The Flux Read Free Page A

of the desk. K-Dash and Quaysean drew their guns, unsure where to shoot. Streamers of forms caught on the steel beams in the ceiling, filling the garage bays in gouts of documentation that shoved them against the lockers. Paul flipped through the paper, swimming through it, sorting through every possible combination of chargemaster prices, hunting for the cheapest available costs for poor Samuel Patziki.
    “Paul, this is fucking crazy !” Valentine cried. “Pac-Man’s chasing a hundred different fruits through a maze, and if he eats the wrong one he’ll die! I can barely keep him alive! You need to–”
    “I need to help ,” Paul muttered, recombining every line item until he found the right cost: $1,396 in bills to Samuel Patziki. Not free, but as cheap as humanly possible given Samuel’s cut-rate Samaritan Mutual policy.
    The paperwork crackled with green energy, sizzling like a summer lightning storm. Quaysean and K-Dash flattened themselves against the wall, waist deep in crackling paper files, not quite sure if the crumpled documents were safe to touch.
    “Don’t move,” Valentine warned them, wading through the paper. She grabbed a fistful of paperwork in her hand; it struggled in her grasp, like an origami animal struggling to escape.
    She squeezed the magic out of it, a dribbling stream of liquefied sunshine, until it landed skittering on the hematite.
    “Dammit, Paul.” She hugged another armful of glowing paper to her chest. The paper dissolved into ash after the ’mancy left dribbled into the tray, leaving Valentine’s arms covered in ink smudges. “I don’t know if Oscar gave us enough hematite to store this much ’mancy. Did you have to go all sorcerer’s apprentice on me here?”
    “Don’t…” Paul pleaded.
    Doing ’mancy had consequences; the universe wanted to balance out the unnaturally beneficial bizarreness with malicious coincidence. Paul needed to redirect this accumulated bad luck elsewhere, pushing the flux where he wanted it.
    Under normal circumstances, an experienced ’mancer like Paul could hold the bad luck at bay for a day or two until he could find somewhere safe to bleed it off. Yet this flux crushed him like a garbage compactor. Paul felt the flux’s pressure pressing in – with the Flex comes the flux , as the old saying went – probing for worst-case scenarios it needed to create now , an ear-popping pressure like an incoming hurricane.
    Aliyah , it whispered. Aliyah could show up .
    He closed his eyes, letting the thought float away. If he focused on his daughter, then some crazy chain of worst-case scenarios would bring Aliyah here, and for all the wrong reasons…
    “You can’t take these risks, Paul,” Valentine chided him. “What if the cops had busted us in the middle of this brew? We’d be fucked.”
    The cops .
    He’d braced himself against thoughts of Aliyah, but hearing about the cops was like telling Paul not to think about a purple elephant. The flux latched onto that thought, surfed through it; Paul felt that pressure flow out of him, a tide of misfortune racing westwards.
    “Did you hear me, Paul?” Valentine repeated. “You can’t back up a dump truck of ’mancy and unload it wherever you damn well please. Not with Aliyah sniffing around. And if you won’t–”
    She finally noticed the stunned expression on Paul’s face, then dropped the paperwork. She balled her fists against her hips.
    “…You just shit the bed, didn’t you?” she asked.
    By way of reply, they heard the whup-whup-whup of incoming police choppers.

Two

Ready Player Three
    “ I thought you had , you know, kind of an in with the cops!” Valentine hissed. “Wasn’t someone supposed to call you if the King snitched on us?”
    Paul held up his dead phone’s cracked screen. “It shattered when the alembics broke.” How the hell had the King found them?
    She flung up her hands. “Oh, that’s great. Just great . I thought you’d mastered your flux, and here we