The Flux (25 page)

“I don’t want to reminisce about the good old days, David.”

“Sure, sure.” David was suspiciously agreeable. “I thought you might be proud of your legacy, is all. You having started up the team and all.”

“What’s going on here, David?”

David ran his hand through his thick black hair. “…listen, Paul. I need a favor.”

“A
favor
?”

“Things are… well, the mayor’s sunk massive funds into the Task Force, and the results? Hell, you’ve seen the headlines. Our equipment is wrecked. But we’ve got
one lead
. I think the guy who rented that garage for Psycho Mantis, well… I think he’s a paperwork-mancer.”

Paul’s blood froze. David registered Paul’s shock and nodded, as though everything was going to plan.

“Oh, yeah. I knew
that
would get your attention, Paul. Knowing how much
you
hate ’mancers. And I can’t think of anyone better suited to track this motherfucker than you. Except I’ve been following it, and the paper trail leads all the way back to SMASH, and... well, if SMASH figures out they’ve got a paperwork-mancer hiding in their midst, then they get the credit, and everything we’ve worked for gets shut down. We need to show SMASH they’re compromised, so we can keep it going. So what do you say? Can you help do what you do best?”

“…you didn’t come here to support Imani.”

“What?” David laughed, a little too uproariously.

Paul pushed closer to David. “You tagged along in the sole hopes of catching
me
. You don’t give a shit about Imani or Aliyah.”

When Paul heard his words echoing back at him from the courtyard, he realized he was screaming. Windows flew open. David backed away.

“I’m not stopping her from wasting her time on some crazy kid, Paul.” He looked baffled. “But New York’s safety is at stake. You trust those schmucks to do a better job than us?”

“You have
a wife
! You have a
wonderful
fucking wife who you’re
alienating
, who is doing her
damnedest
to try to support your pathetic ass
and
her troubled daughter at the same time, and you… you ride with her to a stressful counseling session to
play politics
?”

David looked baffled. “Some things are more important than family, Paul.”

Paul decked him.

Or tried to, anyway. Paul had always been scrawny. He let loose in a wild swing that clipped David’s chin.

David clutched his face, astonished. Paul stared down at his fist, stunned to be so out of control.

But Imani – he’d been so happy for her….

David’s face reddened, and struck back – a hard blow to Paul’s gut that took the wind out of him. Paul tumbled forward; David kneed him in the face.

“You stupid
fuck
!” David cried, punching Paul’s neck. “You gave me a useless fucking department to work with,
asshole
!” Paul struggled to fight back but David grabbed him in a headlock, dragged him back to the parking lot…

Then Rainbird tackled David to the ground, hauled him away. Paul’s blurred vision could just make out Aliyah, watching him with a funereal solemnity, shaking her head as once again, someone needed to rescue him.

It would have been easier for Paul to black out. But he had to shuffle back into the school.

“Don’t look at me,” he murmured through swollen lips. Aliyah didn’t take her eyes off him. Nor did Payne, who glared with dripping malice.

Only Imani had the decency to look away.

“
M
r Payne has
a mission for you, Aliyah,” Rainbird said. Aliyah thumbed the “pause” button on her game so he wouldn’t see.

“Gimme a minute. I gotta save.”

“Pause it. This is important.”

“
I gotta save!
” she yelled. “
Get out!
”

Rainbird gave her that maddening smirk and exited.

Aliyah relaxed. She didn’t need to save; she just didn’t want Rainbird to see what she was playing. She took the card off her lap, the one she always put there when she played
Watch Dogs
:

She stashed the card in a
My Little Pony
game box, then slid the
Watch Dogs
disc in with it, hiding the game among the hundreds of kid-friendly games lined up in her room. And as she did, she had a thought – a thought that, in her head, sounded like a much older version of herself, someone as old as Valentine, speaking kindly but without mercy:

You hide Valentine from Rainbird. You hide Rainbird from Daddy. You hide everything from Mommy.

Maybe you should talk to someone
.

Aliyah felt a wild urge to talk to Daddy, to tell Daddy how she was scared to kill again and how she
didn’t
want to be the person who does all the killing, and all the sick guilt she felt over hitting Rainbird all the time…

…but all Daddy did was make things worse. He drove Aunt Valentine away, and he almost let loose the Institute’s secret, and Rainbird could have made them all safe except that stupid Daddy didn’t want any cops killed.

You’re afraid Daddy will hate you
, that older voice said.
You’re afraid if you show him what a murderer you are, he won’t love you
.

What about Mommy?

Mommy wants to kill you.

“
Shut up!
” Aliyah screamed, grabbing her Nintendo DS. She hated the Nintendo DS. It was a baby game, meant for stupid kids, yet she couldn’t do ’mancy without it.

She wasn’t a kid. She was a
videogamemancer
. She could hurt people. Lots of people.

Rainbird waited for her in the lobby. “Mr Payne has acquired a name.” He thrust a form into her hands, with a single name typed neatly:
Lucas Cournoyer
. “Find this man.”

Aliyah fired up her quest map – which was now CtOS, the map you used in
Watch Dogs
.

Aliyah didn’t like
Watch Dogs
much.

At first she had. Valentine’s game was like every
Grand Theft Auto
knock-off – you were a dude with a gun running around a city, jacking cars, running over all the pedestrians. She laughed. But then she realized
Watch Dogs
had one difference:

All the pedestrians had names.

You had to look the names up with CtOS, but there they were: Ethan Fitzimmons, Doris Shaftsbury, Helen Tomlinson, Luis Damilo. They each had little dollar signs telling you how much they made, so you could hack into their bank accounts, but…

…there were also little facts about them.

Not much. “HIV positive.” “Illegal immigrant.” “Illiterate.” Barely a sentence. Just enough for Aliyah to wonder who these people might be, if they didn’t exist for her to kill.

Because when she killed them, the names blanked out. You couldn’t know anything about a corpse, and now when Aliyah saw a body in
Watch Dogs
’ streets she wondered what she could have learned about that person.

Rainbird had been driving for an hour, tracking down the name on the paper with Aliyah’s help, before Aliyah finally asked. “Who is this?”

Rainbird sighed in a plume of superheated smoke. “That is Oscar Gargunza’s most well-supplied enemy. Mr Payne had to sort through many conflicting reports to find it.”

“Why?”

Rainbird removed his cigar from his mouth, the closest he came to expressing surprise. “Don’t question Mr Payne. I may explain things to you, but Mr Payne’s authority is not to be trifled with.”

“
Duh
. Now tell me.”

“A good soldier never fights someone head-on when he can enlist someone else to do the dying for him. We impress upon Mr Cournoyer that we can find his enemy for him, and
he
will do the work for us.”

“So Oscar goes away.”

“Yes.”

That was good. And bad. Oscar made Daddy do stupid things. And Mr Payne hated, hated,
hated
Oscar. Everything would be fine if it wasn’t for Oscar, at least as far as Mr Payne was concerned.

But someone would have to kill Oscar to make him go away. Aliyah knew that much. Oscar didn’t let things go. He was almost as obsessed as ’mancers.

“You are not to tell your father,” Rainbird snapped. “This is our secret. We are meeting to see if Mr Cournoyer is willing to serve as our executioner. Do you understand?”

Maybe you should talk to someone
.

“
Duh
,” Aliyah repeated. That twist of guilt, floating in her stomach.

That guilt made her want to hit someone
so bad
.

They pulled up across the street from a compound. Aliyah knew the word “compound” because Rainbird had made her play violent military games. This place could have been pulled straight from a
Call of Duty
level; a barbed-wire fence surrounding a warehouse with all the windows blocked over, with guards walking around out front. They weren’t
obvious
guards, pretending to be guys having a smoke, but they watched Rainbird’s car roll up like they were ready to shoot.

“He’s checking his shipment’s quality control.” Rainbird pulled on his fiery mask, gave her one of Payne’s risk-control badges. “All his guards are here.”

Aliyah clasped the badge against her chest like Rainbird taught her, muttered thanks to Mr Payne. “What do you want me to do?”

“They’re NPCs.” Rainbird poked his cigar in their direction. The guards headed towards their car, reaching into their jackets. “Get violent.”

He wanted her to go nuts.

She
liked
going nuts.

Aliyah kicked the car door off its hinges, bowling the guards over. A handful dodged, unloading their guns at her – but Aliyah emerged as Kratos, the God of War himself, the bullets sparking off the Hell-forged chains wrapped around her wrists. She flicked her hand and the curved daggers lashed out, smashing them in the gut, knocking them back into the fence so hard the chain links crumpled around them.

Rainbird fought back.

These guys were
tissue paper
.

Aliyah ran up to the front gate, which was locked, and after a brief QuickTime event where buttons flashed into existence over her head, she yanked the gate off.

Rainbird trailed behind her, taking contented puffs on his cigar.

More guards rushed out, firing machine guns at her, but her ’mancy was strong and all the flux poured into Mr Payne’s badge, and it felt so
good
to see the men scared of her, running away as she bashed them again, and it was OK to hurt them because these weren’t people, they were NPCs.

The pathway led her to the target: Lucas Cournoyer, a pudgy French man in a fine suit, surrounded by three burly men. They huddled around a crate of fine white powder –
that’s what cocaine looks like
, Aliyah thought – and she flicked the bodyguards’ bullets away before punching them through the walls.

“Good work, Hotplate,” said Rainbird, picking his way along the twitching bodies.

“Who- Who are you?” said Lucas Cournoyer, peering out from behind a crate.

“I’m a friend,” Rainbird said jovially – though even Aliyah flinched when his burning-tree mask crackled open in a rough-knotted smile. “We have common enemies.
Your
enemies, however, have ’mancy. I’ve taken some photographs of Mr Gargunza to show you how easy it would be for us to remove your opponents for you… but we’d need something in exchange. Shall we talk?”

Mr Cournoyer was pretty slick, Aliyah thought; he nodded, once, then bowed to invite Rainbird back to his office for wine and negotiations. Aliyah followed, but Rainbird stopped her.

“These are
private
negotiations,” Rainbird told her. “What I discuss with Mr Cournoyer is between him and our leader.”

“But I–”

“You know this is how you keep a righteous man safe: by keeping him far away from unpleasant truths.” Rainbird looked around at the groaning guards. “Don’t fall to your father’s weakness; stay here and ensure no one causes trouble.”

Aliyah wanted to sneak-listen in on Rainbird. But Rainbird always knew when she was coming. And Daddy was in enough trouble with Payne.

That’s when she noticed all the blood.

In the games, the bodies vanished when you stopped paying attention to them. But the guards here – they coughed, bit back screams. The men she’d tossed through the walls lay limp on the other side, their limbs twisted into painful angles, the people well enough limping over to them to try to help. They struggled to breathe through broken ribs.

These are NPCs
, Aliyah reminded herself, trying not to look them in the eye as the remaining guards dragged the unconscious ones away from her, as though she was some terrible, terrible thing.

She’d wanted to be a threat.

Why was being scary so awful?

There was one guard, a slim black man, whose chest hitched. She reached out, grasping the CToS from
Watch Dogs
to get more information on him:

M
alik “Pee Wee” Reles
:

• Got into gangbanging to pay for his Gramma’s nursing home bills

• Goes to night school in the hopes of getting out of the game

• Major: Accounting

• Survival Prognosis: 35%

Aliyah looked at the tiny man bleeding to death on the floor. He looked back at her, eyes wet with terror – terror of her, terror of dying, terror of what would happen to his Gramma without him.

“You’re an NPC.” Aliyah clapped her hands over her face. “You’re an
NPC
.”

Do you want to be the person who does that?

Maybe you should talk to someone
.

P
aul woke
, as he always did, to Aliyah curled up next to him.

She twitched in her sleep, whimpering; he held her against his chest to calm her down. After everything he’d done to her, he was still grateful his presence comforted her.

And she’d been clingy lately. She refused to go to sleep until he did, then slept far later than him. Which wasn’t what he thought of as “normal” when it came to eight year-old girls.

But what was normal? She was a ’mancer. She was a burn victim. She’d killed someone in self-defense. Payne’s therapists assured him Aliyah’s behavior was normal, and this clinginess was just a phase, but... how would they know? As far as Paul knew, Aliyah was unique in all the world.

He
did
know he had to calm an increasing number of nightmares. Even though she went to bed when he did, she slept in far later, sometimes until noon. And even then she stole Red Bulls from the vending machines to stay awake.

Was doing ’mancy with all the other hothouse ’mancers that draining?

He’d tracked her sleeping patterns, a suspicion he disliked in himself. He knew she sometimes snuck off to play videogames while he slept – that much he’d figured out from the night Valentine had woken them all. Doubtlessly Aliyah had stolen violent videogames from Valentine’s room, which was where she’d picked up that awful
God of War
skin.

Maybe that was where the nightmares came from. He’d looked through her games. He’d thrown all the bad ones out and lectured Aliyah, who remained stone-faced.

In her sleep, though, Aliyah’s face flickered between terror and deep concern.

Paul held her tighter. She seemed reluctant to be with him in public, refusing to hold his hand – who could blame her? He was the Institute’s pariah – yet in private, she drank up his embraces, never letting him go.

He pushed his nose into her tangled hair, smelling her little-girl scent.

His phone buzzed, reminding him the meeting with Mr Payne was in an hour, so Paul darted off to shave and put on a nice suit. But by the time he knotted his tie, Payne rapped upon his office door.

“All right, Paul,” Payne said, strangely jovial. “I’ve confirmed the hematite is in place. Your laboratory’s all set.” He handed Paul a typed-out sheet of directions and a faded map. “Get this done, and you’ll be back before dinner.”

Paul glanced back towards Aliyah. “Just another few moments, Mr Payne – I need to get Aliyah ready–”

Payne clucked his tongue. “Paul,
Paul
. I thought we’d decided not to bring your daughter to your immensely dangerous drug manufacturing sessions. Do you
want
to expose her to stray flux?”

“She gets upset when I leave her–”

“And you’re beholden to a
child
? Tell me, Paul, who is the authority figure here?” He thumped Paul’s breast pocket. “We’ve got professionals here to look over her. All our ’mancers are with her. I’ll be with her.”

“You, sir? I thought you’d be coming–”

“I have no need to relive past history. I brewed my legendary Flex there, back in the day – ‘clear as a pane,’ they said – but I serve no purpose putting myself near the danger of a drug brewing today. Why, you don’t need backup, do you, Paul?”

Paul felt the heat rushing to his face, his bruises throbbing. He remembered Rainbird pulling David off him, the humiliation of assistance that only a handicapped man could feel so thoroughly.

“No, sir. I can do this on my own.”

Though he felt a pang of loss; he’d never brewed drugs without Valentine.

“Good man,” Payne said. “The biggest danger you’ll face is boredom, I’m afraid. I drove to those foothills many a time, Paul, always a tedious sojourn; the mountains swallowed up the radio signals. Had to sing my own tunes on the way out.”

“Well, we have iPods now, sir.”

Payne’s cheeks flushed. “Quite right. Quite right. Pop off, get it done, and return with a batch of drugs to satisfy this Oscar fellow for a time. Come on, let’s get you to your car.”

“Just a moment, sir.” He tapped his artificial leg. “I have to get the car charger for this.”

Payne grimaced, as Paul thought he might; most people got embarrassed whenever Paul drew attention to his disability. “Oh. Yes. Go do what you need to.”

Paul went back inside, closing the door – and, more importantly, keeping Payne out of his bedroom. Payne’s trust in Paul these days was thin; Payne had arrived early to watch Paul’s preparations.

Doubtless Payne would have disapproved of indulging Aliyah’s fears.

Paul stroked his daughter’s hair. Aliyah relaxed, her nightmares passed. When she woke, maybe Payne’s professionals could treat the separation anxiety she’d express when she woke up to find her daddy gone.

But Payne be damned, he wanted Aliyah not to panic in the first place.

Paul tucked the map underneath her pillow, scribbling a note: “I’ll be right here. If I don’t answer your calls, it’s because there’s no cell phone reception out in the hills. Back by dinner. XXOO, Daddy.”

“You ready, Paul?”

“Yes, Mr Payne,” said Paul, starting the long drive out to brew himself a big batch of magical drugs.