84.
The Götterdämmerung Trolley

“Do you see now? Who and what you are?”

Riddick hadn’t been visited by Shirah in a while. Now she stood in front of him again, the expression on her hawklike face intent. Around them an enormous graveyard spread out, tombstones covering hillsides and valleys.

“I know what you are,” he told her. “Still not sure what you think I’m supposed to be. This place even real?”

A slow smile spread over her face. “At last, you’re beginning to pay attention. Very good. And no, no graveyard such as this exists on Furya, but if all of the people Zhylaw killed had headstones raised to them, it would look a lot like this.”

“So I’m dreaming right now,” Riddick observed. “And you’ve pulled me into your mental space, the way your brothers and sisters pull Jack into theirs.” He paused, looking around, thinking it over. “Zhylaw. That was the name of the Lord Marshal I killed. The one who attacked our world.”

“I hope that today wasn’t the first time you realized that,” she said, a mirthless smile appearing on her face.

“Just the first day I’ve had all the pieces to the puzzle in my hands,” he countered. “See, here I thought you wanted me to destroy the Necros for you, but the whole time, you just wanted me to take them away from him.”

“I have no enmity for my brother. But he has never reined in the corruption of his vessels. The worse they behave, the more they confirm what he wishes to believe about all humanity.”

“How come you wear a human face?” Riddick asked her. It was still weird to realize what she really was. He’d seen how the Apeiros had puppeted Jack, but Shirah moved so naturally in her borrowed body that it was hard to believe she hadn’t been born in it.

“I have no other to wear anymore,” she told him, a mock-flirtatious smile appearing. “Don’t you like it? I’ve been told it’s very pretty.”

“It’s pretty. Whose was it?”

“Her name was Aiyana, and she lives in me still,” Shirah told him. “They all live on in me. Four hundred years of light-wielders.”

“Light bearer, light bringer, light wielder…” He shook his head. “The light ain’t where I belong.”

She shook her head right back at him. “When you walk into the darkness, Riddick, what is it you think you bring with you?”

“Death.”

Shirah laughed, gesturing around her at the tombstones. “You couldn’t even fill one of these fields. You’re not heartless enough.”

“No?” For a moment he felt insulted.

“Don’t pout, my Lightbringer. You are a warrior. But if you were the kind who could lay waste to whole worlds, who could wish to…” Her smile lit up her face, for a moment almost reminding him of Jack’s smile. “…I would never have marked you as one of mine.”

“Nobody owns me,” he growled.

“Nobody?” Shirah sounded both curious and teasing. “Not even her?”

For a moment he could see Jack, fast asleep beside him, wrapped in darkness and sheets and his arms, her sweat-soaked blonde hair tousled from more than an hour of intense… what, exactly? Fucking? Lovemaking? Something in between?

“She’d never try to.”

“And yet you spent five years alone in a cold wilderness for her. A year turning over every stone in your path… for her. Does none of that make you hers?” Shirah sat down on one of the tombstones, watching him with curiosity.

“The fuck do you care?” he demanded, wishing he could find a doorway out of the dream. She was really starting to piss him off.

“Both of you have been called to this war,” she told him, a look of pity on her face, “but you have very different roles to play in it. No matter how you may try, your destinies will never be entwined.”

“I’m gettin’ really fuckin’ sick of all this destiny bullshit,” he growled. “You, the Moribund, Lucy, the rest of the Apeiros… How the fuck do you know what’s coming?”

“I hatched into my six-shape more than four hundred years ago,” she told him, her expression sobering. “And the Demons of the Darkness came for me and for my brothers and sisters. You know what they did to us. But what they set into motion, in the doing of it, is far worse. Every universe will end, Riddick, if their act isn’t negated. Worlds are already breaking thanks to them. They do not care. There is only one pathway left, for any of us, if anything is to survive. One sequence of events that can stop it. If you choose not to play your part, maybe another will step forward, or maybe all the worlds will fall and everything will end. It’s time for you to choose. If not for me… for her.”

As she had spoken, the graveyard around them had vanished, replaced by a starfield not unlike the one inhabited by the Apeiros in Jack’s dreams. But, he suddenly realized, the stars weren’t stars at all. Each bright light was an entire universe, locked in an intricate dance with all of the others… and the lights were failing. One after another, they guttered and died like burned out candles. Emptiness spread, a cold and terrible void that had no beginning or end and would devour everything…

Another graveyard. The last graveyard.

“Destiny,” he heard Shirah say, “or oblivion. Choose now, before the choice is taken from us all.”

He woke, gasping. “Fuck…”

Beside him on the bed, Jack slept on, one hand curled against her cheek, a slight smile touching her lips. She looked far too fragile to be some kind of warrior of light anywhere in the destiny everybody was spinning, too innocent. But he knew that was an illusion. She was stronger than she knew… if not quite strong enough yet.

It was hard for him to even articulate what had happened between them, what it meant, where it might go… but Jack had awakened a surprising hunger within him, which she’d then somehow managed to sate as well. He’d never, ever had a sexual partner take over from him and run the show before…

…and he was surprised by just how much he had liked it.

But he’d come dangerously close to dropping his shields and letting her see everything, including all the things that she could never know.

He lay beside her for a while, contemplating waking her to tell her about Shirah’s visit. There was so much she wasn’t supposed to know yet, though.

After a moment, he climbed out of bed and padded into the bathroom.

The room had changed somehow. He looked around, frowning and trying to figure out what was different about it. When he finally spotted the difference, he was amazed that it had taken him so long to see it.

Near the enormous bathtub, practically a swimming pool, some deranged sculptor had erected a statue of a grim-looking man peeling off his own skin. Riddick had made a point of covering the damned thing up with towels and spare bathrobes so that he didn’t have to contemplate it on his way to the shower room.

The towels and robes were folded up neatly on a bench nearby. The statue itself was simply gone.

The damned thing had been enormous, made of solid black marble.

He walked over to the space it had occupied.

Part of the base was still on the floor, smoothly blending in with the marble tiling all around it, a solid slab of polished stone level with the rest of the floor.

“That’s some fuckin’ skill she’s got,” he muttered to himself after a moment. Glancing around the room, he spotted other smooth places in the stone where gruesome carvings had disappeared.

Wait a second…

He’d walked right past it on his way back into the rooms, so intent upon his need to hold Jack, to lose himself in her, that he hadn’t even noticed what else had been lost. The centerpiece of the receiving room, a statue depicting torture that he’d covered over with equally disgusting tapestries for more than a year…

…that had been gone too.

The tapestries, as he recalled, hadn’t been folded up; they’d simply been gone as well. He wouldn’t miss any of them.

With all the Grand Guignol elements of the rooms stripped away, what was left had an almost Art Deco feel. He liked it. Looking around, he spotted other evidence of how Jack had spent her time while he was recruiting friends for her, and possibly how they had spent time once their breakfast was over: piles of women’s clothing, and some men’s clothing that was definitely not his, had been carefully folded up and arranged in a corner, along with baskets full of odds and ends: toiletries, strange pieces of jewelry, other things that Jack obviously had no interest in and intended to have cleared out. One dressing table had been set up with an array of basic-looking grooming supplies and even a few pieces of makeup that she’d apparently decided were worth keeping. The rest of the clutter had vanished.

Nice.

A few baskets and piles, he noticed, had papers on top with names scrawled on them, in eyeliner if he wasn’t mistaken: Poly, Lola, Vanessa. Items that she’d apparently set aside for them.

I’ll let the Ennead Kids go through the rest of the stuff before it’s all carted off, he decided. Who knew what they might want? The thing he liked most of all was seeing just how little interest Jack had in material possessions, aside from those things that would be most useful.

There was, he realized, one more labeled pile. He hadn’t expected it to hurt so much to look at. Kyra.

She was saving some things for Kyra.

“Fuck.” Even now it was hard to resist his certainty that Kyra was dead.

He moved on to the shower room, noticing that Jack had placed a small collection of toiletries, along with a long-handled bath brush he’d never seen before, by one of the showerheads a few heads down from his. She appeared to have adjusted the temperature settings of that head to suit her, too. No surprise that she’d need to; he didn’t burn and had his showerhead set to what one of his foster mothers had always called “devil hot.”

He was most of the way through his shower when Jack turned on the water near him and began her own. He couldn’t resist turning to watch her as he rinsed off.

He liked how tall she was, her eye level only two or three inches below his. It had frustrated her, in her memories, that so many men found her height intimidating, but he didn’t. It was, he decided, a turn-on, and not the only one. She was slender but athletic, good muscle tone throughout her body. She had a runner’s legs—no surprise from all her memories of track meets—and he had the suspicion that she might even have succeeded in her goal of being able to not merely keep up with him but outrun him.

Not that I’ve been slacking off…

He wanted to bury himself inside her all over again. As much as he kept being afraid she’d break in his hands, that wasn’t what happened. She’d spent five years—even her sleeper year—training to fight in a war, even if the particulars of that war were still being withheld from her. In some ways she was every bit as strong as him.

He’d drifted over to her stream as he contemplated her. She was rinsing her hair, eyes closed against any shampoo suds that might try to slide into them, head tilted back. Soaked and plastered to her head, her blonde hair looked nearly brown, the way it would become if she remained trapped in the Basilica and cut off from the sun. He let his hunger for her slip through his shields so that she would know he was there before he slid his arms around her and pressed his lips to her throat.

Her answering spike in arousal almost undid him on the spot. She slipped her arms around his shoulders, one hand resting on the back of his neck, and tilted her head back even more for him.

She liked her water much cooler than he typically set his, but it was still warm, the temperature of a rain shower on a hot summer day, the kind he’d played in as a kid back when he’d believed he’d grow up to be a normal man. It was funny how frequently Jack reminded him of that time, of being that boy, still innocent and with a whole life to look forward to. It was like she’d conjured that kid back from oblivion.

’Cept it ain’t that boy holdin’ her now… He balanced carefully on the tiles, not wanting it all to end with both of them sprawling on the floor, and lifted her up so he could wrap her legs around him. It was a move he knew she liked.

He had, after all, been given access to the most amazing and comprehensive carnal cheat sheet that had ever been created. He knew exactly where to touch her and how, exactly what not to do, and how to bring on a wild climax as quickly or slowly as he pleased. His lips and tongue sought out her most sensitive places on her throat and chest even as he slid inside her warm depths.

“So is this shower sex or locker room sex?” Jack asked as she writhed against him in time with his thrusts. “This room is huge.”

“It’s really-hopin’-I-don’t-slip-and-fall sex,” he told her, restraining a laugh. “Careful or you’re gonna wriggle right off me.”

“Pfft! Never happen.” She wanted him to lift his face up to hers; he could feel it. He did, and almost laughed when she ran the tip of her tongue along his lips. He couldn’t recall seeing her try that before. She was endlessly inventive. He licked her lips right back before claiming her mouth in a deep kiss.

He brought her to another intense orgasm—although the two came closer to losing their balance than he was ever going to admit as she flailed wildly in his grasp—before reveling in his own release while she gasped his name. In the aftermath, she rested her head on his shoulder, sighing. She liked it best when she was held through the afterglow; he knew that every bit as well as he knew the exact places to touch her, every bit as well as he knew all of her favorite acts. The power of that knowledge was intoxicating. No uncertainty, no worry of an offer or request inspiring disgust… none of the things that had gotten in the way of his rare attempts to connect with any woman on a deeper level during the fourteen years that he’d improbably topped the Federacy’s WANTED posters. He held Jack close until he felt the moment when she was ready for him to let her go and help her regain her footing.

She gave him a wondering smile; he could feel her wanting to ask him how he’d done everything even though she already knew. “I can’t decide if we need another shower,” she told him with a laugh in her voice, “or another nap.”

He had no particular desire, himself, to go back to sleep. Not if Shirah was going to be waiting to harangue him about the end of the multiverse. “Got a few things I need to do to finish gettin’ things ready for you around here. A few things I need to find out. Especially if what Lucy said about Kyra is true.”

“It is,” Jack told him, retrieving a shower puff she’d appropriated—and why didn’t it surprise him that even shower puffs were black in the Necromonger Armada?—and soaping herself down. “I talked to her again while we were sleeping. Things make a lot more sense after what Lucy told us. I’d had this odd feeling she wasn’t inhabiting a physical space, but I thought maybe that was because we were meeting somewhere between our physical locations.”

“Like when you meet the Apeiros.”

“Yeah, like that. I mean, she’d asked me how long she’d be there, but I guess…” Jack stopped frowning as she dug into the thought. “I guess I didn’t realize that she wasn’t anywhere else, too.”

“’Cause you are.” He stepped back under his own showerhead, cleaning up from their most recent bout of—

What, exactly? He didn’t know whether to call it fucking or lovemaking, and both terms seemed wrong somehow.

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “She isn’t afraid of them anymore, though. I guess that’s good. She says they’ve told her things about what’s coming and how she’ll come back, but she wouldn’t say what they were.”

Well, that was interesting.

Jack switched off her showerhead and reached for a towel. He did the same.

“It bothers you,” he said. Not a question. A fact.

“Well, yeah.” Jack finished drying herself off and nodded toward the larger room before walking toward it. He followed, enjoying the view as they went.

I hate to see you leave, but I love to watch you go… Demme had used that phrase, and it had made a lot more sense to him than the version he’d grown up with, where somehow the two verbs had gotten switched around. Go baby, go…

He could happily watch her go for hours.

Gonna have to go runnin’ with her, he decided. Then I can watch her go the whole time, from right behind her.

He had a feeling that might end with him pouncing her and them “christening” a public space on the ship.

Jack was picking out articles of clothing from a wardrobe she’d taken over. “I’m not thirteen anymore. I know how to be discreet. I’ve spent what, five years now, almost six, getting ready for whatever it is that’s coming. When is everybody in the know finally gonna clue me in? Even Kyra knows more about what’s going on than I do, and she opted out of all of it years ago.”

“Ain’t about whether you’d be indiscreet,” Riddick told her, pulling fresh clothes out of one of his drawers. Unlike Jack, who seemed to want to live in mermaid blues and greens, he didn’t mind that most Necromonger clothing came in Graveside Black.

“Then what is it about?” she grumbled.

He’d told her that before, he thought as he pulled on a pair of cargo pants that had only the slightest hint of the scale texture Necromongers seemed to love so much. He’d told her what the real reason was, but apparently she hadn’t heard him, too focused on thoughts of discretion and impulse control. He didn’t want to have this discussion again, but maybe it needed to happen. She needed to know enough to stop asking, stop railing against it.

Might just be a side effect of a year spent not even remembering that she can isomorph, he thought. She’d had her fundamental identity taken away for a while. That was probably her real issue. Well one of them.

“The real problem, Jack, is that you’re not strong enough yet for what you’d need to do with the knowledge if you had it.”

She frowned at him. “And everybody thinks I won’t be able to control myself enough until I am.”

Yes. But no.

Fuck, she’s not gonna like hearing this.

“Okay. This is probably gonna piss you off. But remember, you asked.” He sat down on the bench near her, pulling a sleeveless shirt over his head. She was mostly dressed, too, but was waiting impatiently for him to continue. “I want you to imagine something, and it’s gonna get pretty fucked up but I need you to go there with me.”

“Okay…?”

“You’re walking home one evening. You get to your apartment building. It’s a tall building, probably hundreds of people live in it. At this time of the evening, most everybody’s probably home, too. So. You’ve just come in through the front door, and you smell smoke.”

Jack sat down on the bench, too, and nodded for him to continue.

“You realize a fire has broken out in the basement and is starting to spread. The sprinklers should have already started going, and the alarms, but they haven’t. You also know that, in addition to the furnaces and boilers, there’s an apartment in the basement, and one of its occupants is a baby. You know that for sure because you can hear it crying.”

Jack’s brows furrowed. “Shit, Riddick—”

“I warned you. You wanna hear this or not?”

“Go on.”

“You go down into the basement and you can see where the fire must’ve started, and how it’s spreading. You realize that it’s gonna reach the furnaces in the next few minutes, and there’s one that has a faulty gas valve, keeps leakin’… and when the fire gets to it, the building might just explode. It’s also spreading toward the baby’s room, but it ain’t there yet. And, over in a corner, you can see where the valves that control the sprinklers are. Looks like the main control valve got stuck. It’ll take you a few minutes to wrestle it open, but you can probably manage to do it and get the sprinklers working before the flames get to that faulty gas valve. If you start right now.”

Jack nodded. He could feel her visualizing it. She had a good imagination.

“So here’s the problem. If you get to work on wrestling that valve open right now, you’ll stop the building from exploding… but you won’t stop the fire from getting to the baby. You’ll probably have to hear it die while you’re saving everybody else. If you go get the baby out of the fire’s path, you won’t have enough time to open the valve… but you can probably get out of the building with the kid before everything blows up and all the rest of your neighbors die. So. What do you do?”

“Fuck, Riddick, that’s sick.”

“C’mon. You have to have heard variations of this puzzle.” Iterations on it had circulated for centuries, probably millennia.

“Yeah, and they all suck.”

“So. What do you do, Jack?”

“There’s no right answer, Riddick.” She looked increasingly put out.

“Ain’t about a right answer. It’s about instinct. It’s about what you react to first and most. And what you can accept. You want to know what you’d do?” He raised his eyebrows at her.

“What makes you think you know?”

“Been deep in your head, girl. You don’t have any secrets from me. And yeah, I know exactly what you’d do.”

A challenging look crossed her face. “Okay, fine. What would I do, Riddick?”

“There’s no way you can listen to that baby scream as it dies. You go straight for it, grab it out of its crib. But. You don’t run out of the building. Do you? Hundreds of other lives are at stake. You think maybe, just maybe, you can get that valve to open in the time that’s left. You set the baby down by your feet and start wrestling with the valve, aware that the fire is getting closer and closer to setting off the explosion. And just as you feel the valve starting to turn, you see the bright flash of the gas igniting and realize you’re outta time. You die. The baby dies. Everybody in the building dies. ’Cause you wanted to save everybody and couldn’t accept that you wouldn’t be able to.”

A look of horror had crept over Jack’s face as he’d described it all. “You are such a shit sometimes.”

“Maybe. But you know I’m right. It’s who you are. You can’t give up on either the baby or your neighbors.”

She closed her eyes, reluctantly acknowledging his words with a tight-lipped nod.

“But here’s the other thing about that,” he continued. “This hatching thing… it’s gonna give you power. A whole fuckload of it. Enough that you could save the baby and wrench that valve open and still have time to have a cup of coffee. Hell, maybe enough that you could walk into the room and make the fire disappear. You ain’t there yet, though. And what everybody’s afraid of is that you’ll try to save the day before you’re powerful enough to do more than throw your life away in the tryin’.”

“Fuck,” she whispered. As she opened her eyes, a tear slid from one along her thick lashes and dropped down onto her lap. “What about you, Riddick? What would you do?”

“Ain’t no hero, that’s for sure,” he told her. But that wasn’t a real answer. “Used to be, I thought I’d just walk away. Not my fight, not my people. I told myself I could just… not care. Not hear. Walk away. That was a lie.”

“And…?” He was being too evasive; she was getting pissed off again.

“The baby. Every fuckin’ time, Jack. When you were under that bone. When the Necros took Kyra from me.” When he’d broken off his mission to rescue Officer Lola and those kids instead of trusting that whatever cleanup crew was coming after them would “discover” the crime boss’s captives and free them all some other way. When he’d let Johns take him prisoner so the merc would stop shooting little kids…

Every fuckin’ time. The baby was what he couldn’t turn his back on. The hell with everybody else. The hell with what might come next, like what the fuck would he do with a baby, aside from leave it on a doorstep and hope whoever found it would take care of it—

—The way I did with Jack six years ago—

—or what else might be lost in the process. That baby was his Achilles heel. Always had been. He couldn’t listen to it scream its last. He might murder the whole fuckin’ ’verse if he was forced to. “I’ll always go for the baby.”

And that, he realized suddenly, was why Shirah kept bugging him about choosing a path, when he’d thought he already had. Because he wasn’t doing any of this to save the multiverse, or even the only ’verse he’d ever personally known.

Everything he’d been doing was about making things safe for Jack.

And what if he couldn’t?

83.
Shape, Shell, Soul, Body

At least, Audrey thought, Riddick’s dark mood made sense… even if nothing else did suddenly.

She felt like they were in some weird game of verbal Chicken, each waiting for the other to break the silence as they stared, baffled, at one another. He thought Kyra was dead; she knew her sister wasn’t.

“Jack,” he finally said, his words deliberate and his expression almost cautious, “she died in my arms. I was holding her. She stopped breathing. Her heart stopped beating. I felt her die.”

She had walked with Kyra just that morning, showing her images of Elodie and her life on Deckard’s World, slipping through the mists of Canaan Mountain’s forests, revisiting the crash planet, until Lucy had summoned her back into—

Hmm.

Lucy? Can you settle this for us, please? She projected, making sure that Riddick could hear her as well. He gave her a quizzical frown.

What would you like settled, little one? Good; Lucy was somewhere in the room, although that could possibly get awkward soon.

“Riddick believes Kyra’s dead,” she said aloud, “but I know she can’t be because I was with her just this morning. And you and the other Apeiros told me she was safe and you had her, over a year ago. Can you tell Riddick what’s true?”

Your sister, Kyra, is safe with us, yes. Her five-shape is protected. Her shell failed last year, but I pulled her five-shape out before it could fail as well.

“Her shell…” Audrey paused, realization hitting her. She remembered all the talk about shells and shapes, years ago, much of which hadn’t made sense at the time. “Her body? Her body died?”

Riddick nodded in agreement, his expression still discomfited. “The old Lord Marshal threw her across the room. She hit a spiked pillar and five of the spikes impaled her through her back. She managed to pull herself off, but she was bleeding out when I got to her.”

Audrey felt the gentle touch of one of Lucy’s long, cool arms on her cheek. Riddick had turned his face away, unable to look at her non-human sister’s impossible shape for more than a fraction of a second. This is true, Lucy said. I was there. I pulled her five-shape from her shell and brought her to safety.

“Safety?” Riddick demanded, his eyes darting toward Lucy and then away again. “She died in front of me. Where the fuck is the safety in that?”

She will be reborn.

“What, ‘born anew’ in the fucking Underverse?” Riddick snarled, standing up and pacing. “We both know there’s no such place. The Underverse is a lie your brother cooked up to keep his minions pacified.”

That is not how she will be reborn, Lucy replied, her telepathic voice calm. But the Underverse, as his vessels conceive it, may indeed exist somewhere among the infinite iterations of reality. Most of the ways they imagine it, they have come up with on their own.

“Gods don’t write books,” Riddick muttered. “The fuckers leave that to the people who think it’s mystic voices they’re hearing in their heads…” He shot a furious glance at Lucy, still close enough to Audrey that he could only look their way for an eyeblink. “So how will Kyra be reborn?”

Audrey will bring her back when the time is right.

“…The fuck…?” If Riddick could have, he’d have stared at Lucy in disbelief.

It was news to Audrey, too. “Um, when will that be, Lucy?” She had a pretty strong suspicion.

After your hatching, you will be ready.

Riddick kept trying to glare over at Lucy, but kept being forced to look away. “Her hatching? Into her fuckin’ six-shape? You need to tell me something right the fuck now about that, because I’m about ready to ’jack this psycho-fuck voyage if I don’t get some better answers. Is this fuckin’ hatching gonna break her ‘shell?’”

No.

“You’d better be sure about that,” he growled.

I am certain. Her hatching approaches, but her death, as you understand death, is still far distant.

“So, uh…” Audrey had to defuse the tension between them somehow. “Riddick saw Kyra’s body die, but you pulled her soul out before it could die too… you’re keeping it safe… and I’m gonna somehow re-corporealize it after I’m able to move in six dimensions?”

Riddick had frozen, a look of horrified comprehension on his face. “Fuck. So that’s what he was trying to… motherfucker.”

“What?” she asked him, but he shook his head, lips pressed together in a hard line.

Your summation is accurate, Audrey. When the time comes, you will know what you need to do. She could no longer feel Lucy on her back and shoulder. I think you two have much to discuss alone. I will be near, should you need me, but not too near.

Riddick had closed his eyes. He shook his head, his lips silently forming words. Audrey, fortunately, had been trained to read lips.

Too much fuckin’ destiny in this shit…

“Riddick?” She kept her voice soft.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he murmured.

“Here?”

“Anywhere near you.”

She reached out, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking, feeling, in spite of the powerful shields he kept up between them. Rage. Outrage. Fear. Fear for her. And…

And there it is… She walked over to him and rested her hand on his cheek again.

“Jack… you should go.” His voice sounded pained. He hadn’t opened his eyes.

“Go where?” she whispered, stepping closer.

“As far away from me as you can. Everything I touch dies.”

“Not everything,” she told him.

“You’re all that’s left.” His voice was the barest thread of sound.

“Riddick.” She found herself barely able to restrain a laugh suddenly. “You spent the last several hours surrounding yourself, surrounding us, with friends. I’m not all that’s left.”

He opened his eyes, his expression shocked and confused. Didn’t he realize how many people had come to love him that day?

“But,” she told him, “even if I was the only one left, you don’t have to be so afraid of losing me.”

His lips pursed as he began to form a protest, an objection. It was more than she could resist. She brought her lips to his and kissed him, the way she’d dreamed of doing for years.

He froze for a second and then, with a groan, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, taking over the kiss with barely constrained hunger. She still couldn’t get a read on his thoughts, but his feelings were clear: desire, longing, lingering fear for her safety… some kind of desperate need to wipe out the horrors of the ’verse by losing himself in her…

She slid her hand from his cheek to the back of his head, the stubble almost feeling like velvet beneath her palm, and wrapped her other arm around his back as she opened her mouth to him. Their tongues slid against each other and Riddick groaned again, deeper, pulling her even more tightly against him. She could feel his growing arousal, the disintegration of his worries and inhibitions, as his hands stroked her back and then moved to grasp her thighs, lifting her up and wrapping her legs around his hips.

He walked back over to the bed, never releasing her mouth, and then lowered her down onto the firm surface before breaking the kiss.

His hungry expression was strangely vulnerable. “Are you sure you want to do this, Jack?”

“Absolutely.” She reached down, pulling off her shoes and socks and dropping them over the side of the bed, before scooting into its center. “C’mere.”

He started to climb onto the bed.

“Whoa! Whoa there. Shoes. Off.”

That, it turned out, was exactly the right thing to say. Riddick barked with laughter, the last of his dour mood dissipating as he sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots. “Demanding right out of the gate.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she quipped back.

His boots and socks removed, Riddick climbed onto the bed, crawling toward her with an almost predatory grin on his face. “So, now that my shoes are off, you got any other demands you want to make?”

“We’ll see,” she told him, beckoning him closer with a smirk. She wasn’t going to let on, for even a second, that she was having a massive case of what felt like stage fright right then. A fantasy that she’d cherished for years was about to become reality, and in response, she was suddenly having crazy performance anxiety.

Maybe he was, too. His answering smirk seemed to be hiding something more serious beneath it.

“Will we, now?” Riddick asked as he reached her, looming over her and gathering her into his arms.

She brought her hand up to his cheek once more, marveling all over again at the reality of him after years of dreams, the face she’d wondered if she’d ever see again, glimmering eyes that had haunted her for so long. “Where the hell can I get eyes like that?” she murmured, recalling the first time she’d seen them.

The emotion that appeared on his face in response was intense and complex, hints of sadness and longing mixed with fondness and desire. “Maybe I wasn’t entirely truthful about where,” he told her. “Shine jobs are real, but I never had one.”

“You weren’t born with them, were you?” Had he been able to see into the dark from the moment of his birth?

“Nah… my earliest memories have colors I can’t see now. I lost those colors and gained new ones while I was bein’ conditioned by the Quantifiers. Keepin’ me in the darkness all the time suddenly stopped workin’ as well for ’em once I started seein’ into the ultraviolet and infrared. I didn’t even notice that my eyes had changed their look until later.”

That was right; in one of the pictures Stacey had shown her, all those years ago, his eyes had been brown. He’d looked young in the picture; she just hadn’t realized quite how young he’d been. She wondered when, and how, Michael’s eyes had changed; he’d never undergone the same kind of brutal conditioning that Riddick had, but she’d seen his silver eyes, undisguised by contacts, just once. On the last night she’d been herself for a while. “Is it a Furyan thing?”

“Might be. I don’t know enough about Furyans yet to be sure. ’Cept for one thing I realized earlier today when I was talkin’ to Lucy. I know where we came from now.”

“Where?” she asked him, even as she slid her hands under his sleeveless shirt and began pulling it up his torso.

He helped her take it off, baring his chest as he answered her. “The second of your missing Star Jumpers, Jack. The Nick Fury. All this weird talk about ‘lightbringers’ and ‘lightbearers’ and the ‘Light of Furya,’ and it suddenly hit me why nobody was talkin’ about ‘fury,’ even though I’ve used that light as a weapon.”

How had she missed that? She rested the palm of her hand on Riddick’s chest and closed her eyes, focusing on his shape.

There: the soft flow of energy not of this ’verse, an innate part of him… no material element of him was straddling universes, and no energy exchange was occurring, but there was a wellspring of power from some other ’verse, and he was tapped into it. She could feel it singing through him, subtly harmonizing with his string frequencies, a perfect symbiosis—

Something her father had told her, years ago, came back to her. The Caldera shouldn’t exist. Nobody can figure out how it does. It isn’t volcanic. It isn’t anything that ought to be there. The fire, or whatever it is, just flows up from the ground for hundreds of miles. It looks like auroras rising up out of the rocks from a distance. The native population “fire walks” through it as part of a lot of ceremonies. I’ve seen them do it, stepping into the fire, their clothes burning right off their bodies, but they come back out without a mark on them, not even a singed hair. The old Lord Shirah told me that they’re the children of the fire itself, maybe a year before the ceremony where he passed his crown, not that he ever wore a crown, to a young woman who became the Lady Shirah…

That fire, she realized, was flowing through Riddick even now.

“Interesting,” Riddick rumbled above her, and she realized that he’d been “reading” her the whole time. “I never knew about that part. But fire doesn’t burn me. Guess now I know why.”

“It’s like there’s a living fire inside you,” she whispered, feeling awed. “It’s so beautiful.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he said, his voice pensive. “Seems to me, though, the ‘beautiful’ in this room is you.”

Guys on the make had often pulled out the word, but Audrey had long ago learned that guys would say almost anything if they thought they could get sex out of it. It was much more meaningful to hear it after the little courtship dance was complete, the outcome already a given, almost as meaningful as when—

No. This was not the time to think of other men, especially not that man. The important thing was what Riddick had said, because—aside from maybe stretching the truth about shine jobs—he had never once lied to her.

She tried to pull him closer, but it was like trying to budge a boulder. Instead, she pulled herself up to him, molding her body against his and kissing his mouth again. Her move stirred a low growl in his chest; a moment later she was pressed down on the mattress by the weight of his body. His hunger drove the kiss as he explored her mouth. He wrapped her legs around his hips again, pressing his erection against her; the wave of answering hunger and arousal that crashed through her made both of them gasp.

“You know,” he murmured against her lips, “I’m tryin’ not to go buck wild here, but you’re makin’ that really hard…”

“Maybe I’d like it if you did.”

“You might be insane,” he laughed, lifting his body away a little and sliding his hands under her tunic.

She arched her back and raised her arms so he could push the tunic up. Once he had it over her head, she pulled it off her arms and let it drop to the side, next to Riddick’s discarded shirt. When she returned her gaze to him, he looked transfixed.

She hadn’t been able to find a bra her size among the discards left behind by the old Lord Marshal’s harem, so she hadn’t had anything on under the tunic. Maybe, she thought, Riddick hadn’t expected that. He was staring at her as if he’d never seen bare breasts before.

“You know,” she parroted back at him after a moment, “you’ve seen the twins lots of times in my memories.”

“Not like this,” he whispered. He reached out, almost seeming afraid that he would shatter her with the lightest touch, and cupped his hand around one breast, stroking his thumb over her nipple. Her back arched as the sensation of his touch jolted all the way through to her core.

She slid her hand over his chest in response, cupping the swell of pure muscle under his nipple. He’s hard where I’m soft… “I’ve had a lot of fantasies about this moment,” she told him as he bent his head and brought his lips to her throat.

“Mmmmmm…” His lips and teeth grazed her skin with remarkable gentleness. “I tried very hard never to think of you that way.”

That made sense; she’d been a kid when they’d parted, and had probably stayed a kid in his mind until they’d met again. “Where did you go after you left New Mecca?” she asked, tilting her head back to give him better access.

“You’re gonna laugh,” he murmured in between nips at her skin. “You remember the planet you almost misdirected Toombs to?”

Holy shit. “You were on UV-6? That planet’s insane. A great big ball of Fimbulwinter!”

“On the surface, anyway,” he chuckled, nibbling at her collar bone. “Get undergound, though… there are hot springs. A lot of subterranean life, whole ecosystems that never see the sun. Funny thing is it made me think of the merc ship we’d been on.”

Audrey wondered what the members of her Amnesty Interplanetary chapter would think if she told them that Richard B. Riddick read poetry. During her “sleeper” year, their low opinion of him and “thugs” like him had left her confused as hell about what was true. “‘Caverns measureless to man?’” she asked him.

“‘Down to a sunless sea,’” he quoted back. “The water was probably too hot for most people to swim in, but I don’t burn. Or boil.”

No, he just ignited fire in every centimeter of her skin that he touched. “That sounds amazing. I’d have loved to see it.”

“You’d’ve hated smelling it,” he said with a soft laugh. “Rotten eggs. Most of the hot springs smelled like that, so I stayed near the surface even if it was cold.”

“Still…” she found herself wishing she’d been there with him.

He lifted his head from her throat, his expression turning sad. “I couldn’t take you with me, Jack. That would’ve gone bad fast. You were way too young for what would probably have ended up happening.”

She wanted to argue, but she knew he was right. “I was fantasizing about something like this happening back then…”

“The two of us alone on a cold world, with nobody else to turn to for warmth, and your hormones going out of control the way they did when you were on Tangiers Prime…” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Recipe for disaster. And no, even if you were dreamin’ about it, you weren’t ready for it. The reality would’ve broken the dream, probably broken you.”

She nodded. It was pure truth. He’d have resisted as long as possible, but she’d been tenacious and overconfident at that age, and would undoubtedly have turned up naked in his bed, maybe sneaking into it after he’d fallen asleep—assuming she could sneak up on him—in an attempt to get past his inhibitions. The results might have been disastrous for both of them. She hadn’t had her shots yet—

“Fortunately, I had mine,” Riddick told her.

Eavesdropper! she thought at him in her fiercest mental “voice,” not really bothered. He smirked at her.

“But just because I wouldn’t’ve given you a disease or gotten you pregnant, wouldn’t’ve changed the fact that it would’ve been dead wrong and would’ve hurt you in other ways.” His expression became regretful. “Last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt you, but I guess one way or another it was inevitable.”

“I… think that was more Imam than you,” she told him. With her memories back in their proper places, she could see clearly how the Holy Man had tried to “scare her straight,” thinking that killing Chillingsworth had put her on a dark path he needed to rescue her from, and had twisted everything, even Riddick’s nearly-wordless departure—

—eyes catching faint glints of light like a pair of tarnished coins as he bent down, his lips brushing against her forehead… “Sorry, kid…”—

—into an indictment of what he’d believed she was becoming.

The genuinely angry growl that started deep in Riddick’s chest, perversely, sent a thrill of arousal through her. “The only reason I told the hoodoo where I’d gone was so he could contact me if you ended up in trouble—which he fuckin’ never did—and so he could tell you where I was once you were an adult, if you still wanted to come looking for me then.”

“What would you have done if I had?” Audrey asked him, already certain of the answer.

“What I’m about to do now, probably.” He kissed her collarbone again and began to kiss his way lower, nuzzling at her breast. “Only reason Toombs got a bead on me there at all was I got a proximity alert about a ship coming in, and I was hopin’ maybe you were on it ’cause the timing was right, so I’d gone out to look…”

“Sorry,” she found herself saying as she arched her back. His arms tightened around her waist as he planted a kiss on her nipple, startling a moan out of her.

“Nah, don’t be. I got a nice little ship out of it. And a heads-up that the holy man was using the information I gave him for his own ends. I wondered if you’d be there when I got back to Helion, but I gotta admit…” he kissed her nipple again, circling its tip with his tongue. “…I was relieved you weren’t in on his bullshit.”

Audrey moaned again, Riddick’s mouth undoing coherent thought for a moment. She found herself wondering what might have happened if she’d been waiting for him on Helion and he’d found her there, believing her to be Imam’s accomplice. Suddenly, the thought of him maybe making her his captive felt intensely erotic.

“You want,” Riddick murmured, “we can play that out sometime. Don’t look for me to tie you up or anything, though. Not my kink.”

She could definitely understand why it wouldn’t be.

He was kissing his way down her abdomen, closer and closer to the waistband of her leggings, which he had hooked his fingers into and begun to pull down over her hips. Her panties were snared in his grasp, too. She arched her body so that he could slide all of it down more easily—

“Fuck, Jack,” he groaned. “How are you so wet already?” He sat up, pulling her leggings and panties off of her completely and tossing them aside before moving to spread her legs and kneel between them.

“’Cause I’ve been waiting for this for longer than you want to know,” she told him.

“Don’t even know what I want to do first…” She could see him contemplating options, and could see the option she wanted most straining against his cargo pants.

“In that case,” she told him, “I have another demand.”

He laughed, a look of surprise and delight spreading over his features as he unbuttoned his pants and pushed them down. “Let me just get these off my legs, Jack.”

“So I’m Jack again?” she asked, watching him as he moved to sit next to her for a moment and pull his pants off the rest of the way, his erection proudly saluting her the whole time.

“Safest name for you,” he told her with a grin. “Everybody here already knows you by it—knows it’s the name of the girl I’ve been looking for, anyway. Connecting your birth name or any of your other aliases to it could unbreak your trail.”

Whoops. He was right. She probably shouldn’t have called herself Audrey in front of Chantesa Vaako.

What’s done is done…

“You’re really okay with the whole Jack B. Badd thing? Even knowing where I got it from?”

“C’mon, it’s a classic.” He smirked at her. “Jack B. Nimble, Jack B. Quick…”

Oh, he was going to play like that, was he? She sat up and “pounced,” straddling his lap as his liquid silver eyes widened. “Jack B. ready to ride your dick.”

He threw back his head, mostly, she thought, so he wouldn’t guffaw right into her face. “Shit, girl, where were you when I was playin’ the dozens with the other kids in government housing?”

“I was probably pre-verbal back then,” she laughed. If she’d even been born yet at all. “Wouldn’t’ve been much help. But enough about that…”

He groaned when she reached down and wrapped her hand around the shaft of his erection. His breath caught as she positioned it against her and sank down onto his length, burying him deep inside her. “Fuck… right to the hilt…”

“I’m greedy like that,” Jack told him as his arms came around her again and he pulled her mouth to his.

82.
The Misnaming of the Rose

In a way, Kyra reflected ruefully, she was lucky. For a certain value of “lucky” that still equaled “fucked.”

Before the shuttle even reached Lupus Station A, the mystery of the fire in the overhead compartment had been “solved:” a tearful, apologetic boy had admitted to everyone—to his parents’ horror and his older brother’s fury—that he’d squirreled away half a dozen packs of Marlboros inside his carry-on and hidden within his toy box for his brother, along with just as many functional, old-fashioned isobutane lighters with flint-and-sparkwheel igniters. The spaceport security staff had missed all of it in their cursory examination of his bag.

Maybe, Kyra thought, that was why the fire had burned so hot and fast, starting in her own bag and spreading to the kid’s… and then going wild when it encountered the lighters. Everything in the compartment had been charred to the point where there was no sign that the fire hadn’t started in the boy’s bag. By the time they docked, everybody seemed to have a theory of how the lighters had managed to spontaneously ignite. But nobody was even glancing at the last passenger to board. Although “Mallory Glynn” was taken aside for a moment by spaceport staff during debarking, it was only so they could offer her a thousand-UD bearer card in compensation for the loss of her property and ask her if she wanted to file a claim for a larger amount.

She’d lost roughly ten thousand UDs worth of bearer cards and belongings to the fire, but she shrugged, accepted the card, and told them that it should cover the damages. She needed to get the hell off the station before General Toal’s goons took a closer look at the accident or the passenger manifest.

Since the new bearer card, conveniently, had no possible ties to Kali Montgomery, she used it to buy her ticket to New Queensland. She didn’t bother purchasing any replacement clothes or toiletries; she’d be in cryo within a matter of hours. Replacements would be cheaper once she was on an actual planet again. While she waited for the Komodo Dundee to begin boarding, she worked at programming her new comm with every bit of data she could dredge from memory. She was pleased with herself when she managed to recall the ID and password for the Merc Network account Tizzy had created for her, which would allow her to see who was hunting her, how much her bounty was, and where people thought she was hiding. But she couldn’t recall the ID and password for the message drop.

Fuck. If she could remember that one, she’d be able to reach out to Tizzy for help reconstituting the rest. Her little sister had all of the data backed up in her brain and could rattle any of it off from memory at a moment’s notice…

We never should have split up, she admitted to herself. She should have especially realized it was the wrong thing to do when Toal had embraced the separation. Divide and conquer… what if she’s been calling for my help this whole time?

She was almost relieved to climb back into cryo and get away from her thoughts.

Six more months in cryo meant countless more repetitions of her dreams, which had taken a darker, sadder tinge somehow. While she still caught a glimpse of Tizzy in the mirror of a settlement house on the crash planet, she knew that her sister had been lost to her, taken from her. The Jack that had been Tizzy was dead.

She was weak… she couldn’t cut it…

And, her conscience screamed when the cryo sedatives didn’t prevent it, it was her fault that Jack was dead. She hadn’t been vigilant enough, had allowed them to be separated.

Which meant that the Jack that was part of her… was dead too?

It felt true.

By the time she woke on New Queensland, having landed at the New Brisbane Interplanetary Spaceport, the narrative had solidified around the idea that Tizzy had died sometime during the adventures they and Riddick had gone on, at the hands of either Imam Abu al-Walid or General Toal, their shared “Jack” identity dying with her… because Riddick had left them and Kyra hadn’t been strong enough to protect her little sister—she was weak, she couldn’t cut it—on her own.

When she really stopped and thought about it, the narrative made absolutely no sense. But trying to think about it awakened elaborate knots of anxiety and guilt. It was easier to move on, move forward, not look back.

New Queensland was a semi-rustic world, with places where “Mallory” could find work she liked, work that suited her temperament. She spent half a year as a ranch hand, working with cattle, riding horses, feeling free and hopeful, before an incident with a handsy supervisor got her fired. Things got harder after that, and nobody seemed willing to give her a shot anymore. There was mining work to be had, but she had no guild membership and no way to afford the requisite shine job without an income stream already in place.

Twenty menthol Kools my ass, she inwardly grumbled when she found out how much the procedure would cost her. She could pay for it, but it would dip too deep into her reserves, her “bug-out money.” If she didn’t find work soon, though, she’d have to pull from that fund anyway just to survive.

Once a week, she did a routine check of her record on the Merc Network. By coincidence, the first thing she saw during her next sign-on was a want ad, put up by some crew out of Lupus Five.

The bounty for Kyra Wittier-Collins was “pending updates.” She had no idea what the hell that meant.

Her next stop was her employment application account, which had one new message.

Dear Ms. Glynn,

Thank you for your interest in our job listing. We regret that we are unable to offer you a position at this time. We will keep your application on file in case any new positions open up.

P.S. You should remove the New Gold Coast Cattle Ranch from your employment history on future applications. They’re saying really nasty things about you to anyone who calls them to verify your job record. I’ve talked to some other women who used to work there so I know what probably really happened, but the head of HR still had to remove you from consideration because of what they said. I’m really sorry! —Jeni.

Fuck. Fuck.

A day later, after kicking the shit out of several gym punching bags and two would-be muggers, Kyra came to her decision. Opening the Merc Network back up, she found the want ad and followed its application link. It wasn’t ideal, but it was work, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to outwit mercs if she needed to. She and Tizzy had demolished an entire platoon of them once.

The application was easy enough; they were looking for new recruits, promising to teach them the trade and offering a good cut even during the apprenticeship. Aside from the basics, she didn’t have to provide a whole lot of information besides education and existing skills. Like Kali Montgomery before her, Mallory Glynn had allegedly attended a military academy; she could simply claim that she’d been traveling for a while before looking for work after graduation and not put down any employers, least of all the New Gold Coast Cattle Fuckers.

But… even if Mallory Glynn’s reputation with employers hadn’t been poisoned, the military academy angle was an issue. She no longer had the backup documents to prove that she’d attended one, and she’d lost all of her notes about exactly which fictive names to put down as references… not to mention access to those references’ messaging accounts to reply to inquiries. Could she really even use that name anymore? Was it any less toxic than trying to use Kyra Wittier-Collins or Kali Montgomery? Maybe it was time to use a new name on applications, starting with that one.

It was a moment of recklessness, a “why the hell not?” that would prove all too costly. She no longer had the ability to create a new identity, but there was one more name that she had a claim to that, she thought in that moment, had far less poison attached to it. She felt a twinge of worry, a hint of foreboding, as she put it on the application instead of Mallory Glynn:

Jack B. Badd

She almost didn’t hit send, almost pulled back and put the Mallory Glynn name back on it. But she took a deep breath, told herself not to wuss out, and submitted the application.

A few hours later, the crew responded, offering a meeting and interview in New Brisbane. She picked an interview time a few days out and got her ass back to the capital city barely in time to make it.

The man who interviewed her was some employment agency guy fielding candidates for the mercs; there was little more to glean from his thoughts than she already knew. He asked her standard questions, had her spar against a local martial artist who was there to evaluate each recruit, and then—after a short comm call—informed her that she met all of the crew’s qualifications. He gave her a contract to sign—several pages long, but he flipped right to the signature page without stopping—and then drove her to the mercs’ vessel at the spaceport.

She’d barely stepped onto the boarding ramp before they had her in cuffs.

The next week, spent in one of their miniscule holding cells, was wracked with both anxiety and fury, and a lot of self-recriminations as she realized what they were doing and why. Jack B. Badd was a known associate of Richard B. Riddick; how the fuck had she overlooked that angle? Her conviction that Jack was dead, and that somehow the whole ’verse should know that, made no sense suddenly. Why the hell had she thought it would work to use a dead girl’s name? Why the hell had she thought anyone else knew Jack was dead?

And how the fuck had she forgotten all about Alexander motherfucking Toombs?

He walked into the room, alone—no sign of Eve Logan, anyway—and frowned at her.

“Who the fuck is this?” he demanded of the mercs. “This ain’t Jack B. Badd.”

“It’s the name she put on her application,” one of the mercs objected. “You sure she’s not the girl?”

“Goddamn sure.” Toombs walked closer, studying her carefully. “But you give Eve Logan a call. This might be the girl she was looking for, last time I saw her. Kyra Somethin’.”

Kyra Somethin’ restrained a groan, struggling to keep her expression deadpan and challenging. I really fucked myself. Every name at her disposal was poisoned, but at least “Mallory Glynn” didn’t have anyone hunting her. She should’ve stuck with “Mallory Glynn.”

Eve Logan, as it turned out, wasn’t interested.

“Apparently,” the leader of the mercs told her with a smirk, “Kyra Wittier-Collins—if that even is you, ’cause your ID says Mallory Glynn and my checks say it’s one hundred percent legit—she ain’t a fugitive anymore. She’s been exonerated. Those pissfucks at Amnesty Interplanetary got all the charges against her dropped or vacated. Ain’t no money in turning you in anywhere, even if you were her. You ain’t even got an outstanding parking ticket, Mallory. So the question is… what do we do with you now?”

They’d already filled up their crew, every berth on the ship except their bounty cages taken, and had only offered her an interview so they could capture Jack B. Badd for Toombs.

Why the fuck had Toombs said Jack was someone else? She’d recognized him; why hadn’t he recognized her?

Another of the merc team laughed, the sound humorless and cruel. “The contract she signed gives us a lot of leeway, you know. Who cares what name’s on it? She signed it, we have video of her signing it… it’s valid even if she never did read what she was signing. Paragraph fifteen says we can subcontract her services to whoever we want.”

There was no escaping the cell. New Queensland, on Elsewhere’s side of the threshold, was an airless rock. The vacuum would kill her before she could drop down to the ground and isomorph back. She toyed with trying to isomorph the whole goddamn ship over to Elsewhere and then come back alone, but the biggest thing she’d ever moved across a threshold was a piece of driftwood. Tizzy had always done the heavy lifting, and she’d fallen into a coma for several hours the time she’d moved a ship that size.

Kyra was stuck. And, very likely, fucked.

A day later, four men arrived at the ship and looked her over.

“Not bad,” one of them said, smirking.

“I like some more tit on a girl, myself,” another grumbled.

Their minds were full of filth. For the first time since she’d been tossed into the cell, Kyra felt real terror.

“Well, you already got you a girl picked out anyway,” the third said. He studied her with a nasty smile. “She’s got her some spirit. Gonna have fun breakin’ her in. We’ll take her.”

It took five of the mercs to get the chains on her. She fought the whole time, costing two of them teeth in the process, but probably would have lost a lot sooner if they weren’t under strict instructions not to “damage the merchandise.” Finally they had her immobilized and loaded into another vehicle, which trundled her over to another launchpad. She’d barely been hauled onto the next ship before the man who’d talked about breaking her appeared, a vile grin on his face, and—

Riddick sprawled backward onto the floor, scrambling off of the dais, heart hammering.

Fuck! Fuck!

His mind had recoiled so powerfully from Kyra’s ordeal that it had completely broken the connection with the Quasi-Dead.

Are you all right, Lord Marshal? they asked.

“Fuck no,” he growled. Suddenly he found himself almost agreeing with the Moribund’s barely-veiled desire to wipe out all of humankind in retribution for—

He forced himself to calm down, to take deep, long breaths. He’d suffered through countless tortures, himself, when he’d been even younger than Kyra was in her memories, before he’d cut his tracker out and gone on the lam… but he’d never been abused that way and couldn’t bring himself to experience it with her. His mind shuddered away from reconnecting with the Quasi-Dead.

“Those men who bought her contract,” he growled after a moment. “Those mercs, too… any of them converts?”

No, the Quasi-Dead told him. None of them are among the ranks, nor have any of them been in the past. They are all unknown to us.

Damn. He would have liked to make one of them live through what she had, over and over and over again until the fucker’s mind collapsed under the weight of the horror she’d experienced.

“What about that motherfuckin’ rancher?”

He is unknown to us as well.

Fucking hell.

Why do you wish to punish someone for a crime not committed against you? the Moribund asked.

“Why are you still destroying worlds after four hundred years?” he countered, trying to center himself.

You know what will happen if I stop.

“Yeah,” Riddick conceded, letting out a gust of air. “I do. Gonna try to find a way to fix that for you.”

You cannot. That is not your role in this. My brothers and sisters believe that is her role. I still doubt. Humans too are weak and treacherous to have so much faith in one of them.

Her? For a moment, with Kyra in the forefront of his mind, he thought that was who the Moribund meant. But no, the rogue Apeiros was speaking of Jack. Jack… who could never, ever know what her sister had been put through after their separation.

“So what is my role in the war against your Demons of the Darkness, exactly?” Riddick stopped and shook his head. “No, never mind. Don’t tell me. All this destiny bullshit… just tell me this. Are you just avenging yourself here? Not your brothers and sisters? One of the first things you said to Jack was something about ‘a trillion deaths’ for every one taken from you.”

He could recall the exact wording if he wanted to stop and think about it, but right now he didn’t want to delve into his own thoughts. Or anyone else’s.

No. I am not just avenging myself.

“There’s your answer, then. Maybe I feel the same way where Kyra’s concerned. Those fuckers helped drive her to her death.”

I understand now.

He needed to recover, get some distance, before he tried to continue, although he was going to have to ask the Quasi-Dead to skip forward when he did.

“How much time’s elapsed since I came in here?” he asked them.

Two hours, they replied.

Fuck. He hadn’t even gotten all that far into her memories, even. She’d spent thirteen months in cryo and roughly another eight months out; the date on her merc contract had indicated that she’d signed the document in mid-February, 2519 and been slaved out before the month ended. Still roughly two and a half years until he’d found her in Crematoria, still roughly two and a half years before his attempt to rescue her got her abducted, converted, and killed.

He still needed to deal with the rest of the converts he wanted to take back… but he needed, more than anything, to spend some time with Jack. She, at least, had managed to survive knowing him without being destroyed. The impulse to stay far away from her before he managed to change that was back, strong as fuck, but…

I need her. More than ever.

He closed his eyes, reaching for some of her memories to counter the horror he’d just faced. Jack in a bar while on a weekend ski trip with her roommate, legally an adult but still too young to drink… fine with avoiding the issue by ordering an iced tea while Janice worked at “getting sloshed” at the other end of the bar… speaking to a man whose surface appearance was not dissimilar to his and inviting him to go skiing with her… later, after the skiing, being invited back to his cabin to warm up…

She’d had a number of creative ways to warm up, and no reservations about employing them. And while most of her had been firmly in the moment, a tiny part of her had imagined that it was her reunion with him…

He could feel himself calming as he explored her memories, paying attention to the ways she liked to be touched and held, the positions she preferred, the places on her body that could ignite her senses. Aside from occasional moments of discomfort and annoyance if one of her partners tried something she discovered she didn’t like, there was almost nothing negative in her experiences. After “Dave” and “Lars,” she had become adept at spotting and avoiding men whose agendas were potentially hurtful to her, finding instead men who just wanted to have, and share, a good time. One of her partners, as a kindly-intended joke, had labeled her a “sport fuck,” and she’d liked the term.

She’d avoided commitment, sticking to “sport fucking,” because part of her was hoping to reunite with either him or Ewan Zdan—and she had, realistically, assumed that it wouldn’t be him she reunited with, even if she chose men who reminded her of him almost half the time—and she’d wanted to avoid any entanglements that would potentially prevent that from happening.

An hour of meditating over her experiences finally calmed the part of him that wanted to unleash mayhem—far too late to be of any use—upon Kyra’s tormentors, and finally made him feel like it was safe for other people to be around him again.

Okay. Time to deal with the other recruits… and then I think I need to talk to her.

The group he’d left in one of the suites adjacent to his rooms perked up as soon as he walked in.

“We’re picking Door Number One,” one of them said. It was no surprise that he was their spokesman again. “We’re all in. What do you need us to do?”

All nine of them. Good. Everyone looked enthusiastic, too. Even better.

“What I’m about to do to each of you is gonna hurt. You braced for that?” Making sure they knew that, were okay with that and prepared for it, was more important than ever suddenly.

“I’m in.” Their leader stepped forward. He was in his early twenties at most, his dark brown skin hiding the corpselike pallor of a Necromonger, closely buzzed hair sporting tiny curls instead of the box braids Riddick had seen in Jack’s memories. “Do me first, whatever it is you need to do.”

One by one, he brought them back from their undead states. It got easier and easier each time, the pain of his conditioning eroding away. Finally, all nine of them were human again, revived and looking astounded.

“Man,” the leader—Antonio—said, after the last conversion was undone, “I had no idea what you were gonna do, but you could ask me to do anything now and I’d be in. There’s no way to thank you enough.”

His friends murmured agreements around them.

“That’s good to hear. Now, let me tell you why I picked you.” He was feeling increasingly at ease, the darkness of Kyra’s experiences retreating for the moment. “You remember, about five and a half years ago, a pair of girls coming out of the spaceport to talk to you about doing a special performance? One of them told you her brother had fucked up his relationship with his girlfriend—Gina—and she wanted you to serenade Gina on his behalf to help win her back?”

He could see recognition spreading over their faces… and delight.

“Remember?” Antonio said as his face split into a huge grin. “Damn! We made so much scratch that day thanks to her! Got some primo gigs out of it, too!”

“Pretty sure the lady we sang to had no clue what was going on, though,” one of the women in the group—Nichelle, a soprano—laughed.

“Aww, who cares?” the group’s tenor, a guy named Malik, laughed back. “It was still gold. How do you know about it, though, Sir?”

“The girl who asked you to do it,” he told them, “is someone special to me. You’ll get to see her again soon. I’m wondering if you can put together a little show for her. And then maybe you can also be in charge of getting some actual life into this flying crypt.”

“What’s your friend’s name?” Antonio asked, grinning. “We’ll need that for the show we put together.”

The name was an issue, wasn’t it? There were multiple possibilities. But only one, he realized, that was safe to use, given who else was on board this ship. Everyone there already knew that he had been seeking his “Jack.” Connecting that name to either of the others that popped into his head could be incredibly dangerous.

Jack it is, he decided. He hoped she’d go along with it.

“She liked to go by ‘Jack’ back then. That work for you?”

“We’re on it,” Antonio promised. “When do you need us to be ready?”

“Gimme a day. Still a few things left to do. And it’s a surprise. I’m gonna ask you to move into some of the suites right by mine, but not to cross paths with her until it’s time for your performance.”

“We need to worry about her overhearing?” the group’s contralto, Nomiki, asked.

“Nah,” he told them. “These walls are pretty thick stone. You should be fine.”

Weird thing for a spaceship’s walls to be made of, now that he thought about it…

He took a few moments to talk to the crews getting the other suites ready and instruct them to determine with the team—apparently called the Ennead Kids back when Jack had encountered them, and they’d never changed the name—how they wanted to arrange and divide up four of the suites between them. With five men and four women in the group, things might get tricky, so he told the crews to let him know if any additional rooms were needed. He’d ordered almost the entire wing vacated after the first few assassination attempts against him, so there was space to spare. Soon, he told the crew leaders, the women who would occupy the remaining two suites would come to speak to them as well.

Okay. Enough dawdling, he told himself. You need to talk to Jack.

Yes, Lucy said from somewhere nearby. You have centered yourself in the light again.

He groaned. There you go, talkin’ about me like I’m the good guy in this story…

Surely you don’t believe that you’re the villain of the piece? There was a hint of both amusement and sadness behind her words.

No wonder, he reflected, Kyra had said that she hated not being the bad guys. Jack had reflected on that, too, contemplating how much better the ’verse would be if only they were the worst villains in it…

And now he needed to tell her. Fuck.

C’mon, you asshole, he prodded himself. This is Jack. She ain’t gonna bite you unless you ask nice.

But, he thought with a sinking heart, she might cry when she heard what he had to tell her. Hell, no “might” about it.

He forced himself to return to his quarters. By the time he reached the doors, there was no sign of his reluctance, his hesitation… no sign that he was in any way bothered by what he had to do next.

Four women were talking and laughing together as he walked in. Someone must have told a really funny joke, because it took them a moment to recover their composure. None of them looked at all discomfited by his entry, though.

He didn’t bother asking what the joke was. He knew, from Jack’s memories, just how raunchy women’s conversations could get when no man was around, and he didn’t feel like embarrassing them by making them explain it all to him.

Jack stood up and walked over to him, her smile bright, and gave him another hug. He held her close, not trying to hide just how much he needed to hold onto her for a spell.

Apparently they all could tell.

“We should go for a while,” Lola said, surprising him. He’d expected her to start trying to run interference.

He lifted his face from where he’d buried it in Jack’s hair. “I have a pair of suites being readied for you three. If you go talk to the crew preparing them, they can get things ready the way you want them. Talk to Olwyn or Jean-Paul. The guards outside know who they are.”

The three women filed out of the room without another word, leaving him alone with Jack.

“Just the three of them, huh?” Jack asked him, her expression amused, not trying to pull back from the tight circle of his arms.

He nodded, still trying to decide what he should tell her first.

“So,” she continued after a moment, “I guess it’s time for us to talk about things?”

He nodded again, wishing he wasn’t feeling so tongue-tied, wishing he dared open up his mind to her without all of the things that he never wanted her to know about pouring out amid the things he was struggling to say.

Her hand on his cheek was warm and gentle. “Should we sit down?” Her expression had taken on a look of concern.

He was choking on the words he needed to get out. Keeping her close, he walked over to the entry into the bedroom and led her through, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her beside him. “This… ain’t easy.”

“It’s okay.” The girl reached over and took his hand. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Deep breath…

Oh for fuck’s sake, just tell her already…

“It’s about Kyra.” He watched her as she nodded, her expression expectant. Oh fuck, this was gonna be bad. “You know I found her last year, right, when I was looking for you?”

“Yeah…?”

“She…” Fuck. Just say it… “She was killed during my fight with the old Lord Marshal.” He forced himself to meet Jack’s eyes as he said it. “She’s dead.”

Jack blinked, her expression becoming confused. In a moment, he was sure, her face would crumple as the pain hit. “That’s… not possible.”

“It’s the truth,” he said in the gentlest voice he could manage.

The girl shook her head. “No, Riddick, I was with her just this morning. She’s not dead. The Apeiros have her.”

81.
Black Fox in a Wolf’s Lair

The knots in Kyra Wittier-Collins’s innards seemed to tighten with each goodbye hug she received from the members of the Meziane family. By the time she climbed into the back of General Toal’s military vehicle and strapped in next to Tizzy, her guts felt as snarled as one of the attempts at crocheting she’d made as a child.

Tizzy, who hardly ever hid her emotions, only seemed sad about the departure. But then, she had somewhere to go. What little worry she was feeling seemed to be reserved for Kyra.

Maybe, Kyra thought, carefully shielding her musings from her sister, I should have told her that nothing came through. The only responses to any of the letters and applications she’d sent out had been one or two infuriatingly polite letters, thanking her for applying but informing her that the position she’d wanted was already filled.

Things didn’t get better on the ride to the train station, which, she conceded, was her own damned fault. She’d been the one who had insisted they split up, insisted they didn’t tell each other where they were going. Tizzy would have been happy to stay together—

Why did I push her away? Why do I push everybody away?

The only thing she could think of, to counter her mistake, was to offer to go looking for Riddick together. But Tizzy turned it down.

I can’t cut it in his world, she’d said, her mental “voice” regretful but firm, as General Toal drove them to the station. I’m just not strong enough.

That baffled Kyra. How could Tizzy think she wasn’t strong enough, after everything she—and they—had done? They’d laid waste to an entire merc platoon together. Tizzy had probably blown up a Star Jumper. What couldn’t they do as a team?

I was the one who ended “together,” she reminded herself, and realized that the real heartsickness she’d been feeling, since they’d begun saying goodbyes at the Meziane house, was for her imminent separation from the sister of her heart.

Tizzy wanted to talk about security codes. It was hard to focus, hard not to get mad, until she realized that the younger girl had crafted one that would be easy for her to remember, no matter what, spelling out Riddick’s name.

I’m always your sister, Tizzy told her, taking her hand. No matter how many light years separate us.

It nearly cost her all of the composure she had left, but she managed not to cry, to even answer I’m always your sister, too, without her mental voice fracturing the way her physical voice might have. Other things she wanted to say crowded against the mental barriers she tried to keep up—don’t go, let’s stay together, I’m scared—but their time was up before she could decide whether or not to say any of them. They were at the station.

Kyra found she was disappointed that the General was able to usher them through security without any scans. She’d wanted to see if Tizzy’s scabbard trick would work, and if it didn’t, having the general handy to bail her out would have been extremely helpful. Although she joked about not needing it yet with Tizzy, she was secretly peeved.

They said their good-byes by the waiting area for the express train to New Casablanca. General Toal even gave them a moment alone for it, politely standing out of earshot. Although normally not a hugger, Kyra suddenly found herself having a hard time letting go of Tizzy.

“I can’t believe this is it,” she whispered. She wondered if she’d expected some kind of mystical intervention, something that would end up keeping them together. If so, she’d wasted all of her chances to choose that path while waiting for something to choose it for her. Fuck… fuck…

“Don’t believe it,” Tizzy said, her voice wavering. “We’re gonna find each other again. Sisters forever.”

“Forever…” Sisters under a trio of suns—or was it moons? Maybe it had been both—going on forever together. And yet Tizzy had made it clear that she wasn’t going to go looking for Riddick. If it were Ewan we were going to look for, she’d probably have been the one to suggest it… “Tizzy?”

“Yeah?”

“If I do find Riddick,” and suddenly she knew that she was definitely going to try, “what do I tell him about you?”

She felt veiled hints of emotions coming off of Tizzy as her sister tried to conceal her reaction: worry, disbelief, sadness, resignation. Their hug loosened and Tizzy drew back to meet her gaze. There was sadness in her large green eyes, an almost ageless look. “Tell him Jack’s dead,” she finally said.

That was right. Riddick had only ever known Tizzy as “Jack.” Why, though, did it sometimes feel lately like that had been her name and not Tizzy’s?

“She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world,” her sister continued.

Yes you are, she wanted to protest. We are! We could find him and make that fake video real…

Why did Tizzy think so little of herself? It hurt, realizing how little faith she had in her own power… and she had so much power.

A little more time and we could turn the Federacy itself on its ear, she thought… but it was never going to happen.

Behind them, General Toal cleared his throat. Their time was gone.

“Always your sister,” Tizzy promised her, huge eyes solemn, as they reluctantly pulled away from each other.

“Always your sister,” she promised back.

General Toal gave Tizzy a small package and seemed genuinely surprised when he got a hug in return. I don’t know why he didn’t expect that. Tizzy’s a hugger. She’d probably hug the fuckin’ Apeiros if she could figure out how to…

Kyra’s train was on the other side of the terminal, going to the New Fes spaceport. General Toal escorted her there, mostly respecting her need for silence. With Tizzy taken from her, there was almost nothing she wanted to talk about with him.

“I have a few things for you,” he told her as they reached the lounge for her train. “Things that I hope will help you find your way.”

He’d given Tizzy just one small package; Kyra got two and an envelope. She wondered if the General knew how aimless her current trajectory actually was, and that was why he was giving her extra. Perversely, she found she resented that.

“Thank you,” she managed to say.

“I truly am sorry it came to this,” he said. It didn’t feel like he was lying. “I did want to help Cedric keep his son’s promise to you. So I hope these things will help you break your trail quickly and return to the ait Meziane tribe soon.”

“Sooner than Tizzy?” She frowned.

“For Ewan’s sake, Tizzy must not return before she is eighteen years old. No such limitation exists for you.”

Yeah, because nobody fell in love with me…

It was a weird thing to feel envious of. Kyra didn’t want Ewan, or any other man, to feel that way about her. Well, except for maybe one man…

Maybe just one man.

“Dihya?” General Toal was asking, looking at her with concern. “Do you need anything to help you? I think your sister has been worried that you don’t have a clear path.”

“No, I’m good.” She conjured up a smile for him, hiding just how good she wasn’t. As much as Tizzy seemed to trust him, as much help as he’d actually given them…

She was plagued by the thought that he would, inevitably, either turn out to be a monster, himself, or share Tomlin’s fate instead.

“Got it all covered,” she told him, projecting I’m fine, it’s fine at him.

She could see that he had his doubts. But he nodded and stepped back. No attempt at a hug, at least. “Godspeed on your journey, then. Come back to us soon, Dihya.”

She’d miss that name, she reflected as she boarded her train and settled in for the trip to New Fes. She’d liked being Dihya, even if she’d never once thought of herself by that name. Everybody who’d called her by it had had such nice thoughts about her in their heads, none of them, even once, contemplating how to hurt or fuck or exploit her.

New Fes was four hours away by rail, enough time to make Kyra feel antsy and claustrophobic in the train seat with other passengers packed in so near to her. The General, who had paid for her ticket, had gotten her one of the cushiest seats in the train, but there was still a stranger sitting next to her, one who had tried to be talkative with her until she’d managed to convince the older woman that they didn’t have any languages in common.

Which meant she couldn’t use her tablet in front of the old bat without giving away that she actually did understand English. Damn it.

She opened up the gifts the General had given her instead, finding a high end, stealth gear money belt in one, a chip library for her tablet full of high school equivalency courses in another—

Yeah, he’d never need to give Tizzy a present like this, she admitted with a sigh.

—and an envelope with an emergency comm number and instructions to use it if she found herself in trouble, and to use it instead of any such number that members of the Meziane family might have given her.

None of them had given her an emergency number, although several of them had given her their regular comm numbers during her recuperation. Huh.

Not bad gifts, all told, though. Halfway through the train ride, her seatmate departed at one of the stops. Soon the seat was taken by a man in expensive clothes who wore too much cologne and whose breath informed her he’d had sardines for lunch, but who at least seemed to have no interest in talking to her. She pulled out her tablet and got to work picking through the imminent spaceport departures at New Fes, seeing which ones still had room for one more traveler.

By the time she arrived at the spaceport, she’d settled on the launch to Lupus Prime, which would begin boarding within the hour and would lift off maybe an hour or two after Tizzy was scheduled to reach New Casablanca. Of all the worlds that ships at New Fes were leaving for, it sounded like it was the best, the one with the most opportunities. She’d hunker down when she got there, use some of the funds Tizzy and the Mezianes had given her to stay afloat for a while, and figure out what she wanted to do next.

The scabbard trick worked. She was proud of that, but wished she could have shared the moment with her sister. Nobody seemed to think there was anything at all unusual about her as she passed through the security checkpoints. She slipped into a restroom once she was through all of them, isomorphing her knives and their scabbards all the way back to U1 and transferring all of her important documents to the money belt General Toal had given her.

Boarding the Caiman Dundee was easy enough. The crewmate who helped her into cryo, she thought with annoyance, was less familiar with the controls than Tizzy had been. And then…

She was on a world with three suns.

Her prior time in cryosleep had been full of strange blanks, in between idyllic but fragmented recollections of her childhood, usually visiting members of her mother’s family on Old Earth or exploring the woods on Canaan Mountain. Any time her mind had ventured toward her more traumatic memories of strife or loss, the chamber had increased her sedative level to abort them. She’d never seen her father in her cryo dreams, or Red Roger, or any of the violence of the fall of the New Christy Enclave. The cryo chamber had fought hard to tamp down any segues into nightmare that tried to begin.

This time, it didn’t need to. This time, new dreams appeared. Dreams untinged by trauma or horror, although they would have contained both if the memories they came from had really been her own.

She was on a world with three suns, surrounded by other crash survivors, all of them friends, all of them thinking kindly of her. She dreamed of Paris P. Ogilvie, her mentor who had taught her how to break into any security system she wanted, and who liked to tease her that her parents had run away from her whenever she pulled silly tricks on him. She dreamed of Shazza, who wanted to become her new mother and whose gruff husband, Zeke, mysteriously died shortly after the crash. She dreamed of Fry, beautiful sad Fry, who had nearly died as well except she’d heard the pilot calling for help and had gotten the others to rescue her. Another would-be mother. She dreamed of Imam—sanctimonious, jolly, treacherous—and his three boys, only one of whom spoke enough English for her to understand him, but all three of whom liked her just fine anyway. She dreamed of Johns, authoritative, tough, treacherous as well.

She dreamed of Riddick.

Strong. Kind to her. Feared by the others until they discovered he was their only chance at salvation. Silver eyes gleaming in the darkness. A voice of graveled velvet quelling her fears and doubts.

She never dreamed of Jack. That was what people called her in the dreams. She only caught one glimpse of Tizzy, the whole time, reflected back at her in a mirror while they were shaving their heads to look more like Riddick. Tizzy had been there, she knew. The dreams were somehow Tizzy’s story… too… but somehow her sister had been almost completely erased from her sight. Not walking beside her. Not joining her and Ali as they explored the settlement. Not running with her and the others into the darkness and then blaming herself for Paris’s death. Tizzy, invisible but present, Jack but not Jack…

Sometimes she dreamed of exploring the Canaan Mountain forests with Riddick, after he had rescued her, something she knew had happened before the eclipse. Exactly what he had rescued her from was obscured, as was how any of the crash survivors had died, precisely. She never saw any of their bodies. But as the dreams repeated, a narrative slowly cohered around them.

Riddick had come to her at the New Christy Enclave when she was twelve and desperately wishing for a better life, and he had helped her run away into the mountains. He’d rescued her. They had stayed there for a while, hunting and traveling together, while he taught her all the things she needed to know to survive in the wild. But then Johns had caught him.

She’d managed to chase after him, with Paris Ogilvie’s help, and had boarded the Hunter-Gratzner so that she could rescue him right back, only the ship had crashed…

Somewhere in the mix of all that, there was a little sister named Tizzy, who was also twelve years old but was somehow a few years younger than her at the same time. Dream logic glided right past such things. But Tizzy—Jack? Or was she Jack?—was weak. She couldn’t cut it. There wasn’t really a place for her in Riddick’s world.

“Tell ’em Riddick’s dead,” her hero, her beloved, told her as they soared through space together. “He died somewhere on that planet.”

Tell him Jack’s dead, Tizzy whispered in response. She was too weak to cut it in his world…

Her mind rebelled against that conclusion, and the dreams looped back to the beginning.

Repetition ingrains memory. By the time Kyra woke from cryo on Lupus Prime, the dreams had repeated so many hundreds—maybe even thousands—of times that they had taken on the weight of lived experience. Tizzy, she knew, had still been alive when they had been separated again from Riddick by the Imam’s treachery. She had almost died soon after, but she’d still been alive to break them out of a hospital and take them to the Meziane family…

But Jack had died. Jack was dead.

She was weak. She couldn’t cut it… Tizzy’s voice whispered.

There was no more Jack. Whether it had been Kyra’s name or Tizzy’s no longer mattered, because Jack was dead.

Riddick, however, wasn’t. He was out there, somewhere…

The fog of cryo took a while to clear off, to let her real memories of real life reassert themselves. She did remember meeting “Jack” at the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital, and the two escaping and taking the Scarlet Matador to Tangiers Prime. She remembered everything that followed, including Jack becoming Tizzy and then their separation. But her memories of before then had, more or less, been overwritten, horror replaced by adventure. And even though part of her knew with perfect clarity that Jack had become Tizzy…

She also knew, with absolute certainty, that she had once been Jack, too, on the crash planet. But Jack was dead.

None of it really held up to scrutiny. Kyra wasn’t the kind to hold such things up to much scrutiny. The past was something that she never wanted to dwell on and that, for years, only appeared in her nightmares. Dreaming of its sanitized version was one thing; waking thought was for the moment at hand. She had far too much to deal with in the present, anyway.

Lykos City, Lupus Prime’s capitol, was a glittering, cosmopolitan metropolis, full of far too many human beings, also full of the darkness and muck that could hide behind any glittering façade. Kyra didn’t like it at all. She wished she’d picked a different destination. Maybe that UV-6 world Tizzy had thought about sending Toombs to—

Nah. She hated the cold even more than she hated being around so many people.

She’d figure it out.

The Kali Montgomery ID that Tizzy had made her went unquestioned and opened a lot of doors for her… almost enough doors. On paper, she was old enough—and had enough money—to get a tiny apartment on her own. Settling in, she began to look for job prospects and catch up on the news.

She was soon horrified to discover that the New Casablanca spaceport had blown up—well, one of its concourses had—scant hours after she’d boarded the Caiman Dundee. There was no Tislilel Meziane listed among the survivors. She hadn’t known, at her own insistence, what the name on Tizzy’s fake ID had been, but none of the footage she found of the aftermath showed her sister.

Had Tizzy died in the explosion?

Jack’s dead…

For a moment, Kyra was tempted to use the emergency number General Toal had given her, to ask him if her sister had survived. But that would mean letting him know where to find her. All of her instincts shied away from that, her distrust blocking her from making the call. A tiny little part of her even wondered if the explosion story was a ploy to get her to come out of hiding.

She’d find a job first, she decided, and then reconsider reaching out. Maybe.

In Lykos City, she swiftly discovered, nobody looked at a tallish, slim young woman and thought fighter. Nobody wanted to hire her for the things she was best at. The closest offer she got was a really disgusting one from an underground arena involving naked cage matches. The Lupus system had no standing army like Tangiers Prime’s, no traditional police force; it kept mercenaries on its payroll instead, who were allowed to contract out for other work in between “tours of duty” as long as none of their jobs ever went against the system’s interests.

Like I would want to be a merc, she mentally sneered. She ate mercs for breakfast.

Following Tizzy’s thorough step-by-step instructions on the tablet, she established a backup identity just in case anything went wrong with “Kali Montgomery.” It wasn’t hard, she decided, as long as she was careful to follow the directions to the letter.

A week passed. No new prospects appeared. She collected her new identity documents, hoping they were as good as the ones Tizzy had made for her.

Now that I have them, she decided, it’s time to get the fuck off this rock.

Sitting in a coffee shop, toying with her tablet and doing a little preliminary research on upcoming launches off of Lupus Prime and onto somewhere a little less “civilized,” she suddenly remembered the message drop that Tizzy had set up for the two of them.

How did I forget about that? she thought, groaning internally. If Tizzy lived, there might be a message awaiting her there. Maybe even more than one.

Fortunately, her login credentials were stored in the tablet, because she’d forgotten them as well.

Rote memorization had always been her weak point; in the Enclave, Teacher—a gruff, bearded man who rarely said anything encouraging or kind—had often yelled at her for her inaccurate recitations of Bible passages. Her recall and reproduction of anything physical was perfect, rivaling Tizzy’s “eidetic” recall, but phrases and speeches—whether spoken or written—were often fuzzy to her, the exact wording getting lost even if she held onto the overall meaning. She’d often, rebelliously, felt that her rewordings were better than the originals, especially where piles of “thees” and “thous” were concerned. But the same, unfortunately, was true of logins.

She remembered every detail Tafrara had shared with her about adapting Old Earth plants to Tangiers Prime, remembered all of the steps she’d learned for the Ceilidh and could dance it again any time someone pulled out a bagpipe, remembered every single Tai Chi pose Ewan and Tafrara had taught her even if she was a little fuzzy on some of their names… but she couldn’t remember the damned passwords Tizzy had made for her. Except one.

She wondered, suddenly, if she had resisted learning them because that would mean admitting that she and Tizzy really were parting ways.

Dozens of messages awaited her, the first posted just a few days after Kyra had left Tangiers Prime. That confused her. They were uninterrupted, as if Tizzy had never gone into cryo at all. Had she stayed on the planet rather than returning to her home world? Maybe the New Casablanca spaceport explosion had changed things in some way. Kyra would have to see what her sister had to tell her; it might affect where she went next—

The back of her neck prickled. Someone was watching her, paying way too much attention to her.

She closed the message system without reading any of Tizzy’s missives. She’d do that later, once she was sure she was safe. Shutting her eyes, she focused on the room around her and the people in it. She had some “esper” tricks that she’d developed, once she started worrying that the Mezianes might try to limit Tizzy’s and her movements, and she was damn well going to use them.

At one table, a guy was trying to flirt with a bored young woman who had only agreed to go out with him so her sister would shut up about her never “putting herself out there.” At another, a frustrated housewife who had gone without sex for more than a year was reading an explicit novel describing, in enthusiastic detail, acts she’d always refused to try with her increasingly estranged husband, while drinking a sickly-sweet concoction that had barely any coffee in it. Two girls, probably exactly Kyra’s real age, were planning a party together for the night when one of their sets of parents would be out of town, both of them hoping for a chance at “seven minutes in heaven” with the same boy. And in a corner booth—

He was military. He was staring right at her, wondering how much longer he would have to wait before he got the order to bring her in.

Motherfucker… She slipped her tablet back into her pack and rose from her seat. She was going to have to get the hell out of town, and off-planet, even faster than she’d been planning.

He followed her at a “discreet” distance. She pretended she didn’t know he was there.

What, she asked herself, would Riddick do in a situation like this? Confront the fucker head-on, maybe?

Somewhere isolated. Somewhere where her shadow would think he had the advantage, held the high ground, but where it would really be her game.

A park. A playground. It was late enough that all of the kids had gone home.

She got ahead of him and, while out of sight, hid her pack under a roundabout that someone had been smart enough to position over soft sand. Then she let him catch up and get one glimpse of her before she vanished behind some trees.

Well, more accurately, up a tree.

He quartered the playground warily, trying to figure out where she’d gone. She waited until he was directly below her to drop down onto him.

The kick to his head as she came down didn’t snap his neck, but it left him groggy and stumbling. She followed up with another kick to his lower spine, not damned hard enough, skipping back out of range as his training took over and, groggy or not, he began to fight in earnest. She had her knives out a second later.

She didn’t kill him, but it was a near thing. She needed him alive, anyway, to unlock his comm and look around in it. Its retina pattern reader wouldn’t work if the blood vessels weren’t pulsing anymore.

Her picture was stored on his comm, a surveillance shot of her leaving the fucking spaceport right after arriving on the planet. The latest message exchange, between him and his CO, told her everything she needed to know.

TM: Is it time to move on her yet?
WN: General Toal says no. Keep observing. Don’t get too close.

General fucking Toal… She’d known it. She’d tried to believe better of him for Tizzy’s sake, but…

She’d fucking known it all along.

No point in digging deeper; she needed to bug out. Shoving the man’s comm back into his pocket and grabbing her sandy pack out from under the roundabout, she hurried back to her apartment, packing as quickly as she could. If there was one tail on her, there would be more. She left her Kali Montgomery ID sitting on the nightstand. Obviously they knew that name. She’d never dare use it again.

Kyra spent a few hours moving from one banking kiosk to another, cashing out the funding cards she suspected Toal’s men might have a line on and then, elsewhere, depositing the funds into new cards. It was tricky work, dodging around the transaction limits, but she finished before the sun rose, what would Tizzy do now a refrain in her head as she tried to think of the sneakiest moves to pull to keep dodging an impending goon squad. She checked the money belt over carefully for bugs, found none, but decided not to risk it. The chip library ended up in the trash along with it, as well as the comm code and even the neurofeedback device Toal had given her. Nothing he’d offered her could be trusted anymore. He might have tapped into anything.

With that in mind, she bought a new comm, wiping the old one after transferring its data to her tablet. She transferred the basic data back onto the new one before boarding a train to the spaceport; she’d do the rest later, once she’d put a few million miles between herself and Toal’s goons and had a chance to sleep. During the ride, she had time to leave one message for Tizzy, but no time to read anything her sister had left for her:

Don’t trust Toal. He tried to grab me. Going dark.
Always your sister. K.

Once she reached the spaceport, she ducked into a restroom and set the scabbard trick into motion again, isomorphing her knives’ scabbards halfway into Elsewhere—thin-atmosphered and desolate on Lupus Prime but technically habitable—far enough to hold something that was fully in that ’verse, and then isomorphing the knives inside each one all the way over. Two stayed on her, “empty” scabbards strapped to her thighs under her loose cargo pants that she could, if necessary, explain away if someone noticed. The rest went into her pack, along with her tablet, clothes, and half of her funding cards.

No Star Jumpers were launching from the spaceport for more than a day, but there was a shuttle to Lupus Station A leaving within an hour. Up on the station, a Star Jumper on its way to New Queensland would begin boarding four hours after she arrived. It was her best bet, especially if they didn’t know she’d gone running yet. Making her way through the spaceport, she bought her ticket at the last possible moment, cleared the security checkpoints as quickly as she could, and raced for her departure gate. She was the last one to board, stuck shoving her pack into a random overhead bin that still had room before taking her seat.

It was, she thought a little blearily, her first launch in an actual seat, with no sedatives in her system. She didn’t even remember being transferred from New Dartmouth to Helion Prime, and lying on the floor of the Scarlet Matador had not been pleasant at all. This was almost comfortable, aside from the pressure on her body—

—and the sudden, stinging heat building on the outside of her thighs—

Fuck! In her rush to board, she’d forgotten to isomorph her knives and scabbards back to U1!

She closed her eyes, focusing on the sting, feeling the blades heating up in their sheaths as she pulled them back into just one universe. They weren’t terribly painful, and were already beginning to cool. Hopefully she wouldn’t have even first-degree burns to deal with—

An alarm began shrieking in the cabin. Smoke was leaking from one of the overhead bins, growing thicker and blacker as everyone’s attention turned to it. There was nothing she could do; God only knew how many Gs were sitting on her chest at the moment. Robotic fire suppression systems, strong enough to function even during liftoff, were on the move. Even as one robotic arm wrenched open the bin and another sprayed it down with fire suppressant, six glowing objects dropped down from the “ceiling” below it and streaked, like holographic meteors, through the shuttle, unseen by anyone but her. Her other knives, still entirely in Elsewhere, no longer held by scabbards that had burned away in both ’verses… white-hot as they fell back to the surface of Lupus Prime.

She could see into the compartment, see the blackened, crumbling remains of her pack and several other bags. Everything had burned hot and fast.

Her pack. Her clothes. Half of her funding cards. Her tablet… with all of the codes and instructions that Tizzy had left for her… all of the data she hadn’t yet ported over to her new comm… the login for the messaging system Tizzy had set up for them… the comm numbers of the Meziane family… hard copies of her new identity’s supporting documents, aside from the ID itself…

Destroyed. All of it… lost forever.

She didn’t even notice when the G forces eased off of her body. She didn’t feel any lighter.

80.
Not His Entourage

That didn’t go too badly.

Riddick stepped out into the hall and looked around at the group of people waiting for him. Several wore full armor, but others were dressed in garb more appropriate for some of the more… cerebral… roles that existed throughout the Armada. He studied them for a moment before glancing over at the guards.

“I need to order breakfast. Been a while since I ate, and even longer since the girl ate anything decent. See if the galley in this beast can put together a ‘traditional Moroccan breakfast.’ Have ’em make enough for fifteen. And tell the maintenance staff that the six suites connected to mine are being opened up again. Have ’em cleaned up and readied for occupation. Any personal possessions left in ’em need to be brought to my audience room, after I’m done working with everybody here.”

“Yes, Lord Marshal. Right away.”

Then again… “Have ’em make enough breakfast for seventeen. You two need some food, too.”

That, he reflected, was the kind of thing Jack wouldn’t have needed to go back and fix. She’d have included the guards from the start. Going so deep in her head was having an odd effect on him.

“Yes, Lord Marshal.” With that, the guards looked a little more relaxed.

He looked back at the assembled group. “Okay. This is gonna take a while. Vanessa Raymond, you’re up first. Come inside.”

Vanessa Raymond was dressed in the garb of a Purifier acolyte. That didn’t surprise him. A lot of the people who ended up in her position had been medical personnel before their conversions. She was tall and strongly built, probably a few years older than him. Her sandy hair had a few threads of silver in it; her lean, square face had laugh lines around the light brown eyes and mobile mouth. The only real difference in appearance, between the Nurse Raymond before him and the one in Jack’s memories, was the deathly pallor of her skin. She stepped forward and followed him back into his audience chamber.

Officer Lola had removed her armor and bogarted his seat. She stood up as soon as he walked in, moving to stand by the inner doors leading to the bedroom.

Is she guarding them? This could get interesting.

“Officer Lola, this is Vanessa Raymond. Vanessa Raymond, officer Lola Santiago, formerly of the New Athens Police Department.”

Raymond frowned, looking at Lola. “I see the scars of Purification, but… what has happened to you?”

“Furyan energy,” Riddick said, seeing Lola’s consternation. “Something we’re gonna talk about a little. You were a medical professional before the Armada came, right? Tell me about what you did.”

Raymond turned her attention back to him. “I was a psychiatric nurse. I worked with troubled adolescents, managing their medication regimens, evaluating their mental and physical well-being, coordinating care programs. My specialty was trauma recovery, working with patients who had been identified as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

“Where’d you work?”

“Eight years at the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital, unfortunately…” She grimaced and then shrugged. “Four and a half years at the Kapodistrian Clinic, until the attack.”

“Do you miss the work? Be honest.”

Raymond began to speak, a “no” clearly forming on her lips, but then stopped, frowning. Good. The impulse toward blind obedience had just been shut down by her Lord Marshal’s command to answer honestly. He’d seen the same struggle on Lola’s face. “I… yes. It… sometimes I don’t understand how the promise of a future paradise could erase every trauma, every neurosis… it feels too good to be true…”

She winced and closed her eyes. He could feel her struggling against voices that were trying to quell her doubts, shove her back into a small corner of her own mind.

“I know one of your former patients. Someone who thinks highly of you, and I think she’d want me to help you. But for me to do that, I need your permission. I can give you the truth. But truth ain’t simple. It ain’t pretty. And it probably doesn’t lead to paradise. So I need you to think hard, and careful, about whether that’s what you want.”

He could see the voices going silent for her, see her thinking over what he had said.

“I… want…” She looked up at him, meeting his eyes. “…truth.”

Lola had nearly fallen. He didn’t know how Raymond might react. “Take a seat.”

He pulled his shirt back off as she sat down in the chair, and then crouched down in front of her.

“Give me your hand.” He took her wrist, closing his eyes and reaching out for the Moribund. He could feel the creature, the way he could feel Lucy, but smoldering with rage and bitterness, pain and… hunger… in a way that Lucy never did.

This one, Moribund… give me this one…

In front of him, Raymond made a strangled, gasping sound. The Moribund had released her; its energies and influence were no longer pouring in, and everything it had taken from her in the last year was now hitting home. His chest began to sting. Opening his eyes, he pressed her hand to the sting…

…and pushed outward.

It was something he’d known how to do from the time he was a child. Something that he’d mastered early on, learning how to channel different types of energy. When he’d been taken by the Quantifiers, he’d had just enough sense to hide it, to pretend he had no such gift. They knew too much about him already, but that was the one thing they never learned. Nonetheless, what they’d done to him had made it impossible to touch the energies anymore…

…until She had come to him again, a year ago, and somehow reached across space to press Her hand to his chest… and the power had returned.

It still hurt like fuck to use it, though. He felt life sparkling through the wrist in his grip and released it even as agony bloomed in his skull and he rocked back on his haunches. Two strong hands were suddenly on his shoulders.

“I got you, big guy,” Lola said from behind him. “You’re okay.”

“How…” Raymond gasped. “How did you…?”

Although she still hadn’t been in sunlight for a little more than a year, there was already more color in her face than before. She looked alive. She felt alive.

Was this why the Quasi-Dead had been so frightened by his “Furyan energy” a year ago? Why the Lord Marshal before him had attacked Furya?

“But all the survivors would say was that the devil had come…” Funny how Jack seemed to know more about Furya than he did. Then again, John MacNamera had apparently served there. After whatever had happened.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the Moribund. Why did you attack Furya? Is it because of what people like me can do?

I did not attack Furya.

Bullshit. I’ve seen a recording. Through Jack’s eyes, anyway. Those were Necromonger ships in the skies.

One portion of the Armada attacked that world. Not at my behest. I would not have ordered an attack upon it. I ended the attack and called them back when I knew.

And why should I believe that?

Because it belongs to my sister. You belong to my sister.

Lucy? That didn’t seem possible. Not given the timing involved.

No. Shirah.

The name felt oddly familiar. Was that Her name? But She had a human body; when She’d spoken to him, he had seen a beautiful woman in front of him, and Her handprint on his chest was a human handprint. How could She possibly be an Apeiros?

And yet the Moribund had just said that he, Furya, and Furyans belonged to Shirah.

He would need to talk to Lucy about it. Most of the Apeiros, from Jack’s memories, seemed honest, aside from the truth they were hiding from the girl because she wasn’t ready to face it yet.

Fuck. Nurse Raymond had asked him a question and instead of answering her…

He opened his eyes, focusing on the world around him again. Two women were watching him with concern.

“You ever heard of Furyans, Nurse Raymond?”

She shrugged. “A little, mostly bizarre rumors. Never met any.”

“You have now.” He climbed back to his feet and picked up his shirt, pulling it back on. He wasn’t entirely sure why he kept doing that, taking it off and putting it back on, except that somehow he wanted to be fully dressed in front of these women as much as possible. He didn’t want them thinking that he expected anything sexual from them.

He especially didn’t want Jack thinking that he expected anything sexual from other women. Especially while the two of them were still in the process of establishing the parameters of their own relationship, and hadn’t even discussed that possible aspect yet.

“So… what you just did…?” Raymond prompted.

“It’s something that Furyans can do,” he told her, “at least some of us. I’m still not clear on all the rules. Now, I figure next up is Dr. Zervas. You two used to work together, didn’t you?”

Raymond nodded. “Both at Aceso and Kapodistrian, yes. You said that you know a former patient of mine?”

Riddick nodded right back at her. “We’ll talk about that once Dr. Zervas has been brought over.”

The whole process was even easier with Polyhymnia Zervas, he realized; the pain in his head lessened each time he forced his way through it. Maybe, if he was lucky, Raymond and Zervas in particular would have some ideas about how to break his conditioning altogether. That was something that hadn’t occurred to him when he’d picked them; their initial selection had been all about Jack’s feelings for people she’d met on Helion Prime.

“Okay,” he told them once Dr. Zervas had recovered. “The two of you,” and he nodded to Raymond and Zervas, “were selected for this because you have a prior relationship with a friend of mine, and she has positive feelings about both of you. You attempted to treat her six years ago at the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital.”

Both women frowned quizzically at each other.

“I say ‘attempted,’” he continued, “because you were working with a faulty premise about what she was suffering from. Nobody was willing to listen to her when she tried to set the record straight, and then she realized her attempts to do so might threaten my safety, so she stopped trying and let you believe the lie.”

He could see Officer Lola connecting her own experiences, in the aftermath of meeting him, to that. Funny how so many of the women who encountered him were stuck lying about it afterward, either for his sake or their own. Like the fuckin’ ’verse itself was insisting on punishing them for getting through even a moment with him unscathed.

“Who is she,” Raymond asked, “and what was the lie?”

“Officially, you knew her as Jane Doe 7439,” Riddick told them. “She preferred to be called Jack. She’d tried to kill herself, and she was suffering from PTSD after surviving a Star Jumper crash and its aftermath, and then being a hostage on a merc ship. What she was not suffering from, though, was either Stockholm Syndrome or trauma from being sexually abused.”

Growing comprehension was spreading on both women’s faces… and then shocked recognition.

“You’re Richard Riddick,” Raymond finally said.

He nodded, trying to keep a smirk off of his face. After everything she’d seen in Helion Prime’s last days, he couldn’t still be a bogey man, could he? Then again, a certain Elemental seemed to believe he was ‘another kind of evil’ to answer the evil of the Necromongers.

But then again, what she believed about the Necromongers made a new kind of sense to him now, anyway…

“That’s me,” he told Raymond. “And when Jack told you I never touched her, she was telling you the truth.”

“And yet later, she admitted you’d threatened her,” Dr. Zervas said. In that calm, clinical way she undoubtedly talked to her own patients.

“She found out that a merc was hanging around and paying attention, and someone was breaking confidentiality rules to feed him information in return for a cut of my bounty. She found out that the Holy Man she’d been staying with knew where I’d gone… and was going to surrender the information if the merc started suspecting the two of them were my friends, instead of my victims, and threatened his family or freedom. The kid changed up her story to protect me.”

He was still more than a little agog about that. But he could see, to the side, Lola nodding. She had tried to protect him, too, even as he was working to get her clear before the fallout of his actions could touch her. Most of the people he’d encountered throughout his life had been inherently selfish enough not to do such a thing… but the ones he liked best in the ’verse always seemed to have that crazy streak of selflessness to them that made him even more of a threat to their well-being than ever.

“I won’t leave without you, Riddick! I’ll find you!” Jack had even planned to rescue him somehow—and who the hell knew how she thought she’d manage that?—when they were on board the Kublai Khan. It was one of the many reasons he’d had to leave her behind; he couldn’t allow her to try to throw herself into harm’s way like that. Not for him.

He’d already lost Carolyn to that.

Zervas was nodding, a thoughtful frown on her face. “In my sessions with her, even after she had ‘admitted’ that you’d threatened her… she refused to unpack any of the abuse you—supposedly—inflicted upon her. She would clam up if I tried to lead her there.”

“Smart move on her part, you know,” he told the doctor. “If she’d tried to make something up, you’d probably have figured out she was still a virgin, and maybe even that she came from a planet with one of the worst and most incomplete sex-ed programs in the Federacy.”

“I thought her accent sounded like she came from Deckard’s World,” Raymond gasped.

“Right in one.” They were quick. Good. They’d need to be. “So here’s the deal. Jack’s here. And while she’s dealt with a lot of her traumas pretty well, she probably could still use someone to listen to what she has to say about it all. She’s been through some wild shit, some of which will probably be hard to believe. But it’s all true. You’re part of her detail now. If she needs help working through any of it, you give it to her. If she just needs friends, you give her that. And your old doctor-patient rules of confidentiality apply to everything she tells you, whether in confidence or even just within these rooms.”

He looked at all three women, who had similar surprised-and-thoughtful looks on their faces.

“You’re her team now. Help her, trust her, and take care of her. And if you find that means you need to protect her from me in some capacity, you do that, too.”

“And the others outside?” Lola asked.

Huh. He really had to decide if he was using first names or last names with these ladies and be consistent about the whole thing.

“They’re not exactly professionals at this kind of thing. But they’re people she liked and cared about and wanted to get to know better when she was on Helion. Some of ’em might need to talk out their trauma from the invasion, even. That one girl, Ofra, was a patient at Aceso when Jack was, and helped her at a critical moment.” He glanced at Ray—no, Vanessa and Poly. “You two recognize her?”

They nodded.

“I’ll do her next. I don’t know if she was still in care or not when she was taken, so once I bring her back, maybe talk to her and see if she’s okay.”

“You’re not at all what I expected,” Poly said, her expression hinting at ruefulness. Vanessa nodded.

“He’s almost exactly what I expected, so far,” Lola said. “I’ll tell you all about how I met him later.”

Ofra proved trickier than he expected. Jack’s recollection of her as one of the C Ward’s “quiet crazies” still applied; the girl didn’t speak, although she obeyed orders promptly when he told her to come in and then sit. He had to go into her head to get an actual conversation going, discovering in the process that she had spent her whole life struggling with verbal communication to such a profound degree that she’d given up on it altogether, something that hadn’t sat well with her family and had led to her committal. She remembered Jack as one of the only people who seemed to understand her nonverbal attempts to communicate… until the Necromongers themselves had arrived, anyway. For her, the invasion had been a liberation. The voices that shoved everyone else into corners of their own minds had set her free.

The food arrived while he was still working with her, so he had the staff set up most of it in one of the suites that was being revived, to accommodate the other nine people who were awaiting his attention.

In the end, Ofra chose to stay as she was. She might, he suspected, be destined to become one of the “Quasi Dead,” channeling other people’s communication through her without needing to speak, herself. He had her join the others for breakfast, telling her that she could return to her duties once she was done and that, if she ever changed her mind, she could come back to him and he’d make good on his offer.

Oddly enough, he could feel all three women approving his decision, even though it bothered him to make it given what he knew. He had a table set up in the audience room, with food for five in it and more actual chairs around it, and made sure both guards had their own helpings, before opening the inner doors to look for Jack.

The girl was in the middle of the bedroom doing Tai Chi.

Apparently she’d found some good things left behind by the prior Lord Marshal’s consorts; she’d even managed to avoid the omnipresent black attire and had found dark blue leggings—still with the odd scaled pattern that characterized so much of Necromonger clothing—and a tunic in a muted blue-green shade. Mermaid colors. He shouldn’t have been surprised. She centered herself and turned toward him and the others—

And her eyes lit up. “Nurse Raymond? Doctor Poly! You survived the invasion!”

Given who she was, hugs followed. Riddick had to quell a sudden rush of envy; she hadn’t hugged him yet, but then, while most of the tension between them had lifted, things were still a work in progress. He would just have to content himself, for now, with watching her be herself.

Not like I was touchy-feely with her before, he conceded. I avoided that for good reason. Maybe she thinks it’s still off the table.

He’d no sooner thought that when Jack spotted the food, realized what he’d ordered just for her—

—and flung her arms around him. “You got my favorites! Thank you, Riddick!”

He struggled to contain all of the feelings her hug was inspiring in him, wrapping his arms around her in return and working to suppress a few inappropriate responses that would probably get side-eyes, or possibly outright glares, from the other women if they noticed.

Let go when you feel her start to pull back, he instructed himself. Don’t go creeper on her.

He did, however, keep his arm around her shoulder for a moment. She smelled amazing.

“Jack, I want you to meet Officer Lola Santiago. She and I go way back. She’s the head of your protection detail. And trust me, on this ship you’re gonna need one.”

It started as a handshake and turned into a hug. Then Jack stepped back, a quizzical frown and a puzzled smile vying for dominance on her face. “You three aren’t straddling ’verses, not even a little. But you’re all dressed like Necromongers…?”

“Riddick did something involving ‘Furyan energy’ to undo our conversion,” Vanessa explained as they sat down to eat, shooting Riddick a quizzical look at the same time. He’d let Jack explain the whole thing about ’verses.

“Oh! Like Michael did to me when the Moribund attacked me.” Aside from a small, expressive shudder—at least half of which, he was pretty sure, was theater—Jack didn’t seem to have any trouble talking about that incident. Which was good, because her three new friends were gonna have a lot of questions for her.

Riddick ate quickly, aware that the other four were settling in for a more leisurely breakfast and gab session, especially when Jack began pouring mint tea around. He rose right as the conversation turned to more earnest topics.

“Still got a lot to do,” he told Jack when she looked a question at him. “I’ll be back later. You four will have plenty of time to get acquainted. Maybe even introduce them to Lucy.”

I’m here. And in answer to your earlier question, yes. Shirah is my sister, and the Light of Furya.

Sounded like there’d be quite a story behind that. Why, he found himself wondering, wasn’t she the Fury of—

Oh. Of course. That was going to be an interesting conversation with Jack, too. Once they were alone.

She walked with him to the doors.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” she said as he reached for the knobs.

He nodded, not ready to actually talk about any of it yet. “When I get back, we will. Just got a few more things to do to make sure this ship is safe for you. Okay?”

She nodded and then gave him another hug.

He hugged her back, wishing they were alone already… glad they weren’t. He still had a lot to work out. “When you and the ladies get hungry, tell the guards what you want. Don’t go exploring yet, though. I know you want to.”

She snorted. “Shit, I still haven’t finished exploring that bathroom of yours. That’ll keep me.”

True; he’d been in smaller hangars. “See you soon, Jack.”

“Looking forward to it.” Her smile was easy, natural, as if the last six years apart had just been a few days.

How did she do that? She wasn’t the sort to just shrug off trauma so easily, was she? She sure as hell hadn’t been in the past.

Then again, he thought as he stepped out into the hall and the doors closed behind him, she is a damned good actress.

He wondered who she was trying to sell the Normal Girl act to. Him? The other ladies in the room? Herself?

It’s the role she’s been required to play for five years. She might not even know how to switch it off.

Of course, there was always the possibility that she was running a game of her own. She was one of General Toal’s Operatives… and the chosen instrument of the Apeiros. And as much as that seemed to plant her firmly in the White Hat camp, it meant that some of her motives might not be fathomable even after his deep dive into her head. She might not be entirely what she seemed, even now.

Well, the last year has been pretty boring…

He left instructions with the guards to see to it that all of his guests were able to order lunch when they were hungry. Then he stopped by the suite where the remaining nine he hoped to convert back from the Moribund’s thrall were waiting.

“Got a few things I need to do before I get to you,” he told them. “That’ll give you time to figure some things out.”

“What is your will, Lord Marshal?” one of them asked.

Damn. They were still deep under.

“You all know each other. I need all of you to think about that, think about who you were before. Before you converted. Think about who you were together, the things you did. When I come back, I need to know if you want to be a team again. And if you’re willing to give up a dream that wasn’t yours and take back the pain that was, along with everything you were together.”

They were frowning; what he was asking for would force their native personalities to the surface. Maybe.

Maybe there was something more he could do about that.

Moribund. These ones I’m with… these nine. Don’t release their bodies yet. But release their minds. Let them think clearly without interference from you or the Quasi Dead.

Why do you not simply make them do what you will?

I need them to want it, too. And not because you or anything else told them to.

You are much like my sister. No wonder she has chosen you.

That was all he needed, another prophecy declaring him its Chosen One.

Around him, he could see nine faces growing more animated, interested, confused…

“When I come back, you can let me know what you’ve decided as a group. You got three choices. Give up the dream and take back the pain, and work with me, doing the things you did together before. Stay as you are, obeying the voices you usually have in your head now, but as a group again. Or go back to your post-conversion lives with no changes at all. Be ready to tell me what you’ve chosen. You’ll probably have a few hours to decide.”

They had already begun talking quietly as he closed the door behind him.

Now it was time to do something he should have done—should have known to do—a year earlier. Something that, if he’d done it back then, might have led him to Jack well before this.

“I’m ready,” he told the Quasi-Dead as he entered their chamber and sat down on the central dais, folding his legs. “Show me the memories of the one called Kyra.”

79.
Officer Lola

Lola Esposito had, from childhood, always wanted to make a difference. To make the world better. For her, that had meant becoming a police officer.

She had been the one racing around her school playground, her windbreaker sleeves tied around her throat so that the jacket flapped out behind her like a cape, “rescuing” her classmates from “peril” before “flying” away again. Protecting the innocent, she’d insisted from that time forward, was her sworn duty…

And it all ends like this, she thought in disgust.

Chained to a filthy bed, naked, her own sets of handcuffs used to spread her arms and lock them to the bedposts behind her head, a nasty set of solid iron “dungeon” cuffs around her ankles keeping her legs open wide, all she could do was lie on the bed and wait for whatever was going to happen.

She’d tried, repeatedly, to get out of the cuffs in the last three hours. Her own sets, at least, could be stress-popped under the right conditions, and more than one perp she’d caught had done exactly that, but she couldn’t get the right angle or pressure to do the same thing. And the cuffs on her ankles were terrifyingly solid, feeling like the kinds of things blacksmiths had churned out more than a thousand years ago for actual medieval dungeons.

The men who had put them on her—one of them a fellow cop, and if she managed to get out of this somehow, she was going to destroy him—had jokingly “warned” her that she wouldn’t be able to escape them.

“You’ll just injure yourself trying,” Detective Palmer had laughed, “but fortunately, you won’t injure any of the parts people are interested in.”

I will fucking end him even if I have to come back from the grave to do it…

They had neatly folded up her clothes and set them on a nearby table, along with her badge, belt, and arms, just where she couldn’t get at any of them. And then they had left, laughing and promising that someone who liked “sticking pigs” would come attend to her soon.

Palmer had fooled her. He’d been the dirty cop she’d been trying to ferret out, the whole time, but he’d tricked her into thinking Sato was the one she was after, tricked her into confiding in him about Sergeant Agassi’s investigation into departmental corruption. And yet… he hadn’t fooled her for long. Tonight had been about gathering proof that he was on Vyacheslav’s payroll, and she’d nearly succeeded… if only she hadn’t gotten caught.

In the last three hours, she’d had nothing to do except make fruitless attempts to break out of the cuffs, go over all the evidence in her head… and wait for something to happen. For one of the doors on either end of the room to open and someone to come in.

Finally one door, to her right, eased open.

Here we go. She’d had a lot of time to think about how she might stand up to the kind of torture her captors had in mind, but a shudder rolled through her all the same.

Instead of someone walking through, a long, slim gun barrel appeared, extending its way past the door crack. Then a man in full combat gear, leading with the rifle, stepped into the room. He stopped, staring at her for a few seconds, before he began moving forward, quartering the room.

Other soldiers followed him in.

Fuck. So it’s gonna be some kind of cosplay gang bang. She gritted her teeth, trying to prepare herself for the ordeal to come.

They ignored her, mostly, moving for the door on the other end of the room.

A few of them took a moment to look her over, and she could swear she saw their filthy thoughts in their eyes. Others looked troubled when they glanced her way. One of them, near the back of the group—barely more than a kid, with black, close-cropped curls, a wrestler’s physique, and odd dark glasses concealing his eyes—kept looking over at her with a frown. As the others left through the next door, he turned and looked back at her again.

“Stay on task,” she heard another soldier mutter to him. “Ain’t no room for improvising in this gig if you want your head to stay on your neck.”

Soon they were gone, the doors closed again.

Another half hour crawled by. Lola was excruciatingly aware of how slowly time was passing thanks to the clock on the wall. Maybe that was one of the more subtle forms of torture in the room—

The lights flickered and died.

No longer able to see the clock, she began to silently count. She was still two hours away from the message she’d made for Sergeant Agassi, on a timed release if she didn’t make it back by then, reaching him and, hopefully, triggering a rescue. But she’d had plenty of time to come up with more than a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t, or why the rescue wouldn’t be in time even if it happened. Two hours left to live through, minimum, if she wanted any kind of chance at all…

The lights flickered on for a moment, died again, and then low emergency lighting came on, dark red and just barely illuminating the wall clock.

Another ten minutes passed before the door on her left eased open again.

The young soldier who had kept looking back at her stepped into the room.

His dark glasses had been removed. The red glow of the emergency lighting seemed to reflect in his eyes, making them ignite. It was like catching a glimpse of the devil.

He walked over to the foot of the bed in silence. Lola had the odd and horrible feeling that those inhuman eyes could see everything, not just the parts of her body that had been exposed and spread open but into her head.

“Never done this before,” he said, his voice deep and full of the gravel that she associated with chain smokers—

—and, she suddenly thought, the old man who had lived one floor down from her, when she was a kid, who had been a prisoner of war in the Bernathi Conflict and had once told her, this is what your voice sounds like if you spend a year screaming all the time…

She shuddered and put the thought aside. “Done what?” She had far too many awful ideas about what he meant, especially with him essentially standing between her legs like that.

“This,” he said, and touched one of the iron cuffs on her ankles. He glowered at it for a moment—

It snapped open right as he hissed in pain and pressed one hand to his temple.

“Fuck,” he muttered. “Sons of bitches… gonna kill ’em all for this…”

What the hell had just happened?

She watched as the man—was he a man? The more she really looked at him, the more she thought he might still be a kid. A huge, hulking, dangerous kid… but not actually an adult yet. What army recruited kids?—took several deep breaths before putting his hand on the other iron cuff and glaring at it.

“Argh!” Now both hands were pressed to his temples, but the second iron cuff had snapped open, too.

She was able to close her legs for the first time in hours… and for the first time in hours, she was suddenly aware of how much her hips and inner thighs hurt from being held in that position for so long.

“You okay?” she found herself asking.

“Not really,” he grumbled as he moved unsteadily around the bed toward her right wrist. “Least I can do this part physically…”

Apparently this kid knew how to pop her cuffs. It took him less than fifteen seconds to have her right arm freed. His walk had steadied as he came around to her left side to work on the remaining cuff.

“Who are you?” she asked him as he worked.

“If I told you, you’d have to tell your bosses.” He popped the last cuff off and gave her a crooked smile. “Wouldn’t you?”

She made her move, rolling to the side so she could lunge off the bed and grab for her guns—

—and fell, sprawling, to the floor, her muscles fucking gelatin.

“Whoa,” he said, and a moment later she felt his hands on her shoulders. “Easy there, officer.”

He helped her to her feet, steadying her. She suddenly smelled blood.

“Fuck,” she muttered, forced to lean against him for a moment while she recovered her balance. There was blood on his shirt, she noticed, and an oozing wound on the join between his neck and shoulder.

“Just breathe,” he told her. “You’re okay. Nothing’s dislocated. How long were you chained up?”

“Nearly four hours,” she grumbled.

She heard the rattle of a wrapper, and then the guy handed her an energy bar, its wrapping already peeled back. “Eat. Tastes like shit, but you need the calories.”

He was right; it was nasty. Halfway through it, before she could even ask, he offered her his opened canteen. Whatever was inside it, it wasn’t water. Not alcohol either; it tasted bitter and chalky, like someone had forgotten to put a masking flavor into an energy drink.

“Exactly,” he said; she wasn’t sure why. “Think you’re up to getting dressed on your own?”

Well, jeez… “I can manage it.”

Her guns were gone when she turned back to the table.

Fuck. What had he done with them?

It took her longer than she liked to dress herself. Longer than he liked, too, because he helped her fasten her bra and button her shirt. Fortunately, her shoes didn’t have laces so she didn’t have to deal with that embarrassment. She put on her belt, aware for the first time that Palmer hadn’t found her recorder and it was still going.

A thunderous boom rocked the building from nearby. Next to her, the soldier laughed softly, took something out of his pocket, dropped it to the ground, and stomped it.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“I officially just died,” he told her. “For a few hours, anyway. Not like they won’t figure it out. C’mon. Got a job for you.”

Did he think she was in Vyacheslav’s pocket? “Already got one.”

“And this fits it perfectly. Don’t make me insist.” He inclined his head toward the door.

He has my guns, she reminded herself, and began walking.

For someone as large as he was, he moved as silently as a cat. He led her unerringly through the darkness; after she stumbled, he reached back, took her hand, and put it on his shoulder. “Not much farther.”

In the distance, she heard a sudden rattle of gunfire. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing you have to worry about,” he said, turning and pushing open a door.

The well-lit room beyond looked, for a moment, like a daycare. A few of the soldiers who had passed through her room were sitting in it, using the child-sized tables as adult chairs, and more than a dozen children sat near them.

Children? Why are there children in a mob-run casino…? Oh. Fuck.

“Kids,” the nameless soldier next to her said, slipping his dark glasses back into place, “this is Officer Lola.”

What the fuck? I never told him my name—

“She’s gonna take you out of here to someplace safe.”

She hadn’t quite known what she’d been expecting. Something nefarious, maybe. Real soldiers wouldn’t have a kid his age—and she was thinking sixteen, maybe seventeen, tops—in their platoon, so these had to be mercs, right? And mercs had no honor, no code. She’d figured he was going to use her as cannon fodder in some way. But…

But this was the job he wanted her for?

She turned to ask him, and found him holding her sidearms out to her, butts first. Still fully loaded, by their weight. She holstered the main gun, keeping her ankle piece drawn, trying to figure out what to say, what to ask.

“You get ’em out of here,” he told her, and followed up with detailed directions. It was the same way she’d been brought in, although the impound lot fence hadn’t had a hole in it at the time. His platoon must have added that feature.

“What about you?” she asked. Merc or not, she suddenly found herself worrying about him. He was just a kid, himself—

“You don’t worry about us. Take care of the kids and we’ll clear you a path.” He was arming weapons of his own as he spoke, as were his brethren, most of whom were herding the kids over to her. “You ain’t never seen none of us. You heard a racket while you were getting loose from your cuffs, found the kids, and got ’em the hell out of here, and you don’t know what else went down. Understood?”

She nodded. She’d have to erase the last bit of the recording she’d made, but whoever these soldiers were, their presence on her audio file might be dangerous… to her, or to them, she wasn’t sure, but either way she should make it go away.

“You never saw us,” he was telling the kids. “That’s for your safety more than ours. Now go.”

She believed him. And somehow that just made her hungrier to know who—what—he was.

It was hard not to wonder, not to speculate, as she led the children out of the “daycare” and off to the right, soon following the path she’d been forced to walk as Palmer and his goon friends dragged her in. She was aware of the soldiers around her, clearing the path… and the moment when the “kid” snapped the neck of one of Palmer’s accomplices who had taken a few liberties with her while helping undress her. She should have been sickened by the ease with which he did it, but she wasn’t. What was he, though? How had he broken the cuffs on her ankles? Why had it felt like he’d been inside her head?

As she finished helping the kids through the fence and turned back to thank him, he was already gone, loping back toward the building they’d left with weapons drawn. The rest of his brethren followed her through the fence and scattered into the darkness, one of them protectively shadowing her and the kids until they reached a well-lit thoroughfare and she could flag down a patrol car.

Fifteen missing and exploited children, recovered in a single night, should have been a career-making coup. It probably would have been, if only she’d been able to keep her mouth shut.

She had… at first. She’d erased the last portion of her recording, starting with the mysterious soldiers’ passage through the room, and had gone along with the pretense that she’d finally managed to pop her own cuffs and that the ones at the foot of the bed were easy to defeat, too, once her hands were free. She’d admitted to hearing fighting elsewhere in the complex as she was evacuating the kids, but both she and the children had sworn that they hadn’t seen anyone as they fled the buildings.

Then the WANTED posters appeared on the station walls.

She recognized all of the faces instantly: the soldiers who had helped rescue the children. Six of them were described as ex-Service, men who had broken out of a military prison and were committing a crime spree, probably as a team. Their alleged ringleader, Charles Demme, was the soldier who had shadowed her and the children to safety. The seventh…

She hadn’t been wrong. He was a kid. Richard B. Riddick, seventeen… with a string of brutal, impossible crimes attributed to him.

Impossible, she knew, because she’d helped process most of the scenes of those murders, knew the detective who was in charge of the cases, and knew for a damned fact that the only reason they were still open cases was because the perp actually behind the killings was fucking untouchable by law enforcement unless they somehow managed to catch him in the act.

She knew, with absolute certainty, that the boy was being framed for crimes he’d had nothing to do with. Which meant all the WANTED posters were probably full of lies.

Vyacheslav was dead. Palmer had died at the casino that night, too, which had led to Agassi closing the corruption case without even listening to her evidence—“He’s dead, Lola. Why take his pension from his widow?”—and word was that all of Vyacheslav’s properties had been confiscated by the New Athens municipal government. And the seven men who had really rescued fifteen innocent children from sex slavery had been transformed into Public Enemies…

She should have kept her mouth shut, but she couldn’t.

Her friends on the force tried to warn her. Eventually, she’d gotten the message… after “accidentally” ending up on a no-fly list and experiencing two near-misses of having potentially career-ending petty crimes almost pinned on her, only to be cleared at the last moment. Finally, she’d shut up and kept her head down, letting the official story stay unchallenged. Finally, she’d understood why Riddick had warned her that she’d never seen him or his friends, and what he’d been trying to protect her from. But it still burned her that she couldn’t defend the honor of the seventeen-year-old boy who had saved her life and rescued fifteen little kids…

And, for the next thirteen years, she had remained a lowly patrol officer even though she’d more than earned a detective’s badge. On Helion Prime’s final night, she’d been assigned to keep the peace in one of the shelters, not even allowed to join the fight against the invaders. And then, the next day, she’d found herself among thousands being offered a terrible, unthinkable choice…

…one faith, one set of loyalties, exchanged for another…

…and, although sometimes her former sets of principles reared up and told her that it was wrong, all wrong…

…she was at peace… of a kind…

“The Lord Marshal has requested your attendance,” Lord Huaman told Lola. “You will know the way.”

She did; exactly how to reach the chambers of the Lord Marshal was suddenly in her head. “Permission to leave my post?”

“Granted.”

Two guards stood at either side of the Lord Marshal’s doors, both looking ill at ease. She approached, waiting quietly in front of them. “Is the Lord Marshal in? He summoned me.”

“He… is not to be disturbed at this time,” one of the guards said. “You will need to wait.”

Deep within, part of her wanted to rebel. Why the hell had she been summoned, at that moment, if she was just going to be made to wait? What the hell was the point?

Leave these thoughts behind. Service is all. Loyalty is all. The Underverse awaits. The voices always came when she had doubts, when the person she had once been tried to reassert herself.

Not like I wasn’t going to be standing still for a few more hours anyway… She let go of the annoyance, stood at parade rest, and settled in to wait.

It didn’t end up being all that long. Maybe fifteen minutes. Then the doors opened and the Lord Marshal, unarmored and strangely familiar, opened the door and leaned out. “Any of my guests arrive yet?”

The voice was familiar, too.

The guards at the door, who seemed unusually reticent, nodded at him and pointed her way.

It was the first time she’d seen the Lord Marshal, even though it had been a little over a year since he’d taken power. He looked over at her, and a broad smile spread over his face. “Officer Lola. C’mon in.”

She’d never worked in any of the force’s public relations areas; aside from the one rescue, she’d never been in a position to need a “kid-friendly” name for her job. There was only one person who had ever called her that; everyone else had just called her Esposito. She found herself staring at him, even as she also found herself obediently walking forward.

How had she not realized? How had she not known?

The Riddick… was her Riddick. How had she not realized?

For a moment, the strange voices that often shut down her thinking had eased off.

She was in his audience room. The inner doors were closed, leaving just a large desk, piled with his armor, and a single chair for furniture. She had the odd sense that once there had been more chairs, but most of them were gone. A statue in the middle of the room had been hidden beneath multiple large tapestries, all of them turned to obscure the pictures and display colorful snarls of thread instead.

“It’s you,” she managed.

“That it is,” he said, still smiling. “How’ve you been, Officer Lola?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t understand what you were really warning me about, back in the day, so I probably didn’t do as well as I should’ve.”

“Hmm… that mean you tried to defend my honor?” He sounded amused.

“Unfortunately, yes.” She had to fight against the impulses to be deferential; the Necromonger Way prized obedience over truth, but he seemed to want truth, so wasn’t that obedience, too?

“Sorry. That can’t have gone well for you.”

“Well, I didn’t end up with a fabricated criminal record, anyway.” Just barely.

“Let me guess, though. You ended up a beat cop for the rest of your career.” He leaned against his desk, watching her, his expression almost… fond? “How’d you know that the criminal record they cooked up was fabricated? You didn’t know anything about me.”

“Because I knew who really committed the crimes. We just couldn’t prove it enough to get past his army of expensive lawyers.”

“You should’ve been a detective.”

“That was the plan,” she admitted, “until I tanked it. I kept an eye on your record, though. I don’t guess I should have been surprised that you really started committing murders.”

It had hurt her heart more than a little, though.

“That was inevitable.” He shrugged, a hint of amusement crossing his enigmatic features.

“I wish it hadn’t been.”

“You were hopin’ I’d make a career out of rescuin’ little kids and damsels in distress?”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” she told him. “But I don’t guess there’s much of a living in that when you’re, what, a rogue Operative? With mercs, cops, and the military trying to chase you down?”

His smile widened again. “Clever girl. You figured it out. When?”

“Two years later. That was when I found out Operatives were real, and how they were conditioned. You broke open those cuffs with your mind and it caused you pain.” And, she realized, she’d seen the wound where he’d cut his tracker out, during the moment when he’d held her and supported her. She just hadn’t understood, at the time, what she was seeing.

The Lord Marshal—the Riddick—no, just Riddick—nodded. “Like I said, you’d’ve been a good detective. I hardly ever do any of that ‘esper’ stuff. Mostly, I rely on other things. But I’m gonna have to use it in a few minutes.”

“What for?”

“You.” Riddick abruptly removed his shirt and set it on the desk. He still had the same wrestler’s physique, a little more solid than it had been fourteen years before. “I need your help. I need you for a special task, and I think you might even like it. But it means giving up a dream. And it means the return of pain. So I’m givin’ you the chance to say no.”

The Necromonger in her couldn’t imagine saying no. She fought past it to consider his words. What dreams did she have left? So many had died, lost to poor choices. There was only one dream left, and it wasn’t even really hers…

Was that the one he meant?

Could she give up the Underverse?

The last fourteen years of her life, the chance to achieve her ambitions, even if she’d failed to… had been because of him. She would have been dead long before any such dream of paradise appeared, if he hadn’t saved her.

She had always wanted to find a way to pay him back. What payment was enough to make up for a saved life?

“I’m not going to say no. What do you need me to do?”

He walked over to her, standing only inches from her. “This is probably gonna hurt. Possibly a lot. I need you to give me your hand.”

She held her hand out to him, surprised when he wrapped his around her wrist.

“Okay. Hold on.” In front of her, Riddick closed his eyes. “This one, Moribund. Release this one to me. Now.”

For a moment, she felt nothing. And then…

Her whole body felt weak, sick… dying… Pain bloomed all the way through her and she felt her strength giving out. The only other time she’d felt like this was when she’d been hospitalized with ’Enza and had genuinely believed she might die…

“He’s released you.” Riddick opened his eyes again. The silver of them was no longer catching the light but shining. And there was a glowing handprint on his chest. He pressed her hand to the print—

Energy exploded out of him and blasted through her body. She convulsed as all of her nerves came back to life and the power coursed through every cell. Riddick’s free arm slipped around her waist, keeping her from falling. Suddenly all of her focus, all of her effort, was on not screaming.

The last of the energy shivered along the ends of her nerves and went still.

Lola gasped, feeling better than she had in years. Her body was full of life, full of power, as if some wellspring had been opened within her. She hadn’t felt this strong and full of vitality since she’d been a kid.

In front of her, Riddick released her and fell to his knees, clutching his head. “Fuck…”

She knelt down beside him, steadying him as he had once steadied her. “You made me human again… how?”

Riddick took several slow, deep breaths before he answered. “It’s a Furyan thing… a trick I learned from another Furyan… one who never got caught and conditioned. He used it to save her life…”

“Her?” Just from the emphasis and intonation, she could tell that Riddick was speaking about someone important to him.

“She’s… a big part of why I did this,” he said, slowly recovering his composure. “She might not need as much protection as I thought, but she still needs protectors. And I need to know they’re not serving the Moribund’s agenda. Just in case.”

“The Moribund?”

“The god of the Necromongers. Been controlling them for more than four hundred years. Until just now, it still had control over you, mostly.”

Riddick rose to his feet again and walked over to his desk, putting his shirt back on.

“So, what happens now?” Lola asked, touching her neck. She still had the scars of purification, but…

…she felt truly purified now. Full of astonishing life.

“Now… you are permanently reassigned to my personal detail. As part of her personal detail.”

“Her?” she asked again.

“When I met her six years ago, she was just a kid. Disguised as a boy, calling herself Jack. I’ve always thought of her by that name.” He gave Lola a wry grin. “I left her on Helion Prime, thought she would be safe there. That didn’t work out so well for her, but she found a safe place on another world… until a merc that was after me decided to try to use her to get to me.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” She’d always hated dealing with mercs when she was a cop, even when they were supposedly there to help.

“It wouldn’t have been, but Jack’s wily as fuck. She got away and started to make a run for it… on a ship that Lord Vaako had gotten into position to raid. He recognized her and brought her to me.”

The girl the Lord Marshal has been seeking for the last year… “And you want me to be part of her protection detail?”

“More than that. She needs friends. Never met an esper who needs human contact as much as she does. Most of us shy away from it. Not her. She lives for it.” He smiled over at Lola. “So yeah, protect her… but even more important… give her companionship. I think you two will like each other.”

“Where is she?”

“Showering, probably, back in there.” He gestured at the closed doors between his audience room and his bedchambers.

“Are you two…?”

“Not yet.”

Lola found herself frowning. “That’s… a little presumptuous of you, isn’t it?”

“Not really.” Riddick smirked. “But if it is, you can protect her from me.”

“Don’t think I won’t.”

Riddick laughed. “I know you will, Lola.”

There was a knock at the outer doors.

“That’ll probably be the rest of the soon-to-be-ex necros I called for,” he said with a grin.

“More people you’re taking back from the path to the Underverse?” she found herself asking.

“Ain’t no such thing, Officer Lola,” he said as he started to walk over to the doors. “The Moribund’s been running a long con for the last four hundred-plus years. You weren’t on your way to paradise.”

“Then what’s the purpose of all this?” she gasped.

“Ain’t time to tell you yet. I will. But not yet.”

If there was no paradise awaiting converts, what was the point of conversion? If death wasn’t the gateway to that promised paradise, why were millions being exterminated? “Riddick?”

“Yeah?” He stopped, looking back at her by the doors.

“If… it’s all a lie… what have you been doing at the head of the Armada for the last year?”

His lips quirked. “Reining it in.”

He opened the doors and stepped through, closing them behind him.

78.
Empires of the Dead

This, Riddick found himself reflecting, was more like the girl he’d expected to find.

“To be fair,” Jack said, her expression turning damned pert the moment the doors closed, “this place is scary as shit. You know how many worlds these guys have burned down?”

“I do now,” he told her, reining in a smirk for the moment, “thanks to your memories.”

He wondered how upset she would be about that. He couldn’t think of a more intimate act he’d ever engaged in with anyone. There was a real possibility that she’d feel violated when she realized just how deep into her memories he had gone.

“Which are all back in my head now, too.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Almost all of them.”

She didn’t seem bothered at all. Interesting.

“What’s still missing?” He had some strong suspicions, but if he was right about what, and why, he wasn’t going to clue her in.

“Well, among other things, I still don’t know what ‘Donna Noble has left the library’ means or what it has to do with Kyra.”

There was a soft rustle from the vaulted ceiling above them. “Sounds like your sister thinks you should let it be,” he said, sidestepping the issue of what had happened to Kyra for the moment. The phrase, itself, was opaque to him.

Jack’s sister. There was a crazy, twisted thought. The girl had gone out and adopted herself four siblings… an esper older brother named Todd, an older sister that he still needed to tell her had died… a telepathic crustacean…

…and an eldritch horror.

Excuse me? But he could hear amusement in the creature’s mental voice.

C’mon, he told Her. You know human beings can’t even look right at you without it breaking their brains a little.

But it was, he thought, a perfect example of who the girl in front of him, no longer afraid of him, truly was. Confronted with members of a mind-bending transdimensional species that most people would instinctively want to flee from or kill, she’d done the most purely Jack thing of all…

She’d made friends with them.

He couldn’t entirely fathom how she did that. With them, or with members of humanity. There was a wellspring of trust within her that hadn’t stopped flowing despite every dire situation she’d found herself in and every genuine monster she’d faced. And she’d been confronted by some nasty ones.

She’d also stayed friends with the Apeiros after they had lifted memories from her mind on multiple occasions and even puppeteered her body. Maybe that was why she seemed so nonchalant about what he and the Quasi-Dead had done.

“I’m trying to let it be,” Jack said, pulling him back out of his musings. “But, I mean… could you?”

“I’m not the one who’d probably go off half-cocked if she knew too much,” he told her. “Even you agreed to have those parts of your memory wiped, when you knew what was in them.”

The girl was frowning at him. “Do you know?”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t especially thrilled about it. But he wasn’t going to derail everything. For now, at least.

“So everybody knows but me,” she grumbled, finally looking irked.

Riddick shook his head, starting to remove his armor. He might not need to wear it every time he left his chambers anymore, now that he had a truce with the Moribund in place…

…or he might. The last Lord Marshal had apparently never stepped out of the rooms without his on.

But then again, back then, the Moribund hadn’t cared how much intrigue, debauchery, or backstabbery its—

His, the nameless one interjected.

—his vassals had engaged in, as long as they obeyed his commands.

“Hardly anybody knows, Jack.” he looked over at her as he set pieces of armor on his desk, weighing her reactions. “Most of the people who figure it out die… at least, the ones who are too good to stand by and let it all keep going.”

She frowned at him. “So, what, you can know because you’re not good enough? That’s bullshit, Riddick.”

There you are. She still believed in him. They just might have a fighting chance to get through this. “Maybe ‘altruistic’ would be a better word. You’re the one who tried to throw herself into a swarm of flying piranhas to save Shazza, not me. Maybe none of us want to see you succeed at that kind of suicidal fuckery.”

Jack was, he was glad to see, considering his words. After a moment, she sighed and nodded. “Yeah, you probably don’t have ‘impulse control problems,’ right?”

“Most of the time? No.” Done removing his armor, he sat down in his chair, watching her. “So here’s the thing. You got too many bulls-eyes all over you for me to just cut you loose. Almost as many as me. Toombs. The Federacy. The Quintessa Corporation. They’d all want to use you. Use you up.”

She nodded. Poor kid didn’t look thrilled, but she seemed to accept what he was telling her.

“Might just be that this is the safest place for you to be right now.” Not to mention that he didn’t want to let her go…

“That’s a really disturbing thought,” she said, glancing around his chambers. He hadn’t made a whole lot of changes to them since he’d taken them over; about the biggest “change” he’d made was pulling down a few hangings depicting bizarre acts of torture and wrapping them around a gruesome statue that couldn’t be removed without a jackhammer. The place was grim, someone’s dark, twisted fantasy—

Oh yeah. That’d help her some.

“Tell me about the Tenth Crusade,” he said, hiding a smile when her expression turned quizzical.

“In real life, there’s never been one,” she said. “I mean, there were a lot more than ten crusades in the Middle Ages on old Earth, but the ones that were numbered only officially go up to eight. Some historians call Lord Edward’s Crusade the Ninth Crusade, though. But no Tenth Crusade ever happened… so a lot of stories were written about one happening.”

“The ship, though.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She shrugged and sat down on the foot of the bed. “You need a second chair.”

“Liked to keep everybody I had to let in here standing. But yeah. I’ll get you one. So. The ship.”

“It’s one of the three missing Phase I Star Jumpers from the early days of Federacy colonization. But you probably remember that from my memories if nowhere else.”

So she did know what he’d done. Odd that she was so casual about it, especially given some of what she had to know he’d seen. More than seen, really.

“I saw ’em, and I probably still have ’em in my head, but I have to go digging for ’em in a way I don’t with my own memories. How ’bout you fill in the details from yours?”

He could tell that she still wondered why he was so interested, but she shrugged it off and started talking. “This Allsense-VR game designer from the late twenty-first century got super rich off of a game he’d named Emperoi Thanatou, which he mistranslated into English as ‘Empires of the Dead’ even though it actually meant ‘death dealers.’ Huh…”

She frowned for a second before continuing.

“It was set in early fourteenth century Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, and players could take on roles as knights, lords, and pilgrims, or the non-European equivalents. Everybody’s goal in the game was to get control of a city called Jerusalem, which had just been made part of the Mediterranean Interdiction Zone about half a decade before the game came out, and nobody could even visit anymore.”

“So his game was about a fictional Tenth Crusade, to a place people had only just been barred from accessing in reality?”

“I guess. He never called it that, but yeah. The game ran for more than a decade, one of those worldwide bestsellers with almost five billion user accounts, but then it got banned by more than a dozen major nations because it was ‘radicalizing’ players, and there were some incidents in which people who played on opposing sides in-game attacked each other in real life. But he was already a trillionaire from it, and he decided he was going to use his money to build a ship and get a colony charter, and go where no Earth government could tell him what to do ever again.”

Riddick realized, suddenly, that he knew a piece of the story that Jack didn’t, that nobody had let preteen Audrey MacNamera read about when she was composing her report. He’d heard of that game, and it had been popular for a reason that had nothing to do with its medieval setting: registered adult accounts could activate a module, for an additional monthly fee, that allowed their “knights” and “lords” to have lifelike Allsense-VR sex with NPC “ladies” and peasant women. Dozens of watchdog groups had been up in arms within a year of the setting’s introduction, after discovering that the sex didn’t have to be consensual and that many players were sacking villages just so they could rape NPCs. The game still existed, and Riddick had encountered more than one “club” of malcontents that still played “unlocked” editions of it for that sole purpose. But that part wouldn’t have been in any of the history books a grammar school girl had access to, especially somewhere like Deckard’s World.

“What was this trillionaire’s name?”

“Chapman Marshal.”

“Hmm.” That made sense. “So he built a ship?”

“He had to get some other trillionaires involved to get the funds together, but yeah. They got a charter to terraform and colonize Kepler-186-f. The Quintessa Corporation had just announced Isomorph Drives, and they commissioned their ship to have one but realized that, since they’d beat the terraforming equipment to Kepler-186 if it flew out on a sublight drive, they’d need to take it with them. That didn’t leave them with a whole lot of room for people.”

“Especially with how primitive cryo was back then,” Riddick mused. The ship Kyra had taken hadn’t used cryo at all, and her memories of life on it, relayed to Jack, had been cold and claustrophobic. “How’d this Marshal guy handle it?”

“He decided to get a second Star Jumper just for the terraforming equipment, and sent it ahead, but that meant they needed a shit-ton more funds than if they’d sent it out with a traditional sublight drive. He put out a call to players of his game, inviting them to ‘join the crusade’ for a fee. The ship’s captain, Bernard Covu, had already been hired, and a famous scientist, Patricia Oltuvm, was put in charge of life support and cryo. They were the only ones who didn’t have to pay… in the first round, anyway. And they were the only ones outside of Marshal and his trillionaire buddies who would be Royals on their new world.”

This was why he didn’t like people much. All those shits who wanted to turn themselves into kings. And all those dipshits who enthusiastically abetted them.

“The prices were crazy. For a billion Old Euros,” Jack continued, “you could be a ‘Lord of the Fleet,’ stay awake during the journey, have a small stateroom on the ship instead of going into cryo, and have a castle fabricated for you during colonization. For a hundred million, you could be a ‘Knight of the Legion,’ get a spot in the newest and safest kind of cryo, and have a manor fabricated for you. For ten million, you could be a ‘Gentleman of the Realm,’ travel in regular cryo, and have a cottage in one of the villages. And for one million, you could be a ‘Vassal of the Imperium,’ travel in regular cryo, and have a place in one of the Royal palaces or Lords’ castles, or be a peasant in one of the villages, at the end of the journey.”

“He get a lot of takers?” People were insane. The idea of shelling out a million Old Euros to go become a feudal serf to some random medievalist gamer…

“Yeah, but there was a problem. His game’s popularity had dropped off in a huge way with women after some big scandal hit. I couldn’t find any details about that,” Jack admitted.

Good.

“Almost everybody who signed up was male and single. There were only going to be three or four paying women on the voyage, and they were already married to other passengers.” Jack rolled her eyes. “So the demographic balance you need for a successful colony didn’t exist. At all.”

“Sounds like a problem. How’d they fix it?” It just figured that players of that game would have assumed that women would be provided for them as an amenity, rather than planning to buy passage for a female companion they already knew. Assuming they knew any women who wanted them within a hundred meters. Demme had warned him away from the game and the groups that played it, years ago, telling him that it was the kind of thing that would make it harder for him to ever bond with a real woman.

“Things got pretty sketchy,” she told him. “The charter members were asked if they wanted to pay to ‘reserve a space’ for a Lady for their household, so they’d have someone to marry and have kids with, and were told there probably wouldn’t be one if they didn’t. Some of them dropped out but most of them decided to do it. Marshal then offered the reserved spaces for free to ‘mail order brides’ trying to get out of the Second Soviet Union, as long as they agreed to marry one of his paying passengers upon arrival. That was another big scandal when that angle came out, about Marshal buying ‘brood mares’ or ‘breeders—’”

And there it was. Baked in from the beginning. Its meaning had changed over time—there had been plenty of brothels on the Armada’s ships with male “breeders” in them before this day had ended them all—but the exploitative relationship had been there from the start.

“—but they loaded up and took off for their new world just after Christmas 2101.”

“And were never seen again.”

“Yeah. They were supposed to drop beacons after each Star Jump, for future navigational purposes and as a way of verifying the success of their journey,” she continued. It must’ve been a hell of a presentation when she’d given it to her grammar school class. Erudite kid. “They dropped their last known beacon on July 1, 2102, halfway to their destination. The next one should have dropped on July 18, 2102, but it never activated, and none of the remaining beacons did, either. A probe was sent to Delubrum—sorry, that’s what they’d officially named Kepler-186-f on their charter, Delubrum—ten years later, and the terraforming had happened, so that Star Jumper had arrived, but there were no signs of any settlements. The charter was dissolved on January 12, 2203, because the standard rule is that a full century has to pass between the time a colony ship was supposed to arrive and the time that the planet’s charter is made available again.”

She frowned at that. He suspected she was thinking of the New Christy Standoff, and the fact that the New Dartmouth Settlement had stolen a chartered world out from under its rightful owners, gotten away with it, and then gotten away with massacring all but half a dozen of the people they’d robbed. Justice, of a kind, had finally been served… just far too late. If Kyra Wittier-Collins were still alive and in a position to collect, she’d nearly be a billionaire herself, thanks to the fines and settlements the Federacy had mandated three years earlier.

“Anybody ever settle on Delubrum?” he asked, shying away—again—from the subject of Kyra.

“Yeah, about fifty years later. One of the last orbital survivor groups to leave the Solar system after the Great Asian War, a group of Dutch Moluccans and Moluccans from Ambon on old Earth. They even kept the name, and after the whole New Christy Standoff, they announced that they would ‘make sure to keep seats at the table’ for the people on the Tenth Crusade if they ever arrived.”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” he told her. “We’re on the Tenth Crusade right now, so it’d be a bad day for everybody if it ever showed up there.”

The shocked look Jack gave him was priceless. He’d been waiting to see her make that face again for…

Six damned years…

“Holy fuck.” Jack looked around, sliding back off the foot of the bed and walking over to one of the walls to touch it. “That explains… Riddick, this whole ship is straddling ’verses.”

“And your friend the Moribund lives in its basement.” He almost added that it lived in the wreckage of the original engine room, but that was something Jack couldn’t know yet.

Panic crossed her features for a split second before he watched her force herself to relax. Not that he could blame her. The Moribund had tried to murder her, after all. Based on the timing, he suspected it had been in retaliation for him killing the old Lord Marshal, but he wasn’t positive. It—he—had been going on about the Apeiros stealing something from him when he’d attacked Jack, and Riddick wasn’t sure how that figured in.

“Well, I will just stay out of the basement, then,” she said, swallowing. Good. He’d struck a truce to protect her, but if the Moribund bore her any lingering hostility, it’d be better not to provoke him. “What do you think happened to it all?” Her voice had become awed again, as she looked around his chambers and contemplated their origins.

“My theory? Their Level Five Incident opened them up to being used by the Moribund.” Not that he actually could blame the creature, considering… “It—sorry, he,” he glanced up at the shadowed area where Jack’s sister perched, “took control of them, and they spun up a whole religion about him. ‘Lord Marshal’ became a kind of title, but the first one to wear it was some guy named Covu, probably that pilot you mentioned, so I’m thinking the bigwig wannabe-Royals who funded the trip didn’t survive very long. But you already picked up on how much their icons and stories are soaked in that game almost all of ’em played.”

You would be correct, the unnamed creature said. We were aware of what he was doing, but couldn’t do anything about it. It is only in the last five and a half years, by human reckoning, that we have been able to speak to humans, ourselves. For more than a day or two, anyway.

How many times, he wondered, had they tried to start such conversations with sufferers of Threshold Syndrome, only to have those humans die on them? And then two confused teenaged esper girls wandered into their starfield…

“You know,” he said, glancing up at Her for a fraction of a second before She began to overwhelm his visual cortex and he had to look away again, “talking to you would be a whole lot easier if you had a name.”

He was keeping Her and Her separated in his head, but if even one more nameless, powered female took it into her head to show up—

“Her name was stolen from Her,” Jack said.

“A ceremony that never happened, right? What’s it entail?” A mixture of confusion and sadness from above him was the only response. “You never knew what it was, did you? Can you be given a name? The way Jack here named your species?”

Perhaps. Do you have a name in mind?

“I do, yeah. I think it’s one that suits where you come from.” Hopefully it would tell her that he knew exactly what was going on, what was being hidden from Jack, and that he was—against his better judgment—joining the fucking cause. Not just to rein the Moribund and his Necromongers in, but to bring an end to the atrocity that had sent the mock-god on his vengeance quest in the first place.

And when someone like me calls something an atrocity…

“What is it?” Jack asked.

He grinned. Now for a bit of verbal sleight of hand. The girl knew way too many old twentieth-century Earth songs; she’d know this one.

“Picture yourself on a boat, on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies”

Jack looked completely astonished… and delighted. She joined in, harmonizing with him as he continued the first verse.

“Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes…”

Damn, he’d forgotten how much fun it could be to sing with someone else. It was something he hadn’t had a chance to do since he’d been a little kid. Before she could launch into the second verse, however, he switched gears, pointing up at her as-yet-unnamed sister and belting out the chorus.

“Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Ahhhhhhh!”

Jack had dissolved into delighted laughter. He could feel “Lucy’s” amusement from above him.

Very circumspect of you, Riddick. The name is, indeed, appropriate. He knew only he could hear her words at the moment. She understood the real meaning he intended, and why he’d veiled it the way he had. Good. Jack didn’t need any more holes in her memory.

And, he noticed, she had stopped calling him Lightbringer and was using his name. Was that for his benefit or Jack’s?

“So, what do you think?” Jack asked Lucy, smiling the very smile he’d been hoping to see since he’d found her.

I accept. I will be Lucy.

“That’s settled then,” he told Jack with a grin. “Now, there are a few things I need to do to finish making this armada safe for both of you. You think you can try not to blow anything up while I’m gone?”

“While you’re making everything safe for me, can I get a shower and maybe a change of clothes?” Jack asked.

“Shower’s through there,” he said, pointing to door leading to the over-luxurious ensuite bathroom. “Clothes… I dunno. Explore the drawers and closets. The old Lord Marshal had six Ladies-in-Waiting who slept here with him. Six, for fuck’s sake… maybe one of them left something behind.”

One of them undoubtedly had; they had all accompanied him back to “his” new quarters that first night, and one of them—a woman with a shaved head, and wasn’t that fucking Freudian of him?—had attempted to seduce and assassinate him. It might have even had a chance of working if he’d actually been enjoying the sex instead of struggling with his sudden, incredible disgust and horror, and hadn’t spotted her reaching for a knife. Moments later she was dead—and he’d have let her live if she hadn’t kept trying to kill him, but there was only so long a fight could go on before he no longer gave a fuck who she kind of resembled or what they’d been doing before she’d tried to stab him—and Zhylaw’s other concubines were banished from not merely these rooms, but the Basilica as a whole. While he’d given the five survivors a chance to take their things with them as they left for other ships and other Lords, he’d never gotten around to dealing with, or throwing out, what they’d left behind. The rest of his would-be assassin’s clothes were probably still somewhere in these rooms.

A few of his nightmares, about finding Jack in the worst possible places, had involved gazing down on the corpse of the woman who’d tried to murder him and realizing that the shaved head above the slashed throat wore her face. That was among the things that he would never, ever tell Jack about, along with—

“What if nothing fits?” she asked, rescuing him from his ruminations. She had a point; the Ladies of the court had a penchant for the tight and the form-fitting. He doubted they could loan each other their outfits.

“I’ll ask your friend, Dame Vaako, who makes her dresses,” he told her, “and have them come see you.”

“Shit. Do I have to wear dresses here?”

Of course she’d hate that. She might have worn jalabiyas sometimes while staying with the Meziane family, but she’d mostly lived in pants, in defiance of the conventions of her homeworld and the Holy Man’s attempts to control her. It was, honestly, hard to imagine her in dresses, although he’d seen her wear a few in her memories… including one or two, in the last year, that he wouldn’t have minded helping her out of. The tight numbers Dame Vaako and the other Court Ladies favored were wrong for a trained fighter, anyway, especially one who wanted to kick easily.

He had the sudden intense urge to have a sparring session with her, see for himself how thoroughly Michael had trained her and whether she’d gotten at all rusty during her year of cold storage.

“Nah,” he told her. “But since that’s probably all that’s here, you tell the tailor to make whatever you want.”

Kyra had been wearing leggings, as he recalled—

He wasn’t ready to talk to her about Kyra yet. It was going to break her heart, just as the fate of the al-Walids probably would despite how they’d treated her.

But if Kyra had been wearing leggings, Jack would be able to wear them, too. He thought. There was a lot about Court culture he still hadn’t learned, hadn’t wanted to know or care about, that might be important to someone who wasn’t standing at the very top of the heap. He needed to make sure she was as close to the top as possible, herself.

You know exactly how to make sure of that, he told himself. He just didn’t know if she’d go for it.

Except, of course, that he knew how she’d spent many of her nights on Deckard’s World, once she was legally old enough to, and he knew who she’d been trying to see, trying to evoke, when she looked at almost half of the men she’d spent them with. And he had no idea why the idea of bringing all of that up, including his far too decent proposal, was making him so reticent. Tongue-tied, even.

Except that he was, in all of his past dealings with women, accustomed to playing, running a game… and this situation, this girl—

She’s almost nineteen. Really gotta start thinking of her as a woman if I’m gonna make this offer.

—needed absolute truth. No games, no lies, not even lying with the truth, as she had apparently become adept at doing under General Toal’s tutelage.

Maybe once all the pieces were in place, he’d be ready for that aspect.

Jack was studying his face. “You okay in there?”

It wasn’t time to make things messy. Not yet. He smiled at her instead. “Always. Now, I’m gonna handle some business out in the audience room, so I’m gonna close you in here. You okay with that?”

She rolled her eyes, smiling to take the edge of her reaction off. “I’ll find a way to survive.”

She was already heading for the bathroom when he closed the doors. Fortunately, he did have business to conduct, or he might have been tempted to follow her. He wasn’t sure either one of them was quite ready for that.

I really need to arrange breakfast for us, he reminded himself as he crossed the sitting room. It had been, as near as he could tell, more than a day since either of them had eaten.

“Any of my guests arrive yet?” he asked, opening the outer doors. The guards on either side, probably still feeling cowed about letting Dame Vaako slip past them, nodded and pointed to a woman in full armor standing nearby.

Well, well, well.

“Officer Lola,” he said, a genuine smile spreading across his face. “C’mon in.”

77.
Sleeping Beauty, Sleeper Agent

“Tell me about the girl,” Dame Vaako said as she carefully unwound her hair.

Lord Vaako, busy removing his armor, glanced over at her with a frown. “We found her on a ship with a few dozen other passengers and crew. She almost escaped and fought better than any of the others tried to. There’s little else to tell. We converted most of the others on the way back, but she remained untouched in every way for delivery to the Lord Marshal.”

“Untouched in every way?” Dame Vaako raised an eyebrow. She was almost certain her husband never visited the Breeder Pits, but after the way that other girl, Kyra, had hung on him when they’d returned from Crematoria…

Vaako sneered. “Untouched, Chantesa. In every way. My soldiers know discipline. As do I.”

True. Even those marked as “breeders” arrived at the Basilica in decent enough shape if her husband’s ship brought them back.

In the last year, even though many of the Lords and Dames had begun to dream of making an assault on the Melpomene System, and some had even begun devising strategies to propose for such an attack, they had been held in check. Only a few ships had been allowed to launch raids on the Sol Tracks as “practice.” Chantesa had heard that there had been similar lulls in the purification of worlds, after each transition from one Lord Marshal to the next, and that it might take another year or two before their new leader either committed to the Way… or was deposed.

In the meantime, raiding parties were grudgingly allowed to go out so that the fleet could still know battle. Most of the “breeders” brought back by the other Lords after such raids had already seen hard use, some even on the verge of death. Never the ones her husband brought back. When he’d presented the girl to Riddick, she undoubtedly had been untouched.

Of course, everyone remembered what had happened the time one raiding party had brought back another girl, who closely resembled Riddick’s quarry and who had endured some hard use before being turned over to him. It had taken the raiding party more than a week to die. Chantesa still shuddered when she recalled it; they had been placed so no one in the Basilica could avoid hearing their screams, although no one could see what was being done to them. Somehow, the Riddick had found a way to make Necromongers, who were supposed to be above pain, scream… and only he, himself, had seemed immune to the horror of their suffering.

Later, she heard whispers that he had compelled the Quasi-Dead to extract all of the memories of that girl’s tortured days of captivity from her mind… and make the entire raiding party relive them from her perspective, on an infinite loop, until their own minds finally shattered. The girl herself, physically healed, converted, and with no memory of being abused, was now the wife of a Purifier on another of the Armada’s ships, and the Riddick apparently had never seen or spoken to her since.

It had been effective, though; no other raiding party since had dared take even a taste when they found a doppelgänger for the girl he’d sought. He always insisted, she’d noticed, that his “rejects” undergo immediate conversion.

It fascinated her that the actual girl, the one the Riddick had been searching for the whole time, seemed to fear him. She hoped to learn more. If the girl was here against her will and had no love for their Lord Marshal… perhaps they could help each other.

Not long after, as they were preparing to sleep, news came that the Riddick had taken the girl into the chamber of the Quasi-Dead and had compelled all would-be observers to leave. They were still in the chamber when she and her husband rose in the morning. She managed to slip close to the grilles for a moment before one of the Riddick’s guards ushered her away.

The girl lay on the dais, posed much like the “Sleeping Beauty” character that Chantesa remembered from her childhood and surrounded by the Quasi-dead, while the Riddick, legs folded and head bowed as if meditating, sat behind her head, his hands on her temples.

“What do you think he’s doing to her?” she whispered to her husband as she was handed back to him.

“I know not, nor do I care.”

Oh, damn you. Grow a little imagination… Faithful and biddable—and formidable in battle—as Lord Niels Vaako might be, he could also be stultifyingly dull.

It was almost a full Standard day before the Riddick emerged from the chamber, the still-unconscious girl in his arms, and carried her away from the Necropolis. Gossip had run wild in that time, growing increasingly imaginative and ridiculous. The girl was far too old be his daughter, and she seemed far too young to be a wife… of an age with, or slightly younger than, the girl Kyra whom he’d attempted to rescue and then avenge.

Dame Vaako loved a good mystery.

“I think I’ll find out what the witch knows,” she told her husband when they rose the next morning.

Aereon of the Elementals had been given a suite—Irgun’s old suite, in fact—after the Riddick had taken over. Interestingly, he hadn’t released the witch and had insisted that she continue to wear the strange stone chains that the late Lord Marshal Zhylaw had called—for some reason that had seemed to amuse him and him alone—the “cherry bombs.” She spent most of her time in the chambers, only occasionally emerging to walk the battlements and listen in on Court business.

“Please come in,” she said, when her guards announced Dame Vaako’s arrival.

Chantesa was surprised to see that the woman had left Irgun’s rooms almost completely unchanged. Perhaps she was in denial about the length of her stay, and refused to do anything to make the rooms more her own because that would mean accepting her standing as a long-term prisoner of the Armada… fascinating.

“We don’t see much of you,” she commented, running her finger along the edge of Irgun’s desk. Someone, at least, was keeping the place clean.

“I very much doubt most Necromongers wish to see any of me,” Aereon replied. It was difficult to look at her at times. Parts of her seemed to disappear in the air currents. But there were moments when Chantesa could almost swear that she saw something else, in the thinned places… something worse than emptiness.

“And why is that?” she asked. “Your people are neutral in our conflict, yes? Why shouldn’t we be… closer?”

“That,” Aereon said, her words slow and precise as if talking to a child, “is the nature of neutrality.”

“And yet you were on Helion Prime warning them about us.”

“I was not the source of any warnings. I was there for another reason.”

“The Riddick?” Chantesa asked. “Were you there looking for him? Because if you were looking for the prophesied Furyan Warrior who would take down our leader, that hardly seems neutral either.”

“The prophesied Furyan Warrior who would become your leader.”

Good parry. And possibly even a valid point. Except that rumors kept swirling about how the Riddick was seeking to break the Way. Funny how those rumors seemed to always come out of the night he’d killed one of the other Lords in a Breeder Pit…

Sumptuous brothels or not, Chantesa preferred to call them by that name. It better fit the lives that the unbelievers trapped inside them actually lived. There but for the grace of conversion…

“Did the prophecies ever mention a girl?” she asked.

“You mean Kyra? No.” Aereon shook her head. “It seems that the whole purpose of her existence was to bring him here, nothing more.”

“There’s another girl. The one he’s been looking for.”

“He has asked me several times about his Jack, yes.”

Chantesa frowned. “I thought Kyra was his ‘Jack.’”

“Apparently not.” Aereon smiled. “He’s asked again and again for answers about who she really was. But I doubt he can find them. Not if he won’t embrace your faith, and it’s clear that he won’t.”

Fascinating. The witch seemed pleased that the Riddick would be denied answers. She wondered if that was why the chains remained on. There was something duplicitous about Aereon that delighted her. Especially if the witch and the Riddick were not actually friends.

“Maybe the other girl will know.”

Aereon’s breath hitched, almost inaudibly, but she caught it. “This other girl… is here?”

“Captured a week ago and given to the Riddick almost two days ago, yes. You must not have attended that Court session.”

“Tell me about her.” The witch’s voice was mild, only hinting at the slightest bit of curiosity, but Chantesa could feel some deeper avidity behind it.

“Young. Tall. Slender. Pretty in her own way. She matches the description he sent out. And she seems to fear him.”

“How curious. I would have thought his quest after her to be impossible.”

“Who is she?” Chantesa asked.

“No one that I know of. Which is odd. Except… yes, of course. I should have realized sooner.”

Oh, now this was intriguing! “Realized what?”

“When I learned the identity of the Furyan Warrior I was seeking,” Aereon said after a pause, “I hired a mercenary to locate him and bring him back to Helion Prime. In fact, I hired several mercenaries, but this one was a particularly crass and difficult man. He had a story to tell—and he insisted upon telling it—of how Riddick had swooped into a high security psychiatric hospital, under everyone’s noses, had extracted two teenage girls from custody, and had taken them offworld with him.”

Aereon rose from her seat and began to pace as she talked. The air currents she stirred up made parts of her vanish in a disconcerting and almost nauseating way. No wonder, Dame Vaako thought, she had so few visitors and even fewer invitations to come out of her chambers.

“The girls were a Jane Doe who apparently went by ‘Jack’ and had a prior history with Riddick, which he had hoped to use to lay a trap,” Aereon continued, “and Kyra Wittier-Collins, a rare female serial killer known to many as the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain. The mercenary believed that both of these girls were Riddick’s lovers, but the world he believed Riddick had spirited them away to was not the one where he was ultimately found, so I suspect Toombs was wrong. And based on Riddick’s questions to me…”

“The Riddick went to Crematoria seeking this ‘Jack’ but found Kyra there instead,” Dame Vaako breathed, delighted, “but had never met her before?”

“It appears so.” Aereon turned the smile of an approving schoolteacher on her. “And yet it also appears that he came to care about her a great deal in a very short time. Odd, given his reputation for aloof detachment and antisocial tendencies. It would seem that he has, in fact, formed genuine bonds with other people, such as they are, at least twice.”

“And now he has his ‘Jack.’ Why would she be afraid of him?” The possibilities were endless, and rather delicious. Had part of the mercenary’s tale been true? Perhaps he had spirited her away and made her a child-bride, only for her to escape his control. Had she possibly even used the other girl to lay a false trail away from herself? Would she, maybe, wish assistance to escape again, for a reasonable price?

“Perhaps you should ask her,” Aereon suggested, a hint of a smile touching her lips.

Perhaps I should.

---

“She’s adorable.”

Audrey and Kyra stood side by side, watching Elodie splash in the creek behind the house that Audrey’s mother, and Alvin, had bought in the small town where Deckard Tech was located, just outside Wyndham Landing. Audrey turned and smiled at Kyra.

“She is, isn’t she? She was born a little over six months after I took off.”

“Yeah,” Kyra said, nodding and smiling back. “I thought so.”

The backyard melted away and they were in the woods on the slope of Canaan Mountain. This space was Kyra’s rather than Audrey’s, shaped by her visions and memories.

“You did?” Audrey followed Kyra into the forest as they talked.

“Yeah. When you told me and the Mezianes about the brother you never had, that’s when it all made sense.” Kyra grinned apologetically at her. “I didn’t say anything because you’d have been pissed off at yourself if you knew. So, did Alvin turn out to be an asshole when you got back?”

“No, he turned out to be surprisingly not-dickish,” Audrey laughed. “And yeah, I was pretty upset to realize I ran away from the thing I’d always wanted most.”

“Family,” Kyra said, nodding. “Yeah. I miss that, too, sometimes. The way it was when I was little, anyway. Your cosmic family is nice, not as scary as I used to think, but… Tizzy, do you know how much longer I’ll be stuck out here? My memory isn’t good enough to just live in it.”

Kyra’s forests, Audrey had noticed, tended to be a little “blurry,” missing most of the details that would truly make them feel real. Maybe that was why she preferred to spend her time in—

As if on cue, a much more detailed and precise landscape opened to them: the bonefield from the crash planet, beneath its blue sun. The memories that Audrey—as Jack—had once shared with Kyra were almost as vivid as life, not to mention missing almost all of the actual traumatic moments. No wonder Kyra spent so much time replaying them and exploring their confines.

“I’ll ask the Apeiros. They don’t make a whole lot of sense when I ask them about you, but I’ll try again—”

Wake, little sister. Wake…

“Do I have to? I wanna stay with Kyra…” But the vision was shredding and the crash planet, and Kyra, had already vanished. It wasn’t a dream any more than the starfield of the Apeiros was a dream, but she was all too aware of its lack of normal physicality. That had to be especially hard on Kyra.

Not now, Audrey. You must wake. You will see her again soon.

Audrey opened her eyes. The strange carvings and draperies of Riddick’s bedroom greeted her.

Fuck.

Your species makes very little sense. The act of reproduction as a malediction. Why? Her sister was lurking somewhere in the shadows directly above her, mostly hidden by the high, vaulted ceiling. Audrey thought she could make out the glitter of eyes.

“We got five hours to unpack it all?”

We do not. One of the Necromonger court is on its way to speak with you. I still struggle to tell human sexes apart, especially with these creatures, but I believe it is female.

“Fun, fun, fun.” Audrey sat up, noticing that Riddick must have slept beside her on the bed, neither of them beneath its covers. “Where’s Riddick?”

In another part of the ship, making arrangements to ensure your safety. The Moribund no longer threatens you.

“I figured that’s why all my memories are back,” she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “Well, almost all of them… What the hell did he do with my shoes?”

On the other side of the bed.

She put them on and laced them up. They weren’t exactly combat boots, but they were still better than sock feet until she knew the lay of the land. “So how come you have a hard time telling Necromonger sexes apart?”

They have no reproductive capability.

“Huh. Did we know this about them?”

No.

“You let Michael know yet? Could be important.”

I will.

She needed a moment to regroup. “Okay. I’m smack-dab in the center of the Necromonger Armada. Its new leader is my old friend Richard B. Riddick, who apparently killed the old leader and took over right after they turned Helion Prime into a ‘Black Planet.’ Just what the hell was Toombs thinking he was gonna do with me here? You know what, never mind. That guy would use ‘boobs’ for a password if a system would accept it. Long as he’s nowhere near Elodie, fuck him. Do I have marching orders from the General? Is there a plan here?”

In truth, the place was still scary as fuck, but at least her brain was in better order now. She’d flowed with the replay that the Apeiros had allowed to be fed through the “Quasi-Dead,” her memories falling back into place as they spooled past. Everything made sense again. Some things made too much sense.

She wasn’t entirely delighted by the person she’d turned into, with most of her salient memories gone, over the last year. That version of Audrey MacNamera had lost almost all of the good therapy she’d received for her traumas, via Ewan, MilitAIre, First-AId, and Michael, and had simply buried them and refused to look, turning more than a little neurotic again in the process. And she’d developed this weird sheltered, privileged-girl righteous sense that she was personally going to right all the major wrongs on her home planet…

Great, and now instead, I’m back in a situation where a whole bunch of people are expecting me to be instrumental in saving a universe…

More than just one, her sister told her from somewhere on the ceiling.

“So no pressure or anything… does General Toal have a plan for this?”

His plan has been to nurture you until you are ready to hatch into your six-shape. Then we can show you everything.

“And… this current situation is, what? A setback? An opportunity? A major clusterfuck?”

We do not know yet. It appears to be connected, but tangentially, to our goals.

“Then my current directive is… gather intel and wait?”

Essentially.

“Okay, I can do that.”

The one who wishes to speak to you is at the door. The guards will not admit it.

“Should I—” Audrey laughed. “Why the hell not? I’m here to gather intel, right?”

Before she’d regained herself, she thought, she’d been genuinely terrified. She could start with that and see where it took her. As she walked over to the doors, she slipped into the necessary role. And introducing Audrey MacNamera as the Petrified Captive…

She opened one door up a crack. “Who…who’s there?”

“Go back inside, girl,” one of the guards on the doors said. “No one in or out. Lord Marshal’s orders.”

“B…but…” She let her eyes dart between the players in the hallway as she pulled the door open further. Two guards, posted on either side of the ornate doors in overwrought armor, and an elegant, beautiful woman, dressed in a form-fitting gown, hair severely coiffed, heavy makeup and her natural darker skin tone both helping to conceal the deathly pallor of most Necromongers.

Female, she told her sister. Our guest is definitely female. See the kind of ornamentation she’s wearing? It’s culturally coded as feminine. Especially in this kind of culture.

“Surely the Lord Marshal would have no objection to a friendly visit?” the woman cajoled in a sultry voice. One of the guards seemed to be struggling against its pull. “If his young guest were to invite me in?”

The two guards shared nervous glances.

It’ll be fine, Audrey pushed at them. Hopefully they weren’t shielded.

They glanced at each other again, shrugging.

“C-can she come in?” she asked, still stammering. “Please?”

After a moment’s hesitation, the guards let the woman pass.

Audrey twisted her hands together, watching her guest prowl into the suite. There was something in her walk, in the way she looked at everything, that suggested she already owned all of it and was just deciding when to take possession. Arrogance, confidence, absolute belief in herself.

Audrey had just the foil for that.

In comparison, she would be stammering, gauche, frightened, desperately in need of guidance and protection… easily manipulated, easily controlled… or so her guest would believe.

“W…what’s your name?” she asked as the woman continued to survey the room, oblivious to Audrey’s shadowy sister watching her in fascination from the vaulted ceiling.

“You may call me Dame Vaako,” the woman said. Chantesa, her mind volunteered silently.

Pretty name, she thought. “I’m, uh, Audrey.”

“Not ‘Jack?’” Dame Vaako asked.

Audrey flinched, blinked, and gave a jerky shake of her head. “N-not Jack.”

I mean, it was the only name I ever told him… She couldn’t exactly blame Riddick for wanting to use it, and for maybe needing the nostalgia of it. She’d had enough names now, and played enough roles, that she wasn’t sure she could truly reject, or even claim, any of them. And if the semi-amnesiac Audrey MacNamera of the prior year was her actual authentic self, she had a whole lot of work left to do on herself.

Jack wasn’t the name, among all the names she’d worn, that she would pick first… but it would do just fine.

But this Dame Vaako didn’t need to know any of that.

“Pity,” the Dame said, running her finger over a shelf edge and then rubbing off the dust she’d collected on her fingertip with her thumb, “he’s been trying so hard to find a girl named Jack.” The woman’s eyes moved to the bedroom beyond the sitting room, taking in the rumpled bed. Although her expression was deadpan, Audrey could feel the way her mind was awhirl with calculations.

Okay. First choice. Should she play really dumb and ask “who,” or make a logical leap?

She wouldn’t play that dumb. The Dame would figure out Audrey was running a game a whole lot sooner if she got caught in that kind of lie.

“Why?” she asked instead, a tremor in her voice. “I don’t… I don’t…”

“Yes, child? Don’t what?” Dame Vaako walked over to her. She had to be wearing some killer heels; she seemed only an inch or two shorter than Audrey, but the proportions of her body suggested she would be at least half a foot shorter if they were both barefoot. Maybe that was why her dress was so tight around her legs, to keep her from taking too-long steps in her shoes and overbalancing.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” Audrey whimpered, breaking her voice twice and letting her eyes grow large and fill with unshed tears. This was the moment when a lot of people would become uncomfortable and find an excuse to retreat, and when especially empathetic types would try to comfort her… what would someone like this Dame Vaako do?

The hand that Dame Vaako brought up to her cheek was chilly. It was a good thing that it was in character for Audrey to flinch, because there was no avoiding it.

Dame Vaako was straddling two ’verses. She could feel it.

Not the way Irena and Colin Kirshbaum had been, though. Or at least, she didn’t think so. It was easier to tell when she was observing from another ’verse herself, but…

Almost all of Dame Vaako was in U1… but something else, something not of this ’verse, was piggybacking on her. There was a strange energy exchange happening…

“Don’t be afraid, child, I won’t hurt you,” the Dame said.

“Your hand’s so cold,” she stammered, shifting her vision so that she could see what filled Dame Vaako’s space in her other ’verses.

Empty interstellar space surrounded her in twenty-seven other ’verses. And yet—

Ohhhhhhh, would you look at that. This whole ship’s crossing a threshold…

She wondered if she could tap into its string vibrations and connect to that ’verse. Crossing over and adding it to her five-shape should be safe to do from inside the ship.

Experiment time after I get rid of our guest, she told her sister, and felt Her amusement above her.

“It’s the Necromonger Way,” Dame Vaako was telling her. “We give up the frailties of human life for something far more glorious. The Underverse.”

“W…what’s that?” At least they hadn’t named their alternate reality Elsewhere, too. That Under plucked at memory.

Beneath, below, under… you weren’t talking about the Necromongers’ Underverse, were you? she asked her sister, and instantly felt Her derision.

“Oh child, there is no way to tell you about that. The only way to see it is to be Purified—” The Dame staggered back, wincing. “No… not allowed… what…?”

That was unexpected. “Are you okay?”

Dame Vaako looked like she’d just developed a nasty headache. “I’m fine…” She shook her head as if trying to clear it.

“Do you need to sit down?” She let her voice fill with worry, as if her sudden concern had temporarily overwhelmed her fear.

“I should go.” The Dame was trying to sound imperious, but a note of odd desperation had crept into her tone. She moved unsteadily for the doors, and for a moment Audrey worried that she’d lose the battle with her heels and dress and totter over. “We can talk again soon… I look forward to learning more about you…”

Whatever had just happened, it had completely cut through the woman’s equilibrium.

Dame Vaako slipped out of the doors, trying and failing to look nonchalant as she went.

“Well. That was weird,” Audrey said.

My brother struck at her.

“Your who?”

For all that we have disowned and repudiated him, the Moribund is still my brother.

She hadn’t been sure until now about the relationship, but that did confirm a suspicion of hers. She had to come at so much of this sideways… “He doesn’t have to be my brother, does he?”

Her sister’s silent laughter filled the ether. No, little sister, he doesn’t wish to be tied to you that way, any more than you wish to be related to him. But he no longer wishes you harm.

“That’s something, at least—”

“Who… the fuck… gave you permission to let that bitch into my rooms?” Riddick demanded of the guards outside.

Hooboy.

She couldn’t tell him from here. His mental shields were as impenetrable as Michael’s.

Walking over to the doors, she cracked one open again. Riddick, outside, was glaring at two very cowed-looking guards. “M-me…” she stammered, more for the guards’ benefit than his. “It was me… I asked if she could…”

“For fuck’s sake,” Riddick muttered.

Furyans use reproduction as a malediction too? Audrey’s sister asked, forcing her to stifle a laugh. It was a good thing musical comedy was one of her fortes and she could keep a straight face through almost any skit.

He pushed past his guards and into the room, compelling her to back up. She scrambled back, keeping up the fearful act while the guards closed the doors and Riddick loomed before her.

He leaned close, breathing in through his nose. “You don’t smell even a little scared, Jack.” He drew back and pulled off his goggles, silver eyes locking with hers, a hint of a smile on his lips. “So what are you playing at?”

76.
Wholly Half-Dead

Riddick felt the moment when the creature in the dark tried to go on the attack, the cold pull as it reached for him, and the burn on his chest as Her handprint flared to life in answer. The unseen eldritch presence surrounding him snapped back as if he’d stung it. He could still feel its louring rage around him. This thing knew how to hate.

I do not answer to you, filth.

“You might want to reconsider that,” Riddick said, smiling in the direction where he’d last caught a glimpse of the Moribund. “I know what you are, and I know what it’d take to end you. Don’t think you want to end yet… do you?”

I will not die alone.

“Plannin’ on takin’ the whole ‘Legion Vast’ with you? All that pompous bullshit they spout, that ain’t you. Is it?”

What do I care what they say, as long as they serve my will?

They’d built a whole religion around its dominance of their bodies, minds, and souls, and it didn’t give a fuck. Nice. Almost like an actual god.

“So let’s make a deal so they can go on serving your will,” Riddick said, leaning against a scorched panel. “And you can get what you really want.”

You know nothing about what I really want.

“You want the ‘Demons of the Darkness’ on their knees, begging you for mercy. You want to make ’em suffer. You want to break their power and give ’em your pain. How’m I doing so far?”

I will listen.

It was a creature of few words. He liked that about it.

“Then here’s the deal. I’m the new Lord Marshal, and you stop throwing your replacement candidates at me to try to take me down. I ain’t converting, ain’t getting ‘purified,’ but I’ll lead your armada and drive it right down the throat of your real enemies.”

Acceptable. So far.

“I’m taking back a handful of your converts, too. Un-purifying them. They’ll be mine. You have plenty; you can spare a few.”

If you think they will live parted from my influence.

“Oh, I know they will.”

Then take whichever you wish, with the exception of the “Quasi-Dead.”

“Which brings me to my next condition. Jack. Audrey. The ‘Little Larva’ you like to call ‘filth.’ She’s mine. You don’t touch her, you don’t influence her, you don’t ‘purify’ her, and you absolutely never try to kill her again. Understood?”

Silence.

Riddick knelt down and picked up a long, sharp sliver of stone from the floor, turning it over in his hand. He knew exactly what it really was. What it could do. And so, he knew, did the Moribund. He balanced it, twirled it, gave it a spin. “Understood?”

I will accept this.

“That includes never sending any of your people against her. What any of ‘your’ Necromongers do, that’s you doing it. Ain’t it?”

I will prohibit it. I do not much care what they do with their time when they are not needed to fulfill my will.

“I figured. You don’t pay much attention to what they’re doing, either. Did you know that they’ve been keeping people from you? Not converting everybody they capture?”

He felt the Moribund’s sudden fury.

“Didn’t think you knew. I’m sure you won’t have any objections if I put a stop to that.”

Why do you care?

“Because out of death, conversion, or what they’re doing… either death or conversion would be better.” The breeder bullshit would finally end. “When I make my move, you’re gonna back me.”

You are the Lord Marshal.

He figured that was as close as the Moribund would get to acquiescing. It was enough.

“Last thing. You’ve been collecting apeirochorons lately. I want ’em. All of ’em.”

I care nothing for what happens to them.

Well, maybe I care, Riddick thought, careful to keep his thoughts thoroughly shielded from his “chess partner.” He shrugged and smiled instead.

Do what you will with them.

“This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he told the shadowy creature in the darkness, setting the sliver of kirshbaumium back down on the floor.

We shall see, Lord Marshal.

He could see the change immediately, the new level of deference that the Necromongers in the hallways displayed as he passed. He’d completed his first step. Soon it would be safe for Jack to wake up, hopefully with her mind and memories intact and in order. Soon, they’d be able to talk again, and maybe she’d know enough—remember enough—to be less afraid of him.

Maybe she’ll try to take me out, he thought with amusement. She was one of General Toal’s trained Operatives, after all, and she’d been trained by a Furyan.

He doubted it, though. That wasn’t Jack. She’d killed, three times, but she wasn’t a killer.

Which was why he needed to do a few more things to ensure that she would be safe on board this flying viper pit.

He walked into the chamber of the Quasi-Dead, drawing them forth.

Yes, Lord Marshal?

That was the first time any of them had called him by the title. Yeah, things were changing.

“I’m gonna visualize a series of people. If they’re converts, I want ’em found and brought to me.” One by one, he conjured faces that he’d seen in Jack’s memories. People she’d known, albeit briefly, while on Helion Prime, and who shone warmly in her thoughts.

He couldn’t give her any of the four she’d known best, though.

It burned at him, even a year later. He should’ve grabbed Lajjun and Ziza and put them on board the ship he’d taken from Toombs. Not just left the Holy Man’s necklace hanging on their doorway while he boarded the Basilica. In the hour that followed, while he searched the ship for signs of Kyra and then moved into position to take the fight to the Lord Marshal himself, he’d had no idea that, moments after the ship’s bulkheads had closed behind him and the Basilica rose from the ground, that undead fucker had detonated something that had wiped out all life on the surface of the planet.

Including Lajjun. Including Ziza. Including thousands of the motherfucker’s own troops who hadn’t made it back on board their ships in time, and who the fuck knew how many thousands, or even millions, of other civilians huddled in the still-smoking ruins.

There wasn’t much about that day that Riddick didn’t regret.

He didn’t mean to call up Kyra’s face—

That one is lost to us. We have only her memories.

“You have what, now?”

The memories of the one called Kyra. We have them.

“Good. I’ll be back later to see them. How many of the others have you found?”

All but the one called Carmouche. His face is unknown to any of the Armada. He may have left Helion Prime before we arrived.

Probably on one of the all-expense-paid travel adventures Jack and her friends had dreamed up, to entice out-system as many people as they could before the invasion. More power to him if he’d gone.

“Have the others sent to me as soon as you get all of them on board this ship.”

Yes, Lord Marshal.

“Now, I don’t wanna be sent either of these next two. I know they’re not converts. I just wanna know what’s happened to ’em.” He conjured up two more faces in his mind.

The first died eight months ago. The second lives in the “Greensleeves Stew.”

“I’ll be back.” He turned and walked out of the room.

Do you need direction to her?

“I know the way.”

It was a corridor he’d never planned on entering again, but now he had enough muscle on his side—the Moribund itself was on board for this—that he could do what he wished he’d been able to do a year ago. Part of it, anyway. The most important part.

He’d tried to get to know the people he’d apparently conquered, especially once he was sure that he couldn’t just step down as their leader; no new leader could rise in his place without vanquishing him first, so unless he wanted to die, he had to find a way to rule these fuckers. Their women were eager to “show him the way,” and a lot of them were damn beautiful. He’d thought that part, at least, would be fun.

He had been so fucking wrong about that.

The whole lot of them really were half-dead. And necrophilia just wasn’t his kink.

Damn near had made him puke his guts out, if he was being honest.

Just try phrasing that in a way that doesn’t give offense to anybody, though…

The Great Lords of the Court had figured it out anyway, and most of them had seemed unsurprised. Lord Vaako had shrugged, telling him that he would find it easier once he converted, himself. Lord Toal, who seemed to have no Lady or Dame by his side—and Riddick was pretty sure he knew why now—had shrugged as well and said that the life of a warrior need not require such distractions. And one of the other Lords had smiled and said that he knew exactly what Riddick needed.

Several of the Lords—Riddick soon noticed that Vaako, Toal, and Scales had all excused themselves from the group—had led him deep into the under-levels of the Basilica, beneath the Necropolis… to a brothel.

At first, it had seemed normal enough. The ladies within, he immediately realized, weren’t converts. No marks on their necks. No sickly pallor to their skin. They lined up, smiling, posing for him in their negligée, all of them beautiful. Most of them didn’t make eye contact, but there was one woman, with flaxen blonde hair and crystal-blue eyes, who kept looking right at him.

“Her,” he’d said, pointing at the woman. “I’ll take her.”

It went wrong almost immediately.

“Riddick,” she’d gasped, putting her arms around him. “I knew you’d come for me!”

He pulled back, staring at her in confusion. For a moment, the way she was acting, he thought somehow he had found another strange fragment of Jack, as if the girl had been shattered and her pieces divided among countless strange women he’d never met before. The woman before him—maybe a little over twenty years old, with eyes that were far too old for the rest of her—smiled at him. There was something off about the smile. Not quite sane.

“It’s me, Riddick! Stacey! It’s me!” And she tried to press her lips to his.

There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t place her. He unshielded his mind a little, brushing against hers—

—and recoiled, his gorge rising and his mental shields slamming back up against both her and the whole establishment around him.

This ain’t a brothel. It’s a fuckin’ rape room.

And this woman he’d picked was in on it all.

“I know what you’ll like,” she told him, her eyes lit up with strange fervor. “See that girl over there? I’ve known her for years. I can show you what makes her cry…”

“Get the fuck off me,” he managed, pushing her away and retreating toward the door.

“Riddick!” She tried to follow him, but one of the attendants held her back. “Don’t leave me! You’re supposed to rescue me!”

He turned toward one of the Lords, most of whom were still in the process of selecting their own companions—victims—for the evening. “You brought me to a fuckin’ rape room!”

He had felt it all in the moment he’d made the mistake of unshielding: the unrelenting horror that the women endured every day and night, praying that the walking corpses who visited would just want a quick fuck and nothing more from them; the sick delight that the Lords took in the soft, warm, living bodies beneath them; the dark games that Stacey liked to play, and had encouraged the Lords to play with her for the last two weeks since she’d been captured, orchestrating especially perverse hells upon her fellow “breeders” even more for her own gratification than the Lords’…

The man frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not of us. They’re just breeders. We can do whatever we wish to mere breeders.”

Seconds later, his head rolled across the floor, stopping at the feet of one of the captive “breeder” women and making her scream in terror.

“Choose carefully, Riddick,” Lord Navok said, rising from the seat he had taken and drawing his blades. Throughout the lounge, the rest of the Lords had drawn theirs. “We know you’re deadly, but there are twenty of us. Can you kill us all before one of us kills you? And how will you fight your way out of the Basilica if you do? This is part of the Necromonger Way. Do you really think you can change us? Will you die trying?”

He had to get the fuck out of there, he realized, and fast, before he got himself killed over something he couldn’t stop, couldn’t change… and it all went on anyway. He wasn’t the self-sacrificing type. As much as he wanted to ghost every man in that room, and one woman in it…

Now ain’t the time.

He turned and walked toward the exit.

“Riddick!” Stacey called after him, her voice pleading and sounding, for an instant, like Jack’s. Jack, begging him not to leave her behind…

Keep walking. Keep walking…

“Riddick!” she called again, and then cried out in pain.

“Be silent, breeder! Know your place!” one of the Lords shouted.

Fuck! Fuck… keep walking… Do not look back…

He’d left the “brothel” and stormed deeper into the bowels of the Basilica, seeking out the engine rooms, possessed of a sudden desire to send them into meltdown and ditch the ship before it exploded. But there had been something down there, dark and eldritch and malicious and waiting for him, that he’d found himself equally unwilling to sacrifice himself to. What he now knew was the Moribund.

That night was the first time he’d awakened, his heart pounding, from a nightmare in which he found not Stacey but Jack, herself, trapped in a Necromonger “brothel.”

He’d found all of them, on each and every ship in the fleet, making their keepers show him every woman they had, but Jack had never been among them. He’d shown her face to the Quasi-Dead and demanded they search their memory stores for any sign that any Necromonger had seen or touched her, any sign that she was among the Armada’s converts. There had been a small handful of women who looked almost like her, but none had been her. The nightmares hadn’t stopped until he’d put out an edict, making the Quasi-Dead share images of Jack’s face with the masses, instructing the entire Armada that any girl or woman who resembled her had to be brought before him immediately upon discovery, before anything else was done to her.

And Alexander Motherfuckin’ Toombs drove her right into the teeth of my raiders…

He had her now. That was what was important. But the rape rooms had gone unchecked for a whole fucking year and the woman, Stacey, had died during that time. That last part wouldn’t have bothered him before, but he now recognized her, although he still couldn’t figure out how she’d known him.

She had been the vicious girl who ran the Killer’s Club from the shadows, when Jack had been locked in the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital. The girl with the violent porn collection, with his picture on her wall—

Not just his picture, he realized. Pictures of other “criminals,” too, or what Jack had believed were criminals. He stopped in the hallway, closing his eyes and visualizing that wall again.

He knew all those faces. He knew all the men Stacey had enshrined on her wall and idolized. Criminals, yes, but something else as well, and he knew exactly where she had to have met them, and him… and when.

“They call us the Suicide Squad, boy, after some bad twenty-first century movies about a bunch of sons-o’-bitches who had to do what we do, only they got to do it with powers…”

He’d been seventeen, and although nobody else in the group had known it about him, he had powers. He’d been pulled off the streets and Quantified at fifteen, chipped, subjected to two agonizing years of conditioning, and this was his test-run, paired up with a group of Service Crims who had been too high up in the clearance chain for a dishonorable discharge and whose skills were too valuable to just let them rot in cells. Most of them were twice his age. They were being sent after a crime kingpin, who was staying at his favorite casino-cum-brothel on Helion Prime and, while he was supposed to be taken out, they had strict instructions that the facility itself was expected to come through undamaged.

In they’d gone, stealthy as could be, quartering the place in the dead of night.

They’d found the cop first, a woman, stripped naked and chained to a bed with her own cuffs. Didn’t look like anybody had touched her yet. None of them did, either. They’d kept moving. It grated at him. Why the fuck wasn’t freeing her part of their mission?

“Stay on task,” one of his companions had muttered when he’d paused, looking back at the room. “Ain’t no room for improvising in this gig if you want your head to stay on your neck.”

They all, he’d realized, had explosive trackers. Apparently another thing they had in common with the sorry fuckers in the old movies.

The kids were next.

There was a whole suite full of them, and the main room almost looked like a daycare except he could see terrible knowledge in their eyes and in the way they posed flirtatiously for the team.

Fuck, he’d thought as they moved on again. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

What good was anything he did if it didn’t involve saving those kids? What good was the Federacy if it didn’t give two shits about ending that kind of monstrosity, and just wanted to take out one in a long line of people who perpetuated it?

He had no problem with taking out their target. The man owned that shithole. He was culpable in everything that was being done in all those rooms. Riddick was fine with completing the hit. But leaving the kids behind… leaving a lady cop chained up, naked, for mauling… letting the place stay standing…

It was almost impossible to use his abilities without specific orders. Excruciatingly painful. But he opened his mind to the other soldiers…

They were thinking the same things. Some of them were fantasizing about fucking the cop, true, but none of them were happy about the kids.

There was something he could do, and he wasn’t even sure how he did it but he knew he could… It was going to hurt like a sonofabitch but it’d be worth it…

When they hit a blind junction, no cameras, he called it up inside him and let it blast out, frying all of the comms. Pain exploded in his head as his conditioning kicked in, but he took a deep breath and pressed forward against the agony and the nausea. There was a beautiful, glowing woman he could catch a glimpse of sometimes, whose hand on his chest felt almost orgasmic, and the thought of her helped push the pain back down.

“What the fuck?!” Corman, their point man, shouted.

Riddick pulled out his knife and went digging. It was hard not to scream, but a moment later he had the explosive tracker out of his neck. His trainers had fucked up by inflicting so many worse torments on him. Still, he very nearly puked. He wiped his blood off with his shirt and put the tracker in his pocket, approaching one of his colleagues. Demme. A guy who’d ended up in the glue for refusing to bomb a refugee camp and turning his missile on his commanders instead. He liked Demme.

“We got about two more minutes until they get a signal lock on us again. Who wants out of this shit?” he asked.

Demme tilted his head, nodding.

“Hold on, man, this ain’t gonna be subtle.” He cut into Demme’s neck, unerringly going for the tracker while his friend groaned and struggled to stay still.

“The fuck are you doing, Riddick?” Corman yelled.

“Gonna rescue those kids and that cop,” he said. “You wanna stay on mission, go ahead. It’ll give us cover. Any of you who want out of this psycho-fuckery, though, this is your one and only chance.”

“Gonna get all our heads blown off,” Nicholson muttered.

In the end, two thirds of the squad had decided to go forward and stay on mission. The rest joined Riddick in strategically placing the explosive parts of their trackers inside the confines of an armory by the junction and carrying the locator parts with them for disposal later. None of the ones who had stayed with him, thankfully, had been imagining fucking the cop. He wouldn’t have to kill one of his crew.

They doubled back to the “daycare.”

“Get the kids dressed in whatever they have that’s closest to street clothes, and get ’em ready to evac,” he told his brothers. “I’ll be back in five.”

Then he went and got the cop.

By the time he had her put together, and ready to lead the kids out of the building, all hell was starting to break loose. He and his comrades had undoubtedly been threatened repeatedly to get back on mission via their fried comms, and then the armory exploded. He’d promptly smashed his tracker, as they’d planned; let HQ think they’d actually died for a little while.

“Kids,” he said, bringing the cop into the ersatz daycare, “this is Officer Lola. She’s gonna take you out of here to someplace safe.”

Until that moment, he was pretty sure the cop had been expecting him to do something nasty to her and was trying to figure out a way to turn the tables on him. She stared at the kids, and then at him, her mouth dropping open when he handed her back both of her confiscated sidearms, fully loaded.

“You get ’em out of here. Take ’em out of this room and turn right, down the long corridor to a T-junction. Turn left, go all the way to the end and out the door. Its security is disabled. Just push it open and go on through. You’ll be in what looks like an impound lot. Get the hell out of there through the hole in the chain link fence and keep going until you hit a main road. You won’t be safe until then. Got that?”

She nodded, all fear of him gone. “What about you?”

“You don’t worry about us. Take care of the kids and we’ll clear you a path. You ain’t never seen none of us. You heard a racket while you were getting loose from your cuffs, found the kids, and got ’em the hell out of here, and you don’t know what else went down. Understood?” He looked around at all of the kids, directing his words at them, too. “You never saw us. That’s for your safety more than ours. Now go.”

The kids went quietly with her, all of them docile and accustomed to obedience. Riddick and his crew shadowed them, efficiently dealing with a small handful of goons who might have tried to stop them. A few of the kids had whispered thankyous to him and the others as they slipped through the fence. One, a little girl, maybe eight years old, with flaxen blonde hair and crystal blue eyes that were way too old and cold for her young face, had turned to look at him and his brothers, her expression adoring…

Stacey. That, he realized, was when and how he’d met Stacey.

His crew had scattered that night, once the kids were gone, and the only one he’d ever seen again was Demme. He’d done a run through the building to see if there were any other innocents who needed freeing, but hadn’t found anyone. Then he’d rejoined the main group, just long enough to make sure the brothers he’d abandoned didn’t get mowed down as a result of the team being cut down in size, and had taken off after it was clear that their mission would be a success. Two days later, his face had jumped to the top of Federacy “Wanted” posters, along with the brothers-in-arms he’d freed, with a dozen completely fabricated crimes attributed to him. It would take less than a year until they began to have real crimes to list in place of their lies.

He’d wondered what Officer Lola had made of that.

Wonder if she’s a convert…

He’d check with the Quasi-Dead when he was done here.

In the meantime, he pounded on the door to the brothel.

“Yes…? Lord Marshal!” The host gave an obsequious smile and bow. “Have you come for…”

“New edict. Courtesy of the Holy Fuckin’ Half-Dead itself. Nobody goes unconverted. You get all those women to the conversion chambers right. The fuck. Now.”

The man began to protest… and then stopped. He could feel the power behind Riddick’s demand. The force that both animated and depleted the Necromongers… was paying attention.

Your god is watching and is it ever pissed…

The women were soon marching out of the room and toward the upper levels. Celia Wyndham was the third out the door.

Funny. Her last name’s the same as the name of that city Jack was livin’ in… Small galaxy…

He’d let her be converted. She’d probably enjoy the experience, if she was still like Jack remembered, and if her masochism had helped her survive the “brothel” for as long as she apparently had. He wouldn’t add her to the coterie he was creating for Jack. They didn’t like each other… but he had a feeling that Jack would still be glad to know that Celia was… comparatively… safe.

The Lords had massed behind the brothel doorway, some confused, some angry, verging on demanding an explanation, none quite ready to draw on him. They could feel it, too… the wrath of their “god” coalescing around them.

“Every one of ’em’s about to become a Lady of the Armada,” he told the men. “This ‘breeder’ bullshit is over. Don’t you fuckin’ ever forget it again.” And be fuckin’ grateful I’m letting you keep your worthless heads.

The edict went out to the entire Armada. No one, outside of the Lord Marshal’s personal entourage, could be unconverted. And anyone who tried to enslave a “breeder” in the future would die “before their due time.”

Not even three hours in, not bad…

Soon “Officer Lola” had been located and was being summoned to him, along with the others. He returned to his quarters…

…in time to see Dame Fuckin’ Vaako slip out of the doors and scurry away.

What the fuck?

75.
Full Circle and Into the Fire

Okay. I’m safe for now. Time to take stock.

Audrey took a deep breath and tried to think as clearly as she could about her situation. As much of it as she actually knew. She could feel far too many holes still impeding her jumbled memory; she just had to hope none of the missing pieces were critical to this puzzle.

Toombs’ plan to coerce her into being his accomplice by threatening her family would no longer work, not now that Michael had been alerted and had moved to protect them. But the longer the merc stayed on Deckard’s World, the higher the chances were of her trail unbreaking in a way that might catch the Quintessa Corporation’s attention and link her to an accident that wasn’t supposed to have any survivors. Might even catch the attention of Federacy Operatives who would want to arrest her, not for anything she’d done as much as for what she was. Either result would be catastrophic. She needed to get offworld, leaving a trail that would make it look, to everybody except Toombs, like she’d never left the planet before. He would give chase, but she might just have enough of a head start to reach one of Toal’s Operatives before he could try to grab her again.

She would just have to make sure that she left enough of an obvious trail that he wouldn’t break off the pursuit before Deckard’s World was far behind them.

Fuck. She had sworn she would never leave again…

…hadn’t she?

Well, maybe I can find my way back to Tangiers Prime…

That would probably be a bad idea. Another place that could draw too much attention back to a trail that needed to stay broken.

Fucking Toombs… She’d really wanted to see Ewan again, too.

She frowned. Had there been plans for her to go there, at one point?

Audrey eased her way through the train’s commuters, over to a small information kiosk. She had twenty minutes until they pulled into Wyndham Landing’s spaceport. Boarding on one of the shuttles up to the space station would close ten minutes after that. She could reserve a seat now—

No. She needed to wait until the very last moment and pay for the seat in person, on camera. If Toombs got an alert before then that she was making the move—and he probably had alerts in place for any financial transactions she engaged in, given how he’d both located her dining hall and then almost caught up to her at her bank—he’d get in place to intercept her.

He still might. It’s the obvious choice…

So she’d throw in a less obvious one.

A trans-continental hopper was taking off five minutes after the shuttle she wanted, flying to Settlement Point. She booked a seat on it under her real name.

If he had an accomplice like Eve Logan waiting to intercept her at the station, they’d stake out the trans-continental concourse instead. That might buy her enough time to get to the shuttle. When she didn’t board the hopper, and the other transaction posted, he’d know where she’d really gone but would have an hour’s wait, minimum, before he or his accomplice could try to follow.

Straightening her clothing and finger-combing her hair, she worked on making herself look as ordinary as possible again. Now it was time to blend in.

He’s probably going to have some legal trouble to deal with, she thought. Chasing me like that means he fled the scene of a probably-fatal accident he had a role in causing. Unless he rented that car under an assumed name, that’s going to come up the moment they book him. If they book him.

She’d be screwed, though, if he had someone staked out up on the station itself, and got a chance to contact them so they could ambush her as she emerged from the shuttle. She couldn’t pull an “isomorph” in orbit; only vacuum waited in all but three of her other ’verses there, and lethal atmospheres prevailed in those three. Even going partway into any of them could kill her. Her only other option would be to isomorph her captor… to commit a murder.

Could she do that?

…Was any of what she’d just contemplated even real?

Just gotta hope that he doesn’t get a chance to arrange an ambush, she told herself.

Twenty minutes felt like twenty years.

Audrey had never been a sloucher. Now, however, she did her best to look three or four inches shorter than her semi-intimidating height of 5’10” as she tried to melt into the center of the debarking crowd. She let the main current carry her from the train toward the entryway to the concourse for high-speed commuter trains, the ones that could reach other towns and resorts in Deckard’s World’s northern hemisphere in the same twenty minutes that her low-speed train had taken to reach the station, before finally separating from the flow near the public restrooms.

Ten minutes to get myself offworld, she told herself. She kept her walk smooth and unhurried as she headed for the shuttle departure deck, blending into another flow of commuters taking the escalator to the top level.

Again, she slouched as much as she could manage. If Toombs had an accomplice, they would be looking for a tall woman with dark blonde hair. She couldn’t do much about the hair yet, but she could make herself as short as possible.

Audrey had one of her bearer cards, and her ID with her real name on it, at the ready by the time she reached the shuttle gates. Two other people behind her were able to buy passage before she heard the ticketing kiosk announce that the shuttle was at capacity. It was packed, a few of her fellow passengers still squabbling over where to put luggage and how to sit together. It took her almost until liftoff to find a free seat.

It was only her second time experiencing escape velocity in a properly padded chair.

The last time she’d left Deckard’s World, she’d been in a baggage compartment and had almost been crushed by someone’s hard-sided luggage set. The takeoff from the crash planet had been very nearly as rough, and she and Kyra had been forced to lie on the utility closet floor, extra hazmat suits their only cushioning, while the Scarlet Matador took off. Swanky chair aside, she hadn’t been in any condition to appreciate how physically comfortable—comparatively speaking—her launch from New Casablanca was. This one was still no picnic—she still felt like an elephant had decided to lie down on top of her—but she knew that at least this time, she wouldn’t be wearing bruises for days, for any reason.

Small mercies. Hang onto the small mercies.

Audrey would reach Plymouth Station A three hours after she had shaken Toombs off her trail, she calculated. Then she would need to start doing some real maneuvers, and making sure he knew—just too late to stop her—what they were.

Gravity was lessening rapidly. After another moment, her hair began to float randomly around her face. She reached out to the data screen in front of her and ran a query for the space station’s current departure schedule. Did anything leaving in the immediate future have space left for one more passenger?

One ship stood out: the Santa Clara. It had more than a dozen berths left—

Berths. No wonder. The Santa Clara was some kind of former cruise ship, originally meant for taking well-heeled passengers through a single system’s prettiest tourist points, that had been refitted for Star Jumping. But it still had bunk rooms instead of aisles of cryo-tubes. Probably there were just enough claustrophobic travelers who couldn’t handle cryo-tubes, and couldn’t afford their own charter Star Jumper with in-seat cryo, to keep it in business.

A ship that wouldn’t force her into cryo. And it was going to New Queensland. How absolutely perfect, if stupid expensive. She’d buy a ticket on it right before it was scheduled to stop admitting passengers.

She noted its gate number and pulled up the space station schematic. There would, she estimated, be just enough time for her to stop in the shopping level—a place where almost anything could be purchased, given how many passengers mislaid their luggage coming and going—and get herself some clothing and toiletries for the month-long journey. Maybe even a replacement tablet.

The next several hours went surprisingly smoothly. No one made a scene; no one attempted to intercept her. Eve Logan apparently wasn’t working with Toombs on this caper. Nor, seemingly, was anyone else. It had surprised her, for a moment, that no one fussed about her meeting all of the requirements for going offworld, but apparently she’d taken care of all that more than a year ago. A vague memory stirred at that point, of plans to actually attend school at Khair Eddine and, hopefully, reunite with Ewan. What had stopped her?

She couldn’t remember. Yet.

Audrey even had a moment to leave a brief, apologetic message on her mother’s answer-comm, knowing Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter, Esq. would be unlikely to pick up a call from an unidentified comm number. She wondered if her mother and Alvin had been alerted by Michael yet, or if they were in for a surprise when they went to pick Elodie up from school and found her under armed guard.

“Mom, it’s Audrey. The things I could never tell you, about the time I was away… one of them came back. I’m okay. I’ll be okay. But I have to go away for a while so nobody gets hurt. I love you. I’ll come back, I swear I will. Keep Elodie safe. You can trust Michael, but don’t trust anybody else you don’t know around her. Don’t leave her unguarded for a second.”

It was only much later, after boarding, after departure, after trying and failing to sleep and while picking out late-night snacks from the Santa Clara’s vending machines, that she realized she’d probably given the accidental impression that, years ago, she might have been abducted by traffickers.

Anything that keeps Elodie safe. Anything that keeps anyone else from figuring out where I went and who I was six years ago.

She was foundering under the weight of memory, struggling to fit it back into the life she thought she knew, the person she’d believed she was for the last year. From moment to moment, she either couldn’t understand how she’d managed to pull off her escape from Toombs… or couldn’t understand how she’d ever not known how to. Some of the memories were shocking in their violence, in her violence, one or two making her worry that she was making a mistake by trying to eat anything. What was she? What had she been?

Few people were up at that hour. When she entered the starboard lounge—which must have once been quite luxurious during the ship’s pleasure cruise days—she noticed that the only people in there all had their backs to the broad picture window. Outside, the stars swirled and danced past the ship as the wormhole from a new ’verse—which she’d aligned herself with, expanding her five-shape to twenty-eight ’verses wide—turned parsecs into miles. She settled onto a couch for the show, nibbling at her snacks.

I’d forgotten all about my five-shape. How could I forget my—

“You always stare at nothing like that?” someone asked to her left. She turned her head.

“Sorry?”

“You looked like you were watching something out the window,” a man in his mid-thirties, self-consciously dressed in the same kinds of clothes most of the first-year guys at Deckard Tech were sporting, told her. He wasn’t bad-looking, but there was something just slightly distasteful about him. A vibe she didn’t like. “Like there’s something there to see. Don’t even know why they have windows in this dive.”

She almost answered him, almost started telling him the history of former luxury ships like the Santa Clara, when the rest of what he’d said snagged her full attention.

Like there’s something there to see…?

“What do you see out the window?” she asked, aware that the man was probably hoping to flirt with her, and that she really ought to shut him down, but suddenly too curious not to ask. Part of her was mentally filing away details about him: five foot nine, 190 pounds, light brown hair, hazel eyes, no scars or tattoos…

What was she?

He frowned, as if it had never occurred to him that anyone would ask such a thing. “What I always see. What everybody always sees. Nothing. You never see anything inside a Star Jump.”

Audrey looked away from him, back out the window. A trio of stars whirled past, red and gold and blue, and for a moment she wondered which ’verse’s version of the crash planet might just have spun by. A wormhole might loop past anything…

“You really don’t see anything out the window?” she asked him after a pause.

“I really don’t.” His tone changed slightly, as he switched from cranky tourist into guy on the make. “But anyway, who needs windows when the view in here is so—”

“But surely,” Audrey cut him off, “you hear the whispers, right?”

Flirtation gave way to uncertainty.

“The what?”

The ones tellin’ me to go for the sweet spot, just to the left of the spine, fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta. It’s a metallic taste, human blood…

No, that would be a little too dramatic. She cocked her head instead, as if listening to something, making her expression quizzical. “You really don’t hear them?”

“Sorry, uh… no.” Someone was no longer on the make. “But, uh… you have a good… night…”

She restrained her laughter until after he’d fled the lounge. Fifteen minutes later, she was alone in the place with her cheese chips and peanut butter cups, the only insomniac left up.

Do people really see nothing out of these windows? She could have sworn that she’d seen stars through the front viewscreen of the Nephrite Undine. Was she misremembering somehow? She’d had no idea that the view was supposed to be…

Dull? Nondescript? Boring? Empty?

Wait. She knew the answer to this. She’d figured it out on the Undine. Another jumbled, restored memory slid back into place for her. She, alone, could see into twenty-seven other universes where no wormhole occluded the view of the stars. Only people with Threshold Syndrome could see stars during a Jump.

My five-shape is gonna be forty-one ’verses wide when I get to New Queensland, part of her, still swimming for the surface, thought, but she was not entirely sure what she meant by that. Something was still missing, something that had to do with…

My sister? Not Elodie… not Kyra… not even Sebby—and how could she have forgotten Sebby?—but someone else…

Memories swirled like the stars out the window as they tried to work their way back into place. One, of living statues from the ship that was screaming, made her recoil in horror. She and Imam had been dragged through a room, on their way to a twisted arena, and while no one had explained anything about the statues they were passing, she had felt how alive and tormented each one was…

She didn’t want that memory to be hers. She wanted it to be Jack’s, to belong to Jack-who-was-dead. No. I’m not going to think about that. It happened to someone else, not me. Not me.

Not me.

She was Audrey, not Jack. Jack had done terrible things. Jack had no place in the life she’d been building for herself. A life now several dozen light years behind her as the first Star Jump came to an end.

Never thought I’d pass this way again…

She’d certainly never intended to.

…had she?

She’d sworn she’d never leave Deckard’s World again… hadn’t she?

Her memories were a massive, contradictory jumble. There was so much she needed to puzzle out. So much that still didn’t make sense. She knew, with iron certainty, that she had been hiding from something far more terrible and insidious than Alexander Toombs. But what it might be, she still couldn’t remember yet…

And, she realized, as a flicker of red caught her eye, she might not have any time left to figure it out.

---

Disengaging contact. Subject is unharmed.

Riddick came back to himself slowly. Being so thoroughly immersed in Jack’s memories—Audrey MacNamera’s memories—had left him a little disoriented.

The chamber of the Quasi-Dead was silent around him. His most trusted guards stood outside, unmoving. He wasn’t sure how many hours had passed.

Jack hadn’t been able to talk for long, tell her story for long, before her exhaustion had overcome her. He’d carried her, sleeping, to the chamber of the Quasi-Dead, and had commanded them to “read” the rest of her story to him.

Disappearing into another person’s memories was an experience unlike anything he’d ever had. It was going to take him a while to sort through it all.

Her sleeping face was still and calm, her breathing slow and steady. He gathered her up as the Quasi-Dead tilted back out of sight, carrying her out of their chamber, his guards falling in around them. All would-be observers had been forbidden to attend the “reading,” and the Quasi-Dead themselves had been forbidden to speak while it transpired. They had been ordered to serve only as conduits, channeling the girl’s memories directly into his head.

Maybe it was because she was an esper, he reflected. Or maybe because she was eidetic. Or maybe because he was both of those things, too… and maybe because she’d been unconscious and unable to resist. But everything had flowed into his mind with cinematic clarity and detail, every sense engaged. He felt like he’d experienced her life. Her highs, lows, terrors, joys… everything.

Everything.

He understood why she’d been so frightened, now. As her memories had come flooding back into her head, they’d brought a confused awareness that she was hiding from someone or something much more dangerous than Toombs. Discovering that he had been looking for her, and from here of all possible places…

She thought I was what she was hiding from… being hidden from. Not exactly an unreasonable conclusion.

“Stay outside,” he told the guards as they opened the door to his chambers. He carried the girl back into his bedroom and lowered her onto the bed, wondering how much longer she would remain unconscious.

Until I wake her, a voice behind him whispered.

“I wondered if you were here,” he murmured, not bothering to turn around. There was no point. Human eyes couldn’t see Her, except in tiny fragments. Human brains—even Furyan brains—couldn’t process what She was.

Where else would I be but with my little sister in her time of peril?

“About a million other places, all at once, if I’m right about what you are,” he told Her.

You see clearly, Lightbringer.

“Ain’t no Lightbringer,” he grumbled.

You bear Her mark upon your chest. Her seed flourishes within you. And you are here, with my little sister. Just as we have chosen Audrey, She has chosen you. You are of Her brood. First and foremost among the Children of Light.

“You gonna spout some prophecy nonsense at me now?”

We do not do prophecies. Cause and effect flow in multiple directions. One stream’s future is another’s past, and its future is the first stream’s past. Free will is why there are endless streams. But the Demons of the Darkness have left only one pathway through, for all of us. Will you walk it?

“I got any kind of choice in the matter?”

None of us do now, because of them.

“Then I guess I’m walkin’ it.” He stared down at the sleeping girl on his bed. She looked so fragile, so vulnerable. But he knew what she was capable of, even better than she did maybe. “Gonna need her for it.”

That is why she’s here.

“You ain’t gonna clue me in on what happens next, are you?” He found himself smirking. This shit, he thought, always went the same way. Gods, monsters, or something else altogether, they never could just lay it out. Had to be fuckin’ mysterious.

Would it help if I did?

He remembered what Michael had said to Jack about prophecies, about how knowing what was coming and struggling against it somehow made it more inevitable than if people stopped fighting the future and just let it all play out. Did what came naturally and saw the result…

“Nah. Why take away the mystery?”

We will meet again soon, Lightbringer.

He really wished She wouldn’t call him that. The darkness was his home; why didn’t They get that? “One more thing. In case there’s any doubt. She’s mine now. Jack is mine.”

You might want to see if Audrey agrees with you. There was a hint of amusement in Her voice. In the periphery of his vision, darkness swirled within the gloom and dissipated.

He suspected She hadn’t gone far.

“John MacNamera’s daughter,” he murmured after a moment, stripping out of his armor and boots before joining Jack on the bed, lying down beside her on top of the sheets. “How interesting.”

He’d encountered the name on multiple occasions, usually when he was trying to figure out how to defeat a particularly impregnable security system. How strange to find out that an opponent he’d never actually met, but had enormous respect for, felt much the same way about him.

What might he have done, he wondered, if he’d known six years ago that the man’s little girl was in his grasp?

“No wonder you were so secretive,” he told the sleeping girl beside him. He’d underestimated her tremendously.

Everything she’d done and said, during their brief time together, had more layers of complexity to it than he’d given her credit for. She’d been running a game, playing the roles she needed to play to try to reach her father, even fooling him in the process. If she’d told him what she was trying to do, where she was trying to go and who she was trying to reach… would he have helped her, or started running a game of his own?

Can’t take it personally that she didn’t want to tell me, he thought. It’s not like she told Shazza, either. Or Fry. Or fuckin’ Paris.

Paris was another who’d had them all—well, almost all of them—fooled, his meek, effete professorial mask and his extreme materialism disguising skills that were much more interesting. He’d missed it, but Jack had caught it. Then again, he hadn’t been the esper wandering around unshielded… and actively seeking mentorship in larceny.

If he’d known that she had the backdoor codes to half the impregnable security systems he’d struggled to beat, stored in her head, would he have been able to let her go her way?

Not to mention, this girl can plan out a heist like nobody’s business…

And yet, after he’d left her, making the Holy Man promise to keep her safe, the hoodoo had kept her trapped instead. She hadn’t been able to heist herself out of the al-Walid home until she’d given up and put a razor to her wrists.

If he’d known how close she would come to destroying herself in the Imam’s house, and how little true caring the Holy Man would actually show her, would he have been able to leave her behind?

“Fuck.” He’d expected a lot better out of the man, after seeing him rescue her from strangling to death in the Kublai Khan’s arena.

He’d probably have taken her with him, instead. And that would not have ended well. For either of them. Even if he’d just asked her where she wanted to go and sent her on her way there, she’d have been Quantified and enslaved before she could reach her father. And if he’d kept her with him… she’d have ended up, one way or another, destroyed. By him.

He lifted one of her arms, pushing her sleeve back and tracing the scar on her inner arm. I wonder when she stopped hiding them… That was somewhere in the memory stream he’d imbibed, he was sure.

Why the fuck did this have to be the best path for her? God was still a fucker. But she had survived, and had even managed to thrive. That was something.

One thing he still didn’t understand was why the Holy Man had thought it was Jack in Crematoria and not Kyra. He got, now, why Kyra would know so much about Jack’s run with him, how she was able to get so many details right even as she got key ones wrong and unknowingly gave her game away, why she wouldn’t have had enough wariness of mercs in spite of sharing a piece of Jack’s history with them. He even had a sense, now, of why she’d believed she was Jack, and why her infatuation with him had run even deeper than that of the girl sleeping next to him. But what had she said or done to make the Holy Man believe that she was the girl he’d failed, and not a stranger?

Because the Holy Man had failed Jack, multiple times over, and then had apparently failed Kyra too…

And I let it happen.

“What are you pitching, Riddick?” Kyra had demanded of him. “That you cutting out was a good thing? That you had my ass covered from halfway across the universe?”

What would his answer to Jack have been, if she’d asked that? The mercs on his tail, he admitted to himself, had been an excuse, and as much as he had been willing to admit to someone other than Jack herself. The existential threat he’d posed to the girl’s mind, body, and soul if they stayed together… was that something he could have admitted to her, if she’d been the one standing there?

But Jack, he knew now, had never expected him to stay with her. She’d expected the two of them to part ways, and she’d accepted it. She just hadn’t counted on getting trapped in the al-Walid house the way she had. And she’d needed him to “say goodnight” before he left. While she was awake to hear it and say goodnight back, to know he cared, to know he hadn’t become disgusted with her for taking a life.

Fuck me… That, right there, had been his biggest mistake.

He’d been so focused on the tearful please-don’t-gos that he’d thought he’d face with her, if he did a real good-bye, it had never occurred to him that she might smile, give him a hug and kiss him on the cheek, tell him to “be careful out there,” and then get back to the business of conniving her way onto a ship to Furya.

“Thought I had you pegged, kid,” he told her as she slept. “But fuck, you’re a slippery one.”

She didn’t react. She was deeply asleep. She’d probably stay that way for hours.

Of course she will, he realized, and suddenly knew exactly what She was waiting for him to do before She allowed her little sister to wake up.

He’d have to figure out Kyra’s deal later. First…

First it was time for him to get some sleep; real sleep, not just meditating while he dream-lived her life. Then, when he woke, it would be time to talk to the Holy Fuckin’ Half-Dead itself. Make this ship safe for Jack to wake up on.

“Nobody enters or leaves these rooms while I’m gone,” he told his guards as he left his quarters several hours later, feeling better rested than he had in a year. In, if he was being truthful, years.

There were corridors, deep in the Basilica, that no one walked. No one dared. He’d only been in them once, himself, when his rage had sent him there looking for a way to annihilate the ship. He retraced the route from memory now. The last time, he’d turned away and considered it a smart move to do so. Good survival instincts.

Now, though, he had business to conduct.

Old, worn signs, utilitarian rather than the ornate monstrosities created by later generations of Necromongers, greeted him and pointed the way.

There. That was the sign he was looking for, so much more meaningful now that he’d lived in Jack’s head.

Tenth Crusade
Built at Oslo Shipping Spacedock 1
Authorized . . . . .  May 18, 2099
Keel Laid  . . . . . June 14, 2100
Launched . . . . . August 27, 2101
Commissioned . . December 27, 2101

“Disappeared July 18, 2102,” Riddick murmured, touching the plaque. The girl’s knowledge about this ship’s early days was encyclopedic.

He followed the signs leading to the original engine room. Last time he’d been down here, he’d stopped at the plaque, unwilling to venture further. Now he understood exactly what awaited him.

The room was a shambles, torn to pieces. An explosion had taken down massive parts of its structure centuries earlier. Wreckage, shielding elements, and fractured bits of stone were scattered throughout. And…

“There you are,” he murmured, catching a glimpse—just a glimpse—of his quarry. “We need to talk.”

It didn’t answer him, vanishing into the shadows.

“We’re gonna talk. Now.” He smiled and played his trump card. “Moribund…”