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

the tread of tanks. The press has been alerted. In the footage, the collapse looks like the sun rising minutes too early. The bulldozers plow through, flanked by sunlight. The tanks are out of the frame.

The Rhees’ house is near the incursion. Shouting wakes Fahima but not Alyssa. Alyssa sleeps like the dead. It’s her ability. Fahima dresses quickly in a tee shirt and sweats, wrapping her hijab clumsily into a knot under her chin. She bursts out the front door into a torrent of people rushing down Dedham, toward the break.

Behind the bulldozers come troops decked out for combat. They split into two groups. Half move down Cambridge, the other half down Dedham. Most carry rifles, but the frontline troops carry weapons that look like leaf blowers. It takes a moment for Fahima to recognize the bastardized versions of her design. She doesn’t understand until she watches a Guardsman train the bulky thing on one of the camp’s fliers and fire. She hears the familiar hum of the inhibitor, and he drops toward the sidewalk, flailing his arms and legs.

Standing in someone’s front yard, Fahima turns her back to the bulldozers and soldiers. She waves her hands in the air. “Get back,” she screams at the Resonants who rush forward to stop the incursion. She sees a boy trying to patch the barricade, pulling branches across from one ripped edge to the other like stitches. A Guardsman hits him with the inhibitor. The boy stares at his hands, confused. He flicks them at the wall ineffectually, as if he’s trying to do a magic trick. A bullet pierces his chest, and he drops to the ground.

The shot turns shouts into screams. People scatter down side streets. Ji Yeon leads a group down Dedham toward the soldiers. Hassan creates a wave of dirt and debris in front of them. They want so badly to look like the small band of rebels who defeat a massive army, but they’re children. Fahima’s head fills with a deafening noise, the sound of a thousand trumpets blaring inside her skull. Everyone hears it. Soldiers grip their ears, failing to understand that the sound is being fed directly into their brains. Ji Yeon’s fighters, prepared for this but not immune, launch themselves at a knot of soldiers. They fight to disarm and disable, not to kill. Ji Yeon throws spears of light at the Guardsmen, aiming for pain points, shoulders, and legs. Guns are tossed away from their owners, brains already addled with the imaginary blare of trumpets are shut down, their owners crumpling like puppets with cut strings. Even when they kill us, we don’t become them, Fahima thinks. Even now, we are not the worst we could be.

One of the soldiers looks around for the source of the sound. He spots Lynette Helms perched calmly on the eaves of a ranch house, not a hint of pain on her face. He levels his rifle and shoots her in the head. She slumps and spills onto the lawn. Dazed, relieved, units move in on Ji Yeon’s group from all angles.

Fahima takes a deep breath. She braces herself against the ivory sculpture with one hand and drops into the Hive. Her body wavers, the beginning of a faint, even as her Hivebody manifests in midair, falling toward the ground, its opalescent surface honeycombed with black.

“Kimani!” she screams. “We need you right now!”

She comes up, returning to her body too late to stop it from toppling. When she picks herself up off the asphalt, she sees the door in the middle of Dedham, standing on its own. The door opens inward. The sight of Kimani’s room in the middle of the open air, war raging around the door frame, makes Fahima feel nauseous.

“Come on!” Kimani shouts. Her face is pained. Fahima’s never seen her make a door that isn’t on a wall. Fahima rushes inside.

“There!” Fahima says, pointing at Ji Yeon and her fighters, who are engaged with soldiers in the intersection. “Go there.”

Kimani slams the door shut and opens it again in the middle of the throng. Bullets strike the asphalt around them, shatter windows in the houses nearby. Fahima grabs the nearest person, who happens to be Ji Yeon. The girl struggles, protests, tries to get back into the fray. Fahima tosses her back into the room. She spots Isidra, not one of the fighters but nearby, holding a round shield of flowing silver stuff. Fahima pulls her in as well. She reaches out a third time, grabbing Hassan by the wrist. He looks at her, encircled in a cloud of dust, eyes tearful and panicked. Before she can get him through the door, his body is riddled with bullets. Fahima pulls at dead weight. She drops his hand and pushes the door shut.

“Let me go!” screams Ji Yeon, lying in a heap on the floor. “You can’t keep me in here while they’re dying.”

“I just saved your ass,” Fahima says.

“Fuck you!” says Ji Yeon. “We have to fight them. They’re going to keep killing us unless we fight them.” She grabs the silver sculpture off an end table and throws it hard. It hits the wall and shatters into a thousand tiny droplets of silver, like ball bearings. They pool together, a half dozen puddles of mercury. Isidra gapes at the ruin of her work.

“There aren’t enough of us to fight them,” Fahima says. “You were going to die, and it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t change anything.”

“You don’t know that,” says Ji Yeon.

Isidra sits on the floor, dazed but uninjured. Kimani is out of breath. “We’ll go house to house,” she says. “We’ll get everyone out we can.”

“Get Alyssa,” Fahima says. “She’s in the basement of 224 Cambridge Street.”

“Your Damp girlfriend’s on her own,” says Ji Yeon. She pulls herself up. “Start at the triage unit on Furness,” she orders Kimani, “then hostels on Essex and Mount—”

“We start with Alyssa,” Fahima tells her, voice tight. She turns to Kimani. “I’m the one