When Jack is twelve, she's a hardscrabble little kid who's scrawny enough to pass for a boy. She fools everyone but the one with the goggles and the silver eyes, because he can smell her blood.
He leaves her with the Imam, and makes no promises.
He doesn't even say goodbye.
She waits for him for three months before taking off.
Jack is tough. The last time she needed adults to look out for her, she was ten. Since then, she's been on her own. She's not naïve, but she's young enough to still believe that she can make it just fine by herself.
She goes to the spaceport and hooks up with a crew of mercs out of Asterden City. Their chief is a gunrunner who goes by Macer, but Jack doubts that's his real name.
But it's not like Jack is hers, so she doesn't say anything.
The mercs are like mercs everywhere: iron-hard, not too clean, morally flexible when it comes to cash. Jack has all of ninety-two Helion credits to her name, and she offers them all to Macer if he'll take her on, teach her the trade.
Macer looks at her, a thin kid on the verge of adolescence, and grins.
"Ninety-two Helions," he says. "Ninety-two Helions doesn't even buy you a berth on theRaker."
He thumbs over his shoulder to the dinged-up craft the crew shares. Jack puts her hands on her hips and puffs out her chest.
"I'm a hard worker," she says.
Macer looks doubtful, but then he catches the eye of theRaker's only female crewmember. Jack thinks that Shein is about Riddick's age. She's missing half of the ring finger on her left hand. Shein gives a little shrug, and Macer copies her example.
"All right," he says. "You bunk in the hold."
And that's it. For as long as it takes theRaker to make the short hop to Plythia, Jack thinks that it's going to work out. She's going to learn the trade, and then she's going to find Riddick. Her plan stops there, but for twelve, even a tough, hardscrabble twelve, it's still a pretty good one.
She's hopeful right up to the point when Shein and Macer walk her into Plythia's dingiest spacer bar and swap her to a slaver for four thousand credits and a tank of fuel.
"Sorry, kid," Shein says, and Macer shrugs at her, like it's a shame, but no big deal.
Jack cries as they walk out.
For the next month, she cries almost incessantly.
When the month is over, she doesn't cry again for five years.
There's a block of time between thirteen and fifteen she doesn't remember all of. Flashes here and there, and timelines she's pieced together. She knows that at thirteen she started to fill out and the slaver lost the kiddie trade. He sold her to a gunrunner on Plythia four, who kept her as a house pet and loaned her to his friends. She killed a man for the first time with a dull eating knife she'd sharpened on a rock stolen from her owner's garden.
The man she killed was her owner's brother-in-law, and he was on top of her, and about to push into her. It was nothing that hadn't happened before, hundreds of times, but this was the last time, something in her decided; maybe her violated little-girl womb. Without thinking, Jack's hand came down, under the bed pad, and found the knife.
The man took a while to die. Jack sat up on the bed, still naked, the man's blood on her, and watched the light go out in his eyes.
Her owner went crazy over the dead body and the blood, and his little pet gone rabid. Jack offered to slit his throat for him if he didn't shut up. He fell quiet, but Jack killed him anyway.
Then she took a bath and changed into traveling clothes, and took off, her dead owner's credits heavy in her knap.
That's when the haze starts. Jack knows she shed her name and identity like dead skin, and became Kyra. She was pretty, and unable to pass for a boy any longer. She remembers men trying to touch her, and she remembers what she did to some of them, although not all.
She's a professional drifter, going from planet to planet, system to system. Here and there she takes a job as a hired knife for someone who doesn't ask questions and doesn't think that tits and a pretty face make you soft. She doesn't have a plan. She doesn't care where she ends up next year, as long as it's someplace she's never been before.
She's never rich, but she never starves.
She's fifteen or almost sixteen – she doesn't keep track of her birthdays anymore – when she shanks the wrong prick in a barfight on Servicon Five. The dead man was the governor's brother, and she knows, in a heartbeat, that she's done.
She goes from Slam to Slam until, at seventeen, she ends up on Crematoria. They don't know what else to do with her. She kills guards when they touch her. And, in a remarkable feat of hope triumphing over experience, they always touch her.
Kyra can barely remember his eyes, or the sound of his voice, but sometimes she remembers how warm he was, when the three of them were fleeing a dead world on a torn-up little ship with half its systems out. Deep space was so cold she hurt inside.
But Riddick was always warm. And that's what she thinks of when she's falling asleep in her cold stone alcove in a Slam she'll never leave. She grips a blade in each hand, rolls her back to the wall, and sinks into a half-sleep, remembering heat.
fin