team will beat your ass,” Clay says.

  “I think we go the same way we did at Unity,” Hayden says. “It’s not like we can go full frontal. However many are in there, it’s more than we can handle.”

  “It doesn’t do us any good to sneak in,” Carrie says. “We need to take the Gate. Getting one of us to it won’t help.”

  “So what’s your idea?” Clay asks.

  “Full front,” Carrie says.

  “We’ll get our asses handed to us,” Clay says.

  “Emmeline says it will work.” This hangs in the air as if all of them are trying to find a way to break bad news to her.

  “You trust her,” Clay says.

  “I believe her,” says Carrie. “Is that enough?”

  “She’s a kid, and she’s bullshitting her way through,” Hayden says. “You can see it.” They grin at Carrie the stupid way people look at one another when they’ve realized they’re in love. “But it’s not like we have other options.” That dumb look comes back every now and then, flaring up like an old injury. Clay has looked at Dom that way even after they’ve been together years and still looks at Rai like that, struck into idiocy by the wonder of having these men in his life. Seeing that look exchanged between Carrie and Hayden reminds Clay that he has other options. He can take his boys and run. Run or fight, whichever he chooses now, he has to do it until everything ends or everything changes.

  This started with a boy walking into a church.

  “Come up with a plan,” he says, getting up to go. “But it’s got to be airtight.”

  * * *

  —

  Carlton, the chef at Vibration, assures Dom all the beef is organic and grass-fed and a list of adjectives that Dom is concerned about, leaving aside the fact they’re feeding Rai a hamburger the size of a Frisbee. It’s Dom’s way of taking control of something, caring for Rai in a situation in which he can do nothing to keep the boy safe. Clay wishes he could think of it as sweet, but it feels like a reprimand, as if Clay’s responsible for where they are. It’s not Dom’s intent, but it’s hard not to take everything personally and reflect it back onto himself. It’s important now not to do that. There’s more here than Clay, and he needs to break out of himself and enjoy this in case it’s the last time.

  “I feel like I’m in a Western,” Dom says. “People keep peering out their windows like there’s going to be a showdown.”

  “Might be a
showdown,” Clay says. “Carrie’s working on a plan.”

  “I thought Emmeline had a plan,” Rai says through a mouthful of burger.

  “She told us what to do, not how to do it,” says Clay. “How to do it’s the hard part.”

  “Your father is very good at how to do it,” Dom says, wagging his eyebrows.

  “Gross,” says Rai.

  “Carrie’s better at putting together ops than I am,” Clay says. “Honestly, I prefer being told what to do. That’s why I married your father.” Dom snorts out a tiny laugh.

  “Stop it, I’m eating,” Rai says.

  Dom squeezes Clay’s hand, sending a signal that says Are we going to be okay? Clay squeezes back, signaling that they will. If Dom asked him out loud, he wouldn’t know how to respond in a way that was honest but affirmative.

  “A school seems like an easy fight,” Rai says, mawing down fries by the fistful. “What happens after?”

  Clay doesn’t know, but he suspects it’s nothing good. If they take the Gate, they head someplace worse.

  “Worry about after after,” he says.

  “I know you’re going to, but I don’t want you to go,” Rai says. There’s a bitter edge in his voice; the sentiment is resigned, but he wants it clear this is a live argument.

  “Rai,” Dom says. “That doesn’t help.”

  “Why should I want to help him get himself killed?”

  “Don’t say that,” says Dom.

  “It’s okay for him to say it,” Clay says. “I don’t want to go either. But I don’t have it in me to sit back and let things get worse.”

  “If they win and you die, things’ll be worse for me,” Rai says. He stares at his plate, hands fixed on the edges of the table, elbows rigid. “Does that factor in?”

  Clay reaches over and puts his hand on the side of Rai’s face. His thumb rests along the boy’s cheekbone, fingers curled around the back of his neck. He feels the tension in Rai’s jaw and wants to pull him in, upend the table full of greasy food and hold his boy. Instead, he grips him gently but strongly. It’s how he wants Rai to think of him if he’s gone.

  “You are the biggest factor in every decision I make. If there were something I could give up that meant you would never experience a moment of pain, I would give that thing up so fast. You are my heart beating outside of my body, and I know how hard this is to understand. I know this looks like part of something bigger, but Rai, this is all about you.”

  * * *

  —

  Clay has seen Carrie choreograph the movements of a dozen Blooms against Army Ranger units, and now he finds himself angry at the idiotic simplicity of what she’s come up with.

  “What do you even call this?” he asks.

  “A leap of faith,” Hayden says. Contained in saying it is Hayden’s own leap. Carrie is choosing to believe in Emmeline; Hayden chooses to believe in Carrie.

  Clay asks for another walk-through, trying to look at it a different way. With those words, leap of faith, he can see the plan as confident. It relies on everything working out in the best possible way and has no contingencies, allows for no mistakes. It’s a plan made by a true believer, and it works if everyone buys in all the way. It’s Emmeline’s larger plan writ small.

  “When?” he asks.

  “By ten the students will be in their dorms or in the common rooms,” Carrie says. “There’s less chance of running into anyone on the lower floors. We can barricade them in and take the Gate.”

  “You’re assuming it’s like our school was,” Hayden says. “This is the Hitler Youth training camp. Maybe they don’t spend their evenings smoking and fucking.”

  “Not all of us spent school nights fucking,” Carrie says.

  “No, some of us were getting high and listening to sad songs while pining away for—” They cut themselves off, but the joking mood has fled the room. Clay wonders what Hayden was about to say. He wishes he had time to sit down and hear the whole story of the two of them, celebrity gossip and catching up with an old friend. On the other side, there’ll be time. Carrie goes to find Waylon so he can relay the plan to everyone else on the street, leaving Hayden and Clay alone.

  “You finally get what you want, and then you have to go off and fight an atemporal shitbag and probably die,” Hayden says. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

  “She seems happy,” Clay says. “I don’t know if it’s you or all of this. But she seems like she’s okay.”

  “Was she not okay when you knew her?” Hayden asks.

  “I always got the feeling she was about to float away,” he says. “Like fighting was the only thing that kept her grounded.”

  “She used to worry she’d disappear,” Hayden says. “She thought it was the end point of her ability: she’d get stronger and stronger until she was gone.”

  “If everything works—”

  “When,” Hayden says.

  “When everything works,” Clay says. “When it’s all done, she’s going to be tough to live with.”

  “Tougher to live without,” Hayden says. Clay smiles because it’s the only reason he knows to commit yourself to anyone.

  Waylon blares a message into their heads. Change of plans, he says. There are five Blooms in the school in addition to staff. One of them’s headed up by Ji Yeon Kim.

  “Then we’re fucked,” says Clay. Carrie says the same thing in his head. They had a chance against junior Faction and a handful of teachers, but Ji Yeon’s Bloom will hand them their asses. Clay was lucky to get away alive the last time he saw her.

  Her psychic contacted me, Waylon says. Says they want to talk. She’ll be waiting on the front steps.

  “Talk to who?” Clay asks.

  They asked for the deserters, Waylon says.

  They expect us to come in alone? Carrie asks.

  They said you couldn’t be that stupid, Waylon says. They said go ahead and bring everybody, but they’re only going to talk to you.

  * * *

  —

  Each war decides how it will be fought, but it comes down to ground. Bodies are fungible; ground is real. Trench warfare is the most brutal iteration of this truth, but it’s evident in every form of war. There are two basic versions: one group holds ground and the other tries to take it, or a piece of ground stands open and contested and two groups rush in to build a bridge of bodies to its other side. The latter is prelude to the former, a subset. Weapons and methods change, but at its heart, war is about taking ground and holding it.

  The contested ground is a block of North Avenue and the church that claims to be a school. Clumsy and ragtag, the imitation army they’ve assembled marches up the center of the street. They’re not soldiers. They’re postal workers and baristas and students. There isn’t anyone on their side who wouldn’t rather be home in bed except maybe Carrie. The Faction is always spoiling for a fight. You don’t train people to kill and keep them idle. A sword’s blade hungers for blood.

  About to get it, Clay thinks.

  Five Blooms stand in the parking lot in front of the Bishop School in a wedge formation. They’re outnumbered but not outgunned. If they take out the small collection of fight-ready folks Waylon dug up, they’ll roll over the rest regardless of numbers. The two groups look at each other across an expanse of asphalt and concrete, the Midwestern sky full of stars.

  “Fliers ready, lithics to the front,” Clay calls. Waylon and the other psychics relay the message to everyone on their side.

  “Someone’s seen Lord of the Rings,” Hayden says.

  “Do you walk over there and meet them?” Bryce asks.

  “I guess we do,” Clay says. He looks at Carrie, who nods. They step forward, and the impulse to take her hand is so strange and so strong that he does. She squeezes his hand in hers, and for a second he feels her faith that all this is going t
o work out. It drains away at the sound of Ji Yeon’s voice, commanding and full of the confidence that comes with the backing of trained killers.

  “You gave me a motherfucker of a headache back in the Bronx,” she says as they approach.

  “Imagine the headache I’m about to give you.”

  Ji Yeon smirks. “Maybe one of us will have a change of heart.”

  “Seems unlikely,” Clay says.

  She steps close to him, close enough to whisper. “The kid’s back there, isn’t he? Maaya and Koyo’s boy.”

  “Don’t talk about—”

  Before he can say Rai’s name, a piece of macadam the size of a Buick sails overhead and crashes against the building, disintegrating against the reinforced concrete. The first shot fired, and it’s come from their side.

  “Fuck,” says Ji Yeon. “I thought we had a minute.” The wedge of Faction agents behind her take battle stances while the men and women behind Clay stare in wonder at the asphalt chunks raining onto the highway.

  One of our lithics jumped off early, Waylon says in their heads. What do you want us to do?

  “Hold,” Clay says out loud.

  A burly, bearded Faction agent snarls at him. “You don’t give us orders.”

  “No,” says Ji Yeon, turning to face her troops. She produces small glowing spikes in her hand and, with a snap of her wrists, flings them into the foreheads of two men in the back of her group. Nine more agents, her Bloom and another, pivot, attacking the other agents in the wedge with wind and telekinesis, with blasts of energy so quick that the assailed are taken out without a chance to retaliate. No one speaks: there’s only the labored breath of the attackers, taxed by the intense if brief exertion, and the clomp of Hayden’s boots sprinting across the street. Hayden skids to a stop, out of breath, and takes in the scene.

  “Did you fucking kill them?” Hayden asks.

  Ji Yeon looks at Hayden and at the agents behind her. Half are on the ground, with the other half standing over them. “Probably not, pop star,” she says. “But they’re going to know tomorrow they were in a fight.”