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

to adjourn the session. Senator Lowery grasps what is happening and who’s responsible. Why didn’t they tell me? he thinks. Why do they never trust me? He reaches into the storm of Senator Adkins’s mind. Frank’s a bigot, yes, but also a colleague. Senator Lowery broadcasts ineffective words of calm.

Eleven members of the upper chamber gain abilities in the Pulse. This is statistically low compared with the general population. In the House of Representatives, the percentage affected is even lower. When enough time has passed to make jokes, a late-night host quips that whatever power intervened that day had no use for rich old white men. As the audience cracks up, a flicker of sadness crosses his face. He wasn’t changed either.

Two hundred million change. Not only with the manifestation of their abilities but with a connection to one another. Their minds link together like their fates. The argument could be made that everyone is connected that way all the time, tied together in common cause. Someone is always around to spout off how the bell tolls for thee, all lives matter. But 200 million feel it, deep and visceral. It’s a feeling not unlike love. It shares with love the potential to curdle, warp into its opposite.

For a moment, they are all together.

—

Fahima stares at the bedroom ceiling, Alyssa’s arm draped over her. She should be at Bishop. She should always be at Bishop. A week has passed since the Pulse. Anything could happen at any second. But Fahima is late getting out of bed, waiting for Alyssa to wake up so they can be together a few moments more. I’ve earned this, she thinks, as if she’s arguing with a world trying to take it away from her. Like a prayer answered with a no, Fahima’s ears pop. Alyssa stirs next to her. Fahima scans the walls of their room for the door. Kimani opens it slowly and peers out.

“You got a second?” she asks.

“Hey, Kimani,” Alyssa mumbles.

“Hey, A. I’ve got to steal your girl.”

“Sharing her with the whole world,” says Alyssa as she turns over and goes back to sleep.

“You couldn’t call?” Fahima asks. She pulls a robe on over her nightshirt.

“They found him,” Kimani says.

Fahima stops what she’s doing. “Which him?”

“Both.”

The day before, Chicago police had found the bodies of Avi Hirsch and Owen Curry in the attic of the Hirsches’ house on Jarvis Avenue. Kimani got the call because she was listed as Avi’s emergency contact, a demonstration of how few friends Avi had left that makes Kimani and Fahima both profoundly sad. The narrative is unclear, but the police think Owen Curry followed Avi from Powder Basin to his home and attacked him, severing Avi’s arm with his ability before Avi shot him in the head. Then Avi shot himself. This last part, no one could quite parse. But they reasoned that Avi Hirsch had recently lost his wife. Add in a traumatic injury on top of an existing traumatic injury, and it wasn’t a huge jump to get to suicide. The police said the bodies had been there several days before a neighbor found them.

“We should tell Emmeline as soon as we can,” Kimani says. “It’s not going to get any easier.”

“Yeah,” says Fahima. Her head plays a greatest hits compilation of every terrible thing she’s ever said to Avi, with bonus tracks of things she thought but didn’t find the opportunity to say. “It’s good, though, that it was him. Avi.” Her own voice sounds distant. “That he was the one to get Owen Curry. He must have been happy with himself.” The thought fails to comfort her. How happy could he have been as he shot himself? Maybe he’d reached a place where he could finally stop.

“When I tell her, I’ll say Curry killed him,” Kimani says. “No need to tell her the other stuff.”

“You’re going to tell her by yourself?”

“Unless you want to—”

“No,” says Fahima. “She trusts you. It’ll be easiest coming from you.” She’s aware how badly she handled the death of Emmeline’s mother, leaving the girl alone until she needed her, pulling Emmeline out of grief for her own purposes. She hasn’t spoken to Emmeline since the Pulse, even to thank her. She’s thought about Emmeline only when considering ways to replicate it. Fahima and Emmeline and the device on a European tour.

“She trusts you, too,” Kimani says.

Maybe she shouldn’t, Fahima thinks.

—

That afternoon, with the relish of a drunk settling in with a bottle of scotch, Fahima opens a folder of gas chromatography results on the black glass substance some of the new Resonants produce and manipulate, along with a comparative report on a sample of the silvery substance Isidra Gonzalez creates. Reading about chemical compounds while the world threatens to burn is a luxury she doesn’t have time for, and a lot of the chemistry is lost on her. But the black glass is fascinating. It looks similar to the black flowers in the Hive, as if they’ve seeped into the real world. If they are the same substance, this is a gift, the meal Fahima’s dreamed of appearing on her table. Imagine putting a cloud of dreamstuff through a gas chromatograph to see what it’s made of. The building could be on fire and Fahima would be here at her desk with this report.

She makes it only far enough to see that unlike the substance Isidra produces, the black glass is nonmetallic when Emmeline knocks on the lab door.

“You have a minute?” Emmeline asks. Her voice is a small bird in the room.

“Yeah, Em,” she says. “I was meaning to come see you.”

“I was hoping you might want to go for a walk,” Emmeline says. “I need to get out of here a little.”

The debt Fahima owes Emmeline goes unimaginably beyond an hour’s walk and is past due. Fahima shuts her report and follows Emmeline to the elevator. On the way out, Shen puts a hand on Fahima’s shoulder and whispers, “Be safe.”

It’s one