Category: Fan Fiction

Afterword

This has been a really wild journey for me, with a whole lot of twists and turns along the way. Thank you to everybody who decided to accompany me on it.

Some twenty-plus-year-old backstory first…

This story began on the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club as an act of rebellion… and self-therapy of a sort.

A lot of fans of Pitch Black, and its ensemble cast, felt our places in the fandom got subsumed when one of the cast members, Vin Diesel, rocketed to stardom a year later behind the wheel of a muscle car. Within a matter of months, virtually all the Pitch Black fansites converted into Vin Diesel fansites to stay relevant in his exploding fandom, and the rest of the cast, and their fans, became afterthoughts within a community that had been a lot more egalitarian when I first discovered it.

I got pulled into co-modding one of those “Vin” sites by some fans of the stories I was writing; later, when its webmistress decided to step down and wanted to name me as her successor—right, ironically, as I was planning on stepping away from Vin fandom and focusing on creating a site for Rhiana Griffith/Jack fans—I put aside those plans and took over running Art of Vin Diesel, prioritizing an already existing community over the one I’d wanted to create. As much as I love all the friends I made on AoVD, that decision became one of my biggest regrets.

I still wonder, from time to time, whether it would have made a significant enough difference if the site I finally began building a bit over a year later had come into existence then, if Universal Pictures would have dared treat Griffith so shabbily if her fanbase had been more visible at the time. Thanks to my position of running one of the “big” Vin fan sites of the period, I ended up privy to a lot of the insider gossip about what had happened behind the scenes during Chronicles of Riddick preproduction, something that really soured me on Hollywood, Universal, the nascent “Riddick franchise,” and even Vin himself for a while.

Although there was no question at all that he was reprising his role, and Keith David was handed his part back, Rhiana was forced to re-audition for her part and, even after she won it hands-down and planning was already beginning for her to travel to the northern hemisphere for shooting, it was subsequently taken from her before contracts could be signed and given to another actress. The news of the casting change slowly leaked out as fans learned that a character named Kyra, who might or might not be connected to Jack, was being played by Alexa Davalos rather than Rhiana Griffith.

Most of us knew Davalos, at that point, as the chronically underdressed electrokinetic thief from the TV show Angel, where she’d been portrayed as a sexpot and had displayed a lot of over-the-top combat moves, and the idea that those were the characteristics that might have recommended her as a continuation of Jack didn’t sit well at all with much of Jack’s existing fanbase. Plus the two actresses looked and sounded absolutely nothing like each other. We held out hope that maybe Kyra was an unrelated character, or that the casting change had been necessary because Rhiana hadn’t been interested in reprising the part, until the news broke in October 2003 that Rhiana had been forced to audition for that very role only to be denied it.

When backroom chatter indicated that she’d lost the role in part because Vin had used up all of his producer-level influence with Universal securing Judy Dench and Colm Feore for the film, and hadn’t saved any of it to help defend Rhiana’s right to reprise her character, I was done. I wanted out of Vin fandom and away from all the gossip about a movie I’d gone from anticipating to dreading. It took me another five months to get my partners at AoVD to let me go, though, and that only finally happened when I got so fed up that I told them they had 48 hours to find a new webmistress or I was pulling the plug on the whole site; in the meantime, I built the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club and finally decamped to it with other Rhiana fans who wanted to focus on nurturing her career in the face of that major setback instead of continuing to invest in a fandom where we were clearly unwanted afterthoughts.

After the film came out, to combat a lot of the actual depression Jack fans were feeling on RGFC over how she had been drastically altered (almost none of the hallmark personality traits she’d displayed in the first film still existed), repudiated (the whole “Jack is dead” speech felt like a slap in the face to many of us), used as little more than a MacGuffin, and then killed off, I posted a writing challenge which I called the “CoR AU” challenge: write stories in which, in spite of everything we saw on the screen, Kyra turned out not to be Jack after all.

That was honestly easier than it ought to have been. In spite of the insistence of major players in the production that Kyra was a continuation of Jack, they had done a whole lot to sabotage their own claims. They had cast a woman who looked and sounded nothing like the original Jack performance—there is literally no facial feature that Alexa and Rhiana have in common (aside from having all of the ones you’d expect on any human face), and Alexa’s voice is more like Fry’s than any other female character in the first film—and then, in addition to giving her a completely unrealistic and improbable sketch of a backstory to try to explain all the changes, they made her blow her lines every time she tried to do a callback to the first film. Then, at the eleventh hour—possibly as a sop to Rhiana fans—they actually cast Rhiana, as Jack, in the anime short The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, something that had an effect of disconnecting Jack and Kyra further for us rather than “bridging the gap.”

So we decided we were going to write all the ways that Kyra didn’t have to be Jack, and could still turn out not to be Jack in spite of everything that had been seen onscreen. Some among us held out hope that maybe it could even influence sequel plans if the stories were plausible and popular enough, although it quickly became clear that the film was tanking too hard at the box office for those sequels (at least, as they were originally envisioned) to happen anyway.

My challenge had a few rules, but the two most important ones, which I brought to this story, were: first, we would treat what had been seen on the screen itself as incontrovertible (what people said, what people did, etc.) even if we were allowed to twist what those moments had meant around and could ignore all of the “rules” that tie-in materials imposed, and second, we would never make Kyra into a villain. A lot of us, definitely including me, were struggling hard with the impulse to blame Alexa Davalos for what had happened (thanks so much, Western Internalized Misogyny!) and we’d decided that it was important to portray her Kyra sympathetically to counter that, even if we couldn’t accept her as a continuation of Jack.

That was the environment in which I began writing a story I initially called Identity Theft, trying to reach for positivity in the midst of the free-floating negativity we were dealing with and trying to find a way past. I floated a lot of ideas of how Kyra could turn out not to be Jack during that period of time, but this was probably the most complicated; most of the rest were one-offs.

But by early-mid 2006, I was vanishing from fandom, and although I continued to maintain the RGFC, and even ran tech for my friends who had taken over AoVD, my writing slowed to a halt. Mostly that was because I was back in college, working on completing a degree, and the Honors program was so demanding that virtually everything I was reading and writing had to be of an academic nature.

Aside from a crazy plot bunny in ’07 that resulted in the first few chapters of Falling Angels (a story that actually borrows a few themes and ideas that I either used, or planned to use, in this tale, since I wasn’t sure I would ever expand on its original 16 chapters) and a later intense bout of writing that resulted from watching the film Prometheus right after taking a graduate course on Middle Eastern Epics and Assyriology (and yes, I will get back to writing Forbidden Gifts soon, I swear…), my unfinished stories got shelved. Meanwhile, the sites slowly went quiet as first Undergrad and then Grad School sucked away all of my free time, while fandom moved from stand-alone sites to social media platforms.

Although Rhiana has never gained the high acting profile her fans were wishing for (in part, selfishly, so we would have more pictures of her to use to create fan art and “book covers” for our stories), she has had a wonderfully successful and happy life. She’s an internationally renowned fine artist whose works have had numerous gallery showings and been sold to collectors around the world, she has a Master’s degree and is a licensed art therapist who uses the creative process to help children work through traumas and behavioral issues, and she’s raising a wonderful daughter.

All of that is stuff that a Hollywood career could have nixed, and God knows, after “Me Too,” I think she may even have dodged a bullet, but part of me still resents that the decision of whether to reprise her character was taken from her, and that the doors such an opportunity would have opened got slammed in her face instead. It still chafes me that Hollywood (then and now) has a habit of treating women (real and fictional) like Kleenex—disposable, replaceable, and indistinguishable—and treating Vin’s fans as too busy thinking between their legs to care who or what else is on the screen as long as he’s front and center on it.

Those mindsets, in my opinion (aside from the fact that they were trying to sell fans of The Fast and the Furious and xXx on a space fantasy at the expense of many of the original Pitch Black/Riddick fans), is a big part of why The Chronicles of Riddick did poorly enough at the box office that Universal shelved the planned sequels until Vin, himself, ransomed the franchise back from them by agreeing to reprise the role of Dominic Toretto. That was the character they had wanted the whole time. And, honestly, Vin’s Riddick portrayals outside of the one in Pitch Black have left me cold, seeming less like the original Riddick than “Vin Diesel is Dominic Toretto/Xander Cage as Riddick.” I’ve tried to bring back the Riddick I actually found compelling in my “CoR AU” stories, instead.

During the height of the COVID epidemic, while I was recovering from Long Covid and didn’t have the strength or energy for a day job, I decided I needed to figure out what to do with the websites I was still, more or less, maintaining, but which had fallen into extreme disrepair. I officially still own the AoVD domain name and webspace, along with RGFC and my own website, but it had been so long since I’d done much with them. I had been in the middle of earning a PhD when COVID essentially killed it, even if it spared me, and hadn’t had time to read or write anything unrelated to my aborted dissertation in years.

When I mentioned to some friends from fandom days that I was thinking of shutting the sites down completely, they convinced me instead to keep them and to at least try to revive the portions of them that had been about the communities that had been built and the works of art (visual or fictive) that had been created. Bringing that back is still a long-term project, hampered by my own schedule (a full-time job + residual Long Covid damage = not much free time, and my own writing gets first dibs on that) and the fact that most of the others who could help me have little time of their own to volunteer anymore. I decided to test out the feasibility of it all with my own webspace, which was by far the smallest of the three, and my own art and stories. In the process, several of my writing muses woke up and demanded attention again.

It wasn’t long before this particular muse took over and began running me ragged. That said, once I complete this story arc and finish my other incomplete works, I doubt I’ll have any further contributions to the “Riddick’verse.” Not unless they bring the Jack who inspired me in the first place—Rhiana’s Jack—back somehow, which I gave up hope of long ago.

 

The Evolution of the Story

During the first few months that I was writing Identity Theft, as it was originally called, it had a much smaller scope. It was going to be, simply, a tale about Jack going to a psychiatric facility for treatment, encountering a “Riddick fan” there and, after the two bonded and shared stories, discovering that her friend Kyra had begun to over-identify with her run with Riddick. The two were going to escape together from the facility, and after Kyra was injured (gaining the scar next to her hip prominently displayed in some scenes in CoR), Jack would spend the entirety of her recuperation telling her such detailed accounts of the events of Pitch Black and Dark Fury that they became, in Kyra’s head, something she’d personally experienced. Then the two separated, with Jack returning home and discovering that the unpleasant circumstances she’d fled were the lead-up to the birth of the baby sister she’d always wanted (yes, that plot point really was 20 years in the making). Kyra, meanwhile, by overidentifying as Jack, would get caught by mercs hoping to use her as a stalking-horse for finding Riddick; when they realized she had no connection to him in spite of her beliefs to the contrary, they’d slave her out as she had claimed in the film.

Things got more elaborate the deeper I went, though, because I began planning out the sequel I wanted to write, covering what happened once Riddick and Jack were reunited on the Basilica, and my plan for Song of Many ’Verses, and the galaxy-shaking mystery driving its plot, was born. That included having Jack develop a connection to multiple universes, and that she and Kyra would already have connected to a separate ’verse during their run together.

I should put a shout-out to Christopher Stasheff here, because there’s a moment in his novel A Company of Stars that inspired me: a grizzled space captain, helping a theatrical company pick out a ship to buy for their interstellar touring itinerary, reacts in horror to one of the ships, pointing to its hull’s unique “crinkled” finish as evidence that it got trapped between universes at some point and barely made it back. The idea of Jack and Kyra being on board a ship that something like that happened to, and that left them straddling two universes and struggling to survive in both, inspired the whole second act of my planned story… even if my writing time went away almost completely before I could actually get to it.

Most of the events that have occurred in the …holy shit… 97 chapters are things I originally planned out in ’04 and ’05, believe it or not, but two areas that definitely got significantly more development as I picked the story back up were the time Jack and Kyra spent on Tangiers Prime and how/why Jack transformed, after her return to Deckard’s World, into the fearful and distrusting person we met in the opening chapters even as she simultaneously developed powers on the same level with any of the major players of Chronicles. I also realized I needed a whole lot more space to develop the mystery of the Apeiros, who hadn’t yet been introduced when I stopped writing in 2006, and—oops, spoilers, can’t tell you what else yet… but a lot of what happened on Tangiers Prime figures heavily in future events of Song of Many ’Verses, and I realized I needed to set more of it up before returning to the “frame story” if I wanted the eventual outcomes to feel naturalistic and earned. I guess I’ll talk more about those elements in that fic’s afterword.

But I sure as hell didn’t expect it to turn into a 400K+ word monster. That’s blowing my mind a little. Still, I’ve loved every second of writing it.

 

Names, Places, and Canonicity

So here are the rules I follow in this story: If it happened onscreen in the Director’s Cuts of Pitch Black or the Chronicles of Riddick, or onscreen in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, it’s canon and I won’t contradict it. Everything else is optional. Everything.

The makers of the Chronicles of Riddick set that in motion by retconning TF out of the extended materials connected to Pitch Black, which had included elements such as Jack originally being named Audrey (and described, in the tie-in novelization, as looking exactly like Rhiana had in her prior film, 15 Amore) along with a general lack of supernatural elements even if Riddick himself may have come across as a little preternatural. Riddick, meanwhile, had multiple contradictory backstories depending on which tie-in you consulted, all of which were then swept aside for the Furyan backstory. If they can cherry-pick, so can I.

So Jack’s “real name” remains Audrey, Kyra has her own new backstory and lineage that has nothing to do with any of the tie-ins, and the Lord Marshal gets to keep his “Zhylaw” name but the B in Riddick’s name now stands for “Booker” instead of the WTFery of “Bruno.” If you see something that contradicts what you “know” about the franchise canon, it’s very likely something that never made it onto the screen in the first place and only has legitimacy through tie-ins that the majority of filmgoers have never seen. (Those tie-ins can enrich a fan’s experience of a film, yes… if the studio continues to honor them…) And whatever Furya is due to appear on the movie screens sometime in 2025 will have nothing in common, in all likelihood, with the one I’m depicting in The Changeling Game and Song of Many ’Verses.

I decided, shortly after I picked the story back up, that it needed a new title. Identity Theft had been appropriate when I wrote the first few chapters, and it was a smaller-scope story involving a mentally unbalanced girl overidentifying with Jack, to the point where she accidentally set herself up for the worst possible fate that might have awaited Jack herself. As the story grew in scope, and as I became increasingly charmed by the Kyra I was writing and the sister-bond she and Jack were developing, it didn’t fit nearly as well. I began to think about a title that would be better suited to a story about a pair of girls with multiple identities and personas, and an identity that wasn’t necessarily tied to either one of them. I went through a bunch of possibilities and decided that this one worked best for the course the story was taking, and its themes of protean identities, shared aliases, and reunions being upended when they’re with someone who either is no longer the person everyone expected, or never was that person to begin with. So Identity Theft became The Changeling Game in July of 2024.

Some of the locations in the story are tied into canonicity, while others are my own creations. The Hunter-Gratzner was “en route to the Tangiers system” according to Owens in Pitch Black, and many of the early tie-in materials made references to planets and events in that system that connected to Riddick. I went with a similar naming structure as planets in the Helion system apparently use in CoR, with the main in-system colony world being “Prime” rather than numbered. At the same time, I decided to play with hints that other naming systems are frequently used, especially since I had already named Audrey’s home planet “Deckard’s World” before I began exploring naming conventions. And, since CoR portrayed “New Mecca” as a stop on a rail line at one point (or at least a transit station serving as a shelter during the invasion), along with having the locals insist that their world was extremely multicultural, it became an ethnic suburb of Helion Prime’s big city, which I named New Athens in keeping with the idea that naming the star Helion (as opposed to, say, Shams, شمس, which is the Arabic word for the sun) pointed to a Greek base for the colony. So I’ve had a lot of fun playing with place-names throughout the story, and most of them have specific meanings and significance. The two moons over U1’s version of Tangiers Prime, for instance, are named Qamar (قمر, Arabic for “moon”) and Taziri (ⵜⴰⵣⵉⵔⵉ, Tamazight for “full moon”).

I actually put together an appendix of all the names, places, dates, and vocabulary in this monster-story, but the damn thing is ginormous and nearly novel length itself. It even has an hour-by-hour (in places) timeline I constructed to keep track of what happened when (a total necessity when your characters hang out on a planet with 44-hour days but you’re trying to keep track of how much your main character is actually aging and when her next birthday would be, OMG). I definitely need all of the references to keep things straight, and had to go back and fix a few things once I’d put it together. Maybe after both stories are concluded, I’ll put it up, too, as a tie-in. (If I put it up now, there’d be way too many spoilers for Song in it.)

 

Soundtrack

Wouldn’t you know it, I had a whole playlist of music that I listened to, and connected to, as I was writing this. A kind of soundtrack formed for me. It originally started with the song “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran, which back in ’04 was about Audrey shrugging off her wild adventures and returning home to her family with no intention of leaving Deckard’s World again (although she ended up being far less “ordinary” upon her return than I’d originally planned!) and developed from there. So here are key tracks (and links to where you can listen to them on YouTube) that influenced me and helped me set the right mood as I was writing:

1. “Lorretine” by Clan of Xymox – A kind of all-purpose theme melody for the story. Especially with the beginning suggesting something rising up out of the darkness, and the end effect that makes me think of a celestial body arcing away and escaping.
2. “In the Shadows” by Amy Stroup – I have a tendency to visualize Riddick carrying an unconscious Jack into the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead (no, I will never treat “Deads” as a real word) during the opening bars, meditating over her and delving into her mind, and envisioning a variety of moments from the story as the song unfolds. There’s a moment right before the final chorus that makes me imagine the Scarlet Matador making its final descent into the phantom waters of New Marrakesh.
3. “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, as performed by (of all things) the Riverdale Cast – I know, I know, but somehow this became the “escape from the hospital” theme for me, maybe due to the frenetic synth pulses, and also a song about sister-bonding (I have an even more improbable song about sister-bonding here, too, LOL) and the connection that begins to be forged between Jack and Kyra during their run together… symbolized by the way Ashleigh Murray and Camila Mendes weave their voices together in this rendition.
4. “Salt in the Rainbow” by Duran Duran – yeah, this is one of three Duran Duran tunes in the list. The song never made it onto any of their studio albums after bootleggers got hold of this early cut, so it didn’t get smoothed out and shined up the way a lot of their materials do, but I love Nick Rhodes’s synth work on it and it fits into the shining moment where things are going really well for Jack and Kyra, their bond is strengthening, and the power building between the two of them feels like something that can take on anything. When I went back to get the link, I found other, more “polished” versions, but this one, with the chorus of “we are forever,” is the one that inspired me.
5. “Thank You” Led Zeppelin, version performed by Duran Duran – In my head this is, instead of a love song from a man to a woman, somehow another sister-bonding song for the story. The opening sounds made me visualize Megaluna hanging over the King Tide in Chapter 23, making the waters glitter, and the moment when Jack realizes that her bond with Kyra has transcended friendship and the two of them have become sisters. It’s an odd choice, I know, but it helped me get into the right mindset for writing a lot of their adventures together.
6. “Time For Flight” by Baby Alpaca – I listened to this a lot as I was writing and developing the Tomlin plot: this man who was going to listen to, and mentor, Jack and Kyra as they explored their burgeoning powers, before suddenly realizing, “shit, the story needs him to get killed off, doesn’t it?”
7. “The Beginning of the End” by Klergy (featuring Valerie Broussard) – There’s a line in the song that’s especially telling: “reckless behavior / is looking at a man like he was a savior,” which is pretty on-the-nose. The bombast and drums right around the 1:30 mark make me imagine the Ennead Kids performing at the Helion Prime spaceport with Eve Logan as their captive audience, while Jack and Kyra slip past her. The frenetic strings building up around the 2:40 mark make me visualize Jack and Kyra racing through the darkness to Othman Tower before the Battle of Othman Plaza. And the closing beat right before the final “the end?” The New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion. I see it so clearly every time, with the final note revealing the devastation that followed. It’s so vivid for me. (And yes, I know it’s also a song associated with Riverdale, but I actually only heard it when part of it was used in an episode of Lucifer.)
8. “Trenched” by Tipper – In my head, I call this song “The Sebby Dance.” There may also be some portions of it that make me think of the Apeiros.
9. “Guyane: V. Lullaby” by Aram Khachaturian (performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi) – This is the theme of New Marrakesh itself, for me. Neeme Järvi’s version is by far the most beautiful I have ever heard.
10. “Radiance” by Peter Boyer (performed by the London Symphony Orchestra) – This is, to me, “The Love Theme of Ewan and Tizzy.” I always visualize, as the piece’s final strains spread out, the moment when the two of them are sitting on Elsewhere’s beach together, eyes locked and hands resting on each other’s cheeks.
11. “Somewhere in Paradise” by Karen Lawrence – This is Ewan and Tizzy’s “Goodbye” theme. The lyrics are so on the nose.
12. “Waves” by Dean Lewis – If there’s a song that better nails the adolescent struggle of veering between one’s childhood self and one’s new adult mindset, I can’t think of it at the moment. Both Jack and Kyra have multiple moments when they wish they could reach back to their more innocent selves and chart a different course, along with moments in which they wish their more adult versions of themselves would stop flitting off and stick around already. I tended to listen to it more when I was writing about the moments leading up to their separation, something neither of them wanted and both dreaded, but that they couldn’t figure out a way to prevent.
13. “Echorus” by Philip Glass (performed by Jennifer Koh, Jaime Laredo, Vinay Parameswaran, and the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble) – In my head this is called “Marianne Goes Home,” and reflects Jack’s mental state as she attempts to hold herself together after the New Casablanca Spaceport Explosion.
14. “Piano Concert in D-Flat Major: II. Andante con anima” by Aram Khachaturian (performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi) – This is the “Theme of the Apeiros.” Try not to find it a little spooky. I dare you.
15. “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran – Audrey returns home and tries to take up a life as a normal girl again. Harder than it looks, of course. There were some specific lines in the song that connected really well early on, but became even more fitting as the story grew in scope: “Here beside the news / Of holy war and holy need / Ours is just a little sorrowed talk,” which felt like it related to her putting aside her past with Riddick to focus on the more deadly threat of the Necromongers. There’s also a bit at the end where a background singer sings: “Any world / Is my world / Every World / Is my world,” which is oddly on the nose for a character who can move between universes, so the song became even apt as the scope of the story grew.

Thank you again, everyone, for reading and accompanying me on this adventure. I hope you like the next leg of the journey, too!

—Ardath Rekha, January 26, 2025

97.
The Rise of Dame Riddick

“It’s okay,” Kyra told Jack as they sat by the stream, watching Elodie play. “I understand. He was yours first, anyway.”

Somehow that just made Jack feel even more guilty.

“You understand, huh?” Jack asked. “I’m not sure I do yet. I’m getting married in the morning and part of me is like… what the hell just happened here?”

Kyra laughed and shook her head. “It’s not that complicated. He’s like me. Mostly stays away from connections to other people, but when one forms… it’s everything.”

Jack had to admit that made sense. “Still…”

“I’m not upset, Jack. I barely knew him. Most of what I thought I knew came from you, so…” She shrugged. “It was more a bond with you than him. In reality, I only really knew him for about a day.”

“I’m not all that far ahead of you, though. Realtime, not just thinking about him or imagining him, I’ve known him for maybe two weeks.”

“Longer than you actually knew either of your other Great Crushes, though,” Kyra pointed out, a wicked sparkle in her eyes.

“Hey! Not fair,” Jack laughed. “It’s just… all really fast.”

“It’s been building for centuries.” Kyra looked out across the woodland field.

It was, Jack knew, a place that neither of them had ever been or imagined. But her new, extended senses had allowed her to bring them there, to the rustic cabin where Michael was hiding her mother and little sister. They stood on the other side of a threshold, unseen observers with no actual physicality, but it was comforting to see that Elodie was safe and well.

“I remember Joren,” Kyra continued after a reflective moment. “He talked, a lot, about the importance of doing great things for humanity. You ever notice how great things are hardly ever good things? He set this all in motion. And now here we are, four hundred-some-odd years later, and time’s running out. Everything’s fast now. Or, at least, out there it is.”

“And in here? How are you holding up?” It was something she worried about, even if the Apeiros kept telling her that Kyra was safe and even beginning to thrive in their care.

“I’m a mind without a body,” Kyra said with a smile. “Time moves differently for me, maybe. I’m not really sure.”

“I’m working on that,” Jack sighed. “Gotta get the parameters just right to call up just the right ’verse…”

“For a body?” Kyra might not really have one at the moment, but she could still raise an imaginary eyebrow. “What are the parameters you’re using?”

“Well, it’s gotta be you,” Jack told her. “I mean, one of your analogues in the U1 cluster, same genetics, same overall string vibrations, so you still have a connection to the Kirshbaum mojo. I couldn’t access those until now, but now… I’m looking for a stream where you are physically healthy, and roughly the same age you were when you died, but somehow don’t have a four-shape or five-shape attached to your shell anymore.”

“So me, but brain-dead?” Kyra asked. “Got it. Can I add a parameter?”

“Absolutely.”

“A me who never went through the shit I did. Physically, I mean. I know all your schooling, and that book you love so much, talk about how virginity is a social construct, but I want mine the fuck back so I can ‘lose’ it on my terms. If you’re shopping for a Kyra body out in the multiverse, find me one where that’s true.”

“I think I can do that,” Jack said after a moment’s thought. It was a complicated order, but not impossible. Maybe a Kyra who had never actually left Earth? “Are you asking the Apeiros for some selective editing of your memories?”

“We’ve talked about it, yeah,” Kyra said. “I want to know what happened to me, but I don’t want to remember it happening. It’s funny, though. They say that kind of stuff spreads out into other memories, too… we’ve been experimenting with how it would affect them. Haven’t quite hit on the right combo yet, if you need me to still be… well, me.”

“Don’t know I’d want you to be anybody else,” Jack told her, wishing that they could hug for real rather than just simulate it in the non-physical world of the mind.

Kyra must have caught the wish. “One day soon. There’ll be nothing the two of us can’t take down together.”

They’d get to put that to the test soon, Jack was about to say, when she felt a mouth against the skin of her throat.

“Gotta go,” she told her sister. “He’s waking up. I’ll come back soon, I promise.”

“Enjoy,” Kyra said, a hint of wistfulness in her voice before she vanished. The cabin and Elodie faded away as well.

Jack opened her eyes.

She was surrounded by darkness. Riddick’s world. She could vaguely make out the vaulted ceiling of their bedroom above her. The Lord Marshal’s bed chamber was luxurious, with a plush mattress and silky sheets—apparently neither Riddick nor the man he’d ousted had extended their asceticism to their sleeping arrangements—but those sheets had been pushed to the side hours earlier. Riddick had been voracious in the wake of her hatching, maybe because he’d perceived it instead as her near-death. It appeared his ardor was returning.

He was nuzzling her throat, his hands moving over her skin. She tilted her head back, giving him better access, and began stroking his shoulders and arms. His shields were still too strong for her to pick up much of what he was thinking and feeling, but she was picking up a sense that he needed to reassure himself, yet again, that she was unharmed and hadn’t been taken from him.

She could definitely help with that.

It only took a few gentle nudges to get him to bring his mouth to hers. The hunger in his kiss was almost intimidating, but she could feel that same shadow of loss and grief behind it. He needed to know that she was safe, and safely his. That he hadn’t lost everything and everyone.

Shifting her position a little, she reached down and guided him inside her, tangling her legs with his. He groaned into her mouth as he filled her. For a moment, he went still, buried in her and holding her close.

He broke the kiss, lifting his head a little so she could see the mercury gleam of his eyes. “Jack… need you to promise me…”

Uh oh… She kept her thought shielded from him, though, reaching up to stroke his cheek. “Promise you?”

“Promise you’ll stay…”

The future shattered around them, infinite tiny variations on things to come. For an instant, in one fragment, she glimpsed him holding her hand, pain and nascent grief in his face as he hovered above her. “Fuck, Jack, why’d it have to be you…?”

It was a glimpse through the eye of the needle, she realized, her first glimpse of what might lie on the other side. If they threaded the needle successfully, managing to follow the one path that could have a future on the other side, that might be what waited for them.

Can’t look that far ahead, she warned herself. We’re all dead if we don’t thread the needle. Whatever’s on the other side will be a better fate than that, any­way…

But Riddick was still waiting for her. For her promise. What promise could she safely give him, knowing what was to come?

“I’ll always be with you,” she murmured, and felt him flinch.

---

It took a long time to soothe him, and she wasn’t sure she really did. By the time they were spent, “morning” had arrived on the Basilica and the sounds of activity in the corridor outside their rooms had begun to filter in. Riddick rose, hints of agitation still swirling around him, and disappeared into the massive bathroom for a few moments before emerging again, showered and dressed. He kissed her hungrily, gazing down at her with an expression that suggested he was struggling against the impulse to demand another promise from her, before his customary deadpan and smirk settled into place.

“I’m gonna go make sure everything’s ready,” he told her. “Don’t sleep in too long.”

“I’ll get up,” she laughed, hoping she didn’t sound nervous, “soon as I can remember how to walk.”

That got a genuine chuckle out of him. He was gone a moment later, his armor still piled on his desk in the outer room.

Well, at least he no longer feels like he has to have it on all the time, right? She sat up in bed, groaning. “Lucy? You around?”

I am here, sister.

“Is he okay? He doesn’t let me hear what he’s thinking.”

He believes you were in danger of death yesterday. It didn’t help that he had only just experienced Kyra’s death from her perspective, courtesy of my brother’s minions.

“Oh.” That definitely explained his need to hold onto her so tightly. His need for promises. Maybe it even explained this wedding business…

Are you uncertain? There was a hint of worry in Lucy’s mental voice.

“I dunno—” Jack stopped herself, struggling not to laugh. “I mean, I guess that means I am uncertain. You said that marrying him has no effect on the outcome of the war. Are you sure about that? He seems to need it a whole lot.”

She climbed out of bed as she talked to her sister, padding into the bathroom. She would shower, clear her head, maybe catch up with Vanessa, Poly, and Lola for a little while—

There was something different about the rooms, she suddenly thought as she turned on the water for her shower head.

I have studied the streams. Marrying him neither prevents nor ensures the successful “threading” of the “needle,” as you have taken to thinking of it. Bringing Kyra back supersedes it in every way.

“It doesn’t even affect his commitment to the plan?”

It does not.

“So,” Jack concluded after a moment as she washed her hair, “I’m not doing it for the whole multiverse-saving thing. I’m doing it because he needs it.”

This is where I grow concerned, little sister. What do you need?

“Shit. I don’t know,” Jack groaned, leaning her head back into the water stream to rinse her hair. “A quiet life. Quieter. I wanted to study sociology and linguistics at Khair Eddine University, maybe even—”

She couldn’t talk about that, couldn’t think about that, didn’t dare articulate it.

“…teach one or both of those subjects one day, myself,” she continued after a pause spent soaping up. “Go exploring. Find new people and new creatures and get to know them. Watch Elodie grow up and make sure she can do and be anything she wants. Talk to my cats. Be one of Toal’s independent operatives. Run around the galaxy with Kyra. Rescue Riddick back after all the times he rescued me. None of it really fits together anyway.”

Is that last one what you’re trying to do now?

“Maybe. I don’t know. I love him…” She turned into the water stream again, rinsing off. “It just still feels really fast. But last night and this morning, I could also feel how… scared of losing me he is. I don’t know what to do about that.”

Except for binding yourself to him in this way.

“I guess.” Jack reached for the water valve and stopped, frowning. “I keep having this weird feeling that something’s watching me. I mean, aside from you.”

You are six-dimensional now, Lucy reminded her. You had noticed before that this ship is straddling two thresholds and exists in three ’verses. There was one you couldn’t touch before now, but now you can.

That was right; the activities of the last few days had pushed that to the side. Jack focused, concentrating on her strange new awarenesses, and put her hand into the stream of water still flowing from the shower. It was touching her, flowing in U1… but where else? She let her senses follow the water…

…and, with a delighted gasp, let her body follow.

It was, and wasn’t, the same room. She found herself hopping as she crossed the threshold, her feet coming down on wet, mossy turf that raised the ground level by a few inches. The walls of the shower room still surrounded her, but—

She was in a garden.

Around her, in a semi-orderly tangle, bushes and vines grew, blossoms adorning them. One bush rustled and a small head poked out, black eyes like shining beads peering at her. A mouse? Something buzzed past and she turned her head, focusing on a little bird, its plumage brilliant yellow, that passed fearlessly close to her and darted through the shower stream.

Other birds perched in the area, watching her with suspicion and looking with longing at the stream of water.

What is this place? Jack asked Lucy as she stepped aside. Immediately a dozen birds mobbed the artificial waterfall, flapping their wings as they bathed beneath it.

As I understand it, the Moribund attempted to make the Tenth Crusade straddle the entire U1 cluster, but he did not have the strength. He did, however, manage to connect the ship to both U1 and what I suppose you might call U1-a. His test of that connection was to release the plants and animals that had been stored for the ship’s arrival at Delubrum, but only in U1-a. The entire ship is naturalized by them… but, again, only in this ’verse. As his minions grow more connected to him, they begin to be able to see it. Most of them take it as proof of the existence of their Underverse.

Jack left her shower running for the birds and ventured back into the large bathroom area. A huge hummock of vegetation marked the location of the statue she’d evicted from U1. Some of its leaves were browning.

“Shit, when I moved the statues partly into Wonderland, I froze the plants growing on them here, didn’t I?”

They will recover.

“Are all the ships in the Armada like this?”

The ones manufactured with the construction equipment that had been on board the Tenth Crusade, yes. The rest exist only in U1. If you do, indeed, need to hide children from those who were too enthused by Zhylaw’s crusade against them, you could do so here.

Aside from the frostbite she’d inadvertently inflicted on a few of the vines, the place seemed almost Edenic. “Is there food here?”

Many of the plants that were sown throughout the ship were intended for agriculture. And there are many of the original food synthesis machines here. My brother removed them from U1 altogether, once he wished his minions to become raiders who relied on the resources they plundered rather than things they could make for themselves. I have discussed this with him, and he has agreed to permit humans to occupy this ’verse. Human children, anyway.

“Why couldn’t I come here before?” Jack focused for a moment, by the table she had claimed as her own, and pulled her towel and comb through from U1.

It is part of the U1 cluster. A minor variant upon the world you know. To consciously navigate the variants within a universe’s flow cluster, you must have a six-shape, not just a five-shape, or you will get lost. The way a handful of the Demons did, to their misfortune, when they were exposed to so-called Kirshbaum rays.

Jack nodded, setting the comb back down in U1 and walking over to the closet she had taken over. She could feel the subtle differences between the two versions of the ’verse, and was certain she could tell them apart and move between them… but if the Demons had only been two ’verses wide when they encountered the “K-rays,” they might have swiftly vanished from their originating ’verse and been unable to find their way back from one of its variants.

“This is important, isn’t it?” she asked Lucy. “Being able to feel the different streams in the cluster. I’m gonna need to make sure that the main U1 stream stays on the course that’ll let us thread the needle.”

Yes. And you will need to pay attention to which courses of action unravel the variants in the stream. And they are unraveling.

“Already?”

Since the day the first apeirochoron was made. Whole branches of the cluster died that day, and most of the branches created since then have been increasingly limited in how they could form. Joren Kirshbaum stole infinity from the multiverse and locked it into a box.

“More like Pandora’s box than I realized,” Jack muttered, drawing her chosen outfit from U1 to…

Fuck it. Eden it is.

She hadn’t put names on many of the ’verses she had access to, but if the shoe fit…

There were abundant signs that the plants and animals had adjusted their habits to deal with the way that things were moved around, and doors were opened and closed, in the suite. Jack was amused to realize that the mattress and sheets currently on the bed must have been looted in the centuries since; in Eden, the bedframe was empty and filled with a raspberry patch… and what appeared to be a small cherry tree.

A few of the raspberries were ripe and hadn’t yet been eaten by wildlife. They tasted wonderful.

“I’m gonna need to set aside some time to explore this whole place,” she told Lucy. “Find those food machines you men­tioned… make sure they work… and make sure there are good places for any kids the Necros bring back to use as rooms. That are actually comfortable. Can’t have them sleeping on raspberry patches.”

Do not get too distracted by the children. The battle will soon be joined.

“I know.” She sighed. “I need to get back to U1, don’t I?”

Perhaps not quite yet.

“Why not?”

Come with me.

She could see Lucy, almost, her eyes catching glimpses of a shadow here, a leg there, the sparkle of eyes…

“Okay,” Jack said, following her out of the suite.

“Weird,” she heard Nichelle of the Ennead Kids say on the other side of the threshold. “Did you just see that door open and close on its own?”

“Oh, like you don’ already know we livin’ on a haunted ship,” Malik retorted with a snort.

Jack found herself struggling to contain her laughter, wondering if they might hear her across the threshold.

You like them a great deal, Lucy observed.

“You bet I do. Wish I’d had friends like them when I was back in school in Settlement Point.”

You were very lonely then.

“Yeah. I keep wishing I’d just said fuck it to all the overcautious bullshit and brought Kyra back there with me. Maybe when MilitAIre caught me out, his plans for keeping me safe and my secrets hidden could’ve included her. And then she’d never have gotten hurt again. Let alone killed.”

Perhaps not. But then what would have drawn Riddick into battle against Zhylaw, to break his power? This war cannot be won without Riddick, because it cannot be won without the Necromongers and the Furyans standing together against the Demons of the Darkness.

“I hate it when the best possible outcome is so fucking brutal,” Jack muttered.

When the war is won, all possible outcomes will be able to manifest again. Every possibility will play out in some ’verse. The sorrow will be balanced by the joy. For every ’verse where something has gone wrong, there will be another where it has gone right. The true nature of infinity will unfold again, there will always be one more ’verse where things can go a different way.

“That what we’re fighting for?”

Part of it.

It was an alluring thought. If she succeeded in threading the needle, following the one path that could break the power of the Kirshbaum dynasty and annihilate the substance used to make apeirochorons, wherever it was found… worlds could bloom again. Other possibilities could unfold. A girl named Audrey MacNamera could grow up somewhere peaceful, maybe follow a dream of scholarship to a beautiful new world and the arms of—

“There is always one more ’verse,” she whispered to herself. It was as close as she could come to a promise.

Lucy, she realized, was leading her toward the throne room.

“Is that what the afterlife really is?” she found herself asking after a moment. “Our four-shapes, or five- or six-shapes, disconnect from our shells and connect up with all the other ’verses we exist in? We get the chance to live out our days in other ways?”

Perhaps. Or perhaps, in time, you become aware enough of those other lives that your consciousness moves past them to the shape that is formed by their totality, and you hatch into the next shape yet.

“Is that what happened to you and the other Apeiros?”

Yes. And no. We are still bounded by shells. Most of us. Shirah surrendered her shell centuries ago and is carried in the shells of her children. They bear her name in turn. She does not feed on them the way—

Lucy stopped, and Jack could swear she saw a shiver pass over her sister’s n-shape.

“The way the Moribund pulls energy from the Necromongers?”

Yes. She feeds her children power, instead, and strengthens them so that they can bear and wield it. Those who can wield the most are candidates to become the next Lord or Lady Shirah, and have their four-shapes merged with her six-shape to continue on with her forever.

“So it’s symbiotic instead of parasitic?” Jack nodded. She remembered Lucy calling Michael a lightbearer, and the power he’d blasted into her to save her life had felt strangely intimate. “When the Apeiros aboard the Scarlet Matador died, what did she do to us? You said something, a while back, about seeding yourselves into others at death. Is that what she did?”

Yes. And no. Her six-shape was trapped inside the apeirochoron. No part of herself could escape, except the …“esper”… part that each of us has, that can use the wiring and communication system embedded in each box to reach out to each other and stay in contact. The part we used to make contact with you, when we felt you moving ships during your great battle. All that she could do was hatch you into your five-shapes by making the ship straddle two ’verses… and whisper into your minds a little at her end, hoping some of you would hear her and understand. As you and Kyra did. As the smallest of the others on board, Lailah, Abdul, and Farida, now do. Those three were still so close to their own hatchings that they are learning quickly. Had my sister been free of her box when she died, she could have seeded all of you with far more power than that.

The throne room, as Jack followed Lucy into it, had been transformed. The writhing ugliness that she had seen when she’d been brought before Riddick, with its spiked pillars and statues depicting suffering, was hidden beneath heaps of vegetation. Vines climbed from level to level, garlanding the formerly stark room with blossoms. Birds and insects flew between the flowers.

“Does the Moribund like how the ship looks on this side?” Jack found herself gasping. “Because it’s beautiful.”

He does. And he is aware that you have paid him a compliment and is… disgruntled about it.

“So that’s really all there is to it?” she heard Riddick asking. It pulled her away from her questions about the Moribund as she focused on him instead.

He was sitting on the throne, his three top officers standing near him. Vaako, Toal, and Scales, she recalled. Toal looked like a younger and slimmer version of his father. All three men seemed to have relaxed around Riddick, some of the formality they’d shown him previously falling away.

“That’s as much as any Lord Marshal has ever done or said, yes,” Toal said, smiling. “There are no vows, either way, other than the promise to keep her as your own until Underverse Come.”

“My older brother was preparing to get married when the Armada arrived on Sunna Prime,” Scales told the group, grinning. “After seeing what he had to deal with, getting ready for that—hall rentals! Meal tastings! Picking out invitations and arguing over which guests would sit where, ye gods!—I am rather glad that it’s so much simpler here.”

“Simpler, yeah,” Riddick mused. “But is it strong enough?”

“What man could ever take her from you?” Vaako asked, frowning and cocking his head.

“I can think of three,” Riddick grumbled.

“Who?” Toal bristled on his behalf.

“First,” Riddick said after a moment, “her father. John MacNamera. Doubt he’d take kindly to his daughter bein’ involved with someone like me. Second, her C.O.”

Toal started, looking surprised.

“Yeah,” Riddick continued, nodding at Toal, “she has a C.O. His name is Michael. He’s a ‘Furyan Warrior’ like me, too, and there’s pretty much nothin’ she wouldn’t do for him if he asked, let alone commanded. And third… and this is the real kicker… if true love actually exists, then hers is named Ewan.”

Vaako was the one who seemed most discomfited by that.

“He ever comes knockin’, she’s probably gone.” Riddick rubbed his temples for a moment before he continued. “Ain’t nothin’ I can do about any of ’em, either. Raise a hand against one of ’em and I lose her even faster. Girl’s way too forgiving a lot of the time, but that’d be beyond her limits. So if any of you were starting to think of ways to do me a favor, you put it out of your mind right now. She’d know.”

Both Toal and Scales deflated a little in response. Jack felt some tension leave her body when they did.

Was he right?

If her father showed up, and demanded that she leave Riddick’s bed, would she? If Michael showed up and told her that being Riddick’s wife compromised her mission objectives, could he order her to break things off with him? And if Ewan—

She still couldn’t let herself think about Ewan. Not here. Not now.

I am going to thread the needle. I have to thread the needle. Everybody dies if I don’t. That’s my only mission. That’s my only goal. The rest, all of it, is something that has to be gained or lost for that pur­pose…

But, she decided, it didn’t have to be the only thing she did. As long as it didn’t compromise that mission, she could be Dame Riddick, be the touchstone he needed. Even if it didn’t help her mission, it would help him…

…and it was, she decided, what she wanted to do. She might have fallen in love with more than one man—four, if she was being honest—but he was the first she’d ever felt that way about. And maybe, once he felt more secure about their connection, the wall between them would finally come down.

So you are decided now, Lucy said after a moment.

They were walking back to the suite, Jack realized. Exactly when she’d left the throne room was hard to recall, because she had been so lost in thought.

“I am, yeah.” She focused on the hallway, empty in U1, and isomorphed back into it, leaving Eden behind for the moment. “So let’s go get ready for this wedding.”

---

The dress she’d chosen was the most vibrant thing she could find, made of the same odd, scaled hide that most Necromonger clothing was constructed from but in vivid shades of blue and green instead of the black that almost all of them wore. Part of her was tempted to think of it as her “mermaid dress,” but she found herself shying away from that phrase. It belonged to another part of her life that she couldn’t linger on now.

Lola, Vanessa, and Poly had all dressed up as well, shunning black for colors that subtly suggested their human status. The Ennead Kids, who had somehow taken the bits and pieces of discarded clothing and jewelry from the tables and assembled them into high-end versions of the outfits they’d worn when she’d first seen them, were eager to get things started. They preceded her into the throne room and started performing an a cappella wedding march as they entered the great hall.

If you’re really doing this, the Moribund grumbled, I suppose I will have to make my minions aware.

I’m really doing it. And what I said before is still true. You grew a beautiful garden on the other side of the threshold.

I’m sure the larvae you bring on board the ship will enjoy it, he grumped. It was, she decided, as close to a thank-you for the compliment as she could expect from him.

Riddick had risen to his feet and was standing in front of the throne. His three would-be Firsts had moved to stand at the sides of the dais. Courtiers were hurrying into the room from all directions, newly aware that something important was about to happen. From the corner of her eye, Jack spotted a familiar flutter of white on the upper level.

The gang’s all here. Let’s get this done. She gave Riddick her most dazzling smile—and even her cousins had been forced to admit it was a good one—and crossed the floor, climbing the steps to stand beside him and take his hand.

Antonio and the other Ennead Kids were making everyone clear a space in front of the throne.

“This one’s for you, Jack B. Badd!” He called out as the crowd calmed.

She could feel the shock throughout the room as the Ennead Kids began to perform. How long had it been since anything of the kind had happened in the Basilica? Had anything like it ever happened there?

Nine voices wove together to build a stunning, vibrant tune as the group broke into coordinated dance moves, spinning and flipping without a single missed beat or sour note. Jack could feel Lucy’s fascination, and even the Moribund himself observing with curiosity and reluctant admiration.

“Jackie, don’t you know,” Antonio sang, “you’re up in his soul…”

She knew the tune intimately, and knew they’d chosen it on purpose. It went in a different direction, though… startling her as it painted an accurate picture of just what she was even doing on the Basilica.

“Thread the needle, Jackie!
We know you’ll find the way…”

Did you tell them about that? she asked Lucy, stunned.

I did. Surprise!

More of this would not be entirely amiss among my servants, the Moribund grudgingly admitted.

The song concluded with a flourish, the entire troupe bowing down before the throne, before her and Riddick. He looked positively energized as he stepped forward and addressed the room. Whatever misgivings he might have seemed to have been set aside.

“Got a few announcements to make to all of you,” he told the room. “First up, new instructions for all ships goin’ out on raids from now on. You already know that nobody’s bein’ brought back as a ‘breeder’ anymore. Nobody’s bein’ cut out as ‘useless,’ either. Everyone’s a convert except kids. But here’s the new rule where babies an’ kids are concerned. You bring ’em back. Alive. And once you do that, you bring ’em here. And you give ’em to her.”

He pointed at Jack, smirking.

“What will she do with them?” called out one of the lords, looking entirely too scandalized for someone wearing tiny skulls for decoration.

“Ain’t your concern,” Riddick said, his grin widening dangerously. Maybe he was hoping that man, in particular, would raise a fuss and could be smacked down.

The man seemed to know it, too, deflating.

“Who is she?” someone else called from the crowd.

“Glad you asked,” Riddick told them, taking her hand. “I present to you: Dame Riddick. She will stand by my side from now ’til Underverse Come. And you are all to treat anything she says as comin’ from me.”

And apparently, that really was all there was to it.

The Ennead Kids began another song a moment later as various Lords and Dames of the Armada approached the throne to formally present themselves to Jack. Within a minute or two, Dame Vaako appeared at her side, putting an arm around her and introducing her to many of them, murmuring small asides to her about them as well. Riddick, after a weighing glance, allowed it, smiling and shaking his head. Jack focused on pairing names with faces and memorizing them, getting a sense of the minds behind each.

Those who had risen to the level of Lord or Dame, she realized, were the members of the Armada who needed less supervision and correction from the Quasi-Dead or the Moribund himself, naturally inclined to follow the path he had set before them. Those most inclined to resist his will were buried in the lower ranks, weighted down by telepathic soporifics. A very few among the highest-ranking, most of them older officers, could see a little way into Eden.

“Here she comes now,” Riddick suddenly growled beside her. “You ready for this?”

“Guess I’d better be,” Jack answered him, taking a deep breath.

Walking toward her, flanked by two guards, was a familiar figure dressed in white. Jack took in the white hair, the imperious posture, the elegant veil and white dress that her mother would have said was meant to upstage a bride at her wed­ding—

Yeah, good luck with that.

—and the hidden darkness masked by her whiter-than-white outward appearance.

Irena Kirshbaum, emissary of the Quintessa Corporation, approached the throne under guard and laden down by chains made of kirshbaumium. As their gazes met, Jack watched Irena’s eyes fill with confused recognition.

Game on, Jack thought as the two of them locked eyes.

The woman’s breath hitched. Then she squared her shoulders and stepped forward, offering her hand to Jack. This time, when they made contact, it was she who flinched, maybe sensing the dizzying number of ’verses that Jack was connected to.

“Aereon of the ‘Elemental race,’” Riddick drawled, his formal words undercut by the irony lacing his tone, “allow me to introduce my wife, Dame Riddick.”

It was all Jack could do to control the sudden urge to smirk as Irena Kirshbaum’s eyes widened, just a little, with imperfectly concealed horror. Had she even realized who she’d attempted to murder just the day before? Or that she had ensured the destruction of her family dynasty by doing so?

Instead, she gave “Aereon” her sunniest and most guileless smile, pure innocence—pure theater but who would ever know—as if they were new friends meeting for the first time instead of the deadliest of enemies.

Game fucking on, Demon of the Darkness.

For a moment, she even felt the barest hint of the Moribund’s gleeful approval.

 

The story will continue in
Song of Many ’Verses

96.
Let No Creature Put Asunder

Where is she? Riddick demanded from Lucy as he ran. He was aware of footsteps in pursuit of his; from the sound of it, Vaako wasn’t far behind. He heard Toal and Scales fall in as he passed them. The trio of would-be Firsts, insisting on following him into whatever crisis he was dealing with. Damn it.

She is near the engine room of the Tenth Crusade, but not in it, Lucy told him.

Near but not in. Practically on top of the Moribund’s lair but not inside it. Still closer than he liked.

What have you done to her? he demanded, letting both Apeiros hear him. He was nearly there…

We have done nothing. This was set in motion by someone else.

“Riddick!” Officer Lola was running towards him along the very route he planned to take. “Jack is in—”

“Trouble, yeah. Got the memo.” Sometimes he thought it ought to be the girl’s slogan. He charged past Lola; she fell in with the others behind him. Hang on, Jack! I’m coming!

“What can we do to help?” Vaako called from behind him. They were passing the Tenth Crusade plaque. Nearly there… nearly—

He saw Dame Vaako first, lying on the floor of what looked like some kind of control room, sobbing. Past her, through a steelglass panel—

“Fuck!”

Jack had her back to him. She was holding something against her chest with one arm. Her other hand was extended, palm forward, toward an open reactor core.

Riddick jumped over Dame Vaako’s prone body and started punching buttons on the control panel, calling up every shutdown procedure he could remember. And he could remember a hell of a lot of them.

“Jack!” None of the codes were working yet. He tried to keep his voice calm, reassuring. How does she get into all of these messes? “I’m gonna get you out of there!”

“This is my fault,” A female voice hiccupped behind him.

“What the fuck did you do, Dame Vaako?” He spared a glance back at her. Her husband had his arms around her and was frowning in confusion.

“It wasn’t her,” Jack rasped from the other side of the glass. The last time he’d heard her voice sound like that, he’d thought she was mourning Johns’ death when she was really preparing herself for her own.

“What happened, Chantesa?” Vaako murmured, stroking his wife’s wet cheek. Scales frowned at them and looked away, moving past them to examine the control panel. Toal moved to another of the panels and began calling up readings.

“It just started all on its own,” the Dame sobbed, leaning her head against her husband’s shoulder. “The controls have always been dead before now.”

What the fuck? What was that woman doing, skulking around in the bowels of the Basilica? She was lucky the Moribund hadn’t eaten her.

“I tried to find an emergency failsafe,” she continued, her voice still hitching but increasingly coherent, “but there’s nothing…”

She looked genuinely devastated, but she’d run—and tried to run—so many games in the last year that it was impossible for him to believe her tears were real. “Things,” he growled at her, “don’t just start all on their own.”

“I was right next to her when they did,” Lola told him, forcing open a cabinet to the side. Behind it, winking lights and meters worked quietly to destroy his universe. “She never touched anything until she started trying to turn the system back off.”

“These readings make no sense,” he heard Toal murmuring to Scales. “Only two thirds of the radiation monitors in the room are registering anything. The others aren’t dead—they seem to be working—but it’s as if there’s a wall up.”

A wall. Jack was isomorphing the radiation away from herself before it could touch her.

Clever girl, brilliant girl… No wonder she wasn’t trying to talk to them. She would need all her focus to do something like that. But how long would she be able to keep it up before she ran out of stamina…?

He had to figure out a way to get her out of there before then.

Something flickered in the corner of his eye, a familiar shape he couldn’t look at long. Lucy was inside the core chamber with Jack, almost visible, racing across the room and up the core pillar—

“What in God’s name is that?” Vaako shouted behind him.

Riddick tried to follow her movements with his eyes, tried to see what she was doing, but his visual cortex wouldn’t cooperate. Was she going to try to rescue Jack? Was there a way to reclose the core from inside the chamber?

But the Apeiros seemed to simply be perching on it.

What the fuck is going on? Lucy? Moribund? You said Jack wouldn’t die!

She won’t. We are busy right now.

Did that fucking thing just shush him?

I have just about had enough of your shit—

“You and me both,” Jack said on the other side of the glass. For a moment he thought she was agreeing with him. She took several long, deep breaths while around him everyone entered random commands on various panels to try to rescue her. “Better be right about this…”

He watched in horror as she dropped the hand that she’d been holding up.

“Jack, no!” he heard himself—and Lola, and Dame Vaako—shouting.

“Hell,” Toal said beside him. “Those sensors that weren’t picking up radiation all just spiked. Whatever wall was up just—”

On the other side of the glass, Jack, her hair blowing back as if a gust of wind had struck her, reached forward toward the pillar, and toward Lucy. One dark, glittering leg stretched out from the mind-breaking form above the unshielded core, touching Jack’s fingertip and making Riddick think, for a second, of a fucked-up version of a famous painting on the ceiling of Old Earth’s Sistine Chapel, and then—

“Fuck!” Riddick slammed his hands against the glass, not understanding what he was seeing.

Aside from the unshielded core, the inner chamber was empty.

Jack and Lucy had vanished.

“How is this possible?” Scales gasped beside him.

How the fuck in­deed…? Riddick turned around, fists clenched, and stared down at Dame Vaako. “Why… the fuck… were you down here with Jack?”

The normally imperious woman wiped at her eyes, leaning against her husband. “She… she was looking for a book. Written by, uh… Minnie something? One of a set of three, and she had the other two. I…” She sniffled, closing her eyes for a moment. New tears spilled out when she opened them back up. “I used to use this place as a retreat, when I was first brought here.”

She rose unsteadily to her feet and walked over to the glass, pointing.

“I would go in there to commune with our god. Sometimes I brought books with me, too…”

In one corner of the room, where she was pointing, a small lamp glowed beside several pillows, a blanket, and a scattered pile of books.

Not as empty as I thought…

“The book she wanted was one I’d brought here. So we came down here to get it.” She closed her eyes again, leaning her forehead against the steelglass. “I don’t understand what happened, how it happened, but… I think it is my fault, Riddick… Tokoloshe said I’d made a mistake and been be­trayed…”

“Tokoloshe?”

“Our god,” she half-whimpered.

The Moribund was talking to a human? Riddick could have sworn the fucker hated all of humanity. Aside from maybe the Quasi-Dead. And he had let her give him a name? A delimiter?

Not important right now. “So what mistake did you make?”

Dame Vaako swallowed before turning to look at him. “I visited the Elemental witch today. She was struggling to do even simple things with those chains on and I… I…”

Fuckin’ hell. “You thought you’d ask her guards to unchain her.”

She nodded.

“Because what trouble could a sweet little old lady who walks through fuckin’ walls like they’re not even there get up to?” He didn’t even realize he was moving until his hand was wrapped around the Dame’s neck and he slammed her back against the wall. “I had those chains on her for a reason!”

“For God’s sake, Riddick—” Lola started.

“Lord Vaako,” he growled, cutting her off, “give me one good reason why I shouldn’t snap Chantesa’s neck right now.”

“Because,” Vaako said quietly, “I love her.”

Well, fuck.

“Sounds like a damn good reason to me,” Jack said from somewhere behind him. “Please let go of my friend, Riddick.”

The hand that had been gripping Dame Vaako’s throat suddenly felt numb and weightless. The woman, no longer pinned to the wall, crumpled to the floor, gasping and coughing. Vaako dropped to her side, gathering her into his arms, even before Riddick could make himself turn around. The others, he was aware, were staring, dumbfounded, at—

Jack. Standing in the outer doorway as if she’d never been trapped in a reactor, looking perfectly normal. She was still holding a large book in one hand.

“How are you here?” Toal asked her while he was still struggling to find words. “How are you alive? We all saw you trapped inside the core chamber.”

“The core isn’t lethal,” she said with a ready smile, as if the soldier had asked her how she’d trained for one of her half-marathons. “I guess I needed its energy boost to be able to hatch into my—hey! Easy there, big guy!”

Riddick had his arms wrapped around her, holding her to him in an embrace that was almost rib-crackingly tight. In that moment, he didn’t know if he’d ever manage to let go again, but he had just enough self-control left to keep from squeezing too hard. He was shaking and wasn’t sure if he could find a way to make that stop.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he whispered, wishing he had her alone in his room. He needed to explore every inch of her to be sure she was—

“No promises,” she murmured.

Fuck! He pulled back, staring down into her face.

Her smile was wry and apologetic. “I know what’s going on now. What’s really going on. This is a war, and I’m gonna have to do some scary shit to help us win it.”

“What war do you speak of?” Vaako asked, still kneeling beside his wife.

Jack shrugged. “The war against the Demons—”

“—of the Darkness,” Dame Vaako gasped. “I remember them from my dreams. Dreams Tokoloshe would send me.”

Toal, Scales, Vaako, and Lola all had looks on their faces as though they were trying to recall similar dreams of their own, struggling with a kind of déjà vu.

“Yeah,” Jack continued, seemingly unsurprised by their reactions. “It’s almost time to take them on. Speaking of which, someone should really order a security lockdown of the shuttles in the starboard bay in the next few minutes. All of them, really, but probably those first. There’s just no telling who might start crawling around in one of them.”

Scales gave Riddick a confused and inquiring look.

“Hell if I know what she means,” he growled, every bit as confused, “but go see to it.”

“My Lord,” Scales said with a nod, and hurried out of the room.

“Been meaning to ask why nobody around here uses comms,” he found himself growling. “Somethin’ against them?”

“The Quasi-Dead are our comms,” Toal said after giving him a quizzical look. “Instantaneous across the light years, unlike the delayed systems used by this upstart Federacy. And the closer we are to the Basilica, the more clearly we can feel our god’s will. What else is needed?”

“Oh, I dunno…” Exasperation flooded through Riddick. I’m supposed to turn a zombie horde into an actual army? “Tactical updates. Warnings about enemy movements. Fuckin’ small talk with friends. You really don’t do any of that shit?”

“If it’s important to us, we pray.” Toal’s voice had taken on a patient tone Riddick remembered from his grade school days. “And if it’s important to Him, He answers.”

Lord and Dame Vaako nodded in solemn agreement. Lola, he was glad to see, was on Team What The Fuck right along with him, concealing her bafflement behind a mostly-convincing deadpan. It was getting tempting to introduce the lot of them to their god right that moment.

“To be fair,” Jack said, “it is a communication method almost nobody outside of the Armada can eavesdrop on. Or steal.”

She slipped out of the loosened circle of his arms and walked over to the control panel, entering commands on its main console. On the other side of the window, the pillar containing the core began to close and lower itself down toward the floor.

“You know how to work the panel?” he asked, surprised.

“I do now, yeah.” She pressed several more controls as the pillar vanished into the floor, and Riddick heard a series of heavy bolts draw back in the metal shield door. It swung slowly open.

“Is that safe?” Lola asked behind him. “That room was just irradi­ated—”

“With ‘Kirshbaum rays,’” Jack said, turning around and smiling. “Totally harmless to baseline humans, might even make some of you hatch into your five-shapes, if you hang out in them long enough.”

“I thought this was a nuclear reactor,” Dame Vaako said in a soft voice.

“Oh, it’s designed like one, sure.” Jack grinned. “Kirshbaum barely understood what he had here or what it was doing. He just figured out how to make it do what he wanted, filed a patent, and slapped his name on it. Riddick, where are the apeirochorons the Moribund’s been collecting?”

“How did you—?” He hadn’t told her about that part of the deal; he’d remember if he had.

Figure it out later, he told himself.

“There’s a storage room near here. They’re inside.” What did she want with them?

“Good. Once your guest of honor is tucked away again, we need to bring them here and get them into the chamber. Their occupants are going torpid.”

“Sorry,” Lola cut in. “What are you two talking about?”

“It’s a long story,” Jack said even as Riddick drew a breath. “I’m still piecing it all together. Got a whole lot of new stuff in my head.”

She’d only been gone a minute or two. What the fuck…? “Where did you go, Jack? When you vanished from the core containment chamber. Where were you?”

“At first it wasn’t a where,” she told him. “It was a when. About four hundred-twenty years ago in this very room. I got to see how everything began. Went a few other places after that.”

“Time travel?” Lola asked. “You’re talking about time travel here.”

Jack shrugged. “I can move in six dimensions now, and time’s the fourth. Just gotta be careful with that one. It’s where most of the bifurcations happen. When they can, anymore.”

There was a weird, ominous note in her words. He opened his mouth to ask—

“My Lord.” A Necromonger soldier had appeared in the doorway. “Commander Scales reports that the Elemental, Aereon, has been captured while attempting to steal and launch one of the shuttles in the starboard bay. He is returning her to her assigned quarters and wanted me to tell you that he’s having the chains put back on her.”

Jack knew. Huh. He spared her a quizzical glance before answering the soldier. “Tell him thank you, and good work.”

“Yes, My Lord.” The man bowed and departed.

“Comms. I’m tellin’ you.” He looked around at the others. “That could have been a comm call, not some soldier walkin’ across the whole ship to talk to me.”

“If you accepted our god into your heart,” Dame Vaako said with pious solemnity, “He would be your ‘comms.’”

That how it works, Moribund? You carryin’ messages for your Armada?

He could feel the creature’s offended outrage. They are my servants. I inform them of how to serve me. I am no courier they can whistle for at will.

Seems like you have a more personal connection to Dame Vaako here.

Apparently, it was possible to growl telepathically. Jack looked like she was suppressing laughter.

“I suddenly feel as though,” Toal said, “anointed by our god or not, He finds you quite—”

“—annoying,” the Vaakos joined him in saying.

Now that was just spooky. But he guessed it proved their point. Might also explain a little why Dame Vaako could pull some of the stunts she has, if the Moribund’s made a favorite pet of her… heh. Creature’s Pet.

Fortunately, the Moribund apparently hadn’t heard that last bit.

“We should probably get back to the newer parts of the Basilica,” Jack said, audibly still struggling not to laugh. “Chantesa, would you like any of your old things from inside the chamber? It’s going to start being closed up most of the time soon.”

“I would.” Dame Vaako climbed to her feet. The expression she turned on Jack seemed genuinely warm. “Thank you.”

Vaako glanced between the two women, looking as surprised as Riddick felt. Whatever had happened, it seemed like the Dame and Jack genuinely considered each other friends.

Shouldn’t be so surprised, I guess. Jack’ll make friends with anything that’ll let her. Even eldritch horrors and Lady Mac­Beth…

Lord Vaako ended up carrying the small lamp and a pile of books, while Dame Vaako carried pillows and blankets as they left the bowels of the Tenth Crusade for the rest of the Basilica.

“You never told me about your retreat,” Vaako murmured to his wife as they brought up the group’s rear.

“I didn’t need a retreat,” Dame Vaako answered, “after you saved me from Lord Vath.”

“So you did need saving, but not from a heretic.”

“Not a heretic, no,” Dame Vaako told him, her voice dropping. “Just a monster.”

“Ah.” Vaako was silent for a moment as they walked. “Had you told me that, at the time, I might have fought twice as hard for your sake.”

“I didn’t know that about you back then, or I would have.”

Beside Riddick, Jack had a pleased smile on her face.

The Vaakos turned off at the hallway to their quarters, Toal formally excusing himself a moment later. Riddick found himself surprised—and then wondering why he was at all surprised—when he saw the tables of discards set up outside his suite, the Ennead Kids picking through their contents while discussing dance moves and rehearsing snatches of song.

They were supposed to be a surprise, though. He glanced over at Jack.

“They did try to be discreet,” she told him, still looking amused and not at all like someone who had almost been killed just a short while before. “But I think you forgot I’d hear their thoughts even if I couldn’t hear them singing. Thank you, though. It’s really good to see them again. And get to know them better, the way I always wanted to.”

“Gonna need a moment alone with Jack,” he grumbled to Lola as they reached the doors to his—well, his and Jack’s—suite.

“Yes, Sir. I’ll be near if you need me.”

Sir. I’m a fuckin’ Sir… As if “my Lord” and “my Liege” hadn’t already been bad enough…

Things had changed inside the suite, too, he saw. Someone—undoubtedly Jack—had set up the outer room as a lounge. His desk was unmolested, his armor still piled on its top, but it was surrounded by groupings of chairs, tables, lamps, and sofas, different areas for conversation and even dining. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, it looked fuckin’ cozy. Especially with the torture statue and the gruesome wall hangings long gone.

He could already see the spot that Jack had begun to nest in: one of the fancy teapots he’d seen in her memories of New Marrakesh sat on a low table beside an ornate, matching glass. The chaise next to it had a throw blanket draped across its bottom and two books leaning against its side. It was positioned to give its occupant a clear view of the room and everyone in it.

“So,” he made himself say in a calm voice, “what have you been up to since I went off, aside from… hatching?”

Jack walked over to the chaise and put her new book down with the other two. “And aside from the mess outside? Reading, mostly. Minnie Sulis’s autobiographies. I knew something was up with them, but I kept forgetting that she wasn’t just a Kirshbaum, but Joren Kirshbaum’s first cousin. I think—and maybe her diary will confirm it—I think she was the one who figured out how to access other ’verses. She had a lot of power.”

“And now your big mystery’s solved?” The whole time, he thought, the Apeiros had been suppressing her ability to put the clues together, but not his when he watched her memories. Aside from the blank spaces in those memories that he hadn’t been able to see into, either.

“Yeah. Got a plan, too, of a kind… it’s gonna take a lot of work, and more time than I’d like, but I can see a way through it.” She turned to him, a wry smile on her face. “They were right, though. Before my hatching, when I couldn’t understand what’s really needed, much less do it yet… there was no way I would have been able to be patient. Now, though—”

“This plan,” he found himself growling. “You gonna live through it?”

“All the way to the end,” she told him. “I have to.”

“And after?”

She shrugged.

God damn it… “You don’t have plans for after?”

“I can’t see that far,” she told him. “All the alternate pathways collapse to that point. On the other side, everything opens back out again. I don’t know where we’ll end up after that.”

Why did he suddenly feel like he was losing her? Like he’d already lost her, somehow? She was right in front of him, and yet—

“So,” she broke in on his thoughts, “Is the position of ‘Dame Riddick’ still one you want me to fill? ’Cause I’m in.”

An even mixture of confusion and relief flowed over him. He crossed the remaining distance between them and pulled her into his arms for a devouring kiss. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried talking about this at all.

They’d have to talk eventually, he silently admitted as he carried her into the bedroom to begin the inch-by-inch exploration of her body he’d wanted to conduct since she’d first reappeared. These ’verse-shaking matters were things that couldn’t be left unarticulated. But for the moment, he needed to forget that words existed, that worlds existed… that anything existed except her, the taste of her mouth and skin and most sensitive flesh… the exquisite feeling of being buried deep inside her… the way her body clutched at his as he brought her to her re­lease… and the pure trust in her face, eyes, and mind as he lost himself in her.

He’d already had too much taken from him, almost everything. He couldn’t lose her, too.

As much as he’d managed to be a lone wolf for years, he realized as he shuddered against her and emptied himself within her depths, he couldn’t be that anymore. He’d let every ’verse in creation fall before he allowed anything to take her away from him again.

95.
Across the Threshold and Beyond the Veil

Hang on, Jack! I’m coming!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And how often does all go well around here…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. This isn’t ionizing radiation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life? In here?

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

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

She dropped her hand.

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

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

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

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

Your six-shape. Welcome, sister.

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

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

“You were caged here? How?”

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

Come with me, Audrey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

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

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

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

“Maybe that box is bigger than you think.”

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

A countdown appeared on the control panel.

Jump to U16 commencing in 00:17:34

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

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

—and the message on the panel had changed.

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

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

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

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

“Shit!” Stefan began hitting controls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the fuck is going on, Naphemil?”

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

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

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

An earsplitting shriek sounded nearby. He turned toward it—

—and screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I on Tangiers Prime somehow?

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

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

“Good. Then let’s begin.”

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

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

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

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

And Jack heard her voice again in her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one seemed to hear it except Jack.

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

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

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

Help me… please help me…

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

It was her own voice, she realized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucy.

Lucy had been trapped inside the box.

Lucy had been the Isomorph Drive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a good plan, my sister.

“Which ship should we do next?”

You cannot. You are almost out of strength.

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

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

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

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

“But—”

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

Names are delimiters, the Moribund grumbled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and finding it.

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

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

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

“Oh… my… God…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not the only reason.

“The ’verse they’re connected to!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do we get to it all?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Red Roger” Fiennes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, this is as good a place as any…

94.
The Vengeance God’s Devotee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Riddick thinks so.”

“To what end?” she asked.

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

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

And the Lord Marshal had let him claim her…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

“Possibly so,” Aereon said. “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s terrible. Why’d he do that?”

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

“Wait, he killed one of them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minnie Sulis…?

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

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

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

“By John Norman?”

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

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

Audrey looked excited. “Can we go there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing. Not a damned thing.

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

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

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

How do I get her out, my Lord?

You do not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh… oh no… She’d been a stupid fool.

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

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

93.
The Eaters of Souls

“These are his last moments!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are you? she asked.

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

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

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

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

Thank you, little larva. This will not hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would she? How do you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is she okay?

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

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

No longer. You are yourself again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without the lies, was anything left to connect them?

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

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

Jack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Riddick live?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riddick came to himself, gasping.

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

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

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

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

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

No. It is not.

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

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

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

No.

“No? Then what the fuck—”

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

Fuck. “I do. Yeah.”

Perhaps I would like to hear you say it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

92.
The Fall of the Black Fox

“Do not touch her!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is your name, girl?” he asked.

“Kyra.”

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

“Earth, originally.”

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

“The New Christy Pilgrim.”

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

These Necros know about the New Christy Massacre? Crazy.

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

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

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

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

“Do you like killing men, Kyra?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You want to make me a Necro?”

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

Except, she thought, an army of Riddick…

But he had fallen, too.

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

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

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

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

“By killing people?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

…corpse…?

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

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

“—will be trivial to you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helion Prime looked nothing like she remembered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is this?” she heard someone ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And who is this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another new one… you have brought us…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had had no one.

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

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

The escape, and the run to Tangiers Prime—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It hurts… it hurts…

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

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

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

It’s you… oh my God, it’s you…

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

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

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

Their Underverse is a lie…

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

…fire crisscrossing the sky over New Marra­kesh…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No no no no NO NO NO—

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

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

But…

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

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

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

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

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

“Right now. Do it.”

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

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

“What is your will, Lord Marshal?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It won’t be long now.”

It wasn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh fuck. Oh shit…

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

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

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

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

Both men went still, facing off across the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he repeated.

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

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

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

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

She wished she’d burned up on Crematoria.

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

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

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

SOMEBODY HELP ME!

91.
Pursued by a Scourging Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

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

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

“Fuck, Jack…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did she know him?

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

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

Whose memories were those?

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

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

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

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

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

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

DUCK!

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

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

Fuck! Who’s shooting?

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

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

The fuck, Kyra? Get that head back down!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe I do,” he growled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad because that meant sunrise was getting close.

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

“Kyra?” Riddick called from above her.

Oh for God’s sake…

“KYRA!”

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

“Get that ass moving!” he roared.

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

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

Shit! Shit!

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

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

Gonna have to keep climbing.

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

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

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

Not like this… “Riddick?”

No answer. But she could feel him listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold on, kid. I’m comin’.

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

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

Except scream. “Riddick!”

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

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

Oh my God.

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

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

I got ya, kid…

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

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

Something was hissing near her. She looked up—

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

Oh fuck, he got scalded for me—

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

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

And he’d come back. For her.

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

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

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

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

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

Both men looked genuinely shocked to see them alive.

“Listen,” Riddick growled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever the hell Necros were, exactly.

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

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

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

And Necros, whatever they were.

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

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

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

“Wait,” Riddick said, looking meditative.

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

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

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

I trust you. She made herself relax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Necros kept coming, trying to swarm them.

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

Riding a combat high…

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

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

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

…and how it was getting easier each time.

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

They were starting to run out of Necros.

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

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

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

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

Had she ever actually done that…?

She kicked and punched back­ward—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and Riddick was doing the impossible, the unthink­able…

…he was not getting up.

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

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

Two Necros were almost on him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She crested the hillside, looking down over the runway.

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

He couldn’t be dead…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck…

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

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

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

He’d want me to sur­vive…

He’d admired survivors.

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

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

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

…and surrounded.

90.
Follow the Lightbringer

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

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

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

“Kyra.”

Speak of the fucking devil…

Riddick was nearby, looking around, frowning quizzically.

“I know you’re near. I can feel you. Come out. I just wanna talk.”

Fine. Fucking fine.

She hoisted herself onto one of the pillars of stone and isomorphed back into U1, dropping down as if she’d been there the whole time. “Yeah?”

He studied her for a moment. She got the feeling that he was struggling with how different she was from what he expected, but that he also found her somehow familiar.

“Kid… I’m sorry I went off on you.” Damn, that had taken him some effort to say. She could feel his unease at using those two little words. “Wanna try again? Maybe… tell me what happened after I left?”

She really didn’t want to talk about that. At all. It was a part of her story, her memories, that never made sense, never held together. One of the parts she tried not to look at. She hadn’t been with Riddick, Imam, and Tizzy when they reached Helion Prime. Somehow she’d been waiting for Tizzy in Aceso. She’d been separated from them before their ordeal on the Kublai Khan, but she didn’t remember how. They’d left the crash planet together, but then the next time she’d seen Imam—

She didn’t understand.

She hadn’t seen Tizzy until Aceso. Why did their reunion in Aceso feel like a first meeting? The way coming face-to-face with Riddick in here had felt like one…

He was watching her intently.

“Riddick, I… when did Imam tell you where I was?”

“Been three days, maybe four, since the Necros took Helion Prime, about. So a little longer than that. By a few hours.”

“Two years, Riddick. He let me rot in here for two years without letting you know. Without even trying. So. Why do you think I left that shithole?”

He sighed. “Fair enough. So. You left New Mecca. Were you looking for me the whole time?”

It had been an idea that had come to her at the eleventh hour, a last-ditch way to stay together with Tizzy that she floated way too late. Tizzy hadn’t wanted to find Riddick. She’d committed to returning to her life before him, severing ties to all possible evidence that she’d ever been—

—Jack? Had Tizzy been Jack?—

—to ensure that the Quintessa Corporation would never discover the secrets she was keeping. The lives she was protecting. She had committed to the course. It had hurt to hear her say how thoroughly she was cutting those ties, though. Jack’s dead…

But Kyra had never really gone looking for him herself, in truth. Thought about it, but without Tizzy it had seemed hopeless somehow.

She shook her head. “It was the easiest thing to tell Imam. Maybe… I figured he’d be more likely to get a message to you if I said that, like that was why I left and not because he was a Grade-A dick.”

Her clearest memory of him was the sight of him stalking over to the Aceso guest elevator with a scowl on his face, while Tizzy emerged from the visiting rooms looking as if someone had drained her of every last drop of blood—

Riddick’s breath hitched. She glanced over at him, not sure what she was seeing on his face. He might be angry, sad, horny, amused, or all of the above at once and she’d never be able to tell between that smirky deadpan of his and that tight mental shield he had.

“You figured he’d be more likely to contact me,” he observed after a moment, “if he didn’t know how low your opinion of him was.”

“Figured it was worth a shot. Guess he proved my opinion of him right, instead.”

“How long did you stay on Helion Prime?”

She shrugged. This was another place where things got murky and weird in her head. “Felt like years. I left on February 12, 2517. I know that because it was the launch date on the logs of the ship I stowed away on.”

And because Tizzy had drawn her attention to the date later on. Tizzy, sitting in their apartment, the late afternoon sun spilling over her hair and gilding it while she cuddled Sebby and talked about numbers like they were comprehensible… and, for the first time, they were…

Riddick’s breathing hitched again for the barest moment. “So a little under five months.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

He nodded. “You go alone?”

Jesus fuck, just ask about Tizzy if you want to know so bad. At the same time, she didn’t feel like volunteering anything. He wasn’t going to find out anything about her sister unless he admitted that she was the one he’d really come for. Not that there was all that much to tell; General Fucking Toal had made sure neither one of them knew where the other was going when they separated. Divide and fucking conquer… “No, it’s safer not to travel alone if you can help it. We kicked around a few places before we split up.”

She couldn’t say they’d been on Tangiers Prime, not after already telling him the date she’d left Helion Prime. Only one ship could have made that journey, and officially it had no survivors. Hundreds of additional people had died so that the Quintessa Corporation could make sure no one blamed it for those deaths; more would die if the Corporation ever realized she and Tizzy had saved all but eighteen of their fellow travelers. Millions might die, if it discovered that the Imazighen were hiding the rest of the survivors. Millions… starting with the Mezianes. Kyra liked the Mezianes.

She wondered what Riddick would do if she told him Tizzy had fallen in love with one of them.

“How’d it all go wrong?” he asked after a moment.

“Like I told you. The mercs. I’d run out of other options. I needed a job and they were the only ones hiring. But they decided the only part of me that was worth anything was between my legs.”

“Hmm.” It was almost a low growl. “So you killed a few people, but got caught and nailed for their murders.”

Seventeen. And that’s just on New Queensland. She was pretty sure his kills hadn’t hit the double-digits until he was at least eighteen, and she’d hit that level at age sixteen while on Tangiers Prime. “That about covers it.”

His deadpan had, somehow, become even more of a blank than ever. “And nobody was at all concerned about a kid being slaved out.” He didn’t precisely sound skeptical, but she felt like he was trying to poke a hole in her story.

“My ID didn’t say I was a kid. And there wasn’t anyone left to prosecute even if it had. Except me for killing them.”

“Lotta mitigating circumstances, though,” he observed. “How’d you end up in the asshole of creation?”

“One of them was related to somebody important. He insisted. Plus Ursa Luna got word I might know you, and they refused to take me if that was true.”

Riddick nodded. After another moment, he seemed to come to a decision. “When it hap­pens—”

“There you two are,” the Guv said, emerging from one of the tunnels. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Word is, the rest of the Moles are dead. No one knows how. There’ll probably be another ‘feeding time’ within the day, once the guards realize.”

“Why the delay?” Riddick asked.

“None of the beasts are acting hungry, apparently,” the Guv told him with a slight smile. “How did you tame that one?”

Figuring out a way to get into the creatures’ good graces had long been a project of the Guv’s, Kyra knew. If she were a better and more loyal friend, she would probably have helped him with it. But even after two years, in which he’d helped her enormously time and again, she couldn’t bring herself to break the promises she’d made on Tangiers Prime and share her secrets with him.

Riddick shrugged. “Didn’t tame it. I’ve always had a way with animals.”

There was a kaiju from a bunch of centuries-old movies, Kyra recollected, who was a “friend to animals and children.” She wished she could remember its name.

Riddick glanced her way, his lips twitching as if he was suppressing a laugh for the barest second.

The Guv, she realized, was out to recruit Riddick into his gang, the way he’d recruited her two years earlier. She doubted it would work. Especially if her suspicions were correct and Riddick had only come here to spring her… or Tizzy… and had no intention of staying past that point.

But he isn’t gonna let go of it yet. Damn.

It was the end of a chance for a real conversation, at least for a while. Kyra did a fade while the Guv monopolized Riddick’s attention, making it literal once she was sure she was alone. She climbed onto “her” pillar, near the two men but not within sight of either of them, lying down in her little ’verse-straddling nest so she could listen to them while breathing the fresher air on the Elsewhere side. Things were getting stuffy enough on the U1 side that the guards would have to do an air exchange soon—

Well, speak of the lice-ridden devils…

Above her, the command center was rising up as the guards got ready to “pop the cork.” Once Kyra was sure no one was looking her way, she isomorphed back to U1. The air exchange was always fun to watch and to feel happening as the wind flowed past her skin.

“So they do go topside,” Riddick rumbled below her, “to swap out air. Interesting.”

The Guv, Kyra figured, hadn’t made much headway in his recruitment efforts, and hadn’t gotten any insights on befriending the “hellhounds.” His unease and awe was increasing, as was his certainty that she wouldn’t be part of his gang anymore if Riddick beckoned her away. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

Funny how law enforcement, and the military, knew all about Riddick, and somehow Stacey had known, too, but other convicts seemed to have no idea who he was.

Then again, kinda hard to get word of mouth going among the crim population if they’re all stuck in prisons that nobody, except the one guy who doesn’t talk much about himself, can escape from…

He was his own kind of phantom.

You listening, kid? his voice sounded in her head, as real as if he’d spoken aloud.

I’m listening.

“When it happens,” he repeated, “it’ll happen fast. Stay on my leg when I cut fence, or stay here. For the rest of your unnatural life.”

So he’d decided to invite the Guv to join him, too. Interesting. It hurt a little—would it ever just be the two of them?—but she figured he knew how much she owed the Guv. She’d probably have died sometime in the last two years if it hadn’t been for him. A thank-you was in order.

“Nobody outs this place,” the Guv was warning Riddick. “Nobody.”

A moment later, Riddick was gone, not bothering to reply.

“He ain’t nobody,” Kyra said, wondering if the Guv had even realized she was still nearby, that she’d stuck close to listen the whole time.

She slid her little knife out of her mouth, wondering if soon she might not need it. Its absence created a weird feeling for a moment, a sense of an empty space, as if she’d pulled out a tooth.

The air exchange was dropping the temperature; she’d need her coat soon if she wanted to stay in U1. Normally, she just transitioned part or all of the way into Elsewhere until the temperature normalized; on that side, the airflow was a gentle constant and all of the weird mining work people did in U1, releasing volcanic gases in the process, was irrelevant.

But she was staying in U1 until whatever it was, that was going to happen fast, happened.

It did happen fast.

Less than an hour later, with the “cork” back in place, shouting broke out in the control room followed by the sounds of gunfire. And then Toombs jumped down through the hole in the control room floor, sliding down the sharkbait rope.

What the hell is he doing here? Had he brought Riddick?

Even as Toombs managed to halt his descent, something exploded up above in the control room. In its wake, everything went quiet. But not for long.

“No!” Toombs suddenly shouted. “Riddick, no!”

As she watched in astonishment, Riddick launched himself from one of the caverns, flying straight at Toombs. He crashed into the merc, snagging Toombs’s bulletproof vest with one hand and pulling himself up until they were at eye level. The merc was straining under the additional weight, struggling to maintain his grip on the rope.

“Should’ve taken the money, Toombs,” Riddick said before grabbing onto the rope and hauling himself upward, not bothering to be gentle about the footholds he found on the merc’s body. Did he know that Toombs was the one who had brought her here?

She watched his effortless-looking hand-over-hand as he climbed up into the control room, feeling amazed. Tizzy had told her that Riddick was a “Furyan,” although neither one of them knew what that really meant other than that most of the Federacy’s trained Operatives were Furyan, powerful espers and maybe something more than that. Were all Furyans like him?

Wait, Tizzy had been trying to go to Furya… She remembered her little sister sobbing in her arms because something had stopped her from getting there. Stopped her from reaching her father…?

It was only a minute or two after Riddick disappeared inside the control room that an alarm sounded and all of the locked gates opened.

Yeah, that was pretty fuckin’ fast… She headed for the stairs, noticing that Toombs was struggling to climb back up the rope as she went.

The Guv had led the way up, his men already primed to follow, waiting for the signal. She wasn’t far behind them. Other convicts, mostly point men from other gangs, were following more cautiously behind her.

“Don’t bother,” she heard Riddick saying as she reached the control room. “Guards ain’t there. They figured out the Necros are comin’ for me.”

What the hell were “Necros?” He’d mentioned them before. Said they’d “taken” Helion Prime? Just a few days earlier…?

“Plan was to clean the bank, ghost the mercs, break wide through the tunnel,” Riddick was telling everyone. “And then somebody got a lucky shot off with this rocket launcher, here…”

He nudged the weapon with his foot, sending it spinning into the scattered detritus of playing cards, pistachio shells, and bullet casings littering the floor.

“…and took out the sled,” he continued. “Guards took off on foot but rigged the door so no one could follow.”

Everyone was following him away from the door in question, toward the kennels. Kyra turned away for a moment. She wanted to see the rocket damage for herself.

Toombs hauled himself back into the control room, grunting with the effort, his face red and sweaty from exertion. Kyra picked up a discarded pistol and armed it. Just in case he thought he had any say in what was happening.

“They’ll take the one ship in the hangar,” Riddick continued, ignoring Toombs’ return, “and leave everyone else here to die.”

“How come you know all this shit?” Toombs demanded as he regained his feet. He seemed determined to ignore the multiple guns pointed his way. “You weren’t even here.”

“’Cause it was my plan,” Riddick said, moving on without another word.

“The fuck he mean by that?” a runner for another gang, a man who everybody called Ratface, grumbled.

“Dunno,” Kyra told him. She had some ideas, but she wasn’t going to float any of them where just anybody could hear them. “Oh, holy shit.”

A familiar woman was sprawled on the ground near the sled track door, her breathing shallow and rapid.

“Logan. Hey. Eve Logan.” She knelt down next to the merc lady, aware that the rest of the convicts were staring at her. “You in there? How badly are you hurt?”

Logan groaned, opening her eyes after a moment. “Think I’ve got some broken ribs… hurts to breathe but not, like, inside my lungs…”

“Mind if I feel it out?”

Logan focused on her. “Kyra? You’re still alive… thank God…”

She nodded. “Let me check you out, okay?”

She remembered the way Ewan’s hands had moved over her after he’d finished patching her up, as he told her he was doing a quick check to make sure she didn’t have any other injuries that needed tending before they took her out of the apartment. There were very few men in the ’verse whose touch she could stand, but she was pretty sure he was still one of them. He’d made her feel impervious. Now she moved her hands the same way, opening up Logan’s armored vest so she could skim her ribcage and keeping an eye on the way the woman reacted to the contact.

“Looks like you probably have two or three cracked ribs,” she said after a moment. “All on your left side. None of them are out of place, though. What do you call those… hairline fractures? We get you bandaged up, you take it easy, you’ll be okay.”

“Why the fuck is she gonna be okay?” Ratface demanded.

“’Cause I just said it,” Kyra told him, rising up from her crouch. “’Cause she’s the closest thing you have to a bargaining chip with the Guild to keep them from just starving everybody out instead of sending any more supplies here. You wanna live, you’ll take good fucking care of her.”

“Hey,” Toombs called out. “I can be a bargaining chip, too!”

Kyra ignored him. She owed Logan a little humanity, but she owed Toombs nothing. “Somebody get Sawbones up here, get him workin’ on her. Get those boys in the Scree Team up here, too. They know electronics. You fix things up and she can put out an official call for relief here. Maybe the Guild will send some actual human guards next time around.”

“Who the fuck are you to tell us what to do, bitch?” Ratface was turning sullen and stupid.

“I’m the bitch you’ll have to thank for it if you’re still alive this time next year. That’s who.” She fixed Ratface with a stern glare. “All you need to know is this. Without her, you’ll all be dead in under a month. Even before the food runs out for you, the hounds’ll break loose and start hunting when it runs out for them. You take good care of them and good care of her.”

“Where you gonna be while all this is goin’ down?” he demanded.

“With him.” She nodded at Riddick, who was leading a group toward the “hellhound” cages, Toombs trapped in their grasp. “Now go get Sawbones like I told you.”

Even if he didn’t know how to do a shine job, Sawbones was a decent enough doctor. Logan would recover under his care. Not that she’d actually enjoy his company; nobody did. The only part of himself he ever washed was his hands before a surgery.

Ratface grimaced, but then nodded and headed for the stairs.

“Guys,” she told the men still standing around her, some of whom had intimidated her in the past, “grab a body and haul it after that little party headed for the cages. The regular ‘hellhound chow’ will last longer if they get a big meal out of these fuckers.”

It took some negotiating, most of it while Toombs roared out Riddick’s name over and over and dodged his cage neighbors, but she got the “hellhounds” to agree not to hunt live humans as long as they stayed well-fed. At her instruction, the convicts hauled the bodies of the mercs and guards into their lair.

Tell the Lightbringer that we remember, one of them said to her as she was leaving. Ask him to remember us.

“The lightbringer?” she asked, confused.

And then she saw him, in her head, from their perspective: Riddick. Glowing with power. The Lightbringer.

“Kyra!” she heard him roar. “Get your ass into the control room, now! We’re goin’ topside!”

“Keep Toombs locked up with the hounds for a day or two,” she told one of the convicts. “He is right that he’ll be a good bargaining chip with the guild. We just need a decent head start.”

The man nodded and she turned away, running back into the main control room. In another side room, she could see Sawbones already tending Logan. Her debts were paid.

Now it was time to find out what Riddick had in mind, especially given the head start the rest of the guards had on them.

She realized that, in some ways, it didn’t matter to her what his plan was. He wasn’t just the hounds’ Lightbringer; he was hers too. Whatever he’d come up with would probably be just as crazy as, and maybe even more brilliant than, one of Tizzy’s schemes. Whether it worked or not, whether they lived or died…

…she had to see how it played out.

89.
The Better Killer

“Check her for me. She always has a blade somewhere.”

Six, to be exact. Not that Kyra was going to help them find any of her shivs.

It wasn’t easy staying still while the greenest member of the guard team walked up behind her. She could anticipate what he was going to do, but only by wading through the other filth in his mind, the things he kept imagining doing to her body.

He was also afraid of her. At least there was that. Too busy holding onto his cudgel to do a real pat-down. He half-assed it with his right hand instead, using the same hand he—

Fuck, his head was full of nasty shit. He completely missed the blade she kept in her sleeve, his hand moving from her right shoulder, down her back, and now his fantasies were getting the better of his caution as he reached her ass.

Not yet. Don’t make your move yet. He’s still a little scared. Wait until he’s only thinking with his dick…

She had her mouth knife ready. She doubted it would come into play, though. Not after what she’d done to the last guy who’d tried to make her go down on him. Usually she just disappeared their junk into Elsewhere, but that time—

His hand moved to her hip. She could feel the jolt of excitement that began overwhelming his caution when one of his fingers touched the bare skin between the hem of her shirt and the waistband of her pants. Revolting as his mind was, she had to stay close to it, warned by it, if she didn’t want her skin to try to crawl right off her body and her defensive reflexes to kick in. She had to stay in control. Anatoliy and the other two—she called them Cueball and Curly in her head, because they always seemed to show up together and she’d never once heard their real names—were watching, growing even more excited. Their guards were beginning to drop, too.

Which was good, because their friend was trying to slide his hand into her waistband and that was more than she felt like tolerating.

She sprung the blades in the back of her right shoe and kicked back, feeling the man’s sudden agony as they slid home.

Your chances of ever being a father were low, thank God, but they just dropped to zero.

She kicked off, arching up and bringing her legs above his shoulders, grabbing his neck with her calves as she began to spin.

Sometime, in the last year, she had begun to get a new sense of the physical, one that baffled her and seemed impossible when she tried to really think about it, but she was pretty sure there was something Tizzy had called “telekinesis” in play. Something she had a vague memory of seeing her mother do when she was little. She could will her momentum and leverage to be stronger than they ought to be, using her grasp of the guard’s neck, as she spun, to flip him and to grab his cudgel. She’d practiced with it, played with it, and knew her limits with it so far. She couldn’t levitate objects, couldn’t even levitate herself—yet, anyway—but she could add in a little something extra to her movements that logic dictated shouldn’t be there.

Hopefully any of the guards who realized she was doing it wouldn’t survive long enough to tell anyone else.

She slammed the cudgel against the side of the man’s head and followed up that blow with one to his gut. Fucker was still standing, looking dazed. She kicked off again, cartwheeling her body with the cudgel as a base for the move, her legs sending him flying into a haphazard flip of his own.

He didn’t break his neck when he landed. Dammit. It had almost worked.

Kyra regained her feet, staring at the other three guards, waiting to see what their plans were.

Their newbie friend might be down, but they were three of Yuri’s veterans, his favorites, and they wouldn’t be nearly as easy, especially now that their guards were back up.

Still, their minds would be less appalling to read if they were thinking about battle tactics instead of their favorite sicko porn acts, much less the specific acts they’d been instructed to make sure they performed on her.

C’mon, you motherfuckers, let’s get this over with.

Anatoliy came at her first. She dodged his swing, spinning and kicking his upper back to send him into the wall. Cueball followed him in, throwing a punch at her with the hand holding his flashlight. She blocked it and the follow-up punch before knocking him face-first into another wall. Behind her, she could feel Anatoliy preparing to move, planning to grab her by her upper arms. She spun and planted the wide part of the cudgel against his throat.

He stared at her, horrified. She got a glimpse, in her mind, of a hand holding up—

—a sardine can key?

He really does see into the future!

It had distracted her at just the wrong moment, and she didn’t hear Curly moving up behind her until he slammed the butt of his cudgel into her upper back. Pain exploded along her spine. He dropped it and grabbed control of the one she was holding, pulling it back against her throat. Cueball turned around and slammed his cudgel into her lower abdomen, far too low to knock the wind out of her, but it still hurt like fuck.

Been hurt worse, she told herself as Curly spun her around and she hit the floor. Let ’em think they’re winning… Got a few tricks they don’t know are possible…

He slammed the cudgel into her back again as she tried to begin a rise-and-roll. She collapsed, feeling Cueball’s rage beat at her as he stalked forward and used the handle of his cudgel to begin choking her. Curly had his hands on her hips, pressing her down.

She needed to stay still for a moment. Let them calm down. Let them think they’d subdued her and that she wasn’t sneaking air from Elsewhere into her lungs. Let them start thinking about fucking her again. Then she’d take the next one out—

“I don’t think she likes being touched,” a voice from her dreams said, and for a moment she thought she’d passed out in the guards’ grasp.

Riddick was watching from a nearby doorway, a metal cup in his left hand.

“I’d take my wounded and go,” he suggested to the guards, “while you still can.”

Riddick to the rescue…

Like the time he’d saved Tizzy from the creature trying to plow through a huge bone to get to her—

—Wait, wasn’t that me?—

Didn’t matter. Riddick always showed up just in time.

Except…

Don’t think about that, not now. He’s here…

Cueball released his hold on her neck. She gasped in a deep breath, still playing the role of the dazed, vulnerable girl who couldn’t possibly be about to isomorph choice body parts off of anyone. Even Riddick, she suspected, was seeing her that way at the moment. Curly let go of her, too. They and Anatoliy had all risen, preparing to face what they considered the real threat in the room.

Fuck you, assholes, when I’m his age, my kill count is gonna be five times what his is. But do go on…

“Is there a name for this private little world of yours?” Cueball asked. “Huh? What happens there when we don’t just… run away?”

None of them seemed to notice or care that she was getting up. She used the bars to stabilize herself as she climbed to her feet—she was woozier than she liked, but she’d be okay in a few minutes—and turned to watch the unfolding tableau.

She didn’t want to miss a minute of a genuine artist at work.

Tizzy had told her that Chillingsworth had called Riddick that. On their very last night together on Tangiers Prime, as they’d struggled to fall asleep without Sebby cuddling up to them, she’d finally told Kyra a little bit about the Kublai Khan and the terrible menagerie in it, but she’d been unwilling to share any images or feelings. Kyra’d had the sense that somehow it was more traumatic than anything that had happened to her—

…us…

—on the crash planet itself. But Tizzy had described being made to stand on a huge ball, only able to balance by staying perfectly still, a metal noose-collar around her throat, and listening as a woman told Riddick, somewhere behind her, that he was an artist and that she wanted to watch the “moment of creation.”

Gonna get to watch one now…

Cueball was still talking. “You’ll kill us… with a soup cup?”

Curly laughed like a cartoon character, in Kyra’s opinion. Cueball wasn’t that funny.

Riddick lifted the cup in question. “Tea, actually.” He smirked and took a sip.

“What’s that?” Cueball asked.

Apparently, Riddick wanted a moment to savor the last of his drink. He smiled as he lowered the cup from his lips and transferred it into his right hand, holding it between his fingers as delicately as if it was a piece of fragile porcelain. “I’ll kill you with my teacup.”

This, Kyra thought, is gonna be amazing.

Riddick set the cup down, upside-down and clearly empty, on a rocky shelf just beside him. Empty handed, he smiled at the guards.

Obviously Anatoliy wasn’t at all psychic, or he’d be warning his friends to run like hell.

Cueball turned away from him, leaning toward Curly.

“You know the rule,” Curly whispered. “They aren’t dead if they’re still on the books.”

Oh, like any of us didn’t just hear you…

But it explained, she realized, why Yuri was still trying to engineer her death instead of just telling the Planetary Governor that she’d died; he didn’t want to have to take her off the books until she really was dead.

Plus, she sighed to herself, he’s supposed to send the man some choice pieces of me as proof, and he can’t just send some random woman’s bits because they’ll probably be DNA tested… The guards near her had been thinking about which ones they were each going to personally collect from her.

Most men, she thought for the millionth time, were slime. For every Riddick, every Guv, every Ewan or Cedric or Izil or Tomlin… there were countless piles of slime walking around.

Maybe she and Riddick could clear the field of more of them now. The way we did on Canaan Mountain…

Had that really happened?

Cueball was drawing his knife. Somebody was about to die. He was in for a surprise about who.

Still, she had a hard time restraining herself from leaping into the fray.

She caught a glimpse of Riddick slamming his hand down on the teacup, splintering the metal at its rim. A fraction of a second later, she heard a horrific squelching noise and Cueball grunted in pain, freezing in place with his knife raised.

Riddick made a move like he was twisting something. A violent shudder ran through Cueball’s back.

And then, as Kyra watched, the guard tilted backward and crashed to the floor, his eyes already empty, all sense of life and mind abandoning the space where his body lay.

The metal teacup protruded from his chest, partly buried in him. His knife fell from his nerveless fingers.

She could feel Curly and Anatoliy’s sudden terror. Both of them had considered Cueball the best hand-to-hand combat fighter they had.

You really should’ve read Riddick’s file, boys…

She had. The Merc Network account that Tizzy had created for her, so she could keep tabs on where hunters were looking for her, had given her access to all of Riddick’s kill data. She’d read through the entirety of his file more than once, coming to understand, in the process, why Stacey had liked looking at his picture while she got herself off. The only weird thing had been his first cluster of kills on Helion Prime, which seemed to have an entirely different M.O. than the rest. Maybe he’d just changed things up when he hit adulthood, though.

The idiots weren’t backing down. Curly moved into combat position, brandishing his cudgel and forcing Anatoliy to do the same. “Come on!” he hissed at Riddick.

As if Riddick was gonna play by his rules.

Casual as could be, as if nobody was on the verge of snapping near him, Riddick knelt down and picked something up off of the floor.

A key from a sardine can.

Okay, maybe Anatoliy’s a little psychic…

Riddick held it up, showing it to both men, and then set it on the same rocky ledge where he’d rested the teacup.

Anatoliy and Curly stared at Riddick for a moment. Kyra could hear them imagining just how he might use that key to kill them. It was tinier than most of her blades but loomed larger in their heads than a sword.

Curly’s nerve broke first.

Both men hurriedly gathered up the newbie guard, still uncon­scious—

—And hopefully permanently im­paired!—

—and carried him past Kyra and down a corridor. Their eyes never moved to her; Riddick filled their vision. Their mission to take her apart for Yuri was forgotten.

It was almost a shame. She’d been planning on feeding their dicks to the “hellhounds” tonight.

Probably won’t be my last chance to do that…

She knelt down beside Cueball, studying Riddick’s handiwork. “Death by teacup.”

It took some effort to pull the cup free. Riddick had buried nearly two inches of it in the guard’s chest and then had turned it at least ninety degrees, mangling the man’s heart.

“Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?” She’d come up with some ingenious ways of killing, and could probably have produced the same effect by isomorphing to make up for the sheer muscle power of Riddick’s move. The man can turn anything into a weapon…

She grinned up at Riddick, waiting for him to ask her about her kills. There’d been a movie she’d seen back in Aceso, which was a favorite among the other Killer’s Club girls, where two men kept one-upping each other with the most improbable methods of killing the enemies surrounding them. A few tactics, she’d known even then, would never work in real life, but it had still been hilari­ous—

“I didn’t come here to play ‘Who’s the Better Killer,’” Riddick growled, turning away.

Had he been in her head?

She stood up behind him. “But it’s my favorite game. Haven’t you heard?”

They’d started playing it on Canaan Mountain.

He was there. He should know that—

He had been there, hadn’t he? They’d hunted Red Roger together…

But somehow she had other memories, more detailed ones, of being alone on the mountain, painstakingly laying traps and shivering in treetops as she kept watch and lured her prey to her…

…using herself as bait to get Roger himself to walk into her snare because he was too focused on the seemingly oblivious naked girl bathing in a creek to realize it was a trap…

That had been her trap, though, not Riddick’s. Where had Riddick gone?

Had he ever been there? He had a weight and presence in this moment that was completely absent from all her memories of him on Canaan Mountain.

Was her banter falling flat because the shared moments she was trying to evoke had never happened? How were they gonna get to the kissing part without the banter?

She could see it so clearly in her head: Ewan calling Tizzy a cheater, a huge smile on his face, her sister walking closer and closer to him as she teasingly refuted his joking accusations and playfully challenged him to do something about them, the intense chemistry igniting between them that she wanted to feel between Riddick and herself now—

“I heard you came looking for me,” Riddick said, not turning around to face her. She had the weird sense that he was testing her, trying to trip her up in some way. But about what? It didn’t feel at all playful.

“Is that all?” It was, pretty much, all she’d told Imam when she’d called him. Two fucking years ago… “Then you missed the good part.”

Somehow, though, she didn’t want to tell him about losing Tizzy. Her sister had trusted a military general and was probably dead, or worse, because of that mistake. She didn’t really want to tell him about Oliver, either. Her biggest regret there was that she hadn’t ghosted him on the spot, buried him out in the hills, and then claimed ignorance when asked where her boss had gone, instead of just threatening to cut off his hands if he ever tried to grope her again. Maybe she’d even have ended up in charge of his paddocks instead of—

“Hooked up with some mercs out of Lupus Five,” she told Riddick, picking up her story there. “Said they’d take me on, teach me the trade, give me a good cut…”

Riddick’s whole body had gone rigid. Tension was suddenly thrumming through him. Maybe he already knew what had happened to her? She set the teacup back down on the ledge.

“They slaved me out, Riddick!” Why did she suddenly feel like it was his fault that had happened to her? Any feelings of playfulness were suddenly gone. “Do you know what that could do to you when you’re that age?”

She’d turned seventeen on New Queensland, but that suddenly wasn’t the age she was thinking of. Somehow her mind shuddered away from the insides of the settler ship, and instead she saw the mercs handing her over to Red Roger and his men. Those men forcing her mother to watch while Roger—

Fuck. No. All that shit had happened to Jack. Not her. Jack was dead. Not her.

“When you’re twelve years old—”

“I told you to stay in New Mecca,” Riddick hissed, swinging around to come face to face with her.

When had he said that? Had he said it to Tizzy and not her?

Riddick suddenly grabbed the light in the low ceiling, just beside them, and pulled it out with a single, powerful yank. It exploded in his hands as he roared at her and she couldn’t stop herself from recoiling. “Did you not listen?”

When she turned back to look at him, he’d pulled his goggles off and was glaring at her.

“I had mercs on my neck. I’ll always have mercs on my neck. I spent five years on a frozen heap just to keep them away from you.”

And Tizzy and I were hunted the whole time you were in fucking hiding! she wanted to shout at him. She managed to stand her ground and keep quiet without saying it. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to talk about Tizzy with him. Everybody always cared more about Tizzy than her…

Riddick’s expression became accusing, even disgusted. “And you go and sign up with the same fake badges—”

She had an image in her head, suddenly, of Tizzy kneeling over Duke Pritchard, the same sneer on her face as she examined the badge she’d taken from the paralyzed merc’s pocket.

“—that wanted to cut you up and use you for bait.”

I told you not to do it, she thought she heard Tizzy whisper, somewhere deep inside her. And something about a motherfucking son of a side of bacon…

“What are you pitching, Riddick?” she demanded, trying not to feel the twist of guilt and shame that her little sister had just provoked. Riddick turned away from her. “That you cuttin’ out was a good thing? That you had my ass covered from halfway across the universe?”

More guilt tore through her. That was what she had done to Tizzy, too. She’d abandoned her little sister after Riddick had abandoned both of them, and had lost her forever. Maybe everything that had happened after that was what she deserved for making that choice, she thought, feeling ill.

So what does Riddick deserve for abandoning both of us?

It was his fault Jack was dead. His fault she’d lost everything. Nothing had worked right once he’d left them.

She felt Riddick’s own sense of guilt swelling, and then felt him push it aside and go blank and unreadable again. “You signed with mercs,” he murmured, walking way.

It was the only choice I had left, damn it… Every other door had closed to her. Every other friend had left or been taken from her. “There was nobody else around.”

Because she’d let General Toal separate her from Tizzy…

Because I told Tizzy we couldn’t stay together anymore…

Fuck.

She had to get out of there before she lost it in front of Riddick.

Keeping her spine straight, she turned and walked out of the room before he could, slamming one of the barred “cell doors” shut behind her. The moment she’d hoped to have with him had unraveled, again, into a godawful mess.

She needed a kill. A good, righteous kill. More than one. Once she was sure she was alone, she isomorphed into Elsewhere and followed a tunnel that led to the warren of the Moles. Three were dead. She’d finish off the rest.

Fuck you, Riddick. I’m the better killer.

Now if she could just stop crying…

You’d never have talked shit like that to Tizzy, damn you, she thought as she crept up on the first of the Moles and pulled his beating heart into Elsewhere. She hoped the “hellhounds” would like human hearts for a midnight snack. How come you can’t care that much about me?

She had the sudden, horrible feeling that Riddick had come to Crematoria for Tizzy, not her. It left her chest feeling even hollower than the Moles were when she was done with them.