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

in storage waiting for a thaw, but Mister Howerton, who oversees the outdoor work crews, thinks grave digging’s hilarious. Especially in the cold, when the effort’s futile. He’ll be out there with a parka and a hip flask, chuckling to himself as he watches prisoners struggle to bury their own.

“Are you waiting for me to tell you how butch you look?” Hayden asks. Suddenly self-conscious, they adjust their ill-fitted platinum wig. After a few days under inhibitor lights, Hayden started to physically revert to their deadgender, all the beautiful changes they’d written on their body coming undone. Their hair was the last thing to go, long blond tresses shriveling like unwatered vines. Hayden petitioned Warden Pitt for hormone therapy, but the warden had as much sympathy for Hayden’s gender identity as he did for their Resonance. Bigotries travel in packs that way. Hayden does their best with makeup and procured wigs but bears the pain of losing their ability more heavily than anyone at Topaz. They’ve lost access to theirself. Carrie’s only cut off from a parlor trick.

“Fuck you,” Carrie says, rubbing her freshly shorn head. She hadn’t appreciated the insulating power of her hair. With her scalp exposed, the cold digs right into her brain. Hayden hands her a cigarette and lights it for her. She blows a column of smoke at Hayden.

“Or punk. Is that better?” Hayden asks. “You look very punk.”

“I will settle for ‘you look like you are not covered in bugs,’ ” Carrie says.

“Children are disgusting,” Hayden says. “It’s unfair to the rest of us to be locked up in here with children.”

“It’s better than snatching the parents and leaving the kids out there on their own,” Carrie says, although she’s unsure. She used to get pissed off with people who held freedom as a sacred abstract, but now it’s something she can hold in her hand. Or, more to the point, can’t. It’s easier here to weigh freedom against other things. Is it better to be a free orphan or a loved but imprisoned child?

“I’ve got something for you,” Carrie says. She hands Hayden a mesh bag she found in the laundry, the kind her mother used to wash pantyhose in. Hayden cocks an eyebrow at her, loosens the drawstring, and peers inside.

“Tell me you didn’t just give me a bag of your hair, single white female.” Carrie tries to grab it back, but Hayden yanks it away. “All creepy crawly with bugs, I bet,” Hayden says. “Merry Christmas to me.”

“I thought there might be someone who could—”

“Glue it to my fucking head?”

Carrie looks at the ground. Miquel tried to talk her out of it, but she felt like she needed to do something for Hayden to close the gap of loss between them. “I don’t know,” she says as they start toward the southeast quad. “People make wigs. Someone might know how to use it to make you one.”

Hayden throws their arms around Carrie, pulling her so close that she can feel the hitch in their breath as they stand together for a second.

“You’re sweet,” Hayden says. “Also a fucking idiot.” They let Carrie go, and they are once again composed, although Carrie can see red rimming their eyes.

“So are you not coming to the pageant tonight?” she asks. “It’s a good alibi.”

“I’ve got my alibi lined up,” Hayden says. They’ve been spending time with Guzman, one of the less terrible guards, who works the eastern fence. He’s promised Hayden he can get them Rez, that he’s working on it. Topaz gives it out to any Resonant whose ability has a physical manifestation that causes pain or death when shut down. Taken in small, constant doses, Rez sustains physical manifestations of ability without allowing the user back into the Hive. Without it, Bryce and Jonathan would be dead. Hayden argued to Warden Pitt that without their ability, they would revert to their deadgender, to no avail. Guzman is trying to help. Hayden’s not fucking him but swears he’s in love and he’ll come through.

“Watch him show up with a ring,” says Carrie.

“Fuck off.”

“Christmas eve? The snow falling on the barbed wire and gun turrets?” says Carrie. “That’s some romantic shit right there. I’d marry him.”

“Are we even allowed to get married?” Hayden asks. “Have they made it illegal yet?”

“Probably,” Carrie says. “It’s not like we get any news in here.”

There’s a one-page weekly newsletter Bryce circulates, but it’s only camp goings-on. Tonight’s pageant. Movie night in the commissary. “Accidental” deaths. Topaz Lake is an Internet dead zone, and they’re cut off from the Hive. No one knows anything about the outside.

“You tell Miquel what’s happening?” Hayden asks.

“Of course,” says Carrie, looking away. One thing hasn’t changed since they were snatched off North Avenue: Carrie doesn’t talk to Miquel about work.

“You think we’re going to pull this off?”

“Of course,” Carrie says.

She misses being able to disappear when she lies.

—

The pageant is the biggest social event since Topaz started. Everyone is here, or close enough to everyone that anyone who isn’t can say he or she was and be believed. The kids arrive early and are handed over to Miquel’s care. Carrie’s mix of pride and worry about Miquel isn’t unlike what the parents must feel. It’s a point of concern that sometimes she thinks of him as delicate. She’s coming to understand it as a symptom of caring. Fear is a by-product, a terror at the object of caring’s potential loss or destruction. It demonstrates not so much that Miquel could break but that Carrie could, shattered by the loss of him.

Bryce finds Carrie in the lobby of the community center, staring at the door that Miquel and the kids disappear through. “It’s a great turnout,” he says. “He must be excited.”

“Nervous,” Carrie says.

“Him or you?”

“Both.”

“It’s nice to see everybody here,” he says.

“It means they’re starting to accept,” says Carrie. “They’re making it into real life.”

“Some of us have been here a year,” Bryce says. “You can’t fight all the time.”

“I can,” Carrie says.

Bryce