The Changeling Game, Chapter 34

34.
An Inward-Facing Fortress

“How’d you do it?” Cedric asked Kyra, studying the smashed window.

Kyra looked over at him. The shots Ewan had given her had finally taken effect, and she no longer seemed to be in any pain but seemed extremely drowsy. Ewan, done treating her internal injuries, was closing up the gory slash in her skin. “Climbed out the west window in the bedroom. There’s a ledge outside. Went as fast I could ’til I got to the fire escape… out that window… ’n gave it a good, hard donkey kick…”

She started to lift her legs as if she was going to try to demonstrate, but hissed sharply as pain returned with the movement.

“Stay still, Dihya,” Ewan admonished, resting one gloved hand on her midriff. The other held the forceps he was using to suture her.

“Fuck, sorry,” Kyra muttered, grimacing.

“It was locked?” Cedric frowned when Kyra nodded. “So how did the mercenary get in?”

“He had one of these,” Jack said, taking the Master Key out of her pocket and holding it out to him.

Cedric took it and looked it over. “Even possessing one of these on Tangiers Prime is a felony. I suggest you let it join him.”

Damn. She’d kind of wanted to keep it. Taking it back, she sighed, shifted it to Elsewhere, and let it fall. She caught Cedric watching her with a suppressed look of wonder on his face.

I guess it does look just like magic, she thought, and not an accident of quantum physics.

While Ewan had continued to work on treating and closing Kyra’s wound, Takama had joined Safiyya and Lalla in efficiently packing up their possessions in the apartment, using their clothing, bedding, and the pillows and blankets they’d decorated with to cushion anything even slightly fragile. Cedric, meanwhile, had been diligently wiping down surfaces to remove all possible fingerprints. They were all wearing gloves from Ewan’s kit, but had told Jack that she was to stay still and watch over Sebby and Kyra, not help. They were almost finished when two men appeared in the apartment’s open doorway.

Sebby crawled onto the top of the couch back and hissed at them.

“It is all right, Sebby,” Takama said to him. “These are my cousins. Ait uxam, Sebby. Family.”

Jack remembered seeing them at the memorial and at the meal afterward. One of them had told everyone a story about Tomlin learning to drive that had almost made mint tea come out of her nose. They were wheeling in a gurney, one designed to roll up and down flights of stairs.

“Perfect… timing,” Ewan said as he tied off a stitch. “Three more and I’ll be done.”

“This should be everything,” Takama said a few minutes later, emerging from the kitchen area with the small quantity of food they’d had—including more olives for Sebby—in a bag.

Now, there was a completely non-horrible idea…

“Takama? Give an olive to Sebby, please.”

The moment Takama offered him the olive, Jack could see the change in Sebby’s posture. She was now one of his best friends. Jack had Cedric, Safiyya, and Lalla offer him olives as well, which he happily devoured while Ewan finished his work. The two cousins—Izil and Usadden—offered him one each too, marveling at him in Tamazight. Each received a thank you, of a sort, from Sebby, who stroked his antennae along their ungloved hands and wrists.

Petting them or learning their scents? Jack wondered. “Now he’ll think of you as ait uxam, for sure.”

While Izil and Usadden carefully lifted Kyra onto the gurney, Ewan pulled off his bloody gloves and washed his hands before accepting an olive from Jack to feed Sebby.

“I’ve heard of offering olive branches before,” he murmured softly as the contented crustacean stroked his hand, “but this is new.”

“Pretty much everything is with him,” Jack admitted. “We didn’t know until tonight that he has a stinger.”

“I wondered why you were so alarmed when he got upset. How strong is his venom?”

“Strong enough to paralyze a hundred-kilo man in a matter of seconds,” Jack told him, feeling a little nervous. What if they refused to let Sebby into their home?

“Is that what killed the mercenary?”

“No,” Jack said, and found that she couldn’t meet Ewan’s eyes, couldn’t even look at his face. “He was still breathing when—” She took a deep breath. “When I…”

Ewan’s hand touched her cheek and he tilted her head up, making her meet his gentle gaze. His eyes were exactly the same shade of green as his brother’s. “When you did what you had to do, to save your life and Dihya’s.” His voice became kindly chiding. “I do understand war. The only thing that outrages me is that you and your sister have been forced onto the front lines of battle so young. That is the real crime here.”

You don’t know how young, Jack thought miserably. Kyra had been twelve when the New Christy Massacre took place, and thirteen when she had finally captured and killed Red Roger, the same age Jack was now… and she had three notches on her belt now, too. Did she really have any innocence left to lose?

Ewan pulled her into a gentle hug. For a long moment they stayed still, Jack resting her head on his chest, breathing in the scent of him—so very nice after the reek of the filthy merc—and listening to his heartbeat, letting it calm her. No one had held her like this since before her father left for Furya. Possibly, no one had ever held her like this.

“You two coming?” Cedric called to them.

Jack didn’t want to let go. She wanted to just stay just like this, rest like this, for a while longer. Reluctantly, she pulled back and looked up at Ewan, meeting understanding and concern in his gaze. His fingertips gently brushed her forehead. “You’re bruised. Did he hit you?”

She’d forgotten all about that for a moment, forgotten why her head hurt. “I hit him in the face with my head.”

That startled a soft laugh out of him. “You are quite ferocious. When we get back to the house, please let me look at it. Now that Dihya is stable, I want to make sure you are, too.”

He kept his arm around her, the way his brother had, as they followed the others down the stairs. She could see Sebby below them, perched protectively on Kyra’s chest as Izil and Usadden maneuvered the gurney around a landing. The others were all carrying bags, including Ewan’s repacked field kit.

“My tablet—”

“Right here,” Ewan chuckled, offering it to her. Then he took a familiar, cheap “burner” comm out of his pocket and held it up. “Whose comm is this? It was on the table beside your tablet, but I thought Takama already packed yours and Dihya’s.”

“The merc’s. I need to get it to another part of town before I isomorph it into Elsewhere. So nobody comes here looking for him.”

“That’s a good thought. May I handle that for you? I know someone who can make sure it goes on a long, wild journey before it disappears forever. No trips to other universes needed.” Ewan smiled down at her. “Although I would really love to visit Elsewhere sometime, if I may.”

“Yes, thank you.” Jack looked around; as yet, no water was rising into the building. “What time is it?”

Ewan glanced at his chrono. “A little after eighteen p.m. Why?”

“Tide’s moving in. When we get to the ground level, though, I need to check something in Elsewhere. Do you have a flashlight?”

“Of course.” He took it out of his pocket and offered it to her.

“I… don’t want you to come with me on this trip over to Elsewhere.” Jack told him, feeling suddenly awkward.

“Ah… yes. I understand.” He didn’t specify what he understood, maybe recognizing that she didn’t want to talk about her need to make sure she’d successfully committed another murder, and to conceal her gruesome handiwork from him. “As I said earlier, though, you bear no shame for any of what happened tonight.”

I do, though. I do…

The waters of Elsewhere were lapping at the lower end of the street, a few blocks away, when they finally emerged from the building. Izil and Usadden had covered Kyra with a white sheet and were wheeling her toward, of all things, a Medical Examiner’s truck. Jack’s heart lurched for a second.

“It’s all right, Tislilel,” Ewan murmured, sensing her distress. “This was the plan. Anyone on the outside will only know that someone must have died in the building and been taken out. They will seem to drop her off at a funeral home, where another of our cousins is waiting to bring her back to the house in a laundry service truck. Takama is going to ride with her the whole way. She’ll be fine.” He kissed the top of her head, removing his arm from around her. “Go take care of your problem while we load the bags in Lalla’s van.”

As Jack walked back toward the apartment building’s outer wall, she found herself wishing that Ewan’s arm was still around her.

If Riddick had left her with a family like this, she thought as she isomorphed over into Elsewhere and continued forward on the sand, she never would have even considered cutting her wrists.

It was a moonless night in Elsewhere; all three moons, no longer near each other in the sky, were somewhere on the other side of the world. Ewan’s flashlight illuminated dried sand, desiccated seaweed, smooth rocks, and small tidepools, terrain she remembered from the previous week. That had been a dark night, too; everyone had been using their comms to light their way.

Frank Vedder, aka Justin Cowell, aka Blaine Mason was sprawled on the rocky ground, his body thoroughly broken by his twenty-meter fall. His head had smashed against a large rock, painting it scarlet. Small crustaceans, like but unlike Sebby, had found the body and begun to feast.

He died fast, a voice from her past rumbled softly in her head, and if we have any choice about it, that’s the way we should all go out…

She would no more cry for this… sicko… than she would have for Johns—and in spite of what Riddick had seemed to believe at the time, the tears she’d almost shed had not been for the merc who had wanted to serve her up as a Judas goat—but part of her still wanted to curl up and cry at the thought of what she had become on this journey and the innocent girl who had been lost along the way. She wanted to cry because, as with Johns, she was glad the man was dead, and part of her hated herself for that.

The Master Key, which she had been tempted to retrieve, had smashed to pieces against another rock. Like I needed to add another felony to the long list…

Taking the surveillance photo of herself and Kyra back out of her pocket—she wasn’t sure why she’d initially kept it, but it needed to cease to exist—she dropped it onto the sand and turned back, retracing her steps until they vanished and she was back outside of the building, before isomorphing back into U1.

“Baraka,” Ewan said as she reappeared. “I was told, and I believed, but it’s still an amazing thing to see.”

“I’m still learning how to do it the best way,” Jack admitted, offering him his flashlight back. “Slow or fast transitions, I mean. It’s kind of frustrating. Nobody’s exactly written a manual about how Threshold Syndrome works even though they really ought to have by now.”

“Assuming that the Quintessa Corporation was willing to allow that knowledge to circulate, that is,” Ewan said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “Let’s get you back to the house. I asked my sister to prepare a room for you and Dihya while we collected you.”

The Medical Examiner’s truck had already departed, Jack noticed. Cedric was loading the last of the bags into the back of what she assumed was Lalla’s van, gesturing them over to him. “Let’s get you home, Tislilel. We have some security tricks in store for anyone who tries to invade our house.”

Soon she was sitting between Cedric and Ewan as Lalla drove them back to the extraordinary mansion she’d only left a few hours before. They made one detour along the way, so that Ewan could hand off the merc’s comm to a man who looked like a pirate riding a motorcycle. A while later, they turned onto the tree-lined avenue they’d walked on, earlier that very day, on their way to and from the church. A massive, high-walled edifice with a familiar gate set in it appeared on the left. There were, she realized, no windows on the outer walls, no sign that it was a house at all. When she and Kyra had originally passed it in the processional, she’d assumed it was a warehouse.

“This is true,” Cedric said when she asked him about it. “The house’s windows look inward only, although we often go up on the roof if we wish to watch what’s happening outside with our own eyes.”

“Roof access? That could be—” Jack stopped herself. This family knew how to take care of itself better than she did. Didn’t it?

“Dangerous? Perhaps,” Cedric said, grinning. “Burglars have tried to come in from the roof, but it’s more difficult than it seems. Only one has ever made it inside.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing good,” Safiyya said. “You and Dihya will be safe, we promise.”

It’s not me I’m worried about, Jack realized. Riddick was a big enough payday to make any merc willing to go to war against a family, even a wealthy and apparently powerful one. As long as people believed he was the one who had sprung her and Kyra from the hospital, anyone they associated with would be fair game in a merc’s eyes.

Could she really bring that kind of havoc down on this family?

Ewan, she realized, was studying her face intently. She hoped she wasn’t showing far too much of what she was feeling… in any direction.

“Sorry,” she made herself say, giving him an apologetic smile. “I think I’m just a little paranoid right now.”

“Understandably,” he said, putting his arm around her again.

Another, larger gate opened beside the van, leading down into a huge, private garage below ground level. Elsewhere’s waters completely filled it. Jack let Ewan help her out of the van and escort her into the house for a second time.

It had never occurred to her until now that the comfortable shabbiness of the Rif might be a front. She still wasn’t sure what the truth was. But her favorite food cart vendor had turned out to be a sociology professor on sabbatical, whose real job seemed to be gathering intel for the Imazighen—intel that had brought Tomlin to her and Kyra’s doorstep—and teaching foreigners to respect their ways. And, at Takama’s word, an entire community had stepped up to smuggle almost two hundred refugees out into the mountains in a single night.

Maybe she should trust that they were stronger than they had seemed, more powerful than they had seemed…

…but still vulnerable. Tomlin had died because she’d given him just enough help, just enough knowledge, to start a fight with the Quintessa Corporation, but not enough to win it.

She wasn’t sure anyone could win a fight against them. Without their Isomorph Drives, regardless of what secrets they were keeping about them, there would be no Star Jumping, no faster-than-light space travel. And without that—

“the end of the Federacy as we knew it…” That was what Tomlin had told his younger brother. Was the truth he’d discovered powerful enough to actually do that? To bring real-time contact between the star systems to an end?

If it was, no wonder the Corporation was willing to kill hundreds and destroy an economy to keep it secret, and to keep their position one where no other power, not even the Federacy itself, could threaten them with reprisals for any atrocious act they chose to commit. And if they ever suspected the secrets, and the people, that the Tomlin-Meziane family was harboring…

…This large and beautiful fortress would be erased from the board altogether.

Could anything defend this family against the monstrous forces, human and possibly otherwise, hunting for her and Kyra? Especially if those different forces ever realized they were all seeking the same two—in the words of one now-dead merc—little girls?

She would have to talk to Kyra about it.

Ewan had been steering her through the house the whole time she had been lost in thought—and there was a whole lot of house!—and up three flights of stairs. The lights in the tastefully decorated corridor he led her down were dim and most of the doors were closed. It reminded Jack a little of a fancy hotel from an old Earth vid. The doors were only on one side of the corridor; was the other side one of the exterior walls?

One door was open, soft light spilling into the hallway, and Jack could hear voices coming from it. Takama’s voice was among them.

“Rest now, Dihya,” she was saying as Ewan led Jack in. “Your sister will be here soon—ah! Here she is now.”

A large, ornately carved bedframe dominated the room. The bed itself looked soft and luxurious. Kyra was settled on its right side, propped up by large pillows in a position Jack remembered from one of her grandmother’s hospital stays. Sebby, who had been resting on a pillow next to her, scuttled across the bed and leapt down, racing to Jack and climbing up onto her shoulder, antennae frisking her face.

“What an extraordinary creature,” she heard either Izil or Usadden say as she stroked his carapace with her fingers. “So devoted. Aside from olives, what does it eat?”

“Cockroaches, mostly… any that were dumb enough to come into our place,” Jack told him. “And bugs that flew in after the west windows got broken. He can’t fly, but he sure tried to, to catch them.”

She wondered when, exactly, Sebby had learned to crawl across the ceiling to launch his attack on the merc. Maybe he’d figured it out so that he could ambush the large moths that had begun coming in at night. She and Kyra had begun finding colorful wing fragments on the foot of their bed and the floor at the end of each night cycle.

“Well, he isn’t going to find those here, I’m afraid,” the cousin—Izil, she realized—continued. “I will stop by a pet supply shop and bring back some possibilities for him.”

“Thank you.” Jack took Kyra’s hand. “Are you okay?”

Kyra’s smile was a little loopy. “Usadden gave me the good stuff,” she said, a slight slur to her words. “Gonna sleep now… now I know you’re okay…”

“She won’t be in any pain,” Usadden murmured. “Not for many hours.”

“Are you a doctor?” Jack found herself asking him. The Meziane family seemed to be huge, and highly accomplished.

He nodded. “I really am a medical examiner. Generally, none of my ‘patients’ require medication, but I have kept my license to practice on the living up to date, so I can also be called upon for search-and-rescue and triage in crises like the one we all suffered last week. And for situations such as this.”

Jack suddenly wondered just how often this family found itself embroiled in intrigue.

“If either of you need anything,” Takama gestured at a small device on the low table next to Kyra’s head. “Someone is always awake in our house and will answer. Once Zdan has made sure you do not have a concussion, Tislilel, try to sleep as well. Good night, girls.”

She shepherded Izil and Usadden out of the room, the three talking softly in Tamazight as they went.

“Now,” Ewan said, reaching into his field bag again, “let’s make sure of you.”

He led her over to a chair and made her sit down, kneeling in front of her.

“You’re a pilot and a medic?”

His grin was rueful. “Pilot in training. I worked for the UMA while I was at University. I think Usadden hoped I’d become a doctor, too, but… flying won. Especially now.” He swallowed, the grief showing in his eyes again.

His brother was his hero, Jack thought as he shone his penlight into her eyes.

“Pupils are responsive, that’s a good start…” For the next several minutes, he took her through a series of tests, some physical and some mental, before nodding in satisfaction. “You’re going to have an impressive bruise on your forehead for a while, and probably a headache, which I’ll give you some meds for, but there are no signs of a concussion.” His smile emerged; as with his older brother, it transformed him from handsome to dazzling. “Which is very good because I imagine you’re quite tired by now. I don’t have to make you stay awake.”

Jack was about to object that she was perfectly awake when a yawn broke through, surprising her. “I think that’s a good thing,” she admitted, laughing.

His brotherly good night kiss left her cheek tingling.

He’s nine years older than I am, she scolded herself as she showered, Sebby splashing at her feet. What I want is never going to happen.

Why did she have to develop feelings for such unattainable men? First Riddick, then Tomlin, and now Ewan…

Feeling a little refreshed from the shower but still sleepy, she climbed into huge bed, moving her pillow to the middle so she’d be close to Kyra, and drifted off.

They were waiting for her, agitated, demanding to know what was wrong with “the other larva” and what had happened to both of them.

If I show you in three-shapes, will you understand? she asked.

We will understand.

Jack conjured up her memories, recreating the apartment in her mind. Her asleep on the couch, Kyra—the other larva, she told them—sleeping in the next room, and the hideous, foul-smelling mercenary sneaking in through their door, climbing on top of her and threatening her with a knife. She recreated the battle that had followed, showing them Kyra coming to her rescue and being wounded, and then Sebby rescuing them both. At first she wasn’t sure if they were seeing any of it, until they began to ask questions about what she had showed them.

So many questions…

“Jack? Jack, wake up…”

She opened her eyes, blinking at the unfamiliar surroundings in the darkness. Kyra was shaking her arm, looking pained and anxious.

“Kyra? Are you okay? I thought the meds—”

“They won’t let me sleep, Jack.” Her sister had the same look of panic in her eyes that she’d had the morning before they broke out of the hospital, when Red Roger had come back to her in her dreams. “They keep asking all these questions… I can’t get them to let me sleep…”

Jack sat up, concerned. “You want me to tell them to knock it off?”

Kyra nodded, her lip trembling.

She closed her eyes, focusing on them. Somehow, she was starting to be able to feel them even when she was awake. The other larva is wounded! she scolded them. You must stop asking her questions! I’ll tell you when she is well enough for you to talk to her again. Until then, you can talk to me. Just to me.

She wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt some kind of reluctant assent.

“I think I got through to them,” she told Kyra.

“Thanks… but… I don’t want to go back to sleep yet. Can you talk to me? Help me stay awake for a while?”

“Absolutely. What do you want to talk about?”

“I… I don’t…” Kyra’s eyes were filling.

She needed an anchor, Jack realized, something to pull her away from her own thoughts and the darkness waiting for both of them. The way she’d needed one that final day at the hospital, when she was drawing Red Roger on the wall—

Of course.

Jack had promised to tell her the true story about Riddick. Originally, it should have happened that very night, but the escape had preempted it and they hadn’t circled back to it since. Now, she decided, it was time. She would give Kyra something to imagine that was almost completely disconnected from the current moment.

“Once there was a girl,” she began, “who was unhappy at home and decided she was going to run away. Her mother was getting remarried to a real asshole, and she wanted to go live with her father. But he was hundreds of light years away on a military base, and nobody was going to just let her go to him. So one day, she cut off her hair, put on her cousin Rob’s outgrown clothes, changed her name to Jack B. Badd, and set off after him…”

She could feel them listening, too.