The Changeling Game, Chapter 40

40.
Out of the Field of Fire

“So what now?” Jack asked Kyra as they returned to their room and two unappetizing trays of food. Sebby had already helped himself to bits of their meals from both trays, including all the olives, and was grooming his carapace on Jack’s pillow.

Kyra swallowed, looking around the room with hurt, wistful longing. “Now… we get ready to leave in a few more days.” Her voice cracked on the word leave. Jack moved to hug her, but she held up a hand. “I can’t right now, I need to… fuck, if that Toombs bastard were in range, I’d—”

“Yeah. Me too.” Jack sighed and sat down, picking up her tablet to start a search. “So where do we go next?”

“We…” Kyra sighed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I really am. I don’t want to run out on you, but… it can’t be we anymore. You heard that Toal guy. Toombs is looking for two girls, partners in whatever crimes he’s made up…”

She sat down on the foot of their bed and sighed, surreptitiously wiping at the corner of her eye.

“He’ll catch us if we stay together,” Kyra finally said.

“Not if I lay a false trail,” Jack protested. “I was thinking maybe some doctored photos of us, with Riddick, could show up on the merc network—”

“You have a life to get back to,” Kyra told her. “You really think that’s gonna work if you show up back at your mom’s house with the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain in tow? ‘She followed me home, mom, can I keep her?’” The bark of humorless laughter that escaped Kyra was painful.

Of course Kyra knew where she was going, Jack realized. She’d felt, in the last few weeks, like they were sometimes hearing each other’s thoughts, seeing into the insides of each other’s heads… and based on the latest revelations, she hadn’t been wrong.

It had started in the hospital, at least between the two of them. Looking back, she thought she could see so many clues—

“I’m a known quantity,” Kyra said, flopping back on the bed and then wincing with pain. “Fucking stitches… my prints are on record. Finger and retina. All kinds of data. You were able to clear yours out, I know that, but mine are in too many systems for you to get to them, too.”

“Amnesty Interplanetary—”

“It doesn’t matter, Jack. They could get me exonerated or pardoned or whatever and it wouldn’t matter. If I’m with you, I’ll lead Toombs right to you. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. He just wants to use me to get to you, and you to get to Riddick.” Kyra sighed and closed her eyes. “Even if the bounty on me ceases to exist tomorrow, I still won’t be safe for you to be around. You can’t ever stop being Jack B. Badd if I’m along for the ride. And we both know you’re sick of being her.”

Jack found herself desperately wishing that Kyra was wrong, but knowing that she wasn’t.

“And,” Kyra sighed, “if anybody outside of this family and that Toal guy ever puts our trail together, enough to prove to the envoy that we were on board the Scarlet Matador… there’s no place in the Federacy that’ll be safe for us or anybody we care about. So yeah, get those fake images out there. Make ’em think we did run off to the Bayou Nebula or something. Make ’em think we’re living lives of crime as Riddick’s hench-bitches a hundred light years away from here. We need all the camouflage we can get. But it doesn’t change what has to happen.”

Jack swallowed, nodding. She could do that. She could lay down a convincing false trail, for all of their sakes. But—

“Will you be okay?” Kyra asked, snatching up the words that she’d been about to say. “I mean, you weren’t being abused by your mom or her boyfriend, were you?”

“No,” Jack told her, sighing. “It wasn’t anything like that. It’s just… I don’t think Alvin and I ever liked each other. He was dating my mom, but… the fact that she had a kid from a previous marriage was a big turn-off for him. I think it made things a little too real. I tried to just… make myself scarce when he was over. I figured they wouldn’t be together long anyway, and when they started fighting all the time, I figured I was right. They even broke up for about a week.”

“What were they fighting about?” Kyra asked, looking interested. It struck Jack again how incredibly different their childhood homes had to have been. If Kyra’s mother had been on board for the whole New Christy colony project, she’d probably been domestic and pious, not a high-powered corporate lawyer who, in the year before Jack took off, often hadn’t gotten back from dates until early Sunday afternoon.

“Everything. Nothing. The dumbest things were suddenly setting them off at each other. I was relieved when it ended, especially because, for a few days, I thought maybe my dad had a chance to come home…”

And then everything had crashed and burned.

“I still don’t know what happened, but suddenly my father was just… really quiet, and then he told me he’d rejoined the Corps of Engineers and was leaving for Furya. I wanted to go, too, but he said there weren’t any schools there that’d be challenging enough for me, and I should stay with my mom, and I’d understand why soon…”

“And did you?” Kyra’s voice was soft, almost hesitant.

“Two days after he left, I came home from school and Alvin was back. Sitting in the living room, holding my mom’s hand… and they told me they were getting married in three weeks.” The pain of that moment was still sharp and fresh. She pressed her fist against her heart, trying to tamp it down.  “They fucking waited until it was too late for me to go with him…”

“Why the hell did she take Alvin back?” Kyra sounded every bit as confused as Jack felt.

“I don’t… know. I didn’t really care. I just felt—” …feel… “—so fucking betrayed…”

“How long after that did you run?”

“A week before the wedding,” Jack sighed. “He was already throwing his weight around, wanting to be a father figure, wanting to be the fucking man of the house, like we needed one of those… He even said ‘my house, my rules’ to me one time, that fucker… So I figured out a route to Furya, forged my mom’s signature on some forms that’d let me pull the money I’d been saving up for summer camp out of the bank, and got the fuck outta there while they were having their bachelor parties and some twit from up the street was too busy making out with her boyfriend to babysit me.”

“And you’re just gonna go back to that?” Kyra looked dubious.

Jack shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. I can’t get to Furya, and I don’t want my parents to think I just died somewhere… but if he’s still a shit I’ll just… I dunno, threaten to disappear again if they don’t let me go live with my grandparents or one of my aunts and uncles, or something. I can’t let them think I just died, though. I didn’t… I didn’t do any of this to hurt them.”

I never wanted to hurt anybody…

It made her ill to think of what she’d put her mother, and also her father, her cousins, her grandparents, everybody through for more than a year now. It was especially hard to think of how her cats must have looked for her, called for her, those first few nights… and they would still have been bereft even if she’d made it to Furya on schedule.

Ewan’s wrong… I don’t think enough about how my actions affect others…

“No, Jack, Ewan’s right about you,” Kyra said.

She glanced over, surprised. Kyra smirked and tapped her temple. There was, she realized, no point in either one of them hiding or denying anymore that they were in each other’s heads.

“You don’t try to hurt anybody. You just tried to get to your dad fast before anyone could stop you,” Kyra continued. “Not your fault there was an unexpected detour into a shitstorm. Life’s just a series of detours, anyway, right? Most of what we plan out never really happens the way we expect it.”

“Yeah. Probably…” No probably about it, Jack admitted to herself. “Yeah. And that’s why I’m gonna give you a shit-ton of resources to take with you if we’re splitting up. Gonna teach you how to ghost around in case you ever need to replace Kali Montgomery with another alias.”

For the next hour, they made plans. They wouldn’t leave right away, but they would have to go soon, before someone got it into their head to restrict their movements “for their own good.” The conversation came to an abrupt halt when they heard voices in the courtyard.

“Fuck,” Kyra said, rising up and grabbing their plates and carrying them into the bathroom. “I don’t know how to put my IV back in. Take Sebby and jump in the shower, okay? I’m going to tell them I needed to take a shit and you couldn’t help me get up to do it because you were already showering. C’mon, go.”

While Jack climbed into the shower with an excited crustacean, Kyra scraped their cold, uneaten food into the toilet and flushed it down.

Jack waited a few minutes, giving Sebby time to do his little water dance at her feet, before she emerged from the shower and slipped into the robe that Kyra had left for her. In the bedroom, Ewan was reconnecting her sister’s IV drip with an air that was simultaneously amused and martyred. He avoided looking at Jack much once he realized she was only wearing a bathrobe.

“In the morning, we’ll begin your physical therapy,” he was telling Kyra. “Your stitches look really good, though. In another few weeks, if you want, Takama can take you to a clinic to have the scar removed.”

“Scars are trophies,” Kyra said. “I want to keep it.”

Tafrara entered the room with a box… a singing box. Sebby, on Jack’s shoulder, began to make a high-pitched reeeeee of excitement.

“Yes, little one, this is your dinner,” she said, pouring the box’s contents into Sebby’s tub. “Yezan! Get off of me, you little…” She brushed off several crickets that had jumped onto her arms instead of into the tub.

With a delighted shriek, Sebby leapt off Jack’s shoulder, bouncing across the bed and then sailing through the air, straight into the tubful of crickets.

“This is why Izil put the box into the tub, flipped open the lid, and jumped back,” Ewan observed.

“And he still had three crickets jump on him,” Tafrara retorted, smirking. “We’ll see how well you manage next feeding. You can show us how it’s done.”

Throughout their good-natured ribbing, Jack noticed, they never once mentioned their visitor, or the conversation in the dining room. She wondered if it would ever come up.

Some of it’ll have to, she thought sadly. They’re gonna have to tell Kyra that her participation in the reception tomorrow evening is off.

Several times, before Ewan and Tafrara said good night and left the room, she thought Ewan was going to say something to her, but he always stopped himself. Things still weren’t normal between them. They’d almost gotten there, until everything changed again while she and Kyra were supposedly having dinner in their room.

Maybe we’ll find a way back to normal, she thought, picking up her tablet and carrying it over to the bed as the door closed. We still have three more Tangiers days…

And then he would be gone. And, soon after, so would she.

Kyra fell asleep almost immediately, but Jack couldn’t manage to. Maybe it was because she’d taken an unscheduled nap during the middle of the day, but her mind was too active. She spent another hour writing up instructions for how to access the hidden menus on different security platforms before Kyra began to whimper in her sleep.

“No… leave me alone… don’t wanna look…”

“Kyra?”

“Just… fucking… stop already…”

Jack closed her eyes, focusing on the starlit place that the Apeiros inhabited. “Are you talking to the other larva?” she demanded.

Yes.

“Stop. Leave her alone. You’re hurting her,” Jack told them.

For a moment, there was silence. Then…

We did not know.

Back on the bed, Jack could feel Kyra relaxing beside her.

“She’s still not healed. Talk to me. Just me.”

You are also injured, they pointed out.

“Maybe, but you don’t hurt me by talking to me. It hurts her when you do. So I need you to leave her alone.”

Nothing should have to be alone, one of them whispered.

“Okay. Fine. But you wait until she talks to you. If she calls to you, you can answer. But otherwise, let her be.”

There was a long pause. She had the sense that the ether they inhabited was full of communication, just none of it directed at her.

This is acceptable, they finally said. You and the smallest ones are enough.

That was a little creepy, she thought, and decided not to ask “enough for what?” Not yet. She wasn’t sure she was ready to know.

They didn’t seem to mean either her or Kyra harm, she reflected. They had been afraid, when she’d been struggling with the cube from the Scarlet Matador, that she would hurt or even kill herself, and had tried to stop her. For the moment, their motives seemed kind. But, and it would be especially true once she left Tangiers Prime and parted ways with Kyra, soon there would be no one she could discuss them with if she developed doubts about that. She would sound completely psychotic—

—like an escapee from a mental hospital, even—

—if she told anyone she was communicating telepathically with a strange alien race, unless she submitted herself to Quantification and the risks Takama believed came with that.

If she ever came to think they posed a threat, though, she might have to.

Unless it’s just a threat to me…

And… there it was.

She spent another half hour, still not even a little sleepy, researching “suicide by proxy” on the tablet. The historical material was disturbing; the law enforcement literature was a little horrifying. She skimmed over case studies of people whose guilt had overwhelmed them but who were repressed from making active suicide attempts, and who began to do more and more dangerous things, most of them in some way connected to the guilt they felt or a moment that they’d survived but felt they hadn’t deserved to. “Suicide by Cop,” she learned, was one of the most common forms, as people punished themselves and ended their lives by creating threatening-seeming situations in which police believed they had no alternative but to shoot to kill.

But it didn’t seem to cover what she was doing. Or what she had done.

In the al-Walid house, she reflected, she had felt completely alone and cut off from the world. She barely spoke Arabic for the first several weeks, none of the people she encountered there knew or were willing to speak English to her even though she knew that Abu, Lajjun, and even little Ziza were all bilingual—they were, they had told her, immersing her in “her” new language “for her own good” —and she wasn’t even allowed to control how she presented herself to the world. Skirts, dresses, and hair coverings, not as disguises but as her new normal, had been shoved upon her. They only grudgingly continued to call her “Jack” because she had refused to give them, or answer to, any other name; they used it as little as possible, too, often referring to her as “her” when she was standing right there.

Why, she wondered, was it so much easier to let people call her Tislilel—which, when she’d looked it up, she’d found literally meant “bride of the sea”—and to wear jalabiyas and other traditional North African attire, here in New Marrakesh than it had been there?

Because the Tomlin-Meziane family loves me, loves us… And because the name had been a gift from a man she had fallen in love with and was in mourning for.

She’d tried so hard to believe in the love that “Uncle Abu” and “Aunt Lajjun” had claimed to feel for her, tried so hard to reciprocate it… but in comparison to what she’d experienced in New Marrakesh, she could see just how empty and controlling it had all really been. The al-Walids had used “love” as a bludgeon, and had very nearly broken her with it.

In their house, she hadn’t had access to any resources she could use to run away again, and they had never given her an opportunity to find any. Anything she questioned or protested was grounds for a lecture about everything they were sacrificing for her sake, and how hurtful her ingratitude was to them. Through it all, she’d felt “Uncle Abu’s” judgmental censure over her hooligan ways, hidden beneath a wrapping of well-intended avuncular guidance, even as she’d been made to feel guilty over her instinctive, bone-deep rejection of all that prescriptive “nurturing.”

Death, she thought, had been the only way she’d seen out of the terrible, inescapable prison that had been assembled around her. Somehow, she’d even come to believe she deserved it all.

Those musings seemed to resonate with something. She tried to follow the thought, but it vanished as she tried to chase it down.

But the only remaining part of the despair she’d suffered in the al-Walid household was the sense that she had failed others when they’d needed her most, hadn’t done enough to help or protect them… and an absolute terror of finding herself as the sole survivor of yet another disaster.

There was, she noted ruefully, an abundance of links to the subject of “survivor’s guilt” on the tablet.

If she really was an esper, the way everybody suddenly seemed to think, was her persistent survival in part because she’d unconsciously foreseen, and been able to side-step, disasters as they came at her?

“First you’re a boy, then you’re a girl, and now you’re a psychic. Careful what you wish for, Jack…”

Of all the people she’d met on the first leg of her run, only three had survived meeting her, and only one of the people she’d loved had. She realized that she couldn’t stop dreading the possibility that history would repeat itself here.

She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t want to be the only one left standing if death came for the people she loved again.

On Deckard’s World, movies from twentieth century America were enormously popular, and she had watched hundreds of them with her cousins. There had been one where a man—a Scotsman, much like Cedric—had discovered that he was immortal and outlived everybody who mattered to him over and over, losing all the people he loved to war and time, slowly growing more aloof and disconnected from humanity. The film had made it seem so romantic and dashing, but a line from one of the songs that had played in it had indelibly embedded itself in her head: Who wants to live forever when love must die?

The conviction that the Tomlin-Meziane family, and the ait Meziane tribe as a whole, would be far safer with her and Kyra gone was still strong. And Kyra would probably be a lot safer, too, no longer traveling with the walking bullseye that was Jack B. Badd. Every bullet she’d dodged, and there had been so many now, seemed to have struck someone else as a result.

She didn’t want to step into a bullet’s path, though. She wanted out of the field of fire.

“Deckard’s World it is,” she sighed, and burrowed her way into the shipping schedules for that region of space.

Most of the shipping turned out to be indirect. Her planet, which had seemed so huge and consequential when she’d lived on it, was considered something of a remote backwater by the rest of the Federacy. There was regular, direct passenger traffic between there and New Queensland, and most of the freight that reached her home world was offloaded on Vasenji Station before making the final leg of its journey on smaller vessels. She would probably have to pass through one of those two locations on her way back.

She narrowed her search, setting a maximum time frame: she wanted to return to Deckard’s World within two years of the date of her disappearance. When she added Tangiers Prime as a starting location, only fourteen scheduled flights were left with openings in either their passenger or crew manifests. With a feeling of resignation, she added an exclusion for cryo-sleep, expecting all of them to disappear from the list.

One did not.

The Nephrite Undine was a new freighter, which was only just coming out of Sirius Shipping’s orbital shipyard at their headquarters above Tangiers Six. The company was preparing for its run-in flight using a new set of Star Jumps that would allow for direct traffic between the Tangiers system and Deckard’s World—

Could anything be more perfect? It seemed too good to be true.

It was.

The ship had never Star Jumped before. Maiden voyages, she soon discovered, had 90.3% success rates. They generally carried inexpensive and easily replaced cargo and were staffed by tiny skeleton crews that not only had to agree to the risk of a journey they might never return from, but also had to be willing to stay out of cryo and be “on call” every second of the journey in case something went wrong. High risk, high maintenance… hardly anybody wanted that. Those positions paid handsomely but were difficult to fill, especially if, as in this case, it was a months-long solo flight.

And, Jack saw, the job listing for the Nephrite Undine was still up.

Sirius Shipping had been sweetening the pot every way they could think of, she read, in an attempt to get even one qualified person to apply. It would be a five-month journey with twenty-five Jumps, none of them more than two days long and the rest of the time spent traversing normal space. The crew quarters were advertised as lush, with a recreational facility and data center that was described as “on par with any luxury system available to the public.” The maintenance schedule, they insisted, would only take up a few hours of each day, and the emergency procedures had been streamlined but shouldn’t be necessary. The human crew member would have AI support and would only be responsible for situations that non-humans had no legal authority to handle.

And yet the position was unfilled.

She dug deeper, slipping behind Sirius Shipping’s firewalls—she gravitated to their ships and ads, she thought, because she knew that they used her father’s security systems everywhere—and digging into their Human Resources department’s confidential files.

The job had been filled, briefly, a month ago, but had been relisted less than a week earlier… following the discovery of an obituary for the man they had hired and who had died in the spaceport explosion. The one backup candidate they’d had on file was no longer available. With the inaugural flight just eleven Standard days away, the company was becoming desperate and had, just hours earlier, increased the benefits they were offering.

Still, the almost one in ten chance that the ship would fail to reach its destination seemed to have deterred everyone… especially with the lucrative alternatives that had opened up in New Casablanca and New Fes as both cities’ spaceports expanded their staffs to accommodate traffic that would normally have gone through New Marrakesh. The few queries the listing had received in the last eight Standard days were from people seeking even more benefits and securities.

“Marianne Tepper,” she noted as she looked over the listing again, was fully qualified for the position. And under the circumstances, she didn’t really care how much she’d be paid.

Ewan was leaving in three Tangiers Prime days, slightly less than six Standard days. To reach the Tangiers Six orbital shipyards in time, she would need to leave New Marrakesh two morning-days after, travel to New Casablanca, and take a midnight launch from there. She would arrive at the Sirius Shipping HQ a little under one Standard day before the Nephrite Undine was scheduled to leave.

But there was almost a one in ten chance that, if she boarded that ship, she’d vanish forever and never make it home at all…

Would this be this some addlepated suicide attempt on her part? Boarding a ship that might never be seen again?

The Hunter-Gratzner was never seen again, she thought, and everybody thought it’d be safe. She had already survived one Level Five Incident. She could survive another, if it came to that.

She’d be home in less than six months if it worked, well before what everybody would think was her fifteenth birthday. If she could play a good enough hand, maybe she could even make people believe she’d been somewhere on Deckard’s World the whole time…

No matter what happened, the Nephrite Undine could break her trail.

Jack opened the message that she had received from Sirius Shipping that morning-day. They were still waiting to hear whether she wanted an interview for the Major Barbara position, something that was probably a simple formality. They might even skip an interview altogether when she made her counter-offer. She began to compose a reply.

Dear Ms. Nguyen, she wrote, addressing it to the executive who had signed the interview offer. A year before she’d taken off, her mother had shown her a stack of letters that had come from candidates she was considering for her law firm. Jack tried to phrase things the way her mother’s favorite choices had in their letters.

Thank you for your kind offer of a potential position on the Major Barbara. I regret that, due to some logistical and scheduling issues traveling to the Catalan System would create, I must decline the offer at this time. However, I am aware that you have another opening that doesn’t pose any such conflicts on your new vessel, the Nephrite Undine…

Either way, she told herself as Kyra slept on beside her, Jack B. Badd could finally disappear forever.