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

She’s handling all of it so well, he thinks. So much better than I am.

“Kids your age can’t be cooped up all day,” says Kimani. “You need time to run around. Blow the stink off, my mom used to say. You like gym class at school?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe you’ll like it here. It’s a nice day out for it.”

“It’s snowy,” says Emmeline.

“Well, it must be a nice day somewhere,” Kimani says. She opens the door, looking down from the top of a hill onto a deep field of green. The air that comes through isn’t warm, but it’s nowhere near the chill of December in New York. Kimani hunkers down next to Emmeline and points upward. “Look, up in the sky.”

Two teenagers fly overhead, swooping in a double helix pattern across an expanse of blue. Leaving Avi and Kimani behind, Emmeline chases after them like they’re a flock of pigeons, waving her arms in the air as if she could take flight. As he steps out into the field, Avi wonders what keeps Emmeline on the ground.

At the bottom of the hill, there’s a boy skinned in pale birch bark, talking to a flower. Avi can’t hear the conversation, but the flower begins to grow, spiraling around the boy’s body like an affable snake. Caught in its coil, he laughs like a little kid, an unselfconscious sound that’s strange coming out of a teenager. Nearby, a girl holds rocks the size of basketballs in each hand. She hurls them at the head of a boy in a Beastie Boys tee shirt. Avi is about to scream, but the rocks shatter and the boy grins, unharmed, brushing chunks of stone off his shoulders.

“This is the only place they can do this,” Patrick says, coming up behind Avi. At their first meeting, Avi hadn’t noticed his lankiness. It’s as if his body, once stretched, has never pulled back into its correct shape. It gives him the look of a convincingly animated scarecrow. “I’d love it if we had a training facility on campus, but there just isn’t space.”

“This isn’t the first-year class, Patrick,” Kimani calls from the doorway.

“I thought this would be more enlightening,” Patrick says. “Show Mr. Hirsch the full scope of what we are.”

“Did you clear this?”

“Are you going to report me?”

Kimani shakes her head in the universal sign for I don’t have time for this and recedes from the doorway, which remains at the top of the hill, casting no shadow in any direction.

“So where are we?” Avi asks.

“Oregon,” says Patrick. “There’s a place out here for Resonants who can’t pass as human. They call it the Commune. I’m sure you’ll get the tour before you write your little story.”

“You don’t like this whole idea,” Avi says.

“I don’t like that we’re doing it, and I don’t like that we’re doing it in half measures,” Patrick says. “You must see it. Trying to pass ourselves off like any other school. We’re not. We’re something else entirely.”

“So why participate?”

“I recognize the necessity,” Patrick says. “The world’s too small for us to hide in anymore. Fringe nut jobs have already put together that we exist. People who spout off about UFOs and the New World Order. You just have to be willing to believe in impossible things. We’re the next conspiracy theory.”

“Why not stay that way?” Avi asks. “Those guys are a joke to most people.”

“It’s getting easier to connect the dots,” Patrick says. “An incident here and there. The right search term and they’re linked together.”

“Then what?”

“Then someone reputable figures it out and does a story exposé-style, and it looks like we’re hiding.”

“You are hiding,” Avi says.

Patrick smirks at him. “The week before we had to go hunt down Owen Curry, I was in Powder Basin, Wyoming,” he says. “Ever heard of it?” Avi shakes his head. “There was a family that died there last week. The Guthridges. Lucy, Sam, Paige, Melody, and Jeb. Single mother, four kids. Local newspaper said they died in a house fire.”

“I didn’t hear about it,” Avi says.

“The mom and kids were beaten and stabbed to death before the fire was set,” Patrick says. “The local paper didn’t mention that. We were tracking the oldest boy and the youngest girl. Both energy projectors from what we could tell. Sometimes a person’s Hivebody indicates how their ability will manifest. I approached Sam, the older boy, about coming to the school. He said he couldn’t leave his family. Bishop was going to offer financial support for the mother and the other kids. The middle kids were baseliners. Sam’s ability had already manifested, so I was tutoring him in the Hive. After work for both of us, when we could find the time. There’s a disconnect, teaching people to use their abilities there instead of in person. It’s like reading a book on the Maillard reaction without ever putting a steak on the grill.” Avi thinks of Emmeline at the stove cooking eggs. It seems like weeks ago. “A couple days before the fire, he came to me and told me he’d used his ability to dig out of a mine collapse. He was so proud of himself. Scared, too, because all the men he worked with had seen him use it. Those men killed him and his family.”

“They were lynched?” Avi says.

Patrick shrugs. “No charges,” he says. “Police put it down as an accident. Bad wiring, maybe. These things happen.”

Avi’s great-grandfather had come over from Germany before the war started. He said that by the time there were official pogroms, grassroots violence had become commonplace. A mob would burn down a Jewish-owned business on the main street in the middle of the day with half the town watching, and the next day the papers would say it had burned as a result of Missgeschick. Misadventure. As if sometimes cobblers’ shops and tailors simply burst into flames. There was no conspiracy, his grandfather said, but a consensus that the truth was not a thing to be spoken.

“The Hive’s