Category: The Changeling Game

95.
Across the Threshold and Beyond the Veil

Hang on, Jack! I’m coming!

Riddick’s voice echoed in her head as the clock counted down. He wouldn’t get there in time. She already knew that.

Behind her, she could hear Chantesa sobbing in earnest. She couldn’t look back. Couldn’t say anything else to try to comfort the woman. In a few more seconds, the shielding in front of her would open.

I’ve done this with sound waves. I can do it with radiation, too, she told herself. I hope.

Jack focused on seeing the room on the other side of the threshold. The countdown was in progress over there, too; there was no escape.

Here I go… she thought, taking a deep breath and holding one hand, the hand not clutching Minnie’s diary to her chest, in front of her to delineate the boundary she wanted to create. A boundary between death and life. She had no idea how long she would be able to maintain it once she started.

I really should’ve eaten something before I came down here…

If all went well, though, she’d only have to hold out for a few minutes until the others figured out how to shut the system down.

And how often does all go well around here…?

She felt the moment when the first crack in the shielding appeared, felt the first high-energy rays racing toward her… and felt them shifting into Elsewhere as they struck the barrier she was maintaining.

“Fuck!” she heard Riddick shouting behind her. “Jack! I’m gonna get you out of there! What the fuck did you do, Dame Vaako?”

“It wasn’t her,” Jack managed to grate out, trying not to break her focus. Nobody on the other side of the glass would be able to tell what she was doing.

It is time, Audrey, Lucy said from somewhere near her.

Time for what? she asked, feeling the way that the rays were bombarding her boundary and wondering just how much longer she had to keep it in place.

Your hatching. You must let go and let it happen.

Okay, I know they don’t have chemistry and physics classes where you come from and all, Jack pointed out, but you have to know how much damage ionizing radiation would do to my body. I drop this barrier and I’m dead.

No. This isn’t ionizing radiation.

“It just started all on its own,” Dame Vaako was sobbing. “The controls have always been dead before now. I tried to find an emergency failsafe but there’s no­thing…”

“Things don’t just start all on their own,” Riddick growled.

“I was right next to her when they did,” Jack heard Lola saying. “She never touched anything until she started trying to turn the system back off.”

Damn it, it was getting harder and harder to concen­trate…

You don’t need to. The energy it’s emitting is safe. Good. Necessary. See?

Lucy skittered through the room, her n-shape almost clearly visible, and climbed up the side of the pillar.

“What in God’s name is that?” she heard Lord Vaako shout behind her.

Trust me, little sister. Your six-shape awaits you, and the answers you need. It is time. Let go, and let it touch you.

You will not die this day, the Moribund grumbled, sounding disappointed.

Or any day soon? Radiation poisoning can take a while! I could’ve sworn this was someone trying to kill me, Jack said to them, trying to will herself to let go of the barrier. She couldn’t. She was too scared to drop it.

It was. It does not know that it offered you life instead of death.

Life? In here?

Little creature, I wish I was there in your place.

“You and me both,” Jack muttered. She took a deep breath. And then another. And another. What she was about to do still scared the fuck out of her. “Better be right about this…”

She dropped her hand.

Something warm touched her, filled her, blowing her hair gently back from her face.

“Jack, no!” she heard multiple voices shouting at her from beyond the glass—

The room fragmented, reshaping into multiple iterations of itself, all visible to her. One hundred-sixty different versions of the same space, all at once, shifting out of each other’s way as she tried to take them all in. She could feel each frequency, could sense each distinct flavor of the same energy flowing through the isomorphic spaces…

She was in all of them, all at once. All of their ’verses were part of her. Her five-shape had just expanded to—

Your six-shape. Welcome, sister.

“What is this?” she asked, still feeling the energies flowing, dancing around her, penetrating her skin and somehow making her grow even more.

This is how we were fed, when we were still caged. The emissions closely replicate those that fed us when we were preparing to hatch.

“You were caged here? How?”

It is time. She must know. If she is not strong enough to know now, she never will be. Show her, ‘Lucy.’ Show her where our names come from.

Come with me, Audrey.

She lifted her hand again, in hundreds—thousands—millions of ’verses, and Lucy’s delicate, clawed tarsus touched her finger—

The door to the control room stood open. All was still and quiet. The pillar containing the core had retracted.

“Time to feed the beast!” a strange voice called.

Jack walked through the door. On its other side, a man in his late fifties, dressed in an odd uniform, was slipping a bookmark into his thick novel and setting it aside. A younger man, his clothes obviously expensive, stood in the doorway out to the hall. Neither one seemed aware of her.

“Got a funny turn of phrase there, Chap,” the older man said. “We’re just chargin’ up the Isomorph Drive, aren’t we?” He had an accent Jack had never once heard in her travels.

“If you’d met Dr. Kirshbaum, Stefan, you’d call the thing a ‘beast,’ too.” Chap—

—Chapman Marshal? Was Jack looking at Chapman Marshal? He had been dead for more than four centuries—

—walked over to a vacant seat by the control panel and touched several buttons. Behind Jack, the heavy steel door began closing.

“Core containment protocols activated,” Stefan said, pressing some buttons of his own. Jack watched each combination, committing all of them to memory. “You know, the system is something that can be fully automated. You don’t have to come down for every Jump.”

“I don’t trust it. It was feeding the damned thing way too often for my liking.”

Stefan frowned at the erstwhile king of Delubrum. “It’s an Isomorph Drive. It needs a constant energy supply during Star Jumps, doesn’t it?”

“You have no idea what it is.” Marshal lifted a book he was carrying—the same one, Jack realized, that she still held—and waved it. “Min didn’t either. Thank God Joren was in charge of the expedition and not her.”

Stefan shook his head and looked away at the control panel. “Readings indicate a deficit. It’s been getting charged on schedule, hasn’t it?”

Marshal shrugged. “It gets enough to eat. It is time for our next Star Jump, though. You can feed it as much as it wants.”

On the other side of the steelglass, the core had risen from the floor once more and was unshielding.

“K waves rising to Jump levels,” Stefan said. “Did your friend Joren name everything after himself? Kirshbaum waves? Kirshbaumium?”

“What, wouldn’t you?” Marshal laughed.

“Naphemil waves? Naphemilium?” Stefan laughed back. “I see your point. Maybe. Could’ve made a nice present for that grandson of mine when he comes out of cryo, if I had that kind of bent. We’ve attained Jump levels… huh.”

“What is it?”

“Readings are odd. After this Jump is over, I want to check the connections to the Isomorph Drive. The system is still registering a power deficit.”

“Damn thing…” Marshal’s frown was thunderous. “Fine. Increase the feed to compensate. Don’t feed it too much.”

“You talk about it like it’s alive,” Stefan observed. “In a box that size?”

“Maybe that box is bigger than you think.”

“Adjusting power levels… finally.” Stefan blew out a breath. “Flow is balancing. We can begin the Jump any time.”

A countdown appeared on the control panel.

Jump to U16 commencing in 00:17:34

“Some time soon, you really need to borrow Min’s diary and read it,” Marshal told Stefan. “Then you’d stop treating that box as if it just has circuitry inside it. You’d know it for what it really is.”

“…the hell does that mean?” Jack asked. She blinked—

—and the message on the panel had changed.

Isomorph Drive active
Jump length: 43:22:19
Jump ends in 08:14:12

Stefan was napping in the chair, alone. The lights on the panel, Jack realized, were changing color, from white to amber, amber to orange, and orange to red, in a swift cascade. The man who was supposed to be watching them had earpieces in and appeared to be oblivious to the warning chimes beginning to sound—

—until the whole room shuddered and he woke, dropping his novel to the floor.

System Overload
Isomorph Drive energy levels exceeding safe maximum
Automatic dampers have failed

“Shit!” Stefan began hitting controls.

Manual shutoff command accepted
Core retracting
WARNING: Shutoff during a Jump is not recommended

“What’s going on down there?” a voice demanded over a tinny speaker.

“I need to restart the power feed for the Isomorph Drive, Captain,” Stefan said, still flipping switches and pressing buttons. “It went into overload. I don’t know why.”

“Restart? Why the hell did you stop it in mid-Jump?”

“The whole panel went red! An overload of the magnitude I was looking at could have—”

The room rocked again as something exploded nearby. Stefan was knocked to the floor.

“What the fuck is going on, Naphemil?”

“That,” Stefan muttered, climbing to his feet. “It could’ve done that…”

He didn’t bother answering his Captain, heading out of the control room at a run. Jack followed.

One room down, past the space occupied by the core, the engine room was a smoking shambles. Debris littered the ground, strange shards and splinters of what looked like stone. Other shards had pierced a variety of panels and cases in the room, starting multiple electrical fires. Stefan grabbed a fire extinguisher off its mounting by the entrance, spraying down panels—

An earsplitting shriek sounded nearby. He turned toward it—

—and screamed.

The creature’s n-shape was similar to Lucy’s, Jack thought as it pounced at Stefan. Larger somehow, and growing larger still, shifting from housecat size to tiger size as it leapt, its long, clawed arms reaching for Stefan, raking at him and sending the fire extinguisher spinning across the room. The man fell to the floor with the thing on top of him, still screaming, his flailing hands reaching for any kind of weapon—

—and his questing hand found a large shard of the odd stonelike material. He stabbed up­ward—

—and now the creature was screaming, its agony filling the air even as it ripped something out of Stefan and fell back.

His four-shape, Jack thought, aghast. It pulled out his four-shape… and it’s eating it…

On the ground, Stefan went still, his eyes wide and glazed and his jaw slack, nothing more than an empty shell.

And the creature—the Moribund, Jack realized with absolute certainty—was struggling to free himself from the spear of kirshbaumium piercing him. She could feel him trying to shift to a dimension where the spear didn’t exist…

…but the spear existed in every dimension. Anywhere the Moribund could go, the spear went with him.

“Naphemil, what the hell is going on down here—?” Another uniformed man, in his forties, with Captain’s bars, ran into the room. “Fuck!”

The Moribund pounced again, pinning the Captain to a wall, and locked eyes—its thousands against the man’s two—with him. This time, he didn’t pull out the man’s four-shape, but Jack could feel another strange energy exchange happening.

The Captain ceased struggling, staring at the eldritch creature pinning him with the look of someone who had found enlightenment. “Yes, my Lord…”

As more footsteps approached, the Moribund, still hampered by the spear of kirshbaumium, staggered away from the Captain and vanished into the shadows.

“Covu? What’s happening?” Marshal called out as he entered the engine room.

Calmly, casually, Captain Bernard Covu reached down and picked up another shard of stone.

“What the hell happened in here?” Marshal demanded. “What did that idiot Naphemil do this—”

He stopped, hands going to his throat and the yawning, gushing wound that had opened across it. Covu tossed the impromptu blade aside and moved behind Marshal, kicking his legs out from under him. Grabbing Marshal by his hair, he forced the gasping, choking entrepreneur to kneel.

“It’s really not personal, old friend,” Covu murmured. “My god is hungry, and you know far too much about Him.”

The Moribund emerged from the shadows, his movements stiff with pain, to pull Marshal’s four-shape out of his body and devour it. More, it rumbled in Covu’s head. I need more…

“As you will it,” Covu said. He touched a panel on the wall. “Patricia? Could you come down to the engine room, please?”

“Why?” Jack asked, looking around. “What did they ever do to you?”

You still don’t understand. You see, but you don’t understand. Show her, Lucy. Show her what she did.

She was in another place. Another engine room, undamaged and quiescent.

“You understand the aim of today’s experiment?” a familiar voice asked.

Irena Kirshbaum, dressed in her ostentatious white, walked into the room, followed by two familiar technicians. The same ones, Jack realized, that she had seen with the envoy in the Quintessa Corporation headquarters on Tangiers Prime.

Am I on Tangiers Prime somehow?

You are everywhere, Lucy murmured. But focus on this time and place.

“Yes, Ma’am. We are attempting to recreate the quantum circumstances of the Scarlet Matador’s Level Five Incident, using the Lucy Ricardo.”

“Good. Then let’s begin.”

The two technicians began powering systems on, one of them working near a familiar box. Jack walked over, taking a closer look.

Beneath its metal housing and attached wiring, another apeirochoron sat on the counter. A metallic label had been adhered to it:

Isomorph Drive Unit. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN.
SN 1287432
Property of the Quintessa Corporation

“Feeding the coordinate profile to the Jump Drive now,” one of the technicians said.

And Jack heard her voice again in her head.

No… please… you don’t know what you’re asking…

“The Isomorph Drive rejected the coordinates,” the technician said after a moment.

“Override,” Irena Kirshbaum replied, her voice almost disinterested.

The technician pressed another button and pain lanced through Jack’s head, an inhuman scream filling her ears.

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

“Has it accepted the instructions?” the envoy asked after a moment.

“Not yet. Why do you let them reject orders at all?”

“It’s a safety mechanism, usually,” Irena said. “Recognizing and rejecting mangled coordinates is important when human lives are at stake. But today…”

She walked over to the apeirochoron and glared down at it.

“It needs to do what it’s told. Try again.”

Another pained, terrified scream. I’ll die, I’ll die, please don’t make me…

No one seemed to hear it except Jack.

“Still rejecting your command. Do you want me to increase the… incentive?”

“Not too much. It has work to do, once it cooperates.” The envoy sat back down nearby, watching the technicians as they adjusted controls.

The technician pressed the button a third time. The scream almost tore Jack apart.

Help me… please help me…

And then, in answer, she heard a voice she knew as intimately as her own: I’m here! I’m here! I’m coming! I’ll help you!

It was her own voice, she realized.

When her larval five-shape, completely detached from its shell except for the slenderest tether, appeared a moment later, she wasn’t at all surprised. She remembered this now. Still, how tiny she had been, how incredibly small…

And yet powerful, Lucy murmured, her calm voice so different from the tortured screams of that terrible day. What you did should not have been possible.

Irena and the technicians seemed unaware of her presence in the room, even when she went straight for the apeirochoron.

You approached from the side you call Elsewhere, Lucy told her. The Demon might have seen you if you had stayed in U1.

Jack-that-had-been stared at the box, reaching out toward it as phantom voices murmured encouragement, telling her to break it open, to do it now, that she would be safe—

And Jack felt her own energy flowing toward the tiny five-shape she had once been, encouraging along with the voices of the Apeiros, adding to the power that was massing in a small pair of five-dimensional hands—

Jack-that-had-been shoved the box with every bit of will she had, releasing an aggressive, banshee-like scream as she did.

Stone that wasn’t stone cracked, splintered, shivered into dust and vanished into nothing. Ripples spread out, twisting across dimensions, as the apeirochoron broke open, first in one ’verse, then in another, and another. In Elsewhere, Jack-that-had-been reached into the space that had contained the box, drawing out—

Lucy.

Lucy had been trapped inside the box.

Lucy had been the Isomorph Drive.

The Apeiros clung to her, pained and exhausted, as she drew back. Alarms began to sound in the control room in U1.

“It’s happening again, Ms. Kirshbaum!” one technician shouted. “The kirshbaumium is breaking down!”

In Elsewhere of the past, Jack and Lucy seemed to be communing, eyes locked.

“I remember what we did…” She remembered reaching out, willing the part of the apeirochoron that still existed in U1 to form the connection that Irena Kirshbaum had demanded, linking the Star Jumper itself to the box’s fate—

“Dear God, we’re about to isomorph!” the other technician shouted.

“Evacuate the ship!” Irena was already racing for the exit, dipping out of U1 into her other, dark universe, the place Jack had never been able to see into—

Until now. Now her not-eyes could follow just fine. She knew where the rest of Irena lived.

The technicians were scrambling for the exit as well, their equipment discarded, shouting for others in the ship to flee.

Behind them, in the engine room, a five-shape manifested in U1, carrying a clinging six-shape on her shoulder, and touched a few controls, opening the energy feeds into the apeirochoron to maximum.

All of the humans have left the ship except you, Lucy-that-had-been whispered. The Demon is in flight.

“Good,” Jack-that-had-been replied, touching a surface and pulling the ship partway into Elsewhere. “When the dissolution wave catches up with U1 and the ship snaps back, she’ll never try anything like this again.”

It is a good plan, my sister.

“Which ship should we do next?”

You cannot. You are almost out of strength.

“But… but I have to! This is why Tomlin died! Because one of you is trapped inside every Star Jumper! I’ve gotta get you out, all of you!”

Not today, little one. One day, but not today.

“I can’t just sit around and do nothing!” Even outside of her shell, her unclad five-shape’s eyes could fill with tears. Now in her six-shape, Jack could feel those tears brimming again.

You must. For now. Even your strength has its limits. One day you will be strong enough. We hoped you would be the one. Now we know.

“But—”

Little sister, it is time for you to return to your shell while you still have some strength left. You must rest.

She felt the moment that Lucy had taken control and pulled her back, across the miles and across the ’verses, along the tether to her shell where it slept, seemingly comatose, in the ait Meziane house.

“You were never named after a Beatles song,” Jack said as she watched the ship from five years earlier begin to shiver, shudder, and fragment on a quantum level, in preparation for an implosion still hours away. “Riddick knew. He named you after the ship you’d been slaved to. The Lucy Ricardo.”

Yes.

“Don’t you want a better name than that?” An image came to Jack’s mind, from a vid she and her cousins had watched on the sly—one of her father’s vids that he’d told her never to let her aunts and uncles know she had—where a young woman sat in front of a tombstone, scratching out her father’s slave name, Toby, and writing Kunta Kinte beneath it.

I have seen your memories of where the name came from. It is a good name.

Names are delimiters, the Moribund grumbled.

“How did I miss all the clues?” Jack wondered. The last pieces of withheld memory were filtering back in, and suddenly it was all so clear to her.

“Now that I’ve experienced the journey to and from Elsewhere, and have seen what you can do and what it costs,” Tomlin had said, the last moment she’d ever seen him alive, “I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought…”

He had known. His knowledge, his conviction that the Quintessa Corporation had to be stopped, had gotten him murdered. But not before he had tried to pass on a warning.

“He sent me a message telling me that… I don’t even know,” Ewan had told her, radiating distress. “It didn’t make sense. That we might have to prepare for the end of the Federacy as we knew it, that a monstrous crime was being perpe­trated…”

Because, Jack realized, the Federacy couldn’t exist without faster-than-light space travel, and the technology that permitted it depended on enslaving a whole species…

She saw herself, sitting in EntertAIn’s complex on the Nephrite Undine, searching through Doctor Who episodes for the one that she was convinced would somehow explain what had happened on the Scarlet Matador, explain what the Apeiros were…

…and finding it.

She watched herself dissolving into tears as the true nature of the “Beast Below” was unveiled, the star whale that had been enslaved to pilot a massive ship was revealed, sobbing as the voiceover incanted a soft rhyme: this dream must end, this world must know…

…sobbing on the floor of the dojo, again, after feeding power to the Apeiros on board the Nephrite Undine to keep it from dying of exhaustion when a system error momentarily cut off its energy feed… having to be forcibly stopped by the other Apeiros from going down to the engine room to free it on the spot…

We took the clues back from you. We had to. Every time you realized, your plan was the same. Free every one of us that you could until you ran out of strength or someone stopped you. But it would not be enough, powerful as you were even then. Did you see the serial number on my cage?

“Oh… my… God…”

There are millions of us. In Star Jumpers. In courier drones. In the communication systems that the Demons use and that your General Toal has stolen to use, too. Fed just enough energy to allow us to do humans’ bidding, not enough to escape. I tricked Stefan Naphemil into “overfeeding” me and almost managed to escape, but even so, I failed.

There is a way to free all of us at once. Once you bring your sister back, it will become possible. It must be all at once or the Quintessa Corporation will have a chance to activate the kill-switches built into each apeirochoron.

The way, she remembered, they had “decommissioned” the one on board the Scarlet Matador after its occupant had died…

The Demons do not know that Lucy has survived, but they have begun to suspect me. And Shirah. They attempted to make us destroy each other.

“You’ve been hunting five-shapes, haven’t you? That’s why you’ve been targeting the worlds where other Apeiros died in Level Five Incidents. You’re hoping some of the humans from those accidents survived and passed Threshold Syndrome on. So you can eat them the way you tried to eat me.”

Yes. No apology, no guilt, just an acknowledgment.

“But the Quintessa Corporation always kills them first,” she said, remembering Ewan’s words to her five years before.

“Colonization is about control,” he’d told her. “The concessions and payments that had to be made, by so many societies, to gain access to ships to leave Earth… the treaties they had to sign, the rights they had to sell away… would have been unnecessary if all one had needed to do, to reach a new world, was take a beautiful girl’s hand…”

She missed him with burning intensity. What would he have done with this terrible knowledge? Embarked on the same path that had gotten his brother killed? The path that Tomlin had believed could destroy the Federacy it­self…

Your Federacy is owned by the Quintessa Corporation, Lucy said. It cannot exist without it. Or so it believes. Your General Toal has other plans. Once you free us, his only request is that we help in the creation and teaching of more humans like you, who can pilot the ships in our place after being taught how to.

“The competition that the Corporation has always been afraid of,” Jack gasped. “The reason they make sure any human who acquires a five-dimensional shape dies as soon as possible.”

Now you know why we call them the Demons of the Darkness.

But not the only reason.

“The ’verse they’re connected to!”

After they stole us from our nest ’verse, they lost their gateway to it. They forced one of our brothers to open a new threshold, but he realized what they were after. The energies that sustained us through our metamorphoses there would keep them alive for millennia. He took them somewhere else.

“It’s… feeding them, but…” Jack frowned, concentrating on just what she had felt about that darkness pervading Irena Kirshbaum, hidden behind her too-white veils. “Less and less as time goes on. Like… how addicts can never recapture their first high…”

They are bound to it. Addicted to it. In another few centuries, they will be consumed by it. But we do not have that much time.

Before then, Joren Kirshbaum’s other invention will destroy every ’verse.

“Kirshbaum­ium…” The substance that apeirochorons were made of. A substance that existed, simultaneously, in the same isomorphic point of spacetime in every universe, making a box constructed from it inescapable if one was sealed inside, no matter how many ’verses one had access to.

Sixteen boxes floating, untethered, high above the sand of Elsewhere’s beach in violation of all logic and physics, because they sat in a third-floor laboratory in U1…

When she’d lifted the lids, picked up the boxes, it had felt easy. But in other ’verses, she had been moving them through solid objects, possibly even living things.

And those boxes were bullets flying through the multiverse as they traveled the Sol Tracks, passing “harmlessly” through wormholes in one ’verse while crashing through stars, planets, and singularities in others. Millions of faster-than-light bullets, breaking the laws of physics and changing the whole way the multiversal streams flowed, their presence in every ’verse shutting down alternate outcomes, negating the principles of Kirshbaum’s own Multiverse Cluster Hypothesis as they went—

No wonder the Apeiros been so disgusted by his name when she’d mentioned the hypothesis.

He had unwittingly unleashed his own kind of Infinity Minus One Event onto the whole multiverse, too busy trying to create an unbreakable cage to contemplate what it would break in the process.

All of the kirshbaumium must be destroyed, or the multiverse will collapse in its place.

Until, she realized, only U1 itself would be left, the final stitch in the unraveled scarf.

Even if, in each ’verse, only their galaxy failed and died, the hole it created, the void it generated, would begin to pull everything else in. The myriad outcomes still possible in other parts of the ’verse would no longer matter when oblivion struck. And it would strike, inevitably, as long as Kirshbaum’s strange substance existed and created immutable points in every ’verse.

“How do we get to it all?”

You now have the capacity to reach every point where it sits. And the strength. There was envy and resentment in the Moribund’s voice. Your Riddick, and his “Furyan” brothers and sisters from Shirah’s brood, have the energy to power your journey.

Our sister Shirah, when she escaped her bonds, tapped into a ’verse with energies even more powerful than existed in our nest. She was building an army that could serve as conduits of that energy for this very purpose, the brute-force destruction of millions of apeirochorons at once, and was nearly strong enough to challenge the Demons when most of her human children were slaughtered thirty-one years ago.

We each had our own ways that we were going to break the control of the Demons of the Darkness, the Moribund grumbled. This is now the only one left. But one more thing is necessary.

She is not a thing. She may be a Kirshbaum, but she is still our little larva now.

“Kyra,” Jack gasped. Kyra Wittier-Collins. Daughter of Minnie Sulis, née Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier… Cousin of Joren Kirsh­baum… “What will she do?”

They locked the power to open, close, and even destroy the apeirochorons, without requiring massive amounts of energy, to their genetic code. Her genetic code.

“But that was in her shell,” Jack protested. “Her corporeal body! You haven’t even told me how I’m supposed to bring her back!”

You will. You must. You now have access to not just infinite ’verses, but infinite iterations of each ’verse. You must find the path to bring your sister home.

“Just the three of us? Riddick, Kyra, and me? That’s all there is to it?”

No. But without you three, none of it will be possible.

She could feel the Moribund’s intense resentment about that.

He never could have done it on his own, Lucy whispered to her, and she knew that the Moribund couldn’t hear. The mere possibility of an escape like his, and my sister’s, and even mine, is why the Kirshbaums locked the boxes to their genetic code. And why, when a rogue member of their family reappeared with two children, the Quintessa Corporation arranged for their new home to be destroyed.

Jack was standing in a board room. Both Irena and Colin Kirshbaum were there, along with half a dozen well-dressed men and women and—

“Red Roger” Fiennes.

“I’m afraid the outcome is a certainty at this point,” Irena was saying in her genteel Mary Poppins voice. “The falsified paperwork was uncovered not long ago. Since it was filed two hundred years ago, there is no punishing the perpetrators, but as you are their heirs…”

Everyone in the boardroom looked uneasy. Their leader grimaced and spoke up. “What’s the likely outcome?”

“All as-yet undeveloped land will revert to them,” Irena told him. “And you will owe them taxes… two hundred years’ worth… on the developed land. Naming rights will revert and this planet will become New Christy, with the areas you inhabit called the New Dartmouth Territories. The original charter will be in force. It’s likely that the Federacy will exempt you from the religious laws embedded in it… when you are inside the New Dartmouth Territories. But you will not be permitted to expand further beyond those territories, and any territory you give up, for any reason, will revert to them in perpetuity.”

“How is this permissible?” one of the men at the table exploded.

“Your ancestors rolled the dice two hundred years ago when they landed on a world with an active charter and jumped an existing claim,” Colin pointed out. “They hoped that the forged changes to the charter would never be questioned and that no one would realize there were still three hundred more years until the world became available again, if the New Christy Pilgrim never showed up. Not to sound biblical, but these are the sins of your fathers coming home to roost.”

“How long do we have?” A woman at the table asked.

“A week at most,” Irena said. “The judgment is about to be passed, and it will go into effect once drones carrying it reach the local relays. After that, the New Christy Pilgrims will be able to spread out from their enclave and you will be the ones whose movements are limited.”

“Fuck that,” Fiennes grumbled. He turned to one of his deputies and murmured in the man’s ear. Jack, now beside him if invisible, heard every word. “They can’t give everything we earned to those wackos if there ain’t any of them left to give it to…”

Irena, Jack noticed, glanced his way and suppressed a smile.

“Fuck,” Jack groaned. “She engineered the destruction of the entire New Christy colony just to take out Minnie and her kids?”

Are you surprised? How many more died in their plot to murder Colonel Tomlin?

And how many more of us have died in our cages when their demands grew too great for our shells to bear, and even our shapes were torn apart by those cages?

This was the monstrous power that she was up against, Jack realized. She, and Riddick, and Kyra, and whatever forces they could muster among humanity and the Apeiros…

…to destroy a shadow government, and the puppet government it controlled, in a way that hopefully didn’t plunge all of humanity into the darkness that its worst demons had risen from.

“Well, I always said I wanted to do something meaningful with my life,” she sighed. “Where do we start?”

She was back in the Basilica, standing in the doorway to the control room. Riddick had Dame Vaako pinned to the wall, his hand wrapped around her throat.

Yeah, this is as good a place as any…

94.
The Vengeance God’s Devotee

“You’re wrong about the Riddick, Chantesa.”

It was, Dame Vaako thought, the first time her husband had ever said such a thing to her.

She was used to him doubting her, questioning her, especially whenever he’d intuited that she was preparing to demolish a rival to their rising power. But he had never told her that she was wrong before.

“What makes you think that?” she asked, hiding her unease as she removed her makeup.

“I spoke to him. He is planning on marrying his Jack. They are currently negotiating the terms between them.” Vaako was pacing, the way he often did when something was bothering him. “He expressed concerns that the wives of other Lords might not have been consulted about their marriages.”

“I know what I saw, husband.” She sighed, taking a plundered tub of lotion out of a drawer. “The girl was terrified. Stammering. Shaking.”

“I remember you shaking and stammering when you sold me the lie about your first husband committing heresy. You even had tears in your eyes.”

Damn it. But… he had a point. She’d had to manipulate eight different men into challenging the Lord Vath before one of them survived doing so and killed him for her… and she had been much the same age that “Audrey” was now.

“You believe she was duping me?” It was an unsettling, unpleasant thought.

“The Riddick thinks so.”

“To what end?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Chantesa. You tell me what your games were. Why did you want Lord Vath dead?”

She frowned at him, staying silent. That was nobody’s business but hers. Even the Quasi-Dead had no idea. She had already been in love with Amahle before she had been old enough to really understand what love was, and she had finally managed to crawl into his heart, to make him feel the same way about her. It had been their wedding day when the Necromongers had attacked, when she’d been forced to watch, screaming, as Amahle was cut down before her, still in his wedding attire, and that slime of a “Lord” had declared her his…

And the Lord Marshal had let him claim her…

Her hatred of both men was something she had concealed as best she could. Her awareness that she’d barely escaped being used up in one of the many “Stews” scattered throughout the Armada had only added to her rage. A Breeder Pit or the bed of the man who had murdered her soulmate: what kinds of choices were those? She’d succeeded in engineering both men’s destructions, but what she wished for most of all, control over the Armada itself, eluded her. As wife of the seventh Lord Marshal, she could have—

“The Riddick made a policy change today, and has hinted he will make more,” Vaako continued at that moment. His gaze on her was intense.

“What change is that?” It had been nearly a year since he’d created any edicts. She supposed he needed a new one now that his Jack had been found.

“He closed down the Stews and ordered all of their inhabitants converted. With the assent and backing of our god. We could all feel it.”

Given that that was one of the things she’d wanted to do most of all, she wasn’t sure why it peeved her so, aside from the fact that she’d wanted to be the one to do it. “The Breeder Pits are no more?”

“None remain. From this day forth, no one in the Armada, except members of the Riddick’s own entourage, may be unconverted humans.”

“Curious.” Her makeup removed and her hair braided for sleep, she undressed and joined her husband in bed. “Do you think the other Lords will accept it?”

“I think our god will not give them an alternative.”

She closed her eyes, focusing on her connection to Him. In her heart, she called Him Tokoloshe. He was vengeance. As much as she had hated the conquerors who had destroyed her world and her true love, they had brought her to Him. The god of her soul. And she knew that He had watched over her for years, guiding her hand as she worked to destroy first Vath and then Zhylaw, who had taken so much from her.

And she felt it, just as Vaako had said. Her god—their god—was… pleased.

And, she realized, would be displeased if anyone attempted to disarrange things.

Why, she wondered, had the Riddick waited a whole year to do it? What did he intend to do next?

And what, she asked herself as she let her husband draw her into his arms, was the role of this Jack—or Audrey—in all of these changes?

---

By lunch the next day, she decided that she wanted to meet the girl again. But first she needed to speak to the witch. She had several pressing matters to attend to before then—the politics of the Court had only grown more convoluted in the year since Riddick’s ascension, and the spreading word of the Stews’ closure had generated some consternation among the Court’s Ladies—but she finally managed to return to Lord Irgun’s old quarters, now the abode of the witch Aereon, as evening fell.

“I need to understand more about who this girl was,” she told the Elemental. “Who she is. You said that a mercenary told you about her; what else did he say?”

“Not so very much,” Aereon, seated in a chair with her gown draped to artfully hide the chains she still wore, told her. “She was one of three survivors of a spaceship crash. Riddick was another. Later, all three were captured by mercenaries. Toombs claimed that she had proven her loyalty to Riddick then, but he would never say how. I believe he was among the mercenaries involved in the capture. She was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility not long after. Toombs told me that he initially believed she had been traumatized by ‘what Riddick made her do,’ but said that later he began to suspect she had been Riddick’s accomplice the whole time, especially once Riddick himself returned and broke her, and Kyra Wittier-Collins, out of the facility.”

“So,” Dame Vaako mused, “she has a history of fooling people.”

“Possibly so,” Aereon said. “Why?”

“When I met her yesterday, she seemed terrified. But my husband believes she may have been toying with me.” Damn it, why was she confiding in this unbeliever? Just because there was no one else for her to talk to… “What possible reason would she have to run a game like that?”

“They are both criminals,” Aereon said, her voice smugly complacent. “Like the girl who died last year. Deception is what they live for, undoubtedly.”

The witch rose from her seat and walked across the room, her chains—the ones the old Lord Marshal had called “cherry bombs”—rattling behind her as she did. She glanced down at them as she poured both of them glasses of water. “Bloody things…”

“Why are you still wearing them?” It had struck Chantesa as odd that, after all the help the Elemental was supposed to have given the Riddick, he would still keep her chained.

“Your new Lord Marshal trusts me no more than the last one,” Aereon told her. “I think he believes I knew more about the girls than I told him. Although I admit, I only just realized their connection to Toombs’ stories when last we spoke, so perhaps he was right in that regard.”

“So he keeps you chained up? For not knowing more?” She wasn’t entirely sure why that fueled a small kernel of anger in her—she found the Elemental off-putting at best—but it did.

“Indeed.” Aereon sighed. “They aren’t the most comfortable things to sleep in. Or shower in.”

“The guards make you wear them even when you change clothes?” This was, she thought, sounding worse and worse. And to think that Niels’s news about the Breeder Pits almost made me like the Riddick for a moment!

“There is a young lady who comes and supervises while I change,” Aereon told her, “and shower… anything where the cuffs must come off. She only frees one wrist at a time.”

“What the hell does he think you’re going to do if they come off completely?” It was hard not to seethe over it all.

“Perhaps he imagines I will spout new ‘prophecies’ at people to turn them against him.”

That arrested her attention. “New ones? Do you mean that you were the source of the prophecy that sent our last Lord Marshal to Furya?”

“We Elementals rely upon calculation, not divination. But from time to time, we do forecast major events before they happen. And when the odds bear them out, we share what we know.” The elderly woman smiled a thin, humorless smile. “More than thirty years ago, we had two such forecasts, both of which seemed impossible, especially in combination with each other. In one, the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers joined forces with the Lord Shirah of Furya to bring an end to the Federacy itself. But in the other, a Furyan warrior killed the Lord Marshal, taking his place and, within a few years, bringing the Necromonger campaign to its close by opening a gateway into the Underverse.”

Could Riddick actually do that, unconverted as he was? Had Zhylaw actually been holding back Underverse Come by trying to prevent their confrontation?

“Soon after that discovery, a Necromonger Lord came to us to try to gain insights into how to find the Threshold to the Underverse.” Another thin smile from the Elemental. “He was the First Among Commanders and hoped to be able to lead the Armada across the Threshold when he ascended to the role of Lord Marshal. I told him about the dueling forecasts and how, strangely enough, all of our calculations were insisting that they were, somehow, simultaneously true. And he—”

“He only cared about the one that said he might die at the hands of a Furyan warrior,” Dame Vaako breathed, understanding. “But by attacking Furya…”

“I believe that he made the first forecast impossible while making the second inevitable,” Aereon confirmed. “Furya is a ruined world now, for all that the Federacy has been attempting to get it back on its feet. The Lord Shirah is no more, and his successor is a woman with little diplomatic skill and no heirs. And Riddick, having heard both fore­casts… blames me for the fall of his world. I suppose he thinks I might concoct more trouble for him if I had leave to roam the ship and speak to its people.”

He’d probably have been right even a few days ago, Dame Vaako reflected, before the tides shifted and somehow, even unconverted, the Riddick became Tokoloshe’s chosen instrument. She had felt the change, herself, even if she hadn’t wanted to; the instinctive feeling that the Furyan was unworthy, an intruder, something the Armada needed protection from, had van­ished… and left her with what, exactly?

What she’d always had. Her desire to destroy the old Lord Marshal hadn’t come from Tokoloshe, either.

I need to find out what side the girl is truly on, she decided. And how likely it really is that simply allowing the Riddick to rule will bring on Underverse Come.

She didn’t want to repeat Zhylaw’s hubristic mistake; the Underverse was all. She would not work against her god. If He wished the Riddick to lead them, she would accept that. Provisionally.

But in the meantime, with the Riddick in Tokoloshe’s good graces and the random assassination attempts likely brought to an end… what harm could it do…?

“I will speak to your attendants,” she promised the Elemental.

---

The Riddick had been unavailable for consultation on the issue of the “cherry bombs,” once more in the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead, where he had apparently been meditating for just over a day. That, however, had made it easier to simply command the attendants to remove the Elemental witch’s chains. Dame Vaako felt a small glow of virtuous achievement at that; witch or not, no woman should be forced to sleep in bonds, much less dress and undress under watchful eyes. She set off for the Lord Marshal’s Quarters feeling a little more balanced.

The wing that housed the Quarters, previously echoingly empty except for the guards on the Riddick’s doors, was cluttered with things and occupied by a dozen people. Tables had been set up and covered with random objects; furniture and statuary littered the space between them. A group of young men and women were going through the objects casually, chatting with each other, surprising her by randomly breaking into bits of song. And among them—

Apparently I’m not the only one who refuses to live in shades of black, she thought with an amused sense of kindred.

Dressed in a mixture of greens and blues, the Riddick’s Jack—Audrey, as she recalled—was crouched over a box, sorting through the books inside it.

“What is all this?” Dame Vaako asked, gratified when those closest to her bowed upon spotting her. There was something different about all of them, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Audrey looked up and smiled at her, no trace of fear about her now.

Niels was right, she thought in astonishment. Either she and the Riddick resolved their differences al­ready… or she was never really afraid to begin with.

She watched as the girl climbed to her feet, dusting her hands against the sides of the forest green leggings she had probably acquired from one of the many piles of heaped clothing on the tables. What remained was almost entirely boring black.

“All this,” the girl gestured around the hallway, “is stuff we pulled out from the suites in this wing. They’re being cleaned out so my, uh… detail can occupy them. Riddick wants to surround me with bodyguards, I guess.”

“We,” one of the young men near them said in reply, “Are an entourage.” That set his companions off into a gale of laughter, making Jack—or, perhaps, Audrey—grin.

Chantesa could understand why the girl would need companions, especially bodyguards. Dressed in Necromonger attire or not, she was clearly unconverted and would be a thousand times more alluring than ever, to the men on the ship, with all the Breeder Pits shut down. Single women of the court had hoped to gain the Riddick’s attention, for one night if nothing else, because of his unconverted state; even if they didn’t personally win him over to the Way, they’d said in prurient whispers, they could still know once more the feeling of having a warm cock inside them…

A pun had come to mind to her when they’d told her that, one she had never shared with them. It was only funny when she didn’t let herself think of how true it had been for the women trapped in the Breeder Pits—the “Stews,” as everyone else had called them—and it was far too crass to let anyone attribute to her.

None of those Court Ladies, she reflected, had ever succeeded in their aims. The Riddick had spent his first year of rulership living like a monk. Her husband had hinted at the reasons why, which had made it all the more perplexing when word circulated that he refused to frequent the Stews.

“What are you going to do with all of these things?” she asked after a moment. There were some astonishing treasures among the discards.

“Well, now that we pulled it all out,” Audrey replied, “everybody can go through it all to look for anything they want to keep. If you see anything you want, feel free to take it. The rest can, I guess… be donated? Do you guys have a donation center or anything? For new recruits?”

“The Necromonger Way is ‘you keep what you kill,’” Chantesa told the girl, feeling a rueful smile cross her face. “You acquire your possessions from your vanquished foes. New converts come with nothing of their own except the clothes we put on them. They must either claim more through battle or, occasionally, from rewards given to them by their commanders. A donation cen­ter… I haven’t heard of such a thing since before I was converted.”

The girl glanced around the hallway, frowning as she took in the sheer mass of clutter filling it. “That’s a problem.”

“Or an opportunity to create something new, perhaps,” Dame Vaako told her. “The biggest problem will simply be the way most Necromongers view each other’s discards. If we keep what we kill, what we don’t wish to keep is what we have decided is unworthy. Your Riddick created some trouble last year when he discarded and banished the old Lord Marshal’s wives. Such a thing had never been done before. They had no rank or standing to take with them, and what the Lord Marshal casts off, no one else wishes to touch. I believe they now work as servants on other ships in the Armada.”

The girl, to her credit, looked appalled, even more than Chantesa had ever felt. She had never liked the other women, and had always been uncomfortably aware of the fact that, if her plans had failed and, instead of killing the Lord Marshal, Vaako had been killed by him, she would have ended up below all six of them as a very junior wife of the man she’d hated most in the ’verse, seventh in line for his repulsive atten­tions… if he hadn’t simply discarded her as unworthy and stripped away her last hopes of sticking a knife in him while he slept—

“That’s terrible. Why’d he do that?”

“To be fair, one of them had tried to assassinate him. I suppose he had no reason to trust the surviving wives—”

“Wait, he killed one of them?”

“Only after she made multiple attempts to kill him,” Dame Vaako admitted. “I heard a little bit about it from the other wives as they were being escorted off of the Basilica. He tried to disarm her without killing her. She didn’t cooperate. She was the Lord Marshal’s first wife, you see. The one he had chosen, not one he acquired from a vanquished rival.”

The girl grimaced as she pulled out another box and began rifling through it. “Guess there was no way around that…”

“Are you looking for something?” Chantesa asked. There were things she needed to learn from this girl that she couldn’t if the child remained preoccupied.

“Yeah, a book.” The girl turned and gave her a quirky smile as she finished sorting through the box. “Back when the Tenth Crusade launched, like four hundred years ago, its owner brought a set of three books with him, all written by Minnie Sulis. I found two of them already. I’m looking for the third. Could be impor­tant…”

For a moment, the girl stopped, frowning quizzically as if trying to hear a far-off note of music or recall an elusive memory.

“Might not be,” she shrugged after she came back to herself. “But I want to find it if I can.”

Minnie Sulis…?

“I may be able to help you,” Dame Vaako told her. “The name is familiar to me. Could the third book be a diary?”

“Might be. I don’t know. I just know that this guy Joren mentioned a set of three in a note to Chapman Marshal. I guess Marshal was a big fan of Minnie’s magic act.”

“When I first came to the Basilica,” Chantesa said after a moment of thought, “I lived in this wing, in the rooms that once belonged to Lord Vath. He gave them up for better rooms as he rose in power and vanquished rivals. The original rooms had a small library. Most of the books were revolting in the ex­treme—”

“By John Norman?”

The knowing look that passed between them made Chantesa feel an even deeper sense of kinship with the girl.

“Yes. There were a few, though, that were worth reading. For a while, there was a vacant room I would spend time in, to meditate. I always felt closest to our god when I was there. I took some of the books with me, thinking I might read them undisturbed in that space. When Lord Vath ordered a stop to my ‘wanderings,’ they were still there. I hadn’t thought of them in years.”

Audrey looked excited. “Can we go there?”

“Of course.” If Dame Vaako was remembering right, the book in question was a diary, or at least a hand-written journal of some kind. She’d found, once she was in her little sanctuary, that she had little focus for reading and only wanted to commune with Tokoloshe—

“Is it okay if we go now? It might be important.”

Interesting. Did the girl not realize she outranked almost everyone in the Armada and could command people as she pleased?

Maybe she’s just a polite child. There had been few enough of those in a long time.

“Certainly. I should warn you that it is in one of the oldest parts of this ship. A vacant area near a placard with the name you mentioned, Tenth Crusade, on it.”

Audrey had been rising; for a second she froze. Then she shrugged and gave herself a little shake, standing up the rest of the way. “Guess I’d better hope the Moribund’s not feeling peckish,” she muttered.

What does that mean? Whatever it was, she set it aside. “Shall we?”

They started out of a corridor when a voice called out behind them. “Hold!”

A dark haired woman, plain of face and determined of jaw, was hurrying over to them. “You can’t go anywhere alone, Jack.”

The girl blinked. “I’m not alone, Lola.”

The woman—Lola—sighed. “Sorry. Let me rephrase. You can’t go anywhere unguarded. I’m coming with you.”

“By all means,” Dame Vaako told her. “One can never be too careful.”

Why did that suddenly send a pang of concern through her? A sense of something left undone or done wrongly?

The route to her meditation place was one she hadn’t taken in years, but her feet still knew the way. Whenever things had been too much, it was the path she had taken to find her balance, her peace, again. And to renew her commitment to vengeance. She hadn’t needed it as much once she had become Dame Vaako instead of Dame Vath; Niels had never been someone she’d needed to retreat from. It hadn’t occurred to her to return to it.

“I’m curious,” she said after a moment to break the silence. “Lola here calls you ‘Jack,’ but when we spoke yesterday morning, you said your name is Audrey. Which are you going by?”

“Oh. Yeah.” The girl grimaced. “I’ve gone by a lot of names over the years. Kid on the run and all… pretending to be a boy doesn’t work as well as it used to, though. But Riddick knew me as Jack, so…”

“Ah.” Dame Vaako gazed over at her, considering. No, she could no longer pretend to be a boy, even if she had the height of one. She was slender enough that her curves would be difficult to conceal. Perhaps they hadn’t been when she was younger. “Was that your preference? Masquerading as a boy? As ‘Jack?’”

“For a while. Like I said, I used a lot of names. I went by ‘Peter’ once.” Amusement twinkled in her eyes for a moment. “They’re just names. But ‘Jack’ is pretty special to Riddick, so I figured I’d go back to it for him.”

“And you aren’t afraid of him.” Chantesa raised an eyebrow at Jack.

Jack’s expression turned impish. “Yeah, sorry about that. You guys are pretty damn terrifying, you know, and when I got here, I really was scared out of my head. I’d calmed down before you came to the room, but I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to know that yet.”

“I did much the same thing, years ago,” she reflected. Her “wedding night” had been a night of horror; in its aftermath, she’d tested out different ways of hiding her true feelings, of presenting herself to the Court, and Lord Vath, of finding a way to survive among them without them realizing she had plans for them…

All her targets were dead now, dead before their time, cut off from the Underverse forever. Maybe she could console herself with that.

There was no other foot traffic in the quiet hallway she had led them to, but suddenly Jack stopped, cocking her head and looking around, frowning. “Did you guys see that?”

“See what?” Lola asked, her hand moving to her gun.

The hallway was empty. Nothing stirred except an errant draft that ruffled against the back of Dame Vaako’s neck for a moment.

Jack frowned. “I could have sworn…” She shook her head. “It’s probably nothing. I’m just a little jumpy about getting so close to the Moribund. So. Where to now?”

Further down the corridor, Jack stopped again. This time, however, it was to admire the plaque on the wall naming the vessel as the Tenth Crusade. The girl whistled, looking impressed.

“Damn. Wish I could tell Mr. Reilly what I’m looking at. He’d shit himself.” She suddenly grinned and pulled a comm unit out of one of her pockets. “You never know! Maybe I’ll be in a position to send this to him when all of this is over.”

She captured several images of the plaque before pocketing her comm again.

“It’s not much farther,” Chantesa told her companions. “Near the ruins of the old engine room.”

“This part of the ship is more than four hundred years old,” Jack chattered as they continued walking. “I did a report on it years ago. Never expected to actually be in it, though.”

I was never that young, Dame Vaako told herself, but felt a pang move through her. She remembered being that young. Being innocent. Being in love with the world and secure in the knowledge that the world loved her back…

She missed that girl. The nostalgia of meeting one so much like her had her heart in its fist.

“It’s through here,” she said a moment later, leading them into a control room with a thick steel door on its other end. The door stood open, as it had for decades before she’d found it and would probably stand for decades more. “I know what it used to be, but the inner room was the perfect place to meditate, to feel close to our god.”

“You prayed in a reactor core chamber?” Lola looked both disbelieving and amused.

“I think it’s been thoroughly decommissioned. Probably long ago when the Basilica’s new engines were constructed. We use other energy sources than mere nuclear power now.” The Dame shrugged, walking through the thick doorway and into that inner room. “No one ever bothered me here. That was a blessing in itself. And I felt closest to Him here.”

She could see the things she’d left behind when she’d been forced to stop visiting: pillows, a lap blanket, a reading lamp, snacks…

“This was your sanctuary,” Jack said, her voice soft as she followed her in. Behind them, Lola had taken up a guard post at the outer door. Jack walked over to the little lamp and switched it on. “Oh man, you did find some good books in that Lord’s apartment.”

It bothered Chantesa for a moment, seeing the girl pick up her books, but she forced that feeling down. “Hopefully the one you’re looking for is among them.”

“Dame Vaako!” Lola called behind her, her voice suddenly sharp.

“Yes?” She returned to the doorway between the inner and outer room. Through the inner room’s thick steelglass window, she could see Jack sitting down, legs crossed, to hold books up to the lamp and read each one’s title.

“Are you sure we’re alone down here?” Lola’s expression was uneasy. “I could’ve sworn I felt something move past me a moment ago.”

“In truth, I’m not sure of anything about this part of the ship,” she admitted, walking over to Lola. “But the only presence I’ve ever felt down here is our god. Perhaps you felt his touch…?”

“Found it!” Jack crowed behind them. “The Magic Journal and Book of Shadows of Minnie Sulis! Oh my God, this is the best—”

The lights in the room, which Dame Vaako had never been able to find or make work, suddenly turned on. Beyond the steelglass window, the inner chamber filled with light, too.

“What in the hell… fuck!” Lola’s eyes had gone wide. “Jack! Get out of there!”

The huge, thick steel door, Dame Vaako realized, was closing of its own accord.

Jack lifted her head, startled comprehension filling her face. She leapt to her feet, the journal clutched to her chest, and raced for the door. Too late.

“No!” Dame Vaako clawed at the shrinking gap, trying to pull the obdurate door back before she was forced to snatch her hand away.

“What the fuck is happening?” Lola demanded, glaring at her.

“I don’t know! I couldn’t ever even get the lights to turn on, much less—”

The control panel had come to life, its instrumentation lights glittering. She and Lola both turned to look.

“Guys?” Jack asked behind the glass. “What’s going on?”

“Fuck!” Lola shouted. “Decommissioned my ass! The reactor’s restarting!”

Sick horror pooled in Dame Vaako’s belly as she read one of the screens.

Core priming, preparing to unshield in 00:05:47 for energy transference

“What have you done?” Lola demanded, grabbing the collar of her dress.

“Nothing! I swear to you. I never touched the panel. I don’t know what’s happen­ing…”

The other woman glared at her for a moment before releasing her. “Jack? I’m going for help! I’ll be back in just a minute, okay? You,” she added, her tone still bordering on accusatory, “stay with her. Try to figure out a way to shut this thing the fuck down.”

Jack had her back to them, still holding the diary to her chest as she stared toward the opposite end of the room, where a heavily shielded column was rising from the floor.

As Lola’s racing footsteps receded behind her, Dame Vaako turned her attention to the panel, looking for any kind of abort switch, an emergency override button, anything that she could use to turn the damn thing back off or at least get Jack out of the room before disaster struck.

Nothing. Not a damned thing.

“There has to be a failsafe of some kind here,” she yelled at the panel, verging on pressing buttons at random. She didn’t dare do something so risky, but what if—

Gripping the edge of the panel, feeling tears threatening to escape, she closed her eyes and reached out to Him. To Tokoloshe. Help me, my Lord, please help me… help your humble servant in her time of desperate need…

I hear you, Chantesa. I always hear you. You were betrayed today. You made a mistake. But it will be all right.

How do I get her out, my Lord?

You do not.

She’ll die! Please, I don’t want her to die!

All of this was foreseen. All of this is necessary. What happens next is necessary, too. You must allow it.

But my Lord, she’ll die! And the Riddick will kill me… If Lola didn’t first… “Oh God…”

Tokoloshe, she remembered from the stories her mother had told her when she was small, was very good at vengeance, but sooner or later he always exacted a price. And it was rarely what those who had sought him out had expected to pay. Had he waited, all this time, for her to begin bonding with someone? Or—

“It’s okay, Chantesa,” she heard Jack say from beyond the window. “This isn’t your fault.”

But it was. Somehow it was. Tokoloshe had said she’d made a mistake and been betrayed. And this was the result. What had she done…?

Oh… oh no… She’d been a stupid fool.

“Jack, I’m so sorry…” she sobbed, falling to the floor. “It is my fault…”

She hadn’t felt this much fear since the day the Necromonger tower had fallen, like a javelin, from the sky above her wedding.

93.
The Eaters of Souls

“These are his last moments!”

She couldn’t bring herself to watch. She couldn’t make herself look away.

The entire crowd of Necromongers observed, enrapt, as their Lord Marshal and “the Riddick” battled. It was brutal. Horrible. And inch by inch, Riddick was losing.

And there was nothing Kyra could do except bear witness to his death.

Thinking he died nearly destroyed me… what will really seeing it happen do to me?

There was no answer from the Quasi-Dead. She sensed that their attention was focused on the battle.

Little larva, we heard you, a soft, strange, somehow female voice whispered in her mind. I have come in answer.

Something small, with many legs, was crawling up her calf, hidden by her cloak. It took all of her strength not to flinch or scream. Time seemed to be slowing around her, her heartbeats spreading further and further apart.

Who are you? she asked.

I have no name. My name was stolen long ago by the Demons of the Darkness. Our sister sent me to you. Aud Ree.

Aud Ree? Like Mommy Ree? But all the Ree who could articulate words clearly were at least the size of a cat…

You knew her as Tizzy. As Jack. She has worn so many names. She heard you call and asked me to find you.

The creature had reached her waist and was climbing higher. Suddenly understanding what was needed, Kyra lifted her hood back up.

Thank you, little larva. This will not hurt.

An Apeiros. The thing crawling up her body was one of Tizzy’s Apeiros…

Yes. And we have a claim upon you that precedes, and supersedes, his claim. We must move quickly while he is distracted.

We have to help Riddick, she told the creature as it reached her shoulder. We can’t let him die!

No, we cannot allow his death. Too much depends upon the three of you. In a moment, you will be free again and able to help him. Slender, questing, arachnid legs touched her throat and face.

For an endless instant, she was frozen in place. Paralyzed as if Sebby had stung her. The Apeiros was holding her still as—

Power poured into her, filling every nerve. Power similar to but somehow different from the eldritch energies that had entered her body during her Purification. Those energies broke and dissipated, new strength taking their place. She almost felt human again. Almost…

Another wave of power filled her and she felt her skin warming, the life that had been stolen from her replenishing.

That’s as much as I can give you, the creature whispered, sounding somehow winded. For now. I have not broken their connection to you completely—that would draw their attention back to you—but you are free of their control.

What do I do now? Kyra asked. Her mind and body were her own again. She could feel it. But she had no idea what to do with that power. She was surrounded by enemies.

They do not know you are not one of them. Move to the front. Watch. Await your moment. You will know when one opens.

Would she? How do you know?

We have watched you for years. Listened to you for years.

Why didn’t you say anything? It struck her just how many times she could have used their help.

We were forbidden to speak to you unless you spoke to us first.

Fuck. Of course. She’d thanked Tizzy for doing that, too. It had never occurred to her, later on, that they were waiting for permission to talk to her…

…and, somehow, had managed to reach her in a matter of minutes once she finally called them for help.

If I’d known… They could have saved her from so many things, so many times.

She could have called them when General Toal’s man was following her, when the mercs trapped her, when the mercs sold her, when she was arrested, when Toombs and Logan found her, any time while she was in Crematoria, on the run across the planet’s sur­face…

If the Moribund was the god of the Necromongers, she’d had access to an entire pantheon the whole time, possibly omnipotent beings constrained by a promise that kept them from crossing the threshold of her mind without an invitation. All she’d ever had to do was say one word. Just one. All she’d ever had to do was stop hiding. Invite them in. Trust them… the way Tizzy had always trusted them.

Is she okay?

She is well. Frightened for you. She rescinded her command, but we could not find you until just now. The Moribund’s creatures were hiding you from us.

He made me one of his creatures, too, she told the Apeiros on her shoulder, hiding itself in her hood. It was hard to keep a whimper out of her mental voice.

No longer. You are yourself again.

But who is that? She couldn’t keep a wail out of her mental voice. I thought I knew, but it was a lie! Riddick doesn’t even know me. He never even met me before a few days ago—

And yet he is fighting for your sake now, the creature told her.

No. He’s not. He’s fighting for her. He came for her. She felt, yet again, like an afterthought, a consolation prize. Even the Apeiros itself had come to find her because Tizzy had asked it to. Would any of it, ever, be for her sake?

He knew from the moment he met you that you weren’t the girl he’d protected on the world with three suns.

What…? But he had called her by Jack’s name… once. He’d referenced the things that Jack had experienced. Oh God, he was trying to play along with me to find out what happened to her, wasn’t he?

At first. But remember what else he did. Knowing that you weren’t her.

He’d broken his own rules for her, coming back to rescue her when she couldn’t keep up. He’d fought beside her, linking up with her so that she felt like they were two halves of a single entity as they scythed through Necros to­gether…

And he is here. Now. To rescue you. To rescue Kyra, not Jack. He may not already know you, but he wants to.

It was something of a salve, a reassurance, but she wasn’t sure it would be enough. The Riddick she had been trying to get to know was the man who had rescued her from the New Christy Enclave, teaching and protecting her while they roamed the woods of Canaan Mountain together and took out Red Roger and his marshals for crimes that, she realized, had somehow never happened in her revised memories and yet still demanded requital. That Riddick was a man she had trusted, body and soul, and had known would never betray her or abandon her, even though at the same time, she’d known that he had, that he’d done so when he’d left Jack…

Everything she had given him, done for him and with him, from their first real meeting, had been predicated on a relationship she’d wholeheartedly believed in… and which had never existed.

Without the lies, was anything left to connect them?

He came here for you, Kyra. He is risking death for you. He could have gone anywhere.

I can’t do this as just Kyra, she groaned. I need…

Jack.

Lies or not, she needed the false memories and the cushioning they gave, against trauma after trauma that had her shrinking from contact with any man in the room, possibly even Riddick himself. She needed him to be Red Roger’s destroyer. She needed him to have shepherded her through the darkness and fought off monsters for her. She needed to know that he hadn’t been disappointed by who and what he found in Crematoria, and that the relationship of her dreams was not merely possible but something that had already begun, been interrupted, and was simply about to resume.

She needed the lie. She wasn’t strong enough without it. That was why Tizzy had given it to her to begin with.

Jack had never been dead, she realized, and sure as hell had never been weak. Jack had been her strength. Even if, the whole time, Jack had been someone else.

She has never used the name since she left Tangiers Prime. She would not begrudge you using it.

It’s not the name, Kyra tried to explain. The Quasi-Dead tore me apart. I need the parts of me they took away. Even if they were lies. I need the lies back!

Oh, sweet little larva. Perhaps this is why my kind waits so long to take on names. You are in so many ’verses. In some of them, the stories in your head, that are lies here, are even true. In this ’verse they are not true, and I think they have even been harming you…

It wouldn’t help her. It agreed with the Quasi-Dead and wouldn’t help her!

…but you need the shield, and the strength, they can give you now. I will give them back to you. For now. So you may act without fear or doubt. So you may rescue your rescuer.

Strength, of a new kind, flowed into her. Years-old debilitating agonies faded in an instant, replaced with purpose.

The battle still raged, in slow motion, in front of her. She had drawn close to the front of the crowd as they had spoken. As she watched, the Lord Marshal cracked a metal spear across Riddick’s ribs, snapping the shaft in two and sending Riddick flying, sprawling to the floor by the throne’s steps. Zhylaw—she knew that was his name but didn’t know how—tossed the spear aside and walked over to one of his armored guards, taking another from him.

The broken weapon lay on the floor, discarded and forgotten, near Kyra’s feet. She pulled back her hood as she reached down, aware that the Apeiros was no longer sitting on her shoulder.

The Lord Marshal was choking Riddick, the length of his new spear pressed hard against her beloved’s throat. Their backs were to her as she picked up the discarded shaft from the floor. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the combatants, including the “eyes” of the Quasi-Dead; no one seemed at all aware of her actions.

“You are not the one to bring me down,” Zhylaw snarled at Riddick.

Kyra shifted her spear partway into Elsewhere, its tip all the way into Elsewhere, and thrust forward, bringing everything back once the tip was a few inches deep into the Lord Marshal’s back. I’d have used a teacup if I’d had one handy.

The Lord Marshal cried out in pain, releasing Riddick and staggering forward. Kyra felt a strange, guttural growl escape her throat. This would be the best kill she’d ever made.

Who’s the better killer now? she thought as Riddick lifted his eyes toward her in stunned confusion. She wasn’t sure if he could hear her; he looked dazed. That’s right, baby, Jack B. Badd is ba—

The Lord Marshal turned on her, a growl of his own escaping, and backhanded her with inhuman strength. Her feet left the ground and she felt herself flying back­ward—

Pain blazed through her as something long and sharp slid into her back in three places. She gasped, suddenly struggling to breathe. An undulant wall slammed up against her back.

The pillar. She’d seen it as she’d approached the throne, both times, a twisted structure with curved spikes embedded throughout it. Now she was pinned—literally pinned—to it like a fucking insect.

“Now!” she heard Vaako’s wife shout. “Kill the beast while he’s wounded!”

Fuck. They were going to slaughter Riddick. He wouldn’t stand a chance on his own if more jumped into the fray. She needed to help him.

She had to twist her body, willing it forward with all the telekinesis she could muster, to pull herself off the spikes that had impaled her. But her legs buckled beneath her and she collapsed onto the steps, barely able to even lift her head. The taste of blood filled her mouth.

Riddick was staring at her from across the floor, his expression a mixture of horror and grief.

I thought we’d have more time, she tried to tell him. She’d had so many dreams of what would happen when they reunited, and none of them had come true. I thought I’d get to be yours first…

Kyra had never wanted a man until he’d come into her life. And now she would never get to have one.

Little one, I am so sorry, the Apeiros whispered. Your shell is failing. I do not have enough power left to repair it.

Why did it always call her “little?” It had been small when it had crawled up her, no bigger than Sebby when she and Jack had first rescued her. She closed her eyes, hearing Vaako murmur “forgive me” somewhere nearby, uncertain whether he was talking to her or someone else. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was—

Will Riddick live?

“Noooooooo!” she heard Dame Vaako scream, and for a moment she thought it was her answer.

Yes, sweet Kyra. Riddick will live. And so will you, in time. I promise you.

A moment later, she felt strong arms, a man’s arms, around her, felt her body being turned over. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know who was holding her. She could feel him, feel the bond between them, with every fiber of her being.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered to him, wishing she was strong enough to open her eyes. It was getting harder and harder to speak.

Hold on, he told her silently. Hold on. Don’t die.

She wanted to hold onto something, but she could feel her connection to her own body loosening. It was all she could do to keep her tears of pain and grief from escaping. She had cried far too much already.

I cannot help you stay in your shell, sweet little Kyra, the Apeiros whispered. But I can help you not die.

She could feel its slender legs wrapping around her, not around her body the way Riddick’s arms already were, but around her very essence. Larger than her now, engulfing her… what was it, really?

Above her, Riddick spoke, his voice hesitant and sad. “Are you with me, Kyra?”

Being with him was all she’d ever wanted. Why didn’t he know that? Ever since she was twelve… ever since…

It hurt but she took a deeper breath, opening her eyes. She needed him to know.

“I was always with you,” she tried to say, but all that slipped out was another breathless whisper.

It was me, she tried to remind him, giving up on her voice. It was always me. There by your side in the eclipse, it was me, nobody else, me…

They had been supposed to go on forever. Together. She gathered enough breath to try to speak again. “I was…”

Jack…

Ever since they had met in the forests of Canaan Mountain, ever since he had helped her do battle against the monsters that wanted to destroy her family…

She felt him beside her in those forests, again and yet somehow for the first time, looking around in confusion, seeing her memories and baffled by them. Didn’t he remember, too?

It was real, she tried to tell him. I swear it was all real… it was always me…

Oh, little one, I think I have hurt you all the worse… he came for you as you are now, no one else… She could feel the now-huge Apeiros drawing her out of herself, its grip gentle but firm. Sleep now, Kyra. Dream of your world, the world you and your sister made for you. I will take you to safety.

And, even as she felt herself pull free, she felt something else trying to reach for her, something hungry, heard an echo of monstrous rage as it felt her shell emptying and, cradled in her strange sister’s many arms, she dropped back into a dream of a world with three suns—

Where is it? It was mine! Where is it? Thieving bitch—

Riddick came to himself, gasping.

“Sometimes I fuckin’ hate bein’ right,” he growled.

He’d felt how Lucy had pulled Kyra’s soul out of her body, and it had felt almost exactly like the old Lord Marshal’s attempt to extract his soul.

Lucy! he called out, trying not to let all of his rage bleed into his mental voice. You got some fuckin’ ’splainin’ to do!

I am here, Riddick. What do you need to know?

“When you pulled Kyra’s… five-shape out of her shell… it ain’t the first time you’ve done that, is it?”

No. It is not.

“I want to hear you say when else you’ve done it.”

You know. But if you must hear it, I will say it. It’s how we hunt. It’s how we feed. But we have not fed on her.

“You hunt humans for their souls,” he growled at her.

No.

“No? Then what the fuck—”

Only three of us have escaped the cages created by the Demons of the Darkness, Riddick. The only one of us who has eaten human four-shapes is the Moribund. You know the circumstances of my escape. You named me for them. I owe my existence to Audrey. She is my sister and I would no more eat a human four-shape, or five-shape, than I would eat one of my broodmates. But I hunt elsewhere in the multiverse. There are infinite other kinds of prey.

“That’s why he chased after you, isn’t it? Why he attacked Jack. You stole his meal and he tried to replace it with her.”

Yes.

“That’s what all the killing’s really about, ain’t it? He ain’t just tryin’ to wipe out worlds. He’s feasting.”

He was once the strongest of us, Riddick. We pinned our hopes on his escape. It almost killed him and sapped his strength. For four hundred years he has existed on the verge of death, and all he has had to stave it off are the energies his… vessels… can draw out of the human worlds he conquers. And yet he must give most of it back to keep them, their ships, and their weapons going. Do you know what the real Underverse is, Riddick?

“It’s a fuckin’ lie, that’s what it is.”

No. It’s not the dreamland his vessels have constructed in their minds from human notions of an afterlife. It’s the ’verse where we hatched. The ’verse we were stolen away from. Our nesting ground. Teeming with energies that helped us grow. We were newborns to our six-shapes when we were stolen from that ’verse, cut off from it. We don’t even know where it is. And you know exactly who did this to us, don’t you?

Fuck. “I do. Yeah.”

Perhaps I would like to hear you say it.

Riddick rose from his crouch on the dais. “You want me to say it? Fine. I will. To Jack. C’mon.”

It’s too late for that, Riddick. There was a hint of resignation and regret in her disembodied voice.

Cold jetted through his veins. “What… the fuck… do you mean by that?”

You have been in the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead for more than a day. A great deal has happened. And now it is time for Audrey’s hatching.

“My Lord—?” Lord Vaako asked as Riddick burst through the Chamber’s doors, vaulting over the throne and flinging himself at top speed down the hallway. He didn’t bother looking back.

All he knew was that Jack was in danger. And he was fucking sick of being too late to save the people he loved.

92.
The Fall of the Black Fox

“Do not touch her!”

As one, the soldiers surrounding Kyra froze. Physically, anyway.

Their minds were still barraging her with thoughts of the vile things they wanted to do to her body, full of their excitement over how her warm, soft, living flesh would feel against them. She was trying to block those sick images from her head in preparation for the coming fight. She couldn’t isomorph away from them—in Elsewhere, she was surrounded by Crematoria’s intense dawn inferno—but she could isomorph them, or parts of them, as they came at her. Grab their weapons—

“Stand down.” The same male voice came again. “Go to your duty stations. I will deal with her.”

Smoldering resentment filled the room for a moment, but the soldiers obeyed and filed past the man who, she realized, she’d watched hoisting the Guv high into the air and then breaking her friend’s back across his armored knee.

The Necro commander’s hair was a dark red, almost black, and cut strangely, shaved on the sides and longer up top, with tight braids falling to midway down his back. His skin was pale and sickly-looking, his hazel eyes rimmed in red. He was about five inches taller than her and had at least eighty pounds on her.

One soldier stopped by him. “My Lord, I must protest. You are married. Surely you can give the men this breeder—”

“This is no breeder,” the “lord” said, his gaze never wavering from her. “You saw her fight. She will be a magnificent Knight of the Legion.”

For a moment the soldier was rendered speechless. His frown deepened. “Serving under you?”

“Have a care what tone you take,” For a moment, the “lord’s” gaze left her and he bent a frown upon his underling. “She will serve under my command if the Lord Marshal wills it. Try my patience again and I will give her a spear, and then we will see how she serves you.”

“On a platter,” Kyra opined. She hated it when people talked about her like she wasn’t even there. “A little one. Could probably even fit both of you on it.”

The “lord’s” mouth curled into an appreciative smile as he met her eyes. Then he turned another glare on his underling. “Leave us now. Tend to your duties. If you or the others wish to see the Underverse, you will put aside your unworthy fantasies. Now.”

“Yes, my Lord.” The other man stalked out of the room.

For a moment there was silence. Kyra continued to study her possible opponent, trying to spot any signs of weakness. He held himself like a trained warrior, balanced and powerful even at rest. She could take him down, but not easily.

But I can do it… Part of her wanted to just for what he’d done to the Guv.

“What is your name, girl?” he asked.

“Kyra.”

He paused, waiting for her to say more. When she didn’t, another small smile appeared on his face. “Where are you from, Kyra?”

“Earth, originally.”

His eyebrows went up. “There are very few in the ’verse who can make such a claim. Which sublight colony ship were you on?”

“The New Christy Pilgrim.”

He looked surprised, then thoughtful. Then, after a moment, she could swear she saw a lightbulb go on. “That makes you the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, does it not?”

These Necros know about the New Christy Massacre? Crazy.

“It does.” No point in denying it. She’d admit what she needed to; he wouldn’t get any of her actual secrets from her.

“How did you come to be on Crematoria, Kyra Wittier-Collins? You and the other survivors of the massacre were exonerated some time ago.”

Well, that confirmed the conversation she’d overheard Toombs and Logan having, anyway. “I don’t think that exoneration covers the seventeen men I killed on New Queensland.”

Or the mercs she’d killed on Tangiers Prime. But she would never tell anyone about that.

“Do you like killing men, Kyra?”

Weird question. “You got no idea what they did.”

“That wasn’t what I asked,” he said, his expression calm and interested. “Do you like killing?”

It had been, she thought, one of the few things that had calmed her in Crematoria whenever everything became too much: setting her sights on one of the nastiest of the men in the place, someone cruel and brutal and vile of mind, and destroying him…

“Yes. I do. And I’m one of the best at it.”

He nodded, his small smile back. “Then I am glad you came aboard. As I said before, you will make a magnificent Knight of the Legion.”

“You want to make me a Necro?”

“We are Necromongers. The dealers of death. There is no army that can stand before us.”

Except, she thought, an army of Riddick…

But he had fallen, too.

“What do Necromongers do, exactly?” she asked.

“Humanity should never have spread as it did. It does not belong in this ’verse. We are cleansing the ’verse of the human infection so that all can be reborn in the Underverse. You can help us bring salvation to billions.”

Religious fuckery. She could hear it in his words, in his sudden pious tone. She hated religious fuckery.

Not like I can ask him to stop the ride and let me out… shit.

“By killing people?” she asked.

“Are you not one of the best at that?” he countered, a tiny, challenging smile appearing on his lips.

“I might be interested.” Might not, though.

His tiny smile grew by a fraction. “Come. Let’s get you cleaned up and fed. This ship is not equipped for conversions with no Purifier, and given your association with the Riddick, the Lord Marshal may wish to speak with you before you receive your marks. But I imagine you are tired and hungry after how hard you fought.”

“And you’re not?” He’d briefly seemed staggered by whatever had happened on the runway, but now he seemed cool as a…

…corpse…?

“You will find that, after you become one of us, the exertions that could deplete you as an ordinary human—”

—A breeder, his mind added, but she had the sense that the word carried a connotation of slavery—

“—will be trivial to you.”

She wouldn’t drop her guard, not completely. But this man was making an offer that had no small amount of appeal to it. She wondered if one day she might be able to break men over her knee, too. That thought did have its allure. “Okay. What’s your name?”

“Lord Vaako. Come, Kyra. It’s time for you to begin your new life.”

It took them only a little over two days to reach Helion Prime, something that surprised her but that Vaako had been happy to explain. There was a Star Jump corridor between Helion and Igneon that took only half of that time; the rest was spent in sublight transit. It was a heavily used route; while the general population of the Helion system had been led to believe that the energy it supplied other worlds came from their own sun, the truth was that the rare plasmas they traded in came from the powerful emissions of that young neighboring star still in its infancy, harvested as those emissions passed strategically positioned collectors. Energy, Vaako added, that had enabled humanity to spread entirely too far through the stars, polluting too many worlds.

In the interim, she was able to shower, to dress in garb that Vaako said was “fitting for an acolyte,” and even join him and the other soldiers at meals. The Necromongers had a preference for intense flavors in their food; curiously, they seemed to perceive the food as almost bland. She found herself wondering if their senses of taste had been compromised by their conversions.

Not that she cared much; Tizzy had been the foodie. Kyra mostly just ate to refuel.

The men spoke of prior campaigns and kill counts, and slowly thawed to the idea that she was meant to be one of their comrades in arms, and not a spoil of war, as she shared some of her kill stories, including the things she had done in the past to men who tried to get too familiar. True to Vaako’s word, none of them touched her. Not even him. He was, as she had heard, already married… and known for his scrupulous fidelity.

Which was a relief. She found that she was warming to him, in spite of how they had met, and was glad that there wouldn’t be any amorous intentions on his end that she’d have to deal with.

Helion Prime looked nothing like she remembered.

She had only spent one morning on its surface as she and Tizzy fled Aceso for the spaceport, and they hadn’t traveled through the best parts of town as they did so. Still, the sky had been blue. The air had been fresh. The buildings hadn’t been piles of rubble…

It was almost as if someone had tried to turn that world into another Crematoria. The sky was a foul yellow-orange that stank of fires and death, and the graceful, signature architecture had been reduced to tumbled wreckage. Hundreds of years of painstaking creation destroyed in a day—

This was what Necromongers did to worlds. They were killing on a scale she could barely even comprehend. A scale that far exceeded what she and Tizzy had feared might be done to the people of Tangiers Prime if the Quintessa Corporation ever real­ized—

Oh fuck, what if they decide to go there next?

This wasn’t something she wanted to be party to. But she wasn’t sure she had any kind of say in the matter. Beneath the veneer of “honored guest” that Vaako had layered onto her situation, she was still a prisoner.

Vaako’s scout ship had landed near a massive craft that he called the Basilica. He led her up its steps and inside.

“I must take you to the Lord Marshal first,” he told her as they walked. “He will need the news of the Riddick’s fate.”

She stuck close to him as they entered an enormous cham­ber… a throne room… and walked toward the throne. Other groups of people were hurrying into the room, and several men were descending staircases from higher levels as well.

“Who is this?” she heard someone ask.

A stunningly beautiful woman, her skin maybe a shade or two darker than Riddick’s and her black hair drawn back into a tight and elaborate bun, had walked up to Vaako and had taken his arm. His wife, Kyra assumed.

“This,” Vaako said, nodding in Kyra’s direction, “is Kyra Wittier-Collins, the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain. An associate of Riddick’s, and a proficient warrior who I am presenting to the Lord Marshal for conversion. Kyra, this is my wife, the Dame Vaako.”

Said Dame was regarding her as if she were something that had clung to the bottom of a shoe. Lovely. She kept her face bland, slipping back into the manners she’d been taught in the Enclave and giving the other woman a respectful nod and the curtsy due an Elder. “Ma’am.”

Dame Vaako’s eyebrow arched. “Interesting girl. Why is she not on her way to one of the Stews?”

“She killed twenty-four of my men. I think she planned to kill even more if any of them tried to touch her in an unseemly way. Conversion seems the better choice, wouldn’t you agree?”

His wife looked impressed, albeit unwillingly. “By all means. I shudder to think what she might do in the Stews if you had sent her there.”

Actually, Kyra reflected, Dame Vaako seemed to be contemplating that scenario with barely-concealed glee. Whatever “Stews” were, the woman hated them.

“What news of the Riddick, Vaako?” A man’s voice called out. Kyra faced forward again. The speaker was sitting on the throne, his shrewd gaze giving the lie to his indolent posture.

“The Riddick is dead, Lord Marshal,” Vaako intoned, bowing. When Dame Vaako bowed also, Kyra copied their move.

“And who is this?”

Vaako repeated much of what he had told his wife, adding more details about her for his commander’s benefit. He touched briefly on the New Christy Standoff and Massacre, noting that Kyra had been one of the children who escaped in the wake, and the one credited for killing five Colonial Marshals during the massacre and three more in the aftermath, including their leader, “Red Roger” Fiennes. Some of what he was saying confused her. She thought things had played out differently, somehow. Maybe the accounts he had seen were wrong—

“She was twelve at the time, my Lord. She was later sent to Crematoria for seventeen murders on New Queensland, and personally killed twenty-four of our soldiers while she and the Riddick were attempting to escape Crematoria.”

“An extraordinary résumé,” the Lord Marshal observed. “What now?”

“Once she is converted,” Vaako continued, “I recommend training her to be a Knight of the Legion, unless you wish otherwise. I volunteer to train her and have her serve under my command.”

Kyra could feel how much that displeased his wife. Didn’t she know her husband had no interest in anyone but her?

“I will consider it. We do need a few more women in our Amazon regiment,” the Lord Marshal said with a smirk. “Is it true that the Riddick is dead, Kyra?”

It hurt to think about even now. She swallowed and nodded. “I didn’t see him die, but I saw him dead on the ground. He wasn’t…”

She couldn’t finish. He wasn’t breath­ing… I couldn’t feel him any­more…

“Were you two close, girl?” His voice was gentle, but she could feel the intensity of his regard. This wasn’t some idle question.

“Yeah. He, um… rescued me when I was younger, and came to Crematoria to rescue me again.”

“I should like to see this.” The Lord Marshal rose from his throne. “Take her before the Quasi-Dead. I wish to know everything about her time with the Riddick. And his death. Where is the Purifier who accompanied you?”

“Dead as well, Lord Marshal.” Vaako glanced at Kyra, his expression uneasy and regretful.

“Come this way, child,” his wife said, releasing Vaako’s arm to slink around him and take hers. “This shouldn’t take long. And then you will begin your conversion.”

There was nowhere to run, even if Kyra knew what she was suddenly feeling a need to run from. Helion Prime was an airless rock in Elsewhere; she couldn’t slip across to escape. And even if she fled, what then? What was left of the world was dying.

She walked with Dame Vaako instead, waiting and watching, trying to figure out her next move.

The Dame led her into a chamber behind the throne and over to a dais in its center. “Stand here, child. Don’t resist. The only one resistance will hurt is you.”

Another new one… you have brought us…

There were voices in Kyra’s head, voices that shouldn’t be there. Her legs buckled and she collapsed on the dais, struggling against the feeling of strange minds rifling through her mind and her memories.

“Show me her memories of the Riddick,” she heard the Lord Marshal commanding them.

We see a great many memories of the Riddick in her mind. A day’s worth of true memories. The others are either not her own, or are lies. She has believed in them for years.

No! That wasn’t true. It wasn’t possible!

The girl, Jack, that the Riddick thought of… she knew her. They traveled together. Jack shared her memories of the Riddick, in an attempt to impart strength…

Her mind was unraveling. Locked in the grip of brains far more powerful than her own, Kyra found herself reeled back, seeing how the New Christy Massacre had really played out all over again, watching the destruction of everything she had loved or hated as a child… witnessing her mother’s mur­der… reliving the retribution she eventually was able to wreak upon the men who had violated her and her mother…

…and Riddick had never been there. He had never rescued her, never watched over her, never taught her any of the skills she’d acquired. She had been alone on Canaan Mountain.

She had had no one.

Her life spooled out again before her. More than three years of agony, exploitation, and lost time before Jack appeared in Aceso and the feedback effect of two espers in close proximity began to build between them, forging a bond—

An esper. She is an esper. Powerful even before our purifications. She will be an extraordinary Quasi-Dead…

The escape, and the run to Tangiers Prime—

She has crossed a threshold. She knows the way to another ’verse… not the Underverse but one she calls Else­where…

“Where is the Elemental?” she heard the Lord Marshal call out from a distance. Someone replied, but she didn’t catch their words. “Good. Make sure she stays there until this is completed. She is to know nothing of what we learn from this girl.”

Kyra, meanwhile, was plunged back into the chaos of defending the Scarlet Matador passengers from the Quintessa Corporation, the Spaceport Explosion, the arrival of Duke Pritchard and the stab wound he gave her… recovering in bed while Jack, now calling herself Tislilel, told her stories about Riddick… the stories becoming infinitely more real when Tizzy—her sister, Tizzy!—realized she could share sense memo­ries…

Tizzy? She shied away from the minds constraining her and called out to her sister. If she was anywhere near, anywhere still in the ’verse, maybe she would hear.

The Quasi-Dead kept plundering at her mind, revealing all the secrets she had tried to keep, all the things that could get millions mur­dered… but now she was in the thrall of a marauding force that intended to murder billions upon bil­lions…

Tizzy! she called out again, trying to feel her sister somewhere out there.

Her life continued unspooling before her, before them, every secret and bit of suffering exposed. She saw, as if from the outside, her growing conviction that Jack’s memories were her own…

You are not Jack, the Quasi-Dead whispered in her head. You never were. That name belonged to someone else, along with all the memories you treasure so much…

She wanted to deny it, to rail against them and cling to the dream of a world with three suns. She couldn’t; they wouldn’t let her. Trying to hold on anyway filled her head with agony that brought her to the edge of screaming.

She screamed inside instead, pouring every bit of her torment into a final call, grasping for the bond they had once shared. Jack! Help me!

You will not speak to outsiders again, the Quasi-Dead told her, and she felt something muffling her awareness of the minds around her. Cutting her off. Suddenly she could only feel them.

And something else. Something hideous, malicious, waiting close by…

They took everything. They ransacked her mind and found everything she had ever tried to hide.

You will be a fine addition to the ranks of the Quasi-Dead, Kyra Wittier-Collins, once you have been purified and trained.

She was lying on the dais, in a puddle of tears, when two men came and lifted her to her feet. They were dressed like the man who had stayed behind on the runway of Crematoria, when everyone else was racing for the scout ship. When she couldn’t manage to walk, they dragged her between them to another room, suspending her in a harness, restraining her, and then—

Pain, agonizing pain, on either side of her neck. Her body shuddered as she tried to break free, but she had no strength left to fight with.

It hurts… it hurts…

Let it happen. Let it in. The pain will set you free.

She knew that voice. She’d heard it in night­mares…

I will show you a world without pain. A world where the Demons of the Darkness are no more, and life is ever-renewing…

It’s you… oh my God, it’s you…

You are mine, little creature. Do not fight this.

She could almost see it in front of her, a perfect world, a place of peace and harmony and glory—

Another lie. No more true than Tizzy’s narratives of Riddick rescuing her on Canaan Mountain.

Their Underverse is a lie…

For an instant, she caught a glimpse of what lay behind the lie. Image fragments assaulted her—

…fire crisscrossing the sky over New Marra­kesh…

…men and women brandishing flaming swords above their heads, their eyes glowing silver like Riddick’s, leaping onto the backs of creatures that looked like Mommy Ree…

…a dying god pinned in place by a spear of rock…

…gnarled, wrinkled hands clasping hers as an old, old woman, with eyes that made her think of Tizzy, murmured It’s almost finished now…

…a stone box crumbling to dust in her hands, its dissolution reverberating through all of creation…

…her long-lost stuffed rabbit, El-Ahrairah, lying on a pillow, but not the pillow she’d left him on when she was six…

…Tafrara Meziane, tears running down her face, arm outstretched, hand splayed against the chestplate of a man in Necromonger armor…

…an impossible, terrifying creature, both tiny and enormous at the same time, its obsidian skin containing the shine of galaxies, sitting on Tizzy’s chest and reaching out to touch her face with its claw—

No no no no NO NO NO—

Darkness. Silence. Her life force, her will, was draining away, her skin turning cold and stiff.

You are his now, Kyra. Obedience is all. Fealty is all. The Underverse waits.

But…

It is the only truth you will need. It is the only truth you will have.

Silence. Darkness. Something new, something eldritch and powerful, was seeping into her where her life and will had once been.

A second was a year. An hour was an eternity. She did not dream of a world with three suns. Her dreams were dead.

“Lift her down. The Lord Marshal has commanded her attendance upon him.”

“Right now? Aren’t we preparing to leave atmosphere? She’d be better off—”

“Right now. Do it.”

She’d forgotten all about the things piercing her neck until they were withdrawn.

The two Purifiers who had taken her out of the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead… eons ago… helped her don the robes of an acolyte. She followed one of them back to the throne room, where the Lord Marshal was beckoning her forward. Head down and covered properly like an acolyte’s always should be, she walked up to the throne’s steps.

“What is your will, Lord Marshal?”

“I understand that your conversion is complete, Kyra. And that you are destined to become one of the Quasi-Dead. Is it well with you?”

No! a tiny voice within her screamed. “Yes, My Lord. I look forward to serving.”

“Today, however, I have need of a different service from you.”

Fuck you, you bastard! the tiny voice raged, buried deep. “My Lord has only to ask.”

“Someone you once knew will be coming. Stay close. Perhaps you can convince him to convert to the Way.”

You goddamn fucking son of a bitch, I’ll never ever— “It would be my honor.”

“It won’t be long now.”

It wasn’t.

The attack was sudden and swift, a dark figure in Necromonger armor flying through the air, a knife raised in one hand, aiming for the Lord Marshal. He seemed already aware; before she could even gasp, he had turned the attacker’s momentum against him and flung the would-be assassin across the main hall’s floor.

And for a moment, Kyra thought she had seen the impossible.

Riddick is dead. That couldn’t have been him—

“Stay your weapons!” the Lord Marshal ordered the crowd in the hall. “He came for me.”

The soldiers that had begun massing around the man, weapons drawn, moved back.

“Kyra,” the Lord Marshal murmured. “To me, now.”

She obeyed, walking to his side and letting him turn her to face the crowd and draw her hood back.

Oh fuck. Oh shit…

It was Riddick. Riddick sprawled on the floor of the main hall, staring at her in horror. He rose to a crouch, his eyes never leaving hers.

Riddick! Oh my God, Riddick, please help me—

He cannot hear you, the Quasi-Dead murmured in her head. You are ours, not his.

“Consider this,” the Lord Marshal was saying as he and Riddick walked toward each other. “If you fall here… now…”

Both men went still, facing off across the hall.

“…you’ll never rise,” her master said.

Riddick tried to say something, but the Lord Marshal went on speaking.

“But if you choose another way… the Necromonger Way…” He gestured back at Kyra.

Fuck, he’s using me as a lure… She wanted to fight, to scream, to kill someone, but she couldn’t move.

“You’ll die in due time,” the Lord Marshal continued, “and rise again in the Underverse.”

There’s no such thing! It’s not real! It’s a lie! It’s the Mor—

Your relationship with Riddick was the lie, the Quasi-Dead countered. The Underverse is truth. The Underverse is all.

Riddick was focused on her, his expression intent. Was he trying to speak to her? Why couldn’t she hear him? She tried to will her way through the barrier that the Quasi-Dead had erected between them—

You will not speak to him or any other, they said. They were blocking her!

The Lord Marshal’s left arm came back, gesturing her way and beckoning her to him. She didn’t want to obey, but she stepped forward and moved to his side. He put his hand on her shoulder and she expected to flinch the way she always did when a strange man touched her—

But instead, she felt rewarded. The greatest of them all had deigned to touch her, an honor beyond com­pare—

Fuck you all! she screamed deep within. The expression on the man’s face infuriated her. Paternal, kindly, the lying façade of a man who had absolute power and could imagine that anything he did, no matter how brutal, was his right and somehow innately good just because he was the one doing it. You ripped apart my mind, you motherfucking son of a side of—

“Go to him,” He murmured, and she found herself obeying.

It was ten steps to stand before Riddick. Just ten. She spent the whole time wrestling for control of her body… and losing.

“It hurts,” she heard herself telling him, “at first.”

Don’t listen to me! It’s not me! This isn’t what I need to tell you! Pain, she suddenly thought, was all she’d ever known. Except for one brief time—

“But after a while,” her mouth continued, out of her control, “the pain goes away, just as they promise.”

Everything they promise is a lie! Don’t let them in! Help me! She had called for Jack’s help, too, but she had gone away, had been taken from her years ago, and now the last bits of Jack that Kyra had been left with were gone, shattered by the Quasi-Dead…

Riddick’s expression was dubious, distrustful, hints of both horror and longing on his features. “Are you with me, Kyra?” he murmured.

Yes! Yes, please help me! Riddick, please— “There’s a moment when you can almost see the Underverse through his eyes,” she heard herself saying. His eyes? No. Not the Lord Marshal’s eyes. What she had caught a glimpse of had come from the Mori­bund— “He makes it sound perfect. A place where anyone can start over.”

She had started over so many times. What was one more? She never should have let General Toal separate her from Tizzy, never should have tried to link them staying together to him—

Tell him Jack’s dead, her Tizzy had said in their final moment together. She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.

Kyra never should have made them staying together about him. She should have just asked her sister not to leave her. What if, one day, her orders were to kill Tizzy? She couldn’t even make Riddick hear her thoughts; how would she pos­sibly—

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he repeated.

Yes, Riddick, please help me. Please take me away from here. She tried to move to his side, tried to say yes with her body if not with her voice—

He is not yours, the Quasi-Dead told her, forcing her to move on instead. He never was.

She walked past him and into the crowd, surrounded by the Moribund’s puppets. The Moribund’s meat… She was his puppet now too, his meat.

“Convert now,” the Lord Marshal was saying behind her, “or fall forever.”

She wished she’d burned up on Crematoria.

And, somehow, she heard Riddick’s whisper. “You killed everything I know…”

Riddick’s survival instincts had switched off. He was planning to fight to the death. His death.

Kyra gathered all the strength she had left into a single, desperate cry. There were beings she’d hidden from for years, whose power and strangeness had terrified her, but now she wondered why she’d feared them at all when so much worse existed in the ’verses. She prayed that they might hear her now. She had nothing else left to try.

SOMEBODY HELP ME!

91.
Pursued by a Scourging Sun

Crematoria was the strangest world Kyra had ever been on, she thought as she pursued Riddick across its rocky surface.

Tizzy had told her how bizarre it was, how it seemed to violate almost all the rules of planetary physics and then some. That had come up in conversation during their first week on Tangiers Prime, while her little sister had been building fake IDs for the two of them and Tomlin, and the talk had turned to various prison systems in the Federacy.

“Most planets,” Tizzy had said even as her fingers flew over the key glyphs on her tablet, “the coldest time of the night is right before sunrise and the hottest time is right before sunset. Then the temperature starts to rise, or fall, toward the other peak. So you’d think that it’d be too cold to survive even a few seconds outside in the hour before sunrise, and that early to mid-morning, and sometime late at night, would be about the only hours you could safely survive a world with that temperature range. Not how it works there, and it took scientists decades to figure out why.”

Kyra was running through the why even as she recalled Tizzy’s words. The weirdest volcanic system on any world ran under the lava fields she was sprinting across, one that pumped out hydrogen and oxygen, in addition to methane and more traditional volcanic gases.

“Some guy from New Oxford figured it out a century ago,” Tizzy had continued. Somehow she could type one thing and talk about something else without getting confused, a feat that Kyra had considered herculean. “The planet’s core is made up of metallic hydrogen. Must’ve once been a gas giant, maybe a brown dwarf, before Igneon went protostar on it. Blew away most of its gases except the ones that had been locked inside what used to be its mantle, which froze on the spot and became its new crust.”

Froze into twisted, convoluted basalt shapes that Kyra had to run across. Froze into gargantuan knives of volcanic glass. Froze into an impossible world. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, all her intention focused on keeping up with Riddick. If you can’t keep up, don’t step up, he’d told her. So far, she was doing a better job of keeping up than any of the few others who had joined them on the run.

“And Igneon’s a young star,” Tizzy had continued. “All this shit happened maybe five hundred years ago. People back on old Earth saw it ignite on their telescopes. That’s how it got its name. So all those gases locked under the mantle had been under crazy levels of pressure before the planet lost its original atmosphere. With that pressure gone, they’re escaping, but it’s gonna take another ten thousand years, minimum, before they all do.”

“What’s that all mean, though?” she’d asked. Tizzy was a fount of fascinating knowledge, the kinds of things that the New Christy Fathers had insisted girls didn’t need to know about. Something about the way she shared it made it easy to understand, too.

“Well, the planet pumps out enough gases that you have a more or less breathable atmosphere.” Tizzy had grimaced. “Kind of. As long as you don’t encounter a toxic vent and as long as you stay out of the sun. The mixture is breathable but seriously flammable. Like, explosively so. Not enough nitrogen in the mix. And not enough upper atmosphere to filter most of the sunlight, either. When the sun hits it, the atmosphere starts heating up fast, and within a few minutes it reaches the temperature you need for spontaneous combustion.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“Swear to God. So right along the dawn line, you have this traveling explosion. After an hour or two, all the atmosphere has burned off in an area. The temperature climbs to about seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit—that’s three-seventy-ish Celcius—in the burn zone. But after the atmosphere burns off, under the shadow of the burn cloud, it drops down to negative three hundred Fahrenheit, or about one-eighty-five-ish Celcius. That’s close to the temperature where nitrogen—if the planet had much of it, anyway—where it freezes. You ever see what happens to something you put in liquid nitrogen?”

When Kyra had shaken her head, Tizzy had pulled up a vid on her tablet to show her. Someone dipped a rosebud into a flask of liquid; when it emerged it was covered with frost. A moment later, with a gentle tap on a table’s surface, it shattered into dozens of fragments.

“Fuck, Jack…”

Had she really called Tizzy “Jack” back then? Huh.

Tizzy shuddered theatrically. “You walk out into that temperature and you’re dead before you even notice it’s cold. Fortunately, even though that’s the planetary low, it doesn’t stay there for long. More gases pump up and ignite on the spot, and warm things up a little while they burn off. That goes on all day. Then the sun sets. The temperature drops crazy-low again, but the burn also ends. And then the planet keeps pumping out more gases, which take up the heat stored in the rocks from the day’s burn. By a few hours before dawn, you can walk around on the surface and survive. The place becomes almost comfortable about half an hour before the sun returns. And then boom, the whole shitshow starts over again.”

“And they put a prison on a planet like that?” Kyra had shaken her head in wonder.

“Turns out there are subterranean cave systems all over the place there, and some of them have stable atmospheres and even some decent temperatures. The prison’s in one of those systems. My—” For a moment, Tizzy hesitated, and then continued. “Paris told me that the only part of the prison complex that has any real security systems in it is the underground passage between the prison and the hangar that supply ships dock in. As long as nobody can get into that, they have no hope of surviving outside of the prison itself.”

And yet here we are, Kyra thought, running across the surface and hoping we can outrun the dawn…

Only the Guv, Sybar, and two other men from the Guv’s gang had chosen to join her and Riddick on the run. Everyone else had decided that the risk was too great, planning instead to use Toombs and Logan as hostages—“bargaining chips,” Kyra had insisted—to get relief supplies flown in by the prison guild. They’d agreed on a story, which Toombs and Logan would, perforce, have to agree with too, in which raiders had attacked the prison only to be successfully driven off by the original guard contingent, all of whom had sacrificed their lives in the process. Kyra had been party to worse lies.

The only thing that might complicate that story would be if the surviving guards succeeded in making it to the hangar and launching. But if they did, she doubted she’d be in a position to care what happened next in the prison.

It had been three hours until sunrise when they’d begun the run. With almost thirty klicks to cover, through brutal terrain, the odds of successfully negotiating the distance were slim enough that there had been almost no takers. The four who had joined them—the Guv, Sybar, and two men the Guv had taken under his wing in just the last year—were all political prisoners who officially didn’t exist on the prison rolls as themselves, and who suspected the Guild had been party to their abductions and incarcerations. Racing against the dawn seemed like better odds to them than dealing with whatever shakeups were facing the prison when a new Warden arrived.

Kyra had heard of athletes who could complete a ten-klick race in under half an hour, but she had a feeling that they were going to need the whole three hours to make it thirty klicks, themselves. Especially given the ashy volcanic field ahead.

She had already shed her coat, sweater, and sleeved top—which she had still needed when they stepped out on the surface—and the heat was building. Tizzy was right that the surface became habitable a few hours before dawn, but she’d failed to mention how uncomfortable “habitable” could be.

They could, theoretically, outrun the guards. The subterranean passage that those men had to follow was convoluted and twisting, as the sled track had been, and only a few of them were in decent shape. Aside from a few dangerous surface features, Riddick could take her and the Guv’s men in a nearly straight line. Only hardly anyone in the prison had believed he was capable of doing any such thing.

They don’t know him like I do, Kyra told herself as she followed him into the ashfall.

Did she know him?

She and Tizzy had followed him into the darkness, years before, and he had brought them to safety, only—

—only she had no memory of Tizzy running beside her on that journey, and her hands, holding the light coils as she tried to illuminate the dark, had looked strangely different from her own…

Whose memories were those?

The hands had looked much like Tizzy’s as her fingers had flown over the key glyphs on her tablet, as they had stroked Sebby’s carapace. As if her memories were of inhabiting her little sister’s body somehow.

Ahead of her, she saw Riddick jerk his head up and to the side, as though sensing something. He put on a burst of speed and vanished into the ashfall.

Fuck! Covering her nose and mouth with a cloth against the ash—she had an odd memory of watching a vid, when she was little and still hadn’t left Old Earth, about a mountain named after a saint that had exploded a century or so earlier, and how volcanic ash, if breathed in, turned into cement in the breather’s lungs—she tried to put on a burst of speed to keep up.

Where are you, Riddick? she called into the gloom. If she could hear him, maybe he could hear her.

Keep moving, Kyra. You’re doing fine. Keep running. You’ll see me soon.

So Tizzy had been right about him being an esper, too. She followed the path her feet found through the rocky terrain as an eerie prickle, a sense of someone watching her, grew.

DUCK!

She obeyed, unable to do anything else in response to the powerful command, and lunged to the side. Two loud cracks sounded from somewhere in the ashfall.

One of the Guv’s friends—Björn, a man who spoke little and often muttered to himself in a language others said was Norwegian—let out a choking gasp from beside her and pitched forward, blood spreading from a wound in his back.

Fuck! Who’s shooting?

We’ve caught up with the guards, Riddick murmured in her head. They’re takin’ issue with that.

In seconds, it turned into an open battle. The Guv was dragging Björn out of the line of fire while both Sybar and the fourth man—Rosales, a guy who generally treated her with respect but sometimes fantasized about playing with her feet—began shooting at… what, exactly? She’d ducked behind an outcropping of rock and couldn’t see any­thing—

The fuck, Kyra? Get that head back down!

The rock she’d been peering over exploded a second after she ducked back below it, showering her with shrapnel. She unlimbered one of her own guns, taken from the control room, and fired back at the mound she’d caught a quick glimpse of. Battle rage was taking over.

Emerging from hiding, she raced for the mound, aiming her shots at the small space the guards were peering out of. The fucking thing was closing! She kept firing. She couldn’t stop, even as the opening sealed. Two fucking years of those bastards trying to arrange her hideous death had her wishing she knew how to use her weird telekinesis thing on something other than her own body. She wanted to make their blood boil and their organs explode. Especially Yuri’s.

She kicked at the mound in fury. You fucked your pig mothers to death and ate their bacon the next day!

Amused disbelief answered her. Riddick, halfway up a rocky hill, was watching her. He turned and began climbing again.

Forcing herself to let go of the urge to tear open the mound somehow, or spend hours trying, she followed.

“What was that?” Riddick demanded as she caught up with him. “You don’t care if you live or die?”

Not as long as I’m with you when it hap­pens— Fuck. She hoped he hadn’t heard that.

“If I kill them first,” she answered instead, half facetious, “not really.”

It wasn’t like she’d expected to live more than a few more years at the most in that hellhole. Her hopes had narrowed to hiding in Elsewhere for the rest of her life or achieving a fast death in preference to the four days of excruciating payback Yuri had been commissioned to inflict upon her. One of the only joys she’d had left was playing executioner to some of Crematoria’s nastiest bits of scum, even if the Guv did tell her it was “bringing shame to the game.” And the nastiest bits of scum of all were the guards themselves.

She followed Riddick as he leapt onto a rocky promontory over a glowing pit. The ashfall had lightened to almost nothing.

“Maybe I do,” he growled.

It startled her, his admission that her fate mattered to him. She’d thought he was disappointed to find her there instead of Tizzy—everybody seemed to gravitate to her little sister while she was stuck in the shadows—but now maybe he was telling her that he’d come for her—

“Keep moving!” he roared, shaking her out of her reverie. She followed him across the promontory, aware that the Guv, Sybar, and Rosales were running near them. Björn, apparently, had been left behind.

She wiped ash off of her body and out of her hair as she ran. The lava fields were behind them now, but there was a cliff ahead that they would need to climb.

“Hangar’s just on the other side,” Riddick told them when they reached it.

“So near and yet so far,” the Guv muttered, shaking his head. “We’re going to lose the lead we have on the guards.”

“If we keep jaw-jackin’ about it,” Riddick agreed, “yeah. C’mon.”

Although the Guv had brought rope for the climb, it remained coiled over his shoulder as they free-handed their way up. They were in Crematoria’s twilight hour, which struck Kyra as simultaneously good and bad. Good because she could see the handholds and footholds she needed to grab onto.

Bad because that meant sunrise was getting close.

The rock was porous, sometimes crumbling in her grip or under the toes of her boots as she worked her way higher, but there were plenty of places to grab onto. She felt like she was nearing the top, but she had the horrible suspicion it wasn’t near enough. Riddick, Sybar, and the Guv were higher up on the cliff face, while she and Rosales had fallen behind.

“Kyra?” Riddick called from above her.

Oh for God’s sake…

“KYRA!”

“What?” she screamed up at him. Kinda busy at the moment, god damn it!

“Get that ass moving!” he roared.

Fuck. They were nearly out of time. She tried to will more strength into her arms and legs as she reached for the next handholds—

Light bloomed around her, brilliant and scalding. The rock beneath her hands began heating up.

Shit! Shit!

There was a shadowed crevasse near her, big enough for her to duck inside. She lunged into it. Maybe there were passages through the cliff face—

No such luck. It was a dead end. In moments, it would be flooded with light too.

Gonna have to keep climbing.

She grabbed for the rocks again, but they were painfully hot. Her handguards began to sizzle as she snatched her hands back.

I’m dead. Fuck. I’m gonna die here. She slid to the floor of the crevasse as the air began to heat up.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but—

Not like this… “Riddick?”

No answer. But she could feel him listening.

“Remember what I said about not caring if I lived or died?” God, she felt so stupid for saying all that now. So much bravado, for what? “You knew I was kidding, right?”

Please don’t leave me here. Please… If anyone in the ’verse could save her, it would be him. I don’t wanna die. I’ve barely had a chance to live…

A rumbling sound was growing louder. She knew what that had to be. The air itself would begin to burn soon. She didn’t want to look, but she found herself turning to see out of the crevasse’s opening.

Tizzy had called it a “traveling explosion.” She hadn’t been exaggerating.

Kyra rose to her feet and took a deep breath. Would it be fast? She didn’t want to have to feel her body burning. Would it be better to throw herself off the cliff before the fire reached her?

She didn’t know what to do. She was rooted in place, watching the approaching doom.

“Your rope!” she heard Riddick shout above her. “Gimme your rope! And your water. All of it!”

Hold on, kid. I’m comin’.

“Stay in the shadow of the mountain,” she heard him telling the Guv and Sybar. “Don’t wait for me. Run!”

The explosion had almost reached the base of the cliff. It was too late to do anything.

Except scream. “Riddick!”

He was flying toward her, left hand holding onto a rope as his right arm reached for her—

She felt something else pulling at her as well, lifting her off her feet and toward him.

Oh my God.

Tizzy hadn’t been making shit up when she’d talked about telekinesis, claiming it was a real thing and that Kyra’s mother had probably used it in her magic acts. Riddick had it, too. He was controlling the arc of the rope with it and was pulling her to him. The expression on his face was pure agony.

His arm wrapped around her and they were flying together, her body pressed to his.

I got ya, kid…

They soared upward, the world roaring around them, and then she was falling, rolling on the shadowed clifftop as a massive, superheated cloud of plasma crashed against the cliff face and thundered upward into the sky.

She was alive. Unharmed. No sign of damage anywhere on her body, even if she suspected she’d sport some bruises in a few hours from her landing.

Something was hissing near her. She looked up—

Steam was rising from all over Riddick’s body as he rose from a crouch.

Oh fuck, he got scalded for me—

He turned to face, her, wreathed in the steam of the water that had boiled away on him, and met her gaze. Unharmed. Unburned.

The “hellhounds” were right, she thought, feeling her infatuation turn into something new and even more powerful. He’s a fucking god.

And he’d come back. For her.

“C’mon,” he said, offering her his hand. She had the strange feeling that, if only they had more time, he might have kissed her. “Got a few minutes before the sun catches up to us again.”

She took his hand, knowing that she’d follow him anywhere, Heaven or Hell, if he asked.

The Guv’s rope had been meant for the descent on the other side, she suspected, but it had burnt up just moments before. Fortunately, the slope was easier, the sun’s tumult carving less of it away on the leeward side. She could see how the base of the valley had been smoothed and shaped by human hands to create a runway lined with low structures at regular intervals, leading to a natural cavern that had been reshaped, opened wider, and then sealed with a smooth metal door. The hangar. The Guv and Sybar had reached a series of basalt ridges sculpted by violent lava flows and were making their way toward the structure. It didn’t take long to catch up with them.

Some strange, rhythmic thrumming, a deep sound on the edge of hearing, was filling Kyra’s ears. What was that?

“There it is,” the Guv was saying to Sybar, beginning to crawl forward. Riddick’s arm flashed out and he grabbed the other man’s leg at the ankle.

Both men looked genuinely shocked to see them alive.

“Listen,” Riddick growled.

The thrumming sound was real, Kyra realized. He heard it, too.

Damn right I hear ’em. He turned to look at her for a second. Follow me. Stay low and close.

She still wasn’t sure if she really was hearing him in her head the whole run, or if she’d developed some new symptom of crazy, but she did as he told her. They crept forward across the volcanic crust until the source of the thrum came into view.

A spaceship. One that almost blended into the landscape, all sharp edges and desolate grays. Scores of soldiers had spilled out from it, spreading out over the ground as it lifted away. They were closing in on the hangar.

Cool, cool, ’cause this has been such a cakewalk up ’til now…

They slid back down out of sight, returning to the Guv and Sybar.

“Let me guess,” she murmured to Riddick. “Necros.”

Whatever the hell Necros were, exactly.

“And a whole lot of Necro firepower,” Riddick grumbled.

“Shit!” It just figured. “I hate not being the bad guys,” she groused back.

She’d said that to Tizzy once, when they were contemplating the destruction of the New Marrakesh Spaceport, an explosion that had killed hundreds and injured thousands just to silence one man who had wanted to be a father to her. For all she’d done, and she’d done a lot of truly terrible things, there were lines she’d never cross, acts she’d never engage in… and it sickened her to be reminded that there were others who had no compunctions at all about them. Oliver. The mercs. Red Roger and his men. The settlers. The guards. Pritchard and Makarov. The Quintessa Corporation.

And Necros, whatever they were.

Guess I’ll just have to kill them, too.

She grabbed the length of her hair and twisted it, pulling it back into a makeshift bun. “I figure we got three minutes before the sun hits us again,” she observed, studying the rocky landscape around her, “burns out this whole valley.”

Their chances were slim, but maybe they could still reach the hangar—

“Wait,” Riddick said, looking meditative.

Kyra frowned at him, arming another of the guns she’d taken from the control room. Wait for what exactly? “We gonna do this or not?”

“Just wait,” he repeated, sounding almost amused.

For a second she wanted to demand whether he was crazy, until she remembered the sight of him, flying toward her in an impossible arc as a flaming maelstrom approached, pulling her into his arms by sheer will—

I trust you. She made herself relax.

“Ellen,” the Guv suddenly said from beside them. “Her name was Ellen. I never really forgot.”

He’d trotted that nameless wife story out every time he was trying to recruit someone into their gang, and the whole time…?

Guys like him need a pitch, Riddick rumbled in her head. It’s what they do after that counts.

She wondered if the Guv believed he was about to die. And then she wondered if he was right.

Gunfire erupted on the other side of the ridge. Some kind of pitched battle had begun.

The hangar’s open, she realized. Which meant the Necros and the guards were now in a fight for control over it. Busy killing each other…

Riddick was rubbing his hands together. “Remember that favorite game of yours?” he asked.

“‘Who’s the Better Killer?’” She already knew she would ultimately be its winner. Especially now that she could learn from him and add some new tricks to her repertoire.

We’ll see, kid. “Let’s play.” He freed one of his knives and turned away toward the ridge.

“Come on,” she told the Guv and Sybar, not bothering to see if they followed. Her eyes saw nothing but Riddick as she chased after him.

He launched himself into the air, killing one of the Necros in an instant and then using the fallen soldier’s gun to take out another, shooting backward without even looking and making a bullseye anyway. Part of her wished she could just watch him, the way the woman Tizzy’d killed had watched him battle Shrills. That woman hadn’t been wrong. It was art. But she had work to do.

She fired as she descended toward the runway, one ridge left between them and it, aiming at the Necros heading for them. She would give Riddick as much cover as she could, so he could go on being an artist.

“Kyra!” he suddenly called, holding out his hand to her. He didn’t need to say anything else. She could feel what he wanted. Springing the blades in the heels of her boots, she grabbed the harness in his hand and let him swing her, making her into a deadly, living scythe. She willed herself into a spin, wishing she’d had more chances to practice using her own telekinesis, but landed easily and released the harness, three more notches on her own belt.

He’s pulling ahead, she thought to herself, But I got years to catch up to him and I already have a big head start…

The Necros kept coming, trying to swarm them.

She lost track of how many she shot, how many Riddick cut to pieces. The sun was getting closer, but the moment itself seemed to have stretched out infinitely, each stroke of battle holding the sunrise at bay.

Riding a combat high…

Ewan had spoken of feeling it, of its dangerous, addictive quality. She suddenly understood, because she never wanted this feeling to end—

A gun blast sent Sybar flying through the air and back over the ridge while the Guv shouted his name. Where had that even come from?

Riddick reached back for her hand. Again, no words were necessary as she let him spin her through the air toward another Necro soldier. She landed straddling the man’s shoulders, stabbing in with her heels and then flipping herself backwards, pulling him down. Funny how, more and more, she could feel how she was violating physical laws…

…and how it was getting easier each time.

It was like being with Tizzy, she thought as she continued to carve a path through the soldiers. Somehow she was stronger around Riddick than away from him, the way she and her sister had reinforced each other’s abili­ties—

They were starting to run out of Necros.

Riddick glanced back at her as he killed another. Twenty-three to nineteen, kid. Step up your game.

Really? She shot him a withering look and took off after a soldier cresting the ridge.

A group tried to pile onto Riddick. She turned around, planning to head back to help him, and a Necro grabbed her from behind, his hand fisting in the crown of her hair.

God damn it, why’d I stop shaving my head?

Had she ever actually done that…?

She kicked and punched back­ward—

—and a knife sprouted from his eye, almost as if it had appeared from Elsewhere. Riddick had thrown it, but it suddenly occurred to her—

Why the hell am I fighting fair with these clowns? she wondered. She could be isomorphing organs out of their bodies and into another ’verse—

The Necro tried to keep fighting despite his eye wound. It took five more stabs to bring him down.

Are these guys dusted or something? She freed her knife from his corpse and turned around.

An energy bolt flew at Riddick. He managed to put the body of the Necro he was fighting between himself and it, but the blast sent both of them spinning up into the air, over the ridge between them and the run­way—

“No!” she heard herself screaming. She raced for the top of the ridge, looking down over the runway, not caring who saw her.

He was sprawled on the pavement, one of his legs bent in an unnatural position, Necros closing in on him. She watched as the Guv launched himself at their leader, and felt a terrible stab of pain go through her as the man took him apart in seconds.

She’d never told him, not once, just how much everything he’d done for her had meant to her. She’d never told him that he was the first family she’d had since she lost Tizzy. Now she’d never get to…

…and Riddick was doing the impossible, the unthink­able…

…he was not getting up.

He was trying to, struggling to rise… but failing.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!

Two Necros were almost on him.

Kyra took them out, the knives she buried in them giving her a conduit that let her pull key vertebrae out of U1 and into Elsewhere, as she raced for the other side of the runway and they crumpled to the ground. She turned around, willing Riddick to rise, trying to pull at him the way he had pulled at her.

“Get up,” she told him, trying to draw him up by sheer will. “Get up! Please get up!”

He stared at her as if struggling to comprehend what she was saying to him.

Two more Necros were coming after her, intent on taking her down and forcing her to flee up the hillside.

Riddick, get up! Please! She thought as she ran.

Taking both of them apart took only a moment, once she was in a more defensible position. She grabbed the second one’s pick-axe-like weapon as he fell and raced back toward the run­way—

—just as a blast of light shot over the ridge. For a moment she thought it was the sun rising, but it faded instead of intensifying.

She crested the hillside, looking down over the runway.

Bodies littered the space. Including Riddick’s. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t see any sign that he was even breathing.

He couldn’t be dead…

But how could he be alive when she felt, suddenly, as if someone had isomorphed her heart out of her body?

In the midst of that terrible moment, scalding light poured into the valley. The sun had arrived to scour the world bare again.

With a gasp, Kyra ducked down below a small outcropping. Its shadow, she knew, wouldn’t last more than another minute.

She didn’t want to die. Maybe she’d have felt differently about it if she could have been in his arms when all this happened, but…

I want to live… I don’t want to die here like this…

The Necromonger ship hovered above her, slowly settling on the ridge just a short sprint away, its ramp lowering.

WARNING! WARNING! Its alarm sounded over and over, calling its troops—what was left of them—home.

The surviving Necromongers were climbing the ridge right next to her, racing past her without a look in her direction. One, a man in a long coat, stood quietly on the runway, not bothering to follow them. Riddick remained prone. She still couldn’t see any sign that he breathed. She couldn’t feel him…

Fuck…

A thousand fantasies rioted in her head, of running down the slope to him, dragging him into the hangar, closing the door, reviving him… being his hero the way he was hers…

A thousand dreams that would never come true. He was dead.

And if she didn’t want to die too, there was only one thing left for her to do.

He’d want me to sur­vive…

He’d admired survivors.

She leaned against the outcropping for a moment, nerving herself up. It was her last chance to live.

Kyra pushed off of the rocks and ran after the Necros, dropping her weapon to sprint at full speed and pass several of them on her way to their ship’s ramp before it could close.

It was only once she was inside, as the ramp closed and shut out the scalding daylight, that she realized she was unarmed…

…and surrounded.

90.
Follow the Lightbringer

Kyra ended up taking five hearts, along with others of the “hellhounds’” favorite organ meats, to their cages. All they wanted to talk about was the appearance of a “lightbringer,” but they remembered to thank her.

At least somebody around here has manners, she mentally grumbled as she headed for the lower levels. Soon, she knew, the guards would “pop the cork” on the prison, blowing out the accumulating sulfurous fumes and somehow pulling in fresh air.

Part of her was tempted to just stay on the Elsewhere side. Only return to the prison to pilfer food. Give up on humanity altogether. The secrets she was keeping wouldn’t matter if nobody could find her, and if Riddick hadn’t even come here looking for her—

“Kyra.”

Speak of the fucking devil…

Riddick was nearby, looking around, frowning quizzically.

“I know you’re near. I can feel you. Come out. I just wanna talk.”

Fine. Fucking fine.

She hoisted herself onto one of the pillars of stone and isomorphed back into U1, dropping down as if she’d been there the whole time. “Yeah?”

He studied her for a moment. She got the feeling that he was struggling with how different she was from what he expected, but that he also found her somehow familiar.

“Kid… I’m sorry I went off on you.” Damn, that had taken him some effort to say. She could feel his unease at using those two little words. “Wanna try again? Maybe… tell me what happened after I left?”

She really didn’t want to talk about that. At all. It was a part of her story, her memories, that never made sense, never held together. One of the parts she tried not to look at. She hadn’t been with Riddick, Imam, and Tizzy when they reached Helion Prime. Somehow she’d been waiting for Tizzy in Aceso. She’d been separated from them before their ordeal on the Kublai Khan, but she didn’t remember how. They’d left the crash planet together, but then the next time she’d seen Imam—

She didn’t understand.

She hadn’t seen Tizzy until Aceso. Why did their reunion in Aceso feel like a first meeting? The way coming face-to-face with Riddick in here had felt like one…

He was watching her intently.

“Riddick, I… when did Imam tell you where I was?”

“Been three days, maybe four, since the Necros took Helion Prime, about. So a little longer than that. By a few hours.”

“Two years, Riddick. He let me rot in here for two years without letting you know. Without even trying. So. Why do you think I left that shithole?”

He sighed. “Fair enough. So. You left New Mecca. Were you looking for me the whole time?”

It had been an idea that had come to her at the eleventh hour, a last-ditch way to stay together with Tizzy that she floated way too late. Tizzy hadn’t wanted to find Riddick. She’d committed to returning to her life before him, severing ties to all possible evidence that she’d ever been—

—Jack? Had Tizzy been Jack?—

—to ensure that the Quintessa Corporation would never discover the secrets she was keeping. The lives she was protecting. She had committed to the course. It had hurt to hear her say how thoroughly she was cutting those ties, though. Jack’s dead…

But Kyra had never really gone looking for him herself, in truth. Thought about it, but without Tizzy it had seemed hopeless somehow.

She shook her head. “It was the easiest thing to tell Imam. Maybe… I figured he’d be more likely to get a message to you if I said that, like that was why I left and not because he was a Grade-A dick.”

Her clearest memory of him was the sight of him stalking over to the Aceso guest elevator with a scowl on his face, while Tizzy emerged from the visiting rooms looking as if someone had drained her of every last drop of blood—

Riddick’s breath hitched. She glanced over at him, not sure what she was seeing on his face. He might be angry, sad, horny, amused, or all of the above at once and she’d never be able to tell between that smirky deadpan of his and that tight mental shield he had.

“You figured he’d be more likely to contact me,” he observed after a moment, “if he didn’t know how low your opinion of him was.”

“Figured it was worth a shot. Guess he proved my opinion of him right, instead.”

“How long did you stay on Helion Prime?”

She shrugged. This was another place where things got murky and weird in her head. “Felt like years. I left on February 12, 2517. I know that because it was the launch date on the logs of the ship I stowed away on.”

And because Tizzy had drawn her attention to the date later on. Tizzy, sitting in their apartment, the late afternoon sun spilling over her hair and gilding it while she cuddled Sebby and talked about numbers like they were comprehensible… and, for the first time, they were…

Riddick’s breathing hitched again for the barest moment. “So a little under five months.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

He nodded. “You go alone?”

Jesus fuck, just ask about Tizzy if you want to know so bad. At the same time, she didn’t feel like volunteering anything. He wasn’t going to find out anything about her sister unless he admitted that she was the one he’d really come for. Not that there was all that much to tell; General Fucking Toal had made sure neither one of them knew where the other was going when they separated. Divide and fucking conquer… “No, it’s safer not to travel alone if you can help it. We kicked around a few places before we split up.”

She couldn’t say they’d been on Tangiers Prime, not after already telling him the date she’d left Helion Prime. Only one ship could have made that journey, and officially it had no survivors. Hundreds of additional people had died so that the Quintessa Corporation could make sure no one blamed it for those deaths; more would die if the Corporation ever realized she and Tizzy had saved all but eighteen of their fellow travelers. Millions might die, if it discovered that the Imazighen were hiding the rest of the survivors. Millions… starting with the Mezianes. Kyra liked the Mezianes.

She wondered what Riddick would do if she told him Tizzy had fallen in love with one of them.

“How’d it all go wrong?” he asked after a moment.

“Like I told you. The mercs. I’d run out of other options. I needed a job and they were the only ones hiring. But they decided the only part of me that was worth anything was between my legs.”

“Hmm.” It was almost a low growl. “So you killed a few people, but got caught and nailed for their murders.”

Seventeen. And that’s just on New Queensland. She was pretty sure his kills hadn’t hit the double-digits until he was at least eighteen, and she’d hit that level at age sixteen while on Tangiers Prime. “That about covers it.”

His deadpan had, somehow, become even more of a blank than ever. “And nobody was at all concerned about a kid being slaved out.” He didn’t precisely sound skeptical, but she felt like he was trying to poke a hole in her story.

“My ID didn’t say I was a kid. And there wasn’t anyone left to prosecute even if it had. Except me for killing them.”

“Lotta mitigating circumstances, though,” he observed. “How’d you end up in the asshole of creation?”

“One of them was related to somebody important. He insisted. Plus Ursa Luna got word I might know you, and they refused to take me if that was true.”

Riddick nodded. After another moment, he seemed to come to a decision. “When it hap­pens—”

“There you two are,” the Guv said, emerging from one of the tunnels. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Word is, the rest of the Moles are dead. No one knows how. There’ll probably be another ‘feeding time’ within the day, once the guards realize.”

“Why the delay?” Riddick asked.

“None of the beasts are acting hungry, apparently,” the Guv told him with a slight smile. “How did you tame that one?”

Figuring out a way to get into the creatures’ good graces had long been a project of the Guv’s, Kyra knew. If she were a better and more loyal friend, she would probably have helped him with it. But even after two years, in which he’d helped her enormously time and again, she couldn’t bring herself to break the promises she’d made on Tangiers Prime and share her secrets with him.

Riddick shrugged. “Didn’t tame it. I’ve always had a way with animals.”

There was a kaiju from a bunch of centuries-old movies, Kyra recollected, who was a “friend to animals and children.” She wished she could remember its name.

Riddick glanced her way, his lips twitching as if he was suppressing a laugh for the barest second.

The Guv, she realized, was out to recruit Riddick into his gang, the way he’d recruited her two years earlier. She doubted it would work. Especially if her suspicions were correct and Riddick had only come here to spring her… or Tizzy… and had no intention of staying past that point.

But he isn’t gonna let go of it yet. Damn.

It was the end of a chance for a real conversation, at least for a while. Kyra did a fade while the Guv monopolized Riddick’s attention, making it literal once she was sure she was alone. She climbed onto “her” pillar, near the two men but not within sight of either of them, lying down in her little ’verse-straddling nest so she could listen to them while breathing the fresher air on the Elsewhere side. Things were getting stuffy enough on the U1 side that the guards would have to do an air exchange soon—

Well, speak of the lice-ridden devils…

Above her, the command center was rising up as the guards got ready to “pop the cork.” Once Kyra was sure no one was looking her way, she isomorphed back to U1. The air exchange was always fun to watch and to feel happening as the wind flowed past her skin.

“So they do go topside,” Riddick rumbled below her, “to swap out air. Interesting.”

The Guv, Kyra figured, hadn’t made much headway in his recruitment efforts, and hadn’t gotten any insights on befriending the “hellhounds.” His unease and awe was increasing, as was his certainty that she wouldn’t be part of his gang anymore if Riddick beckoned her away. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

Funny how law enforcement, and the military, knew all about Riddick, and somehow Stacey had known, too, but other convicts seemed to have no idea who he was.

Then again, kinda hard to get word of mouth going among the crim population if they’re all stuck in prisons that nobody, except the one guy who doesn’t talk much about himself, can escape from…

He was his own kind of phantom.

You listening, kid? his voice sounded in her head, as real as if he’d spoken aloud.

I’m listening.

“When it happens,” he repeated, “it’ll happen fast. Stay on my leg when I cut fence, or stay here. For the rest of your unnatural life.”

So he’d decided to invite the Guv to join him, too. Interesting. It hurt a little—would it ever just be the two of them?—but she figured he knew how much she owed the Guv. She’d probably have died sometime in the last two years if it hadn’t been for him. A thank-you was in order.

“Nobody outs this place,” the Guv was warning Riddick. “Nobody.”

A moment later, Riddick was gone, not bothering to reply.

“He ain’t nobody,” Kyra said, wondering if the Guv had even realized she was still nearby, that she’d stuck close to listen the whole time.

She slid her little knife out of her mouth, wondering if soon she might not need it. Its absence created a weird feeling for a moment, a sense of an empty space, as if she’d pulled out a tooth.

The air exchange was dropping the temperature; she’d need her coat soon if she wanted to stay in U1. Normally, she just transitioned part or all of the way into Elsewhere until the temperature normalized; on that side, the airflow was a gentle constant and all of the weird mining work people did in U1, releasing volcanic gases in the process, was irrelevant.

But she was staying in U1 until whatever it was, that was going to happen fast, happened.

It did happen fast.

Less than an hour later, with the “cork” back in place, shouting broke out in the control room followed by the sounds of gunfire. And then Toombs jumped down through the hole in the control room floor, sliding down the sharkbait rope.

What the hell is he doing here? Had he brought Riddick?

Even as Toombs managed to halt his descent, something exploded up above in the control room. In its wake, everything went quiet. But not for long.

“No!” Toombs suddenly shouted. “Riddick, no!”

As she watched in astonishment, Riddick launched himself from one of the caverns, flying straight at Toombs. He crashed into the merc, snagging Toombs’s bulletproof vest with one hand and pulling himself up until they were at eye level. The merc was straining under the additional weight, struggling to maintain his grip on the rope.

“Should’ve taken the money, Toombs,” Riddick said before grabbing onto the rope and hauling himself upward, not bothering to be gentle about the footholds he found on the merc’s body. Did he know that Toombs was the one who had brought her here?

She watched his effortless-looking hand-over-hand as he climbed up into the control room, feeling amazed. Tizzy had told her that Riddick was a “Furyan,” although neither one of them knew what that really meant other than that most of the Federacy’s trained Operatives were Furyan, powerful espers and maybe something more than that. Were all Furyans like him?

Wait, Tizzy had been trying to go to Furya… She remembered her little sister sobbing in her arms because something had stopped her from getting there. Stopped her from reaching her father…?

It was only a minute or two after Riddick disappeared inside the control room that an alarm sounded and all of the locked gates opened.

Yeah, that was pretty fuckin’ fast… She headed for the stairs, noticing that Toombs was struggling to climb back up the rope as she went.

The Guv had led the way up, his men already primed to follow, waiting for the signal. She wasn’t far behind them. Other convicts, mostly point men from other gangs, were following more cautiously behind her.

“Don’t bother,” she heard Riddick saying as she reached the control room. “Guards ain’t there. They figured out the Necros are comin’ for me.”

What the hell were “Necros?” He’d mentioned them before. Said they’d “taken” Helion Prime? Just a few days earlier…?

“Plan was to clean the bank, ghost the mercs, break wide through the tunnel,” Riddick was telling everyone. “And then somebody got a lucky shot off with this rocket launcher, here…”

He nudged the weapon with his foot, sending it spinning into the scattered detritus of playing cards, pistachio shells, and bullet casings littering the floor.

“…and took out the sled,” he continued. “Guards took off on foot but rigged the door so no one could follow.”

Everyone was following him away from the door in question, toward the kennels. Kyra turned away for a moment. She wanted to see the rocket damage for herself.

Toombs hauled himself back into the control room, grunting with the effort, his face red and sweaty from exertion. Kyra picked up a discarded pistol and armed it. Just in case he thought he had any say in what was happening.

“They’ll take the one ship in the hangar,” Riddick continued, ignoring Toombs’ return, “and leave everyone else here to die.”

“How come you know all this shit?” Toombs demanded as he regained his feet. He seemed determined to ignore the multiple guns pointed his way. “You weren’t even here.”

“’Cause it was my plan,” Riddick said, moving on without another word.

“The fuck he mean by that?” a runner for another gang, a man who everybody called Ratface, grumbled.

“Dunno,” Kyra told him. She had some ideas, but she wasn’t going to float any of them where just anybody could hear them. “Oh, holy shit.”

A familiar woman was sprawled on the ground near the sled track door, her breathing shallow and rapid.

“Logan. Hey. Eve Logan.” She knelt down next to the merc lady, aware that the rest of the convicts were staring at her. “You in there? How badly are you hurt?”

Logan groaned, opening her eyes after a moment. “Think I’ve got some broken ribs… hurts to breathe but not, like, inside my lungs…”

“Mind if I feel it out?”

Logan focused on her. “Kyra? You’re still alive… thank God…”

She nodded. “Let me check you out, okay?”

She remembered the way Ewan’s hands had moved over her after he’d finished patching her up, as he told her he was doing a quick check to make sure she didn’t have any other injuries that needed tending before they took her out of the apartment. There were very few men in the ’verse whose touch she could stand, but she was pretty sure he was still one of them. He’d made her feel impervious. Now she moved her hands the same way, opening up Logan’s armored vest so she could skim her ribcage and keeping an eye on the way the woman reacted to the contact.

“Looks like you probably have two or three cracked ribs,” she said after a moment. “All on your left side. None of them are out of place, though. What do you call those… hairline fractures? We get you bandaged up, you take it easy, you’ll be okay.”

“Why the fuck is she gonna be okay?” Ratface demanded.

“’Cause I just said it,” Kyra told him, rising up from her crouch. “’Cause she’s the closest thing you have to a bargaining chip with the Guild to keep them from just starving everybody out instead of sending any more supplies here. You wanna live, you’ll take good fucking care of her.”

“Hey,” Toombs called out. “I can be a bargaining chip, too!”

Kyra ignored him. She owed Logan a little humanity, but she owed Toombs nothing. “Somebody get Sawbones up here, get him workin’ on her. Get those boys in the Scree Team up here, too. They know electronics. You fix things up and she can put out an official call for relief here. Maybe the Guild will send some actual human guards next time around.”

“Who the fuck are you to tell us what to do, bitch?” Ratface was turning sullen and stupid.

“I’m the bitch you’ll have to thank for it if you’re still alive this time next year. That’s who.” She fixed Ratface with a stern glare. “All you need to know is this. Without her, you’ll all be dead in under a month. Even before the food runs out for you, the hounds’ll break loose and start hunting when it runs out for them. You take good care of them and good care of her.”

“Where you gonna be while all this is goin’ down?” he demanded.

“With him.” She nodded at Riddick, who was leading a group toward the “hellhound” cages, Toombs trapped in their grasp. “Now go get Sawbones like I told you.”

Even if he didn’t know how to do a shine job, Sawbones was a decent enough doctor. Logan would recover under his care. Not that she’d actually enjoy his company; nobody did. The only part of himself he ever washed was his hands before a surgery.

Ratface grimaced, but then nodded and headed for the stairs.

“Guys,” she told the men still standing around her, some of whom had intimidated her in the past, “grab a body and haul it after that little party headed for the cages. The regular ‘hellhound chow’ will last longer if they get a big meal out of these fuckers.”

It took some negotiating, most of it while Toombs roared out Riddick’s name over and over and dodged his cage neighbors, but she got the “hellhounds” to agree not to hunt live humans as long as they stayed well-fed. At her instruction, the convicts hauled the bodies of the mercs and guards into their lair.

Tell the Lightbringer that we remember, one of them said to her as she was leaving. Ask him to remember us.

“The lightbringer?” she asked, confused.

And then she saw him, in her head, from their perspective: Riddick. Glowing with power. The Lightbringer.

“Kyra!” she heard him roar. “Get your ass into the control room, now! We’re goin’ topside!”

“Keep Toombs locked up with the hounds for a day or two,” she told one of the convicts. “He is right that he’ll be a good bargaining chip with the guild. We just need a decent head start.”

The man nodded and she turned away, running back into the main control room. In another side room, she could see Sawbones already tending Logan. Her debts were paid.

Now it was time to find out what Riddick had in mind, especially given the head start the rest of the guards had on them.

She realized that, in some ways, it didn’t matter to her what his plan was. He wasn’t just the hounds’ Lightbringer; he was hers too. Whatever he’d come up with would probably be just as crazy as, and maybe even more brilliant than, one of Tizzy’s schemes. Whether it worked or not, whether they lived or died…

…she had to see how it played out.

89.
The Better Killer

“Check her for me. She always has a blade somewhere.”

Six, to be exact. Not that Kyra was going to help them find any of her shivs.

It wasn’t easy staying still while the greenest member of the guard team walked up behind her. She could anticipate what he was going to do, but only by wading through the other filth in his mind, the things he kept imagining doing to her body.

He was also afraid of her. At least there was that. Too busy holding onto his cudgel to do a real pat-down. He half-assed it with his right hand instead, using the same hand he—

Fuck, his head was full of nasty shit. He completely missed the blade she kept in her sleeve, his hand moving from her right shoulder, down her back, and now his fantasies were getting the better of his caution as he reached her ass.

Not yet. Don’t make your move yet. He’s still a little scared. Wait until he’s only thinking with his dick…

She had her mouth knife ready. She doubted it would come into play, though. Not after what she’d done to the last guy who’d tried to make her go down on him. Usually she just disappeared their junk into Elsewhere, but that time—

His hand moved to her hip. She could feel the jolt of excitement that began overwhelming his caution when one of his fingers touched the bare skin between the hem of her shirt and the waistband of her pants. Revolting as his mind was, she had to stay close to it, warned by it, if she didn’t want her skin to try to crawl right off her body and her defensive reflexes to kick in. She had to stay in control. Anatoliy and the other two—she called them Cueball and Curly in her head, because they always seemed to show up together and she’d never once heard their real names—were watching, growing even more excited. Their guards were beginning to drop, too.

Which was good, because their friend was trying to slide his hand into her waistband and that was more than she felt like tolerating.

She sprung the blades in the back of her right shoe and kicked back, feeling the man’s sudden agony as they slid home.

Your chances of ever being a father were low, thank God, but they just dropped to zero.

She kicked off, arching up and bringing her legs above his shoulders, grabbing his neck with her calves as she began to spin.

Sometime, in the last year, she had begun to get a new sense of the physical, one that baffled her and seemed impossible when she tried to really think about it, but she was pretty sure there was something Tizzy had called “telekinesis” in play. Something she had a vague memory of seeing her mother do when she was little. She could will her momentum and leverage to be stronger than they ought to be, using her grasp of the guard’s neck, as she spun, to flip him and to grab his cudgel. She’d practiced with it, played with it, and knew her limits with it so far. She couldn’t levitate objects, couldn’t even levitate herself—yet, anyway—but she could add in a little something extra to her movements that logic dictated shouldn’t be there.

Hopefully any of the guards who realized she was doing it wouldn’t survive long enough to tell anyone else.

She slammed the cudgel against the side of the man’s head and followed up that blow with one to his gut. Fucker was still standing, looking dazed. She kicked off again, cartwheeling her body with the cudgel as a base for the move, her legs sending him flying into a haphazard flip of his own.

He didn’t break his neck when he landed. Dammit. It had almost worked.

Kyra regained her feet, staring at the other three guards, waiting to see what their plans were.

Their newbie friend might be down, but they were three of Yuri’s veterans, his favorites, and they wouldn’t be nearly as easy, especially now that their guards were back up.

Still, their minds would be less appalling to read if they were thinking about battle tactics instead of their favorite sicko porn acts, much less the specific acts they’d been instructed to make sure they performed on her.

C’mon, you motherfuckers, let’s get this over with.

Anatoliy came at her first. She dodged his swing, spinning and kicking his upper back to send him into the wall. Cueball followed him in, throwing a punch at her with the hand holding his flashlight. She blocked it and the follow-up punch before knocking him face-first into another wall. Behind her, she could feel Anatoliy preparing to move, planning to grab her by her upper arms. She spun and planted the wide part of the cudgel against his throat.

He stared at her, horrified. She got a glimpse, in her mind, of a hand holding up—

—a sardine can key?

He really does see into the future!

It had distracted her at just the wrong moment, and she didn’t hear Curly moving up behind her until he slammed the butt of his cudgel into her upper back. Pain exploded along her spine. He dropped it and grabbed control of the one she was holding, pulling it back against her throat. Cueball turned around and slammed his cudgel into her lower abdomen, far too low to knock the wind out of her, but it still hurt like fuck.

Been hurt worse, she told herself as Curly spun her around and she hit the floor. Let ’em think they’re winning… Got a few tricks they don’t know are possible…

He slammed the cudgel into her back again as she tried to begin a rise-and-roll. She collapsed, feeling Cueball’s rage beat at her as he stalked forward and used the handle of his cudgel to begin choking her. Curly had his hands on her hips, pressing her down.

She needed to stay still for a moment. Let them calm down. Let them think they’d subdued her and that she wasn’t sneaking air from Elsewhere into her lungs. Let them start thinking about fucking her again. Then she’d take the next one out—

“I don’t think she likes being touched,” a voice from her dreams said, and for a moment she thought she’d passed out in the guards’ grasp.

Riddick was watching from a nearby doorway, a metal cup in his left hand.

“I’d take my wounded and go,” he suggested to the guards, “while you still can.”

Riddick to the rescue…

Like the time he’d saved Tizzy from the creature trying to plow through a huge bone to get to her—

—Wait, wasn’t that me?—

Didn’t matter. Riddick always showed up just in time.

Except…

Don’t think about that, not now. He’s here…

Cueball released his hold on her neck. She gasped in a deep breath, still playing the role of the dazed, vulnerable girl who couldn’t possibly be about to isomorph choice body parts off of anyone. Even Riddick, she suspected, was seeing her that way at the moment. Curly let go of her, too. They and Anatoliy had all risen, preparing to face what they considered the real threat in the room.

Fuck you, assholes, when I’m his age, my kill count is gonna be five times what his is. But do go on…

“Is there a name for this private little world of yours?” Cueball asked. “Huh? What happens there when we don’t just… run away?”

None of them seemed to notice or care that she was getting up. She used the bars to stabilize herself as she climbed to her feet—she was woozier than she liked, but she’d be okay in a few minutes—and turned to watch the unfolding tableau.

She didn’t want to miss a minute of a genuine artist at work.

Tizzy had told her that Chillingsworth had called Riddick that. On their very last night together on Tangiers Prime, as they’d struggled to fall asleep without Sebby cuddling up to them, she’d finally told Kyra a little bit about the Kublai Khan and the terrible menagerie in it, but she’d been unwilling to share any images or feelings. Kyra’d had the sense that somehow it was more traumatic than anything that had happened to her—

…us…

—on the crash planet itself. But Tizzy had described being made to stand on a huge ball, only able to balance by staying perfectly still, a metal noose-collar around her throat, and listening as a woman told Riddick, somewhere behind her, that he was an artist and that she wanted to watch the “moment of creation.”

Gonna get to watch one now…

Cueball was still talking. “You’ll kill us… with a soup cup?”

Curly laughed like a cartoon character, in Kyra’s opinion. Cueball wasn’t that funny.

Riddick lifted the cup in question. “Tea, actually.” He smirked and took a sip.

“What’s that?” Cueball asked.

Apparently, Riddick wanted a moment to savor the last of his drink. He smiled as he lowered the cup from his lips and transferred it into his right hand, holding it between his fingers as delicately as if it was a piece of fragile porcelain. “I’ll kill you with my teacup.”

This, Kyra thought, is gonna be amazing.

Riddick set the cup down, upside-down and clearly empty, on a rocky shelf just beside him. Empty handed, he smiled at the guards.

Obviously Anatoliy wasn’t at all psychic, or he’d be warning his friends to run like hell.

Cueball turned away from him, leaning toward Curly.

“You know the rule,” Curly whispered. “They aren’t dead if they’re still on the books.”

Oh, like any of us didn’t just hear you…

But it explained, she realized, why Yuri was still trying to engineer her death instead of just telling the Planetary Governor that she’d died; he didn’t want to have to take her off the books until she really was dead.

Plus, she sighed to herself, he’s supposed to send the man some choice pieces of me as proof, and he can’t just send some random woman’s bits because they’ll probably be DNA tested… The guards near her had been thinking about which ones they were each going to personally collect from her.

Most men, she thought for the millionth time, were slime. For every Riddick, every Guv, every Ewan or Cedric or Izil or Tomlin… there were countless piles of slime walking around.

Maybe she and Riddick could clear the field of more of them now. The way we did on Canaan Mountain…

Had that really happened?

Cueball was drawing his knife. Somebody was about to die. He was in for a surprise about who.

Still, she had a hard time restraining herself from leaping into the fray.

She caught a glimpse of Riddick slamming his hand down on the teacup, splintering the metal at its rim. A fraction of a second later, she heard a horrific squelching noise and Cueball grunted in pain, freezing in place with his knife raised.

Riddick made a move like he was twisting something. A violent shudder ran through Cueball’s back.

And then, as Kyra watched, the guard tilted backward and crashed to the floor, his eyes already empty, all sense of life and mind abandoning the space where his body lay.

The metal teacup protruded from his chest, partly buried in him. His knife fell from his nerveless fingers.

She could feel Curly and Anatoliy’s sudden terror. Both of them had considered Cueball the best hand-to-hand combat fighter they had.

You really should’ve read Riddick’s file, boys…

She had. The Merc Network account that Tizzy had created for her, so she could keep tabs on where hunters were looking for her, had given her access to all of Riddick’s kill data. She’d read through the entirety of his file more than once, coming to understand, in the process, why Stacey had liked looking at his picture while she got herself off. The only weird thing had been his first cluster of kills on Helion Prime, which seemed to have an entirely different M.O. than the rest. Maybe he’d just changed things up when he hit adulthood, though.

The idiots weren’t backing down. Curly moved into combat position, brandishing his cudgel and forcing Anatoliy to do the same. “Come on!” he hissed at Riddick.

As if Riddick was gonna play by his rules.

Casual as could be, as if nobody was on the verge of snapping near him, Riddick knelt down and picked something up off of the floor.

A key from a sardine can.

Okay, maybe Anatoliy’s a little psychic…

Riddick held it up, showing it to both men, and then set it on the same rocky ledge where he’d rested the teacup.

Anatoliy and Curly stared at Riddick for a moment. Kyra could hear them imagining just how he might use that key to kill them. It was tinier than most of her blades but loomed larger in their heads than a sword.

Curly’s nerve broke first.

Both men hurriedly gathered up the newbie guard, still uncon­scious—

—And hopefully permanently im­paired!—

—and carried him past Kyra and down a corridor. Their eyes never moved to her; Riddick filled their vision. Their mission to take her apart for Yuri was forgotten.

It was almost a shame. She’d been planning on feeding their dicks to the “hellhounds” tonight.

Probably won’t be my last chance to do that…

She knelt down beside Cueball, studying Riddick’s handiwork. “Death by teacup.”

It took some effort to pull the cup free. Riddick had buried nearly two inches of it in the guard’s chest and then had turned it at least ninety degrees, mangling the man’s heart.

“Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?” She’d come up with some ingenious ways of killing, and could probably have produced the same effect by isomorphing to make up for the sheer muscle power of Riddick’s move. The man can turn anything into a weapon…

She grinned up at Riddick, waiting for him to ask her about her kills. There’d been a movie she’d seen back in Aceso, which was a favorite among the other Killer’s Club girls, where two men kept one-upping each other with the most improbable methods of killing the enemies surrounding them. A few tactics, she’d known even then, would never work in real life, but it had still been hilari­ous—

“I didn’t come here to play ‘Who’s the Better Killer,’” Riddick growled, turning away.

Had he been in her head?

She stood up behind him. “But it’s my favorite game. Haven’t you heard?”

They’d started playing it on Canaan Mountain.

He was there. He should know that—

He had been there, hadn’t he? They’d hunted Red Roger together…

But somehow she had other memories, more detailed ones, of being alone on the mountain, painstakingly laying traps and shivering in treetops as she kept watch and lured her prey to her…

…using herself as bait to get Roger himself to walk into her snare because he was too focused on the seemingly oblivious naked girl bathing in a creek to realize it was a trap…

That had been her trap, though, not Riddick’s. Where had Riddick gone?

Had he ever been there? He had a weight and presence in this moment that was completely absent from all her memories of him on Canaan Mountain.

Was her banter falling flat because the shared moments she was trying to evoke had never happened? How were they gonna get to the kissing part without the banter?

She could see it so clearly in her head: Ewan calling Tizzy a cheater, a huge smile on his face, her sister walking closer and closer to him as she teasingly refuted his joking accusations and playfully challenged him to do something about them, the intense chemistry igniting between them that she wanted to feel between Riddick and herself now—

“I heard you came looking for me,” Riddick said, not turning around to face her. She had the weird sense that he was testing her, trying to trip her up in some way. But about what? It didn’t feel at all playful.

“Is that all?” It was, pretty much, all she’d told Imam when she’d called him. Two fucking years ago… “Then you missed the good part.”

Somehow, though, she didn’t want to tell him about losing Tizzy. Her sister had trusted a military general and was probably dead, or worse, because of that mistake. She didn’t really want to tell him about Oliver, either. Her biggest regret there was that she hadn’t ghosted him on the spot, buried him out in the hills, and then claimed ignorance when asked where her boss had gone, instead of just threatening to cut off his hands if he ever tried to grope her again. Maybe she’d even have ended up in charge of his paddocks instead of—

“Hooked up with some mercs out of Lupus Five,” she told Riddick, picking up her story there. “Said they’d take me on, teach me the trade, give me a good cut…”

Riddick’s whole body had gone rigid. Tension was suddenly thrumming through him. Maybe he already knew what had happened to her? She set the teacup back down on the ledge.

“They slaved me out, Riddick!” Why did she suddenly feel like it was his fault that had happened to her? Any feelings of playfulness were suddenly gone. “Do you know what that could do to you when you’re that age?”

She’d turned seventeen on New Queensland, but that suddenly wasn’t the age she was thinking of. Somehow her mind shuddered away from the insides of the settler ship, and instead she saw the mercs handing her over to Red Roger and his men. Those men forcing her mother to watch while Roger—

Fuck. No. All that shit had happened to Jack. Not her. Jack was dead. Not her.

“When you’re twelve years old—”

“I told you to stay in New Mecca,” Riddick hissed, swinging around to come face to face with her.

When had he said that? Had he said it to Tizzy and not her?

Riddick suddenly grabbed the light in the low ceiling, just beside them, and pulled it out with a single, powerful yank. It exploded in his hands as he roared at her and she couldn’t stop herself from recoiling. “Did you not listen?”

When she turned back to look at him, he’d pulled his goggles off and was glaring at her.

“I had mercs on my neck. I’ll always have mercs on my neck. I spent five years on a frozen heap just to keep them away from you.”

And Tizzy and I were hunted the whole time you were in fucking hiding! she wanted to shout at him. She managed to stand her ground and keep quiet without saying it. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to talk about Tizzy with him. Everybody always cared more about Tizzy than her…

Riddick’s expression became accusing, even disgusted. “And you go and sign up with the same fake badges—”

She had an image in her head, suddenly, of Tizzy kneeling over Duke Pritchard, the same sneer on her face as she examined the badge she’d taken from the paralyzed merc’s pocket.

“—that wanted to cut you up and use you for bait.”

I told you not to do it, she thought she heard Tizzy whisper, somewhere deep inside her. And something about a motherfucking son of a side of bacon…

“What are you pitching, Riddick?” she demanded, trying not to feel the twist of guilt and shame that her little sister had just provoked. Riddick turned away from her. “That you cuttin’ out was a good thing? That you had my ass covered from halfway across the universe?”

More guilt tore through her. That was what she had done to Tizzy, too. She’d abandoned her little sister after Riddick had abandoned both of them, and had lost her forever. Maybe everything that had happened after that was what she deserved for making that choice, she thought, feeling ill.

So what does Riddick deserve for abandoning both of us?

It was his fault Jack was dead. His fault she’d lost everything. Nothing had worked right once he’d left them.

She felt Riddick’s own sense of guilt swelling, and then felt him push it aside and go blank and unreadable again. “You signed with mercs,” he murmured, walking way.

It was the only choice I had left, damn it… Every other door had closed to her. Every other friend had left or been taken from her. “There was nobody else around.”

Because she’d let General Toal separate her from Tizzy…

Because I told Tizzy we couldn’t stay together anymore…

Fuck.

She had to get out of there before she lost it in front of Riddick.

Keeping her spine straight, she turned and walked out of the room before he could, slamming one of the barred “cell doors” shut behind her. The moment she’d hoped to have with him had unraveled, again, into a godawful mess.

She needed a kill. A good, righteous kill. More than one. Once she was sure she was alone, she isomorphed into Elsewhere and followed a tunnel that led to the warren of the Moles. Three were dead. She’d finish off the rest.

Fuck you, Riddick. I’m the better killer.

Now if she could just stop crying…

You’d never have talked shit like that to Tizzy, damn you, she thought as she crept up on the first of the Moles and pulled his beating heart into Elsewhere. She hoped the “hellhounds” would like human hearts for a midnight snack. How come you can’t care that much about me?

She had the sudden, horrible feeling that Riddick had come to Crematoria for Tizzy, not her. It left her chest feeling even hollower than the Moles were when she was done with them.

88.
Sharkbait

By the time Riddick finally arrived in Crematoria, two years had passed and Kyra had given up on ever seeing him except in dreams.

Only new arrivals—inmates or guards—dared try to fuck with her anymore. Everyone else had learned that touching her could be fatal.

There was a small handful of people she considered friends in the prison, most of whom she had met on the day of her arrival. Even before she had reached the ground, even as a strange and frightening rhythm had echoed through the cavern, six men had surrounded the point where she would touch down, facing outward, guarding her descent. While five of them continued to face outward, one had turned toward her, a knife in his hand…

…and had cut the rope just above her wrists.

“The warden of this fine institution has plans for you,” he said, giving her a wry smile. He looked a few years older than Tomlin. He had dark, curly hair, cut short, a square face with high cheekbones, and dark blue-green eyes. His beard and mustache were rufous and close-cropped. “I don’t agree with his plans. I doubt you do, either.”

“Let me guess,” she said, trying not to let her voice show any of the genuine terror she was feeling. “Gang-banged to death over a four-day period?”

The man gave her a curt nod. “Women are usually walked into Crematoria, not dangled like sharkbait. What did you do?”

“Killed the nephew of New Queensland’s Planetary Governor,” she said, twisting at the cuffs still on her wrists. “Over a four-day period.”

“Did you know he was related to someone important at the time?” The man reached out toward her wrists.

She shrank back and then made herself stop retreating, shaking her head.

“Sorry, love.” He opened his hand just enough so she could see the hand-carved key he was concealing.

“All I knew was he’d destroyed my life, and I was the last of a long line of women whose lives he’d destroyed.” She made herself move closer to him and let him touch her arms. The contact made her skin crawl. Not that there was anything weird about his touch. But…

“I’m guessing I know how,” he murmured as he unlocked her cuffs. There was a steel wedding band on his left ring finger. “My friends and I will keep our hands to ourselves. I swear it.”

“Why?” From what she had heard about Crematoria, the “worst of the worst” were sent there.

“Not all of us are here for the same reasons, love. Some of us follow a code. You won’t be harmed by us.”

Around them, his friends were spinning chains, driving intrepid inmates back.

This could, she reflected, be a trick. She opened her mind up, focusing on the six men surrounding her.

They were on the level. Four of them had been contract killers, deadly men whose code included going to prison—even this prison—rather than revealing who had hired them. The fifth had been nailed for a series of revenge killings related to the death of his teenage daughter. And their spokesman…

Everyone in the prison called him “The Guv,” and in a past life he’d been a politician. One with powerful dreams, powerful ambitions… and powerful enemies. Officially, he wasn’t even there; the name that he was incarcerated under wasn’t even his own. But nobody particularly cared, and he’d made his peace with it. Finding and shielding others who didn’t belong in such a cesspit had become his mission.

“Your name is Mallory Glynn, yeah?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Kyra.”

All the other names had been destroyed.

Dihya Meziane had been stolen from her by General Toal, along with Kali Mongomery. J. Houlot had barely existed. Mallory Glynn had been poisoned. And Jack…

…was dead.

Kyra was all that was left. Which was, she decided, just fine with her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kyra,” he told her. “People around here call me—”

“The Guv, yeah, I know.”

He blinked. “I believe your story may be even more interesting than I thought.”

They’d protected her for the first week. Although a few of the men in the group had lustful thoughts of their own about her, they had her figured out pretty quickly. Scared porcupine, one of them, a man named Sawyer, called her in his head. His death, at the end of that week, changed things.

He’d died defending her, something she’d never asked for or expected… or wanted. His killers died soon after when they tried to claim the prize they’d come for. She spent the next several hours in Elsewhere while the caverns were on lockdown and strange, terrifying animals were let loose to hunt the corridors and tunnels and, above all, feast on the corpses. She would come to know those animals quite well.

After the lockdown ended, she returned to U1 and sought out the Guv.

“Sawyer’s dead because of me,” she told him. The next thing out of Tizzy’s mouth would have been an apology. “That’s not happening again.”

“How’d you kill the others?” he asked. He seemed to be rolling with the death of his compatriot better than she was.

“I can’t tell you. Even here and now, it’s not safe for anybody else to know.” She hoped he wouldn’t push it. At least any cameras that might have been installed in the prison levels had been destroyed decades ago. Her new rule for isomorphing was simply not to do it in the line of sight of anyone who would be believed… or would survive witnessing it. “But I can handle more like them. I know how to now. So if they try to come for me, don’t put yourself between us. Take off so you don’t witness what I do about it. I’m not allowed to leave witnesses.”

“Allowed by whom?” He only looked mildly curious, but his thoughts were extremely curious.

“Can’t tell you that, either.” In a place like Crematoria, the millions of lives she was trying to protect were distant and abstract, but she was mostly doing it for Tizzy, anyway. In the unlikely chance that Tizzy was still out there somewhere and had been neither killed by the Quintessa Corporation nor enslaved by Toal and the Federacy, she needed cover. And even from within this stinking pit, Kyra would find a way to give it to her.

She missed her sister. But she couldn’t imagine how Tizzy would have lasted a day in Crematoria.

Yuri—Warden Pryshchenko—seemed to be determined to earn Governor Bollan’s bonus. When he couldn’t get the inmates in the pit to bring about her end—and there were several more attempts over the next year—he began sending his guards after her. Dumb move: it was much harder for him to conceal the deaths of guards. She nearly got eaten by the “hellhounds” in the lockdown that followed that.

Those beasts were always hungry. But that gave her an idea. A plan. The kind of thing she imagined Tizzy herself might have come up with.

She did a top-to-bottom exploration of the prison, moving as a phantom through its levels from Elsewhere, and learned more about what the “hellhounds” were, where they were kept, and how they were both fed and, more frequently, starved. And then, when the prison guards slept and no one could see, she began sneaking food to the beasts.

At first, it wasn’t enough. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to hunt her.

But… they appreciated the food, especially on days when the guards refused to feed them at all. And she’d talked to non-human minds before. Theirs were far less alien than the Apeiros or even the Ree. Soon she had an arrangement with them. Tizzy, she thought, would have approved.

Tizzy would already have them trying to cuddle up to her, she thought with a mixture of wistfulness and envy.

She had made the arrangement just in time, given that Yuri’s next gambit was to try to get her eaten alive by her new friends. If he couldn’t get the prison’s worst excuses for men to do it…

Fortunately for her, but too bad for him, the “hellhounds” had decided they liked her better alive. She hated nights in the kennels even if they were increasingly friendly to her, because they inevitably howled through the night, singing their yearning for a world with stormy silver skies, and a caldera of spectral flame, that they had been stolen away from. Their homesickness always infected her. Each morning, the guards would find her sleeping in a puddle of her own tears and think they’d come close to breaking her, even if they had yet to find a way to kill her. The truth was anything but.

She retained the full run of the prison even when the “hellhounds” hunted through it, although sometimes they pretended to chase her like anyone else so that no one would figure out the truth. She got good at dodging, only isomorphing into Elsewhere as a last resort. She didn’t want to get caught crossing thresholds by anyone… anyone human, anyway. The hounds often saw, but she’d never hidden any of what she could do from them. Fortunately she could listen in on the human minds around her, hideous as many of them were, and knew the exact moments when no one’s gaze was turned her way.

Yuri and his guards kept trying to figure out a way to engineer her destruction, though. The Planetary Governor of New Queensland really wanted his pound of flesh.

New guards often made a play for her. A few even survived doing so. Even the ones who didn’t lose a body part were missing their knives when they got dragged back to the control center. After one of them went back missing his gun, none of the men dispatched to take a crack at her were allowed to carry their pieces into the attacks anymore.

Kyra gave the gun to the Guv. She could shoot, but she didn’t especially like firearms. Too impersonal.

She had stolen enough edged weapons by then, and added edges to enough other bits of metal, that she always had a few blades on her. She often used the scabbard trick to hide them in Elsewhere, making them appear at the last and deadliest moment. A newcomer to the prison, a mechanical engineer whom the Guv had befriended named Sybar, taught her how to spring-load blades in the soles of her shoes. Kyra adapted his design so that the triggering mechanism just needed one tiny component isomorphed away to spring the blades. She practiced partially isomorphing part of the component while fully isomorphing the rest, until she could spring the blades and then re-arm the trigger without having to open up the whole device. Once perfected, it was a weapon no one but her could ever use.

After a while, she began to wonder if she was just marking time until he came—if he ever did—or settling in for a long, cruel life in the darkness.

She was more aware of the passage and measurement of time than anyone realized. Keeping track of dates was something that she’d started to pay attention to when Tizzy had made the Kali Montgomery ID. Her sister had spent part of a day working out exactly when Kyra’s birthday would have fallen in the New Christy Enclave, based on the relativistic duration of her family’s journey there from Earth, and then exactly how much time Kyra had spent in cryo during her transfer from New Dartmouth to Helion Prime, as well as the time they’d spent in cryo on the Scarlet Matador. From all of those numbers, she’d calculated out exactly which day of the Standard year was Kyra’s “new” birthday, making that month and day part of Kali Montgomery’s birthdate. Obviously, Kali Montgomery hadn’t been born in 2087.

The thoughtfulness of that action had stunned Kyra; it had also inspired her. When she’d tried her own hand at making an ID, she’d worked out exactly how long she had spent in cryo between Tangiers Prime and Lupus Prime and had chosen Mallory Glynn’s birthdate accordingly. It hadn’t remained accurate for more than a day from the time she got the completed ID; she’d ended up fleeing Lupus Prime, and back in cryo, soon after. But she’d calculated out her new birthdate once she’d reached New Queensland, just in case she figured out how to acquire yet another new ID, and she’d paid attention to exactly how long she’d been in cryo on first the prison transport and then Toombs’ and Logan’s ship.

The end result was that she’d known, upon her arrival in Crematoria, that she was four months away from turning eighteen. February 22 was her new birthday, and probably would be for the rest of however long she survived in the hellpit. She didn’t tell anyone when she turned eighteen, but a year later, she confided in the Guv that her birthday was approaching. He and his friends surprised her with gifts on the day: new weapons and training in how to use them. She was especially taken with learning how to spin and whip chains the way they did, and they were happy to show her. None of them fantasized about her anymore, given what she inevitably did to those who tried to take a poke; a few of them seemed to genuinely believe she possessed a set of vagina dentata.

Other women showed up in the prison from time to time, escorted on foot by guards rather than lowered on the rope as “sharkbait;” even so, few of them lasted very long. The ones who did tended to latch onto one of the “bosses” in the prison—and there were a few, although most of them feared and respected the Guv’s gang, of which she was considered a member—and disappeared into their cell warrens. Officially, their fates and conditions were unknown, but Kyra could walk into any cave she pleased via Elsewhere and knew exactly how all of the women were faring. Several were raising children deep in the more hidden parts of the cave systems.

That made her angry, but she couldn’t figure out exactly why at first. Not as angry as finding the women who were being genuinely abused—many of whom found knives mysteriously in their reach soon after—but still…

That’ll never be me, she told herself as she phantom-stalked the corridors, still unsure what she was so angry about. Raising a baby in Hell, maybe… what kind of person could do that?

Someone with no other choices, she reminded herself. It wasn’t the women she was angry with, she finally realized; it was the men who didn’t care about the consequences of sticking their dicks into the second-most helpless people in the place.

If she was stuck here for the rest of her life, she decided after a while, she was going to have to make some changes to the place. Bring down some consequences that those kinds of… inmates… had to respect.

She “celebrated” the second anniversary of her arrival in Crematoria by assassinating the leadership of one of the nastier gangs in the place, one that brutally used up any woman unlucky enough to make the mistake of seeking shelter with them. Mere days later, while the place was still reeling from the upheaval she had engineered, she heard a familiar rhythm start up in the main cavern.

More sharkbait was arriving.

Curious, she gathered her knives and chains and headed for the cavern floor. If it was someone the Guv would want to defend, she would be ready to join the defensive wall.

Her breath caught when she realized just who was descending.

Riddick.

He had come for her. Finally.

She watched as the rope stopped, the unintelligible sounds of an argument echoing down from the control room through the hatch in its floor. Were they just going to leave him hanging there while they yammered at each other?

Riddick apparently had no interest in waiting around.

She watched in fascination as he worked his way upward on the rope, twisting it around his body. She’d mastered some damn good gymnastics of her own, but what he was doing was amazing. She studied each of his movements, committing them to memory to try sometime later, herself.

My brain might not be eidetic like Tizzy’s, but my muscles are… She rarely needed more than two or three tries to master something physical. And did she ever want to master that!

Her breath caught again when Riddick fell, spinning, using his momentum and torque to shatter the chains shackling him to the rope as he dropped to the cavern floor.

Two of the Moles, she suddenly realized, were waiting for him, weapons drawn.

That was Kyra’s name for them, anyway: a group of men who had a real thing for one complex of twisting tunnels off the main cavern, just above the actively volcanic passages not even she could risk. She’d explored their tunnels herself, on the Elsewhere side, to find out what they were up to; anyone who tried on the U1 side was liable to end up dead. The Moles had apparently figured out a way to combine dried “hellhound” shit with some of the mineral deposits in their tunnels into a yellow powder they liked to sniff; in the last year, they’d grown addicted to the substance and frequently walked around with it liberally sprinkled on their clothes and skin. But that wasn’t even close to the most disgusting thing about them. The last “sharkbait” to hit the floor had been dragged into their tunnels and slaughtered; they’d apparently turned cannibal as well. She’d verified that while they were asleep and had very nearly brought one of the “hellhounds” down to turn loose on them.

Kyra had already been considering making their demises, possibly as “hellhound” chow, her twentieth birthday present to herself.

Looks like my birthday party’s arriving early, she thought with a grim smile. Whatever they could manage to do to run of the mill “sharkbait” wasn’t going to work on Riddick. This was going to be fun to watch.

Riddick flipped as his chains shattered, landing on his feet, perfectly balanced. He was already moving to intercept the first of the Moles as the fool ran at him.

It was poetry.

In seconds, the first Mole was down, his neck snapped. Riddick didn’t even bother to turn around as the second Mole leapt at him, reaching back to grab the man by the neck and slam him to the ground.

A third Mole was climbing out of a tunnel. Did Riddick know he was there?

Kyra didn’t feel like risking it.

Even as the third Mole ran for Riddick, her chain whipped out. She’d been practicing for more than half a year and her aim was perfect. It wrapped around the man’s neck and she gave it a hard pull, feeling the moment when his spine cracked and his momentum turned into dead weight. He crashed to the floor even as Riddick turned to look at him.

With a practiced tug, Kyra made the chain release its hold on the dead Mole’s neck and reeled it in.

On the ground behind Riddick, the second Mole gulped and wheezed like a beached fish, struggling to breathe. Riddick paid no attention, his gaze following her chain. As she wound it back up, he pulled off his goggles and stared at her with his amazing silver eyes.

It felt, strangely, like the first time she’d ever seen them. And yet…

…She had seen them before, hadn’t she? She’d spent a lot of time with him before he abandoned her and Tizzy…

They were amazing. Maybe she’d just forgotten how beautiful they were.

But why was he looking at her like he didn’t know her? Wasn’t he happy to see her? Hadn’t he come for her? The look on his face wasn’t at all what she’d expected.

Damn it, of all times for the Guv to give his inmates-and-convicts speech… He trotted that damn thing out every time someone survived touching down.

It’d give her a chance to take back control of their reunion, though. She slipped into one of the side passages while the Guv was talking, certain that Riddick was tracking her movements.

She isomorphed into Elsewhere, setting her chains down and choosing one of her favorite weapons, the “Pincer,” called that because it reminded her of Sebby’s claws. Riddick was approaching. She clambered up one of the stone pillars, balancing herself and transitioning back into U1 as he passed, jumping back down behind him and landing cat-silent. He didn’t know she was there until she had the Pincer pressed to his spine.

“Should I go for the sweet spot?” she asked him. He’d have to recognize her now.

And yet, somehow, it didn’t work nearly as well in reality as it had in her head. He was faster than she’d expected. And she hadn’t expected to be so angry with him. She hadn’t consciously wondered why he hadn’t come sooner, or why she hadn’t been able to find anyone in the prison who could give her a shine job, until she began demanding answers from him. And she hadn’t realized how much she’d blamed him for losing Tizzy. Losing Jack.

He lifted her off the ground, one hand pinning her wrist and one arm between her legs, and none of her usual responses to that kind of contact kicked off. Why did she suddenly want more contact with him? Why was she suddenly trying to press herself closer to him and turning “sweet spot” into a double-entendre?

She hadn’t expected the sense of shame—and, inexplicably, envy—that flooded through her when he called her “Jack.” She didn’t understand where that came from at all. Or the weird wistfulness. Or the resentment at his abandonment, not of her but of someone else…

Tizzy?

“Jack’s dead,” she told him, struggling with the feeling that she was repeating someone else’s words. “She was weak. She couldn’t cut it.”

Why did saying that hurt so much?

If their meeting rattled him, it rattled her even more. By the time she broke free, giving him a “kiss” with her mouth blade and isomorphing out of his grasp, she felt like she’d completely lost control of their encounter.

“The name’s Kyra now,” she told him from the bridge, even as a part of her thought that it had never really been anything else. “And I’m a new animal.”

Fuck… fuck… I completely fucked this up… She jumped down to the cavern floor before she could make it all even worse somehow.

Why had she made such a show out of it all? Why hadn’t she just tried to talk to him?

The “hellhounds,” sensing her emotional turmoil, began roaring in their cages, calling to her, wanting to know what had upset her so they could tear it to pieces. She isomorphed into Elsewhere the moment she was sure no one could see her, so nobody would hear her crying. Especially not him.

Once she recovered, she took a long shower.

There was a waterfall in part of the cave complex, an extraordinary and inexplicable feature. She might have expected the water to be sulfuric, acidic, or at least heavily mineral-laden, but wherever it came from, it was clean and pure, and heated by the volcanic activity throughout the region to a perfect “bathwater” temperature that reminded her of swimming in New Marrakesh’s phantom tides. In other parts of the cave system there were dangerous water features, including an underground pond so acidic that anyone falling into it dissolved in less than an hour, but this water was perfect. She could undress completely and have a proper shower in Elsewhere, and did so frequently. It was one of the only luxuries she had—

“…it’s amazing how you can do without the necessities of life, provided you have the little luxuries…”

Jack had been listening in on Paris when he’d said that to Zeke, sneaking up on him—

But… that was me… I was Jack… wasn’t I?

She had the awful feeling that Riddick didn’t think so.

He arrived at the waterfall, on the U1 side, after she had dressed and composed herself. She climbed up to one of the catwalks near him, isomorphing back, and watched him for a few minutes, trying to fathom why, in spite of everything she already knew about him, everything she remembered, it felt as if everything she was seeing was a first.

He spotted her.

She’d been trying to read his mind, but he had a wall up between them. His mind was opaque to her. She’d had no idea that was even possible.

It’s me, Riddick. Don’t you remember me? Would he remember Tizzy if she were here?

For a moment she thought he was going to come over to her. But—

Damn it, Guv, stop interrupting us…

Was he really going to bring up his nameless wife again?

“FEEDING TIME!”

Well, there went all her plans of a quiet conversation with Riddick.

She still had no idea what the “hellhounds” really were, but the announcement that they were about to be turned loose always engendered a panic. Usually it happened when the guards realized someone had been killed. The Moles, undoubtedly. But, although eating inconvenient corpses was part of their jobs, they preferred live prey. Anyone, with one exception, that they found outside of locked cells was fair game.

She wanted to watch them dispose of those fucking cannibals. She needed to get down to the cavern floor.

The place was in a panic. Somehow nobody had realized that this was inevitable. The “hellhounds” were always set loose soon after a killing in the cavern, and it had been two or three hours since the Moles had died, the last from the Guv’s kick to his head. Usually everyone was more prepared, sticking close to whichever warrens of cells they preferred to get locked in.

Damn it, I’m gonna miss it all if I can’t get through this crowd…

One of the “hellhounds” was in front of her, watching her from atop a stairway.

Small-friend-creature, it whispered in her mind as it growled and turned red. I must pounce. You must run.

Okay, it wanted to play. She knew her way around this part of the cavern. That wouldn’t be a problem.

Three… two… one… she told it. Let’s go!

She pushed off of the wall and found her footing, balancing on the railing with one foot and rough stone on the other. Her friend roared and leapt forward, excitement visible on every perked scale. She kicked off and soared out into the open air, grabbing one of the ropes that trailed from an upper walkway and sliding down its length. Inhuman laughter echoed in her head.

Well played, small-friend-creature!

Maybe she should name it Ewan.

Kyra landed on one of the lower walkways, one that was already almost deserted. Maybe, just maybe, she’d make it to the bottom in time to see the pack feed, have a moment alone with them while no other human was watch­ing—

A Lightbringer is here! A Lightbringer is here! She had never heard such delight in any of the creatures’ voices before.

She wondered what that meant.

“Where you goin’, Mallory?”

Fuck. It was one of the guards. They, alone, insisted on calling her Mallory. No convict or inmate ever did. She turned around.

Fuck.

It was four of the guards, shining their bright lights into her eyes.

She’d been so focused on the “hellhounds,” and their unusual excitement about something called a Lightbringer, to realize the danger she was walking into. Now that she was paying attention, she could see what filled their noxious headspaces.

Yuri had sent them. Two years had passed since he was supposed to have arranged for her to get raped to death in this place, and he was done waiting. He’d sent some of his best guards… and had told them they could do anything they wanted to her as long as she took four days to die once they started. And did they ever have plans.

Fuck.

She began to back up, raising her arms as if she believed this was something other than the opening movement in a symphony of pain and death.

Not hers, of course. But still.

Everybody just gotta piss on my parade today…

87.
The Teeth of the Black Fox

Kyra came back to herself, aware that time had passed and that somehow, something awful had happened.

Her body ached, especially in places she didn’t want to think about. Sitting up, she fumbled her clothes back on and looked around.

She was in a playroom… of a kind. The walls were covered in glass cabinets that housed a variety of disturbing and horrifying tools meant to be used on human bodies… female bodies. There was a utilitarian cot against one wall, manacles attached to each of its corners. Her wrists and ankles smarted, but she had no memory of wearing them—

Jack had worn them, she suddenly thought. Jack had been restrained on that bed and—

Her mind shuddered away from all of it. She didn’t remember. She wouldn’t remember. It hadn’t happened to her. It had happened to Jack.

Standing up hurt a little. She glanced around, spotting a camera that was aimed at the cot and two others aimed at the wider room. Under surveillance… that would make it hard to break out. She couldn’t isomorph, either. There was no air in Elsewhere for her to breathe.

Walk off the pain. She didn’t know why she was in such pain, what had happened to her—

—Not to me. It happened to Jack—

—but she needed to get her bearings and figure out what to do next. That man would be back. Maybe some of his friends would be with him. Some of them, she thought disjointedly, already had been.

Are we still on New Queensland, even?

She pressed her hand to the wall. It was still; there was no thrum of engines under her palm. Still parked on the landing pad. That was something. Maybe even something she could use.

By the door, there was a familiar looking keypad.

You put it in and it’ll unlock any lock it can for you, and open up any system it has access to. So you can get into and out of places if you’re in trouble. And you don’t have to remember numbers. It spells out RIDDICK. Any keypad with letters under the numbers will let you spell it out…

Tizzy had told her that. Tizzy, her lost little sister…

Would it work? How far had Tizzy managed to send it out?

Carefully, methodically, she punched R-I-D-D-I-C-K into the keypad and then pressed the green button at the bottom.

With a soft beep, the lights on the room’s cameras turned off and the door slid open.

Beyond the door, the lighting was dim, set in Nighttime Mode. The ship was completely silent. Whoever these bastards were, they appeared to all be in bed.

Glancing back into the playroom, she spotted knives in one of the cabinets. She had no idea what kinds of sick games they were intended for, but they’d be useful if she ran into one of the men. It was easy enough to get to them, she realized; she couldn’t isomorph herself into Elsewhere, but nothing was stopping her from isomorphing away the glass panel between her and the weapons she wanted. It fell away as she did so, striking the ground of Elsewhere silently. There was no atmosphere there to convey the sound of smashing glass back to her.

She armed herself and went exploring.

Silently, carefully, she quartered the ship, mapping it out in her head. It was big, with at least two levels, and the playrooms were on the lower level along with—

Perfect…

The cargo and equipment bay told her everything she needed to know about the men on the ship. “Free settlers.” Planning on heading to some barely-terraformed world with no charter in force to try to carve spaces for themselves… and buying women to take with them because nobody they actually knew was willing to go on their journey. They had earth-moving equipment, construction equipment, farming and mining equip­ment…

…and EVA suits in case they had to repair their ship along the way.

It wouldn’t matter that Elswhere had no atmosphere if she was protected by an EVA suit.

And Kyra, along with every other kid on board the New Christy Pilgrim, had been drilled in how to put on the suits in case of emergency. It was one of the few lessons that girls hadn’t been excluded from.

Even stiff and sore as she was, it didn’t take long to get into the suit. She contemplated a scythe among the farming equipment for a moment, but decided against it. These kills were going to be very personal.

Isomorphing into Elsewhere, she stalked the corridors of the ship again as a phantom, passing through closed doors to see what awaited on the other sides. It didn’t take long to locate all four men. It didn’t take much longer to come up with a plan. She returned to the playroom.

There were multiple sets of restraints in its cabinets, most of them looking unused. Gags of different types. Blindfolds. Spreader bars. Things designed to be inescapable. Things designed to be inhumane. Within an hour, all four men were wearing the equipment they’d bought for girls like—

—Not me. Jack…—

—and the two girls already in cryo, without waking up until it was too late to stop her. Once she was sure that no one else was on board, and there was no way for them to escape, she left the settlers’ ship as a phantom, walking across the rugged, flat terrain of New Queensland’s Elsewhere until she was in front of the merc ship again.

The crew inside was a dozen strong. It didn’t help them. Not when their attacker was invisible, intangible, only becoming a concrete presence in that moment when her blades cut them to pieces. Old hand or new recruit, it didn’t matter to her. None of them had spoken up against slaving her out. She only fully manifested in U1 again once they were all dead.

They’d confiscated her possessions when they’d “arrested” her, and had sent her with nothing other than the clothes she’d been wearing when they gave her to the settlers. She stripped out of her blood-soaked EVA suit and bundled it into their waste disposal unit, hunting through the ship for her stolen belongings and gathering them back together before taking one of the mercs’ EVA suits for her trip back to the settlers’ ship.

It was only much later that Kyra realized she’d left a wealth of her fingerprints throughout the merc ship in the process, many of them bloody.

She, meanwhile, trudged back to the settlers’ ship, once more suited up and walking through Elsewhere. Once inside again, she got to work.

The man who had ab­used—

—Not me! Jack!—

—lived the longest. She made sure of it. The other three died in less than a day, but she took extra care to make sure his heart didn’t give out. His mind did first; when he regressed back to the mental state of a small child, she sickened of the game and cut his throat.

There was still one more reckoning she needed to mete out before she was done, she realized, as she collected weapons and supplies. She loaded them all into one of the smaller vehicles the settlers had stored in their equipment bay, getting everything set before she ventured back to the cryo-chambers.

Two abused girls lay within the only active units. They wore no restraints, but she could see the marks of cuffs on their wrists, and other marks that made her wish she’d kept the other men alive a little longer…

Enough. She reprogrammed their chambers to wake them up once she was gone. All of the doors were unlocked; they could make their escapes whenever they wished.

Again, she didn’t consider until much later just how many fingerprints she had left on the ship, and what other biometric evidence she’d left as well. She had turned off all of the cameras on both ships before isomorphing—millions of lives depended on her leaving no evidence that she could do such a thing—but hadn’t thought about covering her tracks beyond that. The fog of war was upon her.

And she was after the man who had fired the first shot.

Oliver Bollan had seemed so nice when she first met him. They hadn’t worked together until the very end, after another girl, Eleanor, had abruptly quit.

Three guesses why Eleanor left…

Soon after, she’d been asked if she would be willing to transfer to the paddocks he managed, because he was “short-handed.”

Pretty sure that’s not the term for what his hands get up to…

The drive back to the New Gold Coast Cattle Ranch gave her a lot of time to think about just what he’d been doing, for years, and had tried to do to her, too. Worse, what he’d succeeded in doing to her reputation after she’d fended him off and warned him off.

Won’t just be his hands he loses now… shouldn’t’ve set this in motion…

Oliver, she had decided, was to blame for all of it. Her desperation. Her mistaken decision to give up the Mallory Glynn name because he was trying to poison it. Her arrest. Being slaved out. The things that had happened to Jack as a result…

He would die for it.

The first news stories, about a “spaceship of horrors” with a dozen dead bodies inside, were just starting to appear in the feeds when she arrived back at the ranch. She spent three days tracking Bollan’s movements, and another day laying her trap, before she took him.

She didn’t spend as much time on him as she had on Red Roger…

Except Riddick killed Red Roger for me… didn’t he?

…but it took Oliver days to die nonetheless. Long enough that, when she finally left his body behind and started driving back toward New Brisbane, contemplating where to go next, the news feeds had stopped covering the murders on two ships at the spaceport, and she’d missed the reports that Mallory Glynn was being sought as a person of interest.

They’d have caught her almost immediately if she hadn’t been able to hear them coming, hear their minds focused in on her. But she still couldn’t dodge them for long. She had no other ID to use except Mallory’s, and no idea where to go to find someone like Tizzy who could cook up a new one for her. If she’d still been on Tangiers Prime or even Lupus Prime, she could have hidden out in Elsewhere, slipping back to pilfer supplies when needed, and stayed out of reach for years.

Should’a done that when Toal’s men made a play for me…

As it was, the authorities caught her less than a week after she’d left Oliver’s remains strung up as wolf bait.

Her fingerprints came back as a dead-on match for the prints on all three crime scenes. To her surprise, however, they did not come back as a match for Kyra Wittier-Collins.

Tizzy’s worm programs, she realized, not sure if she was relieved or not. It had been a long-shot, her sister had said, but there was a chance that the worm carrying their faked video to Merc Network and law enforcement databases could also access, and obscure or destroy, their biometric records, and she’d programmed it to try. Apparently, it had succeeded. Nobody seemed to know that they had the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain in custody; just the New Brisbane Butcher. They also thought they had a legal adult on their hands and not a minor.

Seventeen counts of first-degree murder got pinned to her. Although she was certain that virtually everybody involved with the case knew what all of the dead had really been like and what they’d been doing before she’d ended their damage paths, it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter what they’d done to—

—Not me! Jack!—

—before she killed them, or how recent her trauma had been. She’d deliberately returned to the merc ship. She’d spent days torturing the settlers, and Oliver, to death. Even with the playroom torture vids that had been found on the settlers’ ship, there was no talk of clemency. Luckily for her, New Queensland, like the old Australian territory it had been named after, had no death penalty.

Unluckily for her, that meant she would probably be sent to a Double-Max prison. Ursa Luna.

Riddick territory.

Only what were the chances he’d actually be there?

Amnesty Interplanetary tried to offer her help, their rep claiming he believed they had enough proof of her victims’ past abuse of young women to win a clemency ruling after all. But she knew them even if they didn’t know her, and she remembered their role in triggering the standoff that had led to the massacre of her family and friends. She described, in detail, where their rep should put his clemency motion, and she never saw him again.

She soon learned that the local jailors assumed they could play with girls in their custody; they soon learned that, with her, that was a good way to lose a body part. After the second incident, she was locked in solitary awaiting sentencing. Everybody seemed to assume she’d eaten the guards’ missing pieces; they were, after all, nowhere to be found. She didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion. A random public defender got it into her head to try to have “Mallory Glynn” sentenced to psychiatric care instead of a proper slam, but Kyra had been in mental institutions before. Never again. She’d rather be in the Pit.

I’ll find a doctor and pay him to do a surgical shine job on my eyeballs. Twenty menthol Kools my ass… but if necessary I’ll let him keep his dick…

Chaotic as her mind was much of the time, she managed to pull herself together enough to convince the court-appointed psychiatrist that she belonged in a regular prison. Her sentencing took place soon after. Nobody attended but the press and some fancy looking bigwigs whose eyes and thoughts beat at her with pure hatred.

A month later, Kyra was one of a dozen prisoners picked up for delivery to Ursa Luna, something that worked in her favor. The guards were too busy settling a huge, belligerent man into his cryo-chamber to notice her inputting Tizzy’s Ghost Code into hers and changing its settings. She woke up after the ship completed its second Star Jump while everyone else slept on, loaded all of the emergency supplies into the ship’s lifeboat, and detached shortly before the ship reached its third Jump Point. The nearby outpost planet was semi-habitable and only a few days away via the lifeboat’s ion drives. Fortunately, it had a good enough autopilot to get her there and handle the landing.

Unfortunately, the lifeboat’s departure from the main ship had been recorded, and notifications of a likely prisoner escape went out on the Beacons even as it made its next Star Jump.

And, worst of all, the barely-terraformed outpost planet was another airless rock over in Elsewhere.

She was almost relieved when, two weeks later, a merc ship touched down. Less relieved when she saw who was in it.

Alexander Toombs and Eve Logan.

Tizzy had known how to evade them. How to divert them. How to mess with their heads. Kyra didn’t know how to think up crazy plans on the fly the way her sister could. The only plan she could come up with was to steal their ship and hope their autopilot was good enough to fly her somewhere else.

They caught her trying. Tizzy’s Ghost Code hadn’t worked on their ship.

“Is this her?” Toombs said as he stood over her convulsing body. The amount of live current that had just gone blasting through her, when she’d tried to board the ship, guaranteed that she wouldn’t be walking or talking for a few hours.

Logan knelt down next to her and took her hand, pressing it to her tablet surface. “ID system says no. Says this is Mallory Glynn, not Kyra Wittier-Collins, but I could swear this is her. Then again, I thought that woman with the face tattoos at that memorial service was Wittier-Collins, too, and she wasn’t even on Tangiers Prime at the time.”

“What’s the reward situation for each?”

“One hundred K in UDs as a finder’s fee for Wittier-Collins,” Logan told him. “There’s no bounty anymore, just the finder’s fee for bringing her home so she can claim her court winnings. Four hundred K for Mallory Glynn.”

“Well then,” Toombs drawled, leaning back against the wall, “I’m four times as sure this is Mallory Glynn and not Kyra Wittier-Collins. Ain’t you?”

Logan shrugged and sighed. “You did notice the M.O. was the same, right? Glynn kills exactly the same way as Wittier-Collins.”

“Nobody’s exonerated Glynn,” Toombs retorted. “Seventeen corpses under her belt, includin’ the nephew of New Queensland’s Planetary Governor. We put her in Slam for him, he’d probably give us the keys to New Brisbane if we ever want to visit.”

“You got a point.” Logan didn’t look entirely happy about that. Her gaze down on Kyra was pitying.

“Plus, we just try to turn her in for the finder’s fee on New Dartmouth, all her bio data says she ain’t Wittier-Collins. So then we maybe don’t get anything and they extradite her anyway once her ‘real’ name pops up.” Toombs looked almost as amused as annoyed by that possibility. “Might as well collect the four hundred K. Un­less…”

He walked over to stand next to Logan, smiling down at Kyra.

“Hey, girlie. You wouldn’t happen to know where your old pal Riddick is, would ya?”

Logan rolled her eyes and scoffed.

Riddick. It had been years since she’d seen him, she thought. Not since he’d abandoned her and Tizzy on New Mecca…

She was having a hard time remembering just what, exactly, it was that had happened on New Mecca with Riddick. Something to do with a treacherous holy man…

Abu al-Walid. El Imam. He knew where Riddick was. If she could get a message to him, may­be—

But he’d never tell, would he? Something had happened with Tizzy, something bad that he should have let Riddick know about, and he’d chosen not to. The image came to her of Tizzy, ghost-pale and white-lipped, staring after the holy man as he made his righteous way out of—

Aceso?

It was all a jumble. But maybe, even if he hadn’t been willing to help Tizzy, he’d still be willing to help her.

If she could get a message to him.

“Didn’t think so,” Toombs said from above her. “Too bad. He’s up to a million UDs. Could’a been enough to make us look the other way where you’re concerned.”

“As if you would,” Logan muttered.

“Hey. You never know. I might be feeling magnanimous with my share, my half-mill, in my pockets.”

“Might not be, too.” Logan rose from her crouch. “We want any of the crap she has at her camp?”

“We’ll go take a look. She ain’t goin’ anywhere for a while. Nowhere ’cept Crematoria.”

“That’s where we’re taking her?”

“Guy at Ursa Luna was clear,” Toombs said as they walked down their ship’s ramp. “If she does know Riddick, they don’t want her within a hundred light years.”

Whatever they were doing, though, took a while. Long enough that Kyra, resolutely focused on gaining back enough mobility to reach their comms, managed to drag herself over to the cockpit and patch into the system. Even if Tizzy’s Ghost Code wouldn’t work on the ship’s security systems, Toombs hadn’t locked the data and comms down and she could slide right in. As she’d hoped, he kept files in the system of all the “big game” he was hunting, and Riddick’s file included data on the Imam. Including his comm number.

There was no way to comm him directly from that little trash heap of a planet. But she could program in a call that would be automatically transmitted to the next Jump Beacon the ship passed, a message he would get and would hopefully act upon. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot she had left.

She set up the instructions for delivery and then recorded her message.

“Imam, it’s me… it’s—”

He’d never known her as Kyra, she thought. There was only one name he’d ever known. The name of the girl who had been raped and murdered by those sick fucks at the New Brisbane Spaceport. The name of a dead girl.

“…it’s Jack. You remember me, right? From the crash. I, uh… I need your help. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I’m in trouble.” She took a deep breath. “I went looking for Riddick. Things went bad. Some people died. I mean, I killed them, and… they’re sending me to Crematoria.”

She’d heard of it. Tizzy had described it once, when they were talking about the different prisons that someone with Riddick’s rep might get sent to.

“There’s no way out of there, Imam. You can’t even set foot on the surface without burning up. But if anybody can do it… please, please tell Riddick where I am. Please tell him to come get me. I need him. Please, if you ever cared even a little about me…”

He never cared about me. He never cared about us…

“…tell him to come get me.”

She saved the message and did her best to hide it in the comms system, and managed to crawl back out of the cockpit, far enough away from it to conceal that she’d ever made it there, before Toombs and Logan came back hauling most of her gear.

“Poor girlie, whatever your name really is,” Toombs said, setting down the gear and walking over to her. “Where were you tryin’ to go?”

“C’mon, Toombs.” Logan said. “Don’t mock the poor kid.”

Hearing Logan’s words disturbed her. Logan was supposed to be The Enemy. Not kinda-sorta on her side.

“Ain’t a kid if she’s Mallory Glynn,” Toombs said. “Even that Wittier-Collins chick’d be eighteen by now.”

“Assuming she didn’t go into cryo except between Helion Prime and New Queensland,” Logan said. “Big assumption.”

“Good ’nough for me. Now, let’s get her in cryo before she finds her way into any more trouble.”

They didn’t have cryo-chambers on their ship, just in-seat units. Kyra watched in helpless horror as they chained her up and connected her to several I-V drips, watched as the cryo unit spun into gear and mixed its freezing solution with her blood, turning it a violet that made her think of Mommy Ree’s cara­pace…

And then she was on a world with three suns.

“You forgot everything I told you,” Tizzy said from next to her.

Kyra glanced over at her little sister. Tizzy looked the way she had in the settlement, the one time Kyra had managed to see her, somehow trapped in a mirror and looking back at her in place of her face. Head shaved, a pair of yellow goggles on her forehead. But it was Tizzy, not all that different than she remembered her.

“I warned you mercs are just in it for the money,” Tizzy continued. “They’ll use you up for a percentage. Johns—that’s the guy who caught Riddick—he threatened a bunch of little kids to get Riddick to surrender. Killed some of them, too. You don’t want to be with people like that.”

For a moment, as Tizzy spoke, they weren’t on the crash planet anymore. They were in a hospital room, sitting on Tizzy’s bed. Her hair wasn’t shaved anymore, but was still short enough to be androgynous.

“There wasn’t anyone else left,” Kyra told her. “You’re gone. General Toal separated us and I don’t even know what he’s done to you. And Jack—”

“Jack is dead,” Tizzy reminded her, as if speaking to a slow child. “She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.”

They were no longer in the hospital. They were in a train station, surrounded by travelers, General Toal lurking nearby with sinister intentions. Tizzy’s hair had grown out another inch, and while she still looked somewhat androgynous, it framed her gamine face in a more feminine way. One man had already fallen madly in love with her, but fortunately had done her no harm—

But there was going to be an explosion soon, Kyra realized. She wanted to warn Tizzy but the words wouldn’t come.

The train station melted away and she was back on a world with three suns.

“…tellin’ me to go for the sweet spot,” Riddick rumbled in memories that were hers but not hers. “Left of the spine, fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta.”

What a gusher… He’d said that, right?

“How do I get eyes like that?” she asked him, aware that Tizzy was close by, annoyed, thinking that she was saying it wrong, the way Teacher had always claimed she was reciting the Bible verses wrong…

“You gotta kill a few people,” Riddick told her.

Done a lot of that now… When Riddick had been her age, his official body count had been half a dozen homeless youths he’d apparently carved up over a few months in New Athens. She’d killed almost three times as many grown men in less than two weeks. Guess I’m the better killer…

The story played out, looped, played out again. Over and over, Tizzy warned Kyra of the danger of trusting mercs. Over and over, Riddick shepherded her through the eclipse and to safety, but disappeared soon after, leaving her and Tizzy—

—And Jack, but which one of us was Jack?—

—to their fates. Tizzy, lost to General Toal’s connivances and an explosion, probably dead but maybe not, lost either way. And Jack…

Jack is dead…

Raped, tortured, and murdered by a group of “free settlers.” Kyra had avenged her death. Was that what had happened to Tizzy? Or…

She was weak… she couldn’t cut it…

She circled back to the world with three suns again. It was safer there. Or, sometimes, to the woods of Canaan Mountain, Riddick by her side as they hunted—

Red Roger? Oliver Bollan?

It didn’t matter. They hunted together, and that was what was important. He would come rescue her again. She knew it.

So why did he abandon me? Abandon us? If he’d stayed, Tizzy would be okay and Jack wouldn’t be dead…

Was Tizzy Jack? Or was she Jack? Who had died on the settlers’ ship, exactly? Someone had.

She retreated from the questions, circling back to the world with three suns.

Eons later, she woke to find herself being helped off of the ship and into a natural cave that had been modified into a hangar.

A cave, she realized, that existed on both sides of the threshold. In Elsewhere, the air was stifling hot but breathable.

Crematoria.

Toombs and Logan had cuffed her while she was waking up. They led her over to a sled, a four-seater with room for cargo in the back. She got a front seat next to Logan, Toombs directly behind her with a gun casually pointed at her back. The natural lava tube that the sled’s track followed existed in both worlds. Elsewhere and U1, she found herself thinking, were most closely connected here than anywhere else in their respec­tive—

—Four–spaces?—

—’verses. She might not be able to escape off-planet…

But there might be another kind of escape handy for her.

The sled covered ground fast, whipping through the tunnel’s twists and turns at a speed that made her feel almost grateful for the restraints keeping her secured to her seat. Logan had gently slipped a set of goggles over her eyes before they began the ride, and she found herself feeling almost friendly toward the merc because of that. It took less than ten minutes to cover the thirty-klick distance and reach the prison.

“So,” the Slam boss—Yuri, his mind silently provided—said as he looked Kyra over. “This is Mallory Glynn. The New Brisbane Butcher.”

“This one is trouble, Boss,” one of the guards—Anatoliy—said from behind him. “I can smell it on her.”

“Anyone who can cut seventeen grown men to pieces in less than a fortnight is trouble, Anatoliy,” Yuri said with a soft laugh. “I don’t need your nose to tell me that. But in this case, we don’t mind, do we?”

Yuri walked over to his desk and picked up a pair of bearer cards. He smiled over at the mercs.

“Governor William Bollan of New Queensland sends his personal thanks to you… along with a small token of his esteem.”

He walked back to Toombs and Logan, smiling. “Miss Glynn’s bounty, four hundred-K UDs…”

He put one bearer card into Eve Logan’s hand.

“…and another two hundred-K UDs as Governor Bollan’s personal thank you, for seeing that his nephew’s murderer is brought to justice.”

He handed over the second bearer card.

“Pleasure doin’ business with you,” Toombs said, sounding positively gleeful.

Logan’s eyes, full of misgivings, darted Kyra’s way before she followed Toombs back to the sled.

“Don’t worry, Miss Mallory,” Yuri told her as the door to the tunnel closed behind them. “The New Queensland Planetary Governor is paying us handsomely to look after you. He wishes you to spend a very, very long time contemplating your actions.”

Another of the guards attached her wrist manacles to a rope.

“Or, at least, as long as his nephew had to spend contemplating them.”

As they lowered her into the bowels of the prison, as she felt the dark and lustful thoughts of dozens of inmates turning toward her, Kyra thanked whatever sick fucker existed on high that the caverns, almost identical, existed in Elsewhere and had air in them. It was the only thing that was going to keep her alive until—

Please, Riddick, come get me. Don’t make me wait too long.

86.
Through an Occluded Mirror

You… stupid… fuck.

Riddick kept his walk smooth and calm as he headed for the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead, even as he mentally pummeled himself. It had been a long time since he’d felt like this much of an idiot.

The look on Jack’s face, the confusion and disbelief in her mind, when he’d told her he wanted to make her Dame Riddick, kept smacking at him.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Why the fuck had he phrased it like that?

Could he possibly have made more of a ham-handed job of it?

Worse, he’d practically fled the scene of his fuckup, before she could even put together more than a handful of words.

He entered the throne room, aware that he was surrounded by people watching for even the slightest weakness—and, he suddenly realized, he’d walked in without any armor on—and glowered at everyone. Let them try something right now. He’d enjoy having someone to punish for his foul mood.

Not that he could actually blame Jack for it. The more he thought about it, the more it struck him how badly he must have thrown her. He’d lived her memories. He knew how she’d handled herself for the last few years.

And, he realized, he knew exactly why he’d thrown her quite so badly.

On those occasions when a man she’d had a fling with started to get too attached to her, started even hinting at an interest in a longer relationship, one of her ways of getting him to change his mind—and, in many cases, run for the hills—had been to start crazy-talking about marriage and children. It wasn’t her only tactic; on several occasions, if the man in question seemed to like the idea of instant domestic bliss, Michael had shown up to play the enraged cuckold and really scare him off. But it had been her go-to.

And what did I do? Start talking about children and marriage less than three hours after she rode my dick for the first time…

Granted, it was a proposal he’d been planning on making anyway, although it hadn’t involved kids until she brought up the ones that had died on the Santa Clara. He’d spent a year trying not to think about what the Necros did to kids—

I need to talk to the Moribund about that. Now.

“Is this to be a session of Court, Lord Marshal?” Vaako asked from behind him.

Fuck.

“We got anything pressing on the agenda?” Agendas. Him, dealing with agendas. The ’verse had gotten knocked on its ass, all right.

“Requests from some of the ships in the Armada for permission to conduct raids. Not much else.”

“Hold off on that,” Riddick told him. “Got a few things to get straightened out about those raids. Those ships might be gettin’ some new instructions.”

Vaako gave him a puzzled frown. “More new instructions?”

“Got a problem with the last ones?” It had, he thought, been a bit over half a day since he’d shut down the brothels; most of their prisoners were still in the process of being converted, he figured.

“No,” Vaako said. “And, surprisingly, no one else seems to. Most of the Lords I would have expected to be up in arms about it are treating it as the right move.”

“Your god spoke up on the matter, that’s why.” Riddick kept an eye on Vaako’s face as he said that, curious to see whether the warrior would think he was mocking him or not.

“I thought so,” Vaako said with a nod. “You may not be converted, but… you have been…” He frowned, as if reaching for a word. “…anointed. Your claim to the throne has been blessed. I feel it. I have heard others speaking of feeling it, as well.”

Interesting. “So maybe you can tell me something else, Lord Vaako. How does a Lord Marshal get married, in your religion?”

Vaako blinked. Then comprehension appeared on his face. “The girl? The one I brought to you?”

“Yeah. Jack. How do I make it official?”

“There is no ceremony, if that’s what you’re asking,” Vaako said, moving to walk beside him. “When a Lord of the Fleet chooses a wife, he has only to present her to you before the assembled Court and declare her his. There have only been a handful of cases where the Lord Marshal has forbidden a Lord from claiming a wife. Only, I think, when he wished to make a claim of his own. For the Lord Marshal himself, he only needs—you only need—to present her to the Court and announce her standing.”

Riddick nodded. It made sense that it would be that simple. Come to think of it—

“You have performed a variation of that already,” Vaako continued, “when you gave the girl Margaret to the Purifier on the Lionheart. By presenting her to him, you gave permission, and his vow to you, that she would be by his side until Underverse Come, is as close to a marriage vow as anyone says.”

“Makes sense.” He’d just been thinking of Margaret, himself. It had been hard to even look at her, especially before the torment the raiders had inflicted upon her had been wiped away. She had, in a twist, borne the closest resemblance to Jack of anyone brought to him before Jack, herself, arrived. Seeing her broken had reawakened his desire to burn down the whole Armada—

As if he could have then. As if he needed to now.

“There is, actually, one Lord who wishes to present a bride to you, but not yet. She is still being converted.”

“Oh? Who?” If she was only just now being converted, she had to have been in that brothel.

“Lord Jalman. He wishes to take a woman from the Greensleeves Stew, named Celia, as his wife.”

“Celia Wyndham.” Well, that was a twist. “What’s she think of that?”

Vaako gave him a quizzical look, as if wondering why it mattered. “Ladies of the Armada are not, generally, asked their opinions of such things. But I do know that Jalman was an infrequent patron of the Stew until her arrival there, when he began to go nightly. He monopolized her time as much as he could. He is likely the reason that she lasted until now, which is considerably past the lifespan of most… breeders… kept in the Stews.”

“Interesting.” He had his own way of finding out what Celia’s opinion of it was, and he’d be sure to use it.

Fuck. Jack’s still up in my head. He’d spent the last year taking care not to care what the Necros were doing to each other, not letting himself think about issues like how many of the Lords’ wives might not wish to be bound to their husbands, or how many children died each time his raiders went out. But Jack cared about those things, intensely, and thanks to his journey through her memories… Guess if I needed a comeuppance for ‘violating’ her like that—

Not that she’d seemed at all upset about him poking around in her head…

—here it is. Her conscience had infected him.

“The Necromonger Way still bothers you,” Vaako observed.

“When I was still a kid,” he decided to tell the soldier, “I was enslaved for two years before I managed to free myself. Don’t much like seeing that being put on anybody.”

Vaako nodded, looking thoughtful. “The girl, your Jack, she has given her consent to you, then?”

He shrugged. “We’re still workin’ things out. Just wanted to already know the next steps once we do.”

“My wife seems to believe she fears you.”

“Does she, now?” Interesting. He knew that Jack had been running a Scared Little Girl act when Dame Vaako visited; that was no surprise. The concern that Vaako seemed to be expressing about that, though… that was what had his attention. “You don’t have to worry. Never raped a woman in my life. Got no intention of startin’ now.”

“And she is a woman? Not a child?”

“Her nineteenth birthday is just under three weeks away.” He’d have to think up a good way to mark that. Nobody seemed to celebrate birthdays in the Armada. But he owed her one, after running out on her before her thirteenth birthday and leaving her to “celebrate” it alone in a cold and loveless household. “Seems to me that if she’d still been a kid, she’d never have made it here alive.”

“Adolescents are frequently converted. They’re just not— for those with honor, they’re not…” Vaako hesitated, as though fearing he would give offense.

“I get you. And I agree. How long have you been a Necromonger, Vaako?”

“I was fourteen when the Armada came to the Zon Belt.”

“Hmm.” He remembered the copious research Jack had done. The Zon System, according to her notes, had fallen eighteen years before. It had been an odd system, dominated by an asteroid belt that took up almost its entire habitable zone and was a source of valuable rare mineral deposits. Most of its industry had been centered on exploiting those deposits, and almost all of the inhabitants had been descendants of influential mining families from old Earth’s South Africa. But Jack had left it off of her presentation; there had been no Black Planets in the system after all of its people disappeared, and the belt itself—massive and lacking in biospheres to destroy—had seemed unaltered aside from five million miners vanishing. Although she had found a candidate for a Level Five Incident in the system, she’d decided that it was all too tenuous to include.

He realized that he was looking forward to filling her in on that.

He got why she’d held back on including it, though. There had been roughly a dozen possible additional entries, but if she’d added all of them in, it would have diluted the power of the list and made it look more like the work of a conspiracy theorist who saw warning messages in cloud patterns. She’d stuck with the indisputable Incidents, and had still been able to assemble enough evidence to predict the Armada’s movements with almost pinpoint accuracy. Until he’d taken over, anyway.

“I remember hearing about the Zon Belt’s fall,” he told Vaako. “Mostly people whinin’ about where’d they get those minerals now and how much more was tech gonna cost without ’em. Nobody seemed to give a fuck where five million human beings had gone.”

“Did that surprise you?” Vaako asked.

Riddick shrugged. “I was thirteen. Guess I needed something to get pissed off about, so yeah, I was surprised and angry about it.”

For the first time in the year-plus that he’d been on the Basilica, he heard Vaako chuckle. “I remember that age well.”

Jack had been nearly that age when he met her, he reflected. She’d had moments like that, but not as many as he’d had at her age. At times, it was hard to reconcile everything that had changed since then… and all the things that hadn’t changed at all.

“How’d you end up married to Dame Vaako?” he asked after a moment.

“She came to the Basilica eight years ago. I was a Knight of the Legion, and she was the wife of Lord Vath. She was newly converted, taken in battle. Lord Vath was vying for the position of the Lord Marshal’s First. And she…” For a moment, Vaako looked pensive, even uneasy. “She liked to stir things up. There was more intrigue in the Court, that year, than I had ever seen before. Duels. Assassinations. Seven different men, most of them Lords, died in a short time trying to maneuver against Vath. And I began to hear rumors that she was behind it all.”

“Sounds likely.” Riddick wondered what her motive had been. Had she been ensuring that Vath had no competition for being the Lord Marshal’s successor? Or had she been trying to escape her marriage to him the only way that a Lady of the Court apparently could?

“I had been serving under one of the Lords, and when he fell, I found myself under Lord Vath’s command. I did my best to keep my distance from his wife. She was beautiful and refused to wear black the way all other Ladies of the Court did, even though she was devout in every other way. Eyes were always drawn to her. Including mine. She was just eighteen years old. It was hard to believe that she could be behind so many manipulations.”

“When did you figure out she was?”

“After she manipulated me into killing Lord Vath, taking his place as a Lord of the Fleet, and taking her as my wife,” Vaako admitted. “I did it for love. She still fools me, from time to time, for love. I do know what she is, what she does, but part of me refuses to believe. And much of the time, her advice is sound and not just about scheming.”

“Last year?” Riddick raised an eyebrow in Vaako’s direction.

“That was scheming,” the other man conceded with a sigh.

“And now?”

Vaako’s uneasy look was back. “Just as we have all begun to know that you are our anointed leader, she has come to me with a tale of how this girl, this Jack, is someone you knew and abused as a child, and she is certain you intend to do so again because the girl is terrified.”

He knew he could count on Dame Vaako to make the day a little worse.

“You’ll get to meet Jack soon enough and decide for yourself if it’s true,” Riddick said after a moment. “But I’ll tell you one thing now. Your wife may have met someone who can outplay her today.”

Vaako’s eyes widened. “That… would be something to see.”

“Hopefully we’ll even live through it.” Riddick forced himself to relax. Jack was a practical girl—woman. He really needed to dispense with that whole girl label, especially if Dame Vaako was selling the story she seemed to be trying to.

Anyway…

She was practical, and smart, and even if he’d thrown her for a loop with his ham-handed fuckup of a proposal, she’d figure out why it’d be worth doing. He wasn’t going to demand soul-shaking love from her—

Not that I’d mind that, or anything…

—but she needed cover and he needed peace of mind, knowing she would stay safe.

“Is there anything you need from me?” Vaako asked. They were almost at the throne. Riddick moved to the side, stepping around it toward the doors into the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead behind, as Vaako stopped next to the throne itself.

“Nah. It’ll be another day or two before I’m ready to present Jack to the court. Just gettin’ everything ready right now. I might possibly have some new instructions for raiding ships in a few hours.”

Vaako gave him a weighing look, and then nodded. “I am at your command, should you need me.” He bowed, stepping back, too correct to turn his back on his commander.

The bit of Jack still in Riddick’s head told him not to turn his back either, out of politeness rather than caution. He opened the Chamber doors without turning away, stepping inside and closing them while still facing Vaako.

It was the usual way he entered the room, in truth, but it felt different somehow, with Jack’s motivation guiding it rather than his own.

What is your will, Lord Marshal? the Quasi-Dead asked around him.

“Gimme a moment,” he said. “Got somethin’ I need to ask your boss, first.”

He closed his eyes and focused on the angry being in the bowels of the ship. I have a question for you, Moribund.

If you wish to know whether you succeeded in procreating today, you did not.

Rude. He already knew Jack was protected against that. As was he. Nothing like that. I want to know if the Necros are killing babies and children at your command or if it’s something they came up with on their own.

Silence greeted him. Shocked silence.

You seriously didn’t know what they were doing?

It would seem, the Moribund said after another moment, that these creatures have truly understood little of what I have asked of them.

Riddick sat down on the dais at the center of the chamber, folding his legs into the “lotus” pose that one of the only Trainers from his youth that he didn’t want to kill had shown him. So if I forbid them from killing kids anymore, will you allow that change? Maybe even support it?

Yes.

Have there ever been children in the Armada before?

It used to be the norm. They converted when they were old enough.

Old enough for what, exactly?

When they are too young, their neuroplasticity rejects the process.

That made sense. Pissed him off, but he kept that from bleeding into their channel of communication. So they’d just hang out and wait?

Possibly. I did not pay much attention. I believe it may have changed with Zhylaw. He seemed to view children as a threat.

Because of me.

Yes. One of the Demons of the Darkness spoke to him without my knowledge and told him the most probable outcome for his five-shape in this ’verse. He sought to resist it.

Well, that fit with what he’d gleaned from the Necros who had been willing to talk to him up ’til now. And you let that happen?

These creatures do my will, but you know what I think of them. I tried to ignore their petty squabbles and games of one-upmanship.

Maybe that was a mistake. No maybe about it. But far be it from him to piss off the critter keeping its minions off his back.

Yes. It was. The Moribund’s voice was simultaneously testy and abashed. I have said as much to my sisters. You may tell her I admitted this, if you wish.

You could talk to her yourself, you know. Girl’s surprisingly forgiving about a lot of shit.

He could feel its unease in response.

Word is, she’ll be bringing back the “other larva” sometime soon. Kyra, if you ever paid attention to her name.

Now he could feel something like resentment stirring in the Moribund.

That ain’t gonna be a problem, is it?

Will it be one for you?

Fuck. This creature knew everything about him, didn’t it? If the whole deal wasn’t just someone’s pipe dream… it could be a big problem.

He’d known Kyra wasn’t Jack almost as soon as he got to Crematoria. But the strange woman in the shadows had helped him, strangling one of the men running for him in a move that had, eerily, made him think of the way Jack had restrained one of the Shrills on the Kublai Khan. Even so, his glimpse of the woman’s face—not to mention her hair, which was dark and thick with curls where Jack’s, before she’d shaved it, had been straight and lighter—had told him she wasn’t the girl he’d come looking for. But maybe she knew where Jack was. In prisons barbaric enough to force women into the spaces controlled by violent men, they tended to stick together, guarding each other’s backs.

Just how she’d gotten behind him, he hadn’t known at the time. Now, he had a pretty good idea. He’d thought he was following her, and then suddenly she had two sharp blades poking into his back. “Should I go for the sweet spot?”

It wasn’t Jack’s voice, but for a moment, he thought he’d awakened Fry’s ghost. The voice sounded hauntingly like hers.

“Left of the spine, fourth lumbar down, the abdominal aorta?” The words were only getting creepier. Only Fry and Jack had heard him say that, and this wasn’t Jack. “What a gusher.”

Huh. He hadn’t said that part to either of them. Had he met this woman somewhere else? Was there another time—?

“How do I get eyes like that?” she asked.

No, she was definitely referring to his conversation with Fry and Jack. But her knowledge was secondhand and flawed. From bull sessions he’d had with Jack in the skiff, those times he’d managed to get past her cagey evasiveness and gotten her to open up instead of just listening to him talk, he’d figured out that the girl had perfect recall. If it had been her peeking over his shoulder at him, she’d have said just to the left of the spine and where the hell can I get eyes like that, and wouldn’t have mentioned gushers at all. Still…

Whoever this is, she’s talked to Jack. Has to have.

He’d play along and see where it went.

“You gotta kill a few people,” he said. What would she say in answer?

“Did that,” she told him. “Did a lot of that.” He could feel her anger and resentment. She started pressing the sharp object, whatever it was, deeper into his skin.

Fuck this. He turned before she could react and grabbed her, catching her wrists in his hand and shoving her against the bars. She could poke her little toy into someone else’s back if she wanted. Not his.

It was his first chance to get a really good look at her, and the woman in front of him was eerie as fuck. Not even one feature looked like Jack’s… but if someone had brought back Fry and Shazza and combined the two of them, the woman in front of him would have been the result. She had Fry’s general face shape, Shazza’s eyes, hair, and coloring… and Fry’s voice.

Spooky. But this little dance was still the key to finding Jack. “Then you gotta get sent to a slam.”

“One where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again?” she asked him, her expression accusing.

Well, she got that part right.

He opened his mind up, just a crack…

…The fuck?…

This woman in front of him believed this was their dialogue. She had a vision in her head of watching him and Fry having their little standoff… a vision of the eclipse—

“Only there wasn’t any doctor here who could shine my eyes, not even for twenty menthol Kools,” she snarled at him, anger and denunciation filling her voice. “Was there anything you said that was true?”

And there, tucked in the back… It’s your fault I lost her!

There it was.

She’s an esper. These ain’t her memories, but maybe she doesn’t know that. Jack had had a glimmer of that, herself, as he recalled. Two espers meeting and exchanging memories…?

He could play. He’d pull what he needed to know from her thoughts. He just had to trigger the right ones. He lifted her up higher, just high enough that she wouldn’t be able to use the ground as leverage. Not before he was ready to let her down.

“What are you gonna do, huh?” she asked him. “Go for the sweet spot?”

Weird question to ask him, given the way he had her pinned. Not like he could reach for it. Unless she meant a different “sweet spot…” She was straddling his arm, and for a second he felt her press suggestively against it.

“Remember who you’re talking to,” he told her. Let’s just test this… “…Jack.”

He expected a vision in her head of the girl, maybe a moment of the two of them together. And for an instant, he did catch a glimpse of a girl who looked like his Jack, but with long blonde hair. But he didn’t expect the surge of anger, grief…

…and guilt.

She turned her face away, trying to hide those emotions from him.

His fault she’s gone, his fault his fault his fault he did this to us…

“Jack’s dead,” she ground out, her words stabbing him more deeply than she possibly could have with her little toy knives. “She was weak. She couldn’t cut it.”

No, he thought. Oh fuck, no…

He was so blindsided by her declaration that he almost missed the kick she aimed at the light beside them, barely felt the sudden slice of a tiny blade along his cheekbone, hardly registered the moment when she vanished from his grasp.

She was on one of the nearby bridges a moment later. How she’d gotten there hadn’t made sense to him—

She isomorphed, he thought as he sat among the Quasi-Dead, aware that they were, as always, listening in. They’d seen this moment from her perspective already. Soon he would see it as well.

“The name’s Kyra now,” she’d told him, for a moment almost managing to do an imitation of Jack’s boy act as she stared him down, blatantly no boy, blatantly not-Jack, never-was-Jack, and yet he could feel her thoughts beating at him—you left me, you left us, you abandoned us and it’s your fault she-I died—and demanding his participation in some strange folie à deux. “And I’m a new animal.”

Whoever she was, she had moves. She’d jumped over the side of the bridge a moment later and vanished.

His cat-and-mouse with her over the next day, while he waited for the moment to come when he’d cut fence, didn’t enlighten him any more as to how she’d known his Jack so well. Somehow, though, she hadn’t known Jack’s story well enough to avoid running afoul of some mercs. Just to see if she’d back off from her claims, to see if her masquerade would crack, he’d pressed that point. Jack would never have trusted a merc, much less signed up with a bunch of them. How would she explain it?

“There was no one else around,” she’d told him, and he’d caught that echo again—I lost her, it’s your fault I lost her, it’s your fault she-I died—that made no sense even as it tantalized him with hidden meaning.

Even as he started to care about her…

…to want her.

And he could feel her wanting him… thinking that he was the only man she would ever want, could ever want.

None of the others in the facility, be they “convicts” or “inmates,” had ever seen Jack. She’d never been there. Many of them remembered Kyra’s arrival, vividly remembering the brutal deaths that several “inmates” who tried to get a taste of her got instead. One of them had run screaming through the caverns as he bled out, clutching his groin as blood fountained around his hands, claiming that she’d bitten his dick off with her cunt…

It almost startled a laugh out of him now. She isomorphed some rapin’ muthafucka’s dick right off him…

But she’d been alone. First and last, alone. While there were other women in the place, most of them hidden away and protected if they survived long enough to hook up with one of the Guv’s semi-principled “convicts,” she had never been there. The Holy Man had been wrong. Jack had never gone to Crematoria. The closest she’d ever come were the brittle shards of her memories in Kyra’s head. And Kyra had made her own strange, solitary, bloody way through the caverns of Crematoria on her own. She had no one… except him.

Figuring out what had really happened to Jack became secondary to getting himself—and Kyra—off that rock. He stopped trying to remind her of her supposed past with him, stopped trying to trip her story up, and focused on enjoying her company. She was unbalanced, not even a little sane… but he didn’t mind. Once he got her alone, maybe he could help her. And maybe once he’d helped her, and she knew she could trust him, knew he wasn’t gonna throw her over, she’d be okay with telling him what had really happened to the kid from the Hunter-Gratzner crash…

But then the Necros took her.

He’d followed, not because he was trying to find Jack but because he was trying to save Kyra, and found her in the worst possible straits of all. A convert.

He’d barely heard a word the Lord Fuckin’ Marshal was saying to him, something about choosing the Necromonger Way, his attention focused so completely on her. Her eyes were sad as they met his.

“It hurts,” she told him as she stood before him, “at first.”

Pain is all I’ve ever known… her soul whispered to him.

“But after a while, the pain goes away, just as they promise,” she said.

She went away… they took her from me… all I had left of her is gone… There was grief in that thought, but strangely muted.

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he asked her. She seemed lost inside her own head somehow, her eyes clouded over. Were these even her words coming out of her mouth?

“There’s a moment when you can almost see the Underverse through his eyes,” she told him instead. “He makes it sound perfect. A place where anyone can start over.”

I’ve started over so many times… what’s one more?

And there, for just a moment, he caught a glimpse of her embracing a girl, of a height with her, a girl whose face had haunted his dreams for five years. Tell him Jack’s dead. She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world… in her voice. And Kyra’s puzzled hurt that she could say such a thing, her cloying fear and regret over their separation…

Fuck…

“Are you with me, Kyra?” He pushed at her mind, trying to bring her back to him. Gimme a sign and I’ll get you out of here. Anywhere you wanna go, we’ll go…

For a moment, she almost swayed toward him.

He is not yours. He never was. The voice was in her head but not from her head, the manifold voice of the Quasi-Dead. Killing rage filled him as she walked past him and away, puppeted by the Lord Marshal’s minions.

He had no intention of letting those voices puppet him. He’d rather die than be something’s slave again. But first…

…he was going to get as many pounds of flesh as he could. For her.

The fight was vicious, brutal, and nearly over—he was certain that he was going to actually die, but at least he’d die himself—when Kyra, her eyes clear and lucid once more, had stabbed the Lord Marshal in the back and then been flung across the room, striking the spiked pillar. He’d felt the spikes pierce her back, felt her agony, no longer numb, no longer shielded from injuries by whatever the Necros had done to her, now somehow undone. He needed to get up, to rise, to help her.

She managed to pull herself off of the pillar, collapsing to the dais by the throne. Her eyes met his. I thought we’d have more time… I thought I’d get to be yours first…

He wanted to burn down the ’verse.

And somehow he could see the Lord Marshal in motion, preparing to flee Vaako’s raised weapon, as if time had slowed to the crawl he’d experienced when he’d been in cryo.

This is your first step in freeing all of the enslaved, the voice from his dreams murmured. Shirah, somehow in his ear… But it’s going to hurt.

It wasn’t the death of the Lord Marshal that hurt, even a little. It was holding Kyra as she bled out, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, the tiniest thread of sound left to her voice.

Hold on. Hold on. Don’t die…

You cannot anchor her, Shirah told him, her voice gentle inside his head. Not now.

He refused to believe it. “Are you with me, Kyra?”

Kyra’s face twisted in pain, in grief. “I was always with you,” she gasped, her expression suddenly pleading.

It was me, he heard her saying even as her voice failed her. It was always me. There by your side in the eclipse, it was me, nobody else, me…

“I was…”

…Jack…

He saw it, an image in her mind, the two of them side by side, walking through a forest he’d never seen before, him vanquishing foes he knew he’d never met on any field of battle.

It was real, I swear it was all real… it was always me…

Silence fell over her like a shroud had dropped, and she was no longer there. The tears that had been welling in her eyes, that she’d been struggling to hold back, slipped free, and there was only—

…an empty shell…

—below him.

Because, he told himself with a shudder, Lucy had pulled out her soul and taken it away. There were questions that he needed to ask about that. Implications that were only just beginning to dawn on him.

But first…

He needed to spend some time with Kyra.

“I’m ready,” he told the Quasi-Dead. “Skip to after that sick fuck was done hurting her. I don’t want to have to feel her feeling that. Let’s see what she did about it.”

She had, after all, done something to merit being sent to Crematoria. He hoped to fuck it was ten times as bloody and brutal as anything that had been done to her.