Secondhand Sorcery

The cigarette was nasty, a bit of scrap paper rolled around a stingy wad of tobacco that might have been mixed with anything. It was all Fatima had, so she lit it anyway, leaning down to dip the end into the embers of the kitchen fire until it caught. The first puff was even more disgusting than she’d expected; there might be weed in it, or actual weeds. Oh well. Life was short, anyway.

Ruslan gave her the same worried look he always did when she lit up, then looked away when she tried to meet his eyes. Side benefit: the grosser her breath got, the less likely he was to try and kiss her again. They’d come to an unspoken agreement, hashing out the terms of what was acceptable. He could hold her hand however much he wanted, they could hug, she’d kiss him on the cheek, whatever. Anything else—and Rus was pretty clear he’d take anything he could get—was out. She’d been very clear, moving his hands and dodging his mouth more than once. But that didn’t keep him from trying to push the envelope all the damn time. Like this wasn’t enough of a pain in the ass already.

The old lady who owned the house didn’t approve either, but Fatima didn’t even have to pretend to care about what she thought. In a couple of hours they’d be out of this village and they’d never have to see her shriveled ass again. And this was just about the last place left to check out. There might be one or two other, even smaller collections of Kurds in huts in the region, but she doubted they’d get any more valuable intel there. They hadn’t learned anything new in a whole day. Now they were just campaigning, like politicians. Laying the groundwork, buying support, the same way Dad used to do it. Only Dad didn’t have his right-hand man trying to hump his leg all the time.

Now Rus was staring again. Poor kid probably didn’t even realize he was doing it. Not that that made it any less annoying. “Hey,” she said, and his eyes swiveled up a foot to meet hers. “About how many more jobs does your boy have in him?”

“It’s not really that exact.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I said about. I don’t need it on a calculator with decimal places and shit, Rus. I just want to know how many more people we can fix before we have to go hunt for stray dogs again.” The smoke caught the back of her throat, and she coughed.

“It depends how sick they are,” he started, then stopped when she frowned. “He’s getting stressed. He doesn’t like it when people game his system. I should be able to heal one more little thing, like a basic fracture. He’ll refuse big stuff like gunshots, I know it. Unless … you know.”

“Unless we pay him off with another human. Yeah.” She shook her head. Kizil Khan was a hell of an asset, way more useful for this kind of work than Mister Higgins. She could admit that. She only wished he wasn’t such a tightass about his little rules. Maybe that was where Ruslan got it from. “We should be done for now anyway, so I guess it’s cool.”

Ruslan gave her a worried look. Probably looking for reassurance. She guessed she could try. “Look, we’re not playing against the high rollers here; all we need is a crew to back us up, so we can eat on the regular, have a place to sleep, get a network to bring us news and warn us if they’re on to us. Nothing major, nothing permanent.”

“Yeah.” But he looked even more bummed to hear her say it. He wanted them settled down and secure so he didn’t have to worry any more, not just chasing some temporary thing.

“Relax! I’ve done this before, boy. It’s all politics. You get in with your locals, the fight’s half-won. All you need to do is keep them on your side. We know Nadia’s been in this area lately. If we can just take that Bingo place, she’ll hear about it for sure. We get her, we’ve got ourselves a fifty percent increase in firepower, plus whatever news she can bring us. We might get Yuri back too, or even Hamza.”

Ruslan nodded. He didn’t really want that, either. If it was up to him, they’d be married and settled down somewhere. Doing what? He didn’t know. The fool hadn’t thought that far. But as soon as it was more than just the two of them, he’d have a harder time pretending they were a thing that was going to happen. Which was part of the reason Fatima wanted to find the others so badly. She’d be happy to see Yuri, even.

She wasn’t delusional, though, so she was trying to make plans for if it didn’t work out. They could keep chasing Nadia for a long time if they had to. If that didn’t work out, she knew the ropes. The Kurds here hated Turks about as much as Dad’s Afghans had hated Russians and boy-humpers, so that was plenty to work with, and they didn’t have medicine worth a damn. Their strategy here would work long-term if it had to.

Of course, if she wanted to keep Ruslan around long-term, she’d need to give him more than he was getting now. She could accept that. Anybody she married, it’d have to be political, and Kizil Khan made one hell of a mahr. Ruslan himself, well, he’d at least be reliable, and maybe if she got him to work out … nah. He’d still be pretty gross. But whatever. All that was far-future stuff. She had to keep her eye on the ball.

“They’re taking a long time,” Ruslan fretted. “Are they planning something?”

“If they are, you handle it. That way we can get some credit at the Bank of Khan out of it. Two birds, one stone, you know?” He flinched; she pretended she didn’t see it. “I’m not worried,” she added, as she flicked the last of the cigarette into the ashes. “If they want to talk things over a long time, that’s good. Shows they’re taking it serious.”

Maybe a minute later, a boy came into the hut—the chief’s son, she thought. About eight, real skinny. He gave her a short bow, then turned to Rus and babbled something in Turkish. “They’ve decided,” he translated. “He wants us to come back with him.”

“See? Lead on, little man.”

The rest of it went about the same as the last eight visits: the council of elders or whatever, the six guys speaking for the two hundred or so Kurds in this one village, thanked them very much for giving the chief’s third cousin two working legs again. They weren’t ready to formally declare loyalty to the “Emir of Diyarbakir,” since they’d never seen or met the guy, but were open to further meetings with his representatives, and would be happy to pass on any news of other jinni working in the area, and so on. In the meantime, if the Emir would be so very kind as to whoop some Turkish ass for them, they’d be happy to give him more significant support, and peace be upon him, et cetera.

Fatima responded by bowing back, then thanking him through Ruslan for the food, cigarettes, lodging, gifts, prayers, and just general kindness, wishing the people of wherever-the-hell-this-was God’s blessings and promising speedy help for any future problems, especially with wasting any Turkish dogs who gave them any shit. She ended by giving them her cell number, then went outside and called the customer service line for the same American furniture wholesalers she always did. She waited a second for the English recording to tell her that her call was very important so everyone in earshot could hear a male voice on the other end, then reported the good news to the Emir in rapid but respectful English. She hung up before they could hear too much of the hold music, thanked the random villagers one more time, and they were done.

“What do we do when they ask to meet the Emir?” Ruslan asked as he drove them back up the road out of the little mountain valley. “We can’t keep pretending forever.”

“Why not? The Emir of Diyarbakir is a busy man, he doesn’t have time to meet and greet. And they don’t really need to meet him. That’s not what people expect from their government, you dig? They want everything to run smooth. As long as we don’t ask for a lot of cash, you’re not stingy with the healing, and anybody who bothers them gets wrecked, the Emir can be as unfriendly as he wants. Dad hardly ever met anyone face-to-face.

“Besides,” she added as the village vanished behind a curve in the road, “we won’t have to keep this up for that long, remember? Everything’s under control.” Ruslan kept his glum face shut, which was the best she could expect, and he drove them the rest of the way to HQ in silence.

“HQ” was the least-wrecked parts of a place that’d probably looked a lot like the one they just left, back before the war started. A couple of minutes with Kizil Khan was enough to get rid of the stray dogs and vermin who’d been living here, then Mister Higgins cleared out the rubble and unexploded shells. It wasn’t much of a home, but it had more space than the car and parts of it were intact enough to keep the rain out. Their beds were on opposite sides of a room with a hole in its ceiling that worked for a chimney, so they wouldn’t freeze in the night.

All their valuables stayed in the car where they could keep an eye on them, of course. They only came here for downtime. An emergency reserve of securely packaged food and water, wrapped in tarps, was hidden in a ruin they weren’t using for anything else, its entrance blocked by a piece of car Kizil Khan could just barely lift. It worked for a temporary fix.

Ruslan hauled the day’s goodwill donations out of the trunk and threw them in their storeroom, while she went to the bathroom to change into less dusty clothing. No running water, just a bucket filled from the old-timey well for a rag bath. It was better than nothing. There was a little mouthwash too, so she felt a little less nasty when she met up with Rus in the war room. Fatima liked to think ahead, so she had five plastic milk-crates for chairs around the village’s one surviving table. At the moment, it was just the two of them and the leaky oil lamp, and if they ever got the whole crew together again they’d definitely have enough pull to get a better place than this. But still.

“Right now, we’re in pretty good shape,” she told him. “We’re good on food, water, and fuel for at least a week. Plenty of clothes, it’s cold as shit at night but we’ve got bedding and the weather’s only going to get warmer. No sign of snoops that I could see—you spot anything?”

“No, nothing. This place is a dump. Who’d bother looking?”

“Anybody hungry with a sense of initiative,” she told him. “Or who spotted our car coming in or out, and got curious. Our blankets and clothes are totally worth stealing. Don’t get all complacent on me, Rus.”

“I’m not complacent,” he whined. “Just … tired of living here. That’s all.”

“We’ve both been through a lot worse than this,” she began, and paused to swat at a fly that buzzed in the window. It danced out of her reach easily. “Worst of our problems is crap like that. No windows, so the damn bugs get in. Big deal.”

“It’s a bigger deal than you think,” the fly retorted as it landed on the lamp. “Hello, Fatima.”

She froze in place, her hand arrested in mid-swat; only her eyes swiveled to look at Ruslan and confirm that he’d heard it too. His open mouth looked dumb enough to make her self-conscious, so she lowered her hand to the table and said, “What’s up? Who you with, bug?”

“We’ve met before, in your hospital room. About two weeks ago. You, me, and three of my friends.”

“Huh. I remember three dudes with Ballsy Bob. Which one are you?”

“None of the above. I’m the woman your sister knew as Beelzebub. The construct masks my voice as a security feature.”

“Okay. I’ve got no proof, but say it’s you. What’s the deal, homegirl?”

“You tell me. We had a deal, in your room. You said you wanted to defect. Then you left, killing an American emissor along the way. We’re not very happy about that.”

Fatima didn’t lose a beat. “I couldn’t help what Ruslan did,” she argued. “He had a big old Russian hand on his nuts, you know? So my brother and I weren’t what you’d call on the same level. Sorry about that.”

“You don’t seem very sorry to me.”

She shrugged. “Because I’m not. Last I saw you, you were fishing for intel by feeding me bullshit—then you left me in a dirty-ass hospital room with your disrespectful scrub coworkers who wouldn’t tell me a damn thing about what was going on. What I’m saying here is, we kinda started out on the wrong foot. Am I wrong?”

“You can believe what I tell you or not,” the bug huffed, “and I tell you that Hamza Marshall died on January 28. Now that I’ve found you two, all five Marshall children are accounted for.”

“That so? Okay, I’ll bite. Where’s Yuri? I know Nadia’s somewhere close.”

“She really isn’t. The videos you chased here were fakes; I engineered them myself. But I won’t be giving you any more information unless and until you show a willingness to cooperate. And we still have to discuss your own future, don’t we?”

“So what do you want? Rus and I can take this region for you, if you need it locked down. One week and a little cash help, and we’ll have a hundred square miles secure. We’ll have it quiet as a mouse, no sweat.”

“That’s very generous of you,” it said. “And we might take you up on that. Later. For now, I’ve come to ask a simple question: can you describe the Russian agents you worked with?”

She thought about it. “Maybe. What’s in it for us?”

“Assuming you aren’t still in Russian employ, identifying your handlers will make it easier for us to hunt them down, which gives you added security. We can more credibly publicize their names and appearances than you can, which will make it more difficult for them to operate in the country. We both benefit.”

“Still feels like I’m giving you a freebie,” she said. But it was probably fair. Part of this deal was getting left unsaid: if they played along, Uncle Sam would be a little less pissed about his dead emissor. If they’d found her and Ruslan once, they could find them again, unless they went totally dark and didn’t use their familiars at all. Which was a shit way to live in a country at war. Not worth it to keep an in with Moscow she didn’t want anyway, or have the card in reserve.

Meanwhile, the bug was sitting there patiently on the lamp, not saying a thing, and Rus was giving her a hopeful look, so that was his vote. Fatima didn’t think he got a vote, since he was the one who went and killed Sergeant Stiff in the first place, but what the hell. It would put him in a better mood. “Okay,” she said. “I think we’ve got a deal here. The Russians had—“

“Hold it,” the bug snapped. “No offense, but I’ll be getting your two accounts separately. I hope you understand why.”

“I think I do.” The little gnat was starting to get on her nerves now, but she couldn’t expect him to be totally stupid. The only question was whether she could trust him and Ruslan alone—and that wasn’t even hardly a question. He—she?—might get a little extra intel out of her ‘brother’ unsupervised, but he wasn’t going to go his own way. He didn’t have it in him. “All right, fine. Want to take the vermin out for walkies, Rus?”

He didn’t, but she gave him a pitying look and he went anyway, with their new buddy buzzing along behind. That was good—it gave her time to think.

This punk was cocky. The way he just casually told her he’d faked the videos, played them for suckers … or was that a lie too? Maybe. Either way, he obviously thought he had her cornered, and he probably did. He had a VRIL, and an esper, and if he wasn’t a complete idiot he’d have at least one familiar on hand to bring down the pain. So they’d have to play along, for now.

Fortunately, that wouldn’t change their plans much. This bug was probably Ballsy Bob for real, and if he wasn’t he was American or affiliated. America had its hands full trying to hold the country together; they could use her help, and Ruslan’s too. Even if he hadn’t jumped at the offer, he had to know the two of them were their best shot at holding this area down. They could work with this.

If she’d had a real chair, instead of a crappy old milk crate, she’d have leaned back in it to think. She settled for pulling out another cigarette, then remembered her lighter had been empty for the past three days. Hmph. Maybe they could milk American help for a reload, while they were at it.

The fly kept Ruslan for a good five minutes; she resisted the urge to sneak out and snoop, and risk being caught. She could sweet-talk everything Rus had told her out of him later anyway. She got her compact out instead, and spent the time trying to comb her hair into order under her hijab. When the boy and the bug came back in, she was ready with a big, happy smile. Things were looking up.