Flex (21 page)

P
aul didn’t visit
Aliyah these days so much as he visited Mario Land.

“Go left.
Left
, daddy!” Aliyah told him. She’d shoved the Nintendo into Paul’s hands, was making him play again. “See the pipe?”

“It’s a green sewer pipe, Aliyah,” he said, trying not to show how much he hated playing. He humored her out of guilt, but three days spent maneuvering a stereotypical Italian plumber through endless mazes tried his patience.

He looked over to Valentine for help; she made a
do what you gotta do
face and flicked her pink-nailed fingers towards the screen. Paul felt as though Valentine and Aliyah had formed a secret cabal when he was away; he knew they had long conversations. But in his presence, Valentine clammed up and let Paul take the lead, pretending insouciance but watching from the corner of her eye.

“It’s another sewer pipe.” He moved to put the DS down. “Why don’t we do some puzzles instead?”

“
No!
Go on the pipe.
On
the pipe! Now press down.”

Paul obeyed, sighing. Mario hunched down, sliding into the pipe, then dropped into another room with a splash.

“It’s a fish level, Daddy! The hidden aquarium. Swim right. Don’t hit the fishes.”

“That’s nice, Aliyah.” He placed the Nintendo screen-down at the foot of her bed; Valentine scratched her chin in an
I-wouldn’t-do-that
gesture. “Why don’t I read to you instead, Aliyah?”

“
No!
” She shoved the game back into his hands. “You have to see!”

“I’m not rewarding temper tantrums, Aliyah,” he said sternly. “And I’m tired of playing games.”

“They’re not games.” Aliyah scrubbed her eyes, near tears. “Mommy thinks they’re games. Uncle Kit thinks they’re games. My stupid fore-friends think they’re games. But you know! She showed you!”

Paul had the uncomfortable feeling of tuning into a favorite television show after missing several critical episodes. “Who showed me what, Aliyah?”

She flung the Nintendo on the floor. Valentine shrugged:
Told you
.

“
Aliyah!
” He picked it up. One of its screens had cracked. “There is
no
excuse for breaking Aunt Valentine’s gift!”

Aliyah looked at Valentine, then burst into tears. How could children make you feel so guilty for yelling when they were the ones misbehaving? But Paul couldn’t help it – Aliyah had been through so much with the burns and his kidnapping that even this seemed to lie under a large umbrella labeled “My Fault.”

He swept her into a careful embrace, muttering apologies, unsure what he was apologizing for. She hugged him back immediately, and Paul felt a wave of gratitude; whatever she was mad at, she still needed him so hard it hurt.

“You should know,” Aliyah cried. “Valentine told me you were there. But I never found you.”

“Found me where?”

“In the castle! She said if the real world became too scary, I could always walk with Mario. Nothing in the castle could hurt me for real. And there were always hidden doors and gold coins, and if I looked hard enough in the hidden places…”

“You can always find what you need,” Valentine finished, stroking the strange stubble on Aliyah’s scalp.

Paul felt sick. “…and you needed me.”

“So, you need to know the
castle
!” Aliyah cried. “Because I couldn’t find you last time! I checked every door and every mirror and every pond. So, you – you have to know how to find me. I can’t find you. You have to know where to go so we can
meet
.”

Paul envisioned his daughter, burned and lonely, endlessly playing Mario levels searching for him. “You told her I was in
there
?” he whispered at Valentine.

She stiffened, bracing for a fight. “It worked for me when I was a kid.”

“But what if I’d… I’d…”

He couldn’t say
died
in front of Aliyah, but the thought burrowed into his consciousness: his insane daughter, thumbs blistered, trying to find her dead, dead daddy in an imaginary castle.

He realized what a foolish risk he’d taken to rescue Valentine. That was the stupid thing about parenting: the mundane stuff took up so much of your life, you forgot all this pointed towards the future. You spent your days strapping your kids into backseats, reading them bedtime stories, making bowls of cereal for them. That’s what you did as a parent: create routines to make the world seem safer.

If you weren’t paying attention, you’d forget the tasks were not the job.

Then there would be moments where your kid revealed a surprising complexity. As young as Aliyah was, she still had strange worlds captured within her that she didn’t quite have the capacity to share. She’d gotten glimpses outside that safe, padded, Advanced Placement-school cage Paul and Imani had tried to build for her – but ever-suspicious Aliyah knew there were much harder choices and had always sought to find them before they found her.

Aliyah was still so baffled by the
idea
of death that her grief took on the form of an investigation; she was still collecting data on it, like a policeman drawing a chalk outline around a body. Which was good. Because when she’d
really
begun to comprehend the idea of “Daddy being gone forever”, instead of breaking down…

…she’d asked Valentine.

What was I supposed to tell her?
Valentine asked in a taut frown.
It’s not like I had great parental experience. So I taught her my survival skill. And it was fucked up and wrong, but it was all I knew
.

Paul realized why Valentine was so quiet when he was around Aliyah: she was studying him. Taking lessons in case one day she had to do this again.

He buried his face in what was left of Aliyah’s hair to stop himself from crying.

I won’t leave you again
, he promised.
Never
. He squeezed Valentine’s hand in forgiveness.

“Why didn’t you talk to Mommy, sweetie?”

“…She’s a fore, too.”

“…A four-two?”

“A ‘before’,’” Valentine clarified. “Like all the kids in her school. They knew her from before.”

Aliyah nodded so fiercely, Paul had to yank his head back. “All they ever talk about is my burns. I’m not a burn.”

“No,” Valentine reassured her, brushing a nonexistent lock of hair away from Aliyah’s scarred forehead. “No, you’re not.”

“Vallumtime’s an after-friend. She never talks about this.” Aliyah reached out to touch Valentine’s eye-patch, as if it was a bond they shared – which, Paul supposed, it was. “She talks about games, and all the fun things I’m gonna do when I get out.”

“Be fair. Your mother does that, too.”

She straightened herself up – a strangely dignified gesture. “No. I gotta be
strong
for Mom. She looks so sad. I tell her I got a castle. She’s got no castle. So I can’t ever be sad in front of Mommy.” She swallowed. “But I can be sad in front of you, right? The way I’m sad in front of Vallumtime?”

Paul pulled her to his chest so she wouldn’t see him burst into tears. “You can be all the sad you want, sweetie.”

Aliyah didn’t cry, of course. She accepted his hug with a patience that made Paul wonder just who was supporting who in this family. Then she plucked the Nintendo off the bed and shook it; Paul was grateful the crack in the screen wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought, a single silver line running off-center. She pushed it back into his hands.

“The coral maze is to the right.”

He paused the game. “Aliyah.” She refused to look at him, her gaze on the videogame screen. He lifted her chin with his finger. “You know Daddy’s not leaving again, right?”

A hooded glare. Aliyah had always been a preternaturally suspicious child, expecting lies in promises of bedtime and dessert. But this look was so cynical, so
scornful
, that Paul felt like a failed parent.

“You can’t stay here,” Aliyah pronounced. “You fight ’mancers.”

As if she’d pronounced a curse on the hospital, the lights went off.

“Give it a second,” Valentine said. “The backup generators will come on.”

They didn’t.

Paul pulled aside the privacy curtain to look around the burn ward, noticing the lack of nurses. Puzzled patients used their cell phones as impromptu flashlights inside the drawn privacy curtains, giving each chamber a lambent jellyfish glow.

“Daddy?” Aliyah asked. “Is everything all right?”

“I can’t get a signal,” Valentine said, shaking her phone. Judging from the mutters around them, they weren’t alone.

“Things are fine, honey,” he muttered. “Valentine, is there a– oh, good. Imani’s been doing more insurance work. Could you hand me the envelope with Aliyah’s hospital records?”

Valentine gave Paul a suspicious glance as she handed it over, her arm hairs stiffening as Paul did the tiniest bit of bureaucromancy. The papers he removed from the envelope were no longer Aliyah’s medical records but a transcription of police radio.

“A ballroom explosion?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

Paul pulled some more papers out, forms to rent a ballroom and the NYC permits for a contest. The envelope sighed at his touch, an unnervingly porn-star sound. “A dancing competition,” he said. “They had a halon fire suppression system, it went off, a lot of people suffocated. More were trampled in the rush to escape. There’s” – he tallied up – “a hundred and seventeen people incoming? Because we’re the closest hospital. They’re rerouting to others.”

“The nurses must have been called into the ER – are they rererouting again now that the power’s out?”

“I don’t know. They’re not filing reports now.”

“Christ, Paul, your–” Valentine looked at Aliyah, realizing she’d almost said “’mancy”. “Your, uh, cell phone is so weird. It’s got weird limitations.”

“She’s off the grid. This has her fingerprints all over it, though.”

“Whose fingerprints, Daddy?”

Paul did a double take, having forgotten about Aliyah’s presence. “The bad ’mancer, sweetie. The one who burned you. She’s hurting people again.”

Aliyah grabbed his tie. “You’re gonna stop her, right?”

Paul laughed, loving her trust: no terror that the bad ’mancer was coming for her again, just an absolute trust her daddy could kick anyone’s ass.

“No, sweetie,” he said, letting her down gently. “Not this time. But I, uh…” He pondered ways of using his bureaucromancy to restart the hospital generators, but they all involved getting repairmen in sooner.

“I’m on it,” Valentine said, headed for the exit doorway.

“Wait!” Paul said. “Can’t you just…” He waved his hands in the air. “Can’t you rejigger it from here?”

He could have distilled the look she gave him and sold it as pure contempt. “Come on, Paul. I have to fight my way through the maintenance corridors, searching for the switch that turns the power back on. That’s how missions
work
.”

“…and you think
my
cell phone’s weird?”

She shook her head, dismissing him, then raced away in high-top sneakers and crinoline dress, puffing. Valentine wasn’t in shape, but she
was
enthusiastic.

“Vallumtime’s fixing it?” Aliyah asked.

“Yes.” Paul thought of ways to hunt down Anathema. Problem was, anarchomancers weren’t big on filing flight plans.

What did she want? She’d injured a room full of dancers this time. If he could figure out what the hell Anathema was trying to do, then he could intercept her–

–movement outside the curtains. Paul looked up, glad to see a nurse had arrived; he felt strangely nauseated, a gut-churning sickness that felt like wild animals had shit down his throat. Maybe he could ask for a prescription. He grabbed his crutches.

The nurse ripped the curtain down, steel rings tumbling from the ceiling. Paul shrieked in surprise, dropping his cell phone. It shone upward, illuminating the woman who stood before him like a monster in a horror movie.

She gripped a hand-carved spear tipped with a chipped obsidian spearhead. Paul saw flecks of dried blood in those hollows.

The woman holding it radiated a scornful strain, a weather-beaten look that Paul associated with old photos of frontierswomen – a pride at having survived situations that would have killed lesser men. Her hair was a dreadlocked snarl of rat’s bones.

But her face was bizarrely model-perfect: sculpted nose, collagen-plump lips, plastic surgery residuals. It was like someone had abandoned Miss America on Survivor Island, leaving her to learn how to build shelter from vermin-ridden branches.

She flung the hospital curtain to the floor and scrubbed her free palm against the hem of her dress.

Her dress was made of old camouflage-pattern fabric, crudely lashed together from leather straps and bone. The stark simplicity of her garb, of her ancient spear, spoke of a ’mancer’s lifestyle.

“Anathema?” he whispered.

By way of reply, she stabbed him.

I
t had taken
Paul three attempts to pass his police physicals, back when he’d been fresh out of college. “You’re a good kid,” the instructor had told him, after he’d washed out for the second time on the wall-climbing exercise. “But you’re built like a mosquito.”

Paul had done endless pull-ups, trying to build his scrawny muscles into something strong enough to carry the dead weight needed to pass. And when he’d finally vaulted over that wall, he should have felt triumph. All he’d felt was exhaustion.

A natural athlete he was not.

Yet there was one thing Paul was good at, a skill that had carried him through high school when the bullies came knocking: when he had to, he could haul ass.

Which was why, when Anathema stabbed down, Paul whipped his crutch around to knock her spear aside. She radiated sickness, a vulgar death that made it hard to concentrate…

“
Daddy
!” Aliyah screamed as Anathema came at him again, thrusting at his eye – but he smashed the crutch back across her face. Then he used his good leg to launch himself at her.

What the hell am I doing?
he thought as he bore her to the ground. But it was the best strategy: he couldn’t run with one leg, couldn’t hope to outmaneuver her, and so he had to close.

If only she didn’t outweigh him by thirty pounds.

Her lean muscles twitched underneath his hands as he struggled to grab the spear. The other parents in the ward moved to help Paul; she roared at them, her neck corded, and suddenly the ward smelled of lion shit and African veldts. The comfortable darkness turned into a vanished sun, a moonless night where any predator could feed on blind, helpless humans…

How do I know that?
Paul asked, and then realized: ’mancy. Like Valentine’s videogame rules, everyone knew what would happen if they stayed. He heard the football dads scrambling, grabbing their children and fleeing.

How could he fight that with bureaucromancy?

Yet even as he quailed from the way the hospital was hauled back to a darker age, Paul was mesmerized by the beauty of ’mancy. Even though Anathema’s land was cold, hostile, and murderous, seeing her reshape the world was like watching a talented artist draw horrible things.

She smashed his smile with her elbow.

“You take the cost away!” she shrieked, snapping at his throat with filed teeth. “You dump it all into nature, onto
objects
, when the point is they
incinerate
themselves once they’re done! You’re encouraging the spread of our
demise
!”

Is she talking about my flux?
he wondered – and then she clocked him hard again, eradicating all thought.

By the time he shook it off, she’d aimed her spear at his throat.

“I should’ve killed you personally instead of sending one of my obsessed to do the job,” she said, trembling with rage. “I thought one hand would wash the other clean – that one flood of ill-gifted ’mancy could erase another. But I forgot how nature works – it doesn’t use minions; it encourages
battles
. I created you; I have to kill you.”

…created me?
Paul flung up his hands defensively, seeing the cell phone light split across the sharpness of that obsidian spear tip. It would punch through his fingers and throat alike with one muscle-powered shove.

He looked over at Aliyah, apologetic.

Aliyah flung her Nintendo at Anathema’s face.

“
You leave Daddy alone!
” she yelled, looking for something else to throw.

Anathema chuckled, wiping blood from her forehead.

“Your daughter’s a better fighter than you are. But I’ll teach her that nature has no mercy…”

She drew back the spear again. Aliyah pulled herself free from her IVs, launched herself at Anathema, shouting
no no no
. Anathema, bracing the spear in both hands, ignored Aliyah to aim the spear tip at Paul’s heart.

“
Round One
,” a deep announcer’s voice boomed, tearing the veldt to shreds.

Paul saw Anathema’s muscles quivering as she
wanted
to stab down. She’d been frozen in place. Paul felt himself somehow lose focus, shifted from Anathema’s opponent to a mere background sprite.

Anathema looked up in fury, involuntarily assuming a fighting position, a red bar appearing over her head. Valentine appeared with an equally feral grin and a full red bar, facing Anathema down. She brandished a glowing sword – which looked absolutely badass when combined with her eye patch.

“Mortal Kombat, motherfuckress,” Valentine said, her good eye gleaming.

“
Fight!
” the announcer yelled.

Anathema exploded from her stasis to spear Paul’s heart, but her spear tip passed through his body; he wasn’t an interactable object. She retreated as Valentine advanced in a looping swirl of attacks, fencing with the bravura moves of a thousand pirate movies. Anathema blocked them all in showers of golden sparks.

“
Daddy!
” Aliyah shrieked, trying to haul him away. Paul was astonished; couldn’t Aliyah see how marvelous Valentine was, channeling archetypes to fight?

Meanwhile, Anathema and Valentine battled, their red bars chipping away as each scored hits. Aliyah flinched whenever Valentine’s sword sparked; Aliyah didn’t see Valentine defending them but rather saw Valentine wielding a wildfire force that threatened to burn her again…

He pulled Aliyah’s medical chart off the end of the bed, channeling ’mancy. When he lifted the top form away, the list of medications he needed lay underneath. He ran his finger down the list, searching for familiar names.

“There, Aliyah!” He pointed to a reinforced steel cabinet. “Bring me all the medicines on the second shelf!”

He hated risking his daughter’s health to save their lives, but Aliyah did him proud: most six year-olds would have lost their heads, but his daughter merely set her face in the same intense frown she wore whenever she’d set out to beat this level of Mario. Aliyah booked it toward the cabinet, wincing from the pain, retreating from Valentine and Anathema.

Valentine looked triumphant – but her red bar had been chipped away a lot more than Paul would have liked. She’d never been a real fighter, spending most of her life plopped in front of a console, and the loss of her depth perception was a real handicap. Whereas Anathema looked in her environment, fighting with practiced ease. Paul got the uncomfortable feeling that Anathema was toying with Valentine, cataloguing Valentine’s moves in preparation for an overwhelming strategic push.

“
Daddy!
The cabinet’s locked
!”

“
Valentine
?”

Valentine gestured toward the medicine cabinet; it burst open in a spray of sparks just as Anathema punched Valentine in the face hard enough to empty Valentine’s red bar, sending her sprawling to the ground.

“Now you die,” Anathema said.

Aliyah shrieked when the cabinet burst open, tumbling backward as the magic blew the doors wide.

“Sweetie!” Paul yelled. “Get them!”

Fighting fear that would have unmanned a girl three times her age, Aliyah grabbed a stack of white boxes as though she was snatching fish out of a bear’s mouth – and then ran back to Paul, dropping as many as she carried. Anathema brought the spear around, ready to puncture Valentine’s heart…

…Valentine staggered back to her feet, the red bar refilling itself. “Round 2,” the announcer roared. “Fight!”

“
Useless
.” Anathema waved her hand as though she were swatting flies. Paul felt a surge of ’mancy as the electricity drained away, Valentine’s videogamemancy cut off as the room slid back to a time well before circuits had been discovered – before mankind even understood what lightning was.

Back on the veldt, Valentine clawed empty air as her sword faded away, desperately trying to summon back her ’mancy.

Anathema sneered. “You’re no fighter,” she said. “You’re a fat slut.”

She stabbed Valentine through the shoulder.

It would have been through the heart, but Valentine dodged – the one trick Anathema, who’d been on the defensive the whole fight, hadn’t seen. Valentine shrieked, spear punching through flesh.

Paul jabbed a fistful of needles into Anathema’s leg.

Anathema whirled, bringing the spear around to stab Paul, but Paul’s “try it” grin was so fierce, she hesitated. He jerked his chin toward the boxes scattered across the floor.

“The most powerful sedatives civilization has to offer,” he said. “You’ll be asleep in minutes. How far can you run before you pass out?”

It was a bluff. Paul had no medical knowledge; he’d pulled up the list of restricted drugs the nurses had to sign out for, using the ones that sounded familiar. Plus, he’d jabbed the needles into her thigh, not the best cluster of veins as far as Paul knew; maybe he’d hit muscles, missing her bloodstream entirely.

But he was betting the veldt warrior knew less about medicine than he did.

“I’ll kill her first,” she snarled, looking at Aliyah. “Just to watch her faith in you die.”

Then she ran.

Paul crawled over to Valentine, wondering what the rest of the hospital was doing – but between the chaos in the ER and the fleeing patients, he doubted anyone had witnessed anything coherent. Valentine shivered from her wound. She was bleeding – how badly was badly? Paul wondered, unsure how much damage had been done.

“Brave girl.” He pulled Aliyah to him. “Such a brave girl.”

“All right,” Valentine admitted, slumping onto the floor. “I
probably
should have tried harder to find her.”

“You couldn’t have,” Paul told her. “She’s not an anarchomancer. She’s a paleomancer.”