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

Patrick Davenport, face restored, looks over what he’s done. He kneels next to Sarah, and his arms extend until they coil around her like snakes. “Sarah, it’s me, Patrick,” he says. “Your brother. Sarah, you remember me, don’t you? Sarah?”

She looks confused but not worried. Without Cortex, she doesn’t have the memories of what’s happened. She lacks the context to be properly terrified.

There is no place in the Bishop Academy set up to be used as a morgue, and so the bodies are carried down to Fahima’s lab. Faction members serve as pallbearers, looking suitably penitent. Fahima wonders if guilt will evaporate from them or if they will stow it away, letting it haunt them in the days to come, after whatever horrors are next.

The bodies are laid out on tables under sheets. There’re only five. In the scope of how many people Fahima has killed, this is nothing. But those are names on a list, and these are bodies, tangible. She lays hands on the sheets that cover them. They seem so small. Not one is quite full-size.

“O Allah, forgive Tiesha Ibarra,” she whispers. “And elevate her station among those who are guided. Send her along the path of those who came before and forgive us and her, O Lord of the worlds. Enlarge for her her grave and shed light upon her in it.”

She says duas for each one, pulling back the sheets and making sure their eyes are closed, a final separation from this world. Except for Jovan Markovic. A glimpse under the sheet tells Fahima that there’s not enough left of his face for her to do him this last kindness.

She takes the elevator up to the fourth floor, where the nurse’s office and the classrooms on either side of it have been converted into a triage unit. Nurse Burgess, who’s been here since Fahima was a student, patches and bandages while healers she’s decided are capable work their abilities on wounds and breaks. Nurse Burgess lays students down and elevates their feet, covering them with blankets against the chill of shock. When she pauses, leaning heavily against the teacher’s desk to get her breath, Fahima approaches her.

“Do I need to make room for more downstairs?” Fahima asks.

Nurse Burgess glares at her, a look she’s deployed to chastise a generation of students for drug use, promiscuity, and general lack of self-preservation. “You won’t if you let me do my job,” she says. Fahima takes the hint and clears out.

The gym doors hang off broken hinges. Otherwise order has been restored. Ji Yeon and Patrick are in the same corner, conferencing. Whoever was responsible for cleaning up did a poor job. Pink ghosts of Cortex’s blood streak the floor, and there’s a divot where Jovan Markovic’s skull was crushed. Patrick turns away from Ji Yeon when he sees Fahima come in.

“How is Sarah?” he asks with genuine concern. Fahima can’t look at him without remembering the blankness that passed over his face.

“She’s destroyed, Patrick,” she says. “I don’t know if I can bring her back.”

“I should go see her,” he says, breaking eye contact, examining his hands. He’s always been a shit liar. “How many are there?” he asks. “How many dead?”

“Five,” says Fahima. “Jovan Markovic. Ozella Libron. Tiesha Ibarra. Martin Danner. Emmeline Hirsch.” It’s an unconscious substitution, replacing Dashiel Rowling, downstairs with his chest cavity blown open, with Emmeline, safe somewhere in Kimani’s room. Fahima erases Dashiel from today’s tragedy to protect Emmeline and Kimani.

Hearing Emmeline’s name brings a change to Patrick’s face, a chill flicker of disappointment. It’s gone in a second, and Fahima sees her friend again, not the person Patrick is shaping himself into but the person she went to school with, the one she ragged on and counted on. His guilt is real, but there’s something in him that doesn’t share it. A part of Patrick doesn’t give a single fuck for the dead. That part is waxing inside him, pushing her friend to the margins of himself.

“I lost control of them,” he says. “It was like—”

“Why were you controlling them to begin with, Patrick?”

“I wasn’t,” he says, looking away. Another lie. “It was a communication system. I thought it would be a way to coordinate. Like the Hive, only we could use it without going under.”

There’s more she needs to know about the mechanism, the method of communication. Maybe it was intended as harmless and went awry. Maybe it was never meant to be harmless. Sometimes a bug is a feature. Regardless of intent, Fahima will need to have Sarah’s question answered. She’ll need to know exactly what it is Patrick did to people like Ji Yeon and Viola. Those answers will have to wait.

“I need you to promise me you won’t do it anymore,” Fahima says. “Whatever you did to those kids, you undo it.”

“I already did,” he says, looking directly at her to convince her but overshooting the mark. Shit liar since we were kids, Fahima thinks. Sarah always used to say so.

“I need to trust you, Patrick,” Fahima says.

Patrick looks afraid. He leans in close to Fahima’s ear, and the Faction members watch, straining to hear him, as if they’re worried that Patrick might conspire against himself. “There’s something wrong,” he whispers. “I don’t think I’m a good person anymore. I need you here to watch me. Keep me good. Tell me when I’m going too far.”

“We’ll get through this,” Fahima says loudly enough for those who are close to hear. She forces herself to look relaxed, and he smiles at her. She slaps him on the back like an old drinking buddy, and his face slackens back into the mask she now realizes he’s been wearing for years.

It seems to work. Ji Yeon returns to her schematics. The remote viewer closes her eyes and resumes her reports on the army amassing outside. Fahima keeps her pace as she walks out of the room.

Preparations for