The Changeling Game, Chapter 86

86.
Through an Occluded Mirror

You… stupid… fuck.

Riddick kept his walk smooth and calm as he headed for the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead, even as he mentally pummeled himself. It had been a long time since he’d felt like this much of an idiot.

The look on Jack’s face, the confusion and disbelief in her mind, when he’d told her he wanted to make her Dame Riddick, kept smacking at him.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Why the fuck had he phrased it like that?

Could he possibly have made more of a ham-handed job of it?

Worse, he’d practically fled the scene of his fuckup, before she could even put together more than a handful of words.

He entered the throne room, aware that he was surrounded by people watching for even the slightest weakness—and, he suddenly realized, he’d walked in without any armor on—and glowered at everyone. Let them try something right now. He’d enjoy having someone to punish for his foul mood.

Not that he could actually blame Jack for it. The more he thought about it, the more it struck him how badly he must have thrown her. He’d lived her memories. He knew how she’d handled herself for the last few years.

And, he realized, he knew exactly why he’d thrown her quite so badly.

On those occasions when a man she’d had a fling with started to get too attached to her, started even hinting at an interest in a longer relationship, one of her ways of getting him to change his mind—and, in many cases, run for the hills—had been to start crazy-talking about marriage and children. It wasn’t her only tactic; on several occasions, if the man in question seemed to like the idea of instant domestic bliss, Michael had shown up to play the enraged cuckold and really scare him off. But it had been her go-to.

And what did I do? Start talking about children and marriage less than three hours after she rode my dick for the first time…

Granted, it was a proposal he’d been planning on making anyway, although it hadn’t involved kids until she brought up the ones that had died on the Santa Clara. He’d spent a year trying not to think about what the Necros did to kids—

I need to talk to the Moribund about that. Now.

“Is this to be a session of Court, Lord Marshal?” Vaako asked from behind him.

Fuck.

“We got anything pressing on the agenda?” Agendas. Him, dealing with agendas. The ’verse had gotten knocked on its ass, all right.

“Requests from some of the ships in the Armada for permission to conduct raids. Not much else.”

“Hold off on that,” Riddick told him. “Got a few things to get straightened out about those raids. Those ships might be gettin’ some new instructions.”

Vaako gave him a puzzled frown. “More new instructions?”

“Got a problem with the last ones?” It had, he thought, been a bit over half a day since he’d shut down the brothels; most of their prisoners were still in the process of being converted, he figured.

“No,” Vaako said. “And, surprisingly, no one else seems to. Most of the Lords I would have expected to be up in arms about it are treating it as the right move.”

“Your god spoke up on the matter, that’s why.” Riddick kept an eye on Vaako’s face as he said that, curious to see whether the warrior would think he was mocking him or not.

“I thought so,” Vaako said with a nod. “You may not be converted, but… you have been…” He frowned, as if reaching for a word. “…anointed. Your claim to the throne has been blessed. I feel it. I have heard others speaking of feeling it, as well.”

Interesting. “So maybe you can tell me something else, Lord Vaako. How does a Lord Marshal get married, in your religion?”

Vaako blinked. Then comprehension appeared on his face. “The girl? The one I brought to you?”

“Yeah. Jack. How do I make it official?”

“There is no ceremony, if that’s what you’re asking,” Vaako said, moving to walk beside him. “When a Lord of the Fleet chooses a wife, he has only to present her to you before the assembled Court and declare her his. There have only been a handful of cases where the Lord Marshal has forbidden a Lord from claiming a wife. Only, I think, when he wished to make a claim of his own. For the Lord Marshal himself, he only needs—you only need—to present her to the Court and announce her standing.”

Riddick nodded. It made sense that it would be that simple. Come to think of it—

“You have performed a variation of that already,” Vaako continued, “when you gave the girl Margaret to the Purifier on the Lionheart. By presenting her to him, you gave permission, and his vow to you, that she would be by his side until Underverse Come, is as close to a marriage vow as anyone says.”

“Makes sense.” He’d just been thinking of Margaret, himself. It had been hard to even look at her, especially before the torment the raiders had inflicted upon her had been wiped away. She had, in a twist, borne the closest resemblance to Jack of anyone brought to him before Jack, herself, arrived. Seeing her broken had reawakened his desire to burn down the whole Armada—

As if he could have then. As if he needed to now.

“There is, actually, one Lord who wishes to present a bride to you, but not yet. She is still being converted.”

“Oh? Who?” If she was only just now being converted, she had to have been in that brothel.

“Lord Jalman. He wishes to take a woman from the Greensleeves Stew, named Celia, as his wife.”

“Celia Wyndham.” Well, that was a twist. “What’s she think of that?”

Vaako gave him a quizzical look, as if wondering why it mattered. “Ladies of the Armada are not, generally, asked their opinions of such things. But I do know that Jalman was an infrequent patron of the Stew until her arrival there, when he began to go nightly. He monopolized her time as much as he could. He is likely the reason that she lasted until now, which is considerably past the lifespan of most… breeders… kept in the Stews.”

“Interesting.” He had his own way of finding out what Celia’s opinion of it was, and he’d be sure to use it.

Fuck. Jack’s still up in my head. He’d spent the last year taking care not to care what the Necros were doing to each other, not letting himself think about issues like how many of the Lords’ wives might not wish to be bound to their husbands, or how many children died each time his raiders went out. But Jack cared about those things, intensely, and thanks to his journey through her memories… Guess if I needed a comeuppance for ‘violating’ her like that—

Not that she’d seemed at all upset about him poking around in her head…

—here it is. Her conscience had infected him.

“The Necromonger Way still bothers you,” Vaako observed.

“When I was still a kid,” he decided to tell the soldier, “I was enslaved for two years before I managed to free myself. Don’t much like seeing that being put on anybody.”

Vaako nodded, looking thoughtful. “The girl, your Jack, she has given her consent to you, then?”

He shrugged. “We’re still workin’ things out. Just wanted to already know the next steps once we do.”

“My wife seems to believe she fears you.”

“Does she, now?” Interesting. He knew that Jack had been running a Scared Little Girl act when Dame Vaako visited; that was no surprise. The concern that Vaako seemed to be expressing about that, though… that was what had his attention. “You don’t have to worry. Never raped a woman in my life. Got no intention of startin’ now.”

“And she is a woman? Not a child?”

“Her nineteenth birthday is just under three weeks away.” He’d have to think up a good way to mark that. Nobody seemed to celebrate birthdays in the Armada. But he owed her one, after running out on her before her thirteenth birthday and leaving her to “celebrate” it alone in a cold and loveless household. “Seems to me that if she’d still been a kid, she’d never have made it here alive.”

“Adolescents are frequently converted. They’re just not— for those with honor, they’re not…” Vaako hesitated, as though fearing he would give offense.

“I get you. And I agree. How long have you been a Necromonger, Vaako?”

“I was fourteen when the Armada came to the Zon Belt.”

“Hmm.” He remembered the copious research Jack had done. The Zon System, according to her notes, had fallen eighteen years before. It had been an odd system, dominated by an asteroid belt that took up almost its entire habitable zone and was a source of valuable rare mineral deposits. Most of its industry had been centered on exploiting those deposits, and almost all of the inhabitants had been descendants of influential mining families from old Earth’s South Africa. But Jack had left it off of her presentation; there had been no Black Planets in the system after all of its people disappeared, and the belt itself—massive and lacking in biospheres to destroy—had seemed unaltered aside from five million miners vanishing. Although she had found a candidate for a Level Five Incident in the system, she’d decided that it was all too tenuous to include.

He realized that he was looking forward to filling her in on that.

He got why she’d held back on including it, though. There had been roughly a dozen possible additional entries, but if she’d added all of them in, it would have diluted the power of the list and made it look more like the work of a conspiracy theorist who saw warning messages in cloud patterns. She’d stuck with the indisputable Incidents, and had still been able to assemble enough evidence to predict the Armada’s movements with almost pinpoint accuracy. Until he’d taken over, anyway.

“I remember hearing about the Zon Belt’s fall,” he told Vaako. “Mostly people whinin’ about where’d they get those minerals now and how much more was tech gonna cost without ’em. Nobody seemed to give a fuck where five million human beings had gone.”

“Did that surprise you?” Vaako asked.

Riddick shrugged. “I was thirteen. Guess I needed something to get pissed off about, so yeah, I was surprised and angry about it.”

For the first time in the year-plus that he’d been on the Basilica, he heard Vaako chuckle. “I remember that age well.”

Jack had been nearly that age when he met her, he reflected. She’d had moments like that, but not as many as he’d had at her age. At times, it was hard to reconcile everything that had changed since then… and all the things that hadn’t changed at all.

“How’d you end up married to Dame Vaako?” he asked after a moment.

“She came to the Basilica eight years ago. I was a Knight of the Legion, and she was the wife of Lord Vath. She was newly converted, taken in battle. Lord Vath was vying for the position of the Lord Marshal’s First. And she…” For a moment, Vaako looked pensive, even uneasy. “She liked to stir things up. There was more intrigue in the Court, that year, than I had ever seen before. Duels. Assassinations. Seven different men, most of them Lords, died in a short time trying to maneuver against Vath. And I began to hear rumors that she was behind it all.”

“Sounds likely.” Riddick wondered what her motive had been. Had she been ensuring that Vath had no competition for being the Lord Marshal’s successor? Or had she been trying to escape her marriage to him the only way that a Lady of the Court apparently could?

“I had been serving under one of the Lords, and when he fell, I found myself under Lord Vath’s command. I did my best to keep my distance from his wife. She was beautiful and refused to wear black the way all other Ladies of the Court did, even though she was devout in every other way. Eyes were always drawn to her. Including mine. She was just eighteen years old. It was hard to believe that she could be behind so many manipulations.”

“When did you figure out she was?”

“After she manipulated me into killing Lord Vath, taking his place as a Lord of the Fleet, and taking her as my wife,” Vaako admitted. “I did it for love. She still fools me, from time to time, for love. I do know what she is, what she does, but part of me refuses to believe. And much of the time, her advice is sound and not just about scheming.”

“Last year?” Riddick raised an eyebrow in Vaako’s direction.

“That was scheming,” the other man conceded with a sigh.

“And now?”

Vaako’s uneasy look was back. “Just as we have all begun to know that you are our anointed leader, she has come to me with a tale of how this girl, this Jack, is someone you knew and abused as a child, and she is certain you intend to do so again because the girl is terrified.”

He knew he could count on Dame Vaako to make the day a little worse.

“You’ll get to meet Jack soon enough and decide for yourself if it’s true,” Riddick said after a moment. “But I’ll tell you one thing now. Your wife may have met someone who can outplay her today.”

Vaako’s eyes widened. “That… would be something to see.”

“Hopefully we’ll even live through it.” Riddick forced himself to relax. Jack was a practical girl—woman. He really needed to dispense with that whole girl label, especially if Dame Vaako was selling the story she seemed to be trying to.

Anyway…

She was practical, and smart, and even if he’d thrown her for a loop with his ham-handed fuckup of a proposal, she’d figure out why it’d be worth doing. He wasn’t going to demand soul-shaking love from her—

Not that I’d mind that, or anything…

—but she needed cover and he needed peace of mind, knowing she would stay safe.

“Is there anything you need from me?” Vaako asked. They were almost at the throne. Riddick moved to the side, stepping around it toward the doors into the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead behind, as Vaako stopped next to the throne itself.

“Nah. It’ll be another day or two before I’m ready to present Jack to the court. Just gettin’ everything ready right now. I might possibly have some new instructions for raiding ships in a few hours.”

Vaako gave him a weighing look, and then nodded. “I am at your command, should you need me.” He bowed, stepping back, too correct to turn his back on his commander.

The bit of Jack still in Riddick’s head told him not to turn his back either, out of politeness rather than caution. He opened the Chamber doors without turning away, stepping inside and closing them while still facing Vaako.

It was the usual way he entered the room, in truth, but it felt different somehow, with Jack’s motivation guiding it rather than his own.

What is your will, Lord Marshal? the Quasi-Dead asked around him.

“Gimme a moment,” he said. “Got somethin’ I need to ask your boss, first.”

He closed his eyes and focused on the angry being in the bowels of the ship. I have a question for you, Moribund.

If you wish to know whether you succeeded in procreating today, you did not.

Rude. He already knew Jack was protected against that. As was he. Nothing like that. I want to know if the Necros are killing babies and children at your command or if it’s something they came up with on their own.

Silence greeted him. Shocked silence.

You seriously didn’t know what they were doing?

It would seem, the Moribund said after another moment, that these creatures have truly understood little of what I have asked of them.

Riddick sat down on the dais at the center of the chamber, folding his legs into the “lotus” pose that one of the only Trainers from his youth that he didn’t want to kill had shown him. So if I forbid them from killing kids anymore, will you allow that change? Maybe even support it?

Yes.

Have there ever been children in the Armada before?

It used to be the norm. They converted when they were old enough.

Old enough for what, exactly?

When they are too young, their neuroplasticity rejects the process.

That made sense. Pissed him off, but he kept that from bleeding into their channel of communication. So they’d just hang out and wait?

Possibly. I did not pay much attention. I believe it may have changed with Zhylaw. He seemed to view children as a threat.

Because of me.

Yes. One of the Demons of the Darkness spoke to him without my knowledge and told him the most probable outcome for his five-shape in this ’verse. He sought to resist it.

Well, that fit with what he’d gleaned from the Necros who had been willing to talk to him up ’til now. And you let that happen?

These creatures do my will, but you know what I think of them. I tried to ignore their petty squabbles and games of one-upmanship.

Maybe that was a mistake. No maybe about it. But far be it from him to piss off the critter keeping its minions off his back.

Yes. It was. The Moribund’s voice was simultaneously testy and abashed. I have said as much to my sisters. You may tell her I admitted this, if you wish.

You could talk to her yourself, you know. Girl’s surprisingly forgiving about a lot of shit.

He could feel its unease in response.

Word is, she’ll be bringing back the “other larva” sometime soon. Kyra, if you ever paid attention to her name.

Now he could feel something like resentment stirring in the Moribund.

That ain’t gonna be a problem, is it?

Will it be one for you?

Fuck. This creature knew everything about him, didn’t it? If the whole deal wasn’t just someone’s pipe dream… it could be a big problem.

He’d known Kyra wasn’t Jack almost as soon as he got to Crematoria. But the strange woman in the shadows had helped him, strangling one of the men running for him in a move that had, eerily, made him think of the way Jack had restrained one of the Shrills on the Kublai Khan. Even so, his glimpse of the woman’s face—not to mention her hair, which was dark and thick with curls where Jack’s, before she’d shaved it, had been straight and lighter—had told him she wasn’t the girl he’d come looking for. But maybe she knew where Jack was. In prisons barbaric enough to force women into the spaces controlled by violent men, they tended to stick together, guarding each other’s backs.

Just how she’d gotten behind him, he hadn’t known at the time. Now, he had a pretty good idea. He’d thought he was following her, and then suddenly she had two sharp blades poking into his back. “Should I go for the sweet spot?”

It wasn’t Jack’s voice, but for a moment, he thought he’d awakened Fry’s ghost. The voice sounded hauntingly like hers.

“Left of the spine, fourth lumbar down, the abdominal aorta?” The words were only getting creepier. Only Fry and Jack had heard him say that, and this wasn’t Jack. “What a gusher.”

Huh. He hadn’t said that part to either of them. Had he met this woman somewhere else? Was there another time—?

“How do I get eyes like that?” she asked.

No, she was definitely referring to his conversation with Fry and Jack. But her knowledge was secondhand and flawed. From bull sessions he’d had with Jack in the skiff, those times he’d managed to get past her cagey evasiveness and gotten her to open up instead of just listening to him talk, he’d figured out that the girl had perfect recall. If it had been her peeking over his shoulder at him, she’d have said just to the left of the spine and where the hell can I get eyes like that, and wouldn’t have mentioned gushers at all. Still…

Whoever this is, she’s talked to Jack. Has to have.

He’d play along and see where it went.

“You gotta kill a few people,” he said. What would she say in answer?

“Did that,” she told him. “Did a lot of that.” He could feel her anger and resentment. She started pressing the sharp object, whatever it was, deeper into his skin.

Fuck this. He turned before she could react and grabbed her, catching her wrists in his hand and shoving her against the bars. She could poke her little toy into someone else’s back if she wanted. Not his.

It was his first chance to get a really good look at her, and the woman in front of him was eerie as fuck. Not even one feature looked like Jack’s… but if someone had brought back Fry and Shazza and combined the two of them, the woman in front of him would have been the result. She had Fry’s general face shape, Shazza’s eyes, hair, and coloring… and Fry’s voice.

Spooky. But this little dance was still the key to finding Jack. “Then you gotta get sent to a slam.”

“One where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again?” she asked him, her expression accusing.

Well, she got that part right.

He opened his mind up, just a crack…

…The fuck?…

This woman in front of him believed this was their dialogue. She had a vision in her head of watching him and Fry having their little standoff… a vision of the eclipse—

“Only there wasn’t any doctor here who could shine my eyes, not even for twenty menthol Kools,” she snarled at him, anger and denunciation filling her voice. “Was there anything you said that was true?”

And there, tucked in the back… It’s your fault I lost her!

There it was.

She’s an esper. These ain’t her memories, but maybe she doesn’t know that. Jack had had a glimmer of that, herself, as he recalled. Two espers meeting and exchanging memories…?

He could play. He’d pull what he needed to know from her thoughts. He just had to trigger the right ones. He lifted her up higher, just high enough that she wouldn’t be able to use the ground as leverage. Not before he was ready to let her down.

“What are you gonna do, huh?” she asked him. “Go for the sweet spot?”

Weird question to ask him, given the way he had her pinned. Not like he could reach for it. Unless she meant a different “sweet spot…” She was straddling his arm, and for a second he felt her press suggestively against it.

“Remember who you’re talking to,” he told her. Let’s just test this… “…Jack.”

He expected a vision in her head of the girl, maybe a moment of the two of them together. And for an instant, he did catch a glimpse of a girl who looked like his Jack, but with long blonde hair. But he didn’t expect the surge of anger, grief…

…and guilt.

She turned her face away, trying to hide those emotions from him.

His fault she’s gone, his fault his fault his fault he did this to us…

“Jack’s dead,” she ground out, her words stabbing him more deeply than she possibly could have with her little toy knives. “She was weak. She couldn’t cut it.”

No, he thought. Oh fuck, no…

He was so blindsided by her declaration that he almost missed the kick she aimed at the light beside them, barely felt the sudden slice of a tiny blade along his cheekbone, hardly registered the moment when she vanished from his grasp.

She was on one of the nearby bridges a moment later. How she’d gotten there hadn’t made sense to him—

She isomorphed, he thought as he sat among the Quasi-Dead, aware that they were, as always, listening in. They’d seen this moment from her perspective already. Soon he would see it as well.

“The name’s Kyra now,” she’d told him, for a moment almost managing to do an imitation of Jack’s boy act as she stared him down, blatantly no boy, blatantly not-Jack, never-was-Jack, and yet he could feel her thoughts beating at him—you left me, you left us, you abandoned us and it’s your fault she-I died—and demanding his participation in some strange folie à deux. “And I’m a new animal.”

Whoever she was, she had moves. She’d jumped over the side of the bridge a moment later and vanished.

His cat-and-mouse with her over the next day, while he waited for the moment to come when he’d cut fence, didn’t enlighten him any more as to how she’d known his Jack so well. Somehow, though, she hadn’t known Jack’s story well enough to avoid running afoul of some mercs. Just to see if she’d back off from her claims, to see if her masquerade would crack, he’d pressed that point. Jack would never have trusted a merc, much less signed up with a bunch of them. How would she explain it?

“There was no one else around,” she’d told him, and he’d caught that echo again—I lost her, it’s your fault I lost her, it’s your fault she-I died—that made no sense even as it tantalized him with hidden meaning.

Even as he started to care about her…

…to want her.

And he could feel her wanting him… thinking that he was the only man she would ever want, could ever want.

None of the others in the facility, be they “convicts” or “inmates,” had ever seen Jack. She’d never been there. Many of them remembered Kyra’s arrival, vividly remembering the brutal deaths that several “inmates” who tried to get a taste of her got instead. One of them had run screaming through the caverns as he bled out, clutching his groin as blood fountained around his hands, claiming that she’d bitten his dick off with her cunt…

It almost startled a laugh out of him now. She isomorphed some rapin’ muthafucka’s dick right off him…

But she’d been alone. First and last, alone. While there were other women in the place, most of them hidden away and protected if they survived long enough to hook up with one of the Guv’s semi-principled “convicts,” she had never been there. The Holy Man had been wrong. Jack had never gone to Crematoria. The closest she’d ever come were the brittle shards of her memories in Kyra’s head. And Kyra had made her own strange, solitary, bloody way through the caverns of Crematoria on her own. She had no one… except him.

Figuring out what had really happened to Jack became secondary to getting himself—and Kyra—off that rock. He stopped trying to remind her of her supposed past with him, stopped trying to trip her story up, and focused on enjoying her company. She was unbalanced, not even a little sane… but he didn’t mind. Once he got her alone, maybe he could help her. And maybe once he’d helped her, and she knew she could trust him, knew he wasn’t gonna throw her over, she’d be okay with telling him what had really happened to the kid from the Hunter-Gratzner crash…

But then the Necros took her.

He’d followed, not because he was trying to find Jack but because he was trying to save Kyra, and found her in the worst possible straits of all. A convert.

He’d barely heard a word the Lord Fuckin’ Marshal was saying to him, something about choosing the Necromonger Way, his attention focused so completely on her. Her eyes were sad as they met his.

“It hurts,” she told him as she stood before him, “at first.”

Pain is all I’ve ever known… her soul whispered to him.

“But after a while, the pain goes away, just as they promise,” she said.

She went away… they took her from me… all I had left of her is gone… There was grief in that thought, but strangely muted.

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he asked her. She seemed lost inside her own head somehow, her eyes clouded over. Were these even her words coming out of her mouth?

“There’s a moment when you can almost see the Underverse through his eyes,” she told him instead. “He makes it sound perfect. A place where anyone can start over.”

I’ve started over so many times… what’s one more?

And there, for just a moment, he caught a glimpse of her embracing a girl, of a height with her, a girl whose face had haunted his dreams for five years. Tell him Jack’s dead. She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world… in her voice. And Kyra’s puzzled hurt that she could say such a thing, her cloying fear and regret over their separation…

Fuck…

“Are you with me, Kyra?” He pushed at her mind, trying to bring her back to him. Gimme a sign and I’ll get you out of here. Anywhere you wanna go, we’ll go…

For a moment, she almost swayed toward him.

He is not yours. He never was. The voice was in her head but not from her head, the manifold voice of the Quasi-Dead. Killing rage filled him as she walked past him and away, puppeted by the Lord Marshal’s minions.

He had no intention of letting those voices puppet him. He’d rather die than be something’s slave again. But first…

…he was going to get as many pounds of flesh as he could. For her.

The fight was vicious, brutal, and nearly over—he was certain that he was going to actually die, but at least he’d die himself—when Kyra, her eyes clear and lucid once more, had stabbed the Lord Marshal in the back and then been flung across the room, striking the spiked pillar. He’d felt the spikes pierce her back, felt her agony, no longer numb, no longer shielded from injuries by whatever the Necros had done to her, now somehow undone. He needed to get up, to rise, to help her.

She managed to pull herself off of the pillar, collapsing to the dais by the throne. Her eyes met his. I thought we’d have more time… I thought I’d get to be yours first…

He wanted to burn down the ’verse.

And somehow he could see the Lord Marshal in motion, preparing to flee Vaako’s raised weapon, as if time had slowed to the crawl he’d experienced when he’d been in cryo.

This is your first step in freeing all of the enslaved, the voice from his dreams murmured. Shirah, somehow in his ear… But it’s going to hurt.

It wasn’t the death of the Lord Marshal that hurt, even a little. It was holding Kyra as she bled out, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, the tiniest thread of sound left to her voice.

Hold on. Hold on. Don’t die…

You cannot anchor her, Shirah told him, her voice gentle inside his head. Not now.

He refused to believe it. “Are you with me, Kyra?”

Kyra’s face twisted in pain, in grief. “I was always with you,” she gasped, her expression suddenly pleading.

It was me, he heard her saying even as her voice failed her. It was always me. There by your side in the eclipse, it was me, nobody else, me…

“I was…”

…Jack…

He saw it, an image in her mind, the two of them side by side, walking through a forest he’d never seen before, him vanquishing foes he knew he’d never met on any field of battle.

It was real, I swear it was all real… it was always me…

Silence fell over her like a shroud had dropped, and she was no longer there. The tears that had been welling in her eyes, that she’d been struggling to hold back, slipped free, and there was only—

…an empty shell…

—below him.

Because, he told himself with a shudder, Lucy had pulled out her soul and taken it away. There were questions that he needed to ask about that. Implications that were only just beginning to dawn on him.

But first…

He needed to spend some time with Kyra.

“I’m ready,” he told the Quasi-Dead. “Skip to after that sick fuck was done hurting her. I don’t want to have to feel her feeling that. Let’s see what she did about it.”

She had, after all, done something to merit being sent to Crematoria. He hoped to fuck it was ten times as bloody and brutal as anything that had been done to her.