The Changeling Game, Chapter 32

32.
A Lake Full of Tears

It was hard for Jack to concentrate on the memorial service with Toombs and Logan somewhere behind her.

It was a long service. There were prayers and readings, most of which she couldn’t manage to focus on. Family and friends told stories, some in English, some in Arabic, many in Tamazight, and one in French. Safiyya, who had thoughtfully prepared translation tablets for all of the guests, had one for her and one for Kyra, so they could follow what was being said. Everyone seemed to have a story about a time when Gavin Brahim Tomlin, or Brahim Meziane, or “the Colonel,” or El Krim, had helped them when they needed him most. A number of the stories were surprisingly funny. Jack felt herself wishing, yet again, that she could have spent years discovering his hidden depths as they had.

Everyone in the church seemed content to reminisce for hours, as if they might call him back to living, breathing flesh with their words, but eventually Cedric stood and thanked them all for coming.

There would be, he told the audience, a family-only reception that evening, and another reception for his son’s service colleagues in two days’ time. A proper public celebration of his son’s life, open to all, had not yet been scheduled but everyone in attendance that day would be informed as soon as it was.

Somehow, Jack suspected, any invitation addressed to the Quintessa envoy would mysteriously go astray and not reach her.

She could feel the tension humming through Kyra as they rose and followed Safiyya to the vestibule, where the rest of the attendees could offer formal condolences on their way out. This was the most dangerous part. Just how much camouflage could face tattoos and head draperies really create?

“You are shaking, Tislilel. What is it?” Takama whispered.

“Two of the mercs… they know us,” Jack whispered back. “If they realize who we are, things could get really bad.”

“For them,” Takama said firmly. “But I think I know a way to improve your disguises a little. They have not seen you from any direction but behind yet… Lalla, darling, do you have your wig bag with you?”

Within minutes, both she and Kyra had been whisked over to a side room. Takama and Safiyya’s cousin Lalla, it turned out, had an extensive collection of wigs she liked to wear—she had developed alopecia as a teenager, she explained—and often brought several with her to major events. She did not disappoint now. Kyra rejoined the reception line with sleek black hair, bangs draped artfully across her forehead to obscure her distinctive eyebrows. Jack, now wearing a wig that almost exactly matched the long blonde hair she’d cut off when she first went on the run, joined the line a moment later. Lalla had proudly told them that the wigs were made of natural, undyed, untreated human hair, and no one would believe they hadn’t naturally grown it on their heads. The veils, now draped loosely over and around their new hair, completed the illusion.

Jack had to admit that Kyra looked convincingly unlike herself. She suspected that, aside from the “tattoos” on her face, she probably looked more like Audrey MacNamera than she had in a year.

They were already in place as the first well-wishers came through.

Most of them just gave simple condolences. It wasn’t long until Jack was into the rhythm of saying ‘thank you’ back to them in whichever language they had used, making sure to use a thick Tamazight accent in the process. Beside her, Kyra was doing the same. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the envoy and her mercs approaching. While the envoy was offering condolences to each member of the line, the mercs were hanging slightly back, all of them looking uncomfortable.

What, are we too native for you? she found herself thinking angrily. Their expressions made her think of the time she had been invited to a classmate’s Kwanzaa celebration, along with the rest of her class, and had watched as some of her other classmates treated the experience—the foods, the music, the colorful outfits—as too outlandish to even try to appreciate, much less enjoy. Did just wearing white instead of black to a funeral make everything too alien to empathize with? Or did Tomlin’s murderer just naturally gravitate to the types of mercs who had no empathy to begin with?

She tamped down on the anger as fast as she could. I’m grieving here. Grieving. Not wishing for a gun…

Audrey MacNamera, she chided herself, had never fantasized about shooting people. If she wanted to ever be her again, she had to put these awful thoughts out of her head.

“I am so very sorry for your loss,” the envoy said, offering her hand to first Lalla, then Takama, and then Safiyya in turn. Her voice was cultured, her accent the kind Rachel had told her was called Received Pronunciation in really old vids. “Colonel Tomlin was a good man.”

She offered her hand to Kyra, who took it—

—and flinched.

The envoy gave her a quizzical look as she repeated her platitudes. Kyra stammered a thank you in Tamazight-accented English, drawing her hand back.

The only reason Jack didn’t flinch when the envoy took her hand was because she’d been warned by Kyra’s reaction.

There was something wrong with the envoy, something wrong with her touch. Something…

Similar three-shape. Different five-shape…

The thought skated through her mind and was gone. She could feel the woman’s eyes on her, could feel the wrongness of the hand in hers.

“Thank… you…” she managed, taking back her hand.

“Are these your daughters?” The envoy asked Safiyya and Cedric, suddenly seeming far too interested.

“My cousins,” Ewan said, walking over and putting his arms around their shoulders. “Dihya and Tislilel. They had come to town in preparation for the Engagement Moussem. I think that’s now postponed, though. My parents had hopes that one of them might choose instead to marry my brother, anyway… but now that’s not to be, either.”

“They marry their cousins,” Toombs muttered to one of the other mercs, just loudly enough for them to overhear. The envoy shot him a quelling look.

“Distant cousins,” Takama said, also giving him a look that suggested his behavior could get their whole merry troupe thrown out on their asses. “But yes.”

“Better a member of one’s own tribe than most abrrani,” Lalla said. “Meaning no offense, Cedric.”

“You did say most,” Cedric replied, winking at her.

“What the hell is ‘abrrani?’” Toombs bristled.

Logan, Jack noticed, was studying Kyra with a slight frown on her face. This needed to all end fast.

“I… do not…” She pretended that the word she was seeking was on the tip of her tongue, but unreachable, before looking up into Ewan’s handsome face and making her expression pleading and a little hurt. “I don’t understand,” she said in perfectly accented Tamazight.

Ewan caught on instantly. “Dihya and Tislilel don’t speak English,” he rebuked the group. “If you wish to continue talking about them in a language they don’t know, I will take them home now.”

Safiyya nodded. “I think that’s for the best, Zdan. The rest of us will join you shortly.”

It seemed as if the envoy wanted to object, but the atmosphere had chilled. Toombs had given just enough offense to sabotage whatever it was she’d intended to say or do. Ewan steered Jack and Kyra away from the group and out of the church.

“Well played,” he murmured once they were a block away. “I don’t understand what was happening in there, but you put a wonderful stop to it.”

“I don’t understand what was going on, either,” Kyra muttered. “That woman’s hand… what the fuck…”

“Her hand?” Ewan asked, frowning in confusion.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “When her hand touched mine, it felt wrong. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Made my skin crawl,” Kyra huffed.

Jack was trying to think of anything that had ever felt like that. Something about it had momentarily brought back an instant from one of her terrible dreams about the creatures in the darkness, but she wasn’t sure why. Something about three-shapes and five-shapes…

It hit her so suddenly that she stopped walking.

Ewan, still walking between her and Kyra with his arms through theirs, turned to look at her. “What is it?”

“I think she’s connected to another universe,” Jack gasped.

“What?” Kyra shook her head. “No. No way. You and I are and you’ve never felt like that to me.”

“Not Elsewhere. She… she isn’t connected to Elsewhere, I know that much. But… only part of her was here in U1. The rest of her… it’s in another ’verse and there’s something about it that’s—”

“Absolutely fucking horrifying. Yeah, you’re right. That’s what I was feeling, too. Damn. You think she’s partway into the ’verse where the thing that wants us dead comes from?”

Ewan was looking between them with concern. “I think we should take this conversation somewhere more private than this avenue,” he said. “I followed most of what you just said, though. If you’re right, this could be a serious problem.”

He led them down two more streets and through a gate in a high wall. Inside, surrounding a courtyard garden that looked, to Jack, like it had sprung out of one of the fantasy novels she’d loved as a kid—I’m still a kid, damn it, it’s only been a year—was a large multi-story house, its walls, pillars, and carved screens painted various brilliant shades of aqua, blue, and indigo. As Ewan led them past a large room where some of Takama’s marketplace colleagues were setting up the reception Cedric had mentioned, he finally spoke again.

“I don’t know everything that happened leading up to my brother’s death, but my aunt told me that you two, like the passengers and crew of the Scarlet Matador, were stranded between universes, and that you learned how to maneuver between them and helped him teach the others how to do the same. That you call this world ‘U1’ and the other universe ‘Elsewhere,’ and even brought back a pet from that other world. Is all of this correct? It sounds like something that belongs in one of the novels I read in college.”

“It’s true, yeah,” Jack said. His summary reminded her, with a powerful ache, of how Tomlin had answered one of her questions. She found herself wondering if it was a product of their military training, or of the college educations that all military officers, according to her father, were required to have on top of that training.

“You spoke of something that wants to kill you?” His expression was almost a mirror of the one his older brother had worn when he’d learned that she and Kyra had nearly drowned.

“Wants us to die,” Kyra corrected him. “We both… we encountered it, and some other entities, the morning after we helped get the Matador survivors out of New Marrakesh.”

Jack noticed that she was careful to omit all mentions of the deadly battle.

“We thought we were dreaming at first,” Kyra continued, “until we realized we’d both had exactly the same dream. Most of the entities seemed… scary as hell but almost friendly, but then one showed up that hated us and wanted us dead.”

“What did it do?” To Ewan’s credit, he seemed willing to believe them, but Jack had to wonder if he still would be if he knew where they’d escaped from.

“Just talked. Scary stuff. I don’t remember what it said exactly.”

“I do,” Jack sighed. She’d gone over its terrible words in her head several times, trying to figure out what they meant and whether any of it might be connected to the secret Tomlin had thought he’d uncovered. The very fact that she could remember it so clearly drove home to her just how much more connected to reality it was than any other dream she’d ever had. “‘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. We come. We come to take it all back. All the worlds your filth has stolen from us will burn.’”

“That,” Ewan breathed, “is a declaration of war.”

“Yeah,” Kyra said, “but by what? One thing we’re damn sure of is it ain’t human.”

Ewan nodded, his face now pensive. “Why do you think they found you then?” he asked after a moment.

“It was after we went back and forth between universes a lot, and brought people and things across in both directions. J—Tislilel…”

For the briefest instant, Ewan’s eyes narrowed, marking the tiny slip.

“…She moved two hundred-seater shuttles over into Elsewhere and then back. Maybe doing something that big sent out some kind of shockwaves? It practically knocked her out for the rest of the night once it caught up with her.”

“And then you were stuck helping all the Matador survivors cross back into U1 in the marketplace, all by yourself,” Jack pointed out. “That probably sent out some shockwaves, too. They reached out to both of us at the same time.”

“Why in your sleep?” Ewan wondered.

“They wanted to show us things,” Kyra said, her words coming slowly. “Things I don’t think our eyes could even see if we were using them.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Higher dimensions,” Jack blurted, only realizing it was true when she spoke. “They tried to ‘teach’ us how to see them. But once they got past the three-dimensional object it got scary fast. They… apologized for scaring me, after.”

“You actually kept looking?” Kyra asked. “I ran… or something like running given that I was floating out in space in the dream.”

“And all of this happened after you saw my brother for the last time, so he didn’t even know… but he already knew something terrible was happening. He sent me a message telling me that… I don’t even know. 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… he said all of it in my mother’s invented language, so that only I would be able to hear the message, so I know he feared he was being surveilled. He asked me to arrange to come home on leave as soon as I could, so that he could explain it all to me. I was arranging my leave when word came of his death.” Ewan sat down, his expression a devastating mixture of grief and horror. “I don’t know where to… begin…”

Jack did. This was pure Audrey. She sat down next to him and put her arms around him. He gasped and then leaned against her, releasing a heavy sob, the first of many. After a moment, Kyra joined them, putting an arm around him as well.

It would be a long, long time, Jack thought sadly, tears leaking out of her eyes as well, until he began to heal from this. And while he might respect the community’s decision to conceal what they knew of the real reason his brother had died… she doubted he would ever be able to let it go.

Because she couldn’t have. And his brother wouldn’t have. In that moment, she understood him as well as she understood herself. Warning him to stay away from the mystery would do no good; she would warn his aunt and mother instead.

He had almost composed himself again when the rest of his family returned to their house half an hour later.

Sunset was approaching as the family—quite large, Jack soon realized—gathered for the meal that the community had prepared them. As with virtually everywhere in New Marrakesh, Jack noticed a complete absence of alcohol; instead, Maghrebi mint tea was poured from long-spouted teapots into ornate glasses.

Jack and Kyra found themselves on either side of Ewan at the table. He was regaining his equilibrium, slowly. The talk around them moved through a variety of topics, including stories of wild scrapes that “Brahim”—within the family, only his father seemed to have called him Gavin—had gotten into as a child. They reminded Jack of the stories her father had told her about her fictitious namesake.

“Are you three feeling better?” Takama asked during a lull.

“Yes, thank you,” Jack said. “How did things go after we left? With that envoy?”

“Pfft! That one. What a terrible excuse for a person. She tried to keep the conversation going, asking us where you were from and how long you had been in town. I told her it was tribe business and of no concern to outsiders unless one of her men was planning on offering himself at the Moussem. Not that anyone would ever take up such offers.”

“Sorry, what’s a Moussem?” Kyra asked.

“Safiyya, perhaps you should tell this story?” Takama’s expression had gone from scornful to mischievous in less than a second.

Safiyya’s eyes went wide.

“A Moussem is an annual meeting of the tribes,” Ewan told them, rescuing his mother. “The engagement or wedding Moussem is the one time, each year, that couples from different tribes can arrange inter-tribal marriages. There’s a long story behind it, which is much better sung than spoken, but the legend is that long ago, in the Atlas Mountains on Earth, two tribes of Imazighen were at war. The son of one of the tribes, ‘Isli,’ one day met a beautiful young woman, named ‘Tislit.’ The two fell in love, only to realize that Tislit was a daughter of the tribe that his was at war with. They begged their families to let them marry, but their parents refused. Unable to bear being apart, their tears flowed from them in rivers that filled two valleys, creating two new lakes where their tribes’ lands bordered each other. They drowned themselves in the lakes of their tears.”

“If this story sounds a little familiar,” Cedric put in, “I’m fairly sure old Will Shakespeare stole it from the Imazighen. Just like half of Hamlet is straight out of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.”

Ewan snorted. “Undoubtedly. But the two tribes were devastated when they realized what their enmity had done to their own children, and decided that every year, once a year, all of the tribes would gather, and marriages across tribes would be permitted. Men and women seeking partners come, wearing their best. And, in accordance with custom, the women are the ones who initiate the courtship, approaching the men that they fancy most. They talk, and negotiate, and if they are happy with each other, then they introduce each other to their families and then have their engagement recorded. Depending on their negotiations, the marriage may even occur at the festival, too. Which brings us to the story of my parents.”

“Wait,” Kyra said. “Really? The women get to initiate it all?”

“Before the invaders came and tried to change us, almost all of the tribes were matriarchal,” Takama affirmed. “Many are not anymore, thanks to the influence of abrrani—foreigners—but you can still see it, and feel it, in so many of our traditions.”

“Which brings us,” Ewan repeated, looking amused, “to the story of my parents.”

“I was new on Tangiers Prime, just learning my way around, after they’d courted the hell out of me to come teach at their flight school because I’d been breaking records all over the place,” Cedric explained. “The money was too good for me to pass up, but somehow nobody ever asked me if I could speak Arabic, or anything other than English, Gaelic, or Scots. Didn’t occur to me either for some damn fool reason, until I was standing in front of a classroom full of pilots who couldn’t understand a word I was saying to them. My brogue was a lot thicker back then, too.”

“Soon after,” Safiyya laughed, “I got a call at my University office from this panicked Scotsman who needed a translator, or needed to learn Arabic as quickly as he could, and had no idea how to begin. Bear in mind that he was already fluent in three languages.”

“Neither one of us was thinking of falling in love,” Cedric continued. “But there it was. We would find the most ridiculous excuses to check in on each other and spend time together. But what could we do? I was abrrani and my colleagues kept warning me I was playing with fire.”

“None of which meant a thing to my sister,” Takama said. “She had a plan.”

Kyra snickered. “She sounds like you,” she whispered to Jack behind Ewan’s back.

“I got an invitation to witness a genuine Amazigh cultural event,” Cedric chuckled. “The Engagement Moussem. Foreigners are allowed to observe but are instructed to stay on the sidelines and not get involved. And there she was, right in the middle of all the hopeful brides, and all I could think was how crushing it was going to be to watch her choose some other lad to be her life partner. I was going to leave, but my friends wouldn’t let me.”

“I had bribed them to make sure they would keep him there,” Takama added.

“So after all of the singing and dances and things, when the ladies started approaching different men and I was wishing for a swimming pool full of whiskey,” Cedric went on, “I felt this hand on my arm and heard the most beautiful voice in the world asking me if I would walk with her.”

“Our parents were scandalized,” Takama laughed.

“Especially when they realized you’d been in on it the whole time,” Safiyya teased her.

“And that’s how the love of my life proposed to me,” Cedric finished, grinning.

It was, Jack thought, the most romantic thing she had ever heard.

Full night had descended before the gathering broke up. Ewan insisted on walking Jack and Kyra back to their building. Jack had the suspicion he was worried that the mercs might still be interested in them and might try to follow them; he had tried to talk them into taking a guest room in his parents’ house, but had graciously accepted their refusal—“Sebby will be getting worried about us”—as long as they let him see them safely home.

Safiyya and Cedric raised their kids right, she thought to herself, wishing the boys on Deckard’s World had been more like Gavin Brahim and Ewan Zdan.

When he gave each of them a hug at the door of their building, not asking to come in, she had a sudden thought. “I need you to ask Takama something for me,” she murmured to him, not letting him go yet just in case anyone was watching. A lingering hug might play into the weird assumptions Toombs had made at the church… and that would be better than anyone realizing what they were talking about.

“Of course,” Ewan said. “What is it?”

“I need her to reach out to the Matador survivors and find out if any of them had contact with the Quintessa envoy. If she ever touched any of them, or if any of them ever touched her.”

Ewan’s expression was only quizzical for a second before understanding struck. “You need to find out if she knows you were on board, too. She became awfully interested in who you are and where you’re from after she touched you.”

“Yeah. We need to know how much she suspects.”

“I’ll make sure the message goes out and an answer comes back. I promise.” He gave her another hug before letting go. “Good night, Tislilel, Dihya. I will see you again very soon, I hope.”

I hope so too, Jack thought as he walked off into the night. It was hard not to worry. Too many people she cared about had vanished from her life.

Inside, a very clingy crustacean made it clear that they had been gone for far too many hours. Jack had discovered that, in addition to the bugs he ate, he had a great love for olives—enough to sneak up on her plate and steal one if she had any—and had brought some home for him from the gathering. After half a dozen, he was appeased, if still determined to sit on one of them at all times.

While Kyra vanished into the bathroom with Sebby—the little guy loved showers and would screech if he was excluded from one—Jack sat down on the couch and opened her tablet to check on the status of the money drop she’d arranged. The confirmation was waiting for her; the one-time code that she’d programmed into the locker she had rented for the next month had been used. She and Kyra could get the money cards inside whenever they wished.

Low tide had ended in Elsewhere, she noted as she checked her tidal chart. The waters were still another hour or two away from reaching the Rif. They had been on Tangiers Prime for ten and a half of its wildly long days, and Megaluna was almost a new moon. In another night, high tide would peak at midnight again.

Maybe she and Kyra could finally do their beachcombing in the dawn hours, she thought as she shut down the tablet. She was suddenly so tired. Closing her eyes, she decided to rest for a moment on the couch before it was her turn to shower while Sebby danced in the water at her feet.

She could feel them as her mind slipped away from consciousness.

Little larva, are you well?

She was about to answer them when something cold touched her throat.

“Wake up, little girl,” a strange voice said. Her eyes sprang open.

She recognized him from the church immediately: the merc who had been next to Toombs when he made the wisecrack about marrying cousins. He had a knife resting against her throat.

“You an’ me are gonna have a little talk,” he told her. “I just need to know one thing from you. Where’s your friend?”

Oh shit, Kyra… Her eyes, of their own accord, moved toward the hallway door into the bedroom and bath. The shower noises had stopped at some point, but she wasn’t sure when.

“Not her, you imbecile,” the man snarled. “I’m after the big game here. You’re gonna tell me where he is.”

Riddick. Oh fuck. He was after Riddick.