Free Flex by Ferrett Steinmetz Page B

the street…”
    “They needed a sergeant here to show ’em how it’s done. But what the fuck are you doing, huh?” He rapped his knuckles against Paul’s artificial foot. “This means you can’t just run in and shoot bitches. You gotta get wise. Sneaky .” He cuffed Paul in the head.
    “I wanted to see his lair,” Paul lied. “See how he thinks…”
    “Yeah, well, their infrared picked up your body heat, and wham, you’re puking up next week’s lunch. You almost got carted to fuckin’ Nevada.”
    Paul hung his head. An experienced SMASH team had taken him down easily. All his ’mancy hadn’t helped.
    “Get him up, get him up.” Two officers pulled Paul to his feet. Paul groaned as he saw the Channel 5 news crew filming eagerly. Of course the press was here. This was a PR exercise. And Paul had just made the nightly news.
    The cops intercepted the reporters, but the flashbulbs dazzled Paul’s nerve-gas-addled eyes. Lenny escorted Paul over to the police car, whispering in Paul’s ear.
    “Look, I know you wanna kill after what happened to your kid.” He thumped Paul on the shoulder. “The government can wipe those freaks’ brains, put us normal folks in command of ’em, but still… one day, that shit will backlash and bam! New York’s the next Europe.
    “Still,” he continued. “You can’t fuck with those guys head-on. Work underground, my friend. They bring us ordinaries to the Refactor to make sure we’re out of the way , man. Remember, we’re all in this together.”
    Then Lenny thumped the hood of the car; a thumpy man was Lenny Pirrazzini. “Hey, Freddy, get our hero home safe, a’ight? Because we need at least one competent sonuvabitch to take down this Anathema bastard. Paul, visit me; we’ll go hunting. Like old times.”
    We never hunted before , Paul thought – then the car drove away. Paul lolled back. The nerve gas made his vision wander helplessly towards every movement.
    “There’s a Thermos under the seat,” the driver – Freddy – said. Paul unscrewed the cap, grateful for a swig of milky Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Easy on the stomach. He felt a little more like a cop with each sip.
    Today was a bad beat. Not all bad; he’d found his ’mancer. But SMASH now had suspicions. And the reporters…
    …he remembered how he’d made the front page after killing the illustromancer. People had sent shredded Titian prints, sent long emails detailing the bloody tortures Paul should have inflicted upon her before she died, held his most shameful moment up as exemplary. The press overlooked him as Aliyah’s father because as a child, she’d been kept out of the reports – but now?
    The headlines would reflect Lenny Pirazzinni’s interpretation of events: Paul Tsabo, ’mancer killer, was on the hunt.
    As the cop car zoomed back towards Manhattan’s bright towers, Paul wondered: had the SMASH team even been involved before he’d altered the flow of time? Would they have even shown up if he had called it in from his cell phone?
    He knew so little about magic. His hands trembled from the nerve agent, his eyes dry as raisins. Yet that strange stuffiness had lifted. Were tonight’s events flux or ordinary bad luck?
    The gamemancer. The gamemancer would teach him how to master flux.
    She had to.

Eight
“If I Have to Die, It Should be by Magic.”
    O ver the next three days , Paul replayed one conversation in his head, over and over again.
    “Your name?”
    “Paul,” he told her.
    Why in God’s name, Paul wondered, hadn’t he thought to ask, “What’s your name?”
    All bureaucracy started with an identifier: the name, the social security number, the case ID. You couldn’t look people up by “the heavyset girl with the Bowser tattoo”. You needed to place a hook in the Beast.
    He sat in his office, his wastepaper basket overflowing with crumpled forms. He’d had the Beast slither through the police department’s paperwork, searching for distinguishing marks – but