Secondhand Sorcery

Her phone lit up on the nightstand at two in the morning, and her eyes cracked open just before it started ringing. For a long moment she let it ring while she glared at it, willing it to fall off the edge on its own and break. When that didn’t work, she turned over and covered her ear with her pillow. It was a test; if this was an actually important call, they wouldn’t settle for leaving a message.

Sixteen rings, a pause, and it started ringing again. Yes, it was important. She reached out for it, and nearly knocked it on the floor. “Graham. What?” The voice on the other end was crisp and urgent. After a few seconds’ listen, she agreed: this was worth waking up for.

An hour later, she and Dr. Gus were huddled together at the table in the kitchenette. She was fortified with bracing news and a double espresso; he had refused anything stronger than mineral water, and wasn’t quite as awake. “Please, slow down, and bear in mind that modern communications technology is not my strength,” he said. “Again: who has sent what to whom, and how?”

“The ‘what’ part is the easiest to answer. A couple of hundred different files—a mix of scanned physical documents, word processor files, and images, mixed in with some other stuff. All in Russian. They think it’s legit. You could fake all this, technically, but it all seems consistent, and there just aren’t that many people who even know about all this, let alone having the motivation to make up such a big heap of lies about it.”

She laid her phone on the table to show him the big hook: Yuri Voronin-Marshall, his skin pale green and beginning to puff up beneath a layer of grey dirt, a very large wound in the center of his chest. “Like that. Timestamp on the image is last Wednesday, in Russian, and consistent with known Russian equipment. If they faked this with computers or something, they did a really good job, and I couldn’t tell you why.”

Dr. Gus looked briefly at the image before remarking, “Thankfully, it will be some time before breakfast. Where was this picture taken?”

“Supposedly, the hills of Dagestan. Southwest Russia. He’d been buried in a hurry, in some kind of … mountain village? I don’t know. They’re still translating this stuff. Had to dig up relevant experts with the right clearance, I guess. And I haven’t even read all of what they have translated.”

“And we were given this windfall by …”

“The address belongs to an old Czech expat who runs a produce stand in Leeds, England. He was pretty shocked when they knocked on his door. No political involvement, or any kind of connections to Moscow; he doesn’t speak a word of Russian. Oh, and his e-mail was hijacked by scammers weeks ago.”

“I am sorry, but I don’t follow you.“

“Somebody went to the trouble of buying access to a random person’s stolen e-mail so they could send this. Why? Probably because Russian authorities are known to monitor free throwaway address sites in case they get used for something like this, and just thinking about a VPN gets you in big, big trouble. No, don’t ask what a VPN is. The point is, this is probably the best way our new friend—whoever he is—could think of to send this stuff without getting noticed right away. He’ll probably still get caught from leaks on our end. This is too hot. But assuming it’s legit, somebody extremely well-placed just leaked like the Titanic.”

“And what did this person say for himself?”

“Nothing. The body of the message was blank. It was titled ‘for Keisha Graham,’ and had an enormous compressed attachment—it doesn’t matter what that is, either, but this was like somebody putting an envelope on your doorstep, knocking, and running away. But my name threw up a bunch of red flags. Kinda pissed some people off, too, since he just sent it to the Numenate’s PR bullshit address, so about ten people saw it who shouldn’t have. Apparently this guy knew who I was, and knew I was connected to the Marshalls, but didn’t have any better way to reach me.”

Dr. Gus looked back down at the picture on her phone. “This is Yuri, I take it?”

“Yep.” She’d promised to put him in the ground, the last time they met. Evidently somebody had beaten her to the punch. “Contact shotgun blast. The place he was in had been torched. Consistent with a Shum-Shum attack. A few miles away, they found a teenage girl, unburied, and shot at fairly close but more reasonable range.” She flicked through for the picture. The body had been gnawed by animals already, but the hair wasn’t Nadia’s or Fatima’s. It might have been the girl who’d been with Yuri in Homs, but she’d only seen her briefly. “Shotgun here too.”

“I see. And what do the files say? The ones which have been translated, at least?”

“A lot. They say a lot. It looks like our friends have been accomplishing way more than we have.” The phone dinged. “And they keep translating more, or connecting a new piece to an old one. They only got this stuff today, or yesterday, or whatever it was ten hours ago in D.C. You sure you don’t want coffee? This isn’t the kind of intel you sleep on and get back to in the morning.”

“I will survive, thank you. But I may wish to take breakfast early after all.”

The sunrise from the balcony was gorgeous; time had been kind to Verona. It was possible to look at the golden light reflecting off the rows of red roofs, and the trees, and the river, and convince yourself that you’d gone back in time to the Renaissance. There was even an old Roman theater, still in good shape. It was nice to sit back with a real cappucino and biscotti, and watch the city wake up while they tried to make sense of everything.

“I have never before heard of even the theoretical possibility of a familiar changing forms,” Dr. Gus said. “Let alone so drastically as we see reported here. I left a number of books at home, which I would like to consult before saying anything definitive. But with a young host, and an adopted familiar, in the wake of brain trauma … perhaps.”

“And that whole Kuban thing was just Ruslan waking up? Assuming we believe this.”

“If you recall, Captain Park described the Kuban phenomenon as ‘more violent’ than a halo, but similar in structure. If it were really the output of a damaged frontal lobe attempting to reform itself while simultaneously conjuring an emissant, I could believe that much. But I do not think that is the entire answer. Could you ask your translators to prioritize any more works by Russian theoreticians they come across in the general heap? I would be immensely interested in their insights.”

“On it.” She got busy texting. “Something strike you as fishy about this, Doc?”

“That depends what you mean by ‘fishy.’ I am intrigued by the apparent end product, or perhaps products. I have never heard of a dual-phase familiar, with two distinct valences. For a metastable equilibrium to emerge, with one collapsing into the other, and back … it is a strikingly elegant outcome for an apparently chaotic process. There is some crucial element to this story, which we are missing.”

“But the … Blackbird, or whatever they’re calling it. They think it’s a primeval?”

“It is akin to a primeval, yes. I could readily believe that such a thing could emerge from a subnarrative process within a damaged mind. If Kizil Khan had simply become the Blackbird, that would be one thing. But the golden woman, this Saray? She is if anything stronger than her predecessor, and her form is not only human but idealized, the opposite of a primeval. Essentially he has divorced the malevolent and benign aspects of his familiar into two separate beings, and in the process confined the chthonic aspects of his character into one of the two. This is … astonishingly neat work, for the damaged brain of an adolescent boy.”

“Doc, I’m going to be honest with you: I still don’t know what the hell ‘chthonic’ means.” She nearly choked on the word.

“Consider it a kind of ‘VPN.’”

“Ha. Ha. Anyway! Is any of this going to be immediately useful to us?”

“Immediately useful to us in Verona, where we are confronted with an entirely different intractable problem? No. But this has disturbing implications for the future.”

“Such as?”

“The protocols to produce an emissant are notoriously unreliable. Even successes frequently produce entities with disturbing valences or obnoxious limitations—and few have valences more disturbing, or limitations more obnoxious, than those of Kizil Khan. But we did not believe it possible to change a formed emissant. We now have evidence that we were wrong; they can be not only changed but dramatically improved, at least in some respects.”

“Yeah, but only if you first kill the emissor, then get a kid to adopt it, then almost kill the kid.”

“Up till now, to my knowledge, we have done little or no formal research on adopted emissants and the children who control them. Titus Marshall was the first to violate that taboo at scale, and the major powers are only lately catching up. I don’t believe the particular path Ruslan followed is necessarily the only way it could be done.”

“In which case … ugh. The next big thing in paraphysical research is going to be messing up even more kids, on purpose? Just to keep up in the arms race?”

“That is a possibility, yes.”

“And they already have at least two kids with familiars. Maybe three. Kostroma’s reappeared in Fatih, and they probably still have a handle on the kid who stole Pangu.”

“The third being?”

“I didn’t want to bring it up, but … Tantrum Song’s been active in Syria lately. Nobody knows who’s controlling him, though.”

“I see. I suppose that was inevitable. But all three of those are too valuable to risk damaging. I think it more likely they would seek to improve their old Soviet primevals. Distasteful as that thought may be.”

“Oh god, don’t even tell me that.” Her phone dinged again, for at least the hundredth time in five hours. “Okay, that’s a roger on the translation priorities. But—“ It dinged again, while her eyes were still on the screen. “Great. She’s in Geneva now.”

“’She’?”

“Yunks. Clairvoyant confirmed, less than an hour ago. We’re in the wrong damn country, Doc. Again.”

Dr. Gus shrugged. “It is not as if we were accomplishing very much by our presence. I believe I have contributed what I can at this point, as a theoretician.”

“Well, that’s not enough. Obviously. This is, what, her sixth country now?”

“If one includes brief excursions to the Low Countries, I believe it is eight. Germany, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and now Switzerland. But her zone of influence is now, for practical purposes, all of Western Europe.”

“Yeah.” Doc had done incredible work over the past couple of weeks; they had pretty solid theories now on how Yunks moved, how she attacked, how she sustained herself, how she put herself together, when she made a halo and when she didn’t. What they didn’t have was a good plan of attack. There was just no credible way to pin the bitch down so you could kill her. Knowing what she was didn’t make it any easier to resist when she dropped by to chew on your soul.

Which was why they’d had to take the train to get here; nobody was even willing to risk flying an airplane anymore. And anyway, there just weren’t that many people looking to travel inside the EU. Its whole economy had just about collapsed, with an epidemic of suicides, violent crime completely out of control, and a mass exodus from the continent by anyone who could get a ticket. Everyone else was staying home with their doors locked. All the major cities of France, Germany, and Spain were under martial law.

“Have we received any further word on the Colonel?” Dr. Gus asked, when she didn’t say any more.

“Still out of it. MRI’s weird but his brain still works, sort of. They’re calling in more neurologists to consult. Basically the same as yesterday.”

Fresh updates kept trickling in, with maddening slowness. They had a lot of files to dig through, and not many fluent Russian-speakers with the clearance to read it. Keisha kept herself from going crazy by reading dumb novels in between pings, and taking little naps in her chair on the balcony when that didn’t work. It was at least satisfying to read about all the trouble they’d been giving Ivan on their own.

Around ten Doc suggested getting train tickets to Geneva, but without any enthusiasm. By the time they got there she’d be in Austria or somewhere. They’d done the math; if she hopped hosts the way they thought she did, she could get very, very far in one day. Massive floodlights along every major road seemed to slow her down, by forcing her to take shorter hops or detours, but they couldn’t do that everywhere. Not enough lights in the world, and the lights caused accidents.

Anyway, she wasn’t picky about where she killed; they’d pinned her in Valladolid for a full twenty-six hours, and all that got them was eighteen thousand dead in the city before rioters trashed the lights. They were pretty sure she could have slipped out past them at any time—she was just proving a point. Keisha thought she might have caught a glimpse of Yunks there once, and that was about all she’d accomplished over the whole chase, with three other emissors to help her.

Herding her was like … trying to catch a balloon in a windy field by slapping it into a net with a long pole. She just bounced off your halo and went somewhere else. What were they supposed to do, evacuate Europe? It was only a matter of time until she hitched a ride with evacuees and made her way to the US.

A ping woke Keisha up from her umpteenth inadequate nap around noon. She read it, and bit her hand to stifle her sobs. Dr. Gus woke up anyway, and pulled the phone out of her hands when she refused to show him. He skimmed for a second, shook his head, and set it down. He hadn’t known Nadia as well or as long as she had. Which wasn’t even that long. They’d been expecting news like this for a while, if they were even lucky enough to get told about it.

But damn it, the child had deserved better than that. Keisha couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if she’d kept her mouth shut on the day they “met,” and let her bug fly out the window without saying a word. Maybe the girl would be gone by now anyway, with the way ‘Papa’ had been using her. She’d never know.

Once her face was dry, she retreated to her bedroom to sleep for real, and silenced the phone. To hell with the rules. Yunks might be a thousand miles away, and if Nadia was dead, and Ruslan permanently impaired, what were all those files good for? Nothing, to her. Fatima wouldn’t survive long on her own. Probably some strategist in a think tank would be thrilled to find out the next juicy tidbit. Maybe they’d caught Ruslan too, and stuck him full of electrodes. Who cared?

She didn’t sleep long enough; she’d been keeping a weird schedule, the past couple of weeks, and the caffeine was messing with her. It was around four thirty when she picked up the phone again, and found she’d missed sixteen more updates. Joy. She flicked through it, did a double-take, and went to knock on Doc’s door.

“Yes?”

“Doc, I am not even going to pretend to know what’s going on, but … now they’re saying she might be alive. Saray doesn’t follow Kizil Khan’s old rules, or they made a mistake, or something.”

The door cracked open. “Really. She … I do not wish to go into the details, for obvious reasons, but it should not have been possible, to bring her back to life under those circumstances.”

“Fatima and Ruslan have a third person with them, matching Nadia’s description. Maybe Yefimov lied, for some reason? Or there was or is some kind of body double. I don’t know. They seem pretty serious.”

He pulled the door open and stepped out in his nightgown, rubbing his eyes. His white hair was a wild, fuzzy halo around the bare crown of his head. “The fog of war is a damnable nuisance. Where are they, whoever and however many they are?”

“Astrakhan, as of, uh, Wednesday. A couple of plausible sightings then, anyway. That was four days ago, and she could be anywhere now. But Astrakhan is on the northwest edge of the Caspian, right up against the Kazakh border. They suspect Nadia’s headed back home. Assuming it’s her.”

“Who are ‘they’ who so suspect? Our analysts, or theirs?”

“Both, it looks like.”

“In short, they are isolated, more highly desirable to the enemy than ever, and traveling on a predictable trajectory?”

She sighed, and slumped down into a chair with her face on the table. “Yeah.” If you put it that way, it hardly mattered if Nadia was still alive or not. The best part of the news, if you could even call it good, was that they wanted Ruslan at least alive at all costs now, and Nadia too if she was actually somehow alive. Whee.

Doc shut his door and came out to sit beside her. “It seems to me that the surviving Marshalls are of immensely high value to them—but still higher value to us.”

“Of course. They don’t give a damn if these kids die.”

“Not that we know of. But I was not speaking of their emotional value. However many of the Marshalls are left, they are essentially the world’s leading expert on our current nemesis. They spent years in her shadow, and knew her master better than anyone alive.”

“Sure. Don’t think I haven’t thought of that myself. But right now, they’re … wait.” She pulled up the map. Her geography was trash when it came to that part of the world. “Y’know, we’ve got a pretty solid presence in Iran these days, last I checked. Lots of oil, lots of gas, lots of Muslims who don’t want to be Chechnya.”

“Indeed.” He cracked a weary smile. “And?”

“And we both know we’re not accomplishing a damn thing here. And the very last thing Art Dawes said to me is that he doesn’t believe in solving one problem at a time.” She pulled up General Green on her contacts. “So let’s see if he’ll let me volunteer for something absolutely insane.”