The Changeling Game, Chapter 69

69.
Black Fox, Gone to Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which ones did you have in mind?”

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

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

“Maybe someday,” he’d replied…

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

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

“…and an awful lot of running to do…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmm.”

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

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

Huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Inconvenience—”

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

“It’s a what?”

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

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

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

“What, Audrey?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nice to meet you, Dennis.”

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

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

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

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

“The sweet spot?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kyra Wittier-Collins has disappeared.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The agent tried to grab her?”

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

“Fuck. Is he still alive?”

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

Wait just one second…

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

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

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

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

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

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

And would she do it?

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

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

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

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

Should she have, though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
Tizzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that isn’t something new to him…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was one way to describe the idiot, anyway.

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

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

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

Wherever Kyra was, she was alone. Completely alone…

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

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

Somehow, that just made the tears flow harder.