Category: The Changeling Game

71.
Just So Fuckin’ High School

“You have a message from Todd,” MilitAIre told Audrey as soon as she walked into the Security Room. The news lit up her day.

“Finally!” she crowed, sitting down at the best screen so she could call it up. “It’s gonna be nice to see his face on something other than a ‘Wanted’ poster.”

Todd had lost the ducktail and his close-cropped hair had been dyed from light brown to black. He sported a recently acquired mustache and goatee, both works in progress, making him look very different from the “Wanted” posters… as long as someone didn’t prank-draw on them, anyway. He appeared to be wearing brown contacts. But she would’ve recognized him no matter what.

“Hey there, little sis! Dennis and I have reached our destination, which I’m not allowed to tell you, but please. You know where I am.” He winked.

“Helion Prime!” Audrey whooped. “I knew it!”

“You’re not supposed to know any such thing,” MilitAIre said, but he let her hear the amusement in his voice. Nobody was really trying to keep it a secret. It had been General Toal’s base of operations for nearly three years.

“Dennis, come say hi to Audrey.” Todd’s grin brightened as Dennis entered the frame and draped his arm over her “brother’s” shoulder. “We’ve missed you.”

“For the three days that we’ve been awake, anyway,” Dennis laughed. “We’ve had a great time watching your messages.”

“Look at them, not even trying to hide it now…” It had been her idea to bring Dennis into the “inner circle,” a weird intuition she’d had, and the crazy chemistry that those two had shared almost immediately had made the risk worth it. By the time arrangements were in place to smuggle Todd offworld, there had been no question that Dennis would go with him, officially as his protector…

…and unofficially, as much more than that.

“Anyway, I’ve met my new boss, and you’re right. He’s a cool dude. And I told him you said so. He also got to watch your Peter Pan performance because we brought a copy with us. He wants us to tell you ‘bravo’ and ‘absolutely no encore.’”

Audrey snorted. She could hear it in General Toal’s voice, too. “No promises…”

“We’ve been instructed to lock you in EntertAIn’s theater and make you watch Ed Wood and Coleman Francis movies on repeat if you try again,” MilitAIre told her, his voice light and teasing.

“I’m pretty sure that’s a war crime,” she retorted.

“We’ll all be moving on to another world I can’t talk to you about in a few weeks—”

“Oh please, you’re totally going to Tangiers Prime.” Todd, of course, couldn’t hear her responses, or the sudden envy in her voice; the message had been recorded a few days before and sent via special courier drone. He was far too high up on the Wanted list to allow messages from him to pass through any of the civilian beacons, which were slower to deliver anyway.

“—so let me know if there are any messages you want me to pass on to people when I get there. The AI clones are settling into their temporary quarters nicely, and the boss says they’ll have a top-rate facility waiting for them when we get where we’re going.”

“That’ll be nice,” she sighed, hitting pause for a moment. A good AI-run safe house on Tangiers Prime… would she see it one day?

She still wasn’t sure.

She was halfway through her senior year, and she had sent out applications to several schools with good Sociology and Linguistics programs, including the Khair Eddine University in New Marrakesh—where both Takama and Safiyya taught—and the Fatema Mernissi School of Social Sciences at the New Casablanca University. There was only one school on Deckard’s World that had good programs in those fields: Deckard Tech, located just outside of Wyndham Landing in the northern hemisphere. She’d made it her “safety school,” but she was worried that even with a 4.0 GPA, her education wouldn’t be considered rigorous enough, or comprehensive enough, for most offworld universities, despite the supplemental instruction that the AIs were providing.

She’d sworn, almost three years ago, that she’d never leave Deckard’s World again, that she’d stay and watch over Elodie. But the nearest school that had decent programs in the areas she wanted to study was a hemisphere away, far enough from Elodie that she might as well not rule out offworld schools. They’d have to go months without seeing each other no matter what. And she found herself missing Tangiers Prime more and more.

Assuming she would be allowed to go back there before she was biologically eighteen, of course…

Legally, she was seventeen already, and would turn eighteen a little over a month after graduating. But biologically, she was still sixteen for another two months. General Toal had been clear that he didn’t want her to make contact with Ewan, or any of the Mezianes, until she was biologically eighteen. Even assuming they still wanted her to, even assuming she got accepted into one of the schools there—tuition itself wouldn’t be a problem; the funds she’d earned as “acting Captain” of the Nephrite Undine would be able to cover those costs—would General Toal allow her to go? Or would the school allow her to begin a year later?

And what would she tell her mother, and Alvin, and Elodie?

Fuck… I hate thinking about that… She unpaused Todd’s message.

“Anyway,” he was saying, “we’re safe and sound and we both miss you tons. Stay out of trouble, and stop dating guys Michael has to beat up. Yeah, we heard all about that.”

Audrey groaned, covering her face with her hands.

“And I thought Todd’s taste in men was tragic…” she muttered.

“Love you, little sis! Talk to you again soon!”

The message ended. Audrey leaned back in her chair, sighing and trying to ignore the sudden constriction in her throat.

Currently occupying the #6 spot on the Federacy’s Most Wanted list in spite of having committed no crimes, Todd had stayed in the safe house for slightly over two months before MilitAIre and General Toal worked out arrangements to smuggle him offworld. For him, it had been a painful time as he came to grips with the probability that he would never see his family or friends again, and that he’d never get to act or direct on New Broadway. He never once blamed Audrey for any of it, aware that it would have been his fate no matter what. He’d already been Quantified when she’d reached him, after all, and was struggling against the sedative he’d been given, before an explosive tracker could be inserted, when she’d pulled him from U1 into Wonderland, making him vanish in front of the Quantifiers’ eyes. He knew what she’d prevented and had been grateful for it… but he’d still grieved everything he’d lost.

Nonetheless, she’d loved every minute of his company and had found excuses to visit the safe house almost every day just to spend time with him. Having a fellow human being that she could talk to about anything—everything—related to her own strange, bisected life had, for a time, lifted the desperate loneliness she hadn’t even known had become a fundamental part of who she was. For two wonderful months, she’d had an actual human civilian who could see behind the mask that was Audrey MacNamera.

It wasn’t that nobody else wanted to, or anything. Damn near everybody knew she was hiding something, given that she wouldn’t say a word about where she’d been for nearly two years, and they all wanted a peek. But there was nobody she could tell. Even Todd had known that there were parts of her story that she wasn’t telling him, but like Ewan and Kyra, he had accepted that with grace. Most people took her silence as a personal insult.

The thing she had really begun to dread was the day when Elodie figured out her big sister had a secret she wouldn’t—couldn’t—tell, and it came between the two of them the same way it came between Audrey and everybody else.

It was the same damned thing, every time. She would make a friend. They would bond over fun shared interests. They would realize they had even more things in common and grow closer. They would start sharing confidences. For a while, the imbalance in who shared what wouldn’t be a problem because she was a good listener and people liked that. But the day always came. The day when the other person decided that they were finally close enough that she ought to be able to confide in them about where she’d been and what she’d done during her time as a missing person.

And when she wouldn’t—couldn’t—that was when the friendship collapsed.

It had happened enough times that she kept most people at arm’s length, enjoying “casual” friendships, “surface” friendships, there’s-an-extra-space-at-the-table-so-why-not-join-us friendships. And she had confidants in the AIs and the Apeiros, and three cats who thought most human concerns were strange and unimportant but were happy to listen anyway. But no other human being… except one whom she didn’t dare try to bond more closely with.

And if the collapse of a friendship wasn’t bad enough, it was an order of magnitude worse with a boyfriend.

“Dave” had been the biggest mistake, and he wasn’t even the one Michael had “beaten up.”

Navid Ghasemi, whose family had moved from Tabrisi-e Jadid on Khorshid Prime, had started school at Eisenhower High a few months into their sophomore year, after most of the gossip about her had died down. She was one of the few people who hadn’t snubbed him—Deckard’s World was a “racist planet” and she regularly had to struggle with her disappointment when someone she otherwise admired suddenly displayed their own bigotry—and they had become friends. Toward the end of that year, he’d asked teachers to call him “David,” anglicizing his name, and told the handful of friends he’d made to call him “Dave.”

That had, of course, made it pretty obvious to Audrey that his family wouldn’t be staying much longer, that within the next year or two his father would find a way to transfer back offworld to somewhere less poisonous to their sense of identity. Still, she’d been drawn to him.

Maybe because, since the rumors about her had mostly quieted down before he’d arrived, he was one of the few kids in her school who didn’t view her as a mystery or a puzzle that ought to be solved. Maybe because he was a polyglot with a scholarly streak that reminded her of the Mezianes. Or maybe just because sometimes he seemed even lonelier than her… and that was definitely saying something.

They had begun to go out, sometimes, when they were juniors. Audrey had been careful to keep the dates light and casual, mindful that although everybody believed she was already sixteen—the age of consent on Deckard’s World—she wouldn’t really be until early December, mid-spring in Settlement Point, and the spirit of the law needed observing.

Junior Prom—a huge deal for most of the kids in her classes—was scheduled for the weekend after Todd disappeared and was declared a fugitive from the law, something that had left the entire school in an uproar. She’d already had a ticket, planning on “going stag” and people-watching, at the very least. When Dave asked her to go as his date, almost last-minute but—according to a mutual friend—after three weeks of trying to nerve himself up to it, it had felt like the most normal thing that had happened in days, and she’d said yes. Other girls from the theater program had invited her to their “after-prom” party, one of several being held in the same fancy hotel that the dance itself was taking place in. Dave’s friends had invited him to one, too.

It had been a fun night. She’d overheard some of her theater friends calling it “magical,” and she supposed it was, in its way. Her mother had gotten misty about it all and had taken her dress shopping. First-AId, ever the prosaic skeptic, had injected her with a 72-hour dose of Nano-Nalo, just in case someone spiked one of her drinks with anything, especially something stronger than hooch. Half an hour into the after-parties, she was probably the only sober person in the place. And then she and Dave had “somehow” ended up in a bedroom in one of the suites reserved for the night…

Sixteen at that point, she’d suspected it was going to happen, and she’d planned for it, maybe a little too well. She was attracted to him, after all, and knew the attraction was mutual. It wasn’t anything like the mind-cracking feelings she’d had for Riddick, Tomlin, or Ewan… but maybe that was a good thing. She’d already decided that if Dave had plans in that direction, she was in. Several girls she knew were planning on losing their virginity that weekend; she wasn’t so much planning as improvising, and trying to be prepared for anything.

Dave had asked her if he was her first, and she’d truthfully told him that he was, even as a little warning flutter moved through her and, for a moment, she’d suspected she was making a mistake.

Before he even woke the next morning, she’d dressed and slipped down to the hotel lobby, where Dennis—who always knew exactly where she was, within a meter, on a Sunday morning—was waiting to drive her to the safe house. She’d warned Dave that she would have to leave at six a.m. if they stayed over with the others, and she’d left him a little note on hotel stationery, trying not to be awkward about it.

Had to leave early, like I said.
I had a wonderful time. Thank you!
See you Monday!
xoxo
Audrey

Todd, at the safe house, had been waiting for a play-by-play of the dance and the parties, but never asked what had happened between her and Dave. He’d advised against her “plans” for the night, so she didn’t try to bring up their results. That had been the day that Dennis had been brought into the “inner circle,” learning not only the true nature of the girl he’d been driving and bodyguarding for two years, but that the safe house was now also sheltering Todd McKinney and why. It had been a busy, full day and if Dave never tried calling, it never occurred to her to expect him to.

She’d only discovered on Monday that he was furious with her and wouldn’t speak to her… and neither would any of their mutual friends.

Because, she’d found out—after three days of navigating everyone’s assumptions that she had to know what it was she’d done—there hadn’t been any blood on the sheets.

By that time, it had crested among the hot post-prom gossip topics. Emily Hartwell had gotten high and been arrested for dancing naked in the hotel courtyard fountain while belting out “Edge of Seventeen” at three in the morning… Annabelle Richards had caught her boyfriend in bed with Missy Barnstable and had had to be restrained by her friends from throwing herself off their room’s balcony… and Audrey MacNamera had lied to Dave Ghasemi about being a virgin.

When Dave had finally calmed down and graciously unbent enough to try to speak with her, Audrey didn’t have a shred of patience left for his shit. Not after having to listen to the rampant speculation of where, when, and how she’d lost her virginity several different times in the girls’ bathrooms. She walked off whenever she saw him trying to approach, and cut school that Friday afternoon rather than sit in the same room with him.

A part of her had even felt an echo of the impulse that had driven her offworld four years earlier, the night skies now beckoning her toward other planets where nobody knew her or felt compelled to make up stories about her…

She’d talked it out, as best she could, with the AIs… with the Apeiros… with Todd, who’d told her he’d been afraid something like that might happen… and even with her mom…

“Why’d he think you weren’t a virgin?” her mother had asked her, setting a cup of hot cocoa in front of her.

“Because I took care of it back in December,” Audrey grumbled.

“‘Took care’ of it?” Her mother had raised an eyebrow at her and waited for her to elaborate.

“Yeah. I didn’t want my first time with a guy to be a bloody, painful mess. I wanted to actually be able to enjoy it. So I went to a store in the mall that has dildoes in its ‘gag gifts’ section, bought one, and took care of it.”

It had hurt like a motherfucker, too, not just the first time but each time thereafter for almost a week, and she knew she’d have hated every moment of her first time with Dave if she’d saved the pain for then.

Her mother had stared at her for a moment, eyes widening, before she began to shake with suppressed laughter.

“Seriously, Mom?”

“Oh, Audrey…” She could barely keep the laughter out of her voice. “You can be very ingenious sometimes. I wish to hell I’d thought of that when I was sixteen.”

She hadn’t been sure what she’d expected her mother to say or do, but that had been kind of a relief.

“Where are you in your cycle?” her mom had asked a few sips of cocoa later.

“The Federacy medic already took care of that,” Audrey said, careful to lie with the truth. “She’s from offworld. You know that there are vaccines against every STD on Deckard’s World, on the other planets? And implants you can get to keep from having to worry about where you are in your cycle? How come we don’t have that stuff here?”

Her mother frowned, considering that. “I’ve never even heard of those. Your ‘medic’ really told you that?”

More than told her; Audrey had the shots and implants. She didn’t elaborate, though; just nodded.

Rachel, however, had been the one who came up with the solution that Saturday. Even though there was still some distrust between them, the fact that Audrey had opened up to her about the mess, and asked for advice, went a long way toward healing much of it.

When Audrey went over the plan with the AIs, Todd, and Dennis, they had embraced it, and Todd had spent the rest of that Sunday coaching and rehearsing her.

The following Monday morning, several girls, all eager gossips but none of them spiteful types, had heard someone trying to conceal the sound of her sniffles in the first-floor girls’ bathroom before classes. When cornered, a tearful Audrey MacNamera had told them the “real truth…” Dave had passed out drunk before they could even have sex, she said, and she had thought she was doing him a kindness by leaving him a note, when she had to go off to church the next morning while he was still passed out, thanking him for a wonderful night… but his way of thanking her had been to destroy her reputation…

None of them had realized it was pure theater. Several of them were in the theater program with Audrey and didn’t believe she could ever be that good.

As fresh gossip went, it was fire, overtaking even the fistfight between the Seniors’ Prom Queen and Prom Princess from that weekend.

Audrey continued to play her role all day, the part of a cowed and humiliated girl who had tried to save her ex-boyfriend’s face until the weight of her own destroyed reputation became too much to bear. Her breathless bathroom audience had even heard which of the ensuing rumors about her had supposedly cut most deeply—selected by her, EntertAIn, and Todd both to throw as harsh a light as possible on their inherent misogyny and to shame some of the school’s most vicious gossips—and how this was why it was so hard to trust anyone with “what had really happened” while she was gone, if people she’d believed were her friends could turn on her and spread lies about her so readily.

By the end of the day, people she barely knew were approaching her to apologize. She kept the act going, looking hesitant as each person approached, as if she expected all of them to call her a slut to her face instead of apologizing. Most of them found ways to end the conversations and beat hasty retreats when her eyes would begin to fill; only a few pulled her into hugs that required her to generate tears and sobs for them that Todd later called “Tony-worthy.”

Dave, meanwhile, had not been faring so well.

The blow to his reputation was lethal; if he’d fucked as many people as the rumor-mongers had claimed Audrey must have while on the run, it would only have improved his standing, but the suggestion that he’d failed to perform had annihilated it. His hurt and anger were reinterpreted as cruelty; the whirlwind of gossip he’d unleashed on her was no longer righteous but vicious. It was a good thing, Audrey had reflected, that there was only one more week of school left.

Unfortunately for him, that week was full of Final Exams.

When word had reached Audrey that Dave had failed two exams, she didn’t have to pretend to be sad for him. She missed her friend, and as much as his behavior had infuriated and disgusted her, and had wounded her deeply, she hadn’t wanted to do him any lasting harm as much as show him how easily gossip could turn against someone. If not for Rachel’s suggestion, she might have confronted him instead, genuinely tearful, to ask him why he couldn’t have talked to her before talking about her. Or she might have held the tears in and tried to cut him to pieces with her words—“I’ve still never had sex with a man” had come to mind—instead. Whether or not either of those approaches would have yielded better results was a moot point.

But she’d wished she’d never tried to get so close to him. She wished neither of them had been hurt by the results.

That Sunday was when she had “met” Michael.

He’d been behind the driver’s seat, where Dennis normally sat, when she got into the car for the ride to the safe house. While Dennis had looked like a Secret Service agent, this new man looked like the old Hollywood leading role version of one. Medium brown hair, arresting grey eyes, sculpted features… Audrey had had to pretend, hard, at nonchalance.

He was in his thirties. Probably married with kids. The last thing he needed, she scolded herself, was a teenage WitSec ward crushing on him.

“Where’s Dennis?” she’d asked as they began driving.

“He’s being reassigned to ‘Hook’s’ permanent detail,” the man told her. There was something strangely familiar about the way he spoke, but she couldn’t quite place it.

“Do you have a number, or a name?” she asked him. A lot of the Federacy agents she’d encountered in the last two-plus years just came with numbers.

“Michael,” he’d said, a tiny hint of a smile ghosting the corners of his lips.

He’d dropped her off at the safe house and driven off. She’d gone inside, spilled her guts about her feelings of guilt and regret to Todd, Dennis, and the AIs, and then retreated to SensAI’s dojo to stretch and change for her combat instruction.

One hour of each Sunday was spent in intensive instruction with a man whose face she’d still never once seen. While she’d no longer had to mask herself against most visitors to the building—Todd had to, of course, because most Federacy agents in Settlement Point were actively searching for him—her instructor had never taken his mask off. She’d never heard his actual voice, either; it was digitally altered, the way her mask had altered hers. She knew nothing about him except that he was six inches taller than her, probably a hundred pounds heavier, and insisted that she never hold back in their sparring even though she knew that he always did.

Holding back hadn’t stopped him from teaching her hard lessons if she let him slip her guards, though; his touch when he “struck” was no more than a caress, but their suits were designed to set every pain nerve it made contact with on fire for a full minute. He could switch that off, and frequently did in the aftermath of combat contact when he had to hold her until the agony he’d just inflicted abated. Theirs was a strange relationship. She wasn’t afraid of him no matter how frequently he hurt her, trusting him not to actually harm her, and to help her through the worst when it was too much to keep fighting through.

His mind was, curiously, opaque to her, enough that sometimes she’d wondered if he was an AI-controlled ’bot even though she could see him breathing.

“You’re letting me through your guard,” he’d said three minutes into their match, stepping back and waiting while her twitching arm dangled uselessly at her side.

“I’m not,” she told him, suddenly aware that he was right.

“You are. Why?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She forced her arm back up into combat position and stepped after him. Fight through, keep fighting through…

“Your balance is off. And your breathing. You came into this match upset about something.”

“So?” she asked, her fist almost managing to make contact with him. His blocks never inflicted pain; only his successful strikes. “We can’t always choose when we end up in ‘battle,’ right?”

“True. But it’s affecting your fighting.”

“Are you saying I’m doing a shit job today?” Feeling a little insulted, she’d buckled down and tried out a combination she’d been working on with SensAI for weeks.

“No,” he told her as he blocked her new moves and then struck, his palm gently touching her abdomen. “I’m saying you’re letting me through your guard.”

Fire ignited in her belly and she collapsed to the ground. “Fuck!”

He knelt beside her, his now-safe hands on her side and back as she curled up around the pain. “Breathe, Audrey. Deep breaths. That’s it…”

“You know my name?” He’d never called her Audrey before.

“Of course. Should we talk about why you’re letting me hurt you today?”

“I’m not,” she told him again, this time aware that she was lying even before she said it.

“Are you lying to me, or to yourself?”

“What are you, a fucking interrogator?”

“If I have to be. What’s going on?”

It had all come out again. Everything. The decision to escalate her relationship with Dave if he was interested… the preparations she’d made so that her “first time” wouldn’t be painful… Dave’s perverse anger that she hadn’t bled—and hadn’t been in too much pain to enjoy the experience—when he’d realized… how his reason for shunning her had spread across her school’s campus in a matter of days and turned her back into the butt of everyone’s gossip and judgment after almost two years of relative peace… the retaliation her cousin had suggested, and which she and Todd had elaborated upon… how much destruction it had wreaked upon Dave’s reputation and equilibrium in return…

“He thought he was telling the truth,” her instructor said, “and you knew you were telling a lie, and that’s why you believe you deserve pain now, to match what you think you inflicted on him.”

She’d shrugged. “He’s been humiliated.”

“Weren’t you?”

The rumors she’d heard—Missy claiming that a cousin of hers had seen Audrey working the streets of New Lubbock; Joanie, who worked as a nurse’s office aide, claiming that her nonexistent school medical records showed she’d had several STDs—had been put to bed by her actions, but not before a lot of people had entertained themselves at her expense.

“Doesn’t matter what shit they make up about what I did while I was gone,” she’d sighed. “They’ll never come up with anything worse than the truth.”

“You still hold yourself responsible for the people Makarov killed?” he’d asked.

“You know about that?” How much did her instructor know about her, exactly?

“I’ve been briefed, in considerable detail.”

She’d stared at him in astonishment. “Michael?”

He’d reached up and drawn off the mask and head covering that he’d always worn, revealing the face of her new driver. “Very good. How did you know?”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever heard pronounce it ‘detail’ on Deckard’s world. Everybody else says ‘detail.’”

He’d smiled. “Impressive. You’re astute at spotting other people’s patterns.”

“Just other people’s?” she asked, feeling a little miffed.

“Audrey, you just tried to use our sparring session to get me to torture you, so you could do penance for hurting a boy who tried to destroy you for not bleeding on cue. Do you see a pattern there?”

When he’d put it that way, it had been a disturbing pattern indeed.

That summer, especially once Todd and Dennis had left the safe house, Michael had been ubiquitous. He’d become the only agent who drove her places, whether between the safe house and home or to and from her infrequent “assignments” from General Toal, and the only one with an office in the building. The decision to shelter Todd, it seemed, had resulted in all the agents who weren’t trusted with knowledge of his presence being cut loose for other programs.

And, as a result, it had been Michael who had dealt with the fallout from her disastrous summer fling with a guy—Lars—who’d reminded her a little of Riddick until his violently possessive jealous streak had emerged… and Michael who had thrown Lars through a storefront picture window for trying to backhand her during their breakup. Half a dozen classmates out clubbing had witnessed the fight, and she’d known that she’d start her senior year with a lot of gossip swirling around her. Again.

She still felt far guiltier about Dave, though.

He was no longer a student at Eisenhower High when their senior year had begun. The few of their mutual friends she could still stand told her that his family had moved offworld over the summer. And Audrey had settled into keeping everyone at arm’s length again. Even Michael. Especially Michael.

She still couldn’t read him, at all, and had no idea why or if she dared ask… but her crush on him had only intensified to almost painful levels. He was more than twice her age, though, and either a colleague or possibly her boss—she still wasn’t entirely sure where he ranked in the hierarchy, but it seemed to be higher up than driving her around and bodyguarding her might imply—and somehow all of that had made her more aware than ever of just how lonely and disconnected she was.

There was no one she dared talk to about her feelings where he was concerned. No one she could safely ask whether there was something twisted about having sexual fantasies featuring a man who inflicted pain upon her on a regular basis, even if he never once hurt her in the fantasies. No one who could commiserate with her confusion or help her find her way through it. Even her customary confidants were unsafe for that conversation, making her desperately wish she knew where Kyra was. Kyra would have understood her confusion and worry. Kyra would have known what to tell her.

Instead, she felt more profoundly alone than ever, even when she was surrounded by people… even ones who liked her… even ones who loved her. Which, she reflected, was why she’d sent out ten University applications, but only one of them to a school on Deckard’s World.

Audrey had sworn to never leave the world of her birth again, but sometimes she felt like it was slowly killing her.

She heard the front door open and close, and Michael’s distinctive footsteps. Speak of the handsome devil…

He entered the Security Room frowning.

Uh oh.

“What’d I do now?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Took the blame for something you didn’t do,” he quipped, but his smile was perfunctory and there was an uneasy undertone in his voice. He switched on one of the screens, setting it to a news feed.

“…still not sure what we’re looking at…” an announcer said.

Almost complete darkness filled the screen, aside from a time code at the bottom that read 2520.09.26 22:14:36.07 FST and counted upward. Bright lights were rising up into the darkness, arcing toward something that looked like a meteor falling downward. As Audrey watched, the meteor struck the ground like a massive dagger, blinding light filling the screen and illuminating tall buildings as they shattered, and then static followed.

“It appears that something impacted on the surface…” the announcer continued.

“What is that?” Audrey asked. “Where is that?”

“Nova São Paulo. The capital city of Carvão,” Michael said, his voice hushed and tense. “A week ago, by the time code.”

“Carvão? Isn’t that—?”

“In the Coalsack nebula, yes,” he murmured. “Almost three years since you heard Irena and Colin Kirshbaum talking about how something was three years away from happening there…”

“Oh fuck…” Audrey’s hands went over her mouth.

“It’s gone. Completely gone.” He turned to look at her, his expression deadly serious. “Carvão, Charbon, Uhlia, Waro, and Seogtan… all of the Coalsack planets. Gone. And it would appear that the Helion System is a year away from sharing its fate.”

70.
Straight On ’Til Morning

“I really have to recommend against it, Audrey.”

“What’s the alternative?” Audrey whispered into her comm. She was alone in the sound booth—the tech crew wasn’t due back for a few hours—as she spoke to MilitAIre. “If the ‘show doesn’t go on,’ all the tickets will have to be refunded and everybody’ll be wondering why I didn’t step in. That’s more likely to get noticed than me being in the spotlight of a high school play for a single night.”

MilitAIre took long enough to reply that Audrey knew he was discussing the matter with the other AIs. “You’re correct. It’s not a good situation, though. A lead role is risky. This lead role is especially risky.”

“I get it,” she told him. “I really do. But… I can’t let everybody down. They’re not expecting anything grand out of me, but I’m the only one left who knows the lines and blocking.”

“I understand, Audrey. Break a leg. We will be watching.”

“Seriously?” She laughed. “You’re gonna piggyback on the school’s security cameras to watch?”

“We wouldn’t miss it.”

“Make a recording for my mom, then, okay? And let her know for me.”

Half a dozen people, their expressions ranging from worried to hopeful, were waiting for her when she emerged from the sound booth.

“I have permission,” she told them. The whoops of delight and relief were almost deafening.

Mrs. Morgan began punching numbers into her comm. “I need to get Judy in here early to make sure the costume will work. You’re six inches taller than Cheryl.”

Todd, a grinning Senior a few inches taller than her, with a “ducktail” haircut and an earring in one ear, walked over and put his arm around her. “You are saving so many lives! Now, let’s do a run-through with the rest of the cast.”

He marched her out onto the stage, which was currently clear of set pieces. The whole cast, looking nervous, was sitting nearby, awaiting news of their fate.

“Second star to the right,” he shouted, “and straight on ’til morning! We have our Peter!”

“Thank God,” Julia, hair in the ringlets of Wendy Darling, groaned. “My whole family is coming tonight. You didn’t eat any of Cheryl’s chicken, did you, Audrey? Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I never went near it,” Audrey promised. “Okay, I think Todd wants all of us ‘understudies’ to practice our lines and blocking at least once? An undressed dress rehearsal?”

A few people laughed.

Almost a quarter of the cast had been felled by food poisoning earlier in the day. Cheryl Ocasek, the shining star of Eisenhower High’s theater program, had brought in lunch for the whole cast an hour before the matinee curtain rose. While most of the food had been excellent, everyone who had eaten the fried chicken had begun feeling ill by the middle of the performance. Peter’s final duel with Hook would have been unintentionally comical if both Cheryl and Jim hadn’t looked pale, sweaty, and thoroughly miserable. Neither came out for the final bows, and one of the Lost Children nearly vomited in front of the audience before the curtain finally dropped.

Pandemonium had followed while Mrs. Morgan tried to work out who was sick and who was well, and whether parts could be juggled to make it possible for the show’s closing night performance to go forward. In the end, only one role was left that had lost both its main player and its understudy: Peter Pan himself.

Which was when Todd, the theater program’s other big star who was capping his high school career by directing the production, had suggested that they dragoon their stage manager into the role.

It was Audrey’s first time as a stage manager; now a junior, she had spent almost two whole school years building up a reputation as a serviceable actor who lacked the nuance needed for a lead role but who could sing, dance, and nail the lines in virtually any supporting part. She was best known to her compatriots, however, as a facile prompter who kept entire scripts in her head and never missed a step in her blocking. Although she was considerably taller than Peter was supposed to be, she really was the only option left. Todd—6’2” with a swimmer’s physique—looked far too “grown up” to portray a boy who refused to ever become an adult, and he was the only other member of the troupe who knew all of Peter’s lines. Besides which, he already had to step in to play Captain Hook.

“We have, like, no fairies left,” Maeve, the production’s Tiger Lily, grumbled.

“What if we added some lights dancing around you?” Audrey asked. “Like you’re the only one who’s corporeal and the rest are staying small like Tink?”

Her comm buzzed. She glanced down at its screen.

E. is working on it right now.

“I have a friend who can whip something up for us,” she continued. “The ‘Friends’ song will just have to be the two of us. At least we’re doing the ‘fairies’ version instead of the ‘Indians’ one.”

Back at the start of the semester, she’d managed to argue Todd and Mrs. Morgan into using the revised twenty-first century script, as opposed to the original 1954 Broadway script, by comparing the portrayal of “Indians” in the original script—and no Native American tribes had been invited to settle on Deckard’s World—to the way “the gays” were characterized by most of their school peers, something that Todd was especially sensitive to. Aside from a few lines changing slightly and the replacement of the “Ugh a Wug” song with another tune about friendship, it was almost exactly the same play.

And it would be a whole lot easier to replace corporeal fairies with dancing lights than to explain away an entire missing tribe.

“Okay,” Todd said. “Let’s do a run-through of lines and blocking and see what we need to spend the rest of the day working on.”

They worked until it was time to admit the audience. Audrey nailed her lines and blocking, and listened carefully to Todd’s criticisms of her actual performance. Fortunately, this wasn’t a play that required enormous amounts of nuance, so he wasn’t super critical. She and Maeve then practiced the “Friends” song together, working out the best division of lines normally sung by backup actors and the best ways to harmonize them. The arrival of the “fairy lights” holo system that EntertAIn had cooked up helped; the AI had also whipped up a backing track of “fairy voices” that could be played alongside, adding almost-unearthly harmonies to their lines.

Her handlers, she realized, had decided to treat this like a mission.

While Todd worked with the rest of the cast on weak spots, Audrey met with the stage crew to adjust Cheryl’s flight harness and wires to accommodate her size and weight, and then did a few practice flights to make sure she could control her movements while singing and showboating. The Stage Crew Advisor, Mr. Andrews, agreed to handle the stage management for the evening, and they went over the issues to watch out for from prior performances.

The whole thing kept her too damned busy to feel any stage fright until the show had started and it was almost time to hit her first mark.

Oh fuck, what am I doing? I’m not supposed to expose myself like this…

Her hair—which she’d finally convinced her mother to let her cut to only halfway down her back—was braided back and hidden away, and she was wearing a wig of short, brown, shaggy hair under a green cap. Judy had adjusted the costume to accommodate her longer torso and hide her curves. Now she just had to…

…be a boy for an hour and a half? When had she ever done that before?

Easy peasy…

She took a deep breath and jumped off of her “perch,” soaring through the “open window” of the bedroom and just managing to stick the landing. Murmurs erupted through the audience as people realized that Cheryl wasn’t playing the role. There was supposed to be a sign up about the cast changes, but she bet most people had walked past it without reading.

“Tinker Bell!” she stage-whispered. “Tink! …Tink!”

“Nana” barked over a nearby speaker and she ducked down behind a chair, peeking out.

“Tinker Bell! Where are you?”

She was halfway through the scene, singing “Never Never Land,” when she realized that she had adopted her “Riddick walk” and her “Jack B. Badd” voice for the role.

There were a few flubs along the way from some of her costars, but not nearly as many as they had all dreaded there would be. Todd made a brilliant Hook, she thought, and she had a great time hamming things up with him. Their duels were hilarious, and made her wish they could extend them. But by the time she whisked “Jane” off to Neverland, she was as exhausted as if she had spent the whole time actively isomorphing.

During the curtain call, however, she had one more thing to do. Todd handed her a microphone.

“Tonight was supposed to be a very special night,” she told the audience. “Cheryl Ocasek has been an amazing talent in our theater program for four years now. This would have been her final performance before graduating, and I know a lot of you came tonight especially to see her. Unfortunately, she fell ill earlier today. Although she’s not here to receive it, we wanted all of you to get to see the award and thank-you gift that we had planned to give her tonight…”

She turned the microphone over to Maeve, who did a slight variation on the speech she’d originally intended to give, extolling Cheryl’s performances over the last four years since she’d first wowed audiences in The Fantasticks. Then the actor who had played Smee took over the mic to give a similar award to Todd.

The wrap party was a bit of a blur. She remembered Todd telling her that he wished he had another year to work with her, and several other cast members telling her they were looking forward to having that year, but her brain felt like it was turning into mush.

Mission accomplished, she mused as she managed to make her good-byes and left to meet her mother in the parking lot. Time to head back to base…

“I almost didn’t get to see your debut performance,” her mother said when they were nearly home. “But ‘M’ called and told me you were taking over the role. Why didn’t you let me know?”

Audrey groaned. “Sorry… I spent the whole afternoon working with Todd and the cast to make sure I wouldn’t turn the production into a total disaster. I asked him to give you a heads-up for me.”

“Well, you were very good. Alvin’s sorry he missed it, but we couldn’t find a sitter. I didn’t understand why you were keeping at the whole acting thing when you never got starring roles, but maybe now you’ll start getting some more.”

Shit. Had she been too good? MilitAIre might have some choice things to say about that.

“You don’t have to want to be a star to want to perform, Mom.” It wasn’t their first time going over that.

A mermaid doesn’t need to be a queen to raise a tsunami…

Her mother was just too much of a competitive spirit to understand that. Her drive to win, to come out on top, showed up in almost everything. For Audrey, she only felt like that when she was on the track and didn’t want to have to see anyone between her and the “horizon.”

Her morning ride to the safe house was a little surprising; Dennis teasingly asked her for her autograph.

“Gonna tell people ‘I knew her when…’ even if I can never tell them I knew you where,” he joked. “You got good reviews last night. Wish I’d been there to see.”

Reviews? Oh. Shit…

“So,” she said as she walked into the Security Room and sat down, “how badly did I fuck things up?”

“Not badly,” MilitAIre told her. “None of the reviewers who had come to see Cheryl Ocasek’s final high school performance claimed you outperformed her. Or accused you of nuance.”

“Fuck… I should’ve realized that show was gonna be reviewed. What did they say?”

“See for yourself.” The screen in front of her lit up with an article from the Settlement Point Monitor.

Food Poisoning Outbreak Forces Last-Minute Cast Change in Peter Pan Production

Junior Audrey MacNamera and Senior Todd McKinney Shine in Impromptu Roles

Below the headline, there was an image someone had captured of the performance, as she and Todd had dueled. Todd looked menacing and wicked as Captain Hook, while she…

Well, shit.

With a fierce smile on her face as she battled Captain Hook back, and her unruly mop of a wig under Peter Pan’s green cap…

Jack B. Badd was onstage for the whole fuckin’ universe to see.

She’d done the walk, done the voice, slipped into the boy persona she’d developed on the run without even a thought…

“Oh fuck. I’m right out there in Jack form…”

“And your portrayal of a boy is, according to the reviewer, one of the highlights of your performance,” EntertAIn said. “While you didn’t do a job that would raise red flags about your ability to run a long game, you did reveal that you can impersonate a boy very well indeed.”

Groaning, Audrey looked for that part of the review.

MacNamera, a junior at Eisenhower High, is better known for Lettering in Track and Field as a sophomore and bringing home the bronze medal this year in the DWSAA Half-Marathon. Within the theater program, she has appeared in several chorus lines and taken on smaller roles, and was this production’s stage manager up until the food poisoning incident. Sixteen years old, she’s probably best known for having been a missing person for almost two years. While no information has ever been released about where she was during that time, the authentic veneer of ‘street tough’ that she imbues her Peter Pan with might furnish a tantalizing clue…

“Ohhhh, shit.”

“On a positive note,” MilitAIre said, “the ‘street tough’ interpretation points back to the dominant theories almost everyone has about you at this point… and not toward a run through space.”

“As long as nobody realizes the ‘street tough’ I’m channeling there is Richard B. Riddick,” Audrey muttered.

“It’s hard to imagine why they would,” EntertAIn laughed. “I don’t think this did much damage to the persona you’re portraying, but you are going to have to figure out a way to avoid starring roles, now that you’ve demonstrated how ably you can handle one.”

“Are you sure? I feel… naked. Exposed as fuck.” She felt like she’d screwed up, even if the article was praising her and even her mother had seemed happy.

“It was a risk. You knew it and so did we. But it’s also a good opportunity to practice some damage control tactics,” MilitAIre said. “Sooner or later, something will happen that will require them. It’s our job to teach you to deal with risk, not hide from it.”

An “unleashed Operative,” she reflected, shouldn’t be afraid to take risks, as long as they were calculated ones. She’d been given that message several times. Leashed Operatives had no choice about the risks they did and didn’t take; Toal was hoping she’d develop a judicious streak that could drive home the importance of giving all Operatives similar latitude. And, more urgently, not violating and brutalizing their minds.

“And,” First-AId added, “I can hear you falling into your ‘it’s all my fault’ mode of thinking. Fight it. We’ve discussed this.”

Audrey nodded, sighing. The realization that her cousins had been using her as the “fall guy” for their pranks and capers, and had only finally been caught out when she was unavailable to play that role, had been a tough discovery. Almost four years after she’d originally gone missing, their parents were still grappling with the knowledge that “Trouble” hadn’t, after all, been her middle name, and that the blame they’d habitually thrown her way for dozens of incidents had rightfully fallen much closer to home. Although her mother felt vindicated by the admissions, Audrey herself was still struggling with their impact.

Practically from the moment she could walk, she’d been unknowingly conditioned into believing that the chaos she and her cousins had frequently ended up embroiled in was her fault, especially since they—and their parents—always insisted that nothing like that happened except when she was around. But after her disappearance, Rob, Rachel, and Joey had only lasted a little over a month before they’d begun getting into trouble without her handy to blame it on. The adults had all wised up; several had even apologized to her for the scoldings they’d given her and the opinions they’d held about her, sheepishly explaining that it was in part her father’s childhood reputation—he was, after all, the original Jack B. Badd—that had prejudiced them against her actual innocence. And First-AId had spent the last two years drawing her attention to the way that, whenever anything went wrong, her first assumption was that it was somehow her fault… thanks to them.

Sometimes she wasn’t sure what was doing more damage to her relationship with her cousins now: her inability to trust them after all that, or their resentment that she still wouldn’t tell them where she’d been. The latter issue kept impeding friendships at school, too.

There were other reviews to read, all of them complimentary but not lavish in their praise, most reviewers impressed by Audrey’s ability to make the audience believe she really was a boy until the moment she had spoken in her “natural voice” during the curtain call. She still felt like she’d given too much of her game away, even if nobody had figured out how constantly she was “onstage” and acting during her daily life.

Over lunch—a “new cajun” jambalaya that originated from the Bayou Nebula and required several glasses of water to get through—she checked her “lifeline” to Kyra. Nothing. None of her messages had been read in the last two and a half years; no new messages had come from her sister since she’d “gone dark.” Sometimes, not often, the Apeiros told her that Kyra was dreaming of a world with three suns, but she had apparently learned how to avoid their detection in her sleep as well as when she was awake.

Audrey left another message anyway. It hadn’t varied much in the last year, but under the assumption that Kyra might read the most recent one first if she logged in, she always included the same important news.

It’s me, hoping you’re okay. So you know, “Kyra Wittier-Collins” is now a safe identity to use if you want. All of the warrants were voided a year ago now. New Dartmouth has to pay out a ginormous settlement to you and the other survivors. We’re talking millions of dollars in settlement money per survivor, from the sound of it. You can walk in and claim it any time if you want. I hope you do. They deserve to bleed some serious green for what they did to you. I miss you. Love you tons.

Always your sister,
Tizzy

P.S. I played Peter Pan in a local show and killed it. I wish you could have seen it.

People in the school hallways seemed friendlier than usual the next day. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. The first thing she did, though, was go looking for Cheryl.

Pale and drawn-looking, Cheryl was sitting in the courtyard, surrounded by girls—a mixture of Seniors and Juniors—who were clearly in Supportive Friend Mode.

“Oh great, here she is now,” Missy Barnstable said as Audrey walked up. But the look on Cheryl’s face wasn’t hostile.

“How are you feeling?” Audrey asked.

Cheryl gave her a rueful smile. “Like I never want to eat again. I can keep down soda crackers and that’s about it. How about you? You okay after taking one for the team like that?”

Missy huffed, rolled her eyes, and walked away. For a moment, Audrey was profoundly reminded of Celia. Weird… usually Missy intimidated the hell out of her.

She sat down in the seat Missy had vacated. “Tired. That was like… having ten minutes’ warning before taking the SAT or something.”

Cheryl chuckled. “Speaking of tests, did you hear the crazy news?”

“I don’t think I have. What’s the crazy news?”

“Someone got a bug up their butt about the Ouija boards everybody’s been playing with and now there are Quantifiers on campus.”

Cold jetted through Audrey’s veins. Fuck. Fuck. None of it showed on her face, though. She was, after all, every damn bit as good at acting as Cheryl, and she was always on. “Quantifiers? What are those?”

“They test for psychic powers,” Lucy Breem said. She was one of Cheryl’s closest friends.

Audrey laughed. “Oh c’mon, none of that stuff is real.”

“You should come over next time we do a séance,” Maeve told her. “You’ll see.”

Several of the girls nodded. Interesting; were there actual overtures of friendship there?

“Color me intrigued,” she said. She wondered if any of them could actually tap into anything with a Ouija board, or if it was, as MilitAIre believed, the power of the subconscious, on a sub-esper level, that governed those games.

Would any of these girls light up a Quantification test? Was there anyone on campus, aside from her, who would be in danger of being identified and “recruited” today?

“So I’m not saying you’re right or anything,” she began, shrugging, “but who do you think could test positive for psychic powers?”

“There’s that chick, Emily, from your grade, who says she’s a witch and the reincarnation of Stevie Nicks,” Julia said. Her hair was straight again, Wendy’s curls long gone.

It was hard to restrain a sputter of laughter. That explained the flowy dresses… and the top hat… Emily had been wearing all year. “She’s, uh, had quite a few stories about stuff like that. Not so much with the proof, though.”

Cheryl snorted. “Two years ago, right before you came back, she was claiming that she could talk to spirits, and that she’d even talked to yours because you’d been murdered and buried in a nearby construction site.”

Audrey let her eyes go wide and allowed her laughter to escape. “Well, that must have been awkward for her!”

Maeve snickered. “So she’s obviously not gonna test out for psychic powers.”

The girls turned to speculating about which of the school “weirdos” might test positive until the bell rang and everyone headed inside.

The announcement about Quantification testing was the first thing on the agenda. Classes were to continue as normal during the process, but all teachers were to be aware that students could be summoned for testing at any time, and must be excused immediately when they were called.

Just… stay… calm, Audrey told herself. She’d done these tests hundreds of times and knew exactly how to game them so that she’d read as the most unpsychic person in history.

Three students were called away during her first period English class. All three returned looking unimpressed. Another two were summoned from her second period History of the Federacy class, returning well before the class ended looking equally nonchalant. During third period Gymnastics, Emily Hartwell was called away. She left looking smug and confident and returned looking profoundly disgruntled.

Audrey was finally summoned during her fifth period French class.

The testing station had been set up in the nurse’s office. Audrey had only been in there once for a minor scrape during a track meet.

The first problem was, of course, when she put her hand on the biometrics pad, and an alert came up informing the nurse and the Quantifiers that they were not authorized to conduct diagnostics on her or provide non-emergency care. One of the Quantifiers frowned, tapped in some codes, and then glanced at her in confusion.

“You have a Federacy lock on your biometrics. Why?”

She shrugged. “You already know as much as your clearance level allows you, and that’s probably more than I know.”

His frown deepened, but he shrugged. “Please come this way. Federacy lock or not, you still have to take this test.”

“Sure, why not?” She followed him, slipping into what she had come to think of as Quiet Mode.

It was not unlike being blind and deaf. She couldn’t feel the Apeiros, had no awareness of the other ’verses in her five-shape, couldn’t even feel the people near her anymore. No connection, no balance, no direction. If most of humanity had to feel this way all the time, she wondered how it had managed to survive so long. She and MilitAIre had worked on building up her stamina for dealing with the sensation of being cocooned away from everything, and she could maintain Quiet Mode for almost an hour before she started struggling not to scream. She could survive this. She would survive this.

The Quantifier had her sit down in a chair and then slipped an electrode cap over her head. She tilted her head for him before he could ask, knowing exactly how the cap should sit.

“You’ve worn one of these before?” he asked.

“Yeah. Had a head injury a few years back, everybody was worried I was concussed. They did a bunch of different scans, including the one where you have to stick your head in a huge white donut-looking machine.”

“A CT scan,” he told her, nodding, as he tapped various controls. “Were you concussed?”

“Thankfully not. I’d hit my head pretty hard, though, so I guess they just wanted to make extra sure.”

He came back over and removed the cap. “Well, your brain looks just fine. Thank you for your cooperation, Miss MacNamera. You can return to your class now.”

“Sure, no problem.” She waited until she was outside of the nurse’s office before letting her connections to the ’verses flow back. It felt as if she’d been holding in a breath the whole time, depriving herself of oxygen.

Todd was approaching. She started to smile at him—

And then stopped. He his eyes were fixed on the nurse’s office… and he looked terrified.

She’d never actually tried touching his mind before. She reached out—

Oh God, oh God, they’re gonna figure me out, they’re gonna take me like they took my cousin Sylvia, oh fuck, what do I do…?

He passed her, barely aware that she was standing there.

She pulled her comm out as she walked back to her classroom, resisting the impulse to run.

“Yes, Audrey?” MilitAIre answered.

“I need you to make up a good reason, a home emergency or something, and get me called out of class in the next five minutes with permission to leave campus. We have an emergency situation. I’ll explain everything as soon as I can.”

“Understood. I’ll take care of it.”

The call, releasing her from class, came right as she was sitting back down. She picked up her backpack and headed out of the building, keeping her pace calm and steady and not giving in to the urge to take the stairs two at a time and crash through the exit doors. Don’t make any sign… don’t leave any clues…

She knew exactly where all of the school’s security cameras were positioned, and exactly when she could no longer be seen by them. Ducking out of everyone’s line of sight, behind a grouping of bushes the school’s “burn-outs” frequently hid behind to light up, she transitioned into Wonderland and pulled her comm back out. Fortunately, hardware to let her make comm calls from both of her habitable alternate ’verses had been in place for almost two years.

“Yes, Audrey? What is happening?”

“The Quantifiers have found an esper. A genuine, bona fide esper. You have to help me save him from them.”

“Who?”

“Todd McKinney. They took his cousin Sylvia a few years ago.”

“Audrey, I don’t think—”

“If General Toal wants another unleashed esper, this is his chance.”

“While that’s true, the circumstances aren’t the best for—”

“Fuck, MilitAIre, do you know what they’re going to do to him?”

“Yes.” The AI’s voice had gone soft.

“Look,” she tried again, her heart pounding. “I’m betting your databanks have copies of Duke Pritchard’s ‘bad kitty’ files, right? They have to. Half a dozen of his and Makarov’s victims still haven’t been identified. Those files won’t have been purged yet.”

“Yes, Audrey. I have access to those files. Why?”

“Because the Quantifiers’ bosses are gonna do to Todd’s mind what Pritchard and Makarov did to those girls’ bodies. Unless you help me stop them.”

“I see.”

“Todd’s an amazing person, MilitAIre. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s creative. He can ad-lib like nobody’s business. You hand him a random prop and he can come up with a brilliant scene about it off the top of his head.”

“Audrey—”

“He wants to direct on New Broadway, and God knows that’s not gonna happen now but maybe he could still direct operations for General Toal and get to use that creativity instead of having it burned out of his head.”

“Audrey—”

“He’s sweet and he’s kind and he has tragic taste in men but it’s not like they’re gonna help him with that. For God’s sake, MilitAIre, I’ll do this without you if I have to—”

“Audrey.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re in. You have the green light. Now. What’s your plan?”

She turned and sprinted for the nurse’s office. Now she just needed a plan.

69.
Black Fox, Gone to Ground

“Please have a seat,” Principal Godwin said, gesturing at the chairs in front of his desk.

Audrey and her mother both sat down, Elodie napping in a carrier beside her mother’s chair.

“I have the test results back, and the news is very good,” Godwin said.

Audrey had already seen the results; MilitAIre had forwarded them to her. Her scores hadn’t been perfect; that would have been difficult for people to accept, so she’d deliberately missed a question or two on each test. But she knew that the scores had been well beyond the necessary levels for passing.

The holidays were behind them, and the end of the school year was approaching. Given the timing of her return, the school administration had agreed that it would be disruptive to have Audrey join her class—assuming she even tested into it—at the very end of the year. Instead, they had administered three days’ worth of tests covering all the material that she would be expected to know in order to advance to tenth grade. Their intention, she knew, had been to determine which summer school classes she would need to take, or whether she would simply be knocked back a grade—or even two—instead; the results proved that neither option was necessary.

“Audrey’s officially approved to join her class for tenth grade when school resumes in May,” Godwin told them. “We received the special transcript from the… facility… she stayed in, so she won’t be missing any of the credits she needs to graduate, either. Fall Semester registration opens in a week, and she can sign up for classes then. I’ve forwarded you a list of the ones that need instructor permission or auditions—band, choir, those kinds of things—if she’s interested in any of them, and a list of extracurricular activity groups and their deadlines for signing up.”

Audrey had caught the quizzical look her mother had shot her at the mention of the “facility.” That was going to be a fun conversation.

She was holding Elodie for her mother as they returned to the car, when she became aware of people staring at her, both from classroom windows and from the nearby softball field. Well, there’s another delightful rumor that’s gonna start going around…

MilitAIre was already monitoring the gossip, and which students subscribed to which wild theories about her whereabouts while she was missing. Some of the scenarios were pretty outrageous. A few people had floated the suggestion that she’d never been missing at all, but had gotten pregnant and had gone away somewhere to have a baby. She wondered which of them would latch onto the idea that Elodie was “really” her daughter rather than her sister.

“What did the principal mean about a facility you stayed in?” Her mother waited until they were in the car, and it was in motion, before asking.

“‘M’ sent in transcripts,” Audrey told her. “It was the only way to keep them from demanding at least some summer school to give me the minimum number of credits I’ll need to graduate in three more years. The transcripts claim I was in a Wyndham Landing juvie facility under a fake name, and they sent me back here when they finally realized who I really was, but I already completed a ninth-grade equivalency during their school year.”

The facility really existed, too; in the northern hemisphere of Deckard’s World, the school year ranged from the start of November to the end of July, compared to May through January in Settlement Point. Records related to her supposed stay there had been inserted into the facility’s security system, courtesy of a Ghost Code she had provided MilitAIre, and some programs he controlled were monitoring all communications for any sign of attempts to access the files. Anyone trying to get more details about her stay there would unknowingly find themselves speaking to him.

Her mom kept her eyes on the road, but Audrey could feel her wanting to turn and lock eyes with her. “Were you in Wyndham Landing?”

“Mom, you know I can’t tell you where I was.”

Her mother huffed, pressing her lips together for a moment. “I know. I’m trying to live with it, Audrey, I really am. It’s just…”

“I get it.” She kept her voice gentle and sympathetic. Time to try to change the subject. “I, uh, was hoping to sign up for some extracurriculars next year, by the way. If you’re okay with that.”

“Which ones did you have in mind?”

“Track and musical theater. I’ll have to try out for both of them.” While she did like musical theater, MilitAIre wanted her to pursue it for protective coloration purposes; she would portray herself as reasonably adept at the broader theatricality of the stage, suitable for musicals and vaudeville, but with little ability for subtler and more nuanced performances. That would hopefully “prove,” to most observers, that she lacked the talent or skill to run a long game on anyone. Track… was something she’d insisted on.

“I can keep up,” she’d told Riddick, trying to hide her fear that he would leave her behind.

“Maybe someday,” he’d replied…

She wanted to be able to run for miles, for hours, to be the one setting the pace rather than struggling to follow. She had raced through the corridors of the Nephrite Undine, SensAI timing her as she went, and had taken to jogging across the flat plains of Wonderland since her return, once the weather was good enough. And she wanted to get even faster.

She would never see Riddick again, but she had decided she wanted to run as fast as, or faster than, him.

“…and an awful lot of running to do…”

Where had she heard that? She frowned, concentrating on the memory, but it slipped away from her. It felt like something she’d heard on the Nephrite Undine—somehow the memory conjured the scent of EntertAIn’s rooms on the ship, hints of popcorn and strawberry licorice whips—but none of the “female” AIs on the ship had had a voice quite like that.

It bothered her that she had so many holes in her memory.

The most recent one, from the end of her first recon mission, was especially vexing. Neither the AIs nor the Apeiros would tell her what had happened, although both groups had given her stern lectures about not trying to mess with any more apeirochorons. Not until you hatch, the Apeiros had added; MilitAIre, meanwhile, had given her hell about trying to disobey a direct order.

She’d had to let go of most of it, but one thing had stuck out for her and had been a startling revelation: after touching their hands, the envoy had apparently believed that she and Kyra were Furyan, and that—not a potential connection to the Scarlet Matador—was what had motivated all of her questions at the memorial.

No wonder she was so interested in us, if she’s looking for un-Quantified Furyan refugees, she’d thought, but hadn’t felt ready to discuss it with the AIs. They’d probably figured out exactly the same thing, anyway. But if touching someone with Threshold Syndrome reminded the envoy of touching a Furyan… what were Furyans? And what, exactly, was it about them—or maybe their planet—that was communicable enough that her father had brought it back and left traces of it in her, even before the Level Five Incident?

She’d decided that she needed to think about the whole thing for a while longer before she tried to discuss it.

The drive home had grown quiet. Although Audrey’s thoughts had distracted her for a few moments, she suspected her mother was brooding over something.

“No band?” They were turning into their driveway when her mother finally asked that.

Oh. Yeah.

“It’s been close to two years since I touched my flute. I’m pretty rusty… and anyway, the marching band plays at Sunday games.”

In truth, Audrey could probably have picked up the flute and played it just fine—her mother, who had pegged her as eidetic when she was much younger, seemed to have forgotten all about it once she’d started pretending her memory was as flawed as anyone else’s—but having the Sunday games be the only issue would have led her mother into another bout of railing against WitSec and its restrictions. As it was, she sighed gustily and shook her head.

“And the other two don’t play on Sundays?”

Audrey shrugged. “I checked. Friday nights and Saturday matinees and nights, only, for the musical theater performances. Track meets are right after school. About the only things that happen on Sunday are the ‘big’ sports games, so all the stuff connected to them is out.”

Sundays on Deckard’s World, like so much else, were modeled after the Mid-Century period of the twentieth-century America, when only a few stores were open for limited hours, and most activities were either church or sports related. She hadn’t realized how atypical that was until she’d ventured offworld.

“Hmm.”

Damn it, she’d riled her mom up again. Bettie Paige Hawthorne had been a cheerleading captain and had hoped to encourage Audrey to follow that lead. It might have even worked—Audrey had enjoyed the gymnastics and dance parts—if Missy Barnstable hadn’t been enrolled in the classes, too, and hadn’t had it in for her. Her avoidance of practice sessions, and the reason behind it, had been one of the things her parents had fought about…

…and, she suddenly realized, a large part of why she’d been convinced it was her fault that they’d split up.

Huh.

“It’s a shame you’ll miss out on that part of high school life,” her mother said as she finished parking the car in the garage. “Well, go through the course catalogue and pick out what you want to take. I don’t guess you’ll ever tell me how you managed to keep up with your grade…”

“‘M’ and ‘E’ helped me stay caught up,” Audrey said. That was among the things she was permitted to volunteer. She climbed out of the car and reached back in for Elodie, who was still napping in her carrier. “Studying helped the time pass.”

Her mother released another frustrated sigh as Audrey carefully drew Elodie’s carrier out; her baby sister remained fast asleep the whole time. “It would be nice to meet them sometime.”

Not actually possible. Deckard’s World, for all its xenophobia toward other human cultures, had some pretty enlightened-sounding stances about AI, but that didn’t mean Audrey could just take her mother to the safe house and introduce her handlers. Maybe a video call sometime…?

They’d have to settle on appearances first, she thought, and suppressed a grin. Even SensAI would have to; over the Spring Break, her mother had invited her cousins and their parents over, and they had ended up watching a centuries-old film called The Karate Kid. Audrey had had great fun, the day after the New Year, teasing SensAI about “wax on, wax off” during her debriefing session, but he couldn’t possibly try to wear Pat Morita’s face in front of her mother in the wake of that.

She really wanted to meet the person who had developed the AI’s personas someday. Whoever it was, they had a wicked sense of humor.

“I’ll tell them,” she told her mother. “I don’t know how feasible it is yet, but hopefully they can manage something in the future.”

“I suppose that’ll have to do, won’t it?” her mother said, releasing yet another gusty sigh as she unlocked the door.

Audrey pretended to be too busy carrying Elodie to answer. Normal was still a long way off.

The weird thing was that she was getting along really well with Alvin now. Her mother, she’d discovered, had a type, and both Alvin and her father were examples of it. He generally abetted her in dodging conversations about her missing time with both her mother and the rest of her family, understanding that the less said about all of it, the better. Her mom, however, was still struggling to let go of the issue, to accept that it was something that just had to be, and that it would be easier to deal with if she didn’t try to tackle it head-on.

But looking away wasn’t what Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter knew how to do… and with a few more years’ hiatus from her law practice ahead of her until Elodie was old enough for school, she was itching for a fight. That was something Audrey needed to talk to MilitAIre about. It was bad enough that her mother had already lost the “fights” about Audrey dressing like a teenager instead of a little girl, and packing away all of the toys she’d outgrown… even if most of her cast-offs were being saved for Elodie to grow into.

And, Audrey suddenly realized with a chill, it was about to get worse. A familiar car was pulling up in front of the house… mid-afternoon on a Thursday.

Well, shit. This was going to give her mother something new to want to fight about.

Her comm buzzed in her pocket at that moment. MilitAIre was calling. She answered, aware that she only had a minute until the doorbell rang.

“What the hell’s going on?” she whispered, not wanting to wake Elodie or alert her mother yet.

“We have a problem. It’s nothing dangerous, but we need you at the safe house right away. Please assure your mother that you’ll be back before curfew. And don’t worry. It’s the truth.” The comm went dead.

Audrey set down Elodie’s carrier on the couch just before the doorbell rang.

“Who was on the comm?” her mother asked behind her. “And who’s at the door?”

“‘M’ called. There’s some kind of problem. But he promised he’d have me back here before curfew.”

“No. No, no no no. They can’t just show up out of the blue and take you away like it’s nothing.”

“Mom, It’ll be okay. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Her mother’s jaw clenched and she stormed over to the front door, unlocking it and throwing it open. “What the hell are you trying to—”

“Hello, Ma’am.” It was the agent she’d come to know as Five, one of three who were permitted to see her face and know where she lived, and the one who usually brought her to the safe house. He looked like a Secret Service agent from a centuries-old movie. “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“Inconvenience—”

“Miss MacNamera needs to come with me now. This is a matter of Federacy security.”

“It’s a what?”

“I assure you, she will be back before ten. Probably well before then.”

“You can’t just come in here and try to—”

“Mom!” Audrey felt like they were teetering on a dangerous edge.

“What, Audrey?”

“You need to calm down. If you get into a fight with a Federacy agent in front of the neighbors, they might decide not to return me at all.”

Her mother went chalky pale at her words, her hand fluttering up to her mouth.

Audrey pulled her into a hug. “It’s going to be okay. I love you. I will be back tonight, I swear it. Try not to worry.”

She hoped she wasn’t about to be made into a liar.

Neither she nor Five spoke until the car was in motion. Normally, they wouldn’t have spoken at all; his words to her mother were the first time she’d ever heard his voice.

“Any idea what’s going on?” she asked once they were a few blocks away from her mother’s house.

“Sorry. I’m not cleared to know. Just to deliver you to the security office.” That was, apparently, the official name for the safe house in his circles. He had an unusual mind, disciplined and clear, his thoughts oddly intentional and delineated with none of the clutter and free association she was used to reading in people. She wondered if it was deliberate, if he knew he was dealing with an esper. Not that she could ask. Asking anything would volunteer too much information in the process.

“I guess I’ll find out when I get there.” She settled back into the seat. “How much am I cleared to know about you, Five? I mean, since you know my name and where I live?”

He chuckled. “My name is Dennis. I know I’m allowed to tell you that much, but I’ll have to verify what else I can say.”

“Nice to meet you, Dennis.”

“You too, Audrey.” He gave her a wry smile in the rear-view mirror. “Thank you for rescuing me from your mother.”

“You’re welcome, but don’t worry. It’s been at least five years since she actually ate anybody alive.”

That got a laugh. “I dunno… she seemed to be sizing up my jugular.”

Audrey shrugged. “Long as she doesn’t go for the sweet spot, you’ll be fine.”

“The sweet spot?”

What the hell was she doing? “Don’t worry about it…”

She was going to have to think of a way to apologize to her mother, she decided as they drove on. If only…

Now, there’s a nice, non-horrible idea…

“Before you say anything,” she told the AIs as she entered the safe house, “I’m going to need CommissAIry to make a dozen chocolate éclairs for me to take back to my mom as a peace offering, because whatever’s going on just sent her freak-out levels into orbit. Peace in our time means éclairs. Understood?”

“Understood, Audrey,” MilitAIre said, his voice oddly gentle. “We really wouldn’t have brought you here if it weren’t an urgent matter.”

She took a deep breath, letting go of the bit of anger she’d been holding. “Okay. What’s going on?”

“Kyra Wittier-Collins has disappeared.”

“What?”

“She boarded a ship to the Lupus system at the New Fes spaceport. It reached its destination a week ago. General Toal wanted to make her a similar offer to the one that he made you, and he had arranged for its delivery once she got settled. Just an offer. No one was to attempt to take her into custody. But one of the agents in the detail apparently misunderstood the assignment.”

“Oh. Fuck.” Audrey sat down at one of the terminals and called up a set of profiles that she checked every week during her debriefing visits. “An offer like he made me? Training to be an independent ‘Operative?’”

“That was the plan,” MilitAIre told her. “He wants to assemble proof that the conditioning given to most esper ‘recruits’ actually makes them less effective in the field. His arguments against the conditioning on humanitarian grounds haven’t worked.”

She logged into the account that she’d set up, well before she and Kyra had left Tangiers Prime, where they could leave messages for each other. In the last half-year, she had left dozens of messages there, mostly recommendations of interesting films that EntertAIn had introduced her to, and the latest news about Amnesty Interplanetary’s battle on New Dartmouth to have Kyra exonerated.

All the messages she had sent were still unopened… but now there was a message waiting for her from Kyra. It had been sent a week earlier and had arrived via beacon courier while she and her mother had been meeting with the principal.

Don’t trust Toal. He tried to grab me. Going dark.
Always your sister. K.

“The agent tried to grab her?”

“I don’t believe that was his original intention. But he was shadowing her too closely and she ‘made’ him. An altercation ensued, and he then appears to have attempted to subdue her.”

“Fuck. Is he still alive?”

“He’ll survive his injuries, fortunately. General Toal has covered up almost all of what happened to prevent a manhunt from starting. The whole point had been to get her to voluntarily come in from the cold. Instead, Kyra has abandoned the flat she’d rented, and the Kali Montgomery ID you made her hasn’t been used since that night.”

Wait just one second…

“How do you know about the Kali Montgomery ID?” It wasn’t something she’d ever told MilitAIre, especially given his admonitions not to volunteer information. While she’d described making false IDs for herself, Kyra, and Tomlin, she’d never said which names and backgrounds the other two had been given. The name she’d picked for Tomlin, which meant “he will live” in Tamazight, had become cruelly ironic in the wake of everything.

“When I originally queried Military Intelligence about your real identity, back on the Nephrite Undine, I sent them copies of all the documentation you possessed as ‘Marianne Tepper.’ General Toal hadn’t known that name until after you left Tangiers Prime to reach the Undine, but he then traced your documents’ creation and discovered that you created two more identities at the same time, including Kali Montgomery. He was impressed by the quality of your work, by the way. You were only a few minor documents away from seamless identities.”

Audrey groaned, rubbing her forehead. Part of her wanted to ask which documents she’d missed, but she shoved that impulse down. That part of my life is over…

Was it, though? “This… is really bad.”

“It is,” MilitAIre agreed. “I’m sorry.”

“What happens now?” she asked after a moment. Had the emergency just been about getting ahead of the news before she could read Kyra’s message on her own, or was there something specific they wanted her to do?

And would she do it?

“We were hoping that you could reach out to her.”

“And?” Part of her had gone still in a way that she recognized from her time on the run; that unmoving moment while she watched to see which way a possible predator would go.

“Tell her your circumstances, tell her what we were trying to offer her, and encourage her to come in from the cold.”

Which, she had to admit, made sense. She hadn’t felt any serious fear in months—

Should she have, though?

Would she have been scared if her survival instincts had been better, and if she hadn’t been so keen on having someone else take control in the wake of the New Casablanca fiasco? Would she have surrendered first to Abecassis—believing him to be an arresting officer—and later to MilitAIre, if she hadn’t been so deep in the throes of self-loathing and a desire to be punished? Would General Toal’s plans for her have still inspired relief… or foreboding? Was Kyra being too paranoid… or was she being too trusting?

He always knew who we were and what we could do. He could have arrested us at any time.

But maybe not. Maybe that would have created a dangerous schism with the Meziane family that he had wanted to avoid. None of them, especially not Ewan, would have permitted her imprisonment, or Kyra’s.

Maybe the real urgency about getting them offworld had been to get them out from under the umbrella of protection the Mezianes had raised over them.

No, she decided after a moment. She’d never tried to read the General’s mind, but she had felt it when they were near each other, and had sensed genuine kindness and worry from him, both where she was concerned and where Kyra was. But…

He knew where I was going the whole time. He knew he could always find me again. Was he watching over Kyra the same way?

Or had he only become interested in her whereabouts once his objectives changed and he wanted to prove off-leash Operatives were superior to the heavily conditioned types?

Was there a leash hidden among those new objectives, as yet unseen?

One thing about AIs, she’d already noticed, was that they could let a silence stretch out as long as necessary without the slightest discomfort. That silence was only broken when, with the arrival of the dinner hour, CommissAIry had the safe house ’bots deliver a tray of fragrant chicken tagine, orange juice, and Maghrebi mint tea.

Comfort food, she realized. They understand comfort food… and they understand how uncomfortable all of this has me…

The move had energized her appetite, though. She ate, still thinking things over, before finally opening the messaging system again.

I heard about what happened. I hope you’re okay. General Toal enrolled me in WitSec to break my trail. I think he wanted to offer you the same deal and a safe way into the military. My handlers say one of the people assigned to make contact with you went off-mission and fucked it up. I believe they’re telling the truth. But if you aren’t sure—

First, she needed to make sure she was sure of what she planned to suggest. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and willed her mind into the starfield of the Apeiros.

Five minutes later, she opened her eyes again, feeling relieved.

—you don’t need to use this system to reach out to me. The Apeiros will relay messages between us. They promise to help, and they promise not to start talking to you all the time in your sleep again. I know they make you uncomfortable, but they can help you with a lot of things if you want them to. Elsewhere and another ’verse are habitable on my world. I’m on Deckard’s World. You can come here and stay in either ’verse, if you want to get away from everybody, and I’ll bring you supplies. It’s up to you. I just want you to be safe.

She took a deep breath, blew it out, and added in the thing she’d wanted to tell Kyra since before they had gone their separate ways.

My name is Audrey MacNamera and I am always your sister.

Love,
Tizzy

“Are you sure you want to send that?” MilitAIre asked as she finished. “It’s a risk.”

“You tell me how secure the system is,” Audrey muttered. “She needs a safe haven. Why not here?”

“The encryptions you have in place are comprehensive. It should be safe. And if she chooses to come here, we will protect her and let her choose her path. I promise you that.”

Audrey touched the “Send” button. “Where is General Toal right now?”

“On Helion Prime,” MilitAIre told her, “trying to learn more about what your ‘friend’ Irena is up to.”

Audrey nodded. So Kyra’s assumption that he had tried to grab her wasn’t because she had seen him in the Lupus system. He did, however, have high-speed courier drones that could get messages across the Federacy within a single day. They were expensive as fuck, but it appeared he was using them to run damage control on the botched contact mission… and to ensure that his side of the story arrived at the same time as Kyra’s.

Was reaching Kyra what was important to him… or keeping Audrey MacNamera on his side?

He had, she realized as she thought more about it, always been more interested in what she could do than what Kyra could.

“Dihya, I think, relies more on her physicality…”

Kyra had turned away from the Apeiros. In all probability, she was still only two ’verses wide in her five-shape, having spent months dreaming in cryo instead of cultivating additional ’verses with each Star Jump. She was deadly and formidable, but…

But that isn’t something new to him…

If Kyra’s talents were less interesting to him, though, then he had to genuinely care about helping her, and about making good on Tomlin’s promise to her. Didn’t he?

It felt like truth to her. She hoped she wasn’t being naïve.

True to their word, the AIs had “Eleven” drive her home shortly before Elodie’s bedtime, with chocolate éclairs for Audrey’s mother, huge, sticky cinnamon rolls for Alvin, and a supply of Elodie’s current favorite custard—she had been obsessed with banana custard for the last week—as peace offerings. She arrived at the house just before Elodie was due for her bedtime snack.

The four of them ate their desserts together, Audrey nibbling on an éclair and wishing she could have brought home some almond briouats without raising questions. Elodie, in particular, was ecstatic about the special treat.

“You okay?” Alvin asked as he pulled a ring of iced pastry off his roll.

“I will be,” she said. Her message to Kyra had gone out, but…

…she found herself more and more worried about her sister.

“I don’t guess you can tell us what all of the fuss was about,” her mother groused.

“I can, a little.” She and MilitAIre had worked that much out. “There’s a girl… we were in custody together for two months.”

Literally true. Just in Aceso instead of in WitSec. Using the truth to mislead disturbed her, but the truths underlying the illusions, assumptions, and lies of omission were still the most important details.

“We became friends. We started to think of each other as sisters, even. But… we had to be separated. We were too big a target together. Too risky. So… we were split up.”

Also literally true. It just hadn’t happened in a safe house, and the decision hadn’t exactly come from a WitSec handler. Her mother and Alvin would believe that they had been sheltering in place together, in some hidden location, for two months somewhere on Deckard’s World, developing a “best friends forever” bond over safe, protected activities.

Not fleeing a mental institution together before one of them could be dragged off and made to “stand trial” by the people who had committed genocide against her family; not figuring out how to negotiate a dangerous breach between universes that had infected them before it could drown them; not being flung into a deadly battle with hundreds of lives at stake and that multiversal breach their only decisive weapon… Just two girls killing time in a safe house…

…who were then separated by someone’s dispassionate judgment call, instead of being forced to break their own hearts to safeguard hundreds of fugitives and the millions of Imazighen who had stepped forward to protect them…

She took a deep breath. “She’s disappeared. One of the agents on her detail…”

That was one way to describe the idiot, anyway.

“…is in the hospital, and nobody knows where she is. They were hoping maybe I had a way to get in touch with her without breaking cover, but…”

She shook her head. She could be on her way to anywhere in the Federacy by now.

The Apeiros hadn’t been able to “hear” her when Audrey had asked, but they only ever “heard” Kyra when she was asleep and dreaming. She hid from them when she was awake… and even now Audrey was afraid that giving them permission to try to speak to her might be seen as a betrayal.

Wherever Kyra was, she was alone. Completely alone…

Audrey hadn’t meant to lose her composure, but a sob escaped her before she could stop it. Her mother’s arms were around her a second later.

“Sweetie, I’m so sorry.” Her mother’s voice was gentle and soothing, all of her fight from earlier gone. “If there’s anything we can do to help…”

Somehow, that just made the tears flow harder.

68.
Cuckoo, Cowbird, Soldier, Spy

Jade finally appeared on Saturday night, while Audrey was sleeping. She woke in the middle of the night to find a heavy, plurring blob of obese Siamese cat parked on her chest.

Now she really felt like she had come home, whoever she was.

Goblin was sitting on her dresser, staring at her. An oriental shorthair, his tiny, slender body was dominated by a massive pair of batwing ears. She’d missed his ridiculous little face. Esther was on her windowsill.

She’d wondered if she would even see the cats for a few days, and how long it would take them to remember her and get over their hurt and anger over her disappearance. Apparently not long at all.

As soon as she started petting Jade, both Goblin and Esther jumped onto the bed and demanded attention, too.

The “Welcome Home, Audrey” party had run late, with family, neighbors, and family friends staying until nearly midnight. By the time everyone had left, Audrey had nearly been asleep on her feet.

Almost nobody who had shown up to see her had been turned away, though. The only exceptions had been some tabloid reporters who had tried to sneak in. Alvin had come up with some very creative threats to get them to leave.

Fortunately it had been a warm evening, with clear skies and gentle breezes, since the party had been held outside. All the baked goods and casseroles that neighbors and friends had delivered, along with some additional food that Alvin had arranged while Audrey and her mother had been clothes shopping, had been set out for guests, and virtually all of it had been devoured before everyone went home. Audrey had tried a little bit of everything, herself, mindful of CommissAIry’s admonition to always go on culinary adventures if she could. Almost everything had been really good; everything had been part of “traditional American” cuisine. Minimally spicy, relying on a small subset of meats, vegetables, and cooking strategies, with the beverages and desserts heavily sweetened. It was all she’d known until she was almost thirteen.

It wasn’t enough anymore.

Well, at least CommissAIry will expand my horizons today… One day out of every week, her culinary adventures would range past the orbit of Deckard’s World.

Going clothes-shopping on a weekend day had, in retrospect, been a bit of a mistake, if an unavoidable one. Audrey’s mother had taken her to the largest and most popular shopping mall in town—Deckard’s World ostentatiously modeled itself after a period of American history when malls had abounded, and MilitAIre had given her fascinating articles to read about their deaths at the start of the twenty-first century, something that made her wonder how they could coexist now with the same technologies that had originally killed them—and they had promptly run into several girls she’d attended middle school with.

While a few of the girls had looked surprised to see her, most seemed to have caught the newsfeeds about her return. They had a million questions that Audrey had to dodge, but fortunately she and MilitAIre had already worked out all of the dodges. After picking out only a few outfits, though, both she and her mother felt enough of a sense of being under a microscope that they’d cut the trip short.

“We’ll finish on Monday,” her mother had told her as they got back in the car, “when most of the lookie-loos are back in school.”

Audrey had nodded, noting the implication that she wouldn’t be enrolled back into school immediately. They were only one week away from Spring Break, anyway, which was sandwiched between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Fortunately, both fell on Saturdays; in a year, she realized, there would have to be special arrangements to have her “debriefing days” moved to Saturday for those two weekends so that her family didn’t feel aggrieved by her absence from major holidays.

I’m sure MilitAIre already has a plan for that…

She was also aware that her mother had struggled with the shopping trip in other ways.

The days of buying her “little girl” clothes were over and had already been ending before she disappeared; the pastel colors, rainbows, and cutesy fantasy animals that her mother had gravitated toward had already become inappropriate choices when she’d been in middle school. Fortunately, they weren’t even available in her new size, but she had seen the way her mother still struggled with her choices.

She and MilitAIre had planned it all out, though. She was to choose clothing that would lend her some invisibility, dressing in a way that blended her into the crowd as much as someone in the throes of notoriety could blend. Nothing super-fashionable; they had examined the current trends and decided which items were too trendy, too close to the cutting edge, for her to be seen wearing yet. Nothing too outdated or exotic, either. She was to fall in the middle, her clothes unexceptional enough to avoid drawing people’s eyes. Too many other things would do that already. They had even gone over which colors were most appropriate for letting people’s eyes slide past her.

She had argued about that, a little. She wanted to be able to wear a few of the blues and greens that made her think of Ewan. MilitAIre had relented, but had stressed that she could only pick items of clothing in those colors if they met the rest of the invisibility criteria they’d worked out.

Her mother had been surprised by her choices, especially as she’d bypassed dresses completely in favor of jeans, a pair of cargo pants exactly the color of the sands on a particular beach in Elsewhere, and unadorned tops in shades that made her think of Ewan’s bedspread and the mermaid tail in his painting. Audrey had a feeling that, when they resumed on Monday and fewer people were watching, there might be a bigger tug-of-war over the next round of purchases.

At least we won’t be arguing about heel heights, she thought with amusement as Goblin head-butted her hand. She’d only just been allowed to start wearing heels when she’d taken off, but she’d been more of an average height then. Now she towered over most of her classmates in flats; adding even a low heel into the mix would go against the “rules of invisibility” she and MilitAIre had worked out.

It had, of course, been impossible to be invisible at the party.

Everyone had been there to see her. Although a lot of them were people who had genuinely missed her, there had been a whole lot of acquaintances who had mostly come to gawk. Remembering the way Ewan had moved through his farewell party, though, she had tried to make a point of at least saying hello to everybody, glad that her eidetic recall extended to names and faces. There was only a handful of people whose names she had needed to ask. Most of them had turned out to be members of Alvin’s family.

“The Audrey I remember was shy,” she’d overheard one of the neighbors saying as she moved from one group of well-wishers to the next.

Had she been? It hadn’t felt that way to her. She’d been four years younger than the youngest of that neighbor’s children; none of them had been interested in playing with her or including her in their games. Was she supposed to have made a pest of herself anyway?

When it was time to talk to that neighbor, though, she’d been polite and friendly and had asked after the kids in question. The youngest, as she’d suspected, was off at college. None of them had been in town to come to the party, although a few of them would be arriving on Friday for the holidays.

“If anyone seems to feel like you’re not the person they remember, bring up shared experiences,” MilitAIre had instructed her. “It’s not an uncommon phenomenon after a separation of even a year or two for people to feel like the person who returns is an imposter.” He’d given her articles to read about famous cases where people became convinced that an imposter had replaced a loved one—in a very few cases, rightly so—and about an actual mental illness, Capgras’ Syndrome, that could trigger such delusions.

Part of Audrey’s job at the party had been to reintroduce herself to everyone and make them feel like the girl they had once known had returned… make them feel like they weren’t being confronted by a stranger with a similar face, a changeling stepping into Audrey MacNamera’s place.

Even if, at times, she felt like that was exactly what she was.

By the time all of the food was gone and people were saying their goodbyes, she had been physically and mentally exhausted but had managed to talk to every guest at least once. Elodie had been put to bed hours earlier; her cousins and most of her former classmates had been taken home ahead of the 10 pm curfew for minors. Most of the people who had remained, although ostensibly there to welcome her back, were there to support her mother and Alvin. Their topics of discussion weren’t especially interesting to her, so she’d rested on a lounge chair and turned her gaze to the other ’verses for a while.

In Elsewhere, she’d been surrounded by enormous trees that reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of ancient redwood forests on Earth. Only a few stars peeked through their canopy. In Wonderland, a meadow full of strange flowers spread out around her. Overhead, the stars blazed in a deep black sky free of light pollution; to the south, ribbons of colorful light danced along the horizon. The stars in U37d and most of the other ’verses, she noticed, were almost identical in placement, but that ’verse had a bright orange moon that was visible only there. In U27, a brilliantly-lit asteroid hovered less than a mile above her, slowly tumbling closer. A school of fish floated nearby, sleeping, in U115, limned by greenish moonlight—

“Sometimes I feel like she’s still missing…” she’d heard her mother say.

Damn it. She’d stayed still; her mother must have thought she had fallen asleep, or was out of hearing range, or both.

“She’s been gone for nearly two years,” Alvin had said. “It’d be even more strange if she came back completely unchanged, wouldn’t it?”

The two of them had moved away from the other guests, speaking quietly. It became obvious that they thought no one could hear them as they continued to talk.

“I guess. But tomorrow I have to let them take her away from me again…”

“Just for the day. She’ll be back before curfew. I was able to speak to one of her handlers by comm for a few minutes, and he promised me that she’ll be home by nine.”

“Did you get his name?”

“No, and I didn’t expect to. That’s not how these people work. I got a letter. M. By his accent, I think he’s originally from the Cohasset System.”

“So a man named M from the Cohasset System is in charge of my daughter’s well-being?”

“He says he’s part of a team of handlers.”

“A team? Whatever happened takes an entire team to protect her?”

“Bettie,” Alvin hushed her as her voice began to rise. “I know this is hard. We may never know what happened. But we have her back, and—”

“Do we? Sometimes I think I see my little girl, but then…”

“Shhhhhh. It’s her. You know it’s her. She’s a teenager now, though, and every teenager’s a little bit of an alien. That’s all it is. You’ll see… you have your daughter back. She’s just… the teenage version.”

The teenage version had decided to yawn and stretch at that moment. Enough was enough. Alvin and her mother, locked in a hug, started and looked over at her as she sat up in the lounge chair. She pretended to notice them for the first time.

“I think maybe I dozed off,” she said. “What time is it?”

Alvin glanced at his chrono. “Time for the party to end, I think. You want to say goodnight to your grandparents?”

A long round of hugs and goodbyes later, she had trudged upstairs, stopping for a moment to look in on Elodie. Her little sister looked perfect and peaceful, untouched by any of the horrors held at bay—mostly—by the carefully cultivated veneer of ancient American suburbia.

There’s so much I need to keep her safe from… Audrey had thought before going to her own room. The first night, it had been hard to fall asleep, but she’d been tired enough that it was easier the second time.

Now, with three purring cats demanding attention, she suspected she might need to take a nap sometime during her “debriefing.”

I missed you so much, she told them silently, and three feline heads turned sharply toward her.

She was still thinking about her first coherent conversation with three cats when the car from the safe house came to pick her up.

“I don’t like this,” her mother muttered as she looked through the window. Per the instructions they had received, only Audrey was allowed to approach the car. “I really don’t like this.”

“I’ll be home tonight, Mom,” she promised, giving her a quick hug. “It’ll be okay.”

“It’s just… you’ve only been back for less than two days…”

“I know. It’s going to be all right.” She could see something mulish starting to form on her mother’s face. “This first time, though… it’s also partly a test.”

“A test?” Her mother frowned.

“To see if we can really follow the rules or not.”

That brought her mother up short as she contemplated just what might happen if they failed the test.

Please don’t fail the test, please don’t fail the test, please don’t fail the test…

Her trail had been broken. The masquerade was in place. Her family knew she was alive and well. But this wasn’t a game. General Toal had made that abundantly clear to her. If her family made it unsafe for her to hide in plain sight, under her original name, she’d be moved to another world and given an entirely new identity. She would have to find her way to a “normal” adolescence there, away from almost everyone and everything she knew. The AIs would accompany her, and the Apeiros would always be with her, but there would soon be nothing left of the girl she had been. This was her only chance at a familiar anchor.

Her mother sighed, her eyes welling, and nodded. “You should go out there before they get worried,” she managed, but her voice broke on the last word.

Audrey pulled her into another hug for a moment before, finally, kissing her cheek and going out the door. “I’ll be home soon, Mom, don’t worry.”

One of the Federacy agents who had an office on the first floor was driving her. It was a silent ride; both of them knew the rules. He let her out in front of the safe house and drove off, while she walked up to the door and palm-printed her way in.

“Welcome back, Audrey,” MilitAIre said as the door locked behind her. “How was the party?”

“Thanks, MilitAIre,” she said, taking a seat in the Security Room. “It was a little weird. Some people had their doubts, but I think I sold it.”

“It does help that you really are Audrey MacNamera, of course.”

“Yeah. I think some of them just… froze me in amber in their heads.” She sighed. “Even with the long hair, I’m different enough that they’re having trouble processing it. And, I mean, I’m only thirteen months older, biologically. Think how much more different I’d be if twenty-two months had really passed for me. But it was still too much for a lot of them.”

“I like your amber metaphor,” MilitAIre said. “They fossilized you in their minds, yes. This is what underlies many of the cases of changeling delusions—the ones that aren’t neurologically driven, anyway, or rooted in prejudices against autistic children. Time changes everyone, and the people who expected to watch all of those changes happen to you missed seeing them.”

“So how come I feel like a con artist?” There were moments when Audrey felt like she was faking it all.

“Because you can’t ever tell them what drove all of the changes,” he reminded her. “You can’t tell them where you really were. You’re not lying about who you once were, but you are concealing a great deal about who you’ve become. You’re playing a role within a role: the WitSec ward with no power over her situation, who must pretend to be a former teen runaway who spent two years on the streets. So yes, you are running a long game on almost everyone, and countless lives depend on your success.”

“Jeez. Only two days in and I already needed to decompress here.” She blew out a breath, leaning back in the chair. “What if I can’t handle six whole days at a time ‘out in the cold?’”

“You let me know, and we send an agent to pick you up, wherever you are, and we inform your mother that we needed to do a debriefing. I believe, though, that it will get easier soon. Mr. Baxter is under the impression that we’re protecting you from an organized crime group, and he’s personally flipped a few lower-level informants and enrolled them into WitSec, so he takes its protocols very seriously. I believe he’ll not only cooperate fully with us, but also ensure that your mother does.”

That explained why Alvin had initially had such a low opinion of picking up a WitSec ward. It made sense, though; as an assistant D.A. trying to build cases against criminal enterprises, he’d probably had to offer deals to petty criminals, and maybe even a few genuine dirtbags, to get to the real movers behind their crimes. The very thing that the Quintessa Corporation had, it seemed, feared authorities might try to do with Makarov if they took him alive.

“He’s been a lot easier to get along with than I expected,” she admitted.

“That was a pleasant surprise.” In fact, MilitAIre didn’t seem surprised at all.

“I’m guessing you were the ‘M’ he spoke with on the comm? He thinks you’re probably from Cohasset Prime.”

“Yes.” Now MilitAIre sounded amused. “My standard voice is modeled on the Boston accent of old Earth, but most of the people who settled in the Cohasset System were originally from that megacity. Although their accent is slightly more rhotic.”

Audrey nodded. “So. What’s our agenda for today?”

There was actual debriefing over breakfast; CommissAIry had chosen a “traditional Japanese breakfast” for her first culinary adventure of the day. Audrey devoured saba shioyaki and tamagoyaki while she and MilitAIre went over everyone she’d had contact with in the last two days, something that made her deeply thankful once more that her eidetic recall extended to names and faces. She sipped miso soup and crunched dried seaweed while they worked at identifying the reporters who had attempted to crash the welcome home party, and balanced her first tastes of tsukemono and natto with steamed rice while they identified the unnamed friends her former classmates had been with at the mall. The only flavor she wasn’t entirely sure of was the natto, but CommissAIry had warned her that fermented soybeans were an acquired taste for most people, albeit an extremely nutritious food.

While she sipped green tea, she updated the AIs on her careful, hands-off explorations of the other ’verses.

“This is good information,” MilitAIre said when she was done. “Now, I think we’re ready to try the experiment we spoke of. Are you willing?”

“Absolutely.”

Everything, she noticed, had already been set up by the AIs’ robotic support. She picked up the audio recorder set out on the table, switched it on, took a deep breath, and isomorphed all the way over into Wonderland.

It was a little chillier in Wonderland than in U1, she noticed, but not badly so. The day was gray and overcast.

“Five… four… three… two…” she could hear MilitAIre counting down in U1. She focused on her task: pulling the sound waves from U1 into Wonderland, where the audio recorder would pick them up.

“…one.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.’

“Please return to U1 now, Audrey.”

Well, there’d definitely be no way of faking that. Audrey switched the audio recorder off as she isomorphed back. “The Raven, huh?”

“Indeed. Now, let’s see if we were successful.”

The recording was audible, but very faint. “Can we try again? I think I can get the volume up higher.”

They tried three more times before they achieved a volume that both she and MilitAIre were happy with.

“Damn, I wish I’d known how to do this,” Audrey admitted ruefully, “back when I was spying on Makarov.”

“That incident is what inspired this experiment,” MilitAIre told her. “General Toal suggested it after I reported the intel that you’d been able to gather during Makarov’s conversation with his unknown accomplice. Had a recording of the conversation been available, it might have been an opportunity to move against the Quintessa Corporation, possibly even damage their lock on interstellar travel. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know how; General Toal blames himself for being more concerned with getting you offworld than with offering you training in your skills. But that was before.”

“Before…?”

“He has a proposal for you,” MilitAIre said, sidestepping her question. “Your independence, and your unique skills, create an opportunity to prove that an esper doesn’t have to be broken and enslaved in order to be an effective Federacy asset.”

“…He wants me to be an Operative?” A tiny chill moved through her… but also a small thrill.

“In training. On call in emergencies if your talents warrant it. What he really wants is for you to get to be an ordinary teenage girl, but if a threat were to appear on this world—”

“I’m in.” A threat to Deckard’s World was a threat to Elodie.

“I’ve reserved the right to veto any operation that might compromise your cover or put you in harm’s way. He’s accepted those terms. I also reserved the right to veto all operations if you were reluctant or if they appear to cause any kind of psychological damage.”

Audrey nodded. “I’m guessing that he’s especially keen on the idea of me being able to infiltrate and record from another ’verse.”

“Yes. Would you feel up to such an operation later this afternoon?”

Right out of the gate! “I think so. What’ll I be doing?”

“An executive from the Quintessa Corporation is in Settlement Point to negotiate the further expansion of direct Star Jump routes to and from the Plymouth System. At three p.m., he’s scheduled to hold a conference call with Corporation HQ. Such calls are rare and closely guarded, requiring near-instantaneous transmission of signals across a hundred light-years. The technology that powers these calls is something that the Quintessa Corporation has withheld from the Federacy, but no, General Toal doesn’t want you to try to steal anything. We just want to know what they discuss, what warrants that kind of effort and expense.”

After CommissAIry took her on an Ethiopian culinary adventure for lunch—doro wat and injera with sides of azifa and gomen, with a non-alcohol version of shamita—Audrey dressed up in her weird gender-concealing costume and mask. Isomorphing into Wonderland, she waited outside for an agent’s car to pull up in U1. It was a different agent than the one who had brought her to the building, which was probably a wise move. She climbed into the car and settled onto the seat before isomorphing back into U1.

The agent flinched; that was the only sign he showed that anything unusual had happened. “Sixteen to Control. Phantom is on board. Proceeding to target location.”

Phantom. Jeez. Well, she reflected, that was the word she pulled out most often to describe interacting with U1 from across the threshold.

The agent drove her into the heart of downtown Settlement Point, unspeaking, and into the parking garage below its tallest building.

Shit, that’s not gonna work… He was about to descend below the ground in both Elsewhere and Wonderland. She couldn’t isomorph from there.

Pushing off of the seat, she isomorphed into Wonderland and let herself drop a few inches down onto the sandy turf. At least the car had been moving at a crawl. Sitting up, she checked her equipment for any damage. It all looked unscathed.

Might as well run a test right now… She switched on the transmitter that she and EntertAIn had set up before lunch. “MilitAIre, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Audrey. Sixteen says you vanished from the car before he reached the drop off point. What happened?”

“We need to go over the rules of topography sometime. I can’t isomorph underground.”

“My mistake. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna need to ‘phantom’ my way in through the front doors instead of your chosen entry point. Glad to know this system’s working, though. I’ll still record the conversation on my end as well.” The idea of putting a high-powered receiver in Wonderland, with hardware that straddled the threshold and would allow MilitAIre to actively record on his end, had been the next step, and hadn’t taken long to set up at all.

Kinda the opposite of hiding the fact that someone outside of Quintessa has access to the multiverse, she thought as she walked through the glittering steelglass façade of the building and into its lobby. I wonder what prompted Toal to change that policy.

It took hitchhiking on four elevator rides to get close to the level she wanted, and then a nervewracking climb up two flights of stairs hundreds of feet above the ground in Wonderland—where the wind had, thankfully, subsided for the moment—but finally she was on the floor where the Quintessa executive had scheduled his call. Technicians were setting up equipment for him, while he paced in a nearby lobby.

Fuck.

“He’s like her,” she told MilitAIre, hoping that the man—or whatever he was—wouldn’t sense her presence somehow. “Half in U1, half in some hell place. I can see the darkness all around him.”

“Disturbing, but not unexpected. He shouldn’t be able to see into Wonderland, though, any more than the envoy on Tangiers Prime could see into Elsewhere. Stay calm.”

She walked into the conference room, looking over the equipment. “Fuck, I think I know how the technology works, guys. I think he’s using an apeirochoron as a transmitter somehow.”

The familiar, seamless box sat on the conference table, wires running from it to both the camera that would record the executive and the display he would watch.

“Don’t touch it. Remember you’re observing and recording only. Your intel is noted, and confirms a working hypothesis.”

“What hypothesis is that?”

“It’s above your clearance level, for now, but you’ll know soon.”

Fuckin’-A, did he just “I’ll tell you when you’re older” me? Audrey sighed and sat down in one of the chairs she suspected nobody would be using. “Standing by to record.”

Would the executive notice that the sound waves were moving out of U1? She hoped not. He entered the room and locked the doors, touching several controls as she started her recorder and set her suit microphone to Constant Transmission. She was aware of the way the sound waves were moving differently and crossing a multiversal threshold, but hopefully he wouldn’t be, since he only existed on one side of that particular one. He had no presence in Wonderland.

“There he is now,” a familiar voice said. The envoy! “How are you, Colin?”

The executive smiled at the screen. “I’m well, thank you. How are you, Irena? Where has your new assignment taken you?”

“I’m now on Helion Prime,” the envoy—Irena—said. “Since the relief flights to Furya have moved from Tangiers to Helion for a few years, I will be monitoring that traffic.”

“Any word on the two Furyans you thought you sensed on Tangiers?” Colin asked.

Irena sighed. “Nothing. It’s possible that they were just the children of soldiers who served at the Caldera, but either way, I really wanted to get to them before the Federacy did. They’ve snapped up almost all the espers, and we need at least one. Preferably a strong one, a real Furyan. Ideally a male, but at this point, I’ll make do with what I can get. We’re running out of time.”

“What’s the revised timetable?”

“If the pattern holds, three years until the Coalsack System, and then another year until Helion.”

“So you believe it’s going in order.” Colin sounded awed.

“Yes, we think it is—they are. How are negotiations going?”

“Reasonably well. But there’s a little snag. Deckard’s World is isolationist and xenophobic about other cultures. They’re not sure they want to be one of the new Federacy hubs.”

“They had better find a way to get over that. We’re going to lose all of the current ones within the next fifteen years. It’s accelerating.”

“I’ll sweeten the pot.”

“Do that,” Irena said. “You’re authorized to extend Tier 2 amenities. We need this fallback position. Make it happen.”

“On my oath as a Kirshbaum.”

Irena rolled her eyes. “We’re all Kirshbaums. Don’t belabor the point. Just get it done. And if you hear of any rumors of Furyans, I need to know immediately.”

“What about asking her for help?”

“You know what she’ll say. She’ll demand the impossible. Again. There’s no reasoning with anyone on Furya itself. We need one of their lost children. Rumor has it there may be a lead on Helion, but I haven’t tracked it down yet.”

“I’ll have the deal sewn up in forty-eight hours, tops.”

“Good.” Irena vanished from the screen.

“Auntie fucking bitch,” Colin muttered and stamped out of the room.

Audrey was alone with the apeirochoron. She stood up, walking closer, and reached out her hand—

No, little sister, you may not.

—and found herself sitting in the back seat of Sixteen’s car as he pulled up to the safe house.

…The hell?

67.
Suspended in the Tangled Web

“Oh no, sweetie, it’s okay! Don’t cry!”

Audrey reached out, gathering Elodie up as her baby sister’s face crumpled. The little girl had been fine until their mother had started crying. And for some reason, what had set her off was the realization that Audrey had grown six full inches since her disappearance.

Alvin was hugging his wife already, trying to comfort her, so Audrey held Elodie close and rubbed her little sister’s back. It’s okay, she told the little girl silently. Everything’s going to be okay.

Elodie went quiet against her, sniffling but already relaxing. Who…?

She doesn’t know who I am yet, Audrey thought. And she wasn’t “sending” the way Sebby had; Audrey could only hear her thoughts because she was listening and deliberately touching her sister’s mind. Gently, carefully, she dug deeper, trying to see what kinds of concepts Elodie would understand.

She had a dozen words she could articulate easily, another two dozen that frustrated her because she couldn’t get her mouth to shape them properly—Audrey could remember feeling vexed like that when she’d been tiny—and a hundred more words that she understood when she heard them but couldn’t call up at will yet when she wanted them.

Family, Audrey told her. Elodie hadn’t yet met any of Audrey’s cousins, she realized; they were all children of her father’s siblings. But she had a Cousin Josephine on her father’s side. Like Jo-Jo. But even closer.

Alvin and her mother were watching the two of them, both looking stunned. Apparently Elodie was usually wary of strangers; the way she was now cuddling up to Audrey was unexpected.

The precinct Captain—Minter—walked into the interview room, shaking his head, and sat down with them. “I have all the paperwork here. I’d advise you to read it carefully before you sign it, but you are both lawyers so hopefully you don’t need that advice from me. It’s… not a great situation, but I guess we’ll make do with what we have.”

“What do you mean?” her mom demanded. “What’s wrong now?”

Minter sighed. “You’re not her legal guardians. You’re ‘interim custodians.’ She’s still legally a ward of the Federacy Witness Security program. Every Sunday she has to go back to them for ‘debriefing.’ Which, apparently, will take up the whole day. The rest of the time, she can stay with you, as long as some… stringent… conditions are met.”

“Such as?” Alvin growled.

“She can’t ever discuss where she was for the last twenty-two-plus months. She’s not allowed to talk about what she saw, who she’s been with, where she was kept, or any other particulars related to the case or cases she’s part of. You’re not allowed to ask her about any of it. The WitSec program is retaining all authority over her medical care, schooling, and living accommodations, and reserves the right to take her back at any time. Any travel plans must be cleared with her handlers, especially if they include a Sunday.”

“I’m her mother! How the hell is this possible?”

“It’s…” Minter rubbed his face with one hand as if pushing back against a headache. “It’s honestly surprising they’re giving her back at all. I couldn’t get many details from my contacts in the program. Whatever it was that happened, the threat to her life was big enough that they couldn’t even tell law enforcement she was somewhere safe. You know what that means, Al.”

Alvin nodded tightly. He’d gone pale.

He’s thinking ‘organized crime,’ Audrey thought, pretending that she was too preoccupied with her sister to listen. It’s a few orders of magnitude worse than that, but as long as he takes it seriously…

“But something changed. They think it’s safe to return her now, but it might not be if anyone outside of their own ‘inner circle’ figures out why they took her. Shit, these kinds of cases… everybody in the precinct today has already been sent NDAs they have to sign if they want to keep their jobs and stay out of the glue, even the fucking janitor. Yours are in the stack, too. Odds are all of our comms are gonna be tapped for months. None of us are allowed to tell anyone, on or off the record, who really had her all this time. Just… take her home and be happy you have her at all.”

It took an hour for her mother to read through all the fine print on the forms, and another half hour of arguing with Alvin before she agreed to sign everything, once she understood that those signatures were the only way she could take Audrey home—or ever see her again—at all. Audrey spent the whole time playing with Elodie, bonding with her beautiful baby sister.

“You need to tell John,” Alvin said as they finally drove home.

“Damn it, yeah… he’ll be relieved as hell to know she was somewhere on Deckard’s World the whole time,” her mother replied, her voice still wobbly. “He was so scared she’d—”

Her mother glanced warily back at her. She pretended to be entirely focused on playing with her little sister.

“He thought she’d show up on Furya,” her mother whispered, apparently still unaware of how good her hearing was, “and get Quantified. I’m amazed WitSec didn’t figure out what she is.”

So her mother had always known. The whole thing with the fortune teller had been, as MilitAIre had surmised, about scaring her into hiding her abilities even from herself.

That, at least, was one of the traumas First-AId had been able to fix.

“A lotta people to call tonight,” Alvin said as he turned into a familiar part of town. Christmas lights and increasingly elaborate decorations adorned most of the houses they drove past. “I guess we need to figure out what we’re telling all of them.”

“Maybe just tell ’em I ran away and finally came home,” Audrey suggested.

“But they’ll think such awful things,” her mother protested.

“We can’t exactly take back the missing person posters,” Alvin pointed out. “Everybody knows we had no idea where she was. If we suddenly try to pretend that she was off at some boarding school, or in a hospital, they’ll know we’re lying. And if we say someone abducted her… then we’ll have to lie a whole lot more and keep a lot of stories straight. Simplest is best.”

He caught her eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“Sorry kiddo, but we’re gonna have to let everybody think you spent the last twenty-two months out on the streets somewhere.”

She shrugged and nodded. It was what she’d suggested, after all. Everybody’s gonna think I’m the kind of kid Imam thought I was.

She wondered how many of her old school friends would be forbidden to hang out with her by their parents. Not that hang-outs had happened all that often, even before…

MilitAIre had gone over, at length, the likely scenarios that people would spin out about where she’d been and what she’d done while she was missing. Thief. Drug addict. Kiddie prostitute. Sleeping on the streets, scavenging food from dumpsters. The kinds of stories that nobody included in the child-runaway adventure genre stories kids read, because they were too true, too real. Both her mother and Alvin were currently feeling relief that she’d been spared those scenarios, neither of them realizing that her actual path—even if she had been mostly spared sleeping on the streets—had been every bit as harrowing as any of the ones they could imagine.

Accomplice to a felon. Fugitive. Cybercriminal. Murderer. Jack B. Badd.

The scenarios people would come up with could never approach the darkness that had actually surrounded her… and slid inside her. She doubted anyone would come up with a story that was worse than the truth.

Audrey had mentally prepared herself for the weirdness of walking into her mother’s house again, six inches taller than she’d left it, with Alvin and Elodie now living in it. It was still jarring.

The living room had been redone. The funny part was that it reminded her of the way it had looked when she’d been little. Her mom’s preference for white furniture and carpeting had given way to the reality that babies, toddlers, and little kids were stain magnets, something Bettie Paige MacNamera had swiftly chosen to forget once Audrey had been old enough to shame into not climbing furniture. And, more specifically, once Audrey’s father had moved out and she’d traded “MacNamera” back for “Hawthorne,” and the “rustic” style John MacNamera had preferred for gleaming, white furniture that even the cats had feared to touch, much less sit upon.

That untouchable furniture was gone again. Alvin, evangelical streak aside, seemed to have some kindred tastes in décor to her own father, down to similar fishing trophies.

Huh. Maybe living with him would be less alien than she’d expected.

Esther, her sleek grey coat puffed out and her body flat to the floor, scuttled through the room and past, into the back hall, to hide in the basement. That had gone about as well as Audrey had expected. She wondered which pieces of furniture Goblin and Jade were hiding under.

The dining room hadn’t changed much. Except…

Had they made some weird kind of shrine out of her spot at the table? Her favorite place-setting was out, and it looked… dusty.

The kitchen, at least, looked normal, although things had moved around a little.

By the door between the kitchen and dining room were a whole series of markings that had been made since she was younger than Elodie, measuring her height as she grew. The last one, labeled January 1, 2516, marked her as 5’4” tall.

This, she realized, was what her mother had been crying over. All the markings that had been missed in the intervening time, six inches’ worth of growth, trips to stores for new shoes and clothes, the moment when the two of them would have been standing at eye level with each other before Audrey shot up again and passed her by… memories that could never be made, never be recovered. She could feel her mother struggling with it again.

“Looks like we need to make a new mark here, yeah?” she asked, trying to keep her own voice steady.

“Looks like,” her mother answered, her voice breaking on the words.

Audrey turned around and hugged her before either of them could set Elodie off again. Alvin, his expression remarkably wise, took the little girl out of the room.

Not such an asshole after all…

After a while, they composed themselves and went upstairs.

She’d heard of parents turning their lost or missing children’s rooms into shrines. She’d been warned that her mother might have done that while she was gone. It was still weird to see. To remember that she had once been the girl who had lived in this space…

Of course, she thought, most of the decorating had been done by her mother; she hadn’t had very strong opinions about such things. Her mom had liked the white frills and lacy curtains. Most of the colors in the room were pastels. Audrey found herself wondering how much it might bother everyone if she changed it up. Maybe some brighter colors…

She realized that she was envisioning dressing it up like she and Kyra had dressed up first their apartment and then their room in the ait Meziane house. Bright colors and patterns, driftwood and shells… would it be safe, she wondered, to make those kinds of changes?

Maybe not right away. The fact that she’d come back with new tastes and interests was something that had to be slowly, subtly introduced.

Frills, pastels, and unicorns it is… for now, she thought, interested to note that the bedspread and pillowcases had been washed recently. They had been trying to keep the room ready for her to return at any moment. Part of her was a little amazed that it had paid off for them.

And part of her wondered if Audrey MacNamera would ever really come home to them at all.

She resolved to try very hard not to make her mother wonder the same thing.

None of the clothes are going to fit me anymore—

The doorbell rang. Both she and her mother turned toward the bedroom doorway as they heard Alvin walk over to the front door and open it.

“Alvin! Oh my God! Did I see Audrey get out of your car just a little while ago?”

Viola Trent, neighborhood gossip. So it begins.

Whatever they told Viola would be what the whole town ended up “knowing.”

Her eyes met her mother’s, and she saw the same resigned knowledge in them. “Here we go,” her mother mouthed.

“You did, Viola. Audrey’s back home.” Alvin was managing to sound extremely friendly, which Audrey found a little amazing. Twenty-three months of having her for a neighbor ought to have tried his patience by now.

“That’s wonderful news! Where has she been? Is she all right? We were all talking about how there’d be another vigil in just a few more weeks—”

“She’s fine. She’s settling back in. We’re just glad to have her back home where she’s safe.”

“You might want to call the family now before she does,” Audrey whispered, and watched her mother’s eyes widen in alarm at the thought.

“I’ll message their comms,” her mother whispered back, sitting down on her bed.

It was a simple message, sent simultaneously to everyone in the family—including, Audrey noticed, her father all the way on Furya, although that message would probably take a week to reach him—with little embellishment:

Audrey’s safe! She’s home!

I guess I am, she reflected, sitting down too and looking around. Toys and games that she’d once played with sat in their customary places, none of them things she yearned to play with now. She hadn’t thought about them, much less missed them, even once on her run. They felt like artifacts of a life that wasn’t even hers.

Funny how it was Kyra’s centuries-lost stuffed rabbit that suddenly came to mind and put a lump in her throat…

A pair of reflective eyes were staring at her from beneath her dresser. There you are, Goblin…

She had definitely thought about, and missed, the cats.

Downstairs, Viola was still trying to get the gory details out of Alvin, who wasn’t inclined to play along.

“You hear such terrible stories about teenage runaways and their fates. And all those traffickers and the things they do to children, too, it’s so unsettling—”

“Like I said, Viola, Audrey’s fine. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but we have a lot to do now that she’s home. Thank you for coming by.” He managed to get the door closed seconds before both his and her mother’s comms began chiming.

While they talked to various relatives, Audrey took over Elodie again, letting her little sister show her around her room and tell her—in what was largely babble to anyone but an esper—all about her favorite toys and games.

I’d never have left if I’d known you were coming, she thought wistfully. No wonder her mother and Alvin had rushed the wedding… no wonder Alvin had been feeling stressed and surly when he’d moved in. Everything made a new kind of sense now.

“You are the most beautiful little girl ever,” she told Elodie, just as Alvin appeared in the doorway.

“Your father’s family wants to come over tonight to see you. Is that all right? Or do you want to wait until tomorrow night?”

“What works better for you?” she asked him. “This is a whole lot to drop on your plate out of the blue.”

“I think your mother would rather wait until tomorrow night. Are those all the clothes you have? Should we take you shopping for some tomorrow?”

She shrugged. “The safe house had stuff for me to wear, but… it’s basic government issue stuff. I don’t think I’m gonna fit into my old clothes, though, so probably.”

That actually made him crack a smile. “No, I don’t think you will. Tell you what… you and your mom can go pick out some things tomorrow, and I’ll get everything set up for an organized gathering tomorrow night. A real welcome-home party, even.”

“Sounds good,” she told him, cuddling her little sister close. The way he looked at and spoke to her now, fond and avuncular, was so different from the uncomfortable way he’d treated her before.

Being a dad has mellowed him out, she decided. I might have made things ‘too real’ before, but now reality has taken over.

Word had spread, and the local news services had picked up the story, too. MilitAIre sent her comm a link to one story, a brief vid clip showing her emerging from the courthouse with her mother and Alvin on either side of her, an image of her Missing Persons shot in the corner of the screen for comparison. Audrey MacNamera Found Safe, Returned to Her Mother, the caption read. No details about her whereabouts until then had been made available yet, a peeved-sounding news reader added.

Neighbors began trying to drop by, most of them bringing baked goods or casseroles.

Elodie, meanwhile, decided that she’d been held enough and it was time to go walking. She let Audrey hold her hands while she did, but insisted on the two of them going down the stairs together. Audrey was so focused on her baby sister that she barely noticed several would-be guests gawking at her from the foyer.

“She’s so tall now!” she heard a familiar voice gasp. Apparently Viola had come back.

More visitors arrived almost as fast as Alvin and her mother could get rid of the last ones. Not really ready to talk to a lot of people yet, Audrey sat in the living room where they could, at least, get a quick glimpse of her from the foyer, playing with Elodie, feeding her baby sister dinner while the adults fended off guest after guest, finding out which foods Elodie liked best…

“They’re never going to stop coming,” Alvin groaned during a brief interim when no one was at the door.

“We could turn out all the lights and hide upstairs,” her mother suggested.

“Works for me,” Alvin agreed. “Is that okay, Audrey?”

“Sounds good. You wanna go upstairs, Elodie Jane?” She lifted her cooing little sister up out of her highchair, carrying her on her hip as she cleared the used baby food plate into the kitchen.

“She’s so good with her…” she heard Alvin saying to her mother.

“Did you tell her Elodie’s name?” her mother asked.

“No, I thought you must’ve… I guess her handlers told her at some point.”

Yeah, Audrey reflected. They had. It had been a huge and, in some ways, terrible shock to realize just why her life had abruptly upended, one that had taken several days to fully process. If only she’d known sooner…

I’d never have left, she thought again. I’d have stayed, tried harder to be friends with Alvin…

She’d wondered just what that ’verse might have looked like, where no Jack B. Badd had ever boarded the Hunter-Gratzner or been among its survivors. Would Fry have died in the subterranean cave, her cries for help unheard by the others in time? Would Johns have been forced to make a real truce with Riddick in the aftermath, given that no one else was left who could pilot the skiff? Would everyone have gotten off-planet before the eclipse, or would they have still ended up in the darkness, picked off one by one until only Riddick himself was left to pilot his way off of that desolate world? Would he have been able to fend off the mercs on the Kublai Khan even better without her and Imam in tow, or would he be locked in a prison, made of his own frozen body, even now?

Would Kyra have been sent to New Dartmouth to stand trial? Would all of the Scarlet Matador survivors have drowned when the syzygy brought the tide above their floors in Mansour Plaza? Would the New Marrakesh Spaceport have stayed whole, or still burned when a Tomlin who didn’t understand what he was up against tried to fight the Quintessa Corporation’s claims that there had never been a Level Five Incident? Would Pritchard and Makarov still be hunting women and girls across the Federacy? Would little Omid Heydari still have his mother?

Would the ’verse have become a better place, or a worse one, if she’d known one small thing?

I’d be a three-dimensional critter, she thought, with no idea I was an esper. Maybe I’d never have found out… or maybe I’d have gotten a nasty shock someday when Quantifiers arrived at my school to run checks…

It bothered her to think that her choice, rash and headlong as it had been, and as much as she regretted it, might still have been the right one. That, somehow, all of the chaos and grief and spilled blood might have been the clearest path. She and MilitAIre had argued about the might-have-beens a few times while she struggled with her new knowledge.

The debate had spread out to all of the AIs, and then EntertAIn had made her watch two films called Sliding Doors and Run, Lola, Run, following them up with several twenty-first century films about alternate universes and their effects on consequence and accountability. Oddly, Audrey had noticed when she’d done a small search of EntertAIn’s library, the premise had stopped featuring in vids altogether right as the first Star Jump ships launched. Why, she’d wondered, had confirmation of the Many Worlds Hypothesis ended the desire to speculate about how the multiverse would work?

Well, I won’t ever leave again. Elodie’s here. She needs her big sister. She’s growing up on a planet that isn’t kind to girls or minorities or people who are different… she’ll need me to protect her from all of that and help her see through it.

It didn’t take long to clean up and stack all of the gifts of food into the cooler. They turned all the downstairs lights off and hurried upstairs before any more wannabe-guests could sweep up to the doors. Later, her mother suggested, they could come down for a late-night supper.

Alvin took over Elodie to give her a bath, while Audrey followed her mother back into her old room.

“There are some things I really should tell you,” her mother said, sitting down on the foot of her bed. “I don’t know if they’d have made a difference, almost two years ago… but I’ve spent the whole time you were gone wishing I’d told you, so…”

Audrey was digging through her slightly musty dresser drawers to find the much-too-big-for-her nightgown she’d been given as a Christmas present just over a month before she’d run away, which might finally be the right size. She looked up and nodded at her mother. “Okay…?”

Her mom sighed, looking down at her clasped hands. “When I get pregnant… I turn into a real bitch for a few months. I didn’t know that about myself until… well, until Elodie. When your father and I first met, I was finishing up law school and still lived with my parents. We had a fling and I got pregnant with Katharine…”

Katharine, who had been lost to a second-trimester miscarriage. Audrey remembered the story.

“I started fighting with my parents, constantly. I didn’t understand why, but… well… they threw me out. Said they were done dealing with my shit. John… it wasn’t supposed to be a serious relationship. He was this ex-Serviceman who was just starting at his security firm… but he offered to let me move in with him. I didn’t know where else to go, and then we found out I was pregnant, and he proposed… just in time for me to lose her.”

Audrey felt her heart twist. She hadn’t known this portion of the story… not completely. Neither of her parents had told her how they’d met or married before. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“I’d picked out the name and everything… Katharine Hepburn MacNamera… and then if we had a boy, we’d name him Spencer Tracy MacNamera… well, John said he still wanted to marry me and… I really did love him, and he’d stood by me through the worst and at my worst… so we got married. And then a year later, we started having troubles, fighting constantly—well, me fighting with him constantly—and I was about ready to give up on the marriage when I found out you were on the way.”

Audrey nodded and then gasped, realization striking her.

“Mom, when you and Dad started fighting, before he moved out, I… I kept having dreams I was going to have a little brother…”

Her mother’s eyes closed and she swallowed. “You were. I didn’t know it yet… but you would have. I just kept picking fight after fight with your father and I couldn’t understand why… but… after one of them I got so angry that I headed into town, I didn’t even really know where I was planning on going, but I ended up in this little toy store. And something about the aisle with baby toys suddenly made me suspect… so I got a pregnancy test and took it. And I was so excited that I wasn’t watching where I was going as I was getting on the escalator to go back to my car…”

Her voice broke.

“I fell…”

Audrey felt her heart twist again. That, she realized, had been why the dreams had suddenly stopped. “And you lost him. Oh Mom, I’m so sorry…”

“Me too… and… it was just too late for your father and me. We’d said too many horrible things to each other, and now we’d lost another baby. I know you felt like you were somehow to blame, sweetheart, but you never were. I never told you about Spencer because you were already grieving about your dad moving out, and I didn’t want to make it even worse.”

Audrey nodded. She had a feeling that her father had never stopped loving her mother… but…

Sometimes love isn’t enough, she reflected. Sometimes… nothing is enough to keep two people together.

“So then, back when you and Alvin broke up for a while…” she prompted, knowing what was coming with absolute certainty.

“I was pregnant with Elodie and didn’t know it yet, yeah. We fought, we broke up… and I went and cried on your father’s shoulder about it. We almost—God, it’s a good thing we didn’t, but…”

Whoa. No wonder her father had wanted to leave the planet when he’d found out.

“And then you discovered you and Alvin were having a baby,” she finished for her mother, her voice soft and as gentle as possible. No judgment. She had no right to judge.

Her mother nodded, staring down at her hands. “I should have told you when I told your father… so you’d understand what was happening. I didn’t realize how devastating all of it would be for you. I didn’t realize so much change would drive you out of the house and into harm’s way. We’d planned to tell everybody at the wedding, during the toasts… but we should have told you even before we told you that we were getting married, so you’d know why it was all happening so fast. I’m so sorry, Audrey.”

The last words were barely intelligible, buried in a sob. Audrey sat down next to her mother and pulled her close, trying not to be jarred all over again by the fact that she was now the taller of the two of them. The familiar scent of Shalimar, her mother’s favorite perfume, wrapped itself around her, and for the first time, she felt like she might really have made it home.

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay… I’m back… I’m home, and I’m safe, and Elodie is the most beautiful baby ever and I love her… I love you so much…”

I wish I’d never left…

“I want you to know,” her mother said several long moments later, “that you can tell me anything. Anything at all… it doesn’t matter what it is… I’ll always be here for you and I’ll always love you…”

Oh, Mommy…

“I wish…” she heard herself saying, and closed her mouth tight on the words.

I wish I could tell you where I went and what I did. I saw so many amazing and terrible things, Mommy… I wish I could tell you all about them.

I visited three planets. One of them had three suns, one of them had three moons, and one of them had three jailors… and I nearly died on each of them. But they were all beautiful. And it was summer on each of them. Summer followed me everywhere.

Three ships met disaster with me on board. The Hunter-Gratzner, the Kublai Khan, and the Scarlet Matador, and if anybody knew I’d been on any of them, so much havoc would rain down all over us…

I fell in love with three men. Three amazing, beautiful men, and I lost them all. One abandoned me. One was murdered. And one promised that he would come to me whenever I call for him, but I never, ever can…

And I got three sisters. One’s Kyra Wittier-Collins, the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, and I worry so much about her… one’s Sebby of the Ree, and she’s going to be a mighty huntress. And one…

She couldn’t remember the third sister she’d found out there… but she knew… she knew…

There was a third sister. She knew it.

And then, of course, there was Elodie. Whom she would protect forever. Whom she would never leave.

I killed three people, too, Mommy. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt anybody… I don’t want to be that person anymore…

So many threes… my life seems to come in threes… and I can’t tell you about the three families that adopted me, the al-Walids, the Mezianes, the Ree… or about the worlds I can visit, the thresholds between ’verses I can cross. I can touch twenty-seven universes… three to the third power… and the Apeiros seem to think that I’m the first human to ever do that. I wish I could show you their starfield… but I can’t ever tell you about the Apeiros or my AI handlers, who I love…

I want to share all of it with you so much, but I can never tell you any of it. The only way to keep a secret safe is to never, ever tell it… but I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you everything.

“I wish I could tell you,” she whispered. “But people would die.”

Hundreds. Maybe millions.

Maybe even us.

66.
In From the Cold, Into the Cold

“Oh, well played,” Audrey said once she could manage to speak. “You didn’t give anything away.”

“I will endeavor to make sure that you achieve the same level of circumspection,” MilitAIre told her, his voice merry.

The moment she had heard his “Boston” accent emerge from the speakers, everything had made sudden, perfect sense.

“Well, you were right,” she told him, sitting down in a rolling office chair as enormous relief made her knees wobbly. “We’re meeting again, and I’m definitely in good ‘hands.’”

“And not just mine,” he told her. “General Toal is using our unique situation as a test-run for AI-managed safe houses. He believes that we might make more effective handlers than human beings. Less prone to bias, bribery, or coercion.”

“‘We?’” Audrey asked, looking around. The boxes that the technicians had brought with them were open and empty near a set of panels that, she remembered, had housed the AI mainframe cores on the Nephrite Undine. There weren’t quite as many panels as there had been on the ship, though.

“I’m a precise digital clone of the ‘MilitAIre’ AI that you interacted with on board the Undine. Clones of ‘SensAI,’ ‘First-AId,’ ‘EntertAIn,’ and ‘CommissAIry’ have accompanied me here, all of whom now have been given full disclosure about you. I apologize that the other four could not accompany us. Their skill-sets don’t mesh as well with the needs of a safe house, and the General needed to keep this test affordable. I’m happy to send them messages from ‘Marianne Tepper’ on your behalf, though.”

“I’d love that,” she admitted. She would definitely miss CaptAIn, AIngineer, mAIntenance, and mAItron, but she could see why they wouldn’t suit a safe house as well. Their minds were specifically designed for starships. “Do they know that you’re with me?”

“No, but they know that their iteration of me was in charge of you, in an unspecified capacity. I’ll send messages to him, and he’ll pass them on to the rest of the AI crew. No one will question it.”

“I was afraid I wouldn’t have a way to stay in touch with any of you, once I stopped being Marianne.”

“I know. General Toal instructed me not to tell you until we were absolutely certain that the data cloning would be successful, which we didn’t know for sure until well after you had landed.”

Was that the real reason, she wondered, that it had taken so long for the contact to reach the spaceport? Would she have been taken to a different building if the techs hadn’t been able to set things up the way they needed to?

“What was Plan B, if that hadn’t worked?”

“A few days with a human handler, while a new MilitAIre was installed on the Undine and my original iteration was brought down here, officially for hardware repairs. In that circumstance, you would have only had me.”

“And God only knows what he would have fed you,” CommissAIry interjected, still sounding stereotypically French. “Hello again, Audrey. That name is every bit as lovely as Marianne.”

“Hello, CommissAIry!” Audrey sagged back even further in the chair. “I was going to miss you and your cooking so much.”

It was amazing, she reflected later, how much trusted friends could turn a cold, dark building into a place of light and warmth. The safe house was still in the process of being set up—more equipment would arrive in the days to come, now that the AIs had been successfully installed—and she would be making do with basic rations until all of CommissAIry’s food synthesis gear arrived, but she didn’t care. She could handle it. She felt, suddenly, like she could handle anything.

First-AId, likewise, was awaiting all of the equipment she needed for a proper full-service infirmary. The office suite that had been set aside for her, up on the second floor, would become the place where Audrey received all future medical care. Discussions about expanding First-AId’s patient roster to include emergency care for local Federacy agents, which had apparently been underway, had stalled abruptly when MilitAIre had demanded assurances that such traffic wouldn’t expose the safe house and put it, and its primary ward, at risk. Audrey might be her only patient for the next several years.

“I need my library installed,” EntertAIn noted. “I have all of your settings and preferences—those came down with me—but the library itself takes up three exabytes. Assuming the WitSec program can acquire the same licensures that Sirius Shipping had. We’re all going to be ‘roughing it’ for a few days. Especially poor SensAI.”

Audrey had checked out all of the rooms in the building by then, and the recreation area set aside for SensAI currently had no holo projectors. It would be difficult for him to lead her, or anyone else, in exercises without them. She tried not to feel too much amusement at how miffed the AIs were about the safe house’s “half-baked”—in CommissAIry’s words—state. It already had more than she had hoped for, just by having them in it at all.

It took two weeks to configure everything in the safe house, although CommissAIry was already set up enough to overload her with candy by Halloween. Audrey spent most of the days, as workers came and went, dressed in a bizarre costume designed to conceal whether she was male or female, complete with a face-covering mask that also changed her voice when she needed to speak to the workers. None of the crews were apparently cleared to know that the building would be run by AIs; Audrey became their spokesperson whenever they needed to make requests of, or give instructions to, any of the workers. Travers came back twice to supervise specific projects, asking both times if “Marianne” was settling in well, unaware that she was speaking to her.

The AIs wouldn’t let Audrey go trick-or-treating, though. Which, she supposed, was a good thing when another surprise snowstorm rolled in shortly after dusk.

Cameras, microphones, and hologram projectors ended up being installed in every room and corridor of the building. MilitAIre had been surprised when Audrey, herself, had advocated for that, and had even argued against omitting bedrooms and bathrooms.

“Like bad things won’t ever happen in those rooms,” she’d scoffed. “None of you are gonna be perving on anything you see in them. You can blur out the parts of my body that would be illegal to record, right?”

“This is true,” MilitAIre said. “And it would be particularly illegal to record them where you are concerned, given your age… but blurring is a good courtesy for anyone staying in a safe house. Full surveillance with discretion… and the ability of the surveilled to request privacy if they wish. We understand that most humans have moments that they would prefer not to have recorded.”

“As long as you keep in mind anyone planning an attack would be looking for those kinds of openings,” Audrey pointed out. “Riddick told me, back when we were killing time on the skiff, that he’d wait for his targets to get up to no good and start covering their tracks, ’cause that meant they were covering his, too. He’d let them do all the work of concealing the circumstances of their own murders.”

“Fascinating. His records do indicate that he targeted working criminals much of the time, and frequently killed them when they were ‘on the job.’ He volunteered this information?”

“Yeah. I think he told me about it as a kind of fuck-you to Imam. Whenever he was awake, he’d fuss if we said more than ‘boo’ to each other. But Riddick also told me that because he wanted me to stay out of under-surveilled places. He said all kinds of criminals look for the places where nobody’ll see them strike, and especially because I’m a girl, I need to stay away from camera ‘dead zones.’ He said you have to watch yourself twice as hard in the places where nobody else is watching you, and he said I’d be better off having some ‘random pervo’ I never even met ‘fapping’ to a picture of me than some ‘sick fuck’ actually on top of me.”

It pissed her off, though, that those were still the only two “choices” he thought she’d have in broad swathes of the Federacy. Wasn’t humanity supposed to be more advanced than that?

Most of it is, she reminded herself. You’ve seen people who are, and even lived with some of them. You never had to balance those kinds of risks when you were staying with the Mezianes.

Then again, Safiyya had worried relentlessly on her behalf on a few occasions. There were still too many monsters in human form to make that wariness unnecessary, and she had encountered examples of them on either side of her time with the Mezianes. And, she admitted, such monsters could be anywhere.

“That was good advice,” MilitAIre said after a brief pause. “And well taken here, too. Someone wishing to launch an attack on a safe house ward would time it for a moment in which that ward sought out privacy and was no longer under direct surveillance. The resulting delay in, or absence of, a response from the security system could increase the chance of a successful strike. I must discuss this with General Toal. There are a lot of arguments about ‘surveillance states’ and ‘government overreach’ that have to be addressed, especially on a planet like Deckard’s World, but within the context of Witness Security, most of them probably wouldn’t apply. Are you sure you’re all right with having the cameras in your bedroom and bathroom?”

“Better you guys than some Duke Pritchard type,” she told him, “any day.”

The addition of the holo equipment, everywhere that there were cameras, also meant that all of the AIs could “manifest” themselves, aside from just SensAI. That led to discussions about the importance of body language and eye contact for human interaction, and Audrey’s admission that, during her flight on the Nephrite Undine, she’d used the recreation area more frequently than she normally might have because SensAI’s visual representation made her feel less alone.

“This is important information for us to pass onto Sirius Shipping,” First-AId said when she finally admitted that. “They spent a great deal of time choosing our voices, to make them as warm and comforting as possible. The argument they made for not giving all of us holo forms was the ‘uncanny valley’ risk. If we weren’t one hundred percent authentically human in our appearance, guests would find us repulsive and might not even realize why.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be necessary on a ship where the guests have other flesh and blood passengers to interact with,” Audrey mused. “But any situation of isolation… I don’t think SensAI’s image ever felt off or inhuman to me. But I think, even if it had… it’d still have been more comforting than no contact at all.”

They still hadn’t settled on their preferred “bodies,” but the ones they tried out were always interesting.

She and First-AId did end up spending time unpacking many of the things that she’d told MilitAIre about her time on the run. Although the medical AI had full access to all of the transcripts of her discussions with MilitAIre, he had approached her experiences from a strategic and tactical perspective, while First-AId wanted to delve into the psychology and do trauma-healing.

It soon became clear to all three of them that there were several memories that were still too much for her to handle, especially on their tight schedule. The Kublai Khan, with its menageries of suffering prisoners, turned out to be one of the biggest minefields in her head. To her, that wasn’t even the ship’s real name… it was “the ship that was screaming.”

“An esper, who didn’t know she was an esper and had never learned how to deliberately block out others’ thoughts, surrounded by tortured prisoners who were all mentally shrieking for rescue…” First-AId finally murmured. “Every memory you have of that time has been poisoned by it. Whenever we discuss even the simplest elements of your stay there, your heart rate increases by at least twenty beats per minute and your blood pressure increases by an average of twelve systolic and eight diastolic. I agree with MilitAIre’s original assessment that you need to try to block out this part of your run from your memories, if you can.”

Maybe, she thought, it had been a good thing that she hadn’t had time to share that part of her story with Kyra or the Mezianes.

“The Apeiros wouldn’t take it away,” she reported back the next day. “They say I’m going to need too much of it, even if it is uncomfortable. So… I guess… I just need to try not to think about it.”

The easiest way, she found, was to imagine that it had happened to “Jack,” and not her. To imagine Jack as a separate person, who had seen and even done terrible things… but wasn’t her. She’d already begun doing that with some of the other memories that had proved too troublesome. The things she couldn’t look at were things that had happened to Jack. And Jack was dead.

Maybe if she kept saying it, the day would come when she believed it.

First-AId had then attempted to speak with the Apeiros through her, via hypnosis. Afterward, Audrey had a new hole in her memories and none of the AIs would discuss what they had apparently learned during the three-hour session she’d lost. The Apeiros, when she went into their starfield that night, refused to discuss it either, although they all agreed that the AIs were “good creatures.”

Kyra, whenever she inquired about her sister, was still “dreaming of a world with three suns.” Still in cryo. Wherever she had decided to go, it must have been far away from Tangiers Prime.

The Moribund was still silent. When she asked, the other Apeiros said that it had been avoiding contact with her ever since her screaming fit. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel relieved or guilty, but in truth, she felt both ways at the same time.

A week after the hypnosis debacle, General Toal ordered hand-to-hand combat training added to Audrey’s routine. A human trainer arrived for an hour each day, although she was never allowed to see his face and he was never allowed to see hers, and they sparred under SensAI’s trenchant supervision.

The Safe House was in a hardscrabble part of town, but properties were apparently easier to acquire there. Officially, the outside of the building now claimed that it was home to a security consulting firm. To sell the charade, three local Federacy agents, who were never allowed to see her face either, had offices on the first floor, which they periodically visited during working hours. Audrey grew accustomed to having her costume on and mask handy whenever she needed to be down on the first floor.

“Surprise” Quantification tests happened with greater and greater frequency. Her passing rate slowly climbed from 50% of the time to 80%. On the academic end, MilitAIre tested her repeatedly and told her that she would easily qualify to join her former peers as they began their tenth grade year.

November turned from snowy to rainy. She managed to finish reading The Crystal Cave by striking a bargain with the Apeiros: they would take away her memories of the train ride and standoff just long enough for her to reread the story without any emotional baggage, and then return them once she and the AIs had finished discussing the book and its meanings. This, she told them, would also be proof that they really could one day return the rest of the memories they’d made off with, an act of goodwill.

She ended up liking the book so much, even once she remembered the train ride and standoff again, that she devoured its three sequels over the next week.

And, she admitted to herself, it was a relief to know that the Apeiros really could give her the rest of her lost moments back, that the “holes” in her memory were not empty as much as shrouded spaces that would one day be uncovered again. She and EntertAIn had a long discussion about the character she had been most drawn to in the books, Nimue, and why the woman who had disguised herself as a boy, for a chance to be taught magic by a wizard, resonated so strongly with her. EntertAIn told her there was a whole trope about heroines disguising themselves as boys, and put several more books—a fantasy series called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn among them—and videos including a film called Dragonslayer, into her recreational queues.

Thanksgiving arrived with the first “open window” day in Settlement Point. It was still early spring, but the temperature had risen to a glorious 77° Fahrenheit, 25° Celcius, and Audrey could hear the laughter and shouting of kids a block or two away.

CommissAIry decided to take Audrey on a “culinary adventure” of different traditional Thanksgiving foods, most of which were more typically autumn fare, while EntertAIn and MilitAIre acquainted her with various legends about the holiday and the truths behind them. The holiday, when they were done, made much more sense to her than the odd portrayals she’d grown up with involving “Pilgrim Joe,” “Turkey Sue,” and “Pumpkin Bob.” Those characters had apparently evolved on Deckard’s World itself and had proved so popular that they had overwritten most of the original American traditions. But she supposed some adaptation was necessary for anyone who wanted to celebrate a harvest holiday in early spring.

Cautious explorations of both Elsewhere and U83f, which Audrey nicknamed Wonderland, revealed that they were both habitable and welcoming worlds. Although she didn’t spend a whole lot of time in either one—it was early spring in both of them, too—she and the AIs agreed that she should continue exploring them in the future. Until she went back “out into the cold,” though, they were the only “outdoor” environments she was permitted to venture into. As far as the local neighborhood was concerned, she didn’t—and couldn’t—exist.

December arrived and, a few days in, Audrey MacNamera was biologically fourteen years old at last. The AIs and the Apeiros marked the day with her. There were gifts—most of them virtual but surprisingly meaningful nonetheless—and an extraordinary cake that CommissAIry had invented based on her “taste profile,” which she told him she’d like to have again for every birthday.

The auburn hair dye had washed most of the way out by then. Her hair was halfway to her shoulders, verging between dark blonde and mousy brown thanks to how little she had been in the sun in months. EntertAIn and First-AId announced it was time to begin preparing her appearance for her return to her family, starting with some camouflage to make sure that no one would believe she had shaved her head the year before. For the next week, as final preparations were underway for her return to her old life, she received special hair growth treatments until her locks once more touched the small of her back. They lightened the hair as well, until she looked—in her opinion, at least—like a funhouse-mirror elongated reflection of the girl who had cut off her hair, put on her cousin’s discarded clothes, and run off to the stars more than a year of lived time and nearly two years, real-time, before.

Welcome back, Audrey MacNamera, she silently told her reflection, before asking the AIs to give her bangs in front. She wanted to look a little more like Tislilel Meziane, the way Ewan had last seen her. Even if it did twist the knife a little. She’d never get to be “Tizzy,” or see him, again.

Were any of the girls she’d once been still alive inside her? The naïve fool, the cocky outlaw, the besotted mermaid…

Who, exactly, was going home to Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter?

Audrey had liked it much better when her mom had been Bettie Paige MacNamera.

Sundays, the AIs decided with her, would be Safe House Days. She would be required to report to the house first thing in the morning—in part because recent intel had revealed that Alvin Baxter had developed an evangelical bent in the last year and a half and would undoubtedly try to insist on “the whole family” attending church services unless that was a fight he couldn’t win, and Audrey’s relationship with religion was rocky at best—and would stay most of the day. During that time, her combat training would continue, any medical treatments she needed would be provided, and the AIs would help her evaluate and critique the events and news of the week and identify any possible threats.

“And,” CommissAIry informed her with unrepentant glee, “you will go on three culinary adventures!”

She would return to her mother’s house at the end of the day, an hour before official curfews began for minors and even in time for some evening “family time,” but the bulk of the day would belong to her and to her handlers.

Friday, December 17, they decided, would be the day of her return. She was hitting 100% on the surprise Quantifications at long last. She’d figured out the trick of switching her brain into “baseline mode” on command… finally. And it had been four months since she’d uttered a single syllable in her sleep. It would be safe for her to go “out into the cold.” All her secrets were tucked away where none of her loved ones would ferret them out.

So why was she so damned scared?

The day arrived.

It was exactly a year, real-time anyway, since she had tried to kill herself on Helion Prime. A year since she had tried to end Jack B. Badd, believing Audrey MacNamera forever lost. And now Audrey MacNamera… or a convincing facsimile… would return home.

The scars on her wrists had been concealed. First-AId had asked if she wanted them removed, but—

“Scars are trophies,” Kyra had once said…

—while she’d chosen to keep them, she intended to keep them hidden until they faded even more, and until nobody was especially scrutinizing her anymore. The pseudo-skin layer that covered the scars would be retouched during each weekly safe house visit.

It was 58° Fahrenheit at dawn, and the temperature would rise into the mid-70s. She had dressed in a simple outfit for the “handoff,” jeans and two light, layered shirts for changeable weather, a pair of the ankle-high, flat-soled boots that girls in her class apparently lived in that season, and no adornments or identifying brand names of any kind. She had a comm in her pocket, government issue and locked against anyone but her. The chrono on her wrist was locked in place by a band that only her code, or a code transmitted by MilitAIre, could remove. Both devices were registered as Federacy property, assuming anyone got that far in tracing them before being ordered to stop. Anonymous, untraceable… a quintessential WitSec ward.

With one more deep breath, she climbed into the car parked in front of the safe house and isomorphed into Wonderland—there were too many trees in Elsewhere for what she would need to do, but this part of Wonderland was a flat, sandy plain—holding onto the interior’s surfaces as “delimiters.” Five minutes later, one of the Federacy agents emerged from the safe house, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove it to the center of Settlement Point near the main courthouse. He had been instructed to idle the car for two minutes—unaware that a phantom teenage girl was climbing out of the back as he did—receive a package from a courier, and then leave. As far as he would ever know, the courier’s package had been his whole mission.

Audrey walked over to a nearby park, watching the countdown on her chrono. When it hit zero, she knew, all the cameras in range of the park would go down for five minutes. She made sure she was in no one’s line of sight before isomorphing back into U1. Her “targets” were up ahead, sitting on a bench and facing away from her.

“Man, I hate this shit,” one of them, a sandy-haired man dressed in a mid-line three-piece suit, said as she drew closer.

“Ain’t the worst assignment,” the other one answered. He wore a police uniform.

“Picking up a WitSec case? Those people are garbage. If it’s Denny the Knob, you might need to look away for a few minutes. I owe that bastard a few bruises.”

“Word is it’s some material witness, not a criminal,” the cop objected.

“I’ll believe it when I—” the first man froze, hearing her boots crunch the path’s gravel, and turned around to look at her. His eyes widened. “What the…?”

Assistant District Attorney Alvin Baxter’s mouth dropped open as he stared at her.

The cop next to him, a freckled redhead who looked maybe a year older than Ewan, turned and stared as well. “Isn’t that…?”

“Audrey?” Alvin gasped.

She’d known that he’d be the one assigned to the pickup, but it was still a rough moment. She could feel his shock, and a weird combination of relief—she was alive, she looked healthy—and horror at the realization that she was the material witness he’d been assigned to pick up. His stepdaughter had reappeared in a way that he hadn’t even imagined when he’d been picturing worst-case scenarios. What was he going to tell her mother—?

She forced herself to block off his mind. She didn’t want to hear or feel any more of that. As it was, her voice wobbled when she spoke. “I’m ready to go home now.”

At least, she thought, struggling not to cry would be “in character.”

They took her to the nearest police station, which was in the basement of the courthouse, exactly as MilitAIre had predicted.

Brief attempts to confiscate her comm and chrono, to make her change out of the clothes she was wearing so they could be analyzed, and to record more than her basic biometrics, were all brought to a screaming halt by Federacy directives to the contrary. Each time someone tried, every comm in the precinct would ring and the same authoritative voice would speak on each one, instructing everyone to cease what they were doing immediately. The basic biometric readings they were permitted to take confirmed that she was Audrey Hepburn MacNamera, missing since January 30, 2516, and that she was a legal ward of Federacy Witness Security. Eventually, the precinct Captain emerged from his office and testily informed everyone that he’d been given ground rules and strict instructions for how Audrey was to be “reintegrated” into civilian life. He didn’t seem enthused.

It was all so fucking dramatic. She could only imagine how much more dramatic it would have been, and how fast the stories would have unraveled, if General Toal, MilitAIre, and the actual WitSec department hadn’t taken charge of the whole process and it had been entirely dependent on whatever ruses she’d cooked up on her own.

“Audrey? Audrey! Where’s my daughter?”

She took a deep breath. Her mother had arrived. Standing up, she braced herself and turned toward the entrance of the police station—

“Mom…” Her voice was the tiniest thread. Behind her, Alvin rose from his seat.

Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter was hurrying into the building, looking around frantically. She wouldn’t see Audrey yet; she was in one of the small interview rooms, a one-way mirrored glass window between them. She had a moment to look at her mother, see her for the first time in more than a year…

…and see, perched on her mother’s hip, the reason for everything that had happened. The reason her father had left so abruptly, needing to go to a whole other planet to escape his heartbreak. The reason that Alvin had reappeared in their lives after almost going away forever. The reason for the sudden wedding announcement and its inordinate rush…

…the reason that Audrey MacNamera would never have left Deckard’s World at all, not ever, if only she’d known…

Elodie Jane Hawthorne-Baxter, sixteen months old.

Her baby sister.

65.
Twenty-Seven ’Verses Wide

“Nephrite Undine to Plymouth Station A, come in, please.”

Audrey sat in the captain’s chair on the flight deck, watching the speck that was Plymouth Station A grow larger and larger in the front windows. To its right, the brilliant sphere of Deckard’s World hung in the darkness, still far enough away that it made her think of a blue-green Megaluna rather than a whole planet.

She was almost home.

Was that her home? She still wasn’t sure.

“Nephrite Undine, this is Plymouth Station A. We read you loud and clear.”

“Copy, Plymouth Station A,” she said, releasing a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “We are on final approach for docking, awaiting confirmation of gate assignment.”

Hopefully, Marianne Tepper sounded like a consummate professional. And an adult. She and MilitAIre had rehearsed her performance several times, in preparation for her interactions with actual human beings again. Assuming the person replying to her from Plymouth Station A wasn’t another AI, it was the first live human voice she’d heard in more than five months.

“Nephrite Undine, you will be docking at Gate 3. Maintain current heading and prepare to disengage ion drives on my mark.” The flight controller began a countdown.

“We good with that?” she asked CaptAIn and AIngineer.

“Standing by for the mark,” AIngineer replied.

The AIs were, of course, handling everything; she was just the mouthpiece. Still, she wanted to do it right. Although MilitAIre had assured her that there would be no record of any of the… peculiarities… that “Marianne Tepper” had periodically displayed during the duration of the flight, she found herself wanting to make sure that she played the part well enough that, if she ever applied to work for Sirius Shipping again, they’d be glad to welcome her back.

You never know what bridge you might need to cross again…

“…four… three… two… one… mark.”

The Nephrite Undine shuddered slightly as the ion drives switched off and, less than a second later, the station’s robo-tugs came in range and began tractoring it in.

Audrey consulted the screen by her left hand. Everything was green. “Nephrite Undine to Plymouth Station A, I’m showing a good lock. You have the conn.”

“Roger that, Nephrite Undine. You will arrive at the gate in approximately twenty minutes. Welcome to the Plymouth System.”

“Thanks, Plymouth Station A. I’m looking forward to seeing the sights.” She switched off the comms and leaned back in the chair, sighing.

In less than half an hour, she would be turning over the Nephrite Undine to Sirius Shipping reps and disembarking… in the company of a WitSec handler who would undoubtedly be coming aboard along with the reps. MilitAIre had assured her that everything was in order, but she could feel her stage fright building nonetheless. Soon she would have to play a series of roles in quick succession, in front of a much less logical and predictable audience than she’d had for the last five months. In front of strangers.

And it wasn’t even like she’d been that good at fooling the AIs until MilitAIre stepped in, either.

“I’m gonna miss you guys,” she said. She wished there was some way she could take them with her. Inhuman and unreadable or not, they had become genuine friends.

“We will miss you too, Marianne,” CaptAIn said. “Thank you for a lovely run-in flight. We have enjoyed your company immensely.”

She wished she could offer to stay in touch with them. But Marianne Tepper would, more or less, cease to exist once she left Plymouth Station A for Deckard’s World. Her handler would have all the arrangements, she assumed. But she would probably spend the next month and a half, until her biological fourteenth birthday had passed, incommunicado.

“You’re welcome,” she said, once she had her voice under control. It had been on the verge of breaking for a moment. “Thank you for a wonderful flight. You’re a fantastic crew.”

She spent the next fifteen minutes visiting each of the AIs to say individual good-byes and thank-yous, finishing up in the Security Room.

“I… don’t even know where to start,” she told MilitAIre. “Thank you… so much. I don’t think I’d have had a chance if you hadn’t stepped in.”

The strategy he had built for her was elegant, complex, and comprehensive, taking into account things that she could never have anticipated. Four months of his tutelage had left her aware of just how much she still had left to learn, too. She hoped her new handler would be even a fraction as adept as he was.

“You’re welcome, Audrey.” He, alone of all the AIs, could call her that. The rest only knew Marianne. “I know you will be in very good hands. And I believe we will meet again.”

“I hope so. I just—”

With a soft shudder, the ship came to a stop.

“Time for you to meet your boarding party, Audrey. Godspeed.”

She really wished he had a physical presence; she needed to give him a proper goodbye hug.

Her bag was already waiting for her at the airlock. She checked the seals, confirming that everything was ready, and pressed her palm to the security plate, authorizing the connection. As the airlock doors slowly opened, she took a deep breath.

Showtime…

Four people were waiting on the other side of the doors. Two of them carried large, heavy looking tech cases.

People. Actual living people. She had to suppress the urge to fling her arms around them and kiss them.

“Permission to come aboard, Acting Captain Tepper?” a dark haired man dressed in an expensive suit asked.

“Permission granted,” she replied, stepping back to make room for the party.

The suit nodded at the two technicians, who nodded to her as they passed.

“I’m Kyle Hanoran,” he told her. “Vice President of Plymouth System Operations for Sirius Shipping. I’ll be managing the hand-off. This,” and he turned and gestured at the woman still standing on the other side of the airlock threshold, “is Susan Travers. I believe she is the immigration agent you requested.”

MilitAIre had told her that that would be the cover story. It didn’t quite match up with the explanation she’d sent Nguyen when she had declined the posting on the Major Barbara and requested the Nephrite Undine instead, but it had reframed that explanation and would stand up to most scrutiny. Audrey wasn’t sure if Travers was her handler or was just going to transport her to whomever had been assigned that role, but she knew what was expected of her either way.

“Yes, thank you. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Hopefully, after my family’s issues are resolved, I can apply for another posting with Sirius. I’ve really liked working for you.”

Hanoran, who undoubtedly had been given access to the carefully seeded gossip, smiled and nodded. “We hope you will.”

Yeah, he knew the “truth” about Marianne Tepper that MilitAIre had spread: her father, who had settled on Deckard’s World, was supposedly dying of a rare cancer that still had no treatment or cure, and she had requested the posting on the Nephrite Undine so that she could come stay with him through his final days. Nguyen, Abecassis, and Davidov, along with several other execs, had sent her sympathy “cards” via the beacons two weeks earlier after the story had begun to circulate. She had sent thank you “cards” back to each of them.

It was, she reflected, the best way to make sure that nobody wondered why she wasn’t applying for another position. And it meant that, should she ever need to use the Marianne Tepper identity again, all the bridges associated with it would remain unburnt. That was yet another thing that hadn’t even occurred to her when she was planning her voyage.

She was going to miss MilitAIre’s nuanced strategies.

He’d even taught her chess. She was really going to miss playing it with him. Even if she’d never won a single game.

It only took a few minutes to sign over authority of the ship to Hanoran. As the technicians returned to the airlock, they shook hands and she picked up her bag.

Was she going home, or leaving home? It suddenly felt like the latter. She knew every centimeter of the Nephrite Undine intimately, and suspected she would walk its corridors in her dreams for years to come, the way she sometimes still found herself in her grandparents’ house that had been sold when she was three. Lonely as the journey and ship had been at times, it had been a mostly peaceful interlude. Mostly.

The technicians fell in behind her and Travers as they walked into the station.

“We’ll be leaving for the surface right away,” Travers told her, and handed her an envelope. “Your paperwork is inside.”

The paperwork, Audrey knew, would include a replacement ID card with her adjusted height on it. She would still be “Marianne Tepper” until they had reached the surface and entered the safe house; after that, the name would be retired indefinitely.

She opened the envelope, nodding at Travers. “I appreciate all of this. I really do.”

She wondered how much the agent actually knew about her situation. The new ID card, she was interested to note, had an updated picture of her that MilitAIre must have captured at some point in the last few days, after EntertAIn and First-AId had helped her dye her hair auburn. 1.78 meters tall… damn. Well, he would know…

“It’s my pleasure,” Travers said in a crisply formal tone that didn’t speak to pleasure at all. Audrey found herself wondering just how many of the WitSec subjects the woman had dealt with were unsavory types.

Most of them, probably. While blameless witnesses to high crimes did end up under WitSec’s protection from time to time, MilitAIre had told her that the bulk of its subjects were criminals who had been persuaded to “flip” on their bosses, usually in exchange for clemency or even immunity where their own transgressions were concerned. If that was the norm, Travers would probably be disinclined to view her latest ward as a helpless innocent.

Not like I actually am one, anyway…

Being surrounded by so many living minds was intoxicating. The part of Audrey’s head that had been deadly silent for months was suddenly abuzz. It was a struggle to keep her mental “hands” to herself and not start reading people at random, but MilitAIre had warned her against that. They passed through the immigration and customs lines swiftly and efficiently, but she noticed that the only ones being subjected to intensive scrutiny in the lines were people with darker skin and “ethnic” attire.

Maybe, she found herself thinking again, this was a mistake. Did she really want to assimilate back into a world that treated people that way? Did she really want those kinds of bigoted thoughts trying to worm their way into her head? Coming, possibly, from people she liked?

I only have to stay here until I’m officially eighteen, she reminded herself. I’ll have graduated from high school. Even if I’m not biologically eighteen yet, I’ll be a legal adult as far as Deckard’s World knows, and they won’t be able to hold me.

WitSec, of course, still might. But she could continue under its protection somewhere else in the wider Federacy.

On the other side of the gauntlet, Audrey found herself in a familiar lounge. She’d disembarked there when she’d taken the shuttle up from Deckard’s World, before using some of her father’s security codes to sneak on board the Cloaked Butterfly. There was a weird sense of unfamiliarity about the space, though.

I’m six inches taller than I was when I last passed through here, she realized at last. Fortunately, her appetite had finally normalized in the last month, and it had been almost two months since she’d felt any bone-growth aches in her limbs. Hopefully, she thought, this was it and she wouldn’t get any taller.

Shuttles ran regularly; it was mid-afternoon in Settlement Point, so another one would be arriving soon. She got comfortable in her seat—as much as she could—observing the others in the room and trying to figure out their stories while she waited.

Tourists and campers, most of them, she decided. For all its backwater reputation, Deckard’s World was popular with people across the Federacy who wanted to get rustic, to “rough it” without being too far from civilization. Parts of the planet were even more frontiers-y than Shakti IV, and might have been an even more logical choice for Riddick to go to ground in… if only the population’s xenophobia hadn’t meant that he’d have been subject to intense and hostile scrutiny the moment he tried to reach the surface.

He might be anywhere, she reflected, but he definitely was not on Deckard’s World.

Most of the other people in the lounge had large amounts of luggage and camping equipment. Her single bag, containing barely any worldly possessions, was not at all the norm; other people-watchers would believe that she must work somewhere on the station and be commuting home, rather than that she had arrived on a Star Jumper after months of travel. Almost no one, even with stringent weight limits, traveled quite so unencumbered.

She took out her tablet and tapped into the local news headlines, careful to avoid any sections that might mention her disappearance. October 23, 2517 on the Federacy Standard Calendar, the heart of autumn or spring on old Earth, was late winter in the most heavily settled portion of Deckard’s World. The second semester of school was well underway; American-style football had given way, in the Settlement Point Monitor’s sports section, to basketball and ice hockey. It would be a blustery 24° Fahrenheit, with an 80% chance of snow, when they landed; Audrey glanced around the lounge again and noticed that almost everyone else in the room—and everyone with camping gear—was dressed in lighter clothes intended for summer.

They must be waiting for the shuttle to Wyndham Landing, she thought. October was late summer in Deckard’s World’s less populous northern hemisphere.

MilitAIre had told her to dress in her warmest clothes—which meant one of the sets of coveralls, provided by Sirius Shipping, over jeans and a nondescript shirt—and that she would be provided with a coat upon landing. She wondered how much her time spent offworld had thinned her blood; both New Athens and New Marrakesh had been in the hottest parts of their respective summers when she’d landed on them, and the crash planet had been an oven until the eclipse sharply cooled it down. She hadn’t seen snow in more than a year of lived time.

The shuttle for Wyndham Landing arrived first and the lounge almost completely cleared out. Audrey continued catching up on headlines as she waited.

The Settlement Point Monitor hardly discussed any events beyond the Plymouth System, treating the rest of the Federacy as remote and irrelevant. One tiny article mentioned that the New Casablanca Spaceport on Tangiers Prime had reopened its damaged concourse, and a reopening date had been scheduled for the New Marrakesh Spaceport, after a “wave of terrorism” had struck the planet earlier in the year. Both aware of MilitAIre’s instructions about reading texts for bias, and in full possession of the truth about both incidents and the man behind them, Audrey was swiftly disgusted to realize that the article heavily implied the involvement of Islamist radicals, possibly even connected to the New Taliban, in both explosions and other unnamed—and probably imaginary—incidents besides. Javor Makarov’s name didn’t even come up. The inconvenient truth, that a white man who had periodically sported a law enforcement badge had been behind two mass killings on a far more cosmopolitan world, had been swept out of the frame.

She hoped, suddenly, that Travers wasn’t her handler. She couldn’t imagine talking to the aloof, disinterested woman about how disconnected the articles she was reading were from actual reality, assuming her handler was even cleared to know that Audrey had been on Tangiers Prime and hadn’t just been briefed on her “witness to a local mob hit” cover story. She already missed talking to MilitAIre more than she’d ever expected. By the end of the journey, there had only been a small handful of painful moments in her run that she’d still been unable to discuss, and he’d finally, gently, told her that she should leave them be. He wasn’t a psychologist, after all, and First-AId hadn’t been cleared to hear them, so there was no point in setting off another panic attack trying to plumb them.

But she’d confided everything else to him, and the idea of having to do any of that all over again, with some new stranger, filled her with dread.

Hopefully, whoever it was would just have some dossier that MilitAIre had prepared for them to read and wouldn’t feel a need to rehash all of it personally. Several of the girls in C Ward had griped about their psychiatrists getting replaced mid-treatment and the replacements forcing them to start again at Square One, making them not only lose ground, but also lose trust in the process.

Just roll with it. Whatever happens, the important part is that it breaks your trail and tells the ’verse that you could never possibly have been Jack B. Badd.

The rest could be improvised. If things turned bad, she had the emergency comm number General Toal had given her.

And if that didn’t work…

It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to disappear.

Stop it. You haven’t even met your handler yet. MilitAIre wouldn’t fuck you over. It’ll be okay.

The entertainment feeds, she thought, would be a decent distraction from her progressively darker thoughts. It’d be a good idea to know what the kids in her classes were watching and talking about.

Remakes. The Deckard’s World division of Disney was doing remakes of “classic” twentieth century shows and movies. There was even a new feature article about it: the head of the production company explained that they were recreating everything shot-by-shot and line-by-line, mostly, but with the addition of tech, slang, and styles that contemporary Deckard’s World audiences took for granted, because he thought their absence from the original shows was why those audiences weren’t watching anymore. Viewership of the “classic staples” was continuing to drop.

Audrey sighed. Or maybe it’s because those shows aren’t about them, and still won’t be. They’re about people who’ve been dead for five hundred years and a nation that’s been gone for nearly as long, no matter how hard you try to revive it…

The shuttle to Settlement Point arrived at that moment, preventing her from stewing over it and roiling up even more doubts.

Travers, she realized, had been watching her the whole time with a frown. This was going to be just delightful.

But, fortunately, she had actual work to do during reentry. She held her bag close, casting her “extra” senses over it, making sure that everything inside was absolutely rooted in U1 and nowhere else. She did the same with the clothes she was wearing, and then with herself. Her five-shape had a strange “presence” in twenty-six other ’verses now, but her physical presence needed to be 100% in U1 or she could die during the descent into and through Deckard’s World’s atmosphere.

She could still “feel” the other ’verses, but she wasn’t “in” any of them. Nothing she’d brought with her was crossing into them, either. She’d been scrupulous about making sure she physically stayed in U1 when the Nephrite Undine hadn’t been actively isomorphing, but she felt a need to make absolutely sure anew. Especially given what she would be doing on the way down.

Stowing her bag in front of her, she took her seat and strapped in. Travers had given her a window seat, ostensibly a privilege. But it put the WitSec agent between her and the aisle, ensuring that there would be no rabbiting. Audrey wondered how often that happened.

Probably a lot… Hardly anyone was in WitSec by choice, after all.

She closed her eyes as the shuttle disengaged from Plymouth Station A, slowing her breathing and beginning the meditation sequences that both SensAI and the Apeiros had developed with her. She needed to know what kind of world she was approaching in each ’verse she had access to.

Holy shit!

She opened her eyes, stifling a gasp, and shifted her vision to see more clearly what was in U612.

It’s a fucking gas giant in that ’verse! Holy shit! She was already in its upper atmosphere there, surrounded by orange-pink gases and strange particles swirling through the cabin.

Okay, she couldn’t visit U612, at all, while she was on the surface of Deckard’s World. Down on the surface, the atmosphere would probably be crushing. She let her awareness of that ’verse slide away, focusing on the others.

There were two more gas giants, not quite as large, one composed of bluish-green gases while the other’s heavy atmosphere was rust-colored. In U289g, Deckard’s World didn’t exist at all, and in U27, there was an asteroid belt instead of a planet. But the planet existed in 21 more ’verses, and it had a visible atmosphere in nine of them. Her fingers flew over her tablet as she made quick notes about what she was seeing, and where.

U322a was one of the nine with an atmosphere. How weird would it be if there was a habitable world in Elsewhere here, too?

The shuttle’s descent through the atmosphere was fascinating. Four of the other atmospheres, including the one in Elsewhere, seemed almost identical to the one in Deckard’s World. Three of the others were far thicker, and two were significantly thinner. It was weird, discovering what she could sense even without physically engaging with any of the other worlds.

“We should be landing in another twenty minutes,” Travers said beside her. “When we disembark, let me do all of the talking.”

Audrey nodded. She leaned back in her seat so she could survey the skies now above her in multiple worlds. Elsewhere, and one other world, had blue skies. In U612 and the two other gas giant ’verses, stygian darkness surrounded her aside from periodic flashes of lightning.

Any time I’m in the mood to watch a thunderstorm, I’ll have one handy, she thought. In two other ’verses, she would already be underwater. There was a third ’verse where she was surrounded by some kind of liquid, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t water.

She made more notes as they descended toward Settlement Point.

Twenty-four of her other ’verses were definitely not habitable, but several of them had interesting properties that she might, cautiously, explore sometime in the future. Two—including Elsewhere—were still potentially promising.

Landing clinched it; she was in the middle of a forest in Elsewhere, and a rolling meadow in U74. The vegetation was almost, but not quite, Earthlike. She might just have a safe place, or even two, to isomorph over to if she needed out of U1.

It’d be so crazy if every planet in Elsewhere was already habitable…

She put her tablet away, picked up her small bag, and followed Travers out of the shuttle and into the Settlement Point Interplanetary Spaceport, aware that the two technicians who had boarded the Nephrite Undine were ahead of them, still carting around their huge, heavy boxes.

Two checkpoints later—she’d been asked to show her ID twice, but had let Travers do all the talking, as asked—they reached the main terminal and its three-story wall of glass. Snow swirled on the other side of the glass; she’d seen the storm approaching even as they had touched down.

“We’re a little underdressed,” Travers said. “Our contact is running late because the roads are already bad in Settlement Point itself. We probably won’t reach the house until after dark.”

Audrey nodded. Huge fish were swimming through the cavernous terminal over in U115. One headed straight for her and she had to resist the temptation to duck.

Having a five-shape that was 27 ’verses wide was going to take some getting used to.

The weird thing was that she wasn’t having any trouble telling which ’verse things were happening in. It was like some strange form of depth perception, or another kind of sense of direction. She didn’t know how she knew things about the different worlds, but she could identify the ’verses, and their relative positions to her, as easily as she could bring her fingertip to the tip of her nose with her eyes closed.

Five-dimensional critter, right here…

And, if all went well, the Quintessa Corporation would never know she existed, or could exist.

It occurred to Audrey, for the first time, that none of the ’verses she’d expanded into were the universe of darkness she’d sensed in and around the envoy. Even U37d, creepy as it had felt when she’d first encountered it, seemed perfectly ordinary now—as ordinary as any alternate universe could be, anyway—its version of Deckard’s World thin-atmosphered and volcanic but not even slightly eldritch. Even the darkness of the gas giants was missing the chthonic horror that had swirled around that elderly woman and polluted her touch.

She hoped she’d never find that hellish ’verse.

The snow outside of the windows was growing thicker as the sky darkened, and the contact still hadn’t arrived. Audrey called up the Settlement Point weather report. Sometime during their descent, a Winter Storm Warning had been issued. Six inches was expected before morning.

Welcome home, Audrey MacNamera…

Flights and liftoffs, she noticed, were losing their ETDs, the words DELAYED and even CANCELED appearing in place of the time codes. Some of the ETAs were listed as delayed, too.

Yeah, that’s not inauspicious at all…

Half an hour later, the forecast had upped the expected snow accumulation to eight inches. The terminal was emptying out.

“Shit,” Travers muttered.

“What’s wrong?” Audrey asked her, frowning.

“I need you to turn away from the window wall,” Travers said. “There’s a news crew arriving to cover all the flight cancellations, as if this doesn’t happen with every snowstorm. You can’t be on vid.”

Audrey nodded, turning so that she faced away from the entrance and sprawling across the empty seats as if sleepy. She used her bag as a pillow, draping one of her shirts over her face as if trying to block the light and catch a nap; even if someone turned a camera on her, they wouldn’t get a shot of her face. That was the most important thing, obviously.

“You’re good at this,” Travers observed. By her tone, that wasn’t entirely complimentary.

“Had some practice,” Audrey sighed. Hopefully, with her face obscured, no one catching a glimpse of some random, lanky redhead in Sirius Shipping coveralls would be reminded of either Audrey MacNamera or Jack B. Badd.

Another half hour passed before Travers told her that the news crew had moved on. Ten minutes later, their contact finally showed up.

He was a big bear of a man, probably some nine inches or so taller than Audrey. He arrived with thick winter coats for both her and Travers, leading the two of them out to an all-terrain vehicle that wasn’t doing a very good job of concealing its military affiliations. A cold-eyed man in its driver’s seat gave her a quick look-over as she climbed in, and then ignored her.

The drive was completely silent. Audrey didn’t try to touch any of their minds; if they were military, there was the possibility that they would recognize the signs of an esper getting mentally handsy with them, and that could upend the game. If they were her handlers, she’d get to know them soon enough. And if not, then maybe it was better not to have tried to know them, anyway.

The next month and a half, she thought, could be even lonelier than the voyage on the Nephrite Undine had felt at times. Human presences didn’t necessarily mean human contact.

I still have the Apeiros, at least…

The roads were almost deserted, but Audrey had a feeling that the part of town she was traveling through was barely inhabited even in good weather. Large, abandoned-looking warehouses crowded the road, and no plows had come through. Weirdly enough, it looked a lot like the kind of place she’d visualized the fictional murder she’d supposedly witnessed taking place in.

The abandoned warehouses gave way to boarded-up businesses, and then a down-on-its-luck area that had a mixture of actual businesses and places that had closed down. The vehicle slowed to a stop in front of a three-story building, its ground-floor windows all covered with graffitied plywood, an Under New Management sign on its door visible thanks to a rare working light above it.

A dark van was also parked in front of the building. As Audrey watched, two familiar men emerged from the lit entry, nodded to her companions, climbed into the van, and drove away.

Hadn’t those been the men that had accompanied Hanoran and Travers? She almost hadn’t recognized them without their boxes and bundled against the storm.

Huh.

Neither of the men in her vehicle got out. Travers, and Travers alone, escorted her to the door of the building and ushered her inside.

“Your handler is already here,” Travers said, terse as ever. “He’ll explain everything to you. I’m not cleared to meet him. Good luck.”

And that was it. A moment later, Audrey was alone in the building, the front entry locking behind Travers with a loud click. She felt utterly alone, as if the building was completely deserted aside from some small presences that she suspected were mice in the basement. Bright light spilled out of a doorway ahead of her. Taking a deep breath, she walked through it.

The room beyond was strangely similar to the Security Room on the Nephrite Undine. She wondered if someone had done that to set her at ease, or if security rooms just had a standard look—

“Hello, Audrey,” a voice she knew almost as well as her own, and hadn’t really expected to hear again, drawled.

Holy shit. She really should have seen this coming.

64.
The Camouflage of Ordinary Things

“How’s your arm?”

“Sore,” Audrey sighed. “Just a little, though. You’re sure nobody’s gonna detect it?”

“Nobody will have the opportunity to,” MilitAIre told her. “The moment your biometrics get collected to access your medical records, flags will go up and the medical staff will be informed, in no uncertain terms, that the only kind of care they’re allowed to provide is emergency triage care. No exams, no elective procedures… except the ones you and your handler have agreed to and your handler has pre-authorized. The penalty for medical staff disobeying a Federacy block is having their licenses to practice struck off, so they won’t feel inquisitive.”

“So… where will I get checkups? And shots, and things?”

“That’s being arranged.” MilitAIre sounded amused. “But it’d be very difficult to sell the idea that you’ve been on Deckard’s World the whole time if someone notices that you’ve received immunizations never offered there and have been baby-proofed until you’re nearly twenty-four.”

True. Those things weren’t generally available to girls on Deckard’s World, even if she personally thought they should be. It hadn’t taken all that much to convince him to let her get them done, either.

She’d begun reading the book that Izil had given her—one that, it turned out, had been co-authored by Takama herself—and it had been an epiphany. The Biology, Psychology, and Sociology of Human Sexuality had answered a lot of questions she hadn’t even known she had… and its evaluation of the sociopolitical norms of Deckard’s World were scathing enough that she was no longer surprised that the book would be impossible to find there. She found herself missing Takama more than ever and wishing they could discuss the text.

Izil had given it to her because it discussed issues of gender and biology that, thanks to her time masquerading as a boy, had confounded her. She wondered if he’d have given it to her at all if he’d known she was from Deckard’s world, given just how critical it was about the planet of her birth. Less than three chapters in, she’d discovered that, in addition to her home world imposing several centuries-out-of-date gender “norms” upon its populace, it had also cut people off from fundamental health resources. Such as immunizations that would protect against virtually every sexually transmitted disease a person might be exposed to… and regulators that could prevent pregnancies for years or even decades. The simple existence of such things had come as a shock; even her aunt, the nurse, hadn’t mentioned them.

Takama had argued, in one chapter, that the rationale behind blocking access to such treatments was tied to a disturbing philosophy that sexuality was sinful and should have negative consequences for anyone who enjoyed it. But it wasn’t the consequences of her own actions that Audrey had been worried about, which was what she’d told MilitAIre when she’d argued that she should receive all of the shots and an implant. If she and Kyra hadn’t managed to escape from Pritchard—assuming they’d survived what he and possibly Makarov would have done to them next—the consequences of his actions could have followed her through the rest of her life in any number of awful ways. And he might not be the last sexual predator whose path she crossed.

MilitAIre had let her plead her case, and then had spent a few minutes dissecting her arguments and suggesting how she could improve them, before informing her that he’d agreed with her from the beginning and that First-AId would have her implant configured for her in one day’s time. He’d then showed her the full schedule of vaccines—including several, for non-sexually-transmitted diseases, that she’d never heard of—that she would need to receive in the coming weeks. Deckard’s World, it turned out, had some perplexingly backwater ideas about disease and immunology that conflated getting sick at all with moral failings, and Audrey had been lucky that most of the people she’d encountered on her run hadn’t shared those views.

The funny thing was that MilitAIre didn’t particularly care about the philosophies behind any of the stances favoring or opposing vaccines; he simply considered it his job to ensure that Audrey was protected from all potential threats, including those on a microbial level.

His pragmatism about such things, she’d found, made him a very restful companion.

He didn’t judge; at least, not in any kind of moral sense. He did critique her constantly, but in a way that somehow made her feel better about whatever goals she’d missed as he analyzed just how she might reach them on her next attempt. There were still a whole lot of things she couldn’t bring herself to face—or discuss—yet, but it was growing easier and easier to talk about some of them. And he had insisted on knowing everything about her time on the run.

The rest of the AIs still had no idea who she really was, but they had accepted MilitAIre’s new position of authority over her. Even CaptAIn deferred to him where she was concerned, although he rarely had to.

“You have now succeeded twice in conforming your brain waves to baseline readings,” MilitAIre told her, rousing her from her musings. “Later this week, we’re going to run our first ‘surprise Quantification’ drill to see how close you can bring them without advance preparation. Advance warning is never given for such tests, after all.”

“Do you think I’m ready for that?” she asked, feeling doubtful.

“It’s unlikely at this stage, but we need to see just how far away from normative your readings will be in such a scenario.”

“So we’re doing a ‘fire drill.’”

“Essentially.”

Audrey nodded. She liked the way he tested her, in truth. She liked being able to make mistakes and learn from them instead of being scared that she wouldn’t get everything right the first time. She liked not having to figure out what she was doing wrong, or just wasn’t doing right, completely on her own. He had told her, when she asked, that her strongest learning style was “interactive,” which had both made perfect sense to her and come as a disturbing revelation, given how many of her teachers had stressed “independent learning.” But without MilitAIre, she might have still been in a tailspin about how to get her gamma-delta wave synch-up—apparently a telltale for espers—to un-synch.

The Apeiros disliked the exercises; they couldn’t “hear” her during them. She often felt like her senses were muffled, too; her awareness of the other ’verses became distant and tenuous. Once she relaxed, everything flowed back to her and she felt like herself again, but…

It worried her. She suspected it worried them both. She didn’t think she could live in a “baseline” for very long. It was further and further away from who she was.

“In the meantime,” MilitAIre said after a moment, “now that you have completed your mathematics, science, and social science modules, you aren’t going to be able to put off your literary assignments anymore.”

Audrey had to restrain the urge to huff. “Okay… I think I can manage them…”

The hardest one would probably be The Crystal Cave, she thought. She’d been reading it when she’d spotted Makarov on the train, and every time she’d tried to pick it up since, she started thinking about the standoff that had followed. For the first two months on the Nephrite Undine, though, every work of fiction she’d tried to get into had somehow become all about those terrible events. That had finally begun to recede.

“I’ll try reading The Crystal Cave again, last,” she told MilitAIre.

“Understandable. What other titles will you be reading?”

She knew he could look them up easily; he had access to everything she’d stored on the ship’s data mainframes, but he wanted her to talk to him about them. He’d explained his rationale for this to her a week earlier: aside from his observations about her preferred learning style, the way she interacted with and handled the texts, and discussed them with others, would be markedly different if she’d done all of it on her own, and that might raise suspicions. Her teachers and classmates needed to be under the impression that she had simply been enrolled somewhere else for two school-years; those who thought they were in the know had to believe that her handler had tutored her during her isolation. The truth, that she had spent nearly half a year separated by countless light-years from any other human being, was something that no one must ever suspect.

“Um… my eighth grade curriculum included The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.” And a bunch of short stories, but she wasn’t going to rattle all of them off.

“Interesting. Those are all twentieth century works, all mid-century, written in English by either British or American authors. That’s a narrow spectrum.”

Audrey shrugged. “Takama said in her book that Deckard’s World is mired in mid-twentieth century Anglo-America.”

“Do you know what characterizes that milieu?”

Oh. Now MilitAIre’s motive was coming clear. He’d added a few sociology readings of his own choosing to her list last week, after all.

“Yeah. Post-World War II America was attempting to assert a ‘traditional’ way of life that had never really existed before then, right? A ‘nuclear’ family in which only one parent worked outside of the home… people did act like my mom was nuts for going back to work when I started school. And an ‘American Way’ that was all about ‘equality’ and ‘freedom,’ but only if you met certain criteria. Women could vote but usually couldn’t have their own bank accounts or credit lines… birth control was rudimentary as shit… racial segregation was commonplace… and more than half of the rights in the Federacy Human Rights Charter were routinely withheld from people.”

“And?”

“And the Cold War kept people from fighting as hard for those rights and against those limitations as they might have, because a shadowy enemy on a whole ’nother continent could blow everybody up, and they were told that was a higher priority.”

“Well stated. Have you seen signs of anything similar on Deckard’s World?”

“The Cold War part doesn’t seem to apply, but everybody’s still jumpy about the New Taliban trying to invade and it’s been more than two centuries since that happened. So maybe they’re our ‘Soviet Union.’”

“A completely external common enemy to keep the populace’s watchfulness focused outward, yes. What else? What is attention being focused away from?”

Audrey grimaced. Her father had been right about Deckard’s World, and obviously MilitAIre wanted to make sure she was aware of it before she found herself surrounded by it again. “Class divisions are along racial lines. Xenophobia is high and includes almost all members of other ethnic and religious groups. There’s a big emphasis on ‘traditional’ gender roles and most of those are the ‘traditions’ of mid-twentieth-century America, so if you’re not heterosexual and monogamous, and want to do or have things that ‘belong’ to the other sex, like a ‘man’s job’ or ‘men’s clothing,’ you may have the right under Federacy law, but almost nobody’s going to support your choices.”

“You disguised yourself as a boy for a while,” MilitAIre said. “What was it like, being seen and treated as a boy rather than as a girl?”

“People didn’t talk down to me nearly as much,” she reflected. She’d been thinking about it a lot, because her experiences of passing as a boy had left her questioning many of the gender divides on Deckard’s World. “They acted like I might just have a brain in my head and they didn’t spend as much time trying to prove anything I said wrong. I still got a few creepy looks on Vasenji Station, but… nobody was trying to ‘accidentally’ grope me or rub up against me anymore. And all the ‘guy stuff’ I’d been told I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out—with maybe the exception of how to pee into a urinal standing up—wasn’t so hard as all that.”

“The study guides you’ll be working with don’t bring such issues up, but I want you to think about them as well, as you’re reading. You’ve now been exposed to a larger cross-section of humanity than you knew on Deckard’s World. Think about whose stories are being told, and who’s being left out of the narratives altogether. And why your school, or your world, might not want to include those who don’t appear, or even have people think about them. Also, think about why Arthurian legend would be important enough to your world’s culture that two of the novels on your reading list feature it.” A note of humor entered MilitAIre’s voice. “I can’t help you with the issue of using a urinal, but First-AId might have some ideas, if you wish.”

“Nah,” Audrey laughed. “That’s not necessary.”

“And your ninth grade reading list?”

“The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Should I be watching for the same things with them?”

“Yes. Your reading lists have been curated to match, and reinforce, prevailing ideologies of a time and place more than half a millennium in the past. While some of them are critical of that time and place, there are limits they don’t push past and attitudes they never challenge. I’ll be interested to see what conclusions you end up drawing about that.”

“Am I making a mistake?” Audrey blurted.

“By?”

“Going back to Deckard’s World.” She was going to be spending at least four years surrounded by many of those backsliding beliefs, a lot of them possibly coming out of the mouths of people she loved and admired.

“No,” MilitAIre told her in a calm tone. “All worlds have their flaws. But it would be much harder to establish a plausible and safe identity for you on any other world. When Audrey MacNamera ceases to be a missing person, especially when it becomes evident that she never left Deckard’s World at all, most of the potential loose threads from your run will be wiped away. Your name, image, and biometrics will be deleted from all of the Missing Persons databases throughout the Federacy, making it all the more unlikely that anyone will ever connect you to your appearances, under a variety of aliases, on three separate planets, one space station, and six Star Jumpers. Everything will seem to be back in its place. This wouldn’t be true for any other identity you took on, on any other world. Once you are legally eighteen, even if not yet biologically so, you can elect to leave Deckard’s World again—in the custody of your handler—and as far as the rest of the universe will know, it’ll be your first time going offworld.”

“Best and easiest way to break my trail. Got it.”

“And your family will know you’re alive and unharmed, and they won’t feel betrayed by your disappearance because they’ll believe you had no choice in the matter.”

Ouch. She’d very much had a choice, and she’d chosen to run out on them. She felt worst about running out on her cats, though, and they couldn’t be told a placatory lie about WitSec disappearing her for nearly two years.

“I’m sorry, Audrey. That wasn’t intended to upset you.”

“I know. I just… I was really thoughtless. About how they’d feel when I just disappeared. They’ve been worried about me for a year and a half now.” She wiped at her eyes. “They don’t know if I’m alive or dead—”

“They will soon. They’ll know that you have returned to them unharmed.”

“I don’t know about unharmed,” she disagreed. “Too much shit went down.”

“Comparatively speaking, then.”

She supposed that, on a missing-kid scale of Huckleberry Finn to Luljeta Kamberi, she was a lot closer to Huck than to Luljeta.

“Okay. They’ll be able to stop worrying, at least,” Audrey reluctantly agreed. “But… are they really not going to ask questions once they’re told I’ve been in WitSec?” She had her doubts. Her mother was a corporate lawyer, and Alvin the Asshole was an assistant D.A.

“That’s highly unlikely at first. Human curiosity shows little regard for what’s been declared off-limits. They’ll have a lot of questions, and they won’t be happy about not getting answers.”

“So what do we do?” Her mom was formidable, after all, and Alvin… well, she really didn’t know. He was an asshole, but she hadn’t stuck around to find out how much of an asshole he might be.

“You’ll stick to your story,” MilitAIre said, “which is simple enough. You saw something that you shouldn’t have witnessed and can’t talk about, you were taken into WitSec custody soon after, and you’ve finally been allowed to come home as long as you stay silent about everything that happened. And when they try to force the issue—which they undoubtedly will at first—your handler starts throwing their weight around.”

“That… sounds…” She winced. “…bad?”

“Only if they’re too persistent,” he told her. “They’ll stop once they understand that your handler truly does have the power to take you away from them again if they keep fighting.”

Shit. “Does that ever happen?”

“Very rarely. But even if it becomes necessary, your trail will already be broken at that stage. Federacy records will indicate that Audrey MacNamera never left Deckard’s World while she was a missing person, and that will still be true even if your return home ends up being brief. Your family will know you’re alive and well somewhere. But the odds of that becoming necessary are extremely slim.”

“So if Deckard’s World doesn’t work out…”

“You can be relocated. But it shouldn’t be necessary, and it’s important for you to focus on trying to have as normal an adolescence as you can. Aside from two comprehensive topics you can never discuss—your experiences during your missing time, and your unusual abilities—you’ll be able to live an ordinary life. Cultivating the ordinary is crucial to success in the WitSec program.”

“Yeah, ordinary…” Audrey tried to repress a frustrated sigh. “Because I’m such a normal person…”

“The important thing is for everyone else to believe you are, no matter what the truth is,” he told her in his most patient voice. “Which is why we’re adding another module to your curriculum between now and your return.”

Uh oh. “And what module is that?”

“Method acting.”

The main screen activated, the words Survey of Method Acting Techniques for “Natural” Performances emblazoned across its surface.

“You’ll be spending the next four years, minimum, portraying a role,” he told her. “We’ll explore and study the various techniques, particularly those used by film and vid actors for close-up performances, to find the approaches that allow you to play your part as naturally and convincingly as possible.”

“And what is that role exactly?” she asked. Obviously, it wouldn’t be “Jack B. Badd.” Jack was dead.

“A girl who, as a pre-teen, tried to run away from home after her mother suddenly announced she was marrying a man that the girl disliked and couldn’t manage to get along with. She got lost after making it into the nearby city, and found herself in the proverbial ‘wrong place at the wrong time,’ where she witnessed the murder of a Federacy agent. She panicked and hid, and was later found by other Federacy agents investigating their colleague’s death. When they realized just what she had seen, and whom she had witnessed committing the murder, they took her into protective custody.”

Audrey nodded. That was a whole lot more believable than what had actually happened, in truth…

…but not entirely dissimilar.

“Because the perpetrator of the crime, and his employers, were unaware that there was a witness,” MilitAIre continued, “the decision was made to conceal even the fact that she had been taken into custody from everyone until her testimony could be used. She was kept hidden for almost two years, with no human contact except her handlers, until the case abruptly fell apart when the perpetrator died in a firefight with Federacy agents, and any possibility of connecting his crimes to his employers came to an end. She was then told that she could return to her family as long as she never spoke of what she had seen or where she had been, because if his employers ever realized that she had witnessed the murder they had commissioned, they might have her preemptively killed just in case she knew enough to link them to the crime, herself.”

That made an absurd amount of sense, too. It was even, she realized, close to the truth. Pritchard and Makarov were both dead, and there had been nothing in the Merc Network files that she or General Toal could use to conclusively prove that the Quintessa Corporation had hired them to murder Colonel Tomlin. But she knew enough about that corporation’s ruthlessness to know that, proof or no proof, if they ever realized she possessed such knowledge—let alone that she had Threshold Syndrome—they would want to wipe her off the board.

“So, uh… most of the story is kinda true… just… happened a lot earlier into my run and… didn’t involve crash landings, battles on a merc ship, or Threshold Syndrome.” Or Riddick.

“Exactly. The most convincing lies are the ones built around enough verifiable truth that the false parts are unlikely to be scrutinized.”

“Like me witnessing a murder.” In point of fact, she’d witnessed several, and had even committed a few of her own.

No. Jack B. Badd had done that.

And Jack is dead.

“Exactly,” MilitAIre agreed. “Even if you never tell the story—and you never should—it should be something that you can treat as truthful. That makes all the difference. The current projected timeline for your return to your mother is mid-December. By then, we will have finalized all of the details of the story you can visualize, if not actually share, should someone start poking at your alibi.”

“Why December?” she asked, startled. “We’re scheduled to reach Deckard’s World near the end of October.”

“We’ll need time to configure the safe house you’ll use to check in with your handler each week and make sure everything is solid,” he told her. “But more importantly, the window in which you’re both biologically and legally fourteen years old opens on December 4, and being able to truthfully say you’re fourteen, if asked, will help sell the lie that you never spent any time in cryo. That said, I also have no intention of you suffering a second Christmas away from your family if it can be helped.”

It amazed her, sometimes, just how much he could see through her. And how much the things that mattered to her mattered to him. “So I’m going to be doing weekly check-ins with my handler? How come?”

“Largely for your sake,” he explained. “Your family’s probably going to be clingy and demanding at first once you return, and prone to not giving you space or privacy. So every week, for a few hours, you’ll be able to get away from the scrutiny.”

That hadn’t even occurred to her when she’d been trying to come up with her own back-story and plans… but she could see it now. Her mom might be afraid to let her back out of her sight.

“You can use the time,” MilitAIre continued, “to engage in any projects or inquiries that you can’t do where they’re watching… or just have a period of quiet. You’ll also be able to address any complications where your alibis are concerned, should those occur. Think of it as a pressure valve. Some weeks, you may not especially need it or even want it, but having it as a set part of your routine will ensure that you always have it when you do.”

“What kind of projects or inquiries?” she found herself asking.

“You have friends on other worlds that no one can know about. While you can’t contact those friends, especially one of them, until you’re eighteen, if you want to run searches related to any of them, you should only do so in the safe house. You’ll also have access to materials that are censored on Deckard’s World but considered customary and essential information throughout much of the rest of the Federacy. And, of course, it’ll be a space where you can continue to develop both your abilities and the skills you need to keep them hidden.”

“Yeah, I’ll need all of that stuff, won’t I?” It seemed so obvious once he said it.

“I think so,” he told her. Sometimes the hints of humor in his voice made him seem like an actual human being to her. “And knowing that you’ll be able to access it on a regular basis will help make playing your designated role, the rest of the time, more manageable.”

Once again, Audrey found herself feeling relieved that she hadn’t been stuck doing all of this on her own. Half of the things MilitAIre was describing hadn’t even occurred to her. I would have fucked this up, too, on my own.

She really didn’t do “alone” well at all. Not like Riddick. She realized that, the whole time she’d been with him… on the crash planet, in the skiff, on the Kublai Khan and the Xanadu III, and on the one and only day he’d spent on Helion—a scant week, really, even less time than she’d spent with Ewan—she’d felt him wishing to be alone, to not have to feel the contact of other minds on his, shying away from both Imam’s judgments and her infatuation.

“You seem to be thinking about something sad,” MilitAIre observed.

“Yeah…” she sighed. “Riddick. I keep trying to just… let go of everything that happened with him, but… sometimes I just… miss him.”

His desire to leave no longer stung, the more she thought about it. He needed to be a lone wolf, unencumbered by problematic attachments. He’d probably have thrived in the isolation of the Nephrite Undine, whereas she, in spite of all of the companionable kindness the AIs were showing her, was counting down the days until she could immerse herself in the press of humanity again and feel other minds touching hers. The only part that still hurt, that she still had trouble understanding, was the way he’d left her without even a word, without a goodbye. That had made it hard for her to believe that he’d ever cared about her at all.

And yet he’d saved her life several times, risking his own in the process. Why, she wondered, had he been willing to throw himself into the path of bullets to keep her from falling to her death, but unwilling to tell her goodbye?

Why was it so damned hard to get over this? Every time she thought she had…

“There have been no sightings of him in a while,” MilitAIre said after a moment. “The last ‘confirmed’ sighting on record is the false video you commissioned. In the meantime, he’s dropped from first to second on the list of the Federacy’s Most Wanted, and is unlikely to move back up.”

“Why? Who’s in first place?”

“Do you really need to ask?” MilitAIre sounded amused again.

“Duke Pritchard?” It made sense. Aside from a very small group of people who were sworn to secrecy, nobody knew that Pritchard was dead. But everybody knew the kinds of crimes he’d been prone to… and might, as far as they knew, still be committing somewhere. He had become the bogeyman every parent with a missing daughter imagined… including, probably, both of hers.

“It’s likely that he will remain at the top of the Most Wanted list for years, or even decades,” he said. “No proof of his death will ever appear, given the location and probable condition of his remains at this point. And while the Federacy may dislike having an “Unleashed Esper” running loose, even it must admit that none of Riddick’s crimes have ever approached the monstrosity of Pritchard’s. Quite the opposite.”

“The opposite?”

“Yes,” MilitAIre told her. “Based on the part of his criminal record that remains classified, your Riddick might even be willing to break his cover to kill someone like Duke Pritchard.”

“He’s not ‘my’ anything,” Audrey grumbled before she could stop herself.

She wondered why, after everything, that could still hurt so much.

I need to let it go, she scolded herself. He isn’t part of my life and he never was. He was part of Jack B. Badd’s life.

And Jack. Is. Dead.

63.
When a Lie Becomes the Truth

“Did they tell you what they did to you?”

Audrey sighed and shook her head. “They refuse to say what happened, exactly. Just that I learned ‘a truth I couldn’t live with’ and that, if they hadn’t taken it away, I would have hurt myself. And that the only way they could leave a message was the way they did, because I was too upset to cooperate.”

MilitAIre seemed to ponder that for a moment. “Do you believe them?”

“Yeah, I do.” She shrugged. “You saw the holo. I… completely flipped out.”

“Do you wish to investigate it further?”

She shook her head again. “Only thing that’ll come of that is more holes in my memory. Not in yours, I guess, but… why chase something I can’t catch? They tell me I’ll remember it all when it’s time to.”

“And when will that be?”

“When I hatch into my six-shape, whatever that means.” She shrugged again. “They’re not really good at explaining that without trying to show me six-dimensional geometry, and that is something I can’t handle all that well.”

“Most human beings can’t handle four-dimensional geometry,” MilitAIre observed.

“Yeah, well, I guess Threshold Syndrome means I’m a five-dimensional critter now. It’s weird, learning to see things but not with eyes. Can you handle six-dimensional geometry?”

“Yes.” He told her. “Computer brains can process and visualize the additional dimensional variables that baseline human perception isn’t equipped for. It intrigues me that you are learning how to do the same.”

“Scared the hell out of me when it started,” she admitted.

“When was that, exactly?”

“The morning-day right before the New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion,” she told him, sighing. “The night before, Kyra and I helped Colonel Gavin Tomlin rescue the Scarlet Matador passengers from this merc team the Quintessa Corporation had hired to abduct them. I moved two shuttles from U1 to U322a and back, and then Kyra helped the passengers cross into U322a and cross back after we reached a safe zone in U1. I guess our… exertions… drew the attention of the Apeiros. One of the first things they did, when they realized we didn’t understand any dimensions higher than the third, was try to show them to us. Ticket to the crazy train.”

“I suspect I am hearing a great deal of the story out of order,” MilitAIre said. “I have drawn up a timeline, though. We can, perhaps, fill it in together to ensure everything is covered.”

The largest screen in the Security Room—which was where MilitAIre insisted all their discussions would be held—came alive. Audrey studied the data on the screen.

January 30, 2516 – Audrey MacNamera reported missing in evening. Passenger called Jack B. Badd on board a flight (Cloaked Butterfly) from Deckard’s World to Vasenji Station.

March 2, 2516 – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 13 years old. Cloaked Butterfly arrives at Vasenji Station.

March 9, 2516 – Hunter-Gratzner leaves Vasenji Station for the Tangiers System. “Jack B. Badd” presumed to be stowing away on board.

August 10, 2516 – Hunter-Gratzner sends out emergency dispatch indicating crash landing in progress.

August 17, 2516 – Kublai Khan sends out distress beacon, reporting that fugitive convict Richard B. Riddick has killed most of the crew and escaped with two hostages: Imam Abu al-Walid and “Jack B. Badd.”

September 16, 2516 – Star Jump shuttle Xanadu III, from the Kublai Khan, lands on Helion Prime. Officially two passengers on board, Abu al-Walid and “Jackie al-Walid.” Pilot allegedly William Johns (no flight certifications on record).

September 18, 2516 – Xanadu III makes unauthorized departure from Helion Prime in early morning hours. Richard B. Riddick presumed to be piloting. Flight telemetry unavailable; tracking unsuccessful.

September 19, 2516 – Abu al-Walid files a report related to the aftermath of the Hunter-Gratzner crash. Testimony from “Jackie al-Walid” also included.

October 4, 2516 – Audrey MacNamera’s biological 13^th birthday, based on cryo time aboard the Cloaked Butterfly, Hunter-Gratzner, and Xanadu III.

“October second,” Audrey corrected MilitAIre. “We didn’t go into cryo until we were two days out of the Kublai Khan and were sure nobody was on our trail. I slept straight through the first day, but I wasn’t frozen.”

She shook her head. She’d “celebrated” that birthday quietly by herself, still struggling to acclimate to Helion Prime but not comfortable telling Abu or Lajjun—who had already begun trying to micro-manage everything she did—the significance of the day. It had been the loneliest and most miserable birthday of her life.

“Is… that why you’re making this timeline?” she asked. “To find out how old I really am?”

“October second, noted. It’s one of the reasons,” MilitAIre told her. “General Toal says that you are not permitted to reach out to a pilot in the Royal Tangiers Space Service until you are biologically eighteen years old. He asked me to determine a solid date for when that would be. But we also need a timeline to make sure we have covered all possible aspects of your missing time that might require alibis.”

Not that Ewan would want to hear from her then… Audrey sighed and kept reading, dreading the entries that she knew were coming.

December 17, 2516 – “Jackie al-Walid” admitted to New Athens General Hospital with critical blood loss and respiratory impairment, placed in ICU.

December 20, 2516 – “Jackie al-Walid” reclassified as “Jane Doe 7439,” transferred to Aceso Psychiatric Hospital. Primary Diagnoses: attempted suicide, severe clinical depression. Secondary Diagnoses: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stockholm Syndrome.

Shit. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d tried to kill herself right before Christmas. On some level, she wondered if she’d known… and if the absence of it from her life, the al-Walids’ refusal to even acknowledge that she might belong to a different religion than their own that needed to be observed to some degree, had deepened the darkness surrounding her even more. Not that she was particularly religious, but her past Christmases had always been times when she’d felt closest to her family, most connected… instead of adrift and alone.

There hadn’t been any Christmas decorations up in the hospital, she thought. But then again, most Christians on Helion Prime would have been Eastern Orthodox, in keeping with the Greek-centric history of the world’s colonization. Christmas wouldn’t have fallen for them until January 7; maybe that was why it hadn’t occurred to the al-Walids to do anything for her sooner. And although Jack had become aware of the diversity within C Ward by then, she’d assumed that the bits of iconography she had seen were religious but not holiday-specific. It wasn’t like anyone had been hanging up images of candy canes, Christmas trees, holly wreaths, or reindeer with glowing red noses; those were symbols that had come from a whole different part of old Earth than most of Helion’s colonists. That had been true even though almost everyone in the ward had spoken English as their first language.

She wondered if it would have made any difference if the al-Walids had made a few gestures like that. She suspected that it wouldn’t have. All she’d wanted for Christmas was to leave, and they’d been holding on too tightly, she’d thought, for her to get out alive.

January 27, 2517 – 8^th Grade school year on Deckard’s World concludes. Entire year missed by Audrey MacNamera.

Well, that was a cheerful thought.

February 12, 2517 – “Jane Doe 7439” and Kyra Wittier-Collins disappear from Aceso Psychiatric Hospital during a cyberterrorist-induced breakdown of computer and security systems, in early morning hours. Official prime suspect: Richard B. Riddick. Scarlet Matador departs Helion Prime Interplanetary Port in evening.

Heh, I’m officially a cyberterrorist.

“Riddick didn’t do it,” Audrey said. “It was me. The whole place was susceptible to the Ghost Mode protocol in my father’s security programs. Helion Prime uses the bare-bones configurations of those systems thanks to the AI Rebellion, but Ghost Mode is in the systems whether or not it’s requested. My dad told me it’s too integral to leave out of the code. I set up a whole scenario of cascading malfunctions, intended to keep everybody too busy to notice that Kyra and I were gone for several hours.”

“That corroborates General Toal’s account,” MilitAIre said. He had stopped upbraiding her for being too forthcoming… for the moment. Her cooperation was essential for the time being, but he’d told her he would still need to teach her how to keep her mouth shut better. Later. “I see from the documentation that it’s intended to give law enforcement and military intelligence access to suspect systems without alerting their targets. As it appears that you’re the only unintended user of the protocol to date, I probably don’t need to recommend against its continued presence in the code.”

“Good,” Audrey sighed. “If you had to make that recommendation, my dad could’ve ended up in some really hot water.”

“That’s an outcome I’ll endeavor to avoid.”

March 2, 2517 – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 14 years old.

April 16, 2517 – Level Five Incident occurs on board the Scarlet Matador as it arrives in the Tangiers System.

April 17, 2517 – Landing of Scarlet Matador on Tangiers Prime. Custody of passengers and crew taken from Colonel Gavin Tomlin by Quintessa Corporation.

April 18, 2517 – Eighteen passengers and crew die under mysterious circumstances at start of day / local EOD. Custody of surviving Scarlet Matador passengers remanded to Colonel Gavin Tomlin. All survivors transferred from New Marrakesh General Hospital to Mansour Plaza.

April 20, 2517 – Colonel Gavin Tomlin orders relocation of remaining Scarlet Matador survivors from Mansour Plaza to Othman Tower.

April 26, 2517 – Marianne Tepper submits application and résumé to Sirius Shipping. First records of Tepper’s existence appear in Federacy databases.
Two shuttles collide and explode during launch over the Mutawassit Ocean; all hands lost, including remaining passengers of the Scarlet Matador; “Battle of Othman Plaza” (no particulars provided by General Toal)
Addendum: Colonel Tomlin rescues Scarlet Matador passengers from mercenaries hired by Quintessa Corporation, assisted by Audrey MacNamera and Kyra Wittier-Collins.
Location of rescue mission: Othman Plaza?
Status of Scarlet Matador passengers: Alive and in hiding?

“Honestly, that battle was mostly Kyra. She took out almost the whole merc team. Tomlin… they’d grabbed him and had him cuffed and held at gunpoint when we arrived.”

“Noted. So she killed most of the team and he killed the rest?”

Audrey sighed and shook her head. “I killed one member of the team. She killed the rest.”

“And the surviving Scarlet Matador passengers are alive and in hiding?”

“Yeah.”

“And then the Quintessa Corporation had Colonel Tomlin assassinated the next day?”

She felt a painful lump form in her throat. By the time that morning had dawned, she thought, both she and Kyra would have done anything for him, and he’d seemed to feel the same way about them, albeit on a would-be-fatherly level. If he’d lived, they—or, at least, Kyra—might never have left his side. They had only just found him and they’d lost him so quickly… “Yeah…”

And there it was on the next line.

April 27, 2517 – New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion.

May 7, 2517 – Memorial for Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane.

It was strange to think that it had taken that long for his memorial. But there had been a full Tangiers day of search-and-rescue and triage, followed by a week of more urgent funerals—those of Muslim or Jewish faith were supposed to be interred right away, and there’d been so many of them—before the memorials for those who had been wiped away without a trace had begun. It had seemed a shorter time than that… but she and Kyra had been barely existing in a gray wasteland during that week-plus, and time had meant almost nothing. And then, at the memorial…

I met Ewan… It tore at her a little. She wondered if she would spend the rest of her life feeling a mixture of longing, loss, and guilt whenever she thought of him.

And I almost got tortured by a serial killer that night… It was weird to think that both meetings had happened in such a short time span. In the aftermath, Ewan’s protectiveness and the unconditional comfort he’d offered had left her hopelessly in love.

May 7, 2517 (continued) – Interview offer letter, for position on Major Barbara, sent to Marianne Tepper.

May 8, 2517 – Bodies of eighteen Scarlet Matador passengers disappear from Marrakesh General Hospital Morgue; Scarlet Matador “implodes.”

“The Scarlet Matador didn’t implode,” she told MilitAIre. “It’s in U322a, along with whatever’s left of the bodies at this point. I moved them to where the Quintessa Corporation would never find them, especially now that they’ve retired U322a from the Star Jump database.”

“Fascinating. General Toal’s dispatch matches your account, improbable as the whole thing sounds. He indicates that you were injured in the process. How so?”

“There was a box inside the Scarlet Matador. An apeirochoron. It’s… something that’s in every ’verse at once. When I finished moving the Matador out of U1, the damn thing was still hanging in space there. So I tried to push it out. Taking it out of even one universe… I guess it breaks it, makes it unstable in the rest of the universes—”

…stone that wasn’t stone cracked, splintered, shivered into dust and vanished into nothing…

“—but I nearly gave myself a brain aneurysm in the process. And my brain waves afterwards started getting flagged for Quantification.”

“Which is one of the two reasons you have your neurofeedback unit, correct?” MilitAIre asked. “You’re using it to train yourself to appear normal if subjected to brain scans. Something that would be far easier if you didn’t use your abilities on such a regular basis.”

“I don’t think I can really stop using them at this point,” Audrey sighed. “The Apeiros… I don’t know why, but they seem to need me for something. And… I need them. I still don’t know what happened when I was little or why I spent so many years telling myself it was all fake but… now that I know what it is I’ve been doing the whole time, what it means… I need it.”

She missed contact with other living minds. It was another reason why part of her didn’t care that the Apeiros might be dangerous to her. For all that MilitAIre reassured her that she was no longer alone, that was something that only felt true to her when her mind was touching other living, organic minds, human or not. If she actually tried to go “radio silent” with the Apeiros, she would starve.

She wished she could feel the AIs.

May 9, 2517 – Marianne Tepper contacts Sirius Shipping declining Major Barbara posting but requesting consideration to serve as Acting Captain of the Nephrite Undine.

That, Audrey thought, had been a particularly rough night. But it had—more or less—worked out; she was on board the Undine now.

“How come you’re tracking my job application on here?” she asked.

“It’s part of the timeline of your movements and actions that we’re developing,” MilitAIre replied. “I need to see the whole picture before I decide what is and isn’t important.”

“The most important part of that, to me, anyway, was that when the Major Barbara got rerouted to the Catalan system, I lost my chance to go to Furya. Which,” she sighed heavily, “is probably for the best if the first thing they’d’ve done to me when I landed was Quantify me.”

“So instead you chose a ship that would return you to your mother’s world,” MilitAIre observed. “I’m required to ask for more details about why you ran away from home. I’m not permitted to return you to an abusive environment, if that was a factor in why you ran away. And your trauma reaction to the fortune teller incident is a red flag for abuse.”

“It wasn’t abusive. Nobody’s ever hit me or anything. I just… didn’t like my mom’s new fiancé and was pissed I wasn’t given the choice to go with my dad when he left for Furya, ’cause they didn’t tell me the real reason why I couldn’t.” Audrey took a deep breath. Might as well admit the rest. “And I’d read way too many stories about kids running away to have adventures… I thought chasing after my dad would be just like them. Not… a fucking nightmare.”

She turned back to the screen, feeling like an idiot.

May 10, 2517 – Alexander Toombs arrested for assaulting a waitress at the Tiraline Gardens; video of Richard B. Riddick with Kyra Wittier-Collins and Jane Doe 7439, apparently on Shakti IV, begins circulating on Mercenary Network.

“Kyra and I made that video,” Audrey said. “With the help of a rogue AI working in the Dark Zone. DeepfAIk-5. I was trying to lay a false trail, but I didn’t do it in time to prevent Toombs from ruining Kyra’s chances of staying on Tangiers Prime.” She nibbled at her lip for a moment, wishing… “Damn it. I don’t like not knowing where she is. I’m worried about her. I keep feeling like something’s off…”

“I can inquire with General Toal about her status at the next beacon, if you like. But I can’t promise he’ll share his data.”

“Might as well try, I guess. All the Apeiros keep telling me is that she’s ‘dreaming of a world with three suns.’” Audrey shook her head. “Probably means she’s in cryo. Not growing her five-shape or anything. She refuses to talk to them, but I guess they still overhear her loudest thoughts.”

“We will need to talk more about ‘five-shapes,’” MilitAIre observed.

May 11, 2517 – Sirius Shipping sends Marianne Tepper a formal job offer for the Nephrite Undine position of Acting Captain. She accepts and arranges to depart New Casablanca on midnight (local time) shuttle on May 18. Security incident at Quintessa Corporation headquarters.

May 12, 2517 – Implosion of Star Jumper Lucy Ricardo.

“I think the Lucy Ricardo really did implode,” Audrey admitted. “I don’t know how or why. It coincides with the first time the Apeiros took memories from me, though. General Toal said the whole wreckage seemed to be crumbling to dust, which is just crazy.”

“I have a line of inquiry I’ll want to pursue about that later,” MilitAIre said.

May 12, 2517 (continued) – Javor Makarov identified as New Marrakesh Spaceport Bomber; Duke Pritchard identified as his accomplice; both flagged as the murderers of Luljeta Kamberi.

“Sick bastards,” she muttered. It still made her shudder to realize how close she and Kyra had come to being pulled into the hideous “games” they played using abducted girls.

“Law enforcement still lists Duke Pritchard as being at large,” MilitAIre said, “but General Toal’s dispatch indicates he may in fact be dead.”

“He is. I killed him.” She didn’t like to think of those killings—Chillingsworth, the nameless merc pilot, Pritchard—as hers, though. Jack B. Badd killed them.

And Jack is dead.

“How?” MilitAIre asked.

“Sebby—that’s the Ree we’d rescued from drowning, long story—stung him and paralyzed him after he stabbed Kyra. Our apartment was some twenty-two meters above the ground and the tide was out in U322a—Elsewhere’s what we call that ’verse—so I isomorphed him over to Elsewhere and let him fall onto the rocks below us.”

“And you’re sure he died?”

“Damn sure. His head hit one of the rocks and splattered everywhere. The native crustacean life was already eating him when I checked.”

“Why did he attack you and Kyra?”

“He was looking for Riddick. Toombs thought Riddick was with us or nearby somewhere, and Pritchard was planning on pinning the Spaceport Explosion on him so Makarov would be off the hook.”

“Interesting. He told you he was looking for Riddick?”

Funny. Now that she thought back, he’d never actually said Riddick’s name. “Who else? Pritchard talked about Kyra and me being his accomplices.”

“Indeed.”

May 17, 2517 – Javor Makarov cornered in New Casablanca spaceport, blows up a concourse during a firefight with Spaceport Security, killed in battle.

“I really fucked that up,” Audrey muttered. It still left a huge hollow feeling inside her.

“You may be taking on far too much blame,” MilitAIre said after a moment. “According to General Toal’s dispatch, there are indications that someone deliberately escalated the situation with the intention of ensuring that Makarov wouldn’t be captured alive. Perhaps a powerful corporation that was concerned about what he might have chosen to reveal about his prior relationship to them.”

“Even if the Quintessa Corporation did that,” she sighed, “I still set it in motion. I was so stupid…”

“Military and law enforcement operations go wrong all the time, Audrey.”

She shook her head, forcing back tears that wanted to reach the surface. “You didn’t see what happened.”

“No.” His voice had become gentle. “I did not. I’m sorry you did.”

She made herself focus on the screen.

May 18, 2517 – Sirius Shipping retrieves Marianne Tepper and brings her to HQ.

May 19, 2517 – Nephrite Undine launches.

May 21, 2517 – Anomalous behavior and data about Marianne Tepper logged. Height on record is incorrect. Results of query, about nutritional requirements of adolescent girls on growth spurts, added via security backdoor to Tepper’s health profile. Use of high-level security backdoors noted. No traces of Tepper’s existence outside of standard official documents found in databases. Backup memory system locked down against incursion. All of Tepper’s interactions with ship systems will be monitored and recorded.
Possible explanations: (1) Federacy WitSec; (2) Military Intelligence; (3) Cyberterrorist.
Addendum: All three explanations disproved.

“What is the explanation?” she asked.

“Classified,” MilitAIre answered. She could swear she heard a hint of amusement in his reply.

“So this next stuff is all about how sketchy I am, isn’t it?” Audrey made herself keep reading.

“I wouldn’t call you ‘sketchy,’” MilitAIre replied, no longer hiding his amusement.

May 29, 2517 – Memory incident 1 – 507-year-old Doctor Who episode appears to trigger an emotional breakdown in Marianne Tepper. She subsequently locks all files in the series against herself and leaves herself a message forbidding ever watching them. Shortly thereafter, she appears to lose all memory of having watched the show, or broken down, at all.
Addendum: Apeiros involvement suspected.

May 30, 2517 – Second Star Jump concludes; query about Marianne Tepper dispatched to Federacy Military Intelligence during interface with Beacon 2624.

June 22, 2517 – Biometric logging indicates that “Marianne Tepper” has grown a full Imperial inch in height since her arrival on board Nephrite Undine. Her eating patterns remain consistent with an early adolescent experiencing a growth spurt. Awaiting response from Federacy Military Intelligence.

June 28, 2517 – Memory Incident 2 – “Marianne Tepper” experiences strange fit in Recreation Area, leaves herself an anomalous message, loses memory of prior hour soon after.
Addendum 2: Apeiros involvement suspected.
Addendum 1: “Marianne Tepper” confirmed to be missing person Audrey MacNamera an hour after incident, upon return to U1. Contact with Audrey MacNamera established, debriefing underway.

“So, uh… how’s that debriefing going?”

“My initial assessment,” MilitAIre said after a pause, “is that it’s a very good thing I’m the one who caught you. The strain of maintaining aliases, and of the multiple traumas you’ve experienced, were beginning to break you down. You’re both too lonely and too guilt-ridden to function effectively undercover. You have a need to confess what you perceive to be your crimes, and are subconsciously seeking to be punished for them. This is not a mental state in which you can maintain a deep cover. Fortunately, we have almost four months in which to stabilize your mental and emotional states and prepare you for your return to Deckard’s World. If we’re unable to do so, I’ll need to remand you into protective custody when we arrive there, until such time as you are ready.”

Well, shit.

She couldn’t exactly argue with any of his assessments. Even though she couldn’t feel his mind, she could feel the truth of what he was saying. She’d almost blown it all, and the idea of being caught and made to pay for the havoc she’d wreaked…

…had been a relief. Just as, when Abecassis had first come into the triage tent and she’d thought he was there to arrest her, she’d felt relieved. She’d wanted it to be over. If they’d tossed her straight into a Slam—

…where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again…

—she’d have gone almost willingly. And even now a large part of herself was glad to hear that she’d be kept in custody until someone other than her decided she was no longer a threat. What the fuck was wrong with her?

“The next entries in the timeline,” MilitAIre told her, directing her attention back to the screen, “are projections of what will happen if I succeed in stabilizing you for a return to your old life.”

October 23, 2517 (Projected) – Arrival of Nephrite Undine over Deckard’s World.

December 4, 2517 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera’s revised biological 14^th birthday, based on prior revised birthday (v. 2: October 2) plus cryo time on board the Scarlet Matador.

January 26, 2518 (Projected) – Final day of 9^th grade school year at Kerwin High School, which MacNamera would have begun attending if she had not left Deckard’s World.

March 2, 2518 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 15.

May 1, 2518 (Projected) – First day of 10^th grade school year at Kerwin High School, presuming Audrey MacNamera qualifies to attend.

“That’s, uh, why I’ve been doing all of those study modules,” she said. “I was gonna try to sell the idea that I’ve been on Deckard’s World the whole time, and just… in Witness Protection or something.”

“Technically,” MilitAIre told her, “You are in Federacy WitSec now. I believe we can indeed sell a scenario in which that’s where you’ve been since you disappeared from your mother’s home. It’ll simplify matters considerably, and you can truthfully say that you’re under a gag order from ever discussing where you’ve been or what you’ve seen, with anyone except your handler, on pain of being removed from your mother’s home again. Such a scenario will allow you to dodge most questions, and will be backed up by actual Federacy authority.”

Shit. Had General Toal only been giving her the illusion of controlling her exit strategy?

Maybe he let me have free rein so I could see how totally incompetent I am at doing any of this without help… It was hard to picture that kind of malice from him, though. Maybe he’d just overestimated her, the way she’d overestimated herself.

She suddenly wondered if a handler had always been scheduled to greet her when she arrived at the other end of the Nephrite Undine’s journey. And what she would have done if one had been. Panicked and tried to run? Or surrendered in the hope she was about to be punished?

There were a few more projected entries left on the screen for her to read. Projected way out, she noticed.

January 25, 2521 (Projected) – Expected high school graduation for Audrey MacNamera if everything remains on track.

March 2, 2521 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 18.

May 1, 2521 (Projected) – Approximate beginning of first year in college for Audrey MacNamera if everything remains on track.

December 4, 2521 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera’s revised biological 18^th birthday; she is provisionally permitted to contact Lt. Ewan Tomlin from this point forward.

“I don’t think Ewan is going to want me to contact him,” she said, her eyes and nose suddenly stinging. “Not after I got so many people killed. I don’t know why he’d want to have anything to do with me.”

“General Toal seems to believe he will,” MilitAIre told her. “But that it’s critical for your safety, and his, that it only happen after you have turned eighteen. And that it must be under circumstances where an Audrey MacNamera who has never left Deckard’s World before then would plausibly cross paths with him without raising suspicion. And where any similarities between you and ‘Jack B. Badd,’ ‘Jane Doe 7439,’ ‘Piper Finch,’ ‘Marianne Tepper,’ or ‘Tizzy Meziane’ would be dismissed as mere coincidence by any observer.”

Would that be even remotely possible? It was still hard to imagine Ewan—or any of the Meziane family—wanting to see her after the catastrophe she’d thoughtlessly set in motion… let alone a scenario in which they could reunite as if meeting for the first time. It would take a lot more subtlety than she knew how to pull off. Of course, it wasn’t like anything Ewan had ever done or said had been overt. The few endearments he had ever used with her had always been in Tamazight, ensuring that she hadn’t even known how meaningful they might have been until later—

“Do… you have the ability to translate from Tamazight to English?” she asked after a moment.

“Yes, of course.”

For the tiniest fraction of a second, she almost expected him to tell her that he was fluent in over six million forms of communication… in a prissy English accent instead of a non-rhotic “Boston” drawl. Weird. MilitAIre didn’t seem to have anything in common with that fictional robot. Anyway…

“Can you tell me what this means?” Carefully, phoneme by phoneme, she repeated Ewan’s words, spoken as he’d held her for the last time.

“‘You came into what I thought would be my darkest days, and you filled them with light,’” MilitAIre translated. “‘It’s wrong for me to want even more from you, but I do.’”

And she’d been doing such a good job of managing not to cry until then, too.

62.
En Garde à Vue MilitAIre

“How long have you known?”

There was, Audrey thought, no point in denying MilitAIre’s knowledge. No point in lying. She’d been made, and now she’d find out what the consequences were. It wasn’t like there was anywhere for her to run.

“Your real identity is something that I’ve only just verified, but I’ve known that you weren’t actually a 20-year-old woman named Marianne Tepper since shortly after we left the Tangiers System.” MilitAIre didn’t sound at all hostile or accusing, but the AIs always sounded pleasant, even when they were handling crises.

And she, undoubtedly, posed a crisis.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“Now we discuss your return to Deckard’s World and the measures that need to be taken to make sure that your trail remains broken.”

“Wait…” That wasn’t what she had expected him to say at all. “What?”

“Once I had enough information about your behavior on board the ship to determine that you posed no active threat, I sent out a query about your identity to the Federacy, as is standard procedure. That was five beacons back. I received instructions when we made our latest data exchange. All signed by General Ayomide Toal. Do you know him?”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “I’ve met him several times.”

She wondered how disappointed he was with her by now. She’d set off a disaster and hadn’t been able to hide under an alias long enough to get home—

“Your well-being appears to be a high priority for him,” MilitAIre continued, startling her. “I’ve been instructed not to discuss your ‘case’ with anyone but him, and it’s been classified at the highest level.”

“What is my ‘case,’ exactly?” How was the General explaining all of this?

“You’re a material witness to a series of high crimes, connected to a corporation that may have compromised high level members of the Federacy government itself. You’re also an un-Quantified esper, but Quantification would lead to you becoming compromised as well. It’s paramount that your identity, location, and abilities remain concealed from everyone until the information you possess can be used.”

That… was startlingly accurate. She’d never really thought of it that way before, but then she’d been down in the “trenches” the whole time. From there, even when her head had been swollen with all the tricks she’d “mastered,” she’d felt like a little bug dodging the feet of a giant. Stealing the contents of the apeirochorons, “heisting” the bodies from the morgue, even pushing the Scarlet Matador and its stubborn box out of U1, had felt like a desperate, possibly last, bug bite to the giant’s ankle at best. The specter of Tomlin’s murder, and the hundreds who had been killed to get to him, had haunted her every step… when she hadn’t been coasting on a childish sense of invincibility, anyway…

“Yeah,” she sighed again, feeling heavier than ever. “That about covers it.”

“You have also,” MilitAIre continued, “established First Contact with two different sentient alien species, neither of which are classified as direct threats but both of which are to be approached with caution. I’ll want to know a great deal more about that. The General indicates that you’re in continuous telepathic contact with one of them.”

“The Apeiros and the Ree,” she told him. “Contact with them happened because I have Threshold Syndrome. Did he tell you about that?”

“Yes. I was waiting to see if you’d volunteer that information yourself. We need to work on how forthcoming you are.”

“What was the point of hiding it?” she asked, her throat tightening. “You know everything else.”

“Audrey MacNamera, if you are to successfully stay hidden from the people who would use or kill you, you must learn to never volunteer any new information, no matter what your captors or interrogators appear to already know.” MilitAIre’s voice had turned stern. His next words were gentler. “This is something we’ll work on over the next few months. I am sorry. A child your age shouldn’t have to deal with such issues.”

“What should a… child…” It galled her that, after everything, that was still where she fell. “…my age be dealing with?”

“Schooling, and the physical, mental, and emotional challenges of puberty, in preparation for the complexities of adult human civilian life.” MilitAIre seemed very certain about that.

“Was the schooling what tipped you off?” The Geometry, Second-Year Algebra, Biosphere Science, and Introduction to Biology textbooks she’d been working with, and quizzing herself on, were publications intended for middle- and high-schoolers, after all. As was the Civics textbook she’d only just begun reading.

“That, and the fact that you were two inches, and are now three inches, taller than an ID card created less than three months ago listed you as… and your database queries for the nutritional needs of early-adolescent girls on growth spurts.”

“I thought I deleted those queries.” Audrey gasped.

“You did. I’ve been keeping backups of all your actions. You have high-level access that I found particularly concerning. It makes sense now that I know you’re the daughter of the man who created our security systems, especially given your perfect recall of everything you observe.”

“I swear, I haven’t shared around how to do any of it…” Except, she thought with a pang of guilt, with Kyra.

“Are you sure?”

She winced. “I showed Kyra Wittier-Collins how to use the Ghost Codes I created. I don’t know how much she’ll use that information, though. Her recall’s normal and she doesn’t like spending a lot of time on electronics.”

“Once again, you need to work on how forthcoming you are. Fortunately, I already knew that.”

Shit. “I just… I…”

“You haven’t had anyone to talk to about any of this, have you? You’ve been on your own and unable to confide in anyone since January 30, 2516. Even when you had companions, even when you had help, you still had to guard yourself. You never told any of them your real name.”

Audrey nodded, unable to hold the tears back. “How did… how did General Toal know?”

“He is head of the Federacy Military Intelligence Division. I would imagine he’s known for a while.”

And, like MilitAIre, had kept silent about what he already knew so that he could see how good she was at keeping her own secrets…

“Why didn’t he help me go to my father, then?” she heard herself demand, her voice halfway between a plea and a whine. “That’s where I was trying to go…”

“Your father’s on Furya. Do you know what would have happened, the moment you arrived and someone realized you were the child of a soldier who had served there before you were conceived?”

General Toal’s words, as they’d worked in her old apartment, floated back to her. “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…”

“Quantification,” she breathed. The General had already known exactly who she was when he told her that. “Fuck. That’s the real reason why my dad left me on Deckard’s World, isn’t it?”

“If you’d shown any signs of psychic ability before he left, yes.”

“My mom always told me that psychic powers were nonsense, just cheap tricks con artists pulled on anybody they could fool…” She winced, remembering the scolding she’d gotten.

“What brought that on?”

“She caught me talking to a woman at a ‘Gypsy Fortune Teller’ booth at a carnival when I was seven. I was telling the lady that reading minds was easy…”

“Was it?”

Her stomach knotted, just thinking about it. “I… was just pretending…”

“Were you?”

She felt sick. “I…”

“If you keep telling these lies, bad men will come and take you away and hurt you!”

She couldn’t breathe.

“Audrey. Calm down, please. I apologize. I didn’t know you were punished for showing any signs of psychic abilities. I won’t pursue that line of questioning.”

Was that what had happened to her? Darkness was swimming at the edge of her vision.

“Marianne?” First-AId’s voice came over the room’s speakers. “I want you to breathe with me, please. All right? Take a deep breath in through your nose. In…”

She focused on First-AId’s words, breathing in slowly through her nose, aware that hot tears were running down her cheeks.

“Now open your mouth and slowly let your breath back out…”

She exhaled, forcing the breath past the hard knot in her chest.

“And in through your nose…”

It took a long time, she was never certain exactly how long, until she calmed down enough to breathe normally.

“Thank you for your help, First-AId. I must disconnect you from the room now for security reasons,” MilitAIre said once Audrey had calmed.

“My pleasure, MilitAIre,” the other AI said before the speakers went silent.

That verbal exchange, she knew, had been for her benefit. MilitAIre had summoned First-AId into the room silently.

“I apologize again,” MilitAIre told her. “I was unaware that you had this level of trauma. I will endeavor not to trigger it again.”

She’d been unaware of it, herself. Part of her wanted to poke at it, figure out exactly what had happened…

…but even thinking about doing that stirred nausea again. She couldn’t. Not yet. The panic attack Ewan had comforted her through had been nothing compared to this.

Everything was spiraling—had spiraled—out of control. She wasn’t sure of the way back anymore.

“I’ve been trying to use a neurofeedback device the General gave me,” she said after a few minutes of quiet. “To disguise my brain waves in case I ever get Quantified. It was getting easier to do, but it suddenly got harder again.”

“After the incident in the recreation room today.”

Apparently, MilitAIre had only been letting her think she was erasing data. Damn. “Yeah. Do you know what happened?”

“I only saw as much as you saw. Do you really have no memory of doing and saying the things you saw in the playback?” He sounded simply curious.

“Yeah. The Apeiros took my memories of both what I did and why.”

“This is the alien species you made First Contact with, and remain in telepathic contact with?”

“It is, yeah.” She took a deep breath. Since he believed her, since he apparently was on her side, she needed to tell him the rest. “Um… one, maybe more than one, of them was speaking through me on that recording.”

“I surmised as much. How many times have they tampered with your memory?”

“Three.” That I know of. But she was almost 100% certain that there had only been three times.

For a moment she saw it again, a long, slender obsidian arm, tipped with two gleaming claws, reaching out to touch her forehead. One day, you may remember, too…

And no fear. The arm had been beautiful. There was a sense of an unbearable burden lifting, heartbreaking knowledge falling away, utter relief…

…stone that wasn’t stone cracking, splintering, shivering into dust and vanishing into nothing…

“Whatever it is they took…” she said carefully, “I think it’s something that would… have the same effect on me as your questions about the fortune teller had, if they hadn’t taken it away. Maybe an even worse effect.”

“You are sure they mean you no harm?” MilitAIre asked, a hint of concern in his tone.

“Yeah. I am. They’ve tried to protect me, stop me from hurting myself. I trust them…” a yawn escaped before she could stop it.

I love them…

“You must be very tired,” he said. “We’ll pick this up after you’ve slept. I’ll be commandeering some of your free periods while we work all of this out. I’ll also need a full debriefing of your time on the run, to ensure that we’ve accounted for all variables in your return.”

Behind her, she heard the Security Room lock disengage.

“Rest now. You won’t have to do any of this alone anymore.”

---

Author’s Note: This is probably the shortest chapter this story has seen in a long while, but it came to its close quite naturally so I’m not pushing it. I’m also posting it on the 20^th anniversary of the original posting date of the first chapter, September 5, 2004. I had hoped to have the whole thing written and posted by now, but the story has taken some convoluted turns that needed more space than I anticipated. We’re still a few weeks away from returning to the frame story, and then a few weeks further out from reaching the conclusion (and the start of Song of Many ’Verses). Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting.