by Bob Proehl
“What’s impressive is how unimpressive they really were,” Feynman said to anyone who’d listen. Fermi no one could read; Feynman they could read all too well. Feynman would have fired off the Gadget even if he knew it would light up the atmosphere. He was obsessed with the limits of the possible. “You think about the firebombings in Germany? You know a firestorm pulls air into itself? Imagine you see the bombs land and start hoofing it the other way and you’re yanked backward the way you came. A hungry ghost. At least our girls kick you the fuck out. Numbers-wise, the real killers are the pencil pushers at DOD tallying lives up on a ledger. When the books are written, we’ll be the monsters because our girls did it all in one go.”
It reminded Kevin of what he’d heard Bainbridge muttered to Oppenheimer at the test site. Opje had spouted poetry. “Now I am become death,” he said, staring into the blazing star where the Gadget had been. “Destroyer of worlds.” The men in the bunker looked at him blankly and looked away, but Bainbridge held his gaze.
“Now we are all sons of bitches,” he said, translating Opje’s nonsense into English. Kevin had spent the last month trying to place himself between those two statements, trying to decide what he was now. He listened to Feynman prattle, amazed the man’s thoughts matched up exactly with what he said. Another terrifying thing about Feynman, one Kevin had learned only since the test: he was absolutely honest, always.
Raymond and Mona sat down next to him at the high bistro table in the corner. It had been their table since Raymond and Mona had become a public thing. That word again: become.
“To butchery,” Raymond said, lifting his drink.
Mona slapped him on the arm and set her vodka soda down.
“To genocide,” Kevin said, clinking his martini glass against Raymond’s whiskey.
“To the end of it,” said Mona, not wanting to feel left out. Their glasses rattled together like links in a chain. Under the table, Raymond ran a finger over the knuckle of Kevin’s hand, then rested it on his knee. He’d been offered a job at Cal Berkeley, and he and Mona had discussed marriage as the logical evolution of their disguise.
I worry she’s in love with me, he buzzed to Kevin through their connection. Theirs was a clear channel, but Kevin had begun to hear other buzzings—not the din of people’s thoughts but a resonance that told him there were more like them out there.
Don’t worry, Raymond; you’re an unlovable monster, Kevin told him. Raymond grinned and projected lewd pictures into Kevin’s mind as Mona went on about where the various girls were ending up.
Toward the end of the night, Todd Harris stumbled over to them, carrying two pints of beer. He held one out to Raymond, who looked at it like Harris had offered him a dead rat.
“I wanted to say no hard feelings,” Harris slurred. His eyes were watery, and a goofy grin spread from one ear to the opposite one. “For what happened between us last summer. No hard feelings.”
Raymond smiled quizzically, like he couldn’t remember the incident Harris was referencing. Then he buzzed into Harris’s head, loud enough so that Kevin heard.
Smash that pint glass into your face.
Harris cocked his head at Raymond, quizzical.
Your right hand.
Still smiling, Harris extended his right arm and brought the pint glass hurtling toward the middle of his face. It shattered, embedding chunks of glass in his cheek and shredded lips. The other beer dropped to the ground, and Harris wailed like an injured animal. He fell to his knees, pressing his hands to his face, which drove the glass shards deeper, eliciting another scream.
Mona looked at Raymond, and in that moment Kevin thought she knew. There was a horror on her face like on the ridge at Tularosa as the bomb ripped into the world. Kevin was about to go into her thoughts, to calm her, but then she went off as if a switch had been flipped inside her. Her face went calm even as Harris writhed on the ground. Raymond suppressed a grin.
“Jesus, what the fuck happened?” Feynman asked, standing in the pool of blood and beer foaming on the floor.
“He said he couldn’t stand what we’d done,” Mona said, her voice flat. “He said he kept thinking of all those dead Jap babies, and then he smashed that pint glass into his face.”
As she spoke, Kevin could hear the words buzzing from Raymond to her, like an echo that came before the noise it mimicked.
The war functioned strangely. There was no front, no place it was happening. It sprang up here, then there, the way mushrooms on opposite edges of a forest are part of the same organism, linked underground. Fighting in New York, in Los Angeles and Boston and Denver; it was all part of the same war. No place was safe.
Sometimes they were nowhere for days. They stockpiled supplies and came apart from the whole world. Those were bad days. Emmeline thought about that song with the astronaut floating in a tin can that her father liked. She’d lose all orientation, even up and down. The air aged. She breathed oxygen she’d breathed already, like sucking the last drops of juice from a squeezed orange. She pleaded with Kimani to anchor them somewhere, to open the door.
They spent a year in Paris, where the risks of staying outweighed the risks of leaving. It was a good year. Emmeline was thirteen, exploring the city on her own like an urchin in Les Misérables, which she and Kimani read together every night. Kimani anchored them in the fourth arrondissement on the third floor above a boulangerie, the two of them in her little room. Emmeline walked out the door in the morning with no plan and no map for the day. She came back at dusk bearing fresh bread and a bundle of new French phrases, smelling like cigarettes and petrichor. The shop around the block let her buy wine if she said it was for ma mère, and Kimani sipped red as they decoded Le Monde to learn how the war was going. It was as close as it came to touching them: traces of newsprint on Emmeline’s fingertips.
In French, surrendered is s’est rendu. As in Le gouvernement Américain s’est rendu.
They watched peace unfold, watched America separate out like milk curdling into its ugly component parts. Emmeline didn’t know who they were hiding from and thought they’d be able to go back. They didn’t, month after month. People lost their homes and were sent west. European and Asian countries cut ties and recalled ambassadors. Emmeline and Kimani made slow progress through a massive French novel. Emmeline thought they stayed because they were safe in Paris. Why would they want to leave?
The day she saw Black Rose Faction agents on the plaza at the Centre Pompidou, she knew why they were there. She’d read about them, the elite troops of the war, now functioning as “peacekeepers.” Gestapo, Kimani said the first time she saw a press photo of a full Garden, twenty-five Blooms of five Faction agents apiece, each agent with the same dead-eyed stare. She came home and cried into Kimani’s shoulder. They left that night. The night before, Kimani had read the chapter about Cosette joining the convent school. It was titled “Cemeteries Take What Is Given Them.” Emmeline stayed up drawing a picture of Valjean in the coffin. In the drawing, he looked like her father.
They never finished the book. Emmeline couldn’t stand to think about Paris once she’d left it.
Boulder was nice at first. They lived in a hotel in the middle of a city that functioned the way it had before the war. Kimani pushed her limits and expanded their room until it was an entire apartment. Emmeline had her own space for the first time since she had moved out of her parents’ house and into a shared room in the Bishop dorms. It was difficult for Kimani to maintain it. She got tired more quickly. They stopped reading together at night, and Emmeline spent more time alone. She didn’t mind. She was a teenager and wanted to be alone, or thought that was what she was supposed to want. Sometimes she missed the closeness of sharing one room with Kimani, falling asleep on the couch with the sound of Kimani’s sleeping breath nearby.
Feeling safe was complicated. She had to be aware of a threat first. She couldn’t think of herse
lf as safe without the perception of danger. When Emmeline was little, she had an imaginary friend who visited her when things got bad. The first time it happened was when she burned herself with the water on the stove while her father made dinner. The memory was nebulous, but someone was there immediately, before her father registered the clatter of the pot on the linoleum. Her friend calmed her with a smile and a finger to her lips.
Subsequent visits were similar; her friend showed up to chat, to tell Emmeline it would all be all right. It hadn’t happened since her first time in the Hive, when she got caught, caged in a box of black bone. Her friend broke her out. There were times she felt paralyzed, waiting for her friend to show up and tell her what to do.
In Boulder, nothing changed. Emmeline couldn’t remember a time previous when nothing changed. She took a job cleaning rooms at the hotel part-time. They didn’t need the money, but it gave her a way to structure her time. The girls she worked with needed the money badly, and she felt she was taking money that should have been theirs. If there had been a way to sign her paychecks over to the other girls, divvy it up among them, she would have. She felt apart from them. For them this was permanent; for her it wasn’t. She didn’t know what the exit would be or when it would come, but this wasn’t her life, even as one year bled into the next.
Kimani tried to make it feel permanent. “A girl your age needs her ground,” she said. They found ground in Boulder, and Kimani held Emmeline’s feet to it, ballast to keep her from floating away. Kimani watched the door, waiting for a knock, good or bad. One day, Emmeline saw a couple checking in and knew they were with the Black Rose Faction. As soon as they were out of sight, she went and told Kimani.
“Just two?” she said.
“I only saw two.”
“Where there’s two, there’s five,” she said. “We need to head out.”
“No,” she said. She was tired of running. It wasn’t that she wanted to stay in Boulder, but she didn’t want to leave anywhere anymore. “It’s a coincidence,” she said. “They’re tourists, slumming in the Wastes. They’re not here for us.”
Emmeline had seen Resonants in the hotel before. It was unusual but not unheard of. Something in them called to something dormant in her, and she knew them for what they were. Faction agents were a different situation. Emmeline pleaded with Kimani, insisting that they could get out in a snap. In a week, she said, they’d be gone and everything would be back to normal.
Kimani relented, but only if Emmeline took a few days off from work. They holed up in the room as if there were a hurricane in the hall. The lack of windows, which never bothered Emmeline when she knew she could open a door, shrank the room until it felt like the days they’d been physically disconnected from everything, drifting in Hivespace.
It was their fourth night in what Emmeline started calling the Bunker. They were playing chess in the living room. Kimani made Emmeline play on three boards at once. “You and I have to think like that,” she said. “Keep all the wheels turning in our heads.” She beat Emmeline more often than she lost, but that night Emmeline had Kimani in mate on two boards when someone knocked on the door. It was the first time it had ever happened, and the sound, strange and new, startled and thrilled Emmeline.
They never did get to finish that game.
* * *
—
“Can I get you a beer or something?” Kimani says. “We don’t have much, but there’s a couple beers from a local place that aren’t half bad.”
“We should get moving,” Carrie says.
Emmeline tries to find something recognizable in her face, the girl she met her first day at Bishop, the one who was kind to her and, more important to Emmeline that day, was kind to her father. It’s like excavating ruins. There’s so much piled on top of that girl, but everything since then took on the shape of that foundation.
“Emmeline, go to your room and pack up some of your things,” Kimani says.
“Why?” asks Emmeline. “The room’s coming with us.”
“Emmeline, go pack your things,” she repeats. It isn’t a voice Emmeline has heard her use, but it’s one she knows. It’s the voice of a mother who will not be debated with. Emmeline has thought of Kimani as her mother before, a notion that was fleeting and guilty. It’s a betrayal of her real mother, and when the thought pops into her head, she quashes it. There were times, curled up next to Kimani reading a book or watching her smile as she ate, when the feeling welled up in Emmeline’s body, unasked for and unexpected. She let herself float in the sensation of love for and from a mother. Having felt that, she’s afraid of angering Kimani. As ordered, she goes to her room. She scurries, hiding from that look.
“You go help her,” Kimani says to Carrie. “I need a minute.”
The walls of Emmeline’s room are papered in drawings, photorealistic sketches. Her dad at the stove, stirring a pot with a wooden spoon, looking over his shoulder at the viewer with a tender smile. Her mom in a ratty bathrobe, hair up in a wrap, reading a paperback novel. Little Emmeline clutching a stuffed sheep, flanked by her parents. Emmeline spinning like a top in the center of a flock of geese. The Bishop Academy seen from Lexington Avenue, the newly added floors perched on top like a raven on a fence post.
“Can I ask you something?” Carrie says, examining the drawings as Emmeline pulls them off the walls and stuffs them into a folder.
“Sure,” Emmeline says.
“Why did you stay here? There’s no one like us in Boulder.”
“I’m not like us,” Emmeline says, twirling a thick silver bracelet around her right wrist. “I haven’t been like us for a long time.” She takes a drawing of her parents out of Carrie’s hands and puts it in the folder, then puts the folder in her rucksack.
“Kimani could have gotten you out of here anytime,” Carrie says. “She could have opened a door, and you could have walked out to anywhere.”
“She didn’t,” Emmeline says. She looks at Carrie, who looks horrified. She’s finding out Emmeline has lived this way for years. There’s no way to communicate across that, so Emmeline shrugs and continues packing. Kimani waits for them in the living room. Emmeline can see she’s been crying; her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy.
“I think it’s best we get out of here quick, Ms. Moore,” Carrie says.
“You don’t have to call her that,” Emmeline says. “We’re not at school.”
“Stop now,” says Kimani. “It’s nice having someone address me with respect for a change.” She smiles at Emmeline to let her know this is meant as playful, but Emmeline slumps petulantly under the weight of her rucksack all the same.
“You can take us to my apartment in Chicago,” Carrie says, “while I—”
Kimani smiles and shakes her head. “If I move, they’ll see me,” she says.
“You’re not coming?” Emmeline says.
“Emmy, how do you think they’ve been finding us?” Kimani asks. “Every time I move, I throw up a firework for them.”
Kimani had talked around her refusal to use her abilities so often that her logic was carved out for Emmeline in negative space. “There are predators who can’t see you unless you move,” Kimani said. “You could be right in front of them, and as long as you keep still, they walk right past you.” She answered questions sideways like that. It cut down on the number Emmeline asked. There’s knowledge Emmeline won’t let herself absorb, to keep herself safe. Kimani was the closest thing she’s had to a parent for years, and Emmeline let herself consider the absence of her biological parents without imagining separation from her adoptive one.
“But they haven’t found us,” Emmeline says. Her lip trembles.
“Is it Faction that’s after you?” Carrie says. “I saw two agents on my way here.”
“They’re on vacation or something,” Emmeline insists.
“They wouldn’t come here if they wer
en’t looking for something,” says Kimani.
“Where there’s two, there’s five,” Carrie says, and Emmeline flinches at the echo of what Kimani had said earlier.
“Shut up!” Emmeline says, her voice just short of a shout.
“I’ll find you,” Kimani says. “When it’s safe.”
“This is bullshit,” says Emmeline. “I’m not leaving with her.” She jerks her thumb at Carrie.
“I have a car parked a little ways out of the city,” Carrie says. “It’s a hike, especially in the dark, but it’ll get us far enough from here that we can figure something out.”
“That’s your plan?” Emmeline asks. “Drive us to the middle of nowhere and figure something out?”
“My plan is to get you where you need to be,” says Carrie.
“I don’t need to be anywhere,” Emmeline says. “I can stay right here. Everything is fine.”
“We talked about this,” says Kimani. “You knew today was going to come.”
“I thought you’d go with me,” Emmeline says. “You never said—”
“You’re right, I didn’t,” Kimani says. “I didn’t want to think about it either. Now here we are.”
“I can give you a couple minutes,” Carrie says.
“You can fuck off and leave us alone,” says Emmeline. Kimani puts a silencing hand on her shoulder.
“A couple minutes,” she says. Carrie steps out into the hall and shuts the door.
Kimani stands in front of Emmeline. They’re nearly the same height, Emmeline edging her out slightly. Kimani takes Emmeline’s right hand in her left. She taps the bracelet. “There’s another thing we haven’t talked about,” she says.
