Secondhand Sorcery

Keisha retreated from the garden to join Hamp in the shade of the house, where there was less wind, less snow-glare, and a lower risk of being deafened by the shrieks of excited teenage girls. And to give them privacy, she supposed, and herself a little time to think.

“Bet you feel like a hero right about now,” Hamp muttered, hugging himself to hold in body heat.

She shook her head. “Honestly, more like a phony, if you want to know.” The two girls were catching up now, with Nadia babbling questions and Fatima doing a really ineffectual job of papering on her usual too-cool-for-school attitude over her replies. “I mean, yeah, she’s feeling happy, and I’m glad I finally managed that, but …”

“But what? The kid was living in a world of shit, you heard her. You added some sunshine. Take credit, why don’t you?”

“Hamp, you know I didn’t do anything that wouldn’t have happened in a week anyway.” It was a calculated risk, reuniting the sisters, but not that much of a risk. The local remnants of the Turkish army had all the opsec of a small-town newspaper’s gossip column, and Fatima had been halfway through building her own intel network when they found her. All they’d done here was move the timetable forward to reunite the family while they could still claim credit for it.

“You ever spend a week not knowing if somebody you care about is dead or alive? That’s not nothing. Or are you feeling sour because this happens to be operationally useful?”

“There’s that, too,” she admitted. “The poor girl’s been manipulated for years. I wish I didn’t have to do the same thing. And don’t tell me we’re trying to get her on our side to help her, even to save her life. I know that. I’m not claiming this makes sense. It’s just how I feel.”

“If being this manipulative is all it takes to make you guilty, you need to get out of the Numenate fast,” Hamp said. “Switch over to leading Girl Scouts.”

“Don’t think I haven’t considered it.”

Now the initial excitement had passed, and the two girls were sitting in awkward silence. As if they’d just remembered how they’d come to be apart in the first place. Fatima made a brave attempt to break the ice again with some kind of flippant remark; Nadia smiled, but said nothing back. “And another thing,” Hamp groused in her ear. “Why’d you wait so long to spring the surprise, anyway? You show her the picture, you tell her about the kid, then you stand around in thirty-degree weather arguing for ten minutes. What was all that about?”

Keisha shrugged. “I don’t know. Same reason, I guess. I wanted to give myself one last shot at winning honestly.”

“Hah. You honestly thought you had a prayer of convincing an angry twelve-year-old to take your side by using facts and logic. That’s cute.”

“I do wonder what will happen when Ruslan gets added to the mix,” she said, mostly to change the subject. “We can’t put that off much longer now.”

“What are you worrying for? He can save the kid’s life. And we’ll still look good for bringing them together, even if he is an annoying little wimp.” Hamp had spent more time with Ruslan than he cared for. She didn’t see what his problem was, since the boy mostly kept to himself.

The door opened behind them, and the old man came out in a hurry, escorted by the two nurses or whatever they were. They traveled in a tight pack for protection, gave Hamp and Keisha plenty of space, and ignored Fatima completely as they descended on Nadia, insisting in Turkish that she had to go in right now. She argued back, but in a pleading way, and her cheeks were bright red with the cold. She didn’t take long to give up and let them haul her back indoors.

Fatima followed them closely; Keisha stayed behind to make sure Hamp made it in. “So, how do you think the old guy fits in? He doesn’t act like he normally lives here, or like any kind of medical expert. Not while I was observing him, anyway.”

“Doesn’t speak a word of English, either,” Hamp added with a grunt of exertion. He was very gradually getting back some mobility from whatever Yunks had done to his nerves, but it was a slow process, and the cold wasn’t his friend. “Some random friend she made along the way, I guess.”

“Quite a friend,” was all she had to say to that.

The caretaker girls scowled in their direction as they shuffled inside. They had Nadia sitting up in a chair in the living room, away from her usual den in the doctor’s study. Fatima had made herself at home in the adjacent kitchen, draining the coffee-pot and setting it down. The old man waited till her back was turned, then scuttled in behind her to snatch it up and start a fresh batch brewing. He gave them all an ugly look too, and grumbled under his breath.

Fatima didn’t seem to notice him, though she did turn around to look at Keisha as she entered. “Hey, Bob. How long till we can get Rus in here? My girl needs a patch job, and the local talent ain’t cutting it.”

“The local talent is enough,” Nadia said.

“Bullshit,” Fatima said. “I’m not saying they don’t know what they’re doing, but c’mon, you can’t even walk, and this isn’t a clinic, it’s some dude’s house! We can do way better than this.”

Nadia looked up to study her sister for a moment, said, “I know that. But I don’t want Ruslan to heal me.”

“Say what?”

“I said, ‘I don’t want—‘”

“Yeah, I heard you, I just don’t believe it. Are you out of your mind, sister? I’m not trying to be rude here, but you look like hell. You could die.”

“Yes, I know that,” Nadia said. She sounded like she was struggling to keep her voice calm.

“So … what? You want to die? Help me out here. I don’t get it.”

“No, Fatima. I do not want to die. But I am trying to learn from my mistakes. I know how I got here, how I wound up like this. And I understand why this has happened now. I’m not going to go back to the way we used to live.”

Fatima threw up her hands. “The hell you talking about?”

“You know Kizil Khan does not only heal. For every life he saves, he must take another. If I take healing from him—the kind of healing I would need to walk again—I am condemning another person to death. My life is not worth making someone else pay that price.”

Fatima opened and shut her mouth in silence several times before she managed to say, “You’re out of your mind.” She turned to Keisha again. “Bob, what do you think about this?”

“I think Nadia has the right to make up her own mind,” she said, holding back a smile. It was easier, knowing what she knew, for her to stay cool about the situation. And (though she still hated to be so cynical) it really would work out better for them if Nadia was indebted to someone outside the Marshall family for her recovery.

“Get real! She’s just a little kid, she’s twelve—“

“And you’re fourteen!” Nadia objected. “Two years makes you a grownup? Less than two years. My birthday is next month.”

“—and she’s been through a lot, and she’s not thinking straight. You can’t let her straight-up risk her life for this crazy-ass bullshit.”

“The two of you have risked your lives for a lot of things before,” Keisha told her. “At least the principles behind this are better.”

Fatima’s eyes narrowed, and she spun back around. “Nadia, girl, don’t listen to her. She’s playing us, trying to split us up so she can control us better.”

“I have made up my own mind,” Nadia said. “Whatever Beelzebub is trying to do, that’s her business. Kizil Khan is … polluted. Unclean. Evil. I will not kill to save myself.”

“But it doesn’t have to be someone innocent,” Fatima objected. “We kill enemy soldiers all the time, in self-defense. Hell, we kill dogs, or rats! Sometimes he doesn’t even kill, he just makes them a little sicker.”

“Life and death are not a matter of arithmetic. I am paying for my sins already. I’m not going to dig the hole any deeper. I will not accept any amount of healing from Kizil Khan, or forgive you if you do it without my consent. My soul is worth more to me than my body.”

“So what, do you think you’re getting messages from God now? You know his plan for everything? That’s going too far even for kafir. You really have gone crazy, honey.”

This seemed like a good moment for Keisha to intervene. “It doesn’t have to be a choice between the limited assistance available here and using Kizil Khan,” she said. “I’ve told you before, Nadia, that we have medical resources of our own. At the very least, we could arrange to transport in specialists, or tools and medicines that might not be available here.”

Fatima looked mulish, but said nothing, her eyes darting back and forth between her and Nadia, waiting for her sister’s answer. Keisha could see the gears turning in her head, making calculations, judging probabilities. Planning for contingencies. The little warlord at work.

Nadia didn’t seem to notice. She bit her lip, and looked down at her legs, considering. “I am grateful that you returned my sister to me,” she said, “and you might be sincere about this. I don’t know. But I don’t want to take the easy path. Too much of my life has gone wrong already, because I did what seemed safe and easy. It’s too tempting. I would rather be true to myself, than be healthy, and find myself in another cage, doing greater and greater evil for a government which trades me favor for favor. The easy road comes at too high a cost.”

“You mean you’re too good for the kind of dirty work I do,” Fatima said, arms crossed.

“It’s not my place to judge you, Fatima. I have to choose for myself. This is what I choose.” She looked at Keisha. “Do I get a choice, though?”

“It’s not practical for us to force you to do anything, you know that.” Here it was. The big pitch. “But we had something a little different in mind for the two of you. I only ask you to hear me out while I explain it. Fatima has already agreed. Provisionally.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, leaning against the counter. “Provisionally. So I might take it back.”

“Of course,” Keisha said. “Nadia, my government isn’t blind to the reality on the ground. We’ve accepted that Turkey has fractured, and putting it back together, at this juncture, would involve a very long and bloody act of repression that might not even succeed. But letting it fall apart into a cluster of violently competing microstates isn’t desirable either.”

“Desirable,” Nadia echoed. “Who gave you the right decide how it was ‘desirable’ for strangers to live?”

“Countries have interests in the way other countries govern themselves. Problems inside one country’s borders have a way of spilling over and affecting their neighbors. That’s just reality, and I’m trying to be honest with you. We have power, and it’s not okay for us to refuse to use that power to stop violence, and dress that non-action up as some kind of moral purity.”

Nadia looked disconcerted, then disgusted; bad choice of words? Better to move on. “We don’t propose to have you act like oprichniki on our behalf. You wouldn’t do it, and we don’t want that. Basically, what we want is for you to do much the same thing you, Nadia, have been doing, but in a more measured, considered and deliberate way.”

“What do you mean by that? Who would get to decide whether my decisions are ‘deliberate’ enough? You?”

“Yes, I would be willing to advise. But I really do mean ‘advise,’ not ‘decide.’ I don’t want you getting shot again, but I wouldn’t intervene unless you started committing atrocities, or sided with the Russians. Your value to us is that you’re basically unaligned. You, Fatima, and Ruslan have no reason to side with us or our enemies, and you have no strong local interests in Turkey or Kurdistan. You seem to be motivated by ordinary young adult altruism.” Or cold-blooded calculation, or sheer adolescent male horniness. Nadia was altruistic, anyway. “In essence, you could form a buffer state. An island of calm in the storm, and potentially the nucleus of a new, stable regime.”

“A new, stable regime ruled by teenagers?” Nadia laughed, then winced and clutched at her abdomen. “You really are Beelzebub. You take me to the top of the mountain, offer me the power to rule everything. But you don’t mean it, and it’s not yours to give. It never will be.”

God. This was like talking down a cranky toddler who had her hand on the pin to a grenade. “Again: I’m not really proposing that you change much about what you’re doing, Nadia. The Turkish army is unreliable, fragmented, and increasingly corrupt. The Kurdish authorities here are in the Russian pocket. Our own assets are spread very thin, fighting in Istanbul and throughout the world. It’s easy to forget that all this is only one hot-spot, at one moment, in a worldwide, on and off fight between superpowers. We have people on every continent at this moment, engaged in offensive or defensive paraphysical operations.” Mostly offensive, if you really looked at it. Effective defense was too expensive and labor-intensive to be practical for more than a few vital hardened locations, with the current weapons of war. But Nadia didn’t need to hear all that.

“If you can just be a peacemaker—a competent, reliable peacemaker who doesn’t get herself shot every week—on the front lines, stopping further massacres and not permitting troop movements through her turf … that’s good enough for my superiors.” After a week of pleading, and mostly because General Green had other priorities.

“Our real boss would be the Emir of Diyarbakir,” Fatima said.

“And who is that?” asked Nadia suspiciously.

“Doesn’t matter. Could be him,” she said, pointing to the old man, who just about dropped the cup of fresh coffee he was pouring in surprise. “He’d probably clean up well for a photo-op, if you put a spiffy hat on him, some robes and shit …”

“I’m not in a mood for jokes, Fatima.”

“Who’s joking? There is no Emir of Diyarbakir. But Rus and I have been setting up shop for him for days now. Bob there’s given us a little hand with logistics. You could join in. Even if we have to move you around in a wheelchair for a while. I’m not going to ask Rus to heal you if you don’t want it.” She rolled her eyes a little on the last sentence.

“I know how this is going to go,” Nadia said, looking back at Keisha. “I say yes, and the next thing I know you are asking me to look the other way while you send your men through my territory to do heaven knows what.”

“We could do all that now, Nadia, with or without your permission, if we had men to spare. We really don’t, though. And if you’ll forgive my saying so, at the rate you’re going, you won’t be around much longer to help or hurt us.”

The old man said something to Nadia in Turkish; she answered in the same language, and they were off in an extended conversation she couldn’t fathom. She hadn’t had the time to learn more than basic guide-book lingo yet, and only caught the odd word or two. The old Turk gestured in their direction more than once. When they were finished, Nadia looked slightly happier.

“These people are my friends, and Fatima is my sister—no matter how crazy she calls me. I intend to help them. If you want to help me help them, I will accept that help. If you want to talk to me, I will listen. But I will not take any of your orders, and if you try to hurt any of my people, I will hurt you back. Do you understand me?”

Any of my people. So possessive. She was more like her sister than she thought. “Yes, ma’am. I think we can leave it at that, for today. We’ve intruded on you enough, and you need your rest. Would you rather we left Fatima with you, for a little while, or should we take her back with us?”

Nadia was taken aback, but said, “I would appreciate more time with her, if she is willing. Goodbye … what was your name, again?”

“Keisha. Keisha Graham, United States Numenate.”

“Goodbye then, Ms. Keisha.”

“Goodbye,” she said, and took Hamp’s arm to lead him out the door.

“That went surprisingly well,” he muttered in her ear as they made their way back to the car. “It’s about damn time something did.”

“Why shouldn’t it? We’re giving her everything she wants. She couldn’t figure out how to refuse us without looking ridiculous. What was she going to do instead: jump us, go back to Russia for spite, or declare war on America on her lonesome?”

They half-turned at the sound of footsteps one the drive behind them. It was Fatima, of course, with her hands on her hips. “Hey. Bobby, Hamster. We need to get some shit straight before you go.”

“What can we do for you?” Hamp said. It worked better to have him deal with her; he found her funny, for some reason, while she tended to piss Keisha off.

“I know what you were trying to do, back there. Driving a wedge between us. I’m wise to your shit, and I’m warning you now, it’s not cool. I’m not going to put up with it, you dig?”

“Acknowledged. We’ll try to be more circumspect in the future. Anything else?”

“Yeah. I’m giving you some time with Rus alone. You’re not going to try and talk him over, are you?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. We don’t have anything to offer him anyway. We’re not his family, you are.”

“Damn right.” She paused, as if abruptly realizing she’d run out of things to say. Maybe she’d been counting on an argument. “I’m willing to play along, and I think I can talk some sense into Nadia if you give me some time. But I’m still my papi’s girl. If you fuck us, I will burn you so bad you leave a crater, and I won’t feel bad about it when I’m done.”

“We’re here to end a war,” Hamp told her, “not to start one.”

Fatima gave them both a long, purse-lipped glower. The effect, if there was one, was ruined when she started shivering; she’d taken off her coat inside the house, then neglected to put it back on before she chased them outside. “We’re cool, then,” she said, and made an urgent retreat.

Hamp was diplomatic and cautious. He waited until they were back in the car and driving away before he burst out laughing.