Nadia slept for most of the next day and a half. She didn’t know or care how Keisha got them out of the country; she nodded off as the fat man Marat was forcing Mila into handcuffs, and wound up snoring with her head on the horrible woman’s shoulder for most of the drive out of Kazakhstan. At some point in the ride, several strange men appeared to take Mila (and Yefimov’s other assistant) into custody. Nadia woke up long enough to watch her disappear, unresisting, into another car, and reflect that she would probably never see her again. Then she fell back asleep.
There was a plane ride, or several plane rides. They passed through a couple of airports where nobody asked her any questions or expected any identification. Nadia woke up long enough to sleepwalk to wherever they expected her to wait next, then drowsed in the first available seat.
Eventually, the whole process ended with her opening her eyes and seeing late-afternoon sun shining through a window onto a dresser cluttered with tacky knickknacks. She sat up, looked around, and saw that she was in a twin bed in a small room. The wallpaper had an ugly striped pattern, while her bedsheets were covered in faded prints of big-eyed kittens. Nadia herself was still in the same clothes she’d put on … Saturday? Had it been Saturday morning? What day was it now?
Suddenly she realized she had to use the bathroom, very urgently. The room’s door was unlocked, and the door right across the hall was the one she was looking for. Once that was done, it came to her that she was also quite hungry and thirsty. The kitchen, it turned out, was down the hall. Fatima and Ruslan were in a couch in the adjacent den, watching television with the volume turned down low. Fatima looked up and waved as she came in; her other arm was around Ruslan’s shoulder.
Nadia started to ask where they were, but got distracted. “What on earth are you watching?”
“International competitive herding. It’s a close contest so far. We’re rooting for the Irish guy, since he’s got the best accent.”
“Oh.” She paused for a moment, watching a man in a sweater point and whistle to order a dog around a field full of sheep. “Why?”
“It’s sixteen-thirty on a Monday. It’s this, soap operas, or kiddy cartoons. We decided on this.”
“Dogs,” Ruslan added, winning a smile and a shoulder squeeze from Fatima.
“Right.” Nadia collected her thoughts, looked around, and spotted a bowl of mixed fruit on the kitchen counter. That would do. She picked out an apple and a banana, and went rummaging through the fridge once those were gone. There wasn’t much in there, but she did have enough to put together a sandwich and a glass of milk.
“There’s bags of chips in the cupboard next to the stove,” Fatima called out.
“Thank you.” It took her a couple of tries to find the exact cupboard she meant, and the bags said they contained ‘crisps.’ “Cheese and onion?”
Fatima did half a shrug with her free hand. “Bob told them to take us somewhere civilized. This was the best they could do. At least nobody’s shooting at us.”
Nadia tried a chip. It could have been worse. “And where is this?” She looked out the window at rolling green fields under a forested hill. She could see one other house in the distance, tucked up against the hill, but it had to be at least half a kilometer away. “England?”
“I think technically it’s Wales. Somebody’s rental cottage. Does it matter?”
“I suppose not.” She made herself another sandwich, and joined them on the couch, unsure of what was happening but content to let it continue. It didn’t look like anyone was going to shoot at her or try to kidnap her in the immediate future.
The trials ended an hour later with victory for a dog from New Zealand, to Fatima’s disgust. Nadia lost interest within ten minutes, and spent most of the time perusing the house’s dusty selection of video cassettes. She was on the point of suggesting a twenty-year-old romantic comedy when the front door opened, and Keisha and Dr. Gus came in with two big bags full of takeout food.
A minor controversy followed, as Keisha broke out a heap of traditional British pub favorites and Fatima shot down one after another for containing pork, or potentially being fried in lard. Keisha sarcastically offered to call the pub to ask if they, the one restaurant in ten miles, happened to be halal. That got Fatima complaining about the food in general being too heavy and greasy. In the end, Keisha shut her up with a bowl of shepherd’s pie, which Fatima declared adequate but still not very good. Nadia wasn’t sure whether she agreed or not, but she was still hungry enough not to complain. Hers was ‘bubble and squeak,’ which seemed to contain fewer animal products than the rest of it. It was still Lent, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to observe that or not.
Once they were eating quietly, Dr. Gus filled them in on what had been happening in Europe. It was a hard story to believe, and when he finished by asking if they had anything to contribute, Nadia was at a loss.
“I don’t even understand how this could have happened,” she told him. “Aren’t you supposed to be the expert on familiars? How is Yunks surviving without a master?”
“I believe she is forming a series of temporary hosts—or victims—to sustain herself,” he said. “As for how she made the transformation, I suspect Mr. Marshall was in a sense her first such victim.”
Fatima raised an eyebrow. “You mean somebody else made her, and she latched on to him?”
“No. It seems likely that she was conceived from his mind. But she was very unusual; she had no true valence, and no halo. Now she can make a kind of halo, in that she can feed off multiple victims at once. But she has never had a narrative valence. Most emissants have a story they wish to tell; Yunks has a deed she wishes to do, or a relationship she wishes to establish. Namely, domination and torment. I believe that is the key here.”
“I don’t totally understand this myself,” Keisha put in, “and I’ve heard this explanation a bunch of times. But the short version seems to be—correct me if I’m wrong here, Doc—that your adopted father’s emissant might have eaten his personality from the inside out, over the course of years.”
“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person,” Fatima quipped.
Nadia took a moment to think it over before replying. “Eaten his personality, you say. What would that mean?”
“It is normal for an emissant’s valence to influence the emissor’s own behavior, over time,” Dr. Gus said. “But the valence itself is nothing more than a narrative framework to be imposed on the subject’s understanding of the world. It does influence behavior due to its emotional content, but does not dictate a particular course of action for the person under its influence; at every moment, you have a number of possible responses to whatever situation you find yourself in. The valence only nudges you to choose one over the rest.”
“And Yunks is different because … she wants to do a particular thing? But don’t all of them?”
“The difference is somewhat subtle. If I am correct, Titus Marshall and his victim of the moment were the only substrate for a very limited kind of halo. This halo would be informed by a particular self-justifying outlook, of course, but that paradigm would be incidental. Mostly, Yunks was a mere compulsion, and I believe your adopted father was influenced by that compulsion, as all emissors are influenced by their emissants, or as a drug addict is influenced by the pleasurable feeling of his habit.
“Over many years, the compulsion became an overriding factor in his personality, and—going by interviews with his subordinates—it essentially hollowed him out, until he became the pathetic caricature of a person I briefly knew. Yunks, his own offspring, gestated inside his brain, consuming more and more resources. In the end, you cracked the shell of her egg, and she was free to grow beyond her old constraints. This is the result. I do not know what would have happened if Marshall had lived.”
Nadia thought it over. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what to do about this. It sounds like the Yunks I knew was a totally different creature from this … nightmare.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Keisha looked like she’d already come to the same conclusion, and wasn’t happy about it. Dr. Gus was less sure. “All the same,” he said, “I would like to speak with both of you, who knew her during her ‘childhood.’ There may be some clue we have overlooked.”
She was finally, as far as she could tell, safe. She had a full stomach, was well-rested, and the request was reasonable enough—it wasn’t as if he were asking her to use Chansonne. All the same, the thought of going over her experiences with the demon was not at all appealing. “Can it wait till morning?”
“It has waited some time already. More people die every moment Yunks lives.”
She looked at Fatima, who spared her a small nod, then went back to shuffling through the bags for an appetizing desert. “All right, then.”
They were up till after midnight, going over virtually every memory she had of her time with Titus Marshall. Along the way they wound up giving a complete account of everything that had happened since they parted in Syria. Dr. Gus had questions about all of it, sometimes very strange questions. She had no way of answering many of them; there was a lot she had forgotten, and anyway she couldn’t see the significance of the vile man’s exact expression or tone of voice when he said a particular thing. Most of the time, she couldn’t even remember the exact words. And, as the Doctor himself admitted at last, it wasn’t as if the memories she did have were likely to be especially accurate. The human brain just didn’t work that way.
“Well, at least we got them out,” Keisha said at the end, when even Nadia was beginning to feel tired again after her marathon sleep. “Moscow can’t use them. Dawes can’t complain about that.”
“He’d better not,” Fatima retorted. “Not if he doesn’t want my foot up his—“
“What about Colonel Hampton?” Nadia interrupted. “We could ask him. Yunks went after him personally, right? He might know something.”
“Colonel Hampton is in a coma,” Keisha said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Yes. But we can fix comas. We can fix death!” She pointed to Ruslan, who was slumped over on the kitchen counter beside Fatima, snoring into his folded arms. “Couldn’t he bring him back?” Keisha shot a worried glance at Dr. Gus, whose face fell into an expression of forced neutrality. “What? He could. I know it’s dangerous, but if we brought the Colonel out into a remote area, so the Blackbird couldn’t hurt anything important, wouldn’t that be worth it?”
“We have considered it,” said Dr. Gus in a quiet voice.
“And?”
“It was decided not to, for technical reasons.”
“Decided by who? And what reasons?”
Keisha sighed. “Just tell her, Doc.”
“I do not think this is a good time, so soon after—“
“Tell me what?”
“Just. Tell. Her,” Keisha repeated. “Rip off the damn band-aid already.”
Dr. Gus frowned. “If you insist. But I think it is a mistake.” He turned to look Nadia directly in the eye. “Your new emissant. Her name is ‘Chansonne,’ you say. Do you know what that means?”
Nadia thought it over. “Does it mean anything? I don’t think ‘Ézarine’ meant anything. I asked Therese once, and she said it wasn’t even a real French name.”
“’Chansonne’ is not a real French name either. But it is not entirely meaningless. The word ‘chanson,’ without the feminized ending, refers to a genre of medieval French songs, most famously the chansons de geste, tales of deeds. Songs of great warriors, like Roland. Did you know that?”
“No. What does this have to do with Colonel Hampton?”
“You don’t speak more than a handful of words in French. Yet your half-unconscious and badly stressed brain apparently invented this new name, based on a moderately obscure subject you were not familiar with. Even your pronunciation is, as far as I can tell, flawless. Where did it come from?”
“I guess I might have heard it somewhere and forgotten it? Does this matter? Wait. Claude was French. Maybe I inherited a bit of that with Ézarine, without even knowing it?” It didn’t sound very plausible.
“That is one possibility. Another is that chansons de geste were known to your brother.” And he too pointed to the oblivious Ruslan. “I understand he was very well-read.”
Fatima had turned her attention to her empty soda can—which was labeled IRN-BRU—as soon as the conversation turned to old French words. Now she perked up her ears again. “Hold up. What’s he got to do with all this?”
Dr. Gus bit his lip. “There is no delicate way to say this. Nadezhda, if the story you tell us is accurate, you were dead for a period of several hours. That is more than enough time for your brain to sustain catastrophic damage for lack of oxygen. Paraphysical theory has not advanced far enough yet to say how it was that Ruslan revived you. But it seems likely that, once he did, you were literally not the same person you were before. Your brother did not have access to all your memories. Some part of you is essentially Ruslan’s invention.”
“What? That’s ridiculous. Fatima, am I a different person than I was?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“The broad outlines of your personality would be preserved, of course,” Dr. Gus said impatiently. “But small details might have changed, editorial inventions unconsciously inserted to fill in gaps, particularly given your brother’s own dubious mental state at the time. The crux of the matter is that we cannot revive Colonel Hampton to consult him regarding Yunks because it is possible some of his memories will be inadvertently distorted in the process. Were he allowed to revive on his own, we might have better odds of success.”
“You’re going to leave your friend in a coma over that?”
“Such are the stakes of this contest. Yes. The situation is desperate, and difficult choices must be made.”
Nadia racked her brain for memories that might be Ruslan’s, and came up blank. “This is all too ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” Fatima chimed in. “But before this goes any farther, I think we’ve been patient enough. We’ve answered all your questions. You’re the expert here, Doc. What in the hell is going on with all these new familiars? Where did Saray, and the Blackbird, and … that French word. Where did they come from?”
“Nowhere predicted by any extant paraphysical theory,” said Dr. Gus. “Clearly it is key that you are both adolescents, your brains in a more plastic state. Beyond that … two factors seem relevant, and common to both events. One, you both sustained severe cerebral trauma. And two, prior to that trauma, you were both under considerable psychic distress. You, Nadia, because of the death of your brother. With Ruslan, it is more difficult to say for certain, but he was highly agitated before the incident at the bridge, yes?”
“He was always ‘highly agitated,’” Fatima told him with a roll of her eyes. “Didn’t know how to be anything else.”
“The relationship of a child to an adopted familiar is by nature unstable and superficial; the emissant’s valence is foreign to your experience, and shallowly rooted. But the deep structural priming on which the emissant depends is more durable. I believe that your brains, under a burden of heavy emotional distress, simply rebuilt your emissants in their own image, using that bedrock as a foundation. If I am correct—and do note that I am not speaking in any very great confidence here—your relationships to your new familiars will be far deeper.”
“What difference does that make?” Fatima challenged him. Nadia wondered if she was offended by the suggestion that she didn’t have a deep relationship with her father’s familiar.
“If you will pardon me for using a painful example, neither Shum-Shum nor Rhadamanthus have been seen since the deaths of their respective masters. They are gone from the world forever. But I believe that, were Nadia to die again, Chansonne would survive her, potentially to be adopted once more.”
They all let that hang in the air for a moment. “So … Chansonne is mine forever? She won’t go away?”
“I lack the confidence to answer that question definitively. It is possible that, as you are still a minor, she could change again, with or without another major shock or trauma. But possibly not. I have no reason to believe she will simply evaporate.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know how to feel about that. Or about anything else she’d just heard. She wasn’t sure she believed any of it, or thought any of it mattered. But what did matter? “So. Yunks.”
“Yunks,” Keisha agreed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Nadia thought it over. “I think … “ Three heads turned to look at her. Nadia looked into Fatima’s eyes, wondering if her sister were thinking the same thing. Probably not. “I think maybe I do.”