The Changeling Game, Chapter 90

90.
Follow the Lightbringer

Kyra ended up taking five hearts, along with others of the “hellhounds’” favorite organ meats, to their cages. All they wanted to talk about was the appearance of a “lightbringer,” but they remembered to thank her.

At least somebody around here has manners, she mentally grumbled as she headed for the lower levels. Soon, she knew, the guards would “pop the cork” on the prison, blowing out the accumulating sulfurous fumes and somehow pulling in fresh air.

Part of her was tempted to just stay on the Elsewhere side. Only return to the prison to pilfer food. Give up on humanity altogether. The secrets she was keeping wouldn’t matter if nobody could find her, and if Riddick hadn’t even come here looking for her—

“Kyra.”

Speak of the fucking devil…

Riddick was nearby, looking around, frowning quizzically.

“I know you’re near. I can feel you. Come out. I just wanna talk.”

Fine. Fucking fine.

She hoisted herself onto one of the pillars of stone and isomorphed back into U1, dropping down as if she’d been there the whole time. “Yeah?”

He studied her for a moment. She got the feeling that he was struggling with how different she was from what he expected, but that he also found her somehow familiar.

“Kid… I’m sorry I went off on you.” Damn, that had taken him some effort to say. She could feel his unease at using those two little words. “Wanna try again? Maybe… tell me what happened after I left?”

She really didn’t want to talk about that. At all. It was a part of her story, her memories, that never made sense, never held together. One of the parts she tried not to look at. She hadn’t been with Riddick, Imam, and Tizzy when they reached Helion Prime. Somehow she’d been waiting for Tizzy in Aceso. She’d been separated from them before their ordeal on the Kublai Khan, but she didn’t remember how. They’d left the crash planet together, but then the next time she’d seen Imam—

She didn’t understand.

She hadn’t seen Tizzy until Aceso. Why did their reunion in Aceso feel like a first meeting? The way coming face-to-face with Riddick in here had felt like one…

He was watching her intently.

“Riddick, I… when did Imam tell you where I was?”

“Been three days, maybe four, since the Necros took Helion Prime, about. So a little longer than that. By a few hours.”

“Two years, Riddick. He let me rot in here for two years without letting you know. Without even trying. So. Why do you think I left that shithole?”

He sighed. “Fair enough. So. You left New Mecca. Were you looking for me the whole time?”

It had been an idea that had come to her at the eleventh hour, a last-ditch way to stay together with Tizzy that she floated way too late. Tizzy hadn’t wanted to find Riddick. She’d committed to returning to her life before him, severing ties to all possible evidence that she’d ever been—

—Jack? Had Tizzy been Jack?—

—to ensure that the Quintessa Corporation would never discover the secrets she was keeping. The lives she was protecting. She had committed to the course. It had hurt to hear her say how thoroughly she was cutting those ties, though. Jack’s dead…

But Kyra had never really gone looking for him herself, in truth. Thought about it, but without Tizzy it had seemed hopeless somehow.

She shook her head. “It was the easiest thing to tell Imam. Maybe… I figured he’d be more likely to get a message to you if I said that, like that was why I left and not because he was a Grade-A dick.”

Her clearest memory of him was the sight of him stalking over to the Aceso guest elevator with a scowl on his face, while Tizzy emerged from the visiting rooms looking as if someone had drained her of every last drop of blood—

Riddick’s breath hitched. She glanced over at him, not sure what she was seeing on his face. He might be angry, sad, horny, amused, or all of the above at once and she’d never be able to tell between that smirky deadpan of his and that tight mental shield he had.

“You figured he’d be more likely to contact me,” he observed after a moment, “if he didn’t know how low your opinion of him was.”

“Figured it was worth a shot. Guess he proved my opinion of him right, instead.”

“How long did you stay on Helion Prime?”

She shrugged. This was another place where things got murky and weird in her head. “Felt like years. I left on February 12, 2517. I know that because it was the launch date on the logs of the ship I stowed away on.”

And because Tizzy had drawn her attention to the date later on. Tizzy, sitting in their apartment, the late afternoon sun spilling over her hair and gilding it while she cuddled Sebby and talked about numbers like they were comprehensible… and, for the first time, they were…

Riddick’s breathing hitched again for the barest moment. “So a little under five months.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

He nodded. “You go alone?”

Jesus fuck, just ask about Tizzy if you want to know so bad. At the same time, she didn’t feel like volunteering anything. He wasn’t going to find out anything about her sister unless he admitted that she was the one he’d really come for. Not that there was all that much to tell; General Fucking Toal had made sure neither one of them knew where the other was going when they separated. Divide and fucking conquer… “No, it’s safer not to travel alone if you can help it. We kicked around a few places before we split up.”

She couldn’t say they’d been on Tangiers Prime, not after already telling him the date she’d left Helion Prime. Only one ship could have made that journey, and officially it had no survivors. Hundreds of additional people had died so that the Quintessa Corporation could make sure no one blamed it for those deaths; more would die if the Corporation ever realized she and Tizzy had saved all but eighteen of their fellow travelers. Millions might die, if it discovered that the Imazighen were hiding the rest of the survivors. Millions… starting with the Mezianes. Kyra liked the Mezianes.

She wondered what Riddick would do if she told him Tizzy had fallen in love with one of them.

“How’d it all go wrong?” he asked after a moment.

“Like I told you. The mercs. I’d run out of other options. I needed a job and they were the only ones hiring. But they decided the only part of me that was worth anything was between my legs.”

“Hmm.” It was almost a low growl. “So you killed a few people, but got caught and nailed for their murders.”

Seventeen. And that’s just on New Queensland. She was pretty sure his kills hadn’t hit the double-digits until he was at least eighteen, and she’d hit that level at age sixteen while on Tangiers Prime. “That about covers it.”

His deadpan had, somehow, become even more of a blank than ever. “And nobody was at all concerned about a kid being slaved out.” He didn’t precisely sound skeptical, but she felt like he was trying to poke a hole in her story.

“My ID didn’t say I was a kid. And there wasn’t anyone left to prosecute even if it had. Except me for killing them.”

“Lotta mitigating circumstances, though,” he observed. “How’d you end up in the asshole of creation?”

“One of them was related to somebody important. He insisted. Plus Ursa Luna got word I might know you, and they refused to take me if that was true.”

Riddick nodded. After another moment, he seemed to come to a decision. “When it hap­pens—”

“There you two are,” the Guv said, emerging from one of the tunnels. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Word is, the rest of the Moles are dead. No one knows how. There’ll probably be another ‘feeding time’ within the day, once the guards realize.”

“Why the delay?” Riddick asked.

“None of the beasts are acting hungry, apparently,” the Guv told him with a slight smile. “How did you tame that one?”

Figuring out a way to get into the creatures’ good graces had long been a project of the Guv’s, Kyra knew. If she were a better and more loyal friend, she would probably have helped him with it. But even after two years, in which he’d helped her enormously time and again, she couldn’t bring herself to break the promises she’d made on Tangiers Prime and share her secrets with him.

Riddick shrugged. “Didn’t tame it. I’ve always had a way with animals.”

There was a kaiju from a bunch of centuries-old movies, Kyra recollected, who was a “friend to animals and children.” She wished she could remember its name.

Riddick glanced her way, his lips twitching as if he was suppressing a laugh for the barest second.

The Guv, she realized, was out to recruit Riddick into his gang, the way he’d recruited her two years earlier. She doubted it would work. Especially if her suspicions were correct and Riddick had only come here to spring her… or Tizzy… and had no intention of staying past that point.

But he isn’t gonna let go of it yet. Damn.

It was the end of a chance for a real conversation, at least for a while. Kyra did a fade while the Guv monopolized Riddick’s attention, making it literal once she was sure she was alone. She climbed onto “her” pillar, near the two men but not within sight of either of them, lying down in her little ’verse-straddling nest so she could listen to them while breathing the fresher air on the Elsewhere side. Things were getting stuffy enough on the U1 side that the guards would have to do an air exchange soon—

Well, speak of the lice-ridden devils…

Above her, the command center was rising up as the guards got ready to “pop the cork.” Once Kyra was sure no one was looking her way, she isomorphed back to U1. The air exchange was always fun to watch and to feel happening as the wind flowed past her skin.

“So they do go topside,” Riddick rumbled below her, “to swap out air. Interesting.”

The Guv, Kyra figured, hadn’t made much headway in his recruitment efforts, and hadn’t gotten any insights on befriending the “hellhounds.” His unease and awe was increasing, as was his certainty that she wouldn’t be part of his gang anymore if Riddick beckoned her away. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

Funny how law enforcement, and the military, knew all about Riddick, and somehow Stacey had known, too, but other convicts seemed to have no idea who he was.

Then again, kinda hard to get word of mouth going among the crim population if they’re all stuck in prisons that nobody, except the one guy who doesn’t talk much about himself, can escape from…

He was his own kind of phantom.

You listening, kid? his voice sounded in her head, as real as if he’d spoken aloud.

I’m listening.

“When it happens,” he repeated, “it’ll happen fast. Stay on my leg when I cut fence, or stay here. For the rest of your unnatural life.”

So he’d decided to invite the Guv to join him, too. Interesting. It hurt a little—would it ever just be the two of them?—but she figured he knew how much she owed the Guv. She’d probably have died sometime in the last two years if it hadn’t been for him. A thank-you was in order.

“Nobody outs this place,” the Guv was warning Riddick. “Nobody.”

A moment later, Riddick was gone, not bothering to reply.

“He ain’t nobody,” Kyra said, wondering if the Guv had even realized she was still nearby, that she’d stuck close to listen the whole time.

She slid her little knife out of her mouth, wondering if soon she might not need it. Its absence created a weird feeling for a moment, a sense of an empty space, as if she’d pulled out a tooth.

The air exchange was dropping the temperature; she’d need her coat soon if she wanted to stay in U1. Normally, she just transitioned part or all of the way into Elsewhere until the temperature normalized; on that side, the airflow was a gentle constant and all of the weird mining work people did in U1, releasing volcanic gases in the process, was irrelevant.

But she was staying in U1 until whatever it was, that was going to happen fast, happened.

It did happen fast.

Less than an hour later, with the “cork” back in place, shouting broke out in the control room followed by the sounds of gunfire. And then Toombs jumped down through the hole in the control room floor, sliding down the sharkbait rope.

What the hell is he doing here? Had he brought Riddick?

Even as Toombs managed to halt his descent, something exploded up above in the control room. In its wake, everything went quiet. But not for long.

“No!” Toombs suddenly shouted. “Riddick, no!”

As she watched in astonishment, Riddick launched himself from one of the caverns, flying straight at Toombs. He crashed into the merc, snagging Toombs’s bulletproof vest with one hand and pulling himself up until they were at eye level. The merc was straining under the additional weight, struggling to maintain his grip on the rope.

“Should’ve taken the money, Toombs,” Riddick said before grabbing onto the rope and hauling himself upward, not bothering to be gentle about the footholds he found on the merc’s body. Did he know that Toombs was the one who had brought her here?

She watched his effortless-looking hand-over-hand as he climbed up into the control room, feeling amazed. Tizzy had told her that Riddick was a “Furyan,” although neither one of them knew what that really meant other than that most of the Federacy’s trained Operatives were Furyan, powerful espers and maybe something more than that. Were all Furyans like him?

Wait, Tizzy had been trying to go to Furya… She remembered her little sister sobbing in her arms because something had stopped her from getting there. Stopped her from reaching her father…?

It was only a minute or two after Riddick disappeared inside the control room that an alarm sounded and all of the locked gates opened.

Yeah, that was pretty fuckin’ fast… She headed for the stairs, noticing that Toombs was struggling to climb back up the rope as she went.

The Guv had led the way up, his men already primed to follow, waiting for the signal. She wasn’t far behind them. Other convicts, mostly point men from other gangs, were following more cautiously behind her.

“Don’t bother,” she heard Riddick saying as she reached the control room. “Guards ain’t there. They figured out the Necros are comin’ for me.”

What the hell were “Necros?” He’d mentioned them before. Said they’d “taken” Helion Prime? Just a few days earlier…?

“Plan was to clean the bank, ghost the mercs, break wide through the tunnel,” Riddick was telling everyone. “And then somebody got a lucky shot off with this rocket launcher, here…”

He nudged the weapon with his foot, sending it spinning into the scattered detritus of playing cards, pistachio shells, and bullet casings littering the floor.

“…and took out the sled,” he continued. “Guards took off on foot but rigged the door so no one could follow.”

Everyone was following him away from the door in question, toward the kennels. Kyra turned away for a moment. She wanted to see the rocket damage for herself.

Toombs hauled himself back into the control room, grunting with the effort, his face red and sweaty from exertion. Kyra picked up a discarded pistol and armed it. Just in case he thought he had any say in what was happening.

“They’ll take the one ship in the hangar,” Riddick continued, ignoring Toombs’ return, “and leave everyone else here to die.”

“How come you know all this shit?” Toombs demanded as he regained his feet. He seemed determined to ignore the multiple guns pointed his way. “You weren’t even here.”

“’Cause it was my plan,” Riddick said, moving on without another word.

“The fuck he mean by that?” a runner for another gang, a man who everybody called Ratface, grumbled.

“Dunno,” Kyra told him. She had some ideas, but she wasn’t going to float any of them where just anybody could hear them. “Oh, holy shit.”

A familiar woman was sprawled on the ground near the sled track door, her breathing shallow and rapid.

“Logan. Hey. Eve Logan.” She knelt down next to the merc lady, aware that the rest of the convicts were staring at her. “You in there? How badly are you hurt?”

Logan groaned, opening her eyes after a moment. “Think I’ve got some broken ribs… hurts to breathe but not, like, inside my lungs…”

“Mind if I feel it out?”

Logan focused on her. “Kyra? You’re still alive… thank God…”

She nodded. “Let me check you out, okay?”

She remembered the way Ewan’s hands had moved over her after he’d finished patching her up, as he told her he was doing a quick check to make sure she didn’t have any other injuries that needed tending before they took her out of the apartment. There were very few men in the ’verse whose touch she could stand, but she was pretty sure he was still one of them. He’d made her feel impervious. Now she moved her hands the same way, opening up Logan’s armored vest so she could skim her ribcage and keeping an eye on the way the woman reacted to the contact.

“Looks like you probably have two or three cracked ribs,” she said after a moment. “All on your left side. None of them are out of place, though. What do you call those… hairline fractures? We get you bandaged up, you take it easy, you’ll be okay.”

“Why the fuck is she gonna be okay?” Ratface demanded.

“’Cause I just said it,” Kyra told him, rising up from her crouch. “’Cause she’s the closest thing you have to a bargaining chip with the Guild to keep them from just starving everybody out instead of sending any more supplies here. You wanna live, you’ll take good fucking care of her.”

“Hey,” Toombs called out. “I can be a bargaining chip, too!”

Kyra ignored him. She owed Logan a little humanity, but she owed Toombs nothing. “Somebody get Sawbones up here, get him workin’ on her. Get those boys in the Scree Team up here, too. They know electronics. You fix things up and she can put out an official call for relief here. Maybe the Guild will send some actual human guards next time around.”

“Who the fuck are you to tell us what to do, bitch?” Ratface was turning sullen and stupid.

“I’m the bitch you’ll have to thank for it if you’re still alive this time next year. That’s who.” She fixed Ratface with a stern glare. “All you need to know is this. Without her, you’ll all be dead in under a month. Even before the food runs out for you, the hounds’ll break loose and start hunting when it runs out for them. You take good care of them and good care of her.”

“Where you gonna be while all this is goin’ down?” he demanded.

“With him.” She nodded at Riddick, who was leading a group toward the “hellhound” cages, Toombs trapped in their grasp. “Now go get Sawbones like I told you.”

Even if he didn’t know how to do a shine job, Sawbones was a decent enough doctor. Logan would recover under his care. Not that she’d actually enjoy his company; nobody did. The only part of himself he ever washed was his hands before a surgery.

Ratface grimaced, but then nodded and headed for the stairs.

“Guys,” she told the men still standing around her, some of whom had intimidated her in the past, “grab a body and haul it after that little party headed for the cages. The regular ‘hellhound chow’ will last longer if they get a big meal out of these fuckers.”

It took some negotiating, most of it while Toombs roared out Riddick’s name over and over and dodged his cage neighbors, but she got the “hellhounds” to agree not to hunt live humans as long as they stayed well-fed. At her instruction, the convicts hauled the bodies of the mercs and guards into their lair.

Tell the Lightbringer that we remember, one of them said to her as she was leaving. Ask him to remember us.

“The lightbringer?” she asked, confused.

And then she saw him, in her head, from their perspective: Riddick. Glowing with power. The Lightbringer.

“Kyra!” she heard him roar. “Get your ass into the control room, now! We’re goin’ topside!”

“Keep Toombs locked up with the hounds for a day or two,” she told one of the convicts. “He is right that he’ll be a good bargaining chip with the guild. We just need a decent head start.”

The man nodded and she turned away, running back into the main control room. In another side room, she could see Sawbones already tending Logan. Her debts were paid.

Now it was time to find out what Riddick had in mind, especially given the head start the rest of the guards had on them.

She realized that, in some ways, it didn’t matter to her what his plan was. He wasn’t just the hounds’ Lightbringer; he was hers too. Whatever he’d come up with would probably be just as crazy as, and maybe even more brilliant than, one of Tizzy’s schemes. Whether it worked or not, whether they lived or died…

…she had to see how it played out.