Flex (29 page)

T
he three closest savages
, still clad in bright muumuu dresses, barreled towards toward them. “
Zap
them, Valentine!”

“She shut that shit down,” Valentine said. “
Nothing
works. This whole area is nothing but rocks and fire.”

“Gunpowder still works.” Lenny fired five times. Three bullets hit center mass, sending what once had been three muumuu-clad grandmothers tumbling to the ground.

Lenny looked down in his gun in astonishment. “I was best on the range,” he muttered. “God damn if I’m not best in real life, too.”

“Lenny,” Paul whispered. “I know you hate ’mancers. And yeah, I am one. But I need to get to Samaritan Mutual. I can fix this if I get there. And” – he looked at the other hulking figures sprinting toward them – “I need to get there in one piece.”

Lenny spat on the ground. “Look, buddy. At the moment, doesn’t matter if you’re Satan himself. She wants you dead, I want you alive.”

“Not all ’mancers are bad, Lenny – some of us–”

“Quiet.” Lenny squeezed off two more shots. “You hid your evil, and you
will
pay. But I believe you ’mancers will kill each other off, just like humans have civil wars. You can serve as my SMASH team today, Paul.” He gestured at the incoming. “We’ll use you to kill her, and the Order will mop up the rest of your kind.”

“The Order?”

“Doesn’t matter. For today, and one day only, Paul… I’ll count you as a cop. And we
will
get you a ride.”

“We?” Valentine asked.

“Fuck, yes.” Lenny tapped his badge. “We.” And he shouted across the field to the still-standing cops:

“
Attention all officers!
New orders!
Paul fuckin’ Tsabo, killer of ’mancers, needs to get to Samaritan to kill this bitch! I know we’re in the shit now, but it’s time! Protect and goddamned
serve
!
”

Two officers tackled the two nearest savages, risking their lives against much burlier opponents. Paul knew why: only Lenny was irresponsible enough to fire gunshots into a crowd like this. Other cops burst from the crowd, intercepting the savages with nightsticks, overmatched as one man but falling upon them in twos and threes, desperate to stop them.

“
No!
” Anathema screamed. Spiked pit traps yawned open underneath them; others fell as clubs appeared in the savages’ hands. “
I said kill the papermancer!
” And enough of the brutes smashed past the opposition, forcing back the line.

But Paul felt a thrill. This was the epitome of civilization: underpaid cops with every reason to run, ready to give their lives against impossible odds.

Reinforcements arrived. Fresh officers pushed their way through the chaos to surround Valentine and Paul with clear plastic riot shields, escorting them to the park’s edge. They yelled and re-yelled orders, keeping communications up when the radio had failed them. Furious beasts were pushed back with truncheons.

Lenny and the other officers fought their way to the waiting motorcycles. Traffic had stalled, as fleeing drivers had abandoned their vehicles.

The stars went dark. The lights above them flickered out, replaced with an ominous gloom.

“She’s coming.” Valentine started the engine.

“Get the fuck out and let
men
handle this,” Lenny said. Paul felt Anathema’s sickening ’mancy washing over them, killing the motor – and then Valentine kicked it back to life.

“You can stop my fighting,” she muttered with deep satisfaction. “But
nobody
can stop a good racing game.”

“I said
kill them
!”

As they roared off toward Samaritan, Paul saw Lenny in the rearview mirror, bringing his gun up as Anathema and a horde of savages bore down upon them. He stepped into line beside his fellow officers… and then they turned a corner, and Lenny was gone.

“
T
ell me you have a plan
.”

Valentine pulled up next to the Samaritan Mutual building. It was a different world here; the violence hadn’t spread out this far yet, but it was coming. Thousands of maniacs were infiltrating New York, killing the softest targets.

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Your job is twofold: first, something very bad will happen when I’m done.”

“The flux?”

“…yeah.” Paul breathed in through his nose, ignoring the stinging in his eyes. “I won’t be able to contain it this time. But you will.”

Valentine froze.

“I can help you, Paul. We’ll work ’mancy together again, split the load…”

“No. This will… I don’t even know if it can work. But if it does, the flux load will do almost as much damage as Anathema did. Maybe this building will collapse, maybe a meteor strike will hit New York… something. You’ve got to ensure my cure isn’t as bad as the disease. There’s no ’mancer better equipped for that – you’re all about special effects. You could turn a collapsing building into a cutscene. The flux wouldn’t be as bad.”

“Paul, I told you – you’re not allowed to commit suicide–”

“This isn’t suicide. It’s sacrifice.”

Her shoulders slumped. “…what’s my second job?”

Paul pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to keep it together. “You told Aliyah Daddy was in the maze. Show her where I am so… so she doesn’t look all her life. Give her peace.”

Valentine didn’t cry; she’d been hurt too many times for that. Her inevitable reaction, Paul realized, was to wad the pain up where no one would see and keep going.

It made him feel better. She’d be all right. He bureaucromanced his apartment, which was oddly calming; no matter how Anathema tried to rip things down to huts and caves, there would always be rents to pay.

“…There. Your name’s on the lease. It’s rent-controlled. Cheap. It won’t stay if you burn it off to flux, but…”

“…you did your best,” Valentine finished.

Paul moved to hug her goodbye. Valentine crossed her arms.
She’s already walling me off
, he thought, then felt miserable as he realized he was just one more proof the universe had nothing good in store for Valentine DiGriz.

“Do it,” she said, turning away from him.

The air was cold in the lobby. Cold as death.

A
s he rattled
the lock on his door, the papers peeked out of the drawers, playful as puppies. But when they saw him, they crumpled with concern.

“This is it, boys,” he said. “You ready?”

They straightened like soldiers, creases flattened.

“Let’s go look out the window.”

The view from his floor had never been exciting: a sidewalk, a subway entrance, and another skyscraper. But Paul had always liked looking down at the street, the thousands of people making their ways along the sidewalk. He’d always envisioned them going to happy homes, cheerful families, warm meals – a 1950s view of America, he knew, but he also knew there was a lot more love in the city than any news program ever let on.

The papers marched behind him, a funeral procession. SMASH was coming for him even if he survived.

He focused on the street again. The savages hadn’t arrived yet. 1010 WINS was knitting isolated reports into a coherent story – but for now, there were still folks headed home after a long workday. He felt affection for them, even love.

He’d need more than love to turn back time.

But he had bent time, hadn’t he? He’d called in SMASH forces hours before he’d stepped into Valentine’s basement. He’d had his leg sent to a place he hadn’t even known existed when the order was placed.

If bureaucromancy couldn’t backdate a spell, what could?

He filled his lungs with air – and filled his heart with everything he believed. He believed rules made life better. He believed organizations made humans play fairly. He believed that good records were sometimes all that stood between a well-deserved life and a messy death.

And he thought of the soda stands.

The soda stands in Central Park were licensed sellers, subject to state law, taxes, inspections. He’d read Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, knew what the state of food in New York was like before regulations made it safer – spoiled milk mixed with white paint, bread stuffed with sawdust, meat crawling with
E. coli
.

Men had fought shortsighted businessmen seeking a quick buck, and made the world safer.

The soda stands, too, were inspected.

Paul’s body vibrated as he reached back, the floating forms turning into a thousand different documents as Paul did the paperwork to find the soda vendors authorized to sell in Central Park tonight. The information was scattered across forms for sales tax, across the W2s filed for the soda jerks, across the filed work schedules. The papers riffled, hunting down what Paul needed.

Within minutes, he knew every route of every soda vendor working that evening.

And here was the tough part:

There should have been inspections.

There
should
have been inspections.

Paul felt the universe Flex as he told it the truth: someone should have been there that evening, particularly in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks, surprise inspections to verify the water was safe. That hadn’t happened. But it
should
have.

He clutched his hands into fists, tears streaming down his cheeks, as he battered the universe with nothing but a bullheaded opinion of how things should have gone. There would have been inspectors; Paul culled the names of the finest inspectors in New York City, brought them to the universe’s attention, pointed out how fucking reasonable it would have been for these men to be on duty today,
here
, in the wake of all that had happened.

He felt like he’d been shoved twenty fathoms under water. His ears popped, the pressure of What Had Happened so immense, it threatened to crush him.

No
, Paul said, his whisper rumbling to a shout. The universe poured in – not just this planet, but all the space between here and the Sun, all of the empty void between this Sun and the next star, every one of trillions and quintillions of solar systems and galaxies and physical matter telling him the past had happened, every atom in the universe had
registered
it happening, and no force in existence could make it rewrite all that work.

Try me
, Paul whispered, and his words made the stars shudder.

It fought back, trying to erase what he’d done. He bolstered it by lining up cops, the
best
cops, backdating their schedules so they patrolled the Park with extra special vigilance at the time Anathema was swapping water bottles, ready to call in the Blue Thunder at the slightest sign of ’mancy. He rescheduled the water bottle delivery to delay them, engineering bureaucratic snafus that left no time for Anathema to interfere.

The universe spun underneath him like a spider, frantically trying to reweave time back to its original state. Paul reworked the pay slips and work schedules and invoices, ensuring the most meticulous people were on duty to accept the water, people who’d notice the flecks. He posted security guards who’d notice a swap. He…

…
you cannot do this
, the world screamed, pulling apart at the seams, making Paul’s capillaries burst; he sweated blood.

But he’d rebuilt the universe once before, back when the buzzsects had torn its fabric apart.

I said
this is what
happened
!
he cried, and the paperwork pinwheeled behind him, showing the elaborate trace of paperwork and vigilant citizens and smart middle management that led to the water being found tainted an hour before the show. There were paramedics, good ones, who’d rescued the handful of sickened people and gotten them to a safe room, where they’d swollen and roared and, once the ’mancy wore off, returned to being functioning humans. There were calm NPR announcers who’d told people to return home, and the furious man who’d tried to tear open his throat in an old and useless world had, in this one, helped three muumuu clad women onto a city-run bus.

He piled detail after detail onto his world, a fever dream of names and records. He pulled a list of everyone who was there from the credit card charges and subway records, naming person after person and detailing what they’d done…

…and the universe buckled.

There was a lurch that shook the world, the feeling the earth’s crust had become a thin rubber balloon. Things
stretched
.

And when they rebounded, the world was Paul’s.

He saw Central Park clearly, because he
had
seen it, but this time, it had the comforting weight of history. Tainted water, discovered thanks to a series of discoveries by cautious people. The film festival called off. Anathema seen by good cops, who had pursued her into the woods.

The new world fit him like a comfortable pair of jeans. It fit.

He sighed in relief.

Then the flux hit him in a way he never could have conceived.

Taking the flux from Moishe had risked death. This risked obliteration. He had altered time, and as payback, the universe wanted to expunge him from history, blank him, strangle him as a sperm. The forms caught fire, crumbling to ash with papery little cries.

What do you fear?
the flux asked, not so much a voice as a cellular command akin to death.

Paul mentally patted his pockets. He found not one speck of regret.

…nothing
.

It was true. He’d thwarted a killer, saved the park, saved thousands from being chewed to pieces, and did it all through other people’s strength. Maybe Aliyah would die, maybe he would never have existed, but…

…it was worth it.

He felt a beatific grace. This freedom made it clear how saturated his life was with tiny terrors. It was ephemeral, a soul-cleaning epiphany that couldn’t last, but… Paul bathed in the purity of having no regrets.

The flux pushed past Paul’s defenses, puzzled. It searched him for the thing that must be set right in order to rebalance the universe.

And when it found no sense of outrage…

…it agreed.

The threads of time solidified around Paul, radiating out from Samaritan Mutual to New York to rocket out to the sky, spreading one thought of humanity to cold galaxies that had never known human life.

The flux dissipated, withdrawing as though it had been embarrassed to even arrive.

Paul reached out after it, confused, then stopped:

The flux isn’t a law
, he realized, shivering with understanding.
It’s a
counterargument
.
Magic is a conversation with the universe about how the world should be… and I convinced it.

He sagged into an office chair, never so glad to be in a cubicle.

Safe.

He’d made the world safe.