After three months using an emissant, Nadia liked to believe she had learned a few things about tactics, and cunning, and basic caution. She waited for her ride behind the bushes and out of sight, and passed the time by trying and failing to get through to Fatima. When the old grey car pulled up to the curb, she hung up the phone and crouched down to hide better while she watched the car idle. After thirty seconds her driver cut the engine and got out. She kept her hand on the gun in her pocket, and watched.
When he drew level with the bushes, he saw her, and startled. His right hand jerked towards his jacket, where she was sure he had a gun of his own—but he stopped short of drawing. “What the hell are you doing there?” he demanded.
“Waiting to see what you did,” she told him, standing up. Ezarine’s wall was strong and clear in her head. She took a step forward, and glanced at the car to see if it was empty. In the corner of her eye, the driver’s hand drifted back up; she looked back, and he froze. “If I wanted to betray you, I would use my jinni, and you would be dead already.”
He bit his lip, said, “We should not hang around here.”
“Have you heard from the Imam?” she asked him.
“No. We cannot reach him, and he does not contact us. Come along.”
Had the car been empty? She only got a half-second look, and didn’t want to look again. He was surely a faster draw than she was. “Do you think I betrayed you?”
“I think you should get in the car.” His hands were at his sides now, but restless.
“Where will you take me, if I do?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“To help my friend, and your Imam. I think there is a halo around them.”
He nodded, then jerked his head toward the car. “Get in.”
She looked him in the eye. “You get in first. Then I will.” She didn’t want him behind her.
He considered it a long moment, then turned around without a word to get back in. He reached into his jacket, and she started to pull out her gun—but his hand came back up twirling his jangling keys on their chain, and she relaxed. He turned to go around the front of his car, and she stood up to follow—and he kept turning, until he was facing her again, and his left hand emerged from his waistband and spat a bright flash of light.
She jumped back and fell over. Her left shoulder lit up with pain at the same instant her right shoulder hit the sidewalk. Her momentum rolled her over as the gunshots rang out like chain lightning over her head. She was helpless on the ground, but she was also angry.
Ézarine appeared behind the driver, picked him up by the jacket, and swung him in an arc over her head to slam him headfirst into the concrete. She was at Nadia’s side an instant later, helping her to her feet. She could see through her familiar’s eyes as she got up that she left a bloody mess on the sidewalk. Ézarine clapped her hands around Nadia’s shoulder, and she let out ten seconds of gurgling, strangled screams.
That might or might not have been the limit of her endurance; Ézarine had to let go for a second as another man got out of the car, gun drawn. No stealth, no clever plan—the halo had made him stupid, as it always did. A bloody hand clenched down on his until he howled and dropped the pistol. Then a little more, until she felt the bones about to snap under Ezarine’s grip and the man was on his knees begging her to stop. “No guns,” Nadia gritted out.
She staggered forward until she was standing over the man with her own pistol against his forehead. Then she dismissed Ézarine. At once the pain got worse, as she knew it would, but she’d felt worse in her days as a cripple. “You are my new driver,” she told him. “Take me to the Imam. I will kill you if you cross me again. Do you understand? Speak.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good.” She stepped back, leaning on the car for support as best she could without hurting her shoulder worse. “Now, get moving.”
The Imam, as always, had planned ahead; there was a good store of medical supplies in the back. No change of clothes, though. Too bad. Ézarine tore off her bloody shirt, doused the wound in peroxide, and swathed her in gauze and bandages while the man drove. Nadia clenched her teeth the whole time; all the firearms besides her own pistol were locked in the trunk, but if she passed out with the pain Ézarine would vanish, and she would never wake up again.
Once it was done there was nothing for it but to put her equally bloody jacket back on, with her left arm pinned to her side and the sleeve dangling empty. She had only her brassiere and bandages beneath. She zipped it up, for what good that did, and swallowed four ibuprofen dry.
Then she looked up, and met the driver’s eyes staring at them in the rear-view. The car was going perhaps ten kilometers per hour. “Faster, damn you!” Ézarine moved to the front seat in an eyeblink. “Faster, or she will have something to say about it.”
The car’s speed tripled in moments, and Nadia laid herself gingerly back against the seat, putting most of her weight on her right shoulder—which was merely bruised from hitting the pavement. The man winced every time he used his right hand to shift gears. They had lost too much time with all this backstabbing nonsense; the odds were good that the Imam and Therese were dead already. But ‘odds’ weren’t enough to justify abandoning them. What came after that … would come after. There was too much to worry about now, and whatever Yuri had done, he was more than a hundred kilometers away.
They were on the highway now, and Nadia could definitely feel impingement. There was another halo ahead, pushing back against Ézarine. She checked to be sure her four kitties were intact, and the dowser was not visibly broken. “Not far now to the halo’s edge,” she said. “Slow down again.” She got her own handgun ready, then dismissed Ézarine, leaving her wall.
The road ahead, and the scene, didn’t change. The driver wobbled a moment, then recovered. She kept her eye on him, noting the exact moment when he sat up straighter and she caught his little rat face smirking at her in the mirror. They were inside the halo. “You know what Pugachev looks like? A little dancing flame with a man’s shape. He cannot hide his own form. We are looking for that.” Her new driver only snickered. “Fine. Be useless. But stay on this road. This is the only thing we can be sure is real.”
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No sooner had she said it than she saw him: a flickering red light, a man made of fires, dancing in place down a side street. Surely it wasn’t that easy? “Stop!” He still laughed, but he obeyed. She peered down the street, keeping a gun on the driver’s head in case he got any stupid ideas. It looked like the description, all right. Or was the figure itself an illusion? He couldn’t hide himself, but nobody knew if he could make a copy, or twenty copies. She looked down the street the other way, and sure enough there was a dancing fire there as well. He was making fun of her. Well, she would show—
The impact came out of nowhere, slamming into their car and setting it spinning. Nadia caught a glimpse of the windshield shattering before her head smacked into the driver’s seat. The man shouted as the airbag hit him in the face. She looked up just before the next hit, from behind this time, and the car spun again, lifting one side into the air with a crunch and screech of bending metal. For an instant of eternal terror, she was sure they would flip, but they came back down with another crash, and a rattle that she felt all the way up to her bleeding shoulder.
And then, after a final rumbling crescendo of further crashes, fading into distance like a receding tide, it was over. She looked around, and saw their car was demolished, and there was no sign of what had hit it. All around them was a placid residential neighborhood. She couldn’t even see Pugachev anymore. He’d finished distracting her, or gotten distracted himself.
“Are you all right?” The driver groaned, then chuckled, his face covered in blood. Nadia was sure she didn’t look any better. Well, the car wasn’t going anywhere. She pushed her door open; it got about half a foot before banging against something invisible. Of course. There was only one option left, unless she wanted to spend the next hour banging into things like a blind man who’d lost his cane. She set down her gun, got out a kitty, and wrestled it open with her one and a half arms.
At once they were in a different street, and surrounded by five other smashed cars, their occupants mostly unconscious or dead. Ézarine flickered into the air for a look around, but failed to find the seam where reality ended and Pugachev’s dreams began. She could tell they’d pushed him back, and hard, but he was still selling the illusion perfectly.
Obviously, they’d underestimated him. The Imam had never tried to engage with the oprichnik himself before, only assumed his limitations from piecemeal knowledge. But Pugachev predated the Whiteout; he had something like ten years of experience. Of course he would know how to use his powers as a weapon! This whole plan was a stupid joke.
But she would be stupider still, if she let her valence control her. Angry or not, there was a job to be done. She squeezed out of the car, gun ready. Ézarine took a shotgun from the trunk, stuffing a few extra shells into Nadia’s bulging pockets. She’d have to conserve ectoplasm, but she could push though here, and maybe meet up with Fatima. If she met with Therese along the way, so much the better, but Nadia wasn’t going to count on finding her, or her body, if Pugachev tried to hide her.
She tiptoed through the pileup with her gun ready, letting Ézarine pick her up and carry her at one spot where the wreckage was insurmountable. A sudden noise made her turn back, ready to shoot—but it was only her driver, emerging from the car on shaky legs. “What are you up to now?”
“Following you. You think I’m going to stay in this mess?”
She considered it. “Fine. But you go in front.” He glowered, but obeyed. “If you can’t keep up there, I leave you behind.”
She could feel the impingement now, as Pugachev’s halo tried to reassert itself, but it was still far enough away that he couldn’t realistically hit them with another misguided car. It vexed her much more that she had no car of her own. And that her shoulder might still be bleeding a little, and hurt like hell, and she didn’t know how long she could keep going without real medical care. And that Fatima and Ruslan might already be dead.
They’d hardly made it fifty meters when the driver stumbled to his knees, clutching his head and whining. Had he really hurt his head? Whatever. He hadn’t been shot! “Get up,” she told him, not breaking stride. “I don’t need to tie down Ézarine with your dead weight.” To emphasize the point, she had her familiar pop up next to him and prod him with her foot. He slapped weakly at her leg, but stayed on his knees. “Damn you! Fine.” Ézarine grabbed him by the hair and moved him twenty paces up the road, dropping him when they got there. He fell over cursing. “Don’t like it? Use your legs!”
Instead he sat up, facing her, and helped her to a heap of curses in some Dagestani tongue she didn’t know. Why did she have to have a familiar that made everyone uncooperative and hateful? She was on the verge of yanking him another twenty paces when she felt the sudden pressure of another halo once again. Coming from behind.
She turned just as the blast hit her, and she fell down again. She tried to put out her bad hand, trapped inside her jacket, to catch her fall, and flopped over to land on her bad shoulder with a scream that would make Ézarine proud. Her familiar helped her back up to assess the damage … but there wasn’t any. Only a strange shimmering in the air over the pileup they’d just left. No explosion. What had happened, then?
Very quickly the shimmering hardened, forming an enormous crystal wall, clear as air but laced with threads of pale green and milky white. She recognized it at once, at the same second she realized her halo didn’t reach the space around the wall. A kitty. And a trap. She moved Ézarine to stand before her. Glass was only glass. It would shatter at a scream—
There was a crash, a sound like the world ripping in half, and a rushing wind, and a wave of burning needles tore across the side of her left leg. She hissed and grabbed it with her good hand, hissed again in fresh pain and drew it back studded with sparkling bloody slivers—
Glass. All around her on the ground, in great spears and little flecks, green and white and clear. Frosting every surface, sticking out a street sign like a coat of sparkling hairs. Behind her, the driver was limp on the ground, bleeding over the asphalt. Ézarine’s whole front was covered in little shards, enough to trouble even her a little. And just past her, floating in the air, a fresh shimmer was forming, ready to do it again.
Ézarine didn’t give it a chance, but screamed, at full volume and the precise and perfect pitch. She screamed, and kept screaming—she could never run out of breath—and the next murderous wall crumbled in the air as it formed. Nadia left her familiar to it, taking care to stand in her shadow as she wrestled the next kitty out of her pocket one-handed. It didn’t matter that she was shot and bleeding and had one good arm. Yefimov had taken enough from her already. Whatever he was doing here—however he had found them again—if he wanted a fight, she would give it to him.