Fix

by Ferrett Steinmetz

why do you fight

  She was beating them she was beating the monsters, that was the irony. She’d melded her videogames, herding the monsters into Pac-Man mazes and sliding around corners on Sub-Zero’s ice sheets to flip over them like Zelda and sneak up on them like Solid Snake and…

  Valentine tumbled into the burning sky.

  She’d taken apart Its armada, taking out 30% of Its forces, maybe 40% on a lucky run.

  She was also dying, over and over, and each death was

  Valentine tumbled into the burning sky.

  Maybe she’d always fought. Maybe she’d never experienced anything but this fight. Maybe those memories of muscular hugs and a broad back were a hallucination she’d made up because she’d never experienced anything except this endless series of eviscerations.

  Valentine tumbled into

  And with each fight, she became convinced her life had been an illusion. She’d never been anything but the wrecking ball. She’d never been anything but a character in a videogame, and her reward for finishing the game would be some dumb kid turning off the console.

  why do you fight

  Why did she?

  Valentine tumbled into

  why do you FIGHT

  There was no reward except the GAME OVER screen, a flash of emptiness before her flux blanked the world, and

  Valentine

  days she’d been fighting weeks she’d been fighting years she no longer knew

  burning

  all this fighting and she had nothing she had nothing

  Valentine!

  and this time when the game started she didn’t move she let the buzzsects devour her left arm she let them chew the color from her hair she let them take her and

  VALENTINE!

  she knew that voice

  * * *

  The horse had collapsed; the Unimancers swaddled it in wet blankets. Imani stood shocked by the madman who’d galloped out of the woods on a stolen mare.

  Robert knelt, cradling the shattered Nintendo in his hands with the tenderness of a man cupping his lover’s face, staring deep into the wrecked screens.

  “Valentine,” he whispered, and stroked the plastic case like he was stroking her hair.

  * * *

  “…Robert?”

  Something ruffled her hair – the first tender touch she could remember. Even though her stomach was a breeding ground for buzzsects, that touch filled her body with adoration.

  valentine. The voice fuzzed at the edges like a blown speaker, malfunctioning technology on its last legs–

  –but it was Robert.

  No one else could speak three syllables and make her feel so loved.

  As the buzzsects chewed her body away, Valentine thumbed the reload button.

  The world went blank.

  She hovered, trapped in a loading screen.

  “Is that you?” she whispered.

  it’s me

  She closed her good eye. Tears flowed down her cheek.

  Robert was real.

  He was real.

  “I thought…” She choked back tears, hating sounding so weak. “I thought you weren’t coming back…”

  i lied

  Her laugh was nearly a cough – but it was proof she could laugh, and that felt better than anything.

  i heard you were in trouble i had to steal a map of europe and steal a plane and learn to ride a horse but i'm here

  His quiet strength, flowing through that broken channel. Her breath was ragged, shocky, on the verge of breakdown; her hands trembled.

  Robert loved her.

  He knew what a fucked-up mess she was, and he loved her.

  Robert said nothing, listening, filling the air with his attentiveness.

  what do you need baby

  “I…” Valentine stiffened, fists clenching. “I…”

  tell me

  “I need…”

  what

  “I NEED YOU, GODDAMMIT!”

  And Valentine exploded out of the reload screen, cleaving through the hordes like an avenging angel, sweeping aside buzzsects, sundering razorplows.

  “FUUUUCK!” she screamed, furious and embarrassed; her voice thundered across the heavens as she fought to get back to the man she loved. And the earth could explode and the universe could shatter and everything could burn in flames so long as she got to feel her Robert in her arms one last fucking time.

  Selfish, beautiful, unhindered need fueled Valentine’s final rebellion.

  why do you fight the Thing said, and she slammed megatons of power down its throat, scouring unthinkable beasts away in waves of white fire, and she pointed down at Robert, at Paul, at Aliyah–

  “I FIGHT FOR THE PEOPLE I LOVE!” And even then, she could not quite bring herself to say she needed to be with the people she loved, but she knew her need at last.

  As the Thing roared in protest, she poured everything into one last burst of skill.

  She’d spent the last ten days scouting techniques to destroy her enemy – and now she executed her plans to perfection. She slammed down blue walls to sweep through them as a frilly-bowed Ms Pac-Man gulped down their energy, organized buzzsects into formations to pick them off with Galaga shots, hopped onto her Tron-cycle to weave barriers between razorplows, turned into Kirby to vacuum up the pustulents.

  She stepped into their dimensions, trailing her own mishmash of videogame logic, becoming the monster that monsters feared because when she won the game she would go home she got to go home, and when Robert was her goal there was no enemy she could not destroy.

  She herded the remaining monsters into one place – and slammed her finger onto the Defender Smart Bomb button, detonating every last one.

  Valentine scoured the gateway clean of everything but the Thing itself.

  “Baby,” she whispered, telling her man she’d triumphed – but she was miles up in the stratosphere. She only picked out Robert’s tiny dot among the mountain range because he’d gathered together the smoking shards of her Nintendo DS.

  He loved her.

  He loved her.

  Valentine fell into a deep and blissful serenity, the madness that fueled her ’mancy quelled, the wind whipping past as she fell backwards into dreams.

  She never noticed the flux-inferno erupting from her body, freed at last once the cycle had completed, black flames trailing behind her like an annihilating comet. The flux pressed in around her, demanding what she feared–

  –but Valentine was so at peace, it found nothing to latch onto.

  The Thing lunged forward to grab the flux.

  Unconscious, Valentine tumbled from the burning sky.

  Fifty-Three

  All the President’s Women

  Officially, the world leaders had called an emergency summit to confer about the European broach’s growing instabilities.

  That had been a cover story mapped out long in advance. The heads of state were actually bunkered in Australia’s western end, on the opposite side of the world from the broach, waiting to see if the world would end.

  The President had prepared as best she could for this day: several drafts of speeches had been written to cover outcomes ranging from “total success” to “abject failure.” General Kanakia had warned them not to be near any Unimancer, as their efforts to contain the broach might cause an “overflow” – whatever that meant – so various security teams had combined to ensure they were fifty miles away from any Unimancer. The Emergency Broadcast system was prepped in case the dead zone over Europe widened.

  She’d hoped this day would never arrive. Or, at least, that it wouldn’t arrive on her watch.

  On the way here, she’d done a test reading of the “humanity is about to be extinguished” speech, and had thrown up afterwards.

  It had been a good speech. They’d had years to work on it. Every President had to approve the annihilation speech presented to them the day they took office – a brutal induction ceremony to remind them there were some things even Presidents coul
d not control.

  The other world leaders had gathered in the briefing chamber. Some were newly elected, wondering why they’d been put in charge just as things skidded into shit; others had been dictators for decades, chewing out their aides to take out their frustrations.

  They all looked frustrated, afraid, tense. Each had armies at their disposal. Aircraft carriers. Nukes.

  Nothing would help against a broach. Classified files had demonstrated what happened when an experimental nuclear explosion had tried to seal a broach in the late 1940s, and the results hadn’t been pretty.

  The President, like all world leaders, loathed ’mancy – and not just because it caused messes. No, the worst thing about ’mancy was that only ’mancers could fix those messes. Paul Tsabo had demonstrated some new power that altered the broach – a power that held potential to heal or exacerbate it.

  If SMASH and Paul Tsabo couldn’t fix the problem, then no one could.

  Magic forced even the most power mad tyrant to admit fallibility.

  Worse, she couldn’t tell anyone. “Everyone might die tomorrow” would not be soothed by the addendum of “in a worst-case scenario.” It had been agreed decades ago that should the broach go critical, no announcements would be made until they could ensure panicked riots would be their least concerns.

  Her staff had been on edge since General Kanakia had broken the news. It was hard, sending them home to their grandchildren. You couldn’t negotiate with the broach, you couldn’t science it away, you could just… hope.

  They hadn’t even let her bring her family. This was a small bunker, meant for Armageddon.

  So they’d been holed up, guards relaying information from distant Unimancers – their only reliable information source, since radio signals degraded over broach areas – seeing if the problem would improve.

  “Ms President,” the Chief of Staff said. “Reports are, the Unimancers have gone dark.”

  She polished off her Scotch. “All right. It’s go time.”

  “But…”

  “But what?”

  The Chief of Staff drew the President’s attention to the banks of satellite feeds overhead.

  The President leaned forward, watching something hideous emerge from the broach in five-second snapshotted updates.

  “Is that… is that Thing visible from space?” she asked.

  The world leaders gripped their seats, hoping their children would live to see tomorrow.

  Fifty-Four

  Trying Hard to Be the Shepherd

  Paul felt Valentine’s flux before he saw it – a dull implosion that rumbled through his bones, wilted the flowers in Aliyah’s grove.

  Then the sun snuffed out.

  Valentine’s flux swept across the sky like a volcanic eruption, searching for anything to go wrong – Valentine had collapsed at the end of her battle, giving the flux no time to hunt for her fears, and no one else was nearby for it to latch onto. It rippled through the atmosphere, a predatory storm…

  Paul hadn’t finished writing the Contract.

  And as the flux brushed against the jagged fragments of demon dimensions protruding into our space, it set off a chain reaction. Broach after broach after broach went off like fireworks as Valentine’s flux undid the fragile threads of reality. The broaches crisscrossed, overlapped, shredding space until a mountainous white hole punched through to our world.

  A thousand wet holes irised open within the Thing, bellowing triumph.

  Paul’s jaw slackened as he took in the Thing in its fullness – its armada had been annihilated, but its curving spines stabbed arcs through conventional geometry. His eyeballs throbbed, and Paul felt his neurons’ inadequacy – this tiny cluster of organic material between his ears couldn’t process the billions of ways this Thing casually violated all his assumptions about life.

  His limbs seized up as Paul’s mind spiraled into the Thing’s bulging nests of veins. The Thing hissed out sporous eyeball-clouds to see what It invaded. It wedged bulbous pseudopods into the gap, pushed a seesaw head through–

  “Dad!” Aliyah shouted. “Kick its ass!”

  As though all he needed was encouragement to defeat it.

  What he needed was a Contract, and there was no time left to write one.

  Paul squared his shoulders – the temptation was to hold his daughter tight and shield her from the truth. Let her die surprised, rather than watching despair consume her.

  But…

  Help me be the guardian.

  Paul held up the legal pad, showing the scant few paragraphs he’d written before the sky had burst open. “I can’t, Aliyah – the Contract’s not finished–”

  “What do you need?”

  The apocalypse was crashing down on his daughter’s doorstep, and she demanded data to form plans. Her mother would be proud. “I was… I was going to redistribute Valentine’s flux to buy us time–”

  “Time for what?”

  “To drive it back. If we could drive It back into the demon dimensions, I can fix this. But I need a Contract to redistribute her flux among the Unimancers–”

  “I don’t.”

  Aliyah stood at attention, looking at the blackfire chaos as though she could snatch it from the sky.

  But all Paul saw was a thirteen year-old girl standing in the way of a hurricane.

  “Aliyah…” He stammered; each word brought him closer to a future he could not bear. “I’d have to pour her flux into you – enough bad luck that the slightest doubt would annihilate you. And you’d have to use that flux to drive that Thing back.”

  “If I buy you time, can you finish the job?”

  Paul wanted to say I haven’t tested my theory yet.

  But if he doubted his plans, so would she. And the flux would destroy her.

  “I can win,” he told her. “I can win if you drive it back.”

  She cracked her knuckles, tilting her head back to take in the Thing’s immensity. The Thing extended bladed tendrils, reaching for the still-massive flux clouds billowing through the air. Opening the broaches above Bastogne hadn’t dimmed Valentine’s flux one bit.

  The black cloud of fatal luck swept across the horizon, shattering ridges as it touched the ground, vacuuming up rubble, splintering forests.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  Paul remembered her trapped in a soot-choked apartment, her lungs sizzling as she breathed in superheated air. He remembered the nurses intubating her, her crisped skin sticking to the stretcher, the scent of burning hair.

  He remembered watching his daughter die.

  for you it is always fire

  But she had been a little girl then, caught in an accident. She hadn’t chosen to be there when the gas main went up. Paul wondered if he could have borne it better if Aliyah had risked the fire to save someone’s life.

  Help me be their guardian.

  Paul imagined his daughter not as a victim, but as the fireman.

  He tore off the half-written Contract, scribbled a new one.

  Aliyah Tsabo-Dawson agrees to take on her father’s flux debt.

  Simple. A family matter. No legalese, just a straightforward transfer.

  He held out the pen to her, the pad trembling. But Aliyah glared the Thing down as though she’d found something beautiful.

  Which he supposed she had.

  She’d found her purpose.

  “I got this,” she assured him.

  Paul was not at all sure they had this. But he reached up with his ’mancy, using the rights of salvage to claim Valentine’s stray flux.

  Fifty-Five

  Listen

  A tornado of accidents barreled down from above, slipping out from underneath the Thing’s contorted limbs and into Daddy. Dreadful permutations poured into him, the pressure growing until Daddy’s bones creaked…

  The contract glowed a cathode-ray green.

  The flux erupted from her father, fountaining from his body into the legal paper.

  Keep your minds blank,
she told the Unimancers. Here it comes…

  The flux smashed into Aliyah like a freight train, sending her flying backwards as Daddy screamed–

  The flux raked her skin, demanding to know what she loved, interrogating her with physical blows as it tried to rattle loose anything Aliyah feared, a tempest of hatred determined to destroy something…

  Daddy has this, she thought, ignoring the pain as she tumbled across the rocky soil. I buy him time, he fixes this, we win.

  Yet the flux was too much. An ocean of anger poured into her. Blood gushed from her nose; flux stomped her into Bastogne’s soil, her bones flexing…

  A small woman in China absorbed the flux for her.

  The flux slapped Aliyah’s cheeks, howling, furious – Valentine had tricked the universe for ten days straight, someone had to pay, the payment had to be personal, and Aliyah’s hands quivered as the universe demanded to know why she had such faith in her father, and…

  A burly man in Mozambique took her pain away.

  The vehement cyclone roared down into her – but time after time, just as Aliyah was sure she’d burst, someone else in the Unimancers stepped in to fill themselves with stolen flux – a transgender man in Mexico, a polyamorous triad in Iowa, a Yemen soldier…

  The Unimancers distributed this catastrophic tide among them, each man teeming to capacity with more flux than anyone in history had generated. Unimancers across the globe spasmed as tattered black clouds leapt across continents to flow into them.

  A flicker of doubt would unleash this planet-shattering power loose in Mozambique or Mexico or Madagascar. But the Unimancers tuned into Aliyah’s twin faiths:

  She believed in her father.

  She believed in her Unimancer sisters.

  All the rage in the world would not budge her from that serene grace, and the Unimancers held fast to her certainty.

  Seven thousand strong joined up to share in the universe’s savage anger at what Valentine had done. Even the neglected ones had come back to the hivemind – she felt Yoder, promising Aliyah he would be strong as stone.