The Changeling Game, Chapter 37

37.
Folding a Dali Cross

By the time Jack and Ewan left to go to the morgue, everybody had weighed in on the heist. Very few major changes had been made to Jack’s plan, but there had been many good suggestions and improvements.

Including the idea that she should go back to dressing as a boy—but an Amazigh boy—for the day.

The entire family, as it turned out, had known who Kyra really was, and known as much about Jack as anyone on Helion Prime did, for as long as Tomlin himself had; Takama’s intelligence-gathering had been the original source of that information. They had simply chosen to wait for the girls to tell them, or not, themselves. Before his death, Tomlin had also told them that, despite assumptions to the contrary, it had been Jack who had masterminded the hospital escape rather than Riddick. They had been better-known quantities to the Tomlin-Meziane family, the whole time, than they had ever realized.

Either way, she thought, the family’s willingness to include her and Kyra in all of the discussions and decisions that affected them, rather than cutting them out and arbitrarily making decisions on their behalf, still astounded her. Maybe it was even more amazing, given what they had known all along. If only any adults had treated her this way before now…

That, she reflected, made it harder than ever to plan to move on. Going back to being Audrey MacNamera would mean going back to being talked about, rather than to, by all the adults in a room.

The dinner table conversation had been all about the heist. She and Ewan had both gone to bed early, taking mild sedatives to help them fall asleep so that they’d be fully rested when they woke up just two hours after noon. Kyra, although clearly wishing she could go too, had given the plan her stamp of approval.

Even they seemed to approve.

“I can’t talk to you long,” she had told them when she found herself suspended among the stars again. “I have to rest so I can do something difficult in a few hours.”

That had only excited their curiosity. She had struggled to explain, until one of them seemed to come to a strange understanding.

It is hiding the shells of its lost broodmates from them, so they can’t find the rest, it told the others. She felt comprehension, and endorsement, spread around her.

Now, suddenly, everybody seemed to understand except her. “Who are they?”

The Demons of the Darkness. The makers of the cages.

That sounded like something the being that hated her and Kyra might have said.

The — does not understand, they told her. She wasn’t exactly sure what they called it. Not as much a name as a descriptor. Moribund? Something close to that. Your shell looks like their shells, and it thinks that makes you one of them. But your five-shape is different. You and your broodmates only just hatched into your five-shapes. Only you and one other larva are so developed. The others are barely growing, aside from the three from the smallest shells of all. But none of you will ever be like them.

“I… are you talking about our bodies? Our physical shapes? When you say shells?”

Your shell is not your shape. Your shape perceives your shell, but your shell cannot perceive your shape. With each hatching you will perceive more, understand more. You are strong and growing so quickly. But we are patient, and you must be too. You will hatch into your six-shape in your due time. Do not try to make it happen too soon.

And then… you will be ready to help us…

They let her sleep then, and her dreams were full of strange attempts to understand what they had been telling her, to riddle out its meaning. Still, she woke feeling alert, ready to execute her plan.

Do I always start my crazy adventures at 2 in the “morning?” she found herself wondering, as she dressed herself like a teenaged Amazigh boy. This “morning” was bright, of course, the sun only beginning to come down from its hot zenith. She knew from the 44-hour library that people were awake at this hour, but not all that many. She and Ewan would arrive at the morgue while activity was still at its lowest ebb, and while the tide was still dropping away.

Sebby, who now had his cricket tub in their bedroom, climbed all over her for a moment, running his antennae over her strange new clothes, before returning to the bed to snuggle up to Kyra.

Ewan’s room, she had learned, was just two doors down the hall from hers and Kyra’s. He was emerging from it at almost the same moment that she emerged from theirs.

They went over the plan as they ate a simple breakfast, and then checked over their packs and the gear that Cedric had insisted they take with them in case anything went wrong. He had given them a comm with extremely powerful frequencies after dinner—“This thing can transmit through solid rock”—and had instructed Jack to take it halfway between ’verses. Then they had tested its signal, confirming that the part that was still in U1 could still connect to the comms system and reach him. Jack had taken it into the courtyard, isomorphed over to Elsewhere, and used it to call him in possibly the first comm conversation across universes. Before she and Ewan isomorphed into Elsewhere, they were to leave it behind in an agreed-upon, protected location in U1; if they ran into trouble and needed help getting back, they could return to that space in Elsewhere and use it to call Cedric. Kyra, when asked, had said that she felt strong enough to pull them back if she was taken to that location.

That was something Jack hadn’t even thought of when she had begun planning the heist. It made her very glad they were on her side and watching her back. She’d had to add one embellishment to that part of the plan, though, storing the comm in a plastic bag that “lived” in both universes and would shield it from harm in either direction. The outside of the bag, when she checked it over after breakfast, was wet on the Elsewhere side from the pre-noon high tide, but no water had gotten in.

Jack and Ewan went onto the roof, which turned out to have a beautiful rooftop garden, shortly before 3 pm to look over the city. Sunlight glittered on the waters of Elsewhere, which still overlaid most of New Marrakesh’s downtown streets. She described what she was seeing to Ewan, wishing she could show it to him. Technically, she could have, but she was afraid to transition him halfway between worlds, lest she somehow infect him with Threshold Syndrome and make him a target, too.

Describing it would just have to do for the moment.

They spent the next almost-hour walking down toward those streets, which were still nearly completely deserted. The sun was still high in the sky and Jack was suddenly very glad that Ewan had shown her how to wind a proper Amazigh tagelmust around her head; it kept the glare away from her eyes in addition to partly obscuring her face.

“You make a surprisingly convincing boy,” Ewan told her as they walked.

“Really? How come?” Her hair under the tagelmust was still short, of course, just starting to grow longer than was considered a “boy cut” back on Deckard’s World. But other than that, and using bandages to flatten her small breasts against her chest when she had changed, she wasn’t sure what he found so convincing besides dressing in his years-old castoffs.

“I think it’s the way you walk. You don’t normally walk like this. It’s…”

“Oh! Yeah, I watched the way Riddick walked.” She hadn’t been consciously aware that she had slipped into her Riddick imitation, but she realized in that moment that she’d also dropped her speaking voice by a full octave.

The only one she hadn’t been able to fool with the imitation, she thought ruefully, had been Riddick himself.

“You really ran with him, didn’t you? Not as his hostage.” There was no judgment in Ewan’s voice, just curiosity.

“I was never his hostage. He was… nothing like you’d expect.”

“What was he like?”

That was, Jack thought, a good question. She remembered him luring Fry closer and closer to him, his voice a teasing purr, before lunging up out of his seat, held back just inches from her by his chains, to see if she would flinch. Testing her mettle, Jack thought, testing whether she’d be brave enough to face down the real threats on that treacherous, desolate world. She remembered him telling Shazza how they could use the skiff, which the New Australian woman had noted wasn’t a Star Jumper, to flag down the next transport that came through that node in the shipping lanes.

Stick out a thumb. Bound to get picked up… Somehow, she’d skipped telling Kyra that part of the story. She’d have to fill that in for her.

“Pretty self-contained, I guess,” she told Ewan. “I was trying to learn how to walk and talk like a guy well enough to fool everybody, so I followed him around for a while, figuring out how to act like him. He spent that whole time exploring the mining settlement, looking at everything the people’d left behind when they disappeared. He knew they’d all been killed, and told us so, way before we found any bodies.”

“So he was honest with you. Volunteered information.”

“Yeah. Johns—the merc who’d captured him—was lying to all of us the whole time about a lot of things, but Riddick never lied to us. Not once.” She found herself chuckling suddenly. “The only thing I know for a fact he hid from anybody is that I was a girl and he knew it the whole time.”

But, she realized, he’d tried to forewarn her. After Johns had tried to play his little master-and-dog game with Riddick—“You’re missing the party! C’mon, boy!”—and walked away, Riddick had repeated the same words to her… minus the “boy.”

“I can see that. I looked up his record.” Ewan smiled at her expression of surprise. “He appears to have a… code, I guess, for lack of a better word. Maybe even an ethic. There’s a pattern in who he does and doesn’t kill. And aside from some insinuations your former hospital has attempted to make about his treatment of you—”

“All of which are horse shit,” Jack found herself snapping.

That seemed to amuse Ewan. He grinned and shook his head. “Aside from them, all the evidence points to the conclusion that you were probably quite safe around him. Given what I’ve read in the declassified portions of the Hunter-Gratzner crash story, you may have even been far safer with him than away from him.”

“He’s the reason I’m still alive,” Jack told him. “He saved my life several times. Even times when he could’ve just let me die and nobody would’ve blamed him, and things probably would’ve been easier for him if he had.”

“Then he truly was a friend,” Ewan agreed, before changing the subject. “How’s the water level on the other side?”

“Dropping, but the lower level of the hospital will still be flooded. We’ve got time to get into position.”

In the meantime, they took the comm to its designated location, a private garden grotto that Cedric had booked for the family’s exclusive use for the next two days. Jack tethered its bag to a bench in the garden, making sure that the tether was tightly knotted and straddled universes as well. If they needed to take the comm to another location and still keep it protected from Elsewhere’s waters, they could do so. There were no cameras in the space, hinting at one of the ways the grotto was probably used. No one and nothing would see what happened next.

“It’s time,” Jack told Ewan, turning to him.

He took a deep breath, just a tiny hint of nervousness in his eyes. “I’m ready.”

There was sand beneath their feet on the other side; it would be a smooth transition. Jack stepped closer and put her arms around Ewan, stretching her senses to encompass his shape—

—his shell?—

—and drawing both of them, gently, carefully, into Elsewhere, letting one world fade away and the other take its place. She felt his heart speed up against her ear.

“Baraka…”

Now, for the first time, Ewan would be able to see the things she had described to him, the world on the other side of a threshold few could cross. He would see the rolling surf, still retreating from the sloping plain of sand and rock that corresponded with New Marrakesh’s downtown. Off to the northwest, the sun glittered on the hull of the Scarlet Matador, marking the location of the devastated spaceport. Nearer…

She took her binoculars out of her pack and focused on the area where the hospital building, in U1, was visible to her as a faint outline. Something had begun emerging from the water. This was going to be creepy as fuck.

“C’mon,” she said to Ewan, hoping he wouldn’t be too horrified when he saw it, too.

They had almost reached the morgue when he gasped beside her, an appalled look on his face.

The bodies floated in the air, at different levels above the glistening sand, all eighteen of them. Five appeared to be hovering vertically, toes just inches above the beach, while the rest were perfectly horizontal. Back in U1, she knew, they were resting in cold lockers in multiple rooms, draped by shrouds and tagged with identifying information. On the Elsewhere side, they were undraped, untagged… and nauseatingly putrescent. Bone showed in many places where passing fish had nibbled during high tides. Her cousin Joey would have loved a horror vid with visuals like these… as long as he couldn’t smell them. Jack suddenly wished she’d thought to bring nose plugs. Next to her, Ewan made a retching sound.

“What the hell happened to them?” he asked. “They’re supposed to be refrigerated!”

“They are,” Jack told him. “On the U1 side. Over here, they’ve been exposed to the elements for the last two and a half weeks.” She shifted her vision enough to see what they looked like in U1. The walls of the cold lockers blocked her view of most of them, but five were hanging from hooks in a separate room, shrouded in plastic wrappings. “They look frozen over there. I think someone’s been trying to stop the decay with no idea why it’s progressing so quickly.”

She hadn’t expected it to be this bad, but she really should have. Fortunately, the thought of touching corpses had already been bad enough; she’d brought two pairs of thick rubber gloves, one sized for her hands and one for Ewan’s, with her. Ewan, she knew, was carrying eighteen proper white funeral shrouds in his pack.

Regardless of his beliefs or hers, he’d told her, the bodies should be treated in a way that would respect their lost owners, whatever their creeds had been. He’d acquired a clandestine copy of the Matador’s passenger manifest and had the religious affiliations of every passenger who had drowned. He knew which prayers to say over them if they were Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish, or even, in two cases, Buddhist or Hindu, and intended to send them on their way properly upon the shores of Elsewhere, once Jack stole all of them from the morgue of U1.

So let’s do it already…

One by one, trying to breathe through her mouth against the terrible stench of decay, Jack reached out and put her gloved hands on each body, telling Ewan the name on its tag before pulling it the rest of the way into Elsewhere. The moment it was released from U1’s hold, it fell to the wet sand, now half-frozen and—mostly—odorless. The flesh cratered in places where parts that had remained whole in U1 sagged over the gruesome cavities that had developed in Elsewhere.

I did wonder what would happen if a shark from Elsewhere tried to make a meal out of me… The answer was far more disturbing than she’d expected.

It took an hour. An hour she knew she would desperately want to forget forever. She would, she thought, probably have nightmares about this day for a long time.

Jack did the hanging bodies last, since their disappearances would be the easiest to notice. The last of them tried to topple onto her, which gave her a few really bad moments while Ewan held her, murmuring soothingly and stroking her shuddering back.

He had followed her as she worked, draping each body in a shroud, arranging them to face eastward if they were Muslim, and speaking prayers in different languages—Arabic, Latin, English, Hebrew, Khmer, or Hindi—over them depending on which name she had given him for each one. As he was finishing with the last ones, Jack walked over to a strange multicolored cube that hovered, untethered, in part of the space that the morgue occupied in U1.

Their personal effects, she realized as she got closer. All stuffed into a compartment on the other side…

Those definitely had to go, too.

A moment later, all of those items had fallen and scattered onto the beach of Elsewhere. Clothes, that had probably been stuffed in now-empty plastic pouches in U1; jewelry; wallets and purses; corroded comms and chronos; all the little things that eighteen people had had with them first in cryo and then in the hospital, before they had been betrayed by the Quintessa Corporation and left to die horrible deaths…

Quintessa can’t have any of it.

Had any other artifacts been left behind? There didn’t appear to be anything else straddling ’verses in or around the hospital… aside from a pair of expensive-looking earrings and a large wad of cash she spotted and recovered from within an orderly’s nearby locker and dropped onto the sand. She pulled out her binoculars from her pack again, training them on the spaces occupied by first Mansour Plaza and then Othman Tower. Nothing appeared to float incongruously in those spaces. She would take her higher-powered telescope to the roof of the Meziane house to verify it when they got back, but she was almost certain she’d gotten everything. The Quintessa Corporation wouldn’t be able to analyze any of the physical objects that had been straddling universes. Not now.

Except, she suddenly realized, her heart sinking, one very large one…

“Fuck. I have to move the Scarlet Matador,” she groaned.

It was nearly a two-hour walk across the drying sand.

“Are you up for this?” Ewan asked as they hiked closer and closer. “Takama and Dihya have both talked about how you were almost completely wiped out from transitioning those two shuttles back and forth. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“I transitioned them really fast,” Jack said, aware that she was whistling in the dark. “I’m going to do this one slowly. Pull it over here a little at a time. It’ll help that it’s already halfway in Elsewhere.”

“It’s huge, though.”

“I can’t leave it connected to U1. Not now. You’re sure the cryo-tubes were returned to it?” Tracking down nearly two hundred cryo-tubes felt like it would be a far more daunting task than moving the ship.

“That’s what the reports said,” he told her. “Once the tubes were vacated, they were returned to the ship to be quarantined with the rest of its contents. The logs said nobody has entered since. I’m sure the Quintessa Corporation is planning on confiscating it next, though.”

“Bringing me back to my point,” Jack told him. “I… this is crazy, and I could be dead wrong about it, but I don’t think they know what’s in U322A. Your brother, when he was talking to the flight crew back when they first called him… he said that this was the first Level Five Incident on that Star Jump. If we cut them off from accessing anything directly connected to Elsewhere, I don’t think they can get to it on their own. Not without actually using an Isomorph Drive to open a new path.”

“That’s a lot of supposition,” Ewan observed.

“Maybe. But at least I’m not gonna make it any easier for them.” She wished she could make it not merely difficult but painful for them, after all the pain they’d inflicted on others.

“Just promise me that you’ll stop if it gets to be too much.”

She promised, but she wasn’t sure he believed her. She wasn’t sure she believed her, either.

She paused, briefly, to check whether her Ghost Codes still worked with the ship. Once her tablet confirmed the connection—and she had to briefly make it straddle ’verses to get the connection strong enough—she sent a few instructions to the ship before they entered the range of its now-deactivated exterior sensors. None of the cameras that could still see into Elsewhere would record anything unusual, and any cameras covering the ship in U1 were irrelevant.

It was just a few hours over eleven Tangiers Prime days since the Scarlet Matador had touched down. On the U1 side, it looked almost pristine… at least, on the side facing away from the shuttle explosion. In Elsewhere, seaweed coated many of its surfaces and barnacles had begun to grow. In its shade, creatures that looked eerily like Cambrian fossils Jack had once seen in a museum rested and trundled through the sand. Some of the metal surfaces were beginning to corrode. In a few years, Jack thought, the Matador would just be a strange reef on the beach of Elsewhere, sinking into the sand more each time the tide came through until it settled against rock… once it was released from the anchors and platforms of U1.

She put her hand on one of the struts and closed her eyes, feeling it, feeling its existence in both universes, feeling its shape—

—its shell, this is only an empty shell, a shape is so much more…—

—and sensing its boundaries.

She began to call it, and everything within it, home.

Slowly, little by little, she broke down the hold that U1 had on the massive spacecraft, aware that Ewan had moved to stand close behind her at some point, chest against her back, and had his arm around her waist. Bit by bit, she pulled it more and more of the way into Elsewhere, letting it begin to fade from the other ’verse altogether.

Except for one part. One part refused to budge, refused to let go of the other ’verse. One part was obstinately staying anchored.

She opened her eyes, focusing on what was happening in U1, aware that she was leaning back against Ewan and he had both arms around her now.

Alarms were sounding in that other world. People in ground crew gear and security uniforms were running toward the landing site, pointing and shouting. She could see a figure in flowing white garments racing with them—

The envoy. And around her, Jack could see, there was darkness. Some terrible darkness that inhabited the same space the envoy did, hidden by her white garments and the fact that human eyes weren’t made to see such hideous abysses in the fabric of reality…

The envoy was staring at one part of the Matador as she ran.

The rest, Jack felt as a small shockwave passed through her, had just finished crossing the threshold into Elsewhere. Back in U1, the anchors dropped to the ground with loud metallic crashes. Only one thing remained suspended in that space: a smallish metal box.

A box that refused to relinquish its grip on U1.

Her breath quickening, Jack focused all of her attention and energy on it, willing it to cross from U1 to Elsewhere—

—Is it already in Elsewhere?—

—and vanish from the other world. It resisted, feeling inert and far too dense, too complex, for something as simple as a cube…

She shifted her focus, pushing at it, willing it to relinquish its connection to U1, no matter where else it was…

Little larva, what are you doing?

The envoy was hurrying toward it, one hand outstretched.

I gotta get it out of there before she gets to it…

No! they cried out in her head. You are not ready!

She could feel it slowly, grudgingly beginning to shift, its ties to U1 almost imperceptibly thinning.

Little larva, you must stop! Stop now!

“Tislilel, what in God’s name…?” Ewan gasped at the same moment, echoing them without knowing. “Stop! Stop now!”

She couldn’t. Not yet. She was almost there. She couldn’t let the envoy reach it… She almost had it…

With a final, aggressive thrust, Jack shoved hard at the box with her mind and felt something snap, lashing back at her and into her. Blinding pain bloomed in her head.

In U1, the box vanished, startling a horrified scream out of the envoy.

Darkness engulfed Jack.