The Flux

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by Ferrett Steinmetz


  Fifty

  Not A Game, But Murder

  Valentine had led weary soldiers through wartime Germany, she’d investigated toppled castles as a Templar knight, crept deep into underwater palaces ripped apart by libertarian civil wars. Videogames were fundamentally warfare; Valentine mused she’d spent most days wandering through wrecked places strewn with dead bodies.

  But as she stepped into the Institute’s burning wreckage, she realized videogames never told the full truth.

  She covered her nose as the smell hit her – the sweet barbecue scent of roasted human bodies. Videogame heroes never sweated, but here the ashes turned into a salty paste on her skin. She staggered down the burning hallways, trying not to look at the flaming piles of what used to be ’mancers.

  He’d killed everyone.

  Worse, he intended her to be scared. His flames whispered how he would rape her with fire, spitroast her over a slow flame, boil the fluids in her eyeballs.

  And Valentine would creep around a corner to discover Natasha the culinomancer’s body rotating on a white-hot spike, lacquered in barbecue sauce, her face carved. She kicked in the door to the changing room to discover a hundred still-burning plushie dolls, incinerated when they’d rushed to protect the plushiemancer, the plushiemancer slumped against a wall with his eyes steaming.

  She’d wanted to face down Rainbird, she reminded herself. Yet he chipped away at her certainty – and if a ’mancer wasn’t certain, she was doomed.

  A flame licked her head, sizzling hair away.

  She hated how his psych-out techniques were working.

  “I’ve beat Resident Evil on game-plus, asshole!” She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. “I buried Silent Hill, destroyed Dead Space! I know what a trip to the boss level looks like. And you’re behind…”

  She exuded videogame power, splintered the atrium door open.

  “…this door,” she said.

  The atrium’s trees burned, their branches waving like shrieking victims. Rainbird’s room had spilled out molten lava, oozing thick tendrils through the marble floor, lighting up the atrium with a hideous orange light. The ’mancers’ rooms had been turned into pyres.

  Rainbird had moved his throne of knotted rebar out to the atrium, planting it on the remains of the service desk.

  Of course he sat on it, gloating.

  Of course he did.

  “Aunt Valentine!” Aliyah cried, handcuffed to the throne. Valentine grinned, because this stupid fuck had done the dumbass thing of hauling Aliyah out to see her Aunt Valentine burn. Except that reminded Valentine who she’d come here to protect. Even though the air was superheated with the stench of burning metal, Valentine felt strength pouring into her.

  Rainbird smiled, his teeth a gate for the furnace inside.

  “Where is your papermancer?” he asked. “What plans does he have to defeat me?”

  “No plan.” Valentine cracked her knuckles. “I’m just the wrecking ball.”

  She stepped carefully over Mrs Vinere’s burnt bones.

  “Did you have to fucking kill them?” Valentine asked. “They were people, you asshole. Not evidence to be ditched when the feds got close.”

  “They gave us nothing. They should expect nothing in return.”

  “They should have kicked your ass to the curb long ago.”

  Rainbird stepped down from his rebar chair, circling Valentine. The scent of ’mancy filled the air, like stormclouds pregnant with lightning. “They would fail. I’ve killed hundreds of ’mancers.”

  Valentine stepped over broken glass, keeping him at a careful distance. “People like me.”

  Rainbird shrugged, as though their deaths weren’t worth considering. His hands blazed with fire, shifting, probing Valentine’s defenses for weakness. “We offered the rebels safe haven. They wanted a different way.”

  “That’s why New York’s been so quiet, you insane motherfucker. You slaughtered the ones who didn’t fit into your little petting zoo.”

  “It was a good plan!” Rainbird made a feint; Valentine didn’t bite. “I should have incinerated the papermancer on the spot when I realized he knew who we were…”

  “Ah, but you’re not a real fire now, are you?” Valentine shot back. “Real flame burns whatever it touches. You were terrified to displease your master. You’re an enslaved candle….”

  “Enough!”

  Rainbird lifted his hands, and a torrent of lava plunged down through the broken windows overhead–

  Except Valentine slid across the floor on a sheet of ice towards Rainbird, crouched low, one foot pointed straight at Rainbird’s feet as she shot towards him like a speed skater. She smashed into his ankles, popping him high into the air.

  “You can’t–” he roared, flailing as he tumbled backwards.

  But Valentine ignored him, and, summoning a great globe of ice between her palms, shoved it in Rainbird’s direction. The snowball hit him, iceflakes hissing into the lava around him – but it froze him in midair as though he were a paused movie. His body was rimed with a blue frost-sheen, suspended above the ground as if designed to defy gravity.

  Valentine’s crinoline skirt melted away to reveal a blue ninja’s outfit, her mouth and nose covered by a mask, a bandana tied around her head.

  A deep announcer’s voice boomed out of nowhere: “Sub-Zero.”

  “Welcome to my fighting game, motherfucker,” Valentine said, screaming “Mortal Kombat!” before uppercutting Rainbird high into the air.

  Rainbird arced up, dazed, and Valentine launched herself at him with a spinning flip-kick, catching him in the mouth. She slammed him up against a pillar, and when he tried to slip past she swept his legs out from under him again, then roundhouse-elbowed him when he got up.

  Aliyah cheered.

  “Enough!” He sank his fingers into the pillar. The building shook, magma moving deep underground as Rainbird’s anger sank into the roots of the earth, the pillar toppling towards Valentine. She rolled away, landing on her backside.

  “You think you can defeat me!?” Rainbird roared, stalking forward. “I’ve slaughtered ’mancers for years! I know all your foolish tricks. I know your–”

  A slippery pool of ice bloomed beneath Rainbird’s feet, and he did an awkward dance as he avoided falling flat on his ass. Valentine smashed her foot into his jaw.

  “You don’t even know not to walk into a Ground Freeze!” she sneered. “That’s Mortal Kombat 101!”

  She caught him under the chin with a double-fisted uppercut – launching him through the ceiling, sending him high into the night sky before he landed with a lung-emptying whoof on the roof. Valentine leapt up after him, bursting through in a spray of debris.

  “Fine,” Rainbird said, clasping his badge. It glowed, siphoning his flux away. “You want to play games? Even games fear the firelord.”

  He leaned over and vomited a spear of fire straight into Valentine’s gut. It knocked her backwards, sending her tumbling towards the roof’s edge. She patted out the flames on her gi, panicked.

  “Hey, that move’s not in the book!”

  Rainbird rose into the air in a corona of flame. “This is not a game, you one-eyed fool. This is murder.”

  Valentine did a high flip-kick to try to catch him in the face again; Rainbird caught her ankle, smashed her into the ground. She rolled away as Rainbird punched down hard enough to send shockwaves of force, sent Valentine flying.

  Before she could regain her footing, Rainbird had landed on her, pinning her to the ground. Valentine plunged ice knives into his leg; they hissed into boiling water. She formed an ice clone of herself, rolling out from under him; he reached back with a knotted fire-whip and slammed her back into place. She broke his nose with a well-placed palm strike, but Rainbird broke her cheek, shattered her shoulder, rammed her head into the buckled ground.

  “Did you think you could defeat me?” He loomed over her, his broken nose dribbling blood onto her face.

  Valentine
coughed. “Wasn’t my plan, no.”

  “You said you had no plan.”

  “Aunt Valentine lies a lot,” said Aliyah.

  Valentine craned her neck to look over at tiny Aliyah, standing in a perfect warrior’s stance behind Rainbird, her pale old-man’s face tattooed with a streak of red:

  The God of War.

  The thick chain looped around his neck, yanking him off Valentine. Aliyah clutched her Nintendo DS, filling with magical force – and then heaved, sending Rainbird on a high arc overhead, the chain straining, before smashing him face-first into the cracked roof. Aliyah pulled him back, Hulk-smashing him in every direction, grinning like a girl at her birthday party.

  “Thank you for sneaking me the Nintendo, Daddy!” Aliyah said gleefully, sending Rainbird’s body into the roof again and again and again. “Best present ever!”

  “Gah!” Rainbird said, melting the chain – he catapulted off the end, sailing high into the night, then caught himself on a cloud of fire. “Where is the papermancer! Where is he!?”

  “You pay attention to me!” Aliyah yelled, snapping her other chain out and dragging him back down to earth. “Remember? Your special project?!”

  She smashed Rainbird through an air conditioning unit. Aliyah advanced upon him, flicking her knives in his direction, gashing his scarred skin.

  “You said the only power one has comes from killing,” she told him. “Maybe the only power worth having comes from caring!”

  “Maybe it’s just fucking power, little girl!” he screamed, incinerating her knives. He bore down upon her as she kicked at him. She caught him a high hard one right to the groin, but Rainbird inhaled to fill his torso with healing flame.

  “This isn’t about goodness,” Rainbird told her, forcing Aliyah back against the roof. “It isn’t about righteousness. It’s about who has the power to destroy.”

  Aliyah smashed her palm into his throat.

  Rainbird backhanded Aliyah hard; she landed dazed, her Nintendo DS spinning across the rooftop. Rainbird spat broken teeth, turning to Valentine.

  “Two ’mancers. And neither could defeat me.”

  “Didn’t expect to,” Valentine said. “Paul promised me I could get my licks in first.”

  “Who, then? Who will defeat me now?”

  Valentine turned to look at the scrawny, filthy man climbing over the edge of the roof. A man dressed in what once had been a nice suit, once-neatly-combed hair askew, heaving himself up the ladder on his artificial foot.

  “That’d be Paul,” Valentine said serenely.

  Rainbird choked out a disbelieving laugh – but then realized:

  Paul was not afraid of him.

  Paul still looked more like a mugged accountant than an avatar of destruction. But as Paul adjusted his tie to face down Rainbird, he radiated indomitability.

  Paul held up a manila folder, brandishing it before him like a shield.

  “On September 14th, 1993,” Paul said, “The Red Cross diagnosed you with severe spinal scoliosis. They gave you a TLSO back brace, which you wore for the next two years. In 1997, UNICEF gave you another back brace for final adjustments.”

  Rainbird shook his head, unimpressed. “So?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Paul ripped the medical files in half.

  Rainbird’s back convulsed as something was torn from him – a timeline of safety and healing sundered, bones curving painfully into new shapes. He lunged forwards, but his left leg went numb as his spine pinched around now-deadened nerves–

  He tumbled to the ground, years of muscle memory stolen.

  But his twisted body still coursed with flame.

  “I’ll burn y–”

  “In 1996, Doctors Without Borders prescribed a course of primaquine and intravenous fluids to treat your malaria.” Paul said, his voice chillingly calm. “That didn’t happen, either.”

  He ripped the medical files in half again, and Rainbird’s body convulsed, gnawed at itself, his ribs popping out as what had once been a treated case of malaria turned into a recurrent case that had chewed young Rainbird’s body for years.

  “I’ll devour you,” Rainbird said. “You won’t–”

  Paul knelt over Rainbird’s body, now twisted with sores. He held up one record: a UNICEF Child Protection Section report.

  “I’m not sure what happens if I tear this,” Paul said conversationally. “It’s the task force who helped demobilize the child soldier squad you worked for. The local workers who pretended you weren’t a ’mancer because they hoped you might recover in America. The ones who handed you over to Payne, thinking him a kindly benefactor.” Paul waggled the paper, looking at it with genuine curiosity. “If I undo this, what happens? Do you wind up back in Sierra Leone? Or would you be dead on the spot, executed for your crimes?”

  Rainbird fell silent, beaten.

  “Aliyah,” Paul said. “Come here.”

  Aliyah’s God of War outfit melted away, leaving a guilty child. Paul placed the Nintendo DS in her hands solemnly, then stepped away, leaving her to face Rainbird.

  “You got a rough deal, Aliyah,” he told her. “A lot of bad things will happen to you. People want to kill or brainwash or control you, all for reasons you had no choice in. That’s not your fault.

  “And you’re right. We do have to be strong – strong enough to fight our enemies.

  “But killing people doesn’t make you strong, Aliyah. Rainbird can do it. Any moron with a knife can do it. Killing is literally the easiest way to solve a problem. Just throw anyone who disagrees with you in a grave. And...” Paul gestured down at the burning bodies in the atrium, conveying with a gesture how effective Rainbird’s plan would have been if Paul hadn’t stopped him. “The shame is, killing people works. More often than we’d care to admit.”

  Aliyah hugged her Nintendo against her chest. “Why are you telling me this, Daddy?”

  “Because I love you, kid. I’ll love you no matter what you become. But Anathema gave you too much power, too soon. I can’t stop you from doing things anymore. For better or for worse, you’ve got to make your own choices – and whatever you become, I’ll stay with you. So.”

  Paul drew in a deep breath.

  “Should we kill Rainbird?”

  Aliyah gave a weird little laugh, thinking he’d made a Daddy joke – then turned her Nintendo DS over and over again in her hands. It flickered with gamefire, sprouting knives, rattling like an uneasy Pandora’s box.

  “He killed all my friends,” she said, nodding towards the atrium where all the ’mancers’ bodies laid, sprawled and smoking. “He didn’t just murder them, Daddy – he made them suffer.”

  “Yes.”

  “He would have killed Aunt Valentine,” Aliyah continued.

  “Yes.”

  “And…” Aliyah wiped tears away, frustrated. “If we leave him alive, he might kill people again.”

  Paul gave her a rueful head bob, acknowledging all the Daddy wisdom in the world held no good solution. “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t deserve to live,” Aliyah said, her Nintendo DS growling like a living thing in her hands. “He was crazy, and Mr Payne made him crazier. Someone has to stop him. Someone has to make him pay for what he did. Except we can’t give him to SMASH because he knows – he knows us, and then he’ll turn us in, so there’s not even a jail for bad men like him…”

  “Like I said, sweetheart. Killing works. More than any of us would care to admit. Maybe he does need killing.” Paul’s voice broke. “The question is, do you want to be the person who does that?”

  Her Nintendo DS curled into a wicked dagger – the God of War’s preferred weapon. Rainbird made mewling noises, struggling to get away; Paul stepped on his neck, pinning him to the rooftop.

  Aliyah brought the dagger up and down, a smooth arc between its tip and Rainbird’s burning heart, measuring just how easy it would be to remove Rainbird from this earth.

  She snarled, her face flickering between the murderous God of
War and Aliyah, heartbroken and pure. Then Aliyah washed away, and the God of War whirled to face Paul – not Aliyah-sized, but a giant man, all her rage personified, her daggers dropping gore to the earth.

  “What if I am this?” she roared, her breath charnel, something hideous burning and twisting underneath her ribs. “What if I’m a killer like Rainbird?”

  Paul reached up to cup the God of War’s scarred cheek.

  “Then I’ll still love you,” Paul said.

  “Daddy!” the God of War cried, all her heartbreak set loose at last. And as Paul scooped her up in his arms she shrank, becoming Aliyah, becoming a forlorn girl who had no good solutions but now knew the bad ones.

  “Come on, V,” Paul said, and they left Rainbird, trembling, on the rooftop.

  Fifty-One

  Cold Mercy

  Rainbird writhed on the heated tarmac, plotting revenge. His knobbed spine pushed waves of pain up a body he no longer recognized. His weakened muscles were atrophied mockeries.

  But deep within him, he still felt it: that fiery flicker.

  His body could be rehabilitated.

  His flame could be restoked.

  “It will take months,” Rainbird swore, crawling towards the rooftop ladder. “Perhaps years. But I will track you down, papermancer, and I will show your daughter the error of mercy–”

  “Yeah, about that,” said Valentine.

  Rainbird made a choked noise, scrambling backwards; Valentine shrugged and walked forward. She looked resigned, as though checking into work at a job she didn’t like.

  “You see, some guys, you beat ’em and they go, ‘Well, that guy was more talented than me, good for him.’ And they give it up. But other guys – well, they think the whole universe was created to hand them victory. And guys like that are fucking dangerous, because no matter how honestly you beat them, they feel cheated. So they never quit. They come back to stab you in your sleep.”

  “Paul doesn’t kill!” Rainbird cried. “He wouldn’t–”

  Valentine knelt down, patted Rainbird on the head. “I know. That’s sweet of him. And I will do anything – anything, Rainbird – to keep my family from making those hard choices. Are we clear?”

 

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