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

“We’ll figure it out some other way,” Fahima says. “Emmeline gets the night off.”

Emmeline smiles at her, then at Patrick. Then she smiles at Sarah, too. She would have let Sarah do it, Fahima thinks, impressed by the girl’s bravery.

“Is someone going to tell me what happened?” Avi asks. There’s so much to explain to him. Everything that happened in the Hive is a violation of rules, of laws he’s never known existed. They have to be careful not to overload him. Not to break him.

“Someone tried to take her,” Fahima says. “Someone incredibly strong.” Even this isn’t entirely true. Fahima’s not sure it was someone. She puts her hand lightly on the girl’s head, her fingers swallowed in twists of hair. “Emmeline was stronger. She’s fucking amazing.”

“Let’s get this fucking amazing little girl home,” Kimani says from the doorway. Emmeline jumps out of Avi’s arms and runs to her. Avi looks after Emmeline, stricken. Too exhausted to fight, he goes to follow.

Before he can step through the door, Fahima grabs his arm and pulls him close. “It’ll happen again,” she says. “She needs to learn to protect herself.”

“I’ll teach her to—”

“You can’t,” Fahima says. She sees his face fall as something breaks in him, a hope he’d held on to. Fahima drops his hand, letting him go back to his daughter.

Everything is set into place, a great Rube Goldberg device of information, waiting for its first domino to be tipped. Fahima sends documentation to the networks, giving them time to confirm. She uses Avi’s contacts and elicits promises not to run with anything before the Trib article. She’s been working with scientists across the country for years to prove that Resonants can do the things they do. He’s hurt that he wasn’t the only baseliner brought in, but he understands the need. A flood of scientific papers is in the pipeline, held back by nondisclosure agreements that will be lifted once Avi’s pieces go public. The science is opaque to him. His job is to communicate who they are, not what. It’s to make them people rather than biological oddities, rather than freaks. He’s confident he’s pulled it off. The next few days and weeks and months will tell. He thinks about what will happen to Emmeline if he hasn’t.

The Trib article is written as a trumpet blast. The Atlantic piece, scheduled to come out three days later, is the culmination of the last two months of Avi’s life. It’s a sprawling 10,000-word article with Bishop, Patrick, and a glowing girl named Marian on the cover looking like the cast of a summer blockbuster. It maps out more of Resonant culture and delves into whatever science Fahima could explain to him. It wasn’t everything. Avi signed NDAs protecting the locations of the academy and the Commune, along with the identities of Resonants who wanted to speak off the record and watch the dust settle before outing themselves. Avi pointed out that there was enough information about Kevin Bishop in the piece that a savvy reporter could find the school with a reasonable amount of digging. Kimani told him they were taking care of it.

On the February morning when the headline on the Trib reads “They Walk Among Us” with Avi Hirsch’s byline below it, the article simmers. The biggest news stories have context, a connection to the previously known. Bombshells about the president assume that the reader knows who the president is. Celebrity shockers are built on a base understanding of a culture of stardom and familiarity with the famous person in question. The Trib story comes out of nowhere, science fiction intruding on the real world.

The world doesn’t wake with the knowledge that everything has changed. The realization settles in gradually. In the house on Jarvis Avenue, where they’ve let their subscription to the Trib lapse, the morning routine goes on as usual. Avi fixes breakfast. Kay reads her book. Emmeline half sings a Stevie Wonder song they heard on the car radio yesterday, filling in the words she doesn’t know with tuneless nonsense sounds. Every so often she catches Avi’s eye. They haven’t talked about what happens next. Publication means a hard stop for the secret they’ve kept from Kay. It will be good to be rid of it. It’s become a fourth person in the house, a lodger who’s never seen but whose presence is felt in another room, listening at the door. Once the secret is out, their lives will return to what they were before, as if by becoming public and shared, the facts he’s hidden from Kay will cease to be.

Avi puts it out of his mind as he cooks breakfast, as he drives Kay to the station and kisses her good-bye. He’s relieved when she bypasses the news vendor in her rush to catch the train. He drops Emmeline off at school and watches her puffy purple coat blend into a scrum of soft, round bodies. He wonders how long before the story trickles down to these kids. How many will recognize Emmeline instantly as one of the people the story is about.

He picks up a copy of the Trib on his way home but doesn’t bother to read it. He’s worked on it for so long that he can recite all fifteen hundred words. At home, he sets up a Google alert for the word Resonant and for his own name. Not a Twitter user, he looks up #Resonant and mentions of the Trib’s Twitter handle. He waits, uselessly refreshing pages that auto-update if they have anything new to show. He hates the phrase go viral. It converts language and thought into biological weapons. But he is waiting for his story to do just that. He’s the epidemiologist watching for red spots to appear on a map, waiting for the screen to flood while worrying about what will happen when it does. He