Secondhand Sorcery

Yuri came out to meet them as slowly as he could contrive it, emerging from a decrepit wreck that might once have been an inn or saloon. There was only a little hitch in his insolent stroll when he caught sight of Fatima’s shotgun, and he didn’t deign to notice when she turned it to point at him. He reached the stop sign at the corner and leaned against it with his arms crossed. “Hey. ‘Sup?”

“Where’s your bitch?” Fatima demanded.

Slowly, so slowly, with his most languid contempt, Yuri looked down the quivering barrel of the shotgun, then up at Fatima’s face, and stretched, yawning at the sky as if he hadn’t a care in the world. For three full seconds he held the stretch, then slumped back down, his arms re-crossed, and looked meditatively down at a couple of rocks at his feet. And he didn’t say a word.

“Yuri,” Nadia told him—though without hope of helping—“this is not a time for jokes.”

“Ain’t joking,” he said, ostentatiously looking at his fingernails, then throwing a sly look at Nadia, inviting her to share a private laugh at the world’s expense. Her brother was showing off, at the most unhelpful time possible. Presently he turned back to Fatima, remarked, “Arms tired yet?”

“She can’t be far,” Fatima said, and stomped off past him.

Yuri let her get three steps before he spoke up: “The second I hear that gun go off, I fry your car with your boy-toy inside.” Fatima stopped in her tracks and spun around, pointing the gun at his head from mere feet away. Yuri didn’t look at it. “Good idea. Because, y’know, I was so impressed the first time you tried that. From that close, you’ll splatter my brains like, two whole feet farther apart than if you shot me from over there.”

There was no way to fix this. Nadia tried anyway. “Yuri, you know we were betrayed. They knew we were coming. Therese and the Imam are gone, and Fatima tells me I actually got—“

“Yeah, we were fucked,” Fatima interrupted, throwing Nadia a warning look she couldn’t fathom. What wasn’t she supposed to say? “And there’s a short list of suspects.”

“Oh, you were fucked? Funny coincidence—so were we! The bastards went after us as soon as you left. Who do you think ordered that?”

“Yes, you said that on the—oh, for the love of God, Fatima, will you put the gun down? He’s not threatening you, he’s not even moving. At least point it at the ground, before you give me a heart attack. Thank you. Yuri, why don’t you tell us the whole story, from the beginning?”

“Why?” Fatima snapped. “It’ll just be bullshit.” Yuri waved his hand at her, rolling his eyes: See? She won’t believe me, whatever I say.

“I will judge that,” Nadia said. “I love both of you, and I don’t want either of you hurt. Fatima, Maria can’t get far in the time it will take Yuri to tell his side of the story. We have nothing to lose.” Fatima spat on the ground, but didn’t object, which Nadia took for permission to proceed. “Yuri, please tell me the full story. All the details.”

“Already told it,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Or close enough. They turned on us like two minutes after you were gone. We barely made it out of that shithole alive. What else you want? The time I stopped to take a piss?”

“Is that really all?” She tried to look him in the eye, and he met her gaze—eventually. But there was a little delay, just enough that she felt sure, with sudden cold fear, that he was not telling them everything. There was at least one important detail he was holding back.

“Okay,” Fatima said, “story told: they were just picking on your poor little brother, when they knew he could burn them alive. What’s your verdict, judge?”

“Fatima, it’s not that hard to believe. We already know we were betrayed, somehow. They … they were definitely trying to kill me, I know that. But whoever sold us would have known Yuri was still in Gamsutl’, wouldn’t they? So trying to kill him at the same time would have tied up a loose end!”

“Sure, that’s one way to spin it,” Fatima said. “But who was the damn mole, huh? The Imam’s been here for years, building up, causing trouble, and security was pristine. Then we come along, and bam, leak!”

The shotgun’s barrel was starting to creep back up again. Nadia stepped forward to physically push it back down, and place herself between them for good measure. She had her wall up inside her head, and tried to mean it, though she didn’t trust it to hold up to a test. There was a real possibility that that gun would go off, and if it did, it might as well hit her first. It would be the end of the world either way.

“They never presented a target like us until yesterday,” Nadia told her. “And it could have been someone in the Imam’s organization who just disagreed with using us—“

“So they fucked the Imam, and all their brother believers, to sell us out? And then got that city burned down attacking Yuri, instead of just shooting him in the back of the head, like we should have done months ago? That makes no goddamn sense.”

“So what does, huh?” Yuri straightened up from his slouch against the sign. “You think I wanted to kill you—you, Rus, and my sister—and then I set the whole place on fire, stranding myself in the Muslim ass-end of Russia?”

“Why not? You’ve done dumber,” Fatima said. “But no. Simpler explanation. You didn’t screw us—at least, you weren’t the one who started this shit. I got my sights on the no-good goldbricking gunrunner skank who’s been free-riding on your dick for the last month and a half. So where is she? I wanna waste her ass and get on with my life.”

Nadia held up a hand. “Fatima, that doesn’t work either. Do you think she sweet-talked him into betraying our alliance and destroying the whole village? Do you really believe even Yuri would go that far?”

“No. You know what I think happened? I think he’s telling part of the truth. I bet you anything somebody caught the puta passing one last message, telling them we were coming. Of course they turned on them, after that!”

Nadia looked back over her shoulder to check her brother’s reaction. Too late. He’d already had time to fix his face in the same sneer as before. “Yuri, how did it really happen? Did they accuse Maria of anything?”

“Are you siding with them now? You want to get married tomorrow and wear a tent like a big girl?”

“I’m not hearing a denial,” Fatima said.

“Fine, I deny it! Eat me.”

Hopeless. “Then how did it start?” she pressed him “Who did they go after first?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know! They pulled guns on us! I wasn’t keeping a binder with notes and shit!” Again, she noticed a tiny flicker of hesitation before he answered. For a proudly unrepentant sinner, Yuri wasn’t much of a liar. He was still hiding something. Had Fatima noticed? And would it matter, if she had?

“Yuri, you’re not thinking. Our only hope of making this work out is—“

“What’s to work? The bitch is already pointing a shotgun at my ass, you think we’re going to be best pals now? Are you high?”

For just one second, Nadia’s wall held; it was a strange feeling, one she would later compare to trying to hold up a sheet of paper to stop a gush of water. She had time to sense that something was wrong, to feel all her frustrated anger give way to something different. For a long time after, she would wonder if it might have held better against a different valence. Mister Higgins and Ézarine just didn’t disagree that much. When he came calling, his story made too much sense, and his power came trickling past her defenses, and she thought of the principal in his office, and the policemen in the shop. She couldn’t say whether she experienced the actual keystone, or if the memories came up on suggestion by the feelings. Or if there was a real difference between the two.

There was a heavy thump, off to one side. Nadia looked over, and saw the flabby shape of Mister Higgins standing guard in front of the car, surrounded by a floating halo of fresh-disturbed soot. Behind her, Yuri started screaming, pitching a deafening fit. He tried to step past her to challenge Fatima head-on; without even thinking, she shoved him back.

Fresh screams, from the other direction. Maria was storming their way from whatever ruin she’d been hiding in, a fist raised in the air, spitting a torrent of poisonous Arabic. Nadia didn’t understand a word of it, but knew what the girl meant, and agreed: she was done with all this nonsense, and Fatima was going to hear about it.

Fatima’s answer was short, and abrupt, and very, very loud. Nadia recoiled, clapping her hands over her ears too late. She saw Maria fall down, but some absurd part of her brain made her turn to Fatima for confirmation, hoping by some pathetically slim and miraculous chance to find her sister equally bemused. Fatima was a step back from where she’d been before, the smoking barrel of the shotgun raised to heaven as she tugged the slide down to rack a new round.

Before she could think to protest—before her ears could stop ringing so she could hear her own words when she did—Nadia was grabbed by the shoulder and hurled, spinning, into the sooty black dust. She felt more than heard the quick, angry struggle of scuffling feet, and a cloud of ash washed over her as she looked up. The stuff got in her eyes, in her mouth, and even in that desperate moment she thought that there were probably dead men in it, and gagged. Something hit her head, hard; she put up a feeble arm to shield it, got hit again. She scrabbled away on all fours, trying to get clear while she coughed and spat.

Then the gun went off again, and something hot and wet spattered across the whole lower half of her body.

Nadia froze in place, her vision still half-blurred with filth. She felt the anger and contempt bleed out of her, and knew that Mister Higgins was gone. She was only a girl, a very small girl in that moment, sprawled in the dirt with her hands rubbing at her eyes, afraid to take her hands away and see what she had to live with.

She waited until she had cried out the last speck of dust, and her ears could hear perfectly well again, before she opened her eyes. Fatima sat on the ground not ten feet away, the shotgun cradled in her lap, staring at the still shape of Yuri stretched out in front of her. The ground, like Nadia’s clothing, was coated in an absolutely incredible amount of dark red blood. She already knew there was no point in looking closer, but did anyway: yes, there was a very large hole in the center of her brother’s chest. His eyes were open, and perfectly blank. Whatever he’d been feeling or thinking in his last moments, it was gone now, and for good.

And looking down at his vacant face, she felt … relief. Simple, quiet relief, as if a heavy load she had been bearing for ages, for so long she forgot it was even there, had slipped off her back to crash and break on the ground, and she was left standing taller, feeling light and unnaturally free. No shock, no horror, no weeping denials or hysterics. Nothing seemly or proper. Only relief.

Then came weariness, and uncertainty. She had crossed a bridge, and found herself free, and now she didn’t know where she was, or what she ought to do. The world had too many possibilities, and she had too many choices, now that Yuri was not in it any longer. The size of the new frontier made her simply dizzy. And then, as she thought that—that she was free—only then did shame catch up, the slinking feeling that she ought to cry, that she should love her brother, that her dry eyes were a betrayal of him, and their parents, and everything they had been through.

No. She didn’t owe him anything, and the suggestion that she did, even coming from her own heart, filled her with a cold and sick resentment. She would not drag herself back to that place, to be the longsuffering dutiful sister. He had no right to take her back, that beautiful, charming, elegant boy lying in the dirt with his last self-serving lies on his lips and the ashes of his last victims in his pretty blond hair. All the weight of all the dead of forsaken Guryev could not drag her back there. She refused. He had no right, no claim.

It was hard not to laugh, or maybe to shudder, at the creature she had been. A whimpering little thing choking on her own empty pieties, too caught up in playing a role, in being who she thought she ought to be, to wonder who she was. And now that that awful moment was here—and she felt as though she had come to herself all of a sudden, and seen she was making love to the rotting carcass of a dead dog—she looked at herself and saw nothing at all.

Here she was, four years later, with nothing to show for it. Sitting in the remains of a different place consumed by Shum-Shum, a place she had no reason to be, a place she probably couldn’t find on a map. Her only remaining company, in the whole wide world, was her brother’s killer, and a boy even more brainless and destructive than he had been. And even they were more than her. They still had power. This was what all her choices had come down to.

“Nadia?”

She blinked, and looked up at Fatima’s face. She realized she’d been laughing, and rocking in place in the dirt. She’d stopped laughing now, but she thought the sound had been a little too shrill, and she couldn’t recall what, if anything, was funny.

“Hey. Nadia. You with me?”

She nodded. She thought maybe she’d been crying, too, and she wasn’t sure what that was about either. The thought of talking didn’t hold much appeal.

“Listen. Rus is right there. We can make this right—“

Nadia’s laughter cut off the rest. It was okay. She didn’t want to hear any more. She pushed herself to her feet and stumbled off to nowhere in particular while the last sane bit of her adopted family trailed after her, burping up endless reassurance. How very Fatima: there was a fix, there was an answer, there was a patch they could slap on top of the scar and keep on bumbling until they bumbled into another disaster. Fatima’s got your back, homegirl!

“We’re not bringing him back,” Nadia found herself saying.

“Nadia, babe you’re not thinking straight. You think you don’t have Ézarine anymore, right? Well, what if he doesn’t have Shum-Shum anymore?”

“Oh, did you do us a favor with your shotgun?” Nadia turned around to look her in the eye. She wasn’t carrying the gun anymore. “And what if he does have Shum-Shum? Will we bring back Maria too, and pretend all this never happened?” She swept an arm around at the town. What had its name been, anyway? Not Gamsutl’, that was up on the mountain; what was this? It felt like she ought to at least remember the name of the place the little jackass had decided to burn off the map, for reasons they would probably never know now. “Do we get a do-over? Mistakes were made, we walk it back, and we go on with our lives?”

“Rus brought you back, didn’t he?”

“Maybe he shouldn’t have.”

“He can save Yuri too, I know it.”

“No, he can’t. My brother is dead—“

“He can fix that!”

“—and he died a long time ago! I was just too stupid to see it. I don’t care if you can patch up a bloody hole in his chest. You still can’t roll back four years, and drag the real boy out of time, from before he made himself a monster. Whatever you bring back, if you bring it back, it will not be Yuri anymore, and I don’t want it. He wouldn’t thank you anyway, for bringing him back both broken and useless.”

“Nadia, babe—“

“I don’t think I even want you anymore. Nothing good has come of any of this. We’re not even people, Fatima. Some rocks fell down at the top of a mountain before we were born, and they knocked off other rocks, which knocked off other rocks … and here we are, one tiny piece of a tumbling disaster, with nothing to do but watch and see how long until we hit the bottom of the hill, if it even has a bottom at all. I am done with it.”

For once, Fatima had nothing clever to say. No pat explanations, no blithe certainties. It was wonderful to see her look so utterly helpless; maybe she wasn’t alone after all. It felt so good that she was content to stand there for a while—it wasn’t as if she had any better place to go—watching and waiting with cruel joy for Fatima to find her next quip so she could pass her worthless time slapping it down.

Instead Fatima looked down at her feet for a moment. Then she shrugged, and grabbed her sister in a tight hug. Nadia thought she heard the embarrassing word “sorry,” mumbled directly into her ear. There was more with it, but that was the only word she caught. It was the only one that mattered anyway. It was so blatantly, pathetically, ludicrously inadequate, under the circumstances, that she wanted to laugh … but somehow, she found herself weeping instead.