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

says, wiping his glasses on his shirt. The dog trots back to Sarah’s side. Patrick places the coffee cup on the table next to Avi. His arm retracts into the sleeve of his dress shirt, and he shoves his hand in his pocket as if embarrassed.

“I’ve read several of your articles, Mr. Hirsch,” Bishop says. “I liked the piece about the bus bomber in Tel Aviv. I liked that you interviewed his family. Not a lot of reporters bother with that kind of thing. It’s not the normal way to cover an incident like that.”

Avi remembers the boy’s mother. She was so hurt and so ashamed. What god was worth doing this to me? she asked Avi, sobbing. She showed him pictures of the boy when he was younger, playing soccer in the same square where he’d blown himself to pieces. At the end of the interview, she gave him the picture. Take it, she said. That boy was never real. That boy was a lie.

“Most people save their sympathy for the victims,” Avi says. He feels comfortable talking about his work. It’s a reflex response, no different from putting out his hand to shake. By the couch, the dog huffs and lies down to sleep.

“But not you,” says Bishop.

“The boy was a victim, too,” Avi says.

“What about Owen Curry?” Patrick asks.

Avi pauses, trying to summon up sympathy for Owen Curry. It doesn’t work that way. Once he has to try, he’s playacting, fooling himself into thinking he’s a better, kinder person than he is. He tries to imagine Owen Curry as a boy deserving of love, but he sees the girl zigzagging through the church pews. The flash of white.

“Owen Curry is like us,” Bishop says, gesturing to the others with an open hand. “He has abilities. He’s also a very sick young man. We’ve worried for a long time that someone like Owen Curry would be the first the world would hear about us. If he became the public face of our people, we’d all be branded monsters.”

“We will be branded monsters,” Patrick says. “You think a nice write-up in The Atlantic means they won’t come for us with pitchforks?”

“Let the grown-ups talk, Patrick,” says Sarah. Another yelping laugh slips out of Avi at the thought that he’s one of the adults in the room. He has the childhood feeling of being adrift in a sea of incomprehensible things.

“It’s become apparent that it’s time to go public with who and what we are,” says Bishop. “It’s increasingly difficult to keep our existence a secret, and it’s only a matter of time before some other Owen Curry is exposed. Before that happens, we’d like to provide the public some context. We’d like your help.”

“What are you?” Avi asks. He stares at Bishop, trying to see what strange ability he’s hiding. Bishop smiles as if he knows what Avi is thinking.

“We call ourselves Resonants,” says Kimani. “We can do things, but we’re people. Like you.”

“When you talked to that boy’s mother,” Bishop says. “The bomber in Tel Aviv? Were you surprised how normal she was?”

“I had no reason to think she’d be anything but normal,” Avi says.

“We’re normal, Mr. Hirsch,” Bishop says. “We have families and jobs.”

“Owen Curry has killed twenty-one people,” Avi says.

“You would have been twenty-two,” Patrick says, “if we were two minutes slower.”

Avi remembers the hotel room. The feeling that someone had just left.

“You know where he is?” Avi asks.

They all look at one another, assessing the weight of a secret.

“He’s off the board,” says Bishop.

“We need to show Avi,” Kimani says. “Demonstrate some trust.”

“Based on what?” asks Patrick. “He’s working with Homeland Security. What makes you think he won’t turn us in?”

“I don’t work for Homeland,” Avi says.

“He won’t turn us in,” Kimani says.

“We should wipe his memory and throw him back,” Patrick says.

The idea they could erase his memories of this conversation hits Avi for the first time as a possibility. A vertiginous panic unsteadies him, makes the floor waver out of focus under his feet until he’s sure he can see the snow-flecked lawn one story below. The possible is defined by its limits, with everything that can happen bordered by another, scarier world of things that can’t. What can I know now? Avi thinks. What can I be sure is real?

Bishop nods to Kimani, and Patrick slumps his shoulders, defeated. Kimani goes to the same door she brought Avi through and opens it into somewhere completely new.

The lab is brightly lit. The stark white walls are covered in tacked up pieces of paper. Schematics and notes and equations on graphing paper, cocktail napkins. Tables full of wires and takeout containers. The ceiling is lined with hexagonal chicken wire, like a metal honeycomb. Avi notes that there are no computers, a trend he’s heard about in people’s offices, a pushback against the encroachment of constant access. A dam against rivers of information. The clutter reminds Avi of Owen Curry’s hotel room. In the corner, a woman is hunched at a workbench, wearing a lab coat and dark goggles over a red hijab. The blue spark of her welding torch sputters.

“Fuuuuuuuck,” she says, drawing the profanity out. “Kimani,” she yells over her shoulder, “did you know when you door in, it fucks with the air pressure? My fucking ears popped.”

“Avi,” Bishop says, “this is Fahima Deeb. Our resident genius.”

“Your beleaguered tech support,” Fahima says. She swivels on her stool. She takes off her goggles and rubs at her eyes. “I told you not to door into my lab, Kimani,” she calls. “Use the fucking elevator. Or the fucking phone.” Kimani smiles at her from the doorway. “This is the reporter?” Kimani nods, and Fahima swivels again, pointing at Avi with the acetylene torch. “You have any experience in science writing?”

“No,” says Avi.

“Physics, genetics, nothing?”

“No.”

“Fuck,” Fahima says, slouching her shoulders. “I’ll have to translate my notes into idiot.”

“We need to show Avi something,” Bishop says.

Fahima glares