The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  She paused by the door, daring Paul to contradict her.

  “All right, Valentine,” Paul said. “This is your show.”

  Payne’s shoulders were stiff with disappointment.

  * * *

  Three hours into the investigation, Paul allowed himself a smidgeon of hope.

  Valentine was proving surprisingly good at investigating. She was conspicuous as all hell, of course – a stocky woman with a glittery eyepatch, wild black hair tied up in a bow, and wearing crinoline dresses with zombie-blood stockings was guaranteed to stand out – but she’d knocked on John Doe’s landlady’s door, claiming to be his cousin dropping in for a surprise visit.

  The landlady – an old Mexican woman with a prominent Bronx accent – couldn’t remember what John Doe had looked like, but when prompted did remember “the man with those horrible injuries.” She told tales of his terrible insomnia, the way she heard him clomping around in the apartment above her, talking to himself. She’d spoken with him, but the problem had gotten worse; he’d taken to coming in at all hours, drooling blood from his gashed mouth, clapping steaks to his blackened eyes, frightening her other tenants.

  “That must have been horrible,” Valentine said, sipping the tea the landlady had made for them. “Did you kick him out?”

  “Oh, no. He blew his apartment up.”

  Rainbird leaned forward, eyes gleaming.

  Valentine put the tea down. “He blew it up?”

  The landlady shook her head. “He sealed everything off and filled it with bug bombs. Blew his Ikea furniture to flinders. Oh, he claimed his stove’s pilot light went off by mistake… But his security deposit wasn’t enough to rebuild the room. Haven’t seen him since.”

  “Oh, man. How much did my cousin cost you?”

  “Haven’t been able to repair the damage. My insurance company hasn’t paid me yet.”

  Valentine waved Paul into action. While Paul magically hacked her paperwork to get a check on the way, Valentine asked about a forwarding address.

  “I don’t know where he’s gone,” the landlady apologized. “His records burned up in the fire. Otherwise I would have called the cops on him.”

  Valentine thanked her, walked out into the hallway, and twirled on her toes. She extended her index finger, rotating around with a surge of ’mancy, and followed her fingernail out to the complex’s back alley. It was piled high with burned garbage – old glass dishes with tiny bubbled imperfections, sooty Eurotrash shelving units, ashen armchairs with faint green stripe patterns.

  Something glowed in the detritus.

  Valentine kicked aside an old film reel to find a damp receipt for a sale of soap stuck to the ground. The receipt was limned in a pulsing emerald shine, encouraging Valentine to pick it up.

  “Quest item,” she explained, squinting at the address written on it before looking it up in her phone. “Next stop: our crazy-ass bug-bomb-o-’mancer.”

  Rainbird drove them to the destination, piloting the limousine, giving them some privacy in the back. But Valentine was uncharacteristically quiet, staring into her Nintendo without the usual stream of commentary she gave whenever they drove together.

  “Thanks for going along with this, Valentine,” Paul said to clear the silence. “I know it’s giving up a lot…”

  “Where do you want to live, Paul?”

  She’d placed the Nintendo in her lap, stared evenly at Paul. Paul had never been comfortable making eye contact, especially not with Valentine.

  And the truth was, he wasn’t sure he wanted to live at the Institute. He’d been trying to make friends, hoping to find interesting talks like he had with Valentine, but the other ’mancers had nothing to say.

  It had been fun for a few days, living in that glorious library, but… His office back at Samaritan Mutual had been cramped, the cabinets rusty, stuffed underneath a staircase. Yet he’d acquired every book of regulations personally, his macaroni pen cup made by Aliyah, his desk blotter stained with his own ink. He’d reorganized his new digs, but it seemed–

  –well, he didn’t want to say “soulless.” It had a feel. It just wasn’t his feel.

  But when Paul had told Aliyah he was leaving to investigate a ’mancer, she threw a temper tantrum: Daddy was not going out without her. Then Rainbird had appeared, promising to keep Aliyah’s father safe. Paul had expected Aliyah’s usual skepticism – she followed up every one of Paul’s promises with a “really?” – but Aliyah had nodded and hugged Paul before letting him go.

  That was progress.

  Yet now Paul worried about being separated from her. Even though Aliyah curled up by his side every night, Paul had nightmares where Aliyah slipped away, Aliyah having run off to an abandoned house where she burned, burned, burned…

  “I’ll live wherever Aliyah’s happy,” Paul demurred.

  “Paul. Paul. Bad idea.”

  “…what? Why?”

  “If you give up everything for your children’s happiness, Paul, you can’t teach them how to be happy.”

  “Oh, come on. You were the one who gave Aliyah that ludicrous speech on how she’d be alone forever…”

  She thumped her breast with pride. “I’m bad cop here, Paul. You’re good cop. I tell Aliyah the cold realities so she doesn’t drown in your dreams. And… shit, I want you to prove me wrong. But... I’m lonelier than ever there. I’m trying, man. Because I love you. But a life without kissing, or fucking – that’s empty, man. You need more than agape to function, you need eros.” She eyed Paul, shrugged. “OK, maybe you don’t. The only woman I’ve ever seen you make googly eyes at is your ex.”

  “Valentine, I…” Paul swallowed. “All you do is go to the swing clubs. You’re just… fucking.”

  “I’d like love,” she said wistfully. “But since my flux impaled the last guy I loved on a rusty pipe, a girl’s gotta fill the void with something.” She sighed, looking out the window. “Two bisexual firemen will do.”

  Rainbird drove through a decrepit industrial zone, a place filled with abandoned paper mills and businesses that had long vanished. Paul knew the areas well – ’mancers thrived in rotted homes that normal people didn’t dare to visit.

  It was dusk before they pulled up before a ramshackle mansion – a looming Victorian household peeled down to the rotted wood by years of neglect. The windows were boarded over with plywood, the sagging roof so denuded of tiles that even pigeons refused to roost there.

  Stenciled across a boarded window in bright pink letters: “PAPER STREET SOAP COMPANY.” Muscular workers dug ditches outside.

  Valentine pressed her nose against the window, whistling low as she admired scores of filthy biceps. At first Paul thought they were landscapers – why would anyone tend to the lawn when the house was about to fall over? – but then he noted tarps stuck on sticks, rainwater barrels, stacks of glass signaling the beginnings of a greenhouse.

  “Great,” Paul said. “It’s a military compound.”

  Valentine hopped out of the car. “Well, we know our bug-bomb-o-’mancer will be at the front of the line,” and strode up to the house like she owned it. Paul voiced some feeble concerns about doing some reconnoitering; Valentine ignored him.

  Rainbird coasted behind, rolling his cigar between his fingers, glancing uneasily at the burly men armed with shovels. Paul cruised to a halt, his attention caught by the way the men didn’t react.

  Paul limped up, approaching the workers with the caution of a hunter approached a deer. They kept digging holes as the light faded, not paying the slightest bit of attention to him. Or the setting sun. Or, in fact, anything but their shovels.

  They were all young men, handsome as actors; their heads were shorn in tight cuts, their broken-nosed faces full of the fanatic’s glazed admiration.

  He walked in experimentally between two men picking up a glass pane. They bumped against him, knocking him off balance without so much as an apology; they didn’t seem to register Paul’s existence. Then they picked up the glas
s, threatening to bowl him over.

  “They’re mesmerized,” Rainbird said.

  “No.” Paul touched them on the shoulders before smelling the ’mancy on his fingertips. “It’s deeper. I don’t think they exist.”

  “…what?”

  “It’s like Mrs Liu’s cats. There are no lunchboxes or port-a-potties here. And these men are too... well, too perfect. They’re extras on a Hollywood lot.” Paul repressed the urge to try to unmake them. “Our ’mancer wants fanatics working for him, and like Mrs Liu I don’t doubt he has a handful of real people mixed in with the lot, but… his ’mancy is filling in gaps.”

  “Creating people.” Rainbird looked discomfited. “That’s a whole new level of ’mancy.”

  “We’d better catch up with Valentine before she gets in over her head.”

  Valentine stood under the gabled porch, poking two men in pseudo-military uniforms who stood at attention, satchels at their feet. They waited outside the door as if they expected someone to come get them.

  She flicked their noses; one flinched, the other didn’t.

  “Check this out, Paul!” She gave him a lopsided grin, proud of her discovery. She poked the one who flinched. “PC.” Then she wrapped her fingers around the other one’s crotch, squeezing tight. He didn’t move. “NPC.”

  “…What?”

  “Game terminology,” Valentine explained. “This dude’s real. A player character. As witness!” When she knocked his cap off, he began to sweat. “But this one?” She dug her fingernails deeper into his testicles: no response. “A Non-Player Character. Our bug-bomb-o-’mancer made him up. He’s set dressing.”

  “Yeah, we figured that out.”

  The capless, real man – a young white kid who couldn’t have been older than twenty – bent over, intending to pick up his cap, then thought better of it.

  “…is this part of the test?” he ventured.

  Valentine rooted through his satchel. The kid started to protest, but thought better of that, too, baffled as Paul by Valentine’s antics.

  She tossed the items at the kid’s face as she extracted them from his satchel. “One pair black boots. Two pair black socks. Two pair black pants. Two black shirts. And – there it is...” She held up a rubber-banded wad of cash as though it were a smoking gun. “Three hundred dollars in personal burial money.”

  “Valentine,” Paul asked. “Do you know what the hell is going on?”

  She grinned like a mudshark.

  “I do. My sweet stars, Paul, this is a delightful psychosis.” She rapped her knuckles on the door; her knocks boomed, as though the house was hollow. The kid shuffled his rumpled clothes around with his feet, unsure whether he was allowed to bend over to pick it up.

  “Is this part of the test?”

  “You have to determine your own level of commitment,” Valentine shot back. The door rattled half open, held by another suspicious young military kid. He goggled at Valentine.

  “I’m here for the club tonight.” She winked, which looked odd on a one-eyed woman. “Me and my two friends. Not that, you know, we should have heard about it. But you know how boys gossip.”

  He looked down at her breasts, distracted. “I- I’m not sure whether that’s–”

  She gave him a disarming smile. “Is that in your rules? You got eight of them, last I checked. Don’t think ‘No women’ is in there. This is cancer, right?”

  “What? I…”

  “God, you don’t even get your own references.” She pushed open the door, exasperated. “Look, kid, we got faces to punch, same as you. I’m willing to bet I’ve used my cock more than you’ve used yours, and I bought mine at Amazon. Is the club in progress?”

  “…well, yeah, but…”

  “Downstairs? In the shitty basement, filled with men’s sweat?”

  “I wouldn’t–”

  “My kinda action. I’m in.” She pushed past him, all but daring him to tackle her. Paul apologized as he followed in Valentine’s wake, walking into the mildewed stench.

  Valentine shouldered past men – only men – who halted next to triple-decker bunk beds, who paused in filling up industrial drums with chemicals, who stopped rewiring sputtering electrical fixtures to stare at Valentine. She bumped them aside, headed through the maze of rooms towards the basement.

  Pained cries echoed up the stairs, the wet smack of fists bruising flesh. Men cheered.

  He’s got an army here, Paul thought, feeling small as he limped along on his artificial limb, trying to keep up. Rainbird cruised behind him, arms held tight at his sides, puffing on the cigar.

  Valentine charged down the basement stairs, as though she couldn’t wait to see the show. The basement was body temperature, the heated stew smell of shirtless men crammed in to an airless place, laced with stale cigarette smoke and a sharp metallic blood scent. There had been rows of narrow windows facing the west, once, but they’d been boarded over to give people privacy.

  The crowd downstairs, at least thirty shirtless men, fell silent as Valentine strode into view. Piles of shoes, socks, and shirts had been tossed into the corner, along with bloodied towels. Several beaten men cuddled each other, whispering reassurances.

  And yet, Paul thought, that smell was strangely invigorating. Like a lion’s den redolent with the meat scent of predator piss. Parts of you only came alive once you realized your next few moments would be brief, exciting, and possibly final.

  The men in the arena had yet to notice Valentine. Two pudgy accountants grappled each other in a mockery of martial arts. One had smashed the other’s head into a splintered support beam, but had rallied to kneel on his friend’s chest, woozily punching his buddy’s teeth out.

  Valentine sized the shirtless men up like they were a buffet, eyeing them with such lust that they covered their nipples. They stopped cheering, uncertain; Paul realized they’d been confident this gladiator-style arena was a great idea, and it had been a great idea as long as nobody else passed judgment. Someone who found this amusing could sweep away their illusions.

  Then their leader stepped out of the shadows.

  He was bared to the waist, his finely muscled chest awash in a sheen of dried blood, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. His spiky hair was sweat-tousled yet somehow still model-perfect. He had a blackened eye, but it did look like makeup on him – the bruise on his tanned cheek accentuating his perfect cheekbones, forming a frame around a perfectly blue eye.

  The ’mancer – for it was the ’mancer, no doubt – smiled, his crooked grin at odds with his hesitant fighters; he alone seemed content with Valentine’s presence. He gave her a welcoming smile, an effect only slightly spoiled by bloodied teeth.

  “Ever see the rabbits freeze underneath a hawk’s shadow?” he said to his men, never peeling his admiring gaze away from Valentine. “We got a predator here, boys. And you are shitting pellets.”

  Valentine drew in a shallow breath at the ’mancer’s sheer beauty. She dug her elbow into Paul’s ribs. “He’s got inguinal creases, Paul. Inguinal creases.”

  “What in blazes is an inguinal crease?”

  “It’s the ‘V’ surrounding a six-pack ab that makes my panties disintegrate.”

  The ’mancer tapped the two fighting men, pulled them aside as if asking to cut in. They stopped, stunned at Valentine’s presence, but then the crowd reached out to draw them in for manly hugs, slapping them on their sweaty backs, handing them towels.

  The ’mancer stepped into the arena. The other men stepped back, waiting for his lead.

  He winked at Valentine, his bruise-puffed eye barely managing the trick. “So what’s your plan here, hotcakes?”

  “You.” Valentine pointed at him. Called him out. She tugged off her stiletto-heeled boots.

  He threw his head back and laughed. “You’ve distilled self-hatred into self-destruction. We can help you to the next level. You know the rules?”

  Valentine pulled her shirt over her head, tossed it at Paul. She unbuck
led her bra and tossed that at Paul too, her ample breasts plopping out. Paul held her still-warm clothing in shock, unsure who to give it to – but Valentine didn’t think twice about getting half naked before a room of strange men.

  She stepped towards the ’mancer, brimming with glee.

  “This is fight club. And if this is my first night at fight club…” She sighed happily, as if she’d found the home she’d been seeking all her life. “If it’s my first night at fight club, I have to fight.”

  “Goddamned straight,” he said, and punched her.

  Twenty-Six

  I Am Jack’s Clinical Insanity

  Valentine caught the ’mancer’s fist in her hand.

  “You went for the ear,” she said. “How predictable.”

  She kicked him hard in the balls. He went down grinning.

  “Nobody ever seemed to do that in your little movie,” she said, teasing – almost flirtatious. “It’s almost like you forgot guys have testicles.”

  “What the fuck is this, Valentine?” Paul asked.

  “It’s a movie,” she explained, grabbing the ’mancer by the hair, slamming his face into the dirt. “Fight Club. Had a boyfriend obsessed with the damn thing. Though not as obsessed as Tyler Durden here.”

  He grabbed one of her nipple rings, twisted it hard enough that she let go. Then he socked her in the face, sending her bouncing back against the support beam. “This isn’t just Fight Club!” he said heatedly. “I am a Chuck Palahniomancer!”

  “Oh, fuck off.” She landed a roundhouse to his ribs. “There’s nothing here from Choke, or Survivor, or any of Palahniuk’s other books! It’s just the movie! You are a fuckin’ Fight-Club-omancer!”

  He kneed her in the gut.