The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Lenny looked at the fully-stocked garage, the four mechanics, the total absence of anything resembling a Flex lab. He frowned in confusion. Paul almost felt sorry for him; Lenny hadn’t had much success since he’d been promoted to second-in-command of the NYPD Task Force.

  “I’m just–” Paul said, then coughed when he realized he still spoke in his own voice. Fortunately, the projectile vomiting had roughened his usual tones, so Paul adopted a fake German accent. “I’m chust a mechanic. I bought ze shop two months ago…”

  That was all Paul could get out before he dry-heaved again.

  He hoped Lenny would buy it. Lenny had to. Paul’s head spun like a Tilt-a-Whirl, making it impossible to summon more ’mancy. If Lenny decided to haul them all in for questioning, Paul’s fake ID would hold up, but the hastily assembled driver’s licenses he’d given to Valentine, K-Dash, and Quaysean would fall apart once they got booked.

  But Paul knew that Lenny hated looking bad in front of other people.

  Lenny stomped into the auto repair shop to investigate. Puzzled, he kicked one of the hoist’s steel beams experimentally, then looked around for evidence of Flex-making equipment. There was none; Valentine had sold it all off.

  A smarter man would have scoured the garage, knowing ’mancy could do bizarre things – and would have discovered the cooler full of Flex and the $150,000 in the lockers in short order. But Paul knew that Lenny, sweating, must have been thinking of the press that would come down upon him for a false bust, the potential lawsuits over assaulting a small businessman over an anonymous tip.

  And Lenny, as noted, had no ability to improvise.

  He hurled his helmet at one of his subordinates.

  “You dumb fucker!” He stepped over Paul’s still-zip-tied form to get to his fellow officer. “You got the King’s address wrong!”

  “I got nothing wrong!” The officer thrust out a Post-It note. “I had him repeat it! Patziki’s Garage, 584 W Lark Street.”

  “Well, the name on the sign says Galuschak’s Garage!” Paul allowed himself a grin; one of Valentine’s touches. A risky thing to do with the Task Force’s black opal ’mancy-detectors parked outside the door.

  “But this is 584 West Lark Street.”

  Lenny grabbed the paper, crumpled it. “Has the King ever given us a bad lead?”

  “No, sir. But we don’t know a thing about him. We don’t even know how he gets his tips. Maybe he’s just… wrong.”

  Lenny fumed. Paul knew why: the King was Lenny’s only reliable information. If the King had started fucking up, then Lenny was dead in the water.

  Valentine chuckled, then moaned thanks to the gas-induced migraine. Paul shushed her – even whispering sent shooting pains down his neck – but inwardly, he whooped with elation. If they could escape the cops and cast doubt on the anonymous King of New York in the process, then this would be a red-letter day.

  Paul gurgled, affecting the same German accent. “I bought ze shop two months ago… check my records…”

  “You phone that in?” Lenny asked a cop sitting in the cop car, running traces.

  The cop held up Paul’s faked driver’s license. “His ID checks out, sir. Lenny, I think…”

  “You don’t tell me what to think,” Lenny snapped. He grabbed Paul by the scruff of his mechanic’s outfit to haul him to his feet – or tried to. Lenny was almost as skinny as Paul, and couldn’t quite manage it, so a fellow officer rushed in to help. Despite his chubby reskinning, Paul still weighed a hundred and sixty pounds – but Lenny was so furious, neither of them noticed.

  “All right, you motherfucker.” Spit flecks flew off of Lenny’s wispy mustache, landed on Paul’s pseudo-skinned cheeks. “You say you’re a mechanic. And these guys think you’re a mechanic. So… I’m gonna let you go back to work, because I’m generous that way. But if I ever find any – any! – evidence of you harboring a ’mancer, especially that Psycho Mantis videogamemancer, I will rip you a new asshole and piss in the slit.”

  Over the chopper’s dull roar, Paul made out a mechanical chunk-chunk-chunk videogame noise coming from the garage.

  But Valentine got rid of the Pac-Man machine, he thought, dazed.

  Then: Valentine’s wards have dropped.

  “You have to get out of here,” he muttered.

  “You don’t give me orders. I give you orders.”

  “No.” Paul tried to summon his ’mancy; the piercing headache smothered it. “Evacuate now, while you can….”

  Lenny shook Paul. “If you’re holding back information, you dumb motherfucker, I will–”

  The twin bays of the auto repair shop filled with flame, looking for all the world like the nostrils of some great and terrible dragon.

  “What–?” Lenny said, puzzled.

  The cops turned, readying their guns, but it was too late. Several bowling ball-sized wads of fire, like miniature suns, came bouncing out of the entryway, searing straight through the metal of the cop cars–

  Lenny Pirrazzini flung his body over Paul’s to protect him. The patrol vehicles clustered outside went up with an ear-splitting whump.

  Fortunately, the flame balls shot low, sending the explosions straight upwards. The helicopters juked left to avoid the obliterated cop cars, their rotors sucking up great columns of burning smoke.

  The Task Force was in chaos now, some firing into the garage, some checking in with the other cops, others grabbing more tear gas. Lenny examined Paul for injuries.

  “What’s going on?” Lenny was shell-shocked, trying to shield the civilian. “What is that?”

  The ground rumbled. The flames in the burning garage roared, parting to reveal a tiny silhouette, maybe four feet high, wearing an inexplicably jaunty cap with wild tangles of hair stuffed underneath. A little black girl, dressed in a Super Mario outfit complete with blue overalls and puffy white gloves, strode out – a look that might have been ludicrous, if she hadn’t been weaving another sphere of fiery plasma between her hands.

  Paul remembered the first time he’d watched her become Fire Mario, the first time Aliyah had ever killed a person, and wished with all his heart Valentine had never introduced her to that damn game.

  The girl’s words were a quavering shriek of betrayal, of long-dampened fury finally given voice:

  “You hurt my Daddy!” Aliyah cried, and flung flaming death straight at Lenny Pirrazzini.

  Three

  I Am Become Mario, Destroyer of Worlds

  Lenny leapt off Paul, the fireball missing him by inches – but the heat still blistered Lenny’s skin. The fireball bounced down West Lark Street, leaving bubbling cauldrons of asphalt behind.

  The remaining cops – some had already bolted – regrouped behind the smoldering wreckage of a car, tossing nerve-gas grenades over the top in Aliyah’s direction. They didn’t dare make themselves a target – but the two copters did, whirling around to bring their snipers to point in Aliyah’s direction.

  She’s an eight year-old girl, Paul thought, horrified – but the cops didn’t realize that.

  Every act of death and destruction I made will rob someone of something they loved, Anathema, insane and powerful Anathema, had told Paul as she held the spear to his throat. It will cause someone, many someones, to retreat into misery. Withdrawal. Obsession. ’Mancy.

  Anathema had burned his daughter as part of an experiment to create ’mancers all across New York. ’Mancers’ obsessions usually didn’t solidify into magic until they were in their late twenties at the earliest, a lifetime’s worth of mania congealing into universe-contorting willpower.

  But touched by Anathema’s ’mancy, Aliyah had become a ’mancer at the unthinkable age of six.

  I said burn! Aliyah had shrieked, as she’d roasted Anathema alive for daring to hurt her father. ’Mancers burn! Bad people burn! All the bad things in the universe burn!

  Two years after, her rage at a world that wanted to kill her father had never ebbed.

  So the cops did not see a littl
e black girl. They saw a videogamemancer who could reskin herself into any identity at a moment’s notice, someone who slipped effortlessly between Psycho Mantis and Tommy Vercetti and Ryu and a thousand other videogame characters.

  More importantly… they saw ’mancy. And when most people saw ’mancy, they stomped it dead.

  Paul grabbed Lenny by the ankle; the sudden movement sent sloshing waves of pain up his neck. “You have to...” He coughed, remembering his German accent, then held up his cuff zipties. “You must cut me loose. Before she hurts someone.”

  “I think she’s the one who’s going to get hurt, pal.” Lenny looked at the copters.

  “She doesn’t want to kill!” Paul pleaded. “But if you back her into a corner, she’ll – she’ll...”

  The snipers fired.

  Aliyah flicked her fingers in their direction; the bullets vaporized in mid shot, bursting into sprays of white-hot fireworks.

  She spun in a circle, taking in the nerve gas canisters hissing around her, the cops closing in. No one paid attention to her burn-scarred face, not between the bright red cap and the leaping flames. But Paul saw Aliyah’s puffed cheeks as the forces closed in, the confused look of a scared little girl about to throw a temper tantrum.

  This tantrum would kill cops.

  “I said get out!” Aliyah shrieked, “Get away from him! He can’t protect himself, but I can!”

  The choppers swooped low, angling for a better shot among the flames. Aliyah reached improbably deep into her pocket to pull out a bright yellow pencil as large as a baseball bat.

  Aliyah grabbed it; a large tan banner unfurled out. She wrote on the banner, her handwriting a panicked schoolgirl’s scribble:

  Large Air Vent

  I introduced her to gaming, Valentine had told him, but she’s developed her own tastes: Animal Crossing, Scribblenauts…

  And just as in Scribblenauts, writing the word caused a gigantic air vent to pop into existence. Except in the game, the objects you created when you typed were cartoonish, adorable: this was a black wrought-iron creation, sharp and seething with tetanus. It howled, a fetid hurricane blowing the gas back towards the cops.

  Is that what Aliyah’s imagining these days? Paul wondered, grateful he’d never allowed her to play M-rated games….

  The snipers waved to the copters to get closer to the ground; the pilots steered in, setting up the shot. Aliyah whipped out another tan banner to write on, except this time were the words:

  Black Hole

  “No!” Valentine screamed, then vomited Vanilla Kreme.

  The gas whirled into a pulsing void that opened up between the two copters, sucking in the firelight’s flickering brightness so the entire street dimmed like polarized sunglasses. Both copters got yanked towards the hole, as abruptly as a drunk being hauled away from the bar by a bouncer.

  “Jump!” Valentine shrieked at the pilots. “Touch that shit, and you won’t leave bodies for us to bury!”

  Paul couldn’t be sure whether the pilots had heard her – but they bailed out regardless, eager to flee that roiling nothingness. Pilots down from the sky, landing with bonebreaking thuds on the parking lot’s hard asphalt.

  The copters bumped against the hole, then crumpled in midair as they contorted to fit through a space the size of a washing machine.

  The pilots twitched. Thank God; they were alive. Aliyah hadn’t killed anyone new today: just Anathema, still, and Paul knew that one murder was more than Aliyah could bear.

  He started breathing again.

  “You’re bullies!” Aliyah stepped towards the injured pilots, gouts of flame dancing between her fingers. “He’s helpless! You think every ’mancer is... is powerful, but some aren’t! All you do is pick on people who can’t fight back! Make us ashamed of stuff that’s not even our fault! And someone–”

  She sobbed, looking at the remaining cops setting up to fire at her again. Her dark eyes went wide with sorrow.

  “Someone has to stop you,” she whispered, and raised her hand to incinerate them.

  “Cut me loose!” Paul screamed. The old man pseudo-flesh housing his body hadn’t so much blistered as half melted. Lenny stared at Paul’s runnelled fake skin in horror.

  Paul dropped the pretense. “I’m trying to help you, Lenny.”

  Lenny cocked his head, examining Paul. “…Your Majesty?”

  Paul almost contradicted Lenny – he wasn’t the King, nobody knew what the King looked like, the King had been out to get him for months. And to call some anonymous informant “Your Majesty” was a terrifyingly asskissing move for a municipal cop.

  …But whatever it took to get Lenny listening.

  “Yes, Mr Pirrazzini. Zis is ze King. And if you do not cut me loose, you vill all die.”

  German accents, Paul found, were fantastically good for delivering death threats.

  “All right.” Lenny whipped out a twelve-inch knife – far too large to be practical, but traditionally Lenny – and sawed Paul’s cuffs open. “I’ve trusted you this far, sir. But – I need to know who you’re working for…”

  “Go.” Paul clambered to his feet as Lenny retreated. Aliyah’s face squinched up as she grabbed at her head. The cops had dug in deep, ignoring Lenny’s cries to unload full-automatic gunfire on Aliyah, the bullets bursting into fireworks as they bounced off Aliyah’s videogame shields…

  …the flux…

  Paul staggered towards Aliyah, feeling the pressure rising around her. Paul had sat down on Sad Sundays and forced her to do tiny spells, holding her flux for as long as possible before bleeding off the bad luck with stubbed toes and head colds. Driven by panic, Aliyah had done all this ’mancy – vulgar ’mancy, sloppy ’mancy, vast acts of destruction the universe could not overlook. And…

  …Tears streamed down Aliyah’s molten cheeks, evaporating into clouds of steam. She hated all these men, the men who’d hurt her daddy… she didn’t want to kill them. Not yet. She would want to, in time, if Paul couldn’t find a better way to teach her…

  But for now, Aliyah was still a good kid.

  A good kid stuck in a war zone.

  “Sweetie!”

  Aliyah turned to face him, somehow recognizing him even trapped in this stupid Galuschak-skin. Seeing his fear triggered hers. She’d done so much ’mancy that she was carrying a near-fatal load – and there were so many things that could go wrong now. A bullet would break through her shields, and when it did it wouldn’t just kill her, oh no – that bullet would sever her spine at the worst possible location, leave her trapped in a comatose shell for the rest of her life, aware and paralyzed…

  “Daddy!” Aliyah cried, reaching out to her father to save her.

  And under normal circumstances, nothing could save her. ’Mancers had tried their best to hand their flux off to other people, to push it away, but no; you had assaulted the universe’s laws, and the universe would only accept your bad luck as payment. The bullets would find their mark, taking their toll for Aliyah’s careless use of power, and Aliyah would be the youngest ’mancer-suicide.

  Except Paul was a bureaucromancer.

  Paul was her father.

  Paul was her legal fucking guardian.

  Paul flipped his hand open. A contract unfurled from his palm – and the sick wash of the nerve gas pushed back, filling his body with ’mancy-suppressing queasiness.

  But his daughter’s life was at stake. Again.

  The contract was a million words of legalese, too much to read, yet it all boiled down to this:

  Universe, I have the right to take my daughter’s pain.

  He stabbed himself with a Bic pen, raining blood spatters down onto the paper – the oldest and most binding of signatures.

  The universe scanned the contract, found no loopholes. The pressure lifted from Aliyah, who sucked in a great whoop of air, then turned and blew up another police car, sending the squad’s remnants fleeing. Lenny waved them back, directing them to fall back to the abandoned mall across the stree
t.

  The flux squeezed Paul, hunting for the worst things in his life that could go wrong. But Paul had prepared his answer long before Aliyah had shown up:

  The cooler. In the auto repair shop. Burn it.

  The flux siphoned out away; the auto repair roof caved in, sending the glowing embers of Paul’s borrowed cash flying high into the night air. Two million dollars’ worth of Flex burned up, the crystals popping in dazzling blue twinkles. They dissolved into wisps, along with all the remaining good grace of mob boss Oscar Gargunza Ruiz.

  Aliyah had been profligate. It wasn’t enough.

  Paul collapsed as the flux slithered off somewhere else, following its own pathways, pushing bad luck into an uncertain future…

  Aliyah pressed her palm to Paul’s forehead to make sure he was OK. She looked over at K-Dash and Quaysean, still in their mechanic white-boy skins. They’d grabbed guns, firing over the heads of the retreating cops.

  A pixelated aura of ’mancy surrounding Aliyah soared after Lenny Pirrazzini and the retreating cops…

  Paul grabbed her foot. “Stop.”

  She plunked back down to the ground. Aliyah looked at him in disbelief, her near-dreadlocked hair poking out from under her Mario cap.

  “Daddy, you’re sick.” She cupped his face, frowning at what the gas had done to him. “They want to kill you. I’m not always here to protect you. They have to burn.”

  “We can’t kill them. They’re just…”

  Just what? Paul wondered. Doing their jobs? What kind of explanation was that to give to his daughter – that all the people in the world who wanted to trap and brainwash her were just following orders?

  “…they don’t understand,” he finished lamely.

  “How can I show them?” she cried. “I can’t show anyone what I do at school! I can’t tell my teachers! I can’t even show Mommy, or she’d lock me away!”

  Paul felt a stab of guilt. Probably lock you away, he almost corrected her, but swallowed it back. His ex-wife Imani loved Aliyah as fiercely as Paul did, but they’d never seen eye to eye on the proper way to raise her. Imani’s hatred of ’mancy had been the finishing blow to a harsh marriage.