The Changeling Game, Chapter 44

44.
Any Box Could Be Pandora’s

Jack’s letter of employment from the Sirius Corporation was waiting for her when she woke up. “Marianne Tepper” had officially been hired.

She had an odd memory of speaking with the Apeiros and asking them to help her not dream… or to pull her back into their “space” if her dreams became troubled. Maybe it had worked, because she had no memory of any other dreams, but felt surprisingly well-rested given how wretched she’d felt when she’d closed her eyes.

As she had suspected they might, the Sirius Corporation had bypassed the formal interview—one would be held, more or less, when she arrived at the orbital shipyard and they checked her in—and instead had sent her all of the forms a new hire had to fill out. She completed and returned them before Kyra began to stir.

The countdown, she thought, had truly begun for her.

Ewan’s leave would end in two evening-days; his family had been discussing his planned send-off as they walked to the garden grove the evening-day before. Two morning-days after that, it would be Jack’s turn to go. The Sirius Corporation had included information about her reservation on its shuttle to the shipyards that evening-day; she just needed to make sure she was in New Casablanca in plenty of time for it. She booked her ticket immediately, using one of the new funding cards she had picked up from the drop she’d finally visited the day before. Most of the other cards would go to Kyra; all of Jack’s expenses would be paid for once she boarded the Nephrite Undine, and the payout for flying it to Deckard’s World was an almost obscene amount that would easily fund her return home and whatever cover stories she needed to concoct once she got there.

Now she could focus on getting through the next few days.

“So,” Kyra murmured from the pillow next to her, “you got good news?”

“Yeah. Got a route back to— home…” At the last second, she reminded herself that, even though she was finally at the point where she was okay with telling Kyra where home was, they’d agreed that she shouldn’t. Damn. “…leaving three morning-days from now. If all goes as planned, I’ll be back long before my fifteenth birthday.”

“How much younger than that will you actually be?” Kyra asked, smirking. Jack had, after all, told the first group therapy session she’d attended that she was thirteen, and only three Standard months outside of cryo had passed since then.

“Just about fourteen when I get home,” Jack admitted. “I’ve lost nine months to cryo so far. Hopefully I won’t seem too much younger than my official age when I get back.”

“You’ll look different than they remember, I bet, enough to keep them from thinking you should’ve changed even more. I mean, you shot up in height while we were in the hospital.” Kyra snickered at Jack’s shocked look. “Seriously. You didn’t notice? You were two inches shorter than me when you got there. Now we’re the same height. You’ve been on a helluva growth spurt.”

“1.73 meters…” Jack said with awe. “I saw it on my charts two evening-days ago and couldn’t figure it out. I was 1.63 meters when I left— home…”

“I don’t think you’re done growing yet, either, not with the appetite you’ve got,” Kyra told her. “Your family run tall?”

“My dad’s side, yeah. My mom’s side isn’t as tall, but yeah.” Her father was 1.9 meters, the same height as most of the men in the Tomlin-Meziane family. Back on Deckard’s World, though, they used old Imperial measurements, just like twentieth century Americans had; by that reckoning, her father was 6’3”, her mother was 5’6”, and she had been 5’4” when her Missing posters would have gone up, and had just crossed the 5’8” mark on her way to god-knew-what. Kyra, she noticed, used feet and inches, too. But Audrey’s father had insisted on teaching her the metric system concurrently with the Imperial; as ex-military and an engineer, he’d considered it both more precise and more valuable to a life in the wider Federacy.

“Bet you get another inch or two before you stop,” Kyra chuckled beside her. “C’mon… let’s go have breakfast. No more room service unless one of us gets sick or hurt, y’know.”

“Except for Sebby,” Jack laughed, climbing out of bed. “Sebby gets room service.”

Reeeeee? The crustacean in question peeked out from beneath the dresser, where he’d apparently been playing.

“Only because Lalla doesn’t want crickets hopping around in her kitchen,” Kyra laughed back. “Don’t worry, Sebby, we’ll bring you your food soon.”

Sebby chirped happily and vanished under the dresser again.

“I swear, he understands everything we say…”

General Toal was at the table with everyone when they entered, Jack noticed. She wondered if he was staying at the house as a guest. Everyone seemed relaxed around him, though. Maybe he was a regular guest.

Cedric waited until the meal was ending before bringing up the previous night. “We really are sorry about jumping to so many conclusions last night, Tizzy,” he said. “And for overstepping where your liberties are concerned.” His gaze turned to Kyra. “We won’t try to parent you, Dihya. It’s hard not to want to, but… we understand how you feel about it.”

“Thank you,” Kyra murmured, but she set her fork down with food still on it and didn’t pick it back up.

“I’m sorry, too, about not telling you where I was going or anything,” Jack said. “So I should probably tell you that I need to go out for a while, today, to do some things I can’t do here.”

Takama gave her an inquiring look.

“Duke Pritchard brought the bomb into the spaceport,” she told them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw General Toal come to complete alertness, his teacup freezing millimeters from his lips. “The man in the bomber video is Javor Makarov. They’ve worked together a lot. I have evidence I need to release into the wild, but if law enforcement is gonna be able to use it, it has to go out in a way that doesn’t disqualify it from use. Which means I need to do some pretty illegal things to make it look like Pritchard himself accidentally released it. Things I don’t want ever getting traced back here.”

“So you’re going back to the apartment again,” Takama said, her voice soft.

“Yeah. Probably for a few hours.” Jack swallowed. Looking through Pritchard’s files again, making sure she created a trail that would lead law enforcement back to his and Makarov’s Merc Network accounts, making sure none of the surveillance pictures he’d taken of her and Kyra still existed, was going to be a hideous ordeal. At least, if she ended up stress-puking again, the family wouldn’t hear her doing it—

“Someone should go with you—” Ewan said. Tafrara jostled his arm, her expression scolding. “…Like Tafrara—”

“No,” Jack said too quickly. “I… don’t want anybody to see what I’ve found. It’s really bad. I wish I hadn’t seen any of it. But when law enforcement gets it, it’ll be a game changer. Just… it’s bad enough that I had to look at it—”

Kyra, next to her, gasped in horror and covered her mouth. Fuck. Some of what she had seen must have slipped across their connection.

Everyone was looking at Kyra with concern now. She swallowed, wincing, and lowered her hand after a moment. “None of you should see it,” she agreed. “Ever.”

“Won’t it come out, whatever it is?” Lalla asked.

“Not… in so much detail…” Kyra said, pushing her plate a little further way from her.

“Unfortunately, the only way to ensure that it is acted upon at all is a wide release,” General Toal rumbled. “The Universal Mercenary Registry is a powerful organization with a history of evading law enforcement oversight and having warrants voided. You will need to get your data into the public sector, into the hands of people who can and will broadcast it widely, who have high profiles and strong credibility, to ensure it isn’t covered up again.”

“Pretty sure it’s a Federacy crime to broadcast those kinds of pictures,” Jack muttered without thinking, and heard Safiyya gasp.

But she was already mulling it over, thinking about major news outlets that, even if they could never show the pictures themselves, could raise enough of a stink about their mere existence to prevent anyone from being able to sweep it under a rug. Especially if it was obvious that Makarov was also the bomber every law enforcement agency in the Tangiers system was seeking…

What if some random perv reached out to law enforcement and the press, claiming that the porn he’d been collecting starred the bomber, providing just enough examples to prove that multiple class-one felonies had been perpetrated by Makarov, and giving Pritchard’s Merc Network address as the original source…?

Nobody would find it even a little suspicious that the hypothetical sicko was using a brand-new, anonymized account to reach out from, given that whoever it was would have enjoyed those kinds of pictures and only came forward at all because of the bombing.

It could work. She’d just need another new tablet, because the one she’d do it all with would be forever contaminated—

The table, she realized, had gone deathly silent. She looked up. Everyone was gazing at her with similar expressions of sad comprehension and empathy. It was dangerous for her to meet their eyes right now. She focused on Ewan, on what she needed to tell him, avoiding his eyes and looking at his throat instead as she talked.

“Your pirate friend, the one who has Pritchard’s comm… you need to get word to him to get rid of it and get as far away from it as possible. It’s about to become serious hazmat. Especially given the places he’s been taking it.”

“You gave it to Robie?” Usadden asked.

Ewan answered with a curt nod.

“It is not what you think,” Usadden told her, “although under the circumstances, I can see why you might think it… and why it would fit a little too well. Dr. Robie is a gynecologist with the Tangiers Department of Health.”

The absurdity of that—the mental image of a man, who looked like he belonged in an ancient Disney vid about Caribbean pirates, traveling by motorcycle from brothel to brothel to perform state-mandated health checks—startled a laugh out of Jack, a much louder one than was appropriate. She covered her mouth, trying to rein it in.

“I’ll let him know.” Ewan’s voice was subdued, sober.

Nobody at the table was touching their food now. Fuck.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said, getting up. “I didn’t mean to say any of this. I didn’t want any of you to have to know. I’m gonna… go get started…”

“You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” Takama said.

“Shouldn’t…” Jack said in part agreement, wishing that even half of the shoulds everyone cherished so much could be real. “Have to.”

She picked up the singing box of crickets, sitting on a small table by the courtyard doorway, and left before things could get even more complicated.

There was a scorecard attached to the box, she noticed as she carried it upstairs.

How Many Crickets?

The title had been written in both English and Tamazight. Different names had different tallies. Izil had two numbers beside his name: 3 and 5. Tafrara had 7 and 4. Ewan had 8 and 5. Kyra had a 4 by her “Dihya” name. Lalla had a 9. No numbers were by Jack’s name—well, “Tizzy”—yet, but they’d given her a line.

It wasn’t how many crickets were in the box, she realized, but how many would jump onto her when she opened the box. That was what she would need to write in.

Except I know how to make it a zero… It’d give her a chance to practice her new trick.

Sebby leapt onto the bed, bouncing and chittering with excitement, when he heard the cricket song. Jack grinned at him and walked over to his tub, kneeling down and setting the box inside it, and then resting her hands on the box. She focused, for a moment, on the texture and dimensions of the cardboard under her fingers.

The floor of U1, beneath my legs, supports me whether I am in U1 or Elsewhere, she thought carefully. And I am now in Elsewhere, too, and so is this cardboard box… but only the cardboard part, not any of the things inside it, no matter how hard they cling… and I am all the way in Elsewhere with the box now…

The floor held her up. The box vanished from U1, staying firmly in her hands on the other side of the threshold. Within the tub in U1, hundreds of crickets spilled out, their chirps stilling for an instant. Sebby shrieked with delight and leapt into the tub, chomping the first crickets in easy reach of his mandibles.

Exhaling, Jack lifted the cardboard box away, stood up, and isomorphed back into U1 before opening its lid carefully.

No crickets had remained inside.

She found a pen in the bedroom’s desk drawer and put a 0 by her name on the scorecard, setting the box next to the door.

She wished she’d known this particular parlor trick back when Pritchard had invaded the apartment. She could have dispatched him without Kyra even needing to wake up.

Yeah, but then Toombs and Logan would’ve been banging down our door because his comm’s last-known address would’ve been our building…

And, as much as what she’d seen in Pritchard’s account made her gorge rise, she’d never have gained access to it and wouldn’t be able to let the worlds know who had bombed the spaceport.

It was sickening to think that the violence of that night, including Kyra getting stabbed, might have been the best possible outcome.

I need out of this life…

Not life itself, she amended. Just this one.

But Ewan was in this life, and Kyra, and Sebby, and this amazing family…

And I can’t keep any of them. I’m gonna lose them all. Whether I stay or go, and if I try to stay it’ll probably end up being a much worse loss. The thought left her feeling strangled.

As much as she needed to go home, a huge part of her never wanted to leave this place and the family she’d found. The thought that she might, possibly, never see any of them again was hard to face.

She gathered her things, everything she would need for the day—including, she decided, her telescope—and isomorphed over to Elsewhere before leaving the room. She wasn’t in any condition to talk to anyone. She might start bawling her eyes out if she did.

The tide had only just receded, and was still close enough that she could hear it washing in and out nearby, as she reached the wet sand on the ground level. She hadn’t needed to concentrate quite as hard, this time, to keep the surfaces of U1 supporting her. Soon, she suspected, she’d be able to do it subconsciously, and then unconsciously as she continued practicing the new skill.

Okay, first things first, she told herself, aware that she was suddenly procrastinating. Look around New Marrakesh for anything still floating in Elsewhere that shouldn’t be… hopefully there won’t be anything to find, but if there is, hopefully I can get to it before anyone from Quintessa does…

Once that was done, she’d pick up another tablet to use just for her incursions into the Merc Network, and other parts of what her father had always called the Dark Zone and admonished her to stay far away from. She’d set up an account for her fictitious pervert, populate it with “gifts” from Pritchard, and then have the “perv” reach out to a variety of law enforcement and news agencies with just enough evidence to set everyone onto Pritchard’s and Makarov’s trail.

But before she did that, she reminded herself, she had to make sure anything Pritchard had learned about her, or about the Tomlin-Meziane family, was long gone from his account and unrecoverable.

Bonus if I can find something in there that connects him to the Quintessa Corporation and rains fire down on their heads if it comes out…

She pulled out her telescope and got down to business.

An hour later, she’d found several items that she and Kyra had unthinkingly thrown out during their first days in New Marrakesh, including the wigs they had worn that had been ruined by their first high tide. It took another hour to finish reaching all of them and bring them fully into Elsewhere. Her ruined video screen from the Matador, which someone had apparently salvaged from the trash for parts, forced her to carefully climb the phantom steps of a twelve-story building in order to retrieve it and all of its little pieces, something that gave her mild fear of heights an extreme workout and made her wish she’d asked Kyra to accompany her. She got it done, though, and even managed to resist the temptation to kiss the ground once she’d painstakingly made her way back down. As the waters continued to recede in Elsewhere, she followed them down into town, searching for anything small and fencible that one of the orderlies might have helped themselves to.

Nothing.

Maybe they only made the move when they realized they wouldn’t get another chance, she thought. They were supposed to inventory the bodies and personal effects to get them ready for transfer to the Quintessa Corporation… maybe that’s when someone decided to grab those earrings and the cash…

It more or less made sense. Especially if the thief had control over the inventory sheets and could make sure it looked like the missing items had never been there to begin with.

She hoped that was the case. Her life would be a whole lot easier if that were the case.

She did one final look around, sweeping the telescope across the area. Othman Tower and Mansour Plaza were still clear; none of the survivors had left anything behind when they’d been evacuated from either of those buildings. Same for the hospital tower. She swept wider—

…the fuck?…

Something was downtown, in one of the areas that housed fancy government offices and high-powered corporate headquarters. She zoomed in on it as much as the telescope would permit.

Three stories up, within an elegant glass building, hovered at least a dozen small—

Cubes.

“Fuck me,” Jack muttered, putting away the telescope and heading downtown.

There were more apeirochorons in New Marrakesh.

Elsewhere’s tide hadn’t fully receded when she reached the glass building, and she had to slosh through its hip-deep waters as she crossed the final city blocks. It didn’t come as a surprise to her that the corporate logo on the entrance was for the Quintessa Corporation.

Inside, the place looked almost like a movie set for one of the dystopian sci-fi vids her cousins had loved. Everything was shiny and brand-new looking, displaying none of the signs of weathering and use that even her mother’s luxe legal offices had shown. A well-coiffed and impossibly beautiful woman—too beautiful and far too poised to be anything but synthetic—waited to greet people entering the building; well-armed security guards were stationed near every entrance and every doorway further in. An ordinary burglar would never have been able to get past the front doors, she suspected.

But did any of their security extend past U1? The boxes, after all, did.

She kept her movements slow and careful as she crossed the floor, studying everything. So far, nothing on the ground level seemed to exist outside of U1. At least, nothing existed within that space in Elsewhere except salty air and sloshing tidewaters over sand, rocks, and shells. Did they have any kind of map up somewhere, she wondered, as she tried to decide which doorway might lead to a staircase or some other way of reaching the third story without slipping back into U1.

There weren’t any maps or floor plans where she could find them. Not even the ones usually required by Federacy fire codes.

It took her half an hour of quartering the ground level, as cautiously as she could, before she found stairs leading up, tucked into the back of the building. She climbed them with painstaking slowness, studying her surroundings for any sign of anything that could see or reach into Elsewhere, knots slowly twisting their way into her nerves.

Nobody knows I’m here, she thought. It was both reassuring—the Corporation had no idea it was being infiltrated—and distressing. The whole family thinks I’m at the apartment building…

Hopefully this wouldn’t be as stupid a move as she suddenly worried it was.

She took a deep breath as she reached the third story. The floor held her up, but she was starting to feel the full effects of her intense level of concentration. She’d need to find some food to eat, and a place to sit quietly for a while, when she was done here. This shit was taxing.

The cubes floated ahead of her in the space of Elsewhere, hidden behind walls in U1. She passed through those walls easily, avoiding one area that she already knew contained elevator shafts. The walls, to her, were just phantom layers between her and her quarry. She just couldn’t see what else existed in the space with the cubes until she was finally through all of those walls and inside the room that held them.

A laboratory. A laboratory inside a thick steel vault.

One of the cubes was sitting on a counter; the others were stored inside a large cabinet. The walls of the cabinet in U1 blocked her from seeing what else might be inside in that ’verse. In Elsewhere, the cubes simply hung in space, seeming to defy the laws of physics.

They were made of the same strange material as the one she’d encountered in the Scarlet Matador. Up close, they were even stranger. Metal? Stone? She couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe both. Aware that there was a camera in the room, she bypassed the cube on the counter for the moment, reached through the phantom cabinet door, and tried to lift one.

Light. Weird… given the fight the other one gave me, I was expecting it to be super heavy…

But its density was not in any one universe, she realized.

An apeirochoron simultaneously exists in every universe, occupying the same isomorphic point in spacetime in each…

How did she know that?

With a chill, she realized that they had told her that at some point, in one of the dreams that she could mostly, but not completely, remember. They had shown her an apeirochoron when they’d asked her what kinds of locks she knew how to break. And, at some point, they had whispered the rules of its existence to her, most of which she still couldn’t consciously recall.

But unlike the last one she’d encountered, these boxes, she saw, had lids. Unlike the sealed box of her dreams, and the one she’d played an almost-deadly tug-of-war with inside the Matador, they could be opened.

It was only after she lifted the first lid that she wondered if she’d just opened Pandora’s box.

Now, that’s just dumb, she told herself after nothing happened.

She put the base of the box back down, careful to set it exactly where she had picked it up from, held the lid up and away, and reached inside.

Her fingers touched something that felt like a large brooch or badge. It existed on both sides of the threshold, both in Elsewhere and U1.

Motherfuckers already had some souvenirs, she thought, shifting the object all the way into Elsewhere and pulling it out of the box and cabinet.

It was, she realized, a crew badge, complete with Captain’s bars, that had belonged to Octavia Rehnquist, the late captain of the Scarlet Matador. She, along with the rest of the crew, had been among the eighteen dead, too deeply—and deliberately—sedated to save themselves when Elsewhere’s high tide had overtaken their hospital floor. This wasn’t a souvenir; it was a murder trophy.

You absolute fuckers…

She shoved it into her pocket. She’d take it away from the building before tossing it into Elsewhere’s retreating sea, where hopefully nobody from Quintessa could ever find it.

Slowly, carefully, she opened box after box and removed the items inside: a baby’s pacifier, a soldier’s dog-tags, someone’s asthma inhaler, a cigarette lighter, a signet ring, and much more besides. She stuffed most of the items into her pack after realizing there was no way she could carry all of it in her pockets. Just as she was resettling the lid on the last of the boxes within the cabinet, she heard a soft chime and saw the security panel by the massive steel door into the lab change from red to green. The door opened a moment later as she shrugged her pack back on and slipped the second-to-last of the murder trophies, someone’s chrono, into her pocket to join the captain’s badge.

I got done not even a second too soon.

Two technicians walked into the room, followed by the Quintessa envoy.

Bitch has a real thing for wearing white, Jack thought, studying her.

The woman was at least sixty years old, probably older. She was short, around fifteen centimeters, or six inches, shorter than Jack. The shape of her face was not all that dissimilar from Kyra’s, although her nose wasn’t as narrow and her chin had no hint of a cleft like Jack’s sister’s, and her cheekbones were a bit more pronounced. She had blue eyes and snow-white hair that was unusually thick and straight for someone with so much age on her face. She wore it long, barely contained by a loose, translucent off-white scarf worn almost like a shayla but crafted more like a dupatta. Jack wondered if she was wearing that as a perfunctory gesture to the local culture, or if it had any special meaning to her.

Surely, if she had any empathy for the local culture, she wouldn’t have let her mercs dress in anything but white for Tomlin’s memorial, though. It was enlightening to see that white was what she seemed to wear all the time; she hadn’t been making any kind of special effort for the sake of Tomlin’s family and friends. She still looked like she was dressed to upstage some wedding’s hapless bride.

Only part of the envoy was in U1. As before, portions of the space she should have occupied were occluded by a malevolent darkness that no one but Jack seemed to be able to perceive. She hadn’t been able to see it, herself, when she’d been fully present in U1 at the memorial. That had been a mercy.

“I’d like to begin right away with testing,” the envoy was saying to one of the technicians in her Mary Poppins accent. “I need to understand what’s so different about this incident. You’re sure that containment has been holding for the last week?”

“Everything’s been fine, Ma’am,” the technician replied. “No anomalies recorded. The kirshbaumium is stable, as always—almost always, sorry. We waited for you before opening any of the boxes again, though.”

Jack, feeling her heart begin to race, walked over to the box on the counter and stood next to it. Whatever was inside was the final item she needed to rescue. And it had nearly been too late to do so. She was glad she’d gotten to the other boxes first, though. If she did this right, they might never be sure that the contents hadn’t simply vanished at the same time as the bodies.

“Let’s begin,” the envoy said, nodding toward the last—or, to them, first—box.

The technician pulled on a pair of protective gloves and picked up a large, heavy pair of forceps before walking over to where Jack waited. He lifted the lid on the box and slid the forceps inside, starting to draw out a pearl necklace.

As soon as there was room for her fingers, Jack leaned forward, snagged the necklace, and pulled it into Elsewhere.

“What the hell?” the technician gasped. “It was here! I felt it! And now it’s—”

“Lock down the building,” the Envoy snapped, going deathly pale. “I want no one in or out. I want a three-block cordon. Now!”

Clutching the string of pearls in her hand, Jack passed through the vault’s thick walls and raced for the stairs, feeling suddenly like she was running for her life.

She took the phantom stairs much too fast, especially given that only the steps themselves were tangible to her. Fortunately, she was only half a story above ground level when she inevitably careened through the stairwell’s phantom back wall, and the wet sand of Elsewhere cushioned her fall.

As she limped away from the scene of her latest crime, she hoped the pain in her ankle would be something she could walk off and wouldn’t have to explain to anybody.