The Changeling Game, Chapter 49

49.
Sacrifice Play

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

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

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

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

“It was my fault—” Jack began.

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

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

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

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

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

Jack nodded slowly.

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

“Yeah…”

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

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

“And then you said what, again?”

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

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

“Not right away…”

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

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

“When did they stop?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I…” When Kyra put it like that…

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

Jack didn’t know what to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait…” Izil said.

“Shit,” Kyra muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The others looked at her inquiringly.

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

Did it?

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

…but it had never really gotten better after that.

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

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

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

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

The revelation had broken the group, too.

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

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

When she trailed off, Ewan drew in a breath.

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

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

“Say what?” Jack asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against her back, she felt Ewan tense up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which, technically, was true, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should’ve let them leave me behind…

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he’d walked away.

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

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

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