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

Maybe you want to check the closets? Under the desks? Maybe you want to think to yourself, do we have a secret set of jail cells in the basement where we’re illegally holding a wanted man in custody? And if you realize the answer is yes, give us a call. Or tap me on the shoulder, because I’m going to be right here.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Fahima says.

“That’s not helping,” Kay says.

“Feels good, though.” She’s lived with the sense that the government was watching her since they day they took her uncle. None of this feels new, just bigger. A change in degree rather than kind.

The agents file out, giving everyone in the lobby menacing looks over their shoulders as they do. Once they’re gone, Kay gives Sarah her business card.

“When they come back,” she says, “and that is when, call me directly. I won’t be here as fast as I got here today, but I’ll be here.”

Emmeline tugs at her sleeve. “Can you stay a little bit?”

Her mother looks around as if she needs another emergency, a reason to escape. Fahima can tell that Kay isn’t comfortable with all this. What her daughter is now, the world she’s stepped into. But what tethers mother and daughter is the same in both worlds, the old and the new.

“Of course, Leenie,” she says. “I can stay as long as you need me.”

Emmeline smiles and wraps her arm around her mother’s legs, a full circle. Behind her mother’s knees, Emmeline flicks the Shackle with her fingers so it makes quick orbits of her wrist.

Avi and Bishop agree to meet at the Magician. This time, Bishop is waiting for him. It reinforces the same power dynamic as the first time. Bishop is making it clear he has no time for this shit. Arriving from the shitty hotel he’s been staying at out in Cicero, Avi limps across the room to Bishop like a penitent, a child who must explain to his mother about the broken lamp.

“Order something,” he says as Avi sits down. It sounds like a dare. He spins the olives in his glass on their skewer. He doesn’t take his eyes off them.

“I’m good,” says Avi.

“You’re not,” Bishop says, sipping his half-finished martini. “You want a drink so bad, your eyeballs itch. I can feel it from here. We’ll both feel better if you have a drink.”

Avi came here to apologize and seek absolution, but something in Bishop’s tone curdles his guilt into anger.

“Are you trying to say something?” he asks.

“I’m saying get a drink,” says Bishop. “Or don’t. You make your own decisions, Avi.”

“You sure?”

“I understand you’re upset, but I can’t figure out why.” He holds his hand up for the bartender. “This gentleman will have a whiskey.”

“What’s your poison?” the bartender asks Avi.

Avi stares at Bishop. “You tell me,” he says.

“He’ll have your cheapest shit,” Bishop says, looking up from his drink for the first time. He twirls the olives again. “The better to flagellate himself.” The bartender gives Bishop a weird look, then pours Avi a double from the rotgut well liquor.

“You put my academy at risk.”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Avi says.

Bishop shrugs. “It was a predictable outcome,” he says. He’s right. Avi has tried to convince himself that he’s done the right thing, that he was correcting a mistake he made at the motel in Roseland by not calling in Louis as soon as he located Owen Curry. But that wasn’t it at all. He’d been spiteful and drunk and wanted to see someone get hurt. The academy was a stand-in for Bishop himself.

“Did they find him?” Avi says.

“Owen Curry isn’t at the academy,” Bishop says, looking away.

Avi is confused. “Did you move him?” he asks. “Did you kill him?”

“Someone let him out,” Bishop says. “Patrick’s been searching for him a year now with no luck. Personally, I hope he wandered in front of a truck. But it seems unlikely we’d be that lucky.”

A rush of fear and anger floods him, so overwhelming that it nearly drowns out a small thrill, a dark hope. It’ll be me, Avi thinks. I’ll find him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I don’t trust you.”

“Why didn’t you trust me?”

“Because you’re not one of us,” Bishop says. “You’re playing a game. You’re having an exciting adventure. I am not. And I cannot trust those who are.”

Avi slams his hand on the bar. “It’s not a game to me,” he says too loudly. The bartender looks over at him, a caution. Avi lowers his voice. “I’m practically one of you. My daughter—”

“We should talk about Emmeline,” Bishop says. Avi searches his face. They are clearing up final things now. Avi may not be a psychic, but he sees what’s coming.

“You can’t cut me off from her,” he says.

“I could,” Bishop says. “I could make you forget you have a daughter.” Avi thinks about Sarah’s hand on his face, how much he wished she’d make him forget everything. When he imagined it, what he saw was not forgetting but the careful excision of everything about Resonants and the Bishop Academy from his life. What would be left behind would include his marriage, intact, and his daughter, no longer a stranger to him. “But that would be cruel,” Bishop continues. “I’m making concerted efforts not to be cruel anymore.”

“So what, then?”

“I don’t want you in the building ever again,” Bishop says. “If you want to talk to Emmeline, you call her. If you want to see her, you set up a time and a place through me. If she needs to travel, she can call Kimani and ask.”

“I can call Kimani—”

“I don’t want you to call any of my staff,” Bishop says. His anger spills over the edges of his words; Avi can feel it in his head. A tiny flame Bishop quickly shakes out.

“You can’t—”

“Fahima and I are the only ones who know it was you,” Bishop says. He’s collected now, calm. He’s scarier