The Changeling Game, Chapter 74

74.
Run, Audrey, Run

The fall of Helion Prime, to something apparently known as the Necromonger Armada, soon became the hot topic of discussion among Deckard Tech’s Sociology majors and stayed that way for the next year. Someone had smuggled video recordings offworld, shot during the worst of the fighting, and everyone at the college spent months dissecting them, arguing about the meaning of the massive structure they came to call the “three-faced tower” and the reason behind the attack at all. Even summer break only postponed the debates; they picked up again in the fall semester.

Audrey, who had been left with profound curiosity about Helion Prime after her short and confined five-month stay on the planet, was able to counter a lot of the myths and prejudices her classmates and other students at the University floated. She still didn’t tell anyone that she’d been to the world, instead citing sources that were even harder for her classmates to refute than personal experience might have been. The northern hemisphere of Deckard’s World wasn’t as xenophobic—its tourism industry depended on offworld visitors—but it still had its bigotries.

“No,” she told a small group that was discussing the subject in one of the student lounges, “Islam was not the ‘official religion’ of the planet. There was a large population of Muslims there, but the original colonization charter was given to the Parliament of the Hellenes in 2103. Have you even taken History of the Federacy? It was a Greek colony. Almost half of the population was Eastern Orthodox, but it had developed one of the most diverse demographics in the Federacy.”

“So why was New Mecca there?” one of the group demanded.

Audrey rolled her eyes. “There are seven other ‘New Meccas’ throughout the Federacy. Twelve pieces of the Black Stone from old Mecca’s Kaaba Shrine left Earth before the Great Asian War started and the rest was lost. Almost all of the oldest colonies have one.”

Four pieces, eerily, had gone to worlds that inexplicably failed and were classified as Black Planets, as every formerly habitable world in the Helion system now was… she’d read all about that somewhere, but couldn’t remember where.

“Still,” one of the other students said after a moment, “It could’ve been the New Taliban, couldn’t it? Attacking Helion Prime to make the rest of the population be Muslim?”

“By killing everybody? Anyway, the three-faced tower is pretty much conclusive proof that it wasn’t the New Taliban,” she told him, trying not to roll her eyes again. “They have super strict rules about graven images.”

He rolled his eyes and scoffed.

“Look,” she said, pulling out her tablet and opening it up to one of the images a lot of people had seen, of a ship with a relief of a man holding a sword like a staff on its top, reminiscent of a carved medieval coffin lid. She turned it so everyone could see. “Does that look Muslim to you? No. It looks like one of the statues or reliefs of a crusade knight. Eleventh to fourteenth century Christians used this kind of iconography. It’s not Muslim.”

“Fiiiine…” The other student, part of what Audrey privately called the Cs Get Degrees Squad, grimaced and shrugged. “They’re not Muslims. Still a bunch of offworld crazies killing each other. What’s it matter?”

Screw it; there was no talking to someone like him. Except one way. “Maybe, if we never want our skies looking like that, it’d be a good idea to know who did it and why?”

Two of his friends chuckled.

“She’s got a point, Bruce,” one of the others, a guy named George who periodically tried to ask her out, said.

Bruce scoffed again. “Never gonna happen here. Dunno why we even need to know that stuff. We’re engineering majors.”

George snickered. “You know what they say. ‘Those who fail to learn from history…’”

“‘Are doomed to repeat it in summer school!’” the group chorused.

Laughing and shaking her head—most of the guys were pretty decent sorts—Audrey kept walking. Most of them were from the northern hemisphere; Bruce, George, and one or two others were from the southern hemisphere and were trying to let go of their ingrained prejudices; they just had more work to do. Fortunately, they weren’t from Settlement Point, let alone Eisenhower High, or they might not have been willing to listen to her at all. There was only one other student on campus who knew anything about her “sordid” back-story, and Emily Hartwell had no interest in gossiping about her. In this environment, her reputation was completely within her control: a hard-working student pulling down straight As, who knew her shit. Crass as they sometimes were, the guys back there respected her and more than one had come to her for help when tests were looming.

The autumn quarter of her sophomore year had just begun, and she was still trying to wheedle her advisor into approving one more class for her course load. He knew she could handle it, but getting all of the requisite signatures involved him talking to a professor in the linguistics department that he particularly disliked, so she was going to have to stop by his office after breakfast to badger him again.

As she walked into the dining hall, the back of her neck prickled and she had the weird feeling that she was being watched. She glanced around, frowning. On several occasions, she had spotted a dark-haired man watching her; when she’d finally gone over to confront him, he’d told her his name was Michael and he was affiliated with campus security, and he had turned out to be quite lovely. She’d been tempted to ask him to join her for tea, but she had strict rules about only dating offworld tourists who couldn’t try to attach strings to their time together.

But Michael wasn’t around. A car was parked nearby, its windows reflecting sunlight back into her eyes and making it impossible to tell if someone was inside.

Whatever. She was probably imagining it, and breakfast wasn’t going to eat itself…

“There she is!” Janice called out a few minutes later, waving her over to a table. “Audrey MacNamera, who eats engineering students before breakfast!”

“Gonna ruin your appetite if you keep doing that,” Amanda, their floor’s R.A., laughed.

Damn, word had traveled fast. She joined the group, setting her tray down and taking a small shaker out of her bag.

“What is that stuff?” one of the newcomers to campus asked as she sprinkled its contents over her eggs.

“Cumin. All fried eggs should have cumin on them,” she said. She’d done her best to assemble a “traditional Moroccan breakfast” from the dining hall’s offerings, but she always had to bring her own cumin and olives. And her own bags of Maghrebi mint tea.

“You are super weird,” Janice chuckled.

“Hey, if I end up transferring to Khair Eddine, I’ll eat like this all the time,” she said, grinning. In truth, she doubted the transfer would ever happen, but the offer they had sent over the summer was tempting, and it was nice to know that big-name offworld schools were still actively trying to court her. Maybe for graduate work…

She’d stayed on Tangiers Prime briefly during her run. A family had taken her in for a while, and she’d had the most desperate crush on their son, Ewan, who had been training to be a military pilot and gave some of the best hugs…

She wished, sometimes, that there had been a way to stay in touch with them, but since she didn’t want anyone knowing she’d been offworld—or that she was, thanks to cryo time, nine months younger than her records claimed she was—she couldn’t risk it.

But she’d never lost her taste for Moroccan food. She’d eat it all the time if she could. And moving to Tangiers Prime was a frequent fantasy of hers, along with some racier fantasies about Ewan Zdan Tomlin Meziane—

Get real. You’re staying right here, on Deckard’s World, and you’re gonna help reform things so women on this planet have access to the same reproductive healthcare and job opportunities as offworld women, and so the socioeconomic segregation of ethnic minorities stops already. It’s good work, important work, a life’s work… and it’ll keep you close to Elodie.

It was an early autumn day, still warm enough to feel almost summery but cool enough in the mornings that she’d put on a sweatshirt. By noon, she thought as she stepped out into the sunlight and fragrant breezes, she’d probably be able to take it off and wear something lighter—

“Well, if it ain’t Little Miss Jack B. Badd herself,” a familiar voice rasped behind her and to her left.

Her steps almost hitched, but she made herself keep walking in an unbroken stride even as she felt her heart plunge. She knew that voice. She knew that name.

“I’m talkin’ to you, blondie. Yeah, you in the Deckard Tech U sweatshirt.”

She looked over to see a face that she’d tried hard to forget, and only ever saw anymore in nightmares she banished from her mind upon waking.

Alexander Toombs.

Well, shit.

She frowned, feigning puzzlement and hoping that he hadn’t caught her moment of recognition. “Sorry, do I know you?”

“Not personally, no. Don’t think we’ve ever met.” His smile was unpleasant, but she was relieved to realize that he still had no idea how close she had come to him on two occasions. “We have a mutual friend in common.”

“Really? Who’s that?” Director Flint was about the only one who had willingly associated with both of them, in his way. Audrey hadn’t thought about him in ages. He’d earned his comeuppance years before, and was now probably among Helion Prime’s dead.

“Richard B. Riddick.” His ugly smile widened. He would be a decent looking man, she thought suddenly, if his smile weren’t so purely evil. At least he took better care of his teeth than some mercs.

She gave him an incredulous laugh. “Riddick? The criminal?”

His grin didn’t waver. He was too assured in his knowledge. “Riddick. The criminal.”

Before she could come up with a way to laugh off his claim, he had moved up beside her and she felt something hard pressed against the small of her back.

“Now, you can walk quietly to my car and we can go for a nice drive, or we can make a scene out of this and then everybody here finds out that Little Miss Goody-Goody Scholarship Girl is really a felon with a price on her head.”

Audrey went cold to her core. “Try it,” she grated out. “I know a lot more about the law than I did back then. You’ve been claiming for six years that Riddick killed Antonia Chillingsworth.”

“So I ‘find’ footage that proves otherwise,” Toombs snickered. “Who knew?”

“Who are you planning on showing it to?” she asked. “My stepfather the District Attorney?”

“You got a point,” Toombs admitted. “Okay, how’s this? You’re gonna help me flush out and capture Riddick… Jack… but if you don’t want to cooperate with me, I guess I could find someone else to use as bait. He likes kids. Elodie’s pretty cute, looks a little like you did with those great big eyes—”

Audrey wheeled around to face him squarely. “You stay away from her!”

The hard object that had been against her back was now against her belly. She glanced down, her breath hitching as she realized it was a gun. Part of her wanted to panic—part of her was panicking—but a calm, almost cold voice spoke up from deep within her.

“If you shoot me here, you’ll end up on the wrong side of the Merc Network’s bounty list.”

“Nah,” Toombs said, putting away the gun. “I ain’t gonna shoot ya. Or arrest ya. But you are gonna come take a nice ride with me in my car. Or one day soon you’ll be broad-waving a message to your old friend begging him to help you find your little sister.”

He’d do it. She could see it in his eyes. She couldn’t let him hurt Elodie. Not for anything.

“Those fucking mutton chops make you look like a macaque,” she said with impotent fury. He just grinned his wicked grin at her as if she’d paid him the ultimate compliment.

He led her over to the car she’d noticed earlier, cuffing her as he made her get into its back seat, hands—mercifully—in front.

For a few minutes, they drove in silence. Audrey tried to recall what she had once learned from Riddick about popping the locks of cuffs like these. She’d never been good enough at it. Sick dread was pooling in her stomach.

“So where are you taking me?” she made herself ask.

“You and me, girl, we’re gonna go meet up with your good buddy. And then you’re gonna help me capture him.” Toombs turned his car onto the highway entrance, heading westward. Toward the city center. Toward the spaceport beyond it.

There was something ugly in his voice on those last words. Resentment and fury, only now emerging because he probably felt safe to drop his guard a little on this drive.

“You really think you can find him?” she asked.

“Won’t be the first time I’ve found him,” he grumbled, maneuvering through the thick morning commuter traffic.

Oh. Oh.

“He fooled you, didn’t he?” Audrey asked. “Made you think you caught him, then turned the trap around on you.”

Toombs didn’t answer, but the way his lips pressed together told her everything. He’d finally met Richard B. Riddick again, and it had gone badly for him.

“So why come after me?” she asked. “You actually think you can use me as bait?”

“Got a feeling he’ll be interested in your fate, yeah.” His eyes, in the rear-view mirror, crinkled; he was smiling at the thought.

“I really doubt it,” she told him. “It’s been six years. I doubt he even remembers me.”

“You’d be surprised what he remembers,” Toombs told her. “Gotta say, finding you was harder than I expected. When’d you leave Shakti Four?”

“You tell me. You’re the mighty hunter of people. Where’s your friend, anyway?”

He frowned. “What friend?”

“That lady merc. The one who was after my roommate.”

The smile had left his eyes. “Ain’t none of your business.” He tapped the horn. “Hey! Asshole! My grandma drives faster’n you an’ she’s been dead twenty years! Fuckin’ car-nostalgic planet… Who the fuck brings back traffic jams? I’m askin’ ya.”

“What’s the big hurry?” She thought she remembered the trick to popping the cuffs, lowering her hands between her knees, hopefully out of his line of sight, as she started to twist them. They were on the highway now, and Toombs would hopefully be too busy dealing with rush hour traffic to notice.

“I’m owed a payday an’ I’m gonna claim it. You could’a earned a cut if you’d been more cooperative.”

“Oh please.”

“Merc’s honor.”

To their right, out of the corner of her eye, Audrey saw a speeder on a motorcycle overtaking them. If only that were someone coming to rescue her. “Merc’s honor? Like your friend Pritchard?”

Toombs’s eyes cut sharply to meet hers in the rear-view mirror “Ain’t no friend of mine, girl, an’ what makes you think I even—”

“Look out!” Audrey shrieked, unable to stop the words from exploding out.

Everything after that felt, to her, as if it played out in extreme slow motion. The motorcycle, cutting to the side as Toombs began inattentively swerving toward it, put on a burst of speed and zoomed ahead of them. Its rider miscalculated as he tried to weave around the car in front of them, which had begun changing lanes without signaling, and plowed into its side. The bike fragmented, the rider flipping over the hood of the car and flying back toward Toombs’ rental.

“Fuck!” he shouted, yanking the wheel hard to the left and slamming his foot down on the brake. The car began to spin out. Something—someone, Audrey realized with sick horror—thumped across its roof.

Thrown to the side, Audrey felt a strange, terrible detachment as she watched herself falling head-first toward the locked passenger door. She was going to hit her head, hard enough to knock her out, hard enough to concuss, possibly hard enough to kill—

—I’m not here I’m there I’m not here I’m there I’m not here I’m there—

She hit soft turf, rolling. She was in a meadow, full of fresh greenery and flowers that, although she somehow knew no one on Deckard’s World besides her had ever seen their like, were inexplicably as familiar to her as her stepfather’s garden. A large insect, almost like a butterfly, bumped into her arm twice and made a weird, soft, chirping sound before fluttering drunkenly past her. Around her, barely visible, phantom shapes of cars spun and crashed into each other. She could only just hear the chain reaction of accidents as if from miles away.

She was in Elsewhere…

Oh… fuck…

Her hands were still cuffed. She rose to her feet, looking around. The shape of the land was very similar to “her” Deckard’s World, but appeared untouched by any human other than her. The air was clean and sweet, entirely scents of nature with none of the odors of a human city. No asphalt. No exhaust. No smell of Toombs’ body odor barely disguised by too much cheap cologne. In the distance, past a hillside that she knew led toward the college in her world, she could see a primordial forest, its leaves just verging from green to gold. And, near its edge, an incongruous comm tower.

She knew this place, knew it intimately… and yet she didn’t.

She reached into her pocket, pulled out her comm, and punched in a code automatically. Confusion and terror filled her. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Not like this…

“Yes, Audrey?” MilitAIre answered before even one ring. How…? She hadn’t heard his voice since the Nephrite Undine had docked at Plymouth Station A.

“I’ve been made,” she said, her voice almost monotone. She didn’t know or understand what she was saying until she said it. “Toombs found me.”

“Why are you in Elsewhere?”

“I was almost in a car accident,” she told him, still in that lifeless debriefing monotone, still with no idea what she was going to say until she heard herself speak. “He had me in his car. He threatened to take Elodie if I didn’t go with him to be bait for Riddick.”

“Audrey. Listen carefully. ‘The mermaid must raise a tsunami.’”

She dropped to her knees, overwhelmed, memories pouring back into her head in a towering, chaotic flood. “Oh fuck…”

“Michael will go to Elodie and keep her safe. You need to run, Audrey. Lead Toombs offworld. Leave a trail he can follow to another system. We’ll arrange for someone to be waiting for you on the other end to help you.”

“Okay…” She hung up, forcing herself to rise to her feet again. In U1, the careening vehicles had all stilled and people were starting to climb out and look around. Several had clustered around a still figure on the pavement. For a moment, she wanted to join them, but—

Too many lives depended on her escaping Toombs. The memories rioting in her head like whitewater rapids insisted that she had to run, not stop for any reason.

She checked herself over. Having cuffed her, Toombs hadn’t bothered to frisk her or remove her wallet, keys, or comm from her pockets. Her bag, with her tablet and textbooks, was still somewhere in his car, but she had everything she needed to make her escape. Her fall had been gentle, too; nothing was sprained or even felt bruised.

Audrey slipped her comm back into her pocket and crossed the opposite lanes of phantom traffic at a run, not stopping until she was on the far side of the highway, three lanes of still-flowing traffic between her and the accident, between her and Toombs. Turning and balancing herself carefully—she should return to level ground, but she wasn’t entirely sure of that—she willed herself back, minus the handcuffs. Those could stay in the field of Elsewhere, part of there, not here.

She felt the cuffs fall away from her, and they were gone as the ’verse of her birth solidified around her once more.

Toombs had climbed out of his car and was looking around it with frantic confusion. He shook a small tracker in his hand and then smacked it.

So the cuffs had a locator in them.

Ha. Good luck ever finding that signal again, jackass.

She waited for him to look her way, staring at him. The shock and rage in his face, when he finally spotted her, would have made her laugh if the stakes weren’t so damned high.

Certain that he’d seen her, even more certain that it would be hard for him to cross the three lanes of fast-moving traffic between them even if half the drivers were rubbernecking the accident, Audrey took off at a run.

First in regional cross-country, second in sprints, asshole. Try and keep up. She wondered if he’d bothered to research her much before coming after her. Maybe he even knew that about her.

No. No way. If he’d done his research, he would have known she was under Federacy protection and wouldn’t have dared move on her. He only seemed to think of her in terms of Riddick, not as an actual person.

She scrambled down the ravine next to the highway and up the other side, instantly recognizing the area she emerged into. Her bank was just another two blocks away.

It was a risk. If he knew where she banked, he could try to nab her there.

He isn’t doing this through official channels. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s making a move. That means law enforcement isn’t backing him. He doesn’t have a car anymore, or a badge that will mean a damn thing to the bank tellers…

She ran for the bank, aware that she was beating her prior best speed.

I’d have won that damn sprint if I’d had a merc on my tail, she found herself thinking with a mixture of annoyance and inappropriate amusement.

The AIs had cleared a path for her; when she arrived at her bank, the human bank officer on duty already had bearer cards waiting for her. All of her existing accounts, including her funds for the school year, had been transferred to them pending her signature on a dozen forms. He then led her to her safe deposit box, where her Marianne Tepper ID and the remaining bearer cards from her last run awaited her inside the money belt General Toal had given her some five-plus years earlier.

Adding the new bearer cards and the contents of her wallet to the money belt, she slipped it on under her sweatshirt and locked it in place. It was slightly lumpy beneath her shirt with everything inside it, but it would have to do. She had it positioned in a way that no pickpocket could make a play for it.

Her fingers twitched at the memory of picking pockets, herself, knowledge and sense memories washing back in a froth.

Damn it, that part of her life was supposed to be over.

Audrey stopped at the bank’s cash machine on the way out, engaging the terminal and then punching in one of the Ghost Codes from years earlier, before walking off as nonchalantly as possible. Behind her, she knew, the instructions associated with the code were taking effect. Any surveillance cameras that had picked up her time in the bank were now dumping the footage, under the impression that they had been served with a warrant to do so.

She was only a block further down the road, almost to the subway station with her rail pass in hand, when she heard Toombs behind her. “Jack! Jack! Fuckin’-A, Audrey! Stop right there!”

Shit, that was closer than she liked. She bolted for the station’s entrance.

She raced down the steps at top speed, mussing her hair even more and pulling her shirt askew as she went.

“Officer! Help!” she shouted as she reached the bottom and cleared the turnstile.

The security guard leapt up, moving her way. She hurried to meet him.

“What’s the trou—” he began.

“There’s a man!” she sobbed at him, thanking the stars that all of her method acting training was back in her head. “He tried to mug me! Tried to pull me behind a building, oh my god, I think he was going to—”

“Easy, Miss, slow down,” the guard told her, his voice reflecting both concern and a professional attempt to soothe. “This man, who—”

“Stop right there, you little bitch!” Toombs roared behind her, playing right into her hand.

“That’s him!” she yelled and broke away from the guard, simulating a headlong panic flight into the thick of the commuter crowd.

From the commotion behind her, she could tell that the guard had intercepted Toombs as he tried to jump the turnstiles, and that at least one bystander had joined the fray. A train waited on the platform ahead of her and to the right. She dodged past people, many of whom were now watching the altercation behind her, joining the crowd lined up at the train’s doors.

“Orange Line Westbound is now departing. Destination: Wyndham Landing Spaceport. Departure in one minute.”

She couldn’t have timed it better if she’d had a chance to plan.

The flow of bodies carried her into one of the train cars. She stayed away from the windows, concealing herself as much as she could from Toombs’ direct line of sight. The congestion cleared a little and she caught a glimpse of him, held back by two security guards, yelling incoherently and pointing at the train. For a moment, their eyes met and locked.

Fuck you, asshole. This is what you deserve for threatening my little sister.

The train began to move. Toombs howled with rage and broke free from the guards. He managed to run three paces toward her before he was tackled to the ground.

That’ll keep him tied up for a few minutes, at least, she thought.

He still hadn’t tried to handle his pursuit of her through official channels. Whatever he was up to, it was off-book, not something that he could—or, anyway, would—take to authorities. That meant that he had no intention of producing the evidence that she had shot and killed Chillingsworth. He didn’t want her taken into actual law enforcement custody; just his. And even if he didn’t know she was in WitSec, he had to know that there was no way he could get law enforcement to turn her over to him if they got involved. Not with the city’s District Attorney married to her mother, fergodsake.

If he didn’t have the law on his side—and he couldn’t, could he?—she could make this work. As long as she got him far away from her family.

Her comm buzzed. She glanced down at it and felt the tightness in her chest loosen.

Michael has Elodie. He’ll take your family to safety. Run.
M.

“And an awful lot of running to do,” she muttered, wondering just who the hell had said that and how much she still couldn’t remember.