Fix (20 page)

“That's where your dad fails. He's been trying to teach you to control your 'mancy. Because he loves 'mancy. He loves it so hard he'll risk the world for it.”

“–you said no fathers–”

“But we Unimancers love ordinary things. We love the arc of the arrow. We love an honest miss. That's a love
we can teach.”

Aliyah weighed the arrow in her palm. “Is that wise? I'm gonna break out, you know.” Aliyah hoped Ruth did not notice the guilty way she scanned the sky, feeling responsible for that Thing. “Anything you teach me might come back to bite you.”

“You may notice that is not a gun. If it comes down to you fighting our guns and Snow White Specials with a bow and handmade arrows, something has gone
drastically
wrong if you're winning.”

Aliyah suppressed a laugh. “OK. Fine. What's gonna stop me from slipping into videogame mode?”

“
You
will.”

Ruth's confidence made Aliyah feel safe in ways her father never had. She hated that. “Why?”

Ruth leaned in, giving her that fierce and too-kissable grin. “Because you have to outshoot me. And I'm not gonna use one scrap of 'mancy. Slip into videogame mode, and you've admitted you need magic to beat me.”

Aliyah stood, transfixed. She couldn't escape the Unimancer camp… yet. She couldn't take on the Unimancers… yet.

But goddamn if she'd let a kid her own age beat her in a fair contest.

“You got salt?” Aliyah asked. “Pepper?”

Ruth looked bemused. “Why?”

“Because you are gonna eat those fucking words.”

“
G
et the supervisor back
,” Paul said. “The one who ran. Make sure the rest of the staff stay put.”

Valentine pulled up a mission map and ran out of the room.

Paul had removed the handcuff from the surviving Steeplechase brother – “Grady,” according to his medical wristband – and Valentine had placed his dead brother on his lap.

“It might seem ghoulish to you,” Grady apologized, stroking his brother's hair. “But they haven't let us near each other in twenty years.”

“Tell me what happened.”

P
eople always confused
the two of us, but we knew the difference. Even as boys, folks said we were the best hunters in Kentucky.

Wasn't true. Grayson couldn't track worth a damn. Put him in the woods, he'd run in circles. But you pointed him at a target, any target, and he could hit it. Me? Worst shot in the county. But I could track a bobcat through a rainstorm.

“Grady,” my brother said, “you find 'em, I'll take 'em.”

He was the hunter. I was the tracker.

But he was gentle. So gentle. The reason he made himself such a good shot was because he couldn't stand hurting anything. If he winged a deer, he would not let me stop until I tracked it down so he could put it out of its misery.

“One shot, one kill.” My brother's mantra. We needed the meat, but Grayson didn't want 'em to know what hit 'em.

Me? I tracked bees back to their nests. I climbed trees, reconstructing what squirrels did with their day.

Those were the good days – deep in the woods, me tracking down the most skittish animals, and Grayson sneaking up on 'em to touch 'em. He read a comic once that said touching a live deer showed way more skill than killing it. And we both loved that satisfaction of thinking like the animal, working together, melding our skills to fill our family's bellies.

Folks didn't mind us poaching at first, not when their fridges were packed with venison, but… rumors started. “Ain't they a little obsessed?” people asked. Every bad thing in town, people wondered if it was flux.

Not that we cared. Hell, we weren't even thirty, we had the woods and we had our animals.

But Dad fretted. He came out, told us someone'd call SMASH on us. We told him we did no harm, but he said SMASH'd torture us.

So when someone from the big city came along and promised to nurture our skills, Dad told us to go with him.

Dad cried that day. Never seen him cry before that. Never seen him after, either. The bargain was, we could never come home.

He told us it was safer than SMASH.

And me and Grayson were thrilled at first – they took us to shiny places, and told us there was new hunting to be had, and we had ourselves a time tracking things through cities.

We liked the challenge. They'd show us a broken-into house, and ask me who'd done it, and I would find them, and Grayson would tackle them even though they ran.

Then they asked Grayson to kill a man.

Grayson said he wouldn't kill a man.

But they'd been smart and separated us, and they told him he'd kill a man or they'd kill me.

Grayson didn't want to kill nobody. But – he had to. He tried hard, real hard, not to kill anyone, but for him murdering an innocent was the worst thing in the world.

So his flux made sure that happened every time.

He tried to yell, give his victims some warning he was coming. They brought in a surgeon, cut out his voicebox. He refused to kill anymore. They cut off my legs. We both tried to 'mancy up an escape, but the thing we feared most was hurting someone or hurting our brother, and…

The flux. The flux always got us.

We might escape the mob, but we could never escape our flux.

They let me talk to him on the phone sometimes, showed me videos to prove he was alive. They didn't use us much – they're leery of magic, don't want SMASH finding out their business, so we only got hauled out for the big jobs – but knowin' we were murdering people ate us up inside.

But what could you do? If one of us died, the other had no hope. Grayson, he had it worse – sometimes I tracked stolen money down. Every time they let him out, they set him to kill. He tried like hell to escape, but whenever he did the flux shoved him right back into his worst nightmare, and whenever he showed someone mercy his backlash mangled them, and…

Even if he did escape, he didn't know where I was.

And like I said: Grayson couldn't track worth a damn.

A guy took pity on me, after a while. I begged him to smuggle a message to Grayson, tell him how to find me. I know he did, because the mob hauled the informant in, slit his throat on that rug you're standing on, and they told me Grayson would never escape…

“…
a
nd I hoped
he wouldn't,” Grady finished, looking down at his dead brother. “If he ever got here, the worst thing in the world would happen to him. He… he knows how much watching him die would… would tear me up…”

That was Grayson's worst nightmare
, Paul thought.
Dying, knowing he'd failed rescuing his brother
.

He remembered Steeplechase's final smile. Paul and Valentine's arrival ensured someone would care for his brother.

He'd died happy. Paul was glad of that, but…

If he could hold his flux, sir, he might be magnificent.

The Steeplechase brothers had been held in bondage because nobody had taught them to manage their flux. Paul had been lucky enough to stumble across Valentine, who'd taught him the tricks of flux management: how to make your mind go blank to give the flux nowhere to flow, how to burn flux-loads off a chunk at a time through flat tires and food poisoning.

No wonder Steeplechase had cried when he killed those cops. He'd tried to knock them out, but his terror of hurting them had fueled their deaths…

SMASH had stolen away the Steeplechase brothers' education, condemning them to their worst fears coming true all the time.

And the people here – Paul's bureaucromancy flared as he accessed the patients' records, saw Sunset Gardens' scandalously low rents–

“
Valentine!
” he yelled. “Get everyone out on the lawn.”

“But the cops–”

“Let
'
em come. If they even notice. I suspect they're bribed to overlook whatever happens here.”

She barked orders to the cowed nurses, who wheeled protesting people out still in their nightgowns. Paul patted Grady on the shoulder.

“Let's get you out of here.”

“But my brother…” He squeezed Grayson's wrist, anchoring himself. “We can't leave him.”

“I'll take care of his body.” Paul did his best to make sure this confused
'
mancer didn't see his cold fury. “Right now, we need to get you out. Will you let me wheel you out?”

Grady nodded, uncertain, trusting.

Paul guided him out as Valentine oversaw the building's evacuation – old men and women protesting as they grabbed precious mementoes to bring with them. Some went for their phones, but disabling the phone system had been as simple as setting everyone's bills to “unpaid” for the past six months.

There was no flux. They deserved whatever he did to them.

Minutes later, the population of Sunset Gardens stood out on the lawn, huddling, scared. They stayed quiet, in the hands of America's most-wanted 'mancers, unsure what to do.

The veins in Paul's neck bulged.

“You
knew
!” he screamed.

Patient and staff alike looked away.

“They cut off his fucking
legs
!” Paul screamed, pointing to Grady, who cringed. “They
jailed
him! Those weren't nurses – they were armed
guards
! And – you –
knew
!”

Old men and women clutched each other for support.

“
Why
?”

“It was cheap,” said a frizzy-haired septuagenarian.

“Of
course
it was fucking cheap! All you had to do was be OK with
torture
happening down the hall!”

Paul scanned the residents, wondering how the mob's owners had made the offer to them – he doubted it'd been as simple as
oh, we keep a 'mancer imprisoned there to keep his brother in line
. But the folks who ran this place had ensured everyone who took a room here had an understanding:
We do things. It comes at a cost.

The old guy in Room 105 is part of the cost
.

“
That could have been my daughter!
” he shrieked.

Aliyah. Aliyah was in SMASH's hands, and they were abusing her worse than any mob – the mob had had to tiptoe behind the scenes, yet SMASH had the United Nations' approval.

People like this
voted
for little girls to be tortured…

“Why?
Why
would you be OK with that? How could you…” Paul choked on his disbelief. “How could you accept torture for cheap rent?”

“He's a muh–”

“
What
was that?”

Paul wheeled on whoever had spoken; they'd all clapped their hands over their mouths. If Paul was being generous, he might say they were horrified to be confronted with the crippled man they'd tiptoed around for years – but he wasn't in a generous mood, and what they looked like to him was people scared they'd been caught.

“He's a
'mancer,” Paul said, completing the thought for them. “A walking hole in physics. And whatever it takes to keep those people in line, well, that's OK, isn't it? You'll live happy little lives while they suffer, won't you?”

He thought of these old people curled up on padded couches, watching television while Aliyah shrieked in a cold torture facility.

“Not anymore.” He relished the way they shrunk back when he moved. “Valentine. Burn it.”

She'd been grimly nodding along with him, but she froze. “What?”

“Fucking burn it. Raze this fucking place to the ground.”

“Paul.” Valentine's gamefire halo dimmed to a low, shocked burn. “I'm not… They're fucked up, but leaving old people homeless–”

“Whatever happened to Rainbird, Valentine?”

Paul spoke the question softly, off-handedly – but the question hit her like Steeplechase's bullet. She
wrung her hands like a guilty daughter caught shoplifting.

“Yeah,” Paul nodded. “I made contingency plans in case that pyromaniac ever came back for Aliyah. But you never seemed concerned. You gonna tell me he just walked away?”

Paul knew he was right when she couldn't meet his gaze. He reached over, squeezed her shoulder.

“You've done worse,” he assured her. “We'll do worse, to save Aliyah. Now blow this fucking place up and let's get out.”

Valentine made a strangled noise, shamed, conflicted. Then she raised her hands and the clouds parted. A bright red laser beam painted the roof–

And the Sunset Gardens Assisted Living Facility blew to flinders, going up in a catastrophic fireball, sending shards of burning furniture flying. The old people clutched their chests, their family memorabilia annihilated, wondering where they'd live now–

“Remember
that
the next time you think it's OK to hurt a 'mancer,” Paul told them.

He helped Grady Steeplechase into the car as Valentine sat, numbly, in the front seat.

No one dared voice an objection as they pulled away.

T
he forest was filled
with plants, and Aliyah had to touch all of them.

She'd forgotten how to touch.

As she and Ruth slogged through the underbrush, hunting for wild game, Aliyah felt everything: the chill shadows of the trees, the crunch of pine needles beneath her sneakers, the taut string of the bow pressing against her shoulder.

Her videogamemancer life had turned her into a head and a set of hands, cruising through life as though she were viewing it through a camera and a game controller. But now?

No sparkles appeared around edible plants to highlight them for her attention. No help-labels popped up if she focused on a leaf.

That was videogame stuff, and Ruth had taught her videogame stuff was easy.

Pawing through caterpillar-chewed fronds to discover a cluster of berries that wouldn't poison her?

That
was a challenge.

Ruth padded behind, smirking. Aliyah was determined to demonstrate her skills with berry-gathering, since she'd proved so inadequate at hunting game.

Who knew deer were so
fast
?

Still, she
would
beat Ruth, in time – Ruth had her mother's teaching magic. She joked that between Ruth's mother's curriculum and Aliyah's reflexes, Aliyah would put fresh meat on Bastogne's table before winter.

“But,” Ruth had said, raising a finger, “then we'll go head to head. Just me, at first – and then I'll pool my skills with the collective's big game hunters. Let's see if you can out-hunt the squad.”

Shouldn't you be outrunning them instead?

The thought stung Aliyah.

This isn't summer camp. They want to brainwash your father. How can you spend eighteen hour days out here camping?

Why do you intend to be
here
, come winter?

But what could Aliyah do? The Unimancers held Europe together – she'd caught glimpses of General Kanakia's maps, saw how thin his lines of defense were spread. She couldn't kill them. And–

You like Ruth.

Aliyah squeezed prickly thorns, letting the pain distract her. Ruth had taught her these weren't edible:
no thorns, nothing with three leaves, nothing with milky sap…

She reached down, grabbed a fuzzy stalk with curly fronds. She snapped off a piece, rubbed it between her fingers.

Ruth knelt down before Aliyah, opened her mouth wide, fine red eyebrows raised.

Aliyah studied Ruth's face. Ruth didn't have many facial expressions – she'd been a Unimancer for so long, her natural reactions had atrophied to vestigial tics. All that remained was a floating bemusement that left Aliyah uncertain.

Seeing Ruth on her knees sent swirls of fire through Aliyah's belly. Was that how Aunt Valentine felt when she saw Robert?

Ruth sat primly, hands clasped behind her back, her smooth pink tongue waiting for Aliyah to put something on it…

“Still can't tell, can you?” Ruth taunted.

“I could read a normal person's reactions,” Aliyah grumbled. “Most folks would flinch if I was gonna poison them.” She'd fed Ruth the wrong berries once; Ruth had swallowed them calm as candy before she spent the next two days throwing up.

Ruth had walled off her body's reactions, leaving her “core” with the medics. For the next two days Aliyah had the unnerving experience of camping in the woods with a chunky Venezuelan man who talked like a fourteen year-old girl.

Putting berries on his tongue had been far less satisfying.

Aliyah shredded the fronds, trying to figure out if that prickly sensation in her fingertips was an allergic reaction or just Ruth. Though Ruth was her age, Aliyah knew she was more… experienced. Sorta. Ruth had never
done
anything, that would be gross, Ruth was fourteen for God's sake – but Ruth had told her once she could access the Unimancers' memories like she'd lived through them herself.

All
the memories
, she'd said, holding Aliyah's gaze until Aliyah had pretended to chase a rabbit.

Still,
everything
felt like a test with Ruth. So Aliyah had kept things distant, dropping berries into her mouth from up high.

Maybe if she tried to do something, Ruth would laugh.

Maybe you shouldn't be getting so friendly with the organization who tortures 'mancers
, she thought. Some days she had the uneasy suspicion that Ruth's seeming affection was the Collective, poking the weak spots in her psyche.

But she remembered Aunt Valentine explaining why she and Dad had been drawn to each other.
You get lonely, in this business
, Valentine had said.
I spent years afraid to get close to anyone.
That first friend who accepts you for who you are, well…

Valentine had pondered all the ways she and her daddy had never gotten along, and then given Aliyah a crooked smile.
They change everything
.

She looked into Ruth's eyes a lot. They were like slow fireworks, shifting greens and browns.

They never jittered when she looked at Aliyah.

It
had
to be her, alone.

So what if it was? Ruth still wanted to brainwash Daddy and Aunt Valentine.

Except
Ruth
didn't seem brainwashed. And Daddy and Aunt Valentine were–

– she tried to remember what Daddy did with the 'mancers he rescued. Left them alone, mostly. He loved 'mancy for 'mancy's sake, clapping merrily whenever unique magics blossomed.

Whereas Ruth and the Unimancers fought for Bastogne, they fought for Europe, they battled that Thing in the sky. They made safe spaces for
normal
people to live in.

Aliyah wanted the people of Bastogne to stop cringing when they saw her. She wanted to curl up in the same bunk with the Unimancers, to feel their pride in protection.

She wanted to earn Ruth's friendship. All Daddy had taught her to do was magic.

Still, Aliyah wondered what Ruth would do if Aliyah made Ruth suck the sap off her fingers.

“Well?” Ruth waggled her tongue.

Ruth's eyes twinkled, taunting her–

Aliyah's ears popped.

A jagged line knifed through the sky, barely visible through the leaf canopy.

“
Look out!
” Aliyah tackled Ruth aside as a fresh rift slithered through the forest.

The rift was a ripple in a forest bobbing with a million leaves, but Ruth had taught Aliyah what to look for when the reality shifts hit. The sky usually squirmed in some fashion – or at least it did this close to the Bastogne broach. The newer rifts further out towards France and Austria could, ironically, be more dangerous because their shifts were less obvious.

But trees cracking was a sign – some reality shifts exploded organic material, or incinerated it, or froze it till the water shattered. Or sometimes the laws of sound got eaten, so you had to keep moving your head to ensure you heard which way something
wasn't
coming from–

She'd had lots of practice rift-spotting. The rifts seemed drawn to her. Ruth chalked it up to that weird flux stuck to Aliyah.

I almost killed her
, Aliyah thought, panicked.
I can't
–

“How did you know what side to tackle me to?”

Ruth's voice was kindly, but stern – her mother, poking through. Class was clearly in session, which made it easy to slip her hands out from around Ruth's slender waist.

“Instinct,” Aliyah said.

“Now deconstruct instinct into education,” Ruth instructed.

Aliyah hated it, but when she panicked, the voice in her head that calmed her down was no longer Daddy, but Ruth's mother-voice.

She wiped her palms off – they'd tumbled into a berry patch – and looked around.

“The trees on that side of the rift,” Aliyah concluded. “They turned brown.”

Ruth nodded in approval. Green leaves curled up brown in the rift's wake, that glorious underbrush becoming skeletal.

I almost killed you
, Aliyah thought, miserable.
This bad luck flux, it's out for my life
–

Ruth kipped up on her feet to stride along the new rift's edge. Aliyah wanted to pull her back before the rift expanded. But if Aliyah hesitated, then Ruth would know she was scared, and
that
shiz was
not
happening.

So Aliyah crept up. On
that
side of the line, there were new rules of physics fatal to plants – but nobody knew what.

“OK, that's an easy visual.” Ruth stooped over as she gnawed her thumb, analyzing the rift – the sure sign Ruth was channeling edumancy. Her mother'd had an arthritic back, and Ruth adopted her mother's crooked posture whenever she spoke to her mother's memories.

“It smells different, too,” Aliyah said. “Feel the wind? The pressure's dropping. All the air's rushing in. That's why my ears popped.”

“So how would you grade this?”

Aliyah wondered, for the hundredth time, whether Ruth ever got nervous. She knew that Ruth's edumancer mother-simulation took dominance in dangerous moments, walling Ruth's terror out with scientific curiosity. But that hadn't protected her before the Unimancers had arrived.

“An A-grade toxicity, fatal to human life,” Aliyah judged. “C-grade for visibility. If you weren't paying attention to the wind and tree color, you might walk into it.”

Ruth's eyes flared. “I'll add it to our collective.”

As Ruth catalogued the new rift for the Unimancers, the wind swept the dead leaves away like a stage curtain fluttering away, revealing…

The Thing in the sky.

Aliyah had grown to hate the sight of it. That Thing loomed over them like some evil dungeon master. It kept reality as thin as spring ice, constantly fracturing things for the Unimancers to reknit.

(
You did that in Morehead, you know, you condemned them to that
)

Hated it.

(
Dad thought he could control it
)

Hated
it.

Ruth blinked, her hazel eyes ceasing to jitter. “OK. We gotta work our way around this, get back–”

Aliyah shrugged. “That's easy, assuming this rift is fairly straight.”

“You know
where you are?” Ruth asked, bemused. “Out here, in the deep woods?”

“First skill you learn in death matches is ‘memorize the map,'” Aliyah scoffed, turning around to point. “The stream leads back to the mess tent. There's a steep drop-off a half mile over there. And over that rise
is the tree I beat you climbing ten days ago.”

“You didn't beat me – you shoved me off the tree!”

“I maintain that maneuver wasn't outlawed by the rules you'd set. Speaking of beating you, on your knees, soldier.”

“Why?”

Aliyah opened her berry-smeared hands. “Because I tackled you into a blueberry bush. Chow down.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Can we get further away from the rift?”

They gathered up blueberries and curled up next to each other. Aliyah felt a little robbed when Ruth popped the berries directly into her mouth.

“I'm getting good at this,” Aliyah boasted.

“Without a scrap of magic.”

“My bow technique's improving. I know what bad woods look like. I can mostly find food on my own.”

“You can.”

“You don't watch yourself,” Aliyah said, chomping the last handful of berries, “I might just escape this compound.”

“You could.”

Something in Ruth's sudden silence gave Aliyah pause.

“I could run off,” Aliyah ventured. “Take this bow and find my way home.”

“You could.” Ruth angled her head northeast. “Nearest refugee station's seventy miles that way. There's no paperwork out here. A refugee can give any name she wanted – they'd ship her to a new land.” Ruth squeezed her eyes shut, sighing regretfully. “Girl like that would probably become an Olympic bowman. Or something world-class. Former 'mancers never lose their obsession, they just… redirect it to healthier channels. We've got training facilities for 'mancers who want to gear down to normal. But…”

Ruth wiped blueberry juice off her lips, hesitating.

“You don't need them,” she said. “You're learning to leave magic behind. You could take a new identity, if you wanted… as an ordinary girl.”

Aliyah's heart stopped.

What was Ruth
saying
?

“No,” Aliyah whispered. “That's impossible. People don't leave
'mancy behind.”

Ruth gave a bemused snort. “Tell that to your Uncle Robert. Sometimes, the need fades.”

Aliyah tried to imagine being an ordinary girl, painting nails in… well, not in America, they were full up on refugees, they'd ship her off to China or Australia.

She'd been happy in the woods, with Ruth, but… could she be happy in some foreign land, bouncing between foster homes?

Could she live with herself, knowing Europe was crumbling into nothingness? Knowing she'd given up her best tool to
fight
that evil?

“But I…” Aliyah swallowed. “How can you
suggest
that?”

Ruth tapped her temple. “It's our dirty little secret. We don't absorb everyone into the collective – because we above all know 'mancy's terrible cost. It's a burden, Aliyah. If you can give it up, you should.”

“It's not a burden.” Aliyah glared at the freshly-dead wilderness. “Our magic heals the world.”

Ruth constructed a smile for her; Aliyah realized how hard Ruth had mimicked the right facial expressions to make her feel at home. But this one was new – muscle by muscle, Ruth constructed a rueful grin to gift to her friend.

“Your magic doesn't heal things. It can't. Maybe you'd be safe if we could Unimance you, Aliyah, but… we need your father in here. He's got his own way of closing broaches. Kanakia says we need him.”

“So get us
all
in! Dad, me, Valentine–”