Identity Theft

1.
A Short-Lived Flight To Freedom

The first time Audrey MacNamera had gone on the run, she’d done it in style, sneaking aboard a commercial vessel and waiting until the crew had gone into cryo before programming a vacant tube for herself. This time, however, she didn’t dare go into cryo. The risks, as she was well aware, were far too high for that. Passenger ships with actual bunks were increasingly rare and ridiculously expensive, but she’d had to shell out the money. At least until she’d put enough distance between herself and Toombs to breathe a little more easily.

Lying on the cramped little bunk she’d been assigned, listening to her roommates snore and wheeze, she shook her head and tried not to think about the comfortable dorm room and one roommate she’d been forced to leave behind. She’d sworn to herself, five years earlier, that she’d never leave Deckard’s World again, but here she was, in headlong flight to God-only-knew where. Thanks to a piece of her past that just wouldn’t stay dead and buried.

How the hell had Toombs found her? Nobody had managed to track her down, not in five whole years, to the point where she’d finally relaxed and told herself that the past was truly behind her. Had it been waiting, patiently, for her to begin building a life she would regret losing, before it came out to get her? She’d actually gone two whole months without thinking his name even once, and then this Toombs guy had to show up and spoil everything.

Anger was good, she decided, clenching her fists in the too-soft pillow. Anything was better than the cold, gnawing fear she’d been feeling. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to sleep, but neither fear nor anger were sleep-inducing emotions.

Maybe when I finally get tired enough, she told herself. Maybe when I’m a little more relaxed. It had only been half a day since she’d transferred onto this ship and watched the spaceport recede, terrified that at any second they’d be ordered back into port and she’d be escorted off.

She wasn’t fool enough to think that just because she’d gotten off the station, she’d gotten away clean. Toombs would be following. She’d made sure of it; she’d had to. Getting away had been secondary to getting him as far away from her family as possible. The bonus round would be shaking him off her trail.

I can do it, she thought. It wasn’t like she had no experience at running and hiding. She’d been damn good at it once. But she didn’t remember ever having knots like this in her belly… outside of that time.

The memories stirred, and Audrey curled up into a fetal ball trying to fight them back. Even the faintest brush of them on her mind made her feel ill, made her wonder if she could ever make amends for what she’d briefly become, and all the havoc she’d wreaked…

Made her wonder if perhaps she deserved what was happening to her now… or worse.

I’m not gonna get any sleep tonight. Wonder if the galley’s open.

Uncurling, Audrey swung her legs over the side of the bunk and lowered herself down onto the floor, careful not to make any noise. She hadn’t actually undressed for bed – still too tense to risk changing out of street clothes – and her money belt was still on under her shirt. As she slipped quietly out of the sleeping quarters, she marveled at how quickly and efficiently she’d made her escape. Had some part of her been expecting it all along, and been prepared?

The threat to her family – and especially to her younger sister – had paralyzed her almost to the point of catatonia. It had been blind luck that had saved her. Toombs had actually had Audrey in his car, and they were halfway to the spaceport, when a speeder had veered around them and broadsided another car right in front of them. In the ensuing confusion, she’d managed to get clear of Toombs’ car and had run for it. As luck would have it, she was within three blocks of her bank.

She’d pulled all of her money out of her accounts – taking the penalties on her savings, cleaning out her student loans, grabbing everything – within minutes, and had warily made her way to the port, the plan forming in her mind. Waiting until the absolute last moment, she’d bought a ticket to the space station, deliberately buying it in her own name so that Toombs would know she’d gone off-planet. Anything to get him as far from her family as fast as possible.

Now she quietly moved down the ship’s darkened halls, contemplating that headlong rush. She’d had just enough time at the station to buy a duffel bag and a few changes of clothing before boarding this flight. Unless Toombs still had the Kubla Khan at his disposal, and caught up with her, she had four weeks and fourteen star-jumps before she hit New Queensland and found another ship to transfer onto. If she could just stay ahead of Toombs long enough, she’d begin to lay a false trail.

That wasn’t her immediate concern, though. At the moment, she was going to try to eat something.

At the thought of food, her stomach promptly rumbled to life and registered a formal complaint. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, some eighteen hours before… when that slimy son of a bitch had accosted her on the way out of the campus dining hall. Food was definitely in order.

The galley was closed, but there were vending machines. It was hardly a nutritious dinner, but Audrey ended up on a ratty lounge couch by one of the starboard viewports, quietly eating peanut butter cups and cheese chips, watching the way the stars swirled past the window. Star jumping was eerie, and frightened a lot of people who couldn’t deal with the dreamy, directionless feeling it gave them. Most went into cryo if they could help it, making ships like the Santa Clara rare. Audrey had never minded the sensation, and especially now it was a relief when compared to the terror of earlier in the day.

She wondered if Toombs would go into cryo as he pursued her.

Unbidden, the image floated into her mind. Statues. Living statues, dozens upon dozens of them, men and women locked in tormented poses. She’d only been in the room for a moment but she’d felt how alive they all were, how desperate and pained and lonely each one was, trapped in a private hell—

Audrey shuddered and forced the memory back. No. I’m not going to think about that. It happened to someone else, not me. Not me.

Not me.

She took a deep breath and another bite of a peanut butter cup, and watched as the swirling stars slowed and solidified. The star jump was ending, having carried the ship several light years along its route. They would be nearing the outer sectors, she thought, an area of space she’d sworn she would never see again. It was a dark area of space, one that strange and disturbing stories frequently emanated from. She knew from experience that many of the stories were entirely too true, despite sounding like the kinds of tales people would tell around a campfire.

Never thought I’d pass this way again.

A small red flicker caught her eye. She leaned forward, almost pressing her forehead to the viewport, to get a closer look. Something, to the aft of the ship… closing on them…

Fuck! Fuck!

Audrey threw herself back away from the window and scrambled for the intercom, her hand grabbing for the alarm panel. Sirens began to blare as she wrenched it open, a mere second before they were overwhelmed by the roar of impact and the whole ship shuddered. More alarms followed.

He found me. Fuck, he found me! She’d heard other stories, of pirates out in this part of space, and a worse darkness some called “the Hood of the Devil,” but she had no illusions. Toombs would hurt anyone who stood between him and what he wanted.

She scrambled for the door to the hallway. If she was lucky, she could get to one of the escape pods and get clear. Luck, though, obviously wasn’t with her.

Gotta try, though… gotta try…

Another blast knocked her off of her feet and plunged her into darkness. She shook herself and began crawling along the corridor, trying to reach the emergency door she’d seen. People were screaming, she noticed. They were distant, but getting louder. Probably others who had thought of the escape pods.

Gotta get out of here…

Light speared through the corridor, and she heard the sound of heavy boots. Funny. Soldiers? Where’d Toombs get soldiers? Her hand touched the frame of the emergency door and she began fumbling for the handle.

“Here’s one.” The voice was hard, cold, and unfamiliar.

Rough hands grabbed her and hauled her to her feet. As the emergency lights flickered to life, she found herself face-to-mask with an armored man. His body armor was bizarre, almost medieval. Like the drawings that had circulated a few months ago at an Amnesty Interplanetary meeting—

Fuck. They’re real. Oh fuck!

Audrey realized she was looking at a Necromonger.

She shrank back but he wouldn’t let her loose. Instead, he pushed her down the corridor, his hand clamped hard on the back of her neck. She stumbled, hands out to balance herself, as he marched her into a smoky hallway. An irregular tear was along one wall, more light pouring through it. Her captor forced her to climb through. The short hallway beyond was somehow alien, unlike anything on board the Santa Clara, and when she glanced back she saw that it was clamped onto the ship’s wounded outer hull.

They didn’t even bother with the airlocks, they just blasted in wherever they wanted…

The strange corridor opened out into a yawning hangar, full of twisted and disturbing shapes. The Santa Clara‘s other passengers were there, milling about like terrified sheep. Audrey’s captor pushed her roughly toward them.

“That’s the last. She’d almost reached the escape pods.”

“Not an impressive catch,” a new voice commented.

“These ships rarely are.”

Audrey looked around her and spotted the new speaker. He was an imposing man, even without armor, and more frightening in it. Red hair covered the top of his head, in a style that normally she would have found rather laughable, but there was no laughter in her now. He stalked over to the passengers, starting on the far end from her.

“Convert. Breeder. Convert. Breeder. Breeder. Useless. Convert…” As he spoke, the soldiers began to separate the passengers.

Audrey took a deep breath and wracked her brain for the little bit of information she’d heard about these people. She’d thought they were just a space legend, but obviously they weren’t. Converts? Breeders? What was this?

“They move from planet to planet,” Jayven had said, “like locusts. When they show up, they just kill at random for a while until the fight goes out of the population. Then they’ll round up all the survivors. They give ‘em a choice. Convert to their religion and live, or die then and there. Some they won’t even give the choice to if they think they’re useless…”

She couldn’t remember if he’d said anything about “breeders.”

The man was approaching. She swallowed and tried not to shrink before him. No matter what, she was positive that “useless” would be an automatic death sentence, and she was not going to let that label be put on her for anything.

He stopped, studying her and not speaking. She swallowed again, feeling a chill move along her back. He’d barely looked at many of the others, but now the weight of his stare was beating down on her.

“This one goes to the Lord Marshal. She fits the profile.”

The who?

A hand clamped around her arm and pulled her away from the other captives, away from all three groupings of them. She struggled, trying to make a break for the other ship, but it was useless. Panic filled her, the threat of Toombs completely forgotten by this new, incomprehensible menace. She struggled, screaming, her feet and fists flailing wildly. One foot connected hard with the leg of the man restraining her and for a moment she was free. She began to run for the other ship again. She’d get to the escape pods and she’d be safe. All she had to do was—

The floor rushed up to meet her.

---

Lord Vaako gazed down at the unconscious young woman and shook his head. She’d turned out to be a bit of a wildcat… which fit the profile as well. He gestured for the guards to gather her up and carry her back to the cryo units. She’d probably be another disappointment for the Lord Marshal, like all of the others that had been brought to him, but he intended to serve his new Lord well. The girl fit the profile. Green eyes, slender build, high forehead, pointed chin… all the characteristics the new Master of the Necromongers had specified.

Vaako had no idea what it was that his Lord was searching for, exactly, nor why it was such an obsession with him, but he would obey. The girl would be taken to the Basilica and her fate would be decided by Riddick himself.

2.
Object of Desire

What did you give to the man who had everything? It was a question that had plagued the loyal subjects of tyrants for millennia.

For the crafty courtier, the answer was easy enough. You found out his heart’s desire, and brought it to him. Of course, it never truly was that easy, because anything that could elude the master of an Empire would be very difficult to acquire. That didn’t stop his more ambitious sycophants from trying, though.

Among the Necromongers’ elite court, it was no exception.

In the year that had followed Riddick’s ascension to the throne, his courtiers had studied and speculated relentlessly about him. It took a rare and dangerous man to rule them, and they found the few who succeeded at it utterly fascinating… and this new Lord Marshal was no exception. He was the first, in a very long time, who didn’t actually follow their religion and had no interest in converting to it, which added to his allure. Young, single women of the court groomed themselves, vying for his attention, each dreaming that she would be the one to stricken him with love and show him the value of their beliefs.

And ambitious schemers, like Dame Vaako, dreamed of the day Riddick could be deposed and replaced by a strong True Believer, like her husband.

In the year that he’d ruled, only one of his rare edicts had been particularly memorable. It related to the fate of unbelievers, and failure to obey it was punishable by death. All young women in their late teens and early twenties, who fit a specific physical description, were to be brought, unharmed, to him. All of the Necromongers had been required to memorize those attributes and recite them back before every raid. The woman he apparently sought was Caucasian, of medium height or taller with a slender build, green eyes, a high forehead, and a pointed chin. The rules regarding her treatment were iron-clad and more than one Necromonger, who had inadvertently broken them, had died horribly for doing so.

When pressed for an explanation, however, the Lord Marshal had refused to elaborate. He’d examined every young woman brought before him, as though searching for something – or, Dame Vaako supposed, someone – and then dismissing them with the same look of disappointed longing every time. Whatever he sought remained elusive.

Dame Vaako wondered what the reward might be, for the one who brought him his heart’s desire at last.

---

He could feel her eyes on him.

Riddick knew everybody in the damn Basilica was watching him, always watched him, but for some reason he was especially aware of Dame Vaako’s eyes. When she watched him, he felt like she was measuring him for a coffin, and he knew he wasn’t wrong.

He’d seen a lame-ass movie one time, long ago, in which some idiot had screamed “I’m king of the world!” from the prow of an ancient ship, only to have it sink out from under him a few days later. The sucker had ended up as fish food. He thought of that often, now, reminding himself again and again that the power was an illusion. The control was an illusion. He was the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, practically the ruler of the universe for all intents and purposes, and that put him squarely in everybody’s bulls-eye. He’d already dodged half a dozen assassination attempts in the last year, and only one of those had come from outside of the Court.

It made him think longingly of the icy caverns he’d left behind on Planet UV. In comparison to this new life of his, that world was warm and gentle and hazard-free. It wasn’t even as lonely as this place. His brief attempts to connect with these people, to try to understand their ways, had only left him craving solitude more than ever.

He glanced over at Dame Vaako and gave her his best mocking smile, the one that implied he’d be perfectly happy to take her for a test-ride while her husband was away. Her expression chilled and she turned away from him, engaging some of the other Ladies of the court in conversation. Pose, pose, pose. He could tell just from watching them that none of the women liked each other. Sometimes he thought he could hear the sound of cats howling and spitting when they did their little “civilized” dance.

He knew, even if she didn’t yet, that her husband was almost back at the Basilica now. In fact, his ship, and the other two groups of marauders he’d sent out, should be on their final approaches. In fact, all three of them were bringing him “candidates” to review.

He would have to steel himself for another round of disappointments. In the last year, dozens of young women had been brought before him, one or two of them with faces heartbreakingly similar to the one he sought, but his true quarry – the girl he had once known as “Jack” – had never appeared.

Perhaps Kyra had spoken the truth, he thought with a hint of despair. Perhaps the real Jack was dead.

A year of reflection hadn’t helped him figure out why Kyra had tried to pretend to be the girl from his past. He’d played along with her masquerade, but she hadn’t fooled him for a second. She hadn’t looked at all like the Jack he remembered, for one thing. Her hair had been too dark, her nose too snub, her chin too small and the wrong shape, and her eyes had been the wrong color. And above all else, her scent had been wrong. Her attempt to pretend to be Jack would have been laughable, were it not for the fact that she seemed to truly believe she was.

She’d known things that only Jack could know, though, which told him that, at the very least, she’d crossed paths with the girl he sought. He’d decided to play along with her charade, hoping that in time she would lead him to his real quarry. But whatever she knew about the real Jack’s whereabouts had died with her… in this very room.

The entire time, she hadn’t faltered once from her assertions. To the very end, she’d continued insisting that she was the girl from the Hunter-Gratzner crash, and it had left him at a loss as to how to proceed. He couldn’t backtrack to New Mecca and trace Jack’s movements from there; it had been reduced to a smoldering cinder, and Abu al-Walid – who seemingly had been truly fooled into believing Kyra was Jack – was a pile of charred bones somewhere in its ruins. The trail was cold.

And that wispy bitch Aereon, for all of her grandiose claims to prophetic abilities, didn’t know shit. Apparently her clairvoyance was completely inadequate for telling him where one teenage girl had gone.

At times he feared that Jack really was dead, and the thought made him shudder a little. The games he’d tried to play, when he’d first “ascended” to leadership of the Necromongers, had marked him indelibly. He tried not to think about it, but he knew exactly why he had begun waking up in the night, his sheets soaked with sweat, Jack’s pleading eyes floating before him in the darkness. It happened every night now.

For five years he’d been spared those dreams, believing her safe and happy on New Mecca, until he’d learned otherwise and the nightmares had begun. Sometimes, in his dreams, she was the pathetic, insane, homicidal creature he’d found on Crematoria, and those were the worst dreams of all. He had them any time he thought of rescinding his orders and ceasing the parade of lookalike prisoners who filed past him.

The orders stood. He couldn’t stop, until he either found Jack or learned her fate. His obsession, his dreams, would tear at him and drive him mad if he tried.

Riddick was jarred from his reverie by the sound of a woman’s wail. Lifting his head, he watched as his wayfaring soldiers entered the throne room and approached. They were dragging three women into the room with them, and as always he had to quell the surge of hope that tried to move through him. In all likelihood, this would prove as fruitless as every other review had… but he had to know.

He waited patiently, not really looking at the women yet, as they were brought before the dais and made to kneel. After a moment he rose from his throne and stepped down, moving to stand beside one of the trio. The woman had sunk to the floor, sobbing. She had been the source of the wail he’d first heard, and he wanted to get her over with fast. She wouldn’t be Jack. She hadn’t been a hysteric, and the only time he’d ever seen her cry, she’d done so silently. Lifting the woman’s head, he only needed the barest glance before he shook his head and gestured for her to be taken away.

He moved to the second candidate, the first forgotten, and lifted her face to meet his.

This one was extremely beautiful, reminding him a little of Carolyn Fry. The soldiers would fight over her, he knew, but he was no longer interested. Again he shook his head and moved on to the third, certain that disappointment awaited him there, as well.

Lord Vaako himself was making her kneel, her head lowered. He studied the crown of light, straight hair on top of her head for a moment, trying to decide if it was dark blonde or light brown. Reaching down, he grasped her chin, feeling how it curved into an elfin point in his palm. Would Jack’s feel like this? He’d never really had much physical contact with her during their sojourn together. Steeling himself for the inevitable disappointment, he made her lift her face.

He saw her high forehead first, with a slightly irregular hairline that stirred an eerie sense of recognition within him. Dark brows, fine and slightly arched, twitched, and then…

My God.

He knew that elegant nose, those high cheekbones, the curve of those lips… he knew this face as well as he knew his own. Dark-fringed eyes slowly lifted to meet his, green irises fixing on him… and the eyes widened in recognition.

He knew her… and more importantly, she knew him!

Drawing the trembling girl to her feet, he looked over at Lord Vaako, and felt a smile curl over his lips.

“Looks like you found her for me. Good work.”

Silence fell in the room as everyone digested his announcement. Riddick turned his gaze back on Jack, who seemed completely stunned. Her lips worked but no sound emerged.

He wanted to ask her a thousand questions about where she’d gone, but his duties as Lord Marshal were not yet done for the day. There was still a great deal of work left for him to do before he could turn his attention to her. His eyes found Lord Vaako again.

“Take her to my quarters. I’ll deal with her after we’re done here.”

Jack seemed to come out of her stupor as Vaako began to lead her away, but her struggles were half-hearted, as though she didn’t even know where she wanted to go if she managed to get free. Riddick found that he was smiling as he returned to his throne. One courtier met his eyes and shrank back, blanching.

Feeling triumphant, Riddick got down to business.

---

Hours passed before Riddick could adjourn the court and reach his quarters, and he found himself wondering just how much of the rooms Jack would have explored and pried her way through by then. The moment he opened his door, though, he had his answer.

None. She hadn’t touched a thing.

She was in the corner of his sitting room, rocking on the floor. Her legs were pulled tight against her body, arms wrapped around them, her head resting on her knees. He’d seen her do that once before, when they’d hidden in the cargo container and made plans after Hassan’s death, six years earlier.

Why was she afraid? Didn’t she realize that she was safe at last?

Her head jerked up as he closed the door and locked it, and she watched him approach her. She didn’t struggle or protest when he helped her to her feet, but he could feel the tremor in her limbs.

Why is she afraid? It is her, isn’t it?

He suddenly wasn’t sure.

She stayed still as he moved to stand behind her and leaned in, lifting her hair from her throat so he could put his nose to her skin. Her scent came to him, filled his awareness. It wasn’t quite the same as he remembered. There were hints of perfumed soap and shampoo, and none of the grime that had clung to her on a distant, desolate world. But beneath that, the scent of Jack herself was there… it was her.

And she smelled of fear. Powerful fear. Fear that had not abated – but instead had increased – since their encounter in the throne room.

Moving around in front of her again, Riddick felt a heavy, cold knot form in his stomach. He realized, suddenly, what Jack was afraid of. He could see it in her eyes, in the tremor of her lip… and he could smell it all over her.

Him. Jack was terrified… of him!

3.
Echoes of an Unwanted Time

This can’t be happening to me.

Audrey stayed as still as she could, eyes on the imposing figure before her. Of all the people to run into, in the whole galaxy, she’d had to come face to face with Richard B. Riddick.

Worse yet, he was the ruler of the Necromongers, making him the Ultimate Bogey-Man. And worst of all, not only had he recognized her… he’d been looking for her.

Now here she was, in his opulent private quarters, waiting to find out what he wanted and trying not to let the horror she felt show through. She couldn’t believe that it had been less than twenty-four hours since she’d stepped out of her university dining hall, an ordinary college student whose worst problem was whether she could wheedle her academic advisor into approving her course load. She’d been completely normal, the sort of person that things like this did not happen to… and that was the way she’d wanted it. She’d loved that life with a passion… and now it was gone.

Now the nightmare was back. The darkness had swept her up and swallowed her whole.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening!

Paris had babbled those very words, she suddenly realized, as he’d crawled across the desert floor seconds before being torn to pieces. She shuddered with the memory. His death had been her fault. It was one of the memories she’d tried to scour out of her brain and put behind her forever, but now it was back. Now all of it was back.

“I’ve been looking for you, Jack.” The voice was a low purr. Once it had haunted her dreams.

Jack.

“I’m not—” She stopped, wondering exactly what she was trying to deny.

“Not what?”

She swallowed and took the plunge. “My name is Audrey. Audrey MacNamera. I’m not Jack. Jack is—”

“Do not say that Jack is dead!” His vehement snarl startled her. The sudden grip of his hands on her shoulders was painfully tight. “Don’t you fuckin’ dare!”

Audrey closed her eyes and took another deep breath, shaking her head. If he wanted Jack, she was in terrible trouble, because those days were long past for her. She’d driven that darkness out of herself and she’d die before letting it back in.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, trying to draw back from his tight grasp. “I’m not who you’re looking for.”

“You know me,” he growled. “Don’t fuck with me.”

She made her eyes open and meet his. The anger on his face was expected, but the hurt and confusion took her by surprise. It speared through her, reminding her of the fictional Riddick that she’d idolized and pined after. But that man couldn’t truly exist – couldn’t ever have existed – not in the leader of the darkest, most soulless army to ever cross the stars.

“I’m not,” she answered him.

“Not what?” He stepped closer, invading the little bit of space she had left. She forced herself to stand her ground and not crumble before him.

“I’m not fucking with you. But I’m not her. She’s gone.”

A muscle jumped in Riddick’s cheek and he clenched his jaw tight for a moment. He looked ready to do violence, suddenly. This is it. Now he’ll show me. Now at last she’d see him without his masks.

“She’s right in front of me,” he hissed, not touching her.

Audrey shook her head again, trying not to feel his pull, struggling not to give in to it. She’d forgotten how magnetic he could be, how much charisma he had. How long had he led the Necromonger army, she wondered. Had he come here straight from dropping her and Imam off on New Mecca? If Jayven’s stories were to be believed, these people had been committing genocide for decades. How long had he been in on it?

When she’d first seen him, his violent nature had been alluring. She’d known he was a killer, and dangerous, but it had seemed… so vague and distant and unreal. Killing was like movie deaths, she’d thought at the time. The corpses that littered his backtrail hadn’t really been real. Even the first few deaths on that desolate planet hadn’t struck at her too hard… one man’s name she hadn’t even known.

It had helped that, with the possible exception of Johns, none of the deaths on the planet had been Riddick’s doing. He’d seemed almost like a tame beast… more ferocious looking than he really was. She still hadn’t understood what it meant to take a life.

Learning it, firsthand, had changed everything for her.

The man before her was not heroic. He was not a romantic figure. Anyone who could kill over and over, as easily as he did, was a monster. He’d tried to make her over in his image and she’d almost succumbed to the seduction, but she’d learned the truth. She’d almost learned it too late.

Her silence must have infuriated Riddick, because his voice was even more heated and passionate when he spoke again. “I already got fed that line of shit by Kyra, so don’t you start up with the same—”

Kyra?

“Kyra?” How the hell had she found him?

Riddick nodded, the anger in his face receding to reveal… confusion. He clenched his jaw again and took a deep breath. When he finally spoke, his voice was gentler, subdued. “I want to know what happened to you, Jack.”

Pain moved through her chest at the sound of that voice saying that name. He’d rarely ever said it at all, the entire time they’d traveled together, at least where she could hear. “Please don’t call me that.”

“Kyra wanted me to call her Kyra, and I went along with her because she wasn’t really you anyway. But you are Jack and I will call you that. Unless you want to give me a good reason not to.”

Audrey held up her hand in confusion of her own. What he’d just said made no sense to her. Kyra had what?

“Kyra told you she was me?”

Riddick nodded, snorting derisively. “As if I couldn’t spot the difference. A brain-dead blind man could tell you two apart.”

My god, she was even crazier than I thought.

There was a chair to her left. Without thinking, Audrey walked over to it and sat down. She needed to breathe. She needed some kind of massive reality check. Closing her eyes, she counted slowly to ten, begging every power in the universe for the familiar sights of her dorm room or the student lounge when she opened them.

Riddick’s alien, opulent rooms were still there when she looked again, dimly-lit and luxuriously appointed.

“I keep hoping I’m gonna wake up,” she muttered.

“Wake up where?” Riddick stepped in front of her again, crouching down so that his eerie, mercurial eyes were level with hers.

She sighed. He was as relentless as she remembered. Answering him was safer than pissing him off. “Home. Back on Deckard’s World.”

His hand reached out and tugged at the hem of her Deckard Tech U sweatshirt. “You go to school there?”

She nodded and watched bafflement cross his face. It occurred to her that her life, with its earthy, prosaic concerns, was undoubtedly as alien to him as his way of life was to her.

“I just started my sophomore year,” she told him after a moment, needing to fill the silence. She’d forgotten how easily he’d been able to make her talk. “In Sociology.”

“Sociology?” He looked as though he was suppressing more scornful laughter… now aimed at her.

I always knew I was just a joke to him.

Anger filled her. She’d finally made a decent life for herself, and not only had this bastard taken it from her, he was mocking it!

“Yeah, Sociology,” she jeered back at him. “You know, the study of how governments and societies work on all the different worlds before your army comes along and blows them to bits!”

Riddick rocked back as if she’d slapped him, rage suffusing his face and dumping ice all over her anger. He rose slowly, staring down at her, fists clenched…

…and backed away from her.

It left Audrey speechless, both the shivery knowledge that he had wanted to strike her, and the realization that he’d forced himself to disengage before he did. She watched as he stalked over to his ornate desk and began pulling off his ceremonial armor.

“Do you know how the Necromongers became my army?” he growled after a moment.

“No,” she managed. “How?”

“I was looking for you.”

That startled her, spearing through the carefully-crafted armor she’d built around herself. He’d cared about what had happened to her? That wasn’t possible. This was the same man who had abandoned her without a word, without even a good-bye. His indifference to her had been a fundamental part of what she had known.

“Last year the Holy Man tried to forcibly recruit me into defending his planet from the Necromongers. He sent mercs after me. When I got to New Mecca, you were gone, and he fed me some shit about how you were in prison for murder.”

“What?”

He turned and frowned at her. “What I said. He thought you were doing time in Crematoria.”

Audrey blinked and shuddered. Crematoria was considered one of the worst outworld prisons in existence, a place that was routinely found in violation of the Galactic Human Rights Charter. Attempts to have it shut down, however, had repeatedly failed, although new petitions circulated every year and Audrey herself had been signing them ever since she reached her majority.

“He said you never forgave me for leaving you when you needed me most,” Riddick continued.

Jack felt another spear go through her. She felt the sting of tears in her eyes, her nose stinging too.

“I forgave you,” she managed after a moment.

It had taken her a while to forgive him, and that forgiveness had only come when she’d reconciled herself to how little she – or any other person besides himself – had meant to him. It was wrong to blame or hate a person for things they were incapable of doing, she’d told herself. She’d had to forgive Riddick for lacking the capacity to care about her.

Now, though, he was claiming that he had cared.

“I didn’t abandon you,” he growled at her. “I thought you were safe with the Holy Man, and it was better for you if I wasn’t around. And I came back, but you were gone—”

“I’d been gone for four years!” The words exploded out of her before she could stop them.

“Why’d he think you were in slam?” Riddick shouted back at her.

“I don’t know! I don’t have any idea how he could have gotten that kind of crazy—”

Crazy.

Audrey looked up at Riddick, feeling the pieces falling together for her. “It was Kyra, wasn’t it? She was in Crematoria.”

Riddick nodded, his lips compressed into a tight line. “Seemed pretty fuckin’ certain she was you, too. Who the hell was she, Jack?”

For a moment Audrey almost protested the name again, but she let it lie. If all of the darkness she’d turned her back on was being dragged right back out, she probably couldn’t win on that name, either. “She was my roommate in the psychiatric ward.”

Riddick went completely still, staring at her. Had she actually rendered him speechless? Finally his lips moved. “When were you in a psychiatric ward, Jack?”

She sighed and closed her eyes, pushing the sleeves of her sweatshirt up her arms. “Three months after you left me on New Mecca, I tried to kill myself. Almost succeeded, too.” She held her hands out, palms up.

She heard Riddick move closer, his clothing whispering as he crouched down before her again. He took her hands in his and she felt him lean closer. His thumbs ran over the old scars that ran from her wrists up her arms, halfway to her elbows. Time had faded them somewhat, but nobody who really looked at them – as he was looking them now – could mistake their meaning.

It had been three months since she’d awakened to find herself in the al-Walid guest room on New Mecca, with Riddick simply gone. The darkness had swallowed her, and had almost defeated her. She’d decided that it was time to forfeit the battle. Filling the guest bathtub with hot water and stealing one of “Uncle Abu’s” straight razors, she’d climbed in and cut her wrists under the water. It hadn’t even hurt. She’d watched with fascination as ribbons of scarlet spooled out in the water, slowly turning it pink, then red. It had been her last memory until she woke up in the hospital…

…and she’d never seen the al-Walid house again.

4.
The Girl Who Wasn’t There

Riddick felt as though his guts had been torn open.

In all of his imaginings of what it would be like to find Jack, he’d visualized almost everything. He’d pictured what it would be like if she’d become every bit as insane as Kyra. He’d imagined her as an aristocratic lady, a street urchin, even a merc like that Logan woman. He’d truly thought that he’d conceived of every possibility.

But the one thing that he’d never conceived of, that had never occurred to him… was that she wouldn’t like him anymore. The admiration and affection in her eyes, which had captivated him in spite of his best efforts to resist, was something he’d thought would somehow always be there. It had been one of the things he’d looked forward to seeing again when they were reunited. She’d been the one person in the universe who had thought he was a good man, and he’d needed that acceptance more than he’d ever realized.

Now he knew exactly how much he’d needed it, how much he’d counted on it. Now that it was lost to him.

In its own way, it was as bad an outcome as if she’d actually turned out like Kyra.

He studied her closely, forcing himself to set aside all of his expectations and see what was actually in front of him. A strange feeling moved through him as he realized how well she’d actually grown up, perhaps better than he’d ever hoped.

The young woman before him was beautiful. The marks of strain on her face were clearly new to her and not habitual, the sort that would vanish with a good night’s sleep and a hearty meal or two. She was slim, but he could feel good muscle tone on her arms that spoke of health and vitality. Her skin was smooth, flawless, and healthy, her shoulder-length hair glossy if a bit tousled by the battle she’d been caught up in. Her hands in his were slender and unworked, with long, shapely fingers tipped by well-groomed nails. One finger on her right hand had a slight writing callus on its side, and she wore what appeared to be a class ring. Other than small gold studs in her ears, she wore no other jewelry.

Her clothes were both casual and elegant, jeans and a college sweatshirt with running shoes, all clean and in good repair. She looked like an Everywoman, he thought, one of thousands – millions – of wholesome college girls who had been strolling campuses around the galaxy for centuries, moving from class to class, dorm to dining hall. If he could have chosen a life and a future for the feisty girl he’d met in the wreckage of the Hunter-Gratzner, he thought he couldn’t have found a better one than the one she’d apparently built for herself.

What was she doing away from it? How had this prosperous, vivacious college girl ended up a shivering captive of the Basilica? And why did she fear and dislike him?

“Tell me what happened to you,” he commanded, and sadness crossed her beautiful features. His hand rose to stroke her cheek before he could stop it, and he watched the sadness turn into confusion. Did she really think he was that heartless? Didn’t she remember how hard he’d fought to keep her safe? Didn’t she know that he’d been unable to stop himself from doing so?

She lowered her head, looking down at her hands in his. “I… couldn’t handle it all. Everything that had happened… what I’d become… I hated it. I hated myself.”

“Why?” He didn’t understand that. Jack had been one of the most compassionate people he’d ever met, and had awakened an answering compassion within himself; what was there to hate?

“Because I was a killer. People died because of me.”

Well, fuck. Now he understood her reasoning, better than he wanted to. She’d sought, after the crash, to emulate him, and had paid a terrible price for it. And if she’d blamed and hated herself for what had happened as a result, enough to try to end her life, how much more must she have blamed and hated him?

He couldn’t even argue with her. She was, unfortunately, right in her statement. It had been her blood-scent that the creatures had been drawn to, years before, during that desperate run through the desert. At the very least, Paris had died because of an attack the creatures had launched against her. Nor could he contradict her assertion that she was a killer, because her finger had been on the trigger of the gun that had blown Antonia Chillingsworth’s head apart.

The fact that he had never held any of those things against her was irrelevant. She had held them against herself. Imam had been wrong, he realized. She’d never been in any danger of becoming like him. Faced with what it truly meant to be what he was, she’d spurned it, but had done so almost too late to save herself.

Could he have helped her if he’d stayed? Were there things he could have told her, said to her, as someone who knew what it was like to take a life, that might have helped her reconcile herself to what had happened instead of taking a razor to her wrists?

I really did abandon her when she needed me the most, he thought, feeling sick to his stomach. The Holy Man had probably been too busy trying to keep her from following his path to notice that she was, in fact, wallowing in guilt and self-loathing instead. He had probably worsened things without meaning to.

Riddick could see it in his mind, the oblivious cleric warning her of how her soul was endangered by the things she’d done, not even realizing that she was way ahead of him in terms of recriminations and what she’d needed to hear was that she was still a good person. She must have found that good person within her again, but apparently she’d only been able to do it by repudiating that entire time and everything that had been part of it…

…including him. Especially him.

“You were never a bad person, Jack.” It might be too late for him to counter those old beliefs and assumptions, but maybe he could reach her. “You weren’t out to hurt anybody.”

She shook her head. “Yes I was. When I picked up that gun, I wanted her dead.”

Here was an opportunity to counter her, and he pressed it. “And why was that, Jack? What was she doing? You remember, don’t you?”

Anxiety twisted Jack’s face before him. She shook her head again. “It was wrong, what I did, I was wrong—”

“Was she unarmed?” he pushed.

“No, but—”

“Was she trying to kill someone? Maybe someone you cared about? Maybe someone you loved?” He leaned forward. Come on, Jack, admit it.

Jack lurched backward, the chair crashing to the floor and almost tripping her as she stumbled away from him. “I can’t talk about this. I can’t—”

“You have to, Jack,” he countered, following her. “Remember what happened. I opened the escape shuttle hatch and she was standing there. She had a gun in her hand and she fired—”

The high-pitched shriek that emerged from Jack’s mouth didn’t sound human, but more like the sound of a wounded infant animal. Riddick watched in horror as she folded in on herself. Her hands were over her ears, her arms coming forward to cover her face from view. As he watched, she dropped to her knees and then fell onto her side, curling into a tiny, tight, fetal ball. Finally the wail tapered off and she was silent, shivering.

Oh, fuck.

“Jack?” He knelt down beside her and touched her back as gently as he could manage. She didn’t answer.

He put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. The only answer was a soft whimper.

What the fuck did I do to her? he thought, horrified. Shit, she never recovered from all of that. She just buried it and tried to move on.

“Jack?” She still wouldn’t answer him. He lifted her off of the floor, still in her tight, shivering curl, and carried her over to his enormous, lavish bed. Lowering her onto it, he began trying to get her to unfold. “Audrey?”

That elicited a response. She lifted her head and looked at him, blinking.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, the words feeling unfamiliar and almost unpronounceable on his tongue. “I won’t ask you about that anymore, I promise. It’s okay…”

Her face was tear-streaked and tremulous, but she let him unbend her legs and slowly the tension left her limbs. He pulled her sneakers off and tossed them to the floor, keeping his movements slow and deliberate so she wouldn’t panic. She seemed a little confused, and he wondered if she even remembered what he’d asked her.

Whatever they did to her in that psychiatric ward, they didn’t help her enough. He needed to know exactly what had happened. It was the only way he’d be able to avoid triggering another attack like that… and maybe the only way he’d ever get through to her.

“Let’s start over, okay? Tell me about the hospital.” He stroked her cheek and was both surprised and gratified when she didn’t flinch back.

Jack swallowed, and then began to speak. Her voice was level, dry, and subdued, the words uninflected. It was as though she was telling someone else’s story, Riddick thought with awe. Awe that chilled as he realized that was exactly what it was to her. He listened intently. Somewhere in this tale, he hoped, would be the clues he needed to help her become herself again. And maybe, just maybe, an explanation of Kyra’s madness as well.

Riddick listened harder than he’d ever listened to anything before.

5.
Breathing, But Not Living

Jack woke up to a cold, sterile, white world. Everything ached, and she couldn’t move. For a while, she wasn’t sure where she was or why. Memory slowly began to come to her. She was dead. She’d killed herself and now she was dead.

Death, she decided, was boring. Craning her head, she began trying to figure out where she was.

A white room?

It was a small room with no decorations. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor and a door, all white. And a bed. A bed that she was strapped down in.

Well, shit. Maybe she wasn’t dead after all.

She felt numb and floaty on top of the ache. Chilly, too. Everything felt soft and distant, even the failure of her suicide attempt. It annoyed her but the desperate emotions that had inspired it weren’t there. It just was.

Drugged. She’d been drugged. That explained how calm she felt and how long it had taken her to figure out that she wasn’t dead. She lay still contemplating how long it might have been since her attempt. Her arms, she began to notice, were sore, a low throb developing centered in her wrists.

That’s right, I cut them, didn’t I?

The fog was beginning to lift, and with it the numbness. She still felt disconnected and off-center, but she was more and more aware. She tried lifting her head, but could only raise it an inch or two before the restraints held her firmly.

“Hello?” Her voice was raspy, like something sharp was buried inside her throat, and she began to cough. Her lungs ached, too. Why was that?

She was preparing to call out again when the door opened and a middle-aged man in white entered.

If I still thought I was dead, he’d be one hell of a disappointing angel.

“Hello, Miss Doe, I’m glad to see you’re with us again.”

Doe?

“Why am…” She had to stop and cough. “Why am I ‘Miss Doe?’”

The man drew a chair over to the side of Jack’s bed and sat down. She blinked. How had she missed the chair? How much more was she missing? “Under questioning, the al-Walids admitted that they did not know your real name. Perhaps you would like to tell me, and I can have your file changed?”

For a moment, he almost won, and she almost unthinkingly told him her name was Audrey MacNamera. But the words stopped in her mouth. She couldn’t be Audrey anymore. Audrey had been a good person. Innocent. Maybe a little impatient with life, to the point where she’d done a really stupid thing in a fit of pique, but she wasn’t a stone-cold, evil killer. Which, Jack reminded herself, was what she’d become, why she was no longer Audrey, and why she no longer deserved to live.

She shook her head and the doctor – she assumed that was what he was – heaved a sigh.

“Very well, then. You are aware why you’re here, aren’t you?”

Jack shrugged. “Tried to kill myself, right?”

The doctor nodded. “And you very nearly succeeded, too. If Mrs. al-Walid hadn’t found you when she did, you would have.”

Damn her. Never minding her own business…

“After all, when she found you, you’d already slipped under the water and drowned.”

Aha! So that was why her throat and lungs hurt. She must have slid under the water when she passed out.

“How’d she find me? She wasn’t supposed to be home.” Jack had timed the attempt for when nobody was supposed to be around, especially not Lajjun and baby Ziza.

“I don’t know the answer to that. Just that she came home, went to check on you, and found you mere minutes before brain death would have set in.” The doctor frowned and tilted his head at her. “How do you feel? Are you in full possession of your faculties? You do remember who you are, right?”

Jack nodded. “No brain damage, more’s the pity.”

The doctor frowned and leaned closer. “The al-Walids say you go by ‘Jack.’ Would you like to tell me, Jack, why you tried to end your life?”

She sighed. That question had been coming from the get-go. She might as well get it over with so they could move on. “It needs ending.”

“Why?”

The sadness that the drugs had suppressed returned at that moment, a vast, empty ache yawning open. Darkness and desolation filled her, spreading out to consume everything around her. The pristine white room became coal-black in her heart. But the darkness remained empty. He was gone. Even Riddick had turned his back upon what she had become.

“I don’t deserve to live after what I did,” she answered after a moment.

“And what would that be, Jack?” From the mild curiosity in his voice, she realized that he didn’t know. Imam hadn’t spilled her secret.

Too bad. Out it was coming at long last.

“Murder.”

A long, shocked silence followed.

“Who… did you murder, Jack?” Yeah, she’d startled him out of his routine approach.

Jack shrugged a little. “Her name was something Chillingsworth. Owned some ship called the Kubla Khan or Gobbledy-Gook or something.”

“I see.”

“No, you really don’t.” She shrugged again. “You probably don’t even believe me.”

“Of course I do,” he said after a pause that was just a little too long for honesty. “So, uh… how did you do it?”

“I shot her in the head.”

“Why?”

Riddick on the ground… incoherent screams of rage emerging from a twisted mouth that ought to have been beautiful, but was hideously ugly… terror and a sense that she was about to lose something precious, and then the roar and kick—

“Because I wanted to kill her.” The rest didn’t matter. She’d lost something even more precious through her actions, something that she could never, ever recover. Something that she didn’t want to live without. But this doctor, who didn’t even believe she’d done what she said, wouldn’t understand that, so there was no point in trying to tell him about it.

“I see.”

This time Jack didn’t even bother to contradict his meaningless words. She just ignored him. The silence lasted for several minutes.

“Obviously we have a great deal to discuss,” he finally said. “In the meantime, I’m clearing you for the C ward.”

“C ward?” She looked at him with curiosity.

The doctor’s smile was professional, almost salesmanlike. He took a stiff paper chart out of his folder and held it up. The chart was divided into four sections, each lettered A, B, C, and D. Below the letters were headings for “restrictions” and “privileges,” with lists of each.

“There are four wards here,” he explained, touching the chart as he went. “A is for the mildly disturbed who are well on their way to recovery, and pose no threat to themselves and others, and have no intention of escaping. B is for the disturbed who need closer monitoring and restricted movement. C is for patients who may pose a threat to themselves, and possibly others, and need very close monitoring until they stabilize. And D is for patients who are deeply disturbed and violent and pose a genuine hazard to those around them.”

Jack nodded, skimming the lists. C Ward. That meant she probably wouldn’t have access to anything that would let her finish the job. She’d need to get into A Ward for that. Well, she had a goal, of a sort. “Guess you’re not worried I’ll kill again, huh?” she asked him dryly.

He cleared his throat, once more uncomfortable. “You don’t seem to pose any sort of immediate danger, no… you’re lucid, calm—”

“Drugged.”

“No, the drugs have worn off, Jack. And they wouldn’t have stopped you from saying outrageous things if that was your tendency.”

“You don’t consider a confession to murder outrageous?”

He leaned forward, an avid look sparking in his eyes. “Was it intended to be?”

I knew it, he thinks I’m making it up! “I’m not some fucking drama queen if that’s what you’re thinking. That wasn’t a cry for help Lajjun ‘rescued’ me from. I was supposed to die.”

“I understand that. And I promise you, we will help you through this. Whatever happened—”

“I told you—”

“No matter what happened, Jack, you are a lovely young woman with a lot of life ahead of her, and you deserve to live and enjoy it. I promise you, when you leave here at last, you’ll agree with me.”

Yeah, right, whatever. “I’m kinda tired.”

“I imagine you are. It will take a while for you to recover from the blood loss and the other stresses on your body. I will arrange for your transfer to the floor of C Ward. A nurse will be by soon with clothes, and she’ll escort you there. In the meantime, is there anyone you’d like me to get in contact with?” Another expectant pause.

I want my mommy. It floated out of nowhere, along with the sudden, powerful sense-memory of cuddling in her mother’s lap, head on her shoulder, the gentle scent of her perfume – Shalimar – enfolding her. Why had she left home? Was Alvin really that bad?

The power of the memory closed her throat and brought tears dangerously close to the surface. She turned her face away from the doctor and shook her head.

“Alright, then. I’ll speak to you again soon, Jack, and we can begin getting you well.” He rose, the chair squeaking back across the floor. She didn’t turn to look at him as he left the room, still struggling with the pain of being what she’d become, and all the things she’d lost along the way.

I want my mommy, she thought again. I don’t want to be Jack anymore. I want to be Audrey again. I want my old life back.

She’d thought she was completely cried out, that no tears were left. She’d felt dry and empty when she’d climbed into the tub, and sure that she would never cry again. Now, though, as the tears overwhelmed her, she knew she’d been wrong.

She was still crying when the nurse arrived with her clothes.

6.
Back in the Little Leagues?

Released from her bonds, it only took Jack a minute to dress in the standard-issue softie pajamas given to psychiatric patients. The pants and shirt had no buttons, zippers, or fastenings of any kind, and the slippers were really just thick-soled socks. Nothing in the clothes could be used as a tool or a weapon of any kind.

The nurse let Jack take another minute to compose herself and wash her face before leading her down a long, narrow corridor, past door after locked door.

“Which ward is this?” Jack asked.

“It isn’t,” the woman answered. “This is the isolation wing.”

Jack nodded and filed that bit of knowledge away. She wondered what people had to do to get in and out of it, but it made sense that everybody would start off in it.

The corridor ended in a heavy security door that opened onto a T-junction, with two more security doors on either side. One was marked “A – C.” The other was marked simply “D.” Jack watched as the nurse ran a card through the “A – C” door’s scanner and rested her hand on the screen above it.

“Identify, please,” the softly-modulated, but subtly mechanical, voice asked.

“Raymond, Vanessa, with patient Jane Doe 7439.”

Interesting, Jack thought. The security system needed a pass-card, a hand-print, a voice pattern, and specific information about the nurse’s business. A system like that would be difficult-to-impossible to beat. Her father had installed and serviced a variety of such systems, including the ones used by Sirius Shipping and the Hunter-Gratzner, and Jack knew most of the back doors in, but this one, she knew, was way beyond her.

Exactly why was she thinking about escape anyway?

She followed Vanessa Raymond up a flight of steps to yet another security door. A landing was beyond it, and two more doors. One, pointed in the direction of the isolation wing below it, was labeled “C” and the other, “A – B.” A small glass pane let Jack see a flight of steps going upward on the other side of the “A – B” door.

Underground, she realized. That’s where this was. What an ingenious way to minimize the chances of escape! She bet that only the A ward itself, if that, was actually on ground level.

Why do I care how the security system works? Not like I’m planning on living long enough to beat it, anyway…

It was a shame, she suddenly thought, that the doctor hadn’t assigned her to D Ward. There probably would have been someone in there with homicidal enough tendencies for her needs, who could have been provoked into finishing what she’d started. Maybe she’d luck out and someone on C Ward would be like that, but it’d be harder to find.

And everybody thinks dying is way too easy, Jack thought with bitter amusement.

Raymond finished negotiating the lock for C Ward, and Jack followed her inside, into her new home. The corridors, she noticed, had been painted a “soothing” light blue. There was the low sound of human activity, now, different indeed from the sterile quietude of the isolation wing. Voices, sound effects, the soft hum of a media screen. She passed by an open entrance to some kind of gathering room. Glancing in, she saw patients dressed just like her, all female, grouped in clusters. Some were playing cards, some were watching a car chase on the large, flat screen, and a few were milling about on their own. Several turned and glanced her way.

“That’s the community room,” Raymond told her. “There’s also a dining and recreation area, and visiting rooms. But right now, let’s settle you in your dorm.”

Dorm? Jack smirked at the use of that school-like word. Frowning, she glanced back into the community room, and noticed for the first time that all of the patients were very young. The oldest looked to be in her late teens.

Okay, all-female and juvenile. Strange how she’d assumed that she’d be in with adults. Maybe it was a habitual assumption given how much time she’d spent in Riddick’s company. Like getting sent back to Little League after playing in the Majors.

Baseball had been a big deal on Deckard’s World, and Audrey had tracked the batting averages of all of her favorite players from the time she was six. Nobody on Helion Prime seemed to have a clue about the sport, which had frustrated Jack and left her feeling even more disconnected from her old self than ever. Now it was her little in-joke, though. She realized that a grim little smile had crossed her lips, and hid it away from Raymond’s view before the woman could see it.

The nurse led her to a short side-corridor, and to the second door on the left. She opened it and gestured for Jack to enter ahead of her. Jack did, noting that this was apparently Room 34C. Guess that’s my new address, she thought. It’d be easy enough to remember given that it was also her mother’s bra size. Another grim smirk tried to surface but she was ready for it, and it never made it onto her face.

“This will be your room,” Raymond was saying. “I apologize for the… décor. Your roommate is due back from Isolation in another day or two, and her doctor tells us that painting over her… art… would impede her progress. She mostly respects keeping it on her side of the room, at least.”

Jack blinked. Yeah, she could definitely tell the two sides of the room apart. One side was simple and spare, with a narrow bed next to a clean, light blue wall. The other side was a riot of garish, gruesome color. Her unnamed roommate had covered the walls, to and slightly over the invisible halfway mark, with elaborate drawings of death and mayhem. Moving closer, Jack scanned the images.

Good grief, she thought, and wondered if her roommate’s doctor was really as stupid as he suddenly seemed. The figures in the pictures were poorly drawn, but their meanings were crystal-clear to her. In the first month after Riddick had vanished, she’d still been obsessed enough with him to study his crimes, and had learned a great deal about anatomy in the process.

Each of the figures on the wall illustrated a different “kill-spot” on the human body, and the best way to reach it.

Maybe finding someone to finish the job won’t be so hard after all, she thought, suppressing another smile. Looks like my roomie even knows how to make it fast.

Other drawings, elsewhere on the wall, seemed to depict some kind of shootout or massacre. Bodies were littered around a collection of low buildings, a mountain range behind them. Some of the faces were nondescript, but a few were detailed, one or two of them even decent artistic work as though their drawer had spent hours getting them just right. Written in brilliant scarlet across the mountains was a single phrase – in English, Jack noted with surprise – WE NEVR SURENDURRED!

Okay, not very good English…

Jack glanced over the twisted mural again, looking for any other writing. There… beneath the kill-spot drawings. MY FAVRIT GAME. And scattered throughout the drawings, she noticed, were things that possibly were the letter “K.”

“Wow,” she muttered.

“She’s really not that bad anymore,” Raymond said behind her. “She’s come a long way. You should have seen the things she drew in D Ward.”

Jack found herself wishing that she could. “How come she’s in Isolation?”

“It’s just a precaution. The other patient was the aggressor. This time, Kyra was just defending herself, even if she did get a little carried away…”

Jack glanced back at Raymond just as the woman gave herself a little shake.

“Anyway, we don’t feel that it was really a relapse on her part. Don’t worry, she’s no threat to you.”

Well, damn. Jack nodded, giving the nurse what she hoped was a reassured smile. “That’s good to know.”

Raymond glanced at the chrono on her wrist. “Dinner is in about another hour. When the bell rings—”

“Emergency!” The radio on the nurse’s belt suddenly blared. “All available medical staff report immediately to D Ward!”

Raymond hesitated, and then continued, suddenly looking guilty. “…just go out to the main corridor and down to its end. You’ll see everyone else heading there.”

“You’re not gonna show me around?” Jack asked with mild surprise.

“I’m sorry… Jack, right? They need me in D Ward. Will you be okay?”

Jack nodded and sat down on her bed. “Yeah, thanks.”

She glanced at the mural, and when she looked back at the doorway, Raymond was gone.

For several minutes, Jack sat quietly, studying the pictures. There was a lot of anger in them, she decided, rising and moving closer so she could see better. The artist – had Raymond said her name was Kyra? – wasn’t really that bad at drawing, but she only ever bothered on getting a few of the people right… the rest had been left as contemptuous caricatures, with little detail and less accuracy. The kill-spot people were little better than stick figures, mostly… except for one. He had been drawn in lavish detail, staring down in agonized horror at the large knife piercing his femoral artery. The drawing felt almost gleeful, as if its artist had reveled in depicting that particular man’s suffering.

“You really don’t want to mess with those.”

Jack turned around. Two girls, maybe two or three years older than her, were standing in the doorway, their arms linked around each other’s waists. One of them was a petite, delicate blonde… with the meanest, coldest eyes Jack had ever seen on a human being. The other was taller, slightly chubby, with short, dark hair.

“Sorry?”

The dark-haired girl spoke again. “Those are Kyra’s. Mess with ‘em and she’ll kick your ass all over the C Ward.”

The words were less frightening than the look of joyous anticipation that briefly crossed the blonde’s face.

“Kyra’s my roommate?” Jack aimed her question at the brunette, trying to ignore the other girl.

“Yeah, guess she is. I’m Colette and this is Stacy. We’re her friends.” Unspoken was a contemptuous and probably not yours.

“I’m Jack.”

Colette snorted. “Great. Well, just so you know, the only ones who swing that way are me, Stacy, Andrea, and Lynn. Stacy’s mine, and Andrea and Lynn are an item too, so don’t you go trying to cut in.”

Jack blinked, trying to follow what Colette was talking about. It took a moment for her to figure it out.

Oh. Oh!

“No, I’m not—”

“You got something against lesbians?” Stacy snarled.

“No, but I’m not into that…”

Colette smirked. “Oh great, Kyra’s going to be so thrilled. Her new roommate’s a total wimp. What are you in for anyway?”

Jack felt her eyes narrowing. Wimp? She’d traveled with Richard B. Riddick, not exactly the kind of record a wimp could boast—

You’re not actually trying to take pride in that, are you? the voice of the girl she’d once been demanded.

For a moment her throat closed and her eyes began to sting. Stacy’s snort of contempt brought her back to herself. She raised her chin. “Attempted suicide.”

Colette began to chuckle. “Yeah, great. Kyra’s just going to love that.”

“At least she won’t have to worry about this one trying to take her out, like the last one,” Stacy sneered.

“Yeah, true… but just so you know, little girl, you’re in the Big Leagues now. Stacy and me, we’ve done things you can’t even imagine… and Kyra… you just ain’t worthy. So don’t go getting a big head or anything, because you’re the littlest fish in this pond.”

The urge to tell them who she’d run with – and what she’d done – surfaced again, but she swallowed it down. They didn’t deserve to know… and she didn’t deserve to brag about it, anyway. “Whatever you say.”

Colette narrowed her eyes for a moment, studying her. Then she shook her head and turned, drawing Stacy away with her. “We’ll let Kyra deal with you. C’mon, Stace, we got better places to be.”

Jack sat back down on her bed, and waited for the dinner bell to ring. “I’m in the Big Leagues now,” she muttered to herself, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

How she wished Colette was right.

7.
You Meet the Strangest People…

Jack didn’t meet her roommate until the next morning.

Dinner had gone alright. When the bell rang, Jack followed Raymond’s directions to the dining room, where the other girls of C Ward were serving themselves. She deliberately hung back and waited until everyone else had picked out their seats before choosing one of the few empty chairs left over. Mercifully, it wasn’t anywhere near Colette and Stacy.

There was an empty seat by them, but she figured it was probably Kyra’s. And neither girl was the kind of person she wanted to seek out as a friend, anyway… even assuming she was looking for friendship or even a future.

The girls at her table looked her over with mild curiosity and then went back to eating their meals. Jack glanced around, trying to take in as much detail as she could without staring at anyone. That was the kind of thing that would be sure to provoke someone, and for now she wanted to concentrate on blending in.

This was definitely a strictly-juvenile facility. All of the girls in the ward were at least pubescent, and none of them looked fully adult, although one or two came close. A few of the girls were obviously unbalanced, one of them rocking as she ate and another babbling angrily at her spaghetti, but most of them seemed ordinary enough.

Jack quickly discovered that she still had almost no appetite. Three or four bites of her spaghetti and her gorge tried to rise, making her push the plate away from her and shudder. She wasn’t sure if it was the food or her own twisted innards, but she suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of eating another bite. She’d been Lajjun’s great despair, picking at the lavish plates of gourmet foods that Imam’s young wife had prepared.

A sudden, vivid image of Lajjun dragging her out of the tub and trying to revive her almost cost Jack her scant meal. She wasn’t sure if it was a real memory or just her hyperactive imagination, but—

“No appetite yet, huh?”

Jack looked up and met the curious stare of the girl across from her. With her narrow face, uneven features, and hungry gaze, the girl was not at all pretty, but Jack felt no sense of menace from her. Just interest. She shrugged, not really sure what to say in answer.

“Me neither when I first got here,” the girl went on after a moment. “I was so skinny. They had to stick tubes down me at first, and one of them almost went down the wrong pipe—”

“Shut up, Celia!” one of the other girls snapped. “She’s not interested! Why do you always have to talk about this shit when people are trying to eat, anyway?”

A look of hurt came over Celia’s face.

“No, I’m okay,” Jack found herself saying, wanting to soothe that look away.

“Maybe you are,” grumbled another girl. “I don’t wanna hear it.”

“I was just being friendly,” Celia muttered to her spaghetti.

Jack glanced around at the other girls and saw uniformly exasperated looks on their faces. She suddenly had the suspicion that Celia’s concept of friendliness might be a little invasive. She felt bad for her, but at the same time she suspected that if she let Celia latch on, she’d end up feeling even more confined and intruded-upon than she had with the al-Walids.

She knew, however, that she wasn’t going to manage to eat any more of her dinner. The few hints of appetite she’d had were long gone. She sat quietly while the other girls ate and discussed the plot of some soap opera they all watched. A woman in a coma, an adulterous husband, a secret love-child, and a mysterious alien artifact. All of the clichés.

Jack was waiting for someone – anyone – to leave the room so she could, too, without breaking some written or unwritten rule that nobody had told her about yet. Most of the girls, however, seemed content to gab and go back for seconds.

This was a ward for disturbed girls? Jack’s middle school cafeteria had been more unruly. She wondered what the rest of the girls were in for.

Maybe wanton telepathy. No sooner had she thought that, than one of the girls at the table spoke to her.

“So, what’d you do to get here?”

Jack shrugged. If she was curious, they had a right to be, too. “Tried to kill myself.”

“Yeah,” the girl who had snapped at Celia answered. “Those ‘bracelets’ of yours were a giveaway. Did you mean it or are you one of those sob-story types?”

Jack looked more closely at her, studying her face. There was no challenge there, no belligerence, just a mixture of curiosity and caution. Like she’d dealt with a lot of people who carried on for dramatic reasons but didn’t really mean what they were doing. Jack had met a few of those herself. Annabelle, from school, right before she’d taken off, had been like that. A “trendy cutter,” she’d been a showcase of self-inflicted, shallow, non-scarring wounds that were kept hidden from family and teachers, but “accidentally” displayed to fellow students who fussed over her indulgently. Jack had been suckered in for a few weeks, herself, until she wised up to Annabelle’s game. Her refusal to play along any further had earned her a few nasty epithets from the girl’s “support group.”

How wrong they’d been. She hadn’t even started down the path to becoming a “cold-hearted bitch” yet at that point. Alvin still hadn’t moved in, things were still right between her and her mother, and guns were still things that she would never dream of touching, much less using to blow someone’s—

“So is that silence an ‘I meant it,’ or a…” The girl tilted her head back and put the back of one hand to her forehead, making her voice flutter on the verge of a melodramatic sob. “‘You couldn’t possibly understand!’”

Jack felt her lips twitch into a sudden smile, her first in weeks. “No, I meant it. You get a lot of the other kind here?”

“Not many. Most of them are in B Ward, but a few put on a good enough show to get down here. So, you planning on trying again?”

Jack felt her smile vanish. She looked away from the other girl’s shrewd, worldly gaze. “Maybe. How come you’re here?”

“Catatonic schizophrenia.” The girl said it without a moment’s hesitation or shame. “Don’t worry. I haven’t had an episode in a few weeks.”

“Is that good?”

“Probably. Hopefully. They’re trying me out on some new medication, and so far, so good. I’m Heather, by the way.”

Jack felt the smile slipping back onto her lips. “Jack.”

“Nice to meet you, Jack.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

Celia let out a hard, aggrieved sigh and got abruptly up from the table. Jack watched her stalk out of the room, feeling a conflicted, uncomfortable mixture of guilt and annoyance. She wasn’t at all sure why she felt like it was somehow her fault, but she did.

It was, she realized, the way Annabelle had made her feel when she was starting to wise up to her game, but hadn’t really caught on yet.

I don’t even know what she’s in for, but whatever it is, it’s not my responsibility. She hoped she’d remember that. Nobody else at the table was paying any attention to Celia’s behavior, definitely a sign that it was commonplace.

The rest of the dinner was uneventful. Jack skipped dessert, letting the first girl who asked take her piece over. She focused on listening and filing away information, the way she had when she’d been running and hiding. The instincts, she thought, were much the same. But that puzzled her; those were survival instincts. She’d thought she didn’t have any of those left.

Finally people started leaving the tables. The orderlies – somehow Jack had completely failed to see them until now – cleared the places behind the girls as they left their tables.

“That’s fancy service,” Jack remarked, feeling a spark of her old amusement surface. Who’d have thought that crazy girls would get valets?

“Not really,” Heather answered at her side. “They clear all the plates so that they can make sure nobody’s walked off with a piece of silverware that’ll get made into a weapon. And since they clear them from the table, they know who was sitting where, and so they know who to go after. That’s why it’s like that.”

Well. That made sense. Good to know, too. One idle thought that had run through her mind had been that she could try to fashion a stolen knife or fork into a weapon of self-destruction.

Cross that off the options list…

“So, what happens now?”

“Tonight’s movie, if you like ’em. The girls voted for some spy movie… not a James Bond, one of those cheesy knockoffs. I wanted a classic myself. So I’m gonna go read instead. You can watch the movie or go to the game room, or the library, or whatever.”

It was only afterwards that Jack noticed that Heather hadn’t invited her to hang out with her. In that moment, she wasn’t aware of it at all. A small part of her was still feeling disconnected and off-kilter. She considered the possibilities Heather had mentioned, but her decision was hijacked by the yawn that forced its way out at that moment.

“I’m still pretty tired. If I want to head back to my room and turn in, are they gonna get mad?”

“They?”

“The orderlies.”

Heather grinned and shook her head. “No, they won’t give you a hard time. I usually go read in my room after dinner and they’ve never objected.”

Together they headed back toward the “dorms.”

At 22C, Heather stopped and opened the door, gave Jack a grin, a wave, and a “good night,” and was gone a second later before she could answer.

Friendly.

No really, Jack thought, Heather had been very friendly under the circumstances. This was a place where you could know with absolute certainty that anyone you met had something wrong with her. Friendship couldn’t be offered lightly or incautiously.

Jack headed for her room, hoping that Heather would become a friend.

Aren’t you planning on being dead before that happens?

That was right; she was.

Jack sighed and headed for 34C, opening the door and going in. Garish pictures of violence and death glared at her from Kyra’s side of the room. She turned away from them and pulled down the covers on her cot. Climbing in, she faced the light blue wall on her side of the room. At least it didn’t make her think of Riddick’s world of mayhem.

Sleep came more quickly than she would have expected, carrying her down into its depths. Those depths, though, were colder than the deeps of space, full of the lonely dreams of despair that she’d hoped to shed at last with her death. Dreams in which she faced her mother again, her hand firmly in Alvin’s, the two of them smiling at her as though the brutal murder of her dreams was a good thing. Dreams in which she woke up in the al-Walid home and couldn’t find Riddick. “I’m sorry, my child. He thought it best that he already be gone when you woke…”

Everybody leaves me…

Her pillow was wet when she finally woke.

She blinked; she’d gone to sleep with the light still on. Someone was moving around behind her.

Jack rolled over, groaning a little as the pain in her wrists spiked. She needed to ask for some painkillers for that—

Oh boy. This must be Kyra…

The young woman over by the other bed was maybe an inch or two taller than she was. She had long, thick, very dark hair that waved around her shoulders in wild tangles. She was surveying the wall, a red marker in one hand.

I sure hope that’s Kyra…

“Um… hi. Kyra, right?”

The girl turned, frowning. “Yeah. So?”

“Just wanted to make sure before you started drawing. Your friends said you were pretty protective of those pictures.”

Kyra was very pretty. Jack guessed that she was about sixteen or seventeen. Her heart-shaped face had an almost feline quality, Jack thought, as if she was a cat that had been made human. Her eyes were a strange shade of blue-gray that Jack had never seen before in her life. Her small chin had a little hint of a cleft in it. There was something both sensual and challenging about her face, overall… and not exactly friendly. Jack wondered if Kyra was perpetually angry.

“Thanks,” she said, as if it was a foreign word for you. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jack.”

“No. Really.” Scorn sparked in her strange eyes.

Jack suddenly felt tired again. She shrugged, cuddling up to her clammy pillow. “If you don’t like it, there’s always Jane Doe. That’s what it says on my file.”

“And here Colette said you were a wimp.” A strange mixture of scorn and amusement was in her voice.

So she’d already seen her friends.

“How come you asked who I was if you already talked to her?” Jack wondered where this smart-ass attitude was coming from. Deathwish much?

“You’re a suicide case, right?” Kyra’s voice was considering.

Jack nodded. Kyra walked over to the side of her bed and crouched down, fixing her with a hard glare.

“Okay, I’m only gonna say this once… Jack. Maybe you think if you say the right shit, you’ll get lucky and I’ll do to you what I did to Roger over there.” She gestured at the detailed kill-spot drawing on the wall. “Maybe you think I’ll do your dirty work for you. Forget it. I’m not that stupid. But you provoke me? I’ll make you wish I had killed you.”

Jack couldn’t look away from those strange, slatey eyes. For a moment they almost seemed silvery… almost Riddick-like.

This is who I would have become if I’d followed him.

“We understand each other, Jack?” Kyra asked, her voice almost friendly.

“Yeah, we do,” Jack sighed.

“Good.” The smile that crossed Kyra’s face was smug and mocking. “Welcome to C Ward.”

8.
Queen of the Killer’s Club

It was only after a few days in the ward that Jack noticed that almost none of the girls were Muslim.

From the morning she’d awakened in Imam’s house, she’d been surrounded by all things Islam, to the point where she’d come to assume that the entire world of Helion Prime was just like New Mecca. In some ways, New Mecca was very cosmopolitan, but in other ways, it was very provincial and one-note.

It had never occurred to her that it was just an ethnic suburb of a much larger city.

Deckard’s World, of course, was a much younger colony than Helion Prime, and Jack was used to smaller, more rustic towns. It hadn’t really entered her mind that there might be even more city past the points Abu and Lajjun escorted her through… and that there were people, in those other parts of the town, that she’d have related to better. People who played baseball, and allowed pork into their homes, and didn’t have prohibitions against graven images. People she’d have understood, and who would have understood her… or understood her better than the al-Walids had.

Heather had looked at her strangely when she commented on how diverse the girls in C Ward were. It was only after they’d gone around the subject a few times that they realized what Jack’s problem was.

“Shit, Jack, you mean you were on Helion Prime for three months and you never left MeccaTown?” Heather shook her head. “That’s just too weird. You’re not even Muslim, are you? I mean, the way you tore into the BLTs at lunch today, I thought you were gonna go on an eating rampage.”

Jack grinned a little and shook her head, still feeling like her whole world had turned on its side. The taste of that bacon was still with her, and she felt almost like she’d awakened from a long sleep. It was the first meal, since her arrival, that she’d actually finished, much less gone back for seconds of. “I had no idea that the whole planet wasn’t full of Muslim energy brokers. Shit, I had no idea anybody on this planet but me knew about baseball!”

Heather laughed. It was a nice sound, not mocking even though Jack knew she sounded like a complete dweeb. “Don’t tell me you’ve decided you’re normal, now, on the basis of me!”

Good point.

“I just… I’ve been pretty out of it, I guess.” Jack shrugged, unable to explain it better than that. But inside her, it was all coming together. She’d been cut off, from the outside world, from herself, from everything. Strange that she suddenly felt freer, imprisoned in the sub-basement of a psychiatric hospital, than she had the entire three months she’d had the run of the planet’s surface.

How could he do that to me? She wasn’t sure which “he” she meant. Either one would do, she thought.

“So out of it you didn’t even notice you were surrounded by a big city?” Heather looked more amused than ever.

Jack nodded. “Yeah. Well, I mean, we don’t have big cities this big back on D— my home world. And I guess I was kinda… wrapped up in myself.”

“Weird. You’re not the self-centered type. Not like some of the people around here.” Heather chuckled and shook her head. “So what were you all het up about?”

For a moment Jack wanted to smile and say that it was nothing. Just trivial teenage bullshit angst. But that wasn’t true, and in the last few days she’d come to value Heather very highly as a friend. She couldn’t lie, much as she suddenly wanted to. She couldn’t meet her eyes, either.

“I, uh… a bunch of people died thanks to me.”

“What, you had some kind of attack or something?” Heather had talked a little, in the last few days, about some of the “episodes” she had, many of which were less catatonic than epileptic in nature.

Jack shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

“C’mon, I told you all about my screwed-up stuff.” Heather grinned at her, though, and Jack had the sense that, if she insisted, she wouldn’t be pushed any further.

She closed her eyes. Suddenly the urge to confess was back, full force. “I shot and killed somebody. Among other things.”

“By accident? Like… playing with guns?” Heather’s voice was softer, a little hesitant.

“No,” Jack answered, her own voice softer too. “I meant to do it.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then, “Wow. Funny, I’m surprised you’re not hanging out with the Killer’s Club.”

Jack looked up sharply, but there was no censure in Heather’s gaze, just puzzled speculation. “The what?”

“You know… Kyra and Colette and Stacey and Doris. The Killer’s Club.”

Jack blinked. “They all killed people?”

“People, yeah, among other things. Stacey’s somebody you never want to introduce to your pets, you know what I mean?”

Jack shuddered and nodded. There’d been a boy like that in her school. “Are they all like that?”

Heather shook her head. “Well, Kyra’s hunted but I don’t think she’d take it out on pets. She’s not like them. The shit that happened to her would make anybody crazy.”

In the last several days, Jack and Kyra had exchanged maybe a handful of words. The wild-haired girl remained an enigma to Jack, who had to admit she was curious about her and her pictures. “What’s her story?”

“You ever heard of the New Christy Enclave?”

“You’re kidding!” Of course Jack had heard of them. She’d followed the story with enrapt fascination when it was unfolding; she’d even done her classroom Current Events reports on them several times. “She was one of them?”

Heather nodded. “She was one of the last ones they caught after the massacre. I think I heard one of the nurses saying that she’d been hiding in the woods for almost a year when they captured her. And she’s the one who murdered Roger Fiennes.”

Jack felt her mouth fall open in amazement as she realized where she’d seen the man on Kyra’s wall before. Roger Fiennes. Red Roger. Oh my god.

Social Studies had always been Audrey MacNamera’s favorite subject. From the time she was old enough to read, she’d been joining her father in reading the morning paper, learning about the colony worlds and their events. She’d been nine when the New Christy Enclave standoff began.

Her father had repeatedly said to her that the entire situation was one of the worst-handled ones in the history of colonization, and that she should remember it. She had, but it had never occurred to her that she’d meet any of the people involved in it.

The New Christy Colony, ironically, had been one of the very first groups to leave Earth to seek a new home in the stars. One of several religious separatist groups that had set out in the late twenty-first century, they’d left a mere ten years before the first Star Jump drives had been introduced and the colonization process had been revolutionized. While their near-light-speed ship had laboriously plodded across four hundred light years of space, their claim had been jumped.

More than four centuries after they’d left Earth, two years relativistic time for them, they’d arrived at their new home to find that it was already colonized and that the colonial government of the world had no intention of honoring their legitimately-filed claim. The world they’d planned to call New Christy was now a bustling colony planet called New Dartmouth. They’d filed an appeal with Earth, and had set up a planetside camp in the mountains while they waited to hear the results. For three years, they had remained aloof from the other colonists, who considered them a pack of archaic religious weirdos anyway.

Then the trouble had begun.

It had started with a scuffle over the Enclave’s children and their education. For some reason, the colonial government had gotten the wild idea that, despite their refusal to allow any of the new arrivals citizenship, they should have authority over how their children were being educated. From there things had begun to snowball. The story had broken onto the interplanetary news when the situation degenerated into an armed standoff… which had ended in a bloody massacre of most of the Enclave’s members. A handful of survivors – mostly children – had fled into the woods.

And Kyra, apparently, had been one of them.

If she was the one who had killed Red Roger, Jack realized, that meant that she’d been the very last one captured alive.

Roger Fiennes had been the Colonial Marshall in charge of the standoff. Less than a week after the first video footage of the Enclave massacre reached Deckard’s World, news that he and his tactics were under investigation had followed. Amnesty Interplanetary had dispatched observers and investigators, and then the news had come to light that the massacre had occurred less than a day before the Central Council was scheduled to make its ruling on the Enclave’s claim.

When the ruling was made public – the Council had sided with the Enclave – the firestorm had really begun. Audrey and her parents had discussed the new developments virtually every night, as more charges of misconduct were brought out; they were, in fact, some of her last and best memories before her parents had split up. She remembered that Fiennes had vanished right before he was going to be suspended from duty, and she’d argued with her father about whether he’d disappeared on purpose or not. In point of fact, he hadn’t. He’d been ambushed during one of his patrols by one of the Enclave’s now-feral children. His body was found a week later, suspended from a tree, in unspeakable condition. His captor had tortured him to death.

A few months later there’d been a small story about his killer having been captured. A girl, Jack remembered. Details about her identity hadn’t been released because she was a minor. Her gender had been released, along with some of the harrowing stories she’d told about rape and brutality that had occurred during the storming of the Enclave, and which she insisted that Fiennes himself had engineered and participated in.

“Remember this, Audrey,” her father had told her as they cleared the dinner table. It was only five weeks before he would abruptly move out, leaving her confused and shattered. “This is hopefully the only time things will go this out of control, but it may not be the last time the situation happens. There are still fifteen sublight colony ships unaccounted for, and who knows when or where they might show up. And there are three Phase One Star-Jumpers that vanished, too. For all we know, they might reappear at some point.”

The topic had fascinated her so much that she’d done her next history report on the Missing Colony Ships. She’d never heard what had happened to Red Roger’s killer, though. That hadn’t been made public.

“Wow,” she breathed, and heard Heather chuckle.

“You act like you just found the Holy Grail or something.”

Jack blinked and grinned ruefully over at the other girl. “I just… I read a lot about that whole blow-up. Never thought I’d meet one of the survivors. So… why’s she here?”

Heather shook her head in amusement. “Where else would you send a religious wacko who killed three Marshalls?”

“Three?”

“Yeah, she’d been hunting them for a while. I think they were the three who gang-banged her mother during the massacre or something. She tortured all of them before she killed them, too. And she admitted to being one of the Enclave’s shooters during the confrontation, so she probably killed a lot more people.”

Against her will, Jack was impressed. Kyra, she thought, at least had had sounder reasons than Riddick for killing the way she did… her back had been against the wall. “How’d she end up here? Isn’t Helion Prime, like… a hundred light years from New Dartmouth?”

“Well, what I hear is that they tried deprogramming her or something, at first, but then the Amnesty Interplanetary people filed to get her out of there. Something about how the people who had killed her family and way of life had no business telling her what was right and wrong, you know?”

Jack nodded. That certainly made sense to her.

“So she ended up getting sent here. They figured that Helion Prime’s got so much diversity that she’d have a better shot at acceptance. And, you know, learning tolerance herself.”

“And now she’s the leader of the C Ward Killer’s Club?” Interesting outcome.

Heather grinned. “Not really by choice. But the other girls, the ones with a real thing for violence… they just about worship her. They wanna grow up and be her or something. Sometimes she’s really very nice and normal, though.”

“So… what happened to her last roommate?”

Heather rolled her eyes. “Damn. That one really wasn’t Kyra’s fault. Valencia came in here thinking she was some hot shit… and when she heard Kyra’s rep, she wanted to throw down. Not smart. Kyra trashed her before the orderly Val had sucked off, in exchange for him disappearing, finally showed up to do his job. He got fired and I don’t know what happened to Val. Not that anybody cares… she was a bitch.”

Jack nodded and they headed for the dining hall. Throughout her meal, she found herself looking over at Kyra speculatively, more fascinated than ever. The girls around Kyra seemed to hang on every one of the rare words she spoke.

She’s a loner, Jack finally decided. They’re hanging all over her and it doesn’t mean a thing to her. They may be following, but she’s not trying to lead.

Kyra glanced over at her and frowned. Jack looked back down at her plate. Dumb thing to do, staring at her like that.

After dinner she headed for their room, wanting to look at the drawings again now that she knew exactly what they meant.

It was amazing what a little bit of knowledge could do. Now, remembering the pictures in the news, she realized that Kyra had captured the mountain range and the Enclave’s buildings with remarkable accuracy.

“We never surrendered,” she thought sadly. You never should have been put in that position.

When she’d still been Audrey, helping someone like Kyra had been her life’s goal. Before she’d become someone like her.

I wanna be Audrey again…

“You wanna tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?” came Kyra’s voice from behind her.

9.
Never Been to Stockholm

Jack didn’t freeze at the sound of Kyra’s voice. She didn’t whirl around. Somehow, knowing the other girl’s story, and feeling as though there was almost a connection between them as a result, had her at ease. Her eyes were still on the mountain range as she answered Kyra.

“Just looking. I didn’t realize until now that this was the New Christy Enclave. The pictures make a lot more sense to me now.”

Silence from behind her. Jack turned her head, surprising a look of complete stunned disbelief on Kyra’s face.

“You know about New Christy?”

Jack nodded, moving out of Kyra’s personal territory and over to her own bed. “I watched a lot of it on the news. Did some school reports on it. Never thought I’d meet one of its survivors.”

Kyra shook her head and frowned. “You gonna tell me I’m a psycho religious nut, now?” She seemed to be expecting it. Her expression was a mixture of scorn and guarded blankness.

Jack sat down on the bed and shook her head, too. “No, why?”

“Great.” Kyra rolled her eyes. “So I’m your hero now or something?”

Jack wasn’t able to stop the startled burst of laughter that escaped her. She clapped her hand over her mouth before she could get any more offensive, but Kyra’s eyes had already widened.

“What the fuck is so funny?”

“I’m sorry.” Jack cleared her throat because for some reason, the giggles were still with her. “You mean nobody’s ever said to you that those assholes were in the wrong?”

Kyra stared at her, confusion obvious on her face. “What, you mean… Roger and his guys? You think they were wrong?”

“I think they were butchers,” Jack replied seriously.

Kyra stared at her in silence for a long moment. Her jaw tightened and she blinked three times before her face began to relax. When she spoke, her voice was a little uneven, and Jack realized that she’d almost startled tears out of the older girl. “Yeah, you got that right. But that wasn’t what I was asking you, you know. You’re supposed to be in Group right now. The doc sent me to get you.”

“Group?” Jack had no idea what Kyra was talking about now. She wasn’t upset about the intrusion on her space?

Kyra nodded. “Every Sunday night after dinner. C Ward group therapy session.”

Oh. Oh.

“Nobody told me.”

Disbelief and scorn reappeared on Kyra’s face. “What, your guide didn’t tell you during orientation?”

Jack shook her head. “Something happened down in D Ward and she had to go help. Probably a bunch of stuff she never told me. So, where is it?”

Kyra studied her for a moment, the look of slight puzzlement back, and then shrugged. “C’mon.”

In her almost-week in the ward, Jack had rarely visited the recreation room. Usually there was too much noise and activity in it, the two vidscreens competing for attention and far too many people talking over them. Jack had avoided the room except at those odd hours when only a small handful of girls were in it, and there was relative peace and quiet. It was a perverse choice on her part; she liked activity and noise and the bustle of people. But it was something she no longer felt she had a right to.

The room had been rearranged for the group therapy session. The furniture had been pushed back to clear a space in the center of the room, and dining room chairs had been brought in and arranged in a large circle. Most of the chairs were occupied; Heather, she saw, had saved an empty seat by her. She split off from Kyra and headed for it, while Kyra rejoined the Killer’s Club about a third of the way around the circle.

“Nice of you to join us, Jack.” There was censure in the doctor’s voice. It wasn’t the one that had interviewed her in isolation, nor was it the psychiatrist who she’d given the silent treatment to in her last three private therapy sessions.

“Take it up with her tour-guide,” Kyra answered before she could. “They never told her.”

The looks on the faces of the other Killer’s Club girls told Jack that nobody had been expecting Kyra to take her side. The doctor seemed surprised as well. He looked over at Jack, the sternness gone from his face.

“Who brought you into the ward?”

“Nurse Raymond, but there was some kind of emergency down in D Ward and they needed her, so it’s not her fault or anything.” Raymond had seemed nice enough; Jack didn’t want her in trouble over this.

The Doctor made a note of some kind on his pad. “Very well, then. Let’s get started. Girls, I’m sure by now most of you have met our newest resident. She’s officially registered as Jane Doe 7439, but she goes by the name Jack.”

The dutiful chorus of “Hi Jack” that traveled around the circle almost made Jack laugh.

Hi, my name’s Jack, and I’m a Riddickaholic… She had to cough, covering her mouth to hide the smile and stifle the giggle that her thought had stirred within her.

“Hi,” she managed back once her throat was clear of laughter.

“Would you like to tell us a little about yourself, Jack?” There was a strange, avid look in the back of the doctor’s eyes.

Hoping to be the one who gets Stonewall Jack to open up? Bet that’d be some kind of coup or something.

She shrugged, mentally picking through what she could and couldn’t talk about.

“I’m thirteen years old. I’m here because I tried to kill myself, and yes, I meant it.”

Expectant silence greeted her. Everybody was waiting for more.

“Would you like to tell the girls why you wanted to die, Jack?” The doctor’s expression was studiously blank, but Jack could see how avid he was beneath the surface.

Nice to know doctor-patient confidentiality is so highly honored here. Oh well, what the hell?

Deep breath. Why not let it out?

“Because I deserve to die. A few months ago a bunch of people died and it was my fault. It should’ve been me who died, not them.” Strange how saying that, in here, stirred no emotion from her. She felt like she was reciting a tedious old fact.

Curious murmurs spread around the circle.

“Jack,” the doctor continued after a moment. “Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?”

Wise mutters spread throughout the circle, but Jack shook her head. She had no idea what that would be.

“Would someone like to explain it?” He looked around at the girls.

Celia leaned forward in her seat. “It’s like this thing that happens to hostages and people who get kidnapped, where they start sympathizing with their kidnappers. Right?”

“That’s right, Celia. What Jack’s not saying here, girls, is that the deaths she’s talking about happened while she was the hostage of a serial killer.”

“When I was what?” The words exploded out of Jack before she could stop herself. Stares and whispers exploded around her, all focused on her. “I was never a—”

“Then you weren’t the girl on the Kubla Khan four months ago?”

Oh shit…

“I was, but that’s not what happened.”

The doctor lifted a paper off of his clipboard. “Jack, if you’re going to recover from everything that happened to you, the first thing you need to do is admit to what really happened. This is the official report, of both the Hunter-Gratzner crash and your brief stay on the Kubla Khan.”

The room was freezing. Jack couldn’t swallow. She stared at the doctor nervously, wondering just what he was going to say next. Hostage? Serial killer?

“What…” She could barely get words through her numb lips. “What does it say?”

“The truth, Jack. The Hunter-Gratzner crashed, and only about a dozen of you survived the crash. One of them was a very dangerous felon who was being transported back to prison. Richard Riddick.”

Murmurs from the Killer’s Club. Jack couldn’t look at anyone. She stared at her clenched hands in her lap, wondering if it was possible for her knuckles to get any whiter.

“The pilot was another survivor, and she found a geological outpost. There was a small personnel transport there, that had been left behind because it needed repair. It could only carry about a third of you. So… once it had been repaired… Riddick began picking off the rest of the survivors.”

Jack’s voice had failed her. All she could do was wordlessly shake her head in denial.

“He let you and one other live because he needed hostages. He killed the pilot because he could fly the transport himself, and because he’d already coerced the two of you into being his alibi. He tried to pass himself off as the officer who had been escorting him, but the Kubla Khan matched up his voice print and knew who they were really dealing with.”

No! No, that’s not what happened…

“He killed more than fifty people on the ship, including Antonia Chillingsworth. They say they have her murder on security tape, and that he did it, not you. In fact, they say he was using you as a human shield and she was trying to get him to release you—”

“That’s a lie!” Suddenly her voice was back, outrage giving it strength. “That bitch tried to kill all of us!”

“Jeez, what’d he do to you?” One of the other girls leaned forward. Chantelle. That was her name. Jack had only ever talked to her once. “He’s got you all messed up, girl! I mean, you’re talking about one of the most evil men in the galaxy.”

“No, he’s not like that! He kept me safe!” Jack wiped at her stinging eyes and glared around at the disbelieving faces. “He took care of me—”

“Whoa, is that like a euphemism?” another girl chimed in. Jack couldn’t remember her name. “Was he like, fucking you?”

“NO!” Jack’s chair crashed loudly to the floor as she leapt to her feet. “You guys don’t know anything about him, he’s not like that, he’s a good man!”

Skepticism colored the expression of almost every face turned towards her, except the faces of the Killer’s Club girls. They looked fascinated. Stacey looked almost enraptured.

“Please sit down, Jack.” The doctor was using one of those reasonable voices, talking down to her as if she was a small child. Rage flooded through her.

“Fuck you! All of that stuff is bullshit! He saved my life and he didn’t kill that bitch! I did, because she was gonna kill him! You don’t believe me, maybe you should make them show you that video and you can see for yourself that I’m the one who shot her fucking head off!”

The room had gone deathly silent. There wasn’t a single whisper, but everyone was staring.

Oh my god, I just said that, I just tried to justify what I did to her… oh god… The sour taste of bile flooded Jack’s mouth. She fled the rec room and raced for the bathroom, just barely reaching a stall before her dinner exploded back out of her.

They aren’t right, they aren’t… I know what happened. I do… he’s not what they say he is…

Was he?

“The girl. She means nothing to me.”

Did she really remember things the way they happened?

“She’s just a cover story.”

Had he really been her protector? Or had she just been an expendable asset? Why had he kept her from falling down the shaft? He’d lunged out through a hail of bullets to catch her belt and keep her from dying… why?

“Now just ain’t the time.”

Maybe she’d never known him at all.

Jack wiped at her eyes again and flushed the toilet, sniffling as she climbed to her feet. She headed over to the sink, still sniffling, and began to rinse her mouth out.

“Stacey’s gonna want to have your baby now.” Kyra’s voice was calm, detached, a hint of amusement in it but no mockery.

Jack glanced up and saw her leaning against the wall, arms folded. “I, uh, didn’t hear you come in.”

“Yeah, well, Doc Adams figured since we’re roomies I should check and see if you’re okay. You really knew Riddick?”

Jack nodded, spitting water into the sink.

“So you know, I wasn’t kidding about Stacey. She practically worships Riddick. Got pictures of him up on her wall, along with about a dozen other killers she has the hots for. She’s probably gonna want to hear all kinds of details about him.”

“He’s not what people think,” Jack managed, and filled her mouth with water again.

“So, were you two, like…” Kyra gave an illustrative jerk of her hips. “Close?”

Why the fuck does everybody think he’s a child-molester?

“Ewww, no! He would never do that. He’s my friend!”

“Stacey’s gonna be disappointed when she hears that. But hey, whatever. So he’s pretty cool? Where is he now?”

Jack closed her eyes. “I… don’t know.”

“Yeah.” Now there was mockery in Kyra’s voice. “You two are real close friends.”

Pain speared through Jack’s chest. She didn’t open her eyes until she heard the bathroom door shut behind Kyra.

10.
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

Riddick’s hand gently stroked Jack’s cheek, the caress sending shivers through her. She looked up, meeting his concerned gaze.

“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she told him, unable to keep some of the hurt out of her voice. “I thought you didn’t like me.”

Silver eyes gleamed as Riddick shook his head in the dim room. “Not true. I went away because I thought I was bad for you. Obviously I was wrong. Jack, I’m sorry. I should have stayed.”

He gathered her into his arms and she rested her head on the firm strength of his chest, listening to his slow, steady heartbeat. “It’s okay. You’re here now. We can make up for lost time.”

“Yeah, we can.” There was something new in his voice, a tone she’d never heard before. She tilted her head back to look at him and was startled at the feel of his lips on hers. He lowered her onto his huge, silky bed even as she realized what was happening and put her arms around him.

Nothing in her whole life had ever felt so exquisite. She closed her eyes and basked in the taste and feel of his mouth, exploring the strong muscles of his back even as he began to explore her, his hands slipping under her shirt. Her nipples hardened in response to his caresses and her heartbeat began to quicken. His hands were everywhere drawing her towards a delicious release and—

Jack’s eyes snapped open and she gasped.

The dull blue of her wall greeted her and she stared at it in confusion. Where had Riddick gone? Where was he?

From behind her, she heard Kyra’s derisive snort. Confusion fled, replaced by hot embarrassment. She stayed still, pretending that she’d fallen back asleep, as the other girl moved around. After a moment, the door to their room opened and closed.

Fuck. I hope I didn’t talk in my sleep or anything… Avoidance had become her main method of dealing with Kyra and her friends.

It hadn’t been an easy few weeks since her explosion in Group, even before the dreams began. She wasn’t even sure why she was having them. Okay, yeah, she’d had a huge crush on Riddick back on the planet; who wouldn’t have? But he’d never encouraged it or anything, and he’d certainly never done anything to fuel her fantasies. If anything, his abandonment of her ought to have quashed them forever.

She’d thought it had. Certainly all of the dreams she’d had in Imam’s house had been about loss. They’d starred her father, her mother, Shazza, Fry, Riddick… even, sometimes, Imam. She’d lived for months in a desolate dreamscape until its darkness became so pervasive that it seemed to shadow her waking hours as well. But those dreams, which had followed her to the hospital, had receded in the last month and now she almost never had them.

Instead she had these dreams, which left her breathless and blushing and unable to face her roommate.

She glanced over at the clock and decided that the Killers Club girls were probably done with the bathroom by now, and she could shower. It wasn’t that she couldn’t go in before then, or anything; on the contrary, Stacey was dying to corner her for details about Riddick and she knew it. But the girls made her profoundly uncomfortable and she always felt like they were sizing up her hamstrings when she ran into them. Better to just give them a miss whenever possible. She was proud of how well she managed that, given that she bunked with one of them.

Jack climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom, pausing by the door and listening, just to be sure.

“…ohhhhhhhhh… Riddick… ohhhhhhhhhhh…” Kyra’s voice was raised in a breathless imitation of hers.

Shit.

“I knew it!” Stacey crowed on the other side of the door. “Little ho-bag won’t admit it but she did fuck him!”

“Oh please.” That was Colette. Yeah, the whole Killer’s Club was probably still in the bathroom. “I don’t believe it for a second. You’ve read all about him, Stace. What would he want with a scrawny little brat like her?”

“You heard Adams,” Kyra answered. “She was his hostage. Probably it was just a convenience thing, you know? She didn’t fight back much so she was the easiest one to take along with him. Easy to control, willing…”

The voices were approaching the door.

Jack hurried down the hall and ducked around the corner. They’d be heading in the opposite direction, for the community room before breakfast.

Fuck, I hate this. I hate this place. Everything here is shit… She closed her eyes and rubbed at her forehead.

“Hiding from Kyra’s crew?”

Jack’s eyes snapped open again. Heather was standing in front of her, her expression sympathetic. In the last few weeks, she’d aided and abetted Jack’s deliberate avoidance of the Club, running subtle, and not-so-subtle, interference between them.

Okay, not everything here is shit.

“Yeah,” she answered, giving Heather a rueful grin. “I’m popular bathroom talk for them.”

Heather wrinkled her nose and put her arm around Jack’s shoulders. “Yeah, I heard. Idiots. So you have a crush on the guy and dream about him. That doesn’t mean you two really did the deed. I mean, if I had a dream about flying, blue-blooded, hammerhead sharks, that still wouldn’t make them real, you know?”

Jack blinked and almost choked. “Um, no, it wouldn’t.”

“It’s just gossip, you know? They’re acting like he’s a rock star. It’ll pass.”

“Not if tonight’s Group is anything like the last few,” Jack groaned.

In her second Group session, Adams had tried to get her to open up again, and several girls who wanted juicy details had tried to help him back her into a corner. She’d ended up heaving in the bathroom again, and dreading Group so much that, a week ago, she’d hidden rather than go to it. The whole session had ended up being turned into a search for her. By the time she’d crawled out of her hidey hole, the entire hospital was seeking her and she’d ended up in front of the administrators. She was not looking forward to being the pick-on girl again tonight.

“Oh, don’t you worry, I have an idea about that.” There was suppressed laughter in Heather’s voice.

“Oh? What?” Jack reached into her chosen shower stall and turned on the water, letting it heat up while she undressed. Heather was stripping down beside her, now audibly chuckling.

“You have any idea how pissed off Celia is that you’ve been hogging all the attention?”

“I’m not—”

“You know that and I know that, but to a drama queen like her, you’ve got to be doing it on purpose. She’s just dying to get back into the spotlight. So I figure if, when the session starts, I tell Adams I’m worried about her… she’ll launch into one of her dramas and monopolize the whole thing. And that gives you a break.”

Jack gave Heather a grateful smile before she stepped under the water. “Thanks. I really need that. I’m sick to death of everybody wanting me to talk about him.”

“No problem. I just don’t want to have to hunt for you all over the floor again.” Heather started chuckling again, gesturing upward. “I still can’t believe you got up into the false ceiling and managed to stay up there. What do you weigh, five pounds?”

Heather had actually been in the bathroom when Jack had finally emerged from her hiding place, and had collapsed in helpless laughter that still hadn’t let up when the orderlies had escorted Jack away to see the hospital Administrator, who didn’t care that she felt bullied at the sessions by Dr. Adams.

“He’s just trying to help you, Jack,” he’d told her. “You aren’t willing to talk in the individual sessions. At least there you seem to be making some progress towards accepting what really happened to you.”

“What really happened to me? You don’t even know! I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome, okay? Riddick never hurt me and he never would, and you’d know that if you saw the video of what really happened! And if Dr. Adams tries to talk about it again, next time you won’t be able to find me at all!”

That had earned her a night in isolation. She’d retaliated by refusing to speak at all during her next private therapy sessions, not even bothering to look at her doctor.

Heather stuck with her through breakfast, deliberately controlling the conversation at their table so that Jack could eat in peace. Jack had heard a lot of comments, in the last week or two, about Heather’s apparent transformation, from an aloof and taciturn individual to a much more vibrant, outgoing person. They said her meds seemed to be helping her open up a great deal, and that she’d probably be transferred to B Ward soon. Jack was going to miss her terribly when she went, but she had to wonder if it was really the meds, or something else. Heather was very protective of her, and most of her social behavior seemed to be focused in that direction.

It puzzled Jack a little to realize that it was a pattern she’d witnessed her whole life. From the time Matty McDaniels had stood up to the playground bullies for her when she was five, to now, it seemed like there was a steady stream of protectors, and would-be protectors, in her life. Even Riddick had taken on that role for a while. Did something about her just bring that out in people?

Her cousin Rachel had once told her it was her big eyes and the trapped-fawn look she’d get when she was startled or worried. People tended to look at her and assume she was helpless.

Am I? Am I really helpless? Most of the time she didn’t feel that way. Most of the time, she felt like she ought to be helping other people, not being helped by them.

That was how it had felt to be Audrey, anyway. I want to be her again…

The other girls were rising from the table. Breakfast was over. Jack glanced down and noticed that she’d cleaned her plate. She got up and followed Heather out of the dining hall, the two of them heading for the library room. In the last two weeks, Jack had earned computer privileges and had begun using them to catch up on her schoolwork, and on events throughout the colony worlds.

She was reading the latest news about civil rights conflicts on Stradivari when Kyra came in.

“You know, I always knew you were weird, but I didn’t know you were this weird.”

Jack glanced over at her, surprised and trying to figure out how reading in a library would be a sign of weirdness. “Huh?”

Kyra’s eyes were dancing with amusement as she leaned against the wall. Jack had never seen her look like this. “There’s a guy here to see you. A guy in a dress who says his name is ‘Elly Mom.’”

It took a moment for that to sink in well enough for Jack to translate it. Elly Mom? I don’t know anybody named El… oh! El Imam!

She shut down her terminal and gave Heather and Kyra a wry grin, heading for the visitation room. Why hadn’t he just told Kyra he was her “Uncle Abu?” That was what he’d had her call him for the entire three months she’d lived in his home, after all. She’d almost forgotten that once upon a time, he’d been “Imam” to her… and Fry, who had sometimes seemed to have some real hearing problems, had called him “Elmo.”

The visitation room had pretty strict security, on par with the sorts of rooms Jack had seen in prison movies. A series of small booths were ranged in front of a heavy steelglass wall, each soundproofed for privacy and confidentiality. Jack was led to one by an orderly and sat down at the desk inside, slipping on the comm headset. Through the glass, she could see Imam, looking a little uncomfortable in his institutional chair.

“Uncle Abu,” she said by way of greeting.

“Jack.” His voice was reserved, more reserved than she’d ever heard.

She blinked, thrown. From the first time she’d met him, he’d been such a warm person. Now she felt like she’d been struck by a cold wind. “It’s uh… good to see you. How’s everybody at home?”

“We are well,” he replied stiffly, “now.”

What does that mean? Jack took a deep breath and reached for an affectionate smile.

“It’s good to see you—”

“This is not a social call, Jack,” he interrupted her, his voice stern. “I am here because you are causing trouble.”

Uhhhh…

“Look, I know that hiding out in the ceiling was kind of extreme, but you have no idea what those sessions were like—”

“Jack.” The expression of fury on Imam’s face was shocking. It turned him into a stranger. No wonder he hadn’t called himself Uncle Abu; no one by that name was here.

“Yeah?” Her voice came out as a tiny squeak.

“I do not know what you are talking about, nor do I care. My concern is the things you have been saying about Mr. Riddick.”

What?

“But… they were saying all these lies about him.”

“Listen to me, Jack. For once, listen to me.” The only time either of her parents had looked at her like this was when she’d broken her grandmother’s priceless 20th Century Limoges vase. Even Alvin had never looked at her like this.

“O…okay…”

“It is absolutely essential that the authorities continue to believe that we were Mr. Riddick’s unwilling hostages, not his accomplices. The things you are saying cast doubt upon that.”

“But this is all confidential, isn’t it? Doctor-patient—”

“If doctor-patient privilege meant anything to these people, how would I even know about what you’ve been saying? Think, Jack! The hospital contacted the Kubla Khan and asked for a copy of the video recording of Chillingsworth’s murder, so that they could verify the particulars of your story. Fortunately the ship’s new master, Mr. Toombs, has refused to release it to them.”

“Why is that—”

“Jack!” he thundered at her, making her jump and almost knock over her chair. “We are very fortunate that it is in Toombs’ interest to have the authorities believe that Riddick, and not you, killed her, and that he believes you suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and that was why you defended Riddick. If he ceased to believe that, he would realize that we might know more about Riddick’s current whereabouts than we have said—”

“You know where he is?” Hope and hurt speared through her. Why had they kept that knowledge from her? She’d never have told anyone.

“Yes, I do. I know how to reach him should an emergency arise.”

Oh shit. Riddick’s probably disgusted with me…

“What… what did he say when you told him what happened?” She hoped it wouldn’t be too bad.

“I have not contacted him.”

The hope crashed, leaving behind only the hurt. She’d almost died. She’d tried to kill herself, had almost succeeded, and that wasn’t important enough to tell Riddick about?

That’s not why you did it, is it?

Of course it wasn’t. She’d meant to die, not dramatize. But…

It hurt.

“Oh.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at Imam now. The censure in his gaze was overwhelming, and made her feel gauche and worthless.

“If anyone realized that I knew this, Jack, the consequences would be terrible for all of us. They must not know. They must not suspect.”

“Yeah, I understand,” she mumbled.

“No, you do not! You do not understand at all! You must stop arguing with the doctors about him. Let them believe what they want to believe—”

“But it’s not true—”

“That is not the point! You have done enough damage already, and you must stop!”

“Damage?” What did he mean? What had she done?

His glare left her feeling enfeebled. “You remember my little daughter, Ziza, do you not? Several nights every week, now, she wakes up screaming, from dreams of you floating in a tub of bloody water. At first it was several times every night.”

Oh god… oh god…

“I’m so sorr—”

“I will not let those nightmares be compounded by dreams of police invading her home and arresting her father!” Imam’s voice was a thunderous hiss. “So be warned, Jack. If your carelessness results in that happening, I will have no choice. I will tell them where to find him.”

Jack’s whole body felt cold and tingling. “You wouldn’t…”

“I will not let your selfishness destroy my family. If it comes to that, I will. And you would, too, if you were in my place.” He rose, his glare still beating down on her. “We are done, Jack. I wish you the best for your future, but I will have no part of it.”

He had swept out of the room before she could get her voice to work.

Afterwards, she wasn’t sure how she got out of the room. Her legs felt numb, wobbly and weak. Somehow she made it back to her bedroom and lay on her bed, unmoving, unthinking, until Kyra came looking for her because it was time for Group.

“You’re not hiding again are— hey, you okay?”

Too lost in her pain, she only barely registered that it was the first time Kyra had ever expressed any concern about her. She nodded, sitting up. Whatever else happened, she didn’t want to talk about it.

“Probably something I ate…”

“You look like shit. You want me to tell Adams you’re sick?”

Jack shook her head and headed for the door. “No, that’d just make even more… trouble…”

It was another dramatic entrance for her, another round of stares and whispers.

“She’s so pale!”

“Her lips are white…”

Celia let out a loud sigh of disgust and rolled her eyes. Jack headed for Heather’s side, not even noticing that Kyra had continued to walk with her until she sat down and the older girl walked over to her friends.

“Everything okay, Jack?” Dr. Adams, waiting to pounce.

“Yeah, just… my breakfast didn’t agree with me, that’s all.” Heather’s hand, on top of hers, felt hot.

“So, Jack, do you think you—”

“Dr. Adams,” Heather broke in. “I think there’s something a little more important right now.”

“Yes, Heather? What would that be?”

“I… hate to be a tattle tale but… I’m worried about Celia.”

Thank you, Heather. Thank you…

Jack tuned everything out and just sat quietly, taking advantage of the lack of a spotlight on her. Celia was happy to play along with the diversion, gleefully launching into a list of nightmares and obsessions and palpitations that she was suffering from. Any time the conversation started to wind down, Heather – or, Jack noticed, Kyra – would stoke Celia back up. Dr. Adams never got to finish his question.

Celia was still going strong when the session ended and Jack gratefully slipped out of the community room and headed for her bedroom. She was in bed, pretending to be asleep, when Kyra came in a while later.

He was waiting for her when she finally fell asleep.

“Riddick!” She flung herself into his arms and hugged him tightly.

“Jack, Jack, Jack…” There was a hint of impatience in his voice. She looked up at him and was shocked to see him frowning at her.

“What is it?”

“You told, Jack. You gave me away. You fuckin’ sold me out.”

She stepped back, horrified at the thought. “No! No I didn’t, I promise, I—”

“You did, kid. You sold me out. Now they caught me, and they’re gonna execute me.”

“Oh God, no, Riddick! I promise you I didn’t—” She had to help him!

“Don’t worry, Jack.” He drew out a knife with one hand, his other hand grabbing the back of her neck and pulling her towards him again. “I’m not gonna go to Hell alone.”

“No, Riddick! Please!”

Silver flashed towards her, reflected in the glint of his eyes. Her throat was burning. Burning where he’d slashed it. She choked, gagging on her own blood, trying to catch her breath. She couldn’t breathe… couldn’t breathe… her scream was just a weak gargle—

Screaming. Clutching her throat and screaming.

A crack and the side of her face was stinging. She took a breath and another slap stopped her scream in her mouth.

“Damn it, wake up!” Kyra was before her, her hand raised to deliver another blow.

Light flooded the room and one of the large orderlies grabbed Kyra, pulling her back and away. Another joined him. More people spilled into the room, babbling.

“—going on?”

“She was attacking her roommate. Get the Thorazine.”

No…

Kyra stared up at the ceiling, a look of exasperation on her face, but didn’t fight the large men holding her.

No…

“This time it’ll be back to the D Ward with you—”

“No,” Jack finally managed. “It wasn’t her, it was him!”

The orderlies stared at her, and then at each other.

“Hey, no fuckin’ way, I wasn’t even in here—”

“No, not you… him! Riddick!”

The room fell silent. Kyra pulled herself out of the orderlies’ lax grasp and sat back down on her bed.

“Jack?” Heather was beside her. “What happened?”

“He… he said I sold him out and he cut my throat and—”

Heather’s arms were around her. “Shhhhh… it’s okay. It was just a dream. Just a dream…”

Just a dream. No more real than her dreams of Riddick making love to her.

But people believed those were real…

She knew what she needed to do.

Her cousin Rachel had been an expert at theatrical tears, and had taught her how to cry on cue long ago. It was a talent she’d never exploited, until now. It had always seemed wrong. But it was exactly what she needed.

“No it wasn’t,” she sobbed, letting the real tears, that had been waiting all day, flow out. “It wasn’t! He said he’d do it if I ever told…”

“He said he’d kill you?” That was Kyra. Straight, matter-of-fact, catching on fast.

Jack nodded, sniffling. “’Swhy I didn’t wanna talk about him… he said he’d let us go but only if we never talked about him… and Dr. Adams kept bringing it up and bringing it up and when he finds out he’s gonna do it, he’s gonna hunt me down and do everything he said he’d do to me—”

“Jack!” Heather gave her a little shake. “Calm down. You’re safe here. He can’t get to you here.”

“He will,” she moaned. “He’ll find me and he’ll kill me. Because they made me talk…”

She could feel the way the orderlies were focusing on her every word and knew that they’d be repeated to Dr. Adams and the others.

“It’s okay,” Heather whispered, rubbing her back the way her mother used to. “It’ll be okay. You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”

“That’s right,” Kyra agreed. “You don’t.”

So the Killer’s Club would be off her back, too. Perfect.

Riddick would be safe. They’d think he’d terrorized her, that she couldn’t possibly be on his side. They wouldn’t question Imam’s story anymore. Riddick would be safe. For his sake, she could tell these lies.

They were lies… weren’t they?

11.
No Escaping Life Alive

“I can’t sign this.”

The hospital director frowned at Jack. “Why not? These are your words.”

Jack glanced over the page again, at the twisted, liar’s tale of how Richard Riddick had hunted down and murdered her fellow crash survivors, had overcome her with a combination of seduction and coercion, and had ultimately abandoned her with nothing more than a threat of what would happen if she ever spoke of him. They were not her words. She had never said any of this. Someone else had attributed these words to her and had constructed an elaborate fable out of them. There wasn’t a single honest fact anywhere on the page.

But if she said that, things would go right back to where they’d been before Imam’s visit.

Stall, she thought. Just… stall.

If she signed this lie, how much harm would it do Riddick? Would a few more murders on his reputation hurt him?

Yes.

His bounty would go up, at the very least, making him a more appealing target to mercs throughout the galaxy. More importantly, the half-share of the bounty, for bringing him in dead rather than alive, would increase proportionately, and might tempt more people to try simply gunning him down. And even if they did bring him in alive… there was the issue of what this paper claimed he had done to her.

Riddick had never touched her, not in the sense alleged here. He’d never raised a hand against her, and he’d certainly never molested her. Jack had heard enough stories now to know what would happen to him in prison if he returned branded as a child-molester. Those men lived at the bottom of the prison food chain, the targets of the rest of the populace. Imprisonment with that on his record might be worse than a death sentence.

She could not sign these papers.

Stall. Stall.

Jack closed her eyes and covered her face for a minute, trying to compose some kind of approach to this that wouldn’t upset the charade altogether.

“I just can’t,” she hedged, playing for time. “Not here. Not like this. It isn’t safe.”

“Jack, you’re perfectly safe. He can’t get to you here. He can’t touch you.”

Here. There was her handle.

“And what about when you release me? You’re gonna just forget all about me but that’s when he’ll be waiting. Who’s gonna guard me then?”

“Surely Mr. Al-Walid’s home—”

“Isn’t open to me anymore. What do you think he came here to tell me? I’m a bad influence on his daughter and he won’t take me back in.”

In point of fact he really had said that, more or less. She could blame the loss of that protection for the crumbling of her supposed memory block.

The director blinked and sat back.

Good to know you didn’t already know what my conversation with him was about. Did that take you by surprise?

“Dr. Adams had reported that you were unusually subdued after his visit. I understand now. Is that why you could finally admit to what Riddick had really done to you? Because your protection was gone?”

You said it. Not me.

“Yeah, that night I, uh… had this awful dream… and—”

“Yes, that much I knew all about. But Jack, if you sign this document, it will help us catch him.”

That’s what I’m afraid of. And what’s this “us” all of a sudden?

“And what about when he escapes again? He’ll know who blabbed and he’ll come after me.”

“He won’t escape.”

“He always escapes.” Jack rolled her eyes. That part was pure truth, too. If anyone was better at escaping than Richard B. Riddick, she didn’t know who it was. He’d even beaten several of her father’s security systems, earning John MacNamera’s grudging admiration.

“That Riddick is really something,” he’d said one night at the dinner table. “If there’s any kind of hole or back door in a system, he can sniff it out and beat it. I’d want to hire him except for that whole ‘cold-blooded killer’ part of the equation.”

She wondered what her father would say if he knew that she’d traveled in Riddick’s company. Probably something that would have made her mother scream at him.

“He won’t. Not from the Kubla—”

“You mean the ship he escaped from almost five months ago?” Jack met the director’s eyes squarely, suppressing a smirk as he dropped his gaze in response. “I’m not signing that paper. Not until I’m actually leaving here and I know I’m going to be safe from him. Show it to me then.”

The director – Jack realized she’d never bothered to remember his name even though they’d met several times now – stared at her for several long minutes before he finally shrugged. “Very well. Personally I think signing this would help you recover, Jack, but if you insist…”

“I insist.”

“Alright, you may go.” He was punching buttons in his comm even as she got up and left the room. As the door closed, she heard a voice coming through the speaker.

“Toombs.”

Son of a bitch. Treacherous bastard! She wondered how much of a cut the director had been offered in exchange for securing her signature.

Not that it was ever going to happen, of course.

Jack let Nurse Raymond walk her back to the security doors, to begin the descent back down to C Level. She looked around as they walked, noticing for the first time that this floor of the hospital was apparently above-ground. It looked like mid-autumn outside, or what passed for autumn in this arid climate. That made sense. She’d made her attempt on her life one week after classes began at that ghastly school Uncle Abu had picked for her. All girls, and half of them in burkhas. She’d found herself in remedial classes, fergodsake, because she couldn’t speak Arabic very well. And all that time, only a few blocks away, there had been normal schools, where the kids spoke English and wore jeans—

Bastard. Bastard…

Glancing around as they approached the door, Jack realized that this was the first time she’d been up here with a level head. Her prior visits were blurs of rage and anguish. She hadn’t really looked around much. Down the hall, on the other side of a security-glass door, she could see a girl and her parents. The girl, a mass of tattoos, piercings, and attitude that Jack could see from fifty feet away, was ignoring her parents as they filled out forms. New arrival. Gotta be. Wonder where she’ll land?

The familiar sound of musically-tuned keys brought her attention back to the Ward security door.

The very familiar sound…

Jack felt her heart skip and then speed up. She let Nurse Raymond gesture her through and down the stairs, more alert than ever. They went through the A Ward doors, and she could feel her blood rising. The pounding of her heart only eased as Raymond voice-printed their way through the B Ward doors and they continued down.

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

She’d expected to spend the rest of the day wallowing in a “what will I do then?” agony, over how she’d deflect the director when, several months from now, she checked out of the hospital. Now she knew she wouldn’t have to.

The ground floor, and the A Ward, were protected by her father’s security systems. Systems she’d learned, backwards and forwards, years ago. Systems whose back doors she knew by heart. Systems that would, for her, roll over and play dead if she told them to.

All she had to do was get herself cleared for A Ward. Once she was there, she could walk out of the hospital and vanish any time she wanted. She could continue the voyage that had been aborted by the crash of the Hunter-Gratzner, and nobody would ever be the wiser.

Jack B. Badd could cease to exist. Audrey MacNamera could catch up with her father and pretend that she’d just taken a longer route, rather than a detour through hell.

For the first time since Riddick had vanished, she felt hope surging through her.

All I have to do is graduate to A Ward. All I have to do…

“What happened, did Director Flint give you keys to the city or something?” Heather’s sardonic voice cut through her reverie. She blinked and grinned, realizing that she’d been daydreaming in the middle of the C Ward hallway. Nurse Raymond was gone.

“No, but… I did kinda win our argument.”

“Oh yeah?” Heather grinned, rubbing her temple.

Jack frowned. Heather had been doing that a lot in the past week or so, she realized, with increasing frequency. “You okay?”

“Me?” Heather blinked, then glanced at her hand. “Oh. Headache. Nothing serious.”

“You’ve been getting them a lot lately.” Now it was Jack’s protective instincts surging to the fore. “You talk to the doctors about it?”

Heather nodded, grinning at her. “Yeah. They tell me it’s a pretty common side effect of the meds, but it should go away in a few months. No big deal.”

Jack wasn’t sure why, but the hair on the back of her neck was prickling. She supposed she should be relieved by Heather’s words, but she wasn’t.

Something’s wrong.

She was suddenly angry with herself that she hadn’t said anything – asked anything – sooner. She’d noticed the little twinges Heather seemed to get, and noticed them increasing, but this was the first time she’d brought them up. That was taking the whole creed of minding her own business a little too far, she thought.

“Wanna go to the library?” Heather seemed to have moved on completely, but Jack noticed that her hand was staying near her temple.

“Yeah, that sounds good.” She followed Heather, watching her movements more closely now, and hoped that she was wrong. Please let me be wrong.

Until Audrey had been six, her parents had owned a dog named Balto, a large Siberian Husky. Balto had been the sweetest creature on Deckard’s World, and he’d been Audrey’s best friend.

And he’d been epileptic.

When one of his epileptic attacks had been imminent, Audrey had always known somehow. Even before he would realize it was coming and begin to whimper because he knew he was going to bite his tongue again, she had known. The knowledge was something she could never explain to her parents, but it would prickle over her as much as an hour in advance. She’d often spend that hour getting him ready, making sure he’d gone outside and done his business, settling him in his dog bed and not letting him leave it, and petting him when he began to cry.

Audrey hadn’t been home for the attack that finally killed Balto. She’d been away at school, and it had taken her parents months to get her to stop blaming herself for not being there. Since then, she’d never gotten that spooky sense that would fill her when something inside him changed, a harbinger of an organic earthquake that only she could detect.

But Heather was making her feel that way, right now.

Please let me be wrong.

Jack suppressed a shudder and followed her best friend into the library, eyes focused so intently on Heather that she almost walked into a desk.

Heather was digging around through some of the actual, physical books that the center had. C Ward girls weren’t cleared for Readers in their rooms – too many components of those that could be used as impromptu weapons. So the hospital had ordered in a special run of “paperbacks,” books with soft, turnable paper pages and paper covers, amazingly like the antiques her grandmother had. Most of them were “classics,” works of the great literary figures of the 20th and 21st century. Judy Blume. Stephen King. Anne McCaffrey. Douglas Adams.

Jack had checked over the curriculum list at her hometown’s high school, in one of her more intrepid moments on the terminals, and had been amused to see that a lot of her recreational reading was on the required reading list for her high school. To make the irony absolute, the “paperbacks” had been produced using wood pulp from Deckard’s World.

“There we go,” Heather said, pulling a book off of one of the shelves. Hatter Fox, the cover read in large, bold letters, above a picture of a girl who looked even more feral and dangerous than Kyra. “This is a good one.”

“We gonna read in your room?” Jack grabbed a random Lois Duncan off of the shelf, not even glancing at the title.

Heather gave her a funny look, maybe sensing the change in her behavior. Jack wished she could explain without sounding like a complete head-case. “Sure, we can do that.”

They walked over to the book-scanner, running their selections through and inputting their personal codes. Books checked out, they headed back out of the library, nodding at the orderly on duty by the door.

“So,” Heather said after a moment. “Killing Mr. Griffin, huh? You read it before?”

“No, is it good?” Jack glanced down at the book, surprised that something with such a violent-sounding title would have been allowed into the ward.

“Yeah. Pretty good. Funny, you’d make a good Susan McConnell.”

“Who?”

“The book’s heroine,” Heather explained, grinning. “She’s a lot like you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Stacey’s voice came from behind them. “She’s a weakling and a snitch.”

Jack blinked and looked behind her. Stacey, Colette, and Kyra were coming out of the bathroom. Stacey’s eyes were smoldering with resentment, Colette looked amused, and Kyra’s face was a complete deadpan.

“I’m not a snitch,” Jack found herself protesting.

“That’s why you were up in Flint’s office, huh?” Stacey’s hands balled into fists.

“Oh. That.” She’d forgotten that Riddick was one of Stacey’s personal heroes. “Yeah, he wanted me to sign something about Riddick and I told him no way. I don’t think he’s happy with me.”

Stacey blinked in surprise. “You didn’t sign it?”

“Please. I’m not a complete idiot.” Jack found she was even more glad than ever that she’d refused the director.

“Good.” Stacey began to pass her, deliberately invading her personal space. Jack stood her ground, meeting the girl’s ferocious eyes. “You better not, too. ’Cause snitches get stitches.”

Then the blonde girl was past her, Colette following. She met the heavier, dark-haired girl’s malicious smirk with a calm expression, and then Kyra was passing. She flashed Jack a sardonic, sympathetic little hint of a smile, there and gone before her friends could see it.

What the…?

Had she imagined that? Or had she really seen it? She wasn’t sure.

“Well, that was refreshing.” Heather put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “And don’t worry, Susan’s no snitch, she’s just got your kind of conscience. You’re gonna en—”

The hand on her shoulder suddenly clamped down hard, shaking Jack out of her momentary stupor. The sense of unease that had been with her since Heather walked up to her spiked and turned into pure terror.

Heather’s head tilted to the side, her expression a rictus of fear and agony. A high, strange, rattling whine escaped her throat.

Oh fuck. Oh fuck! Jack reached out, trying to catch hold of Heather, as the girl’s body began to writhe and buck.

They were falling.

Jack twisted so that she’d hit the floor first, Heather’s convulsing body falling on top of her. She struggled to get her arms around Heather, wrestling her over, but the other girl’s limbs were spasming out of control. A sharp blow struck the side of her head and for a moment she saw gray.

Got her… gotta hold her… She had Heather down on her back.

“Help!” she screamed, and heard the sound of footsteps heading for her at a run. “Somebody help!”

Heather’s eyes had rolled back. Another horrific groan emerged from her. More hands appeared, holding her down. Jack glanced up and saw Ofra, one of the ward’s “quiet crazies,” next to her, a grim and determined expression on her usually blank face.

“This is Orderly Blevins on C Ward, looks like we have some kind of fight—”

“Jeez, you idiot, you think everything’s about fighting around here?” Jack snapped. That was the same orderly that had wanted to tranq Kyra. “Heather’s having a seizure, now would you help me?”

The man glared at her but put his mic back up to his mouth. “Correction. Medical assistance needed on C Ward. Patient down with convulsions.”

More people were gathering, babbling. Jack ignored them, turning her focus back on Heather. A hint of pink foam had gathered in the corner of her mouth, and Jack grimaced as the sudden stink of urine and feces hit her nose. But the convulsions seemed to be easing.

“Heather? Heather, can you hear me?” The girl’s eyes were still rolled back. “Heather!”

Beneath her, she could feel a strange tremor pass through Heather’s body, and then…

Heather went limp and still.

Too still.

Jack felt as through a rough fist had suddenly clenched around her heart. Heather wasn’t breathing.

“Oh fuck! Heather, no, oh god…”

She leaned forward, pulling Heather’s mouth open, trying to remember the life guard training she’d taken at summer camp two years earlier. She’d only ever done CPR once, and on a dummy. Pinching Heather’s nose closed, she pressed her mouth to hers and blew in, tasting blood on her lips.

One, two, blow, now gotta do the chest… She ignored the excited commotion around her as she ripped open the front of Heather’s shirt. Okay, where do I do this? Oh yeah… Okay, one, two— shit! Beneath her hands she felt something snap.

“Oh god, I think I broke something, somebody please—”

She was being lifted up, away from Heather. “It’s okay,” a voice said in her ear. “You did fine. The crash team’s here, they’ll help her now.”

Heather vanished beneath a huddle of medical uniforms.

Jack struggled for a second, wanting to move back to her friend’s side, before giving up. She glanced back to see who had her and was surprised, anew, to realize it was Kyra. She let her roommate back her up, away from the huddle.

“That was some fast thinking,” Kyra said, a hint of approval in her voice. “Here I thought you’d be the type to go to pieces in a crisis.”

“She stopped breathing,” Jack answered, still stuck on that.

Kyra nodded, frowning. “I’ve seen her have freak-outs before. She never had one like that. Isn’t she on some new experimental treatment?”

Was she? Jack couldn’t remember. She couldn’t think.

“I’m getting nothing,” one of the orderlies said. “We’d better get her upstairs.”

They were lifting Heather’s still form onto a gurney and wheeling her down the hall. Jack watched, feeling as helpless as she had back on that planet, as her friend vanished into the emergency elevator. One of the remaining orderlies walked over to her.

“Looks like you’re going to have a black eye, Jack. You want me to get you something for the pain?”

“Huh?”

“Heather must’ve clocked you a good one,” Kyra commented. “You didn’t even feel it, did you?”

“Wait right here, I’ll get you some meds and an ice pack.” The orderly – Jack finally noticed enough to realize it was the one who had been watching the library – smiled at her and walked off. Carmouche, that was his name. She didn’t know the names of many of the orderlies, but he was always nice to her.

A second later, her knees gave out.

“Whoa, easy.” Kyra caught her and eased her to the floor. “You gonna pass out or anything?”

Jack shook her head a little and winced as the pain around her eye throbbed into virulent life. She let Kyra push her backwards until she was half sitting, half leaning against the wall. “I’ll be okay.”

Carmouche was heading back over to them, carrying a tray. He knelt down beside her and held out a paper cup with two pills in it. “This is for the pain.”

Jack took the cup and tossed the pills into her mouth, accepting a small cup of water to swallow them down. He handed her the ice pack next, which she gingerly applied to the side of her face.

Ow… okay, that’s starting to feel a little better…

“Station One, this is the infirmary, come back.” A voice crackled over Carmouche’s comm.

“This is Station One. Go ahead.”

“Stand by, you’re going to be admitting a van from the Medical Examiner’s office in a few minutes. We have a DOA here—”

The hard fist was back around Jack’s heart, squeezing it.

“Shit, Carmouche, turn that thing off!” Kyra shouted.

Gray swam over Jack’s vision as she watched, with her one good eye, Carmouche scrambling to shut off his comm. The last thing that she heard, as the gray turned to black, was Heather’s name being spoken over it.

12.
Darkness With a Heart

A bell rang. Jack ignored it.

“Jack.”

She ignored that, too.

“Hey, Jack.”

She curled inward and huddled against her pillow.

“Oh, fuck it.”

She heard Kyra leave the room, closing the door behind her. A long, gray time passed and the door opened again.

“Okay, Jackie.” That was Nurse Raymond’s voice. “If Mohammad won’t go to her lunch, her lunch will come to her.”

She heard Nurse Raymond come over to her and the sounds of a tray being set down and arranged.

“Not… hungry.”

“Oh, no you don’t. We let you get away with that yesterday. Today you eat.”

“Don’t wanna.”

“Tough, kid.” Dry humor entered Raymond’s voice. “You didn’t let me get in trouble for not giving you the tour. Are you gonna let me get in trouble for starving you?”

For a moment, Jack almost felt a smile creeping onto her face. Then the pain struck her again. Heather was dead. Heather was dead.

I lose everybody I care about…

She turned over, sighing. Fighting did no good around here. She had no appetite but apparently that didn’t count for shit—

“Soup?”

Raymond smiled kindly. “Broth. Easier on you right now, I figured.”

Well, what the hell, right? Maybe this woman actually had something akin to a clue.

Jack sat up and accepted the mug. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

It was a weirdly civilized interchange. Somehow it had seemed to Jack as if social niceties were some of the things that ought to have mysteriously vanished. Everything felt raw to her, like the world of “please” and “thank you” should be far, far away. Yet there it was.

She sipped the broth slowly, vaguely aware that it was warm but unable to taste it. Raymond didn’t try to force conversation on her while she drank, and just sat quietly beside her bed. Finally Jack was done and set the cup down on the tray.

“That’s very good,” Raymond told her. “Now, tonight I want you to get up and come to the dining room for dinner, alright? If you just want more broth again, that’s fine, but please come there on your own.”

Jack sighed and nodded. She was aware of the threat Raymond was trying very hard not to make, that if she didn’t begin eating on her own power again they’d have to force-feed her.

“I’ll be back in a while to check on you, okay? Is there anything you need?”

“No,” Jack sighed. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

Raymond gave her a dubious look, clearly not buying her reassurance at all, but didn’t push it. Instead, she carried the tray to the door. “See you in a little while, Jackie.”

Jack nodded and waved as the nurse left the room, and then lay back down on her bed. There were two books lying on the little table beside her, she suddenly noticed. Reaching out, she picked them up, and felt her throat tighten. Killing Mr. Griffin and Hatter Fox, the “classics” she and Heather had checked out of the library just moments before everything went to hell.

She began thumbing idly through the first book.

There was a slight pause. Then Mark said, “Nobody wanted to miss watching you die.”

Jack shuddered and flipped forward, as fast as she could, away from that eerie, sickening passage.

It hardly mattered. The cold gripping her came from within and no layer of outer clothing would ever alleviate it.

Jack swallowed and looked harder at the page. “She” was Susan, the girl Heather had said was a lot like her. God yeah, a lot like me. That’s exactly how I feel…

She flipped again.

Susan closed her eyes. When I open them, she told herself, this whole room will have vanished and this dreadful woman with it. Ten years will have gone by, and I will be grown and far away in my private cabin on the shore of a lake. I will look out through my fine window onto deep, calm green, with millions of tiny ripples shining and sparkling in the sunlight, and a breeze will come, clean and sweet across the water, smelling of pine trees. I will think back and ask myself, where was I ten years ago. What was I doing? What was I feeling? And I won’t even remember.

Jack closed the book. Heather had been right. Susan was a lot like her. And that cabin, that lake… John MacNamera had taken his wife and daughter to one much like that, maybe a year before Audrey’s parents had split up. Deckard’s World was full of woodsy places like that, lakes and rivers and mountains and little cabins. Closing her eyes, Jack conjured back that memory, of being Audrey, happy and secure, all right in the world and with her family, offering a handful of her father’s fishing bait to the large turtle she’d encountered by the shore.

Ten years from now, she promised herself, I’ll be Audrey again and all of this won’t even be a bad memory. All of this will be forgotten as if it never happened. As if Jack… and Riddick… never existed.

Heather’s face swam before her eyes for a moment and she wiped away tears. Part of her wanted to forget the yawning hole Heather’s death had left within her, more than anything, but part of her felt like that would be the ultimate treachery.

She set down Killing Mr. Griffin – there was no way she could read it now – and picked up Heather’s book. Hatter Fox, with the girl on the cover who looked even more primally dangerous than Kyra. Would this one be safe to read? She flipped to the last page.

I miss her… I miss her… I miss her…

Oh god…

The book practically leapt out of her hands, flying across the room, and Jack collapsed on her bed. Huge sobs racked her body and she pressed her face hard into her pillow to muffle them.

The door to her room creaked. She could only just barely hear voices over the sound of her anguish, and couldn’t make out who they belonged to.

“Jesus.”

“Look, you guys just go on. I’ll be there in a bit, okay?”

“But you’ll miss the part where he sky-dives off the bridge—”

“I’ll see it another time. You guys go on.”

The door closed. Through her misery, Jack knew that she wasn’t alone again; someone had stayed.

Her sobs were easing. She could hear someone moving around and then the sound of something being put on her bedside table. Whoever it was, she realized, had picked up the books for her. Her springs creaked and the mattress down by her feet sank as someone sat down on the foot of her bed.

Guess I’d better face the music.

She expected to turn over and see Nurse Raymond, or maybe one of the orderlies, watching her. Instead, she found herself pinned by Kyra’s slate-blue gaze. There was no mockery or belligerence in the older girl’s expression. If anything, there was something a bit sad in it.

“Here,” Kyra said, and held out the last of a roll of toilet paper.

Jack sat up, sniffled, and accepted the offering, rolling some paper off to wipe her eyes and nose with. “Th…thanks.”

“No problem.” Kyra’s voice was noncommittal, carefully so. “Nice to see you finally moving around.”

That almost surprised a smile out of Jack. She’d lain like the dead for more than a day, she suddenly realized, while Kyra had come and gone and had periodically spoken to her. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember any of the things the other girl had said.

“Yeah, um…” Jack drew in a shuddering breath. Her voice was completely unsteady. She wiped at her eyes again. “I think they’d start force-feeding me or something soon if I didn’t get up.”

“Probably.” Kyra sounded amused, but not in a hostile or mocking way. “And you should probably take a shower soon, too.”

Jack nodded, wiping her nose again. “Yeah… sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it. Heather was really cool… and I know you two were close.” Kyra’s tone sounded awkward, almost hesitant. “How’s your eye?”

Jack hadn’t even remembered, until that moment, that her left eye was bruised. She gingerly touched the tender flesh. The swelling had begun to go down, but it was still sensitive. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“Good.” Kyra still looked very uncomfortable. “You know… when I first got here, Heather was my roommate.”

Jack blinked, startled. Heather had never mentioned that, the few times they’d talked about the hospital or the other girls in it. “She was?”

“Yeah.” Kyra scooted back on the bed, leaning against the wall. Now she seemed more relaxed. “Down in D Ward. I’d just been transferred here, and she’d been checked in about a week before me. You’re not supposed to have roommates down there, but things were overcrowded, so they bunked us in with each other.”

“What was she like?” Jack was having a hard time picturing Heather needing to be in D Ward.

“She was pretty messed up back then.” A wry smile touched Kyra’s lips. “They were trying all kinds of meds with her to control her episodes, but nothing was working. One or two even made them worse. Between episodes, though, she was cool. Like she was up here.”

“Were you friends?” As far as she knew, Kyra and Heather hadn’t spent any time together up on C Ward; they’d moved in very different circles.

Kyra shrugged. “I guess. Yeah. We were. I don’t remember a lot about that time. There’s a lot missing.”

Jack watched, her own anguish forgotten, as Kyra frowned and then winced. She waited for Kyra to continue speaking.

“They tell me the doctors on New Chris – I mean, New Dartmouth – used electroshock on me. So for the first month or so after the transfer… I don’t remember much. Bits and pieces. Mostly thinking the orderlies were Red Roger’s guys and trying to take ’em out again.” Kyra tried to smile it off, but Jack could see some lingering pain there. “I was really messed up. In and out of isolation, and when I wasn’t in Iso, Heather was… so for a while we barely knew anyone was sharing a room with us. Until we started getting better.”

Jack realized she couldn’t really comprehend it. From the sound of it, even if Kyra had escaped the fate that Red Roger and his men had doled out to most of New Christy’s women, she’d been psychologically raped by the authories once she’d been caught. The only time Jack had ever experienced hallucinations was once, when she was nine, and a new variant of ’Enza had come to Deckard’s World. It was an entirely inadequate comparison, and in spite of herself, she was fascinated, wondering what it would be like to have seen the things Kyra had seen, what it would be like to be ruled by those sorts of nightmares. Her sniffles had finally stopped, forgotten.

“So then you became friends?”

“I guess, yeah. Not much else to do but talk. Everything is restricted down there. If you behave you can leave your room and walk around a little, maybe watch some vids… but it’s a really dead place. So we talked a lot. The Killer’s Club was her idea.”

That almost knocked Jack over. She stared at Kyra in shock.

A slow, almost impish grin spread over Kyra’s face. She nodded at Jack and then reached over and pushed her mouth closed.

“No way. You have got to be kidding me.”

Kyra smirked. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“Well, every time she talked about it, she made it pretty clear she didn’t—” Crap. She couldn’t say that.

“She didn’t like the club. Yeah.” Kyra leaned back against the wall and ran her fingers through her hair. Jack was suddenly reminded, powerfully, of Shazza’s long tresses. For a moment, she could almost see the wild-haired Australian woman sitting next to her in place of Kyra.

She blinked and shook her head, and the drift of illusion was gone.

Kyra was playing with a lock of her hair, twisting it slowly around her finger. “She first started it because she had this idea it’d help me, and maybe help her, too. We’d both killed people. I’d meant to do it. She’d done it by accident during one of her attacks. She thought it’d be nice for us to make some kind of support group, since almost nobody else understood what it was we’d done.”

Jack watched as Kyra held out her hand in front of her, seemingly entranced by her own fingers. Slowly, she closed them into a fist. Jack could almost feel them closing around life itself, extinguishing it.

“What it was like to take a life,” Kyra continued, staring at her fist.

Even Riddick, Jack suddenly thought, had never seemed quite so frightening as Kyra did in this moment. Maybe that was just because, at that time, she still hadn’t understood the true brutality of that way of living.

Kyra glanced over at Jack. A corner of her mouth twitched up in what might have been a smirk, but whether she was mocking Jack or herself was unclear. “She figured we could get over it and move on and put it all behind us, and I guess maybe that worked for her okay, because she wasn’t exactly in her right mind when she scragged those picnickers… but it wasn’t the same for me. I knew what I was doing. I’d do it again. If possible, I’d do it even slower and more painful than I did it the first time.”

Jack swallowed and tried to hide the shudder that was moving through her at those words. Just remember, she admonished herself, Kyra lived through the New Christy Massacre. If you watched someone kill your whole family, you’d probably say the same things about them…

Would she, though? Antonia Chillingsworth had hung her from a ceiling and loosed Shrylls on her. Within the twelve-hour period leading up to that woman’s death, Jack had been kicked in the back, cut with a huge knife, had a gun put to her head, hung, almost fed to a Class 1 Hostile Xeno, chased down by another species of Class 1, shot at, and strangled. So how come she felt so guilty for killing her?

Because he left me. The thought was like a punch in the stomach. I lose everybody I love…

Riddick hadn’t even said good-bye, making his abandonment even worse than her father’s.

The day her father had told her he was leaving was still carved into her mind. She’d thought things were going so well, and that a reconciliation was just around the bend. Her mother seemed to need him again, and only the day before she’d come home from school to find them talking companionably in the living room. But then it had all shattered, and she still didn’t know why.

“Audrey,” he’d told her, as they walked back from the town square, ice cream cones in their hands. “I’ve got something I need to tell you. I’m re-enlisting.”

She’d looked up at her father in confusion, not understanding at first what he meant. He’d discharged from the Corps of Engineers a year before her birth. Finally it dawned on her.

“You’re going back into the Service? Why?”

He’d started to say something and then had stopped himself. Anyone else might have been fooled and not realized he’d changed direction, but he couldn’t fool his own daughter. “They need people with my training, and… I need to do something meaningful.”

“Why, the security systems aren’t?” She’d loved playing with her father’s schematics and knew most of them by heart. Sometimes, in the last year or two, she’d even helped him with them; it was the only way he’d been able to squeeze in his visitation time.

“It’s not that. It’s just… things have changed a lot, Audrey. You’ll understand, soon.”

She always hated it when grown-ups said that to her. It always meant they had no intention of even trying to explain themselves. That was when it struck her what he was really saying.

“You’re going off-planet, aren’t you? You’re leaving! You’re leaving us!”

It was the first time she’d ever seen that look of anguish on her father’s face, that look of vulnerability, and it almost shattered her. John MacNamera was supposed to be invincible.

“I’m sorry, Audrey.”

It was tempting to fling her ice cream cone to the ground and run off, but she managed not to. She wasn’t a little girl anymore; she couldn’t just throw a tantrum, as much as she might want to, and she knew that one wouldn’t do a bit of good. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried to make herself be an adult about it. “Where are you going?”

“I’m being posted to Caldera Base.”

“The Caldera?” The urge to throw a tantrum was back, worse than ever. “That’s on Furya! That’s half a year away by Star-Jump!”

He was leaving. He was leaving and she wouldn’t get to see him anymore, and he wasn’t even going to tell her why.

“They need engineers there, Audrey. Good ones. There’s still a lot of rebuilding work to do. The population’s starting to recover from the Diaspora, but they can’t do it without help.” He turned and locked gazes with her. “I can’t turn away from people who need help.”

He had her there. It was the same way she felt a lot of the time. Her mother had called the two of them her “matched set of activists,” back when she’d still called John MacNamera her anything. He had to go where he was needed.

But what about her? She needed him more than anyone.

“It won’t be forever, Audrey. You’ll understand, soon, why it has to be this way.”

And she had, sooner than she’d liked. It was only a few days after their tearful goodbyes at the spaceport when she came home to find Alvin in her living room, her mother’s hand in his, and had known the real score, too late to demand to go with her father—

“Hey. Jack? You awake in there?”

Jack blinked and looked up. Kyra was leaning over her, almost in her face, looking a little annoyed. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I just… I started thinking about what it’d be like to have something like that happen to my family.”

Kyra’s expression eased. She sat back, a wry grin playing over her face. “Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’d do.”

She probably thinks I’d run and hide under a bed and cry.

“Heather had a really good idea, though,” Kyra continued. “With the support group, I mean. It was pretty cool, for a while. There was this other girl, Doris, down in the D ward at the same time as us, and she’d killed her uncle… bet you can guess why.”

Jack swallowed and nodded.

“So we hung out, and we talked about how we had a shot at new lives when we got out of here, shit like that… and then Heather got sent up to C Ward… and I got transferred about a week later… and Doris came up a few weeks after that. And we kept going for a while.”

“What changed?” Jack found she was curious in spite of herself.

A funny look crossed Kyra’s face. “Stacey and Collette showed up. Hell, Heather was the one who invited them into the group. They’d killed, and all… I guess she figured they needed it too.”

Jack tried to contrast Heather – kind, commanding, caretaker Heather – with those two and their deliberate viciousness.

“They like it too much, don’t they? They’re not looking to ‘get better.’”

The gaze Kyra fixed on her was shrewd, almost approving. “Yeah. And they wanted to know all about me. I didn’t get why at first. I didn’t understand for a long time why Heather stopped coming to the little meeting things we did, why she didn’t talk to me anymore if they were around, any of it.”

“Why?”

Kyra leaned back against the wall again. “The club was supposed to be about getting over it. Not… comparing notes and discussing technique… and all that. I didn’t notice because Stacey and Collette were never anything but nice to me, but I get why she wasn’t comfortable around them. Well, now I do.”

“They idolize you, don’t they?”

Kyra looked almost sad for a moment. “Yeah. They do. They want to be just like me when they get out. Like what they think I am, anyway. No wonder Heather didn’t want to be around them.”

Jack nodded. She never felt comfortable around them either. “So when did you figure it out?”

“When you got here.”

Huh? “Me?”

Kyra smirked a little. “You got here, and Heather just took you over. And I was jealous as hell… and then I realized why she was doing that with you when she stopped doing it with me. She was starting up her version of the Killer’s Club again, and this time, she was making sure the people in it were ones who didn’t want to kill again.”

Jack nodded. She hadn’t known much about the deaths on Heather’s conscience, but she’d known that they’d weighed on her, and—

Wait. Oh. Fuck!

Kyra knew. Kyra knew that her story – the story that Riddick really had been the one to kill Chillingsworth – was a lie. Kyra knew that she’d done it. The same as Heather apparently had.

Oh fuck!

Had she actually managed to fool anyone?

13.
A Lot Like Me, A Lot Like You

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack made herself say. “I never killed anybody.”

The look Kyra turned on her was entirely too knowing. “Yeah, Jack, of course you didn’t.”

Fuck.

Jack took a deep breath and glanced over at the door. It was closed; they were alone. “How long have you known?”

Kyra shrugged. “If you mean, when did I realize you were lying? The moment you told the lie. See, I saw you that day. That guy visited you and afterwards you looked like one of those zombie-freaks on Colette’s Tuesday night show. White as snow.” She smirked. “And I got to know snow really well in New Christie. Next thing we know, you’re changing your story. Contrary to public belief, I can put two and two together.”

“Who else knows?” She hoped someone believed her story.

“Far as I know, I’m the only one. I think Heather knew, too. But you seem to have the staff fooled, and that’s the important part, right?”

Jack swallowed, and leaned forward. “Kyra, listen to me. Nobody can know the truth. Not the staff, and not anybody else here, not your friends, nobody. If the secret gets out, sooner or later they’ll figure out that—”

“That your guardian knows where he is?” Kyra’s eyes were shrewd. “That’s what it was about, huh?”

God, I hope she knows all this stuff because she’s ridiculously smart.

“Yeah. Kyra, promise me that nobody’s going to find out from you.”

The older girl smirked at her. “Remember what Stacey said the other day? ‘Snitches get stitches.’ You don’t have to worry I’m gonna blab your secrets.”

“What about her? She’s got this whole thing for Riddick, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, she does. But she likes the idea that he threatened you even better.”

That made Jack blink. “She does?”

Kyra’s smirk became strangely scornful. “You’ve never seen the porn she hacks off the network. She knows where all of the ‘rape movie’ sites are. There’s nothing she loves more than watching vids of big men hurting little girls. So the idea that Riddick maybe raped you just has her all excited.”

Kyra looked away, but not before Jack saw her sneer of disgust.

“You don’t like that about her,” she hazarded.

“I hate that about her,” Kyra said after a moment. “You know, I saw a lot of what happened when Roger and his men stormed the enclave. They dragged this ten-year-old girl out into one of the courtyards and these five guys took turns with her. I took out three of them before they zeroed in on me and I had to move. She was crying the whole time…”

For a moment, the dark-haired girl’s customary look of savagery was gone. She looked haunted. Vulnerable. Human.

“What happened to her?” Jack wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

When Kyra spoke again, her voice was as close to tears as Jack had ever heard. “When I was escaping with the others, we had to go through the courtyard. She was still in the center of it. They’d killed her… and they’d… mutilated her body. I think they did it while she was still alive.”

“No wonder.”

Kyra’s eyes flashed up at her. “No wonder what?” The vulnerability was gone, replaced by suspicion.

“No wonder you spent a week paying Roger back.”

A shudder passed through Kyra’s frame, and their eyes remained locked for a long moment. Jack suddenly realized that she was probably the first person to hear about this since Heather. Colette and Stacey might worship Kyra, she thought, but only her strength and savagery. The fact that her killings had been motivated by pain, and by love, was something they wouldn’t be able to respect. They wanted her to be a sadist, because that was what they were.

Jack felt like she was inside Kyra’s head. She could see it all so clearly, as if it was happening to her. Home and sanctuary turned into a bloody, violated killing field. People she knew and loved screaming, fleeing, trying to fight, overwhelmed by monsters in human form. Trying to save them, feeling each death as if it were her own. Having no choice but to flee, hating herself for not being stronger, more powerful, not being able to single-handedly save the day.

Even holding a gun, even using it to cut down attackers, couldn’t have countered the soul-annihilating feelings of helplessness—

“Stop.”

Jack came back to herself. “What?”

“Stop it. Don’t do that.” Kyra’s expression was wary, defensive.

“Do what?”

“You know. Don’t do it.”

“I was just… thinking about what it must have been like. To be at the enclave when all of that was happening.”

“I know what you were thinking.”

“Kyra, I promise you, I don’t think you were wrong. What you did, fighting back when they stormed in there, it’s—”

“What you would have done, too. I know. But look, just… stop. Okay? I can’t think about that stuff for long or…” She looked down at her hands, clenched tightly into fists.

“Or you want to do it all again. I’m sorry. I’ll leave it alone.” Suddenly what Kyra had said hit her. “You think I’d have done it too? Not wimped out?”

That seemed to be what Kyra needed her to ask. She chuckled, her equilibrium visibly returning. “You didn’t wimp out when you were on the Kubla Khan. Did you?” She leaned back against the wall, watching Jack with speculative eyes. “You remind me of Kaylee.”

“Who?”

“One of the other girls who got away, with me. She’d kept her cool all during the firefight, took out almost as many invaders as I did. But you know, afterward, it all hit her really hard, the way it hit you. She, uh… shot herself about a week after we went into hiding. Kind of a faster version of what you tried to do.”

“She killed herself?” Jack felt her heart twist, and wondered if that was why Kyra had looked at her with scorn when they’d first met.

“No.” Kyra sighed. “She did a number on herself, but it wasn’t fatal. I had to finish her off. Otherwise it was gonna take her hours to die.”

“God, I’m sorry, Kyra.”

Kyra’s smile was a bit forced in response. “How about we change the subject, okay?”

Jack nodded. “So, uh, how do we make sure that Stacey and the others don’t catch on about Riddick?”

Kyra’s smirk was back. “That’s easy. We make her believe what she wants to believe anyway.”

“How?”

“Well, you let her corner you, and you tell her all about how Riddick did all kinds of horrible, nasty things to you, and give her something to dream about for months. It’s what she wants to be true anyway. Tell it right and she won’t question it.”

“I can’t, Kyra. If that gets out, he could end up with a reputation as a pedophile and if he goes back to prison with that—”

“Damn, Jack. He must really be something, the way you keep trying to protect him.” Humor flashed in her eyes. “But don’t worry. Stacey just wants to believe that stuff. She doesn’t want to share it with the world. You know what she said about snitches. Telling anybody would be snitching to her. She just wants to imagine it while she gets off, if Colette isn’t around to get her off.”

Jack stared at Kyra in wonderment. “And here I thought the New Christies were supposed to be sexually repressed or something.”

Kyra shrugged again. “Maybe. I don’t rightly know. I was, what, twelve when it all went wrong. First time I got my period was in the psychiatric ward after they caught me, and I had no idea what the hell it was until they told me. At first I thought I’d just been used by one of the guards or something, like what I’d seen happen to friends of mine. I guess the Fathers thought if I didn’t know about that stuff, I’d stay innocent and pure or something.” She sneered. “I’ve seen what that gets you. And as for God, after what he let them do? I hate the son of a bitch.”

I absolutely believe in God… and I absolutely hate the fucker. Riddick had said that to Imam. It had been one of those times when Jack was deliberately lurking supposedly out of hearing range, listening. Nobody had ever seemed to notice how good her hearing really was, in spite of the fact that it had saved Carolyn Fry’s life… or at least postponed her death. Jack had made a point of being nearby, listening in, whenever important conversations were going on. She’d known by then that adults were going to hide things from her, supposedly for her own good, and that her survival and freedom depended upon knowing what they were up to. Any of them might have gotten it into their heads to abort her journey to Furya, unless she stayed a few steps ahead of them.

It was how she’d learned about the eclipse cycle, how she’d found out that Johns was planning on stiffing Riddick once they left the planet, and how she’d discovered that Johns was planning on offering her up as a Judas Goat to save his own skin. And it was how she’d learned that Riddick felt exactly the same way about God as Kyra.

“You know, you’re a lot like him.”

“What, I’m a lot like God?” Kyra gave her a joking sneer.

“No, sorry, you’re a lot like Riddick. He’s got a real hate on for God, too.”

The older girl snickered. “Maybe he’s my soul mate.”

Jack found herself chuckling, too. “He’s definitely not Stacey’s, that’s for sure. Seriously, I think he’d like you.”

“That’d be pretty wild. Hey, out of curiosity, where’d you learn how to shoot?”

“Huh?”

“Well, you blasted off Shrivelsworth’s—”

“Chillingsworth.”

“Yeah, her. You blasted her head clean off. You can’t tell me that was the first time you’d ever shot a gun.”

Jack grinned and shook her head. “My dad taught me. I guess he always wanted a son to go hunting with, but all he got was a daughter who could shoot clay pigeons but had hysterics when she killed a live one.”

“Hmm. Well, you know, I hunted a lot when I was in the mountains after the standoff ended… but that was for food. Survival. You probably could do it without crying if you were hungry enough.”

“Maybe,” Jack admitted after a moment. “But just running around out there killing for fun? Not my thing. So I stuck to the target range after that. It was one of the things my parents fought about anyway. My mom didn’t even want me handling a gun.”

“Came in handy, though, didn’t it?” Kyra’s smile was almost approving.

“Yeah. How’d you learn?”

“They started teaching all of us how to use the guns about… oh, a week into the standoff. I think they knew things were going to get bloody.” Kyra gave Jack another wry grin, meant to conceal the twist of pain beneath. It almost did, but Jack still felt like she could see beneath the other girl’s skin now. “So I went from bulls-eyeing target circles, to blowing off men’s heads, to hunting deer and rabbit. One time I got a goose.”

Kyra suddenly winced and put her hand over her mouth.

“What?”

“I just realized… I think that was one of the tame geese from the enclave. They’d follow you around if you gave them corn…” Kyra’s voice drifted off for a long moment and then she cleared her throat. “Fuck. When I get out of here, somebody’s paying for that. You know what I’m gonna do, Jack?”

“No, what?”

As she talked, the distress in her face gave way again to a calm, determined expression. “I’m gonna become a bounty hunter. Gonna go after the kinds of sick shits who do things like in Stacey’s vids. If they’re lucky, maybe they’ll still have their balls when I turn them in for the bounty.”

“Oh, Kyra, no.”

“Why not?”

It took Jack a moment to compose her thoughts in answer to that. “Look, maybe a lot of bounty hunters are good people, I don’t know. But I’ve met a bunch now, and they’re just in it for the money. They’ll use you up for a percentage. Johns – that’s the guy who caught Riddick – he threatened a bunch of little kids to get Riddick to surrender. Killed some of them, too. You don’t want to be with people like that.”

“Well,” Kyra sighed, “it’s either people like them, or something worse, Jack. You may be the type to do the whole domestic life thing, I don’t know… but I already know I’m not. Red Roger took everything I ever knew from me. And he woke up something inside me that these docs can’t get out of me. When I leave here, I know where I’m going to end up, what I’m going to end up doing. I might as well do it in a way that the law won’t come down on me for, you know?”

“It’s just such a bad idea, Kyra. There are other things you could do. Military, or security, or something, but becoming a merc—”

“Military won’t take me, I already checked on that. Nobody wants the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain in their ranks except merc outfits. Don’t worry about it, though. I know the score. I’ll be careful.”

“Don’t trust any of them.”

Kyra gave her a mocking smile, but there was no hostility in it. “Jack, I don’t trust anybody.”

Someone knocked on the door at that moment. It opened, and Nurse Raymond stepped in. Her eyes and smile widened as she entered.

“Well, look who’s up! I guess that broth did the trick, didn’t it?”

Something sure had, Jack thought. She glanced over at her roommate and felt like a secret smile, visible only to the two of them, passed between them.

“Yeah, I’m feeling better, I guess.”

It still hurt. She dreaded going to the dining room and seeing Heather’s painfully empty seat. But she felt a lot stronger now, and she knew who to thank for it.

“Much better. Thank you.”

14.
The Dark Side of the Soul

Dinnertime, Jack knew, was not going to be easy.

She was dreading walking into the dining hall and seeing Heather’s empty seat. She was dreading sitting close to it. Although her talk with Kyra had helped her feel a little bit better about what had happened, she knew that confronting this particular proof of Heather’s absence from the world was going to hurt like hell.

Kyra must have known it, too. Jack could feel the older girl’s eyes on her as she entered the dining room.

Okay, deep breath. Let’s— oh, you little bitch.

Two seats were vacant at Jack’s table: hers, and Celia’s. Celia was sitting in the spot that had belonged to Heather.

The chatter in the room went completely silent as she approached the table, her eyes fixed on the little drama queen. She could see Celia getting paler as she approached, but not doing the smart thing of getting the hell out of that chair.

“Hey, Jack.” The girl’s voice cracked just to the scared side of perky.

Jack couldn’t speak. Her hands were clenched tightly into fists, but the rage she felt was blocking all of the words she might say.

“So, you hungry? I know I always have trouble eating after something bad happens—”

I, me, me, me. Everything in Celia’s world was always about her. Jack realized she was shaking. Not with fear. Not hardly with fear. With murderous rage. The last time fury so dark and intense had coursed through her, Antonia Chillingsworth had ended up headless.

“That’s not your seat.” She didn’t even recognize her own voice when it grated out.

Celia blinked, and went a little paler. “C’mon, Jack, nobody’s using it anymore, and anyway, it’s right next to Maura, you know—”

“You have no business in that seat. That’s Heather’s seat.” It sounded crazy, and yet it also sounded perfectly sensible. Heather had only been dead for two days, and already Little Miss Wants-the-Spotlight was stinking up her chair…

“Jack,” Celia said, as if she was talking to a small child. “Heather’s dead.”

Around them, girls smarter than Celia were clearing away from the table.

“Get out of that chair.” Jack’s fury was so consuming now that her voice couldn’t reach above a whisper.

Celia glanced around, perhaps finally realizing that she might be in trouble. Or perhaps not.

“No.”

“Get… the fuck… out of that chair!”

“It’s mine now. I have seniority at the table and I’ll sit in it if I want. You’re hardly one to complain, since you’re the one who killed her.”

Murmurs had been going back and forth in the background; the silence that fell after Celia’s words was deathly.

“What did you just say?” In her own ears, her voice was strangely breathless. Time seemed to be moving in slow jerks, the way it had when she’d wrenched herself out of Imam’s grasp and begun scrambling for Junner’s discarded gun. Cold was cascading through her limbs, tightening her belly, and there was a strange, almost weightless sensation in her chest.

Her foot barely felt the ground as she took another step forward.

“Everybody saw what you did. Heather would still be alive if you hadn’t—”

The enraged scream inside of Jack’s skull was so loud that she never knew whether she’d made noise aloud, too, although later her throat did hurt. She didn’t hear the chair slam into the ground, either. Her hands were around Celia’s throat, shutting out the vile words. Celia was clawing at her arms.

You fucking, lying little bitch! She was my friend! You wouldn’t know what a friend was if you even had one, you worthless piece of shit! All you’re any good for is wasting people’s time with your bullshit dramas! You want the spotlight? It’s all yours, you bitch, you can have it!

As she struck Celia’s head against the floor for the third time, she realized that everything she was screaming in her mind was pouring out of her mouth. Letting go of Celia’s throat, she slapped the girl hard, once, twice—

A vise-like grip came around her wrist as she brought her hand back for the third slap, and then she was being pulled back away from Celia. More hands came around her and her last glimpse of the of the other girl, before moving bodies obscured her, was of a sodden, sobbing mess curled in a fetal position on the back of Heather’s chair.

The wall slammed into Jack’s back, knocking the wind out of her. The howling tempest of her rage still roared in her ears, blocking out all sound, but Kyra’s face was before her, tense, mouthing the word “Enough!”

Two orderlies, the largest on the floor, appeared, one of them pushing Kyra out of the way and forcing her to release Jack’s wrist. Jack saw the syringe too late to try to dodge it and felt its sharp sting in her throat.

The world dissolved into darkness.

---

Sterile white greeted her when she woke, but her mind remained muzzy, not clearing for a long time. Whatever had been in that syringe was strong. She couldn’t think. Bits and pieces of thoughts and feelings, and memories, would come to her, but flit off before they could assemble into any kind of coherent order.

Audrey lay still, waiting and, when bits of thoughts came to her, wondering why she felt such powerful sadness and loss… and even more powerful guilt and shame. Something dark and horrible was inside her, gnawing at her, and she couldn’t fathom what it was.

What happened? Why do I feel like this?

Slowly, so slowly, small chains of coherent thought began to assemble. There was a girl. A girl named Jack. And Jack had done horrible things, things so terrible that she shied away from contemplating them.

But she knew she needed to look.

Murder. Jack was a murderer. And a liar who had betrayed two dear friends.

Who was this girl? How did she know her?

Memory tugged at her. A woman in a beautiful dress was lying, sprawled, on a floor, a handgun discarded beside her. The coppery stink of blood filled the air. Bits of blood, gore, and hair were everywhere. Audrey forced herself to look harder at the dead woman.

Oh god, she doesn’t have a head…

A man was slowly rising to his feet, his movements faltering as if with pain. He had his hand on his upper arm, blood seeping between his fingers. He was huge, darkly handsome, his lips pressed together in a grim, pained line. Dark welding goggles covered his eyes as he looked directly at Audrey.

“Awfully uncivilized thing you just did, Jack.”

Oh god, no…

Audrey looked down and saw the shotgun in her hands, her finger still loosely on the trigger, smoke wafting from the end of the barrel.

No…

She knew who Jack was.

No…

She was Jack.

“Noooooooo!” The scream ripped its way out of her already-raw throat as she fought against the restraints holding her down. She sobbed, panting, as the rest of her memories began to flood back. The planet. The eclipse. Death upon death upon death. Riddick. A strange memory of him gently taking the gun from her hands and holding her – when had that happened? – before vanishing from her life forever. The tub, and her blood curling through the water. C Ward. Kyra. Heather.

Heather.

Oh, god… did I kill her, too?

Heather bucking and writhing in her grasp, the way Balto had… no, she’d been scared, but it had been familiar to her, until the moment when Heather had stopped breathing. But…

She’d pushed down on Heather’s chest, frantic, and had felt something crunch beneath the heel of her hand.

Was that when she’d killed Heather? Was Celia right? Was it her fault?

It took a long time for the tears to ease. The calm of pure despair finally came to her as she realized that, if she had killed Heather, she could never be Audrey MacNamera again. If she’d killed Heather, she’d murdered Audrey, too.

Many more long hours passed before Nurse Raymond came to take her back to C Ward.

---

Silence fell when people saw her. Silence and stares. She headed awkwardly down the hall, for her room, and slipped inside it. She wasn’t even sure what time it was, whether it was day or night. She’d figure that out when the bell rang for the next meal.

Kyra entered the room moments later, sitting down on her bunk and watching her from across the room.

“You’re back.” A hint of a smile quirked across Kyra’s lips.

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t sure if you would be or not. I got a little worried they were going to decide to put you in D Ward or something.”

Jack shuddered a little. Maybe D Ward was exactly where she really belonged.

“How…” She swallowed. “How’s Celia?”

Kyra shrugged. “She’ll be fine. She’s got some impressive bruises, and she was carrying on something fierce until they took her to the infirmary, but she’s not nearly as bad off as she’s pretending to be.”

Relief, and a little annoyance, washed over Jack. “Oh. Good.”

“You’ve got the whole guilt thing going again, don’t you?” Kyra’s eyes on her were shrewd.

Guilt. There it was. Guilt was what separated Jack from Audrey. Maybe as long as she still cared about things, as long as she still wanted to make things right, Audrey was still in her.

But oh God, caring hurt so much.

“Kyra, uh… I have a question.”

“Sure.”

“Did I kill Heather?”

“What? No way. Look, just because Celia said that, and the administration is trying to hang that shit on you, doesn’t mean it’s true. You didn’t. They just don’t want to admit the meds she was on might have done it.”

“The administration? They’re saying I—?”

“The administration is full of shit. I overheard some of the orderlies bitching about it. They all know it’s a lie and they’re pissed because most of them like you and know how hard you took her death.”

“But Kyra, are you sure that I didn’t do it? She stopped breathing and I couldn’t hear a heartbeat, but when I tried to do CPR I felt something crack—”

Kyra held up her hand. “I figured you were gonna ask that, so I did a little research about CPR on the terminal. Most of the guidelines I found said that, when you’re doing it right, you’re pressing so hard on the breast bone that you might break some of the person’s ribs.”

Broken ribs? Was that what the crunch had been?

“Those guidelines also said that if that happened, you shouldn’t let it stop you,” Kyra continued. “It’s normal, and it happens a lot. So no, you didn’t kill Heather by trying to do CPR on her, even if you did feel something break. Sounds like you were doing exactly what you were supposed to.”

Jack sagged down onto her cot, suddenly feeling boneless. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault…

“Why are they trying to pin it on me?”

“Are you kidding? She was on an experimental drug that’s trying to get through clinical trials. She said something about a week before you got here about how the drug should be on the market in a few more months if everything goes well. Having it turn out to kill patients?” Kyra put her arms behind her head as she leaned back against her garish wall. “That’s pretty much the definition of everything not going well, wouldn’t you say? It’s a cover-up.”

A cover-up. They’d pin the death on some thirteen-year-old girl who was already certified as mentally unstable, and nobody’d have to take the consequences of a beautiful, wonderful person dying horribly. And in a few more months, even more people could start dying from the drug as it hit the open market—

Fuck that! Audrey shouted from within her, in pure Jack dialect.

She shoved herself to her feet.

“We’ll see just what kind of price tag Mister Flint has,” she snarled, flinging open the door and stomping out of the room. She ignored the resumption of the stares and whispers as she stalked over to Carmouche, at the desk by the C Ward main doors.

“I want to see Flint.” She tried to keep the rage out of her voice, but his eyes widened a little.

“Jack, what is it?”

“I want to talk to him. About Heather. Now.”

She waited while he made the call, leaning against the wall and glowering at anyone who looked at her, until Nurse Raymond returned to escort her upstairs.

As they passed through the A Ward locking system, her heart began to race again. She hadn’t imagined it. They were using her father’s system, the X31-B. She knew everything about its specs – she’d even helped her father do the final drafts during one of his visitations – and it’d be easy to get around. She began paying attention to where the cameras were located.

They were using the standard camera models that came with the package, but they’d opted for the “economy mode,” with fewer cameras than were really recommended. Jack began mapping out the cameras’ “blind spots” in her mind.

Remember this. Remember all of this. It’s making a forty-second sweep. Walk across the hallway just right and you’ll never appear on the screens—

“Are you okay, Jack?” Raymond asked her.

Jack forced herself to focus. “Not really.”

Her memories and thoughts of her escape plans, she knew, would forever be tainted by the anguish and rage of Heather’s death. The two would be inextricably linked. Thinking about this moment would evoke the details of the security system, and also the pain. The way any time she thought about her report on the missing StarJump ship called Tenth Crusade, it evoked the smell of her father’s broken air conditioner.

Okay, put it aside for now. Pay attention again after you’ve dealt with Flint. She let Raymond lead her to Flint’s office.

The hospital administrator looked up at her, giving her a perfunctory smile that never reached his eyes. “Yes, Jack, what can I do for you?”

Jack sat down in one of the empty chairs. “You can stop lying about me to the people investigating Heather’s death.”

As the door closed behind her, she thought she heard an approving snort from Raymond.

Flint’s brows went up. He clasped his hand on his desk, and leaned forward a little. “I’m not sure I like your attit—”

“I really don’t care what you like. You’re telling people that my actions during Heather’s seizure were what killed her, and we both know it’s a lie. Her heart stopped. I tried to give her CPR.” Grief tried to overwhelm her and she ruthlessly shoved it back. Later. After.

“Jack, you have no idea how delicate this situation can be—”

“Sure I do. And nowhere near as delicate as, say, three years from now, when the drug gets pulled back off of the shelves for its high fatality rate, it coming to light that you allowed patients in this hospital to be experimented on, and tried to cover up their deaths.”

This was the most dangerous card in her hand, and she knew it. What happened next depended on exactly how dirty Flint really was… and how greedy he was. The spark of fear that appeared in his eyes told her what she’d hoped. He was in it for the money, not to get caught up in deep corporate dirt. She knew it the way she’d known that Johns would offer her up as a sacrifice even before he’d made his proposal to Riddick.

“Jack, think about what you’re—”

“I know what I’m saying. And I’m going to offer you a choice. An easy one. You can keep telling the investigators that I’m responsible for Heather’s death if you want, and run the risk that, when the truth eventually comes out, your career gets ruined. Or you can get your share of the bounty on Riddick from Toombs.”

Score. Flint stared at her in speechless awe. Finally his lips moved. “How…?”

Jack leaned forward, locking her eyes with his, remembering everything her father had told her about how to negotiate to win. “It’s not important. I’m not wrong, am I?”

He just stared at her.

“Here’s the deal. You tell the investigators you were wrong. Heather’s death was caused by the seizure, so whatever caused the seizure was responsible. I was just trying to help. It’s the truth, anyway. And in return, I’ll sign those papers when I check out of the hospital. If my name is any way connected to Heather’s death, though, I’ll never, ever sign anything. Which means Riddick’s bounty doesn’t go up, and our friend Toombs won’t have any reason to give you a share of it.”

She gave him a while to think about it. He pulled out some files, leafing through them for a long moment. Anguish crossed his face.

Is that Heather’s file there? Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Mr. Flint.

“She was doing so well on it…”

Yes, that was Heather’s file.

Flint looked up at her again. “Do you promise, Jack, that you’ll sign the statement?”

“Mr. Flint, I promise. The day I leave here, you’ll have a paper with the truth about Riddick, and my signature on it, right there on your desk. You have my word.”

Flint sighed and seemed to deflate. “Very well. I’ll… set the record straight. It’s probably for the best, anyway. There are two other patients who were about to start on the trials, and…” He gave himself a little shake. “Just remember, I’m going to hold you to this.”

“Absolutely, Mr. Flint.” Jack suddenly wondered if this might result in her release being accelerated. How long would Flint be willing to wait to have those papers in his hand? Well, the sooner she got into A Ward, the better. Then she could walk out of this place and vanish.

She paid close attention to the cameras and the hallways as Raymond walked her back, beginning to map out her route in her head. Soon she’d be free of this place. And then, hopefully, she’d be free of Jack. She didn’t know who this hard-boiled, relentless bitch was, but the sooner she could go back to being Audrey, the better. She didn’t like Jack. Jack killed people. Jack beat people up for being idiots. Jack blackmailed people. Jack was like Riddick, and like Kyra. Jack needed to be ended.

Just as soon as I’m free of this place, she thought, as she re-entered C Ward. Until then, Jack had her uses. But it would be Audrey, not Jack, who reached Furya and her father.

“So, what have you been up to?” Stacey appeared at her side.

She pasted on a smug grin. “Threatening Mr. Flint.”

“You’re kidding.”

Jack just shook her head and grinned, moving on. She remembered what Kyra had told her. Soon she needed to let Stacey corner her, and tell the lie about how horribly Riddick had treated her. But now was not the time. She’d blubber later.

Kyra was still in their room. “So?”

Jack flopped down. “I’m off the hook. Hey, Stacey was almost friendly with me just now. What happened?”

“Are you kidding? You beat the crap out of Celia. That gave you some genuine cred with her.” Kyra chuckled. “In fact—”

The bell rang.

“Perfect timing,” Kyra said with a grin. “I’ll just show you. C’mon, it’s dinnertime.”

Jack let Kyra lead her to the dining hall again, once more dreading the horribly empty seat she’d see there. She stopped, shocked, in the doorway.

“Impressive, huh?” Kyra said, leaning against the wall. “It was my idea.”

The room had been rearranged. Completely rearranged. All of the tables had been moved to different locations, and all of the seats had been swapped around, too. Some of the girls were moving into similar groupings as before, but a lot of them had changed tables as well.

There was no sign of which spot had once been Heather’s. No sign whatsoever.

“I heard Carmouche saying they’re going to do this from now on if there’s a death on the floor. He really liked the idea.”

Jack looked over at Kyra, the absurd, Audrey-like urge to cry filling her. There had to be some way other than tears to express her gratitude, surely. “You did this?”

Kyra nodded, looking smug.

“Thank you.”

Kyra grinned and took her elbow again. “C’mon.”

Jack followed her, realizing that most of the other Killer’s Club girls seemed to have grouped at a table that had two empty chairs, side by side. One for Kyra, she realized… and one for her.

She sat down at the table, expecting at least one of its resident badasses to object to her presence, but received only friendly smiles. Welcoming smiles. “You’re one of us, now” smiles.

Yes, Audrey thought, the moment she got out of this place, Jack had to die.

15.
What Hides Beneath the Skin

“Do we have to?”

Kyra glanced over at Jack and raised an eyebrow. “Not if you want to tell her no.”

Jack shuddered at that. The idea of telling Stacey that no, she didn’t want to spend the afternoon hanging out in the room of a violent psychotic who took offense easily, somehow just wasn’t appealing. “Okay, fine…”

“Relax. She’s just glad to be back out of isolation and needs human contact. She’s not going to go after the real story in front of everybody.” Kyra smirked a little; there was condescension in the smirk but Jack sensed it wasn’t aimed at her. “She wants to hear that privately.”

Only two days earlier – and Jack was still puzzling out what had happened, because it made no sense to her – there had been a sudden, violent altercation between Stacey and Celia. Celia had ended up with a bloody nose and a split lip; Stacey had been dragged off the floor screaming enraged obscenities at the girl. Nobody Jack talked to, though, knew what – or who – had started the fight; both girls were apparently claiming that the other had.

Now Stacey was back, craving a little Killer’s Club company… something that apparently now included Jack. Reluctantly, she climbed off of her bed, shooting her nonchalant roommate a dubious look. After all of her efforts to avoid being alone with Stacey lately, she was now going to be visiting the girl’s room.

“Fine, just don’t leave me alone with her, okay?”

Kyra shrugged. “I won’t, but you know, sooner or later you’re going to have to tell her the story. You can’t avoid it forever.”

“I just…” Jack had found, in the last week, that being honest with Kyra was remarkably easy. “I don’t know what to tell her. I mean, I’m a virgin. I’ve never been with a guy, much less been raped by one. I don’t know what to say that’s not… really obviously fake. She’s gonna know I’m lying.”

Kyra nodded, her expression becoming serious. “We’ll work on your story later, okay? But right now we’d better get over there.”

Suppressing a shudder, Jack followed Kyra out of their room and down the hall. Stacey, she recalled, roomed not with Colette but with a smoldering, taciturn girl named Omphalé, whose crime had qualified her for Killer’s Club status but which had never been explained. Ahead of them in the hall, Jack could see Colette heading into a room, followed by her roommate, Xi Hin. Kyra headed for them.

Jack had grown used to the sight of Kyra’s “artwork” on their walls; the plain light blue expanse that greeted her took her by surprise. Then she turned.

Oh. That must have been Omphalé’s wall.

It was rather like another version between the dichotomy of her side of the room and Kyra’s. Where Omphalé’s side of the room was plain and pristine to the point of sterile, Stacey’s side was jumbled and garish. The wall over her bed was covered by an enormous collage of pictures. Moving closer, awed, Jack realized that most of them were pictures of very savage-looking men. The killers Stacey admired and hoped to emulate, she realized… including Riddick.

Riddick.

Jack had only seen his face in her dreams and imaginings, in the course of the almost-half-year since he’d vanished. Now it glared down at her off of Stacey’s walls. In virtually every shot, he looked enraged with her, staring at her with mute accusation.

Not me. He’s not mad at me. It’s just the way he looked when they took his picture… he was mad at them.

There was no reason to think Riddick knew or cared where she was or what she was doing, or what she was claiming in her attempt to throw people off of his scent. Just because she felt guilty about it didn’t mean he’d blame her.

Still, looking at him on the wall above her, she felt like a traitor.

Why? He never cared about you. If he had, he’d have stayed to say goodbye.

“Check out who’s in love with your wall, Stace,” she heard Colette saying.

Stacey’s snicker, behind her, wasn’t entirely unfriendly. “Or one person on it, anyway. Hey Jack, wanna start your own collection?”

“Huh?” She looked back at the blonde girl, confused.

Stacey’s eyes were glittering with a sort of malicious amusement. This, Jack realized, was her friendly mode. “I’ve got some extra pictures of Riddick I didn’t put up, if you want them for your wall.”

“No, that’s okay,” Jack replied automatically, even as a pang of longing moved through her.

Damn it, I need to get him, and that whole time, out of my system.

“You sure? I’ve even got a picture of him from back when he was busted his first time.”

That made Jack blink. “Really?”

“Heh. Thought you’d be interested…” Stacey pulled a thick folder out from under her mattress and opened it up, leafing through it. Watching with the other girls, Jack felt a wave of nausea move through her as she saw what most of the pictures in there were.

Kyra had been right. Stacey had a thing for depictions of rape. How the hell had she managed to assemble a collection like that – images of large men sexually assaulting small, childlike women – in C Ward?

Kyra’s breath against her ear sent a chill through her; or perhaps that came from what she was seeing. “They don’t take them from her,” the older girl murmured too low for the others to hear, as if reading Jack’s mind. “She’d just get more and they say as long as she still has them and wants them, they know she’s not well yet. I heard one of the nurses saying that when she’s ready to voluntarily give them up, they’ll know she’s responding to treatment.”

Jack nodded, a little shakily. The images were revolting in the extreme, and surely Stacey’s possession of them was illegal. Back on Deckard’s World, Audrey’s cousin Rob had had his own collection of pornos – which had offended her at the time but now seemed almost wholesome – and he’d told her that he had to buy them secondhand or steal them from his father because he couldn’t legally buy them from a store until he was eighteen. Stacey was sixteen at the most; how was she even getting this stuff?

“Here it is!” Stacey crowed triumphantly as she pulled a page out of the pile. “Check out your boyfriend.”

A few of the girls giggled. Jack reached out, unable to resist her curiosity, and took the page.

It was a mug shot; Stacey had printed it out in color. Riddick – very young, maybe only four years older than her in the picture – was staring at the camera with an inhuman sort of rage on his face, holding up a numbered placard with his shackled hands.

He has hair.

Jack had always wondered what Riddick would look like with hair, and now she knew. Close-cropped and tightly curled, the hair hugged the crown of his head. She found herself wishing she could touch it, feel its texture under her fingers instead of just paper—

“Yeah, it’s definitely love,” Stacey snickered, making the other girls laugh, and Jack realized with a flush of embarrassment that she’d been touching the picture.

Shit, just like that fangirl dweeb Joslin back home, with her actor pictures… I’m pathetic.

“So c’mon, Stace, spill,” Colette was saying. “What happened? What’d that bitch Celia do?”

“Nothing.” There was laughter in Stacey’s voice.

Jack looked up from Riddick’s picture, confused. Celia hadn’t done anything? Then why…?

Stacey was looking archly around at the other girls. “There’s this game me and my friends used to play in my old school, when somebody pissed us off. Any of you ever played it? How you destroy someone’s reputation without getting in much trouble yourself?”

Several of the other girls in the room looked confused but were nodding.

“Can’t say I ever got to play those games,” Kyra said. She had her game face on, her I’m tougher than all of you combined face that Jack had begun to understand was a false front. But she alone, of everyone in the room, had a history of enough social isolation to get away with admitting ignorance of such things. She could ask what the others couldn’t without losing face.

Jack, however, already had a sick feeling about what Stacey was going to say. If she wasn’t mistaken, she’d seen it done to some kids back home.

“Okay, it’s like this,” Stacey began. “If you don’t like some bitch, and you get into fights with her all the time, sooner or later the teachers decide it’s your fault. If you get all your friends and go teach her a lesson, same thing; you’re the ones who are ‘ganging up’ on the little cow and she’s all innocent.”

“Right, that makes sense,” Kyra said.

Because that’s exactly what you’re doing, Jack added silently.

“But if you and your friends take turns – one of you gets into a fight with her one day, another one of you gets into it with her a few days later – yeah, you each get sent to a detention once, but she gets sent every time, and it’s not long before they decide that she’s fighting with so many different people, she must be the one starting it. Now she’s the troublemaker, not you. And nobody will believe a word she says anymore.”

Yeah, it was what Jack had seen done in her school; Ahmed, a perfectly nice boy who had gone from being bully-fodder to being a fall guy and scapegoat. Someone had even hidden their cigarettes in his locker one time when word got out that a random locker search was imminent; he’d constantly been in trouble, and Audrey had earned an asskicking of her own when she’d gone to the teachers and told them that she’d seen those cigarettes being stashed by Missy Barnstable before the search, proving it by opening the locker herself. Deckard’s World was more than a little Muslim-hostile, thanks to too many encounters with fanatical members of the New Taliban during its early colonial days. Ahmed and his family had ended up moving away a few months later, something that had made her parents argue about whether they were raising their daughter on “a racist planet.” It had been one of the nails in their marital coffin.

“…all going to take turns with her, huh?” Colette was saying.

“That’s the idea,” Stacey replied, her voice smug. “Jack and I have already gone, so one of you needs to be next. Wait a day or two, and start it when there’s nobody around to say she didn’t start it. Who’s up?”

“I am,” Xi Hin said. “Always wanted to kick that little bitch’s ass.”

Jack felt sick to her stomach. Celia was a pain and a drama queen, but there was no way she deserved this. She looked back down at the picture of Riddick in her hands, trying to focus on it instead.

His eyes are brown, she thought with wonder. They seemed to smolder with rage in the picture. Obviously this was long before his shine job, long before he evolved from the furious man in the picture to the ominously contained predator she’d met in the wreckage of the Hunter-Gratzner. She could see hints of what he’d become, but it was almost like looking at a completely different man.

“Damn, girl,” Colette said, nudging her shoulder. “You’re like, totally in love with Riddick. You’re even worse than Stacey.”

“I’m not.” Jack could see that none of them believed her. “Where’d you find this picture?”

Stacey smirked and Jack realized that now all of them believed, more than ever, that she was completely gone on the guy. “Pulled it out of his file on the Universal Merc Registry.”

I need to check that. I need to see what they know, and what they’re saying about him.

“I didn’t realize we could access that.”

“You can’t.” Stacey looked extraordinarily smug now. “I can, though.”

“How?”

Omphalé chuckled and spoke for the first time since Jack had come in. “We have staff accounts.”

“You have what?” How the hell had they managed to hack into the staff computers?

“Remember Dan Tavey, the orderly who was sacked a few months ago for being too friendly with patients?”

Jack shook her head. “Guess he was before my time.”

Omphalé snickered. “Well, he was a pretty good fuck, and one time, I got him to trade me some access so I could check in with my boys back home. And while I was in there, since he was pretty high up in rank, I created a few new accounts and hid them from the general roster. When he got sacked, I couldn’t use his account anymore, but they didn’t find the other ones. We can go anywhere we want.”

That, she realized, explained how Stacey was getting her hands on porn, too.

Jack felt a strange hunger begin burning inside of her. Access to the Merc network, to flight schedules, to all the things she couldn’t look at now without possibly giving the hospital too many clues about her identity… nothing had ever seemed so important to her. With that access, she could plan out her escape even better, timing it for just the right moment so she could catch a flight offworld. She could ensure that her escape was successful, that she had a route to Furya and her father.

I need that.

But how could she get one of the girls to—

Oh. Oh!

She already had a bargaining chip. Stacey wanted to hear stories about how Riddick had sexually abused her during her supposed captivity; now she could set a price for the tale. Staff account access in return for her tale of woe; Stacey would help facilitate her escape.

Then I can go back to being Audrey and forget I even met a sick creep like her…

“Jeez, talk about a love-hate relationship. Stare any harder at Riddick and you’ll burn a hole through that paper, Jack.”

Fuck. She’d been letting her feelings show. Her feelings about Stacey, though, not Riddick. Still, she could use it; it fit with what she wanted Stacey to believe.

“I uh…” I need out of this room. I don’t know how Kyra stands it. “I need to be alone for a while… you guys mind if I bail?”

“No problem.” Stacey was smirking again. “Take the picture with you. It’ll help.”

Rob, she recalled, had used exactly that tone when talking about taking his dirty magazines into the bathroom.

“Thanks.” Jack headed for the door quickly, afraid to meet Kyra’s gaze. She hoped that she’d stayed long enough to be friendly, to not mess things up, but she needed time away from the sick hypocrisy of it all. It was too big to swallow; she was choking on even a tiny sip of it.

Back in her room she waited and thought, spiraling her plans around each other.

She needed to lie about Riddick to escape. She needed to get in Stacey’s good graces enough to get access to the false staff accounts, in spite of how much Stacey frightened and disgusted her. Once she had access she could plan. She could figure out escape windows, work out the route from the hospital to the spaceport, make sure that nobody was anywhere near finding Riddick based upon anything she or Imam had said, make sure her father would still be on Furya when she got there, everything.

All of this had taken so long, she thought. Was taking so long. She’d been twelve, going on thirteen, when she ran away. It had taken her a month in cryo to reach Vasenji Station, a week before she’d boarded the Hunter-Gratzner, another twenty-two weeks in cryo before the crash; about a week on the planet and on the Kubla-Khan, and then a month in cryo before Riddick had dropped her off with Imam on Helion Prime and vanished without a trace. Three months of darkness before her attempt, and almost two months trapped in this place.

More than a year had passed since she’d run out on her mother and Alvin. It had only been about six months for her, but she was biologically thirteen, and back on Deckard’s World her fourteenth birthday was coming up. Her mother probably believed she was dead by now.

The thought made her feel nauseated again.

It was supposed to be so simple. From Tangiers Prime she would have had a one-month hop to Furya; she would have been there right now. Instead she was trapped in this place, conniving as Jack to manipulate people who disgusted her into helping her escape. This was what his influence had done to her.

I have to get out. I have to get out.

She looked up as Kyra came into the room and shut the door. The older girl sat down on her bed and regarded Jack with a steady gaze.

“I’d give you shit for leaving early, but actually that kinda worked out.”

Jack felt relief move through her; Kyra wasn’t angry. “How?”

“Well, Stacey’s now convinced that Riddick mindfucked you good. You’re all set up there. You won’t even have to go into much detail and she’ll buy it.”

“But that’s the thing, Kyra… I don’t know any detail. And those pictures she has are—”

“Really disgusting. I know. I hate it when she brings them out, too.” Kyra grimaced.

“Why do you hang out with her?”

Kyra rose and went over to the door. Opening it, she leaned out into the hallway and looked around for a moment. Then she closed it again, and turned back to Jack. “Two reasons. The first is… you don’t get to pick your friends in a place like this. You want to survive, you run with the biggest and the strongest. Most of the girls in the Killer’s Club think that’s me, but it’s not. It’s her, because she’s the one who has no conscience. As long as she likes you, thinks she understands you, hell, even looks down on you… you’re good. If she gets it into her head that you might be looking down on her… you’re fucked. If I let her know what I really thought of her and her kind, they’d see to it I never left D Ward again.”

Jack blinked, trying to comprehend it. Stacey was tiny; how could Kyra fear someone as tiny as her?

It’s not her size. It’s her influence. She’s an instigator. She owns Colette and Omphalé, and she wants to own Kyra and me, too. As long as she thinks she can, we don’t have to deal with her enmity. If she realizes she can’t, though, we’re dead meat.

“I see.” She flashed Kyra a sympathetic look. “And the other reason?”

“You may not have noticed, but… these are the kind of people I’m going to be hunting once I leave here and sign up. People just like them are going to be my bounties. I figure I’d better get to know them now. Who knows, one day I might even be the one bringing Stacey herself in.”

A chill moved through Jack and she stared at Kyra in wonder. “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you? Even after what I told you.”

Kyra nodded, a grim expression flitting across her face. “Someone has to put them away. If I can even save one girl from what I— saw…”

Her words trailed off and she went back over to her bed, sitting down and rubbing her forehead. Then she looked up at Jack and gave her a wry smile.

“The trick is to give them what they think they want. Do the Tough Girl routine. Let them think you’re one of them. Let them think they’re in control. Get what you want, and get away clean. If I can get up to B Ward they won’t be able to touch me, because the nurses? The ones I heard talking about Stacey’s porn stash? They say she can’t get up there until she throws it away. But you didn’t hear that, okay?”

Jack nodded. “No way do I want her up on B Ward.”

Kyra grinned. “Planning on going for it yourself, huh? By the way, I’m not going to pick a fight with Celia. Because I already know you’re going to ask me not to, and anyway, if I did, B Ward would be that much farther away.”

A funny feeling moved through Jack and she heard herself speaking. “We could try to get there together.”

Kyra got a startled look on her face, and then nodded. “Yeah. But you’re still going to have to tell Stacey your story before we go, you know.”

“I know. Anyway, I’m going to charge her for it. I want access to those staff accounts. So that’s going to be the price for my story.”

“Setting a price tag. I’m impressed.” Kyra’s voice was admiring. “That means, though, you’re gonna need to really spin a good tale.”

“Yeah, and that’s the problem. I’ve never even had sex… how am I going to convincingly describe what it feels like to be raped?”

Silence greeted her comment. She looked up, and Kyra’s eyes were on her, wary and weighing. They stayed that way, eyes locked, for a long, long moment.

“What I’m about to tell you,” Kyra finally began, “I never, ever said. You never heard it from me. It never, ever happened. Pay attention because I’m only going to ever tell this once. Okay?”

Jack felt chilled again, but nodded. “Okay.”

Kyra began speaking, and continued until the bell for dinner rang. By that time, Jack had no appetite. She picked through her meal, managing to eat little bits of it, and noticed, when she finally rose from the table, that Kyra’s own plate was almost untouched, too. Fortunately the other girls at the table seemed oblivious.

Sleep that night was a long time coming.

No wonder Kyra was so bent on her desire to get involved in law enforcement even if she’d chosen its seediest side. No wonder she didn’t trust legitimate law enforcement, either. No wonder she spent all the time she could practicing combat moves, and no wonder she was so determined to come across as the toughest of the tough. Jack knew, now, what lay behind it, what had been done to her. By Red Roger and his men. By orderlies in her first psychiatric hospital. By a whole parade of men who should have been trustworthy but had used her like a toy, and then used her reputation – as a religious nut and then as a nutcase – against her.

At three in the morning, Kyra fast asleep across the room, Jack slipped out of the bedroom and hid in the bathroom for a good, long cry. Kyra’s story had broken her heart. She knew, now, exactly what to tell Stacey when she spun out her lie, and knew that she’d cry again as she told it. Stacey would think she was weak when she saw the tears, not knowing that they were for someone else.

What am I going to do? she thought as she washed her face and crept back towards her room.

She was going to escape this horrible place, as quickly as she could, but now she had a new problem.

She couldn’t leave Kyra behind… could she?

16.
Spinning the Tangled Web

When Jack finally fell asleep at last, she dreamt, strangely enough, about star-jumping.

She was ten years old again, hard at work on her history report. Audrey MacNamera routinely brought home high marks on her schoolwork, to the point where it had become expected of her. It wasn’t merely that she was intelligent; she threw everything she had into her assignments. As an only child who lived on a street with few other children, most of them too old or too young to be interested in playing with her, she had time to devote to schoolwork that most other children chose not to.

Also, it meant she didn’t have to think about her parents’ unfolding divorce.

Audrey had tried everything she could think of to stop it, but nothing had worked. She didn’t have much to bargain with – how could she swear to get better grades, for instance, when she was already top of her class? She’d offered to do more chores, start hunting with her father again, go without an allowance – anything to bring her father home, but the answer was the same every time. It wasn’t about her. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Her parents just couldn’t live together anymore.

Funny. It felt like it was all about her. Wasn’t she the one paying for whatever had gone wrong? Didn’t that mean it had to be her fault somehow?

So she’d thrown herself into her history report, about the Lost Colony Ships, with more enthusiasm than ever before. Most of it was finished, and she was beyond proud of it, but she’d hit an enormous snag. After half a week of fretting, she’d gone to see Mr. Reilly.

Mr. Reilly taught Audrey’s year, and had approved the scope and subject of her report only after some argument, telling her that it was an extremely ambitious topic. Now, with some trepidation, she had to go to him and ask for some help. She’d run up against an enormous wall, perhaps the very wall he’d been warning her against.

After the room cleared of her classmates, she approached his desk nervously. He smiled as he looked up and saw her. He always had a smile for her; several of her classmates accused her of being the Teacher’s Pet. She didn’t see how that could be true, though. All she did was study; it wasn’t like she sucked up to him or anything.

“Yes, Audrey? Did you want something?”

She took a deep breath, pulling one of the chairs over in front of his desk. “I need help, Mr. Reilly.”

He frowned. “What with?”

“My history paper. I’m having trouble.”

“That was a very ambitious topic, Audrey. I’m not surprised. After all, the fifteen sublight ships alone are—”

“Oh, that part’s done.” She felt her cheeks heat up when he stared at her in disbelief. “It’s the three missing star-jumpers that are causing the problem. I’ve found out the basics about the ships themselves, but… there’s nothing about how star-jump drives work, or why those ships would have gone missing.”

Mr. Reilly’s face cleared, an understanding smile appearing. “Ah. That’s not surprising. I should have told you that you’d have trouble with that.”

“Really? Why? Was I looking in the wrong place?”

He shook his head. “Not much is known about Star Jump Drives. How they work is a closely-guarded secret of the Quintessa Corporation, and has been for hundreds of years now. I can tell you what I do know, though. First, do you understand the problems with light-speed travel?”

Audrey frowned. She thought she sort of did. Maybe. “Um… I’m not sure. I know it has something to do with relativity?”

Mr. Reilly got up and moved over to the board, writing an equation on it.

E=mc²

“This equation is where it starts, Audrey. The ‘E’ refers to the amount of energy needed to move an object. Then the ‘m’ stands for mass. Specifically the mass of the object.”

“What’s the c2?” So far it made sense to her.

“C-squared. That is the square of the velocity you want the object to travel at. For example, if you wanted the object to travel at a speed of ten units, your c-squared would be one hundred units.”

“Okay. I think that makes sense.”

“And if you wanted the object to travel twice as fast, a speed of twenty units, your c-squared would be what?”

“Four hundred units,” Audrey said after a moment of thought.

“Yes. Now, what does that mean?” He waited, giving her an encouraging look.

Audrey thought about it, and then suddenly it hit her. “You’d need four times as much energy, to go twice as fast.”

“And to go three times as fast?”

Realization hit her. “Nine times as much energy.”

Mr. Reilly smiled at her and nodded. “So, do you begin to see the problem with traveling faster and faster?”

“Yeah, um… after a while, you’d need huge amounts of energy just to go a little bit faster?”

“That’s exactly right. Now, how could you begin to compensate for that?” He watched her expectantly.

It came to her after a moment. “Reduce the mass?”

“Yes, Audrey, and that’s exactly why, when you’re looking at the speeds of things, smaller particles can move faster than larger ones. The smallest particles of matter of all are photons, which move at the speed of light, and no larger particle has ever successfully moved that quickly. And as larger particles approach the speed of light, a very unique phenomenon occurs for them.” Mr. Reilly leaned forward, warming to his subject. “Time slows down for them.”

“It does? How?” She had to admit she was fascinated. She’d read fantasy stories about time travel, but the idea that, outside of fiction, the very speed of time could somehow be controlled was… exciting.

“Well, you see, time – as we know it, anyway – is something we perceive in terms of motion and causality—”

“What?”

“The connection between an event and the effects that result from it. Cause and effect. Those things only move in one direction. You can’t smash a vase and then undo it, for example.”

“Yeah, okay.” She’d learned that one the hard way when she was nine.

“Most of the time, though, when we talk about measuring time, we’re really talking about measuring motion. The movements of the hands on an old-fashioned clock, the beat of your heart, the decay of particles in an atomic clock… it’s all about how things move. Now, as you speed an object up, it takes more and more energy for it to move any further, right?”

“Right.”

“Now think about how that would effect all of the particles within that object. So much energy is needed just to keep it moving forward, that less and less is available for its other movements. If you were in a ship, going faster and faster until it got near the speed of light, every atom and molecule within the ship, including all of the ones in you, would begin to move more and more slowly.”

Audrey contemplated that for several long moments, while Mr. Reilly waited.

“So… my heart would beat more slowly, and the ship’s clocks would go more slowly…”

“And all of your nerves would fire more slowly. You wouldn’t even notice that you’d slowed down because to your slowed-down eyes and brain, everything would still seem to be happening at a normal speed.”

“Because everything in the ship would slow down the exact same amount? So that’s why they say that you’d only age an hour but you’d come back to find everybody else had gotten old?”

“That’s exactly right, Audrey. And that was a huge problem, when Earth first started sending out ships. The nearest neighbor star was more than four light-years away, and most of the stars with real potential for colonization were much further out. To get ships to them in a reasonable amount of time meant they had to get as close to light-speed as they possibly could… which meant that the crews of the ships, in many cases, knew that by the time they got back to Earth, everybody they knew would be long dead.”

Audrey contemplated that for a moment. What a harsh, horrible time that must have been, people launching themselves out into a bleak and empty-seeming void with no idea what would be on the other end of their journey… and no way back if things went badly.

Like Kyra and the New Christy Enclave… The schoolroom melted away and she felt like she was hovering over the mountains, gazing down at the bloody disaster as it unfolded. A girl with dark, wild hair was huddled on top of a building, shaking as she aimed a rifle down towards a group of men. Screaming floated up towards her, and cruel laughter. She slowly began to squeeze the trigger, unaware of more, crueler men moving up behind her on the roof—

“Never gonna be free of you, I kill you and kill you and kill you and you just won’t stay dead, why won’t you fucking die already, damn you?”

Jack’s eyes snapped open.

The room was lit with the dim simulation-daylight that signaled morning. Kyra wasn’t in her bed. She was huddled by the wall, by the invisible line of demarcation between her side of the room and Jack’s.

She was drawing.

Jack could hear the squeak of the felt-tip pens Kyra used as they were pressed into the wall, pressed hard and fast. Something was very wrong, she realized. She climbed out of the bed and moved over to Kyra’s side for a closer look.

Roger. Kyra was drawing Red Roger… and herself. Whereas in all of the other pictures of Roger, he’d been helpless and at her mercy, this time the reverse was true. He had her by the throat, his other hand groping inside her shirt, a cruel leer on his face. Her knuckles, on the marker, were white, and she was staring with fixed attention at the drawing.

“I kill you and I kill you and I kill you but you won’t… leave… me… alone…”

Did she even know she was talking?

“Kyra?” Jack said, keeping her voice low and soft.

“You never get out of my head… why won’t you get out of my head…”

“Kyra, it’s me, Jack… he’s not here. He’s dead. He can’t get you.” Would the older girl listen to her?

Kyra went still, and slowly turned to look at her. There didn’t seem to be any recognition in her eyes. “What?”

Shit! Realization struck her. The horrible tales Kyra had told her the night before had awakened the old demons for her. Was that what happened? Could just talking about past darknesses bring them back?

Would she ever be able to go back to being Audrey if that was the case? Or would Riddick and Chillingsworth haunt her forever?

“Red Roger’s dead, Kyra. You killed him.”

Kyra’s face contorted in anguish. “You don’t understand!” She flung the pen down to the floor in emphasis. “I killed him and he keeps coming back! He keeps getting back in my head!”

Jack reached out, catching at Kyra’s upper arms. “We’ll get him out, okay?”

“How?” Kyra sounded panicked.

Shit, I can’t let the other girls, especially Stacey, see her like this! This is my fault, she’d be okay if she hadn’t relived this stuff to tell me about it… I don’t know what to do to get her back to feeling strong—

That was it.

Kyra had given her something important the night before. She could do the same. Whose strength, after all, had she turned to again and again, after the crash? Whose power had reassured her like nothing else could?

His. Riddick’s.

Kyra had given her knowledge; she could give her that power.

“I’ll show you, Kyra, but you’re going to have to let me draw. Is it okay if I change your picture?”

Kyra nodded, still looking oddly helpless, her usual composure still shattered. Jack reached down and picked up the discarded pen. It was black, the red one resting on Kyra’s bedside table. Jack knew she’d end up using them both. Walking over to her own table, she picked up the picture that Stacey had given her the day before. Drawing Riddick would be easier with a “model.” She set to work.

Kyra rocked and muttered behind her as she carefully drew Riddick into the picture, standing behind Red Roger. Jack realized she was proud of the likeness she was achieving; Riddick’s face looked very real and recognizable to her. She kept working, now drawing his arms.

“Who is that?” Kyra finally asked.

“Riddick.”

“Your Riddick? What’s he doing?”

“He’s killing Red Roger, too. To make him stay dead.” She didn’t know if it would work, but maybe it’d be an idea that Kyra could hold onto. Maybe the idea that, when Roger tried to get back into her head, there was something else that would kick him out again, no matter how weak she felt… maybe it’d help her. She carefully drew Riddick’s hands, one gripping Roger’s hair tightly while the other brought a blade across his throat.

“He’ll stay dead? He won’t come back?” Kyra’s voice was almost needy as she asked.

I hope I’m right about this. “That’s right. He won’t come back.” Jack began to change the expression on Roger’s face, as well as she could, from a gloating smirk to a look of fear and pain. Then she went to work on Kyra’s face, changing the terror to relief.

“I could never get him to stop coming back, he just kept coming back over and over…” A note of relief had entered Kyra’s voice.

God, I hope this works. “He can’t now.” She walked over to Kyra’s table and picked up the red marker, and returned to the wall. In a moment, Roger’s throat was spraying blood where Riddick’s knife touched it, but none of the blood landed on the image of Kyra. “He’s dead.”

“He’s dead…” Slowly, a strange smile spread over Kyra’s face. “He’s dead! I killed him and now Riddick killed him too and he’s finally dead!” She lunged at the wall, smacking her hands onto it on either side of the drawing. “You’re dead, you son of a bitch! You can’t get me any more! Not ever again!”

Damn. Jack hoped Kyra would be back to herself a bit more before it was time to go to breakfast. This was getting a little spooky.

But the tension was finally leaving Kyra’s frame, the pinched and harried look easing off of her face, She let out a deep breath, and glanced over at the picture of Riddick. “What’s he really like?”

“Who?”

“Riddick. What really happened after the Hunter-Gratzner crashed? To everybody.”

“Wow… that’s a long story.” Jack glanced at the clock. They only had an hour until breakfast now… maybe half an hour until the Killer’s Club came looking for them. “Tell you what… how about I tell it tonight, after lights-out? When nobody else is around.”

After all, it would fly in the face of everything she intended to tell Stacey today.

Kyra looked at her weighingly for a moment and then nodded. “Yeah. Maybe it’ll give me some good dreams. What’d you dream about?”

Why the hell was the Theory of Relativity making Jack blush?

“A lesson a teacher gave me back at my old school.”

Kyra’s eyebrow went up.

“Oh god, no, nothing like that!” Jack found herself laughing. “It’s just I’m such a great big geek. It was all about the science of space travel and other stuff like that. Crazy, boring stuff.”

“Crazy is never boring.” Kyra smirked as she opened her dresser drawer and started pulling fresh clothes out. “You wanna see something?”

“Sure.” Jack walked over to Kyra, studying her for any lingering signs of her earlier distress, but the older girl seemed to have shaken it off completely. As she watched, Kyra took out a thick pair of socks that had her name scrawled on them in permanent marker.

“We’re not supposed to ‘own’ clothes here, but they decided I needed to have a few things that are totally mine. After I did this to a whole bunch of them, anyway. So these are my socks… and…” She touched the unusually thick soles and a small blade sprang out from the seam. “…my knives.”

Jack gasped. Kyra had a knife in the ward? How the hell…?

“They had an electrician from outside in here a while back. He wasn’t all that careful about his tools. I swiped two of his spare cutter blades when he had his head in a panel and nobody was looking.”

“Holy shit. Better you than Stacey.” Jack’s mind was reeling. What did Kyra expect to need knives for?

“That’s for sure. Those thick soles are a perfect hiding place. They also fit in the mouth but that’s kinda risky.” Kyra definitely had her equilibrium back, along with a pleased-cat expression on her face.

“What do you need them for?” She figured she’d better ask.

“Not much, here… this place is pretty decent.” Kyra put the socks away. “I promised myself I’d never get caught by some perverted fuck again, you know? We didn’t have guys like Carmouche at my last hospital, you know… guys you could actually trust to treat you like a human being, and who’d help you if you needed it. So I planned on helping myself as much as I had to.”

By having lethal defenses if she needed them. After the stories she’d told last night, Jack couldn’t really be surprised. “Yeah, I get that.”

Kyra started gathering up her clothes. “Riddick’s like that too, isn’t he? Like Carmouche. You didn’t need a knife because he was your knife.”

Something inside Jack’s chest twisted at that, as she began gathering up her own clothing. “Pretty much, yeah, until he ran out on me.”

“What are you going to do when Flint figures out you don’t really know where he is, and won’t sign those papers?”

Moment of truth. Jack realized she’d come to her decision while she slept. She turned and looked Kyra square in the eyes. “I won’t be here when he does.”

Kyra’s movement towards the door of their room came to a dead stop. For a moment, the two girls stared at each other, until the silence became so strong that it seemed to fill Jack’s ears. Finally, Kyra spoke. “You have a way out of here.”

Jack nodded, picking her words carefully. “We get up to A ward, and I can handle the rest. I know a back-door through the security.”

“So, what… you’re planning on just sashaying out?” Kyra seemed to have missed the significance of the we.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to keep her response nonchalant. “You wanna come with?”

Kyra shook her head, not in a gesture of no but rather one of I can’t believe it. “How the hell are you gonna manage that?”

People were stirring in the hallway outside. Jack stepped closer to Kyra, lowering her voice. “I know a back-door through the security system they’re using. I’ve used it before. And I know how they have the cameras timed. Seriously. We get up into A Ward, and we can waltz out of there any time we want.”

“There’s no way it can be that simple,” Kyra whispered back.

“Maybe not. That’s why I’m also gonna get a staff account from Stacey. I’m still working out all the details, but I figure we’ve got a little time, right? Nobody goes straight from C Ward to A Ward overnight. You want in?”

Slowly, finally, Kyra nodded. “I want out. I want out of this fucking hole, and away from all of these people. Too fucking many of them…”

Jack nodded, wondering where Kyra would want to run to when they got out. Would she really go merc? Maybe she’d head off to some backwater planet where she could live out in the woods like a wild woman, the way she had before she was finally caught. It made her wonder, all over again, where Riddick had gone, and how he was living. Was he vanishing into crowds, blending in with the people around him… or had he taken off for some barely-habitable world to live like a wild man? She really didn’t know. He’d handled himself well enough with people, but he’d been quick to disappear, too. Again it struck her that Kyra was more Riddick’s kind of person than she was. She might have shaved her head to express her crush through emulation, but Kyra… Kyra was the one with a seed of the same darkness in her.

The darkness was a part of Riddick that Jack had never tried to emulate. When she’d heard stories about him, she’d shuddered and tried to ignore the tales about his killing ways, focusing instead on the spectacular escapes he’d engineered. Her father had loved recounting those, especially when he was working on revamping a security system that Riddick had beaten. If there was any way Jack wanted to be like Riddick, anymore, it was that: his facility for escaping from places everyone thought inescapable. Kyra could take on the rest of him, if she wanted.

“Deal. We’ll talk more about that tonight, too, okay?” Voices were approaching, familiar Killer’s Club voices.

“Okay.” Kyra nodded and started moving for the door, just as Stacey knocked and then opened it.

“There you two are! C’mon before all the little brats use up the hot water.”

They headed, en masse, for the showers. Most of the other girls in the ward tried to avoid showering at the same time as the Killer’s Club; Jack sure had back before they’d swallowed her up. Now she was one of them, though…

…And now it was time to make the most of what that meant.

Kyra gave her a significant glance as she headed for Stacey after showering. The girl was dressing, preening at her reflection in the mirror. It occurred to Jack that Stacey was really very beautiful, but in much the same way that cobras were beautiful. What would Stacey do once she was released? Who would she do it to?

“You need something?” Stacey’s eyes, technically, were beautiful too, or should have been, crystal blue with lush eyelashes… but they were the coldest, cruelest eyes Jack had ever seen in her life.

“Yeah,” Jack made herself reply. “After breakfast… I wanna talk to you about some stuff. Meet me in the library?”

She glanced around at the other girls to indicate that none of them were invited to the little tête-à-tête she had in mind.

Stacey smirked. She obviously knew what Jack wanted to talk about. “Yeah, I can do that. Gimme about an hour after breakfast and I’ll be there.”

An hour. Perfect. Carmouche would be on duty in the library; she could take care of something else she needed in the meantime.

Watching carefully all through breakfast, Jack caught the little bits of clues she’d need. Xi Hin was going to go after Celia right before lunch, probably while she’d still be telling Stacey her manufactured story about Riddick. She pretended not to care, and was careful not to look Celia’s way; she doubted the girl would listen to a thing she had to say, anyway.

But things were coming together in her head. She could see the escape route forming. Now all she had to do was walk it.

After breakfast she went back to her room and picked up the two library books, giving Kyra and the other girls a friendly wave as she passed them again and wiggling her books to show her mission. There’d be no question in anybody’s mind later, if she did this right, that she was totally innocent. If she did this right, Celia would soon be out of their reach and they’d never realize she was responsible for it.

The library was virtually deserted and, as she’d hoped, Carmouche was on duty. She carried her two books over, Hatter Fox on top. That had been the one Heather had chosen for herself on that final day; oddly enough, the titular character made Jack think a lot of Kyra. One of the images from the novel, Hatter trapped in a dog cage, kept haunting Jack, and she wondered if anything like that had been done to Kyra at her last institution—

Focus!

“Here, I need to return these.” She gave Carmouche a genuinely tremulous smile. It was still a little hard to talk to him without being reminded of Heather’s death. She’d been kind of surprised that she’d been able to read the books at all, but part of her had felt like reading them would actually bring her closer, in some strange way, to her lost friend.

“Thanks, Jack, I’ll get these signed right—”

She leaned forward, aware that nobody else was in the room and wanting to take advantage of it. “Celia’s going to get attacked again,” she whispered.

Carmouche started to pull back, alarm and awareness that he was inside the acceptable proximity borders between an orderly and a patient on his face, but he froze as her words registered. “What? When?”

“Xi Hin’s going to jump her a little before lunchtime.”

He frowned. “Xi Hin? Why her?”

She’d committed herself; the Killers Club girls would kick the shit out of her if they ever found out. She’d just have to go all the way.

“They’re doing this for entertainment, okay? I flipped out at Celia and now they’re just keeping it going because they think it’s fun. And ’cause if she keeps getting into fights all the time, it’ll go on her record instead of theirs. Look. You can’t stop the fight… it can’t be anybody they think I’ve talked to today, okay? But stop the fight, and for god’s sake, get her up to B Ward where she belongs.”

She could see him figuring the rest of it out. Celia wasn’t violent, not really. She was melodramatic as hell and probably talked a good game, but when it came right down to it, she wasn’t even self-destructive. A trendy cutter, maybe… maybe even a real cutter who really needed the self-mutilation for something other than truckloads of sympathy, but she wasn’t going to hurt anybody else and she wasn’t going to kill herself. And C Ward was going to chew her up if she didn’t get out fast.

Yeah, Carmouche got it. Jack stepped back from his desk and headed for one of the educational terminals. She’d catch up on her studies while she waited for Stacey to arrive.

Three orderlies passed through the library while she waited, and Carmouche got into hushed conversations with two of them. Jack hoped she’d get her staff account, and be familiar enough with the system, before anything appeared in it where Stacey might see. That sudden thought chilled her. An all-out war with Stacey would be a disaster.

Speak of the devil…

She entered the library alone and headed straight for Jack. They were far enough away from the orderly’s desk to speak in privacy, especially with the place almost deserted. Curiosity, and a sick hunger Jack didn’t want to contemplate, dominated her face as she took the empty chair.

“So, what’s up?”

First rule of negotiation, at least according to her mother: start from a position of strength. Ask for what you want as if it’s your native right.

“I want one of those staff accounts.”

Stacey’s eyebrow arched. “Those are pretty heavy-duty. I don’t just toss those around to everybody, you know.”

Of course not. “But you can get me one, can’t you?”

Cold blue eyes narrowed a little. “I can… what’s in it for me?”

She had to know already. But this was how the game was played, and Jack could play it. She had no choice. These wheels needed to get in motion, unless she really wanted to walk out the door of this place by betraying Riddick.

“Maybe…” She took a deep breath and frowned, pretending that the subject she was bringing up was hurtful and traumatic. Like Rachel had told her, she could look like a trapped fawn with enormous ease; it was time to use that to her advantage. “…I… could tell you about…”

“Riddick? You want a staff account in return for your story.” Stacey’s smile had become predatory.

“…yeah.” Jack’s voice was small and sounded rough in her ears as real anxiety started to surge. What if this didn’t work? This had to work. Everything depended on it working… what if she fucked up and Stacey didn’t believe her… or didn’t deliver?

“You got a deal. But your story’d better be good. C’mon… we’ll go to my room and you can tell me the story there.” Stacey started getting out of her seat.

“The account first.”

The other girl’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t trust me?”

“I just… I wanna know it’s made. Lots of people I thought were gonna be nice to me… y’know… weren’t.”

Like Riddick, if you’re catching my implications.

Stacey’s superior smile was back. “Okay. I can do that.”

She turned around and started punching things up on the terminal by her chair. After a few moments, she sat back with a smile and wrote something down on a piece of paper. “Okay, you’re in. This is the address of the screen you need to call up, and all of the commands you put in… and your user name and password. Which I’ll give you in my room, once you start talking. Okay?”

That’d do. It’d have to. “Okay.”

“Lemme just back out of here and then we’ll— well, fuck.”

Jack felt a chill move through her. “What?”

“They’re transferring that little bitch up to B Ward. What the fuck? She gets in two fights and she gets to go to B Ward? This is so unfair.” Stacey slammed her fist down on the table.

Carmouche glanced up from his desk. “Everything okay, Stacey?”

“Yeah,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “Everything’s fine. Sorry.” She shut her terminal down with a gusty sigh. “Well, that just fucked my day. Your story’d better be good, Jack, because right now I could just… argh! Who the hell decided she was ready for B Ward?”

Me. But Jack couldn’t say that to her. She took another tack instead. “Who?”

“That fuckin’ Celia. She’s going upstairs, god damn it.” Stacey rose to her feet. “They had a transfer order up. She’s probably already heading up there. And we had it all worked out, too… shit.”

Jack climbed to her feet and followed Stacey out, glancing nervously at Carmouche. He’d moved fast. She hoped he’d been discreet about what he actually knew. If not, she hoped that her staff account would let her hide things from Stacey.

Definitely going to be “studying” after lunch. And moving as fast as she could to hide any handles she’d left sticking out.

Stacey led her back into her room, back to where the images of dangerous, brutal men dominated an entire wall. Riddick glared down at her from that wall, along with a few dozen other hardened criminals, his expression accusing. What she was about to claim he’d done, the lies she was about to tell, would be the worst sort of treachery.

I have to do it. It’s not like anybody’s going to take her claims seriously if she does repeat the stories. Hearsay of a crazy girl? Yeah, right. Better her than Flint. Better her than Toombs.

“So, c’mon… spill.” Stacey flopped down on her bed and gave Jack a sullen glare.

Jack took a deep breath, aware that now she was Stacey’s sole source of entertainment for the day. Make it good. Make it real.

“I…” She sat down on Omphalé’s bed and took a deep breath. “Do you want the whole story? Or just… the stuff he did to me?”

“Hmmmm…” A hungry smile twitched at the corners of Stacey’s mouth. “How long had you been with him when he started hurting you?”

Jack took another deep breath. Okay… gotta keep these facts straight in my head. He caught me alone in the settlement, before the eclipse, while the others were running tests on the skiff. Caught me alone, figured out I was really a girl… and made me pay for it. Just gotta keep the “facts” straight…

She began talking. weaving her false tale of threats and taunts and sexual assault, feeling sick to her stomach. There wasn’t any act. As she spoke, the emotions she wanted to convey to Stacey became real and immediate to her. Fear, not of Riddick, but that Stacey would see through her. Horror, not of Riddick’s supposed acts, but the very real acts she was drawing her descriptions from, that had been committed against Kyra. Nausea and anguish, again for Kyra’s sake and for the sake of every girl who’d ever really lived through this. As she spoke, as Stacey’s expression became more and more enrapt, she started to feel something else as well… understanding even better why Kyra wanted to become a merc and hunt the kinds of criminals who would really do these things. Even understanding a little why the mercs who thought Riddick was one of that kind would treat him the way Johns had, using bit and blindfold and billyclub against him as though he was a rabid animal.

Her tears were real. The pain twisting at her as she spoke was real. Everything was real, except the story itself that she was telling. That, and that alone, was a lie… but Stacey would never know.

It was a lie…

…wasn’t it?