The Changeling Game, Chapter 53

53.
Save a Last Sebby Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little larva, you are distressed. What has happened?

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

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

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

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

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

Hush. It is grieving.

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

We do not know.

“Really? But… how were you made?”

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

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

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

Your species rears its young?

“Yeah, most of the time.”

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

“You… seed yourselves…?”

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

And yet they never do.

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

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

You are never appeased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sensed that they were excited by this development.

Soon… you will not be a little larva anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m gonna miss you so much…

Miss you more…

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

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

One last Sebby Dance…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those were Sebby’s thoughts.

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

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

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

Love my sisters…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Izil… good brother. Kind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t want to have to leave them…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reeeeeeeeeeeee…

He stared southeast, both antennae forward.

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

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

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

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

Ten minutes later, the answer came.

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

Sebby began to bounce. Coming! Coming!

“What’s coming, Sebby?”

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

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

Mommy!

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

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

“Holy shit.”