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

of resisters in Revere, calling themselves the Black Rose Faction. Patrick laughs the first time Fahima salutes and calls him “Commandant Davenport,” but as more of Patrick’s soldiers flood the school by the hour, the joke stops being funny. She’s not thrilled that the first group to goose-step through a Gate is lead by Ji Yeon Kim dressed in a Pussy Riot tee shirt and flanked by others who had survived Revere, but Fahima swallows her pride and says, “It’s good to see you. I’m glad you’re here.”

Ji Yeon blanks Fahima, her eyes already sizing up the academy for entry and exit points, strategic details. While working on other things, Fahima watches Ji Yeon operate, determined to figure out what she doesn’t like about the girl. When they first met, Fahima fiercely wanted to like her. There’s a cyclic split between generations of leftists and rebels. Every younger generation thinks the one before didn’t go far enough, and every older generation thinks the younger one’s tactics are desperate and irrational. With Ji Yeon, Fahima felt herself on the elder side of that divide for the first time. Ji Yeon made revolution look sexy and fun, and Fahima was outside with practical concerns about survival, pressing her nose up against the glass while the kids sang Crass songs about eating the rich.

Now Ji Yeon lacks that self-righteous spark. Her efficiency looks plodding, passion replaced by dull resolve. She has the long look you see in deployed soldiers and suicide bombers, the look of someone who’s accepted her own death as a possible consequence of her actions. It’s antithetical to everything the Bishop Academy is supposed to be. They’re supposed to be on the side of life.

Within the Faction, there are a number of new Resonants Ji Yeon calls obsidianists, who produce and manipulate black glass. Ji Yeon tasks them with building a wall along the academy’s front facade. Ji Yeon has names for every type of Resonant, sorting them by ability. Sparks. Metalurges. Voiders. At the bottom of the ranks are the noncoms, those whose abilities are noncombative. The useless, like Fahima.

Fahima watches the obsidianists draw black glass up from the ground or puke it out of their guts. The ones who create it can’t shape it and the ones who shape it can’t create it, so they work in pairs. They layer sheets of the substance into a wall that stretches to the building’s fifth floor, protecting the windows and sealing the building off from the outside. When it’s done, it looks perfect, seamless. It makes Fahima miss the ramshackle quality of the Revere barricade, the everything and the kitchen sink approach to resistance. But the last element in the Revere barricade, the final thing thrown in, had been bodies. If perfection avoids that, Fahima will take perfection.

As she had at Revere, Ji Yeon sets up supply and requisitions systems. They outstrip the existing ones at the academy. The cafeterias, not to mention the hot water heaters and sewer lines, had been overtaxed by the influx of new students, but Ji Yeon has engineers on the issues immediately, along with food brought in through the Gates. The first night of the siege, 600 students are treated to Texas-style barbecue delivered through the Houston Gate by Faction members. After weeks of frozen pizza, the students are ecstatic.

The Faction members make a point of bringing too much. The leftovers, the greasy wreckage of the meal, are a sign of the Faction’s generosity but also its power. The next morning, after a round of scalding hot showers, students sport makeshift black armbands, and Fahima sees sign-up sheets for a Junior Faction in the halls. Fahima remembers her father telling her about how Hamas came to power in Lebanon when he was growing up. “They fixed the sewage lines,” he said. “People will fall in love with you if you keep them from drowning in their own shit.”

Homeland shows up in the afternoon. Fahima is upstairs in the headmaster’s quarters with Sarah when she takes the call. Sarah puts it on speaker. The two of them watch out the window as military vehicles amass on the cordoned-off block of 57th outside the academy entrance. Cortex stands on his back paws to catch a glimpse.

“Sarah,” says Louis Hoffman, “you don’t want to do it like this.”

“I don’t want to do it at all,” Sarah says. “We have kids in here.”

“Send the kids out,” Louis says. “Come out with them. We want to keep everyone safe.”

“You have tanks on our porch, motherfucker,” Fahima shouts.

There’s a pause. “Hello, Fahima,” Louis says. He sounds less than thrilled.

“We had a deal,” Fahima says. Sarah turns to her, confused. Cortex gives a curious whine.

“That deal did not include a city in Wyoming getting wiped off the map,” Louis says. “That deal did not include four agents and a little kid in Central Park skipping like an old record.”

“That was an accident,” Fahima says too quietly for the phone to pick up.

“And it most definitely did not include turning half the U.S. population into freaks.”

“Two thirds,” Fahima says.

“Open the doors, Sarah,” Louis says.

“Didn’t you see? There aren’t any doors,” Sarah says, and hangs up, her eyes still on Fahima. “You had a deal?”

“I gave him some tech,” she says. “In exchange for staying away from the school.”

“Did you give them the inhibitors?”

“They would have come up with them on their own.” It’s not true. No one had the biological research on Resonants to shut them off. Inhibitor tech would have been decades off for anyone but Fahima.

“But they didn’t have to,” Sarah says.

“I bought us time.”

Sarah jerks her thumb at the window. “Time’s up.” The high whine of an industrial saw interrupts them from the street. “We’re not done talking about this,” Sarah says as she steps to the window. Below, Homeland agents press the blade of a massive circular saw to the surface of the black glass. “Can they cut through it?”

“Fuck if I know,” Fahima says. She and Sarah