The Changeling Game, Chapter 28

28.
The Claws of the Black Fox

Othman Tower was only a five-minute walk from the transit station with the storage lockers. At a run, it was half that. Jack was screaming inside the whole way.

Kyra was ahead of her, wild hair streaming out behind her as she ran full tilt toward the building, a long knife that Jack had never seen before suddenly in one hand. Jack wasn’t quite sure where she’d gotten and kept that, exactly. She didn’t want to ask. All she could feel was desperate terror that they were already too late.

A little before they reached the Tower’s plaza, still screened by the avenue’s argan trees, Kyra suddenly stopped and held up her free hand, making a gesture that she and Jack had worked out in the prior days. Isomorph over to Elsewhere, the gesture said.

Jack concentrated, letting the buildings around them fade as she found her footing on the beaches of Elsewhere. She focused on letting her perception of U1 stay intact, though: an invisible girl looking in at the world from the other side of a threshold. She hurried forward, now running after Kyra on wet sand, once the transition was complete.

Two huge shuttles were parked before the building’s main entrance, marring the lovely plaza that led up to the doors. Two lines of people, all with their arms bound at the wrists, were being herded into them at gunpoint by soldiers in motley uniforms. Mercs, Jack thought. Tomlin, dressed once more in his own uniform, his wrists shackled behind his back, was on his knees by the doors with another merc’s gun pointed at his head.

“You grab Tomlin,” Kyra murmured next to her. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Before Jack could ask what she meant, Kyra was in motion, knives in both hands now. The mercs, Jack realized, couldn’t see her—wouldn’t see her until it was far too late.

The first to die was the man holding the gun to Tomlin’s head.

The firearm went skittering across the flagstones as its owner clutched at his slashed throat before toppling to the ground beside Tomlin. He scrambled back away from the body, his eyes widening. Kyra had only made the blade itself manifest in U1. She was already on the move again.

In a second, Jack suddenly thought in alarm, the pilots in the shuttles would hear the commotion and call for help. They probably had the only functional communications in the area right now.

Let’s fix that, shall we?

She brought her hands into U1 and laid them upon one of the two shuttles, pulling it all of the way into Elsewhere, remembering at the last instant to swap in Elsewhere’s air to fill its space. Sometimes, when she and Kyra had been practicing isomorphing objects and had forgotten, the air displacement had created anything from a small snap to a loud bang, although that oddly never happened with their own bodies. This would have roared like thunder.

The huge vessel vanished from the flagstones of U1 and appeared on the sand of Elsewhere. A wave of dizziness passed through Jack; in its wake, she felt light as air. Trying not to stumble in the sand, she raced over to the other shuttle’s location, repeating her moves, staggering as the dizzy-airy feeling grew stronger. The shuttles’ comms would be useless now, a whole universe away from anyone who could hear their messages.

Three more of the merc team’s members, back in U1, were on the ground, dead or dying. The Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, Jack thought, had been fully unleashed. In defense of the Matador survivors, Kyra could do all of the things she hadn’t been able to do to save her own family.

Between the dropping mercs and the vanishing shuttles, some of those survivors were starting to panic. The bewildered mercs surrounding them, realizing the situation was inexplicably spinning out of control, were hunting for something to shoot. In a moment, they might turn their weapons against their captives.

I am in both worlds, I am in both worlds, I am in both worlds…

Now visible, audible, and tangible in U1, she pitched her voice the way she had when, once, she had shouted to keep Shazza from killing an innocent man. “EVERYBODY! ISOMORPH NOW! ALL THE WAY INTO ELSEWHERE! ALL THE WAY!”

Jack hoped they understood what she meant. She didn’t have time to find out. As several weapons pointed and fired in her direction, she isomorphed back out of U1 and ran toward Tomlin’s position.

But she could feel the survivors doing it, feel them crossing from one ’verse to the next. Now, she knew, they would be able to see Kyra’s deadly dance as she slashed her way through the armed mercs who had held them.

Jack reached Tomlin a second later, isomorphing back into U1 beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he told her, sitting up. “What happened to the shuttles?”

“They’re in Elsewhere,” she muttered, grasping the binders on his wrists, shifting them to that other world, and tossing them aside.

A few of the Matador passengers were still in U1, she realized, and in deadly danger. One woman was crouched down, trying to shield two small children despite her bound arms; another, with a small baby harnessed on her chest, was kneeling on the ground trying to present as small a target as possible. A few others looked confused, struggling to do what she’d told them.

Tomlin, she thought, must not have had a chance to brief them on their anchoring tricks. She wondered if he’d even made it into the building before the merc team had captured him.

One merc had spotted her and was lining up a shot when a knife handle suddenly sprouted from his temple. His bullets went wide as he toppled, tearing through one of the stately trees overhanging the plaza. The remaining Matador survivors screamed and dropped to the ground; three more vanished from U1.

“Stop right there! Don’t you move!” Another merc approached her and Tomlin, his rifle pointed directly at them.

Jack wrapped her arms around Tomlin and pulled.

They were in Elsewhere.

“Baraka!” Tomlin gasped, staring around him. “Is this—?”

“Yes,” Jack told him. She got up and hurried over to the spot where she knew the mother with the infant was kneeling, shifting her vision enough to see her clearly, reaching out until she was almost touching her.

She’d never tried this before. She didn’t know if it would even work. Without isomorphing any part of herself back to U1, she focused on the woman, on the parts of her and her baby that were already connected to Elsewhere, and pulled again.

It worked so well that she fell backward, landing on her ass, as mother and child solidified in front of her. Kyra flew past them with a fierce smile on her face, racing for another of the still-standing mercs who was lining up a shot at a hapless civilian. Out of knives, she had a large chunk of driftwood in her hands.

A second later, the driftwood protruded from the merc’s chest and back. His gun clattered to the plaza flagstones as he clutched at the wood in confused agony. Jack saw him crumple to the ground as she wrapped phantom arms around the mother with two small children, pulling them into Elsewhere.

Screams from the shuttles startled her. She turned and saw Tomlin running for one while Kyra raced for the other. She switched ’verses quickly and grabbed up one of the discarded rifles.

“Tomlin!” she shouted as she isomorphed back, throwing the rifle at him when he turned to look. He caught it easily.

The mercs back in U1 were all dead, she realized. Now they had only the shuttle pilots to deal with.

Kyra, following her lead, switched ’verses to grab one of the dropped rifles and reappeared in Elsewhere a second later.

A standoff was about to develop, Jack realized. The pilots had hostages.

“ISOMORPH BACK TO U1!” she bellowed as loudly as she could, hoping the passengers aboard the shuttles would hear her and know what to do. Her throat suddenly felt raw.

She ismorphed over herself, for the moment, letting her vision show her what was in both worlds even as her body stayed in only one. As she watched, several people dropped to the ground in the areas that the shuttles occupied, managing to pull themselves back to U1 on their own. She headed for the shuttle Tomlin had just raced into, pulling a sidearm off one of the fallen mercs as she went and switching off its safety.

I am in U1, but I see into Elsewhere, I am in U1 and cannot be seen in Elsewhere, but I can see…

She walked through the hull of the shuttle like a phantom.

Only the top half of her head was above the cabin floor, unseen. Several cuffed, terrified passengers remained on board. The pilot had one of them in a headlock, holding a gun to her head. Tomlin was trying to talk the man down, but the shouting was getting louder and louder, even through the veil between ’verses.

Jack positioned herself directly beneath the pilot, waiting for a moment when the gun’s aim would waver. She raised her pistol until it was completely above the floor, bracing herself as well as she could in such an awkward position.

I am in U1, only in U1, but the gun in my hand is in both ’verses. And its hammer, and its bullets, are fully in Elsewhere… It was, she thought ruefully, a good thing after all that her father had not only taught her how to shoot, but had made her break down and clean each of the guns they’d worked with. She could visualize, and suddenly feel, those parts of her weapon now.

One of the passengers stared in astonishment in her direction.

As his hostage writhed, twisting her body away from his, the pilot’s gun slipped and pointed away from her for a fraction of a second. It was all Jack needed.

She fired straight up, over and over, emptying the pistol’s clip into the pilot’s torso, before ducking back out of the shuttle.

Small arms fire erupted from the other shuttle’s space. Kyra was standing in its midst, unloading a pistol upward in U1, but on the Elsewhere side Jack could only see the hull of the shuttle itself. Her wild-haired friend emerged a moment later, her face almost glowing with fierce energy.

“That was a damned good idea you had,” she said with a grin. “Last one’s dead.”

Jack could only nod silently, dropping her gun before falling to her knees. She isomorphed back into Elsewhere so she could vomit on the sand instead of in the plaza.

Less than fifteen minutes later, Jack had pulled the now-evacuated shuttles back into U1, and she and Kyra had finished removing everyone’s restraints. The Matador survivors, none of whom were seriously injured, had helped them carry the mercs’ corpses onto the shuttles, taking back comms and other items that the men had confiscated from their captives, before transferring back to Elsewhere at Jack’s instruction, to wait.

“I think you got here not even ten minutes after I did,” Tomlin said as he wiped a merc’s blood off of his recovered comm. “I spent the last several hours making arrangements for tomorrow night. It was the message to meet you here that brought me at all. I never had a chance to reach the lobby before they had me.”

Jack knelt down and transferred a pool of drying blood out of the plaza and into Elsewhere, while Kyra did the same near the other shuttle. It was the last physical evidence of the battle. There was nothing they could do about the damage to the trees where one automatic rifle had chewed them up… but they’d let whoever had sent the mercs worry about covering that up.

Someone—and Jack was pretty sure who—had gone to great lengths to ensure they could perpetrate a heinous crime unseen, after all. It would be a shame, she thought, not to take advantage of their efforts.

Othman Tower’s building and plaza cameras, she had verified, were still offline, and the cameras and comms for several blocks were scrambled; someone had set things up so that none of them would come back on until the shuttles’ transponders signaled that they were out of the cameras’ lines of sight. If Jack and her friends played their cards just right, nobody—not even the people who had sent the mercs—would know just what had really happened there.

If she hadn’t asked Tomlin to meet her here, she suddenly realized, he would have been the one with no idea or proof of what had been done to the people in his care. She suspected that would have broken his heart.

But it meant they probably hadn’t been expecting him to come to the tower, or at least, hadn’t built their plan around when he was expected. They had, in fact, done this on his day off. That was something she could use.

“You’re gonna need to pretend you never got here at all,” she told Tomlin, her voice hoarse and her throat feeling as though she had swallowed glass. Had she really yelled that loudly? “You’re gonna need to pretend that everybody’d already been taken when you finally did get here.”

“All right. Why?”

“If you were here and escaped, that means so did everybody else. If you were never here, they won’t know anybody escaped their trap, just that you never walked into it. You know how to set autopilots?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Go on the shuttles and set each one to auto-launch in another five minutes or so. Make them fly out to sea, out to where it’s deep, and then dive down into the water. At velocity. Crash the fuck out of them where it’ll be hard to get to the wreckage.”

“All right. What does that buy us?”

“I don’t know what the Quintessa Corporation’s plans for the shuttles’ destinations were, but since they’re hiding the fact that they planned to kidnap everybody, they can’t exactly draw attention to it when it all goes wrong. Hopefully they won’t realize that the Matador passengers didn’t die in the crashes.” Jack sighed, suddenly feeling tired and ancient. Every devious idea she’d ever had seemed to be crowding into her head all at once. “Did any of them get on comms to anybody after they grabbed you?”

Tomlin shook his head. He seemed to understand what she was asking—which was good, because she barely did suddenly—and answered as if he was giving a military debriefing. “None of the mercenaries did. The pilots were already on board the shuttles, and they were already loading the passengers, when I walked up. I was coming around the side of the building and only saw the backs of the shuttles, so I don’t think the pilots ever saw me. None of the mercs told anyone they had me in custody. I’m not sure if they were even looking for me or just thought I was an inconvenient witness. And then you moved the shuttles over to Elsewhere before anyone started shooting or screaming. How did you manage—”

“Good. Then as far as they’ll know, you were never here, their mercs kidnapped the Matador survivors as planned, and then everybody, including the mercs, died in the crashes… except you, because you didn’t show up until long after they’d left,” Jack told him. “Meanwhile, we take the survivors up to high ground through Elsewhere, bring them out where your people can hide them, and then you discover, live on camera tomorrow morning, that Othman Tower’s empty and raise a stink about your missing charges.”

Tomlin was staring at her with strange awe again.

“They can’t…” Jack could feel the steam running out of her words. Why did she feel so exhausted suddenly? She could barely put two words together. “They can’t threaten to cripple the economy if you don’t turn over people you don’t have… because they already took them from you.”

“And,” Kyra said from beside her, “If they’re planning on killing all of the survivors off anyway, why should they care how it happens, even if they lose a few soldiers-for-hire in the process? Sucks for them that they eliminated all possible records of what went wrong. Let’s get those things set to fly and get back to Elsewhere. You know where the black boxes on those crates are located? We don’t want those found by divers.”

Jack wanted to follow the two of them, but she couldn’t get her legs to work. She sat quietly on the plaza’s flagstones for a few moments while Tomlin set the shuttles’ controls and Kyra hauled out flight recorders, shifting them into Elsewhere. Her arms and legs felt weak and shaky, and her whole center felt utterly hollow.

“This is what she does,” she heard Kyra saying to Tomlin a few minutes later as they walked up. “She can come up with a crazy plan at the drop of a hat, and it’ll work. She’s like… a mastermind that way. I mean, hell, she’d already planned the march through Elsewhere, but those embellishments? She just came up with them now. On the spot, fergodsake. But killing somebody? That’s going to fuck her up for a while.”

“Even if by doing so, she saved someone’s life?”

“Even so. That’s our Finch.”

“You don’t think it might be the shuttles?”

“I don’t know. Could be. Never even occurred to me to try moving something that big, and she did it four times.”

Strong arms lifted her off the ground and she realized that Tomlin was cradling her like a child. Kyra’s arms came around both of them as she isomorphed them from U1 into Elsewhere.

Jack could, strangely, feel the exact moment when both shuttles left the plaza over in U1. She opened her eyes and watched them, through the veil of dimensions, as they flew off, arrowing toward the coastline.

Kyra was talking to the crowd, telling them that they were going to walk uphill until they were out of the path of the tide, which should stay below sea level for several more hours anyway. Then she was going to help them meet up with people who would take them to a place where they could hide. Jack, exhausted, leaned her head against Tomlin’s shoulder and focused on breathing, on being, while Kyra took charge. She’d told Kyra the plan as they had walked down into town, and her friend had loved it. Kyra would make it happen now.

Time slid by in fits and starts. Jack was in a gray place, exhausted by the terrible battle in the same way that she had been after the ordeal on the Kublai Khan. She’d slept for more than a day after that, clinging the whole time to the gun she’d fired, in fear that she would wake to find herself back in that world of horrors. Now, though, she didn’t dare sleep, not yet, not until she was sure everyone was really, truly safe… but she had no energy left to make sure of that.

She drifted in and out of consciousness through much of the hours-long night march out of the flat plains that corresponded with New Marrakesh’s city center and upward onto the sandy, weedy, increasingly rocky hillsides. Later, she would have memories of strange, small creatures skittering out of the paths of hundreds of human feet. For a while, Tomlin and Kyra both walked in the lead, side by side, Tomlin still carrying her in his arms, the two talking about combat and soldiering. Jack heard him offering to introduce Kyra to some of the officers he knew, people who would never, he promised, turn away the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain when he vouched for her.

She’ll have a home, Jack thought with wistful happiness as exhaustion took her again. She’ll be able to fight with real soldiers, not mercs…

Periodically, when she felt strong enough, alert enough, Tomlin let her walk beside him, but his arm was always protectively around her in case another wave of weakness stuck. One always did after a few moments, and she felt him catching her in a faint more than once. The long line stopped at least twice to take rests and give stragglers a chance to catch up, before they reached an area that Kyra said corresponded with the market square in the Rif.

Kyra brought Tomlin and Jack across first, practically into Takama’s lap.

The next thing Jack knew, she was being fussed over and plied with mint tea and jowhara inside one of the small shops along the square’s perimeter, by a merchant family she’d bought things from before, while Tomlin showered and changed in the shopkeeper’s upstairs rooms. Someone collected his uniform for laundering, and two young women helped Jack get cleaned up and changed out of her scuffed, stained, and torn clothes—how exactly had that happened to them? She’d felt so unscathed at the time—into a soft, colorful jalabiya. Then she watched from a window seat, her head resting heavily against the glass, as the hushed exodus continued outside.

Takama, now assisted by a dozen or so of her fellow street vendors, took each of the survivors in hand as Kyra helped them across, hiding them in nearby shops while she and her friends arranged for merchant trucks to come and take them, in small groups, into the mountains. The night was full of quiet activity as the fugitives—now fed and disguised in traditional djellabas and jalabiyas with scarves around their heads—climbed a few at a time into various trucks and carts. No one was going to make them keep walking any further. Somehow, though, the activity seemed no busier than any of the Rif’s normal night markets. No one would suspect a thing; those markets sometimes lasted from dusk to dawn in the Rif even when everywhere else was essentially shut down. All of the merchants seemed delighted to be in on the operation, cheerfully waving away the money some of the survivors tried to offer them in compensation. The rules of hospitality, which meant a great deal to the Imazighen, had apparently been invoked.

They had done it, Jack thought, allowing herself to relax a tiny bit more.

The sky was still dark, but not quite as dark, and the tide had begun to move in, when the last of the Matador survivors came through and Kyra joined her in the little shop, allowing the merchant’s daughters to clean her up and give her a change of clothing.

Jack had almost forgotten about the storage locker key she’d intended to give Tomlin, hours before, until she’d pulled it and her own key out of her ruined clothing. When he returned to the shop a little before dawn, once again dressed in his cleaned and repaired uniform, she gave it to him at last.

“Thank you, my Tislilel,” he told her, taking the key. “You saved so many lives yet again tonight. Including mine. Remember that. Please do not hold what you had to do against yourself.” He kissed her forehead.

To Jack’s surprise, Kyra allowed him to give her a thank-you kiss as well and listened attentively while he spoke softly to her, too. Jack, whose hearing was far better than people ever seemed to realize, heard every word. “You have a warrior’s spirit, my Dihya. It is a difficult path to tread. But I have faith you will find your way and I promise, I will help you reach it.”

Jack felt a weight lifting off of her with those words. Kyra might not want an agrarian life, or a domestic one, but Tomlin was offering her a life she did want, and a version she would never have to feel shame or regret for. After encountering the band of mercs in the plaza, Jack had hoped that she wouldn’t still consider signing up with any. Now she wouldn’t need to.

At the doorway, Tomlin turned back to them, his eyes both kind and tired. Now his words addressed not only them but his aunt, emerging from a back room with a tray of tea and food for Kyra her hands.

“I should be back in several hours, a day at most. After I am done ‘discovering’ that my charges are missing and filing my complaints, I will request some of my leave time. With all that has happened, no one will grudge me for it or even question it.” He paused, as if debating with himself. Taking a deep breath, he continued. “Now that I’ve experienced the journey to and from Elswhere, and have seen what you can do and what it costs, I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought. We must never let them find my charges… or either one of you.”

With those last words, Gavin Brahim Tomlin, El Krim, left the amber light of the small shop for the predawn darkness.

It was the last time they ever saw him.