Secondhand Sorcery

Keisha woke up with a sore throat, a headache, and wicked postnasal drip, a little after 0500. All of their phones were ringing at once; she picked hers up, croaked a greeting, and heard Tyler Green on the other end. “Where are you?”

“Just outside Patnos,” she answered in a raspy voice. “Sir.” The other three phones were still going. The fire was all grey ashes now, barely warm on the dirt floor of the barn where they’d spent the night. The smell of its smoke was still thick in the air, though.

“Good. I’m going to bed now. I want to hear some progress when I get up.” And he hung up; Hamp muzzily answered his phone, and got a dialtone. Keisha thought about burrowing back into her sleeping bag, but the cold air was already in it, and she had to go. Damn the brass. She wrestled her shoes back onto her feet, rummaged in the bag for more charcoal to toss on the ashes, and considered lighting it again before deciding the latrine was more urgent.

The farmhouse was very old, the far end collapsed. The surviving, stable portion didn’t have working plumbing. Well. Beggars, choosers. There was a reason nobody else was squatting here already. When she got back, Ethan had the fire started again, and was eating yet another bag of prepackaged junk food with the joyless resolve of a true combat veteran.

“Coulda just kept the car heater running in here all night with the doors open,” he said with his mouth full, nodding to the vehicle in its berth under a hayloft. “Almost as warm, probably less carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Good morning, Ethan,” she replied, and dug through their gas-station ration bag in the back of the car. “Did you take everything that wasn’t dry crackers?”

“Should be some cookies in the bottom. One more of them Little-Debbie-in-hijab deals, too.”

She kept digging until she found it. “Banana-chocolate filling? Bastard. You could have at least left me a strawberry.” She washed down a bag of chocolate wafers with two cans of cola and some pills she was reasonably certain were ibuprofen. “North or south?”

“Eh. Let’s check out the nearer target first. Whatever happened at, uh, the T-place, it’s old news already. Night before last. She ain’t gonna be still hanging around, unless they caught her. Did they?”

She pulled up the map on her phone again, did some digging. “If they did, they didn’t tell us.” The story hadn’t updated since yesterday. Or rather the stories, plural. They didn’t even make a lot of sense separately; together, they were a total mess. There was a hospital, and a bridge, and they were attacked in the same night, or at least somebody with a familiar was present at both, and however it worked out a bunch of soldiers got killed. Somehow.

Ethan threw his empty chips bag in the corner. “So let’s get the local take on the story here, before we go dealing with the Army.”

It would be an efficient use of time, but she still didn’t like it. “Let’s get moving quick, then.” She rifled through their little sack of forged credentials, found the Associated Press badge for Sarah Lawrence, and hung it around her neck. Ethan, as her bodyguard, moved his pistol to a more conspicuous holster.

The old men were gradually grousing their way awake now, to the point where she could secure Hamp’s promise to mind house while they were away, and maybe actually trust him to understand what he was agreeing to. They were all running on about four hours’ sleep. Hamp had a gun and a phone; the smoke leaking out of the barn was a giveaway that couldn’t be helped, but hopefully nobody inclined to make trouble would care enough to come looking. Not with so much other trouble around in more convenient places.

Patnos was a very recent boomtown, in the sense that until two days ago it had been a safe and rural part of the country for refugees from the big cities to flee to. Their ruined farm was the only place they could find to crash last night. They had a ten-minute drive—normal, unobtrusive driving, no familiars—before they got into town and had a whole new series of questions to ask.

Between the two of them, Ethan and Keisha had thirty years or more in the field, thousands of hours on the ground on all six habitable continents, and ample experience assessing battlefields. But they hardly needed to draw on any of it when they found smashed helicopters still lying in pieces across the street. The locals were still hauling the pieces away, and each airframe still had sizable chunks intact, too big to move without heavy equipment.

Ethan squinted at one such wreck while Keisha snapped pictures on her phone. “Refitted Cobras, you think? Don’t think Kurdish rebels have access to that kind of hardware.”

“They do, but it wouldn’t be Cobras. They’d have Russian birds, and not as many.”

“That’s what I meant, fool. This makes three of them so far. Hell of a loss even if you had materiel to spare on this podunk town.”

“Which the Turks don’t. And we haven’t seen the whole town yet.” A pickup truck drove up as they watched, and two men got out to wrestle a mangled bit of the helicopter’s door into the bed. The driver looked at them warily, but seemed to accept Keisha’s fake press pass. “Excuse me? Do you speak English?” Both men shook their heads—which might have meant that they didn’t, or just didn’t want to talk—and continued loading up their truck.

The rest of the town was a mess. Lots of bullet holes in concrete, blown out windows, and random impact craters. The dead bodies, at least, were gone, and there was no smell; bodies would keep for a long time in these temperatures. Everywhere they went, the locals backed away, and avoided confrontation. Keisha didn’t know how they felt about English speakers—were they allies to the Turkish oppressor, where Patnos was concerned, or just a neutral third party who could spread the news of what happened here? She guessed the former.

They’d been in town for half an hour before the local militia made an appearance, in the form of three truckloads of armed men driving by and screeching to a halt when they saw foreigners. “What do you do here?” one shouted from the lead vehicle’s passenger window. The second truck was another pickup, where Keisha noted a man in the bed toting a MANPAD.

“Beyanî baş! Sarah Lawrence, Associated Press,” she announced, holding up her badge. “Would you mind telling me what happened here, sir?”

The man leaned out of the window to scrutinize the bit of plastic before answering simply, “We win,” with a suspicious look, as if he suspected this foreign snoop of trying to be funny. What else was there to say?

“Could you give me some details?” She spoke slowly and clearly, trying to look sympathetic. “When did this happen, how did it start, and how did it finish?”

The man ducked back into the car to exchange a few words with his friends in Kurdish—of which Keisha knew maybe thirty words on a good day, and some in the wrong dialect. She couldn’t hear clearly anyway, over the noise of the truck’s engine. The man poked his head back out and told her, “The Turkish dog, he start. We finish. Come to kill Kurds in street. Five helicopter, all shoot down.”

That was broadly consistent with what they saw here. There were signs of destroyed street vehicles everywhere, and some of them might have had rocket-toting Kurdish militiamen like their friend in the pickup. “There were no emissants on either side?” He gave her a quizzical look. “No jinni?” she amended.

“No. No jinn,” he said at once, and looked to the men in the truck behind him, who agreed in chorus: “No jinn! No jinn!” The guy with the launcher smirked and rolled his eyes at the question. “Many Kurd with missile, shoot down. No jinn here,” the spokesman summed up.

And that was that. “Spas dikim,” she thanked him.

“You take picture, tell world,” he replied. “Then go. No place for American here.” And they drove off again.

“How much of that do you believe?” she asked Ethan.

“I don’t know as I’d buy it, even if I hadn’t heard Nadia was involved. Not the usual way, is it? Generally when your local shitheel has the itch to go on a duck hunt, he turns around and runs as soon as the duck shoots back. Maybe they tagged one with a rocket, and maybe they didn’t, but I don’t imagine they hit five at once. Assuming there even were five.”

“And the rest of it does look like a massacre,” she agreed, then started digging in the map app. “Says the Turks claim familiar involvement. Nothing about the Kurd side of the story.”

“But the Turks also said they were trying to capture the town, didn’t they? And I ain’t seen a sign yet that they tried for a ground presence here. Seems both of ‘em are lying somehow.”

“Yeah.” She looked around, saw a pair of kids’ heads ducking out of a window frame where they’d been staring. “Good luck getting the real story here, though. Let’s head north; I can update Hamp on the way.”

They didn’t even get to Tutak. Two miles from their destination they hit a roadblock manned by a full dozen uniformed Turkish soldiers, who informed them very firmly and clearly, with varying degrees of English fluency, that there was no way in hell they would be allowed through. She held up her press pass and pleaded; two of them hoisted middle fingers in reply, while four more pointed back the way they came.

She exchanged a look with Ethan, who calmly backed up and did a three point turn. “We’re doing this low-profile, right?” he said calmly. “That makes it your move, not mine.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “If only it were later in the day, or still snowing. There’s no cover here and it’s broad daylight. I’m going to burn a lot of ectoplasm.”

“Hey, Tyler Green wants results.” He looked in the rear-view mirror to be sure that the truck was out of sight behind them, gave it another five seconds to be sure, then swerved off the road into a snowfield. Their little hatchback slipped and skidded and made wretched time, its shocks transmitting every bump and jostle faithfully to their backsides. “If they mined this place already, you owe me a beer in heaven.”

“They don’t have enough mines to cover this much empty space,” she replied, and pulled out her Benny. “And anyway, who said you go to heaven? Boy, I know your history.”

“Not the whole thing, you don’t. I’m a complicated and frequently classified man.”

It was tricky using the GPS to avoid roads while still approaching the town, but they got reasonably close. Ethan put the car in park, left the engine idling, and scrambled into the back to root around for more junk food while she got to work. She mocked up a SCOPES first, so the little owl could do broad aerial recon for her. After ten minutes, she let it dissolve. “How loyal is the army around here? Do we know?”

“’snot about loyalty,” he said around a mouthful of crackers. “They’re still all Turks. Just … a little more independent than we’re used to, what with high command getting Kentucky-fried. Why?”

“Tutak is buried in patrols right now. I counted ten vehicles on the move, just circling, and it’s not a big city. More parked at corners. Does that represent somebody’s personal remnant of the old army, or are they still getting help from superior officers?”

“Who we gonna get that information from? The Turks? The folks who told us they were trying to capture that town?”

“All right, that’s fair. Get me closer, would you? I’m going to have to do this the hard way, and my smaller models have even worse light tolerance than a SCOPES.”

“Are you seriously fixing to snoop on the whole town long-distance? There’s only so much gas in the tank, and it’s cold as a caribou’s left nut out there.”

Keisha considered arguing with him, but after a second’s thought concluded that time was a more limited resource than ectoplasm. Thirty seconds later, a shiny gold pyrallis was buzzing around the inside of the car, flying in precise loops to heat the air evenly. “There. Lifespan’s one hour in low natural light, and before you ask, it can’t start fires without trying. Now shut up and drive.”

Unfortunately, the little bug also exerted a continuous tax on her attention, attention she would need for the work ahead of her. The first whisperwing slipped out of a crack in the window and dropped down low, zipping between the shadows of bushes and telephone poles. Damn snow and its high albedo, anyway. The little drone was already ailing by the time it crossed the river and got into town proper. She started by locating the hospital, and got all the way through it before the ‘wing gave up the ghost.

“Nothing unusual at the hospital,” she reported. “However many casualties they suffered two nights ago, they aren’t being treated there, and I don’t see any structural damage.”

“All dead, you think?”

“I don’t know if there were any real injuries in the first place,” she said, and blew out another drone. This one checked out the bridge—intact, manned on both ends—and dipped into every building with an army vehicle parked outside. The men within looked tense and frustrated, but not frightened. When the second drone was spent, she paused to look up small clinics in town, then sent a third to spy them out. Again, nothing that looked like recent trauma, and of course no bodies.

“You know,” Ethan observed when she opened her eyes again, “all these boys are notionally our allies. Might not appreciate this if they catch you.”

“They’re covering up not-too-notional war crimes, so I don’t care,” she told him. “Make yourself useful, please. Get me some kind of information about this town. Anything I can work with.”

“Like what? Population figures? Local industries? I don’t even know what you’re looking for. Do you? Oh, and your firebug’s dead.”

She looked around, saw nothing. “It’s been an hour already?”

“Closer to two.”

And she hadn’t even noticed. Her brain was mush right now. “Hell. Green’s going to want answers, and we’re coming up dry. Ethan, the whole damn point of a familiar is that you can’t find one if it’s not active. How does he expect me to find Nadia? How did I expect to find her in the first place? I barely even understand Turkish.”

“Do you understand the kid?”

“I thought I did. We weren’t best friends, but she’s got a very strong moral sense, you know? She felt guilty about hurting anybody, or even the thought that she might have to eventually. Even if she’s been radicalized, I wouldn’t expect her to go attacking a hospital, of all places. Not without being forced at gunpoint.”

“Well, did the hospital look attacked?”

“No! So why are they even making that part up? Just to make it sound bad? Because the Russians attacked a hospital back in Ankara?”

“The hospital, and the bridge,” Ethan mused, staring at the car roof. “They don’t mention anything else consistently, just those two things.”

“All right, back up. Say I’m Nadia. We can be pretty sure she, or somebody with an emissant, was involved back in Patnos, can’t we? And what went down there looks like plain old mass murder. I can see her stepping in to stop that. And then … then she’s up here later the same day, pissed off and ready to lay down a whooping. I can see that too. Just not terror raids on the local infirmary.”

Ethan was still looking up. “The thing about covering your ass is, you usually try to keep the story straight, don’t you? I mean, I’ve done some ass-covering in my time, but if there’s two of us in on it, the first thing we do is agree on what we’re going to say. They didn’t. We’ve got umpteen different versions. We already know they’re lying about at least one thing. I don’t think they’re all morons, so what that says to me—“

“Is that they had multiple people reporting in a panic. Sure. Something happened here, something that set off a bunch of independent alarms right away, bypassing any kind of institutional filter.” And the soldiers did all look tense. “Whatever went down, it probably really did involve the bridge and the hospital.”

Ethan rolled his head against the seat cushion to look at her. “In that order?”

“Maybe. Yeah. She attacks the men the bridge, then,” she swallowed, “then maybe she gets hurt, goes to the hospital, where they hunt her down? If she was hurt that bad, she’d need an accomplice.”

“Or a manager. We don’t know that she isn’t under somebody’s control.”

“Whatever. Let’s focus on finding her. I don’t think she’s dead, or they wouldn’t be so high-strung. They wouldn’t be out patrolling like it was Pyongyang. And definitive proof of a dead Marshall would be big news. They’d want to trumpet that out for a boost in morale. So if she’s hurt bad, but not known to be dead, and she’s not at any facility …”

“All you need is to find the one house, in this whole area, where they’re hiding out with a roughed-up white girl. Is that all?”

“Oh, it won’t be easy. But we’ve got a working explanation, a hypothesis, something we can report to General Green and say we’re working on it. If she’s hurt, she can’t move quickly or inconspicuously, and she probably can’t do anything else on the offensive. She’s going to be lying low in one spot.” Assuming she was still alive at all. “Which means we aren’t running after a moving target anymore.”

“Provided all that guesswork you spun out was right.”

“Yeah. But I don’t have any better leads to follow.” She looked at her pipe’s gauge; still more than half-full. “You let Hamp and Dr. Gus know what’s going on, then get milching. I’ll need plenty of juice to spend. This is an endurance race now.”