35.
A Box with Infinite Chambers

Kyra didn’t manage to fall back asleep until after Jack had narrated up to Ali’s death and funeral, shortly before Fry had told everyone about the coming eclipse. Jack lay beside her, watching her sleep, until she was sure that her dreams weren’t being disturbed. Then she closed her eyes and let sleep reclaim her.

Little larva? May we speak to you now?

“Yes,” she told them, unsurprised to find herself floating in the night sky once more. This seemed to be where they centered themselves: in the darkness, surrounded by stars.

The story you told. Is it true?

“It is, yeah.” Most of it, anyway. She had changed a few things as she went, trying to make it sound like she had met Paris Ogilvie well before the crash, in keeping with her prior claims to Kyra that he was the one who had mentored her in breaking security systems rather than her father unknowingly doing so. She’d worked in all of the things he’d told her about himself after the crash as if they were things she’d learned while traveling with him before boarding the Hunter-Gratzner.

“I’ve been to Earth eleven times now,” he’d told her as he dug through his stash and pocketed tins of caviar, reluctantly offering her one for her own pocket. “Mostly, I’ve stayed in the Western hemisphere. That’s the safest side. But it’s still risky. There are radiation storms even there. And all the best museums and estates have security systems that are still protecting their collections, even now. I almost got fried by a positron screen doing the Smithsonian job…”

At the time, Jack had the sense that he wanted to recruit her, to have her “run with” him for real. He’d been planning his biggest heist yet and was eager to talk about it: taking a crack at the Louvre and the Mona Lisa.

“Nobody’s survived that yet. They say it’s impenetrable. But I found some old documents about the security system, things nobody else has ever seen. I think I can get to her. And if not…” He’d raised a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conte in a toast, taking a long pull and offering the bottle to her. “Dying in the City of Light, that I was named after? It can’t get more poetic than that.”

Jack had taken a small sip of the wine. It wasn’t terrible, but it just tasted halfway between spoiled grape juice and vinegar to her. She had yet to understand why so many people fussed over it.

No one else in the group seemed to take Paris all that seriously, especially when it became clear that he fancied himself a twenty-sixth century Indiana Jones.

“A male Lara Croft, thank you very much,” he’d said when she made the comparison, “not that crass American…” Jack had ended up wondering if he realized that both adventurers had been fictional.

But she had been to some of the holo-museums that reproduced long-lost Earth artifacts, and she had recognized many of the items in Paris’s storage bay. As improbable as it seemed, that gawky, snobbish man really had been, more or less, the wayfaring tomb raider he claimed he was. With a pang of regret, she found herself wishing she had hung onto the boomerang she’d carried for a while. From the British Museum on Earth, it had traveled to an unknown world and had been lost forever. She knew exactly where she’d dropped it after the eclipse, but it might as well have been left in another universe.

They, she suddenly realized, were observing her memories, which she’d conjured into their night sky as she thought of them.

He could break into locked places? they asked.

“Some, yeah,” she told them. “Depending on the kind of lock.”

And you know how to do this, too?

“Yeah. Again, just some of the time. Some locks are harder than others. I’m still learning.” She really wasn’t supposed to be learning anything of the kind, but somehow her life kept taking a turn toward the criminal.

It had been an act of desperation that had led Jack to try to pick Sharon Montgomery’s pocket while waiting for the Hunter-Gratzner to arrive on Vasenji Station. She’d run out of money, none of her father’s security systems were used on the station’s commercial levels, and she was starting to get a little crazy with hunger. She’d done a terrible job of it and, even before her target had turned to look at her, John Ezekiel had her in a headlock.

“Zeke,” Shazza had said, “let the poor kid go.”

“Are you barmy? This little shit tried to steal your wallet.”

“I know, but look at ’im. Skin and bones, he is. When’s the last time you ate, yeah?”

It had been the beginning of a strange few days. Shazza had immediately figured out that she was a girl but had kept that a secret even from Zeke. But if Jack was going to tramp the space lanes, Shazza had announced, “he” was going to do it right.

Starting with how to pick pockets properly.

The hapless and still annoyed Zeke had found himself volunteered to be Jack’s “mark,” as she practiced identifying where people kept their valuables and lifting them undetected. Shazza had played “mark” as well, and had periodically made Jack play the role too, so she could “see how it’s done” and learn how to spot other thieves in a crowd and avoid their light fingers. By the time the Hunter-Gratzner had arrived, the couple had amusedly turned her loose on a few crowds and critiqued her successes and failures until she was, in Shazza’s words, “a certified pro” and it was time to part ways.

She hadn’t actually told them that she was joining them on the ship. They’d only discovered that when they broke open her cryo-tube and freed her in the aftermath of the crash.

“Cripes, kid,” Shazza had said, helping her up off of the floor. “If you’d told me you were planning on stowing away on this beast, I’d’ve bought you a ticket.”

“You need ID to board the normal way,” she’d answered, startling a rare guffaw out of Zeke.

They had also taught her how to pick locks.

These locks… they are mechanical in nature. Do you know how to open other kinds?

“Like what?” she asked, instantly regretting it. She had been thinking about her father’s security systems. They were thinking of something else altogether.

It was, at first glance, a cube, with no breaks in any of its surfaces. But it had far too many surfaces, more and more the longer she looked at it, infinite iterations of itself, dropping deeper and deeper down into—

“Stop, stop I can’t—”

We are sorry, little larva. We forgot how small you still are.

“I’m sorry too,” Jack found herself saying. “I just… I can’t see that far into…”

We understand. You must grow more first. When you hatch into your six-shape, we will show you.

Well, that wasn’t creepy or anything…

They let her sleep for real after that, eavesdropping on her dreams but letting them flow wherever her unconscious mind would take them. Later, she dreamt about being Audrey, sneaking downstairs with her cousins in the middle of the night to watch an antique vid they had been forbidden to see, a gory and disturbing story about a puzzle box that opened doors to other worlds—

She woke up gasping, feeling like she was on the brink of understanding something important.

…something about an old Earth vid called Hellraiser?…

It was gone.

Night, on Tangiers Prime, was long even at the height of summer; most people rose in the dark to begin their mornings. Jack climbed out of bed and picked up her tablet, which she vaguely remembered setting on the guest room’s elegant dresser the night before. Its chrono said that it was a little after six a.m. The sun would rise in another hour or so, which almost felt normal for a moment until she remembered that it had set almost thirteen hours earlier and would remain in the sky for nearly thirty hours once it rose. That was summer in New Marrakesh; most people had wakened two or more hours earlier still and were accustomed to the first few hours of their morning-day being spent in darkness. Mid-winter, Takama had told her when they first met, meant thirty hours of darkness at a time for an entire week, with the sun only rising a few hours before the noon sleep period began and setting just a few hours after everyone woke for the evening-day.

She wasn’t sure how long she had slept, though. She still felt tired, but far too alert and agitated to try to sleep again yet. There was a word tickling at the back of her mind, probably from her spelling bee days, that felt like it had something to do with her dreams. Apeirochoron?

She looked it up on the tablet.

Apeirochoron noun, sing. [mathematics] /əˈpɪr.ɑˈkɔːr.ɑːn/
An n-polytope cube of infinite dimensions.
From άπειρος (ápeiros – “infinite”) + χώρος (chóros – “space, room”)

Was that what they had been trying to show her in her dream? It felt like it was.

But why?

She switched off the tablet and set it down when she heard a soft knock on the door, grabbing up the robe that had been set out for her and slipping it on in a hurry. She wasn’t entirely sure what the Meziane family’s views on bed attire were, but it was something her parents had argued about during family gatherings. She wouldn’t take any chances.

Kyra was still asleep, so she walked over to the door and opened it rather than calling out a come in. Tafrara and Ewan were waiting outside.

The first thing Tafrara did was give her a hug. “I’m so glad you’re safe. I’m sorry I didn’t stay to see you when you arrived.”

“That’s okay. Thank you,” Jack said, hugging her back. Ewan, she noticed, was carrying his field kit. “K—Dihya’s not awake yet.”

“Really? I didn’t think the sedative would last so long.” Concern appeared on his face.

“We, uh… had a problem with the entities. They kept trying to talk to her instead of letting her sleep.” Jack really needed to find a better name for those creatures.

“The… ‘entities?’” Tafrara asked, her expression a little dubious.

“It appears,” Ewan explained, “that Dihya and Tislilel’s comings and goings across universes have attracted the attention of other beings who can do something similar. And who try to communicate with them when they sleep. Is Dihya all right?”

“I managed to get them to shut up and leave her alone,” Jack said with a nod. “But she wasn’t ready to try sleeping again for a while.”

“They must’ve really upset her to break through that sedative so early on. Do you mind if I take a look at her?” He hadn’t tried to brush past her, waiting instead to be invited in.

“Please,” she said, moving aside for him. He flashed her a knee-quaking smile on his way past. Something about the room, she suddenly realized, felt off. “Where’s Sebby?”

“Your little pet?” Tafrara smiled. “He’s downstairs. He started scrabbling at the door a few hours ago. We think he was trying to find something to hunt. So Izil went to the night market and brought back a tub of feeder crickets, and he has been having the best time.”

“He’s been absolutely hilarious,” Ewan added softly, moving aside the covers to check Kyra’s bandages. Kyra’s hand flashed out, catching his wrist, and then relaxed.

“G’morning,” she said, still half-asleep.

“Good morning, Dihya,” he replied, struggling to hide a grin. “I think you just passed your reflex test. How are you feeling?”

“Sore.”

“I have something that’ll help with that.”

“And hungry,” Kyra added.

“That’s a very good sign indeed. We’ll have something brought up to you right away. Tafrara, could you…?”

“Of course, Zdan. Come on,” Tafrara said, tugging at the sleeve of Jack’s robe. “Let’s get you something to eat, too.”

Tafrara led her down two flights of steps to the ground level, and out into the courtyard she’d passed through the previous day. The tide in Elsewhere had receded, Jack noticed; on that side, wan moonlight was sparkling over a barren garden of gleaming stone, wet sand, and seaweed, casting long shadows toward the west. In both worlds, above her, the sky had shifted from black to a dark, intense royal blue as the sun approached the eastern horizon. The air was cool and perfumed with the scent of hundreds of blossoms in the courtyard garden.

“It’s so beautiful,” Jack whispered.

“Thank you,” Tafrara said with a smile. “It’s been a project of mine for many years now.”

“You did all this?”

“Well, not all, but I designed a good deal of the garden layouts.” Tafrara led her across the courtyard and into a brightly-lit room on the other side.

Reeeeeeeeeee! It sounded different from the night before, not at all distressed. Jack followed the sound and spotted a large, high-sided storage tub, its lid set aside.

“Here she is now,” Cedric said, grinning. “You’re gonna love what your little fella’s been up to.”

Jack leaned over the tub and looked in on—

Total destruction. A cricket’s version of a summer disaster vid.

Not a single cricket was chirping. The surviving few were apparently trying to stay as quiet as they could while Sebby, pincers clattering enthusiastically, chased after them and stuffed them into his little mandibles. He wasn’t bothering to be especially tidy, and bits of cricket were everywhere in the tub.

“Oh wow,” she found herself laughing.

“It’s cricket Armageddon in there,” Cedric chuckled. “He’s finished off almost the whole lot.”

“Now I wonder if we’ve been underfeeding him,” Jack said, feeling a little rueful.

“If you have,” Cedric said, rising from the dining table she’d barely registered and pulling a seat out for her, “we’ll set that right soon enough.”

“You should have seen him pouncing them,” Safiyya said, entering the room with a large tray. “He’s like a kitten.”

Safiyya’s tray had a variety of traditional Moroccan breakfast foods on it; Jack suspected that Takama had told her which ones were her favorites. Soon she was settled at the table, dipping baghrir pancakes into amlou and scooping up cumin-seasoned fried eggs and khlii with a slice of khobz. Nearby, she could hear Sebby’s enthusiastic, almost ultrasonic mini-shrieks as he stalked his prey.

I could get used to this…

There were very rare moments—and this, Jack realized, was one of them—when the urge to stop her madcap voyage across the stars became intense. If she said she wanted to stay here, she knew, the Tomlin-Meziane family would welcome her into their fold, accepting her exactly as she was. She would become Tislilel Meziane, adopted daughter of Cedric and Safiyya, or maybe of Takama, youngest sister—or cousin—of Tafrara, Ewan Zdan, and Dihya… and the late Gavin Brahim. She would never be Jack B. Badd or Audrey MacNamera again… and she would never need to use the false ID she had created for her journey onward. She would learn to live by the unique rhythms of a world with 44 hours in its day and an alternate version with three moons and enormous high tides, and she could explore two sets of landscapes wherever she went. And although she could probably never have the man she longed for most of all right now, one day she could find someone almost or just as wonderful in the tribe, or at an engagement Moussem, and make a new family of her own…

Could she really do that?

Her parents, she thought with a pang of guilt, would believe she had died somewhere. Maybe they’d even suspect she’d died in the Hunter-Gratzner crash, but they would never know the truth of what had happened to her. Audrey MacNamera would stay in the “missing” category for a few more years and then be declared dead. Her memorial would have no coffin or urn, just a picture of a naïve young girl with long blonde hair who had vanished one day without a trace. Memories of who she had been and what she had done in her brief life on Deckard’s World would already have faded by then. There would be hardly any stories for anyone to tell about the quiet, studious girl who had lived too far away from her school friends and other children her age and had made do with books and cats for companions, who never got into any trouble unless she was with her cousins—and those stories would really be about them, not her—and whose adventures had almost all been vicarious until then…

Could she really do that to them?

Her heart twisted as she realized that there was no way she could. As alluring as life with the Tomlin-Meziane family might be, and as much as she wanted to have any excuse to catch the light of Ewan’s smile… she could never do that to her family. Especially not after seeing just how torn up Tomlin’s death had left his.

“Are you all right in there?” Cedric asked.

Jack glanced up, trying too late to cover up the look of sadness that had crept over her face. “Um… yeah. Just… got a lot to think about.”

If I didn’t already have a father, I’d want you to be mine…

“Right,” Ewan said at that moment, entering the room. “That’s Dihya settled for the next few hours. She should sleep comfortably for a while. What do we want to do about the officers’ reception?”

“Bloody hell,” Cedric muttered. “I don’t think we dare postpone it. Certain people would want to know why, if we did. Well, we’ll see how she’s faring tomorrow evening. It’s still some sixty-odd hours away.”

“How Dihya’s faring?” Jack asked, momentarily confused.

“The plan was to introduce her to Gavin’s associates in the Service during the reception we scheduled just for them,” Cedric explained. “With that Quintessa bitch looking over our shoulders at the memorial, I couldn’t find a way to extend an invitation for a meet-an’-greet that she wouldn’t invite herself to, other than that. I do plan to keep Gavin’s promise to Dihya.”

Oh! Of course. Now it all made sense. “But now you’re worried she won’t be recovered in time.”

“That’s the worry,” Ewan agreed. “Well, we can work around it if we need to. I know some of them fairly well and can invite them over for dinner, or something.”

“How long is your leave?” Cedric asked.

“I have another week,” Ewan said, popping an olive into his mouth.

Just four more of Tangiers Prime’s long days, Jack realized, and Ewan would be back at the flight academy on Qamar. It was a struggle to keep her dismay off of her face. After the week ended…

She might never see him again.

It would only be another week from then until the transport to Furya arrived and, one way or another, she boarded it and left to reunite with her father. That was a rendezvous she had to keep. More than a year had gone by since she’d disappeared from Deckard’s World, and by now word had reached him that she was missing. She’d planned to beat the news of her disappearance to him, or at least arrive soon after. She couldn’t dally anymore. Which meant that, although she intended to spend the next two weeks immersing herself in this wonderful family, she would have to say goodbye to them all too soon. And goodbye to Ewan, possibly forever, even sooner.

Why did all of these things have to hurt so much?

A gentle hand on the back of her head drew her back to herself. Ewan was leaning forward, studying her face with concern. “Are you all right, Tislilel?”

She tried to manage a reassuring smile, but what appeared was probably pathetic and not reassuring at all. “It’s just… been a rough few weeks. I think maybe I’ll lie down for a while.”

She couldn’t tell them what she was feeling, not now… and could tell him least of all.

“Do you know the way back?”

Jack nodded, able to see it in her mind quite clearly. She only ever got lost in places she’d never been before, and only then if she hadn’t had a chance to map them out in advance or had been given faulty and outdated directions. But she could see every turn she and Tafrara had taken.

The sun hadn’t yet risen as she crossed the courtyard, but the sky had turned a vivid, deep turquoise blue and birds were muttering sleepily in the trees. Jack stopped for a moment to inhale the intoxicating scent of the space. She wanted to remember it forever, this magical garden that might, if only things had been different, have become her home.

She wondered if there were any flowers yet on Furya.

Kyra was sleeping again when Jack returned to their room. Ewan—or possibly his cousin Usadden—had set up an IV drip after she’d left. She looked up the contents of the bags on her tablet. Hydration fluids, mostly, but one small bag, on a timed drip feeding its contents into the other fluids, was a powerful healing accelerant. The tablet told her that it was rarely used because it was prohibitively expensive.

She was about to set the tablet back down when she noticed that she had a message. Or, more specifically, that her newest alias had a message.

Her pulse racing with sudden excitement, she opened it up.

Dear Ms. Tepper,

We are pleased to inform you that you are one of the top candidates to join the crew of the Major Barbara on its upcoming voyage to the Catalan System…

Wait, what?

She had applied to go to Furya. The Major Barbara was supposed to be going to Furya.

She scanned the rest of the letter in growing confusion. The departure date was the same, although the ship was now scheduled to launch from New Fes.

But the destination had changed.

A terrible, cold, empty feeling was filling her as she used one of her Ghost Codes to infiltrate the shipping company’s comms system and snoop on the chatter of the last few days.

Oh. Of course. Of fucking course.

Due to the current difficult circumstances facing Tangiers Prime and particularly New Marrakesh, the planetary government has requested that all humanitarian aid supplies located within the system be reserved for the rescue and recovery efforts currently underway…

The aid packages originally marked for shipment to Furya had been reallocated for local use. The Major Barbara would instead carry construction equipment to Catalonia Seven. And the shipping company was in the middle of arranging a new supply mission to Furya, originating from—

“Helion Prime. Helion fucking Prime…” Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The tears won.

34.
An Inward-Facing Fortress

“How’d you do it?” Cedric asked Kyra, studying the smashed window.

Kyra looked over at him. The shots Ewan had given her had finally taken effect, and she no longer seemed to be in any pain but seemed extremely drowsy. Ewan, done treating her internal injuries, was closing up the gory slash in her skin. “Climbed out the west window in the bedroom. There’s a ledge outside. Went as fast I could ’til I got to the fire escape… out that window… ’n gave it a good, hard donkey kick…”

She started to lift her legs as if she was going to try to demonstrate, but hissed sharply as pain returned with the movement.

“Stay still, Dihya,” Ewan admonished, resting one gloved hand on her midriff. The other held the forceps he was using to suture her.

“Fuck, sorry,” Kyra muttered, grimacing.

“It was locked?” Cedric frowned when Kyra nodded. “So how did the mercenary get in?”

“He had one of these,” Jack said, taking the Master Key out of her pocket and holding it out to him.

Cedric took it and looked it over. “Even possessing one of these on Tangiers Prime is a felony. I suggest you let it join him.”

Damn. She’d kind of wanted to keep it. Taking it back, she sighed, shifted it to Elsewhere, and let it fall. She caught Cedric watching her with a suppressed look of wonder on his face.

I guess it does look just like magic, she thought, and not an accident of quantum physics.

While Ewan had continued to work on treating and closing Kyra’s wound, Takama had joined Safiyya and Lalla in efficiently packing up their possessions in the apartment, using their clothing, bedding, and the pillows and blankets they’d decorated with to cushion anything even slightly fragile. Cedric, meanwhile, had been diligently wiping down surfaces to remove all possible fingerprints. They were all wearing gloves from Ewan’s kit, but had told Jack that she was to stay still and watch over Sebby and Kyra, not help. They were almost finished when two men appeared in the apartment’s open doorway.

Sebby crawled onto the top of the couch back and hissed at them.

“It is all right, Sebby,” Takama said to him. “These are my cousins. Ait uxam, Sebby. Family.”

Jack remembered seeing them at the memorial and at the meal afterward. One of them had told everyone a story about Tomlin learning to drive that had almost made mint tea come out of her nose. They were wheeling in a gurney, one designed to roll up and down flights of stairs.

“Perfect… timing,” Ewan said as he tied off a stitch. “Three more and I’ll be done.”

“This should be everything,” Takama said a few minutes later, emerging from the kitchen area with the small quantity of food they’d had—including more olives for Sebby—in a bag.

Now, there was a completely non-horrible idea…

“Takama? Give an olive to Sebby, please.”

The moment Takama offered him the olive, Jack could see the change in Sebby’s posture. She was now one of his best friends. Jack had Cedric, Safiyya, and Lalla offer him olives as well, which he happily devoured while Ewan finished his work. The two cousins—Izil and Usadden—offered him one each too, marveling at him in Tamazight. Each received a thank you, of a sort, from Sebby, who stroked his antennae along their ungloved hands and wrists.

Petting them or learning their scents? Jack wondered. “Now he’ll think of you as ait uxam, for sure.”

While Izil and Usadden carefully lifted Kyra onto the gurney, Ewan pulled off his bloody gloves and washed his hands before accepting an olive from Jack to feed Sebby.

“I’ve heard of offering olive branches before,” he murmured softly as the contented crustacean stroked his hand, “but this is new.”

“Pretty much everything is with him,” Jack admitted. “We didn’t know until tonight that he has a stinger.”

“I wondered why you were so alarmed when he got upset. How strong is his venom?”

“Strong enough to paralyze a hundred-kilo man in a matter of seconds,” Jack told him, feeling a little nervous. What if they refused to let Sebby into their home?

“Is that what killed the mercenary?”

“No,” Jack said, and found that she couldn’t meet Ewan’s eyes, couldn’t even look at his face. “He was still breathing when—” She took a deep breath. “When I…”

Ewan’s hand touched her cheek and he tilted her head up, making her meet his gentle gaze. His eyes were exactly the same shade of green as his brother’s. “When you did what you had to do, to save your life and Dihya’s.” His voice became kindly chiding. “I do understand war. The only thing that outrages me is that you and your sister have been forced onto the front lines of battle so young. That is the real crime here.”

You don’t know how young, Jack thought miserably. Kyra had been twelve when the New Christy Massacre took place, and thirteen when she had finally captured and killed Red Roger, the same age Jack was now… and she had three notches on her belt now, too. Did she really have any innocence left to lose?

Ewan pulled her into a gentle hug. For a long moment they stayed still, Jack resting her head on his chest, breathing in the scent of him—so very nice after the reek of the filthy merc—and listening to his heartbeat, letting it calm her. No one had held her like this since before her father left for Furya. Possibly, no one had ever held her like this.

“You two coming?” Cedric called to them.

Jack didn’t want to let go. She wanted to just stay just like this, rest like this, for a while longer. Reluctantly, she pulled back and looked up at Ewan, meeting understanding and concern in his gaze. His fingertips gently brushed her forehead. “You’re bruised. Did he hit you?”

She’d forgotten all about that for a moment, forgotten why her head hurt. “I hit him in the face with my head.”

That startled a soft laugh out of him. “You are quite ferocious. When we get back to the house, please let me look at it. Now that Dihya is stable, I want to make sure you are, too.”

He kept his arm around her, the way his brother had, as they followed the others down the stairs. She could see Sebby below them, perched protectively on Kyra’s chest as Izil and Usadden maneuvered the gurney around a landing. The others were all carrying bags, including Ewan’s repacked field kit.

“My tablet—”

“Right here,” Ewan chuckled, offering it to her. Then he took a familiar, cheap “burner” comm out of his pocket and held it up. “Whose comm is this? It was on the table beside your tablet, but I thought Takama already packed yours and Dihya’s.”

“The merc’s. I need to get it to another part of town before I isomorph it into Elsewhere. So nobody comes here looking for him.”

“That’s a good thought. May I handle that for you? I know someone who can make sure it goes on a long, wild journey before it disappears forever. No trips to other universes needed.” Ewan smiled down at her. “Although I would really love to visit Elsewhere sometime, if I may.”

“Yes, thank you.” Jack looked around; as yet, no water was rising into the building. “What time is it?”

Ewan glanced at his chrono. “A little after eighteen p.m. Why?”

“Tide’s moving in. When we get to the ground level, though, I need to check something in Elsewhere. Do you have a flashlight?”

“Of course.” He took it out of his pocket and offered it to her.

“I… don’t want you to come with me on this trip over to Elsewhere.” Jack told him, feeling suddenly awkward.

“Ah… yes. I understand.” He didn’t specify what he understood, maybe recognizing that she didn’t want to talk about her need to make sure she’d successfully committed another murder, and to conceal her gruesome handiwork from him. “As I said earlier, though, you bear no shame for any of what happened tonight.”

I do, though. I do…

The waters of Elsewhere were lapping at the lower end of the street, a few blocks away, when they finally emerged from the building. Izil and Usadden had covered Kyra with a white sheet and were wheeling her toward, of all things, a Medical Examiner’s truck. Jack’s heart lurched for a second.

“It’s all right, Tislilel,” Ewan murmured, sensing her distress. “This was the plan. Anyone on the outside will only know that someone must have died in the building and been taken out. They will seem to drop her off at a funeral home, where another of our cousins is waiting to bring her back to the house in a laundry service truck. Takama is going to ride with her the whole way. She’ll be fine.” He kissed the top of her head, removing his arm from around her. “Go take care of your problem while we load the bags in Lalla’s van.”

As Jack walked back toward the apartment building’s outer wall, she found herself wishing that Ewan’s arm was still around her.

If Riddick had left her with a family like this, she thought as she isomorphed over into Elsewhere and continued forward on the sand, she never would have even considered cutting her wrists.

It was a moonless night in Elsewhere; all three moons, no longer near each other in the sky, were somewhere on the other side of the world. Ewan’s flashlight illuminated dried sand, desiccated seaweed, smooth rocks, and small tidepools, terrain she remembered from the previous week. That had been a dark night, too; everyone had been using their comms to light their way.

Frank Vedder, aka Justin Cowell, aka Blaine Mason was sprawled on the rocky ground, his body thoroughly broken by his twenty-meter fall. His head had smashed against a large rock, painting it scarlet. Small crustaceans, like but unlike Sebby, had found the body and begun to feast.

He died fast, a voice from her past rumbled softly in her head, and if we have any choice about it, that’s the way we should all go out…

She would no more cry for this… sicko… than she would have for Johns—and in spite of what Riddick had seemed to believe at the time, the tears she’d almost shed had not been for the merc who had wanted to serve her up as a Judas goat—but part of her still wanted to curl up and cry at the thought of what she had become on this journey and the innocent girl who had been lost along the way. She wanted to cry because, as with Johns, she was glad the man was dead, and part of her hated herself for that.

The Master Key, which she had been tempted to retrieve, had smashed to pieces against another rock. Like I needed to add another felony to the long list…

Taking the surveillance photo of herself and Kyra back out of her pocket—she wasn’t sure why she’d initially kept it, but it needed to cease to exist—she dropped it onto the sand and turned back, retracing her steps until they vanished and she was back outside of the building, before isomorphing back into U1.

“Baraka,” Ewan said as she reappeared. “I was told, and I believed, but it’s still an amazing thing to see.”

“I’m still learning how to do it the best way,” Jack admitted, offering him his flashlight back. “Slow or fast transitions, I mean. It’s kind of frustrating. Nobody’s exactly written a manual about how Threshold Syndrome works even though they really ought to have by now.”

“Assuming that the Quintessa Corporation was willing to allow that knowledge to circulate, that is,” Ewan said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “Let’s get you back to the house. I asked my sister to prepare a room for you and Dihya while we collected you.”

The Medical Examiner’s truck had already departed, Jack noticed. Cedric was loading the last of the bags into the back of what she assumed was Lalla’s van, gesturing them over to him. “Let’s get you home, Tislilel. We have some security tricks in store for anyone who tries to invade our house.”

Soon she was sitting between Cedric and Ewan as Lalla drove them back to the extraordinary mansion she’d only left a few hours before. They made one detour along the way, so that Ewan could hand off the merc’s comm to a man who looked like a pirate riding a motorcycle. A while later, they turned onto the tree-lined avenue they’d walked on, earlier that very day, on their way to and from the church. A massive, high-walled edifice with a familiar gate set in it appeared on the left. There were, she realized, no windows on the outer walls, no sign that it was a house at all. When she and Kyra had originally passed it in the processional, she’d assumed it was a warehouse.

“This is true,” Cedric said when she asked him about it. “The house’s windows look inward only, although we often go up on the roof if we wish to watch what’s happening outside with our own eyes.”

“Roof access? That could be—” Jack stopped herself. This family knew how to take care of itself better than she did. Didn’t it?

“Dangerous? Perhaps,” Cedric said, grinning. “Burglars have tried to come in from the roof, but it’s more difficult than it seems. Only one has ever made it inside.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing good,” Safiyya said. “You and Dihya will be safe, we promise.”

It’s not me I’m worried about, Jack realized. Riddick was a big enough payday to make any merc willing to go to war against a family, even a wealthy and apparently powerful one. As long as people believed he was the one who had sprung her and Kyra from the hospital, anyone they associated with would be fair game in a merc’s eyes.

Could she really bring that kind of havoc down on this family?

Ewan, she realized, was studying her face intently. She hoped she wasn’t showing far too much of what she was feeling… in any direction.

“Sorry,” she made herself say, giving him an apologetic smile. “I think I’m just a little paranoid right now.”

“Understandably,” he said, putting his arm around her again.

Another, larger gate opened beside the van, leading down into a huge, private garage below ground level. Elsewhere’s waters completely filled it. Jack let Ewan help her out of the van and escort her into the house for a second time.

It had never occurred to her until now that the comfortable shabbiness of the Rif might be a front. She still wasn’t sure what the truth was. But her favorite food cart vendor had turned out to be a sociology professor on sabbatical, whose real job seemed to be gathering intel for the Imazighen—intel that had brought Tomlin to her and Kyra’s doorstep—and teaching foreigners to respect their ways. And, at Takama’s word, an entire community had stepped up to smuggle almost two hundred refugees out into the mountains in a single night.

Maybe she should trust that they were stronger than they had seemed, more powerful than they had seemed…

…but still vulnerable. Tomlin had died because she’d given him just enough help, just enough knowledge, to start a fight with the Quintessa Corporation, but not enough to win it.

She wasn’t sure anyone could win a fight against them. Without their Isomorph Drives, regardless of what secrets they were keeping about them, there would be no Star Jumping, no faster-than-light space travel. And without that—

“the end of the Federacy as we knew it…” That was what Tomlin had told his younger brother. Was the truth he’d discovered powerful enough to actually do that? To bring real-time contact between the star systems to an end?

If it was, no wonder the Corporation was willing to kill hundreds and destroy an economy to keep it secret, and to keep their position one where no other power, not even the Federacy itself, could threaten them with reprisals for any atrocious act they chose to commit. And if they ever suspected the secrets, and the people, that the Tomlin-Meziane family was harboring…

…This large and beautiful fortress would be erased from the board altogether.

Could anything defend this family against the monstrous forces, human and possibly otherwise, hunting for her and Kyra? Especially if those different forces ever realized they were all seeking the same two—in the words of one now-dead merc—little girls?

She would have to talk to Kyra about it.

Ewan had been steering her through the house the whole time she had been lost in thought—and there was a whole lot of house!—and up three flights of stairs. The lights in the tastefully decorated corridor he led her down were dim and most of the doors were closed. It reminded Jack a little of a fancy hotel from an old Earth vid. The doors were only on one side of the corridor; was the other side one of the exterior walls?

One door was open, soft light spilling into the hallway, and Jack could hear voices coming from it. Takama’s voice was among them.

“Rest now, Dihya,” she was saying as Ewan led Jack in. “Your sister will be here soon—ah! Here she is now.”

A large, ornately carved bedframe dominated the room. The bed itself looked soft and luxurious. Kyra was settled on its right side, propped up by large pillows in a position Jack remembered from one of her grandmother’s hospital stays. Sebby, who had been resting on a pillow next to her, scuttled across the bed and leapt down, racing to Jack and climbing up onto her shoulder, antennae frisking her face.

“What an extraordinary creature,” she heard either Izil or Usadden say as she stroked his carapace with her fingers. “So devoted. Aside from olives, what does it eat?”

“Cockroaches, mostly… any that were dumb enough to come into our place,” Jack told him. “And bugs that flew in after the west windows got broken. He can’t fly, but he sure tried to, to catch them.”

She wondered when, exactly, Sebby had learned to crawl across the ceiling to launch his attack on the merc. Maybe he’d figured it out so that he could ambush the large moths that had begun coming in at night. She and Kyra had begun finding colorful wing fragments on the foot of their bed and the floor at the end of each night cycle.

“Well, he isn’t going to find those here, I’m afraid,” the cousin—Izil, she realized—continued. “I will stop by a pet supply shop and bring back some possibilities for him.”

“Thank you.” Jack took Kyra’s hand. “Are you okay?”

Kyra’s smile was a little loopy. “Usadden gave me the good stuff,” she said, a slight slur to her words. “Gonna sleep now… now I know you’re okay…”

“She won’t be in any pain,” Usadden murmured. “Not for many hours.”

“Are you a doctor?” Jack found herself asking him. The Meziane family seemed to be huge, and highly accomplished.

He nodded. “I really am a medical examiner. Generally, none of my ‘patients’ require medication, but I have kept my license to practice on the living up to date, so I can also be called upon for search-and-rescue and triage in crises like the one we all suffered last week. And for situations such as this.”

Jack suddenly wondered just how often this family found itself embroiled in intrigue.

“If either of you need anything,” Takama gestured at a small device on the low table next to Kyra’s head. “Someone is always awake in our house and will answer. Once Zdan has made sure you do not have a concussion, Tislilel, try to sleep as well. Good night, girls.”

She shepherded Izil and Usadden out of the room, the three talking softly in Tamazight as they went.

“Now,” Ewan said, reaching into his field bag again, “let’s make sure of you.”

He led her over to a chair and made her sit down, kneeling in front of her.

“You’re a pilot and a medic?”

His grin was rueful. “Pilot in training. I worked for the UMA while I was at University. I think Usadden hoped I’d become a doctor, too, but… flying won. Especially now.” He swallowed, the grief showing in his eyes again.

His brother was his hero, Jack thought as he shone his penlight into her eyes.

“Pupils are responsive, that’s a good start…” For the next several minutes, he took her through a series of tests, some physical and some mental, before nodding in satisfaction. “You’re going to have an impressive bruise on your forehead for a while, and probably a headache, which I’ll give you some meds for, but there are no signs of a concussion.” His smile emerged; as with his older brother, it transformed him from handsome to dazzling. “Which is very good because I imagine you’re quite tired by now. I don’t have to make you stay awake.”

Jack was about to object that she was perfectly awake when a yawn broke through, surprising her. “I think that’s a good thing,” she admitted, laughing.

His brotherly good night kiss left her cheek tingling.

He’s nine years older than I am, she scolded herself as she showered, Sebby splashing at her feet. What I want is never going to happen.

Why did she have to develop feelings for such unattainable men? First Riddick, then Tomlin, and now Ewan…

Feeling a little refreshed from the shower but still sleepy, she climbed into huge bed, moving her pillow to the middle so she’d be close to Kyra, and drifted off.

They were waiting for her, agitated, demanding to know what was wrong with “the other larva” and what had happened to both of them.

If I show you in three-shapes, will you understand? she asked.

We will understand.

Jack conjured up her memories, recreating the apartment in her mind. Her asleep on the couch, Kyra—the other larva, she told them—sleeping in the next room, and the hideous, foul-smelling mercenary sneaking in through their door, climbing on top of her and threatening her with a knife. She recreated the battle that had followed, showing them Kyra coming to her rescue and being wounded, and then Sebby rescuing them both. At first she wasn’t sure if they were seeing any of it, until they began to ask questions about what she had showed them.

So many questions…

“Jack? Jack, wake up…”

She opened her eyes, blinking at the unfamiliar surroundings in the darkness. Kyra was shaking her arm, looking pained and anxious.

“Kyra? Are you okay? I thought the meds—”

“They won’t let me sleep, Jack.” Her sister had the same look of panic in her eyes that she’d had the morning before they broke out of the hospital, when Red Roger had come back to her in her dreams. “They keep asking all these questions… I can’t get them to let me sleep…”

Jack sat up, concerned. “You want me to tell them to knock it off?”

Kyra nodded, her lip trembling.

She closed her eyes, focusing on them. Somehow, she was starting to be able to feel them even when she was awake. The other larva is wounded! she scolded them. You must stop asking her questions! I’ll tell you when she is well enough for you to talk to her again. Until then, you can talk to me. Just to me.

She wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt some kind of reluctant assent.

“I think I got through to them,” she told Kyra.

“Thanks… but… I don’t want to go back to sleep yet. Can you talk to me? Help me stay awake for a while?”

“Absolutely. What do you want to talk about?”

“I… I don’t…” Kyra’s eyes were filling.

She needed an anchor, Jack realized, something to pull her away from her own thoughts and the darkness waiting for both of them. The way she’d needed one that final day at the hospital, when she was drawing Red Roger on the wall—

Of course.

Jack had promised to tell her the true story about Riddick. Originally, it should have happened that very night, but the escape had preempted it and they hadn’t circled back to it since. Now, she decided, it was time. She would give Kyra something to imagine that was almost completely disconnected from the current moment.

“Once there was a girl,” she began, “who was unhappy at home and decided she was going to run away. Her mother was getting remarried to a real asshole, and she wanted to go live with her father. But he was hundreds of light years away on a military base, and nobody was going to just let her go to him. So one day, she cut off her hair, put on her cousin Rob’s outgrown clothes, changed her name to Jack B. Badd, and set off after him…”

She could feel them listening, too.

33.
Child Soldiers at War

Of course, Jack thought with a mixture of dread and disgust, this just had to happen while the tide’s still out.

She stayed perfectly still, trying to decide what her best option would be. Mercs were nasty business, unpredictable and frequently cruel. Even back when she’d been a genuine innocent, they hadn’t cared. The man holding a knife to her throat might just be trying to intimidate her, or he might be the kind who could slash it without a second thought. The only thing she knew for sure about him was that he hadn’t showered or brushed his teeth in weeks.

“He’s not here,” she said, keeping her voice soft and trying not to move her throat and jaw too much. “He’s never been here.”

“Bullshit. You two are in thick with him. You’re his accomplices.” The merc’s next words were enunciated as if he was talking to a small child. “Tell me where to find him, and you can go free.”

Yeah, right.

“Toombs know you’re horning in on his bounty?” she asked. If she could manage to stall long enough, she thought, the tide would come in and she could isomorph over to Elsewhere without falling to her death. Or maybe Kyra could make a move.

If he didn’t already do something to her while I was asleep…

“Fuck Toombs,” the man growled. “He can’t call dibs on everybody.”

The only other family on the top floor had moved out two days ago, Jack thought. Even if she started screaming her head off, nobody would be able to help her.

Nobody in the building, anyway. Kyra might just be asleep in the other room, but it would be too late by the time she woke up. He’d probably cut Jack’s throat the moment she screamed, and then play out his intimidation act on Kyra instead. And both of them would end up dead, since neither of them knew the answer to his question.

If I scream out loud, anyway.

She’d thought trying to isomorph for the first time had been the biggest, craziest Hail Mary of her life. This new idea dwarfed it.

Can you hear me? Creatures? Are you there? It had never occurred to her to try to reach out to them until now.

“We can do this the easy way,” the merc said unimaginatively, “or we can do this the fun way, little girl. Fun for me, anyway.” He gave her a disgusting leer. Several of his teeth had been lost to rot and replaced with garish gold ones; two more would need replacing soon. Straddling her, he changed his posture slightly so that he could press suggestively against her. “So maybe you should talk now while I’m still feeling charitable.”

Her gag reflex couldn’t decide if it was reacting to his body odor, his breath, or the general foulness of his mind. Men like this were why she’d cut her hair off and posed as a guy.

I’m in trouble… please… warn the other larva… If you can hear me, please… help me…

“I told you, he’s not here,” Jack said. “I don’t know where he is. He didn’t tell us where he was going.”

“You think I’m stupid or something?”

Yes. “No.”

“Then try again. I’m running out of charity.”

Maybe I could do a fast isomorph, just to drop down to the next floor…

And, in all likelihood, break her back on the edge of someone’s table. None of her new “powers” were going to help her in this moment.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” It was the absolute truth. If he was any good at reading people, he’d know it.

Fury passed across his features and then he smiled. It made him look twice as hideous. “You’re really down to get hurt, ain’t ya? You know where I’m gonna hurt you first?”

“I. Don’t. Know. Where. He. Is.”

“Say that again, little girl, and I swear I will fuck you with this kni—”

The living room window exploded inward.

As the merc turned to look, Jack grabbed at the blade. This thing is in Elsewhere, all the way in Elsewhere—

“The fuck?” he shouted as the knife vanished. Jack lunged upward, slamming her head against his face as hard as she could. His chin banged hard against her forehead.

Ow! Fuck…

Kyra was climbing in through the smashed window behind him, a knife in her hand.

“You fucking bitch!” he roared, cocking back a fist. His nose was starting to bleed and his lip was split. Jack grabbed her tablet off of the table and rammed it into his gut with all of her strength. Her ears were ringing for some reason, a high-pitched reeeeeeeeeeeee sound filling them just at the edge of hearing. The merc, grunting hard from the impact, grabbed the tablet out of her hand, tossing it aside and drawing back his fist again.

With a Valkyrie scream, Kyra launched herself at him.

He was a big man. Almost as big as Riddick himself. He turned, swinging his arm, and knocked Kyra to the side before she could land on him.

“You little bitches!”

Kyra tucked and rolled as she fell, coming back up a second later. She’d reversed her knife, holding it by its blade, and flung it at the merc’s head.

He ducked, but just barely. The second knife she launched left a bloody line on his cheek.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

The merc rose from the couch, pulling out a knife of his own. “Bring it, little girl,” he told Kyra.

Jack had no idea where Kyra was keeping her blades, unless she’d already figured out the scabbard trick before Jack could suggest it to her. She had another one in her hand. She was crouching, every line of her body tense, circling to the side.

Jack looked around, trying to think of anything in range that she could repurpose as a weapon.

The merc lunged at Kyra, who danced out of range, luring him away from Jack.

She’s buying time for me to run.

Jack crawled off of the couch, wincing as her head began to throb. She felt woozy from the head blow; there would be no running for her. That ringing in her ears was back.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

The merc lunged at Kyra again, almost catching her. She brought her blade down the length of his arm, ripping the sleeve and scoring his flesh, before ducking out of range again.

“I only need one of you little cunts to tell me where he is,” the man grated, face going a mottled red with rage.

Fuck. He was going in for the kill.

Another lunge, another near miss. Kyra danced to the side and whirled, aiming a kick at his thigh. He dodged and grabbed for her ankle. She retreated out of range, a sheen of sweat glistening on her skin.

Jack grabbed a glass off of the kitchen counter and flung it at the back of the merc’s head.

Her aim would have been dead on, but the son of a bitch dodged it. It smashed against the wall.

“Once I’m done with your friend here, you’ll pay for that,” he said, his voice calm again, almost conversational.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

He lunged at Kyra again. Too late, Jack realized it was a feint.

“No!” she heard herself scream.

As Kyra slashed out and tried to spin away, he grabbed her arm and pulled her against him, thrusting his knife into her abdomen. Kyra made a choked, gasping sound. Her knife dropped from her hand.

“That’s right, you little—”

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Suddenly Jack realized that the noise wasn’t in her head. It was real.

“Sebby, no!”

She watched in horror as Sebby, shrieking, launched himself from the ceiling, leaping at the merc.

He was going to die. The merc would smash him to the ground, kill him, murder everyone and everything she loved—

A long, thin tail she’d never seen before whipped free from Sebby’s back as he landed on the merc’s shoulder. It jabbed once, twice, three times in rapid succession at the man’s throat. The large man froze, making a strange, rattling gurgle.

The room was suddenly, deathly silent.

Kyra moved first, staggering away from the frozen merc, the knife handle sticking out from her abdomen. “Oh shit…”

Slowly the merc began to topple. Sebby leapt from his shoulder to the back of the couch, his tail whipping in agitation. Its end sparkled, a drop of amber liquid catching the light.

Venom, Jack realized as the merc crashed to the ground. Sebby stung him. That’s not a tail, that’s a stinger.

Kyra wasn’t doing much better than the fallen intruder. She looked as if she was struggling to stay conscious. She staggered toward the couch, partly collapsing against it.

Jack hurried over to her, ignoring the merc for the moment. Sebby was staring at the man, his little body tense and his stinger-tail thrashing, as if daring the merc to try to get up.

Kyra’s right hand fumbled at the knife handle where it protruded from her abdomen by her right hip.

“Don’t pull it out,” Jack told Kyra, helping her around to the front of the couch and easing her down onto it. “Don’t touch it. I’m gonna call for help.”

“Shit,” Kyra groaned. “Shit shit shit shit, God, this hurts, Jack…”

“You’re gonna be okay. I promise.”

“I know. Just… that motherfucker…”

“He was looking for Riddick,” Jack told Kyra. “This is all my fault. I’m so sorry—”

“Fuck that noise, it’s not your fault assholes exist. What’re we gonna do with him?”

Jack rose. What, indeed? “Don’t move, okay? I’ll be right back.”

The merc was lying on the ground, his legs awkwardly bent and splayed from his fall. His breathing was shallow, wheezing, his eyes wide and frightened. He was alive but paralyzed. Jack found herself wondering if Sebby’s stinger was for hunting, or if his species bred like tarantula wasps.

She picked up the knife Kyra had dropped and walked over to him. Showing him the blade, she knelt beside him and put it against his throat.

“Maybe this is redundant, but don’t move,” she told him.

A strangled groan escaped his lips.

Jack went through his pockets, pulling out everything he’d been carrying. He had a wallet, an electronic device she recognized, from schematics she’d seen years ago, as a highly illegal “Master Key,” and a fake badge that looked like it had come from the same damned cereal box as the one Johns had carried. Then she rolled him over, grunting with the strain. The bastard was heavy as fuck. One folded piece of paper was tucked into a back pocket. For a moment, the smell made her think he’d voided his bowels.

“Do you ever bathe?” she asked him, tempted to throw him—as if she even could—into a tub and wash the stink off.

And… there it is.

Sometimes her ideas were quite horrible. She wished, though, that she’d thought of this one back when he’d first woken her up. The tide wouldn’t be in yet, but it would come soon enough to wash his stench away forever.

If the fall doesn’t kill him first… It probably would. She’d been so busy worrying about what would happen to her if she dropped through the floor that she’d never even considered…

She rolled him onto his back again, bringing the knife against his throat once more. Just in case. Then she put her hand on his chest.

“When you get to Hell,” she told him, “you tell Chillingsworth I sent you.”

The man’s eyes widened, just a bit, in pure terror.

This piece of garbage is in Elsewhere… all the way in Elsewhere…

He fell through the floor and vanished as silently as a ghost. She shifted her vision, trying to see into Elsewhere instead of U1. Darkness spread below and around her in the other ’verse’s moonless night. She couldn’t see anything—

Kyra groaned behind her.

“Oh shit, sorry, Kyra…” She set the knife down and hurried back to her sister’s side. “I’m gonna call Takama. She’ll know who to bring. We can’t use Emergency Services or anything but she’ll know who to get…”

She was babbling. She grabbed her tablet, relieved to see that it hadn’t taken any damage from the fight, and keyed in the comm number for the Tomlin-Meziane household.

“Azul?” It was Ewan.

“Ewan? It’s Tislilel!”

“Tislilel? What—is everything all right?”

“No! We need your help! We need Takama! Dihya’s been stabbed! By one of that bitch’s mercs! We can’t go to the police or UMA, but she needs a doctor!” In her own ears, she sounded on the verge of hysterics, but she felt as if she was talking from a strange distance.

“We’re coming. Are you at your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Are you safe there?”

“For now.” Jack looked around, suddenly imagining that another merc might leap out of the shadows. No, the man had made it clear he intended to cut Toombs out. He’d come gunning for them alone.

“We’ll be there right away.” The call disconnected.

“Score one… for the Meziane family…” Kyra said in a pained voice. Sebby was sitting on her chest, his stinger hidden once more, stroking her face with his antennae.

Jack gathered up the merc’s possessions and set them on the table, looking through them while they waited. The ID in his thick wallet named him as Frank Vedder; the one behind it bore the name Justin Cowell, and the one behind that called him Blaine Mason. All three had the same picture of his ugly mug. He had money cards in each name. A piece of paper with a string of letters and numbers on it, along with two condoms, were tucked in the otherwise-empty billfold.

What kind of sloppy dumb-ass carries multiple IDs where a cop might find them? she wondered in disgust.

The kind, she supposed, who only bathed every other month.

She transferred the wallet to Elsewhere and let it drop. For a moment, she almost did the same with his comm, until she remembered how many of the “missing and presumed dead” people from the explosion had been identified by their comms’ final locations. She set it on the table. Before sending it out of this ’verse, she’d carry it to another part of town; she didn’t want his last known location to be their apartment.

She unfolded the piece of paper she’d taken from his back pocket and gasped.

“What is it?” Kyra asked. Jack turned the paper so she could see. “Motherfucker…”

It was a printout of a photo, taken with a long-range lens, of Jack and Kyra standing in front of their building talking to a man in traditional Amazigh attire. Tomlin.

How long had mercs pursuing Riddick been in New Marrakesh?

She supposed that, after the breakout, anyone else who knew about the connection between “Jane Doe 7439” and Riddick would have started plotting possible landfalls out of system. A few who rolled the dice correctly might have managed to beat Toombs himself—even beat the Scarlet Matador itself—to Tangiers Prime.

It’s a good thing he took the picture from behind Tomlin, or his new boss would’ve been even more interested in us than ever…

She pocketed the image, along with the Master Key, and then finished examining and disposing of the man’s possessions. The badge dropped down into Elsewhere to join him. She’d let the tide do whatever it wanted with them—

The door slammed open and the Tomlin-Meziane family spilled into the apartment, Cedric and Ewan first, both with guns drawn.

“Dihya!” Takama gasped, slipping between the men and hurrying to her side.

Sebby reared up on his hind legs, rattling his pincers, and screeched a warning. His stinger whipped out. Takama stopped short.

“It’s okay, Sebby!” Jack said, trying to hush him as fast as she could. She didn’t want anyone else getting stung. “Come here. It’s okay.”

She managed to coax him to crawl up her arm and onto her shoulder, and moved away from the couch to make room for the others.

“Jack wouldn’t let me take the knife out,” Kyra said, her voice sounding a little muzzy.

“Jack,” Ewan’s eyes cut toward her as he said the name, “is very wise. We will have to remove it carefully.” He had holstered his gun and was opening the large medical field kit that Takama had carried in.

Battlefield doctors decide who lives and dies. It’s called triage… Nobody had realized that she’d heard that, heard everything that Johns and Riddick had said in their final conversation. Now she shuddered as it came back to her.

Safiyya and Lalla were setting several large, empty suitcases on the floor. “Bathroom first,” Safiyya said, handing Lalla a duffel bag. “Then bedroom.”

“What are you…?” Jack heard herself asking.

“You can’t stay here,” Safiyya told her in a no-nonsense voice. “It’s obviously not safe. This building truly is cursed. You’ll stay with us, at least until Dihya has recovered. Let some scoundrel try to come at you in our home!”

“Should I ask what happened to the man who stabbed her?” Cedric murmured so that only she could hear.

Jack met his eyes. “Please don’t.”

His expression softened and grew sad. Did he realize what she had done?

I’ve committed murder for the third time, she thought, another shudder passing through her.

“OW!” Kyra shrieked. “Fuck!”

Sebby leapt off Jack’s shoulder and scuttled toward her sister, screeching, stinger thrashing like an agitated cat’s tail.

“Sebby no! It’s okay! Don’t sting anybody!” Jack shouted, chasing after him.

“I’m okay, Sebby!” Kyra sobbed. “I’m okay, it’s okay… c’mere… it’s okay…”

The upset crustacean retracted his stinger. He leapt, instead, onto Kyra’s shoulder and began stroking her cheek with his antennae, again making a soft reeeeeeee at the very edge of Jack’s hearing.

Takama set the bloody knife that Ewan had just drawn out of Kyra on the table. Jack walked over and picked it up, looking it over carefully. She wanted to remember every detail about it in case it became important later.

Then she walked over to the spot where the merc had fallen. Standing over it, she transitioned the knife into Elsewhere and dropped it down.

“I should’ve isomorphed him straight over to Elsewhere when I woke up and he was sitting over me,” she heard herself saying. “Shouldn’t’ve given him a chance to hurt her…”

“I don’t imagine,” Cedric said next to her, “that an idea like that would just pop into your head right away.” His hand on her shoulder was light, gentle.

“It will next time.”

“I pray that you will never have to put that to the test, Tislilel. Or would you prefer to be Jack?”

Jack sighed. “Neither one’s my real name. Let’s stick with Tislilel. He gave me that name.” She turned and met Cedric’s eyes. “Gavin did.”

Cedric nodded and swallowed, his eyes acquiring a mournful gleam. “Tislilel it is.”

“Husband!” Safiyya called. “Either pack or clean! We want this tagat place emptied when it’s time to move Dihya!”

Cedric sighed and gave her a somewhat forced grin. “Don’t want even one fingerprint left behind, do we? You want any of the larger furnishings?”

“No, we got rid of most of them already. Whoever moves in next can have what’s left.” Jack wasn’t even going to try to argue with them about the move; beautiful view or not, she suddenly never wanted to see this building again. “But, uh… could you check under the bed and dresser to make sure Sebby didn’t leave anything under either one? He likes to hide and play under them.”

Sebby was still on Kyra’s shoulder, supervising Ewan’s work but no longer posturing threateningly.

“They’re asking if you’re okay…” Kyra groaned, only partly conscious.

“Who’s asking?” Takama glanced between Kyra and Jack.

“The things… on the other side… I was asleep and they were talking to me and suddenly they said ‘the other larva is in danger and needs your help…’”

“The ‘other larva?’” Takama looked confused.

“That’s what they call us,” Jack explained, once again wondering if maybe they were crazy. “The creatures… the ones that started talking to us in our dreams after the rescue. They call us larvae. All except the one that hates us and calls us filth—”

“What do I tell them?” Kyra moaned.

Jack took her hand. “Tell them I’m okay. Tell them that they helped you save me. Tell them…”

She had done it, she realized. She had called out to the frightening beings from her dreams, wide awake, and they had answered, if indirectly. They had defended her. It wasn’t some weird folie a deux she and Kyra were experiencing. It was all wonderfully, terrifyingly real.

“Tell them thank you.”

32.
A Lake Full of Tears

It was hard for Jack to concentrate on the memorial service with Toombs and Logan somewhere behind her.

It was a long service. There were prayers and readings, most of which she couldn’t manage to focus on. Family and friends told stories, some in English, some in Arabic, many in Tamazight, and one in French. Safiyya, who had thoughtfully prepared translation tablets for all of the guests, had one for her and one for Kyra, so they could follow what was being said. Everyone seemed to have a story about a time when Gavin Brahim Tomlin, or Brahim Meziane, or “the Colonel,” or El Krim, had helped them when they needed him most. A number of the stories were surprisingly funny. Jack felt herself wishing, yet again, that she could have spent years discovering his hidden depths as they had.

Everyone in the church seemed content to reminisce for hours, as if they might call him back to living, breathing flesh with their words, but eventually Cedric stood and thanked them all for coming.

There would be, he told the audience, a family-only reception that evening, and another reception for his son’s service colleagues in two days’ time. A proper public celebration of his son’s life, open to all, had not yet been scheduled but everyone in attendance that day would be informed as soon as it was.

Somehow, Jack suspected, any invitation addressed to the Quintessa envoy would mysteriously go astray and not reach her.

She could feel the tension humming through Kyra as they rose and followed Safiyya to the vestibule, where the rest of the attendees could offer formal condolences on their way out. This was the most dangerous part. Just how much camouflage could face tattoos and head draperies really create?

“You are shaking, Tislilel. What is it?” Takama whispered.

“Two of the mercs… they know us,” Jack whispered back. “If they realize who we are, things could get really bad.”

“For them,” Takama said firmly. “But I think I know a way to improve your disguises a little. They have not seen you from any direction but behind yet… Lalla, darling, do you have your wig bag with you?”

Within minutes, both she and Kyra had been whisked over to a side room. Takama and Safiyya’s cousin Lalla, it turned out, had an extensive collection of wigs she liked to wear—she had developed alopecia as a teenager, she explained—and often brought several with her to major events. She did not disappoint now. Kyra rejoined the reception line with sleek black hair, bangs draped artfully across her forehead to obscure her distinctive eyebrows. Jack, now wearing a wig that almost exactly matched the long blonde hair she’d cut off when she first went on the run, joined the line a moment later. Lalla had proudly told them that the wigs were made of natural, undyed, untreated human hair, and no one would believe they hadn’t naturally grown it on their heads. The veils, now draped loosely over and around their new hair, completed the illusion.

Jack had to admit that Kyra looked convincingly unlike herself. She suspected that, aside from the “tattoos” on her face, she probably looked more like Audrey MacNamera than she had in a year.

They were already in place as the first well-wishers came through.

Most of them just gave simple condolences. It wasn’t long until Jack was into the rhythm of saying ‘thank you’ back to them in whichever language they had used, making sure to use a thick Tamazight accent in the process. Beside her, Kyra was doing the same. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the envoy and her mercs approaching. While the envoy was offering condolences to each member of the line, the mercs were hanging slightly back, all of them looking uncomfortable.

What, are we too native for you? she found herself thinking angrily. Their expressions made her think of the time she had been invited to a classmate’s Kwanzaa celebration, along with the rest of her class, and had watched as some of her other classmates treated the experience—the foods, the music, the colorful outfits—as too outlandish to even try to appreciate, much less enjoy. Did just wearing white instead of black to a funeral make everything too alien to empathize with? Or did Tomlin’s murderer just naturally gravitate to the types of mercs who had no empathy to begin with?

She tamped down on the anger as fast as she could. I’m grieving here. Grieving. Not wishing for a gun…

Audrey MacNamera, she chided herself, had never fantasized about shooting people. If she wanted to ever be her again, she had to put these awful thoughts out of her head.

“I am so very sorry for your loss,” the envoy said, offering her hand to first Lalla, then Takama, and then Safiyya in turn. Her voice was cultured, her accent the kind Rachel had told her was called Received Pronunciation in really old vids. “Colonel Tomlin was a good man.”

She offered her hand to Kyra, who took it—

—and flinched.

The envoy gave her a quizzical look as she repeated her platitudes. Kyra stammered a thank you in Tamazight-accented English, drawing her hand back.

The only reason Jack didn’t flinch when the envoy took her hand was because she’d been warned by Kyra’s reaction.

There was something wrong with the envoy, something wrong with her touch. Something…

Similar three-shape. Different five-shape…

The thought skated through her mind and was gone. She could feel the woman’s eyes on her, could feel the wrongness of the hand in hers.

“Thank… you…” she managed, taking back her hand.

“Are these your daughters?” The envoy asked Safiyya and Cedric, suddenly seeming far too interested.

“My cousins,” Ewan said, walking over and putting his arms around their shoulders. “Dihya and Tislilel. They had come to town in preparation for the Engagement Moussem. I think that’s now postponed, though. My parents had hopes that one of them might choose instead to marry my brother, anyway… but now that’s not to be, either.”

“They marry their cousins,” Toombs muttered to one of the other mercs, just loudly enough for them to overhear. The envoy shot him a quelling look.

“Distant cousins,” Takama said, also giving him a look that suggested his behavior could get their whole merry troupe thrown out on their asses. “But yes.”

“Better a member of one’s own tribe than most abrrani,” Lalla said. “Meaning no offense, Cedric.”

“You did say most,” Cedric replied, winking at her.

“What the hell is ‘abrrani?’” Toombs bristled.

Logan, Jack noticed, was studying Kyra with a slight frown on her face. This needed to all end fast.

“I… do not…” She pretended that the word she was seeking was on the tip of her tongue, but unreachable, before looking up into Ewan’s handsome face and making her expression pleading and a little hurt. “I don’t understand,” she said in perfectly accented Tamazight.

Ewan caught on instantly. “Dihya and Tislilel don’t speak English,” he rebuked the group. “If you wish to continue talking about them in a language they don’t know, I will take them home now.”

Safiyya nodded. “I think that’s for the best, Zdan. The rest of us will join you shortly.”

It seemed as if the envoy wanted to object, but the atmosphere had chilled. Toombs had given just enough offense to sabotage whatever it was she’d intended to say or do. Ewan steered Jack and Kyra away from the group and out of the church.

“Well played,” he murmured once they were a block away. “I don’t understand what was happening in there, but you put a wonderful stop to it.”

“I don’t understand what was going on, either,” Kyra muttered. “That woman’s hand… what the fuck…”

“Her hand?” Ewan asked, frowning in confusion.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “When her hand touched mine, it felt wrong. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Made my skin crawl,” Kyra huffed.

Jack was trying to think of anything that had ever felt like that. Something about it had momentarily brought back an instant from one of her terrible dreams about the creatures in the darkness, but she wasn’t sure why. Something about three-shapes and five-shapes…

It hit her so suddenly that she stopped walking.

Ewan, still walking between her and Kyra with his arms through theirs, turned to look at her. “What is it?”

“I think she’s connected to another universe,” Jack gasped.

“What?” Kyra shook her head. “No. No way. You and I are and you’ve never felt like that to me.”

“Not Elsewhere. She… she isn’t connected to Elsewhere, I know that much. But… only part of her was here in U1. The rest of her… it’s in another ’verse and there’s something about it that’s—”

“Absolutely fucking horrifying. Yeah, you’re right. That’s what I was feeling, too. Damn. You think she’s partway into the ’verse where the thing that wants us dead comes from?”

Ewan was looking between them with concern. “I think we should take this conversation somewhere more private than this avenue,” he said. “I followed most of what you just said, though. If you’re right, this could be a serious problem.”

He led them down two more streets and through a gate in a high wall. Inside, surrounding a courtyard garden that looked, to Jack, like it had sprung out of one of the fantasy novels she’d loved as a kid—I’m still a kid, damn it, it’s only been a year—was a large multi-story house, its walls, pillars, and carved screens painted various brilliant shades of aqua, blue, and indigo. As Ewan led them past a large room where some of Takama’s marketplace colleagues were setting up the reception Cedric had mentioned, he finally spoke again.

“I don’t know everything that happened leading up to my brother’s death, but my aunt told me that you two, like the passengers and crew of the Scarlet Matador, were stranded between universes, and that you learned how to maneuver between them and helped him teach the others how to do the same. That you call this world ‘U1’ and the other universe ‘Elsewhere,’ and even brought back a pet from that other world. Is all of this correct? It sounds like something that belongs in one of the novels I read in college.”

“It’s true, yeah,” Jack said. His summary reminded her, with a powerful ache, of how Tomlin had answered one of her questions. She found herself wondering if it was a product of their military training, or of the college educations that all military officers, according to her father, were required to have on top of that training.

“You spoke of something that wants to kill you?” His expression was almost a mirror of the one his older brother had worn when he’d learned that she and Kyra had nearly drowned.

“Wants us to die,” Kyra corrected him. “We both… we encountered it, and some other entities, the morning after we helped get the Matador survivors out of New Marrakesh.”

Jack noticed that she was careful to omit all mentions of the deadly battle.

“We thought we were dreaming at first,” Kyra continued, “until we realized we’d both had exactly the same dream. Most of the entities seemed… scary as hell but almost friendly, but then one showed up that hated us and wanted us dead.”

“What did it do?” To Ewan’s credit, he seemed willing to believe them, but Jack had to wonder if he still would be if he knew where they’d escaped from.

“Just talked. Scary stuff. I don’t remember what it said exactly.”

“I do,” Jack sighed. She’d gone over its terrible words in her head several times, trying to figure out what they meant and whether any of it might be connected to the secret Tomlin had thought he’d uncovered. The very fact that she could remember it so clearly drove home to her just how much more connected to reality it was than any other dream she’d ever had. “‘Death to the things that killed us. Death to the makers of the cages. Death to the ’verse that trapped us. A trillion deaths for every one you took from us. We come. We come to take it all back. All the worlds your filth has stolen from us will burn.’”

“That,” Ewan breathed, “is a declaration of war.”

“Yeah,” Kyra said, “but by what? One thing we’re damn sure of is it ain’t human.”

Ewan nodded, his face now pensive. “Why do you think they found you then?” he asked after a moment.

“It was after we went back and forth between universes a lot, and brought people and things across in both directions. J—Tislilel…”

For the briefest instant, Ewan’s eyes narrowed, marking the tiny slip.

“…She moved two hundred-seater shuttles over into Elsewhere and then back. Maybe doing something that big sent out some kind of shockwaves? It practically knocked her out for the rest of the night once it caught up with her.”

“And then you were stuck helping all the Matador survivors cross back into U1 in the marketplace, all by yourself,” Jack pointed out. “That probably sent out some shockwaves, too. They reached out to both of us at the same time.”

“Why in your sleep?” Ewan wondered.

“They wanted to show us things,” Kyra said, her words coming slowly. “Things I don’t think our eyes could even see if we were using them.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Higher dimensions,” Jack blurted, only realizing it was true when she spoke. “They tried to ‘teach’ us how to see them. But once they got past the three-dimensional object it got scary fast. They… apologized for scaring me, after.”

“You actually kept looking?” Kyra asked. “I ran… or something like running given that I was floating out in space in the dream.”

“And all of this happened after you saw my brother for the last time, so he didn’t even know… but he already knew something terrible was happening. He sent me a message telling me that… I don’t even know. It didn’t make sense. That we might have to prepare for the end of the Federacy as we knew it, that a monstrous crime was being perpetrated… he said all of it in my mother’s invented language, so that only I would be able to hear the message, so I know he feared he was being surveilled. He asked me to arrange to come home on leave as soon as I could, so that he could explain it all to me. I was arranging my leave when word came of his death.” Ewan sat down, his expression a devastating mixture of grief and horror. “I don’t know where to… begin…”

Jack did. This was pure Audrey. She sat down next to him and put her arms around him. He gasped and then leaned against her, releasing a heavy sob, the first of many. After a moment, Kyra joined them, putting an arm around him as well.

It would be a long, long time, Jack thought sadly, tears leaking out of her eyes as well, until he began to heal from this. And while he might respect the community’s decision to conceal what they knew of the real reason his brother had died… she doubted he would ever be able to let it go.

Because she couldn’t have. And his brother wouldn’t have. In that moment, she understood him as well as she understood herself. Warning him to stay away from the mystery would do no good; she would warn his aunt and mother instead.

He had almost composed himself again when the rest of his family returned to their house half an hour later.

Sunset was approaching as the family—quite large, Jack soon realized—gathered for the meal that the community had prepared them. As with virtually everywhere in New Marrakesh, Jack noticed a complete absence of alcohol; instead, Maghrebi mint tea was poured from long-spouted teapots into ornate glasses.

Jack and Kyra found themselves on either side of Ewan at the table. He was regaining his equilibrium, slowly. The talk around them moved through a variety of topics, including stories of wild scrapes that “Brahim”—within the family, only his father seemed to have called him Gavin—had gotten into as a child. They reminded Jack of the stories her father had told her about her fictitious namesake.

“Are you three feeling better?” Takama asked during a lull.

“Yes, thank you,” Jack said. “How did things go after we left? With that envoy?”

“Pfft! That one. What a terrible excuse for a person. She tried to keep the conversation going, asking us where you were from and how long you had been in town. I told her it was tribe business and of no concern to outsiders unless one of her men was planning on offering himself at the Moussem. Not that anyone would ever take up such offers.”

“Sorry, what’s a Moussem?” Kyra asked.

“Safiyya, perhaps you should tell this story?” Takama’s expression had gone from scornful to mischievous in less than a second.

Safiyya’s eyes went wide.

“A Moussem is an annual meeting of the tribes,” Ewan told them, rescuing his mother. “The engagement or wedding Moussem is the one time, each year, that couples from different tribes can arrange inter-tribal marriages. There’s a long story behind it, which is much better sung than spoken, but the legend is that long ago, in the Atlas Mountains on Earth, two tribes of Imazighen were at war. The son of one of the tribes, ‘Isli,’ one day met a beautiful young woman, named ‘Tislit.’ The two fell in love, only to realize that Tislit was a daughter of the tribe that his was at war with. They begged their families to let them marry, but their parents refused. Unable to bear being apart, their tears flowed from them in rivers that filled two valleys, creating two new lakes where their tribes’ lands bordered each other. They drowned themselves in the lakes of their tears.”

“If this story sounds a little familiar,” Cedric put in, “I’m fairly sure old Will Shakespeare stole it from the Imazighen. Just like half of Hamlet is straight out of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.”

Ewan snorted. “Undoubtedly. But the two tribes were devastated when they realized what their enmity had done to their own children, and decided that every year, once a year, all of the tribes would gather, and marriages across tribes would be permitted. Men and women seeking partners come, wearing their best. And, in accordance with custom, the women are the ones who initiate the courtship, approaching the men that they fancy most. They talk, and negotiate, and if they are happy with each other, then they introduce each other to their families and then have their engagement recorded. Depending on their negotiations, the marriage may even occur at the festival, too. Which brings us to the story of my parents.”

“Wait,” Kyra said. “Really? The women get to initiate it all?”

“Before the invaders came and tried to change us, almost all of the tribes were matriarchal,” Takama affirmed. “Many are not anymore, thanks to the influence of abrrani—foreigners—but you can still see it, and feel it, in so many of our traditions.”

“Which brings us,” Ewan repeated, looking amused, “to the story of my parents.”

“I was new on Tangiers Prime, just learning my way around, after they’d courted the hell out of me to come teach at their flight school because I’d been breaking records all over the place,” Cedric explained. “The money was too good for me to pass up, but somehow nobody ever asked me if I could speak Arabic, or anything other than English, Gaelic, or Scots. Didn’t occur to me either for some damn fool reason, until I was standing in front of a classroom full of pilots who couldn’t understand a word I was saying to them. My brogue was a lot thicker back then, too.”

“Soon after,” Safiyya laughed, “I got a call at my University office from this panicked Scotsman who needed a translator, or needed to learn Arabic as quickly as he could, and had no idea how to begin. Bear in mind that he was already fluent in three languages.”

“Neither one of us was thinking of falling in love,” Cedric continued. “But there it was. We would find the most ridiculous excuses to check in on each other and spend time together. But what could we do? I was abrrani and my colleagues kept warning me I was playing with fire.”

“None of which meant a thing to my sister,” Takama said. “She had a plan.”

Kyra snickered. “She sounds like you,” she whispered to Jack behind Ewan’s back.

“I got an invitation to witness a genuine Amazigh cultural event,” Cedric chuckled. “The Engagement Moussem. Foreigners are allowed to observe but are instructed to stay on the sidelines and not get involved. And there she was, right in the middle of all the hopeful brides, and all I could think was how crushing it was going to be to watch her choose some other lad to be her life partner. I was going to leave, but my friends wouldn’t let me.”

“I had bribed them to make sure they would keep him there,” Takama added.

“So after all of the singing and dances and things, when the ladies started approaching different men and I was wishing for a swimming pool full of whiskey,” Cedric went on, “I felt this hand on my arm and heard the most beautiful voice in the world asking me if I would walk with her.”

“Our parents were scandalized,” Takama laughed.

“Especially when they realized you’d been in on it the whole time,” Safiyya teased her.

“And that’s how the love of my life proposed to me,” Cedric finished, grinning.

It was, Jack thought, the most romantic thing she had ever heard.

Full night had descended before the gathering broke up. Ewan insisted on walking Jack and Kyra back to their building. Jack had the suspicion he was worried that the mercs might still be interested in them and might try to follow them; he had tried to talk them into taking a guest room in his parents’ house, but had graciously accepted their refusal—“Sebby will be getting worried about us”—as long as they let him see them safely home.

Safiyya and Cedric raised their kids right, she thought to herself, wishing the boys on Deckard’s World had been more like Gavin Brahim and Ewan Zdan.

When he gave each of them a hug at the door of their building, not asking to come in, she had a sudden thought. “I need you to ask Takama something for me,” she murmured to him, not letting him go yet just in case anyone was watching. A lingering hug might play into the weird assumptions Toombs had made at the church… and that would be better than anyone realizing what they were talking about.

“Of course,” Ewan said. “What is it?”

“I need her to reach out to the Matador survivors and find out if any of them had contact with the Quintessa envoy. If she ever touched any of them, or if any of them ever touched her.”

Ewan’s expression was only quizzical for a second before understanding struck. “You need to find out if she knows you were on board, too. She became awfully interested in who you are and where you’re from after she touched you.”

“Yeah. We need to know how much she suspects.”

“I’ll make sure the message goes out and an answer comes back. I promise.” He gave her another hug before letting go. “Good night, Tislilel, Dihya. I will see you again very soon, I hope.”

I hope so too, Jack thought as he walked off into the night. It was hard not to worry. Too many people she cared about had vanished from her life.

Inside, a very clingy crustacean made it clear that they had been gone for far too many hours. Jack had discovered that, in addition to the bugs he ate, he had a great love for olives—enough to sneak up on her plate and steal one if she had any—and had brought some home for him from the gathering. After half a dozen, he was appeased, if still determined to sit on one of them at all times.

While Kyra vanished into the bathroom with Sebby—the little guy loved showers and would screech if he was excluded from one—Jack sat down on the couch and opened her tablet to check on the status of the money drop she’d arranged. The confirmation was waiting for her; the one-time code that she’d programmed into the locker she had rented for the next month had been used. She and Kyra could get the money cards inside whenever they wished.

Low tide had ended in Elsewhere, she noted as she checked her tidal chart. The waters were still another hour or two away from reaching the Rif. They had been on Tangiers Prime for ten and a half of its wildly long days, and Megaluna was almost a new moon. In another night, high tide would peak at midnight again.

Maybe she and Kyra could finally do their beachcombing in the dawn hours, she thought as she shut down the tablet. She was suddenly so tired. Closing her eyes, she decided to rest for a moment on the couch before it was her turn to shower while Sebby danced in the water at her feet.

She could feel them as her mind slipped away from consciousness.

Little larva, are you well?

She was about to answer them when something cold touched her throat.

“Wake up, little girl,” a strange voice said. Her eyes sprang open.

She recognized him from the church immediately: the merc who had been next to Toombs when he made the wisecrack about marrying cousins. He had a knife resting against her throat.

“You an’ me are gonna have a little talk,” he told her. “I just need to know one thing from you. Where’s your friend?”

Oh shit, Kyra… Her eyes, of their own accord, moved toward the hallway door into the bedroom and bath. The shower noises had stopped at some point, but she wasn’t sure when.

“Not her, you imbecile,” the man snarled. “I’m after the big game here. You’re gonna tell me where he is.”

Riddick. Oh fuck. He was after Riddick.

31.
Paint It White

For the next four of Tangiers Prime’s interminably long days, New Marrakesh felt like one enormous funeral.

Processions flowed, repeatedly, from both the hospital downtown and the makeshift morgue out at the spaceport to the dozens of mosques scattered through the city and up into its hillside suburbs. At least one, every hour, passed through the streets of the Rif to reach the large mosque on a hilltop behind it. The processions, for the most part, were somber and quiet. Everyone wore white.

It was the color of funerals, Takama told Jack and Kyra, the color of mourning, meant to help shepherd the way to eternity. Most brides on Tangiers Prime wore different colors for their weddings, although sometimes one of their dresses would be white.

There were no weddings that week.

The worst processions were the ones with tiny biers. Whole families, traveling together, welcoming home members or seeing members off, had died in the blast, and far too many had been children. Jack couldn’t see anything beneath the white cloth coverings being borne uphill, but the small shapes were more than enough on their own.

Transports arrived frequently, delivering food and medical supplies, and left filled with coffins. Dozens of off-worlders were traveling home in them.

The glitter of downtown, as seen from their window, was mostly intact. But most north, west, and northwest-facing windows had been shattered by the blast. Repair scaffolding had begun to go up around many of the structures. Jack and Kyra still found shards of glass in their own bedroom each evening when the light caught them.

Sebby enthusiastically chased after insects foolish enough to come through the empty panes of the bedroom’s west window. Watching him hunt was entertaining enough that they’d decided to leave it uncovered unless a rainstorm came. His antics were the only levity they had.

Other tenants in the building were already griping that it might be months before the damage to their units was fixed, and many were planning on moving out. Where, exactly, they expected to go was a mystery to Jack; many more people had been rendered homeless by the blast than had died in it, and even simple walks downtown had become overcomplicated.

On the second night, during the midnight hour when most of the sound and motion had ceased, she and Kyra had slipped down the hill to the transport station and their lockers to rescue their false IDs before anyone thought to start going through unclaimed contents. The locker that had contained Tomlin’s ID and funding cards was vacant, its key already returned. He must, Jack thought, have collected his package before he went to the spaceport.

She had planned to find a way to isomorph the package out of the locker if it had still been there, so that nobody would have ever known the alternate ID existed… and so she could have given the funding cards to his family. That money was every bit as lost as any cash people had been carrying in the blast zone.

On the way back up into the Rif, a man in military uniform demanded to see their identification for the first time since they had arrived. The cards Jack had laboriously created passed muster, but they were warned not to violate curfew again.

The curfew, which had only just gone into effect, was apparently part of the manhunt in progress for the bomber. Some survivors had seen him leaving the spaceport; new sketches with greater detail were in circulation. So far, no one had seen him since, but checkpoints were appearing throughout the city. Locals spoke in hushed tones about the concern that the checkpoints and curfews might not go away after he was caught.

The newsfeeds covered hot debates, at the local and planetary level, about whether and how much security should be tightened at the spaceports. Engineers argued about how to prevent another hydrolox-M explosion in the future. Chemical engineers spoke of switching to less volatile fuels, while structural engineers argued for radically redesigning the fueling systems that were standard at every spaceport. Everybody seemed to want to find one quick and easy thing they could do to eliminate the new threat decisively, but nobody could agree on what that one thing would be.

Even though the man shadowing Tomlin hadn’t actually been a terrorist, he had accomplished the goals of one: everyone was living in fear and in search of a sacrificial object they could burn to make things go back to normal.

Through it all, while Jack carefully sidestepped higher security protocols to secure the two of them additional funds, she and Kyra found themselves killing time in the apartment to stay out of the way of the processions, watching Sebby play, and occasionally even talking. Conversations dragged, replies coming after long, vacuous pauses. On the day of Tomlin’s memorial, the desultory talk became more serious.

“So where does all of this leave us?” Kyra asked as Jack was arranging for a money drop.

Jack shrugged. It was hard to feel urgent about anything. She knew she wouldn’t be staying much longer, but a deep malaise had crept in, not dissimilar from the one that had settled over her while she’d lived with the al-Walids. In some ways, it felt worse; Riddick had left her, yes, but Tomlin had been stolen from her and Kyra right as the bond between them had tightened into something she’d thought would be unbreakable. Now she just felt empty.

“Up to you, really.” She looked over at Kyra, trying not to seem completely uncaring. She did care. But the silence inside her had only grown. In the al-Walid house, she had tried to escape it with a razor. Now, she had other, less nihilistic ideas of what to do about it. But first she had to make sure Kyra was going to be okay.

It suddenly hit her that that was what Kyra was no longer sure about.

“Do you still want to stay here?” Jack asked, realizing that what had been a foregone conclusion just days ago might be in doubt.

“I…” Kyra started, and then paused. She looked up at the ceiling, blinking a few times before she continued. “I don’t know anymore,” she said, her voice small and wavering.

Jack felt a pang move through her. Just days ago, everything had seemed so sure. But that had been while Tomlin was alive and planning to help them. He’d known exactly who Kyra was but had come to his own conclusions about her, offering her sanctuary and the exact opportunities she needed most of all. His reputation, when he introduced her to others, would have outweighed or even erased hers. Could—would—anyone else be able to do that for her?

“You’re worried that his dad’s contacts won’t be as good as his, and that he might not be willing to use them at all if he finds out who we really are, aren’t you?”

Kyra nodded, sitting down beside her. “I just… I didn’t even tell Tomlin who I was and I don’t think I’d’ve had the guts to. He already knew. I still don’t know what he’d have thought or done if we hadn’t already done him a huge favor before he figured it out, but his family… I mean, I know he trusted them and all, but…”

Jack put her arm around Kyra’s shoulder, letting the older girl lean against her. “But family’s where people have their biggest blind spots, yeah. They seem great, but…”

“But who’s to say they won’t switch from thanking us for helping him to blaming us for his death once they find out we’re a pair of killers who escaped a loony bin?” Kyra asked with brutal frankness.

Jack winced. She didn’t really want what Kyra was saying to be true, but there it was.

“Yeah. We can’t ever testify against his killers even if we got the chance,” she mused. “Their defense team would eat us alive.”

“I just…” Kyra turned her eyes toward Jack, her expression somehow pleading as if she didn’t expect her to understand. “I don’t think… I can… I don’t think I can take that risk. They’re being so nice, and all, but would they be if they really knew everything we got up to? Tomlin told Takama that we rescued his charges, but I was with her the whole time we were bringing them back through to U1, and he never told her we killed a whole merc team to do it.”

He had, Jack remembered, been circumspect in even alluding to it later on in the shop, when he’d said what turned out to be his final good-byes to them. Takama might have imagined that the whole thing had been some clever bit of cat-burglary on their part. On some level, she had to know the truth; she’d tracked the mostly-empty shuttles out to sea and confirmed that they’d crashed into each other on schedule. But she probably didn’t realize that all the bodies inside were Kyra’s—and Jack’s—handiwork.

“Well,” Jack said after a moment, “Fortunately, Kali Montgomery is a military academy graduate, then, right?”

She couldn’t help feeling a little proud of that. She’d been even happier about the idea that Kyra might not need the identity she’d laboriously constructed, but as much as she hated to admit it, she was a little relieved that the work wouldn’t go to waste. Kyra could replace her past with a new one that had no stigma attached to it and build a whole new life upon it. Still…

“But let’s not completely rule Cedric out. Maybe he can still help. You never know. We’ll see how good his connections are and how much they ask, and maybe using the Kali ID with them will be enough anyway.” Jack grinned for the first time in days. “It’s really well made, you know.”

Kyra grinned back at her. “If you do say so yourself?”

“Hell yeah.”

Jack could see the tension leaving Kyra’s body. “Okay. We’ll see what happens at the memorial,” Kyra said, her voice hopeful. “Maybe it’ll still all work out. What about you? Are you still good?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m probably gonna have to go to either New Casablanca or New Fes to meet the transport to Furya, but it should be okay. It’s still about two weeks away. Plenty of time to get everything lined up. By then, things should be a little better here, too.”

If she had needed to leave for one of those two cities in the next few days, however, she would have had to get in the back of an interminably long line.

“What are you gonna do about the checkpoints?” Kyra suddenly asked. “Word is they’re patting everybody down and running people through scanners before letting anybody into any kind of transport hub. Even the buses.”

“Got a plan for that. You know how the clothes we brought with us existed in both worlds?” Jack suddenly felt some real enthusiasm for the first time in days, thinking about this.

“Yeah?” Kyra, picking up on her mood, looked interested.

“Okay. So… you get a belt. And you make it so it’s half in U1 and half in Elsewhere. Solid in both places… and then you put your scabbard with your knife on it… but that is one hundred percent in Elsewhere. The knife won’t register at all on scanners here in U1, but it’ll be on you the whole time.”

Kyra’s smile had been widening as she spoke. “Better make it a waterproof belt, just in case the tide’s in.”

“But once you’re on board a ship that’s, you know, gonna launch?” Jack continued. “You gotta move it all back to U1. Gotta have it one hundred percent in U1 for all launches and re-entries.”

Kyra looked like she was about to ask why, but then realization came over her face. “Fuck yeah, that’d be bad if you didn’t. Is that why Tomlin wanted the Matador to land here instead of docking at Station B?”

“Yeah. Straddling both worlds like we were, if we’d come down in a regular shuttle, that only existed in U1, the fifty percent of us in Elsewhere would have burned up on entry.” It was a gruesome thought that had come to Jack as she was figuring out how to get Kyra’s knives, or anything else they wanted to keep hidden, past security.

“Damn, no wonder he was so happy about our tricks.” Kyra abruptly gasped, her eyes going wide. “Fuuuuck, Jack, Quintessa was counting on that happening during a launch, too, weren’t they? Those shuttles were ordinary. Didn’t have any connection to Elsewhere until you pulled them in. When they hit escape velocity—” She stopped and made a retching sound, grimacing.

“Assuming the survivors didn’t know how to anchor themselves in U1, yeah,” Jack said, trying not to picture what would have happened to some of them. “Most of them would have been surprise survivors of that, but Tomlin hadn’t had a chance to tell them how to anchor their little kids and the baby.”

“Fucking bastards,” Kyra hissed. “I’d go to war with them if I had anything to fight them with.”

Jack nodded. She felt the same way, but she had no idea where they’d begin. The Corporation had casually murdered the last person who was onto them, along with several hundred people who happened to be even remotely near him at the time. You’d need an army to take them on, she found herself thinking. A really big one.

With a rattle of pincers, Sebby reared up on his back four legs and snapped at the air.

“I think someone’s volunteering to enlist,” Jack said. She had noticed, more and more, how nuanced the little crustacean’s responses to their emotions were.

That put a wan, fond smile back on Kyra’s face. “I think you’re right.” She reached out a hand, letting Sebby crawl up her arm and onto her shoulder. “Hey little guy.” She pursed her lips at him and he reached forward, touching them with his antennae. Then he climbed onto the back of her neck, nestling under her hair.

“So… lacking a whole armada of Sebbies…” Jack sighed. “The best we can do is stay off the Quintessa Corporation’s radar and hope they think the Matador issue is resolved. And just hope Karma has plans for them.”

“The New Christy Elders would’ve said all their sins were gonna come home to roost in the afterlife,” Kyra said thoughtfully. “As if that excuses making this world a living hell or something. I mean, I get that divine justice doesn’t just happen, I saw that firsthand back on Canaan Mountain, but… we need more guys like Tomlin in this ’verse, not even fewer of them. Karma needs to get off its ass already.”

Jack was still nodding when Takama knocked on their door and then entered. Safiyya and Tafrara followed her in. All three were wearing white, their faces and hands decorated with henna tattoos. Takama and Safiyya carried white bundles, while Tafrara had what appeared to be a makeup kit in her hands.

Jack and Kyra glanced at each other in wordless surprise. They had already bought white outfits to wear to the memorial, which was still a few hours away.

“There is a slight change in plans,” Safiyya told them as she walked over to Kyra with her bundle. “The envoy of the Quintessa Corporation has asked to attend Brahim’s memorial and wishes to bring guests with her. Cedric got a look at her guests and believes they are mercenaries.”

“Brahim did not tell us much about your pasts, and we will not ask,” Takama continued, bringing her bundle over to Jack, “but he wanted you concealed from the Corporation and, even more, from any mercenaries who might appear. So while we still want you to attend—and certainly more than that tagat woman—we must make you look as much like true Imazighen as possible.”

For the next hour, while Sebby hid in their bedroom, Jack and Kyra sat as still as possible while the three women decorated their faces and hands with Tamazight markings and Safiyya schooled them in the proper wording and pronunciations of different simple sentences they could use around “outsiders.” The entire community had been put on alert to close ranks against strangers… with the girls firmly inside those ranks. Safiyya spent extra time helping them master the kh and gh sounds that they had barely any experience using, until she was satisfied that they could pass as members of a tribe that rarely had contact with non-Imazighen.

“If the envoy or her mercenaries attempt to speak with you, you will say that you do not understand in Tamazight, and we will translate their words for you. Obviously you will understand everything that they are saying from the beginning, but pretend that you do not, please,” Takama said as she put the finishing touches on Jack’s hands. “You know how to say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘thank you,’ and we will imply to them that anything that requires more involved answers from you is a rude imposition on their part. I doubt that woman has the audacity to give open, public offense to the family of the man she murdered, but you never know.”

Safiyya sniffled at those words.

“Oh, my dearest, I am sorry…”

“No, it’s all right,” Safiyya said, although her voice quavered a tiny bit. “I have done my weeping and my wailing. I am ready to face this.”

Her eldest child is dead, Jack thought, murdered by a woman who’s now insisting on crashing his funeral… and she’s spending her time working on protecting us…

But the community had made its decision: to protect the Matador survivors, and to protect themselves from any further retribution, they would all pretend that Tomlin’s assassination was nothing of the kind, and that he’d just had the misfortune to be in the wrong place when some misguided terrorist committed a heinous act. Virtually everyone in the community knew better, but none of them wanted to go to war over it. An army of a hundred million nomads, farmers, shepherds, and artisans—even ones who were also stalwart warriors—could not hope to defeat the Quintessa Corporation; it would take something far darker than they could ever be.

An army of Riddicks? Jack mused. Maybe.

She and Kyra let the women clothe them in the white woolen dresses and veils that they had brought, until Jack could barely recognize herself in the mirror. Then they made their way carefully down the stairs of the building and over to the market square, to join the procession. To the Tomlin-Meziane family’s church.

It had come as something of a surprise to Jack to learn that, in fact, many of the Imazighen weren’t Muslim, following older faiths from the North African region of their origin. Some of the tribes were Jewish, others Christian, and others followed still older polytheistic and animistic faiths that resonated with some of the most ancient works of mythology Jack had heard of. Many, fascinatingly, mixed and matched multiple belief systems to create new hybrids uniquely their own. Takama—who, it turned out, was spending a year playing at food cart vending and more seriously acting as an intermediary between the New Marrakesh government and her people while on sabbatical from Khair Eddine University—had had a wonderful time explaining the convoluted history of Amazigh religion once Jack got her talking. She was a sociology professor most of the time, when she wasn’t putting her degree to practical field use in the Rif. Her love of teaching had surged to the fore as soon as she realized she had an attentive audience.

Many of the different conquerors of North Africa had brought their religions with them, and the Imazighen had selectively adopted them to varying degrees. One of Catholicism’s most venerated saints—Saint Augustine of Hippo—had been Amazigh. When the Arabs had come in as conquerors, many tribes had violently resisted them for centuries, while others had paid lip service to their beliefs while clandestinely practicing their own. Still others had grafted the Islamic faith onto their existing Christian beliefs, recasting prophets and warriors of that faith as Catholic-style saints. “If you ever hear some misguided anthropologist talking about ‘Chrislam,’” Takama had told Jack, her smile turning a little bit scornful, “that is what they are referring to.”

But Safiyya and Takama came from a tribe that had stayed Christian, something that had probably made it a little easier for Safiyya to marry an outsider who belonged to the Church of Scotland. In deference to the inclusion of many of Tomlin’s colleagues and former comrades-in-arms, the service was non-denominational, albeit held at the church where he had been christened and married.

The family entered the church first, and Jack found herself and Kyra surrounded by its members. A day of mourning or not, they had clearly made a mission of protecting “Dihya” and “Tislilel.” Jack caught a momentary glimpse of Tomlin’s younger brother, Ewan Zdan, tall and dashing and movie star handsome like his brother and father, but with a drawn look of deep misery about his face. Takama had told her that the two brothers had been the very best of friends.

Cedric took Kyra’s hand in his, leaning close as though giving her a kiss. “I won’t be able to introduce you to the officers Gavin served with today,” he murmured, “not if we want to keep that Quintessa bitch off your scent, but I haven’t forgotten. I promise I’ll do right by you.”

“Thank you,” Kyra murmured back, saying it in perfect Tamazight instead of English.

For a moment, Cedric’s eyes twinkled before his expression turned somber again. He gave Jack a gentle hug, too, and led them to the seats reserved for the family of the deceased.

There was no coffin, no urn, nothing to represent Tomlin’s lost earthly form except a stunning portrait of him in military uniform, from the height of his combat pilot days. Other pictures abounded, and Jack took them in with fascination. Childhood pictures, adolescent pictures, wedding pictures with a beautiful woman who, Jack thought, looked a little like her own mother… lovingly chosen to showcase not just his cinematic looks but his intelligence, humor, and warmth.

Even though her departure from Tangiers Prime had been, and still was, relatively imminent, Jack found herself envying everyone who had been given the opportunity to spend years getting to know him.

Other guests had begun to fill the pews behind them when Cedric’s comm chimed. He glanced down at it and then leaned over, holding it out to Jack and Kyra. “The envoy and her entourage are arriving,” he muttered.

The comm’s screen showed the scene outside of the church, and a new group of arrivals disembarking a large vehicle. Their leader was a regal-looking woman with long white hair, clad almost properly in all white, although there was something a little too ostentatious about her clothing. Jack’s mother would have said she was dressed for a wedding where she intended to upstage the bride. The envoy reminded Jack, for a moment, of Antonia Chillingsworth. To either side of her, even less appropriately dressed for the occasion in a variety of colors, were her “assistants,” the people Cedric suspected were mercenaries—

Jack thought, for a moment, that her heart had stopped.

Alexander Toombs and Eve Logan were among them.

30.
As the Ashes Fall from the Sky

A terrible silence had fallen over New Marrakesh.

It wasn’t a physical silence; sirens wailed constantly, ebbing and flowing as emergency vehicles traveled to and from the disaster zone. The drone of military ’copters and the whine of airtankers filled the skies. Agonized screams had even come from within Jack and Kyra’s apartment building, from people who had been standing, dumbfounded, at their own west windows when the shockwave had struck. Human wailing pierced the air from all directions as people learned that someone they loved had been near, or in, the blast zone.

But Jack felt cocooned from it all, even as she and Kyra helped Takama tend their neighbors’ wounds and joined the Imazighen in aid efforts, even as they shared tears and hugs with people who had known Tomlin—Brahim Meziane, to most of them—and had just discovered his fate. She was wrapped in something dark and quiet. In the silence, she couldn’t even hear her heart beating and wondered if she still had one.

She and Kyra cried together that night, after Takama ordered them to bed, but the silence of her heart still wouldn’t lift. The things that waited for her in her dreams left her alone. Later she had a vague memory of them arguing over whether she, and the “other larva,” might be dying. It seemed unfathomable to her at times that she wasn’t.

The initial death toll didn’t quite reach five hundred, but that was more than enough.

Of those almost-five hundred, more than half were “missing and presumed dead,” people whose last known positions had been too close to the blasts for any identifiable remains to be left. That roster was compiled from multiple lists: the shuttle’s crew, all of whom had signed in to begin their shifts more than an hour earlier; roughly fifty passengers who had already checked in and boarded the shuttle early so they could sleep while they awaited liftoff; the ground crews loading and fueling the shuttle; the clocked-in staffs of an exclusive pilots’ lounge, a small duty-free shop, and the security checkpoint located just before the departure gate… and one last, terrible, overlapping list of people whose comms had signaled their final locations within the blast radius before going silent forever.

Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin had been among the last group; his comm’s final location had placed him in the pilots’ lounge, less than twenty meters from the first explosion, and his bank account had a pending meal transaction originating from there. Where the lounge had been, the side of a monstrous crater now sloped down into the earth.

The initial explosion had been declared a terrorist act. Footage had surfaced of an unidentified man leaving a duffel bag on a bench not far from the pilots’ lounge doors, and it was featured in every news feed, but no clear shot of the man’s face was available.

Between the massive fire at the spaceport itself, and the dozens of violent secondary fires on the northwest end of the city caused by the shuttle’s flaming debris, the search-and-rescue operations out at sea were scaled back, almost all of their teams diverted, and the story about that disaster, now thoroughly upstaged, vanished to the back “pages” of the news feeds.

The injury count was in the thousands. The property damage was in the trillions, when six more shuttles and two Star Jumpers that would never fly again were figured in.

New Marrakesh wasn’t, in fact, Tangiers Prime’s largest city; Tomlin had simply chosen to direct the Scarlet Matador there because the planet’s most prestigious hospital was located within it, and possibly because he had his best connections to local resources and logistical capabilities there. Both space traffic and terrestrial flights were immediately rerouted to New Casablanca and New Fes, with the still functional landing pads at New Marrakesh’s spaceport transforming into staging grounds for relief efforts. Thousands of stranded passengers waited within damaged concourses, and in hastily-assembled tents on the tarmac, for transport out of the city.

Check-in stations proliferated. One man, who had initially been reported as presumed dead, turned up a few hours later; he’d been at a police station on the other side of the spaceport, filing a report about his missing comm and wallet, at the time of the explosion. He was the only one thus far, but it had raised hopes that others might reappear. One Tangiers day after the explosion, the secondary list of missing persons, who hadn’t been presumed dead yet but who might have been in the blast radius, had dropped from more than two thousand to slightly under three hundred. At the end of a Tangiers week—four of its long days, a period just eight hours longer than a Standard week—whatever names remained would be added to the list of the dead. It could no longer top eight hundred, but it might still come close. If the noon hour on Tangiers Prime hadn’t been roughly equivalent to the midnight hour on most other worlds, the death and injury tolls might have been five times as high, but the devastation had struck during the spaceport’s “quiet hours.”

Every time Jack thought of those numbers, she felt ill.

Did I cause this? Is this my fault?

She wasn’t going to find the answer in the news feeds. Pulling out her most powerful Ghost Code, she dug into the local law enforcement chatter.

No one seemed to be connecting the shuttle crash over the Mutawassit Ocean to the subsequent explosion at the spaceport, but there was an active—if backburnered—investigation into it. Jack had been right; the Quintessa Corporation had chosen to make its move while Tomlin was off-duty and out of the way. He’d spent his day off putting together a plan for stealing his charges out from under the Corporation’s collective noses even as they were executing a plan to do the same thing to him.

Someone had switched around the evening duty rosters for Othman Tower, swapping in a set of false employee records for the new “staff” that took over the building that night. Jack recognized all of the faces immediately: the merc team. There was no record of who had made the changes.

“So Quintessa contracted out the kidnapping and let that merc team run it on the ground?” Kyra asked. She had taken to reading everything over Jack’s shoulder, partly slumped against her back. Jack didn’t mind; she needed the contact.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But whoever engineered this was either using a Ghost Code, like mine, or is really high up in the security chain around here.”

“That’s not good. Is that who jammed the cameras and comms?”

“Maybe. Either them or the mercs. I thought they had it set up to key off the shuttles’ transponders, but everything stayed off for another twenty minutes after those had already flown off, freaked out Ground Control—” Jack faltered for a moment on those words; that had been the first name she’d had for Tomlin. “—and then crashed. Kinda ham-handed.”

“Maybe,” Kyra said, her voice considering. “Or maybe they thought having a localized blackout keep going for a while after their operation ended would make it seem less connected.”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted. “Either way, whoever it is… they’re dangerous and they don’t care who they kill, and they can ghost around as well as we can, maybe better.”

With that in mind, she dug—carefully, because it was being actively consulted by law enforcement—into the back-end records of the spaceport, looking for a ghost’s trail: abrupt changes to databases with no record of who initiated them; glitched cameras that briefly lost the ability to record people’s movements; other signs that someone was doing the things she had done on Helion Prime, but to a far more harmful purpose. It took her another hour to find what she was looking for, but at least it kept her stable, quieting the part of her that wanted to scream to fill the silence, and might never stop if she let it start.

Someone had, indeed, followed Tomlin to the spaceport and shadowed him on the way to the pilots’ lounge. Someone who could only be tracked by the wake of suddenly malfunctioning cameras, about twenty meters behind Tomlin himself. Cameras at the periphery periodically captured small glimpses of a man dressed in the same clothing the suspected terrorist had been wearing, but never in any detail. By the time he was near enough to a camera for it to get a good shot of him, it had stopped recording.

Tomlin, in the footage, looked uneasy. At one point, he spoke on his comm—probably to Takama—as he walked through the concourse toward the shuttle that would ultimately explode. He lingered briefly by a reflective surface, studying the scene behind him. Trying to identify, Jack thought, his shadow.

Other members of the spaceport staff, dressed in uniforms like his, greeted Tomlin and spoke to him at times. He was clearly popular and well-liked. When he entered the pilots’ lounge, the malfunctions following him stilled to just three cameras, obscuring a space fifteen meters from the lounge’s doors. For the next half hour, those three cameras remained non-functional while a handful of people—a man and a woman in pilots’ uniforms entering the lounge with formally-dressed guests on their arms, someone else’s departing guest in a djellaba and a face-obscuring headwrap, and a trio of curious-looking teens who entered the lounge and were escorted back out a moment later, now looking disappointed—came and went. The glitches only moved when a technician showed up to examine one of the disabled cameras.

For another five minutes, nothing happened. Then a second set of camera glitches described the wake of another person moving, unseen, though the concourse and arriving at the same location.

The arrival, Jack thought, of the duffel bag.

Soon after, two sets of glitches showed Tomlin’s shadow, and his accomplice, departing the spaceport in two different directions, leaving behind an innocuous-looking bag sitting on a bench beside a potted fig tree. They were outside in another ten minutes. The first explosion immediately followed, every camera within forty meters of the bag registering flaring light from its direction before dissolving into static, the cameras beyond that showing the almost instantaneous destruction that had been wrought, and the intense fire that had erupted seconds after, before registering their own flash-and-static deaths slightly over a minute later.

Whatever kind of bomb had been inside the bag, its position and blast radius had ensured that both the pilot’s lounge and the shuttle’s boarding area would be destroyed. They had calculated it so that, when the bomb went off, it wouldn’t matter whether Tomlin was still eating his meal in the lounge or had joined the other passengers at the gate.

Jack couldn’t bring herself to watch the feeds of the explosion from inside the lounge itself yet. Instead, she ran through all the exterior feeds, hoping that one or even both of the men might have accidentally let themselves get caught on a camera that didn’t glitch. Nothing. The only shot she found was the one law enforcement was already circulating, the moment when a camera, too far down the concourse to capture any detail, recorded Tomlin’s shadow placing the duffel bag on the bench and walking away.

The uniformity of the glitching suggested that he and his accomplice had been carrying scrambling devices rather than using Ghost Codes. There were no unexplained changes to any of the databases. Jack felt disgusted with herself for being relieved about that, about the fact that she didn’t have to reveal the existence of the back doors she used, possibly closing them against herself in the process, in order to get justice for Tomlin.

Even though she’d put it off for the very end, Jack still couldn’t bring herself to watch the recordings from inside the pilot’s lounge. As much as part of her desperately wanted to see Tomlin again, even for a moment, she didn’t want to have to watch him die in that moment. Neither did Kyra, who had been petting Sebby while resting her head on Jack’s shoulder.

“So everybody thinks it was terrorism when it was an assassination?” Kyra asked.

“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “Looks that way.”

“Why’d they make it so big?” Kyra asked after a long, morose pause. “I mean, they knew where he was. Did they have to take out the whole concourse to get him? The whole spaceport, for fuck’s sake?”

Of all the infinite ways that the disaster had struck at them, the sheer, brutal magnitude of it hit hardest after losing Tomlin himself. To ensure one man’s death, the Quintessa Corporation had knowingly killed hundreds of people, injured thousands more, and crippled a city.

Jack’s words to Tomlin from the night before came back to her. They can’t threaten to cripple the economy if you don’t turn over people you don’t have, because they already took them from you…

She’d been wrong. She’d been so very wrong. Whether it was because they suspected Tomlin still had the Matador survivors, or because they wanted to prevent an inquest into the secrecy around Level Five Incidents, they’d been willing to do a whole lot more than just threaten. She wondered if the explosion was a message: If you rescue two hundred lives from us, we will take three times as many in their place…

Nobody could be so casually, inhumanly brutal, could they?

Death to the things that killed us… death to the makers of the cages… death to the ’verse that trapped us… a trillion deaths for every one you took from us…

She shuddered. Whatever that was, its malice was personal and vengeful. This was cruelly indifferent. It wasn’t as if Tomlin had known, or could have proven, anything that would actually break the Quintessa Corporation’s monopolistic power over space travel, was it?

I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought. We must never let them find my charges… or either one of you…

Had he discovered something that powerful?

“I think…” she said slowly, aware that Kyra was seeking an actual answer from her, “whatever it was that he figured out about them posed a big enough threat that they didn’t care how many people got hurt, as long as they eliminated it. But…”

She pulled up the spaceport’s schematics as she talked. Anything other than the lounge videos was a welcome tangent.

“…that doesn’t really explain how strong that bomb ended up being, or how it started that fire, or why the shuttle exploded. Shuttles are made to deal with much worse when they hit atmo. It should’ve been okay. Maybe not space-worthy anymore, but still…”

The structure housing the concourse was multi-level. The upper level, where the pilot’s lounge and departure gate had both been situated, was positioned six meters above the tarmac, level with the airlock into the shuttle’s passenger cabin. Beneath it, the ground level was a long, vast warehouse-style structure with conveyors for both baggage and freight, carrying it from the spaceport to the shuttle’s belly. And beneath that—

“There,” Jack groaned, pointing on the screen. “Oh fuck, there it is.”

“What?” Kyra leaned forward, touching the conduit Jack was pointing to. “What is it?”

“Hydrolox-M fuel lines,” Jack managed, feeling ill. “For refueling the shuttle. It was still an hour until launch time, maybe more. The lines were open and pumping.”

She could see it all now. The bomb had been strong enough to ensure that, whether Tomlin was still in the lounge—whose entry doors had been fifteen meters from the duffel bag—or was waiting at the departure gate thirty meters further down the concourse, he wouldn’t survive. But that was also strong enough to reach, and rupture, the hydrolox-M fuel lines eight meters beneath it, while they were actively pumping one of the most combustible materials in the universe into the shuttle’s enormous, almost-filled tanks…

Safety valves further down the line toward the spaceport hub would have tripped closed automatically upon sensing a sudden pressure drop, but if the concussive blast had damaged the valves leading into the shuttle itself, the hydrogen fire would have traveled, in moments, into its tanks, generating a blast whose power was just shy of nuclear.

Had they known the bomb would do that? Had they cared at all about the chain reaction it would set in motion?

And I thought I’d seen monsters on the crash planet…

“I hate not being the bad guys,” Kyra grumbled.

For a moment, Jack’s mind stuttered over that. But technically, she realized, they were both criminals. Escaped from custody and fugitives, they had stolen money and property and falsified documents along the way. They had participated in the hijacking and destruction of two shuttles, albeit ones that were empty aside from some merc bodies. But those were the bodies of their victims. They had committed murder—Jack for a second time, while Kyra had added another dozen or so notches to her belt.

I am technically a multiple murderer now, Jack thought, feeling a bubble of nausea rise in response. Whether she’d been defending people’s lives or not, both of her victims had, at least nominally, been the ones on the right side of the law.

But the world would still be a far better place, she admitted, if their crimes were the worst ones on the board, if they were the worst villains on the stage.

“Yeah,” she finally agreed with a heavy sigh, “me, too.”

A soft knock on their door alerted them to Takama’s arrival before she came in. She wasn’t alone.

The silver-haired woman who came in next was unmistakably Takama’s sister. Safiyya Meziane, Jack realized. Which meant that the fair, Celtic-looking man walking behind her, whose appearance was hauntingy similar to Tomlin’s, was his father Cedric. A younger woman, who looked like both Safiyya and Cedric, followed them in—his sister. Jack recalled that Takama had said her younger nephew was away at flight school, following in his brother’s and father’s footsteps.

She rose from the couch to greet them, Kyra rising beside her. It took her a moment to find words. “I’m so sorry—” she began, before she found herself enveloped in a crushing mass hug.

Sebby, who had been sitting by Jack’s tablet tapping ineffectually at the screen with a pincer, scooted back into the bedroom, perhaps fearing that he was next to be squished.

“Was that it? The creature from the other universe?” Tomlin’s sister, Tafrara, asked.

“Yeah, that’s Sebby,” Jack told her, wiping her eyes. “Sorry, I think he’s feeling shy.”

“We brought you food,” Cedric said. “Takama says you don’t seem to keep any in your home.”

Jack felt terribly embarrassed suddenly. Amazigh culture was huge on hospitality, and they had nothing to offer. “Thank you. We, uh…”

“We’d love it if you’d stay and eat with us,” Kyra said, rescuing her.

That, Jack decided a few minutes later, had been the plan from the start, based on the quantity of food the Tomlin-Meziane family had brought with them. Soon everyone was settled in the living room with fragrant plates. Jack, who hadn’t thought she would ever want to eat again, found that she was suddenly ravenous.

Conversation inevitably turned to the explosion, and to loss.

“They’ve told us that there will be nothing to bury,” Cedric said. “He was too near to the blast. But they haven’t told us anything useful about why this happened. No terrorist groups have taken credit, nobody seems to know—”

“I know,” Jack said heavily. “I know what happened. And I know why.”

For the next half hour, she walked them through what she’d discovered, showing them the glitch patterns and the small amount that had been captured on camera. She showed them the schematics, and how the size of the first explosion had made the second inevitable. They watched somberly; like her and Kyra, they didn’t want to see footage of Tomlin’s last moments in the pilots’ lounge.

“You are every bit as formidable as our son said you were,” Cedric murmured as she put the tablet down at last.

“All this… to kill our son?” Safiyya finally asked. “Why?”

“’Cause they don’t want people knowing about Level Five Incidents,” Jack sighed. “T—Brahim…” That seemed to be what everybody had called him in the Rif, when they weren’t referring to him as El Krim or, as some had pronounced it, Il Karim. “He thought he knew why. Something that happened, when we were rescuing the Matador survivors, made him realize what Quintessa had to be hiding. Maybe they figured out he was onto them.”

“He didn’t tell you what it was?” Cedric asked.

Jack shook her head. She could see Kyra and Takama doing so as well. Whatever he’d discovered, he’d seemed reluctant to voice his suspicions, and had taken them with him into the black.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “This is all my fault—”

“Shut that down,” Kyra snapped. “Shut that down right now. You didn’t do this. They did. You want to know why people keep dying around you? It’s because you don’t bail when things go bad. Ever. So shut down this ‘my fault’ bullshit.”

“Dihya is right, Tislilel,” Cedric told her, and Jack abruptly realized that neither she nor Kyra had ever actually told anyone their names since their arrival in the Rif; now the names that Tomlin had given them had stuck. “I’m an old hand at these kinds of intrigues. They may have been planning on killing Brahim ever since he took the survivors back from them after the high tide. If he was going up to the space station to retrieve evidence of their wrongdoing, they’d have wanted to stop him in a way that didn’t look too specifically targeted at him.”

“I think,” Takama said, “from watching the footage, they may have intended to abduct him, or possibly engineer an accidental death for him… until they realized that he knew they were following him, and he made himself inaccessible to them by going into a lounge that only pilots and their guests can enter. Technically, he still numbered among the pilots even if it has been three years since he last flew a mission.”

Cedric nodded, looking thoughtful. “That’d explain why the bloke on his tail staked out the lounge and called for backup… and a much more violent plan. You say they were using portable jammers on the cameras, not jacking into the security system?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Jack said. “None of the signs of someone with my kind of access were in the system.”

Cedric gave her a weighing look, his expression heartbreakingly like Tomlin’s when he had restrained himself from asking when and how she’d learned so much high-level espionage. Jack swallowed, suddenly feeling like her food had gotten caught in her throat.

“So they may not have had any idea that their briefcase bomb was going to trigger something catastrophic,” he said after a moment. “I suspect, if they’d been able to gain access, they’d have put it on the shuttle itself and timed its detonation for sometime during launch. So whoever it was had top-level tech, but not top-level clearance. Could you have walked a bomb like that onto the shuttle?”

Jack winced, feeling ill, and nodded. She knew exactly how she could have done it, too. “I would never do that,” she whispered.

“We know,” Takama said, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Maybe I should be bothered by how much access you seem to have,” Cedric agreed, “but I’m not, because it seems to me like it’s in pretty safe hands. Incredibly young hands, but—”

“Now hush, Cedric,” Safiyya said in a gentle scolding tone. “You know that my cousin Lalla looked like she was twelve years old until she was nearly thirty. Don’t embarrass her. Or yourself.”

“The point is,” Cedric continued, giving his wife a somewhat subdued playful glance, “you aren’t at all responsible for what happened. The two of you are, in point of fact, also victims of Quintessa. Both of you could’ve run away and hidden, but you stood beside him when he needed allies most of all. You’re why almost two hundred people survived long enough to escape into the mountains. And you saved his life.”

“I didn’t, though,” Jack blurted. “I just postponed his death.”

Just like Fry…

“No one gets to choose how long their life is,” Cedric told her, his voice becoming a bit stern.

I tried to…

“All we can do is make the days we have count. My son would have no regrets about how he spent his last days, and who he spent them with. Nor do we.” He took a deep breath. “Which brings us to one of the reasons we came here today. We’ll be holding his memorial a few days from now, once the search-and-rescue is over and the Islamic funerals are dealt with first. And we would like it, very much, if both of you would join us at it, and stand with us as part of his family.”

Jack looked at Kyra, who was looking back at her in speechless astonishment, eyes filling.

All she could do was nod and try not to start crying again.

Tomlin, she knew, would have wanted this. She had a sense that, on some level, she and Kyra had awakened fatherly impulses in him, and he’d have wanted his family to pull her and Kyra into their orbit and take them in on his behalf. But unlike Kyra, she had a father who was waiting for her, and a life and self that had been put on hold for far too long. For Kyra, what Tomlin had offered was the life she needed, not a further detour away from it. But even as part of Jack had been—and still was—a little tempted to let herself be enfolded into Tomlin’s world and family, she knew it wasn’t where she truly belonged. She needed to be Audrey MacNamera—not Jack B. Badd, not P. Finch, not Tislilel the mermaid—and inhabit a world without mercs, monsters, or murder. But first…

She would do this. She would honor Tomlin at his memorial ceremony. She would make sure that someone kept his promises to Kyra so she would have a future on Tangiers Prime that she could take pride in. But then…

It was, Jack knew, time for her to go.

29.
The Voices of the Void

Sometime after the sky lightened, Kyra and Takama helped Jack climb the eight flights of steps up to their apartment and a frantic Sebby. The little crustacean scuttled straight up her jalabiya and onto her shoulder and refused to be set down for more than a minute.

“It is all just as Brahim described it yesterday,” Takama marveled as she helped Jack lie down on her bed. “How extraordinary. And your little pet… such incredible things you two can do. Rest now, little Tislilel… although I think he should have named you Tiraline instead.”

“He called me Dihya,” Kyra said, sitting down on the bed next to her. “Who’s that?”

“A great warrior queen,” Takama said. Jack closed her eyes and rested her head against the pillow, feeling Sebby settling down against her throat. “Tiraline and Dihya… the Mermaid Queen and the Warrior Queen… fitting for two young women who saved so many lives. Rest now, both of you. I will come and check on you later and bring you some food. What would you like?”

“Anything I didn’t cook,” Kyra said beside her.

Jack, eyes closed, already drifting off, found herself wanting to ask for a peanut butter sandwich, but the words that came out were oddly askew from that.

“Don’t wanna be a queen…”

Takama laughed softly from far away. “That is fine, young Tislilel. A mermaid does not need to be a queen to raise a tsunami…”

The idea of raising tsunamis followed her down into her dreams.

She was floating in darkness, rising and falling on unseen waves. Around her, the stars sparkled and burned as they followed their own tidal patterns. She was adrift among the stars themselves, watching them swirl past her in complex patterns as she swerved around them, free but tethered—

There was something heavy on her back, something chaining her to it, but she couldn’t see it.

And she was not alone.

Creature? something unseen asked. Being?

She tried to get her mouth to work, to call out hello? into the spangled darkness, but the part of her that suddenly felt like prey gone to ground wouldn’t release her voice.

Something is here. Was that her thought, or had the thing said it?

The stars slowed and stopped their tidal spin and for a moment she found herself in darkness.

Alone! a not-voice sobbed. Alone and trapped…

The show that she’d tried to recall, while talking to Tomlin, flashed through her mind. Something about a woman in a mask—

Yes, it said to her. No. What is that thing?

She could feel something reaching for her from the darkness. Something touched her—

You are not like us, it said after a moment, and she could feel its disappointment… and hope.

And, faintly, others like it, distant, near, reaching for her…

Is it one of them?

No. Larval. Bright and shiny…

The stars faded into view once more, whirling and dancing again as she spun through them.

It rode upon her back, but now it has come beneath and she is lost…

Lost? When had she gotten lost? Out here in the stars?

With horror, Jack realized that she was the it that the things were speaking of, not the she.

It has come beneath to us, come below to us, passed under to us…

Below… that resonated somehow.

Below… below… yes… beneath, below, under… we are under… take us to… take us… to the…

She was seeing something that could not be seen with human eyes. A shape that defied dimension, a pattern that murdered reason. Jack struggled to look away.

Too much, too much, poor larva, too much…

It doesn’t understand. Poor larva.

We will teach it…

A line appeared before her, shining in the vast dark.

One.

It shifted, changing, becoming a glowing square, a flat plane.

Two.

Now the glowing square shifted again, evolving into a cube of light.

Three.

The next shape was almost impossible to comprehend.

Four.

The next was worse still.

Five.

NO…

It wouldn’t stop. The shape kept warping itself into something even more impossible and terrifying.

Six… Seven… Eight… Nine… Ten…

Stop, please, stop…

Eleven… Twelve… Thirteen… Fourteen… Fifteen…

No no no no no stopstopstopstopstop—

A sharp pinch on her shoulder launched her up off of her pillow, gasping. Sebby tumbled into her lap.

Jack stared around the room wildly, panting. For a moment, the walls and floor and ceiling were almost incomprehensible to her: barren, flat planes that lacked… what…?

It’s wrong it’s wrong he said there were only ten…

She shuddered, hard. Sebby crawled up her chest and touched her chin with his antennae, gentle and feathery, as though checking to see if she was ill. Had he pinched her awake? She thought he had.

Next to her on the bed, Kyra groaned, frowning in her sleep.

Of all the things she’d expected to dream about, she hadn’t expected… what, exactly? All she could remember now was a tide of stars and a masked woman… and a word…?

…octachoron…?

Lying back down, she cuddled Sebby to her as she settled against the pillow. He’d woken her from a nightmare; that much she knew. She didn’t know how he was so perceptive, but she was grateful that he was.

They were waiting when she drifted off again.

We frightened you. We are sorry.

“Who are you?” she asked, trying to anchor herself in as much ordinary, prosaic reality as she could. She couldn’t see them, but she tried to show them herself. Tall, gangly, short hair verging between brown and blonde, all eyes and elbows and knees as Rachel liked to say—

It is one of them!

No. Similar three-shape. Different five-shape.

“Who are you?” she asked again, trying to see them.

The impossible thing, the shape that wasn’t a shape, the shape that her mind tried to flee from, was back.

It is wondering. Wondering about us.

We are below… beneath… under… under… alone…

Find us. We will show you…

…help us…

DIE.

It was a new “voice,” different from the others. Where she had sensed curiosity, loneliness, and strange desperation until then, she suddenly sensed terrible, implacable hatred.

Death to the things that killed us… death to the makers of the cages… death to the ’verse that trapped us… a trillion deaths for every one you took from us…

No. Leave. It is a larva.

It is filth.

Innocent!

Filth. It has no right to come under. Not innocent. Filth.

Flee, larva. Flee. We cannot protect you.

Jack couldn’t move. She was rooted in place, locked in horror.

We come. We come to take it all back. All the worlds your filth has stolen will burn…

Something tiny and yet enormous took hold of her and the stars spun. She had the sense that another thing, monstrous and cold, had been reaching for her… but now it was gone.

We are sorry, little larva. Forgive us… help us…

“Who are you?” she whispered into the dark.

You see… you know… For a moment it almost came back to her, shards of memory with no meaning attached, glowing towers rising into a black sky, a woman in a mask, a hand slapping down on a button—

Come for us, the not-voices whispered. Save us. Take us… to…

…the Threshold…

The stars whirled around her again and for a moment, she caught another glimpse of the impossible shape, a chained and contained infinity, beautiful and terrible and mind-breaking—

She woke up gasping, pressing her hands over her mouth to suppress a scream. Kyra cried out in terror and sat up at the same moment.

“Fuck!” Kyra shouted, looking around wildly. Sebby scooted off of the bed and zoomed under the dresser.

Jack realized that Kyra had pulled a knife from somewhere and was holding it out defensively.

“What the fuck was that thing? Where did it go?” Kyra gasped.

“The thing in the dark?” Jack asked. “The thing that was huge and tiny at the same time?”

Kyra turned and looked at her, eyes widening. “You saw it too?”

Jack nodded, swallowing. “It said something about a threshold…”

Kyra nodded back. The tension was leaving her body, slowly. “How did we have the same dream?”

Jack shuddered. “Did you… feel it when people crossed over from U1 to Elsewhere last night? And back?”

Kyra looked like she wanted to say no, like she wanted to deny it. “…yes.”

“I think… I think something else felt us.” It was an increasingly unsettling thought.

“Fuck.” Kyra set the knife down. “Whatever it is, it ain’t human. Not even a little.”

“Did it call you a ‘larva’ too?” Jack asked. She was struggling to hold onto the memory. Unlike the perfect recall she had of things she paid attention to while she was conscious, her dreams were rarely accessible to her for long. Sometimes, after Mr. Reilly had told her about the Many Worlds Theory, she’d imagined that she visited other universes in her sleep, lived other lives, and that she couldn’t remember much afterwards because the memories lived in the heads of other Audreys, scattered throughout the multiverse.

Maybe she hadn’t been as far off as she’d thought.

“It did. Most of them did. But there was one…” Now Kyra shuddered. “It hated me. It wanted me dead.”

“Me too. Called me ‘filth.’”

“Filth… larva… way to make a girl feel insignificant. Shit.” Kyra blew out a breath and flopped down on the mattress. “If that was some kind of fucked up First Contact, I really don’t want to meet them out here in reality.”

But is this reality? Jack found herself thinking. If the entities they’d both dreamed about were real, was this the dream world?

She could feel a headache starting.

“I am not gonna go back to sleep for a while,” she said, lying on her back next to Kyra.

Fortunately, their rooms were flooded with light. Jack thought it might be nearing midday outside. There was very little noise coming in through the windows, which seemed to back that up. The heat was beating down, leavened by the sea breezes coming in through the windows, but Jack was glad of the warmth after the deathly cold of the thing from her dreams. Around New Marrakesh, people had probably already retired for the midday sleep period, while they were stuck wide awake and scared to close their eyes—

“So then maybe we should talk about what happened last night,” Kyra said.

“Which part? There’s so much.”

That got a soft laugh from Kyra. “Well, I can tell you some of the things that happened while you were kinda out of it, if you want.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” It bothered Jack that she’d collapsed so hard, while both Kyra and Tomlin had still needed her. “Sorry about that.”

“What for? You did great. Really great. Crazy-great. But anyway, Tomlin and I did a little embellishing of your plan for the shuttles. He set them up so that they’d fly textbook ‘launch to the space station’ paths out of New Marrakesh, and get halfway up into the sky before colliding with each other. Before they left, he and I did a quick isomorph to some alcove just outside of their jamming range, and he called Takama and gave her the transponder frequencies so she could track them. She says they crashed right into each other and exploded way out to sea, right about the time they reached this planet’s stratosphere.” Kyra grinned. “There’s a marine rescue operation going on right now, but nobody’s expecting to find much. And they’re never gonna find the flight recorders, because those are sitting on the beach in Elsewhere.”

“That’s… amazing.”

Kyra snorted. “Well, you said to crash the fuck out of them. Crashing them into each other seemed the best way.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you kidding? Last night was one of the best times I’ve ever had. I should be thanking you.” Kyra’s smile was broad and bright. “I know what I want to do now, what I want to be. I don’t know if you heard any of it, but… Tomlin’s gonna introduce me to some of the officers he served with. People he trusts. I’m gonna do it, Jack. I want to fight for people the way I did last night. He says there are some crack units that get sent on rescue missions, and if I can get into one of those…”

Her smile suddenly faltered. For a moment, the light in her eyes dimmed a little.

“Will you be okay if I do that? I know you told him you have somewhere you need to go, but… do you? I mean, really? ’Cause I don’t want to run out on you or anything.”

Jack felt as if her heart was both impossibly full and being squeezed really tightly. She’d worried more than a little about what would happen to Kyra when it was time for her to continue her journey to her father, but now Kyra was having the same worries about her…

“I will,” she promised. “I do have a place to go… I was on my way to my father when things started going wrong. That’s where I’m going. He doesn’t know I’m coming, but I know he’ll still be on Furya when I get there.”

Kyra looked both relieved and curious. “What’s Furya?”

“A planet,” Jack told her. “Kind of a weird one. There’s like, no record of when it was terraformed or who went to settle it, but a hundred or so years ago, some people showed up at Federacy HQ saying they were from there and wanting to register the planet as a sovereign world. That was a first. There really wasn’t much contact or trade or anything after that, either. But then, about twenty-five years ago, a ton of people from there started showing up all over the Federacy as refugees, saying their world had been attacked. So scouts went out and… well, my dad said someone had committed genocide there. But all the survivors would say was that the devil had come, so, you know, not very helpful. Their biosphere was seriously fucked up by whatever happened, too. So a bunch of worlds offered their old terraforming equipment that they no longer needed, to help the place get put back together. It’s starting to work, but the equipment’s so old that it needs a lot of tending and re-engineering. My dad decided he’d go there and take charge of that. I guess he was stationed there back before I was born, so he already knows how to talk to the locals.”

Describing it to Kyra, she suddenly felt selfish for wanting her father to stay on Deckard’s World with her. He was helping people. After last night, she understood so much better how strong the need to do that could be.

Maybe he’d thought he was leaving her in the best possible place, with her mother and Alvin, much as Riddick had apparently thought that leaving her with Abu and Lajjun had been in her best interest. Her dad, she reflected, had probably been a lot more right about his choice than Riddick had been—

“I love how you know all this stuff,” Kyra said after a moment. “The schooling I got from the New Christy elders… it was all about people from thousands of years ago who talked directly to God and lived for hundreds of years and had a million rules about everything and kept cursing their own children, and none of it made a lick of sense to me. Everything I wanted to learn about… oh no, that was Men’s Business. My job was to cook and clean and make babies one day. I never, ever wanted that job.”

“Well, you won’t have to have it, ever, if you don’t want.” Jack told her. “Tomlin’ll help you get in with the right people. He’s the real deal.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Kyra grinned. “You know, I was real suspicious of him at first. Part of it was I was jealous, you know? The two of you seemed to understand each other so well, from the moment you met, and I’ve never seen you trust anyone so fast. But… you were right about him.”

That astounded Jack. Kyra had been jealous of Tomlin?

But, she recalled, Kyra had also been jealous of her for a while, back when she’d been taken under Heather’s wing. Friendships, she realized, real friendships, were hard to come by for Kyra. She was afraid that there wouldn’t be any room left for her if someone new came along. She was afraid of being replaced and discarded.

“You didn’t need to be jealous,” she managed after a moment. “You’re still my best friend. More than that. I’m an only child… or I was. But now, you’re my sister.”

Kyra swallowed, her smile taking on a tight quality, and Jack realized that she was struggling to suppress tears. “You’re my sister, too,” she managed after a moment, her voice wobbly.

Jack could feel how perilous her own emotions were. If she didn’t say or do something to change it, the two of them were going to end up crying for the next few hours. She wasn’t sure how long it would be before she could stop, if she started. “You think Takama brought us some food while we were asleep?”

Kyra’s expression stabilized and her lips quirked. “Damn. You say food and my stomach starts screaming demands. Let’s go find out.”

Takama had indeed returned while they slept, leaving behind items that could safely sit out—protected from insects—on their table. Beneath the coverings, a variety of breads, nuts, hard cheeses, and fruits awaited them. Jack found a bottle of freshly-made orange juice, the New Marrakesh kind that had ruined her for all others, tucked in their otherwise empty cooler.

“So it’s almost noon,” Kyra said as they ate. “Tide’s out. If you feel up to it—and I’ll understand if you don’t because I don’t think you even know how much you did last night—we could do a little of that beachcombing we talked about. Nobody’ll notice if we appear and disappear places. And after last night, nobody in the Rif is going to think twice if they do see us do that.”

The wariness that had been so thoroughly habitual for Kyra seemed to have dissolved, literally overnight. This was the most relaxed Jack had ever seen her friend.

“I’d like that,” Jack said with a grin. “Let me just check the reports first…”

Her backpack, which had miraculously made it through all of the night’s dramas, was sitting by the table. Takama must have found it at the shop and brought it over, because Jack had no clear recollection of what had happened to it after she’d put it on and begun running for Othman Tower. Inside, her tablet was, amazingly, unscathed.

Unlike the clothes I was wearing… She still couldn’t figure out when she’d ripped both knees off of her pants.

There was nothing in the local news feeds about almost two hundred people disappearing. Not until Jack pulled up the news about the offshore search-and-rescue in progress.

The Quintessa Corporation has confirmed that both shuttles were carrying the surviving passengers and crew of the Scarlet Matador to a new treatment facility. Colonel Gavin Tomlin, who had been supervising the quarantine, is on record as saying that he never authorized, and had not been informed of, the transfer. Local authorities further confirmed that the shuttles appeared to have violated several rules regarding New Marrakesh airspace, and had forced Ground Control to reroute half a dozen flight paths to prevent additional collisions…

“Damn,” Kyra said. “I don’t like his name being right in there.”

“Me neither,” Jack sighed. “No way around it, though, I guess. He was in charge of them. And it’d be suspicious as hell if he wasn’t demanding to know why he’d been left out of the loop.”

“I hope he’s a good actor.” Kyra grinned at Jack. “He’s sure got the looks of one.”

Behind them, the door opened and Takama stepped through. “Awake already?”

Jack realized that, sometime in the last day, she’d stopped thinking of Takama as her favorite food vendor or even Tomlin’s aunt, and had begun thinking of her as family. No wonder, she thought, soldiers coming home from war talked about their brothers and sisters in arms, and meant it. A powerful bond had been forged.

“We had some trouble with bad dreams,” Kyra said, with an ease that suggested she was feeling exactly the same way. She had probably given Takama the code to enter their building and unit.

This is who she was before life went badly wrong for her, Jack thought.

“I suppose that is no surprise. It is good that you are up, though. I spoke to Brahim a little while ago and thought I could give you an update if you were awake. Otherwise, I just wanted to check in on you before I went to sleep, myself.”

“Is everything okay?” Jack asked.

“He is not entirely sure. Everyone seems to have accepted Quintessa’s explanation and his outrage about it, but… he is not sure that the envoy from Quintessa believes what she is claiming. She acted strangely toward him.” Takama sighed. “He has to go up to Tangiers Station A to pull the original transmission logs from the Scarlet Matador, and the readings he took of its approach, because Quintessa is now claiming that it was never a Level Five Incident at all. He told me he thought someone might have been following him into the spaceport.”

“Wait, were you two talking on comms about this?” Kyra was frowning.

Takama laughed softly. “Do not fret, Dihya. We spoke a language no eavesdropper could know.”

“Are you sure?” Jack asked, feeling a cold spot in her belly. “Most translation programs—”

“Have no lexicon for it,” Takama insisted. “My sister invented it when we were children. I told you she is a linguist, yes? It was our secret language for years and years. She taught it to her husband and her children, but outside of the six of us, no one has ever spoken or heard it.”

Jack allowed herself to feel a little relief at that. It worried her, though, that Tomlin was possibly being followed. “What’s he doing about his shadow?”

“He said he might go where the man cannot follow. He does have clearance into almost every part of the spaceport. But I think he may wish to learn a little more about why he is being followed, first. After all—”

With a deafening bang, the apartment building shook.

Jack could hear alarms sounding outside, lots of them. She scrambled from the couch to the nearest window.

People were pouring out onto the streets, talking and shouting. Several of them pointed toward the northwest.

“What is it?” Takama asked.

“I can’t see yet.” Jack told her, running into the bedroom.

Several panes of glass in the western-facing window had cracked, but none had broken. Through the window, to the northwest, Jack could see a large, roiling column of black smoke climbing into the sky, flames licking upward from beneath it.

“Baraka,” Takama groaned at her side. “That is at the spaceport…”

Jack, who had impulsively bought a good set of binoculars—along with an as-yet-unused telescope—two days before, grabbed them off of the dresser and brought them to her eyes.

It was a clear day and Jack could see much of the coast of New Marrakesh. To the northwest, it curved to create a bay. Along the edge of the distant promontory, the runways and launch platforms spread out on the flat land. She could see many of the low structures that made up the spaceport, its concourses, towers, hangars, warehouses, ships…

One of the concourses, beside a shuttle roughly three times the size of the ones she’d encountered the night before, was burning fiercely beneath the rising black cloud. The flames were licking over the hull of the shuttle—

A flash as bright as the sun almost blinded her for a second. She threw her arm up over her eyes until it faded.

Now an enormous, gory red cloud was expanding where the shuttle had been, shooting off fast-moving tendrils of fire that arced through the sky.

“Fuck!” Kyra shouted. “Get away from the window!”

They raced for the doorway, only just reaching it as the shockwave struck. It shattered the window and sent dozens of sharp fragments of glass flying through the space where they’d only just been standing.

“Brahim!” Takama wailed, falling to her knees. “They have murdered Brahim!” she sobbed.

Kyra’s face crumpled as she knelt down next to Takama and put her arms around her. Jack felt numb and weightless.

She couldn’t think. She couldn’t feel. Nothing made any sense. Only two terrible words echoed through the vast emptiness inside her.

Not again!

28.
The Claws of the Black Fox

Othman Tower was only a five-minute walk from the transit station with the storage lockers. At a run, it was half that. Jack was screaming inside the whole way.

Kyra was ahead of her, wild hair streaming out behind her as she ran full tilt toward the building, a long knife that Jack had never seen before suddenly in one hand. Jack wasn’t quite sure where she’d gotten and kept that, exactly. She didn’t want to ask. All she could feel was desperate terror that they were already too late.

A little before they reached the Tower’s plaza, still screened by the avenue’s argan trees, Kyra suddenly stopped and held up her free hand, making a gesture that she and Jack had worked out in the prior days. Isomorph over to Elsewhere, the gesture said.

Jack concentrated, letting the buildings around them fade as she found her footing on the beaches of Elsewhere. She focused on letting her perception of U1 stay intact, though: an invisible girl looking in at the world from the other side of a threshold. She hurried forward, now running after Kyra on wet sand, once the transition was complete.

Two huge shuttles were parked before the building’s main entrance, marring the lovely plaza that led up to the doors. Two lines of people, all with their arms bound at the wrists, were being herded into them at gunpoint by soldiers in motley uniforms. Mercs, Jack thought. Tomlin, dressed once more in his own uniform, his wrists shackled behind his back, was on his knees by the doors with another merc’s gun pointed at his head.

“You grab Tomlin,” Kyra murmured next to her. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Before Jack could ask what she meant, Kyra was in motion, knives in both hands now. The mercs, Jack realized, couldn’t see her—wouldn’t see her until it was far too late.

The first to die was the man holding the gun to Tomlin’s head.

The firearm went skittering across the flagstones as its owner clutched at his slashed throat before toppling to the ground beside Tomlin. He scrambled back away from the body, his eyes widening. Kyra had only made the blade itself manifest in U1. She was already on the move again.

In a second, Jack suddenly thought in alarm, the pilots in the shuttles would hear the commotion and call for help. They probably had the only functional communications in the area right now.

Let’s fix that, shall we?

She brought her hands into U1 and laid them upon one of the two shuttles, pulling it all of the way into Elsewhere, remembering at the last instant to swap in Elsewhere’s air to fill its space. Sometimes, when she and Kyra had been practicing isomorphing objects and had forgotten, the air displacement had created anything from a small snap to a loud bang, although that oddly never happened with their own bodies. This would have roared like thunder.

The huge vessel vanished from the flagstones of U1 and appeared on the sand of Elsewhere. A wave of dizziness passed through Jack; in its wake, she felt light as air. Trying not to stumble in the sand, she raced over to the other shuttle’s location, repeating her moves, staggering as the dizzy-airy feeling grew stronger. The shuttles’ comms would be useless now, a whole universe away from anyone who could hear their messages.

Three more of the merc team’s members, back in U1, were on the ground, dead or dying. The Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, Jack thought, had been fully unleashed. In defense of the Matador survivors, Kyra could do all of the things she hadn’t been able to do to save her own family.

Between the dropping mercs and the vanishing shuttles, some of those survivors were starting to panic. The bewildered mercs surrounding them, realizing the situation was inexplicably spinning out of control, were hunting for something to shoot. In a moment, they might turn their weapons against their captives.

I am in both worlds, I am in both worlds, I am in both worlds…

Now visible, audible, and tangible in U1, she pitched her voice the way she had when, once, she had shouted to keep Shazza from killing an innocent man. “EVERYBODY! ISOMORPH NOW! ALL THE WAY INTO ELSEWHERE! ALL THE WAY!”

Jack hoped they understood what she meant. She didn’t have time to find out. As several weapons pointed and fired in her direction, she isomorphed back out of U1 and ran toward Tomlin’s position.

But she could feel the survivors doing it, feel them crossing from one ’verse to the next. Now, she knew, they would be able to see Kyra’s deadly dance as she slashed her way through the armed mercs who had held them.

Jack reached Tomlin a second later, isomorphing back into U1 beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he told her, sitting up. “What happened to the shuttles?”

“They’re in Elsewhere,” she muttered, grasping the binders on his wrists, shifting them to that other world, and tossing them aside.

A few of the Matador passengers were still in U1, she realized, and in deadly danger. One woman was crouched down, trying to shield two small children despite her bound arms; another, with a small baby harnessed on her chest, was kneeling on the ground trying to present as small a target as possible. A few others looked confused, struggling to do what she’d told them.

Tomlin, she thought, must not have had a chance to brief them on their anchoring tricks. She wondered if he’d even made it into the building before the merc team had captured him.

One merc had spotted her and was lining up a shot when a knife handle suddenly sprouted from his temple. His bullets went wide as he toppled, tearing through one of the stately trees overhanging the plaza. The remaining Matador survivors screamed and dropped to the ground; three more vanished from U1.

“Stop right there! Don’t you move!” Another merc approached her and Tomlin, his rifle pointed directly at them.

Jack wrapped her arms around Tomlin and pulled.

They were in Elsewhere.

“Baraka!” Tomlin gasped, staring around him. “Is this—?”

“Yes,” Jack told him. She got up and hurried over to the spot where she knew the mother with the infant was kneeling, shifting her vision enough to see her clearly, reaching out until she was almost touching her.

She’d never tried this before. She didn’t know if it would even work. Without isomorphing any part of herself back to U1, she focused on the woman, on the parts of her and her baby that were already connected to Elsewhere, and pulled again.

It worked so well that she fell backward, landing on her ass, as mother and child solidified in front of her. Kyra flew past them with a fierce smile on her face, racing for another of the still-standing mercs who was lining up a shot at a hapless civilian. Out of knives, she had a large chunk of driftwood in her hands.

A second later, the driftwood protruded from the merc’s chest and back. His gun clattered to the plaza flagstones as he clutched at the wood in confused agony. Jack saw him crumple to the ground as she wrapped phantom arms around the mother with two small children, pulling them into Elsewhere.

Screams from the shuttles startled her. She turned and saw Tomlin running for one while Kyra raced for the other. She switched ’verses quickly and grabbed up one of the discarded rifles.

“Tomlin!” she shouted as she isomorphed back, throwing the rifle at him when he turned to look. He caught it easily.

The mercs back in U1 were all dead, she realized. Now they had only the shuttle pilots to deal with.

Kyra, following her lead, switched ’verses to grab one of the dropped rifles and reappeared in Elsewhere a second later.

A standoff was about to develop, Jack realized. The pilots had hostages.

“ISOMORPH BACK TO U1!” she bellowed as loudly as she could, hoping the passengers aboard the shuttles would hear her and know what to do. Her throat suddenly felt raw.

She ismorphed over herself, for the moment, letting her vision show her what was in both worlds even as her body stayed in only one. As she watched, several people dropped to the ground in the areas that the shuttles occupied, managing to pull themselves back to U1 on their own. She headed for the shuttle Tomlin had just raced into, pulling a sidearm off one of the fallen mercs as she went and switching off its safety.

I am in U1, but I see into Elsewhere, I am in U1 and cannot be seen in Elsewhere, but I can see…

She walked through the hull of the shuttle like a phantom.

Only the top half of her head was above the cabin floor, unseen. Several cuffed, terrified passengers remained on board. The pilot had one of them in a headlock, holding a gun to her head. Tomlin was trying to talk the man down, but the shouting was getting louder and louder, even through the veil between ’verses.

Jack positioned herself directly beneath the pilot, waiting for a moment when the gun’s aim would waver. She raised her pistol until it was completely above the floor, bracing herself as well as she could in such an awkward position.

I am in U1, only in U1, but the gun in my hand is in both ’verses. And its hammer, and its bullets, are fully in Elsewhere… It was, she thought ruefully, a good thing after all that her father had not only taught her how to shoot, but had made her break down and clean each of the guns they’d worked with. She could visualize, and suddenly feel, those parts of her weapon now.

One of the passengers stared in astonishment in her direction.

As his hostage writhed, twisting her body away from his, the pilot’s gun slipped and pointed away from her for a fraction of a second. It was all Jack needed.

She fired straight up, over and over, emptying the pistol’s clip into the pilot’s torso, before ducking back out of the shuttle.

Small arms fire erupted from the other shuttle’s space. Kyra was standing in its midst, unloading a pistol upward in U1, but on the Elsewhere side Jack could only see the hull of the shuttle itself. Her wild-haired friend emerged a moment later, her face almost glowing with fierce energy.

“That was a damned good idea you had,” she said with a grin. “Last one’s dead.”

Jack could only nod silently, dropping her gun before falling to her knees. She isomorphed back into Elsewhere so she could vomit on the sand instead of in the plaza.

---

Less than fifteen minutes later, Jack had pulled the now-evacuated shuttles back into U1, and she and Kyra had finished removing everyone’s restraints. The Matador survivors, none of whom were seriously injured, had helped them carry the mercs’ corpses onto the shuttles, taking back comms and other items that the men had confiscated from their captives, before transferring back to Elsewhere at Jack’s instruction, to wait.

“I think you got here not even ten minutes after I did,” Tomlin said as he wiped a merc’s blood off of his recovered comm. “I spent the last several hours making arrangements for tomorrow night. It was the message to meet you here that brought me at all. I never had a chance to reach the lobby before they had me.”

Jack knelt down and transferred a pool of drying blood out of the plaza and into Elsewhere, while Kyra did the same near the other shuttle. It was the last physical evidence of the battle. There was nothing they could do about the damage to the trees where one automatic rifle had chewed them up… but they’d let whoever had sent the mercs worry about covering that up.

Someone—and Jack was pretty sure who—had gone to great lengths to ensure they could perpetrate a heinous crime unseen, after all. It would be a shame, she thought, not to take advantage of their efforts.

Othman Tower’s building and plaza cameras, she had verified, were still offline, and the cameras and comms for several blocks were scrambled; someone had set things up so that none of them would come back on until the shuttles’ transponders signaled that they were out of the cameras’ lines of sight. If Jack and her friends played their cards just right, nobody—not even the people who had sent the mercs—would know just what had really happened there.

If she hadn’t asked Tomlin to meet her here, she suddenly realized, he would have been the one with no idea or proof of what had been done to the people in his care. She suspected that would have broken his heart.

But it meant they probably hadn’t been expecting him to come to the tower, or at least, hadn’t built their plan around when he was expected. They had, in fact, done this on his day off. That was something she could use.

“You’re gonna need to pretend you never got here at all,” she told Tomlin, her voice hoarse and her throat feeling as though she had swallowed glass. Had she really yelled that loudly? “You’re gonna need to pretend that everybody’d already been taken when you finally did get here.”

“All right. Why?”

“If you were here and escaped, that means so did everybody else. If you were never here, they won’t know anybody escaped their trap, just that you never walked into it. You know how to set autopilots?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Go on the shuttles and set each one to auto-launch in another five minutes or so. Make them fly out to sea, out to where it’s deep, and then dive down into the water. At velocity. Crash the fuck out of them where it’ll be hard to get to the wreckage.”

“All right. What does that buy us?”

“I don’t know what the Quintessa Corporation’s plans for the shuttles’ destinations were, but since they’re hiding the fact that they planned to kidnap everybody, they can’t exactly draw attention to it when it all goes wrong. Hopefully they won’t realize that the Matador passengers didn’t die in the crashes.” Jack sighed, suddenly feeling tired and ancient. Every devious idea she’d ever had seemed to be crowding into her head all at once. “Did any of them get on comms to anybody after they grabbed you?”

Tomlin shook his head. He seemed to understand what she was asking—which was good, because she barely did suddenly—and answered as if he was giving a military debriefing. “None of the mercenaries did. The pilots were already on board the shuttles, and they were already loading the passengers, when I walked up. I was coming around the side of the building and only saw the backs of the shuttles, so I don’t think the pilots ever saw me. None of the mercs told anyone they had me in custody. I’m not sure if they were even looking for me or just thought I was an inconvenient witness. And then you moved the shuttles over to Elsewhere before anyone started shooting or screaming. How did you manage—”

“Good. Then as far as they’ll know, you were never here, their mercs kidnapped the Matador survivors as planned, and then everybody, including the mercs, died in the crashes… except you, because you didn’t show up until long after they’d left,” Jack told him. “Meanwhile, we take the survivors up to high ground through Elsewhere, bring them out where your people can hide them, and then you discover, live on camera tomorrow morning, that Othman Tower’s empty and raise a stink about your missing charges.”

Tomlin was staring at her with strange awe again.

“They can’t…” Jack could feel the steam running out of her words. Why did she feel so exhausted suddenly? She could barely put two words together. “They can’t threaten to cripple the economy if you don’t turn over people you don’t have… because they already took them from you.”

“And,” Kyra said from beside her, “If they’re planning on killing all of the survivors off anyway, why should they care how it happens, even if they lose a few soldiers-for-hire in the process? Sucks for them that they eliminated all possible records of what went wrong. Let’s get those things set to fly and get back to Elsewhere. You know where the black boxes on those crates are located? We don’t want those found by divers.”

Jack wanted to follow the two of them, but she couldn’t get her legs to work. She sat quietly on the plaza’s flagstones for a few moments while Tomlin set the shuttles’ controls and Kyra hauled out flight recorders, shifting them into Elsewhere. Her arms and legs felt weak and shaky, and her whole center felt utterly hollow.

“This is what she does,” she heard Kyra saying to Tomlin a few minutes later as they walked up. “She can come up with a crazy plan at the drop of a hat, and it’ll work. She’s like… a mastermind that way. I mean, hell, she’d already planned the march through Elsewhere, but those embellishments? She just came up with them now. On the spot, fergodsake. But killing somebody? That’s going to fuck her up for a while.”

“Even if by doing so, she saved someone’s life?”

“Even so. That’s our Finch.”

“You don’t think it might be the shuttles?”

“I don’t know. Could be. Never even occurred to me to try moving something that big, and she did it four times.”

Strong arms lifted her off the ground and she realized that Tomlin was cradling her like a child. Kyra’s arms came around both of them as she isomorphed them from U1 into Elsewhere.

Jack could, strangely, feel the exact moment when both shuttles left the plaza over in U1. She opened her eyes and watched them, through the veil of dimensions, as they flew off, arrowing toward the coastline.

Kyra was talking to the crowd, telling them that they were going to walk uphill until they were out of the path of the tide, which should stay below sea level for several more hours anyway. Then she was going to help them meet up with people who would take them to a place where they could hide. Jack, exhausted, leaned her head against Tomlin’s shoulder and focused on breathing, on being, while Kyra took charge. She’d told Kyra the plan as they had walked down into town, and her friend had loved it. Kyra would make it happen now.

Time slid by in fits and starts. Jack was in a gray place, exhausted by the terrible battle in the same way that she had been after the ordeal on the Kublai Khan. She’d slept for more than a day after that, clinging the whole time to the gun she’d fired, in fear that she would wake to find herself back in that world of horrors. Now, though, she didn’t dare sleep, not yet, not until she was sure everyone was really, truly safe… but she had no energy left to make sure of that.

She drifted in and out of consciousness through much of the hours-long night march out of the flat plains that corresponded with New Marrakesh’s city center and upward onto the sandy, weedy, increasingly rocky hillsides. Later, she would have memories of strange, small creatures skittering out of the paths of hundreds of human feet. For a while, Tomlin and Kyra both walked in the lead, side by side, Tomlin still carrying her in his arms, the two talking about combat and soldiering. Jack heard him offering to introduce Kyra to some of the officers he knew, people who would never, he promised, turn away the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain when he vouched for her.

She’ll have a home, Jack thought with wistful happiness as exhaustion took her again. She’ll be able to fight with real soldiers, not mercs…

Periodically, when she felt strong enough, alert enough, Tomlin let her walk beside him, but his arm was always protectively around her in case another wave of weakness stuck. One always did after a few moments, and she felt him catching her in a faint more than once. The long line stopped at least twice to take rests and give stragglers a chance to catch up, before they reached an area that Kyra said corresponded with the market square in the Rif.

Kyra brought Tomlin and Jack across first, practically into Takama’s lap.

The next thing Jack knew, she was being fussed over and plied with mint tea and jowhara inside one of the small shops along the square’s perimeter, by a merchant family she’d bought things from before, while Tomlin showered and changed in the shopkeeper’s upstairs rooms. Someone collected his uniform for laundering, and two young women helped Jack get cleaned up and changed out of her scuffed, stained, and torn clothes—how exactly had that happened to them? She’d felt so unscathed at the time—into a soft, colorful jalabiya. Then she watched from a window seat, her head resting heavily against the glass, as the hushed exodus continued outside.

Takama, now assisted by a dozen or so of her fellow street vendors, took each of the survivors in hand as Kyra helped them across, hiding them in nearby shops while she and her friends arranged for merchant trucks to come and take them, in small groups, into the mountains. The night was full of quiet activity as the fugitives—now fed and disguised in traditional djellabas and jalabiyas with scarves around their heads—climbed a few at a time into various trucks and carts. No one was going to make them keep walking any further. Somehow, though, the activity seemed no busier than any of the Rif’s normal night markets. No one would suspect a thing; those markets sometimes lasted from dusk to dawn in the Rif even when everywhere else was essentially shut down. All of the merchants seemed delighted to be in on the operation, cheerfully waving away the money some of the survivors tried to offer them in compensation. The rules of hospitality, which meant a great deal to the Imazighen, had apparently been invoked.

They had done it, Jack thought, allowing herself to relax a tiny bit more.

The sky was still dark, but not quite as dark, and the tide had begun to move in, when the last of the Matador survivors came through and Kyra joined her in the little shop, allowing the merchant’s daughters to clean her up and give her a change of clothing.

Jack had almost forgotten about the storage locker key she’d intended to give Tomlin, hours before, until she’d pulled it and her own key out of her ruined clothing. When he returned to the shop a little before dawn, once again dressed in his cleaned and repaired uniform, she gave it to him at last.

“Thank you, my Tislilel,” he told her, taking the key. “You saved so many lives yet again tonight. Including mine. Remember that. Please do not hold what you had to do against yourself.” He kissed her forehead.

To Jack’s surprise, Kyra allowed him to give her a thank-you kiss as well and listened attentively while he spoke softly to her, too. Jack, whose hearing was far better than people ever seemed to realize, heard every word. “You have a warrior’s spirit, my Dihya. It is a difficult path to tread. But I have faith you will find your way and I promise, I will help you reach it.”

Jack felt a weight lifting off of her with those words. Kyra might not want an agrarian life, or a domestic one, but Tomlin was offering her a life she did want, and a version she would never have to feel shame or regret for. After encountering the band of mercs in the plaza, Jack had hoped that she wouldn’t still consider signing up with any. Now she wouldn’t need to.

At the doorway, Tomlin turned back to them, his eyes both kind and tired. Now his words addressed not only them but his aunt, emerging from a back room with a tray of tea and food for Kyra her hands.

“I should be back in several hours, a day at most. After I am done ‘discovering’ that my charges are missing and filing my complaints, I will request some of my leave time. With all that has happened, no one will grudge me for it or even question it.” He paused, as if debating with himself. Taking a deep breath, he continued. “Now that I’ve experienced the journey to and from Elswhere, and have seen what you can do and what it costs, I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought. We must never let them find my charges… or either one of you.”

With those last words, Gavin Brahim Tomlin, El Krim, left the amber light of the small shop for the predawn darkness.

It was the last time they ever saw him.

27.
Paving the Way with Good Intentions

Even dressed in traditional Amazigh clothing instead of his uniform, there was no mistaking Tomlin. Nor the fact that he wasn’t merely sitting on a random doorstep, but was waiting for them.

“Shit,” Kyra muttered beside Jack.

Jack realized she should have seen this coming. In the last few days, as she had begun to learn more and more about the people of the Rif, she had realized what a tightly knit community they were. If they were willing to share stories about one of their own with two strange girls, nothing was stopping them from carrying tales of those girls back to him.

She wondered when he’d put together that the stories were about the same two girls who had accosted him in the parking garage.

“It’s okay,” she murmured back to Kyra, hoping she was right. She kept walking forward, trying to convey through her walk and her posture that she wasn’t at all bothered by his presence on her doorstep, even trying to hint that she had expected it.

Because, she thought, she damn well should have.

Kyra kept pace beside her, but she could feel her friend’s tension.

“Mr. Tomlin,” she said as they approached the building. “It’s good to see you again.”

She hoped Kyra wasn’t telegraphing disagreement with her statement.

“And you, Ms. Finch, Ms. Houlot.” He nodded at each of them, giving them a non-threatening smile. Jack noticed that his posture also seemed to be trying to convey a lack of threat. He seemed well aware that this was a bold and possibly unwelcome move.

“How did you find us?” Kyra asked beside her.

Tomlin shrugged. “My family is here in the Rif. You have met my aunt, Takama. She spoke the other day of the two lovely girls who had moved into this tagat building and were curious about us. How you never spoke about yourselves but encouraged people to talk about themselves. I showed her the one clear capture the security footage had of you—which no longer exists, don’t worry—and she said ‘yes, those are the girls.’”

“Sorry,” Jack couldn’t help but ask. “What does ‘tagat’ mean?”

“I’m afraid it means ‘cursed,’” Tomlin said, his smile becoming rueful. “This building does not have the best of reputations. Its owners are outsiders, who thought they could use it as a jumping-off point for ‘gentrifying’ our neighborhood. No Amazigh will live within it. They struggle to find tenants, and to keep them, especially because they are lazy and cheap and hardly ever make repairs. Perhaps that’s why your pipes burst when you first moved in…”

His smile turned mischievous.

“…Or was that a cover story for why your clothes were soaked after the high tide came through?”

Jack glanced over at Kyra, whose breathing had quickened. Under the deadpan she’d always worn in front of the Killer’s Club girls, Jack could see signs that she was becoming increasingly tense and defensive.

“Well,” Jack replied, hoping she could defuse that tension, “when you’re trying to keep a low profile, telling people you very nearly drowned in an invisible ocean that visited your rooms doesn’t exactly help.”

Alarm had appeared on Tomlin’s face. “You nearly drowned? But I thought you—”

Kyra sighed next to her, visibly making herself relax. “We’ve only ever been about one or two steps ahead of you the whole time, because we stayed out from under the Quintessa Corporation’s thumb and Finch here already knew about Threshold Syndrome.”

Now Tomlin looked a little crestfallen. “I would not have intruded upon you if I didn’t need help, but now I fear—”

“Try us,” Jack interrupted before he could talk himself out of whatever had brought him. She had to admit she was curious. “We’ve been learning how to handle moving between both universes pretty much nonstop. We’re happy to share what we know.”

Kyra’s hand knocked against her wrist. Looking over, she saw a quelling look on her friend’s face.

“What?” she whispered. “They need all the help they can get.”

Tomlin hadn’t missed the exchange. “I should probably tell you that I know who you really are,” he said. “Or at least, who you are,” he added nodding at Kyra. “Whether or not you can or will help me, I can arrange asylum—protection, that is, not an institution—on this world if you wish it. No one will extradite you from here.” His gaze returned to Jack. “I know less about you, my young Tislilel, but having witnessed you swim through the air, I find you far saner than the reports would suggest—”

“She infiltrated the hospital to get me out,” Kyra surprised Jack by saying.

“Ah.” Tomlin nodded. “In that case, I hope that you can, indeed, help me with this problem as well. Most of the passengers and crew have learned how to anchor themselves in U1, as you two instructed. But a few of the passengers are pre-verbal children, and one is a baby, and we don’t know how to teach them to do this, or even if we can. Are they trapped between worlds until they’re old enough to learn?”

“Oh,” Kyra said beside her. “Damn.”

“I don’t think they have to be,” Jack found herself saying. “I think their parents can anchor them.”

“How?” Tomlin asked, hope in his voice.

Jack glanced at Kyra, raising her eyebrow and nodding at their building. There was only one way to show him. Kyra hesitated, but then nodded.

“Are you allowed to come inside a… tagat… building?” Jack asked. “What I want to show you won’t work all that well down here. It’s still high tide.”

“I am allowed, yes.” Tomlin grinned and stood up. “I would have a great deal of explaining to do if I chose to rent here, yes, but I may come inside if you permit me.”

“C’mon in,” Kyra said, resignation in her voice. “I think I know what she wants to show you.”

After the squalid condition of the lobby and the stairwell, Tomlin couldn’t quite contain his astonishment as he walked into their apartment. All of the windows were open, admitting the late-afternoon light but, more importantly, the breezes. Kyra and Jack had removed most of the decrepit furniture and had pulled out the stained carpeting, and had spent the last Standard week—between their many other tasks—scouring the place clean and decorating with colorful blankets and pillows, both to hide the threadbare and battered nature of the remaining furniture and to make it comfortable. Most of their purchases had come from Amazigh vendors in the Rif. Jack had found a way to use a trick of isomorphing to remove the layers of paint concealing the carved woodwork, along with layer upon layer of grubby wallpaper to reveal the original mosaic-adorned plaster beneath. The result was evocative of what the building’s units had first looked like in their halcyon days, before they had been co-opted and corrupted. Souvenirs from Elsewhere sat on a variety of surfaces.

Hearing their arrival, a ferret-sized ten-legged crustacean came scooting out of the bedroom and scurried its way over to Jack’s feet, earning an astonished oath in Tamazight from Tomlin.

“Hey, Sebby.” Jack reached down and let the small creature crawl onto her hands, lifting it up. “You’re right on time.”

“Sebby?” Tomlin asked.

“Well, he’s not a crab, but I always wanted a pet crab to name Sebastian.” Jack grinned. She never had been able to convince her parents to let her have one.

“The Little Mermaid? Really?” Kyra sounded on the verge of laughter.

“And here I thought I might be facetious to nickname you Tislilel,” Tomlin chuckled. “It means ‘mermaid,’” he explained in response to their questioning looks.

Jack’s grin widened. Tislilel. She liked it. “Sebby, here, is some kind of land crustacean from Elsewhere. The monster tide must’ve reached his habitat and dragged him into its wake. We found him clinging to some driftwood and looking pretty miserable when the tide was going back out. I brought him over to U1.”

She raised her eyebrows at Tomlin, waiting for him to catch onto the implication of what she was telling him.

“You can move objects between worlds? And anchor them in a whole new universe?” He glanced around the apartment again, the full significance of the pieces of driftwood, the coral, the shells, finally striking him. “All of this… is from there?”

“Objects… and living creatures.” She nodded at Sebby, who obligingly lifted a pincer and waved it in the air.

“Like a baby, or a small child, who cannot make the transition on its own,” Tomlin breathed. “How?”

“Well, the first thing I ever tried it with was one of the cash cards we’d brought with us from Helion,” Jack told him, suddenly very glad he already knew who they were and she didn’t have to come up with weird verbal dodges. “Local bank machines couldn’t read our cards. Not enough of their data signals in this universe, I guess. I held one really close, and thought about it just being in this ’verse and nowhere else. It was a serious Hail Mary, but it worked.”

“And that’s all there is to it?” Tomlin looked astounded.

“Maybe,” Jack hedged. “Sebby’s the only living creature I’ve ever tried it with. It takes work, and some careful thinking. You have to really be aware of what you want to bring with you, and its dimensions and edges. We didn’t know how to get our clothes to transition with us at first.”

Kyra began snickering. She had fully relaxed, and now her eyes were dancing with merriment as she answered Tomlin’s questioning look. “You should’ve seen it. The first time J—Finch here tried to go all the way to the other side and swim through a wall—whoosh! She went right through but her clothes stayed behind.”

“You can… pass through walls…?”

“Carefully,” Jack told him. “Right now, if I isomorphed all the way over to Elsewhere, I’d be okay, because the water’s still about waist-deep up here. I can still see it even when I’m all the way in U1. It’d hold me up if I switched over right now. But if I tried to do that at low tide, I’d fall straight through the floors and splatter myself against whatever’s eight stories down on that side.”

“I will be sure to warn my charges of that risk,” he said, nodding. “The Quintessa Corporation wants to move them. To a ‘secure facility,’ but they won’t say where. I have been stalling—I don’t want to turn them over. Everything within me says that doing so would be their deaths. So far, the government has sided with me, but I worry they plan to tighten the vise. Tangiers Prime is a primary shipping hub. If they were to declare our Star Jump routes unstable and use that as a pretext to make our port secondary, they could cripple our economy. Their envoy has begun hinting that they might.”

Kyra sat down on their chair, hard. Jack, who had become fairly good at reading her deadpan, could see her outrage over what Tomlin was saying warring with her reluctance to get involved.

Jack sat down on the couch. She gestured at Tomlin to take a seat, too, if he wanted. Sebby scuttled up onto her shoulder and she stroked his carapace absently. “This is bad. I was gonna come see you soon, to warn you again not to dig into what Quintessa’s hiding… but now they want to make everybody disappear?”

“They want to make everybody die,” Tomlin almost growled, sitting down on the couch. “When I was called to the hospital that night, it was after they succeeded with eighteen of my charges. The envoy told the hospital staff that the people in quarantine would be prone to hallucinations, but not to worry about it because they would eventually pass, and to keep them sedated. So when an entire floor of patients began screaming about rising waters and begging for help, nobody paid attention until they began to float out of their beds. The ones that could, anyway. Some had been restrained and some were oblivious thanks to the sedation. When those patients drowned—drowned, in the middle of a dry hospital floor, with other patients levitating—that was when someone finally had the presence of mind to call me.”

Jack suddenly felt nauseated.

Tomlin ran his hand over his face, looking both exhausted and furious. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to burden you with all of this. But with the non-disclosure agreement they made me sign, in order to gain access to the ship at all in the first place, there is no one else I can speak to of such things. Except her, the envoy, and she let them die. I could never possibly trust her, or them.” He looked over at Jack. “But I’m curious as to why you warned me not to.”

“Do you remember the log you saw of the Star Jumps the ship made before it detected the Level Five Incident?” Jack asked.

Tomlin looked startled again, as if wondering how she could know he’d seen it. “Yes.”

“It’s missing a lot of data. We were reading the log on board the Matador, when a bunch of lines suddenly got redacted and then vanished.” Jack set Sebby down on the floor. A cockroach had crawled under the crack between the front door and the floor. “Go get it, Sebby,” she said, and he scuttled after the fleeing insect in a blur of legs and a clatter of pincers. “There were already some redacted lines in the log, because I’d set things up so we’d wake up before the crew and there’d be no record we were on board. But the other lines were pretty significant.”

“The ship notified the Quintessa Corporation that the accident had occurred,” Kyra continued for her. “It sent a whole packet of data to them. We don’t know what was in the packet, but a few minutes after the crew woke up, the ship got an answer back with instructions to destroy the Isomorph Drive and the database it used for calculating Star Jumps.”

Tomlin’s breath caught. “We were told that the drive’s destruction was what had caused the Level Five Incident.”

Jack shook her head, aware that Kyra was doing the same thing. “It looked functional until they sent instructions to ‘decommission’ it. Which were then redacted and deleted from the records before anybody but us could get a look. But you saw what was left. Did you notice how long the last Star Jump was?”

“About four days, I believe.”

“For Star Jumps, that’s long,” Jack said. “Most are under three days apiece. These days, ships spend more time navigating between Jump points than traveling the Jumps themselves, but I’ll bet you already know that.”

Tomlin nodded. “How do you?”

“I did a paper on it a few years ago.” Jack could see he had a lot of questions about that. She held up her hand to stay them. Getting into her study habits and actual age weren’t going to be helpful right now, even if she wanted to talk about them. Which she definitely did not. “The longer a Star Jump lasts, the higher the risk of a Level Five Incident becomes. But nobody knows why because the Quintessa Corporation won’t share details about how the drives work in the first place. The three Phase One Star Jumpers that vanished all had at least one week-long Jump in their itineraries.”

“Yes,” Tomlin said, his voice becoming hushed and almost reverent. “My people were coming to Tangiers on two of those first ships, the Isli and the Tislit. But only the Tislit ever arrived. It is why we have always served in the Tangiers Prime Space Squadrons, and why at least one Amazigh must always be on duty at Space Control, in case the Isli finally appears, so we can bring it home. But all this time… is this the true answer? It was lost between universes, and left stranded there to die, the way these poor souls have been? Ten thousand of our kin?”

“I don’t know,” Jack told him. “I never found an answer to that either, just that this was the most probable explanation.”

“And they know,” Tomlin sighed. “And they do nothing.”

“Whatever it is,” Kyra said, her expression thoughtful, “it’s something they can’t prevent. Maybe it’s part of however the drives work. Like the risks people back on Earth took with nuclear reactors, which mostly worked great, lots of power, no pollution… until they sometimes melted down and fucked everything up for hundreds of miles. My Pa had a lot to say about those, back before he decided to ditch the place and take all of us to ‘God’s New Green World.’ But anyway, maybe it’s a risk that just… comes with the technology.”

“Why wouldn’t they just admit that, then?” Tomlin wondered, clearly not expecting an actual answer from either of them. “It is not as if there is an alternative to the Star Jump drive.”

“Maybe even doing that would cut down on space travel too much?” Kyra wondered. “Or maybe there’s something about why it happens that would upset people if they knew. They were super quick to destroy all of the physical evidence.”

That stirred some vague memory in Jack’s mind, something she couldn’t remember clearly because she hadn’t been paying enough attention at the time. There was a show her cousins had watched one day, a centuries-old classic, in which once a year a group of people were told a terrible secret and then voted on whether to remember it and do something about it, or forget it again and continue on with their lives. Something about that secret, she thought as she struggled toward the memory, might almost explain what was happening now—

It was gone. There wasn’t enough there to recall more. She found herself wishing she’d sat down with Rachel, Joey, and Rob that day to watch that ancient show, instead of taking advantage of the rare occasion that they weren’t monopolizing her grandfather’s gaming console to play a few games herself. She’d overheard some of it, some part of which felt suddenly significant, but it was like a dream that fell apart the more she tried to recall it upon waking.

Maybe it was nothing.

“I think the most important point,” she said after a moment, “is that, regardless of what the secret is, they’re willing to kill whole shipfuls of innocent people to keep it hidden. I’m really worried that you’re in their crosshairs, too. Especially if they figure out that you’ve taught everybody how to survive what’s happened to them. I… don’t have it ready yet, but… I’m making you a backup identity, in case you have to go underground.”

“You can do that?” Tomlin looked startled. She could see him once again weighing her appearance—she didn’t necessarily look like a kid, but she didn’t really look like an adult yet, either—against the things she could do. “Could you do that for my charges?”

She shook her head. “It’s taken me all this time just to put together solid identities for the three of us. Almost two hundred more people? I don’t think we have that kind of time. Would the Imazighen be willing to hide them? Takama told me most of your people live out in the mountains and high plains southeast of here, in the New Atlas Range.”

In fact, the New Marrakesh suburb nicknamed Rif, or Le Rif, mostly housed Amazigh traders passing through with their wares for sale to tourists and offworld merchants in exchange for things the tribes needed, along with a contingent of less nomadic types from across the tribes; their jobs were to provide logistical support and ensure that their people continued to be represented in the local and planetary government. They had made it their duty to continue fighting for their people’s right to live in ways that they, in the process, had to give up themselves.

There were a hundred million Imazighen living out in those vast highlands; some of the tribes had rejected all outsider influence, but others carried comms in their pockets and readily welcomed those new technologies that didn’t conflict with their way of life. A rare few, like Tomlin, came from marriages that weren’t simply inter-tribal—already a complicated affair—but extra-tribal altogether. The diversity she’d observed among the people of Le Rif was, in miniature, the diversity of the Imazighen as a whole. From some of Takama’s hints in recent days, Jack understood that places could be opened within the tribes for outsiders who showed sufficient respect for the culture, such as her and Kyra.

Or, perhaps, for nearly two hundred desperate fugitives with nowhere else to turn for succor, who needed to stay on high ground.

Tomlin was nodding. “I think that could be arranged, at least for a while. Long enough to break their trails and, if possible, help them find their ways home. And if they can’t go home… well, as a people, we are very good at knowing how to hide. You two could hide among us as well, if you wish, for as long as you like.”

It was a sweet offer, and she could see he genuinely meant it, but Jack found herself shaking her head. “I have somewhere I need to go, but thank you.”

Whether or not he knew it yet, her father was waiting for her.

She glanced Kyra’s way, wondering whether her friend would be tempted. But Kyra was shaking her head, too. “I tried my Pa’s agrarian paradise. It’s not for me. I do appreciate the offer, though.”

“I understand,” Tomlin said, his smile indicating that he was not in the least offended. “I must admit that I am more comfortable in a cockpit than a tent, myself. Still, I will do what I must for these people, to keep them safe. Please tell me that the identity you are crafting for me is Amazigh. To my father’s great despair, I’m not a very convincing Scotsman.”

“It is,” Jack reassured him, struggling not to laugh at the sudden mental image of him in a kilt, speaking with a thick brogue. Silly as the image first seemed to her, she suspected he’d still be devastatingly handsome and suave, not at all ridiculous, if he did it.

It surprised her that she was so relaxed around him. Usually, men as handsome as him left her feeling tongue-tied and gauche. Maybe it was just that she’d already won Tomlin’s respect before she’d had a chance to ease up enough to really notice that about him.

“The tide will be down tomorrow night when everyone is sleeping,” Tomlin said. “I think I will bring my charges out of the downtown area then. Once it recedes far enough that they can leave the building, and most people have left the streets, I will take them past the Rif and into the foothills where it cannot reach them at all. My people will take them the rest of the way. But I will have to concoct an explanation for where they have gone, and a distraction of some kind to keep anyone from seeing them leave.”

“J—Finch is really good at those,” Kyra told him. “Since you know who we are, you probably know how we left the hospital during some extremely chaotic malfunctions, right?”

Tomlin nodded slowly. Kyra smiled and tilted her head toward Jack.

“That was all you?” Tomlin asked, startled once more.

“Only way we could get out with a bounty hunter already on-site,” Jack said, struggling to hide the smug grin that wanted to surface. “I had to make sure we got a several-hour head start before they could even realize we weren’t just lost somewhere in the mayhem. And I may have released a few files into the wild that they’d been hiding.”

“Then it’s an especially good thing the Quintessa Corporation has no idea you were on board the Matador. They should be scared of you.” Tomlin grinned, indicating that was a compliment. “If you can come up with a distraction, please let me know. Ask any of my people to get word to Brahim Meziane. That is how they know me best, and it is probably a safer channel than my official name, if Quintessa has its eyes on me.”

Three hours later, as the sun was settling toward the horizon and Jack was putting the final touches on the new identities she had created, she had come up with the perfect way to both get the Matador survivors out of the city unseen… and let her and Kyra keep their beachcombing plans intact in the process.

Tomlin’s gonna love it, she thought with a little bit of glee. But first things first…

“Kyra, I need you for a second,” she called, and her friend entered the room with Sebby on her arm.

“What’s up?”

“I have three names for you to pick from. Which do you like best?” Jack gestured at the screen. Planetary law enforcement had several names held in reserve for witness protection purposes, one of which was about to be taken out of reserve and put into active use. The result would be that, once Jack connected the fake credentials she had created, under a dummy name, to the new name, there would be a genuine birth certificate and a wealth of other, real, identity documentation stored in official locations; no matter how deeply anyone checked into it, no matter how far down they dug, there would be no sign that someone had made it up. These three would work for Kyra’s approximate age and physical appearance.

Kyra leaned over her shoulder, looking at the screen. “Kali Montgomery. I like the way it sounds.”

“Done.” Jack hit a few more buttons on the screen. She loved that name, too, and had almost taken it for herself because it reminded her of both Shazza and Fry, except that she didn’t think she’d look quite old enough to match its base age. “Our identities will be waiting at a drop point downtown in two hours. Along with some funding cards to help Tomlin—I’m gonna put together our funds later. He needs all the money he can get with what he’s about to do.”

“Yeah.” Kyra seemed to have made peace with helping the man. “You know, I never asked, but I’ve always wondered. Why ‘Jack B. Badd?’”

The two were gathering their things as she asked; walking through the switchback roads that led downward to New Marrakesh’s urban center took a while, and both of them preferred to reach drop zones and rendezvous points ahead of anyone else. Jack shrugged, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

“It’s a character from bedtime stories my father used to tell me,” she admitted. She’d never even told Shazza that, and she had confided a lot in her. “Jack B. Badd was always getting into one escapade or another, usually only just managing to stay out of really bad trouble.”

“So, essentially, you.” Kyra snickered.

“Pretty much. Except he really was a boy, not just pretending to be one.” The more Jack thought about it, the more she wondered if the stories had been autobiographical, if John MacNamera, whose closest relatives had sometimes called him “Jack-Mac” where she could hear, had been regaling her with stories about his own scrapes from his childhood.

That was a handle, sticking way out, that she’d never considered when she picked the name: the possibility that its use might make its way back to people who’d recognize the source. Of course, when she’d chosen it, it had never occurred to her that she would end up in quite as many quintessential Jack B. Badd misadventures as she had, or that mercs might one day know the name as belonging to fair prey. That was out of her hands now, though. Fortunately, she’d erased all of the records on Helion that listed her as anything but Jane Doe 7439.

One day, she thought, she’d have to try to erase whatever records Toombs had about her.

Sebby was contentedly patrolling the floorboards, looking for intruders to munch, as they left the apartment.

They stopped by Takama’s food cart on the way, to send word to her nephew that they would come see him at Othman Tower that evening. She gave them a knowing look that suggested she might already be in on the upcoming exodus, before giving Jack a motherly hug and plying both of them with freshly made wraps that they could eat while they walked.

The drop went smoothly. As a precaution, Jack transferred all of the documents and money cards for Tomlin into a storage locker. She’d give him the key and let him pick them up at his convenience. She did the same thing for herself and Kyra; they’d collect theirs on the way back up to the Rif. Once they’d each hidden their keys in their smalls, she switched on her tablet to begin preparing for their meeting with Tomlin by taking control of the security cameras at the base of Othman Tower.

“Oh. Fuck,” she breathed.

The cameras were already off.

26.
A Momentary Lapse from Madness

It took slightly over a Federacy Standard week—four of Tangiers Prime’s strangely elongated day-and-night cycles and some change—before Jack could finish making fake IDs for Kyra, Tomlin, and herself.

The process itself probably took only eight or so hours of her time for each one. But that time had to be divided up into small chunks over the week, each step requiring her to wait for databases to update with new, carefully falsified information, or for a human operator somewhere to review and clear requests that seemed to come from legitimate official sources, or just for redirected funds to finish moving around and become available for the plundering. It might have taken less time if Jack hadn’t also spent extra hours erasing her back-trail in the system once some of the riskier steps were completed.

In between, she and Kyra found that they had a lot of other things to do. Learning how to safely “isomorph” between U1 and Elsewhere topped the list.

They practiced whenever they could. During high tides—never quite as high as that first night’s tide, until the monster wave in the dawn hours two and a half Tangiers days after they’d met with Tomlin—they used the water to buoy them as they practiced safely navigating their way through physical objects like walls, floors, and ceilings. They learned—after a variety of disturbing and comical mishaps—how to consistently make their clothes accompany them on an isomorph, and how to pick up objects from one world and transfer them to the other, and then back. Or not.

Their apartment, now spotless largely thanks to Kyra, acquired unusual decorations brought back from Elsewhere: pale, beautiful twists of driftwood, a chunk of brilliant scarlet coral that they’d found floating through their rooms during their second night, and several exotic shells that had floated through as well. A small ten-legged crustacean, found clinging helplessly onto a piece of driftwood after the monster wave had passed, now lived under their dresser, feasting upon the large insects that infested the building whenever any made the mistake of entering their unit, and periodically creeping over to stare up at Jack in fascination while she worked on building the infrastructure for the fake IDs. Once, she had looked down to find it sitting companionably on her foot, its eyestalks pointed at her face.

When the tides were out, they still practiced, finding empty, deserted spaces where they could work on learning the differences in the geographies of each world and how to account for them. They learned how to switch quickly between ’verses, how to “fade” between them, and how to negotiate differences in the two terrains without getting caught in anything. Kyra, in particular, wanted to practice using combat moves while isomorphing in one direction or another.

“Where did you learn to fight like this?” Jack asked her on the second day, as Kyra patiently showed her how to position her body to deliver a stronger kick.

“I watched the boys back home a lot,” Kyra told her. She still didn’t seem to like talking about life before the standoff and massacre, but she had begun to open up more. “They didn’t teach girls this kind of thing. We were supposed to be homemakers. But they didn’t care if we were nearby doing our chores during their lessons. Some of the boys would show off a little if we were there.”

Jack had already discovered that Kyra was a remarkably quick study, not eidetic like her, but whip-smart and capable of intense focus. It didn’t surprise her to learn that she’d spent much of her days eavesdropping on subjects the Fathers of New Christy refused to teach girls, and then had sneaked out at night to practice what she’d seen when nobody would see or know. The boys of New Christy had been taught karate, boxing, and some other combat styles whose names she hadn’t caught, and she’d relentlessly worked to become better than any of them at all of them, while still completing her stultifying list of “womanly” chores.

The latter explained, Jack reflected, how she’d been able to transform their apartment from a filthy hole in the wall to clean, light, and airy in less than two of New Marrakesh’s crazy-long days.

The only weapons Kyra hadn’t been able to practice with, along the way, were guns, and only because she hadn’t been able to find a way to keep people from hearing her shoot them off in the middle of the night. But she’d taught herself how to aim with bow and arrow, with darts, with knives… and had adapted that knowledge to gun sights and small firearms as best she could. There were infrequent occasions when, in an attempt to put the girls of New Christy in their place and prove to them that “manly” subjects were beyond their reach, one of her male peers would let her and the other girls handle or even shoot a gun, and she used those opportunities to hone her aim while pretending to have no idea what she was doing.

“Zach loved to make fun of girls by getting them to try to shoot,” she explained. “Most of them were playing dumb, too. They’d act like their fingers weren’t strong enough to even pull the triggers. Please. Like the work we were doing every day had left us with delicate little hands… I guess they knew the boys would eat it up, though. But I didn’t play that helpless. He’d tell me that he wanted me to hit the green bottle on the fence, and I’d act like I was aiming for it, but I’d really aim for the knot on the fence post next to it, or the can on its other side. He’d think I was missing when I was making bullseyes. And he was always willing to keep laughing at me if I wanted to keep ‘trying.’”

Kyra, Jack thought, was not nearly as much of a stranger to let’s-pretend games as she seemed to think she was. She just hadn’t learned—yet—how to mimic that many roles. She had two down pat, though: prim, proper quasi-Puritan girl-child… and the ominous, deadly icon of the Killer’s Club that Stacey and Colette had idolized. Jack suspected that her friend still didn’t know who the real Kyra behind either of those masks actually was.

By the time of the standoff, although no one else had known it, Kyra was already the deadliest fighter in New Christy, at least among the children and teens, and needed none of the hurried defensive training they reluctantly gave to the community’s womenfolk.

It had been a startling moment for Jack when she realized that Kyra had been born on Earth, decades before the devastating nuclear war that had finally driven almost all of humanity off the world of its origin.

Part of her had known it, of course; she’d done a report on the New Christy Enclave and knew that their sublight ship had left Earth’s orbit in 2087. But Kyra remembered Earth. She had been six years old when she and her family had boarded a shuttle to the Gateway Prime shipyards on the promise that, at the other end of their long interstellar journey, they would find the agrarian paradise that her father insisted was what God intended for them. She remembered the world of concrete and leaden skies that she’d lived in before then with nostalgia; that, for her, was the world of her innocence before everything had begun to go wrong.

Kyra didn’t realize that Jack’s questions about her old life had a secondary purpose: she wanted to create an identity that her friend would be able to comfortably live within, with a background that wouldn’t be difficult to recall or relate to. It was the same reason that she spent hours learning everything she could about Gavin Brahim Tomlin.

The people she had thought of until then as “Berber,” it turned out, preferred to be called Amazigh in the singular, Imazighen in the plural. That much she’d gleaned from the local shopkeepers and food vendors. Le Rif was Amazigh territory, although no one much minded their intrusion into it. Still, Jack had learned quickly that only outsiders referred to them as “Berbers,” and that if they wanted to be viewed as friends, they needed to adjust their vocabulary a little.

“It is not a kind name, you see,” Takama—rapidly becoming Jack’s favorite food cart vendor—had told her with a gentle smile as she dished up a fragrant bowl of spiced lamb and barley, placing two medfouna beside it. “It’s what colonizers have called us for thousands of years, but it has never been our name for ourselves. The Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Spanish, the French… it comes from the same root as ‘barbarian,’ and that is how they all saw us. To them we were unruly children, meant to be enslaved. We were not meant to govern our own lives in their eyes. Even now, on this beautiful new world, there are those who wish us to subsume our identity to theirs, who refuse to acknowledge that our traditions are no more primitive than their own.”

That had given Jack a great deal to think about, and she had resolutely struck “Berber” from her vocabulary. Kyra, who had never heard of them before coming to Tangiers Prime, did the same with even greater ease. From the Imazighen, Jack had learned far more about Tomlin, the man, than she’d been able to glean from the networks; he was a local hero.

Almost forty Standard years earlier, Cedric Tomlin, from the Scottish colony world of New Alba, had come to Tangiers Prime as a combat flight instructor. He had swiftly fallen in love with the world, and more specifically, with Safiyya Meziane, a linguistics professor who taught second-language courses in all four of Tangiers Prime’s official languages: Arabic, Tamazight—the language Jack had thought of, until then, as “Berber”—French, and English. They had married, and a year later had given birth to a son who received names reflecting both of his heritages.

Gavin Brahim Tomlin had inherited his mother’s facility with languages and his father’s love of flying. He had trained as a combat pilot and had fought in dozens of deadly skirmishes with starship ’jackers who tried to prey upon the Sol Track shipping lanes where they intersected with the Tangiers system. Many of those battles had crept into local legend and had earned him the nickname “El Krim” among the Le Rif—or, Takama told her, just Rif—community.

Now thirty-five, Tomlin had retired “young” from flying after the last major ’Enza variant sidelined him for nearly a year. The gossip Jack had gleaned from Takama was that, although he’d taken several months to recover from the illness, what had very nearly crippled him was the loss of his wife Thiyya, four months pregnant with what would have been their first child, to the disease.

With no guarantee that he would recover enough to be recertified for combat flight, he had retrained and then taken up a position with Tangiers Prime’s Space Traffic Control two years later. His hire was considered a major coup, because in addition to being a local hero, he was a polyglot like his mother and was fluent in almost all of the languages used by ships’ crews that came through the Tangiers system. He had been on duty on Tangiers Station A when the Scarlet Matador had contacted him a Standard day earlier than expected.

If the crew had told him that they weren’t trained or certified to land the ship on the planet’s surface, Jack realized, he could have boarded it and handled the landing for them personally. And, undoubtedly, would have done so without a second thought.

The rest of his story was, for the moment, classified, and she’d worked hard to get access to it. Rather than handing the crisis off to someone else, Tomlin had coordinated with the surface to set up a landing and quarantine zone for the Matador before taking a shuttle to New Marrakesh to oversee everything personally, even sleeping—as Jack had overheard in the flyer—in its Ground Control headquarters to ensure that he would be immediately available if the Matador called. Once the ship had been fully evacuated and the passengers and crews had been quarantined in the top six floors of the hospital tower—

Six floors, Jack thought with sadness. Only four of those floors stayed above the tide that night.

—he had briefly been replaced by a designated representative of the Quintessa Corporation, who had taken over “oversight” of the quarantine. After eighteen people died on her watch, despite the Corporation’s attempts to stay in control, the planetary government overruled them and had even made veiled threats about an inquest into Threshold Syndrome if they obstructed Tomlin’s command again. He had been put back in charge, and while Quintessa had sharply questioned his recent decision to move the Matador survivors from the swanky Mansour Plaza to the highest completed levels of New Marrakesh’s still-under-construction Othman Tower, nobody was impeding his decisions… yet.

Things were tense there, but so far it had remained the prickly tension of people who were overtly polite to each other even as they worked at cross-purposes. None of Jack’s delvings into higher security systems had turned up signs that Quintessa viewed Tomlin as any kind of active threat. Yet.

No one had died since he had taken back command.

From all of this information, Jack slowly wove together identities that she hoped Kyra and Tomlin would each find comfortable to take on, ones that would play to their strengths and explain away their weaknesses without drawing too many comparisons to the personas they would be leaving behind. The identity she constructed herself, although every bit as durable, was simpler, credentialing her developing technical skills so that she could join the next supply crew headed for Furya without too many questions. The next scheduled supply ship was a month away; with luck, she would be on it.

Jack, who no longer believed that luck was in any way on her side, planned to make sure that she was the best possible candidate for the job when it opened. In the rare moments when none of their other agendas dominated her time, she relentlessly studied the technical schematics of commonly used supply ships.

The news from Helion Prime interested her, as well. Relay drones, capable of traversing the Sol Track lanes at speeds that no ships with lives on board could, had already brought stories of the scandal gripping the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital of New Athens.

New Athens? That startled Jack, who had spent her whole time on Helion—which was, she realized, derived more from Greek than Arabic—thinking that she was in a city called New Mecca. Heather had teased her about it, but she still hadn’t quite grasped how much of her understanding of that world had been shaped by Imam Abu al-Walid’s startling parochialism. Would Riddick, she wondered, have been so complacent about leaving her in the man’s care if he had realized?

You have to let it all go, she scolded herself. He’s gone his way and you’ve gone yours. You’ll never meet again. It’s done. Don’t worry about what he was thinking.

Director Flint and several of his subordinates were under investigation, both for enrolling patients in experimental treatments and then attempting to cover up negative outcomes and, more interestingly, for maintaining lax security that had resulted in dozens of patients acquiring illicit staff accounts within the system.

The Killer’s Club, it seemed, hadn’t been the only ones who had pulled that trick.

Careful checking showed that nobody had discovered her account, which she had hidden behind law enforcement code once she had the run of the system, but all of the others had been found. Although Stacey was never named, her violent porn collection, also in the possession of several underage boys in the male wards, had become a topic of heated debate and recrimination. The rationalization that the staff had had for letting them keep it—that their willingness to voluntarily surrender it would be a sign of their recovery—was lambasted by other experts who accused the doctors and nurses of feeding and enabling addictive behavior instead, and of potentially creating sexual predators in the process.

Jack’s escape, and Kyra’s, had been completely overshadowed by the rest of the drama. She suspected that had a lot to do with Toombs, who probably didn’t want other mercs horning in on Richard B. Riddick’s putative trail. While articles occasionally mentioned that two patients had gone missing and had yet to be recovered, they always treated the escape as an effect of the pandemonium that had briefly overtaken the facility… rather than as its cause. If anyone on Helion knew better, they weren’t willing to go on the record saying so.

Amnesty Interplanetary, however, had a great deal to say about the fact that Kyra Wittier-Collins, better known as the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, had fled custody right before she was going to be illegally extradited back to New Dartmouth in violation of Federacy rulings. That scandal was every bit as high-profile as the one embroiling the hospital. Two members of the New Dartmouth cabinet had tendered their resignations as the fallout spread, and as the abuses that had been perpetrated against Kyra, prior to her transfer to Helion, came to light.

Sometimes, Jack thought, justice actually won. A quick check reassured her that none of the orderlies and nurses she’d liked and respected at the hospital were in any trouble, although most were actively seeking new positions at other facilities. A few of the older ones had quietly retired.

It was mid-late afternoon, four days after Jack and Kyra had met with Tomlin, when they saw him again. Jack didn’t quite have the IDs complete—she still had to pick out names for each of them—and had one or two more sessions in the law enforcement networks before everything would be solidified. But she was feeling relaxed and confident. Nine PM, anywhere else in the Federacy, would have signified late evening, but not during a 44-hour day. To the people of Tangiers Prime, it was the equivalent of late morning after their long high noon sleeping period. Elsewhere’s high tide, which shifted roughly an hour later with each cycle, was at its peak once more. In another long day, low tide would occur around noon and midnight, and Jack and Kyra were planning to make the most of that to explore Elsewhere’s hidden landscapes when most people were abed.

Sipping at ices, discussing the prospects of trans-dimensional beachcombing, they felt almost like ordinary teenage girls as they walked back to their apartment building.

Gavin Brahim Tomlin, El Krim himself, was sitting on their front step waiting for them.

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Author’s Note: Abd El-Krim, in the 1920s, led the Imazighen of Morocco’s Rif region in a successful revolt against Spanish colonial rule. His attempt to establish an independent Rif Republic resulted in a combined force of French, Spanish, and Moroccan armies driving him into exile in Egypt, but to the people of the Rif, he remains an important heroic figure. Many contemporary Moroccan textbooks claim he fought against the French and Spanish for the Moroccan monarchy, something the Imazighen of the Rif call revisionist whitewashing. Amazigh culture, and thus the culture’s folklore, is tribal-collectivist and has few solitary-figure heroes to draw from—outside of stories derived from the same sources that fueled better-known Greek mythology—for use in giving a nickname to a living folk hero of the future, so nicknaming him after a legendary and largely-unsung freedom fighter seemed like the next best thing.