The Flux

F
or Mom
, who taught me calmness

B
efore Paul Tsabo
brewed up a batch of magical drugs, he would demand $400,000 in cash from his financier, to be delivered along with the rest of his drug-making paraphernalia. The cash arrived in a great pallet of crumpled twenties, a shrink-wrapped parcel so big it took two of Oscar’s drug runners to carry it into the abandoned auto repair shop Paul had designated as today’s laboratory.

Paul checked the money off on the list.

Paul liked lists. Of
course
he liked lists, or he wouldn’t have become a bureaucromancer. Lists were oases of sanity bobbing in Paul’s increasingly chaotic lifestyle – maybe the King of New York would phone in a tip to the NYPD Task Force again and they’d have to flee the cops, maybe Oscar would finally get tired of Paul’s inability to deliver Flex and quietly put a bullet in Paul’s skull, maybe the magical backlash from brewing Flex would kill everyone in this sleepy suburban neighborhood…

…but by God,
Paul could ensure this list was checked off
.

So Paul checked off each delivery as Oscar’s assistants, K-Dash and Quaysean, hauled them in. Paul ambled around the cracked, oil-stained floor unsteadily – years of physical therapy had gotten him almost used to walking on his artificial right foot. But when an insane ’mancer had lopped off the toes of his left foot two years ago, well, even a top-of-the-line orthotic boot hadn’t helped him regain his former balance.

Still, he refused on principle to get a cane. The titanium rod that served as his right ankle drew enough stares; all of Paul’s crisp suits weren’t enough to hide the scrawny Greek man limping around on one metal prosthetic and one thick black boot. So Paul’s legs trembled with exhaustion as he double-checked to ensure all his drug-making accoutrements were in place:

Fifty pounds of illegal hematite, the only substance on earth you could bind ’mancy into, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Check.

Valentine’s battered
Pac-Man
machine, an antique cabinet from the original 1980 production line, used to detect dangerously shifting probabilities? Check.

Curling glass alembics and tubes to redirect the flow of ’mancy once Paul flooded the room with the power of paperwork? Check.

A desk with five fresh Bic pens, arranged above an untouched legal pad? Check.

$400,000 in cash?

His pen paused over the paper. That cash heap, big enough that Paul could use it as a futon made of Andrew Jacksons, made Paul’s skin crawl. He
owned
that money now, a fragile stack of linen-cotton blend, to be loaded into a rented U-Haul upon completion.

If the brew went wrong, as it had so many times before, then this money would burn. And he would not be able to pay Oscar back.

Paul owed Oscar well over a million dollars for getting him all this hematite, and no amount of bureaucromancy could fill that gap. The universe disliked the way magic bent its rules, demanding the scales get balanced; if Paul rejiggered the paperwork to erase those funds from Oscar’s ledger, then a million dollars’ worth of bad luck would rain down upon Paul’s head.

And if today went wrong – if the King somehow had informants seeded in this bankrupt rural town – then Paul would owe Oscar a million-four. Though Oscar was a patient businessman who played for the long game, Oscar was also a criminal. Paul’s special Flex was a drug that made empires run smoothly, but Paul had to actually deliver some or Oscar would make an example out of him.

Paul’s paperwork magic couldn’t stop bullets.

Yet that wasn’t what
really
worried him. There was no better ’mancer than he qualified to handle deadly loads of bad-luck flux. The NYPD Task Force was a threat – Paul wouldn’t have had it otherwise – but he had inside sources that would alert him if the King somehow tipped the cops off to this remote location. And Oscar was slow to anger, especially with such rare and delicious material on the hook.

That $400,000, a terrifyingly large sum, was insurance against a much worse fate.

Paul stared at the cash, hoping it would not burn today. Hoping his friend Valentine’s wards would hold.

Hoping his daughter Aliyah would not show up.

A
s usual
, Valentine played
Pac-Man
while Paul checked in the equipment. Paul knew Valentine played videogames whenever she got nervous – and though Valentine’s thrillseeking had gotten them in trouble before, even Valentine respected the danger of brewing Flex.

A glittery red eyepatch covered the hole where a military SMASH team had shot Valentine’s eye out. She bobbed her head as she maneuvered Pac-Man along the maze, attempting to recreate stereo vision with a single eye, a strangely birdlike movement.

Her black crinoline dress jiggled; she played the game with her whole body, a fishbelly-pale pudgy girl in fuck-me red pump heels leaning into the console. Her long brunette curls shook as she slammed the joystick around, an Xbox controller dangling from the bandolier wrapped around her curvy hips.

“Some days,” she said, “I’m tempted to warp into Billy Mitchell’s home to show him who the
real
King of
Kong
is.”

Paul flinched at the mention of the King before realizing Valentine was making small talk about someone else. “…who?”

She waved a tattooed hand at the machine, which froze. Old-school arcade machines didn’t have pause buttons, but Valentine’s videogamemancy tweaked reality in odd ways.

“Billy
Mitchell
?” she urged Paul, aghast. “The world champion
Pac-Man
player? First man to get a perfect score? Possessor of the world’s most impermeable mullet?”

“…what’s that have to do with King Kong?”

She spluttered. “Don’t you pay
any
attention to the Twin Galaxies scoreboards, Paul? Billy Mitchell was the high scorer on
Donkey Kong
, too! Smug little snake. Kind of a bully. I think about dropping a life-sized ape on his house and making
him
run up the ladders! I bet his score would–”

She took in Paul’s blank expression, then shook her head, radiating a terrible disappointment.

“Ah, Paul,” she lamented. “You know every line in the New York State tax code, and yet your education features these tragic gaps.”

“Can you keep Aliyah out this time?”

Paul hadn’t meant to ask the question. It just squirted out.

Valentine blew a sigh through pursed lips. She noticed K-Dash and Quaysean, two leanly muscled Hispanic lovers who shifted nervously from foot to foot. Valentine jerked her thumb towards the garage’s back door.

“Go look for the King of New York,” she told them. “We spent hours covering our trail. If he drops the dime on us this time, that means he’s followed us here somehow.”

K-Dash frowned. “But we don’t know what the King looks like–”

“Like
we
do? This neighborhood hasn’t seen a paying customer in years – so if you see anyone lurking about, assume they’re Kingish. But,” she added, “just report back. No…” She pulled an imaginary trigger.

They nodded and headed out, happy to give two of New York’s most notorious ’mancers their privacy.

Valentine crossed her arms and leaned against the cabinet. For a plump goth girl dressed in striped black-and-white stockings and a cocked hat, Valentine looked like she meant business.

“Don’t know if I can stop Aliyah this time, Paul. I’ll try. But the kid plays by different rules.”

“But you’re both videogamemancers.”

“And Aliyah plays different games these days,” Valentine said. “I introduced her to gaming, but she’s developed her own tastes:
Animal Crossing
,
Scribblenauts
,
Professor Layton
. Which means her ’mancy’s got its own style. We used to be similar, but, you know… the kid’s gonna be nine in two months. She’s growing up.”

“Can’t you just play her games?”

Valentine looked like she’d swallowed a slug. “
Me
? Play
Cooking Mama
? Forgive me for having taste, Paul!”

Paul let it drop. Every ’mancer had a worldview that made sense to them, and them only. Valentine had asked a hundred times why Paul couldn’t just conjure up a million dollars out of thin air, marshalling all sorts of arguments about how currency was an illusion perpetrated by society. Since the government printed money on demand all the time, why the hell couldn’t Paul just – and here, Valentine always waved her hands in the air and made a “whoosh” noise – manufacture some damn cash to pay off Oscar?

But it didn’t work that way. Bureaucracy’s whole
point
was that it prevented fraud: without it, anyone could claim they had bought this car or this factory, and who was to say otherwise? Paperwork was what made the universe
fair
. Paul could launder money, hide its ownership, find the best investments for it – but taking stuff for free?

Hell, he had enough moral quandaries manufacturing drugs for a gang leader.

Valentine glanced over at the OfficeMax desk Paul would brew the drugs on, propped across what used to be a repair bay.

“Look, I’m not saying this isn’t the most fucked-up version of ‘Take Your Daughter To Work’ Day ever… But maaaaaybe instead of having me construct wards to keep your kid out, we should invite her along.”

Paul clenched his fists. “You remember what Aliyah did to the last batch of cops, right?”

Valentine met his gaze evenly. “I do.”

“And you remember what would have happened to her if I hadn’t been her legal guardian, right?”

“Do
not
make this about ‘who loves her more,’ Paul,” Valentine snapped. “I adore Aliyah like I squeezed that kid out of my own cooter. But ’mancy’s a dangerous business.”

“Which is why we hold classes,” Paul shot back. “That’s why we have Scouting Saturdays, and Sad Sundays. To
educate
her.”

Valentine shrugged. “Not to suggest you have all the educational skills of a hungover substitute teacher, Paul, but… the kid’s into videogames. She only cuts loose when she’s challenged by real life. I don’t want her hurt, but this profession has no training wheels. This is magic. She might die.”

Paul wanted to get mad. Yet Valentine’s reaction held the carefully chilled regret of all the nurses who’d told him,
Your daughter has third-degree burns over sixty percent of her body, Mr Tsabo. She might not survive
. They were not rejoicing in a child’s death, were not ceasing their struggle… but they had a flinty awareness that everything within their power might not be enough to save Paul’s daughter.

And in truth, though Paul had managed to save her through his bureaucromancy, Aliyah’s scars had never truly healed.

“She’ll be fine.” Paul gritted his teeth. “She just needs to manage her temper.”

“And where is she now?”

“With her mother, for the weekend. According to our divorce agreement, Imani has custody until seven pm Thursday night.”

“So the kid’s stuck in a house with no videogames, with her douche politician of a stepdad and a mother who she has been instructed to lie to. She’s pretending hard to be a normal kid, told if she fucks up this masquerade just
once
, then the entire US government will come down upon her head and wipe her brain. And you think the kid’s not
already
managing her temper?”

Paul limped away in disgust.

“Where are you going?”

“Come on,” Paul said. “Let’s brew.”

K
-Dash
and Quaysean arranged the Bic pens on the desk before stepping back, seeking Paul’s approval.

Paul examined the pens, spaced perfectly parallel, then gave the boys a cheerful nod. They fist-bumped. Quaysean and K-Dash were nice, as criminals went: they held hands tenderly whenever they weren’t hauling in goods. They were reliable, and Paul valued reliability. They had even taken to bringing donuts to the brews, as if this was some Monday morning work gathering.

Valentine tugged her cell phone out of her bra. “Eight pm, Paul,” she said through a mouthful of vanilla crème donut. “If we hustle, we can finish this in time for me to hit the swing clubs.”

Paul picked up the pen.

As his fingers brushed the legal pad, triggering a spark of bureaucromancy, the place’s history flowed through him in one administrative flash: this had once been Patziki’s Auto Repair Shop – a tiny two-bay garage founded in 2004 by one Samuel Patziki, age fifty-four.

He saw the credit reports the bank had run on Samuel before they’d approved him for the loan, noted the W-4 tax records as Samuel had proudly hired his first employees, tallied the dwindling orders to auto part vendors as business lagged. Paul groaned as the first notifications from collection agencies trickled in.

On May 14th, 2009, the bank foreclosed.

Paul looked at the high ceiling crisscrossed with rusted beams, the holes in the concrete where the car lifts had once gone, the windows on the two wide garage bay doors boarded over. All the equipment had long been stripped out; all that was left were rows of empty lockers, and a flyspecked calendar displaying a May 2009 pinup girl.

This place was a grave of ambitions, a bad location in a bankrupt town. That isolation made it perfect for avoiding the King – the King of New York’s phoned-in tips had driven Paul to find a place so dismal even the homeless had stayed away – but though Samuel’s failed business was convenient for Paul, Paul secretly hoped that Samuel Patziki was OK, wherever he was.

He could have followed the paperwork trail back to check in on Samuel, but… Paul needed the illusion of happy endings today.

Valentine spun a quarter between her fingers. “Ready to bring the thunder, Paul?”

Paul looked over at Quaysean and K-Dash. “You don’t have to stay, you know,” he said. “This gets dangerous.”

“You always say that, Mr Tsabo.” They interlaced fingers, kids eager to watch the fireworks.

As Paul turned back to the desk, he allowed himself one tiny smile. He loved having an audience. Maybe one in a thousand people had even seen ’mancy, and most of them found magic terrifying. ’Mancy was illegal because it could rip holes in the seams of the universe, letting buzzsect-demons spill in through the gap to devour the laws of physics.