by Bob Proehl
The chords they’re playing lift into a major key for a moment, then slink back.
“Ji Yeon Kim found us,” Hayden says. “She was gathering troops, I guess. It wasn’t technically the Faction. They never…” Hayden lays their hand on the side of their face. Their ring finger curls into their ear, and they wince uncomfortably. “She was finding people who’d be useful in combat,” they continue. “I’d heard of Ji Yeon because of Revere. She was putting together liberation squads. That’s what she called them. Groups to free the camps. It worked for me and Carrie. We wanted Topaz at the top of the list, but there were bigger camps down the California coast. Up in Bumblefuck, Montana, serious militia country. Ji Yeon promised we’d get there.
“We took out camps in Crater Lake and Emerald Bay. The men at Krupp Hollow laid down their guns and walked away, which was funny. I mean, not laugh out loud funny but funny they knew which way things were going. After Krupp Hollow was Chimney Park. I went into the mess hall wearing the commanding officer’s face; Carrie had snuck up on him in his quarters that morning. A syringe full of methylprylon in the neck. Signature Carrie move.” They smile and chuckle, recalling a fond memory. “I went in and ‘inspected the kitchen,’ which meant dropping thallium in the oatmeal. Poisoned breakfast for forty guards. By lunch they were doubled over with the shits. We walked back out and waited, then strolled right through the front gates.”
“What about Topaz?” Emmeline asks.
“Carrie led twenty of us in,” Hayden says. Something crosses their face, the inverse of the look they got remembering Carrie injecting drugs into people’s necks. Antinostalgia. “They were liquidating the stock. That’s what they called it. They lined people up in the yard and shot them. It was slow work because they had to drag off the bodies to a quicklime pit at the south fence. They didn’t want anybody to know. We saw the pit before we got to where they were executing people. Carrie assumed Miquel was already dead.”
They turn to Emmeline as if they had forgotten she was there. “They’ve been together since Bishop. They got married while we were in the camp. I almost forgot that.” They smile, but it’s a tiny, sad smile. “She lost it,” Hayden continues. “She tore through guards with a knife, except you couldn’t see her or the knife. The guards didn’t know what was happening. They’d look down at themselves and”—Hayden stacks their hands on their belly, then looks down and opens them, palms upward, like they’re catching a ball—“oh, shit, my guts are on the outside. One of them figured out someone was doing it, so he started firing at his friends. All of them, shooting at one another, and Carrie in the middle working her way through them with her knife. When it was over, we looked for survivors. There weren’t many. Carrie went looking for Warden Pitt, who ran the place. Slimy fat nothing. He had to be there because he’d given the kill orders. He had to be around to make sure they were carried out. Carrie went into the trailer where he had his office. She came out drenched in blood.”
“Was Miquel dead?” Emmeline asks.
Hayden shakes their head. “He locked himself and some of his kids in a fallout shelter under the community center. He was a teacher at the camp. They were in bad shape, but they were alive.” Hayden looks around to see if there’s a beer nearby, but there isn’t. “Hey look, Em-Bomb, I’m going to turn in, all right? You should get some rest.”
They lift Emmeline’s curls and kiss her forehead, then head toward the bunks. Emmeline looks away before she sees which one Hayden climbs into, whether they’re alone or joining someone. She picks up Hayden’s guitar and plucks strings, disappointed they don’t work under her fingers the way they did under Hayden’s. She rests her forehead against the window. The spot Hayden kissed presses on the glass, transferring the kiss to the starred skyscape outside.
It’s easy to abandon everything once they make the choice to do it. On the drive from New York to Chicago, Clay has trouble thinking of things he’ll miss. Their apartment, which, though small, was home. Coffee at Grumpy on the way to the Ruse. Mission Cantina for lunch and the twice-a-year splurge for dinner at Café Colette. The silver tabby that wanders the aisles at Molasses Books, which was reopened by one of the clerks after the owner left for the Wastes. The selection of otherwise impossible to find movies at the Video Vortex, owned by a couple, the wife a former festival curator with perfect visual recall and the husband with the ability to digitally encode other people’s memories. Nothing couldn’t be replicated. He didn’t know much about Chicago, but they must have coffee and cats.
It’s tougher for Dom; friendships are his profession. His network of contacts in New York and within the Bishop Foundation is a key part of his skill set. The move renders him professionally useless, starting him back at the bottom with a handful of leads. Clay liked his coworkers well enough, but Dominic had a true affection for the people he worked with. They hung out outside of work; they came to one another’s apartments for dinners and game nights. They bought presents for Rai on Christmas and sent cards to Clay on his birthday. They were friends without labeling themselves as such, and it pained Dom to leave them behind.
Rai has it worst of all. His friends at Berkeley Carroll were his whole world, and he’s sullen the whole trip. There’s a second loss he’s mourning, too: a promise regarding his future, an idea of who he was going to be. After what happened in the Bronx, he asked Clay about it.
“So I’ll never?”
“What we don’t know adds up to more than what we know,” Clay said. “But my boss is the expert to end all experts. And she thinks the people who weren’t affected by the Pulse, no matter how old they were, aren’t going to change.”
“Did you ask her about me?” Rai said. “Did you ask if she could help?”
Clay promised he would. He’d gone through the elaborate steps of setting up the meeting in the Bronx rather than asking Fahima because he was spooked by the idea she’d report him. The loss of whatever potential ability Rai imagined for himself paled next to the pain of being severed from his friends. He held Clay responsible for both.
They pull up in front of a nightclub in Wicker Park that looks, by Clay’s New York standards, divey and tacky. It’s owned by his cousin’s boyfriend. Clay wasn’t close with his cousin growing up; his aunt and uncle claimed he ran away in his early teens when he’d been sent to the Bishop Academy years before the war, before most people knew about Resonants. Clay sheepishly tracked him down after the Pulse, and his cousin had been a sounding board for him since. When Clay told him about the situation with Rai, he chastised Clay for not coming to him first. “You messed around with those Nazis before you called me up?” But his anger was feigned; he told Clay to get them all to Chicago immediately and they’d work things out from there.
“Is this where we live now?” Rai asks. Two women who might be sex workers share a cigarette in the doorway.
“We have family here to help us out,” Clay says. Dom makes a point of checking that the car doors are locked. One of the women gives them a neighborly wave as they enter the stairwell to the apartment above the club.
Bryce greets them from the top of the stairs, his natty outfit and pale birch bark skin making Clay instantly aware that the three of them look like they’ve been driving for days. “Get on up here; I want to see this kid of yours.” He makes a big show of hugging Clay and Dom. “How was the drive?”
“Family road trip,” Clay says. “Real wholesome stuff.”
Bryce opens his arms to embrace Rai, but Rai holds out a hand stiffly. A new, fresh bitterness wells up in him. Bryce wears his Resonance on the outside, a reminder of what Rai might have been but now won’t become. Bryce shakes Rai’s hand respectfully and guides them into the apartment.
Bryce’s boyfriend, Waylon, is so kind that it’s nearly overwhelming. He’s cooked them a big dinner, a huge roast with broccoli and biscuits. He’s found a house for them but insists they can’t go until they’re stuffed. He pou
rs generous glasses of wine for Clay and Dom and a thimbleful for Rai without asking. Rai looks at his dads, daring them to say he can’t have it. Dom turns away toward the window that looks down on the street. All of the sudden, he makes a break for the door.
“They’re stealing the car,” he says.
Bryce holds him back with one massive arm.
“Those are my people,” Waylon says. “They’re moving the luggage over for you. Everything’s taken care of.”
Dominic chafes at having everything tended to this way. He’s used to being the one who makes things appear and disappear with barely perceptible gestures. Before dessert, Waylon wins him over. “Bryce says you were in event planning.”
“Bishop Foundation stuff, mostly,” Dom says. “Office parties, that kind of thing.”
“Bullshit,” says Waylon. “Excuse my language. You did the Hassie Whitehead premiere and the gallery opening for Isidra Gonzalez. I do my research.” Dom blushes. “My booking agent is leaving me at the end of the month. He wants to DJ full time, which is apparently a life choice people still make. It’s not as glamorous as what you’ve been doing, but it’s work if you want it.”
“I would be thrilled,” Dom says.
“So that’s done,” Bryce says. “Which brings us to you, Rai.”
“I don’t need a job,” Rai says through a mouthful of broccoli.
“You need a school,” Clay says.
“I teach at the Unity School in Hyde Park,” Bryce says. “It’s a pilot project, fully integrated.”
“I’d have to go to school with people with abilities?”
“You went to school with people with abilities,” Dom says.
“When I thought I was going to get some,” Rai says.
“It’s a normal curriculum,” Bryce explains. “History, math, science.”
“Sounds boring,” Rai says.
“It’s school, man,” Bryce says, which gets him a halfhearted smile from Rai. “It’ll get you papers to be anywhere in the city. If you hate it, you can play hooky and wander the streets.”
“No, you can’t,” says Dom.
“What papers?” Clay asks.
“You have to understand, Chicago isn’t the nonstop love-in people want to make it seem like,” Bryce says. “The Accords mean the city is integrated, but the Faction can hassle you if you’re a non-Resonant without papers.”
“Sounds fucking great,” Rai mutters.
“Rai!” says Dom, but Clay pats his arm to let it go.
“There’s been a lot more Faction in town than we’re used to,” Waylon says. “Willis Tower’s like an anthill, people going in and out all hours.”
“He’s being paranoid,” says Bryce.
“I’m being straight with them,” Waylon says. Rai gives a huff of a laugh under his breath, and Clay remembers the period in middle school when Rai decided he hated having gay dads. It clearly came from someone else, and it went away quickly, but this was the echo of when Rai was cruelly homophobic because their queerness made him different. “It’s not just more Faction,” Waylon continues. “People are split on keeping the city integrated. The divide between people who are for it and against it is getting more pronounced.”
“We’re getting protesters at the school from both sides,” Bryce says. “That never used to happen.”
“If this isn’t going to work out, maybe we should keep moving,” Clay says. “I don’t want to be part of an exodus out of Chicago. We might as well get a head start.”
“There’s no better place for you to be than here,” Bryce says. “You go west, they’re not going to want you or Dom around. You go back east, they’re not going to want Rai. You want to be a family? You stay here. Don’t worry about Chicago. Chicago can keep its shit together.”
Carrie wakes in the middle of the night to a faint sound of music, thin and tinny. Emmeline is at the window watching the desert go by, one headphone in her ear and the other dangling at her waist. She’s holding an iPod, the unmistakable blue-green glow of the screen lighting the underside of her chin.
“Where did you find that?” Carrie asks.
Emmeline turns around, surprised. She pulls out the earbud.
“It was in the bench,” she says, holding it out to Carrie. “Down between the cushions. You can have it back. I was listening to the song Hayden was talking about, about the moon.” Carrie takes it and scrolls the click wheel through the list of albums, although she knows from the pattern of scuffs on the metal back this is the iPod the bad man took from her in Boulder. A tenuous connection forms in her mind. Carrie pulls the Polaroid out of her wallet and shows it to Emmeline.
“Who are these people?” she asks.
Emmeline examines the picture. “You and Hayden and some random kids,” she says. “You look like shit.”
“I have a scar,” Carrie says, pointing to the forked line that runs down her face in the photo. Emmeline looks at it, then at Carrie’s face, as if the scar might have been there the whole time.
“In the picture you do,” Emmeline says. The girl is a brick wall, which reminds Carrie how defenseless Emmeline is in other ways.
“Are you up?” Carrie asks. Emmeline nods. “There’s something we need to work on.”
“My ability is broken,” Emmeline says. “It’s not coming back. It’s not getting fixed.”
“This isn’t that,” Carrie says. Her hand rests on the lump the iPod makes in her pocket. She wants to add I don’t believe you, but she needs to have Emmeline on her side. “There’s something I need to teach you. In case something happens.”
Emmeline eyes Carrie skeptically. “The people who came after us in Boulder didn’t have psychics with them,” Carrie says, “but they’re going to figure out that was a mistake. When they restaff the Bloom, they’ll add at least one reader. You need to learn to mask yourself psychically. There’s this technique they taught us in school—”
“My mind is a cool white flame,” Emmeline says, rolling her eyes.
“You said you never learned it.”
“I said I never had class with Sarah,” she says. “Kimani taught me. I’m not as helpless as you think.”
“I don’t think you’re helpless,” Carrie says. It’s not optimal; learning psychic defense without a psychic to defend against is like learning to kiss by watching rom-coms. But it’s not as if having Carrie training her would be any better.
“What did you mean, restaff the Bloom?” Emmeline asks.
“A Bloom is always five,” Carrie says. “When an agent is decommissioned, they restaff.”
“How many did you decommission in Boulder?” she asks. She’s cautious with the word, as if it might break open and reveal what it holds inside.
Carrie flinches. It’s an easy question to lie about, but she’s gotten away with enough omissions with Emmeline. “Three,” she says.
“My friend is one of them,” Emmeline says.
“One of them is a friend of mine, too,” Carrie says, then catches herself. “You have to not think about them that way. They aren’t who they are anymore.”
“She’s still my friend,” Emmeline says.
“When you join up, they put something in your head,” Carrie says. Her hand goes to the side of her face, covering her ear. “It’s this voice that tells you what to do. Sometimes. Even when it’s not telling you what to do, it makes you feel bad. It makes you angry all the time.”
“You have one,” Emmeline says. She reaches out and rests her fingertips on Carrie’s face above the eye, where the scar is in the picture. It’s gentle but makes Carrie flinch.
“Yeah.”
“When?” Emmeline asks.
“After Topaz,” Carrie says. “Miquel and I and Hayden, we went back to Chicago. There wasn’t as much fighting there; we were trying to keep the peace. But I didn’t wan
t peace. I was still angry. It might have been easier if they’d killed Miquel. When I thought they killed him, then got him back, that was worse. He was in bad shape, more than I could handle. But it was more like I made a decision to be this person who needed revenge. I became her. And then I didn’t need to be her anymore, but I still was. I didn’t stay in Chicago more than a week. I went and joined up with the Faction for real. They put this thing in my head. They said it was for communication. But it made me feel different, like I wasn’t myself.”
“It’s still there?”
“Not the first one,” Carrie says. “We went into the school in Houston. The army or whatever was holding it. They had kids hostage. The whole school was rigged up with a blast inhibitor. One big flash and my ability was gone. I got out before they blew up the building with everyone in it. All the kids. The rest of my Bloom.
“But the little voice was gone, too. For the first time in months I wasn’t getting orders. No one in my head but me. I wasn’t in a place where I could make decisions for myself. They found me wandering around. They put in a new one, and I was joined up with a new Bloom. Thandi and Martin. Martin I knew from school. Thandi joined the Faction after Houston. She was kind at first. Kinder than I was. I liked her. When I saw her in the woods, all that kindness was gone.”
“It was like that with Viola,” Emmeline says. “My friend. Like something was missing.”
“She must have replaced me after I left,” Carrie says.
“How did you get out?”
“The war was over,” Carrie says. “We wiped out Denver; they bombed Boston. We could have kept going like that until everyone was dead, but they gave up. Separation was the main condition of the Armistice. We got the east, up to Chicago. Whatever was left of the West Coast had been out of anyone’s hands for months. They got everything in between. Millions of people had to get out because the country wasn’t theirs anymore. We were evacuating towns and cities. It was ugly. People were so beaten down, so helpless. The little thing in my head buzzed constantly, egging me on. When I pushed against it, it pushed back. It was easier to listen. We cleared out my hometown. My dad and my brother, I chased them out of their house.
