Secondhand Sorcery

As it turned out, even in Russia, there just weren’t that many people looking to buy automatic weapons off a thirteen-year-old girl.

Fatima should have known better. She did know better; it was just that Dagestan had spoiled her. She’d been hoping for a little of that same fedayeen energy to spill over into Astrakhan next door … but nope. Not a prayer. They were all posers. Didn’t none of these lazy bitches grow up field-stripping AKs. They were even worse than those punk Turks.

The three of them got into the big city after two days on the road, fighting through the usual refugee traffic with a trunkload of scorched but usable salvaged supplies. That included some cash, but not much, since rubles were made of flammable paper. So most of their money had black marks on it and smelled bad. They weren’t alone there, but that was a problem too: they weren’t alone. Tons of desperate people flooding into town at the same time, driving up prices and eating up the same supplies.

So they needed more cash. That meant selling something, and the only thing they had worth selling was a bunch of guns in okay condition, picked by Nadia in a quick Mister Higgins run through the mountaintop. Guns, but no ammo—almost all of that got cooked off. Thank God they’d kept everything unloaded. Anyway, they now had eight valuable weapons of different sizes … and no way to move them.

Nadia tried. Fatima had to give her that. She was the only one of them who spoke Russian, and even though she was in a seriously fucked-up place, she got her head together enough to take their two pistols into a pawn shop and ask for a price. But then she came back out, less than a minute later, still carrying both guns.

“He told me to leave before he called the police,” she said, in the same creepy monotone she said everything in these days.

“Shit. Were you at least … acting normal? Did you try that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, did you smile, or make eye contact, or did you just mumble at the counter like a druggie?”

Nadia threw the guns onto the floorboard and exclaimed to the car’s roof: “Oh, if only we had somebody with us who knew how to sell firearms!”

“No need to be a bitch about it,” Fatima grumbled, but only for her own ears.

The next few pawn shops weren’t any better. They tried switching it up so she brought in rifles or smgs or just one pistol—no difference. Then they went to some small markets, chatted up newspaper stands for leads, and even had Fatima spend about twenty minutes memorizing a little speech in Russian, in case it was just that lily-white Nadia looked too much like a setup. Nope. They told Fatima to get the hell out too.

After six hours’ work, and no results, Fatima was starting to get seriously worried. They were running out of food, even the stale bread that smelled like death, and Rus wasn’t really up to eating that kind of food yet. They’d used the last IV bag yesterday morning. He was looking a lot skinnier these days, and he didn’t complain, but he got tired easy.

Well, it was better than right after the bridge, when they thought Rus was going to die. That was something. Not much, though.

The last of their cash got them fast food for dinner, and Fatima forgot her worries while she reminded Rus how to suck up soda with a straw. He seemed to like it, and it at least had calories. Soda was cheap, if they could just get more money from somewhere. They could keep sleeping in the car, since it wasn’t so miserably cold anymore at the tail end of March, and they were armed.

Which left just one other problem. “Nadia, eat. You can’t save the soup till morning.”

Nadia shrugged. “And?”

“And nothing! I’m not risking my ass, and wasting all our money, hauling you all the way back to Kazakhstan, if you’re just going to starve halfway there.” She almost shouted it. They were in the car, and safe. For the moment.

“It takes weeks to starve. I’m still drinking. I’m just not hungry.”

“Oh, so you’re going to get back home, throw a big ol’ pity party for yourself, then starve. What do you even want to go back there for?”

“Because I have nowhere else to go.”

“You’ve got the whole world.”

“We’ve made enemies of all of them. But I don’t want to see any of it.”

“Hell. Honey, I get that you’re not happy with me, but you can’t—“

“It’s not about you, Fatima. It never was.”

“Look, you fuckin’ told me not to bring him back! I offered.”

“And it’s not about that, either. I’m not mourning my brother. I told you, he died a long time ago.”

“Not mourning? Bullshit. You’re sure mourning for something.”

“Myself. I’m mourning myself.”

How pompous was this child going to get? “What does that even mean? You’re weirded out because you died—is that it?”

Nadia rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why? You think I’m stupid?”

“I think you’re Fatima. And I am Nadia. But I don’t want to be Nadia anymore. That’s the problem.”

Fatima shoved down the last of her mushroom-potato crepe thing. “Well, you’re right. I don’t understand. Congratulations, sis.”

Nadia put her soup in Fatima’s lap. “Here. I know you don’t like borscht, but I’m just not going to finish it.” Then she reclined her seat—Ruslan was in the middle, so they could both do it without squishing him too bad—and closed her eyes.

The street around them was all lit up; they were right in the heart of Astrakhan city, and it was just early evening. Laughing people crossed the street right in front of them, on their way to a movie theater. But they wouldn’t sleep that well anywhere, there was nowhere better to go, and they did have to save gas. So Fatima shut her mouth, tilted her own seat back, and tried to get some rest. God only knew what they were going to do in the morning.

She dropped off sooner than expected, and woke up groggy at—she checked her phone—half past three in the morning. The street was still bright, but a lot less busy. It was raining, but not that hard. More than drizzling, enough that nobody else was out on the streets. Nobody had tried to break into the car, but nobody had bothered to look in on them, either, in all that time. Why would they? Ruslan’s wheelchair was hidden in the back. They were just three random kids in a car, two of them girls, all too young to look like trouble, in the middle of a refugee crisis. Anybody who stopped to check on them might feel like he maybe had to do something to help, and there were too damn many people needing help these days.

Ayşe. That was her name. The little Turk brat, the soldier’s kid from Tatvan. The one who got Sergeant Stiff’s familiar, and caused them all that trouble back on the island. Ayşe had a way of popping back up in Fatima’s memory at the weirdest times, like now, and for whatever reason Fatima had a hard time forgetting her again when she remembered. What had happened to that kid, anyway? And where was she now? They hadn’t had any more problems with her, so Fatima assumed she was still back in Turkey, trying to figure out how to live now that her dad was dead and she’d helped kill like five hundred prisoners as part of somebody’s fucked-up psy-ops mind game. Where the hell did a kid even go, from a place like that?

She thought about it until her eyes got heavy again, and she wasn’t any closer to an answer. So she turned over in her seat—there really wasn’t any comfortable way to lie down in a cold car that you’d spent the last three days in—and was about to fall back asleep when she realized that Nadia was talking. Was talking, and had been talking for a while, only Fatima hadn’t realized. It was like music played in the background at a restaurant, that you heard but didn’t notice until one word in the chorus made you pay attention.

Mind you, it wasn’t all that clear, right away, that Nadia was specifically talking to her. She might not have been talking to anybody at all; she was on her back with her arms behind her head, eyes closed, and at first Fatima thought she was mumbling in her sleep, it was so slow and quiet. Only it was too organized for that.

“It wasn’t that I had a lot to lose. We were never rich. My father was an accountant, I forget for what kind of company, but it’s gone now. We lived in a little apartment, and the neighbors were friends with me but I was just such a brat. I really was. You can’t imagine how much they spoiled me, because I was the younger child, and the girl, and I didn’t even know I was spoiled. The whole world was about me, as far as I knew.

“And then when the city died, I knew, all of a sudden, what I was, and I remembered how I used to cry and whine and make all this trouble over everything, and … and just the memory of it, it disgusted me, now that I knew what real troubles were. Now that I was a monster’s child, and it was too late to go back and say I was sorry, or to thank all those people who put up with me for so long.

“So I tried to do better. I didn’t have anyone to tell me what to do; my priest was dead, and my teachers, and the nice neighbors, and my parents were gone, and Yuri was starting to turn sick even before Titus really got a hold of him and did his best to make him into the Antichrist. There was nothing for me to do but try to be better, to be better than I was, to be better than them, to be good so there was something in my life that wasn’t disgusting, anything I didn’t have to be ashamed of.

“You know who I was. You know what I did. You’ve complained, enough times, about my conscience, and what an awful nuisance it could be. I was doing my best. Sometimes even I knew I was ridiculous, I think, even if I wouldn’t admit it, to cling to this tiny little bit of principle or that even when … you know. Straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.”

She stopped talking for a while after that, but it didn’t sound like she had gone back to sleep. She was breathing too fast. “I hear you,” Fatima said, in case that was all she was waiting for.

And apparently it was. “When I killed Titus … I won’t be ashamed of that. But I used to be, just a little. Because he was my father, or said he was. Isn’t that ridiculous? How just the word ‘father’ can carry more weight than the real thing? That should have been a warning for me, that I was only ever pretending. I had to be a good girl, and good girls listen to their fathers. They don’t hit and hurt! But I think maybe I was only playing.

“Ézarine was poison, too. Pure poison. Now that she’s gone—and I really think she is—I can say that, and not feel like a hypocrite, because she isn’t me anymore. I always knew she would ruin me, even early on, before I would admit it. Claude was a sick, sick man to make her, and wherever he is, I hope he’s happier now. If he’s anywhere at all. I don’t know what I think about that, either, and even that hardly matters now, with all the other things I have to worry about.

“But she did make me strong. No, not strong, maybe. But valuable. She made me too important to throw away, and she pointed me in new directions, where I could take her anger and her power and break what needed to be broken, then blame her when the damage was done. I guess that’s why we believe in demons, so we can hate the things we do without hating ourselves. And Ézarine was a powerful demon.

“Of course I couldn’t keep that up forever. I couldn’t make myself that stupid. I nearly died when I knew what I was, when I knew that the good little girl I’d been building up for four years had turned into a murderer in the space of two months. You know that. But I listened when other people tried to help me, the same way they always tried in Guryev, to shepherd the little brat through her tantrums. I didn’t deserve it, but all of you saved me.

“When Yuri died … I still don’t miss him, you know. Not more than I missed him when he was still there, if he was even there at all. Maybe he was just Shum-Shum in a Yuri suit, by the end. I was glad to see him go, and I won’t be ashamed of that either. If Titus was bad, he was worse. Unless Titus was worse, for making him. It doesn’t make a difference, when they’re both gone.

“But that took the wool away from my eyes again, don’t you see? I promised him, Metakken’s master, that I would stop Yuri, and I did. Shum-Shum won’t ever play his awful music again, unless these foul things can be adopted a second time. I can’t help that, if they can. Either way, I stopped Yuri, but I wasn’t thinking about any promise when I did it. I was only relieved to see him gone. And that brought it all crashing down, in a moment.”

Another long pause. “Well, you weren’t wrong,” Fatima ventured.

“No, I wasn’t. And I can think of reasons why I shouldn’t have done it anyway—Ruslan might have gone mad from the pain of bringing him back, and let out the black thing again, and killed us all. I was probably right not to risk it, not that I was thinking of it back then.

“But isn’t it funny? All that time I wasted, all that work I did, struggling to be a good girl, and making apologies for my brother, and trying to use my pet demon for only good causes. But all I really needed to do was let you at him with a shotgun. You saved at least ten thousand innocent lives in a mad accident, after murdering a girl you were jealous of, all on … a half-baked suspicion, really. Your bad intentions did more than my good ones ever did, because they removed Yuri from the world.

“It should be funny, but I can’t laugh. Because after all my efforts, I am certain that, if anybody bothers to remember me at all when I am gone, they will say of me that the best thing I ever did was to leave my only brother to die.”