Authors: Ferrett Steinmetz
Valentine charged down the basement stairs, as though she couldn’t wait to see the show. The basement was body temperature, the heated stew smell of shirtless men crammed in to an airless place, laced with stale cigarette smoke and a sharp metallic blood scent. There had been rows of narrow windows facing the west, once, but they’d been boarded over to give people privacy.
The crowd downstairs, at least thirty shirtless men, fell silent as Valentine strode into view. Piles of shoes, socks, and shirts had been tossed into the corner, along with bloodied towels. Several beaten men cuddled each other, whispering reassurances.
And yet, Paul thought, that smell was strangely invigorating. Like a lion’s den redolent with the meat scent of predator piss. Parts of you only came alive once you realized your next few moments would be brief, exciting, and possibly final.
The men in the arena had yet to notice Valentine. Two pudgy accountants grappled each other in a mockery of martial arts. One had smashed the other’s head into a splintered support beam, but had rallied to kneel on his friend’s chest, woozily punching his buddy’s teeth out.
Valentine sized the shirtless men up like they were a buffet, eyeing them with such lust that they covered their nipples. They stopped cheering, uncertain; Paul realized they’d been confident this gladiator-style arena was a great idea, and it
had
been a great idea as long as nobody else passed judgment. Someone who found this amusing could sweep away their illusions.
Then their leader stepped out of the shadows.
He was bared to the waist, his finely muscled chest awash in a sheen of dried blood, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. His spiky hair was sweat-tousled yet somehow still model-perfect. He had a blackened eye, but it
did
look like makeup on him – the bruise on his tanned cheek accentuating his perfect cheekbones, forming a frame around a perfectly blue eye.
The ’mancer – for it was the ’mancer, no doubt – smiled, his crooked grin at odds with his hesitant fighters; he alone seemed content with Valentine’s presence. He gave her a welcoming smile, an effect only slightly spoiled by bloodied teeth.
“Ever see the rabbits freeze underneath a hawk’s shadow?” he said to his men, never peeling his admiring gaze away from Valentine. “We got a predator here, boys. And you are shitting pellets.”
Valentine drew in a shallow breath at the ’mancer’s sheer beauty. She dug her elbow into Paul’s ribs. “He’s got inguinal creases, Paul.
Inguinal creases
.”
“What in blazes is an inguinal crease?”
“It’s the ‘V’ surrounding a six-pack ab that makes my panties disintegrate.”
The ’mancer tapped the two fighting men, pulled them aside as if asking to cut in. They stopped, stunned at Valentine’s presence, but then the crowd reached out to draw them in for manly hugs, slapping them on their sweaty backs, handing them towels.
The ’mancer stepped into the arena. The other men stepped back, waiting for his lead.
He winked at Valentine, his bruise-puffed eye barely managing the trick. “So what’s your plan here, hotcakes?”
“You.” Valentine pointed at him. Called him out. She tugged off her stiletto-heeled boots.
He threw his head back and laughed. “You’ve distilled self-hatred into self-destruction. We can help you to the next level. You know the rules?”
Valentine pulled her shirt over her head, tossed it at Paul. She unbuckled her bra and tossed that at Paul too, her ample breasts plopping out. Paul held her still-warm clothing in shock, unsure who to give it to – but Valentine didn’t think twice about getting half naked before a room of strange men.
She stepped towards the ’mancer, brimming with glee.
“This is fight club. And if this is my first night at fight club…” She sighed happily, as if she’d found the home she’d been seeking all her life. “If it’s my first night at fight club, I have to fight.”
“Goddamned straight,” he said, and punched her.
V
alentine caught
the ’mancer’s fist in her hand.
“You went for the ear,” she said. “How predictable.”
She kicked him hard in the balls. He went down grinning.
“Nobody ever seemed to do that in your little movie,” she said, teasing – almost flirtatious. “It’s almost like you forgot guys have testicles.”
“What the fuck is this, Valentine?” Paul asked.
“It’s a movie,” she explained, grabbing the ’mancer by the hair, slamming his face into the dirt. “
Fight Club
. Had a boyfriend obsessed with the damn thing. Though not as obsessed as Tyler Durden here.”
He grabbed one of her nipple rings, twisted it hard enough that she let go. Then he socked her in the face, sending her bouncing back against the support beam. “This isn’t just
Fight Club
!” he said heatedly. “I am a Chuck Palahniomancer!”
“Oh, fuck off.” She landed a roundhouse to his ribs. “There’s nothing here from
Choke
, or
Survivor
, or any of Palahniuk’s other books! It’s just the movie!
You are a fuckin’
Fight-Club
-omancer!
”
He kneed her in the gut.
Paul watched them pound each other, feeling an odd exultation. This was psychotic, yet honest – not the hothouse flowers of Payne’s Institute, but an organic insanity that blossomed in whatever goddamned direction it chose.
Rainbird kept his distance as the men whooped and hollered.
It started as an ordinary fight, but soon enough Paul felt ’mancy flickering between them as the bruises blossomed. Tyler kept laughing, even when she was beating him –
especially
when she was. He fought harder, bringing his combative ’mancy into play. Valentine simply kept pace with her own ’mancy – even though she could go
much
larger, given her ’mancy could draw upon every fighting game in existence.
Yet surprisingly, Valentine played fair, matching him equally. Paul had seen her transform into a fifty-foot-tall boss monster, with flailing tentacles. But she kept her ’mancy low, enduring all the blows he rained down to blacken her cheeks.
They had compatible ’mancies, Paul realized: Valentine’s magic created cartoonish destruction, as did Tyler’s. And as she got the upper hand on Tyler, rolling him over and kneeling on his arms to smash his face, Paul found himself looking away.
It wasn’t the gore. It was the
intimacy
. They exchanged punches instead of kisses, but every blow was an exorcism, reducing each other to survival mode. Regrets? Smashed away with an elbow to your jaw. Inadequacies? How could you feel inadequate, when your body was shoved to its limits and still functioned so triumphantly? All her life, Paul realized, Valentine had retreated into Bowser’s Castle alone, crawling with the itch of things she could not control. Paul had always thought she’d retreated there to find small victories to help her chase bigger ones.
But as he watched her slam Tyler’s head into the bloodstained sawdust, Paul realized the Castle was where Valentine went to die, over and over again. She’d lost too often to allow herself the delusion of guaranteed victory. Instead, she fled to the Castle to find an ordeal so overwhelming, the luxury of self-pity would destroy her: you “won” in the Castle not through triumph, but by facing your blackest despair without holding back.
Tyler howled his approval as Valentine straddled him, smashed him, destroyed him. He was losing, but losing with every ounce of skill he had to offer.
Valentine had walked into this shabby basement, only to find herself standing inside someone else’s castle. She punched with the accuracy of perfect love, him smiling up at her through bloodied teeth because he’d found someone who would never softpedal his flaws.
One by one, Tyler’s men directed their attention elsewhere, surly jealousy on their faces.
Rainbird exhaled a cloud of black smoke. “Is this part of her mission?”
“I think she’s, uh… welcoming him to the fold.” Valentine began kissing Tyler, grinding her hips against him. “Yeah, that’s super-welcoming.”
“This is–”
A sound of impact, filtered through thick plywood. A cry of pain came from outside the boarded-over basement windows, followed by the distinctive sound of policemen calling for backup.
Tyler popped up, his face already half healed. “That’ll be the punji stakes.”
“Punji stakes?”
“Covered pits all around the house. Filled ’em with sharpened stakes. Vietnamese used to cover them in their own feces to punch their shit deep into soldiers’ feet. Me, I put the stakes in point-down, so they have to choose between keeping their foot where I want it, or losing their toes.”
Yowls of anguish. Tyler cupped his hands around his mouth. “
Wise choices! Wise choices, buddy!
”
Paul gasped. “You lined
traps
around your house?” Valentine echoed him, dreamier: “You lined traps around your
house
?”
Tyler ignored them. “Gentlemen! You are not a special snowflake! You are a bee, your stinger roped to your liver, dying for the sake of the hive!
Now get out there and show them what Project Mayhem can do
!” The fighters jogged upstairs, faces grim, as Tyler helped a battered Valentine to her feet.
“All right,” Rainbird said. “Let’s–”
The windows exploded inwards. Paul tumbled backwards, bleeding, as another hollow
boom
echoed throughout the basement. Several basketball-sized clusters flew in through the shattered window – and then exploded into a thousand ping pong-ball-sized things that looked vaguely like grenades, each made of a sticky red rubberized material. They bounced madly around the room, rocketing hard enough to daze Paul as they ricocheted off his skull. A few moments later, they were everywhere – rolling on the floor, stuck to the pillars, adhered to the walls.
“
Hey! My homeowner’s insurance won’t cover that!
” Tyler roared, just as a fusillade of rubber bullets caught him in the throat. He gagged, fell backwards.
Paul plucked a ball off the wall, rolled it between his fingers. They had serial numbers engraved in the small ridge around their equator.
Perfect. He worked best when given IDs.
He read one, activated his bureaucromancy to trace this unique identifier back to the armament factory that created it, to the production line it had rolled off of. He induced a bit of ’mancy to ensure this thing’s quality control had gone slightly awry, so this particular whatever-it-was was a dud – and then pulled up the paperwork that led to its creation –
Patent #8,234,009 B2: An anti-’mancer grenade containing a microscopic chip of high-grade opal (2), surrounded by a set of P-wave sensors (5) to detect fine fractures caused by the presence of any non-Euclidean physics (a.k.a. “’mancy”), attached to a magnesium-based pyrotechnic charge that explodes upon fracture (7a), thus ensuring the safety of civilians while disabling any ’mancer resistance…
Paul traced that back to several other advanced variants on ’mancy-sensing – the drones, small Roomba-sized jet-black devices, near-invisible at night, that could be flown across the city at night to detect ’mancy. The drones had been deployed last night in their first official tests, flying in complex patterns designed to overlap for maximum coverage. Any ’mancy-induced fracture in the drone’s embedded opal – like, say, a crazy ’mancer filling his front yard with artificial men – would broadcast an alert…
“Time to get out.” Rainbird conjured up the sheets of fire he’d used to teleport into Paul’s apartment–
“
No! Don’t use –
” Paul covered his face. As Rainbird summoned his ’mancy, the flashbangs around him detonated in a blinding explosion. Rainbird was catapulted backwards, head lolling. Unconscious or dead? Paul couldn’t tell.
The only reason the cops weren’t hauling Rainbird out of the basement was Tyler’s punji stakes. Phosphorus-blinded, Paul saw dim shadows of confused Task Force members digging each other out of the punji traps, calling for backup.
Valentine grabbed him. She yelled something; Paul heard nothing but ringing. If the broken windows hadn’t dissipated the explosion’s force, Paul’s eardrums would have burst.
Tyler gagged, vomited, grabbing his throat. “Guh!
That
’s new.”
Paul realized: his eardrums
should
have burst. Just like rubber bullets should have ruptured Tyler’s throat. Tyler had visions of a world where men could beat each other to bloodied pulps each night and still work the next morning. So his ’mancy had shielded them from harm.
A blinding spotlight swept across the room. Valentine dragged Paul to cover, rolling him over the carpet of anti-’mancer grenades. A booming voice, amplified so loud Paul heard it over his ringing ears, rumbled through the room.
“PSYCHO MANTIS,” the voice said. “THIS IS DAVID GIABATTA, OF THE NEW YORK ANTI-’MANCER TASK FORCE. YOU HAVE SEEN OUR TECHNOLOGY. WE HAVE WEAPONS TRAINED ON YOU IN THE BASEMENT – ALL FOUR OF YOU, INCLUDING THE UNCONSCIOUS ONE. AND WE WILL PROVE TO SMASH THAT WE CAN BETTER THEM.”
Even at top volume, David sounded quite proud. “SURRENDER. AND YOU WON’T BE HURT. MUCH.”
V
alentine cupped
her hands around Paul’s ear. “
I’ve got half a plan, Paul
,” she shouted. “
Now it’s your turn to pull a miracle out of your ass. Can you disable these fucking grenades?
”
Paul shook away the flashbangs’ wooziness. Despite having survived several pitched battles, he never
liked
the chaos of combat.
“
Yeah
,” he said. The balls jittered at their feet as something tanklike rolled towards the house. He gestured towards Rainbird, who lay – either unconscious or dead, he couldn’t tell – in a smoldering semicircle littered with fragments of detonated grenades. Several laser sights jittered across Rainbird’s body, which lay between them and the stairs: Task Force members ready to fire in case someone else broke for safety.
“
You’ve gotta clear me a space!
” Paul hoped his voice didn’t carry outside the basement. “
I’m lucky I didn’t set off the ones around me when I analyzed it
.”
“
You trust me, Paul?
”
She was still naked from the waist up. Paul thought he’d probably get used to combat before he got used to her bare breasts.
But he trusted her.
“
All right
.” Valentine got out the Xbox controller she always kept at her hip, then pulled Paul against her. “
If I’m not quick enough, this could be game over. Ready, Tyler?
”
Tyler grinned like a mudshark as she yanked him up against her body.
“
Jump towards the stairs on the count of three.”
He fucking hated how crippled his artificial limb and half-foot made him sometimes.
“One…”
If they died because he couldn’t jump high enough…
“Two…”
He looked to Valentine. Her worried glance didn’t give them good odds.
“Three.
”
They all leapt into the air, Paul less than the others. As they reached the zenith of their height, Valentine thumbed the controller’s button and shouted “
Rocket jump!
”
A force-shield glimmered into existence below their feet.
It expanded as the grenades on the floor went off simultaneously, the shield dimming like polarized glass to protect them from the cacophony of thunder–
The explosion launched them across the room, the force raising them high like a rocket, far higher than nonlethal flashbangs should have been able to –Valentine’s videogamemancy at work.
“FIRE!” The Task Force opened fire upon them, the laser sights zipping towards them – but Valentine interposed her force-shield between them. A blue bar appeared over her head, chipped away with each bullet, dwindling as the shield’s effectiveness eroded.
“Up the stairs!” she yelled, shoving them out into the chaos aboveground. Tyler’s men scurried to and fro, some already writhing in pain from rubber bullet hits, others tossing gas masks at each other, still others getting out guns.
Whatever else Tyler did
, Paul thought
, he prepared these boys for war
.
There were blackened spaces, cleared of rubber balls, where the flashbangs had hit Tyler’s magic pseudo-men and disintegrated them. Paul was surprised at how many real followers Tyler had. That still left thousands of flashbangs rolling around.
How much additional funding did David get?
he wondered, dazed.
“
Into the garbage chute, flyboy!
” Valentine yelled, yanking Paul into the commissary, shoving him into a nearby pantry.
“This isn’t a–”
“It’s a
Star Wars
reference, Paul. They can’t fire grenades into an enclosed space with no windows.
Shut them down
.”
More bullets – still rubber, but even rubber bullets could kill with a lucky shot – bounced off the shield, as did more explosions as Valentine’s magic triggered more grenades. They fired through the walls; as promised, David had some high-tech scopes.
Thank God he wants to bring us in alive
, Paul thought.
If he didn’t want to show up SMASH, we’d all be dead
.
As if David had read his thoughts, another announcement blared from the speakers: “KEEP IN MIND I DON’T HAVE TO DEFEAT YOU. I JUST HAVE TO FORCE YOU TO GENERATE ENOUGH FLUX UNTIL YOUR OWN MAGIC DOES YOU IN. I REPEAT: GIVE UP.”
If he got captured, Aliyah was as good as gone.
Valentine slammed the door. Paul crouched down in the pantry, shredded bags of pancake mix pouring down on his head, trying not to think about how low Valentine’s shield was getting.
He had to defuse the grenades. And whatever other technology David had brought with him.
Paul remembered the serial number – he’d always been good with figures – and followed the trail back to its arms manufacturer, seeing a new venture capital corporation that specialized in anti-’mancer weaponry. He felt himself breaking opals – they had detectors, but given that every ’mancer had their own unique approach, nobody knew how to keep all of them out – yet Paul dove into the records.
The grenades were just the tip of David’s technological investment: they’d covered the front lawn with anti-’mancer mines. The cops had rubber bullets, nerve gas tranq darts, surplus military gear.
And worse: looking over the patents, Paul realized why the grenades were red rubber. That red was radioactive dye, microscopic shreds intended to embed themselves deep in the skin, so even if a ’mancer changed shape they’d still be identifiable through a Geiger counter. Paul, Valentine, Tyler and Rainbird – if Rainbird was still alive – were all marked.
He’d deal with that later.
“
That guy’s a ’mancer?
” Tyler yelled from outside the door, incredulous.
“
He’s doing ’mancy right now
.”
“
Fuck
,” Tyler said. “
That guy’s the stealth bomber of magic
.”
And he was. His ’mancy was usually whisper-quiet, just rifling through files – nothing like Tyler’s body-destroying violence or Rainbird’s flaming holocausts.
This next move would be noisy.
A couple of lucky bullets punched through the door. “
Speed it up, Paul! I’m losing shield power!
”
It was all about quality control. Munitions factories had tight quality controls, designed to ensure duds didn’t cost some poor soldier his life. There were best procedures, careful testing, all to ensure a 98 percent reliability rating. These explosives in particular were created in combination with specially trained Unimancers, brainwashed ’mancers who’d calibrate the opals with precise tests until they broke.
One out of every fifty grenades had been pulled randomly from the factory line, thrown into testing, a staggeringly expensive process: they needed full-on ’mancy and a ’mancer-safe explosive range.
Now
, Paul thought.
What are the odds that out of the thirty thousand or so explosives saturating the campus, the remaining ones are duds?
He pulled up all the records, the things that
could
go wrong with explosives – the magnesium, the potassium nitrate, the P-wave sensors, the opals. The temptation was to go after the opals, but the opals were hand-inspected before placement.
The P-wave sensors, however, were experimental electronics sourced from overseas. Where they had lesser anti-’mancer standards.
Paul reached back, collated the records of the tested grenades. They’d assigned each explosive serial numbers so they
could
be checked, but they’d inadvertently made it easier for Paul’s ’mancy to work. He made a list of the properly tested grenades, then cross-referenced them with lists of successfully tested P-wave sensors, correlating so that anything that anyone had inspected would pass, but the rest would have manufacturing defects.
The P-wave sensors were sensitive. Too much impact during shipping could damage them. Yet the shipping containers had impact sensors affixed to them, little green labels that turned red if too many G-forces were applied in transit – but if Paul traced
those
back, he could relax the standards people had used to create the labels, causing defects in those too…
Slowly, Paul built a complex web, cascades of freak reactions and overlooked regulations so all the explosives that had not yet fired would
never
fire.
When he had built that complex network in his head, trembling with effort, he fished a small legal pad from his pocket and signed it into existence.
Nothing happened.
Yet of course, nothing
would
happen. The only difference is those explosives, once primed to fire, were theoretically inert. He’d have to do ’mancy and hope nothing detonated.
The flux slammed into him.
It was like he’d been plunged deep underwater at submarine depths, the bad luck squeezing him so hard he feared it’d burst his lungs…
It worked
, he thought, glad despite the pain.
But the flux was insistent, almost self-flagellating:
you did this to save your own skin, didn’t you?
He tried to tell it that he’d used ’mancy to selflessly protect Aliyah, but the truth was that David’s forces terrified him…
The house.
It was flimsy at the best of times. Tanks rolled towards them.
This house could collapse.
The flux rushed out of him, seeking that dreadful future. Then Paul remembered:
The badge
.
Payne’s Samaritan Mutual badge.
He thrust his hand into his pocket –
keep these touching your skin at all times
, Payne had told him. Paul wished he’d listened. Was he too late? He examined the badge: instead of reading “Samaritan Mutual,” as it had back at the office, instead engraved on its surface were four words:
Always Thank Your Benefactor
.
Of course.
He squeezed the silver badge between his fingers and whispered: “Thank you, King.” As more shots punched through Valentine’s shields, he even managed gratitude.
The badge’s surface – almost like a crown – grew more elaborate, twisting with crenellations. The grooves stiffened, forming miniscule inscribed boxes, fine letters, form numbers:
All the bureaucracy at Samaritan Mutual, packed into a space three inches across.
The badge grew heavy in Paul’s hand. His ’mancy was tugged from off his chest, pulled towards an inescapable potency. Rules were writ into the badge’s grooves, ones that held the weight of authority – a
literal
weight that called all the ’mancy in the area towards it, commanding it, calling the flux back.
Two eyes popped open on the badge. A pure blue.
Payne’s eyes.
Come to me
, the badge said in Payne’s inexorable tones. The flux turned back like a dog called by its master, abandoning this foolish idea of collapsing the house, instead plunging into the maze of Payne’s forged regulations.
The forms scissored back and forth as the flux poured in, the edges on the boxes glimmering like razors, sucking in this sticky tide of bad luck and slicing it up, dispersing it into small packets out across all the insurers who’d rendered themselves accountable to Payne.
Paul clutched the badge, shaking in gratitude as the flux dispersed. His bureaucromancy reached out to connect with the forms, as reflexive as a handshake, and Paul felt Payne deciding who got what: this claimant would get caught in a traffic jam, this claimant would get a cold, this claimant would discover himself erroneously overdrawn…
Payne’s a busy man
, Paul thought woozily.
Then the pantry’s roof caved in, brought down by a thunderous boom.
“
Paul!
” Valentine yelled, yanking the door open. Her shield’s meter was a ragged stub, dwindling under the unceasing hail of rubber bullets. “
You got it done?
”
“Yeah,” Paul muttered, then realized Valentine couldn’t hear him. “
Yes!
”
“Good. Go get ’em, space monkey.”
Tyler stumbled past the shield, pushing past the bullets to head out the front door. His men, huddled underneath their bunk beds, craned their necks to watch as he staggered out onto the porch with raised hands.
“
We surrender!
” he cried.