by Bob Proehl
Ruth shimmies herself up to a proper seat. “You don’t get how pillow talk works, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” Fahima says. “There’s this moment after sex when my head feels clear, and Alyssa used to let me—”
“Okay, you can hold up there,” Ruth says. “Postcoital mentions of the ex—who, by the way, is sleeping down the hall—are a definite no.”
“I used to talk through problems after,” Fahima says. “That’s all.”
“Is this something I need to be here for, or am I like the dudes in a Plato dialogue?” Ruth asks. She puts on a low, stuffy voice with a badly executed British accent: “Oh, Miss Deeb, what a fascinating observation. Can you please further enlighten me on this point due to your obvious wisdom?”
Fahima gently slaps her leg, then rolls over and searches the floor for her clothes. “I’m going to go to the lab for a bit.”
“No, by all means, go ahead,” Ruth says. “Mentally jerk off in front of me. Not weird at all.”
Fahima kisses her and promises to be back soon. She fixes her hijab and gently shuts the door, alone in the halls of the Phoenix school. It’s silly to call it a school: nothing’s been taught here for years. She stopped referring to Bishop as an academy the day the war started even if she thinks of her apartment there as the headmaster’s quarters. Phoenix has been her oubliette, the place she puts things to forget them in the hope the rest of the world would forget them, too. Now it’s a foxhole. It’s hard to imagine any of them getting out of here. The curtain drawn over it was gauzy at best, and all the machines and fail-safes she’s built to protect them amount to nothing more than warding spells and a circle of salt. When the Faction comes sniffing, they’ll find Fahima and the people she’s stowed away and either kill them or press-gang them. For herself, Fahima would prefer the former.
Before that happens, she needs to see the gears of what Glover is doing. One thing is clear: the thing living in Patrick Davenport’s head is still thinking in terms of linear time. Either it’s no longer trapped in some atemporal Source, or keeping one foot in the real world is limiting it. If Raymond Glover wised up, he could hit them at every moment in their history. He could make an enemies list and snuff them all in their cribs. So far he hasn’t, which means his presence here has him locked into the linear flow of time. It’s also clear Glover doesn’t have complete control over Patrick. Maybe he’s doing a good impression of her friend, but there’s a glimmer of Patrick Davenport that suggests that Raymond is only influencing him or operating him by remote.
If that’s the case, Glover is peeking out into the real world from the Source. However he’s doing it, it got worse after the Pulse, which was Fahima’s attempt to break the bottleneck of the Hive. Its success meant expanding the conduit between the Source and the real world—creating millions of new Resonants was a side effect.
“I fucking helped him,” she mutters. “I let this asshole out of the bottle.”
It explained why he was pressing so hard on Project Tuning Fork. The Pulse created more connections between the Source and the real world, but it affected only two-thirds of 5 percent of the global population. A global Pulse would—
“—blow the doors off,” Fahima says as she arrives at her lab. She’s surprised to see the lights are on. She opens the door, and Sarah is squatting on the floor in a T-shirt and sweatpants. “Hey,” Fahima says, trying not to sound alarmed. “What are you doing up?”
“Walking around,” Sarah says. Her voice is singsong, a child’s cadence. “I feel like I forgot something.”
It’s hard to imagine a sentence that better sums up the tragedy of Sarah’s current state. It’s not only that she forgets, it’s that she forgets she’s forgotten. There are strings of days when she understands her condition, but mostly she exists with the permanent sense she might have left an unidentified object in another room. Fahima’s not sure which days are worse.
Sarah stands up. She wipes her hand on her white nightgown, leaving a red streak across her belly. Fahima steps to her and takes the hand, which is sliced deeply across the base of the thumb, tracing Sarah’s lifeline.
“What happened?” Fahima asks, scanning her desk for a towel, something to soak up the blood.
“Something fell,” Sarah says. She looks at her hand like it’s a foreign object. “I cut myself,” she says, not explaining but realizing it now, again.
Fahima notices a puddle and broken glass on the floor. The lid of a sample jar lies faceup, a ring of jagged glass jutting up from it like a crown. She looks at the spot on the shelf desk where Yorick’s jar ought to be, but it’s gone, the books it supported slouching to one side. She checks places where the jar has never been, hoping she’s wrong, that she put it somewhere else while she was talking with Emmeline or after they got back from meeting Bishop. Except she’s ritualistic about placing it right there: third shelf, right-hand corner. She looks on the floor to see if the little black leech is trying to squiggle under a filing cabinet to hide. “Sarah, where is it?”
“It just crawled into my hand,” Sarah says, holding out her bloodied palm. The look on her face is pure innocence, but it’s oversold—the baby-doll come-on, the who me? look of someone who wants you to know they’re getting away with something.
“Sarah?”
“No,” Sarah says. “Not really.”
Someone else smiles at Fahima with Sarah Davenport’s face.
Fahima bolts for the door. No Dampers in here. Stupid, lazy Fahima. She slams the door shut behind her, and Sarah’s body crashes into it. Fahima feels Sarah’s mind slip into her own, hissing, open it for me, Fahima. Let me out let me out.
My mind is a white flame, Fahima thinks, using techniques Sarah taught her, the trick they’d practiced for hours and hours when they were kids. Fahima used to joke that Sarah had some trick she wouldn’t teach Fahima and Patrick to defend against. I am a white flame, Fahima thinks, her back pressed to the door, hoping it will be enough. She locks the door from the outside and sprints down the hall. Certain Sarah is right behind her, she trips and stumbles down the stairs, righting herself with the railing. She finds Emmeline’s room and throws the door open, casting light onto the sleeping girl. The sight triggers a memory of retrieving Emmeline from her grief over her parents to start all this, to create the Pulse. Sarah’s mind peeks out at her from behind the memory. I’m sending everyone, Fahima, she says, the words burning in Fahima’s head like the afterimage of flashbulbs. A hundred black flowers are going to bloom in the desert.
My mind is a white flame.
“Emmeline, go!” Fahima shouts. Emmeline sits up too slowly, props herself up on an arm, and looks at Fahima. “Go, get out of here.”
“Wait,” Emmeline says. Her eyes close, and her body goes limp. Fahima rushes to catch her before she falls. Fahima can hear Emmeline screaming in the Hive, calling out for Kimani. It’s a piercing cry, and Fahima realizes with horror that every Resonant on the planet can hear it.
Emmeline isn’t a blip, Bishop had told Emmeline’s father when they first met. She’s more like a flare. Now she’s a shout, the sonic blast of a girl come into her full power but desperate for help. Fahima’s last best secret is revealed for all to see: the martyred girl returned, the second coming of Emmeline Hirsch.
Emmeline’s body becomes animated again. “It’s okay,” she says. “She’ll be here any minute.”
That’s perfect, Fahima, says the flashbulb voice in Fahima’s head. Hold her right there. I’m on my way.
“You have to go!” Fahima shouts.
“Where?” Emmeline asks.
Fahima looks at her, wishing there was somewhere safe she could name. “Just go,” she says.
Emmeline folds away into nothing. Fahima’s arms swing together around the newly created absence as if she’s hugging herself. The door appears on the wall of Emmeline’s room. Kimani opens it, and Fah
ima wonders why there’s never time to tell people how much you’ve missed them.
“Where’s Emmeline?” Kimani asks frantically.
Where is she, Fahima? says the voice in Fahima’s head.
Kimani grips her forehead, her face contorting in pain. “Who the fuck is in my head?” she says. “It sounds like—”
“He’s in Sarah,” Fahima says. She sees Kimani thinking the same thing she is: It’s over. We lost Emmeline and Sarah. Who’s left? Then Kimani’s face sets into the resolve Fahima needs and should have but can’t muster.
“Where is she?” Kimani asks.
“In my lab.”
Kimani pulls Fahima into the room and closes the door. “When I open this, grab her,” she says. “When I open it again, throw her out.”
Kimani opens the door, overlapping the locked door to Fahima’s lab, which Sarah has been pounding against. There’s no need to grab her; Sarah tumbles into Kimani’s room. Her mind is huge in Fahima’s head, a shout, a scream. Give me Emmeline now. Fahima picks Sarah’s body up by her bony shoulders as Kimani slams the door, then reopens it. Fahima sees enough of what’s beyond to recognize Central Park at night, the Bishop Academy looming over it. Take me back and give me the girl, the voice in her head seethes. Fahima shoves her outside, and Kimani slams the door shut again. They’re both still, listening for thoughts that aren’t their own, but there’s only the sound of their breathing.
“We have to go back and get everyone out of Phoenix,” Fahima says. “He’s going to send Faction, as many as he can. We need to evacuate.”
Kimani pauses. She looks around her room like a person locking up a deceased parent’s house. She opens the door back into Fahima’s lab and gently shoves Fahima out.
“Step back,” she says. Kimani stands in the threshold of the door. Trying to understand what’s happening, Fahima notices the toes of Kimani’s shoes resting on the concrete of the lab floor outside Kimani’s room.
Once, drunk, Fahima asked what would happen to Kimani if she stepped across the threshold of her room and back into the world outside. I can’t, Kimani said, sounding as if she was explaining an impossibility to an insistent child. Fahima thought she understood what Kimani meant. They all had limits on their abilities, thankfully. Some of those limits were hurdles to be overcome, which was half the reason Kevin Bishop started the academy. Others were absolute. Kimani’s doorway was, as Fahima understood it, one of the latter.
Kimani braces herself against the door frame, arms extended, hands pushing out. Her eyes focus past Fahima, past the lab. She makes a sound like she’s being torn in half, a birthing sound of pain and force and release.
Fahima feels it before she understands it. A rush like warm water passes over her, and in its wake a change in the air. There’s a brittle quality to the air in Phoenix, dry and crispy like something baked too long, but now it’s softened. It feels more familiar, more like home.
Kimani drops to one knee, stumbling forward through the door and into the lab. She catches herself on her fingertips, poised like a sprinter before the gun. Through the open doorway, Fahima can see that Kimani’s room is gone. The door goes through the wall of the lab and out into the hallway. An ordinary door. Kimani looks back at it.
“Never seen it from this side,” she says, still out of breath. “Does it always look like that?”
“You came out,” Fahima says. “You came out of your room. I thought you couldn’t—”
“I didn’t come out,” Kimani says. She’s distracted, running her fingers along the dark wood molding that surrounds the door. “I brought you all in.”
The bank of monitors makes Fahima feel like a supervillain. Her first design routed the signals into her optic nerve, but the results made her dizzy and nauseous. This has a theatricality she appreciates. Ruth and Alyssa are in the room Omar Six nicknamed “Control.” In a rare show of unity, all the Omars insist on calling it that. Twenty-Four is operating the communications with teen Omars on the ground while single-digit Omars rescued from the Ruse stew in the hall.
Ruth and Alyssa have reached the worst détente, forged out of in-jokes and observations of Fahima’s hang-ups, although this wears on Ruth. If Fahima is the shared topic of discourse, Alyssa can’t help but pass herself off as the ultimate expert, and her air of I will always know her better than you do raises Ruth’s hackles. They’re all playing professional, except the Omars, who have turned the operation into a slapstick routine. Since they’re the boots on the ground, they can treat it however the fuck they want.
Their options were severely limited after Emmeline disappeared. The first priority had been to find her. Fahima had tracking equipment, but the best stuff was at the Ruse or in the basement of the Bishop Academy. Kimani hadn’t been able to open a door into Bishop in years—as if the Hive were warped and twisted around the school—and opening one into someplace as heavily monitored as the Ruse long enough to load equipment would give their location away, giving the Faction the means to track them.
“Would it be worth it?” Kimani asked. Fahima took a long time before saying no.
As devices probed for Emmeline’s energy signature, skilled Hive users braved Hivespace to look for her. They came back damaged. They weren’t infected with anything—no little Yoricks nestled in their heads—but they were shaken and unwilling to go back in. After a week of fruitless search, Emmeline was given up as lost. Fahima tore up diagrams and schematics in front of Alyssa, who had been the only one to ask, “What the fuck was the plan anyway?” Fahima shouted that it didn’t matter now, crumpled up another indecipherable drawing, and crammed it into a wastebasket.
Two paths had to be pursued simultaneously. The first was to get people out of the Bronx before they got killed. The other was to stop Project Tuning Fork from moving forward, which looked more difficult. The culling in the Bronx was being carried out with bureaucratic diligence: two Blooms crossed the bridge in the morning, killed off whoever they found for a couple hours, and clocked out. Project Tuning Fork had the Faction guarding the global sites where the Chairs were being constructed and kept their primary operator, Thao Bui, under constant guard. Tuning Fork was the highest priority in Bloom deployment, confirming Fahima’s theory that setting off another Pulse was a get out of jail card for Raymond Glover.
Yesterday, Omars Thirteen through Nineteen landed in the Bronx. Kimani opened a door in Kansas, and Ruth ferried them into the borough before zipping off to an extraction point in northern Canada. Their job was to spread the word about an evacuation with a boat big enough for everyone. Fahima was confident the Omars could publicize the mission: the ones who went in could split into dozens, knocking on doors and enlisting known influencers to get their people to the site. The Kindred Network was an advantage in spreading information: whether or not cells in the Bronx tapped into a national organization, they talked among themselves. The problem wasn’t publicity; it was trust. For people in the Bronx, Fahima and her ilk were no different from the Faction Blooms sent in to kill them. Gather here at this time sounded like a shepherd ordering the lambs to organize themselves for slaughter.
“Control, this is Seventeen, headed to the site,” says Omar Seventeen.
“Seventeen, you have to say over, over,” says Omar Thirteen, the whiniest rule follower of the bunch. “Control, tell him he has to say over, over.”
“Right there you said over before you were done,” Seventeen says. “You don’t even know what you’re saying over for.”
“Over,” says Omar Nineteen, busting out in giggles.
“This is like D-Day with idiots,” Fahima says.
“Control, I didn’t copy that, over,” says Omar Thirteen. “Ten-nine, Control.”
“He means repeat,” Omar Twenty-Four says. “Ten-nine is—”
“No more talking until you’re at the site,” Fahima shouts. Ruth and Alyssa laugh into their hands. “
Where’s Kimani? Someone go wake up—”
“I’m right here,” Kimani says, walking into Control with a steaming cup of coffee. She sleeps twelve hours a day since she swallowed the Phoenix school, and this mission falls within a rest period for her. She’s in pajamas she deems suitable for public viewing, fresh flannel with duck prints that make Fahima wish she could be done with this and crawl back into bed.
“We have numbers?” Kimani asks.
“I’m hoping a hundred,” says Fahima. “Probably less.”
“How much time are we talking?”
“As quick as possible, Kimani,” Fahima says. “The longer we’ve got a door open, the better chance they can track you and—”
“Do you ever say I don’t know?” Kimani asks.
“No,” Alyssa and Ruth say simultaneously.
“Make it fast,” Fahima says.
“I’m ready when your boys are ready,” says Kimani, sipping her coffee.
The monitors show a dimly lit theater at the Concourse Plaza Multiplex near Yankee Stadium. Its plastic and faux-velvet seats are empty, and Omar Twenty-One, whose eyes they’re watching through, constantly checks the exits, the entrances, and the ceiling above him, which is a web of shadows, girders, and ventilation pipes. Two other screens show East 161st coming up past the stadium, where Omars Fourteen and Sixteen move their people down the center of the street at a slow jog. Fahima wants to tell them to hurry the fuck up, but she can’t see who’s in the crowd. There could be kids or people with physical disabilities. She told the Omars not to leave behind anyone who wanted in; now she’s reconsidering. She should have said save who you can and left it to their discretion. They could lose the whole pack for the sake of one old lady with a walker.
Other Omars are already in the mall, heading for the multiplex. They pass abandoned food courts, fountains that sit stagnant. Flashlight beams check the corners and the hallways. The Omars have split into two philosophical camps: One believes the fact they’ve made it this far without encountering any Faction means they’re getting away with it. The other thinks they’ve been too lucky already and the shit will hit any second.
