Daddy swallowed. “We’ve kept me separated from the day-to-day business, so they won’t get much. And with the Contract destroyed, they can’t get access to the people who signed up for–”
“I don’t give a shit about Project Mayhem!” Mom leapt to her feet, ignoring the way Mawmaw came to. “I’m not asking you ‘How do we function politically?’, Paul! I’m asking you how this family will function when they scrub your brain and turn you into a smiling Judas! How will Aliyah react when her turncoat father comes to kidnap her?!”
Mom flexed her hands like she wanted to punch something.
Everyone turned to look at Aliyah.
“I think…”
And if Aliyah thought Daddy would judge her for what she was about to say, she’d never have spoken. But she thought of her friends who’d burned at the Institute. She thought of K-Dash and Quaysean hugging as the flames consumed them.
She thought about Savannah and her daddy huddled next to each other for warmth in a barbed-wire prison, singing gospel songs to keep their spirits up.
“…I think,” she said, “I’d live with that a lot better than I would knowing a hundred innocent people were rotting in prison because of me.”
Mommy slumped to her knees, sobbing so fiercely even Mawmaw clambered out of her rocking chair to comfort her. Daddy, Valentine, Robert – soon everyone in the room touched her, stroked her, lent her strength.
“I can’t,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Dammit, Paul – you’ll sacrifice everything for her, won’t you? You’ll kill yourself so she doesn’t feel guilty…”
“Mommy. Look at me.” She pried her mother’s hands from her cheeks, feeling this strange responsibility: I have to carry you now.
Maybe that’s what growing older was.
“I don’t want Daddy to die,” Aliyah told her. “But Savannah and Latisha and Bennie… they can’t be punished for my sins.
“And… I know it’s scary, Mom. But this plan won’t work unless you help. We have to do this tonight, because maybe they’re carting them away as we speak. We have to work fast. So… can you help us plan? Because…”
She hesitated. It was a low blow, hitting her mother in her weakest point. But it would get Mom functioning again.
“…we work best as a family.”
Mom grabbed Aliyah and Dad by the backs of their necks, pressed their foreheads against hers. “Goddammit,” she muttered. “She got this overinflated sense of duty from you, Paul.”
Dad laughed – then realized she hadn’t meant to be funny. “Would you have it any other way?”
She sniffled back tears. “No. No, I would not. I am proud of the daughter we have raised.” He looked happy for a moment, until she added, “But some days, Paul, I wish you’d never met that goddamned illustromancer.”
Aliyah knew what Mommy meant: I wish you’d never fucked us up with your ’mancy.
Aliyah felt that way too. But it would kill Daddy if she ever said that out loud.
Imani helped Mawmaw back to her rocking chair, then straightened her dress.
“All right. The quicker we go in, the better our chances. I want a full list of all the resources we have available.”
Valentine smirked. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a holocaust cloak.”
Mom whirled around on Valentine so fiercely that Mawmaw dropped her needles. “What the fuck is a holocaust cloak?”
“Hey, hey.” Dad massaged her shoulders. “It’s just Valentine riffing.” Imani allowed Daddy’s touch as though it was yet another trial she would endure.
Aliyah wished she felt guilty. But she’d left her friends behind once too often.
It would kill her to do it again.
Ten
Metal Gear Solidified
Valentine swept the binoculars across Morehead-Rowan airport again, wondering why Robert was down there instead of her.
This airport was dinky – a single, mile-long runway sitting disconsolately next to a dozen tin-roofed hangars and a small lodge for private pilots to cool their heels.
And as sunset approached, it still held that sleepy feel – even with several military aircraft refueling on the tarmac. But even the soldiers seemed relaxed, walking into the lodge to get a bite, checking in on the hooded prisoners who’d been herded into an electrically-fenced area beneath one of the hangars.
Nobody seemed tense except for the coffin-sized surveillance drones that swooped across the field like oversized bumblebees. And why should they? Judging from the small number of prisoners – they were down to fifteen – Morehead’s most dangerous child soccer players had been airlifted out.
Robert had crawled into the waist-high grass that surrounded the airport, claiming he needed to disable the anti-’mancer sensors before she could do her spectacular work, and she hadn’t seen him since. Maybe someone had spotted him. Maybe they’d dragged Robert into the lodge for questioning, had him tied to a chair, were beating him senseless.
But though she tried to muster concern, she couldn’t cough up any real worry for her sweetie. Robert had taught himself the arts of stealth so well that even Valentine couldn’t catch him unless she used ’mancy. And when she tried to fret about strangers tying Robert up to a chair and beating him, well, she remembered doing that to him last Thursday.
It was remarkably hard to torture a former Fight Club-mancer-turned-masochist.
“We have to get them out,” Aliyah repeated for the tenth time, bouncing up and down. Valentine pushed her back further into the woods that surrounded the airport.
“Stop creeping closer to them, kid. Remember, if one of those goddamned Unizombies catches sight of you, all of them will know we’re here – and they’ve got super-fast helicopters with response squads in the air.”
“But our plan is to get the prisoners before they refuel–”
“My plan is to get to the prisoners. Your plan is to stay put, kid. The only reason we brought you with us is because leaving you alone at the safehouse left you totally open to a SMASH attack…”
“But if the planes fly off with the last of the prisoners, then they’re lost forever!”
“Yeah, well, maybe Uncle Robert will save them singlehandedly.”
She refocused the binoculars, furious at how clumsy these damned things were. Robert had tried to train her how to use them, but she kept twisting the knobs to focus, squinting until her eyes ached. And she couldn’t use her left hand, for fear of loosening what was taped to her palm…
Real binoculars zoomed in automatically on their target. You never had this problem in stealth games.
The lenses flexed, and–
She quashed the helpful flare of videogamemancy that wanted to adjust the binoculars to her preferred reality. Robert had told her they couldn’t afford any ’mancy here until Paul had disabled the black opal sensors around the compound – one of SMASH’s aggravating upgrades. They’d embedded expensive (and sensitive) microchips of opal inside electronic fracture detectors. The slightest whisper of ’mancy would crack the opals, and the fracture would trigger alarms, and the place would be overrun with Unimancers in their signature black helicopters.
Paul couldn’t disable them until he had the detectors’ serial numbers. Which required Robert to sneak in to an armed base, which should be her goddamned job instead of hanging out babysitting…
She heaved the binoculars into a tree.
“Aunt Valentine!”
“It made me feel better, OK?”
She turned before the kid yelled at her – and why was the kid in the line of danger, anyway? OK, fine, leaving her behind at a safehouse with no exits, shitty reception, and a handful of college volunteers to stave off a SMASH invasion was probably not wise, either. But that wasn’t really why they’d brought her.
Truth was, if things hit the shit here, there was a good chance either she’d get Unimanced or Paul would. And if that happened, Aliyah should know as soon as possible that her favorite aunt would come hunting her.
Yet as she peered into the fading light looking for her goddamned… well, “boyfriend” had been applied to their relationship inelegantly for years, so it would do today, she resented the fact that there weren’t four ’mancers at the airport.
Back when he was Tyler Durden and topped off with crazy, they’d have romped on down there together to knock down soldiers like bowling pins. And while she’d thought it was adorable when his Fight Club-mancy had faded, she’d been sure he’d pick up some other obsession, and…
He hadn’t. Instead, he’d gotten really good at things. She’d watched him pick up lockpicking, and rappelling, and camouflage. He’d tried to teach her Krav Maga, and looked disappointed when she’d surpassed his Israeli karate in a burst of Call of Duty-’mancy.
You can master this stuff too, you know, he’d told her.
She’d brandished the Xbox controller at him. I did.
He flitted from talent to talent like some cut-rate Batman. Everyone else loved what he was doing, oh, he was so good at running Project Mayhem, he always had the right connections to find a friendly face at the worst time, he could find rogue ’mancers the safehouse they needed.
She should love it. She was proud of her boyfriend, she was. He and Paul had polished Project Mayhem until it ran like a fine watch. But here she was again, thumb up her ass like she was some proctologist Little Jack Horner, waiting for Robert to finish his work, and why the hell was she here?
She’d tried helping Project Mayhem. She’d Sims-ed together a house to hold the refugee ’mancers, but her pixelated creations fell apart in an hour. She’d fit wooden beams together like Tetris blocks, creating frames Robert and his men could hang sidings on, but when she got four beams in a row they’d blink into nothingness.
All she was really good at was violence, and there was less and less of a need for that all the time.
She thought of leaving, sometimes. Going somewhere she could kick ass and take names. Then she imagined going to bed alone, never seeing that wicked grin when she grabbed his wrist to slam him against the bed and he wrestled back, knowing she’d achieve a wet victory after covering him in bruises and semen…
“Miss me?”
She whirled around to chuck the binoculars at the sudden noise, then realized she’d already thrown them. And it was Robert, fucking Robert, dangling a black opal detector off the end of his finger.
He knelt as he offered the detector to her.
“Sorry the opening act took so long.” Her anger was swept away by the manifest adoration in his eyes. “Took me a while to find a security breach big enough for me to jimmy out a lock. But the stage is now set for the star of tonight’s show.”
Valentine could not say why his words itched like another herpes breakout.
She squeezed him tight, burying her face between his beautifully soft man-tits.
“Sorry,” he said. “I worked as fast as I could–”
She stepped away. “No apologies. Just call in the sensors’ model number.”
“I already did,” he said. She turned away, trying not to get too invested in his boo-boo faces. “Paul’s disabling them right now.”
That was the unnerving thing about Paul. When Aliyah went off, she could sense the kid’s ’mancy from miles away. When Tyler – Robert – had been in his prime, she’d homed in on him from across the state.
But Paul was a ghost. She knew he was pulling up the factory records of the places these expensive government sensors had been built at, quietly rejigging their quality control routines so that each sensor was a dud, had always been duds. He wove a tremendous magical effort, reaching into the past to backdate errors, a magic threading its way through every sensor installed across two square miles of airport – and Paul, who’d never felt comfortable using paperwork for destruction, would be swimming with so much flux he’d be useless for the rest of the night.
Despite the huge upswell of ’mancy Paul generated, Valentine couldn’t feel a damn thing.
For a nebbish amputee who hugged like a praying mantis, Paul could be one scary-ass dude.
The encrypted walkie-talkie squawked. “OK.” Paul spoke with all the tension of a man who’d shooed a moth out of the house. “You’re safe to go. As safe as we get here, anyway.”
“Remember, your flux is a limited resource,” Imani said. “Treat your ’mancy as if it’s a potion: save it for the bosses.”
Valentine touched her palm to ensure Imani’s secret weapon hadn’t fallen off. “I gotta burn some to get in close. I’m not, you know, fuckin’ Jason Bourne like some people here.”
Robert winced. “Not every situation calls for ’mancy–”
“Can we agree that some situations do?” She shrugged off Robert’s sad brown eyes, took Aliyah by the shoulders. “OK, kid, who’s the cavalry here?”
The kid registered her resentment by looking past Valentine, towards the hooded prisoners huddled miserably underneath the hangar. “Mom is.”
“That’s right. Things aren’t gonna go wrong–” One of the coffin-drones buzzed overhead, turning her swagger into stammer. “But if we wanna get your friends out of the Gimp Suit, we’re gonna need your ’mancy to hijack the plane and fly ’em away safely. Unless Uncle Robert’s taken a correspondence course in flight I’m unaware of…”
He crossed his arms, aggrieved. “I’m not certified, no. Just online simulations.”
She rolled her eye. “Anyway, Aliyah – save your flux for airlifting the civvies.” She grabbed Aliyah’s face, forced her into eye contact. “Because remember, kid – you got them into this, but your flux can still make it a lot worse for them.”
If Paul was here, he would have referred to this conversation as their “Good cop, bad cop” routine – he provided the love, Valentine doled out the guilt. But Valentine didn’t do it to ping-pong the kid into some cheap affection. She did it because Aliyah was as hard-headed as her goddamned father, and sometimes that kid needed to be shocked right the fuck out of her fantasies.
Aliyah’s gaze drifted towards the horizon: they couldn’t see the broach from here, but by God it loomed large in Aliyah’s mind.
She hugged Aliyah, gave a hesitant wave to Robert. He fumbled in his pocket for that damned ring, like he’d done for weeks. She hated poking at him with the Jason Bourne crack, but she’d been tightrope-walking that wire for weeks – enough kindness and he’d feel comfortable enough to pop the question.
She didn’t want to look at his engagement ring until she was sure what her answer would be.
Valentine pushed her thoughts away to stare at the field of uncut grass. The soldiers paced back and forth, shooting the shit, lighting up cigarettes.
She watched for the pattern.
There was always a pattern to the way guards moved.
Sure enough, she began to mark the guards’ pathways. That little runty one paced in circles around the jeep. The drones had a complicated figure-eight pattern overhead, leaving gaps a skilled infiltrator could slip through. The guards went into the lodge to get water, rested for forty-five seconds, slipped off to doze–
This wasn’t magic. This was the way a just world worked. She shouldn’t get out of breath climbing the stairs – she should run for miles. She wasn’t some housewife wannabe cooling her heels while her lover brought home the bacon – she was the star of the show. She wasn’t a klutz with bruised knees from tripping over tree roots – she was a predator, vanishing into the grass.
She wasn’t waiting helplessly for a relationship to implode. She was a badass, about to kick ass. She made the world into her own videogame, a luscious art that trimmed away all the world’s drab redundancy to transform a military compound into a playground.
Valentine made her way towards the hangar bay, feeling her flux building. Not a lot. This was who she should be – she was just giving the universe’s image of herself a little boost.
A drone swooped overhead; she hunkered down instinctively. And that, she thought, was her greatest failure in raising Aliyah
: the kid wouldn’t have ducked, she’d have fought. Which was Valentine’s fault for letting the kid choose her own games. She hadn’t realized she could pick games for Aliyah until Imani had come to them with a list and said, “These games have tactically useful mechanics. Can you learn them?”
The experiment hadn’t been entirely successful. Some of those games had sucked. But what had become very clear was that Aliyah loved modern RPGs and her action games, where the proper response to every challenge was either to battle it head-on, or to level up until you could battle it head-on.
Whereas Valentine’s affinity was for old-school games, stealth games, fighting games – games that punished unwise choices with permanent game overs. She understood that you couldn’t fix some mistakes with a simple “Restart from last checkpoint,” but Aliyah had the headstrong magic of someone who didn’t understand finesse.
Given that SMASH had R&D divisions devoted to neutralizing ’mancy, Valentine did not want to discover what those hefty black-box drones did when triggered. Even the helicopter refueling on the runway made her nervous. And she’d fought helicopters.
She inched closer to the guards by the barbed wire, scooching past a marine with reluctance. Oof. You could have bounced a quarter off that one’s ass. He stopped, making conversation with his friend:
“Know who these mooks are?”
“Got orders from on high to guard ’em. They haven’t made a peep all day.”
“Maybe they’re drugged.”
Valentine paused, palms touching the sun-warmed tarmac, to see if they’d spill any other information:
“Know who these mooks are?”
“Got orders from on high to guard ‘em. They haven’t made a peep all day.”
“Maybe they’re drugged.”
They’d given all the exposition they had, the poor little pinheads. But they stood before the barbed-wire fence penning in the Morehead prisoners. So she grabbed Guard #1 around the neck when Guard #2 turned around, dragged Guard #1 around a corner. She snatched the keycard off his unconscious body, feeling her flux swell – her only indication that he hadn’t had a keycard before she’d gone looking for it.
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