by Bob Proehl
Alyssa hoists herself out of the chair and sits next to Fahima on the couch. It seems like it could be the prelude to a hug. Fahima’s not sure her heart could take a hug right now or that she’d be able to let Alyssa go if she held her for even a second. Alyssa puts her hand on Fahima’s shoulder, keeps her at arm’s length. “It’s good to see you,” she says. “It’s hard but good. It’s good you’re okay.”
Before Fahima can respond, one of the Omars knocks on the door and lets himself in.
“Hey, boss,” he says. “Twenty-Two says we’ve got airborne incoming. It’s got to be your girlfriend.”
“You could not have timed that worse,” Fahima says. Alyssa smiles that smile she gets when Fahima irrevocably fucks up.
* * *
—
Provisions are suboptimal, and although the air of the dinner is cautiously celebratory, the fare is piles of red beans and rice out of the box. The scruffy group of young people who arrived with Alyssa and Emmeline dig in as if starving.
“Hot sauce?” Rafa asks, unsure who to address such a request to.
“I think there’s Tabasco in the pantry,” says Omar Twenty-Eight, who’s taken on the role of cook for Phoenix. He starts to stand, but Rafa’s already up.
“I’ll get it,” he says. Twenty-Eight smiles at Fahima as if to say See, some people can fend for themselves.
“So what’s the situation at Tuning Fork?” Fahima asks Omar Six. Along with a half dozen other Omars, he arrived on the Craft with Ruth, who took one look at Alyssa in the dining room, correctly assessed the situation, and sat down three seats away from Fahima.
“Are you sure we should be talking about this in front of…” Omar Six’s eyes sweep across the strangers at the table.
“It’s cool,” Kristal says. “None of us have any idea what’s going on.”
Omar Six shrugs. “I’m sure things have slowed down without us there,” he says. “But they were ready to roll forward with Thao and the Chair in Beta.”
“Did Cedric fix the Chair?”
“The casualty rates are the same,” Omar Eleven says. “Cedric doesn’t care about the casualty rates.”
“Neither does Patrick,” Fahima says. “I’m not sure he ever did.”
“You’re so impatient with him,” Sarah says. Whenever she speaks, there’s an abruptness to it, an interruption in the normal flow of conversation. “Remember that time at school when you…” Her hand trails at her side, searching for her dog, once the reservoir for her memories.
“Yeah, Sarah,” Fahima says. “I remember.” Sarah smiles and returns to her food.
“I think the thing to worry about right now is the Bronx,” says Ruth. “I’ve been watching the Throgs Neck Bridge. They’re hauling bodies across by the truckload.”
“That’s going to have to wait,” says Fahima.
“Bodies by the truckload sounds important,” Lana says. The rest of the band chimes in with agreement, and Ruth and the Omars avoid making eye contact with any of them. Fahima has forgotten how exhausting the idealism of young people can be.
“I’m not saying it isn’t important,” Fahima says. She can hear notes of Kevin Bishop’s voice ringing in her own, the tone that says I know you think you understand things but please be assured I understand things far better. “We have an opportunity to look at things that are big picture, sort of higher up. Those things will fix things on the ground.”
“Are you going to send Emmeline back in time and unkill trucks full of dead people?” Alyssa asks with an unkind knife in her voice. The kids from the band turn to Fahima, expecting an answer.
“I can’t do that,” Emmeline says.
“Tell them about the thing you did,” Kristal says. “At the theater when the Faction busted in.”
“Tell me, too,” Jerrod says. “I wasn’t there.”
“Because you were fucking Daniel in the mattress store,” Kristal says.
“Yeah, but I still want to know what happened,” Jerrod says sulkily.
“She knocked the things out of our heads,” Viola says. “The little thing that P…P…that Mr. Davenport put in there. Emmeline killed it.”
“I didn’t kill it,” Emmeline says. “I made it go away.”
“She made it go away,” Viola says quietly.
“You used the Hive,” Fahima says. She tries to phrase it as a question, but it comes out closer to an accusation, and Emmeline’s defenses go up.
“I didn’t go in there,” she says. “Kimani told me never to go in there. But sometimes it’s like I can see the whole Hive from outside it.”
“It’s okay, Emmeline,” Fahima says. “You’re not in trouble.”
“Fahima’s trying to figure out how to load you and aim you,” Alyssa says. Emmeline winces.
“I’m just glad we’re all here and safe,” says Ruth. Kristal is staring at her, her mouth full of rice, then breaks out laughing, spraying food back onto her plate. “What?” Ruth asks.
“That is like, the thing you say before everything goes to shit,” she says.
“Yeah, nice job,” Rafa says. “Now we’re all fucked, lady.”
If Emmeline’s being honest, Fahima’s new lab is a shithole. She’s comparing it with the memories she has of the lab in the basement at Bishop with its controlled chaos, messes of gears and gadgets under the sterility and bright lights of a serious place. Along with that, there’s the gloss of memory, the warm soft focus time gives. The current lab looks like the nurse’s office at a sleepaway camp for urban survivalists. There’s not a single project in progress, weird guts exposed to the world. The top of a gray metal industrial desk, the room’s sole furnishing, is buried in papers—charts and schematics marked up with webs of red ink. A bookshelf is built into the wall next to the desk, filled with leather-bound first editions that look unscientific, imported from somewhere else and awkwardly grafted onto this room for staging. In the corner of one shelf, acting as a bookend for the texts that lean against it, there’s a Mason jar, which Fahima pulls down and hands to Emmeline. Inside, what looks like a leech writhes in fluid. When Emmeline takes the jar, the leech shoots to the outer edge, away from her hand.
“Interesting,” Fahima says.
Without touching it, Emmeline knows what it is. She’s seen its brothers and sisters before—its fellow aspects. It’s the thing she wiped out of Viola’s head, and behind it, beyond and through it, there’s the other thing, the bigger thing of which it’s a part.
“It doesn’t like me,” Emmeline says.
“Can you tell me what it is?” Fahima asks. She’s trying to make it sound like a pop quiz question, but there’s a desperate note in her voice that says she doesn’t know the answer.
“It’s him,” Emmeline says. “It’s Patrick. Except it isn’t.”
“No, it isn’t,” Fahima says. “It has a lot of Patrick’s DNA, but it’s something else. Chemically, it looks a lot like—”
“Hivematter,” Emmeline says.
“Similar,” Fahima says, and Emmeline can tell her purpose here is twofold. She’s assessing what the thing in the jar is but also what Emmeline knows about it, what she’s managed to glean for herself without the benefit of chemical analysis.
“It’s deeper than that,” Emmeline says. Fahima nods as if she’s affirming something she already knows, but Emmeline sees her lean in, hungry for new information. “It’s like what we are, what we can do. This is what it looks like when it’s in the real world.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Fahima says. “Bishop could—”
“He could pull it through,” Emmeline says. “This has been pushed out. Mixed with other things. It’s gone bad.”
“How do you know all this?” Fahima asks.
“I can hear it,” Emmeline says. She hands the jar back to Fahima. “You can’t?” There’s a jab in t
he question, an attempt to establish herself as something more than whatever weapon Fahima thinks she is. Emmeline can’t shake off her resentment at being brought here like cargo rather than invited.
“Not everyone’s as tricky as you,” Fahima says. There’s a spark of who they used to be to each other, and Emmeline can’t help but warm to it. “Let me ask you another,” Fahima says as she wedges the jar back onto the shelf. “Your time stuff. Is all that back, too?”
“I haven’t tried since I took the shackle off,” Emmeline says. “I don’t like doing it.”
“Because of what happened before,” Fahima says.
Emmeline nods. She remembers Viola glitching in their dorm room at Bishop. She remembers the boy in Central Park who asked her to Shake Shack before she froze him and three federal agents in an endless loop she couldn’t break.
“I think your ability has matured,” Fahima says.
“I haven’t practiced,” Emmeline says. “I haven’t learned anything.”
“I understand that,” Fahima says. “I think potentially it’s grown, the same way your body has. Or your body’s grown into it. I think if you—”
“You’re lying because you want me to use it,” Emmeline says. “You’re making it sound science-y to get what you need.”
She can see Fahima reach for a denial, then pull back. “Yeah,” she says, not sheepish but clearly caught out.
“Don’t do that,” Emmeline says.
“I might know someone with answers I need,” Fahima says. “Except he’s dead.”
“You should have asked him before,” Emmeline says.
“I didn’t know the questions then,” Fahima says. “I’m not sure I do now.”
“You want me to go back and get him?” Emmeline asks. “Bring him here?”
“Can you?”
“I don’t think I can,” she says. It’s something she’s wondered about since the minute she took the shackle off. What and when does she have access to? How permanent is anything for her? How dead is dead?
“But you can go back and talk to him,” Fahima says. “I’ll give you a list of things we need to know.”
“Why don’t you come with me?” Emmeline asks.
“Can you do that?”
“I have no idea what I can do,” Emmeline says. She rubs the spot on her wrist where the shackle used to be. Something small and sad passes over Fahima’s face, and Emmeline can see who Fahima has let herself turn into, what parts of herself she’s cut off. Preparedness and planning aren’t the opposites of hope, but they run at strange angles to it. Maybe if Emmeline had been part of things rather than hidden away, she’d be like Fahima is now, anticipating the worst outcomes. But Emmeline is coming into things new and still has an idiotic willingness to try.
“I’m not sure I can see him again,” Fahima says. “I’m not sure I can tell him how badly I fucked everything up.”
“I think the number one rule of time travel is that you don’t tell people in the past about their future,” Emmeline says.
“You’re making that up,” Fahima says.
“Kimani and I watched a lot of movies,” Emmeline says. “The actual number one rule of time travel seems to be that whatever the number one rule is, it gets broken by the end of the story.” Fahima smiles. They used to joke like this all the time, an old-timey comedy duo trading one-liners about the fabric of space-time. It’s not the most dear of the things Emmeline’s lost, but she’s glad to have it back.
“How does it work?” Fahima asks. “Do we pick a date and place and set the dial?”
“I think we just find him. Are you ready?” Emmeline doesn’t wait for her to answer. She takes Fahima’s hand and folds them both up and away.
Emmeline and Kimani spent a lot of time talking about how their abilities work. In Kimani’s opinion, Emmeline’s ability was the souped-up version of her own. The way she described it was that all Resonants were in touch with this thing that was bigger than they were. She cited Fahima as evidence. All those things she comes up with, Kimani said. They’re from somewhere. As in they’re already out there and they come to her. She talked about the Hive, which was transspatial: any place in the Hive is everywhere in the real world all at once. That was already some powerful stuff. Beyond that, there was the Source, which was everywhere and everywhen at once. I can do some wild things within the Hive, Kimani said. When I was young, I folded upward out of the real world and into Hivespace like a bubble blown into glass. As she spoke, Emmeline could see it, a perfect pearl of space held within a transparent solid, Kimani inside the pearl. Only like what a bubble is to a circle, Kimani added, and Emmeline’s image of the metaphor burst. Kimani’s idea, which jibed with things Fahima used to tell Emmeline, was that Emmeline was folding up one more level than that, going into the Source, and she was doing it without getting stuck the way Kimani was. Kimani could look down at every point in space, pick where she wanted to go, and attach a door to that spot. When Emmeline folded all the way up, she could look down at every point in space and time and choose where she wanted to go. Then you can go there, Kimani said. No room to carry around. No doorway to stay trapped behind.
Fahima blacks out when they fold all the way up. There’s too much information here; even Emmeline has trouble not being overwhelmed by it. Emmeline sees Headmaster Bishop from the outside, from a direction it’s impossible to point to. His whole life is a trail burning across time. She can’t say why she picks the moment she does, but she chooses a spot on the line that is him and folds herself and Fahima down toward it.
The world takes shape around them, and they’re on a lawn above a beach at night. It’s chilly, and Emmeline rubs her arms for warmth. On the grass near them are children’s toys: a plastic picnic table, a sand pail and shovel. Emmeline’s stomach lurches as she sees a dead cat lying in the grass, its back legs replaced with those of a seagull, its head twisted to stare backward. The small house’s door hangs open, the lights on inside. Emmeline can hear a song, a woman singing over the lilt and plunk of a piano.
“There he is,” Fahima says, pointing away from the house. At the edge of the tide, Headmaster Bishop sits looking out at the ocean. The moon lights his face in profile. He’s younger than when Emmeline knew him, and she has the double-take feeling of seeing pictures of her parents in their teens, the sense that she’s aligned herself with youth and put everyone older than her on the other side of that divide, citizens of another country.
“He looks younger than I am,” Fahima says. “This must be before he got sick.”
“This is before you met him,” Emmeline says. She takes the first steps toward Bishop, with Fahima following her down to the water. The sand crunches under their feet, and as they approach, Bishop tenses and turns an ear toward them. His body relaxes, and he looks back out at the water.
“Mr. Bishop?” Emmeline says when they’re close enough to be heard. “You don’t know us, but we need to talk to you about some things. We have some questions.”
“This isn’t a particularly good time,” Bishop says, not turning.
“We can’t come back later. It’s complicated,” Emmeline says. Bishop turns to face them, and Emmeline hears Fahima draw a sharp breath at the lack of recognition on his face. Emmeline can feel him in her head, skimming the surface of her thoughts. She chooses a terrible memory and focuses on it: an amalgam of the moment she saw the news about Powder Basin and knew her mother was dead and the moment when Kimani told her they found her father’s body. It’s a clumsy technique, but she doesn’t have the energy or focus to follow her white flame training. It’s enough to make Bishop pull out of her head.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Emmeline can’t tell if it’s an apology for barging into her thoughts or sympathy for what he saw there. “Come on up to the house. I’ll make us some tea. Maybe something stronger.” He hauls himself up from the sand, and Fahima
steps forward to offer him a hand—the last time she saw him, he was barely able to walk unassisted. He ignores her and wipes his hands off on his khakis. Emmeline turns and starts toward the house where they’d arrived, assuming it’s his. Bishop grabs her shoulder, his grip harder, more urgent than seems necessary. “Not that one,” he says. He points them toward the gravel road. “Mine’s farther up the beach.”
There’s enough moonlight through the windows that he doesn’t turn on any lamps except the fluorescent hood light above the stove. In its harsh blue glow, Emmeline sees the man Bishop was when she met him. The light sinks into every nascent wrinkle of his face and deepens it, making him the ghost of his future self. He fills the kettle and puts it on the stove.
“I was thinking I’d make myself a martini,” he says. “I must have some gin here somewhere. Can I interest either of you?”
“I’m okay, thanks,” Emmeline says.
In the dim light of the kitchen, she sees tears shimmering in the bottoms of Fahima’s eyes. “That’d be nice,” Fahima says, her voice half choked. Headmaster Bishop nods. He finds bottles in the cupboard above the sink, one large and transparent and the other small and green. He goes through an elaborate ritual of preparation, a series of exacting measurements. Emmeline sees his lips move, counting as he swirls the liquid in the ice with a long spoon. He takes two martini glasses out of the freezer. They give off wisps of steam and cloud to translucency in the close warm air of the kitchen. He pours the drinks and hands one to Fahima, the liquid vibrating with the quiver of her hand so the surface looks like a pond when a breeze passes over it.
“Steady there,” says Headmaster Bishop. He sips his drink. The kettle whistles, and he sets his glass on the counter to search the cupboards again as the kettle continues to whine.
“Young lady,” he says. “Do you prefer black tea or one made of flowers?”
Emmeline considers what’s ahead of them and momentarily regrets not accepting a martini.
“Black is good,” she says.
“Luckily, that’s all we have,” Bishop says, holding up a half-full box of Earl Grey tea bags. He pours Emmeline a steaming cup. “So, then,” he says. “What did the two of you need to ask me?”
