The Changeling Game, Chapter 73

73.
Hiding the Mermaid

Tizzy?

The voice was distant, hard to hear, but so familiar…

Tizzy!

She frowned in her sleep.

Jack! Help me!

Audrey bolted up in bed, gasping. “Kyra?”

“Mmmmm?” In the darkness, her roommate turned over and pulled her covers over her head.

That had been Kyra. Kyra… screaming… in her mind.

She closed her eyes and focused on the sound of that voice.

Kyra?

Nothing.

Kyra, it’s me… where are you?

Silence.

She willed herself into the starfield.

“I think Kyra’s in trouble!” she called out to the Apeiros. “Can any of you hear her?”

We hear nothing, they said after a moment. She has gone silent. There is… something… blocking her.

“Please find her.”

We do not have permission to speak with her.

“I rescind that! You have permission! Please, please find her. She’s in trouble! She needs help!”

We will search. We will tell you when we find her. Rest now, Audrey.

She couldn’t rest. She was too frightened for her sister.

Little one, sweet one, you need to sleep.

“I can’t… I can’t… I’m afraid I’ll miss her call again.”

We are listening. Come, we will help you sleep… One…

A glowing line formed in front of her, stretching forward and back into infinity. A singular path…

Two…

The line spread outward, forming a plane. Infinite lines, infinite paths, the possibility of intersection, reversal, veering through complex geometries, a bounded set of infinities…

Three…

The plane expanded, forming a boundless-yet-bounded cube of light. Infinite lines, infinite planes, even more possibilities of intersection and motion, shapes within the cube, delimited by their edges and yet, within, infinite paths from point to point, edge to edge…

Four…

And the cube came alive, able to travel forward and back upon its own tumbling motion, infinite lines, infinite planes, infinite cubes, motion and intention on an entirely new level, time moving forward and back like waves in a tub, cause becoming effect, a vase unshattering and rising into a little girl’s hand…

Five…

The octachoron split and danced in new directions that hadn’t existed before, time moving sideways, the myriad could-have-beens transforming into realities of their own, streams of causality moving in directions that hadn’t been possible before, effects rippling front to back, side to side… diagonal… loops…

Six…

Causality reared upward in a wave and the decateron splashed its way into new and almost inconceivable places, the could-have-beens joined by could-not-have-beens and new intersections forming, shapes that were both tiny and gargantuan populating spaces too small to hold singularities and yet too vast to navigate without eternities…

Seven…

The dodecapeton opened into something unfathomable, verging on madness, yet so beautiful that she couldn’t look away… she never looked away now. In time she would begin to understand how to navigate the tetradecaexon as well, but she could feel its peace… infinite peace…

Eyes bloomed in the darkness, an impossible being appearing before her, her nameless sister in Her full, glorious n-shape.

Come, little sister, sleep now and dream of your hatching. We will find your sister for you. The deeper ’verses will wait until you are ready…

The sun had risen when she woke again, minutes before her alarm was set to go off.

It was a Thursday, not a Sunday, but she decided to skip breakfast and her morning class to head for the safe house, which was only two blocks from the edge of campus. She had to cross almost the entire campus to get to it; her dorm was on the far side away from its location. Still, by the time deep winter came and that could become a problem, she would be on her way to Tangiers Prime.

“Kyra called me,” she said as the door closed and locked behind her, before any of the AIs could ask her what she was doing there. “She’s in trouble. I need your help to find her.”

“Called you how?” MilitAIre asked. “I show no comms activity.”

“Telepathically, I’m guessing,” Michael said, emerging from a back room. “What did she say?”

“She was calling my names. Tizzy, and then Jack, and then she said, ‘help me.’”

Michael sat down at one of the consoles in the Security Room, inputting search parameters.

“Nothing new yet from the beacons… no traceable activity on either the Kyra Wittier-Collins front or the Kali Montgomery front…” He frowned. “I wish we knew what identity she might have created in the wake of Meisner’s fuckup. Did she seem close by?”

“Pretty far away, I think. The Apeiros said something was blocking her from calling out again. I gave them permission to talk to her if they get a chance to.”

“Good.” Michael glanced at the calendar, frowning. “We’re into the red zone for Helion Prime. Not enough people have bugged out for my liking. I’d hate to think she’d gone back there.”

Audrey had helped him and the others, as the months marched closer, to create as many enticing offers as they could to lure people into taking out-system vacations during the danger period, trying to get them out of harm’s way by any subtle means they could. Rumors about the Necromongers had been planted and circulated, too, with as much information as they could verify and get away with revealing. She had even considered contacting Imam to warn him, but had been ordered not to. Too much effort had gone into breaking the connection between Jack B. Badd and Audrey MacNamera for her to draw attention to it; General Toal told her that it appeared he already knew about the threat, anyway, and took it seriously.

She hoped he was taking his wife and daughter offworld. Just to be sure, she had another set of highly discounted trip offers—Last-minute bookings! Save 90%!—sent to Lajjun, featuring excursions to places she knew would be alluring to her erstwhile foster mother.

C’mon, take the offer and run…

October, the dead of winter back in Settlement Point, was the height of summer in Wyndham Landing. The Summer Quarter was nearing its close. Audrey had signed up for her Autumn Quarter classes and had a booking reserved on the Chrysolite Undine, sister ship to the one whose track she’d pioneered, for its February 19 departure to Tangiers Prime. Michael and the AIs would accompany her, but she hadn’t yet told her family. She was struggling to figure out how to tell them, how to make it painless… or, anyway, not excruciating. At least, she thought, they wouldn’t be unhappy about having followed her to a new hemisphere only to be left behind…

They loved the northern hemisphere. It had, they’d discovered, considerably more to offer than Settlement Point, despite being more rustic and less populated. Geared toward catering to visitors from other worlds, it provided amenities that no one in the southern hemisphere seemed to know or care about, including more advanced reproductive care and childcare services that had resulted in her mother being able to begin practicing law again even before Elodie could start Kindergarten. Alvin, meanwhile, had been delighted to discover that he could go hunting and fishing with his colleagues much more easily, at any of a variety of lodges in easy driving distance. And Elodie had turned into a little wood sprite, with a whole neighborhood of children her own age to play with. While the three of them might miss her, they wouldn’t resent being stranded in a new city when she departed it, and the last several months had also accustomed them to seeing very little of her.

That much, at least, was a relief. She’d managed to do a bit of lasting good for them, no matter what else. It might help them be more okay with her need to return to Tangiers Prime, although they couldn’t know it was a return. From Alvin’s and her mother’s perspective, it was a headlong flight into the unknown that neither of them could fathom wishing to take.

She wished she could explain it to them, in a way that wouldn’t overturn everything. She was a lot less lonely in the northern hemisphere, too. She had friends, confidants even, who neither knew nor cared that there were parts of her life that stayed off-limits. They also didn’t decide she was too debauched to talk to if she couldn’t resist the allure of an offworld man who reminded her of Riddick or Ewan. While she had decided that all men except short-term visitors from offworld were off-limits, where sex was concerned, and so far it had kept the drama to a minimum, she nonetheless felt more and more strongly that she belonged on another world. She’d left too much of her heart on Tangiers Prime. And while she still couldn’t bring herself to ask her handlers whether Ewan had married during her time away, she also couldn’t bring herself to look for a romantic entanglement that might actually get in the way of returning to him.

Her feelings about Michael had, meanwhile, become completely familial. Whether she thought of him as a father, brother, or uncle, she wasn’t entirely sure, but she no longer fantasized about him… which was probably good, given that while she couldn’t read his mind at all, he could apparently read hers easily. If she’d made him at all uncomfortable with her crush and fantasies, though, he’d shown no sign.

“Since you’re here for breakfast, Audrey,” CommissAIry said, “I’ve made your favorite.” One of his robotic trays rolled up, presenting her with a collection of her favorite New Marrakesh breakfast foods. Had he somehow read her mind and known she had been thinking about Tangiers Prime?

“Thank you!” She’d just started to get hungry, her stress levels finally lowering, but was aware that her dining hall had just closed and her class had begun. It was the first class she’d skipped since she’d started at Deckard Tech, but her mind was still too unsettled to try to focus on calculus. Later. Hopefully once she had heard something from the Apeiros about Kyra.

She did attend her Intro to Sociology class later in the day, as well as Principles of Linguistics, mostly because Michael had threatened to make her watch Tommy Wiseau movies if she didn’t stop fretting loudly while he worked. But by evening, her worry for Kyra had made her antsy and a little fractious, and she returned to the safe house for a no-holds-barred sparring session with him that left her sore and exhausted, but much calmer. Afterward, they checked the beacons one last time before she would need to leave to make curfew on campus—

“Fuck,” Michael groaned as new images appeared on the screens. “It’s starting.”

“What?” Audrey had been about to gather her things and go back to the dorm. “What is?”

He moved the image he was looking at onto the main screen. In the sky above Helion Prime, easily recognized by the distinctive light pillars rising up from the bottom of the screen, a comet floated, showing telltale signs of already splintering into multiple pieces. In another day, two at most, those pieces would fall like spears.

“How old is this image?” she asked.

“A week old,” he murmured. “By now, the attack has begun. Maybe even ended.”

“A week? Why’d it take so long to reach us?”

Michael frowned, calling up a dozen reports and sifting through them at lightning speed. In moments like this, when he didn’t bother concealing his abilities, he reminded her a great deal of Riddick. “It looks like three of the beacons that messages would normally pass through, on their way into and out of the Helion system, have been disabled. That’s new.”

“Yeah, it only took us three days to find out about the Aquilan system, not seven.” They had managed, however, to get almost a third of the human population to go traveling to other parts of the galaxy before disaster could strike. Audrey tried not to think about all the pets, livestock, and wildlife that had been left behind to die along with the rest of the human population.

No matter what, though, she always felt like she should have found a way to do more. Found a way to save them all.

“I can hear you,” Michael said. “Stop tearing yourself up over there.”

She sat down next to him, leaning her head on his shoulder. “It just… hurts to think about…”

“Try not to, then. These deaths aren’t at your feet.”

“Feels like they are, sometimes.”

“Seeing the future and being able to control it are completely different things,” he said. “You ever notice how most of the stories about prophecies are about how people’s attempts to prevent them are what make them happen at all?”

“Oedipus?” she asked. It was the first one that came to mind.

“Not even the most famous example,” Michael said, shutting down the feeds. “But look. Four years ago, we had no idea any of this was even happening, or that there was any kind of predictable pattern behind most of the ‘Black Planet Incidents’ until a year ago. Until you brought us the intel. You found the pattern, put all the pieces together… and every life we’ve managed to save since then is because of that. So stop beating yourself up…”

He smirked, reaching over and ruffling her hair.

“…or at least do it a little more quietly.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “Are you ever gonna teach me how to shield the way you do?”

“I’ve tried. What do you think your ‘quiet mode’ is? You can hold it for maybe an hour before you start freaking out. You, girl, can’t handle being disconnected from other minds, not for long, and you avoid practicing it enough to separate your shielding for incoming and outgoing thoughts.”

“Wait, so when MilitAIre was coaching me after we landed…?”

“He was relaying my instructions, yeah. General Toal still wasn’t sure of how good you were at keeping secrets back then. You had some impulse control issues, remember?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. Nobody had ever let her live down her attempt to grab the apeirochoron. Obviously someone had swiped some since then, though. “What changed that? I mean, when you unmasked and all that.”

“Todd. That was when we put together the final pieces about you and knew it’d be safe to give you higher clearance. You’d sacrifice yourself for others in a heartbeat—and it’s part of my job, by the way, to keep you from doing that—but you won’t sacrifice others to save yourself.”

“I have, though…” she sighed.

“Fuck, Audrey, you did not sacrifice Paris Ogilvie. Are you dragging out all of your regrets tonight?”

“Sorry.”

“C’mon…” he groaned. “Let’s go get some of that mint tea you love so much from CommissAIry. The doctor is in.”

They talked until after midnight, until she was finally tired enough, and her demons had been put to rest enough, that she could get to sleep… which she did, in the bedroom they kept for her for occasions just like that one. More than half the time, when her roommate believed she was off with some hot guy, that guy was Michael… who was sleeping across the hall and who, she knew, would view ever touching her in that way as incestuous, as she had slowly come to view it herself. But only most of the time…

Her roommate was sometimes right. Especially if new offworlders happened to be passing through town. But, thankfully, Janice never judged her. Wanted all the juicy details, but never judged.

Soon after she drifted off, she found herself floating in the spangled darkness of the Apeiros starfield.

Kyra is safe, Audrey. We have her. She dreams of a world with three suns. We will keep her safe until she can wake again.

There was something odd about what they told her, she thought. It made her think of something else that she’d once heard, but she couldn’t remember where. “Donna Noble has left the library…?”

What did that even mean?

“Where was she? What happened to her?”

She was in a place of darkness and pain. But now she is safe with us.

“Can I talk to her?”

In time. Right now, she dreams—

Thieving wretches! You have taken what is mine!

Audrey found herself shrinking back from the rage of the Moribund. It filled the ether around her, making the stars themselves quake.

Nothing here is yours, the Apeiros replied, and Audrey felt them massing around her as if to shield her.

You would rob me? Deprive me of what’s mine? I fight this battle for your sakes and this is my reward? Return what you have taken!

There is nothing of yours here to return.

I will not ask again!

There is nothing for you to ask.

Something dark and terrible suddenly loomed above her, surrounded her…

…and hideous cold poured into her, filling her every vein, every cell, choking her…

I do not ask. Deny me and I will take what I wish!

She could hear the Apeiros screaming. She thought she could hear herself screaming, but she was strangling on her last breath.

Release her! She is ours, not yours! You may not have her!

I can have whatever I will! I will have her!

Long, black arms tipped with claws flashed out, raking at the stygian darkness surrounding her and then grasping her in their embrace. Audrey is mine! Release her! Release my little sister!

How dare you call this filth your sister?

How dare you touch her? You are nothing to me! Nothing to us! We disown you! You are not of us!

You are not of us, infinite voices echoed. You are dead to us.

Then fall. All of you. And watch her fall, too.

She could feel her body dying, every cell corroding away…

“Audrey! Audrey!”

Through the darkness she could see him above her, Michael, shirtless, his hair tousled from sleep.

“Give me your hand, Audrey!” He looked to the side of her. “Will this hurt you?”

I am out of range. Help her, Lightbearer. Help her! We consent even if she cannot!

Michael grabbed her hand and pressed it to his chest, to the handprint suddenly glowing on his bare skin. It seared her frozen palm even as white light blazed from Michael’s eyes and she realized that they weren’t really grey, those were contacts he wore by day hiding his real—

A blast of energy crashed through her, lighting up every nerve. It flowed through every cell and synapse, scouring away the Moribund’s darkness. She screamed against the hand covering her mouth, not with pain, but with the release from pain, the return of breath, the return of life, the return of sanity.

You will regret this! I will destroy all that you love… all that he loves…

“Oh shit, oh fuck, he’s going to come after me…” she whimpered against Michael’s hand.

He pulled her into his arms, holding her close. Her cheek was pressed to the still-glowing handprint on his chest, its touch on her skin a balm. “We won’t let him find you. I swear it.”

“He threatened to destroy everything I love… Oh fuck…” Elodie… what if he found Elodie?

We will not permit it. He will never know where to look. It was the voice of her sister, the one without a name, the one veiled from her…

“He’ll find me in my dreams. He’ll find me and track me back…”

No. He won’t.

The darkness in the corner of her bedroom moved, the shape that wasn’t a shape coming almost into her vision but staying at the periphery. Hints of cohesion—eyes? A leg?—appeared and then vanished into shadow. Her sister’s skin contained the shine of galaxies, but it was impossible to look right at Her with three-dimensional eyes.

“What do we do?” Michael asked, not looking directly at her sister either.

She must not remember. For a time. Until his attention has shifted away again. He will forget this madness. She is not the true target of his vengeance, and once he remembers that, he will cease to care about how we thwarted him this day. But in the meantime, she must not remember.

“More holes in my memory?” Audrey gasped. “Why? How much more are you going to take?”

You will not know about us. You will not know about your five-shape. You will believe yourself ordinary, a normal human. You will present to the world as one, and you will live within a shield. Michael will help you put it on. And when we are done, you will wear it with no pain and no awareness that anything is missing.

How did She know Michael’s name?

“You told me you couldn’t hear them,” she wailed, looking up at Michael in confusion.

“I lied,” he told her. “They’ve been talking to me since the hypnosis session you don’t remember. It’s my responsibility to know the things that they can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

“You have no idea how crucial your part in all of this is going to be,” he murmured, stroking her hair. “But if you knew what it was all for, you wouldn’t be able to wait for the right moment. You’d sacrifice yourself to save who and what you can now. Instead of becoming as strong as we need you to be, to help us save everything.”

“Please…” She didn’t know what she was asking for, even. Please make this stop, please don’t let me do all of this alone… please let me be just a girl…

“You’re not gonna do any of this alone,” Michael whispered. “You will never be alone. But, for the next year or so, you are gonna be ‘just a girl.’ Don’t be afraid. We’ll be protecting you the whole time. You won’t see us, and you won’t know or remember what we’re protecting you from, but you will be safe.”

“My flight to Tangiers Prime…”

“It’s going to have to wait. Not forever, though, I swear.”

“Oh no… please, please, please…”

Don’t be afraid, little sister. I will give back everything I take from you now. You will be safe. You will be happy.

“I’ll be a lie…”

“You’ll be Audrey MacNamera,” Michael told her, holding her still as her sister crawled closer. “College girl, sociology major, older sister to Elodie. Happy and normal. And protected. Always protected.” He bent his head and kissed her forehead, his eyeshine catching the light from the hall as he drew back. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“I can’t be alone again, please…”

“You never will be.”

We are always with you.

One delicate tarsus touched her forehead.

In the darkness of her bedroom in the al-Walid house, while she drowsed, still not completely free of the cryo drugs that were working their way out of her system, neither awake nor asleep, the door opened and a familiar silhouette slipped through. For a moment, he stood over her, his eyes catching faint glints of light like a pair of tarnished coins…

He bent down, his lips brushing against her forehead. “Sorry, kid…”

He was gone before she could wake up enough to respond…

When her alarm went off, Audrey rolled over and slapped the snooze button, groaning. Usually she woke up before it, but last night…

“You must’ve gotten in really late,” her roommate, Janice, said. “I’m amazed you beat curfew. Hot night with a guy?”

She groaned again and sat up. “Hot night with a pile of books. I was in the library until closing.”

Audrey MacNamera has left the library… She shook her head, frowning, and the weird fragment of thought vanished.

“You know, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’”

Audrey almost flinched, until Janice said boy instead of girl. Nobody knew she’d once masqueraded as a boy named Jack, not here. And anyway, those days were long behind her.

“How come you missed calc yesterday?” Janice asked as she dressed.

“Something I ate disagreed with me,” she grumbled, climbing out of bed.

“That’s what you get for eating all those weird spicy foods you like.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Audrey switched on her tablet and opened up her news feed. “You got any fun plans for the weekend?”

“There’s a music festival,” Janice told her. “One of those types modeled after Woodstock back on old Earth. I’m thinking I’ll go, get high, get laid by some patchouli-smelling dude who hasn’t showered in six weeks—”

“You will not!” Audrey laughed.

“Fine, fine, ruin my dreams…”

“That sounds more like a total nightmare,” she told Janice. “But if you want, we can go to the Winston Lodge tonight. Listen to bad country music, get tipsy, and get laid by some guy who takes showers regularly and has enough sense to wash his ass-crack?”

Her roommate had encountered a guy who didn’t, a guy who’d believed properly washing his ass would make him gay, and neither one of them had yet gotten over the grossness of it all.

“That almost sounds like fun. Switch ‘tipsy’ for ‘sloshed’ and you’re on.”

“Okay, you’ll get sloshed and I’ll be your bodyguard.”

“Just don’t guard my body too closely, m’kay?”

“Okay…” Audrey frowned down at the tablet. The feed had moved to interplanetary news, and—

Helion System Under Attack?

Thousands of Distress Calls Received by Federacy Beacons

That didn’t sound good. She wondered if the al-Walids still lived there. They’d sucked as foster parents, but still. She hoped they were okay.

Not that anybody knew she’d ever been offworld. That was her little secret.

“Whatcha staring at?” Janice asked, and she switched off the tablet.

“Nothing, just the usual bad news out in the big bad ’verse. You hungry?”

“Starved. Let’s go pillage the dining hall.”

They walked out into the bright summer day a few moments later.

It was, Audrey thought, a beautiful day. The kind of day when nobody could possibly have a worry or care in the world.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Janice asked.

“Gonna visit with my little sister,” she said, grinning. “Maybe take her to the lake for a swim.”

“And then do your Sunday thing?”

“Always,” Audrey laughed. “My ‘Sunday thing’ makes my whole week.”

And if she had no idea what it was that she did on Sundays, it didn’t occur to her to find that odd.