The Changeling Game, Chapter 41

41.
Monde à Deux

Clack!

Jack woke up to the sound of… baseball?

Clack! Clack! Her first impression was of someone hitting ball after ball out of a park in rapid succession. As she woke up more, she realized that she was hearing wood striking wood.

“Again,” Cedric’s voice said from somewhere below her and to the left. She opened her eyes.

Kyra had thrown wide the balcony doors and was sitting in a chair, her arms on the railing and her chin resting on her hands, watching something that was going on outside. Jack got up, pulling on her robe and walking over to see.

Two levels down, in the central area of the courtyard, Tafrara and Ewan were sparring with staffs while Cedric observed them and called out commands. By the sweat sheening their skin and soaking their tops, they had been at it for a while. Both wore loose white pants and tank tops and moved barefoot across the paving stones, circling each other. Just when Jack wondered if that was all they were going to do, they came together again in a flurry of movements, staffs cracking into each other repeatedly as they struck and blocked one another’s strikes.

Ewan was taller and stronger, with a greater reach. But Tafrara, Jack decided, had more skill and experience… and a lower center of gravity that she knew how to use to her advantage. They were evenly matched. Their attacks were almost brutal, forcing Jack to cover her mouth several times when the impulse to cry out a warning struck her. They clearly knew what they were doing, though. On the rare occasions when one of their staffs slipped the other’s guard, it stopped centimeters before actual impact. For a second, both combatants would freeze, waiting for their father to confirm which one of them had just gained a point.

That kind of control was impressive. They hadn’t just been taught how to hit; they’d been taught how not to.

“Goddamn,” Kyra said, her voice wistful and cracking a little. “I want to get in on that…”

Jack put her arm around Kyra’s shoulder, aware all over again just how much her sister had suddenly lost in the last day. By the time she was healed enough to join them in a sparring match like this, Ewan would be back at the flight academy… and it would be time for the two of them to leave. The chance to be part of something so perfectly suited to her had been cruelly ripped away. Worst of all, she could see that beautiful dream right in front of her, but it would be forever out of reach.

I have to help her find something even better before we go…

And it wasn’t like the scene was much easier for Jack to watch.

It was the first time she had seen Ewan wearing so little. His musculature was leaner than Riddick’s and his older brother’s, but he still looked like he could have been carved by either a Renaissance artist or the ancient Greek sculptors they had been emulating. She found herself wishing she could touch him, feel him against her again—

“Down, girl,” Kyra murmured next to her.

“Shit, am I that obvious?” she whispered.

Kyra smirked and shook her head, tapping her temple. “You got a good poker face, though. Shame… think what kind’a damage we could’a done in a casino…”

It was a little hard to laugh at that. All of the might-have-beens were hitting them like violent blows now that they had committed themselves to a course of action that would separate them for years…

…maybe forever.

“Did I miss breakfast?” Jack made herself ask after a moment. The sun appeared to have risen a while ago.

“Yeah, and my first physical therapy session, but I’m sure they’ll get you something.” Kyra glanced at Jack. “Did you tell the Apeiros to stay out of my head?”

“I did, yeah. They were giving you nightmares last night.” She hadn’t actually told Kyra the name she’d given them, but she supposed it was no surprise that her sister knew it anyway.

“They were. Then they said that you had forbidden them to talk to me anymore unless I talked to them first… and I haven’t heard a peep out of ’em since. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Least I could do. I mean, they weren’t even supposed to start talking to you again until I said they could, until I told them you’d healed up—”

“But they freaked the fuck out when you hurt yourself breaking open a …something… Some word like the name you gave them. That’s what they said you’d done, anyway. And I… couldn’t feel you for a few hours… I didn’t even realize I could, and had, until you were suddenly gone from my head. I thought you might’ve died. I kept asking them if you were okay and they kept saying they didn’t know.” Kyra looked incredibly vulnerable in that moment.

“Fuck, I’m sorry. I really didn’t think, did I?”

“Hey. Quit that. You did good. It was something you had to do, even if it was gonna scare a bunch of us. You’re closing the door between ’verses, as much as it can be. It’ll make it harder for that Quintessa bitch to find the other survivors. Or prove that we were ever among them.”

“Yeah…” Jack swallowed. She didn’t feel entirely reassured. “When did you start to feel me again?”

“About two hours before you came back. But damn, you felt weak. There was this moment, though… whoo! You and Ewan better not have been fucking, because I was serious—”

Jack burst out laughing. Below them, in the courtyard, three heads turned to look their way. She felt heat rising into her cheeks. Hopefully, they hadn’t heard what had made her laugh. Hopefully, they didn’t think she was laughing at them. She waved in their direction and Ewan raised his hand, waving back at her.

“No,” she managed to tell Kyra, struggling not to laugh again. “We weren’t. Not for a lack of me wanting to, though. It’s been kinda awkward since then. He knows what I was feeling.”

She tried to leave the rest of it—that she believed the intense chemistry had been mutual—unsaid, but she could see in Kyra’s eyes that she might as well have said that part out loud.

“Of course he does. I knew what you were feeling from how many miles away? Kind of a shame, in a way,” Kyra mused. “He’s been so gentle and careful with me, treating my stab wound, and today’s physical therapy session… If I’d lost my virginity to someone like him, maybe the idea of sex wouldn’t be so disgusting…” She shook her head. “’Course, someone like him would’a never taken it from me when I was twelve… and won’t take it from you now. Well, he’d just better keep being honorable about it all. I figured it was why he was looking so freaked out last night.”

“Yeah,” Jack sighed, “things are uncomfortable right now. They were almost back to normal until that whole dinner table conversation.”

“He was having a hard time looking at you after that, wasn’t he? You never told me what I missed. I mean, I caught some of the ‘child prodigy’ stuff. What brought that talk about?”

“The brain scans I had last night,” Jack explained. “I guess I didn’t actually do myself any brain damage or anything when I broke the apeirochoron—”

“Yeah, that’s what they were going on and on about.”

“—but the scans were abnormal enough that they did an EEG and decided I’m probably a psychic.”

Kyra was giving her a duh look. “And you didn’t know that until now?”

“I…” She hadn’t believed that kind of stuff existed outside of the adventure books she’d read as a kid, and some of the old sword-and-sorcery vids she’d watched with her cousins. There’d been one strange girl in her fourth-grade class who had claimed it was all real, and that she had powers, but had always refused to prove it and had, the next year, claimed she was the secret love child of a popular twentieth century movie star instead. It had all seemed ridiculous to Audrey back then, even if sometimes—

“Damn, Jack, the hour before Heather died, you were following her around like a worried puppy. Wouldn’t let her out of your sight. You looked real uneasy and kept staying super close to her, like you were expecting her to fall over at any second. When she finally did, when I heard you screaming for help, I remember thinking ‘oh, this is why.’”

When Kyra described it like that, it was suddenly so obvious. “I… when I was little, my parents had a dog who was epileptic. I could always tell when Balto was about to have a seizure. He died while I was at school and I… they told me I couldn’t possibly have, but I felt it when he died. And then when Heather started feeling the same way to me…”

“You knew the exact moment she died, too, didn’t you?” Kyra asked. “I saw your face change. And then there were other times, I swore I could feel you in my head, and… that night you had the nightmare about Riddick cutting your throat, I could see it.”

“He’d never do that,” Jack said, still conscious that Kyra needed Riddick to be a hero and not any kind of threat.

“I mean, of course not, but that asshole who visited you got you all mixed up for a while. El Imam Abu al-Walid,” she sneered, spelling out the full name Jack had described him rattling off when they had first met.

Again, Jack found herself remembering how Fry had seemed to think the el Imam part was his first name, calling him by it several times the way he had called her Carolyn, and sometimes seeming to pronounce it as “Elmo.” She’d liked Fry a great deal, and had started to think of her as a kind of older sister, but there had been moments—

“Judgmental dickhead,” Kyra continued. “He really thought you could enjoy killing? Shit.”

“He was nice to me back then,” Jack found herself protesting. “I mean, before the Kublai Khan… during the eclipse…”

“Yeah, before he decided to save you from yourself. Before everybody else who could’a stepped in and made him cut his shit out was gone.” Kyra shook her head. “Sorry. It just makes me so mad. I saw how you looked after he got done giving you a talking-to, and I wanted to beat the shit out of him.”

That, Jack realized, had been the moment a switch flipped in their relationship, and Kyra had begun acting protective toward her… and their minds had started to link up. Two esper roomies, both with PTSD… if the hospital staff had had any idea, she thought, they’d have put them on opposite sides of the building from each other.

“Yeah, they’d have sent us to opposite sides of the planet, even,” Kyra replied to her unspoken words.

“Here, I want to try something…” Jack said, and closed her eyes. She began to put together, in her mind, one of the most beautiful and terrifying moments she’d been describing to her sister… the ringed gas giant rising into the sky and slowly creeping closer and closer to the twin suns…

“Oh shit, Jack, that’s so beautiful…”

It had worked.

After a quick run down to the kitchen for some breakfast—okay, she admitted, a lot of breakfast—Jack spent the next hour conjuring more visions for Kyra, different moments on the crash planet that had been particularly stunning. The miles-long damage path behind the remains of the crash ship… the rising of the blue sun as the twin suns were setting… the enormous field of bones… living clouds of tiny monsters eddying against the auburn sky… in its own way, that desolate, dangerous world had been spectacularly beautiful.

She shied away from other visions, though, refusing to show her sister what Ali’s devoured body had looked like, or Shazza in pieces in the screaming maelstrom… for those, she would only share her carefully crafted words. Kyra was still recovering, still delicate, and seeing those hideous moments wouldn’t help her stay distracted from her pain. She needed the part of the story that was adventure and excitement… not the gruesome reality.

Jack told herself that she wasn’t really lying… just being selective about how much of the ugly truth she would divulge. But part of her, even then, knew that was possibly the biggest lie of all. Kyra, however, seemed to want the lie too much to question it.

Jack was able to let Kyra hear the sounds of the strange creatures on the crash planet, even as she described huddling with the other survivors inside the cargo container and Imam speculating that they used those noises to see. Riddick had located the cutting torch that Shazza had left behind, when they had stopped trying to salvage things and had relocated to the mining settlement, and he had used it carve a passage into one of the largest cargo compartments after they’d ended up trapped in a small one.

“He handed Fry the torch and went off scouting right away, while we were trying to block the opening behind us. He could see everything just fine. But there were sounds… in the compartment… and we all knew the things were already inside.”

Fry had told her to stay close, but Imam hadn’t repeated the admonition in Arabic. Nobody, not even Jack, had noticed at first that Hassan had wandered off.

Not until Jack heard Riddick speak, his voice pitched low enough that the others around her didn’t seem to hear: “Extremely… bad… timing.”

She had convinced herself, until now, that her feeling that the darkness was horribly alive was just her overactive imagination. Now she wondered if she’d been feeling the creatures’ presence. What had she felt?

Two… no… five minds in that stygian darkness. Two human… and three almost incomprehensible aside from ravenous hunger. Hassan, rooted to the spot in terror as he stared up at a horrifying, barely-visible shape above him. Riddick, near him, feeling an almost academic fascination about the creature he could see clearly and a mixture of annoyance and concern for the scared boy just in front of him…

Had she really managed to get that far into people’s heads at the time? Without knowing or understanding?

She’d heard him tell Hassan “just don’t run…” Unlike Ali, Hassan would have known enough English to understand that.

Or should have. As she explored her memories of that moment in greater detail, she thought the boy’s mind had been paralyzed with fear; he could barely think in Arabic, much less English.

“Wow,” Kyra said beside her. “Poor kid…”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “He was really nice, too. So they were over there, just staring at the thing above them in the darkness. Fry called out to Riddick and he raised his voice just a little more, so everybody else could hear him, and said ‘don’t stop burning.’ I think he meant they needed to cut another hole in a wall to get us out of that compartment. That’s what Fry and Johns thought, anyway, because she gave him the torch and he gave her his flashlight, and he started cutting another hole. And that was when Imam finally noticed that Hassan wasn’t in the group anymore.”

The boys, she suddenly realized, had liked giving him the slip, the whole time she’d known them, and Suleiman—who spoke the best English of all of them—had quietly told her back at the mining settlement that they had hardly known him at all before he had been put in charge of their youth group’s Hajj. He’d been a newcomer to their mosque, less member than guest, but had been selected as a replacement guardian after another Imam, who had organized the journey, fell ill; he was only taking them because he’d been on his way to Helion Prime anyway, to return to his wife and young daughter. Perhaps, if they’d known him better, they would have stayed closer to him—

“You knew him better and you cut your wrists to get away,” Kyra grumbled beside her. “Damn, this in-your-head shit is getting spooky. Sorry. It’s hard for me to think of him as one of the good guys in your story after how I saw him treat you.”

The courtyard had fallen silent while they talked and Jack shared her memories; she glanced down and it was empty. Before she could pick up the tale again at the moment of Hassan’s terrified flight and death, someone knocked at their door.

Takama, Cedric, and Safiyya were outside, expressions serious.

Jack had to give them credit; they didn’t hide a thing about the meeting the night before, except just how torn up Ewan had been by all of it. Thanks to the interference of the envoy and Alexander Toombs, she and Kyra were told, it was no longer safe for them to try to introduce Kyra to Tomlin’s former brothers and sisters in arms yet. Out of further concern that the envoy would try to enter their home and provoke an incident with Tafrara, they had contacted all of the invited guests and informed them that the reception had been moved to the grotto Jack and Ewan had used the evening-day before.

The venue change let them also claim that they couldn’t accommodate any guests beyond the ones they had specifically invited, something that would have been preposterous if they had still been hosting it in their enormous home that could—and did, when needed—accommodate the entire ait Meziane tribe. The house, which Jack had been giving a hyphenated name in her head until then, belonged to the whole tribe and was used by whichever members happened to be in town at any time.

“Officially, the change has happened because three visiting members of the tribe have fallen ill,” Takama said. “Including, should anyone inquire, both of you. It is a summer fever common in the New Atlas region. Perhaps you brought it with you when you came down from the mountains.”

“We’ve already had it, so we’re immune, but we wouldn’t want to accidentally spread it to our esteemed guests,” Cedric added, lips quirking a little.

“We truly are sorry that you can’t meet everyone yet, Dihya,” Safiyya told Kyra, reaching out to take her hand. Kyra allowed it, but Jack could feel how much she was struggling with the impulse to pull away from the affection behind it. “But the last thing we want to have happen is for one of them to decide that Toombs’ story about you is more plausible than the truth and turn you over to him.”

“Yeah,” Kyra sighed. “Especially since the only way for me to be the girl he says I am—”

The girl I really am… Jack heard in her head.

“—is if I came on the Scarlet Matador, which would open up a can of Guinea worms all over all of us.”

The image Kyra had in her mind, of those worms, was horrifying. Jack couldn’t help shuddering.

She wondered if Toombs and Logan would stake out the gardens, hoping to get a better look at “Dihya” and “Tislilel” before the disappointing news that they were “sick” was shared—

Hoo boy. There it was.

“Got an idea,” Jack said, unable to suppress her grin. Four sets of eyebrows went up as she grabbed her tablet and began searching for local hospitality services. The others kept talking as she worked, telling Kyra that they hoped, in a few weeks or months, to make the meeting possible.

We’ll be long gone before then, she thought. Well, she would be, anyway. There was always the possibility that Kyra would change her mind and want to stay.

But the vibes coming off her sister didn’t point in that direction.

“There,” she finally said, feeling immense satisfaction. Maybe this would help fix her screw-ups of the evening-day before.

“What is it?” Cedric asked, amusement and trepidation in his voice.

“I just booked some extra help to take care of your guests this evening-day,” Jack told them with a grin. “Nothing major, just carrying hors d’oeuvres trays around and stuff, but check them out.”

The four young women, whose pictures were on the tablet screen, bore eerie resemblances to her, and to Kyra. It really hadn’t been all that difficult to find some who would.

We really could blend in here… hide in plain sight…

It’s too late for that, Jack… Kyra’s voice sighed sadly in her head.

“Good heavens,” Safiyya said, laughing.

“Maybe your guests’ll stop thinking we looked a lot like… us… when they’re looking at other girls who do, too,” Jack said. “And who knows? Maybe Toombs will try to arrest one of them and embarrass the fuck out of himself and that envoy.”

“Not bad,” Cedric told her, trying to hide a grin. “I’ll make sure to have some people on hand who can step in if he tries.”

The conversation briefly shifted to logistics—when and where Jack should have the four waitresses arrive at the garden—before the plans were fully solidified and the discussion moved to the future.

“We’ve settled on a date for the celebration of Brahim’s life,” Takama told them. “His birthday. It’s four Standard months away, so it will be very early in the fall this year. That will give his former colleagues plenty of time to request leave, and the rest of the tribe time to come here.”

“Sounds lovely,” Kyra said beside her. Jack hoped she was the only one who had heard the slight break in her voice as she said it and had caught the sudden feeling of wistful sadness embedded in it. She was feeling much the same way; if things went according to plan, she’d be most of the way back to Deckard’s World when it took place.

It was lunchtime by then. It was also the first time Kyra was officially cleared to go up and down stairs, so it was the first time both of them joined the family in the dining room—for food, anyway—since the memorial dinner. The table was huge, but the family, many of whom Jack had only met once before, almost completely filled it. Lalla, Izil, and even Usadden all joined them; the hospital morgue, Usadden told them, was closed for another Tangiers day while investigators went over everything centimeter by centimeter, trying to discover how eighteen bodies, and all of their belongings, had vanished into thin air. Already, to his dismay, two orderlies had been found to have been pilfering personal effects of the deceased, but nothing connected to the missing Matador passengers had been among their recovered loot.

Jack remembered the earrings and the cash she’d isomorphed out of one of the orderlies’ lockers. Those were floating out in the sea by now, but she would need to do a walkabout through New Marrakesh at some point to see if anything had been stolen and fenced in the days prior and could be seen hovering incongruously somewhere in Elsewhere. Even one such artifact could tell the envoy far too much about her and Kyra…

Ewan, Jack noticed, was sitting at the far end of the table, engaged in quiet conversation with an elderly man who looked a great deal like a male version of Tafrara and Safiyya. His grandfather? They were speaking in Tamazight, so she couldn’t eavesdrop. She felt a little embarrassed and guilty over how much she wanted to.

Most of the family, though, was speaking in English, discussing the plans for the celebration of Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane’s life, making suggestions, planning out how to send word to various members of the tribe and other far-flung friends. They were deliberately making sure to include her and Kyra in the conversation, under the blithe assumption that both girls would still be on Tangiers Prime and participants in the festivities.

Jack didn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise. Neither, she noticed, did Kyra.