The Changeling Game, Chapter 39

39.
Unquantified, Unseen, Unmasked

The good thing about telling Kyra the story of the eclipse, Jack thought to herself, was that she was increasingly sure whatever head trauma she might have wasn’t affecting her memory. The bad thing about it was realizing how often she was lying to her sister about just what had really happened.

Most of her lies, she was aware, were about Riddick. About his thoughts and motivations. About the depth of their emotional connection. In truth, Jack still wasn’t sure what he had thought of his little copycat, whether she’d amused or annoyed him. But in the story she told Kyra—who needed Riddick to be the hero and needed to go on believing that he had metaphorically vanquished Red Roger for her—their friendship had bloomed early and was never in doubt.

There were small things he’d done in their interactions that had pointed to genuine kindness. When they had been sitting in the back of the sand cat, for instance, and she’d been doing her best Riddick impression for him, he had given her the tiniest hint of a smile… and then pointed. When she followed the direction of his finger, she’d spotted the approaching skeletal remains of a massive creature. Shazza, in her haste, was about to drive through it without alerting anyone. Riddick’s silent warning allowed her to duck in time.

For Kyra’s sake, she played up that kindness and removed any ambiguity about his actions and their motives. For the story she told to soothe her sister, he was unfailingly kind to, and protective of, her.

Elsewhere’s lightning was strobing their room and its thunder growled and roared almost nonstop as they lay in bed and Jack continued the story. If they’d been on that side of the threshold, they would have been completely soaked. Both of them were enjoying the show, though; no window had ever provided as spectacular a view of a storm as their window between ’verses.

“We pulled the sand cat up to the crash ship—that’s what we were all calling it, nobody wanted to waste their time calling it the Hunter-Gratzner or anything—and most everybody jumped off to grab supplies and power cells and things, to load into the back. Shazza stayed in the driver’s seat and kept it idling so that we could move the second everything was loaded up. But it was getting darker and darker. The rings were starting to come between us and the suns. I thought, maybe, if I got all the dirt off of the solar collector’s dome, there might still be enough light, so I started wiping at it like crazy with one of my shirts…”

“Why didn’t they have backup power for it?” Kyra asked. “Even just a battery?”

“They really should’ve. Hell, they should’ve had a port where we could have plugged in one of the power cells, or something.” Jack was still peeved about the sand cat, and the suggestion she’d tried to make, later on, that had been completely ignored. She still thought it would have worked. “But they didn’t know there’d ever be a sunset on their planet, not until it was too late, so probably somebody was just too cheap to add that.”

Her father had often railed against customers who were too cheap to pay for protective features they were obstinately convinced they’d never need, especially when they blamed him, later on, for their absence. Deciding to drive without insurance was what he’d called it. The psychiatric hospital on Helion Prime, as it had turned out, had been among those customers. At least, she thought, she and Kyra had personally benefited from that bout of short-sightedness. On a planet of almost eternal sunlight, that same kind of skinflint incaution had cost almost everyone their lives.

“I got that dome so clean, but once the rings were over both of the suns, the collector just stopped turning. The sand cat was dead. The temperature dropped real fast too, by about ten degrees. I could still kind of see the suns behind the rings… a big red blob and a smaller yellow blob… but it had gotten so dark. And then the noises started.”

“Noises?” Kyra snickered. “C’mon, you can be more specific than that.”

“Animal noises,” Jack said, hearing them again in her head. “Growls, cries… sounds I’d heard faintly the whole time we’d been at the crash ship, but I’d thought it was just the wind until after Fry almost got taken. But now they were really loud. And then…”

It had been, she told Kyra, picking through her words carefully as she tried to capture the terrifying beauty of the moment with them, almost like someone had shaken up a snow-globe full of pitch black, batlike shapes, that had begun floating into the darkening sky from the chimney-like structures as if smoke itself had developed sentience. They shrieked as they flowed upward, whirling and spinning in the twilight…

“People… just a suggestion… perhaps you should flee!” Paris’s voice echoed in her head.

She had found herself running alongside the others, racing for the upturned cargo container where Paris was shouting for them to hurry. It was only when she reached the container and looked back that she realized Shazza and Riddick had fallen behind.

“Riddick brought up the rear,” she told Kyra. “He stayed behind Shazza the whole time. I think he could have outrun her if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t. Fry yelled at them to get down, because the creatures were almost on them. They ran up the side of the gouge that the crash ship had plowed in the ground and dove down inside it. I swear, the creatures were chasing them too… flew right over them and away, but then…”

Then, as she had watched helplessly from much too far away, the screeching murmuration had begun to circle back.

She’d watched them both lying on the ground, Riddick on his side, Shazza on her belly. And even from that distance, she had seen the moment when Shazza’s nerves had frayed and snapped.

“Shazza, stay there!” She’d yelled, pulling free of Paris’s restraining grasp. “Stay down, Shazza, just stay down!”

“Come here!” the would-be tomb raider had shouted, pulling her back into the cargo container. She struggled against him, against what was inevitably about to happen.

Shazza couldn’t see what was behind her, running flat-out for the cargo container. But Riddick, on his side, could see everything. He hadn’t even tried to rise. Instead, he rolled onto his back and flattened himself against the dirt. The flock swooped past just inches above his chest.

Several of them struck Shazza, knocking her to her knees. Instead of flinging herself to the ground, instead of rolling to get them off of her, she tried to rise, to keep going.

“Shazza!” Jack had heard herself screaming, trying to throw herself forward to the rescue, “just stay down!”

Paris hauled her back again, his arm around her no longer at all gentle. She fought his hold until the moment when she heard Shazza’s unearthly scream of agony and saw her torso pulling free of her legs in an explosion of blood. She was still screaming, now in several pieces in the living whirlwind’s grasp, as it spun past the container and off into the darkness.

Suddenly Paris’s arm had been the only thing holding Jack up.

And now she found herself lying to Kyra again. Riddick had risen from the ground, calmly, looking completely unbothered, dusting himself off as he sauntered over to the container, stepping around the splashes of Shazza’s blood in the dirt with casual indifference. Jack, who had just lost the closest thing she’d had to a mother since she’d left Deckard’s World, had felt a moment of intense resentment for that nonchalance. For that moment, she’d found herself almost hating him.

She couldn’t tell Kyra that. This wasn’t supposed to be that kind of story for Kyra. Riddick was the tale’s hero. So she muted the grief and pain and…

“There wasn’t anything he could have done to save her, but I know he wanted to…”

She was projecting her own feelings onto him, her own motivations. His had been completely inscrutable. She had no real idea what had lain behind that calm deadpan, not then, maybe not ever. But in the story she told Kyra, it was a mirror of what she had been feeling and wishing.

“Paris was telling us we needed to get deeper inside so he could close the outer doors. Everybody climbed in, but I could hear Fry and Riddick, still outside. These strange new hoots and howls had started up and she asked him, ‘what is it, Riddick? What is it now?’ And he told her, ‘like I said, it ain’t me you gotta worry about.’ And then the last of the light was gone.”

Before she could get further with the story, Takama knocked on the door. Ewan and Tafrara were with her. While they began tending Kyra, Takama led Jack down to the garage level and helped her into a swanky-looking car so they could go get her head imaged.

Dusk had descended over New Marrakesh. In Elsewhere the storm had moved off, upward into the New Atlas foothills, and the tide was moving in. They didn’t drive toward the waters, though, instead driving further uphill and into one of the ritzier suburbs of the city, arriving at what appeared to be a satellite branch of the hospital.

Takama handled the check-in paperwork, using false names for both Jack and herself and weaving a tale, for the intake staff’s benefit, of visiting relatives and a children’s competitive tree-climbing excursion that had gone awry. Moments later, Jack was lying on a table, her head inside what she could only think of as a massive white donut. It didn’t take long. But soon after, a frowning technician appeared, examining the images, and asked if they could do an electroencephalogram.

That took nearly an hour.

Finally, after that was over, a doctor entered the room.

“Is there something wrong with Tafsut?” Takama asked in Arabic, using the false name she’d picked for Jack.

“No, not at all,” the woman answered, surprising both of them. Officially, Jack couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but she was following along just fine. “There are no signs of concussion, no brain bleeds, nothing. She’s perfectly healthy. It’s just…”

Takama shot Jack a confused and worried look just as Jack was shooting one at her.

“Has your niece ever been Quantified?” The way she said it, Jack could hear the capitalization in the word.

Alarm appeared in Takama’s eyes for the briefest instance. Then her expression became disapproving. “No, of course not. We do not believe in such things.”

“You might want to consider having her tested,” the doctor said, holding out a tablet with colorful data and imaging on its screen. “The readings we were getting are unusually high—”

“Baraka!” Takama almost shouted, one hand slapping at the tablet while the other made a gesture that Jack had learned was for warding off evil. “Do not speak of such things! Do you wish to make her a pariah? Ruin her chances to marry and have a family? We will not stay to hear such nonsense!”

If Jack hadn’t spent the last two and a half weeks getting to know Takama quite well, she might have been fooled by the sudden act, but she wasn’t. She could see that the doctor was, though. She could see the change in her demeanor and could, she thought, almost hear her thinking, superstitious old bat…

Takama led Jack back out of the clinic, hovering over her the whole time while deliberately grumbling about terrible treatment and how the doctor was trying to hex her niece, fussing even when she paid the bill. Only after they had driven away from the clinic did she drop the act.

“What was that about?” Jack asked, her emotions caught in a tug of war between confusion, amusement, and a little bit of fear.

“Brahim said that you are good at infiltrating secure systems, yes? You will want to do so the moment we get home, and destroy all of the scans they made of you and the EEG readings they took.” Takama only looked worried now, as she glanced over at Jack. “Have you ever been Quantified?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Jack told her, “so I’m guessing not.”

“It’s testing for extrasensory abilities. When readings go above a certain level, and I think your scans indicated that they would… testers are required to notify the Federacy. You need to destroy those records as soon as we get home. At least,” Takama added, flashing a tight smile at her, “we know you took no lasting harm from your misadventures this afternoon. And I really should not be surprised that a girl who can move a starship between universes, using her will alone, would test highly. I am sorry, Tislilel. I was so worried about brain injury that it never occurred to me I might be exposing you to—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said, feeling a little stunned. “I’ll grab some baseline readings and sub them in, no problem, soon as I have my tablet.”

“I hope it is as easy as you make it sound,” Takama worried beside her.

“Is it that bad?” Jack suddenly found herself worrying that there might have been a kernel of truth in Takama’s act; if it really would make her a pariah with the Imazighen.

“Good heavens, no. Dihya—the warrior queen your sister is named after—was a seer of great power. Such gifts are only as good or as evil as the one making use of them. No, the problem is the Federacy. It ‘recruits’ anyone who tests highly enough. Whether or not they wish to be recruited.”

Jack, who had spent her childhood hearing only good things about the Federacy, was left a little dumbfounded by that claim.

Takama hustled her into the house the moment they returned, almost dragging her upstairs. Her anxiety was infectious, and Jack found herself running alongside her “aunt,” the need to delete the files filling her purpose.

“Get hacking,” Takama commanded the moment they reached the room. “I will have dinner sent up for both of you.”

It took Jack only a few minutes to find her way into the clinic’s files, using her most insidious Ghost Code. Looking over her patient file, she was relieved to see that almost none of the data would point directly to her. She made a few changes to obscure herself further, adjusting the height—when had she reached 1.73 meters?—weight, and eye color that were stored on file. She saved copies of the original scans and readings on her tablet—she wanted to take a closer look at them, herself, later—before going hunting in the system for another head’s data to replace hers with.

Tafrara and Ewan arrived with trays for her and Kyra right as she was finishing up and erasing the security footage, inside the clinic and out in the parking area, that she and Takama had appeared in. They didn’t stay more than a minute.

Weird. Usually there were at least a few moments of joking banter before they left. Jack walked over to the doors that led out onto a balcony overlooking the courtyard, pulling the curtain back just a little.

Brother and sister were hurrying across the courtyard toward the dining room.

Huh.

“I’ll be back,” she told Kyra, and slipped out of the room.

The moment she was level with the courtyard, and the ground of Elsewhere, she isomorphed over, keeping a strong visual and auditory connection with U1. She crossed the still-wet sand of Elsewhere’s version of the courtyard in a hurry, entering the space that was, back in U1, the dining room.

The whole family was assembled. There was no food on the table.

“I suppose it should not have come as a surprise,” Takama was saying in English, probably for the benefit and inclusion of an elderly, elegantly-dressed Black man sitting at the table with them. He, alone, had a cup of tea before him. “Brahim said most of the survivors struggled a great deal to master their instructions. I asked Amastan if any of them had spoken of dreaming of those… beings… both girls speak of, and he says no.”

“Did he answer you about the other matter?” Ewan asked.

“Yes. He says none of them met the envoy, although some of them remember seeing her on their hospital floor. She was aloof and never spoke to, much less touched, any of them.”

“Good. That’s something, at least.” Ewan still looked uneasy, and deeply unhappy.

“So…” Cedric said, after the momentary silence started to become uncomfortable, “all of the survivors of the Matador owe their lives to the fact that the two stowaways on board, who escaped Quintessa’s control, happened to be un-Quantified espers.”

“Are we sure it’s both of them?” Safiyya asked.

“You did not see Dihya bringing them across from the other world—”

“Elsewhere,” Ewan interjected.

“—from Elsewhere and into the market square,” Takama continued. “She has power, too, although probably not quite as much as Tislilel.”

“You got a look at the readings before you started up with the doctor, right?” Cedric asked. “What were the PKP indices?”

“Maximum. As high as the sensors could record.” Takama sighed, steepling her fingers and pressing them to her lips for a moment. “She is a cerebral girl, at her core. A teacher’s dream… Dihya, I think, relies more on her physicality. She has a good mind too, very intelligent, but—”

“Not on the same order of magnitude,” Cedric agreed. “She’s older, but follows Tizzy’s lead becau—”

“Tizzy?” Tafrara blurted.

“Why not? It suits her more than you think. Anyway, she follows Tizzy’s lead because she’s such a quick thinker. Makes it a little hard, though, to tell one of her plans from one of her impulses.”

“Exactly,” Safiyya sighed. “We have all been remiss. We need to bear in mind that even a child prodigy—”

“Is still a child,” Ewan finished her statement for her. “I… am… aware.”

His eyes looked haunted. Tafrara put her arm around his shoulder.

“It is hard for all of us to remember that about her,” she said, her voice soft and almost coaxing.

“I nearly let her kill herself,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

“Do you think that is what she was doing?” Takama suddenly asked.

An arm slipped around Jack’s waist. She flinched and then realized who it had to be. Kyra, wearing the bathrobe Jack had left on the chair, was standing beside her, fully in Elsewhere.

“What’ve I been missing?” her sister whispered. Jack couldn’t find her voice to answer.

“We have seen her records from New Athens General,” Takama was saying. “Severe blood loss and drowning. She very nearly succeeded that time. Could she still be suicidal?”

Ewan’s complexion had turned almost ashen.

“If she is,” Safiyya mused, “I don’t think she knows it. But there is something called ‘suicide by proxy,’ that some people engage in when they won’t deliberately try to die or consciously admit to wanting to. They put themselves into dangerous situations, ones that could result in their deaths—”

“I can’t—” Ewan almost knocked his chair over as he got up from the table. He crossed the room swiftly, approaching the doorway where Jack and Kyra were standing, unseen and intangible.

“Do not go to her!” Cedric commanded, bringing his son to a halt.

Although a world away, Ewan was only inches from Jack, his breathing ragged. The agony on his face twisted at her heart. He closed his eyes and took a few long, deep breaths. Everyone at the table was watching him with concern.

Jack wanted to hug him. She only realized she was leaning toward him when Kyra pulled her back.

Finally Ewan spoke, his expression and voice growing calmer. “She wouldn’t have done that to me. She wouldn’t have left me stranded in another universe.” He turned to face the table. “Maybe she’d put herself in harm’s way. I don’t know. But she’d never do something that put someone else in danger.”

“Not on purpose,” Jack whispered. Ali and Paris still haunted her.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Kyra whispered back, giving her waist a gentle squeeze.

“If she had known, or even suspected, that she was in that much danger… if she had been trying to die… she would have sent me back to this universe first,” Ewan continued.

“You can’t know that,” Safiyya said.

“I do know that. And you do, too.” He turned and stalked back to the table, sitting back down in the chair he’d vacated. His body was still tense. “I think… she just doesn’t know her limits until she crashes into them.”

“This is a reasonable hypothesis,” the Black man mused, his rumbling, accented voice even deeper than Riddick’s. “Many with her kind of ability only develop it at the onset of puberty, which the remaining fragments of her medical records indicate is relatively recent.”

Ewan winced, closing his eyes. Tafrara put her hand on the back of his neck and murmured something soft in Tamazight. He shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together as he looked over at her.

“Your ‘Tizzy,’” the man continued, “may have no idea what she can or cannot do with these gifts until she tries.”

“Who the fuck is he?” Kyra whispered.

Jack shrugged, shaking her head. She had seen him in line, well behind the envoy, at the end of the memorial, but Ewan had already whisked them away from the church before he came anywhere near the family.

“I guess we should be especially grateful that you decided to visit us tonight, General Toal,” Cedric said. “You’ve worked with espers in the past, haven’t you? Trained Operatives.”

Even as the general nodded, Safiyya spoke up. “Is there any new word about your son or his platoon?”

General Toal shook his head, his expression briefly sad. “Nothing. It has been almost ten years… soon they will be declared dead. I… have made my peace with it.” He sighed and then seemed to put it aside. “But I am afraid that my visit this evening is not as auspicious as you have hoped. I came to warn you.”

Uneasy looks passed around the table.

“In the last day, the Quintessa envoy has been approaching many of Gavin Brahim’s former comrades-in-arms, the ones who will be visiting your home tomorrow evening. Many of them have asked me for advice,” the General explained. “She has hinted to all of them that she would like to attend as their ‘plus-one’ if they would be so inclined.”

“If that vile tkahbacht even tries to enter this house—” Tafrara exploded.

“What?” Ewan asked. “What can we do if she tries, Elspeth?”

Jack had wondered if, like her brothers, Tafrara had a Scottish name as well as a Tamazight name. Now she had an answer.

“Our brother’s murderer will never be welcome here!” his sister shouted, slamming her fists on the table. “I will see her dead first!”

“Tafrara.” Somehow, Cedric’s almost-gentle tone stopped her tirade cold. “It’s easily prevented. We’ll just clarify that this isn’t a gathering where plus-ones can be accommodated.”

The General’s mouth twitched and he nodded. “That does indeed solve that part of the problem. But she has not been alone in her visits. Her entourage, these days, includes a mercenary who is eager to tell everybody he meets about the pair of dangerous teenage girls he is tracking—”

Ewan muttered something in Tamazight that made every woman at the table gasp and glare at him. He even got a reproving look from his father. There was no shame on his face now, though; only fury.

“—and he has been circulating pictures of them,” General Toal continued. “Already many of the officers who spoke to me have commented how similar they look to your visiting nieces. Now, we all know the truth about these two young ladies. And certainly, we all know that, even if they were the monsters he portrays them as, they never would have had time to commit the heinous crimes he’s claiming they engaged in between their escape from the psychiatric hospital and when the Scarlet Matador left Helion Prime. But…”

“An accusation does not have to be true to do great damage,” Takama sighed.

Jack felt Kyra begin to tremble beside her.

“Indeed.” The General looked around the table at everyone. “I was hoping to help you make this work. I truly was. But at this time, there is no way we dare introduce Miss Wittier-Collins to the officers who will be visiting tomorrow evening. Whether or not he suspects who your ‘nieces’ really are, this ‘Alexander Toombs’ has poisoned the well.”

“Oh fuck, Jack…” Next to her, Kyra’s eyes were welling with tears.

It just figured that Elsewhere’s tide would show up right then, too.