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

all out,” he says. “Really delving in. Cracking the case.” He makes a gesture like breaking a stick in his hands, forgetting he’s holding a glass of whiskey, which he spills on his pants.

“Glover enlightened the adults while Bishop suffered the little children,” Davenport continues. “I brokered the deal for that building. Prime piece of real estate. Not that Kevin Bishop ever said thank you. There were other options, but the Bishop Academy was still the standard. Relentless class mixing. But he did teach them how to live within the agreement. To keep themselves quiet without going completely insane.” Davenport sips his drink. “He thinks of himself as our Martin Luther King, but at best he’s our Booker T. Washington. That school’s no better than vocational training. But my Sarah’s practically running the place now. She’ll whip it into shape.” He throws his arm around Sarah, who shrinks in his inebriated embrace.

“I’m on it,” she says.

“The thing is,” says Davenport, “you can’t be all things to all people. Bishop doesn’t get that. He wants to be the face of our people, and police the bad eggs, and run the academy like he’s Merlin to Arthur or Aristotle to Alexander. You can’t do them all and do them well. Assess your human resources and put them to work for you. Like Patrick here,” he says, slapping his son on the shoulder. “He’s not going to set the world on fire, but he’s a natural bloodhound. No shame in doing a small job well.”

Patrick pours himself a healthy refill of whiskey. Sarah rolls her eyes and holds her glass out. The two of them can have entire conversations in facial expression and gesture, a secret sibling language they share. Patrick’s arm stretches across the room, the bottle coming dangerously close to knocking the cherry off his father’s cigar.

—

“It’s the bedroom window,” says Sarah, pointing.

“It’s the bathroom,” Patrick says, adjusting the vector of her arm to a different window. His other arm is coiled around the half-empty decanter of whiskey they liberated from his father’s study.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

Patrick rolls his eyes. He hands the decanter off to Fahima, who caps it. His torso stretches up to the window on the second floor, and he pours up into it, liquid flowing back into a pitcher. Fahima watches closely, a thought occurring to her for the first time.

“We used to break in here all the time as kids,” Sarah says, grabbing for the decanter. “Patrick found it first, then he started bringing me. This was after he first resonated. Before I did.”

“Are you sure there’s no one here?” Fahima asks.

“Only the hard-cores are here in November. Bishop is strictly summer people,” Sarah says in a spot-on impersonation of her mother.

Patrick opens the sliding back door of the house to let them in. Sarah steps through the door as if she’s done it a million times before, which she probably has. Cortex hesitates for a second, then follows. Patrick stands, holding the door. Fahima pokes him in the ribs.

“Patrick,” she says, “do you breathe?”

He laughs, and Fahima leans close to try and hear an inhalation. No luck.

“I’m serious,” she says. “Do. You. Breathe?”

“Of course I do,” says Patrick.

“Maybe you don’t even notice you don’t,” Fahima says. “But what you just did—” She swoops her hand upward toward the window. “—I don’t think you have lungs.”

“That doesn’t make any—”

She pokes at him again. “A mass of undifferentiated cells,” she says. “All of them ready to carry out any necessary function. Even…” Fahima gasps a little. “Patrick, does your whole body resonate?”

Patrick blows a boozy breath in her face. “From my lungs to yours,” he says.

An undifferentiated mass of cells could create a cavity, a lunglike space, and inhale into it for show. She imagines Patrick as a huge parahippocampal gyrus wrapped around a breath.

“Come on,” Patrick says, smiling at her with teeth that have to be made of enamel and nerve showing between lips that must be skin rather than some cell pretending to be skin while acting as brain and muscle all at once. Fahima puts the idea out of her mind. She walks into the living room as Patrick turns on the collection of table lamps made out of kerosene lanterns. The room is full of kitschy maritime memorabilia. A half-scale ship’s wheel on the wall. A stuffed seagull staring dumbly from the shelf.

“It’s so quaint,” says Fahima. “I can’t imagine Bishop buying any of this stuff.”

“He didn’t,” Sarah says. “He bought it as a package. Knickknacks and all.”

Fahima looks at an astrolabe mounted on the wall, unable to think of its name. She tries to hear it, but none of these devices are real enough to speak to her. They’re replicas of machines.

“Patrick broke in here first,” Sarah says. “I think he used to hide in here and jerk off.”

“I jerked off at home like a normal kid. I came here to try my ability out.”

“Everybody on the street was waiting for us to resonate,” Sarah says. “I made Patrick promise we’d tell each other before we told our family. They were patrolling the Hive waiting for us to pop up. Patrick resonated first, and he found a corner of the Hive where no one could see him.”

“The onyx room,” Patrick says. “That’s what we called it.”

“How did you find it?” asks Fahima.

“Lucky,” Patrick says.

“His imaginary friend told him about it,” Sarah says, elbowing him in the ribs. “What did you call him?”

“Raygun,” says Patrick. “I had an imaginary friend who talked to me in my head, and I called him Raygun.”

“That’s some creepy The Shining shit,” Fahima says. She holds up her index finger. “Patrick isn’t here, Missus Davenport,” she croaks.

“I didn’t end up in a mental institution,” Patrick snaps back.

“Fair point.”

“Patrick and I used to meet in the onyx room to talk,” Sarah says. “Then we’d come in here to try out our abilities. Patrick let me puppet him around.”

“Hot,” says Fahima.

“We kept it secret for months,” Sarah says.

“Until