by Bob Proehl
“We have a warrant for the arrest of the terrorist Gavin Olsen and any known associates,” she says. “We are authorized to use lethal force against anyone resisting arrest.”
Her hands are at her sides, bright blue spikes forming in her fists. With a motion so quick he barely sees it, she flicks the spikes at two men in the corner booth. Their heads snap back and forward again, and they slump off their seats.
“They were reaching for weapons,” she says.
“I saw it,” says the one with blade hands.
As the screaming starts, the rest of the Bloom mows their way through the lunch crowd. A pool cue spins in the air and drives itself like a spear into the holder’s eye. A rush of heat radiates out from a lone drinker to Clay’s right as the flesh of his face drips down his chin like hot candle wax and the air stings with the smell of burning hair.
“He sold us out,” says the surviving security guard as the men around Olsen try to shuffle him toward the back exit through the chaos.
“I didn’t,” Clay says. Ji Yeon sees him and, although it takes a moment, manages to place him.
“You didn’t sell them out, Mr. Weaver,” she says. “But you should have. What happened to you? You used to be one of the good guys.” As she says it, the severed head of one of the pool players rolls across the linoleum by her feet. “Being here makes you known associates,” she adds, pointing to Rai and Dom.
She hoists another glowing spike in her hand, this one the size of a javelin, and Clay’s world slows down. He remembers this, the cool moment of situational assessment that exists outside of time. He considers a bubble around himself and his family, but without knowing the nature of Ji Yeon’s spikes, that might not save them. He reaches into Ji Yeon’s neck and finds her carotid artery, thumping and pulsing, shoving blood up to the brain. He slows time, like putting his thumb on the edge of a record player, and before Ji Yeon throws, her eyes roll back and she collapses. It’s not the worst thing he can do. There are things he could do that are so much worse.
When she drops, the rest of the Bloom stops as well. It gives Clay an opening to perform the same operation on them, dropping all four in as many seconds. They’ll regain consciousness in a minute or two. He should do something more permanent, but he can’t.
“Get out of here,” he shouts to Dom, who grabs Rai and follows Olsen and his entourage in their rush out the back door. They spill into the alleyway and take off running. Olsen, out of shape, trails behind. The men who are supposed to protect him have decided it’s not worth it.
“Wait,” Clay shouts after him. “Our kid.”
“Were you in there?” Olsen screams. He’s out of breath, eyes wide with panic. “Nobody can help your kid. The cats are done worrying the mice. They’re going to come kill us all. And your kid is one of us.” He takes off down the street in a wobbly sprint.
“Dad,” Rai says, shaking Clay’s shoulder. “Dad, what’s happening? What did you do?”
“She knew you,” Dom says. “They can find us now. Oh, fuck. Fuck.”
The midday sun is impossibly bright, and the screams of the maimed leak from inside the hall.
“We have to go,” Clay says, herding them both toward the car.
“He said I’m one of them, but I’m not, right?” Rai says. Clay pushes him down into the front seat, buckling him in like he’s a child, and closes the door.
Emmeline has the feeling she’s returning to herself. It’s like a sleeping limb coming awake, pins and needles and uselessness. It feels like a sneeze that won’t materialize, a name she can’t recall. It worries her. She’s afraid her ability will become too strong and the shackle she wears will short out under the strain of holding it back. She doesn’t think that’s what she’s experiencing, but she can’t be sure, and it frustrates her. She’s been taking that frustration out on Carrie, which she knows isn’t fair. But fair is a quaint idea, something for kids.
When Carrie doesn’t come back that night, Emmeline is royally pissed. She asks Malcolm if he knows where Carrie’s gone, but he’s cagey. She doesn’t like Malcolm. It’s not the obvious fact that he hates her for what she is or that he spends the whole day sitting around waiting for people to die. He sweats a lot, and it makes him smell like her hands after she’s touched old change.
Emmeline sleeps late the next morning and is awakened by the harsh sound of the buzzer at the front desk. She asked Malcolm why there was so much security, even made a weak joke about how people were dying to get in. Face expressionless, he told her that before the war somebody shot up a hospice in Denver. Ever since, all Colorado hospices have prison-level entry protocols. It’s hard to think about tragedies that came before the war. How can she imagine a couple people shot to death in Denver now that all of Denver’s been wiped off the map?
Assuming that the buzzer signals Carrie returning, Emmeline springs from her bed and throws her rucksack on, ready to ream Carrie for abandoning her and then, she hopes, leave. She rushes out to the front desk, where Malcolm looks nervously at a fuzzy black-and-white monitor that shows a girl not much older than Emmeline, smiling sweetly up at the security camera. Emmeline thinks of how her parents each told the story of the three little pigs differently. Her father gave the wolf a growl when he said Little pig, little pig, let me in. When her mother told it, the wolf implored. Her mother’s version scared Emmeline more. The girl’s face reminds her of her mother’s wolf.
Malcolm turns to Emmeline. Loading dock, he mouths, pointing emphatically down the hallway. Emmeline goes far enough that she’s out of sight but not out of earshot as Malcolm buzzes the girl in.
“I was hoping you could help me,” the girl says. “A friend of mine is missing, and I’m trying to find her. She and I were roommates at boarding school.” Her voice is a cheery singsong. Emmeline can barely keep herself from peering around the corner to confirm that the girl is Viola, her best friend from school. In their last days at Bishop, Viola was vacant, with slackness settled over her bright face. The chilly edge in Viola’s voice the last time they talked is still there, and Emmeline knows if she could see Viola’s face, there would be that same emptiness behind her eyes.
“We specialize in end-of-life—” His words are cut off by a quick hiss of breath, the sound of someone who’s touched something hot by mistake.
“Are you sure you haven’t seen her?” Viola coos. The faint smell of burning hair reaches Emmeline, and she creeps down the hall. At the end of it, one of the double doors opens onto the bright light of day. Alyssa’s in the doorway.
“Come on,” she whispers. “Quick.”
“She’s going to hurt him,” she says.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Alyssa says. “He paged me as soon as she showed up.”
“I thought he didn’t like us,” Emmeline says.
“He doesn’t,” Alyssa says. “But he knows there’s good and bad, and he’s decent enough he’ll protect good ones from bad ones.” She leads Emmeline down the alleyway behind the hospice. “Your name’s not Esther, is it?”
“Nobody’s name is Esther,” Emmeline says.
“You’re Emmeline Hirsch.”
Emmeline doesn’t answer. Alyssa nods and mutters what Emmeline hears as fucking Fahima. She goes to the edge of the alley and checks the street and then beckons Emmeline to come forward quickly.
They make their way through the city, and it occurs to Emmeline that although she’s been chased for years, she’s never had to run. No matter how close the Faction came to finding them, she and Kimani were always steps ahead, on the other side of the world before the agents were sure they had the right country. Every time they jumped, she was furious with Kimani, begging to know why they couldn’t stay, wait it out, hope the Faction would sniff around and move on. Now she knows why, and it’s too late to tell Kimani she’s sorry, that Kimani was right. She’s too late to thank Kimani for keeping
her so safe when she was not yet able to manage safety on her own. She regrets every time she thought about not going back to the room when now all she wants is to see Kimani’s door open in front of her one more time.
Paranoia is new to Emmeline—Kimani had carried the fear for both of them—and she isn’t sure how to handle the feeling that everyone they pass is working with Viola and the Faction. Her steps keep threatening to break into a run, at which point Alyssa gives her hand a small squeeze and says “We’re fine, walk.” For as long as she can remember, the biggest threat to Emmeline has been what’s inside her, the ability Fahima worried could rip the world open or do unspoken harm in the wrong hands. Now she’s smuggling that ability away from whoever she’s been hiding from this whole time and wishing someone had taken the time to tell her who the enemy was.
They end up at a warehouse that’s been converted into apartments. Alyssa undoes a vertical series of locks, each one clacking open louder than the last, then lets them into the modest, warm space. The walls are exposed brick, hung with batiks, and there are bookshelves sagging under the weight of their contents. Where Kimani’s room was spacious but airless, this room feels close but airy, a window open to the dry hot breeze of early afternoon.
“Have you eaten anything? Alyssa asks. “I can’t imagine Malcolm’s been feeding you.”
Within minutes, Alyssa’s apartment smells like canned tomatoes and garlic. Emmeline’s dad would sauté garlic before her mom got home from work even if he didn’t know what he was going to cook. The whole house filled with the smell. Her mom came in and said Something smells good, and her dad gave Emmeline a conspiratorial grin. The routine things about her parents, habits so ingrained that she learned to roll her eyes at them, are the things she misses most about them.
Alyssa keeps up the conversation as she cooks. It’s small talk meant to keep Emmeline calm despite the people who are looking for her and Carrie’s disappearance.
“Fahima talked about you all the time,” Alyssa says. “You were one of her favorites.” Water burbles in the pot. Alyssa gives the saucepan a toss, and the contents reward her with a fresh sizzle.
“How did you know her?” Emmeline asks.
Alyssa doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. “We were dating,” she finally says. “Practically married. I mean, we lived together for years.”
“I didn’t know she—” Emmeline trails off, unsure what she was about to say.
“Liked girls?” Alyssa offers.
“Yeah,” Emmeline says, sure that hadn’t been it.
“Fahima’s good at compartmentalizing,” says Alyssa. “She never talked about work. I think she only told me about you because…” It’s Alyssa’s turn to trail off.
Emmeline waits, then asks, “Because what?”
“Because you scared the shit out of her, frankly,” Alyssa says. “Your ability.”
“You don’t have to be scared,” Emmeline says, tapping her bracelet. “I haven’t used it in forever.”
“You promise not to rip open the space-time continuum in my apartment, I promise not to give you botulism,” Alyssa says.
She drops the contents of a box of pasta into the boiling water. A tide of white bubbles rises above the rim and sizzles on the heating coil. Alyssa stares down into the pot, her back to Emmeline.
“You can’t trust her,” she says.
“Who?”
“Fahima tries,” Alyssa says. “She looks at a situation and throws everything she has at it to fix it. But whatever the problem is, she sees one part of it. And because she’s so smart and so focused, she thinks she can fire a laser at that one target and fix the whole thing.”
“Am I the problem that needs fixing?” Emmeline asks.
“I think you’re the laser.”
Aspects of the room creep into Carrie’s awareness: the blue of the fluorescent lights, the buzz close enough to the sound of inhibitors that for a second she thinks she’s back at Topaz Lake. That year would be the perfect point in her life for her mind to break. Not like Miquel’s, but shattered, the pieces reconfigured haphazardly and uselessly. But these lights buzz at a higher pitch. She can’t feel it in her teeth or her stomach. She slides down, dips into a fuzzier state to be certain her ability is intact. She’s slumped in a straight-backed chair with a ridge pressing into her abdomen. It’s a familiar discomfort: a high school desk built to punish slouching. Carrie straightens up as if a teacher has caught her dozing. She thinks of Deerfield Middle, her school before Bishop. The memories are from another life. I left my name here, she thinks. I wrote it in red so I could find it if I ever came back. There’s a motivational poster of a man crossing a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers. A fish tank, its water opaque. She wedges herself out of the desk. Her body is all ache and stiffness, and there’s a burning behind her eyes.
The door opens, and Cedric Joyner, the man Mayor Pam claimed was here to heal all wounds, enters like a professor coming in after the bell. He moves as if he’s come from somewhere important and has somewhere important to be. Carrie orients herself to her surroundings, but she reflexively goes slippy, becoming blurred edges around smoke.
“Don’t bother,” Cedric says. “I know exactly where you are. I took your knife, so don’t bother with that either.” He pulls it from his pocket, displays it to her, then puts it back. “Or this little relic.” He holds up her iPod, the earbuds dangling. “I think the screen broke a bit when you fell. Such a shame. I imagine it’ll be hard to replace.” He lays it on the teacher’s desk. Carrie lets herself rise up, fully visible. Cedric smiles. “That’s better. Now we can be friends. Would you like to know why your brother sold you out?”
Carrie can see the smug look on Brian’s face as Faction agents dragged her out of his shitty apartment, as if he’d one-upped her in a contest she didn’t know they were having. “He wanted abilities,” Cedric says. “I told him I could give them to him. I can’t, incidentally. I’ve been trying with no luck. Once I found a boy with amazing abilities. I thought he was the key. I strapped him to a machine and pushed it so hard I killed a whole bunch of people, like that.” He snaps his fingers, his face alight with glee. “That’s how I ended up here.”
“I read about you,” Carrie says. “I knew I remembered that name. You murdered a bunch of people in the Bronx.”
Cedric waves his hand as if shooing away a bug. “I was the first person since Emmeline Hirsch to induce Resonance in people who were otherwise…lacking. Not everyone who was part of the experiment lived, but that is what happens when you push boundaries. There are risks. Costs. But none of that made the news in Boulder. They’ve been happy to have me.”
“That was years ago,” Carrie says. “The mayor said you just got here.”
“I may have done some editing in the dear mayor’s head,” he says. “Too much, I think. She’s falling apart.” As Cedric talks, he opens and closes drawers in the teacher’s desk. He removes objects and holds them up like artifacts from a lost civilization, examining them from various angles. He gives off an air of indifference, letting Carrie know that none of this matters half a fuck to him.
He sits behind the desk, leans back in the chair. Carrie feels Cedric in her head. She remembers once when Waylon was drunk at a party and tried to persuade her to make out with him, his clumsy fingers pawing at her thoughts. This isn’t like that. It’s a mechanical spider climbing over the surface of her mind, poking with the sharp points of its legs.
Your thoughts are not an object to be observed and read. They are a process in which you participate. They’re the fuel at the heart of a fire that burns constantly, a cool white flame.
“Your mind is a cool white flame,” Cedric says, mocking her with his nasal intonation. “You’re very good. Sarah Davenport taught you, right?” Carrie doesn’t respond. “She taught me, too. And Fahima Deeb. I was one of Fahima’s first students at
Bishop. Her star pupil. I worked with her for a while after the war, trying to make everyone special. But Sarah was my favorite. So pretty. Everyone thinks she died in the fighting at the Bishop Academy, but Fahima hid her away. Fahima asked me to try to help her with her memories, but that’s not the way my ability works. I learned a few things while I was rattling around in her head. Mostly about her brother. But there’s not much there, and it isn’t getting better. Imagine not being able to keep a memory. Moments flying by you like cupcakes on a conveyor belt. You grab at them but you’re a second behind. Starving forever.” He shakes his head.
“I thought Fahima might have sent you. I was flattered Fahima would send someone to kill me. And someone so impressive. You’ve done some unpleasant things. Although they weren’t always your choice, were they? There’s something in your head like a broken transmitter. A radio on the fritz. But then there are the things you did all on your own, Carrie Norris.” Carrie’s startled by the sound of her name in Cedric’s mouth. “Your mind might be a cool white flame, but I can read your name like an appetizer off a dinner menu.”
For a second Carrie flashes on Emmeline. She throws the image into the flame.
“That’s who I’m interested in,” Cedric says. “You are a small-time smuggler, but that girl you’re thinking of is relevant to my interests. I would greatly like to speak with her. If you tell me where she is, I have no reason not to let you go. Your brother, too. He’s not of any particular use other than as one more guinea pig.”
