Fix

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Valentine liked imagining the Unimancers working furiously to untangle that dense communication: Paul’s quiet admission he’d needed Valentine to beat him back to sanity, her reassurance that smacking each other down when they went too far was part of their friendship, and all was forgiven.

  Their friendship had never needed words to function.

  “Don’t,” she said. Don’t join ’mancies with them to heal the broach.

  He shook his head. I owe them that much.

  She jerked off an imaginary dick.

  He directed her gaze to the Pakistani woman, the two Italian men. “They’re not NPCs, Valentine. We murdered a hundred and fifty people.”

  “Check your math, Paul. We took out at least seven on the airfield, too. Hell, that first broach back in Long Island? I think we slaughtered twenty.”

  Paul dug his nails into his thighs. “This isn’t funny, Valentine. We fucked up.”

  She held up two fingers. “Two reasons why I’m not losing sleep about that, Paul. I’d feel bad thinking they were mindless husks, if they hadn’t gone out of their way to present themselves as that. They pretend to be a faceless, neutered mass to America so they don’t freak the mundanes – and then they hunted us down, telling the world they plan to erase our minds. What the fuck did they expect us to do?”

  The Unimancers tensed. Hope that fucks with your consensus, she thought.

  Paul nodded, making room for her point. “Your second rationale?”

  “Murdering two hundred people will look like a slumber party once these chuckleheads rip open the broach. They’ll try to use your skills to fix the broach, but these assmunches don’t know how to play nice.”

  Valentine’s guards stepped forward, ready to haul her away – but their eyes glowed with new orders. Aliyah, curious to see what Aunt Valentine would say.

  Paul sighed. “You’re not the easiest to work with. Yet we’ve done great ’mancy together.”

  “Because we compromised! These idiots can’t compromise! The instant they don’t get their way, they break down like a bridezilla!”

  “We both want to seal the broach.”

  “For the wrong reasons! Look, when I beat you up, you had a great plan and terrible intentions. Now she’s got great intentions and a terrible plan. And I’m out of sticks to beat her.”

  “And I do?”

  Her stomach churned. She thought he’d have found a stick by now.

  “Look. Even if I wanted to stop them, there’s no help for miles around. The townspeople are on their side. Maybe I bust broaches again – assuming they don’t knock me out, what’s the end game? You know Aliyah. She won’t stop until I kill her. You think I’ll have the willpower left to seal up rifts after… after I do that?”

  No wonder Aliyah let Paul speak. She knew how beaten her father was. “So devise another plan–”

  “I’m tired of plans.” He closed his eyes and inhaled; Valentine knew he must be remembering the barbecue scent of those burning bodies. “My plans hurt people. Let someone else make the decisions for a change.”

  “They’ve made the decisions for seventy yea–”

  A gloved hand clamped around her shoulder. “It’s time.”

  The guards escorted them out into the cool chill of an autumn morning.

  The sunrise terrified her.

  She’d not paid much attention to the broach when she’d arrived; she’d been too shaken by the mass murder, too busy taking out her guilt on the general, too busy worrying whether Paul would die of exhaustion. But now…

  The sun winked out for periods as it vanished behind shards of that alien sky. When the sun crept behind the demon dimension’s intrusions, the whole sky went dark except for one glowing, white-hot jagged spotlight that shone down on Paul.

  Valentine’s skin crawled. It knew Paul was coming.

  Then the sun crept upwards through the patchwork sky, the light filtered – missing colors, missing gamma rays, missing radiation. Sometimes the light strobed into raindrop-like, flash-camera bursts. Other times, the water in the air crystallized into snowflakes.

  It didn’t make sense. The sun disappearing for a moment shouldn’t transform the whole landscape.

  The demon dimensions had poisoned the land.

  All the while, that Thing slithered between the gaps. Clusters of opalescent eyes bulged through as the Thing pressed its weight upon the rifts, raining down clouds of buzzsects. Sometimes, Paul leaned against a tree to catch his breath, and there would be a splintering crackle like two cows being slammed together, and Valentine would look above to see the Thing had smashed segmented fingers the size of a trailer truck down through the sky, trying desperately to work its way in.

  Could he fight this Thing?

  Guards appeared, towing Imani. They allowed her one silent hug with her husband before dragging her away.

  Then Valentine saw the sixty Unimancers lined up in the flowering field.

  The field was dotted with beautiful blue hydrangeas, even though the autumn frost should have withered them. Something powerful had regrown the woods here – something so good it had almost restored Earth-level physics.

  The flowers smelled like Aliyah’s hair.

  Aliyah and Ruth stood together, hands entwined in the field’s center like blushing brides. Well, brides in black Kevlar uniforms. They smiled at each other shyly, welcoming Paul into the Unimancers’ circle, as though this were a beautiful ceremony and not some desperate attempt at warfare.

  Someone jabbed a stun gun into her spine – a clear warning to stop. Paul took a few steps forward, then noticed Valentine falling behind.

  “May I hug my friend before I start?” he asked.

  The Unimancers hesitated, then allowed Valentine to step forward. She hesitated; Paul’s stiff hugs always felt like she was being seized by some awkward praying mantis.

  He whispered in her ear: “They’ll be distracted at the beginning. Make a run for it. Get back to Robert.”

  She pretended to take solace in his spindly arms. “You’re gonna need me, Paul.”

  “We both know that’s not good for you,” Paul said.

  She hugged him for real. The world was about to end, and all Paul thought about was her.

  Of course she couldn’t leave.

  Paul stepped towards Aliyah’s waiting arms.

  Forty

  Wrong Donut

  Paul felt the pressure of that Thing overhead, like an elephant standing on a cracked glass ceiling. It had gone still, poised somehow, waiting to see what Paul would do next.

  He waved Valentine and Imani back; he could keep himself safe, but didn’t want them caught in a crossfire of warring physics.

  Aliyah reached out to him. Paul felt the Unimancers lining up behind her like a circuit. Once he grasped her hand, they’d probe his thoughts to shape him into a weapon against the broach.

  Paul wanted a donut.

  No, he wanted the right donut.

  And he didn’t know what the right donut was.

  He walked towards Aliyah, a hundred minds joining her with each step, their power focusing on him. Yet all he could think was, You don’t want a Vanilla Kreme.

  It was a ludicrous thought, but Kit was right. Paul had been a conservative cruller man all his life, his tastes expanding to glazed chocolate when he got freaky. A Vanilla Kreme? A sticky frosting grenade? Showering powdered sugar with every bite, filling his belly with empty calories? It was the donut of someone who didn’t care about consequences.

  What else had he acquired a taste for, as the War Bureaucromancer?

  Aliyah wriggled her fingers. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s fix this. Your laws, our strength.”

  He felt broken. An unfit tool to do the job.

  Maybe their strength would heal him.

  Gripping Aliyah’s hand felt like reaching blindly into a donut box, hoping this would be the confection he needed.

  Curious minds stampeded into his body.

  Paul’s muscles spasmed as
his limbs were seized by conflicting signals, strangers barging in to examine the transtibial stump below his right knee, flex the remaining toes on his left foot, inhaling to test his still-healing ribs.

  They jostled his thoughts away, elbowed inside his brain like shoppers on Black Friday when the doors snapped open. They tore open locks to get at his memories, ravenous to ransack their enemy’s secrets. They tossed his memories into a messy heap until he couldn’t remember who the burning girl was or why this one-eyed woman played games or how this beautiful lawyer had kissed him.

  His name dissolved, losing meaning, becoming significant only because a thousand men murmured it – Tsabo it’s Tsabo Paul Tsabo –

  (One faint cry of Daddy before the lone familiar voice was swept away)

  He didn’t mind losing memories. So many were painful.

  But this disorganization would not do.

  This invasion had underpinnings – the hivemind had never thought it had rules. Yet there was something akin to an operating system, some methodology determining who got to speak and when. Paul sought out the rough agreements they’d forged, codified them, restructured the collective so they entered his brain according to a descending order of need–

  What is he doing

  Stop no that’s not our way

  mmmmmaybe the Great Unimancer hivemind consists of people weak enough to get caught?

  The hive mind pounded on Paul’s rule-jail. Paul’s orderliness flowed through them, and as the Unimancers fled they were forced to put each memory back where they’d found it.

  Aliyah what the hell did he do

  It’s OK guys that’s just the first exchange, you went in strong, I told you Daddy had powers

  They retreated, uncertain, jangling. Yet their terror was intoxicating: they saw him as some inhuman instrument of revenge, potent, unstoppable.

  Oh, how Paul wished he was that indomitable.

  Aliyah ran through mansions, yanking open doors containing memories of all the precious things lost to broaches.

  Yet this wasn’t mourning: she emphasized the wrongs they could right with her father in the collective, promising them Daddy would ensure the world kept this beauty.

  Daddy. Show them what to do.

  Thousands rooted for him – ready to wick away his flux, a stadium of cheering supporters funneling strength into whoever they designated as their chosen champion.

  As their champion, he understood what Aliyah found here. He’d always seen Unimancy as a horrendous twisting of magic, squeezing uniqueness into conformity – but through Aliyah’s eyes, he saw how they’d created a caring paradise to share with each other, and oh God, Paul was happy to find magic was always gorgeous at its heart.

  It had been a solitary pleasure, healing broaches – like rearranging books. And he’d been precariously slow in Morehead, the buzzsects knocking down a book whenever he’d replaced one.

  Bastogne was a library of books lying broken-backed on the floor, with hundreds of snot-nosed children ready to pull the shelves down.

  Yet the collective held thousands of librarians at his beck and call.

  He could heal the broach with them.

  But where to begin?

  He reached out tentatively, probing the extent of the damage. Everything out here was broken, the rules shifting with each footstep. The sky was a mismatched jigsaw puzzle. There were a thousand places to mend the landscape, but…

  He wanted to reclaim one square inch.

  Which felt so foolish.

  He was certain he could restore one square inch to full beauty – yet if it was like Morehead, that inch would take days to undo the subtle fractures. One microzone of Earth-perfect laws, a tiny diamond of precision.

  It would shine like a jewel.

  Things were so ruined, it would take him days to create a space the size of an ice cube. Yet he imagined the satisfaction of repairing the land with a watchmaker’s fastidiousness, then planting that idealized version of Earth in the demon-rifts like a seed, unfolding into a space so pure no broach could grow in it…

  Cold funerals filled Paul’s memories. Messy deaths replayed in his brain – all the Unimancers who’d sacrificed themselves to hold the broach back. The collective’s rage rose within him.

  A reparation they could fit within a drinking glass was insufficient revenge.

  You have power, Ruth told him. Use it!

  I can’t, Paul said. The last time I used power like that, I…

  You thought to go to war with me? Me?! When bureaucracy is the language of war!

  He felt so ashamed, bellowing threats like some tin-pot dictator. Yet it had been so comforting to worry about nothing but his daughter, to look out at men he’d maimed and feel satisfaction, that Vanilla Kreme disregard…

  We want that

  Paul scowled. What?

  We could never stop you, the hivemind told him. Our might meant nothing. But you’re with us now – use our might to disembowel that Thing…

  Paul remembered living men torn apart – but through the Unimancers, those hundred and fifty dead became his audition.

  They had no need for a meek man who crouched beneath a broken sky and chipped out a sample.

  They needed the War Bureaucromancer.

  And hadn’t that been his error? He’d wasted years nudging American lawmakers into doing the moral thing, when all he’d accomplished had been wiped away in one bad headline.

  When he’d been the War Bureaucromancer, he’d been as merciless as a bullet.

  The Unimancers encouraged him: Yes. Yes. Think larger.

  Paul summoned his ’mancy, feeling the pleasure as his thoughts snapped into alignment with the Unimancers, trying to recall the certainty he’d felt as he stepped out of that burning crater. What would the War Bureaucromancer do?

  Whatever the world needed to battle that Thing in the sky.

  What had God said when He’d created the universe?

  Let there be light.

  Forty-One

  Snap Back to Reality, Whoops, There Goes Gravity

  Paul filled his body with light – not trivial illumination, but the concepts of light.

  He felt photon-cascades rocketing down from outer space, plunging through the atmosphere, ricocheting off trees.

  He felt gravity’s subtle flow tugging straight-lined photons into slender arcs that barely bent as they soared across continents.

  He fused with the collective’s understanding to fathom the electromagnetic spectrum’s great sweep – the knife-like sprinkle of gamma rays, infrared’s warm radiation, the shriek of radio waves…

  A million laws had to converge to create light. Paul envisioned the universe as a great terrarium, and light itself as this fragile creature that could be extinguished if any of those factors failed – had failed, in the demon dimensions.

  He ordered the collective to gather the laws into one great sword, raising it high above the Earth. He formed his awareness into a sharp edge to punch Earth-style physics deep into the demon dimensions – a reverse broach.

  A better world, he thought, exhaling.

  The Unimancers could only do Unimancy; their low tide of debate quashed the certainty a ’mancer needed. They tried to hold him back, protesting bureaucracy wasn’t what drove the universe…

  Paul swept their objections aside. The universe was governed by regulations, orderly laws that controlled the spin of atoms.

  All universes should be so governed.

  And as the Unimancers fell into place behind him, Paul would make the demon dimensions orderly.

  No wonder Aliyah had been so potent in here. Most of the captured Unimancers had been caught after their first ’mancy generated enough bad luck to call SMASH down on their heads. Whereas Paul had followed his unique obsession for years, every act of ’mancy reinforcing his viewpoint until he was incapable of viewing the world through anything but the lens of forms, laws, and regulations.

  He loaded his surety onto the collective until thei
r willpower broke. They’d been starved of victory for decades, needed it so badly they’d agree with anyone who promised triumph.

  They organized underneath his guidance, forming ranks, chains of command, communications protocols.

  He reached up into the heavens to slam Light into the broken sky.

  The dimensional collage overhead shivered, edges blurring as they fused into one unified whole. The chunks glowed a fiery orange as the light fought its way through, like glass heating in an oven–

  Warm yellow sunlight flooded down across the field.

  For the first time in years, the sky over Bastogne was a clear, unbroken blue.

  Sixty-seven Unimancers gasped.

  There was no time to luxuriate; light was their first beachhead. The sun illuminated battalions of unthinkable beasts that chewed up light and shat alien ideas.

  He swept his hands up like a conductor, commanded the Unimancers to send the second wave crashing in.

  Paul took the wedge he’d driven into the demon dimensions and poured all the rules Earth had to offer into it: gravity, mass, conservation of energy. He instructed the hivemind’s scientists to find whatever crevices still ran on fragments of antiquated Earth rules and use them as anchor points.

  The sky shuddered. Paul had turned classical physics into a virus, infecting demon dimensions in the ways the broach infected ours. He had to nourish these thin roots back to life…

  Except what remained of Earth within the broach was dead scar tissue.

  Paul bombarded the broach with Gravity and Time, resuscitating the fragments of Earth that had survived over the past seventy years. The scant microphysics he could nurture bloomed into odd variants – zones where the gravity-to-mass ratio skewed heavy, where the Bohr radius rounded down to five.

  He tended to these mutant strains of Earth – but they rebelled at his touch, collapsing into chaos.

  You wanted to spend weeks forming one miniscule perfection, he thought. He wished he had. If he’d done that instead of charging in, he would have discovered the broach was broken beyond repair. The broach was so wrecked all the ’mancers in the world could not restore it and