The Changeling Game, Chapter 80

80.
Not His Entourage

That didn’t go too badly.

Riddick stepped out into the hall and looked around at the group of people waiting for him. Several wore full armor, but others were dressed in garb more appropriate for some of the more… cerebral… roles that existed throughout the Armada. He studied them for a moment before glancing over at the guards.

“I need to order breakfast. Been a while since I ate, and even longer since the girl ate anything decent. See if the galley in this beast can put together a ‘traditional Moroccan breakfast.’ Have ’em make enough for fifteen. And tell the maintenance staff that the six suites connected to mine are being opened up again. Have ’em cleaned up and readied for occupation. Any personal possessions left in ’em need to be brought to my audience room, after I’m done working with everybody here.”

“Yes, Lord Marshal. Right away.”

Then again… “Have ’em make enough breakfast for seventeen. You two need some food, too.”

That, he reflected, was the kind of thing Jack wouldn’t have needed to go back and fix. She’d have included the guards from the start. Going so deep in her head was having an odd effect on him.

“Yes, Lord Marshal.” With that, the guards looked a little more relaxed.

He looked back at the assembled group. “Okay. This is gonna take a while. Vanessa Raymond, you’re up first. Come inside.”

Vanessa Raymond was dressed in the garb of a Purifier acolyte. That didn’t surprise him. A lot of the people who ended up in her position had been medical personnel before their conversions. She was tall and strongly built, probably a few years older than him. Her sandy hair had a few threads of silver in it; her lean, square face had laugh lines around the light brown eyes and mobile mouth. The only real difference in appearance, between the Nurse Raymond before him and the one in Jack’s memories, was the deathly pallor of her skin. She stepped forward and followed him back into his audience chamber.

Officer Lola had removed her armor and bogarted his seat. She stood up as soon as he walked in, moving to stand by the inner doors leading to the bedroom.

Is she guarding them? This could get interesting.

“Officer Lola, this is Vanessa Raymond. Vanessa Raymond, officer Lola Santiago, formerly of the New Athens Police Department.”

Raymond frowned, looking at Lola. “I see the scars of Purification, but… what has happened to you?”

“Furyan energy,” Riddick said, seeing Lola’s consternation. “Something we’re gonna talk about a little. You were a medical professional before the Armada came, right? Tell me about what you did.”

Raymond turned her attention back to him. “I was a psychiatric nurse. I worked with troubled adolescents, managing their medication regimens, evaluating their mental and physical well-being, coordinating care programs. My specialty was trauma recovery, working with patients who had been identified as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

“Where’d you work?”

“Eight years at the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital, unfortunately…” She grimaced and then shrugged. “Four and a half years at the Kapodistrian Clinic, until the attack.”

“Do you miss the work? Be honest.”

Raymond began to speak, a “no” clearly forming on her lips, but then stopped, frowning. Good. The impulse toward blind obedience had just been shut down by her Lord Marshal’s command to answer honestly. He’d seen the same struggle on Lola’s face. “I… yes. It… sometimes I don’t understand how the promise of a future paradise could erase every trauma, every neurosis… it feels too good to be true…”

She winced and closed her eyes. He could feel her struggling against voices that were trying to quell her doubts, shove her back into a small corner of her own mind.

“I know one of your former patients. Someone who thinks highly of you, and I think she’d want me to help you. But for me to do that, I need your permission. I can give you the truth. But truth ain’t simple. It ain’t pretty. And it probably doesn’t lead to paradise. So I need you to think hard, and careful, about whether that’s what you want.”

He could see the voices going silent for her, see her thinking over what he had said.

“I… want…” She looked up at him, meeting his eyes. “…truth.”

Lola had nearly fallen. He didn’t know how Raymond might react. “Take a seat.”

He pulled his shirt back off as she sat down in the chair, and then crouched down in front of her.

“Give me your hand.” He took her wrist, closing his eyes and reaching out for the Moribund. He could feel the creature, the way he could feel Lucy, but smoldering with rage and bitterness, pain and… hunger… in a way that Lucy never did.

This one, Moribund… give me this one…

In front of him, Raymond made a strangled, gasping sound. The Moribund had released her; its energies and influence were no longer pouring in, and everything it had taken from her in the last year was now hitting home. His chest began to sting. Opening his eyes, he pressed her hand to the sting…

…and pushed outward.

It was something he’d known how to do from the time he was a child. Something that he’d mastered early on, learning how to channel different types of energy. When he’d been taken by the Quantifiers, he’d had just enough sense to hide it, to pretend he had no such gift. They knew too much about him already, but that was the one thing they never learned. Nonetheless, what they’d done to him had made it impossible to touch the energies anymore…

…until She had come to him again, a year ago, and somehow reached across space to press Her hand to his chest… and the power had returned.

It still hurt like fuck to use it, though. He felt life sparkling through the wrist in his grip and released it even as agony bloomed in his skull and he rocked back on his haunches. Two strong hands were suddenly on his shoulders.

“I got you, big guy,” Lola said from behind him. “You’re okay.”

“How…” Raymond gasped. “How did you…?”

Although she still hadn’t been in sunlight for a little more than a year, there was already more color in her face than before. She looked alive. She felt alive.

Was this why the Quasi-Dead had been so frightened by his “Furyan energy” a year ago? Why the Lord Marshal before him had attacked Furya?

“But all the survivors would say was that the devil had come…” Funny how Jack seemed to know more about Furya than he did. Then again, John MacNamera had apparently served there. After whatever had happened.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the Moribund. Why did you attack Furya? Is it because of what people like me can do?

I did not attack Furya.

Bullshit. I’ve seen a recording. Through Jack’s eyes, anyway. Those were Necromonger ships in the skies.

One portion of the Armada attacked that world. Not at my behest. I would not have ordered an attack upon it. I ended the attack and called them back when I knew.

And why should I believe that?

Because it belongs to my sister. You belong to my sister.

Lucy? That didn’t seem possible. Not given the timing involved.

No. Shirah.

The name felt oddly familiar. Was that Her name? But She had a human body; when She’d spoken to him, he had seen a beautiful woman in front of him, and Her handprint on his chest was a human handprint. How could She possibly be an Apeiros?

And yet the Moribund had just said that he, Furya, and Furyans belonged to Shirah.

He would need to talk to Lucy about it. Most of the Apeiros, from Jack’s memories, seemed honest, aside from the truth they were hiding from the girl because she wasn’t ready to face it yet.

Fuck. Nurse Raymond had asked him a question and instead of answering her…

He opened his eyes, focusing on the world around him again. Two women were watching him with concern.

“You ever heard of Furyans, Nurse Raymond?”

She shrugged. “A little, mostly bizarre rumors. Never met any.”

“You have now.” He climbed back to his feet and picked up his shirt, pulling it back on. He wasn’t entirely sure why he kept doing that, taking it off and putting it back on, except that somehow he wanted to be fully dressed in front of these women as much as possible. He didn’t want them thinking that he expected anything sexual from them.

He especially didn’t want Jack thinking that he expected anything sexual from other women. Especially while the two of them were still in the process of establishing the parameters of their own relationship, and hadn’t even discussed that possible aspect yet.

“So… what you just did…?” Raymond prompted.

“It’s something that Furyans can do,” he told her, “at least some of us. I’m still not clear on all the rules. Now, I figure next up is Dr. Zervas. You two used to work together, didn’t you?”

Raymond nodded. “Both at Aceso and Kapodistrian, yes. You said that you know a former patient of mine?”

Riddick nodded right back at her. “We’ll talk about that once Dr. Zervas has been brought over.”

The whole process was even easier with Polyhymnia Zervas, he realized; the pain in his head lessened each time he forced his way through it. Maybe, if he was lucky, Raymond and Zervas in particular would have some ideas about how to break his conditioning altogether. That was something that hadn’t occurred to him when he’d picked them; their initial selection had been all about Jack’s feelings for people she’d met on Helion Prime.

“Okay,” he told them once Dr. Zervas had recovered. “The two of you,” and he nodded to Raymond and Zervas, “were selected for this because you have a prior relationship with a friend of mine, and she has positive feelings about both of you. You attempted to treat her six years ago at the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital.”

Both women frowned quizzically at each other.

“I say ‘attempted,’” he continued, “because you were working with a faulty premise about what she was suffering from. Nobody was willing to listen to her when she tried to set the record straight, and then she realized her attempts to do so might threaten my safety, so she stopped trying and let you believe the lie.”

He could see Officer Lola connecting her own experiences, in the aftermath of meeting him, to that. Funny how so many of the women who encountered him were stuck lying about it afterward, either for his sake or their own. Like the fuckin’ ’verse itself was insisting on punishing them for getting through even a moment with him unscathed.

“Who is she,” Raymond asked, “and what was the lie?”

“Officially, you knew her as Jane Doe 7439,” Riddick told them. “She preferred to be called Jack. She’d tried to kill herself, and she was suffering from PTSD after surviving a Star Jumper crash and its aftermath, and then being a hostage on a merc ship. What she was not suffering from, though, was either Stockholm Syndrome or trauma from being sexually abused.”

Growing comprehension was spreading on both women’s faces… and then shocked recognition.

“You’re Richard Riddick,” Raymond finally said.

He nodded, trying to keep a smirk off of his face. After everything she’d seen in Helion Prime’s last days, he couldn’t still be a bogey man, could he? Then again, a certain Elemental seemed to believe he was ‘another kind of evil’ to answer the evil of the Necromongers.

But then again, what she believed about the Necromongers made a new kind of sense to him now, anyway…

“That’s me,” he told Raymond. “And when Jack told you I never touched her, she was telling you the truth.”

“And yet later, she admitted you’d threatened her,” Dr. Zervas said. In that calm, clinical way she undoubtedly talked to her own patients.

“She found out that a merc was hanging around and paying attention, and someone was breaking confidentiality rules to feed him information in return for a cut of my bounty. She found out that the Holy Man she’d been staying with knew where I’d gone… and was going to surrender the information if the merc started suspecting the two of them were my friends, instead of my victims, and threatened his family or freedom. The kid changed up her story to protect me.”

He was still more than a little agog about that. But he could see, to the side, Lola nodding. She had tried to protect him, too, even as he was working to get her clear before the fallout of his actions could touch her. Most of the people he’d encountered throughout his life had been inherently selfish enough not to do such a thing… but the ones he liked best in the ’verse always seemed to have that crazy streak of selflessness to them that made him even more of a threat to their well-being than ever.

“I won’t leave without you, Riddick! I’ll find you!” Jack had even planned to rescue him somehow—and who the hell knew how she thought she’d manage that?—when they were on board the Kublai Khan. It was one of the many reasons he’d had to leave her behind; he couldn’t allow her to try to throw herself into harm’s way like that. Not for him.

He’d already lost Carolyn to that.

Zervas was nodding, a thoughtful frown on her face. “In my sessions with her, even after she had ‘admitted’ that you’d threatened her… she refused to unpack any of the abuse you—supposedly—inflicted upon her. She would clam up if I tried to lead her there.”

“Smart move on her part, you know,” he told the doctor. “If she’d tried to make something up, you’d probably have figured out she was still a virgin, and maybe even that she came from a planet with one of the worst and most incomplete sex-ed programs in the Federacy.”

“I thought her accent sounded like she came from Deckard’s World,” Raymond gasped.

“Right in one.” They were quick. Good. They’d need to be. “So here’s the deal. Jack’s here. And while she’s dealt with a lot of her traumas pretty well, she probably could still use someone to listen to what she has to say about it all. She’s been through some wild shit, some of which will probably be hard to believe. But it’s all true. You’re part of her detail now. If she needs help working through any of it, you give it to her. If she just needs friends, you give her that. And your old doctor-patient rules of confidentiality apply to everything she tells you, whether in confidence or even just within these rooms.”

He looked at all three women, who had similar surprised-and-thoughtful looks on their faces.

“You’re her team now. Help her, trust her, and take care of her. And if you find that means you need to protect her from me in some capacity, you do that, too.”

“And the others outside?” Lola asked.

Huh. He really had to decide if he was using first names or last names with these ladies and be consistent about the whole thing.

“They’re not exactly professionals at this kind of thing. But they’re people she liked and cared about and wanted to get to know better when she was on Helion. Some of ’em might need to talk out their trauma from the invasion, even. That one girl, Ofra, was a patient at Aceso when Jack was, and helped her at a critical moment.” He glanced at Ray—no, Vanessa and Poly. “You two recognize her?”

They nodded.

“I’ll do her next. I don’t know if she was still in care or not when she was taken, so once I bring her back, maybe talk to her and see if she’s okay.”

“You’re not at all what I expected,” Poly said, her expression hinting at ruefulness. Vanessa nodded.

“He’s almost exactly what I expected, so far,” Lola said. “I’ll tell you all about how I met him later.”

Ofra proved trickier than he expected. Jack’s recollection of her as one of the C Ward’s “quiet crazies” still applied; the girl didn’t speak, although she obeyed orders promptly when he told her to come in and then sit. He had to go into her head to get an actual conversation going, discovering in the process that she had spent her whole life struggling with verbal communication to such a profound degree that she’d given up on it altogether, something that hadn’t sat well with her family and had led to her committal. She remembered Jack as one of the only people who seemed to understand her nonverbal attempts to communicate… until the Necromongers themselves had arrived, anyway. For her, the invasion had been a liberation. The voices that shoved everyone else into corners of their own minds had set her free.

The food arrived while he was still working with her, so he had the staff set up most of it in one of the suites that was being revived, to accommodate the other nine people who were awaiting his attention.

In the end, Ofra chose to stay as she was. She might, he suspected, be destined to become one of the “Quasi Dead,” channeling other people’s communication through her without needing to speak, herself. He had her join the others for breakfast, telling her that she could return to her duties once she was done and that, if she ever changed her mind, she could come back to him and he’d make good on his offer.

Oddly enough, he could feel all three women approving his decision, even though it bothered him to make it given what he knew. He had a table set up in the audience room, with food for five in it and more actual chairs around it, and made sure both guards had their own helpings, before opening the inner doors to look for Jack.

The girl was in the middle of the bedroom doing Tai Chi.

Apparently she’d found some good things left behind by the prior Lord Marshal’s consorts; she’d even managed to avoid the omnipresent black attire and had found dark blue leggings—still with the odd scaled pattern that characterized so much of Necromonger clothing—and a tunic in a muted blue-green shade. Mermaid colors. He shouldn’t have been surprised. She centered herself and turned toward him and the others—

And her eyes lit up. “Nurse Raymond? Doctor Poly! You survived the invasion!”

Given who she was, hugs followed. Riddick had to quell a sudden rush of envy; she hadn’t hugged him yet, but then, while most of the tension between them had lifted, things were still a work in progress. He would just have to content himself, for now, with watching her be herself.

Not like I was touchy-feely with her before, he conceded. I avoided that for good reason. Maybe she thinks it’s still off the table.

He’d no sooner thought that when Jack spotted the food, realized what he’d ordered just for her—

—and flung her arms around him. “You got my favorites! Thank you, Riddick!”

He struggled to contain all of the feelings her hug was inspiring in him, wrapping his arms around her in return and working to suppress a few inappropriate responses that would probably get side-eyes, or possibly outright glares, from the other women if they noticed.

Let go when you feel her start to pull back, he instructed himself. Don’t go creeper on her.

He did, however, keep his arm around her shoulder for a moment. She smelled amazing.

“Jack, I want you to meet Officer Lola Santiago. She and I go way back. She’s the head of your protection detail. And trust me, on this ship you’re gonna need one.”

It started as a handshake and turned into a hug. Then Jack stepped back, a quizzical frown and a puzzled smile vying for dominance on her face. “You three aren’t straddling ’verses, not even a little. But you’re all dressed like Necromongers…?”

“Riddick did something involving ‘Furyan energy’ to undo our conversion,” Vanessa explained as they sat down to eat, shooting Riddick a quizzical look at the same time. He’d let Jack explain the whole thing about ’verses.

“Oh! Like Michael did to me when the Moribund attacked me.” Aside from a small, expressive shudder—at least half of which, he was pretty sure, was theater—Jack didn’t seem to have any trouble talking about that incident. Which was good, because her three new friends were gonna have a lot of questions for her.

Riddick ate quickly, aware that the other four were settling in for a more leisurely breakfast and gab session, especially when Jack began pouring mint tea around. He rose right as the conversation turned to more earnest topics.

“Still got a lot to do,” he told Jack when she looked a question at him. “I’ll be back later. You four will have plenty of time to get acquainted. Maybe even introduce them to Lucy.”

I’m here. And in answer to your earlier question, yes. Shirah is my sister, and the Light of Furya.

Sounded like there’d be quite a story behind that. Why, he found himself wondering, wasn’t she the Fury of—

Oh. Of course. That was going to be an interesting conversation with Jack, too. Once they were alone.

She walked with him to the doors.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” she said as he reached for the knobs.

He nodded, not ready to actually talk about any of it yet. “When I get back, we will. Just got a few more things to do to make sure this ship is safe for you. Okay?”

She nodded and then gave him another hug.

He hugged her back, wishing they were alone already… glad they weren’t. He still had a lot to work out. “When you and the ladies get hungry, tell the guards what you want. Don’t go exploring yet, though. I know you want to.”

She snorted. “Shit, I still haven’t finished exploring that bathroom of yours. That’ll keep me.”

True; he’d been in smaller hangars. “See you soon, Jack.”

“Looking forward to it.” Her smile was easy, natural, as if the last six years apart had just been a few days.

How did she do that? She wasn’t the sort to just shrug off trauma so easily, was she? She sure as hell hadn’t been in the past.

Then again, he thought as he stepped out into the hall and the doors closed behind him, she is a damned good actress.

He wondered who she was trying to sell the Normal Girl act to. Him? The other ladies in the room? Herself?

It’s the role she’s been required to play for five years. She might not even know how to switch it off.

Of course, there was always the possibility that she was running a game of her own. She was one of General Toal’s Operatives… and the chosen instrument of the Apeiros. And as much as that seemed to plant her firmly in the White Hat camp, it meant that some of her motives might not be fathomable even after his deep dive into her head. She might not be entirely what she seemed, even now.

Well, the last year has been pretty boring…

He left instructions with the guards to see to it that all of his guests were able to order lunch when they were hungry. Then he stopped by the suite where the remaining nine he hoped to convert back from the Moribund’s thrall were waiting.

“Got a few things I need to do before I get to you,” he told them. “That’ll give you time to figure some things out.”

“What is your will, Lord Marshal?” one of them asked.

Damn. They were still deep under.

“You all know each other. I need all of you to think about that, think about who you were before. Before you converted. Think about who you were together, the things you did. When I come back, I need to know if you want to be a team again. And if you’re willing to give up a dream that wasn’t yours and take back the pain that was, along with everything you were together.”

They were frowning; what he was asking for would force their native personalities to the surface. Maybe.

Maybe there was something more he could do about that.

Moribund. These ones I’m with… these nine. Don’t release their bodies yet. But release their minds. Let them think clearly without interference from you or the Quasi Dead.

Why do you not simply make them do what you will?

I need them to want it, too. And not because you or anything else told them to.

You are much like my sister. No wonder she has chosen you.

That was all he needed, another prophecy declaring him its Chosen One.

Around him, he could see nine faces growing more animated, interested, confused…

“When I come back, you can let me know what you’ve decided as a group. You got three choices. Give up the dream and take back the pain, and work with me, doing the things you did together before. Stay as you are, obeying the voices you usually have in your head now, but as a group again. Or go back to your post-conversion lives with no changes at all. Be ready to tell me what you’ve chosen. You’ll probably have a few hours to decide.”

They had already begun talking quietly as he closed the door behind him.

Now it was time to do something he should have done—should have known to do—a year earlier. Something that, if he’d done it back then, might have led him to Jack well before this.

“I’m ready,” he told the Quasi-Dead as he entered their chamber and sat down on the central dais, folding his legs. “Show me the memories of the one called Kyra.”