The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

assembly. Each meeting begins by selecting a facilitator. They have no stable heads. No leaders. Alyssa is on the medical committee, which regularly interfaces with the supply acquisition committee. People are pouring in, outpacing supplies, not to mention space. The facilities committee talks about the need to take another block, as if saying it will push the Guard out of Hill Park, giving them the school and the green. Fahima has drawn up plans for solar generators and sewage purification units. The necessary parts go on a list below more immediate needs. Toilet paper and antibiotics. Tampons and soap.

Yesterday Alyssa asked Fahima flat out what the endgame was here. Fahima didn’t have an answer to give her. There’s a value to being here for the sake of being here. It’s intuitive, something she can’t put a name to, and the fact that Alyssa doesn’t feel it highlights the space between them, the differential in how much skin each has in the game. Alyssa wants to know what they’re fighting for. Fahima is coming to understand that fighting is a continued condition of her existence. There may not be an endgame, only another battle and another after that.

Walking down Essex, Fahima hears a familiar voice from one of the powwows and follows it in. Patrick sits cross-legged at the end of a coffee table. Teenagers group around him, dressed in black. She’s seen most of them before, but the only one she recognizes by name is Ji Yeon, directly to his right, looking like a lieutenant to Patrick’s general. Patrick glances up from the map of Revere spread out on the table.

“Have a seat,” he says. “We’re discussing tactics.”

On the map, they’ve labeled crisis points in the wall. One of the boys, a flier, plots out locations of troop amassments. Ji Yeon has a list of resources, including weapons and those in the camp who are effectively weapons. It’s a short list.

“What’s your assessment?” Patrick asks her.

“We can continue to hold them off, but we can’t attack.”

Patrick nods. “What are our options from here?”

Ji Yeon pauses to think. “A full offensive is useless,” she says. “Some of us could make covert runs across the barricade. Low-level sabotage. Targeted assassinations.”

Patrick shakes his head. “First soldier turns up dead, they’ll roll tanks over the whole camp. I like the idea of supply missions, though.”

“We need more fighters,” says Ji Yeon.

“Only if we want a fight,” Patrick says. “It’s better to have people and not need them than to need them and not have them. Can we ask public relations to send word through the Hive? A recruitment drive focused on people with offensive capability?” He looks at Fahima. “There are some students we could call in.” Despite herself, Fahima nods.

The conversation peters out from there. Fahima can’t tell if they’re playing war games or seriously preparing to fight. Once he’s had a last side conversation with Ji Yeon, Patrick and Fahima walk out together.

“What do you think of special ops?” he asks. “They call themselves the Black Rose Faction after the flowers in the Hive.”

“That sounds very Nazi Germany,” says Fahima.

“You have to give it to the Nazis on aesthetics,” Patrick says. “They’re the blueprint for a century of evil names and uniforms.”

“Your kids don’t have uniforms yet?”

He chuckles. “They’re not my kids. They organized themselves before I got here. Bishop called me in as an adviser. It’s all a little above my pay grade. I’m a gym teacher, not a general.”

“You seemed like you were holding your own,” says Fahima.

“I’ll slow them down,” Patrick says. “Maybe keep them from getting killed. For a while.”

“At some point do we let it happen?” she asks. “If the kids want to fight?”

Patrick shakes his head. “Bishop worked his whole life to keep them safe. I’d like to at least stave off a war until he’s gone.”

“He told you?”

“He gave me a sense,” Patrick says.

“We’re talking in terms of days,” Fahima says. “I worry about what comes afterward. If we rise up, what does that make us?”

“Dead, most likely,” says Patrick.

“Even if we win,” Fahima says. “Do we put them in camps? Deport them? Don’t we end up becoming what we fought?”

“Nothing says we have to,” Patrick says. They’re coming up on the intersection where Bishop and Isidra made the sculpture. Patrick’s brow furrows, and he rubs at his temples.

“You okay?” Fahima asks.

“I’ve been getting headaches,” he says.

“You look like shit,” says Fahima. “Been on the road too long.”

So have I, she thinks, but it’s not entirely true. She has Alyssa here with her. Even if they’re not sleeping in their own bed, there’s a strength in carrying her home with her, a touchstone, a turtle’s shell.

Patrick looks at the sculpture, an abstracted tuning fork in ivory.

“That’s an odd thing,” he says.

“You should touch it,” says Fahima. “It’s like having an orgasm and a great idea at the same time.”

“That doesn’t sound nearly as appealing as you think it does,” he says. He recoils from it almost fussily.

Fahima shrugs. “Your loss.” She raps her knuckles on the sculpture, and it rings quietly like a struck gong. She lays her palm against it. Her mind floods with ideas that pass too quickly to register. A parade of impossible inventions. Medical scanner, universal translator, Dyson sphere. Along with the ideas there’s a feeling. The sense of being warm and protected, threaded through with the knowledge that it’s soon to be taken away.

—

Fahima, Alyssa, and Bishop are housed on the near side of Cambridge Street with the Rhees, who have two kids away at college. Alyssa and Fahima share one room, and Bishop is in the other. Alyssa left a note saying she’d be at the triage unit till late. The Rhees are already asleep. Fahima hears the buzz saw of Tae Min Rhee’s snoring as soon as she closes the front door. She goes to the basement to check on Bishop. His room belongs to the Rhees’ daughter, who moved out at seventeen. The decor is an