by Bob Proehl
But help is coming.
Emmeline is thinking of time as a canvas spread out in front of her and as a resource slipping away. Maybe I’ve lost, she thinks. Maybe I changed things and now everyone goes to hell.
A bright circle appears in front of her. Through it, she sees Kimani’s room the way it looked the first time she saw it, when she stepped through a door that wasn’t there and toppled out of her normal life into this one. Miquel steps through the portal, followed by Rai and Tuan. Behind them, Emmeline sees Kimani, her face lined with worry. It was a long shot, a theoretical leap she had to hide from Fahima because it would have driven her nuts, but from inside Kimani’s room, embedded in Hivespace, Tuan was able to open a physical portal into the Hive and bring Rai in. Tuan and Miquel look pained: being here exposes them directly to Glover’s influence, but Miquel connects them to Rai, uninfluenced by Raymond Glover. What Rai thought of as his lack is their asset: it holds them together for the moment.
“Tuan, go,” Emmeline says softly. “Go far and don’t come back.”
“It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?” he says, tapping his temple. “It’s going to hurt.”
“It is,” she says. “But hopefully not for long.”
Tuan steps through the portal and stands next to Kimani, who blows Emmeline a kiss before he seals the portal like a zipper.
“He won’t be gone long,” Emmeline says. “We need to be ready when he gets back.”
She isn’t sure she has the strength to finish this. So much of her is elsewhere that there may not be enough of her here. Raymond could see everything she’s done, so she had to count on herself to do the final part afterward. Iterations of her exhausted from activating Pulses across the world turn their attention backward. They fold out of the world and arrive at the moment they always come to. They find a little girl trapped in a box of black bone, and they come together to save her. Emmeline isn’t there yet, but she will be. She has so much left to do.
She feels a surge of confidence, passed through Miquel and doubled back. It’s enough. She expands herself, taking up as much ground as possible. She wants to give Glover less to come back to, although she can’t say for certain that it matters. This isn’t the battleground; it’s the space between. What matters about the Hive is that it isn’t here or there.
The ground around them comes alive as Raymond Glover returns, howling, wounded. The entire Hive attends to her again, which is good, which is what she needs. Shielded behind Rai’s mind, Miquel is invisible to Raymond. She needs to keep it this way one more moment.
“You think I can’t do that?” Glover bellows. “You’re teaching me how to beat you. I’m going to catch my breath, and then I’m going to rain down on every moment of your life at once.”
Emmeline smiles. Raymond has been thrown out of the Hive in the past, beaten back by a host of future Emmelines, along with Fahima and Sarah and Patrick and Kevin Bishop. It means Emmeline gets through this. Raymond’s already lost but doesn’t know it yet.
“You forgot what it is to be a person in the world,” Emmeline says. Her voice is small and sad. “What a lack of imagination it takes to be everything when you could be something. Everyone rather than someone.”
The Hive around her rears up like a black wave. Before he can move to strike, Miquel grabs hold of her mind and Raymond Glover’s all at once. Like pinning a cloud to the ground, he connects them to every Resonant on earth. All their emotions rush through Miquel and into them, and as they do, the Hive becomes not Emmeline and Glover battling for ground but everyone, connected, the way it should have been from the start.
You can’t build something like this for people, she thinks. You have to build it with them. It has to be theirs. She feels Raymond Glover’s consciousness gripping at the Hive, trying to keep it for himself. Emmeline turns her attention to the Source, the energy that passes from nowhere to somewhere through the Hive. The Pulses have poked millions of new holes in the Hive, each one shining with promise, letting more of the Source through. Buoyed by everyone, drowning in their emotions, she tears the Hive apart. An ocean crashes into an ocean, the Source and the real world swirling into each other. For a second all futures are real. Everything that can happen does. In the face of that, Raymond Glover’s nightmares, the apocalypses that held him together, are infinitesimal. There’s a piece of him in everyone, but the consciousness those pieces answered to is wiped out in a flood of possibility.
Too big, too abstract, Emmeline is lost. It’s the threat of universal connection, the weapon she used against Glover turned back on itself. She loses herself. Glover had his paranoia to cling to, but as Emmeline sublimates into everything, she wonders what she has to tether her thoughts to the world. The Hive comes apart, and infinite lights rise up. Some she knows. Some she loves. Emmeline remembers she has things to do. She has no interest in being everything. She falls back down into herself, into time and the world, waking to what it has become.
The Craft speeds them across the East River toward Midtown, and Fahima looks through its transparent bottom onto Manhattan as black glass grafted onto its skyscrapers and towers degrades into ash and drifts down toward the streets like dark snow. She remembers a statue Bishop made a few days before he died, pulling a white opalescent substance he claimed was a physical iteration of where they got their abilities from into the world. He said it would make them all stronger, and it had. When she saw it after he died, it was Swiss-cheesed with holes, like a rotted tooth. If the black glass was the equal and opposite of that substance, an amplifier for what Raymond Glover had become, the fact it’s dissolving in front of her means two things. The first is that they’ve won. The second is that Fahima has so much work to do. For the first time since she started working to improve the city, Fahima feels ready to give it time and space, let it decide what it wants to be. She’s thought of the city and the country as mechanisms, but they’re organisms, too. Some things you can’t build. Some you have to allow to grow.
When the Bishop building comes into view, she doesn’t recognize it. Her mind has adapted to seeing it topped with the extra floors, sheathed in black glass, and now she’s looking at the bare bones underneath: structural supports, wires and plumbing, the guts of the upper floors’ walls. The top of the building, once a jet-black pyramid, is gone, and the top floor, the massive room that housed the nightmare Patrick turned into, is fully exposed to the night air.
As the Craft touches down at one corner, a door made of dark wood appears, freestanding, in the middle of the room, its shape casting a long shadow over piles of what look like sheets of wet leather. The door opens, and Miquel, Rai, and Tuan emerge. Kimani stands in the doorway, taking in the scene. Ruth retracts the Craft into herself and walks with Fahima toward the door.
“Our girl did it,” Kimani calls. “I don’t know how, but she did.”
“Where is she?” Carrie asks. Her face is smeared with blood, and there’s a furious line of red across her forehead and cheekbone.
“Honey, come here and let me see that,” Hayden says, but Carrie keeps coming toward Fahima.
“Where’s Emmeline?” she shouts.
“I don’t know,” says Fahima.
“We just got here,” Ruth says.
Carrie calls for Emmeline into the open air, and seeing she’s distracted, Miquel sneaks out of the opening that was once a massive obsidian door. He steps over the body of Viola Wilkerson, crushed between the door and a flood of bodies whose owners now mill in the entryway, dazed, or wander through the opening into the larger room, hoping for answers. Miquel has to press through a throng of students coming up the stairs, and the open space that was Raymond Glover’s penthouse fills with curious kids.
At the edge that looks over onto Lexington Avenue, Emmeline Hirsch appears from nowhere. She looks out at the sky, examining it as if something about it might be different. It’s off-putting when huge events leave
no trace. It seems wrong, as if someone forgot to press a final button. Fahima sees the bodies of Sarah and Omar Six and knows they’re not asleep. There are ways bodies can lie sleeping and ways they can’t, positions and shapes they can’t assume. Losing all interest in Fahima, Carrie joins Emmeline at the edge, with Hayden following. Clay, gripping his skull, sees Rai for the first time and tries to form words.
“Hey, Dad,” Rai says. He goes to the edge too. Fahima stands next to him and looks down onto the street. From there she can see the ruin of the Phoenix school propped against the side of the Bishop Academy. Below it, people emerge from the front doors of Bishop, moving through the wreckage of black glass that juts up from the street like teeth. They look up the same way Emmeline searched the sky for a discernible change. Some are bloodied; some wear the armbands of the Black Rose Faction but make idle motions to tear them off, like picking at a scab. They haven’t reached the decision yet, but the seed of it is there.
“You broke the Hive,” Fahima says.
“It was ours,” she says, not turning, speaking with a sureness Fahima has only ever pretended to possess. “It was ours, and I gave it all back.”
Fahima looks around her at Patrick’s distended, ruined body. “Is he dead?” she asks. “Glover. Is he out there somewhere?”
“He was dead a long time ago,” Emmeline says. “But yes, he’s gone now.”
Fahima closes her eyes. She kneels and lays her hand on the ground, which is still warm. “O Allah, forgive Patrick Davenport,” she says. “And elevate his station among those who are guided. Send him along the path of those who came before and forgive us and him, O Lord of the Worlds. Enlarge for him his grave and shed light upon him in it.”
“What’s that?” Emmeline asks.
“Dua,” Fahima says. “Prayer for the dead.”
“It’s pretty,” says Emmeline.
“Then are we still—” Carrie says. Before Emmeline can answer, Carrie flickers out of visibility and back.
“Everyone is, if they want,” she says. “There are no limits now, or at least not any someone else sets.”
Next to Emmeline, Rai gasps as his feet leave the ground, his body drifting upward. It isn’t possible. Fahima had examined the problem from every angle. There were people who resonated and people who could potentially, but there were also those who couldn’t and never would. But here is a boy who couldn’t and never would, flying. Emmeline gives Fahima the canny look she’s had since she came to the Bishop Academy as a little girl.
“No more us and them,” she says. “All us.”
For the year after, Emmeline travels. It seems like a thing people do at her age: gap years and backpacking trips through Europe, journeys of reality avoidance passed off as self-discovery. There are ways to stall the onset of responsibility and adulthood in the hope that when she gets to it, it won’t be as terrifying.
She goes to Europe and the Great Wall of China. She goes to Tunis and the ruins at Carthage. Kimani told her about Hannibal and the elephants, all the kingdoms of Africa swallowed up by history. She could sit under a spruce tree in the Italian Alps and watch Hannibal lead his elephants up a mountain path. Someday she might.
She finds her friends as they die. It’s simple. She spots the moment their Resonance disappears and goes to the time before that, like turning a record a half turn backward to catch the silence between the songs. She’s there with each of them at the end as she was for her father, as she couldn’t manage to be for her mother.
She’s with Miquel, who returns to Manitoba, existing there alone for three years. He meets a young woman at the little bar in town. She tells him about the child she lost and how her entire life feels haunted in the wake. She tells him how hard she’s trying to get away, but there is no away. Miquel excuses himself to use the men’s room, an outhouse attached to the trailer bar with a couple of bolts, lit up by a work lamp hanging off an extension cord. He slips the shackle off his wrist and places it on the edge of the grimy sink.
When he reenters the bar, he gasps as if he’s dived into freezing water even though the bar is warmer than the air outside. Miquel holds his breath as he walks back over to the woman, trying to keep her pain out of him a few more seconds. He sits down, lets the held breath go, and places his hand over hers. Her pain comes at him, an unimaginable wave, and he lets it pour out of her and into him. She looks dazed—there is no way to understand this deep, irrational giving by means of taking. Without another word, Miquel leaves the bar and walks home lit by a waning half-moon. He finds a bottle of pills he stole from a pharmacy in Winnipeg. He swallows them in two handfuls, pausing to smoke a joint to ease the nausea. He lies down on his couch, and Emmeline is there to take his hand and hold it as he falls asleep.
She misses Ruth, lost in a crash over the Urals, moving at her all-time top speed. Emmeline imagines her joyful in her last seconds.
She nearly misses Waylon—he goes so fast, shot in a robbery in the last year of money—but she’s with him as he bleeds out on the North Avenue sidewalk. Bryce stays in Chicago but eventually goes north, following Miquel’s route and then continuing. Emmeline likes to think of him completing Miquel’s journey, finding the north of fables and stories and planting himself there. If he has an end, she never sees it. There are ways to stop without dying.
She’s there when Alyssa is unplugged. Having lost Ruth, Fahima refuses to let Alyssa die, and each piece of her body that gives out is replaced with a loving replica until Alyssa tells Fahima she feels like an old car with none of its original parts. Fahima looks into eyes she built for Alyssa, which glisten with saline pumped through artificial ducts. She kisses her and reaches into her chest cavity, where a plastic heart flutters. Fahima can’t bring herself to do it. Her finger rests on the switch, her cheek against Alyssa’s skinlike cheek. It’s Emmeline who presses down on the switch, like turning off a light. Alyssa sees her and whispers thank you into Fahima’s ear and is gone.
The things Fahima invents to keep Alyssa alive advance medical science a hundred years. Fahima being Fahima, she refuses to give herself the credit she deserves. Emmeline goes to tell her. She smiles at Emmeline when she sees her.
“You look so fucking young,” she says.
“I am,” Emmeline says. She remembers when she was a student at Bishop, terrified of what she might become. She remembers being in awe of a woman who could imagine anything.
“Miss Deeb?” she says.
“You haven’t called me that since you were a kid.”
“Fahima,” she says. “I want to tell you about the future.”
Fahima starts in about paradoxes and continua, and Emmeline grins. It’s a song she almost forgot. Fahima exhausts herself with protests, and Emmeline says, “Let me tell you what you’ve done.”
Fahima looks genuinely afraid. Emmeline smiles. “Let me tell you how many you’ve saved.”
Emmeline tells her the numbers, statistics compiled and brought like flowers gathered from a field. By the time she’s a century ahead, Fahima understands what it means that Emmeline is telling her these things. She knows the conditions under which Emmeline would risk the paradoxes Fahima warned her about. Emmeline asks if Fahima wants her to stay.
“No,” Fahima says. “I’ve got some things I want to finish up.”
Emmeline finds Fahima later, slumped at her desk, a drawing half finished. She looks like she’s fallen asleep during a lecture, worn out from a study session the night before. Emmeline whispers the words Fahima said, the ones for Patrick and Sarah and countless others: O Allah, forgive Fahima Deeb. And elevate her station among those who are guided. Send her along the path of those who came before and forgive us and her, O Lord of the Worlds. Enlarge for her her grave and shed light upon her in it.
Emmeline visits Kimani often. It’s so quiet there.
She finds Dom and Rai with Rai’s wife and kids by Clay’s beds
ide. His ability aged him faster each time he used it, so by the time Dom approaches sixty, Clay has seen a century of life. He hangs on to meet his granddaughter. Rai names her Emma. He says a big name like Emmeline is too much for such a small thing to bear. Clay’s talked them through everything; they’ve been ready for this day for years. The baby rests on Rai’s shoulder, her big brown eyes fixed on Emmeline, as her grandfather slips away.
She has to go far to find Hayden. They live another hundred years. When she finds them, they’re so tired. They founded a school for the arts, had it snaked out from under them by a duplicitous board of directors, and stole it back. They had buried the twins, Lynette and Shane, who will always be the nine-year-olds in the Polaroid, and the twin’s children—five of them in all. For all that, they don’t look a day past thirty. On tour across Europe and Africa, playing a show near the ruins of Carthage on a makeshift stage, with a full band who they keep calling by the names of old bandmates—Rafa and Kristal and Jerrod long gone—Hayden plays their last show. An electrical surge feeds 440 volts back into their mic during the second encore. Emmeline is there before the roadies.
“So fucking short,” Hayden says, lips trembling as their body loses the race to repair itself.
“People talk about this show for a hundred years,” Emmeline says. “It’ll be mythic.” It’s true. Emmeline has checked.
“So fucking short,” Hayden repeats.
Emmeline looks everywhere to find Carrie’s end and never does. She sees Carrie later and later, older and older. She lasts decades after losing Hayden. She goes back to fighting with the weariness of someone returning to a gift they never cared for and the abandon of someone who doesn’t care about dying. She isn’t always on the right side, but she tries to be. Emmeline looks a hundred, two hundred years to find the moment Carrie’s Resonance goes silent, and she can’t find it. Finally she gives up. The only thing she can assume is that Carrie never dies.
