Fix (19 page)

E
ight 'mancers were
to be honored at today's memorial service: two dead of old age, one by accident, five sacrificed sealing broaches.

Everyone agreed Numbers would have been pleased to see his death take place on a statistically average day.

Aliyah hadn't wanted to go to the memorial service, but it would have felt disrespectful to stay away. She was raw after breaking down in the Unimancers' arms yesterday.

She'd always been her family's anchor. Here, she'd become someone who relied on people.

Why couldn't she rely on the people who'd raised her?

The Unimancers, for their parts, had kept a respectful distance, like waiters standing in a restaurant's corner. The people of Bastogne had taken their lead from the Unimancers, refusing to condemn her.

She longed for someone to yell at her, to give her something to fight against…

But Aliyah's only human contact had been Ruth, come to top off her euclidosuppressants. She craved that drug now. She
wanted
her 'mancy locked away.

Getting to the mess tent involved dodging messy smears where light boiled inside like tea in a kettle – the scars from yesterday's rift. The Unimancers acknowledged Aliyah with encouraging smiles. How could they? She'd killed three people. Yet though she scoured their expressions for traces of disgust, not a one of them blamed her.

She thirsted for their forgiveness. Worse, knew they'd give it.

That opened up doors she wasn't ready to step through.

Today's ceremony was overseen by a pot-bellied, dark-skinned man in a crisp military uniform. He stood at the head of the mess tent, looking somber; his nametag, drowning in a chest full of medals, read
KANAKIA
.

Aliyah stared.
This
man had beaten her? With his balding fringe of gray hair and his bulbous nose, General Kanakia looked like a store clerk, not a warrior.

Yet when he turned his calm gaze upon her, she felt like a virus under a microscope. Aliyah bristled; that gaze spoke of hours studying videotapes of her, implied nothing she could do would surprise him. Occasionally he bent down to whisper a question to Ruth, and Ruth always nodded as if to confirm the truth of whatever he'd surmised.

They spoke – Ruth arguing strenuously, the general reluctant – and came to a conclusion.

Ruth thanked him and came over to get Aliyah.

“The general says Numbers' memorial service will have classified information you're not cleared for.” Ruth cracked open a storage case, strapped a bow and quiver over her shoulder. “Come on, let's go for a walk.”

“I killed them,” Aliyah said. “I can't walk away–”

“If you truly honor them, then you won't make this memorial about you.”

Aliyah couldn't have blushed faster if she'd been slapped.

“That's not fair,” she protested. “You've got all those salesmancers and psychomancers and marketingmancers inside you. Are you manipulating me into doing… doing whatever you want?”

Ruth nodded. “Check my eyes, Aliyah.”

Her eyes were a speckled hazel, kind enough that Aliyah wanted to trust her–

–they weren't jittering.

They hadn't jittered during this whole conversation.

Had Ruth severed herself from the collective?

“That's all…” Aliyah wasn't sure how to say it. “That's all
you
?”

The freckles on her cheeks darkened before she turned away. “It's always me, Aliyah. Just sometimes I have help.”

Aliyah remembered being enfolded in the Unimancers' embrace the other day, cresting high on their love…

“Look,” Ruth said. “If we were bringing you into the collective, sure, we'd use every trick to charm you. But you're off-limits. The general's made it quite clear that if I ever interfere with his attempts to capture your father again, he will have me shot. But…”

Ruth sighed, uncertain whether she should talk. “I don't have to channel salesmancers to know how you're feeling. You think you killed people. You're cringing with guilt. But we told you this wasn't your fault – and it
isn't
.”

“Bullshit. I triggered the broach.”

“And I triggered you.” Ruth dug her fingernails into her ribs, her body curling inwards in shame. “I carry… I've got too much influence over the collective at times. They feel guilty over how I got in. They don't want to countermand me unless it's necessary. And when I picked a fight with you, they rode my anger when they should have quashed it, and I
goaded
you. Until you
broke
.”

Was Ruth crying? Shit, Ruth was crying. Crying hard.

Aliyah didn't know Unimancers
could
cry.

Aliyah moved to embrace Ruth – then stopped. She didn't
know
Ruth, hugging her might have been what Aunt Valentine called a
consent violation
.

In the end, she didn't hug Ruth. Mainly because she remembered how good it had felt when Ruth had hugged her yesterday, and how much she craved those soft embraces again, and Ruth's stinging
don't make this about you
felt far too applicable.

“Did you know I could… do that?” Aliyah asked instead, feeling like she should interrupt these waterworks somehow.

“…do what?”

“Broach if you pushed me?”

Ruth laughed. “Shit, no. I thought you'd just cry. As it turns out –
Jesus
, you're strong. Smashed past a dosage that would have incapacitated anyone else.”

Aliyah flashed back to Morehead:
This is playing the game on expert
, she'd thought.
These kids don't have to like you.

Your enemy's compliment was the most addictive drug.

“I'm that good, huh?”

Ruth frowned, realizing she'd conceded a point. “Could have also been a bad dosage. There's some weird flux haloing you. Maybe from your dad, maybe from someone else.”

Aliyah felt better about that, too. Any excuse to feel like she hadn't doomed mankind.

“So somebody else's bad luck fueled yesterday's raging clusterfuck?”

Ruth scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. The thought clearly made her feel better, too. “Maybe.”

“So the world is suicidal, and it's using us as the razor to slit its wrists?”

Ruth blinked – then gave Aliyah the goofiest grin. “Who the hell
talks
like that?”

“Me,” Aliyah said proudly. “Fuckin' flux.”

Ruth spat on the ground. “
Mother
fuckin' flux.”

Aliyah realized she hadn't braced herself for a “language” from Mom or Dad. She'd let the fucks fly freely.

She should miss her family. But it felt nice having nobody looking over her shoulder.

Somebody different looking, anyway.

“A whole flux-fucking
family!
” Aliyah said experimentally. Ruth giggled. Aliyah worried maybe she was disrupting the 'mancer memorial service – but the Unimancers had unobtrusively filed out of the mess hall.

Sheepdogs
, Aliyah thought.

“Come on.” Ruth jerked her thumb towards the woods. “Let's move, before the general drugs your ass into incoherency.”

“You can
try
. Maybe the flux would fuck that up, too.”

“Seriously? The flux wants you awake? You wanna argue the best luck I can have today is beating you unconscious?”

Aliyah followed Ruth into the underbrush without conceding the point.

Twenty yards into the woods, Aliyah realized how easily she could get lost. The Appalachians had given her a taste of deep nature, but hikers and homeowners still wandered through there. Everything here was buried beneath decades of growth, unchecked by any serious human habitation – wildlife rustled beneath each leaf.

Ruth led them down mossy creek banks, tiptoed across the rocks. Aliyah struggled to follow.

Do
not
think of this as a videogame challenge
, she thought.

“OK,” Ruth said cautiously. “I think we both agree talking shit about your father is off-limits.”

Aliyah's cheeks burned with anger. “Goddamned straight.”

“So I'll start with a compliment: You saw how we had to work together to stave off that broach. If your dad can do that solo –
if
– then he's working some powerful juju.”

Aliyah matched Ruth's politeness. “He's one of the smartest men in the world.”

Ruth skipped from stone to stone, looking down as if she was far more comfortable traversing treacherous streams than she was talking to someone her own age. “I don't… OK, sure. But let's say your dad
was
the best guy in the world, you know,
my
mother,
she
was so good, and yet she…”

Ruth reached back to grab Aliyah's wrist before Aliyah toppled backwards. She pulled Aliyah up onto the far shore, and Aliyah felt shamed; the creek had been maybe ten feet across, and she'd
still
needed help.

“Parents do things to you, Aliyah. Even with the best of intentions, they can fuck you up hard. And seeing you worshipping your dad, it got me mad.”

“I wasn't
worshipping
him.”

She waved Aliyah's objections away, too weary to fight, heading into the woods. “Whatever. I sure as fuck worshipped
my
mom. She made the best pancakes, and she made living in a van fun, and when she got brain cancer she distracted me by teaching me about cell growth and chemotherapy.”

Aliyah almost apologized. Then she realized if Ruth was anything like her, she'd sucked down too much sympathy already.

“How old were you?”

Ruth shouldered tree branches aside. “Seven.”

A year older than I was when I got burned
, Aliyah almost said, but mentioning that felt like riding on Ruth's coattails. “That's young.”

Aliyah winced. That pity had squirted out. Ruth shrugged, rolling Aliyah's sympathy off.

“Mom sure as hell thought so,” Ruth agreed. “We'd had so many adventures. She was an educamancer – a super-teacher.”

Now
that
was a killer 'mancy. You could teach people languages, teach them skills, teach them coping techniques – you'd be a living videogame tutorial and psychotherapist. “That's… potent.”

“You think so?” The trees opened up into a great grassy field, so high the grass stalks tickled their underarms. “Most people think ‘magical teaching' is kinda weaksauce, but… you have a dad who's fetishized the IRS.”

“So we have parents who rocked subtle 'mancy.”

“Yeah,” Ruth nodded. “We travelled from town to town. She'd find down-and-out people and train them. We'd come in, fix someone's life, get out before SMASH arrived. It was
Teacher, She Wrote
.”

Ruth paused, waiting for laughter.

“I never heard of that show,” Aliyah admitted.

“Then how'd you know it was a show?”

“Aunt Valentine makes lots of references nobody gets. Eventually you pick up on flavors of confusion.”

“Weird. Anyway, Mom got… she got cancer. She diagnosed herself; she was like a doctor ten times over by that point. And she was convinced I'd be lost without her to guide me.”

Aliyah thought of Dad, hovering near the soccer field. “That's what parents do.”

Ruth unholstered the bow. “Maybe. But most parents don't transfer their own consciousness into
your
consciousness to make sure you'll never be alone, and then blow their brains out before the cancer degrades their cognitive functions.”

Ruth spoke so casually, the full force of what had happened took a moment to hit.

And when Aliyah processed what Ruth's mother had done to her, her thoughts short-circuited.

“So yeah.” Ruth handed the bow to Aliyah, who took it numbly. “I
know
Mom loves me. She's always by my side – or some static copy of her that can never learn is. Always nagging me, always checking in. She means
so well
. But she didn't know I'd feel the bullet burst her brains. She didn't know a seven year-old girl wasn't prepared for a crash course in educamancy. She didn't know her prepared lessons on suppressing flux required a girl who wasn't shit-scared and traumatized.”

“Jesus.” She tried to imagine a 'mancer kid living alone with no one but a dead parent's echo to help her.

“I tried to help people, just like my mom.” Ruth cracked her knuckles. “I hurt 'em. My flux, it… it ruined people. SMASH tracked me down, rehabilitated me, made me part of the collective. They
helped
. They gave me people to transfer my excess flux to, support to calm me down, a cause to live for–”

She looked back towards Bastogne, thumping her fist against her heart. Ruth had been ready to die to protect her town last night.

Ruth's fierce pride made Aliyah envious.

Ruth nodded, once, affirming Aliyah's discomfort. “I was seven, Aliyah. Mom thought she knew what was best for me. And maybe your dad thinks he knows best, but… don't trust him. He loves you. And he loves magic. But love, man, if it granted wisdom…”

She looked out over the swaying field, face suffused with longing.

“…I'd be an ordinary girl.”

Aliyah thought about speaking up. But arguing for her dad's wisdom felt too much like negating Ruth's experience, and lamenting their situation felt sappy, and they both knew sympathy was poison.

The best thing she could do, Aliyah decided, was to let Ruth's words settle and see if they made sense later.

She looked down at the bow, a springy plastic composite. “What do you expect me to do with this?”

“Oh yeah. That's your training.” She handed Aliyah an arrow from the arrow-making family. “I'll teach you to shoot.”

“Like hell you are. Firing a weapon
is
videogames. I'll broach!”