Secondhand Sorcery

They spent the night in a very nice hotel room, free of charge. Normally this would have been wonderful, but it was only free because a swiping hit from Fatima’s “black thing” had demolished a quarter of it—including the front desk—and left much of what remained unstable. They had their pick of the deserted ruins, and checked themselves into the ground-floor room farthest from the damaged portion with a shotgun they’d scavenged from a maimed police car.

The power didn’t work, of course; the plumbing, somehow, did, though not the boiler. Nadia gritted her teeth and hosed herself down thoroughly with the frigid water before turning in. Fatima was asleep in one of the queen beds when she came out. Ruslan lay next to her, in fresh clean clothes from the backpack on his wheelchair. Nadia was surprised that her sister had been up to taking that much care of him before she passed out again. Fatima had one arm wrapped around him as they snored, and an unkind joke popped up in the back of Nadia’s mind, expressing itself in words a half-second before she could chase it away: well, he’s finally ‘sleeping with’ her …

Her clothes from the morning were beyond hope, so she took a fresh towel to the second bed with her, for modesty’s sake. She said her prayers, lay down, and shivered until the space under the covers warmed up. But she couldn’t fall asleep. She’d only been conscious about four hours, after all. Before that, she’d been … what? Asleep, or dead? She couldn’t remember anything past the early afternoon, when she’d been wandering around Petrovskoye on foot, bloody and full of glass. It certainly would have been easy for Yefimov to finish her off. She just had a hard time believing he had, now that she was warm and clean and had nothing wrong with her, physically, than a bruising ache in the side of her head.

Where had her soul gone, in those few crucial hours? Or had it gone anywhere at all? She had no memories of divine light, smothering darkness, or scorching flames. There was just nothing. A little gap. She might as well have fallen asleep, and Fatima’s explanation was that she’d just … stopped existing for that little bit. Oh, is that all?

It didn’t seem like Fatima had even been in a condition to make up lies; she’d been exhausted, and stupid from valence shock. Nadia recognized the symptoms. But that was a different matter from wanting to believe it, or wanting to think about what it might mean.

And Yuri? She certainly didn’t want to think about him. He was lying. She knew that for certain. His story didn’t add up. There was something he wasn’t telling them, and in his case there was one very easy and plain explanation. Just the thought of it made her dread the light of morning.

Eventually, she fell asleep, only to wake again before dawn with the sudden realization that, if she had actually died, she might not have Ézarine anymore. She’d deserted Claude when he died in December, hadn’t she? Would she have deserted Nadia as well, and maybe found a new owner, or simply died for good? Either way, the thought set her gasping with fear, and she nearly lost her head and tried to call her right then and there, in the bleary light before dawn, just for reassurance.

She settled for pulling up her wall instead. She found it as easy as ever to picture—but it didn’t feel the same, somehow. Maybe that was all in her head. Maybe she was only lacking confidence. Or maybe Ézarine was actually gone. She wouldn’t find out until she tried to call her for real, and succeeded or failed. And she couldn’t try to call her, in case she succeeded, unless it was important; the enemy would be watching the whole area with clairvoyants.

For so long, she’d wanted to be rid of Ézarine and her rage. Prayed for it, even. Now that the prayer might actually have been answered, she realized how dangerous it had been to ask. How could you ever prove that you didn’t have an emissant anymore? Especially when your explanation was something as ridiculous as “I was temporarily dead”? Now, if her fears were right, she could live without the temptation of Ézarine’s power, and the rage that came with it … by spending the rest of her life as a powerless fugitive, until someone hunted her down and she died again, for good this time.

Only a little light came in past the blinds, and no sound. This city was dead, most of its roads ruined. She fell asleep again in time, and didn’t wake until late in the morning when the sun was high in the sky.

Fatima had to shake her hard to wake her. “Hey. Come on. We got places to be, sis.”

She raised her head, and saw Ruslan already in his chair. He smiled a little, as if unaware that he’d killed hundreds or thousands yesterday. Maybe he didn’t even understand what he’d done? An innocent mass-murderer. What a thought.

Fatima snapped her fingers in front of Nadia’s nose. “Hey. You with us? We’ve got a lot to do, here. Like breakfast, and beating the truth out of your brother. No time to waste.” Nadia looked up at her sister; she was still wearing her clothes from yesterday, of course, but she’d had time to brush her hair. She looked fresh and ready to go. “It’s been a long damn time since I got anything to eat, you hear? Tell me you’re not hungry.”

For an answer, Nadia reached out and picked up the towel from the nightstand, waving it in Fatima’s face.

“Shit. Okay. Stay here with Rus, I’ll go find a department store to break and enter.”

“Fatima, that’s not funny.”

“Nothing about our situation is funny. We’re back to being low on cash and we can’t call nobody for help. Either I loot you some shit from a store that’s going to go out of business soon anyway, or you can ride around righteously naked like Lady fuckin’ Godiva. Take your pick.”

Nadia assumed that was rhetorical, because Fatima didn’t stay to listen for an answer; she plucked up the shotgun from her own bed and the backpack from Ruslan’s wheelchair, and headed out the door. Too late it came to Nadia that, if she was right about Ézarine, they had no way to defend themselves; she was naked and alone with a brain-damaged invalid who might not even understand what was happening if some hooligan broke into the room to assault her.

As if to punctuate the thought, she heard a terribly familiar sound—like last night’s thunder, but not. Another kind of storm. Multiple weapons, multiple shots, her all-too-practiced ear told her. Not a simple killing, then, but an actual battle, one she could only pray would not come this direction. It was at least some distance away. She slid further under the covers, and struggled in vain not to think about it. This was how most people lived, the ones who had been going about their lives as usual until yesterday. The way she had lived, long ago, with her parents. How did they stand it?

But Fatima came back an hour or so later, bearing Ruslan’s backpack and a new one, both full of clothes, plus a bag of old bread from a bakery’s dumpster. She fed Ruslan while Nadia put her clothes on under the covers. “Had to wave the gun a couple of times,” she said as she popped a bite-size portion in Ruslan’s mouth. He looked up at her soppily; Nadia wondered if she’d be chewing it for him soon, and spitting it into his mouth like a mother bird. “Don’t think anybody followed me, but this place is coming back to life and nobody looks happy.”

“Let’s leave, then,” Nadia said as she got up. “If we can. Can we get a car?” She had no idea where theirs were, or where they were for that matter.

“Sure. It’s the roads that might be a problem.”

There were in fact plenty of cars in the parking lot, many of them perfectly intact. They were still untouched because their keys had been buried or destroyed with their owners. Fatima wasn’t quite as good at hotwiring as she bragged, but after twenty minutes she got one running. Nadia rode ‘shotgun,’ quite literally, with her eyes open for trouble.

Fatima had told the truth: the city was coming to life again, in a dangerous way. They saw few other cars on the streets, and no women or children, but plenty of men. Old men at windows, staring at them as they passed. Middle-aged men on rooftops, pointing rifles down over the edge. Young men with guns or blunt weapons—wrenches, bats, sledgehammers—sprinting from cover to cover down the street, ducking into alleys and crouching behind parked cars. Boys barely older than Ruslan, and a few younger, marching with broken doors or old tables in front of them for shields. One of them leveled a rifle at them, and Fatima stomped on the gas to cross the street before he could fire.

Many times they had to turn around, finding the streets blocked by wrecked cars, or a deep trench in the pavement. Once they came to an actual barricade, one of Snowdrop’s thick glass walls, with boards and cinderblocks piled up to block a gap in its middle. They stopped and turned around; a burst of fire appeared on the ground behind them as they drove away, narrowly missing their trunk. Nadia twisted around to look at it, and saw a broad pool of flames spreading across the road. “Was that a Molotov?”

“Probably.”

“Why are they doing this? Aren’t they afraid of Pugachev, or his men?”

“Well, they were,” Fatima answered. “They were being good little girls and boys, until yesterday. Do you see what it got them?” She pointed to a row of ravaged townhouses, their facades shredded with holes of all sizes. “Looks like they’re done dicking around. Dagestan don’t take no shit.” Yesterday morning, Nadia would have expected a proud tone for her would-be family, but Fatima’s voice was resigned, almost apathetic. Apparently nearly getting killed by the Imam’s men had dampened her enthusiasm for their cause.

Those same men were probably leading the fighting now. Whether it was an attempted rescue or a retaliation hardly mattered to the three of them in the car; it wasn’t their fight anymore. Very likely whoever was in charge now had orders out to kill them on sight. Nadia put her hand on Fatima’s shoulder; she was mouthing silent words at the dashboard, and didn’t seem to notice.

They got out of Petrovskoye about two minutes before the first bomb sent a cloud of smoke and debris up to blot out the skyline behind them. Nadia turned back and looked up, but there were no aircraft that she could see. It must have been a planted explosive of some kind. Others soon followed. Fatima kept driving, turning onto a two-lane highway and heading south.

It was a long, quiet trip. Every now and then Fatima would mutter something to herself, but always in Pashto or Spanish or some other language Nadia didn’t know. She was hunched forward over the wheel as she drove, for no reason Nadia could see. In the backseat, Ruslan was content to look out the window with a slight, vacant smile on his face.

Nadia had enough worries of her own to leave it at that for the first couple of hours. But no longer than that—they had things to discuss, and time was slipping away. “Yuri didn’t call, did he? While you were out getting food, I mean. You had the phone.”

Fatima gave her a sour look, then turned her face back to the road, and said nothing. Nadia was on the point of asking again when she said, “No. No calls. No messages. Nothing.”

“What are you going to do when we get there?”

“What’s he going to do to us?”

“He wouldn’t attack me.”

“Great. You walk in front, then. I don’t know what the son of a bitch is going to do, but he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t deserve anything, at this point. Bare minimum, I have Mister Higgins ready the whole time.”

“But not out?”

“No. SP only.”

“Good.” To fill the silence, she added, “I don’t know if I have Ézarine anymore.”

Fatima looked at her, grunted, and shook her head.

“Fatima, please. We don’t know what happened.”

“Oh, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

“You didn’t hear him when he answered me last night. It would have been your name on the call. I think he really did believe you were behind it all. Or else thought you might be.”

“Man, who the fuck knows what Yuri thinks? He’s out of his goddamn mind.”

“All we know is that there was a fight. We don’t know who started it, or why.”

“And you believe him?”

“I don’t know what I believe,” she said, truthfully enough. “But we have to be careful.”

“Oh, I 100% agree. No argument. I’m going to be damn careful—“

“Careful not to jump to conclusions,” Nadia amended.

“Bullshit. You think Ramzan’s boys picked a fight with Yuri? For no good reason? Knowing what he can do? If you believe that, you’re as crazy as he is.”

“I don’t know what happened! And neither do you!” She knew as she said it that it sounded feeble.

And Fatima called her on it. “Really. We’ve got some time to kill. Give me an alternative explanation, why don’t you? What’s the innocent reason why all this shit went sideways, all at once?”

“Maybe the Imam’s people at Gamsutl’ misunderstood something—“

“Oh, a misunderstanding. And they misunderstood so much that your brother just had no choice but to set the whole mountain on fire, is that it? They couldn’t have talked it out and explained shit. It’s not like both of them speak Russian, or anything. Yuri was a totally helpless victim!”

“Fatima, you saw how they were. Everything was tense, and they were treating both of them, especially Maria, like prisoners.”

“And you think they didn’t have a good reason for that?” Nadia had no answer. “No, I think there’s a very good explanation for all of this. You just don’t want to admit it.”

“If you’ve already made up your mind like this, going to meet him is a mistake.”

“All right. Where else should we go, then? What are our other options?”

“Fatima, I know that you’re angry, and I’m angry too, but I don’t like the way this is going.“

“You don’t like—what are you, fuckin’ Mila? Don’t try to manage me, girl. I ain’t in no mood for head games.”

“Please. If you could just stop and pull over—”

Abruptly, and to Nadia’s complete surprise, she did, and stopped the engine. “Done. You want to get out, now’s your time. I can handle this solo.”

They were on a dirt road, kilometers from anywhere or anything. Nadia could look out her window and see a steep grassy slope leading down to a little stream surrounded by trees. It might be a nice spot for a picnic. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Then what are we stopping for? You want to talk? Well, I don’t. I want my foot up your brother’s ass, is what I want, and I don’t think you’re going to stop me. Not without Ézarine.” She touched the wires together to start up the engine again. “And if you do have her, then I’ve only got one question: whose side are you on?”

“On the side of our family!”

The car lurched back into motion, faster than before. “We don’t have a family, Nadia. We were never a family, not for real. We’re just a random bunch of orphans and … leftovers.” She waved her hand at Ruslan. “All slapped together because somebody could use us. The whole family thing was just a sick joke by a sick old man, and you’re the only one who was ever dumb enough to take it seriously.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“I do believe in family. I had one once, and I was going to have one again, but sweet precious innocent brother Yuri just set that on fire and pissed on the ashes, oh, and fucked us both over in the process, that too, and got your ass straight-up killed and by the way I’m still yet to hear you say anything like ‘thank you’ for me fixing that—“

“Fatima, please, you don’t know—“

“And if you can’t see what’s happened, I can, and sisterly love don’t carry us far enough to ignore it. This is it. You don’t have to be there to see it when it goes down, I’m not gonna make you do that, but I’m not gonna let you stop me. I deserve some answers, and I’m gonna get some. Now.”

She was driving very fast now, faster than Nadia would have liked on such narrow roads. She was still trying to think of something to say when they turned the last corner, and the bulk of the mountainside rolled back to show them the blackened remains of Gamsutl’ perched on its peak, and the equally charred ashes of the derelict town below. Then Nadia couldn’t think of anything to say at all.

They took the last few kilometers at terrible speed, braking hard in the middle of the clearing that had once passed for the town square. There were only a few buildings left standing. Before Nadia could think to stop her Fatima snatched up the shotgun from its spot next to the parking brake, and got out of the car shouting at the top of her lungs, “Yuri! Get your ass out here!” She lowered her voice to add, to herself: “And bring your backstabbing whore of a girlfriend with you.”