The copter’s guns spat fire at him.
Hamir jerked the kite straight up through the rotors.
That was, Hamir thought, the path to victory – to use the beast’s own momentum against it. The blades smashed into the frail wood, pulling the line taut, a one-in-a-million shot only Hamir could have made–
– and the kitestring hit a hairline fracture in one of the rotors, an impact at the perfect angle to have it shiver down its faultline and crack, tumbling free of the helicopter. The other blades smashed around into it, spinning free as the copter sagged sideways, and Hamir watched in glory, the world slowing to a crawl as it always did when Hamir severed his competitor’s string, as if the world itself wanted him to witness every detail of victory.
“I did it!” Hamir cried, raising his arms. “I–”
That was when he saw the jagged chunk of severed rotor spinning towards him. The shattered airfoil punched through his chest, sent him tumbling in a spray of blood.
He twisted his neck back, looking above the landing strip. The copter had crashed in a fiery wreck, spilling burning fuel everywhere, turning the tarmac into a hellish blaze–
Hamir noted the remnants of his kite, inexplicably floating above the chaos, the smashed struts held together by tattered paper. It should have fallen to earth, but the inferno below lifted it up, wafted it high–
A champion.
“I did it,” Hamir wheezed, and died the happiest man alive.
Thirteen
Flux Leads to Suffering
Paul sensed the mission was going off-kilter when the helicopter exploded.
“What the–” Imani bit off a curse as she peered out the narrow slit that remained of the windshield. They couldn’t tell what caused the explosion; the SUV’s impromptu customizations blocked off nine-tenths of the windshield. Imani screeched around curvy roads as she rocketed down to the airfield, the car’s strapped-on armor threatening to fly away.
The fireball was blinding. Paul wondered whether the explosion had been some side effect of his flux, but no – his head still ached from that migraine-like pressure.
Carrying a near-fatal load of bad luck while charging into a war zone?
He’d had better ideas.
“What the hell was that?!” Paul yelled into the walkie-talkie. “Hamir was supposed to distract them!”
“That dumb fucker.” Robert made the condemnation sound mournful. “I told him he was a ’mancer, I told him he needed to manage his flux. He… Aliyah, no!”
Aliyah leapt up to shout into the microphone. “Daddy, Aunt Valentine’s coffin is in the flames! She’s cooking! I’m going in!”
“Negative!” Paul shouted.
“We’re inbound at fifty miles an hour,” Imani snapped. “Do not move, princess.”
“Daddy, you’ve got flux – I don’t! I can take the–”
“Mommy’s plan doesn’t involve ’mancy.” Paul cringed at the white lie – her rescue plan depended on Valentine’s ’mancy, and who knew whether that was still active. “This mission’s gone from a rescue to a retreat. Robert, get Aliyah and get out – we’ll meet you at the safehouse.”
“Daddy, you can’t get captured – Project Mayhem can’t function without you–”
“And I can’t function without you. Do not come in, sweet pea. We’ve got this.”
Imani steered the car towards the carnage’s center. The remaining Unimancers and soldiers had finally noted the SUV rattling towards them, raising their rifles to fire at the inbound threat.
Paul tried not to imagine the things that could go wrong. Or they would go wrong.
“Paul,” Imani said. “If we get out of this alive, I am going to strangle you.”
He stifled a laugh. “You insisted on taking Robert’s defensive driving course.”
“I did it to protect you!”
“Come on,” Paul grinned, as the soldiers knelt to get a better bead on them – and then looked startled as they took in this absurd contraption bearing down upon them. “You never had this excitement when you worked for Taft, Steinberg, and Hollander. Sure, we might die – but you’re driving an invulnerable battering ram to rescue a friend from the United States’ military. Isn’t this a little cool?”
Her sour-faced look melted away into girlish excitement. She adjusted her grip on the steering wheel.
“OK,” she admitted. “It is a little cool.”
And as Imani shoved his head down so he wouldn’t be in the line of gunfire, Paul had never been more in love.
But what he loved far more was the satisfying chunk of high-caliber bullets bouncing off the magically impenetrable bookcases they’d strapped to the car, followed by the sounds of government soldiers diving aside.
They plowed through the fire, scattering flaming bits of copter wreckage. Imani torqued the car sideways, muttering, “Come on, wheels, hold together…” The car jerked as Imani caromed the SUV into Valentine’s coffin-drone, sending it skittering out from the burning pool of jet fuel in a spray of sloppy flames.
Paul couldn’t breathe. The impact had flung him into the seatbelt, his broken ribs jabbing into his side like steak knives–
Imani threw the car into a side-spin, the car juddering underneath her.
The wheels, Paul thought. They’re melting from the heat–
The SUV was – or had been – wrapped in Valentine’s belief that no good videogame chase ended with popped tires. The bookcases were strapped on as sturdily as the safehouse acolytes could manage – but no way this would hold together without a good binding of videogamemancy.
And as Paul worried they might melt from the heat, the flux drained out of him and into the tires with a bang. The tie-downs so improbably holding the bookcases to the SUV slipped, stray bullets fraying their tension to send them clattering to the ground as Imani fought to keep the car from rolling.
They slid to a halt on the far side of the crash, putting a dimming blaze between them and the soldiers.
“Get her out,” Imani yelled, ducking as bullets bounced off the remaining bookcases. Paul hated that he could distinguish between the impact of rubber bullets and live fire – the Unimancers fired rubber bullets, the panicked soldiers shot live fire.
“Go around to the far side of the wreckage to cut off their escape!” the remaining Unimancers ordered, their voices still saturated with the general’s precise tones. “Do not fire! Mr Tsabo is saturated with flux! We must help him before he hurts himself!”
Paul pushed the door open, stumbled over a fallen bookcase as he made his way to Valentine’s drone, choking on the stench of burning rubber and hot metal. He batted at the air, suppressing flashbacks to the apartment fire he’d crawled through to save Aliyah–
This rescue was tactically unwise, he knew. Better to let Valentine burn; she was already unconscious. She’d die unaware, at peace.
That was a good death for a ’mancer.
But he’d already watched his daughter burned alive. He’d never sleep again if he left his best friend to roast.
He made his way to where the drone had skidded to a halt. Paul braced his artificial foot against the tarmac, wrapped his tie around his hand to protect it from the heat, and wrenched open the door.
The acrid, burning chemicals wafted out – the padding had begun to smolder. The Bowser tattoo covering Valentine’s left shoulder was blistered beyond recognition. And…
He covered his mouth in horror.
She looked so small.
Valentine had proudly called herself “Paul’s Wrecking Ball” – he aimed her at his enemies, and she’d plowed through them. But in this transport vehicle, she looked like a pudgy goth girl in her mid-thirties passed out after a night of drinking – not Valentine the legend, but Valentine so fragile it hurt to see her.
“Get her out, Paul!” Imani snapped into the “defensive fire” position Robert had taught her. “Incoming!”
Paul shoved his hands under Valentine’s armpits, screaming as his ribs stabb
ed into him. She was a big girl, he was scrawny – why had Imani tasked him to carry her?
He remembered his days at the police academy: Rookie, your body’s as sturdy as a scarecrow. I should mark you a washout. But goddammit, you do not quit.
He ignored his ribs, ignored the flux, ignored the coffin’s piping hot foam padding.
He had a friend to save.
He yanked her towards the car–
A metal canister bounced towards him, the first of many: flashbangs, designed to stun ’mancers. The Unimancers had flashbangs, they had tear gas, they had all the goddamned advantages.
Don’t work, he commanded, reaching out with his ’mancy to squash the flashbang. He snuffed the remaining flashbangs in the area, disabled the Unimancers’ tasers, shut down their radios–
WHAT DID YOU DO
The flux roared in, a tsunami of bad luck, sweeping Paul off his feet–
Oh crap.
When he’d suppressed the black opal detectors in the compound, Paul had done ’mancy properly – he’d gotten the serial number, traced the trail back to the manufacturer, flipped through their production facilities, found the factory that made these detectors, pulled up lists of components, analyzed quality control routines to search for soft spots.
Everything he’d accomplished with his ’mancy until now could have happened. He’d justified his magic to the universe step by step, walking it through how fifty detectors could have failed simultaneously – the sequence of events was unlikely, and the universe had resented his changes, but at least he’d had a rationale.
In his panic, he’d demanded the equipment fail for no reason.
The universe, trusting his word, had allowed him to do it.
Now the flux exacted its price, and Paul had nothing to tender in exchange. Before, he’d offered the universe a glorious vision: good record-keeping tracked when the rich stole from the poor, it logged what went wrong so the wreckage could be examined for potential improvements, it created best practices that stopped dumb failures like, say, half a hundred government-sourced ’mancer-detectors from failing at once.
WHY DID THIS HAPPEN, the flux roared; the universe coalesced around Paul’s guilt, gave it a throat to speak.
My best friend Valentine. Paul spasmed on the hot ground. I… She was going to die–
MILLIONS DIE EVERY DAY
Maybe someone else could have justified what they’d done, but Paul believed in rules. You didn’t bend the rules just because someone wanted something – you still had to work through the process, fill out the forms, have your case judged by the proper authorities–
In disabling the equipment, Paul had tried to bribe the judge.
“What’s happening?!” Imani yelled. Paul realized a black cloud swirled around him, visible to non-’mancers.
“It’s the flux,” the Unimancer squadron said in General Kanakia’s voice, nine people pulling up to a halt as Imani aimed the gun in their direction. “We’ve… We don’t know what that is. But we can help. Please, Ms Dawson, let us help.”
She waved the gun between the nine soldiers, settled a bead on the closest. “Do you promise to let them go afterwards?”
They shook their heads like a metronome. “You know we can’t promise that, Ms Dawson. He broached in Morehead, and now this – he’s a danger.”
She swallowed. “You will not brainwash him.”
“It’s not brainwashing.” Their hands reached out to Paul like firefighters trying to haul someone out of a burning building. “We’ll show him some new priorities. They’ll help.”
“No!” She put weight on the trigger. “Step back or I’ll shoot.”
“Ms Dawson.” The lead Unimancer stepped forward sorrowfully, hands raised. “We know you’re Project Mayhem’s pacifist. Paul’s a zealot. Ms DiGriz is a killer. But Aliyah doesn’t kill because of you. We know you don’t want to shoot.”
Her fingers went white on the pistol, the trembling barrel fixed on the Unimancer’s forehead. “Then give me better options!”
The lead Unimancer shook her head, wishing she had better options to give. Paul tried to say something, but the flux poured down his throat, choking him–
“That flux is a public menace.” The Unimancer spoke in General Kanakia’s voice, but they all nodded in syncopation as though their hivemind concurred with him. “We have to drain it away.”
She stepped towards Paul.
Imani blew her head off.
Paul would forever remember the way his wife looked then. She was not stoically blasting the life from the incoming squadron, nor was she firing in panicked terror. No, Imani was crying as she shot, an ordinary woman driven to murdering someone in cold blood.
Her efficiency was an awful thing to behold. Imani swallowed back vomit as she blinked her tears away for better aim.
The Unimancers shuddered as Imani shot the next soldier, falling apart into disharmony. Paul had seen this once before, the first time he and Valentine had fought SMASH forces – the Unimancers had stumbled into a trap, and they’d been chewed up by Gunza’s men. In the end, the Unimancers had hated Valentine so much they’d ignored their commander’s orders and tried to capture her.
– they all kill –
– you can’t trust them –
– they’d broach the whole Earth if we let them –
The Unimancers spread apart, rolling to dodge shots with shared expert precision, just as the soldiers tackled Imani to the ground.
I have to die before I do more damage, Paul thought. My ribs, they’re puncturing my heart.
The flux flowed into his chest, kicking his ribs like a horse trying to break out of a stall. He convulsed on the runway, struggling for air, vision fading.
The flux stopped.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Paul quivered as the Unimancers rolled him over, the flux poured into the Unimancers, guiding their hands. They ripped open his shirt to do CPR, getting his lungs working again. His heartbeat stabilized, his consciousness pinwheeling back as air, precious air, flooded down his throat–
Paul struggled to get up, but was too weak to move.
Why had the flux saved him?
“You killed him!” Aliyah shrieked, her voice a guttural bellow, transforming into something deep and masculine. “You killed my father!”
Aliyah, no, Paul thought, helpless to say anything. But he understood what had happened: Robert had ordered Aliyah’s retreat. Yet thanks to the flux, she’d looked back at the perfect moment, seeing a scene that stabbed her worst fears – her mother captured, her father dying, Valentine burned.
Everyone she loved, sacrificed to her bad decision.
The perfect lure to draw her into an unwinnable conflict.
– she’s in God of War mode –
– we practiced for this –
– spread out –
“Give us your weapons, fools!” the Unimancers yelled as Aliyah plowed into them. They grabbed the assault rifles, pinwheeling backwards to avoid Aliyah’s swinging knives.
Paul shivered. Aliyah was channeling Kratos, the God of War, the game that summed up her most violent impulses. She hadn’t summoned Kratos since that final rooftop fight with Rainbird.
Aliyah was going for the kill.
It didn’t matter, though. In the game, the creatures always made a beeline for Kratos, obligingly piling up to get within range of his bloodied weapons. The Unimancers looped around Aliyah, keeping their distance, emptying their rifles into her. The health bar above her head dwindled as they beat her at her own game – one making feints to lure her into committing to attacks, the remaining Unimancers dancing away.
“It’s not fair!” Aliyah shrieked, trying to clear a path towards her father. “IT’S NOT FAIR!”
Paul struggled to crawl to her, but the soldiers stomped on his neck. They flung Imani down next to him, handcuffing her.
The Unimancers ceased fire the instant Aliyah was knocked unconscious. They murmured among themselves:
/> – can’t believe –
– he’d send his own daughter –
– into a warzone –
– do we even want him in with us –
– the general says we need him –
They waved a new coffin-drone down, placed Aliyah into it reverently.
They looked down at her with a newborn parent’s pride.
Then they pressed the red button, and Aliyah shot off to her new life as a Unimancer.
YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DAUGHTER IN WAYS YOU NEVER IMAGINED, the black flux roared. It clung in tendrils to the coffin-drone.
He’d never seen the flux refuse a fear before, but now he realized:
Dying was easy.
This titanic amount of flux demanded suffering.
“Your turn.” They closed in around him.
Fourteen
“Your Kid Will Pull the Trigger”
Another coffin-drone landed on the runway with a heavy thud.
Paul barely noticed.
Aliyah’s gone, he thought. And there’d be no way to get her back before she was Unimanced – this was a special flux, a sticky flux. He’d made an enemy of the universe, and the odds would thwart him until his daughter was a brainwashed government zombie.
He saw Robert, racing towards them in a stolen Jeep. Two Unimancers raised their rifles, ready to shoot out its tires. There would be no escape.
He went limp in the remaining Unimancers’ arms as they lowered him into the coffin with synchronized reflexes.
“No!”
He tumbled into the coffin as half the Unimancers let go. Their smooth coordination collapsed into a schoolyard tussle where some arms grabbed his lapel to pull him out, others pushed him back in, while still others recoiled in horror. The movement jostled his ribs, the pain snuffing his cries of anguish–
Their unison broke apart into different voices, an argument rippling through them.
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