Flex Read Free Page A

perfect order to feed an imaginary guardian Beast.
    Then, shortly after Imani had filed for divorce, his rituals had begun to work …
    This bureaucratic marvel he’d assembled in his office – it now ran on its own, fuelled by what he knew, objectively, to be his ’mancy. He’d tracked down enough ’mancers as part of his job to know how things worked: ’mancers believed so thoroughly in their obsessions that their belief wore a hole through the laws of physics.
    But the Beast hovering over his desk didn’t feel like obsession; whenever he commanded fountains of folders to erupt from his file cabinets, the act felt freeing , wild, as though the universe was using him as an excuse to go on a beautiful bender.
    He envisioned the octopoid shape of the Beast: a floating origami construction of forms and certificates, inhaling addresses and exhaling information. Last night, after pulling the CIA reports, Paul had realized the Beast could access anything that used paperwork – he’d flipped through its infinite file cabinets to fetch data from Hollywood agents, from the IRS, from the United Nations…
    …so lost in this new toy that he’d forgotten his daughter was staying over tomorrow night…
    Paul felt like a terrible parent.
    “Come here.” Something in his tone must have changed, for Aliyah hopped in his lap. She hugged him, and the world grew a little kinder. He put the artificial foot down on the table with a clatter, getting a painful glimpse of the divorce papers Imani had sent over with Aliyah.
    “Sweetie, I’m sorry,” he told her. “I shouldn’t fall asleep when you’re here. But you can’t keep stealing my foot.”
    “I can. You never notice.”
    He stifled a chuckle. “Okay, you can . But you won’t, or you’ll get in trouble. Daddy–”
    What should he tell her? That he’d spank her? That only bad girls were criminals? Those sorts of things were likely to appeal to Aliyah, who seemed to feed on rebellion.
    Might as well try the truth.
    “Daddy’s very ashamed of not having a foot,” he admitted. “It makes him feel stupid and sad when you take it from him. How would you like it if I took your foot?”
    She hid her face; someone less familiar might have thought she was covering her smirk, but Paul knew Aliyah well enough to understand she was hiding shame. “You take my nose sometimes.”
    “Never permanently. And never for reals.”
    “But Mommy says you lost the foot for good reasons! You were fighting ’mancers. You shot them and stopped them from making drugs. She said you got a badge.”
    “She said it is a badge. Of pride. That’s… not quite the same, sweetie.”
    He rubbed his forehead. Aliyah was technically correct; he had gotten a medal for shooting that illustromancer. But he’d never felt good about that. The illustromancer had made Flex because the poor girl had become convinced she could buy Titian’s paintings from the Metropolitan Museum with enough cash.
    Paul had tracked down rumors of a scrawny girl who lurked around the museum every day until closing time, ragged, breathless, gazing at Titian’s portrait of Emperor Charles for hours. His fellow cops ribbed Paul for his weak interrogation skills – but no one doubted his courage and resourcefulness. His boss had once told the department, proudly, that Paul could track a cockroach through a garbage dump.
    Paul had been so desperate to stop her. ’Mancers ripped holes in reality – if you ripped too many holes, you wound up like Europe, a demon-haunted ruin of melted physics. So he’d tracked her to her lair, a tarp-covered alleyway festooned with reproductions…
    …and it was beautiful.
    The paintings loved her so much they performed for her; the illustromancer sat rapt, watching the show as a naked Venus whispered sweet nothings in Adonis’s impassive ear. A lute player sat attentively at Venus’s feet, playing music so beautiful, Paul blinked away tears at the memory. The Virgin Mary, robed in