55.
Forever Your Mermaid

“Are you absolutely sure? Once I do this, there might be no going back.”

In front of Jack, standing on the roof of the ait Meziane house, Izil and Tafrara both looked a little nervous.

Izil nodded first. “I’m sure. I want this.”

“I do, too,” Tafrara said, nodding as well. “I’m sure.”

Jack had to admit that she was nervous, in a way that she hadn’t been since her cousin Rachel had convinced her to act as her understudy for Wendy in the Civic Center’s production of Peter Pan, only to get sick two days before Opening Night. Audrey’s realization that she was about to perform in front of hundreds of people had been almost paralyzing. What she was about to do was every bit as daunting.

She had stage fright.

There were no scripts this time, no directions. No one, to her knowledge, had ever done what she was about to try to do. Where this act was concerned, she was already as close to an expert as anyone alive.

Which, for some reason, made her more conscious than ever that she was just thirteen years old.

For a moment she had to focus on her breathing, the way Ewan had showed her, trying for calm and balance the way he’d taught her in the last few days. Then she reached forward, taking Izil’s and Tafrara’s hands, and closed her eyes.

It was weird to realize that she could still “see” everything around her, just not with eyes. She was all the way in U1 at the moment, but it and Elsewhere both filled her awareness. She could tell what belonged to each world.

We are in both, she thought, focusing on herself, Izil, and Tafrara. They were delineated before her, familiar and yet quite new as she looked at them this way. She felt herself shifting partway into Elsewhere, and felt them moving there too, the quantum frequencies governing their bodies now straddling alignments the way they did for her… the way, she realized, they always had for her since the Incident. We are in both.

Izil’s breath hitched and Tafrara gasped.

Jack opened her eyes.

“Is that…?” Izil had lifted his free hand, pointing upward and to the east.

Jack turned her head and looked.

Floating in the sky, a mere four times as large as any other moon she’d ever seen now that it wasn’t full, Megaluna was a waxing crescent on the verge of becoming gibbous. Its tide would reach the ait Meziane house soon, and they could use the phantom waters that existed in only one world to learn to maneuver between ’verses, controlling which one they belonged to at any moment. They would have roughly an hour and a half before Jack would have to pull them back into U1 to avoid a risk of drowning.

They could do it, she told herself, still feeling the same crazy escalation of the opening-night jitters that had filled her when it was time to sing Tender Shepherd, in front of hundreds of strangers, for the very first time.

“Yeah, that’s Megaluna,” she told them. “What? Oh c’mon, it’s a perfectly good name.” Sighing, she gave them a moment to straighten out their faces. “Right now we’re in both worlds equally. You’ll see things that belong to each world. There’s not a whole lot to see here right now, outside of Megaluna… jeez, really? …because this is a coastal area that’s under the water some of the time. But we’re going to work on moving between U1 and Elsewhere… and telling each world apart.”

“I honestly can’t tell any difference at all,” Takama opined from behind them. “As far as I can see, nothing changed with either of you.”

“Good,” Kyra said. “Looking normal and hiding in plain sight is gonna be pretty important.”

General Toal rumbled a general agreement. He wasn’t at all happy about this development, although Cedric and Takama had finally convinced him of its necessity.

“So,” Tafrara asked after a moment, “now what?”

“Now we go down to the ground level,” Jack said, “and start working with the tide. It’ll be arriving in a few more minutes. The contrast between a wet and a dry world should help you learn how to tell them apart and control which one you’re in.”

It went much faster than Jack expected. But then, although she had never done anything like meditation before she met the Meziane family, they were old hands at it and knew how to control their frames of mind. Within the hour, both Izil and Tafrara had figured out how to transition between universes and began mastering the finer points, passing through walls and making sure their clothes came with them, moving objects back and forth without displacing the air around them… everything that she and Kyra had spent hours or days figuring out by trial-and-error, they absorbed with stunning alacrity.

Everybody had awakened early to make use of Elsewhere’s high tide and watch them float in invisible waters; once it rose enough to fill the top floor of the house, they took a break, realigning themselves completely with U1 and having breakfast.

“Everything is so different now,” Izil commented midway through the meal. “I can still see into Elsewhere. There are fish swimming through this room right now…”

“It’s pretty trippy,” Kyra agreed. “You get used to it after a while. But it does take a while.”

Jack found herself wishing she’d been brave enough to do this with Ewan, when he was still there.

It could have ended really badly if I had, she admitted to herself. We were having a hard enough time controlling ourselves around each other without access to another universe coming into play.

Yeah, Kyra agreed, giving her a sympathetic look. That could have broken both of you. It’s better that didn’t happen.

Maybe, in about five years, she could return and—if Izil and Tafrara hadn’t already reintroduced him to Elsewhere and taught him how to navigate it—she could do it then.

“There will be a few rules,” General Toal said as the meal was ending. “Tizzy and Dihya already have to return all of the souvenirs they acquired from Elsewhere, so an important rule for the two of you,” and he speared Tafrara and Izil with his gaze, “is that you don’t bring back any of your own. Nor do you leave anything straddling universes. Our prior intel indicates that the Quintessa envoy might be able to sense an object that is partly absent from this universe, the way that both girls could sense that about her.”

Both of them nodded, looking sober.

“You are to make no visual or audio recordings of Elsewhere or its inhabitants. There must be no evidence in this universe, whatsoever, that you have access to another. When you are in Elsewhere, you must always have a plausible alibi for where you are in U1. For any trip longer than eleven hours, you must also isomorph back briefly to check in and make sure that your alibi is holding up. I will provide you with special comms to take with you, that won’t be easily traced, so that your check-ins won’t put anything at risk. Make sure, before you do a check-in, that no one in U1 will see or hear, and that nothing will record, your appearance and disappearance. There is no room for error here. More lives than you know depend on what you can do remaining hidden from both the Quintessa Corporation and the Federacy itself.”

Now both Izil and Tafrara looked grim.

“And no further spread of Threshold Syndrome is to occur without my knowledge,” General Toal finished, now making sure that everyone at the table met his gaze for a moment.

They had to wait for the tide to begin receding, and the waters of Elsewhere to drop below roof level, before they could begin practicing again. They first practiced swimming through walls and using partial isomorphs to swim—or, from the perspective of those in U1, levitate—at what would otherwise be crushing depths. Then they practiced transitioning objects to and from Elsewhere, using the various souvenirs that Jack and Kyra had collected before releasing them back to the waters once and for all.

Izil pioneered a way to leave all of the water behind when transitioning back from Elsewhere, his thoroughly-immersed clothing emerging completely dry… something Jack had never figured out how to do, but which she finally mastered right before the tide receded. With the ocean departed, Jack and Kyra taught Izil and Tafrara how to use surfaces in U1 as platforms in Elsewhere, climbing phantom steps and walking through phantom walls without falling through phantom floors, finishing up with the “cricket trick.”

“Now you know everything we do,” Jack told them as the sun dipped toward the horizon. When it rose again, she thought with a pang, it would be time for her to leave. To stop being Tislilel Meziane… possibly forever.

Safiyya and Takama’s parents, along with Lalla, had rescheduled their own departure for the morning-day, just in case Izil ended up needing to go with them after all. As night fell, everyone gathered for one last round of mint tea and conversation in the dining room. It was strangely awkward at first, as they all avoided talking about Jack’s and Kyra’s impending journeys. Neither of them were allowed to share any details about where they were going, even with each other.

Then Cedric began telling stories about Tomlin’s adventures when he’d been a fighter pilot, based on his elder son’s personal confidences, and the awkwardness disappeared for a time.

I’m not going to get a chance to tell Kyra about the Kublai Khan, Jack realized as Cedric told one of the more famous stories about “El Krim’s” battles with pirates along the Sol Track Shipping lanes, when he’d discovered that one cargo hold of a vessel he’d boarded contained a pair of very angry, very hungry shrylls.

“…So he was running as fast as he could,” Cedric continued, “and he said he could feel those things gaining on him, when this door he’d just passed slammed open and three of the pirates who’d run from him earlier burst out, whooping and yelling at him to get down on the floor. At least, that’s what he thought they were starting to say, because suddenly they were screaming instead.”

Jack shuddered. She’d read about how shrylls ate, and had almost experienced it firsthand. “Did he find the kids he was looking for and save them?”

“That he did. The shrylls were still eating those pirates while he got everybody else off the ship and blew it up. Sirius Shipping was furious—they’d cared more about the ship than the kids—until they learned that it was about to turn into a floating shryll nest. Then they finally admitted he might have had a point…”

Everybody at the table chuckled, although most of the expressions also contained wistful sadness. The murder of Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane—who Jack still found herself thinking of as just Tomlin—was still fresh and painful in their hearts. A variation on the same story had been told during his memorial service by one of his comrades in arms; in that version, he’d led the shrylls away from his companions, and they had all believed that he’d sacrificed himself to save them, until he showed up in the boarded vessel’s hangar with half a dozen children, wearing shorted-out slave collars, by his side, one riding on his back.

Riddick, she thought, might have liked Tomlin. At the very least, they would have been on the same side where the kids he’d rescued were concerned. Her father had told her—had he told her? Or had he just thought about it and she’d somehow overheard?—that there was a highly-classified story, one that nobody in law enforcement wanted the public to know lest they start thinking of him as heroic, about Riddick rescuing a group of children who had been abducted and enslaved—

That sounds just like him, Kyra whispered in her mind.

She supposed Kyra was right. Between the story her father had told her, and her own experience of how Riddick had treated her on the crash planet, he did seem to have a soft spot for kids. He’d told his own story about Johns using some child hostages to catch him, but had refused to go into detail about just what had happened to them. All he would say was that Johns had killed a few of the kids. Imam, who had seemed to know more details about the story, had told her that she was far too young to hear them… even though she was already older than the kids who had suffered them firsthand. It especially galled her, even months later, given that any merc who knew her history might consider her an ideal piece of bait for catching Riddick… and might be a sicko like Pritchard.

The only question left was whether or not those kids’ fates had been worse than what Pritchard had had in mind for her and Kyra.

Why, she found herself wondering, do so many adults believe that keeping kids ignorant about the threats they’re facing protects them?

It was their last night with the Meziane family and Jack didn’t want it to end, but most of them had awakened especially early in the evening-day to take advantage of the arrival of Elsewhere’s high tide. Soon they were saying their good-nights, Jack and Kyra returning to their guest room for one last time.

The room felt strange, missing all of the driftwood, coral and shells… and missing Sebby. It sent a pang through Jack; she hadn’t even left Tangiers Prime yet, and it was leaving her. None of the beautiful blankets and pillows that she and Kyra had bought, to decorate first their apartment and then the guest room, could come with them. Safiyya had said she was going to box them up and store them for the day when she, or Kyra, returned, along with most of the clothing they’d bought that was too distinctive of Tangiers Prime to take with them. The few things that Jack could keep, she had to plan on discarding before returning to her family, walking back into their lives with—at least, as far as anyone could tell—nothing more than the extremely nondescript clothes on her body…

It felt like she was preparing to erase herself. As much as she knew it was necessary, it felt like its own terrible new form of suicide. Maybe Jack had to die as she became Audrey again…

…but why did Tizzy have to die?

Kyra looked every bit as brooding and morose as she felt. They didn’t talk, taking fast showers so that they wouldn’t have to think about who was no longer dancing at their feet. When Jack found herself in the starfield of the Apeiros, she anchored herself there, both afraid of the dreams of loss that might otherwise come to her and not wanting to get dragged into Kyra’s dreams of hunting in the forest with Riddick.

The other little larva no longer dreams of that, the Apeiros told her at some point in the night. It dreams of a world with three suns.

“You’re not talking to her, are you?” Jack asked, equally surprised that Kyra might have initiated conversation with them and worried that they had resumed it without her consent.

No. But it is broadcasting those dreams quite loudly. Seeking companions to play its story out with it. The visions are unusually detailed compared to its other dreams. They seem more like the things we see in your mind.

“They’re from the story I told her, the one you listened to. I shared some of the memories with her, to help her see it all better.”

It loves being there.

“Why do you always say ‘it’ and not ‘her?’” Jack asked.

Should we not? Have we offended?

Jack shrugged. “I keep forgetting how different we are. With humans, we’re given names when we’re born, and most of the time our biological sex is known right away.”

She and Izil had had an interesting conversation, in the wake of the answers he’d given Mommy, about biological sex, gender roles, and variations within them… and he’d given her a book—in file form, of course, for her tablet—to read on her journey home, one he thought might be hard for her to get on Deckard’s World itself. He seemed to think she’d been woefully undereducated on the subject, and she suspected he was right.

You already know if you’re male or female?

“Yes. The ‘other larva’ is named Kyra, and she’s female.”

Noted. And you?

“I’m female too, although sometimes I’ve disguised myself as a male. Males are less… preyed upon…”

Do you have a name?

“I have way too many of those,” she sighed. “I don’t even know which one is really mine anymore.”

Interesting.

“You said your names were stolen from you,” Jack recalled. “How?”

We do not know much about what we become as our hatchings progress. But upon our sixth hatching, once we learned whether we were male or female, there would have been a ritual to give us names. The Demons of the Darkness prevented it. We have no names except the one you have given us. Is there nothing you would like us to call you?

“I guess…” She sighed, feeling like she was giving into the inevitable. There had been a time when she had been eager to return to this name, to put Jack behind her forever, but now… “I need to go back to being Audrey. You can call me that if you like. Audrey.”

It was weird how her driving goal, when she’d been trapped in the hospital, now felt like a dead end. Part of her wished she’d asked them to call her Tizzy. But that was a name she had to let go of in too few hours.

She would be Marianne for the journey home, and then Audrey for at least four more years… and after that, she had no idea. But she had better get used to being Audrey again.

She woke feeling a strange sense of resignation.

Kyra seemed in slightly better spirits, at least. They even talked a little as they went through their morning preparations… and began setting out the things that they were planning on taking with them.

Jack’s backpack barely contained anything besides her most nondescript clothing, her tablet, and the neurofeedback device when she closed it; it was small enough that she wouldn’t need to check any luggage at either the train station or the spaceport, and what she had would be mostly unremarkable if security went through it. She looked around the room, sighing, and her eyes fell on the binoculars and telescope she’d bought not long before the Spaceport Explosion.

She’d gotten some good use out of them, but she couldn’t take them home with her.

“You want either of these?” she asked Kyra.

Kyra, who had been frowning at her tablet, looked up. “Maybe the binoculars? I can see them being useful where I’m going. But I don’t have space for the telescope. Probably wouldn’t need one, anyway.”

Jack brought the binoculars over, sliding them into their case and setting it next to Kyra’s pack. “They’re yours. I hope you see some cool stuff through them.”

She hoped Kyra saw better things through them than she had, anyway. No more exploding shuttles or levitating corpses, at the very least.

That left the telescope.

It was the last thing she needed to find a good place for. If she simply left it in the room, Safiyya would pack it away for her return. But that felt wrong. It was meant to be used. She wanted someone to get to enjoy it while she was gone, to think of her…

Ewan. She wanted to give it to Ewan.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” she told Kyra after she closed up the telescope and its stand and put them in their case.

Slipping out of their room, she walked two doors down to Ewan’s. She’d leave it in his room for him to find when he next came home.

The door was locked.

For a moment she dithered. Go back? Ask Safiyya to let her in, or to put it in there for her? Or…

She transitioned into Elsewhere, the floor in U1 still firmly beneath her feet, and walked through the door as a phantom. She isomorphed back on the other side, aware that she was taking a liberty that Ewan, himself, might object to. She hoped he wouldn’t, but a small pang of guilt almost overrode the thrill of adventure and discovery she was feeling.

His room was laid out similarly to hers and Kyra’s, but decorated differently. It felt like him. He had a fondness for blues and greens, and most of the furnishings reflected that. There were several paintings on his walls. She wished there was more light to see them by, or that she dared turn on his lights. They looked beautifully done, all in a singular style…

When she walked closer to one of them, she saw that he had signed them, in English and Tamazight, Ewan Zdan.

He was the painter of all these magnificent works that she could barely see.

There was an easel near his bed, positioned to catch the light coming through the French doors leading onto his balcony. She walked closer; this painting, at least, she would be able to look at with more ease.

Her breath caught in her throat as the work came into view.

It was a painting of a mermaid.

The mermaid floated in a sea, arms reaching forward as though inviting someone into her embrace. While the sea was unfinished, mostly sketched out and not yet painted, meticulous detail had been lavished on the mermaid herself. Her strong tail was covered in aquamarine scales that seemed to sparkle; long golden hair fanned out around her and covered her bare torso, hiding her breasts as completely as if she were clothed. That hair looked almost exactly like the wig Jack had been wearing when they had first met. And the mermaid’s face…

It was her face. Even as she realized that, she found it difficult to recognize herself. He had painted her as if she were one of the galaxy’s great beauties. Every feature was recognizably hers, but…

Is this what he saw when he looked at me? She wondered. Ewan’s words, after they had left Elsewhere and were heading home, came back to her.

“…if all one had needed to do, to reach a new world, was take a beautiful girl’s hand…”

He’d only had a single week to create this. Less; they had spent almost every moment of his final Tangiers day in each other’s company. And yet it was so—

She could hear voices in the courtyard below. Soon someone would come up, looking for her and Kyra, if they didn’t go down to breakfast on their own. As much as she wanted to stay and marvel at Ewan’s work, to let the sun rise and reveal all of his artworks to her, she had to go.

Forcing herself to turn away, she walked over to the bed he had slept in. The impulse to curl up on it was hard to resist, but she was already late returning to her room. Instead, she carefully set the telescope case on the center of the bed. She’d written no note, but she hoped he would know who had to have left it for him. Why hadn’t she written a note?

There was paper on his desk, and a pen. She found herself picking up the pen and a small, blank notecard, scrawling a message on it just for him:

Forever your mermaid,
Tislilel

I can’t leave him this, she realized even as she turned to put it beside the telescope. It was the kind of promise that General Toal had forbidden, and she suddenly realized why. If she couldn’t keep it, if the ’verse conspired in preventing her from ever returning, it wouldn’t just be a promise that broke.

She couldn’t be that cruel to him.

The notecard was in her pocket as she slipped back into Elsewhere and left Ewan’s room.

54.
Mommy Ree

“What is that?” Takama asked, a hint of a quaver in her normally firm, no-nonsense voice.

The enormous crustacean, still a good distance away, was bearing down upon them. Ten-legged, with pincers each as big as a human being, its thick, segmented carapace mottled shades of rose, violet, and indigo, it was moving fast, the miniature versions of itself clinging to its back.

“That,” Jack told them, “is Sebby’s mother.”

“Baraka,” six voices said in unison. Kyra immediately began snickering.

Jack released her seatbelt and clambered over the open back of the vehicle and into the truck bed, avoiding the olive trees and pulling her pack onto one shoulder before turning back and reaching for Sebby. “C’mere, kid, let’s go meet your mama.”

Sebby sprang into her arms.

“Tizzy, wait. What are you doing?” But even as Safiyya was speaking, Jack was already climbing over the side of the bed, jumping down into the field.

“What she does best,” Kyra snorted. “Diving right into the deep end…”

“It could be dangerous!” Tafrara objected.

But Jack, while she sensed nervousness from the approaching creature, also sensed curiosity and longing… and disbelief. No hostility, no anger… not even much fear. And, if “Mommy” was like Sebby, she had a stinger… but didn’t have it out.

Sebby was chirping excitedly as Jack walked forward toward “Mommy,” standing on her shoulder and holding onto her hair.

“Mommy” slowed down, coming to a halt while Jack was still a few meters away. Her antennae, stunning feathery constructions colored a mixture of rose and violet, waved forward toward Jack. Curiosity dominated the emotions coming off her, and hope, and disbelief… and only then, after all of those, nervousness. Was this strange creature a threat to her babies?

I’m no threat to you, Jack thought carefully, hoping that “Mommy” would hear her the way Sebby could. I will not hurt you or your children. I come as a friend.

My sister! Sebby added, chirping for emphasis. Saved me from the bad water!

Squeaking chatter erupted on Mommy’s back. The water, the water, the bad water!

Mommy slowly moved closer, antennae out. Jack stood still, letting her approach, letting Mommy’s feathery antennae brush against her face and Sebby’s carapace.

My child… my lost baby…

The images were sudden and powerful, almost costing Jack her balance. She was crawling along the ground, covered in her children, seeking food for them in the early dawn light. A strange roar kept jangling at her sound receptors, and she kept detecting an odd, briny scent that didn’t belong. Then a large wave crashed over the hillside, striking her. Her babies shrieked, several of them tumbling from her back and falling into the water that was suddenly sloshing around her legs. Another wave struck, and another. She struggled to hold onto the ground, to grab at her children as they floated past her and away, crying for her help…

Half of her babies had been lost to the bad water, the monster wave. There should have been twice as many riding on her back in this moment, and the loss still cut through her. But…

…But one had returned?

Gasping, Jack came back to herself. She might have fallen over, except that Mommy had reached out with one pincer, still closed, to prop her up. Both of her antennae were caressing Sebby.

Jack closed her eyes, conjuring visions of her own to share. The wave that almost took her and Kyra… learning how to move between a world that was dry and the world where the water came and went… the night of the monster wave, when, as it receded, she and Kyra had spotted a small creature clinging to a piece of driftwood… bringing Sebby over to the dry world…

Disbelief. Hope and disbelief.

All true! Sebby insisted, sharing images of his own. Exploring the apartment, discovering the delicious insects that tried to sneak into it… discovering olives…

Now there was a fantastic idea…

Jack unshouldered her pack, moving slowly so she wouldn’t alarm Mommy. Unfastening its top, she pulled out the container of olives that she had brought with her, opened it, and drew out a handful, holding them out to Mommy.

You are going to give Cedric a heart attack, Tizzy. Kyra’s “voice” was tinged with both worry and amusement, even as Mommy’s mandibles delicately touched Jack’s upraised palm.

Mommy was careful, though. She drew the olives in but left Jack’s hand unscathed. A second later, a wave of astonished pleasure flowed over Jack. Olives, she suddenly realized, were amazing. The stuff of life itself.

Curious squeaking erupted on Mommy’s back. Her surviving babies, picking up on her enjoyment, wanted to know what was so wonderful… wanted to try some, too.

Jack wasn’t sure if she had enough olives to go around.

Don’t worry, I think we all packed some, Kyra told her.

Behind her, she heard people moving around the all-terrain vehicle, picking up their packs and opening them, and then heard the swish of the grass parting as they moved through it. The Meziane family was bringing backup.

This is my family, Jack told Mommy, who had tensed slightly. They will not hurt you or your family. They love Sebby too.

Made me their baby! Took me in! Loved me! Love them! Sebby had a lot to say.

In a way, Jack was glad that she hadn’t understood Sebby so clearly until this day; the temptation not to bring him back to his world might have been far too great, and this reunion might never have occurred.

Everyone was holding out olives as they approached. Jack pulled another handful out, too, giving one to Sebby as she did.

She felt the moment when Mommy gave permission, and the other babies began to jump off of her back and scuttle toward Jack and her family.

“Heaven help us,” muttered Usadden.

“It’s fine. It’s going to be just fine,” Izil said, stepping forward and kneeling down to offer olives to the approaching babies. They were, for the most part, roughly half the size of Sebby, or even smaller. Several of them, squeaking eagerly, headed straight for him.

“Shit, you’re gonna get swarmed,” Kyra warned him.

“Wouldn’t be the first time. I mean, with other species…” Izil began giving the nearest babies an olive each. “Start handing them out too, if you don’t want me buried in baby Sebbies.”

Cedric laughed and walked forward, kneeling down a few feet away from Izil.

Jack wasn’t sure if it was her heart that suddenly felt full to overflowing, or Mommy’s.

Soon everyone had a group of babies surrounding them, happily eating olives while Jack fed Mommy and Sebby from her container… and Sebby shared visions of his adventures in the apartment and then the ait Meziane house. He was especially proud of the visions he shared of helping Kyra and Jack fight, and defeat, Pritchard. Stung it! Stung it good!

Mommy didn’t believe at first.

Sebby saved our lives, Jack agreed, backing him up. She shared her own perspective, how dangerous and terrible Pritchard was, how badly he’d hurt Kyra and how much worse he had intended to hurt both of them, how scared for Sebby she was when he jumped from the ceiling onto Pritchard’s shoulder, and then watching as Sebby paralyzed the huge man in an instant…

Already? Mommy asked in wonder. A first kill so soon? She will be a mighty huntress.

“She?” Jack gasped. Unlike Sebby’s referent for a sibling, the concept Mommy had transmitted had definitely been gendered.

Kyra, open-mouthed, turned to look at Jack. Whoa, wait. She?

“Oh my,” Izil said. “I’m looking at these babies, and they have two different physical conformations. Some of them are shaped like their mother, and like Sebby, but some are shaped a little differently. But consistently. This is a species with sex-linked morphologies… and Sebby’s morphology is female.”

“Sebby’s a girl?” Takama asked, looking up from the group of babies surrounding her.

“Jeez,” Kyra laughed, “does she take after her big sister or what?”

Jack was astounded. How had she missed that? Especially given the way she’d run her own con, masquerading as a boy… surely she should have known?

But then, judging by Mommy’s size, Sebby was even more of a baby than they had realized. Maybe biological sex didn’t matter at this stage of her development. Takama had told her, in one of their rambling after-dinner conversations, that even human children’s remains had frequently been impossible for archaeologists to tell apart in digs, unless they had reached puberty before death or there were gender-specific artifacts preserved with them…

How do I tell your males and females apart? Mommy asked. Apparently she had been following along with Jack’s thoughts.

“Oh, um… Izil? I don’t know how to explain this exactly.”

“Explain what, Tizzy?” Izil’s little brood of sebbies seemed to have been sated on olives and now were running their antennae over him. He had sat down on the ground, cross-legged, so that they would have better access. One or two were even climbing up his shirt. They were all still the size of ferrets.

“Mommy—that’s Sebby’s name for her—wants to know how we tell our males and females apart. I uh…” Now Jack felt incredibly embarrassed, aware of just how little concrete information about that she’d actually learned. She felt like—at least most of the time—she could generally tell… but then, she’d put a lot of effort into counterfeiting masculinity by replicating as many of its stereotypical traits as she could. What was the real difference? A zoologist, surely, could explain it better than she could. Humans were, after all, part of the animal kingdom.

“Can you translate for me?” Izil asked. “I’m not hearing anything.”

“Yeah.”

“Among humans—that’s what we’re called—males tend to be larger in size than females. Males tend to have more upper-body strength and narrower hips, while females have wider hips to accommodate gestation—we do that internally, not by laying eggs—and mammary glands on their chests to feed offspring. We often depict this in symbols by giving males a straight rectangular body form and females a form that curves. That is accurate for most, but not all, human beings. Size varies widely enough that there are small males and large females, for instance, and much more variety in body shape than just ‘rectangle’ and ‘curved.’”

Jack could feel Mommy listening through her, fascinated, as Jack visualized what Izil was describing. She conjured up images of her father, Cedric, Ewan, Tomlin, Izil, Usadden, and Riddick. Male. Then she conjured up images of her mother, Shazza, Fry, Takama, Safiyya, Tafrara, and Kyra. Female.

She sensed Mommy’s understanding and fascination, and then Mommy showed her what the humans in front of her looked like, to her. Entirely different colors characterized them, including some that Jack had never seen before and could barely comprehend. Heat signatures, she realized after a moment, mapping out the warmest and coolest parts of their bodies. Izil, cross-legged on the ground… Male? Mommy asked.

Yes, she answered. That’s Izil. He’s been making sure Sebby has lots to eat.

Sebby?

Me! Sebby bounced.

Jack could feel Mommy marveling at just how much food Izil must have been providing her daughter, in order for her to grow so large and begin articulated speech so young.

Maybe, Jack suddenly wondered, it was the olives?

Mommy looked from human to human, showing Jack how she saw them and confirming whether they were male or female. She guessed right every time and was fascinated by the sound patterns of their names.

“May I ask her some questions?” Izil asked.

“Absolutely.”

Izil began asking Mommy about herself, whether the brood climbing over the family was her first or if she’d had more in the past, and other questions about the cycles of the world and how they affected her biological cycles. Soon they knew that she had lived twelve full Tangiers Prime years, making her the equivalent of thirty-two Standard years old, and had first reproduced when she was ten Tangiers Prime years old, roughly five Standard years earlier. That brood had been tiny and unsuccessful, as most first broods frequently were. This new brood had hatched in the spring, making them almost a Standard year old.

Safiyya and Takama started unpacking lunch foods as Izil and Mommy continued their discussion, with Jack and Kyra providing translations. Many of the babies were fascinated by human food and were curious to try some. Sebby, still full from her large breakfast and olive snack, was climbing on Mommy and running her antennae over her mother’s huge carapace, trilling happily.

Soon they knew that Mommy’s species was a solitary predator species that mostly hunted a variety of plain and steppe insects, some of which were bigger than a human. They also ate some kinds of fruit—but nothing, Mommy told them, as impressive as those olives—and a flying animal that looked, to Jack, like someone had stapled bat wings onto a feathered snake. It took a minimum of a full Tangiers Prime year for offspring to grow large enough and strong enough to stop riding their mother’s back, and they would travel alongside her for at least another four of the world’s 32-month-long years after that.

Other predator species existed, and sometimes posed a threat to her babies, but Mommy herself was now far too large for any of them to try to take on. One or two might pose a threat to a visiting human. She showed them, via highly colorized images, what to watch out for. When she projected deliberately and carefully, the others could “hear” her almost as well as Jack and Kyra could.

“Now for the really important question,” Cedric said during a small lull in the conversation. “Is there a place where she dens, or frequents, that would be a good place for the olive trees?”

It took a few minutes to fully unpack his question for Mommy. Then she insisted upon looking over the young trees, touching them with her antennae and examining the maturing fruits forming on them already.

You brought these for us?

“We wanted to make sure Sebby could still have olives, yeah,” Jack told her. “We didn’t know about you. We didn’t know Sebby was still a baby. But yeah, they’re for all of you now.”

I will show you our home. You will always be welcome there. Jack could feel Mommy marveling at it all, these strange creatures, unarmored yet so oddly powerful, who had not merely brought her daughter back to her but had made her flourish almost beyond comprehension… and had brought precious gifts as well! You will come back again, yes?

“I will find a way,” Izil promised. “There are others who know how to come here. Tizzy and Dihya must leave soon, but I will find someone who can help me come back. I want to learn everything I can about you and this world.”

“And we will come back too, one day,” Kyra said. “Once it’s safe for us to return.” She transmitted an impression of something hunting her and Jack, something that hadn’t found them yet but might if they stayed too long in one place, something they were going to lead away from this world before shaking it off their trails so they could safely return.

What hunts you? I will help you fight it.

“I wish you could,” Jack told her sadly. “But it’s too big. The last time someone tried to fight it…”

She closed her eyes, visualizing Tomlin. Sebby squeaked, contributing her own image of Tomlin’s visit to the apartment and the way he had emanated both distress and kindness, but how sad both Kyra and Jack had soon been, a sadness somehow centered upon him. Sighing, Jack showed both Mommy and Sebby why they had been so sad, visualizing Makarov and Pritchard following Tomlin to the spaceport, trapping him in the pilots’ lounge, and then setting off an explosion that laid waste to everything and killed hundreds, including her first intense crush since Riddick…

Monsters! What terrible creatures are these, who would kill so many of their own?

Jack visualized the envoy. They look a lot like us, but they’re not. She showed Mommy what else the envoy was, the darkness that rode undetected upon her…

Wait, was the envoy one of the—

She blinked, shaking her head. For a moment her mind had wandered off on a weird tangent.

“They can’t come here,” she told Mommy. “We’ve made sure of it.”

“You mean,” Kyra said, “you made sure they’ll be afraid to try to access this universe again.”

“I don’t know if I did anything,” Jack sighed. “I don’t remember. But I don’t think they’d have experimented with the Star Jump drive like they did if the ship it was attached to had still been spaceworthy. Whatever happened with that test—”

“I’m pretty damn sure we know what happened—”

“Whatever it was, I doubt they’d risk that happening again. Not without anything to gain. And as long as we break our trails and stay un-Quantified, they’ll never think there’s anything worth gaining.”

We will fight them beside you if you need help. Mommy’s mental voice was firm. This land is full of my brothers and sisters. The People will rise to help you.

That, it turned out, was the name of Mommy’s species: the People. Takama laughed softly, murmuring that the name of virtually every tribe that had developed on Earth had meant that, too, although the Imazighen had taken it one small step further, naming themselves the Free People.

After a few moments, Jack and the others had settled on their name for Mommy’s People, that their tongues could reproduce—and it really was the obvious choice: the Ree. Mommy seemed both amused and approving. She, herself, was known among her people as the Dawn Huntress… but she liked the way “Mommy” sounded when her human visitors said it aloud.

Once her babies had climbed onto her back, Sebby settled among them, Mommy led them uphill. Cedric drove the all-terrain vehicle slowly after her with everybody back inside it and the top still down. Jack, now sitting next to him, focused her vision on U1 periodically; the area that they were entering was increasingly rural back there. Whenever she saw a good stretch of level, empty road, she shifted her vision back to Elsewhere to pick out nearby landmarks. They were going far enough afield that trying to follow their backtrail and isomorph in the confines of the hangar might be more trouble than it was worth.

Jack thought maybe half an hour passed before they reached a long, lovely glen. She could see why Mommy had picked this spot for her burrow… which, they soon discovered, was large, well ventilated, and kept meticulously clean. A shallow, babbling creek ran through the glen, while springy moss grew over much of the ground. Although parts of it were shaded by extraordinary, primordial trees with towering, slender trunks topped by wild crowns of long leaves, much of it would be sunny throughout the day and, at one end, it looked out over the foothills stretching down toward the distant ocean. Cedric’s altimeter said that they were almost 200 meters above sea level, safe from even a monster wave produced by a true syzygy.

Soon Mommy and Tafrara were picking out the best spots to plant the young olive trees while Sebby and her siblings played in the creek, splashing each other and doing little variations on the Sebby Dance. As soon as the first location for an olive tree had been chosen, Cedric began digging. Usadden started digging the second hole, and Izil began on the third. Jack grabbed a shovel to tackle the fourth hole, wanting to be actively involved in the planting; after a little while, Kyra took a turn.

As they all worked on settling the trees into their holes, Tafrara explained to Mommy what the olive trees would need, aside from light and water, to grow well and how to tell if they needed special care. She promised that she would find a way to return, too, to check on their progress and help with any problems that arose.

“This is a bit of a complication,” Cedric murmured to Jack. “We thought, if we got everyone connected to Elsewhere as far away from New Marrakesh as possible, that would be the end of the risk. But now… I think we need that connection again. We need to be able to come back to this world… to continue this friendship… but I don’t know how we can do this without risking the Quintessa Corporation discovering that you, Dihya, and Gavin rescued the Matador passengers.”

Jack had found herself thinking the same thing. The passengers had been sent much further and higher into the New Atlas Mountains; there was no telling what kind of life waited on the other side there, or whether friendly enough contact could be made with it to ensure safe passage between there and this location down in the foothills. But…

She took a deep breath, feeling her heart lurch a little as she realized what she was about to do. “What if there was a way to… infect… someone who wasn’t on board the Matador with Threshold Syndrome? Someone the Quintessa Corporation would have no reason to suspect?”

Cedric had gone still, studying her face intently. “You think you can do it.”

“I… think I can try to do it…”

“Here?”

Jack shook her head. “I think it’d be best to try back at the house. Where there’s more control. And mattresses. The way Dihya and I learned to orient ourselves between universes involved using the tides… floating on the water and then making it let us go. Works best with a mattress under you. I think… I could pull someone halfway between the two universes, the way we started out… and then show them how to navigate between both spaces. Worst case, if they can’t, I just pull them all the way back into U1 and it’s over. I think.”

“I’m in,” Izil said from behind her. “I volunteer. I want to come back here. My zoology degree isn’t all that useful to me right now, especially up in the mountains where everything was brought in from Earth centuries ago… but in these mountains… my whole life I’ve dreamed of getting a chance to explore a whole new world and learn about new creatures, and here it is. Whatever the risks may be, it’s worth them.”

“We volunteer,” Tafrara said, joining them. “As much as I love our world in U1, I need this, too.”

Jack suddenly laughed. “Damn, it’s a shame General Toal already blew up the old apartment building. The top floor would’ve been perfect to practice in during high tide. But we can make it work at the house, too, as the tide’s coming and going. Kyra and I have worked out lots of tricks.”

“It means you’ll need to stay in New Marrakesh until it’s time for us to leave,” Kyra told Izil, joining them. “We won’t have time to teach you much if you’re leaving this evening-day.”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere now,” Izil replied. “If you’re willing to teach me, I’m completely at your disposal until you have to leave.”

“Then I think it’s settled,” Cedric said, looking pleased.

Only one thing remained: saying good-bye to Sebby.

It was easy to spot their little sister, playing among her many siblings in the creek. She was handily two to three times larger than any of them. Jack took off her shoes and rolled up her pants, wading into the water.

“It’s time for us to go, Sebby,” she said, feeling her throat tighten.

She barely had time to put her arms out to catch Sebby as the cat-sized crustacean leapt onto her chest for a hug.

Love my Tizzy… Sebby stroked Jack’s face with her antennae.

“Love my Sebby too,” Jack managed, hearing her voice crack as she cuddled her little sister close and stroked her carapace. “You’re going to be okay here, right?”

Happy… with Mommy… will still miss you… come back when I’m big.

“You’re gonna get so big…” Jack laughed. “I’ve got to come back to see it, don’t I?”

I will be here…

It was hard to let go, but Kyra needed to cuddle Sebby, too… and everyone else had waded into the water to give her hugs as well. Jack retreated from the water and found herself face to face with Mommy.

You are good friends. Always welcome. Those other beings… they are dangerous. Conquerors. An image of strange locust-like creatures, swarming over the land and eating everything in their path, came to her. Mommy had seen such creatures when she was small, had joined in the fight against them and worried that one day such things might return. She was, Jack realized, drawing a comparison between those swarms and the Quintessa Corporation. Do not let them catch you.

“That’s the plan. I can’t come back until I’m sure they won’t know.”

But come back. You are family. You are Sebby’s sister. You are my brood.

“I will, Mommy,” Jack said, reaching out to stroke her face. What a strange and wonderful honor, to be the “daughter” of this magnificent creature…

People keep adopting you everywhere you go, Kyra whispered in her mind with silent laughter.

She’s adopting you, too, you know, Jack whispered back.

The drive back was almost completely silent, broken only by Jack’s directions as she spotted familiar landmarks leading to a stretch of empty, unmonitored rural road in U1. Everyone was, Jack thought, feeling as awed and humbled as she was. Like her, they were all sad to be parted from Sebby, but confident that they had given her the best possible life. Jack could also feel six people processing, in wonderment, the telepathic contact they had experienced for the first time.

Would something like that show up in a Quantification test, she found herself pondering. If so, and the whole family began traveling between ’verses regularly, they might all end up needing neurofeedback units from General Toal.

The road in U1 was still deserted; Jack transferred them back as soon as Cedric reached a stretch that was level in both universes. Once their comms reconnected to the local system, Safiyya took over telling Cedric which way to drive to take them home.

“You know, I’m wondering why you thought Sebby was a boy in the first place,” Kyra said after a few minutes more.

Jack shrugged. “I guess… I had no idea. So I just went with ‘boy.’”

“How come? Me, I usually go with ‘girl’ there. I think most girls do.”

Jack thought about it for a moment. “When I was younger, right before my parents split up… I started having dreams for a while that I was gonna have a baby brother soon. My mom and dad were fighting constantly, and I kept hoping that maybe my dream would come true and they’d be too happy to fight anymore when it did. Instead, the dreams stopped and my dad moved out, but… I guess I’ve always wished for that little brother, ever since.”

Takama put a gentle arm around Jack’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Tizzy. That must have been such a difficult time for you.”

“Yeah…” Jack sighed. Sometimes, part of her still wondered if the divorce was somehow her fault, as stupid as it sounded when she articulated it. “I knew if I ever had a little brother, my parents wanted to name him Spencer. After this twentieth century actor, Spencer Tracy. They’d named me after—”

Shit, she couldn’t say that part. Nor that she’d almost had an older sister, who would have been named Katharine, if she hadn’t been born too early to survive. She’d spilled far too many details already.

“…a twentieth century actress. But I wanted to name my little brother Sebastian… so that’s what I named Sebby. Kinda.”

Kyra was staring at her as if some great revelation had struck.

“What?” she asked, confused.

Her sister just shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”

But Jack was almost certain she was lying.

53.
Save a Last Sebby Dance

The blaze in Jack’s and Kyra’s old apartment building burned hot and hard, visible for miles. Even mostly upwind of it, as the ait Meziane house was, the smell of smoke reached them as they watched on the roof. General Toal didn’t bother trying to pretend that he had no idea what was happening.

“All of its tenants moved out after its landlords did nothing about the damage it took two weeks ago,” he told them. “I believe investigators will conclude that someone attempted to set up a methamphetamine ‘lab’ in one of the empty units. The explosion was quite large, and many of the other abandoned units still had flammable furnishings inside them. Plus, it appears that the landlords had done nothing to keep the building up to the city’s fire codes in years. I highly doubt there will be all that much left of the building to sift through.”

At least, Jack found herself thinking as she watched streams of already-steaming water arcing over the blaze, he evacuates buildings before he blows them up.

The last few tenants to leave would probably be too busy thanking providence that they’d left just in time to question where that providence had come from.

Just in case someone had a suspicious turn of mind, given everything that had happened in recent weeks, almost every member of the ait Meziane tribe who was in town had an iron-clad alibi, attending Ewan’s send-off party miles away and dancing the Ceilidh when the blast had lit up the sky. The few who had stayed home were all far too old and frail to have taken up arson. Jack wondered briefly who the General had gotten to arrange the explosion.

But did it matter? He had decisively broken their trail where Pritchard was concerned, and that was what counted. If there were any leftover signs that the merc had broken into the their apartment, or that someone from that geolocation had been involved in the release of data on the Spaceport Bomber, the who and how were now thoroughly obscured. Toal had fought fire with fire… quite literally.

“Perhaps,” Takama opined with a shrug and a knowing look, “the building simply fell to its own curse.”

Jack did worry that Ewan might have seen the blaze during his launch, and feared for the Rif, but Cedric informed them—shortly before they went back inside—that Ewan had contacted him to report that he was safely on his way to Qamar—a several-hour journey—and had been surprised to hear about the fire.

“His mind was on something else,” Usadden muttered before Izil elbowed him.

For the next hour, General Toal taught Jack and Kyra how to use the neurofeedback machines he’d brought them. The displays showed examples of “baseline” human brain waves, and then took readings of their waves as they first played with their abilities and then rested from doing so. Kyra was able, within the hour, to control her waves so that they mimicked the baseline reading; Jack struggled to get anywhere close. It was hard to stay focused when all she really wanted to do was curl up in a corner for a long cry.

“It takes practice,” the General told her when she was about to give up. “You use your abilities a great deal, so I believe your ‘resting’ state is more poised to make use of them than your sister’s. She relies less on them, and has chosen not to communicate with the Apeiros. In time, you will be able to hide any sign of what you can do, too. In the meantime…”

He inserted a chip into her neurofeedback unit and tapped in some commands.

“…I downloaded the module for sleep-talking. It’s somewhat different, and it will require you to wear the unit’s EEG cap while you sleep. When it detects your speech centers engaging during REM, it will warn you with a tiny jolt of current. It’s less neurofeedback than operant conditioning, in truth. But it should give you the results you need.”

Jack decided not to try it that night. She wanted at least one more normal night of sleep and didn’t want to alarm Sebby. But she intended to practice with both modules as frequently as she could, until she was sure that all of her deadly secrets would stay hidden. She wouldn’t dare go back to her mother’s house until she had that certainty.

The glow from the apartment fire could even be seen, a little, through the guest room’s balcony doors as Jack and Kyra settled in for the night, Sebby snuggled down between them. The room had a dark orange cast to it.

The Apeiros were waiting when Jack finally managed to fall asleep.

Little larva, you are distressed. What has happened?

“I’ve been separated from someone important to me,” she told them. Somehow, in this space, it had become easier to articulate her emotions than in the physical world. “I won’t see him again for years. Maybe ever.”

They had questions, odd ones, and after a few rounds of question-and-answer they seemed to still be confused about whether her connection to Ewan was familial or reproductive.

“That’s okay,” Jack sighed. “I’m confused about that, too.”

She’d paid attention to the very limited instruction she’d received in school about such things, but a lot of it hadn’t made sense. The frank and clinical answers she’d received from her Aunt Lena, her father’s Registered Nurse sister, had been more useful, but still felt incomplete. She and Ewan, she tried to explain, were biologically compatible, and not closely related—or related at all, really—but even though she was probably physically capable of having a baby now, it was much too early for her to do so. And yet, she admitted to them, the relationship she really wanted with him was one that might ultimately lead to offspring one day. But even if the relationship never took that form, she would still want some kind of familial tie to him… anything to have him in her life. It was confusing, but at least, in this space, it wasn’t quite as painful. The urge to cry forever and never speak again was held at bay for the moment.

A breeder making more filth… Apparently the Moribund had been listening in.

Hush. It is grieving.

“How do you reproduce?” she asked the Apeiros. Surely they bred too, didn’t they?

We do not know.

“Really? But… how were you made?”

We hatched. We have hatched six times now. But we cannot hatch into our seven-shapes yet, not until—

It is not yet time. You will know when it is. You will see it.

“So you were hatched but you don’t know who laid your… eggs? Shells?”

Your species rears its young?

“Yeah, most of the time.”

Ours does not. We believe reproduction is our final act in life. But we do not know. When we seed ourselves into other species, though, it is our final act.

“You… seed yourselves…?”

Into other species. Yes. So that we do not truly die in this darkness. And so they might live, too.

And yet they never do.

The Demons of the Darkness find them and kill them in their hatchling state. But you know some have evaded them. And they have not found this little larva. It will grow too strong for them to harm soon. And it has hidden its broodmates from their sight. Can you not acknowledge its cleverness, even now?

Let it tear down all of the cages and break the darkness, and we will agree it is not filth.

You are never appeased.

Why are you? You know what will appease us. In due time, we will make it happen.

The Moribund, Jack thought, was still intimidating in its implacable hatred, but she no longer found any of the beings surrounding her in the darkness terrifying the way she once had. Most of the time, unless the Moribund itself was speaking, she sensed something… indulgent… about their attitude toward her. Whatever they might be, she was pretty sure most of them liked her. And it was much easier to like them back than to go on fearing them.

“I should go,” she told them. “I need to do some real sleeping. I’m taking Sebby back to his home universe tomorrow, so he’ll be safe.”

That, however, brought about more questions, and soon she found herself telling them about how she would need to leave Tangiers Prime, to obscure her trail so that nobody would know she’d been on the Matador. When she told them that she would be traveling on a new Star Jumper, they seemed to become especially intrigued.

You will be crossing the thresholds between four-spaces? Many times?

“Yeah. That’s… not a problem, is it? For the two I’m in now?”

It will not harm your five-shape, no. But it is an opportunity for you to grow your shape. We will watch. When you cross into new four-spaces, we will show you how to connect to them as well.

She sensed that they were excited by this development.

Soon… you will not be a little larva anymore.

That, Jack thought, as she drifted off into actual dreams, was hopefully a good thing.

She found herself repeatedly on Canaan Mountain, watching Kyra hunt, forage, and stalk Red Roger and his men with Riddick by her side. These were not her dreams, but it felt like Kyra was insistently pulling her into them. Finally, out of frustration, she returned to the starfield and the Apeiros. She let the stars spin around her instead, imagining that she was turning the steps of the Ceilidh once more. After a time, she found herself back in Ewan’s arms as he whirled her across the spangled darkness and the stars sang with the voices of bagpipes…

She woke to the feeling of feathery antennae brushing away the tears on her cheeks.

Sebby was perched on her chest, eye stalks staring into her face. The room was still dark, the orange glow of the fire no longer casting odd shadows. Instead, Jack could hear the soft sounds of early morning activity from the courtyard. The air still carried a light scent of smoke. In Elsewhere, water filled the room and a school of fish was swimming through, rimed by wan moonlight from one of the smaller moons.

If the morning-day went as planned, Sebby would return to Elsewhere and she wouldn’t be able to see him for years, if ever again. If he turned out not to be releasable, he would leave with Izil in the evening-day, traveling to sanctuary in the New Atlas Mountains. This was, in all probability, their last morning cuddle. Jack stroked Sebby’s carapace, finding the little places that he liked to have rubbed, wishing that there was some way they could stay together safely.

I’m gonna miss you so much…

Miss you more…

Maybe she was still dreaming? She could have sworn she heard Sebby in her head.

“You wanna take one more shower with me?” she asked him, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t wake up Kyra. Sebby squeaked a happy affirmative.

One last Sebby Dance…

His favorite water temperature had become her favorite temperature, too. She stood under it, giving herself a quick wash but mostly just watching Sebby bounce and wriggle. Would he be able to find anything like this back in Elsewhere? Was she about to cut him off from one of his favorite pleasures?

She kept telling herself that she was doing what was best for him, but… how could she know?

It was hard to turn the water back off. Fortunately, she didn’t have to; Kyra knocked on the shower door after a while to ask for a turn. They traded places while Sebby continued to wriggle and bounce happily. Jack dressed while Kyra washed up and talked to Sebby, checking her tablet for any new messages for Marianne Tepper—Sirius Shipping had sent her their Employee Handbook—before setting out a handful of items she wanted to take with her when they crossed into Elsewhere. While she waited for Kyra and Sebby, she turned back to her tablet to check her news feeds and related alerts.

The apartment building explosion was being reported, but not with very much gusto; the building, after all, had been abandoned and, aside from some smoke inhalation reports from responding firefighters, no one had been hurt, let alone killed. Other stories had precedence.

New Kosovo had issued indictments and arrest warrants for both Duke Pritchard and Javor Makarov, for the murders of 12-year-old Luljeta Kamberi and a fugitive named Tara Krieg, whose remains had finally been located using clues from the men’s Merc Network accounts. Tangiers Prime, meanwhile, had issued multiple arrest warrants for both men on charges of terrorism and mass murder. Eight of the men’s victims, who had appeared in photo and video collections, had been positively identified as women who were alive and in various prisons, and Amnesty Interplanetary had already begun filing petitions to have their convictions and sentences vacated on the grounds that they had already endured punishments far exceeding their crimes. Three more of the collections had been connected to missing teenage girls from worlds across the Federacy, but their fates were not yet known. One news source reported that multiple worlds had sent lists and pictures of all their missing preteen and teen girls to the investigators spearheading the case.

Fuck. Had Deckard’s World sent a picture of her? There were people in local law enforcement, with ties to the Meziane family, who might recognize her.

A careful, heavily cloaked Ghost Mode trip into the law enforcement systems, while Kyra dressed, showed her that Deckard’s World was among dozens of planets that had forwarded Missing Persons case files, and hers was among them. Fortunately, it was in a long queue of materials that had yet to be reviewed. She moved a copy of the file onto her tablet before doctoring the original, subbing in copies of another girl’s face and fingerprints from a file that had already been cleared, adding labels indicating that the contents had already been processed and no match to any of the videos or stills had been found, and marking her name as “Cleared – No Match” in the investigators’ internal database. When the investigators replied to Deckard’s World, they would say that Audrey MacNamera—twelve years old at time of disappearance, 5’4”, Caucasian, green, blonde—was not among Pritchard’s and Makarov’s unidentified victims…

…but, Jack thought with a shudder as she closed the tablet, she very nearly had been.

Would never let it… An image formed in her mind, of Pritchard, seen from above, along with an intense desire to sting…

Those were Sebby’s thoughts.

Jack looked over at Kyra. “Did you hear that?”

Kyra froze, shirt halfway on, and then nodded. “You were thinking about what Pritchard planned to do to us, and Sebby… talked to you… holy shit.”

The crustacean in question was sitting on the foot of the bed. Jack walked over to him, feeling a mixture of wonder and delight. “You were so brave. You saved our lives. I was scared he was gonna hurt you, too, but you were way too strong for him.” She kissed the top of Sebby’s carapace. “Thank you.”

Love my sisters…

“We love you too, Sebby,” Kyra told him, her voice breaking.

They decided to take him with them downstairs to the breakfast table. He could share human foods there, they told him, and then have crickets after. And then it would be time to see if they could find his home in Elsewhere.

Sebby was conflicted; Jack could feel it with increasing clarity. He wanted to have breakfast with all of his friends—family—but the thought that it might well be his last breakfast with them was depressing.

God, am I doing to him what Riddick did to me? Ditching him without even asking him what he needs?

Kyra stopped on the stairs and turned to look at her, wide eyed. Jack could feel her wanting to protest that Riddick would never do such a thing… and then realizing that he already had, more than half a year earlier. Her sister bit her lip, turning away and continuing down the stairs, looking deep in thought.

“We promise,” Jack told Sebby as she carried him into the dining room, knowing he truly did understand what she was saying, “if we can’t find a place there where you’ll be happy, you’ll get to stay with Izil instead.”

Izil… good brother. Kind.

He wasn’t actually using English, Jack reflected, and his word for “brother” was the same as his word for “sister.” The more she thought about it, the more she thought that “littermate” or “broodmate” was closer to what he’d said. Sebby definitely had a concept for siblings, but it definitely wasn’t a human concept and didn’t seem to be gendered.

If only she had more time, there was so much she wanted to learn now that they could talk to each other…

By some unspoken accord, Sebby moved from plate to plate throughout the meal, visiting with each member of the Meziane family and receiving a treat or two from each one. Plus pets. At the end of the meal, Izil surprised everyone by bringing out, not the usual large cricket box, but smaller ones, enough of them so that each member of the family could personally add to Sebby’s tub. He gave Jack two boxes.

“One from you, and one from Ewan Zdan,” he murmured to her has he handed them over. Her eyes and nose began to sting a little in response.

Sebby happily used his antennae to knock any crickets that jumped on people’s hands back into the tub. He radiated delight with the individual attention, petting people’s hands with his antennae even when no crickets escaped.

Dawn was fully upon them when Sebby had finished eating. Jack had both her binoculars and telescope stowed in her pack, along with food and water and a large supply of olives, as she and Kyra followed the family down to the garage, Kyra carrying Sebby like a baby. Jack started for the bed of the all-terrain vehicle, reaching for the nearest of the olive trees, when Takama put a hand on her arm.

“We have other plans for that, Tizzy. Please, get in. You can stow your pack in the bed by the trees.”

Jack noticed that several other backpacks had already been stowed in the bed. Kyra added hers as well a moment later.

Fortunately, there was room for everyone on board the vehicle. Sebby was fascinated by its interior, running his antennae over everything he could reach. It was hard to get him to stay in Kyra’s lap as they drove out of the garage.

“Sebby, we need you to be still,” Jack finally said. “We can’t let anybody outside of the family see you.”

Grump. Jack got a clear image of Sebby making a mental gesture equivalent to sticking his tongue out. But he settled down in Kyra’s lap.

Cedric, behind the wheel, drove up toward the hilltop suburbs, ones that were in line with the burnt husk of the apartment building—which, when they passed it, had collapsed into a smoldering heap that was still being hosed down—and roughly ninety meters above sea level. Somewhere around there, Jack had hypothesized, would be where Sebby had been caught by the monster wave and pulled away from dry land. It did make sense to wait to begin carrying the olive trees until they were already past the worst of the climbing, she admitted. She and Kyra might have worn themselves out long before they reached those heights, if they’d gone with their original plan.

“Turn left here,” Usadden told Cedric as they crested one of the switchback roads leading up a steeper hill. “It’s another two blocks.”

“What is?” Jack asked, looking around at their surroundings.

“That,” Usadden pointed. They were approaching a small… private airfield?

It was tiny compared to the one they had visited the night before, with a short runway designed for small propeller planes and moonskiffs, some of which were parked alongside the runway. The place looked deserted.

“We have rented the airfield for the day,” Cedric told her. “No witnesses. I will pull the truck into the hangar… and then, once we’re sure it’s on level ground on both sides of the threshold, you will move it, and all of us in it—and the rest of its contents, of course—into Elsewhere. And then we will see if we can find Sebby’s old home.”

“If you catch any flies in that wide open mouth, you need to give them to Sebby,” Kyra teased her.

Jack shut her mouth and started paying attention to the terrain over in Elsewhere. Her family, she thought, was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

I don’t want to have to leave them…

She could feel both Kyra’s and Sebby’s sympathetic reactions. All three of them were being forced to give up the Meziane family and part ways with each other… to break a bond that had been forged mere weeks ago but had swiftly come to feel eternal.

You will come back. I will still be here. Sebby’s mental voice was firm and certain.

Jack leaned down and give Sebby another kiss on the top of his carapace. She’d worried that she was abandoning him like Riddick had abandoned her… it had been tying her up in knots… but now…

“How’s the ground looking on the other side?” Cedric asked as he pulled into the hangar.

“A little rough. If you go about ten feet to the right and fifteen feet forward… yeah, this is level with the other side.”

Cedric shifted the vehicle into park. “Power cells are almost fully charged. We’re good to go when you are. What do you say?”

Jack gave him a tight smile and nodded, and reached up to touch the vehicle’s canopy. She closed her eyes and let herself feel it. Oddly enough, the engine’s purr helped. She could feel everything that was being directly affected by the vibration, could feel the way it shifted from part to part, the hull of the vehicle, its wheels, its bed and the plants and packs stowed in it, all the people inside… and she could feel, somewhere far deeper down, the fundamental, quantum vibrations that aligned all of it with U1…

Remembering to swap around the air as she did it, she moved the vehicle from U1 to Elsewhere, hearing gasps of astonishment and delight around her. When she opened her eyes, she was back in her other world.

With no buildings and few trees to obscure the view, Jack could see the retreating ocean stretching away below them and to the west. The ground beneath their tires was soft and springy, a meadow surrounding them.

“Let’s put the top down,” Cedric said, and he and Usadden began to do so immediately. “Give Sebby a chance to see where we’re going, and direct us if he’s inclined to do so.”

With the vehicle’s roof removed, Sebby climbed up onto the back of one of the seats and began looking around, antennae vibrating.

Reeeeeeeeeeeee…

He stared southeast, both antennae forward.

“I think he wants to go that way,” Kyra said. Cedric nodded, putting the truck back into gear, and turned in the direction Sebby had been pointing, driving slowly and carefully.

“Don’t want to accidentally run over somebody,” he explained as he went. “Sebby’s sentient, so who knows what else might be?”

Jack loved that that was his first thought. Every time she thought it was impossible to love this family more…

Reeeeeeeeeeee… Sebby didn’t sound distressed, just… inquiring. As if he was calling out and expecting an answer.

Ten minutes later, the answer came.

Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee… The call was a lower note than Sebby’s. When it repeated a moment later, it was joined by other, higher notes…

Sebby began to bounce. Coming! Coming!

“What’s coming, Sebby?”

“Holy mother of what in the bloody hell…” Usadden gasped. Safiyya made a small squeak and covered her mouth.

A familiar shape, rendered enormous, was cresting a hillside and coming toward them. Sebby, but not. Sebby… the size of a small elephant. An elephant-sized Sebby crawling toward them… singing its Reeeeeeeee in a lower range than Sebby did… its back covered with much smaller duplicates of itself whose Reeeeeeees were far closer in pitch to Sebby’s, many at the very edge of the audible.

Mommy!

Jack swung to look at Sebby, gasping. “What?”

Mommy! Sebby repeated, bouncing, pincers waving with excitement, antennae pointed straight at the approaching mammoth crustacean. Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!

“Holy shit.”

52.
Without Saying Good-Night

“He’s doing it again,” Izil said, beginning to laugh.

“Shh! He’ll stop if he realizes you’re laughing at him,” Tafrara scolded. “Everyone. Keep going.”

Ewan was struggling to keep a straight face as he lowered his body toward the ground, bending his right leg back and straightening his left leg out in front of him, right arm lifted and curved behind him while his left arm extended toward his ankle. Jack and Kyra tried to focus on replicating his pose… while Sebby did too.

“Dear God, I can’t believe I’m not allowed to record this…” Izil gasped.

Three of Sebby’s back left legs were bending back, their right mates stretched forward. His remaining legs were held out for balance as he positioned his pincers—and antennae—in a mirror-image mimicry of Ewan’s arms. Although he wobbled a little, he was holding the pose.

The little crustacean had apparently decided that he wanted to learn Tai Chi, too.

“This is the cutest thing ever,” Kyra whispered.

Jack felt like she was going to burst with emotion. Pride and love warred with the urge to laugh for hours at how adorably silly Sebby looked… and with a powerful ache at the knowledge that, as with Ewan, this was probably her last evening-day with him for years, possibly ever.

“It is very cute,” Tafrara agreed. “Now keep your focus on Zdan and let Sebby focus on him, too.”

Word was spreading. Izil had stopped for a moment to send out a message on his comm. Some members of the family had emerged onto their balconies to observe the session, and after a moment, Jack could see Lalla and Safiyya watching from the dining room doorway.

“We won’t be doing any more of the moves where you have to lift a leg off of the ground,” Ewan murmured as he shifted to another position. “I don’t want him to fall over.”

“Agreed,” Tafrara said as she corrected the way Jack was holding her right arm.

Ewan was gazing directly at Sebby as he changed positions, moving extra-slowly and carefully to make sure the cat-sized crustacean could follow along comfortably. His suppressed laughter had given way to even more powerful emotion, and Jack could tell that he was going to treasure this experience for the rest of his life.

“Sebby really is quite intelligent, isn’t he?” Tafrara murmured by Jack after a while.

“He is, yeah. I swear, he understands everything we say,” Jack answered as she tried to mirror Ewan’s latest movement. “Sometimes I think I understand what he’s saying, too.”

“Much more than a pet, to be sure.” Tafrara nodded, a sad smile on her face. “We will miss him. The house is going to feel so empty without the three of you.”

“Just the three of them?” Ewan asked, bringing his hands into a new position that Sebby promptly imitated with his pincers.

“You call us all the time,” Tafrara laughed.

“See if I will now,” he mock-grumbled at her, straightening up to stand, fully balanced, on both legs, bringing his hands together and bowing at all of them… and especially at Sebby, who bowed back with his pincers touching.

It was their last Tai Chi session with Ewan. In another hour, once they had all showered and changed, it would be time to leave for the send-off party. The day had flown by faster than Jack liked.

Her fire bush was planted, Ewan helping her get it properly situated in its special location while, all around them, his family worked on redesigning the rooftop area to make the bush into the centerpiece of a new, magical garden. It had been loud and chaotic enough that any hope of continuing her narrative, telling the story of the capture and escape from the Kublai Khan, had been lost. She might manage to tell Kyra that part before they parted ways, but Ewan wouldn’t hear it unless—until—she returned in several years’ time.

Her last hours with him were slipping away. Soon there would be a throng of well-wishers wanting to spend time with him, people who knew him far better than she did. They might not get to spend any more time with each other at all once they arrived at the party.

Somehow she was simultaneously dreading their good-bye and fearing she was going to be cheated out of it.

“There’s no way he wouldn’t say a proper good-bye to you,” Kyra told her as they prepared to shower, Sebby eagerly bouncing as he watched them change into their bathrobes. “You’re worrying way too much.”

Jack sighed and nodded. “I know. I just… hate that time’s running out like this. I know we didn’t plan to stay much longer than this anyway, but…”

“Now it’s real,” Kyra said, belting her robe. “And it sucks. When I was little and visited my mom’s family, I always hated it when the visits ended. I always was afraid I’d never see any of them again. Eventually, I was right.”

Jack winced. Kyra’s mom seemed like she’d originally come from some pretty normal people, before she’d decided her gifts were satanic and had followed her husband into… not to put too fine a point on it, but into a cult. If she and Kyra had stayed on Earth instead of setting out across the stars…

…Jack would never have found her way here, not at this time, maybe not at all. And, if Kyra had never left Earth later, in one of the Star Jumpers that came out in ensuing decades, would she have managed to find a happy life there? Most of the textbooks at Jack’s schools had claimed that there was no happiness to be found on Earth by then, although her father had told her that things hadn’t been that simple. But Kyra might never have seen a green world…

She had a sudden memory of her overnoon dreams, of hiking and hiding in a huge forest, sometimes with Kyra and sometimes as Kyra… with Riddick beside her…

Had those even been her dreams?

Weird. She’d also visited with the Apeiros, who had lots of questions about the story she’d been telling and the world she had described. That “dream” was as vivid as waking memory. But hiking with Riddick…

The images were impressionistic. He always wore the same thing, the clothes she’d shown him wearing on the crash planet. Sometimes she’d felt as if she was playing his role, walking beside Kyra and mimicking the way he’d said things, speaking with his voice and wearing his form. Other times, she’d seen everything from Kyra’s perspective as they explored the forest together. At times, he had rescued Kyra from her oppressive life at the Enclave. But sometimes, the massacre had taken place, Riddick had rescued her from the aftermath, and they were hunting the men who had hurt her and murdered her mother, together, as a team. Sometimes he killed Red Roger for her, sometimes they killed him together…

Jack hadn’t “driven” any of the dreams. She’d been an observer, a passenger, as a dreaming Kyra spun out scenarios in which her time in the wilds of Canaan Mountain had not been spent alone, but in the company of a deadly partner.

But, Jack told herself, at least Kyra hadn’t ended up mired in any nightmares. That was good… wasn’t it?

Sebby danced in the shower with each of them as they washed up for the party. When they emerged from the bathroom, fresh clothes were waiting for them on the bed, along with two of Lalla’s wigs. Tonight, they wouldn’t be “Dihya” and “Tislilel,” who were allegedly still too ill to attend. They would pose as two college friends of Ewan’s.

The dresses were beautiful, colorful beaded kaftans belted at the waist. They were obviously expensive, and Jack had almost protested when Takama had shown them the garments earlier.

“None of that,” Takama had said before she could draw in a breath. “You know that we hoped to adopt both of you somehow. Let us at least have one occasion where we bought our ‘daughters’ something lovely to wear.”

In spite of her earlier claims, that had visibly touched Kyra even more deeply than Jack; Kyra, after all, was the genuine orphan of the two of them.

Kyra’s wig was curly and auburn; Jack’s was dark blonde, shoulder-length, with bangs. When she settled it on her head, she felt a weird sense of predestination. This was a look she could see herself wearing in reality… and suddenly wanted to.

Especially, she thought, if Ewan liked it.

“What are our names again?” Kyra asked as she belted her brilliant maroon kaftan.

“You’re Gwen, and I’m Mercia,” Jack told her as she secured the wig’s clips into her hair the way Lalla had shown her. “Tafrara had two college friends who visited a lot, who had those names and hair like we’re wearing, so it’ll be easy for them to remember our names.”

Ewan, she knew, wouldn’t have any trouble keeping his facts straight.

“Is anyone gonna buy that we’re Ewan’s age?” Kyra was attaching her wig’s clips to her own braided-back hair.

“Maybe with you. I’m supposed to have started right when he was graduating. That’s the cover story, anyway. They’re not gonna say much, though. Hopefully nobody will ask or care. It’s just in case.”

Lalla and Takama arrived with a small banquet for Sebby just as they finished getting ready.

“You two look perfect,” Takama said with a smile. “Almost like the real Gwen and Mercia. This will be easy to remember.”

As Sebby settled into what might be his final dinner at the ait Meziane house, Jack and Kyra followed Takama and Lalla down to the garage.

Ewan, garbed in his military uniform and devastatingly handsome, waited by one of the large, elegant transports that the tribe seemed to have several of. The four olive trees were still resting in the all-terrain vehicle’s bed, and no one had gathered near it. As they approached him, Jack found herself feeling very glad that she already knew how much Ewan cared about her, or she might not have found the nerve to talk to him. He looked light-years out of her league.

The expression on his face, however, was admiring. “Don’t you look lovely, ‘Mercia,’” he murmured. “‘Gwen.’ I hope you two will be riding with me?”

“Of course they will,” said Takama. “We wouldn’t dream of depriving you of a moment of their company.”

Ouch. The subtext, that it would be his last chance to see either of them for a long time, was barely below the surface.

The shadows were growing long and the sun was nearing the horizon as they drove down toward the shore, heading south as they went, away from the spaceport. For a moment, Jack was surprised.

“Oh,” she realized aloud. “Of course you didn’t land at the spaceport. Not with what had just happened there.”

“No, non-emergency traffic was extremely limited, but I was able to get special permission to land at Menara Field.” Ewan told her with a smile. “The field is run by friends of the family.”

“It’s not the one where that airshow was held at, is it?” That would be crazy.

Ewan laughed. “No, that was in New Fes. Fortunately.”

“He means,” Tafrara snickered from the front seat, “he’d never have gotten to the Tomcat if he’d had to get past locals who knew him.”

“I still have no regrets,” Ewan laughed.

“And the send-off party’s at the field?” Kyra asked.

“They have a lovely facility, yes,” Tafrara replied. “We wanted to be able to say, if anyone inquired, that we couldn’t accommodate anyone past those we had already invited. In case a certain person was still trying to get a look at the two of you.”

The airfield, larger than Jack expected given her own visits to air shows on Deckard’s World, was home to a variety of aircraft, and had a few landing pads for the occasional small spacecraft. As they walked toward the main building, Ewan pointed out at one of the pads. A small fighter, elegantly designed for both air and space, was poised on it, being fueled.

“That’s my bird. I’ve been training in her for the last six months.”

“It’s beautiful,” Jack said, wishing she could go for a ride in it.

Ewan must have heard it in her voice. “Perhaps one day, I can take you flying,” he whispered, just barely audibly… and in Arabic. Words calculated for her alone. No one else but Kyra was close enough to hear, and she couldn’t understand Arabic.

It was as close to a promise as either of them dared make. She met his eyes and saw a wistfulness in them that mirrored what she was feeling.

“Okay, you two. Don’t make me play chaperone here,” Kyra muttered.

“Sorry.” Ewan gave her a rueful look.

“I forgive you.” Kyra favored him with an arch smile. “This time.”

Ewan put his arm around Jack’s sister and gave her a hug, kissing the top of her head. “Thank you, ‘Gwen.’”

She snickered. “You realize you just kissed Lalla’s wig, right?”

He was, Jack reflected, one of the only men in the universe whom Kyra would allow to do that. She trusted him absolutely. And, because she felt an equally absolute lack of attraction to him, their relationship had genuinely fallen into a sibling-like domain. He made a far better older brother for her than the one she’d been born with.

Jack hoped Kyra wouldn’t have to wait too long to return to him and the rest of the family.

An elderly man greeted them at the building’s entry, clapping Ewan on the back as he welcomed them inside. A corridor with ordinary office doors stretched out in front of them, but through another door to the side…

…there was definitely a party in full swing.

The large room was full of people, who cheered and shouted welcomes the moment they spotted Ewan. Most of the men and women were his age or slightly older, people he had gone to school with or worked with, in all likelihood. Jack spotted General Toal and a few of the officers from the garden party mingling among the revelers. Robie was in the crowd, looking just one eyepatch and parrot away from an ancient Disney pirate captain. Most guests wore colorful Moroccan garb, but only a few of the women wore hijabs or shaylas, and Jack spotted just one woman in a full chador.

Within moments, Ewan had been swallowed up by the crowd. Everyone wanted a chance to talk to him before he left for Qamar. Jack could hear him switching flawlessly between Arabic, French, and Spanish as he went, favoring each conversation partner’s first language. Tafrara showed up a moment later to lead Jack and Kyra to the food tables, where a fascinating array of options made Jack resolve to try a small amount of everything at least once over the course of the night. Kyra gave her a wide-eyed look when she caught that thought.

“You are definitely getting ready to grow another two or three inches,” her older sister whispered to her. “Possibly on the spot.”

As always, Jack noticed, the alcoholic beverages that would have been ubiquitous on Deckard’s World were entirely absent. Instead, Maghrebi mint tea dominated, along with glasses of orange and pomegranate juice, avocado “juice” that Jack already knew from experience was more of a smoothie, raib, and even a few cups of nous nous despite the hour. Small tables dotted the room—there didn’t appear to be an area for dancing—and many of the guests had already filled plates and congregated around most of them.

With a filled plate of her own, Jack settled in to people-watch, trying not to think about how few hours were left until Ewan’s launch window opened and he left Tangiers Prime. Many of the men and women his age seemed to be using the party as an impromptu reunion, chatting in Arabic about what each of them had been doing in the last few years. Most seemed to be pursuing graduate studies of some kind. Several of the women—all distressingly beautiful—were staying close to Ewan and hanging on his every word. His warmth encompassed all of them.

Any of them, she thought heavily, might be his future wife. Any of them would be a more appropriate choice than a thirteen-year-old girl with a massive crush and four and a half years to go before she was even legal on Tangiers Prime. She’d been deluding herself, reading too much into Ewan’s kindness and brotherly affection. When she came back, she would have to be prepared to just be his little sister or young cousin, and to accept whoever he’d married as family, too…

“You seem to be lost in some sad thoughts,” a deep voice rumbled beside her. General Toal sat down next to her.

Jack nodded, swallowing. “Yeah, saying goodbye is hard.”

“You can return one day, ‘Mercia,’” he told her, his voice gentle. “Goodbye does not have to be forever. I know that there will always be a welcome for you here.”

It suddenly occurred to Jack to wonder if Riddick had ever planned to return to Helion Prime, and what he would think if he did and she was gone. But then, no promises of any kind had been made there, and neither he nor Imam had ever particularly cared to ask if she had plans that conflicted with the ones they apparently had contrived for her. Hopefully, if he did come back one day to find her long gone, he’d accept it as an inevitable outcome of their choice to exclude her from decisions about her own fate.

Just as she, she told the ache lodged in her chest, would have to accept whatever she found when she returned to Tangiers Prime one day. Nobody here could put their lives on hold just so she could go off and grow up first.

Full dark had fallen, and some of the guests were already departing. Ewan made sure to speak to each of them one more time as they left.

“Is it almost time already?” she asked General Toal, suddenly feeling stricken.

“No, child. Not yet. But part of the event is something that most of the traditionalists among the Muslim contingent would be uncomfortable with.” He nodded at the departing guests, all of whom, Jack realized, were dressed in more conservative Muslim attire.

“What part is that?” she asked as Kyra sat down next to her.

“A bit of Scottish traditionalism,” Cedric said, joining them. “Which all are welcome to partake in, if their faith allows them to. The Ceilidh.”

Kyra looked startled for a second. “The Kaylee?”

A friend of hers, Jack remembered, had worn that name, and had died a terrible death.

“Ceilidh… C-E-I-L-I-D-H,” Cedric explained. It did sound like he was saying Kaylee, though. “It’s a traditional Scottish dance. We haven’t had a chance to hold one for a while, and I think Ewan’s looking forward to it. So we let all of the guests know that it would be one of the final events of the evening.”

“Most strict observers of Islam follow a prohibition against men and women dancing together,” General Toal added. “For many of them, even watching that take place would be deeply uncomfortable. American square dancing has many of its roots in the Ceilidh, I’m told.”

Kyra, of course, had been born in America, and Jack had been born on a world that fetishized all things American.

Jack grinned. “My grade school taught us how to square dance. I don’t know how similar it really is, but I’m in.”

“My parents always said dancing was sinful,” Kyra said after a moment, a mischievous smile spreading over her face. “I wanna try it.”

“Good,” Tafrara said from behind them. “We can show you the steps. It’s really not hard at all.”

More than half of the guests had departed, and the tables were being moved to the edges of the room. Once anyone who might object had left, Tafrara and Izil began showing Jack and Kyra various steps and telling them their names.

“I’m never going to remember all of this,” Kyra groaned, even as she copied Tafrara’s footwork perfectly.

Jack, who could remember all of the names and the steps that went with them, was privately convinced that, in spite of that, she was going to end up stomping someone’s foot in a moment of pure klutziness.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tafrara laughed. “Go with the movement and let it carry you. We’re not doing competitive performances here.”

“There are competitive performances?” Kyra gasped.

“People will make anything into a competition,” Ewan said, joining them and casting the light of his smile on each of them in turn. “Are we ready? I’ve been waiting for this all night.”

The next thing Jack knew, he had taken her hand and led her out toward the center of the room. Kyra, hand in hand with Izil, followed. Other pairs joined them.

The elderly proprietor who had greeted them stepped up to a microphone, drawing everyone’s attention. He would be their caller, he told them. Many of the remaining guests seemed comfortable just observing as the dance got underway and Jack discovered, for the first time in her life, that bagpipes really could produce gorgeous melodies.

It was hard not to get lost in Ewan’s eyes when he was her partner, and she was always afraid that his would be the foot she tromped on. But he was an expert at the dance, and it never happened. She was whirled from partner to partner, sometimes dancing with Izil, sometimes Usadden, then Cedric, Robie, even General Toal… and then back in Ewan’s arms where time stopped once more. It was a lot like square dancing, although many of the calls were completely different. Whirling through figures felt almost like spinning through the spangled darkness with the Apeiros, but with him alongside her. She wasn’t sure how long it lasted, but she found herself wishing it would never end. Finally, however, the last of the songs ended and both the other dancers and their audience began to clap. She did as well, feeling a mixture of breathless exhilaration and forlorn longing.

Safiyya handed her a glass of something sweet with a hint of a grassy flavor to it, which Jack found herself almost chugging. “Wow, what is this?”

“Aseer kasab,” Safiyya told her. “Sugarcane juice. A good refreshment for after such strenuous exercise.”

Ewan was circulating again, and Jack realized that now he was saying his goodbyes to everyone, sharing hugs and claps on the back as he went. It was almost time.

“On the way back to the ait Meziane house,” General Toal said from beside her, “I have a small present for you and ‘Gwen.’ We spoke of it the other day.”

That reminded her. “Do you know if it could help me stop talking in my sleep? I’m worried about what people might hear me say.”

The General raised his eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, it does help train for that, too. I will show you the settings for that… as well as the settings for what we discussed.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Jack could see Ewan in earnest conversation with Kyra. The moment she dreaded was getting closer and closer.

“Thank you, General,” she said, trying to focus on the moment. “I really appreciate everything you’re doing.”

“It is no more than I would hope anyone in my position would have the honor to do, child.”

Child. The sum total of everything that had gone wrong on her run… no matter where she went, what she did, or how freakin’ tall she got, she was still a child…

People were leaving in droves now. The room was emptying out—

“‘Mercia?’” Ewan asked. He was standing in front of her, holding out his hand. “May I have a moment with you?”

Here we go. Fuck…

Jack nodded, swallowing hard against the constriction suddenly wrapping itself around her throat, and took his hand, standing up.

Ewan led her toward a door to one side of the room. Usadden began to follow them. “We need a moment alone. Please,” Ewan said to his cousin.

Jack was aware of charged glances passing around. Then she saw Cedric nod. Ewan opened the door and drew her through, closing it behind them.

They were in a small office. She suddenly realized that this was the first time they were alone, unchaperoned, since they had returned from Elsewhere.

“I…” Ewan said, stepping close to her, and then faltered for a moment. “I don’t even know your real name.”

“Au—” she started, before his fingertips pressed against her lips.

“And you cannot tell me, not now. I can’t know your name any more than I can know where you’re going. One day… but not now.” Ewan closed his eyes and took a deep breath, taking her hand in his and pressing her palm to his chest above his heart. His eyes opened again and locked with hers, capturing her. “But here’s something I can tell you. Listen carefully, Tizzy.”

He recited a long string of numbers while she gazed up at him in bewilderment.

“Repeat that back, please,” he said when he was done. She did. “Good. That comm code will reach me, no matter where you are in the Federacy, and no matter where I am. I will always have it. If you find yourself in trouble, if you need my help, regardless of where or when, use that code. You only have to leave the message, ‘Tislilel needs you,’ and I will come to you. I know we’re forbidden to make any promises, but upon my life, I swear this. I will come to you. If I receive your call when I’m on my death bed, I will still rise up and come to you. But I hope you will return to us before then, of course…”

Jack couldn’t speak. There were far too many things she wanted to say to him, most of which she didn’t dare articulate. She was trapped in his eyes.

He pulled her into a hug, wrapping his powerful arms around her and holding her close. She found herself clinging to him, wishing she never had to let go. He murmured something in Tamazight, too fast for her to even try to parse, but she knew she would remember every syllable.

“Come back to us when you can, Tislilel Meziane,” he said in a shaky whisper after another moment. “You will always have a home and family here with us. No matter what happens, that will always be true.”

Even if she could find her voice, she realized that she didn’t dare answer him. No promises were allowed, even if she wanted to promise him everything, to tell him she was his forever—

The door opened. “Zdan?” Robie’s voice was gentle. “It’s time. The window’s opening.”

Ewan released her, took her face in his hands, and brushed aside her bangs before kissing her forehead, much as his brother had the last time she’d seen him. “Until we meet again, taḥbibt-iw.”

She rose up and kissed his cheek before he could pull away. It was a struggle not to begin crying as she forced herself to let go, and not to try to press her lips to his. His eyes, on hers, were intense and shining. She still couldn’t get her voice to work, but she could see—could feel all the way through—that he already knew everything she was unable to say.

“Come,” Robie said, putting his hand on Ewan’s shoulder and steering him out of the room.

Kyra entered a moment later and wrapped Jack in a tight hug.

The family walked outside as a group a few minutes later. Ewan, now dressed in his flight suit and carrying his helmet in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, was striding across the tarmac, Robie and the elderly proprietor on either side of him. As they watched, he reached his fighter and spoke to both men for a moment. Robie put his hand on Ewan’s shoulder, saying something. Ewan shook his head and then donned his helmet, climbing into the cockpit. Robie removed the ladder from the spacecraft’s side, retreating with the old man as the fighter’s engines lit up and it began to roll toward the runway. They watched, as a group, as Ewan took off, no one moving until the light from the engines, a star rising upward into the night sky, finally dwindled and vanished.

“Time to go home,” Cedric said after a moment.

Jack felt strangely weightless and numb as they walked toward the vehicles they’d come in… one family member short. Robie and the proprietor had cut across the tarmac and were talking to each other in Arabic as they approached.

“…known him since he was a little boy,” the old man was saying, “and I know he’ll be fine… but I’d still like to know which of those lovely young women had the audacity to break his heart tonight of all nights…”

Jack felt like she couldn’t breathe.

“That’s none of your concern,” Robie said, his voice suddenly sharp.

“Khara,” muttered Usadden. Shit.

“Let’s get you girls home,” General Toal said, steering Jack and Kyra toward the vehicle he’d used to pick Jack up from the pier. “I have something for the two of you…”

“What is it?” Kyra whispered to Jack as they walked with him. “What’s wrong?”

She still couldn’t speak. Instead, she shared that moment mentally with Kyra… fully translated.

Oh, her sister replied silently. Damn…

They climbed into the back seat of the General’s vehicle, where two wrapped boxes with D. and T. on them waited. Jack felt completely hollow.

“I will show you how to use them once we are back at the house,” the General said as he drove them away from the airfield.

She nodded, still unable to talk, wondering if she’d manage to find her voice ever again. Kyra pulled her into another hug and held her as her tears finally slid free.

An orange glow lit part of the night sky, reflecting against the clouds. They were driving toward it.

“What is that?” Kyra asked as Jack wiped her face with the General’s handkerchief.

The glow was growing larger and larger, illuminating a column of black smoke… which was rising from the Rif.

“It would appear,” the General said, sounding completely unsurprised and unconcerned, “that your old apartment building is burning to the ground.”

51.
Who We Become in the Darkness

“What’s going on up there?” Jack asked, craning her neck to look toward the rooftop.

Five stories up, somewhere out of sight, she could hear the shriek of a buzz-saw.

Ewan glanced up and then grinned. “Father said he was going to have most of the chimneytop cut away. Only a few inches will remain above the floor of the rooftop, just enough to help ensure that the fire bush has some boundaries. We’re going to let it form a small dune up there.”

“Will it?”

Tafrara, who was helping Kyra dig the hole for her fig tree, nodded. “That is what it does. We will let it make a little desert garden, and Mother is talking of putting a fountain nearby to give it an oasis. When you two return, I think the entire rooftop will have gardens around its length.”

Kyra’s breath hitched and she glanced over at Jack. Ouch. We’re supposed to avoid talking about the future like that.

Yeah, Jack told her silently. I know… but at least we know there’ll always be a welcome for us here, right?

I hope so, Kyra’s mental “voice” was subdued.

“So,” Izil said, emerging from the house with a glutted Sebby riding his back and peeking over his shoulder, “I hope you waited for us before starting up the story again.”

Jack felt instant relief. The silence, following Tafrara’s gaffe, had been growing awkward.

Ewan had set up a small canopy around the area where they were working, to keep the worst of the waning midday heat and light off them. Lalla had brought out a small array of snacks for them to enjoy while they worked through the evening-day’s “morning” period. Cedric, supervising the removal of most of the chimney-top and the pouring of a few tons of sand down the flue, had told them that it would be shortly after lunch before everything would be ready to plant Jack’s fire bush. Ewan intended to assist her in its planting, the way Tafrara was helping Kyra. And in the meantime…

Jack, who had finally mastered the trick of pouring tea from one of the long-spouted Maghrebi teapots, poured Izil a cup as he joined them. “We were waiting for you two.”

“Good. So you had reached the place in the canyon where the huge bones had fallen during your ride back to the ship?”

“Yeah. Riddick got in front of us and started hoisting them out of the way, to try to clear us a path. There was only one area that was really obstructed, and we almost got all the way through it. But all those monsters that had fallen from the sky, the ones I told you about… some of them weren’t dead yet when they hit the ground. One of them grabbed Suleiman’s leg…”

It was weird to realize, suddenly, how many of the deaths on that planet had been comparatively quiet. Owens and Shazza had both died screaming, and she suspected those screams would haunt her nightmares for years to come. Shazza had heard Zeke screaming, but Jack had been sorting through the contents of a locker in the cargo container at the time. But Ali… if he’d screamed, they hadn’t heard it over the weird alien caterwauls of the creatures killing him. Mostly, death had seemed to come entirely too quietly. Not that this was the moment of Suleiman’s death, but he had certainly thought it was going to be. Even now, having studied Arabic, she couldn’t parse most of what he had been shrieking. At one point it had almost sounded like he was yelling “Daddy!”

The closest word she’d found, when she’d poked around in languages connected to Arabic, meant “Grandma” in Urdu. Had Suleiman been calling out for his grandmother? Maybe speaking in Urdu? Even now she could only guess at half of his sobbing words.

“It ripped up his ankle before they got it off him. Riddick was moving on, dragging the cells further down the canyon, while Fry and Imam were tying up Suleiman’s ankle with Imam’s headwrap. I called out to him, wanting to get him to wait. I mean, I know he probably figured we’d catch up with him…”

Had he? She silenced the doubts that tried to crowd into her head yet again before Kyra could hear them. She knew that, for Kyra, Riddick was the undisputed, undoubted hero of the story…

…and needed to stay that way.

“Before he could turn around, though, I realized I was just standing out in the middle of the canyon with no cover and nothing but a flashlight, and something was swooping down at me from above. I barely had time to get under one of the big pieces of bone before it was on top of me.”

That had been the moment when she had, at least for a while, known that she didn’t really want to die. Or, at the very least, not like that. Struggling to hold the bone up above her with the weight of a large, hungry predator on top of it, while the predator hammered at the barrier with its bony head, had unleashed her own desperate screams.

Ewan put his arm around her as she described it all, and she leaned against him. “I heard Fry yelling ‘get off of her!’ She was trying to use the flashlight I’d dropped to drive it away, but it must’ve been really hungry because it tried to fight her and managed to knock the flashlight out of her hand and smash it. I thought we were both dead, but—”

“Riddick to the rescue,” Kyra breathed. When Jack glanced over, her expression was enrapt.

He’d let out a stunning, predatory roar as he’d lunged at the creature, catching both of its legs as it tried to pounce him. Neither she nor Fry could stop staring as the beast snapped at Riddick repeatedly. It reared back, but he pinned its wrists—ankles?—together and pulled out his shiv, gutting it while it screamed.

I knew he’d come to save us.

Where had that thought come from? It wasn’t hers. She glanced over at Kyra, who had gone still and whose eyes were closed, focused on the visuals she’d been evoking of the battle as she described it, and who was smiling a soft, vindicated smile.

Us? Had that been Kyra? It sent a tiny chill through her.

“After he snapped its neck,” she continued, trying to put whatever that instant had been behind them, “he just stared at it for a moment and said, ‘did not know who it was fuckin’ with.’ Then he looked up at us, like he was surprised we were there, like he’d forgotten all about us while he was fighting it.”

“Riding a combat high,” Ewan murmured.

Jack looked up at him. “A combat high?”

He nodded. “Adrenaline can have that effect. I’ve… felt that rush, once or twice, during really intense battlefield exercises. Some soldiers chase it, developing something called ‘appetitive aggression.’ A love of the fight, and the kill.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Kyra muttered, settling the fig tree into its hole.

“It can be, when soldiers come home to civilian life still addicted to that high,” Ewan mused. “When combined with the numbing effects of battle fatigue, for some of them, moments of violence become the only times when they can feel anything. That combination can be incredibly dangerous for everyone if they start chasing the high again.”

Jack wondered how many times he’d been dispatched, in his role as a paramedic, to deal with the aftermath of someone who had.

Kyra’s expression, Jack noticed, had turned defensive. Jack couldn’t hear any of her thoughts now. Her sister bent her head, appearing focused on filling in the hole around the fig tree’s roots with dirt.

Was she reacting to a possible criticism of Riddick, or was she taking it more personally?

Time to get on with the story, either way.

“Suleiman was hobbling, and he needed to lean on Imam, but he didn’t need to be carried… not at first, anyway. Riddick was in front of us now, the whole way, dragging those four fuel cells. Most of the ground was clear now, but the canyon walls had gotten really high on either side of us. Then Suleiman suddenly fell and couldn’t get back up. Fry and Imam were trying to help him, and then I felt this plop of liquid on my arm. I thought maybe it was more blood from those things…”

“But it wasn’t?” Tafrara asked, helping Kyra fill in the hole around the fig tree.

“It was starting to rain,” Jack sighed.

“Oh no,” Izil groaned. Sebby squeaked in concern, reaching up with both antennae to touch his chin. He chuckled and began petting the cat-sized crustacean. “And you were down to just the flaming bottles by then?”

“Yeah, the only flashlights left were the ones on Riddick’s back. In under a minute, it was pouring. And Riddick started laughing like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard…”

“So where the hell’s your God now?”

Keeping her bottle lit had become Jack’s top priority as they huddled against the cliffside. Fry’s flame had gone out, and they couldn’t get it to reignite. Jack’s whole focus narrowed down to keeping her bottle’s flame from guttering and dying, too, as she tried again and again to relight Fry’s soaked wick. Riddick had climbed up onto an outcropping to scan the path ahead, while Fry begged him to tell her that they were almost at the settlement. Jack still had no idea whether anyone but her had heard his murmured answer: “We can’t make it.”

“We hadn’t even noticed that one of those monsters was crawling down the cliff’s face until it wrapped its tail around Suleiman’s neck and dragged him away. He barely got out a choked kinda scream before he was gone. Imam… lost it. He was screaming up at the darkness, begging for his last kid back. I don’t know if he was begging the monsters or his God… he looked completely broken.”

“I wouldn’t doubt he was dealing with survivor’s guilt as well,” Ewan murmured. Kyra snorted derisively.

“Maybe. He did seem to get all gung-ho about prayer afterward. Like, constantly praying. Maybe he decided if he’d just prayed harder on the planet—”

“Never works,” Kyra muttered. “I know that for a fact.”

“Riddick had found a cave opening in the cliff face,” Jack continued before things could get any more awkward. “He wanted us to hide inside it. But he didn’t follow us in. Instead, he pushed this huge rock in front of the hole once we were inside. We were down to just my bottle. Fry’s had some liquor left in it, but too much water had soaked her wick. I think…”

And now it was time to lie. To straight up, unflinchingly lie. Both about Riddick’s intentions and about what she believed they were, then and now.

“I think he wanted to get the cells to the skiff and then come back for us. He couldn’t drag them and protect us at the same time, but once they were there, he’d be able to keep us safe on the last part of the run. It was hard, waiting, with the light burning lower and lower. We added the liquor from Fry’s bottle to mine so we could make the light last longer…”

She forced herself to resolutely not think about her absolute certainty that Riddick had no intention of returning, that he would leave them behind and take off on the skiff on his own, that none of them meant enough to him to come back. She didn’t want Kyra picking up on it. Instead, she pretended—carefully, so that it wouldn’t leak through—that it had been Tomlin on the other side of the rock, who had promised to return to save them all, and who would be prevented from keeping that promise by nothing less than death itself. The visuals that she let Kyra see absolutely did not include the moment she had turned to Fry and asked, “he’s not coming back, is he?” and had seen the same dashed hopes in the pilot’s eyes.

She did, however, describe the final guttering of the last liquor bottle’s light, as the beasts prowled and sang their chilling songs just outside of the cave. As the last of the firelight died, she and Fry had clasped hands… and realized that they could still see each other’s hands. There was a gentle, bluish glow surrounding them, making her wonder for a moment if the single blue sun had somehow risen and the terrible night was over. But above her, the cave ceiling seemed to glitter with stars, blue stars…

Imam had reached up and brought two of them down, revealing a pair of glowing, wriggling grubs.

The cave was full of them. It was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

Jack heard Kyra’s breath catch as she shared the images of the glow worms spangling the cave ceiling with their soft blue light. “So beautiful,” her sister whispered.

“We decided to fill up one of the two bottles, scrape its labels off, and make a lamp so Fry could go help Riddick get the skiff ready and then come back with him. Imam could barely push the rock away enough for her to squeeze out of the cave. I don’t even know how Riddick had managed to move it. After she left, I kept collecting glow worms so we could try to fill up the second bottle, too. And then, when we were waiting, I heard it…”

Low groans, echoing through the cave from somewhere deep below. It was an animal sound, but deep and dark and terrible. Something enormous was rising up.

“Those huge bones from the canyon, and out in the bonefield? We hadn’t seen anything big enough to leave them behind, not yet. Johns thought maybe the creatures we’d already seen had killed them all off, but… I think he was wrong. I think it just took them even longer to come out in the dark than the other creatures… but they were coming.”

“A whole subterranean ecosystem rising up for a month on the surface,” Ewan breathed.

“A month?” Jack gasped.

Ewan nodded. “Yes. The crash investigators concluded that it took a month before the planets on either side of your crash planet finished the conjunction and light reached the surface again. Roughly two weeks after the eclipse began, things apparently got very rough for life on the surface, too, because the alignment became a true syzygy. I wonder if the huge creatures whose bones you saw, and whose voices you may have heard, used that to fly. The gravitational effects would have been both fascinating and terrifying to observe.”

Staying at the ship would have been death, Jack realized. A whole month in darkness would have ended them all.

“Bloody hell, I’d love to study that world and its life,” Izil muttered.

“You’d need to be armored like a tank to survive for very long,” Jack told him. “Those things were vicious.”

The low, rumbling groans of the beasts—

…why did the word below suddenly make her think of the Apeiros?…

The thought vanished a second later as if plucked from her mind.

—the beasts beneath the surface were growing louder when, with a harsh scraping sound, the rock in front of the cave fell away. For a moment, she thought that one of the rising leviathans had triggered an avalanche, until Fry’s smiling face appeared in the opening… and then she moved out of the way so they could see that Riddick was with her.

“Never had a doubt!” Jack had lied, pure relief coursing through her. The truth was, she was amazed by his return, but wouldn’t have blamed him for leaving them, leaving her, if he had.

They’d barely known each other then. If he’d simply left, flying away either so he wouldn’t have to watch them get taken one by one, or just because he didn’t care about their fates anyway, she wouldn’t have hated him for it or felt particularly betrayed. Maybe because a huge part of her had still felt like she deserved to share the fate that had befallen so many of her recent friends.

But, after four days of getting to know each other better on the skiff and another two days together on the Xanadu III—not that she’d ever told him her real name or destination—having him vanish without a word and strand her in Imam’s household… that was what had hurt. That was what she still couldn’t reconcile. Leaving her to die on the crash planet would somehow have felt far less egregious than leaving her to wither in the harsh, dry emotional desert of Helion Prime.

Kyra’s breath hitched, and Jack realized that her thoughts of betrayal had seeped through their connection. She made herself focus back on the story and sent Kyra images of just how suave and dashing Riddick had looked, framed in the cave opening.

“Anyone not ready for this?” he’d asked, and in that moment, she’d felt ready to do anything.

Two glowing bottles held aloft had done a good job of covering the four of them as they made their final run. At times, Jack thought she could still hear the low, almost subsonic sounds of the great beasts rising up under the ground. She hoped that none of them would rise in the settlement… at least, not until after the skiff could take off. The others seemed not to hear anything at all. Riddick led them to a steep incline, helping them over its top; she didn’t realize he had fallen behind until they reached the bright, welcoming light of the skiff and he wasn’t with them.

“Imam… well, we waited for a long moment inside the skiff, but Fry didn’t come in after us. She was scanning the darkness for any sign of him. But Imam wanted to leave right then. He started telling her to come inside… he knew we couldn’t fly off without either her or Riddick in the pilot’s seat. She was starting to give up and turn back toward us when we heard Riddick scream somewhere out in the darkness. She raced off with one of the glowing bottles. I tried to follow, but Imam wouldn’t let me.”

That had been an awkward moment for the two of them in another, unexpected, way. As she had tried to push past him, Imam had put his hand on her chest to stop her—probably the way he would have blocked one of his boys—and his hand had ended up cupping her right breast for an instant. She’d shoved it away, but it had left both of them shocked and uncomfortable… and Fry, meanwhile, had vanished around a corner. There was no way to follow her. Imam had become even more stand-offish after that—

“Damn, you should’a kicked him in the balls,” Kyra grumbled.

“He didn’t mean to do it,” Jack argued, sighing. “I… think he always meant well…”

Ewan gave her a gentle squeeze. “You need to show yourself as much grace and forgiveness as you show others, a tafat-iw.”

He’d called her that once before, she thought, but she had the weird sense that she’d been …floating in space?… at the time.

“Sometimes I still wonder if,” she continued after a moment, “if he’d let me grab the bottle and go after Fry, both of them would’ve made it back. Like maybe it would’ve been enough light to keep them safe…”

“Or maybe you’d have died, too,” Kyra muttered.

“You could make an excellent First Responder,” Ewan told her. She knew he meant it as a compliment; as a former paramedic, he’d often been one himself. “But only once you learn how to protect yourself a little better at the same time. How long did the two of you wait after that?”

“Seemed like forever,” Jack sighed. “Imam… after a minute he started mumbling in Arabic that if they’d both died we were going to be trapped on that ungodly world. I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time, but…”

Now that she was parsing it from memory, she was appalled to realize just how much he’d resented being left in charge of her, as opposed to any of the boys he had traveled with. His opinions of both Fry and Riddick weren’t any better. If Fry returned, he would be surrounded by two females who didn’t share his faith or understand true propriety; if Riddick returned, he would have to guard her chastity at all times; if both returned, he was convinced that the skiff would turn into a den of iniquity within hours of launching, that Fry had to have promised to indulge Riddick’s undoubtedly perverted appetites to get him to rescue them at all. He’d wondered what terrible sin he had to have committed to bring on this onerous punishment. When she’d finally asked him what he was muttering, he’d told her “Just praying, child,” holding up the beads that he’d somehow managed to hang onto during their run.

“Told you he was a douchebag,” Kyra grumbled. She had cleaned the dirt off of her hands—but not, Jack noticed, from under her nails—and was having a small snack with Tafrara. Sebby was creeping over to steal an olive, clearly thinking nobody would notice. The little pile he was stalking, though, had been placed there just for him.

“Yeah,” Jack admitted with a sigh. “But I think he was pretty traumatized by everything that happened…”

“But taking it out on you reinforced your trauma reaction,” Ewan murmured next to her. “And drove you to this.”

He lifted one of her hands, turning it palm up and running his thumb along the scar on the inside of her arm. She tried very hard not to react inappropriately to his caress, hiding the thrill racing up her spine, and saw a hint of a knowing smirk appear on Kyra’s face.

“I guess,” Jack said. Inside, it still felt to her like Riddick’s abandonment had been a bigger indictment than anything Imam had said or done. But maybe, she thought, he’d been struggling with his own guilt…

From the darkness, they had heard Riddick’s voice, calling out: “Not for me!”

Jack had known, even before he had staggered into view with the glowing bottle in his hand, that Fry was dead.

She described the takeoff from the planet as they cleaned up the gardening gear. Riddick had a ragged gash on his leg that Imam had insisted on treating before they lifted off, and Jack had discreetly changed pads while they were preoccupied, something that left her feeling profoundly uncomfortable afterwards when she discovered just how gritty the pad she’d chosen was. Once they were ready to launch, Riddick had delayed for a nerve-wracking moment, switching off all the lights so he could lure the lurking monstrosities close before burning as many of them as he could with the skiff’s engines. She’d felt his desire for vengeance, and a strange, burning guilt beneath it. She had her own suspicions of what that guilt might have been about, but she omitted it from the story she was telling and the visuals she was feeding Kyra. She’d let him stay the unquestioned hero of the tale.

“So we were out in space, at last, leaving the crash planet. Riddick seemed to know exactly what to do to get us to one of the Sol Track beacons. Imam was praying and pretending not to watch us as I went up and sat down in the copilot’s seat. But I needed us to get our stories straight, just in case we were found quickly.” She was, after all, an open Missing Person case, even if nobody considered her Armed and Dangerous yet. Knowing what kind of cover story Riddick planned to use could affect which one she needed to go with. “So I said to Riddick, ‘a lot of questions, whoever we run into. Could even be a merc ship.’”

Why she’d thought that, exactly, she still didn’t know. It had come to her with an odd sense of certainty. Later, she would wish she’d been certain of almost anything else.

She mimicked the shrug she’d given at the time as she’d looked over at Riddick. “‘So what the hell do we tell them about you?’”

She could hear Kyra murmuring her lines, like a distant echo.

“What did he say?” Tafrara asked as she started putting away the gardening tools.

“He said, ‘tell ’em Riddick’s dead. He died somewhere on that planet.’” Jack was pretty sure he’d meant it, too. He’d seemed to have felt that something transformative had happened.

Maybe he’d even have been right… if only she’d been wrong about the merc ship. But if he’d really intended to change his path, discard his identity and take on a new one, whether posing as William Johns or someone else altogether, their encounter with the Kublai Khan ruined that chance…

…and turned her into a murderer.

50.
A Trickster God for a Call Sign

“We’ll leave to choose the plants right after dinner,” Tafrara said as they walked down to the dining room, “and then we can plant them together after the overnoon sleep, before it’s time to get ready for Zdan’s send-off party.”

“And Tizzy,” Izil added, “can tell us the rest of the story while we’re planting.”

Jack had advanced that story to partway through the canyon run, describing how everyone had let go of everything that wasn’t absolutely essential to their escape offworld and how Riddick had rigged up a rope harness to drag the precious fuel cells himself. Jack’s own backpack, along with the boomerang Paris had lent her, had been discarded along with most of the sled’s contents. The plan had been simple enough: run like hell with all the light they could carry and nothing else to weigh them down.

Imam had insisted on praying with each of them ahead of the run, something that had left Jack feeling awkward and bewildered. Her family hadn’t been especially religious, observing major holidays with a more secular zeal than anything else. The idea of closing her eyes and reaching out to an unseen and powerful entity had seemed weird to her…

…at least, it had until recently, when the Apeiros had reached out to her.

They weren’t gods. She knew that much already. They were powerful, but it wasn’t that kind of power, and she had a sense that they would eschew any such labels.

But she had been left feeling off-kilter after Imam’s prayers until he’d walked off to find Riddick, and Fry had muttered “whatever” under her breath… and then she’d overheard Riddick mocking the cleric’s beliefs. It had been a relief to know that she wasn’t the only one struggling to connect with his attempts at bonding through prayer.

It came as an even bigger relief when Ewan, chuckling, admitted that while his family was nominally Christian, they were every bit as secular as she’d been raised. She was very glad that she hadn’t given him—or any of his family, really—offense with her admission.

The start of the run itself had been frenetic and crazed, little to narrate beyond impressions and Riddick’s periodic roars of “Move!” when they faltered. But then, above them, the monsters had begun battling in the air, blue blood raining down on them and bodies—and body parts—falling from the sky.

Takama came to the guest room door to summon them to dinner, and deliver Sebby’s cricket box, right as Jack described reaching the collapsed pile of massive bones that Shazza had driven through. It was as good a place to break off as any.

Tafrara and Kyra were talking about gardening plans as they walked down the stairs together. Jack felt a sad pang move through her; in Kyra’s dream, that was one of the only chores she’d enjoyed doing in the New Christy Enclave. It struck Jack yet again what a perfect fit her sister was with this family, and how terribly unfair it was that she couldn’t just stay with them. She wouldn’t even be able to circle back to them until she’d broken her trail, something that could take years to be sure of.

And what about her? Could she find a way back here as Audrey MacNamera?

Tangiers Prime, she thought, had several excellent universities. She could apply to one of them, maybe. Return as a college student with a completely plausible and unconnected reason for traveling to New Marrakesh and “meeting” the ait Meziane tribe for the “first time…”

It might work. She’d have to look into which schools had programs that interested her. She couldn’t do it if she couldn’t make the choice to apply feel completely in character…

“You seem suspiciously deep in thought,” Ewan said beside her. “Should I be worried?”

She glanced up at him, catching a hint of a teasing smile… but also concern. “I was thinking about when we might be able to break our trails and come back. What kinds of covers we might need to come up with, to make us showing up for a second time seem plausibly like a first arrival.”

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something good,” he said, his smile widening. “We will be standing by to meet you, for the very first time ever, when you do.”

If she picked a University in New Marrakesh to attend, she thought, she might even be able to visit with the family frequently. She wondered where Ewan would end up based out of once his flight training was over, and how often he might be back at the house.

It was tempting to ask, to try to make plans, but she didn’t dare. It would be at least five years before she would be able to return. He might be married by then, or living on a base in another part of the system. General Toal had warned her that any long-term plans or promises would be red flags to people like Toombs, or to Operatives seeking her or Kyra. As much as she wanted to ask Ewan to wait for her—a hazardous thing to articulate anyway—she couldn’t. Even if it didn’t have the potential to draw dangerous attention to them… it would be cruel to him when she had no idea what might actually happen between that moment and an uncertain future that was years away.

She wished she could close her eyes and skip forward in time, but then she’d still be just as young.

“Are you all right with telling us your story like this?” Ewan asked. “I really should have asked this sooner, but after the way the last sections affected you—”

“No, it’s good,” Jack told him. “It’s, uh… it’s the first time I’ve been able to tell anybody other than Dihya about it. And it’s the last chance I’ll get to tell anyone, too.”

Ewan, pulling out a chair for her, blinked and then nodded. “Because after you leave here, you won’t be able to admit to anyone that you were the girl who survived the Hunter-Gratzner crash.”

Jack nodded back as he pushed in her seat and took the one beside her. “Gotta speak now or forever hold my peace, I guess.”

Ewan’s expression was sad. “You have so much pain attached to it. I worry it’s going to be left unresolved.”

He and Kyra, and Tafrara and Izil, had tried so hard this morning-day to help her with it, but while they’d given her a lot of things to think about, most of it hadn’t really sunk in yet and she knew it. She understood what he was saying—one conversation wasn’t going to do it and yet that might be all she’d ever get—and she could feel his wish that he could sit with her, over time, as she worked through it all. It was another If-Only on the large pile that had formed, part of a life and future she desperately wished could be hers but could never claim without going far away from it first.

“Maybe one day,” she told him once she was sure she could keep the wobble out of her voice.

He nodded, looking as morose as she felt.

“Tell me about piloting,” she asked him, wanting something brighter to talk about for a while. It was the right move.

Ewan’s eyes lit up as he described flying, both in air and in space, and the thrilling terror of launches and re-entries. A part of him came alive that she’d never seen before, and she found herself falling for him all over again. He had completed almost all of his primary training, but the most demanding part—advanced combat flight, both in atmosphere and in space—was ahead of him and would begin a week after he returned to Qamar, once he was recertified as flight-ready and took a final test that had originally been scheduled for a few days after he received the news of his brother’s death.

“I’m behind the rest of my class right now,” he said with a rueful smile. “But hopefully I won’t stay that way. Fortunately, I won’t have two weeks of catch-up to do. Just one. Everyone got a few days off after that test. I had originally been planning to meet up with my brother then.”

The shadow of his grief flickered over him for a moment before he seemed to put it aside and focused on her again.

“Are you ready for the test?” Jack asked, feeling concern. As far as she knew, he hadn’t been getting many opportunities to study and review things.

He grinned and nodded. “You’re not the only eidetic at this table,” he told her, winking.

“Really?” Was that part of why the two of them had bonded so quickly? Within her own family, only one of her uncles had displayed that same kind of recall. Well, and maybe her dad, given how the only things he’d claimed to have forgotten were always suspiciously convenient for him— “Wait, how’d you know I am?”

“The way you narrated your story, especially if it’s your first time telling a lot of it. Your wording and delivery is exact.” He leaned closer, murmuring. “I got the feeling that when Kyra was repeating some of ‘your’ lines, she wasn’t being nearly as precise, and it was bothering you a little.”

“Wow,” she whispered back to him. “You can read me like a book.”

“What are you two whispering about over there?” Takama asked. Although her tone was mild and playful, there was something under it that—

Oh. Oh. They were still being chaperoned, and had gotten a little too close to each other for anybody’s liking. Ewan gave her a rueful smile as he pulled back to a more acceptable distance.

“Tizzy has been telling us the story of the crash of the Hunter-Gratzner,” he answered his aunt. “One of the other survivors was planning on going to Earth to try to liberate artworks from the Louvre. I was saying that some of the things she’s been doing here in the last week would have been great practice for that job.” He winked at Jack from the eye his aunt couldn’t see.

“You see?” Tafrara said, laughing. “My baby brother is pure trouble.”

At least, Jack thought, everybody had stopped worrying—for the moment, anyway—that they were somehow going to do something scandalous at the dinner table.

In five years, nobody would care if they invaded each other’s space that way, whether innocently or less so. What a moment to have to put the two of them on the spot, though, forcing Ewan to lie to avoid possibly hurting Kyra’s feelings, just out of a worry that the two of them might be… what, exactly? Plotting an overnoon fling in the broad daylight?

They kept a more seemly distance from each other for the rest of the meal. Kyra and Tafrara were deep in a discussion about adapting Earth plants to the growing cycle of a world with 44-hour days and 32-month-long years. Jack could feel her sister’s fascination, her desire to soak up all the information and personally explore it.

Damn you, Alexander Toombs, she thought. Kyra, at least, might have been able to stay if he hadn’t spent so much time and effort painting a bullseye on her. Maybe to become a soldier, or maybe to finally get to rekindle the love of learning that had been brutally quelled by her father and New Christy, and get a degree in something like xenobotany…

“What’s wrong?” Ewan murmured.

Jack looked over at him, glancing Kyra’s way again. “She’s so happy here,” she murmured back. “And I don’t know if she even has somewhere else to go…”

Understanding and empathy sparked in his eyes… and worry. “But you do, yes? You’re not just… throwing yourself out into the darkness?”

She nodded. Of course he’d have the same concern about her. “I have relatives waiting for me. I just have to reach them in a way that makes it look like I never tried to take the Hunter-Gratzner as part of my itinerary.”

Some tension left his body when she said that. “And you’ll be able to?”

“Yeah,” she told him, feeling her lips quirk up into a smile that would have stirred an uh oh or an I know that look from Kyra. “I have a plan.”

It might take most of the resources she would earn from flying the Nephrite Undine to Deckard’s World. Possibly even all of them… but she knew how to get more if she needed to. General Toal had put the idea in her head.

Many years ago, I heard the story of a young woman who had been a witness to a terrible crime and was placed in protective custody until she could testify against its perpetrators. She was hidden away, and only allowed periodic, controlled contact with her family, through elaborate channels designed to keep anyone from tracing her whereabouts…

What if the witness had been a kid, and her handlers had been far too worried about her being indiscreet to let her have contact with her family at all? What if any sign that her family even knew she was safe somewhere could have tipped off the people she was hiding from? And what if, even after she had given her testimony and she was allowed to return home, the threat of potential reprisals was so great that she still wasn’t permitted to tell anyone where she had been or why? Deckard’s World’s law enforcement community used enough of her father’s security protocols that she was pretty sure she could make it look like that was what had happened to her, and like only someone with a much higher level of clearance—Federacy level, maybe someone of a similar rank to General Toal himself—could access information about where she had been.

It was a project she planned to work on while she was traveling back to Deckard’s World: creating the scenario, making sure there were no holes in the public side of it, and building a hidden side that would allow her to maintain and defend the story against any and all scrutiny…

“I can see you do have a plan. One day, I hope you can tell me all about it.” Now Ewan’s voice was wistful.

She wanted to promise him that she would, but she knew she couldn’t. General Toal had been clear. No plans, no promises. Nothing that could be used against them or turned into a lie.

“How’d you switch from being pre-med to being a military officer in the flight academy?” she asked instead, genuinely curious. She knew the story of her father’s path into the Corps of Engineers already, and couldn’t figure out where Ewan would have found the time to fit in both and still only be twenty-two.

“Ah!” He smiled, his expression clearing. “Yes. Things work a little differently from one part of the Federacy to another. While we do have ‘Military Academies’ here, the founders of this world were concerned about… well, back on Earth, there had been so many military coups at different points in history. They feared the development of a culture, within the armed forces, that was too disconnected from the rest of the populace to understand and prioritize its needs. So while yes, I did get shipped off to a Military Academy when I was sixteen—”

“To keep you out of trouble,” Tafrara interjected from across the table.

Ewan nodded, wincing and smiling simultaneously. “I was quite the bad seed back then, yes. Even so, I was expected to attend a normal four-year University, with civilians, and to complete much of my combat training with a mixture of both officer candidates and normal enlistees. To ensure that I would always be connected to and bonded with more people than just other officers. I wasn’t sure, for a long time, whether I wanted to be a combat medic or a fighter pilot. And until I turned twenty-one, there was a restraining order keeping me from flying—”

“A what?” Jack stared at him in amazement.

“On his sixteenth birthday,” Cedric chuckled from further down the table, “he and some friends sneaked onto an airfield that was hosting a large air show. He’d somehow memorized the controls for the replica F-14 Tomcats that were flying in the show, and took one on a two-hour joyride. Enrolling him in the Military Academy was part of the plea deal that would let him ever fly again.”

“Fortunately, the Tomcat was undamaged when he landed,” Safiyya sighed. “I had the feeling that half of the visiting brass wanted an excuse to confiscate him from us and keep him.”

Kyra looked like she was ready to burst with repressed laughter. You two really are perfect for each other.

It sure as hell explained why he hadn’t hesitated, even for a second, when she’d dragooned him into the morgue heist. Some of the stories people had told about his older brother at the memorial had been fairly similar, if a little less felonious.

Ewan was blushing. “Yes, I… really was a lot of trouble back then.”

“Back then?” Tafrara laughed.

“I wasn’t allowed within a half-kilometer of any aircraft or spacecraft,” Ewan continued, still blushing and shaking his head. “For five years, I had to watch all of the airshows from the roof here. I couldn’t enter the spaceport, or travel anywhere that required boarding a plane, shuttle, or starship. Which meant a lot of vacations in the New Atlas range.”

“Or biking around with that crazy health inspector friend of yours,” Izil snickered.

Ewan’s blush had, improbably, deepened. “But it also meant that I couldn’t study more than the theoretical classroom aspects of being a pilot until last year. So I focused on a pre-med track for a while, which both Usadden and my ‘crazy health inspector friend’ were thrilled about… and worked for the UMA as a paramedic, for field experience.”

“Which is how you met Robie in the first place,” Usadden laughed.

Jack had a feeling she’d better not ask how wild the rides they’d gone on had gotten.

“On Ewan’s twenty-first birthday,” Cedric picked up the tale, “Gavin had recovered enough from ’Enza that his civilian pilot’s license had been reinstated, so the first thing he did that day was take his baby brother flying. They were gone most of the morning-day, and when they got back, we could all tell that Ewan was never going to become a doctor.”

“I resigned from the UMA and spent every waking minute playing catch-up so I could qualify for the flight academy when I graduated. I just barely squeezed my way in, too.” Ewan said.

“Proving that you have plenty of discipline when you wish to,” Takama teased him in her dryest voice, but her eyes were sparkling with amusement and pride.

“It did help that Gavin had been top of his class when he passed through the flight academy,” Cedric said. “And that Ewan’s joyride in the Tomcat had been talked about for years among the staff. They threatened to give him the call sign ‘Maverick.’”

“Fortunately, that one was already taken,” Ewan said, smiling.

“What is your call sign?” Jack asked.

His smile widened into a grin. “Loki.”

“The Norse trickster god?” She found herself grinning back at him. He actually resembled one of the first actors to play the character in centuries-old movies, if darker-complected. “I like it. It suits you.”

“A little too well at times,” Tafrara laughed. “Come, we should wash up and go to the plant nursery.”

It ended up being a family excursion, almost everyone accompanying them. The plans for the following morning-day were evolving in unexpected ways: Tafrara and Izil both wanted to accompany them to Elsewhere when they tried to return Sebby, and had already expressed that wish. Now Usadden, who had that morning-day off, wanted to join them as well. Takama, Cedric, and Safiyya were discussing whether they should come, too. It might be, Jack realized, everyone’s first and last chance to see what New Marrakesh looked like in an alternate universe.

“Plus, you’ll need extra hands to help with the olive trees and the planting equipment,” Tafrara told them. “Especially if you’re traveling uphill.”

Ewan, shoulder to shoulder with Jack in the back seat of the same rugged all-terrain vehicle Jack had dreamed about overnight, sounded wistful again. “I wish I could come with you.”

“I wish you could, too,” Jack told him back, leaning her head against his shoulder. She suddenly wondered if he meant another trip into Elsewhere, or her trip home… and which one she meant.

Of course, she could no more take home a 22-year-old fighter pilot with a trickster god for a call sign than she could take home the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain…

Proof, she thought, that the universe had a bent toward the cruel.

By the time they reached the nursery, though, it had been decided: “Tizzy” and “Dihya” would be accompanied into Elsewhere by almost the whole family, who would help them plant olive trees for Sebby if he could be successfully released. They would take at least a pair of young trees that were already capable of fruiting, so that the little crustacean wouldn’t have to wait long for treats. While Takama took charge of discussing the trees with the nursery owner, Kyra and Tafrara split off to find a suitable courtyard plant… and Jack found herself walking with Ewan through another part of its gardens, looking at flowering shrubs. They still weren’t alone, but for the moment, it almost felt like they were.

“Do you have anything specific in mind for your plant?” Ewan asked her as she looked over a selection of bushes that she knew had come from other parts of old Earth than Morocco.

“I’m not sure yet,” she told him. “Something that smells nice, I think. And… I don’t know, something that, if we’d all been born in actual Marrakesh back on Earth, might have been native.”

“A desert or steppe plant, then,” Ewan told her. He grinned at her look of surprise. “Old Marrakesh was much further inland than New Marrakesh is. In fact, our latitude and longitude correspond more with old Casablanca on Earth… but ‘New Casablanca’ was already taken by the first settlement here, even though it’s much further north and east. The original Marrakesh, though, was hot and dry. It was closer to the old Atlas Mountains than Casablanca, and the New Atlas Mountains are practically on top of us, so maybe that’s why they chose the name. Let’s see…”

He looked around the nursery, and then nodded.

“I see some of the plants that came from arid parts of Morocco on Earth. Shall we?”

Jack let him lead her to another part of the nursery, where the plants were… well…

A little disappointing. They weren’t at all lush, looking scrubby and spindly instead.

“In the dry climate of the desert,” Ewan told her, in response to the crestfallen expression she hadn’t been able to keep off her face, “a large, broad leaf is a bad idea most of the time. It would dry out too quickly, and with as much sun as deserts tend to get, light collection is easy enough with a small leaf or even just a stem. But if you’d like, we could look at something else.”

But that was when the sweet scent of …something… reached Jack’s nose and captivated her. She’d never smelled a perfume quite like it.

It took her a moment to locate the scent and discover the tiny white blossoms scattered throughout a bush that looked like a living, green broom. Each flower was smaller than her fingernail. She bent closer to get a better look. Tiny, five-petaled, white with a broad green stripe running down the center of each petal, each miniscule anther and stamen tipped with fuchsia, they smelled heavenly.

“What is this?” she asked, looking to see if it had a label.

“Calligonum comosum,” Tafrara said as she and Kyra approached. “The fire bush.”

Kyra was carrying a small potted tree—a fig tree, with a little fruit already growing on it—in the crook of one arm.

“The fire bush?” Jack asked. “Why’s it called that? Does it start fires?”

Tafrara chuckled. “No, it’s named after these,” she said, gesturing to another bush beside the one Jack was examining. It had the same physical structure, but instead of white blossoms, it had clusters of branching, brilliant scarlet tendrils, each cluster bristling around a small fruit. They almost looked like tiny coral reefs. “The white flowers give way to fruits that mature to look like these. Once the fruits appear, a dune covered in these bushes can almost look like it’s on fire.”

Jack realized that there were several fire bushes surrounding the one she’d been looking at, all apparently further into their “seasons” than the one she’d spotted. The tiny white flowers were only present on the one bush. “They’re beautiful.”

“Dead useful, too,” Ewan commented. “They’re popular for sand dune stabilization, feeding livestock, and in medicine. They’re used a lot in folk medicine, and compounds from several parts of the plant are in prescription meds.”

“Wow.” Jack touched the plant carefully. “Is this something we can plant in the courtyard?”

“Yes,” Tafrara said, “but an even better location for it might be on the rooftop.”

“What about the taproot?” Ewan asked her. “I’ve read that it’s very long.”

“I have a spot in mind for that,” Tafrara said with a smile. “Remember the chimney opening we had to cover when you were Tizzy’s age? After the incident?”

Ewan’s own smile had gotten huge. “You want to fill it with sand? We’re going to need a lot of sand.”

“Not so much as all that,” Tafrara said. “But it’s also right by the place where you loved to sit and watch the air shows. A perfect location.”

“What was the incident?” Jack asked, once she was sure neither of them had anything more to add.

“Remember when you asked what happened when a burglar gained access to the house via the roof?” Ewan asked her.

Uh oh. “Yes…?”

“He tried to enter through a large chimney that hadn’t been used in years. The fireplace it led to had been bricked up before I was even born.” Ewan was trying to tell the story with a straight face, but his lips kept twitching toward a smile. “He survived, but just barely. I think he spent two days trapped inside before we realized he was there and broke open the fireplace to get him out. And then had it rebricked immediately, and made sure the news reports included how close he’d come to dying from his burglary attempt.”

“The chimney had been capped, of course, to keep birds from entering,” Tafrara added. “He had removed the caps. So we covered it… but it would be perfect for a long taproot, and could be the centerpiece for an area featuring desert plants.”

“And filling it with sand would definitely ensure that no one ever tries the same stupid stunt once everyone’s forgotten about that last attempt,” Cedric said, joining them. “I’ll go order the sand now. I think we can have it ready for us, and waiting on the roof, before we wake up from the overnoon sleep.”

“Wow,” Jack said, impressed. “That fast?”

“I know a bloke.” Cedric winked and walked away, taking his comm out of his pocket.

Picking up the bush that still had the white flowers, Jack closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and smiled. This scent, she thought, would always remind her of New Marrakesh. She wondered if anyone made a perfume with it.

Once everything had been paid for, Jack and Kyra loaded their plants into the back of the large vehicle they’d come in. Four olive trees already sat in the bed.

“Four?” she asked.

“One from you, one from Dihya, and two from us,” Safiyya explained. “Sebby’s quite captured our hearts, too, after all. Now, I’m up almost past my bedtime, so we should head home.”

The heat was getting intense, and Jack realized that she was feeling sleepy as well. The roads were almost deserted as they drove back to the ait Meziane house. Once they were back in the garage, Cedric instructed them to leave the plants where they were for the moment, as it was time for everyone to get ready for bed.

Ewan walked by her side as they went upstairs.

“It occurs to me that you and Dihya both chose plants that are reflections of yourselves,” he commented.

“Really?”

“Yes. Do you know how fig trees fruit?”

Jack shook her head.

“They never appear to flower. Instead, they produce a round structure called a syconium. All of the flowers are hidden inside. A small wasp crawls inside the syconium to lay her eggs and pollinates the hidden flowers. Her children are born inside the fig and help it ripen, and then they depart, carrying its pollen to other syconia, while their former home matures into the ‘fruit’ we eat.” He quirked one eyebrow at her. “There is no fruit without the wasp.”

It was Jack thought, a good, if complicated, metaphor for Kyra.

She was at her door; Kyra was already moving around inside their room. Ewan kept walking toward his own room. Tafrara, ahead of him, had turned to look back, still acting as a chaperone.

“Ewan?”

He had reached his door and turned to look at her, for an instant seeming surprised that she was no longer beside him. “Yes?”

“What about me? What does the fire bush symbolize?” Aside from being spindly and the youngest in its group…

He hesitated for a moment before answering. “Easily underestimated… but a treasure beyond all reckoning.”

Jack couldn’t find a single thing to say in response to that.

“Sleep well, Tizzy.”

49.
Sacrifice Play

“That is such total horse shit,” Kyra exploded.

Jack, who had just finished describing Paris Ogilvie’s death, found herself staring in confusion at her sister… as did everyone else in the room.

Ewan, Tafrara, and Izil had come back up with the two of them after lunch to hear more of the eclipse story, this time bringing tea with them. Ewan was, at that moment, helping Kyra through her physical therapy stretches; he had frozen in place, looking between her and Jack with growing concern.

“She thinks it’s her fault that Paris guy died,” Kyra added in response to the quizzical looks she was getting. “Jesus fuck, it’s one of the reasons she slashed her wrists. What the hell, Tizzy?”

“It was my fault—” Jack began.

“Why? Because he dropped a flashlight and you tried to pick it up?” Kyra rolled her eyes.

“Trying to pick up that flashlight cost us all of the fiberoptic light,” Jack protested.

“Because he panicked and pulled the power generator over!” Kyra argued back.

“He wouldn’t have panicked if I’d just—”

“Hold on, Tizzy,” Tafrara said, her voice gentle. “Dihya. Both of you. Am I understanding the chain of events correctly here? Paris used up the fuel for the cutting torch, carrying it as a secondary light source while already fully protected by fiberoptics, yes?”

Jack nodded slowly.

“And when it went out, he immediately grabbed for another unnecessary secondary light source, knocking one of the flashlights out of the bin he’d reached into?”

“Yeah…”

“And he made no effort to pick it up?” Tafrara continued.

Jack, feeling more and more like she was trapped on a witness stand, shook her head. “No…”

“And then you said what, again?”

“I said, ‘wait,’” Jack admitted, starting to see where Tafrara was going.

“Did they?” Izil asked, joining in. Sebby was snoozing on the zoologist’s folded legs.

“Not right away…”

“If they had waited when you asked,” Ewan asked, “would you have needed to remove your fiberoptic coil to reach the flashlight?”

“I…” Jack closed her eyes, recalling that moment, feeling Kyra exploring it in her head as she did. She had already begun to turn back for the flashlight, which had still been within the protective halo of light surrounding them, when she’d felt the coil tightening around her; the others weren’t waiting. She had shrugged out of the coil, dropping low to the ground to present less of a target and struggling to let her eyes adjust as she reached for the flashlight, where it had rolled into what had become deep gloom. “No…”

“When did they stop?”

Jack didn’t know for sure. Her fingertips had just touched the barrel of the flashlight when she heard Imam shout and felt him tackle her, even as something monstrous shrieked above her and they rolled to the side. Everything after that had been a blur, gunshots echoing, Imam asking her if she was all right, Paris babbling nearby—this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening—and then the crash of the generator as it toppled over, its whine as it shorted out and powered down, and the coils she was shrugging back into going dark…

Silence had fallen over the group for a terrible moment, and then she’d heard Paris’s final whisper. “I was supposed to die in France. I never even saw France…”

Fire had exploded in the night and she’d caught one last glimpse of him, collapsing, surrounded by the monsters that had been following them… following her.

Jack wiped at her eyes. Thinking of his death still hurt. Kyra and the others might think of the story as somehow being all about Riddick, and she’d been telling it that way for Kyra’s sake, but before their deaths, Shazza and Paris had been the stars of her story, the two adult survivors whom she had spent the most time with, bonded the most closely with, and felt the most powerful connections to. Both of them had spoken of helping her reach her planned destination once they got off of that godforsaken rock… and each of them had also offered to take her with them and watch over her if she had no destination.

Paris had even offered to cut her in on the Mona Lisa heist if she wanted to travel to Earth with him. He’d had little fear of the deadly security systems surrounding it, had been excited by the challenge of facing them down… but the unpredictable organic threats of the crash planet had turned out to be more than he could cope with.

Feeling him being devoured alive by the monsters had nearly undone her. Feeling Riddick’s gaze shift to her, knowing he was thinking it’s her they’re after—

She’d thought, at the time, that she’d been imagining all of that. Now that she knew better, it just made everything worse.

“They got him because they were after me,” she said, switching arguments even though she knew she was doing something her mother called moving the goal posts. “They weren’t following the rest of the group. Just me. They could smell my blood. That’s why it’s my fault.”

“Because you were menstruating?” Ewan asked. His matter-of-fact question startled Jack; back on Deckard’s World, boys and men seemed to go to great lengths to avoid thinking, much less talking, about the messier aspects of female anatomy. A few months before she’d run away, some of her nosier classmates had discovered that she had tampons in her backpack and had freaked out…

She nodded, still not fathoming why he seemed so relaxed about the subject. She’d thought for sure it would disgust him and Izil when she’d mentioned having to find a way to sneak off for a few harrowing minutes to deal with her period, but both men had acted as if the only disturbing elements of that sequence were the creatures that could have been lurking in any shadow. “I’d run out of tampons right before the eclipse, and by the time we were ready to run, I was on my last pad. All I’d had was my emergency stash. And my flow was just starting, so it was super heavy.”

There were more pads that she’d found in the settlement and stashed on board the skiff, but hadn’t had a chance to grab, although they were a few decades old and she’d been dreading using them. She’d been right, too; after twenty-two years of abandonment, gritty desert dust had insinuated its way into them and it had felt, a few times, like putting sandpaper between her legs—

“And asking someone to help you find more, or an alternative, would have broken your masquerade.” There was no judgment in Ewan’s voice. Why did she feel like there should be?

“Yeah,” she muttered, wishing she could disappear into a hole.

“So, let’s get this all straight,” Kyra said, her voice brisk and a little hard. “These people barely listened to a word you said a lot of the time, and a few of them were practically at each other’s throats, but you were supposed to trust them enough to tell them you were really a girl and that you needed more tampons—assuming there even were any to give you—just in case Riddick was right about the monsters smelling blood?”

“I…” When Kyra put it like that…

“And this Paris guy wasted all of the cutting torch’s fuel, even though the group might need it to actually cut stuff with,” Kyra continued, “and when it was all gone, he lost one flashlight while trying to grab another one… and it’s your fault he was being wasteful and panicky?”

Jack didn’t know what to say.

“And then, when you called out ‘wait,’ to the rest of the group, and they didn’t, and you had to take off your own light protection to reach the flashlight as a result, it’s what… all your fault?”

Yes, her inner voice insisted. She’d put that one flashlight ahead of all the rest of the light…

“Oh for God’s sake,” Kyra grumbled. “I can hear what you’re thinking, you know. C’mon. Admit it. They told you before you started running that every bit of light was valuable and you should conserve it all carefully, right? Which is what you were trying to do even as Paris was doing the opposite.”

“You would make an excellent lawyer,” Izil chuckled, pouring another round of mint tea for everyone while stroking Sebby’s exoskeleton.

“So now, let’s see,” Kyra went on, quirking an eyebrow at Izil as she stretched over and picked up her cup. “You get attacked, that hoodoo realizes in time and manages to save you, Johns starts firing his shotgun into the darkness at them even though they’re still staying away from the light, and it’s your fault that Paris flips his shit and starts scuttling away from the safety of the sled and the light? And drags the whole generator contraption over and breaks it in the process?”

“The very thing you avoided doing by taking your light coils off, I’d like to add,” Tafrara said.

“It’s just…” Jack didn’t know how to explain it now. Everything they were saying made sense to her head, but the rest of her was insisting that it was all her doing, her fault.

“I know you don’t like hearing this, and God knows, we all have a hard time remembering it about you ourselves,” Ewan said to her, locking eyes with her, “but you’re only thirteen years old. You were not supposed to be responsible for their well-being. I know you were trying very hard to pull your weight without any complaints after the way Johns tried to use your fear as an argument against the run. Weren’t you?”

Yes, Jack realized. That was a huge part of it. She’d tried to buck up, butch up, be as helpful as possible… but after how unwelcome her attempts to suggest a way to revive the sand cat had been, the thought of confiding in any of them that she was bleeding had been daunting to the point of nausea.

“You held your own while one of the adults in charge of the situation went to pieces over a threat that hadn’t even been aimed at him,” Ewan continued. He was all she could see now, his eyes holding hers in their thrall. “That kind of panic can happen to anyone. Soldiers panic under fire, too. In my field training, we were taught to move as a unit, to retreat as a unit… to never, ever, break formation and run. But the first time you’re under live fire, there’s no telling what will happen, and there’s almost always someone who panics. It’s usually not who you’d expect, either. Sometimes the steadiest-seeming people can lose their minds. I’m not trying to shift all the blame onto Paris, here. But. If he was that close to all-out panic, and it does sound like he was given the other mistakes he was making, something was inevitably going to trigger it.”

“But it was me,” Jack heard herself saying. “Why did it have to be me?”

Ewan looked at Kyra, and then at the others, a question in his expression. When they all seemed to assent, he moved to Jack’s side, sat down behind her, wrapped his arms around her, and drew her into his lap. She leaned against him, struggling for a moment not to cry before giving in and letting him hold her through it. For once, her stupid hormones didn’t get in the way, although she almost wished they would if it might have broken her dark mood and driven off the tears and misery.

He seemed prepared for everything, giving her a handkerchief from his pocket to use to wipe her eyes and nose. His arms stayed around her even after she recovered. Things were, she thought, almost like they’d been before that moment on the beach. She rested her head against his shoulder, glad that she could just… be… for a while. When he brought her teacup to her lips, she sipped gratefully, feeling at home and at peace in a way that she hadn’t in a long time.

“So I’m guessing that nobody knew how to fix the lights, and you had to switch to all of those liquor bottles,” Kyra prompted, managing to time her question for right when Jack began feeling ready to tell more of the story.

“Yeah,” she said. “Fry lit a flare, and the rest of us used the bottles after she lit them for us. We dumped the fiberoptics and the light generator off the sled and kept going… a little faster now that Johns and Imam didn’t have to carry as much weight. It felt like we were walking forever. I asked Fry if we were getting close to the settlement yet… and that’s when we reached the sled tracks.”

“Wait…” Izil said.

“Shit,” Kyra muttered.

“Your sled’s tracks? You had gone in a circle?” Tafrara asked.

Jack nodded. “Everybody thought Riddick had gotten lost. But it was worse than that. We were almost at the canyon… and it was full of those creatures. He said he’d ‘circled once to buy some time to think.’ And I guess he’d decided my secret wasn’t going to keep anymore. He told them I was bleeding. He told them I was a girl and I was bleeding.”

“Tayr-iw, I am so sorry,” Ewan murmured in her ear. Tafrara gave him an odd look.

“I tried to explain it… why I’d done it… I mean, posed as a guy… When I was twelve, back home, these older guys started hitting on me all the time, asking gross stuff like what I had on under my skirt, and did my ‘carpet’ match my ‘drapes’ and shit, until my mom would come roaring out at them and threaten to have them arrested for messing with a kid. A lot of girls at my school were getting picked on like that, some of them were even getting groped, and I thought, maybe if nobody knew I was a girl, especially a girl on her own…”

“You’d be safer, yes,” Ewan nodded. “Somewhat, at least.”

“And after Riddick warned me about my blood, back at the ship, I was afraid they’d just leave me there if they knew. Fry said she wouldn’t do that, but I could see the way everybody else was looking at me, like I was a whole different person.”

“Shit, that’s it,” Kyra gasped. “That’s what changed.”

The others looked at her inquiringly.

“I’ve been trying to figure out why that Imam guy went from being so nice to you and protective of you to being… well, the total dickhead I saw at the hospital, nothing like how you’ve been portraying him. It all started changing when you weren’t a boy anymore, didn’t it?”

Did it?

After Fry had left her alone with Imam in the cave, he’d seemed unable to meet her eyes most of the time. It had been awkward, waiting to find out if they would live or die, with a strange wall up between them. She’d just thought maybe it was his grief over the other boys, or the circumstances of their possible last moments, the chance that the cave might become their tomb…

…but it had never really gotten better after that.

He’d taken it upon himself to act as a chaperone between her and Riddick the rest of the time the three of them had spent together—as if Riddick was lying in wait to defile her the moment his guard dropped—to the point where the two of them had begun coming up with elaborately sneaky ways to steal conversations with one another whenever the Holy Man slept. Riddick’s hearing was every bit as acute as hers, and they’d sometimes spent hours conversing in the tiniest threads of whispers just so they could speak freely.

If I’d managed to tell Riddick about the sand cat, would he have made them listen?

He had, after all, spent a great deal of time on the skiff listening to her, and telling her things that “responsible adults” would have found questionable but that he apparently felt she needed to know about the big bad ’verse she was venturing out into. His attitude toward her, inscrutable as it sometimes was, hadn’t really changed. But—

“I think you’re right,” Jack told the family, her family, surrounding her. “I think… once Imam knew I was a girl… he didn’t know how to relate to me anymore.”

The revelation had broken the group, too.

“Fry decided she’d been wrong, the run wasn’t going to work, and we should head back to the crash ship. But Johns…” She swallowed. This was the ugly part. “Now he wanted to keep going.”

Kyra, reading from her mind the truth she was preparing to spill, gasped. “Oh, that motherfucking son of a…”

When she trailed off, Ewan drew in a breath.

“Don’t you dare say it,” Tafrara scolded him.

There suddenly seemed to be a hidden wellspring of laughter between sister and brother, in spite of the fierce scowl she had aimed his way.

“Say what?” Jack asked.

“Ewan Zdan brought home some really filthy phrases after he attended the basic training segment of the Tangiers Military Academy,” Izil explained, his eyes twinkling. “There’s one in particular that he still sometimes says about someone he truly reviles.”

“Okay,” Kyra said, grinning. “Now you have to share.”

Tafrara rolled her eyes and then nodded at Ewan, sighing.

Ewan’s expression was pure mischief. The Tamazight words that rolled off his tongue were the same ones he’d used the other night when he’d apparently been maligning Toombs, the words that had made every woman at the dinner table glare at him.

“Okay,” Kyra said after nothing else was forthcoming, “and… it means?”

“You want me to say that in English?” Ewan asked, looking mock-scandalized.

“It means,” Tafrara grumbled, “‘he fucked his pig mother to death and then ate her bacon the morning after.’”

“All I was going to add to what Dihya said was ‘side of bacon,’” Ewan insisted, his expression the picture of innocence.

“That motherfucking son of a side of bacon…” Kyra began to cackle with delight.

Jack couldn’t help snickering, too. “Nice,” she said, tilting her head to look up at him. “You’ve got incest, bestiality, matricide, cannibalism, and haram all rolled into one insult there.”

“Exactly,” Ewan laughed, his gaze upon her turning heart-stoppingly wicked just for an instant before he adopted a look of cherubic innocence again.

“You see now just how much trouble my baby brother truly is,” Tafrara snorted. “So. Now that we have established the heritage, proclivities, crimes, and dietary practices of this ‘Johns,’ why did he want to keep going and what made it so awful?”

Stifling a groan, Jack described the verbal battle that had followed, as Johns threw everything Fry had said to him—ever—back in her face and attempted to annihilate her authority by revealing that she’d panicked during the crash and almost jettisoned the passenger compartment. Even now, that was something Jack couldn’t bring herself to believe about Fry, but the pilot had never denied it, Johns’ words driving her instead into a frenzy so desperate that she’d tried to physically assault him and had ended up knocked to the ground.

That time, it had been Imam who had stepped in—“You’ve made your point. We have all been scared!”—before Johns announced that the matter was decided and they were going through the canyon. What little bit of democracy the group had possessed had, seemingly, been swept away.

“You think that’s your fault, too, don’t you?” Kyra asked, almost glaring at her. “You think you gave him that opportunity to take over. Tizzy, he was gonna come up with something to use an excuse to make his move. Like you keep telling me, mercs’ll use up anybody for a percentage.”

“It was still…” Jack stopped. She could see that none of them agreed with her.

“Didn’t anybody at that damned hospital help you through any of this?” Ewan suddenly asked.

Jack shook her head. “They were too busy trying to get me to ‘admit’ that none of it ever happened, and that Riddick had killed everybody else and taken Imam and me hostage.”

“…The hell? The official investigation report says that there is hostile life on that planet.” Ewan’s arms tightened around her a little. He looked outraged. “Granted, it also tries to claim that Riddick used that as cover for some murders and took you hostage, but… they tried to deny every aspect of your story?”

“She never got a chance to tell it,” Kyra sighed. “They started bulldozing her from the get-go. You know, there were actually a bunch of really good therapists on the staff, like this one woman named after a Greek muse who asked me to just call her Polly—”

“Oh, I met her,” Jack grumbled. “Maybe she’s great for actual survivors of sexual abuse like you, but she walked into our sessions trying to get me to ‘face’ the ‘fact’ that Riddick had raped me—”

Against her back, she felt Ewan tense up.

“—which is a load of bullshit because I’m still a virgin and he never so much as looked at me that way.” She felt Ewan relaxing again. Whew. “He never threatened me, or any of us. The whole time we were on that planet, the only person he ever tried to hurt, let alone kill, was Johns.”

Which brought her, at last, to the merc’s… bacon lineage.

And an admission of just how good her hearing actually was. Somehow, whether via her crazy-acute hearing or something else that she hadn’t consciously known about herself back then, she’d overheard every word Johns and Riddick had said to each other.

She replayed the entire conversation for everyone, as the merc attempted to buddy up to his former captive with a promise that Riddick would survive the journey and go free if he cooperated with the “sacrifice play” Johns wanted to run: kill one of the four civilians and use their body to draw the predators in the canyon away from everyone else.

Even then, Jack had known that Johns wanted it to be either Carolyn Fry or her, and the only really logical choice would be her. If he had any plans of stiffing Riddick, he’d still need Fry to pilot the skiff.

Riddick was playing coy. She wasn’t sure why at first. But he kept doing things—expansive gestures and turns to look back at the group—that seemed designed to draw the others’ attention… clue them in…

“I think Riddick was trying to warn us,” she said after a moment. “I’d asked Imam what they were talking about. I don’t think he could hear a damned thing. Or if he could, he didn’t want to admit it was anything that bad. He told me they were probably talking about how to get through the canyon.”

Which, technically, was true, but…

Finally, Johns had enough. He gave up dancing around the subject, since Riddick was refusing to be his dance partner. “You do the girl, and I’ll keep the others off your back…”

“Yeah, right,” Kyra snarled. “Not that he ever would have, but if Riddick had killed you, nobody else in the group would’ve trusted him, ever again, or lifted a finger to stop Johns from taking him back into custody. He was probably counting on them helping him put Riddick back in chains when they got to the skiff.”

Jack, who had earlier described seeing Johns furtively sneaking a set of restraints onto the skiff hours before the eclipse, and who had found them crushing half of her gritty sanitary pads when she finally went to get one before the launch, just nodded.

Maybe that was the only reason Riddick had balked. Maybe he’d known his chance of ever being a free man would be lost if he added her to his kill count. Maybe that was all defending her, in that moment, had meant to him. While part of her still clutched at all the many small kindnesses he had shown her, he had still outed her to the others and then abandoned her in the repressive al-Walid household. It was hard to reconcile those two Riddicks and divine which one had turned to Johns and said, “I’m just wondering if we don’t need a bigger piece of bait.”

Four voices whooped with vindication and triumph, cheering him on, when she said that line in her “Riddick voice.”

The moment the two men began to fight, the moment Johns’ shotgun started firing into the night, Fry had pulled them all into a headlong sprint away from the battle zone. Jack hadn’t been wrong; the strange tension between the three of them was ending in bloodshed, which might spiral out to encompass all of them. Just how long they ran she wasn’t sure. With no idea where they were going, they had followed the tracks of the sled itself, blindly and unthinkingly…

…and, of course, they had circled the way it had, and found themselves confronted by Riddick.

“Back to the ship, huh?” he’d asked. “Just huddle together ’til the lights burn out? ’Til you can’t see what’s eating you? That the big plan?”

Johns was dead. Jack didn’t know whether Riddick had killed him or whether the creatures had, and she didn’t dare ask. None of them did.

“We’re gonna lose everybody out here,” she’d found herself saying, no longer bothering to try to drop her voice down into a ‘boy’ range. “We should’ve stayed at the ship.”

I should’ve let them leave me behind…

“Oh goddamn it, I fucking heard that, Tizzy…” Kyra groaned. “You still think everybody’d have ridden off into the sunrise if they’d just abandoned you? Or sacrificed you?”

“It’s a kind of magical thinking,” Ewan murmured, one hand stroking her hair. “I’ve seen it before, usually with people struggling with survivor’s guilt. You get basic counseling training when you’re a paramedic, or at least I did, and we were warned that this was something that we might see happen to someone trying to cope with fresh trauma… the wish to trade places with the ones who were lost. People in crisis often want to find something they can offer as a sacrifice, bargain away, to make everything go back to normal. Sometimes, those dealing with survivor’s guilt want that sacrifice to be themselves, so that everything will be right again and the guilt they feel will be absolved. But Tizzy, it’s an illusion, both the blame you’re taking on and what you wished to do to fix it. The world will not become better if you are lost from it.”

“Especially not for any of us,” Tafrara agreed, her voice soft and sad.

Jack nodded as Ewan held her, trying to believe, wishing she could believe. It was probably better consolation than she’d gotten months earlier, when Riddick had been the one trying to tell her something that maybe he’d thought would be reassuring—“He died fast, and if we have any choice about it, that’s the way we should all go out”—as he walked up to stand scant inches behind her. She’d felt the heat of his body radiating against her back, felt his eyes on her, felt his hand reaching out toward her for a second before it withdrew.

This is it, she had thought. If he’s gonna kill me, this is when it’ll happen.

But his voice, dark and rough and yet somehow gentle, had filled her ears instead. “Don’t you cry for Johns. Don’t you dare.”

And he’d walked away.

She didn’t know what was more disturbing now: the fact that she had been prepared to let him cut her throat without a fight, if that was his plan…

…or the fact that part of her had been disappointed when he hadn’t.

“Fucking shit, Tizzy,” Kyra groaned. “Fucking shit.”

48.
Tizzy the Terrible

“You’re mine now,” Ewan murmured into Jack’s ear. “I can’t let you go… ever…”

He began to move against her, his hands pinning her wrists to the bedroll he’d spread out beneath her. She wrapped her bare legs around his naked waist, letting him have his way, groaning softly at the pleasure he was stirring in her. He’d taken her from the house without warning, without a word, and brought her into the mountains, refusing to accept that they might never see each other again. Now her past and future fell away and there was only this moment, only him—

“Tizzy. Tizzy. Keep it down…”

Jack’s eyes flew open.

The tent canvas that had been above her just seconds ago was gone, replaced with the ornate tiled ceiling of the bedroom in the ait Meziane house, barely visible in the gloom.

Kyra, herself only half visible in the predawn darkness, was sitting up next to her and watching her with a smirk. “Damn, girl, that dream of yours got me all hot and bothered, and I don’t even like sex,” she snickered.

Fuck.

“Please tell me I didn’t call out his name.” Jack groaned, now with embarrassment.

“I woke you up before you could, but I think you were about to.” Kyra’s smile was positively merry. “I figured you wouldn’t want that to happen.”

Jack sat up in the bed, aware that she’d been on the verge of feeling something incredible, which had now receded unfulfilled. “Thanks, I think…”

“Yeah, sorry about that. But you’re really gonna need to learn how to not talk in your sleep before you return home, you know.” Kyra’s smile turned wry. “Gonna have a bunch of people, who are very interested in picking up any clues they can about where you’ve been, listening in once you’re there.”

“Fuuuuuuck…” Jack flopped back against the pillows. “Is that something I can even learn how to do?”

“Probably. Maybe you can ask the General if that device he’s bringing us will help you do that. Who knows?” Kyra lay down next to her again, sighing. “I’m sorry you can’t stay, you know. I wish we both could. It’s all happening so fast now.”

That, weirdly, had been the driving force behind the dream. She’d “awakened” in it to find Ewan beside their bed, taking her hand and putting a finger to her lips when she started to ask what he was doing. He’d led her down to the garage and to a large, rugged vehicle, strapping her in without speaking, and driven them out of the city and into the mountains. Rather than give her up, he had decided to abandon his career and reputation and claim her as his own right then…

It was all very wish-fulfillment but was absolutely the opposite of what the real Ewan would ever do, she thought. Even given how devastated he’d looked after dinner.

“God, part of me wishes that hadn’t been a dream… that it had been real…”

“He wouldn’t be the man you’re hung up on if it had been, you know,” Kyra sighed next to her. “Part of what you’re in love with is the fact that he’d never do something like that. Never actually hurt you. And doing that would hurt you. Trust me, it really would.”

“I know…” Jack grumped. “I really do know that. Sometimes.”

And sometimes, she thought ruefully, she started to convince herself that she’d be able to handle it, that she was plenty adult enough to offer and receive such things. Only after those moments passed would she realize, yet again, that those were some of her most childish thoughts of all.

She’d had similar fantasies about Riddick, half a year earlier. Sometimes she wondered if that was why he’d disappeared on her, because he knew what she felt for him and was worried that, if she offered herself to him the way she’d sometimes fantasized about doing, he might take her up on it. Had crushing on him driven him away?

I just wish he’d said good-bye…

But part of her was dreading how hard it was going to be to say good-bye to Ewan.

Another part of her wished she’d never started crushing on him, either, or whatever it was she was feeling. She missed Ewan’s hugs, missed resting her head against his chest or shoulder and having him hold her close, missed the affection, teasing, and intuitive understanding of each other’s ideas that they’d been able to share those first few days… before any touch, any glance, had started setting her body on fire. The desire she felt, and couldn’t control, had become a barrier that was cheating her out of one of the most powerful emotional bonds she’d ever found.

And now it was too late to find a way to fix that.

“Time fixes it,” Kyra said, as if replying to spoken words rather than her thoughts. “You won’t be a bundle of hormones forever. Or maybe you’ll just figure out how to handle them. Not sure. I read up on some of that stuff at the hospital, and actually talked about it with one or two of my therapists. Mostly I was trying to figure out why I feel so dead inside about the whole thing… turns out a lot of rape survivors do. But I read about what normal sex drives are supposed to be like, too, especially when they’ve just kicked on… and it’ll get easier to handle. In time.”

“Fuckin’ time,” Jack groaned. “I’m almost out of that…”

“Nuh uh,” Kyra snickered. “You’re just going home for a while. Once you learn how to handle it all, and the ’verse says you’re a legal adult… look out worlds, here comes Tizzy the Terrible!”

“Oh, my God…”

“Hey, it’s a step up from Jack B. Badd. Isn’t that really your dad, anyway?”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted, laughing. “The more I think about it, the more I think I stole his childhood nickname.”

“And now you have your own,” Kyra grinned.

She had to admit, she liked being “Tizzy…”

“I can’t take it with me, though,” she found herself musing. “It’d connect me to here. When I get back home, I can’t ever be either ‘Jack’ or ‘Tizzy’ anymore.”

“Yeah, not if you want to ever come back here someday,” Kyra said after a moment. “I can’t take ‘Dihya’ with me, either. Fuck, I’m gonna miss that name…”

“Maybe one day you’ll get to use your own name again, though,” Jack said. “Once you’re eighteen, New Dartmouth law says your criminal record as a minor gets sealed, even if the statute of limitations isn’t up and even if they haven’t had a chance to prosecute yet. I looked it up. Once you turn eighteen, they can’t touch you. So, like, two years from now… you can tell the whole ’verse your real name if you want.”

“Yeah,” Kyra replied, her voice wistful, “but the whole ’verse already knows who that is. It’s still gonna be the same deal… they’ll think I should be in jail anyway. And if I want to come back here in a few years and try to network with those officer friends of Tomlin’s, it definitely can’t be as me. Toombs made sure of that.”

“Fuckin’ Toombs…” Jack found herself wishing she’d sent him on his wild goose chase on a much more inhospitable world than Shakti Four. There was a frigid, desolate, barely habitable planet she’d heard about a while back, UV-6, that would have been perfect. She could have made him freeze his ass off the whole time he was chasing his own malodorous tail. Too late now, though… “Well, maybe in a few years, Kali Montgomery can do that networking instead, right?”

“Yeah, she’s even got a military background. It’ll all work out…” But Kyra was shielding her thoughts from Jack again. She could feel the barrier that had gone up.

“Are you okay with me knowing that name?” Jack asked, wondering if that was the problem. “Because I can show you how to make a new ID if you want.”

“Nah, it’s all good.” Kyra shook her head and quirked a smile at Jack. “I like that name. Picked it myself. It’s fine. I’m really not worried about you getting caught and interrogated. You’re an escape artist. People go to grab you and whoosh, you’re somewhere else. That was true even before you learned how to isomorph.”

“Okay.” Jack sighed, still wishing she knew what Kyra was hiding. “Are you okay with what I did last night?”

“What’d you do last night?”

“When you were having a nightmare. And I stopped it.”

Kyra frowned quizzically at her. “I had a nightmare? I don’t remember. Well, thank you for stopping it, anyway. But I just remember having a really… nice dream.” An almost-goofy smile crossed her lips. “Nearly as nice as the one you had.”

Maybe that was the only part she remembered?

When Jack had taken over the dream, she’d depicted Riddick single-handedly slaughtering all of Red Roger’s men, drawing from the spectacular combat moves she’d seen him use when he’d battled the shrylls, and then gutting Roger Fiennes himself while Kyra watched. Then he had offered her his hand and told her that he was taking her away from Canaan Mountain and the New Christy Enclave, enacting every facet of the rescue that she’d always wished for.

At that point, she had let Kyra start “driving” again and withdrawn from her sister’s mind. Where they’d gone from there, she didn’t know. She’d needed some sleep of her own. Steering someone else’s dreams like that had turned out to be hard work.

“You’re welcome,” she told Kyra, grinning. “As long as you got a good night’s sleep, right? I was thinking… when we take Sebby back—”

Reee? Sebby lifted his head. He had been sleeping down by their feet.

“Yeah, you, sweetie. Don’t worry. We’re gonna take good care of you, I promise. But I was thinking we could ask Tafrara where she buys the plants she puts in the courtyard, and buy a little olive tree to take with us. Maybe even two. So Sebby can eat olives forever.”

Kyra’s eyes lit up at the idea. “Oh my God, Tizzy, that’s it. That’s also the way we can leave something behind here for the family. We can plant something in the courtyard, and to everybody else in the ’verse it’ll just be another plant, but they’ll always know it came from us.”

Sebby squeaked and bounced up the bed to them, catching their enthusiasm and chirping happily. Jack could tell he had olives in mind now, and that they’d better bring some up for him when they came back from breakfast with his crickets.

“Oh shit. I don’t think Izil is gonna buy enough crickets!” Sebby had more than doubled in size, after all.

“He will if we catch him before he goes,” Kyra said, climbing out of bed. Jack hurried after her.

Izil had already left, but Lalla, hearing the problem, put together an “appetizer” plate of Sebby’s favorite human foods for him, including an abundance of olives, to compensate. Breakfast was still half an hour off, but almost everyone was up, and they all wanted to see how Sebby had grown and take a look at his exuviae. Jack led the way, carrying up the tray, while Kyra talked to Tafrara about buying some olive trees and the idea of planting something special in the courtyard.

Focusing on keeping the tray balanced, Jack didn’t realize that Ewan was the one walking beside her until he opened the bedroom door for her. He seemed unusually subdued.

“You okay?” she asked as she went through the door, forcing herself not to brush up against him in passing.

“Yes…” Ewan’s smile was dim in comparison to the ones he usually flashed her. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

Sebby chirped in curiosity as everybody filed in. He seemed a lot less nervous about the whole family crowding the room.

“Baraka, he’s grown so big!” Takama marveled.

“Izil needs to see this when he gets back,” Safiyya laughed. “His degree is in zoology. He will love this.”

“He’s going back up into the New Atlas Mountains soon, isn’t he?” Jack asked. When Safiyya nodded, she turned to General Toal. “Can… can I give him Sebby’s exuviae to take with him? Would that be okay? It wouldn’t be anywhere near New Marrakesh, and it doesn’t have any quantum connections to Elsewhere.”

How, she suddenly wondered, did she know that last bit?

“As long as he can be discreet about it,” the General answered slowly, “that should be all right. Sebby’s morphology is quite alien, in truth, but if he is willing to claim that it was sent to him from somewhere offworld, and promises not to publish any articles about your pet…”

“We’ll make sure he agrees to that,” Cedric told the General.

If for some reason they couldn’t return Sebby to Elsewhere, Jack decided, Izil should be the one to take custody of him. He was, after all, a zoologist, he’d been fascinated by Sebby from the beginning, and he’d taken it upon himself to keep their rambunctious crustacean well fed. She glanced at Kyra and saw her knowing nod of agreement.

Sebby, meanwhile, was happily chomping olives and squeak-mumbling softly to himself.

Breakfast was subdued, the mood from the prior evening carrying over. Kyra and Tafrara continued discussing plants and refining the idea for the garden. They decided that she and Jack should each pick out a plant for the courtyard when they went to get an olive tree or two, and once they had picked out their plants, Tafrara would determine the best locations for each one in the courtyard.

“We can never tell anyone outside of the family who planted them, of course,” Takama said as they finished solidifying the plan, “but it will be a nice thing for all of us to know. I have spoken with the other tribal representatives in the Rif, and they have all agreed to our story. Two distant cousins from our tribe, Dihya and Tislilel, came to town in preparation for the engagement Moussem, which of course ended up being canceled after the explosion. In an unhappy turn of events, they then fell ill with Atlas Fever shortly after Brahim’s memorial and had to be sent home once they recovered enough to travel. And that is as much as anyone in the Rif will ever say about you… aside from that you were lovely, pleasant, polite girls whenever you came to the market. Which at least means they will have something true to say.”

It felt, to Jack, like an epitaph. By the look on Ewan’s face, he felt the same way.

Izil joined them at the end of the meal, cricket box under his arm, and was immediately excited to hear about Sebby’s molt. Kyra led him upstairs to see, telling Jack that she’d been practicing the isomorph trick and wanted to try it with the crickets herself. Jack, Ewan, and Tafrara followed not long after.

Izil and Kyra were sitting by the tub, watching Sebby play with his food and talking quietly. Izil stood up as Jack entered the room.

“Dihya tells me that you two feel, if you are unable to return Sebby to Elsewhere next morning-day, that I should take him with me into the mountains when I go,” he said, taking her hand. “I am honored. I do hope he can be released among his own kind, but I promise to take very good care of him for you if he cannot be.”

“Thank you.” It was a relief to know that, no matter what, Sebby would be safe. Now she just had to figure out a way to stop worrying so much about Kyra.

“After dinner,” Tafrara told her and Kyra, “we will go pick out plants. My favorite nursery is open into the overnoon hours and that’s the best and quietest time to find things, so we’ll go there shortly before we plan to retire for sleep ourselves. In the meantime…”

“We want to spend as much time with you today as possible,” Ewan said, his eyes on Jack.

She could see how hard he was trying to hide the full depth of what he was feeling. For a moment, she imagined she saw an echo of her dream in his eyes.

The first thing they did was Kyra’s physical therapy session, which now incorporated Tai Chi. Jack was fascinated. Ewan led them, while Tafrara moved between her and Kyra to correct their balance and posture. He began with breathing and balance, and then had them lift their arms and legs into specific positions, holding them and slowly moving from one to another. The way Jack felt herself concentrating reminded her of the way she had focused to keep the floor of U1 beneath her in Elsewhere.

An hour passed, almost before she knew it. As Kyra had said, she could feel, in the aftermath, how much work her body had actually been doing, even though each moment had felt easy and natural. She didn’t feel it in an achy or uncomfortable way, though. She felt as if she’d tapped into something powerful.

No wonder meditating kept Riddick from going crazy in his cryotube… Maybe the way that meditation condensed time had countered the way that cryosleep drugs stretched it out.

I need to keep doing this. She wondered if there were classes back on Deckard’s World.

“So, what would you two like to do next?” Tafrara asked.

“Tizzy’s been telling me the story of the Hunter-Gratzner crash,” Kyra said. “I was hoping she could finish telling it before we have to split up… although maybe she should start over if you guys are gonna hear it, too?”

It was, Jack thought, a kind of souvenir she could leave behind with Ewan, Izil, and Tafrara: the story of the accident that had ultimately brought her, and Kyra, to their doorstep. A truth that few knew, given the lies that had begun to circulate since then. They could be trusted with it. And who knew; one day, one of them might come face to face with Richard B. Riddick himself, and the story they knew might just save their lives.

She didn’t start from quite the same place that she had with Kyra, though. General Toal had made it clear that she wasn’t allowed to reveal anything about where she had come from or where she had been trying to go, after all. So…

“I would have come to the Tangiers System on the Hunter-Gratzner a few months before I ended up getting here, if it hadn’t crashed,” she began instead. “But it came out of one of its Star Jumps and crossed a comet’s path on its way to the next Jump Point, and got holed by a bunch of micrometeors. That’s what the inquiry afterwards figured out. Most of the crew died in their tubes, except for the navigator and the docking pilot. The ship crash-landed on a planet with an outpost that had lost contact with the Federacy about twenty-two years ago. But I didn’t know any of that until much later. The first thing I knew, I was waking up in my cryotube, lying on my side, and couldn’t get the doors to open…”

This time, as she spoke, she conjured vivid mental images for Kyra, matching them to her words. Pounding on the box, wondering if it was now her coffin, until Shazza and Zeke had appeared through the glass and begun cutting her out…

Kyra had her eyes closed, focusing on the visions Jack was feeding her.

Jack skipped over some things, like some of the conversations she’d had with Paris while they rummaged through his storage compartment for supplies and, later, weapons once Riddick escaped into the desert. For some odd reason, she felt weirdly possessive of that relationship, maybe because she’d begun drawing upon some of the things he’d told her about running museum heists for her own excursions into burglary. Plus, more practically, those were conversations she’d portrayed as happening before the cash, the first time she’d told the story to Kyra. As she retold the parts Kyra had already heard, doing imitations of each person’s voice and mannerisms as she reproduced dialogues, Kyra began saying her lines for her.

“How do I get eyes like that?” Kyra asked softly, as Jack described Riddick glancing over at her after his chained lunge toward Fry.

“You gotta kill a few people,” Jack answered in her Riddick imitation, not bothering to correct her sister’s wording this time, either.

“Okay, I can do it…”

Maybe it should have worried her, but it was fun to have Kyra participate that way. She let it slide, moving forward with the tale.

The eclipse had descended over the crash planet, Hassan had died, and the survivors had adopted Fry’s plan to return to the settlement as the lunch hour approached in New Marrakesh. Now she was coming up on the part of the story that still had her fuming, all these months later.

“We got to work making as much light as we could, from everything we could find. Paris had me find him a bunch of these weird tubes that he could use to make wicks for the liquor bottles. And Fry told me to start pulling these big, glowing fiberoptic cables out of the bulkheads,” she said, unable to keep a grumble out of her voice. “Those things were glowing really brightly, and there were a ton of them, and I thought maybe there’d be enough light to use them to power the Sand Cat. They were talking about pulling everything on a sled and draping the cables over our shoulders as we ran, and nobody’d stop to listen to me, even if just to tell me they’d already thought of it and it wouldn’t work…”

“Fry,” she’d said, holding up a glowing coil, “don’t you think this’d be enough to run—”

“No, Jack, pull it all down. We need all of it.”

“That’s not what I—”

“El-Imam, I need to talk to you for a second,” Fry said, walking off without another word to her.

“Johns,” she’d tried again. “I was thinking if we coiled enough of this up around the—”

“Look, kid, I’m busy. Talk to Fry if you need something.” He had one of his shotgun shells, a bright red one, in his hand and was turning it over and over as if that was the most important task in the universe.

“But she—”

“Talk. To. Fry.” The glare he’d given her had driven her back.

“Paris, I was wondering—”

“Just who I wanted to see. Do you think you can carry some of the food supplies in your backpack? We won’t need them until we get to the skiff.”

“Sure, but—”

“Brilliant. Here we go. Now, I still have to figure out how we’re going to bundle up and pull all of these bottles.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to t—”

“Must run. So much to do before we set off…”

“Imam, I have an idea—”

“Child, have you finished coiling up the cables? We really are in a hurry.”

“But we won’t have to be if you would just—”

“Stay on task. Suleiman!” He switched to Arabic, which she hadn’t understood at the time but now could parse from memory. “Have you disconnected the secondary power generator? Hurry!”

“I just wanted to tell them,” Jack concluded for her audience, “that the fiberoptics could produce enough light to switch the Sand Cat’s photovoltaic collector back on and probably have enough left over to ring its perimeter. We could’ve driven the whole way back if they’d just stopped to listen…”

“Didn’t Riddick listen to you?” Kyra asked, odd longing in her voice.

“He was busy, too,” Jack moped. “He passed by me once, talking to Fry as he went. He did say something to me, but he was gone before I could reply. He said ‘check your cuts. These bad boys know our blood now.’ I didn’t have any cuts but… I think he knew I was having my period and was warning me that the things outside would know, too. Fuck, I hate being too young to be listened to…”

“We will always listen to you, Tislilel,” Ewan said. His hand on her shoulder, for once, didn’t send a jolt down to her core but filled her instead with wistful yearning for the peace he was offering. She had less than one Tangiers day left before he would be gone.

“Yes,” Izil agreed. “Always.”

Kyra took Jack’s hand and gave it a squeeze, maybe feeling her sudden, stricken longing. To find this kind of acceptance and respect, and to have to give it up, leave it behind…

“Would it have worked?” Ewan asked Tafrara. “Using the fiberoptics?”

“I think it would have,” she said after a thoughtful moment. One of her degrees, Jack had learned, was in Engineering, much like John MacNamera’s. “They had their own power source, yes? Which you had to drag? I’ve seen the kinds of fiberoptics you speak of. They could have been more than sufficient. Especially with direct application, coiling around the collector as you describe. What color of light was the photovoltaic engine designed to work under?”

“All colors, I think,” Jack sighed. “The twin suns were red and yellow, made everything look real orange when they were up, and the third sun was blue like the fiberoptic light. It ran under both kinds of light, so it should’ve been fine. I figured if we piled enough lit coils onto the collector…”

“Yes,” Tafrara told her, looking sympathetic and a little sad. “It would have worked. What did they do instead?”

“We put the generator powering them onto this sled they made out of a piece of the ship’s outer hull,” Jack muttered, trying hard not to whine about it. Her eyes and nose were stinging. “Along with the rest of the power cells we needed to launch the skiff, and a bunch of Paris’s liquor bottles, some flashlights, and other stuff they’d scavenged. It was so heavy. Then we wrapped the fiberoptics around our bodies, all connected to that one generator. Riddick ran ahead, and Imam and Johns grabbed onto rope handles on the sled to drag it, and the rest of us ran alongside the sled to keep up with the generator and surround each other with light. And we followed Riddick into the darkness…”

And, she thought miserably as she followed everyone downstairs for lunch, four more of the crash survivors, three of whom she had genuinely bonded with, had died.

But what was worse, she thought as she sat down at the table, was that even if maybe they should have listened to her about the Sand Cat, what happened after that…

…was all her fault.

47.
Princess With a Thousand Enemies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cricket tub was completely empty.

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

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

“Holy shit,” Kyra breathed.

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

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

Reeeeeeeee… The bathroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cedric, Ewan, and Usadden all winced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It took her a long time to fall asleep.

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

Everything, it seemed, had been lost.

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

Minnie Sulis
A Night of Magic
One Night Only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s just—”

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

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

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

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

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

Lost.

Forever.

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

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

The gray world of the colony ship was a coffin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first, they must catch you…

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

But first, they must catch you.

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

…until…

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

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

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

The men laughed.

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

“Oh God… MOMMY…”

Jack woke up with a start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The battle began, all over again.

But now it was different.

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

…Riddick rose to meet them.

46.
Heirs to the Caldera

The official story, which began circulating an hour before Jack and General Toal left for the old apartment, was that the second of the two Star Jumpers irreparably damaged in the spaceport explosion had also been compromised worse than anyone had realized. One of the reactor cores powering its sublight ion drive had slowly destabilized until it ruptured almost exactly seven Tangiers days later… a little under two of the planet’s long days after a similar rupture had allegedly destroyed the other damaged Star Jumper, the ill-fated Scarlet Matador. Jack, who knew exactly what had really happened to the Matador and where to find it, rolled her eyes and saw Ewan doing the same thing.

The unofficial story, which General Toal said was only being whispered by a handful of eyewitnesses, was that the ship had abruptly imploded some five hours after the Quintessa Corporation had tried to run an unexplained test… one that had begun at almost exactly the same moment as Jack’s strange fit toward the end of the morning-day. The test had ended not long after it had begun with everyone involved fleeing the ship, but no warnings of an impending crisis had been issued until the implosion itself occurred hours later. What little of the massive vessel was left was disturbingly friable, even its protective hull plates disintegrating when touched.

“They tried to use its Isomorph Drive to open a bridge to U322A,” Jack said when the General finished his update. The family had insisted on bed rest for her, but cabin fever was already building and making her antsy. Everyone crowding into the bedroom to listen in just added to the weird near-claustrophobia. Sebby, chittering in annoyance, had already retreated under the bed.

“You know this?” the General asked. “You remember?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember much of anything after feeding Sebby.” She actually did remember the abortive tickle-battle, and the conversation with Kyra that had followed, but it seemed like everyone was more comfortable thinking that had been lost to her, too. “Just… we took away every other potential bridge they had, so…” She shrugged, wishing she could explain where her certainty came from. Usually she could, but there was a strange fog in parts of her mind that had never existed before.

“Yes,” Ewan said. “When we were going to the Scarlet Matador, you said that would be the only way for them to gain access to Elsewhere once everything else was gone. But why would they want to?”

“The envoy said she wanted to understand what made this Level Five Incident so different from all the others,” Jack mused. Sometimes, she felt like she knew, or should know, much more, but when she tried to chase the feeling down, it evaporated.

“Hopefully, having her attempt to re-establish a connection end in another disaster will deter her,” the General said. “Perhaps there is a way to make her believe that it’s a problem with that universe, itself.”

“Won’t that get any shipping route that uses U322A for a Jump suspended?” Cedric asked, frowning.

“Likely. But they can route around it. They have, in point of fact, done so several times in the past with other universes, and with Jumps they decided were too long. Better that than the realization that there might be a human mind behind so much of their ill fortune, or even two.” The General’s gaze on Jack, and on Kyra, was speculative.

“You think we did this?” Kyra asked him, looking shocked.

“Well, that’s the interesting thing,” he rumbled, his voice contemplative. “Neither of you ever left this house. And your whole focus, during that period, was your adopted sister. I don’t think you did anything…”

His gaze moved to Jack.

“…and you don’t seem to remember anything that happened while you were under.”

Under…

…beneath, below, under…

Yes, a soft voice murmured somewhere far away. You may know and tell that much… it will do no harm.

“I think I was with the Apeiros,” Jack answered slowly. “Whatever was happening… they were afraid. Terrified.”

“Do you think U322A, your Elsewhere, might be their home? Perhaps the bridge would have endangered it.”

She shook her head after a moment’s careful thought. Navigating her memory, at least where this was concerned, felt like jumping from one steppingstone to another, but instead of water between the stones, there were vast, fathomless gulfs of strange emptiness. She’d never experienced anything like it before in her life. It was unnerving.

But, strangely, there were other things that she knew with iron certainty now, which had never been in her head before.

“They call us ‘little larvae,’” she told everyone, “because our five-dimensional shapes are so small… only two universes wide. They’re much bigger…”

…tiny but enormous…

“I don’t think they could think of Elsewhere as their world any more than…” She cast about in her head for a suitable comparison. “…than you could think that chair you’re sitting in is your world.”

“And yet, whatever it was the Quintessa Corporation tried to do this morning-day, bridging U1 and U322A perhaps… terrified them and incapacitated you.” His eyes turned to Kyra. “But not you.”

Kyra shook her head. “Tizzy told them they were forbidden to talk to me anymore unless I talked to them first.”

General Toal looked fascinated. “You were able to forbid these beings to do something?”

Jack shrugged. “I told them they were hurting her. I guess they didn’t want to do that.”

“So they let her be…?”

“I think so. But…” She looked over at Kyra. “I think I remember you screaming that something was wrong.”

“Yeah, because you were having a fit.” Kyra shook her head. “Whatever it was, I didn’t feel any of it except what I could feel coming off of you.”

“And what was that?” Takama asked.

“Something was screaming for help and she was trying to go to it, in her head. And then she was gone.” Kyra shuddered. “I swear, it was like she wasn’t even in her body anymore…”

“Completely unresponsive,” Usadden murmured, and Jack saw him shudder, too.

“Except,” Ewan spoke up, “the brain-wave readings my portable scan got were off the charts.”

“Please tell me I don’t have to go get another CT scan,” Jack groaned.

“No, that would be ill-advised indeed,” General Toal said. “Were her readings like that after the last… incident, Ewan Zdan?”

Ewan shook his head. “They were normal… but those were readings I took afterwards, not during. She might have lit up the scan the same way if I’d used it when she was moving the Matador out of our universe.”

“Perhaps you should scan her again now.”

Ewan looked at Jack, a question in his eyes. She nodded, watching him get the portable scanner back out of his field kit. Kyra tensed a little as he came over to Jack’s side, as though she expected both of them to fall under each other’s thrall again.

After all, he had almost needed to be pried off of her earlier.

Even as the alerts had begun to go off, he had dropped everything he’d been carrying onto the chair and raced over to her, landing beside her on the bed and pulling her into a hug so tight that she almost hadn’t been able to breathe. Sebby had screeched and begun posturing threateningly—snapping his pincers like rapid-fire castanets but, at least, not brandishing his stinger—until Kyra, hurrying in after the others, managed to calm him down. Although intensely and inappropriately aware of Ewan’s powerful torso pressed to hers, Jack had found herself even more aware that he was shaking. It had taken a long moment for Usadden to get through to him and convince him to let her go… and then convince her to let him go when her mixture of concern and desire made her clingy. Only then did Jack find out that, for the prior few hours, she had appeared to be comatose.

Now, though, Ewan was all business, running his scan the way he had undoubtedly done countless times when he had worked as a paramedic. “Much closer to normal. But…” He swallowed and shook his head. “When I still worked for the UMA, I had been instructed that if I ever saw readings like this, I should refer the patient for Quantification.” He shook his head again. “They didn’t look like this last time.”

The General looked as if a suspicion had been confirmed for him. Ewan, giving Jack an apologetic look, put the scanner away and returned to the chair he’d been sitting in. He was keeping his distance, but she could feel how much he didn’t actually want to.

“Okay,” she sighed, sitting up. “Brain is normal…ish. No signs of physical injury, right?”

Usadden nodded.

“Then can I please get up? I have a lot I still need to do. Today.”

“Perhaps it should wait until things calm down—” Tafrara began.

“No, I think she’s right,” the General said. “While all eyes are pointed at this new disaster, she may have an easier time insinuating herself into the systems she needs to access, in order to plausibly get the word out about Makarov. I will accompany her to the apartment and watch over her.”

At Jack’s request, he took her to a nearby tech shop to purchase a tablet she could use just for the purposes she had in mind, before driving her to the apartment building. The place was almost entirely empty and still; most of the tenants had moved out after the owners had been unresponsive and uncommunicative in the wake of the spaceport bombing. None of the shattered west and north windows had been repaired, although a very few had been boarded over on the lowest levels. Jack led General Toal up the filthy, stinking stairway, more conscious than ever of how nasty it was; if it bothered him, he showed no sign.

“So,” Jack asked as she unpacked the tablet, sat cross-legged on the floor—she refused to ever touch the couch again—and began to configure it, “why are you really here?”

He sat down in the chair they had left behind, steepling his fingers. “You are getting very good at reading people, Tizzy. I do, indeed, have an ulterior motive for wishing to speak with you alone.”

Maybe that should have scared her, but it didn’t. She knew that, as a military general, he was undoubtedly a dangerous man in at least some way… but she’d been associating with dangerous men for months, starting with Riddick and Johns. She just looked over at him and nodded encouragement.

“You have always had some esper ability, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Seems like it. Nothing obvious, but…” She restarted the tablet to let some of her custom configurations take. “…I think there were signs when I was little. Strange stuff. Nothing too freaky, though. Nothing that couldn’t be explained away.”

“But since the Scarlet Matador, and since your communions with the beings you call the Apeiros, it has grown considerably.” It wasn’t a question.

“I guess,” Jack said, busy armor-plating the tablet against incursions with the protective systems her father had liked best. “It’s… hard to tell. Like Ewan said the other night, I don’t know where my limits are until I crash into them—”

Oh, oops. Nobody but Kyra knew she’d heard that.

General Toal only laughed softly. “In truth, you would make an extraordinary recruit. An Operative who can stand among her targets, listening to their whispered secrets, without them ever knowing…” His expression grew serious. “That is what I needed to speak to you about.”

“You gonna try to recruit us?” The tablet was almost ready. Jack glanced over at the General. “Kyra might be interested if it means rescuing girls from the shit she was put through, but—”

“No, I am not,” he said, surprising her. “I have worked with Operatives before. Officially, slavery is illegal within the Federacy… except where they are concerned.”

Well, that wasn’t a chilling statement or anything… “Why?”

“Your own abilities would terrify most people, child. You can spy on any discussion without people knowing you’re standing among them. You can come and go from a locked and impregnable fortress as you please, regardless of its security systems. You have made bodies disappear from a morgue, hidden valuables vanish from a high-security vault, and a twenty-thousand-ton Star Jumper travel from one universe to another with a touch of your hand. And may, possibly, have imploded another Star Jumper in your sleep.”

Jack opened her mouth to protest… but…

Holy fuck. She really had done all that. Phrased that way, she sounded scary as shit. And that wasn’t even touching on what Kyra could do, killing people without any sign she was anywhere near them…

“What government would ever allow such power to go unchecked?”

His rhetorical question sent an icy wind blowing through her. “What… would they do?”

“Espers are taken to a secure facility for training and conditioning. I don’t know exactly what happens there. They will not speak of it. But every Operative I have met is mentally and emotionally incapable of exercising their powers except under orders. Their ability to improvise, as you two do so well, has been taken from them, something that has cost more than a few of them their lives when situations went pear-shaped, the chain of command broke down, and there was no one left with the authority to tell them how to use their abilities to save themselves or others.”

“That’s…”

“Not a fate I could ever wish for you, no. I serve the Federacy to serve humanity, and this is one of the great conflicts between those two callings. I will not tell them about you or Kyra.”

“Th…thank you. What… is that all they would do? Psychological conditioning?”

The General shrugged. “You would have a tracker implanted in you… one with an explosive device inside, just in case you found a way to break through that conditioning and tried to escape. I know of only one Operative-in-training who has ever managed to successfully remove it and flee captivity. You have met him.”

It took a moment to find her voice. “Riddick.”

“They point to him, his kill count and the various crimes he has committed—or allegedly committed—in the last decade, whenever anyone objects to the way espers are handled. Did you ever see him use his abilities?”

“I don’t think so…” But there had always been something preternatural about him, about his speed and timing and the way he hadn’t even had to look behind him, most times, to know who or what was coming. He wasn’t invulnerable—he’d very nearly died on the crash planet—but…

She had watched him take a knife and cut his own neck open to remove the explosive tracker that Chillingsworth had ordered implanted in him, and had found herself thinking that it wasn’t the first one he’d removed that way…

“Espers were much rarer even a generation ago,” the General told her, “before the Furyan Diaspora. Many of the orphans of that… disaster… have turned out to be quite powerful. 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 on Furya in the aftermath—”

Jack’s breath caught. Her father’s last tour of duty in the Corps of Engineers, the year before he met her mother, had been on Furya. He had shown her pictures of the Caldera, and the base that sat beside it, and had told her it was the strangest world he’d ever visited. But it was also the world he’d chosen to return to when he re-enlisted.

Was that where all of this came from?

General Toal was watching her with interest. He’d figured her out, knew she had to be the daughter of some member of the Service who had been stationed on Furya… where she had been headed, herself, before everything went wrong. What would she have found there, she wondered, if she had made it?

Except…

“I… don’t think Kyra has any ties to Furya…”

“No. The sublight colony ship she was on never passed that way. But the files on her are extensive. Did you know she was born on late twenty-first century Earth?”

Jack nodded.

“Before her mother joined her father’s church and gave up such things, she was a performer of some renown. Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier, better known to her world as Minnie Sulis. A stage magician whose act included mind reading, levitation, and teleportation. Most such acts are elaborate trickery of course, but the records indicate that many of her signature ‘tricks’ could be neither replicated nor debunked. When she converted to the Church of the New Christy Pilgrims, though, she quit the stage and claimed that she had turned her back on the devil.”

“So she was probably an esper the whole time,” Jack mused.

“One who became convinced what she was doing was witchcraft, it seems. But yes.”

“You… need to tell Kyra all of this, too.”

The General nodded. “I will, yes. It’s important that both of you protect yourselves from discovery. Tomorrow evening, when I come to Ewan Zdan’s send-off party, I’m bringing each of you a very special device. A neurofeedback training unit. It will help you learn how to control your own minds, and the readings your brain scans produce, so that you can hopefully beat a Quantification test—should you ever be subjected to one—and pass as normal.”

For a long moment, Jack was rendered speechless. He was giving them something incalculably precious… and incredibly dangerous to him. If anyone ever discovered that he had helped two espers hide from the Federacy, it would be the end of more than just his career.

“Thank you,” she finally managed, wishing she could say something that would convey how much she knew he was risking, how much generosity he was showing.

“You’re welcome, Tizzy. Now… another reason I came here today is to help you deal with these terrible files you have found. I understand why you don’t want anyone else to have to see them,” he said as he walked over to sit down beside her on the floor, crisscrossing his legs with the limberness of a man a third his age, “but I have served as a judge on a great number of courts martial, and have reviewed evidence of the worst war crimes human beings can perpetrate. Please allow me to help you with this. I am far more inured to the trauma that even pictures of such things can cause than you should ever have to be.”

Jack felt relief suddenly untying the knots in her spine. The idea of looking at those images again, of sifting through them for examples that could be sent on, that would show enough to provoke outrage without being too graphic to ever be published, had been on the very edge of bearable. To look again at the misery and agony in the faces of those women and girls…

“I’d… really appreciate that. Last time I looked at this stuff, I ended up puking up everything I’d eaten for the last month.”

“I’m truly sorry that you had to see such things at all.”

Kyra, she thought, had lived through such things, which was immeasurably worse. Sometimes she had to remind herself that, for every man who was capable of such egregious brutality, for every Red Roger, or Duke Pritchard, or Javor Makarov… or even a William Johns… there were men like General Toal, like Cedric, Gavin, Ewan, and all the men of ait Meziane… like Riddick. Men who, although perhaps fearsome in their own ways, had too much honor to ever engage in such hideous, sadistic acts.

Men who possibly needed protection of their own from the schemes of monsters like Pritchard and Makarov.

“There’ll be stuff we need to delete, too,” she told the General. “Aside from following Kyra and me around to try to get to Riddick, he was helping Makarov track Toml— Gavin Brahim. I don’t think we want everything he recorded about that where people can nose into it… and I don’t want any of the pictures he took of Kyra and me getting out.”

“Agreed. We will curate this collection carefully.”

Jack logged them in and they got to work. It wasn’t long before she let him take over almost entirely, looking away as he examined the different image collections that Pritchard had assembled and chose examples from each collection to include in their fictional pervert’s stash.

“Hmm,” he said at one point. “I recognize three of the women so far. Former fugitives now serving prison terms… I think their sentences may end up being vacated on the strength of this evidence.”

“That’s… good, right?”

General Toal sighed. “Possibly. Unfortunately, I doubt they will receive much compensation or assistance, aside from being released and having the relevant crimes expunged from their records. Few in their positions do.”

“Is there anything you can do to help them?”

He shook his head, looking somber and a little regretful. “I suspect that this release of information is as much as I can personally do for them. Any overt intervention on my part could draw too much attention to what I might know about Pritchard and Makarov, myself… and how I might have learned it.”

Shit. “Yeah…”

Maybe, she thought, someday there would be something she could do. Her father had told her about working with various NGOs, when he was stationed on different worlds, which had provided targeted aid to groups in need. Maybe she could join, or if need be create, one that would help victims of these kinds of crimes—

“Dear God.”

“What?” Jack looked over at General Toal. “Something bad?”

The General was frowning, advancing through a series of pictures. Bracing herself, Jack leaned over to look.

Nothing remotely pornographic was on the screen anymore. Instead, a surveillance camera showed a man dressed in traditional Amazigh attire, a tagelmust covering his head and obscuring most of his face, exiting a swanky-looking restaurant, the image taken from behind him. It vanished and was replaced by a new shot, from a different angle—

Jack recognized this frame. The surveillance camera it originated from had been covering the entrance to the pilots’ lounge. The same man was emerging from the lounge, partly turned as though waving goodbye to whomever had brought him as a guest. She remembered watching him leave the lounge when she’d reviewed the footage.

Glancing at her, his expression suddenly a little wary, the General closed the folder without advancing through further pictures. “I don’t understand why they would be so interested in collecting stills of the people they murdered that day,” he said. “I may wish to examine this more closely… but I think its presence would cloud the investigation we wish to see pursued.”

As she watched, he took a chip out of his pocket, connected it to the tablet, and transferred three folders to it—none of them from the “Bad Kitties” folder—before deleting them from Pritchard’s account.

Jack had the strange feeling that some kind of sleight-of-hand had just occurred, but at the same time, she didn’t feel any ill intent coming off of the General… more a sense that he had just done something to protect someone else. Maybe it was, as she’d pondered earlier, someone who would be harmed by the scrutiny that even drawing the two mercs’ interest could generate. One of the other folders, she realized, was the one that contained the surveillance pictures of her and Kyra.

He already knows who we are, and he’s risking a shit-ton to hide us from his own bosses…

Whatever else he was hiding, whoever else he might be protecting, she’d let it slide. It probably wasn’t any of her business.

“There is,” he said slowly, pocketing the chip again, “one more thing I need to discuss with you while we’re here. If you and Kyra haven’t already begun to plan your exit strategy off this world, now is the time to do so.”

“Why?” Jack already had her exit in place, but his words sent a chill through her anyway.

“Because it’s only a matter of time before a formal investigation of the repeated calamities at the spaceport is initiated by the Federacy,” he told her. “Such investigations always include at least two esper Operatives. One of the things they will be looking for…”

He locked eyes with her, and she could feel him willing her to understand how serious the matter was.

“…is evidence of someone like you.”