Flex (3 page)

All of which would be a welcome distraction from signing the divorce papers.

He picked them up. Imani had written on the envelope in her neat, calligraphic handwriting: “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Punctuated by a tiny, cracked heart.

He frowned.
She’d
cheated on
him
.
She’d
filed for divorce.

This separation was unbearable because they still loved each other. Love was plentiful, endlessly renewable. What wore thin, Paul had come to understand, was
like
. And Imani had never understood why the illustromancer’s death had bothered Paul, never understood why Paul didn’t take the promotions offered him at the NYPD, never understood why anything felt
wrong
to Paul. “Why can’t you accept the world for what it is?” she’d cried.

Because he’d seen what the world could be. And he’d shot the woman who’d shown him.

Paul couldn’t explain that, not to himself, not to anyone, so he’d buried himself at work. Exasperated, Imani had fled to another man, Paul’s opposite: ambitious, a member of the mayor’s cabinet, muscular and passionate. Reality fit David Giabatta as tightly as David’s custom-tailored suit.

That was the trick, wasn’t it? Reality. It felt wrong without ’mancy. It had always felt wrong.

He stumbled into his bedroom. As he bent to sign the divorce papers, they flowered open in a spontaneous generation of ’mancy, unfolding into a thousand different pieces of paperwork that would also occur as a result of this action: Imani’s name change form, the removal of his name from their mortgage, her separate cable bills.

It seemed cruel at first, all these reminders of things they used to do together… and then Paul realized the forms were trying to reassure him in the only language they knew how:

There will still be a future
.

His ’mancy, this love, was illegal. If anyone at work unlocked the door to Paul’s office, they’d find the evidence for the military to press-gang him into the Unimancy squad. They’d brain-burn him, take his daughter away. Because ’mancy was evil, it had annihilated Europe, it was the ultimate crime.

But he loved magic. And here was proof it loved him back.

“I’m a bureaucromancer,” he whispered. He’d never said that out loud before. Yet as he spoke the words, he felt their correctness; after years of numbness, he’d found his way back to beauty. His daughter, his magic, all this inexplicable joy knitting together into one seamless whole.

That’s when the gas main blew up in the apartment below him, and Paul’s world caught fire.

A
liyah was screaming
.

Paul shoved the dresser away with both hands. Something had blown it across the room, knocking him down and landing on him. The hardwood floor’s polished surface had buckled into splintered hillocks, with blue-white flames jetting up between them.

“
Baby, stay calm!
” he said. “
Daddy’s coming to get you
!”

But what could he do? The boxes he’d packed his books in were ablaze, the wallpaper blackening. This place was going up fast, so what was his best bet? He’d never been a fireman. Hell, scrawny as he was, he
couldn’t
have been; he’d only passed the NYPD physicals thanks to sheer tenacity, running wind sprints until his lungs burned.

“
Sweetie! Are you okay
?
Are you hurt?
”

“
I can’t see, Daddy! I can’t see!
”

Paul lurched towards the living room, then stumbled back; his body rejected the act of walking into those flames before his conscious mind could intervene. His hair crinkled, singeing from the heat, his temples blistered from just poking his head in. The doorway smoked, a billowing blackness shot through with orange flame.

What the hell had happened?
Why weren’t the sprinklers kicking in?
Below him, he heard a man and a woman shrieking, dying slowly.

At least Aliyah was uninjured.

Or in so much shock she didn’t realize how burnt she was.

He had to get her out of here.

But how? Paul could see shards of his La-Z-Boy embedded in the ceiling. Ragged bits of burning rug fluttered upwards, carried aloft by air rushing in through the gaps created by the explosion. The black smoke roiled, shimmering – was that gas? Aliyah’s Dora the Explorer DVDs had been blown across the room, Dora’s face chewed by ashen blackness.

“
Crawl to the fire escape, baby!
” Each breath was like inhaling a carton of cigarettes. “
Scream! Get someone’s attention!
”

She didn’t reply.

The smart bet would be to creep out the fire escape of his own bedroom, on the tenement’s back side. There was no way he could make it through that conflagration. Just abandon your child to her burning bedroom and hope the firemen would get there.

No. He had to take the chance.

Paul crouched down, hunting for cooler, breathable air, and looked for patterns in the roiling smoke and flames. He needed to find a rhythm to the burning, some safe pathway he might travel to Aliyah. Pyromancers were the first known ’mancers – scarred cavemen with melted cheeks, brutes who set forests ablaze to watch how the flames danced through the trees.

He was a bureaucromancer, for Christ’s sake. What the hell could he do to an inferno?

Paul thought of the Beast in his office. Bureaucracy never did anything in haste. The flames rushed in, devouring, consuming. What form could deal with that?

As if by answer, the charred remains of his divorce paperwork fluttered down neatly into his palms.

It wasn’t about forms, he realized. Ancient man had cut throats, making sacrifices to fill their cities with potency – fuelling the nameless powers that watched over them. Bureaucracy was a slower, safer process: surrendering a morning to the DMV, devoting your brainpower to complete your taxes. But the goal remained the same: take
these
actions to donate your life’s force to the collective might, do these
other
actions to bleed that energy back.

There was raw power in the paper. He just had to unlock it.

Paul leaned against the wall, his world spinning; hot ashes blistered his lips, flames devoured the oxygen. The divorce lawyer had filled out most of the paperwork – all that was left was a space for his signature – but Paul pressed his divorce papers against the smoking wall and began to annotate.

He scrawled in new boxes, added new fields. And as he did, the paper extended underneath his flattened palm, unfolding like a kite to become the size of a newspaper, and then wallpaper, and then something even larger, a patchwork mural of stapled forms. Paul scribbled new checkboxes in the corners, and his ragged block printing condensed into crisp 8-point Times New Roman. He corralled the words into different boxes, which cloned themselves into different shades – puce copies, canary yellow copies, smudged gray Xerox.

He endlessly repeated the same words:
Request for refile. Extension. More information is needed
.

“
Aliyah!
” he gurgled, wringing the last good air from his lungs.

No answer.

Right
, he thought, and did the one thing that activated every act of bureaucratic magic:

He signed his name.

The paperwork peeled away from the wall, a flock of origami cranes flinging themselves towards the fire. They wrapped paper wings around the flame in loving, suicidal embraces before crumpling into charcoal husks. But a storm of further correspondence rocketed through the doorway, etching Paul’s skin with paper cuts as a hail of forms hurtled towards the blaze, driving it back, clearing a thin pathway towards Aliyah’s bedroom.

Bureaucracy did not move quickly. But it
could
delay the inevitable.

Despite everything, Paul laughed, a gleeful howl, because he’d finally done what the illustromancer had done – raised something magical from a mundane world, then used this glory to beat back horrors. It felt insanely good,
literally
insanely good, that rush of shoving backwards off the bridge and trusting the bungee cord to catch you.

Paul crawled down the path underneath a canopy of black smoke, his good foot blistering, his artificial leg sparking with jittering electricity. He’d never done ’mancy this intense; until now, he’d just swiped the phone numbers of aging Hollywood starlets from old Rolodexes. He tried to ride that surge of triumph – but instead, he felt like he’d been shoved into a room full of balloons, the swelling, ear-popping pressure before the storm.

The flux
, he thought, panicked. You could bend reality only so much before it bent back. Experienced ’mancers could juggle their karmic debts for weeks, but that was a training Paul didn’t have…

Get to your daughter now
, he thought.
Pay it off later
.

Aliyah’s room scrubbed his eyes with cinders, sucked the clean air from his lungs. He dropped to the floor, sucking in the scant remnants of oxygen trapped in her pink shag rug, feeling for Aliyah. He patted the bedspread, making his way towards the window…

…and touched her bare arm.

He had a moment – a moment he would remember for the rest of his life – where he realized her arm was moving up and down in time with her lungs. She was breathing, raggedly, with great effort. Aliyah had passed out from the smoke before she’d figured out how to undo the latches on this new window.

She was alive.

Then the flux hit.

“
No!
” Paul screamed as the universe flexed back, pouring all the fire his paperwork had consumed into his daughter. Aliyah’s tangled hair burst into a bonfire; her skin peeling, she roasted so badly that even unconscious, she began screaming. Paul kicked open the window, hauled her out to the night air, yelled to the paramedics below
Please, save my daughter
.

Which they did.

Most of her, anyway.

B
ureaucracy had burned Aliyah
. Now bureaucracy saved her.

–Paul’s lungs were shriveled like wet cotton balls from the smoke damage; the ER technicians face-fucked him with a breathing tube, strapping him down to irrigate the soot from his larynx with squirts of cold water. He heard Aliyah wheezing next to him, the paramedics saying this girl’s lungs were badly burnt, maybe too burnt to survive–

–they kept her sedated. They planed off Aliyah’s dead skin until they hit bleeding, living flesh. They changed her tubes, sucking pus from her lungs. Aliyah shook her head as if to deny this was happening, gargling like she was drowning–

But through this body-ripping cruelty, Paul felt bureaucracy guiding the hands of the medics. Her bandages, peeled off every eight hours, the task checked off by nurses and verified by supervisors. Aliyah’s allergies to antibiotics, dutifully drawn from medical files and posted by her bed. Her blood, carried away in vials, broken down into clean numbers.

Though the nurses sagged with exhaustion, the actions that kept Aliyah’s heart beating were converted into simple steps.

Paul loved the regularity of the hospital and hated his love of it.

His devotion to bureaucracy had stolen time from Aliyah. He’d stayed late at the office for months now to avoid fights with Imani, silently mastering Samaritan Mutual’s baroque paperwork systems.

Why hadn’t he spent that time with Aliyah? Why hadn’t he quit his job to cuddle her in his arms, appreciate the miracle of the rise and fall of her tiny chest?

Why had he burned her?

My ’mancy saved her
, he reminded himself. Aliyah had been lucky, the doctors had told him and Imani over and over, to have survived the smoke for as long as she had. She would have suffocated if Paul hadn’t gotten there when he did. Paul remembered the exhilaration of files hurtling over his shoulders in an administrative hailstorm, of commanding burning wood to step aside so he could rescue his daughter…

–
Aliyah’s skin crisping beneath his fingertips, the flames taking revenge
–

“I saved you,” he muttered. “I
saved
you.”

Paul tried to memorize what was left of Aliyah’s beautiful face. Aliyah’s remaining skin pulled tight into new formations as the burns puckered; the doctors shoved splints into her mouth to ensure her shrinking cheeks didn’t tug her lips shut. Her old smile disappeared, lost in scars.

Maybe he’d saved her from death, but… he’d done that. It had been an accident, but apologies didn’t heal her blisters.

And still, she might die.

Paul paced the burn ward. It was a hallway-sized terrarium, a jungled warmth designed to keep heat trapped inside skinless patients. They kept the lights dimmed to shield the children’s eyes, cloaking Aliyah’s bed in a funereal dusk.

You couldn’t look your own child’s death in the eye, he discovered. Exhausted, he fluttered between desperate hope that Aliyah would make it and bracing himself in case she didn’t…

Aliyah groaned, shifting beneath disposable cotton pads.

They’re late with her painkillers again,
he thought.
You know why, don’t you? The nurse’s charts are too complex, their schedules strained. You could optimize their night shifts, cull their unnecessary paperwork–

His hand paused as it reached for the nurse’s button. Paul couldn’t heal his daughter. He could imagine no document that would regraft her skin.

But what use was all this new power if he couldn’t use it to help someone?

Paul felt the hospital vibrating around him, a strained web of bureaucracy aching for solutions. He reached out, sick with guilt over what he’d done, desperate for escape.

The bureaucracy reached back.

The schedules of every nurse poured into his brain, their hourly wages and the department’s budget – comforting, beautiful numbers, a puzzle of people.

The schedules melted at his touch, eager to be reshaped by compassionate hands. He sank into this unearthly joy, layering vacation requests over union rules. Aliyah twitched, her sedatives wearing off. Paul smiled: under his loving watch, every child would be soothed on schedule.

This would be a place of healing, a magic to counteract the damage he’d done.

And when he’d settled upon the proper configuration, Paul searched Aliyah’s bedside for a form. Energy hummed in his fingertips; he had to sign something to enact this magic. His breakfast menu would do. As he reached out, fingers trembling from the painkillers for his own burns, the bold lists of “egg-white omelet” and “orange juice” shrank to tiny ribbons of overlapping schedules – a paradise of the best nurses, working according to their circadian rhythms–

It felt
so good
, doing this, so natural, like kicking off too-tight shoes at the end of a long business day.

Paul signed. The schedules contracted. The orderlies frowned, sensing next week’s plans had changed…

…Flux squeezed his temples.

A nurse headed for Aliyah, a fresh bag of Fentanyl in his hands. The ward’s efficiency was improving already. But the laws of physics jostled close, demanding restitution: Paul had fixed things, and now something had to go wrong.

Cold reality flooded in. Had he been doing ’mancy in a children’s ward? Next to
Aliyah
? He’d chased enough ’mancers to know what flux blowback did – hell, he’d hunted most of them down only because their ’mancy rebounded. He had to get out before anyone got hurt–

The children–

The flux leapt from his body, darting into the janitor’s closet. Paul lurched forward, unsteady on his artificial leg – too late. There was a gurgle, a hiss, then a choked shriek as one of the orderlies stumbled out, wreathed in green smoke, blisters bubbling on his lips. A bleach bottle tumbled from the orderly’s hands as Paul’s eyes watered, the children’s ward filling with the hot scent of chlorine gas…

H
e must not sign a form
.

Paul tended to Aliyah: he ensured that her saline bags never went dry, her dead tissue was debrided twice a day, her sleeping form was flipped every four hours to keep clots from forming. He brought every change in Aliyah’s symptoms to the doctors so nothing would go overlooked.

Aliyah’s charts offered to grade the doctors’ performances. He didn’t dare accept their help.

No one blamed him for the orderly’s mistake. They called it an accident: a clogged drain full of ammonia that had reacted with a bucketful of discarded mop bleach. A freak event that had created a cloud of deadly poison and sickened eight kids.

Only Paul knew how close he’d come to killing children.

He’d been trying to
help
. But he’d flipped competencies: once a master of red tape, now a fumbling ’mancer. Worse, the world wanted magic. The letters fidgeted under his gaze as he glanced at insurance forms, eager to act at his behest – and yes, the burn ward ran more efficiently, but he remembered the children coughing as the nurses clapped oxygen masks over them and he
must not let that out
–

If he focused on Aliyah, he could do no ’mancy. He’d hurt her too much already. But magic, he discovered, now squirmed effortlessly out of his daydreams…

Imani sat next to him.

She frowned, looking him up and down. Paul felt suddenly shabby – his suit, once crisp, was stained brown with sweat. Whereas Imani, stylish as always, wore a long tan coat with seven onyx-black buttons, splitting at mid-calf to reveal a black skirt. It looked both businesslike and regal, which suited her – an Egyptian princess’s stiff bearing.

Imani reached out to place her palm against her daughter’s ankle, a perfunctory but firm touch, enough to let Aliyah know she was here. Then she brushed a greasy lock of hair away from Paul’s forehead.

He froze at her touch, as always. There was something so transcendently beautiful about her that he’d always believed she might vanish with the dawn.

“You stink, Paul.” Her voice was blandly factual. “Have you been home since Aliyah got here?”

He smiled ruefully.

“I haven’t had a home since the fire.”

She sighed. “Don’t tell me Samaritan Mutual is refusing you replacement housing…”

“No, Kit found me a place.” His boss and best friend Kit had pressured Samaritan Mutual’s notoriously stingy claims department until they had grudgingly checked Paul into a no-tell motel. “It’s just… easier to sleep here.”

Imani’s face went slack; she picked out appropriate expressions for every occasion but had never quite mastered polite regret.

“Paul.” She placed her palm against his ankle in what she’d meant to be a caring gesture, but her hands touched cold metal. She flinched back, wiping her fingers on the hem of her dress.

“You’d better learn to quash that reaction,” Paul snapped.

She blushed. “It’s just – just still a surprise, that’s all.”

He jerked his chin towards Aliyah’s bandaged face. “That’s what
they’ll
say.” People always winced when his pants leg fell open to reveal his black carbon shin… then their faces softened into sickening pity. Bad enough enduring that sympathy with a deformity you could hide under a pair of slacks – but a face?

You saved her
, he told himself, for the thousandth time.
She’d be dead without you
. But scarred as she was, her future would be a hard, hard thing.

“Paul, look – you’ve been in lockdown mode for two weeks. That’s understandable. Kit tells me it’s a pretty standard response to trauma. But now she’s stabilized, you – you have to start helping her.”

“I’m doing everything I can to help.”

Except ’mancy. Not ’mancy.

She arched one perfectly plucked brow. She’d always seen through him. “Everything?”

“…yes.”

She tossed an envelope onto his lap. Paul recoiled –
the Beast!
– and it tumbled off, sailing underneath the bed. Imani sighed, slid one high-heeled foot underneath to retrieve it, then pressed the paper into his palm.

Paul squeezed his eyes shut:
if I don’t look at it, I can’t hurt her–

“Just tell me what it is,” he hissed.

“Oh, for Christ’s – they’re refusing her reconstructive surgery,” Imani said hotly.

Shocked, he looked. The clauses twitched under his fingertips, shamed: Samaritan rejected a perfectly good claim because the treatment would cost half a million dollars, and the surgery wasn’t “necessary to life-sustaining functions.”

The clauses wriggled invitingly:
But we could
make
them fund it
…

He shoved the thought aside, smelling chlorine. “How did you get this?”

“While you’ve been bathing Aliyah in pity,
I’ve
been bombarding Samaritan with requests,” she shot back. “With Kit’s help, I’ve got four world-class plastic surgeons willing to testify this technique is the only way to repair Aliyah’s features. Half a million dollars. Yet your employers think ‘a face’ is an
unnecessary expenditure
. And the man who Kit tells me is the best in all of Samaritan Mutual at pushing claims forms through? The man every cop on the NYPD came to when a bureaucratic obstruction needed to vanish?
That
man has been treating every piece of paperwork like it’s a rattlesnake.”

Paul imagined how he’d force a claim through Samaritan Mutual’s layers of tight-pursed bureaucrats – and as he did, he felt the universe Flex invitingly...

“No,” he muttered, quashing the urge.

“
No?
”

“No, no, I mean, of course I’ll–”

“I tried to do the right thing when you lost your foot, Paul. I played the good wife, dispensing sympathy. I thought you’d come
back
to me. But you didn’t. You
gave up
.”

“I’m sorry – it’s not your–”

“I won’t let you give up on Aliyah. You work for an
insurance agency
.
Her
insurance agency. And by God, you’ll pull every string or I’ll fight you for sole custody.”

You want her to be safe, yet you’re asking me to use magic I don’t know how to control!

“That’s not fair – you don’t–”

“I don’t care, Paul,” Imani snapped, exhausted. Then her face softened; half the reason their marriage had chugged along for as long as it did was they could never stay mad at each other.

She leaned in. “…is it the ’mancy, Paul?”

Paul stiffened.

“I know that…” Imani wrung her hands. “…that killing that ’mancer broke something inside you. And your apartment must have been ablaze with magic – if you saw things in the fire, it’s okay to talk. I’ve asked Kit, he says he can get Samaritan Mutual to pay for PTSD treatment–”

If she knew I was a ’mancer, I’d be locked up in the Refactor
, Paul realized
. It must be something else…

Paul shook his head, stupefied by the facts. “…They think a ’mancer was responsible for the fire?”

“Someone’s dosing people with fatal levels of Flex and setting them loose. We were lucky Aliyah survived the attack – Kit thinks it may be a terrorist ’mancer at work. But… you’ve tracked down ’mancers. For Samaritan. So, you know how they think. Is that…” Imani swallowed. “Is that why Samaritan is refusing Aliyah’s treatments, Paul? Acts of God and magic?”

That was the line of most insurance companies, who loathed ’mancers. Insurance companies profited by making bets on nice, predictable averages; magic’s unpredictability bent their bell curves in half.

Oh, you could get insurance against magic, but that was expensive, since no actuarial table could predict ’mancer strikes. And ’mancer claims were insanely variable; rebuilding a burnt house was a fixed cost, but ’mancers could turn apartment complexes into fried chicken.

So most folks opted for the cheaper “Acts of God and magic” coverage. Samaritan could deny any claim, no matter how expensive, if Paul or his boss Kit could ferret out evidence of ’mancy. That was Paul’s whole job, tracking down ’mancers to save Samaritan some dough.

“Magic doesn’t matter in health insurance claims.” Paul’s voice was taut with fury as he tried to comprehend what Imani had just told him. All of Aliyah’s pain had been part of some crazy asshole’s
plan
? Someone had almost killed his daughter
intentionally
?