lynchpin
The heavens spoke, alien words slithering into Paul’s brain.
The Thing in the sky had a voice. Each syllable it spoke threatened to snuff out Paul’s heart.
The Unimancers shrieked in terror. It spoke it’s never spoken we didn’t know it could speak
we know you lynchpin
It clawed the sunlight away, revealing that white nothingness beyond.
“Get out.” Paul pointed at the sky, calling down barrages of fundamental principles – the Thing couldn’t exist on Earth, its mountainous body was a crazy quilt of paradoxes. He was the War Bureaucromancer, and he would drive this Thing back.
you think you are war
It stomped, and the sky cracked. Buzzsects poured out in an ichorous halo; they swallowed up Paul’s laws and extruded an osseous armor around the Thing.
we are war
“No,” Paul whispered.
A dark blaze spread from horizon to horizon with the languid pleasure of a cat licking its lips. The Thing spread multitudinous limbs out, still barred behind that stained glass sky – but the flames poured in, and it absorbed them into its body, became a mockery of the sun.
for you it is always fire
“No!” Paul screamed, feeling the collective panic. He tried to hold onto the War Bureaucromancer’s bloody certainty, but no willpower on Earth could force this Thing back–
you hold the rules yet know not how to use them
we will use them
we will strip the rules from your bones and use them to unlock this cage
“No,” Paul begged.
The Thing bent a finger and inverted gravity.
Slowly, inexorably, Paul tumbled upwards into the burning sky.
Forty-Two
Heart, Broken
Aliyah was shrieking at her father, begging him not to bring the heavens down on that Thing.
Daddy, no! she cried. That’s not bureaucromancy!
She’d felt his urge to start small – that was the father she’d trusted. The man who’d spent months planning political rallies, carefully anticipating contingencies, worried sick someone might get hurt when SMASH showed up.
Daddy believed his magic sprung from his love of rules, but Aliyah had always known the truth: he’d learned to cast spells while working for a crappy insurance company that longed to refuse claims. Her father had harnessed their rules to subvert the system, getting people the money they needed.
Good work, Dad, she’d started to say. We’ll back you for as long as–
A thousand protests drowned out her assurance.
The Unimancers were a military operation – and to them, Paul Tsabo was a weapon. They didn’t understand his ’mancy involved hours of careful planning, were infuriated that Paul the gun balked at being fired.
No, wait–
Their ’mancy infiltrated his mind, brought him into line with their harmony, convinced him yes, he needed to go bigger, and Aliyah shrieked her head off as they rolled over her like a river.
She’d never been on a losing side of a Unimancer argument. But now she was the minority vote, and they silenced her.
Consensus.
She stood frozen while her father rearranged the Unimancers to his liking, then assaulted the Thing in the sky, and the Thing shrugged off their best efforts–
It’s broken it’s too broken we can’t fix this no one can fix this
Aliyah’s heart thumped as her father wailed–
He rose into the sky.
Save him! Aliyah thought. But she was one voice among thousands.
The general broadcast calm, issuing orders – but her father had laced the hivemind with regulations. In his absence, the confused remnants couldn’t remember who was authorized to speak to who; they were manacled by chains of command.
They had thought they were war. The Thing proved them wrong.
Ruth, Aliyah thought, help me. But Ruth, too, was frozen – the Mom-construct had sensed danger, was analyzing the ramifications and deluging Ruth with details. Ruth was in a screaming fight with an unthinking telemarketers’ script that would not stop dispensing instructions–
Aliyah ran.
And though Aliyah sped to her father, she ran as herself – God, she’d gotten so used to the Unimancer’s feedback loop honing her clumsy reflexes into athlete’s grace. She tripped.
That Thing vomited out beast-armies, the sky seething with tentacles squirming towards her father–
Someone grabbed her shoulder.
“Get ’em to safety, kid.” Valentine squinted towards the sky. “I got this.”
Valentine looked heroic – a vision of her aunt the way she’d viewed her when she was six years old. Valentine viewed the sky without fear, as if the heavens aflame was another broken nail.
Aliyah remembered Aunt Valentine’s kindnesses: giving her that first Nintendo DS in the burn ward, knowing a kid in pain needed as much distraction as she could get. Sticking French fries into milkshakes with Aunt Valentine back at her apartment, then sticking them up their nose. The way Aunt Valentine had saved her with a secret gift of the right videogame at the right time.
That trust poured into the network, calmed them: seven thousand Unimancers grabbed onto Aliyah’s unwavering conviction that Valentine would save them.
Valentine pressed her Nintendo DS into Aliyah’s hands. “Keep this safe for me,” she whispered, kissing Aliyah on the forehead.
Her hair sprouted out, black tresses becoming impossibly long, spreading out in great bat wings. A chunky pair of pistols appeared in her hands as her frilly goth-dress slimmed into a form-fitting black leather outfit.
“…Bayonetta?” Aliyah asked. Sometimes it was hard to tell who Valentine channeled, as she refused to adjust her weight to match gaming’s skinny character models.
“I wish my default wasn’t fighting games,” Valentine said. “Tell your dad I apologize for kicking his ass.” She chewed her lip. “Again.”
She launched into the air in a trail of ruby fire, hair soaring out behind her, her body highlighted against the blackfire heavens…
She slammed into Paul’s spine fist-first.
Aliyah winced; Aunt Valentine’s go-to maneuver had been to catch Paul in a mid-air combo. Yet the visuals were electric as her father was tossed around like a rag doll. Encouraged, the Unimancers mustered willpower to drive back the unnatural conflagration. The inferno overhead sputtered into speckled smoke as they shouted their love into the broach.
“He’s mine!” Valentine smacked Paul around, Paul jerking upwards as the Thing in the sky tried to wrest him away. “I am the protector! I am the guardian! And you – will – not – have – my – friend!”
With each word she smashed her elbow into Paul’s cheek, fired her guns into his skull, claimed him with compassionate violence. The Thing in the sky roared, clawing Its way towards Paul–
Valentine flipped into a roundhouse kick that caught Paul in the stomach, sent him hurtling back down to Earth to slam into the ground. Imani rushed up next to Daddy, who was bleeding but not injured – videogame logic.
Paul leapt up screaming, reaching for Valentine.
Valentine lifted her fists in triumph, bobbing on streams of crimson energy. “Fuck yeah!” she cried–
Unlike Bayonetta, she did not float back down to Earth.
The flames above her circled into a shrinking vortex, the Thing stirring the remaining flames into a tornado.
Valentine tumbled upwards.
“Oh yeah?” Valentine tore off her eyepatch, flung it downwards like a duelist throwing down the glove. “You want some of this, ugly? I got enough bullets for every demon you got!”
She summoned a Contra cannon onto her shoulder, fired a glowing shot–
Except the stability Daddy had created had worn off. The sky fissured as Valentine unleashed her ’mancy, the last Earth’s gravity cascading away.
“Get some, motherfucker!” she screamed, as she pinwheeled into the demon
dimensions, firing madly at the buzzsects and rifters that rushed down to meet her. They ate furrows through her body, swarmed around the magical pistols in her hands. “I did my job! I protected the ones I loved! It doesn’t matter if I–”
They ate her pistols.
They ate her arms.
They ate her mouth.
The heavens closed over Valentine’s disintegrating remains as they were sucked up into the sky. There was a great burst of green light – Xbox light – and Valentine was gone.
Part Four
War Without Tears
Forty-Three
Miss You in the Saddest Fashion
Imani gave Paul and Aliyah two days to grieve. Any less, and they’d break under the weight she needed them to carry; any more, and time might run out.
Then she hauled Aliyah out to the place where everything had gone so wrong.
Paul sat on a stump, not having left the flowering field where Valentine had died. Imani had forced him to eat, but Paul silently caressed the bruises Valentine had left, pushing his fingers deep into her marks, ensuring they’d never fade.
The flowers in the grove continued to bloom as though Valentine hadn’t been devoured, and the sky hadn’t fractured further. The dimensional cracks above had deepened into a collapsed junkie’s veins. Now convulsions seized the heavens, the Thing more determined than ever to smash down the gates.
Imani wasn’t a ’mancer, and even she felt the sickness spreading across the sky.
Each skyquake took longer, as though the Thing gathered increasing strength with each blow. The fissures into the demon dimensions inched across the sky like a hairline crack spreading across a windshield.
It was coming for them.
She sat Aliyah down on the ground facing her father. Paul wore Valentine’s eyepatch, ignoring Aliyah to study the blue blossoms at his feet; Aliyah opened and shut the Nintendo DS mechanically, as though it were a puzzle to be unlocked.
“Hey,” Imani snapped.
They both looked up guiltily.
“You fucked up,” she told them.
As expected, they both cringed. They still hadn’t come to terms with the magnitude of what had gone wrong. They still didn’t want to admit they had caused Valentine’s death.
Their belief was pure when channeled properly. But as the divorce had taught Imani, that same belief could shunt inconvenient realities aside.
“Know why you fucked up?”
They looked up, eager for answers.
“Because you stopped fucking talking to each other.”
She quashed a swell of anger as both her husband and daughter averted their gazes.
“I don’t know what happened in the hivemind.” Imani grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck. “I get you’re ashamed. I get you don’t want to talk to each other. But that’s the only way we work.
“When we worked as a family, nothing could defeat us. Now you two are playing tug-of-war – we get you crashing in here to haul your daughter away whether she wants rescuing or not, and you commandeering the Unimancers to use your daddy like a socket wrench.
“That shit is killing people.”
Imani closed her eyes, breathing hoarsely. It took a lot to get her to swear. But it felt like a fitting eulogy for Valentine.
“In case you have forgotten, I’m the mom here.” She yanked their heads back, forcing them to look at the sky’s sickening pulse. “As this family’s matron, I am telling you that is what we are here to stop. As such, you two will work out your differences – any personal issues that get in the way of you saving the world is our enemy. And if you can’t find a way to reconcile…”
She tugged Valentine’s eyepatch, gripped the Nintendo DS Aliyah held.
“…I’m gonna take those mementoes away. Because you don’t deserve to have a part of Valentine if you can’t remember what she stood for.”
She figured she’d done enough when they both hung their heads. Paul was so talented, her daughter was so powerful…
And both were so adrift.
What Imani had learned working for massive organizations is that after a corporation went bankrupt, reporters invariably pointed to the external problems facing the now-dead company – as though those obstacles had been what had toppled a billion-dollar industry.
But no. Those companies had stockpiles of brilliant minds, millions of dollars in cash to hire contractors, raw labor to make massive changes. But the brilliant minds squabbled and the cash got squandered and the labor got mistreated until that massive force was diffused into a whiff of stale bureaucracy.
Past a certain level of power, a corporation was like the Titanic. You could always steer around the iceberg, unless so many hands grabbed at the wheel that you plowed straight into avoidable catastrophes.
And if the apocalypse came, it would not be because of that Thing about, but because the incredible potency of Aliyah and Paul and General Kanakia and the Unimancers and herself could not align themselves.
Her family worked best when their power was concentrated into a piercing laser; her fear was that Paul and Aliyah would tear at each other until they were as ineffective as moonbeams.
But who could change a ’mancer’s mind but another ’mancer?
“Talk,” she said, hoping Valentine’s legacy would be enough to enact change.
Having done all she could do, Imani walked back to the general’s office to see if he had a drink stashed anywhere.
* * *
Paul and Aliyah sat quiet for a long time, doing their best not to look at the sky.
* * *
“…nice eyepatch,” Aliyah ventured.
Paul lifted it up sheepishly, blinking as he exposed his covered eye to the wavering sunlight. “You like it? I’m down a foot, I’m down a best friend… I figure I might as well be down an eye.” He rubbed his eyesocket with the heel of his palm. “I honestly don’t know how she wore it. The inside has rhinestones.”
“So did her bra.”
Paul winced. “Don’t remind me.”
Aliyah smirked. “You know her problem with those bras, right?”
Paul buried his face in his hands, blushing. “Oh, God. Tell me she didn’t come to you when–”
“–when it caught on her nipple ring, yeah.” She raised her voice, doing a passable Valentine imitation. “‘This fucker’s got my tit like a fishhook, I’m telling you! Come extricate your aunt before I dangle this fucking bra off me like a Christmas ornament.’”
“I am so sorry for sticking you with that job,” Paul said. “She tried to get me to be her tit-fixer. ‘Paul, it’s a breast, not a water balloon filled with acid. You’d help out if my earrings got tangled in my hair, right?’”
“Did you ever?”
“Oh, God no. I imagined your Mom walking in while I unstuck Valentine’s nipple ring with a paper clip, and…”
They dissolved in laughter.
“I always figured she got Robert to scoop her out,” Paul apologized.
“Nope.” Aliyah smacked her lips, as if trying to get a terrible taste out of her mouth. “She said the sight would spoil their romance.”
Paul massaged his temples. “I still haven’t told Uncle Robert.”
Mournful silence washed over them.
Neither of them liked looking up these days. The sky was their failure. Aliyah flipped the Nintendo DS open and shut, open and shut.
Paul craned his neck. “Have you played since…”
“I’ve tried.”
She angled the Nintendo in her dad’s direction, then pushed the start button to summon Super Mario’s first level. She left Mario idle. After a minute, the screen wobbled, and the unit reset itself.
“It broke when Aunt Valentine… well, you know.” She hunched over the Nintendo. “The collective’s offered to help me repair it, but… I’m gonna leave it.”
“You really don’t play anymore, huh?”
Paul leaned forward on the stump, filled with wan hopefulness. Aliyah squee
zed the Nintendo DS, wishing she could be what her father wanted her to be, feeling the correctness in refusing him.
“No. Just… too many bad memories when I play.”
An exquisite look of pain crossed Paul’s face. “It was… yeah. Lots of bad things happened when you played.” He took the Nintendo DS away, absolving her. “I get it.”
He didn’t say, I wanted magic to be as good for you as it was for me. They both understood that. Aliyah had a kind of ’mancy, sure – but it was a regimented magic that traded art for comfort.
They moved with stiff ritual formality as Paul placed the Nintendo aside.
After a few minutes, the Nintendo blooped, broken, resetting. Aliyah thumped the grass with her heels.
“You don’t have to play it,” Paul told her.
She sobbed. “I’m not afraid of games, Dad. It’s… She didn’t finish. Her level’s incomplete. Her mission was incomplete – and she died for such stupid reasons! If she’d died beating that Thing, I could–”
“Wait a minute,” Paul snapped. “You’d be OK with Valentine dying?”
Aliyah’s eyes went flinty. “If she went down taking out the broach? Goddamn straight I would. I’d hold a party if she’d saved Europe.”
“No.” His refusal was a whisper. “Aliyah, that’s not this mission’s point, we’re keeping people safe–”
“That’s the enemy.”
“What?”
“Can you come with me?”
Paul squinted, confused; his daughter’s anger had dissolved, yet he still quivered with rage: how could Valentine’s death be acceptable?
Yet he heard the weary please? threaded through his daughter’s command; she didn’t want to fight any more than he did.
He let her lead him through the woods.
She led him up choked thickets, climbing a ridge. His artificial foot had never been good on uneven surfaces, the toes catching on underbrush, and the hill’s steepness made him pant with exhaustion. She assisted him as best she could, but her eyes weren’t jittering – for whatever reason, she was reluctant to call upon her Unimancy.
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