Secondhand Sorcery

Keisha would never forget the trip across the Caspian—forty hours in a shipping container, with a cot, a bucket, and a battery-powered lamp for company. Nothing to do the whole time but sleep and worry. Even after it made port, there was a long wait, as she waited for them to unload her container, then move it again to a more sheltered part of the harbor. All according to plan. There were whole departments full of guys who cooked up these schemes, and kept them ready on the off chance somebody might need to sneak into Kazakhstan in a hurry.

The crane dropped her off, and three knocks on the door told her it was unlocked, and safe to come out. The plan said to give the knocker sixty seconds to get away before she came out. In practice, it took her five minutes to work up the nerve. She had to be the only black woman in five hundred miles. She had on coveralls and a hard hat, but she’d hardly have been less conspicuous if she were naked. Everyone who saw her would notice her, and remember.

But there was no hope for it. In another half-hour the knocker would come back, and strip the container, and destroy all the evidence. She couldn’t stay. So she left. Quick strides were the key; she’d memorized the layout of the port on her way over, and she’d stand out less if she looked busy.

Her contact was a guy named Marat, a short, stocky man who worked as a contractor for the city. She found him repairing the side door of a warehouse, and introduced herself with the name on her Malian passport: “Madina Fomba.” She didn’t know whose idea it was to make her from Mali, or why. They could have made her from Mars; the story wouldn’t hold up under any scrutiny. She had both of her pipes in her bag, and that was a death sentence right there.

Officially, Marat was supposed to pose as her new husband, except mail-order brides weren’t traditionally a thing in Kazakhstan. This was one of those parts of Asia where, if you couldn’t persuade a woman to have you, you kidnapped a local girl and called it marriage after you’d slept with her, because her family wouldn’t take her back. But she couldn’t use that story, so a green-card romance it was.

Her “husband” greeted her in Russian, his eyes darting around the harbor. She answered him in the same language, poorly, and with her very obvious Georgia drawl. He actually winced at the words coming out of her mouth, and she shut up in a hurry. They didn’t talk again until they were in his dusty white pickup.

Even then, Marat wasn’t the talkative type. He said that work was drying up now that reconstruction was done, and that he was ready to move to America and start a new business, and that was all he felt like telling her. His English was about as good as her Russian. When she asked, he said he was a trained clairvoyant, too. But she didn’t like the way he said it. She suspected he hadn’t used his talents in years.

There were men like him everywhere, quietly drawing down stipends from the State Department in case they might be useful someday. She’d had to work with a Marat or two, over the course of her career. They were never much help in a pinch. They’d been gambling that the bill would never come due to turn their lives upside-down, and always resented that it had.

He drove her to his apartment first, to drop off her luggage and get her first shower in almost three days. When she came out, dressed like a Kazakh woman (complete with a scarf, to hide her hair), he gave her a look she didn’t care for, and mentioned that he didn’t have a girlfriend at the moment. She didn’t reply. He added that his bed was very large and comfortable. She rolled her eyes, and loaded her pockets with kitties. When he added that he had never been with an African woman before, she held up her pipe, and told him she could use it to make a magic bug that would crawl up his urethra, then explode. She used gestures to be sure he understood her. He did.

He put up his hands when she proposed getting to work right away, and tried to make excuses: she’d just got here, he could get her a proper meal, state security would be less vigilant tomorrow. Keisha stood up, and got very close to him, so that he flinched and took a step back. She was a little taller than him, and maybe ten pounds lighter. She looked down into his eyes, and told him they’d be going now. Sullenly, he agreed.

They parked a block away from the larger of Atyrau’s two police stations, and Keisha got out the map so he could plot for her. He broke into a sweat at the sight of it. She asked him if he could do this, or if she needed to just kick him to the curb and handle it on her own. He snapped that he could handle whatever she could, and maybe more.

She bit back a sigh as she got out her piccolo. Yeah, she’d met men like Marat before. Some of them in the Corps. Nadia, you’d better be grateful for all this …

She took out the cars first; every car in the lot, marked or unmarked, got a hole drilled clean through its starter. Then came the phones, and the internet, and the power, all with one burrowing drone. By the time the lights died, the cops were starting to freak out.

That was as far as she got before Zenith interrupted, which was fine—she hadn’t expected to get even that far. She got maybe a second’s warning of Marat fumbling at the map, and then the halo hit. That second was still enough for her to brace herself, and jump aboard the keystone sequence with Adesina.

Zenith was a legend in the Numenate—if a joke could be a legend. Nobody knew why the commiest of the commies had decided to stick around and work for the administration that murdered his heroes. Blackmail, maybe? Whatever it was, he’d been around long enough to make even his keystone famous: the men getting up before dawn to build a literal bridge was just pure Red kitsch, with the ringing hammers and everything. It could have come straight from an old propaganda reel. It was a kind of gag you could bring out for a cheap laugh over the lunch table. Rocketman, the emissor so unimaginative his keystone echoed the party line.

The actual experience, of course, was different. It was impossible for her to see those groaning, weary men, aching everywhere but determined to do their part, without thinking of Papa, kissing her goodbye ten different times before vanishing to a place he couldn’t tell her. When he died, falling into the river this time, it only made the story more poignant. The bridge went up in the end, and the workers paused to honor the fallen warrior, and all was well. The workers went home with smiles on their faces, knowing they would be back at another job tomorrow, to make a better future.

The vision passed, and she was back in a truck, watching Zenith rise into the sky on giant plumes of flame and smoke. The familiar himself was just a tiny speck of silver at the top. Adesina was ready for him, standing on the roof of the station. His flight curved in the air, tipping over with deceptive deliberation to intercept the threat. The old woman’s eyes lit up, and the silver speck shone twice as bright from the heat of her glance on his beautiful skin. In the street two blocks away, Keisha and Marat waited for the impact as calmly as they would wait for a bus.

She didn’t see the actual approach; once he tipped over, he was moving too fast to track. There was a flash like lightning, pure white fire, and the whole street and everything on it shook from the force and the noise of his passage. Windows shattered, and the truck’s suspension grumbled below them. When Keisha’s vision cleared, she saw ten or twenty rooflines burning, just from the flames of his exhaust.

Zenith himself was a quarter-mile off, hovering in the air on the jets of fire from his feet, assessing the damage. Looking for Adesina too, maybe, but in vain. He’d been flying blind, straight into the sun, and there was no limit to how fast her Grandmama could move, provided nobody could see her. She was already behind him now, as it happened, perched on a telephone pole like an old crow. Through her eyes Keisha saw her enemy, a gaudy idol of retro-futurist perfection with smooth, sparkling skin and bulbous spheres at every joint. There was a line of rivets, like the front of a button-up shirt, straight down the middle of his back.

He had his hands on his hips as he floated, superhero-style. The confident champion, buoyed up by the collective strength of the common man. She felt the same way—but she was right. Adesina’s eyes flashed, and Zenith was a second, silver sun, incandescent with her power. And then a falling star, landing with a crash.

By the time he rose back up—incinerating a couple of houses in the process—she was ready for him in a different spot, atop a water tower. He accelerated just slowly enough for her to catch a glimpse of his handsome, square-jawed face before she burned it off with the rest of him. And he fell with an earthshaking thump. Again.

She’d prepared for this. Zenith was incredibly fast, and nothing could survive a direct hit from that charge, but his acceleration was trash and he couldn’t maneuver. To say nothing of the collateral damage … Adesina was quick and efficient. She struck him down as fast as she could, from a different angle every time. When he gave up flying to run through the streets, she was ready in a dark alley to strike him down along the way. He tried to fake her out, doubling back, and she moved ahead of him, and hit him twice as hard.

When he finally gave up, a good chunk of the city was on fire, and whole blocks were in ruins. Marat shook off the dropped valence more slowly than she did, and stared in horror at the black smoke rising from the sky. Without Adesina’s eyes, he hadn’t seen a bit of what happened, only felt and heard the terrible noise. She didn’t try to stop him from getting out to look around. She wanted the time to think this over, alone.

This was just what she was afraid would happen. A trap she could have handled, if it was a trap for her. She knew from the “Leeds bonanza” files that they had at least three emissors more competent than Zenith on this case, one of them a Knyaz. There was no reason to let her run amok like this, unless they’d decided on the spot that giving her free rein was the best way to lure in the Marshalls. As soon as the kids showed up, she was sure Snowdrop and company would come out in force. But she didn’t see a better option.

It suddenly came to her that Marat had been gone for a long time; she opened his door, peered out into the street both directions, and saw nothing. Just what she needed … she whipped up a quick “skeeter,” and sent it out hunting. Skeeters were fast, and her dear hubby wasn’t built for running. It found him inside a minute, and tagged him right on the back of the neck. He was still lying down in the street, grunting in pain, when she caught up with him in person. She hoisted him to his feet; he could barely stand even with help.

“Where were you going?” she asked. No answer. Probably the muscle spasms wouldn’t let him. “That was something special I got you with,” she whispered in his ear. “The immediate symptoms will fade soon, but you have about … eighteen hours until it comes back worse, and another six after that until it kills you. I can tag you with another drone to neutralize the poison for twelve hours at a time, as many times as I want. It takes a VRIL to make that special, temporary antidote.”

She manhandled him into his truck’s passenger seat. “I can’t cure you completely until we get back to friendly territory. If I get killed here, you will die less than a day later, painfully. So you want to take very good care of me. Understand?” He didn’t. She’d have to repeat it to him slower, when she got the time. The important thing was that she’d worked out a good story to keep him in line. She couldn’t spend all her time keeping an eye on him.

His apartment had survived, but the one across the street was in bad shape, and the roads were clogged with people trying to either rescue survivors or pack up their stuff and skip town. She felt bad about doing this to these people, and a little worse because she couldn’t help feeling relieved that nobody had a glance to spare for the two of them with so much going on. They parked two streets over, and snuck into the building by a side door.

It took time to tell him the whole “poison” story, but he looked like he bought it. At least, she didn’t think he was a good enough actor to break into a cold sweat on command. When she told him to lie down in his walk-in closet, he obeyed meekly, and didn’t complain when she dragged a table in front of the door.

As soon as he was secured, she got to work with her big “Benny” pipe. It was a cloudy night, so a single whisperwing would last her two hours. She sent the little drone into everything that looked like it might be a hotel, checking every individual room. When those were done, she moved on to little houses, on the off-chance the kids had rented a room. No luck. She hoped Zenith hadn’t killed the kids by accident that afternoon. More likely they just weren’t in the city anymore; she couldn’t picture Nadia hanging back while all that was going on.

She was too tired to keep going after the first ‘wing ran out of juice. She sent a message requesting more help before turning in for the night. There was no hope of getting a second emissor, and they wouldn’t have any more local assets in this backwater. She asked for a Kazakh or Russian interpreter, or a more trustworthy clairvoyant, or a couple more VRIL pipers—anything. Out of pure desperation, she said a quick prayer too, though it felt awkward and hypocritical.

There was a reply from Tyler Green in the morning, telling her there were no new revelations from the Leeds files, and asking her to keep them updated. Nothing about reinforcements. Well, God could still answer the prayer …

Art Dawes had agreed to this too damn quickly. The whole thing was a hail mary, now that they’d run out of options and hope, and he didn’t feel like risking more than he had to on it. Probably the White House already had people putting together a slick package with her life story to feed network news when she got killed here. Her death wouldn’t solve anything, but it would play in Peoria, and help to bury Belvedere. Maybe that was all Mr. President was hoping to get out of this.

Marat came out of his closet on all fours, like a dog, when she pulled the chair out of the way. Her right-hand man, for lack of literally anyone else for the job. She didn’t let herself feel sorry for him, but she did “delay the poison” with a simple nipper drone, the kind she used for trifling distractions, instead of something more painful.

His first task of the day was to translate the morning news, where—again, as expected—she found them blaming her for all the damage. And they had a point; she’d started the fight. She wouldn’t be doing that again, unless they forced her hand. Instead, since they’d kindly shown her they would be treating her with kid gloves, she got to work with her pipes again. Ivan might have all kinds of tricks she didn’t, but they didn’t have VRIL. She could scour the whole city.

A timid hand tapped her shoulder. Keisha turned and saw Marat, bowing with his hands clasped in front of his belly. She wasn’t sure she liked this over-the-top (or maybe under-the-bottom) humility better than his stupid machismo. “What?”

“What do I do?”

“Do you know how to milch?”

His shoulders slumped. Apparently that last word was familiar. “Yes.”

“Then get—no, wait, I don’t have an empty kitty. Just hold tight for now.”

“Do nothing?”

“Sure. But stay close. And cancel any work you have. Say you’re sick, whatever.” She looked out at the city. There would be fresh work for repairmen for the foreseeable future. “Today, we watch and wait. But I don’t think they’ll let me tease their espers with this stuff forever. If I don’t see the kids today, we go on the attack again tomorrow.”

“Attack?” he echoed with a grimace.

“That’s right. We could be up against four emissors here. I don’t like those odds. So rest up. Tomorrow, we take down Zenith.”