The Changeling Game, Chapter 70

70.
Straight On ’Til Morning

“I really have to recommend against it, Audrey.”

“What’s the alternative?” Audrey whispered into her comm. She was alone in the sound booth—the tech crew wasn’t due back for a few hours—as she spoke to MilitAIre. “If the ‘show doesn’t go on,’ all the tickets will have to be refunded and everybody’ll be wondering why I didn’t step in. That’s more likely to get noticed than me being in the spotlight of a high school play for a single night.”

MilitAIre took long enough to reply that Audrey knew he was discussing the matter with the other AIs. “You’re correct. It’s not a good situation, though. A lead role is risky. This lead role is especially risky.”

“I get it,” she told him. “I really do. But… I can’t let everybody down. They’re not expecting anything grand out of me, but I’m the only one left who knows the lines and blocking.”

“I understand, Audrey. Break a leg. We will be watching.”

“Seriously?” She laughed. “You’re gonna piggyback on the school’s security cameras to watch?”

“We wouldn’t miss it.”

“Make a recording for my mom, then, okay? And let her know for me.”

Half a dozen people, their expressions ranging from worried to hopeful, were waiting for her when she emerged from the sound booth.

“I have permission,” she told them. The whoops of delight and relief were almost deafening.

Mrs. Morgan began punching numbers into her comm. “I need to get Judy in here early to make sure the costume will work. You’re six inches taller than Cheryl.”

Todd, a grinning Senior a few inches taller than her, with a “ducktail” haircut and an earring in one ear, walked over and put his arm around her. “You are saving so many lives! Now, let’s do a run-through with the rest of the cast.”

He marched her out onto the stage, which was currently clear of set pieces. The whole cast, looking nervous, was sitting nearby, awaiting news of their fate.

“Second star to the right,” he shouted, “and straight on ’til morning! We have our Peter!”

“Thank God,” Julia, hair in the ringlets of Wendy Darling, groaned. “My whole family is coming tonight. You didn’t eat any of Cheryl’s chicken, did you, Audrey? Please tell me you didn’t.”

“I never went near it,” Audrey promised. “Okay, I think Todd wants all of us ‘understudies’ to practice our lines and blocking at least once? An undressed dress rehearsal?”

A few people laughed.

Almost a quarter of the cast had been felled by food poisoning earlier in the day. Cheryl Ocasek, the shining star of Eisenhower High’s theater program, had brought in lunch for the whole cast an hour before the matinee curtain rose. While most of the food had been excellent, everyone who had eaten the fried chicken had begun feeling ill by the middle of the performance. Peter’s final duel with Hook would have been unintentionally comical if both Cheryl and Jim hadn’t looked pale, sweaty, and thoroughly miserable. Neither came out for the final bows, and one of the Lost Children nearly vomited in front of the audience before the curtain finally dropped.

Pandemonium had followed while Mrs. Morgan tried to work out who was sick and who was well, and whether parts could be juggled to make it possible for the show’s closing night performance to go forward. In the end, only one role was left that had lost both its main player and its understudy: Peter Pan himself.

Which was when Todd, the theater program’s other big star who was capping his high school career by directing the production, had suggested that they dragoon their stage manager into the role.

It was Audrey’s first time as a stage manager; now a junior, she had spent almost two whole school years building up a reputation as a serviceable actor who lacked the nuance needed for a lead role but who could sing, dance, and nail the lines in virtually any supporting part. She was best known to her compatriots, however, as a facile prompter who kept entire scripts in her head and never missed a step in her blocking. Although she was considerably taller than Peter was supposed to be, she really was the only option left. Todd—6’2” with a swimmer’s physique—looked far too “grown up” to portray a boy who refused to ever become an adult, and he was the only other member of the troupe who knew all of Peter’s lines. Besides which, he already had to step in to play Captain Hook.

“We have, like, no fairies left,” Maeve, the production’s Tiger Lily, grumbled.

“What if we added some lights dancing around you?” Audrey asked. “Like you’re the only one who’s corporeal and the rest are staying small like Tink?”

Her comm buzzed. She glanced down at its screen.

E. is working on it right now.

“I have a friend who can whip something up for us,” she continued. “The ‘Friends’ song will just have to be the two of us. At least we’re doing the ‘fairies’ version instead of the ‘Indians’ one.”

Back at the start of the semester, she’d managed to argue Todd and Mrs. Morgan into using the revised twenty-first century script, as opposed to the original 1954 Broadway script, by comparing the portrayal of “Indians” in the original script—and no Native American tribes had been invited to settle on Deckard’s World—to the way “the gays” were characterized by most of their school peers, something that Todd was especially sensitive to. Aside from a few lines changing slightly and the replacement of the “Ugh a Wug” song with another tune about friendship, it was almost exactly the same play.

And it would be a whole lot easier to replace corporeal fairies with dancing lights than to explain away an entire missing tribe.

“Okay,” Todd said. “Let’s do a run-through of lines and blocking and see what we need to spend the rest of the day working on.”

They worked until it was time to admit the audience. Audrey nailed her lines and blocking, and listened carefully to Todd’s criticisms of her actual performance. Fortunately, this wasn’t a play that required enormous amounts of nuance, so he wasn’t super critical. She and Maeve then practiced the “Friends” song together, working out the best division of lines normally sung by backup actors and the best ways to harmonize them. The arrival of the “fairy lights” holo system that EntertAIn had cooked up helped; the AI had also whipped up a backing track of “fairy voices” that could be played alongside, adding almost-unearthly harmonies to their lines.

Her handlers, she realized, had decided to treat this like a mission.

While Todd worked with the rest of the cast on weak spots, Audrey met with the stage crew to adjust Cheryl’s flight harness and wires to accommodate her size and weight, and then did a few practice flights to make sure she could control her movements while singing and showboating. The Stage Crew Advisor, Mr. Andrews, agreed to handle the stage management for the evening, and they went over the issues to watch out for from prior performances.

The whole thing kept her too damned busy to feel any stage fright until the show had started and it was almost time to hit her first mark.

Oh fuck, what am I doing? I’m not supposed to expose myself like this…

Her hair—which she’d finally convinced her mother to let her cut to only halfway down her back—was braided back and hidden away, and she was wearing a wig of short, brown, shaggy hair under a green cap. Judy had adjusted the costume to accommodate her longer torso and hide her curves. Now she just had to…

…be a boy for an hour and a half? When had she ever done that before?

Easy peasy…

She took a deep breath and jumped off of her “perch,” soaring through the “open window” of the bedroom and just managing to stick the landing. Murmurs erupted through the audience as people realized that Cheryl wasn’t playing the role. There was supposed to be a sign up about the cast changes, but she bet most people had walked past it without reading.

“Tinker Bell!” she stage-whispered. “Tink! …Tink!”

“Nana” barked over a nearby speaker and she ducked down behind a chair, peeking out.

“Tinker Bell! Where are you?”

She was halfway through the scene, singing “Never Never Land,” when she realized that she had adopted her “Riddick walk” and her “Jack B. Badd” voice for the role.

There were a few flubs along the way from some of her costars, but not nearly as many as they had all dreaded there would be. Todd made a brilliant Hook, she thought, and she had a great time hamming things up with him. Their duels were hilarious, and made her wish they could extend them. But by the time she whisked “Jane” off to Neverland, she was as exhausted as if she had spent the whole time actively isomorphing.

During the curtain call, however, she had one more thing to do. Todd handed her a microphone.

“Tonight was supposed to be a very special night,” she told the audience. “Cheryl Ocasek has been an amazing talent in our theater program for four years now. This would have been her final performance before graduating, and I know a lot of you came tonight especially to see her. Unfortunately, she fell ill earlier today. Although she’s not here to receive it, we wanted all of you to get to see the award and thank-you gift that we had planned to give her tonight…”

She turned the microphone over to Maeve, who did a slight variation on the speech she’d originally intended to give, extolling Cheryl’s performances over the last four years since she’d first wowed audiences in The Fantasticks. Then the actor who had played Smee took over the mic to give a similar award to Todd.

The wrap party was a bit of a blur. She remembered Todd telling her that he wished he had another year to work with her, and several other cast members telling her they were looking forward to having that year, but her brain felt like it was turning into mush.

Mission accomplished, she mused as she managed to make her good-byes and left to meet her mother in the parking lot. Time to head back to base…

“I almost didn’t get to see your debut performance,” her mother said when they were nearly home. “But ‘M’ called and told me you were taking over the role. Why didn’t you let me know?”

Audrey groaned. “Sorry… I spent the whole afternoon working with Todd and the cast to make sure I wouldn’t turn the production into a total disaster. I asked him to give you a heads-up for me.”

“Well, you were very good. Alvin’s sorry he missed it, but we couldn’t find a sitter. I didn’t understand why you were keeping at the whole acting thing when you never got starring roles, but maybe now you’ll start getting some more.”

Shit. Had she been too good? MilitAIre might have some choice things to say about that.

“You don’t have to want to be a star to want to perform, Mom.” It wasn’t their first time going over that.

A mermaid doesn’t need to be a queen to raise a tsunami…

Her mother was just too much of a competitive spirit to understand that. Her drive to win, to come out on top, showed up in almost everything. For Audrey, she only felt like that when she was on the track and didn’t want to have to see anyone between her and the “horizon.”

Her morning ride to the safe house was a little surprising; Dennis teasingly asked her for her autograph.

“Gonna tell people ‘I knew her when…’ even if I can never tell them I knew you where,” he joked. “You got good reviews last night. Wish I’d been there to see.”

Reviews? Oh. Shit…

“So,” she said as she walked into the Security Room and sat down, “how badly did I fuck things up?”

“Not badly,” MilitAIre told her. “None of the reviewers who had come to see Cheryl Ocasek’s final high school performance claimed you outperformed her. Or accused you of nuance.”

“Fuck… I should’ve realized that show was gonna be reviewed. What did they say?”

“See for yourself.” The screen in front of her lit up with an article from the Settlement Point Monitor.

Food Poisoning Outbreak Forces Last-Minute Cast Change in Peter Pan Production

Junior Audrey MacNamera and Senior Todd McKinney Shine in Impromptu Roles

Below the headline, there was an image someone had captured of the performance, as she and Todd had dueled. Todd looked menacing and wicked as Captain Hook, while she…

Well, shit.

With a fierce smile on her face as she battled Captain Hook back, and her unruly mop of a wig under Peter Pan’s green cap…

Jack B. Badd was onstage for the whole fuckin’ universe to see.

She’d done the walk, done the voice, slipped into the boy persona she’d developed on the run without even a thought…

“Oh fuck. I’m right out there in Jack form…”

“And your portrayal of a boy is, according to the reviewer, one of the highlights of your performance,” EntertAIn said. “While you didn’t do a job that would raise red flags about your ability to run a long game, you did reveal that you can impersonate a boy very well indeed.”

Groaning, Audrey looked for that part of the review.

MacNamera, a junior at Eisenhower High, is better known for Lettering in Track and Field as a sophomore and bringing home the bronze medal this year in the DWSAA Half-Marathon. Within the theater program, she has appeared in several chorus lines and taken on smaller roles, and was this production’s stage manager up until the food poisoning incident. Sixteen years old, she’s probably best known for having been a missing person for almost two years. While no information has ever been released about where she was during that time, the authentic veneer of ‘street tough’ that she imbues her Peter Pan with might furnish a tantalizing clue…

“Ohhhh, shit.”

“On a positive note,” MilitAIre said, “the ‘street tough’ interpretation points back to the dominant theories almost everyone has about you at this point… and not toward a run through space.”

“As long as nobody realizes the ‘street tough’ I’m channeling there is Richard B. Riddick,” Audrey muttered.

“It’s hard to imagine why they would,” EntertAIn laughed. “I don’t think this did much damage to the persona you’re portraying, but you are going to have to figure out a way to avoid starring roles, now that you’ve demonstrated how ably you can handle one.”

“Are you sure? I feel… naked. Exposed as fuck.” She felt like she’d screwed up, even if the article was praising her and even her mother had seemed happy.

“It was a risk. You knew it and so did we. But it’s also a good opportunity to practice some damage control tactics,” MilitAIre said. “Sooner or later, something will happen that will require them. It’s our job to teach you to deal with risk, not hide from it.”

An “unleashed Operative,” she reflected, shouldn’t be afraid to take risks, as long as they were calculated ones. She’d been given that message several times. Leashed Operatives had no choice about the risks they did and didn’t take; Toal was hoping she’d develop a judicious streak that could drive home the importance of giving all Operatives similar latitude. And, more urgently, not violating and brutalizing their minds.

“And,” First-AId added, “I can hear you falling into your ‘it’s all my fault’ mode of thinking. Fight it. We’ve discussed this.”

Audrey nodded, sighing. The realization that her cousins had been using her as the “fall guy” for their pranks and capers, and had only finally been caught out when she was unavailable to play that role, had been a tough discovery. Almost four years after she’d originally gone missing, their parents were still grappling with the knowledge that “Trouble” hadn’t, after all, been her middle name, and that the blame they’d habitually thrown her way for dozens of incidents had rightfully fallen much closer to home. Although her mother felt vindicated by the admissions, Audrey herself was still struggling with their impact.

Practically from the moment she could walk, she’d been unknowingly conditioned into believing that the chaos she and her cousins had frequently ended up embroiled in was her fault, especially since they—and their parents—always insisted that nothing like that happened except when she was around. But after her disappearance, Rob, Rachel, and Joey had only lasted a little over a month before they’d begun getting into trouble without her handy to blame it on. The adults had all wised up; several had even apologized to her for the scoldings they’d given her and the opinions they’d held about her, sheepishly explaining that it was in part her father’s childhood reputation—he was, after all, the original Jack B. Badd—that had prejudiced them against her actual innocence. And First-AId had spent the last two years drawing her attention to the way that, whenever anything went wrong, her first assumption was that it was somehow her fault… thanks to them.

Sometimes she wasn’t sure what was doing more damage to her relationship with her cousins now: her inability to trust them after all that, or their resentment that she still wouldn’t tell them where she’d been. The latter issue kept impeding friendships at school, too.

There were other reviews to read, all of them complimentary but not lavish in their praise, most reviewers impressed by Audrey’s ability to make the audience believe she really was a boy until the moment she had spoken in her “natural voice” during the curtain call. She still felt like she’d given too much of her game away, even if nobody had figured out how constantly she was “onstage” and acting during her daily life.

Over lunch—a “new cajun” jambalaya that originated from the Bayou Nebula and required several glasses of water to get through—she checked her “lifeline” to Kyra. Nothing. None of her messages had been read in the last two and a half years; no new messages had come from her sister since she’d “gone dark.” Sometimes, not often, the Apeiros told her that Kyra was dreaming of a world with three suns, but she had apparently learned how to avoid their detection in her sleep as well as when she was awake.

Audrey left another message anyway. It hadn’t varied much in the last year, but under the assumption that Kyra might read the most recent one first if she logged in, she always included the same important news.

It’s me, hoping you’re okay. So you know, “Kyra Wittier-Collins” is now a safe identity to use if you want. All of the warrants were voided a year ago now. New Dartmouth has to pay out a ginormous settlement to you and the other survivors. We’re talking millions of dollars in settlement money per survivor, from the sound of it. You can walk in and claim it any time if you want. I hope you do. They deserve to bleed some serious green for what they did to you. I miss you. Love you tons.

Always your sister,
Tizzy

P.S. I played Peter Pan in a local show and killed it. I wish you could have seen it.

People in the school hallways seemed friendlier than usual the next day. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. The first thing she did, though, was go looking for Cheryl.

Pale and drawn-looking, Cheryl was sitting in the courtyard, surrounded by girls—a mixture of Seniors and Juniors—who were clearly in Supportive Friend Mode.

“Oh great, here she is now,” Missy Barnstable said as Audrey walked up. But the look on Cheryl’s face wasn’t hostile.

“How are you feeling?” Audrey asked.

Cheryl gave her a rueful smile. “Like I never want to eat again. I can keep down soda crackers and that’s about it. How about you? You okay after taking one for the team like that?”

Missy huffed, rolled her eyes, and walked away. For a moment, Audrey was profoundly reminded of Celia. Weird… usually Missy intimidated the hell out of her.

She sat down in the seat Missy had vacated. “Tired. That was like… having ten minutes’ warning before taking the SAT or something.”

Cheryl chuckled. “Speaking of tests, did you hear the crazy news?”

“I don’t think I have. What’s the crazy news?”

“Someone got a bug up their butt about the Ouija boards everybody’s been playing with and now there are Quantifiers on campus.”

Cold jetted through Audrey’s veins. Fuck. Fuck. None of it showed on her face, though. She was, after all, every damn bit as good at acting as Cheryl, and she was always on. “Quantifiers? What are those?”

“They test for psychic powers,” Mary-Jo Breem said. She was one of Cheryl’s closest friends.

Audrey laughed. “Oh c’mon, none of that stuff is real.”

“You should come over next time we do a séance,” Maeve told her. “You’ll see.”

Several of the girls nodded. Interesting; were there actual overtures of friendship there?

“Color me intrigued,” she said. She wondered if any of them could actually tap into anything with a Ouija board, or if it was, as MilitAIre believed, the power of the subconscious, on a sub-esper level, that governed those games.

Would any of these girls light up a Quantification test? Was there anyone on campus, aside from her, who would be in danger of being identified and “recruited” today?

“So I’m not saying you’re right or anything,” she began, shrugging, “but who do you think could test positive for psychic powers?”

“There’s that chick, Emily, from your grade, who says she’s a witch and the reincarnation of Stevie Nicks,” Julia said. Her hair was straight again, Wendy’s curls long gone.

It was hard to restrain a sputter of laughter. That explained the flowy dresses… and the top hat… Emily had been wearing all year. “She’s, uh, had quite a few stories about stuff like that. Not so much with the proof, though.”

Cheryl snorted. “Two years ago, right before you came back, she was claiming that she could talk to spirits, and that she’d even talked to yours because you’d been murdered and buried in a nearby construction site.”

Audrey let her eyes go wide and allowed her laughter to escape. “Well, that must have been awkward for her!”

Maeve snickered. “So she’s obviously not gonna test out for psychic powers.”

The girls turned to speculating about which of the school “weirdos” might test positive until the bell rang and everyone headed inside.

The announcement about Quantification testing was the first thing on the agenda. Classes were to continue as normal during the process, but all teachers were to be aware that students could be summoned for testing at any time, and must be excused immediately when they were called.

Just… stay… calm, Audrey told herself. She’d done these tests hundreds of times and knew exactly how to game them so that she’d read as the most unpsychic person in history.

Three students were called away during her first period English class. All three returned looking unimpressed. Another two were summoned from her second period History of the Federacy class, returning well before the class ended looking equally nonchalant. During third period Gymnastics, Emily Hartwell was called away. She left looking smug and confident and returned looking profoundly disgruntled.

Audrey was finally summoned during her fifth period French class.

The testing station had been set up in the nurse’s office. Audrey had only been in there once for a minor scrape during a track meet.

The first problem was, of course, when she put her hand on the biometrics pad, and an alert came up informing the nurse and the Quantifiers that they were not authorized to conduct diagnostics on her or provide non-emergency care. One of the Quantifiers frowned, tapped in some codes, and then glanced at her in confusion.

“You have a Federacy lock on your biometrics. Why?”

She shrugged. “You already know as much as your clearance level allows you, and that’s probably more than I know.”

His frown deepened, but he shrugged. “Please come this way. Federacy lock or not, you still have to take this test.”

“Sure, why not?” She followed him, slipping into what she had come to think of as Quiet Mode.

It was not unlike being blind and deaf. She couldn’t feel the Apeiros, had no awareness of the other ’verses in her five-shape, couldn’t even feel the people near her anymore. No connection, no balance, no direction. If most of humanity had to feel this way all the time, she wondered how it had managed to survive so long. She and MilitAIre had worked on building up her stamina for dealing with the sensation of being cocooned away from everything, and she could maintain Quiet Mode for almost an hour before she started struggling not to scream. She could survive this. She would survive this.

The Quantifier had her sit down in a chair and then slipped an electrode cap over her head. She tilted her head for him before he could ask, knowing exactly how the cap should sit.

“You’ve worn one of these before?” he asked.

“Yeah. Had a head injury a few years back, everybody was worried I was concussed. They did a bunch of different scans, including the one where you have to stick your head in a huge white donut-looking machine.”

“A CT scan,” he told her, nodding, as he tapped various controls. “Were you concussed?”

“Thankfully not. I’d hit my head pretty hard, though, so I guess they just wanted to make extra sure.”

He came back over and removed the cap. “Well, your brain looks just fine. Thank you for your cooperation, Miss MacNamera. You can return to your class now.”

“Sure, no problem.” She waited until she was outside of the nurse’s office before letting her connections to the ’verses flow back. It felt as if she’d been holding in a breath the whole time, depriving herself of oxygen.

Todd was approaching. She started to smile at him—

And then stopped. He his eyes were fixed on the nurse’s office… and he looked terrified.

She’d never actually tried touching his mind before. She reached out—

Oh God, oh God, they’re gonna figure me out, they’re gonna take me like they took my cousin Sylvia, oh fuck, what do I do…?

He passed her, barely aware that she was standing there.

She pulled her comm out as she walked back to her classroom, resisting the impulse to run.

“Yes, Audrey?” MilitAIre answered.

“I need you to make up a good reason, a home emergency or something, and get me called out of class in the next five minutes with permission to leave campus. We have an emergency situation. I’ll explain everything as soon as I can.”

“Understood. I’ll take care of it.”

The call, releasing her from class, came right as she was sitting back down. She picked up her backpack and headed out of the building, keeping her pace calm and steady and not giving in to the urge to take the stairs two at a time and crash through the exit doors. Don’t make any sign… don’t leave any clues…

She knew exactly where all of the school’s security cameras were positioned, and exactly when she could no longer be seen by them. Ducking out of everyone’s line of sight, behind a grouping of bushes the school’s “burn-outs” frequently hid behind to light up, she transitioned into Wonderland and pulled her comm back out. Fortunately, hardware to let her make comm calls from both of her habitable alternate ’verses had been in place for almost two years.

“Yes, Audrey? What is happening?”

“The Quantifiers have found an esper. A genuine, bona fide esper. You have to help me save him from them.”

“Who?”

“Todd McKinney. They took his cousin Sylvia a few years ago.”

“Audrey, I don’t think—”

“If General Toal wants another unleashed esper, this is his chance.”

“While that’s true, the circumstances aren’t the best for—”

“Fuck, MilitAIre, do you know what they’re going to do to him?”

“Yes.” The AI’s voice had gone soft.

“Look,” she tried again, her heart pounding. “I’m betting your databanks have copies of Duke Pritchard’s ‘bad kitty’ files, right? They have to. Half a dozen of his and Makarov’s victims still haven’t been identified. Those files won’t have been purged yet.”

“Yes, Audrey. I have access to those files. Why?”

“Because the Quantifiers’ bosses are gonna do to Todd’s mind what Pritchard and Makarov did to those girls’ bodies. Unless you help me stop them.”

“I see.”

“Todd’s an amazing person, MilitAIre. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s creative. He can ad-lib like nobody’s business. You hand him a random prop and he can come up with a brilliant scene about it off the top of his head.”

“Audrey—”

“He wants to direct on New Broadway, and God knows that’s not gonna happen now but maybe he could still direct operations for General Toal and get to use that creativity instead of having it burned out of his head.”

“Audrey—”

“He’s sweet and he’s kind and he has tragic taste in men but it’s not like they’re gonna help him with that. For God’s sake, MilitAIre, I’ll do this without you if I have to—”

“Audrey.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re in. You have the green light. Now. What’s your plan?”

She turned and sprinted for the nurse’s office. Now she just needed a plan.