Three Sisters, Chapter 3

3.
Hard Bargains

“You seriously never asked them about it?”

Riddick frowned over at Jack as he walked her toward her ship. “Why, exactly, would I? These people want to cross the Threshold and stay on the other side. In what reality does that translate to ‘rescuing’ people from the Underverse?”

Damn it. She didn’t want to admit it, but he was making a whole lot of sense. “I don’t know. Have you asked them about the lore in general, even?”

That didn’t improve the expression on his face. “Kid, you know me. Better than I know you, it seems.”

Ouch.

“Have I ever been interested in the hoodoo bullshit people delude themselves into believing?” he continued.

“Jeez. When you put it that way… fuck.” Jack sighed, trying not to give into the urge to yank her hair out. “So you don’t have any head starts here.”

It’s okay, she told herself. Sometimes plans come together. Sometimes they fall apart. You know this. Roll with it.

As the youngest of the Three Sisters, she’d spent her entire life listening to Eve and Kyra tell her exactly How the Universe Worked. Plans, they’d said, were merely guidelines, starting points, ideas to keep in mind. They almost never worked out quite as intended.

The Hunter-Gratzner was a good case in point.

Sometimes it felt like Riddick could read her mind. This was one such moment. “Tell me more about what you and your sisters had planned for me five years ago,” he said.

Shit.

“It was Eve’s idea,” she told him with a sigh. “We’d almost caught up with you when Johns made his move. So she decided we’d just steal you out from under him. Kyra’d worked with Paris before, and he happened to be booking passage on the Hunter-Gratzner anyway. Which was dumb of him because commercial vessels like that one always get scrutinized by customs, and he knew it. So she told him if he helped us out, we’d offload his cargo onto our ship and help him bypass customs altogether when we made the rendezvous.”

“What rendezvous was that?” Riddick asked.

At least he was sounding a little more curious than cranky.

“One week into the voyage, Paris had set my cryo unit to revive me. I went into the navigation deck and changed the ship’s course. We were scheduled to meet up with Eve and Kyra, and our ship, twenty-three weeks out. Only there was a comet in the new course’s path that Kyra accidentally left out of the plotting data. The ship went right through it, and it went right through the ship.”

“You…?” Riddick’s lips were twitching with amusement. “…hijacked the Hunter-Gratzner?”

Jack shrugged. “Eve knew all the right codes. She had me memorize them. We were a week away from the rendezvous when that damned comet fucked everything up.”

“So when you got to the rendez­vous…?” He nodded at her to fill in the blanks. Fortunately, he still looked amused.

“We were gonna move your cryo unit over to our ship, along with all of Paris’s cargo. Then we’d have programmed the Hunter-Gratzner to resume its journey and get back on course. The detour would’ve added three or four weeks to the journey, but by the time anybody realized it, we’d have had a five-month head start.”

“You’d have been rolling in money, and I’d have been back in Slam.” A hint of annoyance crept into Riddick’s voice.

“For about as long as anyone ever manages to hold you,” she told him, “yeah.”

The record was three months. That had been the first time Riddick had gone to prison, when he’d gotten his shine job under the mistaken assumption that breaking out would be a lot harder than it ever was for him. Since then, no slam had held him for more than a month.

“You weren’t worried I’d come after you?” He purred. He still sounded weirdly amused by it all.

She shrugged. “You’d never have seen us. You’d have been in your cryo unit until after we got paid and left.”

“Too bad you didn’t calculate that comet in.”

“Yeah.” She turned another corner and frowned. Retracing her steps was usually easier than this. The Basilica was a little bit of a maze. “We had to improvise after that.”

“‘We’ being you and Paris.” He touched her shoulder. When she looked over at him, he was smirking as he nodded toward a different corridor than she’d been about to start down.

“That’s right.” She turned in the correct direction, annoyed. Somehow that moment had given him more of the upper hand. Things didn’t look any more familiar down this corridor. “Luckily we’d picked good cryo units between you and the cockpit, so we both lived. I switched into my emergency role and we pretended we’d never met before.”

“So you were just a random runaway boy who happened to stow away.” Riddick nodded to himself. “What was the plan at that point?”

“Survive two weeks, at least.” Jack shrugged. “Once we missed the rendezvous, Eve and Kyra would backtrack our route and hopefully realize where we were. We just needed to make sure you stayed secure and that we neutralized Johns. Not that that played out, either.”

He snorted next to her. She looked over at her and tried not to melt at the sight of the amused smile she hadn’t seen in years.

“You seemed to have a lot of games going, when I checked in on you guys,” he observed. “Seemed pretty tight with Shazza.”

Ouch. Dammit…

“Yeah. She, uh…” Jack grimaced. “She reminded me of Kyra. Like, a lot. I was gonna ask my sisters to help her out, especially after Zeke died. Hell, I was gonna ask them if we could recruit her.”

Spending time with Shazza had, oddly, been almost like spending time with her sisters themselves, and had made her wonder whether it was what having a mother was like. The vibrant, wild-haired woman’s death had torn her up far more than she’d expected it might. And then Ogilvie had panicked and gotten himself killed. She’d felt completely alone and un­moored…

…except that Riddick, even though he had outed her and her treacherous period, seemed to have connected with her. A bond had begun to form. Instead of managing to ensnare him, she’d found herself ensnared. And, by the time they left the planet, even though she knew that he had very nearly abandoned her twice… they had become friends.

“When did you decide you weren’t gonna collect my bounty, exactly?” Riddick asked her. She wondered again if he was reading her mind somehow.

“I was already trying to think up ways to talk my sisters out of trying when we took off,” she admitted. “That whole thing I said to you about a merc ship… that was about crossing paths with them. I didn’t figure the Kublai Khan would find us first.”

She’d made her first kill on that ship. For him.

“Or that I’d leave you behind on New Mecca,” he rumbled.

“No, that didn’t really surprise me all that much.” She looked over at him as he led her through another corridor. It didn’t look at all familiar. “I wasn’t ecstatic about it, but it fit your M.O.”

That got another snort out of him. “My M.O.”

“Yeah, your M.O.” She rolled her eyes at him. “You don’t think I’ve been studying criminology?”

He smirked at her. “Maybe I should give you a pop quiz to see how far you’ve gotten. How long did you stay on New Mecca, anyway? The Holy Man never said.”

“A pop quiz? Jeez.” Jack was increasingly sure that she had no idea where they were in the Basilica. “I was there for a month. Then Kyra showed up at the school he was sending me to. I left a note for him that night before we took off. Told him I was going off to look for you.”

“And were you?” Riddick opened a door for her and she followed him through it.

“No. Not once I convinced my sisters you were off-limits. I told them I owed you.”

“Did you, now?” He was closing the door behind them, closing and locking it.

“Where are we?” she asked. This was definitely not the docking area where she’d left the Logan’s Luck. It looked like—

Shit, I think he took me to his private chambers.

That was definitely a bed back in the darkest part of the room.

“Where we can talk,” he told her, looming closer. “Really talk.”

“What, we haven’t been really talking until now?” Jack stood her ground, determined not to let him intimidate her.

“We got a lot more to talk about.” His mouth quirked in amusement again. “Starting with what, exactly, you already owe me.”

There seemed to be something insinuating in the way he phrased that.

“I told you… your bounty was off-limits and, if you’d stuck around, we were gonna get you new identity papers. Really good ones.”

“And since that never happened…” Riddick moved behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat of his body against her back, murmuring the next words in her ear. “…what do you owe me now?”

Holy shit. She could feel her pulse speeding up. “You got something in mind?”

“I do.” His fingers were moving through her hair, lifting it away from the back of her neck. It was hard to contain a shiver. “You.”

“Me?” Not that she was obtuse. Or inexperienced. But she didn’t want either of them misunderstanding the other. Not about something like this. “Not Eve, or Kyra?”

“Your sisters are pretty,” he conceded, his breath against the nape of her neck almost freeing a gasp from her. “But it sounds like Eve already has a guy. And Kyra’s not in the picture. And anyway, you’re the one I know. You’re who I went looking for.”

His arm slid around her waist and he drew her back against him.

“Is this…” She needed to choose her words carefully. Something that was getting harder and harder to do. “…why you went looking for me?”

“This?” He had both of his arms around her now, his hand caressing her throat. His words were the softest breath in her ear; no one else would even know he was speaking… if anyone else had been there to bear witness. “Nah. I went looking for you because I wanted to pay back the debt I owed you.”

“For shooting Chillingsworth?” she asked, unable to stop her breath from hitching as his lips brushed her throat.

“That’s right,” he whispered. “And maybe I paid that debt to Kyra instead of you, but you set me up to do that, didn’t you? It counts. That debt is paid. The others still need settling up.”

“And how much…” She really didn’t want to talk anymore. Slowly, carefully, she raised one arm and reached back, her hand finding the back of his head and resting against it. “…will I owe you for rescuing Kyra again?”

“I think it’ll take a long time to pay that off,” he murmured, his hand beginning to move down her throat.

“Is this how Fry got you to come back for us?” Jack didn’t realize she was asking the question until it was already out. His hand stilled.

“No,” he murmured after a moment.

Suddenly Riddick was no longer holding her. She steadied herself, wondering where he had gone.

“Had to bring her up…” It was the tiniest thread of sound. If her hearing had been any less acute, she’d have missed it. She suspected she wasn’t meant to hear it at all.

Where he was in the gloom, exactly, eluded her. She closed her eyes, focusing on what she could hear. She thought he’d gone completely still. He could see her clearly, she knew, even if she had no idea where he was.

“You think I ran out on you,” he said after a moment, somewhere near the bed. “Was gonna take off from that planet without you.”

“Weren’t you?” At the time, she’d resigned herself to it. Her sisters had always warned her that games of cat-and-mouse like the ones they played often ended in death, especially up against supremely dangerous opponents like him. Their friendship, at the time, had been tenuous, strained by her lies, both the ones he’d already exposed and the ones she’d still maintained. She hadn’t expected any loyalty out of him, even if she’d begun to feel some toward him.

“She thought I was, too,” he grumbled. “Came at me all accusing, challenging…”

The bed creaked as he settled onto one of its ends.

“Probably should’ve just told her my plan, but the more she came at me, the more I wanted to fuck with her.”

“Your plan?” Carefully, aware that she couldn’t see anything she might be about to trip over, Jack made her way closer to the bed.

“I was gonna pilot the skiff into the canyon. Settle it down near the spot where I’d left you. Turn on all the lights, and you’d have been able to stroll over to the entrance.” His silver eyes gleamed through the darkness at her. She walked closer.

“You could do that?” she asked him, even as she realized that of course he could. She’d seen the skiff’s wings. While it could, in an emergency, be used as a lifeboat to get people offworld—as they had used it—it was mostly meant for atmospheric flight. A short hop like that would have been easy for it, especially with all the power they’d pulled from the crash ship.

“Yeah. Planned to, too.” She could make him out more clearly, sitting on the foot of his bed. He looked haunted. “But there she was, accusing me of not being part of the human race…”

Jack sat down next to him on the bed and put her hand on his shoulder. What had her thoughtless words unleashed, exactly?

“Got it into my dumbass head I’d make her admit that she wasn’t any better than she thought I was. I’d get her on board the skiff, thinking she was gonna save her own ass at your expense, and then fly it into the canyon to get you and the holy man.”

But that, Jack knew all too well, wasn’t how it had played out. “What happened instead?”

“She tried to take me on. She fuckin’ threw down. Told me she’d die for you. So I let her think I caved. But it was too late. I’d fucked it up. She wouldn’t get on the skiff with me.” In the gloom, she could just make out his pained grimace. “I’d broken her trust. She refused to believe I’d pilot it into the canyon and not just take off with her on board. You know what happened next.”

“Shit, Riddick.” She moved her hand down his back so she could lean her head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

No wonder, she thought, he’d taken off so fast after getting her and Imam to safety. No wonder he didn’t seem more upset about the head games she’d played with him.

“Yeah.” He didn’t speak for a long moment. “Me too.”

He stood up and moved away from her.

“I’ll have someone go get your sister and her… boy­friend… from your ship,” he said as he walked toward the room’s door and unlocked it. “Set ’em up in a room near this one. And I’ll start looking into how this whole rescue mission to the Underverse is supposed to work. You need anything, you let the guards who patrol the corridors know.”

Wait, what? “Riddick?”

“It’s good to see you again, Jack.” Without another word, he left, closing the door behind him.

“Fuck.” Jack flung herself back on the bed, aware that somehow she’d just accidentally talked Riddick out of something she’d wanted for years.

Posted on the 25^th anniversary of the theatrical release of Pitch Black, February 18, 2025.