The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  He hugged her anyway.

  “Good choice for lunch, I think.” She brushed off her dress, picked up the menu. “Though I’m going to win this time.”

  “Who says I’ll let you?”

  She rolled her eyes; between that and her coiffured mop of hair, the gesture reminded Paul very much of Aliyah. “You’ll let me.”

  He chafed at her announcement, but knew he would let her.

  She picked out her meal, then crossed her hands across her lap, politely; table manners ran deep in the Dawson family. But that worn, sorrowful look had returned to her face.

  “So.” She whispered so the waiter couldn’t hear her. “Does she still hate me, Paul?”

  “She doesn’t hate you, Imani. She’s just... she’s a very confused girl right now.”

  She clutched her fingers once, twice, as if trying to grip something to calm her nerves. “She hasn’t answered my calls in ten days.”

  Paul cringed. Aliyah had been caught up in playing with the other ’mancers, she’d done ’mancy all day and crashed into bed at night. Though even with a full night’s sleep, she still dropped off into naps throughout the day. Did doing new ’mancy tire children? It never did him, but…

  “I didn’t realize it had been that long,” Paul apologized. “I’m sorry, I should have made her call…”

  “It’s fine, Paul. It’s just… you said you had something to tell me about her?”

  Paul braced himself. “Oh yeah.” He fished out a brochure from a manila envelope. Here’s the part where Paul lied. “I’ve found a school for Aliyah. It’s upstate. A dorm school. Specializing in girls with post-traumatic stress disorder. Which, honestly, is what I think Aliyah has.”

  “That’s what her therapists say, yes.”

  Imani reached over and took the leaflet, perused it. The brochure had been printed yesterday. The LisAnna Foundation For Children’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder hadn’t existed until two days ago. Hell, it hadn’t had a name until yesterday, when Mr Payne had decided to name it after his sisters who’d died in the war.

  The site for the school had been purchased four days ago – a location Aliyah had insisted be very far away from the Institute, because she didn’t want Mommy and stupid, stupid David to know where she really lived.

  But on the Internet, this newly minted school was a venerable institution. Payne had demonstrated to Paul how the Internet was a large storehouse of bureaucratic records. Paul had infiltrated ICANN’s opal-secured servers to insert records so the LisAnna Foundation had apparently created a website in 2004, inserted reviews into hundreds of web pages from various parents, rearranged Google’s database entries so the LisAnna Foundation would come up as a hit if Imani Dawson searched for it.

  That’s what he’d been doing with his time, and Paul felt guilty he hadn’t checked in on whether Imani and Aliyah were talking.

  Imani folded the leaflet. “Can you afford it?”

  “There are government programs to help assist.”

  She hid an exhausted smile behind the brochure. “Of course you’d get funding.”

  “Now, it’s a ninety-minute drive away,” he said, holding up his hands to ward off her aggravated interruptions. “So you’d need to rent a car. And they’re set on creating structure for their students, so you can’t visit without making an appointment in advance. I know you–”

  She slid the brochure into her purse. “It’s fine, Paul. They’re professionals. We need professionals.” She trailed off into a defeated silence.

  The waiter came by. Imani ordered, having forgotten about the food game – but as usual, she’d unconsciously homed in on the one dish on the menu Paul was dying to order: the tikka masala.

  He could have ordered something else. But how could they have a mealtime battle if they both had the same thing?

  According to the rules of the game, Paul had arrived first and so had the right to order first. Yet Imani looked so dejected over sending Aliyah off to the Foundation that he ordered the tandoori chicken instead.

  Once the waiter shuffled off, Paul said: “After the court battles for custody, I thought you’d go balls to the wall to stop me from putting her in a private school.”

  She rearranged her fork and knife to be perpendicular, an oddly shy gesture. “I don’t know, Paul. Maybe I should. But… I don’t…” She gave the plate a rueful smile. “Oh, God, Paul I thought you’d be the bad parent. You’d been distant those last few years, working late, never coming home – then Aliyah gets burned and you all but commit suicide, leaving her in the hospital to go fight ’mancers.”

  Paul felt sick. He was the bad parent. He’d charged after Valentine to save her, gotten kidnapped, and in the weeks he’d been held hostage, well… that was when Aliyah had played videogames over and over again, sick with pain, trying not to think about her maybe-dead Daddy.

  If Paul had been a better father, Aliyah wouldn’t be a ’mancer.

  Imani straightened her napkin. “But I keep thinking: If I’m such a good goddamned mother, how come Aliyah is getting worse? And I’ve rounded up all the help I can get, every therapist and teacher and consultant, and… she only seems content when she’s with you. So maybe you should…”

  She took a long sip of her water, embarrassed.

  “Maybe you should hire the people to look after her,” she finished.

  It would never occur to Imani to help Aliyah without assistance.

  “It’s not like I won’t visit,” Imani stressed. “I’m not giving up on her. I’m just… I need to shift strategies.”

  Paul’s stomach clenched with guilt. How could he help her be a better mother to Aliyah without telling her everything? If SMASH captured Aliyah now, that would lead them straight back to not just Paul, but Mr Payne and all the ’mancers at the Institute.

  Paul reached across to take Imani’s hands. She let him, which inspired a wave of almost terrifying gratitude.

  “She thinks you’re a little scary sometimes,” he told her. “Telling her SMASH might haul her away if she won’t stop playing games?”

  She stiffened. “She knows ’mancers don’t start until their mid-twenties. I know lots of kids love videogames, but… why take a chance? Who knows what could happen twenty years down the line?”

  He almost told her about Aliyah; didn’t. “Yet when you tell her she could become a ’mancer, well… Aliyah gets scared.”

  She closed her eyes, breathing through her nose; her old trick to calm herself before she yelled. Her hands tightened, grinding his fingers. “I get scared, Paul. Those fuckers are running around loose in the city, and nobody can catch them. A ’mancer almost burned my daughter to death. Twice. A ’mancer crushed my husband’s leg. A ’mancer ruined our marriage, Paul. Those fucking ’mancers, Paul… they’ve hurt us so much.”

  The ’mancer didn’t ruin our marriage, he wanted to tell her. I fell in love with magic. And I couldn’t tell you.

  Imani’s fingers traced a light circle in the air, a half a shrug, then tossed her anger away. “But you’re right, you’re right. If it scares her, I need to back off. I suppose all the dinnertime conversations with David weren’t helping.”

  “…what’s David doing?”

  She leaned forward. “Oh, you’ll be interested in this. You love hunting ’mancers. He’s got a lead on some real advanced hardware for finding ’mancy – hi-tech Israeli stuff. SMASH doesn’t have the jurisdiction to use that kind of tech but the Task Force? They’ll be unleashing some advanced stuff very soon.”

  Paul prickled with fear sweat. “Where’d he get the money? The mayor never gave me black-book funding.”

  “David’s squeezed all his connections for this operation. This is... well, you know what a high-profile position it is.” She coughed politely, overlooking Paul’s traditional allergy to politics. “If he can get Psycho Mantis when you couldn’t, that puts him on an upwards trajectory. He’s aiming to head up SMASH.”

  Paul froze.

  Paul remembered
what Payne had told him to do with the faked identification, to hide them forever from David: Make the trail lead back to SMASH, Paul. Force him to start requesting records from the bureau he’s in competition with. A proud man like David would sooner die than work with people who might steal his thunder.

  If David wasn’t jealous of SMASH, he might have found Paul already.

  “But David’s not military,” Paul spluttered.

  “Won’t matter if he shows enough results. And he is hell-bent on getting Psycho Mantis.”

  The waiter brought their lunch. Imani took a dainty bite of the tikka masala and did a happy wiggle dance in her chair. Paul took a mouthful of a decent, if unexceptional, tandoori chicken. She offered him her bite, which he took, and felt the tasty heat of turmeric-laced tomatoes.

  “You win,” he admitted.

  “Sometimes you lose,” she shrugged, scooping half her masala onto her bread plate and pushing it towards him. “But I wouldn’t worry, Paul. David’s driving himself hard, because, hardware or no, he knows no one’s better than you at hunting ’mancers. And if you couldn’t catch Psycho Mantis, what hope does David have?”

  Paul imagined a competent Task Force run by people determined to catch him, and thought David had a very good chance indeed.

  Twenty-Three

  Mrs Liu’s Infinite Kittens

  “Hello, Mittens!” Mrs Liu picked up one of her cats. “Hello, Trouble. Oh, you’re a mischievous little devil! And my sweet little Lickums…”

  Paul perched on a chair as a sea of ragged tails bobbed to and fro beneath him: clusters of cats purring on the stove, tangles of cats squabbling beneath the kitchen table, rows of cats staring down at him from the cabinets with the grace of queens.

  The ’mancy here looked mundane, but Paul had watched for hours, fascinated, trying to figure out how it was done.

  Mrs Liu looked quite kindly as she hugged each of her cats, an elderly Chinese lady with a thin chuckle and a staunch disregard for the way the cats knocked her teacups off her table – yet she’d hugged a new kitty to her breast every minute or two for several hours, and had not hugged the same one twice.

  This was a large apartment, but it held infinite cats. And Paul had eventually realized Mrs Liu’s secret:

  There was no litter box.

  No cat never escaped out the front door.

  It had taken him days to figure this out, but… Paul was pretty sure Mrs Liu’s cats didn’t actually exist.

  The Institute’s records said she’d been brought here with three cats, all spayed. She’d created a litter of kittens that were completely unremarkable aside from the fact that they’d coalesced out of midair.

  He felt a vague temptation to tug on a cat’s ’mancy and see what was left once Mrs Liu’s spell unraveled. But Paul had been informed that one word from Mrs Liu and the place would turn feral, wherein he would be dragged by cat-induced peristalsis down the hallways, torn to shreds and never seen again.

  He preferred not to die wearing a gaudy luchador mask.

  He didn’t want to upset her anyway. One of the joys at being at the Institute was watching everyone’s different magics. After he’d done the necessary paperwork for Mr Payne, Paul would relax by flitting from universe-bending joy to universe-bending joy – dropping in to see Natasha the culinomancer whip up a magical flan, or trying to figure out what Juan the bookiemancer saw as he plucked predictions from the buzzing swarms of numbers, or watch Idena the origamimancer crease a single typewriter-sized sheet of vellum into a table-sized paper forest, every leaf and branch meticulously outlined.

  He just wished they would talk to him.

  The Foundation was legally designated as her full-time school now, and Aliyah – sorry, Hotplate – had the run of the place. Here, she was everyone’s favorite godchild. Even now, Aliyah made a magical mask with Mrs Vinere. Aliyah taught her how to make Majora’s Masks, where each mask let you bounce around the room like a pinball.

  Without Aliyah, the best Mrs Vinere could do would give you a new face. But with Aliyah, all the ’mancers seemed… amplified.

  Mrs Liu, like all the other ’mancers, had been skeptical of Paul. She’d cracked open the door when he mentioned Aliyah’s name – he shouldn’t have confirmed he was Hotplate’s father, it broke Mr Payne’s SMASH-thwarting information barriers, but he needed to introduce himself with the proper authority. And even then she eyed him warily, as though at any moment he might reveal he did not like cats.

  It was funny; all his life he’d been attracted to ’mancy, had lost his foot because he’d had to watch the illustromancer work, had become a bureaucromancer because he loved magic.

  Here he was, with all this ’mancy, and still no one to share it with.

  No Foundation ’mancer made eye contact. They had their own fiefdoms; his visits perplexed them. They paid attention for precisely as long as he spoke to them, looking away as if they longed to get back to their kitchen, or their football game, or their stuffed animal caves.

  The culinomancer had baked amazing dishes of grilled purple cauliflower couscous – but left them stacked by the ovens, shrugging when Paul asked for a bite. The origamimancer had completed her forest and then chucked it into the garbage.

  They created beauty, but felt no need to share it.

  Their tiny magics made him itch with guilt. He loved bureaucracy, but… he had a daughter he loved, and Valentine, and an ex-wife he still had dinner with. Still his ’mancy was stronger than theirs.

  Their lives had been consumed by their obsessions, yet they’d been rewarded with magics barely more than coincidence.

  It was unfair. Valentine could destroy buildings, and she wasn’t half as devoted to her games as that lonely little plushiemancer who sat for hours, trying to teach his befuddled stuffed animals to dance. They only rocked back and forth.

  But when Aliyah dropped by, his animals did musical numbers. They loved Aliyah because her videogamemancy could be anything – a cooking game, a basketball game, a little farm with plushie horses. They didn’t have to pretend to like anything else, because Aliyah loved what they did. They could plug into her ’mancy.

  Paul was proud of Aliyah. They both needed to socialize these poor recluses.

  Which was why Paul had brought Mrs Liu a bottle of cream, and tried to make conversation.

  “So… why is Trouble such trouble?” he inquired. “What’s the little scamp get up to?”

  “Piddles,” she murmured, nuzzling a new kitty nose-to-nose. “Aww, Piddles.”

  Maybe he should have brought cat treats.

  A brisk knock on the door: Mrs Liu straightened. She stood up, brushing clumps of cat hair off her dress, then slicked back her hair. She flung the door open wide, then crouched almost as if to bow.

  Mr Payne pushed a dolly heaped high with canned cat food through the door, sunny as a sour man like Payne could be. “Here you go, Mrs Liu. The cleaners will be in to take out your garbage later today.”

  She bobbed her head, trembling, as if wanting to get the words right. “Thangew.”

  Payne cocked his head. “What was that, Mrs Liu?”

  “Thank you, King.” Her words had the stiff ring of a practiced speech. When she curtsied, her cats stretched out, miaowing respectfully in Payne’s direction. Payne nodded curtly, a general acknowledging his troops’ marginal effort.

  “All I need.” He turned to Paul. “Mr Mongoose! Good to see you. Come with me.”

  By the time Paul remembered his code name was Mongoose, Payne had left. Mrs Liu stayed frozen until Mr Payne was gone, then unloaded her cat food with shivering gratitude.

  Paul picked his way through the swarming cats and left; no one seemed to notice.

  Payne had already strode to the next room. Two luchador-masked orderlies pushed pallets of supplies behind him.

  Paul caught up just as Payne was unloading bundles of paper into the origamimancer’s room. The origamimancer – a woman as pale and angular as the paper she worked with –
bowed and presented a sculpture of Payne to him.

  “Wonderful.” Payne turned, pleased, to deposit it in Paul’s hands. “What do you think?”

  The origami was a sternly angled version of Payne, with a blank face and a stiff twisted-vellum crown. Even cupped in Paul’s palm, it seemed to loom over him.

  “It’s quite nice,” Paul lied.

  “We’ll put it in my antechamber.” Payne whisked it off Paul’s palm and handed it to an orderly. He shut the door on the origamimancer. “So, Mr Mongoose. What do you think of your fellow ’mancers?”

  “They seem a little…” Paul didn’t want to sound cruel. Payne had found a way to keep seventeen ’mancers working together in secrecy. Hell, Paul had juggled three ’mancers, and that had come close to disintegrating at times.

  “They’re not the friendliest people,” Paul finished.

  “They’re not,” Payne admitted. “Though you mustn’t let that get you down. Truth is, I don’t encourage them to mix much.”

  “…you don’t?”

  “I don’t prevent socializing – but frankly, each ’mancer represents their own worldview. It’s quite stupid, honestly, but I’ve seen the evidence with these old rheumy eyes: get two different ’mancers talking, and they forget the world is out to get them! They forget they’re a precious few blessed enough to bend physics with mere willpower, and start squabbling over which hobby is superior. Next thing you know, you’ve got a magical war on your hands.”

  “You really do think ’mancy is a blessing, don’t you?”

  “Oh God yes. You’ve felt that fervent glory, haven’t you? That sense the universe has lined up behind you?”

  Paul had, once. He’d saved New York City with it. The rest had been doubt and concern.

  Payne slugged him on the shoulder. “It’s a wonder any of us can do – well, any of this. But we forget what we have in common. I’ll tell you, sir, there were some real catfights back in the 1970s before my psychologists perfected ’mancer integration. That’s why there’s so many regulations here.”