39.
Unquantified, Unseen, Unmasked

The good thing about telling Kyra the story of the eclipse, Jack thought to herself, was that she was increasingly sure whatever head trauma she might have wasn’t affecting her memory. The bad thing about it was realizing how often she was lying to her sister about just what had really happened.

Most of her lies, she was aware, were about Riddick. About his thoughts and motivations. About the depth of their emotional connection. In truth, Jack still wasn’t sure what he had thought of his little copycat, whether she’d amused or annoyed him. But in the story she told Kyra—who needed Riddick to be the hero and needed to go on believing that he had metaphorically vanquished Red Roger for her—their friendship had bloomed early and was never in doubt.

There were small things he’d done in their interactions that had pointed to genuine kindness. When they had been sitting in the back of the sand cat, for instance, and she’d been doing her best Riddick impression for him, he had given her the tiniest hint of a smile… and then pointed. When she followed the direction of his finger, she’d spotted the approaching skeletal remains of a massive creature. Shazza, in her haste, was about to drive through it without alerting anyone. Riddick’s silent warning allowed her to duck in time.

For Kyra’s sake, she played up that kindness and removed any ambiguity about his actions and their motives. For the story she told to soothe her sister, he was unfailingly kind to, and protective of, her.

Elsewhere’s lightning was strobing their room and its thunder growled and roared almost nonstop as they lay in bed and Jack continued the story. If they’d been on that side of the threshold, they would have been completely soaked. Both of them were enjoying the show, though; no window had ever provided as spectacular a view of a storm as their window between ’verses.

“We pulled the sand cat up to the crash ship—that’s what we were all calling it, nobody wanted to waste their time calling it the Hunter-Gratzner or anything—and most everybody jumped off to grab supplies and power cells and things, to load into the back. Shazza stayed in the driver’s seat and kept it idling so that we could move the second everything was loaded up. But it was getting darker and darker. The rings were starting to come between us and the suns. I thought, maybe, if I got all the dirt off of the solar collector’s dome, there might still be enough light, so I started wiping at it like crazy with one of my shirts…”

“Why didn’t they have backup power for it?” Kyra asked. “Even just a battery?”

“They really should’ve. Hell, they should’ve had a port where we could have plugged in one of the power cells, or something.” Jack was still peeved about the sand cat, and the suggestion she’d tried to make, later on, that had been completely ignored. She still thought it would have worked. “But they didn’t know there’d ever be a sunset on their planet, not until it was too late, so probably somebody was just too cheap to add that.”

Her father had often railed against customers who were too cheap to pay for protective features they were obstinately convinced they’d never need, especially when they blamed him, later on, for their absence. Deciding to drive without insurance was what he’d called it. The psychiatric hospital on Helion Prime, as it had turned out, had been among those customers. At least, she thought, she and Kyra had personally benefited from that bout of short-sightedness. On a planet of almost eternal sunlight, that same kind of skinflint incaution had cost almost everyone their lives.

“I got that dome so clean, but once the rings were over both of the suns, the collector just stopped turning. The sand cat was dead. The temperature dropped real fast too, by about ten degrees. I could still kind of see the suns behind the rings… a big red blob and a smaller yellow blob… but it had gotten so dark. And then the noises started.”

“Noises?” Kyra snickered. “C’mon, you can be more specific than that.”

“Animal noises,” Jack said, hearing them again in her head. “Growls, cries… sounds I’d heard faintly the whole time we’d been at the crash ship, but I’d thought it was just the wind until after Fry almost got taken. But now they were really loud. And then…”

It had been, she told Kyra, picking through her words carefully as she tried to capture the terrifying beauty of the moment with them, almost like someone had shaken up a snow-globe full of pitch black, batlike shapes, that had begun floating into the darkening sky from the chimney-like structures as if smoke itself had developed sentience. They shrieked as they flowed upward, whirling and spinning in the twilight…

“People… just a suggestion… perhaps you should flee!” Paris’s voice echoed in her head.

She had found herself running alongside the others, racing for the upturned cargo container where Paris was shouting for them to hurry. It was only when she reached the container and looked back that she realized Shazza and Riddick had fallen behind.

“Riddick brought up the rear,” she told Kyra. “He stayed behind Shazza the whole time. I think he could have outrun her if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t. Fry yelled at them to get down, because the creatures were almost on them. They ran up the side of the gouge that the crash ship had plowed in the ground and dove down inside it. I swear, the creatures were chasing them too… flew right over them and away, but then…”

Then, as she had watched helplessly from much too far away, the screeching murmuration had begun to circle back.

She’d watched them both lying on the ground, Riddick on his side, Shazza on her belly. And even from that distance, she had seen the moment when Shazza’s nerves had frayed and snapped.

“Shazza, stay there!” She’d yelled, pulling free of Paris’s restraining grasp. “Stay down, Shazza, just stay down!”

“Come here!” the would-be tomb raider had shouted, pulling her back into the cargo container. She struggled against him, against what was inevitably about to happen.

Shazza couldn’t see what was behind her, running flat-out for the cargo container. But Riddick, on his side, could see everything. He hadn’t even tried to rise. Instead, he rolled onto his back and flattened himself against the dirt. The flock swooped past just inches above his chest.

Several of them struck Shazza, knocking her to her knees. Instead of flinging herself to the ground, instead of rolling to get them off of her, she tried to rise, to keep going.

“Shazza!” Jack had heard herself screaming, trying to throw herself forward to the rescue, “just stay down!”

Paris hauled her back again, his arm around her no longer at all gentle. She fought his hold until the moment when she heard Shazza’s unearthly scream of agony and saw her torso pulling free of her legs in an explosion of blood. She was still screaming, now in several pieces in the living whirlwind’s grasp, as it spun past the container and off into the darkness.

Suddenly Paris’s arm had been the only thing holding Jack up.

And now she found herself lying to Kyra again. Riddick had risen from the ground, calmly, looking completely unbothered, dusting himself off as he sauntered over to the container, stepping around the splashes of Shazza’s blood in the dirt with casual indifference. Jack, who had just lost the closest thing she’d had to a mother since she’d left Deckard’s World, had felt a moment of intense resentment for that nonchalance. For that moment, she’d found herself almost hating him.

She couldn’t tell Kyra that. This wasn’t supposed to be that kind of story for Kyra. Riddick was the tale’s hero. So she muted the grief and pain and…

“There wasn’t anything he could have done to save her, but I know he wanted to…”

She was projecting her own feelings onto him, her own motivations. His had been completely inscrutable. She had no real idea what had lain behind that calm deadpan, not then, maybe not ever. But in the story she told Kyra, it was a mirror of what she had been feeling and wishing.

“Paris was telling us we needed to get deeper inside so he could close the outer doors. Everybody climbed in, but I could hear Fry and Riddick, still outside. These strange new hoots and howls had started up and she asked him, ‘what is it, Riddick? What is it now?’ And he told her, ‘like I said, it ain’t me you gotta worry about.’ And then the last of the light was gone.”

Before she could get further with the story, Takama knocked on the door. Ewan and Tafrara were with her. While they began tending Kyra, Takama led Jack down to the garage level and helped her into a swanky-looking car so they could go get her head imaged.

Dusk had descended over New Marrakesh. In Elsewhere the storm had moved off, upward into the New Atlas foothills, and the tide was moving in. They didn’t drive toward the waters, though, instead driving further uphill and into one of the ritzier suburbs of the city, arriving at what appeared to be a satellite branch of the hospital.

Takama handled the check-in paperwork, using false names for both Jack and herself and weaving a tale, for the intake staff’s benefit, of visiting relatives and a children’s competitive tree-climbing excursion that had gone awry. Moments later, Jack was lying on a table, her head inside what she could only think of as a massive white donut. It didn’t take long. But soon after, a frowning technician appeared, examining the images, and asked if they could do an electroencephalogram.

That took nearly an hour.

Finally, after that was over, a doctor entered the room.

“Is there something wrong with Tafsut?” Takama asked in Arabic, using the false name she’d picked for Jack.

“No, not at all,” the woman answered, surprising both of them. Officially, Jack couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but she was following along just fine. “There are no signs of concussion, no brain bleeds, nothing. She’s perfectly healthy. It’s just…”

Takama shot Jack a confused and worried look just as Jack was shooting one at her.

“Has your niece ever been Quantified?” The way she said it, Jack could hear the capitalization in the word.

Alarm appeared in Takama’s eyes for the briefest instance. Then her expression became disapproving. “No, of course not. We do not believe in such things.”

“You might want to consider having her tested,” the doctor said, holding out a tablet with colorful data and imaging on its screen. “The readings we were getting are unusually high—”

“Baraka!” Takama almost shouted, one hand slapping at the tablet while the other made a gesture that Jack had learned was for warding off evil. “Do not speak of such things! Do you wish to make her a pariah? Ruin her chances to marry and have a family? We will not stay to hear such nonsense!”

If Jack hadn’t spent the last two and a half weeks getting to know Takama quite well, she might have been fooled by the sudden act, but she wasn’t. She could see that the doctor was, though. She could see the change in her demeanor and could, she thought, almost hear her thinking, superstitious old bat…

Takama led Jack back out of the clinic, hovering over her the whole time while deliberately grumbling about terrible treatment and how the doctor was trying to hex her niece, fussing even when she paid the bill. Only after they had driven away from the clinic did she drop the act.

“What was that about?” Jack asked, her emotions caught in a tug of war between confusion, amusement, and a little bit of fear.

“Brahim said that you are good at infiltrating secure systems, yes? You will want to do so the moment we get home, and destroy all of the scans they made of you and the EEG readings they took.” Takama only looked worried now, as she glanced over at Jack. “Have you ever been Quantified?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Jack told her, “so I’m guessing not.”

“It’s testing for extrasensory abilities. When readings go above a certain level, and I think your scans indicated that they would… testers are required to notify the Federacy. You need to destroy those records as soon as we get home. At least,” Takama added, flashing a tight smile at her, “we know you took no lasting harm from your misadventures this afternoon. And I really should not be surprised that a girl who can move a starship between universes, using her will alone, would test highly. I am sorry, Tislilel. I was so worried about brain injury that it never occurred to me I might be exposing you to—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said, feeling a little stunned. “I’ll grab some baseline readings and sub them in, no problem, soon as I have my tablet.”

“I hope it is as easy as you make it sound,” Takama worried beside her.

“Is it that bad?” Jack suddenly found herself worrying that there might have been a kernel of truth in Takama’s act; if it really would make her a pariah with the Imazighen.

“Good heavens, no. Dihya—the warrior queen your sister is named after—was a seer of great power. Such gifts are only as good or as evil as the one making use of them. No, the problem is the Federacy. It ‘recruits’ anyone who tests highly enough. Whether or not they wish to be recruited.”

Jack, who had spent her childhood hearing only good things about the Federacy, was left a little dumbfounded by that claim.

Takama hustled her into the house the moment they returned, almost dragging her upstairs. Her anxiety was infectious, and Jack found herself running alongside her “aunt,” the need to delete the files filling her purpose.

“Get hacking,” Takama commanded the moment they reached the room. “I will have dinner sent up for both of you.”

It took Jack only a few minutes to find her way into the clinic’s files, using her most insidious Ghost Code. Looking over her patient file, she was relieved to see that almost none of the data would point directly to her. She made a few changes to obscure herself further, adjusting the height—when had she reached 1.73 meters?—weight, and eye color that were stored on file. She saved copies of the original scans and readings on her tablet—she wanted to take a closer look at them, herself, later—before going hunting in the system for another head’s data to replace hers with.

Tafrara and Ewan arrived with trays for her and Kyra right as she was finishing up and erasing the security footage, inside the clinic and out in the parking area, that she and Takama had appeared in. They didn’t stay more than a minute.

Weird. Usually there were at least a few moments of joking banter before they left. Jack walked over to the doors that led out onto a balcony overlooking the courtyard, pulling the curtain back just a little.

Brother and sister were hurrying across the courtyard toward the dining room.

Huh.

“I’ll be back,” she told Kyra, and slipped out of the room.

The moment she was level with the courtyard, and the ground of Elsewhere, she isomorphed over, keeping a strong visual and auditory connection with U1. She crossed the still-wet sand of Elsewhere’s version of the courtyard in a hurry, entering the space that was, back in U1, the dining room.

The whole family was assembled. There was no food on the table.

“I suppose it should not have come as a surprise,” Takama was saying in English, probably for the benefit and inclusion of an elderly, elegantly-dressed Black man sitting at the table with them. He, alone, had a cup of tea before him. “Brahim said most of the survivors struggled a great deal to master their instructions. I asked Amastan if any of them had spoken of dreaming of those… beings… both girls speak of, and he says no.”

“Did he answer you about the other matter?” Ewan asked.

“Yes. He says none of them met the envoy, although some of them remember seeing her on their hospital floor. She was aloof and never spoke to, much less touched, any of them.”

“Good. That’s something, at least.” Ewan still looked uneasy, and deeply unhappy.

“So…” Cedric said, after the momentary silence started to become uncomfortable, “all of the survivors of the Matador owe their lives to the fact that the two stowaways on board, who escaped Quintessa’s control, happened to be un-Quantified espers.”

“Are we sure it’s both of them?” Safiyya asked.

“You did not see Dihya bringing them across from the other world—”

“Elsewhere,” Ewan interjected.

“—from Elsewhere and into the market square,” Takama continued. “She has power, too, although probably not quite as much as Tislilel.”

“You got a look at the readings before you started up with the doctor, right?” Cedric asked. “What were the PKP indices?”

“Maximum. As high as the sensors could record.” Takama sighed, steepling her fingers and pressing them to her lips for a moment. “She is a cerebral girl, at her core. A teacher’s dream… Dihya, I think, relies more on her physicality. She has a good mind too, very intelligent, but—”

“Not on the same order of magnitude,” Cedric agreed. “She’s older, but follows Tizzy’s lead becau—”

“Tizzy?” Tafrara blurted.

“Why not? It suits her more than you think. Anyway, she follows Tizzy’s lead because she’s such a quick thinker. Makes it a little hard, though, to tell one of her plans from one of her impulses.”

“Exactly,” Safiyya sighed. “We have all been remiss. We need to bear in mind that even a child prodigy—”

“Is still a child,” Ewan finished her statement for her. “I… am… aware.”

His eyes looked haunted. Tafrara put her arm around his shoulder.

“It is hard for all of us to remember that about her,” she said, her voice soft and almost coaxing.

“I nearly let her kill herself,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

“Do you think that is what she was doing?” Takama suddenly asked.

An arm slipped around Jack’s waist. She flinched and then realized who it had to be. Kyra, wearing the bathrobe Jack had left on the chair, was standing beside her, fully in Elsewhere.

“What’ve I been missing?” her sister whispered. Jack couldn’t find her voice to answer.

“We have seen her records from New Athens General,” Takama was saying. “Severe blood loss and drowning. She very nearly succeeded that time. Could she still be suicidal?”

Ewan’s complexion had turned almost ashen.

“If she is,” Safiyya mused, “I don’t think she knows it. But there is something called ‘suicide by proxy,’ that some people engage in when they won’t deliberately try to die or consciously admit to wanting to. They put themselves into dangerous situations, ones that could result in their deaths—”

“I can’t—” Ewan almost knocked his chair over as he got up from the table. He crossed the room swiftly, approaching the doorway where Jack and Kyra were standing, unseen and intangible.

“Do not go to her!” Cedric commanded, bringing his son to a halt.

Although a world away, Ewan was only inches from Jack, his breathing ragged. The agony on his face twisted at her heart. He closed his eyes and took a few long, deep breaths. Everyone at the table was watching him with concern.

Jack wanted to hug him. She only realized she was leaning toward him when Kyra pulled her back.

Finally Ewan spoke, his expression and voice growing calmer. “She wouldn’t have done that to me. She wouldn’t have left me stranded in another universe.” He turned to face the table. “Maybe she’d put herself in harm’s way. I don’t know. But she’d never do something that put someone else in danger.”

“Not on purpose,” Jack whispered. Ali and Paris still haunted her.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Kyra whispered back, giving her waist a gentle squeeze.

“If she had known, or even suspected, that she was in that much danger… if she had been trying to die… she would have sent me back to this universe first,” Ewan continued.

“You can’t know that,” Safiyya said.

“I do know that. And you do, too.” He turned and stalked back to the table, sitting back down in the chair he’d vacated. His body was still tense. “I think… she just doesn’t know her limits until she crashes into them.”

“This is a reasonable hypothesis,” the Black man mused, his rumbling, accented voice even deeper than Riddick’s. “Many with her kind of ability only develop it at the onset of puberty, which the remaining fragments of her medical records indicate is relatively recent.”

Ewan winced, closing his eyes. Tafrara put her hand on the back of his neck and murmured something soft in Tamazight. He shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together as he looked over at her.

“Your ‘Tizzy,’” the man continued, “may have no idea what she can or cannot do with these gifts until she tries.”

“Who the fuck is he?” Kyra whispered.

Jack shrugged, shaking her head. She had seen him in line, well behind the envoy, at the end of the memorial, but Ewan had already whisked them away from the church before he came anywhere near the family.

“I guess we should be especially grateful that you decided to visit us tonight, General Toal,” Cedric said. “You’ve worked with espers in the past, haven’t you? Trained operatives.”

Even as the general nodded, Safiyya spoke up. “Is there any new word about your son or his platoon?”

General Toal shook his head, his expression briefly sad. “Nothing. It has been almost ten years… soon they will be declared dead. I… have made my peace with it.” He sighed and then seemed to put it aside. “But I am afraid that my visit this evening is not as auspicious as you have hoped. I came to warn you.”

Uneasy looks passed around the table.

“In the last day, the Quintessa envoy has been approaching many of Gavin Brahim’s former comrades-in-arms, the ones who will be visiting your home tomorrow evening. Many of them have asked me for advice,” the General explained. “She has hinted to all of them that she would like to attend as their ‘plus-one’ if they would be so inclined.”

“If that vile tkahbacht even tries to enter this house—” Tafrara exploded.

“What?” Ewan asked. “What can we do if she tries, Elspeth?”

Jack had wondered if, like her brothers, Tafrara had a Scottish name as well as a Tamazight name. Now she had an answer.

“Our brother’s murderer will never be welcome here!” his sister shouted, slamming her fists on the table. “I will see her dead first!”

“Tafrara.” Somehow, Cedric’s almost-gentle tone stopped her tirade cold. “It’s easily prevented. We’ll just clarify that this isn’t a gathering where plus-ones can be accommodated.”

The General’s mouth twitched and he nodded. “That does indeed solve that part of the problem. But she has not been alone in her visits. Her entourage, these days, includes a mercenary who is eager to tell everybody he meets about the pair of dangerous teenage girls he is tracking—”

Ewan muttered something in Tamazight that made every woman at the table gasp and glare at him. He even got a reproving look from his father. There was no shame on his face now, though; only fury.

“—and he has been circulating pictures of them,” General Toal continued. “Already many of the officers who spoke to me have commented how similar they look to your visiting nieces. Now, we all know the truth about these two young ladies. And certainly, we all know that, even if they were the monsters he portrays them as, they never would have had time to commit the heinous crimes he’s claiming they engaged in between their escape from the psychiatric hospital and when the Scarlet Matador left Helion Prime. But…”

“An accusation does not have to be true to do great damage,” Takama sighed.

Jack felt Kyra begin to tremble beside her.

“Indeed.” The General looked around the table at everyone. “I was hoping to help you make this work. I truly was. But at this time, there is no way we dare introduce Miss Wittier-Collins to the officers who will be visiting tomorrow evening. Whether or not he suspects who your ‘nieces’ really are, this ‘Alexander Toombs’ has poisoned the well.”

“Oh fuck, Jack…” Next to her, Kyra’s eyes were welling with tears.

It just figured that Elsewhere’s tide would show up right then, too.

38.
The Bell That Must Not Ring

Pain.

There was nothing but pain for a time. Her universe was made of it.

Little larva, can you hear us? Little larva, come back to us…

She wanted to tell them to leave her alone, but she couldn’t make words.

Little larva, do not die. Come back to us…

They weren’t going to leave her alone. Finally she found just enough strength to answer.

“Not dying…” she mumbled. “Just… trying to fucking sleep…”

“That’s my girl,” a man’s deep, velvety voice said from somewhere outside of the darkness. “You rest, a tafat-iw. I have you. I’ll keep you safe…”

Riddick? No. The voice was different, just as deep but not quite as rough. With a hint of an accent Riddick didn’t have…

Ewan. That was the name that went with the voice. Ewan Zdan…

We told you not to do that, little larva. You could have died.

“Had… to… move it…”

We do not understand how you accomplished that and lived. It should not have been possible. You are still so small.

The stars were far too bright to look at. She felt them surrounding her, peering at her with eyes that weren’t eyes, seeing her in some way she struggled to comprehend.

You almost broke your five-shape. Do not try to do anything like that again until you have hatched.

“Do what?” she managed to ask, also managing to limit her words to the dream space. She was vaguely aware that her body—her shell—was being held in someone’s arms. Ewan’s?

They tried to explain, but she didn’t understand. She could barely focus. They showed her mind-bending shapes, things that normally would have had her fleeing in terror, but she wasn’t even strong enough—or scared enough—to look away. Emotion was a blank. Emotion needed energy, and she had none.

A cube, she thought after they showed her yet another iteration. A sealed cube with no way in or out…

Broken now.

It means nothing. The …Moribund’s…? voice was like angry distant thunder.

It means everything.

She was already lost. What use is breaking an empty box? Be done with this filth.

She hatched this larva and its broodmates. They are not filth. They are hope. This little one might even be the One.

One reckless trick and you would fall at its nethers. You lie to yourselves. We will be your “One.” You waste your time. We do not need this filth’s help to rise. We will break the ’verse itself…

And have you yet? Go. You have no place among us.

If Jack were strong enough to care, she thought, she might have been afraid. But she felt almost as if she was back in the isolation ward, cocooned against herself, cut off from sense and emotion. Even the poisonous rage of the one entity—

She needed to call them something better than that.

“Do you have names?” she asked the darkness. “What are all of you called?”

Names are delimiters, the Moribund snarled. Jack wondered if it knew what the others called it.

Our names were stolen, they whispered.

“Can I give you one? I need something to call you.”

She sensed disgust from the one hateful “voice” in the darkness, but curiosity from the others.

“What about…” The word, which had been in her head since the morning, floated back. “Apeiros?”

Apeiros… infinite… She could feel them mulling it over. It is an interesting choice. You may see deeper than you know. A name that means hope. Yes, little larva, you may call us this.

Fools. All of you. Falling over a tiny piece of filth…

Little by little, the pain was receding. The stars were no longer blinding. Jack could feel herself, not floating anymore, but lying down on something warm. She could hear a soft double-rhythm pulling at her.

Go, little larva. You can wake to your five-space now. You will not die…

She opened her eyes.

There was still daylight, but the light level had dropped considerably. Even so, it felt almost too bright to keep her eyes open, and it set her head pounding again. She was resting in Ewan’s lap, head on his chest, his heartbeat in her ear. He was sitting in the sand, legs stretched out and his back leaning against a boulder, gazing out over the landscape of Elsewhere. The tide, although still several kilometers away, had begun rolling back in and the sun, mostly hidden by the deep grayish blue of pregnant storm clouds, was halfway to the horizon. Lightning flickered over the waters off to the southwest.

An unknotted string hung in the air nearby, marking the spot where Jack had tethered the special comm to a bench in U1. Ewan had carried her back to the location of the grotto.

He had the comm in one hand, and his other arm was wrapped around her. Their packs lay beside them in the sand. His was open and a smaller version of his field kit was out; several bloodstained wipes were lying crumpled beside it along with a penlight and a portable diagnostic.

He glanced down at her and blinked, his eyes widening a little. “Baraka. Oh, thank God. Tislilel? Are you back with me?”

“Mmm-hmm…”

“I need you to say a little more than that, tahbibt-iw. Can you, for me?”

“Did I pass out?” Jack managed to ask.

“You did. Your nose started bleeding right before you collapsed, and for a while, one of your pupils was dilated. You’ve been unconscious for the last three hours while I brought you back here. I was afraid you might have given yourself an aneurysm.”

“Kinda felt like I did… fuck, my head hurts… I felt like I split it open when I pushed that damned box out…”

“Box?” Ewan gave her a quizzical frown.

“Inside the ship. I think… I think I broke open an apeirochoron.”

“Unless that’s just the name of some cerebral blood vessel I’ve forgotten about, I don’t know what that means.”

She didn’t really have words for what she was trying to tell him… or if she did, she couldn’t put them together. She couldn’t paint the air with shapes made out of light, Apeiros style, to try to show him, either. But that was okay. Maybe one day…

Maybe one day what, exactly? She felt like she was trying to focus in eight directions at once, some of which were impossible. Her thoughts were looping… looping…

“Please don’t go back to sleep, Tislilel. Not yet.”

“Sorry…” She wanted to tell him that she’d gone too far, that she should have listened to him, and to them, and stopped. But she’d been incapable of doing so at the time, and even now that was hard to admit. It had been the act of a child, the child she kept telling herself she no longer was. She changed the subject. Slightly. “I saw the envoy. She was at the spaceport. And I got a better look at what she’s connected to. Darkness. She wears all white, but she’s all darkness.”

An infinite darkness that even the Apeiros seemed to fear…

The demons of the dark… What would look like a demon to one of them?

“Stay awake, Tislilel. No sleeping. Did she see you?”

“No. Remember how I used my tablet for a few minutes before we got close to the ship?”

“I do, yes.”

“I turned off the ship’s outside cameras. My codes were still good. Nobody saw us walk up, in either ’verse.”

Ewan laughed softly. “Well played. So you could see her in U1, but she couldn’t look into Elsewhere to see either of us. And if they were recording the camera feeds from the ship itself…”

“We never appeared on them before they stopped.”

“That’s a relief. I’m curious… do you play chess?”

Jack wondered if he really was curious, or just trying to keep her talking, coherent, and awake. “My dad was gonna teach me, but when my parents started fighting, and after the divorce, he never had time.”

“You should learn it. You have the right strategic mind for it.”

“I dunno. Half the time I feel like it doesn’t tell me the plan until it’s time to do it.” She was, slowly, having an easier time staying focused on the moment at hand. The tide would be rising soon. “What time is it?”

“Almost thirteen pm.” He quirked a smile at her. “We’ve missed lunch. Not that I had any kind of appetite until now. How about you? Are you feeling at all hungry?”

“Yeah, but… also queasy. Is that bad?”

“Possibly. Do you want to try to drink some water? I can give you something for your headache if you think you can keep it down.”

Until then, Jack hadn’t noticed how thirsty she was. “Yes, please. Or if you have anything with caffeine—”

“Absolutely not. Not until I know for certain you don’t have a brain injury.”

“Spoilsport…”

“I’m serious, Tislilel. No caffeine until I say it’s safe.”

“Fine… any orange juice?”

“Yes, that you can have. And I do, indeed, have some.”

He brought out a small bottle of juice for her, making her use the first few sips to take some pills for her headache. To their mutual relief, her nausea began to ease, and he let her have some of the savory crackers he’d also brought, flavored with spices she’d never known before New Marrakesh.

“These are so good,” Jack sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Now I’m really getting hungry.”

“It might be time for us to go, then. Especially with that rain approaching. I was just about to call for help when you began mumbling actual words.” He stroked her cheek with his fingertips. “You have no idea what a relief it was to hear you say ‘trying to fucking sleep…’”

He had done an amazing imitation of her accent. She found herself laughing. Ow.

“My head does still hurt,” she admitted, “but not nearly as bad. I think I can pull us back into U1, though.”

“Now you have me in a quandary,” Ewan sighed. “I don’t want to overtax you after everything you’ve already done, and especially not before I can get a good scan of your hard little head. But the alternative is dragging your sister out of bed, while she’s still healing, to come down here to bring us across. So you have to promise me…”

He leaned his head closer to hers, locking his eyes with hers, his expression simultaneously fiercely serious and gently teasing. The palm of his hand, where it rested on her cheek, made her skin tingle.

“…that this time, you really will stop if it becomes too much.” A hint of a genuine plea appeared on his face. “Please don’t scare me like that again.”

He thought I might be dying, too. At the time, it had just felt like a strange tug of war game that she’d desperately needed to win. Until the tension had abruptly snapped and its full power ricocheted back against her. She’d won, but she still wasn’t sure of the cost. What if she really had given herself brain damage?

She lifted her hand and rested it on his cheek, feeling smooth skin and rough stubble under her palm, the muscles over his cheekbone and the hollow below, the strong line of his jaw. “I promise. I really, truly promise.”

His eyes weren’t olive green, she found herself thinking. More a sea green, a few shades paler, and slightly bluer, than hers, which her father had called “moss green,” her mother had called “jade green,” and her cousins, always looking for creative ways to be rude, had called “pond scum green.” His sea green, she mused, was the loveliest shade she’d ever seen.

For a long, still moment, their eyes stayed locked. Jack found she was intensely aware of every point of contact between their bodies, all of which seemed to almost hum with energy. Then a look of alarm flickered over his face and he pulled away, just a little. A second later, a roguish—but somehow forced—grin appeared as he drew back even more. “In that case, I will accept your invitation to return to U1. I’ve made sure we’re in a clear space of the garden Ababat—sorry, my father—rented.”

“How’d you manage that?” Jack asked, still recovering from the moment herself as he moved her off of his lap—the brief touch of his hands on her waist sending powerful shocks coursing through her—and stood up.

He picked up the plastic bag that had held the comm, dropping the tether inside it at the same time. “I flapped it around the space to make sure it didn’t hit anything on the other side. Since it’s in both worlds.”

“Smart,” Jack laughed, climbing unsteadily to her feet. This time, laughing didn’t make her head hurt quite so much.

“I have my moments,” he agreed as he helped her up and began reassembling their packs. She noticed that he was careful not to let their bodies come into contact again.

It made the transition back a little awkward, but he was willing to at least let her hold his hands to do it. A moment later, they were surrounded by a garden that she realized would have been a terribly romantic setting if they weren’t suddenly so busy hiding from each other.

A lesser man, she mused, would have tried to kiss her. Would she have wanted him to quite so desperately if he’d been a lesser man?

If I were even just five years older… she thought, filled with a sense of terrible loss. He would never, ever act on what she was certain both of them had suddenly been feeling. Part of her, the part that still wanted to try to eat an entire bucket of Halloween candy in one sitting, the part that knew and didn’t care that some of the things she craved might be bad for her, the part that always convinced itself that she was more of an adult the less she acted like one—the part of her that had nearly shattered her brain over a sealed box just hours earlier—was tempted to try to get him to do so anyway. Every cell of her body was hungry for something she couldn’t name or explain but was certain he could give her. But—

It would break him. It would break them both. She didn’t want to know that, but she knew it.

And then, she admitted to herself and had to swallow back a laugh, Kyra would cut his dick off and make him eat it.

Maybe, she supposed as she rewound the tagelmust around her head, she could return to Tangiers Prime when she was legally an adult. Maybe then, if Ewan hadn’t already married and settled down, there would be a space for these feelings…

“So,” he asked behind her, the cheerful tone in his voice sounding just a little bit forced, “do you feel up to making the trek back home?”

Jack shouldered her pack and nodded, slipping back into her teenage boy persona. Hopefully that’d help defuse the moment further. “Let’s do it,” she said in her boy voice, an octave below normal.

The rented grotto was part of a garden complex that could be hired for lunches and dinners, for parties and gatherings. Although the lunch hours had already passed, many of the parties were only just breaking up. Well-dressed diners and revelers were departing, most giving Jack and Ewan askance looks as they emerged from their grotto and locked its gate behind them. They did rather look like a pair of disheveled ruffians, Jack thought. She was glad Ewan had already cleaned up her nosebleed.

I know what they all think he’s been doing… with a boy, she thought, hiding the snicker that bubbled up. Even a few hours ago, she could have shared the joke with him. Not now.

While he stayed close to her as they walked, and she could feel him watching her the whole time for signs that she was unwell, he didn’t touch her. The gulf suddenly between them felt miles wide. But any time she glanced his way, she saw only concern. Periodically, he tried to use the special comm to make a call, but it never seemed to go through, even after she pulled it all the way back into U1 for him.

Along the route back up into the Rif, Jack heard snatches of conversation and rumor about some kind of new security incident at the spaceport. Nobody was sure, exactly, what had happened out there, but the place was in full lockdown and the local comms system was overloaded. She was suddenly glad that the garden Cedric had chosen was so far away from the perimeters that had gone up around the spaceport… and might soon go up around the hospital. It was even outside of the checkpoints she and Kyra had encountered the last time they’d traveled downtown, partway up into the heights.

And Ewan had had to haul her unconscious ass that whole distance, she realized. Almost fifteen kilometers and up several hills…

“I’m really hoping that carrying my dead weight all that way didn’t throw out your back or anything,” she told him.

“It was torture,” he said with an almost-easy smile. “You weigh nearly much as my boot camp combat load.”

“This is what you guys get for feeding me,” she teased back, feeling more relaxed—more like things were normal—with each passing minute.

“You do eat enormous quantities. Not quite your weight in crickets, though… I could swear I thought it was going to rain soon,” Ewan said as they crested a switchback and looked down over the city and sea below them. To the west, the sky was mostly clear, the sun dropping closer to the horizon. Her eyes were handling the increased light level better, she realized.

“Not in this universe,” Jack reminded him. No one was around to hear.

“Ah. Yes. Of course.” Ewan’s smile became rueful. “Is it raining over there yet?”

Jack shifted her vision to look into the darkening world of Elsewhere. “Looks like it’s gonna storm pretty hard there soon. Good thing we didn’t wait around on that side.”

“It’s a beautiful place,” Ewan remarked. “So untouched by humans until now. And yet habitable…”

“Pretty weird, huh?” Jack agreed as she followed his train of thought. “No terraforming required.”

“I suppose every planet has a universe where that’s true,” he mused, gazing out over the more familiar landscape of U1’s New Marrakesh.

“Yeah. Back when I was first learning about this stuff, I asked my teacher why we’d gone into space at all if we could’ve just moved to other Earths that hadn’t been polluted to death. He didn’t know why.”

“Because colonization is about control,” Ewan said after a pensive moment. “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—”

He stopped himself then, turning his head away, but not before she saw the sudden, stricken look that passed over his face.

Jack made herself look away, too. The instant of vulnerability she’d seen in his eyes was unnerving, almost negating the thrill of hearing him call her beautiful. “Oh look,” she said after an awkward minute, pointing at the hospital. Its base practically sparkled with flashing blue lights. “I think someone discovered our handiwork.”

“I think you’re right.” Ewan grinned, his expression relaxing again. “Fortunately, Usadden had this evening-day off and instructed the noon shift to complete an inventory of the Matador bodies an hour before we were set to arrive. In preparation for turning them over to the Quintessa Corporation tomorrow, of course. So they were fully accounted for long after he left the morgue at the end of the morning-day. And he has an iron-clad alibi for this afternoon.”

“Where’s he been while we’ve been doing crime?”

“Attending a conference hosted by the President of the City Council,” Ewan told her, the sparkle back in his eyes. “Discussing, of all things, how to improve the quarantine protocols for incoming Star Jumpers.”

“That,” Jack laughed, “is a damned good alibi.”

The silence between them as they hiked the rest of the way still wasn’t entirely comfortable, but it was slowly getting there. They were still two blocks away from home, and phantom thunder had begun to growl overhead in Elsewhere, when Cedric, Safiyya, Takama, and Izil hurried out to meet them.

“Where have you two been?” Takama demanded. “Dihya’s been upset for hours, saying Tislilel was hurt!”

Fuck, Jack thought, guilt knotting her stomach. Of course she knew… She hoped the Apeiros hadn’t begun badgering her sister again.

“Right after she started,” Cedric added, “we got word that the spaceport was under lockdown. What did you two do?”

Jack could feel even more guilt rising within her, and the sudden fear that they might never trust one of her plans, or her, again.

“Tislilel realized that it wouldn’t matter what else we took away from the Quintessa Corporation if they still had the Scarlet Matador,” Ewan told them. “But pulling that into Elsewhere turned out to be more difficult than she expected. Some part of it—you called it an ‘apeirochoron,’ is that right?—resisted. Pulling it through knocked her out.”

But she hadn’t pulled it through, she thought. It had already been in Elsewhere. She’d had to force it out of U1—

“And you allowed this?” Safiyya’s face, in that moment, looked almost exactly like her mother’s when she’d been up to no good with her cousins.

“He was yelling at me to stop,” Jack volunteered, some of Audrey’s I’m-so-sorry-please-forgive-me seeping into her voice. “I… didn’t.”

“I want her to have a proper CT scan,” Ewan added. “We can use the bruise she already has on her forehead as the excuse.”

“I will arrange it,” Takama said, sighing. “Right now, we had better let Dihya have a look at her so she can calm down and get back to resting.”

“Did you try to call us at all?” Izil asked. “The comms have been spotty since the lockdown was announced. We tried a few times, but got no answer.”

“It took almost three hours to get from the spaceport to the garden,” Ewan sighed. “But yes, I did try. Several times. No connection.”

“Why did it take so long?” Safiyya asked, frowning again at her son.

“He had to carry me the whole way,” Jack told them. “I was out cold.”

Big mistake. Takama and Safiyya began fussing over her, their arms around her as they shepherded her toward the house. Ewan had fallen back and was talking softly to Cedric and Izil, too softly for Jack to hear what they were saying.

“It’s done, though,” she told both women, struggling to find a way to get back to a sense of achievement. “Everything that had a connection to Elsewhere in the hospital and the spaceport is all the way in Elsewhere now. You should’a heard the envoy scream when the ship disappeared…”

“I am glad you succeeded,” Takama said, her voice still a little stern. “Now, though, you are on bed rest until I take you for the scan, and after that until the physician says otherwise. Understood? You may be very good at ‘heists,’ but there will be no more for a while.”

Kyra and Sebby were both agitated when Jack entered the bedroom.

“Oh thank fuck,” Kyra muttered, sagging against her pillows. She looked exhausted, sending another pang of intense guilt through Jack. Sebby, meanwhile, practically launched himself across the room and wouldn’t stop touching Jack’s face with his antennae.

Later, while Jack and Kyra rested, Ewan appeared with Tafrara by his side to change Kyra’s bandages and IV bags. He seemed more himself, bantering with both of them in an easy way, telling Kyra that, next morning-day, she would be allowed to get up and begin walking. They had brought a very late lunch with them, which Jack dug into ravenously, and he’d even teased her about how moving starships must be hungry work.

Those words echoed through her, trying to connect to… something… but failing.

It was only much later that Jack realized that, for the remainder of her stay on Tangiers Prime, Ewan made it a point to never be alone with her again.

Except once.

37.
Folding a Dali Cross

By the time Jack and Ewan left to go to the morgue, everybody had weighed in on the heist. Very few major changes had been made to Jack’s plan, but there had been many good suggestions and improvements.

Including the idea that she should go back to dressing as a boy—but an Amazigh boy—for the day.

The entire family, as it turned out, had known who Kyra really was, and known as much about Jack as anyone on Helion Prime did, for as long as Tomlin himself had; Takama’s intelligence-gathering had been the original source of that information. They had simply chosen to wait for the girls to tell them, or not, themselves. Before his death, Tomlin had also told them that, despite assumptions to the contrary, it had been Jack who had masterminded the hospital escape rather than Riddick. They had been better-known quantities to the Tomlin-Meziane family, the whole time, than they had ever realized.

Either way, she thought, the family’s willingness to include her and Kyra in all of the discussions and decisions that affected them, rather than cutting them out and arbitrarily making decisions on their behalf, still astounded her. Maybe it was even more amazing, given what they had known all along. If only any adults had treated her this way before now…

That, she reflected, made it harder than ever to plan to move on. Going back to being Audrey MacNamera would mean going back to being talked about, rather than to, by all the adults in a room.

The dinner table conversation had been all about the heist. She and Ewan had both gone to bed early, taking mild sedatives to help them fall asleep so that they’d be fully rested when they woke up just two hours after noon. Kyra, although clearly wishing she could go too, had given the plan her stamp of approval.

Even they seemed to approve.

“I can’t talk to you long,” she had told them when she found herself suspended among the stars again. “I have to rest so I can do something difficult in a few hours.”

That had only excited their curiosity. She had struggled to explain, until one of them seemed to come to a strange understanding.

It is hiding the shells of its lost broodmates from them, so they can’t find the rest, it told the others. She felt comprehension, and endorsement, spread around her.

Now, suddenly, everybody seemed to understand except her. “Who are they?”

The demons of the darkness. The makers of the cages.

That sounded like something the being that hated her and Kyra might have said.

The — does not understand, they told her. She wasn’t exactly sure what they called it. Not as much a name as a descriptor. Moribund? Something close to that. Your shell looks like their shells, and it thinks that makes you one of them. But your five-shape is different. You and your broodmates only just hatched into your five-shapes. Only you and one other larva are so developed. The others are barely growing, aside from the three from the smallest shells of all. But none of you will ever be like them.

“I… are you talking about our bodies? Our physical shapes? When you say shells?”

Your shell is not your shape. Your shape perceives your shell, but your shell cannot perceive your shape. With each hatching you will perceive more, understand more. You are strong and growing so quickly. But we are patient, and you must be too. You will hatch into your six-shape in your due time. Do not try to make it happen too soon.

And then… you will be ready to help us…

They let her sleep then, and her dreams were full of strange attempts to understand what they had been telling her, to riddle out its meaning. Still, she woke feeling alert, ready to execute her plan.

Do I always start my crazy adventures at 2 in the “morning?” she found herself wondering, as she dressed herself like a teenaged Amazigh boy. This “morning” was bright, of course, the sun only beginning to come down from its hot zenith. She knew from the 44-hour library that people were awake at this hour, but not all that many. She and Ewan would arrive at the morgue while activity was still at its lowest ebb, and while the tide was still dropping away.

Sebby, who now had his cricket tub in their bedroom, climbed all over her for a moment, running his antennae over her strange new clothes, before returning to the bed to snuggle up to Kyra.

Ewan’s room, she had learned, was just two doors down the hall from hers and Kyra’s. He was emerging from it at almost the same moment that she emerged from theirs.

They went over the plan as they ate a simple breakfast, and then checked over their packs and the gear that Cedric had insisted they take with them in case anything went wrong. He had given them a comm with extremely powerful frequencies after dinner—“This thing can transmit through solid rock”—and had instructed Jack to take it halfway between ’verses. Then they had tested its signal, confirming that the part that was still in U1 could still connect to the comms system and reach him. Jack had taken it into the courtyard, isomorphed over to Elsewhere, and used it to call him in possibly the first comm conversation across universes. Before she and Ewan isomorphed into Elsewhere, they were to leave it behind in an agreed-upon, protected location in U1; if they ran into trouble and needed help getting back, they could return to that space in Elsewhere and use it to call Cedric. Kyra, when asked, had said that she felt strong enough to pull them back if she was taken to that location.

That was something Jack hadn’t even thought of when she had begun planning the heist. It made her very glad they were on her side and watching her back. She’d had to add one embellishment to that part of the plan, though, storing the comm in a plastic bag that “lived” in both universes and would shield it from harm in either direction. The outside of the bag, when she checked it over after breakfast, was wet on the Elsewhere side from the pre-noon high tide, but no water had gotten in.

Jack and Ewan went onto the roof, which turned out to have a beautiful rooftop garden, shortly before 3 pm to look over the city. Sunlight glittered on the waters of Elsewhere, which still overlaid most of New Marrakesh’s downtown streets. She described what she was seeing to Ewan, wishing she could show it to him. Technically, she could have, but she was afraid to transition him halfway between worlds, lest she somehow infect him with threshold syndrome and make him a target, too.

Describing it would just have to do for the moment.

They spent the next almost-hour walking down toward those streets, which were still nearly completely deserted. The sun was still high in the sky and Jack was suddenly very glad that Ewan had shown her how to wind a proper Amazigh tagelmust around her head; it kept the glare away from her eyes in addition to partly obscuring her face.

“You make a surprisingly convincing boy,” Ewan told her as they walked.

“Really? How come?” Her hair under the tagelmust was still short, of course, just starting to grow longer than was considered a “boy cut” back on Deckard’s World. But other than that, and using bandages to flatten her small breasts against her chest when she had changed, she wasn’t sure what he found so convincing besides dressing in his years-old castoffs.

“I think it’s the way you walk. You don’t normally walk like this. It’s…”

“Oh! Yeah, I watched the way Riddick walked.” She hadn’t been consciously aware that she had slipped into her Riddick imitation, but she realized in that moment that she’d also dropped her speaking voice by a full octave.

The only one she hadn’t been able to fool with the imitation, she thought ruefully, had been Riddick himself.

“You really ran with him, didn’t you? Not as his hostage.” There was no judgment in Ewan’s voice, just curiosity.

“I was never his hostage. He was… nothing like you’d expect.”

“What was he like?”

That was, Jack thought, a good question. She remembered him luring Fry closer and closer to him, his voice a teasing purr, before lunging up out of his seat, held back just inches from her by his chains, to see if she would flinch. Testing her mettle, Jack thought, testing whether she’d be brave enough to face down the real threats on that treacherous, desolate world. She remembered him telling Shazza how they could use the skiff, which the New Australian woman had noted wasn’t a Star Jumper, to flag down the next transport that came through that node in the shipping lanes.

Stick out a thumb. Bound to get picked up… Somehow, she’d skipped telling Kyra that part of the story. She’d have to fill that in for her.

“Pretty self-contained, I guess,” she told Ewan. “I was trying to learn how to walk and talk like a guy well enough to fool everybody, so I followed him around for a while, figuring out how to act like him. He spent that whole time exploring the mining settlement, looking at everything the people’d left behind when they disappeared. He knew they’d all been killed, and told us so, way before we found any bodies.”

“So he was honest with you. Volunteered information.”

“Yeah. Johns—the merc who’d captured him—was lying to all of us the whole time about a lot of things, but Riddick never lied to us. Not once.” She found herself chuckling suddenly. “The only thing I know for a fact he hid from anybody is that I was a girl and he knew it the whole time.”

But, she realized, he’d tried to forewarn her. After Johns had tried to play his little master-and-dog game with Riddick—“You’re missing the party! C’mon, boy!”—and walked away, Riddick had repeated the same words to her… minus the “boy.”

“I can see that. I looked up his record.” Ewan smiled at her expression of surprise. “He appears to have a… code, I guess, for lack of a better word. Maybe even an ethic. There’s a pattern in who he does and doesn’t kill. And aside from some insinuations your former hospital has attempted to make about his treatment of you—”

“All of which are horse shit,” Jack found herself snapping.

That seemed to amuse Ewan. He grinned and shook his head. “Aside from them, all the evidence points to the conclusion that you were probably quite safe around him. Given what I’ve read in the declassified portions of the Hunter-Gratzner crash story, you may have even been far safer with him than away from him.”

“He’s the reason I’m still alive,” Jack told him. “He saved my life several times. Even times when he could’ve just let me die and nobody would’ve blamed him, and things probably would’ve been easier for him if he had.”

“Then he truly was a friend,” Ewan agreed, before changing the subject. “How’s the water level on the other side?”

“Dropping, but the lower level of the hospital will still be flooded. We’ve got time to get into position.”

In the meantime, they took the comm to its designated location, a private garden grotto that Cedric had booked for the family’s exclusive use for the next two days. Jack tethered its bag to a bench in the garden, making sure that the tether was tightly knotted and straddled universes as well. If they needed to take the comm to another location and still keep it protected from Elsewhere’s waters, they could do so. There were no cameras in the space, hinting at one of the ways the grotto was probably used. No one and nothing would see what happened next.

“It’s time,” Jack told Ewan, turning to him.

He took a deep breath, just a tiny hint of nervousness in his eyes. “I’m ready.”

There was sand beneath their feet on the other side; it would be a smooth transition. Jack stepped closer and put her arms around Ewan, stretching her senses to encompass his shape—

—his shell?—

—and drawing both of them, gently, carefully, into Elsewhere, letting one world fade away and the other take its place. She felt his heart speed up against her ear.

“Baraka…”

Now, for the first time, Ewan would be able to see the things she had described to him, the world on the other side of a threshold few could cross. He would see the rolling surf, still retreating from the sloping plain of sand and rock that corresponded with New Marrakesh’s downtown. Off to the northwest, the sun glittered on the hull of the Scarlet Matador, marking the location of the devastated spaceport. Nearer…

She took her binoculars out of her pack and focused on the area where the hospital building, in U1, was visible to her as a faint outline. Something had begun emerging from the water. This was going to be creepy as fuck.

“C’mon,” she said to Ewan, hoping he wouldn’t be too horrified when he saw it, too.

They had almost reached the morgue when he gasped beside her, an appalled look on his face.

The bodies floated in the air, at different levels above the glistening sand, all eighteen of them. Five appeared to be hovering vertically, toes just inches above the beach, while the rest were perfectly horizontal. Back in U1, she knew, they were resting in cold lockers in multiple rooms, draped by shrouds and tagged with identifying information. On the Elsewhere side, they were undraped, untagged… and nauseatingly putrescent. Bone showed in many places where passing fish had nibbled during high tides. Her cousin Joey would have loved a horror vid with visuals like these… as long as he couldn’t smell them. Jack suddenly wished she’d thought to bring nose plugs. Next to her, Ewan made a retching sound.

“What the hell happened to them?” he asked. “They’re supposed to be refrigerated!”

“They are,” Jack told him. “On the U1 side. Over here, they’ve been exposed to the elements for the last two and a half weeks.” She shifted her vision enough to see what they looked like in U1. The walls of the cold lockers blocked her view of most of them, but five were hanging from hooks in a separate room, shrouded in plastic wrappings. “They look frozen over there. I think someone’s been trying to stop the decay with no idea why it’s progressing so quickly.”

She hadn’t expected it to be this bad, but she really should have. Fortunately, the thought of touching corpses had already been bad enough; she’d brought two pairs of thick rubber gloves, one sized for her hands and one for Ewan’s, with her. Ewan, she knew, was carrying eighteen proper white funeral shrouds in his pack.

Regardless of his beliefs or hers, he’d told her, the bodies should be treated in a way that would respect their lost owners, whatever their creeds had been. He’d acquired a clandestine copy of the Matador’s passenger manifest and had the religious affiliations of every passenger who had drowned. He knew which prayers to say over them if they were Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish, or even, in two cases, Buddhist or Hindu, and intended to send them on their way properly upon the shores of Elsewhere, once Jack stole all of them from the morgue of U1.

So let’s do it already…

One by one, trying to breathe through her mouth against the terrible stench of decay, Jack reached out and put her gloved hands on each body, telling Ewan the name on its tag before pulling it the rest of the way into Elsewhere. The moment it was released from U1’s hold, it fell to the wet sand, now half-frozen and—mostly—odorless. The flesh cratered in places where parts that had remained whole in U1 sagged over the gruesome cavities that had developed in Elsewhere.

I did wonder what would happen if a shark from Elsewhere tried to make a meal out of me… The answer was far more disturbing than she’d expected.

It took an hour. An hour she knew she would desperately want to forget forever. She would, she thought, probably have nightmares about this day for a long time.

Jack did the hanging bodies last, since their disappearances would be the easiest to notice. The last of them tried to topple onto her, which gave her a few really bad moments while Ewan held her, murmuring soothingly and stroking her shuddering back.

He had followed her as she worked, draping each body in a shroud, arranging them to face eastward if they were Muslim, and speaking prayers in different languages—Arabic, Latin, English, Hebrew, Khmer, or Hindi—over them depending on which name she had given him for each one. As he was finishing with the last ones, Jack walked over to a strange multicolored cube that hovered, untethered, in part of the space that the morgue occupied in U1.

Their personal effects, she realized as she got closer. All stuffed into a compartment on the other side…

Those definitely had to go, too.

A moment later, all of those items had fallen and scattered onto the beach of Elsewhere. Clothes, that had probably been stuffed in now-empty plastic pouches in U1; jewelry; wallets and purses; corroded comms and chronos; all the little things that eighteen people had had with them first in cryo and then in the hospital, before they had been betrayed by the Quintessa Corporation and left to die horrible deaths…

Quintessa can’t have any of it.

Had any other artifacts been left behind? There didn’t appear to be anything else straddling ’verses in or around the hospital… aside from a pair of expensive-looking earrings and a large wad of cash she spotted and recovered from within an orderly’s nearby locker and dropped onto the sand. She pulled out her binoculars from her pack again, training them on the spaces occupied by first Mansour Plaza and then Othman Tower. Nothing appeared to float incongruously in those spaces. She would take her higher-powered telescope to the roof of the Meziane house to verify it when they got back, but she was almost certain she’d gotten everything. The Quintessa Corporation wouldn’t be able to analyze any of the physical objects that had been straddling universes. Not now.

Except, she suddenly realized, her heart sinking, one very large one…

“Fuck. I have to move the Scarlet Matador,” she groaned.

It was nearly a two-hour walk across the drying sand.

“Are you up for this?” Ewan asked as they hiked closer and closer. “Takama and Dihya have both talked about how you were almost completely wiped out from transitioning those two shuttles back and forth. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“I transitioned them really fast,” Jack said, aware that she was whistling in the dark. “I’m going to do this one slowly. Pull it over here a little at a time. It’ll help that it’s already halfway in Elsewhere.”

“It’s huge, though.”

“I can’t leave it connected to U1. Not now. You’re sure the cryo-tubes were returned to it?” Tracking down nearly two hundred cryo-tubes felt like it would be a far more daunting task than moving the ship.

“That’s what the reports said,” he told her. “Once the tubes were vacated, they were returned to the ship to be quarantined with the rest of its contents. The logs said nobody has entered since. I’m sure the Quintessa Corporation is planning on confiscating it next, though.”

“Bringing me back to my point,” Jack told him. “I… this is crazy, and I could be dead wrong about it, but I don’t think they know what’s in U322A. Your brother, when he was talking to the flight crew back when they first called him… he said that this was the first Level Five Incident on that Star Jump. If we cut them off from accessing anything directly connected to Elsewhere, I don’t think they can get to it on their own. Not without actually using an Isomorph Drive to open a new path.”

“That’s a lot of supposition,” Ewan observed.

“Maybe. But at least I’m not gonna make it any easier for them.” She wished she could make it not merely difficult but painful for them, after all the pain they’d inflicted on others.

“Just promise me that you’ll stop if it gets to be too much.”

She promised, but she wasn’t sure he believed her. She wasn’t sure she believed her, either.

She paused, briefly, to check whether her Ghost Codes still worked with the ship. Once her tablet confirmed the connection—and she had to briefly make it straddle ’verses to get the connection strong enough—she sent a few instructions to the ship before they entered the range of its now-deactivated exterior sensors. None of the cameras that could still see into Elsewhere would record anything unusual, and any cameras covering the ship in U1 were irrelevant.

It was just a few hours over eleven Tangiers Prime days since the Scarlet Matador had touched down. On the U1 side, it looked almost pristine… at least, on the side facing away from the shuttle explosion. In Elsewhere, seaweed coated many of its surfaces and barnacles had begun to grow. In its shade, creatures that looked eerily like Cambrian fossils Jack had once seen in a museum rested and trundled through the sand. Some of the metal surfaces were beginning to corrode. In a few years, Jack thought, the Matador would just be a strange reef on the beach of Elsewhere, sinking into the sand more each time the tide came through until it settled against rock… once it was released from the anchors and platforms of U1.

She put her hand on one of the struts and closed her eyes, feeling it, feeling its existence in both universes, feeling its shape—

—its shell, this is only an empty shell, a shape is so much more…—

—and sensing its boundaries.

She began to call it, and everything within it, home.

Slowly, little by little, she broke down the hold that U1 had on the massive spacecraft, aware that Ewan had moved to stand close behind her at some point, chest against her back, and had his arm around her waist. Bit by bit, she pulled it more and more of the way into Elsewhere, letting it begin to fade from the other ’verse altogether.

Except for one part. One part refused to budge, refused to let go of the other ’verse. One part was obstinately staying anchored.

She opened her eyes, focusing on what was happening in U1, aware that she was leaning back against Ewan and he had both arms around her now.

Alarms were sounding in that other world. People in ground crew gear and security uniforms were running toward the landing site, pointing and shouting. She could see a figure in flowing white garments racing with them—

The envoy. And around her, Jack could see, there was darkness. Some terrible darkness that inhabited the same space the envoy did, hidden by her white garments and the fact that human eyes weren’t made to see such hideous abysses in the fabric of reality…

The envoy was staring at one part of the Matador as she ran.

The rest, Jack felt as a small shockwave passed through her, had just finished crossing the threshold into Elsewhere. Back in U1, the anchors dropped to the ground with loud metallic crashes. Only one thing remained suspended in that space: a smallish metal box.

A box that refused to relinquish its grip on U1.

Her breath quickening, Jack focused all of her attention and energy on it, willing it to cross from U1 to Elsewhere—

—Is it already in Elsewhere?—

—and vanish from the other world. It resisted, feeling inert and far too dense, too complex, for something as simple as a cube…

She shifted her focus, pushing at it, willing it to relinquish its connection to U1, no matter where else it was…

Little larva, what are you doing?

The envoy was hurrying toward it, one hand outstretched.

I gotta get it out of there before she gets to it…

No! they cried out in her head. You are not ready!

She could feel it slowly, grudgingly beginning to shift, its ties to U1 almost imperceptibly thinning.

Little larva, you must stop! Stop now!

“Tislilel, what in God’s name…?” Ewan gasped at the same moment, echoing them without knowing. “Stop! Stop now!”

She couldn’t. Not yet. She was almost there. She couldn’t let the envoy reach it… She almost had it…

With a final, aggressive thrust, Jack shoved hard at the box with her mind and felt something snap, lashing back at her and into her. Blinding pain bloomed in her head.

In U1, the box vanished, startling a horrified scream out of the envoy.

Darkness engulfed Jack.

36.
Pathways to Pandemonium

By the time Kyra’s sedative wore off and she woke up, Jack had mostly recovered. She had spent the morning unpacking the suitcases that contained their possessions and putting them away, scattering their shells, coral, and driftwood around the room on free surfaces. She’d even gotten dressed, although part of her had wanted to burrow under the covers and hide from the universe. From all the universes. But going to sleep would have meant having to explain her unhappiness to inquisitive beings—entities? She really needed to come up with a name for them—and she couldn’t bring herself to face that yet, either.

“What’ve I been missing?” Kyra asked almost immediately.

“Sebby attempting to drive crickets into extinction. Breakfast.” The death of my dreams. Jack shrugged. “Not much else.”

“Ewan gave me broth for breakfast. How come even broth tastes so damned good here?” Kyra looked over at the IV drip. “What’s all this?”

“Fancy medicine to make you heal faster.”

“That eager to get rid of us, are they?” The amusement in Kyra’s voice belied her words.

“You remember that reception for Tomlin’s colleagues in the Service? The one Cedric mentioned at the end of the memorial?”

“Yeah?”

“They were planning on introducing you to everybody there and keeping Tomlin’s promise. They’re worried you won’t be well enough now, but I guess they’re trying to stack the deck for you. That stuff in the bags is expensive.”

“If they keep being this amazing, I may never leave— What is it? What’s wrong?” Kyra tried to sit up, grimaced, and lay back against her pillows. “Damn it…”

To keep her from trying again, Jack climbed onto the bed next to her. “I, uh…”

The concern on Kyra’s face was only growing, which just made it worse.

“The transport… to Furya… it’s…” The tears were trying to burst out of her. She struggled to hold them in, to find her voice. “It’s… leaving from… Helion…”

“Oh shit, Jack…” Kyra put her left hand behind Jack’s head and pulled her closer. “C’mere. My shoulder’s not stabbed…”

It took a while before she managed to get her sobs under control.

When she was cried out, feeling hollow and quiet, Kyra didn’t try to ask her what she was going to do. Jack would later realize that her sister understood exactly how lost she was already feeling and didn’t want to make it any worse by putting her on the spot. They lay there for a while, neither one feeling any need to fill the silence. Finally, though, Kyra spoke.

“That was quite some hug Ewan was giving you last night as they were wheeling me out. He hasn’t tried anything, has he?”

“What?” That surprised Jack out of her torpor. “No. It wasn’t like that. He’s nearly twice my age, anyway.”

“Good.” The look in Kyra’s eyes was far older than she was. “You just remember that, too. You look at him the way you looked at his older brother. And he was old enough to be your father, but I know that’s not what you were thinking about. I’ll bet you looked at Riddick the same way, didn’t you? You got a thing for older men, but I swear to God if anyone touches you—”

“He’d never.”

“He’d better not. I think he’s amazing, too, but he tries to mess with you and I will cut his dick off and make him eat it.”

“I believe you.” It didn’t surprise her, even a little, that it would be a sore point for Kyra, given what she’d been put through when she was still Jack’s age.

“Good. Don’t get me kicked outta here because I fucked up Cedric and Safiyya’s chance at having grandchildren.”

Now it was hard to keep a straight face. “I will keep it in my pants, I swear.”

An impish sparkle appeared in Kyra’s eyes. “Nuh uh. I told you, I’ll make him eat ‘it.’”

And just like that, Kyra had lifted all of the heaviness off of her. They didn’t laugh long, but the darkness had receded.

“We’ve got some time to kill,” Kyra said. “Wanna tell me more of Riddick’s story?”

Was it Riddick’s story? Well, if that was how Kyra thought of it… “Sure. You remember where we left off?”

“I was drifting in and out. Um… last thing I remember for sure was him showing Fry his eyes and you asking him ‘how do I get eyes like that?’”

“Where the hell can I get eyes like that?” Jack thought, but didn’t correct her sister.

She settled down next to Kyra, instead, and got comfortable.

“Yeah. He turned and looked at me and said, ‘you gotta kill a few people.’ Like he was talking about pulling a prank. And me, I was all bluster, trying to impress him, so I said ‘okay, I can do it!’”

In retrospect, part of her wished she’d been wrong about that.

“Yeah, now I remember, and he said… something about being sent to a slam…”

“‘Where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again,’” Jack said, dropping her voice to the lowest part of its register and making it a little growly. It wasn’t a bad imitation, if she did say so herself. “‘You dig up a doctor, and you pay him twenty menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs.’”

It was fun, she thought, reproducing the way Riddick had said it, and his choices of which words to emphasize. She’d wondered for a moment if he was from Deckard’s World, himself, when he’d mentioned the Kools; one of her classmates had bragged about smoking that very brand, which was hundreds of years old.

“Damn, that sounds like it’d hurt.”

“Yeah.”

Jack had looked up the procedure while she was living with the al-Walids; it was dangerous and incredibly painful, and many of the people who had it done went blind. But in a place like “the Pit,” she supposed, the risk was a necessary one.

“I asked him if it was so he could see who was sneaking up on him in the dark, and he said ‘exactly!’ But that was when Fry ordered me to leave. Nobody wanted me to talk to him. I heard him call me a ‘cute kid,’ though…”

It suddenly struck her that Riddick had never once referred to her as a boy. Had he known, the whole time, what she really was? Had he been abetting her secret with even his choice of words? Up until he’d finally outed her, anyway…

“So he didn’t kill Zeke?” Kyra asked.

“Shazza sure thought he did, but he said it wasn’t him. He told Fry that there was something else we needed to worry about instead. I think Fry wanted to prove he was lying…”

The story spun out as they lay on the bed, side by side. She described Fry going into the hole, discovering that it opened into a cave system, and everyone waiting for her to come back… then the strange cries, sounding like Fry’s voice, that Jack had started to hear coming through the weird mineral formations nearby… and the terrifying discovery that something lived underground and had been on the verge of killing Fry before Jack had managed to get Imam and Johns to listen to the voice on the wind. Afterward, they had released Riddick and struck a deal with him, letting him join their party. But still refusing to allow Jack to talk to him.

“It was okay, though. They took us to this mining encampment they’d found, and there were all these cool buildings to explore.”

As the second-youngest of the survivors, exploration had been the official job she had been given by Fry, Johns, and Shazza. She wasn’t even supposed to look for anything specific; just go looking. As Audrey, she had long ago come to understand what that kind of instruction really meant: The grown-ups are busy. Stay out of the way.

Run along and play, little girl.

Only long practice had allowed her to hide her resentment at that. But, at least, as the second-youngest of the survivors, she hadn’t been entirely alone.

“Ali knew maybe six words of English, which was twice as much as I knew of Arabic, but we went off together to check out the houses. I found this broken pair of welding goggles in one of them, almost like the ones Riddick took from the Hunter-Gratzner when he escaped, and that’s when I got the idea that I could shave my head and imitate the biggest badass I’d ever seen…”

It had seemed so logical at the time. As if somehow a shaved head and goggles would transform her from a scrawny beanpole of a kid into… well, someone who didn’t have to worry about space station scum trying to proposition her or pull her into a dark corridor. Someone who wouldn’t wake up to find a filthy, sadistic merc straddling her with a knife to her throat…

I was so fucking naïve… It felt, at times, like ages had passed since then instead of roughly half a standard year.

It was the second time she’d gone through this part of the story with Kyra, and she found herself drawing in even more detail. Riddick, she told Kyra, had moved like a hunter… or a tracker… through the settlement, periodically pausing to unearth and examine objects that had, until then, been lost in the dust. Knowing what she did now but hadn’t understood then, she could see much more clearly what he had to have been seeing as he studied them.

“Everything was really old, like decades had gone by since anybody had touched them. And it wasn’t the kind of stuff people just left lying around, either. It was the kind of stuff that gets dropped, and nobody bothers to pick up, when there’s a panic on. He found a pair of eyeglasses with a cracked lens at one point, just lying in the middle of a road. The houses were like that, too. All the things you’d put away or take with you, if you were planning to leave, were still sitting out.”

“You don’t really think they left their with clothes on the hooks, photos on the shelves?”

In retrospect, she had seen Riddick’s tension rising, too, and the way an increasing level of caution and—battle readiness?—had begun to characterize the way he walked. He’d walked not like someone who was looking for a fight, but someone who expected one at any second.

Was that the walk she had begun imitating? Huh.

Jack was aware that she still wasn’t telling the story entirely truthfully. She had already recharacterized Paris as a mentor he’d never been, excusing away his retreat to the periphery of her story by drawing on the genuine truth that Shazza had essentially adopted her on the spot after the crash and had needed her more than ever once Zeke died. Now, though, she couldn’t quite tell the story right where Ali was concerned. She hadn’t managed to the first time through, either.

There had been a moment, when they had realized that Riddick was heading for a large building she would later remember with a shudder as the Coring Room, when mischievous glee had lit up both of their faces and they came to the unspoken mutual decision to get there first. Neither of them had quite understood the tension that was humming through Riddick’s frame by then, or why it might be a bad move to head for a building before he had cleared it. Jack understood now—and her story reflected that knowledge—that Riddick was following a trail, and that he knew the pandemonium that had overcome the settlement was leading straight to that building. It was the worst possible time to get ahead of him.

Or maybe part of Jack had realized. She hadn’t even tried to go inside, after all. Instead, she had wanted to climb up on top of the building to check out the odd, lumpy structure hidden beneath a tarp, but Ali had wanted to go into the building itself. He’d spotted a way in. She hadn’t known that at the time, hadn’t understood what he was saying to her in Arabic, although now, when she recalled his words after three months of immersion in his language, every word was horribly clear: this way! There’s a hole in one of the panels that we can fit through! He had shrugged and gone his own way when she’d shaken her head and pointed at the roof. She had never seen him—alive—again.

Even months later, the guilt of that was too gut-twistingly intense to explore. The therapists at the hospital would undoubtedly have told her that it was something she needed to come to terms with, needed to talk her way through. Maybe they were even right, but this wasn’t the time. She was telling Kyra the story, and that still-raw pain wasn’t something that would help distract her sister from hers. So the sense of blithe adventure that she’d briefly felt at the time prevailed. When Riddick pulled the tarp away from the roof, catching her spying on him, and had simply called to her to come with him—“You’re missing the party, come on!”—she had followed him without even a thought for Ali’s whereabouts.

Kyra didn’t need to hear just how much that had torn her up afterward. She didn’t need to know, either, that Riddick had seemed fully aware of where Ali must have gone but hadn’t seemed to particularly care, in spite of already knowing that the Coring Room was the most dangerous place in the settlement. The story Jack was telling was meant to soothe and entertain, not wallow in guilt or expose the first moment she began to doubt her hero.

Kyra made it through Ali’s death this time, all the way to the start of the eclipse, before she began to nod off. Jack kept the story going for a while longer, until her sister began to snore lightly, before she let the tale drop. She’d continue it later, probably restarting with the beginning of the eclipse again.

Climbing off of the bed, she went into the bathroom and washed up, erasing the last evidence of her crying jags. She’d have to figure something out, and soon.

But what was there to figure out, exactly? Her pathway to Furya had closed, barring a half-year wait and possibly a return to a world where she was actively being sought by the authorities. Unless she wanted to give into temptation and surrender her old life altogether, breaking her parents’ hearts in the process, there was only one place left to go.

Back to Deckard’s World. Back to her mother and Alvin the Asshole.

Back to being Audrey MacNamera. That was what she wanted, though, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

The chrono said it was thirteen a.m., the equivalent of mid-afternoon for one of Tangiers’ morning-days. Nine hours until high noon, eight hours until Elsewhere’s high tide, five hours until most people retired to sleep, and just a little over two hours until the waters of Elsewhere began to rise above sea level. She realized she was hungry. She’d have something to eat and then figure out which transports might take her back to Deckard’s World, and if there were any she could take that didn’t require getting back into Cryo. The prospect of ever being frozen again made her shudder.

Sebby raced over to her as soon as she entered the dining room. She spent a long moment cuddling him, walking over and peeking into the high tub he’d been playing in. It was completely empty now, aside from some bits of cricket exoskeleton and several of Sebby’s own droppings.

What, she suddenly wondered, was she going to do about him when she left?

Maybe the Tomlin-Meziane family would want to keep him. Maybe, if Kyra stayed with them and pursued a military career, he’d be happy being her companion.

If she can, Jack thought with a shiver. They still needed to talk about whether their mere presence was putting a bulls-eye on everyone they loved here.

Jack was able to put together a simple but filling lunch using the fruits, breads, cheeses, and khlii set out beneath protective screens on the dining room table. A carafe of orange juice had also been left out. She suspected that someone had been thinking of her, specifically, although the quantity of food available hinted that other members of the family were inclined to stop by for snacks as well.

Sebby, of course, began demanding olives. He was happy to sample the other foods as well, spitting out the bread and dates but enthusiastically devouring goat cheese and khlii in addition to every olive he could snag. Jack was finishing up, and tidying up after both of them, when Ewan appeared in one of the doorways.

“I was hoping I’d find you here,” he said.

His demeanor was different. This was not El Krim’s grieving younger brother or the protective rescuer of the night before. He seemed agitated. He seemed, she realized, most like the Ewan who had burst through her apartment door, alongside his father, with his gun drawn.

“What’s wrong?”

He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and releasing it. “You know how you were concerned about whether the envoy ever touched any of the Matador passengers? She’s about to get her chance. Usadden called me. The morgue still has the bodies of the eighteen people who died during the first high tide… but the Quintessa Corporation just filed paperwork to take custody of all of them.”

Fuck me running, Jack thought, going cold. “When?”

“He’s buying us time. He told them the bodies are scattered throughout the facility and he’ll need a full Tangiers day to get the paperwork in order. They’re still identifying victims from the blast, so he’s not actually lying. He’s told them the earliest they can do a pickup is fifteen am tomorrow.”

“Good,” Jack said. A familiar light sensation had filled her chest and her mind was racing. “Do you know the location of the morgue? Is it at the hospital downtown?”

Downtown was ten meters above sea level, she thought, her mind whirling through calculations.

“Yes.”

“Is it on the ground level? Higher? Lower?” It was happening to her again. She could see the path she needed to walk. The feeling was both exhilarating and terrifying.

“One level below ground level.”

The same level as the parking garage where she and Kyra had come out. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

“Good. The tide in Elsewhere will leave downtown at roughly 4:15 pm. We’re leaving here at 3 pm. If you have any plans for this evening-day, cancel them. Damn it, I wish Kyra could be in on this—”

Fuck. She’d said her sister’s real name out loud. She glanced at Ewan. He didn’t look even a little confused.

I just confirmed something he already knew, she realized, heart lurching. How much did that mean he knew about her?

“I will endeavor to be a suitable proxy,” he told her, and she had the feeling he was hiding a smile.

Fuck it. Whether he thought of her as Tislilel, or Jack B. Badd, or P. Finch, or Jane Doe 7439, or her newest alias, Marianne Tepper, it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter if he knew she was really Audrey MacNamera. He knew how to keep a secret. All that mattered was that he had her back.

“Good, because you and me… we’re about to pull a heist. And you’re gonna get to visit Elsewhere to help me do it.”

35.
A Box with Infinite Chambers

Kyra didn’t manage to fall back asleep until after Jack had narrated up to Ali’s death and funeral, shortly before Fry had told everyone about the coming eclipse. Jack lay beside her, watching her sleep, until she was sure that her dreams weren’t being disturbed. Then she closed her eyes and let sleep reclaim her.

Little larva? May we speak to you now?

“Yes,” she told them, unsurprised to find herself floating in the night sky once more. This seemed to be where they centered themselves: in the darkness, surrounded by stars.

The story you told. Is it true?

“It is, yeah.” Most of it, anyway. She had changed a few things as she went, trying to make it sound like she had met Paris Ogilvie well before the crash, in keeping with her prior claims to Kyra that he was the one who had mentored her in breaking security systems rather than her father unknowingly doing so. She’d worked in all of the things he’d told her about himself after the crash as if they were things she’d learned while traveling with him before boarding the Hunter-Gratzner.

“I’ve been to Earth eleven times now,” he’d told her as he dug through his stash and pocketed tins of caviar, reluctantly offering her one for her own pocket. “Mostly, I’ve stayed in the Western hemisphere. That’s the safest side. But it’s still risky. There are radiation storms even there. And all the best museums and estates have security systems that are still protecting their collections, even now. I almost got fried by a positron screen doing the Smithsonian job…”

At the time, Jack had the sense that he wanted to recruit her, to have her “run with” him for real. He’d been planning his biggest heist yet and was eager to talk about it: taking a crack at the Louvre and the Mona Lisa.

“Nobody’s survived that yet. They say it’s impenetrable. But I found some old documents about the security system, things nobody else has ever seen. I think I can get to her. And if not…” He’d raised a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conte in a toast, taking a long pull and offering the bottle to her. “Dying in the City of Light, that I was named after? It can’t get more poetic than that.”

Jack had taken a small sip of the wine. It wasn’t terrible, but it just tasted halfway between spoiled grape juice and vinegar to her. She had yet to understand why so many people fussed over it.

No one else in the group seemed to take Paris all that seriously, especially when it became clear that he fancied himself a twenty-sixth century Indiana Jones.

“A male Lara Croft, thank you very much,” he’d said when she made the comparison, “not that crass American…” Jack had ended up wondering if he realized that both adventurers had been fictional.

But she had been to some of the holo-museums that reproduced long-lost Earth artifacts, and she had recognized many of the items in Paris’s storage bay. As improbable as it seemed, that gawky, snobbish man really had been, more or less, the wayfaring tomb raider he claimed he was. With a pang of regret, she found herself wishing she had hung onto the boomerang she’d carried for a while. From the British Museum on Earth, it had traveled to an unknown world and had been lost forever. She knew exactly where she’d dropped it after the eclipse, but it might as well have been left in another universe.

They, she suddenly realized, were observing her memories, which she’d conjured into their night sky as she thought of them.

He could break into locked places? they asked.

“Some, yeah,” she told them. “Depending on the kind of lock.”

And you know how to do this, too?

“Yeah. Again, just some of the time. Some locks are harder than others. I’m still learning.” She really wasn’t supposed to be learning anything of the kind, but somehow her life kept taking a turn toward the criminal.

It had been an act of desperation that had led Jack to try to pick Sharon Montgomery’s pocket while waiting for the Hunter-Gratzner to arrive on Vasenji Station. She’d run out of money, none of her father’s security systems were used on the station’s commercial levels, and she was starting to get a little crazy with hunger. She’d done a terrible job of it and, even before her target had turned to look at her, John Ezekiel had her in a headlock.

“Zeke,” Shazza had said, “let the poor kid go.”

“Are you barmy? This little shit tried to steal your wallet.”

“I know, but look at ’im. Skin and bones, he is. When’s the last time you ate, yeah?”

It had been the beginning of a strange few days. Shazza had immediately figured out that she was a girl but had kept that a secret even from Zeke. But if Jack was going to tramp the space lanes, Shazza had announced, “he” was going to do it right.

Starting with how to pick pockets properly.

The hapless and still annoyed Zeke had found himself volunteered to be Jack’s “mark,” as she practiced identifying where people kept their valuables and lifting them undetected. Shazza had played “mark” as well, and had periodically made Jack play the role too, so she could “see how it’s done” and learn how to spot other thieves in a crowd and avoid their light fingers. By the time the Hunter-Gratzner had arrived, the couple had amusedly turned her loose on a few crowds and critiqued her successes and failures until she was, in Shazza’s words, “a certified pro” and it was time to part ways.

She hadn’t actually told them that she was joining them on the ship. They’d only discovered that when they broke open her cryo-tube and freed her in the aftermath of the crash.

“Cripes, kid,” Shazza had said, helping her up off of the floor. “If you’d told me you were planning on stowing away on this beast, I’d’ve bought you a ticket.”

“You need ID to board the normal way,” she’d answered, startling a rare guffaw out of Zeke.

They had also taught her how to pick locks.

These locks… they are mechanical in nature. Do you know how to open other kinds?

“Like what?” she asked, instantly regretting it. She had been thinking about her father’s security systems. They were thinking of something else altogether.

It was, at first glance, a cube, with no breaks in any of its surfaces. But it had far too many surfaces, more and more the longer she looked at it, infinite iterations of itself, dropping deeper and deeper down into—

“Stop, stop I can’t—”

We are sorry, little larva. We forgot how small you still are.

“I’m sorry too,” Jack found herself saying. “I just… I can’t see that far into…”

We understand. You must grow more first. When you hatch into your six-shape, we will show you.

Well, that wasn’t creepy or anything…

They let her sleep for real after that, eavesdropping on her dreams but letting them flow wherever her unconscious mind would take them. Later, she dreamt about being Audrey, sneaking downstairs with her cousins in the middle of the night to watch an antique vid they had been forbidden to see, a gory and disturbing story about a puzzle box that opened doors to other worlds—

She woke up gasping, feeling like she was on the brink of understanding something important.

…something about an old Earth vid called Hellraiser?…

It was gone.

Night, on Tangiers Prime, was long even at the height of summer; most people rose in the dark to begin their mornings. Jack climbed out of bed and picked up her tablet, which she vaguely remembered setting on the guest room’s elegant dresser the night before. Its chrono said that it was a little after six a.m. The sun would rise in another hour or so, which almost felt normal for a moment until she remembered that it had set almost thirteen hours earlier and would remain in the sky for nearly thirty hours once it rose. That was summer in New Marrakesh; most people had wakened two or more hours earlier still and were accustomed to the first few hours of their morning-day being spent in darkness. Mid-winter, Takama had told her when they first met, meant thirty hours of darkness at a time for an entire week, with the sun only rising a few hours before the noon sleep period began and setting just a few hours after everyone woke for the evening-day.

She wasn’t sure how long she had slept, though. She still felt tired, but far too alert and agitated to try to sleep again yet. There was a word tickling at the back of her mind, probably from her spelling bee days, that felt like it had something to do with her dreams. Apeirochoron?

She looked it up on the tablet.

Apeirochoron noun, sing. [mathematics] /əˈpɪr.ɑˈkɔːr.ɑːn/
An n-polytope cube of infinite dimensions.
From άπειρος (ápeiros – “infinite”) + χώρος (chóros – “space, room”)

Was that what they had been trying to show her in her dream? It felt like it was.

But why?

She switched off the tablet and set it down when she heard a soft knock on the door, grabbing up the robe that had been set out for her and slipping it on in a hurry. She wasn’t entirely sure what the Meziane family’s views on bed attire were, but it was something her parents had argued about during family gatherings. She wouldn’t take any chances.

Kyra was still asleep, so she walked over to the door and opened it rather than calling out a come in. Tafrara and Ewan were waiting outside.

The first thing Tafrara did was give her a hug. “I’m so glad you’re safe. I’m sorry I didn’t stay to see you when you arrived.”

“That’s okay. Thank you,” Jack said, hugging her back. Ewan, she noticed, was carrying his field kit. “K—Dihya’s not awake yet.”

“Really? I didn’t think the sedative would last so long.” Concern appeared on his face.

“We, uh… had a problem with the entities. They kept trying to talk to her instead of letting her sleep.” Jack really needed to find a better name for those creatures.

“The… ‘entities?’” Tafrara asked, her expression a little dubious.

“It appears,” Ewan explained, “that Dihya and Tislilel’s comings and goings across universes have attracted the attention of other beings who can do something similar. And who try to communicate with them when they sleep. Is Dihya alright?”

“I managed to get them to shut up and leave her alone,” Jack said with a nod. “But she wasn’t ready to try sleeping again for a while.”

“They must’ve really upset her to break through that sedative so early on. Do you mind if I take a look at her?” He hadn’t tried to brush past her, waiting instead to be invited in.

“Please,” she said, moving aside for him. He flashed her a knee-quaking smile on his way past. Something about the room, she suddenly realized, felt off. “Where’s Sebby?”

“Your little pet?” Tafrara smiled. “He’s downstairs. He started scrabbling at the door a few hours ago. We think he was trying to find something to hunt. So Izil went to the night market and brought back a tub of feeder crickets, and he has been having the best time.”

“He’s been absolutely hilarious,” Ewan added softly, moving aside the covers to check Kyra’s bandages. Kyra’s hand flashed out, catching his wrist, and then relaxed.

“G’morning,” she said, still half-asleep.

“Good morning, Dihya,” he replied, struggling to hide a grin. “I think you just passed your reflex test. How are you feeling?”

“Sore.”

“I have something that’ll help with that.”

“And hungry,” Kyra added.

“That’s a very good sign indeed. We’ll have something brought up to you right away. Tafrara, could you…?”

“Of course, Zdan. Come on,” Tafrara said, tugging at the sleeve of Jack’s robe. “Let’s get you something to eat, too.”

Tafrara led her down two flights of steps to the ground level, and out into the courtyard she’d passed through the previous day. The tide in Elsewhere had receded, Jack noticed; on that side, wan moonlight was sparkling over a barren garden of gleaming stone, wet sand, and seaweed, casting long shadows toward the west. In both worlds, above her, the sky had shifted from black to a dark, intense royal blue as the sun approached the eastern horizon. The air was cool and perfumed with the scent of hundreds of blossoms in the courtyard garden.

“It’s so beautiful,” Jack whispered.

“Thank you,” Tafrara said with a smile. “It’s been a project of mine for many years now.”

“You did all this?”

“Well, not all, but I designed a good deal of the garden layouts.” Tafrara led her across the courtyard and into a brightly-lit room on the other side.

Reeeeeeeeeee! It sounded different from the night before, not at all distressed. Jack followed the sound and spotted a large, high-sided storage tub, its lid set aside.

“Here she is now,” Cedric said, grinning. “You’re gonna love what your little fella’s been up to.”

Jack leaned over the tub and looked in on—

Total destruction. A cricket’s version of a summer disaster vid.

Not a single cricket was chirping. The surviving few were apparently trying to stay as quiet as they could while Sebby, pincers clattering enthusiastically, chased after them and stuffed them into his little mandibles. He wasn’t bothering to be especially tidy, and bits of cricket were everywhere in the tub.

“Oh wow,” she found herself laughing.

“It’s cricket Armageddon in there,” Cedric chuckled. “He’s finished off almost the whole lot.”

“Now I wonder if we’ve been underfeeding him,” Jack said, feeling a little rueful.

“If you have,” Cedric said, rising from the dining table she’d barely registered and pulling a seat out for her, “we’ll set that right soon enough.”

“You should have seen him pouncing them,” Safiyya said, entering the room with a large tray. “He’s like a kitten.”

Safiyya’s tray had a variety of traditional Moroccan breakfast foods on it; Jack suspected that Takama had told her which ones were her favorites. Soon she was settled at the table, dipping baghrir pancakes into amlou and scooping up cumin-seasoned fried eggs and khlii with a slice of khobz. Nearby, she could hear Sebby’s enthusiastic, almost ultrasonic mini-shrieks as he stalked his prey.

I could get used to this…

There were very rare moments—and this, Jack realized, was one of them—when the urge to stop her madcap voyage across the stars became intense. If she said she wanted to stay here, she knew, the Tomlin-Meziane family would welcome her into their fold, accepting her exactly as she was. She would become Tislilel Meziane, adopted daughter of Cedric and Safiyya, or maybe of Takama, youngest sister—or cousin—of Tafrara, Ewan Zdan, and Dihya… and the late Gavin Brahim. She would never be Jack B. Badd or Audrey MacNamera again… and she would never need to use the false ID she had created for her journey onward. She would learn to live by the unique rhythms of a world with 44 hours in its day and an alternate version with three moons and enormous high tides, and she could explore two sets of landscapes wherever she went. And although she could probably never have the man she longed for most of all right now, one day she could find someone almost or just as wonderful in the tribe, or at an engagement Moussem, and make a new family of her own…

Could she really do that?

Her parents, she thought with a pang of guilt, would believe she had died somewhere. Maybe they’d even suspect she’d died in the Hunter-Gratzner crash, but they would never know the truth of what had happened to her. Audrey MacNamera would stay in the “missing” category for a few more years and then be declared dead. Her memorial would have no coffin or urn, just a picture of a naïve young girl with long blonde hair who had vanished one day without a trace. Memories of who she had been and what she had done in her brief life on Deckard’s World would already have faded by then. There would be hardly any stories for anyone to tell about the quiet, studious girl who had lived too far away from her school friends and other children her age and had made do with books and cats for companions, who never got into any trouble unless she was with her cousins—and those stories would really be about them, not her—and whose adventures had almost all been vicarious until then…

Could she really do that to them?

Her heart twisted as she realized that there was no way she could. As alluring as life with the Tomlin-Meziane family might be, and as much as she wanted to have any excuse to catch the light of Ewan’s smile… she could never do that to her family. Especially not after seeing just how torn up Tomlin’s death had left his.

“Are you all right in there?” Cedric asked.

Jack glanced up, trying too late to cover up the look of sadness that had crept over her face. “Um… yeah. Just… got a lot to think about.”

If I didn’t already have a father, I’d want you to be mine…

“Right,” Ewan said at that moment, entering the room. “That’s Dihya settled for the next few hours. She should sleep comfortably for a while. What do we want to do about the officers’ reception?”

“Bloody hell,” Cedric muttered. “I don’t think we dare postpone it. Certain people would want to know why, if we did. Well, we’ll see how she’s faring tomorrow evening. It’s still some sixty-odd hours away.”

“How Dihya’s faring?” Jack asked, momentarily confused.

“The plan was to introduce her to Gavin’s associates in the Service during the reception we scheduled just for them,” Cedric explained. “With that Quintessa bitch looking over our shoulders at the memorial, I couldn’t find a way to extend an invitation for a meet-an’-greet that she wouldn’t invite herself to, other than that. I do plan to keep Gavin’s promise to Dihya.”

Oh! Of course. Now it all made sense. “But now you’re worried she won’t be recovered in time.”

“That’s the worry,” Ewan agreed. “Well, we can work around it if we need to. I know some of them fairly well and can invite them over for dinner, or something.”

“How long is your leave?” Cedric asked.

“I have another week,” Ewan said, popping an olive into his mouth.

Just four more of Tangiers Prime’s long days, Jack realized, and Ewan would be back at the flight academy on Qamar. It was a struggle to keep her dismay off of her face. After the week ended…

She might never see him again.

It would only be another week from then until the transport to Furya arrived and, one way or another, she boarded it and left to reunite with her father. That was a rendezvous she had to keep. More than a year had gone by since she’d disappeared from Deckard’s World, and by now word had reached him that she was missing. She’d planned to beat the news of her disappearance to him, or at least arrive soon after. She couldn’t dally anymore. Which meant that, although she intended to spend the next two weeks immersing herself in this wonderful family, she would have to say goodbye to them all too soon. And goodbye to Ewan, possibly forever, even sooner.

Why did all of these things have to hurt so much?

A gentle hand on the back of her head drew her back to herself. Ewan was leaning forward, studying her face with concern. “Are you alright, Tislilel?”

She tried to manage a reassuring smile, but what appeared was probably pathetic and not reassuring at all. “It’s just… been a rough few weeks. I think maybe I’ll lie down for a while.”

She couldn’t tell them what she was feeling, not now… and could tell him least of all.

“Do you know the way back?”

Jack nodded, able to see it in her mind quite clearly. She only ever got lost in places she’d never been before, and only then if she hadn’t had a chance to map them out in advance or had been given faulty and outdated directions. But she could see every turn she and Tafrara had taken.

The sun hadn’t yet risen as she crossed the courtyard, but the sky had turned a vivid, deep turquoise blue and birds were muttering sleepily in the trees. Jack stopped for a moment to inhale the intoxicating scent of the space. She wanted to remember it forever, this magical garden that might, if only things had been different, have become her home.

She wondered if there were any flowers yet on Furya.

Kyra was sleeping again when Jack returned to their room. Ewan—or possibly his cousin Usadden—had set up an IV drip after she’d left. She looked up the contents of the bags on her tablet. Hydration fluids, mostly, but one small bag, on a timed drip feeding its contents into the other fluids, was a powerful healing accelerant. The tablet told her that it was rarely used because it was prohibitively expensive.

She was about to set the tablet back down when she noticed that she had a message. Or, more specifically, that her newest alias had a message.

Her pulse racing with sudden excitement, she opened it up.

Dear Ms. Tepper,

We are pleased to inform you that you are one of the top candidates to join the crew of the Major Barbara on its upcoming voyage to the Catalan System…

Wait, what?

She had applied to go to Furya. The Major Barbara was supposed to be going to Furya.

She scanned the rest of the letter in growing confusion. The departure date was the same, although the ship was now scheduled to launch from New Fes.

But the destination had changed.

A terrible, cold, empty feeling was filling her as she used one of her Ghost Codes to infiltrate the shipping company’s comms system and snoop on the chatter of the last few days.

Oh. Of course. Of fucking course.

Due to the current difficult circumstances facing Tangiers Prime and particularly New Marrakesh, the planetary government has requested that all humanitarian aid supplies located within the system be reserved for the rescue and recovery efforts currently underway…

The aid packages originally marked for shipment to Furya had been reallocated for local use. The Major Barbara would instead carry construction equipment to Catalonia Seven. And the shipping company was in the middle of arranging a new supply mission to Furya, originating from—

“Helion Prime. Helion fucking Prime…” Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The tears won.

34.
An Inward-Facing Fortress

“How’d you do it?” Cedric asked Kyra, studying the smashed window.

Kyra looked over at him. The shots Ewan had given her had finally taken effect, and she no longer seemed to be in any pain but seemed extremely drowsy. Ewan, done treating her internal injuries, was closing up the gory slash in her skin. “Climbed out the west window in the bedroom. There’s a ledge outside. Went as fast I could ’til I got to the fire escape… out that window… ’n gave it a good, hard donkey kick…”

She started to lift her legs as if she was going to try to demonstrate, but hissed sharply as pain returned with the movement.

“Stay still, Dihya,” Ewan admonished, resting one gloved hand on her midriff. The other held the forceps he was using to suture her.

“Fuck, sorry,” Kyra muttered, grimacing.

“It was locked?” Cedric frowned when Kyra nodded. “So how did the mercenary get in?”

“He had one of these,” Jack said, taking the Master Key out of her pocket and holding it out to him.

Cedric took it and looked it over. “Even possessing one of these on Tangiers Prime is a felony. I suggest you let it join him.”

Damn. She’d kind of wanted to keep it. Taking it back, she sighed, shifted it to Elsewhere, and let it fall. She caught Cedric watching her with a suppressed look of wonder on his face.

I guess it does look just like magic, she thought, and not an accident of quantum physics.

While Ewan had continued to work on treating and closing Kyra’s wound, Takama had joined Safiyya and Lalla in efficiently packing up their possessions in the apartment, using their clothing, bedding, and the pillows and blankets they’d decorated with to cushion anything even slightly fragile. Cedric, meanwhile, had been diligently wiping down surfaces to remove all possible fingerprints. They were all wearing gloves from Ewan’s kit, but had told Jack that she was to stay still and watch over Sebby and Kyra, not help. They were almost finished when two men appeared in the apartment’s open doorway.

Sebby crawled onto the top of the couch back and hissed at them.

“It is all right, Sebby,” Takama said to him. “These are my cousins. Ait uxam, Sebby. Family.”

Jack remembered seeing them at the memorial and at the meal afterward. One of them had told everyone a story about Tomlin learning to drive that had almost made mint tea come out of her nose. They were wheeling in a gurney, one designed to roll up and down flights of stairs.

“Perfect… timing,” Ewan said as he tied off a stitch. “Three more and I’ll be done.”

“This should be everything,” Takama said a few minutes later, emerging from the kitchen area with the small quantity of food they’d had—including more olives for Sebby—in a bag.

Now, there was a completely non-horrible idea…

“Takama? Give an olive to Sebby, please.”

The moment Takama offered him the olive, Jack could see the change in Sebby’s posture. She was now one of his best friends. Jack had Cedric, Safiyya, and Lalla offer him olives as well, which he happily devoured while Ewan finished his work. The two cousins—Izil and Usadden—offered him one each too, marveling at him in Tamazight. Each received a thank you, of a sort, from Sebby, who stroked his antennae along their ungloved hands and wrists.

Petting them or learning their scents? Jack wondered. “Now he’ll think of you as ait uxam, for sure.”

While Izil and Usadden carefully lifted Kyra onto the gurney, Ewan pulled off his bloody gloves and washed his hands before accepting an olive from Jack to feed Sebby.

“I’ve heard of offering olive branches before,” he murmured softly as the contented crustacean stroked his hand, “but this is new.”

“Pretty much everything is with him,” Jack admitted. “We didn’t know until tonight that he has a stinger.”

“I wondered why you were so alarmed when he got upset. How strong is his venom?”

“Strong enough to paralyze a hundred-kilo man in a matter of seconds,” Jack told him, feeling a little nervous. What if they refused to let Sebby into their home?

“Is that what killed the mercenary?”

“No,” Jack said, and found that she couldn’t meet Ewan’s eyes, couldn’t even look at his face. “He was still breathing when—” She took a deep breath. “When I…”

Ewan’s hand touched her cheek and he tilted her head up, making her meet his gentle gaze. His eyes were exactly the same shade of green as his brother’s. “When you did what you had to do, to save your life and Dihya’s.” His voice became kindly chiding. “I do understand war. The only thing that outrages me is that you and your sister have been forced onto the front lines of battle so young. That is the real crime here.”

You don’t know how young, Jack thought miserably. Kyra had been twelve when the New Christy Massacre took place, and thirteen when she had finally captured and killed Red Roger, the same age Jack was now… and she had three notches on her belt now, too. Did she really have any innocence left to lose?

Ewan pulled her into a gentle hug. For a long moment they stayed still, Jack resting her head on his chest, breathing in the scent of him—so very nice after the reek of the filthy merc—and listening to his heartbeat, letting it calm her. No one had held her like this since before her father left for Furya. Possibly, no one had ever held her like this.

“You two coming?” Cedric called to them.

Jack didn’t want to let go. She wanted to just stay just like this, rest like this, for a while longer. Reluctantly, she pulled back and looked up at Ewan, meeting understanding and concern in his gaze. His fingertips gently brushed her forehead. “You’re bruised. Did he hit you?”

She’d forgotten all about that for a moment, forgotten why her head hurt. “I hit him in the face with my head.”

That startled a soft laugh out of him. “You are quite ferocious. When we get back to the house, please let me look at it. Now that Dihya is stable, I want to make sure you are, too.”

He kept his arm around her, the way his brother had, as they followed the others down the stairs. She could see Sebby below them, perched protectively on Kyra’s chest as Izil and Usadden maneuvered the gurney around a landing. The others were all carrying bags, including Ewan’s repacked field kit.

“My tablet—”

“Right here,” Ewan chuckled, offering it to her. Then he took a familiar, cheap “burner” comm out of his pocket and held it up. “Whose comm is this? It was on the table beside your tablet, but I thought Takama already packed yours and Dihya’s.”

“The merc’s. I need to get it to another part of town before I isomorph it into Elsewhere. So nobody comes here looking for him.”

“That’s a good thought. May I handle that for you? I know someone who can make sure it goes on a long, wild journey before it disappears forever. No trips to other universes needed.” Ewan smiled down at her. “Although I would really love to visit Elsewhere sometime, if I may.”

“Yes, thank you.” Jack looked around; as yet, no water was rising into the building. “What time is it?”

Ewan glanced at his chrono. “A little after eighteen p.m. Why?”

“Tide’s moving in. When we get to the ground level, though, I need to check something in Elsewhere. Do you have a flashlight?”

“Of course.” He took it out of his pocket and offered it to her.

“I… don’t want you to come with me on this trip over to Elsewhere.” Jack told him, feeling suddenly awkward.

“Ah… yes. I understand.” He didn’t specify what he understood, maybe recognizing that she didn’t want to talk about her need to make sure she’d successfully committed another murder, and to conceal her gruesome handiwork from him. “As I said earlier, though, you bear no shame for any of what happened tonight.”

I do, though. I do…

The waters of Elsewhere were lapping at the lower end of the street, a few blocks away, when they finally emerged from the building. Izil and Usadden had covered Kyra with a white sheet and were wheeling her toward, of all things, a Medical Examiner’s truck. Jack’s heart lurched for a second.

“It’s alright, Tislilel,” Ewan murmured, sensing her distress. “This was the plan. Anyone on the outside will only know that someone must have died in the building and been taken out. They will seem to drop her off at a funeral home, where another of our cousins is waiting to bring her back to the house in a laundry service truck. Takama is going to ride with her the whole way. She’ll be fine.” He kissed the top of her head, removing his arm from around her. “Go take care of your problem while we load the bags in Lalla’s van.”

As Jack walked back toward the apartment building’s outer wall, she found herself wishing that Ewan’s arm was still around her.

If Riddick had left her with a family like this, she thought as she isomorphed over into Elsewhere and continued forward on the sand, she never would have even considered cutting her wrists.

It was a moonless night in Elsewhere; all three moons, no longer near each other in the sky, were somewhere on the other side of the world. Ewan’s flashlight illuminated dried sand, desiccated seaweed, smooth rocks, and small tidepools, terrain she remembered from the previous week. That had been a dark night, too; everyone had been using their comms to light their way.

Frank Vedder, aka Justin Cowell, aka Blaine Mason was sprawled on the rocky ground, his body thoroughly broken by his twenty-meter fall. His head had smashed against a large rock, painting it scarlet. Small crustaceans, like but unlike Sebby, had found the body and begun to feast.

He died fast, a voice from her past rumbled softly in her head, and if we have any choice about it, that’s the way we should all go out…

She would no more cry for this… sicko… than she would have for Johns—and in spite of what Riddick had seemed to believe at the time, the tears she’d almost shed had not been for the merc who had wanted to serve her up as a Judas goat—but part of her still wanted to curl up and cry at the thought of what she had become on this journey and the innocent girl who had been lost along the way. She wanted to cry because, as with Johns, she was glad the man was dead, and part of her hated herself for that.

The Master Key, which she had been tempted to retrieve, had smashed to pieces against another rock. Like I needed to add another felony to the long list…

Taking the surveillance photo of herself and Kyra back out of her pocket—she wasn’t sure why she’d initially kept it, but it needed to cease to exist—she dropped it onto the sand and turned back, retracing her steps until they vanished and she was back outside of the building, before isomorphing back into U1.

“Baraka,” Ewan said as she reappeared. “I was told, and I believed, but it’s still an amazing thing to see.”

“I’m still learning how to do it the best way,” Jack admitted, offering him his flashlight back. “Slow or fast transitions, I mean. It’s kind of frustrating. Nobody’s exactly written a manual about how threshold syndrome works even though they really ought to have by now.”

“Assuming that the Quintessa Corporation was willing to allow that knowledge to circulate, that is,” Ewan said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “Let’s get you back to the house. I asked my sister to prepare a room for you and Dihya while we collected you.”

The Medical Examiner’s truck had already departed, Jack noticed. Cedric was loading the last of the bags into the back of what she assumed was Lalla’s van, gesturing them over to him. “Let’s get you home, Tislilel. We have some security tricks in store for anyone who tries to invade our house.”

Soon she was sitting between Cedric and Ewan as Lalla drove them back to the extraordinary mansion she’d only left a few hours before. They made one detour along the way, so that Ewan could hand off the merc’s comm to a man who looked like a pirate riding a motorcycle. A while later, they turned onto the tree-lined avenue they’d walked on, earlier that very day, on their way to and from the church. A massive, high-walled edifice with a familiar gate set in it appeared on the left. There were, she realized, no windows on the outer walls, no sign that it was a house at all. When she and Kyra had originally passed it in the processional, she’d assumed it was a warehouse.

“This is true,” Cedric said when she asked him about it. “The house’s windows look inward only, although we often go up on the roof if we wish to watch what’s happening outside with our own eyes.”

“Roof access? That could be—” Jack stopped herself. This family knew how to take care of itself better than she did. Didn’t it?

“Dangerous? Perhaps,” Cedric said, grinning. “Burglars have tried to come in from the roof, but it’s more difficult than it seems. Only one has ever made it inside.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing good,” Safiyya said. “You and Dihya will be safe, we promise.”

It’s not me I’m worried about, Jack realized. Riddick was a big enough payday to make any merc willing to go to war against a family, even a wealthy and apparently powerful one. As long as people believed he was the one who had sprung her and Kyra from the hospital, anyone they associated with would be fair game in a merc’s eyes.

Could she really bring that kind of havoc down on this family?

Ewan, she realized, was studying her face intently. She hoped she wasn’t showing far too much of what she was feeling… in any direction.

“Sorry,” she made herself say, giving him an apologetic smile. “I think I’m just a little paranoid right now.”

“Understandably,” he said, putting his arm around her again.

Another, larger gate opened beside the van, leading down into a huge, private garage below ground level. Elsewhere’s waters completely filled it. Jack let Ewan help her out of the van and escort her into the house for a second time.

It had never occurred to her until now that the comfortable shabbiness of the Rif might be a front. She still wasn’t sure what the truth was. But her favorite food cart vendor had turned out to be a sociology professor on sabbatical, whose real job seemed to be gathering intel for the Imazighen—intel that had brought Tomlin to her and Kyra’s doorstep—and teaching foreigners to respect their ways. And, at Takama’s word, an entire community had stepped up to smuggle almost two hundred refugees out into the mountains in a single night.

Maybe she should trust that they were stronger than they had seemed, more powerful than they had seemed…

…but still vulnerable. Tomlin had died because she’d given him just enough help, just enough knowledge, to start a fight with the Quintessa Corporation, but not enough to win it.

She wasn’t sure anyone could win a fight against them. Without their Isomorph Drives, regardless of what secrets they were keeping about them, there would be no Star Jumping, no faster-than-light space travel. And without that—

“the end of the Federacy as we knew it…” That was what Tomlin had told his younger brother. Was the truth he’d discovered powerful enough to actually do that? To bring real-time contact between the star systems to an end?

If it was, no wonder the Corporation was willing to kill hundreds and destroy an economy to keep it secret, and to keep their position one where no other power, not even the Federacy itself, could threaten them with reprisals for any atrocious act they chose to commit. And if they ever suspected the secrets, and the people, that the Tomlin-Meziane family was harboring…

…This large and beautiful fortress would be erased from the board altogether.

Could anything defend this family against the monstrous forces, human and possibly otherwise, hunting for her and Kyra? Especially if those different forces ever realized they were all seeking the same two—in the words of one now-dead merc—little girls?

She would have to talk to Kyra about it.

Ewan had been steering her through the house the whole time she had been lost in thought—and there was a whole lot of house!—and up three flights of stairs. The lights in the tastefully decorated corridor he led her down were dim and most of the doors were closed. It reminded Jack a little of a fancy hotel from an old Earth vid. The doors were only on one side of the corridor; was the other side one of the exterior walls?

One door was open, soft light spilling into the hallway, and Jack could hear voices coming from it. Takama’s voice was among them.

“Rest now, Dihya,” she was saying as Ewan led Jack in. “Your sister will be here soon—ah! Here she is now.”

A large, ornately carved bedframe dominated the room. The bed itself looked soft and luxurious. Kyra was settled on its right side, propped up by large pillows in a position Jack remembered from one of her grandmother’s hospital stays. Sebby, who had been resting on a pillow next to her, scuttled across the bed and leapt down, racing to Jack and climbing up onto her shoulder, antennae frisking her face.

“What an extraordinary creature,” she heard either Izil or Usadden say as she stroked his carapace with her fingers. “So devoted. Aside from olives, what does it eat?”

“Cockroaches, mostly… any that were dumb enough to come into our place,” Jack told him. “And bugs that flew in after the west windows got broken. He can’t fly, but he sure tried to, to catch them.”

She wondered when, exactly, Sebby had learned to crawl across the ceiling to launch his attack on the merc. Maybe he’d figured it out so that he could ambush the large moths that had begun coming in at night. She and Kyra had begun finding colorful wing fragments on the foot of their bed and the floor at the end of each night cycle.

“Well, he isn’t going to find those here, I’m afraid,” the cousin—Izil, she realized—continued. “I will stop by a pet supply shop and bring back some possibilities for him.”

“Thank you.” Jack took Kyra’s hand. “Are you okay?”

Kyra’s smile was a little loopy. “Usadden gave me the good stuff,” she said, a slight slur to her words. “Gonna sleep now… now I know you’re okay…”

“She won’t be in any pain,” Usadden murmured. “Not for many hours.”

“Are you a doctor?” Jack found herself asking him. The Meziane family seemed to be huge, and highly accomplished.

He nodded. “I really am a medical examiner. Generally, none of my ‘patients’ require medication, but I have kept my license to practice on the living up to date, so I can also be called upon for search-and-rescue and triage in crises like the one we all suffered last week. And for situations such as this.”

Jack suddenly wondered just how often this family found itself embroiled in intrigue.

“If either of you need anything,” Takama gestured at a small device on the low table next to Kyra’s head. “Someone is always awake in our house and will answer. Once Zdan has made sure you do not have a concussion, Tislilel, try to sleep as well. Good night, girls.”

She shepherded Izil and Usadden out of the room, the three talking softly in Tamazight as they went.

“Now,” Ewan said, reaching into his field bag again, “let’s make sure of you.”

He led her over to a chair and made her sit down, kneeling in front of her.

“You’re a pilot and a medic?”

His grin was rueful. “Pilot in training. I worked for the UMA while I was at University. I think Usadden hoped I’d become a doctor, too, but… flying won. Especially now.” He swallowed, the grief showing in his eyes again.

His brother was his hero, Jack thought as he shone his penlight into her eyes.

“Pupils are responsive, that’s a good start…” For the next several minutes, he took her through a series of tests, some physical and some mental, before nodding in satisfaction. “You’re going to have an impressive bruise on your forehead for a while, and probably a headache, which I’ll give you some meds for, but there are no signs of a concussion.” His smile emerged; as with his older brother, it transformed him from handsome to dazzling. “Which is very good because I imagine you’re quite tired by now. I don’t have to make you stay awake.”

Jack was about to object that she was perfectly awake when a yawn broke through, surprising her. “I think that’s a good thing,” she admitted, laughing.

His brotherly good night kiss left her cheek tingling.

He’s twelve years older than I am, she scolded herself as she showered, Sebby splashing at her feet. Almost twice my age. What I want is never going to happen.

Why did she have to develop feelings for such unattainable men? First Riddick, then Tomlin, and now Ewan…

Feeling a little refreshed from the shower but still sleepy, she climbed into huge bed, moving her pillow to the middle so she’d be close to Kyra, and drifted off.

They were waiting for her, agitated, demanding to know what was wrong with “the other larva” and what had happened to both of them.

If I show you in three-shapes, will you understand? she asked.

We will understand.

Jack conjured up her memories, recreating the apartment in her mind. Her asleep on the couch, Kyra—the other larva, she told them—sleeping in the next room, and the hideous, foul-smelling mercenary sneaking in through their door, climbing on top of her and threatening her with a knife. She recreated the battle that had followed, showing them Kyra coming to her rescue and being wounded, and then Sebby rescuing them both. At first she wasn’t sure if they were seeing any of it, until they began to ask questions about what she had showed them.

So many questions…

“Jack? Jack, wake up…”

She opened her eyes, blinking at the unfamiliar surroundings in the darkness. Kyra was shaking her arm, looking pained and anxious.

“Kyra? Are you okay? I thought the meds—”

“They won’t let me sleep, Jack.” Her sister had the same look of panic in her eyes that she’d had the morning before they broke out of the hospital, when Red Roger had come back to her in her dreams. “They keep asking all these questions… I can’t get them to let me sleep…”

Jack sat up, concerned. “You want me to tell them to knock it off?”

Kyra nodded, her lip trembling.

She closed her eyes, focusing on them. Somehow, she was starting to be able to feel them even when she was awake. The other larva is wounded! she scolded them. You must stop asking her questions! I’ll tell you when she is well enough for you to talk to her again. Until then, you can talk to me. Just to me.

She wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt some kind of reluctant assent.

“I think I got through to them,” she told Kyra.

“Thanks… but… I don’t want to go back to sleep yet. Can you talk to me? Help me stay awake for a while?”

“Absolutely. What do you want to talk about?”

“I… I don’t…” Kyra’s eyes were filling.

She needed an anchor, Jack realized, something to pull her away from her own thoughts and the darkness waiting for both of them. The way she’d needed one that final day at the hospital, when she was drawing Red Roger on the wall—

Of course.

Jack had promised to tell her the true story about Riddick. Originally, it should have happened that very night, but the escape had preempted it and they hadn’t circled back to it since. Now, she decided, it was time. She would give Kyra something to imagine that was almost completely disconnected from the current moment.

“Once there was a girl,” she began, “who was unhappy at home and decided she was going to run away. Her mother was getting remarried to a real asshole, and she wanted to go live with her father. But he was hundreds of light years away on a military base, and nobody was going to just let her go to him. So one day, she cut off her hair, put on her cousin Rob’s outgrown clothes, changed her name to Jack B. Badd, and set off after him…”

She could feel them listening, too.

33.
Child Soldiers at War

Of course, Jack thought with a mixture of dread and disgust, this just had to happen while the tide’s still out.

She stayed perfectly still, trying to decide what her best option would be. Mercs were nasty business, unpredictable and frequently cruel. Even back when she’d been a genuine innocent, they hadn’t cared. The man holding a knife to her throat might just be trying to intimidate her, or he might be the kind who could slash it without a second thought. The only thing she knew for sure about him was that he hadn’t showered or brushed his teeth in weeks.

“He’s not here,” she said, keeping her voice soft and trying not to move her throat and jaw too much. “He’s never been here.”

“Bullshit. You two are in thick with him. You’re his accomplices.” The merc’s next words were enunciated as if he was talking to a small child. “Tell me where to find him, and you can go free.”

Yeah, right.

“Toombs know you’re horning in on his bounty?” she asked. If she could manage to stall long enough, she thought, the tide would come in and she could isomorph over to Elsewhere without falling to her death. Or maybe Kyra could make a move.

If he didn’t already do something to her while I was asleep…

“Fuck Toombs,” the man growled. “He can’t call dibs on everybody.”

The only other family on the top floor had moved out two days ago, Jack thought. Even if she started screaming her head off, nobody would be able to help her.

Nobody in the building, anyway. Kyra might just be asleep in the other room, but it would be too late by the time she woke up. He’d probably cut Jack’s throat the moment she screamed, and then play out his intimidation act on Kyra instead. And both of them would end up dead, since neither of them knew the answer to his question.

If I scream out loud, anyway.

She’d thought trying to isomorph for the first time had been the biggest, craziest Hail Mary of her life. This new idea dwarfed it.

Can you hear me? Creatures? Are you there? It had never occurred to her to try to reach out to them until now.

“We can do this the easy way,” the merc said unimaginatively, “or we can do this the fun way, little girl. Fun for me, anyway.” He gave her a disgusting leer. Several of his teeth had been lost to rot and replaced with garish gold ones; two more would need replacing soon. Straddling her, he changed his posture slightly so that he could press suggestively against her. “So maybe you should talk now while I’m still feeling charitable.”

Her gag reflex couldn’t decide if it was reacting to his body odor, his breath, or the general foulness of his mind. Men like this were why she’d cut her hair off and posed as a guy.

I’m in trouble… please… warn the other larva… If you can hear me, please… help me…

“I told you, he’s not here,” Jack said. “I don’t know where he is. He didn’t tell us where he was going.”

“You think I’m stupid or something?”

Yes. “No.”

“Then try again. I’m running out of charity.”

Maybe I could do a fast isomorph, just to drop down to the next floor…

And, in all likelihood, break her back on the edge of someone’s table. None of her new “powers” were going to help her in this moment.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” It was the absolute truth. If he was any good at reading people, he’d know it.

Fury passed across his features and then he smiled. It made him look twice as hideous. “You’re really down to get hurt, ain’t ya? You know where I’m gonna hurt you first?”

“I. Don’t. Know. Where. He. Is.”

“Say that again, little girl, and I swear I will fuck you with this kni—”

The living room window exploded inward.

As the merc turned to look, Jack grabbed at the blade. This thing is in Elsewhere, all the way in Elsewhere—

“The fuck?” he shouted as the knife vanished. Jack lunged upward, slamming her head against his face as hard as she could. His chin banged hard against her forehead.

Ow! Fuck…

Kyra was climbing in through the smashed window behind him, a knife in her hand.

“You fucking bitch!” he roared, cocking back a fist. His nose was starting to bleed and his lip was split. Jack grabbed her tablet off of the table and rammed it into his gut with all of her strength. Her ears were ringing for some reason, a high-pitched reeeeeeeeeeeee sound filling them just at the edge of hearing. The merc, grunting hard from the impact, grabbed the tablet out of her hand, tossing it aside and drawing back his fist again.

With a Valkyrie scream, Kyra launched herself at him.

He was a big man. Almost as big as Riddick himself. He turned, swinging his arm, and knocked Kyra to the side before she could land on him.

“You little bitches!”

Kyra tucked and rolled as she fell, coming back up a second later. She’d reversed her knife, holding it by its blade, and flung it at the merc’s head.

He ducked, but just barely. The second knife she launched left a bloody line on his cheek.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

The merc rose from the couch, pulling out a knife of his own. “Bring it, little girl,” he told Kyra.

Jack had no idea where Kyra was keeping her blades, unless she’d already figured out the scabbard trick before Jack could suggest it to her. She had another one in her hand. She was crouching, every line of her body tense, circling to the side.

Jack looked around, trying to think of anything in range that she could repurpose as a weapon.

The merc lunged at Kyra, who danced out of range, luring him away from Jack.

She’s buying time for me to run.

Jack crawled off of the couch, wincing as her head began to throb. She felt woozy from the head blow; there would be no running for her. That ringing in her ears was back.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

The merc lunged at Kyra again, almost catching her. She brought her blade down the length of his arm, ripping the sleeve and scoring his flesh, before ducking out of range again.

“I only need one of you little cunts to tell me where he is,” the man grated, face going a mottled red with rage.

Fuck. He was going in for the kill.

Another lunge, another near miss. Kyra danced to the side and whirled, aiming a kick at his thigh. He dodged and grabbed for her ankle. She retreated out of range, a sheen of sweat glistening on her skin.

Jack grabbed a glass off of the kitchen counter and flung it at the back of the merc’s head.

Her aim would have been dead on, but the son of a bitch dodged it. It smashed against the wall.

“Once I’m done with your friend here, you’ll pay for that,” he said, his voice calm again, almost conversational.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

He lunged at Kyra again. Too late, Jack realized it was a feint.

“No!” she heard herself scream.

As Kyra slashed out and tried to spin away, he grabbed her arm and pulled her against him, thrusting his knife into her abdomen. Kyra made a choked, gasping sound. Her knife dropped from her hand.

“That’s right, you little—”

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Suddenly Jack realized that the noise wasn’t in her head. It was real.

“Sebby, no!”

She watched in horror as Sebby, shrieking, launched himself from the ceiling, leaping at the merc.

He was going to die. The merc would smash him to the ground, kill him, murder everyone and everything she loved—

A long, thin tail she’d never seen before whipped free from Sebby’s back as he landed on the merc’s shoulder. It jabbed once, twice, three times in rapid succession at the man’s throat. The large man froze, making a strange, rattling gurgle.

The room was suddenly, deathly silent.

Kyra moved first, staggering away from the frozen merc, the knife handle sticking out from her abdomen. “Oh shit…”

Slowly the merc began to topple. Sebby leapt from his shoulder to the back of the couch, his tail whipping in agitation. Its end sparkled, a drop of amber liquid catching the light.

Venom, Jack realized as the merc crashed to the ground. Sebby stung him. That’s not a tail, that’s a stinger.

Kyra wasn’t doing much better than the fallen intruder. She looked as if she was struggling to stay conscious. She staggered toward the couch, partly collapsing against it.

Jack hurried over to her, ignoring the merc for the moment. Sebby was staring at the man, his little body tense and his stinger-tail thrashing, as if daring the merc to try to get up.

Kyra’s right hand fumbled at the knife handle where it protruded from her abdomen by her right hip.

“Don’t pull it out,” Jack told Kyra, helping her around to the front of the couch and easing her down onto it. “Don’t touch it. I’m gonna call for help.”

“Shit,” Kyra groaned. “Shit shit shit shit, God, this hurts, Jack…”

“You’re gonna be okay. I promise.”

“I know. Just… that motherfucker…”

“He was looking for Riddick,” Jack told Kyra. “This is all my fault. I’m so sorry—”

“Fuck that noise, it’s not your fault assholes exist. What’re we gonna do with him?”

Jack rose. What, indeed? “Don’t move, okay? I’ll be right back.”

The merc was lying on the ground, his legs awkwardly bent and splayed from his fall. His breathing was shallow, wheezing, his eyes wide and frightened. He was alive but paralyzed. Jack found herself wondering if Sebby’s stinger was for hunting, or if his species bred like tarantula wasps.

She picked up the knife Kyra had dropped and walked over to him. Showing him the blade, she knelt beside him and put it against his throat.

“Maybe this is redundant, but don’t move,” she told him.

A strangled groan escaped his lips.

Jack went through his pockets, pulling out everything he’d been carrying. He had a wallet, an electronic device she recognized, from schematics she’d seen years ago, as a highly illegal “Master Key,” and a fake badge that looked like it had come from the same damned cereal box as the one Johns had carried. Then she rolled him over, grunting with the strain. The bastard was heavy as fuck. One folded piece of paper was tucked into a back pocket. For a moment, the smell made her think he’d voided his bowels.

“Do you ever bathe?” she asked him, tempted to throw him—as if she even could—into a tub and wash the stink off.

And… there it is.

Sometimes her ideas were quite horrible. She wished, though, that she’d thought of this one back when he’d first woken her up. The tide wouldn’t be in yet, but it would come soon enough to wash his stench away forever.

If the fall doesn’t kill him first… It probably would. She’d been so busy worrying about what would happen to her if she dropped through the floor that she’d never even considered…

She rolled him onto his back again, bringing the knife against his throat once more. Just in case. Then she put her hand on his chest.

“When you get to Hell,” she told him, “you tell Chillingsworth I sent you.”

The man’s eyes widened, just a bit, in pure terror.

This piece of garbage is in Elsewhere… all the way in Elsewhere…

He fell through the floor and vanished as silently as a ghost. She shifted her vision, trying to see into Elsewhere instead of U1. Darkness spread below and around her in the other ’verse’s moonless night. She couldn’t see anything—

Kyra groaned behind her.

“Oh shit, sorry, Kyra…” She set the knife down and hurried back to her sister’s side. “I’m gonna call Takama. She’ll know who to bring. We can’t use Emergency Services or anything but she’ll know who to get…”

She was babbling. She grabbed her tablet, relieved to see that it hadn’t taken any damage from the fight, and keyed in the comm number for the Tomlin-Meziane household.

“Azul?” It was Ewan.

“Ewan? It’s Tislilel!”

“Tislilel? What… is everything all right?”

“No! We need your help! We need Takama! Dihya’s been stabbed! By one of that bitch’s mercs! We can’t go to the police or UMA, but she needs a doctor!” In her own ears, she sounded on the verge of hysterics, but she felt as if she was talking from a strange distance.

“We’re coming. Are you at your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Are you safe there?”

“For now.” Jack looked around, suddenly imagining that another merc might leap out of the shadows. No, the man had made it clear he intended to cut Toombs out. He’d come gunning for them alone.

“We’ll be there right away.” The call disconnected.

“Score one… for the Meziane family…” Kyra said in a pained voice. Sebby was sitting on her chest, his stinger hidden once more, stroking her face with his antennae.

Jack gathered up the merc’s possessions and set them on the table, looking through them while they waited. The ID in his thick wallet named him as Frank Vedder; the one behind it bore the name Justin Cowell, and the one behind that called him Blaine Mason. All three had the same picture of his ugly mug. He had money cards in each name. A piece of paper with a string of letters and numbers on it, along with two condoms, were tucked in the otherwise-empty billfold.

What kind of sloppy dumb-ass carries multiple IDs where a cop might find them? she wondered in disgust.

The kind, she supposed, who only bathed every other month.

She transferred the wallet to Elsewhere and let it drop. For a moment, she almost did the same with his comm, until she remembered how many of the “missing and presumed dead” people from the explosion had been identified by their comms’ final locations. She set it on the table. Before sending it out of this ’verse, she’d carry it to another part of town; she didn’t want his last known location to be their apartment.

She unfolded the piece of paper she’d taken from his back pocket and gasped.

“What is it?” Kyra asked. Jack turned the paper so she could see. “Motherfucker…”

It was a printout of a photo, taken with a long-range lens, of Jack and Kyra standing in front of their building talking to a man in traditional Amazigh attire. Tomlin.

How long had mercs pursuing Riddick been in New Marrakesh?

She supposed that, after the breakout, anyone else who knew about the connection between “Jane Doe 7439” and Riddick would have started plotting possible landfalls out of system. A few who rolled the dice correctly might have managed to beat Toombs himself—even beat the Scarlet Matador itself—to Tangiers Prime.

It’s a good thing he took the picture from behind Tomlin, or his new boss would’ve been even more interested in us than ever…

She pocketed the image, along with the Master Key, and then finished examining and disposing of the man’s possessions. The badge dropped down into Elsewhere to join him. She’d let the tide do whatever it wanted with them—

The door slammed open and the Tomlin-Meziane family spilled into the apartment, Cedric and Ewan first, both with guns drawn.

“Dihya!” Takama gasped, slipping between the men and hurrying to her side.

Sebby reared up on his hind legs, rattling his pincers, and screeched a warning. His stinger whipped out. Takama stopped short.

“It’s okay, Sebby!” Jack said, trying to hush him as fast as she could. She didn’t want anyone else getting stung. “Come here. It’s okay.”

She managed to coax him to crawl up her arm and onto her shoulder, and moved away from the couch to make room for the others.

“Jack wouldn’t let me take the knife out,” Kyra said, her voice sounding a little muzzy.

“Jack,” Ewan’s eyes cut toward her as he said the name, “is very wise. We will have to remove it carefully.” He had holstered his gun and was opening the large medical field kit that Takama had carried in.

Battlefield doctors decide who lives and who dies. It’s called triage… Nobody had realized that she’d heard that, heard everything that Johns and Riddick had said in their final conversation. Now she shuddered as it came back to her.

Safiyya and Lalla were setting several large, empty suitcases on the floor. “Bathroom first,” Safiyya said, handing Lalla a duffel bag. “Then bedroom.”

“What are you…?” Jack heard herself asking.

“You can’t stay here,” Safiyya told her in a no-nonsense voice. “It’s obviously not safe. This building truly is cursed. You’ll stay with us, at least until Dihya has recovered. Let some scoundrel try to come at you in our home!”

“Should I ask what happened to the man who stabbed her?” Cedric murmured so that only she could hear.

Jack met his eyes. “Please don’t.”

His expression softened and grew sad. Did he realize what she had done?

I’ve committed murder for the third time, she thought, another shudder passing through her.

“OW!” Kyra shrieked. “Fuck!”

Sebby leapt off Jack’s shoulder and scuttled toward her sister, screeching, stinger thrashing like an agitated cat’s tail.

“Sebby no! It’s okay! Don’t sting anybody!” Jack shouted, chasing after him.

“I’m okay, Sebby!” Kyra sobbed. “I’m okay, it’s okay… c’mere… it’s okay…”

The upset crustacean retracted his stinger. He jumped, instead, onto Kyra’s shoulder and began stroking her cheek with his antennae, again making a soft reeeeeeee at the very edge of Jack’s hearing.

Takama set the bloody knife that Ewan had just drawn out of Kyra on the table. Jack walked over and picked it up, looking it over carefully. She wanted to remember every detail about it in case it became important later.

Then she walked over to the spot where the merc had fallen. Standing over it, she transitioned the knife into Elsewhere and dropped it down.

“I should’ve isomorphed him straight over to Elsewhere when I woke up and he was sitting over me,” she heard herself saying. “Shouldn’t’ve given him a chance to hurt her…”

“I don’t imagine,” Cedric said next to her, “that an idea like that would just pop into your head right away.” His hand on her shoulder was light, gentle.

“It will next time.”

“I pray that you will never have to put that to the test, Tislilel. Or would you prefer to be Jack?”

Jack sighed. “Neither one’s my real name. Let’s stick with Tislilel. He gave me that name.” She turned and met Cedric’s eyes. “Gavin did.”

Cedric nodded and swallowed, his eyes acquiring a mournful gleam. “Tislilel it is.”

“Husband!” Safiyya called. “Either pack or clean! We want this tagat place emptied when it’s time to move Dihya!”

Cedric sighed and gave her a somewhat forced grin. “Don’t want even one fingerprint left behind, do we? You want any of the larger furnishings?”

“No, we got rid of most of them already. Whoever moves in next can have what’s left.” Jack wasn’t even going to try to argue with them about the move; beautiful view or not, she suddenly never wanted to see this building again. “But, uh… could you check under the bed and dresser to make sure Sebby didn’t leave anything under either one? He likes to hide and play under them.”

Sebby was still on Kyra’s shoulder, supervising Ewan’s work but no longer posturing threateningly.

“They’re asking if you’re okay…” Kyra groaned, only partly conscious.

“Who’s asking?” Takama glanced between Kyra and Jack.

“The things… on the other side… I was asleep and they were talking to me and suddenly they said ‘the other larva is in danger and needs your help…’”

“The ‘other larva?’” Takama looked confused.

“That’s what they call us,” Jack explained, once again wondering if maybe they were crazy. “The creatures… the ones that started talking to us in our dreams after the rescue. They call us larvae. All except the one that hates us and calls us filth—”

“What do I tell them?” Kyra moaned.

Jack took her hand. “Tell them I’m okay. Tell them that they helped you save me. Tell them…”

She had done it, she realized. She had called out to the frightening beings from her dreams, wide awake, and they had answered, if indirectly. They had defended her. It wasn’t some weird folie a deux she and Kyra were experiencing. It was all wonderfully, terrifyingly real.

“Tell them thank you.”

32.
A Lake Full of Tears

It was hard for Jack to concentrate on the memorial service with Toombs and Logan somewhere behind her.

It was a long service. There were prayers and readings, most of which she couldn’t manage to focus on. Family and friends told stories, some in English, some in Arabic, many in Tamazight, and one in French. Safiyya, who had thoughtfully prepared translation tablets for all of the guests, had one for her and one for Kyra, so they could follow what was being said. Everyone seemed to have a story about a time when Gavin Brahim Tomlin, or Brahim Meziane, or “the Colonel,” or El Krim, had helped them when they needed him most. A number of the stories were surprisingly funny. Jack felt herself wishing, yet again, that she could have spent years discovering his hidden depths as they had.

Everyone in the church seemed content to reminisce for hours, as if they might call him back to living, breathing flesh with their words, but eventually Cedric stood and thanked them all for coming.

There would be, he told the audience, a family-only reception that evening, and another reception for his son’s service colleagues in two days’ time. A proper public celebration of his son’s life, open to all, had not yet been scheduled but everyone in attendance that day would be informed as soon as it was.

Somehow, Jack suspected, any invitation addressed to the Quintessa envoy would mysteriously go astray and not reach her.

She could feel the tension humming through Kyra as they rose and followed Safiyya to the vestibule, where the rest of the attendees could offer formal condolences on their way out. This was the most dangerous part. Just how much camouflage could face tattoos and head draperies really create?

“You are shaking, Tislilel. What is it?” Takama whispered.

“Two of the mercs… they know us,” Jack whispered back. “If they realize who we are, things could get really bad.”

“For them,” Takama said firmly. “But I think I know a way to improve your disguises a little. They have not seen you from any direction but behind yet… Lalla, darling, do you have your wig bag with you?”

Within minutes, both she and Kyra had been whisked over to a side room. Takama and Safiyya’s cousin Lalla, it turned out, had an extensive collection of wigs she liked to wear—she had developed alopecia as a teenager, she explained—and often brought several with her to major events. She did not disappoint now. Kyra rejoined the reception line with sleek black hair, bangs draped artfully across her forehead to obscure her distinctive eyebrows. Jack, now wearing a wig that almost exactly matched the long blonde hair she’d cut off when she first went on the run, joined the line a moment later. Lalla had proudly told them that the wigs were made of natural, undyed, untreated human hair, and no one would believe they hadn’t naturally grown it on their heads. The veils, now draped loosely over and around their new hair, completed the illusion.

Jack had to admit that Kyra looked convincingly unlike herself. She suspected that, aside from the “tattoos” on her face, she probably looked more like Audrey MacNamera than she had in a year.

They were already in place as the first well-wishers came through.

Most of them just gave simple condolences. It wasn’t long until Jack was into the rhythm of saying ‘thank you’ back to them in whichever language they had used, making sure to use a thick Tamazight accent in the process. Beside her, Kyra was doing the same. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the envoy and her mercs approaching. While the envoy was offering condolences to each member of the line, the mercs were hanging slightly back, all of them looking uncomfortable.

What, are we too native for you? she found herself thinking angrily. Their expressions made her think of the time she had been invited to a classmate’s Kwanzaa celebration, along with the rest of her class, and had watched as some of her other classmates treated the experience—the foods, the music, the colorful outfits—as too outlandish to even try to appreciate, much less enjoy. Did just wearing white instead of black to a funeral make everything too alien to empathize with? Or did Tomlin’s murderer just naturally gravitate to the types of mercs who had no empathy to begin with?

She tamped down on the anger as fast as she could. I’m grieving here. Grieving. Not wishing for a gun…

Audrey MacNamera, she chided herself, had never fantasized about shooting people. If she wanted to ever be her again, she had to put these awful thoughts out of her head.

“I am so very sorry for your loss,” the envoy said, offering her hand to first Lalla, then Takama, and then Safiyya in turn. Her voice was cultured, her accent the kind Rachel had told her was called Received Pronunciation in really old vids. “Colonel Tomlin was a good man.”

She offered her hand to Kyra, who took it—

—and flinched.

The envoy gave her a quizzical look as she repeated her platitudes. Kyra stammered a thank you in Tamazight-accented English, drawing her hand back.

The only reason Jack didn’t flinch when the envoy took her hand was because she’d been warned by Kyra’s reaction.

There was something wrong with the envoy, something wrong with her touch. Something…

Similar three-shape. Different five-shape…

The thought skated through her mind and was gone. She could feel the woman’s eyes on her, could feel the wrongness of the hand in hers.

“Thank… you…” she managed, taking back her hand.

“Are these your daughters?” The envoy asked Safiyya and Cedric, suddenly seeming far too interested.

“My cousins,” Ewan said, walking over and putting his arms around their shoulders. “Dihya and Tislilel. They had come to town in preparation for the Engagement Moussem. I think that’s now postponed, though. My parents had hopes that one of them might choose instead to marry my brother, anyway… but now that’s not to be, either.”

“They marry their cousins,” Toombs muttered to one of the other mercs, just loudly enough for them to overhear. The envoy shot him a quelling look.

“Distant cousins,” Takama said, also giving him a look that suggested his behavior could get their whole merry troupe thrown out on their asses. “But yes.”

“Better a member of one’s own tribe than most abrrani,” Lalla said. “Meaning no offense, Cedric.”

“You did say most,” Cedric replied, winking at her.

“What the hell is ‘abrrani?’” Toombs bristled.

Logan, Jack noticed, was studying Kyra with a slight frown on her face. This needed to all end fast.

“I… do not…” She pretended that the word she was seeking was on the tip of her tongue, but unreachable, before looking up into Ewan’s handsome face and making her expression pleading and a little hurt. “I don’t understand,” she said in perfectly accented Tamazight.

Ewan caught on instantly. “Dihya and Tislilel don’t speak English,” he rebuked the group. “If you wish to continue talking about them in a language they don’t know, I will take them home now.”

Safiyya nodded. “I think that’s for the best, Zdan. The rest of us will join you shortly.”

It seemed as if the envoy wanted to object, but the atmosphere had chilled. Toombs had given just enough offense to sabotage whatever it was she’d intended to say or do. Ewan steered Jack and Kyra away from the group and out of the church.

“Well played,” he murmured once they were a block away. “I don’t understand what was happening in there, but you put a wonderful stop to it.”

“I don’t understand what was going on, either,” Kyra muttered. “That woman’s hand… what the fuck…”

“Her hand?” Ewan asked, frowning in confusion.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “When her hand touched mine, it felt wrong. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Made my skin crawl,” Kyra huffed.

Jack was trying to think of anything that had ever felt like that. Something about it had momentarily brought back an instant from one of her terrible dreams about the creatures in the darkness, but she wasn’t sure why. Something about three-shapes and five-shapes…

It hit her so suddenly that she stopped walking.

Ewan, still walking between her and Kyra with his arms through theirs, turned to look at her. “What is it?”

“I think she’s connected to another universe,” Jack gasped.

“What?” Kyra shook her head. “No. No way. You and I are and you’ve never felt like that to me.”

“Not Elsewhere. She… she isn’t connected to Elsewhere, I know that much. But… only part of her was here in U1. The rest of her… it’s in another ’verse and there’s something about it that’s—”

“Absolutely fucking horrifying. Yeah, you’re right. That’s what I was feeling, too. Damn. You think she’s partway into the ’verse where the thing that wants us dead comes from?”

Ewan was looking between them with concern. “I think we should take this conversation somewhere more private than this avenue,” he said. “I followed most of what you just said, though. If you’re right, this could be a serious problem.”

He led them down two more streets and through a gate in a high wall. Inside, surrounding a courtyard garden that looked, to Jack, like it had sprung out of one of the fantasy novels she’d loved as a kid—I’m still a kid, damn it, it’s only been a year—was a large multi-story house, its walls, pillars, and carved screens painted various brilliant shades of aqua, blue, and indigo. As Ewan led them past a large room where some of Takama’s marketplace colleagues were setting up the reception Cedric had mentioned, he finally spoke again.

“I don’t know everything that happened leading up to my brother’s death, but my aunt told me that you two, like the passengers and crew of the Scarlet Matador, were stranded between universes, and that you learned how to maneuver between them and helped him teach the others how to do the same. That you call this world ‘U1’ and the other universe ‘Elsewhere,’ and even brought back a pet from that other world. Is all of this correct? It sounds like something that belongs in one of the novels I read in college.”

“It’s true, yeah,” Jack said. His summary reminded her, with a powerful ache, of how Tomlin had answered one of her questions. She found herself wondering if it was a product of their military training, or of the college educations that all military officers, according to her father, were required to have on top of that training.

“You spoke of something that wants to kill you?” His expression was almost a mirror of the one his older brother had worn when he’d learned that she and Kyra had nearly drowned.

“Wants us to die,” Kyra corrected him. “We both… we encountered it, and some other entities, the morning after we helped get the Matador survivors out of New Marrakesh.”

Jack noticed that she was careful to omit all mentions of the deadly battle.

“We thought we were dreaming at first,” Kyra continued, “until we realized we’d both had exactly the same dream. Most of the entities seemed… scary as hell but almost friendly, but then one showed up that hated us and wanted us dead.”

“What did it do?” To Ewan’s credit, he seemed willing to believe them, but Jack had to wonder if he still would be if he knew where they’d escaped from.

“Just talked. Scary stuff. I don’t remember what it said exactly.”

“I do,” Jack sighed. She’d gone over its terrible words in her head several times, trying to figure out what they meant and whether any of it might be connected to the secret Tomlin had thought he’d uncovered. The very fact that she could remember it so clearly drove home to her just how much more connected to reality it was than any other dream she’d ever had. “‘Death to the things that killed us. Death to the makers of the cages. Death to the ’verse that trapped us. A trillion deaths for every one you took from us. We come. We come to take it all back. All the worlds your filth has stolen from us will burn.’”

“That,” Ewan breathed, “is a declaration of war.”

“Yeah,” Kyra said, “but by what? One thing we’re damn sure of is it ain’t human.”

Ewan nodded, his face now pensive. “Why do you think they found you then?” he asked after a moment.

“It was after we went back and forth between universes a lot, and brought people and things across in both directions. J—Tislilel…”

For the briefest instant, Ewan’s eyes narrowed, marking the tiny slip.

“…She moved two hundred-seater shuttles over into Elsewhere and then back. Maybe doing something that big sent out some kind of shockwaves? It practically knocked her out for the rest of the night once it caught up with her.”

“And then you were stuck helping all the Matador survivors cross back into U1 in the marketplace, all by yourself,” Jack pointed out. “That probably sent out some shockwaves, too. They reached out to both of us at the same time.”

“Why in your sleep?” Ewan wondered.

“They wanted to show us things,” Kyra said, her words coming slowly. “Things I don’t think our eyes could even see if we were using them.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Higher dimensions,” Jack blurted, only realizing it was true when she spoke. “They tried to ‘teach’ us how to see them. But once they got past the three-dimensional object it got scary fast. They… apologized for scaring me, after.”

“You actually kept looking?” Kyra asked. “I ran… or something like running given that I was floating out in space in the dream.”

“And all of this happened after you saw my brother for the last time, so he didn’t even know… but he already knew something terrible was happening. He sent me a message telling me that… I don’t even know. 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… he said all of it in my mother’s invented language, so that only I would be able to hear the message, so I know he feared he was being surveilled. He asked me to arrange to come home on leave as soon as I could, so that he could explain it all to me. I was arranging my leave when word came of his death.” Ewan sat down, his expression a devastating mixture of grief and horror. “I don’t know where to… begin…”

Jack did. This was pure Audrey. She sat down next to him and put her arms around him. He gasped and then leaned against her, releasing a heavy sob, the first of many. After a moment, Kyra joined them, putting an arm around him as well.

It would be a long, long time, Jack thought sadly, tears leaking out of her eyes as well, until he began to heal from this. And while he might respect the community’s decision to conceal what they knew of the real reason his brother had died… she doubted he would ever be able to let it go.

Because she couldn’t have. And his brother wouldn’t have. In that moment, she understood him as well as she understood herself. Warning him to stay away from the mystery would do no good; she would warn his aunt and mother instead.

He had almost composed himself again when the rest of his family returned to their house half an hour later.

Sunset was approaching as the family—quite large, Jack soon realized—gathered for the meal that the community had prepared them. As with virtually everywhere in New Marrakesh, Jack noticed a complete absence of alcohol; instead, Maghrebi mint tea was poured from long-spouted teapots into ornate glasses.

Jack and Kyra found themselves on either side of Ewan at the table. He was regaining his equilibrium, slowly. The talk around them moved through a variety of topics, including stories of wild scrapes that “Brahim”—within the family, only his father seemed to have called him Gavin—had gotten into as a child. They reminded Jack of the stories her father had told her about her fictitious namesake.

“Are you three feeling better?” Takama asked during a lull.

“Yes, thank you,” Jack said. “How did things go after we left? With that envoy?”

“Pfft! That one. What a terrible excuse for a person. She tried to keep the conversation going, asking us where you were from and how long you had been in town. I told her it was tribe business and of no concern to outsiders unless one of her men was planning on offering himself at the Moussem. Not that anyone would ever take up such offers.”

“Sorry, what’s a Moussem?” Kyra asked.

“Safiyya, perhaps you should tell this story?” Takama’s expression had gone from scornful to mischievous in less than a second.

Safiyya’s eyes went wide.

“A Moussem is an annual meeting of the tribes,” Ewan told them, rescuing his mother. “The engagement or wedding Moussem is the one time, each year, that couples from different tribes can arrange inter-tribal marriages. There’s a long story behind it, which is much better sung than spoken, but the legend is that long ago, in the Atlas Mountains on Earth, two tribes of Imazighen were at war. The son of one of the tribes, ‘Isli,’ one day met a beautiful young woman, named ‘Tislit.’ The two fell in love, only to realize that Tislit was a daughter of the tribe that his was at war with. They begged their families to let them marry, but their parents refused. Unable to bear being apart, their tears flowed from them in rivers that filled two valleys, creating two new lakes where their tribes’ lands bordered each other. They drowned themselves in the lakes of their tears.”

“If this story sounds a little familiar,” Cedric put in, “I’m fairly sure old Will Shakespeare stole it from the Imazighen. Just like half of Hamlet is straight out of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.”

Ewan snorted. “Undoubtedly. But the two tribes were devastated when they realized what their enmity had done to their own children, and decided that every year, once a year, all of the tribes would gather, and marriages across tribes would be permitted. Men and women seeking partners come, wearing their best. And, in accordance with custom, the women are the ones who initiate the courtship, approaching the men that they fancy most. They talk, and negotiate, and if they are happy with each other, then they introduce each other to their families and then have their engagement recorded. Depending on their negotiations, the marriage may even occur at the festival, too. Which brings us to the story of my parents.”

“Wait,” Kyra said. “Really? The women get to initiate it all?”

“Before the invaders came and tried to change us, almost all of the tribes were matriarchal,” Takama affirmed. “Many are not anymore, thanks to the influence of abrrani—foreigners—but you can still see it, and feel it, in so many of our traditions.”

“Which brings us,” Ewan repeated, looking amused, “to the story of my parents.”

“I was new on Tangiers Prime, just learning my way around, after they’d courted the hell out of me to come teach at their flight school because I’d been breaking records all over the place,” Cedric explained. “The money was too good for me to pass up, but somehow nobody ever asked me if I could speak Arabic, or anything other than English, Gaelic, or Scots. Didn’t occur to me either for some damn fool reason, until I was standing in front of a classroom full of pilots who couldn’t understand a word I was saying to them. My brogue was a lot thicker back then, too.”

“Soon after,” Safiyya laughed, “I got a call at my University office from this panicked Scotsman who needed a translator, or needed to learn Arabic as quickly as he could, and had no idea how to begin. Bear in mind that he was already fluent in three languages.”

“Neither one of us was thinking of falling in love,” Cedric continued. “But there it was. We would find the most ridiculous excuses to check in on each other and spend time together. But what could we do? I was abrrani and my colleagues kept warning me I was playing with fire.”

“None of which meant a thing to my sister,” Takama said. “She had a plan.”

Kyra snickered. “She sounds like you,” she whispered to Jack behind Ewan’s back.

“I got an invitation to witness a genuine Amazigh cultural event,” Cedric chuckled. “The Engagement Moussem. Foreigners are allowed to observe but are instructed to stay on the sidelines and not get involved. And there she was, right in the middle of all the hopeful brides, and all I could think was how crushing it was going to be to watch her choose some other lad to be her life partner. I was going to leave, but my friends wouldn’t let me.”

“I had bribed them to make sure they would keep him there,” Takama added.

“So after all of the singing and dances and things, when the ladies started approaching different men and I was wishing for a swimming pool full of whiskey,” Cedric went on, “I felt this hand on my arm and heard the most beautiful voice in the world asking me if I would walk with her.”

“Our parents were scandalized,” Takama laughed.

“Especially when they realized you’d been in on it the whole time,” Safiyya teased her.

“And that’s how the love of my life proposed to me,” Cedric finished, grinning.

It was, Jack thought, the most romantic thing she had ever heard.

Full night had descended before the gathering broke up. Ewan insisted on walking Jack and Kyra back to their building. Jack had the suspicion he was worried that the mercs might still be interested in them and might try to follow them; he had tried to talk them into taking a guest room in his parent’s house, but had graciously accepted their refusal—“Sebby will be getting worried about us”—as long as they let him see them safely home.

Safiyya and Cedric raised their kids right, she thought to herself, wishing the boys on Deckard’s World had been more like Gavin Brahim and Ewan Zdan.

When he gave each of them a hug at the door of their building, not asking to come in, she had a sudden thought. “I need you to ask Takama something for me,” she murmured to him, not letting him go yet just in case anyone was watching. A lingering hug might play into the weird assumptions Toombs had made at the church… and that would be better than anyone realizing what they were talking about.

“Of course,” Ewan said. “What is it?”

“I need her to reach out to the Matador survivors and find out if any of them had contact with the Quintessa envoy. If she ever touched any of them, or if any of them ever touched her.”

Ewan’s expression was only quizzical for a second before understanding struck. “You need to find out if she knows you were on board, too. She became awfully interested in who you are and where you’re from after she touched you.”

“Yeah. We need to know how much she suspects.”

“I’ll make sure the message goes out and an answer comes back. I promise.” He gave her another hug before letting go. “Good night, Tislilel, Dihya. I will see you again very soon, I hope.”

I hope so too, Jack thought as he walked off into the night. It was hard not to worry. Too many people she cared about had vanished from her life.

Inside, a very clingy crustacean made it clear that they had been gone for far too many hours. Jack had discovered that, in addition to the bugs he ate, he had a great love for olives—enough to sneak up on her plate and steal one if she had any—and had brought some home for him from the gathering. After half a dozen, he was appeased, if still determined to sit on one of them at all times.

While Kyra vanished into the bathroom with Sebby—the little guy loved showers and would screech if he was excluded from one—Jack sat down on the couch and opened her tablet to check on the status of the money drop she’d arranged. The confirmation was waiting for her; the one-time code that she’d programmed into the locker she had rented for the next month had been used. She and Kyra could get the money cards inside whenever they wished.

Low tide had ended in Elsewhere, she noted as she checked her tidal chart. The waters were still another hour or two away from reaching the Rif. They had been on Tangiers Prime for ten of its wildly long days, and Megaluna was almost a new moon. In another night, high tide would peak at midnight again.

Maybe she and Kyra could finally do their beachcombing in the dawn hours, she thought as she shut down the tablet. She was suddenly so tired. Closing her eyes, she decided to rest for a moment on the couch before it was her turn to shower while Sebby danced in the water at her feet.

She could feel them as her mind slipped away from consciousness.

Little larva, are you well?

She was about to answer them when something cold touched her throat.

“Wake up, little girl,” a strange voice said. Her eyes sprang open.

She recognized him from the church immediately: the merc who had been next to Toombs when he made the wisecrack about marrying cousins. He had a knife resting against her throat.

“You an’ me are gonna have a little talk,” he told her. “I just need to know one thing from you. Where’s your friend?”

Oh shit, Kyra… Her eyes, of their own accord, moved toward the hallway door into the bedroom and bath. The shower noises had stopped at some point, but she wasn’t sure when.

“Not her, you imbecile,” the man snarled. “I’m after the big game here. You’re gonna tell me where he is.”

Riddick. Oh fuck. He was after Riddick.

31.
Paint It White

For the next four of Tangiers Prime’s interminably long days, New Marrakesh felt like one enormous funeral.

Processions flowed, repeatedly, from both the hospital downtown and the makeshift morgue out at the spaceport to the dozens of mosques scattered through the city and up into its hillside suburbs. At least one, every hour, passed through the streets of the Rif to reach the large mosque on a hilltop behind it. The processions, for the most part, were somber and quiet. Everyone wore white.

It was the color of funerals, Takama told Jack and Kyra, the color of mourning, meant to help shepherd the way to eternity. Most brides on Tangiers Prime wore different colors for their weddings, although sometimes one of their dresses would be white.

There were no weddings that week.

The worst processions were the ones with tiny biers. Whole families, traveling together, welcoming home members or seeing members off, had died in the blast, and far too many had been children. Jack couldn’t see anything beneath the white cloth coverings being borne uphill, but the small shapes were more than enough on their own.

Transports arrived frequently, delivering food and medical supplies, and left filled with coffins. Dozens of off-worlders were traveling home in them.

The glitter of downtown, as seen from their window, was mostly intact. But most north, west, and northwest-facing windows had been shattered by the blast. Repair scaffolding had begun to go up around many of the structures. Jack and Kyra still found shards of glass in their own bedroom each evening when the light caught them.

Sebby enthusiastically chased after insects foolish enough to come through the empty panes of the bedroom’s west window. Watching him hunt was entertaining enough that they’d decided to leave it uncovered unless a rainstorm came. His antics were the only levity they had.

Other tenants in the building were already griping that it might be months before the damage to their units was fixed, and many were planning on moving out. Where, exactly, they expected to go was a mystery to Jack; many more people had been rendered homeless by the blast than had died in it, and even simple walks downtown had become overcomplicated.

On the second night, during the midnight hour when most of the sound and motion had ceased, she and Kyra had slipped down the hill to the transport station and their lockers to rescue their false IDs before anyone thought to start going through unclaimed contents. The locker that had contained Tomlin’s ID and funding cards was vacant, its key already returned. He must, Jack thought, have collected his package before he went to the spaceport.

She had planned to find a way to isomorph the package out of the locker if it had still been there, so that nobody would have ever known the alternate ID existed… and so she could have given the funding cards to his family. That money was every bit as lost as any cash people had been carrying in the blast zone.

On the way back up into the Rif, a man in military uniform demanded to see their identification for the first time since they had arrived. The cards Jack had laboriously created passed muster, but they were warned not to violate curfew again.

The curfew, which had only just gone into effect, was apparently part of the manhunt in progress for the bomber. Some survivors had seen him leaving the spaceport; new sketches with greater detail were in circulation. So far, no one had seen him since, but checkpoints were appearing throughout the city. Locals spoke in hushed tones about the concern that the checkpoints and curfews might not go away after he was caught.

The newsfeeds covered hot debates, at the local and planetary level, about whether and how much security should be tightened at the spaceports. Engineers argued about how to prevent another hydrolox-M explosion in the future. Chemical engineers spoke of switching to less volatile fuels, while structural engineers argued for radically redesigning the fueling systems that were standard at every spaceport. Everybody seemed to want to find one quick and easy thing they could do to eliminate the new threat decisively, but nobody could agree on what that one thing would be.

Even though the man shadowing Tomlin hadn’t actually been a terrorist, he had accomplished the goals of one: everyone was living in fear and in search of a sacrificial object they could burn to make things go back to normal.

Through it all, while Jack carefully sidestepped higher security protocols to secure the two of them additional funds, she and Kyra found themselves killing time in the apartment to stay out of the way of the processions, watching Sebby play, and occasionally even talking. Conversations dragged, replies coming after long, vacuous pauses. On the day of Tomlin’s memorial, the desultory talk became more serious.

“So where does all of this leave us?” Kyra asked as Jack was arranging for a money drop.

Jack shrugged. It was hard to feel urgent about anything. She knew she wouldn’t be staying much longer, but a deep malaise had crept in, not dissimilar from the one that had settled over her while she’d lived with the al-Walids. In some ways, it felt worse; Riddick had left her, yes, but Tomlin had been stolen from her and Kyra right as the bond between them had tightened into something she’d thought would be unbreakable. Now she just felt empty.

“Up to you, really.” She looked over at Kyra, trying not to seem completely uncaring. She did care. But the silence inside her had only grown. In the al-Walid house, she had tried to escape it with a razor. Now, she had other, less nihilistic ideas of what to do about it. But first she had to make sure Kyra was going to be okay.

It suddenly hit her that that was what Kyra was no longer sure about.

“Do you still want to stay here?” Jack asked, realizing that what had been a foregone conclusion just days ago might be in doubt.

“I…” Kyra started, and then paused. She looked up at the ceiling, blinking a few times before she continued. “I don’t know anymore,” she said, her voice small and wavering.

Jack felt a pang move through her. Just days ago, everything had seemed so sure. But that had been while Tomlin was alive and planning to help them. He’d known exactly who Kyra was but had come to his own conclusions about her, offering her sanctuary and the exact opportunities she needed most of all. His reputation, when he introduced her to others, would have outweighed or even erased hers. Could—would—anyone else be able to do that for her?

“You’re worried that his dad’s contacts won’t be as good as his, and that he might not be willing to use them at all if he finds out who we really are, aren’t you?”

Kyra nodded, sitting down beside her. “I just… I didn’t even tell Tomlin who I was and I don’t think I’d’ve had the guts to. He already knew. I still don’t know what he’d have thought or done if we hadn’t already done him a huge favor before he figured it out, but his family… I mean, I know he trusted them and all, but…”

Jack put her arm around Kyra’s shoulder, letting the older girl lean against her. “But family’s where people have their biggest blind spots, yeah. They seem great, but…”

“But who’s to say they won’t switch from thanking us for helping him to blaming us for his death once they find out we’re a pair of killers who escaped a loony bin?” Kyra asked with brutal frankness.

Jack winced. She didn’t really want what Kyra was saying to be true, but there it was.

“Yeah. We can’t ever testify against his killers even if we got the chance,” she mused. “Their defense team would eat us alive.”

“I just…” Kyra turned her eyes toward Jack, her expression somehow pleading as if she didn’t expect her to understand. “I don’t think… I can… I don’t think I can take that risk. They’re being so nice, and all, but would they be if they really knew everything we got up to? Tomlin told Takama that we rescued his charges, but I was with her the whole time we were bringing them back through to U1, and he never told her we killed a whole merc team to do it.”

He had, Jack remembered, been circumspect in even alluding to it later on in the shop, when he’d said what turned out to be his final good-byes to them. Takama might have imagined that the whole thing had been some clever bit of cat-burglary on their part. On some level, she had to know the truth; she’d tracked the mostly-empty shuttles out to sea and confirmed that they’d crashed into each other on schedule. But she probably didn’t realize that all the bodies inside were Kyra’s—and Jack’s—handiwork.

“Well,” Jack said after a moment, “Fortunately, Kali Montgomery is a military academy graduate, then, right?”

She couldn’t help feeling a little proud of that. She’d been even happier about the idea that Kyra might not need the identity she’d laboriously constructed, but as much as she hated to admit it, she was a little relieved that the work wouldn’t go to waste. Kyra could replace her past with a new one that had no stigma attached to it and build a whole new life upon it. Still…

“But let’s not completely rule Cedric out. Maybe he can still help. You never know. We’ll see how good his connections are and how much they ask, and maybe using the Kali ID with them will be enough anyway.” Jack grinned for the first time in days. “It’s really well made, you know.”

Kyra grinned back at her. “If you do say so yourself?”

“Hell yeah.”

Jack could see the tension leaving Kyra’s body. “Okay. We’ll see what happens at the memorial,” Kyra said, her voice hopeful. “Maybe it’ll still all work out. What about you? Are you still good?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m probably gonna have to go to either New Casablanca or New Fes to meet the transport to Furya, but it should be okay. It’s still about two weeks away. Plenty of time to get everything lined up. By then, things should be a little better here, too.”

If she had needed to leave for one of those two cities in the next few days, however, she would have had to get in the back of an interminably long line.

“What are you gonna do about the checkpoints?” Kyra suddenly asked. “Word is they’re patting everybody down and running people through scanners before letting anybody into any kind of transport hub. Even the buses.”

“Got a plan for that. You know how the clothes we brought with us existed in both worlds?” Jack suddenly felt some real enthusiasm for the first time in days, thinking about this.

“Yeah?” Kyra, picking up on her mood, looked interested.

“Okay. So… you get a belt. And you make it so it’s half in U1 and half in Elsewhere. Solid in both places… and then you put your scabbard with your knife on it… but that is one hundred percent in Elsewhere. The knife won’t register at all on scanners here in U1, but it’ll be on you the whole time.”

Kyra’s smile had been widening as she spoke. “Better make it a waterproof belt, just in case the tide’s in.”

“But once you’re on board a ship that’s, you know, gonna launch?” Jack continued. “You gotta move it all back to U1. Gotta have it one hundred percent in U1 for all launches and re-entries.”

Kyra looked like she was about to ask why, but then realization came over her face. “Fuck yeah, that’d be bad if you didn’t. Is that why Tomlin wanted the Matador to land here instead of docking at Station B?”

“Yeah. Straddling both worlds like we were, if we’d come down in a regular shuttle, that only existed in U1, the fifty percent of us in Elsewhere would have burned up on entry.” It was a gruesome thought that had come to Jack as she was figuring out how to get Kyra’s knives, or anything else they wanted to keep hidden, past security.

“Damn, no wonder he was so happy about our tricks.” Kyra abruptly gasped, her eyes going wide. “Fuuuuck, Jack, Quintessa was counting on that happening during a launch, too, weren’t they? Those shuttles were ordinary. Didn’t have any connection to Elsewhere until you pulled them in. When they hit escape velocity—” She stopped and made a retching sound, grimacing.

“Assuming the survivors didn’t know how to anchor themselves in U1, yeah,” Jack said, trying not to picture what would have happened to some of them. “Most of them would have been surprise survivors of that, but Tomlin hadn’t had a chance to tell them how to anchor their little kids and the baby.”

“Fucking bastards,” Kyra hissed. “I’d go to war with them if I had anything to fight them with.”

Jack nodded. She felt the same way, but she had no idea where they’d begin. The Corporation had casually murdered the last person who was onto them, along with several hundred people who happened to be even remotely near him at the time. You’d need an army to take them on, she found herself thinking. A really big one.

With a rattle of pincers, Sebby reared up on his back four legs and snapped at the air.

“I think someone’s volunteering to enlist,” Jack said. She had noticed, more and more, how nuanced the little crustacean’s responses to their emotions were.

That put a wan, fond smile back on Kyra’s face. “I think you’re right.” She reached out a hand, letting Sebby crawl up her arm and onto her shoulder. “Hey little guy.” She pursed her lips at him and he reached forward, touching them with his antennae. Then he climbed onto the back of her neck, nestling under her hair.

“So… lacking a whole armada of Sebbies…” Jack sighed. “The best we can do is stay off the Quintessa Corporation’s radar and hope they think the Matador issue is resolved. And just hope Karma has plans for them.”

“The New Christy Elders would’ve said all their sins were gonna come home to roost in the afterlife,” Kyra said thoughtfully. “As if that excuses making this world a living hell or something. I mean, I get that divine justice doesn’t just happen, I saw that firsthand back on Canaan Mountain, but… we need more guys like Tomlin in this ’verse, not even fewer of them. Karma needs to get off its ass already.”

Jack was still nodding when Takama knocked on their door and then entered. Safiyya and Tafrara followed her in. All three were wearing white, their faces and hands decorated with henna tattoos. Takama and Safiyya carried white bundles, while Tafrara had what appeared to be a makeup kit in her hands.

Jack and Kyra glanced at each other in wordless surprise. They had already bought white outfits to wear to the memorial, which was still a few hours away.

“There is a slight change in plans,” Safiyya told them as she walked over to Kyra with her bundle. “The envoy of the Quintessa Corporation has asked to attend Brahim’s memorial and wishes to bring guests with her. Cedric got a look at her guests and believes they are mercenaries.”

“Brahim did not tell us much about your pasts, and we will not ask,” Takama continued, bringing her bundle over to Jack, “but he wanted you concealed from the Corporation and, even more, from any mercenaries who might appear. So while we still want you to attend—and certainly more than that tagat woman—we must make you look as much like true Imazighen as possible.”

For the next hour, while Sebby hid in their bedroom, Jack and Kyra sat as still as possible while the three women decorated their faces and hands with Tamazight markings and Safiyya schooled them in the proper wording and pronunciations of different simple sentences they could use around “outsiders.” The entire community had been put on alert to close ranks against strangers… with the girls firmly inside those ranks. Safiyya spent extra time helping them master the kh and gh sounds that they had barely any experience using, until she was satisfied that they could pass as members of a tribe that rarely had contact with non-Imazighen.

“If the envoy or her mercenaries attempt to speak with you, you will say that you do not understand in Tamazight, and we will translate their words for you. Obviously you will understand everything that they are saying from the beginning, but pretend that you do not, please,” Takama said as she put the finishing touches on Jack’s hands. “You know how to say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘thank you,’ and we will imply to them that anything that requires more involved answers from you is a rude imposition on their part. I doubt that woman has the audacity to give open, public offense to the family of the man she murdered, but you never know.”

Safiyya sniffled at those words.

“Oh, my dearest, I am sorry…”

“No, it’s all right,” Safiyya said, although her voice quavered a tiny bit. “I have done my weeping and my wailing. I am ready to face this.”

Her eldest child is dead, Jack thought, murdered by a woman who’s now insisting on crashing his funeral… and she’s spending her time working on protecting us…

But the community had made its decision: to protect the Matador survivors, and to protect themselves from any further retribution, they would all pretend that Tomlin’s assassination was nothing of the kind, and that he’d just had the misfortune to be in the wrong place when some misguided terrorist committed a heinous act. Virtually everyone in the community knew better, but none of them wanted to go to war over it. An army of a hundred million nomads, farmers, shepherds, and artisans—even ones who were also stalwart warriors—could not hope to defeat the Quintessa Corporation; it would take something far darker than they could ever be.

An army of Riddicks? Jack mused. Maybe.

She and Kyra let the women clothe them in the white woolen dresses and veils that they had brought, until Jack could barely recognize herself in the mirror. Then they made their way carefully down the stairs of the building and over to the market square, to join the procession. To the Tomlin-Meziane family’s church.

It had come as something of a surprise to Jack to learn that, in fact, many of the Imazighen weren’t Muslim, following older faiths from the North African region of their origin. Some of the tribes were Jewish, others Christian, and others followed still older polytheistic and animistic faiths that resonated with some of the most ancient works of mythology Jack had heard of. Many, fascinatingly, mixed and matched multiple belief systems to create new hybrids uniquely their own. Takama—who, it turned out, was spending a year playing at food cart vending and more seriously acting as an intermediary between the New Marrakesh government and her people while on sabbatical from the city’s University—had had a wonderful time explaining the convoluted history of Amazigh religion once Jack got her talking. She was a sociology professor most of the time, when she wasn’t putting her degree to practical field use in the Rif. Her love of teaching had surged to the fore as soon as she realized she had an attentive audience.

Many of the different conquerors of North Africa had brought their religions with them, and the Imazighen had selectively adopted them to varying degrees. One of Catholicism’s most venerated saints—Saint Augustine of Hippo—had been Amazigh. When the Arabs had come in as conquerors, many tribes had violently resisted them for centuries, while others had paid lip service to their beliefs while clandestinely practicing their own. Still others had grafted the Islamic faith onto their existing Christian beliefs, recasting prophets and warriors of that faith as Catholic-style saints. “If you ever hear some misguided anthropologist talking about ‘Chrislam,’” Takama had told Jack, her smile turning a little bit scornful, “that is what they are referring to.”

But Safiyya and Takama came from a tribe that had stayed Christian, something that had probably made it a little easier for Safiyya to marry an outsider who belonged to the Church of Scotland. In deference to the inclusion of many of Tomlin’s colleagues and former comrades-in-arms, the service was non-denominational, albeit held at the church where he had been christened and married.

The family entered the church first, and Jack found herself and Kyra surrounded by its members. A day of mourning or not, they had clearly made a mission of protecting “Dihya” and “Tislilel.” Jack caught a momentary glimpse of Tomlin’s younger brother, Ewan Zdan, tall and dashing and movie star handsome like his brother and father, but with a drawn look of deep misery about his face. Takama had told her that the two brothers had been the very best of friends.

Cedric took Kyra’s hand in his, leaning close as though giving her a kiss. “I won’t be able to introduce you to the officers Gavin served with today,” he murmured, “not if we want to keep that Quintessa bitch off your scent, but I haven’t forgotten. I promise I’ll do right by you.”

“Thank you,” Kyra murmured back, saying it in perfect Tamazight instead of English.

For a moment, Cedric’s eyes twinkled before his expression turned somber again. He gave Jack a gentle hug, too, and led them to the seats reserved for the family of the deceased.

There was no coffin, no urn, nothing to represent Tomlin’s lost earthly form except a stunning portrait of him in military uniform, from the height of his combat pilot days. Other pictures abounded, and Jack took them in with fascination. Childhood pictures, adolescent pictures, wedding pictures with a beautiful woman who, Jack thought, looked a little like her own mother… lovingly chosen to showcase not just his cinematic looks but his intelligence, humor, and warmth.

Even though her departure from Tangiers Prime had been, and still was, relatively imminent, Jack found herself envying everyone who had been given the opportunity to spend years getting to know him.

Other guests had begun to fill the pews behind them when Cedric’s comm chimed. He glanced down at it and then leaned over, holding it out to Jack and Kyra. “The envoy and her entourage are arriving,” he muttered.

The comm’s screen showed the scene outside of the church, and a new group of arrivals disembarking a large vehicle. Their leader was a regal-looking woman with long white hair, clad almost properly in all white, although there was something a little too ostentatious about her clothing. Jack’s mother would have said she was dressed for a wedding where she intended to upstage the bride. The envoy reminded Jack, for a moment, of Antonia Chillingsworth. To either side of her, even less appropriately dressed for the occasion in a variety of colors, were her “assistants,” the people Cedric suspected were mercenaries—

Jack thought, for a moment, that her heart had stopped.

Alexander Toombs and Eve Logan were among them.

30.
As the Ashes Fall from the Sky

A terrible silence had fallen over New Marrakesh.

It wasn’t a physical silence; sirens wailed constantly, ebbing and flowing as emergency vehicles traveled to and from the disaster zone. The drone of military ’copters and the whine of airtankers filled the skies. Agonized screams had even come from within Jack and Kyra’s apartment building, from people who had been standing, dumbfounded, at their own west windows when the shockwave had struck. Human wailing pierced the air from all directions as people learned that someone they loved had been near, or in, the blast zone.

But Jack felt cocooned from it all, even as she and Kyra helped Takama tend their neighbors’ wounds and joined the Imazighen in aid efforts, even as they shared tears and hugs with people who had known Tomlin—Brahim Meziane, to most of them—and had just discovered his fate. She was wrapped in something dark and quiet. In the silence, she couldn’t even hear her heart beating and wondered if she still had one.

She and Kyra cried together that night, after Takama ordered them to bed, but the silence of her heart still wouldn’t lift. The things that waited for her in her dreams left her alone. Later she had a vague memory of them arguing over whether she, and the “other larva,” might be dying. It seemed unfathomable to her at times that she wasn’t.

The initial death toll didn’t quite reach five hundred, but that was more than enough.

Of those almost-five hundred, more than half were “missing and presumed dead,” people whose last known positions had been too close to the blasts for any identifiable remains to be left. That roster was compiled from multiple lists: the shuttle’s crew, all of whom had signed in to begin their shifts more than an hour earlier; roughly fifty passengers who had already checked in and boarded the shuttle early so they could sleep while they awaited liftoff; the ground crews loading and fueling the shuttle; the clocked-in staffs of an exclusive pilots’ lounge, a small duty-free shop, and the security checkpoint located just before the departure gate… and one last, terrible, overlapping list of people whose comms had signaled their final locations within the blast radius before going silent forever.

Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin had been among the last group; his comm’s final location had placed him in the pilots’ lounge, less than twenty meters from the first explosion, and his bank account had a pending meal transaction originating from there. Where the lounge had been, the side of a monstrous crater now sloped down into the earth.

The initial explosion had been declared a terrorist act. Footage had surfaced of an unidentified man leaving a duffel bag on a bench not far from the pilots’ lounge doors, and it was featured in every news feed, but no clear shot of the man’s face was available.

Between the massive fire at the spaceport itself, and the dozens of violent secondary fires on the northwest end of the city caused by the shuttle’s flaming debris, the search-and-rescue operations out at sea were scaled back, almost all of their teams diverted, and the story about that disaster, now thoroughly upstaged, vanished to the back “pages” of the news feeds.

The injury count was in the thousands. The property damage was in the trillions, when six more shuttles and two Star Jumpers that would never fly again were figured in.

New Marrakesh wasn’t, in fact, Tangiers Prime’s largest city; Tomlin had simply chosen to direct the Scarlet Matador there because the planet’s most prestigious hospital was located within it, and possibly because he had his best connections to local resources and logistical capabilities there. Both space traffic and terrestrial flights were immediately rerouted to New Casablanca and New Fes, with the still functional landing pads at New Marrakesh’s spaceport transforming into staging grounds for relief efforts. Thousands of stranded passengers waited within damaged concourses, and in hastily-assembled tents on the tarmac, for transport out of the city.

Check-in stations proliferated. One man, who had initially been reported as presumed dead, turned up a few hours later; he’d been at a police station on the other side of the spaceport, filing a report about his missing comm and wallet, at the time of the explosion. He was the only one thus far, but it had raised hopes that others might reappear. One Tangiers day after the explosion, the secondary list of missing persons, who hadn’t been presumed dead yet but who might have been in the blast radius, had dropped from more than two thousand to slightly under three hundred. At the end of a Tangiers week—four of its long days, a period just eight hours longer than a Standard week—whatever names remained would be added to the list of the dead. It could no longer top eight hundred, but it might still come close. If the noon hour on Tangiers Prime hadn’t been roughly equivalent to the midnight hour on most other worlds, the death and injury tolls might have been five times as high, but the devastation had struck during the spaceport’s “quiet hours.”

Every time Jack thought of those numbers, she felt ill.

Did I cause this? Is this my fault?

She wasn’t going to find the answer in the news feeds. Pulling out her most powerful Ghost Code, she dug into the local law enforcement chatter.

No one seemed to be connecting the shuttle crash over the Mutawassit Ocean to the subsequent explosion at the spaceport, but there was an active—if backburnered—investigation into it. Jack had been right; the Quintessa Corporation had chosen to make its move while Tomlin was off-duty and out of the way. He’d spent his day off putting together a plan for stealing his charges out from under the Corporation’s collective noses even as they were executing a plan to do the same thing to him.

Someone had switched around the evening duty rosters for Othman Tower, swapping in a set of false employee records for the new “staff” that took over the building that night. Jack recognized all of the faces immediately: the merc team. There was no record of who had made the changes.

“So Quintessa contracted out the kidnapping and let that merc team run it on the ground?” Kyra asked. She had taken to reading everything over Jack’s shoulder, partly slumped against her back. Jack didn’t mind; she needed the contact.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But whoever engineered this was either using a Ghost Code, like mine, or is really high up in the security chain around here.”

“That’s not good. Is that who jammed the cameras and comms?”

“Maybe. Either them or the mercs. I thought they had it set up to key off the shuttles’ transponders, but everything stayed off for another twenty minutes after those had already flown off, freaked out Ground Control—” Jack faltered for a moment on those words; that had been the first name she’d had for Tomlin. “—and then crashed. Kinda ham-handed.”

“Maybe,” Kyra said, her voice considering. “Or maybe they thought having a localized blackout keep going for a while after their operation ended would make it seem less connected.”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted. “Either way, whoever it is… they’re dangerous and they don’t care who they kill, and they can ghost around as well as we can, maybe better.”

With that in mind, she dug—carefully, because it was being actively consulted by law enforcement—into the back-end records of the spaceport, looking for a ghost’s trail: abrupt changes to databases with no record of who initiated them; glitched cameras that briefly lost the ability to record people’s movements; other signs that someone was doing the things she had done on Helion Prime, but to a far more harmful purpose. It took her another hour to find what she was looking for, but at least it kept her stable, quieting the part of her that wanted to scream to fill the silence, and might never stop if she let it start.

Someone had, indeed, followed Tomlin to the spaceport and shadowed him on the way to the pilots’ lounge. Someone who could only be tracked by the wake of suddenly malfunctioning cameras, about twenty meters behind Tomlin himself. Cameras at the periphery periodically captured small glimpses of a man dressed in the same clothing the suspected terrorist had been wearing, but never in any detail. By the time he was near enough to a camera for it to get a good shot of him, it had stopped recording.

Tomlin, in the footage, looked uneasy. At one point, he spoke on his comm—probably to Takama—as he walked through the concourse toward the shuttle that would ultimately explode. He lingered briefly by a reflective surface, studying the scene behind him. Trying to identify, Jack thought, his shadow.

Other members of the spaceport staff, dressed in uniforms like his, greeted Tomlin and spoke to him at times. He was clearly popular and well-liked. When he entered the pilots’ lounge, the malfunctions following him stilled to just three cameras, obscuring a space fifteen meters from the lounge’s doors. For the next half hour, those three cameras remained non-functional while a handful of people—a man and a woman in pilots’ uniforms entering the lounge with formally-dressed guests on their arms, someone else’s departing guest in a djellaba and a face-obscuring headwrap, and a trio of curious-looking teens who entered the lounge and were escorted back out a moment later, now looking disappointed—came and went. The glitches only moved when a technician showed up to examine one of the disabled cameras.

For another five minutes, nothing happened. Then a second set of camera glitches described the wake of another person moving, unseen, though the concourse and arriving at the same location.

The arrival, Jack thought, of the duffel bag.

Soon after, two sets of glitches showed Tomlin’s shadow, and his accomplice, departing the spaceport in two different directions, leaving behind an innocuous-looking bag sitting on a bench beside a potted fig tree. They were outside in another ten minutes. The first explosion immediately followed, every camera within forty meters of the bag registering flaring light from its direction before dissolving into static, the cameras beyond that showing the almost instantaneous destruction that had been wrought, and the intense fire that had erupted seconds after, before registering their own flash-and-static deaths slightly over a minute later.

Whatever kind of bomb had been inside the bag, its position and blast radius had ensured that both the pilot’s lounge and the shuttle’s boarding area would be destroyed. They had calculated it so that, when the bomb went off, it wouldn’t matter whether Tomlin was still eating his meal in the lounge or had joined the other passengers at the gate.

Jack couldn’t bring herself to watch the feeds of the explosion from inside the lounge itself yet. Instead, she ran through all the exterior feeds, hoping that one or even both of the men might have accidentally let themselves get caught on a camera that didn’t glitch. Nothing. The only shot she found was the one law enforcement was already circulating, the moment when a camera, too far down the concourse to capture any detail, recorded Tomlin’s shadow placing the duffel bag on the bench and walking away.

The uniformity of the glitching suggested that he and his accomplice had been carrying scrambling devices rather than using Ghost Codes. There were no unexplained changes to any of the databases. Jack felt disgusted with herself for being relieved about that, about the fact that she didn’t have to reveal the existence of the back doors she used, possibly closing them against herself in the process, in order to get justice for Tomlin.

Even though she’d put it off for the very end, Jack still couldn’t bring herself to watch the recordings from inside the pilot’s lounge. As much as part of her desperately wanted to see Tomlin again, even for a moment, she didn’t want to have to watch him die in that moment. Neither did Kyra, who had been petting Sebby while resting her head on Jack’s shoulder.

“So everybody thinks it was terrorism when it was an assassination?” Kyra asked.

“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “Looks that way.”

“Why’d they make it so big?” Kyra asked after a long, morose pause. “I mean, they knew where he was. Did they have to take out the whole concourse to get him? The whole spaceport, for fuck’s sake?”

Of all the infinite ways that the disaster had struck at them, the sheer, brutal magnitude of it hit hardest after losing Tomlin himself. To ensure one man’s death, the Quintessa Corporation had knowingly killed hundreds of people, injured thousands more, and crippled a city.

Jack’s words to Tomlin from the night before came back to her. They can’t threaten to cripple the economy if you don’t turn over people you don’t have, because they already took them from you…

She’d been wrong. She’d been so very wrong. Whether it was because they suspected Tomlin still had the Matador survivors, or because they wanted to prevent an inquest into the secrecy around Level Five Incidents, they’d been willing to do a whole lot more than just threaten. She wondered if the explosion was a message: If you rescue two hundred lives from us, we will take three times as many in their place…

Nobody could be so casually, inhumanly brutal, could they?

Death to the things that killed us… death to the makers of the cages… death to the ’verse that trapped us… a trillion deaths for every one you took from us…

She shuddered. Whatever that was, its malice was personal and vengeful. This was cruelly indifferent. It wasn’t as if Tomlin had known, or could have proven, anything that would actually break the Quintessa Corporation’s monopolistic power over space travel, was it?

I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought. We must never let them find my charges… or either one of you…

Had he discovered something that powerful?

“I think…” she said slowly, aware that Kyra was seeking an actual answer from her, “whatever it was that he figured out about them posed a big enough threat that they didn’t care how many people got hurt, as long as they eliminated it. But…”

She pulled up the spaceport’s schematics as she talked. Anything other than the lounge videos was a welcome tangent.

“…that doesn’t really explain how strong that bomb ended up being, or how it started that fire, or why the shuttle exploded. Shuttles are made to deal with much worse when they hit atmo. It should’ve been okay. Maybe not space-worthy anymore, but still…”

The structure housing the concourse was multi-level. The upper level, where the pilot’s lounge and departure gate had both been situated, was positioned six meters above the tarmac, level with the airlock into the shuttle’s passenger cabin. Beneath it, the ground level was a long, vast warehouse-style structure with conveyors for both baggage and freight, carrying it from the spaceport to the shuttle’s belly. And beneath that—

“There,” Jack groaned, pointing on the screen. “Oh fuck, there it is.”

“What?” Kyra leaned forward, touching the conduit Jack was pointing to. “What is it?”

“Hydrolox-M fuel lines,” Jack managed, feeling ill. “For refueling the shuttle. It was still an hour until launch time, maybe more. The lines were open and pumping.”

She could see it all now. The bomb had been strong enough to ensure that, whether Tomlin was still in the lounge—whose entry doors had been fifteen meters from the duffel bag—or was waiting at the departure gate thirty meters further down the concourse, he wouldn’t survive. But that was also strong enough to reach, and rupture, the hydrolox-M fuel lines eight meters beneath it, while they were actively pumping one of the most combustible materials in the universe into the shuttle’s enormous, almost-filled tanks…

Safety valves further down the line toward the spaceport hub would have tripped closed automatically upon sensing a sudden pressure drop, but if the concussive blast had damaged the valves leading into the shuttle itself, the hydrogen fire would have traveled, in moments, into its tanks, generating a blast whose power was just shy of nuclear.

Had they known the bomb would do that? Had they cared at all about the chain reaction it would set in motion?

And I thought I’d seen monsters on the crash planet…

“I hate not being the bad guys,” Kyra grumbled.

For a moment, Jack’s mind stuttered over that. But technically, she realized, they were both criminals. Escaped from custody and fugitives, they had stolen money and property and falsified documents along the way. They had participated in the hijacking and destruction of two shuttles, albeit ones that were empty aside from some merc bodies. But those were the bodies of their victims. They had committed murder—Jack for a second time, while Kyra had added another dozen or so notches to her belt.

I am technically a multiple murderer now, Jack thought, feeling a bubble of nausea rise in response. Whether she’d been defending people’s lives or not, both of her victims had, at least nominally, been the ones on the right side of the law.

But the world would still be a far better place, she admitted, if their crimes were the worst ones on the board, if they were the worst villains on the stage.

“Yeah,” she finally agreed with a heavy sigh, “me, too.”

A soft knock on their door alerted them to Takama’s arrival before she came in. She wasn’t alone.

The silver-haired woman who came in next was unmistakably Takama’s sister. Safiyya Meziane, Jack realized. Which meant that the fair, Celtic-looking man walking behind her, whose appearance was hauntingy similar to Tomlin’s, was his father Cedric. A younger woman, who looked like both Safiyya and Cedric, followed them in—his sister. Jack recalled that Takama had said her younger nephew was away at flight school, following in his brother’s and father’s footsteps.

She rose from the couch to greet them, Kyra rising beside her. It took her a moment to find words. “I’m so sorry—” she began, before she found herself enveloped in a crushing mass hug.

Sebby, who had been sitting by Jack’s tablet tapping ineffectually at the screen with a pincer, scooted back into the bedroom, perhaps fearing that he was next to be squished.

“Was that it? The creature from the other universe?” Tomlin’s sister, Tafrara, asked.

“Yeah, that’s Sebby,” Jack told her, wiping her eyes. “Sorry, I think he’s feeling shy.”

“We brought you food,” Cedric said. “Takama says you don’t seem to keep any in your home.”

Jack felt terribly embarrassed suddenly. Amazigh culture was huge on hospitality, and they had nothing to offer. “Thank you. We, uh…”

“We’d love it if you’d stay and eat with us,” Kyra said, rescuing her.

That, Jack decided a few minutes later, had been the plan from the start, based on the quantity of food the Tomlin-Meziane family had brought with them. Soon everyone was settled in the living room with fragrant plates. Jack, who hadn’t thought she would ever want to eat again, found that she was suddenly ravenous.

Conversation inevitably turned to the explosion, and to loss.

“They’ve told us that there will be nothing to bury,” Cedric said. “He was too near to the blast. But they haven’t told us anything useful about why this happened. No terrorist groups have taken credit, nobody seems to know—”

“I know,” Jack said heavily. “I know what happened. And I know why.”

For the next half hour, she walked them through what she’d discovered, showing them the glitch patterns and the small amount that had been captured on camera. She showed them the schematics, and how the size of the first explosion had made the second inevitable. They watched somberly; like her and Kyra, they didn’t want to see footage of Tomlin’s last moments in the pilots’ lounge.

“You are every bit as formidable as our son said you were,” Cedric murmured as she put the tablet down at last.

“All this… to kill our son?” Saffiya finally asked. “Why?”

“’Cause they don’t want people knowing about Level Five Incidents,” Jack sighed. “T—Brahim…” That seemed to be what everybody had called him in the Rif, when they weren’t referring to him as El Krim or, as some had pronounced it, Il Karim. “He thought he knew why. Something that happened, when we were rescuing the Matador survivors, made him realize what Quintessa had to be hiding. Maybe they figured out he was onto them.”

“He didn’t tell you what it was?” Cedric asked.

Jack shook her head. She could see Kyra and Takama doing so as well. Whatever he’d discovered, he’d seemed reluctant to voice his suspicions, and had taken them with him into the black.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “This is all my fault—”

“Shut that down,” Kyra snapped. “Shut that down right now. You didn’t do this. They did. You want to know why people keep dying around you? It’s because you don’t bail when things go bad. Ever. So shut down this ‘my fault’ bullshit.”

“Dihya is right, Tislilel,” Cedric told her, and Jack abruptly realized that neither she nor Kyra had ever actually told anyone their names since their arrival in the Rif; now the names that Tomlin had given them had stuck. “I’m an old hand at these kinds of intrigues. They may have been planning on killing Brahim ever since he took the survivors back from them after the high tide. If he was going up to the space station to retrieve evidence of their wrongdoing, they’d have wanted to stop him in a way that didn’t look too specifically targeted at him.”

“I think,” Takama said, “from watching the footage, they may have intended to abduct him, or possibly engineer an accidental death for him… until they realized that he knew they were following him, and he made himself inaccessible to them by going into a lounge that only pilots and their guests can enter. Technically, he still numbered among the pilots even if it has been three years since he last flew a mission.”

Cedric nodded, looking thoughtful. “That’d explain why the bloke on his tail staked out the lounge and called for backup… and a much more violent plan. You say they were using portable jammers on the cameras, not jacking into the security system?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Jack said. “None of the signs of someone with my kind of access were in the system.”

Cedric gave her a weighing look, his expression heartbreakingly like Tomlin’s when he had restrained himself from asking when and how she’d learned so much high-level espionage. Jack swallowed, suddenly feeling like her food had gotten caught in her throat.

“So they may not have had any idea that their briefcase bomb was going to trigger something catastrophic,” he said after a moment. “I suspect, if they’d been able to gain access, they’d have put it on the shuttle itself and timed its detonation for sometime during launch. So whoever it was had top-level tech, but not top-level clearance. Could you have walked a bomb like that onto the shuttle?”

Jack winced, feeling ill, and nodded. She knew exactly how she could have done it, too. “I would never do that,” she whispered.

“We know,” Takama said, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Maybe I should be bothered by how much access you seem to have,” Cedric agreed, “but I’m not, because it seems to me like it’s in pretty safe hands. Incredibly young hands, but—”

“Now hush, Cedric,” Safiyya said in a gentle scolding tone. “You know that my cousin Lalla looked like she was twelve years old until she was nearly thirty. Don’t embarrass her. Or yourself.”

“The point is,” Cedric continued, giving his wife a somewhat subdued playful glance, “you aren’t at all responsible for what happened. The two of you are, in point of fact, also victims of Quintessa. Both of you could’ve run away and hidden, but you stood beside him when he needed allies most of all. You’re why almost two hundred people survived long enough to escape into the mountains. And you saved his life.”

“I didn’t, though,” Jack blurted. “I just postponed his death.”

Just like Fry…

“No one gets to choose how long their life is,” Cedric told her, his voice becoming a bit stern.

I tried to…

“All we can do is make the days we have count. My son would have no regrets about how he spent his last days, and who he spent them with. Nor do we.” He took a deep breath. “Which brings us to one of the reasons we came here today. We’ll be holding his memorial a few days from now, once the search-and-rescue is over and the Islamic funerals are dealt with first. And we would like it, very much, if both of you would join us at it, and stand with us as part of his family.”

Jack looked at Kyra, who was looking back at her in speechless astonishment, eyes filling.

All she could do was nod and try not to start crying again.

Tomlin, she knew, would have wanted this. She had a sense that, on some level, she and Kyra had awakened fatherly impulses in him, and he’d have wanted his family to pull her and Kyra into their orbit and take them in on his behalf. But unlike Kyra, she had a father who was waiting for her, and a life and self that had been put on hold for far too long. For Kyra, what Tomlin had offered was the life she needed, not a further detour away from it. But even as part of Jack had been—and still was—a little tempted to let herself be enfolded into Tomlin’s world and family, she knew it wasn’t where she truly belonged. She needed to be Audrey MacNamera—not Jack B. Badd, not P. Finch, not Tislilel the mermaid—and inhabit a world without mercs, monsters, or murder. But first…

She would do this. She would honor Tomlin at his memorial ceremony. She would make sure that someone kept his promises to Kyra so she would have a future on Tangiers Prime that she could take pride in. But then…

It was, Jack knew, time for her to go.