The Flux (21 page)

Aliyah’s vivid imagination was why she’d become a videogamemancer at such a young age – while other children would have focused on beating the game, Aliyah had imagined worlds beyond what Mario had shown her. And her imagination had been Imani’s gift, showing Aliyah the power of story.

Long before she had lost herself in videogames, Aliyah had lost herself in her mother’s words.

And so as Imani told the story of Sam, and how Sam made all her animal friends in the winter, the falcons and weasels and raccoons, Aliyah shivered from imaginary cold. She giggled as the animals stole Sam’s provisions, then mouthed “yes” as Sam stole two dead deer from the local hunters. And she tensed up as Sam’s mother found her in the wilderness, having finally tracked down her runaway daughter after reading newspaper articles about the “wild girl of the wilderness.”

Then, instead of hauling her daughter back home, Sam’s mother decided to come live with Sam. She brought the family – Sam’s dad, her brothers and sisters – so Sam would have company in her lonely wilderness life.

Aliyah relaxed, sighing.

“That’s how much I love you, sweetie,” Imani said, closing the book. “No matter what you do, you’ll never be alone. Maybe I won’t understand why you do it, but I’ll always find you. And I’ll live with you. Wherever you are.”

Aliyah nodded once, content – then, as she considered what that meant, a look of betrayal flashed across her face.

She slapped the book out of her mother’s hands.

A crackle of ’mancy filled the air.

Payne stabbed a red button. Security guards bolted from their stations.

“You will
never
find my home!
”
Aliyah screamed, taking a step towards Imani as though she wanted to punch her, then clutched her fists to her chest. “We’re safe there! I finally have friends, and all you’d do is
kill us
! Kill us
all
!”

Imani looked as though she’d been gut-punched. “Aliyah, I want to–”

“You want me dead! You want Daddy dead! You and David – stupid, stupid David! Get out!
Get out
!”

A shimmer of ’mancy shorted out the fluorescent lights overhead – but the security guards burst in through the doors, distracting Imani. They acted like counsellors, telling her Aliyah was quite upset and it was several hours past her appointment, and it was time to leave.

Imani sagged in their arms, looking utterly defeated. She let them escort her off the premises, as the guards sympathized and told her that parents often upset the children with PTSD, it’s really the therapists who know how to handle it, and Imani got in the car and sat there stunned for a full five minutes before driving away in a daze.

Paul didn’t talk to her. He was too busy holding Aliyah, who sobbed into his shirt, wailing for a mother who she’d trusted for just a bit too long.

“
Y
ou almost got Daddy
killed
!”

Aliyah felt guilty as she dunked Rainbird into the cauldron of molten iron again, blistering flesh from bones. She didn’t like hurting people, even people like Rainbird – and she especially didn’t like hurting people who had nothing to do with why she was angry. Aliyah was still mad that Mommy had tricked her, using that stupid book to pretend Mommy was ready to protect her, when her stupid boyfriend had almost killed Daddy.

She’d believed Mommy. Even now, she wanted Mommy hugs so bad she ached for them, and every time she felt that stupid
stupid
need, she shoved Rainbird’s disintegrating body back into the lava.

Rainbird never minded. He always smiled as she boiled his eyeballs, dragged him along the burning catwalk, dunked him in the cauldron.

That smile made her madder. He smiled like they were friends, and they
weren’t
friends, she was just
learning
stuff from him, and so she pushed his head underneath the red-hot pig iron until his cheeks melted and his teeth turned black.

Rainbird’s smile held secrets, and she would beat him until the secrets fell out.

“Enough,” he burbled.

Aliyah pushed him down further. “You lied! You didn’t protect my
father
!”

“
Enough!
”

A volcano drove Aliyah back. She wore her Kratos skin, which should have protected her – it was from
God of War
, a Rated-M-For-Mature game Rainbird had let her play. Rainbird brought her all the most violent videogames – “So you can learn new magics,” he’d said – and Aliyah loved Kratos the most. Kratos killed everyone with his big curved daggers. He killed titans, he killed gods, he killed anyone. He never felt remorse.

He didn’t fear fire.

But Aliyah did. She hated that weakness. Whenever Rainbird shot flames at her, she clenched herself so as not to wet her pants.

“I cannot save a man from his bad impulses.” Rainbird’s flesh grew back as he pulled himself up onto a slotted catwalk. “I
had
him safe. We could have escaped. But he endangered himself. You know that.”

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 Creed
s, 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 person 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.