Secondhand Sorcery

“So, it looks like Faisal made it, and he’s still got my back,” Yuri boasted. “Good times. One sketchy unmarked van, on the way.”

“Is he still going to have your back when he hears you’re ditching him?” Fatima asked from Nadia’s other side.

“He doesn’t have to know that right away. Besides, who says I’m ditching him? If he wants to join us up north, I’m not gonna argue. Are you?”

Fatima was, by the sounds of it, but Nadia didn’t listen. She was glad to have her brother back, and safe, but her emotions had been yanked back and forth too many times this night, by familiars and by plain honest stress, and she wanted to keep to herself. Especially when the alternatives were talking to Ruslan, or to the concubine. The former was huddled up against Fatima’s side on the opposite side of their group from the latter, giving her furtive looks as though she might suddenly attack him, and he might enjoy it.

The girl. Why did they have to have her along? Nadia didn’t know where she had come from, but she couldn’t believe she could be a good influence on her brother. Not that she was showing much interest in Yuri; he had an arm around her as he argued with Fatima—Nadia refused to look and see where his hand was—but she was looking away, her head tilting here and there to scan the distance. There was something about her Nadia didn’t like or trust, even apart from her life of sin. She had to be at least two years older than him, and a foot taller. Did she enjoy sleeping with a killer, or was she only using him for her own profit?

Nadia saw headlights approaching along the otherwise deserted street bordering the park, and was instantly on guard. “Is that him? How did he get here so fast?”

“Calm down. I had backups ready a couple of blocks away.”

“And they stayed in place after all that?” Ruslan said.

“Why not? I won,” he said, with his face still half-covered in indescribable filth. “This is Syria, boy. My people have seen some shit. They don’t scare easy.”

Wearily, Nadia readied her wall. Somebody needed to be prepared for more trouble. But the vehicle was, in fact, a plain dark-colored van with no rear windows, which pulled up along the curb and stopped. A man in a suit got out of the passenger door to open the side doors. “Thanks, Aladdin. Good thing you took this job, huh?”

Aladdin (was that his actual name, or more of her brother’s sick humor?) nodded tersely, and said in English, “The Zionists are on the move. We must hurry.”

Yuri gallantly helped his girl up into the van with a hand on the small of her back. “There you go, babe. Tactical retreat,” he said to the man Aladdin. “We’re short a headquarters, so we run for the border and regroup. My peeps here have resources we can use.”

“The Lebanese border, sir?” the man asked as they all filed in. Nadia hesitated, then ducked back into the third row of seats to avoid sitting next to the concubine. Fatima came in next, forcibly hauling Ruslan after her to avoid presenting him with his own dilemma. Probably afraid that he would make the wrong choice.

“North,” Yuri said. “We have, you know, brothers in jihad up there, shit like that.”

“Turkey is two hundred kilometers away.”

“I know that, fool!” He clambered in and sat next to the girl. “But if you’re scared of the damn Zionists, why would we stay close? Now move, it ain’t safe here.”

Aladdin closed the doors and returned to his own space. The driver, who had showed no interest in the conversation, took off again at once. “So,” Yuri said, too loudly, “what kind of assistance can we count on from, uh … “

“The Emir of Diyarbakir?” Fatima said. “Depends on what kind of help you need. We have a solid intel network, three emissors, and thousands of supporters.” Mostly illiterate Kurdish villagers.

“Where are we going now?” Ruslan said. “We left all our stuff at the hotel.”

“We must assume the Zionists are prepared for us to go to ground nearby,” Aladdin said. “Their intelligence capabilities are damnably good.”

“So, Turkey?” Fatima said.

“We will not make it so far. We will to take you to Damascus; Faisal and his men can join us there, and provide protection.”

“Damascus isn’t much closer than the Turkish border, is it?” Nadia said. He didn’t answer. “Yuri?”

“We’re not going to Damascus, Aladdin. C’mon.” Still no answer, and the van didn’t change direction. “Hey! Who the hell is in charge here?”

Aladdin barked a command in Arabic, and the van pulled over. “We will take you to Damascus,” he said. “Or you may get out and take your chances on the street. There is no other option … Boss Yuri.”

Yuri howled in protest, then started trying to sweet-talk the man. This was useful. It gave Nadia cover to lean forward and whisper in the girl’s ear, in Russian: “Is the van in park, or does the driver only have his foot on the brake? It’s important.”

“I will see,” the girl muttered back, then leaned forward to plead with the driver. She got only a string of angry Arabic for her efforts, and gave up at once. “In park,” she reported.

Ézarine immediately appeared in between the two men. She reached over to unlock the driver’s door, unbuckled his seat belt, then flickered outside to open the door and haul him out into the street. Aladdin, as it turned out, was armed, and had his pistol most of the way out of his suit’s jacket pocket when Ézarine came back in and forced him to drop it, nearly breaking his hand in the process. Then she punched him in the chest and face until he evicted himself.

Ézarine helped both men on their way with a series of slaps and kicks while Nadia and company worked out alternative driving arrangements. Yuri made to get up, but Nadia grabbed him by the collars of his jacket and shirt, and forced him back down. “Ow! Lemme go, dammit!”

“Can your feet even reach the pedals in this monster? You—Maria, was it?—can you drive?”

“Of course.” She slipped easily into the driver’s seat. Her quarry routed, Ézarine flickered back into the seat Maria had just left, next to Yuri. Maria frowned in the rear view mirror. “It will be harder to concentrate on driving, with her around.”

“Hard, not impossible,” Nadia said. She’d heard the man shifting; the van was manual. “And the Israelis have VRIL, but no emissors. Ézarine stays out.”

The girl grumbled, but put the car in gear and moved on. “It will be a long drive to Turkey, and we are low on fuel.”

“There was this great place we could get gas for free,” Yuri griped in his most petulant tones, “until these guys showed up. Fat chance of getting any help from my people after this.”

“If we’re going to be driving in a halo, we all need to shut up,” Fatima put in. “Anything we say with her out is just going to be useless fights. Show some sense. Damn.” Yuri huffed but obeyed, and Fatima immediately contradicted her own advice by murmuring to Nadia, “Are you sure we want the whore driving? I don’t know her or what she’s after.”

“But you don’t know the way, either. And she seems to.”

“Of course she does,” Yuri interrupted. “She got me across the border in the first place, dumbass. She does this for a living. And you’d better watch your—ooooowww!” Ézarine kept twisting his nipple, and a good part of the surrounding flesh, for a full three seconds. “Motherfu—ooowwwwww!” The other nipple. “Ow! Shit! Stop it! Okay!” Maria glowered into the mirror again until Yuri subsided.

Fatima sighed, then leaned over to rest her head on Ruslan’s shoulder. “Wake me up if something more important and less stupid happens, would you?”

“Gonna be a bruise,” Yuri grumbled, but left it at that. There was sullen silence for the better part of ten minutes, as the van made its way through the dark streets of Homs. There was no traffic; even with an obvious major disaster at the refinery, nobody wanted to move and expose themselves to further danger. As far as anyone knew, Yuri still owned this town. Word would spread fast; by dawn there might be a fresh fight for control of the city. Nadia hoped to be long gone by then.

They were on a deserted major highway, headed north at aggressive speed, when they heard the report of the rifle. The van abruptly lurched, dipping to one side, and swerved across three lanes, Maria struggling to regain control. “Tire’s out!” she shouted, over the noise of another shot.

“Sniper,” Fatima said, alert at once. The van was going straight now, more or less, but they could hear and feel the bad wheel thumping against the asphalt, slowing them down. They all ducked just as the windshield shattered, cold wind spewing pebbled glass over their heads, and the van lost control completely and spun across the highway with all the grace of a drunk and heavily pregnant cow. There might have been another gunshot, or a hundred; they wouldn’t have been audible over the noise that followed.

By God’s mercy they weren’t going that fast when the lumbering thing finally tipped. It fell over on one side and simply skidded a bit, screeching and grinding to a halt after two seconds of terror. Most of Fatima’s weight fell onto her, and Ruslan’s onto Fatima’s. There was a melee of panicked shoving against what had used to be the van’s left side, punctuated by frantic Pashto swears right in Nadia’s ear. Everything was sideways and loud and dark and cold—

and she was back in the shop having the same old argument with the cops, and the sons of bitches weren’t even letting her talk to defend herself they were pulling out their guns and she heard shooting

The van’s wall rattled against her face as something heavy thumped into the ground a few feet away, blotting out what little light came in through the broken windshield. A second later they were lit up again by new light, a flickering rainbow flash that shifted and danced around the cabin. The gunfire took on fresh urgency, with bursts added to the single shots. Nadia extracted herself from the tangle—it helped when she remembered they were all wearing seatbelts—and poked her head around the seat in front of her, but Yuri was already standing up and blocking the view.

They all winced at a loud, familiar whooshing sound, followed by an even louder detonation. “Rocket,” Fatima announced, unnecessarily.

“What did it hit?” Ruslan demanded, still struggling with his seat buckle, which was stuck behind his hip as he dangled. Nadia shoved her way past Yuri so as to not be under him if he suddenly fell the rest of the way down.

“Who cares?” Fatima said. “It bounced off, same as everything else. Something blew up, and it wasn’t us.”

Now Nadia was past the center row of seats and could see the bulgy form of Mister Higgins planted in front of them, silhouetted against a massive wall of thousands of his shining bubbles. More were spewing out of him as she looked, flying out to make the barrier taller. “We should be safe pretty soon,” Fatima said as she came up alongside her. “I never met anything he couldn’t bounce back, except another familiar.”

They heard a grunt, a yell, a thump, and a moan, as Ruslan achieved his goal behind them. Yuri was huddled against the wall—no, the floor—holding his head like it might break. Nadia looked down at the girl Maria, who was still buckled in and immobile. It was hard to tell by bubble-light, but the edge of the girl’s face could have been bloody. A thought came to her. “Has Mister Higgins ever tried to bounce a cruise missile?”

“Shit. Why you gotta ask these questions?”

“Well, has he?”

“Hell no. Come on, let’s move.”

By the time they got themselves and the boys out, there was an almost perfect dome of shining spheres around the van. Maria refused to wake up, so they had to unbuckle her, then maneuver in a bubble to pick her up.

“Can she breathe in that thing?” Yuri fretted as she bobbed past him, floating flat on her back inside.

“How should I know? I usually use them to kill people. You should be grateful we’re not leaving her tramp ass behind. We really should.”

“You try it and I will bail in a—“

“We’re in a halo,” Nadia reminded them. “Please try to control yourselves.” She was tempted to ditch both of them, to get away from their stupid bickering, but was with it enough to tell that was Mister Higgins too. Anyway, she’d have to get past that dome to go anywhere.

There were no more gunshots, or any other noises, coming from outside, but she couldn’t see clearly through it. There might be a hundred men lined up and ready to fire as soon as they got a clear shot. “Can you see through this, Fatima?”

“Not really. And he can’t either. Hold on.” The shining mass of baubles suddenly contracted around them, losing half its mass in the process. Nadia couldn’t see where the shed excess went to, but she heard shouts and a few more scattered shots. “Yep, still there.”

“You can’t get rid of them?” Ruslan was incredulous.

“Without seeing where they are? No. Any other stupid questions?”

“Let’s just go,” Yuri said. “Keep the wall moving around us. We’ll get to another car we can jack eventually.”

Ruslan put his hands on his hips. “On foot, without even seeing where we’re going?”

“We follow the lines on the road, smegface!”

“We don’t even know the way to the border!”

Nadia tried to tune out the rest of the argument while she thought. They couldn’t drop the wall even for an instant, or they’d get shot. They couldn’t attack whoever was out there shooting. They couldn’t call another familiar while Mister Higgins was out. Walking would take ages, and there was no way to go faster without a car. All they had was … ah.

“Fatima, could you set the van upright again?”

For an answer, Mister Higgins turned around and leaned over to spew out more of his shining froth; the foam stayed small and low to the ground until it oozed under the wreck. Then the little bubbles inflated, at different rates. The van creaked a bit, but tilted smoothly back up and crashed onto its wheels again. “It won’t drive worth a damn anymore. You wanna play Ethan’s game?”

“Yes.” Not looking at Yuri, not thinking about the man he’d just killed. “Can Mister Higgins keep up?”

“Won’t need to keep up for long. C’mon.” Yuri whined slightly less once Maria was lying on the floor, out of the bubble, and he found her pulse. It might have been a touching show of concern if she hadn’t known Yuri. Everyone else resumed their previous seats, with Fatima shutting her eyes tight on the theory that her brain would have an easier time not crashing the halo if it couldn’t directly see what was going on. Nadia didn’t think it worked that way, but wasn’t going to waste time arguing.

When they were ready, more bubbles rushed in under the chassis, and they were aloft, the shield contracting still further to make a dense shell. They didn’t move very quickly, but as Fatima had observed, they didn’t need to; with the barrier out of the way, Mister Higgins could see everything he needed to. Their shield was so thick that hardly any of the noise of battle seeped through, but Nadia could imagine. Outside, as they drifted along like a balloon, a lot of men were being crushed to death.

As if she could hear her thoughts, Fatima chimed in, “Not much fight in these boys, once we could fight back. They want to give up and quit as much as we do, and they’re not used to it.”

“But who?” Nadia said. “Israelis?”

“Can’t see. If I had to guess, though, I’d say the guys we just carjacked took it kinda personal.”

“It wasn’t my idea—“

“Shut up, Yuri.”

“I had a good operation here, dammit.”

“Nobody cares.” They were drifting slowly down already. With a slight thump the wreck settled back to the ground, and the bubbles vanished. Nadia exhaled with relief as the halo disappeared and she got her proper mind back, but it was short-lived. “I didn’t straight-up kill all of them, Rus. Fix the whore, would you?”

Nadia understood a second too late for it to matter. Once again she had a vision of the man in the tent, and then her mind was dull with the futility of existence for the better part of a minute while Kizil Khan did his work. When he was done, he left, and Maria sat up on the floor of the van, looking confused.

“What did you just do?” Nadia shouted. It didn’t help that a number of small aches and cuts she’d gotten in the crash, and barely noticed, were suddenly gone as well.

“I left those dudes half-squished on purpose, hon. They were going to die anyway; I just made them useful. But we ain’t got time to argue about your conscience. I can’t guarantee that they won’t come back, whoever they were—it’s really fucked that we have so many enemies we can’t keep straight who’s trying to kill us, you know that?—and we don’t have a working car anymore.”

Nadia was still going to argue until Yuri said, “You need to get your ass unpuckered, you know that?”

“It’s just us now,” Ruslan chimed in. “Nobody’s going to help us anymore. If we don’t use what we have—everything we have—we’re doomed.”

“But … “ She looked around. The van was dark, lit only by the moon. She couldn’t really see faces very well. It didn’t seem anybody was on her side, though.

“You want to take the high road, it’s right there,” Fatima said. “But you take it alone.”

Nadia shook her head and shoved her way out of the van, suddenly sick of all of them. “Whatever. Let’s just move, before anybody else has to die for this disaster.”

“Sounds good.” Fatima followed close behind her, determined to get the last word. Ruslan followed her closely, while Maria interrogated Yuri, trying to get a grasp on what on earth had just happened. “Hey, you’ve got thirty seconds before we walk!” Fatima called back into the van.

Nadia wasn’t even going to wait that long. She didn’t know the entire way, but they were still on the same stretch of highway, surrounded by bare open fields, with a few faintly lit bumps on the distant horizon that might be shops or gas stations. Homs was visible behind them—the refinery was still burning. If she was lucky, she might walk off a bit of her anger before she had the others’ company inflicted on her again.

No such luck. She heard steps hurrying to catch up with her, and turned around to deliver a stinging retort which faltered on her tongue when he saw it was Ruslan. “Hey. I know you’re upset, but we’re not doing that bad. We’re still together. We have Yuri back. And we’ve just shown that they can’t stop us.”

“We repelled one attack,” she corrected him, and went back to walking. “No more. We still have, what was it? Two hundred kilometers? Just to get to the border?”

“But we can do it,” he insisted, jogging after her. “As long as we stick together. Between the four of us, we can do almost anything.”

It had come to this. They were alone, on the edge of a benighted city in a war-torn country whose government, among many others, was now going to be out to kill them. And Ruslan was giving her pep talks. “I don’t need to be encouraged, Ruslan. Least of all by you. I have nowhere to run off to, nobody else who will have me. I’m going to concentrate on surviving this night. We can work out the details later.”