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

“The system,” Fahima repeats. “The system is the world, the actual world. The Hive keeps the numbers down. Limits the number of Resonants.” Even Patrick hadn’t suspected that. Things in her head shift. The device she was designing comes apart, and its pieces reassemble themselves differently. Better. The final piece is obvious, but Fahima turns her attention away from it. She’ll have to consider it soon, but not now.

“He built it strong. Good,” Kimani says. “I see those flowers, and I worry. But it won’t break unless somebody breaks it.”

“Maybe someone should,” says Fahima.

“You take a listen to your own advice,” Kimani says. “Allow the possibility that we followed him because he was right.”

“No one’s right about everything,” Fahima says. She plucks an olive from her drink, places it between her front teeth, and neatly slices it in half, just as Bishop used to do.

Sunlight pours in the high, narrow eastern windows of Hall H, and Carrie Norris lies awake. Miquel’s body wraps around hers like kudzu through chain link. One of her earbuds is still in. The other dangles over the edge of the bed like a rock climber detached from a cliff face. The battery on her iPod has been dead for months, but she still finds it a comfort to put the earbuds in before she goes to sleep.

She’s not the only one up. She can hear the shift in breathing. She’s attuned to it. After four months in the camp at Topaz Lake, somewhere in western Nevada, Carrie inhabits Hall H like a body teeming with other bodies. The slow sleep breaths of the room and the measured, snotty lung rattles of kids sharing the same December cold is dominant, layered over the buzz of inhibitors that glow a constant green. Another rhythm rises out of it: the hasty inhale-exhale pattern of others like Carrie, who wake into a panic, rediscovering where they are. The horror of their circumstances greets them fresh each morning, grips something in their chests, and squeezes.

There are 643 Resonants in the facility at Topaz Lake. The number shifts in either direction, but it hovers in the mid-600s. Many were already in some form of custody. Small-town jails, immigration detention centers. People whose disappearance could be effected with a lost piece of paperwork. Those people keep coming, with stories of getting picked up by local police for minor violations and ending up here. Then there are those who were grabbed off the streets, out of their homes. That seems to have stopped. Or at least paused.

Thirty-one people live in the cots and bunks of Hall H, a tarpaper shack the length and width of a school bus. Miquel is the odd extra: unmarried. Warden Pitt denied their request to cohabitate, but none of Hall H’s residents complain about Miquel. He’s loved more than Carrie. Not just here but throughout the camp. He tells Carrie it’s because he works in the schoolhouse with the dozen kids among Topaz’s population. People are indebted to those who tend to children, but it’s not just that. People love that Miquel listens and that he remembers. Carrie’s access to the camp’s black markets provides Miquel endless chances to show up with little favors for people. I remember you said you like marmalade, he says to Edith Fowler in Hall F, a widow who used to be able to read minds like newspaper headlines but now can only smile sweetly and say Bless you in a way that carries weight, a blessing that will be passed up the chain. The camp’s affection rarely passes to Carrie, the procurer of these gifts. She’s liked to the extent that she makes Miquel happy. It’s enough.

“Hey, baby,” he whispers through a fog of half sleep. Others in the bunks murmur. The hall wakes like a large hibernating mammal, slow and lumbering. Feet slap the floor, and Miquel pulls her close as the front door lets in a bitter blast of high desert winter air. No one told Carrie the desert got this cold. No one tells you the truth about anything. Miquel takes a lock of her hair and curls it around two of his fingers.

“You sure?” he asks.

Carrie nods, scratches an itch behind her ear. “It grows back,” she says. Miquel hmmmphs and extracts himself from her, pushing his body up and over hers to land on the floor like a gymnast. At the apex of this maneuver, he plants a kiss on her cheek.

“I’ll go get the things,” he says, and takes off into the cold without a jacket. A Hall H mother has to stop him and remind him. No sense of self-preservation. No understanding of the borders between himself and the world. Remember, you love these things about him, she thinks. The thought undoes itself like a magician’s trick knot, appearing solid only to resolve into nothing.

Carrie heads to the women’s bathroom. The women of Hall H outnumber the men and are for the most part mothers. All the halls are coed, but the distribution seems designed to discourage procreation, if not fucking altogether. Hall B houses the camp’s young single women, but the only men there are ancient to the point of sexual irrelevance. Hall H has a couple of young bucks but insulates them with women grieving for their children who are on the outside. Considering this as a plan assumes that their jailors think of them as human, with desires and motivations. There’s little evidence to support that.

The ablutions of the mothers strike Carrie as theatrical. Black market requests for brand-name mascara and blush are frequent. The markup on these products subsidizes the costs of smuggled antidepressants and antibiotics. In the mirror next to Carrie, a woman in her thirties applies concealer to a fading black eye. Carrie can’t remember her name, only that she “dates” Mister Benavidez, one of the guards. In the fall, her arms and