Fix (3 page)

The net was on fire, the plastic burning. The goalie shrieked “'Mancer!” and fled, the other kids running with her.

The flux squeezed in around Aliyah, the low pressure of an incoming stormfront. Even if you didn't mean to do 'mancy, the universe
hated
it when you broke its rules. It inflicted surges of bad luck upon you to even out the odds.

Aliyah dimly heard parents calling 911, grabbing their children, flinging open the trunk to get their shotguns. But all Aliyah could think about was K-Dash and Quaysean – her friends who'd burned to death because she'd loved them when the flux hit. The flux hit you in all the places you feared most, and it would chew your friends to pieces to make you miserable.

She'd fallen in love with Morehead.

Her love endangered them.

But it was OK. She reached into her pocket for the Contract – one of the unique magics Daddy had mastered to disperse bad luck safely. Once she called upon the Contract's power, she'd–

“What… What did you do?” Savannah stared at Aliyah as if she couldn't quite process this. “Did you just try to–”

Aliyah backed away as Savannah stepped towards her, hands held out, begging Aliyah to tell her the truth:

“–did you just try to kill that girl?” Savannah finished.

Aliyah hadn't. The ball would have bounced off; the goalie had been sheathed in a protective aura of videogame physics. Yet she realized that soccer ball had looked like cannon fire to everyone else…

As Aliyah flinched from Savannah's fear, her flux squirmed away before she signed the Contract, bad luck seeking the worst possible consequence–

“
Savannah!
” someone bellowed – Savannah's dad, who'd looked over his shoulder fondly at her in the back seat as he'd sung
God Is In The House
loud enough for Aliyah to read the lyrics off his lips.

Except now Savannah's dad grabbed Savannah by her shoulder, yelling “
Get behind me!
” as he aimed a revolver at Aliyah.

Aliyah prepped a videogame shield, knowing this wasn't even the bad luck. Savannah's dad wanting to murder her was just what she got for losing control.

The flux would, somehow, make this worse.

P
aul had planned
for Imani to push him around so he could chat with the other parents – but he'd picked up a small flux-load from magically altering Mrs McBrayer's paperwork. Rather than risk having it squirm off higgledy-piggledy, he'd had his wheelchair jam. So Imani had played socialite while Paul sat sidelined.

He dug through the cooler they'd brought: she got headaches in bright sun, so he'd packed Advil and suntan lotion, and he'd tucked away a special supply of donuts so they could play the Donut Game with Uncle Kit on the way home…

The only thing he couldn't get her was friends. But she seemed to be making those on the field.

He smiled, proud.

Valentine sat next to him, clutching a concealed margarita one of the mothers had snuck her. “Whoo!” She flopped down. “I am
so
not used to getting drinks from people who aren't trying to get in my pants.”

Paul arched his eyebrows. “Making friends with the locals?”

“Wasted effort, Paul. I'm a kinky bitch, and I'd lay dollars to delicious donuts there's not a kink club within a hundred miles. I could never connect with these adorable vanilla confections.”

Yet Paul noticed Valentine had discreetly swapped her Confederate flag tattoos out for some less confrontational Garth Brooks ink.

Then Valentine's head snapped up as she felt the surge of videogamemancy.

“Oh God,” Paul muttered. “Is she…?”

“She's shit the bed,” Valentine pointed at Aliyah; her fellow players backed away as a black arrow shimmered into existence above her head, pointing down at her. “She's
selected
herself. As the active player.”

The parents elbowed each other, looking for confirmation they weren't hallucinating.

“
Aliyah!
” he yelled, trying to get her attention before she went too far – better to have them know her real name than for people to see 'mancy. But Aliyah's magic twisted his cry, turned it into a thunderous roar of approval, a thousand people chanting
Aliy-ah! Aliy-ah! Aliy-ah!

It could have been a beautiful moment of approval, except for the furious parents charging out onto the field to tackle Aliyah. Some – too many – reached underneath their shirts for concealed carry holsters–

“Get me targets, Paul,” Valentine said, leaping to her feet.

Paul sucked in a deep breath and dove into the records. He focused on the man sharing an ice-cold lemonade with Imani, the glass dropping from his hand as he squinted at Aliyah:

Braxton Tolliver: his Google history indicates many posts on anti-'mancer blogs, as well as repeated visits to the Magiquell website, a corporation that manufactures injectable nerve-gas cocktails designed to impede a 'mancer's concentration. Failed the certification exam to purchase Magiquell last October.

Paul scanned Tolliver's posts –
I'm not saying I hate 'mancers, but they did destroy Europe
– and marked him as a bright orange THREAT LEVEL: HIGH before breaking into Tolliver's bank histories to list recent purchases. He sorted through endless Sam's Club and SafeWay receipts, scanning for dangerous expenditures: tasers, guns, pepper sprays.

No weapon purchases. Nothing to elevate Braxton Tolliver to a red THREAT LEVEL: SEVERE.

By the time Paul snapped into an analysis of Eliza Tolliver, Braxton's wife, the lemonade glass was hitting the ground. He devoured her Internet history, her phone records, her email, compiling a comprehensive profile that would have made the FBI's best work look shoddy. He flashed his attention to the coach, to Savannah's parents, to Bennie's mother and the–

“Speed it up, Paul,” Valentine said. Aliyah had detonated a blazing ball into the net, which had bought her a couple of moments as people dove for cover. “I'm glad for a little action –
finally
– but I can't fight them all!”

Paul suppressed a flare of irritation.
Or you could just, you know, teleport us all out to safety
.

That was unfair, he knew: Valentine's magic ran according to the videogame rules she had devised, and Valentine would never play a game that allowed her to teleport away from a battle. She couldn't retreat any more than Paul could magically drop millions into a bank account – the universe only bent to their will because they believed in an alternative system, one with different unbending rules. Paul believed paperwork made the world safer; he couldn't conjure up money, or embezzle it.

Likewise, scrappy Valentine needed to face down her opponents one by one.

“Come on, Paul.” She bounced from foot to foot, anxious to mix it up. “Less planning, more punching.”

He finished profiling. “Ready for download.”

They touched fingertips. Their 'mancies intertwined; Paul shivered as his bureaucratic dossiers were converted into a game mod. As a videogamemancer, Valentine could gamify just about anything.

“Disable, don't destroy,” Paul reminded her. “Remember, we brought this to them.”

“
Arkham Knight
it is.”

A bat-winged cape fluttered down from Valentine's neck; she flicked her fingers out, covering them in leather gauntlets. She wasn't quite Batman – she'd kept her thick figure, still pudgy and womanly beneath the cowl – but cloaked in shadow, she looked deadlier than anything else on the Morehead soccer field.

She leapt out towards Braxton Tolliver, grabbing him by the shoulders and burying her knee in his gut, before launching off him to leap into Mrs Darby as she fumbled out a Magiquell hypodermic from her purse. Valentine bounced around the soccer field like a pinball, her batcape flapping behind her, each successful attack adding numbers to the combo meter above her head.

Paul winced. Valentine's takedown should have shattered Mr Sheltowee's spine, but the videogame rules turned him into a bruiseable videogame villain. He staggered to his feet, little birds circling above his head, to rush at Valentine with a club he'd pulled from nowhere.

“You're him,” a southern-accented voice said: Mrs Tolliver, cradling her husband's unconscious body. “You're that terrorist the President hates.”

“Please disperse – we'll contain the situa–”

The flux smashed in around him, crippling migraine pressure. The universe knew the difference between information he could have dug out with a couple of Freedom of Information requests, and the sneaky hacking he'd done to ferret out private citizens' records. This flux was the universe's fury at being violated, wanting to rebalance the magic with gouts of bad luck–

“You hurt my husband.” She was numb with shock.

“I'm sorry.” Paul held up his hand in a mixture of apology and forbiddance. “'Mancy is a delicate operation, and–”

The flux hammered in at him:
It's a delicate operation?
What could go wrong, pray tell? Let us turn your worst nightmares into reality
. Paul kept his mind blank; if he worried about Mrs Tolliver's mental health, the flux would find a way to drive her insane–

He reached into his breast pocket, pulling out the only thing that could safely disperse this flux:

The Contract With America.

The Contract was handkerchief-sized, made of rich vellum, inscribed in impossibly tiny yet calligraphically-perfect lettering. His tension eased as he ran his fingers along the Contract's sewn edges: he would never have dared put Morehead's population
near
'mancy without his generous volunteers to reduce the danger.

Paul snapped the Contract open, unfurling it to the size of a kite. On it were the names of 32,503 people who supported pro-'mancy legislation – supported it so thoroughly they'd signed the paperwork that allowed Paul to assign his bad luck to them.

Paul had learned the trick from an old enemy. Yet unlike Mr Payne, who'd buried his flux-dumping in the thousand paragraphs of a EULA agreement, Paul had open-sourced his legalese. He allowed people to refuse or accept the bad luck at will, ensuring no one person would ever be assigned fatal misfortune.

Even with all those safeguards, being caught signing a magical contract would get you a lifetime prison sentence. The fact that thousands risked imprisonment for Paul humbled him.

Those thousands allowed him to keep giving speeches despite SMASH's best efforts – he could enact great acts of 'mancy to keep bystanders safe whenever SMASH turned peaceable rallies into war zones.

Once again, Paul closed his eyes and offered thanks.

Then he poured the flux into the Contract, assigning tiny inconveniences. With this many people, he could chop this deadly flux-load into a thousand stubbed toes–

“You're trying to destroy Morehead – like those 'mancers destroyed Europe!”

Mrs Tolliver aimed a taser at him – but there was no record of a taser purchase anywhere in the Tollivers' finances. How could Paul have missed that on their threat-check?

Paul cursed himself: not everyone bought their weapons legally.

“Mrs Tolliver,” Paul said. “I'm not trying to destroy Morehead. I just… I just wanted to let my little girl play soccer.”

The flux struggled to escape the Contract. It didn't want to be broken down to be dispersed among strangers locking their keys inside their cars – it burned to wreck Paul's life personally–

“Your girl kicked flaming death at my daughter,” Mrs Tolliver murmured. In the background, Valentine kicked the guns out of three men's hands, oblivious to Mrs Tolliver's threat. “Your fat friend broke my husband's arm. The President's right – someone needs to stop you obsessed murderers–”

Years of training stopped Paul from imagining what could go wrong. Any fear would be a lightning rod for the flux to course down.

And he
did
fear destroying Morehead. All it would take was one sharp jab at the thin barriers that separated this world from the demon dimensions, and deadly buzzsects would come pouring through, the buzzsects that had devoured Germany, devoured France–

Devour Morehead!
the flux roared. It took all Paul's skill to blank his fears.

A gun cocked.

“Mrs Tolliver.” Imani evinced more compassion than you could reasonably expect from a woman aiming a gun at someone's chest. “I brought you donuts. We're not here to hurt you.”

“
Then why did you hurt my husband?
”

Paul wished he had a better answer than
Because your husband said mean things about 'mancers
.

Who was he, to profile people?

“Because, Lizzie,” Imani said calmly, “he would have shot Paul with his stun gun.”

Oh. Right
, Paul thought.

“I know things look bad, Lizzie,” Imani continued, emphasizing Mrs Tolliver's first name. “But believe me: things will get worse if you fire that weapon. Give Paul a moment to clean up the flux, and we will leave. We will leave and never come back.”

Mrs Tolliver slowly raised the stun gun.

Imani chewed her lip, trying to work up the gumption to pull the trigger. Robert had trained her personally, giving her paramilitary lessons since they'd gone on the run from the government. She could punch tight clusters of shots through any paper target.

Mrs Tolliver endangered everyone here – yet that was because she'd bought into the news' anti-'mancer propaganda. Imani and Mrs Tolliver had been exchanging donut recipes a few minutes ago; switching from that to inflicting a sucking chest wound was a transformation Imani could not quite complete.

Most days, Paul would have taken pride in her hesitation.

“A broach is imminent, Mrs Tolliver.” Her sudden formality was not lost upon Mrs Tolliver, nor was her finger tightening on the trigger. “If you don't stop, I'll have to fire. Please.” Her voice hitched. “Do
not
make me.”

Mrs Tolliver's lips moved as she tried to tally up the facts. Her husband laid next to her – unconscious, not dead. Imani could have shot her.

Then the soccer coach's limp body flew past Mrs Tolliver as Valentine kicked him into a Chevy truck.

“
No more tricks!
” Mrs Tolliver said, and fired.

Paul felt a sickly squirm of flux. His? No:

Aliyah's.

As Paul watched in horror, the taser's barbs embedded themselves into the Contract's fragile paper, the electricity triggering prematurely to disintegrate this complex magical structure into a maelstrom of loose 'mancy–

Creating a sharp jab at those vital barriers that separated Morehead from the hellish otherworlds.

“
No!
” Paul cried.

As he was flung away, Paul heard that infernal buzzing. Swarms of buzzsects poured through a rift, each a color no human could comprehend, ready to gobble down the color of grass, the speed of light, the beat of time.

Paul fought to stay awake, knowing he was the only person within a hundred miles who could contain a broach.

The concussion hammered him into unconsciousness.