by Bob Proehl
“You can keep him,” Carrie says.
Cedric shakes his head sadly. “Carrie Norris, do you know where you are? You’re in the New Vista High School. Former, that is.” He looks around. “I believe this was a social studies classroom. But in another sense, Carrie Norris, you’re in Room 101. You get that reference. You’re very well read. I can see that. But watch this.” Cedric touches Carrie’s forehead with his thumb like a priest administering the ashes.
“Do you know where you are, Carrie Norris?” he says. “You’re in Room 101. Do you get that reference? Do you remember Room 101?”
She doesn’t. She can see the book, its cover white except for the title and the author’s name. An eye; she remembers an eye. She can’t read the text; it’s smeared and out of focus. Room 101 is something terrible; as a kid it terrified her. But it’s gone.
“It’s 1984,” Cedric says. “You read it three times in eighth grade. You underlined passages. You woke up from nightmares of rats gnawing at your face. I ate it out of your brain. I ate all of your Orwell, just for kicks. That’s what I do. I eat people’s memories. Like those rats chewing on your cheeks. Like cupcakes on a conveyor belt.” He mimics shoveling food into his mouth with both hands and grins at Carrie, cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk’s. Carrie can’t move. For a second she thinks she’s forgotten how. The terror of this feeds into the fear that holds her in place; when her mind lets the thought go, she’s pinned. “That’s how I came to be Fahima’s star pupil. I went on a little tour. I met with the greatest scientists in the field, and I ate everything they knew. And still she kicked me out. Aired my dirty laundry in public. What she didn’t tell them is that I was close, closer than she ever got. If I had Emmeline Hirsch, I could do wondrous things. Things Fahima Deeb can’t. I’d be welcomed back as a hero.”
Cedric clasps his hands together. “I would love to be able to spend the whole day with you, Carrie Norris,” he says. “But I need Emmeline Hirsch. I can’t see her directly. She’s slippy. Is that your word? Emmeline is naturally slippy. But you know where she is. I’m going to give you some time. I want you to think about what else I could take. The day you and your friends spent at Coney Island in the cold. Your mother. Your name.”
He throws Carrie a wink.
“I just want the girl,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt her. When it’s done, I’ll take her out of your head. Betrayal leaves a phantom pain. I hate thinking of anyone suffering that way. The girl will be like George Orwell and Winston Smith and the rats.” He snaps his fingers again. “Gone.”
Carrie drifts in and out of consciousness, bleeding from fresh wounds in her memory. When she feels stable, she assesses the room. Ideally, there would be something sharp: a letter opener or an ancient pair of scissors. But high schools are like mental institutions and prisons. There’s nothing that can be repurposed as a weapon for fear a student might turn it against a teacher. Carrie considers the effectiveness of sharpened pencils when she sees the defibrillator pack by the door.
She stands up, her legs unsteady. It seems unlikely the defibrillator will carry a charge, but she clicks the pillbox case open and sees a light blinking green. At the same time, she hears voices in the hall. Not Cedric but Kenny and Justin, the ones who came for her in Brian’s apartment. Carrie drops into slippiness, bringing the paddles of the defibrillator with her. She stands behind the door.
“Cedric’s going to be pissed if you even touch her,” says Kenny.
“She killed Marty and Thandi,” Justin says. “You don’t want to see her pay for that?”
“He’s going to hollow out her brain,” Kenny says. “That’s bad enough.”
“I want to give her something to remember,” Justin says.
“I’m telling you she’s not going to remember shit,” Kenny says. “What are you going to do, rape her?”
“She used to want it so bad,” says Justin.
“Not from you,” Kenny says.
“I’m going to scuff her up.”
“Fuck that,” says Kenny. “I’m going to grab dinner.”
“I’ll catch up,” Justin says.
Carrie listens to footsteps heading down the hall. She wants to cry out to him for help, hoping whatever part of his humanity is still there will respond. She wants to scream at him for looking the other way. The doorknob turns, and the door swings toward her. Carrie moves toward its edge. Justin closes the door behind him. She worries the defibrillator won’t have any effect because of Justin’s ability with electricity, but there’s nothing else at hand. She waits for him to take another step into the room, then puts the paddles on either side of his head and fires a charge. He lets out a gargling noise and shudders to the ground. Carrie’s on him immediately, straddling his chest. The paddles hum and whine as a second charge builds. He looks at her, dazed, and shakes his head to clear it. His eyes come into focus, welled up with tears.
“Do it,” he says. She feels his arms struggling weakly against her legs. “Do it now.” His face quivers with sobs. “There’s someone else in my head with me. There’s less of me every day. We used to be good. Carrie. Please. I don’t know how long I can—” His pained expression twists into a smile, and his face firms up in cruel resolve. “That wasn’t very nice.” His voice changes, calms and drops half an octave in the middle of a sentence. Something milky and black swims over the surface of his eyes. It frightens Carrie backward so she’s sitting on his legs rather than his chest. Justin or whatever’s controlling him sits up. “Can’t you hear me anymore, Carrie? I’ve been calling y—”
Carrie presses the paddles against Justin’s forehead and releases another charge. The scared boy surfaces again. “Please!” he says. Carrie feels a humming vibration coming from him, an echo of the paddles’ building charge. His hands spark and crackle. She jumps off his legs as he brings his hands up to his face. The room fills with the smell of ozone, a storm about to break. “I don’t want to be this.” He presses his face into his palms, muffling his scream. Sharp ozone is blanketed by the low smell of cooked meat and singed hair as his body slumps backward, hands welded to his face.
Carrie doesn’t give herself time to register the horror of it. She files it away with other horrors. She’ll revisit it in dreams, in moments when she feels safe. She’s up and out the door, leaving Justin’s body smoking on the classroom floor.
She runs down the hall. The lights are off. There’s a thrill in being in a school after dark, even as an adult. She imagines pranks, flasks of cheap booze consumed in the bathroom while classmates slow dance in the gym. It’s the stuff of teen movies, and Carrie worries her mind is filling in gaps where actual memories had been with scripted fictions. Sneaking into Bishop, she thinks. Miquel and me. Bryce and Waylon behind us, holding hands. Did we do that?
Carrie hears sustained cries of pain coming from down the hall. The ground floor of every high school centers on the gym, like spokes feeding into a hub. Carrie can hear it in the quality of the screams, an echo and a space she remembers from Deerfield High. She associates it with the squeak of sneaker soles on hardwood, the shrill enthusiasm of pep rallies bouncing off cinder-block walls. She continues down the hall, toward the center. The gym doors are closed, but light and sound leak through around the wooden doors. Knowing it will draw attention to her but unable to stop herself, she pushes the door open.
The gym is set up like a triage unit. Rows and rows of hospital beds, teenagers and old people strapped to them. Some sleep, some writhe, some scream. There must be a hundred beds.
The door eases shut, and Carrie watches attendants make their way through the rows. She focuses on the one nearest. She’s middle-aged with the weary air of a mother. She wears saddlebags, one resting on either thigh. She stops at each bed and pulls something out of the left bag. A small metal cylinder, no bigger than Carrie’s pinkie finger. Carrie recognizes it immediately. These little canisters were how sh
e made a living for years. The nurse discharges the canister of Rez into a tube that runs up each patient’s left nostril, then puts the spent canister in the other saddlebag, where it clinks against the others. As the dose hits, each patient slams against their restraints, their body pushing heavenward only to get pulled back down. The attendant moves on to the next patient.
In the far corner of the gym there are beds with sheets thrown over them, the uneven terrain of bodies beneath. Creeping through the rows, Carrie moves toward them. As she does, she brushes the starched sheets of one of the patients, who startles and grabs her by the wrist. His skin is translucent; she can see the fascia underneath, the blood vessels surging like leeches fattening themselves. She’d have no way to recognize him if it weren’t for his Deerfield High T-shirt, stained with vomit around the collar, hovering over the gory insides of his body like an angel resting on wisps of cloud. Brian stares into her eyes, and Carrie is at once sure he can’t see her and positive he can.
“Doctor,” he croaks. “I don’t think it’s working.”
Carrie shakes her wrist free and stares at her brother. He’s in no state to run. She’ll have to carry him out. She hurries to the makeshift morgue. There’s a metal tray of autopsy tools, scalpels of various sizes. She grabs three and holds them folded along her forearm. She goes back toward where Brian is to cut him loose.
The door swings open, and Cedric enters with Kenny.
“That’s enough now, Carrie Norris,” he shouts to the entire room. He can’t pinpoint her. It’s her only advantage, but it’s not enough to save her and Brian.
The doctor panics and runs from the room. Carrie leaps over one of the bodies and zigzags toward Cedric and Kenny. She doesn’t need the white flame meditation now; her mind is a flitting piece of malice moving across the room. She focuses on Cedric, watching his glance dart around the space, occasionally picking up on the spot where she was.
Everywhere you think I am, I’m not.
Scurrying under a gurney in a low crouch, she comes up between Cedric and Kenny. She raises two of the scalpels and stabs both into Cedric’s eye. His head jerks back, pulling the weapons from her hand as he falls to his knees, screaming. Carrie grabs Kenny by the neck and shoves him up against the lockers, the last scalpel drawing blood from his stubbly neck.
“Why are you doing this?” she says. “What the fuck does the Faction want experimenting on these people?”
“It’s Davenport,” he says, tapping the side of his head. “He wants everyone like us.” He’s sobbing, watching Cedric on the ground trying to free the metal from his orbit.
Carrie feels a thrashing inside her brain. Cedric, wounded, lashing out, trying to grasp at her memories and shred them. She lets Kenny go and delivers a swift kick underneath Cedric’s jaw. She kneels down and finds her knife in his pocket, realizing that her stolen iPod sits on the desk in the classroom upstairs. She tucks the knife back into its holster.
She winds through the beds, looking for Brian or whatever’s left of him. When she finds him, she yanks the needles out of his arm and hoists him onto her shoulders, grateful he’s such a bag of bones. She carries him out of the gym and down the hall, hoping it’s in the direction of an exit. Behind her, the pained moans of the patients in the gym, the choked gasps of Cedric trying to scrabble back to his feet and regain his breath. For an instant, she’s back in the camp at Topaz, the brief return of her ability and the promise of escape for some of them. She should get everyone out, but there’s no way and no time. Hunched under Brian’s weight, she walks out the school’s front doors.
Fahima isn’t used to butting her head against a problem, but it’s happening more and more lately. Project Tuning Fork is the obvious example, but then there’s this one: she needs a way to objectively study Hivematter. This is roughly like saying she needs to autopsy a dream or throw a wish into a mass spectrometer. What’s wanted is a version of Kimani’s room she can fold around herself like a deep sea diving suit. Once, she would have been able to imagine the workings of such a thing and sketch it out on a napkin, but now even the concept makes her head hurt. The Hive is transspatial, which is how Kimani’s room travels and the answer to how she can be in two places at once when she’s not anywhere at all. She thinks the key might be thinking of what Kimani’s room looks like from the outside, but where would you stand to look at it? It abuts the real world only at the door. What’s on the other side of Kimani’s walls?
If she could dream up a suit, she could fold into the Hive and pick one of the black flowers as easily as stealing a peony in Central Park, but she’s stuck dropping her mind into the Hive, interfacing with the flowers there only through her Hivebody. No data, no instruments. Lying on the couch in the headmaster’s quarters, Fahima lets her mind go in, her Hivebody manifesting at the same place it always does: the spot where they rescued Emmeline Hirsch from a cage of onyx, the first time Fahima saw the black substance in the Hive or anywhere else. It’s grown over with snakes of black vine, but Fahima can see the spot at the center where the cage Emmeline was held in had burst like a pustule, freeing the captive girl inside.
Knowing what’s coming and bracing herself for it as best she can, Fahima grabs one of the black flowers with the bare hand of her Hivebody. The first time she ever touched the black substance in the Hive, it flooded her head with memories of her mistakes, shame at things she’d done. Bring it on, fucker, she thinks. Shame is basically where I live. But the feeling that invades her mind when she grips the bloom isn’t about anything that’s already happened. It orients her thinking toward the future and finds nothing there. Not a dystopia, not an earth in ruins, but nothing. Eschaton. She lets go of the flower, but the hopelessness lingers, a nihilistic certainty that all of this is pointless. She looks at her hand, expecting to see burns, some physical remnant of the harm the flower’s done to her mind, her heart, but the skin is intact, unblemished.
Fahima remembers the object Kevin Bishop created in Revere before he died, an inverse of the black glass. Touching it made her feel powerful; it kicked her ability into an unsustainable overdrive, one she wouldn’t feel again until the first moments after the Pulse. But along with that power, there’d been a feeling of hope, of the limitless potential the future held. It was what she felt was at the core of Bishop’s message: that Resonants were an embodiment of some future promise. Not a destiny, because destiny was limited to a single preordained path. It was a multiplicity of futures, branching and ever-expanding possibilities.
Now she struggles to recall that feeling. It seems cheap and naïve, and she can’t help thinking it might be permanently eclipsed by this one. With a sense that she’s lost something, Fahima brings herself up out of the Hive, back into a lab she thinks of as Remote Site Minus One. It’s not on any of the Bishop Foundation’s paperwork, and except for the Omars, only four people outside the site know about it. Some days four seems like too many.
The sample swims in a jar on her desk, twisting itself into shapes as if trying to relay a message or spell out its name. She hasn’t said it out loud, but in her head she’s been calling it Yorick.
She sliced pieces off it and ran them through every test from gas chromatography to Kirlian photography. The latter was terrifying: the entire plate came out exposed, as if the tiny slice of Yorick implied a ubiquitous presence. More traditional tests yielded two incompatible results: Yorick was organic matter that shared Patrick’s DNA, but Yorick was also inorganic matter with the same structure and chemical composition as black glass. It tells her nothing. It’s brought her no closer to understanding what’s wrong with Patrick than she was the day of the riot, the first time she saw something foreign looking out at her from behind his eyes.
She’s theorized that he’s infected with something, that constant contact with the black glass has had a permanent effect on his mind. She’s imagined that his own personality, his psyche or whatever you want to call it, has become d
iminished by shearing off tiny pieces like Yorick here and inserting them in the brains of Faction members like poor dead Heidi. She asked Omar if it felt this way when he had too many duplicates out in the world, as if his essential self was a limited amount of water poured out in drams into dozens of smaller containers, leaving the main one nearly empty. Omar said it didn’t work like that but refused to explain further. The two theories could work in tandem: Patrick lessened by division and then infected. But neither told her anything useful.
Fahima sits, staring at Yorick, which floats sleepily in formalin. Next to the jar, a martini with a twist swimming in it, yellow echo of Yorick’s black. Fahima keeps thinking what a poor game of chess she’s played. She’s near the point where the only option is to flip the board, send the pieces flying.
She worries that Patrick can sense it, that it calls out to him, maybe even wanting to rejoin him. Yorick hasn’t given up much in the way of information, so it would be a shame if he blew their cover. Thinking about it reminds her how likely it is Patrick already knows about this place and tolerates it. Feeling as if she’s being watched, she puts Yorick back on the shelf, leaning a copy of The Feynman Lectures against it. She picks up her martini, starts up the Gate she’s secretly kept here, and in the deafening roar that follows steps through into the headmaster’s quarters at Bishop.
Sarah wanders in from the bedroom without any real purpose. The Omars here are good with her, although some are better than others. As he has with the ones at the lab, Omar has been letting more of his duplicates persist autonomously. They’re growing into actual people, whereas Sarah is static.
“Working?” she says.
“Not really,” Fahima says. “You want anything?” She points at her martini. “I could make you one of these.”
