Secondhand Sorcery

She woke in total darkness to the sound of her own angry shout and found herself restrained, flat on her back and immobile. Strangling-tight arms gripped her by the chest, and the waist, and the knees, and she could not shake them off. She strained to reach the thing on her chest so she could bite those horrible arms, but she couldn’t reach. So she tried to shake herself loose instead, squirming and thrashing in the black, screaming to wake the dead the whole time. She could feel it working; she rocked from side to side. She shouted louder, pushed harder, and at last she tipped over, smacked into something hard, bounced off again, and with a terrible crash the thing that was holding her slammed into the floor. But the gripping arms didn’t let go. She slid down a little, far enough that she could bash her head against the floor, which she did, over and over. The pain of each impact made her a little angrier which gave her the strength to fight harder. Even if it hurt her, the whole world was shaking with the impact—she could feel it. So she fought and fought, for spite—

As suddenly as it had come, the anger was gone, leaving a terrible pain in her head. She tried to grab it, only to find her arms were still restrained. But the things grabbing her didn’t feel like giant hands anymore. More like belts or straps. She felt around in the darkness until her hands found something like a buckle, and worked the tough fabric strap through it—it was tight, and she was hanging sideways off the thing it attached to, so this took a while. After a long moment’s work it got loose enough for her to slip her arms free, and then she worked faster. Once that top belt was loose she was able to shift down and get her waist free, still in pitch black, and when that was done she could simply pull her feet out of the bottom belt to she lying free on a cold metal floor. She tried to kick away the thing that had held her, but it didn’t want to move and she was tired, so she let it stay there.

Now that she wasn’t yelling or struggling, she noticed a quiet, rhythmic noise in the background, a kind of soft drumming. She could feel it vibrating the metal floor under her, too. It was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She hadn’t quite gotten to the point of wondering who and where she was when she heard a rattling noise, then a creak, and a pale blue-white line appeared against the darkness below her feet. She flinched back from the light, shielding her eyes. After a moment a quiet voice said, “Nadia?”

She meant to answer, but the words tripped on her tongue. A thing that was not a word fell out instead.

“Nadia? Is that you?”

She thought so. “Yes.”

Another creak, and the line of light got wider and more painful. But her eyes were starting to adjust now, so she kept looking, and a little dark round thing appeared against the light. It had fuzzy, indistinct edges. Nadia looked at it, and it didn’t move, and her eyes kept adjusting until the light didn’t seem so bright anymore; in fact, it was barely light at all. The drumming noise was louder now, and of different pitches mixed together. There was a sudden flash of much brighter light, just for an instant, and it lit up the cold hard thing she was in, and the edges of the dark thing. But then it was gone, and her mind groping for its name found the word lightning just as the distant boom of thunder sounded.

An arm appeared around the dark round thing, which she recognized as a head, and a human shape pushed its way into the place that held her. Cold, shaking hands touched her legs, then her arms, then her head and face. The other person was breathing very fast. Nadia pushed herself up so she was sitting on the floor, while the other person (a girl?) kept patting at her. It was a little annoying, and the girl smelled bad, like tobacco smoke. But then Nadia realized she smelled even worse, and not like smoke, so she didn’t say anything.

She didn’t remember coming to this place, or recognize what it was. But her pants were cold and wet, and something was caked to her bottom, and her head hurt terribly where she’d been bashing it against the floor. Why had she done that?

At last the patting stopped, and the girl said, “What the fuck.”

“You don’t need to swear,” Nadia told her. But the girl hadn’t said the swear very loudly, or emotionally. It just slipped easily out of her, as natural as her breath, and barely less quiet.

“Nadia, you’re—I don’t even—“ Abruptly her silhouette fell back to sit on the floor with a bump, and everything shook so that Nadia realized they were in some kind of vehicle, and that the girl was Fatima. “What the fuck,” she repeated. “I … I don’t even know.”

“Where are we?”

Fatima sat there a moment, looking back at the light behind her, before answering, “Same city. Don’t remember the name now. The capital place.”

“Petrovskoye.”

“Yeah. What’s left of it. The whole north half is busted to hell. Might as well have bombed it.”

“What happened?”

“Shit! What a question.” She laid back against the metal wall of the … truck? Was this a truck? Nadia looked at the thing that had held her; it was a stretcher on wheels. This might be an ambulance, she thought, but it was bare, no medical equipment. A little panel truck, maybe, or a trailer, like people rented for moving. It was about the right size.

The light from the open door lit Fatima’s face now. She looked tired. No, not tired—exhausted. Her mouth was hanging open, and her eyelids drooped. Nadia didn’t feel tired, more like she’d been sleeping for a long time. Well-rested, just a bit foggy. Maybe she’d been anesthetized. She thought back. “We were going to fight Pugachev, weren’t we?”

“Yeah.” She sounded half-asleep already.

“And I couldn’t reach Therese and the Imam. So I called my ride, but he shot me.” She reached up and felt her shoulder, but she already knew it was fine. There was no trace of a wound. “And then I went to rescue Therese, and … Snowdrop attacked. Snowdrop! Where is she? Are we safe?”

“Snowdrop’s gone.” Fatima’s voice was peevish.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean she ran for it. We chased her off.”

“How? Are you sure? Yefimov is crafty, you can’t be sure—“

“Shut up! Okay? Just shut up. This is all just so totally fucked. I’m going to need a minute. More than a minute. Maybe an hour, maybe a day. I don’t know. Shit.”

“Do we have a day?”

“Don’t know that either. I don’t know a goddamn thing, sister.”

“You know more than me.”

“Yeah.” Fatima kept staring out at the light. The sky was cloudy and dark, so it was hard to tell, but Nadia thought it might have been evening. A lot of time had passed since she went to help the others.

“Is Ruslan safe?” she ventured. “I think he was with you. Wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. He’s fine, he’s right out there.” She tossed her hand in the general direction of the door. “Probably ought to get him out of the rain,” she said. But she didn’t move.

Nadia couldn’t recall Fatima ever looking so hapless, so disorganized. This wasn’t the girl who’d come up the tower a few months ago, seen Nadia sitting with their father’s corpse, and immediately started spinning up a plot. Something had happened, and she wasn’t going to find out what with this approach. “Fatima. Can you just answer simple questions, please? One at a time. Short answers. Can you please do that for me?”

She considered it. “Guess so.”

“Where are Therese and the Imam?”

“No clue. Probably captured, or dead.” She said it without feeling.

“Yuri?”

“Fuck him. I don’t care.” She cocked her head, considering, and added, “Might care later. Not now, though. He’s not here. That’s good enough.”

“Okay.” What to ask next. “Were you attacked?”

“When?”

“At the cafe, where you were waiting.”

“Oh. Yeah. The guy from the bridge. The one with the hot rocks and shit.”

“Ardent? What happened to him?”

“We chased him off. Or killed him. Not sure. Don’t know where he went.”

“You chased him off,” she repeated. She wished she hadn’t bashed her head so much, and thought about making that her next question, but putting it into words seemed hard, and she wanted to go in order. It would be easier for Fatima if they didn’t jump around. “With Mister Higgins?”

“No. Rus did it.”

“Ruslan? He got Kizil Khan out? Is he better?”

Fatima laughed. “Child, I don’t even know how to answer that.”

“Did he use Kizil Khan?” she repeated, trying to stay calm.

“No. Yes. Sorta.”

“Fatima, I know this is hard, but can you explain that?”

Fatima took a deep breath. “I think … I think when Rus got hit at the bridge, or maybe a little later, Kizil Khan got busted. He’s not acting normal. He’s not Kizil Khan anymore. He’s not even a he. He’s a chick—that princess thing I told you about, from the hospital. Except when he isn’t. Don’t ask me what the hell it all means, but he just saved our asses.”

“Fatima, you’re not making any sense.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“So … Ruslan has a new fami—“

“You were dead,” Fatima said.

“What?”

“You were dead, when we found you. Okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean. That you. Were fucking. Dead. Is that too fucking complicated to understand? Do I need to draw a fucking picture for you?”

“That’s ridiculous. Kizil Khan can’t raise the—“

“He’s not fucking Kizil Khan! Did we fuck up your brain when we brought you back? You were dead, child! Dead! Cold, stiff, blood all over and you’d shit your pants, eyes wide open, strapped down to that stretcher to bring back for a trophy. Dead. You think I don’t know what a corpse looks like? How dumb would I have to be? I’ve seen a billion of ‘em. You weren’t sleeping, you weren’t in a coma, you were a bloody fucking mess, and you were dead. Can you wrap your puny little mind around that?”

Nadia looked down, and saw that her clothes were in tatters, full of little holes. Barely more than rags, really, and soiled. She poked her finger through a gap, and it came away with a dusting of old dried blood. But the skin underneath was untouched. “Dead.”

“Yes!”

“All right.” She still didn’t really believe it, but it seemed important to Fatima. She could work out what actually happened later. “Who put me in this?”

“Yefimov. Or somebody working for him. Whoever.”

“But you … what did you do?“

“I told you, Kizil Khan’s busted now. He—she—doesn’t even have the same keystone. The imam’s boys shot Amina and he flipped out, and the girl came out and fixed her. But the story was all wrong. No dead kid in the tent. There were still tents, but it was all about doing camp chores or something.”

“Okay. And then?”

“I think the rock guy found us that way. The girl went out to fight him, and … I didn’t see what happened, but I think she got her ass kicked. So she flipped out again, and the girl turned into something else. This black thing.”

“A black thing.”

“Yes. And it didn’t feel the same. The girl was sad and wanted to hurt so she could fix people. The black thing was just pissed. He started tearing shit up. I didn’t see what happened. I was so pissed myself I couldn’t think, I just started punching walls and hitting people. But when he stopped, I had a broken hand, and everything was wrecked. Buildings knocked down, big-ass ditches in the street—“

“Are you sure Ardent didn’t do that?”

“No. It was him. The black thing did it.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, hell. I know because he kept doing the same shit after Ardent was gone, okay?”

“Okay. I believe you.” Punching walls and hitting people. Just like she’d been doing. “You were too angry to think, you said?”

“Yeah.”

“So you beat Ardent, somehow, and then what?”

“I got out of the cafe and everything was fucked, and she was trying to fix it, people popping up from the streets just like you.”

“Who’s ‘she’? You said it was a black thing.”

“Motherf—she changed back! Back and forth, back and forth! She just kept switching! First the crying bitch, who wants to heal, but it hurts her, see? I think it hurts him, too. He cries and shakes the whole time. After a while she can’t take it and she breaks, turns into the black thing, starts destroying everything. Then he gets worn out and turns back into her, starts trying to fix the shit, and the people, he just broke—“

“I understand,” she lied, to stop her shouting. The straps from the gurney were still hanging loosely off her; she pulled them out of the buckles, stood up, and went to look out the door. Ruslan was sitting in his wheelchair just outside, soaked to the skin and fast asleep in the pouring rain. The truck was parked next to a gas station, which looked closed; across the street was a mountain of wet rubble. The street was strewn with broken bricks and bits of shattered glass. “And Yefimov?”

“Came knocking while she was dicking around trying to make it all better. I think. I couldn’t do much, I was either crying or screaming and hitting shit the whole time. It was a little better when we were crying, I could think enough to move him around so she could hurt herself and fix more people. The black thing just made me insane. But I couldn’t really see much either way, you know?”

“Then how do you know Yefimov is gone?”

“Nadia. For God’s sake. It’s almost night. Ain’t a damn thing happened for more than an hour, at least. Probably more like five hours. We both passed out, right in the street, and nobody laid a finger on either of us until the rain woke us up again. Don’t know how long that was. Yefimov’s gone.”

“Right. And then you found me—“

“In this truck. When I woke up, I got Mister Higgins out and sent him up for aerial recon, started following the smashed-up glass until we found this truck, just sitting in the street with four shredded tires where the shards were thickest. Headlights still on and everything, but no driver in sight. Must have run for it.”

Nadia looked up the street; the rain was starting to die down, just enough that she could see the devastation extending as far as she could see. She could see the remains of several of Snowdrop’s signature walls, their centers punched out by some violent force. She didn’t know how much of Fatima’s story to believe, but there’d been a terrible battle here. That much was clear. “And I was lying in this gurney.”

“Yes. Dead. Very, very dead.” Fatima pulled a cigarette out of her pocket, but found it too squishy and wet to light. “So I went out there and screamed at Rus to do something, and the girl came out again, and here you are. But he hurt like hell doing it, and I guess the pain tipped him over and got out the black thing again.”

Which would explain the way Nadia felt when she woke up. Assuming she believed any of it. She was starting to understand why Fatima looked so drained; it was exhausting just to listen to all this. She got out of the truck, stepping gingerly down into the street. It was almost night, and only a few scattered streetlights were still on. Ruslan was the only person in sight.

She stood in the rain with her arms spread, letting it wash away the old blood and … whatever had soaked her pants. She was freezing cold in seconds, and wondered how Ruslan could sleep through it. He must be utterly exhausted. But the cold woke her up a little more, and the shock of it cleared her thoughts. She stayed there until she couldn’t stand it anymore, then went and pushed Ruslan under the canopy of the gas station so he could start drying off. None of its lights were on.

She reached for the phone the Imam had given her, but it came out of her pocket in several plastic pieces. The dowser was likewise broken, with a chunk of brick inside it, and a tear on the inside of the pocket it was in, against her body. As though the bit of shrapnel had gone through her body and lodged in the device. Nadia shook her head, and went back to the truck, where she shook her snoring sister awake again.

“Fatima, please. I know you’re tired, but this is important. I don’t know if we’re in danger now, and I don’t know how much of my own memory I can trust. But I remember Amina saying something about Yuri burning Gamsutl’. Do you remember that too?”

Fatima rubbed at her eyes. “Something like that. Lemme sleep.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. There’s too much to do.”

“It can wait,” Fatima muttered, folding her arms and sliding a little further down the wall of the truck. Nadia pinched her, hard. “Ow! Damn it!”

“Fatima, I barely know how to drive, and we need to move. Something terrible has happened—that much is clear—and if we’re going to save any of the others we can’t waste any time at all.” But it was no use. Fatima was asleep again before she finished the sentence. So she fished in her sister’s pockets until she found a phone, then browsed through the contacts. There was no entry for “Yuri.” She scrolled back up—herself, Therese, the Imam, a surprisingly long list of new Dagestani acquaintances—and found one she didn’t recognize in the middle, “Pendejo.” She didn’t know what that meant, but hit CALL. What else could she do?

She counted the rings—twenty-two before someone picked up. The voice at the other end snapped “What?” No jokes, no banter, no teasing tone. Just the one word in a hostile snarl.

Well, she could snarl too. “Yuri, what have you done?”