The Flux Read Free Page B

are with the po-po about to kick down our door–”
    “–if you hadn’t interrupted me in mid-brew, I would have kept it under control!”
    K-Dash cleared his throat politely. Quaysean glanced over towards the garage door, where the sound of the choppers beat louder against the plywood nailed over the windows.
    Paul headbobbed an apology at Valentine. “…hug it out later?” he offered.
    “Hug it out.” She shot Paul a pair of jaunty fingerguns by way of forgiveness. Then she scooped up armfuls of paper and squeezed, raining gouts of magic down onto the hematite. Paul mashed the gritty green flecks and sunny ’mancy together, squeezing until they condensed into clear white crystals:
    Flex. The most dangerous drug in the world. Magic a non-’mancer could use. Worth millions.
    More than enough to repay Oscar for this hematite.
    But by then, the choppers whirred overhead.
    “Now what?” Valentine asked, her fingers curling around the Xbox controller she always kept at her waist. Oscar’s meth labs had come pre-installed with secret exits, but they’d switched to a distant locale to try to avoid the King – which meant all this place came equipped with was obscurity. “Should I jack a car, go all Grand Theft Auto ?”
    “Civilians get hurt when you do that.” Valentine’s videogame magic was brutally effective at causing mayhem – her channeling a first-person shooter could slaughter any police force – yet Paul refused to hurt cops for doing their job. “Besides,” he continued, looking longingly at the pallet of money, “we’d still leave evidence behind.”
    “So… we ask them to leave nicely?”
    “You’re damn straight we do.” He grabbed a legal pad, rested it on a teetering stack of cash, and began scribbling.
    Leasing agreements blossomed out from under his pen. Paul picked a name at random: Lemuel Galuschak. He inserted a birth certificate into the state records office in Menands, New York, then backfilled in several faked grade school records as Lemuel grew up in, let’s say, the 1950s – Paul gave Lemuel unexceptional grades, preferring to have Lemuel be on the varsity sports team–
    Sirens wailed, joining the chopper noise. Valentine made a circling motion with her finger. “Speed it up, Paul.”
    “Fine, fine.” Paul blazed through, giving Lemuel Galuschak a spotty employment record until a fake uncle in Europe left him $75,000. That’d hold up to a cursory analysis, at least. Then Paul tracked down the building’s owner, filled out forms showing Galuschak had purchased the building in an auction two months ago, for–
    Oh, goddammit. He didn’t have time to negotiate. Paul grabbed a thick stack of bills, $50,000 in cash. As he riffled through the stack, each bill evaporated into confetti snippets of shredded mortgage contracts.
    That was $50,000 more than he wanted to spend, but the alternative was to have $50,000 worth of bad luck crash down now. Too much, with the cops setting up shop outside the door.
    “There,” he said, panting as he finalized the permits to store volatile chemicals. “We now own this garage. Or at least Lemuel Galuschak does, a sixty seven year-old man with a heart condition.”
    Valentine gave an exasperated gesture that encompassed the room, which consisted of ashen concrete, a desk, and a set of lockers – lockers lit up by flickering purple from the lights of the police cars outside leaking through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. “And when the cops bust through the doors, we tell them… what? Lemuel says it’s totes cool to set up a magical meth lab in his empty auto repair shop?”
    “Can you make it not empty? Can you make it look like we’ve actually set up shop in here?”
    “…for Flex?”
    “No,” Paul said. “To repair cars.”
    “How do you propose I do that?”
    “Don’t ask me – you’re the videogame queen. Isn’t there some videogame-style way to populate this garage with fresh equipment?”
    “Jesus Christ,