The Changeling Game, Chapter 68

68.
Cuckoo, Cowbird, Soldier, Spy

Jade finally appeared on Saturday night, while Audrey was sleeping. She woke in the middle of the night to find a heavy, plurring blob of obese Siamese cat parked on her chest.

Now she really felt like she had come home, whoever she was.

Goblin was sitting on her dresser, staring at her. An oriental shorthair, his tiny, slender body was dominated by a massive pair of batwing ears. She’d missed his ridiculous little face. Esther was on her windowsill.

She’d wondered if she would even see the cats for a few days, and how long it would take them to remember her and get over their hurt and anger over her disappearance. Apparently not long at all.

As soon as she started petting Jade, both Goblin and Esther jumped onto the bed and demanded attention, too.

The “Welcome Home, Audrey” party had run late, with family, neighbors, and family friends staying until nearly midnight. By the time everyone had left, Audrey had nearly been asleep on her feet.

Almost nobody who had shown up to see her had been turned away, though. The only exceptions had been some tabloid reporters who had tried to sneak in. Alvin had come up with some very creative threats to get them to leave.

Fortunately it had been a warm evening, with clear skies and gentle breezes, since the party had been held outside. All the baked goods and casseroles that neighbors and friends had delivered, along with some additional food that Alvin had arranged while Audrey and her mother had been clothes shopping, had been set out for guests, and virtually all of it had been devoured before everyone went home. Audrey had tried a little bit of everything, herself, mindful of CommissAIry’s admonition to always go on culinary adventures if she could. Almost everything had been really good; everything had been part of “traditional American” cuisine. Minimally spicy, relying on a small subset of meats, vegetables, and cooking strategies, with the beverages and desserts heavily sweetened. It was all she’d known until she was almost thirteen.

It wasn’t enough anymore.

Well, at least CommissAIry will expand my horizons today… One day out of every week, her culinary adventures would range past the orbit of Deckard’s World.

Going clothes-shopping on a weekend day had, in retrospect, been a bit of a mistake, if an unavoidable one. Audrey’s mother had taken her to the largest and most popular shopping mall in town—Deckard’s World ostentatiously modeled itself after a period of American history when malls had abounded, and MilitAIre had given her fascinating articles to read about their deaths at the start of the twenty-first century, something that made her wonder how they could coexist now with the same technologies that had originally killed them—and they had promptly run into several girls she’d attended middle school with.

While a few of the girls had looked surprised to see her, most seemed to have caught the newsfeeds about her return. They had a million questions that Audrey had to dodge, but fortunately she and MilitAIre had already worked out all of the dodges. After picking out only a few outfits, though, both she and her mother felt enough of a sense of being under a microscope that they’d cut the trip short.

“We’ll finish on Monday,” her mother had told her as they got back in the car, “when most of the lookie-loos are back in school.”

Audrey had nodded, noting the implication that she wouldn’t be enrolled back into school immediately. They were only one week away from Spring Break, anyway, which was sandwiched between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Fortunately, both fell on Saturdays; in a year, she realized, there would have to be special arrangements to have her “debriefing days” moved to Saturday for those two weekends so that her family didn’t feel aggrieved by her absence from major holidays.

I’m sure MilitAIre already has a plan for that…

She was also aware that her mother had struggled with the shopping trip in other ways.

The days of buying her “little girl” clothes were over and had already been ending before she disappeared; the pastel colors, rainbows, and cutesy fantasy animals that her mother had gravitated toward had already become inappropriate choices when she’d been in middle school. Fortunately, they weren’t even available in her new size, but she had seen the way her mother still struggled with her choices.

She and MilitAIre had planned it all out, though. She was to choose clothing that would lend her some invisibility, dressing in a way that blended her into the crowd as much as someone in the throes of notoriety could blend. Nothing super-fashionable; they had examined the current trends and decided which items were too trendy, too close to the cutting edge, for her to be seen wearing yet. Nothing too outdated or exotic, either. She was to fall in the middle, her clothes unexceptional enough to avoid drawing people’s eyes. Too many other things would do that already. They had even gone over which colors were most appropriate for letting people’s eyes slide past her.

She had argued about that, a little. She wanted to be able to wear a few of the blues and greens that made her think of Ewan. MilitAIre had relented, but had stressed that she could only pick items of clothing in those colors if they met the rest of the invisibility criteria they’d worked out.

Her mother had been surprised by her choices, especially as she’d bypassed dresses completely in favor of jeans, a pair of cargo pants exactly the color of the sands on a particular beach in Elsewhere, and unadorned tops in shades that made her think of Ewan’s bedspread and the mermaid tail in his painting. Audrey had a feeling that, when they resumed on Monday and fewer people were watching, there might be a bigger tug-of-war over the next round of purchases.

At least we won’t be arguing about heel heights, she thought with amusement as Goblin head-butted her hand. She’d only just been allowed to start wearing heels when she’d taken off, but she’d been more of an average height then. Now she towered over most of her classmates in flats; adding even a low heel into the mix would go against the “rules of invisibility” she and MilitAIre had worked out.

It had, of course, been impossible to be invisible at the party.

Everyone had been there to see her. Although a lot of them were people who had genuinely missed her, there had been a whole lot of acquaintances who had mostly come to gawk. Remembering the way Ewan had moved through his farewell party, though, she had tried to make a point of at least saying hello to everybody, glad that her eidetic recall extended to names and faces. There was only a handful of people whose names she had needed to ask. Most of them had turned out to be members of Alvin’s family.

“The Audrey I remember was shy,” she’d overheard one of the neighbors saying as she moved from one group of well-wishers to the next.

Had she been? It hadn’t felt that way to her. She’d been four years younger than the youngest of that neighbor’s children; none of them had been interested in playing with her or including her in their games. Was she supposed to have made a pest of herself anyway?

When it was time to talk to that neighbor, though, she’d been polite and friendly and had asked after the kids in question. The youngest, as she’d suspected, was off at college. None of them had been in town to come to the party, although a few of them would be arriving on Friday for the holidays.

“If anyone seems to feel like you’re not the person they remember, bring up shared experiences,” MilitAIre had instructed her. “It’s not an uncommon phenomenon after a separation of even a year or two for people to feel like the person who returns is an imposter.” He’d given her articles to read about famous cases where people became convinced that an imposter had replaced a loved one—in a very few cases, rightly so—and about an actual mental illness, Capgras’ Syndrome, that could trigger such delusions.

Part of Audrey’s job at the party had been to reintroduce herself to everyone and make them feel like the girl they had once known had returned… make them feel like they weren’t being confronted by a stranger with a similar face, a changeling stepping into Audrey MacNamera’s place.

Even if, at times, she felt like that was exactly what she was.

By the time all of the food was gone and people were saying their goodbyes, she had been physically and mentally exhausted but had managed to talk to every guest at least once. Elodie had been put to bed hours earlier; her cousins and most of her former classmates had been taken home ahead of the 10 pm curfew for minors. Most of the people who had remained, although ostensibly there to welcome her back, were there to support her mother and Alvin. Their topics of discussion weren’t especially interesting to her, so she’d rested on a lounge chair and turned her gaze to the other ’verses for a while.

In Elsewhere, she’d been surrounded by enormous trees that reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of ancient redwood forests on Earth. Only a few stars peeked through their canopy. In Wonderland, a meadow full of strange flowers spread out around her. Overhead, the stars blazed in a deep black sky free of light pollution; to the south, ribbons of colorful light danced along the horizon. The stars in U37d and most of the other ’verses, she noticed, were almost identical in placement, but that ’verse had a bright orange moon that was visible only there. In U27, a brilliantly-lit asteroid hovered less than a mile above her, slowly tumbling closer. A school of fish floated nearby, sleeping, in U115, limned by greenish moonlight—

“Sometimes I feel like she’s still missing…” she’d heard her mother say.

Damn it. She’d stayed still; her mother must have thought she had fallen asleep, or was out of hearing range, or both.

“She’s been gone for nearly two years,” Alvin had said. “It’d be even more strange if she came back completely unchanged, wouldn’t it?”

The two of them had moved away from the other guests, speaking quietly. It became obvious that they thought no one could hear them as they continued to talk.

“I guess. But tomorrow I have to let them take her away from me again…”

“Just for the day. She’ll be back before curfew. I was able to speak to one of her handlers by comm for a few minutes, and he promised me that she’ll be home by nine.”

“Did you get his name?”

“No, and I didn’t expect to. That’s not how these people work. I got a letter. M. By his accent, I think he’s originally from the Cohasset System.”

“So a man named M from the Cohasset System is in charge of my daughter’s well-being?”

“He says he’s part of a team of handlers.”

“A team? Whatever happened takes an entire team to protect her?”

“Bettie,” Alvin hushed her as her voice began to rise. “I know this is hard. We may never know what happened. But we have her back, and—”

“Do we? Sometimes I think I see my little girl, but then…”

“Shhhhhh. It’s her. You know it’s her. She’s a teenager now, though, and every teenager’s a little bit of an alien. That’s all it is. You’ll see… you have your daughter back. She’s just… the teenage version.”

The teenage version had decided to yawn and stretch at that moment. Enough was enough. Alvin and her mother, locked in a hug, started and looked over at her as she sat up in the lounge chair. She pretended to notice them for the first time.

“I think maybe I dozed off,” she said. “What time is it?”

Alvin glanced at his chrono. “Time for the party to end, I think. You want to say goodnight to your grandparents?”

A long round of hugs and goodbyes later, she had trudged upstairs, stopping for a moment to look in on Elodie. Her little sister looked perfect and peaceful, untouched by any of the horrors held at bay—mostly—by the carefully cultivated veneer of ancient American suburbia.

There’s so much I need to keep her safe from… Audrey had thought before going to her own room. The first night, it had been hard to fall asleep, but she’d been tired enough that it was easier the second time.

Now, with three purring cats demanding attention, she suspected she might need to take a nap sometime during her “debriefing.”

I missed you so much, she told them silently, and three feline heads turned sharply toward her.

She was still thinking about her first coherent conversation with three cats when the car from the safe house came to pick her up.

“I don’t like this,” her mother muttered as she looked through the window. Per the instructions they had received, only Audrey was allowed to approach the car. “I really don’t like this.”

“I’ll be home tonight, Mom,” she promised, giving her a quick hug. “It’ll be okay.”

“It’s just… you’ve only been back for less than two days…”

“I know. It’s going to be all right.” She could see something mulish starting to form on her mother’s face. “This first time, though… it’s also partly a test.”

“A test?” Her mother frowned.

“To see if we can really follow the rules or not.”

That brought her mother up short as she contemplated just what might happen if they failed the test.

Please don’t fail the test, please don’t fail the test, please don’t fail the test…

Her trail had been broken. The masquerade was in place. Her family knew she was alive and well. But this wasn’t a game. General Toal had made that abundantly clear to her. If her family made it unsafe for her to hide in plain sight, under her original name, she’d be moved to another world and given an entirely new identity. She would have to find her way to a “normal” adolescence there, away from almost everyone and everything she knew. The AIs would accompany her, and the Apeiros would always be with her, but there would soon be nothing left of the girl she had been. This was her only chance at a familiar anchor.

Her mother sighed, her eyes welling, and nodded. “You should go out there before they get worried,” she managed, but her voice broke on the last word.

Audrey pulled her into another hug for a moment before, finally, kissing her cheek and going out the door. “I’ll be home soon, Mom, don’t worry.”

One of the Federacy agents who had an office on the first floor was driving her. It was a silent ride; both of them knew the rules. He let her out in front of the safe house and drove off, while she walked up to the door and palm-printed her way in.

“Welcome back, Audrey,” MilitAIre said as the door locked behind her. “How was the party?”

“Thanks, MilitAIre,” she said, taking a seat in the Security Room. “It was a little weird. Some people had their doubts, but I think I sold it.”

“It does help that you really are Audrey MacNamera, of course.”

“Yeah. I think some of them just… froze me in amber in their heads.” She sighed. “Even with the long hair, I’m different enough that they’re having trouble processing it. And, I mean, I’m only thirteen months older, biologically. Think how much more different I’d be if twenty-two months had really passed for me. But it was still too much for a lot of them.”

“I like your amber metaphor,” MilitAIre said. “They fossilized you in their minds, yes. This is what underlies many of the cases of changeling delusions—the ones that aren’t neurologically driven, anyway, or rooted in prejudices against autistic children. Time changes everyone, and the people who expected to watch all of those changes happen to you missed seeing them.”

“So how come I feel like a con artist?” There were moments when Audrey felt like she was faking it all.

“Because you can’t ever tell them what drove all of the changes,” he reminded her. “You can’t tell them where you really were. You’re not lying about who you once were, but you are concealing a great deal about who you’ve become. You’re playing a role within a role: the WitSec ward with no power over her situation, who must pretend to be a former teen runaway who spent two years on the streets. So yes, you are running a long game on almost everyone, and countless lives depend on your success.”

“Jeez. Only two days in and I already needed to decompress here.” She blew out a breath, leaning back in the chair. “What if I can’t handle six whole days at a time ‘out in the cold?’”

“You let me know, and we send an agent to pick you up, wherever you are, and we inform your mother that we needed to do a debriefing. I believe, though, that it will get easier soon. Mr. Baxter is under the impression that we’re protecting you from an organized crime group, and he’s personally flipped a few lower-level informants and enrolled them into WitSec, so he takes its protocols very seriously. I believe he’ll not only cooperate fully with us, but also ensure that your mother does.”

That explained why Alvin had initially had such a low opinion of picking up a WitSec ward. It made sense, though; as an assistant D.A. trying to build cases against criminal enterprises, he’d probably had to offer deals to petty criminals, and maybe even a few genuine dirtbags, to get to the real movers behind their crimes. The very thing that the Quintessa Corporation had, it seemed, feared authorities might try to do with Makarov if they took him alive.

“He’s been a lot easier to get along with than I expected,” she admitted.

“That was a pleasant surprise.” In fact, MilitAIre didn’t seem surprised at all.

“I’m guessing you were the ‘M’ he spoke with on the comm? He thinks you’re probably from Cohasset Prime.”

“Yes.” Now MilitAIre sounded amused. “My standard voice is modeled on the Boston accent of old Earth, but most of the people who settled in the Cohasset System were originally from that megacity. Although their accent is slightly more rhotic.”

Audrey nodded. “So. What’s our agenda for today?”

There was actual debriefing over breakfast; CommissAIry had chosen a “traditional Japanese breakfast” for her first culinary adventure of the day. Audrey devoured saba shioyaki and tamagoyaki while she and MilitAIre went over everyone she’d had contact with in the last two days, something that made her deeply thankful once more that her eidetic recall extended to names and faces. She sipped miso soup and crunched dried seaweed while they worked at identifying the reporters who had attempted to crash the welcome home party, and balanced her first tastes of tsukemono and natto with steamed rice while they identified the unnamed friends her former classmates had been with at the mall. The only flavor she wasn’t entirely sure of was the natto, but CommissAIry had warned her that fermented soybeans were an acquired taste for most people, albeit an extremely nutritious food.

While she sipped green tea, she updated the AIs on her careful, hands-off explorations of the other ’verses.

“This is good information,” MilitAIre said when she was done. “Now, I think we’re ready to try the experiment we spoke of. Are you willing?”

“Absolutely.”

Everything, she noticed, had already been set up by the AIs’ robotic support. She picked up the audio recorder set out on the table, switched it on, took a deep breath, and isomorphed all the way over into Wonderland.

It was a little chillier in Wonderland than in U1, she noticed, but not badly so. The day was gray and overcast.

“Five… four… three… two…” she could hear MilitAIre counting down in U1. She focused on her task: pulling the sound waves from U1 into Wonderland, where the audio recorder would pick them up.

“…one.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.’

“Please return to U1 now, Audrey.”

Well, there’d definitely be no way of faking that. Audrey switched the audio recorder off as she isomorphed back. “The Raven, huh?”

“Indeed. Now, let’s see if we were successful.”

The recording was audible, but very faint. “Can we try again? I think I can get the volume up higher.”

They tried three more times before they achieved a volume that both she and MilitAIre were happy with.

“Damn, I wish I’d known how to do this,” Audrey admitted ruefully, “back when I was spying on Makarov.”

“That incident is what inspired this experiment,” MilitAIre told her. “General Toal suggested it after I reported the intel that you’d been able to gather during Makarov’s conversation with his unknown accomplice. Had a recording of the conversation been available, it might have been an opportunity to move against the Quintessa Corporation, possibly even damage their lock on interstellar travel. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know how; General Toal blames himself for being more concerned with getting you offworld than with offering you training in your skills. But that was before.”

“Before…?”

“He has a proposal for you,” MilitAIre said, sidestepping her question. “Your independence, and your unique skills, create an opportunity to prove that an esper doesn’t have to be broken and enslaved in order to be an effective Federacy asset.”

“…He wants me to be an Operative?” A tiny chill moved through her… but also a small thrill.

“In training. On call in emergencies if your talents warrant it. What he really wants is for you to get to be an ordinary teenage girl, but if a threat were to appear on this world—”

“I’m in.” A threat to Deckard’s World was a threat to Elodie.

“I’ve reserved the right to veto any operation that might compromise your cover or put you in harm’s way. He’s accepted those terms. I also reserved the right to veto all operations if you were reluctant or if they appear to cause any kind of psychological damage.”

Audrey nodded. “I’m guessing that he’s especially keen on the idea of me being able to infiltrate and record from another ’verse.”

“Yes. Would you feel up to such an operation later this afternoon?”

Right out of the gate! “I think so. What’ll I be doing?”

“An executive from the Quintessa Corporation is in Settlement Point to negotiate the further expansion of direct Star Jump routes to and from the Plymouth System. At three p.m., he’s scheduled to hold a conference call with Corporation HQ. Such calls are rare and closely guarded, requiring near-instantaneous transmission of signals across a hundred light-years. The technology that powers these calls is something that the Quintessa Corporation has withheld from the Federacy, but no, General Toal doesn’t want you to try to steal anything. We just want to know what they discuss, what warrants that kind of effort and expense.”

After CommissAIry took her on an Ethiopian culinary adventure for lunch—doro wat and injera with sides of azifa and gomen, with a non-alcohol version of shamita—Audrey dressed up in her weird gender-concealing costume and mask. Isomorphing into Wonderland, she waited outside for an agent’s car to pull up in U1. It was a different agent than the one who had brought her to the building, which was probably a wise move. She climbed into the car and settled onto the seat before isomorphing back into U1.

The agent flinched; that was the only sign he showed that anything unusual had happened. “Sixteen to Control. Phantom is on board. Proceeding to target location.”

Phantom. Jeez. Well, she reflected, that was the word she pulled out most often to describe interacting with U1 from across the threshold.

The agent drove her into the heart of downtown Settlement Point, unspeaking, and into the parking garage below its tallest building.

Shit, that’s not gonna work… He was about to descend below the ground in both Elsewhere and Wonderland. She couldn’t isomorph from there.

Pushing off of the seat, she isomorphed into Wonderland and let herself drop a few inches down onto the sandy turf. At least the car had been moving at a crawl. Sitting up, she checked her equipment for any damage. It all looked unscathed.

Might as well run a test right now… She switched on the transmitter that she and EntertAIn had set up before lunch. “MilitAIre, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Audrey. Sixteen says you vanished from the car before he reached the drop off point. What happened?”

“We need to go over the rules of topography sometime. I can’t isomorph underground.”

“My mistake. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna need to ‘phantom’ my way in through the front doors instead of your chosen entry point. Glad to know this system’s working, though. I’ll still record the conversation on my end as well.” The idea of putting a high-powered receiver in Wonderland, with hardware that straddled the threshold and would allow MilitAIre to actively record on his end, had been the next step, and hadn’t taken long to set up at all.

Kinda the opposite of hiding the fact that someone outside of Quintessa has access to the multiverse, she thought as she walked through the glittering steelglass façade of the building and into its lobby. I wonder what prompted Toal to change that policy.

It took hitchhiking on four elevator rides to get close to the level she wanted, and then a nervewracking climb up two flights of stairs hundreds of feet above the ground in Wonderland—where the wind had, thankfully, subsided for the moment—but finally she was on the floor where the Quintessa executive had scheduled his call. Technicians were setting up equipment for him, while he paced in a nearby lobby.

Fuck.

“He’s like her,” she told MilitAIre, hoping that the man—or whatever he was—wouldn’t sense her presence somehow. “Half in U1, half in some hell place. I can see the darkness all around him.”

“Disturbing, but not unexpected. He shouldn’t be able to see into Wonderland, though, any more than the envoy on Tangiers Prime could see into Elsewhere. Stay calm.”

She walked into the conference room, looking over the equipment. “Fuck, I think I know how the technology works, guys. I think he’s using an apeirochoron as a transmitter somehow.”

The familiar, seamless box sat on the conference table, wires running from it to both the camera that would record the executive and the display he would watch.

“Don’t touch it. Remember you’re observing and recording only. Your intel is noted, and confirms a working hypothesis.”

“What hypothesis is that?”

“It’s above your clearance level, for now, but you’ll know soon.”

Fuckin’-A, did he just “I’ll tell you when you’re older” me? Audrey sighed and sat down in one of the chairs she suspected nobody would be using. “Standing by to record.”

Would the executive notice that the sound waves were moving out of U1? She hoped not. He entered the room and locked the doors, touching several controls as she started her recorder and set her suit microphone to Constant Transmission. She was aware of the way the sound waves were moving differently and crossing a multiversal threshold, but hopefully he wouldn’t be, since he only existed on one side of that particular one. He had no presence in Wonderland.

“There he is now,” a familiar voice said. The envoy! “How are you, Colin?”

The executive smiled at the screen. “I’m well, thank you. How are you, Irena? Where has your new assignment taken you?”

“I’m now on Helion Prime,” the envoy—Irena—said. “Since the relief flights to Furya have moved from Tangiers to Helion for a few years, I will be monitoring that traffic.”

“Any word on the two Furyans you thought you sensed on Tangiers?” Colin asked.

Irena sighed. “Nothing. It’s possible that they were just the children of soldiers who served at the Caldera, but either way, I really wanted to get to them before the Federacy did. They’ve snapped up almost all the espers, and we need at least one. Preferably a strong one, a real Furyan. Ideally a male, but at this point, I’ll make do with what I can get. We’re running out of time.”

“What’s the revised timetable?”

“If the pattern holds, three years until the Coalsack System, and then another year until Helion.”

“So you believe it’s going in order.” Colin sounded awed.

“Yes, we think it is—they are. How are negotiations going?”

“Reasonably well. But there’s a little snag. Deckard’s World is isolationist and xenophobic about other cultures. They’re not sure they want to be one of the new Federacy hubs.”

“They had better find a way to get over that. We’re going to lose all of the current ones within the next fifteen years. It’s accelerating.”

“I’ll sweeten the pot.”

“Do that,” Irena said. “You’re authorized to extend Tier 2 amenities. We need this fallback position. Make it happen.”

“On my oath as a Kirshbaum.”

Irena rolled her eyes. “We’re all Kirshbaums. Don’t belabor the point. Just get it done. And if you hear of any rumors of Furyans, I need to know immediately.”

“What about asking her for help?”

“You know what she’ll say. She’ll demand the impossible. Again. There’s no reasoning with anyone on Furya itself. We need one of their lost children. Rumor has it there may be a lead on Helion, but I haven’t tracked it down yet.”

“I’ll have the deal sewn up in forty-eight hours, tops.”

“Good.” Irena vanished from the screen.

“Auntie fucking bitch,” Colin muttered and stamped out of the room.

Audrey was alone with the apeirochoron. She stood up, walking closer, and reached out her hand—

No, little sister, you may not.

—and found herself sitting in the back seat of Sixteen’s car as he pulled up to the safe house.

…The hell?