The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Paul couldn’t risk Imani finding out. Because merely being a ’mancer was illegal. The penalty was to be abducted by SMASH, the government’s brainwashed troops, and converted into a Unimancer. If Imani decided that was best for Aliyah, he couldn’t stop the troops from finding her.

  Even if the secrets Aliyah locked up were corroding her.

  “If all they ever do is hurt us when we do ’mancy, then…” Aliyah flailed her arms. “They’re never going to understand!”

  “You’re right,” Paul admitted. “I don’t know how to show them how… how beautiful our gift is.”

  He’d given Aliyah some blunt truths in her short life. Too many. Yet somehow, his daughter never stopped believing Daddy could make it all better.

  “So we have to stop them, Daddy,” Aliyah said, her innate fierceness rising to the fore, staring at the ground as if she wanted to stomp Lenny Pirrazzini. “We have to hunt them down before they hunt you down, then kill them until they’re so scared they don’t dare come near us….”

  “Maybe we do need to kill them,” Paul allowed.

  Aliyah stopped, astonished that reasonable old Dad would agree with her. Paul held her, letting her contemplate all the things she’d have to do to make the world safe her way, and then asked:

  “The question is, do you want to be the person who does that?”

  Aliyah’s eyes welled with tears. She grabbed him tight, burying her face in his shoulder so no one would see her cry. But cry she did, copiously, the tears of a girl who never wanted to hurt anyone, yet was coming to the conclusion that maybe she would have to.

  Paul held her, let her pour her anguish into him.

  There would be time for fighting later.

  Four

  Layers Peeling

  K-Dash emptied clips over the cops’ heads, keeping them at bay, while Quaysean poured a huge Thermos of sweet Dunkin’ Donuts coffee down Valentine’s throat. The quickest way to recover from a nerve-gas hangover, they’d discovered, was to boost the blood sugar.

  Aliyah trailed behind Paul, no longer Fire Mario, just a scrawny scarred eight year-old kid with wild hair. She refused to let go of her daddy’s hand. Paul led her among the smoking wreckage, ensuring Lenny’s men couldn’t get a clear look at her.

  “Valentine,” Paul said. “You got enough juice left to go Grand Theft Auto?”

  “Tall order, Paul. I feel like a squadron of trolls just bukkakked in my brain.”

  “What’s ‘bukkakke’, Daddy?”

  “It’s like snot. They snotted in her brain.”

  Valentine snorted. “Don’t lie to her, Paul.” She turned to Valentine. “It’s a sex thing. I probably shouldn’t have said it in front of you.”

  Aliyah brightened. Aunt Valentine was a reliable source for all the secrets grown-ups wouldn’t tell her. “But what’s that mean?”

  “A) Don’t you dare tell her, and B) We need to get you out of here now,” Paul snapped. “Push through the gas. Get her home. But don’t drop her back at Imani’s house by yourself; the last thing I need is more evidence for my ex-wife to think we’re shacking up.”

  Valentine looked like she’d licked a cockroach. “You’re Ken-doll smooth down there as far as I’m concerned, buddy. Actually, you might be. When was the last time you had a date?”

  “Just get Aliyah somewhere safe and wait for me.”

  “Where you going?”

  “This will be a PR fiasco. Lenny can’t cope with this mess on his own. And if Lenny goes down…”

  She adjusted her eyepatch, covering the hole where SMASH had shot her eye out. “Then the creampuff local Task Force goes down, and Big Bad Federal SMASH starts patrolling town again.” Valentine groaned, getting to her feet. “I had a hot date at the swingers’ club with two firemen. Bisexual firemen, Paul. They told me they were good at sliding down each other’s poles. If you put that much ’mancy out again without checking with me…”

  “I don’t think I’ll get the chance. Oscar’s at his limit.”

  “You had to burn our Flex to save her? Jesus fuck, Aliyah!” Aliyah hung her head. “How many hours have I spent teaching you how to keep your shit pent? You can’t keep using your dad as some kind of fucked-up flux-diaper, you have to manage your own–”

  More choppers sounded. More sirens.

  “You and I will continue this talk in the car,” Valentine said to Aliyah, who cringed. Valentine gestured at a smoking car, which flipped over and turned into a sleek Maserati. “Get in.”

  K-Dash and Quaysean leaped into the back seat. Aliyah grabbed Paul’s hand as Valentine hauled her into the vehicle. “No!” she cried. “I’m not leaving until Daddy’s safe!”

  Paul looked around at the burned repair shop, the shrapneled cars, the chunks of rotors embedded deep in the asphalt. He tried to imagine how all this would look on the evening news, and realized what a total catastrophe this night had been.

  “We’ll be a lot less safe unless you let Daddy clean up this wreckage,” he said sadly.

  Aliyah, confused, looked to Valentine for confirmation. Valentine nodded, buckling Aliyah into the seat before pulling a pair of driver’s goggles down over her face that hadn’t been there a second ago. Aliyah spread her fingers against the window, sniffling back tears as she let Valentine’s ’mancy take her away.

  The windows tinted. Valentine skidded out of the parking lot, going zero to sixty in the blink of an eye, swerving to knock over a couple of streetlamps because that’s what you did in these games.

  Paul retreated, gouts of pain thrumming through his body. He kicked in the plywood of the abandoned convenience store next door, feeling the ache in his stump as his metal foot hit the wood, then pushed his way through sodden tiles to find the bathroom. Those were Valentine’s stupid videogame rules: you could only change back to your original skin by entering a dark room.

  Why? Paul had never understood videogames. But it made sense to Valentine, and Valentine’s obsession shaped her magic.

  He emerged as Paul Tsabo, his normal self – a small, neatly dressed man with a crisp tie and a power suit, an effect only slightly dampened by his metal ankle on one leg and his clunky orthotic boot on the other. His balance was wobbly to begin with, and the nerve gas’s residual effects made it even harder to walk; maybe he should get a cane.

  No. He felt crippled enough, most days.

  His left arm dribbled blood. That was nothing new. He’d incurred one wound the last time he’d fought SMASH in a magical battle so intense they’d punched a collective hole through the laws of physics, allowing extradimensional buzzsects to pour through a broach in space. Paul had managed to heal the gap before it had torn itself out of his control – but the buzzsects had eaten a groove in his left forearm that could never heal, could not be stitched up.

  He also had a bleeding head wound from the shattered alembic. But Paul’s extradimensional wound was a constant, oozing reminder of why he could never let SMASH have jurisdiction in New York again.

  He crawled out of the convenience store, ready to ensure that would never happen.

  He headed for the terrified cops holed up across the street – debating whether to approach the garage now that the ’mancers had apparently left.

  Paul strode across the street. They aimed rifles at him.

  Then they grinned as they recognized him.

  “Mr Tsabo!” Lenny cried, flinging out his arms. Paul could never tell whether Lenny was genuinely grateful when Paul showed up at fiascos like this, or if Lenny was self-deluded enough to think blatant routs were somehow successes.

  Then again, Paul would never have hired an efficient man to be the person who hunted ’mancers in Manhattan.

  “What kept you?” Lenny asked as the cops well enough to walk surrounded Paul, shook his hand. “I sent you a text an hour ago. The King tipped us off again!”

  “Phone broke.” Paul held up his shattered screen. “So what happened?”

  “We had a little incident here.” Lenny shrugg
ed off the rubble around him. “But... I met the King! I think he’s working with Psycho Mantis, feeding us information from the inside! Legitimate fucking intel at last!”

  Paul scowled. “How many injured?”

  Lenny’s mustache wilted. “Nine.”

  “Any deaths?”

  “No. The copter pilots broke some bones. But… I think they’ll be OK.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Paul sighed in genuine relief. He’d have to visit each of the officers, make sure their insurance covered the damage. Despite Aliyah’s hatred of the police, everyone on Paul’s force were good men, dutiful, having joined to make the world better.

  They’d just been convinced the world was better without ’mancy – and in that, ninety-nine percent of New York agreed with them.

  If only he could tell them he was a ’mancer.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Tsabo,” Lenny said. “I just... I got a tip, and you know how damn slippery Psycho Mantis is…”

  “So you sent the whole team in. Without making a plan. Or scoping the territory. Just… sent them in.” Paul mentally tallied up the cost of the wrecked patrol cars, of the two helicopters, of the hospital costs of the injured cops. He glimpsed the incoming news choppers, envisioning how the blackened rubble must look from overhead.

  If I could only tell them who I am, Paul thought guiltily, looking over at the moaning men waiting for ambulances. If Aliyah wasn’t at stake, I would tell them. They trusted Lenny to lead them because they trusted me…

  As a drugmaker, Paul had been grateful for Lenny’s limited bag of tricks. But putting on his other hat, Paul was starting to realize the flux hadn’t just impacted his drugmaking career.

  “So who got the call this time?” he asked.

  “Wieczniak,” Lenny jerked his thumb in Wieczniak’s direction.

  “And the trace?”

  “To yet another pay phone. They’re seeing if there’s surveillance video in the area, but… there won’t be. When the King doesn’t want to be seen, he won’t be.”

  Who was turning them in? Paul thought. He’d isolated the location this time, which meant there was a mole in Oscar’s organization. The obvious targets were now K-Dash and Quaysean – but no, he trusted them. Oscar wouldn’t set the cops on him to try to take him out, would he?

  Fact was, Paul didn’t know who the King was, or what his motivations were. Unknowns always scared Paul.

  “Cut the admiration, Lenny. He’s another informant. We don’t know what his motivations are.”

  Lenny blushed. “Yeah. Yeah, Mr Tsabo. It’s just that… you know we’ve had a dry streak.”

  The burning garage collapsed inwards, sending sparks high into the air. News vans peeled around the corner, reporters jumping out with the eagerness of men who’d found juicy footage to fill tomorrow’s broadcast.

  “Time to polish this turd,” Paul muttered.

  Lenny sagged. “Yes, sir.”

  Paul straightened his tie. The reporters thrust their microphones out, calling out to Mr Paulos Costa Tsabo, chief of the New York Task Force For ’Mancer Control, asking for comment on this most recent fiasco. The remaining officers surrounded him, pushing the reporters back, buying Paul some dignity.

  Paul tried to think of something noble to say to put a good face on today’s rout. There wasn’t much. So instead, he went on a clichéd defensive – the usual stew of “setbacks will happen” and “’mancers are a danger that can surprise even trained professionals” and “I promise you, we are closer than ever to catching Psycho Mantis.”

  Which was a lie. His best friend was Valentine DiGriz, aka Psycho Mantis. They’d hidden in plain sight for almost two years, Paul abusing his privilege to steer investigations away from his door – which had all gone perfectly until the King of New York started dropping anonymous tips that led Paul’s forces straight to every brew site.

  As Paul watched the reporters practically get into fistfights over who got to ask the first question, he realized this latest flux might have shattered his life more than any arrest.

  Five

  Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death

  By the time Paul finished handling the press conference – which did not go well, and would lead the eleven o’clock news – he was ready to collapse.

  But first, he had to return Aliyah to Imani’s custody.

  He didn’t dare have Valentine bring her back – Imani loved her daughter deeply, but she’d had a plan laid out for Aliyah from the moment of Aliyah’s birth. That plan began with getting her daughter into the right preschools and ended with a summa cum laude Yale graduation as a lawyer. (Not coincidentally, Imani was a Yale alumnus and a high-powered corporate lawyer.) Imani saw videogames as time-wasting pursuits that siphoned precious hours away from Aliyah’s inevitable climb to respectability.

  Imani had managed to keep Aliyah free of videogames’ taint until Aliyah was six, when Anathema had roasted Aliyah. Valentine had met Aliyah in the hospital and, sensing a wounded child in need of distraction, handed Aliyah a Nintendo DS.

  Aliyah had most sincerely strayed from Imani’s plans since then. So whenever Imani spoke Valentine’s name, it was with the chill malice of a parent about to reopen up her court case for sole custody.

  Imani wasn’t a threat to Paul – his beloved paperwork would never let Imani take Aliyah away from him – but she did make him feel eternally guilty. Imani and he both wanted the best for Aliyah; they just disagreed on how to make that happen. And maybe Imani was prone to looking for people to blame whenever something bad happened, but….

  Paul had once loved Imani, and even now he would not hurt her.

  If he was lucky, maybe Imani hadn’t realized Aliyah had slipped out again. Imani nervously joked that her little girl was part ninja, not realizing Aliyah had ’mancied into Sly Cooper stealth mode to sneak past her.

  So Paul took the subway back to his apartment complex, then let himself into Valentine’s place. He’d used his bureaucromancy to get them side-by-side apartments, wanting his best friend next door to him – but not too close.

  He could accept living next door to Valentine’s sloppy black hole of an apartment, but not in it.

  The door opened partway, bouncing off a trashbag packed full of Valentine’s endless supplies of second-hand clothing. Paul picked his way among the discarded Subway wrappers and flattened videogame packages and dried condoms that festooned the kitchen floor.

  What he heard in the living room was not Valentine and Aliyah playing videogames, as he’d expected, but Valentine talking to Aliyah. Paul could just peer around the corner to see them in the living room, sitting cross-legged, side by side on a broken futon.

  Paul paused.

  He should have announced his entrance. But Valentine and Aliyah had created their own dynamic: they made playdates with each other, laughed at in-jokes they didn’t bother to explain to Paul, ate sloppy fast-food meals together. Imani would have had a heart attack, had she known her precious daughter was eating processed sugar. Even now, Paul saw the crumpled Shake Shack bag where Valentine had treated Aliyah to an extra-large peanut butter milkshake.

  Their bond didn’t make Paul jealous. Aliyah needed friends, and Valentine always relayed the important details back to Paul.

  But… Valentine related what Valentine thought was important.

  As he looked at the old skirts Valentine had tossed to hide the used sex toys on the kitchen table, Paul wondered whether Valentine understood what a normal parent needed to know.

  He hated himself for eavesdropping. But if Aliyah was telling Valentine something – particularly after Aliyah had nearly gotten herself killed tonight – then didn’t he deserve to know? As a father?

  He couldn’t help himself.

  “No!” Aliyah squealed, giggling. “I told you to dip the fries in the shake!”

  “…nod pud them ub my dose?”

  Aliyah let out a disgusted squeal. “You are inhuman.”

  Valentine plucked two fries out of her nose,
wiped her face with the back of her hand. “It’s salt and fat: two of the best things in the universe. They’re delicious no matter what orifice you put them in. And what else could make a French fry better but sugar?”

  “…bacon?” Aliyah suggested.

  “Goddammit, your genius means we’re gonna have to haul our ass back to Shake Shack and swirl some bacon all up in this shiz. All the deadly flavors, swing-dancing in my heart. I won’t last a minute.”

  “Don’t worry,” Aliyah said. “We’ll stock up on medi-packs.”

  Aliyah munched her fries – a silence that lasted so long, Paul almost gave up and walked in. Then Valentine sighed.

  “So why’d you bust in on us, kiddo?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “OK.”

  Paul would have pointed out how Aliyah had been battering at Valentine’s shields for hours, highlighted just how unlikely it was that Aliyah would have happened to wind up at their exact address at the exact time they were brewing by accident, a chain of events that indicated clear intent. Paul would have dissected her excuses, a lawyer flensing lies on the witness stand, until Aliyah was forced to admit the truth.

  That was what Paul always hoped would happen, anyway. In practice, when Aliyah was presented with facts that contradicted her story, she denied the facts. Then she fell silent, and no force Paul had discovered could get her to open up again.

  Yet Paul was fascinated: here, Valentine went silent. Her casual agreement was the discussion’s end: Aliyah had told her it was an accident, Valentine accepted that, which left nothing more to say.

  Aliyah pushed a fry around in her shake, making patterns in the ice cream.

  “…I don’t like staying at Mom’s place.”

  “Of course not,” Valentine snapped. “Your Mom makes GlaDOS look like a well-adjusted human being.”

  Paul didn’t get the reference; he assumed, as with most of Valentine’s non sequiturs, that it somehow related to videogames. Aliyah clearly got the reference, looking shamed and uncomfortable at Valentine’s insult.