Secondhand Sorcery

“We knew this was coming,” Hamp told her over the phone. He sounded tired. “And I, at least, expected the Israelis to bring it up. I would, in their place. Just not—“

“Not so abruptly, and without discussing it with us first, yeah.” The deck of the Spenser was chilly but not cold; spring was coming. She looked around to be sure Nadia hadn’t followed her outside. “Possibly they expected us to have told them ourselves.”

She imagined she could actually hear Hamp’s eyes rolling over the line. “Right. Did they happen to mention that we have a price on the little prick’s head?”

“Not that I can tell, and I don’t think we need to bring it up either. Could you talk to … to whoever we’ve got on that? I don’t want to walk into a firefight.” She thought a moment, then amended, “A bigger firefight than necessary.”

“I’ve sent word through General Green. It’s something of a multinational coalition at this point, but they weren’t making a whole lot of progress anyway. The kid’s not stupid.”

“Would you expect him to be? Nadia isn’t. So, are we just putting the manhunt on pause, or what?”

“Green accepts that we have no choice but to try and recruit him, or else forfeit the loyalty of the other three, and that trying to assassinate him thereafter will give us up to four hostile underage emissors instead of one. He’s not happy, but he accepts it. He’s, uh, got a lot of things he’s not happy about lately, in fact. Speaking of which, there’s … something else you should know.”

“What? What now?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s … you don’t get much of the news there, do you?”

“On a warship? I could, but don’t. That’s what I’ve got you for. Spit it out.”

He sighed. “It hit the airwaves Friday morning, while you and Grampy Turk were bugging out with the kids. It was just inside baseball stuff at first: high-quality footage from this place called Tatvan, an emissant nobody’d seen before, slugging it out with Pangu and Snowdrop in some place called Tatvan. All the wonks were shooting rumors back and forth, wondering who was behind it. No big deal, at first. I didn’t notice it myself.”

Keisha felt her legs start to wobble, and leaned against a bulkhead. A passing sailor gave her a concerned look; she waved him on with a painful smile. “At first.”

“By Saturday night it came to the attention of somebody at EUCOM, who shot somebody a line, who shot somebody else a line. It was the weekend, things moved slowly. Eventually somebody thought to kick it up to General Green, who sent a carefully worded response, then went back and reviewed my equally carefully worded report about Tatvan. He called me up with some very pointed questions late last night. I wasn’t sure how to answer, but I did my best. He hung up after about a quarter-hour, the last minute of which was largely profanity.”

“Jesus, Hamp!”

“It gets worse.”

“I don’t think I—“

“You need to know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner, then?”

“You had enough on your plate with Nadia. There’s nothing you can do about it, anyway. But the clock is definitely ticking now.”

“How long do we have?”

“Not long. Green’s been ominously quiet, but I checked this morning’s headlines—it’s morning back home now—and, well, Adesina made the front page of the New York Times.”

“SHIT!”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t have led with that?”

“You’re on a mission, Chief. It’s not the end of the world. Let me handle this.”

“How? That does not make a lick of sense. How on God’s green earth are you going to ‘handle’ it?”

“I’m not, if you want to put it that way. And neither are you. It’s political now, miles over our heads. You can’t run from it, and you can’t stop it. So why worry? For a while there I wondered if it’d be kinder to just not tell you at all. Ethan was inclined that way, said it’d be a distraction you didn’t need. Dr. Gus overruled him.”

“Oh, god.” She was sitting on the deck now, her back against the bulkhead. She couldn’t remember how that happened. “Oh, dear god.”

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. Look, when it comes down to it, you’re a warrant officer. Small fry.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yeah. You can play the Nuremberg Defense. Nobody wants to see an actual combat veteran eat it unless she’s been actually treasonous, which you haven’t.”

“Depends how you define treason.“

“Don’t give me that! More important heads will roll first. Possibly including mine. You focus on getting Yuri out of there alive, and keeping the other kids safe.”

“How am I supposed to even … oh god, Hamp, I’m scared.”

“Don’t be. Nobody involved in this wants an emissor’s face on TV, you hear? It’d be a felony, for God’s sake. The weasels who blew on Fred Walsey are still doing time. If by some miracle they get acquitted, it’s just instant career death. Might as well get filmed kicking a disabled veteran. The worst you’ll ever face is a sympathetic closed-door committee. And you’re literally protecting orphan kids—“

“I’m not protecting them from anything. They’re seeing repeated combat action under seriously sketchy circumstances—“

“Which you can’t help—“

“You think cable news is going to play it that way?”

“Keisha? What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

She looked up into Nadia’s concerned blue eyes. She’d forgotten the kid was nearby. And mobile again. That would take some getting used to. “Nadia’s here. I’ll talk to you later, Hamp. Thanks.” She hung up before he could reply.

“Bad news?”

She pushed herself to her feet, hoping her legs didn’t wobble too bad. “Nothing you need to worry about, Nadia.”

“But you’re worried,” she pointed out.

“It’s something personal,” she said. “Excuse me.” She squeezed past the girl to head back indoors so she could lie down in her bunk. But Nadia just followed her.

“Personal problems you hear about from Colonel Hampton? Is there something wrong at home? Something with your husband?”

Keisha’s laugh echoed off the metal walls. “I don’t have a husband, child! And it’s nothing like that.”

“You’re not married yet? But you have to be almost thirty!”

“What does that have to do with—no. No.” She was still walking, and Nadia was still trailing behind. “We’re not having that discussion right now. I’m sorry, but I think I need to be alone.”

“I see,” Nadia said. But she didn’t stop following her. In a minute they were at the door to the room Keisha shared with three Brit servicewomen. Nadia grabbed her sleeve. “Keisha, you’re my friend. You’ve been my friend even when I wasn’t yours. I owe you my life and my freedom. You seem very upset. Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do for you? I promise I won’t tell anyone, even Fatima.”

Those big blue eyes … damn it. Just as she’d finally got the kid to like and trust her, this had to happen. “This shouldn’t be anything that concerns you. But I need to be straight with you: I might have to leave you soon.”

“For how long?”

“Potentially? For good.”

“That would very much concern me! What has happened?”

She looked in Nadia’s face, decided she wasn’t going to shake the kid off and that it wouldn’t be kind to try. “You might as well come in.” All her roommates, thankfully, were absent. She flopped onto her bunk and explained it as briefly as she could. Which wasn’t very brief, especially since Nadia had never been to America in her life and had very little idea how it was run.

“So … are they going to put you in jail?”

“It’s possible. But I don’t know. It’s hard to say because nothing like this has happened before. I might have to testify at a lot of hearings.”

“I can testify too, if you need me to.”

She put on a smile. “I appreciate that. But I don’t think the testimony of a foreign-born teenager will count for much.”

“Maybe not.” She bit her lip. “Will the Colonel, or Ethan, or Dr. Gus be staying with us?”

“Again: I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer, but I want to be honest.”

“Honesty is good. So … it could be just the three of us, by ourselves. Four if you count Yuri.”

She hadn’t even thought that far. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What do you mean? Will somebody else be replacing you, if you all get called back to testify?”

“That’s not impossible. But I’m going to keep having to answer ‘I don’t know’ to a lot of these questions. Adesina is famous now, at least some people know about the program that created her, and when the people who matter unravel the whole thing it’s going to cause a big change—somehow—in the way Americans think about familiars, their government, the military, everything.”

“Oh.” Nadia cocked her head, thinking it over. “How do you think they’ll react?”

“It won’t all be one way, you know. I don’t read follow the news much, even on the rare occasion when I have a long stretch stateside, but I know familiars are controversial. Some people embrace them as the key to America’s safety, other people think we’re just a tool of evil elites trying to run the world behind the scenes. A lot of it is crazy, conspiracy-theory stuff.” She laughed. “Of course, some of those crazy conspiracy theories said that we never stopped making familiars, and now the world will know they were right, so … “

Nadia looked more perplexed than anything else. “So?”

“So what happens to me might depend on who has the loudest voice or convinces the most people, possibly by appealing to bad motivations or selfish reasons. I don’t know what your opinion on democracy is, but it gets messy sometimes. It’s the price we pay for accountable government: things aren’t as straightforward as they could be when one or a few people are in charge permanently.”

“It sounds that way,” Nadia said carefully. “But … they won’t try to execute you, will they?”

“Execute me? Why would they do that?”

“If they think you have done wrong, and it sounds like they might, they will have to punish you,” she said. “But you can’t put an emissor in jail; they’d just break right out.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

Nadia’s face scrunched up in concentration, then cleared into a relieved smile. “Oh. You mean they wouldn’t let them put you in jail in the first place. That’s right. Even getting you into custody would be very hard, wouldn’t it?”

“No, I mean that if they give me time, I will serve it.” Nadia looked lot. “There’s such a thing as winning the battle and losing the war. If I refuse to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement, I’ll be proving that emissors can’t be trusted, and that the order that was meant to keep me from being trained was right in the first place. A lot of Americans think that already, because of people like Titus Marshall. And then they’d almost certainly put out a kill order on me. I’d spend the rest of my life as a fugitive, if I survived at all.”

“I would be with you. We all would. We could protect you.”

“I’m sure you’d try, dear, and I appreciate that. But I wouldn’t want that anyway. There’s a principle at stake here. I know you can understand accepting suffering for the sake of principles. You’ve done plenty of that yourself.”

Nadia spread her hands. “What is the principle, though? To let people who fear and hate you lock you up for years so they won’t hate you more?”

Keisha started putting together an explanation, looked at Nadia’s face, and stopped. On one side, thousands of years of democratic traditions going back to Ancient Greece and Rome. The Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, a new nation conceived in liberty—a whole body of knowledge and tradition Keisha Graham had been absorbing in school since she was five or six.

On the other side, an ethnic Russian Kazakh born and raised under tyranny, parted from it by unfathomable tragedy, adopted by a sociopathic war profiteer and abused and exploited ever since. The child had never known an authority worthy of trust, with the possible exception of her parents. Keisha wasn’t going to ask about that. To Nadia, anyone who wasn’t kin or a proven friend was a potential enemy at best.

“When I first met Titus Marshall,” Keisha said at last, “he told me that he was going to be a real emperor. That traditional governments were on the way out, and emissors like him were the future of humanity. Sooner or later, he thought, it was inevitable that people with so much devastating power would dominate people without it. He’s not the first person I’ve heard floating that idea—it’s what everyone in America is so scared of. He was the first person I met to advocate it so baldly. My principle, if you can call it that, is that I would go to jail to prove him wrong.”

Nadia’s face had fallen throughout the whole speech. “I suppose you could be right. But where will that leave us? I know, you don’t know what will happen. But what if it leaves me, and Fatima and Ruslan, and even Yuri, to face Yefimov and all the rest by ourselves? Will we be on our own?”

“I think Kemal would stay with you, if nothing else,” she said feebly, to avoid telling the poor girl that she didn’t know one more time.

“What does your government think of us, though? What do your people think of us, of what used to be the Marshall family?”

“As far as I know, the general public knows we were paying Marshall to use you and the other children, that you disappeared for a bit before being turned on Ankara by the Russians, and that you have been wandering around Turkey ever since, making trouble. A few obsessive people follow every bit of paraphysical activity closely, sometimes in an unhealthy way—especially on the internet—but most people don’t like to think about it. It’s very depressing for them, and makes them feel powerless.

“And … there’s a culture of deferential silence around everything paraphysical. There are so many laws about exposing an operative, and so much fear that the protection we give will fail because of such an exposure, that the media doesn’t poke its nose in very far, even after all the previous scandals. Like I said, most people don’t want to read that stuff anyway.”

“That is the same everywhere,” Nadia interrupted with a huff of impatience. “I remember my father and his friends complaining over dinner, that the world was run more and more by sorcerers every year, and nobody even wanted to talk about it. It was the kind of thing everybody has said so much that they don’t even think about it when they say it, like complaints about corruption, or rising prices. They complain to complain, because there is nothing to be done. What does that have to do with us?”

“The average American is not aware that we’re supporting you, or that we’re associated with you in any way. Didn’t you know that?”

“I hadn’t really thought about what the average American thinks. How do you think they will react, when they find out?”

“I think, most likely, it won’t be anything like the main issue. Just the news of Project Belvedere will be huge, and the part where we were continuing to ‘use’ underaged combatants—that’s how they’ll put it—will just be the cherry on top. Most likely,” she put careful emphasis on the words, “this will lead to a loss of support for foreign involvement in general.”

“Including us.”

“Yes.” That was all she could say.

Without another word Nadia whipped around and rushed out the hatch. Keisha didn’t even consider chasing after her. Instead she sighed and, fighting the strong temptation to just shut her eyes and try to sleep so she wouldn’t have to think, got out her phone. Information access might be limited here, but she had to try. She owed Nadia some answers.