88.
Sharkbait

By the time Riddick finally arrived in Crematoria, two years had passed and Kyra had given up on ever seeing him except in dreams.

Only new arrivals—inmates or guards—dared try to fuck with her anymore. Everyone else had learned that touching her could be fatal.

There was a small handful of people she considered friends in the prison, most of whom she had met on the day of her arrival. Even before she had reached the ground, even as a strange and frightening rhythm had echoed through the cavern, six men had surrounded the point where she would touch down, facing outward, guarding her descent. While five of them continued to face outward, one had turned toward her, a knife in his hand…

…and had cut the rope just above her wrists.

“The warden of this fine institution has plans for you,” he said, giving her a wry smile. He looked a few years older than Tomlin. He had dark, curly hair, cut short, a square face with high cheekbones, and dark blue-green eyes. His beard and mustache were rufous and close-cropped. “I don’t agree with his plans. I doubt you do, either.”

“Let me guess,” she said, trying not to let her voice show any of the genuine terror she was feeling. “Gang-banged to death over a four-day period?”

The man gave her a curt nod. “Women are usually walked into Crematoria, not dangled like sharkbait. What did you do?”

“Killed the nephew of New Queensland’s Planetary Governor,” she said, twisting at the cuffs still on her wrists. “Over a four-day period.”

“Did you know he was related to someone important at the time?” The man reached out toward her wrists.

She shrank back and then made herself stop retreating, shaking her head.

“Sorry, love.” He opened his hand just enough so she could see the hand-carved key he was concealing.

“All I knew was he’d destroyed my life, and I was the last of a long line of women whose lives he’d destroyed.” She made herself move closer to him and let him touch her arms. The contact made her skin crawl. Not that there was anything weird about his touch. But…

“I’m guessing I know how,” he murmured as he unlocked her cuffs. There was a steel wedding band on his left ring finger. “My friends and I will keep our hands to ourselves. I swear it.”

“Why?” From what she had heard about Crematoria, the “worst of the worst” were sent there.

“Not all of us are here for the same reasons, love. Some of us follow a code. You won’t be harmed by us.”

Around them, his friends were spinning chains, driving intrepid inmates back.

This could, she reflected, be a trick. She opened her mind up, focusing on the six men surrounding her.

They were on the level. Four of them had been contract killers, deadly men whose code included going to prison—even this prison—rather than revealing who had hired them. The fifth had been nailed for a series of revenge killings related to the death of his teenage daughter. And their spokesman…

Everyone in the prison called him “The Guv,” and in a past life he’d been a politician. One with powerful dreams, powerful ambitions… and powerful enemies. Officially, he wasn’t even there; the name that he was incarcerated under wasn’t even his own. But nobody particularly cared, and he’d made his peace with it. Finding and shielding others who didn’t belong in such a cesspit had become his mission.

“Your name is Mallory Glynn, yeah?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Kyra.”

All the other names had been destroyed.

Dihya Meziane had been stolen from her by General Toal, along with Kali Mongomery. J. Houlot had barely existed. Mallory Glynn had been poisoned. And Jack…

…was dead.

Kyra was all that was left. Which was, she decided, just fine with her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kyra,” he told her. “People around here call me—”

“The Guv, yeah, I know.”

He blinked. “I believe your story may be even more interesting than I thought.”

They’d protected her for the first week. Although a few of the men in the group had lustful thoughts of their own about her, they had her figured out pretty quickly. Scared porcupine, one of them, a man named Sawyer, called her in his head. His death, at the end of that week, changed things.

He’d died defending her, something she’d never asked for or expected… or wanted. His killers died soon after when they tried to claim the prize they’d come for. She spent the next several hours in Elsewhere while the caverns were on lockdown and strange, terrifying animals were let loose to hunt the corridors and tunnels and, above all, feast on the corpses. She would come to know those animals quite well.

After the lockdown ended, she returned to U1 and sought out the Guv.

“Sawyer’s dead because of me,” she told him. The next thing out of Tizzy’s mouth would have been an apology. “That’s not happening again.”

“How’d you kill the others?” he asked. He seemed to be rolling with the death of his compatriot better than she was.

“I can’t tell you. Even here and now, it’s not safe for anybody else to know.” She hoped he wouldn’t push it. At least any cameras that might have been installed in the prison levels had been destroyed decades ago. Her new rule for isomorphing was simply not to do it in the line of sight of anyone who would be believed… or would survive witnessing it. “But I can handle more like them. I know how to now. So if they try to come for me, don’t put yourself between us. Take off so you don’t witness what I do about it. I’m not allowed to leave witnesses.”

“Allowed by whom?” He only looked mildly curious, but his thoughts were extremely curious.

“Can’t tell you that, either.” In a place like Crematoria, the millions of lives she was trying to protect were distant and abstract, but she was mostly doing it for Tizzy, anyway. In the unlikely chance that Tizzy was still out there somewhere and had been neither killed by the Quintessa Corporation nor enslaved by Toal and the Federacy, she needed cover. And even from within this stinking pit, Kyra would find a way to give it to her.

She missed her sister. But she couldn’t imagine how Tizzy would have lasted a day in Crematoria.

Yuri—Warden Pryshchenko—seemed to be determined to earn Governor Bollan’s bonus. When he couldn’t get the inmates in the pit to bring about her end—and there were several more attempts over the next year—he began sending his guards after her. Dumb move: it was much harder for him to conceal the deaths of guards. She nearly got eaten by the “hellhounds” in the lockdown that followed that.

Those beasts were always hungry. But that gave her an idea. A plan. The kind of thing she imagined Tizzy herself might have come up with.

She did a top-to-bottom exploration of the prison, moving as a phantom through its levels from Elsewhere, and learned more about what the “hellhounds” were, where they were kept, and how they were both fed and, more frequently, starved. And then, when the prison guards slept and no one could see, she began sneaking food to the beasts.

At first, it wasn’t enough. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to hunt her.

But… they appreciated the food, especially on days when the guards refused to feed them at all. And she’d talked to non-human minds before. Theirs were far less alien than the Apeiros or even the Ree. Soon she had an arrangement with them. Tizzy, she thought, would have approved.

Tizzy would already have them trying to cuddle up to her, she thought with a mixture of wistfulness and envy.

She had made the arrangement just in time, given that Yuri’s next gambit was to try to get her eaten alive by her new friends. If he couldn’t get the prison’s worst excuses for men to do it…

Fortunately for her, but too bad for him, the “hellhounds” had decided they liked her better alive. She hated nights in the kennels even if they were increasingly friendly to her, because they inevitably howled through the night, singing their yearning for a world with stormy silver skies, and a caldera of spectral flame, that they had been stolen away from. Their homesickness always infected her. Each morning, the guards would find her sleeping in a puddle of her own tears and think they’d come close to breaking her, even if they had yet to find a way to kill her. The truth was anything but.

She retained the full run of the prison even when the “hellhounds” hunted through it, although sometimes they pretended to chase her like anyone else so that no one would figure out the truth. She got good at dodging, only isomorphing into Elsewhere as a last resort. She didn’t want to get caught crossing thresholds by anyone… anyone human, anyway. The hounds often saw, but she’d never hidden any of what she could do from them. Fortunately she could listen in on the human minds around her, hideous as many of them were, and knew the exact moments when no one’s gaze was turned her way.

Yuri and his guards kept trying to figure out a way to engineer her destruction, though. The Planetary Governor of New Queensland really wanted his pound of flesh.

New guards often made a play for her. A few even survived doing so. Even the ones who didn’t lose a body part were missing their knives when they got dragged back to the control center. After one of them went back missing his gun, none of the men dispatched to take a crack at her were allowed to carry their pieces into the attacks anymore.

Kyra gave the gun to the Guv. She could shoot, but she didn’t especially like firearms. Too impersonal.

She had stolen enough edged weapons by then, and added edges to enough other bits of metal, that she always had a few blades on her. She often used the scabbard trick to hide them in Elsewhere, making them appear at the last and deadliest moment. A newcomer to the prison, a mechanical engineer whom the Guv had befriended named Sybar, taught her how to spring-load blades in the soles of her shoes. Kyra adapted his design so that the triggering mechanism just needed one tiny component isomorphed away to spring the blades. She practiced partially isomorphing part of the component while fully isomorphing the rest, until she could spring the blades and then re-arm the trigger without having to open up the whole device. Once perfected, it was a weapon no one but her could ever use.

After a while, she began to wonder if she was just marking time until he came—if he ever did—or settling in for a long, cruel life in the darkness.

She was more aware of the passage and measurement of time than anyone realized. Keeping track of dates was something that she’d started to pay attention to when Tizzy had made the Kali Montgomery ID. Her sister had spent part of a day working out exactly when Kyra’s birthday would have fallen in the New Christy Enclave, based on the relativistic duration of her family’s journey there from Earth, and then exactly how much time Kyra had spent in cryo during her transfer from New Dartmouth to Helion Prime, as well as the time they’d spent in cryo on the Scarlet Matador. From all of those numbers, she’d calculated out exactly which day of the Standard year was Kyra’s “new” birthday, making that month and day part of Kali Montgomery’s birthdate. Obviously, Kali Montgomery hadn’t been born in 2087.

The thoughtfulness of that action had stunned Kyra; it had also inspired her. When she’d tried her own hand at making an ID, she’d worked out exactly how long she had spent in cryo between Tangiers Prime and Lupus Prime and had chosen Mallory Glynn’s birthdate accordingly. It hadn’t remained accurate for more than a day from the time she got the completed ID; she’d ended up fleeing Lupus Prime, and back in cryo, soon after. But she’d calculated out her new birthdate once she’d reached New Queensland, just in case she figured out how to acquire yet another new ID, and she’d paid attention to exactly how long she’d been in cryo on first the prison transport and then Toombs’ and Logan’s ship.

The end result was that she’d known, upon her arrival in Crematoria, that she was four months away from turning eighteen. February 22 was her new birthday, and probably would be for the rest of however long she survived in the hellpit. She didn’t tell anyone when she turned eighteen, but a year later, she confided in the Guv that her birthday was approaching. He and his friends surprised her with gifts on the day: new weapons and training in how to use them. She was especially taken with learning how to spin and whip chains the way they did, and they were happy to show her. None of them fantasized about her anymore, given what she inevitably did to those who tried to take a poke; a few of them seemed to genuinely believe she possessed a set of vagina dentata.

Other women showed up in the prison from time to time, escorted on foot by guards rather than lowered on the rope as “sharkbait;” even so, few of them lasted very long. The ones who did tended to latch onto one of the “bosses” in the prison—and there were a few, although most of them feared and respected the Guv’s gang, of which she was considered a member—and disappeared into their cell warrens. Officially, their fates and conditions were unknown, but Kyra could walk into any cave she pleased via Elsewhere and knew exactly how all of the women were faring. Several were raising children deep in the more hidden parts of the cave systems.

That made her angry, but she couldn’t figure out exactly why at first. Not as angry as finding the women who were being genuinely abused—many of whom found knives mysteriously in their reach soon after—but still…

That’ll never be me, she told herself as she phantom-stalked the corridors, still unsure what she was so angry about. Raising a baby in Hell, maybe… what kind of person could do that?

Someone with no other choices, she reminded herself. It wasn’t the women she was angry with, she finally realized; it was the men who didn’t care about the consequences of sticking their dicks into the second-most helpless people in the place.

If she was stuck here for the rest of her life, she decided after a while, she was going to have to make some changes to the place. Bring down some consequences that those kinds of… inmates… had to respect.

She “celebrated” the second anniversary of her arrival in Crematoria by assassinating the leadership of one of the nastier gangs in the place, one that brutally used up any woman unlucky enough to make the mistake of seeking shelter with them. Mere days later, while the place was still reeling from the upheaval she had engineered, she heard a familiar rhythm start up in the main cavern.

More sharkbait was arriving.

Curious, she gathered her knives and chains and headed for the cavern floor. If it was someone the Guv would want to defend, she would be ready to join the defensive wall.

Her breath caught when she realized just who was descending.

Riddick.

He had come for her. Finally.

She watched as the rope stopped, the unintelligible sounds of an argument echoing down from the control room through the hatch in its floor. Were they just going to leave him hanging there while they yammered at each other?

Riddick apparently had no interest in waiting around.

She watched in fascination as he worked his way upward on the rope, twisting it around his body. She’d mastered some damn good gymnastics of her own, but what he was doing was amazing. She studied each of his movements, committing them to memory to try sometime later, herself.

My brain might not be eidetic like Tizzy’s, but my muscles are… She rarely needed more than two or three tries to master something physical. And did she ever want to master that!

Her breath caught again when Riddick fell, spinning, using his momentum and torque to shatter the chains shackling him to the rope as he dropped to the cavern floor.

Two of the Moles, she suddenly realized, were waiting for him, weapons drawn.

That was Kyra’s name for them, anyway: a group of men who had a real thing for one complex of twisting tunnels off the main cavern, just above the actively volcanic passages not even she could risk. She’d explored their tunnels herself, on the Elsewhere side, to find out what they were up to; anyone who tried on the U1 side was liable to end up dead. The Moles had apparently figured out a way to combine dried “hellhound” shit with some of the mineral deposits in their tunnels into a yellow powder they liked to sniff; in the last year, they’d grown addicted to the substance and frequently walked around with it liberally sprinkled on their clothes and skin. But that wasn’t even close to the most disgusting thing about them. The last “sharkbait” to hit the floor had been dragged into their tunnels and slaughtered; they’d apparently turned cannibal as well. She’d verified that while they were asleep and had very nearly brought one of the “hellhounds” down to turn loose on them.

Kyra had already been considering making their demises, possibly as “hellhound” chow, her twentieth birthday present to herself.

Looks like my birthday party’s arriving early, she thought with a grim smile. Whatever they could manage to do to run of the mill “sharkbait” wasn’t going to work on Riddick. This was going to be fun to watch.

Riddick flipped as his chains shattered, landing on his feet, perfectly balanced. He was already moving to intercept the first of the Moles as the fool ran at him.

It was poetry.

In seconds, the first Mole was down, his neck snapped. Riddick didn’t even bother to turn around as the second Mole leapt at him, reaching back to grab the man by the neck and slam him to the ground.

A third Mole was climbing out of a tunnel. Did Riddick know he was there?

Kyra didn’t feel like risking it.

Even as the third Mole ran for Riddick, her chain whipped out. She’d been practicing for more than half a year and her aim was perfect. It wrapped around the man’s neck and she gave it a hard pull, feeling the moment when his spine cracked and his momentum turned into dead weight. He crashed to the floor even as Riddick turned to look at him.

With a practiced tug, Kyra made the chain release its hold on the dead Mole’s neck and reeled it in.

On the ground behind Riddick, the second Mole gulped and wheezed like a beached fish, struggling to breathe. Riddick paid no attention, his gaze following her chain. As she wound it back up, he pulled off his goggles and stared at her with his amazing silver eyes.

It felt, strangely, like the first time she’d ever seen them. And yet…

…She had seen them before, hadn’t she? She’d spent a lot of time with him before he abandoned her and Tizzy…

They were amazing. Maybe she’d just forgotten how beautiful they were.

But why was he looking at her like he didn’t know her? Wasn’t he happy to see her? Hadn’t he come for her? The look on his face wasn’t at all what she’d expected.

Damn it, of all times for the Guv to give his inmates-and-convicts speech… He trotted that damn thing out every time someone survived touching down.

It’d give her a chance to take back control of their reunion, though. She slipped into one of the side passages while the Guv was talking, certain that Riddick was tracking her movements.

She isomorphed into Elsewhere, setting her chains down and choosing one of her favorite weapons, the “Pincer,” called that because it reminded her of Sebby’s claws. Riddick was approaching. She clambered up one of the stone pillars, balancing herself and transitioning back into U1 as he passed, jumping back down behind him and landing cat-silent. He didn’t know she was there until she had the Pincer pressed to his spine.

“Should I go for the sweet spot?” she asked him. He’d have to recognize her now.

And yet, somehow, it didn’t work nearly as well in reality as it had in her head. He was faster than she’d expected. And she hadn’t expected to be so angry with him. She hadn’t consciously wondered why he hadn’t come sooner, or why she hadn’t been able to find anyone in the prison who could give her a shine job, until she began demanding answers from him. And she hadn’t realized how much she’d blamed him for losing Tizzy. Losing Jack.

He lifted her off the ground, one hand pinning her wrist and one arm between her legs, and none of her usual responses to that kind of contact kicked off. Why did she suddenly want more contact with him? Why was she suddenly trying to press herself closer to him and turning “sweet spot” into a double-entendre?

She hadn’t expected the sense of shame—and, inexplicably, envy—that flooded through her when he called her “Jack.” She didn’t understand where that came from at all. Or the weird wistfulness. Or the resentment at his abandonment, not of her but of someone else…

Tizzy?

“Jack’s dead,” she told him, struggling with the feeling that she was repeating someone else’s words. “She was weak. She couldn’t cut it.”

Why did saying that hurt so much?

If their meeting rattled him, it rattled her even more. By the time she broke free, giving him a “kiss” with her mouth blade and isomorphing out of his grasp, she felt like she’d completely lost control of their encounter.

“The name’s Kyra now,” she told him from the bridge, even as a part of her thought that it had never really been anything else. “And I’m a new animal.”

Fuck… fuck… I completely fucked this up… She jumped down to the cavern floor before she could make it all even worse somehow.

Why had she made such a show out of it all? Why hadn’t she just tried to talk to him?

The “hellhounds,” sensing her emotional turmoil, began roaring in their cages, calling to her, wanting to know what had upset her so they could tear it to pieces. She isomorphed into Elsewhere the moment she was sure no one could see her, so nobody would hear her crying. Especially not him.

Once she recovered, she took a long shower.

There was a waterfall in part of the cave complex, an extraordinary and inexplicable feature. She might have expected the water to be sulfuric, acidic, or at least heavily mineral-laden, but wherever it came from, it was clean and pure, and heated by the volcanic activity throughout the region to a perfect “bathwater” temperature that reminded her of swimming in New Marrakesh’s phantom tides. In other parts of the cave system there were dangerous water features, including an underground pond so acidic that anyone falling into it dissolved in less than an hour, but this water was perfect. She could undress completely and have a proper shower in Elsewhere, and did so frequently. It was one of the only luxuries she had—

“…it’s amazing how you can do without the necessities of life, provided you have the little luxuries…”

Jack had been listening in on Paris when he’d said that to Zeke, sneaking up on him—

But… that was me… I was Jack… wasn’t I?

She had the awful feeling that Riddick didn’t think so.

He arrived at the waterfall, on the U1 side, after she had dressed and composed herself. She climbed up to one of the catwalks near him, isomorphing back, and watched him for a few minutes, trying to fathom why, in spite of everything she already knew about him, everything she remembered, it felt as if everything she was seeing was a first.

He spotted her.

She’d been trying to read his mind, but he had a wall up between them. His mind was opaque to her. She’d had no idea that was even possible.

It’s me, Riddick. Don’t you remember me? Would he remember Tizzy if she were here?

For a moment she thought he was going to come over to her. But—

Damn it, Guv, stop interrupting us…

Was he really going to bring up his nameless wife again?

“FEEDING TIME!”

Well, there went all her plans of a quiet conversation with Riddick.

She still had no idea what the “hellhounds” really were, but the announcement that they were about to be turned loose always engendered a panic. Usually it happened when the guards realized someone had been killed. The Moles, undoubtedly. But, although eating inconvenient corpses was part of their jobs, they preferred live prey. Anyone, with one exception, that they found outside of locked cells was fair game.

She wanted to watch them dispose of those fucking cannibals. She needed to get down to the cavern floor.

The place was in a panic. Somehow nobody had realized that this was inevitable. The “hellhounds” were always set loose soon after a killing in the cavern, and it had been two or three hours since the Moles had died, the last from the Guv’s kick to his head. Usually everyone was more prepared, sticking close to whichever warrens of cells they preferred to get locked in.

Damn it, I’m gonna miss it all if I can’t get through this crowd…

One of the “hellhounds” was in front of her, watching her from atop a stairway.

Small-friend-creature, it whispered in her mind as it growled and turned red. I must pounce. You must run.

Okay, it wanted to play. She knew her way around this part of the cavern. That wouldn’t be a problem.

Three… two… one… she told it. Let’s go!

She pushed off of the wall and found her footing, balancing on the railing with one foot and rough stone on the other. Her friend roared and leapt forward, excitement visible on every perked scale. She kicked off and soared out into the open air, grabbing one of the ropes that trailed from an upper walkway and sliding down its length. Inhuman laughter echoed in her head.

Well played, small-friend-creature!

Maybe she should name it Ewan.

Kyra landed on one of the lower walkways, one that was already almost deserted. Maybe, just maybe, she’d make it to the bottom in time to see the pack feed, have a moment alone with them while no other human was watch­ing—

A Lightbringer is here! A Lightbringer is here! She had never heard such delight in any of the creatures’ voices before.

She wondered what that meant.

“Where you goin’, Mallory?”

Fuck. It was one of the guards. They, alone, insisted on calling her Mallory. No convict or inmate ever did. She turned around.

Fuck.

It was four of the guards, shining their bright lights into her eyes.

She’d been so focused on the “hellhounds,” and their unusual excitement about something called a Lightbringer, to realize the danger she was walking into. Now that she was paying attention, she could see what filled their noxious headspaces.

Yuri had sent them. Two years had passed since he was supposed to have arranged for her to get raped to death in this place, and he was done waiting. He’d sent some of his best guards… and had told them they could do anything they wanted to her as long as she took four days to die once they started. And did they ever have plans.

Fuck.

She began to back up, raising her arms as if she believed this was something other than the opening movement in a symphony of pain and death.

Not hers, of course. But still.

Everybody just gotta piss on my parade today…

87.
The Teeth of the Black Fox

Kyra came back to herself, aware that time had passed and that somehow, something awful had happened.

Her body ached, especially in places she didn’t want to think about. Sitting up, she fumbled her clothes back on and looked around.

She was in a playroom… of a kind. The walls were covered in glass cabinets that housed a variety of disturbing and horrifying tools meant to be used on human bodies… female bodies. There was a utilitarian cot against one wall, manacles attached to each of its corners. Her wrists and ankles smarted, but she had no memory of wearing them—

Jack had worn them, she suddenly thought. Jack had been restrained on that bed and—

Her mind shuddered away from all of it. She didn’t remember. She wouldn’t remember. It hadn’t happened to her. It had happened to Jack.

Standing up hurt a little. She glanced around, spotting a camera that was aimed at the cot and two others aimed at the wider room. Under surveillance… that would make it hard to break out. She couldn’t isomorph, either. There was no air in Elsewhere for her to breathe.

Walk off the pain. She didn’t know why she was in such pain, what had happened to her—

—Not to me. It happened to Jack—

—but she needed to get her bearings and figure out what to do next. That man would be back. Maybe some of his friends would be with him. Some of them, she thought disjointedly, already had been.

Are we still on New Queensland, even?

She pressed her hand to the wall. It was still; there was no thrum of engines under her palm. Still parked on the landing pad. That was something. Maybe even something she could use.

By the door, there was a familiar looking keypad.

You put it in and it’ll unlock any lock it can for you, and open up any system it has access to. So you can get into and out of places if you’re in trouble. And you don’t have to remember numbers. It spells out RIDDICK. Any keypad with letters under the numbers will let you spell it out…

Tizzy had told her that. Tizzy, her lost little sister…

Would it work? How far had Tizzy managed to send it out?

Carefully, methodically, she punched R-I-D-D-I-C-K into the keypad and then pressed the green button at the bottom.

With a soft beep, the lights on the room’s cameras turned off and the door slid open.

Beyond the door, the lighting was dim, set in Nighttime Mode. The ship was completely silent. Whoever these bastards were, they appeared to all be in bed.

Glancing back into the playroom, she spotted knives in one of the cabinets. She had no idea what kinds of sick games they were intended for, but they’d be useful if she ran into one of the men. It was easy enough to get to them, she realized; she couldn’t isomorph herself into Elsewhere, but nothing was stopping her from isomorphing away the glass panel between her and the weapons she wanted. It fell away as she did so, striking the ground of Elsewhere silently. There was no atmosphere there to convey the sound of smashing glass back to her.

She armed herself and went exploring.

Silently, carefully, she quartered the ship, mapping it out in her head. It was big, with at least two levels, and the playrooms were on the lower level along with—

Perfect…

The cargo and equipment bay told her everything she needed to know about the men on the ship. “Free settlers.” Planning on heading to some barely-terraformed world with no charter in force to try to carve spaces for themselves… and buying women to take with them because nobody they actually knew was willing to go on their journey. They had earth-moving equipment, construction equipment, farming and mining equip­ment…

…and EVA suits in case they had to repair their ship along the way.

It wouldn’t matter that Elswhere had no atmosphere if she was protected by an EVA suit.

And Kyra, along with every other kid on board the New Christy Pilgrim, had been drilled in how to put on the suits in case of emergency. It was one of the few lessons that girls hadn’t been excluded from.

Even stiff and sore as she was, it didn’t take long to get into the suit. She contemplated a scythe among the farming equipment for a moment, but decided against it. These kills were going to be very personal.

Isomorphing into Elsewhere, she stalked the corridors of the ship again as a phantom, passing through closed doors to see what awaited on the other sides. It didn’t take long to locate all four men. It didn’t take much longer to come up with a plan. She returned to the playroom.

There were multiple sets of restraints in its cabinets, most of them looking unused. Gags of different types. Blindfolds. Spreader bars. Things designed to be inescapable. Things designed to be inhumane. Within an hour, all four men were wearing the equipment they’d bought for girls like—

—Not me. Jack…—

—and the two girls already in cryo, without waking up until it was too late to stop her. Once she was sure that no one else was on board, and there was no way for them to escape, she left the settlers’ ship as a phantom, walking across the rugged, flat terrain of New Queensland’s Elsewhere until she was in front of the merc ship again.

The crew inside was a dozen strong. It didn’t help them. Not when their attacker was invisible, intangible, only becoming a concrete presence in that moment when her blades cut them to pieces. Old hand or new recruit, it didn’t matter to her. None of them had spoken up against slaving her out. She only fully manifested in U1 again once they were all dead.

They’d confiscated her possessions when they’d “arrested” her, and had sent her with nothing other than the clothes she’d been wearing when they gave her to the settlers. She stripped out of her blood-soaked EVA suit and bundled it into their waste disposal unit, hunting through the ship for her stolen belongings and gathering them back together before taking one of the mercs’ EVA suits for her trip back to the settlers’ ship.

It was only much later that Kyra realized she’d left a wealth of her fingerprints throughout the merc ship in the process, many of them bloody.

She, meanwhile, trudged back to the settlers’ ship, once more suited up and walking through Elsewhere. Once inside again, she got to work.

The man who had ab­used—

—Not me! Jack!—

—lived the longest. She made sure of it. The other three died in less than a day, but she took extra care to make sure his heart didn’t give out. His mind did first; when he regressed back to the mental state of a small child, she sickened of the game and cut his throat.

There was still one more reckoning she needed to mete out before she was done, she realized, as she collected weapons and supplies. She loaded them all into one of the smaller vehicles the settlers had stored in their equipment bay, getting everything set before she ventured back to the cryo-chambers.

Two abused girls lay within the only active units. They wore no restraints, but she could see the marks of cuffs on their wrists, and other marks that made her wish she’d kept the other men alive a little longer…

Enough. She reprogrammed their chambers to wake them up once she was gone. All of the doors were unlocked; they could make their escapes whenever they wished.

Again, she didn’t consider until much later just how many fingerprints she had left on the ship, and what other biometric evidence she’d left as well. She had turned off all of the cameras on both ships before isomorphing—millions of lives depended on her leaving no evidence that she could do such a thing—but hadn’t thought about covering her tracks beyond that. The fog of war was upon her.

And she was after the man who had fired the first shot.

Oliver Bollan had seemed so nice when she first met him. They hadn’t worked together until the very end, after another girl, Eleanor, had abruptly quit.

Three guesses why Eleanor left…

Soon after, she’d been asked if she would be willing to transfer to the paddocks he managed, because he was “short-handed.”

Pretty sure that’s not the term for what his hands get up to…

The drive back to the New Gold Coast Cattle Ranch gave her a lot of time to think about just what he’d been doing, for years, and had tried to do to her, too. Worse, what he’d succeeded in doing to her reputation after she’d fended him off and warned him off.

Won’t just be his hands he loses now… shouldn’t’ve set this in motion…

Oliver, she had decided, was to blame for all of it. Her desperation. Her mistaken decision to give up the Mallory Glynn name because he was trying to poison it. Her arrest. Being slaved out. The things that had happened to Jack as a result…

He would die for it.

The first news stories, about a “spaceship of horrors” with a dozen dead bodies inside, were just starting to appear in the feeds when she arrived back at the ranch. She spent three days tracking Bollan’s movements, and another day laying her trap, before she took him.

She didn’t spend as much time on him as she had on Red Roger…

Except Riddick killed Red Roger for me… didn’t he?

…but it took Oliver days to die nonetheless. Long enough that, when she finally left his body behind and started driving back toward New Brisbane, contemplating where to go next, the news feeds had stopped covering the murders on two ships at the spaceport, and she’d missed the reports that Mallory Glynn was being sought as a person of interest.

They’d have caught her almost immediately if she hadn’t been able to hear them coming, hear their minds focused in on her. But she still couldn’t dodge them for long. She had no other ID to use except Mallory’s, and no idea where to go to find someone like Tizzy who could cook up a new one for her. If she’d still been on Tangiers Prime or even Lupus Prime, she could have hidden out in Elsewhere, slipping back to pilfer supplies when needed, and stayed out of reach for years.

Should’a done that when Toal’s men made a play for me…

As it was, the authorities caught her less than a week after she’d left Oliver’s remains strung up as wolf bait.

Her fingerprints came back as a dead-on match for the prints on all three crime scenes. To her surprise, however, they did not come back as a match for Kyra Wittier-Collins.

Tizzy’s worm programs, she realized, not sure if she was relieved or not. It had been a long-shot, her sister had said, but there was a chance that the worm carrying their faked video to Merc Network and law enforcement databases could also access, and obscure or destroy, their biometric records, and she’d programmed it to try. Apparently, it had succeeded. Nobody seemed to know that they had the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain in custody; just the New Brisbane Butcher. They also thought they had a legal adult on their hands and not a minor.

Seventeen counts of first-degree murder got pinned to her. Although she was certain that virtually everybody involved with the case knew what all of the dead had really been like and what they’d been doing before she’d ended their damage paths, it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter what they’d done to—

—Not me! Jack!—

—before she killed them, or how recent her trauma had been. She’d deliberately returned to the merc ship. She’d spent days torturing the settlers, and Oliver, to death. Even with the playroom torture vids that had been found on the settlers’ ship, there was no talk of clemency. Luckily for her, New Queensland, like the old Australian territory it had been named after, had no death penalty.

Unluckily for her, that meant she would probably be sent to a Double-Max prison. Ursa Luna.

Riddick territory.

Only what were the chances he’d actually be there?

Amnesty Interplanetary tried to offer her help, their rep claiming he believed they had enough proof of her victims’ past abuse of young women to win a clemency ruling after all. But she knew them even if they didn’t know her, and she remembered their role in triggering the standoff that had led to the massacre of her family and friends. She described, in detail, where their rep should put his clemency motion, and she never saw him again.

She soon learned that the local jailors assumed they could play with girls in their custody; they soon learned that, with her, that was a good way to lose a body part. After the second incident, she was locked in solitary awaiting sentencing. Everybody seemed to assume she’d eaten the guards’ missing pieces; they were, after all, nowhere to be found. She didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion. A random public defender got it into her head to try to have “Mallory Glynn” sentenced to psychiatric care instead of a proper slam, but Kyra had been in mental institutions before. Never again. She’d rather be in the Pit.

I’ll find a doctor and pay him to do a surgical shine job on my eyeballs. Twenty menthol Kools my ass… but if necessary I’ll let him keep his dick…

Chaotic as her mind was much of the time, she managed to pull herself together enough to convince the court-appointed psychiatrist that she belonged in a regular prison. Her sentencing took place soon after. Nobody attended but the press and some fancy looking bigwigs whose eyes and thoughts beat at her with pure hatred.

A month later, Kyra was one of a dozen prisoners picked up for delivery to Ursa Luna, something that worked in her favor. The guards were too busy settling a huge, belligerent man into his cryo-chamber to notice her inputting Tizzy’s Ghost Code into hers and changing its settings. She woke up after the ship completed its second Star Jump while everyone else slept on, loaded all of the emergency supplies into the ship’s lifeboat, and detached shortly before the ship reached its third Jump Point. The nearby outpost planet was semi-habitable and only a few days away via the lifeboat’s ion drives. Fortunately, it had a good enough autopilot to get her there and handle the landing.

Unfortunately, the lifeboat’s departure from the main ship had been recorded, and notifications of a likely prisoner escape went out on the Beacons even as it made its next Star Jump.

And, worst of all, the barely-terraformed outpost planet was another airless rock over in Elsewhere.

She was almost relieved when, two weeks later, a merc ship touched down. Less relieved when she saw who was in it.

Alexander Toombs and Eve Logan.

Tizzy had known how to evade them. How to divert them. How to mess with their heads. Kyra didn’t know how to think up crazy plans on the fly the way her sister could. The only plan she could come up with was to steal their ship and hope their autopilot was good enough to fly her somewhere else.

They caught her trying. Tizzy’s Ghost Code hadn’t worked on their ship.

“Is this her?” Toombs said as he stood over her convulsing body. The amount of live current that had just gone blasting through her, when she’d tried to board the ship, guaranteed that she wouldn’t be walking or talking for a few hours.

Logan knelt down next to her and took her hand, pressing it to her tablet surface. “ID system says no. Says this is Mallory Glynn, not Kyra Wittier-Collins, but I could swear this is her. Then again, I thought that woman with the face tattoos at that memorial service was Wittier-Collins, too, and she wasn’t even on Tangiers Prime at the time.”

“What’s the reward situation for each?”

“One hundred K in UDs as a finder’s fee for Wittier-Collins,” Logan told him. “There’s no bounty anymore, just the finder’s fee for bringing her home so she can claim her court winnings. Four hundred K for Mallory Glynn.”

“Well then,” Toombs drawled, leaning back against the wall, “I’m four times as sure this is Mallory Glynn and not Kyra Wittier-Collins. Ain’t you?”

Logan shrugged and sighed. “You did notice the M.O. was the same, right? Glynn kills exactly the same way as Wittier-Collins.”

“Nobody’s exonerated Glynn,” Toombs retorted. “Seventeen corpses under her belt, includin’ the nephew of New Queensland’s Planetary Governor. We put her in Slam for him, he’d probably give us the keys to New Brisbane if we ever want to visit.”

“You got a point.” Logan didn’t look entirely happy about that. Her gaze down on Kyra was pitying.

“Plus, we just try to turn her in for the finder’s fee on New Dartmouth, all her bio data says she ain’t Wittier-Collins. So then we maybe don’t get anything and they extradite her anyway once her ‘real’ name pops up.” Toombs looked almost as amused as annoyed by that possibility. “Might as well collect the four hundred K. Un­less…”

He walked over to stand next to Logan, smiling down at Kyra.

“Hey, girlie. You wouldn’t happen to know where your old pal Riddick is, would ya?”

Logan rolled her eyes and scoffed.

Riddick. It had been years since she’d seen him, she thought. Not since he’d abandoned her and Tizzy on New Mecca…

She was having a hard time remembering just what, exactly, it was that had happened on New Mecca with Riddick. Something to do with a treacherous holy man…

Abu al-Walid. El Imam. He knew where Riddick was. If she could get a message to him, may­be—

But he’d never tell, would he? Something had happened with Tizzy, something bad that he should have let Riddick know about, and he’d chosen not to. The image came to her of Tizzy, ghost-pale and white-lipped, staring after the holy man as he made his righteous way out of—

Aceso?

It was all a jumble. But maybe, even if he hadn’t been willing to help Tizzy, he’d still be willing to help her.

If she could get a message to him.

“Didn’t think so,” Toombs said from above her. “Too bad. He’s up to a million UDs. Could’a been enough to make us look the other way where you’re concerned.”

“As if you would,” Logan muttered.

“Hey. You never know. I might be feeling magnanimous with my share, my half-mill, in my pockets.”

“Might not be, too.” Logan rose from her crouch. “We want any of the crap she has at her camp?”

“We’ll go take a look. She ain’t goin’ anywhere for a while. Nowhere ’cept Crematoria.”

“That’s where we’re taking her?”

“Guy at Ursa Luna was clear,” Toombs said as they walked down their ship’s ramp. “If she does know Riddick, they don’t want her within a hundred light years.”

Whatever they were doing, though, took a while. Long enough that Kyra, resolutely focused on gaining back enough mobility to reach their comms, managed to drag herself over to the cockpit and patch into the system. Even if Tizzy’s Ghost Code wouldn’t work on the ship’s security systems, Toombs hadn’t locked the data and comms down and she could slide right in. As she’d hoped, he kept files in the system of all the “big game” he was hunting, and Riddick’s file included data on the Imam. Including his comm number.

There was no way to comm him directly from that little trash heap of a planet. But she could program in a call that would be automatically transmitted to the next Jump Beacon the ship passed, a message he would get and would hopefully act upon. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot she had left.

She set up the instructions for delivery and then recorded her message.

“Imam, it’s me… it’s—”

He’d never known her as Kyra, she thought. There was only one name he’d ever known. The name of the girl who had been raped and murdered by those sick fucks at the New Brisbane Spaceport. The name of a dead girl.

“…it’s Jack. You remember me, right? From the crash. I, uh… I need your help. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I’m in trouble.” She took a deep breath. “I went looking for Riddick. Things went bad. Some people died. I mean, I killed them, and… they’re sending me to Crematoria.”

She’d heard of it. Tizzy had described it once, when they were talking about the different prisons that someone with Riddick’s rep might get sent to.

“There’s no way out of there, Imam. You can’t even set foot on the surface without burning up. But if anybody can do it… please, please tell Riddick where I am. Please tell him to come get me. I need him. Please, if you ever cared even a little about me…”

He never cared about me. He never cared about us…

“…tell him to come get me.”

She saved the message and did her best to hide it in the comms system, and managed to crawl back out of the cockpit, far enough away from it to conceal that she’d ever made it there, before Toombs and Logan came back hauling most of her gear.

“Poor girlie, whatever your name really is,” Toombs said, setting down the gear and walking over to her. “Where were you tryin’ to go?”

“C’mon, Toombs.” Logan said. “Don’t mock the poor kid.”

Hearing Logan’s words disturbed her. Logan was supposed to be The Enemy. Not kinda-sorta on her side.

“Ain’t a kid if she’s Mallory Glynn,” Toombs said. “Even that Wittier-Collins chick’d be eighteen by now.”

“Assuming she didn’t go into cryo except between Helion Prime and New Queensland,” Logan said. “Big assumption.”

“Good ’nough for me. Now, let’s get her in cryo before she finds her way into any more trouble.”

They didn’t have cryo-chambers on their ship, just in-seat units. Kyra watched in helpless horror as they chained her up and connected her to several I-V drips, watched as the cryo unit spun into gear and mixed its freezing solution with her blood, turning it a violet that made her think of Mommy Ree’s cara­pace…

And then she was on a world with three suns.

“You forgot everything I told you,” Tizzy said from next to her.

Kyra glanced over at her little sister. Tizzy looked the way she had in the settlement, the one time Kyra had managed to see her, somehow trapped in a mirror and looking back at her in place of her face. Head shaved, a pair of yellow goggles on her forehead. But it was Tizzy, not all that different than she remembered her.

“I warned you mercs are just in it for the money,” Tizzy continued. “They’ll use you up for a percentage. Johns—that’s the guy who caught Riddick—he threatened a bunch of little kids to get Riddick to surrender. Killed some of them, too. You don’t want to be with people like that.”

For a moment, as Tizzy spoke, they weren’t on the crash planet anymore. They were in a hospital room, sitting on Tizzy’s bed. Her hair wasn’t shaved anymore, but was still short enough to be androgynous.

“There wasn’t anyone else left,” Kyra told her. “You’re gone. General Toal separated us and I don’t even know what he’s done to you. And Jack—”

“Jack is dead,” Tizzy reminded her, as if speaking to a slow child. “She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.”

They were no longer in the hospital. They were in a train station, surrounded by travelers, General Toal lurking nearby with sinister intentions. Tizzy’s hair had grown out another inch, and while she still looked somewhat androgynous, it framed her gamine face in a more feminine way. One man had already fallen madly in love with her, but fortunately had done her no harm—

But there was going to be an explosion soon, Kyra realized. She wanted to warn Tizzy but the words wouldn’t come.

The train station melted away and she was back on a world with three suns.

“…tellin’ me to go for the sweet spot,” Riddick rumbled in memories that were hers but not hers. “Left of the spine, fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta.”

What a gusher… He’d said that, right?

“How do I get eyes like that?” she asked him, aware that Tizzy was close by, annoyed, thinking that she was saying it wrong, the way Teacher had always claimed she was reciting the Bible verses wrong…

“You gotta kill a few people,” Riddick told her.

Done a lot of that now… When Riddick had been her age, his official body count had been half a dozen homeless youths he’d apparently carved up over a few months in New Athens. She’d killed almost three times as many grown men in less than two weeks. Guess I’m the better killer…

The story played out, looped, played out again. Over and over, Tizzy warned Kyra of the danger of trusting mercs. Over and over, Riddick shepherded her through the eclipse and to safety, but disappeared soon after, leaving her and Tizzy—

—And Jack, but which one of us was Jack?—

—to their fates. Tizzy, lost to General Toal’s connivances and an explosion, probably dead but maybe not, lost either way. And Jack…

Jack is dead…

Raped, tortured, and murdered by a group of “free settlers.” Kyra had avenged her death. Was that what had happened to Tizzy? Or…

She was weak… she couldn’t cut it…

She circled back to the world with three suns again. It was safer there. Or, sometimes, to the woods of Canaan Mountain, Riddick by her side as they hunted—

Red Roger? Oliver Bollan?

It didn’t matter. They hunted together, and that was what was important. He would come rescue her again. She knew it.

So why did he abandon me? Abandon us? If he’d stayed, Tizzy would be okay and Jack wouldn’t be dead…

Was Tizzy Jack? Or was she Jack? Who had died on the settlers’ ship, exactly? Someone had.

She retreated from the questions, circling back to the world with three suns.

Eons later, she woke to find herself being helped off of the ship and into a natural cave that had been modified into a hangar.

A cave, she realized, that existed on both sides of the threshold. In Elsewhere, the air was stifling hot but breathable.

Crematoria.

Toombs and Logan had cuffed her while she was waking up. They led her over to a sled, a four-seater with room for cargo in the back. She got a front seat next to Logan, Toombs directly behind her with a gun casually pointed at her back. The natural lava tube that the sled’s track followed existed in both worlds. Elsewhere and U1, she found herself thinking, were most closely connected here than anywhere else in their respec­tive—

—Four–spaces?—

—’verses. She might not be able to escape off-planet…

But there might be another kind of escape handy for her.

The sled covered ground fast, whipping through the tunnel’s twists and turns at a speed that made her feel almost grateful for the restraints keeping her secured to her seat. Logan had gently slipped a set of goggles over her eyes before they began the ride, and she found herself feeling almost friendly toward the merc because of that. It took less than ten minutes to cover the thirty-klick distance and reach the prison.

“So,” the Slam boss—Yuri, his mind silently provided—said as he looked Kyra over. “This is Mallory Glynn. The New Brisbane Butcher.”

“This one is trouble, Boss,” one of the guards—Anatoliy—said from behind him. “I can smell it on her.”

“Anyone who can cut seventeen grown men to pieces in less than a fortnight is trouble, Anatoliy,” Yuri said with a soft laugh. “I don’t need your nose to tell me that. But in this case, we don’t mind, do we?”

Yuri walked over to his desk and picked up a pair of bearer cards. He smiled over at the mercs.

“Governor William Bollan of New Queensland sends his personal thanks to you… along with a small token of his esteem.”

He walked back to Toombs and Logan, smiling. “Miss Glynn’s bounty, four hundred-K UDs…”

He put one bearer card into Eve Logan’s hand.

“…and another two hundred-K UDs as Governor Bollan’s personal thank you, for seeing that his nephew’s murderer is brought to justice.”

He handed over the second bearer card.

“Pleasure doin’ business with you,” Toombs said, sounding positively gleeful.

Logan’s eyes, full of misgivings, darted Kyra’s way before she followed Toombs back to the sled.

“Don’t worry, Miss Mallory,” Yuri told her as the door to the tunnel closed behind them. “The New Queensland Planetary Governor is paying us handsomely to look after you. He wishes you to spend a very, very long time contemplating your actions.”

Another of the guards attached her wrist manacles to a rope.

“Or, at least, as long as his nephew had to spend contemplating them.”

As they lowered her into the bowels of the prison, as she felt the dark and lustful thoughts of dozens of inmates turning toward her, Kyra thanked whatever sick fucker existed on high that the caverns, almost identical, existed in Elsewhere and had air in them. It was the only thing that was going to keep her alive until—

Please, Riddick, come get me. Don’t make me wait too long.

86.
Through an Occluded Mirror

You… stupid… fuck.

Riddick kept his walk smooth and calm as he headed for the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead, even as he mentally pummeled himself. It had been a long time since he’d felt like this much of an idiot.

The look on Jack’s face, the confusion and disbelief in her mind, when he’d told her he wanted to make her Dame Riddick, kept smacking at him.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Why the fuck had he phrased it like that?

Could he possibly have made more of a ham-handed job of it?

Worse, he’d practically fled the scene of his fuckup, before she could even put together more than a handful of words.

He entered the throne room, aware that he was surrounded by people watching for even the slightest weakness—and, he suddenly realized, he’d walked in without any armor on—and glowered at everyone. Let them try something right now. He’d enjoy having someone to punish for his foul mood.

Not that he could actually blame Jack for it. The more he thought about it, the more it struck him how badly he must have thrown her. He’d lived her memories. He knew how she’d handled herself for the last few years.

And, he realized, he knew exactly why he’d thrown her quite so badly.

On those occasions when a man she’d had a fling with started to get too attached to her, started even hinting at an interest in a longer relationship, one of her ways of getting him to change his mind—and, in many cases, run for the hills—had been to start crazy-talking about marriage and children. It wasn’t her only tactic; on several occasions, if the man in question seemed to like the idea of instant domestic bliss, Michael had shown up to play the enraged cuckold and really scare him off. But it had been her go-to.

And what did I do? Start talking about children and marriage less than three hours after she rode my dick for the first time…

Granted, it was a proposal he’d been planning on making anyway, although it hadn’t involved kids until she brought up the ones that had died on the Santa Clara. He’d spent a year trying not to think about what the Necros did to kids—

I need to talk to the Moribund about that. Now.

“Is this to be a session of Court, Lord Marshal?” Vaako asked from behind him.

Fuck.

“We got anything pressing on the agenda?” Agendas. Him, dealing with agendas. The ’verse had gotten knocked on its ass, all right.

“Requests from some of the ships in the Armada for permission to conduct raids. Not much else.”

“Hold off on that,” Riddick told him. “Got a few things to get straightened out about those raids. Those ships might be gettin’ some new instructions.”

Vaako gave him a puzzled frown. “More new instructions?”

“Got a problem with the last ones?” It had, he thought, been a bit over half a day since he’d shut down the brothels; most of their prisoners were still in the process of being converted, he figured.

“No,” Vaako said. “And, surprisingly, no one else seems to. Most of the Lords I would have expected to be up in arms about it are treating it as the right move.”

“Your god spoke up on the matter, that’s why.” Riddick kept an eye on Vaako’s face as he said that, curious to see whether the warrior would think he was mocking him or not.

“I thought so,” Vaako said with a nod. “You may not be converted, but… you have been…” He frowned, as if reaching for a word. “…anointed. Your claim to the throne has been blessed. I feel it. I have heard others speaking of feeling it, as well.”

Interesting. “So maybe you can tell me something else, Lord Vaako. How does a Lord Marshal get married, in your religion?”

Vaako blinked. Then comprehension appeared on his face. “The girl? The one I brought to you?”

“Yeah. Jack. How do I make it official?”

“There is no ceremony, if that’s what you’re asking,” Vaako said, moving to walk beside him. “When a Lord of the Fleet chooses a wife, he has only to present her to you before the assembled Court and declare her his. There have only been a handful of cases where the Lord Marshal has forbidden a Lord from claiming a wife. Only, I think, when he wished to make a claim of his own. For the Lord Marshal himself, he only needs—you only need—to present her to the Court and announce her standing.”

Riddick nodded. It made sense that it would be that simple. Come to think of it—

“You have performed a variation of that already,” Vaako continued, “when you gave the girl Margaret to the Purifier on the Lionheart. By presenting her to him, you gave permission, and his vow to you, that she would be by his side until Underverse Come, is as close to a marriage vow as anyone says.”

“Makes sense.” He’d just been thinking of Margaret, himself. It had been hard to even look at her, especially before the torment the raiders had inflicted upon her had been wiped away. She had, in a twist, borne the closest resemblance to Jack of anyone brought to him before Jack, herself, arrived. Seeing her broken had reawakened his desire to burn down the whole Armada—

As if he could have then. As if he needed to now.

“There is, actually, one Lord who wishes to present a bride to you, but not yet. She is still being converted.”

“Oh? Who?” If she was only just now being converted, she had to have been in that brothel.

“Lord Jalman. He wishes to take a woman from the Greensleeves Stew, named Celia, as his wife.”

“Celia Wyndham.” Well, that was a twist. “What’s she think of that?”

Vaako gave him a quizzical look, as if wondering why it mattered. “Ladies of the Armada are not, generally, asked their opinions of such things. But I do know that Jalman was an infrequent patron of the Stew until her arrival there, when he began to go nightly. He monopolized her time as much as he could. He is likely the reason that she lasted until now, which is considerably past the lifespan of most… breeders… kept in the Stews.”

“Interesting.” He had his own way of finding out what Celia’s opinion of it was, and he’d be sure to use it.

Fuck. Jack’s still up in my head. He’d spent the last year taking care not to care what the Necros were doing to each other, not letting himself think about issues like how many of the Lords’ wives might not wish to be bound to their husbands, or how many children died each time his raiders went out. But Jack cared about those things, intensely, and thanks to his journey through her memories… Guess if I needed a comeuppance for ‘violating’ her like that—

Not that she’d seemed at all upset about him poking around in her head…

—here it is. Her conscience had infected him.

“The Necromonger Way still bothers you,” Vaako observed.

“When I was still a kid,” he decided to tell the soldier, “I was enslaved for two years before I managed to free myself. Don’t much like seeing that being put on anybody.”

Vaako nodded, looking thoughtful. “The girl, your Jack, she has given her consent to you, then?”

He shrugged. “We’re still workin’ things out. Just wanted to already know the next steps once we do.”

“My wife seems to believe she fears you.”

“Does she, now?” Interesting. He knew that Jack had been running a Scared Little Girl act when Dame Vaako visited; that was no surprise. The concern that Vaako seemed to be expressing about that, though… that was what had his attention. “You don’t have to worry. Never raped a woman in my life. Got no intention of startin’ now.”

“And she is a woman? Not a child?”

“Her nineteenth birthday is just under three weeks away.” He’d have to think up a good way to mark that. Nobody seemed to celebrate birthdays in the Armada. But he owed her one, after running out on her before her thirteenth birthday and leaving her to “celebrate” it alone in a cold and loveless household. “Seems to me that if she’d still been a kid, she’d never have made it here alive.”

“Adolescents are frequently converted. They’re just not— for those with honor, they’re not…” Vaako hesitated, as though fearing he would give offense.

“I get you. And I agree. How long have you been a Necromonger, Vaako?”

“I was fourteen when the Armada came to the Zon Belt.”

“Hmm.” He remembered the copious research Jack had done. The Zon System, according to her notes, had fallen eighteen years before. It had been an odd system, dominated by an asteroid belt that took up almost its entire habitable zone and was a source of valuable rare mineral deposits. Most of its industry had been centered on exploiting those deposits, and almost all of the inhabitants had been descendants of influential mining families from old Earth’s South Africa. But Jack had left it off of her presentation; there had been no Black Planets in the system after all of its people disappeared, and the belt itself—massive and lacking in biospheres to destroy—had seemed unaltered aside from five million miners vanishing. Although she had found a candidate for a Level Five Incident in the system, she’d decided that it was all too tenuous to include.

He realized that he was looking forward to filling her in on that.

He got why she’d held back on including it, though. There had been roughly a dozen possible additional entries, but if she’d added all of them in, it would have diluted the power of the list and made it look more like the work of a conspiracy theorist who saw warning messages in cloud patterns. She’d stuck with the indisputable Incidents, and had still been able to assemble enough evidence to predict the Armada’s movements with almost pinpoint accuracy. Until he’d taken over, anyway.

“I remember hearing about the Zon Belt’s fall,” he told Vaako. “Mostly people whinin’ about where’d they get those minerals now and how much more was tech gonna cost without ’em. Nobody seemed to give a fuck where five million human beings had gone.”

“Did that surprise you?” Vaako asked.

Riddick shrugged. “I was thirteen. Guess I needed something to get pissed off about, so yeah, I was surprised and angry about it.”

For the first time in the year-plus that he’d been on the Basilica, he heard Vaako chuckle. “I remember that age well.”

Jack had been nearly that age when he met her, he reflected. She’d had moments like that, but not as many as he’d had at her age. At times, it was hard to reconcile everything that had changed since then… and all the things that hadn’t changed at all.

“How’d you end up married to Dame Vaako?” he asked after a moment.

“She came to the Basilica eight years ago. I was a Knight of the Legion, and she was the wife of Lord Vath. She was newly converted, taken in battle. Lord Vath was vying for the position of the Lord Marshal’s First. And she…” For a moment, Vaako looked pensive, even uneasy. “She liked to stir things up. There was more intrigue in the Court, that year, than I had ever seen before. Duels. Assassinations. Seven different men, most of them Lords, died in a short time trying to maneuver against Vath. And I began to hear rumors that she was behind it all.”

“Sounds likely.” Riddick wondered what her motive had been. Had she been ensuring that Vath had no competition for being the Lord Marshal’s successor? Or had she been trying to escape her marriage to him the only way that a Lady of the Court apparently could?

“I had been serving under one of the Lords, and when he fell, I found myself under Lord Vath’s command. I did my best to keep my distance from his wife. She was beautiful and refused to wear black the way all other Ladies of the Court did, even though she was devout in every other way. Eyes were always drawn to her. Including mine. She was just eighteen years old. It was hard to believe that she could be behind so many manipulations.”

“When did you figure out she was?”

“After she manipulated me into killing Lord Vath, taking his place as a Lord of the Fleet, and taking her as my wife,” Vaako admitted. “I did it for love. She still fools me, from time to time, for love. I do know what she is, what she does, but part of me refuses to believe. And much of the time, her advice is sound and not just about scheming.”

“Last year?” Riddick raised an eyebrow in Vaako’s direction.

“That was scheming,” the other man conceded with a sigh.

“And now?”

Vaako’s uneasy look was back. “Just as we have all begun to know that you are our anointed leader, she has come to me with a tale of how this girl, this Jack, is someone you knew and abused as a child, and she is certain you intend to do so again because the girl is terrified.”

He knew he could count on Dame Vaako to make the day a little worse.

“You’ll get to meet Jack soon enough and decide for yourself if it’s true,” Riddick said after a moment. “But I’ll tell you one thing now. Your wife may have met someone who can outplay her today.”

Vaako’s eyes widened. “That… would be something to see.”

“Hopefully we’ll even live through it.” Riddick forced himself to relax. Jack was a practical girl—woman. He really needed to dispense with that whole girl label, especially if Dame Vaako was selling the story she seemed to be trying to.

Anyway…

She was practical, and smart, and even if he’d thrown her for a loop with his ham-handed fuckup of a proposal, she’d figure out why it’d be worth doing. He wasn’t going to demand soul-shaking love from her—

Not that I’d mind that, or anything…

—but she needed cover and he needed peace of mind, knowing she would stay safe.

“Is there anything you need from me?” Vaako asked. They were almost at the throne. Riddick moved to the side, stepping around it toward the doors into the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead behind, as Vaako stopped next to the throne itself.

“Nah. It’ll be another day or two before I’m ready to present Jack to the court. Just gettin’ everything ready right now. I might possibly have some new instructions for raiding ships in a few hours.”

Vaako gave him a weighing look, and then nodded. “I am at your command, should you need me.” He bowed, stepping back, too correct to turn his back on his commander.

The bit of Jack still in Riddick’s head told him not to turn his back either, out of politeness rather than caution. He opened the Chamber doors without turning away, stepping inside and closing them while still facing Vaako.

It was the usual way he entered the room, in truth, but it felt different somehow, with Jack’s motivation guiding it rather than his own.

What is your will, Lord Marshal? the Quasi-Dead asked around him.

“Gimme a moment,” he said. “Got somethin’ I need to ask your boss, first.”

He closed his eyes and focused on the angry being in the bowels of the ship. I have a question for you, Moribund.

If you wish to know whether you succeeded in procreating today, you did not.

Rude. He already knew Jack was protected against that. As was he. Nothing like that. I want to know if the Necros are killing babies and children at your command or if it’s something they came up with on their own.

Silence greeted him. Shocked silence.

You seriously didn’t know what they were doing?

It would seem, the Moribund said after another moment, that these creatures have truly understood little of what I have asked of them.

Riddick sat down on the dais at the center of the chamber, folding his legs into the “lotus” pose that one of the only Trainers from his youth that he didn’t want to kill had shown him. So if I forbid them from killing kids anymore, will you allow that change? Maybe even support it?

Yes.

Have there ever been children in the Armada before?

It used to be the norm. They converted when they were old enough.

Old enough for what, exactly?

When they are too young, their neuroplasticity rejects the process.

That made sense. Pissed him off, but he kept that from bleeding into their channel of communication. So they’d just hang out and wait?

Possibly. I did not pay much attention. I believe it may have changed with Zhylaw. He seemed to view children as a threat.

Because of me.

Yes. One of the Demons of the Darkness spoke to him without my knowledge and told him the most probable outcome for his five-shape in this ’verse. He sought to resist it.

Well, that fit with what he’d gleaned from the Necros who had been willing to talk to him up ’til now. And you let that happen?

These creatures do my will, but you know what I think of them. I tried to ignore their petty squabbles and games of one-upmanship.

Maybe that was a mistake. No maybe about it. But far be it from him to piss off the critter keeping its minions off his back.

Yes. It was. The Moribund’s voice was simultaneously testy and abashed. I have said as much to my sisters. You may tell her I admitted this, if you wish.

You could talk to her yourself, you know. Girl’s surprisingly forgiving about a lot of shit.

He could feel its unease in response.

Word is, she’ll be bringing back the “other larva” sometime soon. Kyra, if you ever paid attention to her name.

Now he could feel something like resentment stirring in the Moribund.

That ain’t gonna be a problem, is it?

Will it be one for you?

Fuck. This creature knew everything about him, didn’t it? If the whole deal wasn’t just someone’s pipe dream… it could be a big problem.

He’d known Kyra wasn’t Jack almost as soon as he got to Crematoria. But the strange woman in the shadows had helped him, strangling one of the men running for him in a move that had, eerily, made him think of the way Jack had restrained one of the Shrills on the Kublai Khan. Even so, his glimpse of the woman’s face—not to mention her hair, which was dark and thick with curls where Jack’s, before she’d shaved it, had been straight and lighter—had told him she wasn’t the girl he’d come looking for. But maybe she knew where Jack was. In prisons barbaric enough to force women into the spaces controlled by violent men, they tended to stick together, guarding each other’s backs.

Just how she’d gotten behind him, he hadn’t known at the time. Now, he had a pretty good idea. He’d thought he was following her, and then suddenly she had two sharp blades poking into his back. “Should I go for the sweet spot?”

It wasn’t Jack’s voice, but for a moment, he thought he’d awakened Fry’s ghost. The voice sounded hauntingly like hers.

“Left of the spine, fourth lumbar down, the abdominal aorta?” The words were only getting creepier. Only Fry and Jack had heard him say that, and this wasn’t Jack. “What a gusher.”

Huh. He hadn’t said that part to either of them. Had he met this woman somewhere else? Was there another time—?

“How do I get eyes like that?” she asked.

No, she was definitely referring to his conversation with Fry and Jack. But her knowledge was secondhand and flawed. From bull sessions he’d had with Jack in the skiff, those times he’d managed to get past her cagey evasiveness and gotten her to open up instead of just listening to him talk, he’d figured out that the girl had perfect recall. If it had been her peeking over his shoulder at him, she’d have said just to the left of the spine and where the hell can I get eyes like that, and wouldn’t have mentioned gushers at all. Still…

Whoever this is, she’s talked to Jack. Has to have.

He’d play along and see where it went.

“You gotta kill a few people,” he said. What would she say in answer?

“Did that,” she told him. “Did a lot of that.” He could feel her anger and resentment. She started pressing the sharp object, whatever it was, deeper into his skin.

Fuck this. He turned before she could react and grabbed her, catching her wrists in his hand and shoving her against the bars. She could poke her little toy into someone else’s back if she wanted. Not his.

It was his first chance to get a really good look at her, and the woman in front of him was eerie as fuck. Not even one feature looked like Jack’s… but if someone had brought back Fry and Shazza and combined the two of them, the woman in front of him would have been the result. She had Fry’s general face shape, Shazza’s eyes, hair, and coloring… and Fry’s voice.

Spooky. But this little dance was still the key to finding Jack. “Then you gotta get sent to a slam.”

“One where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again?” she asked him, her expression accusing.

Well, she got that part right.

He opened his mind up, just a crack…

…The fuck?…

This woman in front of him believed this was their dialogue. She had a vision in her head of watching him and Fry having their little standoff… a vision of the eclipse—

“Only there wasn’t any doctor here who could shine my eyes, not even for twenty menthol Kools,” she snarled at him, anger and denunciation filling her voice. “Was there anything you said that was true?”

And there, tucked in the back… It’s your fault I lost her!

There it was.

She’s an esper. These ain’t her memories, but maybe she doesn’t know that. Jack had had a glimmer of that, herself, as he recalled. Two espers meeting and exchanging memories…?

He could play. He’d pull what he needed to know from her thoughts. He just had to trigger the right ones. He lifted her up higher, just high enough that she wouldn’t be able to use the ground as leverage. Not before he was ready to let her down.

“What are you gonna do, huh?” she asked him. “Go for the sweet spot?”

Weird question to ask him, given the way he had her pinned. Not like he could reach for it. Unless she meant a different “sweet spot…” She was straddling his arm, and for a second he felt her press suggestively against it.

“Remember who you’re talking to,” he told her. Let’s just test this… “…Jack.”

He expected a vision in her head of the girl, maybe a moment of the two of them together. And for an instant, he did catch a glimpse of a girl who looked like his Jack, but with long blonde hair. But he didn’t expect the surge of anger, grief…

…and guilt.

She turned her face away, trying to hide those emotions from him.

His fault she’s gone, his fault his fault his fault he did this to us…

“Jack’s dead,” she ground out, her words stabbing him more deeply than she possibly could have with her little toy knives. “She was weak. She couldn’t cut it.”

No, he thought. Oh fuck, no…

He was so blindsided by her declaration that he almost missed the kick she aimed at the light beside them, barely felt the sudden slice of a tiny blade along his cheekbone, hardly registered the moment when she vanished from his grasp.

She was on one of the nearby bridges a moment later. How she’d gotten there hadn’t made sense to him—

She isomorphed, he thought as he sat among the Quasi-Dead, aware that they were, as always, listening in. They’d seen this moment from her perspective already. Soon he would see it as well.

“The name’s Kyra now,” she’d told him, for a moment almost managing to do an imitation of Jack’s boy act as she stared him down, blatantly no boy, blatantly not-Jack, never-was-Jack, and yet he could feel her thoughts beating at him—you left me, you left us, you abandoned us and it’s your fault she-I died—and demanding his participation in some strange folie à deux. “And I’m a new animal.”

Whoever she was, she had moves. She’d jumped over the side of the bridge a moment later and vanished.

His cat-and-mouse with her over the next day, while he waited for the moment to come when he’d cut fence, didn’t enlighten him any more as to how she’d known his Jack so well. Somehow, though, she hadn’t known Jack’s story well enough to avoid running afoul of some mercs. Just to see if she’d back off from her claims, to see if her masquerade would crack, he’d pressed that point. Jack would never have trusted a merc, much less signed up with a bunch of them. How would she explain it?

“There was no one else around,” she’d told him, and he’d caught that echo again—I lost her, it’s your fault I lost her, it’s your fault she-I died—that made no sense even as it tantalized him with hidden meaning.

Even as he started to care about her…

…to want her.

And he could feel her wanting him… thinking that he was the only man she would ever want, could ever want.

None of the others in the facility, be they “convicts” or “inmates,” had ever seen Jack. She’d never been there. Many of them remembered Kyra’s arrival, vividly remembering the brutal deaths that several “inmates” who tried to get a taste of her got instead. One of them had run screaming through the caverns as he bled out, clutching his groin as blood fountained around his hands, claiming that she’d bitten his dick off with her cunt…

It almost startled a laugh out of him now. She isomorphed some rapin’ muthafucka’s dick right off him…

But she’d been alone. First and last, alone. While there were other women in the place, most of them hidden away and protected if they survived long enough to hook up with one of the Guv’s semi-principled “convicts,” she had never been there. The Holy Man had been wrong. Jack had never gone to Crematoria. The closest she’d ever come were the brittle shards of her memories in Kyra’s head. And Kyra had made her own strange, solitary, bloody way through the caverns of Crematoria on her own. She had no one… except him.

Figuring out what had really happened to Jack became secondary to getting himself—and Kyra—off that rock. He stopped trying to remind her of her supposed past with him, stopped trying to trip her story up, and focused on enjoying her company. She was unbalanced, not even a little sane… but he didn’t mind. Once he got her alone, maybe he could help her. And maybe once he’d helped her, and she knew she could trust him, knew he wasn’t gonna throw her over, she’d be okay with telling him what had really happened to the kid from the Hunter-Gratzner crash…

But then the Necros took her.

He’d followed, not because he was trying to find Jack but because he was trying to save Kyra, and found her in the worst possible straits of all. A convert.

He’d barely heard a word the Lord Fuckin’ Marshal was saying to him, something about choosing the Necromonger Way, his attention focused so completely on her. Her eyes were sad as they met his.

“It hurts,” she told him as she stood before him, “at first.”

Pain is all I’ve ever known… her soul whispered to him.

“But after a while, the pain goes away, just as they promise,” she said.

She went away… they took her from me… all I had left of her is gone… There was grief in that thought, but strangely muted.

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he asked her. She seemed lost inside her own head somehow, her eyes clouded over. Were these even her words coming out of her mouth?

“There’s a moment when you can almost see the Underverse through his eyes,” she told him instead. “He makes it sound perfect. A place where anyone can start over.”

I’ve started over so many times… what’s one more?

And there, for just a moment, he caught a glimpse of her embracing a girl, of a height with her, a girl whose face had haunted his dreams for five years. Tell him Jack’s dead. She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world… in her voice. And Kyra’s puzzled hurt that she could say such a thing, her cloying fear and regret over their separation…

Fuck…

“Are you with me, Kyra?” He pushed at her mind, trying to bring her back to him. Gimme a sign and I’ll get you out of here. Anywhere you wanna go, we’ll go…

For a moment, she almost swayed toward him.

He is not yours. He never was. The voice was in her head but not from her head, the manifold voice of the Quasi-Dead. Killing rage filled him as she walked past him and away, puppeted by the Lord Marshal’s minions.

He had no intention of letting those voices puppet him. He’d rather die than be something’s slave again. But first…

…he was going to get as many pounds of flesh as he could. For her.

The fight was vicious, brutal, and nearly over—he was certain that he was going to actually die, but at least he’d die himself—when Kyra, her eyes clear and lucid once more, had stabbed the Lord Marshal in the back and then been flung across the room, striking the spiked pillar. He’d felt the spikes pierce her back, felt her agony, no longer numb, no longer shielded from injuries by whatever the Necros had done to her, now somehow undone. He needed to get up, to rise, to help her.

She managed to pull herself off of the pillar, collapsing to the dais by the throne. Her eyes met his. I thought we’d have more time… I thought I’d get to be yours first…

He wanted to burn down the ’verse.

And somehow he could see the Lord Marshal in motion, preparing to flee Vaako’s raised weapon, as if time had slowed to the crawl he’d experienced when he’d been in cryo.

This is your first step in freeing all of the enslaved, the voice from his dreams murmured. Shirah, somehow in his ear… But it’s going to hurt.

It wasn’t the death of the Lord Marshal that hurt, even a little. It was holding Kyra as she bled out, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, the tiniest thread of sound left to her voice.

Hold on. Hold on. Don’t die…

You cannot anchor her, Shirah told him, her voice gentle inside his head. Not now.

He refused to believe it. “Are you with me, Kyra?”

Kyra’s face twisted in pain, in grief. “I was always with you,” she gasped, her expression suddenly pleading.

It was me, he heard her saying even as her voice failed her. It was always me. There by your side in the eclipse, it was me, nobody else, me…

“I was…”

…Jack…

He saw it, an image in her mind, the two of them side by side, walking through a forest he’d never seen before, him vanquishing foes he knew he’d never met on any field of battle.

It was real, I swear it was all real… it was always me…

Silence fell over her like a shroud had dropped, and she was no longer there. The tears that had been welling in her eyes, that she’d been struggling to hold back, slipped free, and there was only—

…an empty shell…

—below him.

Because, he told himself with a shudder, Lucy had pulled out her soul and taken it away. There were questions that he needed to ask about that. Implications that were only just beginning to dawn on him.

But first…

He needed to spend some time with Kyra.

“I’m ready,” he told the Quasi-Dead. “Skip to after that sick fuck was done hurting her. I don’t want to have to feel her feeling that. Let’s see what she did about it.”

She had, after all, done something to merit being sent to Crematoria. He hoped to fuck it was ten times as bloody and brutal as anything that had been done to her.

85.
In Battling the Darkness…

Jack wasn’t sure why she was suddenly so angry, why she suddenly wanted to yell at Riddick. She didn’t even know what she wanted to yell.

On the bench beside her, he seemed to be having some kind of disturbing epiphany. She didn’t even try to read what it might be about—not that he’d let her read anything more than the stray emotion—still too busy struggling to fathom why she was so mad at him out of nowhere. It was something about the baby. Something about it that offended her.

It wasn’t the part where he’d compared her, and then Kyra, to the baby. That didn’t bother her all that much. She understood what he was saying. Confronted with actual suffering, especially the suffering of someone he considered an innocent, he couldn’t stay disengaged. Lola Esposito had told her about his youthful attempt at heroics and the children he’d rescued—

But that was the problem.

“Riddick,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could. “There were four little kids on the Santa Clara. The ship I was on when your Necromongers caught me. What happened to them?”

Riddick winced. “Fuck, Jack, you really gonna make me say it?”

“Yes.”

“The Necros kill children. You already know that.”

“So you only choose the baby if you can hear it crying,” she sighed, her heart twisting.

That was, she realized, what was upsetting her.

“Jack, I didn’t choose any of this.” He ran his hand over his face, looking abruptly exhausted. “You think I’ve been ruling the Necros for the last year? That ain’t what’s been happening.”

“You have the Moribund on your side, Riddick.” How wasn’t that ruling them?

“As of this morning I do. Before then… you ever heard of havin’ the tiger by the tail?”

She shook her head.

“The sayin’ goes: ‘once you have the tiger by the tail, you can never let go.’” He shrugged, his expression grim. “’Cause the second you do, it’ll turn on you and rip your throat out. This fuckin’ cult has this whole ‘you keep what you kill’ thing goin’. It’s straight out of that Emperoi Thanatou game. Whatever belonged to the person you kill becomes yours. His possessions. His women. His rank. I became Lord Marshal when I killed the last one, but now I’m locked in.”

He stood up, shooting her an angry look, and began to pace.

“I either run the show or I die, Jack. You don’t resign this position and there’s only one way someone else succeeds you.”

That was a chilling thought. Tiger by the tail indeed. He’d never been the suicidal type, she reflected. There’d have been a point when, in his place, she’d probably have just let go. She’d sure as hell tried to when she was thirteen. But he didn’t have that problem.

He glanced her way, nodding, his brows creasing with a look of pain. Had her thoughts about her suicide attempt, all those years ago, hurt him?

“Most of the Necros don’t care who’s sittin’ on the throne,” he continued after a moment, “long as their lives go on the way they like ’em. But if I tried to change things? Tried to change their Way? They’d all turn on me. One or two, or even a dozen, gettin’ it in their heads they wanna throw down… that I can handle. The whole fuckin’ Armada comin’ for me at once? What do you think’d happen then?”

Shit.

“Been savin’ more kids than you know by holdin’ ’em back and slowin’ ’em down. Ain’t about now when you figured they’d be attackin’ the Melpomene system? Why do you think that ain’t happenin’ yet?”

Fuck… “I’m sorry. I didn’t…” He’d been imprisoned the whole time. In the only prison, ever, that he hadn’t been able to escape. And she’d started to blame him for it…

“There’s a lot about ’em I find hard to stomach. Until today, though, if I’d tried to change any of it, I’d’ve gotten dead and it’d have kept going, maybe gotten even worse. You changed that, Jack. You brought me the key to takin’ control of them.”

The Moribund. If he was controlling the Necromongers… “Does he want children dead?”

“I’ll be sure to ask him. Could be he doesn’t care one way or the other. A lot of their worst shit comes from that game the first generation of Necros liked so much. Most of their Way don’t even come from him. They made it up themselves. If he ain’t behind it, he can stop it.”

“What if he is behind it?” The Moribund wanted all of humanity dead, after all. Why would he spare children?

“Maybe his sisters can change his mind. But then we have a new problem.” He walked behind her as he spoke and put his hands on her shoulders.

She shivered and then leaned back, resting the back of her head against his abdomen. “New problem?”

“What to do with a bunch’a kids when their parents are bein’ turned into Necros.”

Shit, that was an issue.

It had taken the Necromonger ship three days to bring her and the others from the wreckage of the Santa Clara to the Armada. Three hideous days in which most of her fellow passengers had undergone conversion, a few at a time, and she’d felt what was happening to their minds in the process. She’d felt the deadening of their thoughts and feelings, the loss of their initiative, the rise of an agenda that wasn’t their own, wasn’t even human…

She should have recognized the Moribund’s touch even then. But her mind had still been so jumbled and jangled, the tsunami of restored memories still frothing and chaotic, the moments of her life transformed into debris borne on its eddies in no particular order. Instead, she’d spent the whole time terrified of what might be done to her next. Part of her, she realized, must nonetheless have known she was being brought closer and closer to the creature that had tried to devour her a year earlier. Her terror had reached a fever pitch right as she was presented to Riddick, and she’d believed it was fear of him. Most of her thoughts from that night had been attempts to rationalize why she feared him instead of trusting him.

“You know I’d never try to hurt you, Jack,” he murmured.

“I do,” she admitted. “I just… got lost…”

“I know. And I got an idea about those kids… if you’re up for it.” There was a teasing challenge in his voice.

“What is it?”

“You take charge of ’em.” He sat down beside her on the bench, nudging her shoulder with his arm. “I figure it’ll keep you out of trouble until it’s time for your ‘hatching.’”

If I’m up for it… She was going to have to be, wasn’t she? Lives were at stake, and he understood exactly how much that meant to her. “I’m in.”

“The trick is… you’re gonna need more power than you have right now to pull that off. More rank. You’re gonna need a title on your name. So nobody thinks they can take the kids from you. There’s a few jackasses who walk around wearin’ strings of baby skulls. Don’t want any of their kind tryin’ to pull rank on you. Only so many people I can kill at a time.”

His voice was calm, with a hint of humor in it, but she had the sudden impression that he was getting nervous. “You have a title in mind?”

“Dame Riddick.”

Wait…

“Did…” She was suddenly having a hard time putting together words. “Riddick, did you just…”

He nodded, watching her with an especially intense gaze.

“I… I uh…”

He looked away. “I’ll give you time to think about it. Got some things I need to finish up. When I get back, I’ll know if the Moribund has anything against kids or it’s just more shit from that game.”

His voice had taken on a strange, impersonal tone. A moment later he was gone.

“Holy… shit…” Jack still couldn’t manage to put together words. This was… Not what I expected, even a little…

Had she already screwed it up? The way he’d pulled back and left…

“Goddamn. Lucy?”

Yes, Audrey?

“Is Riddick okay? I think I may have just upset him.”

He seemed upset with himself, not with you. Do you wish me to ask him to come back?

“Where was he going?”

To the “Chamber of the Quasi-Dead.” That’s where he took you, to read your memories.

She’d been unconscious through most of that. As exhaustion had claimed her, she remembered, she’d said something to Riddick about wishing he could just read her story right from her head. It had been so difficult to speak of much of it, to even put it into a coherent order. She was glad he’d taken her up on the offer…

…even if it did mean that he knew both every sex fantasy, and every doubt, she’d ever had about him.

“Never expected I’d get a proposal of marriage out of all of that…”

The Riddick proposed becoming your mate? A concerned tone had crept into Lucy’s telepathic voice.

She really didn’t want to talk about that.

“Why do you call him the Riddick?” she dodged. “It’s just his family name, isn’t it?” Maybe not even that if he really had just been a baby that showed up somewhere random after the Furyan Diaspora, she reflected.

You and he have been thinking about a game that was once played by humans, and especially by the humans who became the first Necromongers. Some of its lore persists among them. It includes lore of an… “enpeecee?” …who, if left unchecked, would destroy the realm that those playing the game wished to conquer for themselves. Evocation of that name, Lord Riddick, is evocation of a fundamental threat to everything they strive for.

“That’s a really weird coincidence.”

It’s no coincidence at all. Your Riddick was born Richard Booker. Shirah slipped the name from the game into the minds of everyone who handled him as a baby after he was taken off Furya. She didn’t just do it with him. Every Lightbearer and Lightbringer who escaped the attack thirty years ago now wears the surname, as a warning to our brother that he overstepped and owes penance. Especially after he allowed Zhylaw, of all possible people, to ascend to the throne.

“Wait, Michael’s last name is Riddick, too?” He’d never once, in the years she’d known him, shared his surname with her. No wonder.

Where else do you think I learned about the name and its meaning?

“And neither of you told me until now because…?”

It was not yet time for you to know.

“Why’s it time now?”

You are here, among the Necromongers. And the war with the true enemies, the Demons of the Dark, approaches.

“Almost showtime, huh?” Jack sighed. “Am I making a mistake?”

What mistake do you think you might be making?

“Oh fuck, any of it. Trying to bring kids into the Armada. Fucking my childhood hero. Maybe even marrying him. Shit. I really want to talk to Kyra about that but what if she thinks I’m stealing him from her?”

Lucy, who had been somewhere on the ceiling for the conversation until then, dropped down to the floor. For a moment, Jack caught a glimpse of her full, glorious n-shape, before her brain rebelled and redacted the image to a confused impression of shining black segmented legs and the sparkle of faceted eyes. Then don’t tell her yet, but perhaps your new friends could advise you on human relationships. All three of them seem likely to have had more experience with them than you.

“True… Lucy, the last time I had sex with a friend, it turned into a total clusterfuck.”

There it was, she realized. She was scared that somehow her involvement with Riddick would go pear-shaped the way things had gone with Dave. And she’d specialized in flings after him. Did she even know how not to keep Riddick at arms’ length? To let him in? He’d proposed to her, even if he’d kind of come at it sideways…

You fear that you’re going to put up the barricade that you kept between yourself and most of the other men who wished to have you as their mate for more than a few nights?

“I’m worried I already have.”

He has been planning to ask this of you since before you woke. He believes this is the only way he can protect you. But I think he planned to already have made the offer before he expected the two of you would be ready to have sex.

“Shit, and I just jumped right to it.”

You wanted to comfort him. He needed to be comforted. Fierce beings, such as he, often need the most comforting. And have the most difficulty accepting it. You gave it to him in a form he could appreciate.

“So, uh…” Maybe it should have bugged her that Lucy seemed to have a better bead on the men in her life than she did, but she was glad of it. If what had happened between her and Riddick would have harmed her somehow, she was almost certain Lucy would have interceded. “Is this proposal on the level? Or just… for show?”

I sense it is both.

“So. What do I do?”

This is neither a step on the path nor a step off of it. It is incidental to what must come. What do you wish to do?

“Shit. I don’t know. I’m not even nineteen yet.” She’d always assumed that, if someone she adored was going to propose to her, it would be Ewan. The Meziane tribe was big on family. But Riddick, in her mind, had seemed the type who might give her a few nights of attention before it was time for him to move on again, and she was an old hand at handling that. “Do things ever go as planned?”

Perhaps you should focus on something else for a while.

“Good idea,” Jack muttered, looking around. “So, you know what this place is like on the other side of its threshold. Habitable? I mean, for a critter with no exoskeleton like me.”

Habitable. Chilly and the air is stale but breathable. Are you ready?

“Yeah.” Jack closed her eyes—it made the process easier—and held out her hands, feeling the gentle touch of Lucy’s delicate, clawed tarsi on her palms. “Let’s go exploring a little.”

She could feel the change as Lucy drew her across; her sense of the other ’verses in her five-shape had finally developed to that point. As with the ’verse she’d aligned with on board the Santa Clara, she had no idea what number her newest one was assigned in the Quintessa Corporation database. Not that such things mattered much; careful intel from some of General Toal’s embedded agents had confirmed that the Corporation knew almost nothing about the nature of the other ’verses their ships ventured into and cared even less, just as long as the wormholes were stable and the ships returned in one piece. And as long as, when the ships didn’t, the results could be covered up without too much fuss.

The air chilled against her skin and turned oddly lifeless. She opened her eyes and looked around.

Nothing sat on the dressing table she’d chosen. On the bare marble floor nearby, no piles of clothing, no baskets of sundries, waited to be removed. Several pieces of odd jewelry, however, floated in the space where the baskets sat back in U1. Items, she decided, from the original flight of the Tenth Crusade, or made from materials it had carried. Items that had always straddled the ’verses. Little else, aside from the stone architecture and the heavy furniture, existed on that side of the threshold.

The vile statue of a man peeling his skin off his own body stood by the pool. Although she’d pushed it out of U1, she hadn’t been able to touch it on its other side. With a sigh, she walked over to it and put her hand on it again…

“Wait… what? Lucy, it’s still straddling ’verses. I mean, aside from the part I shoved into Wonderland. It’s in a third ’verse.”

I will show you the way to that one later. When the time is right. I suggest you pull the part in Wonderland back into this ’verse, though. Some of the cold is transferring from the portion that is suspended in deep space there.

“Oh. Yeah, good idea.” Jack focused on the stone, aware of the chill coming from an entirely different world. She pulled her hand away fast as the portion in Wonderland crossed over the threshold. “Shit, that’s cold!”

She would, she decided as she walked around the bathroom and then out into the reception area, realigning bits of gruesome artwork, need to push things into this ’verse rather than Wonderland in the future. These rooms, on this side of the threshold, were becoming almost glacial from the cold of deep space that their stonework had been exposed to. Finished, she isomorphed back into U1 with a shudder.

“Holy crap!”

Lola had returned to the suite while she’d been on the other side. Her abrupt appearance in the center of the room had sent the woman into a defensive posture.

“Sorry, Lola. I didn’t mean to scare you.” She was going to need to be more careful.

“Where the hell did you just come from?” Lola rose from her crouch, clearly struggling to relax.

“The other ’verse this ship is straddling.” Well, one of them, anyway…

Jack had told Lola, Vanessa—and it was still hard to think of Nurse Raymond as Vanessa—and Poly about her ability to move between ’verses, but she had a feeling none of them had really believed her. Even Ewan, who had believed, had been unable to restrain a startled oath the first time she appeared before his eyes—

God, I can’t think about him right now… Her mind recoiled back from evoking memories of Ewan so near the bed she and Riddick had shared.

“I thought Riddick said the Underverse isn’t real.” Now Lola was frowning.

“Dunno about that, but there’s nothing especially exciting about the ’verse I was just in. Just empty rooms. Mostly empty, anyway.” Time to change the subject, though. “Are your new rooms okay?”

“They’re fine,” Lola sighed. “They’re lovely. The crews are almost done cleaning them out and are putting things in the hallway outside for you to figure out what you want to do with them. Are you okay?”

Hours earlier, after all, she and the others had left the rooms while Riddick was clinging to her as if she was a buoy in rough seas.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t hurt me.” Quite the opposite; he’d known exactly how to touch her and what to do next at every moment. She felt absolutely safe with him—

So what, she wondered, was the problem? What was she so confused about?

“Did you two…?”

“Several times.” She’d showered most of the evidence away, but there were some telling marks on her throat that she had no doubt Lola could see. She could sense the ex-cop’s concern, her worry that Riddick was taking advantage… “He asked me to marry him.”

“He what?”

“Officer, I swear I didn’t get him pregnant or anything.”

“That’s why you seem so uneasy.” Lola had the look of someone experiencing an epiphany.

“I just…” Jack let the air out of her lungs in a rush and took a new breath, feeling like she kept choking on her words. “I never thought he’d ask me anything like that. He seems to mean it, too.”

“I’m curious, Jack. What did you think you two would be to each other when you met again?”

“I didn’t think we ever would, Lola. Did you think you would?”

Lola shook her head, looking around the reception room. “You need some of the furniture we pulled out from the other suites in here. Unless it really will be just the two of you most of the time.”

When she’d been hauled into the room the first time, there had been one desk, one chair, one pile of upturned tapestries covering a hideous statue, and a whole lot of empty space. “I wasn’t even sure Necromongers had much furniture,” she said. “What were your old rooms like?”

“I was in a barracks with about twenty other women who fight—or, I guess, are intended to fight, because we were all new converts—in the Armada.” Lola shrugged. “Nobody talks much after conversion. ‘The Underverse is all.’”

Yikes. “So I’m guessing cots and foot lockers.”

“Pretty much. The high mucky-mucks get better rooms, like the one I’m in now.”

And Riddick, stuck in a palatial suite, had emptied its reception room of all of the furniture that would allow him to receive. He was going to have to let her bring some of it back if he wanted her to play the wife here. Especially if he was going to put her in charge of God only knew how many children.

What have I gotten myself into here? “Okay, let’s take a look at all of this stuff.”

Lola laughed as they walked toward the outer doors. “You might sound a little more enthused.”

Jack shrugged as she followed Lola out into the hallway. “Never been much on stuff. You either have to leave it behind when you cut and run, or you have to plan on losing it somewhere along the way.”

The image of Kyra’s lost stuffed rabbit tugged at her mind.

“An unusual perspective,” Poly said from the side, “from a girl who spent most of her childhood in a recreation of Small Town America.”

Tables had been set up throughout the hallway and piled with random objects. Couches, chairs, and free-standing light fixtures crowded the space as well. Jack spotted an attendant arranging things and walked over to her after smiling and shrugging at Poly.

“Hi,” she said to the woman. “I’m Jack.”

“Olwyn, My Lady.”

“Olwyn, that’s pretty. Um… back in the Lord Marshal’s bath, there are some piles of things that need to be brought out. Anything that’s sitting on the floor and doesn’t have someone’s name on it can come out here and join this other stuff.”

“Of course, My Lady.”

“Just Jack is fine, please.”

“Of course… Jack.” Olwyn curtseyed and moved off, summoning two other attendants to follow her into Riddick’s rooms.

And Jack made herself look around at all of the clutter.

“If I’m gonna do this, I guess this is how it starts,” she muttered to herself. Playing at housewife had never been on her agenda.

Think of it, she told herself, as undercover work.

She’d spent the years after her return to Deckard’s World pretending to be an ordinary schoolgirl. She could pull this off, whatever it was, too. Hopefully Riddick wasn’t just trying to stick her on a shelf, safely out of harm’s way, with this proposal of his.

She picked out a few arrangements of furniture and had them set up in Riddick’s reception room—

Our reception room, I guess… looks like I’m getting married…

—listening in amusement as some of the regular attendants tried to figure out what had happened to the statue that had once been in the room. Most of the hangings and statuary that now sat in the hallway were disgusting enough that she doubted any of the people Riddick had de-converted could possibly want them.

“Offer them to the other ranking lords of the Armada,” she told Olwyn. “I guess they like these kinds of things.”

There were clothes, baubles, trinkets… she picked out a few things, spotting a set of nearly-new boots in her size, a few more articles of clothing that were in her preferred colors and near enough to her size not to look ridiculous, and a small bottle of her mother’s favorite perfume. All of the jewelry was too ostentatious to appeal.

“Take what you want of the rest,” she told Lola, Poly, and Vanessa. “And then let the group I’m not supposed to know about yet have at what’s left.”

She snickered at the shocked look on their faces. Even Riddick seemed to forget that she was an esper and would know what was going on even if everybody was trying to be quiet about it. Except for the things that were being hidden from her by the Apeiros themselves.

One last table had something of actual interest to her on it: books. She suspected she was going to have some time on her hands that they could fill.

Most of the titles, she decided as she searched through the piles, were not all that interesting, even a little distasteful. Someone had diligently collected the works of an author named John Norman, and all of the covers—dozens of them!—depicted buxom, half-naked women in states of disturbing subservience. She was just about to give up on the whole table when a name on a cover caught her eye.

Minnie Sulis?

Two books, both hardcovers, sat near the bottom of a pile. She pulled them out for a closer look.

Magic Is Real

By Minnie Sulis

A familiar image graced the cover: the picture of Minnie that had been on the poster in Kyra’s dream. She opened the book up and looked inside.

It had been published in 2075, at the height of Minnie’s stage career; the copy in her hand was a First Edition, the kind of thing people put a lot of value on back on Deckard’s World. Minnie had autographed the inside cover.

To Chapman,
Keep dreaming big, and the magic will happen!
—Minnie

Chapman Marshal had gotten Minnie’s autograph, some ten years before he created Emperoi Thanatou, some six years before Kyra was born. Intrigued, Jack turned to the second book.

Magic Isn’t Real

By Minnie Sulis

Minnie’s face didn’t grace this cover. Instead, there was an illustration of a broken crystal ball and a snapped magic wand. It had been published in 2083, when Kyra had been a toddler, and was also a First Edition. Inside, there were two autographs. The first, in different handwriting, was addressed to Chapman:

Chap,

I know the book’s a bit of a downer, but I want you to have all three of Min’s works for your journey. She even signed it. May bold adventures await you, O Pioneering Crusader!

Joren

Kyra had thought about a cousin named Joren in her dream. Was that who had given the book to the would-be King of Delubrum?

The second autograph, lower down on the page, was in Minnie’s handwriting:

Joren,

“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”

Take care that, in battling the darkness, you don’t become one of its demons.

All my love,
Minnie

“Holy shit…” Jack breathed, right before she felt the tickle of Lucy’s mind on hers and something vanished from her awareness.

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.