The Changeling Game, Chapter 36

36.
Pathways to Pandemonium

By the time Kyra’s sedative wore off and she woke up, Jack had mostly recovered. She had spent the morning unpacking the suitcases that contained their possessions and putting them away, scattering their shells, coral, and driftwood around the room on free surfaces. She’d even gotten dressed, although part of her had wanted to burrow under the covers and hide from the universe. From all the universes. But going to sleep would have meant having to explain her unhappiness to inquisitive beings—entities? She really needed to come up with a name for them—and she couldn’t bring herself to face that yet, either.

“What’ve I been missing?” Kyra asked almost immediately.

“Sebby attempting to drive crickets into extinction. Breakfast.” The death of my dreams. Jack shrugged. “Not much else.”

“Ewan gave me broth for breakfast. How come even broth tastes so damned good here?” Kyra looked over at the IV drip. “What’s all this?”

“Fancy medicine to make you heal faster.”

“That eager to get rid of us, are they?” The amusement in Kyra’s voice belied her words.

“You remember that reception for Tomlin’s colleagues in the Service? The one Cedric mentioned at the end of the memorial?”

“Yeah?”

“They were planning on introducing you to everybody there and keeping Tomlin’s promise. They’re worried you won’t be well enough now, but I guess they’re trying to stack the deck for you. That stuff in the bags is expensive.”

“If they keep being this amazing, I may never leave— What is it? What’s wrong?” Kyra tried to sit up, grimaced, and lay back against her pillows. “Damn it…”

To keep her from trying again, Jack climbed onto the bed next to her. “I, uh…”

The concern on Kyra’s face was only growing, which just made it worse.

“The transport… to Furya… it’s…” The tears were trying to burst out of her. She struggled to hold them in, to find her voice. “It’s… leaving from… Helion…”

“Oh shit, Jack…” Kyra put her left hand behind Jack’s head and pulled her closer. “C’mere. My shoulder’s not stabbed…”

It took a while before she managed to get her sobs under control.

When she was cried out, feeling hollow and quiet, Kyra didn’t try to ask her what she was going to do. Jack would later realize that her sister understood exactly how lost she was already feeling and didn’t want to make it any worse by putting her on the spot. They lay there for a while, neither one feeling any need to fill the silence. Finally, though, Kyra spoke.

“That was quite some hug Ewan was giving you last night as they were wheeling me out. He hasn’t tried anything, has he?”

“What?” That surprised Jack out of her torpor. “No. It wasn’t like that. He’s nearly a decade older than me, anyway.”

“Good.” The look in Kyra’s eyes was far older than she was. “You just remember that, too. You look at him the way you looked at his older brother. And he was old enough to be your father, but I know that’s not what you were thinking about. I’ll bet you looked at Riddick the same way, didn’t you? You got a thing for older men, but I swear to God if anyone touches you—”

“He’d never.”

“He’d better not. I think he’s amazing, too, but he tries to mess with you and I will cut his dick off and make him eat it.”

“I believe you.” It didn’t surprise her, even a little, that it would be a sore point for Kyra, given what she’d been put through when she was still Jack’s age.

“Good. Don’t get me kicked outta here because I fucked up Cedric and Safiyya’s chance at having grandchildren.”

Now it was hard to keep a straight face. “I will keep it in my pants, I swear.”

An impish sparkle appeared in Kyra’s eyes. “Nuh uh. I told you, I’ll make him eat ‘it.’”

And just like that, Kyra had lifted all of the heaviness off of her. They didn’t laugh long, but the darkness had receded.

“We’ve got some time to kill,” Kyra said. “Wanna tell me more of Riddick’s story?”

Was it Riddick’s story? Well, if that was how Kyra thought of it… “Sure. You remember where we left off?”

“I was drifting in and out. Um… last thing I remember for sure was him showing Fry his eyes and you asking him ‘how do I get eyes like that?’”

“Where the hell can I get eyes like that?” Jack thought, but didn’t correct her sister.

She settled down next to Kyra, instead, and got comfortable.

“Yeah. He turned and looked at me and said, ‘you gotta kill a few people.’ Like he was talking about pulling a prank. And me, I was all bluster, trying to impress him, so I said ‘okay, I can do it!’”

In retrospect, part of her wished she’d been wrong about that.

“Yeah, now I remember, and he said… something about being sent to a slam…”

“‘Where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again,’” Jack said, dropping her voice to the lowest part of its register and making it a little growly. It wasn’t a bad imitation, if she did say so herself. “‘You dig up a doctor, and you pay him twenty menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs.’”

It was fun, she thought, reproducing the way Riddick had said it, and his choices of which words to emphasize. She’d wondered for a moment if he was from Deckard’s World, himself, when he’d mentioned the Kools; one of her classmates had bragged about smoking that very brand, which was hundreds of years old.

“Damn, that sounds like it’d hurt.”

“Yeah.”

Jack had looked up the procedure while she was living with the al-Walids; it was dangerous and incredibly painful, and many of the people who had it done went blind. But in a place like “the Pit,” she supposed, the risk was a necessary one.

“I asked him if it was so he could see who was sneaking up on him in the dark, and he said ‘exactly!’ But that was when Fry ordered me to leave. Nobody wanted me to talk to him. I heard him call me a ‘cute kid,’ though…”

It suddenly struck her that Riddick had never once referred to her as a boy. Had he known, the whole time, what she really was? Had he been abetting her secret with even his choice of words? Up until he’d finally outed her, anyway…

“So he didn’t kill Zeke?” Kyra asked.

“Shazza sure thought he did, but he said it wasn’t him. He told Fry that there was something else we needed to worry about instead. I think Fry wanted to prove he was lying…”

The story spun out as they lay on the bed, side by side. She described Fry going into the hole, discovering that it opened into a cave system, and everyone waiting for her to come back… then the strange cries, sounding like Fry’s voice, that Jack had started to hear coming through the weird mineral formations nearby… and the terrifying discovery that something lived underground and had been on the verge of killing Fry before Jack had managed to get Imam and Johns to listen to the voice on the wind. Afterward, they had released Riddick and struck a deal with him, letting him join their party. But still refusing to allow Jack to talk to him.

“It was okay, though. They took us to this mining encampment they’d found, and there were all these cool buildings to explore.”

As the second-youngest of the survivors, exploration had been the official job she had been given by Fry, Johns, and Shazza. She wasn’t even supposed to look for anything specific; just go looking. As Audrey, she had long ago come to understand what that kind of instruction really meant: The grown-ups are busy. Stay out of the way.

Run along and play, little girl.

Only long practice had allowed her to hide her resentment at that. But, at least, as the second-youngest of the survivors, she hadn’t been entirely alone.

“Ali knew maybe six words of English, which was twice as much as I knew of Arabic, but we went off together to check out the houses. I found this broken pair of welding goggles in one of them, almost like the ones Riddick took from the Hunter-Gratzner when he escaped, and that’s when I got the idea that I could shave my head and imitate the biggest badass I’d ever seen…”

It had seemed so logical at the time. As if somehow a shaved head and goggles would transform her from a scrawny beanpole of a kid into… well, someone who didn’t have to worry about space station scum trying to proposition her or pull her into a dark corridor. Someone who wouldn’t wake up to find a filthy, sadistic merc straddling her with a knife to her throat…

I was so fucking naïve… It felt, at times, like ages had passed since then instead of roughly half a standard year.

It was the second time she’d gone through this part of the story with Kyra, and she found herself drawing in even more detail. Riddick, she told Kyra, had moved like a hunter… or a tracker… through the settlement, periodically pausing to unearth and examine objects that had, until then, been lost in the dust. Knowing what she did now but hadn’t understood then, she could see much more clearly what he had to have been seeing as he studied them.

“Everything was really old, like decades had gone by since anybody had touched them. And it wasn’t the kind of stuff people just left lying around, either. It was the kind of stuff that gets dropped, and nobody bothers to pick up, when there’s a panic on. He found a pair of eyeglasses with a cracked lens at one point, just lying in the middle of a road. The houses were like that, too. All the things you’d put away or take with you, if you were planning to leave, were still sitting out.”

“You don’t really think they left their with clothes on the hooks, photos on the shelves?”

In retrospect, she had seen Riddick’s tension rising, too, and the way an increasing level of caution and—battle readiness?—had begun to characterize the way he walked. He’d walked not like someone who was looking for a fight, but someone who expected one at any second.

Was that the walk she had begun imitating? Huh.

Jack was aware that she still wasn’t telling the story entirely truthfully. She had already recharacterized Paris as a mentor he’d never been, excusing away his retreat to the periphery of her story by drawing on the genuine truth that Shazza had essentially adopted her on the spot after the crash and had needed her more than ever once Zeke died. Now, though, she couldn’t quite tell the story right where Ali was concerned. She hadn’t managed to the first time through, either.

There had been a moment, when they had realized that Riddick was heading for a large building she would later remember with a shudder as the Coring Room, when mischievous glee had lit up both of their faces and they came to the unspoken mutual decision to get there first. Neither of them had quite understood the tension that was humming through Riddick’s frame by then, or why it might be a bad move to head for a building before he had cleared it. Jack understood now—and her story reflected that knowledge—that Riddick was following a trail, and that he knew the pandemonium that had overcome the settlement was leading straight to that building. It was the worst possible time to get ahead of him.

Or maybe part of Jack had realized. She hadn’t even tried to go inside, after all. Instead, she had wanted to climb up on top of the building to check out the odd, lumpy structure hidden beneath a tarp, but Ali had wanted to go into the building itself. He’d spotted a way in. She hadn’t known that at the time, hadn’t understood what he was saying to her in Arabic, although now, when she recalled his words after three months of immersion in his language, every word was horribly clear: this way! There’s a hole in one of the panels that we can fit through! He had shrugged and gone his own way when she’d shaken her head and pointed at the roof. She had never seen him—alive—again.

Even months later, the guilt of that was too gut-twistingly intense to explore. The therapists at the hospital would undoubtedly have told her that it was something she needed to come to terms with, needed to talk her way through. Maybe they were even right, but this wasn’t the time. She was telling Kyra the story, and that still-raw pain wasn’t something that would help distract her sister from hers. So the sense of blithe adventure that she’d briefly felt at the time prevailed. When Riddick pulled the tarp away from the roof, catching her spying on him, and had simply called to her to come with him—“You’re missing the party, come on!”—she had followed him without even a thought for Ali’s whereabouts.

Kyra didn’t need to hear just how much that had torn her up afterward. She didn’t need to know, either, that Riddick had seemed fully aware of where Ali must have gone but hadn’t seemed to particularly care, in spite of already knowing that the Coring Room was the most dangerous place in the settlement. The story Jack was telling was meant to soothe and entertain, not wallow in guilt or expose the first moment she began to doubt her hero.

Kyra made it through Ali’s death this time, all the way to the start of the eclipse, before she began to nod off. Jack kept the story going for a while longer, until her sister began to snore lightly, before she let the tale drop. She’d continue it later, probably restarting with the beginning of the eclipse again.

Climbing off of the bed, she went into the bathroom and washed up, erasing the last evidence of her crying jags. She’d have to figure something out, and soon.

But what was there to figure out, exactly? Her pathway to Furya had closed, barring a half-year wait and possibly a return to a world where she was actively being sought by the authorities. Unless she wanted to give into temptation and surrender her old life altogether, breaking her parents’ hearts in the process, there was only one place left to go.

Back to Deckard’s World. Back to her mother and Alvin the Asshole.

Back to being Audrey MacNamera. That was what she wanted, though, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

The chrono said it was thirteen a.m., the equivalent of mid-afternoon for one of Tangiers’ morning-days. Nine hours until high noon, eight hours until Elsewhere’s high tide, five hours until most people retired to sleep, and just a little over two hours until the waters of Elsewhere began to rise above sea level. She realized she was hungry. She’d have something to eat and then figure out which transports might take her back to Deckard’s World, and if there were any she could take that didn’t require getting back into Cryo. The prospect of ever being frozen again made her shudder.

Sebby raced over to her as soon as she entered the dining room. She spent a long moment cuddling him, walking over and peeking into the high tub he’d been playing in. It was completely empty now, aside from some bits of cricket exoskeleton and several of Sebby’s own droppings.

What, she suddenly wondered, was she going to do about him when she left?

Maybe the Tomlin-Meziane family would want to keep him. Maybe, if Kyra stayed with them and pursued a military career, he’d be happy being her companion.

If she can, Jack thought with a shiver. They still needed to talk about whether their mere presence was putting a bulls-eye on everyone they loved here.

Jack was able to put together a simple but filling lunch using the fruits, breads, cheeses, and khlii set out beneath protective screens on the dining room table. A carafe of orange juice had also been left out. She suspected that someone had been thinking of her, specifically, although the quantity of food available hinted that other members of the family were inclined to stop by for snacks as well.

Sebby, of course, began demanding olives. He was happy to sample the other foods as well, spitting out the bread and dates but enthusiastically devouring goat cheese and khlii in addition to every olive he could snag. Jack was finishing up, and tidying up after both of them, when Ewan appeared in one of the doorways.

“I was hoping I’d find you here,” he said.

His demeanor was different. This was not El Krim’s grieving younger brother or the protective rescuer of the night before. He seemed agitated. He seemed, she realized, most like the Ewan who had burst through her apartment door, alongside his father, with his gun drawn.

“What’s wrong?”

He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and releasing it. “You know how you were concerned about whether the envoy ever touched any of the Matador passengers? She’s about to get her chance. Usadden called me. The morgue still has the bodies of the eighteen people who died during the first high tide… but the Quintessa Corporation just filed paperwork to take custody of all of them.”

Fuck me running, Jack thought, going cold. “When?”

“He’s buying us time. He told them the bodies are scattered throughout the facility and he’ll need a full Tangiers day to get the paperwork in order. They’re still identifying victims from the blast, so he’s not actually lying. He’s told them the earliest they can do a pickup is fifteen am tomorrow.”

“Good,” Jack said. A familiar light sensation had filled her chest and her mind was racing. “Do you know the location of the morgue? Is it at the hospital downtown?”

Downtown was ten meters above sea level, she thought, her mind whirling through calculations.

“Yes.”

“Is it on the ground level? Higher? Lower?” It was happening to her again. She could see the path she needed to walk. The feeling was both exhilarating and terrifying.

“One level below ground level.”

The same level as the parking garage where she and Kyra had come out. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

“Good. The tide in Elsewhere will leave downtown at roughly 4:15 pm. We’re leaving here at 3 pm. If you have any plans for this evening-day, cancel them. Damn it, I wish Kyra could be in on this—”

Fuck. She’d said her sister’s real name out loud. She glanced at Ewan. He didn’t look even a little confused.

I just confirmed something he already knew, she realized, heart lurching. How much did that mean he knew about her?

“I will endeavor to be a suitable proxy,” he told her, and she had the feeling he was hiding a smile.

Fuck it. Whether he thought of her as Tislilel, or Jack B. Badd, or P. Finch, or Jane Doe 7439, or her newest alias, Marianne Tepper, it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter if he knew she was really Audrey MacNamera. He knew how to keep a secret. All that mattered was that he had her back.

“Good, because you and me… we’re about to pull a heist. And you’re gonna get to visit Elsewhere to help me do it.”