Flex (11 page)

“
T
here is
no reason on earth you should meet my connection,” Valentine explained. “You’re
famous
, Paul. I mean, you’re an E-lister, below Kathy Griffin, but… you hunt ’mancers, and this is a Flex deal. If anyone recognizes you, I don’t have a lot of experience using my ’mancy to deflect
bullets
.”

Paul stood amidst the detritus of Valentine’s apartment, adjusting his New York Mets baseball cap. A coffee can of Flex now sat on the box that served for a nightstand, right next to the tub of ANAL LUBE. The contents of that coffee can were worth more than the apartment building.

“You don’t understand,” Paul put on his sunglasses. He’d applied a pair of artificial muttonchops to his cheeks. “I’m not Paul Tsabo. I’m your uncle Revenna – well, not your uncle by blood; your mother met me a long time ago in college, and I’ve been there for every one of your birthday parties. I got you your first copy of Super Mario Paint, and you told me about your ’mancy when your powers first manifested, because…”

Valentine’s nervousness showed in today’s outfit. Instead of her normal cleavage-baring extravaganzas, today she wore a white Che Guevara T-shirt and purple jacket over a pair of clean blue jeans. For Valentine, that was practically dressed for an interview.

“Jesus, Paul,” she said, cutting him off. “When you got a fake ID, did you memorize the license number?”

“I
still
have it memorized.”

“Yeah, well… you look different enough from a distance. The Destiny 2 shirt is a nice touch. And maybe I’d go with your overly elaborate backstory, even though if I’d had a relative that helpful, I never would’ve blossomed.” She tapped his artificial right ankle with her foot. “But that?”

“That’s not… nobody notices. I’m not going to jog…”

“Face it, Paul – scrawny, missing a foot, big old limp? You could dress up in a gorilla suit and I’d still pick you out. You can’t come along.”

Paul crossed his arms. “I need to see what we’re into.”

“It’s not ‘us’, Paul, it’s
me
. I’m the person who’s supposed to
make
it for him. The less he knows about you, the better.”

“Valentine DiGriz.” Calling her full name got her attention; a tiny bit of parent magic. “I have to follow every lead. If he deals in Flex, maybe he knows about… Anathema.”

Paul hated to say the name, because it meant failure. While he’d spent the weekend brewing glorious drugs with Valentine, there’d been another killing – and sure enough, thirty-two models had been crushed at a beauty contest by a set of unsecured overhead lights.

“He doesn’t,” she said, exhausted. “If he had real Flex in the pipeline, he wouldn’t be using
me
.”

“Even so. It’s a lead. And then there’s…” He pushed back his cap, hating to have to say this. “I want to make sure my magic is going to the right place. I’m not a… a drug dealer. That Flex is clear because I didn’t want anyone else
hurt
. If we just hand the Flex to some other maniac, then…”

She rubbed her eyebrow piercing. “Don’t fucking
guilt
me, Paul. I had someone I needed a favor from.”

“Do you trust them?”

“Oh, yes, Paul. We all know drug dealers run kitten farms where they raise sunshine and love.”

“Some dealers sell to their friends.”

“Didn’t you used to be a cop? You know Flex doesn’t attract pot dealers – or, at least, not for long. This guy who needs it, he’s… he’s got something to prove. That’s why he wants this. Flex is a name-maker.”

“So… He’s not going to sell to a guy who might set an apartment complex on fire?”

“Oh,
fuck you
, Paul!” She punted a cartridge across the room. “You come in here, begging for my expertise, then question me? It’s a drug dealer. He’s
not nice
. What he does with this stuff probably won’t make you happy.”

Paul crossed his arms. “Will it make
you
happy?”

She punched her thigh. “Get in the fucking closet, Paul.”

“What?”

“I said get in the
fucking closet
!” She outweighed him by a hundred pounds, and Paul had the distinct feeling she’d seen more fights than he had. The closet door swung open, revealing stark blackness. ‘Mancy rose from her fingertips, a cold electron flow.

“Hey, wait–” he protested. “I didn’t–”

“In.” She shoved him in and slammed the door.

His flesh peeled off. It was painless, like someone lifting a sticker off a sheet. Paul couldn’t see what lay underneath but felt his physical essence exposed – not bones, not muscle, but a mathematical equation that contained the expression of all his movements.

Some other skin slid down over him, fitting snugly over him. He reached for the doorknob and stepped out, limping as he always had – the same sore-filled pain, the same gait.

Valentine held up a marker-scrawled mirror so Paul could see his reflection:

He was a twenty-year old punk kid.

His arms, now exposed in a wifebeater shirt, were muscular and spiraled with tribal tattoos; he touched them experimentally. He could feel his own skin sliding underneath artificial layers.

Paul explored his new face with his fingers. His lips were lush and pouty; his fingers lingered on his new lip ring. His hair was dyed a spiky blonde, hidden beneath a black watch cap.

This new reflection offended him. He looked like an idiot who grunted more than he spoke, shrugging at everything he didn’t understand.

Then he realized: his leg. His leg was whole.

Hoping against hope, he reached down: he felt foamy meat underneath the jeans, like padding. He squeezed hard; there was no feeling, just a hard titanium core.

“Good enough.” Valentine made a flicking gesture with her thumb, pushing an imaginary button to accept the change. “I reskinned you. If anyone asks, you’re my new boyfriend tagging along to protect me. The disguise won’t last long, but it should get your dumb ass through this meeting. You’ll do nothing but listen – and if
that
doesn’t satisfy your curiosity we’re doing the right thing, I will take this coffee can of Flex and fucking walk. Are we clear?”

“Is this the kind of guy you
date
? This… dim-witted prettyboy?”

“Yeah, well,” she huffed, “
Clearly,
I don’t hang around men for their intellect.” She grabbed the coffee can full of Flex.

“You sure you want to hand all that to Gunza sight unseen?”

Valentine thought better of it, emptied a single crystal into a crumpled McDonald’s bag, leaving the bulk of the drugs behind. “Come on; let’s get this over with.”

As she shut the door behind them, Paul took one last glimpse at the ANAL LUBE can, beginning to understand just what Valentine liked to do with pretty, incoherent boys.

A
s Paul struggled
to limp after Valentine through the subway tunnels – she pushed ahead at a rapid clip, pointedly not looking back – he had to admit: he felt more alive than he had in years.

Samaritan Mutual had promised him an exciting career, a cross between a private detective and CSI, but what he actually did was spend his time sifting through wreckage for subtle clues, then testifying in court. It was tedium – and discovering he was
good
at tedium had encouraged him to settle into a numbing routine.

Now he was on the beat again, sneaking into a drug dealer’s lair.

He would quiz this dealer for potential magical connections, sure. He would ensure his Flex – yes,
his
Flex – got to the right place, sure. But it was also that he needed to witness the changes in the world he’d wrought.

He’d help Aliyah, of course. He’d stop Anathema. But he couldn’t deny the joy of rising to new challenges.

And there
were
challenges. Now that he had a coffee can full of guilt-free ’mancy, what the hell would he do with it? He could sell it to get money, he guessed… but he didn’t know who he’d sell it to, and in any case, the idea of becoming a drug dealer sickened him. He’d seen the harm done when idiots couldn’t handle the flux; inflicting that on innocents would make him no better than Anathema.

Maybe he could use the Flex to get lucky himself, stumbling across the right loophole to force Samaritan Mutual’s hand… but there was still the operation, the most critical part of the process.

The problem was,
he
didn’t need to get lucky; he needed Aliyah’s
surgeon
to be lucky.

He’d envisioned walking up to the doctor before the operation with a handful of the world’s most illegal drug, saying, “Here. Sniff this.” That plan didn’t end well. Nor did it work out well if the doctor decided that Aliyah was not his top priority and so instead decided to intuitively burn his gifted luck on scoring with some pretty nurse. And so Paul had spent most of the day plotting, angling for ways he could use his Flex to secretly dose an operating room and have them all focused on the most important thing of all: Aliyah.

Even Valentine’s rage could not daunt him. She sat next to him, playing a Game Boy, until she got up wordlessly at their stop. Paul read the newspapers over other people’s shoulders; he noted with a dim pride that the Buffalo earthquake had made the third page.
I did that
.

Still, he fretted every time a commuter bumped into him; the skin shifted around him, threatening to rub away. He restrained a maddening urge to itch his tattoos off.

The subway exit emerged in a cramped metropolitan area doing its best imitation of a suburb; rows of cheap, tiny houses with stamp-sized lawns. The locals had planted greenery in an attempt to liven up the place, but the wage slaves who lived here got home too late to mow the lawn and couldn’t afford hired help… so the nooks between the houses had wild thatches sticking out in areas no lawnmower could reach. Stray cats darted in and out everywhere.

Valentine tapped the McDonald’s bag against her leg, getting her bearings. Then she headed towards a white house with narrow, shuttered windows. The bay windows looked slit-eyed, suspicious.

Valentine knocked. The door cracked open, a reedy voice piping up from within. “Who is it?”

“Valentine.” She rattled the bag. “Got a delivery for Gunza.”

A whistle of doubt. “Has the placebomancer come through at last? And who’s with you?”

She sighed. “My boyfriend.”

“Wait.”

An exchange of voices from inside. Valentine danced from leg to leg nervously, like she had to go to the bathroom. Paul realized he’d been so caught up in mastering his own magic that he’d never asked why Valentine needed the Flex.

The door opened. Two young Hispanic kids, maybe fifteen, waved them inside. They wore striped brown shirts with popped collars, pink baseball caps, looking like extras from Jersey Shore. Paul noted the guns jammed underneath their shirts, though.

Paul froze when they patted down his calves, but the reskinning held up to their perfunctory frisk. Their message was clear:
You’re not actually a threat
.

The two guards escorted them upstairs to what had once been a grand bedroom, refashioned with a large desk, a safe, and a wide-screen television mounted on the wall. The TV blared out
Teen Mom
.

Behind the desk sat a young man with sapphire teeth.

“Valentine, baby!” Gunza got up from behind the desk, swaggering as he moved to hug Valentine, dressed in a black suit with a Chinese collar. He might have looked a little like Neo from the Matrix, except Gunza was toad-ugly. His pockmarked, mole-flecked skin could have been either a leathery suntan or a light Negroid complexion – but his smile inspired an instant dislike in Paul. It was a smile designed to intimidate, all bared gums and shocking jewels.

The sapphires looked like discolored rocks at the bottom of a dirty aquarium.

The two thugs closed the door behind them. Gunza cocked his head towards Paul.

“Who’s this?”

“My boyfriend.”

Gunza’s body language dismissed Paul instantly. “Hope you don’t place bets on this one.”

“I didn’t
bet
,” Valentine retorted. “Raphael bet on himself, with his money. I told him I wouldn’t help him win. But he entered anyway.”

Gunza spread his hands in oily sympathy. “Black opals galore at the tournament. You get anything worth a decent prize, you bet your ass they’re gonna scope for ’mancy. Even a Halo tournament. So you couldn’t help him, and your boy came in… what, 503rd out of 512 players?”

Valentine’s face fell. “I let him win when we played head-to-head.”

“You made him think he was badass. The badass was
you
.” He poked her in the breastbone, a gesture that both respected her power and dismissed it. Then he gestured to two cheap wooden seats, inviting them to sit down. He eased back into a leather chair as though it were a throne.

“I’m surprised to see you coming back with new boy here.” Gunza tapped his teeth in curiosity. “You hated those Flex factories we built you. I thought you stayed only cause Raphael would get the chop if you didn’t produce. Now you with fresh meat here, and still ready to brew?”

“I still don’t want Raph
dead
,” Valentine said, surprised.

“Won’t kill him. Not over ten large. But we’d sure mess up his hands. Make sure he never clutched a controller again.”

Gunza searched Valentine’s face for a reaction. She gave him nothing.

Gunza let out a hissing noise of derision, then turned to Paul. “Bitches, right? She’s in your bed, but she’s thinking about Raphael.”

Paul’s cheeks went flush with anger; Valentine had done this for love, to protect a boyfriend who clearly didn’t even care about her.

Paul feigned a shrug. “…She’s good in bed.”

Gunza brayed laughter, giving him a thumbs-up. “Not my style, backdoor man. But you get yours, friend.” He returned to Valentine. “Anyway, I’m twenty large into you. I set up Flex labs for you; you burned two, the third got raided. My family’s questioning my investment, so I was gonna send some birdies to your crib… Your timing’s good. What you got?”

“Enough.” She pushed the bag across the desk.

“This better be a hell of a Big Mac.”