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

he’s been, alone. Basra. Kabul. Aleppo. Kigali. Laundry list of horrors. There are no photos of him from any of them. He was there to be an eye looking out.

He yanks the pull string, and the ladder comes down, raining dust. Except for a handful of boxes, the attic is as he left it. A time capsule. All of his things, all of Emmeline’s. A few boxes of Kay’s the movers missed that she’d never sent for. Emmeline didn’t want any of her things either, and Avi didn’t need any of his. He wonders why they’re keeping any of it.

On the desk is the journal he took from the motel room in Roseland. Owen Curry, on the run and pouring hate onto the page. He feels sympathy for the boy. Not for the monster who blew up the food court and the church, who wiped out the life of that little girl. For the boy immediately afterward. On the run and broken.

He starts up the old computer, going to the shared drive he stores pieces on. There’s the book in all its various drafts. Avi opens a document file titled “NULL.” He reads it, giving it the kind of once-over he does before sending a piece out. It’s perfect, the prose tight, the gaze of it unflinching. He’s memorized the first line: On December 4, a young Resonant named Owen Curry opened up a hole in the world and fed nineteen people into it. In a ritual he’s repeated any number of drunken nights, he creates an e-mail to Carol at the Trib. He attaches “NULL” to it. The text of the e-mail is simply, here. The cursor hovers over the send button for a second, two, before he deletes the e-mail.

Avi looks at the wall under the porthole. The place Kimani’s door used to appear. He feels Sarah’s hand on the side of his face, his skin tender to the touch, the bruise starting to take on form and color beneath the skin. She could have made me forget, he thinks. She was already in my head. She could have erased it all. It would have been better.

Avi takes out his phone. The screen cracked during the fight. He hasn’t been paying much attention to anything the last couple of days. He hasn’t been taking care of himself or the things that belong to him. He scrolls through his contacts and dials.

“Look who finally came home,” Louis says. “I saw you on the news last week. Where the fuck did you learn to punch?”

“Why haven’t you arrested me?” asks Avi.

“It’s been too long,” Louis says. “We’ve moved on to bigger things. There’s a war on; didn’t you hear?”

“Is that how Homeland sees it?”

“More or less,” Louis says. “We all read your book. Your new friends sound real nice. I notice you left out our mutual acquaintance.”

Avi touches the wood paneling of the western wall. There was a door there once that led to a room that led to a whole world, but it’s gone, as if it never existed.

“You want to find Owen Curry?”

Fahima will never admit the amount of time and money she spent on the look of it. A certain bulk is necessary to house the mechanism, but she wanted it to be something a ten-year-old would want to wear. Not knowing much about the aesthetics of ten-year-olds, this meant thinking in terms of what she might have wanted to wear at that age. She wasn’t the kind of girl who pined after jewelry, but she remembered an armband Aunt Majeda wore: a broad piece of engraved silver studded with ovals of blood-red carnelian. The engravings looked like calligraphic Arabic but were much older Turkmeni symbols that stood for mountains and rams. She’d found an image online, not the same piece but something similar. She found a jeweler in the Diamond District on West 47th who could get carnelian cheap and had someone who could do the metalwork. While she waited on that, she worked on making the mechanism smaller. She ran into the same problem she’d had when she made the gun for Patrick: the best design, the ideal form of the thing, was minuscule. But it would have to be tucked in alongside the parahippocampal gyrus, emitting a small countersignal directly at the origin point of a person’s Resonance. It was an elegant and permanent solution. Emmeline would have to settle for a device the size of a watchband that fit perfectly into a beautiful housing. Still, Fahima can’t help thinking of it as the Shackle.

Emmeline undoes the clasp on the older model, and it clunks to the counter. The sound makes Emmeline jump. She must have expected the world to end as soon as she took it off. They both pause. Fahima hadn’t ruled out the possibility that they were venting a container whose contents were under pressure. Emmeline’s ability might be like soda in a shaken can. No one had been exposed to inhibitors long-term except Owen Curry, and he hadn’t stuck around for a physical. There was no way to predict what ending that exposure would look like. But the Shackle lies on the counter, two leering grins connected at a hinge, and nothing happens.

“No quantum singularity,” says Fahima. “No rip in space-time.”

“You thought there might be?” Emmeline asks.

“There was a chance,” she says.

“But you took it off anyway?”

“It was ugly,” says Fahima. She holds up the new one. It’s half the size and a quarter of the weight.

“It’s pretty,” Emmeline says. Fahima isn’t sure if she’s being honest or trying to make her feel good about her efforts. Emmeline’s warmed in her time here, but there’s a persistent strangeness to her affect, the sense that she’s here and somewhere else at once. Fahima attaches the bracelet around Emmeline’s right wrist, which she’s measured already. Emmeline holds it up, admires it, then rolls the sleeve of her sweater down over it. Fahima