Flex (20 page)

One hundred and twenty-eight racetrack watchers had been trampled when a desperate jockey, who’d never had a big win in a decade-long career, had been dosed with Flex. The state-mandated black opals installed at the entry to each stall had shattered, informing the racetrack owners of ’mancy – but by the time they realized the race had been rigged, the other fifteen horses in the race had panicked. Their muzzles foamed as if lions were chasing them, and they leapt in improbably high arcs to trample the spectators. A hundred and nineteen spectators were already dead, as were eight jockeys, as was the dosed jockey who crossed the finish line, saw the carnage behind him, then clutched his chest and died.

Paul looked over the records. Anathema had a knack for finding ignorant people with odd obsessions. She found friendless, isolated people – then fed them low-grade Flex and set them loose.

The targets. They seemed random, but… Paul sensed a pattern.

Also strange: the abundance of survivors. A gas main explosion that violent should have killed everyone in Paul’s apartment complex. Likewise, a plane had crashed into a crowded office, wounding hundreds with shrapnel but killing comparatively few. There had been an abundance of broken legs at the Aqueduct – but given the crowd of twelve thousand, a hundred and twenty-eight deaths was slim.

Anathema was injuring far more than she killed.

Was that terrorism? Paul didn’t think so. Anathema had made no demands. And as he brought up the FBI’s secret files on Anathema, he realized that even though the profilers couldn’t detect any clear pattern, he felt one.

She was
building
toward something.

Was his ’mancy trying to tell him something? Or was that his detective’s instinct dredging up some message from his subconscious?

Paul gorged himself on information until SMASH reports piled up in drifts around his feet, inhaling details on every one of Anathema’s Fluxsplosions – the nursing ward, the model runway, the cookie factory, the old-age hospital. He submerged himself in data, trying to figure out what linked all these attacks…

A
knock on his door
. The reports darted back into their folders like startled birds. Who the hell was interrupting him at
this
time of night?

What startled Paul was how bright it was outside. And how scratchy his face was. And how large the bag of donuts was that Kit was carrying.

“
Someone’s
worked all night.” Kit pushed a hot coffee into Paul’s hands. “What, two weeks of torture wasn’t enough to get you to take a day off?”

Paul tugged the sticky gauze pad off his left arm; it was soaked. He must have studied for hours.

“It’s Anathema.” He gulped the coffee gratefully, feeling its warm sweetness fill his stomach.

“What’d you find?” Kit leaned back against a leather-bound set of regulations, grinning. Paul had seen that admiring grin before, in Central Park, where Kit endlessly railbirded chess games. Kit loved watching an opponent doggedly play against a superior talent, losing again and again, refusing to quit until they’d learned
something
from the battle.

“She’s an anarchomancer,” Paul said.

Kit frowned. “How do you figure?”

Paul fanned the reports across his desk. “Everything she’s hitting – it’s some aspect that binds us together as a people. The cookie plant? Processed food. The nursing home? People that old die without hospitals. The horse racing? Gross spectacle. The Internet travel agency? The Internet, obvious. The plastic surgery patients and runway models? Helpless femininity. She’s hitting targets that are all…
civilizationy
.”

That wasn’t all, though. Anathema’s flux had tangled with his, like two dogs snarling at the end of leashes; her ’mancy opposed his bureaucracy. Anathema was tearing down the things he wanted to raise up…

Kit sucked in his cheeks. “That’s… pretty thin, Paul.”

“Do I question
your
hunches?”

Kit sighed. “…All right, bubeleh. When you get your reports in for the cops, you can peddle this ‘anarchomancer’ theory. Then you’ll have a nice talk with all those reporters who’ve been waiting ever so patiently for you. But you can’t keep pulling all-nighters. You’ve got a girlfriend to tend to.”

“…I do?”

“Not that you
told
me – hey, I guess you date someone a decade younger, you don’t want to mouth it about – but I have to say Imani was
not
thrilled by your new squeeze hanging around Aliyah–”

Paul made the time-out sign. “Wait, wait. Valentine?”

“The cute pudgy goth kid? With the manga turtle tattoo. And the eye patch.”

Bowser
, Paul almost corrected him – then realized that if Kit thought Valentine’s Super Mario tattoo was a manga turtle, that was for the best.

“No, no, no. Not my type. All my crushes are like Imani – thin, willowy, unattainable. I think I get off on being rejected.”

“I think you
don’t
get off unless it’s a challenge,” Kit riposted.

“Anyway, Valentine’s just a friend.”

“A
good
friend. She was there every night for Aliyah. That girl’s never had younger siblings – you can tell by the way her shoulders tense around kids – but… whenever Aliyah got upset, she’d talk about how brave you were, then walk her through another Mario level.” Kit scratched his temple. “You should tell Imani that you’re not dating Valentine. Aliyah’s calling her ‘Aunt Valentine.’ Your kids don’t call someone ‘Auntie’ unless there’s a long family history or short, hot sex.”

“
Kit!
” There was always something extra naughty about the old Jewish guy talking about fucking. “I don’t think of Valentine that way.”

Kit waggled bushy gray eyebrows. “Did you have
that
amputated, too?”

“Christ, Kit, she’s a
kid
. Show some respect.”

“Sorry.”

The silence made Paul feel like he’d somehow rebuked Valentine.

“She… she makes me feel like I can
do
things,” he clarified. “I mean, does she know my daughter? Hell, no. But she meets the kid once and suddenly they’re best friends. I like the way she follows her emotions.”

Kit nodded stiffly. Paul recognized the gesture. Kit often said the best way to get people to open up was not to judge… and Kit was conspicuously not judging.

“…and that’s good for you?”

“It’s different.” Paul picked his way through the minefield. “I mean, you know, Imani – if she met a handicapped kid, she’d be asking all sorts of questions like ‘What responsibilities will we be taking on here?’ Valentine just catapults herself into things. It’s… exciting.”

And it
was
, Paul realized. He’d just been kidnapped for two weeks, humiliated, near death. The army was sniffing after him. Gunza’s superiors were hunting him. He was hunting a terrorist.

Yet he’d never felt more alive.

“There’s a fire in your eyes now, kid,” Kit said. “The Paul I knew last month would never have charged in after a Flex dealer. And, you know, we’re gonna endure some management shakeout from that, but… it’s better than depressed, divorced Paul. Where’d you meet her?”

That was a little close for comfort.

“…support group.” Paul looked a little shamed. Kit, as planned, let him off the hook.

“Well, let’s toast to new friends.” He lifted his coffee cup. “Then I take you to my barber.”

“What? Why?”

“For a straight-razor shave before your press conference.”

“Oh, come
on
, Kit…”

“You will tell them how easily Anathema will be beaten once the heavy hitters weigh in. You will remind them Samaritan Mutual is not just an insurance company but an investigative agency, and that we know how to find ’mancers.”

“You want me to
showboat
?”

“I want you to bitch-slap Anathema on the front page of every paper. And do it before our bosses find out I called this press conference. I want you linked with us so they can’t fire you.”

“Should we really be taunting ’mancers?”

“She’s too smart for revenge. Our best profilers have called her out on national television. She hasn’t bitten.”

“But…”

“
But
we haven’t had two ’mancers active in New York since the 1950s,” Kit said. “LA? New Orleans? Those hellholes have always been ley lines of activity. New York? We’ve been clean for
decades
. This influx scares the hell out of us – we thought we were immune. So, play into that. Keep Mr Payne thinking it’d be bad PR to fire a popular figure… and nothing’s more popular than the mundane who kills ’mancers.”

Paul despaired. He’d been the poster boy for anti-magic hatred back after the illustromancer. Faking that smile had damn near killed him.

“Yet we may have actually learned a lesson from history. We’re not dithering like they did after World War II, when all the European refugees flooded in. SMASH is reorganizing after the assault on their headquarters, the mayor’s making speeches, and Samaritan is getting tasked with hunting.” Kit took a bite of a glazed donut, closing his eyes in satisfaction. “Every ’mancer in NYC will be dead or in the army before year’s end.”

“You want them all dead?”

“I want them Refactored.” Kit’s smile was vulpine, the bared teeth before the checkmate. “That way, they remember what they lost.”

As Kit took another donut from the bag, Paul wondered:
How long before Kit figures out the truth?

W
alking
into a home you had conjured out of paperwork was a thrill that only magic could provide.

Finding a good apartment in New York City normally took a month, but real estate agents couldn’t work Paul’s magic. And so it was that Paul had handed a set of keys to Valentine, along with a Visa gift card loaded with a couple thousand dollars from his savings, and said, “Set our home up with something nice.”

It
felt
magical, following his GPS to a new location. He was exhausted from his all-nighter, followed by a long press conference in which the reporters encouraged him to trash-talk, followed by a day-long meeting justifying his kidnapping to Mr Payne. He’d almost fallen asleep on Aliyah during his after-work visit.

Still, as Paul watched the GPS arrow approach this strange address, his hands shook with excitement; what would his new digs look like? He’d purposely not paid attention to the lease, trusting the Beast to find him something nice.

Plus, he’d left the décor to Valentine, a girl with crazy tastes. He’d told her to go nuts decorating, make the place her own. If the apartment was as crazy as her dresses, he might have to tone it down before he could settle in. He pictured his new living room as an explosion of Tim Burton set dressing, all bold colors and skewed angles. What art would she have bought? Would the sofa be one of those crazy ones you could barely sit on?

Imani had preferred staid furniture: frosted glass cabinets, stiff sofas. After years of enduring his wife’s ladder-back rocking chairs, the idea of lounging in a bean bag felt like fucking without a condom.

He quivered with potential. The old Paul never would have allowed the universe to choose a home for him.

And his place had a doorman. A doorman! A pleasant Hispanic man in a red coat, smiling wearily as he opened the brass door to welcome Paul in.

The lobby floor’s faded marble and faux-gold trim comforted him. Maybe nobody had the energy to scrub hard enough to eradicate the century’s worth of cigar smoke that had saturated the walls, but the locals kept the floors swept clean.

This would be so satisfying.

Valentine’s garish style might clash with the rent-controlled locals – what if he couldn’t live with all those bright colors? – but still, opening up that door was like tearing the gift wrap off a birthday present.

He walked in.

What he got:

• Bare kitchen countertops strewn with crumpled Burger King bags and more crumpled Red Bull cans.

• A stack of unassembled IKEA boxes piled in the corner.

• A wide living room, bare but for a black futon and a wide-screen TV balanced precariously on the futon’s box.

• Piles of videogames complete with clumps of cellophane where they’d been ripped open.

• Valentine sitting merrily on the futon, playing
Spyro the Dragon
.

She threw him a happy wave as he entered, not breaking eye contact with the TV. She whipped her head back and forth as she played; it seemed perplexingly hyperkinetic until Paul realized Valentine was compensating for her missing eye.

“Greetings, Herr Paulmeister!” she said cheerfully. “Please hold while I kill this boss monster.”

Paul stared at the wreckage of his new place. He should have paid attention to her apartment, not her dress.

Paul started putting trash into a garbage can. She’d at least bought one of those, even if there was nothing in it but the receipt for its purchase.

He wasn’t upset. While it would have been nice to come home to, well, a home, there was also a certain satisfaction in building your own space. Maybe Valentine didn’t care where the TV was… but Paul would screw in the mounting hardware, set up the surround sound. Which was in itself excitingly transgressive, since Imani disapproved of television and would never have allowed this monstrosity inside her house.

Paul felt a flabby greasiness; he was picking up a used condom. Valentine paused the game.

“Ooh.” She winced, plucking it from his fingers. “Sorry ’bout that. Wash your hands.”

“You’ve had this apartment for thirty-six hours!” Paul complained, squirting Purell onto his fingers.

“Been living in my car for two weeks.” She stuffed the moist condom into a Burger King bag. “I had a
lot
of pent-up energy.”

“You couldn’t just go home with someone?”

“Going home with a stranger? That shit’s dangerous. And not everyone’s so happy once they find out you’ve got the herp.”

Paul made a face. “…So you weren’t kidding about that.”

“Had my first breakout the day after Gunza took you.”

Paul felt miserable: here was Valentine, with a freshly missing eye and a flux-induced STD. Which she’d done to save his ass from the Army and Gunza.

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, chuckalucks.” She tapped his chin with her knuckles. “I’d done the research. The world thinks herpes is the Scarlet Letter – but the truth is, you get a couple of breakouts a year, the rest of the time you’re totes normal. If periods were a communicable disease, they’d be way worse.” She smiled. “Not that I wanted to go viral. But I’ll take the hit. For a good cause.”

“I’m glad you think I’m a good cause.”

She brightened. “Plus, turns out, if you post an ad on Craigslist saying you’re a horny girl with herpes, guys will deliver themselves to your door like they were pizza.” She pondered. “Pizza that lies about how big it is.”

“How many guys have
been
here?”

She looked out the window. “…I had some energy.”

“Jesus. You had more sex in one day than I had in my last year of marriage.”

“I’d tell you to Craigslist some in, but let’s be honest: casual-encounters-mancy doesn’t work for the penis-laden. So, how was the paper chase?”

He flopped down on the chair. The last thirty-six hours crashed down around him. “Well, I, uh, called Anathema out in a press conference.”

“Really.”

“Did you see it on the news?”

She picked up the controller, unpausing the game. “I stopped watching television a week ago. The newscasters kept saying how SMASH was closing in on me. Weirded me out.”

“That makes two of us. Did you get any leads on him?”

“I’m just the weapon, Paul. Point me at someone, I’ll pulverize ‘em with my many violent antics.”

“Come on, you can’t even do a radar search?”

“He’s somewhere in New York; I know that. The minute I zoom in, it fuzzes out.”

“You telling me some random mage can blur the screens of Valentine DiGriz? I saw you take down a SMASH team.”

Her shoulders tensed. “…Yeah.”

Wasn’t she eager for adventure?
Paul thought, confused. “Come on, Valentine. We need to find Anathema before she–”

She flung the controller to the hardwood floor. “And that’s
my
responsibility?”

“I thought you’d want to help.”
How much have I taken Valentine for granted?
“I – I’m not sure if I can find her myself…”

“Oh, great. Some nutso bitch decides to take out the city, and
I’m
the only one standing in the way? The person you want to stop this citywide thread is not SMASH, not the cops, not the insurance agents who are paid to fucking do it – but the girl who’s been homeless for two fucking weeks, searching for her best friend?”

“No, but – Anathema’s killed people. If she strikes again–”

“
Let her
!” Valentine scrubbed tears from her cheeks. “I’ve done my duty! Don’t tell me I don’t deserve a, a day off! Don’t tell me I don’t deserve a few days in a, a really nice apartment, with a bed that’s not all itchy, and
blankets
, and…”

She started to cry but squelched her tears in a convulsive effort. Paul moved towards her, then paused in mid-gesture, unsure how to comfort her; a hug seemed too intimate, a pat on the shoulder too callous. All the while, Valentine drew her legs up underneath her, breathing heavily.

“…you don’t know,” she muttered, reproaching herself. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

She looked up at the ceiling. Paul thought she was trying to avoid crying, but after a moment, he noticed the engraved designs above them. “This is a really nice apartment, Paul. Maybe the nicest I’ve ever lived in.” She sighed. “We’re not gonna have it for long.”

“The contracts are secure. Even if we’re late with the payments, I can stall eviction for months.”

She chuckled. “That answer’s so
you
, Paul. Such a new fish.”

“I’ve rented apartments before.”

She put her hand on his chest. “Stop. You’re a kid playing with Christmas toys, all starry-eyed. But… the flux comes and you lose things. This isn’t the first time I’ve lived out of my car. Not the first time I’ve lost a boyfriend, either… though usually, they just leave. Or cheat. Or both. It’s always awful, though. It has to be. The flux has to rip you up…”

Raphael
. He’d barely given that poor kid a thought, but of course it was all Valentine thought about.

How could he be such a terrible friend?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Paul reassured her. “The SMASH team, they pushed when they were supposed to pull back…”

“That’s not the point. The point is, this? It all goes away. One day, you’ll need some really cool magic, and you’ll need a downside. This apartment? Gone. And I’m back on the street. I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep the car. Someday, I’ll flux that away and then I’ll be sleeping in alleyways. Then what will I do? I’m a videogamemancer. How the hell can I do magic when I’m a bum pushing a fucking shopping cart?”

She barked a humorless laugh.

“You’ll find a way. I believe in you.”

“It’s not about believing. It’s about… I want a few days in a nice, warm house with working plumbing and heat and pizza delivery. Because I won’t have this after the next hunt. I won’t have anything ever.”

“That’s nonsense. You’ll rebuild.”

“I’ll rebuild it and burn it all. You’re new to this, Paul, but… When you’re a ’mancer, everything goes away. Because everything comes second to your love of magic. And the magic never loves you back.”

Paul pulled away, offended. “The magic never loves you
back
?”

“…no,” she said, and began crying in earnest.

He pressed the controller into her hands. “Play.”

“I don’t want to–”

“No. I mean
play
. Let it loose, Valentine.”

“The neighbors – they’re old ladies – I’ve been laying low–”

“Fuck them.” Expletives were a delightful new taste on his tongue. “These things? They’re childhood friends. They loved you when no one else would. Now
invite them out to play
.”

Uncertain, she swapped out consoles, then pressed start. Cartoon cars zoomed to a stop up along a rainbow road, engines rumbling. The road looped out around purple mountains.

Three chimes counted down. Valentine gunned the accelerator.

The apartment lurched.

Rainbows streamed out of the big-screen television to slide underneath them. A cherry-scented wind whooshed past as the futon was lifted up, tilted from side to side, metamorphosed into a small red buggy. The screen widened as the futon leapt forward, merging with Valentine’s car to swerve across the winding roads.

As players, they were immortal; falling into a lava pit only slowed them down. They drove through immense castles, across snowy landscapes, their tires kicking up sand on tropical beaches.

Paul flung his hands in the air rollercoaster-style as burly Bowser zoomed past them, Princess Peach darting between them; it was a friendly race on a friendly day, and Peach waved at Valentine as she plowed the futon through a shimmering box to emerge with a trio of orbiting turtle shells.

Valentine whooped as she rounded the first curve, the wind from the screen drying her tears. She waved back, greeting her oldest buddies before dropping banana peels in front of them. They whooped as they careened off the road, their merry defeat a part of the game.

The garbage can tipped over, tilting with them as Valentine skidded across the finish line. The crowd’s cheers vibrated the walls, the other racers pumping their fists in joy as the neighbors pounded on the floor to silence the noise.

The futon dropped to the floor with a clatter, collapsing into a heap of splintered wood.

“First!” Valentine hoisted the controller above her head like a trophy. He hadn’t seen a real smile from Valentine since she’d started wearing that pirate’s patch, and it did his heart good.

Gold coins poured out from the screen, exploded in fireworks.

“I had a life without magic.” Paul ran his fingers reverently through the firework-sparkles, poured glittering remnants into Valentine’s hand. “Maybe you get four walls, three meals, and two weeks of vacation. But you give up one thing. And you spend your life wondering what happened to it.”

“Pretty slick salesmanship, Paul.”

“I’m only selling what I believe. And believe this: as long as I’m slinging spells, I’ll ’mance you a home. I won’t
let
you sleep in alleyways.”

“Pinky promise?”

He held out his pinky solemnly. “Pinky promise.”

“If any of my boyfriends made that promise, I’d laugh ’til I cried,” she said. “But when you say it, I believe you.”

“That’s because I don’t make promises I don’t keep.”

“You realize I do, right? All the time. Scandalously. Trivially.”

“Good to know.”

She shook her head, reached down to tousle Aliyah’s paper-chain necklace – which, Paul realized, he was still wearing. “You’re a good man, Paul Tsabo. Now get some fucking sleep.”

And despite the broken futon and his always-bleeding arm, Paul was gone.