The Changeling Game, Chapter 79

79.
Officer Lola

Lola Esposito had, from childhood, always wanted to make a difference. To make the world better. For her, that had meant becoming a police officer.

She had been the one racing around her school playground, her windbreaker sleeves tied around her throat so that the jacket flapped out behind her like a cape, “rescuing” her classmates from “peril” before “flying” away again. Protecting the innocent, she’d insisted from that time forward, was her sworn duty…

And it all ends like this, she thought in disgust.

Chained to a filthy bed, naked, her own sets of handcuffs used to spread her arms and lock them to the bedposts behind her head, a nasty set of solid iron “dungeon” cuffs around her ankles keeping her legs open wide, all she could do was lie on the bed and wait for whatever was going to happen.

She’d tried, repeatedly, to get out of the cuffs in the last three hours. Her own sets, at least, could be stress-popped under the right conditions, and more than one perp she’d caught had done exactly that, but she couldn’t get the right angle or pressure to do the same thing. And the cuffs on her ankles were terrifyingly solid, feeling like the kinds of things blacksmiths had churned out more than a thousand years ago for actual medieval dungeons.

The men who had put them on her—one of them a fellow cop, and if she managed to get out of this somehow, she was going to destroy him—had jokingly “warned” her that she wouldn’t be able to escape them.

“You’ll just injure yourself trying,” Detective Palmer had laughed, “but fortunately, you won’t injure any of the parts people are interested in.”

I will fucking end him even if I have to come back from the grave to do it…

They had neatly folded up her clothes and set them on a nearby table, along with her badge, belt, and arms, just where she couldn’t get at any of them. And then they had left, laughing and promising that someone who liked “sticking pigs” would come attend to her soon.

Palmer had fooled her. He’d been the dirty cop she’d been trying to ferret out, the whole time, but he’d tricked her into thinking Sato was the one she was after, tricked her into confiding in him about Sergeant Agassi’s investigation into departmental corruption. And yet… he hadn’t fooled her for long. Tonight had been about gathering proof that he was on Vyacheslav’s payroll, and she’d nearly succeeded… if only she hadn’t gotten caught.

In the last three hours, she’d had nothing to do except make fruitless attempts to break out of the cuffs, go over all the evidence in her head… and wait for something to happen. For one of the doors on either end of the room to open and someone to come in.

Finally one door, to her right, eased open.

Here we go. She’d had a lot of time to think about how she might stand up to the kind of torture her captors had in mind, but a shudder rolled through her all the same.

Instead of someone walking through, a long, slim gun barrel appeared, extending its way past the door crack. Then a man in full combat gear, leading with the rifle, stepped into the room. He stopped, staring at her for a few seconds, before he began moving forward, quartering the room.

Other soldiers followed him in.

Fuck. So it’s gonna be some kind of cosplay gang bang. She gritted her teeth, trying to prepare herself for the ordeal to come.

They ignored her, mostly, moving for the door on the other end of the room.

A few of them took a moment to look her over, and she could swear she saw their filthy thoughts in their eyes. Others looked troubled when they glanced her way. One of them, near the back of the group—barely more than a kid, with black, close-cropped curls, a wrestler’s physique, and odd dark glasses concealing his eyes—kept looking over at her with a frown. As the others left through the next door, he turned and looked back at her again.

“Stay on task,” she heard another soldier mutter to him. “Ain’t no room for improvising in this gig if you want your head to stay on your neck.”

Soon they were gone, the doors closed again.

Another half hour crawled by. Lola was excruciatingly aware of how slowly time was passing thanks to the clock on the wall. Maybe that was one of the more subtle forms of torture in the room—

The lights flickered and died.

No longer able to see the clock, she began to silently count. She was still two hours away from the message she’d made for Sergeant Agassi, on a timed release if she didn’t make it back by then, reaching him and, hopefully, triggering a rescue. But she’d had plenty of time to come up with more than a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t, or why the rescue wouldn’t be in time even if it happened. Two hours left to live through, minimum, if she wanted any kind of chance at all…

The lights flickered on for a moment, died again, and then low emergency lighting came on, dark red and just barely illuminating the wall clock.

Another ten minutes passed before the door on her left eased open again.

The young soldier who had kept looking back at her stepped into the room.

His dark glasses had been removed. The red glow of the emergency lighting seemed to reflect in his eyes, making them ignite. It was like catching a glimpse of the devil.

He walked over to the foot of the bed in silence. Lola had the odd and horrible feeling that those inhuman eyes could see everything, not just the parts of her body that had been exposed and spread open but into her head.

“Never done this before,” he said, his voice deep and full of the gravel that she associated with chain smokers—

—and, she suddenly thought, the old man who had lived one floor down from her, when she was a kid, who had been a prisoner of war in the Bernathi Conflict and had once told her, this is what your voice sounds like if you spend a year screaming all the time…

She shuddered and put the thought aside. “Done what?” She had far too many awful ideas about what he meant, especially with him essentially standing between her legs like that.

“This,” he said, and touched one of the iron cuffs on her ankles. He glowered at it for a moment—

It snapped open right as he hissed in pain and pressed one hand to his temple.

“Fuck,” he muttered. “Sons of bitches… gonna kill ’em all for this…”

What the hell had just happened?

She watched as the man—was he a man? The more she really looked at him, the more she thought he might still be a kid. A huge, hulking, dangerous kid… but not actually an adult yet. What army recruited kids?—took several deep breaths before putting his hand on the other iron cuff and glaring at it.

“Argh!” Now both hands were pressed to his temples, but the second iron cuff had snapped open, too.

She was able to close her legs for the first time in hours… and for the first time in hours, she was suddenly aware of how much her hips and inner thighs hurt from being held in that position for so long.

“You okay?” she found herself asking.

“Not really,” he grumbled as he moved unsteadily around the bed toward her right wrist. “Least I can do this part physically…”

Apparently this kid knew how to pop her cuffs. It took him less than fifteen seconds to have her right arm freed. His walk had steadied as he came around to her left side to work on the remaining cuff.

“Who are you?” she asked him as he worked.

“If I told you, you’d have to tell your bosses.” He popped the last cuff off and gave her a crooked smile. “Wouldn’t you?”

She made her move, rolling to the side so she could lunge off the bed and grab for her guns—

—and fell, sprawling, to the floor, her muscles fucking gelatin.

“Whoa,” he said, and a moment later she felt his hands on her shoulders. “Easy there, officer.”

He helped her to her feet, steadying her. She suddenly smelled blood.

“Fuck,” she muttered, forced to lean against him for a moment while she recovered her balance. There was blood on his shirt, she noticed, and an oozing wound on the join between his neck and shoulder.

“Just breathe,” he told her. “You’re okay. Nothing’s dislocated. How long were you chained up?”

“Nearly four hours,” she grumbled.

She heard the rattle of a wrapper, and then the guy handed her an energy bar, its wrapping already peeled back. “Eat. Tastes like shit, but you need the calories.”

He was right; it was nasty. Halfway through it, before she could even ask, he offered her his opened canteen. Whatever was inside it, it wasn’t water. Not alcohol either; it tasted bitter and chalky, like someone had forgotten to put a masking flavor into an energy drink.

“Exactly,” he said; she wasn’t sure why. “Think you’re up to getting dressed on your own?”

Well, jeez… “I can manage it.”

Her guns were gone when she turned back to the table.

Fuck. What had he done with them?

It took her longer than she liked to dress herself. Longer than he liked, too, because he helped her fasten her bra and button her shirt. Fortunately, her shoes didn’t have laces so she didn’t have to deal with that embarrassment. She put on her belt, aware for the first time that Palmer hadn’t found her recorder and it was still going.

A thunderous boom rocked the building from nearby. Next to her, the soldier laughed softly, took something out of his pocket, dropped it to the ground, and stomped it.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“I officially just died,” he told her. “For a few hours, anyway. Not like they won’t figure it out. C’mon. Got a job for you.”

Did he think she was in Vyacheslav’s pocket? “Already got one.”

“And this fits it perfectly. Don’t make me insist.” He inclined his head toward the door.

He has my guns, she reminded herself, and began walking.

For someone as large as he was, he moved as silently as a cat. He led her unerringly through the darkness; after she stumbled, he reached back, took her hand, and put it on his shoulder. “Not much farther.”

In the distance, she heard a sudden rattle of gunfire. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing you have to worry about,” he said, turning and pushing open a door.

The well-lit room beyond looked, for a moment, like a daycare. A few of the soldiers who had passed through her room were sitting in it, using the child-sized tables as adult chairs, and more than a dozen children sat near them.

Children? Why are there children in a mob-run casino…? Oh. Fuck.

“Kids,” the nameless soldier next to her said, slipping his dark glasses back into place, “this is Officer Lola.”

What the fuck? I never told him my name—

“She’s gonna take you out of here to someplace safe.”

She hadn’t quite known what she’d been expecting. Something nefarious, maybe. Real soldiers wouldn’t have a kid his age—and she was thinking sixteen, maybe seventeen, tops—in their platoon, so these had to be mercs, right? And mercs had no honor, no code. She’d figured he was going to use her as cannon fodder in some way. But…

But this was the job he wanted her for?

She turned to ask him, and found him holding her sidearms out to her, butts first. Still fully loaded, by their weight. She holstered the main gun, keeping her ankle piece drawn, trying to figure out what to say, what to ask.

“You get ’em out of here,” he told her, and followed up with detailed directions. It was the same way she’d been brought in, although the impound lot fence hadn’t had a hole in it at the time. His platoon must have added that feature.

“What about you?” she asked. Merc or not, she suddenly found herself worrying about him. He was just a kid, himself—

“You don’t worry about us. Take care of the kids and we’ll clear you a path.” He was arming weapons of his own as he spoke, as were his brethren, most of whom were herding the kids over to her. “You ain’t never seen none of us. You heard a racket while you were getting loose from your cuffs, found the kids, and got ’em the hell out of here, and you don’t know what else went down. Understood?”

She nodded. She’d have to erase the last bit of the recording she’d made, but whoever these soldiers were, their presence on her audio file might be dangerous… to her, or to them, she wasn’t sure, but either way she should make it go away.

“You never saw us,” he was telling the kids. “That’s for your safety more than ours. Now go.”

She believed him. And somehow that just made her hungrier to know who—what—he was.

It was hard not to wonder, not to speculate, as she led the children out of the “daycare” and off to the right, soon following the path she’d been forced to walk as Palmer and his goon friends dragged her in. She was aware of the soldiers around her, clearing the path… and the moment when the “kid” snapped the neck of one of Palmer’s accomplices who had taken a few liberties with her while helping undress her. She should have been sickened by the ease with which he did it, but she wasn’t. What was he, though? How had he broken the cuffs on her ankles? Why had it felt like he’d been inside her head?

As she finished helping the kids through the fence and turned back to thank him, he was already gone, loping back toward the building they’d left with weapons drawn. The rest of his brethren followed her through the fence and scattered into the darkness, one of them protectively shadowing her and the kids until they reached a well-lit thoroughfare and she could flag down a patrol car.

Fifteen missing and exploited children, recovered in a single night, should have been a career-making coup. It probably would have been, if only she’d been able to keep her mouth shut.

She had… at first. She’d erased the last portion of her recording, starting with the mysterious soldiers’ passage through the room, and had gone along with the pretense that she’d finally managed to pop her own cuffs and that the ones at the foot of the bed were easy to defeat, too, once her hands were free. She’d admitted to hearing fighting elsewhere in the complex as she was evacuating the kids, but both she and the children had sworn that they hadn’t seen anyone as they fled the buildings.

Then the WANTED posters appeared on the station walls.

She recognized all of the faces instantly: the soldiers who had helped rescue the children. Six of them were described as ex-Service, men who had broken out of a military prison and were committing a crime spree, probably as a team. Their alleged ringleader, Charles Demme, was the soldier who had shadowed her and the children to safety. The seventh…

She hadn’t been wrong. He was a kid. Richard B. Riddick, seventeen… with a string of brutal, impossible crimes attributed to him.

Impossible, she knew, because she’d helped process most of the scenes of those murders, knew the detective who was in charge of the cases, and knew for a damned fact that the only reason they were still open cases was because the perp actually behind the killings was fucking untouchable by law enforcement unless they somehow managed to catch him in the act.

She knew, with absolute certainty, that the boy was being framed for crimes he’d had nothing to do with. Which meant all the WANTED posters were probably full of lies.

Vyacheslav was dead. Palmer had died at the casino that night, too, which had led to Agassi closing the corruption case without even listening to her evidence—“He’s dead, Lola. Why take his pension from his widow?”—and word was that all of Vyacheslav’s properties had been confiscated by the New Athens municipal government. And the seven men who had really rescued fifteen innocent children from sex slavery had been transformed into Public Enemies…

She should have kept her mouth shut, but she couldn’t.

Her friends on the force tried to warn her. Eventually, she’d gotten the message… after “accidentally” ending up on a no-fly list and experiencing two near-misses of having potentially career-ending petty crimes almost pinned on her, only to be cleared at the last moment. Finally, she’d shut up and kept her head down, letting the official story stay unchallenged. Finally, she’d understood why Riddick had warned her that she’d never seen him or his friends, and what he’d been trying to protect her from. But it still burned her that she couldn’t defend the honor of the seventeen-year-old boy who had saved her life and rescued fifteen little kids…

And, for the next thirteen years, she had remained a lowly patrol officer even though she’d more than earned a detective’s badge. On Helion Prime’s final night, she’d been assigned to keep the peace in one of the shelters, not even allowed to join the fight against the invaders. And then, the next day, she’d found herself among thousands being offered a terrible, unthinkable choice…

…one faith, one set of loyalties, exchanged for another…

…and, although sometimes her former sets of principles reared up and told her that it was wrong, all wrong…

…she was at peace… of a kind…

“The Lord Marshal has requested your attendance,” Lord Huaman told Lola. “You will know the way.”

She did; exactly how to reach the chambers of the Lord Marshal was suddenly in her head. “Permission to leave my post?”

“Granted.”

Two guards stood at either side of the Lord Marshal’s doors, both looking ill at ease. She approached, waiting quietly in front of them. “Is the Lord Marshal in? He summoned me.”

“He… is not to be disturbed at this time,” one of the guards said. “You will need to wait.”

Deep within, part of her wanted to rebel. Why the hell had she been summoned, at that moment, if she was just going to be made to wait? What the hell was the point?

Leave these thoughts behind. Service is all. Loyalty is all. The Underverse awaits. The voices always came when she had doubts, when the person she had once been tried to reassert herself.

Not like I wasn’t going to be standing still for a few more hours anyway… She let go of the annoyance, stood at parade rest, and settled in to wait.

It didn’t end up being all that long. Maybe fifteen minutes. Then the doors opened and the Lord Marshal, unarmored and strangely familiar, opened the door and leaned out. “Any of my guests arrive yet?”

The voice was familiar, too.

The guards at the door, who seemed unusually reticent, nodded at him and pointed her way.

It was the first time she’d seen the Lord Marshal, even though it had been a little over a year since he’d taken power. He looked over at her, and a broad smile spread over his face. “Officer Lola. C’mon in.”

She’d never worked in any of the force’s public relations areas; aside from the one rescue, she’d never been in a position to need a “kid-friendly” name for her job. There was only one person who had ever called her that; everyone else had just called her Esposito. She found herself staring at him, even as she also found herself obediently walking forward.

How had she not realized? How had she not known?

The Riddick… was her Riddick. How had she not realized?

For a moment, the strange voices that often shut down her thinking had eased off.

She was in his audience room. The inner doors were closed, leaving just a large desk, piled with his armor, and a single chair for furniture. She had the odd sense that once there had been more chairs, but most of them were gone. A statue in the middle of the room had been hidden beneath multiple large tapestries, all of them turned to obscure the pictures and display colorful snarls of thread instead.

“It’s you,” she managed.

“That it is,” he said, still smiling. “How’ve you been, Officer Lola?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t understand what you were really warning me about, back in the day, so I probably didn’t do as well as I should’ve.”

“Hmm… that mean you tried to defend my honor?” He sounded amused.

“Unfortunately, yes.” She had to fight against the impulses to be deferential; the Necromonger Way prized obedience over truth, but he seemed to want truth, so wasn’t that obedience, too?

“Sorry. That can’t have gone well for you.”

“Well, I didn’t end up with a fabricated criminal record, anyway.” Just barely.

“Let me guess, though. You ended up a beat cop for the rest of your career.” He leaned against his desk, watching her, his expression almost… fond? “How’d you know that the criminal record they cooked up was fabricated? You didn’t know anything about me.”

“Because I knew who really committed the crimes. We just couldn’t prove it enough to get past his army of expensive lawyers.”

“You should’ve been a detective.”

“That was the plan,” she admitted, “until I tanked it. I kept an eye on your record, though. I don’t guess I should have been surprised that you really started committing murders.”

It had hurt her heart more than a little, though.

“That was inevitable.” He shrugged, a hint of amusement crossing his enigmatic features.

“I wish it hadn’t been.”

“You were hopin’ I’d make a career out of rescuin’ little kids and damsels in distress?”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” she told him. “But I don’t guess there’s much of a living in that when you’re, what, a rogue Operative? With mercs, cops, and the military trying to chase you down?”

His smile widened again. “Clever girl. You figured it out. When?”

“Two years later. That was when I found out Operatives were real, and how they were conditioned. You broke open those cuffs with your mind and it caused you pain.” And, she realized, she’d seen the wound where he’d cut his tracker out, during the moment when he’d held her and supported her. She just hadn’t understood, at the time, what she was seeing.

The Lord Marshal—the Riddick—no, just Riddick—nodded. “Like I said, you’d’ve been a good detective. I hardly ever do any of that ‘esper’ stuff. Mostly, I rely on other things. But I’m gonna have to use it in a few minutes.”

“What for?”

“You.” Riddick abruptly removed his shirt and set it on the desk. He still had the same wrestler’s physique, a little more solid than it had been fourteen years before. “I need your help. I need you for a special task, and I think you might even like it. But it means giving up a dream. And it means the return of pain. So I’m givin’ you the chance to say no.”

The Necromonger in her couldn’t imagine saying no. She fought past it to consider his words. What dreams did she have left? So many had died, lost to poor choices. There was only one dream left, and it wasn’t even really hers…

Was that the one he meant?

Could she give up the Underverse?

The last fourteen years of her life, the chance to achieve her ambitions, even if she’d failed to… had been because of him. She would have been dead long before any such dream of paradise appeared, if he hadn’t saved her.

She had always wanted to find a way to pay him back. What payment was enough to make up for a saved life?

“I’m not going to say no. What do you need me to do?”

He walked over to her, standing only inches from her. “This is probably gonna hurt. Possibly a lot. I need you to give me your hand.”

She held her hand out to him, surprised when he wrapped his around her wrist.

“Okay. Hold on.” In front of her, Riddick closed his eyes. “This one, Moribund. Release this one to me. Now.”

For a moment, she felt nothing. And then…

Her whole body felt weak, sick… dying… Pain bloomed all the way through her and she felt her strength giving out. The only other time she’d felt like this was when she’d been hospitalized with ’Enza and had genuinely believed she might die…

“He’s released you.” Riddick opened his eyes again. The silver of them was no longer catching the light but shining. And there was a glowing handprint on his chest. He pressed her hand to the print—

Energy exploded out of him and blasted through her body. She convulsed as all of her nerves came back to life and the power coursed through every cell. Riddick’s free arm slipped around her waist, keeping her from falling. Suddenly all of her focus, all of her effort, was on not screaming.

The last of the energy shivered along the ends of her nerves and went still.

Lola gasped, feeling better than she had in years. Her body was full of life, full of power, as if some wellspring had been opened within her. She hadn’t felt this strong and full of vitality since she’d been a kid.

In front of her, Riddick released her and fell to his knees, clutching his head. “Fuck…”

She knelt down beside him, steadying him as he had once steadied her. “You made me human again… how?”

Riddick took several slow, deep breaths before he answered. “It’s a Furyan thing… a trick I learned from another Furyan… one who never got caught and conditioned. He used it to save her life…”

“Her?” Just from the emphasis and intonation, she could tell that Riddick was speaking about someone important to him.

“She’s… a big part of why I did this,” he said, slowly recovering his composure. “She might not need as much protection as I thought, but she still needs protectors. And I need to know they’re not serving the Moribund’s agenda. Just in case.”

“The Moribund?”

“The god of the Necromongers. Been controlling them for more than four hundred years. Until just now, it still had control over you, mostly.”

Riddick rose to his feet again and walked over to his desk, putting his shirt back on.

“So, what happens now?” Lola asked, touching her neck. She still had the scars of purification, but…

…she felt truly purified now. Full of astonishing life.

“Now… you are permanently reassigned to my personal detail. As part of her personal detail.”

“Her?” she asked again.

“When I met her six years ago, she was just a kid. Disguised as a boy, calling herself Jack. I’ve always thought of her by that name.” He gave Lola a wry grin. “I left her on Helion Prime, thought she would be safe there. That didn’t work out so well for her, but she found a safe place on another world… until a merc that was after me decided to try to use her to get to me.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” She’d always hated dealing with mercs when she was a cop, even when they were supposedly there to help.

“It wouldn’t have been, but Jack’s wily as fuck. She got away and started to make a run for it… on a ship that Lord Vaako had gotten into position to raid. He recognized her and brought her to me.”

The girl the Lord Marshal has been seeking for the last year… “And you want me to be part of her protection detail?”

“More than that. She needs friends. Never met an esper who needs human contact as much as she does. Most of us shy away from it. Not her. She lives for it.” He smiled over at Lola. “So yeah, protect her… but even more important… give her companionship. I think you two will like each other.”

“Where is she?”

“Showering, probably, back in there.” He gestured at the closed doors between his audience room and his bedchambers.

“Are you two…?”

“Not yet.”

Lola found herself frowning. “That’s… a little presumptuous of you, isn’t it?”

“Not really.” Riddick smirked. “But if it is, you can protect her from me.”

“Don’t think I won’t.”

Riddick laughed. “I know you will, Lola.”

There was a knock at the outer doors.

“That’ll probably be the rest of the soon-to-be-ex necros I called for,” he said with a grin.

“More people you’re taking back from the path to the Underverse?” she found herself asking.

“Ain’t no such thing, Officer Lola,” he said as he started to walk over to the doors. “The Moribund’s been running a long con for the last four hundred-plus years. You weren’t on your way to paradise.”

“Then what’s the purpose of all this?” she gasped.

“Ain’t time to tell you yet. I will. But not yet.”

If there was no paradise awaiting converts, what was the point of conversion? If death wasn’t the gateway to that promised paradise, why were millions being exterminated? “Riddick?”

“Yeah?” He stopped, looking back at her by the doors.

“If… it’s all a lie… what have you been doing at the head of the Armada for the last year?”

His lips quirked. “Reining it in.”

He opened the doors and stepped through, closing them behind him.