Secondhand Sorcery

Ten days. Ten days had passed since the end of the world. Ayşe was still alive, though she didn’t know why, and she had a job to do. That was all she had to sustain her, and she prayed that it would be enough.

Only a month ago, everything had been normal. She had come home from school on Friday expecting a normal weekend in the capital. Saturday morning was the wrestling meet; she went with her Ana and brother to cheer for cousin Demir and his team. Then came lunch. They were on their way home when everything fell apart.

It was only luck that they were on the road, far from any of the five targets, when the jinn tore Ankara apart. Baba was less lucky, on an errand to the General Directorate building at the moment it was attacked. They didn’t get home till after dark that day, and when they did they stayed even later until they got the call that Baba was alive and well but would have to stay up late helping.

The next day Ana told Ayşe that the President was dead, and much of the government with him, and that Baba was going to have to help the men taking charge of the country while they retreated from Ankara. He could not do his job right, she said, if he was worried about them. Ayşe was ashamed now to think of how she had cried and made a fuss, like a little child. There had been nothing to really cry about, yet. Only stupid things, like missing school or not getting to see her friends.

They’d only retreated a short distance anyway, to a house in Polatlı barely an hour’s drive away. Ana tried to make a joke of it, that they were Polats moving to Polatlı. Ayşe’d still kept complaining, because there was nothing to do, and no good food, and they’d left behind a lot of her things, and Baba never called. Until he did call, a few nights later, just as she was getting ready for bed. He’d been very excited, and asked to speak to her immediately.

It was not the reassuring conversation she’d expected. Baba told her he needed her to do something right now, and that she could help save their country. When she complained that she was tired, he got very angry and shouted over the phone line, in a way he had hardly ever shouted before. Ayşe actually dropped the phone and ran away, but he just called back and shouted at her poor Ana instead, and to make it stop Ayşe told them she would do it.

Ana threw both of them into the car and drove them to Ankara very fast. When they got there Baba gave her a tight hug and told her she would be a hero of the Turkish nation, remembered in all the history books. He looked very excited but also very tense and he almost dragged her into his own car to take her—it was just the two of them, no guards or assistants—to a place that looked like it used to be a department store. The glass front door was smashed. Baba told her she was safe with him but she was not sure she believed him. It was very dark inside.

She screamed when she saw the thing in the back of the store. She could not see it clearly but it looked very large and hairy. There was light around it somehow; Ayşe didn’t see where it was coming from but she could tell the thing was purple, not a normal color at all. Baba kept pulling her closer to it and when they got within ten meters she started gasping and he shook her hard to make her stop.

He knelt down and grabbed her by the shoulders. This was important, he said, and she must be brave. The creature would be her friend and protect her but she would have to think the right way to make it be her friend. She told him she did not want to be its friend, and he slapped her. Then he told her to think, very hard, about being lost in the mountains, in a place with lots of ice and snow.

It didn’t make any sense, but she was afraid to tell him that. She thought about cold mountains but nothing happened and Baba told her she was doing it wrong. She asked him what the right way was and he told her she needed to concentrate harder. So she shut her eyes very tight and thought and thought but she couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t doing anything and that there was a monster so very close, even if Baba wasn’t acting afraid of it.

A long time passed and Ayşe opened her eyes and the hairy thing was still there. Something about it was funny, like it wasn’t totally solid. She could see the outline of a rack of winter coats through its body. Baba noticed her looking and told her to stop it. She didn’t need to look at it. If she thought the right way, like a good child, she would befriend it, and then she could use its power to defend Ana and Baba and little Abdullah and the whole Turkish nation, like Usman the Dauntless. That was when she understood that the purple thing was a jinni, and that made her more afraid, but at least she understood.

Ayşe shut her eyes again and thought about ice in the mountains. She had never been to real mountains but she had seen pictures, and been in the snow. She thought all kinds of ways about ice and mountains, about people skiing and building snowmen and drinking hot tea and cocoa in log cabins. Those were friendly thoughts, weren’t they? But the jinni didn’t care.

It was a jinni, and jinn liked to fight. So she thought about armies fighting in the snow, about her ancestors riding their horses through mountain passes. Then she thought about avalanches falling down mountains and burying people alive, in case it was a bloodthirsty jinni, but it still didn’t care. She wondered if Baba was wrong and the jinni was tired of ice and snow—it wasn’t anywhere near either now, even if it was next to the coats—but she didn’t know what else to do so she kept thinking of cold mountains.

She opened her eyes just a crack, so Baba wouldn’t notice, and snuck a look at the jinni. This, she thought, was taking a very long time. The moment she thought it, the jinni moved, raising a purple lump on its body and turning it towards her. A single bright yellow light appeared in the middle; after shrieking and jumping back, she realized that was its head, and it only had one eye. So now it was looking at her?

This is taking a very long time, she thought again. The beast kept looking. She thought about time, about long times, about months and years and centuries, and before she knew it she was thinking longer, of whole ages of the earth, and the pictures in her head were much more vivid and real, her body pressed up against a sheer stone face by a biting cold wind. She felt certain, just for a moment, that she would die in the cold.

Then it passed, and she was back in the department store with Baba and the jinni. His name, of course, was Pangu, and he was her friend, if you could call it that. He was filling the whole building with white mist, and it was chilly, so she told him to go away, and he did. Then Baba got down and made a fuss over her, telling her she had done very well and now they could help everyone. And she had believed him, and smiled, but she was very tired. She fell asleep in the car.

When she woke up it was morning, and the car was still moving. She asked Baba when they were going to get home, and he told her they would not; Ana and brother were okay, but it was very dangerous right now and Ayşe and Baba were needed elsewhere to help others. She asked why. He pretended he had not heard, and kept driving. When she asked louder, he gave her a look, and she shut her mouth.

They spent most of the next week just driving. Baba would stop, and get on the phone and talk with his friends from work, and argue with them, and usually swear just before hanging up. They were always changing the direction they had to drive in, because (Baba said) there was an evil foreign jinni destroying all the eastbound highways and everything near them. Ayşe offered to go and chase it away with her new jinni, but Baba told her that was foolish talk and they would stay away from it.

When they finally found a place where Baba felt safe, he didn’t ask her to do anything; in fact, he told her never to bring Pangu out at all, unless he or one of his new men told her to, or another jinni attacked. So she spent long hours shut up in a hotel room, doing nothing. Baba seemed angry all the time and she didn’t dare to ask him many questions, or even complain. He did not want her to call Ana or the rest of the family, and wanted to read any letters she sent so they didn’t reveal anything dangerous or secret. Ayşe didn’t understand how she could do that when she didn’t know anything. She couldn’t see how they were helping anybody.

After the first two days Baba had his men (he had men helping him now, men he said worked with him in Army Intelligence) bring her books to read, and the TV was hooked up again. It was still boring and made Ayşe anxious. Baba had some meals with her but he was always distracted with work.

Then one night she heard gunfire from the docks, and a voice on the radio demanding her assistance. She called for Pangu, but too late; two other jinn appeared and threw him back, defeated. There was nothing Ayşe could do but cower in her room, where she learned, several hours later, that Baba was dead.

She didn’t cry at first. None of it felt real. She hadn’t seen Ana or Abdullah for weeks, and now Baba was gone too. His men told her what to do, and she did it because they were adults and listening to adults was the only part of her old life she had left. She fell asleep very late and slept till they woke her up and told her they had found the girl, the American spy, who killed her Baba. It was a girl with a jinni, not much older than Ayşe—the same girl and the same jinni who had attacked Baba at the General Security building.

They took Ayşe with them to question the girl; she was an ugly teenager, with pimples, and very rude. She smelled like she had fouled her pants. It made Ayşe angry to think that such a nasty and dirty person had caused so much suffering for Turkey, and for her. When the men were not looking she snuck in and made the stupid girl hurt some more, but the men caught her and dragged her away. They took her out of the hotel and locked her in a dusty old bedroom in somebody’s house.

She could have escaped, easily, with Pangu. But she didn’t have anywhere to go if she did—where were her Ana, and Abdullah? Were they even still alive? It was a relief when the Americans came to retrieve their spy the next day. There was a fight, and the men came to Ayşe in a panic begging her to help. So she did. It didn’t do anything, but it made her feel like she wasn’t totally helpless. Someone needed her. But the good feeling didn’t last long, because she lost again, and the spy-girl got away.

The very next day Ayşe was sitting in her same dusty bedroom, trying and failing to sleep so she wouldn’t have to think, when she heard a knock at the door. She opened it and saw a small, pretty blonde lady she’d never met before. The lady spoke poor Turkish with a Russian accent, so at first Ayşe was afraid, but the lady explained that she didn’t work for the Russian government; she was part of some organization with the UN that helped victims of crimes. Ayşe didn’t really understand it, but the lady was very kind and asked how she’d been doing. Her name was Mila.

They talked for a long time, without even leaving the room. Mila was a good listener and asked a few questions, then said her agency could help. Ayşe asked her if Baba’s men would be okay with that, and Mila frowned and said it was not up to them. Then she took Ayşe out of the house—nobody else was home—and showed her how those men had been doing terrible things, making slaves of women and girls and moving drugs, and not telling Baba about any of it. They talked to women who said they had been beaten and locked up. Ayşe could believe it. The men had never been kind to her.

But that didn’t matter now. Mila took Ayşe out to really see the town for the first time, and she saw that the men were not in charge anymore; Mila said they had run away after the fight with the jinni, and now men with her agency were in charge again. Ayşe saw a number of them on patrol in cars. Nobody acted afraid; a lot of people stopped to cheer when the soldiers passed by.

Now Ayşe was living a nice house in Van, and nobody was asking her to do anything unusual. She was staying with a family who had two daughters around her age. They were all kind and they went to school together, but they were still all strangers and she knew she would never see Baba again and Mila (who visited at least once a day to check on her) said they’d had no luck finding Ana either. She went to bed every night feeling so homesick she could die.

That was the way things were when Mila came to see her again, more than a week after Baba’s death. She still hadn’t found any of Ayşe’s family, she said, but they’d learned that the American spy and her friends were coming back into their territory. They didn’t know exactly when, but they would be coming to break prisoners out of a jail and maybe use them to start trouble.

Ayşe didn’t hesitate. Van was a good and peaceful place whose people had taken her in and given her shelter. She could not allow these filthy foreigners to hurt them, when she had the power to fight back.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mila told her. “It would be very dangerous. We can find another way to defeat this spy.”

“But she has a jinni! Normal men cannot stand up to a jinni!”

“It isn’t just her, though. She will have several allies with her, and all of them have their own jinn. You have only one.”

Ayşe jumped to her feet, her fists balled at her sides. “Even if I am alone, I won’t let them hurt any more people!”

Mila pursed her lips. “You are a very brave girl,” she said, “and I can’t stop you if you are determined. It might not be much more dangerous to fight than to be a bystander when they attack. I will only ask you to be careful. We don’t want you hurt.”

“I won’t,” she promised, and made another promise to herself at the same time. She wouldn’t let the filthy American bitch get away a third time. Resul Polat would be avenged.