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

it. He felt that way with Kay sometimes, as if he were holding his hands out to her, waiting for her to bridge the rest of the gap between them. He imagined he could understand Owen Curry. Seeing him now, there isn’t enough of a person here to understand. Owen Curry isn’t a bomb. He’s just a monster, the kind you can find anywhere. The thing that’s in him, that Avi is actually hunting, can’t be questioned any more than he could interview an IED or an atom bomb. Owen Curry is the shitty container it walks around in.

“Let’s go,” Avi says.

Fahima leads them back into the lab and locks the door behind them. “Sweetheart, isn’t he?”

Avi takes a deep breath, trying to reset himself. There is mercifully familiar ground he can stand on here. He can be a reporter, run the professional script. Everything is easier to handle if you have someone to be. He slaps his back pocket, wishing for the notepad that’s sitting on his desk, in his office, in another world. “How long are you going to hold him here?” he asks.

“Indefinitely,” Bishop says.

“You can’t keep him locked up,” says Avi. “You can’t keep him in there.”

“We can’t turn him over to the police,” Bishop says. “The lights are the only things inhibiting his ability.”

“Thank you very much,” Fahima says, taking a little bow.

“They’re hurting him,” Avi says. With grim pride, he realizes he’s managed to sympathize with Owen Curry.

“Good,” says Patrick.

“There’s no jail that could hold him other than this one,” Bishop says.

“We should kill him,” says Patrick.

“No more killing,” Bishop says.

Avi stares at Bishop, registering the implication of the word more. Something vague and dangerous about Kevin Bishop is confirmed. Out of the group, the only ones Avi trusts are Patrick and Kimani. Her because she seems kind and honest. Him because he seems like an asshole. You know where you are with assholes.

“Someone is moving pieces around,” says Bishop. “I doubt Owen Curry was an angel before, but someone’s been in his head. He was pushed to do those things. Even if he wasn’t pushed very hard.”

“Why?” Avi asks.

Bishop shakes his head. “To force us out in the open?”

“Worked,” says Patrick.

“There’s no reason for me to be involved,” Avi says. “I write about wars and school shootings. This is…I don’t even know what this is.”

“We are trying to preclude a war,” Bishop says.

“We’re busing ourselves to the killing fields,” says Patrick. Avi can sense the longevity of this argument, the way it’s been buried only to rise back up.

“We need your help,” Kimani says.

“I haven’t written anything in a year,” Avi says. “I’m not on staff anywhere. I have no platform. Walk into the newsroom at the New York Times and say, Hey, we’ve got superpowers. Who wants to interview us? They’ll line up.”

“We don’t say superpowers,” says Patrick.

“There’s something else,” Kimani says from the doorway. Bishop shakes his head, but Kimani ignores it. Avi recognizes the sadness in her face. He’s never gone on a death notification, but he’s seen military officers prepare for them, readying to deliver the worst news a family can get. The mix of solemnity and compassion is how Kimani looks at him as she says, “When we came to your house the first time, you weren’t the one we were looking for.” Avi stares at her, his face blank.

Bishop sighs. “Your daughter is one of us,” he says.

“She can’t be,” Avi says. As he denies it, he knows it’s true. That’s them, he thinks. That’s them in your head making you believe them. But it isn’t. It’s everything he’s ever known or suspected about Emmeline confirmed. What they’re telling him is the answer to all the things he’s wondered about her, and it turns out he didn’t want answers. He wanted to keep her strange and ethereal without it ever needing to mean something larger. As the mystery of his daughter ossifies into something definite, he’s grieved by the death of the mystery. He clutches at that uncertainty, begging it to come back and replace this awful new knowing.

“How could you know that?” Avi says. “You’ve never met my daughter.” He doesn’t say her name, as if he can keep it from them. They know, he thinks. They know everything in your head.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Bishop says.

“Try,” says Avi, a panic welling in his chest. None of them speak. Then Fahima clears her throat.

“You and I are going to be having a lot of conversations that don’t make any sense,” she says. “So why not start? When someone begins to resonate…” She trails off. She sounds like a parent trying to have the talk with her kid but unsure what the most basic building block of the talk should be. “There’s a space, like a shared psychic space, that all of us have access to. It’s like a chat room just for people like us. We call it the Hive. When someone’s abilities manifest, they start to show up in the Hive. Usually they can’t talk to anyone else. It takes a while to learn how to communicate in Hivespace. But we can see them. Like a blip on a radar. Emmeline showed up maybe two weeks ago. She may not even know she’s going there. But she was there.”

“And you saw her?” Avi asks. “You saw the blip?”

“Fuck yes, we saw her,” Fahima says.

“Emmeline isn’t a blip,” Bishop says. “She’s more like a flare. Your daughter is very powerful, Avi. Or she will be.”

Avi looks at the steel door that contains Owen Curry, a broken boy who disappeared twenty-one people out of the world with half a thought. He thinks of all the words he would use to describe Emmeline and how incompatible each is with the word powerful.

My little Emmeline, he thinks. What will she become? It’s a thought any parent might have about any child, but now, with nothing left as impossible, its implications are bigger than Avi can fathom.