Flex (13 page)

P
aul tumbled backward
, cracking his head against the sink bottom. Gunza picked Paul up off the floor to engulf him in a hug.

Paul trembled in Gunza’s grip, a baby bird in the palm of a six year-old.

“Genius.” Gunza kissed Paul on the forehead. “
Master
. I was worried I’d never find you again. The moment I lit up,
you
lit up. We were linked. You couldn’t send a girl to do your job; no, you had to
witness
. How could you not? You were the Flex. You
are
this Flex.”

Gunza’s fawning respect was more unsettling than any gun.

“How did you find me?” Paul asked, stunned. “We gave you a sample. A
tiny
sample.”

“Crawled the carpets,” Gunza replied dreamily. “Picked through each loop, sorting dust from Flex, spending all night plucking each stray crystal off the floor. By morning, I’d reassembled a spoonful. Enough to find the master.”

Paul had underestimated Gunza’s determination. So
stupid
.

“What do you want?”

“To show you who I am, sir.” Gunza reached into his vest, pulled out a roll of fifties. “To show you what I can do.”

Paul clenched his fists. Gunza riffled the stack, extended it towards him. “Go ahead,” Gunza urged him. “Take it. It’s
nothing
.”

Paul tried mightily to be unimpressed, but Gunza’s nothing would have paid Paul’s rent for a year. He imagined peeling off twenties for Aliyah’s surgeons until the hospital accountants told him to stop.

“Not worth it,” Paul said. Which was a lie. He burned to. But selling to men like Gunza? Never.

Gunza sucked air between his bejeweled teeth. “You sure?”

This was the friendly portion of negotiations. Every thug was a reasonable man at first. But once bribes failed, the hammers came out.

He should probably reap the rewards, get on Gunza’s good side while he could… But making Flex was excruciating; it was like strangling a part of his soul even when he wasn’t selling the end product.

Paul had swallowed his instincts before, burying himself in work over guilt at killing the illustromancer. That had done enough damage to Aliyah. He’d do horrible things to save her, but he had to retain his self-respect – otherwise, he’d be no father.

“Positive.”

Gunza turned to leave.

“No threats?” Paul asked.

“What shall I do, sir?” Gunza asked. “Could call in the military, but that wouldn’t get me more Flex. Could kidnap you, but you’re a ’mancer. Eventually, all guns misfire around you. Could tell your boss; maybe he rains cops down on my head.” He bared those sapphire teeth again. “No. On you, I have no grip. Find me if you change your mind.”

“That’s… oddly reasonable.”

“I’m as reasonable as my options.” The door swung shut.

W
hat did
Valentine look like now?

He glanced at Valentine’s new driver’s license on the way back to the hotel. He’d spent three hours envisioning all the errors that would have to occur for a genuine driver’s license to be created with wrong information, and the Beast had spat out a California ID. On it was Valentine, looking sullen beneath a tangle of bleached-blond hair.

Had he changed her? As she’d changed him during the reskin? There was so much he didn’t understand about his power… but for the first time, he felt as though he might master it.

Squeezing the cash from Samaritan Mutual would be a challenge. Paul could set Aliyah’s treatment to approved, but someone would notice. Ironically, of all the places he could work for, Samaritan Mutual was most resistant to his powers…

He unlocked the hotel room door, only to find the room maid-clean. Valentine’s cell phone was no longer plugged into the wall, nor was her PlayStation wired to the hotel television.

The sole sign of Valentine’s presence was an empty coffee can on the bed. Paul peered inside to find a note in Valentine’s handwriting:

They have my boyfriend.

P
aul paced around the room
, listing all the reasons he shouldn’t go after Valentine. Gunza was expecting it; that’s why he’d let him go. Valentine shouldn’t have cared about a boy who hadn’t so much as texted her since Paul met her.

“She’s in her twenties,” he whispered. “She’s
supposed
to do dumb things for love.”

He clutched the coffee can, feeling guilt. She’d told Paul to put the flux in the Flex. She’d told him to stay at home. She’d told him to keep his mouth shut. If he’d just listened, she would have handed over a can of substandard Flex, and Gunza might have let her go.

She’d been treading water, and he’d pushed her under
.

If he’d been thinking with his old brain, his Samaritan Mutual planning brain, he would have thought this through – anticipated Gunza’s next moves, then hauled them both out of the line of fire. Instead, entranced by the Beast’s power, fixating on how to save Aliyah, he’d thought ’mancy could handle the details.

Now he knew: magic was no replacement for common sense.

Time to turn on detective mode: what would Gunza do next, knowing that Paul was the
real
source of Flex? Knowing Gunza had assumed, correctly, that Paul would come after Valentine and her idiot lover to save them?

Paul left a message at Kit’s office, explaining that he’d be investigating deep for a couple of days.

Then he flipped through a folder thick with forms – his generic stockpile he’d taken to keeping with him, a modern grimoire. He pulled out a change of address form. As he scrawled, Valentine’s generic white California’s license faded to the engraved baby blue of a New York license. He checked the address. After that, it was a matter of figuring out which departments had jurisdiction.

This would get bloody before it was done. But he could at least free Valentine.

T
he burn ward’s
lights had been turned way down, leaving sleeping children wreathed in dim shadow. Aliyah had fallen asleep in mid-game, her Nintendo DS in her hands. She hugged it, dreaming.

Paul squeezed Aliyah’s foot. She woke with a start: “What is it, Daddy? Do they have to do something bad?”

Of course
, Paul thought. He showed up for all her debridements to hold her hand, so arriving at two in the morning meant something awful was about to happen.

He’d burned her. He’d done this. He’d done so much wrong to her already.

He was about to do more.

“No, no, sweetie. But Daddy has to… he has to go away for a while.”

She cocked her head in curiosity. She wasn’t dumb; Dad didn’t show up this late if it was ordinary. “Is it an emergency ’vestigation? ’Mancers gone bad?”

Yes
. “No. Can you keep a secret? A big one? You can’t tell anyone.”

“Yes.”

“Even Kit. Even Mommy.”

“Yes.”

He believed her. Aliyah had always locked her emotions tight.

“Aunt Valentine is in trouble. Big trouble. And I have to go get her out of it.”

Her face steeled. “Is it killing trouble?”

What the fuck am I doing?
Paul thought.
I should be lying
. Yet he had promised himself that if Aliyah was old enough to ask the questions, she deserved honest answers from now on.

“Yes,” he whispered. “It’s killing trouble.”

Aliyah looked concerned but not surprised. She turned her Nintendo DS over and over in her hands, drawing strength from it. Imani would have preferred Aliyah retreat into books, but Super Mario World was Aliyah’s bolthole when the world became unmaintainable… and Aliyah never forgot who gave her gifts.

She reached out to touch Paul’s cheek, her fingers still slippery from the skin grafts.

“You
save
her,” she commanded. “You kill the bad men. You bring Aunt Vallumtime
back
.”

Paul found himself crying, absolved by his own daughter.

“I will,” he promised. “I will.”

P
aul pulled
up at a respectful distance, still in his rented white van, scoping the factory entrances with binoculars.

He double-checked the address on the license; sure enough, at the Beast’s urgings, the address had rewritten itself to reflect where Valentine lived now. According to Google Maps, Gunza had stashed Valentine in an abandoned factory near Queens.

The factory was huge, a testament to some once-mighty industry that had moved elsewhere. The bricks were black with soot; even the graffiti artists had given up on this locale. The windows had been smashed in, a row of knocked-out meth teeth. Pigeons fluttered in and out, the birds having created a messy ecosystem in the building’s high rafters.

Occasionally, one of Gunza’s thugs swaggered out to take a call on their cell phones. They gave exaggerated “Hey baby’s” that Paul could see from across a parking lot, doing unconscious peacock walks as they strutted to impress the women on the phone. No surprises there.

Paul double-checked the taser at his belt and waited for the inspector to arrive.

A blue inspector’s van pulled to a stop before the main entrance – Paul made out the white sticker on the guy’s windshield. A potbellied older man got out, holding a clipboard.

Two more Jersey Shore thugs emerged, looking quizzical; they’d clearly been expecting Paul. They patted their waists, unsure whether to brandish their guns or put them away. With them distracted, Paul bolted across the parking lot at top speed, a rolling limp that tried to compensate for his slow right ankle.

The fire exit was open. They weren’t worrying about Valentine escaping… or maybe they wanted to lure Paul in. Regardless, the entire place reeked of ’mancy.
His
’mancy.

Paul crept into the cavernous space; it was shadowy inside, made darker by the vast pieces of iron machinery that squatted on the concrete floor. Paul didn’t know what purpose these boilers and racks of rusted sheet metal had once served, but they cut the football-field-sized expanse of concrete into a maze. His foot whirred with every step.

He emerged by a rusted clock and timecard holder next to a set of abandoned offices. Their broken windows looked out over an open area marked with faded spray paint that had once marked the boundaries for forklifts.

There sat Valentine and a young boy who must be her lover.

They sat on fold-up chairs, facing each other, as if they had been dragged out here to have a chat by some psychotic therapist. Between them sat a bingo machine: the makings of a Flex lab.

They were surrounded by three thugs and Gunza, who never took his eye off of Valentine.

Paul slipped over a broken picture-frame window and crouched inside an office as Gunza listened to the thugs reporting back.

“He says you requested the inspection last week.” One of the thugs handed over a slip of paper.

Gunza glanced at Valentine, asking for silent confirmation this was Paul’s handiwork. She shrugged. Her boyfriend stared up at two pigeons fighting over a twig.

“It says someone wants this place condemned,” Gunza said, puzzled. “Who the fuck wants it condemned?”

The thug tapped the paper. “
You
do.”

“’Mancy for sure.” Gunza reached into his pocket for a small baggie, scooped a dollop of Flex onto his pinkie fingernail, inhaled it. “Put them in the offices, where he can’t see them. If he comes near, Flex him a coincidence to leave.”

“Yeah, buddy.” The thug fist-bumped Gunza. “We gonna
use
this.”

Valentine was already on her feet; Paul was glad to see her refusing to be being pushed around like a hostage. “Come on, sweetie,” she said, reaching out for her boyfriend’s hand. “We gotta move.”

Her boyfriend –
his name’s Raphael
, Paul remembered – was tall, gawkily beautiful. He hugged a skateboard against his chest as though it was a teddy bear. He either trusted Valentine implicitly or was just used to being told where to go, since he was the only person here who didn’t look concerned.

Paul felt the dim pressure of ’mancy as the guard approached. Paul flattened himself against the wall as he realized Valentine’s guard would enter the office Paul had chosen. Dumb luck or magic?

Didn’t matter. He readied the taser. Maybe the false plan he’d created to lure in Gunza would work and they could run free.

Except as the thug entered the room, Paul saw the Flex residue on the kid’s nose.

He gave it a try, reaching out to jam the taser against the kid’s neck. Sure enough, the taser caught in the kid’s double-popped collar, discharging harmlessly into cotton. The kid turned, his face lighting up as the Flex flowed through him, and punched Paul – a perfect shot to the solar plexus, emptying the wind from Paul’s lungs.

By the time Paul came to, Gunza stood over him.

“That’s all you got, man? Building inspectors?”

“It’s what I had,” Paul wheezed.

Gunza patted the bag of Flex in his pocket. “We’re flawless now. Wanted the inspector gone. I Flexed, and bam! Next I knew, he was griping about how this was a bullshit assignment. Said if he had his way, he’d go home.” Gunza grinned. “He went home.”

Gunza knelt before Paul. “Now, you the golden goose. You gonna be fed well, doctors look you over. But don’t run. You try, we provide disincentives.” He jiggled the bag before Paul’s nose. “This is your job now.”

Paul jerked his head towards Valentine. “Okay. Now let her go.”

“She’s disincentive number one.” The thugs roared with laughter. “We set up labs before. My boys are out getting what you need to brew. And when it’s all in place, you make the Flex.”

“Can we have a pizza?” Raphael asked. “I’m hungry.”

Valentine looked pained. Gunza nodded paternally. “We all gotta eat, man. Pizzas all around.” Gunza looked at Paul. “You got a preference, man? Deep dish, Domino’s?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

“I like artichokes.” Raphael’s voice was wan, the words of a beautiful man who’d grown used to having his every sentence found fascinating. “You put some sun-dried tomatoes and artichokes on a pizza, it’s like a work of art.”

“California Pizza Kitchen it is. We’ll put in the call; I’m sure you got things to talk out. But remember, as long as we got the Flex, you got no options. It’s five ’mancers against two.”

“I know how it works,” Paul said. “It’s my ’mancy.”

“So, we’re clear.” A thought occurred to Gunza, and he chuckled, a low purr. “Clear as Flex.”

“We’re clear.” Gunza drank up Paul’s submission – then strutted to the factory exit with his crew, handing out high fives.

Valentine grabbed Paul’s arm, checking he was okay. “If you
had
to come, did you have to half-ass it? Sending one grumpy inspector? What the hell kind of plan was that?”

Paul held up a single finger, feeling more alive than he had in months.
That was step one
, he mouthed.