Secondhand Sorcery

There was only one bridge to the island, at its point of closest approach to the shore, and it was still two kilometers long, exposed all the way. All made of solid green-and-white streaked glass, thick enough to support a truck’s weight. There would be sharpshooters covering it—at least, they couldn’t afford to assume there wouldn’t be, which amounted to the same thing.

The water was cold and deep, and there would be no place on the island to moor a boat in the unlikely event that they got one there unseen. Nor any entrance to use once they did. Making their own entrance was a possibility, but as Ruslan pointed out, they had no idea what cracking any part of the structure would do to the rest of it; that was the problem with structures so impractical they needed a familiar to make them. Was the whole thing molded out of one gigantic solid piece? Could a single crack spread to bring it down and kill everyone inside? Hard to say.

They didn’t know any of the staff, had no local contacts or foreign allies left to beg for favors. No time or means to gather further intelligence. Nothing they had could tunnel quickly and quietly. Flight was the most conspicuous option of all. But what wasn’t conspicuous, with a familiar?

“I gotta say, I’m still not sold on this,” Fatima said as Maria eased their stolen jihadi SUV onto the bridge.

“If you come up with a better plan in the next five minutes, please tell us,” Nadia replied. Ézarine was the best they had at slipping past barriers. Ruslan couldn’t be risked in the line of fire, since he couldn’t heal himself. Yuri was useless around anything they didn’t want annihilated. And Mister Higgins was their best shot for closing the distance. Once they had those four facts straight, the plan was pretty well made for them. She only hoped Yefimov hadn’t worked out the same thing.

“We still don’t know that the Erbals are even in that tacky thing.” Fatima wasn’t really suggesting they back out; this was only her way of letting off stress. Which didn’t make it much less annoying. Nadia elected to turn her attention elsewhere.

“Maria, are you doing okay? How is the surface?”

“It’s fine,” she replied, though her hands were tight on the wheel. “Not slipping at all.” They were moving slowly, but most trucks moved slowly here; it was difficult for anyone to trust that much weight to a support made of such a famously fragile material. They didn’t have Ruslan to annoy them by looking up facts about its compressive strength. Looking down out the window, Nadia could see that the surface wasn’t perfectly smooth, but ridged with a fine, shallow pattern, like their own truck’s tires. Yefimov had put more thought and effort into this than she expected; the thought only made her more jittery.

Fatima twisted in her seat to look back; they were at least a hundred meters from land now, probably closer to two. The approach to the bridge was deserted, with no traffic on the road along the shore. “Okay, I’d say this is far enough. You two ready?”

“I am.”

“Da.”

With a long, straight span, there was no real danger in continuing to roll slowly forward while Mister Higgins spun out his keystone sequence. Two seconds later, the blobby thing was half-hidden behind their truck, waddling on his feet to keep up. Anybody watching with binoculars would notice immediately, and if there were clairvoyants in the prison, they had just set off an alarm. It made it harder to fight the overpowering urge to write off this whole plan as stupid.

She could leave the truck, anyway. Nadia was already in the cargo space; she just had to open up the back door. Mister Higgins obligingly paused, to give her room to open and to burp out a single big bubble. For a whole second, maybe two, it hung in the space between them, bobbing along to keep pace with the vehicle. Mister Higgins kept up his waddle, with the occasional short hop to close the gap as the truck gained on him despite their glacial pace. Nadia could feel every crashing hop through the truck’s body, and that discomforting sensation, as much as fear of being called a coward, gave her the nerve to shut her eyes, lean forward, and let Mister Higgins catch her.

She didn’t even feel the transition as she passed through the filmy edge of the bubble, but as soon as her whole body was through all motion stopped at once, leaving her floating in the air. She took a few seconds to accustom herself to the sensation in peace, twisting around inside the little jail. It was possible to stretch out her limbs and touch the edges, but the film only gave slightly. There would be no hope of breaking it. Her life was now entirely in the hands of Fatima and Mister Higgins.

Nadia twisted herself around to look forward, towards the still-open back of the car. Fatima was still looking back. Their eyes met. Nadia couldn’t hear anything, but she could see Fatima’s lips move through the shining rainbow-tinted barrier between them: you ready for this, girl?

The honest answer would have been an irritable shrug, but Nadia wondered how well that would come across while weightless. Her hair was drifting around her face, trying to get in her eyes. So she extended her right hand in a thumbs up. At once the bubble lurched to the side, spinning over the bridge’s ornate railing and into the frigid water of Lake Van.

Of course Nadia screamed. Nobody but her could hear her, and she coughed and spluttered as she sucked her own long hair into her mouth; why hadn’t she thought to secure it better? By the time she stopped hacking she was facing forward again and the bubble was directly underneath the bridge, moving much faster than before through the arched gallery formed by its supports.

Even with only three people to draw from, the halo would extend a good distance forward of the SUV. Fatima’s first priority was to get her sister as close to the prison as possible, in the one position where absolutely nobody could hope to see her. Within seconds she reached that limit—the leading edge of the halo from the still-crawling truck—and bounced hard against the bubble’s edge as it slowed back to a matching pace.

The recoil threw her back into the surface behind her, then back again, and she bounced around like a ping-pong ball until her momentum wore down and she was floating in a giant soap bubble drifting through water that could kill her just with the temperature, before she got the chance to properly drown. Mister Higgins would be somewhere behind her, facing away and vomiting out a steady stream of more bubbles to push him forward like a jet engine. But she couldn’t see him.

It was insane. Nadia realized that now, and she didn’t think it was just the valence telling her that. Even if there were no clairvoyants on guard in the prison, they might be suspicious. They didn’t know if there was a radio protocol approaching the facility, or if the guards would shoot unrecognized vehicles. One shot could take out Maria and crash the car, or simply shatter the bridge and send it plunging into the deep.

She wanted to leave. She wanted to reach out and bang on the walls of her tiny one-person jail, and scream that she had changed her mind, that she wanted out, that they would find another way. But she was terrified, against all reason, that the immeasurably thin barrier she had seen deflect bullets would give way before her hands and send the icy waters rushing in to blot out her life. All she could do was curl up inside the ball breathing fast, wondering if she was using up her limited supply of air as she did.

The waters were dark, darker than she expected. She could make out the supports crawling by on either hand—did Maria really need to drive quite so slowly?—and if she strained her eyes the surface of the bridge they connected to, but nothing more. She had no way of measuring how far they had gone already, or how far they still had to go. It felt like a long time had passed already. Too long. In the vanishingly unlikely event she made it out of the water alive, Nadia pledged that she would abort this whole idiotic scheme the moment her feet touched dry land again. She would run the whole two kilometers back, by herself if she had to.

She didn’t hear what happened, and of course she didn’t see it. Her first sign that anything had gone wrong, that anything had changed at all, was a sudden stop, her body thumping once again, face-first, into the front of the bubble. Then a long, drifting silence in the dark, floating perfectly still. The space inside was still silent; a jet could have swooped directly overhead and she would have heard nothing. She could only know that Fatima was still alive and conscious, and that they weren’t moving anymore.

Then, very suddenly, they were, at terrifying speed and Nadia was tossed around like a rag doll in a tornado as her private cell flung itself sideways and up. She saw nothing but bright sunlight reflecting off glass and water alike, smeared through the bubble’s rainbow haze, alternating with a clear blue winter sky. When she stabilized again, and had got her breath back, and finished shrieking, she was floating hundreds of feet in the air, and could see the entire Lim Island Holding Facility laid out beneath her.

When she looked down, she could just make out a dark speck where the bridge met the island. Maybe a suggestion of glimmer where there might be a layer of protective bubbles. Farther back along the bridge, another speck of vehicle, immobile but with the suggestion of motion along its edges. A little shining dot rippled its way back across the bridge at speed, slapping into the other vehicle and sending it skidding back along the span.

From above, it looked no more violent than bouncing pool balls; up close, men would be dying as their truck rolled. Behind it, the line of the bridge disappeared, section by section shivering and dropping into Lake Van. When the truck itself came to a rest one final section fell out beneath it, leaving an enormous gap. There would be no walking away now. Damn it.

Mister Higgins erupted out of the water in a spray of foam, a tiny pinkish blot on the landscape, growing bigger by fits and starts. It took Nadia a moment to realize that the ridiculous thing was actually spitting out bubbles underneath himself and bouncing on them to gain altitude. As soon as she understood, she turned away; it was unnerving to see all that empty space directly under her feet.

Instead she looked down at the prison. It was about three in the afternoon, and the sun was high in the sky, but beneath the glare she could see the faint shapes of men scurrying around like ants. Most of the building would be inside his halo by now, feeding their enemy; those men would have little stomach for fighting. Unfortunately, Nadia couldn’t do what she had to do by looking down from the sky.

From above, the prison was three quadrangles stuck together, with open courtyards where the natural ground of the island was exposed. Mister Higgins set her bubble floating down towards the closest. The shining towers rose up faster than Nadia had expected, and for one heart-stopping instant she thought one of the sharp-edges pinnacles was going to snag the edge of her bubble and pop it. But she sank past it with plenty of space to spare, and the bubble landed her back on firm earth, and popped, leaving her exposed.

Now came what might have been the most dangerous part of the entire operation: with her sister landed safely inside the prison’s boundaries, Fatima simply dismissed Mister Higgins. The familiar, and all his bubbles, vanished at once. Nadia fell to her knees, dizzy—but only for a moment. Within two seconds she was thinking, once again, of the principal in his office.

The window for joining in was narrow, and for an instant she hesitated; she could not forget what had happened last time she tried to harmonize with Fatima. But she was surrounded by enemies, and failing would almost certainly mean death. One fear overcame another, and the cops showing up at the garage seamlessly metamorphosed into snide, pretty female officers sneering at Nadia while they put her down in French. Then the vision passed, and Ézarine was beside her.

The courtyard was surrounded by four stories of the prison facility, three balconies running the whole perimeter. A man with a gun could appear on any of them at any moment. She sprinted for the closest wall, with Ézarine right behind her. She could actually see through it—through all the walls—but Snowdrop’s characteristic white and green streaks limited useful visibility to the closest corridor, and a bit of the one beyond that, and useless flickers of blurred color for anything farther away. Nobody could hide for anything here, and privacy would be a joke, but trying to see through the whole thing and put it all together mentally would give her headaches in short order.

Outside, Mister Higgins was gearing up again. Enormous bubbles were already rising in the sky outside, providing an even better target for everyone’s attention than a glowing naked woman. Nadia ran along the wall until she found an opening, then dashed in, slipped, and fell, sending lancing pains through her shoulder and hip as she landed.

The floor was glass too, very thick, and colder than the damp air outside, so that it was covered in condensation. Drops fell off the ceiling to spatter on Nadia’s head as Ézarine helped her back to her feet. Was the whole floor a smooth deathtrap? No. A narrow strip down the middle of it was textured with ridges, providing a slightly less treacherous footing. Fuzzy green mold grew in the cracks, as it did along the walls, accentuating the bleary green and white of the glass itself. The track was just wide enough to walk on by putting one foot in front of another. Running would be an invitation to a cracked skull.

The corridor ran parallel to the courtyard outside, so she picked a direction and had Ézarine help her limp along, holding her hands out to keep her from falling. She heartily damned Sergei Yefimov to hell with every step; it would take her a year to search this dungeon at such a pace. She wanted to just smash a hole in the wall and leave now, it was so unfair—but that was Mister Higgins talking. Which only made her more frustrated …

She looked up and saw the smeared forms of two men, staring at her through at least two walls. Their shouts were hardly more recognizable, but the way their arms flew to their sides was sign enough of their intentions. Ézarine was with them before they could draw, and knocked them both down with a punch apiece. Nadia kept limping on as her familiar took care of them; by the time they were subdued, she’d made her way to a door leading to some kind of storage room.

The door was the same material as everything else, and the latch as well, a crude and bulky thing with a long lever, too big to snap by accident. Nadia yanked it loose and slid the door aside, then went in and sat down among piles of plastic totes. Ézarine brought her one of the unconscious men; he wasn’t wearing a proper uniform, but had a cloth mask hanging on his lower face, a stun-gun, a flashlight, and a club at his belt, and … what on earth were the things on his feet? Like stubby glass skis tied on over his shoes. They were as big and clumsy as the door’s latch, but she supposed with practice they would slide pretty nicely over this horrible floor, if it always stayed damp. Meanwhile, any intruder or escapee would have to mince along the little track to avoid breaking his neck.

They were too big for her feet, even if she could learn to use them quickly, so Ézarine disarmed the man, dropped him off in the courtyard where the skis wouldn’t work, then came back to help her stack the totes in a little fort around her. There weren’t enough to hide her completely, but they would make her harder to notice. She settled in with her gun out and pointed at the door. Ézarine would have to do the actual searching. Waiting in one place would be twice as unpleasant with the halo.

Ézarine flickered down the hall, staying in one place only long enough to check for prisoners. It was clear enough, after the first few seconds, that the ground floor was nearly all storage and support areas, and most of them empty. No kitchens, no plumbing—how would you install either, in a place like this? There weren’t even electric lights, except portable ones on batteries. The whole place was little more than a medieval dungeon, complete with the damp, slime, and mold. It couldn’t be healthy to live this way. She wondered if it would get hot like a greenhouse in summer.

The cells started on the second floor. Not individual rooms, but great big chambers fifty feet or more to a side, with dozens of wretched occupants huddled together for warmth. The sliding doors were secured by being too thick to break without tools, and only latching on the outside. She assumed there was some similarly clever and brutal method to get them air and water, and to let them use the bathroom, but she didn’t care enough to check. Ézarine threw the doors open, one after another, and moved on.

There wasn’t time to check every face against her memories of the pictures Kemal had sent, distorted by Ézarine’s perceptions. She would just have to free the whole prison, and hope that none of them were there for an actual good reason. God only knew how they would get them all off the island and to safety, but that was a problem for later. At least there were no more guards yet—Fatima would be keeping them busy chasing bubbles. Not that they were even worth worrying about. Sooner or later Yefimov would make an appearance, she knew, and then there would be more trouble.

There were a truly massive number of holding chambers, all lined up end to end, each with at least a score of prisoners inside. Most were all men, a few were all women, one had women and children together. What the children were supposed to have done, Nadia couldn’t guess. Probably just related to people they needed influence over, the same as the Erbals. Ézarine kept throwing doors open and moving on.

She could see that the first few rooms’ occupants were already shuffling out into the hallways. They were still huddled together in clumps, shivering and coughing. Far too few had coats on. The halo would give them the spirit they needed to keep moving, however badly they had been treated here. That was something.

Ézarine was just finishing up the first long hallway, and turning the corner to start on the next, when the guards came sliding around the far end where she’d started to catch the escapees. They were far enough away that Ézarine only noticed by the sudden burst of shouting. She teleported back and saw a half-dozen men like the ones she’d knocked out, all toting clubs and stun-guns at an enormous, huddled mass of sickly men, the occupants of ten or more chambers all packed together in one clot that filled the hall.

Ézarine flickered behind the guards to start knocking them down, only for the prisoners to come surging forward, clinging to each other for balance. A few slipped and fell. A few more were clubbed or shocked down. The rest kept moving forward around the fallen, shouting and swearing, until they washed over the guards in a wave and bore them down to the ground with fists and feet. Five guards fell, and the sixth barely escaped, sliding away with frantic speed as grasping hands caught at the air behind him.

The escapees were after him soon enough, freshly armed with his friends’ weapons. A few, Nadia was pleased to note, paused long enough to throw open more doors, adding to the mob. A few more caught sight of stairs leading down, and half the group peeled away to look for more trouble. The jailbreak, it seemed, was managing itself now. About time.

Then the next set of guards appeared, ten of them this time, and bearing long black rifles. Before Nadia could even think of taking them down with Ézarine, they lowered arms at the mob, and opened fire.