The Changeling Game, Chapter 81

81.
Black Fox in a Wolf’s Lair

The knots in Kyra Wittier-Collins’s innards seemed to tighten with each goodbye hug she received from the members of the Meziane family. By the time she climbed into the back of General Toal’s military vehicle and strapped in next to Tizzy, her guts felt as snarled as one of the attempts at crocheting she’d made as a child.

Tizzy, who hardly ever hid her emotions, only seemed sad about the departure. But then, she had somewhere to go. What little worry she was feeling seemed to be reserved for Kyra.

Maybe, Kyra thought, carefully shielding her musings from her sister, I should have told her that nothing came through. The only responses to any of the letters and applications she’d sent out had been one or two infuriatingly polite letters, thanking her for applying but informing her that the position she’d wanted was already filled.

Things didn’t get better on the ride to the train station, which, she conceded, was her own damned fault. She’d been the one who had insisted they split up, insisted they didn’t tell each other where they were going. Tizzy would have been happy to stay together—

Why did I push her away? Why do I push everybody away?

The only thing she could think of, to counter her mistake, was to offer to go looking for Riddick together. But Tizzy turned it down.

I can’t cut it in his world, she’d said, her mental “voice” regretful but firm, as General Toal drove them to the station. I’m just not strong enough.

That baffled Kyra. How could Tizzy think she wasn’t strong enough, after everything she—and they—had done? They’d laid waste to an entire merc platoon together. Tizzy had probably blown up a Star Jumper. What couldn’t they do as a team?

I was the one who ended “together,” she reminded herself, and realized that the real heartsickness she’d been feeling, since they’d begun saying goodbyes at the Meziane house, was for her imminent separation from the sister of her heart.

Tizzy wanted to talk about security codes. It was hard to focus, hard not to get mad, until she realized that the younger girl had crafted one that would be easy for her to remember, no matter what, spelling out Riddick’s name.

I’m always your sister, Tizzy told her, taking her hand. No matter how many light years separate us.

It nearly cost her all of the composure she had left, but she managed not to cry, to even answer I’m always your sister, too, without her mental voice fracturing the way her physical voice might have. Other things she wanted to say crowded against the mental barriers she tried to keep up—don’t go, let’s stay together, I’m scared—but their time was up before she could decide whether or not to say any of them. They were at the station.

Kyra found she was disappointed that the General was able to usher them through security without any scans. She’d wanted to see if Tizzy’s scabbard trick would work, and if it didn’t, having the general handy to bail her out would have been extremely helpful. Although she joked about not needing it yet with Tizzy, she was secretly peeved.

They said their good-byes by the waiting area for the express train to New Casablanca. General Toal even gave them a moment alone for it, politely standing out of earshot. Although normally not a hugger, Kyra suddenly found herself having a hard time letting go of Tizzy.

“I can’t believe this is it,” she whispered. She wondered if she’d expected some kind of mystical intervention, something that would end up keeping them together. If so, she’d wasted all of her chances to choose that path while waiting for something to choose it for her. Fuck… fuck…

“Don’t believe it,” Tizzy said, her voice wavering. “We’re gonna find each other again. Sisters forever.”

“Forever…” Sisters under a trio of suns—or was it moons? Maybe it had been both—going on forever together. And yet Tizzy had made it clear that she wasn’t going to go looking for Riddick. If it were Ewan we were going to look for, she’d probably have been the one to suggest it… “Tizzy?”

“Yeah?”

“If I do find Riddick,” and suddenly she knew that she was definitely going to try, “what do I tell him about you?”

She felt veiled hints of emotions coming off of Tizzy as her sister tried to conceal her reaction: worry, disbelief, sadness, resignation. Their hug loosened and Tizzy drew back to meet her gaze. There was sadness in her large green eyes, an almost ageless look. “Tell him Jack’s dead,” she finally said.

That was right. Riddick had only ever known Tizzy as “Jack.” Why, though, did it sometimes feel lately like that had been her name and not Tizzy’s?

“She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world,” her sister continued.

Yes you are, she wanted to protest. We are! We could find him and make that fake video real…

Why did Tizzy think so little of herself? It hurt, realizing how little faith she had in her own power… and she had so much power.

A little more time and we could turn the Federacy itself on its ear, she thought… but it was never going to happen.

Behind them, General Toal cleared his throat. Their time was gone.

“Always your sister,” Tizzy promised her, huge eyes solemn, as they reluctantly pulled away from each other.

“Always your sister,” she promised back.

General Toal gave Tizzy a small package and seemed genuinely surprised when he got a hug in return. I don’t know why he didn’t expect that. Tizzy’s a hugger. She’d probably hug the fuckin’ Apeiros if she could figure out how to…

Kyra’s train was on the other side of the terminal, going to the New Fes spaceport. General Toal escorted her there, mostly respecting her need for silence. With Tizzy taken from her, there was almost nothing she wanted to talk about with him.

“I have a few things for you,” he told her as they reached the lounge for her train. “Things that I hope will help you find your way.”

He’d given Tizzy just one small package; Kyra got two and an envelope. She wondered if the General knew how aimless her current trajectory actually was, and that was why he was giving her extra. Perversely, she found she resented that.

“Thank you,” she managed to say.

“I truly am sorry it came to this,” he said. It didn’t feel like he was lying. “I did want to help Cedric keep his son’s promise to you. So I hope these things will help you break your trail quickly and return to the ait Meziane tribe soon.”

“Sooner than Tizzy?” She frowned.

“For Ewan’s sake, Tizzy must not return before she is eighteen years old. No such limitation exists for you.”

Yeah, because nobody fell in love with me…

It was a weird thing to feel envious of. Kyra didn’t want Ewan, or any other man, to feel that way about her. Well, except for maybe one man…

Maybe just one man.

“Dihya?” General Toal was asking, looking at her with concern. “Do you need anything to help you? I think your sister has been worried that you don’t have a clear path.”

“No, I’m good.” She conjured up a smile for him, hiding just how good she wasn’t. As much as Tizzy seemed to trust him, as much help as he’d actually given them…

She was plagued by the thought that he would, inevitably, either turn out to be a monster, himself, or share Tomlin’s fate instead.

“Got it all covered,” she told him, projecting I’m fine, it’s fine at him.

She could see that he had his doubts. But he nodded and stepped back. No attempt at a hug, at least. “Godspeed on your journey, then. Come back to us soon, Dihya.”

She’d miss that name, she reflected as she boarded her train and settled in for the trip to New Fes. She’d liked being Dihya, even if she’d never once thought of herself by that name. Everybody who’d called her by it had had such nice thoughts about her in their heads, none of them, even once, contemplating how to hurt or fuck or exploit her.

New Fes was four hours away by rail, enough time to make Kyra feel antsy and claustrophobic in the train seat with other passengers packed in so near to her. The General, who had paid for her ticket, had gotten her one of the cushiest seats in the train, but there was still a stranger sitting next to her, one who had tried to be talkative with her until she’d managed to convince the older woman that they didn’t have any languages in common.

Which meant she couldn’t use her tablet in front of the old bat without giving away that she actually did understand English. Damn it.

She opened up the gifts the General had given her instead, finding a high end, stealth gear money belt in one, a chip library for her tablet full of high school equivalency courses in another—

Yeah, he’d never need to give Tizzy a present like this, she admitted with a sigh.

—and an envelope with an emergency comm number and instructions to use it if she found herself in trouble, and to use it instead of any such number that members of the Meziane family might have given her.

None of them had given her an emergency number, although several of them had given her their regular comm numbers during her recuperation. Huh.

Not bad gifts, all told, though. Halfway through the train ride, her seatmate departed at one of the stops. Soon the seat was taken by a man in expensive clothes who wore too much cologne and whose breath informed her he’d had sardines for lunch, but who at least seemed to have no interest in talking to her. She pulled out her tablet and got to work picking through the imminent spaceport departures at New Fes, seeing which ones still had room for one more traveler.

By the time she arrived at the spaceport, she’d settled on the launch to Lupus Prime, which would begin boarding within the hour and would lift off maybe an hour or two after Tizzy was scheduled to reach New Casablanca. Of all the worlds that ships at New Fes were leaving for, it sounded like it was the best, the one with the most opportunities. She’d hunker down when she got there, use some of the funds Tizzy and the Mezianes had given her to stay afloat for a while, and figure out what she wanted to do next.

The scabbard trick worked. She was proud of that, but wished she could have shared the moment with her sister. Nobody seemed to think there was anything at all unusual about her as she passed through the security checkpoints. She slipped into a restroom once she was through all of them, isomorphing her knives and their scabbards all the way back to U1 and transferring all of her important documents to the money belt General Toal had given her.

Boarding the Caiman Dundee was easy enough. The crewmate who helped her into cryo, she thought with annoyance, was less familiar with the controls than Tizzy had been. And then…

She was on a world with three suns.

Her prior time in cryosleep had been full of strange blanks, in between idyllic but fragmented recollections of her childhood, usually visiting members of her mother’s family on Old Earth or exploring the woods on Canaan Mountain. Any time her mind had ventured toward her more traumatic memories of strife or loss, the chamber had increased her sedative level to abort them. She’d never seen her father in her cryo dreams, or Red Roger, or any of the violence of the fall of the New Christy Enclave. The cryo chamber had fought hard to tamp down any segues into nightmare that tried to begin.

This time, it didn’t need to. This time, new dreams appeared. Dreams untinged by trauma or horror, although they would have contained both if the memories they came from had really been her own.

She was on a world with three suns, surrounded by other crash survivors, all of them friends, all of them thinking kindly of her. She dreamed of Paris P. Ogilvie, her mentor who had taught her how to break into any security system she wanted, and who liked to tease her that her parents had run away from her whenever she pulled silly tricks on him. She dreamed of Shazza, who wanted to become her new mother and whose gruff husband, Zeke, mysteriously died shortly after the crash. She dreamed of Fry, beautiful sad Fry, who had nearly died as well except she’d heard the pilot calling for help and had gotten the others to rescue her. Another would-be mother. She dreamed of Imam—sanctimonious, jolly, treacherous—and his three boys, only one of whom spoke enough English for her to understand him, but all three of whom liked her just fine anyway. She dreamed of Johns, authoritative, tough, treacherous as well.

She dreamed of Riddick.

Strong. Kind to her. Feared by the others until they discovered he was their only chance at salvation. Silver eyes gleaming in the darkness. A voice of graveled velvet quelling her fears and doubts.

She never dreamed of Jack. That was what people called her in the dreams. She only caught one glimpse of Tizzy, the whole time, reflected back at her in a mirror while they were shaving their heads to look more like Riddick. Tizzy had been there, she knew. The dreams were somehow Tizzy’s story… too… but somehow her sister had been almost completely erased from her sight. Not walking beside her. Not joining her and Ali as they explored the settlement. Not running with her and the others into the darkness and then blaming herself for Paris’s death. Tizzy, invisible but present, Jack but not Jack…

Sometimes she dreamed of exploring the Canaan Mountain forests with Riddick, after he had rescued her, something she knew had happened before the eclipse. Exactly what he had rescued her from was obscured, as was how any of the crash survivors had died, precisely. She never saw any of their bodies. But as the dreams repeated, a narrative slowly cohered around them.

Riddick had come to her at the New Christy Enclave when she was twelve and desperately wishing for a better life, and he had helped her run away into the mountains. He’d rescued her. They had stayed there for a while, hunting and traveling together, while he taught her all the things she needed to know to survive in the wild. But then Johns had caught him.

She’d managed to chase after him, with Paris Ogilvie’s help, and had boarded the Hunter-Gratzner so that she could rescue him right back, only the ship had crashed…

Somewhere in the mix of all that, there was a little sister named Tizzy, who was also twelve years old but was somehow a few years younger than her at the same time. Dream logic glided right past such things. But Tizzy—Jack? Or was she Jack?—was weak. She couldn’t cut it. There wasn’t really a place for her in Riddick’s world.

“Tell ’em Riddick’s dead,” her hero, her beloved, told her as they soared through space together. “He died somewhere on that planet.”

Tell him Jack’s dead, Tizzy whispered in response. She was too weak to cut it in his world…

Her mind rebelled against that conclusion, and the dreams looped back to the beginning.

Repetition ingrains memory. By the time Kyra woke from cryo on Lupus Prime, the dreams had repeated so many hundreds—maybe even thousands—of times that they had taken on the weight of lived experience. Tizzy, she knew, had still been alive when they had been separated again from Riddick by the Imam’s treachery. She had almost died soon after, but she’d still been alive to break them out of a hospital and take them to the Meziane family…

But Jack had died. Jack was dead.

She was weak. She couldn’t cut it… Tizzy’s voice whispered.

There was no more Jack. Whether it had been Kyra’s name or Tizzy’s no longer mattered, because Jack was dead.

Riddick, however, wasn’t. He was out there, somewhere…

The fog of cryo took a while to clear off, to let her real memories of real life reassert themselves. She did remember meeting “Jack” at the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital, and the two escaping and taking the Scarlet Matador to Tangiers Prime. She remembered everything that followed, including Jack becoming Tizzy and then their separation. But her memories of before then had, more or less, been overwritten, horror replaced by adventure. And even though part of her knew with perfect clarity that Jack had become Tizzy…

She also knew, with absolute certainty, that she had once been Jack, too, on the crash planet. But Jack was dead.

None of it really held up to scrutiny. Kyra wasn’t the kind to hold such things up to much scrutiny. The past was something that she never wanted to dwell on and that, for years, only appeared in her nightmares. Dreaming of its sanitized version was one thing; waking thought was for the moment at hand. She had far too much to deal with in the present, anyway.

Lykos City, Lupus Prime’s capitol, was a glittering, cosmopolitan metropolis, full of far too many human beings, also full of the darkness and muck that could hide behind any glittering façade. Kyra didn’t like it at all. She wished she’d picked a different destination. Maybe that UV-6 world Tizzy had thought about sending Toombs to—

Nah. She hated the cold even more than she hated being around so many people.

She’d figure it out.

The Kali Montgomery ID that Tizzy had made her went unquestioned and opened a lot of doors for her… almost enough doors. On paper, she was old enough—and had enough money—to get a tiny apartment on her own. Settling in, she began to look for job prospects and catch up on the news.

She was soon horrified to discover that the New Casablanca spaceport had blown up—well, one of its concourses had—scant hours after she’d boarded the Caiman Dundee. There was no Tislilel Meziane listed among the survivors. She hadn’t known, at her own insistence, what the name on Tizzy’s fake ID had been, but none of the footage she found of the aftermath showed her sister.

Had Tizzy died in the explosion?

Jack’s dead…

For a moment, Kyra was tempted to use the emergency number General Toal had given her, to ask him if her sister had survived. But that would mean letting him know where to find her. All of her instincts shied away from that, her distrust blocking her from making the call. A tiny little part of her even wondered if the explosion story was a ploy to get her to come out of hiding.

She’d find a job first, she decided, and then reconsider reaching out. Maybe.

In Lykos City, she swiftly discovered, nobody looked at a tallish, slim young woman and thought fighter. Nobody wanted to hire her for the things she was best at. The closest offer she got was a really disgusting one from an underground arena involving naked cage matches. The Lupus system had no standing army like Tangiers Prime’s, no traditional police force; it kept mercenaries on its payroll instead, who were allowed to contract out for other work in between “tours of duty” as long as none of their jobs ever went against the system’s interests.

Like I would want to be a merc, she mentally sneered. She ate mercs for breakfast.

Following Tizzy’s thorough step-by-step instructions on the tablet, she established a backup identity just in case anything went wrong with “Kali Montgomery.” It wasn’t hard, she decided, as long as she was careful to follow the directions to the letter.

A week passed. No new prospects appeared. She collected her new identity documents, hoping they were as good as the ones Tizzy had made for her.

Now that I have them, she decided, it’s time to get the fuck off this rock.

Sitting in a coffee shop, toying with her tablet and doing a little preliminary research on upcoming launches off of Lupus Prime and onto somewhere a little less “civilized,” she suddenly remembered the message drop that Tizzy had set up for the two of them.

How did I forget about that? she thought, groaning internally. If Tizzy lived, there might be a message awaiting her there. Maybe even more than one.

Fortunately, her login credentials were stored in the tablet, because she’d forgotten them as well.

Rote memorization had always been her weak point; in the Enclave, Teacher—a gruff, bearded man who rarely said anything encouraging or kind—had often yelled at her for her inaccurate recitations of Bible passages. Her recall and reproduction of anything physical was perfect, rivaling Tizzy’s “eidetic” recall, but phrases and speeches—whether spoken or written—were often fuzzy to her, the exact wording getting lost even if she held onto the overall meaning. She’d often, rebelliously, felt that her rewordings were better than the originals, especially where piles of “thees” and “thous” were concerned. But the same, unfortunately, was true of logins.

She remembered every detail Tafrara had shared with her about adapting Old Earth plants to Tangiers Prime, remembered all of the steps she’d learned for the Ceilidh and could dance it again any time someone pulled out a bagpipe, remembered every single Tai Chi pose Ewan and Tafrara had taught her even if she was a little fuzzy on some of their names… but she couldn’t remember the damned passwords Tizzy had made for her. Except one.

She wondered, suddenly, if she had resisted learning them because that would mean admitting that she and Tizzy really were parting ways.

Dozens of messages awaited her, the first posted just a few days after Kyra had left Tangiers Prime. That confused her. They were uninterrupted, as if Tizzy had never gone into cryo at all. Had she stayed on the planet rather than returning to her home world? Maybe the New Casablanca spaceport explosion had changed things in some way. Kyra would have to see what her sister had to tell her; it might affect where she went next—

The back of her neck prickled. Someone was watching her, paying way too much attention to her.

She closed the message system without reading any of Tizzy’s missives. She’d do that later, once she was sure she was safe. Shutting her eyes, she focused on the room around her and the people in it. She had some “esper” tricks that she’d developed, once she started worrying that the Mezianes might try to limit Tizzy’s and her movements, and she was damn well going to use them.

At one table, a guy was trying to flirt with a bored young woman who had only agreed to go out with him so her sister would shut up about her never “putting herself out there.” At another, a frustrated housewife who had gone without sex for more than a year was reading an explicit novel describing, in enthusiastic detail, acts she’d always refused to try with her increasingly estranged husband, while drinking a sickly-sweet concoction that had barely any coffee in it. Two girls, probably exactly Kyra’s real age, were planning a party together for the night when one of their sets of parents would be out of town, both of them hoping for a chance at “seven minutes in heaven” with the same boy. And in a corner booth—

He was military. He was staring right at her, wondering how much longer he would have to wait before he got the order to bring her in.

Motherfucker… She slipped her tablet back into her pack and rose from her seat. She was going to have to get the hell out of town, and off-planet, even faster than she’d been planning.

He followed her at a “discreet” distance. She pretended she didn’t know he was there.

What, she asked herself, would Riddick do in a situation like this? Confront the fucker head-on, maybe?

Somewhere isolated. Somewhere where her shadow would think he had the advantage, held the high ground, but where it would really be her game.

A park. A playground. It was late enough that all of the kids had gone home.

She got ahead of him and, while out of sight, hid her pack under a roundabout that someone had been smart enough to position over soft sand. Then she let him catch up and get one glimpse of her before she vanished behind some trees.

Well, more accurately, up a tree.

He quartered the playground warily, trying to figure out where she’d gone. She waited until he was directly below her to drop down onto him.

The kick to his head as she came down didn’t snap his neck, but it left him groggy and stumbling. She followed up with another kick to his lower spine, not damned hard enough, skipping back out of range as his training took over and, groggy or not, he began to fight in earnest. She had her knives out a second later.

She didn’t kill him, but it was a near thing. She needed him alive, anyway, to unlock his comm and look around in it. Its retina pattern reader wouldn’t work if the blood vessels weren’t pulsing anymore.

Her picture was stored on his comm, a surveillance shot of her leaving the fucking spaceport right after arriving on the planet. The latest message exchange, between him and his CO, told her everything she needed to know.

TM: Is it time to move on her yet?
WN: General Toal says no. Keep observing. Don’t get too close.

General fucking Toal… She’d known it. She’d tried to believe better of him for Tizzy’s sake, but…

She’d fucking known it all along.

No point in digging deeper; she needed to bug out. Shoving the man’s comm back into his pocket and grabbing her sandy pack out from under the roundabout, she hurried back to her apartment, packing as quickly as she could. If there was one tail on her, there would be more. She left her Kali Montgomery ID sitting on the nightstand. Obviously they knew that name. She’d never dare use it again.

Kyra spent a few hours moving from one banking kiosk to another, cashing out the funding cards she suspected Toal’s men might have a line on and then, elsewhere, depositing the funds into new cards. It was tricky work, dodging around the transaction limits, but she finished before the sun rose, what would Tizzy do now a refrain in her head as she tried to think of the sneakiest moves to pull to keep dodging an impending goon squad. She checked the money belt over carefully for bugs, found none, but decided not to risk it. The chip library ended up in the trash along with it, as well as the comm code and even the neurofeedback device Toal had given her. Nothing he’d offered her could be trusted anymore. He might have tapped into anything.

With that in mind, she bought a new comm, wiping the old one after transferring its data to her tablet. She transferred the basic data back onto the new one before boarding a train to the spaceport; she’d do the rest later, once she’d put a few million miles between herself and Toal’s goons and had a chance to sleep. During the ride, she had time to leave one message for Tizzy, but no time to read anything her sister had left for her:

Don’t trust Toal. He tried to grab me. Going dark.
Always your sister. K.

Once she reached the spaceport, she ducked into a restroom and set the scabbard trick into motion again, isomorphing her knives’ scabbards halfway into Elsewhere—thin-atmosphered and desolate on Lupus Prime but technically habitable—far enough to hold something that was fully in that ’verse, and then isomorphing the knives inside each one all the way over. Two stayed on her, “empty” scabbards strapped to her thighs under her loose cargo pants that she could, if necessary, explain away if someone noticed. The rest went into her pack, along with her tablet, clothes, and half of her funding cards.

No Star Jumpers were launching from the spaceport for more than a day, but there was a shuttle to Lupus Station A leaving within an hour. Up on the station, a Star Jumper on its way to New Queensland would begin boarding four hours after she arrived. It was her best bet, especially if they didn’t know she’d gone running yet. Making her way through the spaceport, she bought her ticket at the last possible moment, cleared the security checkpoints as quickly as she could, and raced for her departure gate. She was the last one to board, stuck shoving her pack into a random overhead bin that still had room before taking her seat.

It was, she thought a little blearily, her first launch in an actual seat, with no sedatives in her system. She didn’t even remember being transferred from New Dartmouth to Helion Prime, and lying on the floor of the Scarlet Matador had not been pleasant at all. This was almost comfortable, aside from the pressure on her body—

—and the sudden, stinging heat building on the outside of her thighs—

Fuck! In her rush to board, she’d forgotten to isomorph her knives and scabbards back to U1!

She closed her eyes, focusing on the sting, feeling the blades heating up in their sheaths as she pulled them back into just one universe. They weren’t terribly painful, and were already beginning to cool. Hopefully she wouldn’t have even first-degree burns to deal with—

An alarm began shrieking in the cabin. Smoke was leaking from one of the overhead bins, growing thicker and blacker as everyone’s attention turned to it. There was nothing she could do; God only knew how many Gs were sitting on her chest at the moment. Robotic fire suppression systems, strong enough to function even during liftoff, were on the move. Even as one robotic arm wrenched open the bin and another sprayed it down with fire suppressant, six glowing objects dropped down from the “ceiling” below it and streaked, like holographic meteors, through the shuttle, unseen by anyone but her. Her other knives, still entirely in Elsewhere, no longer held by scabbards that had burned away in both ’verses… white-hot as they fell back to the surface of Lupus Prime.

She could see into the compartment, see the blackened, crumbling remains of her pack and several other bags. Everything had burned hot and fast.

Her pack. Her clothes. Half of her funding cards. Her tablet… with all of the codes and instructions that Tizzy had left for her… all of the data she hadn’t yet ported over to her new comm… the login for the messaging system Tizzy had set up for them… the comm numbers of the Meziane family… hard copies of her new identity’s supporting documents, aside from the ID itself…

Destroyed. All of it… lost forever.

She didn’t even notice when the G forces eased off of her body. She didn’t feel any lighter.