The Changeling Game, Chapter 47

47.
Princess With a Thousand Enemies

“You hear back yet from any of the places you reached out to?”

Kyra glanced over at Jack as she slipped off her shirt. For a brief moment, she seemed to hesitate. “One or two. Why?”

Jack felt an odd mixture of relief and concern. Kyra seemed to be hiding something from her, but she wasn’t sure what. “General Toal told me that we shouldn’t waste any time getting offworld if we can help it. He thinks all the disasters that have happened here in the last few weeks are gonna bring down some esper-hunters, in addition to the Operatives he mentioned at dinner.”

Kyra grimaced. “That does not sound good. Does that mess with your timetable?”

“It shouldn’t. I leave for New Casablanca in three morning-days. And I’ll be offworld before—”

“Hold up. Don’t tell me.” Kyra’s smile was wry. “I’m not supposed to know, remember? We can’t spill—”

“What we don’t know, yeah,” Jack sighed. The idea that she was leaving Kyra behind, and couldn’t even know for sure whether her sister’s future was secure, bothered the hell out of her. Especially now that she had the sense that Kyra was hiding something more from her than just a chosen destination. “How about you?” she asked after a moment. “No specifics, but… what’s it looking like?”

“I’m giving it one more day,” Kyra said. “My first choice hasn’t responded yet… so I’m gonna give them a little more time before I accept an offer. Not too much, though. I don’t want the other offers going away, especially if our timeline is tight all of a sudden.”

Jack tied the sash on her bathrobe and looked around. “Have you seen Sebby?”

“Not since he plowed through his crickets before dinner, no.”

The cricket tub was completely empty.

The initial search of the bedroom turned up nothing until Jack, mindful of Sebby’s fondness for playing under furniture, looked under the bed. What she pulled out stunned both her and Kyra.

A complete, Sebby-shaped exoskeleton with a large hole in its front.

“Holy shit,” Kyra breathed.

“Sebby molted?” Jack looked around, carefully setting the exuviae on top of the bedspread. “Where is he?”

“Sebby?” Kyra called out. “Baby? Where are you?”

Reeeeeeeee… The bathroom.

Now the size of a large housecat, Sebby had managed to open the shower stall and was trying, with very little success, to crawl up the wall to turn on the faucets. Jack leaned in and turned them on for him, getting the water to his favorite temperature. He began to bounce and wriggle beneath the stream, doing what she and Kyra had come to call the Sebby Dance.

“We’re gonna need a bigger cricket tub,” Jack marveled.

“Shit, Tizzy, what are we gonna do about him? I don’t think I can take him with me. Can you?”

“No,” she sighed. “And there’s still so much we don’t know about him, isn’t there? Part of me is tempted to ask Cedric and Safiyya if they can keep him, but…”

“But not after what the General told us tonight, right?” Kyra looked stricken.

General Toal and Jack hadn’t returned to the ait Meziane house until almost dinnertime, well after the story they’d carefully planted had begun to break wide. They had spent several hours monitoring its development and giving little nudges to some of its aspects as things progressed. Astonishingly, she’d managed to eat the light lunch Takama had packed for them, but keeping it down had been difficult at times.

Confronted with the compelling—and horrifying—evidence about the identity of the New Marrakesh Spaceport Bomber, and the nature of his other heinous crimes, the news agencies had begun scrambling to scoop each other and be first to report as many salacious details as they could legally spill. Law enforcement had initially been far more cautious, but within an hour, the names Javor Makarov and Duke Pritchard were circulating freely in both news reports and law enforcement press releases about two “persons of interest” in the bombing… and other crimes, besides.

Soon after, Amnesty Interplanetary’s local chapter issued its own press release, disclosing that it was investigating allegations of human rights violations the two suspects might have engaged in while transporting fugitives and prisoners.

It took less than half an hour beyond that for law enforcement to secure a warrant for the data files of the fictitious pervert Jack and the General had created, which contained a larger and more damning cache of images than had originally been sent out to the news agencies, along with a cross-section of Pritchard’s favorite videos. That cache contained more than enough explicit detail to give investigators probable cause to serve the Merc Network itself with a new round of warrants.

Right as Jack and General Toal were preparing to leave the apartment and return to the ait Meziane house, the story exploded. Several of the pictures their fictional sicko claimed he’d been sent by Pritchard, and one of the videos, “starred” a girl who had just been identified as Luljeta Kamberi. She was a high-profile murder victim from the Tito System, a girl who had disappeared from New Kosovo three years earlier and whose mutilated remains had been discovered a year later. Jack remembered reading about her and seeing the wave of Stranger Danger PSA vids that had circulated in response. She hadn’t recognized the girl’s face in Pritchard’s vile image collection because the pain and terror twisting it had distorted it too much from the sweet, smiling portrait always shared in the media.

Both Pritchard and Makarov, according to the backroom law enforcement chatter Jack and the General had been monitoring, were known to have been bounty hunting in New Kosovo at that time, pursuing a woman who “starred” in another violent image and vid collection… and whose bounty was still open and unclaimed. There had been no further sightings of her since approximately the same time that twelve-year-old Luljeta had vanished.

The phrase “sexual predators” had begun to give way to “serial killers” in the backroom chatter. Soon after, someone leaked the Luljeta Kamberi connection to the press.

“This…” General Toal had said with some trepidation, “just escalated to a Federacy case. Their crimes now cross enough planetary jurisdictions that no one else can claim authority. I think nothing the Mercenary Network tries to do now will prevent law enforcement from gaining access to those accounts. Not when so much evidence is appearing that these two men have been using the Network’s resources, for years, to commit some truly heinous atrocities. Not when every planetary embassy on Tangiers Prime begins demanding access to see if any of their worlds’ missing daughters are featured in similar collections. I had honestly believed all their victims were alive somewhere, but this discovery changes everything.”

“That means Operatives are definitely gonna be coming, too, doesn’t it?” Jack felt chilled and hollow, aware that she and Kyra had come all too close to sharing Luljeta’s grisly fate. Not one of the nauseating threats Pritchard had made to her had been empty.

“I imagine they will be here within the week, yes. And they will be going over everything that is known about the events leading up to the spaceport explosion.” He’d bored into her with his gaze as he said that. “We need to make absolutely sure there’s nothing left that can lead them to you, or your sister, or the family we both care about that has been protecting you.”

“Is there any way to prevent that last part? I mean, their whole mission that day was to murder Colonel Tomlin.”

“I honestly don’t know. But we must conceal any sign that he was anything more than an inconvenient witness to the cover-up of a Level Five Incident, and especially that he was protecting and hiding survivors of the Incident.”

Or, in fact, that there had been any survivors at all.

Dinner table conversation, that evening as the sun set, had centered around the different handles that might still be sticking out to point investigators toward the ait Meziane tribe and the Rif in general. That was also when the General had, as gently as he could, informed everyone that neither “Dihya” nor “Tislilel” could remain on Tangiers Prime for much longer. The other Matador survivors were to stay hidden, in as remote parts of the New Atlas range as possible, but the two espers in their number had to put as many light years as they could between themselves and the unfolding investigation… and the Federacy Operatives who would soon be part of it. And, most essential and terrible of all, none of the people they left behind could know where they were going or how to reach them.

Most of the family had looked stricken; Ewan had looked devastated. It had been hard for Jack to meet his eyes, and even harder to look away once she did.

Everything connected to Elsewhere, they all finally—if reluctantly—agreed, needed to be gone from New Marrakesh before the Operatives arrived. Including the driftwood, coral, and shells Jack and Kyra had collected. Including Sebby.

Now, Jack reached into the shower and carefully stroked Sebby’s still-hardening new carapace. “We’re gonna have to take him home. Morning after Ewan’s send-off… we need to take him back to Elsewhere, where he belongs. Before anybody in the investigation hears about him and realizes he doesn’t belong to this ’verse.”

She felt like something had reached into her chest, gripped her heart, and begun crushing it.

“Yeah,” Kyra agreed, her voice cracking. “I don’t see anything else we can do.”

“I figure he’s from somewhere up in the heights,” Jack managed to continue after a moment. “Some ninety meters above sea level. That’s where the wave must’ve caught him. We get some good elevation maps, and we can figure out the best spots to try. Maybe, once we’re there, he’ll know where to go.”

“Maybe…” Kyra leaned against her and reached in to pet Sebby, too. “What if he doesn’t? What if he’s too domesticated now?”

Jack winced. It wasn’t a thought she liked. “Then we bring him back with us, and we ask Takama to have someone take him to the other Matador survivors and have them take care of him. Some of them know how to switch between ’verses pretty well. They can… I dunno… do a soft release once he gets used to his own world again…”

Sebby turned and crawled onto their kneeling legs, trying to nuzzle both of their abdomens at the same time. His reeeeeee was oddly plaintive.

“Oh… fuck…” Kyra gasped. Jack could feel tears starting in her own eyes as she watched them sliding down Kyra’s cheeks. “He knows… he knows what we’re talking about doing…”

Jack nodded, struggling not to start crying as she stroked the length of Sebby’s soft new exoskeleton. The tears slipped out anyway. “We love you, Sebby. We don’t want to leave you, but… bad things are happening and we’re going to have to go somewhere we can’t take you. I promise you, we’re going to find you a good place to be, first. A place you can be happy…”

Reeeeeeee… Jack thought she could almost hear real words in it. Happy with you…

Had Riddick felt like this, she wondered, when he was preparing to leave her behind? Was that why he’d slipped away like a thief in the night rather than say goodbye?

She and Kyra both took extra-long showers so that Sebby could keep dancing in the water at their feet. Jack wished she had eight more legs so that she could do the Sebby Dance along with him properly.

There would be no record of this dance, except in her and Kyra’s memories, after they parted. General Toal had been clear. No pictures, no vids, no souvenirs. They couldn’t take any with them and couldn’t leave any for the ait Meziane family to remember them by. Anything that could ever link them to this time and place had to be destroyed or left in Elsewhere. When they left, they had to vanish like ghosts.

Jack, at least, wouldn’t need pictures or souvenirs to remember these moments clearly, but she could see how distressed everyone else was… especially Ewan.

And she could feel how upset Kyra was behind her deadpan… until her sister began inexplicably blocking the connection between them.

Maybe that was because of the awful anecdote that the General had also shared with them.

“Many years ago,” he’d told the group at the table, “I heard the story of a young woman who had been a witness to a terrible crime and was placed in protective custody until she could testify against its perpetrators. She was hidden away, and only allowed periodic, controlled contact with her family, through elaborate channels designed to keep anyone from tracing her whereabouts. Her mother worried a great deal about her and, as time wore on, became increasingly desperate to make sure that she was all right. She began to beg her daughter to tell her something, anything, about where she was or how she was doing.”

His gaze had swept the table, fixing on each person as he continued. “Eventually, the young woman caved. Her handler did not discover it until much later, but she told her mother the name of the city she was living in.”

Cedric, Ewan, and Usadden all winced.

“For a while, nothing seemed amiss,” General Toal continued. “But her mother subscribed to the city’s local news service, checking its headlines and weather reports every day. After a time, that …quirk… came to the attention of the wrong people. They now knew which city to search for their quarry. After a few more weeks, they found the young woman they had been hunting. And then, not long after that poor, worried mother saw a headline about a fatal house fire in the feed she had subscribed to, she learned that it was her own daughter who had died in that fire.”

The table had remained silent, everyone seated at it looking aghast.

“I’m telling you this story so that you will understand how important it is not to know where either Dihya or Tislilel have gone, and not to try to find out. As difficult and painful as it is, and I do understand how painful it is…”

After all, Jack had thought, his own son’s been missing for almost a decade.

“…all ties between you and them must be cut, for everyone’s safety.”

Safiyya, in particular, seemed to be struggling to find an argument against that. Ewan looked exactly the way he had when Jack had first seen him at his brother’s memorial: crushed by loss.

“They do not have to leave tonight,” the General continued. “That would be precipitous and might draw attention to the fact that they were fleeing something. But they should stay no longer than another week, and should time their departures to coincide with those of other family members who are going back to the New Atlas range… or returning to their duties after taking time off for Gavin Brahim’s memorial.” His eyes fixed on Ewan for a moment.

Everyone had been quiet and somber for the rest of the evening, even as those departures were being solidified. In one Tangiers day, after night fell and Qamar was in the right part of the sky, Ewan would be returning to the flight academy. His grandparents, Izil, and Lalla would be leaving for the New Atlas mountains the evening-day after that. And, the General decided, he would escort the two of them to the high-speed rail station the following morning-day, where they would depart for destinations no one could know.

Jack, who had told him about her ticket to the New Casablanca spaceport, was not allowed to ask what Kyra’s destination would be. Kyra had already known about that ticket, but wasn’t allowed to know where Jack was going from there. In fact, General Toal had forbidden her to tell him, either. It all made sense…

But she was plagued by the terrible suspicion that Kyra didn’t have a destination yet. Was that what her sister was hiding?

The whole thing had become terribly, depressingly imminent. Even though Tangiers Prime had always been intended as just a way-station, even though Jack had been reminding herself since before Tomlin’s death that she couldn’t stay and needed to move on…

The prospect of leaving was still far more painful than she’d ever expected it would be.

It took her a long time to fall asleep.

She dreamed, at first, about wandering empty halls and rooms, seeking someone, anyone. Some of the rooms were from the ait Meziane house, others from her mother’s house or her father’s apartment; once she even found herself back in the apartment she and Kyra had shared. But all the rooms were empty. No people, no furniture, no life.

Everything, it seemed, had been lost.

Except, on one floor, she found a poster lying face down. She turned it over.

Minnie Sulis
A Night of Magic
One Night Only

A SOLD OUT sticker had been plastered on top of the ticketing information. The face of the woman on the poster stunned Jack.

Kyra. An older, slightly curvier Kyra with gold hair and thinner, lighter eyebrows, dressed in a sparkling, multicolored corset and top hat. A dove crouched on the raised palm of her left hand, wings spread and preparing to take flight. Above the cupped fingers of her right hand, a glowing crystal sphere hovered.

Kyra’s mother, Jack realized. Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier, better known to late twenty-first century America by her stage name, much as her real esper abilities had been concealed behind the mannered artifice of stage magic.

General Toal still hasn’t told Kyra about her mother, Jack thought. I have to remind him to…

But Kyra—actual Kyra, but just a little girl—was lifting the poster out of a box. The room was no longer empty. It was small, cramped, dominated by a large bed. The box had come out from deep beneath it. The windows were shut, but through them Jack could hear a low roar, like the ocean but steady rather than tidal. She walked to one window and looked out.

Gray, gray, gray. Gray buildings towering on every side, rising up to blot out the sky. Gray pavement below, choked with vehicles, the source of the steady roar and the periodic, strident sounds of horns. Gray air, putting a hint of a metallic taste in her throat. Gray sky peeking through the spaces between skyscrapers, haze making the buildings themselves fade away into nothing at their peaks.

New York City, 2087. The year Kyra had said goodbye to the world of her birth.

Kyra set the poster aside, lifting up the spangled corset beneath it and running her fingers over its gemmy beads and sequins. The moment was charged with magic and nostalgia; to her, there were no riches or treasures in the ’verse that could compare to the glittering fabric in her hands, and there never would be. She put it in her lap and surveyed the other treasures in the box: a crystal ball, a tarot deck, a set of playing cards tipped with sharp metal edges, a compressed black top hat—

“What are you into now?” a man’s scolding voice said behind her. “Oh, for the love of—Min! Min!”

Kyra, curled up on her side on her own bed, head pressed to her pillow, a stuffed bunny clutched to her chest with one hand while the other pressed over her exposed ear, trying to blot out the shouting.

“You said you’d gotten rid of that devilry! Now you’re letting it corrupt our daughter!”

“It’s just—”

“You can’t bring it with us! Either you belong to God or to the devil, Min! Choose!”

Min… Mommy… crying later when she thought no one would hear…

The box, when Kyra next sneaked into her parents’ bedroom to pull it out again and play with the things inside, was no longer there.

Filling a small box of her own, not long after, as her father lectured her. “We can’t take much, but we don’t need much. God will provide. Take only what’s most important… why are you packing that?”

…the stuffed bunny, worn and much beloved, lying forlornly on the bed as she left her bedroom for the last time and struggled not to cry… another lost treasure that no worldly riches could ever compare to…

Lost.

Forever.

Gray, and more gray, more than two years of gray, wandering the cramped halls of a stern and chilly spaceship. The other children were so alien to her, so different from the kids she’d known at her first school, mostly pious cookie-cutter duplicates of each other and dull to talk to. Her school lessons were alien, too. She was still learning to read, now from a book called Bible Stories for Children, but the other subjects, the ones she’d liked most, were gone. No art period, no gymnastics, no learning about plants and animals…

The boys got to learn about plants and animals. Her older brother played with construction and chemistry sets she was forbidden to even touch. The boys got to run and jump, tumble and kick, and throw and hit balls. But she wasn’t allowed anymore.

The gray world of the colony ship was a coffin.

Green, at last. The green world her father had said God promised them. Yet somehow all the grown-ups were angry about it. Even as they talked about God’s providence, even as they told the children to rejoice at having real grass under their feet and real trees above their heads… nine-year-old Kyra could feel how furious they all were. They felt cheated somehow. Her mother hushed her when she asked why, fear sparking in her eyes.

Chores, endless chores to make the days turn gray again. Washing and cooking and cleaning, none of which her brother ever had to do. Gardening, at least, wasn’t bad. But if she let the dirt stay under her nails, her father shouted at her. “Unclean” was an epithet that meant God would hate her. When she figured out what she needed to do and be for God to like her, she wasn’t sure she wanted Him to.

She would steal away after each day’s chores to learn the things that her brother was allowed to learn, but that no one would teach her. It was painstaking work, with no one to help her figure out her mistakes. She resolved that she just couldn’t make any…

…Disappearing into the green, whenever she could get away, to climb the trees and follow the animals’ trails… to run and tumble and kick unseen by anyone but those who could never betray her secrets…

…Sometimes she stole paper and pencils so she could draw detailed pictures of the plants and animals she had seen in the woods, try to capture the beauty of the valley that spread below Canaan Mountain, or reproduce the faces of her family and the few people she considered anything like friends. She kept them hidden from everyone, and learned how to switch hands and hold the pencils in a variety of ways when her father sharply queried her about the writing callus she was developing on one finger. As a girl, he said, she didn’t need to learn how to write, or read anything more than the Good Book…

One day, as she sketched the valley from the perspective of a high tree branch, twelve years old, huge vehicles began to arrive, arraying themselves around the Enclave. Tense-looking men emerged from one vehicle and marched toward the gates…

Her mother, still so beautiful but her face increasingly lined with sorrow, stress, and murdered dreams, gathered her into a fierce hug when she stole home later. “Where have you been? I’ve been so worried…”

The vehicles remained arrayed around the Enclave. Kyra wasn’t allowed out anymore; none of the children were. Bad men were outside, she was told, and they would do terrible things to her if they caught her.

But first, they must catch you…

Her mother had read that to her once from a book she’d found and pilfered from her cousin Joren’s library shelves, back on Earth, because it had rabbits on the cover. Mommy could only read her parts of it when no one else was home, but her father had snatched it away from them, shouting, when he’d come home early and caught them with it. Kyra still didn’t know how it ended. The book was connected, in her heart, to that lost and mourned stuffed bunny, whose official name had been Patches but who, secretly, she’d called El-Ahrairah…

But first, they must catch you.

She knew all the hidden ways through the forest around the Enclave, and had known how to get in and out, unseen, for years. The bad men never caught her, never even saw her.

…until…

Fire. Smoke. Blood. Screaming. Kyra reloaded, aimed at one of the bad men and pulled the trigger, watching just long enough to make sure he fell and didn’t rise. She moved on before anyone could fire back, finding another place to aim from, another bad man to aim at…

…Struggling in their grip as they dragged her into a courtyard, her shirt torn away and one of them painfully twisting her hair in his fist. Her mother, cornered by three more of the bad men, had her hands out, holding them up in a gesture that Kyra remembered from a time when she was little and, one day while her father and brother were both away at some church event, the brooms had danced. But her face crumpled and she began to cry.

“No…” Min—Mommy—sobbed. “I won’t… I can’t… I won’t let the devil back in me…”

The men laughed.

“You’re gonna have my devil in you in a minute, bitch,” one of them said, reaching forward to grasp the fabric of her dress—

“Oh God… MOMMY…”

Jack woke up with a start.

Kyra, next to her on the bed, whimpered again. “Mommy…”

Her dream, she realized, had been Kyra’s dream, now morphing into a terrible nightmare as the standoff and massacre unfolded again in her mind.

“Kyra,” she murmured, touching her shoulder. “Wake up. It’s okay. You’re not there…”

“No,” Kyra whisper-sobbed. “I have to save her… have to save us…”

But there had been no way for twelve-year-old Kyra to do that… and there was no way now for sixteen-year-old Kyra to do it either.

Is she going to be ruled by these nightmares after we’re separated? Oh fuck…

Only knowing that she had to do something, Jack leaned close, put her arms around Kyra, closed her eyes…

…and dove back into her sister’s mind the way she could dive into the mindspace the Apeiros inhabited.

She was back in the New Christy Enclave. She froze the moment and rolled it backward, feeling Kyra’s initial resistance and then assent. Turn back time, turn it back, please undo what was done…

The battle began, all over again.

But now it was different.

As Red Roger’s bad men poured into the Enclave…

…Riddick rose to meet them.