The Changeling Game, Chapter 43

43.
What Cannot Be Unlearned

The silence grew more and more painful as the moment dragged on. Takama’s words hung over everyone. Jack, standing in two thresholds at once, could barely breathe.

Oh fuck, Jack, she heard in her head. Kyra wasn’t any happier about this than she was.

“No,” Ewan finally said, looking from one face to another. “No. Don’t even start thinking about it.”

“We may have to—” Safiyya began.

“What the hell are you planning on doing, exactly?” he demanded. “Casting a circle of salt around them? Trapping them in a bottle or a lamp? Locking them in a tower above Elsewhere’s high tide line? Do you think they will ever believe you’re on their side again—”

“We are on their side—”

“Not if you start thinking of imprisoning them! Tislilel hasn’t even confided her real name to us yet and you would completely shatter her trust—”

“We just want to keep them safe,” his mother protested.

“Don’t make me remind you of what happened the last time someone tried to keep her safely locked up,” Ewan told her, his voice shaking a little. “Look at her arms if you’ve forgotten.”

Jack glanced down at her wrists. She’d honestly begun to forget the scars were there, markings of a suicide attempt that now seemed to have happened eons ago to another girl. She’d have to figure out what to do about them when she was heading home. There would be a lot of questions waiting for her on the other end of her journey, and that could be an especially difficult one to answer.

“What would you suggest we do instead? Let them run wild?” For whatever reason, Safiyya seemed to be the most upset.

Her first-born son’s been dead for less than two weeks, Jack reminded herself.

She can’t replace him with us, even if we were staying, Kyra countered in her head.

“Why do you believe she’s running wild?” Ewan asked his mother. “A child prodigy may still be a child, but she’s also still a prodigy and if we stop respecting that—”

“I just want to know where she is!” Safiyya’s voice was breaking.

Jack winced at the desperate pain in her voice and stepped back out of their line of sight, isomorphing into U1 before re-entering the dining room doorway. “Right here,” she said. She’d gone for her calmest tone, but it sounded more depressed than calm.

Four alarmed faces stared at her; General Toal’s expression remained deadpan. She could see, in Ewan’s face in particular, the knowledge that she had probably heard everything.

“The Quintessa Corporation envoy fired Toombs and Logan after the scuffle at the garden,” she told them, her voice still heavier than she’d planned, before any of them could get over their shock and start in on her. That dual revelation seemed to shock them all speechless anew. “They’re planning on leaving Tangiers Prime. Back during the overnoon sleep period, I sent out a fake vid that makes it look like Kyra and I are on Shakti Four with Riddick, and they’ve fallen for it, so that’s where they’re planning to go now. Before they were fired, Logan was reviewing recordings of all outgoing calls made by morgue employees before the Matador bodies disappeared. I spent the last five hours hiding the evidence that Usadden called Ewan and took a call from him a few hours later.”

She kept her words calm, informative, trying to use the debriefing style that both Ewan and his older brother had sometimes used. Silence greeted her. Almost everyone looked stricken; General Toal’s face remained inscrutable.

“If anyone ever asks,” she said, turning to Ewan and meeting his gaze, “you called Usadden that morning-day, not the other way around, and only once. You wanted him to settle a bet you had with Didier over how and when rigor mortis sets in.”

Ewan blinked, his eyes widening slightly. The call had been in Tamazight, but her translator program had helped her wade through it. Still, she could see him wondering how much of the language she’d picked up.

Jack shrugged at him. “It was the only other recording I could find that was short enough and didn’t reference times or events that could get flagged. I hope all of you agreed to your service provider recording your calls, because it looks like they have recordings of everything.”

“Tizzy…” Cedric began softly.

She couldn’t let him continue. She didn’t dare. Part of her desperately wanted to apologize to them, beg their forgiveness, let them take control of the moment and all the moments to come, but she couldn’t. In only a few more days, she had to leave, and if she let them tie her to them—and it would be so easy to—she might never go. This was, probably, as good a moment as she would ever get to sever that forming knot before it could tighten into something inescapable.

“I didn’t want to commit any class-one felony cybercrimes using your network address or geolocation,” she told all five of them instead, “so I went back to the apartment. It’s paid through the end of the month, anyway.”

Takama closed her eyes and nodded, sighing. Jack had the odd feeling that General Toal was struggling to hide a smile.

“I also learned, from shadowing Toombs, that the real name of the man I killed—” she faltered for a second as Safiyya flinched “—is Pritchard. They worked together sometimes. He was borrowing Toombs’ Master Key when he broke into our apartment, and I guess Toombs was holding onto his ‘Cam-Jam’ as collateral. I looked it up. It’s merc slang for a long-range camera jammer. I think Pritchard may have been the person who brought the bomb into the spaceport, but I won’t know for sure until I crack open his Merc Network account and take a look. So I’m gonna go do that, and then I’m gonna go to bed. Good night.”

She’d kept her voice calm, almost flat, through the whole speech. She’d tried not to let any of the hurt show, the sadness, the growing awareness that the harder they tried to hold onto her, the more she’d want to run. She hoped none of that had managed to come through, but her voice had felt so heavy the whole time.

Before they could say anything, she turned and started across the courtyard.

“Tislilel,” Ewan called after her, “have you eaten anything?”

She turned around again. He was standing in the doorway, poised to follow her. She could feel him struggling not to, struggling not to say dozens of things that could never be undone if he gave them voice. She shook her head at him, realizing for the first time that she hadn’t eaten since before they had all left for the officers’ reception and she had followed behind them as a phantom.

“Tafrara and I will bring something up to you,” He managed.

“Thank you.” She wanted to say so much more to him. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for defending me. Thank you for protecting me from myself on the beach of Elsewhere…

…I love you…

If she said another word, she’d unravel everything. Instead, she turned away and headed into the opposite side of the ait Meziane house.

If they did lock us up, she found herself thinking, How would we get out? Our room is on the third floor. Unless we floated out of the house during high tide, we can’t pass through the walls without falling through the floor.

Could they?

She hadn’t been able to follow Logan into the courthouse, and had missed the beginning of her argument with Toombs, because the courthouse steps hadn’t existed in Elsewhere. But was there any way to be more selective? To let some of U1’s solid surfaces prevail while others were excluded?

She was still on the ground level, Elsewhere’s sands beneath her feet on the other side of the threshold, she thought as she reached the staircase up to the second story. If she wanted to test her idea, this was the best place to try. She isomorphed over, keeping U1 visible as a shadowy overlay, and contemplated the lowest stairstep.

I am in Elsewhere, completely in Elsewhere… the objects of U1 are not with me. I can pass through them, but… the surfaces of U1 will elevate me…

Her foot dropped through the top of the first step when she tried to put her weight on it.

Fuck. She sighed and concentrated harder. I didn’t learn to isomorph the first time I tried to, either… This was too important to give up yet.

She repeated her mantra, focusing on the idea that the solid surfaces of U1, the floors and stairs, should support her weight even when her body was all the way in Elsewhere… when she wanted them to. That the step, although it didn’t exist in Elsewhere, could still override the laws of gravity of that other ’verse, at least where she was concerned…

She tried stepping onto it again.

It held her weight.

Carefully, one step after another, she began to climb the staircase, barely daring to breathe.

“Tizzy?” Cedric’s voice called from behind her. She stopped, heart lurching, and turned to look at him.

Was she actually in U1? Could he see her on the stairs? Was that why the steps were holding her up?

But Cedric was looking around, walking toward the staircase but not focusing on her.

“Is she upstairs already?” Safiyya asked, entering the room with General Toal.

“Looks like,” Cedric told her. He took his wife’s arm as she started toward the stairs herself. “You need to let Ewan and Tafrara handle this. After everything she may have heard you and Takama saying.”

“But—”

“We’ll only make things worse right now. Let them talk to her first, m’love?”

“I recommend this as well,” General Toal agreed. “Tonight was, unfortunately, not handled well. Especially now that we know where she was, and what she was doing for your family’s sake.”

Safiyya looked like she wanted to argue with him, but then she sighed and nodded, her face crumpling. Cedric drew her into a hug. Their grief was too painful for Jack to look at long.

She turned and finished climbing the steps. They hadn’t known she was there; what she had tried was working.

Kyra, can you feel what I’m doing?

Yeah. Good thought. You’ll need to teach me how. Now get up here.

Kyra pulled her into a hug the moment she entered their room. They stood still, embracing fiercely, for a long moment, only finally letting go when Sebby climbed onto both of them to get their attention.

“We can’t stay much longer,” her sister whispered, sadness in her face. “I love them and I know you do, too… but they don’t get how much danger they’re putting themselves in, trying to look out for us.”

“Yeah,” Jack sighed, wishing there was some argument that could be mustered against that, but knowing there wasn’t. “Did you find anything?”

“Got a few possibilities,” Kyra said with a wry grin. “Can you help me write the cover letters? You’re pretty good at that.”

They were finishing the first cover letter when Tafrara and Ewan knocked on the door. Kyra closed down the tablet and put it away while Jack walked over to let them in.

True to Ewan’s word, they had brought up food. The moment its aroma hit Jack’s nose, she realized how ravenous she was. “Thank you. So much. Do you two want to come in?”

They did, but the next few minutes were a little awkward. Jack tried to concentrate on stuffing her face, especially any time the urge to apologize surfaced again.

I’m going my own way in just a few days more, she reminded herself. They’d better get used to it now. I’d better get used to it now.

Kyra, however, needed firmer answers.

“Look,” she said, her eyes moving between Ewan and Tafrara. “We love all of you, we really do, but I gotta know if someone’s about to start locking us in here or anything.”

Ewan winced, looking ashamed, even though he was the one who had argued vehemently against it.

“Our parents are very sorry,” Tafrara began.

“Sorry they considered it, or sorry we overheard them considering it?” Kyra asked.

“A bit of both,” Ewan muttered.

Tafrara shot him a look. “It’s just… neither of you should be on your own, not at your ages,” she told them. “You shouldn’t have to take care of yourselves so much.”

Kyra looked over at Jack. Don’t rise to that, she sent through the air before turning to look at Tafrara again. “You know neither of us chose to be in these situations, right?”

“But that just makes it more important for you to have someone—”

“Making the few choices we have left for us?” Kyra tilted her head, still keeping her eyes locked with Tafrara’s. “You know my story, right? You know what started the whole damned stand-off in the first place?”

Ewan and Tafrara both shook their heads.

“The New Christy Elders wouldn’t let girls learn math. Or science. Or social sciences. Or anything much except how to be good little wives and brood mares. You know who figured that out and raised a stink?” When they didn’t answer, she continued. “Amnesty Interplanetary, that’s who. And a bunch of shitstains who hated us already took it up as a cause. ‘Save the girls of New Christy.’ As if they actually gave a fuck. You know how many of those girls died after Red Roger and his men stormed the place to supposedly rescue us?”

“All but three,” Ewan whispered. “And you were one of those three.”

“And trust me, you don’t want to know what they did before killing most of ’em. You don’t even want to imagine.” Kyra stood up, stalking the room with restless energy. Jack could feel her wishing for something, someone, to pummel until the pain went away again. “So yeah, I know your parents mean well… but people meaning well already cost me my whole family, my friends, my freedom, my virginity…”

Brother and sister both winced.

Kyra stopped near the balcony doors and turned back to face the room. “Nobody… nobody makes my choices for me. Not ever again. I appreciate everything you guys have done for me, are trying to do for me, but that’s my line in the sand. I’m not gonna be anybody’s daughter. It’s too late.”

It was, Jack realized, the last word on the subject. Neither Tafrara nor Ewan asked about her own reasoning or plans; Kyra had shut the whole conversation down too thoroughly. Her sister had done that on purpose, so that Jack wouldn’t tell them where she had been trying to go, or where she was going back to, or even just that she already had a family that was awaiting her return. The known quantity of Kyra’s history had been used to obscure the hidden story of “Jack B. Badd.”

No wonder she’s not impressed by Amnesty Interplanetary’s attempts to defend her now, Jack thought. They accidentally set all of it in motion, and even if they try to atone now—

“We are so sorry, Dihya,” Ewan said. His voice was subdued.

Kyra managed a curt nod. “Not like any of you were in on it. It’s just… too late for me to go back. You know, the most fucked up part of all of it was I wanted someone to rescue me back then. I wanted a different life than I’d gotten. I wanted to do the things they said were boy things. I wanted out of the enclave. Did I ever get my fucking wish…”

You didn’t make any of that happen, Jack told her. None of it was your fault.

Kyra looked her way, a pained smirk appearing on her face. Survivor’s guilt, right? Just another thing we have in common…

“We’ll explain to our parents,” Tafrara said in a voice that was every bit as cowed as Ewan’s. “I think… they miss getting to be parents… once Zdan went off to University, they haven’t quite known what to do with themselves since. I think, when they saw these two orphans wander into the Rif—not just our parents but Takama and Brahim, too—they were all hoping…”

“To rescue us,” Jack finished for her. “Only the things they wanted to rescue us from…”

Mercenaries? Monsters? Death and destruction? Mayhem? Being, essentially, child soldiers on a shadowed battlefield where most of the villains posed as white-hats? The loss of innocence?

“…already ate us,” Kyra finished when she couldn’t.

Ewan closed his eyes, swallowing. When he reopened them, and they met Jack’s, the sorrow and regret in them speared through her. She couldn’t look away—

Kyra cleared her throat sharply.

“We should go,” Tafrara said, nudging her brother to break the dangerous spell that had begun to build. “We’ll let you two rest. In the morning, we have something special planned,” she continued as she ushered Ewan out of the room. “We saw you watching us spar, and even though your stitches won’t let you do that yet, there are exercises that are safe for you to do.”

Ewan allowed himself to be pushed out of the room, not looking back.

“We’ll show you tomorrow. Good night, girls,” Tafrara said, and closed their door.

Kyra stared after them for a moment and then started to snicker. “Damn. You two can’t even look at each other without sparks the size of Sebby flying. Now we know how to end any awkward conversation around here.”

“Jeez, yeah,” Jack grumbled. “With even more awkwardness.”

“Well, he’s only here for two more Tangiers days,” Kyra said, and then winced as pain sliced through Jack at the thought. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. But even if you were eighteen right now, we’d still have to leave, you know. So it’s better that there’s this …barrier… anyway.”

“I guess so,” Jack said, pulling the new tablet out of her bag. “I’m gonna move my stuff off that tablet so it’s all yours. I’ve got instructions on how to use ghost codes and how to make fake IDs on there. You get to keep those. But that way you don’t have to worry about me seeing your plans.”

“And you don’t have to worry about me seeing yours,” Kyra nodded. “I know you don’t like it, but… everybody thinks they’re brave and stoic enough to make it through being interrogated, but most people turn out not to be. We can’t spill what we don’t know.”

Jack nodded, reminded of Pritchard again. He hadn’t seemed to care that she didn’t know where Riddick was. She was pretty sure he’d begun really looking forward to hurting her because he’d realized she wouldn’t have any bargaining chips to use to make him stop. There’d been something deeply sick in his head.

“Yeah, that guy was a fucking creep,” Kyra agreed. “I felt it, too. A little too literally. Son of a bitch got a hard-on when he stabbed me.”

“Eww. I didn’t see that.”

“I felt it. Went away fast after Sebby stung him, though. You’d better not feel even a little regret about finishing him off.”

“Don’t you cry for Johns. Don’t you dare,” a voice rumbled, in response, out of memory. Even though it was entirely inside her head, her sister heard it.

“When’d that happen?” Kyra asked, tilting her head quizzically.

“Damn, I still have a lot to tell you about the eclipse.”

Jack talked while she ported her data over to the new tablet, careful not to describe in too much detail just what had happened to Hassan, focusing instead on the discovery that light wasn’t merely painful but injurious to the crash planet’s native life, burning away the skin of the one Johns shot and killed. All they needed, they’d realized, was enough light, and they could make their way back to the mining settlement and the skiff.

Except that Johns wanted to stay put. The argument had gotten ugly. Imam, still seeming so wise and judicious to her, had said that the orrery back in the settlement indicated that the darkness might last a long time, days or even weeks, subtly siding with Fry. Paris, aside from volunteering his alcohol stash for burning and pointing out that the sand cat wouldn’t run at night—an assumption Jack still had issues with—refused to choose a side. But then when Johns and Fry started getting really nasty with each other, and Johns had started to make a move toward violence—

Riddick had stepped in.

Calm, silent, having said nothing at all during the debate, he still didn’t speak, but he put himself between Fry and the muzzle of Johns’ gun. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the possibility that, if the merc pulled the trigger, he’d be headless. Instead, he’d gently tapped one of Johns’ legs with his shiv.

At the time, Jack had thought it was her imagination, the male voice she’d heard in her head, the Riddick voice in her head murmuring The abdominal aorta’s a gusher, but wait ’til you see the femoral artery go…

“Goddamn, he’s a serious badass,” Kyra snickered.

It shouldn’t have been quite so equal a standoff. Would Riddick really have had time to slice open Johns’ thigh if the lawman—she’d still thought he was one up to that point—started to pull the trigger? But she’d heard another echo of Riddick’s voice, along with the remembered heat of him against her back—

—No, not her back, but Fry’s—

—saying “then again, I am worth twice as much alive.”

And somehow she’d known, suddenly, that Fry knew Johns wasn’t a real cop. That he’d done something so horrible that he’d lost all of Fry’s respect in the process. Something that, when Fry had realized it, had shifted her allegiance away from him and his empty representation of law and order. She had no faith in him, no belief that he could or would help any of them. She trusted Riddick more…

Riddick, who was calmly staring Johns down while acting as Fry’s shield.

The fake cop had backed off, his smile disturbingly unhinged as he did so. Jack had been struck with terrible knowledge: this wasn’t over. Whatever was going on with the three of them was going to end in blood.

“Hopefully his,” Kyra said, powering down her tablet and setting it aside. “Okay… my cover letters and credentials are sent and my brain is fried… you okay if I go to sleep now?”

“Sure,” Jack said, checking over her new tablet’s safeguards one more time. “I’m gonna see if I can get into Pritchard’s account and then I’ll probably do the same.”

“Sounds good. G’night…”

Jack spent another half hour making sure that her incursion into the Merc Network would be untraceable, before finally pulling up the login screen. Typing in Pritchard’s username, she hoped that Toombs wasn’t still tossing obscene password possibilities at the account and it wouldn’t be locked.

A new screen appeared, inviting her to enter a password.

Jack closed her eyes, visualizing the piece of paper that had been tucked into Pritchard’s billfold. It had looked like a random string of numbers and letters at the time; now, having seen the gross passwords that Toombs had tried, and the way he’d used numbers as letter substitutions in places, the string resolved into a revolting phrase that told her far too much about what Pritchard paid brothels extra to let him do. Suddenly she regretted being eidetic; there was no way to wash that back out of her mind.

She entered the combination into the password field, feeling sullied just typing it.

Welcome, Duke Pritchard.

She was in.

The man was a packrat; that didn’t surprise her. His case and correspondence files stretched back for more than two decades. He and Toombs had been messaging for the last decade, on and off, and had seemingly worked on several cases together. Only one other correspondence file was larger. She opened that file and dug in.

Bingo.

She read over the most recent messages, feeling a strange tightening in her stomach as she went.

DP: Don’t worry about it. Lay low. I’ve got a line on him. We can make him take the fall for everything. Bonus: both his girls are fair game.

“Motherfucker,” Jack murmured. They’d been planning on shifting the blame for the spaceport explosion onto Riddick?

She looked back further in the log.

JM: Target inaccessible. Need a two-block package. You know the kind. Can you bring it to me?
DP: On my way. Location?
JM: Concourse C4. How’s that for irony?

You fucking bastards.

DP, Duke Pritchard, had brought the bomb into the spaceport. A “package” sized to take out two city blocks? Or maybe a package made out of two blocks of explosives? She wasn’t sure. But JM was the man who had shadowed Tomlin in the spaceport, driving him into the pilots’ lounge, and then calling for a bomb to wipe him and hundreds of others off the map.

Who was JM?

She dug around in more correspondence and case subfolders, looking for anything where the full name was spelled out. It took just ten minutes and then she hit the jackpot.

Javor Makarov. He and Pritchard had hunted together often. Their bounties, she noticed, were almost always women when they did. She realized why soon after when she found the media files Pritchard had hidden in a subfolder with the odd label “Bad Kitties.”

There were, she realized, multiple image collections behind the label… hideous pictures that Stacey would have loved, of Pritchard and Makarov with, when Jack opened one collection, a young woman who looked barely older than Kyra…

There were more than two dozen different collections like that, she saw, her nausea rising. Each set featured a different woman. Or girl. Always young, one or two looking younger than her…

There were vid files in each folder, too. She didn’t even try to open any of those.

The man with Pritchard in virtually every image was recognizably the same man who had been captured, at a distance, by surveillance cameras as he set the bomb down on a bench. Makarov was the bomber. But he was so much worse than that.

Her hands shaking, Jack began to assemble a new file folder in Pritchard’s account, copying as much damning evidence as she could stomach into one deadly, terrible dossier. She would have to send it on later, from the old apartment, just in case anyone could break through the backtrail protections that she had in place. Once the tide went back out, she would go.

And then law enforcement would learn a whole lot more about Duke Pritchard and Javor Makarov, two monsters hiding behind fake badges… two hideous excuses of men who made William Johns look like an Eagle Scout by comparison.

She wondered just how much Toombs had really known about Pritchard… and how much Logan really knew about Toombs. Worse, she now knew exactly what would have been done to her and Kyra, only a few evening-days earlier, if the Apeiros and Sebby hadn’t been helping them defend themselves.

…both his girls are fair game…

It was too much.

Jack hoped none of the ait Meziane clan—especially not Ewan, who had made such an effort to get her fed—could hear her puking her guts out into the toilet. She hoped she’d shielded Kyra from what she had learned, and it wouldn’t seep into either of their dreams.

Could she ever be Audrey again with this monstrous knowledge in her head?