49.
Sacrifice Play

“That is such total horse shit,” Kyra exploded.

Jack, who had just finished describing Paris Ogilvie’s death, found herself staring in confusion at her sister… as did everyone else in the room.

Ewan, Tafrara, and Izil had come back up with the two of them after lunch to hear more of the eclipse story, this time bringing tea with them. Ewan was, at that moment, helping Kyra through her physical therapy stretches; he had frozen in place, looking between her and Jack with growing concern.

“She thinks it’s her fault that Paris guy died,” Kyra added in response to the quizzical looks she was getting. “Jesus fuck, it’s one of the reasons she slashed her wrists. What the hell, Tizzy?”

“It was my fault—” Jack began.

“Why? Because he dropped a flashlight and you tried to pick it up?” Kyra rolled her eyes.

“Trying to pick up that flashlight cost us all of the fiberoptic light,” Jack protested.

“Because he panicked and pulled the power generator over!” Kyra argued back.

“He wouldn’t have panicked if I’d just—”

“Hold on, Tizzy,” Tafrara said, her voice gentle. “Dihya. Both of you. Am I understanding the chain of events correctly here? Paris used up the fuel for the cutting torch, carrying it as a secondary light source while already fully protected by fiberoptics, yes?”

Jack nodded slowly.

“And when it went out, he immediately grabbed for another unnecessary secondary light source, knocking one of the flashlights out of the bin he’d reached into?”

“Yeah…”

“And he made no effort to pick it up?” Tafrara continued.

Jack, feeling more and more like she was trapped on a witness stand, shook her head. “No…”

“And then you said what, again?”

“I said, ‘wait,’” Jack admitted, starting to see where Tafrara was going.

“Did they?” Izil asked, joining in. Sebby was snoozing on the zoologist’s folded legs.

“Not right away…”

“If they had waited when you asked,” Ewan asked, “would you have needed to remove your fiberoptic coil to reach the flashlight?”

“I…” Jack closed her eyes, recalling that moment, feeling Kyra exploring it in her head as she did. She had already begun to turn back for the flashlight, which had still been within the protective halo of light surrounding them, when she’d felt the coil tightening around her; the others weren’t waiting. She had shrugged out of the coil, dropping low to the ground to present less of a target and struggling to let her eyes adjust as she reached for the flashlight, where it had rolled into what had become deep gloom. “No…”

“When did they stop?”

Jack didn’t know for sure. Her fingertips had just touched the barrel of the flashlight when she heard Imam shout and felt him tackle her, even as something monstrous shrieked above her and they rolled to the side. Everything after that had been a blur, gunshots echoing, Imam asking her if she was all right, Paris babbling nearby—this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening—and then the crash of the generator as it toppled over, its whine as it shorted out and powered down, and the coils she was shrugging back into going dark…

Silence had fallen over the group for a terrible moment, and then she’d heard Paris’s final whisper. “I was supposed to die in France. I never even saw France…”

Fire had exploded in the night and she’d caught one last glimpse of him, collapsing, surrounded by the monsters that had been following them… following her.

Jack wiped at her eyes. Thinking of his death still hurt. Kyra and the others might think of the story as somehow being all about Riddick, and she’d been telling it that way for Kyra’s sake, but before their deaths, Shazza and Paris had been the stars of her story, the two adult survivors whom she had spent the most time with, bonded the most closely with, and felt the most powerful connections to. Both of them had spoken of helping her reach her planned destination once they got off of that godforsaken rock… and each of them had also offered to take her with them and watch over her if she had no destination.

Paris had even offered to cut her in on the Mona Lisa heist if she wanted to travel to Earth with him. He’d had little fear of the deadly security systems surrounding it, had been excited by the challenge of facing them down… but the unpredictable organic threats of the crash planet had turned out to be more than he could cope with.

Feeling him being devoured alive by the monsters had nearly undone her. Feeling Riddick’s gaze shift to her, knowing he was thinking it’s her they’re after—

She’d thought, at the time, that she’d been imagining all of that. Now that she knew better, it just made everything worse.

“They got him because they were after me,” she said, switching arguments even though she knew she was doing something her mother called moving the goal posts. “They weren’t following the rest of the group. Just me. They could smell my blood. That’s why it’s my fault.”

“Because you were menstruating?” Ewan asked. His matter-of-fact question startled Jack; back on Deckard’s World, boys and men seemed to go to great lengths to avoid thinking, much less talking, about the messier aspects of female anatomy. A few months before she’d run away, some of her nosier classmates had discovered that she had tampons in her backpack and had freaked out…

She nodded, still not fathoming why he seemed so relaxed about the subject. She’d thought for sure it would disgust him and Izil when she’d mentioned having to find a way to sneak off for a few harrowing minutes to deal with her period, but both men had acted as if the only disturbing elements of that sequence were the creatures that could have been lurking in any shadow. “I’d run out of tampons right before the eclipse, and by the time we were ready to run, I was on my last pad. All I’d had was my emergency stash. And my flow was just starting, so it was super heavy.”

There were more pads that she’d found in the settlement and stashed on board the skiff, but hadn’t had a chance to grab, although they were a few decades old and she’d been dreading using them. She’d been right, too; after twenty-two years of abandonment, gritty desert dust had insinuated its way into them and it had felt, a few times, like putting sandpaper between her legs—

“And asking someone to help you find more, or an alternative, would have broken your masquerade.” There was no judgment in Ewan’s voice. Why did she feel like there should be?

“Yeah,” she muttered, wishing she could disappear into a hole.

“So, let’s get this all straight,” Kyra said, her voice brisk and a little hard. “These people barely listened to a word you said a lot of the time, and a few of them were practically at each other’s throats, but you were supposed to trust them enough to tell them you were really a girl and that you needed more tampons—assuming there even were any to give you—just in case Riddick was right about the monsters smelling blood?”

“I…” When Kyra put it like that…

“And this Paris guy wasted all of the cutting torch’s fuel, even though the group might need it to actually cut stuff with,” Kyra continued, “and when it was all gone, he lost one flashlight while trying to grab another one… and it’s your fault he was being wasteful and panicky?”

Jack didn’t know what to say.

“And then, when you called out ‘wait,’ to the rest of the group, and they didn’t, and you had to take off your own light protection to reach the flashlight as a result, it’s what… all your fault?”

Yes, her inner voice insisted. She’d put that one flashlight ahead of all the rest of the light…

“Oh for God’s sake,” Kyra grumbled. “I can hear what you’re thinking, you know. C’mon. Admit it. They told you before you started running that every bit of light was valuable and you should conserve it all carefully, right? Which is what you were trying to do even as Paris was doing the opposite.”

“You would make an excellent lawyer,” Izil chuckled, pouring another round of mint tea for everyone while stroking Sebby’s exoskeleton.

“So now, let’s see,” Kyra went on, quirking an eyebrow at Izil as she stretched over and picked up her cup. “You get attacked, that hoodoo realizes in time and manages to save you, Johns starts firing his shotgun into the darkness at them even though they’re still staying away from the light, and it’s your fault that Paris flips his shit and starts scuttling away from the safety of the sled and the light? And drags the whole generator contraption over and breaks it in the process?”

“The very thing you avoided doing by taking your light coils off, I’d like to add,” Tafrara said.

“It’s just…” Jack didn’t know how to explain it now. Everything they were saying made sense to her head, but the rest of her was insisting that it was all her doing, her fault.

“I know you don’t like hearing this, and God knows, we all have a hard time remembering it about you ourselves,” Ewan said to her, locking eyes with her, “but you’re only thirteen years old. You were not supposed to be responsible for their well-being. I know you were trying very hard to pull your weight without any complaints after the way Johns tried to use your fear as an argument against the run. Weren’t you?”

Yes, Jack realized. That was a huge part of it. She’d tried to buck up, butch up, be as helpful as possible… but after how unwelcome her attempts to suggest a way to revive the sand cat had been, the thought of confiding in any of them that she was bleeding had been daunting to the point of nausea.

“You held your own while one of the adults in charge of the situation went to pieces over a threat that hadn’t even been aimed at him,” Ewan continued. He was all she could see now, his eyes holding hers in their thrall. “That kind of panic can happen to anyone. Soldiers panic under fire, too. In my field training, we were taught to move as a unit, to retreat as a unit… to never, ever, break formation and run. But the first time you’re under live fire, there’s no telling what will happen, and there’s almost always someone who panics. It’s usually not who you’d expect, either. Sometimes the steadiest-seeming people can lose their minds. I’m not trying to shift all the blame onto Paris, here. But. If he was that close to all-out panic, and it does sound like he was given the other mistakes he was making, something was inevitably going to trigger it.”

“But it was me,” Jack heard herself saying. “Why did it have to be me?”

Ewan looked at Kyra, and then at the others, a question in his expression. When they all seemed to assent, he moved to Jack’s side, sat down behind her, wrapped his arms around her, and drew her into his lap. She leaned against him, struggling for a moment not to cry before giving in and letting him hold her through it. For once, her stupid hormones didn’t get in the way, although she almost wished they would if it might have broken her dark mood and driven off the tears and misery.

He seemed prepared for everything, giving her a handkerchief from his pocket to use to wipe her eyes and nose. His arms stayed around her even after she recovered. Things were, she thought, almost like they’d been before that moment on the beach. She rested her head against his shoulder, glad that she could just… be… for a while. When he brought her teacup to her lips, she sipped gratefully, feeling at home and at peace in a way that she hadn’t in a long time.

“So I’m guessing that nobody knew how to fix the lights, and you had to switch to all of those liquor bottles,” Kyra prompted, managing to time her question for right when Jack began feeling ready to tell more of the story.

“Yeah,” she said. “Fry lit a flare, and the rest of us used the bottles after she lit them for us. We dumped the fiberoptics and the light generator off the sled and kept going… a little faster now that Johns and Imam didn’t have to carry as much weight. It felt like we were walking forever. I asked Fry if we were getting close to the settlement yet… and that’s when we reached the sled tracks.”

“Wait…” Izil said.

“Shit,” Kyra muttered.

“Your sled’s tracks? You had gone in a circle?” Tafrara asked.

Jack nodded. “Everybody thought Riddick had gotten lost. But it was worse than that. We were almost at the canyon… and it was full of those creatures. He said he’d ‘circled once to buy some time to think.’ And I guess he’d decided my secret wasn’t going to keep anymore. He told them I was bleeding. He told them I was a girl and I was bleeding.”

“Tayr-iw, I am so sorry,” Ewan murmured in her ear. Tafrara gave him an odd look.

“I tried to explain it… why I’d done it… I mean, posed as a guy… When I was twelve, back home, these older guys started hitting on me all the time, asking gross stuff like what I had on under my skirt, and did my ‘carpet’ match my ‘drapes’ and shit, until my mom would come roaring out at them and threaten to have them arrested for messing with a kid. A lot of girls at my school were getting picked on like that, some of them were even getting groped, and I thought, maybe if nobody knew I was a girl, especially a girl on her own…”

“You’d be safer, yes,” Ewan nodded. “Somewhat, at least.”

“And after Riddick warned me about my blood, back at the ship, I was afraid they’d just leave me there if they knew. Fry said she wouldn’t do that, but I could see the way everybody else was looking at me, like I was a whole different person.”

“Shit, that’s it,” Kyra gasped. “That’s what changed.”

The others looked at her inquiringly.

“I’ve been trying to figure out why that Imam guy went from being so nice to you and protective of you to being… well, the total dickhead I saw at the hospital, nothing like how you’ve been portraying him. It all started changing when you weren’t a boy anymore, didn’t it?”

Did it?

After Fry had left her alone with Imam in the cave, he’d seemed unable to meet her eyes most of the time. It had been awkward, waiting to find out if they would live or die, with a strange wall up between them. She’d just thought maybe it was his grief over the other boys, or the circumstances of their possible last moments, the chance that the cave might become their tomb…

…but it had never really gotten better after that.

He’d taken it upon himself to act as a chaperone between her and Riddick the rest of the time the three of them had spent together—as if Riddick was lying in wait to defile her the moment his guard dropped—to the point where the two of them had begun coming up with elaborately sneaky ways to steal conversations with one another whenever the Holy Man slept. Riddick’s hearing was every bit as acute as hers, and they’d sometimes spent hours conversing in the tiniest threads of whispers just so they could speak freely.

If I’d managed to tell Riddick about the sand cat, would he have made them listen?

He had, after all, spent a great deal of time on the skiff listening to her, and telling her things that “responsible adults” would have found questionable but that he apparently felt she needed to know about the big bad ’verse she was venturing out into. His attitude toward her, inscrutable as it sometimes was, hadn’t really changed. But—

“I think you’re right,” Jack told the family, her family, surrounding her. “I think… once Imam knew I was a girl… he didn’t know how to relate to me anymore.”

The revelation had broken the group, too.

“Fry decided she’d been wrong, the run wasn’t going to work, and we should head back to the crash ship. But Johns…” She swallowed. This was the ugly part. “Now he wanted to keep going.”

Kyra, reading from her mind the truth she was preparing to spill, gasped. “Oh, that motherfucking son of a…”

When she trailed off, Ewan drew in a breath.

“Don’t you dare say it,” Tafrara scolded him.

There suddenly seemed to be a hidden wellspring of laughter between sister and brother, in spite of the fierce scowl she had aimed his way.

“Say what?” Jack asked.

“Ewan Zdan brought home some really filthy phrases after he attended the basic training segment of the Tangiers Military Academy,” Izil explained, his eyes twinkling. “There’s one in particular that he still sometimes says about someone he truly reviles.”

“Okay,” Kyra said, grinning. “Now you have to share.”

Tafrara rolled her eyes and then nodded at Ewan, sighing.

Ewan’s expression was pure mischief. The Tamazight words that rolled off his tongue were the same ones he’d used the other night when he’d apparently been maligning Toombs, the words that had made every woman at the dinner table glare at him.

“Okay,” Kyra said after nothing else was forthcoming, “and… it means?”

“You want me to say that in English?” Ewan asked, looking mock-scandalized.

“It means,” Tafrara grumbled, “‘he fucked his pig mother to death and then ate her bacon the morning after.’”

“All I was going to add to what Dihya said was ‘side of bacon,’” Ewan insisted, his expression the picture of innocence.

“That motherfucking son of a side of bacon…” Kyra began to cackle with delight.

Jack couldn’t help snickering, too. “Nice,” she said, tilting her head to look up at him. “You’ve got incest, bestiality, matricide, cannibalism, and haram all rolled into one insult there.”

“Exactly,” Ewan laughed, his gaze upon her turning heart-stoppingly wicked just for an instant before he adopted a look of cherubic innocence again.

“You see now just how much trouble my baby brother truly is,” Tafrara snorted. “So. Now that we have established the heritage, proclivities, crimes, and dietary practices of this ‘Johns,’ why did he want to keep going and what made it so awful?”

Stifling a groan, Jack described the verbal battle that had followed, as Johns threw everything Fry had said to him—ever—back in her face and attempted to annihilate her authority by revealing that she’d panicked during the crash and almost jettisoned the passenger compartment. Even now, that was something Jack couldn’t bring herself to believe about Fry, but the pilot had never denied it, Johns’ words driving her instead into a frenzy so desperate that she’d tried to physically assault him and had ended up knocked to the ground.

That time, it had been Imam who had stepped in—“You’ve made your point. We have all been scared!”—before Johns announced that the matter was decided and they were going through the canyon. What little bit of democracy the group had possessed had, seemingly, been swept away.

“You think that’s your fault, too, don’t you?” Kyra asked, almost glaring at her. “You think you gave him that opportunity to take over. Tizzy, he was gonna come up with something to use an excuse to make his move. Like you keep telling me, mercs’ll use up anybody for a percentage.”

“It was still…” Jack stopped. She could see that none of them agreed with her.

“Didn’t anybody at that damned hospital help you through any of this?” Ewan suddenly asked.

Jack shook her head. “They were too busy trying to get me to ‘admit’ that none of it ever happened, and that Riddick had killed everybody else and taken Imam and me hostage.”

“…The hell? The official investigation report says that there is hostile life on that planet.” Ewan’s arms tightened around her a little. He looked outraged. “Granted, it also tries to claim that Riddick used that as cover for some murders and took you hostage, but… they tried to deny every aspect of your story?”

“She never got a chance to tell it,” Kyra sighed. “They started bulldozing her from the get-go. You know, there were actually a bunch of really good therapists on the staff, like this one woman named after a Greek muse who asked me to just call her Polly—”

“Oh, I met her,” Jack grumbled. “Maybe she’s great for actual survivors of sexual abuse like you, but she walked into our sessions trying to get me to ‘face’ the ‘fact’ that Riddick had raped me—”

Against her back, she felt Ewan tense up.

“—which is a load of bullshit because I’m still a virgin and he never so much as looked at me that way.” She felt Ewan relaxing again. Whew. “He never threatened me, or any of us. The whole time we were on that planet, the only person he ever tried to hurt, let alone kill, was Johns.”

Which brought her, at last, to the merc’s… bacon lineage.

And an admission of just how good her hearing actually was. Somehow, whether via her crazy-acute hearing or something else that she hadn’t consciously known about herself back then, she’d overheard every word Johns and Riddick had said to each other.

She replayed the entire conversation for everyone, as the merc attempted to buddy up to his former captive with a promise that Riddick would survive the journey and go free if he cooperated with the “sacrifice play” Johns wanted to run: kill one of the four civilians and use their body to draw the predators in the canyon away from everyone else.

Even then, Jack had known that Johns wanted it to be either Carolyn Fry or her, and the only really logical choice would be her. If he had any plans of stiffing Riddick, he’d still need Fry to pilot the skiff.

Riddick was playing coy. She wasn’t sure why at first. But he kept doing things—expansive gestures and turns to look back at the group—that seemed designed to draw the others’ attention… clue them in…

“I think Riddick was trying to warn us,” she said after a moment. “I’d asked Imam what they were talking about. I don’t think he could hear a damned thing. Or if he could, he didn’t want to admit it was anything that bad. He told me they were probably talking about how to get through the canyon.”

Which, technically, was true, but…

Finally, Johns had enough. He gave up dancing around the subject, since Riddick was refusing to be his dance partner. “You do the girl, and I’ll keep the others off your back…”

“Yeah, right,” Kyra snarled. “Not that he ever would have, but if Riddick had killed you, nobody else in the group would’ve trusted him, ever again, or lifted a finger to stop Johns from taking him back into custody. He was probably counting on them helping him put Riddick back in chains when they got to the skiff.”

Jack, who had earlier described seeing Johns furtively sneaking a set of restraints onto the skiff hours before the eclipse, and who had found them crushing half of her gritty sanitary pads when she finally went to get one after the launch, just nodded.

Maybe that was the only reason Riddick had balked. Maybe he’d known his chance of ever being a free man would be lost if he added her to his kill count. Maybe that was all defending her, in that moment, had meant to him. While part of her still clutched at all the many small kindnesses he had shown her, he had still outed her to the others and then abandoned her in the repressive al-Walid household. It was hard to reconcile those two Riddicks and divine which one had turned to Johns and said, “I’m just wondering if we don’t need a bigger piece of bait.”

Four voices whooped with vindication and triumph, cheering him on, when she said that line in her “Riddick voice.”

The moment the two men began to fight, the moment Johns’ shotgun started firing into the night, Fry had pulled them all into a headlong sprint away from the battle zone. Jack hadn’t been wrong; the strange tension between the three of them was ending in bloodshed, which might spiral out to encompass all of them. Just how long they ran she wasn’t sure. With no idea where they were going, they had followed the tracks of the sled itself, blindly and unthinkingly…

…and, of course, they had circled the way it had, and found themselves confronted by Riddick.

“Back to the ship, huh?” he’d asked. “Just huddle together ’til the lights burn out? ’Til you can’t see what’s eating you? That the big plan?”

Johns was dead. Jack didn’t know whether Riddick had killed him or whether the creatures had, and she didn’t dare ask. None of them did.

“We’re gonna lose everybody out here,” she’d found herself saying, no longer bothering to try to drop her voice down into a ‘boy’ range. “We should’ve stayed at the ship.”

I should’ve let them leave me behind…

“Oh goddamn it, I fucking heard that, Tizzy…” Kyra groaned. “You still think everybody’d have ridden off into the sunrise if they’d just abandoned you? Or sacrificed you?”

“It’s a kind of magical thinking,” Ewan murmured, one hand stroking her hair. “I’ve seen it before, usually with people struggling with survivor’s guilt. You get basic counseling training when you’re a paramedic, or at least I did, and we were warned that this was something that we might see happen to someone trying to cope with fresh trauma… the wish to trade places with the ones who were lost. People in crisis often want to find something they can offer as a sacrifice, bargain away, to make everything go back to normal. Sometimes, those dealing with survivor’s guilt want that sacrifice to be themselves, so that everything will be right again and the guilt they feel will be absolved. But Tizzy, it’s an illusion, both the blame you’re taking on and what you wished to do to fix it. The world will not become better if you are lost from it.”

“Especially not for any of us,” Tafrara agreed, her voice soft and sad.

Jack nodded as Ewan held her, trying to believe, wishing she could believe. It was probably better consolation than she’d gotten months earlier, when Riddick had been the one trying to tell her something that maybe he’d thought would be reassuring—“He died fast, and if we have any choice about it, that’s the way we should all go”—as he walked up to stand scant inches behind her. She’d felt the heat of his body radiating against her back, felt his eyes on her, felt his hand reaching out toward her for a second before it withdrew.

This is it, she had thought. If he’s gonna kill me, this is when it’ll happen.

But his voice, dark and rough and yet somehow gentle, had filled her ears instead. “Don’t you cry for Johns. Don’t you dare.”

And he’d walked away.

She didn’t know what was more disturbing now: the fact that she had been prepared to let him cut her throat without a fight, if that was his plan…

…or the fact that part of her had been disappointed when he hadn’t.

“Fucking shit, Tizzy,” Kyra groaned. “Fucking shit.”

48.
Tizzy the Terrible

“You’re mine now,” Ewan murmured into Jack’s ear. “I can’t let you go… ever…”

He began to move against her, his hands pinning her wrists to the bedroll he’d spread out beneath her. She wrapped her bare legs around his naked waist, letting him have his way, groaning softly at the pleasure he was stirring in her. He’d taken her from the house without warning, without a word, and brought her into the mountains, refusing to accept that they might never see each other again. Now her past and future fell away and there was only this moment, only him—

“Tizzy. Tizzy. Keep it down…”

Jack’s eyes flew open.

The tent canvas that had been above her just seconds ago was gone, replaced with the ornate tiled ceiling of the bedroom in the ait Meziane house, barely visible in the gloom.

Kyra, herself only half visible in the predawn darkness, was sitting up next to her and watching her with a smirk. “Damn, girl, that dream of yours got me all hot and bothered, and I don’t even like sex,” she snickered.

Fuck.

“Please tell me I didn’t call out his name.” Jack groaned, now with embarrassment.

“I woke you up before you could, but I think you were about to.” Kyra’s smile was positively merry. “I figured you wouldn’t want that to happen.”

Jack sat up in the bed, aware that she’d been on the verge of feeling something incredible, which had now receded unfulfilled. “Thanks, I think…”

“Yeah, sorry about that. But you’re really gonna need to learn how to not talk in your sleep before you return home, you know.” Kyra’s smile turned wry. “Gonna have a bunch of people, who are very interested in picking up any clues they can about where you’ve been, listening in once you’re there.”

“Fuuuuuuck…” Jack flopped back against the pillows. “Is that something I can even learn how to do?”

“Probably. Maybe you can ask the General if that device he’s bringing us will help you do that. Who knows?” Kyra lay down next to her again, sighing. “I’m sorry you can’t stay, you know. I wish we both could. It’s all happening so fast now.”

That, weirdly, had been the driving force behind the dream. She’d “awakened” in it to find Ewan beside their bed, taking her hand and putting a finger to her lips when she started to ask what he was doing. He’d led her down to the garage and to a large, rugged vehicle, strapping her in without speaking, and driven them out of the city and into the mountains. Rather than give her up, he had decided to abandon his career and reputation and claim her as his own right then…

It was all very wish-fulfillment but was absolutely the opposite of what the real Ewan would ever do, she thought. Even given how devastated he’d looked after dinner.

“God, part of me wishes that hadn’t been a dream… that it had been real…”

“He wouldn’t be the man you’re hung up on if it had been, you know,” Kyra sighed next to her. “Part of what you’re in love with is the fact that he’d never do something like that. Never actually hurt you. And doing that would hurt you. Trust me, it really would.”

“I know…” Jack grumped. “I really do know that. Sometimes.”

And sometimes, she thought ruefully, she started to convince herself that she’d be able to handle it, that she was plenty adult enough to offer and receive such things. Only after those moments passed would she realize, yet again, that those were some of her most childish thoughts of all.

She’d had similar fantasies about Riddick, half a year earlier. Sometimes she wondered if that was why he’d disappeared on her, because he knew what she felt for him and was worried that, if she offered herself to him the way she’d sometimes fantasized about doing, he might take her up on it. Had crushing on him driven him away?

I just wish he’d said good-bye…

But part of her was dreading how hard it was going to be to say good-bye to Ewan.

Another part of her wished she’d never started crushing on him, either, or whatever it was she was feeling. She missed Ewan’s hugs, missed resting her head against his chest or shoulder and having him hold her close, missed the affection, teasing, and intuitive understanding of each other’s ideas that they’d been able to share those first few days… before any touch, any glance, had started setting her body on fire. The desire she felt, and couldn’t control, had become a barrier that was cheating her out of one of the most powerful emotional bonds she’d ever found.

And now it was too late to find a way to fix that.

“Time fixes it,” Kyra said, as if replying to spoken words rather than her thoughts. “You won’t be a bundle of hormones forever. Or maybe you’ll just figure out how to handle them. Not sure. I read up on some of that stuff at the hospital, and actually talked about it with one or two of my therapists. Mostly I was trying to figure out why I feel so dead inside about the whole thing… turns out a lot of rape survivors do. But I read about what normal sex drives are supposed to be like, too, especially when they’ve just kicked on… and it’ll get easier to handle. In time.”

“Fuckin’ time,” Jack groaned. “I’m almost out of that…”

“Nuh uh,” Kyra snickered. “You’re just going home for a while. Once you learn how to handle it all, and the ’verse says you’re a legal adult… look out worlds, here comes Tizzy the Terrible!”

“Oh, my God…”

“Hey, it’s a step up from Jack B. Badd. Isn’t that really your dad, anyway?”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted, laughing. “The more I think about it, the more I think I stole his childhood nickname.”

“And now you have your own,” Kyra grinned.

She had to admit, she liked being “Tizzy…”

“I can’t take it with me, though,” she found herself musing. “It’d connect me to here. When I get back home, I can’t ever be either ‘Jack’ or ‘Tizzy’ anymore.”

“Yeah, not if you want to ever come back here someday,” Kyra said after a moment. “I can’t take ‘Dihya’ with me, either. Fuck, I’m gonna miss that name…”

“Maybe one day you’ll get to use your own name again, though,” Jack said. “Once you’re eighteen, New Dartmouth law says your criminal record as a minor gets sealed, even if the statute of limitations isn’t up and even if they haven’t had a chance to prosecute yet. I looked it up. Once you turn eighteen, they can’t touch you. So, like, two years from now… you can tell the whole ’verse your real name if you want.”

“Yeah,” Kyra replied, her voice wistful, “but the whole ’verse already knows who that is. It’s still gonna be the same deal… they’ll think I should be in jail anyway. And if I want to come back here in a few years and try to network with those officer friends of Tomlin’s, it definitely can’t be as me. Toombs made sure of that.”

“Fuckin’ Toombs…” Jack found herself wishing she’d sent him on his wild goose chase on a much more inhospitable world than Shakti Four. There was a frigid, desolate, barely habitable planet she’d heard about a while back, UV-6, that would have been perfect. She could have made him freeze his ass off the whole time he was chasing his own malodorous tail. Too late now, though… “Well, maybe in a few years, Kali Montgomery can do that networking instead, right?”

“Yeah, she’s even got a military background. It’ll all work out…” But Kyra was shielding her thoughts from Jack again. She could feel the barrier that had gone up.

“Are you okay with me knowing that name?” Jack asked, wondering if that was the problem. “Because I can show you how to make a new ID if you want.”

“Nah, it’s all good.” Kyra shook her head and quirked a smile at Jack. “I like that name. Picked it myself. It’s fine. I’m really not worried about you getting caught and interrogated. You’re an escape artist. People go to grab you and whoosh, you’re somewhere else. That was true even before you learned how to isomorph.”

“Okay.” Jack sighed, still wishing she knew what Kyra was hiding. “Are you okay with what I did last night?”

“What’d you do last night?”

“When you were having a nightmare. And I stopped it.”

Kyra frowned quizzically at her. “I had a nightmare? I don’t remember. Well, thank you for stopping it, anyway. But I just remember having a really… nice dream.” An almost-goofy smile crossed her lips. “Nearly as nice as the one you had.”

Maybe that was the only part she remembered?

When Jack had taken over the dream, she’d depicted Riddick single-handedly slaughtering all of Red Roger’s men, drawing from the spectacular combat moves she’d seen him use when he’d battled the shrylls, and then gutting Roger Fiennes himself while Kyra watched. Then he had offered her his hand and told her that he was taking her away from Canaan Mountain and the New Christy Enclave, enacting every facet of the rescue that she’d always wished for.

At that point, she had let Kyra start “driving” again and withdrawn from her sister’s mind. Where they’d gone from there, she didn’t know. She’d needed some sleep of her own. Steering someone else’s dreams like that had turned out to be hard work.

“You’re welcome,” she told Kyra, grinning. “As long as you got a good night’s sleep, right? I was thinking… when we take Sebby back—”

Reee? Sebby lifted his head. He had been sleeping down by their feet.

“Yeah, you, sweetie. Don’t worry. We’re gonna take good care of you, I promise. But I was thinking we could ask Tafrara where she buys the plants she puts in the courtyard, and buy a little olive tree to take with us. Maybe even two. So Sebby can eat olives forever.”

Kyra’s eyes lit up at the idea. “Oh my God, Tizzy, that’s it. That’s also the way we can leave something behind here for the family. We can plant something in the courtyard, and to everybody else in the ’verse it’ll just be another plant, but they’ll always know it came from us.”

Sebby squeaked and bounced up the bed to them, catching their enthusiasm and chirping happily. Jack could tell he had olives in mind now, and that they’d better bring some up for him when they came back from breakfast with his crickets.

“Oh shit. I don’t think Izil is gonna buy enough crickets!” Sebby had more than doubled in size, after all.

“He will if we catch him before he goes,” Kyra said, climbing out of bed. Jack hurried after her.

Izil had already left, but Lalla, hearing the problem, put together an “appetizer” plate of Sebby’s favorite human foods for him, including an abundance of olives, to compensate. Breakfast was still half an hour off, but almost everyone was up, and they all wanted to see how Sebby had grown and take a look at his exuviae. Jack led the way, carrying up the tray, while Kyra talked to Tafrara about buying some olive trees and the idea of planting something special in the courtyard.

Focusing on keeping the tray balanced, Jack didn’t realize that Ewan was the one walking beside her until he opened the bedroom door for her. He seemed unusually subdued.

“You okay?” she asked as she went through the door, forcing herself not to brush up against him in passing.

“Yes…” Ewan’s smile was dim in comparison to the ones he usually flashed her. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

Sebby chirped in curiosity as everybody filed in. He seemed a lot less nervous about the whole family crowding the room.

“Baraka, he’s grown so big!” Takama marveled.

“Izil needs to see this when he gets back,” Safiyya laughed. “His degree is in zoology. He will love this.”

“He’s going back up into the New Atlas Mountains soon, isn’t he?” Jack asked. When Safiyya nodded, she turned to General Toal. “Can… can I give him Sebby’s exuviae to take with him? Would that be okay? It wouldn’t be anywhere near New Marrakesh, and it doesn’t have any quantum connections to Elsewhere.”

How, she suddenly wondered, did she know that last bit?

“As long as he can be discreet about it,” the General answered slowly, “that should be all right. Sebby’s morphology is quite alien, in truth, but if he is willing to claim that it was sent to him from somewhere offworld, and promises not to publish any articles about your pet…”

“We’ll make sure he agrees to that,” Cedric told the General.

If for some reason they couldn’t return Sebby to Elsewhere, Jack decided, Izil should be the one to take custody of him. He was, after all, a zoologist, he’d been fascinated by Sebby from the beginning, and he’d taken it upon himself to keep their rambunctious crustacean well fed. She glanced at Kyra and saw her knowing nod of agreement.

Sebby, meanwhile, was happily chomping olives and squeak-mumbling softly to himself.

Breakfast was subdued, the mood from the prior evening carrying over. Kyra and Tafrara continued discussing plants and refining the idea for the garden. They decided that she and Jack should each pick out a plant for the courtyard when they went to get an olive tree or two, and once they had picked out their plants, Tafrara would determine the best locations for each one in the courtyard.

“We can never tell anyone outside of the family who planted them, of course,” Takama said as they finished solidifying the plan, “but it will be a nice thing for all of us to know. I have spoken with the other tribal representatives in the Rif, and they have all agreed to our story. Two distant cousins from our tribe, Dihya and Tislilel, came to town in preparation for the engagement Moussem, which of course ended up being canceled after the explosion. In an unhappy turn of events, they then fell ill with Atlas Fever shortly after Brahim’s memorial and had to be sent home once they recovered enough to travel. And that is as much as anyone in the Rif will ever say about you… aside from that you were lovely, pleasant, polite girls whenever you came to the market. Which at least means they will have something true to say.”

It felt, to Jack, like an epitaph. By the look on Ewan’s face, he felt the same way.

Izil joined them at the end of the meal, cricket box under his arm, and was immediately excited to hear about Sebby’s molt. Kyra led him upstairs to see, telling Jack that she’d been practicing the isomorph trick and wanted to try it with the crickets herself. Jack, Ewan, and Tafrara followed not long after.

Izil and Kyra were sitting by the tub, watching Sebby play with his food and talking quietly. Izil stood up as Jack entered the room.

“Dihya tells me that you two feel, if you are unable to return Sebby to Elsewhere next morning-day, that I should take him with me into the mountains when I go,” he said, taking her hand. “I am honored. I do hope he can be released among his own kind, but I promise to take very good care of him for you if he cannot be.”

“Thank you.” It was a relief to know that, no matter what, Sebby would be safe. Now she just had to figure out a way to stop worrying so much about Kyra.

“After dinner,” Tafrara told her and Kyra, “we will go pick out plants. My favorite nursery is open into the overnoon hours and that’s the best and quietest time to find things, so we’ll go there shortly before we plan to retire for sleep ourselves. In the meantime…”

“We want to spend as much time with you today as possible,” Ewan said, his eyes on Jack.

She could see how hard he was trying to hide the full depth of what he was feeling. For a moment, she imagined she saw an echo of her dream in his eyes.

The first thing they did was Kyra’s physical therapy session, which now incorporated Tai Chi. Jack was fascinated. Ewan led them, while Tafrara moved between her and Kyra to correct their balance and posture. He began with breathing and balance, and then had them lift their arms and legs into specific positions, holding them and slowly moving from one to another. The way Jack felt herself concentrating reminded her of the way she had focused to keep the floor of U1 beneath her in Elsewhere.

An hour passed, almost before she knew it. As Kyra had said, she could feel, in the aftermath, how much work her body had actually been doing, even though each moment had felt easy and natural. She didn’t feel it in an achy or uncomfortable way, though. She felt as if she’d tapped into something powerful.

No wonder meditating kept Riddick from going crazy in his cryotube… Maybe the way that meditation condensed time had countered the way that cryosleep drugs stretched it out.

I need to keep doing this. She wondered if there were classes back on Deckard’s World.

“So, what would you two like to do next?” Tafrara asked.

“Tizzy’s been telling me the story of the Hunter-Gratzner crash,” Kyra said. “I was hoping she could finish telling it before we have to split up… although maybe she should start over if you guys are gonna hear it, too?”

It was, Jack thought, a kind of souvenir she could leave behind with Ewan, Izil, and Tafrara: the story of the accident that had ultimately brought her, and Kyra, to their doorstep. A truth that few knew, given the lies that had begun to circulate since then. They could be trusted with it. And who knew; one day, one of them might come face to face with Richard B. Riddick himself, and the story they knew might just save their lives.

She didn’t start from quite the same place that she had with Kyra, though. General Toal had made it clear that she wasn’t allowed to reveal anything about where she had come from or where she had been trying to go, after all. So…

“I would have come to the Tangiers System on the Hunter-Gratzner a few months before I ended up getting here, if it hadn’t crashed,” she began instead. “But it came out of one of its Star Jumps and crossed a comet’s path on its way to the next Jump Point, and got holed by a bunch of micrometeors. That’s what the inquiry afterwards figured out. Most of the crew died in their tubes, except for the navigator and the docking pilot. The ship crash-landed on a planet with an outpost that had lost contact with the Federacy about twenty-two years ago. But I didn’t know any of that until much later. The first thing I knew, I was waking up in my cryotube, lying on my side, and couldn’t get the doors to open…”

This time, as she spoke, she conjured vivid mental images for Kyra, matching them to her words. Pounding on the box, wondering if it was now her coffin, until Shazza and Zeke had appeared through the glass and begun cutting her out…

Kyra had her eyes closed, focusing on the visions Jack was feeding her.

Jack skipped over some things, like some of the conversations she’d had with Paris while they rummaged through his storage compartment for supplies and, later, weapons once Riddick escaped into the desert. For some odd reason, she felt weirdly possessive of that relationship, maybe because she’d begun drawing upon some of the things he’d told her about running museum heists for her own excursions into burglary. Plus, more practically, those were conversations she’d portrayed as happening before the cash, the first time she’d told the story to Kyra. As she retold the parts Kyra had already heard, doing imitations of each person’s voice and mannerisms as she reproduced dialogues, Kyra began saying her lines for her.

“How do I get eyes like that?” Kyra asked softly, as Jack described Riddick glancing over at her after his chained lunge toward Fry.

“You gotta kill a few people,” Jack answered in her Riddick imitation, not bothering to correct her sister’s wording this time, either.

“Okay, I can do it…”

Maybe it should have worried her, but it was fun to have Kyra participate that way. She let it slide, moving forward with the tale.

The eclipse had descended over the crash planet, Hassan had died, and the survivors had adopted Fry’s plan to return to the settlement as the lunch hour approached in New Marrakesh. Now she was coming up on the part of the story that still had her fuming, all these months later.

“We got to work making as much light as we could, from everything we could find. Paris had me find him a bunch of these weird tubes that he could use to make wicks for the liquor bottles. And Fry told me to start pulling these big, glowing fiberoptic cables out of the bulkheads,” she said, unable to keep a grumble out of her voice. “Those things were glowing really brightly, and there were a ton of them, and I thought maybe there’d be enough light to use them to power the Sand Cat. They were talking about pulling everything on a sled and draping the cables over our shoulders as we ran, and nobody’d stop to listen to me, even if just to tell me they’d already thought of it and it wouldn’t work…”

“Fry,” she’d said, holding up a glowing coil, “don’t you think this’d be enough to run—”

“No, Jack, pull it all down. We need all of it.”

“That’s not what I—”

“El-Imam, I need to talk to you for a second,” Fry said, walking off without another word to her.

“Johns,” she’d tried again. “I was thinking if we coiled enough of this up around the—”

“Look, kid, I’m busy. Talk to Fry if you need something.” He had one of his shotgun shells, a bright red one, in his hand and was turning it over and over as if that was the most important task in the universe.

“But she—”

“Talk. To. Fry.” The glare he’d given her had driven her back.

“Paris, I was wondering—”

“Just who I wanted to see. Do you think you can carry some of the food supplies in your backpack? We won’t need them until we get to the skiff.”

“Sure, but—”

“Brilliant. Here we go. Now, I still have to figure out how we’re going to bundle up and pull all of these bottles.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to t—”

“Must run. So much to do before we set off…”

“Imam, I have an idea—”

“Child, have you finished coiling up the cables? We really are in a hurry.”

“But we won’t have to be if you would just—”

“Stay on task. Suleiman!” He switched to Arabic, which she hadn’t understood at the time but now could parse from memory. “Have you disconnected the secondary power generator? Hurry!”

“I just wanted to tell them,” Jack concluded for her audience, “that the fiberoptics could produce enough light to switch the Sand Cat’s photovoltaic collector back on and probably have enough left over to ring its perimeter. We could’ve driven the whole way back if they’d just stopped to listen…”

“Didn’t Riddick listen to you?” Kyra asked, odd longing in her voice.

“He was busy, too,” Jack moped. “He passed by me once, talking to Fry as he went. He did say something to me, but he was gone before I could reply. He said ‘check your cuts. These bad boys know our blood now.’ I didn’t have any cuts but… I think he knew I was having my period and was warning me that the things outside would know, too. Fuck, I hate being too young to be listened to…”

“We will always listen to you, Tislilel,” Ewan said. His hand on her shoulder, for once, didn’t send a jolt down to her core but filled her instead with wistful yearning for the peace he was offering. She had less than one Tangiers day left before he would be gone.

“Yes,” Izil agreed. “Always.”

Kyra took Jack’s hand and gave it a squeeze, maybe feeling her sudden, stricken longing. To find this kind of acceptance and respect, and to have to give it up, leave it behind…

“Would it have worked?” Ewan asked Tafrara. “Using the fiberoptics?”

“I think it would have,” she said after a thoughtful moment. One of her degrees, Jack had learned, was in Engineering, much like John MacNamera’s. “They had their own power source, yes? Which you had to drag? I’ve seen the kinds of fiberoptics you speak of. They could have been more than sufficient. Especially with direct application, coiling around the collector as you describe. What color of light was the photovoltaic engine designed to work under?”

“All colors, I think,” Jack sighed. “The twin suns were red and yellow, made everything look real orange when they were up, and the third sun was blue like the fiberoptic light. It ran under both kinds of light, so it should’ve been fine. I figured if we piled enough lit coils onto the collector…”

“Yes,” Tafrara told her, looking sympathetic and a little sad. “It would have worked. What did they do instead?”

“We put the generator powering them onto this sled they made out of a piece of the ship’s outer hull,” Jack muttered, trying hard not to whine about it. Her eyes and nose were stinging. “Along with the rest of the power cells we needed to launch the skiff, and a bunch of Paris’s liquor bottles, some flashlights, and other stuff they’d scavenged. It was so heavy. Then we wrapped the fiberoptics around our bodies, all connected to that one generator. Riddick ran ahead, and Imam and Johns grabbed onto rope handles on the sled to drag it, and the rest of us ran alongside the sled to keep up with the generator and surround each other with light. And we followed Riddick into the darkness…”

And, she thought miserably as she followed everyone downstairs for lunch, four more of the crash survivors, three of whom she had genuinely bonded with, had died.

But what was worse, she thought as she sat down at the table, was that even if maybe they should have listened to her about the Sand Cat, what happened after that…

…was all her fault.

47.
Princess With a Thousand Enemies

“You hear back yet from any of the places you reached out to?”

Kyra glanced over at Jack as she slipped off her shirt. For a brief moment, she seemed to hesitate. “One or two. Why?”

Jack felt an odd mixture of relief and concern. Kyra seemed to be hiding something from her, but she wasn’t sure what. “General Toal told me that we shouldn’t waste any time getting offworld if we can help it. He thinks all the disasters that have happened here in the last few weeks are gonna bring down some esper-hunters, in addition to the Operatives he mentioned at dinner.”

Kyra grimaced. “That does not sound good. Does that mess with your timetable?”

“It shouldn’t. I leave for New Casablanca in three morning-days. And I’ll be offworld before—”

“Hold up. Don’t tell me.” Kyra’s smile was wry. “I’m not supposed to know, remember? We can’t spill—”

“What we don’t know, yeah,” Jack sighed. The idea that she was leaving Kyra behind, and couldn’t even know for sure whether her sister’s future was secure, bothered the hell out of her. Especially now that she had the sense that Kyra was hiding something more from her than just a chosen destination. “How about you?” she asked after a moment. “No specifics, but… what’s it looking like?”

“I’m giving it one more day,” Kyra said. “My first choice hasn’t responded yet… so I’m gonna give them a little more time before I accept an offer. Not too much, though. I don’t want the other offers going away, especially if our timeline is tight all of a sudden.”

Jack tied the sash on her bathrobe and looked around. “Have you seen Sebby?”

“Not since he plowed through his crickets before dinner, no.”

The cricket tub was completely empty.

The initial search of the bedroom turned up nothing until Jack, mindful of Sebby’s fondness for playing under furniture, looked under the bed. What she pulled out stunned both her and Kyra.

A complete, Sebby-shaped exoskeleton with a large hole in its front.

“Holy shit,” Kyra breathed.

“Sebby molted?” Jack looked around, carefully setting the exuviae on top of the bedspread. “Where is he?”

“Sebby?” Kyra called out. “Baby? Where are you?”

Reeeeeeeee… The bathroom.

Now the size of a large housecat, Sebby had managed to open the shower stall and was trying, with very little success, to crawl up the wall to turn on the faucets. Jack leaned in and turned them on for him, getting the water to his favorite temperature. He began to bounce and wriggle beneath the stream, doing what she and Kyra had come to call the Sebby Dance.

“We’re gonna need a bigger cricket tub,” Jack marveled.

“Shit, Tizzy, what are we gonna do about him? I don’t think I can take him with me. Can you?”

“No,” she sighed. “And there’s still so much we don’t know about him, isn’t there? Part of me is tempted to ask Cedric and Safiyya if they can keep him, but…”

“But not after what the General told us tonight, right?” Kyra looked stricken.

General Toal and Jack hadn’t returned to the ait Meziane house until almost dinnertime, well after the story they’d carefully planted had begun to break wide. They had spent several hours monitoring its development and giving little nudges to some of its aspects as things progressed. Astonishingly, she’d managed to eat the light lunch Takama had packed for them, but keeping it down had been difficult at times.

Confronted with the compelling—and horrifying—evidence about the identity of the New Marrakesh Spaceport Bomber, and the nature of his other heinous crimes, the news agencies had begun scrambling to scoop each other and be first to report as many salacious details as they could legally spill. Law enforcement had initially been far more cautious, but within an hour, the names Javor Makarov and Duke Pritchard were circulating freely in both news reports and law enforcement press releases about two “persons of interest” in the bombing… and other crimes, besides.

Soon after, Amnesty Interplanetary’s local chapter issued its own press release, disclosing that it was investigating allegations of human rights violations the two suspects might have engaged in while transporting fugitives and prisoners.

It took less than half an hour beyond that for law enforcement to secure a warrant for the data files of the fictitious pervert Jack and the General had created, which contained a larger and more damning cache of images than had originally been sent out to the news agencies, along with a cross-section of Pritchard’s favorite videos. That cache contained more than enough explicit detail to give investigators probable cause to serve the Merc Network itself with a new round of warrants.

Right as Jack and General Toal were preparing to leave the apartment and return to the ait Meziane house, the story exploded. Several of the pictures their fictional sicko claimed he’d been sent by Pritchard, and one of the videos, “starred” a girl who had just been identified as Luljeta Kamberi. She was a high-profile murder victim from the Tito System, a girl who had disappeared from New Kosovo three years earlier and whose mutilated remains had been discovered a year later. Jack remembered reading about her and seeing the wave of Stranger Danger PSA vids that had circulated in response. She hadn’t recognized the girl’s face in Pritchard’s vile image collection because the pain and terror twisting it had distorted it too much from the sweet, smiling portrait always shared in the media.

Both Pritchard and Makarov, according to the backroom law enforcement chatter Jack and the General had been monitoring, were known to have been bounty hunting in New Kosovo at that time, pursuing a woman who “starred” in another violent image and vid collection… and whose bounty was still open and unclaimed. There had been no further sightings of her since approximately the same time that twelve-year-old Luljeta had vanished.

The phrase “sexual predators” had begun to give way to “serial killers” in the backroom chatter. Soon after, someone leaked the Luljeta Kamberi connection to the press.

“This…” General Toal had said with some trepidation, “just escalated to a Federacy case. Their crimes now cross enough planetary jurisdictions that no one else can claim authority. I think nothing the Mercenary Network tries to do now will prevent law enforcement from gaining access to those accounts. Not when so much evidence is appearing that these two men have been using the Network’s resources, for years, to commit some truly heinous atrocities. Not when every planetary embassy on Tangiers Prime begins demanding access to see if any of their worlds’ missing daughters are featured in similar collections. I had honestly believed all their victims were alive somewhere, but this discovery changes everything.”

“That means Operatives are definitely gonna be coming, too, doesn’t it?” Jack felt chilled and hollow, aware that she and Kyra had come all too close to sharing Luljeta’s grisly fate. Not one of the nauseating threats Pritchard had made to her had been empty.

“I imagine they will be here within the week, yes. And they will be going over everything that is known about the events leading up to the spaceport explosion.” He’d bored into her with his gaze as he said that. “We need to make absolutely sure there’s nothing left that can lead them to you, or your sister, or the family we both care about that has been protecting you.”

“Is there any way to prevent that last part? I mean, their whole mission that day was to murder Colonel Tomlin.”

“I honestly don’t know. But we must conceal any sign that he was anything more than an inconvenient witness to the cover-up of a Level Five Incident, and especially that he was protecting and hiding survivors of the Incident.”

Or, in fact, that there had been any survivors at all.

Dinner table conversation, that evening as the sun set, had centered around the different handles that might still be sticking out to point investigators toward the ait Meziane tribe and the Rif in general. That was also when the General had, as gently has he could, informed everyone that neither “Dihya” nor “Tislilel” could remain on Tangiers Prime for much longer. The other Matador survivors were to stay hidden, in as remote parts of the New Atlas range as possible, but the two espers in their number had to put as many light years as they could between themselves and the unfolding investigation… and the Federacy Operatives who would soon be part of it. And, most essential and terrible of all, none of the people they left behind could know where they were going or how to reach them.

Most of the family had looked stricken; Ewan had looked devastated. It had been hard for Jack to meet his eyes, and even harder to look away once she did.

Everything connected to Elsewhere, they all finally—if reluctantly—agreed, needed to be gone from New Marrakesh before the Operatives arrived. Including the driftwood, coral, and shells Jack and Kyra had collected. Including Sebby.

Now, Jack reached into the shower and carefully stroked Sebby’s still-hardening new carapace. “We’re gonna have to take him home. Morning after Ewan’s send-off… we need to take him back to Elsewhere, where he belongs. Before anybody in the investigation hears about him and realizes he doesn’t belong to this ’verse.”

She felt like something had reached into her chest, gripped her heart, and begun crushing it.

“Yeah,” Kyra agreed, her voice cracking. “I don’t see anything else we can do.”

“I figure he’s from somewhere up in the heights,” Jack managed to continue after a moment. “Some ninety meters above sea level. That’s where the wave must’ve caught him. We get some good elevation maps, and we can figure out the best spots to try. Maybe, once we’re there, he’ll know where to go.”

“Maybe…” Kyra leaned against her and reached in to pet Sebby, too. “What if he doesn’t? What if he’s too domesticated now?”

Jack winced. It wasn’t a thought she liked. “Then we bring him back with us, and we ask Takama to have someone take him to the other Matador survivors and have them take care of him. Some of them know how to switch between ’verses pretty well. They can… I dunno… do a soft release once he gets used to his own world again…”

Sebby turned and crawled onto their kneeling legs, trying to nuzzle both of their abdomens at the same time. His reeeeeee was oddly plaintive.

“Oh… fuck…” Kyra gasped. Jack could feel tears starting in her own eyes as she watched them sliding down Kyra’s cheeks. “He knows… he knows what we’re talking about doing…”

Jack nodded, struggling not to start crying as she stroked the length of Sebby’s soft new exoskeleton. The tears slipped out anyway. “We love you, Sebby. We don’t want to leave you, but… bad things are happening and we’re going to have to go somewhere we can’t take you. I promise you, we’re going to find you a good place to be, first. A place you can be happy…”

Reeeeeeee… Jack thought she could almost hear real words in it. Happy with you…

Had Riddick felt like this, she wondered, when he was preparing to leave her behind? Was that why he’d slipped away like a thief in the night rather than say goodbye?

She and Kyra both took extra-long showers so that Sebby could keep dancing in the water at their feet. Jack wished she had eight more legs so that she could do the Sebby Dance along with him properly.

There would be no record of this dance, except in her and Kyra’s memories, after they parted. General Toal had been clear. No pictures, no vids, no souvenirs. They couldn’t take any with them and couldn’t leave any for the ait Meziane family to remember them by. Anything that could ever link them to this time and place had to be destroyed or left in Elsewhere. When they left, they had to vanish like ghosts.

Jack, at least, wouldn’t need pictures or souvenirs to remember these moments clearly, but she could see how distressed everyone else was… especially Ewan.

And she could feel how upset Kyra was behind her deadpan… until her sister began inexplicably blocking the connection between them.

Maybe that was because of the awful anecdote that the General had also shared with them.

“Many years ago,” he’d told the group at the table, “I heard the story of a young woman who had been a witness to a terrible crime and was placed in protective custody until she could testify against its perpetrators. She was hidden away, and only allowed periodic, controlled contact with her family, through elaborate channels designed to keep anyone from tracing her whereabouts. Her mother worried a great deal about her and, as time wore on, became increasingly desperate to make sure that she was all right. She began to beg her daughter to tell her something, anything, about where she was or how she was doing.”

His gaze had swept the table, fixing on each person as he continued. “Eventually, the young woman caved. Her handler did not discover it until much later, but she told her mother the name of the city she was living in.”

Cedric, Ewan, and Usadden all winced.

“For a while, nothing seemed amiss,” General Toal continued. “But her mother subscribed to the city’s local news service, checking its headlines and weather reports every day. After a time, that …quirk… came to the attention of the wrong people. They now knew which city to search for their quarry. After a few more weeks, they found the young woman they had been hunting. And then, not long after that poor, worried mother saw a headline about a fatal house fire in the feed she had subscribed to, she learned that it was her own daughter who had died in that fire.”

The table had remained silent, everyone seated at it looking aghast.

“I’m telling you this story so that you will understand how important it is not to know where either Dihya or Tislilel have gone, and not to try to find out. As difficult and painful as it is, and I do understand how painful it is…”

After all, Jack had thought, his own son’s been missing for almost a decade.

“…all ties between you and them must be cut, for everyone’s safety.”

Safiyya, in particular, seemed to be struggling to find an argument against that. Ewan looked exactly the way he had when Jack had first seen him at his brother’s memorial: crushed by loss.

“They do not have to leave tonight,” the General continued. “That would be precipitous and might draw attention to the fact that they were fleeing something. But they should stay no longer than another week, and should time their departures to coincide with those of other family members who are going back to the New Atlas range… or returning to their duties after taking time off for Gavin Brahim’s memorial.” His eyes fixed on Ewan for a moment.

Everyone had been quiet and somber for the rest of the evening, even as those departures were being solidified. In one Tangiers day, after night fell and Qamar was in the right part of the sky, Ewan would be returning to the flight academy. His grandparents, Izil, and Lalla would be leaving for the New Atlas mountains the evening-day after that. And, the General decided, he would escort the two of them to the high-speed rail station the following morning-day, where they would depart for destinations no one could know.

Jack, who had told him about her ticket to the New Casablanca spaceport, was not allowed to ask what Kyra’s destination would be. Kyra had already known about that ticket, but wasn’t allowed to know where Jack was going from there. In fact, General Toal had forbidden her to tell him, either. It all made sense…

But she was plagued by the terrible suspicion that Kyra didn’t have a destination yet. Was that what her sister was hiding?

The whole thing had become terribly, depressingly imminent. Even though Tangiers Prime had always been intended as just a way-station, even though Jack had been reminding herself since before Tomlin’s death that she couldn’t stay and needed to move on…

The prospect of leaving was still far more painful than she’d ever expected it would be.

It took her a long time to fall asleep.

She dreamed, at first, about wandering empty halls and rooms, seeking someone, anyone. Some of the rooms were from the ait Meziane house, others from her mother’s house or her father’s apartment; once she even found herself back in the apartment she and Kyra had shared. But all the rooms were empty. No people, no furniture, no life.

Everything, it seemed, had been lost.

Except, on one floor, she found a poster lying face down. She turned it over.

Minnie Sulis
A Night of Magic
One Night Only

A SOLD OUT sticker had been plastered on top of the ticketing information. The face of the woman on the poster stunned Jack.

Kyra. An older, slightly curvier Kyra with gold hair and thinner, lighter eyebrows, dressed in a sparkling, multicolored corset and top hat. A dove crouched on the raised palm of her left hand, wings spread and preparing to take flight. Above the cupped fingers of her right hand, a glowing crystal sphere hovered.

Kyra’s mother, Jack realized. Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier, better known to late twenty-first century America by her stage name, much as her real esper abilities had been concealed behind the mannered artifice of stage magic.

General Toal still hasn’t told Kyra about her mother, Jack thought. I have to remind him to…

But Kyra—actual Kyra, but just a little girl—was lifting the poster out of a box. The room was no longer empty. It was small, cramped, dominated by a large bed. The box had come out from deep beneath it. The windows were shut, but through them Jack could hear a low roar, like the ocean but steady rather than tidal. She walked to one window and looked out.

Gray, gray, gray. Gray buildings towering on every side, rising up to blot out the sky. Gray pavement below, choked with vehicles, the source of the steady roar and the periodic, strident sounds of horns. Gray air, putting a hint of a metallic taste in her throat. Gray sky peeking through the spaces between skyscrapers, haze making the buildings themselves fade away into nothing at their peaks.

New York City, 2087. The year Kyra had said goodbye to the world of her birth.

Kyra set the poster aside, lifting up the spangled corset beneath it and running her fingers over its gemmy beads and sequins. The moment was charged with magic and nostalgia; to her, there were no riches or treasures in the ’verse that could compare to the glittering fabric in her hands, and there never would be. She put it in her lap and surveyed the other treasures in the box: a crystal ball, a tarot deck, a set of playing cards tipped with sharp metal edges, a compressed black top hat—

“What are you into now?” a man’s scolding voice said behind her. “Oh, for the love of—Min! Min!”

Kyra, curled up on her side on her own bed, head pressed to her pillow, a stuffed bunny clutched to her chest with one hand while the other pressed over her exposed ear, trying to blot out the shouting.

“You said you’d gotten rid of that devilry! Now you’re letting it corrupt our daughter!”

“It’s just—”

“You can’t bring it with us! Either you belong to God or to the devil, Min! Choose!”

Min… Mommy… crying later when she thought no one would hear…

The box, when Kyra next sneaked into her parents’ bedroom to pull it out again and play with the things inside, was no longer there.

Filling a small box of her own, not long after, as her father lectured her. “We can’t take much, but we don’t need much. God will provide. Take only what’s most important… why are you packing that?”

…the stuffed bunny, worn and much beloved, lying forlornly on the bed as she left her bedroom for the last time and struggled not to cry… another lost treasure that no worldly riches could ever compare to…

Lost.

Forever.

Gray, and more gray, more than two years of gray, wandering the cramped halls of a stern and chilly spaceship. The other children were so alien to her, so different from the kids she’d known at her first school, mostly pious cookie-cutter duplicates of each other and dull to talk to. Her school lessons were alien, too. She was still learning to read, now from a book called Bible Stories for Children, but the other subjects, the ones she’d liked most, were gone. No art period, no gymnastics, no learning about plants and animals…

The boys got to learn about plants and animals. Her older brother played with construction and chemistry sets she was forbidden to even touch. The boys got to run and jump, tumble and kick, and throw and hit balls. But she wasn’t allowed anymore.

The gray world of the colony ship was a coffin.

Green, at last. The green world her father had said God promised them. Yet somehow all the grown-ups were angry about it. Even as they talked about God’s providence, even as they told the children to rejoice at having real grass under their feet and real trees above their heads… nine-year-old Kyra could feel how furious they all were. They felt cheated somehow. Her mother hushed her when she asked why, fear sparking in her eyes.

Chores, endless chores to make the days turn gray again. Washing and cooking and cleaning, none of which her brother ever had to do. Gardening, at least, wasn’t bad. But if she let the dirt stay under her nails, her father shouted at her. “Unclean” was an epithet that meant God would hate her. When she figured out what she needed to do and be for God to like her, she wasn’t sure she wanted Him to.

She would steal away after each day’s chores to learn the things that her brother was allowed to learn, but that no one would teach her. It was painstaking work, with no one to help her figure out her mistakes. She resolved that she just couldn’t make any…

…Disappearing into the green, whenever she could get away, to climb the trees and follow the animals’ trails… to run and tumble and kick unseen by anyone but those who could never betray her secrets…

…Sometimes she stole paper and pencils so she could draw detailed pictures of the plants and animals she had seen in the woods, try to capture the beauty of the valley that spread below Canaan Mountain, or reproduce the faces of her family and the few people she considered anything like friends. She kept them hidden from everyone, and learned how to switch hands and hold the pencils in a variety of ways when her father sharply queried her about the writing callus she was developing on one finger. As a girl, he said, she didn’t need to learn how to write, or read anything more than the Good Book…

One day, as she sketched the valley from the perspective of a high tree branch, twelve years old, huge vehicles began to arrive, arraying themselves around the Enclave. Tense-looking men emerged from one vehicle and marched toward the gates…

Her mother, still so beautiful but her face increasingly lined with sorrow, stress, and murdered dreams, gathered her into a fierce hug when she stole home later. “Where have you been? I’ve been so worried…”

The vehicles remained arrayed around the Enclave. Kyra wasn’t allowed out anymore; none of the children were. Bad men were outside, she was told, and they would do terrible things to her if they caught her.

But first, they must catch you…

Her mother had read that to her once from a book she’d found and pilfered from her cousin Joren’s library shelves, back on Earth, because it had rabbits on the cover. Mommy could only read her parts of it when no one else was home, but her father had snatched it away from them, shouting, when he’d come home early and caught them with it. Kyra still didn’t know how it ended. The book was connected, in her heart, to that lost and mourned stuffed bunny, whose official name had been Patches but who, secretly, she’d called El-Ahrairah…

But first, they must catch you.

She knew all the hidden ways through the forest around the Enclave, and had known how to get in and out, unseen, for years. The bad men never caught her, never even saw her.

…until…

Fire. Smoke. Blood. Screaming. Kyra reloaded, aimed at one of the bad men and pulled the trigger, watching just long enough to make sure he fell and didn’t rise. She moved on before anyone could fire back, finding another place to aim from, another bad man to aim at…

…Struggling in their grip as they dragged her into a courtyard, her shirt torn away and one of them painfully twisting her hair in his fist. Her mother, cornered by three more of the bad men, had her hands out, holding them up in a gesture that Kyra remembered from a time when she was little and, one day while her father and brother were both away at some church event, the brooms had danced. But her face crumpled and she began to cry.

“No…” Min—Mommy—sobbed. “I won’t… I can’t… I won’t let the devil back in me…”

The men laughed.

“You’re gonna have my devil in you in a minute, bitch,” one of them said, reaching forward to grasp the fabric of her dress—

“Oh God… MOMMY…”

Jack woke up with a start.

Kyra, next to her on the bed, whimpered again. “Mommy…”

Her dream, she realized, had been Kyra’s dream, now morphing into a terrible nightmare as the standoff and massacre unfolded again in her mind.

“Kyra,” she murmured, touching her shoulder. “Wake up. It’s okay. You’re not there…”

“No,” Kyra whisper-sobbed. “I have to save her… have to save us…”

But there had been no way for twelve-year-old Kyra to do that… and there was no way now for sixteen-year-old Kyra to do it either.

Is she going to be ruled by these nightmares after we’re separated? Oh fuck…

Only knowing that she had to do something, Jack leaned close, put her arms around Kyra, closed her eyes…

…and dove back into her sister’s mind the way she could dive into the mindspace the Apeiros inhabited.

She was back in the New Christy Enclave. She froze the moment and rolled it backward, feeling Kyra’s initial resistance and then assent. Turn back time, turn it back, please undo what was done…

The battle began, all over again.

But now it was different.

As Red Roger’s bad men poured into the Enclave…

…Riddick rose to meet them.

46.
Heirs to the Caldera

The official story, which began circulating an hour before Jack and General Toal left for the old apartment, was that the second of the two Star Jumpers irreparably damaged in the spaceport explosion had also been compromised worse than anyone had realized. One of the reactor cores powering its sublight ion drive had slowly destabilized until it ruptured almost exactly seven Tangiers days later… a little under two of the planet’s long days after a similar rupture had allegedly destroyed the other damaged Star Jumper, the ill-fated Scarlet Matador. Jack, who knew exactly what had really happened to the Matador and where to find it, rolled her eyes and saw Ewan doing the same thing.

The unofficial story, which General Toal said was only being whispered by a handful of eyewitnesses, was that the ship had abruptly imploded some five hours after the Quintessa Corporation had tried to run an unexplained test… one that had begun at almost exactly the same moment as Jack’s strange fit toward the end of the morning-day. The test had ended not long after it had begun with everyone involved fleeing the ship, but no warnings of an impending crisis had been issued until the implosion itself occurred hours later. What little of the massive vessel was left was disturbingly friable, even its protective hull plates disintegrating when touched.

“They tried to use its Isomorph Drive to open a bridge to U322A,” Jack said when the General finished his update. The family had insisted on bed rest for her, but cabin fever was already building and making her antsy. Everyone crowding into the bedroom to listen in just added to the weird near-claustrophobia. Sebby, chittering in annoyance, had already retreated under the bed.

“You know this?” the General asked. “You remember?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember much of anything after feeding Sebby.” She actually did remember the abortive tickle-battle, and the conversation with Kyra that had followed, but it seemed like everyone was more comfortable thinking that had been lost to her, too. “Just… we took away every other potential bridge they had, so…” She shrugged, wishing she could explain where her certainty came from. Usually she could, but there was a strange fog in parts of her mind that had never existed before.

“Yes,” Ewan said. “When we were going to the Scarlet Matador, you said that would be the only way for them to gain access to Elsewhere once everything else was gone. But why would they want to?”

“The envoy said she wanted to understand what made this Level Five Incident so different from all the others,” Jack mused. Sometimes, she felt like she knew, or should know, much more, but when she tried to chase the feeling down, it evaporated.

“Hopefully, having her attempt to re-establish a connection end in another disaster will deter her,” the General said. “Perhaps there is a way to make her believe that it’s a problem with that universe, itself.”

“Won’t that get any shipping route that uses U322A for a Jump suspended?” Cedric asked, frowning.

“Likely. But they can route around it. They have, in point of fact, done so several times in the past with other universes, and with Jumps they decided were too long. Better that than the realization that there might be a human mind behind so much of their ill fortune, or even two.” The General’s gaze on Jack, and on Kyra, was speculative.

“You think we did this?” Kyra asked him, looking shocked.

“Well, that’s the interesting thing,” he rumbled, his voice contemplative. “Neither of you ever left this house. And your whole focus, during that period, was your adopted sister. I don’t think you did anything…”

His gaze moved to Jack.

“…and you don’t seem to remember anything that happened while you were under.”

Under…

…beneath, below, under…

Yes, a soft voice murmured somewhere far away. You may know and tell that much… it will do no harm.

“I think I was with the Apeiros,” Jack answered slowly. “Whatever was happening… they were afraid. Terrified.”

“Do you think U322A, your Elsewhere, might be their home? Perhaps the bridge would have endangered it.”

She shook her head after a moment’s careful thought. Navigating her memory, at least where this was concerned, felt like jumping from one steppingstone to another, but instead of water between the stones, there were vast, fathomless gulfs of strange emptiness. She’d never experienced anything like it before in her life. It was unnerving.

But, strangely, there were other things that she knew with iron certainty now, which had never been in her head before.

“They call us ‘little larvae,’” she told everyone, “because our five-dimensional shapes are so small… only two universes wide. They’re much bigger…”

…tiny but enormous…

“I don’t think they could think of Elsewhere as their world any more than…” She cast about in her head for a suitable comparison. “…than you could think that chair you’re sitting in is your world.”

“And yet, whatever it was the Quintessa Corporation tried to do this morning-day, bridging U1 and U322A perhaps… terrified them and incapacitated you.” His eyes turned to Kyra. “But not you.”

Kyra shook her head. “Tizzy told them they were forbidden to talk to me anymore unless I talked to them first.”

General Toal looked fascinated. “You were able to forbid these beings to do something?”

Jack shrugged. “I told them they were hurting her. I guess they didn’t want to do that.”

“So they let her be…?”

“I think so. But…” She looked over at Kyra. “I think I remember you screaming that something was wrong.”

“Yeah, because you were having a fit.” Kyra shook her head. “Whatever it was, I didn’t feel any of it except what I could feel coming off of you.”

“And what was that?” Takama asked.

“Something was screaming for help and she was trying to go to it, in her head. And then she was gone.” Kyra shuddered. “I swear, it was like she wasn’t even in her body anymore…”

“Completely unresponsive,” Usadden murmured, and Jack saw him shudder, too.

“Except,” Ewan spoke up, “the brain-wave readings my portable scan got were off the charts.”

“Please tell me I don’t have to go get another CT scan,” Jack groaned.

“No, that would be ill-advised indeed,” General Toal said. “Were her readings like that after the last… incident, Ewan Zdan?”

Ewan shook his head. “They were normal… but those were readings I took afterwards, not during. She might have lit up the scan the same way if I’d used it when she was moving the Matador out of our universe.”

“Perhaps you should scan her again now.”

Ewan looked at Jack, a question in his eyes. She nodded, watching him get the portable scanner back out of his field kit. Kyra tensed a little as he came over to Jack’s side, as though she expected both of them to fall under each other’s thrall again.

After all, he had almost needed to be pried off of her earlier.

Even as the alerts had begun to go off, he had dropped everything he’d been carrying onto the chair and raced over to her, landing beside her on the bed and pulling her into a hug so tight that she almost hadn’t been able to breathe. Sebby had screeched and begun posturing threateningly—snapping his pincers like rapid-fire castanets but, at least, not brandishing his stinger—until Kyra, hurrying in after the others, managed to calm him down. Although intensely and inappropriately aware of Ewan’s powerful torso pressed to hers, Jack had found herself even more aware that he was shaking. It had taken a long moment for Usadden to get through to him and convince him to let her go… and then convince her to let him go when her mixture of concern and desire made her clingy. Only then did Jack find out that, for the prior few hours, she had appeared to be comatose.

Now, though, Ewan was all business, running his scan the way he had undoubtedly done countless times when he had worked as a paramedic. “Much closer to normal. But…” He swallowed and shook his head. “When I still worked for the UMA, I had been instructed that if I ever saw readings like this, I should refer the patient for Quantification.” He shook his head again. “They didn’t look like this last time.”

The General looked as if a suspicion had been confirmed for him. Ewan, giving Jack an apologetic look, put the scanner away and returned to the chair he’d been sitting in. He was keeping his distance, but she could feel how much he didn’t actually want to.

“Okay,” she sighed, sitting up. “Brain is normal…ish. No signs of physical injury, right?”

Usadden nodded.

“Then can I please get up? I have a lot I still need to do. Today.”

“Perhaps it should wait until things calm down—” Tafrara began.

“No, I think she’s right,” the General said. “While all eyes are pointed at this new disaster, she may have an easier time insinuating herself into the systems she needs to access, in order to plausibly get the word out about Makarov. I will accompany her to the apartment and watch over her.”

At Jack’s request, he took her to a nearby tech shop to purchase a tablet she could use just for the purposes she had in mind, before driving her to the apartment building. The place was almost entirely empty and still; most of the tenants had moved out after the owners had been unresponsive and uncommunicative in the wake of the spaceport bombing. None of the shattered west and north windows had been repaired, although a very few had been boarded over on the lowest levels. Jack led General Toal up the filthy, stinking stairway, more conscious than ever of how nasty it was; if it bothered him, he showed no sign.

“So,” Jack asked as she unpacked the tablet, sat cross-legged on the floor—she refused to ever touch the couch again—and began to configure it, “why are you really here?”

He sat down in the chair they had left behind, steepling his fingers. “You are getting very good at reading people, Tizzy. I do, indeed, have an ulterior motive for wishing to speak with you alone.”

Maybe that should have scared her, but it didn’t. She knew that, as a military general, he was undoubtedly a dangerous man in at least some way… but she’d been associating with dangerous men for months, starting with Riddick and Johns. She just looked over at him and nodded encouragement.

“You have always had some esper ability, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Seems like it. Nothing obvious, but…” She restarted the tablet to let some of her custom configurations take. “…I think there were signs when I was little. Strange stuff. Nothing too freaky, though. Nothing that couldn’t be explained away.”

“But since the Scarlet Matador, and since your communions with the beings you call the Apeiros, it has grown considerably.” It wasn’t a question.

“I guess,” Jack said, busy armor-plating the tablet against incursions with the protective systems her father had liked best. “It’s… hard to tell. Like Ewan said the other night, I don’t know where my limits are until I crash into them—”

Oh, oops. Nobody but Kyra knew she’d heard that.

General Toal only laughed softly. “In truth, you would make an extraordinary recruit. An Operative who can stand among her targets, listening to their whispered secrets, without them ever knowing…” His expression grew serious. “That is what I needed to speak to you about.”

“You gonna try to recruit us?” The tablet was almost ready. Jack glanced over at the General. “Kyra might be interested if it means rescuing girls from the shit she was put through, but—”

“No, I am not,” he said, surprising her. “I have worked with Operatives before. Officially, slavery is illegal within the Federacy… except where they are concerned.”

Well, that wasn’t a chilling statement or anything… “Why?”

“Your own abilities would terrify most people, child. You can spy on any discussion without people knowing you’re standing among them. You can come and go from a locked and impregnable fortress as you please, regardless of its security systems. You have made bodies disappear from a morgue, hidden valuables vanish from a high-security vault, and a twenty-thousand-ton Star Jumper travel from one universe to another with a touch of your hand. And may, possibly, have imploded another Star Jumper in your sleep.”

Jack opened her mouth to protest… but…

Holy fuck. She really had done all that. Phrased that way, she sounded scary as shit. And that wasn’t even touching on what Kyra could do, killing people without any sign she was anywhere near them—

“What government would ever allow such power to go unchecked?”

His rhetorical question sent an icy wind blowing through her. “What… would they do?”

“Espers are taken to a secure facility for training and conditioning. I don’t know exactly what happens there. They will not speak of it. But every Operative I have met is mentally and emotionally incapable of exercising their powers except under orders. Their ability to improvise, as you two do so well, has been taken from them, something that has cost more than a few of them their lives when situations went pear-shaped, the chain of command broke down, and there was no one left with the authority to tell them how to use their abilities to save themselves or others.”

“That’s…”

“Not a fate I could ever wish for you, no. I serve the Federacy to serve humanity, and this is one of the great conflicts between those two callings. I will not tell them about you or Kyra.”

“Th…thank you. What… is that all they would do? Psychological conditioning?”

The General shrugged. “You would have a tracker implanted in you… one with an explosive device inside, just in case you found a way to break through that conditioning and tried to escape. I know of only one Operative-in-training who has ever managed to successfully remove it and flee captivity. You have met him.”

It took a moment to find her voice. “Riddick.”

“They point to him, his kill count and the various crimes he has committed—or allegedly committed—in the last decade, whenever anyone objects to the way espers are handled. Did you ever see him use his abilities?”

“I don’t think so…” But there had always been something preternatural about him, about his speed and timing and the way he hadn’t even had to look behind him, most times, to know who or what was coming. He wasn’t invulnerable—he’d very nearly died on the crash planet—but…

She had watched him take a knife and cut his own neck open to remove the explosive tracker that Chillingsworth had ordered implanted in him, and had found herself thinking that it wasn’t the first one he’d removed that way…

“Espers were much rarer even a generation ago,” the General told her, “before the Furyan Diaspora. Many of the orphans of that… disaster… have turned out to be quite powerful. It’s something about their world itself, it seems. The powers have even appeared among the children of the relief troops who were stationed at the Caldera Base on Furya in the aftermath—”

Jack’s breath caught. Her father’s last tour of duty in the Corps of Engineers, the year before he met her mother, had been on Furya. He had shown her pictures of the Caldera, and the base that sat beside it, and had told her it was the strangest world he’d ever visited. But it was also the world he’d chosen to return to when he re-enlisted.

Was that where all of this came from?

General Toal was watching her with interest. He’d figured her out, knew she had to be the daughter of some member of the Service who had been stationed on Furya… where she had been headed, herself, before everything went wrong. What would she have found there, she wondered, if she had made it?

Except…

“I… don’t think Kyra has any ties to Furya…”

“No. The sublight colony ship she was on never passed that way. But the files on her are extensive. Did you know she was born on late twenty-first century Earth?”

Jack nodded.

“Before her mother joined her father’s church and gave up such things, she was a performer of some renown. Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier, better known to her world as Minnie Sulis. A stage magician whose act included mind reading, levitation, and teleportation. Most such acts are elaborate trickery of course, but the records indicate that many of her signature ‘tricks’ could be neither replicated nor debunked. When she converted to the Church of the New Christy Pilgrims, though, she quit the stage and claimed that she had turned her back on the devil.”

“So she was probably an esper the whole time,” Jack mused.

“One who became convinced what she was doing was witchcraft, it seems. But yes.”

“You… need to tell Kyra all of this, too.”

The General nodded. “I will, yes. It’s important that both of you protect yourselves from discovery. Tomorrow evening, when I come to Ewan Zdan’s send-off party, I’m bringing each of you a very special device. A neurofeedback training unit. It will help you learn how to control your own minds, and the readings your brain scans produce, so that you can hopefully beat a Quantification test—should you ever be subjected to one—and pass as normal.”

For a long moment, Jack was rendered speechless. He was giving them something incalculably precious… and incredibly dangerous to him. If anyone ever discovered that he had helped two espers hide from the Federacy, it would be the end of more than just his career.

“Thank you,” she finally managed, wishing she could say something that would convey how much she knew he was risking, how much generosity he was showing.

“You’re welcome, Tizzy. Now… another reason I came here today is to help you deal with these terrible files you have found. I understand why you don’t want anyone else to have to see them,” he said as he walked over to sit down beside her on the floor, crisscrossing his legs with the limberness of a man a third his age, “but I have served as a judge on a great number of courts martial, and have reviewed evidence of the worst war crimes human beings can perpetrate. Please allow me to help you with this. I am far more inured to the trauma that even pictures of such things can cause than you should ever have to be.”

Jack felt relief suddenly untying the knots in her spine. The idea of looking at those images again, of sifting through them for examples that could be sent on, that would show enough to provoke outrage without being too graphic to ever be published, had been on the very edge of bearable. To look again at the misery and agony in the faces of those women and girls…

“I’d… really appreciate that. Last time I looked at this stuff, I ended up puking up everything I’d eaten for the last month.”

“I’m truly sorry that you had to see such things at all.”

Kyra, she thought, had lived through such things, which was immeasurably worse. Sometimes she had to remind herself that, for every man who was capable of such egregious brutality, for every Red Roger, or Duke Pritchard, or Javor Makarov… or even a William Johns… there were men like General Toal, like Cedric, Gavin, Ewan, and all the men of ait Meziane… like Riddick. Men who, although perhaps fearsome in their own ways, had too much honor to ever engage in such hideous, sadistic acts.

Men who possibly needed protection of their own from the schemes of monsters like Pritchard and Makarov.

“There’ll be stuff we need to delete, too,” she told the General. “Aside from following Kyra and me around to try to get to Riddick, he was helping Makarov track Toml— Gavin Brahim. I don’t think we want everything he recorded about that where people can nose into it… and I don’t want any of the pictures he took of Kyra and me getting out.”

“Agreed. We will curate this collection carefully.”

Jack logged them in and they got to work. It wasn’t long before she let him take over almost entirely, looking away as he examined the different image collections that Pritchard had assembled and chose examples from each collection to include in their fictional pervert’s stash.

“Hmm,” he said at one point. “I recognize three of the women so far. Former fugitives now serving prison terms… I think their sentences may end up being vacated on the strength of this evidence.”

“That’s… good, right?”

General Toal sighed. “Possibly. Unfortunately, I doubt they will receive much compensation or assistance, aside from being released and having the relevant crimes expunged from their records. Few in their positions do.”

“Is there anything you can do to help them?”

He shook his head, looking somber and a little regretful. “I suspect that this release of information is as much as I can personally do for them. Any overt intervention on my part could draw too much attention to what I might know about Pritchard and Makarov, myself… and how I might have learned it.”

Shit. “Yeah…”

Maybe, she thought, someday there would be something she could do. Her father had told her about working with various NGOs, when he was stationed on different worlds, which had provided targeted aid to groups in need. Maybe she could join, or if need be create, one that would help victims of these kinds of crimes—

“Dear God.”

“What?” Jack looked over at General Toal. “Something bad?”

The General was frowning, advancing through a series of pictures. Bracing herself, Jack leaned over to look.

Nothing remotely pornographic was on the screen anymore. Instead, a surveillance camera showed a man dressed in traditional Amazigh attire, a tagelmust covering his head and obscuring most of his face, exiting a swanky-looking restaurant, the image taken from behind him. It vanished and was replaced by a new shot, from a different angle—

Jack recognized this frame. The surveillance camera it originated from had been covering the entrance to the pilots’ lounge. The same man was emerging from the lounge, partly turned as though waving goodbye to whomever had brought him as a guest. She remembered watching him leave the lounge when she’d reviewed the footage.

Glancing at her, his expression suddenly a little wary, the General closed the folder without advancing through further pictures. “I don’t understand why they would be so interested in collecting stills of the people they murdered that day,” he said. “I may wish to examine this more closely… but I think its presence would cloud the investigation we wish to see pursued.”

As she watched, he took a chip out of his pocket, connected it to the tablet, and transferred three folders to it—none of them from the “Bad Kitties” folder—before deleting them from Pritchard’s account.

Jack had the strange feeling that some kind of sleight-of-hand had just occurred, but at the same time, she didn’t feel any ill intent coming off of the General… more a sense that he had just done something to protect someone else. Maybe it was, as she’d pondered earlier, someone who would be harmed by the scrutiny that even drawing the two mercs’ interest could generate. One of the other folders, she realized, was the one that contained the surveillance pictures of her and Kyra.

He already knows who we are, and he’s risking a shit-ton to hide us from his own bosses…

Whatever else he was hiding, whoever else he might be protecting, she’d let it slide. It probably wasn’t any of her business.

“There is,” he said slowly, pocketing the chip again, “one more thing I need to discuss with you while we’re here. If you and Kyra haven’t already begun to plan your exit strategy off this world, now is the time to do so.”

“Why?” Jack already had her exit in place, but his words sent a chill through her anyway.

“Because it’s only a matter of time before a formal investigation of the repeated calamities at the spaceport is initiated by the Federacy,” he told her. “Such investigations always include at least two esper Operatives. One of the things they will be looking for…”

He locked eyes with her, and she could feel him willing her to understand how serious the matter was.

“…is evidence of someone like you.”

45.
Infinity Minus One

Where are you? Are you all right?

Ewan had sent the message to her tablet an hour earlier. Fuck. Everybody was probably freaking out.

Jack grabbed her massive sandwich and bit down as she keyed in a reply. She was ravenous.

I’m okay. Comm died. Don’t ask. Not on record.

She’d have to delete any trace of their communications later, just in case. A reply appeared on her screen after a moment.

Understood. Be safe. Come home soon.

Be safe… This day, Jack thought, had gotten absurdly complicated.

The last artifacts from the Scarlet Matador had been disposed of, though. She had carried them down to the receding waters of Elsewhere and, one by one, had flung all sixteen pilfered murder trophies as far out to sea as she could. Then she had hiked—slowly, but her ankle had thankfully stopped bitching after half an hour—to one of the piers in U1. She’d picked a touristy pier open to the public, isomorphed back in a sheltered location, and waded into the surf, slogging through the actual waters of U1’s Mutawassit Ocean before climbing onto the pier holding out her now-dead, dripping comm for everyone to see, muttering in Arabic about her stupid cousin Abu and no warranty against saltwater corrosion. Everybody in hearing range had given her sympathetic looks, one man suggesting she try putting it in a bowl of rice anyway, just in case.

She’d even done that, buying a bowl of uncooked rice from a chain restaurant that only English-speaking tourists seeking “Traditional American Cuisine” frequented, and that she’d also bought her ginormous meal from. The dead comm—which she’d deliberately immersed, herself, to create her alibi for how soaked her pants had gotten in another universe’s ocean—sat in the bowl off to her side while she stuffed her face with everything she’d ordered, feeling ridiculously famished and exhausted.

Apparently isomorphing the way she had, controlling her presence in and interactions with two universes at the same time, took a lot of calories out of a girl.

Kilometers away, the news on her tablet reported that downtown New Marrakesh was dealing with another security incident. Jack imagined that the moment Ewan or one of his relatives had seen that the Quintessa Corporation building was at the incident’s center, they’d begun trying to reach her comm. It had been a whole universe away at the time, and she’d dunked it too quickly, upon her return to U1, for it to hook back up to the comm system and inform her of their calls.

She’d need to buy a replacement when she bought the third tablet, on her way back up to the Rif. All this cloak-and-dagger bullshit was hard on tech.

But first she needed to eat and drink her weight in food.

Shit, she thought moments later as Cedric walked into the restaurant, right as she was finishing her first sandwich. I forgot to make the second tablet untraceable again… Half the family had connections to military and law enforcement; they’d probably been waiting for her to reply so they could lock onto her signal and come find her.

Outside, she could see Takama and General Toal sitting in the front seats of a vehicle. She wondered which one of them had sprung for the tech to locate her.

Honestly, though, she wasn’t sure why she hadn’t just told them where she was and asked them to come get her. Other than the persistent, gnawing belief that she’d be imposing on them if she did.

“Welcome to the afterparty,” she muttered as Cedric sat down across from her. “Y’want anything?”

“What happened to your comm?” he asked, gesturing at the rice bowl.

“Sploosh, into the ocean. On purpose. I needed a good alibi for why I was soaked to the waist.” She stuffed several fries into her mouth before he could ask another question. While she chewed, she could see him taking in the size of her massive order—one “Mega Mac” down, one to go, and a “family size” order of skinny, salty “American Style French Fries”—and studying her more closely.

“You look exhausted. Why are you soaked to the waist?”

“I’ll tell you on the way back? It’s kinda…” She glanced around at the half-empty establishment—somehow, she kept missing lunch and then eating like a fiend to make up for it—before continuing. “…hush-hush. I swear, today I could eat my weight in crickets…”

“Miss? Can we get boxes and a bag for my daughter’s order?” Cedric asked a passing waitress. “And if she ordered dessert, that to go, too. Did you order dessert, Tizzy?”

“Not yet. I was gonna get apple pie. Haven’t had that in more than a year…” Damn, she was feeling sleepy.

“Do you have an entire pie? Actually, do you have two? I think the rest of the family would enjoy that too.” Cedric took out his card and offered it to the waitress. “Please put everything on here.”

“I’m hanging onto the fries for the ride,” Jack told Cedric as he boxed up the rest of her food. To her amusement, he poured the uncooked rice into a paper bag and pushed the comm back inside it, adding that to the to-go bag.

Once everything had been paid for and gathered up, Jack followed Cedric outside and to the waiting vehicle, which had a military surplus look to it. Maybe the General owned it? He was behind the wheel. Takama had a device in her hand, switched off, that Jack suspected had been used to find her.

“We are quite eager,” General Toal said once the vehicle was in motion, “to hear about your adventures today.”

“Which,” Takama added, “do not appear to have taken place anywhere near your old apartment.”

“Yeah… about that…” Jack shook her head. “I was getting ready to go there when I remembered I still needed to check for anything else that was straddling universes before Quintessa could find it.”

“There was more?” Cedric asked.

“Yeah. K—Dihya and I—”

“You can call Miss Wittier-Collins by her real name when we’re alone,” the General said as he turned a corner. “We all know it.”

Hoo boy. Just as long as they hadn’t figured out her real name…

“When Kyra and I first got here and were just figuring out the rules, a bunch of the stuff we brought with us got wrecked by our first high tide. We didn’t understand the significance of that yet when we threw it all out. I had to track all that stuff down. Then I was using my telescope to look up into the towers all the other survivors stayed in, in case they left anything behind, when I saw something in the Quintessa Corporation building that was definitely straddling universes.”

“And what did you find there?” The General asked. This, Jack realized, was a debriefing.

“Sixteen apeirochorons.” It was only at that moment that she realized she’d unconsciously counted them as she liberated their contents.

“What is an apeirochoron?” Takama asked. “Ewan mentioned that the other day, but I do not know what it means.”

“It’s a geometry term, I think,” Jack said. “It’s a cube. But it’s not a three-dimensional cube. It’s an infinite-dimensional cube.”

“Infinite dimensions?”

“Yeah. Like… it exists here and now in a very specific place in our universe… and it exists in that same location of every other universe at the same time.” The Apeiros had described it to her without language, or maybe in the less articulable language of pure mathematics itself, and she was struggling to find the right words. “There was one on board the Scarlet Matador. When I managed to push it out of this universe, I broke that one. Nearly broke me, too.”

“How did that break it?” Cedric asked.

“What’s infinity minus one?” Jack countered.

“Still infinity, according to mathematics.”

“Yeah, but what if it isn’t?” She argued, trying to explain something that she had learned in one of her not-dreams and that still hurt her head. “What if, by taking away that one, you’ve made the infinite finite?”

“This is not a hypothetical situation you’re posing, is it?” General Toal asked as he wound the vehicle up toward the Rif. “This is what happened to the box you found on the Matador. When it ceased to exist in this universe…”

“I don’t know for sure, but the Apeiros think it’s collapsing in all the universes now.”

Like a knitted scarf slowly unraveling once a single stitch was lost…

“Is that why they didn’t want you to do it?” Takama asked.

“No, they were afraid doing it’d kill me. They seem to think it’s a good thing that it’s collapsing. I think. It’s hard to tell with them sometimes.”

“What about these new boxes you found?” The General asked after a moment. “Is the new security situation because you broke one or more of them?”

“Unh-uh,” Jack said, swallowing the last bit of the cooling fry she’d been chewing while the General spoke. “That would’ve knocked me out cold again. Or maybe dead. But these ones weren’t sealed. They were being used to hold items the Corporation stole from the hospital after the first high tide got everybody evacuated. Stuff everybody’d lost when they left or died, that didn’t get taken to the morgue. Stuff that could’ve been analyzed to learn more about Elsewhere.”

“‘Stuff’ that I presume you liberated?” General Toal couldn’t quite hide his smile when she nodded. “And that’s why they locked down a three-block radius around their building. And you spent your next hour…?”

“Throwing it all as far out to sea as I could, putting a few klicks between me and downtown before I returned to U1, and making up a plausible explanation for why I was soaked.”

“Her explanation,” Cedric said as the General pulled into the ait Meziane garage, “was that her comm fell into the water by the pier and she had to fish it out. Which is why she still wasn’t answering our calls once she returned to this universe.”

“Sorry,” Jack muttered, and then ate the last of her fries.

“Are you always so hungry and tired after a venture into Elsewhere?” the General asked as he parked.

“Only when I do something big. Like moving a whole fu—freakin’ spaceship or making a floor in one ’verse hold me up in another…” Jack yawned. “Shit, I still have so much to do…”

“I think your other ‘mission’ can wait until this evening-day, yes?” Takama said. “In fact, that gives Dr. Robie more time to get away from the comm he has been carrying around.”

“Yeah… I think it’ll have to wait,” Jack admitted as Cedric helped her out of the vehicle and led her toward the stairs. “I need my second sandwich…”

And then a nap. A long nap.

“I have Tislilel!” Cedric called out as they emerged on the ground level of the house. “And apple pie!” He pitched his voice lower for her sake. “You may have a slice before or after your sandwich, as you please.”

“I’d better give you guys a head start on the pie or I might eat the whole thing in one gulp—”

An instant later, she had been lifted into an almost-crushing hug by a pair of strong arms, only her toes still touching the ground.

“I was so worried about you…” Ewan whispered, holding her tightly to him.

Her reaction had nothing to do with worry.

Kyra cleared her throat loudly nearby.

“Zdan!” Safiyya said sharply. “Let the poor girl breathe.”

Ewan released her, looking like a man just coming to his senses after blacking out for a moment. “Sorry…”

Everyone, including Kyra, was giving him charged looks, but nobody was saying a damn thing.

The elephant in this room is fucking ginormous, Jack thought, now feeling breathless, and could feel Kyra suppressing a laugh in response.

Cedric led the way into the dining room while Jack caught her breath and Ewan got his embarrassed blush under control, everyone pretending that they couldn’t see either of them even as they tried not to look at each other.

“So. What kind of adventure did you have downtown?” Safiyya asked as she set out plates and forks for everyone.

Jack threw a pleading glance at Cedric as she lifted her second “Mega Mac” out of the bag.

For the next few minutes, while she concentrated on eating, Cedric retold her story with a fair degree accuracy and even more flair. Jack found herself thinking that it was much like listening to her father narrating one of his probably autobiographical Adventures of Jack B. Badd, back when he’d still told her bedtime stories. It all sounded like such a charming scrape now, but she remembered being more than a little scared the whole time…

…not to mention feeling an infuriated disgust at the idea that the Corporation, or even just the envoy, was keeping trophies from their victims…

Kyra turned and gave her a knowing look. Better they think it was a charming scrape than we give them another reason to want to lock us up for our own good, right?

Yeah… “I know it all sounds really impulsive… but… only because I didn’t think to mention that I needed to finish that job first before starting on my next one. And ’cause I had no idea I’d need to go after those boxes to do it.”

So yeah, she admitted to herself, really impulsive…

She was glad she didn’t have to tell them about her ankle. And at least, she suddenly thought, she could eat. She’d probably have had no appetite at all by then if she’d gone with her original plans. Maybe that was why she’d found an excuse to put those plans off…?

“We’re just glad you’re safe,” Lalla said, setting a slice of the apple pie in front of her. The rest, she realized, had been divided among everyone else at the table. Probably for the best.

“Thank you.” She was, finally, beginning to feel like she might be approaching full… but not until she had at least some of her pie.

“There is, however,” Tafrara said with a stern voice, “another matter that we need to discuss with you.”

Uh oh…

Tafrara held up the scorecard, pointing to the 0 Jack had put next to her name. “Really? Really? We’re going to need an instant replay of this.”

Judging by the sighs and laughter around the table, Jack wasn’t the only one feeling sudden relief. It occurred to her that everybody, including Kyra, was trying very hard not to scold her for scaring them yet again. Had they worried Tafrara was about to break some agreed-upon approach for dealing with her?

Definitely not telling them I fell off the stairs… Or, well, through a wall. She was suddenly twice as glad that her ankle hadn’t even been sprained.

Kyra’s breath hitched and she turned a searing look on Jack. Don’t make me take their side… Jeez. Can’t leave you alone for a minute…

Jack napped for a few hours, Sebby insisting on sleeping beside her head the whole time, and woke shortly before dinnertime. The sun was shining directly into the courtyard, still about six hours away from actual high noon, but summer-intense enough already that nobody wanted to actually walk through it and instead took longer detours through the house to reach the dining room. Her ravenous appetite was back.

Thanks to her excursion, she learned, and also to her nap, she had missed two of the Tai Chi sessions that Ewan and Tafrara had started up for Kyra. That, it turned out, had been the big surprise Tafrara had hinted at the night before.

“It’s so good, Tizzy, you need to try it,” Kyra said, seeming to prefer that sobriquet to Jack. “It’s slow, didn’t pull my stitches at all, but after we were done, I felt like I’d had a real workout.”

“You had,” Ewan laughed. “Slow and controlled takes as much effort as any other kind of action. More, sometimes.”

Usadden picked that moment to swallow wrong. Jack wasn’t sure why both Ewan and Tafrara promptly shot him glares.

“That sounds amazing,” Jack said. Usadden, still sputtering, excused himself from the table and went into the kitchen for a moment.

“We’ll hold another session after the overnoon sleep,” Ewan told her. “Perhaps you can join it before you go off on your next, hopefully easier, adventure.”

“I’d like that.” She’d seen vids of people doing Tai Chi and had wondered about its slow pace. If Kyra said it was the real deal, though, it undoubtedly was.

“So,” Tafrara said as the table was being cleared, “it’s time for us to settle the matter of the crickets. Definitively.”

Izil and Ewan both began laughing.

“Yes, we need proof of this,” Izil agreed.

“Okay…” Jack felt herself struggling not to smirk. “C’mon up… you can watch and learn.”

Kyra began snickering.

Everybody wanted to see. Practically the whole family, plus the General, followed Jack upstairs as she carried Sebby’s singing box.

This, she thought to herself, was going to be fun.

Sebby was a little bit nervous when so many people came into the room, but it was dinnertime and that part had him ecstatic. While he bounced on the bed and shrieked at her to hurry, she knelt down in front of the tub and lowered the cricket box inside. Winking at Kyra, she isomorphed herself and the cardboard into Elsewhere, letting the crickets spill out into the tub and vanishing from everyone’s sight except her sister’s.

The room erupted in gasps of astonishment. Sebby hesitated for a second and then leapt into the tub to begin the carnage in earnest.

Jack stood up, holding the box in front of her, and reappeared in U1. Opening its lid, she tilted it forward so that everyone could see that it was empty of any crickets. “Tah-dah!”

“You cheater!” Ewan exclaimed, his expression one of pure delight.

“That’s not cheating,” Jack told him, laughing.

“Oh no?” He stepped forward, his smile wide and giving the lie to the faux scowl he was trying to effect. “How is that not cheating?”

“’Cause it’s skill,” she replied, walking toward him in mock challenge. “I got skill.”

“Skill at cheating,” he teased back, eyes dancing with humor as he stepped closer. “I’m calling foul on this…”

“Oh yeah? What’s the penalty?” She found herself grinning up at him, inches from him, daring him to…

…to what, exactly?

“The penalty is… tickling!” He laughed, his hands going for her ribs and startling a squeak out of her!

The rush of feeling that exploded through her was almost nothing like being tickled, though—

Kyra coughed loudly.

“Okay, enough of that,” Cedric said with strangely forced levity, moving between them. Jack found herself backing up and then sitting down abruptly on the foot of her bed. How had she gotten so out of breath again? Her heart was racing—

“What do the judges think of the instant replay?” Tafrara asked everyone, her tone odd. Ewan had turned away, nodding at something his father was murmuring in his ear.

“I think the score is valid,” General Toal said. “Zero and zero.”

“Agreed,” Lalla said. Izil nodded.

“Perhaps we should allow our ‘cricket champion’ to rest,” Safiyya said, ushering everyone out of the room.

Jack was still regaining her equilibrium as they left; they were gone before exactly what had happened really sank in.

“I swear, you two are like… some kind of dangerous chemical reaction,” Kyra said, sitting down next to her on the bed.

“My cousins and I teased each other all the time that way,” Jack found herself protesting. “Nothing like that ever happened when we did…”

“Like I said, it’s the combination of the two of you,” Kyra replied. “Never seen anything like it, myself. If you could bottle it, people’d pay billions for it.”

“This sucks,” Jack grumbled. “We’re trying to just… be…”

Friends? Siblings? Cousins? Something, anything that would let them retain the powerful emotional connection that had blossomed between them without it veering into hormonal chaos. But the chaos kept taking over.

“Maybe, in five years or so, you can come back and see if those crazy-huge sparks still fly,” Kyra said.

“If we can break our trails well enough,” Jack sighed. Why did that suddenly stir a tickle of fear in her? The hungry ache Ewan’s touch had awakened in her had abruptly disappeared.

“That video of yours probably will,” Kyra chuckled. “Everybody’s gonna be looking for our trail on Shakti Four now, right? It’d probably be a bad idea for either of us to ever go there.”

“A very bad idea,” Jack agreed, glad that the subject had, more or less, moved on. She shivered against a sudden chill. “It’s a big world, though, right? Plenty of places Riddick and his two… hench-bitches…”

Kyra laughed. “That’s us, yeah.”

“…could go to ground for years. Aside from one or two big cities where most of the population lives, it’s all wild frontier. I could see him liking a place like that.” It should have been a comforting thought, but somehow it wasn’t. Her mouth felt weirdly dry. The cold seemed to be deepening, even though it was a bright, hot day outside. The hairs on her arms, she noticed, were standing straight up.

“I could see me liking a place like that, too,” Kyra sighed. “Damn.”

“So mercs might spend years looking for him on that one world…” Jack continued, trying to slow down her heart—which had begun racing again—and quiet the growing sense of foreboding that was filling her, “and we can go anywhere else we want, maybe even—”

Whatever Jack had been about to say next was lost in a sudden surging flood of panic.

“Tizzy? Tizzy, are you okay?”

She felt ice cold. Her heart was hammering. Pure terror was flowing into her, not her own, but from somewhere close by, somewhere…

“Something’s wrong!” Kyra shouted.

No, no, no, please no… no… please don’t make me… please… no more…

Those weren’t her thoughts. It wasn’t her terror. But it was consuming her.

I’ll die, I’ll die, please don’t make me…

“Something’s wrong!” Kyra screamed, from far, far away.

Jack could hear footsteps and shouts as people poured back into the bedroom. She could see the ornate ceiling above her, feel the bed beneath her back…

But she was somewhere else. Somewhere dark, cramped, shot with pain…

Screaming. Not her. Only a tiny thread of sound could escape her constricted throat.

The Apeiros were screaming. The spangled darkness behind her eyes was full of their terror.

Help me… please help me…

Jack flung herself forward, reaching out toward the voice.

I’m here! I’m here! I—

The world went dark.

---

Break it open… do it now…

We will keep you safe…

You will not die…

…yet…

We will not let the demons find you.

---

Stone that wasn’t stone cracked, splintered, shivered into dust and vanished into nothing. Ripples spread out, twisting across dimensions. Something tiny but enormous clutched her hand.

---

Floating… drifting in a shattered oblivion…

Rest now, little larva. You have done well.

Something was unraveling, an impossible equation breaking down before her not-eyes.

Infinity minus one…

Infinity broken.

You will not die.

Long, black legs, tipped with claws, emerged from the gaping tear in reality.

---

Sebby hissed beside her, rising up, stinger flailing…

“It’s okay, Sebby. She won’t hurt me…”

He slowly backed away, stinger still lashing with agitation, as She approached, void-black appendages reaching toward Jack’s face. A thousand eyes gazing down upon her… A million eyes… infinite eyes…

Infinity unchained, uncontained…

…this infinity unbroken and…

…rising.

Little larva, what you have done will never be forgotten…

Her obsidian skin contained the shine of galaxies.

…by us.

One delicate tarsus touched Jack’s forehead… and something vanished. There was an empty space where once there had been terrible knowledge, peace where there had been crushing anguish.

One day, you may remember, too.

The door to the bedroom opened.

Reality twisted and She was gone.

---

Takama entered the bedroom, carrying an I-V pole. Usadden and Ewan followed behind her, both carrying I-V bags and monitoring equipment. They stopped, their morose expressions dissolving into astonishment.

Jack sat up in bed, yawning, wiping at her wet cheeks. She looked around. By the shadows, it was nearly high noon. Had she fallen asleep? The last thing she remembered… was…

“Baraka,” she heard three voices say in unison. A saline bag dropped from Ewan’s hand to the floor.

Sebby climbed onto her lap, his stinger tucked away. She thought that it had been out a moment ago, but that made no sense. Had he been trying to protect her from something? She stroked his carapace, and he caressed her arm with his antennae. She’d been feeding Sebby, she remembered, and then…

She’d been dreaming, she thought. A strange dream about demons in the darkness—no, of the darkness—and a creature whose n-shape was both impossible to look at and too beautiful to look away from…

…and an unraveling scarf?

“Hi guys,” she said, wondering why they were staring at her so strangely. “What’s going on?”

As if things weren’t already weird enough, a loud, rumbling boom struck at that moment. The emergency alerts on three comms and one tablet started going off a few seconds later.

44.
Any Box Could Be Pandora’s

Jack’s letter of employment from the Sirius Corporation was waiting for her when she woke up. “Marianne Tepper” had officially been hired.

She had an odd memory of speaking with the Apeiros and asking them to help her not dream… or to pull her back into their “space” if her dreams became troubled. Maybe it had worked, because she had no memory of any other dreams, but felt surprisingly well-rested given how wretched she’d felt when she’d closed her eyes.

As she had suspected they might, the Sirius Corporation had bypassed the formal interview—one would be held, more or less, when she arrived at the orbital shipyard and they checked her in—and instead had sent her all of the forms a new hire had to fill out. She completed and returned them before Kyra began to stir.

The countdown, she thought, had truly begun for her.

Ewan’s leave would end in two evening-days; his family had been discussing his planned send-off as they walked to the garden grove the evening-day before. Two morning-days after that, it would be Jack’s turn to go. The Sirius Corporation had included information about her reservation on its shuttle to the shipyards that evening-day; she just needed to make sure she was in New Casablanca in plenty of time for it. She booked her ticket immediately, using one of the new funding cards she had picked up from the drop she’d finally visited the day before. Most of the other cards would go to Kyra; all of Jack’s expenses would be paid for once she boarded the Nephrite Undine, and the payout for flying it to Deckard’s World was an almost obscene amount that would easily fund her return home and whatever cover stories she needed to concoct once she got there.

Now she could focus on getting through the next few days.

“So,” Kyra murmured from the pillow next to her, “you got good news?”

“Yeah. Got a route back to— home…” At the last second, she reminded herself that, even though she was finally at the point where she was okay with telling Kyra where home was, they’d agreed that she shouldn’t. Damn. “…leaving three morning-days from now. If all goes as planned, I’ll be back long before my fifteenth birthday.”

“How much younger than that will you actually be?” Kyra asked, smirking. Jack had, after all, told the first group therapy session she’d attended that she was thirteen, and only three Standard months outside of cryo had passed since then.

“Just about fourteen when I get home,” Jack admitted. “I’ve lost nine months to cryo so far. Hopefully I won’t seem too much younger than my official age when I get back.”

“You’ll look different than they remember, I bet, enough to keep them from thinking you should’ve changed even more. I mean, you shot up in height while we were in the hospital.” Kyra snickered at Jack’s shocked look. “Seriously. You didn’t notice? You were two inches shorter than me when you got there. Now we’re the same height. You’ve been on a helluva growth spurt.”

“1.73 meters…” Jack said with awe. “I saw it on my charts two evening-days ago and couldn’t figure it out. I was 1.63 meters when I left— home…”

“I don’t think you’re done growing yet, either, not with the appetite you’ve got,” Kyra told her. “Your family run tall?”

“My dad’s side, yeah. My mom’s side isn’t as tall, but yeah.” Her father was 1.9 meters, the same height as most of the men in the Tomlin-Meziane family. Back on Deckard’s World, though, they used old Imperial measurements, just like twentieth century Americans had; by that reckoning, her father was 6’3”, her mother was 5’6”, and she had been 5’4” when her Missing posters would have gone up, and had just crossed the 5’8” mark on her way to god-knew-what. Kyra, she noticed, used feet and inches, too. But Audrey’s father had insisted on teaching her the metric system concurrently with the Imperial; as ex-military and an engineer, he’d considered it both more precise and more valuable to a life in the wider Federacy.

“Bet you get another inch or two before you stop,” Kyra chuckled beside her. “C’mon… let’s go have breakfast. No more room service unless one of us gets sick or hurt, y’know.”

“Except for Sebby,” Jack laughed, climbing out of bed. “Sebby gets room service.”

Reeeeee? The crustacean in question peeked out from beneath the dresser, where he’d apparently been playing.

“Only because Lalla doesn’t want crickets hopping around in her kitchen,” Kyra laughed back. “Don’t worry, Sebby, we’ll bring you your food soon.”

Sebby chirped happily and vanished under the dresser again.

“I swear, he understands everything we say…”

General Toal was at the table with everyone when they entered, Jack noticed. She wondered if he was staying at the house as a guest. Everyone seemed relaxed around him, though. Maybe he was a regular guest.

Cedric waited until the meal was ending before bringing up the previous night. “We really are sorry about jumping to so many conclusions last night, Tizzy,” he said. “And for overstepping where your liberties are concerned.” His gaze turned to Kyra. “We won’t try to parent you, Dihya. It’s hard not to want to, but… we understand how you feel about it.”

“Thank you,” Kyra murmured, but she set her fork down with food still on it and didn’t pick it back up.

“I’m sorry, too, about not telling you where I was going or anything,” Jack said. “So I should probably tell you that I need to go out for a while, today, to do some things I can’t do here.”

Takama gave her an inquiring look.

“Duke Pritchard brought the bomb into the spaceport,” she told them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw General Toal come to complete alertness, his teacup freezing millimeters from his lips. “The man in the bomber video is Javor Makarov. They’ve worked together a lot. I have evidence I need to release into the wild, but if law enforcement is gonna be able to use it, it has to go out in a way that doesn’t disqualify it from use. Which means I need to do some pretty illegal things to make it look like Pritchard himself accidentally released it. Things I don’t want ever getting traced back here.”

“So you’re going back to the apartment again,” Takama said, her voice soft.

“Yeah. Probably for a few hours.” Jack swallowed. Looking through Pritchard’s files again, making sure she created a trail that would lead law enforcement back to his and Makarov’s Merc Network accounts, making sure none of the surveillance pictures he’d taken of her and Kyra still existed, was going to be a hideous ordeal. At least, if she ended up stress-puking again, the family wouldn’t hear her doing it—

“Someone should go with you—” Ewan said. Tafrara jostled his arm, her expression scolding. “…Like Tafrara—”

“No,” Jack said too quickly. “I… don’t want anybody to see what I’ve found. It’s really bad. I wish I hadn’t seen any of it. But when law enforcement gets it, it’ll be a game changer. Just… it’s bad enough that I had to look at it—”

Kyra, next to her, gasped in horror and covered her mouth. Fuck. Some of what she had seen must have slipped across their connection.

Everyone was looking at Kyra with concern now. She swallowed, wincing, and lowered her hand after a moment. “None of you should see it,” she agreed. “Ever.”

“Won’t it come out, whatever it is?” Lalla asked.

“Not… in so much detail…” Kyra said, pushing her plate a little further way from her.

“Unfortunately, the only way to ensure that it is acted upon at all is a wide release,” General Toal rumbled. “The Universal Mercenary Registry is a powerful organization with a history of evading law enforcement oversight and having warrants voided. You will need to get your data into the public sector, into the hands of people who can and will broadcast it widely, who have high profiles and strong credibility, to ensure it isn’t covered up again.”

“Pretty sure it’s a Federacy crime to broadcast those kinds of pictures,” Jack muttered without thinking, and heard Safiyya gasp.

But she was already mulling it over, thinking about major news outlets that, even if they could never show the pictures themselves, could raise enough of a stink about their mere existence to prevent anyone from being able to sweep it under a rug. Especially if it was obvious that Makarov was also the bomber every law enforcement agency in the Tangiers system was seeking…

What if some random perv reached out to law enforcement and the press, claiming that the porn he’d been collecting starred the bomber, providing just enough examples to prove that multiple class-one felonies had been perpetrated by Makarov, and giving Pritchard’s Merc Network address as the original source…?

Nobody would find it even a little suspicious that the hypothetical sicko was using a brand-new, anonymized account to reach out from, given that whoever it was would have enjoyed those kinds of pictures and only came forward at all because of the bombing.

It could work. She’d just need another new tablet, because the one she’d do it all with would be forever contaminated—

The table, she realized, had gone deathly silent. She looked up. Everyone was gazing at her with similar expressions of sad comprehension and empathy. It was dangerous for her to meet their eyes right now. She focused on Ewan, on what she needed to tell him, avoiding his eyes and looking at his throat instead as she talked.

“Your pirate friend, the one who has Pritchard’s comm… you need to get word to him to get rid of it and get as far away from it as possible. It’s about to become serious hazmat. Especially given the places he’s been taking it.”

“You gave it to Robie?” Usadden asked.

Ewan answered with a curt nod.

“It is not what you think,” Usadden told her, “although under the circumstances, I can see why you might think it… and why it would fit a little too well. Dr. Robie is a gynecologist with the Tangiers Department of Health.”

The absurdity of that—the mental image of a man, who looked like he belonged in an ancient Disney vid about Caribbean pirates, traveling by motorcycle from brothel to brothel to perform state-mandated health checks—startled a laugh out of Jack, a much louder one than was appropriate. She covered her mouth, trying to rein it in.

“I’ll let him know.” Ewan’s voice was subdued, sober.

Nobody at the table was touching their food now. Fuck.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said, getting up. “I didn’t mean to say any of this. I didn’t want any of you to have to know. I’m gonna… go get started…”

“You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” Takama said.

“Shouldn’t…” Jack said in part agreement, wishing that even half of the shoulds everyone cherished so much could be real. “Have to.”

She picked up the singing box of crickets, sitting on a small table by the courtyard doorway, and left before things could get even more complicated.

There was a scorecard attached to the box, she noticed as she carried it upstairs.

How Many Crickets?

The title had been written in both English and Tamazight. Different names had different tallies. Izil had two numbers beside his name: 3 and 5. Tafrara had 7 and 4. Ewan had 8 and 5. Kyra had a 4 by her “Dihya” name. Lalla had a 9. No numbers were by Jack’s name—well, “Tizzy”—yet, but they’d given her a line.

It wasn’t how many crickets were in the box, she realized, but how many would jump onto her when she opened the box. That was what she would need to write in.

Except I know how to make it a zero… It’d give her a chance to practice her new trick.

Sebby leapt onto the bed, bouncing and chittering with excitement, when he heard the cricket song. Jack grinned at him and walked over to his tub, kneeling down and setting the box inside it, and then resting her hands on the box. She focused, for a moment, on the texture and dimensions of the cardboard under her fingers.

The floor of U1, beneath my legs, supports me whether I am in U1 or Elsewhere, she thought carefully. And I am now in Elsewhere, too, and so is this cardboard box… but only the cardboard part, not any of the things inside it, no matter how hard they cling… and I am all the way in Elsewhere with the box now…

The floor held her up. The box vanished from U1, staying firmly in her hands on the other side of the threshold. Within the tub in U1, hundreds of crickets spilled out, their chirps stilling for an instant. Sebby shrieked with delight and leapt into the tub, chomping the first crickets in easy reach of his mandibles.

Exhaling, Jack lifted the cardboard box away, stood up, and isomorphed back into U1 before opening its lid carefully.

No crickets had remained inside.

She found a pen in the bedroom’s desk drawer and put a 0 by her name on the scorecard, setting the box next to the door.

She wished she’d known this particular parlor trick back when Pritchard had invaded the apartment. She could have dispatched him without Kyra even needing to wake up.

Yeah, but then Toombs and Logan would’ve been banging down our door because his comm’s last-known address would’ve been our building…

And, as much as what she’d seen in Pritchard’s account made her gorge rise, she’d never have gained access to it and wouldn’t be able to let the worlds know who had bombed the spaceport.

It was sickening to think that the violence of that night, including Kyra getting stabbed, might have been the best possible outcome.

I need out of this life…

Not life itself, she amended. Just this one.

But Ewan was in this life, and Kyra, and Sebby, and this amazing family…

And I can’t keep any of them. I’m gonna lose them all. Whether I stay or go, and if I try to stay it’ll probably end up being a much worse loss. The thought left her feeling strangled.

As much as she needed to go home, a huge part of her never wanted to leave this place and the family she’d found. The thought that she might, possibly, never see any of them again was hard to face.

She gathered her things, everything she would need for the day—including, she decided, her telescope—and isomorphed over to Elsewhere before leaving the room. She wasn’t in any condition to talk to anyone. She might start bawling her eyes out if she did.

The tide had only just receded, and was still close enough that she could hear it washing in and out nearby, as she reached the wet sand on the ground level. She hadn’t needed to concentrate quite as hard, this time, to keep the surfaces of U1 supporting her. Soon, she suspected, she’d be able to do it subconsciously, and then unconsciously as she continued practicing the new skill.

Okay, first things first, she told herself, aware that she was suddenly procrastinating. Look around New Marrakesh for anything still floating in Elsewhere that shouldn’t be… hopefully there won’t be anything to find, but if there is, hopefully I can get to it before anyone from Quintessa does…

Once that was done, she’d pick up another tablet to use just for her incursions into the Merc Network, and other parts of what her father had always called the Dark Zone and admonished her to stay far away from. She’d set up an account for her fictitious pervert, populate it with “gifts” from Pritchard, and then have the “perv” reach out to a variety of law enforcement and news agencies with just enough evidence to set everyone onto Pritchard’s and Makarov’s trail.

But before she did that, she reminded herself, she had to make sure anything Pritchard had learned about her, or about the Tomlin-Meziane family, was long gone from his account and unrecoverable.

Bonus if I can find something in there that connects him to the Quintessa Corporation and rains fire down on their heads if it comes out…

She pulled out her telescope and got down to business.

An hour later, she’d found several items that she and Kyra had unthinkingly thrown out during their first days in New Marrakesh, including the wigs they had worn that had been ruined by their first high tide. It took another hour to finish reaching all of them and bring them fully into Elsewhere. Her ruined video screen from the Matador, which someone had apparently salvaged from the trash for parts, forced her to carefully climb the phantom steps of a twelve-story building in order to retrieve it and all of its little pieces, something that gave her mild fear of heights an extreme workout and made her wish she’d asked Kyra to accompany her. She got it done, though, and even managed to resist the temptation to kiss the ground once she’d painstakingly made her way back down. As the waters continued to recede in Elsewhere, she followed them down into town, searching for anything small and fencible that one of the orderlies might have helped themselves to.

Nothing.

Maybe they only made the move when they realized they wouldn’t get another chance, she thought. They were supposed to inventory the bodies and personal effects to get them ready for transfer to the Quintessa Corporation… maybe that’s when someone decided to grab those earrings and the cash…

It more or less made sense. Especially if the thief had control over the inventory sheets and could make sure it looked like the missing items had never been there to begin with.

She hoped that was the case. Her life would be a whole lot easier if that were the case.

She did one final look around, sweeping the telescope across the area. Othman Tower and Mansour Plaza were still clear; none of the survivors had left anything behind when they’d been evacuated from either of those buildings. Same for the hospital tower. She swept wider—

…the fuck?…

Something was downtown, in one of the areas that housed fancy government offices and high-powered corporate headquarters. She zoomed in on it as much as the telescope would permit.

Three stories up, within an elegant glass building, hovered at least a dozen small—

Cubes.

“Fuck me,” Jack muttered, putting away the telescope and heading downtown.

There were more apeirochorons in New Marrakesh.

---

Elsewhere’s tide hadn’t fully receded when she reached the glass building, and she had to slosh through its hip-deep waters as she crossed the final city blocks. It didn’t come as a surprise to her that the corporate logo on the entrance was for the Quintessa Corporation.

Inside, the place looked almost like a movie set for one of the dystopian sci-fi vids her cousins had loved. Everything was shiny and brand-new looking, displaying none of the signs of weathering and use that even her mother’s luxe legal offices had shown. A well-coiffed and impossibly beautiful woman—too beautiful and far too poised to be anything but synthetic—waited to greet people entering the building; well-armed security guards were stationed near every entrance and every doorway further in. An ordinary burglar would never have been able to get past the front doors, she suspected.

But did any of their security extend past U1? The boxes, after all, did.

She kept her movements slow and careful as she crossed the floor, studying everything. So far, nothing on the ground level seemed to exist outside of U1. At least, nothing existed within that space in Elsewhere except salty air and sloshing tidewaters over sand, rocks, and shells. Did they have any kind of map up somewhere, she wondered, as she tried to decide which doorway might lead to a staircase or some other way of reaching the third story without slipping back into U1.

There weren’t any maps or floor plans where she could find them. Not even the ones usually required by Federacy fire codes.

It took her half an hour of quartering the ground level, as cautiously as she could, before she found stairs leading up, tucked into the back of the building. She climbed them with painstaking slowness, studying her surroundings for any sign of anything that could see or reach into Elsewhere, knots slowly twisting their way into her nerves.

Nobody knows I’m here, she thought. It was both reassuring—the Corporation had no idea it was being infiltrated—and distressing. The whole family thinks I’m at the apartment building…

Hopefully this wouldn’t be as stupid a move as she suddenly worried it was.

She took a deep breath as she reached the third story. The floor held her up, but she was starting to feel the full effects of her intense level of concentration. She’d need to find some food to eat, and a place to sit quietly for a while, when she was done here. This shit was taxing.

The cubes floated ahead of her in the space of Elsewhere, hidden behind walls in U1. She passed through those walls easily, avoiding one area that she already knew contained elevator shafts. The walls, to her, were just phantom layers between her and her quarry. She just couldn’t see what else existed in the space with the cubes until she was finally through all of those walls and inside the room that held them.

A laboratory. A laboratory inside a thick steel vault.

One of the cubes was sitting on a counter; the others were stored inside a large cabinet. The walls of the cabinet in U1 blocked her from seeing what else might be inside in that ’verse. In Elsewhere, the cubes simply hung in space, seeming to defy the laws of physics.

They were made of the same strange material as the one she’d encountered in the Scarlet Matador. Up close, they were even stranger. Metal? Stone? She couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe both. Aware that there was a camera in the room, she bypassed the cube on the counter for the moment, reached through the phantom cabinet door, and tried to lift one.

Light. Weird… given the fight the other one gave me, I was expecting it to be super heavy…

But its density was not in any one universe, she realized.

An apeirochoron simultaneously exists in every universe, occupying the same isomorphic point in spacetime in each…

How did she know that?

With a chill, she realized that they had told her that at some point, in one of the dreams that she could mostly, but not completely, remember. They had shown her an apeirochoron when they’d asked her what kinds of locks she knew how to break. And, at some point, they had whispered the rules of its existence to her, most of which she still couldn’t consciously recall.

But unlike the last one she’d encountered, these boxes, she saw, had lids. Unlike the sealed box of her dreams, and the one she’d played an almost-deadly tug-of-war with inside the Matador, they could be opened.

It was only after she lifted the first lid that she wondered if she’d just opened Pandora’s box.

Now, that’s just dumb, she told herself after nothing happened.

She put the base of the box back down, careful to set it exactly where she had picked it up from, held the lid up and away, and reached inside.

Her fingers touched something that felt like a large brooch or badge. It existed on both sides of the threshold, both in Elsewhere and U1.

Motherfuckers already had some souvenirs, she thought, shifting the object all the way into Elsewhere and pulling it out of the box and cabinet.

It was, she realized, a crew badge, complete with Captain’s bars, that had belonged to Octavia Rehnquist, the late captain of the Scarlet Matador. She, along with the rest of the crew, had been among the eighteen dead, too deeply—and deliberately—sedated to save themselves when Elsewhere’s high tide had overtaken their hospital floor. This wasn’t a souvenir; it was a murder trophy.

You absolute fuckers…

She shoved it into her pocket. She’d take it away from the building before tossing it into Elsewhere’s retreating sea, where hopefully nobody from Quintessa could ever find it.

Slowly, carefully, she opened box after box and removed the items inside: a baby’s pacifier, a soldier’s dog-tags, someone’s asthma inhaler, a cigarette lighter, a signet ring, and much more besides. She stuffed most of the items into her pack after realizing there was no way she could carry all of it in her pockets. Just as she was resettling the lid on the last of the boxes within the cabinet, she heard a soft chime and saw the security panel by the massive steel door into the lab change from red to green. The door opened a moment later as she shrugged her pack back on and slipped the second-to-last of the murder trophies, someone’s chrono, into her pocket to join the captain’s badge.

I got done not even a second too soon.

Two technicians walked into the room, followed by the Quintessa envoy.

Bitch has a real thing for wearing white, Jack thought, studying her.

The woman was at least sixty years old, probably older. She was short, around fifteen centimeters, or six inches, shorter than Jack. The shape of her face was not all that dissimilar from Kyra’s, although her nose wasn’t as narrow and her chin had no hint of a cleft like Jack’s sister’s, and her cheekbones were a bit more pronounced. She had blue eyes and snow-white hair that was unusually thick and straight for someone with so much age on her face. She wore it long, barely contained by a loose, translucent off-white scarf worn almost like a shayla but crafted more like a dupatta. Jack wondered if she was wearing that as a perfunctory gesture to the local culture, or if it had any special meaning to her.

Surely, if she had any empathy for the local culture, she wouldn’t have let her mercs dress in anything but white for Tomlin’s memorial, though. It was enlightening to see that white was what she seemed to wear all the time; she hadn’t been making any kind of special effort for the sake of Tomlin’s family and friends. She still looked like she was dressed to upstage some wedding’s hapless bride.

Only part of the envoy was in U1. As before, portions of the space she should have occupied were occluded by a malevolent darkness that no one but Jack seemed to be able to perceive. She hadn’t been able to see it, herself, when she’d been fully present in U1 at the memorial. That had been a mercy.

“I’d like to begin right away with testing,” the envoy was saying to one of the technicians in her Mary Poppins accent. “I need to understand what’s so different about this incident. You’re sure that containment has been holding for the last week?”

“Everything’s been fine, Ma’am,” the technician replied. “No anomalies recorded. The kirshbaumium is stable, as always—almost always, sorry. We waited for you before opening any of the boxes again, though.”

Jack, feeling her heart begin to race, walked over to the box on the counter and stood next to it. Whatever was inside was the final item she needed to rescue. And it had nearly been too late to do so. She was glad she’d gotten to the other boxes first, though. If she did this right, they might never be sure that the contents hadn’t simply vanished at the same time as the bodies.

“Let’s begin,” the envoy said, nodding toward the last—or, to them, first—box.

The technician pulled on a pair of protective gloves and picked up a large, heavy pair of forceps before walking over to where Jack waited. He lifted the lid on the box and slid the forceps inside, starting to draw out a pearl necklace.

As soon as there was room for her fingers, Jack leaned forward, snagged the necklace, and pulled it into Elsewhere.

“What the hell?” the technician gasped. “It was here! I felt it! And now it’s—”

“Lock down the building,” the Envoy snapped, going deathly pale. “I want no one in or out. I want a three-block cordon. Now!”

Clutching the string of pearls in her hand, Jack passed through the vault’s thick walls and raced for the stairs, feeling suddenly like she was running for her life.

She took the phantom stairs much too fast, especially given that only the steps themselves were tangible to her. Fortunately, she was only half a story above ground level when she inevitably careened through the stairwell’s phantom back wall, and the wet sand of Elsewhere cushioned her fall.

As she limped away from the scene of her latest crime, she hoped the pain in her ankle would be something she could walk off and wouldn’t have to explain to anybody.

43.
What Cannot Be Unlearned

The silence grew more and more painful as the moment dragged on. Takama’s words hung over everyone. Jack, standing in two thresholds at once, could barely breathe.

Oh fuck, Jack, she heard in her head. Kyra wasn’t any happier about this than she was.

“No,” Ewan finally said, looking from one face to another. “No. Don’t even start thinking about it.”

“We may have to—” Safiyya began.

“What the hell are you planning on doing, exactly?” he demanded. “Casting a circle of salt around them? Trapping them in a bottle or a lamp? Locking them in a tower above Elsewhere’s high tide line? Do you think they will ever believe you’re on their side again—”

“We are on their side—”

“Not if you start thinking of imprisoning them! Tislilel hasn’t even confided her real name to us yet and you would completely shatter her trust—”

“We just want to keep them safe,” his mother protested.

“Don’t make me remind you of what happened the last time someone tried to keep her safely locked up,” Ewan told her, his voice shaking a little. “Look at her arms if you’ve forgotten.”

Jack glanced down at her wrists. She’d honestly begun to forget the scars were there, markings of a suicide attempt that now seemed to have happened eons ago to another girl. She’d have to figure out what to do about them when she was heading home. There would be a lot of questions waiting for her on the other end of her journey, and that could be an especially difficult one to answer.

“What would you suggest we do instead? Let them run wild?” For whatever reason, Safiyya seemed to be the most upset.

Her first-born son’s been dead for less than two weeks, Jack reminded herself.

She can’t replace him with us, even if we were staying, Kyra countered in her head.

“Why do you believe she’s running wild?” Ewan asked his mother. “A child prodigy may still be a child, but she’s also still a prodigy and if we stop respecting that—”

“I just want to know where she is!” Safiyya’s voice was breaking.

Jack winced at the desperate pain in her voice and stepped back out of their line of sight, isomorphing into U1 before re-entering the dining room doorway. “Right here,” she said. She’d gone for her calmest tone, but it sounded more depressed than calm.

Four alarmed faces stared at her; General Toal’s expression remained deadpan. She could see, in Ewan’s face in particular, the knowledge that she had probably heard everything.

“The Quintessa Corporation envoy fired Toombs and Logan after the scuffle at the garden,” she told them, her voice still heavier than she’d planned, before any of them could get over their shock and start in on her. That dual revelation seemed to shock them all speechless anew. “They’re planning on leaving Tangiers Prime. Back during the overnoon sleep period, I sent out a fake vid that makes it look like Kyra and I are on Shakti Four with Riddick, and they’ve fallen for it, so that’s where they’re planning to go now. Before they were fired, Logan was reviewing recordings of all outgoing calls made by morgue employees before the Matador bodies disappeared. I spent the last five hours hiding the evidence that Usadden called Ewan and took a call from him a few hours later.”

She kept her words calm, informative, trying to use the debriefing style that both Ewan and his older brother had sometimes used. Silence greeted her. Almost everyone looked stricken; General Toal’s face remained inscrutable.

“If anyone ever asks,” she said, turning to Ewan and meeting his gaze, “you called Usadden that morning-day, not the other way around, and only once. You wanted him to settle a bet you had with Didier over how and when rigor mortis sets in.”

Ewan blinked, his eyes widening slightly. The call had been in Tamazight, but her translator program had helped her wade through it. Still, she could see him wondering how much of the language she’d picked up.

Jack shrugged at him. “It was the only other recording I could find that was short enough and didn’t reference times or events that could get flagged. I hope all of you agreed to your service provider recording your calls, because it looks like they have recordings of everything.”

“Tizzy…” Cedric began softly.

She couldn’t let him continue. She didn’t dare. Part of her desperately wanted to apologize to them, beg their forgiveness, let them take control of the moment and all the moments to come, but she couldn’t. In only a few more days, she had to leave, and if she let them tie her to them—and it would be so easy to—she might never go. This was, probably, as good a moment as she would ever get to sever that forming knot before it could tighten into something inescapable.

“I didn’t want to commit any class-one felony cybercrimes using your network address or geolocation,” she told all five of them instead, “so I went back to the apartment. It’s paid through the end of the month, anyway.”

Takama closed her eyes and nodded, sighing. Jack had the odd feeling that General Toal was struggling to hide a smile.

“I also learned, from shadowing Toombs, that the real name of the man I killed—” she faltered for a second as Safiyya flinched “—is Pritchard. They worked together sometimes. He was borrowing Toombs’ Master Key when he broke into our apartment, and I guess Toombs was holding onto his ‘Cam-Jam’ as collateral. I looked it up. It’s merc slang for a long-range camera jammer. I think Pritchard may have been the person who brought the bomb into the spaceport, but I won’t know for sure until I crack open his Merc Network account and take a look. So I’m gonna go do that, and then I’m gonna go to bed. Good night.”

She’d kept her voice calm, almost flat, through the whole speech. She’d tried not to let any of the hurt show, the sadness, the growing awareness that the harder they tried to hold onto her, the more she’d want to run. She hoped none of that had managed to come through, but her voice had felt so heavy the whole time.

Before they could say anything, she turned and started across the courtyard.

“Tislilel,” Ewan called after her, “have you eaten anything?”

She turned around again. He was standing in the doorway, poised to follow her. She could feel him struggling not to, struggling not to say dozens of things that could never be undone if he gave them voice. She shook her head at him, realizing for the first time that she hadn’t eaten since before they had all left for the officers’ reception and she had followed behind them as a phantom.

“Tafrara and I will bring something up to you,” He managed.

“Thank you.” She wanted to say so much more to him. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for defending me. Thank you for protecting me from myself on the beach of Elsewhere…

…I love you…

If she said another word, she’d unravel everything. Instead, she turned away and headed into the opposite side of the ait Meziane house.

If they did lock us up, she found herself thinking, How would we get out? Our room is on the third floor. Unless we floated out of the house during high tide, we can’t pass through the walls without falling through the floor.

Could they?

She hadn’t been able to follow Logan into the courthouse, and had missed the beginning of her argument with Toombs, because the courthouse steps hadn’t existed in Elsewhere. But was there any way to be more selective? To let some of U1’s solid surfaces prevail while others were excluded?

She was still on the ground level, Elsewhere’s sands beneath her feet on the other side of the threshold, she thought as she reached the staircase up to the second story. If she wanted to test her idea, this was the best place to try. She isomorphed over, keeping U1 visible as a shadowy overlay, and contemplated the lowest stairstep.

I am in Elsewhere, completely in Elsewhere… the objects of U1 are not with me. I can pass through them, but… the surfaces of U1 will elevate me…

Her foot dropped through the top of the first step when she tried to put her weight on it.

Fuck. She sighed and concentrated harder. I didn’t learn to isomorph the first time I tried to, either… This was too important to give up yet.

She repeated her mantra, focusing on the idea that the solid surfaces of U1, the floors and stairs, should support her weight even when her body was all the way in Elsewhere… when she wanted them to. That the step, although it didn’t exist in Elsewhere, could still override the laws of gravity of that other ’verse, at least where she was concerned…

She tried stepping onto it again.

It held her weight.

Carefully, one step after another, she began to climb the staircase, barely daring to breathe.

“Tizzy?” Cedric’s voice called from behind her. She stopped, heart lurching, and turned to look at him.

Was she actually in U1? Could he see her on the stairs? Was that why the steps were holding her up?

But Cedric was looking around, walking toward the staircase but not focusing on her.

“Is she upstairs already?” Safiyya asked, entering the room with General Toal.

“Looks like,” Cedric told her. He took his wife’s arm as she started toward the stairs herself. “You need to let Ewan and Tafrara handle this. After everything she may have heard you and Takama saying.”

“But—”

“We’ll only make things worse right now. Let them talk to her first, m’love?”

“I recommend this as well,” General Toal agreed. “Tonight was, unfortunately, not handled well. Especially now that we know where she was, and what she was doing for your family’s sake.”

Safiyya looked like she wanted to argue with him, but then she sighed and nodded, her face crumpling. Cedric drew her into a hug. Their grief was too painful for Jack to look at long.

She turned and finished climbing the steps. They hadn’t known she was there; what she had tried was working.

Kyra, can you feel what I’m doing?

Yeah. Good thought. You’ll need to teach me how. Now get up here.

Kyra pulled her into a hug the moment she entered their room. They stood still, embracing fiercely, for a long moment, only finally letting go when Sebby climbed onto both of them to get their attention.

“We can’t stay much longer,” her sister whispered, sadness in her face. “I love them and I know you do, too… but they don’t get how much danger they’re putting themselves in, trying to look out for us.”

“Yeah,” Jack sighed, wishing there was some argument that could be mustered against that, but knowing there wasn’t. “Did you find anything?”

“Got a few possibilities,” Kyra said with a wry grin. “Can you help me write the cover letters? You’re pretty good at that.”

They were finishing the first cover letter when Tafrara and Ewan knocked on the door. Kyra closed down the tablet and put it away while Jack walked over to let them in.

True to Ewan’s word, they had brought up food. The moment its aroma hit Jack’s nose, she realized how ravenous she was. “Thank you. So much. Do you two want to come in?”

They did, but the next few minutes were a little awkward. Jack tried to concentrate on stuffing her face, especially any time the urge to apologize surfaced again.

I’m going my own way in just a few days more, she reminded herself. They’d better get used to it now. I’d better get used to it now.

Kyra, however, needed firmer answers.

“Look,” she said, her eyes moving between Ewan and Tafrara. “We love all of you, we really do, but I gotta know if someone’s about to start locking us in here or anything.”

Ewan winced, looking ashamed, even though he was the one who had argued vehemently against it.

“Our parents are very sorry,” Tafrara began.

“Sorry they considered it, or sorry we overheard them considering it?” Kyra asked.

“A bit of both,” Ewan muttered.

Tafrara shot him a look. “It’s just… neither of you should be on your own, not at your ages,” she told them. “You shouldn’t have to take care of yourselves so much.”

Kyra looked over at Jack. Don’t rise to that, she sent through the air before turning to look at Tafrara again. “You know neither of us chose to be in these situations, right?”

“But that just makes it more important for you to have someone—”

“Making the few choices we have left for us?” Kyra tilted her head, still keeping her eyes locked with Tafrara’s. “You know my story, right? You know what started the whole damned stand-off in the first place?”

Ewan and Tafrara both shook their heads.

“The New Christy Elders wouldn’t let girls learn math. Or science. Or social sciences. Or anything much except how to be good little wives and brood mares. You know who figured that out and raised a stink?” When they didn’t answer, she continued. “Amnesty Interplanetary, that’s who. And a bunch of shitstains who hated us already took it up as a cause. ‘Save the girls of New Christy.’ As if they actually gave a fuck. You know how many of those girls died after Red Roger and his men stormed the place to supposedly rescue us?”

“All but three,” Ewan whispered. “And you were one of those three.”

“And trust me, you don’t want to know what they did before killing most of ’em. You don’t even want to imagine.” Kyra stood up, stalking the room with restless energy. Jack could feel her wishing for something, someone, to pummel until the pain went away again. “So yeah, I know your parents mean well… but people meaning well already cost me my whole family, my friends, my freedom, my virginity…”

Brother and sister both winced.

Kyra stopped near the balcony doors and turned back to face the room. “Nobody… nobody makes my choices for me. Not ever again. I appreciate everything you guys have done for me, are trying to do for me, but that’s my line in the sand. I’m not gonna be anybody’s daughter. It’s too late.”

It was, Jack realized, the last word on the subject. Neither Tafrara nor Ewan asked about her own reasoning or plans; Kyra had shut the whole conversation down too thoroughly. Her sister had done that on purpose, so that Jack wouldn’t tell them where she had been trying to go, or where she was going back to, or even just that she already had a family that was awaiting her return. The known quantity of Kyra’s history had been used to obscure the hidden story of “Jack B. Badd.”

No wonder she’s not impressed by Amnesty Interplanetary’s attempts to defend her now, Jack thought. They accidentally set all of it in motion, and even if they try to atone now—

“We are so sorry, Dihya,” Ewan said. His voice was subdued.

Kyra managed a curt nod. “Not like any of you were in on it. It’s just… too late for me to go back. You know, the most fucked up part of all of it was I wanted someone to rescue me back then. I wanted a different life than I’d gotten. I wanted to do the things they said were boy things. I wanted out of the enclave. Did I ever get my fucking wish…”

You didn’t make any of that happen, Jack told her. None of it was your fault.

Kyra looked her way, a pained smirk appearing on her face. Survivor’s guilt, right? Just another thing we have in common…

“We’ll explain to our parents,” Tafrara said in a voice that was every bit as cowed as Ewan’s. “I think… they miss getting to be parents… once Zdan went off to university, they haven’t quite known what to do with themselves since. I think, when they saw these two orphans wander into the Rif—not just our parents but Takama and Brahim, too—they were all hoping…”

“To rescue us,” Jack finished for her. “Only the things they wanted to rescue us from…”

Mercenaries? Monsters? Death and destruction? Mayhem? Being, essentially, child soldiers on a shadowed battlefield where most of the villains posed as white-hats? The loss of innocence?

“…already ate us,” Kyra finished when she couldn’t.

Ewan closed his eyes, swallowing. When he reopened them, and they met Jack’s, the sorrow and regret in them speared through her. She couldn’t look away—

Kyra cleared her throat sharply.

“We should go,” Tafrara said, nudging her brother to break the dangerous spell that had begun to build. “We’ll let you two rest. In the morning, we have something special planned,” she continued as she ushered Ewan out of the room. “We saw you watching us spar, and even though your stitches won’t let you do that yet, there are exercises that are safe for you to do.”

Ewan allowed himself to be pushed out of the room, not looking back.

“We’ll show you tomorrow. Good night, girls,” Tafrara said, and closed their door.

Kyra stared after them for a moment and then started to snicker. “Damn. You two can’t even look at each other without sparks the size of Sebby flying. Now we know how to end any awkward conversation around here.”

“Jeez, yeah,” Jack grumbled. “With even more awkwardness.”

“Well, he’s only here for two more Tangiers days,” Kyra said, and then winced as pain sliced through Jack at the thought. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. But even if you were eighteen right now, we’d still have to leave, you know. So it’s better that there’s this …barrier… anyway.”

“I guess so,” Jack said, pulling the new tablet out of her bag. “I’m gonna move my stuff off that tablet so it’s all yours. I’ve got instructions on how to use ghost codes and how to make fake IDs on there. You get to keep those. But that way you don’t have to worry about me seeing your plans.”

“And you don’t have to worry about me seeing yours,” Kyra nodded. “I know you don’t like it, but… everybody thinks they’re brave and stoic enough to make it through being interrogated, but most people turn out not to be. We can’t spill what we don’t know.”

Jack nodded, reminded of Pritchard again. He hadn’t seemed to care that she didn’t know where Riddick was. She was pretty sure he’d begun really looking forward to hurting her because he’d realized she wouldn’t have any bargaining chips to use to make him stop. There’d been something deeply sick in his head.

“Yeah, that guy was a fucking creep,” Kyra agreed. “I felt it, too. A little too literally. Son of a bitch got a hard-on when he stabbed me.”

“Eww. I didn’t see that.”

“I felt it. Went away fast after Sebby stung him, though. You’d better not feel even a little regret about finishing him off.”

“Don’t you cry for Johns. Don’t you dare,” a voice rumbled, in response, out of memory. Even though it was entirely inside her head, her sister heard it.

“When’d that happen?” Kyra asked, tilting her head quizzically.

“Damn, I still have a lot to tell you about the eclipse.”

Jack talked while she ported her data over to the new tablet, careful not to describe in too much detail just what had happened to Hassan, focusing instead on the discovery that light wasn’t merely painful but injurious to the crash planet’s native life, burning away the skin of the one Johns shot and killed. All they needed, they’d realized, was enough light, and they could make their way back to the mining settlement and the skiff.

Except that Johns wanted to stay put. The argument had gotten ugly. Imam, still seeming so wise and judicious to her, had said that the orrery back in the settlement indicated that the darkness might last a long time, days or even weeks, subtly siding with Fry. Paris, aside from volunteering his alcohol stash for burning and pointing out that the sand cat wouldn’t run at night—an assumption Jack still had issues with—refused to choose a side. But then when Johns and Fry started getting really nasty with each other, and Johns had started to make a move toward violence—

Riddick had stepped in.

Calm, silent, having said nothing at all during the debate, he still didn’t speak, but he put himself between Fry and the muzzle of Johns’ gun. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the possibility that, if the merc pulled the trigger, he’d be headless. Instead, he’d gently tapped one of Johns’ legs with his shiv.

At the time, Jack had thought it was her imagination, the male voice she’d heard in her head, the Riddick voice in her head murmuring The abdominal aorta’s a gusher, but wait ’til you see the femoral artery go…

“Goddamn, he’s a serious badass,” Kyra snickered.

It shouldn’t have been quite so equal a standoff. Would Riddick really have had time to slice open Johns’ thigh if the lawman—she’d still thought he was one up to that point—started to pull the trigger? But she’d heard another echo of Riddick’s voice, along with the remembered heat of him against her back—

—No, not her back, but Fry’s—

—saying “then again, I am worth twice as much alive.”

And somehow she’d known, suddenly, that Fry knew Johns wasn’t a real cop. That he’d done something so horrible that he’d lost all of Fry’s respect in the process. Something that, when Fry had realized it, had shifted her allegiance away from him and his empty representation of law and order. She had no faith in him, no belief that he could or would help any of them. She trusted Riddick more…

Riddick, who was calmly staring Johns down while acting as Fry’s shield.

The fake cop had backed off, his smile disturbingly unhinged as he did so. Jack had been struck with terrible knowledge: this wasn’t over. Whatever was going on with the three of them was going to end in blood.

“Hopefully his,” Kyra said, powering down her tablet and setting it aside. “Okay… my cover letters and credentials are sent and my brain is fried… you okay if I go to sleep now?”

“Sure,” Jack said, checking over her new tablet’s safeguards one more time. “I’m gonna see if I can get into Pritchard’s account and then I’ll probably do the same.”

“Sounds good. G’night…”

Jack spent another half hour making sure that her incursion into the Merc Network would be untraceable, before finally pulling up the login screen. Typing in Pritchard’s username, she hoped that Toombs wasn’t still tossing obscene password possibilities at the account and it wouldn’t be locked.

A new screen appeared, inviting her to enter a password.

Jack closed her eyes, visualizing the piece of paper that had been tucked into Pritchard’s billfold. It had looked like a random string of numbers and letters at the time; now, having seen the gross passwords that Toombs had tried, and the way he’d used numbers as letter substitutions in places, the string resolved into a revolting phrase that told her far too much about what Pritchard paid brothels extra to let him do. Suddenly she regretted being eidetic; there was no way to wash that back out of her mind.

She entered the combination into the password field, feeling sullied just typing it.

Welcome, Duke Pritchard.

She was in.

The man was a packrat; that didn’t surprise her. His case and correspondence files stretched back for more than two decades. He and Toombs had been messaging for the last decade, on and off, and had seemingly worked on several cases together. Only one other correspondence file was larger. She opened that file and dug in.

Bingo.

She read over the most recent messages, feeling a strange tightening in her stomach as she went.

DP: Don’t worry about it. Lay low. I’ve got a line on him. We can make him take the fall for everything. Bonus: both his girls are fair game.

“Motherfucker,” Jack murmured. They’d been planning on shifting the blame for the spaceport explosion onto Riddick?

She looked back further in the log.

JM: Target inaccessible. Need a two-block package. You know the kind. Can you bring it to me?
DP: On my way. Location?
JM: Concourse C4. How’s that for irony?

You fucking bastards.

DP, Duke Pritchard, had brought the bomb into the spaceport. A “package” sized to take out two city blocks? Or maybe a package made out of two blocks of explosives? She wasn’t sure. But JM was the man who had shadowed Tomlin in the spaceport, driving him into the pilots’ lounge, and then calling for a bomb to wipe him and hundreds of others off the map.

Who was JM?

She dug around in more correspondence and case subfolders, looking for anything where the full name was spelled out. It took just ten minutes and then she hit the jackpot.

Javor Makarov. He and Pritchard had hunted together often. Their bounties, she noticed, were almost always women when they did. She realized why soon after when she found the media files Pritchard had hidden in a subfolder with the odd label “Bad Kitties.”

There were, she realized, multiple image collections behind the label… hideous pictures that Stacey would have loved, of Pritchard and Makarov with, when Jack opened one collection, a young woman who looked barely older than Kyra…

There were more than two dozen different collections like that, she saw, her nausea rising. Each set featured a different woman. Or girl. Always young, one or two looking younger than her…

There were vid files in each folder, too. She didn’t even try to open any of those.

The man with Pritchard in virtually every image was recognizably the same man who had been captured, at a distance, by surveillance cameras as he set the bomb down on a bench. Makarov was the bomber. But he was so much worse than that.

Her hands shaking, Jack began to assemble a new file folder in Pritchard’s account, copying as much damning evidence as she could stomach into one deadly, terrible dossier. She would have to send it on later, from the old apartment, just in case anyone could break through the backtrail protections that she had in place. Once the tide went back out, she would go.

And then law enforcement would learn a whole lot more about Duke Pritchard and Javor Makarov, two monsters hiding behind fake badges… two hideous excuses of men who made William Johns look like an Eagle Scout by comparison.

She wondered just how much Toombs had really known about Pritchard… and how much Logan really knew about Toombs. Worse, she now knew exactly what would have been done to her and Kyra, only a few evening-days earlier, if the Apeiros and Sebby hadn’t been helping them defend themselves.

…both his girls are fair game…

It was too much.

Jack hoped none of the ait Meziane clan—especially not Ewan, who had made such an effort to get her fed—could hear her puking her guts out into the toilet. She hoped she’d shielded Kyra from what she had learned, and it wouldn’t seep into either of their dreams.

Could she ever be Audrey again with this monstrous knowledge in her head?

42.
A Growing Stack of Felonies

Jack didn’t bother keeping a discreet distance between herself and Eve Logan as she shadowed the merc. There was no need. She was, after all, in Elsewhere as she did it. It was more fun that way, hiking practically by Logan’s side; she got to hear everything the merc was muttering as she walked.

“Idiot! Absolute idiot! He’s gonna get us kicked off this planet… not that I’d be sad to leave this teetotaler shithole…”

Only when Logan hurried up the flight of steps that led to New Marrakesh’s courthouse did Jack stay behind; there were no such steps in Elsewhere for her to climb. It didn’t matter too much; she knew exactly what the merc was doing inside.

Her honey trap had caught Toombs; now Logan had to bail him out of jail.

Kyra had stayed back at the ait Meziane house, not wanting to be a phantom attendee of a party that had, originally, been clandestinely in her honor. She intended to spend the evening-day researching other opportunities that could replace the one she had lost, and that her false ID qualified her for. But Jack hadn’t been able to stay away.

She had begun worrying about the four women she’d thrown into Toombs’ path too much to just let everything play out without watching. Elsewhere and U1 were similar enough in terrain—most places—that following everyone back to the garden, invisibly, hadn’t been hard at all. She’d felt like the star of one of the Ginny Lane, Kid Spy novels she’d voraciously devoured at the age of nine as she did it. Ginny’s cases would have been so much easier if she could have conducted surveillance from another universe. She wouldn’t have needed so much of the tech Audrey’s father had insisted didn’t actually exist.

She had antigravity shoes, which don’t exist, but never once used a Master Key, which does… huh. Of course, using a Master Key was a felony. Jack had, months ago, already discovered how different adventures were in reality, compared to those safe, sanitized books where every case was solved, and every caper foiled, within a hundred pages.

The party hadn’t even begun yet. The grotto was still being set up by the garden’s regular staff. Cedric was greeting men and women in military uniforms outside of the garden complex itself and directing them inside. Apparently, among the officers Tomlin had served with, early was on time, on time was late, and there was absolutely nothing fashionable about being late. The wait staff was still arriving, intermingled with the officers they would soon be serving, when one of the four waitresses Jack had added hurried up to Cedric… and Toombs pounced.

It was one of the two who looked a great deal like Kyra, technically not even his bounty as much as Logan’s. In person, the resemblance was even more uncanny, although the woman had straight black hair and bangs instead of Kyra’s wild, dark brown tangle. But Kyra had been wearing a long, black wig with bangs at Tomlin’s memorial, when Toombs and Logan had gotten a brief look at her and been told she was Ewan’s cousin Dihya. The waitress was almost at the entryway, and had begun asking Cedric in Arabic if she was late, when Toombs emerged from concealment between two ornamental topiaries and grabbed her from behind.

“Ain’t happenin’, Miss Wittier-Collins,” he said, grasping the crown of her hair and pulling as if to remove a wig. “You’re comin’ with me, an’ you’re gonna tell me where your friends—”

The waitress, who hadn’t understood a word of what Toombs was saying—none of the women Jack had hired spoke English—obligingly picked that moment to scream.

Within seconds, Toombs was surrounded by several active members of Tangiers Prime’s military service and the two off-duty police officers Cedric had asked to join the event. While Tafrara comforted the disheveled waitress once they’d pulled Toombs away from her, he shouted about how they were harboring a fugitive from the law and would pay for interfering with an officer conducting an arrest. Seeing him arrested, on the spot, by two actual police officers had made Jack very glad that nobody could hear her whoop of victory in Elsewhere.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Logan had quietly said from behind another topiary.

Seriously? You’re hiding behind a bush shaped like a camel and calling him stupid?

A military captain, a few years older than and almost as handsome as Ewan, had taken the young waitress in hand, charming away her tears and asking her if she would accompany him to the police station, promising to stay with her and hold her hand the whole time she gave her statement to the authorities. Jack could see the young woman going from thinking that this was one of the worst days of her life to the starry-eyed hope that it might turn into one of the best.

Do the men of this planet just breathe in suave from birth?

Toombs, meanwhile, was staring in outraged confusion at the second Kyra doppelganger, who had just walked up and begun asking Safiyya for directions to the party. This one looked even more like Kyra than the first. Both of Jack’s own lookalikes had arrived with her, one shorter and much curvier than her and the other with long auburn hair braided in an updo that would be impossible to pull off with any wig. Several of Tomlin’s former colleagues had begun murmuring to each other, gesturing to the waitresses and to Toombs as they did.

He just lost all credibility with the military officers who witnessed this, Jack thought with delight as some of them offered to escort the new doppelgangers inside. Everybody at the party is gonna hear just how full of shit his accusations turned out to be. And they’re all gonna see how easy it is for a New Marrakesh woman to meet the descriptions he’s been throwing around…

But, she admitted as she waited for Logan to re-emerge from the courthouse, it wouldn’t be enough. Kyra was right. Their mere presence on Tangiers Prime, if ever proved, would reveal that they had to have traveled on the Scarlet Matador, and that anyone who had given them shelter might know too much about that accident to live.

They still had to leave the planet, and they could only ever possibly return if they broke their trails too thoroughly for any connection between their visits to ever be made.

Thinking about that filled her with strange, hollow pain. This world, she thought, could have become Kyra’s home, maybe even hers too, if only—

Logan and Toombs, fortunately, emerged from the courthouse right as she was in danger of wallowing in the unfairness of it all. Although the two mercs walked side by side, Jack could feel, even across the threshold between worlds, just how angry both of them were with each other.

“…and don’t even get started on me about them bein’ locals,” Toombs was growling as they came into hearing range. “I was goddamn set up and nobody’ll say who by.”

“Nobody knows, damn it,” Logan fumed right back at him. “The women were hired last minute to work for the party, but not by the Meziane family. There’s no record of who contracted them or where the payment came from, but the garden staff was expecting them. Whoever arranged this—”

“He did. He’s here. This proves what I’ve been tellin’ ya.” Toombs scratched at his neck. “Son of a bitch flushed us out—”

“I hate to break it to you, especially now, but you’re wrong,” Logan said, pulling out her comm and cuing something up on it. “I got an alert about this from the Merc Network while I was waiting for you to get processed and released. Hot off the damned presses.”

Jack, who had fallen into step with the mercs as they came in range, didn’t need to look over Toombs’ shoulder to see what he was about to watch. She’d spent most of the morning-day and part of the noon sleeping period building the video file, using extremely powerful, and even more extremely illegal, programs to do it. The programs had just needed some archival footage of Riddick and a few minutes of posing and talking on camera from her and Kyra, and they had assembled everything with such speed and precision that Jack had been left wondering if the people of Helion Prime were right about AIs after all. Even so, it had taken hours to get just right. Toombs’ face, to her delight, became more and more confused, and angry, as he watched.

On the little screen, in long-shot but looking as real as if they were standing in front of the mercs, she and Kyra were dancing, clad in slinky little dresses, on either side of Richard B. Riddick, touching his chest and arms suggestively as he finished a drink and said something that made both of them laugh. They were surrounded by other revelers out on a public street at night, the glittering buildings in the background indicating that the street party was on—

“Shakti Four? What the fuck are they doing on Shakti Four?” Toombs looked as if he was about to break Logan’s comm. She grabbed it back out of his hand before he could.

“It was the spring equinox on Shakti Four two weeks ago,” Logan told him. “Big party. The ship that took off for there was the Barsoom. It boarded and launched while we were fussing over the Scarlet Matador and Bon Temps passengers, and landed there just in time for a hemisphere-wide shindig. I checked the Barsoom’s manifest and there were three last-minute passengers. A man and two women. It’s them. We’ve been chasing wild geese here.”

“Fuck. I hate that guy.” Toombs scratched at his head, making Jack glad that whatever vermin his fingers were chasing down couldn’t jump across the threshold and onto her. “We thought he was distractin’ you from the passengers on the Matador. Then, when they all cleared, we thought maybe it was a diversion to keep me away from the Bon fuckin’ Temps…” His mimicry of Logan’s correct French pronunciation was childishly mocking. “And by the time we were done with that, and thinkin’ maybe we’d missed somethin’ on the Matador ’cause no cameras glitched over by the Pretentious Fuckin’ Good Times… he and his girlies were gone on a whole ’nother ship. Son of a bitch. The big ones are s’posed to be dumb…”

Jack didn’t bother hiding the smug grin that had bloomed over her face. The false trail had worked.

It wasn’t even something she could really take much credit for, aside from a few moments’ research into which ships she and Kyra could have departed on instead of the Matador. Her father had told her about several very dangerous worm programs that still showed up from time to time on the networks… some of which could be tamed and even trained by people with the right codes and sent on new targeted missions. He’d showed her the codes, probably unaware that they would stay in her head forever. Now two of those worms had been liberated from law enforcement containment and, after a little bit of domestication and instruction, one was burrowing its way through the Merc Network, laying bits of false trail and erasing contradictory data as it spread from node to node. In a few weeks, the entire merc network, from one end of the Federacy to the other, would carry her video… and the accuracy of the information about her and Kyra would be massively diminished, too. Another, smaller worm was making minute changes to the Barsoom’s flight manifest records throughout the Federacy.

And, Jack thought ruefully, by doing all that, I’m technically a class-one cyberterrorist now… The felonies kept stacking up somehow.

She’d gone back to the old apartment building to pull those stunts, wanting to make sure that none of it could ever be traced back to the ait Meziane house. That trip could have caused a few problems of its own, but Ewan was the only one who saw her and Kyra sneaking back into the house, and he’d kept his mouth shut even if he hadn’t looked thrilled about it.

“Does that mean we’re leaving?” Logan asked. “Finally?”

“Soon as Pritchard turns back up,” Toombs said. “Son of a bitch still has my Master Key. Where the fuck is he today?”

Logan tapped her comm a few times. “Still somewhere south of here on the coast. The… Shady La— damn it, another brothel. How is he paying for all this shit?”

Jack snickered, remembering the motorcycle pirate that Ewan had given “Pritchard’s” comm to. Apparently, the ride it had gone on was a wild one indeed. I should ask him what that guy’s story is…

“Maybe that big score he insisted was about to come through did, and he just didn’t wanna share it,” Toombs grumbled. “Fucker’ll be back when he finishes blowin’ through his winnin’s. Meantime, you get anywhere with his account?”

“Nope. His password clue was ‘fuck you, Alex.’”

Toombs snorted. “Asshole knows me, I’ll give him that. Lemme try.”

Logan started to hand over her comm again and then stopped, holding it out of Toombs’ reach for a moment. “You break it, and you’re buying me a brand new one with twice the memory.”

“Yeah, yeah… gimme.”

Now Jack did watch over Toombs’ shoulder as he pulled up Pritchard’s Merc Network login. She paid close attention as he entered the other man’s User ID, committing it to memory.

“How many tries do I get?” Toombs asked.

Logan rolled her eyes, you should know this written on her face. “Three. Then the system locks you out for an hour.”

Toombs began to type.

BOOBS

“Oh for God’s sake,” Logan grumbled. “Are you twelve? You know damn well that you have to use capital and lower-case letters, and numbers, and a minimum of eight.”

“Fine,” Toombs snickered, changing his guess.

B1gB00bs

“You’re really not funny,” Logan told him.

Toombs seemed genuinely surprised that his guess hadn’t worked. His next one was obscene enough to make Logan smack the back of his head.

“You’re just wasting guesses here, fergodsake—”

“He’s spent the last how-the-fuck long goin’ from brothel to brothel and you think this password would be out of character?” Toombs asked, smirking as she rolled her eyes. “You don’t even know what he pays those places to let him do. Count yourself lucky.”

“Trust me, anything you find gross, I don’t wanna know about.”

“Annnnd… now I’m locked out. So much for his favorite food groups…”

“Why are you even bothering, anyway? Let’s just get the hell off this rock.”

“He owes me a Master Key.”

“So what?” Logan groused. “You’ve got his Cam-Jam. Call it even.”

“Maybe I will. What’s the word from Her Majesty?”

“Oh. Yeah. ‘You’re fired.’” Logan frowned at him. “That was for both of us, by the way. I’m guilty by goddamn association. Thanks for that, asshole. I had a perfect record ’til you came along.”

“’Til Riddick came along and took a likin’ to the piece of tail you were huntin’, you mean.” Toombs handed her back her comm. “Not a scratch on it, see? Does that mean you don’t have to finish goin’ through the comm records for the morgue staff?”

A chill moved through Jack.

“Yeah, she said she’d have someone else do that,” Logan sighed. “I managed to get your charges reduced to misdemeanor assault. The Meziane family was talking about pressing stalking charges, saying you had intended to assault a visiting relative—way to be subtle, by the way—but I talked them out of it. Plead no contest, pay the damned fine, and we can get off this planet today.”

“Damn right. You wanna come with me to Shakti Four when we do? They’re a civilized world that knows how to serve booze.” Toombs waggled his brows.

“Jesus Christ, you just can’t let go of him, can you? You’re gonna end up like Johns.” Logan shook her head. “Maybe. Gotta check on the status of the Wittier-Collins case back on New Dartmouth, first, make sure the bounty hasn’t been pulled. There’s a bunch of pressure on the government about that case from both sides. Half the planet wants to see her hang and the other half wants her crowned as a rebel princess. Weird damned world.”

“They’re all weird. Whether or not she’s good for the bounty, we catch up to her and we find the big prize. I’m still willin’ to split the take with you…”

Jack turned away from the pair, on a new mission. Slipping back into U1 behind an ornamental screen, she headed for the transit station where she’d rented a locker for a two-month stretch. Once she had liberated the funding cards inside, she went straight to a nearby tech shop, hurriedly purchasing the equipment she needed, and then started back for the Rif. The two mercs would be gone in the next few hours, the next day at most, and she no longer needed to dog their steps. She had something much more urgent to attend to.

As much as she didn’t like going back to the apartment where Kyra had been stabbed—by a merc she now knew was really named Pritchard—it was better to pull some of her more illegal shenanigans there than near or in the ait Meziane house. And anyway, Kyra was using her tablet to plan her next moves. The two of them had agreed, unhappily, that neither one of them should know where the other was going, just in case one of them got caught. Jack spent an hour setting things up on the new tablet, pulling in some of her more illegal resources, before she was ready to get started. Fortunately, the reception for Tomlin’s service colleagues was a lunch-to-dinner affair and she had until full dark to get back to the house without anyone noticing she’d been gone.

The first issue to deal with, she decided, was the morgue staff comm records.

Sometime after the Quintessa Corporation had informed the morgue of their intention to claim the Matador passengers’ bodies, after all, Usadden had called Ewan to warn him. That call linked the Meziane family, even if only tenuously, to the subsequent disappearance of all eighteen of those bodies. It needed to cease to exist.

It took another hour to locate the cache that was being sifted through, which technically belonged to law enforcement but was being handled by Quintessa Corporation staff and their associates. Once she found her way in, she began searching. She had the advantage of knowing what she was looking for, while the staff did not. It still took longer than she liked.

Usadden had been smart; no calls had been made from the morgue to the Meziane household or Ewan’s private comm number. But his private comm showed a call to Ewan’s, approximately an hour after he had finished talking to the Quintessa Corporation on the morgue’s line, that lasted two minutes. Worse, a recording of the call had been downloaded and logged.

She was going to have to fix that.

“Here’s the problem with trying to steal something, or kill somebody, and not have people realize that you were targeting something or someone specific,” Riddick had told her one “night” on the skiff, after Imam had fallen asleep and they could speak freely without incurring the holy man’s censure. The cleric was already trying to limit their conversations; talking shop about felonies would have sent him raging if he’d known. But Jack would have been happy to listen to Riddick talk about anything, and the world of crime was what he knew best. “You do a surgical strike, just taking that one thing, or taking out that one person, and you’ve told everybody way too much about the reason behind it. And how to find you, or your employer.”

“What do you mean?” she’d asked.

“Well… say I was hired to get a new piece of military tech that some developer had at home in his safe. I go in, crack open the safe, steal the tech, and leave… and everybody knows that the tech was the target. They know whoever stole it was hired by someone who wanted to use it, or maybe stop its developer from using it. So there’s a small suspect list, the fences who deal in that kind of tech are put under surveillance, countermeasures go into place to minimize the damage the tech can do… everybody’s anticipating the next steps of someone who’d steal, or use, that tech.”

Jack had nodded. Anything to keep him talking, but it really was fascinating. Riddick was, after all, one of the only people who’d ever defeated one of her father’s security systems, and he’d defeated four of them.

“But what if, instead, I went in like a normal burglar? Emptied out the safe, not just of that piece of tech but all the other documents and valuables inside. Stole the wife’s jewelry. Took the electronics. Made off with some of the smaller artworks. Made it look like my goal was just to grab anything valuable and portable and the tech just happened to get caught up with all that. Now they don’t know what I was really after. Now, as far as they know, I don’t even know what I have. Now they gotta put every fence in town under surveillance. If they want the tech back, they gotta hope that some of the other things I stole start showing up on the black market and can be traced back to one source. The whole way they look for me, and everything I took, changes…”

If she just deleted that one recording, Jack realized, she would draw all the attention to it, to that one call and the people who had made and received it. But if a wider array of materials went missing or got damaged…

Thank you, Riddick, wherever you are. She hoped it was somewhere nice… just not Shakti Four.

Jack checked the log. Eve Logan hadn’t been replaced yet, and she’d only just finished going through the records from the morgue itself. Morgue employees’ private comm calls, however…

…had all been stored in a separate folder. Personal comms required more warrants, many of which were still being signed, filed, and served.

Jack replaced the contents of every single recording within the folder with pure white noise. Then, carefully, she reversed the metadata of Usadden’s call to Ewan, making it look like Ewan had called Usadden. For good measure, she canceled forty of the warrants that were still being processed, including the one for Usadden’s comm, and erased all evidence that they had ever been filed. A quick side-trip using another Ghost Code, into the comms servicer the Meziane family used, and their records also indicated that Ewan had called Usadden that morning instead of the reverse. Much less suspicious.

She listened to a few of the other comm conversations Ewan and Usadden had had in recent weeks, wondering if the Meziane family even knew such things were being kept on file, picking the most innocuous and extemporaneous of them and replacing the comms servicer’s offending audio file with it. If the file got downloaded again and another warrant was served, all anyone would hear was Ewan asking his cousin to settle a debate he and his—literal—wingman had about when and how rigor mortis set in after death. Ewan had apparently won the debate.

Weird thing to be arguing about, she thought. Something to do with a really old vid called Clerks…?

There had been another, actual call from Ewan to Usadden several hours later, which no one from Quintessa or law enforcement had logged or requisitioned. Yet. If they ever did, it would damn the whole family. That one, at least, Jack could erase completely from the system. She spent some extra time making sure that all traces of that call had been eradicated.

By the time she finished, night had settled in. She still needed to hack into Pritchard’s account in the merc network, but that was something she could safely do back in her and Kyra’s room in the ait Meziane house. She wouldn’t be committing any class-one felonies by logging into a dead merc’s account, especially since, she realized, she already knew his password. She wiped her new equipment and reset it to factory specs, hopefully erasing all evidence that it had been used to commit several cybercrimes, and then bundled everything up to take home.

Someone had always escorted her into the ait Meziane house, she realized as she reached the locked gates. Even when Ewan had caught them sneaking back during the noon sleeping hours earlier that day—and he’d never said why he was up at that time—he’d simply opened each of the gates for them and it hadn’t occurred to her that they might have needed keys, even though the courtyard level was under six meters of Elsewhere’s high tide at the time and bypassing them hadn’t been an option. Fortunately, the next tide had yet to arrive. She passed through the gates’ corridor on the Elsewhere side, wondering if she should ask for keys or if that would be a bad idea, given how soon she was going to be leaving.

It had gotten later than she’d realized; the party had already broken up. Takama, Safiyya, Cedric, and Ewan were arguing in the dining room as she entered the courtyard. She slipped back across the threshold into Elsewhere before they could see or hear her, approaching them as a phantom.

“…can’t keep just going off on her own like this,” Safiyya was saying. The presence of General Toal, seated nearby and diplomatically staying out of the fray, explained why she was saying it in English.

“It is what she is accustomed to doing,” Takama said. “That is a habit that we may have trouble breaking.”

Kyra? Listen in with me. You need to hear this. After a second, she could feel her sister paying attention to what she was seeing and hearing.

“But if she is to live with us—”

“Is she?” Cedric asked. “Gavin said she told him she had somewhere she needed to go. What makes you believe either of them plan to stay past Dihya’s recovery? Have you even invited them to yet? Much less heard them say yes?”

“They are children!” Safiyya protested.

“D’you think, after everything they’ve been through and done, that they’re just going to let any of us treat them like children?” Ewan asked. “You know what I was like at that age, and I was still fairly sheltered. They already know how to survive without—”

“Survive? Dihya was stabbed!”

“And Tizzy killed the man who did it,” Cedric observed, putting a gentle hand on his wife’s shoulder.

Jack winced even as Safiyya did.

“My point is,” Ewan continued, “you’re not going to convince them that you’re looking out for them by treating them like kids. Especially since they’re used to us not doing so.”

“Even if that was—”

“Even if that was wrong, yes. I do know that. But if you turn around and start… infantilizing them now—”

Safiyya gasped, staring at her son in offended shock.

“—it might just be the last time we ever see them.” He looked around at his parents and aunt. “I’m serious. For God’s sake, they’re high-powered espers with experience living on the streets and cracking security systems, and the ability to move into a whole other universe at will. You couldn’t keep me out of trouble, and I’m a baseline human and your son. Even if you were their parents and had the authority, how could you possibly think to ground someone who can do all that?”

“You can’t,” Takama agreed. “Not without locking them up in a way that they can’t escape, even with all of those advantages.”

For a moment, as Jack felt her heart plummeting, no one spoke.

41.
Monde à Deux

Clack!

Jack woke up to the sound of… baseball?

Clack! Clack! Her first impression was of someone hitting ball after ball out of a park in rapid succession. As she woke up more, she realized that she was hearing wood striking wood.

“Again,” Cedric’s voice said from somewhere below her and to the left. She opened her eyes.

Kyra had thrown wide the balcony doors and was sitting in a chair, her arms on the railing and her chin resting on her hands, watching something that was going on outside. Jack got up, pulling on her robe and walking over to see.

Two levels down, in the central area of the courtyard, Tafrara and Ewan were sparring with staffs while Cedric observed them and called out commands. By the sweat sheening their skin and soaking their tops, they had been at it for a while. Both wore loose white pants and tank tops and moved barefoot across the paving stones, circling each other. Just when Jack wondered if that was all they were going to do, they came together again in a flurry of movements, staffs cracking into each other repeatedly as they struck and blocked one another’s strikes.

Ewan was taller and stronger, with a greater reach. But Tafrara, Jack decided, had more skill and experience… and a lower center of gravity that she knew how to use to her advantage. They were evenly matched. Their attacks were almost brutal, forcing Jack to cover her mouth several times when the impulse to cry out a warning struck her. They clearly knew what they were doing, though. On the rare occasions when one of their staffs slipped the other’s guard, it stopped centimeters before actual impact. For a second, both combatants would freeze, waiting for their father to confirm which one of them had just gained a point.

That kind of control was impressive. They hadn’t just been taught how to hit; they’d been taught how not to.

“Goddamn,” Kyra said, her voice wistful and cracking a little. “I want to get in on that…”

Jack put her arm around Kyra’s shoulder, aware all over again just how much her sister had suddenly lost in the last day. By the time she was healed enough to join them in a sparring match like this, Ewan would be back at the flight academy… and it would be time for the two of them to leave. The chance to be part of something so perfectly suited to her had been cruelly ripped away. Worst of all, she could see that beautiful dream right in front of her, but it would be forever out of reach.

I have to help her find something even better before we go…

And it wasn’t like the scene was much easier for Jack to watch.

It was the first time she had seen Ewan wearing so little. His musculature was leaner than Riddick’s and his older brother’s, but he still looked like he could have been carved by either a Renaissance artist or the ancient Greek sculptors they had been emulating. She found herself wishing she could touch him, feel him against her again—

“Down, girl,” Kyra murmured next to her.

“Shit, am I that obvious?” she whispered.

Kyra smirked and shook her head, tapping her temple. “You got a good poker face, though. Shame… think what kind’a damage we could’a done in a casino…”

It was a little hard to laugh at that. All of the might-have-beens were hitting them like violent blows now that they had committed themselves to a course of action that would separate them for years…

…maybe forever.

“Did I miss breakfast?” Jack made herself ask after a moment. The sun appeared to have risen a while ago.

“Yeah, and my first physical therapy session, but I’m sure they’ll get you something.” Kyra glanced at Jack. “Did you tell the Apeiros to stay out of my head?”

“I did, yeah. They were giving you nightmares last night.” She hadn’t actually told Kyra the name she’d given them, but she supposed it was no surprise that her sister knew it anyway.

“They were. Then they said that you had forbidden them to talk to me anymore unless I talked to them first… and I haven’t heard a peep out of ’em since. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Least I could do. I mean, they weren’t even supposed to start talking to you again until I said they could, until I told them you’d healed up—”

“But they freaked the fuck out when you hurt yourself breaking open a …something… Some word like the name you gave them. That’s what they said you’d done, anyway. And I… couldn’t feel you for a few hours… I didn’t even realize I could, and had, until you were suddenly gone from my head. I thought you might’ve died. I kept asking them if you were okay and they kept saying they didn’t know.” Kyra looked incredibly vulnerable in that moment.

“Fuck, I’m sorry. I really didn’t think, did I?”

“Hey. Quit that. You did good. It was something you had to do, even if it was gonna scare a bunch of us. You’re closing the door between ’verses, as much as it can be. It’ll make it harder for that Quintessa bitch to find the other survivors. Or prove that we were ever among them.”

“Yeah…” Jack swallowed. She didn’t feel entirely reassured. “When did you start to feel me again?”

“About two hours before you came back. But damn, you felt weak. There was this moment, though… whoo! You and Ewan better not have been fucking, because I was serious—”

Jack burst out laughing. Below them, in the courtyard, three heads turned to look their way. She felt heat rising into her cheeks. Hopefully, they hadn’t heard what had made her laugh. Hopefully, they didn’t think she was laughing at them. She waved in their direction and Ewan raised his hand, waving back at her.

“No,” she managed to tell Kyra, struggling not to laugh again. “We weren’t. Not for a lack of me wanting to, though. It’s been kinda awkward since then. He knows what I was feeling.”

She tried to leave the rest of it—that she believed the intense chemistry had been mutual—unsaid, but she could see in Kyra’s eyes that she might as well have said that part out loud.

“Of course he does. I knew what you were feeling from how many miles away? Kind of a shame, in a way,” Kyra mused. “He’s been so gentle and careful with me, treating my stab wound, and today’s physical therapy session… If I’d lost my virginity to someone like him, maybe the idea of sex wouldn’t be so disgusting…” She shook her head. “’Course, someone like him would’a never taken it from me when I was twelve… and won’t take it from you now. Well, he’d just better keep being honorable about it all. I figured it was why he was looking so freaked out last night.”

“Yeah,” Jack sighed, “things are uncomfortable right now. They were almost back to normal until that whole dinner table conversation.”

“He was having a hard time looking at you after that, wasn’t he? You never told me what I missed. I mean, I caught some of the ‘child prodigy’ stuff. What brought that talk about?”

“The brain scans I had last night,” Jack explained. “I guess I didn’t actually do myself any brain damage or anything when I broke the apeirochoron—”

“Yeah, that’s what they were going on and on about.”

“—but the scans were abnormal enough that they did an EEG and decided I’m probably a psychic.”

Kyra was giving her a duh look. “And you didn’t know that until now?”

“I…” She hadn’t believed that kind of stuff existed outside of the adventure books she’d read as a kid, and some of the old sword-and-sorcery vids she’d watched with her cousins. There’d been one strange girl in her fourth-grade class who had claimed it was all real, and that she had powers, but had always refused to prove it and had, the next year, claimed she was the secret love child of a popular twentieth century movie star instead. It had all seemed ridiculous to Audrey back then, even if sometimes—

“Damn, Jack, the hour before Heather died, you were following her around like a worried puppy. Wouldn’t let her out of your sight. You looked real uneasy and kept staying super close to her, like you were expecting her to fall over at any second. When she finally did, when I heard you screaming for help, I remember thinking ‘oh, this is why.’”

When Kyra described it like that, it was suddenly so obvious. “I… when I was little, my parents had a dog who was epileptic. I could always tell when Balto was about to have a seizure. He died while I was at school and I… they told me I couldn’t possibly have, but I felt it when he died. And then when Heather started feeling the same way to me…”

“You knew the exact moment she died, too, didn’t you?” Kyra asked. “I saw your face change. And then there were other times, I swore I could feel you in my head, and… that night you had the nightmare about Riddick cutting your throat, I could see it.”

“He’d never do that,” Jack said, still conscious that Kyra needed Riddick to be a hero and not any kind of threat.

“I mean, of course not, but that asshole who visited you got you all mixed up for a while. El Imam Abu al-Walid,” she sneered, spelling out the full name Jack had described him rattling off when they had first met.

Again, Jack found herself remembering how Fry had seemed to think the el Imam part was his first name, calling him by it several times the way he had called her Carolyn, and sometimes seeming to pronounce it as “Elmo.” She’d liked Fry a great deal, and had started to think of her as a kind of older sister, but there had been moments—

“Judgmental dickhead,” Kyra continued. “He really thought you could enjoy killing? Shit.”

“He was nice to me back then,” Jack found herself protesting. “I mean, before the Kubla Khan… during the eclipse…”

“Yeah, before he decided to save you from yourself. Before everybody else who could’a stepped in and made him cut his shit out was gone.” Kyra shook her head. “Sorry. It just makes me so mad. I saw how you looked after he got done giving you a talking-to, and I wanted to beat the shit out of him.”

That, Jack realized, had been the moment a switch flipped in their relationship, and Kyra had begun acting protective toward her… and their minds had started to link up. Two esper roomies, both with PTSD… if the hospital staff had had any idea, she thought, they’d have put them on opposite sides of the building from each other.

“Yeah, they’d have sent us to opposite sides of the planet, even,” Kyra replied to her unspoken words.

“Here, I want to try something…” Jack said, and closed her eyes. She began to put together, in her mind, one of the most beautiful and terrifying moments she’d been describing to her sister… the ringed gas giant rising into the sky and slowly creeping closer and closer to the twin suns…

“Oh shit, Jack, that’s so beautiful…”

It had worked.

After a quick run down to the kitchen for some breakfast—okay, she admitted, a lot of breakfast—Jack spent the next hour conjuring more visions for Kyra, different moments on the crash planet that had been particularly stunning. The miles-long damage path behind the remains of the crash ship… the rising of the blue sun as the twin suns were setting… the enormous field of bones… living clouds of tiny monsters eddying against the auburn sky… in its own way, that desolate, dangerous world had been spectacularly beautiful.

She shied away from other visions, though, refusing to show her sister what Ali’s devoured body had looked like, or Shazza in pieces in the screaming maelstrom… for those, she would only share her carefully crafted words. Kyra was still recovering, still delicate, and seeing those hideous moments wouldn’t help her stay distracted from her pain. She needed the part of the story that was adventure and excitement… not the gruesome reality.

Jack told herself that she wasn’t really lying… just being selective about how much of the ugly truth she would divulge. But part of her, even then, knew that was possibly the biggest lie of all. Kyra, however, seemed to want the lie too much to question it.

Jack was able to let Kyra hear the sounds of the strange creatures on the crash planet, even as she described huddling with the other survivors inside the cargo container and Imam speculating that they used those noises to see. Riddick had located the cutting torch that Shazza had left behind, when they had stopped trying to salvage things and had relocated to the mining settlement, and he had used it carve a passage into one of the largest cargo compartments after they’d ended up trapped in a small one.

“He handed Fry the torch and went off scouting right away, while we were trying to block the opening behind us. He could see everything just fine. But there were sounds… in the compartment… and we all knew the things were already inside.”

Fry had told her to stay close, but Imam hadn’t repeated the admonition in Arabic. Nobody, not even Jack, had noticed at first that Hassan had wandered off.

Not until Jack heard Riddick speak, his voice pitched low enough that the others around her didn’t seem to hear: “Extremely… bad… timing.”

She had convinced herself, until now, that her feeling that the darkness was horribly alive was just her overactive imagination. Now she wondered if she’d been feeling the creatures’ presence. What had she felt?

Two… no… five minds in that stygian darkness. Two human… and three almost incomprehensible aside from ravenous hunger. Hassan, rooted to the spot in terror as he stared up at a horrifying, barely-visible shape above him. Riddick, near him, feeling an almost academic fascination about the creature he could see clearly and a mixture of annoyance and concern for the scared boy just in front of him…

Had she really managed to get that far into people’s heads at the time? Without knowing or understanding?

She’d heard him tell Hassan “just don’t run…” Unlike Ali, Hassan would have known enough English to understand that.

Or should have. As she explored her memories of that moment in greater detail, she thought the boy’s mind had been paralyzed with fear; he could barely think in Arabic, much less English.

“Wow,” Kyra said beside her. “Poor kid…”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “He was really nice, too. So they were over there, just staring at the thing above them in the darkness. Fry called out to Riddick and he raised his voice just a little more, so everybody else could hear him, and said ‘don’t stop burning.’ I think he meant they needed to cut another hole in a wall to get us out of that compartment. That’s what Fry and Johns thought, anyway, because she gave him the torch and he gave her his flashlight, and he started cutting another hole. And that was when Imam finally noticed that Hassan wasn’t in the group anymore.”

The boys, she suddenly realized, had liked giving him the slip, the whole time she’d known them, and Suleiman—who spoke the best English of all of them—had quietly told her back at the mining settlement that they had hardly known him at all before he had been put in charge of their youth group’s Hajj. He’d been a newcomer to their mosque, less member than guest, but had been selected as a replacement guardian after another Imam, who had organized the journey, fell ill; he was only taking them because he’d been on his way to Helion Prime anyway, to return to his wife and young daughter. Perhaps, if they’d known him better, they would have stayed closer to him—

“You knew him better and you cut your wrists to get away,” Kyra grumbled beside her. “Damn, this in-your-head shit is getting spooky. Sorry. It’s hard for me to think of him as one of the good guys in your story after how I saw him treat you.”

The courtyard had fallen silent while they talked and Jack shared her memories; she glanced down and it was empty. Before she could pick up the tale again at the moment of Hassan’s terrified flight and death, someone knocked at their door.

Takama, Cedric, and Safiyya were outside, expressions serious.

Jack had to give them credit; they didn’t hide a thing about the meeting the night before, except just how torn up Ewan had been by all of it. Thanks to the interference of the envoy and Alexander Toombs, she and Kyra were told, it was no longer safe for them to try to introduce Kyra to Tomlin’s former brothers and sisters in arms yet. Out of further concern that the envoy would try to enter their home and provoke an incident with Tafrara, they had contacted all of the invited guests and informed them that the reception had been moved to the grotto Jack and Ewan had used the evening-day before.

The venue change let them also claim that they couldn’t accommodate any guests beyond the ones they had specifically invited, something that would have been preposterous if they had still been hosting it in their enormous home that could—and did, when needed—accommodate the entire ait Meziane tribe. The house, which Jack had been giving a hyphenated name in her head until then, belonged to the whole tribe and was used by whichever members happened to be in town at any time.

“Officially, the change has happened because three visiting members of the tribe have fallen ill,” Takama said. “Including, should anyone inquire, both of you. It is a summer fever common in the New Atlas region. Perhaps you brought it with you when you came down from the mountains.”

“We’ve already had it, so we’re immune, but we wouldn’t want to accidentally spread it to our esteemed guests,” Cedric added, lips quirking a little.

“We truly are sorry that you can’t meet everyone yet, Dihya,” Safiyya told Kyra, reaching out to take her hand. Kyra allowed it, but Jack could feel how much she was struggling with the impulse to pull away from the affection behind it. “But the last thing we want to have happen is for one of them to decide that Toombs’ story about you is more plausible than the truth and turn you over to him.”

“Yeah,” Kyra sighed. “Especially since the only way for me to be the girl he says I am—”

The girl I really am… Jack heard in her head.

“—is if I came on the Scarlet Matador, which would open up a can of Guinea worms all over all of us.”

The image Kyra had in her mind, of those worms, was horrifying. Jack couldn’t help shuddering.

She wondered if Toombs and Logan would stake out the gardens, hoping to get a better look at “Dihya” and “Tislilel” before the disappointing news that they were “sick” was shared—

Hoo boy. There it was.

“Got an idea,” Jack said, unable to suppress her grin. Four sets of eyebrows went up as she grabbed her tablet and began searching for local hospitality services. The others kept talking as she worked, telling Kyra that they hoped, in a few weeks or months, to make the meeting possible.

We’ll be long gone before then, she thought. Well, she would be, anyway. There was always the possibility that Kyra would change her mind and want to stay.

But the vibes coming off her sister didn’t point in that direction.

“There,” she finally said, feeling immense satisfaction. Maybe this would help fix her screw-ups of the evening-day before.

“What is it?” Cedric asked, amusement and trepidation in his voice.

“I just booked some extra help to take care of your guests this evening-day,” Jack told them with a grin. “Nothing major, just carrying hors d’oeuvres trays around and stuff, but check them out.”

The four young women, whose pictures were on the tablet screen, bore eerie resemblances to her, and to Kyra. It really hadn’t been all that difficult to find some who would.

We really could blend in here… hide in plain sight…

It’s too late for that, Jack… Kyra’s voice sighed sadly in her head.

“Good heavens,” Safiyya said, laughing.

“Maybe your guests’ll stop thinking we looked a lot like… us… when they’re looking at other girls who do, too,” Jack said. “And who knows? Maybe Toombs will try to arrest one of them and embarrass the fuck out of himself and that envoy.”

“Not bad,” Cedric told her, trying to hide a grin. “I’ll make sure to have some people on hand who can step in if he tries.”

The conversation briefly shifted to logistics—when and where Jack should have the four waitresses arrive at the garden—before the plans were fully solidified and the discussion moved to the future.

“We’ve settled on a date for the celebration of Brahim’s life,” Takama told them. “His birthday. It’s four Standard months away, so it will be very early in the fall this year. That will give his former colleagues plenty of time to request leave, and the rest of the tribe time to come here.”

“Sounds lovely,” Kyra said beside her. Jack hoped she was the only one who had heard the slight break in her voice as she said it and had caught the sudden feeling of wistful sadness embedded in it. She was feeling much the same way; if things went according to plan, she’d be most of the way back to Deckard’s World when it took place.

It was lunchtime by then. It was also the first time Kyra was officially cleared to go up and down stairs, so it was the first time both of them joined the family in the dining room—for food, anyway—since the memorial dinner. The table was huge, but the family, many of whom Jack had only met once before, almost completely filled it. Lalla, Izil, and even Usadden all joined them; the hospital morgue, Usadden told them, was closed for another Tangiers day while investigators went over everything centimeter by centimeter, trying to discover how eighteen bodies, and all of their belongings, had vanished into thin air. Already, to his dismay, two orderlies had been found to have been pilfering personal effects of the deceased, but nothing connected to the missing Matador passengers had been among their recovered loot.

Jack remembered the earrings and the cash she’d isomorphed out of one of the orderlies’ lockers. Those were floating out in the sea by now, but she would need to do a walkabout through New Marrakesh at some point to see if anything had been stolen and fenced in the days prior and could be seen hovering incongruously somewhere in Elsewhere. Even one such artifact could tell the envoy far too much about her and Kyra…

Ewan, Jack noticed, was sitting at the far end of the table, engaged in quiet conversation with an elderly man who looked a great deal like a male version of Tafrara and Safiyya. His grandfather? They were speaking in Tamazight, so she couldn’t eavesdrop. She felt a little embarrassed and guilty over how much she wanted to.

Most of the family, though, was speaking in English, discussing the plans for the celebration of Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane’s life, making suggestions, planning out how to send word to various members of the tribe and other far-flung friends. They were deliberately making sure to include her and Kyra in the conversation, under the blithe assumption that both girls would still be on Tangiers Prime and participants in the festivities.

Jack didn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise. Neither, she noticed, did Kyra.

40.
Out of the Field of Fire

“So what now?” Jack asked Kyra as they returned to their room and two unappetizing trays of food. Sebby had already helped himself to bits of their meals from both trays, including all the olives, and was grooming his carapace on Jack’s pillow.

Kyra swallowed, looking around the room with hurt, wistful longing. “Now… we get ready to leave in a few more days.” Her voice cracked on the word leave. Jack moved to hug her, but she held up a hand. “I can’t right now, I need to… fuck, if that Toombs bastard were in range, I’d—”

“Yeah. Me too.” Jack sighed and sat down, picking up her tablet to start a search. “So where do we go next?”

“We…” Kyra sighed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I really am. I don’t want to run out on you, but… it can’t be we anymore. You heard that Toal guy. Toombs is looking for two girls, partners in whatever crimes he’s made up…”

She sat down on the foot of their bed and sighed, surreptitiously wiping at the corner of her eye.

“He’ll catch us if we stay together,” Kyra finally said.

“Not if I lay a false trail,” Jack protested. “I was thinking maybe some doctored photos of us, with Riddick, could show up on the merc network—”

“You have a life to get back to,” Kyra told her. “You really think that’s gonna work if you show up back at your mom’s house with the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain in tow? ‘She followed me home, mom, can I keep her?’” The bark of humorless laughter that escaped Kyra was painful.

Of course Kyra knew where she was going, Jack realized. She’d felt, in the last few weeks, like they were sometimes hearing each other’s thoughts, seeing into the insides of each other’s heads… and based on the latest revelations, she hadn’t been wrong.

It had started in the hospital, at least between the two of them. Looking back, she thought she could see so many clues—

“I’m a known quantity,” Kyra said, flopping back on the bed and then wincing with pain. “Fucking stitches… my prints are on record. Finger and retina. All kinds of data. You were able to clear yours out, I know that, but mine are in too many systems for you to get to them, too.”

“Amnesty Interplanetary—”

“It doesn’t matter, Jack. They could get me exonerated or pardoned or whatever and it wouldn’t matter. If I’m with you, I’ll lead Toombs right to you. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. He just wants to use me to get to you, and you to get to Riddick.” Kyra sighed and closed her eyes. “Even if the bounty on me ceases to exist tomorrow, I still won’t be safe for you to be around. You can’t ever stop being Jack B. Badd if I’m along for the ride. And we both know you’re sick of being her.”

Jack found herself desperately wishing that Kyra was wrong, but knowing that she wasn’t.

“And,” Kyra sighed, “if anybody outside of this family and that Toal guy ever puts our trail together, enough to prove to the envoy that we were on board the Scarlet Matador… there’s no place in the Federacy that’ll be safe for us or anybody we care about. So yeah, get those fake images out there. Make ’em think we did run off to the Bayou Nebula or something. Make ’em think we’re living lives of crime as Riddick’s hench-bitches a hundred light years away from here. We need all the camouflage we can get. But it doesn’t change what has to happen.”

Jack swallowed, nodding. She could do that. She could lay down a convincing false trail, for all of their sakes. But—

“Will you be okay?” Kyra asked, snatching up the words that she’d been about to say. “I mean, you weren’t being abused by your mom or her boyfriend, were you?”

“No,” Jack told her, sighing. “It wasn’t anything like that. It’s just… I don’t think Alvin and I ever liked each other. He was dating my mom, but… the fact that she had a kid from a previous marriage was a big turn-off for him. I think it made things a little too real. I tried to just… make myself scarce when he was over. I figured they wouldn’t be together long anyway, and when they started fighting all the time, I figured I was right. They even broke up for about a week.”

“What were they fighting about?” Kyra asked, looking interested. It struck Jack again how incredibly different their childhood homes had to have been. If Kyra’s mother had been on board for the whole New Christy colony project, she’d probably been domestic and pious, not a high-powered corporate lawyer who, in the year before Jack took off, often hadn’t gotten back from dates until early Sunday afternoon.

“Everything. Nothing. The dumbest things were suddenly setting them off at each other. I was relieved when it ended, especially because, for a few days, I thought maybe my dad had a chance to come home…”

And then everything had crashed and burned.

“I still don’t know what happened, but suddenly my father was just… really quiet, and then he told me he’d rejoined the Corps of Engineers and was leaving for Furya. I wanted to go, too, but he said there weren’t any schools there that’d be challenging enough for me, and I should stay with my mom, and I’d understand why soon…”

“And did you?” Kyra’s voice was soft, almost hesitant.

“Two days after he left, I came home from school and Alvin was back. Sitting in the living room, holding my mom’s hand… and they told me they were getting married in three weeks.” The pain of that moment was still sharp and fresh. She pressed her fist against her heart, trying to tamp it down.  “They fucking waited until it was too late for me to go with him…”

“Why the hell did she take Alvin back?” Kyra sounded every bit as confused as Jack felt.

“I don’t… know. I didn’t really care. I just felt—” …feel… “—so fucking betrayed…”

“How long after that did you run?”

“A week before the wedding,” Jack sighed. “He was already throwing his weight around, wanting to be a father figure, wanting to be the fucking man of the house, like we needed one of those… He even said ‘my house, my rules’ to me one time, that fucker… So I figured out a route to Furya, forged my mom’s signature on some forms that’d let me pull the money I’d been saving up for summer camp out of the bank, and got the fuck outta there while they were having their bachelor parties and some twit from up the street was too busy making out with her boyfriend to babysit me.”

“And you’re just gonna go back to that?” Kyra looked dubious.

Jack shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. I can’t get to Furya, and I don’t want my parents to think I just died somewhere… but if he’s still a shit I’ll just… I dunno, threaten to disappear again if they don’t let me go live with my grandparents or one of my aunts and uncles, or something. I can’t let them think I just died, though. I didn’t… I didn’t do any of this to hurt them.”

I never wanted to hurt anybody…

It made her ill to think of what she’d put her mother, and also her father, her cousins, her grandparents, everybody through for more than a year now. It was especially hard to think of how her cats must have looked for her, called for her, those first few nights… and they would still have been bereft even if she’d made it to Furya on schedule.

Ewan’s wrong… I don’t think enough about how my actions affect others…

“No, Jack, Ewan’s right about you,” Kyra said.

She glanced over, surprised. Kyra smirked and tapped her temple. There was, she realized, no point in either one of them hiding or denying anymore that they were in each other’s heads.

“You don’t try to hurt anybody. You just tried to get to your dad fast before anyone could stop you,” Kyra continued. “Not your fault there was an unexpected detour into a shitstorm. Life’s just a series of detours, anyway, right? Most of what we plan out never really happens the way we expect it.”

“Yeah. Probably…” No probably about it, Jack admitted to herself. “Yeah. And that’s why I’m gonna give you a shit-ton of resources to take with you if we’re splitting up. Gonna teach you how to ghost around in case you ever need to replace Kali Montgomery with another alias.”

For the next hour, they made plans. They wouldn’t leave right away, but they would have to go soon, before someone got it into their head to restrict their movements “for their own good.” The conversation came to an abrupt halt when they heard voices in the courtyard.

“Fuck,” Kyra said, rising up and grabbing their plates and carrying them into the bathroom. “I don’t know how to put my IV back in. Take Sebby and jump in the shower, okay? I’m going to tell them I needed to take a shit and you couldn’t help me get up to do it because you were already showering. C’mon, go.”

While Jack climbed into the shower with an excited crustacean, Kyra scraped their cold, uneaten food into the toilet and flushed it down.

Jack waited a few minutes, giving Sebby time to do his little water dance at her feet, before she emerged from the shower and slipped into the robe that Kyra had left for her. In the bedroom, Ewan was reconnecting her sister’s IV drip with an air that was simultaneously amused and martyred. He avoided looking at Jack much once he realized she was only wearing a bathrobe.

“In the morning, we’ll begin your physical therapy,” he was telling Kyra. “Your stitches look really good, though. In another few weeks, if you want, Takama can take you to a clinic to have the scar removed.”

“Scars are trophies,” Kyra said. “I want to keep it.”

Tafrara entered the room with a box… a singing box. Sebby, on Jack’s shoulder, began to make a high-pitched reeeeee of excitement.

“Yes, little one, this is your dinner,” she said, pouring the box’s contents into Sebby’s tub. “Yezan! Get off of me, you little…” She brushed off several crickets that had jumped onto her arms instead of into the tub.

With a delighted shriek, Sebby leapt off Jack’s shoulder, bouncing across the bed and then sailing through the air, straight into the tubful of crickets.

“This is why Izil put the box into the tub, flipped open the lid, and jumped back,” Ewan observed.

“And he still had three crickets jump on him,” Tafrara retorted, smirking. “We’ll see how well you manage next feeding. You can show us how it’s done.”

Throughout their good-natured ribbing, Jack noticed, they never once mentioned their visitor, or the conversation in the dining room. She wondered if it would ever come up.

Some of it’ll have to, she thought sadly. They’re gonna have to tell Kyra that her participation in the reception tomorrow evening is off.

Several times, before Ewan and Tafrara said good night and left the room, she thought Ewan was going to say something to her, but he always stopped himself. Things still weren’t normal between them. They’d almost gotten there, until everything changed again while she and Kyra were supposedly having dinner in their room.

Maybe we’ll find a way back to normal, she thought, picking up her tablet and carrying it over to the bed as the door closed. We still have three more Tangiers days…

And then he would be gone. And, soon after, so would she.

Kyra fell asleep almost immediately, but Jack couldn’t manage to. Maybe it was because she’d taken an unscheduled nap during the middle of the day, but her mind was too active. She spent another hour writing up instructions for how to access the hidden menus on different security platforms before Kyra began to whimper in her sleep.

“No… leave me alone… don’t wanna look…”

“Kyra?”

“Just… fucking… stop already…”

Jack closed her eyes, focusing on the starlit place that the Apeiros inhabited. “Are you talking to the other larva?” she demanded.

Yes.

“Stop. Leave her alone. You’re hurting her,” Jack told them.

For a moment, there was silence. Then…

We did not know.

Back on the bed, Jack could feel Kyra relaxing beside her.

“She’s still not healed. Talk to me. Just me.”

You are also injured, they pointed out.

“Maybe, but you don’t hurt me by talking to me. It hurts her when you do. So I need you to leave her alone.”

Nothing should have to be alone, one of them whispered.

“Okay. Fine. But you wait until she talks to you. If she calls to you, you can answer. But otherwise, let her be.”

There was a long pause. She had the sense that the ether they inhabited was full of communication, just none of it directed at her.

This is acceptable, they finally said. You and the smallest ones are enough.

That was a little creepy, she thought, and decided not to ask “enough for what?” Not yet. She wasn’t sure she was ready to know.

They didn’t seem to mean either her or Kyra harm, she reflected. They had been afraid, when she’d been struggling with the cube from the Scarlet Matador, that she would hurt or even kill herself, and had tried to stop her. For the moment, their motives seemed kind. But, and it would be especially true once she left Tangiers Prime and parted ways with Kyra, soon there would be no one she could discuss them with if she developed doubts about that. She would sound completely psychotic—

—like an escapee from a mental hospital, even—

—if she told anyone she was communicating telepathically with a strange alien race, unless she submitted herself to Quantification and the risks Takama believed came with that.

If she ever came to think they posed a threat, though, she might have to.

Unless it’s just a threat to me…

And… there it was.

She spent another half hour, still not even a little sleepy, researching “suicide by proxy” on the tablet. The historical material was disturbing; the law enforcement literature was a little horrifying. She skimmed over case studies of people whose guilt had overwhelmed them but who were repressed from making active suicide attempts, and who began to do more and more dangerous things, most of them in some way connected to the guilt they felt or a moment that they’d survived but felt they hadn’t deserved to. “Suicide by Cop,” she learned, was one of the most common forms, as people punished themselves and ended their lives by creating threatening-seeming situations in which police believed they had no alternative but to shoot to kill.

But it didn’t seem to cover what she was doing. Or what she had done.

In the al-Walid house, she reflected, she had felt completely alone and cut off from the world. She barely spoke Arabic for the first several weeks, none of the people she encountered there knew or were willing to speak English to her even though she knew that Abu, Lajjun, and even little Ziza were all bilingual—they were, they had told her, immersing her in “her” new language “for her own good” —and she wasn’t even allowed to control how she presented herself to the world. Skirts, dresses, and hair coverings, not as disguises but as her new normal, had been shoved upon her. They only grudgingly continued to call her “Jack” because she had refused to give them, or answer to, any other name; they used it as little as possible, too, often referring to her as “her” when she was standing right there.

Why, she wondered, was it so much easier to let people call her Tislilel—which, when she’d looked it up, she’d found literally meant “bride of the sea”—and to wear jalabiyas and other traditional North African attire, here in New Marrakesh than it had been there?

Because the Tomlin-Meziane family loves me, loves us… And because the name had been a gift from a man she had fallen in love with and was in mourning for.

She’d tried so hard to believe in the love that “Uncle Abu” and “Aunt Lajjun” had claimed to feel for her, tried so hard to reciprocate it… but in comparison to what she’d experienced in New Marrakesh, she could see just how empty and controlling it had all really been. The al-Walids had used “love” as a bludgeon, and had very nearly broken her with it.

In their house, she hadn’t had access to any resources she could use to run away again, and they had never given her an opportunity to find any. Anything she questioned or protested was grounds for a lecture about everything they were sacrificing for her sake, and how hurtful her ingratitude was to them. Through it all, she’d felt “Uncle Abu’s” judgmental censure over her hooligan ways, hidden beneath a wrapping of well-intended avuncular guidance, even as she’d been made to feel guilty over her instinctive, bone-deep rejection of all that prescriptive “nurturing.”

Death, she thought, had been the only way she’d seen out of the terrible, inescapable prison that had been assembled around her. Somehow, she’d even come to believe she deserved it all.

Those musings seemed to resonate with something. She tried to follow the thought, but it vanished as she tried to chase it down.

But the only remaining part of the despair she’d suffered in the al-Walid household was the sense that she had failed others when they’d needed her most, hadn’t done enough to help or protect them… and an absolute terror of finding herself as the sole survivor of yet another disaster.

There was, she noted ruefully, an abundance of links to the subject of “survivor’s guilt” on the tablet.

If she really was an esper, the way everybody suddenly seemed to think, was her persistent survival in part because she’d unconsciously foreseen, and been able to side-step, disasters as they came at her?

“First you’re a boy, then you’re a girl, and now you’re a psychic. Careful what you wish for, Jack…”

Of all the people she’d met on the first leg of her run, only three had survived meeting her, and only one of the people she’d loved had. She realized that she couldn’t stop dreading the possibility that history would repeat itself here.

She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t want to be the only one left standing if death came for the people she loved again.

On Deckard’s World, movies from twentieth century America were enormously popular, and she had watched hundreds of them with her cousins. There had been one where a man—a Scotsman, much like Cedric—had discovered that he was immortal and outlived everybody who mattered to him over and over, losing all the people he loved to war and time, slowly growing more aloof and disconnected from humanity. The film had made it seem so romantic and dashing, but a line from one of the songs that had played in it had indelibly embedded itself in her head: Who wants to live forever when love must die?

The conviction that the Tomlin-Meziane family, and the ait Meziane tribe as a whole, would be far safer with her and Kyra gone was still strong. And Kyra would probably be a lot safer, too, no longer traveling with the walking bullseye that was Jack B. Badd. Every bullet she’d dodged, and there had been so many now, seemed to have struck someone else as a result.

She didn’t want to step into a bullet’s path, though. She wanted out of the field of fire.

“Deckard’s World it is,” she sighed, and burrowed her way into the shipping schedules for that region of space.

Most of the shipping turned out to be indirect. Her planet, which had seemed so huge and consequential when she’d lived on it, was considered something of a remote backwater by the rest of the Federacy. There was regular, direct passenger traffic between there and New Queensland, and most of the freight that reached her home world was offloaded on Vasenji Station before making the final leg of its journey on smaller vessels. She would probably have to pass through one of those two locations on her way back.

She narrowed her search, setting a maximum time frame: she wanted to return to Deckard’s World within two years of the date of her disappearance. When she added Tangiers Prime as a starting location, only fourteen scheduled flights were left with openings in either their passenger or crew manifests. With a feeling of resignation, she added an exclusion for cryo-sleep, expecting all of them to disappear from the list.

One did not.

The Nephrite Undine was a new freighter, which was only just coming out of Sirius Shipping’s orbital shipyard at their headquarters above Tangiers Six. The company was preparing for its run-in flight using a new set of Star Jumps that would allow for direct traffic between the Tangiers system and Deckard’s World—

Could anything be more perfect? It seemed too good to be true.

It was.

The ship had never Star Jumped before. Maiden voyages, she soon discovered, had 90.3% success rates. They generally carried inexpensive and easily replaced cargo and were staffed by tiny skeleton crews that not only had to agree to the risk of a journey they might never return from, but also had to be willing to stay out of cryo and be “on call” every second of the journey in case something went wrong. High risk, high maintenance… hardly anybody wanted that. Those positions paid handsomely but were difficult to fill, especially if, as in this case, it was a months-long solo flight.

And, Jack saw, the job listing for the Nephrite Undine was still up.

Sirius Shipping had been sweetening the pot every way they could think of, she read, in an attempt to get even one qualified person to apply. It would be a five-month journey with twenty-five Jumps, none of them more than two days long and the rest of the time spent traversing normal space. The crew quarters were advertised as lush, with a recreational facility and data center that was described as “on par with any luxury system available to the public.” The maintenance schedule, they insisted, would only take up a few hours of each day, and the emergency procedures had been streamlined but shouldn’t be necessary. The human crew member would have AI support and would only be responsible for situations that non-humans had no legal authority to handle.

And yet the position was unfilled.

She dug deeper, slipping behind Sirius Shipping’s firewalls—she gravitated to their ships and ads, she thought, because she knew that they used her father’s security systems everywhere—and digging into their Human Resources department’s confidential files.

The job had been filled, briefly, a month ago, but had been relisted less than a week earlier… following the discovery of an obituary for the man they had hired and who had died in the spaceport explosion. The one backup candidate they’d had on file was no longer available. With the inaugural flight just eleven Standard days away, the company was becoming desperate and had, just hours earlier, increased the benefits they were offering.

Still, the almost one in ten chance that the ship would fail to reach its destination seemed to have deterred everyone… especially with the lucrative alternatives that had opened up in New Casablanca and New Fes as both cities’ spaceports expanded their staffs to accommodate traffic that would normally have gone through New Marrakesh. The few queries the listing had received in the last eight Standard days were from people seeking even more benefits and securities.

“Marianne Tepper,” she noted as she looked over the listing again, was fully qualified for the position. And under the circumstances, she didn’t really care how much she’d be paid.

Ewan was leaving in three Tangiers Prime days, slightly less than six Standard days. To reach the Tangiers Six orbital shipyards in time, she would need to leave New Marrakesh two morning-days after, travel to New Casablanca, and take a midnight launch from there. She would arrive at the Sirius Shipping HQ a little under one Standard day before the Nephrite Undine was scheduled to leave.

But there was almost a one in ten chance that, if she boarded that ship, she’d vanish forever and never make it home at all…

Would this be this some addlepated suicide attempt on her part? Boarding a ship that might never be seen again?

The Hunter-Gratzner was never seen again, she thought, and everybody thought it’d be safe. She had already survived one Level Five Incident. She could survive another, if it came to that.

She’d be home in less than six months if it worked, well before what everybody would think was her fifteenth birthday. If she could play a good enough hand, maybe she could even make people believe she’d been somewhere on Deckard’s World the whole time…

No matter what happened, the Nephrite Undine could break her trail.

Jack opened the message that she had received from Sirius Shipping that morning-day. They were still waiting to hear whether she wanted an interview for the Major Barbara position, something that was probably a simple formality. They might even skip an interview altogether when she made her counter-offer. She began to compose a reply.

Dear Ms. Nguyen, she wrote, addressing it to the executive who had signed the interview offer. A year before she’d taken off, her mother had shown her a stack of letters that had come from candidates she was considering for her law firm. Jack tried to phrase things the way her mother’s favorite choices had in their letters.

Thank you for your kind offer of a potential position on the Major Barbara. I regret that, due to some logistical and scheduling issues traveling to the Catalan System would create, I must decline the offer at this time. However, I am aware that you have another opening that doesn’t pose any such conflicts on your new vessel, the Nephrite Undine…

Either way, she told herself as Kyra slept on beside her, Jack B. Badd could finally disappear forever.