“Aunt Valentine makes lots of references nobody gets. Eventually you pick up on flavors of confusion.”
“Weird. Anyway, Mom got… she got cancer. She diagnosed herself; she was like a doctor ten times over by that point. And she was convinced I’d be lost without her to guide me.”
Aliyah thought of Dad, hovering near the soccer field. “That’s what parents do.”
Ruth unholstered the bow. “Maybe. But most parents don’t transfer their own consciousness into your consciousness to make sure you’ll never be alone, and then blow their brains out before the cancer degrades their cognitive functions.”
Ruth spoke so casually, the full force of what had happened took a moment to hit.
And when Aliyah processed what Ruth’s mother had done to her, her thoughts short-circuited.
“So yeah.” Ruth handed the bow to Aliyah, who took it numbly. “I know Mom loves me. She’s always by my side – or some static copy of her that can never learn is. Always nagging me, always checking in. She means so well. But she didn’t know I’d feel the bullet burst her brains. She didn’t know a seven year-old girl wasn’t prepared for a crash course in educamancy. She didn’t know her prepared lessons on suppressing flux required a girl who wasn’t shit-scared and traumatized.”
“Jesus.” She tried to imagine a ’mancer kid living alone with no one but a dead parent’s echo to help her.
“I tried to help people, just like my mom.” Ruth cracked her knuckles. “I hurt ’em. My flux, it… it ruined people. SMASH tracked me down, rehabilitated me, made me part of the collective. They helped. They gave me people to transfer my excess flux to, support to calm me down, a cause to live for–”
She looked back towards Bastogne, thumping her fist against her heart. Ruth had been ready to die to protect her town last night.
Ruth’s fierce pride made Aliyah envious.
Ruth nodded, once, affirming Aliyah’s discomfort. “I was seven, Aliyah. Mom thought she knew what was best for me. And maybe your dad thinks he knows best, but… don’t trust him. He loves you. And he loves magic. But love, man, if it granted wisdom…”
She looked out over the swaying field, face suffused with longing.
“…I’d be an ordinary girl.”
Aliyah thought about speaking up. But arguing for her dad’s wisdom felt too much like negating Ruth’s experience, and lamenting their situation felt sappy, and they both knew sympathy was poison.
The best thing she could do, Aliyah decided, was to let Ruth’s words settle and see if they made sense later.
She looked down at the bow, a springy plastic composite. “What do you expect me to do with this?”
“Oh yeah. That’s your training.” She handed Aliyah an arrow from the arrow-making family. “I’ll teach you to shoot.”
“Like hell you are. Firing a weapon is videogames. I’ll broach!”
“That’s where your dad fails. He’s been trying to teach you to control your ’mancy. Because he loves ’mancy. He loves it so hard he’ll risk the world for it.”
“–you said no fathers–”
“But we Unimancers love ordinary things. We love the arc of the arrow. We love an honest miss. That’s a love we can teach.”
Aliyah weighed the arrow in her palm. “Is that wise? I’m gonna break out, you know.” Aliyah hoped Ruth did not notice the guilty way she scanned the sky, feeling responsible for that Thing. “Anything you teach me might come back to bite you.”
“You may notice that is not a gun. If it comes down to you fighting our guns and Snow White Specials with a bow and handmade arrows, something has gone drastically wrong if you’re winning.”
Aliyah suppressed a laugh. “OK. Fine. What’s gonna stop me from slipping into videogame mode?”
“You will.”
Ruth’s confidence made Aliyah feel safe in ways her father never had. She hated that. “Why?”
Ruth leaned in, giving her that fierce and too-kissable grin. “Because you have to outshoot me. And I’m not gonna use one scrap of ’mancy. Slip into videogame mode, and you’ve admitted you need magic to beat me.”
Aliyah stood, transfixed. She couldn’t escape the Unimancer camp… yet. She couldn’t take on the Unimancers… yet.
But goddamn if she’d let a kid her own age beat her in a fair contest.
“You got salt?” Aliyah asked. “Pepper?”
Ruth looked bemused. “Why?”
“Because you are gonna eat those fucking words.”
Twenty-Five
The Criminal Cried as He Dropped Him Down
“Get the supervisor back,” Paul said. “The one who ran. Make sure the rest of the staff stay put.”
Valentine pulled up a mission map and ran out of the room.
Paul had removed the handcuff from the surviving Steeplechase brother – “Grady,” according to his medical wristband – and Valentine had placed his dead brother on his lap.
“It might seem ghoulish to you,” Grady apologized, stroking his brother’s hair. “But they haven’t let us near each other in twenty years.”
“Tell me what happened.”
* * *
People always confused the two of us, but we knew the difference. Even as boys, folks said we were the best hunters in Kentucky.
Wasn’t true. Grayson couldn’t track worth a damn. Put him in the woods, he’d run in circles. But you pointed him at a target, any target, and he could hit it. Me? Worst shot in the county. But I could track a bobcat through a rainstorm.
“Grady,” my brother said, “you find ’em, I’ll take ’em.”
He was the hunter. I was the tracker.
But he was gentle. So gentle. The reason he made himself such a good shot was because he couldn’t stand hurting anything. If he winged a deer, he would not let me stop until I tracked it down so he could put it out of its misery.
“One shot, one kill.” My brother’s mantra. We needed the meat, but Grayson didn’t want ’em to know what hit ’em.
Me? I tracked bees back to their nests. I climbed trees, reconstructing what squirrels did with their day.
Those were the good days – deep in the woods, me tracking down the most skittish animals, and Grayson sneaking up on ’em to touch ’em. He read a comic once that said touching a live deer showed way more skill than killing it. And we both loved that satisfaction of thinking like the animal, working together, melding our skills to fill our family’s bellies.
Folks didn’t mind us poaching at first, not when their fridges were packed with venison, but… rumors started. “Ain’t they a little obsessed?” people asked. Every bad thing in town, people wondered if it was flux.
Not that we cared. Hell, we weren’t even thirty, we had the woods and we had our animals.
But Dad fretted. He came out, told us someone’d call SMASH on us. We told him we did no harm, but he said SMASH’d torture us.
So when someone from the big city came along and promised to nurture our skills, Dad told us to go with him.
Dad cried that day. Never seen him cry before that. Never seen him after, either. The bargain was, we could never come home.
He told us it was safer than SMASH.
And me and Grayson were thrilled at first – they took us to shiny places, and told us there was new hunting to be had, and we had ourselves a time tracking things through cities.
We liked the challenge. They’d show us a broken-into house, and ask me who’d done it, and I would find them, and Grayson would tackle them even though they ran.
Then they asked Grayson to kill a man.
Grayson said he wouldn’t kill a man.
But they’d been smart and separated us, and they told him he’d kill a man or they’d kill me.
Grayson didn’t want to kill nobody. But – he had to. He tried hard, real hard, not to kill anyone, but for him murdering an innocent was the worst thing in the world.
So his flux made sure that happened every time.
He tried to yell
, give his victims some warning he was coming. They brought in a surgeon, cut out his voicebox. He refused to kill anymore. They cut off my legs. We both tried to ’mancy up an escape, but the thing we feared most was hurting someone or hurting our brother, and…
The flux. The flux always got us.
We might escape the mob, but we could never escape our flux.
They let me talk to him on the phone sometimes, showed me videos to prove he was alive. They didn’t use us much – they’re leery of magic, don’t want SMASH finding out their business, so we only got hauled out for the big jobs – but knowin’ we were murdering people ate us up inside.
But what could you do? If one of us died, the other had no hope. Grayson, he had it worse – sometimes I tracked stolen money down. Every time they let him out, they set him to kill. He tried like hell to escape, but whenever he did the flux shoved him right back into his worst nightmare, and whenever he showed someone mercy his backlash mangled them, and…
Even if he did escape, he didn’t know where I was.
And like I said: Grayson couldn’t track worth a damn.
A guy took pity on me, after a while. I begged him to smuggle a message to Grayson, tell him how to find me. I know he did, because the mob hauled the informant in, slit his throat on that rug you’re standing on, and they told me Grayson would never escape…
* * *
“…and I hoped he wouldn’t,” Grady finished, looking down at his dead brother. “If he ever got here, the worst thing in the world would happen to him. He… he knows how much watching him die would… would tear me up…”
That was Grayson’s worst nightmare, Paul thought. Dying, knowing he’d failed rescuing his brother.
He remembered Steeplechase’s final smile. Paul and Valentine’s arrival ensured someone would care for his brother.
He’d died happy. Paul was glad of that, but…
If he could hold his flux, sir, he might be magnificent.
The Steeplechase brothers had been held in bondage because nobody had taught them to manage their flux. Paul had been lucky enough to stumble across Valentine, who’d taught him the tricks of flux management: how to make your mind go blank to give the flux nowhere to flow, how to burn flux-loads off a chunk at a time through flat tires and food poisoning.
No wonder Steeplechase had cried when he killed those cops. He’d tried to knock them out, but his terror of hurting them had fueled their deaths…
SMASH had stolen away the Steeplechase brothers’ education, condemning them to their worst fears coming true all the time.
And the people here – Paul’s bureaucromancy flared as he accessed the patients’ records, saw Sunset Gardens’ scandalously low rents–
“Valentine!” he yelled. “Get everyone out on the lawn.”
“But the cops–”
“Let ’em come. If they even notice. I suspect they’re bribed to overlook whatever happens here.”
She barked orders to the cowed nurses, who wheeled protesting people out still in their nightgowns. Paul patted Grady on the shoulder.
“Let’s get you out of here.”
“But my brother…” He squeezed Grayson’s wrist, anchoring himself. “We can’t leave him.”
“I’ll take care of his body.” Paul did his best to make sure this confused ’mancer didn’t see his cold fury. “Right now, we need to get you out. Will you let me wheel you out?”
Grady nodded, uncertain, trusting.
Paul guided him out as Valentine oversaw the building’s evacuation – old men and women protesting as they grabbed precious mementoes to bring with them. Some went for their phones, but disabling the phone system had been as simple as setting everyone’s bills to “unpaid” for the past six months.
There was no flux. They deserved whatever he did to them.
Minutes later, the population of Sunset Gardens stood out on the lawn, huddling, scared. They stayed quiet, in the hands of America’s most-wanted ’mancers, unsure what to do.
The veins in Paul’s neck bulged.
“You knew!” he screamed.
Patient and staff alike looked away.
“They cut off his fucking legs!” Paul screamed, pointing to Grady, who cringed. “They jailed him! Those weren’t nurses – they were armed guards! And – you – knew!”
Old men and women clutched each other for support.
“Why?”
“It was cheap,” said a frizzy-haired septuagenarian.
“Of course it was fucking cheap! All you had to do was be OK with torture happening down the hall!”
Paul scanned the residents, wondering how the mob’s owners had made the offer to them – he doubted it’d been as simple as oh, we keep a ’mancer imprisoned there to keep his brother in line. But the folks who ran this place had ensured everyone who took a room here had an understanding: We do things. It comes at a cost.
The old guy in Room 105 is part of the cost.
“That could have been my daughter!” he shrieked.
Aliyah. Aliyah was in SMASH’s hands, and they were abusing her worse than any mob – the mob had had to tiptoe behind the scenes, yet SMASH had the United Nations’ approval.
People like this voted for little girls to be tortured…
“Why? Why would you be OK with that? How could you…” Paul choked on his disbelief. “How could you accept torture for cheap rent?”
“He’s a muh–”
“What was that?”
Paul wheeled on whoever had spoken; they’d all clapped their hands over their mouths. If Paul was being generous, he might say they were horrified to be confronted with the crippled man they’d tiptoed around for years – but he wasn’t in a generous mood, and what they looked like to him was people scared they’d been caught.
“He’s a ’mancer,” Paul said, completing the thought for them. “A walking hole in physics. And whatever it takes to keep those people in line, well, that’s OK, isn’t it? You’ll live happy little lives while they suffer, won’t you?”
He thought of these old people curled up on padded couches, watching television while Aliyah shrieked in a cold torture facility.
“Not anymore.” He relished the way they shrunk back when he moved. “Valentine. Burn it.”
She’d been grimly nodding along with him, but she froze. “What?”
“Fucking burn it. Raze this fucking place to the ground.”
“Paul.” Valentine’s gamefire halo dimmed to a low, shocked burn. “I’m not… They’re fucked up, but leaving old people homeless–”
“Whatever happened to Rainbird, Valentine?”
Paul spoke the question softly, off-handedly – but the question hit her like Steeplechase’s bullet. She wrung her hands like a guilty daughter caught shoplifting.
“Yeah,” Paul nodded. “I made contingency plans in case that pyromaniac ever came back for Aliyah. But you never seemed concerned. You gonna tell me he just walked away?”
Paul knew he was right when she couldn’t meet his gaze. He reached over, squeezed her shoulder.
“You’ve done worse,” he assured her. “We’ll do worse, to save Aliyah. Now blow this fucking place up and let’s get out.”
Valentine made a strangled noise, shamed, conflicted. Then she raised her hands and the clouds parted. A bright red laser beam painted the roof–
And the Sunset Gardens Assisted Living Facility blew to flinders, going up in a catastrophic fireball, sending shards of burning furniture flying. The old people clutched their chests, their family memorabilia annihilated, wondering where they’d live now–
“Remember that the next time you think it’s OK to hurt a ’mancer,” Paul told them.
He helped Grady Steeplechase into the car as Valentine sat, numbly, in the front seat.
No one dared voice an objection as they pulled away.
Twenty-Six
O Father, Where Art Thou?
The forest was filled with plants, and Aliyah had to touch all of them.
/>
She’d forgotten how to touch.
As she and Ruth slogged through the underbrush, hunting for wild game, Aliyah felt everything: the chill shadows of the trees, the crunch of pine needles beneath her sneakers, the taut string of the bow pressing against her shoulder.
Her videogamemancer life had turned her into a head and a set of hands, cruising through life as though she were viewing it through a camera and a game controller. But now?
No sparkles appeared around edible plants to highlight them for her attention. No help-labels popped up if she focused on a leaf.
That was videogame stuff, and Ruth had taught her videogame stuff was easy.
Pawing through caterpillar-chewed fronds to discover a cluster of berries that wouldn’t poison her?
That was a challenge.
Ruth padded behind, smirking. Aliyah was determined to demonstrate her skills with berry-gathering, since she’d proved so inadequate at hunting game.
Who knew deer were so fast?
Still, she would beat Ruth, in time – Ruth had her mother’s teaching magic. She joked that between Ruth’s mother’s curriculum and Aliyah’s reflexes, Aliyah would put fresh meat on Bastogne’s table before winter.
“But,” Ruth had said, raising a finger, “then we’ll go head to head. Just me, at first – and then I’ll pool my skills with the collective’s big game hunters. Let’s see if you can out-hunt the squad.”
Shouldn’t you be outrunning them instead?
The thought stung Aliyah.
This isn’t summer camp. They want to brainwash your father. How can you spend eighteen hour days out here camping?
Why do you intend to be here, come winter?
But what could Aliyah do? The Unimancers held Europe together – she’d caught glimpses of General Kanakia’s maps, saw how thin his lines of defense were spread. She couldn’t kill them. And–
You like Ruth.
Aliyah squeezed prickly thorns, letting the pain distract her. Ruth had taught her these weren’t edible: no thorns, nothing with three leaves, nothing with milky sap…
Fix Page 20