by Bob Proehl
“What the fuck is happening?” Clay asks.
“Change of heart,” says Ji Yeon. “Or change of head.” She taps her temple, a signal everyone inducted into the Faction knows. “We were stationed in Berlin, guarding the Chair. That asshole with the eye patch told us there would be bodies to clean up afterward. Fucking grinned while he said it. Makes me sick now, but at the time it didn’t bother me. Fuck, I probably grinned back.”
She puts her fingers to her cheek, pressing into the skin, checking if feeling has returned. “Sometimes I can tell he’s using my face, not just looking out my eyes. The Chair went off, and it was like…it was like the Pulse again.” She turns to Carrie. “Do you remember what it felt like? Like your ability was flowing through you? It felt so pure. It was over, and the thing in my head was dead. Was for all of us who were there.” She waves her hand at the fallen agents. “These ones they sent me from Buffalo or whatever. We were supposed to take you all out and go make sure the Pulses go off as scheduled. But I’m done.” The others nod emphatically. “Turns out I’ve been fucked with for a long time. I’m ready to do something about it.”
The volunteer army creeps forward, scared but too curious to stop. Rai breaks from the pack and runs toward them, stopping before coming too close. He looks warily at Ji Yeon, who has one glowing javelin in her hand. She stares at Rai, eyes blinking as she realizes who he is, and the javelin retracts, leaving only her open palm.
The Craft lands in a playground in Astoria between a slide spotted with rust and a swing set from which the swings have been removed. The ground is covered in wood chips spongy from the previous night’s rain. There was a ferry from here down the East River that dropped passengers on Roosevelt Island before stopping in Queens and Kips Bay. It’s Fahima’s opinion that ferries are slow and terrible, as are all boats. With better train lines orbiting Roosevelt Island, there was no need to keep the boats running. The decommissioned ferries sit in Kips Bay, too worn and rusted to be worth salvaging. From here, she can see the Roosevelt Island Lighthouse across the East River.
“Is there a signal or anything?” Ruth asks. “Are they going to flash the light at us?”
“We have to trust they’ll be there,” Fahima says.
“They’ll be there,” Emmeline says.
Fahima clicks on a flashlight, and they walk down to the edge of the river, a quick drop and a short cliff. Ruth extends the Craft back out of her stomach in its usual shape, then wrinkles her brow. A straight fissure appears on one side and arcs up and over like a canopy opening. The simple shape of a boat rests in the water, transparent, pressing down the river.
“Will it be fast?” Fahima asks Ruth.
“Do you want it to be fast?”
“I don’t like boats.”
“Would you like fast boats less?”
“I would dislike them more but for a shorter amount of time,” Fahima says.
“Let’s be fast,” Emmeline says. She checks the sky as if she can tell time by the stars. There are things she’s not telling, which bothers the shit out of Fahima, but not as much as getting onto a boat. It reels as she places her foot into it, and Fahima says “woah there” as if she’s trying to calm a horse. Emmeline smirks and Ruth giggles. Fahima glares at both of them, although neither sees it in the dark.
“Sorry,” Ruth says. “I’ll hold it steady. I wanted to give you the full boat experience.”
“I don’t want the full boat experience,” Fahima says. “I want the ‘I have gotten to the place I need to be undetected and can now forget my means of conveyance’ experience.”
“And fast,” Emmeline adds. Ruth nods, and Fahima regrets slipping into the employer-employee aspect of their relationship. Alyssa was right that there’s a power dynamic between them that benefits Fahima, but wrong that it’s inherently toxic and dooms them to failure. Those parts are true only if Fahima doesn’t stop being a shit about it.
“It’s going to be great,” Fahima says, giving a weak thumbs-up. “Full boat experience.”
It’s not as bad as she feared and takes only a few minutes, barely long enough for her to worry about what’s waiting on the other side. She felt confident about her inside people when she contacted them but keeps remembering the worm in Thao Bui’s head. Why wouldn’t Glover implant everyone on the Ruse? Maybe there’s a limit to how many he can spread around, but when she considers all the Faction agents who carry bits of him in their heads, a few dozen more doesn’t seem difficult. If the people they’re supposed to meet have been suborned, this is going to end quickly.
The Craft pulls onto the shore and shoves forward onto the sand. It’s the first moment Fahima considers propulsion, the fact that Ruth is not only creating the vessel but moving it. They get out, and Ruth sucks the Craft back into her guts.
“If this works, you’ll be able to fly out of here,” Emmeline says.
“I don’t love it when you say ‘if,’ ” Fahima says. Two figures are coming down the beach. Fahima tries to read into their body language and the speed of their approach, but there’s no way to tell until they arrive if they’re who she’s expecting or if they’ve brought passengers.
“You made it!” Roxane calls. “We thought you were dead. Everything is so strange right now.”
“Thao’s missing,” Marlon says. “He was supposed to be at the Tokyo Chair this morning, and he never showed up.”
“Did they call it off?” Fahima asks.
“They pushed it back to tonight,” Roxane says.
“Who are they calling up?”
Marlon and Roxane look at each other as if they haven’t considered this. Fahima wonders if they know about the thing Glover put in Thao’s head when he was picked. One of them is next, and like Thao, neither of them can operate a Chair without a massive casualty rate. Cedric makes his pick, and one of these two becomes another cell in the organism that is Raymond Glover.
“We got a golf cart,” Marlon says. “Where do you need to—”
“Are you Emmeline Hirsch?” Roxane asks. She has the starstruck look people get around Hayden. Fahima feels a ping of envy: despite everything she’s done, people never look at her that way.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Emmeline says. She extends her hand, and for a second Fahima thinks Roxane is going to kiss it rather than shake it.
“My job for five years has been to try to be you,” Roxane says. “When I heard you in the Hive a couple days ago, calling that name, I felt like all this wasn’t for nothing. I felt like you were going to come and fix it all.”
“I’m not,” Emmeline says. “But if this works, we’ll get to a place where we can start to fix things.”
* * *
—
Like with the back doors into the computer systems, Fahima worried someone would find the door in the janitor’s closet that leads to a basement that’s nowhere on any of the Ruse’s floor plans. A lithic might notice the void in the building’s structure; a telemetric might brush up against a mop that noticed Fahima’s late-night coming and going.
“No one’s been in the lab bays since they decided to activate the project,” Marlon explains. “There are folks on diagnostics and data, but nobody checks in on the other Chairs.”
She leads them down the stairs and is relieved to click on the lights and see that nothing’s been touched. The original Chair sits in the middle of the space, wired to devices that siphon off the massive amount of energy it’s designed to handle. It hasn’t been turned on since the day Emmeline used it to generate the Pulse, but Fahima comes down to visit it, to remind herself that she did one thing right, once.
“It’s sort of ugly,” Ruth says.
“Every machine that works is beautiful,” says Fahima, running her hand along the armrest.
“Is she going to undo it?” Marlon asks Fahima, eyeing Emmeline. “Take away everybody’s abiliti
es?”
“Some of us came by our shit naturally, Pulser,” says Roxane.
“She is not going to undo it,” Emmeline says, climbing up into the Chair. The first time Emmeline sat in it, she looked tiny, like a kid usurping a mall Santa’s empty throne. Now it fits her. When Emmeline stayed Fahima’s hand and kept her from poisoning Thao and as she laid out a plan that was nebulous but better than anything Fahima came up with, Fahima told herself that Emmeline was an adult now. This is the first moment she sees it’s true.
“She is going to do something else,” Emmeline says.
Ji Yeon throws the front doors open onto the narthex of the megachurch. Young people crowd balconies and lurk in doorways. This doesn’t negate Carrie’s theory that most of them would have been in their rooms this time of night. A true thing about schools is that when something new happens, everyone knows and tries to press closer to it, as if novelty gives off heat. These kids heard their teachers moving out and caught the rumor that Ji Yeon Kim, the fucking founder of the Black Rose Faction, had shown up—they must have run down there en masse.
“Hang back and let me talk to them,” Ji Yeon says. She hasn’t explained enough about what’s going on, but Carrie’s trying to accept more things on faith. Maybe Emmeline knew this was going to happen. Maybe for Emmeline it already had.
“Whoever teaches covert surveillance is getting fired, because I can see every damn one of you,” Ji Yeon shouts as she swaggers into the center of the room. The kids laugh nervously. They know her, Carrie thinks. She shows up and gives the commencement speech every year or passes through on inspection. She’s their Kevin Bishop.
“Who can tell me the function of the Black Rose Faction?” Ji Yeon asks. A boy with a stripe of dark purple over one glowing green eye raises his hand, and Ji Yeon points at him.
“To protect Resonants,” he says.
“Good, good,” says Ji Yeon. “Protect Resonants against what?”
Everyone is silent for a moment, and a low murmur passes around the room. They know there’s an answer—the question is too obvious and important not to have one—but scouring their memories, or in some cases the memories of others, they can’t find it.
“It’s not your fault you don’t know,” she says. “We never made it clear. We needed enemies to fight, and we made them. Or we became them. The Faction has done terrible things for terrible reasons, but it doesn’t have to be that way. When you leave here, be better. Be good.”
The students murmur among themselves. Carrie wonders how many hear what Ji Yeon’s saying and how many care. When she was with the Faction, she worked closely with nine people across two Blooms. Four were good people in bad circumstances, and Viola had the worm put in her head so young she hadn’t “set” as a person yet. Left alone, she might have grown up to be kind, but at that age it was possible to get knocked off course. Sweet kids turn into angry teenagers, and sometimes that sweetness never comes back. That left three people Carrie never had a read on. It was possible that even without a voice squawking in their ear, they’d be willing to do terrible things. What are the percentages in a school for kids who volunteer to join an army during peacetime? What are the odds they hear weakness rather than strength in Ji Yeon’s words and fall on her like crows on carrion? Carrie looks to Ji Yeon’s hands, where the bud of a glowing spear shines in each palm, ready.
“Back to your quarters,” she shouts. Her voice trembles slightly, and Carrie is sure the kids hear it. “Classes are canceled tomorrow, but I hope you’ll all use the day to…to…” Carrie holds her breath. She’s seen substitute teachers lose a room to stutters and slips no worse than this. Once they lose it, they’re dead; teenagers don’t offer second chances. “Whatever,” Ji Yeon says. “Jerk off and get high, I don’t care. It’s your time.”
This kills across the room. Going for the laugh is a high-risk move that fails more often than it succeeds, but Ji Yeon pulls it off, rescuing herself.
“Nobody can jerk off all day,” one of the kids jeers.
“Pendelton can,” shouts another.
“Fuck you, Krueger,” yells someone Carrie presumes is Pendelton.
“To quarters, all of you,” Ji Yeon shouts, quieting the rising din. “I’ll report anyone below third floor in five minutes. Nobody taught you to hide; show me they at least taught you how to retreat.”
The kids scurry off and disappear, leaving Carrie, Ji Yeon, and Clay in the silence that adheres to large empty rooms. Ji Yeon’s shoulders slump; she’s exhausted from the effort of pretending to be someone she no longer is. “I wish I could tuck them in bed until it’s over,” she says. “You think there’s any way to keep them from getting hurt?”
“Win fast,” Clay says. He doesn’t trust Ji Yeon, but Carrie’s inclined to. The Bishop student inside her heard Ji Yeon’s speech as it was intended. It echoed off something Kevin Bishop put there a long time ago, an idea that’s the opposite of what the Faction put in her head and a vaccine against it.
“Gate’s in the offices behind the apse,” Ji Yeon says. They walk through the narthex and into the nave of the church, which the school uses for assemblies. Ji Yeon’s boots clack on the hardwood, and the sound reverberates, amplified by the sacred acoustics of the room.
“I want to play a show in here,” Hayden whispers in Carrie’s ear.
Carrie imagines Hayden’s voice filling this room like that of a full choir.
“Victory party,” she says, wrapping her arm around Hayden’s waist. “Everybody who lives gets on the list.”
Emmeline talked briefly with Clay and Thao about what it felt like to use the Chair, and it makes her sad that their experiences were confrontational. Thao said something about “punching against it,” and Clay said it was like coaxing an animal out of hiding. For Emmeline, it’s a feeling of intense relief. Some people’s abilities are intuitive—Carrie has to work against hers to stay visible—but Emmeline’s takes enormous effort to use. When the Chair turns on, she feels as if someone else is doing the lifting for her, as if her ability is fluid and light and she has only to direct it. With the Chair contributing, her ability is limited only by what she can imagine herself doing.
Creating this Pulse isn’t as easy as the first time. It’s easier than the second—the Chair in Berlin wasn’t built for her, and it had taken work to shape her ability into something the Chair could feed off—but it’s difficult this time to find the sense of connection. The problem is she’s trying to do it the same way she did the first time and expecting different results.
She thinks back to the moment in the movie theater at the mall. She remembers what it felt like to see the bits of darkness in Viola and Carrie and flush them out. It’s not the same as inducing Resonance, which is like ringing a gong so loudly in the living room the glassware in the kitchen shakes. This is like striking thousands of tiny bells delicately and all at once to produce something that passes as a unified sound. As the Chair hums to life, Fahima and Ruth fade out and Emmeline makes herself manifold. She is everywhere in New York and also here; she is in the Hive and in the real world and beyond both for a moment so small it could slip into the crack between two seconds. A half of a half of a heartbeat and it’s done.
“What the fuck was that?” Fahima asks. “The readings are…”
“It was something different,” Emmeline says. “I did it once before but smaller. This was big. This was all of New York.” She climbs down from the Chair, and her legs buckle under her. Fahima and Ruth rush to her, each slipping herself under one arm. She’s exhausted, and they’ve barely started, and all she can think is that she can’t tell anyone she isn’t sure she can make it to the end. She needs everyone operating with irrational confidence, and Emmeline’s the only one who can carry it off.
“Head rush,” she says, although the truth is the exact opposite.
“Your nose,” Ruth says. Her hand moves toward Emmel
ine’s face but stops. Emmeline dabs her nostril with her fingers. The substance that’s trickled out is viscous, the consistency of honey. It’s pearlescent white with threads of deep red, and it makes her fingertips go numb.
“Is this the first time that’s happened?” Fahima asks. Emmeline nods. It isn’t a lie if you don’t say anything out loud. Fahima wipes her nose clean with the corner of her hijab. “Bishop got nosebleeds like that before he died. He said this was—”
“It’s everything,” Emmeline says. “It’s the black glass and its opposite.”
Fahima looks at her like Emmeline’s stopped speaking English, which, from Fahima’s point of view, maybe she has. Emmeline struggles more and more with language. The way she looks at things, the way she’s planning, can’t be expressed in the linear march of one word after another. She wishes she could talk to Fahima in a language of maps, a lexicon of schematics. Maybe then they’d have common ground, but even that wouldn’t be exactly right.
“Are you dying?” Fahima asks.
“No,” Emmeline says. “I don’t think so.”
“We need to trust her,” Ruth says. She touches Fahima’s cheek. “We did things your way, and now we do it a different way. It’s all right. You don’t have to carry everything yourself.”
Emmeline sees Fahima struggling with this, and she can imagine Fahima digging in her heels here so hard that nothing will go according to plan.
“What do we do?” Fahima asks.
“You can still backdoor into the systems now that you’re onsite?” Fahima nods. “When I give you the signal, activate all the Chairs. It’ll take a while to get them ready, so you should hurry.”
“We can’t activate them; there’s no one in them,” Fahima says.
“I’ll be in them,” Emmeline says. Or I won’t, she thinks. “Be ready,” she says. “Think about the implosion model. It’s all about timing.”
