The Changeling Game, Chapter 87

87.
The Teeth of the Black Fox

Kyra came back to herself, aware that time had passed and that somehow, something awful had happened.

Her body ached, especially in places she didn’t want to think about. Sitting up, she fumbled her clothes back on and looked around.

She was in a playroom… of a kind. The walls were covered in glass cabinets that housed a variety of disturbing and horrifying tools meant to be used on human bodies… female bodies. There was a utilitarian cot against one wall, manacles attached to each of its corners. Her wrists and ankles smarted, but she had no memory of wearing them—

Jack had worn them, she suddenly thought. Jack had been restrained on that bed and—

Her mind shuddered away from all of it. She didn’t remember. She wouldn’t remember. It hadn’t happened to her. It had happened to Jack.

Standing up hurt a little. She glanced around, spotting a camera that was aimed at the cot and two others aimed at the wider room. Under surveillance… that would make it hard to break out. She couldn’t isomorph, either. There was no air in Elsewhere for her to breathe.

Walk off the pain. She didn’t know why she was in such pain, what had happened to her—

—Not to me. It happened to Jack—

—but she needed to get her bearings and figure out what to do next. That man would be back. Maybe some of his friends would be with him. Some of them, she thought disjointedly, already had been.

Are we still on New Queensland, even?

She pressed her hand to the wall. It was still; there was no thrum of engines under her palm. Still parked on the landing pad. That was something. Maybe even something she could use.

By the door, there was a familiar looking keypad.

You put it in and it’ll unlock any lock it can for you, and open up any system it has access to. So you can get into and out of places if you’re in trouble. And you don’t have to remember numbers. It spells out RIDDICK. Any keypad with letters under the numbers will let you spell it out…

Tizzy had told her that. Tizzy, her lost little sister…

Would it work? How far had Tizzy managed to send it out?

Carefully, methodically, she punched R-I-D-D-I-C-K into the keypad and then pressed the green button at the bottom.

With a soft beep, the lights on the room’s cameras turned off and the door slid open.

Beyond the door, the lighting was dim, set in Nighttime Mode. The ship was completely silent. Whoever these bastards were, they appeared to all be in bed.

Glancing back into the playroom, she spotted knives in one of the cabinets. She had no idea what kinds of sick games they were intended for, but they’d be useful if she ran into one of the men. It was easy enough to get to them, she realized; she couldn’t isomorph herself into Elsewhere, but nothing was stopping her from isomorphing away the glass panel between her and the weapons she wanted. It fell away as she did so, striking the ground of Elsewhere silently. There was no atmosphere there to convey the sound of smashing glass back to her.

She armed herself and went exploring.

Silently, carefully, she quartered the ship, mapping it out in her head. It was big, with at least two levels, and the playrooms were on the lower level along with—

Perfect…

The cargo and equipment bay told her everything she needed to know about the men on the ship. “Free settlers.” Planning on heading to some barely-terraformed world with no charter in force to try to carve spaces for themselves… and buying women to take with them because nobody they actually knew was willing to go on their journey. They had earth-moving equipment, construction equipment, farming and mining equip­ment…

…and EVA suits in case they had to repair their ship along the way.

It wouldn’t matter that Elswhere had no atmosphere if she was protected by an EVA suit.

And Kyra, along with every other kid on board the New Christy Pilgrim, had been drilled in how to put on the suits in case of emergency. It was one of the few lessons that girls hadn’t been excluded from.

Even stiff and sore as she was, it didn’t take long to get into the suit. She contemplated a scythe among the farming equipment for a moment, but decided against it. These kills were going to be very personal.

Isomorphing into Elsewhere, she stalked the corridors of the ship again as a phantom, passing through closed doors to see what awaited on the other sides. It didn’t take long to locate all four men. It didn’t take much longer to come up with a plan. She returned to the playroom.

There were multiple sets of restraints in its cabinets, most of them looking unused. Gags of different types. Blindfolds. Spreader bars. Things designed to be inescapable. Things designed to be inhumane. Within an hour, all four men were wearing the equipment they’d bought for girls like—

—Not me. Jack…—

—and the two girls already in cryo, without waking up until it was too late to stop her. Once she was sure that no one else was on board, and there was no way for them to escape, she left the settlers’ ship as a phantom, walking across the rugged, flat terrain of New Queensland’s Elsewhere until she was in front of the merc ship again.

The crew inside was a dozen strong. It didn’t help them. Not when their attacker was invisible, intangible, only becoming a concrete presence in that moment when her blades cut them to pieces. Old hand or new recruit, it didn’t matter to her. None of them had spoken up against slaving her out. She only fully manifested in U1 again once they were all dead.

They’d confiscated her possessions when they’d “arrested” her, and had sent her with nothing other than the clothes she’d been wearing when they gave her to the settlers. She stripped out of her blood-soaked EVA suit and bundled it into their waste disposal unit, hunting through the ship for her stolen belongings and gathering them back together before taking one of the mercs’ EVA suits for her trip back to the settlers’ ship.

It was only much later that Kyra realized she’d left a wealth of her fingerprints throughout the merc ship in the process, many of them bloody.

She, meanwhile, trudged back to the settlers’ ship, once more suited up and walking through Elsewhere. Once inside again, she got to work.

The man who had ab­used—

—Not me! Jack!—

—lived the longest. She made sure of it. The other three died in less than a day, but she took extra care to make sure his heart didn’t give out. His mind did first; when he regressed back to the mental state of a small child, she sickened of the game and cut his throat.

There was still one more reckoning she needed to mete out before she was done, she realized, as she collected weapons and supplies. She loaded them all into one of the smaller vehicles the settlers had stored in their equipment bay, getting everything set before she ventured back to the cryo-chambers.

Two abused girls lay within the only active units. They wore no restraints, but she could see the marks of cuffs on their wrists, and other marks that made her wish she’d kept the other men alive a little longer…

Enough. She reprogrammed their chambers to wake them up once she was gone. All of the doors were unlocked; they could make their escapes whenever they wished.

Again, she didn’t consider until much later just how many fingerprints she had left on the ship, and what other biometric evidence she’d left as well. She had turned off all of the cameras on both ships before isomorphing—millions of lives depended on her leaving no evidence that she could do such a thing—but hadn’t thought about covering her tracks beyond that. The fog of war was upon her.

And she was after the man who had fired the first shot.

Oliver Bollan had seemed so nice when she first met him. They hadn’t worked together until the very end, after another girl, Eleanor, had abruptly quit.

Three guesses why Eleanor left…

Soon after, she’d been asked if she would be willing to transfer to the paddocks he managed, because he was “short-handed.”

Pretty sure that’s not the term for what his hands get up to…

The drive back to the New Gold Coast Cattle Ranch gave her a lot of time to think about just what he’d been doing, for years, and had tried to do to her, too. Worse, what he’d succeeded in doing to her reputation after she’d fended him off and warned him off.

Won’t just be his hands he loses now… shouldn’t’ve set this in motion…

Oliver, she had decided, was to blame for all of it. Her desperation. Her mistaken decision to give up the Mallory Glynn name because he was trying to poison it. Her arrest. Being slaved out. The things that had happened to Jack as a result…

He would die for it.

The first news stories, about a “spaceship of horrors” with a dozen dead bodies inside, were just starting to appear in the feeds when she arrived back at the ranch. She spent three days tracking Bollan’s movements, and another day laying her trap, before she took him.

She didn’t spend as much time on him as she had on Red Roger…

Except Riddick killed Red Roger for me… didn’t he?

…but it took Oliver days to die nonetheless. Long enough that, when she finally left his body behind and started driving back toward New Brisbane, contemplating where to go next, the news feeds had stopped covering the murders on two ships at the spaceport, and she’d missed the reports that Mallory Glynn was being sought as a person of interest.

They’d have caught her almost immediately if she hadn’t been able to hear them coming, hear their minds focused in on her. But she still couldn’t dodge them for long. She had no other ID to use except Mallory’s, and no idea where to go to find someone like Tizzy who could cook up a new one for her. If she’d still been on Tangiers Prime or even Lupus Prime, she could have hidden out in Elsewhere, slipping back to pilfer supplies when needed, and stayed out of reach for years.

Should’a done that when Toal’s men made a play for me…

As it was, the authorities caught her less than a week after she’d left Oliver’s remains strung up as wolf bait.

Her fingerprints came back as a dead-on match for the prints on all three crime scenes. To her surprise, however, they did not come back as a match for Kyra Wittier-Collins.

Tizzy’s worm programs, she realized, not sure if she was relieved or not. It had been a long-shot, her sister had said, but there was a chance that the worm carrying their faked video to Merc Network and law enforcement databases could also access, and obscure or destroy, their biometric records, and she’d programmed it to try. Apparently, it had succeeded. Nobody seemed to know that they had the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain in custody; just the New Brisbane Butcher. They also thought they had a legal adult on their hands and not a minor.

Seventeen counts of first-degree murder got pinned to her. Although she was certain that virtually everybody involved with the case knew what all of the dead had really been like and what they’d been doing before she’d ended their damage paths, it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter what they’d done to—

—Not me! Jack!—

—before she killed them, or how recent her trauma had been. She’d deliberately returned to the merc ship. She’d spent days torturing the settlers, and Oliver, to death. Even with the playroom torture vids that had been found on the settlers’ ship, there was no talk of clemency. Luckily for her, New Queensland, like the old Australian territory it had been named after, had no death penalty.

Unluckily for her, that meant she would probably be sent to a Double-Max prison. Ursa Luna.

Riddick territory.

Only what were the chances he’d actually be there?

Amnesty Interplanetary tried to offer her help, their rep claiming he believed they had enough proof of her victims’ past abuse of young women to win a clemency ruling after all. But she knew them even if they didn’t know her, and she remembered their role in triggering the standoff that had led to the massacre of her family and friends. She described, in detail, where their rep should put his clemency motion, and she never saw him again.

She soon learned that the local jailors assumed they could play with girls in their custody; they soon learned that, with her, that was a good way to lose a body part. After the second incident, she was locked in solitary awaiting sentencing. Everybody seemed to assume she’d eaten the guards’ missing pieces; they were, after all, nowhere to be found. She didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion. A random public defender got it into her head to try to have “Mallory Glynn” sentenced to psychiatric care instead of a proper slam, but Kyra had been in mental institutions before. Never again. She’d rather be in the Pit.

I’ll find a doctor and pay him to do a surgical shine job on my eyeballs. Twenty menthol Kools my ass… but if necessary I’ll let him keep his dick…

Chaotic as her mind was much of the time, she managed to pull herself together enough to convince the court-appointed psychiatrist that she belonged in a regular prison. Her sentencing took place soon after. Nobody attended but the press and some fancy looking bigwigs whose eyes and thoughts beat at her with pure hatred.

A month later, Kyra was one of a dozen prisoners picked up for delivery to Ursa Luna, something that worked in her favor. The guards were too busy settling a huge, belligerent man into his cryo-chamber to notice her inputting Tizzy’s Ghost Code into hers and changing its settings. She woke up after the ship completed its second Star Jump while everyone else slept on, loaded all of the emergency supplies into the ship’s lifeboat, and detached shortly before the ship reached its third Jump Point. The nearby outpost planet was semi-habitable and only a few days away via the lifeboat’s ion drives. Fortunately, it had a good enough autopilot to get her there and handle the landing.

Unfortunately, the lifeboat’s departure from the main ship had been recorded, and notifications of a likely prisoner escape went out on the Beacons even as it made its next Star Jump.

And, worst of all, the barely-terraformed outpost planet was another airless rock over in Elsewhere.

She was almost relieved when, two weeks later, a merc ship touched down. Less relieved when she saw who was in it.

Alexander Toombs and Eve Logan.

Tizzy had known how to evade them. How to divert them. How to mess with their heads. Kyra didn’t know how to think up crazy plans on the fly the way her sister could. The only plan she could come up with was to steal their ship and hope their autopilot was good enough to fly her somewhere else.

They caught her trying. Tizzy’s Ghost Code hadn’t worked on their ship.

“Is this her?” Toombs said as he stood over her convulsing body. The amount of live current that had just gone blasting through her, when she’d tried to board the ship, guaranteed that she wouldn’t be walking or talking for a few hours.

Logan knelt down next to her and took her hand, pressing it to her tablet surface. “ID system says no. Says this is Mallory Glynn, not Kyra Wittier-Collins, but I could swear this is her. Then again, I thought that woman with the face tattoos at that memorial service was Wittier-Collins, too, and she wasn’t even on Tangiers Prime at the time.”

“What’s the reward situation for each?”

“One hundred K in UDs as a finder’s fee for Wittier-Collins,” Logan told him. “There’s no bounty anymore, just the finder’s fee for bringing her home so she can claim her court winnings. Four hundred K for Mallory Glynn.”

“Well then,” Toombs drawled, leaning back against the wall, “I’m four times as sure this is Mallory Glynn and not Kyra Wittier-Collins. Ain’t you?”

Logan shrugged and sighed. “You did notice the M.O. was the same, right? Glynn kills exactly the same way as Wittier-Collins.”

“Nobody’s exonerated Glynn,” Toombs retorted. “Seventeen corpses under her belt, includin’ the nephew of New Queensland’s Planetary Governor. We put her in Slam for him, he’d probably give us the keys to New Brisbane if we ever want to visit.”

“You got a point.” Logan didn’t look entirely happy about that. Her gaze down on Kyra was pitying.

“Plus, we just try to turn her in for the finder’s fee on New Dartmouth, all her bio data says she ain’t Wittier-Collins. So then we maybe don’t get anything and they extradite her anyway once her ‘real’ name pops up.” Toombs looked almost as amused as annoyed by that possibility. “Might as well collect the four hundred K. Un­less…”

He walked over to stand next to Logan, smiling down at Kyra.

“Hey, girlie. You wouldn’t happen to know where your old pal Riddick is, would ya?”

Logan rolled her eyes and scoffed.

Riddick. It had been years since she’d seen him, she thought. Not since he’d abandoned her and Tizzy on New Mecca…

She was having a hard time remembering just what, exactly, it was that had happened on New Mecca with Riddick. Something to do with a treacherous holy man…

Abu al-Walid. El Imam. He knew where Riddick was. If she could get a message to him, may­be—

But he’d never tell, would he? Something had happened with Tizzy, something bad that he should have let Riddick know about, and he’d chosen not to. The image came to her of Tizzy, ghost-pale and white-lipped, staring after the holy man as he made his righteous way out of—

Aceso?

It was all a jumble. But maybe, even if he hadn’t been willing to help Tizzy, he’d still be willing to help her.

If she could get a message to him.

“Didn’t think so,” Toombs said from above her. “Too bad. He’s up to a million UDs. Could’a been enough to make us look the other way where you’re concerned.”

“As if you would,” Logan muttered.

“Hey. You never know. I might be feeling magnanimous with my share, my half-mill, in my pockets.”

“Might not be, too.” Logan rose from her crouch. “We want any of the crap she has at her camp?”

“We’ll go take a look. She ain’t goin’ anywhere for a while. Nowhere ’cept Crematoria.”

“That’s where we’re taking her?”

“Guy at Ursa Luna was clear,” Toombs said as they walked down their ship’s ramp. “If she does know Riddick, they don’t want her within a hundred light years.”

Whatever they were doing, though, took a while. Long enough that Kyra, resolutely focused on gaining back enough mobility to reach their comms, managed to drag herself over to the cockpit and patch into the system. Even if Tizzy’s Ghost Code wouldn’t work on the ship’s security systems, Toombs hadn’t locked the data and comms down and she could slide right in. As she’d hoped, he kept files in the system of all the “big game” he was hunting, and Riddick’s file included data on the Imam. Including his comm number.

There was no way to comm him directly from that little trash heap of a planet. But she could program in a call that would be automatically transmitted to the next Jump Beacon the ship passed, a message he would get and would hopefully act upon. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot she had left.

She set up the instructions for delivery and then recorded her message.

“Imam, it’s me… it’s—”

He’d never known her as Kyra, she thought. There was only one name he’d ever known. The name of the girl who had been raped and murdered by those sick fucks at the New Brisbane Spaceport. The name of a dead girl.

“…it’s Jack. You remember me, right? From the crash. I, uh… I need your help. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I’m in trouble.” She took a deep breath. “I went looking for Riddick. Things went bad. Some people died. I mean, I killed them, and… they’re sending me to Crematoria.”

She’d heard of it. Tizzy had described it once, when they were talking about the different prisons that someone with Riddick’s rep might get sent to.

“There’s no way out of there, Imam. You can’t even set foot on the surface without burning up. But if anybody can do it… please, please tell Riddick where I am. Please tell him to come get me. I need him. Please, if you ever cared even a little about me…”

He never cared about me. He never cared about us…

“…tell him to come get me.”

She saved the message and did her best to hide it in the comms system, and managed to crawl back out of the cockpit, far enough away from it to conceal that she’d ever made it there, before Toombs and Logan came back hauling most of her gear.

“Poor girlie, whatever your name really is,” Toombs said, setting down the gear and walking over to her. “Where were you tryin’ to go?”

“C’mon, Toombs.” Logan said. “Don’t mock the poor kid.”

Hearing Logan’s words disturbed her. Logan was supposed to be The Enemy. Not kinda-sorta on her side.

“Ain’t a kid if she’s Mallory Glynn,” Toombs said. “Even that Wittier-Collins chick’d be eighteen by now.”

“Assuming she didn’t go into cryo except between Helion Prime and New Queensland,” Logan said. “Big assumption.”

“Good ’nough for me. Now, let’s get her in cryo before she finds her way into any more trouble.”

They didn’t have cryo-chambers on their ship, just in-seat units. Kyra watched in helpless horror as they chained her up and connected her to several I-V drips, watched as the cryo unit spun into gear and mixed its freezing solution with her blood, turning it a violet that made her think of Mommy Ree’s cara­pace…

And then she was on a world with three suns.

“You forgot everything I told you,” Tizzy said from next to her.

Kyra glanced over at her little sister. Tizzy looked the way she had in the settlement, the one time Kyra had managed to see her, somehow trapped in a mirror and looking back at her in place of her face. Head shaved, a pair of yellow goggles on her forehead. But it was Tizzy, not all that different than she remembered her.

“I warned you mercs are just in it for the money,” Tizzy continued. “They’ll use you up for a percentage. Johns—that’s the guy who caught Riddick—he threatened a bunch of little kids to get Riddick to surrender. Killed some of them, too. You don’t want to be with people like that.”

For a moment, as Tizzy spoke, they weren’t on the crash planet anymore. They were in a hospital room, sitting on Tizzy’s bed. Her hair wasn’t shaved anymore, but was still short enough to be androgynous.

“There wasn’t anyone else left,” Kyra told her. “You’re gone. General Toal separated us and I don’t even know what he’s done to you. And Jack—”

“Jack is dead,” Tizzy reminded her, as if speaking to a slow child. “She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.”

They were no longer in the hospital. They were in a train station, surrounded by travelers, General Toal lurking nearby with sinister intentions. Tizzy’s hair had grown out another inch, and while she still looked somewhat androgynous, it framed her gamine face in a more feminine way. One man had already fallen madly in love with her, but fortunately had done her no harm—

But there was going to be an explosion soon, Kyra realized. She wanted to warn Tizzy but the words wouldn’t come.

The train station melted away and she was back on a world with three suns.

“…tellin’ me to go for the sweet spot,” Riddick rumbled in memories that were hers but not hers. “Left of the spine, fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta.”

What a gusher… He’d said that, right?

“How do I get eyes like that?” she asked him, aware that Tizzy was close by, annoyed, thinking that she was saying it wrong, the way Teacher had always claimed she was reciting the Bible verses wrong…

“You gotta kill a few people,” Riddick told her.

Done a lot of that now… When Riddick had been her age, his official body count had been half a dozen homeless youths he’d apparently carved up over a few months in New Athens. She’d killed almost three times as many grown men in less than two weeks. Guess I’m the better killer…

The story played out, looped, played out again. Over and over, Tizzy warned Kyra of the danger of trusting mercs. Over and over, Riddick shepherded her through the eclipse and to safety, but disappeared soon after, leaving her and Tizzy—

—And Jack, but which one of us was Jack?—

—to their fates. Tizzy, lost to General Toal’s connivances and an explosion, probably dead but maybe not, lost either way. And Jack…

Jack is dead…

Raped, tortured, and murdered by a group of “free settlers.” Kyra had avenged her death. Was that what had happened to Tizzy? Or…

She was weak… she couldn’t cut it…

She circled back to the world with three suns again. It was safer there. Or, sometimes, to the woods of Canaan Mountain, Riddick by her side as they hunted—

Red Roger? Oliver Bollan?

It didn’t matter. They hunted together, and that was what was important. He would come rescue her again. She knew it.

So why did he abandon me? Abandon us? If he’d stayed, Tizzy would be okay and Jack wouldn’t be dead…

Was Tizzy Jack? Or was she Jack? Who had died on the settlers’ ship, exactly? Someone had.

She retreated from the questions, circling back to the world with three suns.

Eons later, she woke to find herself being helped off of the ship and into a natural cave that had been modified into a hangar.

A cave, she realized, that existed on both sides of the threshold. In Elsewhere, the air was stifling hot but breathable.

Crematoria.

Toombs and Logan had cuffed her while she was waking up. They led her over to a sled, a four-seater with room for cargo in the back. She got a front seat next to Logan, Toombs directly behind her with a gun casually pointed at her back. The natural lava tube that the sled’s track followed existed in both worlds. Elsewhere and U1, she found herself thinking, were most closely connected here than anywhere else in their respec­tive—

—Four–spaces?—

—’verses. She might not be able to escape off-planet…

But there might be another kind of escape handy for her.

The sled covered ground fast, whipping through the tunnel’s twists and turns at a speed that made her feel almost grateful for the restraints keeping her secured to her seat. Logan had gently slipped a set of goggles over her eyes before they began the ride, and she found herself feeling almost friendly toward the merc because of that. It took less than ten minutes to cover the thirty-klick distance and reach the prison.

“So,” the Slam boss—Yuri, his mind silently provided—said as he looked Kyra over. “This is Mallory Glynn. The New Brisbane Butcher.”

“This one is trouble, Boss,” one of the guards—Anatoliy—said from behind him. “I can smell it on her.”

“Anyone who can cut seventeen grown men to pieces in less than a fortnight is trouble, Anatoliy,” Yuri said with a soft laugh. “I don’t need your nose to tell me that. But in this case, we don’t mind, do we?”

Yuri walked over to his desk and picked up a pair of bearer cards. He smiled over at the mercs.

“Governor William Bollan of New Queensland sends his personal thanks to you… along with a small token of his esteem.”

He walked back to Toombs and Logan, smiling. “Miss Glynn’s bounty, four hundred-K UDs…”

He put one bearer card into Eve Logan’s hand.

“…and another two hundred-K UDs as Governor Bollan’s personal thank you, for seeing that his nephew’s murderer is brought to justice.”

He handed over the second bearer card.

“Pleasure doin’ business with you,” Toombs said, sounding positively gleeful.

Logan’s eyes, full of misgivings, darted Kyra’s way before she followed Toombs back to the sled.

“Don’t worry, Miss Mallory,” Yuri told her as the door to the tunnel closed behind them. “The New Queensland Planetary Governor is paying us handsomely to look after you. He wishes you to spend a very, very long time contemplating your actions.”

Another of the guards attached her wrist manacles to a rope.

“Or, at least, as long as his nephew had to spend contemplating them.”

As they lowered her into the bowels of the prison, as she felt the dark and lustful thoughts of dozens of inmates turning toward her, Kyra thanked whatever sick fucker existed on high that the caverns, almost identical, existed in Elsewhere and had air in them. It was the only thing that was going to keep her alive until—

Please, Riddick, come get me. Don’t make me wait too long.