The Changeling Game, Chapter 29

29.
The Voices of the Void

Sometime after the sky lightened, Kyra and Takama helped Jack climb the eight flights of steps up to their apartment and a frantic Sebby. The little crustacean scuttled straight up her jalabiya and onto her shoulder and refused to be set down for more than a minute.

“It is all just as Brahim described it yesterday,” Takama marveled as she helped Jack lie down on her bed. “How extraordinary. And your little pet… such incredible things you two can do. Rest now, little Tislilel… although I think he should have named you Tiraline instead.”

“He called me Dihya,” Kyra said, sitting down on the bed next to her. “Who’s that?”

“A great warrior queen,” Takama said. Jack closed her eyes and rested her head against the pillow, feeling Sebby settling down against her throat. “Tiraline and Dihya… the Mermaid Queen and the Warrior Queen… fitting for two young women who saved so many lives. Rest now, both of you. I will come and check on you later and bring you some food. What would you like?”

“Anything I didn’t cook,” Kyra said beside her.

Jack, eyes closed, already drifting off, found herself wanting to ask for a peanut butter sandwich, but the words that came out were oddly askew from that.

“Don’t wanna be a queen…”

Takama laughed softly from far away. “That is fine, young Tislilel. A mermaid does not need to be a queen to raise a tsunami…”

The idea of raising tsunamis followed her down into her dreams.

She was floating in darkness, rising and falling on unseen waves. Around her, the stars sparkled and burned as they followed their own tidal patterns. She was adrift among the stars themselves, watching them swirl past her in complex patterns as she swerved around them, free but tethered—

There was something heavy on her back, something chaining her to it, but she couldn’t see it.

And she was not alone.

Creature? something unseen asked. Being?

She tried to get her mouth to work, to call out hello? into the spangled darkness, but the part of her that suddenly felt like prey gone to ground wouldn’t release her voice.

Something is here. Was that her thought, or had the thing said it?

The stars slowed and stopped their tidal spin and for a moment she found herself in darkness.

Alone! a not-voice sobbed. Alone and trapped…

The show that she’d tried to recall, while talking to Tomlin, flashed through her mind. Something about a woman in a mask—

Yes, it said to her. No. What is that thing?

She could feel something reaching for her from the darkness. Something touched her—

You are not like us, it said after a moment, and she could feel its disappointment… and hope.

And, faintly, others like it, distant, near, reaching for her…

Is it one of them?

No. Larval. Bright and shiny…

The stars faded into view once more, whirling and dancing again as she spun through them.

It rode upon her back, but now it has come beneath and she is lost…

Lost? When had she gotten lost? Out here in the stars?

With horror, Jack realized that she was the it that the things were speaking of, not the she.

It has come beneath to us, come below to us, passed under to us…

Below… that resonated somehow.

Below… below… yes… beneath, below, under… we are under… take us to… take us… to the…

She was seeing something that could not be seen with human eyes. A shape that defied dimension, a pattern that murdered reason. Jack struggled to look away.

Too much, too much, poor larva, too much…

It doesn’t understand. Poor larva.

We will teach it…

A line appeared before her, shining in the vast dark.

One.

It shifted, changing, becoming a glowing square, a flat plane.

Two.

Now the glowing square shifted again, evolving into a cube of light.

Three.

The next shape was almost impossible to comprehend.

Four.

The next was worse still.

Five.

NO…

It wouldn’t stop. The shape kept warping itself into something even more impossible and terrifying.

Six… Seven… Eight… Nine… Ten…

Stop, please, stop…

Eleven… Twelve… Thirteen… Fourteen… Fifteen…

No no no no no stopstopstopstopstop—

A sharp pinch on her shoulder launched her up off of her pillow, gasping. Sebby tumbled into her lap.

Jack stared around the room wildly, panting. For a moment, the walls and floor and ceiling were almost incomprehensible to her: barren, flat planes that lacked… what…?

It’s wrong it’s wrong he said there were only ten…

She shuddered, hard. Sebby crawled up her chest and touched her chin with his antennae, gentle and feathery, as though checking to see if she was ill. Had he pinched her awake? She thought he had.

Next to her on the bed, Kyra groaned, frowning in her sleep.

Of all the things she’d expected to dream about, she hadn’t expected… what, exactly? All she could remember now was a tide of stars and a masked woman… and a word…?

…octachoron…?

Lying back down, she cuddled Sebby to her as she settled against the pillow. He’d woken her from a nightmare; that much she knew. She didn’t know how he was so perceptive, but she was grateful that he was.

They were waiting when she drifted off again.

We frightened you. We are sorry.

“Who are you?” she asked, trying to anchor herself in as much ordinary, prosaic reality as she could. She couldn’t see them, but she tried to show them herself. Tall, gangly, short hair verging between brown and blonde, all eyes and elbows and knees as Rachel liked to say—

It is one of them!

No. Similar three-shape. Different five-shape.

“Who are you?” she asked again, trying to see them.

The impossible thing, the shape that wasn’t a shape, the shape that her mind tried to flee from, was back.

It is wondering. Wondering about us.

We are below… beneath… under… under… alone…

Find us. We will show you…

…help us…

DIE.

It was a new “voice,” different from the others. Where she had sensed curiosity, loneliness, and strange desperation until then, she suddenly sensed terrible, implacable hatred.

Death to the things that killed us… death to the makers of the cages… death to the ’verse that trapped us… a trillion deaths for every one you took from us…

No. Leave. It is a larva.

It is filth.

Innocent!

Filth. It has no right to come under. Not innocent. Filth.

Flee, larva. Flee. We cannot protect you.

Jack couldn’t move. She was rooted in place, locked in horror.

We come. We come to take it all back. All the worlds your filth has stolen will burn…

Something tiny and yet enormous took hold of her and the stars spun. She had the sense that another thing, monstrous and cold, had been reaching for her… but now it was gone.

We are sorry, little larva. Forgive us… help us…

“Who are you?” she whispered into the dark.

You see… you know… For a moment it almost came back to her, shards of memory with no meaning attached, glowing towers rising into a black sky, a woman in a mask, a hand slapping down on a button—

Come for us, the not-voices whispered. Save us. Take us… to…

…the Threshold…

The stars whirled around her again and for a moment, she caught another glimpse of the impossible shape, a chained and contained infinity, beautiful and terrible and mind-breaking—

She woke up gasping, pressing her hands over her mouth to suppress a scream. Kyra cried out in terror and sat up at the same moment.

“Fuck!” Kyra shouted, looking around wildly. Sebby scooted off of the bed and zoomed under the dresser.

Jack realized that Kyra had pulled a knife from somewhere and was holding it out defensively.

“What the fuck was that thing? Where did it go?” Kyra gasped.

“The thing in the dark?” Jack asked. “The thing that was huge and tiny at the same time?”

Kyra turned and looked at her, eyes widening. “You saw it too?”

Jack nodded, swallowing. “It said something about a threshold…”

Kyra nodded back. The tension was leaving her body, slowly. “How did we have the same dream?”

Jack shuddered. “Did you… feel it when people crossed over from U1 to Elsewhere last night? And back?”

Kyra looked like she wanted to say no, like she wanted to deny it. “…yes.”

“I think… I think something else felt us.” It was an increasingly unsettling thought.

“Fuck.” Kyra set the knife down. “Whatever it is, it ain’t human. Not even a little.”

“Did it call you a ‘larva’ too?” Jack asked. She was struggling to hold onto the memory. Unlike the perfect recall she had of things she paid attention to while she was conscious, her dreams were rarely accessible to her for long. Sometimes, after Mr. Reilly had told her about the Many Worlds Theory, she’d imagined that she visited other universes in her sleep, lived other lives, and that she couldn’t remember much afterwards because the memories lived in the heads of other Audreys, scattered throughout the multiverse.

Maybe she hadn’t been as far off as she’d thought.

“It did. Most of them did. But there was one…” Now Kyra shuddered. “It hated me. It wanted me dead.”

“Me too. Called me ‘filth.’”

“Filth… larva… way to make a girl feel insignificant. Shit.” Kyra blew out a breath and flopped down on the mattress. “If that was some kind of fucked up First Contact, I really don’t want to meet them out here in reality.”

But is this reality? Jack found herself thinking. If the entities they’d both dreamed about were real, was this the dream world?

She could feel a headache starting.

“I am not gonna go back to sleep for a while,” she said, lying on her back next to Kyra.

Fortunately, their rooms were flooded with light. Jack thought it might be nearing midday outside. There was very little noise coming in through the windows, which seemed to back that up. The heat was beating down, leavened by the sea breezes coming in through the windows, but Jack was glad of the warmth after the deathly cold of the thing from her dreams. Around New Marrakesh, people had probably already retired for the midday sleep period, while they were stuck wide awake and scared to close their eyes—

“So then maybe we should talk about what happened last night,” Kyra said.

“Which part? There’s so much.”

That got a soft laugh from Kyra. “Well, I can tell you some of the things that happened while you were kinda out of it, if you want.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” It bothered Jack that she’d collapsed so hard, while both Kyra and Tomlin had still needed her. “Sorry about that.”

“What for? You did great. Really great. Crazy-great. But anyway, Tomlin and I did a little embellishing of your plan for the shuttles. He set them up so that they’d fly textbook ‘launch to the space station’ paths out of New Marrakesh, and get halfway up into the sky before colliding with each other. Before they left, he and I did a quick isomorph to some alcove just outside of their jamming range, and he called Takama and gave her the transponder frequencies so she could track them. She says they crashed right into each other and exploded way out to sea, right about the time they reached this planet’s stratosphere.” Kyra grinned. “There’s a marine rescue operation going on right now, but nobody’s expecting to find much. And they’re never gonna find the flight recorders, because those are sitting on the beach in Elsewhere.”

“That’s… amazing.”

Kyra snorted. “Well, you said to crash the fuck out of them. Crashing them into each other seemed the best way.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you kidding? Last night was one of the best times I’ve ever had. I should be thanking you.” Kyra’s smile was broad and bright. “I know what I want to do now, what I want to be. I don’t know if you heard any of it, but… Tomlin’s gonna introduce me to some of the officers he served with. People he trusts. I’m gonna do it, Jack. I want to fight for people the way I did last night. He says there are some crack units that get sent on rescue missions, and if I can get into one of those…”

Her smile suddenly faltered. For a moment, the light in her eyes dimmed a little.

“Will you be okay if I do that? I know you told him you have somewhere you need to go, but… do you? I mean, really? ’Cause I don’t want to run out on you or anything.”

Jack felt as if her heart was both impossibly full and being squeezed really tightly. She’d worried more than a little about what would happen to Kyra when it was time for her to continue her journey to her father, but now Kyra was having the same worries about her…

“I will,” she promised. “I do have a place to go… I was on my way to my father when things started going wrong. That’s where I’m going. He doesn’t know I’m coming, but I know he’ll still be on Furya when I get there.”

Kyra looked both relieved and curious. “What’s Furya?”

“A planet,” Jack told her. “Kind of a weird one. There’s like, no record of when it was terraformed or who went to settle it, but a hundred or so years ago, some people showed up at Federacy HQ saying they were from there and wanting to register the planet as a sovereign world. That was a first. There really wasn’t much contact or trade or anything after that, either. But then, about twenty-five years ago, a ton of people from there started showing up all over the Federacy as refugees, saying their world had been attacked. So scouts went out and… well, my dad said someone had committed genocide there. But all the survivors would say was that the devil had come, so, you know, not very helpful. Their biosphere was seriously fucked up by whatever happened, too. So a bunch of worlds offered their old terraforming equipment that they no longer needed, to help the place get put back together. It’s starting to work, but the equipment’s so old that it needs a lot of tending and re-engineering. My dad decided he’d go there and take charge of that. I guess he was stationed there back before I was born, so he already knows how to talk to the locals.”

Describing it to Kyra, she suddenly felt selfish for wanting her father to stay on Deckard’s World with her. He was helping people. After last night, she understood so much better how strong the need to do that could be.

Maybe he’d thought he was leaving her in the best possible place, with her mother and Alvin, much as Riddick had apparently thought that leaving her with Abu and Lajjun had been in her best interest. Her dad, she reflected, had probably been a lot more right about his choice than Riddick had been—

“I love how you know all this stuff,” Kyra said after a moment. “The schooling I got from the New Christy elders… it was all about people from thousands of years ago who talked directly to God and lived for hundreds of years and had a million rules about everything and kept cursing their own children, and none of it made a lick of sense to me. Everything I wanted to learn about… oh no, that was Men’s Business. My job was to cook and clean and make babies one day. I never, ever wanted that job.”

“Well, you won’t have to have it, ever, if you don’t want.” Jack told her. “Tomlin’ll help you get in with the right people. He’s the real deal.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Kyra grinned. “You know, I was real suspicious of him at first. Part of it was I was jealous, you know? The two of you seemed to understand each other so well, from the moment you met, and I’ve never seen you trust anyone so fast. But… you were right about him.”

That astounded Jack. Kyra had been jealous of Tomlin?

But, she recalled, Kyra had also been jealous of her for a while, back when she’d been taken under Heather’s wing. Friendships, she realized, real friendships, were hard to come by for Kyra. She was afraid that there wouldn’t be any room left for her if someone new came along. She was afraid of being replaced and discarded.

“You didn’t need to be jealous,” she managed after a moment. “You’re still my best friend. More than that. I’m an only child… or I was. But now, you’re my sister.”

Kyra swallowed, her smile taking on a tight quality, and Jack realized that she was struggling to suppress tears. “You’re my sister, too,” she managed after a moment, her voice wobbly.

Jack could feel how perilous her own emotions were. If she didn’t say or do something to change it, the two of them were going to end up crying for the next few hours. She wasn’t sure how long it would be before she could stop, if she started. “You think Takama brought us some food while we were asleep?”

Kyra’s expression stabilized and her lips quirked. “Damn. You say food and my stomach starts screaming demands. Let’s go find out.”

Takama had indeed returned while they slept, leaving behind items that could safely sit out—protected from insects—on their table. Beneath the coverings, a variety of breads, nuts, hard cheeses, and fruits awaited them. Jack found a bottle of freshly-made orange juice, the New Marrakesh kind that had ruined her for all others, tucked in their otherwise empty cooler.

“So it’s almost noon,” Kyra said as they ate. “Tide’s out. If you feel up to it—and I’ll understand if you don’t because I don’t think you even know how much you did last night—we could do a little of that beachcombing we talked about. Nobody’ll notice if we appear and disappear places. And after last night, nobody in the Rif is going to think twice if they do see us do that.”

The wariness that had been so thoroughly habitual for Kyra seemed to have dissolved, literally overnight. This was the most relaxed Jack had ever seen her friend.

“I’d like that,” Jack said with a grin. “Let me just check the reports first…”

Her backpack, which had miraculously made it through all of the night’s dramas, was sitting by the table. Takama must have found it at the shop and brought it over, because Jack had no clear recollection of what had happened to it after she’d put it on and begun running for Othman Tower. Inside, her tablet was, amazingly, unscathed.

Unlike the clothes I was wearing… She still couldn’t figure out when she’d ripped both knees off of her pants.

There was nothing in the local news feeds about almost two hundred people disappearing. Not until Jack pulled up the news about the offshore search-and-rescue in progress.

The Quintessa Corporation has confirmed that both shuttles were carrying the surviving passengers and crew of the Scarlet Matador to a new treatment facility. Colonel Gavin Tomlin, who had been supervising the quarantine, is on record as saying that he never authorized, and had not been informed of, the transfer. Local authorities further confirmed that the shuttles appeared to have violated several rules regarding New Marrakesh airspace, and had forced Ground Control to reroute half a dozen flight paths to prevent additional collisions…

“Damn,” Kyra said. “I don’t like his name being right in there.”

“Me neither,” Jack sighed. “No way around it, though, I guess. He was in charge of them. And it’d be suspicious as hell if he wasn’t demanding to know why he’d been left out of the loop.”

“I hope he’s a good actor.” Kyra grinned at Jack. “He’s sure got the looks of one.”

Behind them, the door opened and Takama stepped through. “Awake already?”

Jack realized that, sometime in the last day, she’d stopped thinking of Takama as her favorite food vendor or even Tomlin’s aunt, and had begun thinking of her as family. No wonder, she thought, soldiers coming home from war talked about their brothers and sisters in arms, and meant it. A powerful bond had been forged.

“We had some trouble with bad dreams,” Kyra said, with an ease that suggested she was feeling exactly the same way. She had probably given Takama the code to enter their building and unit.

This is who she was before life went badly wrong for her, Jack thought.

“I suppose that is no surprise. It is good that you are up, though. I spoke to Brahim a little while ago and thought I could give you an update if you were awake. Otherwise, I just wanted to check in on you before I went to sleep, myself.”

“Is everything okay?” Jack asked.

“He is not entirely sure. Everyone seems to have accepted Quintessa’s explanation and his outrage about it, but… he is not sure that the envoy from Quintessa believes what she is claiming. She acted strangely toward him.” Takama sighed. “He has to go up to Tangiers Station A to pull the original transmission logs from the Scarlet Matador, and the readings he took of its approach, because Quintessa is now claiming that it was never a Level Five Incident at all. He told me he thought someone might have been following him into the spaceport.”

“Wait, were you two talking on comms about this?” Kyra was frowning.

Takama laughed softly. “Do not fret, Dihya. We spoke a language no eavesdropper could know.”

“Are you sure?” Jack asked, feeling a cold spot in her belly. “Most translation programs—”

“Have no lexicon for it,” Takama insisted. “My sister invented it when we were children. I told you she is a linguist, yes? It was our secret language for years and years. She taught it to her husband and her children, but outside of the six of us, no one has ever spoken or heard it.”

Jack allowed herself to feel a little relief at that. It worried her, though, that Tomlin was possibly being followed. “What’s he doing about his shadow?”

“He said he might go where the man cannot follow. He does have clearance into almost every part of the spaceport. But I think he may wish to learn a little more about why he is being followed, first. After all—”

With a deafening bang, the apartment building shook.

Jack could hear alarms sounding outside, lots of them. She scrambled from the couch to the nearest window.

People were pouring out onto the streets, talking and shouting. Several of them pointed toward the northwest.

“What is it?” Takama asked.

“I can’t see yet.” Jack told her, running into the bedroom.

Several panes of glass in the western-facing window had cracked, but none had broken. Through the window, to the northwest, Jack could see a large, roiling column of black smoke climbing into the sky, flames licking upward from beneath it.

“Baraka,” Takama groaned at her side. “That is at the spaceport…”

Jack, who had impulsively bought a good set of binoculars—along with an as-yet-unused telescope—two days before, grabbed them off of the dresser and brought them to her eyes.

It was a clear day and Jack could see much of the coast of New Marrakesh. To the northwest, it curved to create a bay. Along the edge of the distant promontory, the runways and launch platforms spread out on the flat land. She could see many of the low structures that made up the spaceport, its concourses, towers, hangars, warehouses, ships…

One of the concourses, beside a shuttle roughly three times the size of the ones she’d encountered the night before, was burning fiercely beneath the rising black cloud. The flames were licking over the hull of the shuttle—

A flash as bright as the sun almost blinded her for a second. She threw her arm up over her eyes until it faded.

Now an enormous, gory red cloud was expanding where the shuttle had been, shooting off fast-moving tendrils of fire that arced through the sky.

“Fuck!” Kyra shouted. “Get away from the window!”

They raced for the doorway, only just reaching it as the shockwave struck. It shattered the window and sent dozens of sharp fragments of glass flying through the space where they’d only just been standing.

“Brahim!” Takama wailed, falling to her knees. “They have murdered Brahim!” she sobbed.

Kyra’s face crumpled as she knelt down next to Takama and put her arms around her. Jack felt numb and weightless.

She couldn’t think. She couldn’t feel. Nothing made any sense. Only two terrible words echoed through the vast emptiness inside her.

Not again!