The Changeling Game, Chapter 67

67.
Suspended in the Tangled Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Such as?” Alvin growled.

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

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

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

Alvin nodded tightly. He’d gone pale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He caught her eyes in the rear-view mirror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dining room hadn’t changed much. Except…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not such an asshole after all…

After a while, they composed themselves and went upstairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of the clothes are going to fit me anymore—

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

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

Viola Trent, neighborhood gossip. So it begins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audrey’s safe! She’s home!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audrey nodded and then gasped, realization striking her.

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

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

Her voice broke.

“I fell…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish I’d never left…

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

Oh, Mommy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a third sister. She knew it.

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

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

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

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

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

Hundreds. Maybe millions.

Maybe even us.