The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Which was, supposedly, impossible. Mage-grade hematite was closely regulated, guarded by multiple levels of government anti-’mancer protections personally designed by SMASH agents. Yet someone had clearly infiltrated the supply chain to do some extremely subtle ’mancy.

  Fortunately, subtle ’mancy was Paul’s specialty.

  Paul spread his fingers across the receipts, then breathed out; his fingers lengthened and sank deep into the papers, disappearing into a fathomless sea of recordkeeping. The vouchers riffled apart as his fingertips probed through receipt after receipt, extending with a crackle of bone, pushing deep like questing tree roots.

  He infiltrated the records, the endless storage web that tracked this bag of hematite from the pay stubs of the workers in Australia who had unearthed it, to the freight invoices where it was loaded onto the docks, to the duty taxes from the ship that’d hauled the hematite in to New York, to the truck mileage records when it had been delivered to the processing plant in Albany, to the sampling records taken at the hematite preparation facilities…

  Paul reached out with fingers that stretched across continents, in a bureaucratic daze, tapping each invoice to check for that hollow ring of magic. He’d hunted ’mancers for years. ’Mancy had an unmistakable feel he could never quite put into words.

  He tapped gently, because something was hunting him. But Paul didn’t think the King of New York expected Paul to follow him back home.

  Paul frowned. He’d been reluctant to attribute the snitching to ’mancy – too slow. He loved magic, and had prepared a safe haven for other ’mancers. He didn’t want to believe he’d have to fight a fellow ’mancer, but Paul had been convinced to take the initiative.

  He rippled his lengthened fingers; they split at the knuckles, budding into new finger-growths, each finger following its own trail through dusty files and backup computer tapes. Paul was dimly aware of his vine-like curtains of digits combing through the global networks, a probing entity growing through the information storehouses like fingernailed kudzu.

  There. Something at the preparation facility glimmered with ’mancy – evanescent enough that Paul almost wrote it off as a hallucination.

  The samples as the hematite was refined.

  Paul wasn’t sure what that meant, but that was bureaucracy’s beauty: you never had to wonder for long. He pulled up the other sampling records, seeing how many had this ’mantic tinge, pressing out gently with his millions of fingertips so as to avoid the government-grade opals studded around the plant.

  This was so easy, Paul thought, grinning as if in a pleasant dream, his wrists weighed down by the miles of flesh he’d extruded into the paperwork. Most ’mancers were like Valentine – producing vulgar gouts of ’mancy that twisted the world into something violently different. The government wasn’t prepared for whisper-quiet intrusions that changed a few lines on a piece of paper.

  He riffled through the records, checking them each in turn for that strange, familiar magical tinge. The plant’s records were saturated with this elevator-music ’mancy, so quiet you barely noticed its presence, an insidious thread worming its way through every crevice in the hematite processing plant.

  This ’mancy – it had started almost three years ago. Right after Aliyah had killed Anathema. Yet this wasn’t Anathema’s ’mancy; her magic had made him sick. This ’mancy practically curled up in Paul’s fingers like a kitten, a comforting correctness…

  He shook his head. The pleasant nature of this ’mancy distracted him. What had happened two years ago? What had been the inciting incident that had tainted this hematite?

  Paul wrists were sunk deep into his desk. He wrapped his distorted fingers around the records, sinking deeper into the information. Many things had happened at the plant shortly after Paul had been appointed to the Task Force – the usual promotions, new hires, government regulations – but the most notable was when the plant had changed hands to a subsidiary of a larger mineral processing conglomeration.

  Even that transaction bore a tinge of ’mancy.

  He heard muffled explosions, followed by cheers; Valentine and Aliyah, playing some game with the volume turned up in Valentine’s apartment. His throat was dry. How long had he been investigating, anyway? Maybe he should stop…

  No. He was close. He clenched his fingers, and his millions of fingertips split yet again, slithering into thousands of small businesses that tried to obfuscate an owner. That sense of comforting magic got closer as he sifted through, somehow familiar as he tracked this thread of ’mancy through shell corporation after shell corporation back to its owner…

  Lawrence Payne.

  Paul rocked back in his chair, stunned. He would have fallen off, were he not rooted to the desk by his infinitely long fingers. But his flesh tendrils knitted together to tell the full story – the shell corporations were owned by Samaritan Mutual, and Samaritan Mutual was owned by Lawrence Payne, and oh God the King of New York was Lawrence Payne.

  And as he realized this, his distant fingers accidentally brushed across another ’mancy-node embedded in Samaritan Mutual. Something within the miles of paperwork flared to life, a buzzing electricity coursing up Paul’s dendritic fingers, tracing its way back to him.

  Paul yanked away, trying to sever the connection. But bureaucracy was in his blood. And flesh, and bone. He was literally bound to the ’mancy. He could not unknot himself from this paperwork Gordian knot…

  “Valentine!” he yelled. “I’ve figured out who the King is! It’s Payne! It’s Lawrence Payne! Payne is the King of New York!”

  More explosions. Giggling. They couldn’t hear him. And speaking Lawrence’s name seemed to accelerate the process. The tracer-’mancy climbed up the knuckled nets of his hands, crawling spiders locking him into place.

  He’d used Samaritan Mutual’s authority to gain access, and that access homed in on him.

  Despite everything, Paul admired the magic’s subtlety: Payne was a master. And why not? He must have been doing ’mancy for decades. Why hadn’t Paul seen it before? The reliance on totems in Payne’s office: the filing cabinets, the antiquated mimeograph machine, the stock ticker.

  They weren’t just old equipment; they were loci, the tools Payne used to summon his version of bureaucromancy.

  Paul had hunted ’mancers for years. But Payne had used Samaritan Mutual to hunt ’mancers for decades.

  And Paul realized why. It was so simple, why hadn’t he thought of this before…

  The tracer-’mancy finally clambered up to his wrists, signaling its location in a burst of GPS coordinates. The curtains caught fire, a flicker at first, then rippling into flame.

  “Valentine!” Paul screamed, rattling the desk. “Valentine!”

  The curtains burned away, revealing the window – but instead of New York City’s skyline, Paul saw an endless portal of white-hot fire. It shone like the sun’s interior, a swirling flame vortex speckled with black sunspots…

  …one of the spots grew larger.

  Paul’s body prickled with a sheen of sweat; the room heated up like an oven. He stopped screaming. He’d vowed long ago, back when he first met Valentine and thought she’d murder him, that when he died he would do so with dignity.

  Though Paul wasn’t sure he would die today.

  The black spot swelled to take the form of a well-dressed man in a suit, wearing a burning-wood mask. He expanded to human size, then stepped out of the window, his footsteps setting fire to the now-burning bed, puffing on a cigar.

  He paused, removing the cigar from the furnace of his mouth.

  “Rainbird,” Paul nodded in Rainbird’s direction, as though Rainbird had shown up to a scheduled business meeting. The dancing flames on Rainbird’s oaken mask obscured his face – but he halted in mid-step, rattled by Paul’s calm.

  “You’d given me a job,” Paul said. “You didn’t expect me to find you, did you? You planned to… mislead me.”

  Rainbird flicked ashes off the end of his cigar, not qui
te acknowledging Paul. But nor did he incinerate Paul – an excellent start.

  “And I wouldn’t have found you.” Paul directed Rainbird’s gaze down to his distorted hands, the green-glass shimmer of Paul’s bureaucromancy still glimmering across the desk. “Not without my own ’mancy.”

  Rainbird glanced back through the portal, as if searching for fresher orders.

  “You’re not killing ’mancers, are you?” Paul asked. “You’re saving them. I wanted to make a sanctuary for ’mancers. To protect them from a world that would hunt them down.

  “The only thing I hadn’t considered,” he finished, “was that someone might have done it first.”

  Rainbird sighed, exhaling black coal-smoke, shoulders slumping. He removed his mask; the sigils on his cheeks glowed like burning embers.

  “I was assigned to remove the evidence of whoever had tracked Mr Payne’s business dealings back to him,” Rainbird said. “Normally, Mr Payne does not brook having his orders countermanded. Yet these are special circumstances...”

  Rainbird rolled his cigar between his lips, pondering. The flames danced across the bed as he stood, unconcerned, in a raging bonfire, the curtains engulfed in fire, the room filling with smoke.

  He was not immune to flame, Paul saw. Rainbird’s skin crinkled into burnt ash, consumed, but his flesh regrew around the embered sigils, endlessly renewing itself to stoke his beloved flames. Rainbird’s now-naked face was set in a grimace of exultant pain, his cheeks dripping fat as holes opened up to reveal blackened teeth, then healing over once more, pulling strength from the fire that consumed him.

  Rainbird’s eyes, however, never burned. They were glazed in rapture.

  Rainbird shook a caul of fire off his right hand, spattering flames across the carpet. The gesture looked threatening, until Paul realized he was extinguishing his fingers to reach into his pocket for a phone.

  Thank God, Paul thought. Sanity.

  “Step off, fucknuts!” Valentine cried. Paul felt a surge of ’mancy as Valentine’s magic filled the room – then everything froze. The flames halted in mid-flicker. The smoke clouds turned solid, immobile. Rainbird’s hand paused, fingers wrapped around an ancient Bakelite black plastic phone from the 1950s, clublike, the kind that couldn’t make a call without being attached to the wall.

  The entire world froze within a block of glass, like a picture.

  Then the tableau shattered like a broken window. Cracks shivered through reality, crystal shards pulling free, jagged chunks of curtain and fiery bed and smoke tumbling down into an endless void, revealing an empty TV screen.

  The world spun as Paul tumbled down into the television…

  Fifteen

  Kick Extreme Super-Bahamut-Style Ass

  A green HP bar hovered over Paul’s head.

  Moments ago he’d been chained to his desk by miles of questing information fingers – but now he bounced on the toes of his artificial feet, back and forth, back and forth.

  He willed himself to stop bouncing, couldn’t. He was a pixelated game sprite, cycling through the same animation.

  The room was transformed into a blocky recreation of his bedroom. Though the bed remained on fire, the flames no longer grew as they consumed the bed. Instead, the same two pillows cycled through identical fire animations, exuding a pillar of smoke that always dissipated as it reached the ceiling. The fragile curtains, which had been blazing away into ash, now rippled with endless flame – threatening to ignite the room, but never progressing beyond their programmed destruction.

  Valentine had transformed his bedroom to be as large as a gymnasium – big enough for two teams to face off. She stood off to Paul’s left, raising her fists pugnaciously, occasionally pausing to pop a double-barreled middle finger at Rainbird.

  Rainbird stood before the fire portal, cycling through his own animation – a man in an asbestos suit, snapping his fingers, generating sparks of flame. He looked supremely irked.

  Paul tried to say something. His mouth refused to open. It wasn’t his turn.

  Valentine’s mouth moved; no words came out. Instead, a small blocky menu unfolded over her head, her dialogue appearing one letter at a time:

  Paul! We are in a Japanese RPG now! Act as master support while I draw fire!

  A pause, as the window stayed long enough for Paul to read it, then unfolded itself the moment he finished the words. Then, another dialogue window appeared over Valentine’s head:

  …get it? “Draw fire?”

  Hee hee hee hee hee.

  She snapped her fingers. A menu appeared as she scrolled through the options:

  * * *

  Kick ass

  Kick extreme ass

  Kick extreme super-Bahamut-style ass.

  She chose “Kick extreme super-Bahamut-style ass” without hesitation. Rainbird frowned as an orange diamond appeared over his head. Valentine confirmed her target with a nod, and then did a swirling dance, her diaphanous dress flowing as she summoned something huge from the earth.

  Wait, Paul thought. When did she get a diaphanous dress?

  The apartment floor burst apart as a dragon exploded out from caverns deep underneath New York.

  The dragon, whiskered and silvery and baring sharklike teeth, shrugged the roof aside to soar high into the night air, whizzing across a preternaturally black New York skyline before posing next to the full moon.

  But it’s a waning moon tonight, Paul thought, before going with Valentine’s videogame logic.

  “Kiiiiick – assss!” Valentine shouted, her words echoing across all New York’s skyscrapers. The dragon grinned as it heard her command, plunging down from untold heights to smash into Rainbird.

  The dragon hit Rainbird like a nuclear bomb detonating.

  The world went white.

  Small numbers coalesced out of the blackness – 165,739 damage. Paul was always disconcerted by the way Valentine’s games somehow instilled rules knowledge into his head. That damage was tremendous, an end-game amount, damage that would obliterate most normal bosses.

  But as the light dimmed from the dragon’s nuclear fury, Rainbird was still standing.

  He adjusted his collar. A dialogue box popped over his head.

  My turn….

  Valentine’s eyes went wide. A dialogue box appeared over her head.

  …crap.

  Rainbird summoned his own menu, selected from his own list:

  Conflagration

  Inferno

  Supernova

  He selected “Supernova,” then moved the orange targeting reticule to over Valentine’s head. He breathed in, his lungs sucking in all the flame from the apartment – which was completely healed from all the dragon damage as though the Bahamut attack had never happened. Rainbird’s chest glowed an ominous blue-white, his body armored in flames, the room thrumming as Rainbird smashed a fist into the floor and opened up a channel to the Earth’s fiery heart.

  He lifted his hands; a tide of magma smashed into Valentine, burning her flesh to blackened bone. Paul strained against his animation, trying to scream – but it wasn’t his turn to react.

  Valentine’s body appeared from nowhere, seemingly unhurt despite having burnt to ashes a moment before. Numbers popped above her head: 888,888 damage. The eights were little skeletal heads, crumbling to ash as Valentine wobbled unsteadily.

  Then she collapsed, unconscious. A glowing red status appeared above her: VALENTINE is down!

  Then it was Paul’s turn.

  A menu appeared above Paul’s head, which somehow he could read despite it hovering over him:

  Papercuts

  Analyze

  Item

  Dammit.

  Paul bounced from foot to foot – this damnable sprite form left him no choice but to bounce from artificial foot to orthotic boot, an activity both painful and pathetic. The strange little dance, the menus, all accentuated the fact that Paul wasn’t any good in a one-on-one physical confrontation. He’d hoped for an option like “Sword
Swarm” or “Mantis Attack,” but no.

  Papercuts.

  Without Valentine or Aliyah to back him, a mugger could take Paul down, let alone some fire-touched phoenix avatar – and Valentine was down.

  He scanned the options again. No “retreat” option. No “dialogue” option, either; he wished he could tell Valentine they didn’t need to fight, that Rainbird could be negotiated with, though maybe the attack had changed Rainbird’s mind. Paul flicked back and forth through the menu, examining his three options, uncertain which to use.

  Paul wasn’t sure, so he selected “Analyze.” The menu buzzed and flashed red.

  Are you sure you don’t want an item?

  What item could he possibly want at a time like this? He selected Analyze again. Another buzz.

  Are you sure you don’t want an item, Paul?

  Paul looked over at Valentine, who, though unconscious, seemed to be pointing to the items. He chose that option, which opened up a submenu with sorts of items: healing potions, speed potions, status removal effect potions, Phoenix Down….

  He moved the cursor over the Phoenix Down potions. “Revives any one character,” said the description.

  Hint hint, Paul.

  Paul selected the Phoenix Down; a golden feather shot out from between his palms to hover over Valentine, showering her in golden sparkles that tugged her to her feet. Her HP bar refilled itself as she steadied herself, then cracked her knuckles.

  You’re one hell of a boss monster, Valentine’s dialogue box said. But I am the game. And you are going down.

  Rainbird struggled to speak, but it wasn’t his turn. Yet before Valentine selected from her menu, a chime of triumph sounded and someone ran into the room in a puff of smoke:

  ALIYAH has joined the party!

  Even in sprite form, Aliyah looked nervous. Paul knew why: all her worst moments had happened in burning rooms. Anathema had trapped her in a blazing fire, burning her horribly, and when she’d become a ’mancer she’d incinerated an apartment building in the process.