The Changeling Game, Chapter 75

75.
Full Circle and Into the Fire

Okay. I’m safe for now. Time to take stock.

Audrey took a deep breath and tried to think as clearly as she could about her situation. As much of it as she actually knew. She could feel far too many holes still impeding her jumbled memory; she just had to hope none of the missing pieces were critical to this puzzle.

Toombs’ plan to coerce her into being his accomplice by threatening her family would no longer work, not now that Michael had been alerted and had moved to protect them. But the longer the merc stayed on Deckard’s World, the higher the chances were of her trail unbreaking in a way that might catch the Quintessa Corporation’s attention and link her to an accident that wasn’t supposed to have any survivors. Might even catch the attention of Federacy Operatives who would want to arrest her, not for anything she’d done as much as for what she was. Either result would be catastrophic. She needed to get offworld, leaving a trail that would make it look, to everybody except Toombs, like she’d never left the planet before. He would give chase, but she might just have enough of a head start to reach one of Toal’s Operatives before he could try to grab her again.

She would just have to make sure that she left enough of an obvious trail that he wouldn’t break off the pursuit before Deckard’s World was far behind them.

Fuck. She had sworn she would never leave again…

…hadn’t she?

Well, maybe I can find my way back to Tangiers Prime…

That would probably be a bad idea. Another place that could draw too much attention back to a trail that needed to stay broken.

Fucking Toombs… She’d really wanted to see Ewan again, too.

She frowned. Had there been plans for her to go there, at one point?

Audrey eased her way through the train’s commuters, over to a small information kiosk. She had twenty minutes until they pulled into Wyndham Landing’s spaceport. Boarding on one of the shuttles up to the space station would close ten minutes after that. She could reserve a seat now—

No. She needed to wait until the very last moment and pay for the seat in person, on camera. If Toombs got an alert before then that she was making the move—and he probably had alerts in place for any financial transactions she engaged in, given how he’d both located her dining hall and then almost caught up to her at her bank—he’d get in place to intercept her.

He still might. It’s the obvious choice…

So she’d throw in a less obvious one.

A trans-continental hopper was taking off five minutes after the shuttle she wanted, flying to Settlement Point. She booked a seat on it under her real name.

If he had an accomplice like Eve Logan waiting to intercept her at the station, they’d stake out the trans-continental concourse instead. That might buy her enough time to get to the shuttle. When she didn’t board the hopper, and the other transaction posted, he’d know where she’d really gone but would have an hour’s wait, minimum, before he or his accomplice could try to follow.

Straightening her clothing and finger-combing her hair, she worked on making herself look as ordinary as possible again. Now it was time to blend in.

He’s probably going to have some legal trouble to deal with, she thought. Chasing me like that means he fled the scene of a probably-fatal accident he had a role in causing. Unless he rented that car under an assumed name, that’s going to come up the moment they book him. If they book him.

She’d be screwed, though, if he had someone staked out up on the station itself, and got a chance to contact them so they could ambush her as she emerged from the shuttle. She couldn’t pull an “isomorph” in orbit; only vacuum waited in all but three of her other ’verses there, and lethal atmospheres prevailed in those three. Even going partway into any of them could kill her. Her only other option would be to isomorph her captor… to commit a murder.

Could she do that?

…Was any of what she’d just contemplated even real?

Just gotta hope that he doesn’t get a chance to arrange an ambush, she told herself.

Twenty minutes felt like twenty years.

Audrey had never been a sloucher. Now, however, she did her best to look three or four inches shorter than her semi-intimidating height of 5’10” as she tried to melt into the center of the debarking crowd. She let the main current carry her from the train toward the entryway to the concourse for high-speed commuter trains, the ones that could reach other towns and resorts in Deckard’s World’s northern hemisphere in the same twenty minutes that her low-speed train had taken to reach the station, before finally separating from the flow near the public restrooms.

Ten minutes to get myself offworld, she told herself. She kept her walk smooth and unhurried as she headed for the shuttle departure deck, blending into another flow of commuters taking the escalator to the top level.

Again, she slouched as much as she could manage. If Toombs had an accomplice, they would be looking for a tall woman with dark blonde hair. She couldn’t do much about the hair yet, but she could make herself as short as possible.

Audrey had one of her bearer cards, and her ID with her real name on it, at the ready by the time she reached the shuttle gates. Two other people behind her were able to buy passage before she heard the ticketing kiosk announce that the shuttle was at capacity. It was packed, a few of her fellow passengers still squabbling over where to put luggage and how to sit together. It took her almost until liftoff to find a free seat.

It was only her second time experiencing escape velocity in a properly padded chair.

The last time she’d left Deckard’s World, she’d been in a baggage compartment and had almost been crushed by someone’s hard-sided luggage set. The takeoff from the crash planet had been very nearly as rough, and she and Kyra had been forced to lie on the utility closet floor, extra hazmat suits their only cushioning, while the Scarlet Matador took off. Swanky chair aside, she hadn’t been in any condition to appreciate how physically comfortable—comparatively speaking—her launch from New Casablanca was. This one was still no picnic—she still felt like an elephant had decided to lie down on top of her—but she knew that at least this time, she wouldn’t be wearing bruises for days, for any reason.

Small mercies. Hang onto the small mercies.

Audrey would reach Plymouth Station A three hours after she had shaken Toombs off her trail, she calculated. Then she would need to start doing some real maneuvers, and making sure he knew—just too late to stop her—what they were.

Gravity was lessening rapidly. After another moment, her hair began to float randomly around her face. She reached out to the data screen in front of her and ran a query for the space station’s current departure schedule. Did anything leaving in the immediate future have space left for one more passenger?

One ship stood out: the Santa Clara. It had more than a dozen berths left—

Berths. No wonder. The Santa Clara was some kind of former cruise ship, originally meant for taking well-heeled passengers through a single system’s prettiest tourist points, that had been refitted for star-jumping. But it still had bunk rooms instead of aisles of cryo-tubes. Probably there were just enough claustrophobic travelers who couldn’t handle cryo-tubes, and couldn’t afford their own charter Star Jumper with in-seat cryo, to keep it in business.

A ship that wouldn’t force her into cryo. And it was going to New Queensland. How absolutely perfect, if stupid expensive. She’d buy a ticket on it right before it was scheduled to stop admitting passengers.

She noted its gate number and pulled up the space station schematic. There would, she estimated, be just enough time for her to stop in the shopping level—a place where almost anything could be purchased, given how many passengers mislaid their luggage coming and going—and get herself some clothing and toiletries for the month-long journey. Maybe even a replacement tablet.

The next several hours went surprisingly smoothly. No one made a scene; no one attempted to intercept her. Eve Logan apparently wasn’t working with Toombs on this caper. Nor, seemingly, was anyone else. It had surprised her, for a moment, that no one fussed about her meeting all of the requirements for going offworld, but apparently she’d taken care of all that more than a year ago. A vague memory stirred at that point, of plans to actually attend school at Khair Eddine and, hopefully, reunite with Ewan. What had stopped her?

She couldn’t remember. Yet.

Audrey even had a moment to leave a brief, apologetic message on her mother’s answer-comm, knowing Bettie Paige Hawthorne-Baxter, Esq. would be unlikely to pick up a call from an unidentified comm number. She wondered if her mother and Alvin had been alerted by Michael yet, or if they were in for a surprise when they went to pick Elodie up from school and found her under armed guard.

“Mom, it’s Audrey. The things I could never tell you, about the time I was away… one of them came back. I’m okay. I’ll be okay. But I have to go away for a while so nobody gets hurt. I love you. I’ll come back, I swear I will. Keep Elodie safe. You can trust Michael, but don’t trust anybody else you don’t know around her. Don’t leave her unguarded for a second.”

It was only much later, after boarding, after departure, after trying and failing to sleep and while picking out late-night snacks from the Santa Clara’s vending machines, that she realized she’d probably given the accidental impression that, years ago, she might have been abducted by traffickers.

Anything that keeps Elodie safe. Anything that keeps anyone else from figuring out where I went and who I was six years ago.

She was foundering under the weight of memory, struggling to fit it back into the life she thought she knew, the person she’d believed she was for the last year. From moment to moment, she either couldn’t understand how she’d managed to pull off her escape from Toombs… or couldn’t understand how she’d ever not known how to. Some of the memories were shocking in their violence, in her violence, one or two making her worry that she was making a mistake by trying to eat anything. What was she? What had she been?

Few people were up at that hour. When she entered the starboard lounge—which must have once been quite luxurious during the ship’s pleasure cruise days—she noticed that the only people in there all had their backs to the broad picture window. Outside, the stars swirled and danced past the ship as the wormhole from a new ’verse—which she’d aligned herself with, expanding her five-shape to twenty-eight ’verses wide—turned parsecs into miles. She settled onto a couch for the show, nibbling at her snacks.

I’d forgotten all about my five-shape. How could I forget my—

“You always stare at nothing like that?” someone asked to her left. She turned her head.

“Sorry?”

“You looked like you were watching something out the window,” a man in his mid-thirties, self-consciously dressed in the same kinds of clothes most of the first-year guys at Deckard Tech were sporting, told her. He wasn’t bad-looking, but there was something just slightly distasteful about him. A vibe she didn’t like. “Like there’s something there to see. Don’t even know why they have windows in this dive.”

She almost answered him, almost started telling him the history of former luxury ships like the Santa Clara, when the rest of what he’d said snagged her full attention.

Like there’s something there to see…?

“What do you see out the window?” she asked, aware that the man was probably hoping to flirt with her, and that she really ought to shut him down, but suddenly too curious not to ask. Part of her was mentally filing away details about him: five foot nine, 190 pounds, light brown hair, hazel eyes, no scars or tattoos…

What was she?

He frowned, as if it had never occurred to him that anyone would ask such a thing. “What I always see. What everybody always sees. Nothing. You never see anything inside a star jump.”

Audrey looked away from him, back out the window. A trio of stars whirled past, red and gold and blue, and for a moment she wondered which ’verse’s version of the crash planet might just have spun by. A wormhole might loop past anything…

“You really don’t see anything out the window?” she asked him after a pause.

“I really don’t.” His tone changed slightly, as he switched from cranky tourist into guy on the make. “But anyway, who needs windows when the view in here is so—”

“But surely,” Audrey cut him off, “you hear the whispers, right?”

Flirtation gave way to uncertainty.

“The what?”

The ones tellin’ me to go for the sweet spot, just to the left of the spine, fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta. It’s a metallic taste, human blood…

No, that would be a little too dramatic. She cocked her head instead, as if listening to something, making her expression quizzical. “You really don’t hear them?”

“Sorry, uh… no.” Someone was no longer on the make. “But, uh… you have a good… night…”

She restrained her laughter until after he’d fled the lounge. Fifteen minutes later, she was alone in the place with her cheese chips and peanut butter cups, the only insomniac left up.

Do people really see nothing out of these windows? She could have sworn that she’d seen stars through the front viewscreen of the Nephrite Undine. Was she misremembering somehow? She’d had no idea that the view was supposed to be…

Dull? Nondescript? Boring? Empty?

Wait. She knew the answer to this. She’d figured it out on the Undine. Another jumbled, restored memory slid back into place for her. She, alone, could see into twenty-seven other universes where no wormhole occluded the view of the stars. Only people with Threshold Syndrome could see stars during a Jump.

My five-shape is gonna be forty-one ’verses wide when I get to New Queensland, part of her, still swimming for the surface, thought, but she was not entirely sure what she meant by that. Something was still missing, something that had to do with…

My sister? Not Elodie… not Kyra… not even Sebby—and how could she have forgotten Sebby?—but someone else…

Memories swirled like the stars out the window as they tried to work their way back into place. One, of living statues from the ship that was screaming, made her recoil in horror. She and Imam had been dragged through a room, on their way to a twisted arena, and while no one had explained anything about the statues they were passing, she had felt how alive and tormented each one was…

She didn’t want that memory to be hers. She wanted it to be Jack’s, to belong to Jack-who-was-dead. No. I’m not going to think about that. It happened to someone else, not me. Not me.

Not me.

She was Audrey, not Jack. Jack had done terrible things. Jack had no place in the life she’d been building for herself. A life now several dozen light years behind her as the first star jump came to an end.

Never thought I’d pass this way again…

She’d certainly never intended to.

…had she?

She’d sworn she’d never leave Deckard’s World again… hadn’t she?

Her memories were a massive, contradictory jumble. There was so much she needed to puzzle out. So much that still didn’t make sense. She knew, with iron certainty, that she had been hiding from something far more terrible and insidious than Alexander Toombs. But what it might be, she still couldn’t remember yet…

And, she realized, as a flicker of red caught her eye, she might not have any time left to figure it out.

Disengaging contact. Subject is unharmed.

Riddick came back to himself slowly. Being so thoroughly immersed in Jack’s memories—Audrey MacNamera’s memories—had left him a little disoriented.

The chamber of the Quasi-Dead was silent around him. His most trusted guards stood outside, unmoving. He wasn’t sure how many hours had passed.

Jack hadn’t been able to talk for long, tell her story for long, before her exhaustion had overcome her. He’d carried her, sleeping, to the chamber of the Quasi-Dead, and had commanded them to “read” the rest of her story to him.

Disappearing into another person’s memories was an experience unlike anything he’d ever had. It was going to take him a while to sort through it all.

Her sleeping face was still and calm, her breathing slow and steady. He gathered her up as the Quasi-Dead tilted back out of sight, carrying her out of their chamber, his guards falling in around them. All would-be observers had been forbidden to attend the “reading,” and the Quasi-Dead themselves had been forbidden to speak while it transpired. They had been ordered to serve only as conduits, channeling the girl’s memories directly into his head.

Maybe it was because she was an esper, he reflected. Or maybe because she was eidetic. Or maybe because he was both of those things, too… and maybe because she’d been unconscious and unable to resist. But everything had flowed into his mind with cinematic clarity and detail, every sense engaged. He felt like he’d experienced her life. Her highs, lows, terrors, joys… everything.

Everything.

He understood why she’d been so frightened, now. As her memories had come flooding back into her head, they’d brought a confused awareness that she was hiding from someone or something much more dangerous than Toombs. Discovering that he had been looking for her, and from here of all possible places…

She thought I was what she was hiding from… being hidden from. Not exactly an unreasonable conclusion.

“Stay outside,” he told the guards as they opened the door to his chambers. He carried the girl back into his bedroom and lowered her onto the bed, wondering how much longer she would remain unconscious.

Until I wake her, a voice behind him whispered.

“I wondered if you were here,” he murmured, not bothering to turn around. There was no point. Human eyes couldn’t see Her, except in tiny fragments. Human brains—even Furyan brains—couldn’t process what She was.

Where else would I be but with my little sister in her time of peril?

“About a million other places, all at once, if I’m right about what you are,” he told Her.

You see clearly, Lightbringer.

“Ain’t no Lightbringer,” he grumbled.

You bear Her mark upon your chest. Her seed flourishes within you. And you are here, with my little sister. Just as we have chosen Audrey, She has chosen you. You are of Her brood. First and foremost among the Children of Light.

“You gonna spout some prophecy nonsense at me now?”

We do not do prophecies. Cause and effect flow in multiple directions. One stream’s future is another’s past, and its future is the first stream’s past. Free will is why there are endless streams. But the Demons of the Dark have left only one pathway through, for all of us. Will you walk it?

“I got any kind of choice in the matter?”

None of us do now, because of them.

“Then I guess I’m walkin’ it.” He stared down at the sleeping girl on his bed. She looked so fragile, so vulnerable. But he knew what she was capable of, even better than she did maybe. “Gonna need her for it.”

That is why she’s here.

“You ain’t gonna clue me in on what happens next, are you?” He found himself smirking. This shit, he thought, always went the same way. Gods, monsters, or something else altogether, they never could just lay it out. Had to be fuckin’ mysterious.

Would it help if I did?

He remembered what Michael had said to Jack about prophecies, about how knowing what was coming and struggling against it somehow made it more inevitable than if people stopped fighting the future and just let it all play out. Did what came naturally and saw the result…

“Nah. Why take away the mystery?”

We will meet again soon, Lightbringer.

He really wished She wouldn’t call him that. The darkness was his home; why didn’t They get that? “One more thing. In case there’s any doubt. She’s mine now. Jack is mine.”

You might want to see if Audrey agrees with you. There was a hint of amusement in Her voice. In the periphery of his vision, darkness swirled within the gloom and dissipated.

He suspected She hadn’t gone far.

“John MacNamera’s daughter,” he murmured after a moment, stripping out of his armor and boots before joining Jack on the bed, lying down beside her on top of the sheets. “How interesting.”

He’d encountered the name on multiple occasions, usually when he was trying to figure out how to defeat a particularly impregnable security system. How strange to find out that an opponent he’d never actually met, but had enormous respect for, felt much the same way about him.

What might he have done, he wondered, if he’d known six years ago that the man’s little girl was in his grasp?

“No wonder you were so secretive,” he told the sleeping girl beside him. He’d underestimated her tremendously.

Everything she’d done and said, during their brief time together, had more layers of complexity to it than he’d given her credit for. She’d been running a game, playing the roles she needed to play to try to reach her father, even fooling him in the process. If she’d told him what she was trying to do, where she was trying to go and who she was trying to reach… would he have helped her, or started running a game of his own?

Can’t take it personally that she didn’t want to tell me, he thought. It’s not like she told Shazza, either. Or Fry. Or fuckin’ Paris.

Paris was another who’d had them all—well, almost all of them—fooled, his meek, effete professorial mask and his extreme materialism disguising skills that were much more interesting. He’d missed it, but Jack had caught it. Then again, he hadn’t been the esper wandering around unshielded… and actively seeking mentorship in larceny.

If he’d known that she had the backdoor codes to half the impregnable security systems he’d struggled to beat, stored in her head, would he have been able to let her go her way?

Not to mention, this girl can plan out a heist like nobody’s business…

And yet, after he’d left her, making the Holy Man promise to keep her safe, the hoodoo had kept her trapped instead. She hadn’t been able to heist herself out of the al-Walid home until she’d given up and put a razor to her wrists.

If he’d known how close she would come to destroying herself in the Imam’s house, and how little true caring the Holy Man would actually show her, would he have been able to leave her behind?

“Fuck.” He’d expected a lot better out of the man, after seeing him rescue her from strangling to death in the Kublai Khan’s arena.

He’d probably have taken her with him, instead. And that would not have ended well. For either of them. Even if he’d just asked her where she wanted to go and sent her on her way there, she’d have been Quantified and enslaved before she could reach her father. And if he’d kept her with him… she’d have ended up, one way or another, destroyed. By him.

He lifted one of her arms, pushing her sleeve back and tracing the scar on her inner arm. I wonder when she stopped hiding them… That was somewhere in the memory stream he’d imbibed, he was sure.

Why the fuck did this have to be the best path for her? God was still a fucker. But she had survived, and had even managed to thrive. That was something.

One thing he still didn’t understand was why the Holy Man had thought it was Jack in Crematoria and not Kyra. He got, now, why Kyra would know so much about Jack’s run with him, how she was able to get so many details right even as she got key ones wrong and unknowingly gave her game away, why she wouldn’t have had enough wariness of mercs in spite of sharing a piece of Jack’s history with them. He even had a sense, now, of why she’d believed she was Jack, and why her infatuation with him had run even deeper than that of the girl sleeping next to him. But what had she said or done to make the Holy Man believe that she was the girl he’d failed, and not a stranger?

Because the Holy Man had failed Jack, multiple times over, and then had apparently failed Kyra too…

And I let it happen.

“What are you pitching, Riddick?” Kyra had demanded of him. “That you cutting out was a good thing? That you had my ass covered from halfway across the universe?”

What would his answer to Jack have been, if she’d asked that? The mercs on his tail, he admitted to himself, had been an excuse, and as much as he had been willing to admit to someone other than Jack herself. The existential threat he’d posed to the girl’s mind, body, and soul if they stayed together… was that something he could have admitted to her, if she’d been the one standing there?

But Jack, he knew now, had never expected him to stay with her. She’d expected the two of them to part ways, and she’d accepted it. She just hadn’t counted on getting trapped in the al-Walid house the way she had. And she’d needed him to “say goodnight” before he left. While she was awake to hear it and say goodnight back, to know he cared, to know he hadn’t become disgusted with her for taking a life.

Fuck me… That, right there, had been his biggest mistake.

He’d been so focused on the tearful please-don’t-gos that he’d thought he’d face with her, if he did a real good-bye, it had never occurred to him that she might smile, give him a hug and kiss him on the cheek, tell him to “be careful out there,” and then get back to the business of conniving her way onto a ship to Furya.

“Thought I had you pegged, kid,” he told her as she slept. “But fuck, you’re a slippery one.”

She didn’t react. She was deeply asleep. She’d probably stay that way for hours.

Of course she will, he realized, and suddenly knew exactly what She was waiting for him to do before She allowed her little sister to wake up.

He’d have to figure out Kyra’s deal later. First…

First it was time for him to get some sleep; real sleep, not just meditating while he dream-lived her life. Then, when he woke, it would be time to talk to the Holy Fuckin’ Half-Dead itself. Make this ship safe for Jack to wake up on.

“Nobody enters or leaves these rooms while I’m gone,” he told his guards as he left his quarters several hours later, feeling better rested than he had in a year. In, if he was being truthful, years.

There were corridors, deep in the Basilica, that no one walked. No one dared. He’d only been in them once, himself, when his rage had sent him there looking for a way to annihilate the ship. He retraced the route from memory now. The last time, he’d turned away and considered it a smart move to do so. Good survival instincts.

Now, though, he had business to conduct.

Old, worn signs, utilitarian rather than the ornate monstrosities created by later generations of Necromongers, greeted him and pointed the way.

There. That was the sign he was looking for, so much more meaningful now that he’d lived in Jack’s head.

Tenth Crusade
Built at Oslo Shipping Spacedock 1
Authorized . . . . .  May 18, 2099
Keel Laid  . . . . . June 14, 2100
Launched . . . . . August 27, 2101
Commissioned . . December 27, 2101

“Disappeared July 18, 2102,” Riddick murmured, touching the plaque. The girl’s knowledge about this ship’s early days was encyclopedic.

He followed the signs leading to the original engine room. Last time he’d been down here, he’d stopped at the plaque, unwilling to venture further. Now he understood exactly what awaited him.

The room was a shambles, torn to pieces. An explosion had taken down massive parts of its structure centuries earlier. Wreckage, shielding elements, and fractured bits of stone were scattered throughout. And…

“There you are,” he murmured, catching a glimpse—just a glimpse—of his quarry. “We need to talk.”

It didn’t answer him, vanishing into the shadows.

“We’re gonna talk. Now.” He smiled and played his trump card. “Moribund…”