Category: The Changeling Game

18.
The Game, Afoot

By the time the lights rose at 2 a.m., Jack’s nerves were screaming at a fever pitch. She and Kyra sat up simultaneously.

Jack walked over to Kyra’s side so she could keep her voice to a whisper. “Anything you want, grab now. Once we walk through that door, it’s going to lock behind us and nobody will be able to open it until Lights On.”

Kyra gave her an impressed look, walking over to her drawers and grabbing the two pairs of socks she had told Jack about: the ones hiding her knives. She gestured to her pajamas. Do we need to change? was her unspoken question.

Jack shook her head and motioned toward the door. The only thing she had chosen to take was a small cloth, which she planned to use to keep her fingerprints off of everything. She’d already erased her fingerprints from her files this afternoon, retracting two outstanding database queries at the same time, but there was no point in leaving them new samples to collect. Their room had already been thoroughly wiped down.

The lights dimmed back off as Kyra opened the door, exactly according to plan. Jack followed her out, closing the door behind them and giving it a gentle, testing push. It had locked. She took a deep, shaky breath, aware that Kyra was watching her in the dim light, and led the way toward the door out of C Ward.

The halls were empty and silent, with no sign of the usual guard staff that would normally be on duty. On the very rare occasions when Jack had needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, someone had always been nearby and watching. Not now. It was more than a little spooky.

Jack knew exactly where all of the staff probably was right now, exactly where her faked orders had sent each of them at 1:45 and how long it would take them to complete the tasks they believed they had been assigned… but there was always the possibility of error, of some annoyed or bored person deciding “let’s not and say we did” about an assignment, someone being so efficient that they would manage to get done well ahead of schedule, or someone procrastinating. Her nerves screamed at her that, any moment, she and Kyra would be caught before they had even left C ward. It took all of her effort not to launch into a flat-out run for the door.

She made herself keep walking, steadily and carefully. She had budgeted them plenty of time. As long as they weren’t seen, they should be all right.

They had reached the door when she heard voices around the corner, grumbling about the stupid task she had assigned them and arguing over whether it really had to be done right this moment. Kyra gave her a stricken look.

Deep breath.

Her cloth-covered hand was surprisingly steady as she punched in the Ghost Code. The security light flashed green and, with a soft click, the door opened before her. She motioned Kyra through.

And then, they were in the stairwell. She closed the door as softly as she could, releasing the breath she was holding as the security light switched back to red.

Two more doors greeted them. One, to Jack’s left, opened on the stairway down to D Ward and the isolation wing, while the other, across from the door she had just closed, led upward to B Ward and the levels above it. Like a twisted airlock, the landing itself was just a waiting area, a security measure to prevent… well, to prevent exactly what she was doing.

Next to her, Kyra looked as taut-wound as she felt. An aura of danger was coming off of her, similar to the one that she had felt coming off of Riddick months ago, as he prepared to flood the skiff with fire suppressant. The older girl had switched into battle mode.

Jack didn’t, as far as she knew, have a battle mode, but she could feel her own mode switching on, the one that had let her power through exams and crack her way through research sources. The one that she had used when she was leaving Deckard’s World, to make her way through both familiar and new security systems. Her focus had gone needle-sharp.

“Nobody can get into the stairwell now, not as long as we’re in it,” she murmured to Kyra. “I need you to remember this number chain. 7-4-3-3-4-2-5. Put it in any keypad and whatever you’re trying to open will open. Repeat it back.”

Her voice the tiniest thread in the silence, Kyra responded. “7-4-3-3-4-2-5.”

Jack nodded and punched the code into the door that led up to B Ward. She ushered Kyra through, made sure it locked behind her, and began climbing the steps. She could hear Kyra almost-silently repeating the numbers beside her.

Most of the keypads had letters on them. She wondered if Kyra would notice that the code was spelling out Riddick’s name. Didn’t matter. That had been her own private joke. She was, after all, pulling a Riddick here, breaking out of a place that was supposed to be too secure for such breakouts.

She wondered if her father would be mortified by what she was doing.

She had, after all, cut through virtually every safeguard he had ever designed, because she knew the designs as intimately as if she had created them herself. That, she realized, was one handle she would have absolutely no control over: if anybody spotted that the compromised systems had a designer in common, John MacNamera, who had a missing daughter her age…

It didn’t matter. Not now. There was nothing she could do about it, anyway.

They had reached the door to the next landing. Jack entered the code again. Green. They passed into the B Ward vestibule.

Below her, she knew, things would be returning to almost normal. Aside from her room with Kyra remaining locked until Lights On, few other anomalies would remain as long as nobody tried to go up from either C or D Ward. If D Ward called for backup for any reason, the orderlies on C Ward would know and could respond, and the reverse was true as well. Only a few minutes had passed so far, but they were on schedule, and the disruption was still minimal, negligible, hopefully both unnoticeable and unnoticed.

She punched the Ghost Code into the door for the A Ward stairway and ushered Kyra through. The older girl had remained silent and hypervigilant, seeming to understand the stakes every bit as well as—and perhaps even better than—she did.

And now, Jack thought as they climbed the stairs toward A Ward, B Ward was returning to a level of normalcy… as long as nobody needed to go up.

They passed through the A Ward doors two minutes later. Now all of the wards could go about business as usual, slightly more isolated from the outside world than they realized, but otherwise normal except for one locked and very empty room.

The last flight of stairs, used by both the girls’ and boys’ wards, was as ghostly-silent as the previous ones, but it felt somehow more momentous. At the top, she would no longer be controlling most of the cameras, after all. She wouldn’t need to.

They reached the door at the top, and she put her hand on Kyra’s shoulder, feeling the tiniest flinch beneath her fingers. She kept her voice to the thinnest thread of a whisper.

“Okay. This is where you want to do exactly what I do, exactly when I do it. If I walk, you walk with me. If I stop, you stop too. I know how all of the cameras on the main level are timed. If we do this right, we won’t appear on any of them.”

“What about the cameras in the stairwell? And below us?”

“I put them on a loop.”

Kyra looked stunned. “How?”

“I set it up this afternoon. Short loops of the cameras, seeing nothing, from recordings made about this time last night. So the light would be the same. The loops started when I punched in the code to leave C Ward. When we walk through this door and it locks behind us, they’ll go back to actually recording what’s happening now.”

“You couldn’t do the same with the ones up top?”

“Not with most of them. Many of them are moving. And this level has actual windows. Furniture. Things that get moved around from day to day. A loop from another night would be more obvious. But it’s fine. They’ll never see us. You ready?”

She could feel Kyra steeling herself next to her. “Let’s do it.”

Once more, Jack punched in the Ghost Code. The door’s click echoed through the stairwell as it opened, but nobody from the lower wards should hear it. She hoped.

Most of the people who worked on the Admin level worked there in the day. The nighttime staff was a skeleton crew, much as the orderlies on the Third Shift were a third in number of either of the two day shifts. A handful of security staff and a few janitors were the only occupants, and almost all of them had been assigned to the two upper floors for the next hour. Jack glanced at the chrono in the hallway.

2:15.

Their silent, careful ascent had taken fifteen minutes, mostly because of how cautious she was being.

Jack closed the door behind them. She rested her hand on Kyra’s arm as she watched the movement of the cameras closest to them. One stationary camera stared right at them, but saw nothing. It would continue to loop on nothing until she punched in the Ghost Code again, away from its reach.

Once she was certain of where she was in the timing, she squeezed Kyra’s arm and began walking. Not toward the exit.

Kyra gave her a confused look but kept up with her, halting when she stopped abruptly and then walking again with her once the cameras were looking away again. When they reached Jack’s destination, she gave Jack another quizzical look.

Jack wished she could put more concrete meaning into the smile she gave Kyra in return, as she punched the Ghost Code into the door of the Women’s Locker Room and ushered her through.

The lights came on automatically as they entered, and Jack closed her eyes against the sudden brightness for a moment. Behind them, the locker room door closed, locked, and became impervious to all codes except the Ghost Code until their exit.

“What’s this for?” Kyra whispered.

“We can’t go out in our PJs,” Jack whispered back with a grin. “It’d be dead obvious where we escaped from. Locker number 223. The nurse who uses it has your shoe size and is maybe a size bigger than you in pants and shirts. She’s on duty down on D ward right now, so her street clothes should be in there. Her shift won’t end until after they realize we’re gone.”

“What’s her combination?”

“Just use the code I gave you. It works for all the locks.”

Kyra gave her another impressed look and walked over to locker number 223. Jack walked over to 347 and popped it open. Her choice was an orderly on B Ward, who was tall enough that her pants wouldn’t show Jack’s ankles.

The chrono read 2:25 when they finished changing, and 2:35 when Jack finished going through the night shift lockers for spare cash and wiping prints off of everything she and Kyra had touched. There wasn’t a huge amount of money, but there didn’t need to be. She had other plans for that. But cash was always useful, and its absence might distract law enforcement, briefly, from the real nature of what had happened that night.

“One more stop and then we’re on our way out.”

She could see that Kyra was already feeling antsy. Freedom was so close, after all, why delay it? But this was necessary.

They reached Director Flint’s office, unseen, at 2:40. Twenty minutes left until the diversionary activities she’d assigned the staff ended on the levels below them, fifty until they ended in the admin levels. Jack intended to be out of the building before 3 am, but she had built in the extra time, just in case.

His office was much as she remembered it. She glanced over the papers on his desk, quickly, spotting the transfer orders for Kyra, awaiting final signatures. Helion Prime, it seemed, had a real thing for hard copies rather than digital, probably thanks to the whole AI Rebellion that had happened on Helion Six a decade earlier. Lajjun had told her about that one day, when she’d asked why so many of the things that were automated on other worlds—or, at least, on Deckard’s World—were done manually. The people of Helion had a huge distrust for computer minds.

Which, come to think of it, probably explained why so many of the higher security features on her father’s systems had been switched off. In all probability, the hospital and local law enforcement didn’t even know Ghost Mode existed on their systems.

She moved to Flint’s file cabinet. Its keypad control was susceptible to Ghost Mode; she’d made sure of it a few hours ago. The files, well organized, included hard copies of everything known about her and Kyra. She pulled their files out and closed the cabinets.

The decision, to go full-on Scorched Earth, had come to her when she was almost done preparing for their escape. At 3:30 am, the instructions she had left behind would wipe the last year’s worth of backup data stored by the hospital, in both its secondary and tertiary locations. Meanwhile, a small collection of its data, about Heather and other patients on her deadly medicine, would be forwarded to several local media outlets. Most of the current, live records would be undamaged by the purges, but two files would be irretrievably corrupted: hers, and Kyra’s. With their hard copies lost as well, it would be hard for the hospital to reconstruct most of the details they had amassed about their two missing jailbirds… especially given the heat that would hopefully come down on them almost immediately with the news about the potentially lethal drug being handed out to a dozen patients.

“Wipe down anything I’ve been touching, please,” she said to Kyra, as she moved to Flint’s physical Inbox.

Kyra nodded, pulling out one of her special socks from the pocket of her new pants, and running it thoroughly over the file cabinet. Jack flipped through the Inbox until she found the packet she was looking for. It would have arrived shortly after midnight—the courier had been instructed to deliver it between midnight and 1 am—and so no one except the front desk would have seen it.

Inside, a dozen cards, ostensibly reward gifts for high-performing staffers, waited to be activated. Jack logged into Flint’s terminal, in full Ghost Mode, and activated them, one eye on the chrono. It was 2:50 once she was done. She divided the cards into two piles, pocketing half and holding half out to Kyra.

“Funds for our travels,” she whispered. “There’s a muni transport card in there, and money for food and clothes.”

Kyra’s expression was a little awed as she took the cards.

The last time Jack had staged a bug-out—back when she’d left Deckard’s World to go after her father—she hadn’t had these kinds of resources, and she’d found herself desperately wishing for them. This time, she was going to make sure she didn’t have to learn from the same mistakes twice. The hospital might not even notice how light their petty cash account was until after they finished dealing with all of their more pressing scandals, by which time—she hoped!—the last traces of the path the money had taken would be wiped away.

“We’re almost ready,” Jack said. She slid her file, and Kyra’s, and Kyra’s transfer papers, into the empty envelope. Then she opened up Director Flint’s printer, pulling out a loose piece of paper and nodding for Kyra to wipe the machine down. She set the paper on Flint’s desk and inscribed her final message to him.

I promised you that I would tell you the truth about Riddick before I left.
I always keep my promises, so here it is:
You will never, ever find him.
—Jack B. Badd

Kyra laughed softly beside her.

She had promised that the truth would be sitting on his desk when she left, but that part was one she needed to break. It would be too easy, too obvious, and would give the game away too quickly. She folded the paper, twice, and opened the drawer that had contained her file. She tucked the paper into the now-empty hanging folder that bore the label Jane Doe 7439, closed the drawer, and gave it a final wipe-down.

It was 2:55.

The stuffed envelope tucked under one arm and a smaller envelope in her hand, Jack opened the door to Flint’s office. He rated a stationary camera, which had begun looping when she and Kyra had left the women’s locker room. It would continue looping until she put in her next code. With Kyra waiting beside her, she timed the nearby cameras in their sweeps, and then began walking purposefully toward the front desk. Kyra kept pace silently. Jack was suddenly aware that Flint’s decorative letter-opener, a bit of metal styled like a miniature antique sword, was now in Kyra’s right hand.

Well, why not? So far, everything had gone according to plan, but there were no guarantees.

She could make out the bank of monitors at the front desk, showing moving and static shots from around the hospital wards. The timing was completely randomized, but she knew that nothing had appeared to break the desk guard’s boredom.

Well, until now… She put her hand on Kyra’s shoulder, stopping her by a door with a keypad. Taking out her little cloth, she keyed in one penultimate code.

It wasn’t 7-4-3-3-4-2-5. Not this time. Instead, she keyed in a new Ghost Code, switching from the quiet escape scenario to her Scorched Earth plan: 4-3-2-8-4-3-7.

HEATHER

And all hell began to break loose.

The monitors on the front desk dissolved into static. Then the lights died, plunging the complex into total blackness for ten seconds before emergency lighting activated. Throughout the hospital, Jack knew, a very convincing simulation of a blackout was unfolding. To everyone else within the building, it would appear that the emergency generators had switched on, powering essential systems.

Except that none of the cameras were recording anymore.

Except that some of the locks that were supposed to automatically unlock in an outage appeared to be stuck. And others, that were supposed to automatically lock down, were wide open.

Such as the freight entryway, just out of the direct line of sight of the front desk, and right next to her.

She pushed it open and ushered Kyra through, closing the door quietly as she heard the front desk guard trying to reach for backup on his comm.

Too bad the comms system was completely offline, now, too. All he’d get in response would be static.

Low red light bathed the short corridor she and Kyra hurried down. At its end, she simply pushed on the waiting, disarmed door. It opened onto a driveway with LOADING ZONE marked on it in Helion Prime’s four primary languages.

Heather’s body, she suddenly realized, would have taken this exact route when it left the hospital.

“Come on,” she murmured to Kyra. “We’re almost all the way out.”

“There’s more?” Kyra asked, keeping her voice soft as she jogged beside her up the driveway.

“Just the gate. Then we’ll be out. Gonna take us about five minutes to reach it.”

It took less than that.

With the gate almost in sight, Jack pulled Kyra to the side of the driveway and motioned for her to get low, creeping forward next to the hedge that lined both sides of the drive. She could hear the gate guard cursing, unable to raise either the outside world or the main building. The gate stood partway open, frozen in that position, seemingly having malfunctioned upon the start of the blackout.

“We can make it if we run,” Kyra murmured.

“We’re not going that way,” Jack told her. “C’mon.”

The hedge had a small break between one bush and the next, and a cobbled pathway emerging between the two bushes. Jack pulled Kyra down the path, to a small human-sized gate that appeared in the wall. Through the bars, she could see the virtually deserted parking lot beyond it. Only one vehicle was parked there; only one visitor was staying overnight.

She keyed Riddick’s name into a security keypad for the final time, and the little gate opened.

“When you go through, go left and stay close to the wall so the guard on the main gate can’t see you,” She told Kyra in a whisper.

Kyra nodded and went left. Jack closed the gate and followed her.

Now, behind them, the security system moved into its endgame, simulating a whole slew of minor malfunctions that expanded to include the guest facility—mostly—and the outer grounds. The lights over the parking area flickered and died. Most of the guest facility lost power as well. But not Eve Logan’s rooms. Nothing happened within them to disturb her rest… Jack hoped.

Enveloped in full darkness now, Jack grabbed Kyra’s hand and pulled her into a run, through the vast emptiness of the parking lot and toward the driveway beyond.

“Is somebody out there?” a man’s voice called from behind them.

A moment later, Jack heard a window roll up.

“What’s going on?” a woman called.

Fuck. Eve Logan, awake. Jack squeezed Kyra’s hand and ran flat out for the driveway.

“We got no power down here! I can’t even call anybody! Can you?” the gate guard shouted to Logan.

Jack and Kyra reached the driveway and sprinted up its length as the guard began sweeping his flashlight around the lot. Kyra had begun to outpace Jack, but waited for her at the edge of the road.

“Where the hell are we?” she asked. “I thought we were in a city!”

“More like its outer suburbs,” Jack told her. “Don’t worry. Logan can’t get out of her room for about another fifteen minutes, tops, and by then…”

The headlights for the muni bus appeared as it rounded the corner and approached. Jack stepped up to the bus stop and touched its call button. This, she knew, was how most of the staff got to and from work.

“…we will be long gone. Get out the muni transport card I gave you.” Jack already had hers in her hand.

Kyra fumbled for it, almost dropping her other cards, but then had it in her hand as well. Jack wasn’t sure what she’d done with Flint’s letter opener, but doubted she’d actually let go of it.

Jack opened the smaller envelope she’d been carrying and pulled out the final two items she’d ordered along with the money cards. “Here,” she told Kyra, clipping a GUEST tag from the hospital onto her shirt. She clipped her own on just before the headlights from the bus illuminated them.

The driver barely gave them a second look once he’d glanced at their tags. The muni transport cards worked. Jack sank down into one of the bus’s seats, Kyra beside her, struggling not to give into the urge to shake herself to oblivion.

“Four stops from now, we get off, and get on the train. We’re taking a detour into one of the shittiest parts of town to get rid of our files and change out our clothes. Hope you still have your knives on you,” she murmured to Kyra, low enough to keep the bus driver from hearing.

Kyra’s nod was tight, but the look in her eyes was warm in a way that it had never been before. Jack had been aware that, at some point in the past, she had earned Kyra’s respect, but that had changed.

Now, she realized with a strange lurch, she had earned something even stronger.

Admiration.

17.
The Player and the Game

Jack ran out of Stacey’s room at top speed, heading for the bathroom, the precious slip of paper with her staff account information clutched tightly in one hand. She ran flat-out, as though pursued by the natives of a world with too many suns and too much darkness. She still almost didn’t make it.

It was only when she was already heaving that the full weight of the déjà vu settled on her. Weeks ago, after her first group therapy session, she’d flung herself into this very same stall. Then she’d been struggling to make people believe the truth about Riddick. Now… lies. She’d been telling horrible, nauseating lies that had driven what was left of her breakfast right back out of her.

If he knew what I’d said, he’d hate me so much…

It was over, she realized, as she forced herself to her shaky feet. Whatever chance she’d had of one day meeting Riddick again, renewing their friendship, indulging her fantasies… was over. She’d never be able to look him in the eye, not after betraying him like this. Even if he never knew, she would. She’d destroyed it, all of it. There was nothing left; nothing more. Richard B. Riddick was out of her reach forever, and she’d never have the right to look for him.

Jack had betrayed him. Jack had to die. Audrey would leave here and resume her life, but Jack had no right to live on anymore, within or without.

But first, she had to get out of this place.

Stacey’s door was still closed when she left the bathroom. She tried not to think about what Stacey was doing behind that door, let alone what the vicious girl was imagining as she did it. Instead, she walked resolutely back to the library and the vacant terminals.

It had felt like she had been talking forever, but the clocks said it hadn’t been all that long. Lunch was still two hours away. She could hear the sounds of a popular movie playing in the main recreation area. She recognized the opening credits theme and knew it was one almost everybody had been waiting to see. Abu and Lajjun, still trying to pull her out of her downward spiral, had taken her to it during its first week in theaters, a scant month before she cut her wrists.

The library would probably be deserted. Maybe she could get her ass covered even before lunch.

Carmouche had gone off-duty and been replaced by an orderly that Jack didn’t recognize. That wasn’t ideal. The woman was tall, slender but muscled, her medium-brown hair tied back. She was reading one of the old, thick, Victoria Holt novels from old Earth and seemed absorbed in the text, but her posture reminded Jack somehow of Riddick at rest: contained peril that could burst forth at any moment. Jack wondered if the orderly normally worked on D Ward. Most of her nametag was blocked by the book she held, but it ended with “-AN.”

Pretending to ignore the orderly, Jack walked over to the terminals as calmly and resolutely as she could—act like you belong and people will believe you belong—waiting to be challenged, but she wasn’t. Either the orderly bought the act or just didn’t care either way.

Then again, everybody on the staff seemed to think they had all of their patients sandboxed on the computers. The truth was anything but.

Whatever else could be said about her, Stacey had come through. The login worked. Even better, as the staff menu opened up, Jack recognized its layout immediately.

Her father had helped design it. He’d shown her how it worked. And best of all, she still remembered the law enforcement override that he had helped build into it. Any law enforcement agency that had the command on file could get in. She could get in. On a level that the other girls had no idea existed.

I might not even have to wait to make my move until I leave C ward, she thought with shaky amazement.

Before she did anything else, though, she needed to make sure that she had control of the Celia situation. Stacey would be preoccupied for a little while longer… she hoped… and that would give her enough time to make sure that neither she—nor any of the other Killer’s Club girls with purloined admin accounts—could ever find out that it was Jack’s intel that had led to the girl’s transfer.

Snitches get stitches, she reminded herself. Those would be hard for Audrey to explain.

She pulled up the transfer notice and read it carefully. No signs of her handiwork there. Next, however, was Celia’s file.

There it was.

Based on confidential information from a fellow patient, we now know that Celia has been targeted for group bullying by a clique in the C ward nicknamed the “Killer’s Club.” Given her relatively clean record and overall progress, we are moving her to B ward to ensure her safety.

That wouldn’t do at all. Only members of the Killer’s Club had been in the room when Stacey revealed her plan, and only Jack was an unknown quantity to them. If any of them read it, it would be instantly obvious that the patient in question was her.

Let’s just fix that, shall we?

Jack rewrote the paragraph, changing the wording carefully so that it would still sound like something an adult, a professional, had written. Finally she was satisfied.

Based on similar prior incidents, we believe that Celia has been targeted for group bullying, possibly by a clique in the C ward nicknamed the “Killer’s Club.” Given her relatively clean record and overall progress, we are moving her to B ward to ensure her safety.

That, she finally thought with a sigh, was as good as she could make it. Now she just needed to make sure there were no handles in her own record… and do a little sanitizing of any information that could be used to track her once she bugged out.

Her record still listed her as Jane Doe 7439. That was a good sign. If they were trying to pin her identity down, nothing had come back yet. She moved to the most recent entries in her chart first. Would they have mentioned the incident?

Damn. Of course they did. And they have no idea how porous their system is…

Not that the code was porous, of course. Her father didn’t do bad work. It wasn’t his fault that one of the orderlies had been so lax about security, or that none of the features to detect and prevent that kind of breach that had been enabled. And she might just clean up a few more things once she launched the law enforcement back door.

But first, there was an entry to fix—and carefully—before any of the Killer’s Club girls thought to take a look.

In spite of the fact that Miss Doe was the first to get into a fight with Celia Wyndham, she has obliquely expressed remorse for the act by warning us that Miss Wyndham is now the target of systematic bullying. The previous concerns about her closer association with the Killer’s Club may be unfounded.

She definitely couldn’t risk any of the girls seeing that.

It took her almost a half hour, and a dozen unsatisfactory attempts, to find wording that would work. Not far off, she could hear the movie getting more and more car-chase and explosion heavy. Although few girls ventured into the library at any time, she couldn’t risk any of Stacey’s friends looking over her shoulder while she worked on this. Satisfied at last, she saved the new paragraph.

Miss Doe’s instigation of the systematic bullying of Celia Wyndham seems to confirm our previous concerns about her growing association with the Killer’s Club. She should be monitored closely for any signs of remorse for her actions.

Much better, she thought. Now she was the Killer’s Club’s newest accomplice, not their snitch.

She read through the rest of her record carefully, looking for any notes that could potentially connect her to Audrey MacNamera once she went on the run. Someone had identified her accent as common to Deckard’s World. She deleted the line and found three more references to Deckard’s World—all speculative, but still—that needed to be deleted as well. The movie ended as she saved and closed Jane Doe 7439’s files. Nobody had come in yet; the orderly who had taken over from Carmouche appeared to be engrossed in her Victoria Holt novel and happy to ignore her.

Perfect.

Backing out to the administrative main menu, she launched the special login for law enforcement, holding her breath until its distinctive menu appeared. Now for the important moves.

She changed her staff account so that it was top-tier, with access to everything, and checked that the other Killer’s Club accounts—easy to identify now that she could see who had created each account—had been on the same tier that her own had been. She was relieved to see that none of them would have had greater clearance than she had; she didn’t need to dig back into her file, or Celia’s, to make sure that she hadn’t missed anything she hadn’t had access to. When it suddenly occurred to her to check Stacey’s file for references to her, she was relieved to see that there were none.

She only got to spend a few more minutes poking around on the law enforcement level, gleaning passcodes and information about lockdown systems, before she heard voices approaching. Her screen was back to normal—the screen of an ordinary patient—before Xi Hin and Omphalé walked in.

She suppressed a sigh of relief.

“Hey, Jack,” Xi Hin said, her voice very nearly friendly. “You haven’t seen a certain drama queen around, have you?”

Jack glanced nervously at the orderly, who was continuing to ignore them. The woman turned another page in her novel, seemingly oblivious to their conversation. Or she’s really good at pretending not to listen…

She decided to at least pretend to go with the latter.

Making her glance at the orderly a little more obvious, Jack motioned Xi Hin and Omphalé to move further away from the front desk with her. Both girls looked intrigued as they followed her.

“She’s gone,” she whispered, once she was sure that even an astute eavesdropper would be out of range.

“Gone?” Xi Hin blurted. Omphalé shushed her. “What do you mean, gone?” she continued in a whisper. “It’s my turn to—”

That earned her another shushing from Omphalé.

“Stacey told me earlier,” Jack whispered, glad that she didn’t have to be the originator of the news. “Sent up to B Ward.”

“Why?” Omphalé whispered, her expression shocked. Stacey had been enraged, but Omphalé just seemed confused. The plans for tormenting the girl had probably just been a diversion to her, and not the serious business they’d become for Stacey.

Jack shrugged. It was better not to leave too many handles out by knowing too much. “That’s what she wanted to know, too.”

Xi Hin turned and sat down at the nearest terminal—Jack’s—and logged her out before logging into her staff account. After a moment, she swore. “They figured us out, looks like. Sounds like Stacey’s not the first one to play that game here.”

Omphalé gave Jack an askance look and whispered something to Xi Hin, who started typing up a new query.

Bet I know what they’re going to check…

Omphalé’s amused snort confirmed it. “They say you instigated it all, Jack. Stacey’s gonna be pissed that you’re getting all the credit.”

Jack walked over and read the doctored passage over Xi Hin’s other shoulder, taking her time before reacting. Let them think she was a slowish reader. Let them think she’d never read that paragraph before, much less written most of it. “Looks to me like that’s blame I’m getting, not credit.”

“Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe.”

Inwardly, part of her wanted to curl into a ball and shiver for hours. She had come dangerously close to earning the lifelong enmity of the cruelest and most brutal girls in the ward. If Stacey had decided to dig into the reasons for Celia’s transfer before hearing Jack’s story, or if the other Killer’s Club girls hadn’t been distracted by an action movie…

I’d be in pieces, or maybe just in D Ward… and I’d never get out of here.

“You okay?”

She glanced over at both girls. “Yeah, sorry. I, uh… told Stacey some stuff she wanted to know about… uh… Riddick… and…”

She swallowed. Thinking about that recitation in Stacey’s room made her feel ill and guilty all over again. No faking needed.

The girls’ faces were almost sympathetic.

“Hey,” Xi Hin said after a moment. “I bet the therapists’d say it’s good you’re facing that stuff head-on. You know, admitting the truth.”

She and Omphalé nodded at each other with the sage expressions of old veterans at therapy.

“I guess,” she replied, and the lunch bell rang.

Food had no appeal to Jack. She sat quietly at the table, picking at the unappetizing contents of her plate, while conversation flowed around her. She avoided even glancing in Stacey’s direction. It was hard to look Kyra’s way, either. Those had been her ordeals she’d been describing. She just hoped that Kyra was right about Stacey, and that the stories would never spread. Having Riddick’s reputation tarnished with Red Roger’s crimes on Canaan Mountain would be a disaster.

I need more time in the system, she thought to herself. The sooner she could get out of this place, the better, before even more of her soul was compromised. She needed codes. She needed to sanitize Kyra’s records, too, so that her friend would also be harder to trace. There were a thousand moving parts and she needed to line all of them up—

Everyone was getting up. The meal was over.

“I’d ask how it went, but I guess I know,” murmured Kyra as they rose. “You okay?”

Jack looked over at Kyra, wishing she had even half the armor and aplomb the older girl possessed. Knowing what she had endured just made her all the more impressive.

I have to get her out of here.

“I will be,” she managed after a moment. “I need to get more time on the library terminals. Can you cover for me? Keep people from wondering what I’m up to?”

Kyra nodded, although she seemed to be wondering why it was so important. When the other girls in the Killer’s Club headed for the recreation room, she kept them distracted while Jack slipped away.

The romance novel enthusiast was still on duty in the library. Jack picked a different workspace, selecting a table with two terminals facing away from both the duty desk and the entry. On one, she began leading a set of false trails, using her patient account to browse pages that related to interests she’d never had as Audrey MacNamera. On the other, she logged in to her improved, highest level staff account and made some further changes to her patient record, deleting entries about her prior browsing history and the subjects she’d pursued. In their place, she added records connected to the new sites she was browsing. Jane Doe 7439, she had decided, liked to read about neo-Cajun cuisine, watched New Creole cooking shows, liked to listen to zydeco music, and never made anything above a B- on her schooling modules.

While another cooking show started on the terminal beside her, she switched over to the law enforcement account and began setting up a master passcode that would let her go through all of the facility’s doors… undetected. Via Ghost Mode.

“They don’t understand what they’re asking for,” John MacNamera had groused at her two years ago, leaning back on his couch and blowing out a frustrated breath. “This ‘Ghost Mode’ is going to blow up in their faces one day.”

Audrey had sat quietly. Her father would explain without her asking. He always did. She had glanced down at the specs he was working with. There it was: Ghost Mode. She scanned over the instructions for using it, filing them away in her memory.

It was very fortunate that nobody in the hospital had any idea just how good her memory was.

“Eidetic” was the term her mother used with her. She only had to read things once to remember them clearly and precisely. And her mother had sternly explained, after she got into a fight with one of her cousins about which of them was remembering an event “right,” that what she could do was extremely rare, a gift that she hadn’t done anything to earn, and that it was rude to show it off and unkind to expect others to have it.

Which, fortunately, meant that long before she left Deckard’s World and began her run, she had become an old hand in concealing the full extent of her knowledge and recall. Nobody expected a kid to remember everything, down to the tiniest detail, so nobody—except possibly her parents—ever realized that she was faking it when she got less-than-perfect marks on a quiz or test, or claimed not to remember something that had happened when she was three.

Now, however, sitting at the terminal, she could still see the instructions for “Ghost Mode” in her memory, and still hear her father grumbling about the mistake the security firm was making.

“When this mode is attached to a security code, no records are generated when the code is used,” he’d explained after a moment. “Sure, that’s great for a situation where you think someone high up is compromised and you don’t want them to know they’re being investigated, or the police are on the way… but I can think of a million ways it could be abused.”

“What are you going to do?” Audrey had asked him.

“I can’t take it out. We can’t have one package for clients who want Ghost Mode and another for clients who don’t. The code’s too integral.” Her father had sighed. “But we can make two sets of documentation. Only the clients who request Ghost Mode will get instructions on how to enable it.”

But it was always there, asked for or not, enabled or not. Now Jack keyed in the instructions for making her newly-minted security codes “Ghost Mode,” hiding them from the general administrative registry as well. She’d chosen a number combination that no one else used. Now it would open any door on any of the floors and there would be no record that the doors had opened at all.

Sure, she could have gone through the doors using any combination of the administrators’ passcodes—they were all in her head now—but this code had a further advantage: she could share it with Kyra, and her friend would only need to remember one number.

She spent the next hour—while a middle-aged woman, on the screen next to her, quietly droned on about the best jambalaya recipes—studying the camera layouts and timing on the stairs between C Ward and A Ward, and the layout of the ground level. She had the escape route picked, the timing worked out, and everything memorized when she heard voices approaching. By the time four girls entered the library, she seemed to be doing poorly on an algebra quiz while listening to singers from centuries earlier admonish listeners: “Don’t Mess With My Toot-Toot.” She got a few funny looks, but nobody seemed to suspect anything.

They’d never heard her listen to music before. They’d never know that she listened to anything but zydeco. Now, though, there would be witnesses to the fact that this was Jane Doe 7439’s music of choice. Everything in her record would point to a colony on the opposite side of the Helion system from Deckard’s World.

We can leave whenever we want, she reassured herself. As soon as I clean up Kyra’s records so she’s harder to trace.

That, she decided, would be her next stop once she was alone again.

Score one for zydeco music. The girls, muttering about how weird she was, left quickly with their books. Once they were gone, she logged back in as a top admin and got back to work. She opened up Kyra’s file—

Oh. Shit.

A cold chill flowed down her back. Her fingers shook as she typed. She didn’t dare change much—the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain was, after all, the facility’s closest thing to a celebrity patient—but she changed what she could.

This was bad. This was very… very bad.

Her decision made, she switched over to the duty rosters and made subtle adjustments that would ensure a nice, wide open gap in coverage, all along her planned escape route, between 2 and 3 am. Scrolling through the daytime duty roster, she found the anomaly she was looking for. She switched back over to the law enforcement account and looked at the orderly’s records again.

It was even worse than she had thought.

Fuck. She glanced up at the seemingly-oblivious woman at the front desk, wondering whether she was just killing time or paying closer attention to everything than it seemed.

It wouldn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. She couldn’t let it matter.

She shut down the terminals when the dinner bell rang, and walked out of the library as calmly as she could, trying not to let it be too obvious that her skin was trying to crawl right off of her body.

She forced herself to eat her entire dinner. It was dry and tasteless in her mouth, and most of her attention was spent on keeping it down. From the few comments she could make herself focus on, everybody thought she was still out of sorts from her morning conversation with Stacey. She squirreled away a few rolls when nobody was looking.

For later.

The woman was gone when she returned to the library, replaced by one of the regular evening-duty orderlies. Jack felt a tiny amount of the tension leave her spine as she worked. It only took her another two hours to get everything in place. Her hands shook a little as she shut down the terminal, spent a few minutes pretending to be a germaphobe and wiping down all of the terminals she had used that day, and left the library.

Normally she showered in the morning, but she felt like she stank of fear. After a quick shower, she killed time cleaning the room she and Kyra shared, wiping down every surface that she might have touched at any point. Would anybody bother dusting for fingerprints? She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t want to risk it. While she waited for Kyra to return for Lights Out, she ran over the plan again and again in her mind, rehearsing each step of the way, each possible complication.

It would work. It had to.

Finally Kyra arrived, saying goodnight to Colette and Xi Hin before she entered their room.

“You’ve been the talk of the Club,” she said with a wry grin. “Not that Stacey’s sharing the story you told, thank God, but it bought you some legit cred. Especially with you being the insti—”

“Don’t let anybody give you meds tonight. If they do, fake swallowing them. Spit them out when nobody’s looking.”

“Okay…?”

Jack walked up to Kyra, getting close enough that she could breathe the next words and her friend would still hear them, but nobody else possibly could. “We’re leaving tonight.”

Kyra went still, staring at her in surprise and wonder. “Tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” It was to her credit that she didn’t even ask how, given that Jack had previously said they needed to get to A Ward first.

“There’s a transfer order in for you. For tomorrow at noon.”

“What?” Kyra whisper-hissed in astonishment.

“Somebody decided you’re well enough to stand trial. They’re shipping you back to New Dartmouth. And the mercenary in charge of taking you there is already here, pretending to be an orderly.”

“But—”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re going tonight. 2 am. Don’t go to sleep.”

Someone knocked on the door.

As if controlled by the same set of puppet strings, Kyra and Jack retreated to their beds in tandem. “Come in!” Jack called.

The Victoria Holt-reading orderly stood in the doorway. Her name tag, no longer obscured, confirmed everything Jack had already learned about her.

E. Logan

They didn’t even bother giving her a fake name…

The false orderly, a woman Jack now knew was really named Eve Logan, professional bounty hunter, entered the room with a smile that was just a hair too wide to be authentic, carrying a tray with pills on it. “Time for bed, girls!”

Neither one of them were normally scheduled for bedtime sedation. Their eyes met for the briefest moment. Then Kyra was all smiles, reaching for the cup the merc was offering her.

Jack accepted hers, fumbling the cup long enough to keep Logan from noticing that Kyra was pocketing her pills instead of putting them in her mouth. She was glad that her cousin Rob had gone through a “close-up magic” kick and had insisted on teaching her several variations of the Vanishing Quarter. Eve Logan left a moment later, undoubtedly convinced that both girls would soon be sedated heavily enough that neither one would be up before noon.

Kyra gave her a haunted look as the lights were lowered. Jack nodded. She had set a timer in the system. The lights would come partway back up at 2 am exactly, right as their door unlocked and all of the orderlies would have assignments to be nowhere nearby. Eve Logan, she knew, would be asleep in the administrative guest building by then; if she woke up for any reason, she’d find her door and comms mysteriously locked and unresponsive until daybreak.

Glancing over at Kyra, barely visible in the dark, Jack had a feeling that both of them would still be wide awake when the lights came up.