Secondhand Sorcery

Keisha had been called to make a lot of difficult calls over the years, sometimes on short notice, while working on limited information. She’d gotten used to the snap decisions, for those moments when you needed to make a choice, any choice at all, and trust that it would be better than indecision paralysis. Now she wondered if that was what made it so hard to make a relatively unimportant decision, given plenty of time, with plenty of options and abundant information.

RUSSIAN-ENGLISH BIBLE WITH COMMENTARY. RUSSIAN BIBLE WITH IMITATION LEATHER BINDING. BIBLE IN NEW RUSSIAN TRANSLATION. On and on she scrolled, occasionally popping open a new window to check if there was some particular approved translation or other issue she wasn’t aware of. Inevitably she got bogged down in page after page of discussions about first-millennium heresies, and either her Russian or her theology wasn’t good enough to keep up.

What would it say, if she bought Nadia the book with the expensive binding? Would it seem more like a bribe, like some tacky thing Titus Marshall would go for? But the cheapest edition might be insulting too. A dual-language bible might or might not send a message she didn’t intend about international cooperation. Nobody had found any bibles at all when they searched the old base in Thessaloniki; did the Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan not encourage bible-reading or something? She checked that too, got a bunch of pages written in Kazakh that might or might not have been relevant.

It might have helped if Keisha had bothered to crack open a bible herself at any point in the last five years. Or gone to church. Or prayed, outside of moments when she was facing imminent death. She was sure Grandmama would have had something to say to her about that, too …

She glanced away from the screen long enough to look out the window. Still nothing. She didn’t need to look out the window anyway; Ruslan was doing it for her, obsessively, every time his pacing brought him past it. Keisha’s entire role in this drama was babysitting Ruslan, and keeping her magnolia up. She’d taught him S.P., but he didn’t have the discipline to maintain an image for long—at least, not in any of the tests they’d done. He’d have no prayer of doing it now, with his lady-love outside in the cold and the danger where he couldn’t see her.

It would have made the situation more tolerable if they’d had more space for Ruslan to pace in. Lodging was as tight here in Tatvan as anywhere else, and they’d gone for the relatively deluxe option of a local family’s opportunistic pop-up B&B. A couple of hundred dollars a night, American, for a “private” room with one bed and space for sleeping bags. Another hundred in gratuity for no questions asked, and no reports to the local authorities. The actual hotels were cheaper these days, but you might get thrown in with random strangers or berthed in separate rooms to use space more efficiently. Not worth the risk, or the drama.

A message popped up on her phone, from Hamp: “Did you order a dress? One just showed up.”

She smiled, texted back: “Nadia’s. Sewing project w/Fatima. Show her in AM. Let me know react.”

A pause, then: “OK. Icons too, some clothes, photos in frames. All in good shape.”

“TY.” So all her begging hadn’t been totally useless; Green’s staff were willing to help out. It had probably cost a good chunk of change to make all that stuff disappear from an evidence locker in Thessaloniki, then move it more than a thousand miles through war zones. Which meant somebody up the chain of command was feeling good about their prospects of success.

Keisha wasn’t. On paper, they had three emissants to use, one with a badly wounded but still technically active master. In practice, she was keeping an eye on three volatile young adults with no real aims for this war or their territory, no loyalty to the United States or any other country, and three widely disparate sets of priorities. The Emirate of Diyarbakir was a shaky, easily distracted, pubescent triumvirate.

This night’s plan would have been fine, for adult operatives. Overkill, even, with two emissors and a third for last-ditch backup, against a handful of conventional mercenaries. With Fatima and Ruslan to work with, she was hoping the sheer simplicity of the plan would save them. She’d managed to talk them out of something much more ambitious and dangerous, and that was where her influence ran out.

But Keisha knew there was a chart somewhere, outlining the chain of command: Three auxiliary assets, or however the Marshalls were defined, with her as their CO, Hamp as hers, Ethan somewhere off to one side, Dr. Gus just floating next to them with a question mark, and a line up to General Green from there. The chain of command was never designed to accommodate temperamental kids who might or might not take advice. As far as military law was concerned, she was in charge, and responsible for her subordinates.

Keisha had been doing sketchy ops long enough to see it as a good sign that Green was still considered Hamp’s direct superior for “Operation Joan of Arc.” If they smelled disaster on the wind, that straight line would get filled in with an intermediary real quick, to pad Green’s back end for a crash landing.

Rifle fire, muted but clear, broke the peace of the snowy night outside. So much for simplicity. Ruslan raced her to the window and won, being closer; she poked her head around his to see the intermittent sparkle of distant muzzle flashes. They were a bit over a mile from the dock, to avoid Fatima’s halo, but close to the shore with a decent line of sight to the little peninsula where the ferry landed. The boat itself was clearly visible by its running lights, a short distance from land.

“All right, let’s go,” she said, before Ruslan could say anything, and possibly work himself up into a panic. If Fatima was on the ball, she’d be done with the action by the time they got there, and appreciate a timely pickup. If she wasn’t, she’d be in deep trouble, and want reinforcements.

Their hosts were naturally more than a little alarmed, though the gunfire had died down by the time they got down the stairs. Precious seconds were lost reassuring them that they just had to go check something out right now and their sudden departure at this exact moment was a pure coincidence. They didn’t buy it, but Keisha didn’t care, and in the end they just bolted for the car and let the locals think what they wanted.

She wasn’t supposed to be riding along. Not that she’d been given specific, explicit orders to that effect, but she was supposed to minimize the risk that anyone would detect U.S. involvement, so that the Marshalls would just look like very skilled and canny kids acting on their own. But that would mean, in this case, letting Ruslan drive around a combat zone on his own, and she was damned if she’d do that. She barely trusted this kid to put his shoes on the right feet.

He could, at least, drive manual. Keisha kept in the backseat and crouched down, not that it would make any difference. Nobody else was crazy enough to be out walking the streets in these temperatures.

Ruslan slammed on the brakes, bashing Keisha’s head against the back of his seat. “Ow! Dammit! What are you doing, child?”

“Look!” She followed his pointing hand to see something small and dark scurrying out of the glare from their headlights.

“Is that a kid?”

“It was a girl, my age. She just ran out on the road in front of me, like she didn’t even see me! Crazy.”

“Crazy, or scared out of her wits.” Because Fatima, just as she’d feared, had made a mess of this. All the women and girls she’d set out to liberate were running around panicked in below-zero weather. At least she hadn’t heard any more guns. “Let’s go pick up your sister before she causes any more chaos.”

Keisha poked her head up high enough to scan the roadside for more runaway women as Ruslan drove on to the rendezvous point. They couldn’t rescue a bunch of scattered trafficking victims in their one car, for multiple reasons, but depending on how bad she’d messed this up Fatima herself might be running loose—if she wasn’t dead or dying by the ferry.

She spotted three grown people running—two women and a man, as best she could tell from glances in the dark—over the next few minutes. One of them looked like she wasn’t wearing much for the weather, but there wasn’t a lot Keisha could do but hope the woman got help. Recovering Fatima took priority, and the fewer people saw them, the better.

The rendezvous point was a small school a half-mile from the ferry, about as far as they dared to put it. Keisha kept her eyes peeled the whole way, darting this way and that. “We’re going to give her five minutes to show up, then start driving towards the docks. Assuming nothing else happens.”

“But if she’s been shot—“

“We’re balancing multiple hard-to-measure risks here,” she told him. “Risk of hypothermia from a missed meetup, risk of—LOOK OUT!”

The road curved. Their course didn’t. There was a tremendous noise of shattering glass and crunching metal, and her seatbelt did its very best to slice her neck in half. Everything shook, then went still, and Keisha came back to herself with a strange sensation in her head—a memory, or something like it, of a magnolia blossom encased in ice.

She shook her head, and the pain in her neck made her more alert. Her first and automatic response, instilled by countless repetitions of very tedious drills, was to strengthen her SP, focusing on her flower until it was clear and distinct. Only when she saw grandmama’s tree blooming in its usual way did she look up, and see Ruslan slumped over the steering wheel. Both airbags had deployed—the system to do that was thankfully too simple for a halo to kill—and the shattered windshield was covered in snow, ice, and mauled and twisted branches.

Her next impulse was to open the side door; she reached for the handle, found it stiff, looked at the window and saw it was completely frosted over. Cranking it down didn’t work, either. She had to pull the handle hard and shove with her shoulder to get the rear door open. Frigid white mist rushed into the car as soon as she did, dropping the temperature twenty degrees. What on earth?

This wasn’t anything natural, anywhere, at any time of year. Even as she looked down, she could see more frost forming on her coat where the mist touched it. Clearly a paraphysical effect. She stuck her head out, saw nothing but dark shadows and icy white mist. The effect was Pangu’s—but Harry Chen was dead, wasn’t he?

There were two possible explanations she could see: either he was somehow alive and way off the reservation, or somebody was copying Titus Marshall’s business model. Either one would make the strategic situation enormously worse and more complicated, but for the next few minutes it didn’t matter. Their current duty was just to survive.

She shut the door again, though it was too late to keep the mist out, and reached forward to shake Ruslan by the shoulder, hard. No point being gentle; if he’d sustained neck trauma he’d freeze to death before anyone could heal him. He groaned, said something she couldn’t understand.

“Hey. We need to move.”

“Why?”

“It’s cold, and there’s a familiar around.”

“Won’t matter,” he mumbled. “We don’t matter.”

Yep. Halo had him too, and he didn’t have the necessary training to break loose—a difficult task even for experienced adults. Fatima might or might not be alive, but they couldn’t hang around waiting for her to be their cavalry. The VRIL wouldn’t do a blessed thing in an active halo. That left Keisha with exactly two choices, and one of them was basically to sit in the car and pray for help.

It was amazing how quickly your options could narrow down to one. But that made them easier, as long as you didn’t think about long-term consequences.

They hadn’t packed a kitty. There shouldn’t have been any need. But a kitty was just a jump-starter, a big sealed container of preharvested ectoplasm. She had a few grams in the pic’ in her pocket. Better than nothing. The trick would be using it—she probably wasn’t the only emissor with VRIL training, but there wasn’t exactly a standard procedure for this. Before her fingers could get too stiff with cold, she got out her piccolo and put it to her lips. The trick would be to draw out the full volume at once, and absorb it at the same time …

The tree. The house. The pastor and the officer at the front door. Crying in bed, the hand on her shoulder, the words of assurance, the story of certain hope, the story of her life for the past fifteen years. It didn’t come out in an instant, and it wasn’t quite as good as a kitty, but it worked; when it was over, Adesina was sitting in the back beside her, it was only the ordinary cold of a February night by the shore of Lake Van, and the lethal mist was nowhere in sight.

Ruslan lifted his head, shook it, and turned around to look. “Who’s that?” He wasn’t anxious about the question, only curious. He knew everything would turn out all right.

“Never mind. Just … come on.” She opened the door again and got out. Ruslan followed, more stiffly and slowly. As soon he was clear, Adesina came hobbling around the rear of the car in her usual inscrutable way, frowning and shaking her head at the dead tree with the car crumpled around it. “Stay here for now.”

“I can help,” he said, still sounding confident. It was strange to hear him say anything without even a little whine in his voice.

“Not now, you can’t. You’d only slow me down. I’m going to try and find the emissant producing the mist. Once you get clear of my halo, pull out your own familiar right away; it’ll keep the mist from coming back. Do you understand? What did I just tell you?”

“I’m going to call Kizil Khan as soon as I can,” he said, with a smirk in his voice. As if to say, this was easy—did she think he was deaf?

She knew he would go back to being a neurotic mess as soon as she was gone, but she also knew this was the best she was going to get. She ran as she thought—or vice versa—and wished either her brain or her feet could have a clear path to follow. Ideally she would break out her phone, which had a dowser function—but phone or dowser, it was still way past the loj limit, and couldn’t work inside a halo. And releasing Adesina, even for a second, would only let Pangu’s fog come rushing back to reclaim the space. She was on her own, pounding the pavement.

There was no clear order to Tatvan’s north end; the few “major” roads with more than two lanes cut through a fractal mess of older lanes and courts. The space between was cluttered with walls, fences, and shady trees, all covered in snow, implacably hostile to shortcuts. She couldn’t afford the time it would take to backtrack, so Adesina made her unobtrusive way to the roofs of the tallest buildings she could find in every neighborhood, scouting out the dead ends and straining her shining eyes for a glimpse of Pangu’s mist.

In five minutes Keisha knew it was hopeless. Everywhere they went, they pushed back on the thing they were looking for, and that was just slightly shiny fog—near impossible to spot, at a distance, against snowy ground on a cloudy night. It was possible that Pangu had already disappeared. It was also possible that he was rampaging through a completely different part of town.

Intellectually, Keisha knew the situation was very bad, even horrifying; with Adesina out, she felt, and was capable of feeling, only mild dismay. It was a dangerous limitation, and the rational part of her knew there was nothing more to be done on foot. So she gave her grandmother’s ghost a little bow and set her free, holding onto a single white flower for a keepsake.

The fog did not come back. That was something. It gave her a brief, peaceful moment to process how badly things had changed. A former American asset was now active in Tatvan, apparently hostile, and presumably in the hands of a minor. She’d been forced to reveal her nature as an emissor to the single most unreliable Marshall child, and probably several dozen strangers. And another of the Marshall children was, at this point, very likely dead.

Several dogs howled in the distance, all at once; she whipped her head around, and saw a black shape like an enormous bird rising against Tatvan’s humble skyline. She swallowed, and tried to keep her magnolia steady as she waved for Kizil Khan’s attention. They could keep searching. It wasn’t hopeless. Fatima could turn up at any moment.

At least, that was what she would have to tell Ruslan.