Secondhand Sorcery

It was moving day. Fatima’s nurse, whose name she refused to learn, worked her way around the bed, fiddling with IV lines and pumps and sorting through the heaps of stained towels and empty syringe wrappers the room had accumulated over the past couple of days. The hamper and trash were both overflowing already—nobody’d come in to change them since Monday morning—so she just shoved crap onto the floor whenever it got in the way.

She obviously wished she could do the same with the room’s human clutter, Fatima’s rotating crew of bodyguards. There was only one in the room right now, but he took up way more space than he needed to, and didn’t bother pulling back his outstretched legs to let the nurse pass. She’d given up asking, or even scolding. They’d all be out of her hair soon enough.

“I just got it,” the man said now, looking up from his phone. “You’re Ricky’s little girl, aren’t you? Enrique Alvarez. Man, it’s been a while.”

“My father’s name was Omar,” Fatima said.

“Yeah, sure, but all that was later, right? His real name was Enrique.”

“His real name was Omar,” Fatima repeated. “Not Enrique.”

“Okay, okay, fine,” the man said, rolling his eyes. “He was born Enrique, though. Ricky Alvarez from San Diego. Everybody’s heard of him.”

“I haven’t. My father’s name was Omar. That’s the only name I ever heard anyone call him.” She was pretty sure she wouldn’t normally be so patient with a jackass like this. They were giving her good drugs. Probably scared she’d lose her temper and call Mister Higgins if they let her get too sore.

The security guy was in a good mood too. “Man, that takes me back,” he said, smiling. “I met him once, you know? Way, way, way back when. I was just a kid, fresh out of the army. Did SIGINT stuff, got transferred in sideways after they started me screwing around with dowsers. He was … hell, he was just about to deploy, I guess. Don’t know if it was to Afghanistan, or somewhere else. I had no idea who he was, thought he was kind of an asshole to be honest. No offense, but he kinda was. I might have been one of the last people to ever see him stateside, before he … you know?”

“Before he embraced the truth of Islam,” Fatima supplied, just to watch him squirm.

And he did squirm, a little. Scratched the back of his neck, looked away. Not for long, sadly. “So he was your dad, then? What was he like?”

Even the drugs could only do so much. “Who the hell are you, and why is it your business?”

“Oh, sorry. Sam Parker, Numenate.” He extended his right hand, remembered hers was in a cast, and swapped it for his left, which she left hanging. After a second he pulled it back, unruffled, and went on, “Did he really get into the whole sharia thing? How many wives did he have?”

“At least twenty,” Fatima told him. “We stopped counting after that. They got to be a real pain in the ass, there wasn’t enough room in the cave anymore, so he divorced a couple and cut their heads off to scare the rest away.”

“Oh.” He frowned at a bilingual No Smoking sign on the wall. “Really?”

“No.” She looked to the nurse, who was now just throwing the dirty towels out into the hallway to clear a path on the floor. “How much longer is it going to be?”

“I do not know,” the nurse said curtly, kicking an empty chips bag out of her way. Fatima was pretty sure she’d be more tolerant of the Numenate geeks if they didn’t leave their crap lying around to attract roaches. Parker leaned over and grabbed the bag to stuff it into the edge of the trash can; after three seconds it uncrumpled itself and popped out onto the floor again. He’d already turned away to scope out the nurse as she left the room.

Fatima squirmed uselessly against the bedding. The drugs didn’t do much for the hot, itchy feeling she got from lying in one spot all day. The room was cramped and dirty and she could smell herself in spite of all the wet-rag baths. The smell just came out of the cast, out of her bandages, out of her exposed pores, and it felt like the air wasn’t circulating enough to replace what she’d already breathed.

The TV had never worked, since they were running the hospital off a generator and trucking in gas. The staff were too busy to stay and chat—before they learned about the move, they’d only come in once every couple of hours—and her Numenate escort seemed to all be dumb jerkoffs like this Parker guy. It was just Fatima and her drugged-up brain versus the thought of a long, pathetic future in America.

A younger man stepped into the room, throwing a can at her guard underhand. “Hey, Sam. Catch.”

Parker snagged it with both hands, then laughed. “Still cold? Sweet. Thanks, Dave. Where’d you get it?”

“Food truck outside. Expensive as hell, and they’re all out of actual hot food, but their cooler still works.”

“Thank God,” the older man said as he cracked it open.

Fatima got the kid’s attention with a little hand wave. “Hey. What’s going on out there?”

“I haven’t been authorized to tell you any more, miss,” he answered stiffly. “Anything else you need, Sam?”

Parker chugged from the can. “I’ll probably need to take a piss in about an hour. If the ambulance doesn’t get here first. They’re taking long enough.”

It was actually an hour and a half before the nurse came in with a lanky paramedic to haul her away to the other hospital. The two idiots spent the last forty-five minutes blathering about college basketball right there in the room, so that Fatima was almost overjoyed to see them switched out for Sergeant Stiff.

She didn’t know Stiff’s real name, and he’d never told her. He didn’t talk much in general. Thin and on the short side, crew-cut and clean-shaven, dark hair flecked with grey, mostly white but maybe with a little Asian in him judging by the eyes and complexion. He was the one consistent element in her entourage, since early yesterday morning, and he’d never stayed in the room for long. Only poked his head in to check on whoever was with her. Judging by the way they straightened up in their seats when they saw him, he was in charge, and kind of a hardass.

Now he showed up without a word to walk alongside her bed as they wheeled her down the hall and out the door for transport. It wasn’t an easy trip; the hallways were nearly as cluttered as her room had been, with a mixture of trash bags and patients in stretchers, some of the latter not looking too lively and most of them smelling about as bad as the trash. The lights overhead were dim, and flickered.

She only got a moment’s glimpse of the Ankara street before they moved her to the stretcher, just long enough for her to shiver in the cold breeze, then miss it when they stuffed her, Stiff, and a collection of IV pumps into the claustrophobic ass-end of the ambulance. Outside, she could hear the nurse telling the paramedics the last few details about the drugs she was on. According to her hospital wristband, she was Ashley Wallace, and as far as these guys knew she was the daughter of somebody important at the U.S. Embassy who’d got into a car accident.

Sergeant Stiff wasn’t good company, but he didn’t really bother her, either. He had an earpiece in, and the glazed look of somebody whose attention was somewhere else. Once the paramedic crawled in too there was hardly any room, and Fatima let her eyes droop shut as the vehicle creaked into motion. She never got good sleep these days, but sometimes quantity could make up for quality, and the rocking of the vehicle was surprisingly pleasant. They might have doped her a little extra, too. Good times.

But she was still tense and uncomfortable. The best she could do was a drowse, her eyes popping partway open again every time the ambulance came to a hard stop, which seemed to be often. In between she dreamed, confusing dreams about Hamza, and Ruslan, and Nadia, all running in and out of her old house in Lashkargah looking for her. Only Fatima wasn’t there, she was somewhere else, but she was in the house at the same time trying to tell them that but they couldn’t hear …

They couldn’t find Yuri either, but she couldn’t figure out why they were bothering to look for him. Yuri had been gone for a long time, ages ago. Fatima had seen it herself, Yuri lying dead in the tent while Fatima screamed and tore her hair, then ran out of the tent into the cold. She cried Yuri’s death to the sky, but the winds over the glacier drowned her out, and the sunrise reflecting off the ice blinded her. The world was huge, and she was only a dot on the surface, doomed to die in the cold.

The ambulance gave a godawful lurch, and she was awake again. Sergeant Stiff stood beside her with a hand on her shoulder, looking stern. He loomed over her like a mountain, impossibly strong and tall. The paramedic on Fatima’s other side had disappeared; she turned and saw him on the floor for a split second before the ambulance shook again, and the back doors flew open to reveal a world shrouded in dense white fog. The mist came pouring in through the new opening, and Fatima winced and drew back before the terrible cold of the stuff through her flimsy hospital gown.

Something huge and dark came in through the open doors right after, blotting out the white light of the fog and filling the back of the truck with a smell like blood. Whatever-it-was clamped down hard on the bottom of Fatima’s stretcher and yanked it back with it through the doors, out into the cold. She screamed, from the IVs ripping out of her arm as much as from fear, and it capsized as it whipped out, spilling her onto the icy cold pavement. Her head cracked on the ground, and she rolled like a log until something stopped her. Blind against the pavement, she reached up to feel what it was, only to draw back her hand with a gasp when she touched frigid metal.

Something thumped hard into the ground behind her with a roar like a jet taking off, and she scrambled back to her feet to get clear, feeling fresh pains in her legs, feet, and arms as they brushed against the frost-covered surfaces of cars and the hard black street. She caught a glimpse, as she ran, of a monstrous shaggy shape like an ape’s, long-armed and coated in thick fur the color of ice in twilight. A black eagle, equally enormous, fell on it out of the sky, ripping at it with talons and beak, spattering hot blood everywhere.

Fatima couldn’t see where she was going, didn’t know why she was running or where to. She was caught in the mist, in the endless white death that consumed everything, and it was hopeless to try and escape. She could only hope that eventually the mist would fade, and whatever was left of her body would become a place for new life to grow. It would only hurt her more to struggle, so she stopped, and turned in place, shivering, to watch the battle. Other people were doing the same thing all around, staring open-mouthed from the sidewalks or the insides of their stopped cars.

The great beast reached up to swat the eagle away, knocking it end over end; awkwardly it took to the air after rolling over a few car roofs, struggling to regain its balance. The beast glared at it with its single shining yellow eye, glowing like a lamp through the fog, and made to chase it down. Too slow. The eagle flapped up out of reach, fifty feet in the air. The giant pointed at it with one long lavender-grey arm, and the mist drew closer about it, riming its bloody feathers with frost, weighing it down. The eagle croaked, struggling to stay aloft, then gave up and fell with a terrible crash, right on top of the beast. The impact set the nearest cars bouncing, knocked shards of pink ice flying off the bird’s feathers as it went to work again with its hooked beak.

A hand gripped Fatima’s cast, and she turned to see Sergeant Stiff beside her with a pistol in his other hand. “We need to leave,” he said in flat tones. All the traffic on the street had come to a halt when the two gods appeared, with several collisions in sight. The ambulance’s back still hung wide open; its front end was jammed against a bent streetlight. Fatima didn’t struggle as the man dragged her off, though she did turn her head to keep an eye on the battle until it passed out of her view. The last thing she saw was the giant throwing the ice-covered eagle off again.

They walked fast down a side street, Stiff’s head swiveling back and forth for threats. The pavement still hurt Fatima’s feet, but the rest of her felt much better; the bandages itched, and the cast was heavy and clunky, but the flesh and bones beneath were fine. Strange. She only wished her feet weren’t so tender, or that the mist could be less cold.

Her brain, at least, felt numb; everything now felt distant, like it was happening to somebody else, like she had gone back to dreaming, and watching the things she did without judgment. She noticed, but did not react, when Sergeant Stiff went a little more stiff beside her. Noticed with more interest, but did not react, when the shambling sloth-like form of the beast appeared out of the fog in front of them, very close, so that she could see the bare white skull of its face, bristling with white fangs and set about with long frozen locks of dusky purple hair. The single shining eye was dispassionate as it turned from her to look up into the sky, and Fatima turned her head as well, a bit too slow, too slow to see whatever it was that slammed into the two of them and knocked her flying.

There was a noise of multiple gunshots, very close together, and a high-pitched scream she could hardly make out for the ringing in her ears. She looked up from where she had fallen and saw the mighty dark eagle ripping away with its huge beak at something she could just recognize as what was left of Sergeant Stiff. Ripping, tearing, and cracking, but not swallowing—belatedly she remembered that Kizil Khan did not eat. As if he heard the thought, he lifted up his bloody beak and opened it, very wide, so that she could see his true and manlike face staring at her from the back of his throat. Several fresh bruises and scrapes along Fatima’s arms and back, so fresh she hadn’t properly noticed them yet, disappeared as she looked into the Red King’s eyes.

Then the mist cleared, the twilight beast stumbled off into an alley, and with a loud shuddering wail Kizil Khan spread his wings and faded into nothing. For several seconds, Fatima stood in place, barely covered by a ragged hospital gown in fifty-degree weather. Sergeant Stiff’s remains didn’t move either. What the hell was she going to do now? It was getting towards evening, her whole bodyguard was dead, and she still didn’t speak much Turkish—

“Fatima? Is that you?”

She turned, and saw Ruslan, frozen in midstep on the sidewalk like a rabbit who’d just spotted a wolf. His jaw hung open, and his hands wrung each other right below his chin. His eyes were red, and every inch of him was trembling, though he was wearing way more clothing than she was. With sudden horror, Fatima realized that, from where he stood, he had to have seen her bare ass, and now she was wearing a flimsy bit of cotton in cold weather. Convulsively she flung her arms together to cover herself; at the same instant Ruslan made up his mind and rushed forward to grab her in a bear hug.

The cast was heavy and rigid, and her arm was still fine beneath it. She used it as a shield to ward him off, then smack him when that didn’t work. But he still had a weight advantage, and his jacket gave him padding. He’d managed to work his arms most of the way around her when his brain caught up and he figured out that she was not in a hugging mood. Several clumsy blows to the head and shoulders, and a barrage of Pashto curses, reinforced the lesson as he stumbled back, blubbering; she used her free left hand to hold the back of her gown closed. The street was full of storefronts with big windows, and somebody had to be watching.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh god, I’m so sorry!” he wailed … and wailed, and wailed, until Fatima, spotting a shop door a few feet away, decided to take it inside where it was sort of private. Which was still hard, since she had no free hands to work with. She had to shout at him to make him open the door for her.

It was a chain restaurant, mostly deserted; the lone employee stared from behind the counter as she stumbled in sideways and sidled into a booth so she could sit down. Ruslan followed at a wary distance, snuffling, and sat down on the other side. The other patrons—a thirtysomething couple and their small kid on the other side of the dining area—also stared. All of them looked pretty out of it. Which made sense, given all the shit that just went down while they were in here trying to eat camel and couscous or whatever.

Fatima didn’t care. It was warm, and nobody could see her back end. Things were looking up already. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded, before Ruslan could start groveling again. “You could have killed me, you dumbass!”

“I … I just rescued you, didn’t I?”

“Rescued? Who the fuck asked you to rescue me? I didn’t need a rescue, fool! How many people did you just kill? Shit!” The guy at the counter gave her a worried look, then looked away, as if he was trying to pretend she didn’t exist in the hopes it would come true.

“But … but … you were a prisoner. I needed to save you.”

Fatima crossed her arms, thunking her cast against the table in the process. “No. No, Rus, you really, really didn’t.” His lip quivered. “Ah, hell. Did you—was this your idea, or did the Russians put you up to this?” His face told her they had. “Uh-huh. And it was just you? What about the others?”

“There aren’t any others,” he said very quietly. “It’s just me now. Me, and you.”

“What happened to them?” There was no way that line of bullshit Ballsy Bob had fed her was true.

“I don’t know. Something went wrong Sunday—that’s the day after you and Nadia disappeared, two days ago now—“

“I know what day it is, thank you.”

“What happened to Nadia, anyway?”

“Beats me,” she muttered, leaning in close. “The security building hit just went all to hell. I got shot and they took me in. I didn’t see where Nadia went, and they wouldn’t tell me anything about her.” She still wasn’t sure why Nadia had flipped like that, but it felt safer to keep the whole thing quiet until she could figure it out.

“Well, there was a security leak on Sunday, and they came for Hamza and Yuri,” Ruslan whispered back, copying her posture. “They were captured, or ran away, or something.”

Or something. “Yeah, the Americans tried to give me a story like that. What really happened, though?” Ruslan’s face was blank. “Y’know what, never mind that now. We can’t be hanging around here. The Russians sent you to grab me, right? What’s next?”

“We meet up with Noorlan, and he gets us out of the city so we can join up with Yefimov and the others outside the cordon. We’ll have to move pretty soon.”

“Cordon? What cordon?”

“The Americans have the city surrounded, and they’re going to start sweeping block by block in the next twelve hours.”

“Huh.” Fatima chewed her lip, trying to think fast. Ruslan had just fragged an emissor trying to bail her out, and they might not believe it was just him being a dumbass. Might think it was coordinated. And it wasn’t like the America deal was much of a deal in the first place. But she trusted the Russians even less. Could she trust Ruslan? Not to act like he had any brains, obviously. He didn’t, and he never would. But he didn’t have it in him to lie. That was something. He’d always have her back.

Meanwhile, the guy up at the counter was on the phone, talking very quietly and keeping an eye on them as he did. Looking too casual for her tastes. That decided her. “All right, let’s move. Give me your jacket. Now.” He complied at once, looking pleased to help. He was big enough that it would cover at least some of her, and that would have to do. Getting it on with the cast was a whole other hassle, especially when she didn’t want to give Rus any more shows in the process. They wound up draping it over her right shoulder, letting her grip it with her free fingers poking through the cast, and stuffing her left arm through the sleeve.

“You and me, we’ve got some work to do,” she explained as they hurried out of the restaurant and down the street. “Hamza, Nadia, and Yuri are still out there. We’ve got to get the crew back together.”

“Mr. Yefimov—“

“Mr. Yefimov can eat a big bag of dicks, Rus. You got that? Extra smeggy. We’re not going back to the Russians.”

“But—“

“Rus, how much help did they give you with this daring rescue you just pulled?”

“They told me where you’d be—“

“And then left you to do the actual, dangerous work, right?”

“Snowdrop is going to break us through the cordon soon.”

“The cordon they say exists. You got any proof of that? You sure it wasn’t just some horseshit they made up to make you feel like you had to hurry? And to depend on them, even when you didn’t need to?”

“He told the others too,” Ruslan tried.

“Yeah, in front of you. What do you think they say when they’re alone? Bet you anything they’re laughing at your dumb ass, doing the hard part to get me back while they hang out jerking it to Turkish goat porn. No. It’s just you and me for now, brother.”

“You and me?” He barely breathed the words.

“Yes. You, and me. No Russians, nobody else. Partners.”

Ruslan stopped in his tracks. “Fatima. I have something very important to ask you, and it can’t wait.”

Oh, God. Not now. “Rus, it’s freezing cold, there’s going to be a billion guys with guns on our tail soon, and I’m not even wearing any pants.”

“I know, but,” he swallowed, “Fatimat-al-zahra. Will you let me be … can I be your Ali?”

She was already wearing his jacket. Shit. Evasive action. “Rus, I’ve gotta tell you, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, but let me repeat myself for the slow ones in the crowd: Billion guys with guns. Cold. No pants.” She ticked the items off on the fingers of her free hand as she said it. “Oh, and I can’t use my right arm. You need to get me some real clothes, and get us both under cover, before we get into philosophy or whatever you’re on about.”

Ruslan’s face fell; before he could cry again, she got up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Come on, boy, don’t take life so serious. It’ll probably end too soon for both of us anyway. Let’s go find me some shoes. It’s just you and me, now.”

“Yeah,” he said with a smile, throwing an arm around her shoulders. She chose not to throw it off; it was extra insulation. “Just you and me.”