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

“A source,” says Avi.

“With a capital S,” Bishop says. “I’ve always capitalized it. We thought of it as a place. A physical location outside of our current dimension. We tried to access it directly with no luck. That’s how we created the Hive.”

Avi notices the repeated use of we but decides he’ll dig into it later. “I don’t think I understand the Hive,” he says.

“It’s a place. Something like a place,” Bishop says. “It’s between here and there. There are things I won’t tell you about it and things I can’t because I don’t know. A long time ago, I stopped trying to figure out where our abilities came from and focused on what we could do with them.”

“What about your colleague, what was his name again?” Avi asks, knowing Bishop hasn’t mentioned the name. “Did he keep trying to figure them out?”

“My friend’s investigations into the Source led him far afield,” Bishop says. “Eventually it got him killed.”

“How did he die?”

“I killed him,” Bishop says. Bishop signals to the bartender for another drink, then turns back to Avi with a face that indicates he’s finished with this subject. This is the reason to be afraid of him, thinks Avi. Not because he’s someone willing to kill. Because he believes every decision he makes is justified. Avi’s met true believers. Government agents. Insurgent leaders. The object of belief is irrelevant because ultimately the object of belief is themselves. They can be incredible forces for good, but they’re easily suborned, led wrong by their self-confidence. He wonders if Bishop is a man he can hand the care of his daughter over to, then realizes with a chill that even if he doesn’t send Emmeline to the academy, the rest of her life will be spent in a world populated by Kevin Bishop’s disciples.

“Why did you hide?” Avi asks.

“It was what I knew,” Bishop says. “I moved back to the city after the war. Lived there most of my life, when I wasn’t traveling. People forget or they have trouble imagining it, but people were being arrested for being gay well into the seventies. In New York. We had to keep ourselves secret, but also we had to be able to recognize one another if we didn’t want to be alone. We developed languages, ways of seeing and signaling. We had to be legible to one another and illegible to everyone else. We built a world within the world.

“The way Resonance works, the way we can instantly know our own, combined with the implicit threat we present to others. It seemed to me the only answer was to hide. We could have one another. We could be loved without being afraid.”

“Why not change everyone’s minds?” says Avi. “Why not take over the world?”

Bishop laughs, a bold thing that comes from deep in his chest and spreads out into the room. After a few seconds, it breaks into coughing. He recovers in time to thank the bartender for his second drink.

“I can barely keep the school in order,” he says. “Why the fuck would I want to rule the world?”

“You could be a philosopher king,” says Avi. “A benevolent god.”

“At best, I’m a gardener,” he says. “I tend to my charges. I bend them a little toward the light.”

“You pull out the weeds,” Avi says.

“Owen Curry,” Bishop says, looking down at the bar. “Will Owen be in your article?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. Not right at the beginning,” Bishop says. It isn’t an order, only an expression of preference, but Avi feels the force of it. “We’re learning how to police our own. For a long time, my methods were less humane.”

“There were others who were bad?”

“Some,” says Bishop.

“And you killed them?”

“I did,” Bishop says. His voice is bright, as if Avi had asked him if he was enjoying his drink. “Part of me thinks I should have killed Owen Curry. I lie awake in my quarters, thinking I could go into the cell and end him and no one would blame me. What would your friend in Homeland Security do if I dumped Owen Curry’s corpse on his desk?”

“He’d give you a fucking medal,” says Avi.

Bishop nods. “Fahima told you about the effect baseliners have on our abilities,” he says. “Being around people who aren’t Resonants dampens them. It reduces what we can do. But the opposite is true, too. The more of us there are, the stronger we get. The school sits in a kind of balance. The students are stronger for being together but are held back by being in the middle of the city. The risk of one of us being too powerful frightens me. I was out hunting monsters, but I was also a population control. Which, when I say it out loud, sounds monstrous.”

“You were culling?” Avi asks. It’s not exactly the question he wants to ask, since he already knows the answer. He needs to know the circumstances under which Bishop would take a life. Would it have to be someone who’d gone bad, irreparably evil? Might it be someone who made a mistake? Or someone who was too powerful, as powerful as Bishop and Fahima believe Emmeline is going to be?

“I was willing to yank out a seedling that might grow to be a weed,” he says. “Abilities like ours in the hands of teenagers is a terrifying thought on its own. With the idea that those power levels would increase as the Resonant population increased…Well, I was more preemptive than I should have been. Too many of us would be too much.”

“Fahima says there are more of you.”

“Every day,” he says. “It’s a slow curve upward, but it’s speeding up. Maybe that’s good for the world. Maybe that’s what the world wants, if you can think of the world as having desires. My friend used to talk about the Source as if it were sentient. I don’t know that I ever believed it, but I had the sense I’d