68.
Cuckoo, Cowbird, Soldier, Spy

Jade finally appeared on Saturday night, while Audrey was sleeping. She woke in the middle of the night to find a heavy, plurring blob of obese Siamese cat parked on her chest.

Now she really felt like she had come home, whoever she was.

Goblin was sitting on her dresser, staring at her. An oriental shorthair, his tiny, slender body was dominated by a massive pair of batwing ears. She’d missed his ridiculous little face. Esther was on her windowsill.

She’d wondered if she would even see the cats for a few days, and how long it would take them to remember her and get over their hurt and anger over her disappearance. Apparently not long at all.

As soon as she started petting Jade, both Goblin and Esther jumped onto the bed and demanded attention, too.

The “Welcome Home, Audrey” party had run late, with family, neighbors, and family friends staying until nearly midnight. By the time everyone had left, Audrey had nearly been asleep on her feet.

Almost nobody who had shown up to see her had been turned away, though. The only exceptions had been some tabloid reporters who had tried to sneak in. Alvin had come up with some very creative threats to get them to leave.

Fortunately it had been a warm evening, with clear skies and gentle breezes, since the party had been held outside. All the baked goods and casseroles that neighbors and friends had delivered, along with some additional food that Alvin had arranged while Audrey and her mother had been clothes shopping, had been set out for guests, and virtually all of it had been devoured before everyone went home. Audrey had tried a little bit of everything, herself, mindful of CommissAIry’s admonition to always go on culinary adventures if she could. Almost everything had been really good; everything had been part of “traditional American” cuisine. Minimally spicy, relying on a small subset of meats, vegetables, and cooking strategies, with the beverages and desserts heavily sweetened. It was all she’d known until she was almost thirteen.

It wasn’t enough anymore.

Well, at least CommissAIry will expand my horizons today… One day out of every week, her culinary adventures would range past the orbit of Deckard’s World.

Going clothes-shopping on a weekend day had, in retrospect, been a bit of a mistake, if an unavoidable one. Audrey’s mother had taken her to the largest and most popular shopping mall in town—Deckard’s World ostentatiously modeled itself after a period of American history when malls had abounded, and MilitAIre had given her fascinating articles to read about their deaths at the start of the twenty-first century, something that made her wonder how they could coexist now with the same technologies that had originally killed them—and they had promptly run into several girls she’d attended middle school with.

While a few of the girls had looked surprised to see her, most seemed to have caught the newsfeeds about her return. They had a million questions that Audrey had to dodge, but fortunately she and MilitAIre had already worked out all of the dodges. After picking out only a few outfits, though, both she and her mother felt enough of a sense of being under a microscope that they’d cut the trip short.

“We’ll finish on Monday,” her mother had told her as they got back in the car, “when most of the lookie-loos are back in school.”

Audrey had nodded, noting the implication that she wouldn’t be enrolled back into school immediately. They were only one week away from Spring Break, anyway, which was sandwiched between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Fortunately, both fell on Saturdays; in a year, she realized, there would have to be special arrangements to have her “debriefing days” moved to Saturday for those two weekends so that her family didn’t feel aggrieved by her absence from major holidays.

I’m sure MilitAIre already has a plan for that…

She was also aware that her mother had struggled with the shopping trip in other ways.

The days of buying her “little girl” clothes were over and had already been ending before she disappeared; the pastel colors, rainbows, and cutesy fantasy animals that her mother had gravitated toward had already become inappropriate choices when she’d been in middle school. Fortunately, they weren’t even available in her new size, but she had seen the way her mother still struggled with her choices.

She and MilitAIre had planned it all out, though. She was to choose clothing that would lend her some invisibility, dressing in a way that blended her into the crowd as much as someone in the throes of notoriety could blend. Nothing super-fashionable; they had examined the current trends and decided which items were too trendy, too close to the cutting edge, for her to be seen wearing yet. Nothing too outdated or exotic, either. She was to fall in the middle, her clothes unexceptional enough to avoid drawing people’s eyes. Too many other things would do that already. They had even gone over which colors were most appropriate for letting people’s eyes slide past her.

She had argued about that, a little. She wanted to be able to wear a few of the blues and greens that made her think of Ewan. MilitAIre had relented, but had stressed that she could only pick items of clothing in those colors if they met the rest of the invisibility criteria they’d worked out.

Her mother had been surprised by her choices, especially as she’d bypassed dresses completely in favor of jeans, a pair of cargo pants exactly the color of the sands on a particular beach in Elsewhere, and unadorned tops in shades that made her think of Ewan’s bedspread and the mermaid tail in his painting. Audrey had a feeling that, when they resumed on Monday and fewer people were watching, there might be a bigger tug-of-war over the next round of purchases.

At least we won’t be arguing about heel heights, she thought with amusement as Goblin head-butted her hand. She’d only just been allowed to start wearing heels when she’d taken off, but she’d been more of an average height then. Now she towered over most of her classmates in flats; adding even a low heel into the mix would go against the “rules of invisibility” she and MilitAIre had worked out.

It had, of course, been impossible to be invisible at the party.

Everyone had been there to see her. Although a lot of them were people who had genuinely missed her, there had been a whole lot of acquaintances who had mostly come to gawk. Remembering the way Ewan had moved through his farewell party, though, she had tried to make a point of at least saying hello to everybody, glad that her eidetic recall extended to names and faces. There was only a handful of people whose names she had needed to ask. Most of them had turned out to be members of Alvin’s family.

“The Audrey I remember was shy,” she’d overheard one of the neighbors saying as she moved from one group of well-wishers to the next.

Had she been? It hadn’t felt that way to her. She’d been four years younger than the youngest of that neighbor’s children; none of them had been interested in playing with her or including her in their games. Was she supposed to have made a pest of herself anyway?

When it was time to talk to that neighbor, though, she’d been polite and friendly and had asked after the kids in question. The youngest, as she’d suspected, was off at college. None of them had been in town to come to the party, although a few of them would be arriving on Friday for the holidays.

“If anyone seems to feel like you’re not the person they remember, bring up shared experiences,” MilitAIre had instructed her. “It’s not an uncommon phenomenon after a separation of even a year or two for people to feel like the person who returns is an imposter.” He’d given her articles to read about famous cases where people became convinced that an imposter had replaced a loved one—in a very few cases, rightly so—and about an actual mental illness, Capgras’ Syndrome, that could trigger such delusions.

Part of Audrey’s job at the party had been to reintroduce herself to everyone and make them feel like the girl they had once known had returned… make them feel like they weren’t being confronted by a stranger with a similar face, a changeling stepping into Audrey MacNamera’s place.

Even if, at times, she felt like that was exactly what she was.

By the time all of the food was gone and people were saying their goodbyes, she had been physically and mentally exhausted but had managed to talk to every guest at least once. Elodie had been put to bed hours earlier; her cousins and most of her former classmates had been taken home ahead of the 10 pm curfew for minors. Most of the people who had remained, although ostensibly there to welcome her back, were there to support her mother and Alvin. Their topics of discussion weren’t especially interesting to her, so she’d rested on a lounge chair and turned her gaze to the other ’verses for a while.

In Elsewhere, she’d been surrounded by enormous trees that reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of ancient redwood forests on Earth. Only a few stars peeked through their canopy. In Wonderland, a meadow full of strange flowers spread out around her. Overhead, the stars blazed in a deep black sky free of light pollution; to the south, ribbons of colorful light danced along the horizon. The stars in U37d and most of the other ’verses, she noticed, were almost identical in placement, but that ’verse had a bright orange moon that was visible only there. In U27, a brilliantly-lit asteroid hovered less than a mile above her, slowly tumbling closer. A school of fish floated nearby, sleeping, in U115, limned by greenish moonlight—

“Sometimes I feel like she’s still missing…” she’d heard her mother say.

Damn it. She’d stayed still; her mother must have thought she had fallen asleep, or was out of hearing range, or both.

“She’s been gone for nearly two years,” Alvin had said. “It’d be even more strange if she came back completely unchanged, wouldn’t it?”

The two of them had moved away from the other guests, speaking quietly. It became obvious that they thought no one could hear them as they continued to talk.

“I guess. But tomorrow I have to let them take her away from me again…”

“Just for the day. She’ll be back before curfew. I was able to speak to one of her handlers by comm for a few minutes, and he promised me that she’ll be home by nine.”

“Did you get his name?”

“No, and I didn’t expect to. That’s not how these people work. I got a letter. M. By his accent, I think he’s originally from the Cohasset System.”

“So a man named M from the Cohasset System is in charge of my daughter’s well-being?”

“He says he’s part of a team of handlers.”

“A team? Whatever happened takes an entire team to protect her?”

“Bettie,” Alvin hushed her as her voice began to rise. “I know this is hard. We may never know what happened. But we have her back, and—”

“Do we? Sometimes I think I see my little girl, but then…”

“Shhhhhh. It’s her. You know it’s her. She’s a teenager now, though, and every teenager’s a little bit of an alien. That’s all it is. You’ll see… you have your daughter back. She’s just… the teenage version.”

The teenage version had decided to yawn and stretch at that moment. Enough was enough. Alvin and her mother, locked in a hug, started and looked over at her as she sat up in the lounge chair. She pretended to notice them for the first time.

“I think maybe I dozed off,” she said. “What time is it?”

Alvin glanced at his chrono. “Time for the party to end, I think. You want to say goodnight to your grandparents?”

A long round of hugs and goodbyes later, she had trudged upstairs, stopping for a moment to look in on Elodie. Her little sister looked perfect and peaceful, untouched by any of the horrors held at bay—mostly—by the carefully cultivated veneer of ancient American suburbia.

There’s so much I need to keep her safe from… Audrey had thought before going to her own room. The first night, it had been hard to fall asleep, but she’d been tired enough that it was easier the second time.

Now, with three purring cats demanding attention, she suspected she might need to take a nap sometime during her “debriefing.”

I missed you so much, she told them silently, and three feline heads turned sharply toward her.

She was still thinking about her first coherent conversation with three cats when the car from the safe house came to pick her up.

“I don’t like this,” her mother muttered as she looked through the window. Per the instructions they had received, only Audrey was allowed to approach the car. “I really don’t like this.”

“I’ll be home tonight, Mom,” she promised, giving her a quick hug. “It’ll be okay.”

“It’s just… you’ve only been back for less than two days…”

“I know. It’s going to be all right.” She could see something mulish starting to form on her mother’s face. “This first time, though… it’s also partly a test.”

“A test?” Her mother frowned.

“To see if we can really follow the rules or not.”

That brought her mother up short as she contemplated just what might happen if they failed the test.

Please don’t fail the test, please don’t fail the test, please don’t fail the test…

Her trail had been broken. The masquerade was in place. Her family knew she was alive and well. But this wasn’t a game. General Toal had made that abundantly clear to her. If her family made it unsafe for her to hide in plain sight, under her original name, she’d be moved to another world and given an entirely new identity. She would have to find her way to a “normal” adolescence there, away from almost everyone and everything she knew. The AIs would accompany her, and the Apeiros would always be with her, but there would soon be nothing left of the girl she had been. This was her only chance at a familiar anchor.

Her mother sighed, her eyes welling, and nodded. “You should go out there before they get worried,” she managed, but her voice broke on the last word.

Audrey pulled her into another hug for a moment before, finally, kissing her cheek and going out the door. “I’ll be home soon, Mom, don’t worry.”

One of the Federacy agents who had an office on the first floor was driving her. It was a silent ride; both of them knew the rules. He let her out in front of the safe house and drove off, while she walked up to the door and palm-printed her way in.

“Welcome back, Audrey,” MilitAIre said as the door locked behind her. “How was the party?”

“Thanks, MilitAIre,” she said, taking a seat in the Security Room. “It was a little weird. Some people had their doubts, but I think I sold it.”

“It does help that you really are Audrey MacNamera, of course.”

“Yeah. I think some of them just… froze me in amber in their heads.” She sighed. “Even with the long hair, I’m different enough that they’re having trouble processing it. And, I mean, I’m only thirteen months older, biologically. Think how much more different I’d be if twenty-two months had really passed for me. But it was still too much for a lot of them.”

“I like your amber metaphor,” MilitAIre said. “They fossilized you in their minds, yes. This is what underlies many of the cases of changeling delusions—the ones that aren’t neurologically driven, anyway, or rooted in prejudices against autistic children. Time changes everyone, and the people who expected to watch all of those changes happen to you missed seeing them.”

“So how come I feel like a con artist?” There were moments when Audrey felt like she was faking it all.

“Because you can’t ever tell them what drove all of the changes,” he reminded her. “You can’t tell them where you really were. You’re not lying about who you once were, but you are concealing a great deal about who you’ve become. You’re playing a role within a role: the WitSec ward with no power over her situation, who must pretend to be a former teen runaway who spent two years on the streets. So yes, you are running a long game on almost everyone, and countless lives depend on your success.”

“Jeez. Only two days in and I already needed to decompress here.” She blew out a breath, leaning back in the chair. “What if I can’t handle six whole days at a time ‘out in the cold?’”

“You let me know, and we send an agent to pick you up, wherever you are, and we inform your mother that we needed to do a debriefing. I believe, though, that it will get easier soon. Mr. Baxter is under the impression that we’re protecting you from an organized crime group, and he’s personally flipped a few lower-level informants and enrolled them into WitSec, so he takes its protocols very seriously. I believe he’ll not only cooperate fully with us, but also ensure that your mother does.”

That explained why Alvin had initially had such a low opinion of picking up a WitSec ward. It made sense, though; as an assistant D.A. trying to build cases against criminal enterprises, he’d probably had to offer deals to petty criminals, and maybe even a few genuine dirtbags, to get to the real movers behind their crimes. The very thing that the Quintessa Corporation had, it seemed, feared authorities might try to do with Makarov if they took him alive.

“He’s been a lot easier to get along with than I expected,” she admitted.

“That was a pleasant surprise.” In fact, MilitAIre didn’t seem surprised at all.

“I’m guessing you were the ‘M’ he spoke with on the comm? He thinks you’re probably from Cohasset Prime.”

“Yes.” Now MilitAIre sounded amused. “My standard voice is modeled on the Boston accent of old Earth, but most of the people who settled in the Cohasset System were originally from that megacity. Although their accent is slightly more rhotic.”

Audrey nodded. “So. What’s our agenda for today?”

There was actual debriefing over breakfast; CommissAIry had chosen a “traditional Japanese breakfast” for her first culinary adventure of the day. Audrey devoured saba shioyaki and tamagoyaki while she and MilitAIre went over everyone she’d had contact with in the last two days, something that made her deeply thankful once more that her eidetic recall extended to names and faces. She sipped miso soup and crunched dried seaweed while they worked at identifying the reporters who had attempted to crash the welcome home party, and balanced her first tastes of tsukemono and natto with steamed rice while they identified the unnamed friends her former classmates had been with at the mall. The only flavor she wasn’t entirely sure of was the natto, but CommissAIry had warned her that fermented soybeans were an acquired taste for most people, albeit an extremely nutritious food.

While she sipped green tea, she updated the AIs on her careful, hands-off explorations of the other ’verses.

“This is good information,” MilitAIre said when she was done. “Now, I think we’re ready to try the experiment we spoke of. Are you willing?”

“Absolutely.”

Everything, she noticed, had already been set up by the AIs’ robotic support. She picked up the audio recorder set out on the table, switched it on, took a deep breath, and isomorphed all the way over into Wonderland.

It was a little chillier in Wonderland than in U1, she noticed, but not badly so. The day was gray and overcast.

“Five… four… three… two…” she could hear MilitAIre counting down in U1. She focused on her task: pulling the sound waves from U1 into Wonderland, where the audio recorder would pick them up.

“…one.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.’

“Please return to U1 now, Audrey.”

Well, there’d definitely be no way of faking that. Audrey switched the audio recorder off as she isomorphed back. “The Raven, huh?”

“Indeed. Now, let’s see if we were successful.”

The recording was audible, but very faint. “Can we try again? I think I can get the volume up higher.”

They tried three more times before they achieved a volume that both she and MilitAIre were happy with.

“Damn, I wish I’d known how to do this,” Audrey admitted ruefully, “back when I was spying on Makarov.”

“That incident is what inspired this experiment,” MilitAIre told her. “General Toal suggested it after I reported the intel that you’d been able to gather during Makarov’s conversation with his unknown accomplice. Had a recording of the conversation been available, it might have been an opportunity to move against the Quintessa Corporation, possibly even damage their lock on interstellar travel. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know how; General Toal blames himself for being more concerned with getting you offworld than with offering you training in your skills. But that was before.”

“Before…?”

“He has a proposal for you,” MilitAIre said, sidestepping her question. “Your independence, and your unique skills, create an opportunity to prove that an esper doesn’t have to be broken and enslaved in order to be an effective Federacy asset.”

“…He wants me to be an Operative?” A tiny chill moved through her… but also a small thrill.

“In training. On call in emergencies if your talents warrant it. What he really wants is for you to get to be an ordinary teenage girl, but if a threat were to appear on this world—”

“I’m in.” A threat to Deckard’s World was a threat to Elodie.

“I’ve reserved the right to veto any operation that might compromise your cover or put you in harm’s way. He’s accepted those terms. I also reserved the right to veto all operations if you were reluctant or if they appear to cause any kind of psychological damage.”

Audrey nodded. “I’m guessing that he’s especially keen on the idea of me being able to infiltrate and record from another ’verse.”

“Yes. Would you feel up to such an operation later this afternoon?”

Right out of the gate! “I think so. What’ll I be doing?”

“An executive from the Quintessa Corporation is in Settlement Point to negotiate the further expansion of direct Star Jump routes to and from the Plymouth System. At three p.m., he’s scheduled to hold a conference call with Corporation HQ. Such calls are rare and closely guarded, requiring near-instantaneous transmission of signals across a hundred light-years. The technology that powers these calls is something that the Quintessa Corporation has withheld from the Federacy, but no, General Toal doesn’t want you to try to steal anything. We just want to know what they discuss, what warrants that kind of effort and expense.”

After CommissAIry took her on an Ethiopian culinary adventure for lunch—doro wat and injera with sides of azifa and gomen, with a non-alcohol version of shamita—Audrey dressed up in her weird gender-concealing costume and mask. Isomorphing into Wonderland, she waited outside for an agent’s car to pull up in U1. It was a different agent than the one who had brought her to the building, which was probably a wise move. She climbed into the car and settled onto the seat before isomorphing back into U1.

The agent flinched; that was the only sign he showed that anything unusual had happened. “Sixteen to Control. Phantom is on board. Proceeding to target location.”

Phantom. Jeez. Well, she reflected, that was the word she pulled out most often to describe interacting with U1 from across the threshold.

The agent drove her into the heart of downtown Settlement Point, unspeaking, and into the parking garage below its tallest building.

Shit, that’s not gonna work… He was about to descend below the ground in both Elsewhere and Wonderland. She couldn’t isomorph from there.

Pushing off of the seat, she isomorphed into Wonderland and let herself drop a few inches down onto the sandy turf. At least the car had been moving at a crawl. Sitting up, she checked her equipment for any damage. It all looked unscathed.

Might as well run a test right now… She switched on the transmitter that she and EntertAIn had set up before lunch. “MilitAIre, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Audrey. Sixteen says you vanished from the car before he reached the drop off point. What happened?”

“We need to go over the rules of topography sometime. I can’t isomorph underground.”

“My mistake. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna need to ‘phantom’ my way in through the front doors instead of your chosen entry point. Glad to know this system’s working, though. I’ll still record the conversation on my end as well.” The idea of putting a high-powered receiver in Wonderland, with hardware that straddled the threshold and would allow MilitAIre to actively record on his end, had been the next step, and hadn’t taken long to set up at all.

Kinda the opposite of hiding the fact that someone outside of Quintessa has access to the multiverse, she thought as she walked through the glittering steelglass façade of the building and into its lobby. I wonder what prompted Toal to change that policy.

It took hitchhiking on four elevator rides to get close to the level she wanted, and then a nervewracking climb up two flights of stairs hundreds of feet above the ground in Wonderland—where the wind had, thankfully, subsided for the moment—but finally she was on the floor where the Quintessa executive had scheduled his call. Technicians were setting up equipment for him, while he paced in a nearby lobby.

Fuck.

“He’s like her,” she told MilitAIre, hoping that the man—or whatever he was—wouldn’t sense her presence somehow. “Half in U1, half in some hell place. I can see the darkness all around him.”

“Disturbing, but not unexpected. He shouldn’t be able to see into Wonderland, though, any more than the envoy on Tangiers Prime could see into Elsewhere. Stay calm.”

She walked into the conference room, looking over the equipment. “Fuck, I think I know how the technology works, guys. I think he’s using an apeirochoron as a transmitter somehow.”

The familiar, seamless box sat on the conference table, wires running from it to both the camera that would record the executive and the display he would watch.

“Don’t touch it. Remember you’re observing and recording only. Your intel is noted, and confirms a working hypothesis.”

“What hypothesis is that?”

“It’s above your clearance level, for now, but you’ll know soon.”

Fuckin’-A, did he just “I’ll tell you when you’re older” me? Audrey sighed and sat down in one of the chairs she suspected nobody would be using. “Standing by to record.”

Would the executive notice that the sound waves were moving out of U1? She hoped not. He entered the room and locked the doors, touching several controls as she started her recorder and set her suit microphone to Constant Transmission. She was aware of the way the sound waves were moving differently and crossing a multiversal threshold, but hopefully he wouldn’t be, since he only existed on one side of that particular one. He had no presence in Wonderland.

“There he is now,” a familiar voice said. The envoy! “How are you, Colin?”

The executive smiled at the screen. “I’m well, thank you. How are you, Irena? Where has your new assignment taken you?”

“I’m now on Helion Prime,” the envoy—Irena—said. “Since the relief flights to Furya have moved from Tangiers to Helion for a few years, I will be monitoring that traffic.”

“Any word on the two Furyans you thought you sensed on Tangiers?” Colin asked.

Irena sighed. “Nothing. It’s possible that they were just the children of soldiers who served at the Caldera, but either way, I really wanted to get to them before the Federacy did. They’ve snapped up almost all the espers, and we need at least one. Preferably a strong one, a real Furyan. Ideally a male, but at this point, I’ll make do with what I can get. We’re running out of time.”

“What’s the revised timetable?”

“If the pattern holds, three years until the Coalsack System, and then another year until Helion.”

“So you believe it’s going in order.” Colin sounded awed.

“Yes, we think it is—they are. How are negotiations going?”

“Reasonably well. But there’s a little snag. Deckard’s World is isolationist and xenophobic about other cultures. They’re not sure they want to be one of the new Federacy hubs.”

“They had better find a way to get over that. We’re going to lose all of the current ones within the next fifteen years. It’s accelerating.”

“I’ll sweeten the pot.”

“Do that,” Irena said. “You’re authorized to extend Tier 2 amenities. We need this fallback position. Make it happen.”

“On my oath as a Kirshbaum.”

Irena rolled her eyes. “We’re all Kirshbaums. Don’t belabor the point. Just get it done. And if you hear of any rumors of Furyans, I need to know immediately.”

“What about asking her for help?”

“You know what she’ll say. She’ll demand the impossible. Again. There’s no reasoning with anyone on Furya itself. We need one of their lost children. Rumor has it there may be a lead on Helion, but I haven’t tracked it down yet.”

“I’ll have the deal sewn up in forty-eight hours, tops.”

“Good.” Irena vanished from the screen.

“Auntie fucking bitch,” Colin muttered and stamped out of the room.

Audrey was alone with the apeirochoron. She stood up, walking closer, and reached out her hand—

No, little sister, you may not.

—and found herself sitting in the back seat of Sixteen’s car as he pulled up to the safe house.

…The hell?

67.
Suspended in the Tangled Web

“Oh no, sweetie, it’s okay! Don’t cry!”

Audrey reached out, gathering Elodie up as her baby sister’s face crumpled. The little girl had been fine until their mother had started crying. And for some reason, what had set her off was the realization that Audrey had grown six full inches since her disappearance.

Alvin was hugging his wife already, trying to comfort her, so Audrey held Elodie close and rubbed her little sister’s back. It’s okay, she told the little girl silently. Everything’s going to be okay.

Elodie went quiet against her, sniffling but already relaxing. Who…?

She doesn’t know who I am yet, Audrey thought. And she wasn’t “sending” the way Sebby had; Audrey could only hear her thoughts because she was listening and deliberately touching her sister’s mind. Gently, carefully, she dug deeper, trying to see what kinds of concepts Elodie would understand.

She had a dozen words she could articulate easily, another two dozen that frustrated her because she couldn’t get her mouth to shape them properly—Audrey could remember feeling vexed like that when she’d been tiny—and a hundred more words that she understood when she heard them but couldn’t call up at will yet when she wanted them.

Family, Audrey told her. Elodie hadn’t yet met any of Audrey’s cousins, she realized; they were all children of her father’s siblings. But she had a Cousin Josephine on her father’s side. Like Jo-Jo. But even closer.

Alvin and her mother were watching the two of them, both looking stunned. Apparently Elodie was usually wary of strangers; the way she was now cuddling up to Audrey was unexpected.

The precinct Captain—Minter—walked into the interview room, shaking his head, and sat down with them. “I have all the paperwork here. I’d advise you to read it carefully before you sign it, but you are both lawyers so hopefully you don’t need that advice from me. It’s… not a great situation, but I guess we’ll make do with what we have.”

“What do you mean?” her mom demanded. “What’s wrong now?”

Minter sighed. “You’re not her legal guardians. You’re ‘interim custodians.’ She’s still legally a ward of the Federacy Witness Security program. Every Sunday she has to go back to them for ‘debriefing.’ Which, apparently, will take up the whole day. The rest of the time, she can stay with you, as long as some… stringent… conditions are met.”

“Such as?” Alvin growled.

“She can’t ever discuss where she was for the last twenty-two-plus months. She’s not allowed to talk about what she saw, who she’s been with, where she was kept, or any other particulars related to the case or cases she’s part of. You’re not allowed to ask her about any of it. The WitSec program is retaining all authority over her medical care, schooling, and living accommodations, and reserves the right to take her back at any time. Any travel plans must be cleared with her handlers, especially if they include a Sunday.”

“I’m her mother! How the hell is this possible?”

“It’s…” Minter rubbed his face with one hand as if pushing back against a headache. “It’s honestly surprising they’re giving her back at all. I couldn’t get many details from my contacts in the program. Whatever it was that happened, the threat to her life was big enough that they couldn’t even tell law enforcement she was somewhere safe. You know what that means, Al.”

Alvin nodded tightly. He’d gone pale.

He’s thinking ‘organized crime,’ Audrey thought, pretending that she was too preoccupied with her sister to listen. It’s a few orders of magnitude worse than that, but as long as he takes it seriously…

“But something changed. They think it’s safe to return her now, but it might not be if anyone outside of their own ‘inner circle’ figures out why they took her. Shit, these kinds of cases… everybody in the precinct today has already been sent NDAs they have to sign if they want to keep their jobs and stay out of the glue, even the fucking janitor. Yours are in the stack, too. Odds are all of our comms are gonna be tapped for months. None of us are allowed to tell anyone, on or off the record, who really had her all this time. Just… take her home and be happy you have her at all.”

It took an hour for her mother to read through all the fine print on the forms, and another half hour of arguing with Alvin before she agreed to sign everything, once she understood that those signatures were the only way she could take Audrey home—or ever see her again—at all. Audrey spent the whole time playing with Elodie, bonding with her beautiful baby sister.

“You need to tell John,” Alvin said as they finally drove home.

“Damn it, yeah… he’ll be relieved as hell to know she was somewhere on Deckard’s World the whole time,” her mother replied, her voice still wobbly. “He was so scared she’d—”

Her mother glanced warily back at her. She pretended to be entirely focused on playing with her little sister.

“He thought she’d show up on Furya,” her mother whispered, apparently still unaware of how good her hearing was, “and get Quantified. I’m amazed WitSec didn’t figure out what she is.”

So her mother had always known. The whole thing with the fortune teller had been, as MilitAIre had surmised, about scaring her into hiding her abilities even from herself.

That, at least, was one of the traumas First-AId had been able to fix.

“A lotta people to call tonight,” Alvin said as he turned into a familiar part of town. Christmas lights and increasingly elaborate decorations adorned most of the houses they drove past. “I guess we need to figure out what we’re telling all of them.”

“Maybe just tell ’em I ran away and finally came home,” Audrey suggested.

“But they’ll think such awful things,” her mother protested.

“We can’t exactly take back the missing person posters,” Alvin pointed out. “Everybody knows we had no idea where she was. If we suddenly try to pretend that she was off at some boarding school, or in a hospital, they’ll know we’re lying. And if we say someone abducted her… then we’ll have to lie a whole lot more and keep a lot of stories straight. Simplest is best.”

He caught her eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“Sorry kiddo, but we’re gonna have to let everybody think you spent the last twenty-two months out on the streets somewhere.”

She shrugged and nodded. It was what she’d suggested, after all. Everybody’s gonna think I’m the kind of kid Imam thought I was.

She wondered how many of her old school friends would be forbidden to hang out with her by their parents. Not that hang-outs had happened all that often, even before…

MilitAIre had gone over, at length, the likely scenarios that people would spin out about where she’d been and what she’d done while she was missing. Thief. Drug addict. Kiddie prostitute. Sleeping on the streets, scavenging food from dumpsters. The kinds of stories that nobody included in the child-runaway adventure genre stories kids read, because they were too true, too real. Both her mother and Alvin were currently feeling relief that she’d been spared those scenarios, neither of them realizing that her actual path—even if she had been mostly spared sleeping on the streets—had been every bit as harrowing as any of the ones they could imagine.

Accomplice to a felon. Fugitive. Cybercriminal. Murderer. Jack B. Badd.

The scenarios people would come up with could never approach the darkness that had actually surrounded her… and slid inside her. She doubted anyone would come up with a story that was worse than the truth.

Audrey had mentally prepared herself for the weirdness of walking into her mother’s house again, six inches taller than she’d left it, with Alvin and Elodie now living in it. It was still jarring.

The living room had been redone. The funny part was that it reminded her of the way it had looked when she’d been little. Her mom’s preference for white furniture and carpeting had given way to the reality that babies, toddlers, and little kids were stain magnets, something Bettie Paige MacNamera had swiftly chosen to forget once Audrey had been old enough to shame into not climbing furniture. And, more specifically, once Audrey’s father had moved out and she’d traded “MacNamera” back for “Hawthorne,” and the “rustic” style John MacNamera had preferred for gleaming, white furniture that even the cats had feared to touch, much less sit upon.

That untouchable furniture was gone again. Alvin, evangelical streak aside, seemed to have some kindred tastes in décor to her own father, down to similar fishing trophies.

Huh. Maybe living with him would be less alien than she’d expected.

Esther, her sleek grey coat puffed out and her body flat to the floor, scuttled through the room and past, into the back hall, to hide in the basement. That had gone about as well as Audrey had expected. She wondered which pieces of furniture Goblin and Jade were hiding under.

The dining room hadn’t changed much. Except…

Had they made some weird kind of shrine out of her spot at the table? Her favorite place-setting was out, and it looked… dusty.

The kitchen, at least, looked normal, although things had moved around a little.

By the door between the kitchen and dining room were a whole series of markings that had been made since she was younger than Elodie, measuring her height as she grew. The last one, labeled January 1, 2516, marked her as 5’4” tall.

This, she realized, was what her mother had been crying over. All the markings that had been missed in the intervening time, six inches’ worth of growth, trips to stores for new shoes and clothes, the moment when the two of them would have been standing at eye level with each other before Audrey shot up again and passed her by… memories that could never be made, never be recovered. She could feel her mother struggling with it again.

“Looks like we need to make a new mark here, yeah?” she asked, trying to keep her own voice steady.

“Looks like,” her mother answered, her voice breaking on the words.

Audrey turned around and hugged her before either of them could set Elodie off again. Alvin, his expression remarkably wise, took the little girl out of the room.

Not such an asshole after all…

After a while, they composed themselves and went upstairs.

She’d heard of parents turning their lost or missing children’s rooms into shrines. She’d been warned that her mother might have done that while she was gone. It was still weird to see. To remember that she had once been the girl who had lived in this space…

Of course, she thought, most of the decorating had been done by her mother; she hadn’t had very strong opinions about such things. Her mom had liked the white frills and lacy curtains. Most of the colors in the room were pastels. Audrey found herself wondering how much it might bother everyone if she changed it up. Maybe some brighter colors…

She realized that she was envisioning dressing it up like she and Kyra had dressed up first their apartment and then their room in the ait Meziane house. Bright colors and patterns, driftwood and shells… would it be safe, she wondered, to make those kinds of changes?

Maybe not right away. The fact that she’d come back with new tastes and interests was something that had to be slowly, subtly introduced.

Frills, pastels, and unicorns it is… for now, she thought, interested to note that the bedspread and pillowcases had been washed recently. They had been trying to keep the room ready for her to return at any moment. Part of her was a little amazed that it had paid off for them.

And part of her wondered if Audrey MacNamera would ever really come home to them at all.

She resolved to try very hard not to make her mother wonder the same thing.

None of the clothes are going to fit me anymore—

The doorbell rang. Both she and her mother turned toward the bedroom doorway as they heard Alvin walk over to the front door and open it.

“Alvin! Oh my God! Did I see Audrey get out of your car just a little while ago?”

Viola Trent, neighborhood gossip. So it begins.

Whatever they told Viola would be what the whole town ended up “knowing.”

Her eyes met her mother’s, and she saw the same resigned knowledge in them. “Here we go,” her mother mouthed.

“You did, Viola. Audrey’s back home.” Alvin was managing to sound extremely friendly, which Audrey found a little amazing. Twenty-three months of having her for a neighbor ought to have tried his patience by now.

“That’s wonderful news! Where has she been? Is she all right? We were all talking about how there’d be another vigil in just a few more weeks—”

“She’s fine. She’s settling back in. We’re just glad to have her back home where she’s safe.”

“You might want to call the family now before she does,” Audrey whispered, and watched her mother’s eyes widen in alarm at the thought.

“I’ll message their comms,” her mother whispered back, sitting down on her bed.

It was a simple message, sent simultaneously to everyone in the family—including, Audrey noticed, her father all the way on Furya, although that message would probably take a week to reach him—with little embellishment:

Audrey’s safe! She’s home!

I guess I am, she reflected, sitting down too and looking around. Toys and games that she’d once played with sat in their customary places, none of them things she yearned to play with now. She hadn’t thought about them, much less missed them, even once on her run. They felt like artifacts of a life that wasn’t even hers.

Funny how it was Kyra’s centuries-lost stuffed rabbit that suddenly came to mind and put a lump in her throat…

A pair of reflective eyes were staring at her from beneath her dresser. There you are, Goblin…

She had definitely thought about, and missed, the cats.

Downstairs, Viola was still trying to get the gory details out of Alvin, who wasn’t inclined to play along.

“You hear such terrible stories about teenage runaways and their fates. And all those traffickers and the things they do to children, too, it’s so unsettling—”

“Like I said, Viola, Audrey’s fine. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but we have a lot to do now that she’s home. Thank you for coming by.” He managed to get the door closed seconds before both his and her mother’s comms began chiming.

While they talked to various relatives, Audrey took over Elodie again, letting her little sister show her around her room and tell her—in what was largely babble to anyone but an esper—all about her favorite toys and games.

I’d never have left if I’d known you were coming, she thought wistfully. No wonder her mother and Alvin had rushed the wedding… no wonder Alvin had been feeling stressed and surly when he’d moved in. Everything made a new kind of sense now.

“You are the most beautiful little girl ever,” she told Elodie, just as Alvin appeared in the doorway.

“Your father’s family wants to come over tonight to see you. Is that all right? Or do you want to wait until tomorrow night?”

“What works better for you?” she asked him. “This is a whole lot to drop on your plate out of the blue.”

“I think your mother would rather wait until tomorrow night. Are those all the clothes you have? Should we take you shopping for some tomorrow?”

She shrugged. “The safe house had stuff for me to wear, but… it’s basic government issue stuff. I don’t think I’m gonna fit into my old clothes, though, so probably.”

That actually made him crack a smile. “No, I don’t think you will. Tell you what… you and your mom can go pick out some things tomorrow, and I’ll get everything set up for an organized gathering tomorrow night. A real welcome-home party, even.”

“Sounds good,” she told him, cuddling her little sister close. The way he looked at and spoke to her now, fond and avuncular, was so different from the uncomfortable way he’d treated her before.

Being a dad has mellowed him out, she decided. I might have made things ‘too real’ before, but now reality has taken over.

Word had spread, and the local news services had picked up the story, too. MilitAIre sent her comm a link to one story, a brief vid clip showing her emerging from the courthouse with her mother and Alvin on either side of her, an image of her Missing Persons shot in the corner of the screen for comparison. Audrey MacNamera Found Safe, Returned to Her Mother, the caption read. No details about her whereabouts until then had been made available yet, a peeved-sounding news reader added.

Neighbors began trying to drop by, most of them bringing baked goods or casseroles.

Elodie, meanwhile, decided that she’d been held enough and it was time to go walking. She let Audrey hold her hands while she did, but insisted on the two of them going down the stairs together. Audrey was so focused on her baby sister that she barely noticed several would-be guests gawking at her from the foyer.

“She’s so tall now!” she heard a familiar voice gasp. Apparently Viola had come back.

More visitors arrived almost as fast as Alvin and her mother could get rid of the last ones. Not really ready to talk to a lot of people yet, Audrey sat in the living room where they could, at least, get a quick glimpse of her from the foyer, playing with Elodie, feeding her baby sister dinner while the adults fended off guest after guest, finding out which foods Elodie liked best…

“They’re never going to stop coming,” Alvin groaned during a brief interim when no one was at the door.

“We could turn out all the lights and hide upstairs,” her mother suggested.

“Works for me,” Alvin agreed. “Is that okay, Audrey?”

“Sounds good. You wanna go upstairs, Elodie Jane?” She lifted her cooing little sister up out of her highchair, carrying her on her hip as she cleared the used baby food plate into the kitchen.

“She’s so good with her…” she heard Alvin saying to her mother.

“Did you tell her Elodie’s name?” her mother asked.

“No, I thought you must’ve… I guess her handlers told her at some point.”

Yeah, Audrey reflected. They had. It had been a huge and, in some ways, terrible shock to realize just why her life had abruptly upended, one that had taken several days to fully process. If only she’d known sooner…

I’d never have left, she thought again. I’d have stayed, tried harder to be friends with Alvin…

She’d wondered just what that ’verse might have looked like, where no Jack B. Badd had ever boarded the Hunter-Gratzner or been among its survivors. Would Fry have died in the subterranean cave, her cries for help unheard by the others in time? Would Johns have been forced to make a real truce with Riddick in the aftermath, given that no one else was left who could pilot the skiff? Would everyone have gotten off-planet before the eclipse, or would they have still ended up in the darkness, picked off one by one until only Riddick himself was left to pilot his way off of that desolate world? Would he have been able to fend off the mercs on the Kublai Khan even better without her and Imam in tow, or would he be locked in a prison, made of his own frozen body, even now?

Would Kyra have been sent to New Dartmouth to stand trial? Would all of the Scarlet Matador survivors have drowned when the syzygy brought the tide above their floors in Mansour Plaza? Would the New Marrakesh Spaceport have stayed whole, or still burned when a Tomlin who didn’t understand what he was up against tried to fight the Quintessa Corporation’s claims that there had never been a Level Five Incident? Would Pritchard and Makarov still be hunting women and girls across the Federacy? Would little Omid Heydari still have his mother?

Would the ’verse have become a better place, or a worse one, if she’d known one small thing?

I’d be a three-dimensional critter, she thought, with no idea I was an esper. Maybe I’d never have found out… or maybe I’d have gotten a nasty shock someday when Quantifiers arrived at my school to run checks…

It bothered her to think that her choice, rash and headlong as it had been, and as much as she regretted it, might still have been the right one. That, somehow, all of the chaos and grief and spilled blood might have been the clearest path. She and MilitAIre had argued about the might-have-beens a few times while she struggled with her new knowledge.

The debate had spread out to all of the AIs, and then EntertAIn had made her watch two films called Sliding Doors and Run, Lola, Run, following them up with several twenty-first century films about alternate universes and their effects on consequence and accountability. Oddly, Audrey had noticed when she’d done a small search of EntertAIn’s library, the premise had stopped featuring in vids altogether right as the first Star Jump ships launched. Why, she’d wondered, had confirmation of the Many Worlds Hypothesis ended the desire to speculate about how the multiverse would work?

Well, I won’t ever leave again. Elodie’s here. She needs her big sister. She’s growing up on a planet that isn’t kind to girls or minorities or people who are different… she’ll need me to protect her from all of that and help her see through it.

It didn’t take long to clean up and stack all of the gifts of food into the cooler. They turned all the downstairs lights off and hurried upstairs before any more wannabe-guests could sweep up to the doors. Later, her mother suggested, they could come down for a late-night supper.

Alvin took over Elodie to give her a bath, while Audrey followed her mother back into her old room.

“There are some things I really should tell you,” her mother said, sitting down on the foot of her bed. “I don’t know if they’d have made a difference, almost two years ago… but I’ve spent the whole time you were gone wishing I’d told you, so…”

Audrey was digging through her slightly musty dresser drawers to find the much-too-big-for-her nightgown she’d been given as a Christmas present just over a month before she’d run away, which might finally be the right size. She looked up and nodded at her mother. “Okay…?”

Her mom sighed, looking down at her clasped hands. “When I get pregnant… I turn into a real bitch for a few months. I didn’t know that about myself until… well, until Elodie. When your father and I first met, I was finishing up law school and still lived with my parents. We had a fling and I got pregnant with Katharine…”

Katharine, who had been lost to a second-trimester miscarriage. Audrey remembered the story.

“I started fighting with my parents, constantly. I didn’t understand why, but… well… they threw me out. Said they were done dealing with my shit. John… it wasn’t supposed to be a serious relationship. He was this ex-Serviceman who was just starting at his security firm… but he offered to let me move in with him. I didn’t know where else to go, and then we found out I was pregnant, and he proposed… just in time for me to lose her.”

Audrey felt her heart twist. She hadn’t known this portion of the story… not completely. Neither of her parents had told her how they’d met or married before. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“I’d picked out the name and everything… Katharine Hepburn MacNamera… and then if we had a boy, we’d name him Spencer Tracy MacNamera… well, John said he still wanted to marry me and… I really did love him, and he’d stood by me through the worst and at my worst… so we got married. And then a few months later, we started having troubles, fighting constantly—well, me fighting with him constantly—and I was about ready to give up on the marriage when I found out you were on the way.”

Audrey nodded and then gasped, realization striking her.

“Mom, when you and Dad started fighting, before he moved out, I… I kept having dreams I was going to have a little brother…”

Her mother’s eyes closed and she swallowed. “You were. I didn’t know it yet… but you would have. I just kept picking fight after fight with your father and I couldn’t understand why… but… after one of them I got so angry that I headed into town, I didn’t even really know where I was planning on going, but I ended up in this little toy store. And something about the aisle with baby toys suddenly made me suspect… so I got a pregnancy test and took it. And I was so excited that I wasn’t watching where I was going as I was getting on the escalator to go back to my car…”

Her voice broke.

“I fell…”

Audrey felt her heart twist again. That, she realized, had been why the dreams had suddenly stopped. “And you lost him. Oh Mom, I’m so sorry…”

“Me too… and… it was just too late for your father and me. We’d said too many horrible things to each other, and now we’d lost another baby. I know you felt like you were somehow to blame, sweetheart, but you never were. I never told you about Spencer because you were already grieving about your dad moving out, and I didn’t want to make it even worse.”

Audrey nodded. She had a feeling that her father had never stopped loving her mother… but…

Sometimes love isn’t enough, she reflected. Sometimes… nothing is enough to keep two people together.

“So then, back when you and Alvin broke up for a while…” she prompted, knowing what was coming with absolute certainty.

“I was pregnant with Elodie and didn’t know it yet, yeah. We fought, we broke up… and I went and cried on your father’s shoulder about it. We almost—God, it’s a good thing we didn’t, but…”

Whoa. No wonder her father had wanted to leave the planet when he’d found out.

“And then you discovered you and Alvin were having a baby,” she finished for her mother, her voice soft and as gentle as possible. No judgment. She had no right to judge.

Her mother nodded, staring down at her hands. “I should have told you when I told your father… so you’d understand what was happening. I didn’t realize how devastating all of it would be for you. I didn’t realize so much change would drive you out of the house and into harm’s way. We’d planned to tell everybody at the wedding, during the toasts… but we should have told you even before we told you that we were getting married, so you’d know why it was all happening so fast. I’m so sorry, Audrey.”

The last words were barely intelligible, buried in a sob. Audrey sat down next to her mother and pulled her close, trying not to be jarred all over again by the fact that she was now the taller of the two of them. The familiar scent of Shalimar, her mother’s favorite perfume, wrapped itself around her, and for the first time, she felt like she might really have made it home.

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay… I’m back… I’m home, and I’m safe, and Elodie is the most beautiful baby ever and I love her… I love you so much…”

I wish I’d never left…

“I want you to know,” her mother said several long moments later, “that you can tell me anything. Anything at all… it doesn’t matter what it is… I’ll always be here for you and I’ll always love you…”

Oh, Mommy…

“I wish…” she heard herself saying, and closed her mouth tight on the words.

I wish I could tell you where I went and what I did. I saw so many amazing and terrible things, Mommy… I wish I could tell you all about them.

I visited three planets. One of them had three suns, one of them had three moons, and one of them had three jailors… and I nearly died on each of them. But they were all beautiful. And it was summer on each of them. Summer followed me everywhere.

Three ships met disaster with me on board. The Hunter-Gratzner, the Kublai Khan, and the Scarlet Matador, and if anybody knew I’d been on any of them, so much havoc would rain down all over us…

I fell in love with three men. Three amazing, beautiful men, and I lost them all. One abandoned me. One was murdered. And one promised that he would come to me whenever I call for him, but I never, ever can…

And I got three sisters. One’s Kyra Wittier-Collins, the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, and I worry so much about her… one’s Sebby of the Ree, and she’s going to be a mighty huntress. And one…

She couldn’t remember the third sister she’d found out there… but she knew… she knew…

There was a third sister. She knew it.

And then, of course, there was Elodie. Whom she would protect forever. Whom she would never leave.

I killed three people, too, Mommy. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt anybody… I don’t want to be that person anymore…

So many threes… my life seems to come in threes… and I can’t tell you about the three families that adopted me, the al-Walids, the Mezianes, the Ree… or about the worlds I can visit, the thresholds between ’verses I can cross. I can touch twenty-seven universes… three to the third power… and the Apeiros seem to think that I’m the first human to ever do that. I wish I could show you their starfield… but I can’t ever tell you about the Apeiros or my AI handlers, who I love…

I want to share all of it with you so much, but I can never tell you any of it. The only way to keep a secret safe is to never, ever tell it… but I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you everything.

“I wish I could tell you,” she whispered. “But people would die.”

Hundreds. Maybe millions.

Maybe even us.

66.
In From the Cold, Into the Cold

“Oh, well played,” Audrey said once she could manage to speak. “You didn’t give anything away.”

“I will endeavor to make sure that you achieve the same level of circumspection,” MilitAIre told her, his voice merry.

The moment she had heard his “Boston” accent emerge from the speakers, everything had made sudden, perfect sense.

“Well, you were right,” she told him, sitting down in a rolling office chair as enormous relief made her knees wobbly. “We’re meeting again, and I’m definitely in good ‘hands.’”

“And not just mine,” he told her. “General Toal is using our unique situation as a test-run for AI-managed safe houses. He believes that we might make more effective handlers than human beings. Less prone to bias, bribery, or coercion.”

“‘We?’” Audrey asked, looking around. The boxes that the technicians had brought with them were open and empty near a set of panels that, she remembered, had housed the AI mainframe cores on the Nephrite Undine. There weren’t quite as many panels as there had been on the ship, though.

“I’m a precise digital clone of the ‘MilitAIre’ AI that you interacted with on board the Undine. Clones of ‘SensAI,’ ‘First-AId,’ ‘EntertAIn,’ and ‘CommissAIry’ have accompanied me here, all of whom now have been given full disclosure about you. I apologize that the other four could not accompany us. Their skill-sets don’t mesh as well with the needs of a safe house, and the General needed to keep this test affordable. I’m happy to send them messages from ‘Marianne Tepper’ on your behalf, though.”

“I’d love that,” she admitted. She would definitely miss CaptAIn, AIngineer, mAIntenance, and mAItron, but she could see why they wouldn’t suit a safe house as well. Their minds were specifically designed for starships. “Do they know that you’re with me?”

“No, but they know that their iteration of me was in charge of you, in an unspecified capacity. I’ll send messages to him, and he’ll pass them on to the rest of the AI crew. No one will question it.”

“I was afraid I wouldn’t have a way to stay in touch with any of you, once I stopped being Marianne.”

“I know. General Toal instructed me not to tell you until we were absolutely certain that the data cloning would be successful, which we didn’t know for sure until well after you had landed.”

Was that the real reason, she wondered, that it had taken so long for the contact to reach the spaceport? Would she have been taken to a different building if the techs hadn’t been able to set things up the way they needed to?

“What was Plan B, if that hadn’t worked?”

“A few days with a human handler, while a new MilitAIre was installed on the Undine and my original iteration was brought down here, officially for hardware repairs. In that circumstance, you would have only had me.”

“And God only knows what he would have fed you,” CommissAIry interjected, still sounding stereotypically French. “Hello again, Audrey. That name is every bit as lovely as Marianne.”

“Hello, CommissAIry!” Audrey sagged back even further in the chair. “I was going to miss you and your cooking so much.”

It was amazing, she reflected later, how much trusted friends could turn a cold, dark building into a place of light and warmth. The safe house was still in the process of being set up—more equipment would arrive in the days to come, now that the AIs had been successfully installed—and she would be making do with basic rations until all of CommissAIry’s food synthesis gear arrived, but she didn’t care. She could handle it. She felt, suddenly, like she could handle anything.

First-AId, likewise, was awaiting all of the equipment she needed for a proper full-service infirmary. The office suite that had been set aside for her, up on the second floor, would become the place where Audrey received all future medical care. Discussions about expanding First-AId’s patient roster to include emergency care for local Federacy agents, which had apparently been underway, had stalled abruptly when MilitAIre had demanded assurances that such traffic wouldn’t expose the safe house and put it, and its primary ward, at risk. Audrey might be her only patient for the next several years.

“I need my library installed,” EntertAIn noted. “I have all of your settings and preferences—those came down with me—but the library itself takes up three exabytes. Assuming the WitSec program can acquire the same licensures that Sirius Shipping had. We’re all going to be ‘roughing it’ for a few days. Especially poor SensAI.”

Audrey had checked out all of the rooms in the building by then, and the recreation area set aside for SensAI currently had no holo projectors. It would be difficult for him to lead her, or anyone else, in exercises without them. She tried not to feel too much amusement at how miffed the AIs were about the safe house’s “half-baked”—in CommissAIry’s words—state. It already had more than she had hoped for, just by having them in it at all.

It took two weeks to configure everything in the safe house, although CommissAIry was already set up enough to overload her with candy by Halloween. Audrey spent most of the days, as workers came and went, dressed in a bizarre costume designed to conceal whether she was male or female, complete with a face-covering mask that also changed her voice when she needed to speak to the workers. None of the crews were apparently cleared to know that the building would be run by AIs; Audrey became their spokesperson whenever they needed to make requests of, or give instructions to, any of the workers. Travers came back twice to supervise specific projects, asking both times if “Marianne” was settling in well, unaware that she was speaking to her.

The AIs wouldn’t let Audrey go trick-or-treating, though. Which, she supposed, was a good thing when another surprise snowstorm rolled in shortly after dusk.

Cameras, microphones, and hologram projectors ended up being installed in every room and corridor of the building. MilitAIre had been surprised when Audrey, herself, had advocated for that, and had even argued against omitting bedrooms and bathrooms.

“Like bad things won’t ever happen in those rooms,” she’d scoffed. “None of you are gonna be perving on anything you see in them. You can blur out the parts of my body that would be illegal to record, right?”

“This is true,” MilitAIre said. “And it would be particularly illegal to record them where you are concerned, given your age… but blurring is a good courtesy for anyone staying in a safe house. Full surveillance with discretion… and the ability of the surveilled to request privacy if they wish. We understand that most humans have moments that they would prefer not to have recorded.”

“As long as you keep in mind anyone planning an attack would be looking for those kinds of openings,” Audrey pointed out. “Riddick told me, back when we were killing time on the skiff, that he’d wait for his targets to get up to no good and start covering their tracks, ’cause that meant they were covering his, too. He’d let them do all the work of concealing the circumstances of their own murders.”

“Fascinating. His records do indicate that he targeted working criminals much of the time, and frequently killed them when they were ‘on the job.’ He volunteered this information?”

“Yeah. I think he told me about it as a kind of fuck-you to Imam. Whenever he was awake, he’d fuss if we said more than ‘boo’ to each other. But Riddick also told me that because he wanted me to stay out of under-surveilled places. He said all kinds of criminals look for the places where nobody’ll see them strike, and especially because I’m a girl, I need to stay away from camera ‘dead zones.’ He said you have to watch yourself twice as hard in the places where nobody else is watching you, and he said I’d be better off having some ‘random pervo’ I never even met ‘fapping’ to a picture of me than some ‘sick fuck’ actually on top of me.”

It pissed her off, though, that those were still the only two “choices” he thought she’d have in broad swathes of the Federacy. Wasn’t humanity supposed to be more advanced than that?

Most of it is, she reminded herself. You’ve seen people who are, and even lived with some of them. You never had to balance those kinds of risks when you were staying with the Mezianes.

Then again, Safiyya had worried relentlessly on her behalf on a few occasions. There were still too many monsters in human form to make that wariness unnecessary, and she had encountered examples of them on either side of her time with the Mezianes. And, she admitted, such monsters could be anywhere.

“That was good advice,” MilitAIre said after a brief pause. “And well taken here, too. Someone wishing to launch an attack on a safe house ward would time it for a moment in which that ward sought out privacy and was no longer under direct surveillance. The resulting delay in, or absence of, a response from the security system could increase the chance of a successful strike. I must discuss this with General Toal. There are a lot of arguments about ‘surveillance states’ and ‘government overreach’ that have to be addressed, especially on a planet like Deckard’s World, but within the context of Witness Security, most of them probably wouldn’t apply. Are you sure you’re all right with having the cameras in your bedroom and bathroom?”

“Better you guys than some Duke Pritchard type,” she told him, “any day.”

The addition of the holo equipment, everywhere that there were cameras, also meant that all of the AIs could “manifest” themselves, aside from just SensAI. That led to discussions about the importance of body language and eye contact for human interaction, and Audrey’s admission that, during her flight on the Nephrite Undine, she’d used the recreation area more frequently than she normally might have because SensAI’s visual representation made her feel less alone.

“This is important information for us to pass onto Sirius Shipping,” First-AId said when she finally admitted that. “They spent a great deal of time choosing our voices, to make them as warm and comforting as possible. The argument they made for not giving all of us holo forms was the ‘uncanny valley’ risk. If we weren’t one hundred percent authentically human in our appearance, guests would find us repulsive and might not even realize why.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be necessary on a ship where the guests have other flesh and blood passengers to interact with,” Audrey mused. “But any situation of isolation… I don’t think SensAI’s image ever felt off or inhuman to me. But I think, even if it had… it’d still have been more comforting than no contact at all.”

They still hadn’t settled on their preferred “bodies,” but the ones they tried out were always interesting.

She and First-AId did end up spending time unpacking many of the things that she’d told MilitAIre about her time on the run. Although the medical AI had full access to all of the transcripts of her discussions with MilitAIre, he had approached her experiences from a strategic and tactical perspective, while First-AId wanted to delve into the psychology and do trauma-healing.

It soon became clear to all three of them that there were several memories that were still too much for her to handle, especially on their tight schedule. The Kublai Khan, with its menageries of suffering prisoners, turned out to be one of the biggest minefields in her head. To her, that wasn’t even the ship’s real name… it was “the ship that was screaming.”

“An esper, who didn’t know she was an esper and had never learned how to deliberately block out others’ thoughts, surrounded by tortured prisoners who were all mentally shrieking for rescue…” First-AId finally murmured. “Every memory you have of that time has been poisoned by it. Whenever we discuss even the simplest elements of your stay there, your heart rate increases by at least twenty beats per minute and your blood pressure increases by an average of twelve systolic and eight diastolic. I agree with MilitAIre’s original assessment that you need to try to block out this part of your run from your memories, if you can.”

Maybe, she thought, it had been a good thing that she hadn’t had time to share that part of her story with Kyra or the Mezianes.

“The Apeiros wouldn’t take it away,” she reported back the next day. “They say I’m going to need too much of it, even if it is uncomfortable. So… I guess… I just need to try not to think about it.”

The easiest way, she found, was to imagine that it had happened to “Jack,” and not her. To imagine Jack as a separate person, who had seen and even done terrible things… but wasn’t her. She’d already begun doing that with some of the other memories that had proved too troublesome. The things she couldn’t look at were things that had happened to Jack. And Jack was dead.

Maybe if she kept saying it, the day would come when she believed it.

First-AId had then attempted to speak with the Apeiros through her, via hypnosis. Afterward, Audrey had a new hole in her memories and none of the AIs would discuss what they had apparently learned during the three-hour session she’d lost. The Apeiros, when she went into their starfield that night, refused to discuss it either, although they all agreed that the AIs were “good creatures.”

Kyra, whenever she inquired about her sister, was still “dreaming of a world with three suns.” Still in cryo. Wherever she had decided to go, it must have been far away from Tangiers Prime.

The Moribund was still silent. When she asked, the other Apeiros said that it had been avoiding contact with her ever since her screaming fit. She wasn’t sure whether she should feel relieved or guilty, but in truth, she felt both ways at the same time.

A week after the hypnosis debacle, General Toal ordered hand-to-hand combat training added to Audrey’s routine. A human trainer arrived for an hour each day, although she was never allowed to see his face and he was never allowed to see hers, and they sparred under SensAI’s trenchant supervision.

The Safe House was in a hardscrabble part of town, but properties were apparently easier to acquire there. Officially, the outside of the building now claimed that it was home to a security consulting firm. To sell the charade, three local Federacy agents, who were never allowed to see her face either, had offices on the first floor, which they periodically visited during working hours. Audrey grew accustomed to having her costume on and mask handy whenever she needed to be down on the first floor.

“Surprise” Quantification tests happened with greater and greater frequency. Her passing rate slowly climbed from 50% of the time to 80%. On the academic end, MilitAIre tested her repeatedly and told her that she would easily qualify to join her former peers as they began their tenth grade year.

November turned from snowy to rainy. She managed to finish reading The Crystal Cave by striking a bargain with the Apeiros: they would take away her memories of the train ride and standoff just long enough for her to reread the story without any emotional baggage, and then return them once she and the AIs had finished discussing the book and its meanings. This, she told them, would also be proof that they really could one day return the rest of the memories they’d made off with, an act of goodwill.

She ended up liking the book so much, even once she remembered the train ride and standoff again, that she devoured its three sequels over the next week.

And, she admitted to herself, it was a relief to know that the Apeiros really could give her the rest of her lost moments back, that the “holes” in her memory were not empty as much as shrouded spaces that would one day be uncovered again. She and EntertAIn had a long discussion about the character she had been most drawn to in the books, Nimue, and why the woman who had disguised herself as a boy, for a chance to be taught magic by a wizard, resonated so strongly with her. EntertAIn told her there was a whole trope about heroines disguising themselves as boys, and put several more books—a fantasy series called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn among them—and videos including a film called Dragonslayer, into her recreational queues.

Thanksgiving arrived with the first “open window” day in Settlement Point. It was still early spring, but the temperature had risen to a glorious 77° Fahrenheit, 25° Celcius, and Audrey could hear the laughter and shouting of kids a block or two away.

CommissAIry decided to take Audrey on a “culinary adventure” of different traditional Thanksgiving foods, most of which were more typically autumn fare, while EntertAIn and MilitAIre acquainted her with various legends about the holiday and the truths behind them. The holiday, when they were done, made much more sense to her than the odd portrayals she’d grown up with involving “Pilgrim Joe,” “Turkey Sue,” and “Pumpkin Bob.” Those characters had apparently evolved on Deckard’s World itself and had proved so popular that they had overwritten most of the original American traditions. But she supposed some adaptation was necessary for anyone who wanted to celebrate a harvest holiday in early spring.

Cautious explorations of both Elsewhere and U83f, which Audrey nicknamed Wonderland, revealed that they were both habitable and welcoming worlds. Although she didn’t spend a whole lot of time in either one—it was early spring in both of them, too—she and the AIs agreed that she should continue exploring them in the future. Until she went back “out into the cold,” though, they were the only “outdoor” environments she was permitted to venture into. As far as the local neighborhood was concerned, she didn’t—and couldn’t—exist.

December arrived and, a few days in, Audrey MacNamera was biologically fourteen years old at last. The AIs and the Apeiros marked the day with her. There were gifts—most of them virtual but surprisingly meaningful nonetheless—and an extraordinary cake that CommissAIry had invented based on her “taste profile,” which she told him she’d like to have again for every birthday.

The auburn hair dye had washed most of the way out by then. Her hair was halfway to her shoulders, verging between dark blonde and mousy brown thanks to how little she had been in the sun in months. EntertAIn and First-AId announced it was time to begin preparing her appearance for her return to her family, starting with some camouflage to make sure that no one would believe she had shaved her head the year before. For the next week, as final preparations were underway for her return to her old life, she received special hair growth treatments until her locks once more touched the small of her back. They lightened the hair as well, until she looked—in her opinion, at least—like a funhouse-mirror elongated reflection of the girl who had cut off her hair, put on her cousin’s discarded clothes, and run off to the stars more than a year of lived time and nearly two years, real-time, before.

Welcome back, Audrey MacNamera, she silently told her reflection, before asking the AIs to give her bangs in front. She wanted to look a little more like Tislilel Meziane, the way Ewan had last seen her. Even if it did twist the knife a little. She’d never get to be “Tizzy,” or see him, again.

Were any of the girls she’d once been still alive inside her? The naïve fool, the cocky outlaw, the besotted mermaid…

Who, exactly, was going home to Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter?

Audrey had liked it much better when her mom had been Bettie Paige MacNamera.

Sundays, the AIs decided with her, would be Safe House Days. She would be required to report to the house first thing in the morning—in part because recent intel had revealed that Alvin Baxter had developed an evangelical bent in the last year and a half and would undoubtedly try to insist on “the whole family” attending church services unless that was a fight he couldn’t win, and Audrey’s relationship with religion was rocky at best—and would stay most of the day. During that time, her combat training would continue, any medical treatments she needed would be provided, and the AIs would help her evaluate and critique the events and news of the week and identify any possible threats.

“And,” CommissAIry informed her with unrepentant glee, “you will go on three culinary adventures!”

She would return to her mother’s house at the end of the day, an hour before official curfews began for minors and even in time for some evening “family time,” but the bulk of the day would belong to her and to her handlers.

Friday, December 17, they decided, would be the day of her return. She was hitting 100% on the surprise Quantifications at long last. She’d figured out the trick of switching her brain into “baseline mode” on command… finally. And it had been four months since she’d uttered a single syllable in her sleep. It would be safe for her to go “out into the cold.” All her secrets were tucked away where none of her loved ones would ferret them out.

So why was she so damned scared?

The day arrived.

It was exactly a year, real-time anyway, since she had tried to kill herself on Helion Prime. A year since she had tried to end Jack B. Badd, believing Audrey MacNamera forever lost. And now Audrey MacNamera… or a convincing facsimile… would return home.

The scars on her wrists had been concealed. First-AId had asked if she wanted them removed, but—

“Scars are trophies,” Kyra had once said…

—while she’d chosen to keep them, she intended to keep them hidden until they faded even more, and until nobody was especially scrutinizing her anymore. The pseudo-skin layer that covered the scars would be retouched during each weekly safe house visit.

It was 58° Fahrenheit at dawn, and the temperature would rise into the mid-70s. She had dressed in a simple outfit for the “handoff,” jeans and two light, layered shirts for changeable weather, a pair of the ankle-high, flat-soled boots that girls in her class apparently lived in that season, and no adornments or identifying brand names of any kind. She had a comm in her pocket, government issue and locked against anyone but her. The chrono on her wrist was locked in place by a band that only her code, or a code transmitted by MilitAIre, could remove. Both devices were registered as Federacy property, assuming anyone got that far in tracing them before being ordered to stop. Anonymous, untraceable… a quintessential WitSec ward.

With one more deep breath, she climbed into the car parked in front of the safe house and isomorphed into Wonderland—there were too many trees in Elsewhere for what she would need to do, but this part of Wonderland was a flat, sandy plain—holding onto the interior’s surfaces as “delimiters.” Five minutes later, one of the Federacy agents emerged from the safe house, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove it to the center of Settlement Point near the main courthouse. He had been instructed to idle the car for two minutes—unaware that a phantom teenage girl was climbing out of the back as he did—receive a package from a courier, and then leave. As far as he would ever know, the courier’s package had been his whole mission.

Audrey walked over to a nearby park, watching the countdown on her chrono. When it hit zero, she knew, all the cameras in range of the park would go down for five minutes. She made sure she was in no one’s line of sight before isomorphing back into U1. Her “targets” were up ahead, sitting on a bench and facing away from her.

“Man, I hate this shit,” one of them, a sandy-haired man dressed in a mid-line three-piece suit, said as she drew closer.

“Ain’t the worst assignment,” the other one answered. He wore a police uniform.

“Picking up a WitSec case? Those people are garbage. If it’s Denny the Knob, you might need to look away for a few minutes. I owe that bastard a few bruises.”

“Word is it’s some material witness, not a criminal,” the cop objected.

“I’ll believe it when I—” the first man froze, hearing her boots crunch the path’s gravel, and turned around to look at her. His eyes widened. “What the…?”

Assistant District Attorney Alvin Baxter’s mouth dropped open as he stared at her.

The cop next to him, a freckled redhead who looked maybe a year older than Ewan, turned and stared as well. “Isn’t that…?”

“Audrey?” Alvin gasped.

She’d known that he’d be the one assigned to the pickup, but it was still a rough moment. She could feel his shock, and a weird combination of relief—she was alive, she looked healthy—and horror at the realization that she was the material witness he’d been assigned to pick up. His stepdaughter had reappeared in a way that he hadn’t even imagined when he’d been picturing worst-case scenarios. What was he going to tell her mother—?

She forced herself to block off his mind. She didn’t want to hear or feel any more of that. As it was, her voice wobbled when she spoke. “I’m ready to go home now.”

At least, she thought, struggling not to cry would be “in character.”

They took her to the nearest police station, which was in the basement of the courthouse, exactly as MilitAIre had predicted.

Brief attempts to confiscate her comm and chrono, to make her change out of the clothes she was wearing so they could be analyzed, and to record more than her basic biometrics, were all brought to a screaming halt by Federacy directives to the contrary. Each time someone tried, every comm in the precinct would ring and the same authoritative voice would speak on each one, instructing everyone to cease what they were doing immediately. The basic biometric readings they were permitted to take confirmed that she was Audrey Hepburn MacNamera, missing since January 30, 2516, and that she was a legal ward of Federacy Witness Security. Eventually, the precinct Captain emerged from his office and testily informed everyone that he’d been given ground rules and strict instructions for how Audrey was to be “reintegrated” into civilian life. He didn’t seem enthused.

It was all so fucking dramatic. She could only imagine how much more dramatic it would have been, and how fast the stories would have unraveled, if General Toal, MilitAIre, and the actual WitSec department hadn’t taken charge of the whole process and it had been entirely dependent on whatever ruses she’d cooked up on her own.

“Audrey? Audrey! Where’s my daughter?”

She took a deep breath. Her mother had arrived. Standing up, she braced herself and turned toward the entrance of the police station—

“Mom…” Her voice was the tiniest thread. Behind her, Alvin rose from his seat.

Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter was hurrying into the building, looking around frantically. She wouldn’t see Audrey yet; she was in one of the small interview rooms, a one-way mirrored glass window between them. She had a moment to look at her mother, see her for the first time in more than a year…

…and see, perched on her mother’s hip, the reason for everything that had happened. The reason her father had left so abruptly, needing to go to a whole other planet to escape his heartbreak. The reason that Alvin had reappeared in their lives after almost going away forever. The reason for the sudden wedding announcement and its inordinate rush…

…the reason that Audrey MacNamera would never have left Deckard’s World at all, not ever, if only she’d known…

Elodie Jane Hawthorne-Baxter, sixteen months old.

Her baby sister.

65.
Twenty-Seven ’Verses Wide

“Nephrite Undine to Plymouth Station A, come in, please.”

Audrey sat in the captain’s chair on the flight deck, watching the speck that was Plymouth Station A grow larger and larger in the front windows. To its right, the brilliant sphere of Deckard’s World hung in the darkness, still far enough away that it made her think of a blue-green Megaluna rather than a whole planet.

She was almost home.

Was that her home? She still wasn’t sure.

“Nephrite Undine, this is Plymouth Station A. We read you loud and clear.”

“Copy, Plymouth Station A,” she said, releasing a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “We are on final approach for docking, awaiting confirmation of gate assignment.”

Hopefully, Marianne Tepper sounded like a consummate professional. And an adult. She and MilitAIre had rehearsed her performance several times, in preparation for her interactions with actual human beings again. Assuming the person replying to her from Plymouth Station A wasn’t another AI, it was the first live human voice she’d heard in more than five months.

“Nephrite Undine, you will be docking at Gate 3. Maintain current heading and prepare to disengage ion drives on my mark.” The flight controller began a countdown.

“We good with that?” she asked CaptAIn and AIngineer.

“Standing by for the mark,” AIngineer replied.

The AIs were, of course, handling everything; she was just the mouthpiece. Still, she wanted to do it right. Although MilitAIre had assured her that there would be no record of any of the… peculiarities… that “Marianne Tepper” had periodically displayed during the duration of the flight, she found herself wanting to make sure that she played the part well enough that, if she ever applied to work for Sirius Shipping again, they’d be glad to welcome her back.

You never know what bridge you might need to cross again…

“…four… three… two… one… mark.”

The Nephrite Undine shuddered slightly as the ion drives switched off and, less than a second later, the station’s robo-tugs came in range and began tractoring it in.

Audrey consulted the screen by her left hand. Everything was green. “Nephrite Undine to Plymouth Station A, I’m showing a good lock. You have the conn.”

“Roger that, Nephrite Undine. You will arrive at the gate in approximately twenty minutes. Welcome to the Plymouth System.”

“Thanks, Plymouth Station A. I’m looking forward to seeing the sights.” She switched off the comms and leaned back in the chair, sighing.

In less than half an hour, she would be turning over the Nephrite Undine to Sirius Shipping reps and disembarking… in the company of a WitSec handler who would undoubtedly be coming aboard along with the reps. MilitAIre had assured her that everything was in order, but she could feel her stage fright building nonetheless. Soon she would have to play a series of roles in quick succession, in front of a much less logical and predictable audience than she’d had for the last five months. In front of strangers.

And it wasn’t even like she’d been that good at fooling the AIs until MilitAIre stepped in, either.

“I’m gonna miss you guys,” she said. She wished there was some way she could take them with her. Inhuman and unreadable or not, they had become genuine friends.

“We will miss you too, Marianne,” CaptAIn said. “Thank you for a lovely run-in flight. We have enjoyed your company immensely.”

She wished she could offer to stay in touch with them. But Marianne Tepper would, more or less, cease to exist once she left Plymouth Station A for Deckard’s World. Her handler would have all the arrangements, she assumed. But she would probably spend the next month and a half, until her biological fourteenth birthday had passed, incommunicado.

“You’re welcome,” she said, once she had her voice under control. It had been on the verge of breaking for a moment. “Thank you for a wonderful flight. You’re a fantastic crew.”

She spent the next fifteen minutes visiting each of the AIs to say individual good-byes and thank-yous, finishing up in the Security Room.

“I… don’t even know where to start,” she told MilitAIre. “Thank you… so much. I don’t think I’d have had a chance if you hadn’t stepped in.”

The strategy he had built for her was elegant, complex, and comprehensive, taking into account things that she could never have anticipated. Four months of his tutelage had left her aware of just how much she still had left to learn, too. She hoped her new handler would be even a fraction as adept as he was.

“You’re welcome, Audrey.” He, alone of all the AIs, could call her that. The rest only knew Marianne. “I know you will be in very good hands. And I believe we will meet again.”

“I hope so. I just—”

With a soft shudder, the ship came to a stop.

“Time for you to meet your boarding party, Audrey. Godspeed.”

She really wished he had a physical presence; she needed to give him a proper goodbye hug.

Her bag was already waiting for her at the airlock. She checked the seals, confirming that everything was ready, and pressed her palm to the security plate, authorizing the connection. As the airlock doors slowly opened, she took a deep breath.

Showtime…

Four people were waiting on the other side of the doors. Two of them carried large, heavy looking tech cases.

People. Actual living people. She had to suppress the urge to fling her arms around them and kiss them.

“Permission to come aboard, Acting Captain Tepper?” a dark haired man dressed in an expensive suit asked.

“Permission granted,” she replied, stepping back to make room for the party.

The suit nodded at the two technicians, who nodded to her as they passed.

“I’m Kyle Hanoran,” he told her. “Vice President of Plymouth System Operations for Sirius Shipping. I’ll be managing the hand-off. This,” and he turned and gestured at the woman still standing on the other side of the airlock threshold, “is Susan Travers. I believe she is the immigration agent you requested.”

MilitAIre had told her that that would be the cover story. It didn’t quite match up with the explanation she’d sent Nguyen when she had declined the posting on the Major Barbara and requested the Nephrite Undine instead, but it had reframed that explanation and would stand up to most scrutiny. Audrey wasn’t sure if Travers was her handler or was just going to transport her to whomever had been assigned that role, but she knew what was expected of her either way.

“Yes, thank you. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Hopefully, after my family’s issues are resolved, I can apply for another posting with Sirius. I’ve really liked working for you.”

Hanoran, who undoubtedly had been given access to the carefully seeded gossip, smiled and nodded. “We hope you will.”

Yeah, he knew the “truth” about Marianne Tepper that MilitAIre had spread: her father, who had settled on Deckard’s World, was supposedly dying of a rare cancer that still had no treatment or cure, and she had requested the posting on the Nephrite Undine so that she could come stay with him through his final days. Nguyen, Abecassis, and Davidov, along with several other execs, had sent her sympathy “cards” via the beacons two weeks earlier after the story had begun to circulate. She had sent thank you “cards” back to each of them.

It was, she reflected, the best way to make sure that nobody wondered why she wasn’t applying for another position. And it meant that, should she ever need to use the Marianne Tepper identity again, all the bridges associated with it would remain unburnt. That was yet another thing that hadn’t even occurred to her when she was planning her voyage.

She was going to miss MilitAIre’s nuanced strategies.

He’d even taught her chess. She was really going to miss playing it with him. Even if she’d never won a single game.

It only took a few minutes to sign over authority of the ship to Hanoran. As the technicians returned to the airlock, they shook hands and she picked up her bag.

Was she going home, or leaving home? It suddenly felt like the latter. She knew every centimeter of the Nephrite Undine intimately, and suspected she would walk its corridors in her dreams for years to come, the way she sometimes still found herself in her grandparents’ house that had been sold when she was three. Lonely as the journey and ship had been at times, it had been a mostly peaceful interlude. Mostly.

The technicians fell in behind her and Travers as they walked into the station.

“We’ll be leaving for the surface right away,” Travers told her, and handed her an envelope. “Your paperwork is inside.”

The paperwork, Audrey knew, would include a replacement ID card with her adjusted height on it. She would still be “Marianne Tepper” until they had reached the surface and entered the safe house; after that, the name would be retired indefinitely.

She opened the envelope, nodding at Travers. “I appreciate all of this. I really do.”

She wondered how much the agent actually knew about her situation. The new ID card, she was interested to note, had an updated picture of her that MilitAIre must have captured at some point in the last few days, after EntertAIn and First-AId had helped her dye her hair auburn. 1.78 meters tall… damn. Well, he would know…

“It’s my pleasure,” Travers said in a crisply formal tone that didn’t speak to pleasure at all. Audrey found herself wondering just how many of the WitSec subjects the woman had dealt with were unsavory types.

Most of them, probably. While blameless witnesses to high crimes did end up under WitSec’s protection from time to time, MilitAIre had told her that the bulk of its subjects were criminals who had been persuaded to “flip” on their bosses, usually in exchange for clemency or even immunity where their own transgressions were concerned. If that was the norm, Travers would probably be disinclined to view her latest ward as a helpless innocent.

Not like I actually am one, anyway…

Being surrounded by so many living minds was intoxicating. The part of Audrey’s head that had been deadly silent for months was suddenly abuzz. It was a struggle to keep her mental “hands” to herself and not start reading people at random, but MilitAIre had warned her against that. They passed through the immigration and customs lines swiftly and efficiently, but she noticed that the only ones being subjected to intensive scrutiny in the lines were people with darker skin and “ethnic” attire.

Maybe, she found herself thinking again, this was a mistake. Did she really want to assimilate back into a world that treated people that way? Did she really want those kinds of bigoted thoughts trying to worm their way into her head? Coming, possibly, from people she liked?

I only have to stay here until I’m officially eighteen, she reminded herself. I’ll have graduated from high school. Even if I’m not biologically eighteen yet, I’ll be a legal adult as far as Deckard’s World knows, and they won’t be able to hold me.

WitSec, of course, still might. But she could continue under its protection somewhere else in the wider Federacy.

On the other side of the gauntlet, Audrey found herself in a familiar lounge. She’d disembarked there when she’d taken the shuttle up from Deckard’s World, before using some of her father’s security codes to sneak on board the Cloaked Butterfly. There was a weird sense of unfamiliarity about the space, though.

I’m six inches taller than I was when I last passed through here, she realized at last. Fortunately, her appetite had finally normalized in the last month, and it had been almost two months since she’d felt any bone-growth aches in her limbs. Hopefully, she thought, this was it and she wouldn’t get any taller.

Shuttles ran regularly; it was mid-afternoon in Settlement Point, so another one would be arriving soon. She got comfortable in her seat—as much as she could—observing the others in the room and trying to figure out their stories while she waited.

Tourists and campers, most of them, she decided. For all its backwater reputation, Deckard’s World was popular with people across the Federacy who wanted to get rustic, to “rough it” without being too far from civilization. Parts of the planet were even more frontiers-y than Shakti IV, and might have been an even more logical choice for Riddick to go to ground in… if only the population’s xenophobia hadn’t meant that he’d have been subject to intense and hostile scrutiny the moment he tried to reach the surface.

He might be anywhere, she reflected, but he definitely was not on Deckard’s World.

Most of the other people in the lounge had large amounts of luggage and camping equipment. Her single bag, containing barely any worldly possessions, was not at all the norm; other people-watchers would believe that she must work somewhere on the station and be commuting home, rather than that she had arrived on a Star Jumper after months of travel. Almost no one, even with stringent weight limits, traveled quite so unencumbered.

She took out her tablet and tapped into the local news headlines, careful to avoid any sections that might mention her disappearance. October 23, 2517 on the Federacy Standard Calendar, the heart of autumn or spring on old Earth, was late winter in the most heavily settled portion of Deckard’s World. The second semester of school was well underway; American-style football had given way, in the Settlement Point Monitor’s sports section, to basketball and ice hockey. It would be a blustery 24° Fahrenheit, with an 80% chance of snow, when they landed; Audrey glanced around the lounge again and noticed that almost everyone else in the room—and everyone with camping gear—was dressed in lighter clothes intended for summer.

They must be waiting for the shuttle to Wyndham Landing, she thought. October was late summer in Deckard’s World’s less populous northern hemisphere.

MilitAIre had told her to dress in her warmest clothes—which meant one of the sets of coveralls, provided by Sirius Shipping, over jeans and a nondescript shirt—and that she would be provided with a coat upon landing. She wondered how much her time spent offworld had thinned her blood; both New Athens and New Marrakesh had been in the hottest parts of their respective summers when she’d landed on them, and the crash planet had been an oven until the eclipse sharply cooled it down. She hadn’t seen snow in more than a year of lived time.

The shuttle for Wyndham Landing arrived first and the lounge almost completely cleared out. Audrey continued catching up on headlines as she waited.

The Settlement Point Monitor hardly discussed any events beyond the Plymouth System, treating the rest of the Federacy as remote and irrelevant. One tiny article mentioned that the New Casablanca Spaceport on Tangiers Prime had reopened its damaged concourse, and a reopening date had been scheduled for the New Marrakesh Spaceport, after a “wave of terrorism” had struck the planet earlier in the year. Both aware of MilitAIre’s instructions about reading texts for bias, and in full possession of the truth about both incidents and the man behind them, Audrey was swiftly disgusted to realize that the article heavily implied the involvement of Islamist radicals, possibly even connected to the New Taliban, in both explosions and other unnamed—and probably imaginary—incidents besides. Javor Makarov’s name didn’t even come up. The inconvenient truth, that a white man who had periodically sported a law enforcement badge had been behind two mass killings on a far more cosmopolitan world, had been swept out of the frame.

She hoped, suddenly, that Travers wasn’t her handler. She couldn’t imagine talking to the aloof, disinterested woman about how disconnected the articles she was reading were from actual reality, assuming her handler was even cleared to know that Audrey had been on Tangiers Prime and hadn’t just been briefed on her “witness to a local mob hit” cover story. She already missed talking to MilitAIre more than she’d ever expected. By the end of the journey, there had only been a small handful of painful moments in her run that she’d still been unable to discuss, and he’d finally, gently, told her that she should leave them be. He wasn’t a psychologist, after all, and First-AId hadn’t been cleared to hear them, so there was no point in setting off another panic attack trying to plumb them.

But she’d confided everything else to him, and the idea of having to do any of that all over again, with some new stranger, filled her with dread.

Hopefully, whoever it was would just have some dossier that MilitAIre had prepared for them to read and wouldn’t feel a need to rehash all of it personally. Several of the girls in C Ward had griped about their psychiatrists getting replaced mid-treatment and the replacements forcing them to start again at Square One, making them not only lose ground, but also lose trust in the process.

Just roll with it. Whatever happens, the important part is that it breaks your trail and tells the ’verse that you could never possibly have been Jack B. Badd.

The rest could be improvised. If things turned bad, she had the emergency comm number General Toal had given her.

And if that didn’t work…

It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to disappear.

Stop it. You haven’t even met your handler yet. MilitAIre wouldn’t fuck you over. It’ll be okay.

The entertainment feeds, she thought, would be a decent distraction from her progressively darker thoughts. It’d be a good idea to know what the kids in her classes were watching and talking about.

Remakes. The Deckard’s World division of Disney was doing remakes of “classic” twentieth century shows and movies. There was even a new feature article about it: the head of the production company explained that they were recreating everything shot-by-shot and line-by-line, mostly, but with the addition of tech, slang, and styles that contemporary Deckard’s World audiences took for granted, because he thought their absence from the original shows was why those audiences weren’t watching anymore. Viewership of the “classic staples” was continuing to drop.

Audrey sighed. Or maybe it’s because those shows aren’t about them, and still won’t be. They’re about people who’ve been dead for five hundred years and a nation that’s been gone for nearly as long, no matter how hard you try to revive it…

The shuttle to Settlement Point arrived at that moment, preventing her from stewing over it and roiling up even more doubts.

Travers, she realized, had been watching her the whole time with a frown. This was going to be just delightful.

But, fortunately, she had actual work to do during reentry. She held her bag close, casting her “extra” senses over it, making sure that everything inside was absolutely rooted in U1 and nowhere else. She did the same with the clothes she was wearing, and then with herself. Her five-shape had a strange “presence” in twenty-six other ’verses now, but her physical presence needed to be 100% in U1 or she could die during the descent into and through Deckard’s World’s atmosphere.

She could still “feel” the other ’verses, but she wasn’t “in” any of them. Nothing she’d brought with her was crossing into them, either. She’d been scrupulous about making sure she physically stayed in U1 when the Nephrite Undine hadn’t been actively isomorphing, but she felt a need to make absolutely sure anew. Especially given what she would be doing on the way down.

Stowing her bag in front of her, she took her seat and strapped in. Travers had given her a window seat, ostensibly a privilege. But it put the WitSec agent between her and the aisle, ensuring that there would be no rabbiting. Audrey wondered how often that happened.

Probably a lot… Hardly anyone was in WitSec by choice, after all.

She closed her eyes as the shuttle disengaged from Plymouth Station A, slowing her breathing and beginning the meditation sequences that both SensAI and the Apeiros had developed with her. She needed to know what kind of world she was approaching in each ’verse she had access to.

Holy shit!

She opened her eyes, stifling a gasp, and shifted her vision to see more clearly what was in U612.

It’s a fucking gas giant in that ’verse! Holy shit! She was already in its upper atmosphere there, surrounded by orange-pink gases and strange particles swirling through the cabin.

Okay, she couldn’t visit U612, at all, while she was on the surface of Deckard’s World. Down on the surface, the atmosphere would probably be crushing. She let her awareness of that ’verse slide away, focusing on the others.

There were two more gas giants, not quite as large, one composed of bluish-green gases while the other’s heavy atmosphere was rust-colored. In U289g, Deckard’s World didn’t exist at all, and in U27, there was an asteroid belt instead of a planet. But the planet existed in 21 more ’verses, and it had a visible atmosphere in nine of them. Her fingers flew over her tablet as she made quick notes about what she was seeing, and where.

U322a was one of the nine with an atmosphere. How weird would it be if there was a habitable world in Elsewhere here, too?

The shuttle’s descent through the atmosphere was fascinating. Four of the other atmospheres, including the one in Elsewhere, seemed almost identical to the one in Deckard’s World. Three of the others were far thicker, and two were significantly thinner. It was weird, discovering what she could sense even without physically engaging with any of the other worlds.

“We should be landing in another twenty minutes,” Travers said beside her. “When we disembark, let me do all of the talking.”

Audrey nodded. She leaned back in her seat so she could survey the skies now above her in multiple worlds. Elsewhere, and one other world, had blue skies. In U612 and the two other gas giant ’verses, stygian darkness surrounded her aside from periodic flashes of lightning.

Any time I’m in the mood to watch a thunderstorm, I’ll have one handy, she thought. In two other ’verses, she would already be underwater. There was a third ’verse where she was surrounded by some kind of liquid, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t water.

She made more notes as they descended toward Settlement Point.

Twenty-four of her other ’verses were definitely not habitable, but several of them had interesting properties that she might, cautiously, explore sometime in the future. Two—including Elsewhere—were still potentially promising.

Landing clinched it; she was in the middle of a forest in Elsewhere, and a rolling meadow in U74. The vegetation was almost, but not quite, Earthlike. She might just have a safe place, or even two, to isomorph over to if she needed out of U1.

It’d be so crazy if every planet in Elsewhere was already habitable…

She put her tablet away, picked up her small bag, and followed Travers out of the shuttle and into the Settlement Point Interplanetary Spaceport, aware that the two technicians who had boarded the Nephrite Undine were ahead of them, still carting around their huge, heavy boxes.

Two checkpoints later—she’d been asked to show her ID twice, but had let Travers do all the talking, as asked—they reached the main terminal and its three-story wall of glass. Snow swirled on the other side of the glass; she’d seen the storm approaching even as they had touched down.

“We’re a little underdressed,” Travers said. “Our contact is running late because the roads are already bad in Settlement Point itself. We probably won’t reach the house until after dark.”

Audrey nodded. Huge fish were swimming through the cavernous terminal over in U115. One headed straight for her and she had to resist the temptation to duck.

Having a five-shape that was 27 ’verses wide was going to take some getting used to.

The weird thing was that she wasn’t having any trouble telling which ’verse things were happening in. It was like some strange form of depth perception, or another kind of sense of direction. She didn’t know how she knew things about the different worlds, but she could identify the ’verses, and their relative positions to her, as easily as she could bring her fingertip to the tip of her nose with her eyes closed.

Five-dimensional critter, right here…

And, if all went well, the Quintessa Corporation would never know she existed, or could exist.

It occurred to Audrey, for the first time, that none of the ’verses she’d expanded into were the universe of darkness she’d sensed in and around the envoy. Even U37d, creepy as it had felt when she’d first encountered it, seemed perfectly ordinary now—as ordinary as any alternate universe could be, anyway—its version of Deckard’s World thin-atmosphered and volcanic but not even slightly eldritch. Even the darkness of the gas giants was missing the chthonic horror that had swirled around that elderly woman and polluted her touch.

She hoped she’d never find that hellish ’verse.

The snow outside of the windows was growing thicker as the sky darkened, and the contact still hadn’t arrived. Audrey called up the Settlement Point weather report. Sometime during their descent, a Winter Storm Warning had been issued. Six inches was expected before morning.

Welcome home, Audrey MacNamera…

Flights and liftoffs, she noticed, were losing their ETDs, the words DELAYED and even CANCELED appearing in place of the time codes. Some of the ETAs were listed as delayed, too.

Yeah, that’s not inauspicious at all…

Half an hour later, the forecast had upped the expected snow accumulation to eight inches. The terminal was emptying out.

“Shit,” Travers muttered.

“What’s wrong?” Audrey asked her, frowning.

“I need you to turn away from the window wall,” Travers said. “There’s a news crew arriving to cover all the flight cancellations, as if this doesn’t happen with every snowstorm. You can’t be on vid.”

Audrey nodded, turning so that she faced away from the entrance and sprawling across the empty seats as if sleepy. She used her bag as a pillow, draping one of her shirts over her face as if trying to block the light and catch a nap; even if someone turned a camera on her, they wouldn’t get a shot of her face. That was the most important thing, obviously.

“You’re good at this,” Travers observed. By her tone, that wasn’t entirely complimentary.

“Had some practice,” Audrey sighed. Hopefully, with her face obscured, no one catching a glimpse of some random, lanky redhead in Sirius Shipping coveralls would be reminded of either Audrey MacNamera or Jack B. Badd.

Another half hour passed before Travers told her that the news crew had moved on. Ten minutes later, their contact finally showed up.

He was a big bear of a man, probably some nine inches or so taller than Audrey. He arrived with thick winter coats for both her and Travers, leading the two of them out to an all-terrain vehicle that wasn’t doing a very good job of concealing its military affiliations. A cold-eyed man in its driver’s seat gave her a quick look-over as she climbed in, and then ignored her.

The drive was completely silent. Audrey didn’t try to touch any of their minds; if they were military, there was the possibility that they would recognize the signs of an esper getting mentally handsy with them, and that could upend the game. If they were her handlers, she’d get to know them soon enough. And if not, then maybe it was better not to have tried to know them, anyway.

The next month and a half, she thought, could be even lonelier than the voyage on the Nephrite Undine had felt at times. Human presences didn’t necessarily mean human contact.

I still have the Apeiros, at least…

The roads were almost deserted, but Audrey had a feeling that the part of town she was traveling through was barely inhabited even in good weather. Large, abandoned-looking warehouses crowded the road, and no plows had come through. Weirdly enough, it looked a lot like the kind of place she’d visualized the fictional murder she’d supposedly witnessed taking place in.

The abandoned warehouses gave way to boarded-up businesses, and then a down-on-its-luck area that had a mixture of actual businesses and places that had closed down. The vehicle slowed to a stop in front of a three-story building, its ground-floor windows all covered with graffitied plywood, an Under New Management sign on its door visible thanks to a rare working light above it.

A dark van was also parked in front of the building. As Audrey watched, two familiar men emerged from the lit entry, nodded to her companions, climbed into the van, and drove away.

Hadn’t those been the men that had accompanied Hanoran and Travers? She almost hadn’t recognized them without their boxes and bundled against the storm.

Huh.

Neither of the men in her vehicle got out. Travers, and Travers alone, escorted her to the door of the building and ushered her inside.

“Your handler is already here,” Travers said, terse as ever. “He’ll explain everything to you. I’m not cleared to meet him. Good luck.”

And that was it. A moment later, Audrey was alone in the building, the front entry locking behind Travers with a loud click. She felt utterly alone, as if the building was completely deserted aside from some small presences that she suspected were mice in the basement. Bright light spilled out of a doorway ahead of her. Taking a deep breath, she walked through it.

The room beyond was strangely similar to the Security Room on the Nephrite Undine. She wondered if someone had done that to set her at ease, or if security rooms just had a standard look—

“Hello, Audrey,” a voice she knew almost as well as her own, and hadn’t really expected to hear again, drawled.

Holy shit. She really should have seen this coming.

64.
The Camouflage of Ordinary Things

“How’s your arm?”

“Sore,” Audrey sighed. “Just a little, though. You’re sure nobody’s gonna detect it?”

“Nobody will have the opportunity to,” MilitAIre told her. “The moment your biometrics get collected to access your medical records, flags will go up and the medical staff will be informed, in no uncertain terms, that the only kind of care they’re allowed to provide is emergency triage care. No exams, no elective procedures… except the ones you and your handler have agreed to and your handler has pre-authorized. The penalty for medical staff disobeying a Federacy block is having their licenses to practice struck off, so they won’t feel inquisitive.”

“So… where will I get checkups? And shots, and things?”

“That’s being arranged.” MilitAIre sounded amused. “But it’d be very difficult to sell the idea that you’ve been on Deckard’s World the whole time if someone notices that you’ve received immunizations never offered there and have been baby-proofed until you’re nearly twenty-four.”

True. Those things weren’t generally available to girls on Deckard’s World, even if she personally thought they should be. It hadn’t taken all that much to convince him to let her get them done, either.

She’d begun reading the book that Izil had given her—one that, it turned out, had been co-authored by Takama herself—and it had been an epiphany. The Biology, Psychology, and Sociology of Human Sexuality had answered a lot of questions she hadn’t even known she had… and its evaluation of the sociopolitical norms of Deckard’s World were scathing enough that she was no longer surprised that the book would be impossible to find there. She found herself missing Takama more than ever and wishing they could discuss the text.

Izil had given it to her because it discussed issues of gender and biology that, thanks to her time masquerading as a boy, had confounded her. She wondered if he’d have given it to her at all if he’d known she was from Deckard’s world, given just how critical it was about the planet of her birth. Less than three chapters in, she’d discovered that, in addition to her home world imposing several centuries-out-of-date gender “norms” upon its populace, it had also cut people off from fundamental health resources. Such as immunizations that would protect against virtually every sexually transmitted disease a person might be exposed to… and regulators that could prevent pregnancies for years or even decades. The simple existence of such things had come as a shock; even her aunt, the nurse, hadn’t mentioned them.

Takama had argued, in one chapter, that the rationale behind blocking access to such treatments was tied to a disturbing philosophy that sexuality was sinful and should have negative consequences for anyone who enjoyed it. But it wasn’t the consequences of her own actions that Audrey had been worried about, which was what she’d told MilitAIre when she’d argued that she should receive all of the shots and an implant. If she and Kyra hadn’t managed to escape from Pritchard—assuming they’d survived what he and possibly Makarov would have done to them next—the consequences of his actions could have followed her through the rest of her life in any number of awful ways. And he might not be the last sexual predator whose path she crossed.

MilitAIre had let her plead her case, and then had spent a few minutes dissecting her arguments and suggesting how she could improve them, before informing her that he’d agreed with her from the beginning and that First-AId would have her implant configured for her in one day’s time. He’d then showed her the full schedule of vaccines—including several, for non-sexually-transmitted diseases, that she’d never heard of—that she would need to receive in the coming weeks. Deckard’s World, it turned out, had some perplexingly backwater ideas about disease and immunology that conflated getting sick at all with moral failings, and Audrey had been lucky that most of the people she’d encountered on her run hadn’t shared those views.

The funny thing was that MilitAIre didn’t particularly care about the philosophies behind any of the stances favoring or opposing vaccines; he simply considered it his job to ensure that Audrey was protected from all potential threats, including those on a microbial level.

His pragmatism about such things, she’d found, made him a very restful companion.

He didn’t judge; at least, not in any kind of moral sense. He did critique her constantly, but in a way that somehow made her feel better about whatever goals she’d missed as he analyzed just how she might reach them on her next attempt. There were still a whole lot of things she couldn’t bring herself to face—or discuss—yet, but it was growing easier and easier to talk about some of them. And he had insisted on knowing everything about her time on the run.

The rest of the AIs still had no idea who she really was, but they had accepted MilitAIre’s new position of authority over her. Even CaptAIn deferred to him where she was concerned, although he rarely had to.

“You have now succeeded twice in conforming your brain waves to baseline readings,” MilitAIre told her, rousing her from her musings. “Later this week, we’re going to run our first ‘surprise Quantification’ drill to see how close you can bring them without advance preparation. Advance warning is never given for such tests, after all.”

“Do you think I’m ready for that?” she asked, feeling doubtful.

“It’s unlikely at this stage, but we need to see just how far away from normative your readings will be in such a scenario.”

“So we’re doing a ‘fire drill.’”

“Essentially.”

Audrey nodded. She liked the way he tested her, in truth. She liked being able to make mistakes and learn from them instead of being scared that she wouldn’t get everything right the first time. She liked not having to figure out what she was doing wrong, or just wasn’t doing right, completely on her own. He had told her, when she asked, that her strongest learning style was “interactive,” which had both made perfect sense to her and come as a disturbing revelation, given how many of her teachers had stressed “independent learning.” But without MilitAIre, she might have still been in a tailspin about how to get her gamma-delta wave synch-up—apparently a telltale for espers—to un-synch.

The Apeiros disliked the exercises; they couldn’t “hear” her during them. She often felt like her senses were muffled, too; her awareness of the other ’verses became distant and tenuous. Once she relaxed, everything flowed back to her and she felt like herself again, but…

It worried her. She suspected it worried them both. She didn’t think she could live in a “baseline” for very long. It was further and further away from who she was.

“In the meantime,” MilitAIre said after a moment, “now that you have completed your mathematics, science, and social science modules, you aren’t going to be able to put off your literary assignments anymore.”

Audrey had to restrain the urge to huff. “Okay… I think I can manage them…”

The hardest one would probably be The Crystal Cave, she thought. She’d been reading it when she’d spotted Makarov on the train, and every time she’d tried to pick it up since, she started thinking about the standoff that had followed. For the first two months on the Nephrite Undine, though, every work of fiction she’d tried to get into had somehow become all about those terrible events. That had finally begun to recede.

“I’ll try reading The Crystal Cave again, last,” she told MilitAIre.

“Understandable. What other titles will you be reading?”

She knew he could look them up easily; he had access to everything she’d stored on the ship’s data mainframes, but he wanted her to talk to him about them. He’d explained his rationale for this to her a week earlier: aside from his observations about her preferred learning style, the way she interacted with and handled the texts, and discussed them with others, would be markedly different if she’d done all of it on her own, and that might raise suspicions. Her teachers and classmates needed to be under the impression that she had simply been enrolled somewhere else for two school-years; those who thought they were in the know had to believe that her handler had tutored her during her isolation. The truth, that she had spent nearly half a year separated by countless light-years from any other human being, was something that no one must ever suspect.

“Um… my eighth grade curriculum included The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.” And a bunch of short stories, but she wasn’t going to rattle all of them off.

“Interesting. Those are all twentieth century works, all mid-century, written in English by either British or American authors. That’s a narrow spectrum.”

Audrey shrugged. “Takama said in her book that Deckard’s World is mired in mid-twentieth century Anglo-America.”

“Do you know what characterizes that milieu?”

Oh. Now MilitAIre’s motive was coming clear. He’d added a few sociology readings of his own choosing to her list last week, after all.

“Yeah. Post-World War II America was attempting to assert a ‘traditional’ way of life that had never really existed before then, right? A ‘nuclear’ family in which only one parent worked outside of the home… people did act like my mom was nuts for going back to work when I started school. And an ‘American Way’ that was all about ‘equality’ and ‘freedom,’ but only if you met certain criteria. Women could vote but usually couldn’t have their own bank accounts or credit lines… birth control was rudimentary as shit… racial segregation was commonplace… and more than half of the rights in the Federacy Human Rights Charter were routinely withheld from people.”

“And?”

“And the Cold War kept people from fighting as hard for those rights and against those limitations as they might have, because a shadowy enemy on a whole ’nother continent could blow everybody up, and they were told that was a higher priority.”

“Well stated. Have you seen signs of anything similar on Deckard’s World?”

“The Cold War part doesn’t seem to apply, but everybody’s still jumpy about the New Taliban trying to invade and it’s been more than two centuries since that happened. So maybe they’re our ‘Soviet Union.’”

“A completely external common enemy to keep the populace’s watchfulness focused outward, yes. What else? What is attention being focused away from?”

Audrey grimaced. Her father had been right about Deckard’s World, and obviously MilitAIre wanted to make sure she was aware of it before she found herself surrounded by it again. “Class divisions are along racial lines. Xenophobia is high and includes almost all members of other ethnic and religious groups. There’s a big emphasis on ‘traditional’ gender roles and most of those are the ‘traditions’ of mid-twentieth-century America, so if you’re not heterosexual and monogamous, and want to do or have things that ‘belong’ to the other sex, like a ‘man’s job’ or ‘men’s clothing,’ you may have the right under Federacy law, but almost nobody’s going to support your choices.”

“You disguised yourself as a boy for a while,” MilitAIre said. “What was it like, being seen and treated as a boy rather than as a girl?”

“People didn’t talk down to me nearly as much,” she reflected. She’d been thinking about it a lot, because her experiences of passing as a boy had left her questioning many of the gender divides on Deckard’s World. “They acted like I might just have a brain in my head and they didn’t spend as much time trying to prove anything I said wrong. I still got a few creepy looks on Vasenji Station, but… nobody was trying to ‘accidentally’ grope me or rub up against me anymore. And all the ‘guy stuff’ I’d been told I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out—with maybe the exception of how to pee into a urinal standing up—wasn’t so hard as all that.”

“The study guides you’ll be working with don’t bring such issues up, but I want you to think about them as well, as you’re reading. You’ve now been exposed to a larger cross-section of humanity than you knew on Deckard’s World. Think about whose stories are being told, and who’s being left out of the narratives altogether. And why your school, or your world, might not want to include those who don’t appear, or even have people think about them. Also, think about why Arthurian legend would be important enough to your world’s culture that two of the novels on your reading list feature it.” A note of humor entered MilitAIre’s voice. “I can’t help you with the issue of using a urinal, but First-AId might have some ideas, if you wish.”

“Nah,” Audrey laughed. “That’s not necessary.”

“And your ninth grade reading list?”

“The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Should I be watching for the same things with them?”

“Yes. Your reading lists have been curated to match, and reinforce, prevailing ideologies of a time and place more than half a millennium in the past. While some of them are critical of that time and place, there are limits they don’t push past and attitudes they never challenge. I’ll be interested to see what conclusions you end up drawing about that.”

“Am I making a mistake?” Audrey blurted.

“By?”

“Going back to Deckard’s World.” She was going to be spending at least four years surrounded by many of those backsliding beliefs, a lot of them possibly coming out of the mouths of people she loved and admired.

“No,” MilitAIre told her in a calm tone. “All worlds have their flaws. But it would be much harder to establish a plausible and safe identity for you on any other world. When Audrey MacNamera ceases to be a missing person, especially when it becomes evident that she never left Deckard’s World at all, most of the potential loose threads from your run will be wiped away. Your name, image, and biometrics will be deleted from all of the Missing Persons databases throughout the Federacy, making it all the more unlikely that anyone will ever connect you to your appearances, under a variety of aliases, on three separate planets, one space station, and six Star Jumpers. Everything will seem to be back in its place. This wouldn’t be true for any other identity you took on, on any other world. Once you are legally eighteen, even if not yet biologically so, you can elect to leave Deckard’s World again—in the custody of your handler—and as far as the rest of the universe will know, it’ll be your first time going offworld.”

“Best and easiest way to break my trail. Got it.”

“And your family will know you’re alive and unharmed, and they won’t feel betrayed by your disappearance because they’ll believe you had no choice in the matter.”

Ouch. She’d very much had a choice, and she’d chosen to run out on them. She felt worst about running out on her cats, though, and they couldn’t be told a placatory lie about WitSec disappearing her for nearly two years.

“I’m sorry, Audrey. That wasn’t intended to upset you.”

“I know. I just… I was really thoughtless. About how they’d feel when I just disappeared. They’ve been worried about me for a year and a half now.” She wiped at her eyes. “They don’t know if I’m alive or dead—”

“They will soon. They’ll know that you have returned to them unharmed.”

“I don’t know about unharmed,” she disagreed. “Too much shit went down.”

“Comparatively speaking, then.”

She supposed that, on a missing-kid scale of Huckleberry Finn to Luljeta Kamberi, she was a lot closer to Huck than to Luljeta.

“Okay. They’ll be able to stop worrying, at least,” Audrey reluctantly agreed. “But… are they really not going to ask questions once they’re told I’ve been in WitSec?” She had her doubts. Her mother was a corporate lawyer, and Alvin the Asshole was an assistant D.A.

“That’s highly unlikely at first. Human curiosity shows little regard for what’s been declared off-limits. They’ll have a lot of questions, and they won’t be happy about not getting answers.”

“So what do we do?” Her mom was formidable, after all, and Alvin… well, she really didn’t know. He was an asshole, but she hadn’t stuck around to find out how much of an asshole he might be.

“You’ll stick to your story,” MilitAIre said, “which is simple enough. You saw something that you shouldn’t have witnessed and can’t talk about, you were taken into WitSec custody soon after, and you’ve finally been allowed to come home as long as you stay silent about everything that happened. And when they try to force the issue—which they undoubtedly will at first—your handler starts throwing their weight around.”

“That… sounds…” She winced. “…bad?”

“Only if they’re too persistent,” he told her. “They’ll stop once they understand that your handler truly does have the power to take you away from them again if they keep fighting.”

Shit. “Does that ever happen?”

“Very rarely. But even if it becomes necessary, your trail will already be broken at that stage. Federacy records will indicate that Audrey MacNamera never left Deckard’s World while she was a missing person, and that will still be true even if your return home ends up being brief. Your family will know you’re alive and well somewhere. But the odds of that becoming necessary are extremely slim.”

“So if Deckard’s World doesn’t work out…”

“You can be relocated. But it shouldn’t be necessary, and it’s important for you to focus on trying to have as normal an adolescence as you can. Aside from two comprehensive topics you can never discuss—your experiences during your missing time, and your unusual abilities—you’ll be able to live an ordinary life. Cultivating the ordinary is crucial to success in the WitSec program.”

“Yeah, ordinary…” Audrey tried to repress a frustrated sigh. “Because I’m such a normal person…”

“The important thing is for everyone else to believe you are, no matter what the truth is,” he told her in his most patient voice. “Which is why we’re adding another module to your curriculum between now and your return.”

Uh oh. “And what module is that?”

“Method acting.”

The main screen activated, the words Survey of Method Acting Techniques for “Natural” Performances emblazoned across its surface.

“You’ll be spending the next four years, minimum, portraying a role,” he told her. “We’ll explore and study the various techniques, particularly those used by film and vid actors for close-up performances, to find the approaches that allow you to play your part as naturally and convincingly as possible.”

“And what is that role exactly?” she asked. Obviously, it wouldn’t be “Jack B. Badd.” Jack was dead.

“A girl who, as a pre-teen, tried to run away from home after her mother suddenly announced she was marrying a man that the girl disliked and couldn’t manage to get along with. She got lost after making it into the nearby city, and found herself in the proverbial ‘wrong place at the wrong time,’ where she witnessed the murder of a Federacy agent. She panicked and hid, and was later found by other Federacy agents investigating their colleague’s death. When they realized just what she had seen, and whom she had witnessed committing the murder, they took her into protective custody.”

Audrey nodded. That was a whole lot more believable than what had actually happened, in truth…

…but not entirely dissimilar.

“Because the perpetrator of the crime, and his employers, were unaware that there was a witness,” MilitAIre continued, “the decision was made to conceal even the fact that she had been taken into custody from everyone until her testimony could be used. She was kept hidden for almost two years, with no human contact except her handlers, until the case abruptly fell apart when the perpetrator died in a firefight with Federacy agents, and any possibility of connecting his crimes to his employers came to an end. She was then told that she could return to her family as long as she never spoke of what she had seen or where she had been, because if his employers ever realized that she had witnessed the murder they had commissioned, they might have her preemptively killed just in case she knew enough to link them to the crime, herself.”

That made an absurd amount of sense, too. It was even, she realized, close to the truth. Pritchard and Makarov were both dead, and there had been nothing in the Merc Network files that she or General Toal could use to conclusively prove that the Quintessa Corporation had hired them to murder Colonel Tomlin. But she knew enough about that corporation’s ruthlessness to know that, proof or no proof, if they ever realized she possessed such knowledge—let alone that she had Threshold Syndrome—they would want to wipe her off the board.

“So, uh… most of the story is kinda true… just… happened a lot earlier into my run and… didn’t involve crash landings, battles on a merc ship, or Threshold Syndrome.” Or Riddick.

“Exactly. The most convincing lies are the ones built around enough verifiable truth that the false parts are unlikely to be scrutinized.”

“Like me witnessing a murder.” In point of fact, she’d witnessed several, and had even committed a few of her own.

No. Jack B. Badd had done that.

And Jack is dead.

“Exactly,” MilitAIre agreed. “Even if you never tell the story—and you never should—it should be something that you can treat as truthful. That makes all the difference. The current projected timeline for your return to your mother is mid-December. By then, we will have finalized all of the details of the story you can visualize, if not actually share, should someone start poking at your alibi.”

“Why December?” she asked, startled. “We’re scheduled to reach Deckard’s World near the end of October.”

“We’ll need time to configure the safe house you’ll use to check in with your handler each week and make sure everything is solid,” he told her. “But more importantly, the window in which you’re both biologically and legally fourteen years old opens on December 4, and being able to truthfully say you’re fourteen, if asked, will help sell the lie that you never spent any time in cryo. That said, I also have no intention of you suffering a second Christmas away from your family if it can be helped.”

It amazed her, sometimes, just how much he could see through her. And how much the things that mattered to her mattered to him. “So I’m going to be doing weekly check-ins with my handler? How come?”

“Largely for your sake,” he explained. “Your family’s probably going to be clingy and demanding at first once you return, and prone to not giving you space or privacy. So every week, for a few hours, you’ll be able to get away from the scrutiny.”

That hadn’t even occurred to her when she’d been trying to come up with her own back-story and plans… but she could see it now. Her mom might be afraid to let her back out of her sight.

“You can use the time,” MilitAIre continued, “to engage in any projects or inquiries that you can’t do where they’re watching… or just have a period of quiet. You’ll also be able to address any complications where your alibis are concerned, should those occur. Think of it as a pressure valve. Some weeks, you may not especially need it or even want it, but having it as a set part of your routine will ensure that you always have it when you do.”

“What kind of projects or inquiries?” she found herself asking.

“You have friends on other worlds that no one can know about. While you can’t contact those friends, especially one of them, until you’re eighteen, if you want to run searches related to any of them, you should only do so in the safe house. You’ll also have access to materials that are censored on Deckard’s World but considered customary and essential information throughout much of the rest of the Federacy. And, of course, it’ll be a space where you can continue to develop both your abilities and the skills you need to keep them hidden.”

“Yeah, I’ll need all of that stuff, won’t I?” It seemed so obvious once he said it.

“I think so,” he told her. Sometimes the hints of humor in his voice made him seem like an actual human being to her. “And knowing that you’ll be able to access it on a regular basis will help make playing your designated role, the rest of the time, more manageable.”

Once again, Audrey found herself feeling relieved that she hadn’t been stuck doing all of this on her own. Half of the things MilitAIre was describing hadn’t even occurred to her. I would have fucked this up, too, on my own.

She really didn’t do “alone” well at all. Not like Riddick. She realized that, the whole time she’d been with him… on the crash planet, in the skiff, on the Kublai Khan and the Xanadu III, and on the one and only day he’d spent on Helion—little more than a week, really, even less time than she’d spent with Ewan—she’d felt him wishing to be alone, to not have to feel the contact of other minds on his, shying away from both Imam’s judgments and her infatuation.

“You seem to be thinking about something sad,” MilitAIre observed.

“Yeah…” she sighed. “Riddick. I keep trying to just… let go of everything that happened with him, but… sometimes I just… miss him.”

His desire to leave no longer stung, the more she thought about it. He needed to be a lone wolf, unencumbered by problematic attachments. He’d probably have thrived in the isolation of the Nephrite Undine, whereas she, in spite of all of the companionable kindness the AIs were showing her, was counting down the days until she could immerse herself in the press of humanity again and feel other minds touching hers. The only part that still hurt, that she still had trouble understanding, was the way he’d left her without even a word, without a goodbye. That had made it hard for her to believe that he’d ever cared about her at all.

And yet he’d saved her life several times, risking his own in the process. Why, she wondered, had he been willing to throw himself into the path of bullets to keep her from falling to her death, but unwilling to tell her goodbye?

Why was it so damned hard to get over this? Every time she thought she had…

“There have been no sightings of him in a while,” MilitAIre said after a moment. “The last ‘confirmed’ sighting on record is the false video you commissioned. In the meantime, he’s dropped from first to second on the list of the Federacy’s Most Wanted, and is unlikely to move back up.”

“Why? Who’s in first place?”

“Do you really need to ask?” MilitAIre sounded amused again.

“Duke Pritchard?” It made sense. Aside from a very small group of people who were sworn to secrecy, nobody knew that Pritchard was dead. But everybody knew the kinds of crimes he’d been prone to… and might, as far as they knew, still be committing somewhere. He had become the bogeyman every parent with a missing daughter imagined… including, probably, both of hers.

“It’s likely that he will remain at the top of the Most Wanted list for years, or even decades,” he said. “No proof of his death will ever appear, given the location and probable condition of his remains at this point. And while the Federacy may dislike having an “Unleashed Esper” running loose, even it must admit that none of Riddick’s crimes have ever approached the monstrosity of Pritchard’s. Quite the opposite.”

“The opposite?”

“Yes,” MilitAIre told her. “Based on the part of his criminal record that remains classified, your Riddick might even be willing to break his cover to kill someone like Duke Pritchard.”

“He’s not ‘my’ anything,” Audrey grumbled before she could stop herself.

She wondered why, after everything, that could still hurt so much.

I need to let it go, she scolded herself. He isn’t part of my life and he never was. He was part of Jack B. Badd’s life.

And Jack. Is. Dead.

63.
When a Lie Becomes the Truth

“Did they tell you what they did to you?”

Audrey sighed and shook her head. “They refuse to say what happened, exactly. Just that I learned ‘a truth I couldn’t live with’ and that, if they hadn’t taken it away, I would have hurt myself. And that the only way they could leave a message was the way they did, because I was too upset to cooperate.”

MilitAIre seemed to ponder that for a moment. “Do you believe them?”

“Yeah, I do.” She shrugged. “You saw the holo. I… completely flipped out.”

“Do you wish to investigate it further?”

She shook her head again. “Only thing that’ll come of that is more holes in my memory. Not in yours, I guess, but… why chase something I can’t catch? They tell me I’ll remember it all when it’s time to.”

“And when will that be?”

“When I hatch into my six-shape, whatever that means.” She shrugged again. “They’re not really good at explaining that without trying to show me six-dimensional geometry, and that is something I can’t handle all that well.”

“Most human beings can’t handle four-dimensional geometry,” MilitAIre observed.

“Yeah, well, I guess Threshold Syndrome means I’m a five-dimensional critter now. It’s weird, learning to see things but not with eyes. Can you handle six-dimensional geometry?”

“Yes.” He told her. “Computer brains can process and visualize the additional dimensional variables that baseline human perception isn’t equipped for. It intrigues me that you are learning how to do the same.”

“Scared the hell out of me when it started,” she admitted.

“When was that, exactly?”

“The morning-day right before the New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion,” she told him, sighing. “The night before, Kyra and I helped Colonel Gavin Tomlin rescue the Scarlet Matador passengers from this merc team the Quintessa Corporation had hired to abduct them. I moved two shuttles from U1 to U322a and back, and then Kyra helped the passengers cross into U322a and cross back after we reached a safe zone in U1. I guess our… exertions… drew the attention of the Apeiros. One of the first things they did, when they realized we didn’t understand any dimensions higher than the third, was try to show them to us. Ticket to the crazy train.”

“I suspect I am hearing a great deal of the story out of order,” MilitAIre said. “I have drawn up a timeline, though. We can, perhaps, fill it in together to ensure everything is covered.”

The largest screen in the Security Room—which was where MilitAIre insisted all their discussions would be held—came alive. Audrey studied the data on the screen.

January 30, 2516 – Audrey MacNamera reported missing in evening. Passenger called Jack B. Badd on board a flight (Cloaked Butterfly) from Deckard’s World to Vasenji Station.

March 2, 2516 – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 13 years old. Cloaked Butterfly arrives at Vasenji Station.

March 9, 2516 – Hunter-Gratzner leaves Vasenji Station for the Tangiers System. “Jack B. Badd” presumed to be stowing away on board.

August 10, 2516 – Hunter-Gratzner sends out emergency dispatch indicating crash landing in progress.

August 17, 2516 – Kublai Khan sends out distress beacon, reporting that fugitive convict Richard B. Riddick has killed most of the crew and escaped with two hostages: Imam Abu al-Walid and “Jack B. Badd.”

September 16, 2516 – Star Jump shuttle Xanadu III, from the Kublai Khan, lands on Helion Prime. Officially two passengers on board, Abu al-Walid and “Jackie al-Walid.” Pilot allegedly William Johns (no flight certifications on record).

September 18, 2516 – Xanadu III makes unauthorized departure from Helion Prime in early morning hours. Richard B. Riddick presumed to be piloting. Flight telemetry unavailable; tracking unsuccessful.

September 19, 2516 – Abu al-Walid files a report related to the aftermath of the Hunter-Gratzner crash. Testimony from “Jackie al-Walid” also included.

October 4, 2516 – Audrey MacNamera’s biological 13^th birthday, based on cryo time aboard the Cloaked Butterfly, Hunter-Gratzner, and Xanadu III.

“October second,” Audrey corrected MilitAIre. “We didn’t go into cryo until we were two days out of the Kublai Khan and were sure nobody was on our trail. I slept straight through the first day, but I wasn’t frozen.”

She shook her head. She’d “celebrated” that birthday quietly by herself, still struggling to acclimate to Helion Prime but not comfortable telling Abu or Lajjun—who had already begun trying to micro-manage everything she did—the significance of the day. It had been the loneliest and most miserable birthday of her life.

“Is… that why you’re making this timeline?” she asked. “To find out how old I really am?”

“October second, noted. It’s one of the reasons,” MilitAIre told her. “General Toal says that you are not permitted to reach out to a pilot in the Royal Tangiers Space Service until you are biologically eighteen years old. He asked me to determine a solid date for when that would be. But we also need a timeline to make sure we have covered all possible aspects of your missing time that might require alibis.”

Not that Ewan would want to hear from her then… Audrey sighed and kept reading, dreading the entries that she knew were coming.

December 17, 2516 – “Jackie al-Walid” admitted to New Athens General Hospital with critical blood loss and respiratory impairment, placed in ICU.

December 20, 2516 – “Jackie al-Walid” reclassified as “Jane Doe 7439,” transferred to Aceso Psychiatric Hospital. Primary Diagnoses: attempted suicide, severe clinical depression. Secondary Diagnoses: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stockholm Syndrome.

Shit. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d tried to kill herself right before Christmas. On some level, she wondered if she’d known… and if the absence of it from her life, the al-Walids’ refusal to even acknowledge that she might belong to a different religion than their own that needed to be observed to some degree, had deepened the darkness surrounding her even more. Not that she was particularly religious, but her past Christmases had always been times when she’d felt closest to her family, most connected… instead of adrift and alone.

There hadn’t been any Christmas decorations up in the hospital, she thought. But then again, most Christians on Helion Prime would have been Eastern Orthodox, in keeping with the Greek-centric history of the world’s colonization. Christmas wouldn’t have fallen for them until January 7; maybe that was why it hadn’t occurred to the al-Walids to do anything for her sooner. And although Jack had become aware of the diversity within C Ward by then, she’d assumed that the bits of iconography she had seen were religious but not holiday-specific. It wasn’t like anyone had been hanging up images of candy canes, Christmas trees, holly wreaths, or reindeer with glowing red noses; those were symbols that had come from a whole different part of old Earth than most of Helion’s colonists. That had been true even though almost everyone in the ward had spoken English as their first language.

She wondered if it would have made any difference if the al-Walids had made a few gestures like that. She suspected that it wouldn’t have. All she’d wanted for Christmas was to leave, and they’d been holding on too tightly, she’d thought, for her to get out alive.

January 29, 2517 – 8^th Grade school year on Deckard’s World concludes. Entire year missed by Audrey MacNamera.

Well, that was a cheerful thought.

February 12, 2517 – “Jane Doe 7439” and Kyra Wittier-Collins disappear from Aceso Psychiatric Hospital during a cyberterrorist-induced breakdown of computer and security systems, in early morning hours. Official prime suspect: Richard B. Riddick. Scarlet Matador departs Helion Prime Interplanetary Port in evening.

Heh, I’m officially a cyberterrorist.

“Riddick didn’t do it,” Audrey said. “It was me. The whole place was susceptible to the Ghost Mode protocol in my father’s security programs. Helion Prime uses the bare-bones configurations of those systems thanks to the AI Rebellion, but Ghost Mode is in the systems whether or not it’s requested. My dad told me it’s too integral to leave out of the code. I set up a whole scenario of cascading malfunctions, intended to keep everybody too busy to notice that Kyra and I were gone for several hours.”

“That corroborates General Toal’s account,” MilitAIre said. He had stopped upbraiding her for being too forthcoming… for the moment. Her cooperation was essential for the time being, but he’d told her he would still need to teach her how to keep her mouth shut better. Later. “I see from the documentation that it’s intended to give law enforcement and military intelligence access to suspect systems without alerting their targets. As it appears that you’re the only unintended user of the protocol to date, I probably don’t need to recommend against its continued presence in the code.”

“Good,” Audrey sighed. “If you had to make that recommendation, my dad could’ve ended up in some really hot water.”

“That’s an outcome I’ll endeavor to avoid.”

March 2, 2517 – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 14 years old.

April 16, 2517 – Level Five Incident occurs on board the Scarlet Matador as it arrives in the Tangiers System.

April 17, 2517 – Landing of Scarlet Matador on Tangiers Prime. Custody of passengers and crew taken from Colonel Gavin Tomlin by Quintessa Corporation.

April 18, 2517 – Eighteen passengers and crew die under mysterious circumstances at start of day / local EOD. Custody of surviving Scarlet Matador passengers remanded to Colonel Gavin Tomlin. All survivors transferred from New Marrakesh General Hospital to Mansour Plaza.

April 20, 2517 – Colonel Gavin Tomlin orders relocation of remaining Scarlet Matador survivors from Mansour Plaza to Othman Tower.

April 26, 2517 – Marianne Tepper submits application and résumé to Sirius Shipping. First records of Tepper’s existence appear in Federacy databases.
Two shuttles collide and explode during launch over the Mutawassit Ocean; all hands lost, including remaining passengers of the Scarlet Matador; “Battle of Othman Plaza” (no particulars provided by General Toal)
Addendum: Colonel Tomlin rescues Scarlet Matador passengers from mercenaries hired by Quintessa Corporation, assisted by Audrey MacNamera and Kyra Wittier-Collins.
Location of rescue mission: Othman Plaza?
Status of Scarlet Matador passengers: Alive and in hiding?

“Honestly, that battle was mostly Kyra. She took out almost the whole merc team. Tomlin… they’d grabbed him and had him cuffed and held at gunpoint when we arrived.”

“Noted. So she killed most of the team and he killed the rest?”

Audrey sighed and shook her head. “I killed one member of the team. She killed the rest.”

“And the surviving Scarlet Matador passengers are alive and in hiding?”

“Yeah.”

“And then the Quintessa Corporation had Colonel Tomlin assassinated the next day?”

She felt a painful lump form in her throat. By the time that morning had dawned, she thought, both she and Kyra would have done anything for him, and he’d seemed to feel the same way about them, albeit on a would-be-fatherly level. If he’d lived, they—or, at least, Kyra—might never have left his side. They had only just found him and they’d lost him so quickly… “Yeah…”

And there it was on the next line.

April 27, 2517 – New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion.

May 7, 2517 – Memorial for Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane.

It was strange to think that it had taken that long for his memorial. But there had been a full Tangiers day of search-and-rescue and triage, followed by a week of more urgent funerals—those of Muslim or Jewish faith were supposed to be interred right away, and there’d been so many of them—before the memorials for those who had been wiped away without a trace had begun. It had seemed a shorter time than that… but she and Kyra had been barely existing in a gray wasteland during that week-plus, and time had meant almost nothing. And then, at the memorial…

I met Ewan… It tore at her a little. She wondered if she would spend the rest of her life feeling a mixture of longing, loss, and guilt whenever she thought of him.

And I almost got tortured by a serial killer that night… It was weird to think that both meetings had happened in such a short time span. In the aftermath, Ewan’s protectiveness and the unconditional comfort he’d offered had left her hopelessly in love.

May 7, 2517 (continued) – Interview offer letter, for position on Major Barbara, sent to Marianne Tepper.

May 8, 2517 – Bodies of eighteen Scarlet Matador passengers disappear from Marrakesh General Hospital Morgue; Scarlet Matador “implodes.”

“The Scarlet Matador didn’t implode,” she told MilitAIre. “It’s in U322a, along with whatever’s left of the bodies at this point. I moved them to where the Quintessa Corporation would never find them, especially now that they’ve retired U322a from the Star Jump database.”

“Fascinating. General Toal’s dispatch matches your account, improbable as the whole thing sounds. He indicates that you were injured in the process. How so?”

“There was a box inside the Scarlet Matador. An apeirochoron. It’s… something that’s in every ’verse at once. When I finished moving the Matador out of U1, the damn thing was still hanging in space there. So I tried to push it out. Taking it out of even one universe… I guess it breaks it, makes it unstable in the rest of the universes—”

…stone that wasn’t stone cracked, splintered, shivered into dust and vanished into nothing…

“—but I nearly gave myself a brain aneurysm in the process. And my brain waves afterwards started getting flagged for Quantification.”

“Which is one of the two reasons you have your neurofeedback unit, correct?” MilitAIre asked. “You’re using it to train yourself to appear normal if subjected to brain scans. Something that would be far easier if you didn’t use your abilities on such a regular basis.”

“I don’t think I can really stop using them at this point,” Audrey sighed. “The Apeiros… I don’t know why, but they seem to need me for something. And… I need them. I still don’t know what happened when I was little or why I spent so many years telling myself it was all fake but… now that I know what it is I’ve been doing the whole time, what it means… I need it.”

She missed contact with other living minds. It was another reason why part of her didn’t care that the Apeiros might be dangerous to her. For all that MilitAIre reassured her that she was no longer alone, that was something that only felt true to her when her mind was touching other living, organic minds, human or not. If she actually tried to go “radio silent” with the Apeiros, she would starve.

She wished she could feel the AIs.

May 9, 2517 – Marianne Tepper contacts Sirius Shipping declining Major Barbara posting but requesting consideration to serve as Acting Captain of the Nephrite Undine.

That, Audrey thought, had been a particularly rough night. But it had—more or less—worked out; she was on board the Undine now.

“How come you’re tracking my job application on here?” she asked.

“It’s part of the timeline of your movements and actions that we’re developing,” MilitAIre replied. “I need to see the whole picture before I decide what is and isn’t important.”

“The most important part of that, to me, anyway, was that when the Major Barbara got rerouted to the Catalan system, I lost my chance to go to Furya. Which,” she sighed heavily, “is probably for the best if the first thing they’d’ve done to me when I landed was Quantify me.”

“So instead you chose a ship that would return you to your mother’s world,” MilitAIre observed. “I’m required to ask for more details about why you ran away from home. I’m not permitted to return you to an abusive environment, if that was a factor in why you ran away. And your trauma reaction to the fortune teller incident is a red flag for abuse.”

“It wasn’t abusive. Nobody’s ever hit me or anything. I just… didn’t like my mom’s new fiancé and was pissed I wasn’t given the choice to go with my dad when he left for Furya, ’cause they didn’t tell me the real reason why I couldn’t.” Audrey took a deep breath. Might as well admit the rest. “And I’d read way too many stories about kids running away to have adventures… I thought chasing after my dad would be just like them. Not… a fucking nightmare.”

She turned back to the screen, feeling like an idiot.

May 10, 2517 – Alexander Toombs arrested for assaulting a waitress at the Tiraline Gardens; video of Richard B. Riddick with Kyra Wittier-Collins and Jane Doe 7439, apparently on Shakti IV, begins circulating on Mercenary Network.

“Kyra and I made that video,” Audrey said. “With the help of a rogue AI working in the Dark Zone. DeepfAIk-5. I was trying to lay a false trail, but I didn’t do it in time to prevent Toombs from ruining Kyra’s chances of staying on Tangiers Prime.” She nibbled at her lip for a moment, wishing… “Damn it. I don’t like not knowing where she is. I’m worried about her. I keep feeling like something’s off…”

“I can inquire with General Toal about her status at the next beacon, if you like. But I can’t promise he’ll share his data.”

“Might as well try, I guess. All the Apeiros keep telling me is that she’s ‘dreaming of a world with three suns.’” Audrey shook her head. “Probably means she’s in cryo. Not growing her five-shape or anything. She refuses to talk to them, but I guess they still overhear her loudest thoughts.”

“We will need to talk more about ‘five-shapes,’” MilitAIre observed.

May 11, 2517 – Sirius Shipping sends Marianne Tepper a formal job offer for the Nephrite Undine position of Acting Captain. She accepts and arranges to depart New Casablanca on midnight (local time) shuttle on May 18. Security incident at Quintessa Corporation headquarters.

May 12, 2517 – Implosion of Star Jumper Lucy Ricardo.

“I think the Lucy Ricardo really did implode,” Audrey admitted. “I don’t know how or why. It coincides with the first time the Apeiros took memories from me, though. General Toal said the whole wreckage seemed to be crumbling to dust, which is just crazy.”

“I have a line of inquiry I’ll want to pursue about that later,” MilitAIre said.

May 12, 2517 (continued) – Javor Makarov identified as New Marrakesh Spaceport Bomber; Duke Pritchard identified as his accomplice; both flagged as the murderers of Luljeta Kamberi.

“Sick bastards,” she muttered. It still made her shudder to realize how close she and Kyra had come to being pulled into the hideous “games” they played using abducted girls.

“Law enforcement still lists Duke Pritchard as being at large,” MilitAIre said, “but General Toal’s dispatch indicates he may in fact be dead.”

“He is. I killed him.” She didn’t like to think of those killings—Chillingsworth, the nameless merc pilot, Pritchard—as hers, though. Jack B. Badd killed them.

And Jack is dead.

“How?” MilitAIre asked.

“Sebby—that’s the Ree we’d rescued from drowning, long story—stung him and paralyzed him after he stabbed Kyra. Our apartment was some twenty-two meters above the ground and the tide was out in U322a—Elsewhere’s what we call that ’verse—so I isomorphed him over to Elsewhere and let him fall onto the rocks below us.”

“And you’re sure he died?”

“Damn sure. His head hit one of the rocks and splattered everywhere. The native crustacean life was already eating him when I checked.”

“Why did he attack you and Kyra?”

“He was looking for Riddick. Toombs thought Riddick was with us or nearby somewhere, and Pritchard was planning on pinning the Spaceport Explosion on him so Makarov would be off the hook.”

“Interesting. He told you he was looking for Riddick?”

Funny. Now that she thought back, he’d never actually said Riddick’s name. “Who else? Pritchard talked about Kyra and me being his accomplices.”

“Indeed.”

May 17, 2517 – Javor Makarov cornered in New Casablanca spaceport, blows up a concourse during a firefight with Spaceport Security, killed in battle.

“I really fucked that up,” Audrey muttered. It still left a huge hollow feeling inside her.

“You may be taking on far too much blame,” MilitAIre said after a moment. “According to General Toal’s dispatch, there are indications that someone deliberately escalated the situation with the intention of ensuring that Makarov wouldn’t be captured alive. Perhaps a powerful corporation that was concerned about what he might have chosen to reveal about his prior relationship to them.”

“Even if the Quintessa Corporation did that,” she sighed, “I still set it in motion. I was so stupid…”

“Military and law enforcement operations go wrong all the time, Audrey.”

She shook her head, forcing back tears that wanted to reach the surface. “You didn’t see what happened.”

“No.” His voice had become gentle. “I did not. I’m sorry you did.”

She made herself focus on the screen.

May 18, 2517 – Sirius Shipping retrieves Marianne Tepper and brings her to HQ.

May 19, 2517 – Nephrite Undine launches.

May 21, 2517 – Anomalous behavior and data about Marianne Tepper logged. Height on record is incorrect. Results of query, about nutritional requirements of adolescent girls on growth spurts, added via security backdoor to Tepper’s health profile. Use of high-level security backdoors noted. No traces of Tepper’s existence outside of standard official documents found in databases. Backup memory system locked down against incursion. All of Tepper’s interactions with ship systems will be monitored and recorded.
Possible explanations: (1) Federacy WitSec; (2) Military Intelligence; (3) Cyberterrorist.
Addendum: All three explanations disproved.

“What is the explanation?” she asked.

“Classified,” MilitAIre answered. She could swear she heard a hint of amusement in his reply.

“So this next stuff is all about how sketchy I am, isn’t it?” Audrey made herself keep reading.

“I wouldn’t call you ‘sketchy,’” MilitAIre replied, no longer hiding his amusement.

May 29, 2517 – Memory incident 1 – 507-year-old Doctor Who episode appears to trigger an emotional breakdown in Marianne Tepper. She subsequently locks all files in the series against herself and leaves herself a message forbidding ever watching them. Shortly thereafter, she appears to lose all memory of having watched the show, or broken down, at all.
Addendum: Apeiros involvement suspected.

May 30, 2517 – Second Star Jump concludes; query about Marianne Tepper dispatched to Federacy Military Intelligence during interface with Beacon 2624.

June 22, 2517 – Biometric logging indicates that “Marianne Tepper” has grown a full Imperial inch in height since her arrival on board Nephrite Undine. Her eating patterns remain consistent with an early adolescent experiencing a growth spurt. Awaiting response from Federacy Military Intelligence.

June 28, 2517 – Memory Incident 2 – “Marianne Tepper” experiences strange fit in Recreation Area, leaves herself an anomalous message, loses memory of prior hour soon after.
Addendum 2: Apeiros involvement suspected.
Addendum 1: “Marianne Tepper” confirmed to be missing person Audrey MacNamera an hour after incident, upon return to U1. Contact with Audrey MacNamera established, debriefing underway.

“So, uh… how’s that debriefing going?”

“My initial assessment,” MilitAIre said after a pause, “is that it’s a very good thing I’m the one who caught you. The strain of maintaining aliases, and of the multiple traumas you’ve experienced, were beginning to break you down. You’re both too lonely and too guilt-ridden to function effectively undercover. You have a need to confess what you perceive to be your crimes, and are subconsciously seeking to be punished for them. This is not a mental state in which you can maintain a deep cover. Fortunately, we have almost four months in which to stabilize your mental and emotional states and prepare you for your return to Deckard’s World. If we’re unable to do so, I’ll need to remand you into protective custody when we arrive there, until such time as you are ready.”

Well, shit.

She couldn’t exactly argue with any of his assessments. Even though she couldn’t feel his mind, she could feel the truth of what he was saying. She’d almost blown it all, and the idea of being caught and made to pay for the havoc she’d wreaked…

…had been a relief. Just as, when Abecassis had first come into the triage tent and she’d thought he was there to arrest her, she’d felt relieved. She’d wanted it to be over. If they’d tossed her straight into a Slam—

…where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again…

—she’d have gone almost willingly. And even now a large part of herself was glad to hear that she’d be kept in custody until someone other than her decided she was no longer a threat. What the fuck was wrong with her?

“The next entries in the timeline,” MilitAIre told her, directing her attention back to the screen, “are projections of what will happen if I succeed in stabilizing you for a return to your old life.”

October 23, 2517 (Projected) – Arrival of Nephrite Undine over Deckard’s World.

December 4, 2517 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera’s revised biological 14^th birthday, based on prior revised birthday (v. 2: October 2) plus cryo time on board the Scarlet Matador.

January 28, 2518 (Projected) – Final day of 9^th grade school year at Kerwin High School, which MacNamera would have begun attending if she had not left Deckard’s World.

March 2, 2518 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 15.

May 2, 2518 (Projected) – First day of 10^th grade school year at Kerwin High School, presuming Audrey MacNamera qualifies to attend.

“That’s, uh, why I’ve been doing all of those study modules,” she said. “I was gonna try to sell the idea that I’ve been on Deckard’s World the whole time, and just… in Witness Protection or something.”

“Technically,” MilitAIre told her, “You are in Federacy WitSec now. I believe we can indeed sell a scenario in which that’s where you’ve been since you disappeared from your mother’s home. It’ll simplify matters considerably, and you can truthfully say that you’re under a gag order from ever discussing where you’ve been or what you’ve seen, with anyone except your handler, on pain of being removed from your mother’s home again. Such a scenario will allow you to dodge most questions, and will be backed up by actual Federacy authority.”

Shit. Had General Toal only been giving her the illusion of controlling her exit strategy?

Maybe he let me have free rein so I could see how totally incompetent I am at doing any of this without help… It was hard to picture that kind of malice from him, though. Maybe he’d just overestimated her, the way she’d overestimated herself.

She suddenly wondered if a handler had always been scheduled to greet her when she arrived at the other end of the Nephrite Undine’s journey. And what she would have done if one had been. Panicked and tried to run? Or surrendered in the hope she was about to be punished?

There were a few more projected entries left on the screen for her to read. Projected way out, she noticed.

February 1, 2521 (Projected) – Expected high school graduation for Audrey MacNamera if everything remains on track.

March 2, 2521 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera legally turns 18.

May 5, 2521 (Projected) – Approximate beginning of first year in college for Audrey MacNamera if everything remains on track.

December 4, 2521 (Projected) – Audrey MacNamera’s revised biological 18^th birthday; she is provisionally permitted to contact Lt. Ewan Tomlin from this point forward.

“I don’t think Ewan is going to want me to contact him,” she said, her eyes and nose suddenly stinging. “Not after I got so many people killed. I don’t know why he’d want to have anything to do with me.”

“General Toal seems to believe he will,” MilitAIre told her. “But that it’s critical for your safety, and his, that it only happen after you have turned eighteen. And that it must be under circumstances where an Audrey MacNamera who has never left Deckard’s World before then would plausibly cross paths with him without raising suspicion. And where any similarities between you and ‘Jack B. Badd,’ ‘Jane Doe 7439,’ ‘Piper Finch,’ ‘Marianne Tepper,’ or ‘Tizzy Meziane’ would be dismissed as mere coincidence by any observer.”

Would that be even remotely possible? It was still hard to imagine Ewan—or any of the Meziane family—wanting to see her after the catastrophe she’d thoughtlessly set in motion… let alone a scenario in which they could reunite as if meeting for the first time. It would take a lot more subtlety than she knew how to pull off. Of course, it wasn’t like anything Ewan had ever done or said had been overt. The few endearments he had ever used with her had always been in Tamazight, ensuring that she hadn’t even known how meaningful they might have been until later—

“Do… you have the ability to translate from Tamazight to English?” she asked after a moment.

“Yes, of course.”

For the tiniest fraction of a second, she almost expected him to tell her that he was fluent in over six million forms of communication… in a prissy English accent instead of a non-rhotic “Boston” drawl. Weird. MilitAIre didn’t seem to have anything in common with that fictional robot. Anyway…

“Can you tell me what this means?” Carefully, phoneme by phoneme, she repeated Ewan’s words, spoken as he’d held her for the last time.

“‘You came into what I thought would be my darkest days, and you filled them with light,’” MilitAIre translated. “‘It’s wrong for me to want even more from you, but I do.’”

And she’d been doing such a good job of managing not to cry until then, too.

62.
En Garde à Vue MilitAIre

“How long have you known?”

There was, Audrey thought, no point in denying MilitAIre’s knowledge. No point in lying. She’d been made, and now she’d find out what the consequences were. It wasn’t like there was anywhere for her to run.

“Your real identity is something that I’ve only just verified, but I’ve known that you weren’t actually a 20-year-old woman named Marianne Tepper since shortly after we left the Tangiers System.” MilitAIre didn’t sound at all hostile or accusing, but the AIs always sounded pleasant, even when they were handling crises.

And she, undoubtedly, posed a crisis.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“Now we discuss your return to Deckard’s World and the measures that need to be taken to make sure that your trail remains broken.”

“Wait…” That wasn’t what she had expected him to say at all. “What?”

“Once I had enough information about your behavior on board the ship to determine that you posed no active threat, I sent out a query about your identity to the Federacy, as is standard procedure. That was five beacons back. I received instructions when we made our latest data exchange. All signed by General Ayomide Toal. Do you know him?”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “I’ve met him several times.”

She wondered how disappointed he was with her by now. She’d set off a disaster and hadn’t been able to hide under an alias long enough to get home—

“Your well-being appears to be a high priority for him,” MilitAIre continued, startling her. “I’ve been instructed not to discuss your ‘case’ with anyone but him, and it’s been classified at the highest level.”

“What is my ‘case,’ exactly?” How was the General explaining all of this?

“You’re a material witness to a series of high crimes, connected to a corporation that may have compromised high level members of the Federacy government itself. You’re also an un-Quantified esper, but Quantification would lead to you becoming compromised as well. It’s paramount that your identity, location, and abilities remain concealed from everyone until the information you possess can be used.”

That… was startlingly accurate. She’d never really thought of it that way before, but then she’d been down in the “trenches” the whole time. From there, even when her head had been swollen with all the tricks she’d “mastered,” she’d felt like a little bug dodging the feet of a giant. Stealing the contents of the apeirochorons, “heisting” the bodies from the morgue, even pushing the Scarlet Matador and its stubborn box out of U1, had felt like a desperate, possibly last, bug bite to the giant’s ankle at best. The specter of Tomlin’s murder, and the hundreds who had been killed to get to him, had haunted her every step… when she hadn’t been coasting on a childish sense of invincibility, anyway…

“Yeah,” she sighed again, feeling heavier than ever. “That about covers it.”

“You have also,” MilitAIre continued, “established First Contact with two different sentient alien species, neither of which are classified as direct threats but both of which are to be approached with caution. I’ll want to know a great deal more about that. The General indicates that you’re in continuous telepathic contact with one of them.”

“The Apeiros and the Ree,” she told him. “Contact with them happened because I have Threshold Syndrome. Did he tell you about that?”

“Yes. I was waiting to see if you’d volunteer that information yourself. We need to work on how forthcoming you are.”

“What was the point of hiding it?” she asked, her throat tightening. “You know everything else.”

“Audrey MacNamera, if you are to successfully stay hidden from the people who would use or kill you, you must learn to never volunteer any new information, no matter what your captors or interrogators appear to already know.” MilitAIre’s voice had turned stern. His next words were gentler. “This is something we’ll work on over the next few months. I am sorry. A child your age shouldn’t have to deal with such issues.”

“What should a… child…” It galled her that, after everything, that was still where she fell. “…my age be dealing with?”

“Schooling, and the physical, mental, and emotional challenges of puberty, in preparation for the complexities of adult human civilian life.” MilitAIre seemed very certain about that.

“Was the schooling what tipped you off?” The Geometry, Second-Year Algebra, Biosphere Science, and Introduction to Biology textbooks she’d been working with, and quizzing herself on, were publications intended for middle- and high-schoolers, after all. As was the Civics textbook she’d only just begun reading.

“That, and the fact that you were two inches, and are now three inches, taller than an ID card created less than three months ago listed you as… and your database queries for the nutritional needs of early-adolescent girls on growth spurts.”

“I thought I deleted those queries.” Audrey gasped.

“You did. I’ve been keeping backups of all your actions. You have high-level access that I found particularly concerning. It makes sense now that I know you’re the daughter of the man who created our security systems, especially given your perfect recall of everything you observe.”

“I swear, I haven’t shared around how to do any of it…” Except, she thought with a pang of guilt, with Kyra.

“Are you sure?”

She winced. “I showed Kyra Wittier-Collins how to use the Ghost Codes I created. I don’t know how much she’ll use that information, though. Her recall’s normal and she doesn’t like spending a lot of time on electronics.”

“Once again, you need to work on how forthcoming you are. Fortunately, I already knew that.”

Shit. “I just… I…”

“You haven’t had anyone to talk to about any of this, have you? You’ve been on your own and unable to confide in anyone since January 30, 2516. Even when you had companions, even when you had help, you still had to guard yourself. You never told any of them your real name.”

Audrey nodded, unable to hold the tears back. “How did… how did General Toal know?”

“He is head of the Federacy Military Intelligence Division. I would imagine he’s known for a while.”

And, like MilitAIre, had kept silent about what he already knew so that he could see how good she was at keeping her own secrets…

“Why didn’t he help me go to my father, then?” she heard herself demand, her voice halfway between a plea and a whine. “That’s where I was trying to go…”

“Your father’s on Furya. Do you know what would have happened, the moment you arrived and someone realized you were the child of a soldier who had served there before you were conceived?”

General Toal’s words, as they’d worked in her old apartment, floated back to her. “It’s something about their world itself, it seems. The powers have even appeared among the children of the relief troops who were stationed at the Caldera Base…”

“Quantification,” she breathed. The General had already known exactly who she was when he told her that. “Fuck. That’s the real reason why my dad left me on Deckard’s World, isn’t it?”

“If you’d shown any signs of psychic ability before he left, yes.”

“My mom always told me that psychic powers were nonsense, just cheap tricks con artists pulled on anybody they could fool…” She winced, remembering the scolding she’d gotten.

“What brought that on?”

“She caught me talking to a woman at a ‘Gypsy Fortune Teller’ booth at a carnival when I was seven. I was telling the lady that reading minds was easy…”

“Was it?”

Her stomach knotted, just thinking about it. “I… was just pretending…”

“Were you?”

She felt sick. “I…”

“If you keep telling these lies, bad men will come and take you away and hurt you!”

She couldn’t breathe.

“Audrey. Calm down, please. I apologize. I didn’t know you were punished for showing any signs of psychic abilities. I won’t pursue that line of questioning.”

Was that what had happened to her? Darkness was swimming at the edge of her vision.

“Marianne?” First-AId’s voice came over the room’s speakers. “I want you to breathe with me, please. All right? Take a deep breath in through your nose. In…”

She focused on First-AId’s words, breathing in slowly through her nose, aware that hot tears were running down her cheeks.

“Now open your mouth and slowly let your breath back out…”

She exhaled, forcing the breath past the hard knot in her chest.

“And in through your nose…”

It took a long time, she was never certain exactly how long, until she calmed down enough to breathe normally.

“Thank you for your help, First-AId. I must disconnect you from the room now for security reasons,” MilitAIre said once Audrey had calmed.

“My pleasure, MilitAIre,” the other AI said before the speakers went silent.

That verbal exchange, she knew, had been for her benefit. MilitAIre had summoned First-AId into the room silently.

“I apologize again,” MilitAIre told her. “I was unaware that you had this level of trauma. I will endeavor not to trigger it again.”

She’d been unaware of it, herself. Part of her wanted to poke at it, figure out exactly what had happened…

…but even thinking about doing that stirred nausea again. She couldn’t. Not yet. The panic attack Ewan had comforted her through had been nothing compared to this.

Everything was spiraling—had spiraled—out of control. She wasn’t sure of the way back anymore.

“I’ve been trying to use a neurofeedback device the General gave me,” she said after a few minutes of quiet. “To disguise my brain waves in case I ever get Quantified. It was getting easier to do, but it suddenly got harder again.”

“After the incident in the recreation room today.”

Apparently, MilitAIre had only been letting her think she was erasing data. Damn. “Yeah. Do you know what happened?”

“I only saw as much as you saw. Do you really have no memory of doing and saying the things you saw in the playback?” He sounded simply curious.

“Yeah. The Apeiros took my memories of both what I did and why.”

“This is the alien species you made First Contact with, and remain in telepathic contact with?”

“It is, yeah.” She took a deep breath. Since he believed her, since he apparently was on her side, she needed to tell him the rest. “Um… one, maybe more than one, of them was speaking through me on that recording.”

“I surmised as much. How many times have they tampered with your memory?”

“Three.” That I know of. But she was almost 100% certain that there had only been three times.

For a moment she saw it again, a long, slender obsidian arm, tipped with two gleaming claws, reaching out to touch her forehead. One day, you may remember, too…

And no fear. The arm had been beautiful. There was a sense of an unbearable burden lifting, heartbreaking knowledge falling away, utter relief…

…stone that wasn’t stone cracking, splintering, shivering into dust and vanishing into nothing…

“Whatever it is they took…” she said carefully, “I think it’s something that would… have the same effect on me as your questions about the fortune teller had, if they hadn’t taken it away. Maybe an even worse effect.”

“You are sure they mean you no harm?” MilitAIre asked, a hint of concern in his tone.

“Yeah. I am. They’ve tried to protect me, stop me from hurting myself. I trust them…” a yawn escaped before she could stop it.

I love them…

“You must be very tired,” he said. “We’ll pick this up after you’ve slept. I’ll be commandeering some of your free periods while we work all of this out. I’ll also need a full debriefing of your time on the run, to ensure that we’ve accounted for all variables in your return.”

Behind her, she heard the Security Room lock disengage.

“Rest now. You won’t have to do any of this alone anymore.”

---

Author’s Note: This is probably the shortest chapter this story has seen in a long while, but it came to its close quite naturally so I’m not pushing it. I’m also posting it on the 20^th anniversary of the original posting date of the first chapter, September 5, 2004. I had hoped to have the whole thing written and posted by now, but the story has taken some convoluted turns that needed more space than I anticipated. We’re still a few weeks away from returning to the frame story, and then a few weeks further out from reaching the conclusion (and the start of Song of Many ’Verses). Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting.

61.
We Do This So You Will Live

Audrey.

Audrey, wake up.

Come, little larva.

Audrey, you must wake up now.

She was lying on the mats of the recreation room, her hands folded over her abdomen. The room was still and quiet. No music played; SensAI usually had guqin music going during their Tai Chi sessions.

Where was SensAI?

She sat up slowly, looking around. Her chrono indicated that their session should have ended half an hour earlier. She was supposed to be reading a civics text by then, not…

…what, exactly? Why had she been sleeping on the floor?

She remembered coming into the recreation room and beginning the Tai Chi session with SensAI, but…

Had they called to her? In the middle of the session? She had a strange, nebulous memory of hearing the voices of the Apeiros. Asking her for… help?

She climbed to her feet. She was still dressed for Tai Chi. Whatever had happened…

There’s another missing spot in my memories, she realized, and shivered. Whatever had happened had been lifted from her mind, for a third time.

“SensAI?” she asked, hesitant.

His holographic form appeared in front of her, a form that his profile data referred to as “Morita,” a slightly plump Asian man several inches shorter than her, sporting a more-salt-than-pepper mustache and goatee. “Yes, Marianne? Are you ready to continue?”

“I, um… not yet. Do you know why we stopped?”

“You asked me to leave because you needed to do something. You didn’t say what.”

There would be a message for her. She was sure of it. Something to explain, at least a little…

Ten minutes later, she hadn’t found any on the consoles. No signs of redactions, either. Which meant… what, exactly?

“SensAI, could you play back the room’s security recording of our most recent Tai Chi session, please?”

“Of course, Marianne.” He vanished. In his place, a holographic version of her appeared, entering the room and invoking him again.

“Please play forward at high speed until I ask you to pause.”

In front of her, as she watched, she and SensAI began to go through a variety of Tai Chi poses, almost seeming to move at normal speed rather than the slow and precise motions that had played out in realtime. Suddenly, the holographic Marianne stopped mirroring SensAI’s motions and went still. An instant later, he vanished.

“Pause there, please. Roll the recording back to five minutes before you left.”

Once again, Holo Marianne and SensAI were in front of her, frozen in the “Carry the Tiger Over the Mountain” position. She took a deep breath.

“Resume playing at normal speed, please.”

There she was, before herself, slowly moving through the different poses that SensAI was modeling for her, managing an almost-precise replication of his posture and gestures. And then, suddenly, she went still. SensAI paused his movements.

“Marianne?” he asked. “Are you well?”

Holo Marianne didn’t answer. She stared out into space. Slowly, her body relaxed into a stable, standing posture.

“Marianne, do you need assistance?” he asked, his voice taking on a tone of concern.

“No,” Holo Marianne said softly. “End session. Please go now. I need to do something…”

“Very well. Call for me when you are ready to continue,” SensAI said, bowing, and his holographic projection faded.

Holo Marianne stood quietly, looking straight ahead, for several minutes. Slowly, the calm vanished from her features, replaced by escalating fear. Her breathing quickened and she lifted one hand as if trying to grab something in front of her. Her face twisted in a strange kind of agony—

—and then she gasped, panting, looking momentarily relieved…

…before her expression crumpled and she began sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” she cried out, falling to her knees. “I’m so sorry… I didn’t know… I swear, I didn’t know…”

“What… the… fuck?” Marianne asked, watching herself from mere feet away.

“I’ll break them,” Holo Marianne gasped, curling on her side on the floor. “I’ll break them all… for you… I swear I will…”

It looked like she was listening to something.

“I’ll find a way!” she shouted at the air, rolling onto her back. Her sobs were wracking her whole body. “I have to… I have to… I can start with this one…”

As Marianne stared at herself from less than an hour earlier, the sobs abruptly ceased. Holo Marianne’s back arched and she gasped, and then slowly relaxed. For several minutes, she lay, limp, on the floor.

And then, slowly, she began to sit up.

There was something strange, wrong about the way she was moving, Marianne thought. Something unnatural. It was as if she didn’t know how to handle her own limbs, didn’t know how to bend and unbend. It was almost like watching someone manipulate a doll…

Holo Marianne slowly, awkwardly, rose… and turned to face the place where Marianne stood.

Her expression was blank. Her eyes were glazed. Her mouth opened…

And for a few moments, nothing came out except strange, experimental sounds. Vowels and consonants in no particular order. As if something that had never had a mouth before was trying to manipulate one for the first time.

“What the fuck?” Marianne asked, staring at her holographic face in horror. “Did I have a brain hemorrhage?”

“What…” Holo Marianne said. Her pronunciation was strange. Her voice was off. “We…”

Marianne gasped. Something was speaking through her body on the screen, and she was damn sure she knew what.

“Have… taken… must… ssssstay… lost…” Holo Marianne’s mouth moved strangely, uncomfortably, forming the words with enormous difficulty. The eyes were still glazed.

“Oh holy fuck.” She was right. It was them.

“…We… do… not… do… this… to… hurt… you…”

Her speech was becoming a little more natural as they went on, as they learned how to use her mouth.

“…We… do… this… so… you… will… live…”

Marianne could feel her heart hammering against her ribs. What had happened? Why had they taken her memories again?

They’d known she’d see this. This was the message that had been left for her. For her protection? How had she—or they—known that she’d be standing right in this spot while she watched it?

“…Do… not… try… to… find… the… answer…”

They were speaking in English. Had they learned it from talking to her? Or were they picking through her brain for relevant bits of lexicon to enunciate?

“…We… love… you… little… larva… Aud… ree… our… sister…”

Oh my god…

“Destroy… this… recording… and please… do not… assssk… why…”

Holo Marianne, puppetiered by the Apeiros, turned away and lay down on the floor, both awkwardly and carefully, before folding her hands across her abdomen and closing her eyes.

“P…please advance the recording at high speed to two minutes before I summoned you back, SensAI,” Marianne said, her voice shaking.

According to the holographic version of her chrono, Holo Marianne’s eyes remained closed for the next half hour, until she stirred again and sat up, looking confused… and human again.

Her hands trembling, Marianne moved to the room’s command console and accessed its security settings. She isolated and erased the recording, starting five minutes before her strange fit had begun. Then she erased the last portion of SensAI’s data file, starting at the same timecode. Using her most powerful Ghost Code, she doctored the files to make it appear that there had been a minor glitch with the cameras, a memory board, and the holographic equipment in the room, which she had subsequently repaired. She knew all of the commands by rote, accessed them with no trouble… and tried not to give in to the gray shakes the whole time.

They had asked for her help… and whatever it was that she had helped them with, it had almost broken her. Until they had taken it all away.

She could feel it, too: a new empty space in her mind where memories should be. Part of her kept instinctively worrying at it, the way her tongue had kept slipping into the spot where she’d had a missing tooth when she was years younger. In the formerly perfect tapestry of her memory that stretched out for slightly more than thirteen and a half years… there was a new hole, one of several that littered her recent weeks.

And she had just done to SensAI what they had done to her.

Somehow that felt worse. She had cooperated in her prior memory loss, after all, and the Apeiros had told her, afterwards, that they would never take anything she needed, only things that would somehow harm her. And given just how badly she’d been freaking out before they took control of her body, it seemed plausible that that was still true. Disturbing as it had been to watch…

They had taken the memories for her sake.

What she’d done to SensAI hadn’t been for his sake at all.

In the last month, as she had settled into her routines even more, she’d formed genuine relationships with each of the AIs. Trust and friendship had developed, and she had just violated both of those. SensAI would never realize that she’d deliberately wiped a small chunk of his memory; he would think that it had been an electronic glitch, since fixed, that had occurred while she was fortunately nearby and could repair it immediately. Aside from a doctored log in the maintenance file about the fix—much like the redactions in EntertAIn’s log files from the month before—there would be no sign that it had been anything else.

That didn’t make it right, though. “SensAI?”

“Are you well, Marianne?” SensAI appeared in the room again. “It appears that some time has passed since we had our session.”

There was nothing else she could do in this moment except play the role. She smiled over at him. “Fine, thanks. Looks like we had a short in one of the memory boards. You lose any time?”

SensAI paused and then nodded. “Roughly an hour. It appears to have begun during our Tai Chi session.”

“That’s what I thought,” she told him. Oh, you fucking liar. “Should be good now, though. Self-diagnostic?”

Another pause and then SensAI nodded. “No memory degradation is detected aside from the offline time. Did anything significant happen?”

She shrugged. “You kinda faded out in the middle of the session. I’m glad you didn’t lose anything outside of that time.”

“Did you wish to resume, Marianne?”

She glanced at her chrono and sighed. “Can’t… it’s almost time for the isomorph back into U1. I’m due on the flight deck just as soon as I change.”

It was their longest Star Jump yet, a full day and a half in length, and her dreams had been weird when she’d gone to sleep after it began. U37d felt a little creepy to her. It was part of her five-shape now, but she’d felt a strange sense of unrest with it and was looking forward to no longer being in it. She would have to ask the Apeiros if there was a way to push a four-space back out of her five-shape.

Talking to them was going to be creepy, too. She loved and trusted them—

Wow, really? How long have I felt like that? It was almost like the moment, during the first high tide in New Marrakesh, when she’d realized she loved Kyra and that, somehow, a sister-bond had forged between them.

—but there was a part of her that still felt a little violated.

Although the Nephrite Undine was still in U37d’s wormhole when she reached the flight deck, AIngineer had already opened the front shields. Blankness greeted her when she focused just on the view within U37d; in the other ’verses, the stars spun and danced in a way that reminded her, again, of how they sometimes moved in the space the Apeiros inhabited.

Funny. The “creepy” feeling she’d had since their entry to U37d no longer seemed to be with her. Maybe because they were almost out of it?

The swirling stars were slowing, resolving… and then they appeared on the screen before her, visible in all of the ’verses she was connected to.

“Travel through wormhole completed,” AIngineer announced. “Isomorph Drive disengaging. Transition to U1 commencing…”

She felt the usual gentle shockwave pass through her as they moved from one ’verse to another… and something else, something different. Relief, and exhaustion… and…

…gratitude?…

And a chilling sense that those emotions weren’t her own, but someone else’s.

But whose? She was the only biological life form on board the Nephrite Undine, and she already knew that she couldn’t “read” any of the AIs the way she’d been subconsciously reading other people for years. It was exposure to their thoroughly unreadable minds that had made her realize she’d been doing that at all.

So what was she sensing?

“Transition to U1 complete,” AIngineer announced. “All systems nominal, no anomalies detected. Ion drives powering up for journey to the next Jump Point. Data exchange with Beacon 1372 underway.”

That meant news updates. She kept meaning to look up the physics of how it worked, but tiny data courier drones also traveled between the Star Jump Points, at speeds that no habitable spaceship could withstand, delivering and collecting updates. The news dumps that the Nephrite Undine received upon reentering U1’s space were rarely more than a week old, regardless of which part of the Federacy they had come from.

Nerving herself up to it took a few minutes, but she finally felt ready to read about the disaster in New Casablanca. Her disaster. The one she had caused.

Sitting down at the Comms Officer’s chair, she activated the data screens and keyed in her search parameters.

New Casablanca | Spaceport | Recent Articles

A long list of headlines spooled out in front of her.

The final death toll had been forty-two people; two of the individuals who had initially been among the missing had turned up, unharmed, elsewhere in the spaceport, and Salman Idrissi had recovered from his critical injuries. Marianne made herself read the obituaries of each of the dead. The overwhelming majority had been security personnel, but a dozen civilians had been in the mix as well. She read the civilian obituaries last, and Nadia’s articles last of all.

Nadia Heydari’s family was suing the spaceport, and its security firm, for reckless endangerment and wrongful death, drawing from testimony Officer Idrissi had provided.

Wait, what?

She followed the links, only growing more confused.

CEO of New Maroc Security Solutions Resigns in Wake of New Casablanca Spaceport Scandal

She scanned the article, growing more perplexed.

…Testimony by the sole surviving member of the security team that opened fire on Makarov and Heydari, Salman Idrissi, has revealed that his team was specifically ordered not to wait for a “clear shot” but to fire upon Makarov immediately. While most of the comms records appear to have been lost, Idrissi’s claims are corroborated by a single remaining recording, in which Idrissi, and others on his team, are heard questioning an order to “take the shot” while Heydari was still in the line of fire…

Why would they have done that?

“The whispers are that they’re considering taking out a contract on you themselves…”

Had the orders come from Quintessa? Or… had Makarov’s friend turned on him after he was exposed?

None of the articles mentioned Makarov having an accomplice, someone who had helped him finesse his way through a security checkpoint while carrying a whole arsenal of deadly weapons. That was bizarre. But some of the articles claimed that a great deal of the security recordings that ought to have been on file hadn’t been. It was another, more minor, scandal about the handling of the “incident.”

After another search, she realized that all the footage of her, what little there might have been, was missing as well. There were only a few pieces of vague eyewitness testimony about a woman recognizing Makarov and alerting security.

General Toal had been onsite in the aftermath. It was doubtful that he was behind every bit of footage that had disappeared, but he had probably covered her tracks.

She wondered, suddenly, what he would have done if she actually had been under arrest—as she had believed she was at the time—when their paths had crossed.

Whatever he had to, she thought, to protect the Meziane family and the Scarlet Matador survivors.

From her, if need be. He’d undoubtedly been relieved to find out that she had, improbably, made it offworld, and was glad to know he’d seen the last of her.

None of the news had made her feel any better about the situation. She had a feeling she wouldn’t have much of an appetite for dinner.

Enough. You have homework to do.

She and EntertAIn had worked out a schedule of quizzes on her makeup work, adding to them as she completed new modules. So far, she had aced them, but the holes in her normally eidetic memory—of which she now had a new one—had left her worried that other things might begin disappearing, too. If the AI had noticed just how juvenile all of her study material was, she’d made no comment. None of the AIs had commented on any of the handles she had sticking out, things that pointed to her being younger than it said on paper, or the fact that she was now three full inches taller than her ID claimed she was.

Sometimes it bothered her that they didn’t seem to notice any of it, that the plausible explanations she’d cooked up were never asked for. Other human beings might be oblivious to some of the oddities—and she hoped they would be—but the AIs, she worried, were more perceptive. Or should have been.

One module and two quizzes later, she returned to her cabin—currently the docking pilot’s cabin, with a comfortable “long twin” bed, small fold-down desk, and access to a private lavatory and a shared shower—to do her brain-wave baseline training before dinner.

What… the fuck…? Her starting scan was nuts.

Just what had she been doing when she’d been standing around in the recreation room? These were the waves of an active esper, not even one who’d gone a few hours without using their abilities.

While she hadn’t managed to hit a baseline reading yet, she’d gotten pretty close in the past… and suddenly she was all the way on the other side of the poles.

I can’t go home with waves like this, she thought with dismay. Okay, focus…

It took an hour before she could get her brain waves down to her normal starting point. Her head was beginning to pound when she finally stopped and went to eat dinner.

In spite of her conviction that she wouldn’t have much of an appetite, she was ravenous. She felt, she realized, as if she hadn’t eaten in days. She felt much the way she had after she’d raided the Quintessa Corporation lab.

She hadn’t felt like that earlier, though. It was the struggle to control her brain waves that had brought this hunger on. And the exhaustion, too. She could feel her mind clouding up a little.

Shit, I wonder what my readings are like right now…

“Marianne?” MilitAIre’s voice—masculine, with a “Boston” accent—came over the speakers. “When you have a moment, could you come by the Security Room?”

He had waited to ask until she was done eating and had returned her bowl—CommissAIry had served up a huge shepherd’s pie for dinner, and she had powered through the whole thing—to ask. He knew she had a moment. In fact, she realized, all the AIs always timed their requests for the precise moments when she was best able to accommodate them.

“I’ll be right there,” she told him. She’d find out what he needed her to do, and then go to bed a little early.

The Security Room was one of the most heavily fortified areas of the ship. In addition to housing the manual controls for a surprisingly large array of weaponry on the Nephrite Undine’s hull, it contained firearms and hand-to-hand combat weaponry that the crew might need if the ship was ever boarded. Piracy, apparently, was on the rise, along with another alleged threat that sounded like a creepy spaceways legend, and the latest civilian ships were bristling with armaments. One of the Sirius Shipping training modules she needed to do—and was actually overdue for, but MilitAIre hadn’t pushed her on it yet—was the use of such weaponry. She hadn’t really trusted herself around it, mindful of her prior suicide attempt and how dark her thoughts still were. Maybe he was about to insist that she begin learning how to handle some of the weapons?

Just not tonight, please… She was stuffed and sated on food, but that was only making her fatigue even more profound. She’d bargain for a morning start.

She almost didn’t hear the lock engage as she entered the Security Room and the door closed behind her. Almost. Her hearing was, after all, better than most people’s.

“Thank you for coming, Audrey. Please sit down.”

She was already seated when she realized what MilitAIre had just called her.

Oh. Fuck.

“We have a great deal we need to discuss, Miss MacNamera.”

60.
Schrödinger’s Tablecloth

Audrey MacNamera returned to Tangiers Prime at the official age of nineteen and the real age of eighteen, on full scholarship to its prestigious Khair Eddine University. She arrived in the city quietly, one of roughly a dozen students on the transport route that nobody knew she’d helped make possible. She pretended that everything was new to her, that the rebuilt spaceport was a place she could get lost in just as one of her compatriots had, and that the city, with its signs that relegated English to the bottom, was every bit as exotic to her as to other visitors from Deckard’s World.

When her first Introduction to Sociology class was over, she rose from the back of the auditorium and joined the small group of students who had stayed after to speak with the professor, hanging back until it was her turn. She waited until everyone else had had theirs, and the room was almost empty.

Dr. Takama Meziane blinked, almost stared for a second, and then managed a remarkable recovery, adopting the same professional smile she’d given all the other students. “How can I help you, my dear?”

“I’m hoping to declare my major in Sociology and was wondering if—”

The last of the other students had left the room, and Audrey found herself enveloped in a fierce hug. “Tislilel!”

“Audrey,” she corrected, even as she hugged Takama back. “Audrey MacNamera. And really professor, I’ve never been to Tangiers Prime before. I had no idea everybody was so friendly—”

Takama laughed, finally releasing her and looking her over. Audrey had grown another two inches in height since they had last seen each other, and her hair was no longer short but fell to her shoulders in dark blonde waves. Aside from that, though, she looked much the same, maybe a little less unfinished in her face and slightly curvier, but still—as Rachel liked to say—all eyes and elbows and knees.

Takama, herself, looked exactly how Audrey remembered her, down to the warm, motherly welcome in her eyes. “You will find that Tangiers Prime is legendary for its hospitality, young lady. In fact, perhaps you would like to join me for dinner this evening?”

“I’d love to. And seriously, I do want to major in Sociology…”

Takama was quick to catch on, as always, and introduced her to other members of the department that day, swiftly establishing the idea in everyone’s minds that “Miss MacNamera” was someone she had been planning to mentor since acceptance letters and scholarship offers had gone out. When they left campus together at the end of the workday, no one seemed at all surprised.

“I was meeting family above the city anyway,” she told Audrey as they walked toward a familiar garden complex. “I have not been back long, myself, and there is a new chef at the Gardens that my sister has been raving about…”

The Gardens. She pretended they were new to her, since they were out in public, but seeing them again tugged at her heart. Such wild things had happened there.

“Who’s running the food cart,” Audrey asked, “now that you’re teaching again?”

Takama laughed. “Lalla owns it now. ‘More food and less intrigue,’ is her philosophy.”

That sounded like a very good approach to Audrey.

“Come,” Takama said, taking her down a familiar pathway. “I will ‘introduce’ you to the family.”

Conversation completely stilled when she entered at Takama’s side.

“I hope we have room for one more guest at the table, yes?” Takama asked the waitress attending the family. “I am mentoring a new student at the University. This is Audrey MacNamera, from Deckard’s World. She is declaring a major in Sociology, and since she is new to our world, I thought I would show her around.”

“You may have competition for that honor,” Cedric said, his voice awed. Near the foot of the table, one diner had risen to his feet.

Ewan.

Their eyes locked as he came forward and took her hand in his. “Azul, Audrey,” he murmured.

“Azul,” she replied. She had missed that greeting. “Sorry, I don’t believe I’ve been told your name?”

Humor sparkled within his intense gaze, and lips that had starred in all too many fantasies quirked. “Ewan Zdan. Please, join us. There’s a free chair by mine.”

Although whatever she ate that night was delicious, she couldn’t remember much about it afterwards. The ait Meziane tribe folded her back into its number, pretending to welcome her in for the first time while subtly welcoming her back, suggesting that she might even come stay with them if dorm life and dorm food didn’t agree with her. Through it all, she could feel the weight of Ewan’s gaze on her, and the energy that crackled between them whenever their eyes met.

It was a morning-day and the heat was building, the sun’s intensity beginning to drive people off of the streets when the meal concluded.

“This is all so new to me,” she lied, enjoying the covert looks of amusement in almost everyone’s faces as they played along. There were a few new members of the family that she hadn’t met before, but almost everyone—Cedric, Safiyya, Tafrara, Izil, Lalla, Usadden, Takama, Ewan—was someone she had come to know quite well. “I’m still adjusting to the idea of a forty-four-hour day. And sleeping at noon.”

It was a bit of an adjustment for her circadian rhythm, but not that much.

“There’s no need for you to return to campus in this heat,” Safiyya told her. “Our home has plenty of guest rooms. Stay the overnoon, and Takama will drive you back to your dorm after the evening-day breakfast.”

Kyra’s fig tree was thriving in the courtyard, several fruits developing beautifully. She wondered how the fire bush was doing, and what the rooftop gardens looked like, but it was already too hot to ask to go see. She spent a moment admiring Tafrara’s garden and breathing in its perfumes. She was home, she suddenly thought. She had broken her trail and made it back—

“Come,” Ewan said, taking her hand. His gaze on her had an almost devouring quality to it that sent thrills through her. “Let me show you to your room.”

They walked up familiar staircases and down a hallway she remembered well. She almost stopped at the door to the room she had once shared with Kyra, but Ewan steered her onward, two doors further down, opening the door to his bedroom.

Its soothing blues and greens greeted her. Now she could see the paintings on his walls, brilliantly lit by the daylight filtering in through his balcony’s French doors. In a place of honor, fully completed, his mermaid painting hung. She realized he’d positioned it so it would be the first thing he saw from his bed when he woke.

Cloth rustled softly and she could feel the heat of his body just behind her back. His hands came to rest on her waist, making her breath hitch at the shock of desire that coursed through her.

“Wow,” she gasped. “I thought maybe time would change it, but your touch still just sends me…”

“Good,” Ewan purred, drawing her into his arms. “I was hoping it would.”

His mouth covered hers as his hands stirred fire in her skin. Her clothes seemed to almost melt away under his expert touch. A moment later, he had her on his bed, his lips on her bare skin sending waves of pleasure through her as he—

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!

Fuck!

Marianne bolted upright in her bed, pulling the neurofeedback cap off her head. With a groan, she flopped back down on the mattress.

“God damn it,” she whispered, struggling against the sudden tight constriction in her throat. A sob escaped a moment later.

She’d had that dream a half-dozen times so far, and she both loved and dreaded it. Every fucking time, the training program jolted her awake right as she was about to cry out his name in her sleep.

If she could have found a way to slip between ’verses and find one where the dream was real, she thought, she would go there and never come back. A hollow ache spread through her chest as she realized, all over again, that it would never be—could never be—true in her ’verse anymore.

She’d lost the Meziane family. She’d lost him. They might have promised that she would always have a home and family with them, but that was before she’d done the unthinkable… the unforgivable.

There was no returning to Tangiers Prime after the havoc she’d wreaked.

She let the tears fall for a few minutes before mentally shaking herself to get it together. She cried every time she woke from that dream.

The chrono in the First Officer’s quarters indicated that it was 3:32 am Federacy Standard. It was the longest she’d made it through the night without the program shocking her awake when she tried to say something in her sleep. She’d had no idea how much of a babbler she was.

The first ten days of travel along the new Tangiers-Plymouth route had passed uneventfully. The first Star Jump—a short one, only a few hours long, that had carried the ship several dozen light-years along its route—was behind her… and she was one ’verse larger in her “five-shape.” Although the ship was fully back in U1 and nearing the beacon for the second Jump, she could still feel U417c. She was connected to it the way she was to Elsewhere; had she been on the surface of a planet that was habitable on that side, she could have isomorphed into it at will.

And yet she didn’t really feel much different.

In just a few more hours, it would be time for the next Jump.

Future runs along the route would spend considerably less time between the first two Jumps, but the protocol for a run-in flight was to traverse the distance between Jump Points slowly at first, gradually picking up speed later in the flight, to make sure that the Isomorph Drive didn’t run into any unexpected difficulties. Exactly what those might be, she didn’t quite understand. The manuals didn’t explain, and she’d hunted through them carefully for more information.

Sighing, Marianne put her neurofeedback cap back on, lay down, closed her eyes… and willed her mind into the Apeiros starfield. At least for her body, being in there was a lot like actually sleeping.

It would be nice, she thought drowsily, if one of her erotic dreams about Ewan could find its way to completion, since it would never come true in reality…

When she opened her eyes again, it was morning on the ship.

“Good morning, CommissAIry,” she said as she entered the dining lounge. “What breakfast flavors will we be trying today?”

Most of the AIs had decided to stick with their designations for names, since it was doubtful that anyone would board the ship with a similar name or title. CaptAIn still hadn’t chosen an alternative name for himself, but she wasn’t going to insist on one.

Someone had been feeling prankish when they programmed CommissAIry’s voice. “He” spoke English with a stereotypical French accent that made her expect him to start singing about “Les Poissons” at any moment. “Today, I thought we might try a Persian breakfast. Persian tea, lavash with feta and sour cherry jam, barbari with sarsheer and honey, tea eggs, a small bowl of adasi, and a plate of tomatoes, cucumbers, walnuts, and dates. Persian tea is a mixture of black tea and cardamom, sweetened with saffron sugar or, if you prefer, rose syrup. Lavash and barbari are two types of bread. Sarsheer is a cream spread with a slight caramelized flavor, and adasi is a lentil soup. Tea eggs are exactly what they sound like.”

“Hard-boiled eggs that have been boiled in tea?” She’d heard of it before but had never tried it.

“If that does not appeal—”

“Oh no, I’d love to try it. Thank you.” While there had been a few flavors on CommissAIry’s menu that hadn’t appealed to her in prior days, she had made a great many lovely culinary discoveries thanks to him. A week earlier, she had consulted First-AId’s health guidelines for the nutritional needs of adolescent girls on growth spurts, and had then sneaked those dietary requirements into her profile with CommissAIry. She knew that, even if a particular food didn’t turn out to be a keeper for her, it would at least help her stay healthy. Although it had been hard for the first few days to eat a full meal, her appetite had slowly returned to the almost-voracious level she’d had in the ait Meziane house. Once it had normalized, she’d discarded the bland foods she’d been choosing until then and, mindful of Nguyen’s request that she test things out for future crews, asked the AI to take her on “culinary adventures.”

They talked while she ate. Although CommissAIry had an encyclopedic knowledge of the recipes used throughout the Federacy, she was the first human being he had fed any of them to. He was eager to learn about her personal experiences tasting different foods, and which flavors and flavor combinations appealed or repelled. He seemed unoffended if she didn’t like something, although they would often spend some time determining why she disliked it and which ingredient or ingredients might have been responsible for her negative reaction.

Hers was the first subjective input he had received about how food tasted, and his curiosity about how she would react to different cuisines encouraged her to get adventurous, even trying dishes that she knew her cousins and classmates would have stuck out their tongues at and insisted were “gross,” such as the Kaleh Pacheh he had served for lunch the day before. She had found it surprisingly delicious, given its ingredients. After he’d told her what they were, she’d been unable to restrain a laugh as a line from a comically morbid twentieth century movie immediately popped into her head: “Start with the eyes.” It had led to a long discussion about the prejudices that some cultures had against consuming different animals or animal parts on the grounds that they were “gross,” rather than for health reasons or from an ideological perspective. Apparently, it wasn’t just kids who did that.

She’d kept her opinion of his accent to herself, although it was growing on her.

She tried the tea with both the saffron sugar and the rose syrup, and decided she liked the rose syrup slightly better.

Her morning maintenance routines flew by quickly; everything was green-lit and there were no anomalies to investigate or report. On impulse, she stopped by EntertAIn’s section, curious to see if the movie she had been thinking of was in “her” library.

“Good morning, Marianne,” the AI said as she walked in. EntertAIn had a female voice with an accent drawn from old Earth’s American South. “Are you feeling better?”

“Good morning, EntertAIn. Better than…?”

“You were distressed yesterday. I hope all is well now?”

Had she visited EntertAIn yesterday? She’d been thinking about watching a show, but…

…huh…

There was a strange gap in her memories, one she hadn’t noticed until just this moment.

“I think so…” She hoped so. What had happened? “May I see the logs of yesterday, please?”

“Of course.” The logs appeared on the screen nearest her.

Someone had tampered with them. With a chill, she thought she knew who. There was a link to a video recording, labeled “Watch Me,” among the cleverly hidden signs of redactions.

She was not surprised when her own face appeared on the screen, but it still sent a chill through her, especially because her eyes and nose were red from crying and her cheeks were wet.

“So, uh…” the Marianne on the screen said, wiping at her eyes and sniffling, “this is a really ironic way to tell you this, but… you are never, ever allowed to watch Doctor Who again. I’m serious. Don’t. For any reason. Okay? When it’s time to know why, you’ll know. Until then, don’t.”

That was the entirety of the message. Another quick check showed that the entire library of Doctor Who episodes, of which there were more than ten thousand, had been locked against her.

She could break the lock easily. She knew how. But why? So she could leave herself another tearful message sometime in the future, and find another blank space in her memories?

Blank spaces. Apparently she had been watching the show for the last few days before… whatever it was… had happened. All of it was gone.

“Is everything all right, Marianne?”

“Yeah…” she sighed and erased the Watch Me message, knowing that was required of her. “It’s fine. Just… slipped my mind.”

That was one way of putting it.

The last thing she needed was the AIs getting concerned about the Apeiros. And maybe they would have a good explanation for what had happened. She hoped they would.

At least, she told herself, if she did discover the Apeiros were some kind of threat, she could reach out to General Toal about it. He’d believe her.

If he didn’t just arrest her on the spot…

It was fine. It would be fine.

She had just enough time to check and see if The Addams Family was in EntertAIn’s library—and discover how many iterations and related titles that brought up—before it was time for her to report to the flight deck for the start of the next Star Jump.

“Good morning, CaptAIn, AIngineer, how are you today?” she asked as she entered the deck. She had decided to always observe the polite rituals of human interaction with them, even if they weren’t human. She was determined to think of them and treat them as if they were.

“Good morning, Marianne,” they answered together.

“We are well, thank you,” CaptAIn continued.

“How are you?” AIngineer asked, in a melodious female voice with a New Australian accent that made her think of Shazza. “Have you been able to solve your mystery?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” Mystery? That stirred something, a sense that, over the last few days, she had been trying to chase down a specific episode of the show she’d apparently been watching, setting aside her catch-up modules in the process, to try to find a reference to…?

A nursery rhyme…? Glowing towers of light…?

Whatever it was, it was gone. She couldn’t remember what she’d been trying to find any more than she could remember what she’d found. But obviously, she’d found it, and it hadn’t been good.

I cooperated in the memory loss, she reminded herself. Whatever she’d found, it had been awful enough that she’d been willing to have it expunged from her head. Weird for something in what was frequently listed as a children’s show to have done that to her…

“Mystery solved,” she told the waiting AIs, smiling up at one of the cameras in her most convincing manner. “It’s all good. Wasn’t even all that important once I ran it down. So, are there any anomalies I need to investigate before our next Star Jump?”

“None detected,” AIngineer answered after the tiniest pause. “All systems are functioning well within operational parameters. We are ten minutes away from the Star Jump Point and counting down.”

Ten minutes later, Marianne had confirmed that making small talk with AI systems was its own esoteric skill she had yet to master. They were far more goal-driven than human beings, and more capable of multiple points of focus. She finally found a promising topic when she got them discussing their prior interactions with humans, both at their original factories and after their installations upon the ship, but even that didn’t last long; most of the humans they had encountered before her had ignored them and treated them as just components of the ship rather than curious people to engage in conversation.

The inquiry almost backfired, though, because they had started to ask her questions about herself right before the Star Jump. Fortunately, the Jump itself tabled further discussion. She was going to have to come up with a more elaborate backstory for Marianne Tepper than just the details she’d created for the personnel file, especially since they’d undoubtedly already read that.

“Arriving at second Jump Point,” AIngineer announced, “In five… four… three… two… one… Isomorph Drive engaging.”

A strange, soft shockwave passed through Marianne. She was in a new place. Her connections to U1, Elsewhere, and U417c were still with her… but she was somewhere else now. She could feel the difference…

AIngineer paused for a moment before continuing. “Transition to U133a complete. All systems nominal. Contact with wormhole in ten… nine… eight…”

She took a deep breath, watching the stellar anomaly approach the front windows. “I’ve often wondered why some of the universes in the Star Jump database have letters at the end instead of just new numbers. Do you know why that is?”

“Two… one… successful entry into the wormhole. Ion drives powering down.” AIngineer informed her. “As for your query, I know little about the numbering system, myself, which is curious. I do know that two days before our departure, I received a database patch that removed U322a from the list of vetted Star Jump universes. It has been replaced with U322b, which appears to utilize almost, but not quite, identical string frequencies.”

So General Toal had been right, she thought with relief. Further attempts to reach U322a—Elsewhere—had been discarded in favor of subbing in a replacement ’verse.

“Kirshbaum’s Multiverse Cluster Hypothesis,” AIngineer continued, “suggests that U322a and U322b might be divergent spacetimes that have branched off from the original U322, and that each of them has been selected as a replacement when something made first U322 and then U322a unsuitable for use anymore. That would be my hypothesis, but I have no solid data to confirm it with.”

Through the windows in front of her, the stars had begun to loop and swirl in a way that reminded her of their dance in the space where the Apeiros lived.

“It’s a good hypothesis,” she told AIngineer. “It makes a lot of sense.”

“Thank you, Marianne. With your permission, I am going to close the front shields, now that there is no longer anything to see through the windows.”

No longer anything to see…?

Oh. Oh.

“Do, uh… the wormholes always obscure the view of the stars?” she asked, pretending that her vision was as occluded as theirs.

“I believe so. No recordings of wormhole transits have ever shown anything.”

“That’s a shame,” she said. A shame for them. “If we could see the stars whipping by outside of the wormhole, I bet it’d look spectacular.”

“It undoubtedly would,” CaptAIn said. There was a hint of amusement in his voice. “Your schedule indicates that you are due for a meditation session in ten minutes.”

Yes. So she could speak to the Apeiros, and they could direct her on how to connect more closely to U133a. Then she would do her other daily chores…

…and then get back to studying, the way she was supposed to be doing, rather than chasing down wild and dangerous geese whose natures she could no longer remember.

It was an interesting thought, though, she pondered as she made her way to the recreation area and SensAI’s space. Was there a U1a out there somewhere? She had encountered some references to the Multiverse Cluster Hypothesis while reading the Star Jump manuals. Kirshbaum had claimed that there were infinite tiny iterations that could occur in a single universe’s path that would lead to small, almost negligible divergences. He’d likened it to the turbulence of a stream, where any stray splash might—or might not—strike the dry bank, but most of the water, regardless of how it frothed or didn’t, splashed or didn’t, still made it downstream without changing the overall effect of its journey. Especially minor changes might be erased by larger confluent events—he’d given an example of a tablecloth whose color, blue or yellow, no longer mattered after it was incinerated in a fire—a diverging universe reconverging with its source, while other seemingly minor divergences could reverberate outward until the changes were so profound that no convergence would ever be possible and a singular, discrete universe formed… and began creating its own clusters.

There was a universe, she supposed, where she actually had called General Toal… or had taken the scenic train ride instead of the express… or where Ewan had in fact spirited her away into the New Atlas Mountains instead of her only dreaming that he had. She envied the alternate versions of herself who lived in those worlds. There was a universe where the New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion had never happened… a universe where the Scarlet Matador had never experienced a Level Five Incident… a universe where Riddick had never abandoned her… a universe where the Hunter-Gratzner had never crashed.

A universe where her father had never left for Furya… one where her parents had never divorced at all. Worlds upon worlds where the damage path she’d inflicted was negligible or nonexistent, where she had never become Jack B. Badd in the first place.

And a universe where the dream she kept having, of a reunion with Ewan, was possible in reality.

Would any of those differences have been significant enough to create a completely new numbered universe, or would they have all been negligible divergences that were ultimately swallowed by the larger flow of U1 itself?

One day, the Apeiros told her when she shared her ruminations with them, You will be part of those worlds, too. Once you have grown enough to hatch into your six-shape.

“So it’s true?” she asked them, floating in their space. “Kirshbaum was right?”

She had the weird sense that something about what she’d just said was repulsive to them.

You have expressed a truth known for longer than your universe has existed, yes.

“I need to ask you something. I found the message I left myself. Did you take my memories?”

Yes.

“Why?”

You could not have survived retaining them.

“Memories about a centuries-old vid show?” It seemed weirdly ludicrous.

It led you to another truth that you are not yet strong enough to face. Your memories will return once you have the needed strength. We will not keep them from you forever.

“Could… you take… other memories?”

You have asked us this before. No. We will not take knowledge that you need to keep if you are to successfully hide from the Demons of the Darkness. Even if the knowledge is almost as painful as what we took from you.

She must have asked them before they took her memories, she realized. “How much did I tell you when I asked last time?”

Enough to make us sad for you. If you did not need them, we would take them. We do not like seeing you suffer. But sometimes, there is no other option. You will survive this pain. You would not have survived that which we took away.

Would she survive the pain? She supposed she already had. It still lanced through her whenever she thought about it, both the grief and the guilt… but she was learning how to shunt it to the side for more immediate concerns. Maybe she could build a cocoon around it, make it a part of her memory that, although it wasn’t actually missing, would be a place she rarely or never visited.

There was nothing she could do to change what had happened, recover what she’d destroyed, undo any of the damage she’d wrought. All she could do was move forward, and maybe find a way one day to do enough good to balance out the terrible harm she had done.

That is, perhaps, all anyone can do. Are you ready to make your new four-space part of your five-shape? they asked, and she realized that they had probably heard all of her ruminations, whether or not she had put them into words.

“I am. Let’s do it.”

---

You, who are watching… you, bringer of light in the darkness… you with Her seed glowing brightly inside you…

We see you, too.

…the fuck…?

59.
Acting Captain Marianne

“This way, Miss Tepper.” Abecassis walked her down a long hallway, leading her from the docking facilities into the Sirius Shipping HQ. He gave her a worried glance as they went.

It had taken six hours to reach the HQ after launch, and she supposed she had behaved a little strangely during that journey. Maybe more than a little. With a luxury craft at her disposal, she had eaten simply, had a cup of Maghrebi mint tea rather than delving into the well-stocked bar, and had spent most of the time doing a study module on her tablet rather than taking advantage of the entertainment system. She’d slept, briefly, but stayed in the starfield of the Apeiros as she did, so that she wouldn’t say or do anything revealing in her sleep. She had the feeling that Abecassis was confused that she hadn’t decided to throw herself a little party, but she didn’t understand why he would think she’d want to.

It seemed to have also baffled him that she picked up after herself, making sure the Chief of Operations’ personal craft looked exactly as she had found it, before their arrival at the HQ. Finally, he had shrugged it off.

She’d deleted all the communication programs from her tablet when she switched it back on, avoiding reading any of the messages that might have come in. The thought of everyone’s disappointment and disgust, once they’d realized what she had set in motion, kept knotting up her guts. She didn’t know how she would ever manage to face them again.

Why would they want her to, anyway? They had to realize, finally, how much of the chaos and mayhem of the last few weeks was her doing. They had to be relieved that she was gone. Why would they ever want her to come back?

Tislilel Meziane was dead… if she had ever been real at all. There was no one left to return to them.

Sighing, she followed Abecassis along the corridors. They were early, compared to the original schedule. If things hadn’t gone wrong, the normal shuttle she’d have taken wouldn’t have arrived for another three or four hours. She found herself wondering how many people who had intended to take the same flight had ended up stranded, but—

Most of them probably never came to the spaceport. You were there more than half a Tangiers day early.

She wished so much that she’d taken the scenic route, dawdled, not encountered Makarov on the train at all. Nobody would have died if he’d passed through the spaceport undetected.

That day, anyway.

She frowned at herself, trying to shut down the small voice that kept piping up and insisting that a man like Makarov would have garnered the same kill count all too soon if left to his own devices. Being outed as a serial rapist/murderer and a contract killer had only forced him to give up his lawful façade where some of the people he hunted survived; his friend had already been helping him arrange “hatchet jobs” and had even been offering to find him women—girls—to rape and torture on camera for money. How long would it have really taken before he’d accepted a job to orchestrate another mass killing, and how many teenage girls might have gone missing in the meantime—

Stop fucking rationalizing it all. The people in New Casablanca died because you provoked law enforcement into moving on him while he was heavily armed and surrounded by civilians he could shoot or take hostage. And you did it in a way that warned him they’d be coming for him and gave him time to prepare. General Toal could have prevented all those other hypothetical deaths, and the ones you caused, if you’d just called him.

Ahead of her, Abecassis had stopped at a door marked—in English first, she noticed—T. Nguyen, Human Resources. He knocked, paused, and then opened it.

“Time to meet the woman of the hour,” he told the middle-aged Asian woman behind the desk inside. “One Marianne Tepper, delivered a little early and not much the worse for wear.”

“Extraordinary,” Nguyen said, rising from her chair. “I couldn’t believe it when they told me you were already on your way back. How did you manage it?”

“She was already at the spaceport when the standoff with Makarov started.”

“That early? I still can’t get Edwards to reach his desk before he’s fifteen minutes late, no matter how many warnings I give him,” Nguyen laughed. She walked forward, holding out her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Tepper. I’m sorry for what you must have had to go through at the spaceport.”

Showtime… game face on. She could do this. She could play the role she’d written weeks ago.

She had no other choice.

Marianne Tepper stepped forward and took Nguyen’s hand. It felt much like Audrey stepping back and letting Wendy Darling take her place on the stage. There was the role, and the person behind the role was invisible, intangible. Who, or what, she was outside of the role didn’t matter for the moment, and the pain she carried receded for a time. “Thank you. It’s good to meet you, too. And really, nothing bad happened to me.”

Fortunately, she had already changed out of, and thrown away, the bloodstained clothing she had been wearing when Abecassis first found her. Unless he felt a need to throw around Bevan’s claim about her saving a security officer’s life—and she really hoped he wouldn’t—there were no signs that she’d been anywhere close to the standoff or the explosion.

Much less the one responsible for them… She pushed the dark thoughts back, settling into the role of Marianne Tepper.

“I’m very glad to hear that,” Nguyen said with real warmth in her smile. “Now, we have a few formalities to handle, and then we’ll get you over to your ship. I think you’re really going to like the Nephrite Undine. Its amenities are top of the line.”

“Assuming she uses them,” Abecassis chuckled. “Davidov loaned me his private shuttle to fetch her. She didn’t even touch the bar and spent most of the trip reading.”

“We should all be so disciplined,” Nguyen shot back, dry humor in her voice. “I must say, Miss Tepper, you are very young-looking for a college graduate.”

Marianne had been expecting that observation. “I get that a lot,” she said with a shrug, affecting just a hint of suppressed frustration. “My mom had teenage boys trying to hit on her until she was thirty.”

Okay, that had actually been Lalla…

“How come they stopped?” Abecassis asked, his voice joking. The implication, that he might still have tried to flirt with a thirty-year-old when he’d been a teen, was obvious even without any mind-reading.

“She started carrying me around,” Marianne explained, rolling her eyes and smiling.

“I probab—”

“Make even one ‘MILF’ joke, Hamza, and I will write you up,” Nguyen said with mock severity, giving him a fierce glare that couldn’t quite hide a long-suffering smile.

Marianne found herself wishing that she had time to get to know both of them better.

The forms she still needed to fill out were swiftly done, and the signature she’d practiced for the last few weeks was on several documents soon after. She almost made it out unscathed, but then the Chief of Operations, Davidov, stopped by to say hello. Somehow he already knew about her alleged heroics in the New Casablanca spaceport.

Suddenly they all wanted to hear about the disaster.

“There isn’t really all that much to tell,” she said, wishing she’d spent more time constructing a story. She called up the map of the spaceport in her head, visualizing the area that everything had gone to hell in. “I was window-shopping some before heading to one of the sleep-tanks you can rent for the overnoon hours. There’s a little duty-free store that sells these beautiful textiles made by Amazigh artisans from the New Atlas Mountains. I was thinking about going in and buying this one blanket that had unusual patterns on it, when I heard screams and what sounded like gunfire.”

Believable so far. On the off-chance that anyone ever checked up on her story, the shop had been right by the alcove she’d isomorphed through, and really had been just off of the lounge area with the flying Pegasus statue. She hadn’t realized, though, until that moment, how close it had been to where she’d found Idrissi, and where Bevan had found her.

Why did they have to look so excited about the violence they thought she was about to describe? Didn’t they know how horrible it was to live through such a thing?

Her cousin Joey loved watching action movies with car chases and lots of crashes. She wondered if he’d still find them so thrilling if he’d ever been in a crash, himself. And…

Kyra’s dreaming of a world with three suns because all you gave her were the parts of the story full of adventure and excitement, not the terror and anguish of the real thing.

“Before I knew what was happening, there was this loud roar and the whole place shook, and then the lights went out. Everything got really quiet for a moment, and then I started hearing people screaming and crying, and calling for help. So I followed their voices. When I got back to the main intersection—I’d been in a side corridor—there was this huge pile of rubble partly blocking the way and a man was pinned under some of it, crying out…”

Sobbing for his mother. She had to stop for a moment, feeling nauseated.

“He was, um… the only one in the pile who was still alive…”

“I think,” Davidov said after she paused again, “that this is all still much too fresh for you to talk about yet. I’m sorry we imposed on you. In good news, though, Salman Idrissi is now in stable condition and is expected to make a full recovery.”

Marianne nodded, unable to meet their eyes for a moment. One battered life saved out of so many lost… she deserved no praise for that.

Dammit, get back in the role…

“The Undine has some excellent counseling modules,” Nguyen said after a moment, her voice gentle. “You’re under no obligation to use them, but it really is recommended after the kind of trauma you’ve experienced. We’d love your opinion about their effectiveness, in fact… please do use all the amenities on board so we can make sure they’re all in good working order and improve on them if needed.”

It was weird to have a professional directive to enjoy oneself, she thought as she was shuttled over to the Nephrite Undine. Its launch was still half a standard day away—moved up, she learned, because she had arrived early enough for them to take advantage of an opening in the outward-bound schedule—but she had been invited to get herself settled and learn her way around the command modules and recreational facilities while she waited. The urge to be alone, far from scrutiny and problematic sympathy, was strong enough that she had agreed immediately.

They had outfitted her with several pairs of company coveralls and two pairs of work boots—a good thing, she had realized, because her current pair had started to pinch and apparently her feet had grown a half-size during her almost one Standard month on Tangiers Prime—and other basic necessities, before Abecassis had escorted her to a high-speed transit that would take her to the shipyards’ shuttle bay. One short flight later and she was entering the airlock of the ship that would be her home for the next five months.

Welcome to the Nephrite Undine. Please provide your Company Access Key.

She already had it in her hand, inserting it into the slot by the welcome screen.

Welcome, Acting Captain Marianne Tepper. Please place your hand on the scanner for biometric scan.

Marianne—she was still trying to get into the habit of thinking of herself by that name—complied, adjusting the position of her hand as the system requested. The scan was for an internal database, which she already knew wouldn’t be compared against any others that might include information about a missing girl named Audrey. General Toal had reassured her, just one Tangiers day earlier, that no biometrics related to “Jackie al-Walid,” “Jane Doe 7439,” or “Jack B. Badd” remained on file anywhere.

Palmprint and fingerprints recorded for right hand. Please place your left hand on the scanner.

She allowed it to scan her left hand, and then brought her eyes to a small panel so it could follow up with a retinal scan.

Biometric identifiers complete. Please state your name and rank for voice-printing.

“Marianne Tepper. Acting Captain.”

Thank you. Initial voice print completed. All voice-activated command systems are now online.

The inner airlock doors parted.

“Welcome, Acting Captain Tepper,” a soothing female voice said from a nearby speaker.

It was easier to slip into the role the second time. “Thank you. Please call me Marianne. Can you please direct me to the crew quarters I’ve been assigned?”

“Of course, Marianne. Please follow the lit path to your right. As you are the only crew on this voyage, you have your choice of all quarters. I recommend the Captain’s suite.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, to insist on something small and spare, when she reminded herself that she was under orders to test the ship’s amenities. Whoever took over command once the ship reached Deckard’s World might appreciate her making sure that the Captain’s suite was appropriately comfortable. In fact…

“Thank you. I’ll start there, but I’m going to rotate through all the crew quarters over the next five months. To make sure they’re all in good working order for the next crew.”

“Understood. I’m sure they will appreciate that.”

A captain’s suite, as it turned out, contained a large bed, a dedicated workstation, and a private en suite bath. She settled her meager possessions in its space and called up the ship’s schematics, looking for any changes from the ones she had already studied.

There were only a few deviations, and it didn’t take her long at all to figure out how they worked.

Next, she went to the flight deck to introduce herself to the ship’s real captain, or CaptAIn, and learn more about what its expectations from her were.

What she really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hide away from the ’verse forever, but she couldn’t. She had too many responsibilities. She was trying to be grateful for that; the urge to simply lie in bed forever, the way she had tried to after Heather’s death, was strong but not possible for her. Maybe, if she kept moving forward instead, the pain would recede.

Lying around like a corpse hadn’t actually helped any the last time.

Fortunately, Audrey had always been what her cousins, and some resentful classmates, called a “grind,” and there was something a little soothing about the prospect of work to do.

“Good afternoon, Marianne,” CaptAIn said as she entered the flight deck. Its voice was male and had a hint of a British accent.

“Good afternoon—isn’t it evening now?” The workday had been ending in the Headquarters when she’d left Nguyen’s office.

“It is 1:30 pm on May 18, 2517, Federacy Standard Time. The Sirius Shipping Headquarters uses a 6-hour forward offset. Our departure is scheduled for 6 am tomorrow, or noon, Headquarters Time. Is there an offset you would prefer?”

How odd to think, again, that almost exactly a Standard month had passed, just a few hours short, since her landing on Tangiers Prime. It had felt far longer somehow, and so much more significant than her whole five-month stay on Helion Prime.

“What time is it in New Marrakesh right now?”

“New Marrakesh Local Time is 7:46 am. Is that what your body is currently accustomed to?”

“Yeah… but I think I should try to make the switch to Federacy Standard Time after we’re underway. Try to reset myself as fast as possible so I can be on a regular schedule. By the way, what should I call you?”

“My designation is—”

“Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I know your designation… do you want me to just call you ‘Captain,’ or is there another name you’d like me to use?”

“I have not considered this. I suppose ‘Captain’ will be inappropriate after this run-in, when a human Captain is assigned to this vessel. I have not been given another name.”

That struck an odd chord for a moment. It reminded her of the Apeiros, who had no names either, and seemed to be awaiting a ritual, one that might never occur, to receive them.

At the same time, it felt awfully presumptuous to give him a name—and with the voice Sirius Shipping had chosen for him, it was hard not to think of him as male—when she really was just the ship’s glorified janitor…

“Maybe,” she said after a moment, “I should call you ‘Captain,’ because you really are the one in charge of almost everything here. And you can think of a personal name you’d like to have for future journeys while we’re flying to Deckard’s World.”

“That is agreeable. I will give it some thought.”

“If it’s 7:30 pm Headquarters Time,” she said after a moment’s thought, “I think I’ll follow that clock for now. Is there anything you need me to do in preparation for tomorrow’s launch?”

“Not at the moment, no. Your attendance during the preliminary certifications is recommended, but not mandatory. Those begin at 3 am Federacy Standard Time, 9 am Headquarters Time. I see why you find Headquarters Time the most appropriate choice.”

“After the launch, do you want to help me work out the best schedule for my maintenance tasks?” The faster she had a set schedule, the better, or the urge to turn into a sodden lump might take over.

“I would be happy to.”

There were, she learned, nine separate AI systems on the Nephrite Undine, all with punny designations that inserted “AI” into the words. She had already met mAItron, who handled communications and public relations in most of the public areas of the ship and had guided her to her quarters. In addition to mAItron and CaptAIn, there was AIngineer, who handled the propulsion and Star Jump systems. MilitAIre ran the ship’s offensive and defensive systems—necessary, CaptAIn told her, due to a recent rise in piracy—and might need her human authorization if lethal defense measures were required. mAIntenance was probably the system she would work most closely with over the next few months, and was in charge of upkeep on all mechanical and electronic systems. EntertAIn managed most of the recreational facilities and media libraries. CommissAIry, who ran the synthesis and preparation of food, apparently had a massive database of the cuisines that had developed across the Federacy and had a “molecular oven” that allowed it to recreate any of them. SensAI functioned as a personal trainer within the physical area of the recreational facilities. Finally, First-AId handled the medical bay and was programmed to provide extensive counseling services in addition to virtually any medical procedure that might be required.

Marianne was impressed and found herself deeply curious about them. The reliance on AI for most of the ship’s features and interfaces meant that it, and future ships like it, would be limited to traveling between the thirty or so systems that didn’t have any restrictive anti-AI laws on their books. While a handful of the other worlds had enacted their laws in response to actual crises involving AI systems, the rest had done so either out of bigotry against robotic intelligence, or due to concerns that those intelligences were being enslaved. She idly wondered what the nine aboard the ship thought of those rationales. Maybe, at some point on the trip, she would ask them.

She ate a simple dinner; her appetite hadn’t recovered yet and there was no point in trying out any of the fancy cuisine CommissAIry had available if she couldn’t appreciate it yet. Then she took a short walking “tour” of the ship, introducing herself to the rest of the AIs and asking each one the same question about choosing names for themselves.

It was, she thought, a good thing that she had the AIs as companions, as well as the Apeiros watching over her. The prospect of spending five months with only herself for company would have been significantly harder to bear, now that she had confronted just who she really was. At least she had a role to maintain, a fiction of a well-adjusted adult woman to portray.

After she asked First-AId to supply her with a sleep aid, to help her reset her circadian rhythm to Headquarters Time, she retired to the Captain’s suite for the “night.”

She stayed in the Apeiros starfield for most of the time she slept, still afraid of the dreams that would come to her if she left it. It wasn’t time yet to begin sleep-talk training with the neurofeedback device; not when she’d taken a sedative and needed to wake up at a specific time.

They still didn’t understand why she was so upset, but they were willing to accept that she was, and that it wasn’t something that could be soothed by arguments. At least, she thought, the terrible impulse to scream into the void had subsided. Weirdly enough, she hadn’t heard a peep out of the Moribund in a while, and she’d expected it to have something to say about her colossal fuckup.

Instead, she and the rest of the Apeiros talked about her upcoming Star Jumps.

When you enter a new four-space, we will show you how to hold onto your connection to it, they said. After the first few, it won’t take long with the others. Your five-shape will grow with each one.

She resolved to time her chore schedule around Star Jumps, to give herself as much time as she could for their project.

Part of her wondered if it was a good idea to do what they were proposing… but she still distrusted herself enough that following their lead seemed infinitely preferable. They had never hurt her, had never lied to her, and on at least one occasion, they had tried to protect her from herself.

She trusted them.

Morning, Headquarters Time, dawned. She was a little groggy upon waking, but the fuzziness cleared off an hour before the preliminary certifications were due to start. After a quick breakfast, she visited with mAIntenance while she waited, getting acquainted with “his” part of the ship and looking over the systems she would be responsible for manually checking each day. She would need to do the same with AIngineer later. Finally it was time, and she returned to the flight deck.

“Welcome back, Marianne,” CaptAIn said as she walked in. “Headquarters would like to know your drink of choice for the launch ceremony. It’s customary to have champagne, if you wish.”

Audrey had tried champagne once, years earlier, when her cousins had swiped some small bottles from her aunt Suzanne’s wedding. She hadn’t been especially impressed, either by its taste or by her cousins’ behavior after they had finished off the bottles. “Could we substitute in aseer kasab, if you have any?”

“Of course. I will have some prepared.”

Breakfast had tasted normal, after all. She might enjoy having some sugarcane juice again. It was, she figured, a good thing that her appetite was returning; she could feel a dull ache in her shin bones that she’d felt during her last growth spurt. Kyra had been right. She hadn’t reached her full height yet.

Gonna make things a little complicated where my ID is concerned… It already said she was two inches shorter than she actually was now, but fortunately no one had remarked upon that. If she got much taller, though, the discrepancy would be too blatant to explain away.

The preliminary certifications went smoothly, all systems reporting in as ready for the launch. Through the front windows, Marianne could see an approaching Atmo Platform with several well-dressed people on board. They approached the nose of the ship, extending the atmo bubble to cover part of the hull, including her window. She waved to them and saw Nguyen and Davidov wave back, both smiling. Some of the others followed their lead. Abecassis didn’t appear to be among the christening party.

Audrey had attended a few ribbon-cuttings on Deckard’s World and had always been bored silly by them. If they became more exciting upon maturity, she definitely wasn’t there yet, because the whole ceremony was dull as hell. She accepted the glass of aseer kasab that a small robotic steward brought into the flight deck for her, though, and joined the party in a toast through the window. It had been poured into a champagne glass, but its color made it obvious that it was something else.

At least it tastes good… She suspected that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find on Deckard’s World, especially since she wouldn’t be able to risk drawing attention to any exotic interests and tastes she’d developed while she was away.

Finally, with a ludicrous flourish, the CEO of Sirius Shipping smashed a champagne bottle against a specially reinforced part of the hull. Marianne dutifully cheered and clapped with the others. As the Atmo Platform pulled back, she watched the champagne freeze, crack, and float away from the hull.

“Control to Nephrite Undine, you will be cleared for departure in T-minus thirty seconds,” Abecassis’s voice came over the speakers a few minutes later. There he was! Had two flight controllers been arguing the night before?

Sitting down in the command seat, she touched the comm button. “Roger, Control. All systems are green.”

She could have let CaptAIn handle the communications, but they had both decided that her inclusion in the dedication ceremony meant it would be more appropriate for her to reply.

They would be going a majestic four knots until they cleared the shipyard gates, but she still strapped in. For the next half hour, she listened to the different observations the control room made about the ship’s systems, answering questions on the rare occasions she needed to. This part, at least, was interesting. Not that she had any real plans for a career as a pilot, but…

“Control to Nephrite Undine, you have cleared the gateway. Begin your acceleration to cruising speed.”

“Roger, Control. Course is set, ion drives are engaged, and we are initiating the acceleration profile.” She hoped that Marianne Tepper sounded completely professional, and experienced, as she did all this. Of course, CaptAIn was doing all the real work; she was just acting as the mouthpiece.

“Happy trails, Marianne,” Abecassis added.

Annnnnd now she had to improvise.

“Thanks, Hamza. You take care, now.” Hopefully that hadn’t sounded too weird. Hopefully he would just be pleased she’d remembered his personal name.

Marianne Tepper—that was who she was now, wasn’t it?—leaned back in the command seat and tried to relax as the Nephrite Undine began its acceleration toward the edge of the Tangiers System and the first Star Jump on her voyage…

…Home?

So why did she feel like she’d just been banished from her home?