by Bob Proehl
“Control, we have our first group in,” says Omar Twenty-One. “You want to open the doors for us?”
“That’s a negative, Twenty-One,” Fahima says, cursing herself as soon as she hears it.
“Negatory there, good buddy, over,” says Omar Eighteen. He’s striving to keep things light, but he’s out of breath. Fahima checks his feed: he’s in the parking lot at the far end of the mall.
“We get everybody in the room and then we open the door,” Fahima says.
“You have to say over, over,” Omar Thirteen insists.
“Hurry the fuck up,” Fahima says. “Over.”
On the main feed, people file into the theater and, on instinct, take their seats. “Keep their asses standing,” Fahima hisses at Twenty-One.
“Everybody up, everybody up,” says Omar Twenty-One. People grumble but oblige. A third group arrives with Omars Fourteen and Sixteen, larger than expected. All the rows are filled with people, and the aisles are brimming.
“Call in if you’re still on your way,” Fahima says.
“Waiting outside the theater,” Omar Thirteen says. “Does that count? Over.”
“Down the hall, be there in two,” says Omar Seventeen.
“We’re looking for an unlocked door,” Omar Eighteen says. “But we’ll be there in a couple.”
“Thirteen, how many people you have?”
“Thirty-some,” he says.
“Eighteen?”
“I got maybe a dozen,” says Omar Eighteen. “I’m going to bust us through the glass; we’ll be right there.”
“You guys suck at this game,” Omar Seventeen says. “I’ve got a hundred people waiting to get in. You can line up behind my ass.”
“Fuck,” says Fahima.
“What’s that put the total at?” Kimani asks.
Fahima doesn’t answer.
“There’re three hundred seats in the theater, so there’s more than that in the room,” says Alyssa. “If Seventeen’s not lying, we’re talking about five hundred.”
“This would be the first time we talked about five hundred,” says Kimani. She sounds unhappy.
“No one’s seen any Faction,” says Ruth. “We’ve got time.”
“We don’t know that,” says Alyssa, too sharply.
“It’s not a matter of time,” Kimani says. “It’s a matter of space. I’m not set up to accommodate another five hundred people.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Fahima says.
“I’ll figure it out, you mean,” says Kimani.
“Yes, I mean you’ll figure it out.”
“Saving your ass the second time this week,” she says. She smiles, but it’s a tired one that reminds Fahima of Bishop on days when he couldn’t keep up his flawless front. “Do I get a headset?”
Ruth and Alyssa both offer theirs, and Kimani takes Ruth’s. “Mr. Twenty-One, do you hear me?”
“I read you, Control,” says Omar Twenty-One.
“Please can the walkie-talkie bullshit for the next five minutes,” Kimani says. “In a minute I’m going to open a door at the base of the stage there, right in the middle. I need you to line people up four by four. That’s as wide as I can get it, and we want to move them in fast. Can you start doing that for me?”
“Of course, Miss Moore,” he says.
“Thank you, Mr. Twenty-One,” Kimani says. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath like a gymnast about to start a routine. On the screen, people in the left-hand aisle get in formation. Others in the rows complain that they were here first and Omar Twenty-One makes it clear they can listen to him or fuck right off.
Kimani takes one more breath and exhales. What appears to be an elaborate garage door appears exactly where she said and pulls open inward. On one of the lower monitors, they can see the open doorway from the inside of a basement room the crowd will be evacuated into.
“Okay, march them in,” Kimani says.
The line starts into the doorway, and as they disappear from Omar Twenty-One’s feed in the theater, they reappear on the feeds of Twenty-Six and Twenty-Seven, who wait for them in the basement with water and blankets. The rows empty into the left aisle, and the aisle drains before Seventeen’s group enters and fills it. People in the right-hand aisle protest, and Omar Twenty-One picks an arbitrary point at which they’ll switch the aisle from which they’re feeding.
“Everybody’s coming aboard,” Fahima says. “Eighteen, where are you?”
“Control, I have a problem,” says Omar Eighteen. “I think we’ve been followed.”
“What?”
“I’m trying not to be heard by my people here, but I’m seeing ghosts,” he says.
Fahima finds Twenty-One’s feed on the monitors. His movements are quick and jittery, but she doesn’t see anything suspicious.
He only has a dozen, she thinks. Cut him loose. Close the door.
“Twenty-One, I need you to double-time people in, now,” she says.
Twenty-One’s feed jumps up and down as he nods. “Move them to the back,” he shouts through the doorway. “Make some room.” His hand pinwheels as he hurries people through.
Fahima covers the mic of her headset. “Isolate Eighteen,” she tells Omar Twenty-Four. He types a quick sequence, and the banter and trash talk of the other Omars cuts out of her headset. “Eighteen, can you tell me what you see?”
“I’m saying a ghost,” he says. “A face popping out of the walls, running alongside us. And I’m…Control, I’m not sure those doors were locked. I think there’s someone in my head.”
A transphasic and a psychic, Fahima notes. She tries to imagine the other three-fifths of the Bloom. Ji Yeon had a gift for putting together pentads that combined to something larger than the sum of their parts. Voltron that shit, she told Fahima. Fahima could never get her head around Ji Yeon’s system, much less duplicate it. Eighteen’s feed flicks upward, and Fahima sees what he sees: someone moving above them, visible through the tinted skylight.
“Flier,” Eighteen says. “They’re tracking us in. I’m going to lead them off. Close the door.”
“How much longer do we need?” Fahima asks Twenty-Four, covering her mic.
“I don’t know, two minutes? Five?”
“Can you get there in five?” she asks Eighteen.
“It’s not a matter of how fast we get there,” Eighteen says. “It’s who we’re bringing with—fuck!”
The glass above him shatters, and Eighteen screams for his group to run from the raining shards. Through the feed, Fahima watches as a girl appears out of a pillar, snatches a teenage boy out of Eighteen’s group, and phases him halfway into the wall, his eyes and mouth immediately welling with blood. The flier swoops low, scattering the group in a panic. They run toward open storefronts, looking for shelter as a second flier swoops in with someone dangling from each arm. One of them Fahima doesn’t recognize; the other she does. Sarah Davenport still wears her nightgown from the Phoenix school. It billows around her legs as the flier lowers her down by the fountain.
They’re fucked, Fahima thinks.
“Everyone in the theater is in,” Omar Twenty-Four says. “Hold the door?”
The panicked evacuees suddenly stop and walk calmly toward the fountain, piloted.
“Sarah was never that strong,” Kimani says. “She could puppet somebody, but not more than one at a time.”
“She’s got help,” Fahima says, remembering the malice and glee in Sarah’s face the last time she saw it. The first evacuee, a middle-aged woman, reaches the fountain, and the Faction agent Fahima doesn’t recognize places his hand on her forehead as if giving her a blessing. With a bright flash and a scream, the woman’s head is gone and the rest of her body falls.
“Oh, fuck,” says Omar Eighteen.
“Eighteen, you cannot let them
catch you,” Fahima says quietly.
“Fahima, do I shut the door?” asks Kimani.
“She’s in my head,” Eighteen says.
Another evacuee meets his burning end at the edge of the frame.
“Eighteen, I’m so sorry,” Fahima says.
“It’s okay, boss,” Omar Eighteen says. “It’s okay.” His feed slowly pans down, looking across his stomach to the gun holstered on his hip. He takes it out, but his attention focuses on Sarah. He takes another step toward her, and Fahima’s sure he’s lost. The Omars are a complex structure, and without explaining to Fahima how they share information, they’ve made it clear to Fahima that no Omar can ever be captured. Eighteen takes another lurch forward.
“Eighteen, please,” Fahima says. The feed moves up and down slowly: a nod. The sound of the gunshot comes through the audio as the feed goes black.
“That’s it,” Alyssa says, throwing her headset on the floor. “I am done. Drop me anywhere. I don’t care. I’m done.”
“Kimani,” says Fahima. “Shut the door.”
They’ve been taking turns driving Rai to school since the announcement a week before. Nothing feels as if it’s changed, but after the fighting started at the Bishop Academy, there were days of eerie calm when the news felt like dreams. Going to work in Manhattan and seeing tanks blocking off Lexington Avenue registered as if someone were shooting a movie.
Clay drives by Faction agents standing on corners like beat cops, but he doesn’t know what, if anything, is supposed to happen next. When nothing does, they continue with their days as if all this were normal. Every night, after Rai goes to bed, Clay and Dom stay up talking about whether it’s time to leave. Every night, they decide not yet.
Today is Clay’s day to drive, but Dom’s helping a student committee plan the winter formal they’re holding at Vibration, so he’s taking Rai in.
“I might swing the kids by the venue afterward so they can get a sense of the space,” Dom says. He bustles around the kitchen while Clay pores over a printout of one of Avi Hirsch’s unpublished articles, a story about a Resonant woman outside Riyadh who liberated all the women in her village and teleported them to the United States, only to have them sent back and killed.
“Uh-huh,” Clay says.
“Then I’ll run Rai back out to the school for basketball practice, so it’ll be you and me for dinner.”
“Yeah, sure,” Clay says.
Dom stops, gently closing the fridge. “You are not listening at all, are you?”
Clay looks up, caught. “Downtown after school,” he says. “Basketball. You and me for dinner. You want that Thai place?”
“The one in the Ukrainian Village?” Dom asks. He kisses Clay on the cheek and rubs his shoulders. “No, baby, I want decent Thai food, but I will settle for the place in the Ukrainian Village.”
“Like you settled for me?” Clay asks, wrapping his arm around Dom’s waist.
“Never,” Dom says as he kisses Clay.
Rai bounds down the stairs and into the kitchen. He opens the fridge and stares blankly into it. He glances over his shoulder at his dads.
“Stop being gross,” he says.
“Hey, at practice today, don’t forget to follow your shot,” Clay says.
“Okay, Dad,” Rai says, continuing to scan the fridge.
“Nobody on that team crashes the boards,” Clay says, unclear who he’s explaining this to. “There’s a real opportunity to—”
Rai looks at him, confused by this sudden deployment of basketball jargon.
“I mean, hustle, right?” Clay says. He turns his attention back to the article. “It’s all about hustle.”
Rai kisses him on the cheek. “Bye, Dad.”
He spends his days in the attic, especially since “the shout.” Everyone heard it, and everyone knew who it was. No one will say Emmeline Hirsch’s name out loud. As with the Faction’s announcement, the fact that nothing came afterward caused doubt. If Emmeline Hirsch was back, why wasn’t she working miracles: writing messages in the sky or appearing in somebody’s soup? Why wasn’t Project Tuning Fork revising its plans to include the original operator, the only Resonant to work a Chair successfully?
Clay doesn’t doubt it was Emmeline Hirsch who screamed a woman’s name across the psyche of every Resonant there is, but he isn’t sure what it means. In the absence of a path forward, he moves back, digging into whatever archive of the Hirsch family remains in the house on Jarvis Avenue. What strikes Clay is that they were like any other family. On Avi Hirsch’s hard drive, there are photos of him and his wife and daughter huddled together in front of a church, bundled in winter coats; of Emmeline at the kitchen counter drawing; of Hirsch and his wife at an office party, he uncomfortable in a suit and she easily elegant in a black sheath dress. The pictures date back five years before the war started, after which there’s nothing. It’s part of the myth of Emmeline Hirsch: the whole family wiped out in the span of a week. But for the last five years of his life Avi Hirsch didn’t take a single photo he felt was worth saving.
Clay scrolls backward, falling deeper into the family’s past, when a shout spikes through his brain. There were times all Faction agents would get an ice pick of a headache in the center of their skulls. They understood it was the thing that had been put in them, although Clay’s ability shorted out whatever it was. As the pain subsides, he’s ready for the garbled message that used to follow the piercing sensation, as if he were back in the war. With the pain at a distance, he can distinguish it from the past. It’s reminiscent of the two recent broadcasts through the Hive from the Faction and, later that night, from Emmeline Hirsch. This is different, a signal on another wavelength.
Clay, can you hear me? says a voice in his head.
“Who is this?” Clay says out loud to the empty room
It’s Waylon. Where are you?
“I’m at home,” Clay says. His voice echoes in the small space of the attic.
You need to get down here, Waylon says. It’s the Faction. They’ve got the kids.
Clay feels Waylon’s presence slip out of his mind. He looks around the office as if he might find a weapon, something he can use. He checks the drawers of the desk, although he’s gone through them before and knows there’s nothing but notes. He looks at the locked bottom drawer. The first time he came up here, he decided to respect the drawer. He gives a tug, enough to assess the weakness of the lock. One hard yank and it comes free. Inside, there’s the paperwork for a divorce, signed only by Kay Hirsch. The papers are arched, resting on something. When Clay removes them, he finds a .22 and two boxes of bullets. It wouldn’t be his gun of choice—too delicate—but it’s at hand. He loads it and stuffs it into the back of his belt, then pockets the extra ammunition and leaves.
The assemblage of Resonant and baseliner parents at Vibration looks more like a PTA meeting than a military council. Carrie isn’t sure what she hoped to find when she answered Waylon’s shout and rushed here, but it isn’t encouraging. She wonders how many people here saw any combat on either side. Even if they had, that was a long time ago, plenty of time to get soft and comfortable.
She finds Waylon sitting in a booth with Hayden, their hand resting on his shoulder while Waylon has his eyes closed and his head back, a pained expression on his face. Hayden holds up their other hand for Carrie to wait.
“He’s in touch with Bryce inside the school,” Hayden says. “We’re waiting for a full report. Where’s Miquel?”
“He left,” Carrie says. Her tone makes it clear she doesn’t want to discuss it any further.
Waylon’s head snaps forward, and his eyes open, falling immediately on Carrie. “No one’s been hurt,” he announces. People immediately clamor for answers, throwing the names of their children at Waylon as if he can check an attendance sheet. A man muscles his way through the crowd until he’s st
anding next to Carrie.
“Are Rai and Dom in there?” he asks. “Can Bryce see them?”
Carrie turns to look at the man, and recognition and action come in the same moment: before Carrie can articulate who he is, she’s got the knife out of her belt loop and at his throat.
“Carrie, what the fuck?” Hayden screams. Everyone who’d crowded forward pushes back, and Carrie feels the barrel of a gun press against her stomach, under her ribs.
“He’s with them,” Carrie says. “He’s Faction.”
Hayden is about to try to calm Carrie down but backs off when they see the gun. Carrie feels Waylon in her head and burns him out with the white flame.
“I can handle a gut shot better than you can handle a slit throat,” she hisses at Clay.
“I’m not gonna take that bet, kid,” Clay says.
“Is it still in your head?” she asks, tapping the point of the knife twice against Clay’s temple before putting it back to his throat.
“Mine doesn’t work, especially after Houston,” he says. “I could hear it squawking sometimes, but it was garbled. And they couldn’t hear me.”
“Ever?” Clay shakes his head, a slight movement to avoid a slice. “But the shit we—”
“I was doing what had to be done,” Clay says.
“I thought you died in Houston,” she says.
“Thought you did, too.”
“Did anyone else make it out?” she asks. “Nicole? Maaya and Koyo?” He doesn’t move, and that’s her answer. They hold their pose, she with the knife pressed against his neck and he with the gun aimed into her guts.
“I found Rai,” he says. “Maaya and Koyo’s kid. My husband and I, we adopted him.”
Carrie’s eyes fill up with tears. “Little Rai?” Her knife pulls away from Clay’s throat, hovering below her hip to indicate the height Rai was when Koyo would project an image of him running around their encampments. Clay takes her hand in his empty hand and lifts the blade back up, past his neck to the level of his chin.
