Flex (30 page)

V
alentine was
proof of this new world; her ripped pigtail was still on. The crowd around them moved at an amble, no rush to get to safety. Nobody had stopped to listen to the news bulletins.

Valentine munched on a Ring Ding. “What the hell’d you do, Paul? You look like you’re in love.”

He was. He floated through a saner world. The magic he loved was no violation of the natural order – it was the natural order’s way of evolving. The ’mancy wasn’t a flaw in the contract but a hidden clause for bargaining.

His throat swelled shut when he tried to tell her. He hugged her instead.

“You, uh–” She stiffened under his arms, then patted his back awkwardly. “
Ho
-kay, you’ve had a big day. Stopped the big scheme with a flow of inspecto-mancy.”

She gave him a perfunctory squeeze, then stepped out as soon as was marginally polite. “One kiss and I’ll fry every neuron in your brain,” she told him.

“Aliyah.” He felt like he was tugging himself along by hidden strings, a mannequin he piloted by force of will.

“I’ve done
way
too much peyote to see this as normal,” Valentine sighed. “Can your blotter paper dispense LSD? Blink twice for ‘yes’.”

“No, I… I’ll explain later. Too big for words.”

“You need little-girl hugs. Let’s get you some.”

A
liyah was staying
at Kit’s apartment, which hadn’t made Kit too happy. He’d wanted Aliyah back in the burn ward but understood the dangers with Anathema on the loose. As such, he’d offered his home for precisely three days, after which it was time to get the girl professional medical treatment.

Yet the leftover hot cocoa cups piled in Kit’s sink, as well as the battered Connect Four set on the coffee table, told Paul Kit still relished playing the loving uncle.

“I see she suckered you,” Paul said, feeling life return to normal. Kit’s apartment was full of old magazines but never musty; he was an organized pack rat, and his couches were worn but eminently comfortable. The whole place had an elegant design Kit had settled on back when his wife had still been alive, and that hadn’t changed since the day she’d passed on.

“You gotta get that girl some help,” he groused without any real heat; it was almost like Paul had never revealed himself as a ’mancer to Kit, though he knew
that
fact hadn’t been rewritten. “I tried to play games with her.
Real
games. She asked if I had an iPad, then tuned into her Nintendo.”

“Her dad was in danger,” Valentine said, looking weirded out; if you’d never known Kit’s wife, Paul supposed there was an almost mausoleum-like atmosphere to the place. “She heard you coordinating efforts with the cops, hunting Anathema – that’s scary. So she takes her mind off by playing videogames.”

“I wouldn’t mind if it made her happy,” Kit shot back. “She looks miserable. I was afraid she’d slip through that screen.”

“Where is she now?” Paul asked.

“Sleeping.” Kit jerked his chin back to what had once been his wife’s bedroom. “Poor thing passed out when she heard the film festival was safe.”

It was an act of purest family to have Aliyah stay in that bedroom, Paul knew, because the fact that Kit’s wife had withered away in there made it a sacred space. It probably chased away a few ghosts to have a small girl in there.

“I might pass out myself,” Paul said. Valentine gave him a pained look –
Please don’t leave me alone with this crazy old guy
– but after all Paul had done, he felt he deserved a little selfishness.

“Hey.” Kit pushed his hat back on his head. “You… you called in those soda inspections, didn’t you? To stop her.”

Paul nodded wearily. Kit frowned.

“That was good ’mancy,” he finally allowed – not a judgment on Paul’s performance but weighing “good” against “evil.” “And if I knew – I
knew
– you could do it without the flux, then maybe. Maybe.”

It was an apology:
I’m sorry I have to turn you in
. Paul didn’t want to think about that. He’d skipped his flux load once, but there were plenty of things he wasn’t comfortable changing. Having the government work the way it should to save New York? He felt no guilt for that. But getting a rent-controlled apartment? Looking up someone’s voting record? That still felt like cheating… and the next time he ’manced, it’d come with a price tag.

Kit was right: his lifestyle put Aliyah in danger. Maybe SMASH was the right move. But all he wanted was to hug his daughter.

“It’s fine.” Paul squeezed past Kit to push open the door to Aliyah’s room. He heard Valentine trying to make conversation:

“So – where’s the donuts?”

“I don’t keep them at home,” Kit said, vaguely offended. “They’re fattening.”

Then Paul saw Aliyah.

She snored on a duvet-covered bed, a hand-knitted cover that had kept Kit’s wife warm during her final days. The Nintendo rested on her chest, burbling music. Kit had left the window open so a breeze could stir the musty air; the room was cramped with folding tables and cardboard trays of old bills, but there was just enough room to snuggle up on the bed next to her.

He shut the door. A spear point jabbed his spine.

“
Ssshhhh
,” Anathema said, her shark’s grin obscenely white.

“
H
ow did
you–”

“
Sshhhh
.” She wrenched him back, pulling him onto the tip of her spear; a pinprick of blood blossomed at the base of his spine, the promise of future wounds. “Tell the illusionmancer the girl needs something from the store.”

Paul lowered his voice, so as not to wake Aliyah. “What should she get?”

“You know them both better than I. Choose something plausible
he
doesn’t have, that
she
’ll have to go out for.” She poked, making it clear she could shove the spear through spine and stomach alike. “No tricks.”

Paul debated doing some subtle ’mancy – arranging the drinks down at the bodega to send a hidden message? – but if Paul could sense her ’mancy, she’d sense his.

He cracked the door.

“Valentine?” he whispered. She looked up eagerly, a dog chosen at the pound, already stifled in this old-fashioned home. “Could you get Aliyah some animal crackers? She could really use some.”

Valentine flung her purse over her shoulder, out the door like a shot.

That left Kit. Who was no match for Anathema.

Neither was Paul, for that matter.

“Lock it.” Paul did. Thankfully, Aliyah hadn’t woken; she was still curled on the bed. She’d always been a deep sleeper.

Anathema crouched on the windowsill. Why not? The room was small; she could stab Paul from anywhere.

She relaxed, a woman with total mastery of the situation. She wore tattered deerskins drawn with odd insignias; her hair was wild and matted. She nodded, giving Paul a grudging respect, a strange and shared sadness that such an entertaining game was about to end.

“You stopped me today.”

“Yes.”

“I felt your ’mancy in the park. It knits people together.”

“Thank you.”

“No. It’s like… watching bees covering everything in wax. Those people, they think meat comes from a store. They think bodies vanish into funeral homes. Your ’mancy distances people from truths. Real truths.”

“You know I disagree.”

“…Yes.”

Silence. Aliyah’s breathing. Anathema, studying him.

Paul wondered why she hadn’t killed him. One spear thrust, and the only person who could thwart her was gone.

Then he realized:
She’s lonely, too
. Lonely as Paul had been before he’d found Valentine, lonely as every ’mancer.

She wants to talk shop before she kills me
, he thought, amazed.

“You figured it out, didn’t you? That this…” She waved her hands at the sky. “…is the way the universe works. Show it a heart lacking fear, and everything realigns. You did that today.”

“Yes.” Paul should have stayed silent – but he wanted to talk to her, too. She was one of the few who wanted something so badly, she’d willed new rules into existence.

“I didn’t think you had that in you.” Was that a hint of admiration?

“I couldn’t have if you hadn’t… won. Everything died in the park. People should be… safe.”

“Safe is killing us all.” She hunched forward, as if sharing a magnificent secret. “You realize you’ve already lost, right?”

“Obviously. I can’t put a restraining order on your spear.”

She gave a grim chuckle. Aliyah began to stir. “The spear will fall, yes. But your birth was my true strike. The deaths? Were the feint. A distraction to slip through the killing thrust. You.
You
were my first knife to the heart. The first of many, rulemancer.”

Paul’s breath stopped in his throat. What had he done to further her plans? “I don’t–”

“I made you. Birthed your ’mancy.” She twirled her spear as quick as a magician’s trick, thumped him in the chest with the butt of it. “Why would I kill civilians with Flex? That’s stupid. You can kick a hive, but the bees will get you. All your SMASH, your army, your policemen… I was guaranteed to fall eventually. Wouldn’t waste my life for that.”

“Then why
start
?”

She reached out with every sinew, desperate to convince. “Because
we’re the rot
. This ability to concentrate on one thing – it’s unhealthy, Paul. It’s not good to bend the universe to our will. Do it wrong, and the universe breaks. Things leak through. You’ve seen them.”

The buzzsects
. “But that’s only if we–”

She waved him off. “Yes, yes, a pure heart can change the rules forever – but how many have that? I would raze cities to prove my love, and even I waver. No! The point is, the Internet creates ’mancers. People can craft their own reality, shutting out the facts that make them uncomfortable. They can spend hours, days online, knotting themselves around a single idea, eventually becoming a physics sink that destroys everything around them. More ’mancers are born every day.”

“So you’ll
kill
people to
stop
them?”

“No.” She grinned, and Paul felt her relishing this moment – a secret plan, carried for ages, a thing she’d been dying to share with someone who understood. “I’m accelerating the process. The world needs more ’mancers – hundreds. Thousands. I’ll show them a New York filled with magical wars, tears in reality – overloading the land until they
have
to face the problem.”

“You didn’t create any ’mancers.”

“You.” She poked him with her spear, a gesture of ownership. “You were born quickly. Others are gestating.”

Paul felt like he was arguing from the wrong angle. “You didn’t create me!”

“The fire. Your daughter. They forced you to retreat into your obsessions, squeezed magic from your dead soul. We both know no happy man becomes a ’mancer. So I crafted my spells. I figured out ways to let chaos create order, tailoring horrific deaths to make hundreds suffer. Every act of death and destruction I made will rob someone of something they loved. It will cause someone,
many
someones, to retreat into misery. Withdrawal. Obsession.
’Mancy
.”

She spoke the last three words as though they were an equation.

“…you did this to seed New York with ’mancers?”

“Yes.” She leaned in eagerly, the last secret revealed.

Her spear tip rose.

“…Daddy?” Aliyah asked, blinking owlishly.

“But you didn’t create me,” Paul replied, perplexed. “I found my power months
before
she was hurt.”

The spear tip quivered. She shook her head, the tiny rat bones in her dreadlocks rattling. “No. I made you. That’s – that’s how I planned it…”

Paul continued, feeling strangely guilty for puncturing a fellow ’mancer’s dreams. “I believed in bureaucracy for
years
. I’d created the Beast
weeks
before you made your Flex.”

“No – you unlocked your power in the flames–”

“Sorry, Anathema,” he said, guilt turning to satisfaction. “My ’mancy had nothing to do with the fire. It had nothing to do with
you
. You haven’t created a single ’mancer, Anathema. I’m just a coincidence.”

“
No!
I
felt
you in the fire! I
felt
new ’mancy! I felt creation when the building burned!”

“
Daddy!
” Aliyah flung herself off the bed to interpose herself between Anathema and her father.

“I was rescuing my daughter,” Paul said, straightening. “You’ve lost, Anathema! You had no long-term schemes. Your rituals were delusions. You’re a common mass murderer.”

“I’ll show you murder!” she cried. “
I’ll hack you to bits!
”

She thrust her spear past Aliyah, burying it in Paul’s good foot. Paul felt a nauseatingly familiar flow of pain up his leg. Two of his toes tumbled into his shoe’s tip.

Blood gushed onto the floor as Paul cried out.
Aliyah, I’m sorry you have to see your father gutted before you…

“I will cut your limbs off before I
let
you die…” Anathema said, drawing her spear back.

“Don’t look, Aliyah…”

But Aliyah was vibrating – some kind of seizure? Her Nintendo DS jittered on the bed. The hairs rose on Paul’s neck – a spell; Valentine must have returned to save him–

–but it wasn’t Valentine’s ‘mancy.

“
You – hurt – my – Daddy!
” Aliyah shrieked, her voice thrumming in several dimensions.

She levitated off the floor; Anathema’s spear shattered in her hands. Anathema pressed herself against the window, whimpering, a savage fearing the sun.

Aliyah reached into a pocket she had not possessed two seconds ago, pulled out a red-and-white Mario cap too big to fit into the pocket, and placed it on her head.

Flames burned on the cap. They raced down her body, engulfing her in fire.
No
! Paul thought, imagining sizzling flesh – but the flames did not touch her, merely limned her form.

A miniature sun blossomed between Aliyah’s palms. She toyed with it, a small girl palming a basketball, except that basketball was hot as a furnace.

Fire Mario
, Paul thought.

“
Burn
,” Aliyah said – and hurled the sun into Anathema’s face.

Anathema’s hair went up like a bonfire, her flesh melting, the room filled with the scent of burnt pork. She clawed at her face as she hurled herself out of the window.

“
I said burn!
” Aliyah shrieked. “
’Mancers burn! Bad people burn! All the bad things in the universe
burn
!
”

Aliyah flung fireball after fireball after Anathema. They impacted the walls in gouts of flames that devoured the wallpaper, raced up the ceiling. Anathema sizzled on the fire escape. The metal grate glowed like a barbecue, cooking the skin from Anathema’s bones. She tried to leap away, but Aliyah flung flames at her, caging her, the air wavering with heat…

“…mercy…” Anathema croaked, her melted face an eerie mirror of Aliyah’s. “No warrior should die… at the hands of a child…”

“The bad ’mancers,” Aliyah informed Anathema in a lofty tone, “
burn
.”

Anathema leapt off of the fire escape in a vain attempt to escape her death – but Aliyah intercepted her in midair with another fireball. Anathema burst apart in a blaze of pyrotechnics, plummeting in a fiery comet down to splatter in a burst of lava and blackened bones.

“Paul?” Kit thumped at the door. The room went up quickly, the air black smoke, the walls lost behind flames. “Paul!”

Aliyah was still on fire. Her tears were like burning gasoline.

“Come on, Aliyah.” Paul was afraid to touch her. “We have to get out of here.”

Aliyah just cried – and as she wept, the Nintendo DS next to her on the bed caught fire, the flame catching on the padded mattress, which went up instantly. She did not move to meet Paul; instead, she hugged herself and retreated deeper into the fire. A pyre of immolation.

The bad ’mancers burn
, Paul thought, and realized with horror what Aliyah intended to do.

What kind of world would drive a small girl to suicide
? Paul thought, despairing.

Then:
No
.
The girl does not understand the world
.

“Sweetie,” he said, his hair singeing into acrid smoke. “I know you think ’mancy is… is the worst thing possible. And bad things
can
come of it. But so can beautiful things. Magic reflects what’s in your heart.

“I talked to the universe tonight, sweetie. I asked it to do something magnificent for me, and… and it did. Just like it saved you when you should have died. ’Mancy isn’t a bad thing; it’s the proof that if you care enough about things,
the world listens
.

“Which means… it means ’mancers aren’t bad. They’re people. And people are good, and bad, and… you’re good. You’re my kid. You
have
to stick around, because the world has so much to hear from you. Please. Please, Aliyah.
Let it hear you
.”

The mattress smoke had filled the room, filling it with soot, an impenetrable blackness. Aliyah was in there. And he would crawl onto the bed if he had to, but…

He held out his arms.

“You’re lost in the maze, sweetie,” he told her. “It’s scary, but I will come find you. I will
always
find you…

“But you can’t stop looking for me.”

“
Daddy!
” She flung herself, flaming, into his arms.

Paul caught her. He did not burn.

He opened the door just before Kit chopped it down with a fire axe. “What happened?” he asked, huffing with panic. “What did–”

Then he saw Aliyah blazing in Paul’s arms, and slumped. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

It would have been easier if Paul had asked Kit for help; his “good” foot slipped in blood. He’d never realized how much of his balance was dependent on toes gripping the floor.
I’m a cripple now
, Paul thought bitterly, then heard his artificial foot whir.
Well, more of one
.

But nothing could have compelled him to abandon his daughter. The apartment complex went up with an absurd speed, as if eager to erase Anathema. Kit called 911, thumping on doors to rouse people to safety; by the time Paul struggled down the stairs, fighting streams of neighbors, the place was almost gone.

Aliyah, mercifully, had extinguished herself, just a small and sobbing burn victim.

Valentine rushed up, dropping a grocery bag full of animal crackers and Red Bull. “What happened? What–”

Then she saw Aliyah. Aliyah stopped crying for long enough to meet Valentine’s gaze – and Paul felt the residual energy flowing between them, a squirming reaction like two magnets passing each other.

“…oh,” Valentine said.

Aliyah cried like a girl who’d lost her soul.

Paul braced himself, searching for flux. He had to cleanse Aliyah of bad luck. Then he realized: her worst nightmare had come true. She was a ’mancer.

This first act of magic came prepaid.