are you calling me here, Kenneth?” she asked, then paled. “You – you slept with who?”
Anathema pulled Julian away as he reached out to comfort Green Dress. Anathema’s grip was stronger than the bodybuilders; he was being hauled back to the bathroom by hungry wolves…
“You don’t have enough Flex left to break those odds.” She pushed Julian into a cushioned seat. “A full-scale breakup? On command? That’s a frontal assault.” She batted him on the nose. “Why waste precious energy going for the throat when you can dig traps?”
Julian flushed. He hated the way Anathema made him feel… well, as naïve as he was. “…So?”
“With the Flex comes the flux. Your desire, lent might by this reality-corroding poison, pushed some serious probabilities around. Now the universe pushes back. You need to let bad things happen to bleed off the good.” She sized him up, green eyes glittering. “Can you? Can you let the bad things happen for me, little lamb?”
The numbers flew backwards now, a countdown to a bomb, offering horrible outcomes. The headmaster’s wife chatted in the corner; she could suspend him for being out on a school night. A chicken croquette crawled with salmonella.
And behind it all, swelling like a blister, the biggest, baddest possibility: she could notice her opal is broken.
“Give me more Flex,” Julian moaned. “I need ’mancy or she’ll leave…”
Anathema scowled. “You want to do ’mancy?”
Julian scrambled to placate her. “Is that a bad thing? I, I… don’t know how ’mancers act. I’ve never met one… I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has met one…”
She bared those sharp meth-teeth again. “’Mancers are scum. Sinkholes in the universe. They’re going to destroy the world as you know it.”
She clapped a calloused palm over her mouth to smother her laughter.
Julian was near panic when Anathema shoved a paper sack into his hand. The cloudy Flex crystals glowed faintly, covered with tiny, rippling hairs. Flex wasn’t true ’mancy – only a ’mancer could wear a hole in the universe through their obsessions – but a ’mancer could distill their magic, gift it in bastardized formats to mundanes. Julian crammed the crystals into his mouth, crunching them to powder; by the time he’d choked down the Flex, Anathema had slipped through the crowd, exiting with a fluid grace.
Green Dress grabbed him. Her languid beauty had transformed into haughty fury.
“Still wanna break the ice, preppie?”
“Y-yes.”
“Then let’s do this.”
She assaulted him in the cab, kissing him like she was dispensing revenge. He felt her breasts, palming the broken opal, ditching it under the cab driver’s seat.
It should have been his life’s climax, getting head in the back of the cab. But horrid potential futures squeezed his temples: the taxi’s front tire could blow. A cop could pull them over. A traffic jam could bring her to her senses.
Julian used the new Flex to push the old flux away. It was like trying to pay off credit cards with other credit cards; debt accrued.
Did it matter? He was kissing a woman who never would have noticed some pimpled kid working at a dry cleaners.
She hauled him up to her apartment. He wanted lovemaking; she fucked him angrily, like a porn star. At her instructions, he came all over her beautiful face, then sent her ex-boyfriend photos of her smeared cheeks.
“Can I sleep here?” he asked.
“Whatever.” She rolled over.
He’d fucked her, and she’d barely noticed him. He slid his arms underneath her in supplication… and when she sighed and settled reluctantly back, acknowledging him, Julian shivered in unknowable bliss.
What he’d done was wrong. He knew that. But her tolerating his presence felt like a benediction, a sign he deserved some place among the wealthy and beautiful, and oh God, he’d lied and was going to Hell.
And as Julian thought about Hell, the thought swelled in his head like a blister. Something popped, and all those terrible possibilities flooded in.
The gas main beneath them exploded.
A million-to-one chance, the inspectors later said. But that was no consolation as the flame filled the apartment, fusing his skin to hers, her shrieking in pain, him shrieking as he realized what he’d done. The last thing Julian saw was the numbers fading, returning to zero, burning up along with his flesh.
Julian had been good at counting costs.
Just not good enough.
PART I
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
ONE
MISSING THINGS
Paul Tsabo woke to discover that once again, his six year-old daughter had stolen his right foot.
“Aliyah!” He half-rose from the La-Z-Boy he’d drifted off in, then realized hopping about the apartment on