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punching.”
    He finished profiling. “Ready for download.”
    They touched fingertips. Their ’mancies intertwined; Paul shivered as his bureaucratic dossiers were converted into a game mod. As a videogamemancer, Valentine could gamify just about anything.
    â€œDisable, don’t destroy,” Paul reminded her. “Remember, we brought this to them.”
    â€œ Arkham Knight it is.”
    A bat-winged cape fluttered down from Valentine’s neck; she flicked her fingers out, covering them in leather gauntlets. She wasn’t quite Batman – she’d kept her thick figure, still pudgy and womanly beneath the cowl – but cloaked in shadow, she looked deadlier than anything else on the Morehead soccer field.
    She leapt out towards Braxton Tolliver, grabbing him by the shoulders and burying her knee in his gut, before launching off him to leap into Mrs Darby as she fumbled out a Magiquell hypodermic from her purse. Valentine bounced around the soccer field like a pinball, her batcape flapping behind her, each successful attack adding numbers to the combo meter above her head.
    Paul winced. Valentine’s takedown should have shattered Mr Sheltowee’s spine, but the videogame rules turned him into a bruiseable videogame villain. He staggered to his feet, little birds circling above his head, to rush at Valentine with a club he’d pulled from nowhere.
    â€œYou’re him,” a southern-accented voice said: Mrs Tolliver, cradling her husband’s unconscious body. “You’re that terrorist the President hates.”
    â€œPlease disperse – we’ll contain the situa–”
    The flux smashed in around him, crippling migraine pressure. The universe knew the difference between information he could have dug out with a couple of Freedom of Information requests, and the sneaky hacking he’d done to ferret out private citizens’ records. This flux was the universe’s fury at being violated, wanting to rebalance the magic with gouts of bad luck–
    â€œYou hurt my husband.” She was numb with shock.
    â€œI’m sorry.” Paul held up his hand in a mixture of apology and forbiddance. “’Mancy is a delicate operation, and–”
    The flux hammered in at him: It’s a delicate operation? What could go wrong, pray tell? Let us turn your worst nightmares into reality . Paul kept his mind blank; if he worried about Mrs Tolliver’s mental health, the flux would find a way to drive her insane–
    He reached into his breast pocket, pulling out the only thing that could safely disperse this flux:
    The Contract With America.
    The Contract was handkerchief-sized, made of rich vellum, inscribed in impossibly tiny yet calligraphically-perfect lettering. His tension eased as he ran his fingers along the Contract’s sewn edges: he would never have dared put Morehead’s population near ’mancy without his generous volunteers to reduce the danger.
    Paul snapped the Contract open, unfurling it to the size of a kite. On it were the names of 32,503 people who supported pro-’mancy legislation – supported it so thoroughly they’d signed the paperwork that allowed Paul to assign his bad luck to them.
    Paul had learned the trick from an old enemy. Yet unlike Mr Payne, who’d buried his flux-dumping in the thousand paragraphs of a EULA agreement, Paul had open-sourced his legalese. He allowed people to refuse or accept the bad luck at will, ensuring no one person would ever be assigned fatal misfortune.
    Even with all those safeguards, being caught signing a magical contract would get you a lifetime prison sentence. The fact that thousands risked imprisonment for Paul humbled him.
    Those thousands allowed him to keep giving speeches despite SMASH’s best efforts – he could enact great acts of ’mancy to keep bystanders safe whenever SMASH turned peaceable rallies into war zones.
    Once again, Paul