Authors: Ferrett Steinmetz
A
liyah dropped the cartridges
, concerned, then ran over to take Valentine’s hand – and kept it there, even though Valentine’s hand was a squamous mass of cilia.
“Aunt Valentine, this is everything we need.” She looked terribly hurt.
“Oh, bullshit. Look, I...” Her face drooped into her old Valentine self. “I can’t talk to you guys when I’m shapeshifting.”
“Ms Mercer, if anyone sees you–”
“
Can
it, G-Man,” Valentine said, whirling on Payne. “This is between me, Paul, and the kid.
Not
you.”
Payne held up his hands. “Then I’ll leave you to discuss this amongst yourselves.” He exited the room, Rainbird trailing reluctantly behind him, closing the door.
Aliyah pressed a spanking new Nintendo DS into Valentine’s hands. “Aunt Valentine, this has all the videogames we ever need! We can play whatever we want! And you and I, we can…” She looked shamed for reasons she didn’t quite understand. “We can sit on a
comfortable
couch, like at Mommy’s house, and play in a clean place…”
“Oh, no. No no no. You…” She swallowed, raising the new Nintendo DS. “This is a door prize. Some rich asshole gave it to us. It cost us nothing and it means nothing.” She reached over to pluck Aliyah’s old Nintendo DS from her hands. “This, Aliyah – this, I saved up for weeks to get, working a minimum-wage job, putting away my money, sneaking into GameStop to play snippets on my lunchbreak.
This
was four months of labor and longing, brought into this world like a child, and when I finally got my hands on one, well, you bet your ass I treasured it.”
“But you gave it to me.”
“Yeah.” Valentine knelt, getting down on eye level with Aliyah. “When I saw a burned little girl in a hospital, I gave her my best toy ever, because that kid needed some love.” She clutched the Nintendo DS, touching it to Aliyah’s forehead as if trying to bestow a blessing. “This
is
love, Aliyah.”
She took the new Nintendo, cocked her arm back, and pitched it like a fastball into a
Squirtle
tile decoration. “
That
,” she said, “is marketing.”
Aliyah flushed with anger. “You broke that! That was mine!”
“Who the hell cares? Hang on a sec.” Valentine flung open the door. “Hey, Flameface! Our Nintendo DS is broken! Can you req us another one?”
Rainbird did a double-take. “Of course. I’ll–”
She slammed the door on him. “You see, Aliyah? It means nothing to him. So how can it mean something to you?”
Paul felt like he should interrupt, just to reassert his status as a parent, but as usual he wasn’t sure how to disturb the flow of Aliyah and Valentine’s relationship.
Aliyah swept her hand out, encompassing the three stories’ worth of games, the television sets, the hammock of plushie Pikachus. “Aunt Valentine, we don’t have to play the same game over and over again. We can try anything.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She clutched Aliyah’s shoulders. “When I grew up, all we had was one cartridge. It’s all my parents could afford. That’s how I found the magic in it – I played it over and over again. We’re not playing the same game because we can’t afford it – we’re playing it because you only find the awesome secrets when you keep investigating the old things.”
“Well,
I
get bored!” Aliyah said, huffing behind her mask.
Valentine clenched her fist between her breasts, as if Aliyah had struck her.
I introduced her to gaming
, Paul remembered Valentine saying.
But she’s developed her own tastes
.
“Valentine,” Paul said. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”
Valentine held Aliyah’s gaze, but neither broke. They both seemed to expect some sort of apology. Then Valentine sniffed haughtily, and walked away with Paul.
“Look, Valentine…” Paul stopped. The space he’d ushered her to had a blinding spotlight shining down and a 60” television blaring
Dragonball Z
cartoons in their face. “Hang on, let me shut this off–”
Valentine snapped her fingers; all the electronics in the area sizzled and went black, giving them a shadowy respite. Aliyah had curled up in a
Spongebob Squarepants
chair, pointedly playing a new game.
“You didn’t short out Aliyah’s–”
“I’m not gonna fuck up her room any more. I just pulled the plug. And take off that fucking luchador mask, Paul. This is close enough to a Mexican soap opera as it is.”
Paul tugged it off, feeling blissfully cool air prickle his scalp. “OK, look. I know this isn’t your comfort zone–”
“You can say
that
again.”
“But you know, this is just what Payne thought you wanted. If you want to buy your own stuff, well, great,
do
that. You never have enough space in your closets, so… why not customize this big space until you’re happy?”
She dangled Paul’s mask in front of him. “And when I bring some new guy home to fuck, what am I going to tell him? Mexican wrestlers are my kink?”
Paul sagged. “…oh.”
“Maybe the other ’mancers here have abandoned their earthly pleasures, Paul, but me? I’ve got a few itches I need scratched. Not that the swing clubs are any place to find a boyfriend, but I… even if I can’t have a lover in case I kill the fucker – again – I need something more than a Hitachi. I need warm flesh. I need to feel
needed
.”
Paul rubbed his temples. “Hoo boy.”
“‘Hoo boy’ as in you think I shouldn’t do that?”
“‘Hoo boy’ as in, ‘I think you of all people shouldn’t have to live as a nun.’”
She closed her eyes, gave Paul a pained smile. “
Thank
you, Paul.”
“But it’s past eleven, and it’d be a two-hour ride back to our apartment, and you’re always a little crabby after you’ve fought a battle for your life.”
She held up a finger to interrupt him. “I would have
clobbered
that soot-streaked asshole, Paul. That’s what I do. You need some firepower to back up your management skills, and I? Am your firepower.”
She trembled with pride. Though Valentine was a pain in the ass, her protective belligerence sprang straight from her love for them both – and her insistence that Paul needed so much protection filled Paul with an uneasy mixture of love and helplessness.
He hugged her. She patted him on the back, stiffly; she’d once likened Paul’s hugs to being slowly encased by a mantis.
“All right, Tsabo, break it up, break it up,” she muttered, pushing him away.
“Just… let’s give it two weeks here. Can you go two weeks without sex?”
“I can go two weeks without food, Paul. Doesn’t mean I
want
to.”
“I know. But… did you see how happy she looked? Playing with the other ’mancers?”
Valentine looked over her shoulder at Aliyah, half asleep in the chair, refusing to stop playing her Nintendo even though she kept nodding off between changing game cartridges. A reluctant grin crooked across Valentine’s mouth. “…yeah.”
“And you know she’d be heartbroken if you left, right?”
Valentine winked her good eye at Aliyah. Aliyah
hmpf
ed and turned away, but it was proof Aliyah hadn’t been paying nearly as much attention to the game as she’d have liked Valentine to believe.
“All right, you silver-tongued bastard. Two weeks.”
“Who knows? Maybe you’ll find love here.”
Valentine shivered. “If that plushiemancer makes a move on me, I’ll teleport his ass into a game of
Resident Evil
.”
“Thanks.” Paul squeezed her shoulder, then went over to Aliyah, who thrashed to protest that she hadn’t been sleeping. “Hey, sweetie. I think it’s time I tucked you in.”
“OK.” Aliyah got up, shambled towards the door, dragging the Nintendo DS with her.
“Wait. You don’t want to sleep in your new room?”
She rubbed sleep from her eyes. “I don’t like sleeping away from you.”
Paul almost lectured her on how his room was right next door if she needed him… But the days when Aliyah still wanted to cuddle up with him were coming to an end.
He stood, transfixed by that bittersweet realization that one day she would not need him, and – maybe within the year, at the rate she was progressing through the rebellion of her prematurely-accelerated adolescence – one day she’d retch when he tried to accompany her in public.
And it was their first night here, he mused. Safer to stick together.
“Come on, sweetie.” And though it always hurt his stump to pick up Aliyah’s weight, he scooped her up in his arms and teetered over to his new and glorious apartment, ready to curl up next to his precious little girl.
R
ainbird’s room
is three stories of slotted metal catwalks, each crisscrossed over an industrial cauldron of molten iron. Breathing the superheated air here cooks Rainbird’s tongue into brown hamburger, but his body draws strength from the heat and heals into living flesh again. He spends hours examining his fingers as he dips them into a sluice of processed lava, watching his fingernails sizzle and peel back…
He sits on a throne of red-hot rebar, and watches what burns on the brick fireplace before him. Sometimes it’s wood. Mostly, he straps his wriggling fuel into place before he ignites it.
The door opens.
Aliyah enters.
She stands on the catwalks, wearing a tiny suit of power armor, all curves and shiny orange plating: the Varia suit from
Metroid
. Underneath, she still wears the pajamas she wore when she used ’mancy to put her dad to sleep and sneak away.
Slowly, she removes her helmet and shakes her dreadlocked hair out.
There are a thousand ways to protect yourself from lava in videogames; Aliyah could have taken the form of Charizard or written “snowstorm” in
Scribblenauts
or extinguished this room in a variety of ways.
She wants Rainbird to see her face.
Rainbird doesn’t get up.
“You burned,” he tells her. “You almost died in your father’s apartment. The smoke blistered your lungs.”
“Yes.” Her burn-scarred face is determined, not showing any fear – or, at least, not any fear of
him
.
“You dream of fire every night.”
“Yes.”
“You know he can’t protect you.”
“I have to protect
him
,” Aliyah says, a note of childish – petulance? urgency? – in her voice. “Anathema would have cut him open if I hadn’t stopped her. Then, the police had him on the
ground
. Tied up. Nerve gassed. Almost dead. And if I hadn’t come when I did…”
She shakes her head, trying to clear the image. That is what Aliyah dreams of – fire, dead fathers, mothers with husbands who want to kill her, and no one in the world strong enough but her.
Maybe we do need to kill them
, her father had told her.
The question is, do you want to be the person who does that?
Someone has to be.
She squeezes her eyes shut, locking the tears tight. And when she opens them, Rainbird stands next to her. He keeps a respectful distance. She watches the flesh on his ribs burn away, opening up a latticed glimpse into the blackened cinder of Rainbird’s beating heart.
Tiny glowing faces peek out, grimacing with each heartbeat, shrieking silently before going quiet again – all the men and women Rainbird has burned alive. He pulls his ribs open, affording her a better look.
Though Aliyah shudders at the sight, she refuses to look away from the tiny souls trapped in that ashen heart.
Rainbird nods, sympathetically. “You want to be strong.”
“I killed only one person. And I... I think about her
all the time
. She
cried
when I killed her. I took away everything from her. And if I feel sorry for some murdering buh-
b
-word who was going to... she was stabbing my father with a
spear
! And even then, if I had to do it again, I don’t know if... if I…” Aliyah swallows. “So I
can’t
be sorry, can I?”
Rainbird pulls flesh down over his ribs as though tugging a shirt over himself. When he grins, the nerves in his teeth are glowing filaments. “No. Of
course
you can’t.”
“But Dad, and Valentine, they... they keep trying to
stop
me, and if I listen then who’s going to protect them?”
Rainbird smiles as though he understands completely. “They’re afraid of what you could be, Aliyah. Whereas
I
think people should be like fire. They should consume everything they can grasp to grow strong. And never you fear, Aliyah, for I know fire’s most cherished secret…”
Aliyah gazes up at him, trembling with relief. The door closes, pushed shut by a waft of burning gas.
“…I’ll teach you how to regret nothing.”
P
aul hated
the way he always felt nervous whenever he had a lunch date with Imani. She was his ex-wife, for God’s sake. Whatever they’d had, it was over. They only got together to discuss issues like Aliyah – which, of course, was precisely what they
would
be discussing today.
So why did he feel like he had to impress her?
He’d chosen a nice little Indian restaurant that had opened last week to good Yelp reviews – not someplace well known yet. Imani liked fine dining, but more than that, she liked the thrill of discovery, and in that Paul had always been happy to indulge her. And the place was well kept, trimmed with fresh green plants and the gaudy red and gold wallpaper that Paul was never sure was actual Indian tradition or just what New Yorkers expected of an Indian restaurant.
Then Imani came in.
Paul forgot all about the restaurant.
She dressed stylishly as always, shrugging off her long tan coat, revealing an Egyptian goddess clad in a gold and tan sheath dress that showed off her long legs.
She paused in the doorway, troubled, looking for all the world like a dame in some 1950s detective novel about to hire a private investigator. Which was ridiculous, he reminded himself: she was a corporate lawyer, working ten-hour days, had squeezed the space out of her schedule for a lunchtime talk.
Then she smiled as she saw Paul, striding towards him with both arms open, as though his presence had chased her fears away.
He hated hugging her. Not only was it awkward standing up with his prosthetic leg, not only did he worry about smearing blood on her fine dress with his ever-bleeding left arm, but that flash of casual intimacy always reminded him of the tenderness they no longer shared.
He hugged her anyway.
“Good choice for lunch, I think.” She brushed off her dress, picked up the menu. “Though I’m going to win this time.”
“Who says I’ll let you?”
She rolled her eyes; between that and her coiffured mop of hair, the gesture reminded Paul very much of Aliyah. “You’ll let me.”
He chafed at her announcement, but knew he would let her.
She picked out her meal, then crossed her hands across her lap, politely; table manners ran deep in the Dawson family. But that worn, sorrowful look had returned to her face.
“So.” She whispered so the waiter couldn’t hear her. “Does she still hate me, Paul?”
“She doesn’t
hate
you, Imani. She’s just... she’s a very confused girl right now.”
She clutched her fingers once, twice, as if trying to grip something to calm her nerves. “She hasn’t answered my calls in ten days.”
Paul cringed. Aliyah had been caught up in playing with the other ’mancers, she’d done ’mancy all day and crashed into bed at night. Though even with a full night’s sleep, she still dropped off into naps throughout the day.
Did
doing new ’mancy tire children? It never did him, but…
“I didn’t realize it had been that long,” Paul apologized. “I’m sorry, I should have made her call…”
“It’s fine, Paul. It’s just… you said you had something to tell me about her?”
Paul braced himself. “Oh yeah.” He fished out a brochure from a manila envelope. Here’s the part where Paul lied. “I’ve found a school for Aliyah. It’s upstate. A dorm school. Specializing in girls with post-traumatic stress disorder. Which, honestly, is what I think Aliyah has.”
“That’s what her therapists say, yes.”
Imani reached over and took the leaflet, perused it. The brochure had been printed yesterday. The LisAnna Foundation For Children’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder hadn’t existed until two days ago. Hell, it hadn’t had a name until yesterday, when Mr Payne had decided to name it after his sisters who’d died in the war.
The site for the school had been purchased four days ago – a location Aliyah had insisted be
very
far away from the Institute, because she didn’t want Mommy and stupid, stupid David to know where she
really
lived.
But on the Internet, this newly minted school was a venerable institution. Payne had demonstrated to Paul how the Internet was a large storehouse of bureaucratic records. Paul had infiltrated ICANN’s opal-secured servers to insert records so the LisAnna Foundation had apparently created a website in 2004, inserted reviews into hundreds of web pages from various parents, rearranged Google’s database entries so the LisAnna Foundation would come up as a hit if Imani Dawson searched for it.
That’s what he’d been doing with
his
time, and Paul felt guilty he hadn’t checked in on whether Imani and Aliyah were talking.
Imani folded the leaflet. “Can you afford it?”
“There are government programs to help assist.”
She hid an exhausted smile behind the brochure. “Of course
you’d
get funding.”
“Now, it’s a ninety-minute drive away,” he said, holding up his hands to ward off her aggravated interruptions. “So you’d need to rent a car. And they’re set on creating structure for their students, so you can’t visit without making an appointment in advance. I know you–”
She slid the brochure into her purse. “It’s fine, Paul. They’re professionals. We need professionals.” She trailed off into a defeated silence.
The waiter came by. Imani ordered, having forgotten about the food game – but as usual, she’d unconsciously homed in on the one dish on the menu Paul was dying to order: the tikka masala.
He could have ordered something else. But how could they have a mealtime battle if they both had the same thing?
According to the rules of the game, Paul had arrived first and so had the right to order first. Yet Imani looked so dejected over sending Aliyah off to the Foundation that he ordered the tandoori chicken instead.
Once the waiter shuffled off, Paul said: “After the court battles for custody, I thought you’d go balls to the wall to stop me from putting her in a private school.”
She rearranged her fork and knife to be perpendicular, an oddly shy gesture. “I don’t know, Paul. Maybe I should. But… I don’t…” She gave the plate a rueful smile. “Oh, God, Paul I thought
you’d
be the bad parent. You’d been distant those last few years, working late, never coming home – then Aliyah gets burned and you all but commit suicide, leaving her in the hospital to go fight ’mancers.”
Paul felt sick. He
was
the bad parent. He’d charged after Valentine to save her, gotten kidnapped, and in the weeks he’d been held hostage, well… that was when Aliyah had played videogames over and over again, sick with pain, trying not to think about her maybe-dead Daddy.
If Paul had been a better father, Aliyah wouldn’t be a ’mancer.
Imani straightened her napkin. “But I keep thinking:
If I’m such a good goddamned mother, how come Aliyah is getting worse?
And I’ve rounded up all the help I can get, every therapist and teacher and consultant, and… she only seems content when she’s with you. So maybe you should…”
She took a long sip of her water, embarrassed.
“Maybe
you
should hire the people to look after her,” she finished.
It would never occur to Imani to help Aliyah without assistance.
“It’s not like I won’t visit,” Imani stressed. “I’m not giving up on her. I’m just… I need to shift strategies.”
Paul’s stomach clenched with guilt. How could he help her be a better mother to Aliyah without telling her everything? If SMASH captured Aliyah now, that would lead them straight back to not just Paul, but Mr Payne and all the ’mancers at the Institute.
Paul reached across to take Imani’s hands. She let him, which inspired a wave of almost terrifying gratitude.
“She thinks you’re a little scary sometimes,” he told her. “Telling her SMASH might haul her away if she won’t stop playing games?”
She stiffened. “She knows ’mancers don’t start until their mid-twenties. I know lots of kids love videogames, but… why take a chance? Who knows what could happen twenty years down the line?”
He almost told her about Aliyah; didn’t. “Yet when you tell her she could become a ’mancer, well… Aliyah gets scared.”
She closed her eyes, breathing through her nose; her old trick to calm herself before she yelled. Her hands tightened, grinding his fingers. “
I
get scared, Paul. Those fuckers are running around loose in the city, and nobody can catch them. A ’mancer almost burned my daughter to death.
Twice
. A ’mancer crushed my husband’s leg. A ’mancer ruined
our marriage
, Paul. Those fucking ’mancers, Paul… they’ve hurt us
so much
.”
The ’mancer didn’t ruin our marriage
, he wanted to tell her.
I fell in love with magic.
And I couldn’t tell you
.
Imani’s fingers traced a light circle in the air, a half a shrug, then tossed her anger away. “But you’re right, you’re right. If it scares her, I need to back off. I suppose all the dinnertime conversations with David weren’t helping.”
“…what’s David doing?”
She leaned forward. “Oh, you’ll be interested in this. You love hunting ’mancers. He’s got a lead on some real advanced hardware for finding ’mancy – hi-tech Israeli stuff. SMASH doesn’t have the jurisdiction to use that kind of tech but the Task Force? They’ll be unleashing some advanced stuff
very
soon.”
Paul prickled with fear sweat. “Where’d he get the money? The mayor never gave
me
black-book funding.”
“David’s squeezed all his connections for this operation. This is... well, you know what a high-profile position it is.” She coughed politely, overlooking Paul’s traditional allergy to politics. “If he can get Psycho Mantis when you couldn’t, that puts him on an upwards trajectory. He’s aiming to head up SMASH.”
Paul froze.
Paul remembered what Payne had told him to do with the faked identification, to hide them forever from David:
Make the trail lead back to SMASH, Paul. Force him to start requesting records from the bureau he’s in competition with. A proud man like David would sooner die than work with people who might steal his thunder
.
If David wasn’t jealous of SMASH, he might have found Paul already.
“But David’s not military,” Paul spluttered.
“Won’t matter if he shows enough results. And he is hell-bent on getting Psycho Mantis.”
The waiter brought their lunch. Imani took a dainty bite of the tikka masala and did a happy wiggle dance in her chair. Paul took a mouthful of a decent, if unexceptional, tandoori chicken. She offered him her bite, which he took, and felt the tasty heat of turmeric-laced tomatoes.
“You win,” he admitted.
“Sometimes you lose,” she shrugged, scooping half her masala onto her bread plate and pushing it towards him. “But I wouldn’t worry, Paul. David’s driving himself hard, because, hardware or no, he knows no one’s better than you at hunting ’mancers. And if
you
couldn’t catch Psycho Mantis, what hope does David have?”
Paul imagined a competent Task Force run by people determined to catch him, and thought David had a very good chance indeed.