by Bob Proehl
“I want to help,” Emmeline says. “Even if that means fighting.”
“If it means fighting, fight,” Carrie says. “Just, don’t turn into someone you wouldn’t fight for. Don’t let yourself become someone you don’t even like.”
“You’re not a bad person,” Emmeline says. “Here.” She holds out the bracelet she wore on her wrist, wide and silver with beautiful stones and script. “Your payment. I’m sure Fahima was going to give you this, or one like it.”
“It shut you off.”
“For a long time, yeah,” Emmeline says. She lifts one of the red stones to reveal a switch. “This is how you turn it on. It gets power from moving it around. But you have to check it before you go to bed.” Under another stone, there’s an LCD readout. “This tells you how long the battery has left.” She clicks the stone back into place and runs her finger over the Arabic letters inscribed there. “The word on it means time.”
“I can’t take this,” Carrie says.
“I don’t need it anymore,” Emmeline says.
“I didn’t finish the job. I was supposed to get you where you needed to be.”
“I think you did,” Emmeline says. She presses the bracelet into Carrie’s hands, then runs off down the hall, past Alyssa, who’s been standing in the doorway.
“It’s not a blessing,” she tells Carrie. “Best case, it’s a stopgap. Fahima used to say every time she looked at that thing, it reminded her there was one more problem she couldn’t solve.”
“Maybe my problem’s not as big,” Carrie says. “Maybe for him this is enough.”
“There’s a mattress store downstairs,” Alyssa says. “There’s probably twenty teenagers fucking like rabbits in there, but I bet you could find noise-canceling headphones and an empty bed.”
“I need to get going,” Carrie says. She feels light and heavy at once. Alyssa looks at her like a mother.
“You need rest,” Alyssa says. “We all do.”
Carrie shakes her head. “I gotta go.”
“Every time I get mixed up in Fahima’s life, I feel like I’m watching a movie with the subtitles off,” Alyssa says.
“Don’t let her—” Carrie starts, but she’s not sure what she’s worried about. She wants to know that Alyssa will protect Emmeline from Fahima and Hayden will protect all of them from everything else, but she doesn’t know how to ask.
“I won’t,” Alyssa says.
“Could you tell Hayden thank you?” Carrie says. “I didn’t mean to leave them with this mess.”
“Not your mess,” Alyssa says. “You haven’t told Hayden?”
“I can’t. I’m going back to Chicago, and there are people there I need to finish things with.” She runs her fingers over the inscriptions on the bracelet. “Whatever this is,” Carrie says, waving her hand toward the center of the mall, which throbs with bass and the shouts of young people, “I don’t think I’m a part of it anymore.”
“I’m not a part of it, and I’m still going,” says Alyssa.
Carrie thinks about the baseliners who’ve been in her life since she left home for the Bishop Academy. There weren’t many: her parents and Brian, the guards at Topaz and the people she fought in the war, the people in Jonathan’s neighborhood who eyed her sideways when she left his apartment and the people in New York before the war who did the same, the ones she brought food and medicine to in the Wastes who mumbled thank you or gave her looks that said is this all? Who among all of them had been kind or caring? Who bothered to look past what she was to who she was, and who would have fought alongside her?
“Thank you,” she says to Alyssa, and the words feel insufficient, as if she should explain what for. She doesn’t have time to list the little kindnesses or the absence of kindness that makes each of them stand out. She hugs Alyssa and walks to the escalator.
She finds Tuan sitting on the counter of an ear-piercing kiosk, nodding his head in time to the music, assessing the dance floor like it’s a pool he thinks might be too cold to jump into. Carrie grips his knee to get his attention.
“Hey, Killer Carrie,” he says. “Your girl there make any decisions? She’s got some fans here after whatever she pulled in the theater.”
“I’m not sure,” Carrie says, but she is sure. Emmeline’s like her a little bit. Emmeline will do what she has to. “I need to get back to Chicago fast.”
Tuan’s eyes go wide, and he looks at Carrie like he’s trying to guess her weight. “You know I can’t do that anymore,” he says. “Too much distance and too much—”
“Don’t,” says Carrie. “I know it sucks for you, and I know it’s going to make you feel like shit for days. But I need to be there now or people are going to get hurt.”
He sighs deeply and hops down off the counter. He draws a circle in the air, then grips its edges, stretching them up and down, left and right, with obvious physical strain until the portal is tall enough and wide enough for Carrie to fit through. Its surface looks like rain pouring down a mirror. Tuan wipes away a trickle of pink liquid dribbling from his nose.
“Thank you,” Carrie says. She’s about to step through when she feels hands wrap around her waist, a body press against her back.
“Nice fucking try,” Hayden says in her ear, then nips Carrie’s earlobe with their teeth and plunges them both through.
Fahima’s glad her last entry to the Bishop Academy has the feeling of finality. Knowing she’ll never be back helps her attend to all the details. As she pushes through the revolving door, she notes the place where it scrapes the tile, slowing in its spin. She closes her eyes and lets the acoustics of the lobby fill her mind with a sense of its space, the height of the ceilings, and the distance of every wall. She takes a deep breath and tastes lemon-scented cleaning products, the sour milk and soil smell of adolescent body odor, and the high burn of ozone as a student arcs across the room as a blur of electricity. When she started working here, no one was allowed to use their abilities in the lobby. Now they’re all free to be their whole selves everywhere. Fahima tries to remind herself that this is a victory. She tries to feel as if she’s won.
She stops when Shen says his standard “Hello, Dr. Deeb.” She stands between him and the elevators, playing his words back in her head, listening for a sign he’s lost to her. She’d told herself if they took Shen, it was over. But she’d told herself that about Omar and Ruth. She’d said As long as Emmeline is safe and As long as nothing happens to Alyssa. All of these were predicated on the idea that she’d be the one to make choices, that she got to draw those lines.
“Have you heard anything about the Mexican place on Orchard?” she asks Shen.
“Mission Cantina? I hear it’s not bad,” he says. “Not as good as Toalache.”
“I thought Toalache’s overrated.”
“It would be impossible to overrate Toalache.”
“I’m thinking I might go there tonight,” she says. “You want me to bring anything back?”
“The short rib and bone marrow tacos are fantastic,” he says.
“Tacos it is.” She smiles at him because she can’t let him see her cry over tacos she’ll never get to deliver. The elevator doors shut in front of her.
Upstairs is too quiet. She moved Sarah out last night, and not being greeted by a full report from a guardian Omar when she arrives makes the place feel abandoned. Fahima clears papers off her desk, grabbing heaps and stuffing them into a messenger bag. She stops at the Polaroid she found taped to the window, the image of the street below. She knew what it meant as soon as she saw it. It was a message to start, the date and time written on the bottom indicating the last moment before it would all be too late. The message could have been wrong. There would be some comfort knowing she’d started too late. There would be someone else to blame. Fahima puts the Polaroid in the bag with the rest of the papers: the schematics for useless de
vices, the notes toward ineffectual plans.
She’s so busy packing, she fails to notice Ji Yeon standing in the doorway, flanked by all four members of her Bloom.
“Do you have a minute?” Ji Yeon asks.
“Not really,” Fahima says, continuing to pack. “I’m supposed to meet with Cedric in an hour to give a full accounting of where we stand with Project Tuning Fork, which is suddenly everyone’s highest possible priority.”
“It’s always been the highest priority,” Ji Yeon says. “It’s the end of everything we’ve worked toward.” Something in the cadence of her voice puts Fahima on edge. “That’s why we were surprised to find out you’d been altering the data.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fahima says.
“Cedric’s had technopaths running through all the files,” Ji Yeon says. “They say it was sloppy work, as if you wanted to get caught.”
They were half right. Fahima had never been too careful when she rewrote files at the Ruse not because she wanted to get caught but because she thought the Omars were the only ones who’d ever see them.
Fahima sorts the papers, trying to make it look like she’s looking for something in particular.
“We understand,” Ji Yeon says. “You were being cautious. Too cautious, maybe. None of that matters now. We’re here to talk about something else.”
Fahima drops the papers and turns on Ji Yeon. “What happened to you?” she asks. “You were a good kid. You were a prick, but you were a good kid.”
“You always saw me as a kid,” says Ji Yeon, smiling her tight smile.
“It’s not so bad, being a kid,” Fahima says. “It means you’re not all full of adult bullshit.”
“Like you?”
“Exactly like me,” Fahima says. “I thought you were going to change the world.”
“Like you?”
“Better than me. Better than this.”
“I like to think I am changing the world,” says Ji Yeon.
“Are you even still in there, Ji Yeon?” Fahima asks even though she knows the answer.
Ji Yeon looks confused for a moment, even scared. She opens her mouth to speak and then snaps it shut. Her face goes deadly calm, all fear, all feeling gone.
“There’s a flicker,” Ji Yeon says. Her voice is different. Deeper. Fahima stops and looks at her, searching for the last bit of the girl she met behind a barricade in Revere, Massachusetts, ready to give her life for a noble and futile cause. She can’t find it. “We’re mostly me now.”
“Which one?” Fahima says.
“All of us,” the five members of the Bloom say in unison.
“What do they do?” Fahima asks. “The little pieces you put in their heads?” She circles Ji Yeon like she’s examining a statue in a museum.
Ji Yeon’s mouth pulls up into a wider smile. “Focus on the little pieces and you miss the big picture.”
“That’s droll,” Fahima says. “Patrick isn’t droll.”
“I’m barely Patrick anymore,” says one of the ones behind Fahima. The beanpole of a boy with acne scars. “You’ve figured that out at least.”
Fahima keeps her attention on Ji Yeon because it’s easiest. “You’re Raymond Glover,” she says.
“You know my name,” says the soccer mom on Ji Yeon’s left, “but I’m guessing you don’t know a thing about me. Kevin never told you. He was keeping secrets.”
“You were one of the first,” Fahima says.
“I was the first,” says Ji Yeon. “Kevin and I. Created at the same time.”
“Where’ve you been, Ray?” Fahima says.
“Doesn’t matter,” says the beanpole.
“Tell me where the girl is,” says the soccer mom. She slams Fahima’s suitcase shut.
“I don’t know,” Fahima says.
Ji Yeon places her hand on Fahima’s cheek. “Tell me or I will crawl into your skull and find out.”
“You promised me you’d never,” Fahima says.
“Patrick promised you,” Ji Yeon says.
“You’re scared of her,” Fahima says. She watches for a flinch, but Ji Yeon is only a mask. Even more than Patrick’s face. Raymond is elsewhere.
“She’s the solution to our problem,” says the beanpole. “Think of the lives we could save with her help.”
“You could save them by waiting,” Fahima says.
“I am so tired of waiting,” says the beanpole.
“I’ve been waiting such a long time,” says the pudgy one.
“Ask me again about the little pieces,” says Ji Yeon.
“What do they do, Ray?”
“They’re a stopgap,” Ji Yeon says. “They’re tin cans and a string.”
“This?” the beanpole asks.
“What I’m doing right now?” the pudgy one asks.
“It’s painful to do it this way,” Ji Yeon says.
“Don’t show off for my benefit, Ray.”
Ji Yeon smiles that awful fake smile again. Fahima circles her. “I like you, Fahima,” she says. “You’re so practical but idealistic at the same time. It’s made you very easy to work with.”
“Ray?” Fahima asks.
“Hmm?” She can’t tell which of them it comes through, a querying sound that hangs in the air for a second.
“You should’ve called me upstairs for this little meeting,” Fahima says. “You could have had home field advantage.”
She presses a button, and the overhead lights begin to hum. They turn a sickly green, and each member of the Bloom trembles and goes slack, dropping to the floor like the bones have gone out of them. It’s a temporary fix, but it gives Fahima enough time to climb up on a chair, remove the corner panel of the door, and turn on the Gate. She grabs her bag and steps through. Two Omars are waiting on the other side.
“Brick the Gate,” Fahima says. She’s texting Ruth two sets of coordinates: an extraction point and her current location.
The Omars hesitate. “Shouldn’t we wait for them?”
“They’ll have to come by air,” she says.
“Do you think Ruth can get them out by air?”
“She’ll fucking have to!” Fahima shouts. “She can do it,” she adds quietly.
One of the Omars enters a code into the Gate panel, and electronics burn out like dying stars. The image of the headmaster’s quarters in the doorway strewn with the unconscious bodies of Ji Yeon and her Bloom ripples, wavers, and fades. At both ends, the Gates become inert, useless arches of metal, their connection severed.
Kevin wondered how it could have happened without his noticing. He was nominally aware of every Resonant in New York City at any time, and Raymond Glover’s presence had been a high thin note at the edge of his consciousness for fifty years, so constant he often forgot it was there. When he got a call at the school from an office ten blocks away inviting him to a meeting with Raymond Glover, CEO of Harmonic Solutions, he had to ask himself if Raymond had been hiding from him.
Bitter about the way he’d been summoned, Kevin left the school at the time of his appointment and walked from 57th and Lexington to the financial district, where Harmonic Solutions was housed in a newly built tower that gleamed with all the idealism of New York that year. Kevin had heard the promises about a rising stock market lifting all boats, but he wondered about the cost. It was as bougie to wax nostalgic over the days he might score shake weed or an anonymous blow job in Times Square as it was to slaver at the prospect of spiking rents and franchise restaurants on every block. Kevin had been an occasional tourist in that darker dream of the city; he looked like a man striding into his midforties and a veteran of a debaucherous downtown heyday, but he had turned eighty last month. The slow aging was an unexpected side effect of his ability, one not all Resonants shared. Kevin had been called to the bedside of some of hi
s oldest friends, the first Resonants he met in his wandering years after the war. When their minds began to go and they worried about the harm their abilities might cause, they summoned him to ferry them over the Styx. Some of them made it no secret they resented his youth, and others saw it as a reason for hope. They were leaving, but Kevin Bishop would carry on.
Security on the ground floor called upstairs to confirm his arrival and issued him a visitor’s badge. The receptionist for Harmonic Solutions on the twenty-first floor was the type of skinny blond boy Raymond seemed to have at least one of around at all times. Is this why you stayed hidden? Kevin wondered. Didn’t want me to meet your latest boy toy? Kevin might have the body of a man younger than he felt, but the spark of the young had long gone out in him. If that was what Raymond wanted, he’d be looking elsewhere.
“Here at Harmonic Solutions we offer a dynamic program of healing and self-actualization designed personally by our founder, Mr. Glover,” said the receptionist. His voice was a thin reed trembling in the light breeze such a small body could muster. Kevin dipped down to Hivescan him and found nothing. The boy had no Resonance. A quick survey of the building showed there were no Resonants here other than him and a dead spot that must have been Raymond. While Kevin tried to figure it out, the boy’s voice dropped a half octave and his expression of enthusiastic conversion to a New Age cult became more playful.
“Don’t be nervous, Kevin,” the boy said in this voice. “I wanted you to see my new project. It’s an urban farming experiment. I’m going to let go of Adrian now, and he’ll bring you back. And no, Kevin, I’m not fucking him. Jealousy’s a bad color on you.”
“Raymond?” said Kevin.
The boy blinked at him like a dreamer awakening. “Well, he’s Mr. Glover to me,” he said, his voice again a high treble. “But he told me you were old friends, so I suppose he’s Raymond to you.” The boy looked around as if he’d said a cuss word, then grinned at Kevin conspiratorially.
