Authors: Ferrett Steinmetz
“This,” Payne said, snapping the mask open briskly between his hands, “is how we fight SMASH: anonymity. None of the nurses know what the residents look like. None of the
residents
know what each other looks like. None of the employees know each other’s names, just the names on the hoods. If someone betrays us, they can only tell SMASH so much.”
Except for us
, Paul thought guiltily.
We figured out who Payne was
.
“Even Rainbird is not his true name.” Payne jerked his chin over towards Rainbird, who glowered at the revelation. “I chose it out of a book. He left his name behind to become something stronger in here… and I ask you to do the same.”
Payne held the mask out to Aliyah; it had glittering swirls of flames running up its cheeks. Paul wondered if Payne had unconsciously chosen it to mirror Aliyah’s burn scars.
“Jesus, she’s looking at that mask like she’s choosing her first Pokemon,” Valentine muttered.
“HOTPLATE,” Aliyah read off the mask, in a daze.
“The names are chosen at random for staff,” Payne explained. “Once you choose your own name later, Mrs Vinere will find a perfect mask to fit your personality. But for now…”
“
No
.” Aliyah pulled it on over her face, then turned to face Rainbird. “I’m Hotplate. I can be Hotplate.”
Payne chuckled, then tied the back of the mask tighter, trying to fit an adult-sized mask to a child’s head. It was a fatherly gesture; Paul suppressed a pang of jealousy.
Instead, he reached out with his own bureaucromancy, interfacing with Payne’s records to see which masks here had already been assigned so he could choose a free one. The act felt foolish, slightly redundant: after all, his ’mancy was Payne’s.
Still, he plucked a blue-sky mask off the rack, one with white clouds sewn into the leather and bright lightning-bolt rims around the eyeholes. “I’ll be MONGOOSE for now. I see you’re not taking your ‘random’ names from old CIA case files.”
“Good eye, Paul!” Payne said, thrilled. “I like a man who can catch me out.”
Paul pulled the mask on, feeling detached from the world. Looking through the eyeholes felt like looking through a camera lens; it wasn’t
him
participating in this bizarre scene, he was watching it happen to someone else. He tied the back tight, pressing the leather taut against his face, feeling as though if he pressed it to his skin it would root him to this reality.
He turned to Valentine, curious to see what mask she’d choose – but Valentine wasn’t there. What
was
there was a shifting nightmare of oily tendrils in roughly human form, like a dark snake orgy at midnight, drooling wet saliva from a million tiny teeth.
Paul leapt away. The thing reached out for him apologetically, a bundle of organic cables in the mockery of an arm – then the squid-like blackness flushed pink, coalescing into a fully human hand.
A mouth sagged open, spoke in Valentine’s voice. “Hang on there, Paul.”
The hand rippled with colors and patterns, convulsing up the body, black leather scabbing across its greasy surface. When the transformation finished, a slouched angry man in a leather jacket stood before them, a sullen face shadowed by a hoodie, examining its hand as though it might burst into an octopoid shape again at any moment.
“Ta da!” said the man; Valentine’s merry tone was completely at odds with her angry-white-boy skin. “Call me Alex Mercer.”
“…Is that a videogame guy?”
“It’d be hysterical if you got the gag here, Paul, but let’s be honest: all my best jokes involve Wikipedia research.”
Rainbird held out a mask to her, letting it dangle off the end of his finger. “You can’t choose your own shape, Ms DiGriz. You need a mask. Or an official ’mancy chosen by Mrs Vinere, our masqueromancer. Something
stable
.”
“The hell I can’t.” Something slithered ominously under Valentine’s leather jacket. “I’ve already lost my peripheral vision after SMASH shot out my eye. I’m not putting a goddamned Mexican wrestling mask over my head.”
Rainbird made a strangled noise; Payne made a calming gesture. “Let it go, Rainbird. For now. It’s time we–”
Payne looked around in confusion. “…Where’s Aliyah?”
A thunderclap sounded from the doorway. “LET’S PLAY!” Aliyah cried, her voice echoing across the complex, a high and joyful sound.
“Oh no,” Payne muttered, “Oh no.” But Paul was already running towards the door where all the ’mancers lived. Valentine burst the door into splinters with the press of an imaginary “A” button, letting Paul rush through first.
Aliyah stood atop a circular nurses’ station in the center of an ornate atrium. The sun shone down on the nursing station through a vast polarized glass canopy overhead. The atrium was so large that Aliyah’s voice still echoed back and forth when Paul and Valentine burst in.
Paul limped across the atrium’s gold-flecked marble floor, trying not to trip over the squares dug into the ground where pruned trees had been planted at erratic intervals. The ’mancers couldn’t be allowed outside all that much, Paul realized, so Payne had made the space to mimic some Greek pantheon, a place where they could stroll in the sunshine and savor what snippets of nature they could. Even as Paul vaulted over the statues of slender goddesses, bolting in a straight path for the nurses’ station in the center, he knew it would take him a few minutes to cross the vast floor and reach Aliyah.
The atrium itself was ringed with gold-flecked marble pillars, modelled after a grand hotel lobby. Twenty gold-trimmed doors faced inwards – the luxury suites Payne had spoken of, their majestic entrances set into the walls’ circular sweep, the atrium shaped like a great compass with a room in every direction.
The doors cracked open, heads peering out to see what the commotion was.
Aliyah held her Nintendo DS high, ready to summon more lightning down through the circular skylight three stories above. A glowing pillar of pixelated light limned her slim form. An attendant in a black and yellow luchadore mask cowered next to her, unsure what to do.
Aliyah did a slow 360, eyeing each of the doors. “
My name is Aliyah!
” she boomed, her luchador mask glimmering with power. “
I am almost nine years old!
” She hesitated, as if she wanted to say more, then burst out with: “
Who wants to play with me?
”
“No,” Payne muttered. “No, no,
no
. I’m supposed to introduce them, some of these ’mancers haven’t been out of their room in
years
…”
The doors around Aliyah opened wider.
Sixteen ’mancers poked their heads out. Most were pale; some looked positively sallow. They were mostly whip-thin with bodily neglect or pudgy with comfort eating, peering out to look at Aliyah with the vague confusion of someone who’d crawled into a hole and had asked not to be disturbed.
“
Any of you?
” Aliyah asked, looking heartbroken.
An emaciated Chinese lady crept cautiously out of her room, followed by a trail of well-groomed tabby cats in an orderly queue. Behind her, Paul saw a room crammed full of pacing cats.
An obese jowly black man with sweat stains chewed on his cigar, then scribbled notes on an immense leather ledger he carried like a small infant in the crook of his arm. He opened the ledger; a buzzing swarm of black numbers soared out to explore the room ahead of him, swirling to investigate this small black girl standing on the table.
A beet-faced woman in sauce-splattered chef’s garments emerged, holding a sizzling saucepan filled with pure ’mancy, the bottom of her pan red-hot and continuing to cook her magical food.
A stylish woman with no face at all, just a blank caul, clutched the doorframe and aimed her empty face towards Aliyah – then vanished inside to reemerge as a willowy socialite, her face reshaped into a friendly abstract mosaic.
“I thought there were seventeen of them,” Paul muttered.
“You’re forgetting me.” Rainbird jerked his chin towards a room that glowed lava-red.
One by one, the ’mancers came out, each trailing some indication of their own obsession: a glowing lightsaber, bloodied ballet slippers that never quite touched the ground, a duffle bag of plush raccoon dolls.
They converged on Aliyah, cocking their heads, groundhogs being called to rouse themselves after a long and shadowy winter. They clutched their fingers, summoning ’mancy, as the orderlies ran for the hills…
“Orders, sir?” Rainbird asked.
“…hold.”
Aliyah stood in the center of the ’mancers, looking at them earnestly. They shuffled to a halt, sizing her up with curiosity.
She spun in the air once, twice, three times, rising as she twirled, then came down with a golden sword clutched in her hand. “It’s dangerous to go alone!” she recited, a solemn oath. “Take this.”
Kneeling, Aliyah split the weapon into sixteen smaller swords, each carved from shimmering ’mancy. She fanned them out and offered a sword to each politely.
The crazy cat lady laughed.
The bookie applauded.
The chef kissed her fingertips.
They stepped forward, smiling, thrilled to see a small child so eager for their company. They each took a sword from Aliyah’s hands, and transformed it – the ballet dancer made it into a graceful golden swan, who she did a
pas de deux
with. The woman with the blank face plucked a sword with fine grace and, stripping her old face away to drop it on the ground like a shed snakeskin, plunged the sword into her cheekbones to become a radiant being of golden blades.
Aliyah giggled as the cat lady turned the sword into a laser pointer to turn her cats into a wild circus of tumbling whiskers, and the bookie split the sword into two and handed it to two ’mancers to show Aliyah what the odds were on their fighting, and the Lucasmancer engaged Aliyah in a great Jedi fight, his lightsaber against her sword, in an epic battle that scarred the walls with lightning and elicited a thunderous roar of approval from all the ’mancers when Aliyah finally won victory to a great swell of “Duel of the Fates.”
“
Daddy!
” she cried, exultant. “
I’m home!
”
T
he dazzling shows
of ’mancy went on for a while – well past Aliyah’s bedtime, but Paul felt no urge to end such a perfect night for her. Eventually the orderlies crept back out, adjusted their luchador masks, and brought out beachfront chairs for Paul, Valentine, and Payne to watch the show.
“I should order in pizza,” Payne mused. “As a reward for their kind welcome.”
“You’ll annoy Julia,” Rainbird said. He stood at attention behind Payne. His wooden-mask eyes were blazing treetrunk gashes, but he never took his gaze away from the ’mancers exchanging barrages of ’mancy with Aliyah.
“Quite right. Rainbird, when it’s calmed down a bit, see if our resident culinomancer won’t do her loaves and fishes trick for us.”
Paul looked over to Valentine, who he expected to complain – Paul spent more time trying to get Valentine to eat her vegetables than he did convincing Aliyah – but Valentine bent over her own Nintendo DS, conspicuously ignoring the sixteen-’mancer party.
He considered saying something, but didn’t want to have that conversation in front of Rainbird. So instead, he watched his daughter, who now fed and maintained a living stuffed-animal corral, courtesy of a pallid plushomancer with a pink kitty face. The other ’mancers sat in a circle, waiting their turns to play with her. Paul understood why – Aliyah was enthralled by the slightest ’mancy.
Even though all the plushomancer could do was make his toy raccoons waddle about a bit, Aliyah treated him like royalty. She joined her ’mancy with his, had the raccoons sit up and bow to him.
Occasionally she’d gallop back to grab Paul’s hand, shouting
Daddy Daddy come see this
, and would make a great show of something new she’d figured out how to do with her powers. Paul would applaud, and Aliyah would smother him in more kisses, whispering more thanks for bringing her where it was safe.
Then she’d dart off to the next ’mancer to entwine her magic with theirs.
The other ’mancers filed by to thank Payne, bowing one by one; he waved them away graciously. Each had delicate masks, affixed by ’mancy, obscuring their identity but displaying who they wanted to be.
Paul couldn’t remember the last time he’d relaxed.
“You’ve given your girl a special gift, Mr Mongoose.” Payne nudged Paul to remind him of his code name. “Most ’mancers find other ’mancies to be – well, a little offputting. Proof the universe isn’t entirely on their side. Joining to
combine
spells is like getting Israel and Gaza to negotiate. But your daughter – she’s been casting spells with you all along, hasn’t she?”
Paul straightened his tie. “She has.”
“And you and Mr Mercer over there.” He lifted his drink to Valentine, who did not react. “That’s how you avoided the police – by combining your strengths?”
“Yes sir.”
Payne toasted him. “You did so much with so little, Mr Mongoose. Your resourcefulness, it’s... well, I wish I’d had you at my side when I brewed Flex in upstate New York.”
His words quenched a thirst Paul hadn’t known he was starved for. Raising Aliyah, alone, with no one but Valentine and Kit to talk to, well… It had been stressful. Paul knew every parent worth their salt worried how they were screwing up their kids, but at least those parents could compare their experiences with the other parents at school.
Aliyah’s ’mancy, though – no one else was raising a child ’mancer. How could he tell how well he was doing? Tears welled in his eyes as he realized how badly he’d needed to hear
You’re doing OK
.
Then he realized: though the ’mancers had been playing for hours, there had been no flux.
He bolted up, ready to... well, he wasn’t sure how to protect Aliyah, but he would. Payne pressed him back down into his seat, surprisingly strong for a septuagenarian.
“Relax. The flux is handled.”
“But…” Paul sensed the ’mancy in the area, tried to figure out where the flux was going. “You can’t erase flux.” He remembered the one time he’d done that, back when he’d saved New York with magic forged from perfect conviction. “I mean, not unless you’re absolutely convinced what you’re doing is right…”
“When Hotplate there assaulted the Task Force – how did you stop the flux backlash from obliterating her?”
“I signed her bad luck over to me.”
Payne clucked his tongue, the bemusement of a student who’d figured out the answer before you did. “Oh, Paul. You were so close. Another year or two, you’d have figured it out.”
“Figured
what
out?”
Payne held his hand out. Rainbird deposited a smartphone into it; Payne tapped an app open before offering it to Paul. “I’d like to introduce you to my friend Eula.”
“Eula? That’s…” Paul sent tendrils of inquisitive ’mancy into the phone, which showed Sami R, the Samaritan Mutual Incident Reporting application – a cute little 1950s cartoon businessman ready to take your information. Except Paul detected a tiny dollop of ’mancy stashed away somewhere in the code.
“My End User License Agreement,” Payne said with satisfaction. “Now me, I like paper. Paper can be locked away safe, unlike all these hackers chipping away at my domain. I enjoy the feel of paper in my hands. And if I
had
to open up my forms to the Internet to remain competitive, well, I thought, those mundanes damn well
owed
me.”
Paul punched the signup button, which gave a little popup window: “Before you can use Sami R, you must agree to the following terms and conditions,” followed by seventy pages of eye-wateringly small text. The touch of a button scrolled to the bottom of the page, which said “Agree” – but his ’mancy informed him of a clause buried deep in the legalese, abstracted and dense.
“The agreement,” Paul said in wonder. “They agree to absorb your leftover flux.”
“We process five hundred claims through that app each month. Our bad luck is distributed across a pool of almost twenty thousand people. If my clan generates excessive heat, well, everyone who’s filed an electronic claim stubs a toe.”
Valentine looked up, sour-faced. “So you just dump all your shit on your claimants?”
“I said ‘excessive.’ Much of what I do here is focused on training novice ’mancers to manage their flux load – early on, as you know, is the time when SMASH is most likely to catch them. This is merely a bleed-off mechanism to help the untrained.”
Paul sighed. “And the perfect safety mechanism to teach Aliyah.”
“You mean Miss Hotplate, don’t you? And yes. We’ll get her doing ’mancy responsibly. And–”
Rainbird’s phone buzzed. “Sorry, sir – you told me to interrupt you when things were ready?”
Payne’s kingly face brightened. “So soon? Excellent.” He clapped his hands to get the ’mancers’ attention; only Aliyah ignored him, still playing with the stuffed animals. “Pardon me, friends! I’m afraid it is time for tonight’s gathering to end.”
Disappointed groans.
“That’s all right! You still have your apartments to play in. If you wish further company, well… I don’t suppose you’d care to come back, little Hotplate?”
She’s not Hotplate, she’s Aliyah
. Paul quashed an irrational surge of jealousy. Imani had picked that name out for her, naming Aliyah after Imani’s favorite singer. Calling her anything else felt like... well, like she wasn’t his daughter.
But here, she was Hotplate. She needed to be, for safety’s sake. Hopefully nobody remembered her using her name when she’d called out to them.
Yet he’d
think
of her as Aliyah.
The thought felt oddly rebellious.
Aliyah – Hotplate – looked up, eyes wide through her mask. “You couldn’t
stop
me from coming back!”
The ’mancers gave a cheer, before slinking back into their lairs. The cat lady led her cats back inside to the cluster of felines waiting for her return, the culinomancer opened the door to a bustling kitchen, the bookiemancer opened the door to a room with seven widescreen TVs tuned to sports networks. Crackles of magic fizzled as the doors slammed shut.
Valentine slouched in her hoodied Alex Mercer-skin. “Wow, are they recluses or what?”
“We build them places that are comfortable for them.” Payne extended his hand to help her off the chair. “Speaking of that, I have something I think you’ll all enjoy.”
Valentine frowned, but let Payne guide her on. He led them under a well-trimmed tree, around a huge Roman column, headed towards three doors ringing the lobby’s huge circle.
“Thing is, it’s not safe for ’mancers to be out in public. So we encourage people to stay here. That way, if they get the urge to do a little ’mancy – and I think we all know it spills out of us as we daydream – it won’t alert anyone. But if I ask them to commit to living in a single space,” Payne said, unlocking one of the rooms with a great golden key, “then I should provide the proper incentives, shouldn’t I?”
He swung open the door to reveal a spacious, three-story apartment with polished mahogany floors and a twisting spiral staircase that rose up into a cut-glass chandeliered ceiling. The floors were lined with the plush oriental rugs Paul had always preferred, the walls lined with neat brass filing cabinets packed tight with forms.
Paul stepped towards the great black desk in the room’s center, an altar to forms. That wooden desk held everything he’d ever wanted – a green ink-blotter, a rich leather deskpad, a brass lamp.
Payne reached into his breast pocket pulled out a small bouquet of four jet-black fountain pens. “No more Bic pens for you, my friend.”
Paul twirled in circles to take it all in – three stories of beauty for him to collate, fill, and organize.
“Here’s the best part,” Payne said.
He nudged an electronic pad with his elbow. The smooth, rhythmic tones of Snoop Dogg pulsed throughout the place, Paul’s favorite music, the easy flow of his teenaged years thrumming through the carpets.
“With our ’mancy, it’s easy to look up your favorite iTunes tracks,” Payne told him.
“This – this…” Paul trailed off, gaping at the wonder.
Aliyah gave it the cursory inspection of a bored kid wandering through a museum. “It’s pretty, Daddy,” she allowed. She looked up at the single bed, placed artfully high up for privacy. “But where do I sleep?”
“Oh, we have a special place for you, little Hotplate! And you, Alex.” Valentine shrugged sullenly. “If you two will come next door? You both have similar ’mancies – why, you’re almost sisters! So I figure I can show you both at once.”
Aliyah darted out of the room, bouncing with excitement. Valentine shrugged, her body rippling with uneasy black tentacles, and followed. They all walked over to the next room, and Payne produced another golden key.
“Now this – this, I think, should be enough to win any videogamemancer’s heart.”
He pushed the door in to reveal another three-story apartment – yet where Paul’s library had been all golden lamplight, Aliyah’s room was lit a bright and welcoming game-store white. The walls were decorated with colorful
Pokemon
mosaics, formed from bright plastic pixel tiles.
Huge flat-screen televisions dominated every story – each with a comfortable couch and a library of games, still in their original packaging, lined up neatly on shelves. Periodic snack food stations were slotted into the walls – a Slurpee machine, a Dunkin’ Donuts rack, a popcorn cart.
But the rows of game cartridges dominated all.
“There’s a space for every video game system we could find, from Vectrex to the PlayStation 4,” Payne explained, leading in Aliyah, who muffled a squee with both hands. “We cobbled together as complete a library as we could muster in a day – we’ll get more, of course.”
Aliyah ran over to the Nintendo DS section, which had every game on her Amazon wishlist. She took them off the shelves, comparing them to each other – then pulled them all down, a waterfall of cartridges tumbling to the ground. Aliyah scooped them up, clutched them to her chest.
“This is Hotplate’s room, so the games are rated appropriately for her age,” Payne said. “Yet if you’ll allow me to escort you to your room, Ms Mercer, the selection is – “
Valentine stood in horror, her arms flopping black pseudopods.
“You...” Her face rippled in distress. “You think I can do ’mancy in
this
corporate shithole?”