The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Aliyah wanted to try to hit Rainbird again, but… Rainbird was right. Daddy pulled his punches. He’d stopped her from hurting the policemen at the garage, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt policemen, but….

  Daddy would rather die than hurt people.

  That shouldn’t feel like a weakness, but it was.

  She had her daddy’s weakness, and that’s why she needed Rainbird. Rainbird had no weakness. He was all strength, and maybe strength was scary. Rainbird didn’t seem to care about anything but fire, and occasionally her. He made her sick to her stomach, but Aliyah had decided Rainbird was like medicine: something awful to be endured to make her stronger.

  “It’s time you worked, little girl,” Rainbird said. “We all must pitch in to safeguard this place. Mr Payne needs you to find someone.”

  He went over to his safe, the only place in his lair that didn’t burn, to pull out a photo. It showed a small man in a nice white suit and Panama hat, walking with a cane.

  “That’s Oscar,” Aliyah said. “That’s Daddy’s…”

  She trailed off, shamed because she wanted to say “boss.”

  “Your father’s old boss,” Rainbird said. “Only a ’mancer should lead another ’mancer.”

  Secretly she agreed, but Rainbird couldn’t trash-talk Daddy. “Daddy owes Oscar money.”

  “What are debts, to those such as us?” He reached into the safe, produced a handful of burning twenties, flicked the ashes aside. “Now. Find Oscar. He is hiding from us.”

  She looked down at the photo. She’d never liked Oscar. Oscar reminded her of when she thought ’mancy was scary, back when she’d shrieked when Daddy did magic. She didn’t like that time at all.

  “…how?”

  Rainbird looked puzzled. “I believe your Aunt Valentine found her last target by making him a… what did you call it… a ‘quest item.’”

  “Oh!” That was what she loved about ’mancy: there were always new ways to use your powers. Daddy taught her that. And the Institute was a wonderful school where Mrs Vinere taught her about masks and she taught Mrs Vinere how masks worked in videogames. Juan the bookiemancer taught her the mathematical formulas that determined whether a Pokemon got trapped.

  This was how the world should work, Aliyah thought. Not a world that treated magic like a crime, but a world where her special powers were beloved.

  She spread her hands open. A radar screen popped out between her palms, complete with a glowing dot to show Oscar’s location.

  “Perfect,” Rainbird said. And though Aliyah hated the way she thirsted for Rainbird’s approval, she glowed with pride. She liked it because mean ol’ Rainbird wouldn’t do anything nice just because he thought he should. Daddy showered her with praise for stupid stuff, gushing over little kiddie accomplishments, but only a grown-up’s work would satisfy Rainbird.

  It was like Rainbird saw something she could be, and was shaping her. Which made her uncomfortable sometimes. But Daddy made her uncomfortable, too. He said he wanted her to be whatever made her happy, and Aliyah didn’t know what happy was these days.

  Valentine used to be the person who told Aliyah what made her happy. But Valentine hated this place so much that Aliyah being happy here started arguments. Aliyah couldn’t understand why Valentine didn’t like this place, but Valentine wanted a boy with a cute butt and that was disgusting.

  “All right,” Rainbird said. “Mr Payne has given us our orders. Let’s go get him.”

  “We’re not going to…?” Aliyah couldn’t say the word “kill.” She thought about killing a lot. She played Rainbird’s murder games like they were real. Sometimes the people in them became real as she played, but Aliyah only had killed one person and her ’mancy couldn’t make anything she couldn’t imagine. So in the end they all burned like Anathema had, weeping for mercy as they fell from a window before they splattered apart on the pavement, and then Aliyah shuddered and turned off the game.

  “Today, we send him a message.” He sniffed, then added: “It’ll protect your father.”

  They got into a limousine. It was creepy leaving the Institute this late, and even creepier leaving when there were almost no cars on the road, just a dead flat space between times when people were awake.

  The dot on her radar glowed as Rainbird steered the car through the freeways, towards Oscar. The dot grew bigger. Aliyah squirmed in her seat, hating this silence.

  “How will this protect my father?”

  He puffed on his cigar. It smelled like burning bodies. “The same way I would have protected my father. By walling off his worst instincts.”

  Aliyah turned to face him. Rainbird never spoke about anything but the present. She hadn’t thought he had a past.

  Rainbird grinned. “We lived in a small village. We’d heard armies were coming. But my father, he was like yours. He believed in talking. ‘We have all lived here all our lives,’ he said. ‘We have had our differences. No one needs to resort to violence.’

  “Then the armies came. Boys, like me. Nine, ten years-old. All the men had been killed in battle, you see, but they needed someone to keep up the war. And these boys, they couldn’t be convinced. They shot my father for daring to speak up. Then they shot my mother. Then they told me I was a soldier.”

  Aliyah clapped her hands over her mouth. How could Rainbird speak so calmly? She couldn’t even say “Anathema stabbed Daddy.”

  Rainbird followed the dot into a sleazy motel’s parking lot, pulling into a parking space at the back. “They beat me whenever I cried. They needed people killed, and either I’d kill the people they needed killed or they’d kick me to death. And I was scared, like you, little Aliyah. Scared all the time.”

  Maybe we do need to kill people, Daddy had said. The question is, do you want to be the person who does that?

  “So how did you…”

  Rainbird pointed towards the two men sharing a cigarette, watching for anyone who approached where Oscar slept. “Get us there.”

  Aliyah had learned from Valentine how to play stealth games, and Rainbird had let her play all the Assassin’s Creeds, games where she snuck up and slit men’s throats. She fiddled with her Nintendo DS, and Oscar’s guards in the car became dim automata, with glowing green cones marking their line of sight. The cones swept back and forth.

  “I got good at killing,” Rainbird said, cocking his head in admiration at Aliyah’s work. “But while the other boys forgot their villages, took on the army as their new family, I burned to escape. And one day, we fought in an old hotel, another battle against the United Front, and… it caught fire. We couldn’t escape. And as the roof collapsed upon us, I realized: fire didn’t care. Fire never cared. I must be the fire, and as they burned alive I was burned to life.”

  His eyes gleamed like banked coals. Aliyah remembered her own flame, the firestorm welling up inside when Anathema had hurt her father, the scarring fires pouring out to consume someone else…

  She’d been glad when she’d killed Anathema. So glad. And she’d tried hard to hold on to that ephemeral joy, but had been weighted down by all sorts of questions of who got to kill and why and her daddy telling her nobody should kill and yet she had killed, a part of her had liked it, and a part of her felt like throwing up all the time…

  Rainbird smiled. And that smile did hold a secret, yes; once he’d held that teeter-totter feeling of excitement and sickness, but he’d left the sickness behind to kill whoever walked in his path.

  Aliyah trembled. She wasn’t sure she wanted to learn this lesson.

  Then she thought of Anathema, stabbing her father. Of the policemen, tying him up.

  Maybe we do need to kill people.

  He would have died twice if she hadn’t saved him, and what would happen if she couldn’t kill and Daddy took a bullet to the head?

  “I don’t…” Aliyah struggled to find the right words. “I don’t see how this protects my father.”

  “Let me show you.”

  Do you want to be the pe
rson who does that?

  “I can’t kill now,” Aliyah protested.

  Rainbird ignored her, sauntering past the green cones, melting the lock on the motel room. Aliyah trailed behind, walking in to discover a sleeping Oscar in his motel bed, curled up in silk pajamas, small and vulnerable.

  He was small and vulnerable. Enspelled by her stealth game, Oscar would not wake up. They could stab him, and he would die as an insta-kill; those were the game’s rules.

  But Rainbird loomed over the bed, relishing the power of knowing he could end Oscar’s life at any moment.

  “What are…” Aliyah remembered to whisper. “What are you doing?”

  “Who is this?” Rainbird flicked his fingers towards Oscar’s snoring form.

  “He’s Oscar.”

  “No. What kind of person is he?”

  “…Daddy’s boss?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know.” Aliyah was frustrated enough to stab Rainbird again.

  Rainbird held up a finger. “What I learned when my fellow soldiers died was, there are two things in this world: the fire, and what the fire burns. And when you are the fire… it is your job to burn. There is no shame in burning kindling. It’s who you are, and who they are.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It is true. But look at you, Aliyah: you have turned these men into puppets for your amusement. For you, it is not the fire.”

  He knelt down, tapping her chest. She slapped his hand away. He grinned that secret-storing grin at her.

  “You…” He frowned, struggling to remember a term he’d heard elsewhere. “...are the player character. And these…” He swept his hand around to encompass the guards tick-tocking mechanically back and forth. “These aren’t people. They are NPCs.”

  She looked down at Oscar. Rainbird was right. Oscar wasn’t a man, any more: he was a mission. Something you’d never feel bad about killing, because he’d been placed there for your amusement.

  Maybe we do need to kill people.

  These aren’t people. They are NPCs.

  Rainbird took out his phone to photograph Oscar’s sleeping form. Taking all the photos right up against Oscar’s nose, as though to highlight how stupid and helpless he was.

  Aliyah stood by his side, watching.

  Thirty-Three

  You Don’t Bring Me Donuts Anymore

  Payne spread open an old, brittle map across his desk, tracing mountains with gnarled fingertips. He located a spot marked with a neat blue “X.”

  “I can offer you my old Flex laboratory,” Payne said. “It’s far out in the high hills, where no one thinks to look. I haven’t used it in decades, so it’ll take my men a few days to get the equipment back in order. But – it served me well, and it’ll serve you well.”

  Payne drummed his fingers on his desk, contemplating his next words.

  “The question is, Paul… do you need a Flex lab?”

  Paul steeled himself. He’d been expecting pushback from Payne.

  “What would you suggest, sir?”

  Payne shrugged, in that noncommittal way people did when they offered to do terrible things. “Rainbird gives us… more options… to handle these drug-seeking blackmailers.”

  “I thought you said we couldn’t find Oscar.”

  Payne gave Paul a cheerful wink. “I have resources. You don’t have to be beholden to mundanes, Paul.”

  And what Paul wanted to say was so bizarre he couldn’t form the words:

  You never brought me donuts.

  Which was the strangest reason Paul had heard of not to murder someone, but it rang true. He might not be buddies with K-Dash and Quaysean, given that hard wall of “Oscar might order me to kill you some day” that stood between them, but… they’d discovered Paul’s sweet tooth, and had brought donuts to the Flex brews. They’d given him coffee.

  Whereas Payne had given him infinitely more than a $9.99 box of donuts, but… Payne hadn’t asked Paul what office he’d want; he’d just made one for him. Paul couldn’t shake off that uncomfortable feeling Payne viewed him as an extension of his own needs, and…

  …the donuts K-Dash and Quaysean brought didn’t feel like attempts to curry Paul’s favor. They had the scent of organic kindness, of nice things people did for folks they liked.

  Paul had never seen Payne eat a donut. The man lived on black coffee and vitamins. And he never offered any to anyone else.

  “It’s… complicated, sir.” And once again, Paul found that “sir” tacked on to an otherwise innocuous sentence, the subjugation bubbling up unwanted.

  Payne let loose a disappointed wheeze.

  “Paul. I understand. Men get attached to people who stand their ground next to them. But… they’re not your friends.”

  “They saved my life.”

  “They saved an investment. That doesn’t make them your allies.”

  But Payne hadn’t seen the childlike grin on Quaysean’s face when he’d watched Paul do ’mancy. He hadn’t seen the way that Quaysean and K-Dash had, after a few Flex-brewing sessions, quietly held hands and given Paul a forthright look that said This is who we are, and I’m trusting you. He hadn’t seen the raw joy as K-Dash had hugged Valentine.

  It was business, yes. But you could mix business and friendship.

  More importantly, you couldn’t mix bureaucracy and murder. Oh, Paul had explored enough to know there were forms lurking in CIA files that could request death. But that wasn’t the bureaucracy he had fallen in love with. The bureaucracy he knew helped people; it didn’t send fiery hitmen to incinerate them.

  “I’d rather give him the Flex, sir. It’s easier.”

  Payne clenched his fists. “Paul, I’m not saying it’s good to kill people. But if we don’t, we are at the mercy of organized crime.”

  “Oscar’s crime is so organized, I’m certain K-Dash and Quaysean are the only other people who can identify us. If more people knew, they would have tried to leverage me. Trust me, I saw it when his brother kidnapped me – everyone’s hungry for Flex.”

  “Paul, I...” He buried his face in his hands. “Squeamish men cannot lead.”

  “I don’t like killing.”

  “Nobody likes killing!” Payne pounded the map. “I am trying very hard to respect your authority, Paul. But I am now beholden to an unknown crime syndicate with uncertain roots, and your squeamishness during the Paper Street incident means we still have David Giabatta working to track you down. Forty years of experience tells me these are not wise decisions. These are not designed to minimize risk.”

  “I think they are. Oscar’s worried about Valentine taking him out for years. If he dies, I’m pretty sure he has leaked information ready to go.”

  Payne snorted, seeing through the lie. “‘Pretty’ sure.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet he’s never mentioned this post-mortem threat to you.”

  “Why would he? If I knew, I’d work to defuse it.”

  “So you don’t want to exterminate the biggest leak to our safehouse, based on… a hunch.”

  “He and I think alike.”

  “You are not a crime overlord. You could barely keep two ’mancers at heel. And as such, I will beg you to reconsider, because the sooner we can burn Oscar Gargunza’s bones to ash and bury that particular threat vector, the safer we will all be.”

  Payne hunched over the desk, doing his best to stare Paul down. If Paul refused, Payne would order a hit on Oscar anyway…

  “Found him!”

  Valentine burst through the door, applying mascara with one hand, hiking up her bandolier with the other.

  “We got him, Paul! Hang on, I gotta…” She fiddled with the security monitors, then gave up and grabbed for her Xbox controller. Several newscasts flickered across the screen, showing New York’s tungsten-yellow streets flickering with a skyscraper on fire.

  No, wait – not “a” skyscraper.

  The skyscraper where David Giabatta held office for the New York Task Forc
e.

  And it wasn’t on fire, exactly. Only half the facing windows were aflame, as though there had been very careful explosions …

  “Is that a gigantic ‘V’ written in destruction across the skyscraper?” Payne asked, peering closer.

  Valentine did a girlish pirouette. “Isn’t that romantic?”

  “That is...” Paul shivered, thinking how this would play out in tomorrow’s headlines. “That’s insane! It’s taking a huge risk, calling out David! And he left your initial up there as a billboard-sized clue–”

  More explosions. Windows mirroring the other side of the building detonated, showering glass down upon the cops who’d cordoned off the area.

  “Now it’s a ‘W’.” Valentine scratched her chin. “What’s that mean?”

  “This isn’t even Fight Club!” Paul shouted, apoplectic. “This is Say Anything with terrorism! I sat through that awful movie, and Tyler Durden wasn’t doing all this just to get some girl’s attention!”

  “Kinda the way it worked out for him, though.”

  “That’s not the point! That movie was about brutal cynicism! He’s… inaccurate!”

  “And bureaucracy isn’t about making the world better, Paul. We ’mancers pick and choose from our source material. I got me a Fight-Club-o-’mancer who skews romantic.”

  “You have no ’mancer at all, Ms DiGriz,” Payne interjected. “You’ll stand down.”

  “What?”

  “We rescue ’mancers who are willing to play ball; we are not rescuing this boy from his own poor decisions. We’ve taken too many chances.”

  “But…” Valentine scrambled for rationales. “He knows my name. My first name, anyway. He knows Paul’s name. If he gets captured…”

  “He won’t. I’ve seen his kind before. He’s another anarchomancer in modern clothing.” Payne said the word “modern” with a moue of distaste. “He’s halfway towards killing himself already, and he’d die before anyone hauled him in. And if we ushered him into the fold, he’d not play well by our rules.”