The Flux (10 page)

“
I
’m
bored
,” Aliyah said, kicking her heels against the old pharmacy counter.

“Sorry, kid,” Valentine said. “I played tag, and
Walking Dead
, and
Call of Duty
, and… without ’mancy, I’m fresh out of games.”

Aliyah whistled. “Mommy knows lots of games.”

Valentine bristled. “Yeah, well, that’s why I’m your aunt.”

Aliyah tensed. Valentine reached over and squeezed Aliyah’s foot, as close as Valentine ever came to apologizing.

“Look, you wanna go watch Paul work? There’s gonna be some crazy ’mancy going on soon.”

She tensed. “Really?”

“Well, Daddy-’mancy.”

“Oh.” Aliyah slumped. Paul quelled indignation at this quiet insult; Aliyah had never respected his magic. It was, he supposed, the way of all parents – children never seemed to respect their parents’ strengths – but he resisted an urge to explain that “Paying the rent” was a power greater than any
Grand Theft Auto
rampage.

But Aliyah had enough to feel guilty about. And the poor girl was in for a long day. By sunset, Paul thought, he hoped to have a lead on the King of New York.

Paul phoned up Lenny; the last thing he wanted was to spend the day loading and unloading equipment, only to find Lenny had dropped his end of the deal.

“Yo, ’mancer-hunter,” Lenny said on the third ring. “You ready to bust some bewitching bitches?”

“Can you keep it down?” Paul asked, remembering how Kit had gotten busted at Samaritan Mutual. “I’m not on the force. You’re not even supposed to talk to me.”

“Relax those britches, I’m on the snitches. Our grand ol’ boss David is up to his nostrils, chasing that paper trail to figure out who bought the Patziki garage. He’s
miles
from my department.”

That failed to reassure Paul in any meaningful way. “So you’ll call….”

“…the moment we hear from the King, Paul. I’ll get you timestamps and everything. I know you love precision. You wanna share your reasons, though?”

“Thanks, Lenny.”

Lenny’s voice overflowed with admiration. “You are the most secretive son-of-a–”

Paul hung up. Quaysean and K-Dash leapt up as Paul glanced at them; they were as bored as Aliyah.

“Just one more thing,” Paul said, double-checking his list, which contained each piece of equipment they used to brew Flex. The columns waited for Paul to record the proper information: when the equipment was hauled in, when they were first used, who brought them in.

Bureaucracy was like science: it only worked when you collected the correct data.

“You have the opal on properly?” Paul asked.

“Yes, Mr Tsabo.”

“All right. Haul in the desk.”

Aliyah perked up a bit as K-Dash and Quaysean brought in the new OfficeMax desk, then slumped again as Paul brought out a stopwatch – aside from a burner cell phone Paul had picked up at the mall, nothing digital was allowed on site – and clicked off an hour’s waiting time.

“What’s the stone, Daddy?” Aliyah stared at the silvery rock stuck to the cheap desk. “It’s pretty.”

“The opal? They shatter in the presence of ’mancy.”

Aliyah touched it, then jumped back. “It didn’t break!”

“That’s because you didn’t do ’mancy.” Her eyes narrowed mischievously. “And if you do ’mancy here, Ms Aliyah, I will break your butt. That opal is worth more than your Mommy’s car.”

Aliyah poked at it again, seeming relieved. “So I’m not magical.”

“Not until you do ’mancy,” Paul explained. “And even then, most opals aren’t that accurate. You have to target your ’mancy directly at the person wearing it before the opal breaks. Most people think opals are a safeguard against all ’mancy – but honestly, the ones I could get for the Task Force–”

“ – you’re not
on
the Task Force any more, Daddy! – ”

“–Yes I know, Aliyah, I was using the past tense there, and the ones I
could
get
back then
were government grade. We wore them, and had them placed all around our office, but there are all sorts of ways to cast ’mancy that don’t affect people directly.”

“Like Valentine changing the furniture in the garage?”

“Good answer, Aliyah. Yes. Those weren’t cast directly on anyone, so they didn’t crack the government-grade opals.

“But this,” Paul said, polishing the opal with a handkerchief, “is a very expensive opal. It shatters in the presence of any ’mancy, no matter how subtle. They have to ship it a special way, routing all the way around Europe so nothing breaks it. If anything magical happens, anything at all… This will break like a mirror.”

“You think the King is a ’mancer?”

“I think we need to rule that out.”

Paul waited a half an hour – long enough for the King to call in – and then opened up all the drawers, using the desk just like he’d use it to cast ’mancy. Nothing.

“Bring in the legal pads,” Paul said.

The rest of the day went like clockwork, which was to say not particularly interesting when you had to stare at it for hours straight. The legal pads were brought in, and opened up half an hour later. Then the Bic pens. Then the alembics. Then the silver knife.

“Nothing’s
happening
, Daddy,” Aliyah cried.

“That’s science for you. Sometimes things don’t happen for long periods.”

“But I’m
bored
.”

He chucked her on the chin. “It builds character.”

“
Ghod
,” Valentine huffed. “That is the daddiest thing you could say
ever
. Don’t listen to him, Aliyah, all boredom ever builds is naps.”

They brought in the sack of hematite, a $50,000 opal pinned to the burlap, put it on a shelf. Half an hour passed. Paul recorded the time. Paul ripped the sack open…

The opal shattered.

“Well,” Paul said, satisfied. “That’s progress.”

L
ater that night
, Paul spread out the paperwork on the desk in his bedroom. Sure enough, the King had called seven minutes after Paul had ripped open the hematite – just long enough to get to a pay phone. And the ’mancy surge had been small,
very
small; only years of tracking ’mancers had attuned him to this ’mancy.

Someone had tagged the hematite bags, and used them to trace Paul’s Flex operations.

Paul closed the bedroom curtains, ensuring privacy, then stacked K-Dash’s notes into piles. This was the tricky part. Somewhere between the time some underpaid worker dug this raw hematite from the earth and the time K-Dash bribed a guard named Annabelle Leckie down at a plant in Long Island to look the other way, a ’mancer had gotten his hands on this.

Which was, supposedly, impossible. Mage-grade hematite was closely regulated, guarded by multiple levels of government anti-’mancer protections personally designed by SMASH agents. Yet someone had clearly infiltrated the supply chain to do some extremely subtle ’mancy.

Fortunately, subtle ’mancy was Paul’s specialty.

Paul spread his fingers across the receipts, then breathed out; his fingers lengthened and sank deep into the papers, disappearing into a fathomless sea of recordkeeping. The vouchers riffled apart as his fingertips probed through receipt after receipt, extending with a crackle of bone, pushing deep like questing tree roots.

He infiltrated the records, the endless storage web that tracked
this
bag of hematite from the pay stubs of the workers in Australia who had unearthed it, to the freight invoices where it was loaded onto the docks, to the duty taxes from the ship that’d hauled the hematite in to New York, to the truck mileage records when it had been delivered to the processing plant in Albany, to the sampling records taken at the hematite preparation facilities…

Paul reached out with fingers that stretched across continents, in a bureaucratic daze, tapping each invoice to check for that hollow ring of magic. He’d hunted ’mancers for years. ’Mancy had an unmistakable feel he could never quite put into words.

He tapped gently, because something was hunting
him
. But Paul didn’t think the King of New York expected Paul to follow him back home.

Paul frowned. He’d been reluctant to attribute the snitching to ’mancy – too slow. He loved magic, and had prepared a safe haven for other ’mancers. He didn’t want to believe he’d have to fight a fellow ’mancer, but Paul had been convinced to take the initiative.

He rippled his lengthened fingers; they split at the knuckles, budding into new finger-growths, each finger following its own trail through dusty files and backup computer tapes. Paul was dimly aware of his vine-like curtains of digits combing through the global networks, a probing entity growing through the information storehouses like fingernailed kudzu.

There. Something at the preparation facility glimmered with ’mancy – evanescent enough that Paul almost wrote it off as a hallucination.

The samples as the hematite was refined.

Paul wasn’t sure what that meant, but that was bureaucracy’s beauty: you never had to wonder for long. He pulled up the other sampling records, seeing how many had this ’mantic tinge, pressing out gently with his millions of fingertips so as to avoid the government-grade opals studded around the plant.

This was so
easy, Paul thought, grinning as if in a pleasant dream, his wrists weighed down by the miles of flesh he’d extruded into the paperwork. Most ’mancers were like Valentine – producing vulgar gouts of ’mancy that twisted the world into something violently different. The government wasn’t prepared for whisper-quiet intrusions that changed a few lines on a piece of paper.

He riffled through the records, checking them each in turn for that strange, familiar magical tinge. The plant’s records were saturated with this elevator-music ’mancy, so quiet you barely noticed its presence, an insidious thread worming its way through every crevice in the hematite processing plant.

This ’mancy – it had started almost three years ago. Right after Aliyah had killed Anathema. Yet this wasn’t Anathema’s ’mancy; her magic had made him sick. This ’mancy practically curled up in Paul’s fingers like a kitten, a comforting correctness…

He shook his head. The pleasant nature of this ’mancy distracted him. What had happened two years ago? What had been the inciting incident that had tainted this hematite?

Paul wrists were sunk deep into his desk. He wrapped his distorted fingers around the records, sinking deeper into the information. Many things had happened at the plant shortly after Paul had been appointed to the Task Force – the usual promotions, new hires, government regulations – but the most notable was when the plant had changed hands to a subsidiary of a larger mineral processing conglomeration.

Even
that
transaction bore a tinge of ’mancy.

He heard muffled explosions, followed by cheers; Valentine and Aliyah, playing some game with the volume turned up in Valentine’s apartment. His throat was dry. How long had he been investigating, anyway? Maybe he should stop…

No. He was close. He clenched his fingers, and his millions of fingertips split yet again, slithering into thousands of small businesses that tried to obfuscate an owner. That sense of comforting magic got closer as he sifted through, somehow familiar as he tracked this thread of ’mancy through shell corporation after shell corporation back to its owner…

Lawrence Payne.

Paul rocked back in his chair, stunned. He would have fallen off, were he not rooted to the desk by his infinitely long fingers. But his flesh tendrils knitted together to tell the full story – the shell corporations were owned by Samaritan Mutual, and Samaritan Mutual was owned by Lawrence Payne, and oh God the King of New York was Lawrence Payne.

And as he realized this, his distant fingers accidentally brushed across another ’mancy-node embedded in Samaritan Mutual. Something within the miles of paperwork flared to life, a buzzing electricity coursing up Paul’s dendritic fingers, tracing its way back to him.

Paul yanked away, trying to sever the connection. But bureaucracy was in his blood. And flesh, and bone. He was literally bound to the ’mancy. He could not unknot himself from this paperwork Gordian knot…

“
Valentine!
” he yelled. “
I’ve figured out who the King is! It’s Payne! It’s Lawrence Payne! Payne is the King of New York!
”

More explosions. Giggling. They couldn’t hear him. And speaking Lawrence’s name seemed to accelerate the process. The tracer-’mancy climbed up the knuckled nets of his hands, crawling spiders locking him into place.

He’d used Samaritan Mutual’s authority to gain access, and that access homed in on him.

Despite everything, Paul admired the magic’s subtlety: Payne was a master. And why not? He must have been doing ’mancy for decades. Why hadn’t Paul seen it before? The reliance on totems in Payne’s office: the filing cabinets, the antiquated mimeograph machine, the stock ticker.

They weren’t just old equipment; they were
loci
, the tools Payne used to summon his version of bureaucromancy.

Paul had hunted ’mancers for years. But Payne had used Samaritan Mutual to hunt ’mancers for
decades
.

And Paul realized why. It was so simple, why hadn’t he thought of this
before
…

The tracer-’mancy finally clambered up to his wrists, signaling its location in a burst of GPS coordinates. The curtains caught fire, a flicker at first, then rippling into flame.

“
Valentine!
” Paul screamed, rattling the desk. “
Valentine!
”

The curtains burned away, revealing the window – but instead of New York City’s skyline, Paul saw an endless portal of white-hot fire. It shone like the sun’s interior, a swirling flame vortex speckled with black sunspots…

…one of the spots grew larger.

Paul’s body prickled with a sheen of sweat; the room heated up like an oven. He stopped screaming. He’d vowed long ago, back when he first met Valentine and thought she’d murder him, that when he died he would do so with dignity.

Though Paul wasn’t sure he would die today.

The black spot swelled to take the form of a well-dressed man in a suit, wearing a burning-wood mask. He expanded to human size, then stepped out of the window, his footsteps setting fire to the now-burning bed, puffing on a cigar.

He paused, removing the cigar from the furnace of his mouth.

“Rainbird,” Paul nodded in Rainbird’s direction, as though Rainbird had shown up to a scheduled business meeting. The dancing flames on Rainbird’s oaken mask obscured his face – but he halted in mid-step, rattled by Paul’s calm.

“You’d given me a job,” Paul said. “You didn’t expect me to find you, did you? You planned to… mislead me.”

Rainbird flicked ashes off the end of his cigar, not quite acknowledging Paul. But nor did he incinerate Paul – an excellent start.

“And I wouldn’t have found you.” Paul directed Rainbird’s gaze down to his distorted hands, the green-glass shimmer of Paul’s bureaucromancy still glimmering across the desk. “Not without my own ’mancy.”

Rainbird glanced back through the portal, as if searching for fresher orders.

“You’re not killing ’mancers, are you?” Paul asked. “You’re
saving
them. I wanted to make a sanctuary for ’mancers. To protect them from a world that would hunt them down.

“The only thing I hadn’t considered,” he finished, “was that someone might have done it first.”

Rainbird sighed, exhaling black coal-smoke, shoulders slumping. He removed his mask; the sigils on his cheeks glowed like burning embers.

“I was assigned to remove the evidence of whoever had tracked Mr Payne’s business dealings back to him,” Rainbird said. “Normally, Mr Payne does not brook having his orders countermanded. Yet these are special circumstances...”

Rainbird rolled his cigar between his lips, pondering. The flames danced across the bed as he stood, unconcerned, in a raging bonfire, the curtains engulfed in fire, the room filling with smoke.

He was not immune to flame, Paul saw. Rainbird’s skin crinkled into burnt ash, consumed, but his flesh regrew around the embered sigils, endlessly renewing itself to stoke his beloved flames. Rainbird’s now-naked face was set in a grimace of exultant pain, his cheeks dripping fat as holes opened up to reveal blackened teeth, then healing over once more, pulling strength from the fire that consumed him.

Rainbird’s eyes, however, never burned. They were glazed in rapture.

Rainbird shook a caul of fire off his right hand, spattering flames across the carpet. The gesture looked threatening, until Paul realized he was extinguishing his fingers to reach into his pocket for a phone.

Thank God
, Paul thought.
Sanity
.

“
Step off, fucknuts!
” Valentine cried. Paul felt a surge of ’mancy as Valentine’s magic filled the room – then everything froze. The flames halted in mid-flicker. The smoke clouds turned solid, immobile. Rainbird’s hand paused, fingers wrapped around an ancient Bakelite black plastic phone from the 1950s, clublike, the kind that couldn’t make a call without being attached to the wall.

The entire world froze within a block of glass, like a picture.

Then the tableau shattered like a broken window. Cracks shivered through reality, crystal shards pulling free, jagged chunks of curtain and fiery bed and smoke tumbling down into an endless void, revealing an empty TV screen.

The world spun as Paul tumbled down into the television…