The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “I would have.”

  Paul gave her a weary grin. “I always loved the way you never bullshit me.”

  “When this whole thing started, I would have thought, ‘Well, we need professionals to handle this,’ and called in SMASH, and been surprised as all hell when I never saw my daughter again. But I’ve seen how hard you tried to keep it from me. I saw how suppressing who you are ate you both up. And – well, watching David work, I don’t think all that much of the professionals these days, either.”

  “David’s no professional.” Paul sipped his coffee and made a bitter face. “He’s a politician.”

  “At least he’s alive.”

  Paul cocked his head. “What?”

  “Aliyah,” Imani explained. “She didn’t kill him.”

  Paul’s glare was a look of such cold fury that she repressed an animal instinct to run from that uncompromising gaze.

  “What did they do to Aliyah?” Paul’s eyes refocused on a distant spot beyond her.

  No; his eyes glowed.

  Like most people, Imani had never witnessed ’mancy. Paul’s eyes had gone the glossy black of a CRT screen. Tiny green letters scrolled up from underneath his eyelids, in thick block fonts.

  Paul’s eyes were windows to all the information in the world. Imani shrank back; her husband’s gaze was bottomless, merciless. Paul was a channel to petabytes of information, scouring Payne’s records, and she could drown in that data.

  And yet… there was something beautiful about that power. For the first time, she understood why Paul had tracked down that illustromancer, had wanted to warm his hands by her magic’s bright fire…

  “They... they tried to make Aliyah kill David,” Imani volunteered. “But she didn’t. She just–”

  Imani laughed. His magic was glorious. Now she understood why he’d locked Aliyah away – this ’mancy was too noisy, the SMASH teams would see them, they’d haul them to the Refactor…

  “She locked David in a Pokeball, Paul!” Imani spoke quickly, trying to gain his attention. “Think of how clever our daughter is, Paul. They thought they could make her murder, but instead she balled David up and he... he rolled underneath her bed…”

  “Payne,” Paul whispered.

  Wet papers pulled themselves off the alleyway’s muck, lurching broken-backed towards Paul – old meal checks, delivery receipts, shredded credit card receipts knotting back together in attempts to please their master. Old tax forms dove out of the dumpster.

  The forms loved Paul so much they came to life and genuflected before him. This is what he saw when he saw the illustromancer, she thought. Something both beautiful and terrible.

  Paul knotted his hands into fists.

  Hairs stiffened on Imani’s neck. Force waves emanated out from Paul, and she realized how much Paul had been holding back all along – not just his ’mancy, but a righteous anger he had pent up for far too long.

  Imani felt Paul reaching out to computers across the globe, accessing forms, shoving the information through levels of bureaucracy. Bits flipped in computerized records; forms spontaneously shredded themselves, leaving layers of confetti.

  Paul had been dead, now he was alive. Any good bureaucracy had forms to reverse clerical errors – and when they didn’t, Paul spun the paperwork himself, creating new procedures. And while it would have normally taken weeks for the changes to seep back through the records, Paul rammed through the changes instantly, reverting tax records, insurance forms, the files in SMASH.

  Undoing all his mistakes.

  When he was done, the papers at his feet applauded in dry crumpling noises.

  Paul lifted his head to the sky.

  “Payne!” he cried.

  And the forms around him disintegrated. For miles around, the ink on every credit card signature unlooped, forming the same word – PAYNE – before disintegrating into tangled coils.

  Every dot matrix printer in New York City clacked to life, hammering on the paper furiously until the page was battered solid black.

  “Payne!” Paul bellowed, and the files in every filing cabinet in New York thrashed like wild animals, battering at their steel cages, maddened by some unknowable force.

  Paul’s fury was like a storm sweeping down on the men who had enslaved their daughter. Imani took his hand, feeling his ’mancy flow through her – surfing Paul’s devotion to Aliyah, Paul’s rage, Paul’s commitment, his beliefs so strong the universe itself stepped aside rather than face this glorious madman down.

  She flung her arms out and howled mad laughter, realizing the man she had loved had returned to her at last.

  Forty-Nine

  Lightning Loves Thunder

  “Incoming.” Tyler had kept watch while Valentine tried to eke out some sleep.

  Valentine groaned, shrugging off the pile of pee-stained towels she’d been using as blankets. They’d been running from abandoned house to abandoned house – God, Tyler had a fucking radar for shitholes to end all shitholes – kicking bums out to live in their refuse, trying to stay ahead of SMASH.

  Not that Valentine had particularly high standards for living, but at least she’d kept the bedbugs out, never worried about stepping on used needles. Now she couldn’t sleep, because no matter where they went, SMASH tracked them down.

  Her only consolation was Tyler’s phenomenal sex. But it seemed increasingly likely that would end, too.

  She grabbed the Nintendo DS from Tyler’s hands. “Goddammit, Tyler,” she muttered, looking at the glowing green readout fanning out from the screen, reading the incoming troop positions. “With these readings, you should have warned me twenty minutes ago.”

  “These readings are a bunch of dots,” he said, combing his spiky hair with his fingers.

  “You were not ready, player one,” she grumbled, knowing he was right. Tyler was good at long-term planning, but SMASH hadn’t allowed them time. The SMASH troops, brainwashed ’mancers except for their commanders, had stormed into New York City, using their Unimancy to track down magic.

  “So how bad is it?” Tyler asked, shrugging on his red leather jacket and lighting up a cigarette.

  “Bad.” The SMASH troops had snuck into place as they always did. If it wasn’t for Valentine’s videogamemancy, she never would have seen them coming – SMASH troops acted like one organism. If one saw you, all saw you. As long as they had one stealth expert on the team, all were stealth experts. You heard them coming when they smashed through your windows.

  They were close. Too close.

  Valentine brought up the map, looking for exit routes. This felt like a videogame marathon competition: fighting past her sleep-deprived muzziness to make the correct strategic decisions, reflexes failing, pressure rising.

  “They’ve got eyes in the sky.” She pointed to whirling icons that signified choppers. “If we run for it, they’ll know.”

  “How the hell do they keep finding us?”

  Valentine sighed. Unlike Valentine, who could turn off her games for a while, Tyler was his ’mancy – much as it pained her to admit it, his chiseled abs and Brad Pitt-handsome face radiated ’mancy. She could abandon him to save herself, but…

  She’d abandoned one friend already, and it had all but killed her.

  “Can’t Portal my way out this time,” she muttered, watching the soldiers set up around their position, having learned from Valentine’s past escapes. “Maybe I could go all Dig-Dug and tunnel into the ground, but…”

  Tyler chewed on his cigarette. “The flux.”

  SMASH’s Unimancers couldn’t quite do countermagic. Yet a hundred identical magic-imbued soldiers could firm reality’s beliefs, increasing everyone else’s flux backlash a hundredfold.

  “That’s a long way to dig,” Valentine mused. “Tunnels collapse.”

  “They don’t have flux,” Tyler said bitterly.

  “They get bad luck, same as any ’mancer. They’re distributing it to other soldiers. Like Payne. Whereas our bad luck gives them another coinci
dence to take advantage of…”

  “If only we had someone like Paul.”

  She whirled on him, ready to yell – he knew not to bring up Paul around her – but Tyler’s face was caught halfway between the badass Tyler Durden he pretended to be and the timid accountant he’d once been. Which was why she loved him. If all she’d seen was badass Tyler, well, she’d shrugged off lots of badass idiots. She loved his vulnerability.

  And Paul.

  Goddammit, she missed Paul.

  He peered out of the cracked basement window. “You got a clever escape plan? I’m fresh out.”

  She closed down the games radar. “No. They’ve got us cornered. We gotta fight.”

  He cracked his knuckles. “This is it: ground zero. Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?”

  Valentine ignored the way he quoted that fucking movie again, and instead grabbed his cheeks, bringing him nose-to-nose with her. “We do not surrender.” She lifted up the gun she’d shoved into her skirt. “We carry Aliyah in our heads. And we do not let those brainwashed bastards take her. Their goal is to capture; death is our escape.”

  “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

  She thwacked him. “Stop fucking quoting.”

  He looked so wounded, so afraid to disappoint her, that she kissed him. He melted into her kiss, just another confused boy with issues to work out, having armored himself in butch philosophies because he was such soft, soft Jell-O inside.

  Valentine wondered if she’d ever get over falling for men who needed her to save them.

  Then she looked at the hundred soldiers waiting outside, and realized: no, she wouldn’t.

  She gripped her Xbox controller. “Why are they hesitating?” she asked Tyler. His ’mancy wavered, shaken by death fears no true Tyler Durden would have. “They’re in position. But maybe if we hit them hard, we have a chance. Go on three… two… one…”

  Her phone buzzed.

  She arm-barred Tyler, stopping him before he dove out the window. She flashed her cracked iPhone at him, which had a text from a number she couldn’t identify:

  You can always find me in the maze.

  “Well, that’s cryptic,” Tyler said.

  “To you, maybe,” Valentine grinned, cracking open her DS.

  “What are you–”

  She pressed her finger to his lips. “Shh, baby. Mommy’s working.”

  She fired up Mario. This would have to be a perfect speed-run: she had no time to get to Paul’s level. Once she did, and SMASH detected the surge in ’mancy, they would come in no matter what happened.

  She smacked her lips. She’d kill for a Red Bull.

  She fired Mario across the landscape, running as fast as Mario’s stubby little legs would carry him, taking advantage of every glitch. Jump, jump, hunch into the fourth pipe, hit the flag to Zone 1-2. Ricochet jump off the turtle, jump through the ceiling, warp to Zone 4….

  God, she loved a challenge.

  “Their eyes are glowing,” Tyler reported. “The SMASH team. They’re staring into space.”

  “Do you tap Stradivarius on the shoulder during his concerts? Shut up and–”

  But Lakitu’s stupid cloud-camera hurled a spiked egg at her, and she blocked out the impending SMASH invasion to duck under it, running to Paul, clean jump over the piranha plants, into World 4-2 and towards Paul.

  “Goddammit, Paul,” Valentine muttered. “Why’d we decide your castle was in World 8-2?”

  The soldiers had paused for some reason, giving her precious time – but she couldn’t count on their inactivity. She had to hop in pixel-perfect jumps across needle-like peaks, where any fall meant game over…

  There. The dark blue bricks of Bowser’s castle.

  Paul waited there, extending his hand from the screen, pushing his fingers through the clear plastic. Which was crazy; he was no videogamemancer, but somehow he bridged the gap between their ’mancies.

  Paul’s world vibrated with deadlines and demands, a place where everything fit into a neat box, and if it didn’t fit then he would build a box to fit it. Slipping into his magic felt like putting on a paper straightjacket.

  But with it also came the scent of freshly washed towels, and clean floors, and safety.

  She’d missed those. Even if she wasn’t entirely comfortable with that ’mancy, she now realized someone had to do it, and that someone was Paul.

  The soldiers outside snapped to attention, sensing the surge in ’mancy. They fired through the window…

  “Gotcha,” Paul said. His grip was sure and strong. She grabbed Tyler’s hand, and as rubber bullets bounced into the basement Paul tugged them through the Nintendo….

  To land in an oppressively tidy apartment. Valentine had always thought Paul had been a little retentive when it came to his place, but this looked like Martha Stewart’s masturbatory fantasies. They plopped down on an autumn-brown leather couch, three magazines positioned on a freshly wiped glass table, a pitcher of iced tea on a tray.

  It took Valentine a moment to recognize Paul, who leaned against a black-flecked marble counter, huffing with effort. He’d grown an unappetizing unshaven drunkard’s look. His stained suit looked like the paper placemat underneath an unappealing diner meal. His titanium foot was the only thing that made him look like – well, Paul.

  But he also looked somehow… comfortable. She couldn’t quite articulate the sensation – but Paul had always seemed allergic to his own personality, vibrating with indecision. Yet moth-eaten and battered, Paul seemed more relaxed than ever.

  She stormed up to him. “Say it,” she said belligerently.

  He gave her a wan smile. “I was wrong.”

  “Now say the better thing.”

  “…and you were right.”

  “Now say the sweetest thing of all.”

  Paul rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “And I’ll never doubt you again.”

  “Hug it out,” Valentine said, sweeping Paul up in a huge twirling embrace, the kind she knew made Tyler a little jealous. Let him be jealous. Paul was her friend, even if his awkward hugs were like being crushed by a praying mantis.

  “How the hell did you do videogamemancy?” she said, squeezing him tightly. “I mean, we showed you, but… that’s way outside your comfort zone. The flux on that’s gotta be crushing you.”

  “All I have to do is convince the universe the world is better if I save my daughter from Payne, and the flux dissipates. I can do that without blinking.”

  “You righteous sonofabitch! You found another loophole!”

  Someone coughed politely. Imani. Paul’s frosty ex. Which explained the too-clean apartment. She pierced Valentine with a jealous gaze.

  Valentine stopped, not quite releasing Paul.

  “Are you two….” she whispered.

  “We’re concerned parents,” Paul demurred… but Valentine saw the blush darkening beneath his stubble. “She called in a threat to SMASH for you, to buy us time. Claimed I was magically altering their records, had set them up to attack two innocent people in a basement.”

  “Wait – SMASH knows you’re a bureaucromancer?”

  “When I undid all the records marking me as dead, I… I was noisy. Everyone knows, now.”

  Valentine ticked off her first positive checkmark in Imani’s favor. “And they believed you when an anonymous tip called in to warn them about the mysterious bureaucromancer?”

  “As a lawyer, I can be very convincing.” Imani bestowed upon Valentine the politest of possible smiles. “And in light of recent disasters, every government agency’s sensitive about catching bad PR.”

  “Great. Well, look, Mrs Tsabo, I’m totally gonna Bechdel it up with you after this is over, but now we gotta discuss Payne before he kills us.”

  Imani blinked, her distaste clear. She shot Paul a quizzical look. “Can you translate her for me, please?”

  Paul shrugged, goofily content. “I catch about fifty percent of her on
a good day.”

  “I’m talking about kicking Payne’s ass,” Valentine said.

  “…What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

  Tyler paced in the living room, plunging his hands into his hair, looking more like Edward Norton than Brad Pitt.

  “Jesus, we barely escaped SMASH!” Tyler spluttered. “Not ‘fought’ or ‘beat,’ mind you: escaped. The government is still hunting us. They know all our tricks. And unless things have changed, we have a multibillionaire executive with his own private psycho pyromancer murderer, who can do all the ’mancy they want and spread their bad luck out across thousands of clients, whereas every act of magic we do hands a critical advantage to the bad guys. You’re acting like being friends again has fixed everything, and... and things don’t work that way!”

  Valentine made a raspberry with her armpit. “…for you, maybe.”

  “It’s OK, Valentine.” Paul limped forward to handle a hyperventilating Tyler. “Tyler, I want you to listen to me.”

  “OK…”

  “My eyes are open.”

  Tyler did a double-take at Paul quoting his own movie to him, then examined Paul’s face for doubt. SMASH’s havoc had eroded Tyler’s faith, but Paul’s experiences had lent him certainty.

  Certainty was a deadly weapon in a ’mancer’s hands.

  “You don’t need to worry, Tyler… because I’m a bureaucrat. That means I’ll utilize all my resources – and yes, that means everyone has a purpose.” Paul poured himself a glass of iced tea, drank it deep. “I’ll even give Project Mayhem a purpose.”

  “But… but Project Mayhem has a purpose,” Tyler protested. “Mine.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Tyler tensed, as if preparing to punch Paul, then his tension drained away. Valentine knew this was for the best; Tyler liked playing leader, but she knew from the way he curled up trembling in her arms that he hated the responsibility.

  Valentine raised her hand eagerly, as though hoping to be picked first in gym class. “Is my purpose to kick Rainbird’s fiery little ass?”

  Paul cocked fingerguns in her direction.

  Valentine clapped her hands together and danced.