Authors: Ferrett Steinmetz
“
I
ncoming
.” Tyler had kept watch while Valentine tried to eke out some sleep.
Valentine groaned, shrugging off the pile of pee-stained towels she’d been using as blankets. They’d been running from abandoned house to abandoned house – God, Tyler had a fucking radar for shitholes to end all shitholes – kicking bums out to live in their refuse, trying to stay ahead of SMASH.
Not that Valentine had particularly high standards for living, but at least she’d kept the bedbugs out, never worried about stepping on used needles. Now she couldn’t sleep, because no matter where they went, SMASH tracked them down.
Her only consolation was Tyler’s phenomenal sex. But it seemed increasingly likely that would end, too.
She grabbed the Nintendo DS from Tyler’s hands. “God
dammit
, Tyler,” she muttered, looking at the glowing green readout fanning out from the screen, reading the incoming troop positions. “With these readings, you should have warned me twenty minutes ago.”
“These readings are a bunch of dots,” he said, combing his spiky hair with his fingers.
“You were not ready, player one,” she grumbled, knowing he was right. Tyler was good at long-term planning, but SMASH hadn’t allowed them time. The SMASH troops, brainwashed ’mancers except for their commanders, had stormed into New York City, using their Unimancy to track down magic.
“So how bad is it?” Tyler asked, shrugging on his red leather jacket and lighting up a cigarette.
“Bad.” The SMASH troops had snuck into place as they always did. If it wasn’t for Valentine’s videogamemancy, she never would have seen them coming – SMASH troops acted like one organism. If one saw you,
all
saw you. As long as they had one stealth expert on the team,
all
were stealth experts. You heard them coming when they smashed through your windows.
They were close. Too close.
Valentine brought up the map, looking for exit routes. This felt like a videogame marathon competition: fighting past her sleep-deprived muzziness to make the correct strategic decisions, reflexes failing, pressure rising.
“They’ve got eyes in the sky.” She pointed to whirling icons that signified choppers. “If we run for it, they’ll know.”
“How the hell do they keep
finding
us?”
Valentine sighed. Unlike Valentine, who could turn off her games for a while, Tyler
was
his ’mancy – much as it pained her to admit it, his chiseled abs and Brad Pitt-handsome face radiated ’mancy. She could abandon him to save herself, but…
She’d abandoned one friend already, and it had all but killed her.
“Can’t Portal my way out this time,” she muttered, watching the soldiers set up around their position, having learned from Valentine’s past escapes. “Maybe I could go all Dig-Dug and tunnel into the ground, but…”
Tyler chewed on his cigarette. “The flux.”
SMASH’s Unimancers couldn’t quite do countermagic. Yet a hundred identical magic-imbued soldiers
could
firm reality’s beliefs, increasing everyone else’s flux backlash a hundredfold.
“That’s a long way to dig,” Valentine mused. “Tunnels collapse.”
“
They
don’t have flux,” Tyler said bitterly.
“They get bad luck, same as any ’mancer. They’re distributing it to other soldiers. Like Payne. Whereas
our
bad luck gives them another coincidence to take advantage of…”
“If only we had someone like Paul.”
She whirled on him, ready to yell – he knew not to bring up Paul around her – but Tyler’s face was caught halfway between the badass Tyler Durden he pretended to be and the timid accountant he’d once been. Which was why she loved him. If all she’d seen was badass Tyler, well, she’d shrugged off lots of badass idiots. She loved his vulnerability.
And Paul.
Goddammit, she missed Paul.
He peered out of the cracked basement window. “You got a clever escape plan? I’m fresh out.”
She closed down the games radar. “No. They’ve got us cornered. We gotta fight.”
He cracked his knuckles. “This is it: ground zero. Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?”
Valentine ignored the way he quoted that fucking movie again, and instead grabbed his cheeks, bringing him nose-to-nose with her. “We do
not
surrender.” She lifted up the gun she’d shoved into her skirt. “We carry Aliyah in our heads. And we do
not
let those brainwashed bastards take her. Their goal is to capture; death is our escape.”
“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
She thwacked him. “
Stop fucking quoting.
”
He looked so wounded, so afraid to disappoint her, that she kissed him. He melted into her kiss, just another confused boy with issues to work out, having armored himself in butch philosophies because he was such soft, soft Jell-O inside.
Valentine wondered if she’d ever get over falling for men who needed her to save them.
Then she looked at the hundred soldiers waiting outside, and realized: no, she wouldn’t.
She gripped her Xbox controller. “Why are they hesitating?” she asked Tyler. His ’mancy wavered, shaken by death fears no true Tyler Durden would have. “They’re in position. But maybe if we hit them hard, we have a chance. Go on three… two… one…”
Her phone buzzed.
She arm-barred Tyler, stopping him before he dove out the window. She flashed her cracked iPhone at him, which had a text from a number she couldn’t identify:
You can always find me in the maze
.
“Well, that’s cryptic,” Tyler said.
“To
you
, maybe,” Valentine grinned, cracking open her DS.
“What are you–”
She pressed her finger to his lips. “Shh, baby. Mommy’s working.”
She fired up
Mario
. This would have to be a perfect speed-run: she had no time to get to Paul’s level. Once she did, and SMASH detected the surge in ’mancy, they would come in no matter what happened.
She smacked her lips. She’d kill for a Red Bull.
She fired Mario across the landscape, running as fast as Mario’s stubby little legs would carry him, taking advantage of every glitch. Jump, jump, hunch into the fourth pipe, hit the flag to Zone 1-2. Ricochet jump off the turtle, jump through the ceiling, warp to Zone 4….
God
, she loved a challenge.
“Their eyes are glowing,” Tyler reported. “The SMASH team. They’re staring into space.”
“Do you tap Stradivarius on the shoulder during his concerts? Shut up and–”
But Lakitu’s stupid cloud-camera hurled a spiked egg at her, and she blocked out the impending SMASH invasion to duck under it, running to Paul, clean jump over the piranha plants, into World 4-2 and towards Paul.
“Goddammit, Paul,” Valentine muttered. “Why’d we decide your castle was in World 8-2?”
The soldiers had paused for some reason, giving her precious time – but she couldn’t count on their inactivity. She had to hop in pixel-perfect jumps across needle-like peaks, where any fall meant game over…
There. The dark blue bricks of Bowser’s castle.
Paul waited there, extending his hand from the screen, pushing his fingers through the clear plastic. Which was crazy; he was no videogamemancer, but somehow he bridged the gap between their ’mancies.
Paul’s world vibrated with deadlines and demands, a place where everything fit into a neat box, and if it didn’t fit then he would build a box to fit it. Slipping into his magic felt like putting on a paper straightjacket.
But with it also came the scent of freshly washed towels, and clean floors, and safety.
She’d missed those. Even if she wasn’t entirely comfortable with that ’mancy, she now realized someone had to do it, and that someone was Paul.
The soldiers outside snapped to attention, sensing the surge in ’mancy. They fired through the window…
“Gotcha,” Paul said. His grip was sure and strong. She grabbed Tyler’s hand, and as rubber bullets bounced into the basement Paul tugged them through the Nintendo….
To land in an oppressively tidy apartment. Valentine had always thought Paul had been a little retentive when it came to his place, but this looked like Martha Stewart’s masturbatory fantasies. They plopped down on an autumn-brown leather couch, three magazines positioned on a freshly wiped glass table, a pitcher of iced tea on a tray.
It took Valentine a moment to recognize Paul, who leaned against a black-flecked marble counter, huffing with effort. He’d grown an unappetizing unshaven drunkard’s look. His stained suit looked like the paper placemat underneath an unappealing diner meal. His titanium foot was the only thing that made him look like – well, Paul.
But he also looked somehow…
comfortable
. She couldn’t quite articulate the sensation – but Paul had always seemed allergic to his own personality, vibrating with indecision. Yet moth-eaten and battered, Paul seemed more relaxed than ever.
She stormed up to him. “Say it,” she said belligerently.
He gave her a wan smile. “I was wrong.”
“Now say the better thing.”
“…and you were right.”
“Now say the sweetest thing of all.”
Paul rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “And I’ll never doubt you again.”
“Hug it out,” Valentine said, sweeping Paul up in a huge twirling embrace, the kind she knew made Tyler a little jealous. Let him be jealous. Paul was her friend, even if his awkward hugs were like being crushed by a praying mantis.
“How the hell did you do videogamemancy?” she said, squeezing him tightly. “I mean, we showed you, but… that’s
way
outside your comfort zone. The flux on that’s gotta be
crushing
you.”
“All I have to do is convince the universe the world is better if I save my daughter from Payne, and the flux dissipates. I can do
that
without blinking.”
“You righteous sonofabitch!
You found another loophole
!”
Someone coughed politely. Imani. Paul’s frosty ex. Which explained the too-clean apartment. She pierced Valentine with a jealous gaze.
Valentine stopped, not quite releasing Paul.
“Are you two….” she whispered.
“We’re concerned parents,” Paul demurred… but Valentine saw the blush darkening beneath his stubble. “She called in a threat to SMASH for you, to buy us time. Claimed I was magically altering their records, had set them up to attack two innocent people in a basement.”
“Wait – SMASH knows you’re a bureaucromancer?”
“When I undid all the records marking me as dead, I… I was noisy. Everyone knows, now.”
Valentine ticked off her first positive checkmark in Imani’s favor. “And they
believed
you when an anonymous tip called in to warn them about the mysterious bureaucromancer?”
“As a lawyer, I can be very convincing.” Imani bestowed upon Valentine the politest of possible smiles. “And in light of recent disasters, every government agency’s sensitive about catching bad PR.”
“Great. Well, look, Mrs Tsabo, I’m totally gonna Bechdel it up with you after this is over, but now we gotta discuss Payne before he kills us.”
Imani blinked, her distaste clear. She shot Paul a quizzical look. “Can you translate her for me, please?”
Paul shrugged, goofily content. “I catch about fifty percent of her on a good day.”
“I’m talking about kicking Payne’s ass,” Valentine said.
“…What the fuck is
wrong
with you people?”
Tyler paced in the living room, plunging his hands into his hair, looking more like Edward Norton than Brad Pitt.
“Jesus, we barely escaped SMASH!” Tyler spluttered. “Not ‘fought’ or ‘beat,’ mind you:
escaped
. The government is
still
hunting us. They know all our tricks. And unless things have changed, we have a multibillionaire executive with his own private psycho pyromancer murderer, who can do all the ’mancy they want and spread their bad luck out across thousands of clients, whereas every act of magic
we
do hands a critical advantage to the bad guys. You’re acting like being friends again has
fixed
everything, and... and things don’t work that way!”
Valentine made a raspberry with her armpit. “…for
you
, maybe.”
“It’s OK, Valentine.” Paul limped forward to handle a hyperventilating Tyler. “Tyler, I want you to listen to me.”
“OK…”
“My eyes are open.”
Tyler did a double-take at Paul quoting his own movie to him, then examined Paul’s face for doubt. SMASH’s havoc had eroded Tyler’s faith, but Paul’s experiences had lent him certainty.
Certainty was a deadly weapon in a ’mancer’s hands.
“You don’t need to worry, Tyler… because I’m a bureaucrat. That means I’ll utilize all my resources – and yes, that means everyone has a purpose.” Paul poured himself a glass of iced tea, drank it deep. “I’ll even give Project Mayhem a purpose.”
“But… but Project Mayhem
has
a purpose,” Tyler protested. “Mine.”
“Not anymore.”
Tyler tensed, as if preparing to punch Paul, then his tension drained away. Valentine knew this was for the best; Tyler liked playing leader, but she knew from the way he curled up trembling in her arms that he hated the responsibility.
Valentine raised her hand eagerly, as though hoping to be picked first in gym class. “Is my purpose to kick Rainbird’s fiery little ass?”
Paul cocked fingerguns in her direction.
Valentine clapped her hands together and danced.
V
alentine had led
weary soldiers through wartime Germany, she’d investigated toppled castles as a Templar knight, crept deep into underwater palaces ripped apart by libertarian civil wars. Videogames were fundamentally warfare; Valentine mused she’d spent most days wandering through wrecked places strewn with dead bodies.
But as she stepped into the Institute’s burning wreckage, she realized videogames never told the full truth.
She covered her nose as the smell hit her – the sweet barbecue scent of roasted human bodies. Videogame heroes never sweated, but here the ashes turned into a salty paste on her skin. She staggered down the burning hallways, trying not to look at the flaming piles of what used to be ’mancers.
He’d killed everyone.
Worse, he
intended
her to be scared. His flames whispered how he would rape her with fire, spitroast her over a slow flame, boil the fluids in her eyeballs.
And Valentine would creep around a corner to discover Natasha the culinomancer’s body rotating on a white-hot spike, lacquered in barbecue sauce, her face carved. She kicked in the door to the changing room to discover a hundred still-burning plushie dolls, incinerated when they’d rushed to protect the plushiemancer, the plushiemancer slumped against a wall with his eyes steaming.
She’d wanted to face down Rainbird, she reminded herself. Yet he chipped away at her certainty – and if a ’mancer wasn’t certain, she was doomed.
A flame licked her head, sizzling hair away.
She hated how his psych-out techniques were working.
“I’ve beat
Resident Evil
on game-plus, asshole!” She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. “I buried
Silent Hill
, destroyed
Dead Space
! I know what a trip to the boss level looks like. And you’re behind…”
She exuded videogame power, splintered the atrium door open.
“…this door,” she said.
The atrium’s trees burned, their branches waving like shrieking victims. Rainbird’s room had spilled out molten lava, oozing thick tendrils through the marble floor, lighting up the atrium with a hideous orange light. The ’mancers’ rooms had been turned into pyres.
Rainbird had moved his throne of knotted rebar out to the atrium, planting it on the remains of the service desk.
Of course he sat on it, gloating.
Of
course
he did.
“Aunt Valentine!” Aliyah cried, handcuffed to the throne. Valentine grinned, because this stupid fuck had done the dumbass thing of hauling Aliyah out to see her Aunt Valentine burn. Except that reminded Valentine who she’d come here to protect. Even though the air was superheated with the stench of burning metal, Valentine felt strength pouring into her.
Rainbird smiled, his teeth a gate for the furnace inside.
“Where is your papermancer?” he asked. “What plans does he have to defeat me?”
“No plan.” Valentine cracked her knuckles. “I’m just the wrecking ball.”
She stepped carefully over Mrs Vinere’s burnt bones.
“Did you have to fucking kill them?” Valentine asked. “They were
people
, you asshole. Not evidence to be ditched when the feds got close.”
“They gave us nothing. They should expect nothing in return.”
“They should have kicked your ass to the curb long ago.”
Rainbird stepped down from his rebar chair, circling Valentine. The scent of ’mancy filled the air, like stormclouds pregnant with lightning. “They would fail. I’ve killed hundreds of ’mancers.”
Valentine stepped over broken glass, keeping him at a careful distance. “People like me.”
Rainbird shrugged, as though their deaths weren’t worth considering. His hands blazed with fire, shifting, probing Valentine’s defenses for weakness. “We offered the rebels safe haven. They wanted a different way.”
“
That’s
why New York’s been so quiet, you insane motherfucker. You slaughtered the ones who didn’t fit into your little petting zoo.”
“It was a good plan!” Rainbird made a feint; Valentine didn’t bite. “I should have incinerated the papermancer on the spot when I realized he knew who we were…”
“Ah, but you’re not a real fire now, are you?” Valentine shot back. “
Real
flame burns whatever it touches.
You
were terrified to displease your master. You’re an enslaved candle….”
“
Enough!
”
Rainbird lifted his hands, and a torrent of lava plunged down through the broken windows overhead–
Except Valentine slid across the floor on a sheet of ice towards Rainbird, crouched low, one foot pointed straight at Rainbird’s feet as she shot towards him like a speed skater. She smashed into his ankles, popping him high into the air.
“
You can’t–
” he roared, flailing as he tumbled backwards.
But Valentine ignored him, and, summoning a great globe of ice between her palms, shoved it in Rainbird’s direction. The snowball hit him, iceflakes hissing into the lava around him – but it froze him in midair as though he were a paused movie. His body was rimed with a blue frost-sheen, suspended above the ground as if designed to defy gravity.
Valentine’s crinoline skirt melted away to reveal a blue ninja’s outfit, her mouth and nose covered by a mask, a bandana tied around her head.
A deep announcer’s voice boomed out of nowhere: “Sub-Zero.”
“Welcome to my fighting game, motherfucker,” Valentine said, screaming “
Mortal Kombat!
” before uppercutting Rainbird high into the air.
Rainbird arced up, dazed, and Valentine launched herself at him with a spinning flip-kick, catching him in the mouth. She slammed him up against a pillar, and when he tried to slip past she swept his legs out from under him again, then roundhouse-elbowed him when he got up.
Aliyah cheered.
“
Enough!
” He sank his fingers into the pillar. The building shook, magma moving deep underground as Rainbird’s anger sank into the roots of the earth, the pillar toppling towards Valentine. She rolled away, landing on her backside.
“You think you can defeat
me
!?” Rainbird roared, stalking forward. “I’ve slaughtered ’mancers for years! I know all your foolish tricks. I know your–”
A slippery pool of ice bloomed beneath Rainbird’s feet, and he did an awkward dance as he avoided falling flat on his ass. Valentine smashed her foot into his jaw.
“You don’t even know not to walk into a Ground Freeze!” she sneered. “That’s
Mortal Kombat
101!”
She caught him under the chin with a double-fisted uppercut – launching him through the ceiling, sending him high into the night sky before he landed with a lung-emptying
whoof
on the roof. Valentine leapt up after him, bursting through in a spray of debris.
“Fine,” Rainbird said, clasping his badge. It glowed, siphoning his flux away. “You want to play games? Even games fear the firelord.”
He leaned over and vomited a spear of fire straight into Valentine’s gut. It knocked her backwards, sending her tumbling towards the roof’s edge. She patted out the flames on her gi, panicked.
“Hey,
that
move’s not in the book!”
Rainbird rose into the air in a corona of flame. “This is not a game, you one-eyed fool. This is murder.”
Valentine did a high flip-kick to try to catch him in the face again; Rainbird caught her ankle, smashed her into the ground. She rolled away as Rainbird punched down hard enough to send shockwaves of force, sent Valentine flying.
Before she could regain her footing, Rainbird had landed on her, pinning her to the ground. Valentine plunged ice knives into his leg; they hissed into boiling water. She formed an ice clone of herself, rolling out from under him; he reached back with a knotted fire-whip and slammed her back into place. She broke his nose with a well-placed palm strike, but Rainbird broke her cheek, shattered her shoulder, rammed her head into the buckled ground.
“Did you think you could defeat me?” He loomed over her, his broken nose dribbling blood onto her face.
Valentine coughed. “Wasn’t my plan, no.”
“You said you had no plan.”
“Aunt Valentine lies a lot,” said Aliyah.
Valentine craned her neck to look over at tiny Aliyah, standing in a perfect warrior’s stance behind Rainbird, her pale old-man’s face tattooed with a streak of red:
The God of War.
The thick chain looped around his neck, yanking him off Valentine. Aliyah clutched her Nintendo DS, filling with magical force – and then heaved, sending Rainbird on a high arc overhead, the chain straining, before smashing him face-first into the cracked roof. Aliyah pulled him back, Hulk-smashing him in every direction, grinning like a girl at her birthday party.
“Thank you for sneaking me the Nintendo, Daddy!” Aliyah said gleefully, sending Rainbird’s body into the roof again and again and again. “Best present ever!”
“Gah!” Rainbird said, melting the chain – he catapulted off the end, sailing high into the night, then caught himself on a cloud of fire. “Where is the papermancer!
Where is he
!?”
“You pay attention to me!” Aliyah yelled, snapping her other chain out and dragging him back down to earth. “Remember? Your special project?!”
She smashed Rainbird through an air conditioning unit. Aliyah advanced upon him, flicking her knives in his direction, gashing his scarred skin.
“You said the only power one has comes from killing,” she told him. “Maybe the only power
worth
having comes from caring!”
“Maybe it’s just fucking
power
, little girl!” he screamed, incinerating her knives. He bore down upon her as she kicked at him. She caught him a high hard one right to the groin, but Rainbird inhaled to fill his torso with healing flame.
“This isn’t about goodness,” Rainbird told her, forcing Aliyah back against the roof. “It isn’t about righteousness. It’s about who has the power to destroy.”
Aliyah smashed her palm into his throat.
Rainbird backhanded Aliyah hard; she landed dazed, her Nintendo DS spinning across the rooftop. Rainbird spat broken teeth, turning to Valentine.
“Two ’mancers. And neither could defeat me.”
“Didn’t expect to,” Valentine said. “Paul promised me I could get my licks in first.”
“Who, then? Who will defeat me now?”
Valentine turned to look at the scrawny, filthy man climbing over the edge of the roof. A man dressed in what once had been a nice suit, once-neatly-combed hair askew, heaving himself up the ladder on his artificial foot.
“That’d be Paul,” Valentine said serenely.
Rainbird choked out a disbelieving laugh – but then realized:
Paul was not afraid of him.
Paul still looked more like a mugged accountant than an avatar of destruction. But as Paul adjusted his tie to face down Rainbird, he radiated indomitability.
Paul held up a manila folder, brandishing it before him like a shield.
“On September 14th, 1993,” Paul said, “The Red Cross diagnosed you with severe spinal scoliosis. They gave you a TLSO back brace, which you wore for the next two years. In 1997, UNICEF gave you another back brace for final adjustments.”
Rainbird shook his head, unimpressed. “So?”
“Not anymore.”
Paul ripped the medical files in half.
Rainbird’s back convulsed as something was torn from him – a timeline of safety and healing sundered, bones curving painfully into new shapes. He lunged forwards, but his left leg went numb as his spine pinched around now-deadened nerves–
He tumbled to the ground, years of muscle memory stolen.
But his twisted body still coursed with flame.
“I’ll burn y–”
“In 1996, Doctors Without Borders prescribed a course of primaquine and intravenous fluids to treat your malaria.” Paul said, his voice chillingly calm. “That didn’t happen, either.”
He ripped the medical files in half again, and Rainbird’s body convulsed, gnawed at itself, his ribs popping out as what had once been a treated case of malaria turned into a recurrent case that had chewed young Rainbird’s body for years.
“I’ll devour you,” Rainbird said. “You won’t–”
Paul knelt over Rainbird’s body, now twisted with sores. He held up one record: a UNICEF Child Protection Section report.
“I’m not sure what happens if I tear this,” Paul said conversationally. “It’s the task force who helped demobilize the child soldier squad you worked for. The local workers who pretended you weren’t a ’mancer because they hoped you might recover in America. The ones who handed you over to Payne, thinking him a kindly benefactor.” Paul waggled the paper, looking at it with genuine curiosity. “If I undo this, what happens? Do you wind up back in Sierra Leone? Or would you be dead on the spot, executed for your crimes?”
Rainbird fell silent, beaten.
“Aliyah,” Paul said. “Come here.”
Aliyah’s
God of War
outfit melted away, leaving a guilty child. Paul placed the Nintendo DS in her hands solemnly, then stepped away, leaving her to face Rainbird.
“You got a rough deal, Aliyah,” he told her. “A lot of bad things will happen to you. People want to kill or brainwash or control you, all for reasons you had no choice in. That’s not your fault.
“And you’re right. We do have to be strong – strong enough to fight our enemies.
“But killing people doesn’t make you strong, Aliyah. Rainbird can do it. Any moron with a knife can do it. Killing is literally the easiest way to solve a problem. Just throw anyone who disagrees with you in a grave. And...” Paul gestured down at the burning bodies in the atrium, conveying with a gesture how effective Rainbird’s plan would have been if Paul hadn’t stopped him. “The shame is, killing people
works
. More often than we’d care to admit.”
Aliyah hugged her Nintendo against her chest. “Why are you telling me this, Daddy?”
“Because I love you, kid. I’ll love you no matter what you become. But Anathema gave you too much power, too soon. I can’t stop you from doing things anymore. For better or for worse, you’ve got to make your own choices – and whatever you become, I’ll stay with you. So.”
Paul drew in a deep breath.