by Proehl, Bob
The minute a dorm room is emptied, Patrick has people there to fill it. Sarah’s developed a network of teachers and administrators. Patrick’s built a pyramid of fighters and trainers. It’s apparent he’s been at this a long time. His wilderness years were not all about hunting Owen Curry. They’ve adopted the name of the first group of resisters in Revere, calling themselves the Black Rose Faction. Patrick laughs the first time Fahima salutes and calls him “Commandant Davenport,” but as more of Patrick’s soldiers flood the school by the hour, the joke stops being funny. She’s not thrilled that the first group to goose-step through a Gate is lead by Ji Yeon Kim dressed in a Pussy Riot tee shirt and flanked by others who had survived Revere, but Fahima swallows her pride and says, “It’s good to see you. I’m glad you’re here.”
Ji Yeon blanks Fahima, her eyes already sizing up the academy for entry and exit points, strategic details. While working on other things, Fahima watches Ji Yeon operate, determined to figure out what she doesn’t like about the girl. When they first met, Fahima fiercely wanted to like her. There’s a cyclic split between generations of leftists and rebels. Every younger generation thinks the one before didn’t go far enough, and every older generation thinks the younger one’s tactics are desperate and irrational. With Ji Yeon, Fahima felt herself on the elder side of that divide for the first time. Ji Yeon made revolution look sexy and fun, and Fahima was outside with practical concerns about survival, pressing her nose up against the glass while the kids sang Crass songs about eating the rich.
Now Ji Yeon lacks that self-righteous spark. Her efficiency looks plodding, passion replaced by dull resolve. She has the long look you see in deployed soldiers and suicide bombers, the look of someone who’s accepted her own death as a possible consequence of her actions. It’s antithetical to everything the Bishop Academy is supposed to be. They’re supposed to be on the side of life.
Within the Faction, there are a number of new Resonants Ji Yeon calls obsidianists, who produce and manipulate black glass. Ji Yeon tasks them with building a wall along the academy’s front facade. Ji Yeon has names for every type of Resonant, sorting them by ability. Sparks. Metalurges. Voiders. At the bottom of the ranks are the noncoms, those whose abilities are noncombative. The useless, like Fahima.
Fahima watches the obsidianists draw black glass up from the ground or puke it out of their guts. The ones who create it can’t shape it and the ones who shape it can’t create it, so they work in pairs. They layer sheets of the substance into a wall that stretches to the building’s fifth floor, protecting the windows and sealing the building off from the outside. When it’s done, it looks perfect, seamless. It makes Fahima miss the ramshackle quality of the Revere barricade, the everything and the kitchen sink approach to resistance. But the last element in the Revere barricade, the final thing thrown in, had been bodies. If perfection avoids that, Fahima will take perfection.
As she had at Revere, Ji Yeon sets up supply and requisitions systems. They outstrip the existing ones at the academy. The cafeterias, not to mention the hot water heaters and sewer lines, had been overtaxed by the influx of new students, but Ji Yeon has engineers on the issues immediately, along with food brought in through the Gates. The first night of the siege, 600 students are treated to Texas-style barbecue delivered through the Houston Gate by Faction members. After weeks of frozen pizza, the students are ecstatic.
The Faction members make a point of bringing too much. The leftovers, the greasy wreckage of the meal, are a sign of the Faction’s generosity but also its power. The next morning, after a round of scalding hot showers, students sport makeshift black armbands, and Fahima sees sign-up sheets for a Junior Faction in the halls. Fahima remembers her father telling her about how Hamas came to power in Lebanon when he was growing up. “They fixed the sewage lines,” he said. “People will fall in love with you if you keep them from drowning in their own shit.”
Homeland shows up in the afternoon. Fahima is upstairs in the headmaster’s quarters with Sarah when she takes the call. Sarah puts it on speaker. The two of them watch out the window as military vehicles amass on the cordoned-off block of 57th outside the academy entrance. Cortex stands on his back paws to catch a glimpse.
“Sarah,” says Louis Hoffman, “you don’t want to do it like this.”
“I don’t want to do it at all,” Sarah says. “We have kids in here.”
“Send the kids out,” Louis says. “Come out with them. We want to keep everyone safe.”
“You have tanks on our porch, motherfucker,” Fahima shouts.
There’s a pause. “Hello, Fahima,” Louis says. He sounds less than thrilled.
“We had a deal,” Fahima says. Sarah turns to her, confused. Cortex gives a curious whine.
“That deal did not include a city in Wyoming getting wiped off the map,” Louis says. “That deal did not include four agents and a little kid in Central Park skipping like an old record.”
“That was an accident,” Fahima says too quietly for the phone to pick up.
“And it most definitely did not include turning half the U.S. population into freaks.”
“Two thirds,” Fahima says.
“Open the doors, Sarah,” Louis says.
“Didn’t you see? There aren’t any doors,” Sarah says, and hangs up, her eyes still on Fahima. “You had a deal?”
“I gave him some tech,” she says. “In exchange for staying away from the school.”
“Did you give them the inhibitors?”
“They would have come up with them on their own.” It’s not true. No one had the biological research on Resonants to shut them off. Inhibitor tech would have been decades off for anyone but Fahima.
“But they didn’t have to,” Sarah says.
“I bought us time.”
Sarah jerks her thumb at the window. “Time’s up.” The high whine of an industrial saw interrupts them from the street. “We’re not done talking about this,” Sarah says as she steps to the window. Below, Homeland agents press the blade of a massive circular saw to the surface of the black glass. “Can they cut through it?”
“Fuck if I know,” Fahima says. She and Sarah spend the first night of the siege manning the window as if it were a watchtower. After blunting three saw blades, Homeland switches to acetelyne torches. Sparks bounce futilely off the wall below. A new agent rotates in every time a torch dies. Sarah and Fahima take turns napping on the couch, but Cortex keeps a constant vigil. Fahima’s on her shift, idly stroking the top of Cortex’s head, when her phone rings.
“You’re on the news,” Alyssa says.
Fahima smiles. “Can you see the top-floor windows?” She waves enthusiastically, forearm like a windshield wiper, like a kid on the back of a boat as it pulls away from shore.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Alyssa asks.
“Tell you what?”
“You left for work this morning knowing this could happen.”
“I leave for work every morning knowing this could happen,” says Fahima. It’s funny how little of the situation Alyssa understands. Maybe it’s a failure on Fahima’s part, an inability to communicate the threat. She hasn’t had the time or the energy to hold Alyssa’s hand and slow-walk her through it. Or maybe it’s something you can grasp only from the inside.
“I can come there,” Alyssa says. “Kimani can get me, and I can—”
“Lys, there’s no reason for you to be here,” Fahima says. “I’ll be home soon.”
She says it knowing it isn’t true. She’s resigned to never seeing their apartment again. But Alyssa believes her and after an exchange of “I love you”s hangs up.
By morning, Homeland has made no visible progress. Faction obsidianists work their way up, sheathing the building in black glass. By noon of the second day, the windows on the top floor, the headmaster’s quarters, are covered. The Bishop Academy is encased
, an onyx tower in the middle of Manhattan, surrounded by armored vehicles.
The Faction turns the gym into a command center. Schematics of the building are spread on tables. A remote viewer sits cross-legged on the wooden floor, casting her consciousness out over 57th to reconnoiter the street while someone records her every word. As Faction members bustle in and out, students awaiting relocation stand outside, hoping to overhear what’s happening or be tapped to join up. Fahima is permitted to come and go as she wants. She isn’t sure who among the faculty isn’t allowed access. She suspects Sarah’s on the list of excluded.
The second night, Patrick calls Fahima in for a strategy session with Ji Yeon. There are others in the gym, but they keep their distance, working on whatever they’ve been tasked with while the generals make decisions. Patrick seems to be able to pull them close or hold them at a distance without saying anything.
“What are our options for getting out?” Patrick asks.
“We can get to the other schools,” says Fahima, “but Homeland is rolling up on Houston and LA, too.”
“What about Chicago?”
“Chicago’s going down different,” says Ji Yeon. “The mayor sent police to keep Homeland off North Avenue.”
“Chicago’s on our side?” Patrick asks with the barest hint of a smile.
“Having the police on our side and having police officers on our side are two different things,” says Ji Yeon. “I wouldn’t count on a blue wall to hold.”
“If we run, we end up in the same situation somewhere else,” Fahima says.
“Worse,” says Ji Yeon. “We’re fortified here.” The black glass walls have been up only a few hours, but they already feel more like enclosure than defense.
“What are our options if we fight?” Patrick asks.
Ji Yeon shrugs. “They’ve got inhibitor rigs set up. Unless we take them out, we’re dead out the door. If we open up windows at the top and send fliers down on them—”
“You want people to throw their bodies on the lights?” Patrick asks.
“Unless you have a better idea.”
“I might,” says Fahima. She’s relieved that Sarah and Kimani aren’t in the room. She can hold on to her secret a little longer. “If their inhibitor rigs are anything like the ones I designed, there’s a flaw. A weak point.”
“Is it the thermal exhaust port?” asks Ji Yeon, smirking. This is the girl Fahima met in Revere. Whip smart and funny, the kind of girl who drops a Star Wars reference into a war council.
“I can short them out,” Fahima says.
“Okay, then what?” Patrick asks, turning to Ji Yeon. The light that flickered on behind her eyes goes cold again. She points to the schematic of the building, the windows on the sixth floor.
“Obsidianists pull back the wall and we send out fliers,” she says. “They carry sparks and metalurges. Take out the heavy weapons. While they’re looking up, we open the front doors and hit them low. Disorient them with psychics, throw physical kids at them.”
“What’s the goal?” Fahima asks.
“We get them off our lawn,” Ji Yeon says.
“They’ll send more,” says Fahima.
“Then we kill more.”
Fahima looks to Patrick. She knows this isn’t going to stop but holds out hope that it will. Either way, the decision falls to him. He nods. “Now what?”
“We wait till morning, closer to noon,” Ji Yeon says. “They’ve got the lights on us now, but if the sun’s high, it’ll mask—”
The gym doors bust open. Sarah drags Viola in by the arm. Cortex is at Sarah’s heel, teeth bared. One of the Faction members takes a step to restrain her. Sarah puts her palm on his face, and he crumples to the ground. His partner steps back, holding his hands up defensively. Sensing the opportunity to see behind the curtain, students file in behind Sarah. Fahima sees Maya Patel and Jovan Markovic, both in their last year. She sees Alma Mason and Boyd Scott and Mona Lamb. How many students have I taught? Fahima thinks. What percentage of the original Resonant population, before the Pulse, passed through the Bishop Academy? These are statistics she could find, numbers she could summon up. Then there’s the unquantifiable corollary: How much good have we done?
“What did you do to her, Patrick?” Sarah asks, shoving Viola in front of him, presenting her as evidence. Sarah’s hands rest on her shoulders, holding her still. Viola glows with heat, and Sarah jerks her hands back. Viola stands with her arms crossed, smirking knowingly at Patrick. It’s not a face Fahima’s ever seen Viola make.
“What did you put in this girl’s head?”
Now that the question is out there, Fahima realizes her own stupidity at not asking it. She’s seen enough to know something’s been wrong. The blank expression on Viola. The cold, dark look that passes over Ji Yeon’s face, over the faces of all the Faction members. It was all in front of her, but Fahima hadn’t wanted to see it. She needed not to see.
“Sarah,” says Patrick. “I need you to calm down. I can explain.” He stretches his arm to sweep Viola protectively to the side. Ji Yeon steps in front of the girl, arms crossed, face mirroring Viola’s.
“She burned her name into Daniel’s arm,” Sarah says. “This sweet little girl branded Daniel Ramos like it was nothing.”
“Sarah—”
“I looked in her head, Patrick,” says Sarah. Cortex is tense on the ground, looking from Patrick to Ji Yeon, assessing threats to Sarah. “I saw you. A little piece of you in the middle of her mind. How could that be, Patrick? What did you do to her?”
“Sarah, this is me,” Patrick says. “You know me.”
“If you won’t just tell me—” Sarah reaches out to touch him, to go into his head and find the truth. She could do it without contact, but something in her needs the physical connection. She’d doubt what she saw without it, and she needs to be sure.
Her hand falls on his bare arm, and Patrick’s face blurs. His features sink into a pool of skin and become indistinct. He yanks his arm out of Sarah’s grip and backhands her hard across the face, knocking her backward. Sarah is registering the shock of it when Cortex leaps at Patrick and bites into his arm. Patrick screams, but Cortex holds fast, dangling from his flailing arm as Sarah scrambles to her feet. Fahima stoops to help her. She sees Ji Yeon produce a shining needle, a foot long and menacing, from her right hand. It rests on her palm a moment, then she grips it like a spear and plunges it into Cortex’s belly. The dog yelps in pain but keeps his jaw clamped on Patrick’s arm. Ji Yeon produces another spike, thicker than the first. This one she drives through Cortex’s eye. He yelps, shudders like he’s shaking water from his fur, and drops in a heap at Patrick’s feet. Sarah screams like she’s being torn in half and sits down cross-legged on the floor. Ji Yeon smiles, and the same smile flickers across Patrick’s face before it’s replaced by proper horror at what’s happened.
“Sarah,” Fahima says, kneeling down next to her. “Sarah, are you okay?”
Sarah looks at her blankly. “Hey, Fahima,” she says. Her voice is high and light, like a child’s. “Have you seen my dog?”
Maya Patel, one of Sarah’s prize students, charges at Ji Yeon. All around her are images of weapons: a twirling mace, a collection of flying swords. None of them are real. Ji Yeon pierces Maya in the shoulder with a spike, and one of the other Faction members, pimple-faced and balding, lights the little girl up with a bolt of electricity from across the room, tossing her back against the padded wall. Maya slumps to the floor, body twitching.
Jovan Markovic, who carried a crush for Maya since their first year, throws himself at her second attacker, jumping on the pimple-faced boy and grabbing the sides of his head. The pimple-faced boy goes slick with sweat as Jovan draws the water out of his body, pulling every bit of moisture through his skin. The pimple-faced boy goes into seizure, but a bulky Faction member grabs Jovan off him by the back
of the head and slams him into the hardwood of the gym floor again and again. The first few strikes are accompanied by wet, cracking sounds that deteriorate into noises that remind Fahima of her father’s hands hitting ground lamb in the kebab stand when she was a child. Dull, meaty thuds.
The rest of the Faction members watch, grinning. They eye the students who crowded into the gym the way wolves eye prey, licking their teeth. Fahima hears screams from out in the hallway. Whatever is happening is happening everywhere. The whole academy.
“Patrick, stop this,” Fahima says. She takes a step toward him, but Ji Yeon stands between them.
“I don’t know what this is,” he says. Something in him wants this, Fahima thinks. “This isn’t my fault,” he pleads. But he’s lying. He might not understand it, but part of him knows.
“I don’t care whose fault it is, Patrick,” she says. It feels important to say his name, to establish a connection to who he is. Fahima doesn’t have enough data to understand everything, but there are things she intuits, a collection of impossibles and improbables, several of which must be true. Ji Yeon produces another spike and spins it on the tip of her finger like a witch brandishing a cursed spindle. She smiles at Fahima. Fahima glares at her to back her off, but Ji Yeon can spot a bluff. “Stop this, Patrick.”
Patrick’s features drown in a mask of skin, leaving his face an eerie blank. “Fine,” he says. The voice comes from somewhere behind the caul, a voice made of white noise and wasps’ nests, buzzing and multivalent as if it’s not one voice but thousands, coalescing from everywhere and emerging from inside Patrick.