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

be ideal would be an implant nestled against the parahippocampal gyrus. But that would require Patrick to apprehend Owen Curry and perform quick, clean brain surgery. The thought is not without its appeal. What she comes up with is bulky, the size of a leaf blower. But it can be aimed and should be effective up to fifty yards.

She tries Patrick’s phone, but there’s no answer. Grudgingly, she sits down and goes to look for him in the Hive.

Without meaning to, she manifests next to the shattered abscess where Emmeline was held. The Hive isn’t spatial; there is no “there” there. Still, she lands on the same spot. On the ground, there are shards of something obsidian, pieces of the cage Emmeline was in. Cautious, remembering what happened last time, Fahima picks one up. She’s braced for another terrible memory, some emotional wound ripped open. Instead, a hundred images flash on the dark surface, people and places she doesn’t know. The flicker of images speeds up, blurring. The shard vibrates in her hand. Fahima drops it as if it’s hot. She looks at it lying on the ground: it’s still. She steps back, pushes herself away from this place to someplace neutral. Someplace that’s not full of questions she can’t answer.

She’s never been any good at searching for people in the Hive. Sarah’s tried to teach her, but it’s like shouting while simultaneously bouncing around the room. She calls out to Patrick through the Hive, focusing all her attention on an image of him, a concept of her friend. The landscape around her condenses, like zooming out on a smartphone screen, and there is Patrick, standing as if he’s been waiting for her all day.

“Sorry I missed your call,” he says. “I was caught up.”

“I’ve got your gun,” Fahima says.

“Great. Now all I need is someone to shoot it at.” He sounds as tired as she feels. No one’s gotten much rest. Bishop’s handling interview requests and taking meetings with senators in DC. Kimani’s picking up new students at an alarming rate, along with busing Bishop and Patrick around. Sarah’s running the day-to-day of the school, dealing with the influx of new students. She’s excellent at it, a born administrator. Much to Sarah’s horror.

“Where are you?” Fahima asks.

“I got distracted,” he says. “I found a little terrorist cell outside of Denver.”

“Us or them?”

“Us. Four or five kids putting Kill All Damps bullshit on the Internet. I spoke with them. Convinced them of the error of their ways.”

“You didn’t take them off the board?” Fahima affects her best imitation of Bishop, his slightly nasal Brooklyn Brahmin tone. Patrick does a great impression of him. Less accurate but funnier.

“I made myself big and scary,” Patrick says. He looks too bored to be either. “It usually works.”

“And when it doesn’t?”

“I buy them off,” he says. “I enlist them in our cause using the persuasive power of my bank account.”

“You are a credit to capitalism,” Fahima says.

“There are lots of these little knots out there,” Patrick says. “I have to wonder what’s going on with Bishop. Usually he’s on top of these things.”

“He’s busy here,” says Fahima.

“He’s missing something big. I’m not sure these groups are unconnected. Someone’s recruited them. That’s who I should be looking for. Not Owen Curry. I’m playing Whac-A-Mole out here.”

It’s strange that she misses him. They’ve spent half their lives as friends who don’t particularly get along, a thing you can be when the pool of potential friends is limited. Patrick and Sarah were late bloomers, and Fahima spent her first years as a Resonant in Lakeview. When they arrived, within a month of each other, the three of them were set apart from the rest of the first-years by age. What brought them together was a shared teenage contempt for the Bishop Academy. In the first years, they were the only ones who deemed themselves too cool for school. Fahima because it didn’t give her the answers she demanded. Patrick and Sarah because the sanctuary it provided wasn’t new to them or even necessary. They’d never run from a farm town lynch mob or seen horror dawning on the faces of their parents. While the others existed in a constant state of pep rally, Fahima, Patrick, and Sarah stood apart, smirking.

Teenage Fahima, bitter at the time that had been taken from her and experimenting with personalities and sexual identities in a rush to catch up, loved Sarah in a way that made attraction seem tiny and hated Patrick less than she hated everyone else. She watched them with the envy only children have for sibling bonds, the deep desire to insert herself into it. Patrick was the first person Fahima came out to, after a clumsy and halfhearted pass on his part. His easy acceptance of who she was earned a trust that preceded real affection, served as the ground it could grow in.

Despite their teenage sneering, they all found their way back to Bishop as adults. Sarah said that it was meant to be and that they’d found the best place for themselves. Behind her back, Patrick whispered to Fahima that the three of them were too fucked up to hack it in the real world, which felt closer to the truth. It’s Patrick, not Sarah, with whom Fahima can be unsparingly honest. Worn out by the need to be upbeat about the way things have gone this year, she’s pained by the lack of his candor in her life.

“When can you come home and pick this thing up?” she says.

“No rush, I guess,” says Patrick. “What took you so long?”

Fahima laughs. “My mind wandered in the opposite direction,” she says. She thinks about a sketch she made the night before. A kind of a bomb. A burst transmitter that wouldn’t inhibit Resonance but jump-start it.

“Trail’s cold here. I’ll have Kimani come pick me up,” Patrick says. “Maybe the four of us can have a drink before I head back out.”

“Make it back tonight and we can