Fix (14 page)

“Yeah.”

“You mean the psycho we keep caged up because a) we're not quite sure how
to
kill him, and b) we don't dare let the Unimancers incorporate this maniac's tracking powers?”

Paul held Robert's gaze. “That was the rumor, yes.”

Robert approached Paul with the air of a man sneaking up on a lion. “Paul. We're all worried about Aliyah. But I've got leads,
good
leads, from people working overtime to track her down. The huntomancer, he's… he's not an option I'd recommend. Especially when we're negotiating for Aliyah's release. They won't touch her until talks collapse…”

Imani spluttered. “What fresh bullshit, Robert!
We're
negotiating, and
still
calling in all our chits to break Aliyah out of prison – you think
they've
stopped torturing her because we're
negotiating
?”

“They don't know Paul's lost his power!” he snapped, waving his arms around at an imaginary Congress. “They're politicians! They have got to be scared shitless that Paul's digging through their files for embarrassing revelations! A little bureaucromancy can unleash scandals that make Watergate look like an overdue library book!”

Paul blinked. Why
hadn't
he thought to do that, back when he'd had the power?

The answer came ringing back, sounding hollowly naïve:
because you don't use paperwork to blackmail people
.

But what if it made for a better world? Why
hadn't
he been unearthing scandals to cleanse the government of bad politicians?

“That blackmail potential is why I think they'll move
quicker
to neutralize him,” Imani replied. “If they can brainwash Aliyah now, they'll have a permanent hold on him.”

“Of
course
we have to hurry,” Robert agreed. “But… let's explore other options before the huntomancer…”

“Other
nonmagical
options?” Valentine's cynical voice cut through the tension. “Last time I negotiated with the Unimancers, it cost me this eye and my last boyfriend.”

“And unleashing a magical killer on the world is good
strategy
?”

“Oh, come
on
!” She slugged his arm, dodging around him, throwing shadow punches. “What happened to your sense of adventure? When the hell did Tyler ‘You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs' Durden become some dickless accountant?”

Robert snatched her fist out of mid-air – and then brought it to his lips, kissed her knuckles.

“I didn't need Tyler,” he whispered, “once I found what made me happy.”

She flicked her hand like she was shaking off dog drool. “Oh, no. No, no, no, Robert. Don't you
dare
go there–”

“Stop,” Paul said. “I know this is dangerous, Robert. But – your other safehouses with 'mancers who might help us have been captured, right?”

He hunched down, defensive. “We've still got 'mancers on tap. But the skillsets that could locate Aliyah are narrow…”

“So what's your odds on our mundane connections getting us a bead on Aliyah's location? Especially now that Project Mayhem's an illicit operation?”

“It's… possible.” The way he said it didn't give Paul much hope.

“And how long does it take for the Unimancers to torture someone over to their side?”

Robert studied his shoetips. As Valentine elbowed him, Paul realized with a shock:
He didn't want me to know how bad things could get
.

“It… varies. They have to retrain them physically up to military standards. But we've seen some old allies reappear on the other side in as little as a month.”

“So what do we do when someone's abducted?”

“Standard policy is to eradicate all evidence they had access to within ten days.”

Paul couldn't breathe: in the worst case scenario, they had five days left to rescue her.

“Look,” Robert urged. “I know it's bad. But trust to negotiation. Trust to
procedure
. Just… trust the organization you've built will find her.”

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DAUGHTER IN WAYS YOU NEVER IMAGINED

“Robert?” Paul asked.

“Yes?”

“Take me to the huntomancer.”

“
Y
ou should taste them
,” the Unimancer teenager said to Aliyah, sweeping her gloved hand across the box of donuts. “We don't have a… Dunkis out here, but we have some people who worked at Dunkins. We tried our best to recreate the donuts in our mess hall.”

Aliyah got a clear vision of Unimancers working together in a kitchen – one whipping up frosting, one dropping donuts into a fryer, moving in that gymnastic synchronization so they never bumped elbows.

She shook it off. She had to escape.

Though she
was
hungry.

And not eating when she had the opportunity seemed foolish.

Especially when the opportunity was donuts.

She leaned over and almost toppled over, the drugs messing with her balance. But the teenaged Unimancer – the word R
UTH
was embroidered in white thread on a leather shoulder-patch – did not move to help her. Ruth studied her with the seriousness of a doctor diagnosing a patient.

Yet when Aliyah's fingers closed around the chocolate glazed, Ruth's expression softened into something Aliyah recognized – that hopeful look Aliyah had back at the Wendy's, that half-grin of someone searching for someone to smile back at her.

Well, Aliyah
had
to eat the donut now.

She took a bite. Sweet sugar glaze crackled under her teeth, her mouth filling with sticky chocolate. She crammed the rest into her mouth, wishing for a glass of milk to wash it down.

“Oh good,” Ruth sighed. “I was worried we'd gone to all that trouble for nothing.”

The singular pronoun shocked Aliyah. “I?”

Ruth's contented smile was whisked away as neatly as a magician whipping a tablecloth out from under a dining set. “Yeah.” She thumped her chest. “
I
.
I
snuck in here,
I
'll get in trouble if Kanakia catches me,
I
broke consensus to see you. So yeah.
I
.”

Aliyah didn't know why she felt sorry when she'd been beaten, drugged, and hauled to a new location – but Ruth's angry reaction held the reflexive hurt of someone constantly misunderstood. Aliyah couldn't erase someone's unique identity, especially the only other teenaged 'mancer she'd ever heard of.

But she wouldn't apologize, either.

“Well,
I
don't know that,” she shot back. “All
I've
ever seen is
you
guys trying to kidnap us – and you finally did. Good for you. But don't make it sound like I
should
have known you had hobbies when you're not shanghaiing defenseless doilymancers.”

“
Ha!
” Ruth leaned back in her chair, impressed. “Oh,
that
polled well.”

Aliyah felt she should have understood what Ruth meant, but the drugs clogged her thoughts.

“OK,” Ruth whistled, impressed. “You're fearless. I can see how you survived with nothing to back you up.”

“I had plenty to back me up. I had my daddy's Contract, and Valentine's expertise, and Mom's–”

Ruth waved her off. “The fact that you think that's ‘plenty' tells me you don't know what we work with. By our standards, what you did was like climbing Mount Everest in a diaper.”

“I suppose being a Unimancer is like flying to the top in a helicopter?”

Ruth's eyes flicked to one side, consulting with someone else. “You'd crash. The air's too thin up there for helicopters.” She stared over Aliyah's shoulder, her voice mutating into a deeper male voice's recitation. “The 2005 altitude record used a specialized copter with the weight stripped off…”

Ruth shook away the information.

“No. The Unimancers are… they're a Sherpa team. The saggiest, softest millionaire can show up at the base, and their expertise can haul anyone's ass up the mountain.”

“Yeah.” Aliyah yanked at the handcuff contemptuously, as though she'd break it off any moment. “That's not happening.”

“No.” Ruth looked pensive. “It won't.”

Aliyah did a double-take, which fuzzed into a triple-take as she almost fainted from the movement. Stupid drugs.

Ruth blotted the sweat from Aliyah's forehead. “General Kanakia is furious at me for letting your father get away. He's the one we want inside the collective – well, the one the general wants, anyway.”

“Why?”

“He's got some off-the-charts talents for sealing broaches – the reports from Long Island were chaotic, but eventually we concluded Paul healed a broach without Unimancer backup. Rumor is, he later purposely triggered a broach to kill his enemy Payne, then sealed it up so thoroughly we couldn't find a trace of the disruption.”

Aliyah kept a poker face, neither confirming nor denying the rumors. Even though, she thought with pride, they were true.

“So you're out,” Ruth said. “If we Unimance you, we can't bring Paul's talents in. We can't have a father and a daughter inside the hivemind at the same time.”

Maybe she could goad Ruth into giving up intel. “Why? Because your stupid SMASH torture techniques can't break a father's love for his daughter?”

“What? There's no–”

Ruth's fingers popped open in surprise. Her eyes darted back and forth like ping-pong balls, trying to follow some internal roar of debate that Aliyah's words had generated. Aliyah watched as Ruth's face morphed into a hundred different people, each hotly arguing – some angry, others earnest, some begging for peace – Ruth's skin tones shifting up and down the pigmentation spectrum.

But those morphing facial features all held an unmistakable core of Ruth. Yet with each physiognomic transformation, Ruth's certainty wavered. Eventually, she brought her fingers into a fist over her heart – the symbol of the SMASH logo.

“Consensus,” she whispered. Ruth's face held the giddy relief that Aunt Valentine had whenever she emerged mussy-haired from a motel room with Uncle Robert.

“No dissenting opinions allowed, eh?” Aliyah needled.

Ruth wasn't bothered. “No
unwise
opinions. Why should I tell you how we operate, when there's a risk of you being a chip in some hostage exchange? I'm not sending you home with new intel just because you got my goat.”

Aliyah bleated.

Ruth smiled. Aliyah hated the way she
liked
that smile. She'd always fallen for people who challenged her. But Rainbird had challenged her – and Rainbird had been a psychopath murderer trying to turn her into a hired killer.

She was already thinking of Ruth as a friend, which was the most dangerous trap of all.

So when Ruth left – and Ruth
had
to leave before someone discovered her, because she'd admitted she wasn't supposed to be here – Aliyah would figure out how to get the handcuffs off. Uncle Robert had taught her how to unlock cuffs, and if she could remember how to–

Ruth closed her fingers around Aliyah's wrist.

Aliyah realized she'd been staring at the handcuffs as she pondered her escape, telegraphing her next move.

“You're gonna escape unless we get you to realize why you need to stay put,” Ruth whispered. “You're not like the other 'mancers – I've seen Legomancers cry when they realized we had nothing for them to assemble. Most of the others sink into the drugs. The general thinks you'll break down without your dad – but you'll fight until you get back to him, won't you?”

Aliyah closed her eyes, refusing to give Ruth – and all the Unimancers watching her through Ruth – an answer.

Ruth unlocked the cuffs, slipped the needle out of Aliyah's hand. Aliyah tensed – was this a psych-ops challenge, where they'd pretend to set her free to see how she reacted?

She sat in the chair, refusing to budge.

Stiff fingers jabbed into the inside of her elbow. Ruth tugged; Aliyah's body followed before Aliyah told it to stop.

Aliyah braced herself. Ruth stepped alongside, dropping into a policeman's come-along position – but when she jerked Aliyah's wrist to the breaking point, Aliyah stayed put.

“Think this hurts?” Aliyah hissed. “Try having your skin stripped off in the burn ward.”

Ruth pulled her forward again, experimentally. Aliyah didn't move.

“You little…” Ruth's consternation was laced with an admiration that Aliyah drank up. “I'm trying to help.”

“Help one more step, and I'll yell. How will the general react when he finds you smuggling me out?”

“Jesus Christ. You're my age.”

It should have sounded like a complaint – but it was a compliment. They were both teenaged 'mancers, forced into lifestyles they'd never asked for. And though Aliyah didn't know what had happened to Ruth, they were both veterans. They should be competing on the cheerleading squad, or daydreaming about their driver's license–

Yet they both felt more comfortable in this prison than they would have on a soccer field.

“Come on.” Ruth let go. “You'll hurt yourself trying to escape. You'll hurt all of us, unless I show you why you want to stay put. I know you don't want to hurt anyone.”

Aliyah resisted long enough to pluck a Vanilla Kreme donut from the box before exiting. If the Unimancers
did
speak Uncle Kit's donut-language, they'd know Vanilla Kreme meant “reckless rebellion.”

She stepped outside. The sky was splintered into golds and crusted reds, streaked with colors that hurt to look at. Aliyah slumped down on the three wooden steps leading up to the office – which she noted
was
on wheels – clutching her head.

“It's the drugs, mostly.” Ruth caught Aliyah in one hand, rescued the donut with the other. “Once you understand why you can't escape, we'll see if we can't talk the general into lowering the dosage. Otherwise, you'll fuzz out whenever someone walks by. Eat the donut, a filled stomach will help.”

Aliyah studied her shoetips. Her mission was clear: play on Ruth's sympathy, flush the drugs from her system, chip away at their security.

“I suppose you'd know all about what they do to 'mancers here…” Aliyah muttered.

“Well,
yeah
. But only because I'm linked into everybody else's memories. I took a different path into Unimancy.”

“'Cause they caught you doing 'mancy before you were out of diapers?” That wasn't strategy – it slipped out. She really
did
want to know how Ruth had become a 'mancer.

“No. Because I…” Ruth blew a lock of hair out of her face. “Yes. Yes, I
know
she's working me. Just trust I'm not gonna fuck this up?”

Aliyah grinned ruefully. She knew that tone all too well.

“Unimancers?” she joked. “More like Unimommies.”

Aliyah was expecting to see either Ruth's anger, or her shy grin – but instead, Ruth hugged her knees to her chest. “They're a real family, Aliyah. They protect people. Not like the selfish pack of idiots
you
call kinfolk.”

“They're not selfish – Daddy would give his life for me–”

“And the lives of everyone in Morehead!”

Aliyah's skin prickled: how had that slipped her mind? Her flux had opened a broach that had triggered an emergency evacuation. Savannah and Latisha, forced to move from their homes–

She'd
forgotten
.

Maybe she
was
selfish.

But she wouldn't admit that to Ruth.

“That broach opened because they were afraid!” she spat. “Because
you
made them afraid! Your anti-'mancy propaganda, you scared them until they fought us, and–”

Ruth's cheeks flushed with rage. “You think you want your dad to rescue you. You think you wanna escape. You even have the gall to think you're the good guy. Well, stand up, little 'mancer. Time to meet the
real
world.”

Ruth hauled Aliyah to her feet.

This had been a mountain town, once, a grand street winding between great gabled houses – but it had been encroached by thick forests, and unhealthy black trees had pushed massive holes through the brick walls. The survivors had strung plastic tarps between the gaps of the leaning buildings, shored up the collapsing houses with stout oaken logs, created a tiny refugee city in the hollows of what once had been a thriving town.

Aliyah saw black-uniformed Unimancers stepping from wooden barracks piled high with camouflage-green sleeping bags. Yet the city was strewn with haggard survivors: two emaciated boys staggering home underneath the weight of a dead deer. An old woman with a plastic axe, her gauze-wrapped hands bleeding from where she'd chopped wood for the incoming winter. A family working in unison to make arrows – a boy carving the shaft, his sister tying machine-tooled metal heads to the front, the father applying the fletching.

They wore bizarre mixes of deerskin boots and puffy orange winter jackets. And they worked in conjunction with the Unimancers – a Unimancer trotted in on a horse, and the locals helped the Unimancer down, rubbed her horse dry, offered to clean her rifle.

The locals ignored Aliyah. They set to their tasks with the grave singularity of people who depended on their work to survive, their necks bowed from forever staring downwards.

The Unimancers, however, strode out to stare at Aliyah with grave sadness.

Ruth shook Aliyah. “Don't look back at us. Look up. Look at what your people
did
.”

Aliyah lifted her gaze up over the shanty refugee town. She looked up the steep mountainside, past the blasted slopes of dead trees–

Her scream died in her throat.

The sky was
splintered
, like a shattered pane of stained glass. It flexed dangerously, as though some immense oceanic pressure from the other side weighed down upon it – and every time it pulsed, it exhaled buzzsect swarms–

“
Look
at it!” Ruth grabbed Aliyah's hair, forced her gaze back to that shattered landscape. “
You
know what that is!
Everyone
does!”