Flex (7 page)

O
ver the next three days
, Paul replayed one conversation in his head, over and over again.

“Your name?”

“Paul,” he told her.

Why in God’s name, Paul wondered, hadn’t he thought to ask, “What’s
your
name?”

All bureaucracy started with an identifier: the name, the social security number, the case ID. You couldn’t look people up by “the heavyset girl with the Bowser tattoo”. You needed to place a hook in the Beast.

He sat in his office, his wastepaper basket overflowing with crumpled forms. He’d had the Beast slither through the police department’s paperwork, searching for distinguishing marks – but if his gamemancer had a police record, it had been before her tattoo.

Even if she had given him a fake name, that would have worked. But the paperwork resisted finding her by a name
he
had assigned.

He had problems thinking of her as “Anathema”. Anathema was a murderer. This girl had been friendly, even cordial. She’d treated him like a colleague. Deep down, he didn’t want to believe someone who shared his enthusiasm for ’mancy could kill someone.

Even though she’d been about to kill him.

He holed up in his office, ignoring the phone. Reporters were calling. They asked whether Paul was hunting the ’mancer who’d hurt his daughter, begging for confirmation of evil magic at work. He’d taken to yelling, “Why don’t you tell people to donate to my daughter’s charity fund instead?” before slamming the phone down.

That worked, to some extent. Folks had donated eight thousand dollars – enough to pay the deductibles.

If he’d asked people to donate to a fund dedicated to slaughtering ’mancers, he’d have a million already.

Paul tried to relax by filling out the other paperwork – the counterclaim forms on Aliyah’s treatment. Samaritan Mutual was mustering its resources, compiling its in-network doctors to explain why Aliyah’s reconstructive surgery wasn’t life-saving, and therefore not covered. Paul knew how to play that game. He doubted he could win without using ’mancy, but he could keep the ball in play long enough to satisfy Imani he was doing something.

Still. The clock was ticking. Any day, Anathema would engineer her next accident. This time, it would be thirty-two innocents dead.

What if Paul had to kill that pretty, pudgy girl before she killed again?

The Beast slept fitfully. The stacks of forms rose into the air whenever Paul thought he had a lead, like cats confirming this new noise was indeed the can opener. But as soon as Paul realized
No, this won’t work either
, they collapsed back into place.

The frustrating thing was, there were magics that tracked down strangers; the mob had twin huntomancers (and as a cop, Paul had once been told to look the other way after they’d helped the department corner a particularly messy serial killer). Collectomancers sometimes developed powers that led them to the action hero they needed to complete their set. A junkomancer in Queens was an open secret on the force, a harmless kook unaware he was a ’mancer – but he could find anything, literally
anything
, in his junkyard.

Bureaucromancy needed things to be filled out in order. He could not skip that first step: identification.

“Maybe I chose the wrong magic,” Paul muttered, kicking the wastebasket.

The crumpled paper balls rolled towards Paul, lining up in neat rows before his feet, forlorn children looking up to a teacher. He felt guilty.

Paul knelt down, patting the tops of the discarded paper tentatively, not quite wanting to commit to the action lest he look foolish. They rubbed up against his fingertips, rustling as they fought to be touched.

“It’s not you,” he told them, smiling. It wasn’t. The Beast was a force multiplier, a way for a messy humanity to store information no one man could remember. If Paul had to bend his will to its needs, then so what? That was its beauty. The worst anarchist still filled out forms to buy a house. The richest driver still had to renew his license. Bureaucracy treated everyone alike.

No, he thought. You did not break the rules. You made them work for you.

The wadded papers purred at his feet. Paul basked in their trust.

A
fter banging
his head against the Anathema issue, Paul needed to see Aliyah.

He’d have liked to say she missed him, but they kept her sedated much of the time to speed healing. Still, his visitations were like going to church. It didn’t matter if nobody heard you; it mattered that you went.

Paul stopped by the bathroom, splashing water over his face and straightening his tie, before he went in to see her. Not that Aliyah cared what Daddy looked like – but if he ran into Imani, he wanted to look energized, a man going toe-to-toe with Samaritan Mutual.

“Got a hot date, Paul?” a voice purred.

Paul whirled. The gamemancer emerged from the bathroom stall. She now wore a cut-off black T-shirt that exposed a doughy midriff, accentuated by a bandolier of brass bullets slung around her hips. She wore a supremely satisfied look.

“Paul
Tsabo
,” she added, nodding.

Paul ran.

Her fingers twitched. The bathroom door vanished, replaced by an image of a door. In desperation, Paul kicked the wall, but it had become impregnable. A bazooka shot at close range, Paul realized, would leave only a dark smudge, to fade harmlessly a few moments later.

Why had he chosen bureaucromancy when other ’mancers could do this?
Why
?

He hoped Imani would get Aliyah the treatment she needed. This would be a messy, mysterious death.

But he would not die sobbing.

He turned to face her, his back to the wall; all he needed was a blindfold and last cigarette. The other walls in the room had turned flat and two-dimensional, the bathroom mirror a rectangle of blue shading.

She nibbled a peeling purple fingernail, looking curiously wicked.

“You’re pretty calm about this,” she said.

“If I have to die, it should be by magic.”

“Hmm.” She glanced back towards the bathroom stall. “How long did you wait for me to show up, Paul? In that basement?”

“…I dunno. Ten, fifteen minutes?”

“You’re lucky.” She pulled herself up on the bathroom counter, waving a Wii controller at the stalls. “I’ve been in there all
day
. Listening to guys pinching loaves next to me… It got boring after the batteries ran down on my DS. But I didn’t wanna leave lest I missed you, Paul.”

Paul wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.

“I should have figured you’d find me. You can track down anyone, I suppose. Just… turn the world into videogame radar, make me your mission point.”

She arched plucked eyebrows. “Really, Paul? After I just told you I’ve been waiting in the bathroom all day? …Though, yeah, actually, I
should
have done that.”

“What magic did you use?”

“Googlemancy. Do an image search for ‘Paul policeman artificial foot mancy’ and you get Paul Tsabo. Next time this happens, Paul, give yourself a fake name. A
cool
one. I mean, ‘Paul’? You could have said, ‘Call me the Whisperer in the Darkness.’ ‘My friends call me Agent Steel.’ ‘I’m Batman.’
Anything
. It sort of breaks the mystique when you finally get your lurker and he’s named
Paul
.”

The words “next time” gave Paul a small, wavering elation he might live.

“So, you think I should have been…
lurkier
.”

She pulled her fists to her chest, then crossed her fingers, as if betting on a lucky horse. “Come on, Paul! The lurking? It’s totally badass. You think I played videogames twenty hours a day because I
liked
the real world? Crap, I’ve been waiting all my life for some mysterious stranger to show up and involve me in an Adventure. What’d I get? Minimum wage jobs. Community college. Zero bearded guys showing up to tell me I’m a wizard now, zero droids arriving asking me to rescue hot princes.

“Then I’m in the basement, brewing. And there is –
the stranger
!” She framed the scene with her hands. “A little wimpy, no James Marsden, but
official
. A government-agent suit. An offer of aid. Ties to a secret organization! Even a missing limb pointing at a mysterious past! Booo-
nus
!

“For the first time in
years
,” she said, licking her lips, “I went to bed excited. If you existed, maybe there was a sword in a stone somewhere. The world had let me down for so long – but for the first time in a long time,
anything
could happen.”

“So, what happened?” Paul asked.

“Got bored.” She sucked air between her teeth. “If you’d showed up the next day, Paul, my life woulda been a wonderland. Next day, I was jittery. Today, I thought, ‘Wait, will he show up again? What’s the Paul-signal?’ So I started doing research. And what’d I find?”

Paul shifted his weight to his good foot. “…a gimpy insurance agent?”

“With a burned daughter. So, seriously, Paul. What are you up to?”

T
hey stood
at the foot of Aliyah’s bed.

This was the hour the parents came to visit, seeing their burned children off to sleep. Their happiness was stretched thin as Saran Wrap. You couldn’t cry around your children; that would scare them. So the parents all acted like they were interviewing their kids for TV shows, receiving each piece of news with high-eyebrowed, cajoling grins.

Only the gamemancer looked grim.

She turned her Nintendo DS over and over in her hands, blinking back tears. She scrutinized Aliyah solemnly, as if searching for the cheat code to heal these blisters.

“…So, how much do you need?”

“Too much,” Paul whispered, then added: “Half a million.”

“Jesus.”

“I mean, to do it proper. They’re doing what they can here. But…”

“…You don’t want to take a chance with your daughter’s face,” she finished. “Five hundred thousand dollars.” Paul could see her weighing the figures in her head. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“I wasn’t asking you for
money
!” Paul snapped.

“Then what the fuck are we doing, Paul? Hiding in Flex labs and surprising ’mancers doesn’t seem like the best way of providing medical coverage.”

Don’t mock me! You made me do this!
he almost shouted, then realized:
She didn’t know
. Plenty of little girls got burned in New York. She hadn’t drawn the connection. She probably didn’t even understand that Paul had burned Aliyah, trying to save her.

Then:
She said “we
.”

One glimpse of Aliyah’s burns, and this ’mancer wanted to help. He could see the determination on her face; she was being sarcastic because already, she cared too much.

Were those the emotions of a murderer? Maybe. He’d seen too many weeping killers in his time on the force to think taking a life robbed you of empathy. Kit cheered at ’mancer’s deaths, but he’d have taken a bullet for a stranger. Paul had wanted to strangle the girl who’d burned his daughter… until he’d met her. And whoever Anathema hated enough that she was killing for, well…

…maybe she was a weird mixture of callousness and caring, like every other human.

“I need a teacher,” Paul said. “I can work the system; I can’t handle the flux. Last thing I want to do is to – to make it worse for her.” He flexed his fingers, always feeling Aliyah burning.

The gamemancer made an aborted gesture with her hands, an arc-like movement that tried to encompass too much and failed. “We don’t
teach
each other, Paul. ’Mancy’s as specific as thumbprints. The Konami code’s not gonna do the same thing for you that it does for me.”

“…the Konami code?”

Her fingers twitched, tapping it out. “Point is, flux is… it’s trial and error. Like… walking. Eventually, you fall down enough times that you figure out when to stick out your leg.” She glanced down at his metal ankle, wincing. “…too soon?”

“I don’t have
time
for trial and error! If I flux myself into the Army, or hurt anyone else, then… No.
Unacceptable
. I need to do this on the down-low.”

“‘Down-low.’ That word sounds foreign when you use it, Paul. Like a lozenge in your throat. I’d stay away from street slang if I were you.”

“Don’t mock me. I need your help.”

The gamemancer flung her hands in the air. “What do you want me to do, Paul?”

This hadn’t gone the way Paul thought it would. He thought he’d hate her; her grief had melted his anger. He thought he’d have to blackmail her; she was all too willing to assist. He thought she’d have wisdom to share; she had none.

He looked at the other parents, loving caretakers. If this was their only option, wouldn’t they take it?

“…Teach me to make Flex,” he whispered.

She stepped back. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Flex is the only thing that every ’mancer I’ve ever known can do,” he said, so low his voice hurt. “Maybe you can’t train me to play videogames, but I know ’mancers of violently different persuasions have taught each other how to brew Flex successfully. We can all do it. It’s as close to ritual magic as we come.”

“So I break out the alembics and run you through the crystal. What’s that teach you?”

“When you make Flex,” Paul said thickly, “You offload the flux into something else. The ritual is practically all about channeling bad luck away from you. And managing flux is really the most critical skill a ’mancer
can
learn. If I can…” He swallowed.

“Flex isn’t easy money, Paul. Trust me on that one.”

“This isn’t about money!” Paul swallowed back revulsion at the idea of inflicting more flux backlash on the world. “If I can get good at this, then money’s never an issue. It’s just that–” He sighed. “If I can make Flex, then I can probably get a grip on my backlash.”

“…
if
you make Flex,” she echoed scornfully. “Did you not notice my rain of frogs, Paul? That wasn’t my first time on tilt, either. So what makes you think
I’m
the great Flex expert?”

“You know more than I do.”

She chewed her lip, nodding, not liking where his logic led but unable to argue with it. “You know I know where your daughter lives, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means if this is a sting operation, I’m gonna be pissed. You’re a – well, you’re not a cop. But you’re a bloodhound
for
cops. And I–” Her tears mixed with mascara. “If it turns out that you trotted out this poor girl as some emotional con to get me jailed, you are the worst fucking human being in the world.”

“I’m not.” He was stunned, wounded, confused; he
did
intend to kill her, but Aliyah wasn’t part of that. “I’m not.”

She saw the hurt on his face. She turned away to squeeze Aliyah’s toes – a mother’s instinct, loving and kind. Then she yanked her fingers away.

“…I can’t believe I’m involving someone else…” She cracked her knuckles. “All right, I’m in. We’ll start tomorrow.”

Aliyah shifted beneath Vaselined dressings, woken by the ’mancer’s touch. “…Daddy?”

“Don’t move, sweetie.” He knelt down. “You have to stay still for the skin grafts to take root.”

“But the staples
itch
.” Paul smiled; it was the first time since Aliyah’s burning that she’d felt feisty enough to whine. “And the TV is bad.”

“You – you have Uncle Kit’s Dora DVDs, don’t you?”

“The nurses forget to press play.”

“Know what
you
need?” a new voice said. Paul was startled to see the gamemancer kneeling next to Aliyah; he’d forgotten she was here. “Distraction. Take this.” She booted up Super Mario on her Nintendo DS, then handed it over. “When I was a little, lonely girl, that’s what my parents gave me. It opened up new worlds.”

Aliyah took the black plastic case reverently. Her fingers were stiff and clumsy, knotted with scar tissue.

But her
smile
…

“Mommy says videogames rot your brain.”

The ’mancer snorted. “I could show you some things that’d make your Momma’s brain spin like a spun penny.”

Paul chuckled. He’d never thought of doing ’mancy in front of Imani. It’d be nice to see her reaction when she realized why he’d hidden his emotions. Well, not nice, but…
fitting
.

“You have cartoons on your skin,” Aliyah asked. “Does it hurt? I want some.”

“After all you’ve been through, sweetie, a few needles would be a cakewalk.”

Aliyah smiled. “What’s your name?”

The ’mancer reached out to caress what was left of Aliyah’s hair. “Valentine,” she said. “Valentine DiGriz.”