The Flux (16 page)

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.

“
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.”

“
N
ot 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?”

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.

T
hree 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 glass, 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.