The Changeling Game, Chapter 51

51.
Who We Become in the Darkness

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

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

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

“Will it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and needed to stay that way.

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

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

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

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

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

I knew he’d come to save us.

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

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

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

“Riding a combat high,” Ewan murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to get on with the story, either way.

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

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

“It was starting to rain,” Jack sighed.

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

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

“So where the hell’s your God now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A month?” Jack gasped.

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

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

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

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

The low, rumbling groans of the beasts—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and turned her into a murderer.