The Changeling Game, Chapter 88

88.
Sharkbait

By the time Riddick finally arrived in Crematoria, two years had passed and Kyra had given up on ever seeing him except in dreams.

Only new arrivals—inmates or guards—dared try to fuck with her anymore. Everyone else had learned that touching her could be fatal.

There was a small handful of people she considered friends in the prison, most of whom she had met on the day of her arrival. Even before she had reached the ground, even as a strange and frightening rhythm had echoed through the cavern, six men had surrounded the point where she would touch down, facing outward, guarding her descent. While five of them continued to face outward, one had turned toward her, a knife in his hand…

…and had cut the rope just above her wrists.

“The warden of this fine institution has plans for you,” he said, giving her a wry smile. He looked a few years older than Tomlin. He had dark, curly hair, cut short, a square face with high cheekbones, and dark blue-green eyes. His beard and mustache were rufous and close-cropped. “I don’t agree with his plans. I doubt you do, either.”

“Let me guess,” she said, trying not to let her voice show any of the genuine terror she was feeling. “Gang-banged to death over a four-day period?”

The man gave her a curt nod. “Women are usually walked into Crematoria, not dangled like sharkbait. What did you do?”

“Killed the nephew of New Queensland’s Planetary Governor,” she said, twisting at the cuffs still on her wrists. “Over a four-day period.”

“Did you know he was related to someone important at the time?” The man reached out toward her wrists.

She shrank back and then made herself stop retreating, shaking her head.

“Sorry, love.” He opened his hand just enough so she could see the hand-carved key he was concealing.

“All I knew was he’d destroyed my life, and I was the last of a long line of women whose lives he’d destroyed.” She made herself move closer to him and let him touch her arms. The contact made her skin crawl. Not that there was anything weird about his touch. But…

“I’m guessing I know how,” he murmured as he unlocked her cuffs. There was a steel wedding band on his left ring finger. “My friends and I will keep our hands to ourselves. I swear it.”

“Why?” From what she had heard about Crematoria, the “worst of the worst” were sent there.

“Not all of us are here for the same reasons, love. Some of us follow a code. You won’t be harmed by us.”

Around them, his friends were spinning chains, driving intrepid inmates back.

This could, she reflected, be a trick. She opened her mind up, focusing on the six men surrounding her.

They were on the level. Four of them had been contract killers, deadly men whose code included going to prison—even this prison—rather than revealing who had hired them. The fifth had been nailed for a series of revenge killings related to the death of his teenage daughter. And their spokesman…

Everyone in the prison called him “The Guv,” and in a past life he’d been a politician. One with powerful dreams, powerful ambitions… and powerful enemies. Officially, he wasn’t even there; the name that he was incarcerated under wasn’t even his own. But nobody particularly cared, and he’d made his peace with it. Finding and shielding others who didn’t belong in such a cesspit had become his mission.

“Your name is Mallory Glynn, yeah?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Kyra.”

All the other names had been destroyed.

Dihya Meziane had been stolen from her by General Toal, along with Kali Mongomery. J. Houlot had barely existed. Mallory Glynn had been poisoned. And Jack…

…was dead.

Kyra was all that was left. Which was, she decided, just fine with her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kyra,” he told her. “People around here call me—”

“The Guv, yeah, I know.”

He blinked. “I believe your story may be even more interesting than I thought.”

They’d protected her for the first week. Although a few of the men in the group had lustful thoughts of their own about her, they had her figured out pretty quickly. Scared porcupine, one of them, a man named Sawyer, called her in his head. His death, at the end of that week, changed things.

He’d died defending her, something she’d never asked for or expected… or wanted. His killers died soon after when they tried to claim the prize they’d come for. She spent the next several hours in Elsewhere while the caverns were on lockdown and strange, terrifying animals were let loose to hunt the corridors and tunnels and, above all, feast on the corpses. She would come to know those animals quite well.

After the lockdown ended, she returned to U1 and sought out the Guv.

“Sawyer’s dead because of me,” she told him. The next thing out of Tizzy’s mouth would have been an apology. “That’s not happening again.”

“How’d you kill the others?” he asked. He seemed to be rolling with the death of his compatriot better than she was.

“I can’t tell you. Even here and now, it’s not safe for anybody else to know.” She hoped he wouldn’t push it. At least any cameras that might have been installed in the prison levels had been destroyed decades ago. Her new rule for isomorphing was simply not to do it in the line of sight of anyone who would be believed… or would survive witnessing it. “But I can handle more like them. I know how to now. So if they try to come for me, don’t put yourself between us. Take off so you don’t witness what I do about it. I’m not allowed to leave witnesses.”

“Allowed by whom?” He only looked mildly curious, but his thoughts were extremely curious.

“Can’t tell you that, either.” In a place like Crematoria, the millions of lives she was trying to protect were distant and abstract, but she was mostly doing it for Tizzy, anyway. In the unlikely chance that Tizzy was still out there somewhere and had been neither killed by the Quintessa Corporation nor enslaved by Toal and the Federacy, she needed cover. And even from within this stinking pit, Kyra would find a way to give it to her.

She missed her sister. But she couldn’t imagine how Tizzy would have lasted a day in Crematoria.

Yuri—Warden Pryshchenko—seemed to be determined to earn Governor Bollan’s bonus. When he couldn’t get the inmates in the pit to bring about her end—and there were several more attempts over the next year—he began sending his guards after her. Dumb move: it was much harder for him to conceal the deaths of guards. She nearly got eaten by the “hellhounds” in the lockdown that followed that.

Those beasts were always hungry. But that gave her an idea. A plan. The kind of thing she imagined Tizzy herself might have come up with.

She did a top-to-bottom exploration of the prison, moving as a phantom through its levels from Elsewhere, and learned more about what the “hellhounds” were, where they were kept, and how they were both fed and, more frequently, starved. And then, when the prison guards slept and no one could see, she began sneaking food to the beasts.

At first, it wasn’t enough. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to hunt her.

But… they appreciated the food, especially on days when the guards refused to feed them at all. And she’d talked to non-human minds before. Theirs were far less alien than the Apeiros or even the Ree. Soon she had an arrangement with them. Tizzy, she thought, would have approved.

Tizzy would already have them trying to cuddle up to her, she thought with a mixture of wistfulness and envy.

She had made the arrangement just in time, given that Yuri’s next gambit was to try to get her eaten alive by her new friends. If he couldn’t get the prison’s worst excuses for men to do it…

Fortunately for her, but too bad for him, the “hellhounds” had decided they liked her better alive. She hated nights in the kennels even if they were increasingly friendly to her, because they inevitably howled through the night, singing their yearning for a world with stormy silver skies, and a caldera of spectral flame, that they had been stolen away from. Their homesickness always infected her. Each morning, the guards would find her sleeping in a puddle of her own tears and think they’d come close to breaking her, even if they had yet to find a way to kill her. The truth was anything but.

She retained the full run of the prison even when the “hellhounds” hunted through it, although sometimes they pretended to chase her like anyone else so that no one would figure out the truth. She got good at dodging, only isomorphing into Elsewhere as a last resort. She didn’t want to get caught crossing thresholds by anyone… anyone human, anyway. The hounds often saw, but she’d never hidden any of what she could do from them. Fortunately she could listen in on the human minds around her, hideous as many of them were, and knew the exact moments when no one’s gaze was turned her way.

Yuri and his guards kept trying to figure out a way to engineer her destruction, though. The Planetary Governor of New Queensland really wanted his pound of flesh.

New guards often made a play for her. A few even survived doing so. Even the ones who didn’t lose a body part were missing their knives when they got dragged back to the control center. After one of them went back missing his gun, none of the men dispatched to take a crack at her were allowed to carry their pieces into the attacks anymore.

Kyra gave the gun to the Guv. She could shoot, but she didn’t especially like firearms. Too impersonal.

She had stolen enough edged weapons by then, and added edges to enough other bits of metal, that she always had a few blades on her. She often used the scabbard trick to hide them in Elsewhere, making them appear at the last and deadliest moment. A newcomer to the prison, a mechanical engineer whom the Guv had befriended named Sybar, taught her how to spring-load blades in the soles of her shoes. Kyra adapted his design so that the triggering mechanism just needed one tiny component isomorphed away to spring the blades. She practiced partially isomorphing part of the component while fully isomorphing the rest, until she could spring the blades and then re-arm the trigger without having to open up the whole device. Once perfected, it was a weapon no one but her could ever use.

After a while, she began to wonder if she was just marking time until he came—if he ever did—or settling in for a long, cruel life in the darkness.

She was more aware of the passage and measurement of time than anyone realized. Keeping track of dates was something that she’d started to pay attention to when Tizzy had made the Kali Montgomery ID. Her sister had spent part of a day working out exactly when Kyra’s birthday would have fallen in the New Christy Enclave, based on the relativistic duration of her family’s journey there from Earth, and then exactly how much time Kyra had spent in cryo during her transfer from New Dartmouth to Helion Prime, as well as the time they’d spent in cryo on the Scarlet Matador. From all of those numbers, she’d calculated out exactly which day of the Standard year was Kyra’s “new” birthday, making that month and day part of Kali Montgomery’s birthdate. Obviously, Kali Montgomery hadn’t been born in 2087.

The thoughtfulness of that action had stunned Kyra; it had also inspired her. When she’d tried her own hand at making an ID, she’d worked out exactly how long she had spent in cryo between Tangiers Prime and Lupus Prime and had chosen Mallory Glynn’s birthdate accordingly. It hadn’t remained accurate for more than a day from the time she got the completed ID; she’d ended up fleeing Lupus Prime, and back in cryo, soon after. But she’d calculated out her new birthdate once she’d reached New Queensland, just in case she figured out how to acquire yet another new ID, and she’d paid attention to exactly how long she’d been in cryo on first the prison transport and then Toombs’ and Logan’s ship.

The end result was that she’d known, upon her arrival in Crematoria, that she was four months away from turning eighteen. February 22 was her new birthday, and probably would be for the rest of however long she survived in the hellpit. She didn’t tell anyone when she turned eighteen, but a year later, she confided in the Guv that her birthday was approaching. He and his friends surprised her with gifts on the day: new weapons and training in how to use them. She was especially taken with learning how to spin and whip chains the way they did, and they were happy to show her. None of them fantasized about her anymore, given what she inevitably did to those who tried to take a poke; a few of them seemed to genuinely believe she possessed a set of vagina dentata.

Other women showed up in the prison from time to time, escorted on foot by guards rather than lowered on the rope as “sharkbait;” even so, few of them lasted very long. The ones who did tended to latch onto one of the “bosses” in the prison—and there were a few, although most of them feared and respected the Guv’s gang, of which she was considered a member—and disappeared into their cell warrens. Officially, their fates and conditions were unknown, but Kyra could walk into any cave she pleased via Elsewhere and knew exactly how all of the women were faring. Several were raising children deep in the more hidden parts of the cave systems.

That made her angry, but she couldn’t figure out exactly why at first. Not as angry as finding the women who were being genuinely abused—many of whom found knives mysteriously in their reach soon after—but still…

That’ll never be me, she told herself as she phantom-stalked the corridors, still unsure what she was so angry about. Raising a baby in Hell, maybe… what kind of person could do that?

Someone with no other choices, she reminded herself. It wasn’t the women she was angry with, she finally realized; it was the men who didn’t care about the consequences of sticking their dicks into the second-most helpless people in the place.

If she was stuck here for the rest of her life, she decided after a while, she was going to have to make some changes to the place. Bring down some consequences that those kinds of… inmates… had to respect.

She “celebrated” the second anniversary of her arrival in Crematoria by assassinating the leadership of one of the nastier gangs in the place, one that brutally used up any woman unlucky enough to make the mistake of seeking shelter with them. Mere days later, while the place was still reeling from the upheaval she had engineered, she heard a familiar rhythm start up in the main cavern.

More sharkbait was arriving.

Curious, she gathered her knives and chains and headed for the cavern floor. If it was someone the Guv would want to defend, she would be ready to join the defensive wall.

Her breath caught when she realized just who was descending.

Riddick.

He had come for her. Finally.

She watched as the rope stopped, the unintelligible sounds of an argument echoing down from the control room through the hatch in its floor. Were they just going to leave him hanging there while they yammered at each other?

Riddick apparently had no interest in waiting around.

She watched in fascination as he worked his way upward on the rope, twisting it around his body. She’d mastered some damn good gymnastics of her own, but what he was doing was amazing. She studied each of his movements, committing them to memory to try sometime later, herself.

My brain might not be eidetic like Tizzy’s, but my muscles are… She rarely needed more than two or three tries to master something physical. And did she ever want to master that!

Her breath caught again when Riddick fell, spinning, using his momentum and torque to shatter the chains shackling him to the rope as he dropped to the cavern floor.

Two of the Moles, she suddenly realized, were waiting for him, weapons drawn.

That was Kyra’s name for them, anyway: a group of men who had a real thing for one complex of twisting tunnels off the main cavern, just above the actively volcanic passages not even she could risk. She’d explored their tunnels herself, on the Elsewhere side, to find out what they were up to; anyone who tried on the U1 side was liable to end up dead. The Moles had apparently figured out a way to combine dried “hellhound” shit with some of the mineral deposits in their tunnels into a yellow powder they liked to sniff; in the last year, they’d grown addicted to the substance and frequently walked around with it liberally sprinkled on their clothes and skin. But that wasn’t even close to the most disgusting thing about them. The last “sharkbait” to hit the floor had been dragged into their tunnels and slaughtered; they’d apparently turned cannibal as well. She’d verified that while they were asleep and had very nearly brought one of the “hellhounds” down to turn loose on them.

Kyra had already been considering making their demises, possibly as “hellhound” chow, her twentieth birthday present to herself.

Looks like my birthday party’s arriving early, she thought with a grim smile. Whatever they could manage to do to run of the mill “sharkbait” wasn’t going to work on Riddick. This was going to be fun to watch.

Riddick flipped as his chains shattered, landing on his feet, perfectly balanced. He was already moving to intercept the first of the Moles as the fool ran at him.

It was poetry.

In seconds, the first Mole was down, his neck snapped. Riddick didn’t even bother to turn around as the second Mole leapt at him, reaching back to grab the man by the neck and slam him to the ground.

A third Mole was climbing out of a tunnel. Did Riddick know he was there?

Kyra didn’t feel like risking it.

Even as the third Mole ran for Riddick, her chain whipped out. She’d been practicing for more than half a year and her aim was perfect. It wrapped around the man’s neck and she gave it a hard pull, feeling the moment when his spine cracked and his momentum turned into dead weight. He crashed to the floor even as Riddick turned to look at him.

With a practiced tug, Kyra made the chain release its hold on the dead Mole’s neck and reeled it in.

On the ground behind Riddick, the second Mole gulped and wheezed like a beached fish, struggling to breathe. Riddick paid no attention, his gaze following her chain. As she wound it back up, he pulled off his goggles and stared at her with his amazing silver eyes.

It felt, strangely, like the first time she’d ever seen them. And yet…

…She had seen them before, hadn’t she? She’d spent a lot of time with him before he abandoned her and Tizzy…

They were amazing. Maybe she’d just forgotten how beautiful they were.

But why was he looking at her like he didn’t know her? Wasn’t he happy to see her? Hadn’t he come for her? The look on his face wasn’t at all what she’d expected.

Damn it, of all times for the Guv to give his inmates-and-convicts speech… He trotted that damn thing out every time someone survived touching down.

It’d give her a chance to take back control of their reunion, though. She slipped into one of the side passages while the Guv was talking, certain that Riddick was tracking her movements.

She isomorphed into Elsewhere, setting her chains down and choosing one of her favorite weapons, the “Pincer,” called that because it reminded her of Sebby’s claws. Riddick was approaching. She clambered up one of the stone pillars, balancing herself and transitioning back into U1 as he passed, jumping back down behind him and landing cat-silent. He didn’t know she was there until she had the Pincer pressed to his spine.

“Should I go for the sweet spot?” she asked him. He’d have to recognize her now.

And yet, somehow, it didn’t work nearly as well in reality as it had in her head. He was faster than she’d expected. And she hadn’t expected to be so angry with him. She hadn’t consciously wondered why he hadn’t come sooner, or why she hadn’t been able to find anyone in the prison who could give her a shine job, until she began demanding answers from him. And she hadn’t realized how much she’d blamed him for losing Tizzy. Losing Jack.

He lifted her off the ground, one hand pinning her wrist and one arm between her legs, and none of her usual responses to that kind of contact kicked off. Why did she suddenly want more contact with him? Why was she suddenly trying to press herself closer to him and turning “sweet spot” into a double-entendre?

She hadn’t expected the sense of shame—and, inexplicably, envy—that flooded through her when he called her “Jack.” She didn’t understand where that came from at all. Or the weird wistfulness. Or the resentment at his abandonment, not of her but of someone else…

Tizzy?

“Jack’s dead,” she told him, struggling with the feeling that she was repeating someone else’s words. “She was weak. She couldn’t cut it.”

Why did saying that hurt so much?

If their meeting rattled him, it rattled her even more. By the time she broke free, giving him a “kiss” with her mouth blade and isomorphing out of his grasp, she felt like she’d completely lost control of their encounter.

“The name’s Kyra now,” she told him from the bridge, even as a part of her thought that it had never really been anything else. “And I’m a new animal.”

Fuck… fuck… I completely fucked this up… She jumped down to the cavern floor before she could make it all even worse somehow.

Why had she made such a show out of it all? Why hadn’t she just tried to talk to him?

The “hellhounds,” sensing her emotional turmoil, began roaring in their cages, calling to her, wanting to know what had upset her so they could tear it to pieces. She isomorphed into Elsewhere the moment she was sure no one could see her, so nobody would hear her crying. Especially not him.

Once she recovered, she took a long shower.

There was a waterfall in part of the cave complex, an extraordinary and inexplicable feature. She might have expected the water to be sulfuric, acidic, or at least heavily mineral-laden, but wherever it came from, it was clean and pure, and heated by the volcanic activity throughout the region to a perfect “bathwater” temperature that reminded her of swimming in New Marrakesh’s phantom tides. In other parts of the cave system there were dangerous water features, including an underground pond so acidic that anyone falling into it dissolved in less than an hour, but this water was perfect. She could undress completely and have a proper shower in Elsewhere, and did so frequently. It was one of the only luxuries she had—

“…it’s amazing how you can do without the necessities of life, provided you have the little luxuries…”

Jack had been listening in on Paris when he’d said that to Zeke, sneaking up on him—

But… that was me… I was Jack… wasn’t I?

She had the awful feeling that Riddick didn’t think so.

He arrived at the waterfall, on the U1 side, after she had dressed and composed herself. She climbed up to one of the catwalks near him, isomorphing back, and watched him for a few minutes, trying to fathom why, in spite of everything she already knew about him, everything she remembered, it felt as if everything she was seeing was a first.

He spotted her.

She’d been trying to read his mind, but he had a wall up between them. His mind was opaque to her. She’d had no idea that was even possible.

It’s me, Riddick. Don’t you remember me? Would he remember Tizzy if she were here?

For a moment she thought he was going to come over to her. But—

Damn it, Guv, stop interrupting us…

Was he really going to bring up his nameless wife again?

“FEEDING TIME!”

Well, there went all her plans of a quiet conversation with Riddick.

She still had no idea what the “hellhounds” really were, but the announcement that they were about to be turned loose always engendered a panic. Usually it happened when the guards realized someone had been killed. The Moles, undoubtedly. But, although eating inconvenient corpses was part of their jobs, they preferred live prey. Anyone, with one exception, that they found outside of locked cells was fair game.

She wanted to watch them dispose of those fucking cannibals. She needed to get down to the cavern floor.

The place was in a panic. Somehow nobody had realized that this was inevitable. The “hellhounds” were always set loose soon after a killing in the cavern, and it had been two or three hours since the Moles had died, the last from the Guv’s kick to his head. Usually everyone was more prepared, sticking close to whichever warrens of cells they preferred to get locked in.

Damn it, I’m gonna miss it all if I can’t get through this crowd…

One of the “hellhounds” was in front of her, watching her from atop a stairway.

Small-friend-creature, it whispered in her mind as it growled and turned red. I must pounce. You must run.

Okay, it wanted to play. She knew her way around this part of the cavern. That wouldn’t be a problem.

Three… two… one… she told it. Let’s go!

She pushed off of the wall and found her footing, balancing on the railing with one foot and rough stone on the other. Her friend roared and leapt forward, excitement visible on every perked scale. She kicked off and soared out into the open air, grabbing one of the ropes that trailed from an upper walkway and sliding down its length. Inhuman laughter echoed in her head.

Well played, small-friend-creature!

Maybe she should name it Ewan.

Kyra landed on one of the lower walkways, one that was already almost deserted. Maybe, just maybe, she’d make it to the bottom in time to see the pack feed, have a moment alone with them while no other human was watch­ing—

A Lightbringer is here! A Lightbringer is here! She had never heard such delight in any of the creatures’ voices before.

She wondered what that meant.

“Where you goin’, Mallory?”

Fuck. It was one of the guards. They, alone, insisted on calling her Mallory. No convict or inmate ever did. She turned around.

Fuck.

It was four of the guards, shining their bright lights into her eyes.

She’d been so focused on the “hellhounds,” and their unusual excitement about something called a Lightbringer, to realize the danger she was walking into. Now that she was paying attention, she could see what filled their noxious headspaces.

Yuri had sent them. Two years had passed since he was supposed to have arranged for her to get raped to death in this place, and he was done waiting. He’d sent some of his best guards… and had told them they could do anything they wanted to her as long as she took four days to die once they started. And did they ever have plans.

Fuck.

She began to back up, raising her arms as if she believed this was something other than the opening movement in a symphony of pain and death.

Not hers, of course. But still.

Everybody just gotta piss on my parade today…