by Bob Proehl
“Have you seen the Faction use their abilities?” Clay asks. He talks out loud even though they’re communicating with their thoughts, unable to break the habit.
They have an obsidianist, Bryce says. He sealed us in the auditorium with black glass, and he carries some sort of knives. I’m not sure about the rest.
So we’re going in blind, Carrie says.
“Not quite,” Clay says. “Waylon, can you link us to the math teacher?”
Ms. Beasley? Bryce asks.
Waylon obliges, and the voice of an obviously flustered older woman joins them in their heads.
“Can you look around the building and tell me where everyone is?” Clay asks.
An image of the whole school appears in his head. There are two clumps of glowing dots: the Resonant students in the auditorium and the baseliner kids in the gym. He focuses on the second set, wishing he could tell which ones are Dom and Rai. He scans the rest of the image. There are dots outside the gym and the auditorium; two more move about the halls.
“Where’s the fifth?” Clay asks.
Roof? Above? Carrie suggests. I’d want a flier for surveillance.
“So we assume?”
We never assume.
Oh my God, you two are insufferable, Hayden says. Bryce, did you get a good look at any of them?
The obsidianist, yeah, Bryce says.
Show me.
An image forms in their heads of a man who looks as if he’s cosplaying a pirate. He has a bandolier of obsidian knives across his chest, a week’s worth of stubble, and a face so lopsided it looks like someone smudged half of it with a wet thumb.
Fuck, I hate being ugly, Hayden says. Their pop star features go soft and doughy, dark prickles of beard rising through the skin of their chin, their blond hair withering into dirty brown curls as their gut expands and their shirt folds on itself to mimic the bandolier.
You want the gym, right? Carrie asks Clay. He nods. Waylon, give me as many of the kids as you can hook us up with. Clay’s head is filled with the panicked chatter of two dozen kids, and despite the fact they’re less individuated voices than a dull collective roar, he searches for Rai’s voice among them, with no luck. Everybody here? Carrie asks. There is a general murmur of assent. Okay, this is what we’re doing.
* * *
—
They approach the Unity School’s front door underneath the blanket of Carrie’s ability. The world takes on an opalescent quality like the way it appears to Clay when he’s looking out of his bubble. At the door, Carrie takes a knee to jimmy the lock. Clay asked once where she picked up some of her less legal skills. Is that the shit they taught you at Bishop?
Misspent youth, she replied.
When the lock pops, Clay speeds them through the door so it’s open less than a second, then slows time so the door closes soundlessly. Wearing the face Bryce showed them, Hayden heads toward the auditorium while Carrie and Clay move toward the gym.
“Hey,” Hayden calls before turning the corner. Their voice is comedically gruff. Carrie turns back. “Don’t die.”
“Got it,” says Carrie.
As they pass the cafeteria, Clay hears someone whisper “over here” from down one hallway, then from another. He knows it isn’t real, that there’s a kid sitting in the auditorium planting noises all over the school, but it shakes him. The fear isn’t real either—it’s the woman the kids call Mama Bear, using the flip side of her ability to project a low thrum of paranoia throughout the school like Muzak. Turns out he can know there’s nothing to be afraid of and be scared shitless at the same time, as any kid could have told him.
“You have a plan from here?” he asks Carrie.
Stab people, Carrie says through the psychic link. Hope they don’t have impenetrable skin or something.
Through their connection, they see Hayden approaching the door of the auditorium. Hayden’s plan hinges on the Faction agent guarding the door not being the one whose face they’re wearing, and they’re relieved it’s a girl in her late teens whose body from the waist down consists of eight spidery legs in constant motion, dancing to inaudible music. She gives Hayden a what’s-up nod as they approach.
“They want you over by the gym,” Hayden says in the thick, gruff voice they imagined the Faction agent might sound like.
“For what?” asks the spider girl.
“How the fuck should I know?” Hayden barks. The spider girl holds her hands up defensively and scurries down the hall.
Headed your way, Hayden says.
Thanks loads, Carrie says.
Clay and Carrie see the doors to the gym. There are two Faction agents there, one covered in luminous boils and the other with a ring of eyes all the way around his head.
“You hear that, Hank?” says the one with the boils.
Hank cocks a half dozen eyebrows skeptically at his partner. “It’s nothing,” he says. “Quit trying to creep me out.”
“I heard something. Go look.”
“Why do I have to—” Hank begins, but stops himself. The guy with multiple eyes must be used to getting stuck with lookout duty. He rolls an odd number of eyes and starts down the hall toward Carrie and Clay.
“Can he see us?” Clay whispers.
I don’t know, maybe, says Carrie. Do the thing.
“Which thing?”
The put them to sleep thing you used to do, Carrie says. Clay waits until Hank rounds the corner and then creates a bubble of slow time in his carotid artery. All of Hank’s eyes roll back to the whites as he slumps against the lockers. Carrie picks the lock on one, and they cram Hank into it like they’re high school bullies.
Clay pulls the gun out of his pocket, and Carrie presses it back down with her hand. Stay behind me, she says. They walk up to the remaining guard, and Carrie draws the knife from the back of her belt. She stands directly in front of the guard, invisible to him, and delicately presses the point of the knife against his throat.
“I don’t particularly want to kill you,” she says quietly. “But I’m also running low on fucks to give. You open that door and my friend will help you sleep through what happens next.”
The man’s face quivers in fear, each boil sweating nacreous liquid. He takes a step toward the door, then stops. His face twists into a grin Clay swears he’s seen in his head before, back when the little black worm still worked.
“It’s nice, the two of you coming back to the fold,” the agent says in the soured honey voice that once whispered and buzzed in Clay’s ear. “There’s nothing for you in here. They’re all dead.”
“Clay,” Carrie shouts.
Shaking himself out of a trance, Clay reaches into the agent’s brain and slows the blood flow through the carotid. The grin holds, but his eyes roll back and he collapses in a heap. It’s possible Clay held it too long, did permanent damage, but as Carrie had said, they’re short of fucks to give.
Carrie searches the man for the keys, checking the pockets of his pants and shirt but coming up empty. The whispers continue to echo through the halls, and Clay is having trouble not firing at each sound when a voice shouts “Hey, what the fuck?” Clay looks to his left and sees the pirate guy running toward them with an ebony knife raised.
“Shit, what if it’s Hayden?” he says, the piped-in fear overriding his judgment.
“Why the fuck would Hayden come running at us with a knife?” Carrie asks. She’s trying to pick the lock, but her hands are shaking. Clay is comforted knowing she’s experiencing the same baseless fear he is. He turns toward the Faction agent, steadies his trembling right arm with his left, and fires three shots: one high on the shoulder, one under the ribs, and the third snapping the agent’s head back, dropping him. The door swings open, and Clay turns toward it, searching the gym for Rai and Dom, forgetting he’s brandishing a pistol. The kids shriek; the room is wire
d with a combination of secondhand and actual fear. Carrie gently takes the gun out of Clay’s hand, and the burden of it, removed, is massive. His son collides with him, almost knocking him over, but Dom is there to hold him up.
“Are you all right?” he asks them both.
“We’re fine,” Rai says. “Dad pretended to be normal and came with me. He kept me safe.”
Dom is about to amend this gently to something like both your dads kept you safe when Clay hears the rapid approach of scuttling legs. He tells himself it’s more imaginary sounds until the spider girl appears in the doorway of the gym, her face grinning like the other agent’s, a smile that stretches her face painfully until it looks as if the skin of her lips will split at the corners. She skids to a halt, changing her vector, but before she can move toward the kids, Clay slows time to a crawl around her legs and speeds it around her torso so that the girl cleaves neatly in half, her upper body landing on the hardwood floor in a rapidly spreading pool of blood.
With one hand, she presses herself up slightly so that she can look at Carrie and Clay.
“You should come back to me,” she says, her voice deep and not her own. “I’m the only place you’ll ever belong.”
Parents wait outside the Unity School to gather their children and rush them away. The kids make a point of thanking their rescuers, especially the ones saved by Hayden. Carrie and Clay don’t get the same level of gush, but then Hayden had managed to get their roomful of kids out bloodlessly. The thanks Carrie receives are muttered, whispered, delivered with eyes averted. Even with the body count, it’s good to save people rather than attack them, although they’re past the point where she can do one without the other. Remember when all the camps were empty and you still had to fight? she thinks. That day’s coming back around soon enough.
She hears the voice in her head, a memory now rather than a live broadcast: I’m the only place you’ll ever belong.
“That’s the end,” Bryce says, scratching at the patch of leaves that top his scalp. “None of them will come back. The baseliners will go west, and the Resonant kids will sign up for some other school. Even if they stay, what’s the point?”
“You have things to teach them,” Carrie says. “Whether or not—”
“They learned the last lesson this place is going to teach,” he says. “Thank you for getting them out. I know you don’t do this shit anymore.”
“I keep saying that, and then I’m out here doing this shit again,” says Carrie. Bryce hugs her tightly, then goes to check on a couple of kids whose parents haven’t shown up yet.
Carrie sees Clay being comforted by his husband on the school steps. She had time to adjust to being back in the middle of this shit, but it’s new to him and hitting him hard. She stands there watching them, thinking about Miquel and about Hayden, who’s signing autographs on notebooks, textbooks, whatever the kids have at hand. She notices the boy sitting on the ground near her feet, his attention fixed on Clay and his husband.
“Hey,” she says. “You’re Rai.”
“Do I know you?” he asks. Carrie hunkers down and sits next to him on the pavement.
“I knew your folks.”
“My dads?” he asks, pointing his chin at Clay and Dom.
“Your one dad,” says Carrie. “But I knew Maaya and Koyo too.”
His attention perks up, but he covers it with a veneer of adolescent scorn. “When you were all Nazis in the war or whatever?”
“We were the good guys,” Carrie says. She considers this, thinking about the voice, the wolf’s grin that surfaced on the agents’ faces, the little black worm that used to live in her head. “We thought we were.”
“Nazis probably thought they were the good guys too.”
“Your dad talk to you about any of that?” she asks.
“He said he was in communications.”
Carrie takes a sharp breath in. Once she asked Koyo what he’d tell Rai when it was all over. I’d never tell him I wasn’t in it, Koyo said. But I won’t tell him what I did. I’ll say I was in communications. Something bloodless.
“Your dad and your folks?” Carrie says. “They were heroes. I fought with them for months. There was this one time—”
“Lady, I don’t know you,” Rai says. “I don’t say this to make you feel bad. But the army you and my parents and my dad used to be in tried to kill me today. So I don’t care how badass all of you were back in the day. Great fucking job; you won. How’s it all working out?”
Carrie thinks about the day before she left to go looking for Emmeline, when Bryce invited her to the Unity School to offer her a job. By trying to avoid being around kids, she’s damned herself to some steaming helpings of teenage contempt the last couple weeks.
“It’s fucked, huh?” she says.
“Not for you,” Rai says. “You’ve got special powers, and you rule the world. Sounds nice.”
“When I was your age—”
Rai rolls his eyes so epically Carrie’s sure she can hear it. “That is the off switch for my caring about what you’re going to say.”
She smiles and pushes forward. “When I was your age,” she says, “I hated everybody older than me.” She clicks off classes of adults on her fingers. “Hated my parents because they didn’t understand me. Hated my teachers because they told me to hide who and what I was. It’s how it works. Old people fuck up; young people have to fix it. Then they get old and fuck it up again.”
“So where are you and where am I in all this?” Rai asks.
“You’re young people,” Carrie says. “I’m somewhere in between. I’ve fucked up plenty of things. So I’m trying to fix them, which makes me like a young person.”
“That is a very old person thing to say,” Rai says.
“You sound like a friend of mine,” Carrie says, thinking of Emmeline and her attack on Carrie’s middle-age taste in music. Rai watches his dads, then looks at the school. He knows the same thing Bryce did: the Unity School is over. Carrie imagines what a comfort a school like this must have been to him, the way Bishop had been to her.
“So are you going to tell me how my parents were badasses?” Rai asks.
Carrie shakes her head. “Wouldn’t matter, right? What would that tell you about them? I can tell you they loved you a lot. They never shut up about you. Your dad used to…” She struggles to find the word for Koyo’s ability. Hologram feels too cheesy: there was a solidity to what he could do. “He could make these three-dimensional light projections. Did you know that? He made one of you all the time. He said it was the closest he could get to having you there.”
For Carrie, it had been no different from having an actual child with them. When they were attacked in camp outside an army depot in Boise, she scrabbled through the tents looking for a boy who wasn’t there. “Your mom hated it,” she says. “She never said anything because it made your dad happy, but I think it made it worse for her, being away from you and seeing this image of you she couldn’t hold on to. She’d sleep with her arms wrapped around herself, and I remember thinking she was imagining you and hugging you as tight as she could.” Carrie felt jealous when she’d see Maaya sleeping that way, an emotion she could never map. It wasn’t longing for her own mother or a childish wish that Maaya, only a few years older than Carrie, could be her mother. It was wishing she’d had a mother who missed her when she was away rather than forgetting her while she was in the room. “Maaya was funny,” Carrie says. “She had whole books of jokes that she memorized. Like, anything someone said would remind her of a joke.”
“Were they good?” Rai asks.
“Oh, no, they were terrible,” Carrie says. “Bad puns. Dad jokes.”
Rai nods as if this confirms his belief in the unfunniness of all adults. “Do you remember any of them?”
Carrie’s head floods with punch lines out of context, setups th
at don’t land. What she remembers more than the content is the rush of warm feeling that wasn’t laughter but something akin to it that came whenever Maaya told a joke. The dark thing in her head went silent in those moments. “I can’t do them as well as she did,” she says. “I liked them when she told them. Without her they sound dumb.”
“Can you tell me one?” he asks.
Carrie rifles through all the mismatched fragments in her head, looking for two that go together. When she assembles a pair, she wishes it were something more relevant, symbolic of Maaya and her love for her son or representative of who she’d been. Carrie clears her throat, trying to hear Maaya’s delivery in her head.
“Why couldn’t the pirate learn the alphabet?” she says.
Maybe wishing the same thing, treating it like a riddle, Rai spends time considering. After a minute, he gives up. “Something something arrgh?”
“Because he got lost at c.”
Rai stares at her blankly, then stifles a laugh, a contagious little one. “That’s terrible,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Thanks, lady,” Rai says.
“Sure, kid,” Carrie says, patting him fraternally on the back.
“Rai,” he says, holding out his hand and introducing himself.
“Carrie,” she says, happy to start again with him at the beginning.
The Craft touches down on lush grass that’s never seen the blade of a mower. Droplets of dew crush against its belly as it lands. When Ruth pulls the construct back into herself, she shivers as if the cool drops have run down the back of her neck. Below, in the foothills of the Alps, the city of Innsbruck expands with a marchlike rhythm, its buildings not identical but similar enough to give that impression; the variations in color aren’t a simple red-yellow-blue repetition but suggest a pattern that would reveal itself under deeper analysis. It looks untouched by time, which was the original appeal.
