Flex (9 page)

“Can’t find my Flex bra,” she muttered, tossing a petrified McRib over her shoulder.

“…Does the right bra help with magic?”

She laughed. “No, you silly! But making Flex stinks. I’m not bringing that smell with me to the club. Oh,
there
you are.”

She bent over to pick up a large-cupped foam bra, then yanked off her shirt. Paul saw her ample breasts plop out before he averted his gaze. He watched from the corner of his eye as she hooked the bra in front, rotated it around her body, then stuck her arms through the straps.

There was nothing seductive about it. Valentine simply didn’t care who saw her naked.

As Valentine tugged her shirt back on, she knocked over the tub of ANAL LUBE, which rolled toward Paul’s feet.

“Oh! Sorry.” She balanced it back on the box, noting Paul’s shocked expression. “That’s not for me, you know.” She slapped her butt. “I’m an exit-only kinda girl.”

“Then why…” He looked, baffled, from the large tub to her and back. “Why’s it there?”

She gave him a wry look. “I don’t think you really wanna know.”

“…maybe I don’t.”

“Your comfort level is mine, my man. My ’man
cer
.” She mock-punched him on the chin, then stuffed the hematite sack into a black garbage bag. “You pick up the stuff we needed?”

“Yeah. I got a bingo machine, the copper wire, the–”

“You have the air of responsibility about you, Paul. Let us not sully that with details.”

They wrestled the sack downstairs. Between the flux pressure in his head and the heavy lifting, Paul worried he’d pop a vein before they wrestled the equipment into the van.

Valentine whistled as she slid into the passenger’s seat, resting a huge Dunkin’ Donuts bag in her lap. “
Nice
. I can see I’m going places with you. You didn’t put this car in your own name, did you?”

“Conjured it from blank paper.” Paul plugged his leg into the USB port to charge it, feeling supremely cocky.

“Dude!” She offered the high five, then frowned, scrutinizing him. “What
is
your school?”

Paul froze, caught in a tug-of-war; he wanted to share all his secrets with Valentine, exchange ’mancy tips, geek out over this amazing thing they shared – but then he thought of her future targets. Secluding her for the weekend meant she couldn’t kill innocents today, but… that was just delaying the inevitable.

She didn’t
feel
like a killer. But Imani hadn’t felt like a cheater. And Paul had been a mediocre cop, his dogged attention to detail offset by his eagerness to look for the good in people.

He remembered her first words to him, words that defined the ’mancer lifestyle:
I don’t like killing
. He didn’t like killing, either. The one time he’d shot someone had almost destroyed him, and he’d barely known the illustromancer. Killing Valentine would be destroying the only person who understood him…

Could he kill a ’mancer again? Even for Aliyah?

“That’s… hard to explain.”

She looked hurt. She reached down into the Dunkin’ bag to bring out a box, a cruller in the center.

“…donut?” she asked.

He craved sweetness. He went with a glazed.

“You struck me as a cruller guy,” she said, leaning back. “Instead, you went with the donut that’s
almost
interesting. Glazed is the donut for people who don’t know what donut they like.”

“You sound like my friend Kit,” he chuckled. “He does Dunkin’ prognostications.”

“That guy is one wise dude. Never trust a man who doesn’t like a donut.” She swigged her coffee, eyeing Paul guardedly. Then: “Is that something you…
can
do?”

“Can do what?”

“Getting vans. Is it part of your
raison d’être
? How bad’s your flux level? I got a backseat full of hematite; I don’t wanna get pulled over.”

“I don’t know how bad it is. I haven’t done this enough to compare, remember?”

“And you’re not sharing enough for me to tell.” She crossed her arms, fuming; it reminded Paul of Aliyah holding her breath until she got what she wanted.

Paul ate his donut.

“…
be
that way.” She blew a lock of hair away from her forehead. “Flux is all about the SFX.”

“The what?”

“
Special effects
.” She huffed a perfectly teenaged “Ghod” under her breath. “If the stuff I do is related to videogames? Low flux. If I get a van, they either fade away like a power-up after fifteen minutes, or arrive with a squad of cops in pursuit.”

Paul remembered the forms, flying like falcons at the apartment’s flames. He’d pushed his bureaucromancy to save his daughter, but… even then, it felt like cheating. No wonder it had rebounded so terribly.

“It’s a balance between ‘how difficult would it be to do without ’mancy’ and ‘how in-flavor is it,’” Valentine continued. “Turning the bathroom door into something you couldn’t kick open woulda taken me ten minutes with a hammer, so… final blowback? I chipped a nail.” She displayed a nasty blood blister.

“So,” Valentine concluded. “How big a stretch is ‘getting a van’ for you, O Mystery ’Mancer?”

“I’m a…” He trailed off. “I’ve got some juice for this.”

“Tell me,
tell
me!” She bounced up and down like a kid waiting for her birthday cake. “You’re only the third mage I’ve ever met. You know
my
juice. It’s only fair; give it up!”

Her excitement buoyed him up; he couldn’t remember finding someone who
wanted
to talk about ’mancy. “…only the third?”

“Hey, it’s not like there are support groups. I read somewhere just one in ten thousand people fit the psychological profile to become ’mancers.”

“It’s one in fifty thousand,” Paul corrected her. Her eyes narrowed, and Paul realized he was still part cop to her.

“You
would
know.”

“Most don’t survive,” Paul said. “Many are institutionalized, tranked quiet. The rest, well, most get their first flux blowback and wind up Refactored or dead.”

“Worst game show ever: Refactored or Dead!”

“You’re right. There
aren’t
a lot of us.”

She settled back into the seat, looking out over the morning traffic. It occurred to Paul how lonely a life she must lead; playing games twelve hours a day to feed her obsessions, with no one to talk to. He thought about the tub of ANAL LUBE, and Valentine’s bubbly charm suddenly seemed saturated with isolation – a happy welcoming into her parlor because you could never see the rest of her house.

“…It’s not that crazy,” Paul admitted.

“Finding a third mage?”

“Getting a van.”

“Okay.” He liked that she respected his mystery, pathetic as it was. “You feel it squidging around you? Like a bad masseuse kneading your forehead?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s the universe playing debt collector. If you’re not careful, your subconscious guides it; that’s where the disaster happens. If you wanna blow it off, shape the charge.”

“How?”

“Been thinking about this. Me,
I
imagine something bad. If it’s close to the amount I owe, it’ll flow through. But I had to be careful, because it’s like learning to pee. First time you open up your pee-hole, you can’t stop. Once you build up the muscles, you can dole it out.”

Paul chewed his lip. “I can’t pee like that. I don’t think guys can.”

She hid a smile behind her coffee. “Face it, Paul. Our genitalia is superior in
every
way.” Her face fell, looking pensive. “Shame I’m addicted to cock.”

These did not seem like the words of a mass murderer. “So when I’m starting,” Paul said, “I should envision bad things on a par with the weirdness I’ve committed, right? Nothing too bad? And then – let it flow?”

“Yup.”

“All right. Buckle in.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and pulled over to the right lane. A bang and a flapping sound, and Paul cruised to a stop with two flat front tires.

“
That’s
the spirit!” Valentine cheered.

F
ive hours
and two Dunkin’ Donuts stops later, they pulled up next to Paul’s safe house.

“Is there a word that means ‘pretty’ and ‘dumpy’ at the same time?” Valentine asked, then: “Hope not. Somebody’d use it to describe me.”

Paul stepped out of the car, delighting in his power as he viewed the house. It was
real
.

The house he’d procured was a ramshackle thing nestled in deep woods, twenty-five minutes away from the nearest grocery store. It had been an earnest living space where a family had once dreamed of living out in the country, then discovered the reality of isolation.

Still, the place had a beautiful view – perched on the edge of a rough promontory that sloped down into a river. The backyard had a crescent curve at its edge, marking the drop-off into the wooded valley. He listened to the green branches rustling in the wind, a great contented sigh.

He patted the house like a baby’s bottom, in part to verify its reality; yesterday, he’d used his ’mancy to purchase it under an assumed name in a sheriff’s sale several weeks back, all for five hundred dollars.

“…A rental?” Valentine squinted at the house’s dilapidated wood shingles. She was probing around the edges, trying to dope out what ’mancy Paul commanded.

“Nope. I own it. Or someone with a name very much like mine, anyway.”

She considered. “You’re not a doppelmancer, are you?”

“…
is
there such a thing?”

“I dunno. But you sure are buying a lot of things and not paying for them.”

“Oh, I’m paying for them.” Paul tossed a glass alembic at her.

She pondered that, then grinned and gave him fingerguns. “Ah, Paul. You’re keeping me on my toes.”

It was a convivial moment, soaked in that fluttering teenaged anticipation you got before putting on a play. He sensed the hours of hard work ahead, hauling in the equipment and setting it up… but it was a fine labor, a skilled thing meant to fuel their dreams. The sweat brought an ardent satisfaction; each heavy box carried into the house fit another piece into some clockwork construction. The ritual alembics and chalk diagrams would be assembled not just into a lab but a lifestyle. Paul’s brain thrummed with elation as he realized, shit, yes, he was going to do something he’d dreamed all his life:

They were going to go into this house and make magic.

That cheer was incinerated by his follow-up thought:
magic that will brew illegal drugs
.
Which she will use to kill people
.

“Come on.” He fished the key out from his pocket. “Let’s get this over with.”

V
alentine twirled
the handle on the bingo machine they’d set up in the moldy living room. She plucked out five wooden balls with fading letters, laid them into a tray. She frowned, a fortune-teller reading tea leaves.

She kept whirling the handle until the balls ricocheted inside the metal cage, then removed five balls to stare at them. It could have been cautious preparation, were it not for the way she bit her lip and avoided his gaze.

“No patterns
this
time?” Paul asked.

“Nothing obvious.” Valentine drained another Red Bull, her hands shaking from more than caffeine. “I’ve been told sometimes the balls come out spelling arcane mathematical patterns, so you’d never know it wasn’t random without a PhD… but if that’s the case, we’re doomed anyway.”

“I haven’t done ’mancy since we got here. Neither have you. We should be at perfectly normal odds now, unless you know something I don’t.”

Paul sat at the kitchen table they’d moved into the living room, wanting to get this over with. He’d spread his forms out before him, perfectly aligned, flanked by three new Bic pens. Valentine had eyed his equipment with interest but said nothing.

Beyond the paperwork were long-stemmed alembics, ultra-slim watering cans of smooth glass. Copper tubes corkscrewed in and out of inscribed distillation devices that would, theoretically, condense Paul’s raw ’mancy. Valentine had set a silver knife, its blade scabbed with blood, next to the Bics.

He drew aimless patterns in the cookie sheet heaped with brown hematite, which looked like a huge container of eye shadow. Paul swallowed back anxiety; it was like waiting in front of a rollercoaster, standing in line while you looked over the drop and imagined the fall.

Valentine glanced at the unused loops of copper wire in the corner. “Are you sure we can’t use the siphon?”

Paul flattened his palms against the table. “There’s nothing that would make me endanger Aliyah again. My job is the only other thing I value – and if I lose that, I lose the insurance, I lose Aliyah. So tell me: what do I have that’s big enough to ground loose flux?”

“Nothing,” she whispered. “If this goes wrong, the worst luck will hit everything in the area. Billion-to-one long shots that will cripple me in all the ways I fear most.” Valentine closed her eyes, hyperventilating.

“You promised you’d help.”

“I did. You realize you’re taking your life in your hands, right?”

“I do.”

“And that you could take me with you?”

“Yes.”

“I started with that first part because I thought it’d be more motivating, but you realize it’s the second part I care about.”

He whipped out his phone to brandish a picture at her: Aliyah in better days.

Valentine nodded. Then she held up her fist and waggled it in the air, as if deciding whether to throw rock, paper, or scissors.

She extended her finger, pointing at him.

“Do magic,” she commanded.

Paul stared blankly.

“…how?”

“’Mancy isn’t rituals, Paul. It’s love. When you started, I’ll bet dimes to dollars you didn’t fire up ’mancy to
do
anything. You just… did it. And the ’mancy flowed from that love.”

Paul thought back to his nighttime shifts at Samaritan Mutual, trying to conceive of the Universal Unified Form – the single form that, once created, would be so comprehensive, it would obviate the need for any other form ever again. Just silly daydreams to distract him from his impending divorce – but, in Paul’s mind, the form was sprawling, large enough to lie across mountains like a napkin thrown over a dinner plate.

But there had been something reassuring about cataloguing every activity a human being could ever request of someone, then devising a set of flexible fields to cover that eventuality. The Universal Unified Form omitted nothing. No matter what trouble you encountered, the Universal Unified Form had a place for you.

Paul scribbled on the blank papers, starting where he always did:
First Name. Middle Name. Last Name. Sex. Date of Birth. Address 1. Address 2. City…

Alembics rattled on the table. The blank paper expanded to the size of a kite as Paul scribbled upon it, drawing boxes and underlines and scores to handle the automobile purchases, then any repair work that had to be done upon the automobiles, then the lists of parts the shop might order to repair the automobiles…

He half-heard Valentine’s voice: “N-46! I-26! B-7! G-54. No pattern.”

The automobiles had factories that needed parts. The parts required bills of lading, tax statements, tracking numbers. The people who delivered the parts would have insurance claims, expense reports, OSHA forms…

…the Beast. The Beast that touches every civilized human…

“B-15!” Valentine’s voice rose in excitement. “I-30! N-45! G…52! O… 68! Keep going, Paul; keep going!”

Paul imagined the tax forms for the parts and felt that distant muscle Flex. Back at Samaritan, his office was a blur of dancing paperwork. If Kit was there, he heard the cheerleader pom-pom shake of all the forms cheering Paul on…

“B-10! I-20! N-30! G…” She swallowed. “G-10,456,243? O-£? X-marks-the-spot? Paul, you’re… you’re doing something very strange here!”

Paul didn’t stop. He was on to the international treaties, the trade agreements, the currency exchanges. Valentine waded through waist-deep piles of paper, trying to grab the rolls as they shot out in freshly inked streams, wrestling them like a snake. She got a grasp, hugged them and hauled them back to the alembic.

She looked terrified, elated, orgasmic. She was literally hip-deep in the magic, flush with a wild thrill. Paul recognized the feeling from when he spied on other ’mancers, that happiness of watching the universe dance to someone else’s tune…

Valentine wept.

She folded the forms into crisp edges, squeezing droplets of pure sunshine into the alembic. As the drops tumbled off the edge of the forms, the forms turned gray and dull. They crumbled into ash as she extracted the raw magic into the alembic.

It was like watching his dreams die.

Valentine turned to grab another handful. Paul yanked her back.

She slapped him.

“
You can’t leave your love in this, Paul!
” she yelled, barely audible over the tumult of thrashing confetti. “
It has to be clean!
”

Paul knew why. Death Metal and his cartoonish Flex, so easy to trace back to a music lover: that would be him, if he didn’t flense his personality from the magic. How long would it take Kit to track bureaucratic-flavored Flex back to Paul? Especially with Kit wondering about the rats?

“
Help me!
” Valentine was drowning in paper.

He strangled his magic, squeezing his personality out, poured the sad, strained remnants into that damned glass cup. He’d never thought of Flex as a mockery of ’mancy, but it was; all that passion, all that individual beauty, stripped clean so boring people could fulfill mundane dreams.

“I know,” Valentine whispered, her tears falling into the dead ash piling up at their feet. “I
know
.”

He understood now why Valentine had gone on tilt. She’d turned that basement into a kinetic joy of whizzing hedgehogs and diving starfighters… and she couldn’t bring herself to kill that beauty. Freed, her magic had surged forth in a wild cascade, following its own bliss…

The sun-fluid, raw magic, boiled out of the alembic, turned the copper tubes molten red, tumbling into sigilled boxes and out again, becoming less him with every step. It was a magic slaughterhouse, a place where you shoved in bright-plumed birds and vomited out shredded pink meat.

Paul felt nauseated from this destruction, sick from the flux smashing down on him like a mattress, making each breath a struggle.

The fluid boiled out. The magic danced like water tossed on a red-hot pan, squirming on a cookie sheet heaped with hematite.

“You have to force them in,” Valentine told him. “You have to bond them.” She took his hands, pressed them against the tray, trapping the raw magic between Paul’s palms and the gritty hematite. “I can’t do it. It belongs to you.”

Paul scooped up great handfuls of hematite and magic alike, mashing them together like eggs into cake mix. The power thrummed up his arms, trying to flow back into his body. He forced it back. The gritty dirt clumped together, condensing into cold chunks of crystal as he rooted the magic inside. Pounds of hematite shrank into pebbles of glowing Flex.

His arms ached. The congestions of stray luck, the flux, pressed his eyelids against his eyeballs. But opaque white stones of Flex rested in a nest of damp hematite.

“Okay.” Valentine spoke with the low hush of someone about to defuse a bomb. “Now. Shove the flux in there, too.”

Paul thought of some stupid freshman, unable to handle the flux blowback, scarring Aliyah forever. Of all the other innocents killed in horrid accidents, all for the crime of being near some asshole riding high on stolen magic.

He couldn’t let that happen to anyone else.

“…No.”

“We’re not making this shit for friends, Paul.”
Who are
you
making this for, Valentine?
“You’re carrying a cataclysmic load of bad luck. If you don’t bind the flux with the magic, all that is gonna rain down on your head.” She licked her lips, pleading. “And mine.”

The flux snaked in around him. He thought of crippled Aliyah. Maybe that was Valentine’s goal – she needed Flex brimming with bad luck to get desperate people to shred themselves and everyone around them. And Paul – he’d pass these deadly coincidences on to the people least fit to handle them…

“I can’t.” The room sparked in colors the human eye could not name, the excess magic straining against the bonds of reality. “I know it’ll kill us, Valentine. But I can’t… I can’t let this go…”

“That’s the
deal
, Paul! You wanted to learn magic! You wanted me to teach you! So
put the fucking flux in the stones before it backlashes
!”

“I will not!”

She flexed her fingers, an old-style gunslinger hovering her hand over her holster. “I’m too close to the center. Even if I ran, I’d still get zapped. So don’t make me try something stupid.” She swallowed, then added: “Please. Paul.
Put the fucking flux in
.”

Something rustled beneath Paul’s fingertips. The last living bit of the Universal Unified Form heaved itself up weakly; the remnants of a transfer form.

Of course.

“
Get back!
” As he shoved Valentine away, a huge gout of that color-that-was-not-a-color surged from his fingers, catapulting her across the room. He knelt before the half-dead form, scrawling the relevant words across the top:

Hazardous waste transfer
.

What was bureaucracy best at, if not transferring blame from one department to another?

Valentine fought to get at Paul as he scrawled magic sigils across the page:
Generator’s name and mailing address. EPA ID number. Waste codes.
And then the critical portion:

Assigned Material Transfer Site
.

“Woods outside of cabin,” he wrote, and scribbled his name just as Valentine grabbed the silver dagger to stab him.

The house slid left.

The earth shook with a bowel-loosening rumble, glassware flying in every direction. Paul saw the woods sliding downward, massive tree trunks toppling, long-buried roots spraying dirt into the air.

An earthquake
, Paul thought, so amazed he couldn’t quite fit the thought inside his head.
In upstate New York
.