Fix

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Fix

  Ferrett Steinmetz

  Contents

  Dedication

  Dressing up in Costumes, Playing Silly Games

  1. Warriors, Come Out to Play

  2. An American Girl, Raised on Promises

  3. 3-2-1 Contract

  4. All the Good Things in the Universe Burn

  5. Repairs and Despairs

  6. Fellowship of Nothing

  7. Smiling Weapons

  8. ’Til the Landslide Brought Me Down

  9. Sturdy Bookshelves

  10. Metal Gear Solidified

  11. Outgunned, Outmanned, Outnumbered, Outplanned

  12. The Terribly Short Triumph of Hamir Singh

  13. Flux Leads to Suffering

  14. “Your Kid Will Pull the Trigger”

  Hans Plays With Lottie, Lottie Plays With Jane

  15. Neuropeptalks

  16. Teachers Leave Them Kids Alone

  17. Chekov’s Orange Juice

  18. Welcome to the Jungle

  19. Wodehouse is a Very Very Very Fine House

  20. Death of a Salesmancer

  21. An Indecent Proposal

  22. Trying to Do the Unimaginable

  23. The Sunset Gardens Assisted Living Facility

  24. Love is Not Enough

  25. The Criminal Cried as He Dropped Him Down

  26. O Father, Where Art Thou?

  27. Wrecking Ball

  28. Kiss the Apocalypse

  29. Tsabo’s Decree

  30. Kiss With a Dying Man’s Tongue

  31. Proof the World Wants You to Die

  32. War Bureaucracy

  33. The Ol’ Kali Ma Excavation

  34. Why She Didn’t Kill Him

  Games Without Frontiers

  35. A Particular Set of Skills She Has Acquired Over a Very Long Career

  36. Donutmancy

  37. Daughter Says Knock You Out

  38. Blue Valentine

  39. Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

  40. Wrong Donut

  41. Snap Back to Reality, Whoops, There Goes Gravity

  42. Heart, Broken

  War Without Tears

  43. Miss You in the Saddest Fashion

  44. Uncomfortable Mortalities

  45. All Locked Doors Must Open

  46. The Secret That Saved the World

  47. Pulsations and Reparations

  48. “Run,” Valentine Says

  49. Cut the Cord

  50. Pills and Thrills and Daffodils Will Kill

  51. Got To Get Out Of This World Somehow

  52. Tumbled, From the Burning Sky

  53. All the President’s Women

  54. Trying Hard to Be the Shepherd

  55. Listen

  56. What Aliyah Said

  57. For One Last Time, I Need Y’all to Roar

  58. After Me, There Will Be No More

  59. Which Can Eternal Lie

  60. Do I Dare Repair the Universe?

  61. Got Me Hoping You’ll Save Me Right Now

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  ∞ : The Chapter Midway Through the End Credits

  Acknowledgments II

  The CHAPTER That Comes After The Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Legals

  To Erin, my beautifully bold trailblazer

  * * *

  And to Amy, my entertainingly excellent experimenter

  * * *

  I'd like to tell you girls that parenting isn’t quite this hard

  * * *

  But it is

  Part One

  Dressing up in Costumes, Playing Silly Games

  One

  Warriors, Come Out to Play

  The Morehead Youth Soccer League met outside the local Wendy’s before heading to the first scrimmage of the season, so the kids could load up on Frosties while their parents scrawled out their kids’ league applications. The coach sat regally in her red vinyl booth, the parents lining up to place their forms before her; she scrutinized the waivers to ensure the kids’ emergency contacts were duly filled in.

  Statistically speaking, Paul thought, Morehead was the safest place in America for Aliyah to pretend to be a normal child.

  She’d begged him: I can keep my magic under control, Dad. I don’t even want to do magic, I swear! I know your political rallies are important, they’re making the world safe for us ’mancers, but… nobody takes their kids to a speech that ends in tear gas and SMASH squadrons. We’re always on the run, so I hardly ever meet anyone my own age – and when I do, they never see me, just my magic.

  Can’t I play soccer? In disguise? So I can have a social life somewhere?

  He’d remind her how badly the government wanted to capture her, to capture all of them, and that the pro-’mancer rallies were only safe because he and his Project Mayhem allies planned them out months in advance. Showing up in hostile territory, among families who hadn’t been vetted, with only a handful of bodyguards to protect them? That could get them captured and brainwashed. And Aliyah would go quiet and say she understood, but…

  Late at night, he’d see her holed up under the covers with an iPad, watching video blogs of teenaged girls’ manicure tutorials. She’d trace her fingertips across the screen, whispering their words back to them fondly, as if speaking like them created a connection that substituted for being with them.

  On Aliyah’s thirteenth birthday, Paul and Imani had agreed to let her try out for a soccer league.

  She’d hugged him for an hour.

  Still, Paul had used his bureaucromancy to triangulate the neighborhoods located furthest away from SMASH garrisons; he broke into government registries to find the cities with the lowest numbers of registered anti-’mancer weaponholders, comparing his population density charts against anti-’mancer polls.

  Ultimately, he had narrowed his choice down to one of seven cities where Aliyah was least likely to be kidnapped if her magic showed. He then spent another three weeks mired in deep analysis before Valentine had finally thrown a dart at his map and picked the closest safe town.

  Morehead, Kentucky, it was.

  Still, as his wife Imani pushed him in through the door of the Wendy’s, he felt uneasy leaving Aliyah in front with the other girls. She’d used her videogamemancy to reskin herself, hiding her burn scars to look like any other exuberant young black teenaged girl, but had refused to change her wild tangled curls.

  “Those curls are me, Dad,” she’d told him. “I’ll hide my magic – but I won’t change my skin color or my hair. The girls there have to see some of who I really am – or we might as well not be friends at all, right?”

  She was right. But those curls were routinely plastered on the New York Times, her picture placed next to every op-ed asking whether ’mancy should be regulated instead of simply making ’mancers illegal. Aliyah was the youngest ’mancer in what remained of the world – and though he’d tried hard to convince America that he and his daughter were human beings, worthy of the Bill of Rights, he’d barely budged the needle away from “brainwash them all.”

  One of the girls stopped bouncing a soccer ball and moved to talk to Aliyah. Paul froze: maybe this kid had recognized Aliyah’s hair. Maybe Aliyah would forget to introduce herself by her fake name. Maybe a parent would…

  “Did we really need the wheelchair?” Imani whispered, as she pushed Paul through the entryway.

  As expected, people turned to stare when the handicapped person showed up; Paul tugged his hat down, hiding from their pity.

  “You can walk, you know,” Imani told him pointedly.

  “I can limp.” Paul wiggled his artificial foot, hidden beneath layers of videogame pseudo-skin; the disguise not only covered his bladelike titanium foot with a spon
gy sneaker, but it masked his normal Greek swarthiness beneath a dark African-American skin tone that matched Aliyah’s natural look. “If they see a girl with those infamous curls, accompanied by a father with that infamous limp, they’ll know who we are.”

  Imani removed his hat to ruffle his hair. “This is a small town. They won’t expect the world’s most dangerous ’mancers to show up here. Even if they did, you’re now disguised as black instead of Greek – and though I remain gloriously black, these itchy wrinkles you have festooned me with make me look a decade older. All that’ll give Aliyah away today is a father who’s so tensed for incoming SMASH squadrons he’ll set everyone else on edge… so may I suggest you lighten the hell up?”

  He smiled. Imani always cleaved through his bullshit. So did Valentine.

  That was why, he supposed, Imani was his wife and Valentine was his best friend.

  “I’ll try,” he promised. She steered him closer to the coach, who spoke animatedly with a mother who she obviously knew from previous seasons.

  “You made your best plans. Now pack away that paranoia! Look, we’re getting in line to file paperwork! What better way could you spend a day?” She turned to Valentine. “Speaking of enjoying the day, will you ever look up from your phone?”

  Unlike Paul’s complete makeover, Valentine hadn’t disguised herself overmuch – she’d pointedly reskinned her Super Mario tattoos with gratuitous Confederate flags and Dixie guns, and exchanged her usual darkly gothic cleavage-baring dresses for cut-off Daisy Dukes and a low-cut Charlie Daniels T-shirt, but she was still a curvy, hefty brunette. The local fathers snuck guilty glances as she swivel-hipped by.

  Though it was a little weird seeing her without her boyfriend Robert at her side.

  Valentine walked up to them, playing videogames on her phone, navigating through the Wendy’s crowd without looking up. Her expression, however, was concealed behind wraparound sunglasses. A SMASH team had shot out Valentine’s left eye, and all her videogame reskinning couldn’t restore her lost vision.

  “What, pray tell, am I missing by keeping my nose in a game?” Valentine asked, thumbs tapping away. “The rampant excitement of parents changing diapers? The ebullient joie de vivre of young boys playing punch buggy?”

  “I hope,” Imani said, dropping her voice low, “that you’ll stop playing games once Aliyah gets onto the field.”

  For a woman in her early thirties, Paul thought, Valentine did the disgusted Gawd huff better than any teenager. She lowered her sunglasses to peer over them at Imani, cocking her head as though she couldn’t quite fathom how she and Imani still failed to understand each other despite five years on the run together.

  “Have you ever played a game of PlayStation FIFA Soccer?”

  “You know I haven’t.” Imani didn’t play videogames except to teach Aliyah; she’d considered them a waste of time before her daughter had become a videogamemancer. Imani had never quite understood how her daughter, who she’d envisioned becoming a Yale corporate lawyer like her dear old mom, had become so obsessively entangled with Super Mario that her videogame love punched holes through physics.

  “Well, the reason Aliyah chose soccer is because FIFA is the most tedious fucking game in the entire universe. There are no fiery trails streaking behind the ball, no fireworks bursting overhead when someone scores a goal – nothing to spark Aliyah’s fertile imagination into magical outbursts. FIFA is a perfectly ordinary replication of a perfectly ordinary game made for perfectly ordinary people, and as such I will only survive this impending tedium by defeating all comers at Infinity Blade.”

  Imani blinked, disappointed. “Aliyah seemed so excited to play soccer.”

  “She’s excited to fit in with someone who’s not us.” Valentine directed Imani’s gaze through the front window. A group of kids had gathered around Aliyah as she told some crazy story; the girls smothered giggles with their hands. Yet whereas every other girl clutched a soccer ball, Aliyah’s sat on the ground. “She’ll tolerate the soccer.”

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “Two reasons.” Valentine ticked them off on her fingers. “First, Uncle Robert can’t make it, because he’s prepping a local safehouse. He’d been doing soccer drills with her. So she needed at least one of us here.”

  Depending on who you talked to, Robert was either Valentine’s boyfriend (as he described it) or her lover (as she described it) – a former Fight-Club-o-’mancer who’d outgrown his Tyler Durden persona to become the thoroughly non-magical, hyper-competent security chief of Paul’s organization.

  “And the second reason?” Imani asked.

  “Because Paul’s paperwork magic won’t stop an angry redneck’s bullet. If Aliyah shits the bed, you guys are gonna need me.”

  Imani nodded. Though she’d never understood what bonded Paul and Valentine, she respected their friendship – and respected Valentine’s hyper-violent Grand Theft Auto-inspired mayhem more.

  Valentine’s New York City sneer was far too dismissive of the small-town life for Paul’s taste – but she’d been the one who’d handed her Nintendo DS to a burned girl trapped in a hospital, thus passing on her videogamemancy to Aliyah. “Besides, I’ve told Aliyah I’ll elbow Valentine whenever she makes a good play. Watch.”

  He nudged Valentine in the ribs. She flung up her arms reflexively and yelled, “GO OUR TEAM!”

  “See?” Paul said brightly. “I’ve got her trained.”

  Imani snorted, hiding her bemusement behind one manicured hand. Even in her aged pseudoskin, masquerading as a soccer mom, she looked as elegant as the day he’d fallen in love with her.

  The last parents finished talking to the coach. Imani pushed Paul into position. The coach, an elderly woman wearing a Wildcats baseball cap, plucked a fresh application off a stack of blank forms.

  “Well, aren’t you a feisty bunch?” She fished a pen from her pocket. “Welcome aboard. We’ll just need a–”

  But Paul had already placed the paperwork on the table – every field filled out in legible block lettering, the forms stacked in the order they’d been presented on the website, the $35.00 check paperclipped to the left corner.

  “Huh,” the coach said pleasantly, flipping through to double-check Paul’s work. “You came prepared.”

  Imani gave their cover story about how they were homeschoolers, and all too used to government paperwork–

  –but all Paul noticed was the sloppy stack of forms by the coach’s elbow, and the big blank space on the top waiver where someone’s “Emergency Contact” information should be.

  That empty space is no big deal, he told himself. This is a small town; everyone knows everyone.

  Yet to Paul, that unfilled data felt like a dead child. It was unlikely the coach would be out sick when a kid got hurt. Yet Paul envisioned worst-case scenarios: a kid breaking her neck on the field, nobody knowing who to call, a disastrous medical decision made because nobody could contact Mom in time.

  Unlikely, but… bad things happened.

  Paperwork kept records for when good people needed them, he thought. And as he envisioned the empty paperwork, tuning out Imani and the coach, he thought how good it would be for that information to be there, and…

  The name on the form correlated to seven babies born at Morehead hospital, but only one of those kids was old enough for the Soccer League. The date of birth matched this child up to one mother, name of Leslie Hornor, who lived in Lakeview Heights…

  An audible noise, like pencils scribbling.

  The blank emergency contact field filled itself in.

  The stack of forms straightened itself into a neat pile.

  Imani coughed – she knew what ’mancy felt like – but the coach turned around, perplexed.

  “Did you feel something move?” the coach asked.

  “Must be a gust of wind,” Imani said.

  Paul gripped his wheelchair, looking away from the forms. That spontaneous magic was why it was so hard to control ’mancers, yet s
o wrong to imprison them. Few set out to become ’mancers: magic stemmed from relentless obsession. If you believed with a diamond-hard conviction the universe should act a certain way, sometimes it did. You didn’t mean to make it do anything, it just… shuffled out of the way.

  The universe moved because the world was better off for the changes you wanted to make. Having all the emergency contact fields in that stack filled out was a minor change, but Paul felt better knowing that all the kids here were as safe as he could make them.

  Yet it was also why today’s game would be a test for Aliyah. Like most ‘mancers, Paul had been an ordinary man for almost forty years before his bureaucromancy blossomed – the result of one too many nights working for Samaritan Mutual. Valentine was considered an exceptionally talented ’mancer for sparking in her late twenties. Both had lived as mundanes, internalizing the “normal” way the world worked.

  Aliyah, however, had been made into a ’mancer at six years old. Physics had always scurried out of her way. And she kept forgetting the world wasn’t supposed to have rainbow roads and showers of gold coins.

  Her ’mancy was beautiful, of course, her digitized pixels popping out of mid-air to form what, in a better world, would be considered art… But ever since the European Broach, the world had been all too willing to murder ’mancers, or brainwash them.

  “Thanks for being patient while I checked your work,” the coach said. “You have no idea how important paperwork is around here.”

  “It’s what binds the universe together,” Paul said. And for him? It did. That’s why he’d accidentally done ’mancy.

  Today, he’d see whether Aliyah loved friendship more than videogames.

  Two

  An American Girl, Raised on Promises

  When Aliyah was six, she’d killed a magical terrorist by summoning the power of Fire Mario.