Ruslan was discharged from the hospital a few hours after the incident. Not that he was exactly ready to be discharged; he was awake, sort of, but he still couldn’t talk or move very well. Mostly the people who ran the hospital were afraid that ‘it’ would happen again, and the fact that they had no idea what ‘it’ was only made ‘it’ scarier. If whatever he had done hadn’t happened to heal everyone in the hospital besides himself to perfect health, they would probably have been much angrier, maybe even dangerously so.

As it was, everyone in Krymsk was terrified, and Therese told the Marshalls they needed to get moving before he did it again and turned the whole town against them. If the hospital hadn’t been ready to kick Ruslan out, they would have taken him anyway; he’d bought them a little time by (they hoped) knocking out all of the regime’s clairvoyants at the same time he knocked out Aare, but they had precious little time before a large number of men with guns, and probably a few with emissants, descended on the town.

“Again you break cover,” Therese complained as they pushed Ruslan’s wheelchair at a not-terribly-safe pace across the parking lot. “Always, at every chance. Even the one who is unconscious, in a coma—he breaks cover!”

Fatima said something back, but under her breath, and in Pashto, too quietly for Therese to catch. It wasn’t that Therese had forgiven her, exactly, for stealing the car. She was only prepared to overlook it, barely, because it seemed like in doing so she had saved Ruslan’s life, and possibly those of several hundred sick civilians as well. Just like Yuri’s little kidnapping lark, it had been a mad idea that happened to pay off.

“He will need a lot of care,” Therese reminded Fatima. “He cannot eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. He is in diapers. I expect you to take care of that as well.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Fatima muttered back, and pushed the chair a little faster to get more distance between them. It jolted on a rough patch in the asphalt, and she swore, struggling to maintain control. Ruslan didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were open, but didn’t seem to track anything most of the time; a bobbing bit of drool danced out of his drooping mouth as he wobbled across the lot. They didn’t know if he would ever get better, or if he would spend the rest of his ‘life’ as an inert lump that only happened to look like a person.

Therese peeled away from their group to get in her own car, where Aare was resting with a cloth over his eyes. The rest of them went in their one functioning truck, the lone survivor of the bridge attack, which still had Turkish plates. Therese had meant to see if they could bribe some Russian bureaucrat for local plates, before this happened. She’d meant to do a lot of things. Too late now. They would have to take their chances with the foreign tags, at least until they got out of immediate danger.

Even with four of them, it was incredibly hard to get Ruslan’s inert mass inside and secured, since he was heavier than any two of them combined. Therese watched them struggle from her own idling car, her arm dangling out the window to drum an impatient beat on the door with her fingers. When they finally got him buckled, they had the wheelchair to deal with, a parting gift from the hospital to speed them on their way out of town. It broke down and folded up, but it took all four of them working together to figure out how, while Therese revved her engine suggestively.

It was Fatima’s turn to drive, in the sense that Maria and Yuri didn’t feel like it and they were all annoyed with her for getting Therese in an even worse mood than usual. “Don’t even know where we’re going,” she muttered. “Does she?”

“Somewhere safer than here,” was all Nadia could say. Ruslan was in the passenger seat, leaving Yuri in the back as a barrier between his sister and his girlfriend.

“More fun with cultists,” said Yuri. He glanced at Maria before adding, still in English, “And me with a committed girlfriend along. You know all the groupie lays I could be getting out of this?”

Nadia didn’t bother to act outraged, or to slap him; some part of Yuri was just itching for that kind of attention. He still had two black eyes from Ruslan punching him on Saturday. Maybe he’d enjoyed that, too. She only felt a little bad for wishing that he’d been the one turned into a vegetable. Then they’d have Ruslan’s help, and Maria gone for good.

They followed Therese out of the parking lot and onto the highway. They still didn’t have working phones of their own, so they’d have to simply follow her closely for four hours straight, to—Nadia looked down at their paper map—some place called Kropotkin. Four hours felt like a very long time to sit next to Yuri while he snuggled up to his horrible, treacherous concubine.

She let their little convoy get up to speed on a straight stretch before starting a conversation. “Do you think he’s safe now, Fatima?”

“How should I know? But he’s not like he was before. I think he just woke up with a tube in his face, and lost his shit.”

“And called Kizil Khan.”

“Right.”

“Who then made everyone but himself feel terrible pain, but without permanent harm, before—“

“Look, honey, I’m under a lot of stress right now, and I’m tired, and it’s been a weird, weird, weird-ass day, so if you’re going to call me a liar I’m going to need you to save it for later when I’ve got my hands free and I can give you the pimp-hand, a’ight?”

“I’m not trying to be rude, and I believe you! You don’t have any reason to lie.” This time. “I just want to understand what happened.”

“That makes two of us. The thing barfed itself inside-out, and turned into, like, a princess. Looked like she was from the Arabian Nights, or some Bollywood musical scene. Or something.”

“And then?”

“And then she cried blood on me, screamed, and disappeared. That’s it.”

“Crying blood does sound like Kizil Khan, a little bit.”

“Yeah, but she healed the whole damn hospital. Or something did, anyway. K.K. couldn’t do that. Or wouldn’t. Not without wasting at least as many people to offset.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of a problem, isn’t it?” Yuri piped up. “Who’s to say he isn’t going to pop out again tonight and balance his books, huh? And he’s all brain-damaged. He could kill us as easy as anybody else.”

Fatima sighed. “I know. Don’t think I haven’t thought it. But he hasn’t done anything yet.”

“Just don’t mention any of that in front of Therese,” Nadia urged them. “We need her help.”

Yuri snorted. “You know her paranoid ass thought of that long before we did. She’s gone suicidal, or something, now that her husband’s dead. Crazy. Doesn’t even care what happens anymore.”

“You can just shut up, Yuri,” said Nadia, tempted more than ever to hit or pinch him. “She has saved our lives, and lost everything doing it, and you don’t even know her. She’s not even that old, you know, and this is a lot of responsibility she isn’t used to.”

“Twenty-nine,” Fatima said. “That’s what she told me. I do kinda worry she’s gonna crack. Don’t you? I don’t know what she was like when this hubby of hers was around, but now … don’t know, man.”

“She’s—she has military experience.” She’d been about to say ‘like Keisha,’ and remembered just in time not to bring that up around Yuri. “I think she’s used to working under pressure, and maybe to losing people, too. Not her husband, necessarily, but I think she’s been a spy for at least five years, and a warrior before that.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Fatima frowned into the rear-view. “Maybe. But she’s not a spy any more, is she? She burned her whole network trying to help us—she says so every chance she gets, whenever we annoy her. Like she’s our mom, trying to guilt-trip us. I don’t think she’s even in touch with her bosses any more; they’re tuning her out for whatever’s going on in Germany. This is all snap calls by some bitch we barely know, half unhinged with grief, acting on no information. I don’t like that. That’s all I’m saying.”

“We don’t need to be running anyway,” said Yuri. “Are we forgetting that every esper in like a bajillion miles is out cold right now?”

“We think that,” stressed Fatima.

“Yeah, yeah. And we think the stupid Lamprey’s toast too. It sure looks like we cleaned out the competition. We could be raising some serious hell here, instead of running and hiding under a rock. Am I wrong?”

“Usually,” said Fatima. “And we’ve got two sick people to mind now.”

“We have cultists for that,” Yuri replied, flapping a hand dismissively. “We’re wasted on butt-wiping duty or whatever. One of those nuts is probably a nurse. They can get Veg-O-Matic there sorted out, and he can fix—“

“Hey!” Fatima snapped. “He’s our brother.”

“Was,” corrected Yuri with a smile. “At least, he was our brother—for you, he was more like, I dunno, your official Platonic Bitch, and now you’re all uptight because you don’t have a spare to string along and make you feeeeeeeOOOWW dammit!”

Maria turned her head with a frown, and Nadia let go of the place between her brother’s ribs and hip to say, in Russian, “He was asking for it. Mind your business.” She rolled her eyes and went back to looking out the window.

“What’s wrong with you?” Yuri shouted, right in her ear. “All I’m doing is telling the truth!” He raised a fist; Nadia raised hers as well, jabbing it towards him in a feint, and he flinched away, grumbling.

“Children, are you going to behave back there, or do I have to pull over?” Fatima called out.

“We’re fine,” Nadia replied, returning demurely to rest against the back of her seat. They were well out of Krymsk now, headed towards Krasnodar. On their right she could see the gutted remains of a three-story building, its brick walls blackened with soot, its windows and doors smashed out. Whatever had happened there, it was probably recent, and done on their account, which gave her a strange feeling.

She waited until it was gone in the distance behind them before speaking up again. “So, are you both still prepared to keep fighting?”

Yuri said only “Sure,” as if she had asked whether he would like to get burgers for lunch. Nadia hadn’t expected any different. Fatima, on the other hand, was hesitant.

“We came out here to teach these pricks a lesson,” she said. “And I think we have. They’ve learned they can’t dick around with the Marshalls and not expect to suffer for it. And they’ve hit back pretty hard, too.” She glanced at Ruslan, whose head had sagged over against the seatbelt. “But … if we got out of here, would they chase us? Would they look for more trouble? I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think we can ‘get out of here,’ though,” Nadia said. “They will be watching the airports, and sea traffic will be hopelessly snarled after we took out the bridge. It would take at least a week of driving to get us anywhere not controlled by the Kremlin, and they would probably find us in that time. Even if we escaped Russian territory, we would have to fight our way out.”

“Which is fine,” Fatima said. “I’m not saying we don’t defend ourselves—they mess with us, they get the pain. That’s cool. But, like, what are we trying to do here?”

“Force them to retreat from Fatih,” said Nadia. “That was our goal.”

“Your goal,” said Yuri.

“Yeah,” agreed Fatima, “and I don’t know if it’s realistic. Not now, maybe not ever, maybe it never was. Sure, we’ve got moves, but … we’re not an empire, you know? We’re still just four kids, or, I don’t know, three and a half, now, and Russia’s a big-ass country. We can make it hard for them, and we have, but unless you think we’re going to raise hell all the way to Moscow and take down the … the … the gunya …”

“Knyazya,” Nadia supplied.

“Yeah, them. Unless you think we’re going to personally kill all of them, and I hope you don’t, I think they’ll keep on rolling with the punches, however hard we punch, and do what they have to to keep what they have.” She shrugged. “Sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Titus was able to bring down the Soviet Union,” Nadia said. “Him, and Mr. Vitelli, and later Hamza.”

“Which is how we got these assholes instead,” snickered Yuri. “You think it’ll happen twice?”

“I don’t know. But I want to try. Not necessarily to change the whole government of this country, I don’t think that would work, but to try to do something big. Something serious, something worth doing. Not just being gangsters, holding some little bit of territory for a while. Don’t you want anything more than that, with everything we can do?”

“No,” said Yuri. “Not really, no. You’re the Voronin sibling with the bug up her butt, and I’m the fun one. We’re both good at our jobs, so I say we stay in our lanes.”

“Do you really believe you were put on this earth just to have fun, Yuri, no matter what it costs anybody else?”

“Hell, I don’t know about that. You don’t, either. It’s all a big, bizarre accident, as far as I can tell. If things had gone even a little different, I wouldn’t have Shum-Shum, and we’d both have been burned alive or choked to death years ago. Nobody but me is writing the script here. There’s no script to follow.”

“You didn’t used to think that way.”

“It’s called learning, and changing your mind. Everything about our lives is just plain stupid, Nadia. If you think God sent me a magic flying glass jellyfish that makes people want to giggle while they burn to death, and he had a specific thing he wanted me to do with it, I gotta tell you, I have no damn clue what it was. No clue at all. Until he sends me a sign I can read, I’m gonna stick to living it up until something kills me.”

“Oh, is that all? Fatima, what about you? What do you think?”

“I follow the rules as best I can,” Fatima said. “I think it’s a good idea, to force the kafirun out of the Dar al-Islam. I can absolutely get on board with that. Killing the Lamprey? That’s a good deed, no question. Same thing for slimy bastards like that Polat guy, back in Tatvan. And Yefimov? Don’t even get me started on him. You give me a clear shot at him, I will 100% take it, no questions asked. All that’s good.”

“But?” Nadia prompted.

“But I don’t think it’s a commandment from God, or anything like it, that I have to change the whole damn world. That’s just … megalomania, I guess. Sorry, sister, but we’ve all got our limits. I know mine, and I’m not so sure you know yours.”

“I’m not a megalomaniac,” Nadia said. “I only want to do good with what I was given. Megalomaniacs only care about themselves.”

“Hey, you’re the one who asked. And that’s my answer. Sorry.”

Nadia looked at Yuri, who said, “What? I wanted to go to Iraq, remember? It’s still not too late. Probably a bit of a schlep, though.”

She scowled, and set her face back against the window, giving her family up as hopeless for the time being. Three and a half hours to Kropotkin.