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

holding her still. Viola glows with heat, and Sarah jerks her hands back. Viola stands with her arms crossed, smirking knowingly at Patrick. It’s not a face Fahima’s ever seen Viola make.

“What did you put in this girl’s head?”

Now that the question is out there, Fahima realizes her own stupidity at not asking it. She’s seen enough to know something’s been wrong. The blank expression on Viola. The cold, dark look that passes over Ji Yeon’s face, over the faces of all the Faction members. It was all in front of her, but Fahima hadn’t wanted to see it. She needed not to see.

“Sarah,” says Patrick. “I need you to calm down. I can explain.” He stretches his arm to sweep Viola protectively to the side. Ji Yeon steps in front of the girl, arms crossed, face mirroring Viola’s.

“She burned her name into Daniel’s arm,” Sarah says. “This sweet little girl branded Daniel Ramos like it was nothing.”

“Sarah—”

“I looked in her head, Patrick,” says Sarah. Cortex is tense on the ground, looking from Patrick to Ji Yeon, assessing threats to Sarah. “I saw you. A little piece of you in the middle of her mind. How could that be, Patrick? What did you do to her?”

“Sarah, this is me,” Patrick says. “You know me.”

“If you won’t just tell me—” Sarah reaches out to touch him, to go into his head and find the truth. She could do it without contact, but something in her needs the physical connection. She’d doubt what she saw without it, and she needs to be sure.

Her hand falls on his bare arm, and Patrick’s face blurs. His features sink into a pool of skin and become indistinct. He yanks his arm out of Sarah’s grip and backhands her hard across the face, knocking her backward. Sarah is registering the shock of it when Cortex leaps at Patrick and bites into his arm. Patrick screams, but Cortex holds fast, dangling from his flailing arm as Sarah scrambles to her feet. Fahima stoops to help her. She sees Ji Yeon produce a shining needle, a foot long and menacing, from her right hand. It rests on her palm a moment, then she grips it like a spear and plunges it into Cortex’s belly. The dog yelps in pain but keeps his jaw clamped on Patrick’s arm. Ji Yeon produces another spike, thicker than the first. This one she drives through Cortex’s eye. He yelps, shudders like he’s shaking water from his fur, and drops in a heap at Patrick’s feet. Sarah screams like she’s being torn in half and sits down cross-legged on the floor. Ji Yeon smiles, and the same smile flickers across Patrick’s face before it’s replaced by proper horror at what’s happened.

“Sarah,” Fahima says, kneeling down next to her. “Sarah, are you okay?”

Sarah looks at her blankly. “Hey, Fahima,” she says. Her voice is high and light, like a child’s. “Have you seen my dog?”

Maya Patel, one of Sarah’s prize students, charges at Ji Yeon. All around her are images of weapons: a twirling mace, a collection of flying swords. None of them are real. Ji Yeon pierces Maya in the shoulder with a spike, and one of the other Faction members, pimple-faced and balding, lights the little girl up with a bolt of electricity from across the room, tossing her back against the padded wall. Maya slumps to the floor, body twitching.

Jovan Markovic, who carried a crush for Maya since their first year, throws himself at her second attacker, jumping on the pimple-faced boy and grabbing the sides of his head. The pimple-faced boy goes slick with sweat as Jovan draws the water out of his body, pulling every bit of moisture through his skin. The pimple-faced boy goes into seizure, but a bulky Faction member grabs Jovan off him by the back of the head and slams him into the hardwood of the gym floor again and again. The first few strikes are accompanied by wet, cracking sounds that deteriorate into noises that remind Fahima of her father’s hands hitting ground lamb in the kebab stand when she was a child. Dull, meaty thuds.

The rest of the Faction members watch, grinning. They eye the students who crowded into the gym the way wolves eye prey, licking their teeth. Fahima hears screams from out in the hallway. Whatever is happening is happening everywhere. The whole academy.

“Patrick, stop this,” Fahima says. She takes a step toward him, but Ji Yeon stands between them.

“I don’t know what this is,” he says. Something in him wants this, Fahima thinks. “This isn’t my fault,” he pleads. But he’s lying. He might not understand it, but part of him knows.

“I don’t care whose fault it is, Patrick,” she says. It feels important to say his name, to establish a connection to who he is. Fahima doesn’t have enough data to understand everything, but there are things she intuits, a collection of impossibles and improbables, several of which must be true. Ji Yeon produces another spike and spins it on the tip of her finger like a witch brandishing a cursed spindle. She smiles at Fahima. Fahima glares at her to back her off, but Ji Yeon can spot a bluff. “Stop this, Patrick.”

Patrick’s features drown in a mask of skin, leaving his face an eerie blank. “Fine,” he says. The voice comes from somewhere behind the caul, a voice made of white noise and wasps’ nests, buzzing and multivalent as if it’s not one voice but thousands, coalescing from everywhere and emerging from inside Patrick.

The Faction members stop what they’re doing as if someone has hit a pause button. They return to themselves, a soft flood of consciousness sluicing over them. They look confused. Some wake confronted with immediate horrors, atrocities committed while they slept. Ji Yeon drops to her knees, cradling Cortex in her arms, weeping. The bulky Faction member who pummeled Jovan into the floor nudges the boy’s body with his foot, as if trying to