The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  He gave her free rein because he saw how strong she’d be when she grew up. Society took all the traits that a kid needed to be a successful adult – independence, a questioning spirit, a ferocious drive to satisfy your own needs – and then quashed them relentlessly, so thoroughly suppressing those urges that some adults never figured out how to be happy again. Paul needed to protect Aliyah’s free spirit until the time it would serve her well.

  So playing Mario with Aliyah, feeling her deftly thread her ’mancy into his videogame, hearing her cheer him on? He would never have chosen to have his daughter become a videogamemancer, but with her riding his shoulder as he played, he saw the raw joy she took in gaming – a joy she went out of her way to share with him.

  It wasn’t enough for her to game; she needed him to see what she loved about it.

  That good feeling lasted until he got to the lava levels.

  Sweat prickled Paul’s face as he dropped onto a blackened stone platform. The screen, once the size of his palm, had inched open as wide as the far wall, a window through which he could walk. The graphics had upgraded themselves – finely detailed cartoon shapes, Mario himself a full-sized man made of Legos, the whirling fire traps turned three-dimensional.

  The castle was dark, cavernous, saturated with death. Any single misstep could kill you. Paul wondered, not for the first time, How could anyone relax under all this pressure?

  Yet he could see from Aliyah’s smile how much she loved it. She was a magnet, drawn to danger.

  The lava burbled, hissing pixelated holes in the living room carpet.

  “Keep going, Daddy! Just a few more steps. You can do it!”

  “Are you sure she’s on this level?”

  “Auntie Valentine’s never anywhere else.”

  And sure enough, through the gaping portal they’d opened up, Valentine stood on Super Mario’s final level – fighting Bowser on a tightrope suspended over a deadly volcano. Bowser hurled stone hammers at Valentine; Valentine dodged them. In the real world, plump Valentine got out of breath jogging down the street to Dunkin’ Donuts – but in this world, she was an acrobat, the twirling hammers whizzing by so close they ruffled her hair.

  She was topless.

  And fighting with both arms clasped behind her back.

  Paul had never gotten used to walking into Valentine’s apartment to find her walking around half-naked, though Valentine never minded. She liked clothes, changing outfits three times a day, but didn’t see a need for them, comfortable in her own stretchmarked skin. She was fifty pounds overweight, but those pounds accentuated her curves – curves that unnerved Paul. He was old-fashioned enough to believe you shouldn’t see someone naked unless you were at least a little in love with them, and Valentine was utterly not his type – so as always, he covered his eyes, censoring her with his fingers.

  Valentine landed badly, wobbling on the tightrope. She almost let go of her wrists, which she clutched to keep her arms locked behind her spine – but with an effort of will, she struggled to find her balance without releasing her grip.

  As she jerked away from one stone hammer, another smashed her in the face.

  Valentine tumbled towards the lava – and everything froze.

  “Restart,” Valentine muttered, her face pale as though in a fever dream. Her nose leaked blood.

  Valentine upended herself from the lava, tumbling upwards in a reversal of gravity and time, landing on the rope. She landed on the far ledge, across from the switch that would send Bowser plunging into the lava.

  Her breasts were bruised hammer-black.

  This was what ’mancers did, when the world upset them; they retreated to their own reality, creating a safe place where they endlessly acted out fantasies of better worlds – except Valentine’s retreat was bloody and bitter.

  Paul wondered how the flux didn’t kill her, but that was every ’mancer’s trick: though creating a lava pit with an animated villain would have destroyed Paul, Valentine believed in a videogame-based escape right down to the roots of her heart. So the universe didn’t complain too much, just as it didn’t give Paul too much guff for summoning apartment leases out of midair.

  Valentine cracked her neck, then clasped her arms behind her back again and stepped out onto the tightrope.

  “Valentine?” Aliyah called.

  Valentine frowned at them, as if to ask, What the hell are you doing here? – and freed her hands. Her full balance regained, she darted across the rope in one smooth motion, tumbling under Bowser’s great horned feet, jamming her elbow into the switch before Bowser tossed his first hammer. The tightrope snapped, sending Bowser tumbling into the lava below.

  Paul realized Valentine had been toying with Bowser, could have finished this whenever she desired.

  She only relaxed when challenged.

  Valentine panted, blood dripping from her nose onto her bare breasts, glaring maliciously at them.

  “What do you want?”

  Aliyah stepped forward, not quite entering the level. “You haven’t slept in three days, Auntie Valentine. I’m worried about you.”

  “Are you spying on me?”

  “I’m taking care of you,” Aliyah said, hurt.

  Valentine choked on laughter. “Nobody cares for us. You’re too young to understand, and he–” She gestured violently in Paul’s direction “–He’s too naïve.”

  “Too naïve for what?” Paul asked.

  “You–” She wiped off her face, then massaged her temples. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I came here to stop thinking about this shit.”

  “What shit?” Aliyah asked, then looked intensely guilty as Paul glared at her for swearing.

  “You haven’t done this,” Valentine spat. “You don’t know what the end looks like. But me, I’ve been through it before: the bad luck piles up until you can’t recover. You lose your job, then you lose your home, then you lose your boyfriend, and... and...”

  She scrubbed tears from her face.

  “We’re gonna lose each other,” Valentine whispered. “One ’mancer’s flux load is bad enough. But three? God, Paul, these years with you and Aliyah have been the best years of my life. You don’t know what a balm it’s been, having friends, having a place to live, this stability…

  “But you’ve lost your job,” she continued. “Now it’s just a matter of time. Eventually SMASH will take Aliyah, or you’ll die like Raphael, or… or something terrible. That’s how ’mancy works. And you gotta brace for that crash. You gotta start pushing stuff away, before…”

  Her tears sizzled into the lava below. “Goddammit, Valentine DiGriz doesn’t do tears.”

  “Does she hug little girls?” Aliyah asked.

  “Always,” Valentine promised, stepping out from the lava-filled castle to embrace Aliyah with the fervor of a woman trying to freeze this moment in time forever. “Always.”

  Valentine shook as she held Aliyah, trembling with – rage? Terror? Sadness? Paul couldn’t tell.

  Paul was reluctant to join in, mainly because Valentine was topless, sweaty, and bleeding. But he drew in a breath and embraced them both.

  After a long time, Valentine stopped trembling.

  “…this isn’t the end,” Paul told her.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Neither do you. You were alone when things were bad.”

  Valentine jerked away. “And how is it going to get better with more ’mancers bringing their flux load crashing down on us? Hell, Aliyah goddamned near killed us all with her last trick.”

  “It’s not my fault,” Aliyah protested. “They hurt Daddy! And you! Those stupid mundanes deserved to be punished!”

  Paul scowled. “Where did you hear that term?”

  “…punished?”

  “Mundanes.”

  Aliyah seemed startled by her father’s anger. “In school...”

  “That,” Paul said hotly, “is a bad word. It makes it seem like we’re better than they are.”

  Aliyah thrust out
her lower lip. “We are better. Mundanes are mean.”

  “Sweetie. I know the police are... a problem, but–”

  “Mommy’s a problem.”

  Paul exchanged a quick glance over to Valentine: can we put your concerns on hold to discuss the kid’s issues? Valentine nodded and grabbed a towel, blotting the blood off her nose.

  “Aliyah,” Paul warned. “Do not talk about your mother like that.”

  “She wants to kill me.”

  “What? Your Mommy loves you. More than anything.”

  Aliyah shook her head. “She was at the table, talking with stupid David. And David was talking about how close he was to finding the ’mancers you couldn’t catch. They were laughing, Daddy! Laughing at how he was going to find us! They toasted to him finding you!”

  “Sweetie, that’s–”

  “And then I was so mad, I asked if I could go play my Nintendo so I didn’t start yelling, and Mommy said if I didn’t stop playing, then I’d become a videogamemancer and David would have to hunt me down.”

  Oh no, Paul thought. Imani had probably meant it as a joke. But to Aliyah, in these circumstances…

  “I didn’t hurt David,” Aliyah said. “I wanted to. Instead, I’m moving in with you and Valentine, and never talking to mundanes as long as I live.”

  “Aliyah. You must talk to your mother.”

  “No. She acts nice! But I can’t trust her.”

  This would all go so much easier, Paul thought, if I could tell Imani what was happening.

  Then he remembered what Valentine had said: It’s the beginning of a slide into a deep abyss. SMASH will take one of us…

  Paul wondered what that load of flux squirming away had already done to them. Yet he was strangely grateful Aliyah had generated a big load of flux; ’mancers got more bad luck whenever they felt like they broke their own personal rulesets, and Aliyah must have felt guilty indeed about running away from home.

  “You’re not moving in with us full-time, Aliyah. The court order says we alternate weeks. When you’re twelve, if you feel the same way, we’ll get you a lawyer.”

  Aliyah stomped her feet, and the apartment complex shuddered. “You can’t stop bullets with your stupid papermancy! This is the one thing you can do! You fix this!”

  “I could change that, Aliyah. But I won’t.”

  “Then you break Mommy and David up!”

  Aliyah crossed her arms, braced to dismiss whatever counterargument he made. Going head to head had never worked out well.

  Paul took another tack.

  “Do you know what happened after Daddy lost his foot, Aliyah?”

  Predictably, Aliyah softened. She craved that intimacy of being let in on grown-up talk. “…No.”

  “Do you remember how Daddy lost it?”

  “You–” Her eyes widened as she remembered. “You killed a ’mancer. But before she died, she hurt you.”

  He nodded. “She hurt me in more ways than one. Because I didn’t want to kill her. I’d never seen ’mancy before, and she was an illustromancer–”

  “A what?”

  “A ’mancer who loved art. More specifically, this poor girl loved a painter called Titian. She had posters of all his art tacked up in an alleyway. Daddy only found her because she was selling Flex, trying to make enough money to buy Titian’s paintings. Not that she could have, poor thing. She was crazy to think she could buy paintings from the museums, like a shopping mall.

  “But crazy as she was, she loved those paintings. And they came alive for her. Angels soared overhead, warriors thundered on horseback, sea serpents writhed in the oceans...”

  Aliyah hugged her knees, looking troubled. “And that….”

  “Yes, Aliyah. It all went away when I killed her. But Daddy was a mundane back then. Daddy thought all magic was bad. That’s why I hunted her down. I was just as stupid as Mommy or David.” Paul sagged. “And when she saw me, all she saw was a mundane. Someone to be killed. So she sent her painted horses after me, and I shot her.”

  Aliyah frowned, uncertain. “…so?”

  Valentine gave Paul a confused look. Yeah, Paul. What’s your moral here?

  Paul felt like he’d been leading up to something. But there wasn’t a moral to be taken away. They couldn’t be honest.

  “I isolated myself, Aliyah. I... I pushed your Mother away, and she never understood. Even if I... well, I couldn’t tell her about the ’mancy, but once I started walling that part of my life away from her, the rest of it just... well, it died.”

  “David wants us all dead,” Aliyah whispered – as though shamed to say such a thing out loud. “And Mommy? Mommy agrees with him.”

  Paul wanted to say that David was just following the polls and Imani was just going along with David, that of course Imani didn’t want all the ’mancers locked away – especially not Aliyah. But Imani did hate ’mancers. She’d hated them ever since the illustromancer had crippled Paul, hated them so hard that Paul couldn’t even tell Imani that he blamed himself for the accident.

  That almost, that granule of doubt, seized his tongue for a critical second before he stammered out a “no.”

  Aliyah nodded, as if that settled things.

  “I love Mommy. But… we can’t trust her. So I won’t go back.”

  Paul fishmouthed. He looked to Valentine for help; Valentine shrugged.

  “No, Aliyah,” he said. “No. You can’t abandon–”

  Someone pounded on the door.

  Paul realized the portal to the Super Mario lava level was still open, filling the room with the stink of hot metal; Valentine slammed it shut, locking her personal flux-load tight so it wouldn’t seep out.

  Aliyah looked at Paul as if to ask, See how much you trust the mundanes?

  The pounding continued, now accompanied by a muffled voice: “Paul! Paul! It’s Lenny! Open up!”

  Paul gestured at Valentine to take Aliyah to her bedroom. Lenny wasn’t the brightest bulb on the marquee, but if Lenny met Paul’s friend with the videogame tattoos all over her body…

  Paul unlocked the door. Lenny Pirrazzini came bounding in, excited as a puppy.

  “Paul!” he cried. “You–”

  He took in Paul’s uncharacteristic stubble, Paul’s blood-soaked bandage on his ever-bleeding arm, the reek of Scotch in the kitchen.

  “Whoah.” Lenny wiped his sleeve across his forehead, wiping away a prickle of sweat; the apartment must have been at least a hundred degrees. “Now I see why you weren’t picking up your phone, buddy. I guess a little pity party is justified, but – whoah. Didn’t see you as a drinker.”

  Paul was too tired to argue. “What’s up, Lenny?”

  “I got news that’ll get you back on the case, Paul. It’s David! He had a brainstorm to find Psycho Mantis!”

  “Have I….” Paul had never minded Lenny’s blatant adulation, but he’d never encouraged it, either – and Lenny seemed like a man who, once he’d broken the seal, would have dropped by at odd hours. “Did I give you my address?”

  “Looked you up in the records,” Lenny said, sticking his head in Paul’s refrigerator and waving the cool into his face. “I know, I know, ‘confidentiality’ and all that happy crappy, Paul, but damn! We are on the case!”

  Paul’s terror grew. “…You realize I’m not on that case anymore, Lenny.”

  Lenny looked heartbroken, then rallied and punched Paul in the shoulder. “You kidder! Guy like you hunts! Even if the mayor takes you off the case for a little collateral damage, will that keep you away? It sure didn’t stop you when you tracked down Anathema! Nah, you’ll find these magic-slinging psychos wherever they cower! You hate ’mancers!”

  “…what’s David doing?”

  “He had a brainstorm an hour ago!” Lenny held up both hands, as if framing a picture. “He told us to follow the fake IDs.”

  Lenny grabbed a stunned Paul and shook him.

  “Don’t’cha get it?” Lenny cried. “We’ve got all four fake IDs on record from the
Lark Street bust! Someone put a lot of money into getting all the right certificates filed, to create the illusion of a working garage!”

  “But Psycho Mantis, he’s... he’s a videogamemancer…”

  “A videogamemancer with backing. Someone’s doing his grunt work. David, that prick, he’s hired a team of analysts –” And here, Lenny beamed, acting as though he’d handed Paul the greatest of gifts “–but who’s better suited to track down white-collar crime than you, the Master of Paperwork?”

  Paul sagged against the counter as Lenny rummaged around in Paul’s fridge. He understood something Lenny did not:

  Bureaucromancy did not conjure up certifications and fake IDs out of nowhere; it was more like a supercharged form of money laundering. Everything Paul did was on record. He could bury the request underneath a trail, he could masquerade behind a series of faked IDs, but if someone was determined enough then Paul’s name would turn up somewhere downstream.

  “We got the bastard, Paul!” Lenny cried, thrusting a celebratory beer into Paul’s hands. “And we’ll pitch in – the guys on the force know who had our backs when the press wanted our heads! You point us at this cocksucker, and we’ll do the rest!”

  Paul eyed the beer blearily, then swigged it down in one gulp. At least I know where the flux went, he thought.

  Nine

  Donutmancy

  It’s just an insurance company, Paul told himself. You worked there, you got a better job, you quit. It’s not like they’re mad at you or anything.

  But still, Paul felt powerless standing before Samaritan Mutual’s great glass tower. He’d have to walk back in there and ask for his old job.

  He needed that job – not just for the money, but for the ability to request forms. His bureaucromancy, he’d discovered last night, was hampered. Back when he’d been an insurance agent, he’d had the legal ability to request police dossiers, which he could chain upwards into phenomenal requests. When he’d been the New York Task Force leader, he’d had almost unlimited access.

  But Paul Tsabo, unemployed civilian?

  As a man with no particular legal standing, his power was much, much lessened. He could file requests for information, but no one was obligated to grant them – and though his bureaucromancy could still force people’s hands, it also increased his flux load dramatically. In obfuscating his paper trail last night, what had once cost him a stubbed toe now required the theft of a credit card.