The Nobody People

not a perfect way of finding new Resonants,” Patrick says. “It takes time. I’d guess a fifth of the Resonants we pick up have had the shit kicked out of them before we get to them. Usually by someone close. Boyfriends, mothers. A big part of their first months at Bishop is convincing them they aren’t freaks or demons who deserve to die. Some we don’t get to in time. Fahima has numbers on that. She always has numbers.” Avi doesn’t want to see those numbers for fear he’ll imagine Emmeline as one of them. He thinks of every incident she’s had at school in which her behavior or some kid’s reaction to it necessitated a call home, an awkward conversation with a parent who, while apologetic, clearly agreed with his or her kid that the problem wouldn’t have come up if Emmeline had been normal. How long before it escalates? Before Emmeline moves from mixed-race oddity, to superpowered freak, to number?
Patrick cups his hands around his mouth and shouts to one of the fliers. “Eli, keep your ankles pressed together to cut your drag. You look like a goddamn pinwheel.”
“You think coming out is going to get more of you killed,” Avi says.
“Bishop thinks they kill us because they don’t understand us,” Patrick says. “Their kid or their sister starts glowing, and they shriek ‘demon’ and beat them to death with a bat. He thinks if they have a word for us, a concept, we’ll be safer.”
“But not safe,” says Avi.
“I don’t think naming a group of people has ever kept them safe,” Patrick says. Avi’s been thinking the same thing. He wonders if he’s helping create a label that constitutes a target, only to slap it on his daughter.
“Why not quit in protest?”
“Somebody has to teach these kids how to fight,” Patrick says, looking out at the students playing grab-ass in the field.
“Who will they have to fight?” Avi asks. He imagines Emmline on the front lines. Emmeline in a foxhole. Emmeline in a JLTV, lifted in the air by a blast.
“People like you,” Patrick says. “Excuse me.” He strides across the field toward the girl hefting boulders, warning her not to lift from the shoulder. You’re wrong, Avi thinks. I’d fight with you before I’d let her. It’s the sprawling, empty pledge fathers make to keep their children safe against all threats, to swing blindly at the world as it comes for their kids.
Avi wanders down the other side of the hill, half looking for Emmeline. He finds Fahima lying in the grass, massive black bug-eye sunglasses covering most of the exposed parts of her face.
“Patrick give you the doom-and-gloom speech?” she says.
“Something like that,” he says, carefully lowering himself to sit next to her. He stretches his legs out in front of him, relieved to have the weight off.
Fahima waves it away. “He’s a kitten,” she says. “Bishop’s going to be pisssed he went off script and showed you the upperclassmen. We’re supposed to be putting our best faces forward. Whenever he brings his jocks out here, he gets it in his head that we’re training an army.”
“You’re not?” Avi asks. “Training an army?”
“It’d be a pretty scraggly army,” Fahima says. “We’ve got fliers who can’t dunk a basketball. Kids whose strength is usable only when they’re throwing a tantrum. But if we were, these kids would be the front line.”
“Even the tree kid?” Avi asks.
“The tree kid supplies ridiculously potent weed to most of the upperclassmen,” says Fahima.
“No shit,” Avi says.
Fahima nods. “I had to confiscate some once,” she says. “Fucking incredible.”
“You didn’t kick him out?”
“We don’t kick anybody out,” Fahima says. “It’s a sanctuary as much as it’s a school. We keep our people safe for as long as they need to feel safe.”
“So you’re a teacher, too?”
“I’m a lot of things,” says Fahima. “But yeah, I teach.”
“You split your time between the lab and the academy?”
“The lab is in the basement of the academy,” Fahima says, popping a long blade of grass between her teeth and grinning.
“You have Owen Curry around a bunch of kids?” It’s the first threat to Emmeline that’s concrete, and in Avi’s head the worst, the thing he’s been avoiding, happens. He sees Salem Baptist Church in Roseland, Emmeline zigzagging through the pews as Owen Curry makes his way up the center aisle like a bride.
“Owen Curry’s not going anywhere,” Fahima says.
“Because of the lights?”
Fahima makes a gesture between a nod and a shrug. “It’s tough to explain.”
“I’m already tired of that as an excuse,” Avi says.
“I know. I’m trying to throw a lot at you all at once to see what sticks. So far you are the Teflon of reporters.”
“I think I’m doing pretty well.”
“We need you to do better,” Fahima says. “Now that things have started, they are going to move very fast. No one is going to have the time to make sure you’re keeping up. If we don’t do this exactly right, every single one of us is going to be in a box like Owen Curry. Or worse. Even your girl.”
“I’ll do better,” Avi says, resolved. He turns back to watch Patrick’s students hone their abilities. “Are all the kids at the academy like this?”
“These are the physical kids,” she says. “Their abilities tend to be, I don’t know, showy? And these are upper level. Best of the best. But even these ones, when we get them back to Bishop, they’ll be slightly less impressive. That’s why I come out here.” She taps her temple. “Up the ol’ abilities.”
“What changes?”
Fahima lowers her glasses so she can glare at him over the tops. “There’s fewer of you around.”
“Me?” Avi asks.
She scratches an itch high up on her forehead, under her hijab. “Have you heard anyone use the word Damp yet?”
“Darren Helms called me a Damp,” Avi says. “I assumed it meant someone who’s not like you all.”
“Most of us call you guys baseliners,” she says. “Damp is kind of a shitty thing to call someone.”
“I