Secondhand Sorcery

The Democratic Confederation of Zîlan condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the vicious incursions of foreign adventurers and American lackeys. The barbarity of yesterday’s assault on the Lim Island facility was matched only by its brazenness and incompetence. It remains, at this point, unclear what objective motivated the unknown attackers to destroy the entire prison, killing most of its inmates in the process. The people of Zîlan may take comfort in the knowledge that these madmen will not remain unknown, or alive, for long—

There was more, but none of it was worth reading. Nadia already knew that they were being hunted. Not effectively; the local authorities didn’t actually want a confrontation with multiple emissants to take place on their territory. They’d only issued broad warnings to be suspicious of unknown people, and circulated them widely and loudly enough that there was no chance of Nadia’s increasingly motley gang finding any safe haven within their territory.

At present they were hiding in the far southeast of Turkey, squatting with some of Maria’s smuggler friends. Nadia hated depending on the girl, but they were in no position to choose. Their hosts were her distant cousins, in some tortuous sense of that word, and had people knock on their door at all hours. There’d been three just last night, waking Nadia from sleep, but all three had moved on after very brief and quiet conversations. One had driven a truck around to the side of the house and loaded or unloaded something as well. Nadia didn’t ask.

The next bit of news was much briefer and less bombastic. In fact, it was little more than two names on a list: Ferhat and Deniz Erbal, of Bayburt. The details about their supposed crimes had been stripped away, and there was no mention of the sentence anymore. Just a note that they had been transferred out of the Lim Island facility—it didn’t say where to—on February 28, the day before the attack. More likely the two of them had never been there at all. Their new location would be forthcoming, Nadia was sure, as soon as Yefimov had found the time to set up another trap.

A knock on the door downstairs. Nadia didn’t look up from her phone. If the visitors were after the Marshalls, they would have opened with an artillery strike on the house. Anyway, she wouldn’t recognize any of their surviving enemies besides Yefimov, and Mila. Assuming you didn’t count the Polat girl, and Nadia doubted whether she would come back, or knock if she did. Moving on …

The next one was Ruslan’s discovery, found by chance hunting through foreign media. American cable news, in this case. A man in a blue suit, with black glasses and silver hair, frowning as he snapped into a microphone on the table in front of him: “Would you please explain to me, General, what these American-trained assets were doing, or trying to do, on that island?”

“Senator, I have to object to the characterization of these—“

“Pangu is an American asset, General! We trained him. We made him! And, now that his emissor has been killed in the line of duty—apparently while guarding, or failing to guard, another of these underage belligerents—we see him, and the child he failed to guard, and one other mysteriously misplaced American weapons project, cooperating in the demolition of a facility for holding prisoners of war. With the inmates still inside it!”

“These individuals were not acting under our orders, Senator.”

“And why is that? We have ample evidence, General Green—evidence you yourself provided—that the Marshall children were considered to be acting under our supervision barely a week ago. They appear to have succeeded in exactly one operation, shutting down a local black market with considerable use of force, before joining up with a sociopathic rogue agent across the border, killing a decorated veteran emissor, and finally defecting to perpetrate this—this fiasco. I am … appalled. More than appalled. I simply don’t know a word strong enough for this, General.”

Nadia kept watching a bit longer, but it was mostly posturing indignation. Absolutely nobody, it seemed, knew that the prison had been built to fail. But plenty of people knew about the people Zîlan had been holding inside. A surprisingly large number had been notable philanthropists, religious leaders, or statesmen, two months earlier, when Turkey had been a single united country. The little bit of the Turkish government that survived, or was trying to put itself back together, wasn’t very happy about that.

It had been humiliating enough when they only knew they had been tricked into committing mass murder. It was even worse once they realized that the whole thing had been aimed at somebody else—at a population of gullible, TV-watching idiots on the other side of the world. That Nadia and her family were now outlaws, marked for death, in both Kurdish and Turkish territory? That might be even less than a side benefit. They weren’t even a consideration, only tools used to manipulate other tools.

But that was not the worst thing Nadia had to face this day. That would be the sheet of paper sitting on the table in front of her. The one she had been ignoring while she flipped through her phone, looking at things she had already seen and reading things she already knew. Several other sheets of paper just like it were crumpled up in the wastebasket, or on the floor.

Dear Kemal, I know what it looks like but don’t believe what you see on TV

Dear Kemal, I am so sorry. I promise we did our best, but it was all a trap.

Dear Kemal, Your family is still alive. We were unable to free them, but

But but but. So many buts. The current sheet was blank so far, except for the letterhead that said the paper used to belong to a small accounting company. It was all they had, and not much of it. All she had done so far was waste paper.

Another knock, this time at the door to the room she shared with Fatima. The interruption annoyed her less than it should have. Anything but this letter. “What?”

Yuri’s voice came through the door. “Family meeting. Our room. Now. Move it.”

“A meeting?” She got no answer but the sound of footsteps walking away.

The house was bigger than it looked from the street, where you could mistake it for a modest single-family dwelling. Little annexes had been tacked onto it, sprawling back into the tree cover on one side, and a basement dug deep, so that it was big enough to hide any number of people or bulk goods. Several of the added rooms, she’d noticed, locked only from the outside. Yuri and Maria’s was the largest, big enough to cram in several chairs around the bed. With all five of them present, it was still quite crowded.

Fatima opened the discussion without ceremony. “We’ve got to move,” she said. “Nothing about this place is stable or secure, and Maria says we’ve got to be gone by nightfall tomorrow anyway. Her cousins need the space for something or somebody else. So if any of you got any idea where we’re supposed to go from here, now’s the time to say so.”

“Going south’s still an option,” Yuri said. “No, hear me out! Really! Maria’s family knows a bunch of people in Iraq. Plenty of work keeping the peace there.”

“You mean sitting on their Kurds for a change?” Nadia said with distaste.

“More like helping their Kurds deal with, you know, all the shit going down around Syria and here. Buncha scrub mooja-hideens needing their asses kicked.”

“Isn’t Iraq American, though?” Ruslan asked. “I thought they had American bases there.”

Yuri shrugged. “Maria says they’re mostly in the other end of the country. The Kurds have been trying to police their own space, but it makes tension and shit, and there’s all this local politics. Away from the oil fields, security drops off, and you get some hardcore Wild West crazy going down.”

“And Maria’s family has probably been selling in that area,” Nadia said. Fatima looked like she’d been about to say the same thing, but contented herself with a nod.

“Does it matter? Sure, she sells guns. But here’s the thing, fools: we’re guns! Big-ass guns! They know how to sell our kind of goods.”

“Only we’re not for sale,” Nadia told him.

“No,” Fatima said, “this isn’t a sale situation. This is more like the Karimi family trying to build itself up into a whole new business. From small-time gunrunners to doing logistics for a local government.” She sounded skeptical, but not totally against it. Resigned, maybe.

“It could work,” Ruslan said. “There’s four of us. Russia’s committed here, and they couldn’t spare enough people to really bother us there without provoking the US in the south of the country. They can’t handle another front.”

This sounded like a good point for Nadia to speak up. “Is that what you want to be, Ruslan? To be a rat, or, or a vulture, eating the corpses in the middle of a no-man’s-land, where neither side dares to go? Is that all we aspire to?”

Yuri threw his head back, and threw out his hands, nearly slapping Ruslan in the face. “Moraaaaals!” It was sort of moaning curse.

“What’s your idea, then?” Fatima said. “Do you have one?”

“Yes, and it isn’t just about ‘morals.’ Have you forgotten Hamza?”

Fatima shut her eyes. “No. I know. The bastards got him. If he were still alive, we’d have heard about him doing something by now, or trying to find us. Anything. He’s gone. But I can’t fix that.”

“Yes. They got him. And us. Multiple times now, they have hurt us, and we have always retreated. We were doing something similar to what Yuri just proposed here, and not really affecting Russia’s goals. They still hurt us, and destroyed what we were working for, and for what? To cause political scandals in a country none of us has ever been to!”

“Do you hear another idea?” Yuri asked Ruslan. “Because I don’t hear another idea.”

“I don’t think we should keep going after the Erbals,” Ruslan said, ignoring him. “I know they’re stuck in a bad situation and, you know, and everything, but I don’t—“

“I wasn’t going to suggest we go after the Erbals,” Nadia cut him off. “They’re just bait, and Russia will keep using them against us for as long as we keep going after them.” She tried not to think of Kemal as she said it. What would happen to his daughter, or his son-in-law, or his baby grandson? It was out of her hands. “I propose that we take the fight to the Russians.”

Fatima’s eyes snapped open. Ruslan’s jaw dropped. Yuri only snickered, and rolled his eyes. Maria, who hadn’t been able to follow the English conversation, looked from face to face, but said nothing. It was left to Fatima to break the silence. “I didn’t think revenge was really a Christian thing.”

“It isn’t. We prefer justice. If you want to call it revenge, it can be that too. But it’s also just sense. If you think we can take our four familiars and skitter off under some rock somewhere, and Yefimov and his masters will leave us alone … then you have no business calling me naive.”

“On paper, at least, I can see it,” Fatima said. “They’ve fucked us, over and over again. We owe them. Not just because of justice—though it is that—but because it’s practical. They need to learn you can’t fuck with the Marshall family and not bleed for it. The logical answer is to bleed them, good and hard. That way they learn. I like that.”

“But?” Nadia said.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Ruslan all but shouted. “You think we’re not safe hundreds of miles away from them, so you want us to go up and pick a fight?”

“The fight’s been picked,” Fatima said. “They started it, a long time ago. We owe them, and I like to pay my debts. You remember that, Rus. You were around when we took care of the men who killed Omar Alvarez.”

Ruslan pouted. “Yuri, what do you think?”

“Eh. I didn’t really like running for my life in Ankara, Yefimov’s a crusty old dickbag, and they deserve all the pain we could give them. Of course, I didn’t like it when Nadia’s homegirl shot me, either, and I got over that, when I had to. I like living, and we’ll live longer in Iraq.”

“But for what?” Nadia said. “Living for what?”

“What does that even mean?” Yuri said. “You don’t live ‘for’ anything. You live because dying fuckin’ sucks! Shit.”

Ruslan turned back to Fatima. “Do you really want to go to war with Russia?”

“I don’t think the Karimis can help us much with that,” Yuri put in.

“I don’t make my decisions based on how much help I can get from your whore, Yuri. And I’m not decided here. Even if we want to jack them up good—which I do, especially after this latest round of bullshit—we don’t have to do it straight away. We could make a strategic retreat. Northern Iraq wouldn’t be a bad base of operations to start a counterattack from.”

“You’re only putting off the fight because it frightens you,” Nadia said. “Retreating and regrouping is a thing for normal armies. Our weapons are inside us, we don’t need ammunition, and nothing the knyazya care about is anywhere near Iraq. Turkish Kurdistan is only a chess-piece for them, to be sacrificed for the right price. The same as we were.”

“Wait,” Ruslan said. “If you’re not talking about attacking them in Turkey, where do you want to go?”

“Wherever we need to,” Nadia replied, and pondered what that meant. What could they do? She thought aloud, the answers coming slow. “Titus always taught us that familiars are offensive weapons. Russia needs to spend a tremendous amount of money, and use multiple familiars and clairvoyants to hold onto Fatih. To maintain a defensive position with offensive weapons.”

“So, what, we attack Fatih again?” The idea seemed to terrify Ruslan.

“No. It is prepared for a fight.” She knew that at once, and what was more—“Russia itself is not. Not against all four of us. We invade. We bring the war to them. It will not make much to force them to withdraw from Fatih.” She admired the conviction in her own voice. She didn’t think they could possibly guess that she was voicing the ideas as they came to her.

“If it’s that easy, why hasn’t America done it already?” said Fatima. Ruslan, siting beside her, appeared to be speechless.

“Have you seen how America talks lately? Their senators and generals and other tools? They are frightened and timid. They don’t want to take any risks, and never did. That was why they hired Titus, you know. So they wouldn’t have to risk their own.”

“But you want to risk yourself?” Fatima said. Her tone wasn’t challenging; she wanted to know exactly what her sister was after.

“I will be bound to Ézarine until I die. Nothing I do will take me away from danger. I could be killed at any moment. If I am bound to die, isn’t it better to die doing something meaningful? America will not do what needs to be done. Yefimov has already beaten them. The Knyazya will keep Fatih, and once they have it they will take more, and more, and more—unless they are stopped! And we can stop them. I know we can. We can show them all that we are not trash, we are not a liability, we are not tools. We have power. We can change this world, and we can make it better.”

She was on the edge of her seat now, her hands clenched in fists at her sides. She could feel her whole body trembling with eagerness. She’d come into this meeting disheartened and helpless; now she saw the way.

Fatima was less convinced; if anything, she looked somewhat alarmed at Nadia’s zeal. Ruslan was looking to her for cues, lost at sea. Yuri’s face lit up with a slow smile that built up, stretching out the corners of his lips until his face split open in a long, loud, raucous laugh. Everyone stared. Maria gave him a warning look. But he kept laughing. He threw back his head, slapped the bed beside him, and did not stop laughing until he had fallen back upon the mattress.

“Holy shit,” he wheezed at last. He sat up. “Okay, I’m in.”

“Yuri, it’s not funny,” Nadia told him. Not that he ever believed her when she said so.

“Not supposed to be. I mean it. Fuck it. I’m in.” When she kept glaring, he went on, “I mean, sure, it’s a quick run to an early grave, but I was headed there anyway. We’ve both been on borrowed time since Guryev. I wanna hit the ground and make a big ol’ crater shaped like a middle finger, you know? Right in Ivan’s direction. So sure, let’s do this.”

He probably, in some sense, meant it, but this still seemed like one of the times when it was better to ignore him. He would change his opinion in half an hour anyway. “Fatima. You think of yourself as a soldier, don’t you? What kind of war are you planning to fight?”

She pursed her lips. “Honestly, if you gave me a choice? I’d kinda want to go after the Polat kid, before we did anything else.”

Yuri blew a raspberry. “To do what? You killed her dad, and she knocked down the fucking prison! We shouldn’t have taken her in in the first place. You’re lucky just ran off, instead of wasting us the second we fell asleep.”

“What the hell do you know, fool? The grownups are talking. Shut your mouth.” She turned back to Nadia. “It probably doesn’t make sense to you.”

“No, it does. She’s a lot like us. We really should stick together.”

Fatima hesitated, biting her lip, but finally said, “Yeah.”

“And if we knew where she went, or had any idea where to start, I would follow her,” Nadia went on. “But she left in the middle of the night, on Friday, three days ago. We’re hundreds of miles away, and she’s probably living with somebody in Zîlan, where they would kill us on sight. I don’t see how we could even begin to find her, and while we were trying—“

Fatima held up her hands. “Heaps of dead bodies. Yeah, I got it.” She sighed. “Wish I didn’t have to.”

“So …”

Fatima sighed. “Tell you what. We have to ditch this house in twelve hours anyway. We have that long to try and figure out a plan of attack. As long as at least one of us comes up with a plausible way to put a hurting on his airtight-pinched, vodka-pickled, washed-up-commie ass, well, I’m game to try.” She looked up as Nadia smiled. “But I mean a good plan, you hear? No winging it.”

“I know.” She glanced at Ruslan, who had his face in his hands and might have been hyperventilating. Whatever. There were three of them. Ruslan would follow the group, and Fatima, as he always did. Meeting adjourned. She had other, better things to do with her afternoon.

To my briefly adopted father:

I write to you with gratitude for the time you gave me, and grief for what it has cost you. I will not apologize, because I am not guilty in this, and you taught me to be clear about these things. But I am sorry that you have been made to pay a higher price for being a better man than so many of the people around you.

If we can find a way to rescue your family, without causing additional harm to the innocent—I don’t think you would want that—we will do it. If we cannot, we, or I at least, will trust to God to see them through, as He sees us all. In the meantime, you have given me my life back, and I have promised not to waste it. I can’t give you any details, in case this letter is intercepted, but we will not rest while foreigners try to take your country from you.

There is a Bible verse, that’s sticking in my memory now—you’ve probably never heard it. I lost my Bible long ago, of course, in all this chaos, but it went something like, “Who are these men, who eat my people as a man eats bread? Do they not know God? They will know fear, fear like there never was before.” I’ve felt enough fear in my life to never want to cause it again, but I will if I have to.

It’s better if you don’t try to contact me again, until this is all over (if it ever is). I don’t think you could anyway. We’ll be moving around a lot. If Miss Keisha is with you, give her my thanks and my love; if you see the Colonel or Dr. Gus, say hello to them as well. Whatever kind of life you’re living now, it’s the least I can do to try and give you your old one back, whatever that takes. I hope I can see you holding your grandson one day. But this letter has gone on long enough. I have work to do, and I shouldn’t put it off. You taught me that, too.

With love,

your daughter,

Nadezhda