Secondhand Sorcery

Keisha’s route was clear enough; Yuri was almost directly ahead, in a straight line down the highway. All she had to do was follow it north along the bike lane, with the occasional detour into a parking lot where a car had swerved off the road as it crashed. After a thousand feet came the intersection that turned off towards the airport, then the road continued through a more rural stretch of fields and scattered trees. Yuri was stuck along the west side, where the only ways on were little one-lane dirt roads.

I think I can handle a fourteen-year-old with a god complex. She’d sounded like she meant it. She’d thought she meant it, when she said it. Jogging off into the dark alone to run him down gave her a different perspective on things.

She’d barely been in the city twelve hours, after her red-eye back from Istanbul, and spent a lot of that time catching up on sleep. There’d been plans to catch up with Dr. Gus, to discuss next steps and get his insights on the situation here. Instead she woke up, checked obsessively after Nadia, and wound up in the middle of this disaster.

And now she had to deal with Yuri. Why did it have to be Yuri? The other four would all have been difficult in different ways, but after weeks of observations she had confidence that they were rational actors from their own perspective and within their personal limitations. Keisha could generally understand what they were thinking and why. But Yuri? Yuri was the one who always had to push it just a little farther than he should, who said the wrong thing for the fun of causing trouble and didn’t seem to mind when the trouble came for him.

It probably wasn’t coincidence that he was also the one with the damn primeval familiar. Every emissor supposedly had a tendency to think more like their emissant for a time after using it, and there seemed to be some long-term effects as well—though all studies had been limited in scale, difficult to replicate, and heavily redacted before their release to a very select readership. But even those studies had depended on a population of actual emissors, whose familiars were products of their own deepest desires.

Would the sloppy weld job that bound Shum-Shum to Yuri work the same way? Flip a coin. But he sure acted like it. She might be preparing to negotiate with a hormonal kid who had a cartoon devil on his shoulder urging him to do the craziest, stupidest thing possible. Whatever made the biggest mess, really.

That was Shum-Shum’s whole shtick, as far as any of the reports she’d read could tell—instead of a normal, narrative valence about a human being’s role in the universe, Yuri’s primeval bastard familiar felt a toddler’s urge to knock over a stack of blocks so it could squeal at the loud noise. The whole world was a stream of sensations for it to enjoy, nothing more. Which made her wonder if all the dead people in all these cars had actually enjoyed the destruction that ended their lives, caught up in Shum-Shum’s grip to the end.

As she reached the intersection—where two semi trucks had managed to wreck an airport shuttle between them—she again felt the urge to stop and help. Here and there survivors were still crawling out of the crumpled metal, crying and screaming in Greek as they tried and failed to wake up the people they’d been riding with. Keisha could probably save at least a couple of lives still, but if she stopped to save one, she’d wind up trying to save them all, and eventually Yuri might get frustrated enough to try and burn a path through. When all you have is a hammer …

Several people called out to her for help as she picked her way through the highway at the crossing. When she didn’t stop, they switched to cursing instead—at least, it sounded like cursing. She didn’t speak much Greek. It tore at her heart, but she kept going, holding up Hamp’s pistol conspicuously in case anybody got crazy. If all went well, she might be able to help later. She heard sirens, but Thessaloniki’s EMS probably couldn’t even physically get to this point.

There was hardly any shoulder north of the intersection, and cars had crashed into the shrubbery by the roadside at several points. She wound up moving away from the road, cutting through the fields on the east side until she spotted moving lights on the other side. Then she ducked into the shadow of a tree and unzipped her bag.

The timing would be a little tricky. A “buzzer” was easy enough to make, piccolo work. Assuming Yuri didn’t get mad enough to manifest while it was en route, it would take him down easy—but he was driving a car, and she didn’t want him dead.

Luck was with her, for once. The tiny little ectoplasmic bee made its way across the street unnoticed and unmolested, and got there about thirty seconds after Yuri shut off his car to get out and walk. Like her, he’d been accosted by desperate civilians; like her, he had a gun out. Unlike her, he was flinging cuss words at them as he edged away, in a mixture of Russian, Greek, and English. Keisha had the buzzer land on his head, then detonate.

Not being a familiar, it couldn’t make a real self-sustaining halo; all it could do was project a small and short-lived field where unprotected human beings couldn’t think straight. Yuri, and everyone in about a fifteen-foot radius, froze in place staring at nothing, their brains full of static, while Keisha hurried to make her way across the street before they woke up. The edge of the effect was already receding by the time she clambered over the median and got proper line of sight on the kid.

Her usual magnolia was enough to get her through her own trap, where she grabbed the kid by the back of the neck and dragged him around behind a smushed VW Beetle for something sort of like privacy. One glance confirmed that the driver was stone dead, slumped over the wheel with a shattered skull. She returned her attention to Yuri just in time for him to shake off the buzzer’s last effects and discover the .45 pointed at his nose.

When he recognized it, he looked almost offended. “Who the hell are you?”

Apparently he hadn’t been all that well briefed. “I have the gun, you answer the questions, Yuri. That’s how this works.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. If you’ve got questions, ask ‘em, bitch. I don’t have all night.”

It was tempting to pistol-whip him, but he might enjoy it. “Titus Marshall. What’s he after? Why did he send you to the airport tonight?”

He gave her a long, wary look before answering, “To shut it down. Nothing lands, nothing leaves. Mission accomplished.”

“And he didn’t specify how?” Yuri curled his lip, and she shoved the barrel against his nose to focus him. “That was a question, Yuri. Did he specifically tell you to destroy the airport?”

“No, I improvised. Are we going somewhere with this? Did I make you miss your flight, or what?”

“Why didn’t he send his men, or make a phone call? Why is he using you for this?”

“I don’t know, ask him! Jesus. Why didn’t your boss send somebody actually intimidating to interrogate me? Did he just figure you’d be extra pissy on your period?”

He wasn’t taking this seriously, of course. Probably thought this was like a cop show on TV, only he could call up Shum-Shum the moment he got bored with it. The conventional cop-show escalation would be to slap him around a little, but she doubted that would be productive. Instead she grabbed him by the left wrist, stretched his arm out against the pavement, and shot him right through the palm.

The .45 was loud, but she didn’t mind; the ringing in her ears made it harder to hear his screaming. Keisha caught a little of it; unsurprisingly, there was some racist shit mixed in with the howls and conventional cussing. Whatever. She’d heard worse, by people she had slightly more cause to respect.

She pulled out her pic’ again, doing her best to ignore the abuse while she drew some deep breaths. Playing one-handed was tough, but she wasn’t about to stow her weapon. His screams took on a more demanding note when the little bubble of ectoplasm appeared on the end, but she ignored that too.

When the bubble congealed into a dangling, wiggling thing like a caterpillar coming out of its egg, she bit down on the end of the pipe to hold it in place, wrestled his wounded hand under it (which took some effort) and let the worm drop directly onto the wound. It wriggled its way in while he screamed, then vanished, leaving a grey filmy matter in the hole.

He snatched the hand back as soon as she let it go, squinting and running his hands over the palm. “What the fuck was that?”

“It’s called a plugworm,” she said as she tucked the pipe away and zipped up her bag again. “Paraphysical first aid. You won’t bleed out, and it’ll contain the worst of your body’s inflammatory response for a bit. Mildly analgesic, too. Not enough that you won’t hurt at all, but you should be able to form coherent sentences, if you choose to. If you don’t choose to—or if you choose to continue giving me mouth—I have more bullets. I can shoot you in your other palm, or wherever, and you won’t die.”

He glared and said nothing. “It’s important that you understand, Yuri: I’m not a sadist. I’m a professional. Professionals don’t shoot punk-ass ignorant kids because they call them rude names, or for fun. I just can’t have you calling Shum-Shum on me, and a steady but not totally debilitating pain should prevent that. Assuring you that I am serious is only a side benefit. But if I need to shoot you again, I won’t have any compunctions, either. Not after what you just did.”

She held the gun up to his right shoulder, and was rewarded by a widening of his eyes. “So, Yuri Titovitch. Why did your father send you to secure the airport tonight, and not one of his men? Actually, scratch that. Why did he tell you to shut down the airport at all?” If Yuri didn’t even know to look out for someone matching her description …

“He’s taking over Thessaloniki,” Yuri said, through his teeth. “For real. Not just protection money, we’re going to run the whole thing direct.”

So Marshall had decided to respond to infiltration by escalating to a coup—assuming he’d told Yuri the truth, and that Yuri was telling the truth to her, none of which was anything like guaranteed. “He sent you to the airport. Where did he send the other four? Ruslan, Nadia, Fatima, and Hamza. Where are they?”

“How do you know about us?” he demanded. Getting his courage back now.

“I know a lot of things. And not just me. We all know. Your father doesn’t have the resources to pull off what he’s trying now, and he never will. He’ll never secure himself against the kind of intelligence tools the international community he despises can use against him. Titus Marshall is not invincible, Yuri.”

He responded by freezing up, staring at her for a moment, then busting out laughing. It wasn’t pleasant laughter; he clutched at his wounded hand as he cackled, wincing and peeling back his lips. He just couldn’t help himself, it seemed. Keisha suddenly felt tired. There were VRIL tools to encourage truthfulness for interrogation, but she didn’t have much training or experience in using them, and she doubted how much more useful info she’d get out of the little asshole. The coup story didn’t make much sense to her, but he still might believe it himself.

She straightened up to look around over the dead Beetle. It occurred to her that, if he really had decided all on his own to shut down the airport by turning it into a crater, he might have reinforcements on the way to slap him over the head. Time to move on.

Yuri didn’t want to come, but was persuaded by a couple of fingers dug deep between his ribs. Keisha was struck by how puny he was as she dragged him to his feet; he might not even be a hundred pounds. She prodded him along the shoulder of the road easily, keeping the gun pressed against his ribs while he stumbled along groaning. Her other arm was around his shoulder, and nobody tried to stop her while she was escorting a wounded child. God only knew what they’d made of the gunshot earlier.

It felt like a very long walk back to Hamp and Doc, made worse by her growing realization that she had no idea what she was going to do with Yuri. She doubted she could keep him securely for long, even if she could keep him hurting enough that he couldn’t call his familiar. You could argue that he’d earned himself a shallow grave instead, but she didn’t think she had it in her to do it. She had a genuine tiger by the tail, even if the tiger was just a cub.

Thankfully, he kept his mouth shut most of the way, and didn’t make trouble—until they got to the intersection. That was about the same as she’d left it, only a bit more crowded as the walking wounded staggered away from the airport. A few flashing lights were just visible at the end of the road to the east, the extreme limit of where emergency vehicles could reach, and it drew in the hopeful like moths. Between them and the greater density of wrecks, she didn’t think she could hug-and-drag Yuri all the way across with a gun in his ribs.

“All right,” she muttered in his ear, “I’m going to give you a little slack on the leash now, understand? Only a little. You’re going to stay close, and refrain from doing anything stupid or surprising. You won’t like what happens if you do. Understood?”

He groaned something that might have been a yes, and she let him go, holding the pistol one-handed against her jeans where it wouldn’t be immediately obvious at a glance. His own weapon had hit the pavement when her buzzer got him. When he’d got about six steps on her, she started trailing after, never taking her eyes off him even when she had to turn sideways to squeeze through a gap.

He was almost to the far side when he stopped in his tracks, turned his head slightly to look at her. “Keep moving,” she called, and he nodded—then bolted, jinking to the left towards one of the wrecked semis. She got him in her sights, thought better of it—too many bystanders—and took off after him instead, pledging to kick him good and hard in the nuts when she caught him. He could move surprisingly fast on those stubby little legs; he was running off into roadside tree cover by the time she cleared the semi. She shot at him, hit a pine instead, kept running.

Something weird popped up in her peripheral vision; she turned to look, saw an enormous soap bubble, bigger than herself, drifting toward her. It was so bizarre that for a long moment she could only stare, watching it bob up and down against the grass and asphalt. By the time her brain caught up and she ran for it the bubble was less than ten feet away. It shifted to track her—there was a fence just ahead—she turned to run along it, but the bubble was right on her—

It caught her right in the back and popped, spattering her with soap slime. Nothing else happened. Of course. She hadn’t forgotten Grandmama’s magnolia the whole time, so it was only soap once it hit her. Same reason she hadn’t even noticed the halo that let Yuri know he had backup on scene.

Looking back, she could see a half-dozen more of the shiny bubbles floating across the highway; none were smaller than the one that had just hit her, and several were bigger, swelling up as they came. As she watched, the biggest of them drifted into a pickup truck and neatly swallowed it up before rising up into the sky with it. She tracked it with narrow eyes; as it rose, the bubble seemed to shrink, silently crushing the truck inside it. But it was still moving her direction, floating overhead …

Keisha ran for her life, and felt as much as heard it when the bubble popped and the compressed wad of truck slammed into the ground behind her, spraying her legs with asphalt and metal. She looked back, saw more bubbles coming, lifting and squeezing a couple of cars, a motorcycle, and a panel truck. She vaulted the fence and ran like hell, the bag bouncing against her back. More earth-shaking crashes followed her.

Mister Higgins. Of all the familiars, she had Mister Higgins after her—it was a special kind of humiliation. Fatima must be somewhere close by, but with a true halo up both of Keisha’s VRILs were useless. If she could sneak in unseen, she might tag Fatima with Hamp’s pistol, but she didn’t like her odds and there were an awful lot of civilians on scene. The sooner she cut and ran, the better.

If she could just get back to her companions, and her tank full of ectoplasm … but no. This situation didn’t call for that kind of escalation, let alone compromising Belvedere. Yuri was as good as gone, and the sooner he and Fatima got out of here the fewer people they would hurt. Doctor Gus still needed medical attention, attention he couldn’t get in an active war zone.

So Keisha swallowed her pride, and set off at a jog down the side streets and parking lots, away from the highway, and from Yuri’s quickest route back to his base. If she could just stay clear of the children she’d come here to help, she might still have a prayer of salvaging this mess.