The Somebody People E-Book

Bob Proehl

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 823

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A group of outcasts with extraordinary abilities must save a crumbling world from annihilation in this gripping follow-up to The Nobody People. Fahima Deeb changed everything seven years ago when she triggered the Pulse, imbuing millions of people with otherworldly gifts like flight, telekinesis, or superhuman strength. She thought that would herald the end of the hostilities between those with abilities and those without, but it instead highlighted a new problem: There is someone behind the scenes, able to influence and manipulate these newly empowered people into committing horrible acts against their will. Worse still, that shadowy figure is wearing the face of Fahima's oldest friend, Patrick Davenport. Fahima is horror-struck when she realizes that Patrick has built an army entirely under his control to wipe out all who oppose him. With nowhere to turn and few she can trust, Fahima must rely on uncertain allies: Carrie Norris, whose illusion of a normal life vanishes at Fahima's reappearance. Clay Weaver, a retired soldier fighting to keep his husband and son safe—and to keep Patrick from taking over his mind. And, finally, Emmeline Hirsch, adrift and untethered from her ability to travel through time. Together, they might be able to topple Patrick's shadowy regime . . . though it may spell destruction for the entire world.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Bob Proehl The Nobody People

Title Page

Leave us a review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Staring at the Sea 1998

One: The New World

Vantage

Destroy Everything You Touch

Roosevelt Island/Park Slope

Gala

Park Slope

Thieves Like Us

Blast

Said Your Name in an Empty Room

Prospect Heights

Inquiry

I Can’t Feel At Home in this World

Prospect Heights

Klatch

Badlands Ain’t Treatin’ Us Good

Rendezvous

Roosevelt Island

Mainly Jesus and My Hot Rod

Prospect Heights

No Church in The Wild

Postmortem

Eat The Rich

The Love Song of Kevin Bishop

Two: Beyond The Boundary

On Living

I’ll Fall With Your Knife

On Reentry

A Song in Which to Weep

Lower East Side/Throgs Neck

On Wandering

Let Me Steal This Moment From You Now

School’s Out Forever

Samples

On Escape

The Love Song of Kevin Bishop

Three: Blank Generation

On Home

Wicker Park

I’m On Fire

Takeover

On Commerce

I Think We’re Alone Now

On Clarity

Rogers Park

I’m Beginning To See The Light

Graduation

The Love Song of Kevin Bishop

Four: The Reasons We Fight

I Never Asked For The Truth, But You Owe That To Me

On Arrival

Exes

On Ability

Coda

On Limits

Hyde Park

The Next Five Years Trying to be With Your Friends Again

Infiltration

Five: Imagining Defeat

Evacuation

Rogers Park/Wicker Park

All We’ve Won With The Saber and The Gun

Diplomacy

Hyde Park

That Was Your Mother, That Was Your Father

Inheritance

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep

On Returning

Six: A Murmuration Of Starlings

Pills

On Preparation

Everything They Say We Are, We Are

North Avenue

Chair

Step Into This House

On Gathering

I Ache In The Places I Used To Play

The Bishop Lobby

Let Me Take My Chances On The Wall Of Death

Sin Eater

Thirty-First Floor

On Opposition

Aftermath

Epilogue: on Endings

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Also by Bob Proehl

The Nobody People

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THE SOMEBODY PEOPLE

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094633

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094640

Published By Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition July 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2021 Bob Proehl. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To those charged with fixing things we broke,and those whose broken things we tried to fix.

PROLOGUE

STARING AT THE SEA 1998

And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea—Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire, With myriads of Cloudy terrors banners dark, and towers Surrounded.

—WILLIAM BLAKE, America a Prophecy

A million tiny things add up to a death. Take away one, and life goes on. Laid out in perfect sequence, they lead to an end.

On Wednesday, two fifth-years at the Bishop Academy for the Arts turned in the same term paper, word for word. The teacher hauled them into Headmaster Kevin Bishop’s office and left them to his judgment. Elton Daly claimed Marcine Walden psychically poached the paper from him, and Marcine insisted any theft was accidental. She was a dreamwalker, roaming the sleeping minds of students in the dorms while she slept. It was possible she experienced the paper while wandering through Elton’s dream. She had no more control over it than any dreamer has over their own path. The way she saw it, she was the victim, subject to the nightmares and wet dreams of her fellow students, unable to dream for herself.

Kevin’s cellphone came to life in his pocket like a lively cricket. He continued listening to the argument, tenting his fingers under his chin in a display of interest. The quickest thing would be to pry into their minds and confirm what he suspected. Marcine had easy smarts and a deep current of intellectual laziness. Elton excelled in all his academics but was failing Psychic Defense. God help me, I know them all so well, he thought. Rather than investigate and dole out punishment, he facilitated reconciliation. Marcine would rewrite her paper with Elton’s help and would teach him to keep his mind shut.

As they left his office, Kevin caught a spark pass between them—not romantic but an understanding of mutual interest, the seed of community. He smiled at the small joys and miseries of his job.

His phone showed three missed calls from Laura at her house in eastern Maine. After the calls was a text from her cell:

been meaning to call u but worried im overreacting. have concenrs abt bobby and hoping u cd come up and talk 2 him.

The message was no different from hundreds of others he received at the academy. Mothers and fathers sure their children were a danger to themselves or others. Concerns. They all had concerns. Kevin checked his calendar, then texted back:

So nice to hear from you! It’s been too long. Busy with academy stuff until the end of the week, but I can take the early train up on Saturday and be there by afternoon. It will be good to see you and Tom and Bobby.

Waiting for a response, Kevin went into the Hive to find Bobby and do a quick assessment. He could see the boy, a shimmer among a sea of twinkling lights. Nothing remarkable, which wasn’t a surprise. Bishop had watched Laura closely growing up, but her ability hadn’t been that impressive: some minor light manipulation. The man she ended up with, over Kevin’s mild objections, was a low-level precognitive who made a living beating the stock market by seeing shifts a few seconds ahead. These things weren’t genetic, but there were trends. When Laura called to tell Bishop she was pregnant after a long period of drifting among the communes and kibbutzes Resonants had built across the world, Kevin bought her a house on Oceanside Drive, near his own. The enclave in Maine was a yuppie iteration of hippie ideals, a nice place to settle into if you never wanted to feel alone. Kevin rarely made it to his own house there, but Laura and Tom had been over the moon and had lived there full-time since Bobby was born.

The shimmer of Bobby Foster’s Hivebody solidified, and he looked at Kevin quizzically. He was tiny, but that didn’t mean anything. Kevin had students who were physically hulking but manifested in the Hive as ninety-pound weaklings, Charles Atlas ads in reverse.

“Hello, Bobby,” Kevin said. “Your mom tells me you’ve started to resonate. That’s very exciting.”

Bobby’s expression didn’t change. He’d never been a cheerful kid, sullen even on the Christmases when Kevin went out to visit, accepting expensive toys from “Grandpa Kevin” with politeness but no enthusiasm. His Hivebody dissipated like smoke.

Kevin came out of the Hive and checked his phone. There was a text from Laura: thx.

*   *   *

Delays and distractions piled up. A million tiny things. He’d forgotten a dance recital on Saturday and bumped his trip back to Sunday, when the first train out wasn’t until nine, with a long gap between connections in Boston. The Boston-to-Ogunquit line juddered and start-stopped along ancient tracks, and one lurch spilled Kevin’s lukewarm coffee down the front of his white shirt. By the time the train pulled into the Ogunquit station, Kevin was annoyed with the whole trip. He called a cab that took forever to show up because it was the off-season and there was only one cab in town. He texted Laura that he had to stop by his house to get cleaned up and he’d be there shortly.

Kevin’s house was a bungalow with a sliver of beachfront. He hired people to keep the place up and tried not to think of them as “staff.” The yard was trimmed and the house was spotless, with not a speck of dust on the collection of maritime kitsch that had come with the house. Upstairs, the dressers and closets were stocked with clothes. Kevin often thought of retreating to the beach house on a whim, no suitcases, but it never worked out. The clothes he kept there were castoffs from a former life, shed skins. He picked out a chambray dress shirt that was too sharp at the shoulders to be fashionable and snug around his paunch. He walked down Oceanside Drive toward Laura and Tom’s place as the daylight sputtered out behind a row of new construction, houses built tall on the hill to afford the owners views of the water. Their long shadows crept over the street, over the smaller houses bought early and cheap, and onto the beach, inching toward the incoming tide.

Laura and Tom’s house was bigger than Kevin’s but modest: a family home on a piece of the beach that transitioned from rough sand to sharp rock, down from the breakwall that protected the nicer homes farther down the street. Their lawn was littered with Bobby’s toys, sun-faded primary-colored hunks of plastic with edges rounded for safety, some of which Kevin remembered purchasing. From under a miniature picnic table near the side of the house, Kevin heard a mewling sound and went toward it. Squatting onto his haunches, he came eye to eye with Easter, the elderly and round-faced silver tabby he’d bought for Laura on her twenty-fourth birthday. The plump cat’s hind legs had been replaced with the back end of a gray seagull. The thin bird legs couldn’t support Easter’s bulk. She dragged herself toward Kevin on her forelegs, webbed feet slapping uselessly on the wet grass. Kevin held out a hand to the cat, which bowed her head like a condemned man waiting for the mercy of the ax. He scratched under her jaw as dread stirred in his guts.

Kevin heard another noise from inside the house. It was wheezing and plaintive, not unlike Easter’s pained cry. He pulled his hand back and headed toward the house, Easter trying futilely to follow, calling for him to come back.

Having come from his own house, Kevin was reminded by Laura and Tom’s living room that there was a difference between a well-kept house and a lived-in home. Simple clutter, the echoes of use, imbued warmth to a space. Here it was augmented by the smell of nag champa burning and a Tori Amos album on the stereo. Laura had played it constantly in the months after her mother died, the dancing piano and lilting soprano drifting out of her dorm room whenever Kevin went to check on her. A year later, when she told him kindly but firmly that she was too old to stay at the school any longer and that it was time for her to be out from under his care, he played the same album to fill the absence in her wake. The songs came to hold conflicting emotions that were impossible for the words and music to bear. He hadn’t listened to it in years, and hearing it now brought him back to the day she left. He stood in the doorway, momentarily lost, until he heard a whine of pain and fear from the kitchen.

The tile floor was scattered with shards of broken glass and a pool of red wine Kevin mistook for blood. Laura sat on the floor, leaning against the side of a counter. Her eyes were panicked, and her thin cry got louder when she saw him. Jutting out of her right side, where her arm ought to be, was the torso of Tom, his Patriots T-shirt seamed together with her blouse in a line that ran across his chest from one shoulder to the opposite armpit. Kevin closed his eyes and tried to mentally sort them back into their proper places. He tried to superimpose the image of the two of them from the most recent photo they had sent: Laura and Tom on some faraway beach with the sun setting behind them. Bobby had stayed with Tom’s parents for a few days—“figured you had enough kids to deal with” the note from Laura said. He tried to restore them to the way they looked at their wedding, watching through tears as the closest thing Kevin would ever have to a daughter walked away from him again, this time toward another man. When he opened his eyes, they were still an inextricable tangle of parts. The fusion was inexact, failing to connect Tom’s upper chest to a working set of lungs. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, and his lips had the blue tinge of a drowning victim. Laura clawed at the line where the two bodies rudely intersected as if she could separate herself from the dead weight of him.

“Room,” Laura said, squeezing the word out from overtaxed lungs. She twitched her shoulder to point, and the motion shook the body melded to hers, Tom’s head lolling sickly to the side.

Kevin reached into what was left of her mind. It was noise and horror, nothing coherent enough to be called a thought. Laura, honey, it’s me, he told her. I’m going to make it better. I’m going to make it stop hurting. Laura, it’s me. It’s Dad. He could count on one hand the number of times either of them had used the term. Her wedding. The death of her mother. Once, when she was thirteen and he’d made a particularly atrocious pun and she let it slip.

And now.

He found a static place, the still center where a determined mechanism kept her shocked body alive despite itself. With less effort than snuffing a candle, Kevin shut the machine down. Laura’s body went mercifully limp. He eased her eyelids shut and then her husband’s.

I’m sorry, Mona, he thought. I promised you I’d keep her safe. If I’d been a day sooner. An hour. A million things had lined up in a sequence and brought him here. Kevin stood silently over the bodies, his eyes streaming tears but his body taut and still. His mind searched the house for an impossible presence, someone he knew couldn’t be there but he nonetheless suspected. There was nothing.

“Sad old idiot,” Kevin muttered to himself, his voice broken and hoarse. The Tori Amos album faded out, and Kevin heard the soft babble of a child, punctuated with the caws of a gull, coming from the hallway off the kitchen, the direction Laura had gestured. He heard the whir of the CD player as the disc returned to the beginning and started up again.

Bobby sat cross-legged on his bed, cooing baby talk to a seagull with the hindquarters of a silver tabby. Kevin’s mind reeled at the implication: somewhere in this house was the rest of Tom’s body, topped with Laura’s missing arm.

Bobby’s features favored his mother, delicate and girlish. They reminded Kevin of Laura’s father, whose image Kevin had seen in Laura’s face the day he went and got Laura to hide her from a man who never bothered to come looking. Laura had her father’s beautiful face, which she’d passed undiluted to Bobby. Bobby’s hand ran along the animal’s back from feathers to fur. Its tail went up, erect and panicked. Bobby stopped talking and looked up when Kevin stepped into the room.

“You’re not my real grandpa,” he said.

“Have you been talking to your grandpa, Bobby?” Kevin asked slowly and quietly. “Has anyone other than me talked to you in the shimmering place? Someone named—”

“They called you here to take me away,” Bobby said. “Because of what I did to Easter.” He stroked the animal in his lap. “But she’s better like this. See?” He held the animal up for Kevin’s inspection, his little hands under its wings, which flapped in a sad attempt at escape. Bobby dropped the thing to the floor, where it landed with a thud. Its claws made skittering noises on the hardwood.

“I don’t want you here,” Bobby said.

Kevin felt a pinch in his stomach. A cramp doubled him over. He jumped into Bobby’s mind, looking for that still center, the static place he could shut down, or at least a memory he could exploit, a moment Bobby felt enough kindness or love toward Kevin to give him pause. He couldn’t concentrate through the pain in his gut. Flailing, he found Bobby’s ability instead and seized it. It was a writhing thing, hot with power but clumsy. Kevin tried to use it to undo whatever damage Bobby had done to his insides, but it was like molding raw meat with numb fingers. He managed to ease the pain before Bobby’s ability wriggled away from his control.

Bright lights exploded behind Kevin’s left eye as two blood vessels were soldered together. Kevin concentrated through it and gripped the boy’s ability again. He extended it down into Bobby’s chest; like slamming a door against a strong wind, he sealed the valves of Bobby’s aorta and pulmonary artery shut. Bobby looked at him, surprised. His little hand clutched at his scrawny chest, and he fell off the bed. All Kevin could see were his sneakers twitching and spasming. The gull cat let out an inquisitive croak from the foot of the bed. Rubbing his stomach to ease the knot of phantom pain there, Kevin walked out of the room. He glanced at Laura’s broken body for a moment as if he might have missed some detail and she could be hanging on to life, but he looked away and left the house.

The moon was low on the water, forming a figure eight with its own reflection. Easter dragged herself over and head-butted Kevin’s ankle. Why give the name to the head but not the tail? Kevin thought. His mind swayed drunkenly with the thought, and he laughed, an unsteady hiccup. He bent down and picked her up, cradling her. Her weight was out of balance, top-heavy. He remembered her as a kitten, a puffball of claws and curiosity. She’d brought some piece of Laura back, something Kevin had worried was destroyed by her mother’s death, and for that, he forgave the cat all the scratched furniture and pissed-in shoes.

Easter looked at him with the same pleading eyes as Laura. The minds of animals were alien things, and attempts to use his ability on them came with the danger of being lost within. Kevin petted Easter’s neck. He took her head in one hand and braced her lopsided body under his other arm. He twisted, like taking a stuck lid off a jar. Easter shivered once and was still. Kevin rested her body on the damp grass and trudged out onto the beach. He sat down at the tide line, the waves flirting with his heels. Vision returned to his left eye, which was blurred with tears.

“No more,” he whispered to himself. The surf swallowed the promise, as if the world didn’t believe him. Kevin doubted the words himself. He’d said them before.

Behind him, he heard footsteps on the sand, the crunch of tiny shells crushed underfoot. He was sure it was Bobby, alive and coming for revenge. Laura and Tom, or Mona, or Raymond, or one of the countless other dead. Whoever it is, they can have me, he thought.

Kevin Bishop was done.

ONE

THE NEW WORLD

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.

—PAUL VIRILIO, Politics of the Very Worst

VANTAGE

Fahima Deeb looks out the window of the headmaster’s quarters of the Bishop Academy onto the glittering and changed face of New York. The light in the mornings is pale and milky but illuminates a city warped from drab concrete into a science fiction dreamscape. The map of the city is altered: office buildings repurposed for housing or torn down to provide green space, sidewalks widened to shift dominance from cars to pedestrians. Looking up shows the biggest changes: well above the ground, the air is full of traffic. Bullet-shaped public transit craft piloted by telekinetics slice the air between spires of polished onyx that gleam in the dawn light, their architecture inspired by coral growth and the mycorrhizal root structures of fungi. She’d been concerned about the likelihood of collisions. People had enough trouble not smacking into one another with two vectors; introducing a third opened up the potential for an exponential increase in accidents. What she didn’t account for was the amount of space. Every street in the city was a Grand Canyon. As long as the number of objects in the air didn’t see a massive increase, there was space enough for all above the streets.

Fahima is not the first to adopt New York City as her home and alter it indelibly. She wonders if the ones who came before her felt they’d evolved the city into its final form. Her changes are more than cosmetic. The buildings are a sign of shifts beneath. Capitalism is an inefficient engine: so much waste for such a low yield. New York was built to fuel it with bodies, huddle around its meager light, suffer the punishing heat it gave off as by-product, and choke on its noxious exhaust. The city, the country, and the economy are machines constructed of obsolete components, with necessary inputs, outputs desired and undesired. But Fahima has improved it. She dreams in machines. She’s inventing something better.

She looks down onto Lexington Avenue, where a film crew sets up lighting rigs and lays thick cable along the gutters. Trailers cordon off the block at either end. It shouldn’t worry her: this is still New York. Occasional film crews are a mix of excitement, curiosity, and inconvenience she accepts as part and parcel of living here. But she’s shaken. She picks up a Polaroid that’s been sitting on her desk since she found it taped to the window last week with 5:45 A.M. Wednesday June 8th written in black marker in the white space under the image. She holds it up, comparing it with the street below. It isn’t a perfect match; she’s twenty minutes late, and some things have moved, the light shifting with the speed it does in the early morning. But the angle is right and the parked cars are the same, the lighting rigs and the trailers that weren’t there yesterday but are here today. The photograph was taken from her apartment window this morning and stuck to the glass a week before it was taken.

Fahima dresses and starts the coffee. There’s a collective that grows strains of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe out in Nyack, creating microclimates to mimic its home, adjusting chemicals in the soil. People swear by it. There’s plastic in the palate, a burnt rubber taste as if the plants are rebelling, aware they’ve been displaced. Fahima gets Sumatran coffee in the Bed-Stuy black markets. It’s an indulgence, a confession that capitalism has perks for those in the ruling class. For all her egalitarian plans, Fahima lives in a tower.

She looks into the guest bedroom where Sarah Davenport sleeps. Some days she doesn’t wake up at all. Others she screams in the middle of the night because she doesn’t know where she is. People with small children talk about how beautiful and peaceful they look when they’re asleep, but Sarah’s rest is fitful, if prolonged. She mutters names without context, twitches like she’s being hit. Fahima quietly closes the door.

She sips her coffee as her mind rattles through lists of the people she’s about to meet. Omar gave her dossiers and a cheat sheet with names spelled phonetically, position, country of origin, and predilections. Eito Higashi, Japan’s minister of economy. Two daughters, a dog, a list of proclivities Fahima hadn’t known there were names for. Malik Antoun, low-level Saudi prince and avid horse breeder with a penchant for alcohol while abroad. Niklas Babisch, former German ambassador to the United States, now the Großonkel of the New Left in the Bundestag. On paper, Babisch is Fahima’s greatest ally out of the dozen in the group. He’ll be a pain in the ass.

All men, powerful but not too powerful. Each one has a reason for being here that avoids the perception his country is reopening diplomatic relations with the United States. Everything is run through the Bishop Foundation, orchestrated by its executive director, Fahima Deeb. Last night she dreamed Kevin Bishop came back from the dead and saved her from having to go through with this.

She goes over the dossiers, comparing her incorrect and incomplete recollections with the facts as written, then puts them in her bag. She tucks the photo in as well, quickly, like she’s trying to pull a sleight of hand on herself. She picks out a hijab Ruth bought her in Chicago, a piece of shimmering blue cloth with whorls of deep green that coalesce into a map of the earth, spin like a globe, then sublimate back into abstraction, repeating on a hypnotic loop. Fahima thinks it’s on the nose. Ruth reminded her these are government employees and the most obvious symbolism might fly over their heads. Fahima arranges the hijab perfectly, tucking in errant strands of hair, then clasps it with a gold pin in the shape of a handshake. I might as well wear a fucking tie-dye and beads, she thinks as she steps out her front door.

Omar Wright waits for her in the hall. His tan Yves Saint Laurent suit offsets his dark skin. Omar perpetually informs Fahima and anyone else who’ll listen about the brands of his suits and has tried to encourage Fahima to be less schlubby for big events, going as far as to pick out her outfit for this evening. Between Omar and Ruth, she feels like a doll being dressed by enthusiastic children: Muslim Barbie.

“Oh, hi,” Omar says, as if surprised to see her. Omar’s official title has never been decided. He calls himself her majordomo, but refuses to tell her what that means. He takes the edge of her hijab between his index and middle fingers and lifts it to assess. He gives a slight shrug. “Sort of on the nose,” he says.

“Ruth,” says Fahima.

“Sweet kid,” Omar says. He shimmers and divides into two identical copies of himself, each in the same Yves Saint Laurent suit. They face each other, then launch into a game of rock paper scissors that takes five rounds before one of them loses. The winner gives a triumphant hmmph and proceeds into Fahima’s apartment.

“Should it bother me that I get the loser every morning?” she asks.

Omar shakes his head. “Watching Ms. Davenport’s a cushy job,” he says. “Chances are she’ll sleep all day and he’ll sit around watching porn.”

“I was better off not knowing that,” says Fahima.

“You asked,” Omar says as he steps into the elevator.

When they redesigned the building to accommodate the new floors above the thirteenth, Fahima decided on a maglev shaft. The ride is fast and smooth, and unlike an Einstein-Rosen bridge up the building’s spine, there’s no risk of rending space-time, which is a plus.

A pack of students load in with them, conversing in the stage voices of teenagers, asserting their place in the world by sheer force of volume. Below the thirteenth, the students own the building. Fahima insisted on it. What goes on above the old headmaster’s quarters, in the new floors obsidianists built after the Armistice, might be antithetical to everything Bishop believed in, but the original building Kevin bought and loved remains a school.

“I’m telling you, I could see her down there,” says one of the kids.

“Bullshit,” another retorts.

“You have, like, a passing interest in her,” says the first. “I’m a superfan who happens to have telescopic vision. I’m a student of her work, and I am telling you I can identify Leida LaPlante by the top of her head from eight stories up.”

“We’re all sorry your ability is basically doesn’t need binoculars.”

“Five bucks says Harris used his ability to look down her shirt and jerk off.”

“No one is going to take that bet.”

“Fuck every one of you and I’m telling you it’s her.”

“Who’s she even playing?”

“I heard she’s playing Ji Yeon Kim.”

“They got a white lady to play Ji Yeon Kim?”

“Not a white lady. Leida Fucking LaPlante.”

“It’s some bullshit.”

The doors slide open at the fifth-floor cafeteria with a ding, a digital approximation of the physical bells once installed on every floor. We should have left them, Fahima thinks, the tinny facsimile in her ears. We should have kept one real thing.

“You ready for this?” Omar asks once they’re alone.

“Not remotely,” says Fahima.

The elevator hits the ground floor and bounces. One more thing she keeps meaning to fix.

The Bishop lobby is slipping into slow decline. Flakes of gilding peel off the columns, and tile floors are scuffed to the texture of pumice. A senior art sculpture old enough it took damage in the siege sits in the center of the lobby, waiting for a student to announce their brilliance by replacing it with their own work. Building resources are unlimited, but new floors would erase desire paths worn into the tile by decades of rushing students, and Fahima won’t let it happen.

“Good morning, Dr. Deeb,” says Shen. He’s the only person who attaches the proper title to her name, and she’s endlessly grateful. “Big day all around.”

Like the lobby, Shen is getting old. In his case, it’s physical degradation related to his ability. Shifting sizes ravages his joints and connective tissue, but Fahima’s afraid metal hips and knees wouldn’t shift along with the rest of his body. Resonant-specific medicine is an infant field. He’s useless as a security guard; he moves with leaden slowness. Fahima can’t bring herself to replace him for the same reason she hasn’t had the lobby redone. There are so few remnants of the old Bishop. So much has been changed and written over.

“Where do I take a dozen international diplomats with various dietary exclusions for breakfast in this city?” Fahima asks Shen.

His brow crinkles. “Breakfast’s tough,” he says. “Foundation’s dime?” Fahima nods. “Norma’s at the Parker on 56th and Sixth. It’s not what it used to be, but they can cook an egg.”

Shen’s understanding of the changes in the city is unique. For him, the displacement of millions of non-Resonants from the city primarily resulted in a restaurant holocaust, with hundreds of the city’s finest chefs shunted off to the Wastes or, at best, the Bronx. Where Fahima built a miracle of urban planning, Shen sees an apocalypse for takeout options.

“Make a reservation,” Fahima says to Omar. She’s already lost the name of the restaurant in a tide of names, titles, hobbies and interests, lactose intolerances, gluten allergies, and religious restrictions.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Deeb,” Shen says. “They’re only people.”

There is a way they’ve taken to talking about the world outside that catches Fahima’s ear strangely. The implied sentence is They’re only people, not like us. It’s the product of a war won, a verbal expression of the policy of “separation as protection” that followed. It’s also the seed of an ugly form of racism, one today’s meeting, along with the government’s discussions of reunification, might stamp out. Equality was built into Kevin Bishop’s teaching, and it was the first thing discarded when the situation came to open blows. Shen is one of the kindest people she knows, but he looks down on common humans with bemused contempt, as if they’re children. Because of this, he thinks today’s stakes are low. Assuming a group is weak blinds you to its strengths.

Once they’re through the revolving doors, Omar doubles again so he can stand on either side of Fahima, guiding her through the scrum of people out front. Lexington Avenue is drenched in lights. Fahima turns back to look at the Bishop building. Lit up as it is, something about its appearance that’s been teasing at the edge of her brain finally comes to her. With the black glass stripped off the lower floors of the edifice, all the floors that still hold classrooms and dorms, and the new upper floors that housed Black Rose Faction offices and Patrick’s quarters, all reinforced with black glass, the spire that was once the Bishop Academy looks like a match stood on end.

Racks of kliegs are aimed at the building, and cameramen hover above, checking shots. The street is snaked with electrical cords and blocked off at either end by trailers. Tanks and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles are parked with their fronts oriented to the academy’s entrance. Trucks full of weapons sit ready, and men in Homeland Security uniforms make small talk while sipping coffee or sit awaiting the application of makeup. Fahima’s knees buckle with a sense of déjà vu. Seven years ago, she looked down on the same vehicles, the same men, from the window of the headmaster’s quarters with Sarah Davenport and contemplated the war that was about to happen. Obsidianist shapers had to carve out the space for windows again after the Armistice, pulling the black glass carapace back like curtains of opalescent tar. It was a sign to the students and to the rest of the city: Bishop no longer needs its defenses. Bishop is safe. But when Fahima looks up at the building, those holes have been filled in, completing the feeling that she’s returned to the beginning and will have to fight the war all over again.

“What is all this?” she asks.

The Omar on her left smiles at her indulgently. “Do you not look at the permits you sign off on?” he says.

“They’re shooting the last night of the siege,” Right Omar says.

“But it’s daytime.”

“They fix it in post.”

Fahima turns back, watching through the glass as dozens of people work to re-create a moment of Fahima’s life, a place where her narrative intersected with a narrative large enough, important enough to be considered history.

“Are any of those people famous?” she asks.

“You really are out of touch, boss,” says Left Omar.

“If any of them are famous, get them to the thing tonight,” she says. “All the famous ones.”

“On it,” says Left Omar. He blocks a floating coil of cables from smacking Fahima in the head as they turn off Lexington and head toward the N station at 59th.

When the end comes and someone asks Fahima, What achievement would you like to be remembered for? she will say this:

I fixed the New York City subway system.

Sleek maglev trains serpentine through pristine tunnels, piloted by telekinetics who can stop on a dime or ease to a gentle halt as they slide silently into a station. At hub points around the city, metalurges divine the location of each train and relay the information to Hiveweb operators, omnipaths embedded in slabs of black glass like Han Solo in carbonite. They’re human Internet servers, bridging the Hive and the actual world to form a communication network that spans the city, accessible by touching the veins of black glass that thread through the architecture and sidewalks. The operators redirect pilots to points of building congestion. Stations are spotless, temples of gleaming tile. Voiders move through the city like coprophages, sending the trash of 20 million inhabitants into the null. Do some of the stops smell like urine? Yes, some of the stops smell like urine. Fahima is working on it.

Above, the city creeps skyward. With no room to expand out, New York grows up. Six buildings in Manhattan are taller than the Burj Khalifa. Rich emirates try to snatch up as many obsidianists as they can get their hands on. Fahima’s impressed by how many pass on offers abroad to complete the work that needs doing here. Between black glass and other makers, they can build at next to no material cost. New construction is mostly residential, as are the towers that used to house trading firms and banks. The financial sector of the economy has been nationalized, run by a corps of precogs. They take up little space. Wall Street is all low-income housing. Fahima hasn’t eliminated capitalism, but she’s expelled its worst practitioners. She has spiteful dreams of investment bankers in the Wastes struggling to convince anyone they have useful skills. Between the new residential units and the ones vacated on Exodus Day, there are enough apartments in New York for anyone who wants one. Waitresses can afford one-bedrooms, and bike couriers live in Battery Park. Universal housing within the city is the next step, but for now, no one sleeps on the streets in the five boroughs.

Upstate, useless suburbs have been plowed under for farmland. Westchester County is a massive agrarian commune, the weather regulated by a team of pressure manipulators. Produce pours into the city’s new farmer’s markets. No one has to go hungry.

Schools across the city are palaces, and the teachers want for nothing. The Bishop Foundation runs most directly, but there are others. Real arts schools, like the one the Bishop Academy used to masquerade as. Conservative prep schools that teach kids how to suppress their abilities. And the Black Rose Faction training schools, which take a mix of the martially inclined and the problem kids from other schools. Those Fahima tries not to think about.

In hospitals and clinics, healers and menders work like sleepless saints toward Fahima’s ultimate goal for New York: no more dying. First in the city, then the country, then the world.

After a quick transfer, they get off near the Museum of Natural History and walk along Central Park West. They pass one of the few buildings in the city left at its original height, now dwarfed at a mere fifty-eight stories. Fahima had paid it special attention, leaving its garish exterior like a blemish on the face of the city but gutting the interior and throwing the stock of the gift shop on a bonfire. They melted down the ridiculous gold embellishments throughout the huge upper apartments and sold them off to create a resource center for immigrant Resonants. Before the war, she’d cross the street to avoid falling in its shadow; now she smiles every time she goes by it.

One of the Omars points to the sky over the park at what looks to be a translucent cloud. “We’re late,” he says, and the three of them pick up their pace, falling just short of a jog.

Ruth Hammond refers to it as the Craft, but everyone else who works for Bishop calls it the Amoeba. It becomes bullet-shaped speeding through the air, but no one except Ruth ever sees it like that. They see it the way it is now, a translucent blob wavering like a soap bubble, hovering over the lake in Central Park. It holds Ruth and twelve worried diplomats like fruit floating in a Jell-O mold. As it descends, it casts thirteen shadows on the grass, surrounded by a vague ring. Its shape becomes more definite, flattening on the bottom until it looks like a proper UFO, an upended pie plate. It lands silently, each bureaucrat’s feet gently set on the ground, before retracting like a tablecloth yanked back by a magician and disappearing somewhere inside Ruth.

“Gentlemen,” says Ruth Hammond. “Welcome to New York.”

Fahima walks up to Ruth and kisses her on the cheek. Ruth grabs Fahima’s hip and holds her close for a beat before letting her go. Ruth’s hair smells like ozone and rain.

“What time you make?” Fahima asks when she’s back at arm’s length.

“From London in a half hour,” Ruth says.

“They puke?”

“Not a one.”

“Good girl,” says Fahima. She’s aware of her habit of infantilizing Ruth to keep her at a distance. Awareness doesn’t stop her from doing it. Fahima turns to the assembled bureaucrats, who wobble on shaky legs. If Fahima had her way, they’d stay punch-drunk and susceptible the entire visit. There was talk of putting the psychic whammy on the lot of them and skipping the show, but Fahima decided that determining the global future that way was morally unacceptable. Plus, with Kevin Bishop dead and Sarah Davenport broken, no one on the Bishop staff had the psychic chops to pull it off.

Omar distributes universal translators the size of jelly beans. The British representative attempts to shove his in his ear, and Omar explains via gesture that they’re to be swallowed. Fahima allows a minute for the gel caps to dissolve, releasing floods of nanites. Tiny sexy genius machines, Alyssa used to call them. Fahima’s mind drifts through Alyssa’s nicknames for Fahima’s inventions, the small of Alyssa’s back and how the smell of hospital disinfectants on her skin drove Fahima wild, the series of body-blow accusations Alyssa landed in their last fight, leaving Fahima too stunned to cry until Alyssa was out the door and out of her life. She tugs at the hanging edge of her hijab, pulling her head a tick to the right and returning to the moment she’s in.

“Gentlemen, I hope you had an amazing flight,” she says. “In case Ms. Hammond didn’t tell you, you were traveling at ten times the speed of sound in a craft that requires no fuel other than a hearty breakfast for the pilot.” She winks at Ruth and immediately understands it as a mistake. “Which, incidentally, is our first stop.”

Omar motions for them to follow, and eleven of them fall in line. He’s singular, presenting as a perfectly average personal assistant. Fahima finds it’s best not to show them any abilities that raise serious existential questions like What does identity mean when you can spread your consciousness over several bodies? Abilities like Omar’s have been fodder for late-night stoned conversations at Bishop since the academy opened its doors. At this stage, it’s easier to keep the metaphysics out of it.

As Fahima hoped, one of the diplomats points to the spectacle at the bottom of the hill, his mouth gawping like a fish’s. She notes the anchor-shaped mole on his cheek, flips through her mental Rolodex, and determines that it’s Eito Higashi, the Japanese minister of economy, who’s holding his translator pill pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He repeats the same phrase over and over. Fahima doesn’t speak Japanese, but what the fuck is that? is universal even without tiny sexy genius machines to translate it. She takes his hand and lifts it slightly toward his mouth, then mimes putting a pill into her own mouth and swallowing. Higashi repeats whatever he’s saying.

“I call it the Glitch,” says Fahima. “I like giving things capitalized common nouns for names. It makes me feel like I’m in a science fiction story.” Behind her, a Yemeni boy sits in the grass. He grins as his eyes follow the parabola of an invisible object above him. On the crest of the hill, three men unshoulder bulky weapons and take aim at the spot the boy is watching. A fourth man points to the invisible object, raises his hand and clenches it into a fist, and points again. An ignorant seagull repeats a half circle of flight, jumping back to her origin point each time she reaches the end of her arc. After two seconds, they reset and repeat. They’ve been doing this for seven years.

Once there was a boy in the air, the focus of everyone’s attention. The boy is gone, and there’s this tableau locked in a looping piece of time. “It’s a reminder that our potential is also a threat when used improperly. When used in fear or anger.” It’s a message, landing them here. Be fucking afraidof us. Be amazed but also pants-shittingly afraid. Notice I said when and not if.

She’s glad Bishop isn’t here to see her do this. He thought they could win hearts and minds by cleaning up oil spills and curing cancer. He thought they’d get power through democratic channels and the moral arc of history. She wonders if he’d be proud of where they are or horrified how they got here.

DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH

The light from Jonathan’s chest glows like a warm coal through his silk sheets. Carrie is impressed by his commitment to terrible aesthetics. Of course he has silk sheets. His wardrobe of Paisley print shirts and vintage bell-bottom jeans complements an apartment decorated with bead curtains and beanbag chairs. It would be funnier if she wasn’t sleeping with him.

He wakes as she’s dressing. She pulls on jeans crisp with yesterday’s sweat, dusty from her run out to the Wastes. Last night she came directly from the road, a twelve-hour drive in a truck with a busted AC. She skipped her apartment, stopping only to pick up the bottle of whiskey that’s now on the nightstand, a swig of it left in the bottom so Carrie can claim they didn’t finish it all in one night. In a dreamy mumble, he asks her to stay. He promises coffee. This is becoming routine, which makes it worse.

“I’ve got that thing with Bryce this morning,” she says.

“Show and tell?” he says, tugging down on one of her belt loops. She swats his hand away, sure to make it clear it’s not a flirtatious swipe. “I don’t go on shift until seven,” he says. “You could stop by beforehand.”

“I have dinner plans,” she says.

“You could bring him dinner now, and he wouldn’t know the difference,” Jonathan says. “He’s got no idea what time it is down there.”

“Don’t talk about him,” Carrie says, turning away, looking at Jonathan over her shoulder.

Jonathan puts up his hands. “I wasn’t saying anything bad.”

“Don’t talk about him at all,” Carrie says. What she means is don’t talk. She wishes she could keep Jonathan in one room and Miquel in another, her life compartmentalized and discreet. This room is for touching. This room is for talking. This room is mine. Physically, she has all three. She wants to build up the walls in her head, to slam and lock the doors between.

Jonathan’s Marlboros, Bic, and Moleskine float across the room. He never refers to cigarettes, pens, or notebooks, calling each by its proper brand name and accepting no substitutes. He haunts street markets for artifacts of the old world. “I had a line come to me in a dream,” he says. The pen uncaps itself. A cigarette jumps out of the pack and into the corner of his mouth, where it hangs unlit. If he ever tries to read her one of his poems, this thing is over.

“I’m working till close if you want to come by after,” he says. His cigarette bobs like a conductor’s baton. He stares hard at the page like the line from his dream is written behind it. The good parts of their routine are the ones that don’t involve speaking. Letting herself in with the key under the mat. Finding him already in bed, reading, or asleep, or waiting. He’s made a commitment to her. The key under the mat implies fidelity, no one else in his bed. It’s her or nothing, for now.

“Maybe,” she says. She leaves without saying goodbye, easing the apartment door shut so she doesn’t wake Mrs. Ogilve next door, who isn’t a Resonant but seems to have superhuman hearing. There’s an R spray-painted on Jonathan’s door in hunter orange, the third time it’s happened since he and Carrie started sleeping together. This one’s been here a few weeks, and Jonathan seems resigned to leaving it alone. People in Pilsen don’t hide their dislike of Resonants. As someone with an ability that’s visibly apparent, Jonathan’s an easy mark. No amount of helping Mrs. Ogilve bring her groceries up will endear him to the neighborhood. Carrie asked him once why he put up with it, and he quoted her his current rent.

The neighborhood bustles with life; it provides everything to its residents. North of Roosevelt Avenue, it’s risky for non-Resonants to walk around without papers to prove they’ve got a reason to be there. Within this handful of blocks, they can leave the house without documents, pick up a six-pack or tamales, and not worry.

The man working at La Catrina passes for friendly as he fixes Carrie a café con leche and fills a paper bag with churros. He used to own the building; now he rents from a Resonant who bought it cheap after the Armistice and hasn’t been south of Roosevelt since. Chicago is the only integrated city left, an exception carved out in the Armistice, but it has its own dividing lines, some unspoken and some written into law. Non-Resonants are allowed to stay, but they’re second-class citizens, without property rights. They’re tenants in their own homes, employees of businesses that had been in their families for generations. They could stay, but Carrie didn’t understand why any would want to.

Carrie fishes for her wallet, but the man waves her away.

“The suit paid for you,” he says, gesturing with his chin. Carrie spins in time to catch the back of someone walking out. The sharp lines of a dark blue suit stand out among the soft curves of the other clients’ attire. Carrie stuffs a bill into the tip jar without checking the denomination and tries to catch her benefactor. She runs into an abuela waiting in line who gives her a look that says she knows what Carrie is. She can tell from the way Carrie moves through the world as if she belongs in it. Non-Resonants don’t walk that way anymore even in their own neighborhoods. Carrie eyes the dark spot of coffee spilled on her wrist, and an irrational anger moves across her mind like a cloud of heat. The abuela sees the change in Carrie’s face, flinches, and steps aside.

“Sorry,” Carrie says, lightly patting the old woman’s shoulder. She leaves the café and checks her corners, looking for the dark blue suit. She spots him about to turn onto Sangamon. Before taking off in pursuit, she checks the other direction. A man wearing the same suit takes the left onto South Carpenter. Carrie freezes, unsure what to do. Both suits are out of sight. Carrie convinces herself she didn’t see what she saw and that it doesn’t matter anyway. Some idiot trying to pay it forward, screwing up the natural cadence of her day with a kindness unasked for. She follows the suit that headed toward Sangamon Avenue, but only because it’s the way she was going.

At Halsted and 16th, carrying the still-warm paper bag of churros, she waits for the number 50 bus. It’s right on time, gliding up to the curb a foot off the ground. On the side there’s an ad for Hayden Cohen’s new album. Hayden has spent the last year touring Europe as a cultural ambassador, assuring other countries that what’s left of the United States isn’t a feudal state. Carrie hasn’t talked to them in months.

She gives a halfhearted smile to the operator, who doesn’t return it. He’s a college-age kid, hasn’t been working more than a year. Older operators, magnetics and telekinetics, banter with passengers while they maneuver their buses. It takes all this kid’s concentration to keep his afloat. Out the window, she sees the suit standing on the sidewalk. The bus windows are tinted, but he waves as if he sees her, a dainty twiddling of his fingers that’s the physical equivalent of toodle-oo. The bus pulls away from the curb, and he’s gone. Carrie moves to the back of the bus, which is full of janitors and maids, dishwashers and busboys headed into the city for work. Some of them were doctors, professors, and middle managers, but they take whatever jobs they can find.

Carrie feels the anger that flashed at the woman in the café, but unfocused. Something in her wants to jump off the bus, to get herself away from these people. She tells herself it’s shame. At Bishop they talked like they were morally evolved. They saw enough oppression and rejected it outright. It took work to put hurt aside. The last seven years had shown Resonants willing to recycle old scripts, roles reversed, lines read more emphatically this time, delivered with the vitriol that comes from knowing the feel of the boot heel on your neck.

“It isn’t natural,” Bryce said to her once. “All the shit we’ve done to regular people and we’re okay with it? How do you have it done to you and then you turn around and do the same shit back? Something in us got twisted up. Something went rotten.”

Carrie puts her earbuds in. She spins the click wheel on her ancient iPod, searching for something calming or distracting. She starts a Joanna Newsom album, but the waterfalls of harp make her edgy and impatient. With nothing but dead air in her ears, she sticks her nose into the bag of churros, inhaling the deep earthy smell of cinnamon. The bag is Swiss-cheesed with transparent spots of grease. She watches the city change as the bus moves uptown. They’re renovating the university. Obsidianists cover red brick with dull black glass. Makers coax it up from the ground, gnarly and branching like coral. Shapers work in teams of two, melting it down into balls and flattening it into sheets. A lot of Pulsers turned out to be obsidianists, an ability that didn’t exist before the Pulse. It’s a point of pride, a retort to older Resonants who say that Pulsers aren’t real Resonants. We even discriminate among ourselves, Carrie thinks. The black glass is a symbol of progress, of possibility in the new world. Carrie can’t stand the sight of it here or in the Hive, where it pops up in formations like scrub grass, some as tall as she is. Everyone she knows stays out of the Hive. Everyone she likes, at least. The people who spend time there have something different about them. A mean edge.

Carrie gets off at Hyde Park. The school isn’t far from the university, a beat-up brick building at Cottage Grove and 55th. The Bishop Foundation took over the schools in Chicago after the first Bishop school, the megachurch on North Avenue, was repurposed as a training academy for the Black Rose Faction. This one is unique among all the schools in the city. The Unity School is the only integrated high school left in America. Carrie scans the temporary security card Bryce gave her and enters. It’s before first period, and kids loiter in the halls. A handful are visibly Resonant; Carrie sees a girl with a row of four bright blue eyes and a boy whose body is a rapidly spinning sandstorm below the neck. With many, there’s no way to tell. They interact as equals. She assumes the normal striations of high school social life are at work, with kids glomming on to their own kind, but the groups seem to be mixed. It doesn’t prove her cynicism unfounded, but it impresses her. Maybe kindness and tolerance increase from one generation to the next. There may be hope even if that hope excludes Carrie, who’s fought so hard for it.

“You’re late,” Bryce says as he emerges from the principal’s office.

“I brought churros,” she says.

Bryce grabs one from the bag. “You get these around here?” he asks, knowing exactly where she got them.

“A place,” says Carrie.

“Uh huh,” Bryce says. He hugs her, his skin rasping against her cheek. Carrie thinks of her closest friends as a star inscribed in a pentagon: five points connected by ten lines. The time in Topaz Lake bonds Carrie, Hayden, Miquel, and Bryce, leaving Waylon on the outside, constantly aware that he dodged captivity. In the months that followed, her friends dropped away one by one: Miquel left behind when they escaped, Bryce returning to Chicago instead of fighting with them to attack the camps, Hayden going back to normal life after they finally returned to liberate Topaz. The thrum of pride and shame over everything they did is strongest between Carrie and Hayden, but she feels it with Bryce, too. A signal passed back and forth, an undersong to every word and gesture that says You’re okay. We made it, and all of that is over, and you’re okay.

“You’re going to shadow me for the day,” he says.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“Was it funny?” he says. “Come on. I’ll give you the tour.”

There isn’t much to tour. There’s nothing novel or revolutionary about the place itself. It feels prewar, the way Carrie remembers the school she went to before Bishop. What’s remarkable about the Unity School is how unremarkable the students seem.

“They wanted to call it the Kevin Bishop Unity School,” Bryce explains as they walk the halls. “But I wasn’t having it. I mean, yes, the man was a saint or what all. But if Kevin Bishop wanted a unity school, he could’ve built one. You can talk about protecting us from them or teaching us to protect ourselves. But at the end of the day, you have to look at the fact that we went to a segregationist school.”

“That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” Carrie says.

One of the female teachers coos “Good morning, Principal Thomas,” batting her eyelashes before fixing Carrie with a back-off glare. It’s all Carrie can do to keep from laughing. When Bryce started out at Bishop, a towering sixteen-year-old, he was the hottest commodity in the school’s sexual economy. Girls were shattered when he came out. It’s funny how within a school patterns repeat infinitely, the same dramas played out forever and always for the first time.

“What we’re doing here is something completely different. Completely new,” Bryce says. “We’re saying to these kids, be kids. Don’t be baseliner kids, don’t be Resonant kids. Be kids.”

“How is this not an all lives matter thing?”

“Because we got ours,” Bryce says. “That all lives matter I don’t see color noise was white people asking people to get over stuff that wasn’t over.” There’s a hesitation in his voice every place he wants to use the word shit, a tiny hitch as he searches for something G-rated. “This is us, and we won the war. Now we decide who we’re going to be. If we choose to be like them, the whole thing repeats. We stay locked in this forever, hating on and beating the stuffing out of each other until there’s nobody left.”

“Sign me up for the newsletter,” she says. “Put me down for a donation. Why am I here?”

“I’m offering you a job,” says Bryce.

“I have a job,” she says. “I work for your husband.”

Bryce leans in as a passel of students runs by. “I want to offer you a job where you don’t have to carry a knife,” he says.