The Flux (22 page)

P
ayne spread open an old
, brittle map across his desk, tracing mountains with gnarled fingertips. He located a spot marked with a neat blue “X.”

“I can offer you my old Flex laboratory,” Payne said. “It’s far out in the high hills, where no one thinks to look. I haven’t used it in decades, so it’ll take my men a few days to get the equipment back in order. But – it served me well, and it’ll serve you well.”

Payne drummed his fingers on his desk, contemplating his next words.

“The question is, Paul… do you
need
a Flex lab?”

Paul steeled himself. He’d been expecting pushback from Payne.

“What would you suggest, sir?”

Payne shrugged, in that noncommittal way people did when they offered to do terrible things. “Rainbird gives us… more options… to handle these drug-seeking blackmailers.”

“I thought you said we couldn’t find Oscar.”

Payne gave Paul a cheerful wink. “I have resources. You don’t have to be beholden to mundanes, Paul.”

And what Paul wanted to say was so bizarre he couldn’t form the words:

You never brought me donuts
.

Which was the strangest reason Paul had heard of not to murder someone, but it rang true. He might not be buddies with K-Dash and Quaysean, given that hard wall of “Oscar might order me to kill you some day” that stood between them, but… they’d discovered Paul’s sweet tooth, and had brought donuts to the Flex brews. They’d given him coffee.

Whereas Payne had given him infinitely more than a $9.99 box of donuts, but… Payne hadn’t asked Paul what office he’d want; he’d just made one for him. Paul couldn’t shake off that uncomfortable feeling Payne viewed him as an extension of his own needs, and…

…the donuts K-Dash and Quaysean brought didn’t feel like attempts to curry Paul’s favor. They had the scent of organic kindness, of nice things people did for folks they liked.

Paul had never seen Payne eat a donut. The man lived on black coffee and vitamins. And he never offered any to anyone else.

“It’s… complicated, sir.” And once again, Paul found that “sir” tacked on to an otherwise innocuous sentence, the subjugation bubbling up unwanted.

Payne let loose a disappointed wheeze.

“Paul. I understand. Men get attached to people who stand their ground next to them. But… they’re not your friends.”

“They saved my life.”

“They saved an investment. That doesn’t make them your allies.”

But Payne hadn’t seen the childlike grin on Quaysean’s face when he’d watched Paul do ’mancy. He hadn’t seen the way that Quaysean and K-Dash had, after a few Flex-brewing sessions, quietly held hands and given Paul a forthright look that said
This is who we are, and I’m trusting you
. He hadn’t seen the raw joy as K-Dash had hugged Valentine.

It was business, yes. But you could mix business and friendship.

More importantly, you couldn’t mix bureaucracy and murder. Oh, Paul had explored enough to know there were forms lurking in CIA files that
could
request death. But that wasn’t the bureaucracy he had fallen in love with. The bureaucracy he knew helped people; it didn’t send fiery hitmen to incinerate them.

“I’d rather give him the Flex, sir. It’s easier.”

Payne clenched his fists. “Paul, I’m not saying it’s
good
to kill people. But if we don’t, we are at the mercy of organized crime.”

“Oscar’s crime is
so
organized, I’m certain K-Dash and Quaysean are the only other people who can identify us. If more people knew, they would have tried to leverage me. Trust me, I saw it when his brother kidnapped me – everyone’s hungry for Flex.”

“Paul, I...” He buried his face in his hands. “Squeamish men cannot lead.”

“I don’t like killing.”

“
Nobody likes killing!
” Payne pounded the map. “I am trying
very hard
to respect your authority, Paul. But I am now beholden to an unknown crime syndicate with uncertain roots, and your squeamishness during the Paper Street incident means we still have David Giabatta working to track you down. Forty years of experience tells me these are
not
wise decisions. These are not designed to
minimize
risk.”

“
I
think they are. Oscar’s worried about Valentine taking him out for years. If he dies, I’m pretty sure he has leaked information ready to go.”

Payne snorted, seeing through the lie. “‘Pretty’ sure.”

“Yes.”

“Yet he’s never mentioned this post-mortem threat to you.”

“Why would he? If I knew, I’d work to defuse it.”

“So you don’t want to exterminate the biggest leak to our safehouse, based on… a
hunch
.”

“He and I think alike.”

“
You
are not a crime overlord.
You
could barely keep two ’mancers at heel. And as such, I will
beg
you to reconsider, because the sooner we can burn Oscar Gargunza’s bones to ash and bury that particular threat vector, the safer we will all be.”

Payne hunched over the desk, doing his best to stare Paul down. If Paul refused, Payne would order a hit on Oscar anyway…

“
Found him!
”

Valentine burst through the door, applying mascara with one hand, hiking up her bandolier with the other.

“We
got
him, Paul! Hang on, I gotta…” She fiddled with the security monitors, then gave up and grabbed for her Xbox controller. Several newscasts flickered across the screen, showing New York’s tungsten-yellow streets flickering with a skyscraper on fire.

No, wait – not “a” skyscraper.

The skyscraper where David Giabatta held office for the New York Task Force.

And it wasn’t on fire, exactly. Only half the facing windows were aflame, as though there had been
very careful
explosions …

“Is that a gigantic ‘V’ written in destruction across the skyscraper?” Payne asked, peering closer.

Valentine did a girlish pirouette. “Isn’t that
romantic
?”

“That is...” Paul shivered, thinking how this would play out in tomorrow’s headlines. “That’s insane! It’s taking a huge risk, calling out David! And he left your initial up there as a billboard-sized clue–”

More explosions. Windows mirroring the other side of the building detonated, showering glass down upon the cops who’d cordoned off the area.

“Now it’s a ‘W’.” Valentine scratched her chin. “What’s
that
mean?”

“This isn’t even
Fight Club
!” Paul shouted, apoplectic. “This is
Say Anything
with terrorism! I sat through that awful movie, and Tyler Durden wasn’t doing all this just to get some girl’s attention!”

“Kinda the way it worked out for him, though.”

“That’s not the point! That movie was about brutal cynicism! He’s…
inaccurate
!”

“And bureaucracy isn’t about making the world better, Paul. We ’mancers pick and choose from our source material. I got me a
Fight-Club
-o-’mancer who skews romantic.”

“You have no ’mancer at all, Ms DiGriz,” Payne interjected. “You’ll stand down.”

“What?”

“We rescue ’mancers who are willing to play ball; we are
not
rescuing this boy from his own poor decisions. We’ve taken too many chances.”

“But…” Valentine scrambled for rationales. “He knows my name. My first name, anyway. He knows Paul’s name. If he gets captured…”

“He won’t. I’ve seen his kind before. He’s another anarchomancer in modern clothing.” Payne said the word “modern” with a moue of distaste. “He’s halfway towards killing himself already, and he’d die before anyone hauled him in. And if
we
ushered him into the fold, he’d not play well by our rules.”

“We can’t let him die!”

“What we
cannot
do,” Payne said, “Is risk twenty ’mancers to save one idiotic boy.”

“But it is a
cute
boy… wait, that won’t work on you. Tyler is a
potent
boy.”

“He’s powerful, I grant you that. He’s also hell-bent on self-destruction. I too watched the film. He won’t get the happy ending he thinks he will.”

“But I–”

“Leave to help him, Ms DiGriz, and you’ll be on your own. It’s high time you chose which side you’re on.”

“Which
side
?!?” Paul barely held back Valentine as she leapt for Payne, fingers crooked to claw his eyes out. “This is a fucking ’
mancer
, you emaciated scarecrow! You’re the asshole forever telling us you’re saving these precious flowers!”

“I’m also the one telling Mr Tsabo that a ruler makes tough decisions. It’s my money. It’s my Institute. It’s my risk pool. I have been quite generous with my resources – and between you, the Task Force, and this overly informed crime syndicate, I have taken more chances than I can bear. This additional hazard is off-limits. Do you understand me?”

Valentine’s voice was low and poisonous. “Oh, I get you.”

Payne sneered. “You little reptile. You–” He stopped, massaged his forehead. “
You
talk some sense into her, Paul. You understand what’s at stake. Your position. Your daughter’s future.
Talk
to her.”

He stormed out, back stiffened.

Valentine clasped her hands together in prayer, shook them at him. “
Pleeeeeease
, Paul.”

Paul shrank back in his chair, leery of the things she could talk him into. “Valentine…”

Valentine saw Paul’s uncertainty. She flattened her palm between her breasts, as though massaging her aching heart.

“Look.” Her voice cracked. “I gave up a lot to be here. Because I love you.”

Her weakness always terrified Paul. He thought of her as so strong, he forgot she could break. “Don’t…”

“No, Paul. You don’t understand. You’ve got Aliyah to cuddle up with at night. You hardly ever left your apartment. A stack of forms, that’s like Disneyland for you. You didn’t lose anything, being transplanted here.”

“That’s not true.”

“No. It
is
. But for me, I gave up so much already. When I killed Raphael, I–”

“You didn’t kill him, Valentine. That was…”

“My flux did it, Paul. It killed him because I loved him, that insensitive little shit, and that was the proof I should never have a boyfriend. My love is a chambered bullet, waiting to fucking kill the next motherfucker who opens up to me. So I moved in next door to you, and it wasn’t terrible because you’re my best fucking friend, but I started hitting the swing clubs because sometimes that was the only way I could get a fucking
hug
, and I…”

Her tears smeared her mascara. She swatted her cheeks, then waved at the screens. “
That
, Paul. That’s a guy who’s interested in me, someone who can maybe take the punches I give – and if I don’t go at least
try
to look for him then I might as well lie down in a grave and pull the dirt over my fucking head, because what the fuck am I living for if I can’t love somebody?”

“Valentine, I….” Paul took her hand. “You deserve love. You
do
. You’re…”

“Say it.”

“You’re my best friend, too.”

She sniffled. “I kinda needed to hear that right now.”

Paul’s eyes stung with tears. “But I don’t know how much leeway I have with Mr Payne. He’s pissed. He’s
right
to be pissed. And if he kicks us out, then Aliyah loses all this support, all this training…”

“I get that, Paul. I
do
. But…” She trembled, afraid to say what came next. “Don’t I deserve to have somebody for me?”

Paul stared over at the burning office building, seeing more cops screeching in as news helicopters swarmed around. It would be dangerous. And Payne was right; Tyler would not fit in any better here than Valentine.

But what good was being second-in-command at the Institute, if he couldn’t use that power to help his friends? What kind of friend was he if he condemned Valentine to living among antisocial ’mancers, sexless?

“Oh, God,” he muttered. “This is such a mistake.”

“That’s how you
always
say yes!” Valentine squealed, and tackle-hugged him.

D
oing magic
, Paul had discovered, involved lots of driving.

Valentine could have opened up a portal, but she’d already generated enough flux
Metal Gear Solid-
ing her way out of the Institute. So she drove a stolen car while Paul did research on his laptop.

She mashed the accelerator to the floor, headlights zooming through blackness, even though neither were quite sure where to go yet. And she would not shut up.

“This is like a first date test,” she babbled. “All I got is an initial. If I can find him with a single letter, well, then we’re meant to be, aren’t we?”

Paul grunted noncommittally.

“A muttered affirmation does not signal approval of my love life, Paul.”

“Sorry. I’m researching.”

“Can’t you just…” She signed an imaginary piece of paper, Paul’s literal signature move.

“I’d have to use Payne’s access,” he explained. “Besides, much of what the munitions companies do is public record, if you know where to look. What did you call it when you tracked me down online? Googlemancy?”

“Googlemancy.”

“Well, I’m Googling.”

She thumped the steering wheel. “Good times, Paul. It’s you and me, on our own again, investigating. That feels good. Clean.”

Except it didn’t, not to Paul. He stroked Payne’s badge, feeling its chill ridges; without Payne’s authorization, it was just a chunk of dead metal, unable to drain away flux’s danger. Valentine did a little booty-dance in her seat, enthused – but Paul felt as though he’d stepped away from Samaritan Mutual’s protection to search for a lunatic who he didn’t even like.

“All right, I’ve got the address,” he said, pulling it up. “We’re not too far from it, anyway. They’re international companies, so they have to be delivering
somewhere
within the Port Authority. If you look at the companies David’s contracted with, the anti-’mancer munitions usually deliver to the Newark-Elizabeth port…”

“‘W’ for Warehouse.”

“This is a slender lead, Valentine. I wouldn’t get too excited.”

The parking lot to the port was sprawling; even at three in the morning, every inch of asphalt was packed with cars, because cargo arrived at all hours. This, Paul knew, was where New York and New Jersey’s cargo landed, stacked on ships trundling in from all continents, constant tides of merchandise to be unloaded.

They pulled over before they got to the parking lot’s gate, so Paul could ’mancy up the appropriate credentials using his legal pad. But as they presented their badges, the guard noted Valentine’s eyepatch.

The guard leaned out of his booth, pushing his face through their car window.

“Do they call you Valentine?” he asked. He spoke with a zealot’s slightly hypnotized cadence.

“Who wants to know?”

He tapped the bruise on his bandaged cheekbone, winking conspiratorially. “Tyler’s been waiting for you.”

Valentine punched Paul in the shoulder. “You see?
True love
. I can read this guy like a book.”

“Well, yeah,” Paul said. “That book is
Fight Club
.”

“Pull over to the far side,” said the guard. “Walk to the west side entry. Someone from Project Mayhem will meet you there.”

The guard pulled his hat down, slouching back into his booth. Paul leaned over, feeling the mild embarrassment of having to repeat your order when the drive-through clerk didn’t hear you. “Has Tyler already–”

“The first rule of Project Mayhem,” the guard recited serenely, “is that you don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem.”

Valentine stomped on the gas and parked, as though humiliated by Paul’s questions. They looked over the miles of orange and black corrugated steel shipping containers, stacked into towers for as far as the eye could see – a massive, moving maze that changed as cranes sorted through the containers to find the one they needed. Workers wearing orange safety vests and hard hats moved along, marking inventory off on touchpads.

The Port Harbor was city-sized, and needed to be. Anything shipped by boat ended up here. Nobody, not even the most diligent bureaucrats, could catalogue everything in these cargo holds – there wasn’t the manpower to verify what all these massive crates held, so stashed in with legitimate shipments were drugs and illicit arms and God knew what else.

“Whoah.” Valentine whistled. “That’s a lot of shipping.”

“$256.8 billion dollars in commerce over the last financial year,” Paul noted.

“Well, aren’t
you
the Harper’s Index of our little social circle.”

A scruffy Polish guy met them at the entryway, squinting through bruised, swollen eyes. He handed them each a hard hat, an orange reflective vest, and a dockworker’s uniform. They changed into them, then walked into the battered steel labyrinth. Forklifts whizzed around corners; quivering shipping containers blocked out the light as the cranes hauled them high into the sky.

“Do you know what Tyler intends to–” Paul began.

“The second rule of Project Mayhem is that you don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem.”

Paul probed the guy with ’mancy to verify he hadn’t been formed from Tyler’s obsessions. But as far as he could tell, their guide was very real. Tyler had been gaining support among the dockworkers.

“
Paul!
” Valentine drew her index finger across her throat. “
Totes
rude to verify someone’s reality.”

“They don’t ask questions, they don’t have any knowledge, they just follow orders–”

The guard coughed. “The fifth rule of Project Mayhem is that you have to trust Tyler Durden.”

“See?” Valentine said, as though that solved everything. He hunched over to follow their guide between two rusted shipping containers.

“
V
!”

Tyler hailed them from the top of a large, rusted shipping container, feet dangling off the edge as he kicked the corrugated steel sides, smoking a cigarette. A group of dockworkers had gathered below him, looking up at him with adoration, shuffling from foot to foot as though they couldn’t wait for the party to begin.

The container sat in an impromptu battered asphalt courtyard, walled off by the careful placement of other shipping containers. Tyler had wanted privacy, and the dockworkers made it happen.

Their efficiency should have reassured Paul. But this had a cultlike flavor; the waiting dockworkers, the seclusion, all smacked of ceremony.

Tyler jumped down from the container to meet Valentine – then panicked as he realized he’d leapt down eight feet. He landed awkwardly, scuffing his hands. His men rushed forward to pick him up; he smacked them away, covering his face, making incoherently embarrassed noises.

Valentine pushed the Project Mayhem members aside to kneel down, taking Tyler’s hands in hers tenderly. He gave a perfunctory struggle, but Valentine held his wrists, refusing to let him push her away.

“It’s OK,” she whispered. A cryptic smile bloomed across her face, as though she’d been expecting this moment. “It’s OK.”

He let her peel his hands away. Tyler’s face had changed. He still wore Brad Pitt’s handsome features, but his eyes held the scared terror of an insignificant accountant toiling at Samaritan Mutual, a chubby man who’d gone home to one too many single-serving TV dinners.

He offered that fear to her belligerently, tilting his chin as though he expected her to punch the vulnerability from his body–

–but instead, Valentine kissed him chastely on the lips.

He nodded when she was done, as though a ritual had somehow been completed. And when he brushed back his hair, his eyes had snapped back to the old Tyler.

“Hey,” Tyler said, slipping on his sunglasses. “No hard feelings about the abandonment, right?”

“You offered, I declined.”

“We got a nice little firebomb in here.” Tyler thumped the shipping container a little too hard, adopting a swagger.

“This container holds all the latest anti-’mancer technology shipped over from Israeli factories. They’re super-sensitive to ’mancy. So pretty much anything we do will cause a massive explosion.” He winked at Valentine, who clasped her hands together in pride. “I mean, how do you feel about casting spells together? Because that last fight, well, it hung high in the rafters of
my
life.”

“Are you fucking
crazy
!?”

Tyler’s men stepped back as Paul limped forward, looking to Tyler for orders. Tyler, nonplussed, took a long draw off his cigarette.

“Is any ’mancy really sane, Paul?” he replied.

“I cannot believe you used ’mancy to taunt David Giabatta. The city’s terrified of ’mancers after we damn near wiped out the Task Force–”

“No, we
saved
the Task Force,” Tyler said calmly. “It was your firebird freak who almost killed them.”

“Regardless – we have a law enforcement organization that keeps the far deadlier SMASH out of New York, and after everything we’ve gone through, you’re
amping
the pressure on them? To... to go on a
date
?”

“Whoah!” Tyler held his hands up, wiggling his fingers as if to show there was nothing up his sleeve. “Not a scrap of ’mancy in
that
operation, Paul. Just hard-working Project Mayhem members, using all the improvised explosives mankind has to offer.”

“And how many of those hard-working members were real?”

Tyler stubbed out his cigarette. “What do you mean?”

“Jesus. He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. He wants to be the center of attention so badly he’ll conjure up associates…”

Valentine stepped in between them. “Ix-nay on the akefay udesday talk, Paul. Bad for morale if half their team dissolves into a puddle of soap fat.”

“This isn’t a
team
! A team has a goal! All Tyler wants to do is... well, it’s
mayhem
!”

“No.” Tyler corrected Paul with the firm confidence of a man holding a royal flush. “What I
want
to do is take any organization who thinks brainwashing ’mancers is valid, and show them they can’t fight organized resistance.” He jerked his thumb towards the dockworkers. “This is the organized resistance.”

“And then what? The Task Force falls, SMASH comes to town, and – what? You beat up the military until the ’mancers are all free?”

Tyler smirked – a strangely sympathetic grin. “So how’s that paperwork thing working out for you?”

Paul would have punched Tyler if that didn’t fuel Tyler’s magic. Instead, he trembled with rage. Because Tyler was right: with all his access to bureaucratic power, the most Paul had done was piggyback on someone else’s safe space.

He
should
have been able to do more. For Aliyah. For Valentine. For everybody. And yet this upstart ’mancer, with his movie-stolen good looks and reliance on chaos, claimed to have a better plan than Paul.

He turned to Valentine for support. She refused to meet his gaze.

“Your problem,” said Tyler, “is that
you
are afraid to let everything crumble. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, Paul!”

“Those omelets are
people
, Tyler. People are going to die. They’re going to die because your showdown feeds the newspapers with all the bad-’mancer headlines they can get!”

Tyler flung his arms wide. “Fuck that! People are dying right now! The only difference is they’re dying in classic, well-worn ways! I’m not afraid to look people in the eye and tell them their spilled blood is what oils the gears of change. Am, I fellas?”

He whirled to face the dockworkers. They cheered: “We have to trust Tyler Durden! We have to trust Tyler Durden!”

Tyler puffed up, drinking strength from their applause. Which enraged Paul, because Tyler Durden wasn’t even this guy’s true name; he’d erased his records to obscure his unimpressive past.

“You’re following a movie!” Paul cried. “All you cinemancers are flawed! You’re seeking a happy ending, but real life doesn’t have credits!”

“This isn’t about happy endings, Paul. It’s about
meaning
. These guys go to a useless job, go home, buy expensive shit, feeling like the same organic sludge. They are meaningless. In creating change, they infuse their anonymous lives with meaning. They will
die
to attain relevance. They can help
me
live.”

“You are not Tyler Durden.” Paul’s voice was hoarse with anger. “Tyler had no ego.
You
are a nebbish seeking glory.
You
are a fucking cult leader.”

“And you are ineffective.”

“
Enough!
”

Tyler cringed as Valentine clicked the green “X” on her game controller. The shipping container made a muffled
whoof
sound, its battered sides crumpling outwards as Valentine’s ’mancy triggered all the opal chips inside the anti-’mancer munitions. The container rocked, spurting smoke, tilted to fall on its side with an echoing
boom
.

Valentine made a gazelle-like leap to the top, an effect marginally spoiled by the sproinging Mario “bounce” sound effect that accompanied her. She straddled the smoldering container, addressing the crowd.

Tyler gazed up at her, lovestruck as a pimply teenager.

“Paul,” she barked. “If we have a goddamned chance to sabotage these anti-’mancer technologies, we take it. And Tyler…” She trailed off, biting her lip. “
Jesus
, you’re good-looking.”

He winked.

“Tyler, we’ve been making a difference. It’s just… small. And corporate as fuck. Will you come with us? To help make it better for the ’mancers we have?” Sirens blared as the container’s explosion reached the ears of the Port security. “Before all the cops converge on our position?”

“You’d be surprised at how many cops understand
some
’mancers are looking out for their wellbeing.” But Tyler gestured for his men to scatter, then reached up to help Valentine down. She muffled a smile with her fingertips, blushing – then interlaced her fingers with his, holding hands.

“Come on.” She rushed past Paul, dashing towards the car. “We gotta get him back to the Institute.”

Valentine looked alive, her eyes wide with adrenaline excitement. She tugged Tyler, who stared at Valentine with a goofy grin that said he couldn’t believe his own luck.