by Proehl, Bob
The Faction members stop what they’re doing as if someone has hit a pause button. They return to themselves, a soft flood of consciousness sluicing over them. They look confused. Some wake confronted with immediate horrors, atrocities committed while they slept. Ji Yeon drops to her knees, cradling Cortex in her arms, weeping. The bulky Faction member who pummeled Jovan into the floor nudges the boy’s body with his foot, as if trying to rouse him from sleep.
Patrick Davenport, face restored, looks over what he’s done. He kneels next to Sarah, and his arms extend until they coil around her like snakes. “Sarah, it’s me, Patrick,” he says. “Your brother. Sarah, you remember me, don’t you? Sarah?”
She looks confused but not worried. Without Cortex, she doesn’t have the memories of what’s happened. She lacks the context to be properly terrified.
There is no place in the Bishop Academy set up to be used as a morgue, and so the bodies are carried down to Fahima’s lab. Faction members serve as pallbearers, looking suitably penitent. Fahima wonders if guilt will evaporate from them or if they will stow it away, letting it haunt them in the days to come, after whatever horrors are next.
The bodies are laid out on tables under sheets. There’re only five. In the scope of how many people Fahima has killed, this is nothing. But those are names on a list, and these are bodies, tangible. She lays hands on the sheets that cover them. They seem so small. Not one is quite full-size.
“O Allah, forgive Tiesha Ibarra,” she whispers. “And elevate her station among those who are guided. Send her along the path of those who came before and forgive us and her, O Lord of the worlds. Enlarge for her her grave and shed light upon her in it.”
She says duas for each one, pulling back the sheets and making sure their eyes are closed, a final separation from this world. Except for Jovan Markovic. A glimpse under the sheet tells Fahima that there’s not enough left of his face for her to do him this last kindness.
She takes the elevator up to the fourth floor, where the nurse’s office and the classrooms on either side of it have been converted into a triage unit. Nurse Burgess, who’s been here since Fahima was a student, patches and bandages while healers she’s decided are capable work their abilities on wounds and breaks. Nurse Burgess lays students down and elevates their feet, covering them with blankets against the chill of shock. When she pauses, leaning heavily against the teacher’s desk to get her breath, Fahima approaches her.
“Do I need to make room for more downstairs?” Fahima asks.
Nurse Burgess glares at her, a look she’s deployed to chastise a generation of students for drug use, promiscuity, and general lack of self-preservation. “You won’t if you let me do my job,” she says. Fahima takes the hint and clears out.
The gym doors hang off broken hinges. Otherwise order has been restored. Ji Yeon and Patrick are in the same corner, conferencing. Whoever was responsible for cleaning up did a poor job. Pink ghosts of Cortex’s blood streak the floor, and there’s a divot where Jovan Markovic’s skull was crushed. Patrick turns away from Ji Yeon when he sees Fahima come in.
“How is Sarah?” he asks with genuine concern. Fahima can’t look at him without remembering the blankness that passed over his face.
“She’s destroyed, Patrick,” she says. “I don’t know if I can bring her back.”
“I should go see her,” he says, breaking eye contact, examining his hands. He’s always been a shit liar. “How many are there?” he asks. “How many dead?”
“Five,” says Fahima. “Jovan Markovic. Ozella Libron. Tiesha Ibarra. Martin Danner. Emmeline Hirsch.” It’s an unconscious substitution, replacing Dashiel Rowling, downstairs with his chest cavity blown open, with Emmeline, safe somewhere in Kimani’s room. Fahima erases Dashiel from today’s tragedy to protect Emmeline and Kimani.
Hearing Emmeline’s name brings a change to Patrick’s face, a chill flicker of disappointment. It’s gone in a second, and Fahima sees her friend again, not the person Patrick is shaping himself into but the person she went to school with, the one she ragged on and counted on. His guilt is real, but there’s something in him that doesn’t share it. A part of Patrick doesn’t give a single fuck for the dead. That part is waxing inside him, pushing her friend to the margins of himself.
“I lost control of them,” he says. “It was like—”
“Why were you controlling them to begin with, Patrick?”
“I wasn’t,” he says, looking away. Another lie. “It was a communication system. I thought it would be a way to coordinate. Like the Hive, only we could use it without going under.”
There’s more she needs to know about the mechanism, the method of communication. Maybe it was intended as harmless and went awry. Maybe it was never meant to be harmless. Sometimes a bug is a feature. Regardless of intent, Fahima will need to have Sarah’s question answered. She’ll need to know exactly what it is Patrick did to people like Ji Yeon and Viola. Those answers will have to wait.
“I need you to promise me you won’t do it anymore,” Fahima says. “Whatever you did to those kids, you undo it.”
“I already did,” he says, looking directly at her to convince her but overshooting the mark. Shit liar since we were kids, Fahima thinks. Sarah always used to say so.
“I need to trust you, Patrick,” Fahima says.
Patrick looks afraid. He leans in close to Fahima’s ear, and the Faction members watch, straining to hear him, as if they’re worried that Patrick might conspire against himself. “There’s something wrong,” he whispers. “I don’t think I’m a good person anymore. I need you here to watch me. Keep me good. Tell me when I’m going too far.”
“We’ll get through this,” Fahima says loudly enough for those who are close to hear. She forces herself to look relaxed, and he smiles at her. She slaps him on the back like an old drinking buddy, and his face slackens back into the mask she now realizes he’s been wearing for years.
It seems to work. Ji Yeon returns to her schematics. The remote viewer closes her eyes and resumes her reports on the army amassing outside. Fahima keeps her pace as she walks out of the room.
Preparations for war continue.
The entire academy is on lockdown except for troop movements. The students who haven’t been shipped through the Gates wait in their rooms for orders. They wouldn’t be out in the halls anyway. They’ve gone to ground in small groups for comfort.
Fahima takes a last tour of the halls. The moment is closing in on her now, her options narrowing. She ducks into an empty classroom, the black box theater where Sarah used to teach her art students. She pulls out her phone and calls Alyssa, who picks up but doesn’t speak.
Fahima takes a deep breath. “There’s something I need you to do,” she says. “And there can’t be any questions. I need you to just do it right away.”
One more piece in its proper place, Fahima walks to the elevator at the end of the third-floor hall. A Faction guard stands in front, sucking down bottled water, blocking her. He’s the pimple-faced boy who knocked Maya Patel out of the air. Maya is one floor above, hooked up to a breathing apparatus. Fahima takes her left index finger and pokes it at the bunched fingers of her right hand. It’s a gesture her uncle used to make at annoying customers’ backs that roughly means You have five fathers. It’s an illegible act of rebellion, but it makes Fahima feel better. The pimple-faced boy takes it as some kind of secret salute and steps aside, letting her in.
The elevator makes its slow climb to the top floor. A regenerative drive to capture the friction heat from braking and channel it back into the grid, Fahima thinks. A shaft of variable gravity. She makes promises to herself. She lists the people she needs to protect. Emmeline and Sarah. Alyssa and Kimani. They can never ask her what she’s done or why. There are decisions coming that will be terrible but necessary, and in the end she won’t apologize. She’ll make them to ward off further horrors
and to stop Patrick if it comes to the point where he needs to be stopped.
The library of the headmaster’s quarters is dim and quiet. The black glass lets in the barest light. There are moving boxes shoved into the corners, empty shelves where Bishop’s first editions have been relocated to the student library on the seventh floor. Fahima wonders if Sarah ever would have settled in here, made it her own. Bishop’s ghost fills the space, haunting it with questions Fahima never got around to asking him or he never saw fit to answer. She’s searched the bookshelves and desk drawers for a diary or journal with no luck. Bishop’s past was swallowed up in his death as surely as if Owen Curry had gulped it down into whatever nowhere now held the town of Powder Basin and its residents. Some things are simply gone.
Through an open door, Fahima sees Sarah on the edge of the bed in the headmaster’s bedroom. Her blond hair is in a windblown tussle, and her sharp business attire is askew, making her look as if she’s wandered away from an explosion. It isn’t far from the truth. Sarah stares out a window sheeted over with black glass. Her hand trails at her side. Her fingers search. One of the Faction members must have led her up here from the infirmary and forgotten about her, unware that Sarah has barely used the bedroom in weeks. She’s been sleeping on the couch in the main office downstairs most nights. Fahima knows because she’s checked on Sarah before sneaking in here at night to work, to install. Crisis can afford one opportunities. She bends down and takes Sarah’s hand in her own.
“Sarah,” she says.
“Fahima,” says Sarah. Her face lights up with recognition. “I was with you earlier. Something is wrong.” She’s not entirely gone, Fahima thinks. Cortex was like an external hard drive for Sarah’s memories, but there has to be information stored inside the system. Parts of her are here.
“Sarah, do you remember what happened?” Fahima asks. “What happened to Cortex?”
It takes Sarah a moment to place the name. When she does, her hand pulls free of Fahima’s and gropes the air at her side, seeking her companion. Her hand closes into a loose fist. “He wanders off sometimes,” she says, bringing her hand to her chest and holding it in the other. “He’s not a bad dog. He’ll come back in a minute.” She turns back to the window. Fahima puts her hand on Sarah’s shoulder, and she startles. She examines Fahima’s reflection in the black glass, confused. She smiles and turns around.
“Fahima,” she says. “I was with you earlier. Something is wrong.”
“It is,” Fahima says. “I’m working on it.” She doesn’t have a plan to fix it yet, but she has a plan to buy herself time. Bury the ones she wants to keep. Hide them deep in the earth to keep them safe. Fahima pulls a footstool over to the doorway. She stands on tiptoe and removes the wooden corner piece on the top right side of the door frame, revealing a panel of buttons. She’s proud of her work. The dark wood molding around the door perfectly covers the machinery of the Gate Fahima built into the frame. She enters a code, and the Gate ramps up.
“Fahima, what’s that sound?” Sarah asks, yelling to be heard. Fahima climbs down, holding on to the jamb for balance. Her hand feels like it’s resting on the hood of an old car. The wood is alive with the working of the machinery underneath. The library on the other side of the door shimmers like a heat mirage. Another room swims into view. Fahima sees Alyssa waiting for them in her OR scrubs. Her features are out of focus, but Fahima would know her anywhere.
“I’ve got a place for you to stay,” Fahima says. “Somewhere you’ll be safe.”
Fahima takes Sarah’s hand and leads her through the door.
For Story and Alex, who are growing up with strange abilities I can only hope to understand
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wouldn’t have even attempted this book without the encouragement and support of my agent, Seth Fishman. This book started from a “you could do something like that” conversation over beers when my first book was still new in the world, and I cannot thank him enough for the times between then and now when his enthusiasm has managed to overwhelm my doubts.
At some point, a book needs someone to see something in it that isn’t quite there yet. Thank you to Sarah Peed at Del Rey for seeing what this book could be and helping to get it there. Thanks as well to Andrea Schulz at Viking, whose early reads on it helped me rein in my natural impulse toward sprawl and turn what was a guided tour of a world into a focused story.
Thank you to my incredibly talented writing group, Melanie Conroy-Goldman Hamilton and Jennifer Savran Kelly, for their willingness to speed through large chunks of novel, guided only by breathless summaries of what’s come before or which draft we were on, or what characters had been changed, replaced, or cut entirely. Thank you to Mariam Quraishi and Khaled Malas for advice when asked, correction when required.
This book owes an obvious debt to a half century or more of X-Men comics. There’s not enough room to list every writer and artist whose work on those books I admire, but I’d be remiss in failing to acknowledge the impact of Chris Claremont’s writing on me as a kid, and still as an adult. Thanks also to Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes, and Ramzi Fawaz, whose loving and critical assessment of those comics has shaped the way I think about them.
This book also has Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster series deep in its DNA, and now that you are (presumably) at the end of this one, I urge you to go pick those books up, if you haven’t already.
A lot of the thinking and approach of this book comes from the discipline of disability studies. Enforcing Normalcy by Leonard Davis, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability by Elizabeth Barnes, and Deaf President Now!: The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University by John B. Christiansen and Sharon N. Barnartt were touchstone texts as I was writing, as were Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and, from another vector entirely, Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree.
I started writing this book late in 2016, and the ghosts of David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen haunt the text. The book evolved while watching resistance movements forming around the country in response to what was happening at a national level. I began from a point of despair, convinced America was unsalvageable or, worse, not worth saving. It was a long path back from there, and this book and the next trace that arc. The way has been lit by the efforts of amazing, impassioned people who manage to imagine a utopia when dystopia seems alarmingly close. This book is a sort of long, elliptical thank-you note to all who fight, who strive, who resist.
And thank you, always, to Heather, for suffering through the emotional and economic swings of my particular form of employment. It’s difficult to float away in one’s head all day without knowing you have a safe place to come back to, and you’re mine.
BY BOB PROEHL
A Hundred Thousand Worlds
The Nobody People
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOB PROEHL is the author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds, a Booklist Best Book of the Year. He has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York, a deejay, a record-store owner, and a bartender. He was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and a resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony. His work has appeared on Salon, as part of the 33⅓ book series, and in American Short Fiction.
bobproehl.com
Twitter: @bobproehl
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