The Changeling Game, Chapter 48

48.
Tizzy the Terrible

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

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

“Tizzy. Tizzy. Keep it down…”

Jack’s eyes flew open.

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

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

Fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, weirdly, had been the driving force behind the dream. She’d “awakened” in it to find Ewan beside their bed, taking her hand and putting a finger to her lips when she started to ask what he was doing. He’d led her down to the garage and to a large, rugged vehicle, strapping her in without speaking, and driven them out of the city and into the mountains. Rather than give her up, he had decided to abandon his career and reputation and claim her as his own right then…

It was all very wish-fulfillment but was absolutely the opposite of what the real Ewan would ever do, she thought. Even given how devastated he’d looked after dinner.

“God, part of me wishes that hadn’t been a dream… that it had been real…”

“He wouldn’t be the man you’re hung up on if it had been, you know,” Kyra sighed next to her. “Part of what you’re in love with is the fact that he’d never do something like that. Never actually hurt you. And doing that would hurt you. Trust me, it really would.”

“I know…” Jack grumped. “I really do know that. Sometimes.”

And sometimes, she thought ruefully, she started to convince herself that she’d be able to handle it, that she was plenty adult enough to offer and receive such things. Only after those moments passed would she realize, yet again, that those were some of her most childish thoughts of all.

She’d had similar fantasies about Riddick, half a year earlier. Sometimes she wondered if that was why he’d disappeared on her, because he knew what she felt for him and was worried that, if she offered herself to him the way she’d sometimes fantasized about doing, he might take her up on it. Had crushing on him driven him away?

I just wish he’d said good-bye…

But part of her was dreading how hard it was going to be to say good-bye to Ewan.

Another part of her wished she’d never started crushing on him, either, or whatever it was she was feeling. She missed Ewan’s hugs, missed resting her head against his chest or shoulder and having him hold her close, missed the affection, teasing, and intuitive understanding of each other’s ideas that they’d been able to share those first few days… before any touch, any glance, had started setting her body on fire. The desire she felt, and couldn’t control, had become a barrier that was cheating her out of one of the most powerful emotional bonds she’d ever found.

And now it was too late to find a way to fix that.

“Time fixes it,” Kyra said, as if replying to spoken words rather than her thoughts. “You won’t be a bundle of hormones forever. Or maybe you’ll just figure out how to handle them. Not sure. I read up on some of that stuff at the hospital, and actually talked about it with one or two of my therapists. Mostly I was trying to figure out why I feel so dead inside about the whole thing… turns out a lot of rape survivors do. But I read about what normal sex drives are supposed to be like, too, especially when they’ve just kicked on… and it’ll get easier to handle. In time.”

“Fuckin’ time,” Jack groaned. “I’m almost out of that…”

“Nuh uh,” Kyra snickered. “You’re just going home for a while. Once you learn how to handle it all, and the ’verse says you’re a legal adult… look out worlds, here comes Tizzy the Terrible!”

“Oh, my God…”

“Hey, it’s a step up from Jack B. Badd. Isn’t that really your dad, anyway?”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted, laughing. “The more I think about it, the more I think I stole his childhood nickname.”

“And now you have your own,” Kyra grinned.

She had to admit, she liked being “Tizzy…”

“I can’t take it with me, though,” she found herself musing. “It’d connect me to here. When I get back home, I can’t ever be either ‘Jack’ or ‘Tizzy’ anymore.”

“Yeah, not if you want to ever come back here someday,” Kyra said after a moment. “I can’t take ‘Dihya’ with me, either. Fuck, I’m gonna miss that name…”

“Maybe one day you’ll get to use your own name again, though,” Jack said. “Once you’re eighteen, New Dartmouth law says your criminal record as a minor gets sealed, even if the statute of limitations isn’t up and even if they haven’t had a chance to prosecute yet. I looked it up. Once you turn eighteen, they can’t touch you. So, like, two years from now… you can tell the whole ’verse your real name if you want.”

“Yeah,” Kyra replied, her voice wistful, “but the whole ’verse already knows who that is. It’s still gonna be the same deal… they’ll think I should be in jail anyway. And if I want to come back here in a few years and try to network with those officer friends of Tomlin’s, it definitely can’t be as me. Toombs made sure of that.”

“Fuckin’ Toombs…” Jack found herself wishing she’d sent him on his wild goose chase on a much more inhospitable world than Shakti Four. There was a frigid, desolate, barely habitable planet she’d heard about a while back, UV-6, that would have been perfect. She could have made him freeze his ass off the whole time he was chasing his own malodorous tail. Too late now, though… “Well, maybe in a few years, Kali Montgomery can do that networking instead, right?”

“Yeah, she’s even got a military background. It’ll all work out…” But Kyra was shielding her thoughts from Jack again. She could feel the barrier that had gone up.

“Are you okay with me knowing that name?” Jack asked, wondering if that was the problem. “Because I can show you how to make a new ID if you want.”

“Nah, it’s all good.” Kyra shook her head and quirked a smile at Jack. “I like that name. Picked it myself. It’s fine. I’m really not worried about you getting caught and interrogated. You’re an escape artist. People go to grab you and whoosh, you’re somewhere else. That was true even before you learned how to isomorph.”

“Okay.” Jack sighed, still wishing she knew what Kyra was hiding. “Are you okay with what I did last night?”

“What’d you do last night?”

“When you were having a nightmare. And I stopped it.”

Kyra frowned quizzically at her. “I had a nightmare? I don’t remember. Well, thank you for stopping it, anyway. But I just remember having a really… nice dream.” An almost-goofy smile crossed her lips. “Nearly as nice as the one you had.”

Maybe that was the only part she remembered?

When Jack had taken over the dream, she’d depicted Riddick single-handedly slaughtering all of Red Roger’s men, drawing from the spectacular combat moves she’d seen him use when he’d battled the shrylls, and then gutting Roger Fiennes himself while Kyra watched. Then he had offered her his hand and told her that he was taking her away from Canaan Mountain and the New Christy Enclave, enacting every facet of the rescue that she’d always wished for.

At that point, she had let Kyra start “driving” again and withdrawn from her sister’s mind. Where they’d gone from there, she didn’t know. She’d needed some sleep of her own. Steering someone else’s dreams like that had turned out to be hard work.

“You’re welcome,” she told Kyra, grinning. “As long as you got a good night’s sleep, right? I was thinking… when we take Sebby back—”

Reee? Sebby lifted his head. He had been sleeping down by their feet.

“Yeah, you, sweetie. Don’t worry. We’re gonna take good care of you, I promise. But I was thinking we could ask Tafrara where she buys the plants she puts in the courtyard, and buy a little olive tree to take with us. Maybe even two. So Sebby can eat olives forever.”

Kyra’s eyes lit up at the idea. “Oh my God, Tizzy, that’s it. That’s also the way we can leave something behind here for the family. We can plant something in the courtyard, and to everybody else in the ’verse it’ll just be another plant, but they’ll always know it came from us.”

Sebby squeaked and bounced up the bed to them, catching their enthusiasm and chirping happily. Jack could tell he had olives in mind now, and that they’d better bring some up for him when they came back from breakfast with his crickets.

“Oh shit. I don’t think Izil is gonna buy enough crickets!” Sebby had more than doubled in size, after all.

“He will if we catch him before he goes,” Kyra said, climbing out of bed. Jack hurried after her.

Izil had already left, but Lalla, hearing the problem, put together an “appetizer” plate of Sebby’s favorite human foods for him, including an abundance of olives, to compensate. Breakfast was still half an hour off, but almost everyone was up, and they all wanted to see how Sebby had grown and take a look at his exuviae. Jack led the way, carrying up the tray, while Kyra talked to Tafrara about buying some olive trees and the idea of planting something special in the courtyard.

Focusing on keeping the tray balanced, Jack didn’t realize that Ewan was the one walking beside her until he opened the bedroom door for her. He seemed unusually subdued.

“You okay?” she asked as she went through the door, forcing herself not to brush up against him in passing.

“Yes…” Ewan’s smile was dim in comparison to the ones he usually flashed her. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

Sebby chirped in curiosity as everybody filed in. He seemed a lot less nervous about the whole family crowding the room.

“Baraka, he’s grown so big!” Takama marveled.

“Izil needs to see this when he gets back,” Safiyya laughed. “His degree is in zoology. He will love this.”

“He’s going back up into the New Atlas Mountains soon, isn’t he?” Jack asked. When Safiyya nodded, she turned to General Toal. “Can… can I give him Sebby’s exuviae to take with him? Would that be okay? It wouldn’t be anywhere near New Marrakesh, and it doesn’t have any quantum connections to Elsewhere.”

How, she suddenly wondered, did she know that last bit?

“As long as he can be discreet about it,” the General answered slowly, “that should be all right. Sebby’s morphology is quite alien, in truth, but if he is willing to claim that it was sent to him from somewhere offworld, and promises not to publish any articles about your pet…”

“We’ll make sure he agrees to that,” Cedric told the General.

If for some reason they couldn’t return Sebby to Elsewhere, Jack decided, Izil should be the one to take custody of him. He was, after all, a zoologist, he’d been fascinated by Sebby from the beginning, and he’d taken it upon himself to keep their rambunctious crustacean well fed. She glanced at Kyra and saw her knowing nod of agreement.

Sebby, meanwhile, was happily chomping olives and squeak-mumbling softly to himself.

Breakfast was subdued, the mood from the prior evening carrying over. Kyra and Tafrara continued discussing plants and refining the idea for the garden. They decided that she and Jack should each pick out a plant for the courtyard when they went to get an olive tree or two, and once they had picked out their plants, Tafrara would determine the best locations for each one in the courtyard.

“We can never tell anyone outside of the family who planted them, of course,” Takama said as they finished solidifying the plan, “but it will be a nice thing for all of us to know. I have spoken with the other tribal representatives in the Rif, and they have all agreed to our story. Two distant cousins from our tribe, Dihya and Tislilel, came to town in preparation for the engagement Moussem, which of course ended up being canceled after the explosion. In an unhappy turn of events, they then fell ill with Atlas Fever shortly after Brahim’s memorial and had to be sent home once they recovered enough to travel. And that is as much as anyone in the Rif will ever say about you… aside from that you were lovely, pleasant, polite girls whenever you came to the market. Which at least means they will have something true to say.”

It felt, to Jack, like an epitaph. By the look on Ewan’s face, he felt the same way.

Izil joined them at the end of the meal, cricket box under his arm, and was immediately excited to hear about Sebby’s molt. Kyra led him upstairs to see, telling Jack that she’d been practicing the isomorph trick and wanted to try it with the crickets herself. Jack, Ewan, and Tafrara followed not long after.

Izil and Kyra were sitting by the tub, watching Sebby play with his food and talking quietly. Izil stood up as Jack entered the room.

“Dihya tells me that you two feel, if you are unable to return Sebby to Elsewhere next morning-day, that I should take him with me into the mountains when I go,” he said, taking her hand. “I am honored. I do hope he can be released among his own kind, but I promise to take very good care of him for you if he cannot be.”

“Thank you.” It was a relief to know that, no matter what, Sebby would be safe. Now she just had to figure out a way to stop worrying so much about Kyra.

“After dinner,” Tafrara told her and Kyra, “we will go pick out plants. My favorite nursery is open into the overnoon hours and that’s the best and quietest time to find things, so we’ll go there shortly before we plan to retire for sleep ourselves. In the meantime…”

“We want to spend as much time with you today as possible,” Ewan said, his eyes on Jack.

She could see how hard he was trying to hide the full depth of what he was feeling. For a moment, she imagined she saw an echo of her dream in his eyes.

The first thing they did was Kyra’s physical therapy session, which now incorporated Tai Chi. Jack was fascinated. Ewan led them, while Tafrara moved between her and Kyra to correct their balance and posture. He began with breathing and balance, and then had them lift their arms and legs into specific positions, holding them and slowly moving from one to another. The way Jack felt herself concentrating reminded her of the way she had focused to keep the floor of U1 beneath her in Elsewhere.

An hour passed, almost before she knew it. As Kyra had said, she could feel, in the aftermath, how much work her body had actually been doing, even though each moment had felt easy and natural. She didn’t feel it in an achy or uncomfortable way, though. She felt as if she’d tapped into something powerful.

No wonder meditating kept Riddick from going crazy in his cryotube… Maybe the way that meditation condensed time had countered the way that cryosleep drugs stretched it out.

I need to keep doing this. She wondered if there were classes back on Deckard’s World.

“So, what would you two like to do next?” Tafrara asked.

“Tizzy’s been telling me the story of the Hunter-Gratzner crash,” Kyra said. “I was hoping she could finish telling it before we have to split up… although maybe she should start over if you guys are gonna hear it, too?”

It was, Jack thought, a kind of souvenir she could leave behind with Ewan, Izil, and Tafrara: the story of the accident that had ultimately brought her, and Kyra, to their doorstep. A truth that few knew, given the lies that had begun to circulate since then. They could be trusted with it. And who knew; one day, one of them might come face to face with Richard B. Riddick himself, and the story they knew might just save their lives.

She didn’t start from quite the same place that she had with Kyra, though. General Toal had made it clear that she wasn’t allowed to reveal anything about where she had come from or where she had been trying to go, after all. So…

“I would have come to the Tangiers System on the Hunter-Gratzner a few months before I ended up getting here, if it hadn’t crashed,” she began instead. “But it came out of one of its Star Jumps and crossed a comet’s path on its way to the next Jump Point, and got holed by a bunch of micrometeors. That’s what the inquiry afterwards figured out. Most of the crew died in their tubes, except for the navigator and the docking pilot. The ship crash-landed on a planet with an outpost that had lost contact with the Federacy about twenty-two years ago. But I didn’t know any of that until much later. The first thing I knew, I was waking up in my cryotube, lying on my side, and couldn’t get the doors to open…”

This time, as she spoke, she conjured vivid mental images for Kyra, matching them to her words. Pounding on the box, wondering if it was now her coffin, until Shazza and Zeke had appeared through the glass and begun cutting her out…

Kyra had her eyes closed, focusing on the visions Jack was feeding her.

Jack skipped over some things, like some of the conversations she’d had with Paris while they rummaged through his storage compartment for supplies and, later, weapons once Riddick escaped into the desert. For some odd reason, she felt weirdly possessive of that relationship, maybe because she’d begun drawing upon some of the things he’d told her about running museum heists for her own excursions into burglary. Plus, more practically, those were conversations she’d portrayed as happening before the cash, the first time she’d told the story to Kyra. As she retold the parts Kyra had already heard, doing imitations of each person’s voice and mannerisms as she reproduced dialogues, Kyra began saying her lines for her.

“How do I get eyes like that?” Kyra asked softly, as Jack described Riddick glancing over at her after his chained lunge toward Fry.

“You gotta kill a few people,” Jack answered in her Riddick imitation, not bothering to correct her sister’s wording this time, either.

“Okay, I can do it…”

Maybe it should have worried her, but it was fun to have Kyra participate that way. She let it slide, moving forward with the tale.

The eclipse had descended over the crash planet, Hassan had died, and the survivors had adopted Fry’s plan to return to the settlement as the lunch hour approached in New Marrakesh. Now she was coming up on the part of the story that still had her fuming, all these months later.

“We got to work making as much light as we could, from everything we could find. Paris had me find him a bunch of these weird tubes that he could use to make wicks for the liquor bottles. And Fry told me to start pulling these big, glowing fiberoptic cables out of the bulkheads,” she said, unable to keep a grumble out of her voice. “Those things were glowing really brightly, and there were a ton of them, and I thought maybe there’d be enough light to use them to power the Sand Cat. They were talking about pulling everything on a sled and draping the cables over our shoulders as we ran, and nobody’d stop to listen to me, even if just to tell me they’d already thought of it and it wouldn’t work…”

“Fry,” she’d said, holding up a glowing coil, “don’t you think this’d be enough to run—”

“No, Jack, pull it all down. We need all of it.”

“That’s not what I—”

“El-Imam, I need to talk to you for a second,” Fry said, walking off without another word to her.

“Johns,” she’d tried again. “I was thinking if we coiled enough of this up around the—”

“Look, kid, I’m busy. Talk to Fry if you need something.” He had one of his shotgun shells, a bright red one, in his hand and was turning it over and over as if that was the most important task in the universe.

“But she—”

“Talk. To. Fry.” The glare he’d given her had driven her back.

“Paris, I was wondering—”

“Just who I wanted to see. Do you think you can carry some of the food supplies in your backpack? We won’t need them until we get to the skiff.”

“Sure, but—”

“Brilliant. Here we go. Now, I still have to figure out how we’re going to bundle up and pull all of these bottles.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to t—”

“Must run. So much to do before we set off…”

“Imam, I have an idea—”

“Child, have you finished coiling up the cables? We really are in a hurry.”

“But we won’t have to be if you would just—”

“Stay on task. Suleiman!” He switched to Arabic, which she hadn’t understood at the time but now could parse from memory. “Have you disconnected the secondary power generator? Hurry!”

“I just wanted to tell them,” Jack concluded for her audience, “that the fiberoptics could produce enough light to switch the Sand Cat’s photovoltaic collector back on and probably have enough left over to ring its perimeter. We could’ve driven the whole way back if they’d just stopped to listen…”

“Didn’t Riddick listen to you?” Kyra asked, odd longing in her voice.

“He was busy, too,” Jack moped. “He passed by me once, talking to Fry as he went. He did say something to me, but he was gone before I could reply. He said ‘check your cuts. These bad boys know our blood now.’ I didn’t have any cuts but… I think he knew I was having my period and was warning me that the things outside would know, too. Fuck, I hate being too young to be listened to…”

“We will always listen to you, Tislilel,” Ewan said. His hand on her shoulder, for once, didn’t send a jolt down to her core but filled her instead with wistful yearning for the peace he was offering. She had less than one Tangiers day left before he would be gone.

“Yes,” Izil agreed. “Always.”

Kyra took Jack’s hand and gave it a squeeze, maybe feeling her sudden, stricken longing. To find this kind of acceptance and respect, and to have to give it up, leave it behind…

“Would it have worked?” Ewan asked Tafrara. “Using the fiberoptics?”

“I think it would have,” she said after a thoughtful moment. One of her degrees, Jack had learned, was in Engineering, much like John MacNamera’s. “They had their own power source, yes? Which you had to drag? I’ve seen the kinds of fiberoptics you speak of. They could have been more than sufficient. Especially with direct application, coiling around the collector as you describe. What color of light was the photovoltaic engine designed to work under?”

“All colors, I think,” Jack sighed. “The twin suns were red and yellow, made everything look real orange when they were up, and the third sun was blue like the fiberoptic light. It ran under both kinds of light, so it should’ve been fine. I figured if we piled enough lit coils onto the collector…”

“Yes,” Tafrara told her, looking sympathetic and a little sad. “It would have worked. What did they do instead?”

“We put the generator powering them onto this sled they made out of a piece of the ship’s outer hull,” Jack muttered, trying hard not to whine about it. Her eyes and nose were stinging. “Along with the rest of the power cells we needed to launch the skiff, and a bunch of Paris’s liquor bottles, some flashlights, and other stuff they’d scavenged. It was so heavy. Then we wrapped the fiberoptics around our bodies, all connected to that one generator. Riddick ran ahead, and Imam and Johns grabbed onto rope handles on the sled to drag it, and the rest of us ran alongside the sled to keep up with the generator and surround each other with light. And we followed Riddick into the darkness…”

And, she thought miserably as she followed everyone downstairs for lunch, four more of the crash survivors, three of whom she had genuinely bonded with, had died.

But what was worse, she thought as she sat down at the table, was that even if maybe they should have listened to her about the Sand Cat, what happened after that…

…was all her fault.