The Changeling Game, Chapter 56

56.
Always Her Sister, Never His

Jack sat on the roof by the fire bush and watched the sun rise one final time for her on Tangiers Prime, part of her afraid that she would never see it rise there again.

New Marrakesh sloped down to the west, its jewel box glow fading as twilight gave way to daylight. In Elsewhere, the tide had reached the ait Meziane house and was rising around it. Qamar was setting on the western horizon. Somewhere on it, Ewan was probably in the process of being recertified for combat flight and settling back into the life he’d known before they’d met.

As, she reminded herself, she would have to.

Breakfast had been postponed until after sunrise, Lalla insisting that, given the timing of everyone’s planned departures, a heartier “brunch” would be better. Jack was considering making a return to Ewan’s room to see his paintings, once enough light began to fill it—

“I thought I might find you up here,” General Toal rumbled behind her.

He took a seat near her in one of the chairs that had been arranged to take in both the fire bush and the spectacular view. His eyes, however, remained on her.

“What is it?” Jack asked. She knew him well enough now to know that he would prefer not to waste time on pleasantries and small talk. It was something she liked a great deal about him.

“There are some things I need to tell you, that would best be discussed here and now rather than at the train station. No chance of eavesdroppers.”

“Okay.” She felt a small prickle of unease but tried to let it go.

“I know Ewan Zdan gave you an emergency comm number. I understand his rationale for doing so, and I know that if he hadn’t, worrying that you were out there, alone and defenseless, would have preyed on him unbearably. I could have stopped him from doing it, but I didn’t. But now, I need you to understand that you are not to use it, for any reason, for at least the next four and a half years.”

Jack stared at him, speechless.

“I will not leave you out there undefended. I’ll give you another emergency number to use, one that will reach me. You can use that number whenever you need to, wherever you may be. But if you were to call for his help before that time is up, you could destroy him.”

“…How…?”

Fortunately, he understood what she was asking despite her inability to get the words out. “The next few years are a very demanding time in a new fighter pilot’s life. Leaves are rare and must accommodate mission schedules rather than the reverse. Imagine, in the midst of those duties… say, two or three years from now… you found yourself in danger and called him for help. Imagine, to answer that call, he had to disobey his mission orders and go A.W.O.L. And now imagine what would happen upon his return, when he was arrested and court-martialed, and it came to light that he had run off to meet up with a teenage girl, not yet of legal age, who had only been thirteen years old when he fell in love with her.”

Jack couldn’t restrain a gasp. In love? His choice of phrasing left her reeling.

“Do you think anyone would believe him,” General Toal continued, “if he said he’d never touched you improperly even once? Do you think there would be any defense he could put forth that would prevent a dishonorable discharge? Or even, possibly, time in a military prison?”

She hadn’t expected him, or anyone, to be quite so blunt. Everyone had been so careful not to give a name to the …tension… between Ewan and her until then. But maybe she had needed this bucket of icewater dumped all over her. “Oh. God.”

“He didn’t know you were only thirteen when he fell in love, of course.” The General’s voice was gentler now. “When his family first met you, almost nothing was known about you except that Gavin Brahim believed you had infiltrated the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital to rescue Kyra Wittier-Collins. All of your records there had been destroyed, apparently by you during the escape you had engineered. You were knowledgeable enough and authoritative enough in his meetings with you that he estimated you were older than Kyra, and her records clearly indicate she’s sixteen years old. He thought you were possibly even a legal adult using an unusually youthful appearance as a cover. That was Takama’s initial assessment of you, as well, because you behaved much like one of her high-performing University students.”

Part of Jack wanted to feel a sense of accomplishment about that—it meant that her portrayal of Marianne Tepper, legal adult, might just stand up to scrutiny—but a sense of dread was building within her, too.

“After Gavin Brahim… died… in the Spaceport Explosion,” he continued, “it became clear to his parents and aunt that you couldn’t be much older than Kyra, but she seemed to follow your lead enough that it never occurred to them that you might be much younger. That was what Ewan Zdan believed he knew about you when you two first met.”

Sixteen. Ewan had thought she and Kyra were both sixteen when he’d made up the cover story of them coming to town for the engagement Moussem, an event he would have believed they were only two years too young for. Aging them upward, she realized, had been his ploy to make it sound impossible for his “cousins” to be the girls Toombs and Logan were seeking. Apparently he’d had no idea just how much upward he was aging her. But then, her current ID said she was even older.

He’d thought it was a sixteen-year-old holding him when he’d broken down, and a sixteen-year-old he’d held, after he spoke of being outraged at someone so young being forced onto a battlefield… when he’d comforted her on the wet sands of Elsewhere after a corpse falling onto her had triggered a panic attack… when he’d used his body to support hers while she wrestled the Scarlet Matador out of U1… and later, when he’d come so very close to kissing her…

“When… did he find out…?” Had her mouth ever felt this dry?

“After the two of you returned from your ‘morgue heist,’” The General told her, his expression almost kind, “he confided in his father that there was a moment when he had almost lost control and kissed you, and might have done a great deal more than that if he had, because you had seemed quite receptive. He had managed to control himself, but he asked to be chaperoned with you from then on so that he wouldn’t give in to temptation and possibly do you harm. He spoke of hoping to be able to court you properly if you were still on Tangiers Prime two years from now. Cedric contacted me because I was the source of the intelligence that Takama had passed on to Gavin Brahim about the two of you. He told me that they needed to know more about you, who you were, whom you might work for, and above all, how old you really were, because Ewan Zdan’s happiness, reputation, and very future might depend upon the answers.”

And, of course, Jack thought, she’d been so cagey about revealing any details about who she really was… if they’d actually asked her, she’d probably have tried to lie. They must have known that, too.

“As it happens,” General Toal continued, “I had only just received additional files from Helion Prime, about a girl who had spent three days in Intensive Care at New Athens General before being transferred to the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital… whose patient records initially named her Jackie al-Walid before re-designating her as Jane Doe 7439.”

Jack’s heart lurched. She’d never even thought to look for those files, to try to hide them, assuming she even could have reached them—

“The documents now only exist in my possession. No one else will ever find them. But they did reveal that you’re just thirteen years old, and that the circumstances that had brought you to Aceso had been deadly serious and not, as Gavin Brahim had believed, a pretext for an infiltration.” His eyes looked sad; he knew exactly how close she had come to a successful suicide, maybe better than she did. “I needed to warn the family about the envoy’s behavior, anyway, so I brought the files with me when I visited that evening. I arrived shortly after Takama took you to have your brain imaged. In my life, I have had to deliver a lot of terrible news to people, but few have ever been quite as devastated as Ewan Zdan was when he learned how close he’d come to… taking advantage of… a child. And an emotionally fragile one, at that.”

Jack nodded, remembering just how rocky he had looked after her return, and the agony on his face when he’d almost lost control and his father had had to stop him from rushing up to her room to make sure she wasn’t still actively suicidal. There was no way to refute General Toal’s word choices, as much as both child and emotionally fragile felt like hard slaps in the face; they were all too accurate.

“By then, everyone had seen you in action enough to know that you were the mastermind behind the hospital escape, regardless of your age. The final piece in the puzzle of how you could be so precocious was Takama bringing back the news that you were an un-Quantified esper of an extremely high degree.”

“Is that why you stayed?” She’d wondered at his sudden appearance, although it was obvious that the family already knew, liked, and respected him.

“Partly. I have always been welcome here. Many years ago, before my son disappeared, he was engaged to Tafrara Elspeth, who, I think, still hasn’t moved on from him even though he will soon be declared dead. They have always treated me as family since then. But yes, I stayed to make sure that whatever intrigues surrounded the two of you would not threaten them… or you.”

Jack suddenly wondered if the family had been protecting her from Ewan… or Ewan from her.

“A bit of both,” General Toal admitted when she could no longer hold back the question. “I know that Ewan Zdan tried, very hard, to reframe his love for you as brotherly, familial, but I don’t believe he succeeded. And I know that, the night after we all learned just how brutal Pritchard’s plans for you and your sister had truly been, he barely slept. It really is for the best if the two of you have no contact, whatsoever, until you can return here as a legal adult with no traceable connections to your time on this world now. For your sake and his.”

Lalla’s magnificent brunch tasted like sawdust in her mouth.

Nobody seemed to be in high spirits, but Jack felt like hers had dropped to a new nadir. She hadn’t even tried to go back to Ewan’s room, feeling like it would somehow visit disaster upon him if she did. If she had been able to stay, she wondered, what steps would the Meziane family have ended up needing to take to keep Ewan safe from her?

General Toal had given her the comm number he wanted her to use, if needed, in place of the one Ewan had shared. He had promised that he would give Kyra the number, too, in case she ever needed to call for help. And he had made her swear that she wouldn’t use the number Ewan had given her until she was at least eighteen years old, and that she wouldn’t fudge the numbers even a little by pretending that cryo-time counted as aging.

Four and a half years, minimum, Jack sighed to herself, all outside of cryo… only then can I come back. She’d known it, but its reality hadn’t truly struck her until her talk with the General.

She was glad that she had picked the Nephrite Undine for her return voyage. Five months alone in deep space would at least not be five months when time was passing for Ewan but not her. She would never go into cryo again if she could help it.

Finally, the meal was over. Jack felt bad that she hadn’t been able to enjoy it; Lalla had made sure to set out all her favorite foods.

The good-byes that followed were worse.

Everybody was trying to be brave about it, and stoic, to keep from setting anyone else off, but nobody was happy. She could feel them trying not to show that they were afraid she and Kyra would never return, that the terrible darkness that seemed to be pursuing them would catch them, and that they wouldn’t even have each other for protection anymore. More than one set of eyes turned pleadingly toward General Toal; he looked regretful but didn’t bend.

There was no way for him to bend, at least where Jack was concerned; her plan had been in place well before he had made their departures mandatory, but she’d hoped that there might be a way for her to stay in contact with the family, eventually…

…She didn’t know what she had been hoping. To somehow find a way to live in more than one world at once without crossing the threshold between ’verses, maybe? For a happily-ever-after to just sweep in, save them all, and take away every choice except staying? Reality didn’t work like that, much as she wanted it to.

Still, she wished that Kyra, at least, could have remained with them. She kept having a bad feeling about her sister’s trajectory out of there.

Every member of the family murmured a variation on the same theme, which she had first heard from Ewan: come back to us as soon as you can. You will always have a home and family here.

“I will,” she told each one, wondering of the ’verse would make a liar out of her, “as soon as I can…”

“We would have gifts for you,” Takama told her, her voice wobbling, “for your travels and to remember us by… but…”

But they weren’t allowed, aside from bags of snacks that Lalla had packed for each of them to take with them, and the somewhat impersonal money cards the General had been willing to permit.

“Don’t worry,” Jack said, her own voice in danger of cracking. “I’ll never, ever forget you.”

And, if she was lucky, she wouldn’t have to make do with memories for all that long. But luck didn’t seem to be with her lately.

A thousand hugs later, they could delay things no longer. Cedric and Izil helped the elderly Mezianes, Safiyya and Takama’s parents and an ancient great-uncle who didn’t speak anything but Tamazight, load their luggage into Lalla’s roomy van for their return to the mountains, while Lalla climbed into its driver’s seat. General Toal, meanwhile, unlocked the doors of his vehicle and helped Kyra and Jack inside. All they had was one backpack each, plus Lalla’s snack bags, everything that they could safely take with them stowed inside. They had plenty of funds to get more things as needed, both the funding cards Jack had procured—almost all of which she, still plagued by the suspicion that her sister might be hiding a lack of prospects from her, had given to Kyra—and additional funds from the ait Meziane tribe, but they were still under strict instructions not to spend them on anything that might point to a stay on Tangiers Prime. No mementos whatsoever.

The family could only wave good-bye to them from within the garage as they drove out; there was supposed to be no sign that the General’s drive away from the house was in any way remarkable and not just some brief errand. They were out of sight far too quickly.

To General Toal, it probably seemed like the drive to the train station occurred in sullen silence. In fact, Jack and Kyra talked to each other the whole way… just not out loud.

This sucks, Kyra groaned silently as they stopped waving and sat forward. I didn’t think it would this much.

Me neither, Jack admitted, aware yet again that heartache was a physical thing. Fuck. Half of me is tempted to just… disappear into Elsewhere and spend the next five years living with Mommy Ree and Sebby, even if it would mean a diet of bugs and quetzalcoatls…

And whats?

Those flying feathered snake things Mommy Ree showed us, Jack explained. They make me think of something from Aztec mythology.

Damn, now I wish we had time for you to tell me about that, Kyra mentally sighed. I’m gonna miss all the fun stuff you know. So, are you gonna do it? Go native in Elsewhere?

Jack sighed, wishing… I can’t. I couldn’t, even before we got the bum’s rush. I have to let my family know I’m alive. That means either showing up at my dad’s home or my mom’s, with a plausible explanation for where I’ve been that doesn’t point to the Scarlet Matador. Or Riddick. Or you.

Not that she actually wanted to go back to Deckard’s World and Alvin the Asshole…

Or… Kyra’s mental “voice” had become considering, almost sly. We could say “fuck it” and go look for Riddick?

Jack wasn’t sure what the chill that moved down her back was responding to. Did this mean Kyra didn’t have a good path out of there? Why else would she want to try to find Riddick instead? Especially now, when there were bullseyes painted on their backs and any merc in the ’verse would love to use them as stalking horses to track him down? She managed to keep her appalled disbelief from bleeding into their link, but only just barely.

If he’d wanted me to find him, she mentally sighed instead, he’d have told me where he was going instead of just telling Imam.

Suddenly she wondered if the logic behind that was akin to the logic General Toal had for running interference between her and Ewan; would there have been a time, had she stayed with Imam, when he would have finally shared that information with her? Maybe once she was mature enough that any infatuation she still felt would no longer threaten Riddick’s reputation and safety? Had Imam refused to tell Riddick about her near-death for the same reason that the General had forbidden her from contacting Ewan before she was at least eighteen—because the only thing trying to come to her aid could have done, in that moment, was bring about his destruction?

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. Whatever the reason behind his decision to cut her off and strand her on Helion Prime, whyever Imam had chosen not to tell him about the state of her well-being, the schism had to stay as it was. Too many lives depended upon her returning home and spending the next four and a half years living as an ordinary girl who couldn’t possibly have any connection to Jack B. Badd’s madcap—and just mad—careen across the Sol Tracks. If anyone ever realized that Audrey MacNamera knew Richard B. Riddick, her backtrail could unravel and put the hundreds of survivors of the Scarlet Matador, and the millions of Imazighen protecting them, at risk of sharing Colonel Tomlin’s tragic fate. Somehow, she knew that the Quintessa Corporation wouldn’t be above genocide; exactly where that certainty came from, she couldn’t tell, but it was absolute. She had to jettison her past. She had deny Riddick’s part in it.

Some of that, she suspected, had bled through. Kyra’s expression had turned sad. You really don’t want to find him? There was a hint of incredulity in her sister’s mental voice.

I can’t cut it in his world, Jack said. Not when that world included Alexander Toombs and the Quintessa Corporation, and a connect-the-dots that could doom millions if its picture was ever revealed. I’m just not strong enough.

She wasn’t sure anyone was, or even could be.

For a moment, a brooding silence truly did descend.

You remember the Ghost Codes I gave you, right? Jack asked when it started getting uncomfortable. She still found herself worrying that Kyra didn’t have a good path out, especially if her sister was considering ditching it to kite after Riddick.

I have them all saved, don’t worry. I can’t carry stuff around in my head the way you do.

You won’t have to with one of them. Remember the code we used to get out of the hospital?

Vaguely. Kyra shrugged, looking a little frustrated. Most people, Jack reminded herself, needed a lot of repetition to remember even short comm numbers…

I repurposed it, she told Kyra. It’s now a general system-slicer. You put it in and it’ll unlock any lock it can for you, and open up any system it has access to. So you can get into and out of places if you’re in trouble. And you don’t have to remember numbers. It spells out RIDDICK. Any keypad with letters under the numbers will let you spell it out.

Nice, Kyra said, a hint of admiration sneaking in and replacing the annoyance. That one will be easy to remember. Thanks!

You’re welcome. Jack reached out and took Kyra’s hand. I’m always your sister. No matter how many light years separate us.

She wondered, suddenly, how far apart they could go and still “hear” each other. Damn. That was something they hadn’t thought to explore or practice, and really should have.

I’m always your sister, too, Kyra said, her mental voice almost wobbling the way her physical voice might have.

With that, their time was up. General Toal’s vehicle was pulling up to the rail station.

Security was tight; even though the station was outside of the spaceport—although one of its lines went to and from it on a regular basis—everyone was still on edge. Javor Makarov remained at large, after all, and all but a handful of people in the know believed the same was true for Duke Pritchard. A man in military uniform approached the vehicle and gave the General an astonished salute; Toal spoke to him for a moment before handing him the vehicle’s keys. Rank did have its privileges; apparently, while the General was inside the terminal with them, the officer he’d just spoken to had to play valet for him.

He walked them past the long checkpoint lines, using his clout to clear their path and leaving all of the officers on duty the impression that they were, probably, plainclothes operatives of his and licensed to carry most of the contraband being screened for.

Guess we don’t need the scabbard trick yet, huh? Kyra joked.

Jack gave her a wry grin. She figured Kyra had at least one knife on her somewhere.

“As we all know your immediate destination, Tizzy, we’ll go there first,” General Toal told her. “I hope you will be all right with saying your goodbyes there.”

She managed a nod, not sure if she was up to talking yet. There were a lot of tears being held at bay right then.

It was a short walk to the lounge for the New Casablanca Express. Jack had had a choice, when she’d made her reservation: a long, leisurely 22-hour trip with multiple stops and a scenic view most of the way, or a 3-hour high-speed trip with no stops and much less to see. She’d picked the latter; she wanted a good margin between her arrival in New Casablanca and her launch… and she didn’t want to fall even more in love with a world she had to leave behind. An absolutely enormous world, she realized anew, given the distance between New Marrakesh and New Casablanca.

General Toal gave them a moment alone to say their goodbyes.

Kyra wasn’t much of a hugger, but suddenly they were clinging fiercely to each other.

“I can’t believe this is it,” Kyra whispered.

“Don’t believe it,” Jack told her, struggling to make her own voice work. “We’re gonna find each other again. Sisters forever.”

“Forever…” Kyra sighed, still holding on tightly. “Tizzy?”

“Yeah?”

“If I do find Riddick… what do I tell him about you?”

Oh God. She was still planning on doing it, wasn’t she?

It wouldn’t work. Riddick was too good at slipping through the cracks. If she did get onto his trail, he might play cat-and-mouse with her if he was feeling amused, but he’d never let her catch him and probably wouldn’t even let her see him, unaware that they had any kind of connection and she wasn’t just some green merc making a play for him. Jack and Kyra didn’t actually look like they could be related, as much as they were sisters to the bone now. There was no obvious surface connection between them that anyone would intuit. Jack hoped Kyra had better options, and plans, at her disposal than looking for a fugitive who could go for years without being spotted if he chose.

Riddick’s words to her in the skiff, as they left the crash planet behind, came back to her. Why not? It was probably truer for her than it had been for him. And it wasn’t like Kyra would ever really have a chance to pass the message on.

“Tell him Jack’s dead,” she said. “She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.”

This was, after all, the last day she could allow herself to be Jack B. Badd, even on the inside. Jack B. Badd is dead, long live Audrey MacNamera…

Kyra looked pained. She hadn’t called Jack anything but “Tizzy” in a while, but there was a terrible finality in what had just been said, and Jack suddenly realized that it might have cut deep.

Toal cleared his throat behind them, and they reluctantly pulled away.

“Always your sister,” she promised Kyra.

“Always your sister,” Kyra promised back.

General Toal offered Jack a small package as Kyra stepped away. “A good way to keep valuables safe. We use these in the Service. Godspeed, child.”

He looked surprised when she gave him a hug.

“Thank you. For everything,” she told him.

“You’re welcome. Come back to us one day, once you can.” There was genuine fondness in his eyes.

A moment later, they were gone.

The package, Jack discovered, held a money belt, designed to lie flat against the body and conceal itself from most scrutiny. The material was the kind that deterred scans, too, in a way that didn’t raise alarms. High-grade military stuff. She transferred her funding cards and ID into it and put it on under her shirt. The only thing left in her pack that might draw scrutiny was the neurofeedback device, but Toal had provided her with medical documentation to show if anyone inquired.

She took her tablet out of the pack while she waited for the train as the lounge began to fill. There was something she had been curious about for a while. Activating her translation program, she set it to translate Tamazight into English, displaying text results in response to audio input.

“A tafat-iw,” she whispered into the tablet’s microphone. Ewan had called her that twice.

my light

Wow. “Tayr-iw,” she whispered next. he had murmured that one when she’d told everyone about the devastating moment when Riddick had outed her as a girl.

my love

No wonder Tafrara had given him an odd look. There was one more phrase he’d used, both in Elsewhere and when they had said their final good-byes. Now she had butterflies in her stomach as she whispered it. “Taḥbibt-iw.”

my beloved

General Toal had been right, she thought with awe. Ewan had never thought of her as his little sister, no matter how hard he might have tried to. She couldn’t come back, or reach out to him, until she wouldn’t have to be a sister anymore.

She took a deep breath. There was one more thing she needed to translate—

“Attention, all passengers departing for New Casablanca. Your train is arriving. Please have your boarding passes ready.” The announcement was in Arabic, followed a moment later by the same in Tamazight, then French, then English.

She’d have to translate it later.

She packed away the tablet and joined the queue, boarding a few minutes later and finding her seat. The process was orderly and efficient, especially compared to every transit ride she had taken on Deckard’s World. There were so many little things she was going to miss—

Try not to think about it, she told herself. In less than five years, you can come back. It doesn’t have to be forever.

Her backpack stowed and her tablet back out, she decided that she was better off not whispering at it in Tamazight where her seatmates might hear. Instead, she pulled up one of the many catch-up modules she needed to work on if she didn’t want to show up on Deckard’s World significantly behind her old classmates, containing a twentieth-century novel she needed to read and two study guides on its interpretations.

She remained engrossed in the novel—a portrayal of Arthurian legend from Merlin’s perspective—until dinner was served.

As she paid for a bocadillo and a small cup of tayb wa hari—and, of course, a glass of mint tea—a man passed through the aisle, brushing against the cart server and glancing back at her for just a moment before moving on. Jack’s breath caught in her throat.

“Is everything all right, Miss?” The server asked her in Arabic, returning her card.

“Yes,” Jack lied, giving her a tight smile and focusing on not stumbling over the Arabic words she needed to say. “Thank you. Everything’s fine.”

She settled back into her seat, for a moment unable to touch her food. The man had a thick beard and glasses, and he wore a djellaba with a kufi on his head instead of the Western clothes he normally wore, but she had recognized him nonetheless and her heart was still pounding.

Javor Makarov was on her train.