The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “I’m happy to be here,” Paul demurred. “And Aliyah is so content. But…”

  “They’re hothouse flowers.”

  “What?”

  Payne swept his hand to encompass the pillars, the lobby, twenty doors with a ’mancer secluded inside each one. “The ’mancers. They’re hothouse flowers, sir. I know you want them to be as witty as Ms Mercer and lovable as little Hotplate, but… not everybody gets to be charming.”

  “I didn’t expect…”

  “No. You came here expecting company. You were hoping to find others to... what term do you children use these days? ‘Geek out’ over your love of ’mancy?”

  Paul slumped. “Maybe I did.”

  Payne nodded in sympathy. “I did once, too. But… in truth, I’ve come to realize doing ’mancy is the real beauty. I didn’t bring them here to socialize them. I think it might even be an insult to see them as broken. What we do here is to foster a little demesne for them to follow their bliss. That’s our job, Mr Mongoose – to create a place where ’mancers can thrive. Together.”

  It was funny. There had been a time where Payne’s voice would have set him to trembling. Now, somehow, Payne reassured him.

  “In fact,” Payne said, pacing the lobby’s rim, “There’s only one person who does not fit in.”

  And he stopped before Valentine’s door.

  “No,” Paul whispered.

  Paul cracked open the door to check in on Valentine. She was curled up in the wreckage of all the ripped-down Mario mosaics and smashed display racks. She’d kicked the videogames – still in their packaging – into a gigantic heap in the corner. The shattered fluorescents sputtered overhead.

  She hunched over, sullenly playing her old videogames on her old Nintendo DS, looking like Valentine.

  Paul shuddered. She wasn’t wearing her Alex Mercer skin any more. A bad sign, considering she had only three days left on her promise to stay here.

  Payne closed the door. His orderlies, sensing the incoming storm, had scattered.

  “She hasn’t left us yet,” Payne said, exasperated. “Which is good. I don’t know what I’d do if she left, considering all the intel she has on our operation. If the Task Force picks her up and hands her to SMASH, we’re good as dead.”

  “Mr Payne – “

  “King. It’s King here. You of all people should understand the need for obscurity.”

  “Look, Mr King. What are you suggesting?”

  Payne flung up his hands. “Who knows, Paul? You’re her supervisor. I brought her in here because I supposed you ran a tidy operation. Do you?”

  Payne stepped closer, almost bumping chest-to-chest with Paul; all his old fears came rushing back. That terror that Mr Payne might check in on you today, and take away your job.

  Paul tried to envision Valentine, checking in at 9:00 every morning, and saw the impending disaster in Payne’s Institute. Payne could not think of Valentine as just another employee.

  “She’s no hothouse flower,” Paul explained. “She’s my enforcer. Just like you have Rainbird. And he doesn’t stay cooped up in here.”

  Payne harrumphed. “Rainbird’s won special privileges.”

  “And Valentine’s won mine. She needs real-world challenges in addition to illusory ones. So what do you have?”

  “Paul, I can’t give her an assignment without knowing she’s with us…”

  “She’s with me. That should be good enough.”

  Payne shifted his weight. Paul remembered Payne was a six-foot-tall ex-Marine, and he was a scrawny man tottering on a fake ankle.

  “You wanted a second-in-command.” Paul forced an unnatural jolliness into his voice. “But you’re not hiring us, Mr Payne. This is a merger. That involves adjustments on both ends.”

  “A merger,” Payne snapped, “assumes the other company was successful in its operations.”

  “It was successful. Until you and I accidentally went to war.”

  The only person who Paul had ever seen go toe-to-toe with Payne was his old boss Kit. Kit had defused Payne’s managerial explosions with cool logic. Paul stole from Kit’s playbook, driving Payne right up to the edge by dismantling his assumptions.

  Once again, Paul thought, my daughter’s wellbeing depends on Mr Payne not firing me.

  And just as he did whenever he faced down Kit, Payne broke. He gave Paul a sickly smile.

  “I suppose you’re right, Paul. ’Mancers, we– we mustn’t fight. There’s too much at stake. If we can’t bring everyone onto the same page, well... well, then we’re back to Germany, and the broaches, with physics raped in its still-warm grave….”

  Payne’s eyes dimmed, his hands shivering, and Paul almost asked what horrors Payne remembered. They had to be grim. Decades had passed, and he’d still been driven to honor his dead sisters by naming the PTSD school after them…

  It seemed kindest to let the memories pass, without digging them up further. Sure enough, Payne squeezed back the tears.

  “I can offer you a training run. Which I am not thrilled about, mind you. Your successor David has installed a fortune’s worth of opals around his relevant servers and filing cabinets, making it much harder to see what he’s doing at the Task Force. You’ve told us he’s ordering in more equipment from foreign militaries; his new budget is concomitant with that. Under normal circumstances, I’d never let a novice out with the NYPD hunting for us.”

  “…but?”

  “But there are still ’mancers being created in New York. If I don’t miss my guess, we’ve found one we need to get to before David Giabatta’s cursed Task Force gets their hands on him. I was going to assign this one to Rainbird, but… I suppose my best investigator can do the job just as well.”

  He squeezed Paul’s shoulder affectionately. Paul felt almost shamed by the intense pride the old man’s compliments inspired. Paul liked having his work graded. Running his own illegal ’mancy business had meant forever having to bury his greatest triumphs.

  Paul hadn’t realized how desperately he hungered for appreciation.

  “But,” Payne added, jerking his head towards Valentine’s room, “keep her in line. I know a loose cannon when I see one. If this is truly a merger, Paul, then you must get her on our side.”

  Payne placed a gentle emphasis on the word our as he swept his hand around the great stone rotunda.

  Payne’s extended fingers pointed at Aliyah.

  He didn’t recognize her, at first. She was hidden behind ivy-covered columns, shouting as she sparred with a fellow ’mancer. She held a pair of wickedly curved daggers, chained at the hilt, the chains wrapped around her forearms, lashing out with such force that her blade nicked stone off of a fluted pillar.

  Streaks of fire arced into the air. Rainbird, then. She was playing with Rainbird.

  Aliyah pressed her advantage, backing him back up against the lobby’s central desk where – for the hundredth time this week – a luchador-wearing receptionist dove for cover. Rainbird had summoned blazing swords in his blistered hands, thwarting Aliyah’s wild attacks with precise defenses.

  And for a moment, Paul wasn’t sure if it was Aliyah. Her pretty little-girl smile had crumpled into a glowering old man’s goateed scowl. Her keloid burn scars were reduced to a single puckered scar cleaved down through her right eyebrow and cheek. A sweeping red tattoo covered her left eye, looping over her bald head, around ears now studded with gold pirate’s loops.

  It must have been some videogame character. It didn’t look like Aliyah, at least not the Aliyah he knew.

  But then Aliyah darted past Rainbird’s defenses, nicking Rainbird’s long coat with her daggers – and though her face was an old male warrior, her triumphant shout was purest Aliyah.

  Rainbird chuckled, patting her on the head.

  Aliyah shook his touch off, clutching her daggers.

  “Again,” she commanded.

  Rainbird grinned around his cigar and fell into another defensive stance as Aliyah went after him. “Bleed
it off before it gets too bad.”

  Aliyah pressed her attack, squeezing her eyes shut as she unleashed a flow of flux. Sure enough, one of her chained daggers shot wild, chopping a thin birch tree in half; the tree toppled towards her, threatening to tangle her up in thin branches. Aliyah leapt away and continued the assault.

  “Good,” Rainbird murmured. “Now keep your feet together. I could push you off balance.”

  Aliyah adjusted her feet, but never stopped advancing. When she wanted something, Paul thought, she’d never held back. And she wanted to beat Rainbird.

  Rainbird smiled serenely the entire time, as if he was certain she would beat him some day.

  Paul just watched them. Aliyah had stopped playing with the other children. She’d been terrified to. But here, swinging blades, accidentally chopping trees in half, she could hurt no one.

  “What a lovely little girl,” Payne said, content, then excused himself.

  Aliyah had lost so many things, Paul thought: her parents’ marriage, her normal looks, her ordinary childhood, her innocence. He couldn’t let her lose the Institute; not so soon after finding it, anyway. Valentine threatened to get them all ejected from this new-found – well, the Institute wasn’t paradise, but it was stable. Safe. A place for Aliyah to master her ’mancy.

  And if Valentine couldn’t get on board, well… no. She’d learn to love it here. Or at least find something tolerable. With Payne’s wealth, there had to be something here to appease her.

  He looked back at Aliyah. She swung her daggers with such force that she almost gutted Rainbird. He’d reminded himself to tell Aliyah to hold back when she played; Aliyah got overexcited, but Paul knew she didn’t want to kill anyone, not really.

  Then Paul opened the door to talk to Valentine.

  Twenty-Four

  New Sheriff In Town

  “I came here expecting a briefing.” Valentine looked around in confusion at the small beige meeting room. She squinted at Payne, who’d entered carrying a manila folder.

  “This is a briefing,” Paul explained.

  “Where’s the big oval seats we sit in while a computer voice narrates our next mission?” she asked. “Where are the billboard-sized screens that zoom in on our target? Where’s the staff of data analysts in dark gray Samaritan Mutual uniforms, huddled over computer terminals as they sift for data?”

  “Um… we never had those. Not even on the police force.”

  “And so reality disappoints once again.” Valentine plopped her ass into a swiveling computer seat. She turned to Payne. “Can’t you whip up a PowerPoint presentation or something?”

  Payne frowned, taking his place at the head of the table. “That’s nonsense frippery the Internet has encouraged. We need no frills. Just data.”

  Valentine reached into her skirt to pull out her Nintendo DS, propping her stiletto-booted feet up on the table. She conspicuously played while Payne laid out the contents of his manila folder upon the table’s clean white surface.

  Paul almost asked Payne to just make a damn PowerPoint slide for once. He’d spent the last hour convincing Valentine that rescuing ’mancers could be a grand adventure, full of the excitement she was distinctly not getting being cooped up in a room “surrounded by weeniemancers,” as she put it. And he’d gone far out of his way to imply – though not promise, Paul would never lie to her – that tracking down ’mancers wouldn’t be more boring Paul stuff like reading through files.

  Now Valentine and Payne were on edge, jockeying for Paul’s attention.

  Not a good start.

  It didn’t get much better when Rainbird walked into the room.

  Valentine leapt out of her chair. “What the fuck is Creepazoid doing here?”

  Payne rearranged the papers Valentine had knocked out of true. “I said you could investigate. I did not say unsupervised. Not with this elevated threat level.”

  “This fucker tried to burn me.”

  “That ‘fucker’ burns whoever I aim him at, Ms DiGriz. I authorized him to burn anyone who attacked him.”

  “I–” Valentine looked at Paul, who pleaded silently for her to go along. Rainbird swept by them to sit next to Payne, examining Paul and Valentine with the faint amusement one would give to watching two birds fighting over a scrap of bread. He turned his scarred hands over upon the table, palm-up, as if to ask: Well? Are you going to leave?

  Valentine slapped her hands on the table hard enough to make the waterglasses rattle. “Right,” she said, leaning over to scour Payne’s compiled evidence. “Let’s see who’s better at wrangling some goddamned ’mancers.”

  Paul could breathe again. If they could get through this mission, maybe he could make this…

  “First, these.” Payne handed out a silver Samaritan Mutual badge to each of them, folded inside a leather case. “Keep these touching your skin at all times.”

  “Not sure I want you rubbing up against me,” Valentine said.

  “Those badges are the flux dumps that allow me to redirect your bad luck out to my risk pool. Without them touching your bare flesh, when you do ’mancy, your bad luck comes down on one person: you. I’d consider going solo to be fairly risky behavior, given that David Giabatta’s task force have vowed to take you down – but that’s your decision, Ms DiGriz.”

  Valentine turned the heavy badge over in her fingers, not quite willing to give it back.

  “No?” Payne asked archly. “Then clasp it to your bare breast and thank me.”

  “What?”

  He turned away to rifle through a folder, uncaring. “That’s how it activates.”

  Valentine fumed, then pressed the thick curves of the badge against the swell of her left breast. The badge’s ridges squeezed shut, a tick affixing itself to her skin. Feeling queasy, Paul tucked his badge into his pocket, wanting to distance himself from the metal’s skin-warm touch.

  “Thank you, King,” Valentine said between gritted teeth. Paul felt a flow of ’mancy open up between them. Payne nodded.

  “Some day I’ll make you mean that, Ms DiGriz. But we have a case to investigate.” Payne touched the papers, assuring their proper order, before clearing his throat. “This one’s very unusual. He’s an ex-employee. In fact, I’d almost overlooked him… but recent evidence has shown Samaritan Mutual may be proficient in generating ’mancers.”

  He gave Paul a broad wink, an actor trying to simulate warmth.

  “Where are the pictures?” Valentine asked, shuffling through the papers. “He worked for you, so you must have ID. All you’ve got are these blurry shots of a guy with… shit, looks like someone’s roughed him up. All I can see are bruises.” She leaned back, closing her eyes in bliss. “Mmm, bruises. You know what bruises are? Makeup for men.”

  Payne sniffed. “Those are his employee IDs. Which have somehow been blurred. Furthermore, his fellow employees don’t remember what he looked like. They remember catastrophic injuries, yet… he never filed a medical claim, despite some coworkers remembering him with broken cheekbones.”

  Valentine wrapped her arms around herself and rocked. “Sexy, sexy bruises.”

  “So… what happened?”

  “We fired him, of course. Yet he had investigated some of Anathema’s terrorist attacks for us in years past, and we know Anathema’s attacks were designed to create new ’mancers. That, in conjunction with the fact that we don’t know… well….”

  Payne hesitated, embarrassed. Rainbird drummed his fingers on the table sympathetically. “It’s ’mancy, sir. Odd things come with the territory. You can’t be expected to have all the facts.”

  Payne nodded, appeased. “Thank you, Rainbird.”

  “So what’s this dude’s name?” Valentine said. As Paul spread the case files across the table, he noted thumbprint smudges of sickly brown blotted across the files. All the fields that had once contained the man’s name had bloated, swelling up from water damage and dissolving into mold – though the rest of the papers remained the same crisp eggshell-white
they’d been when they’d been extracted from Payne’s immaculate records.

  “That can’t be right.” Paul frowned, reaching out with his ’mancy to pull up the file on a computer. A flickering static haze obscured the field where the man’s name should be. Paul scrolled down, but sure enough, the haze fizzled and reappeared in front of the name before Paul could read it.

  “That’s the problem,” Payne said. “As far as we can tell, he’s erased his name from the world.”

  Twenty-Five

  The Strongest And Smartest Men Who’ve Ever Lived

  “Not a problem.” Valentine scooped up the papers. “We’ve got his last known address. We’ll walk it over.”

  “It’s not quite that simple.” Rainbird tugged the papers out of her grip. “We should pinpoint what kind of ’mancer he is. Or determine whether he is, in fact, the ’mancer at all. Perhaps he’s the victim of another man’s obsession.”

  “You think some crazy ’mancer’s erasing people’s injuries and their names? Tchuh.”

  Paul held out his hand for the files. A nod from Payne, and Rainbird deposited them into Paul’s palm. “A little advance groundwork wouldn’t be amiss here, Valentine. Fact is, when I bureaucromanced Payne, I tripped his wires. Yet someone was so good they waltzed in through Payne’s records and deleted himself, and Payne didn’t even notice.”

  “The old boy’s oblivious to a lot of things.” Valentine headed for the door, yanking the paper out of Paul’s fingers. “This is a wild goose chase to keep me distracted anyway, so tell you what, Paul – we’re gonna do this the Valentine way. We’re gonna go pound on his door, hope this game is structured so the clues are lying on the ground, and skip all this Samaritan Mutual overcautious bullshit.”

  “That’s–”

  “Tut-tut-tut.” She held up a hand. “As much as I appreciate how y’all are trying to engage my sense of mystery, we all realize this comes down to one thing: will Valentine be satisfied, trading in a healthy sex life for chasing random ’mancers around Brooklyn? Frankly, we either find out I like the hunt, or we have a real uncomfortable conversation about what happens next. So I’m not presupposed to doing a lot of legwork here, capiche?”