Two guards hauled Jack to her feet. She's shorter than me, Jack realized, dimly, for the first time. As if she knew what she was thinking, Dame Vaako's hard eyes glittered. "Oh, I'm sorry," the woman whispered, smiling. "I slipped."

Jack licked her dry lips. Keep quiet, Kyra hissed inside of her head, sounding more like Dame Vaako than she thought possible. She'll be dead soon.

I'm going crazy, Jack thought.

No, it's just me.

"You seem distracted, my dear," Dame Vaako stated, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

Jack stared at her, and started to laugh. If you only knew -- "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's just – I understand now. My place. What's going on. I've seen the Underverse. I understand."

Dame Vaako's expression was amazing. "Bring her," she ordered, curtly. Two burly solders hefted her to her feet, their hands hard enough to bruise.

They took her back to the med deck. They gave her a drink that made everything small and distant. Doctors tested and retested, muttering. Finally, they took her to a small room, wearing nothing but a paper robe.

Dame Vaako and her guards never left her side. As soon as the doctors were gone, she turned on Jack, a look of malicious triumph in her eyes.

"So you are Furyan."

Jack sighed. "Yeah."

The older woman pulled out a knife. Jack eyed it. "It's death to be a Furyan."

Jack started to laugh. "Yeah, well, don't let me stop you."

Dame Vaako hissed in frustration. "I can't kill you. Toal wants you."

"Sucks to be you then."

Dame Vaako's eyes narrowed. She made a decision. "Hold her, down." Dame Vaako commanded. Her men obeyed with alacrity. She pulled Jack's gown apart. "So tell me, Furyan. Do Furyan's bleed?"

Jack started to laugh. "Do you?"

She almost didn't see the knife move, it went so fast. Dame Vaako cut her on the top of the breast. Like everything else, the pain was distant. She kept laughing.

"You do bleed."

Jack shook her head, beyond answering. Dame Vaako tried a different tact, resting the knife at the tip of Jack's throat, letting it play down her chest almost seductively.

At some point, the pain got too close. Jack stopped laughing. Dame Vaako smiled, triumphant at last. Leaned down. Licked up some of the blood from the hollow of Jack's throat. "A Lord Marshal's blood is in your veins," she whispered, wonderingly. "We're going to have so much fun, you and I."

A communicator beeped. Dame Vaako answered it. "What? Yes. I am on my way." She deliberately laid the knife on Jack's belly. Fixed her men with a look.

"Play with her, clean her up, then take her to the priests. Don't be too gentle."

They weren't.

When they finished, they left. The doctor who had treated her before, Melissa, snuck in, lips tight. She quickly and furtively cleaned and sealed the cuts, gave Jack a shot of something that banished the pain and most of the everything else, replacing it with an echoing numbness.

At last, Dame Vaako's men came back, took her to silent attendants who stripped her and washed her and dressed her in a simple white dress. No shoes. No where to hide a weapon. Then priests poked and prodded and whispered worriedly. Despite Kyra raging at her, she could not muster any energy to care. Finally, they hung a gold necklace around her neck. One priest dabbed oil on her forehead.

The priests took her to the throne room, pushed her to her knees in front of the throne, next to a newly erected slab of grey stone. The stone was familiar. It looked like a thin slice of the dead stone Riddick had taken her to, an eternity before. For the first time since Melissa patched her up, she felt something.

Fear.

Necros kill Furyans.

I was right. I'm going to bleed to death on a rock.

Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up, dazed, into Toal's smiling face. His smile faded as he scrutinized her. He addressed one of guards. "Why is she drugged?"

The blond guard, who had enjoyed making her whimper and squirm as he cleaned out her cuts, said nervously, "Once Dame Vaako learned she was Furyan, she ordered it. To avoid taking risks."

Toal gazed down on her, unexpectedly compassionate. Then his expression stiffened. "You're hurt?"

She met his eyes, confused. Licked her lips. Nodded.

"Who hurt you?"

A trap? She shook her head, but the compassion in his eyes seemed genuine. He crouched beside her, his voice was soft. "I'm so sorry. No harm was supposed to come to you." He glared at the guards. "No more harm will come to you, once we finish the ceremony. You will be treated as a sacred woman. You have my word as the Lord Marshal."

Somehow the words came through her dry lips. "Even though I'm Furyan?"

"Yes. We all began as something else, child." He touched her face, gently, and she could feel the tears beginning to well up in response to his sympathy.

He believes, Jack realized, dimly. He believes he's doing the right thing; bringing a blessing to the universe.

"Stop having sympathy for the bad guys!" Kyra was raging. "He doesn't care about you. He just wants what Riddick had. You're just part of the victory."

What's a bad guy, Kyra?

Kyra fell silent.

The Rhea docked quietly at the long forgotten airlock under the Necropolis. Riddick led them to the ancient altar. The light of their flashlights made it even greyer than it looked before.

He sat on the stone. "Conduit?"

"Yes, Riddick?"

"Not Lord Marshal?"

"That is unclear. Your title has been challenged."

"Report."

The voice was so old it sounded like it was dissolving to dust. "Toal is a faithful son. He will be crowned soon. Then they will attack the Illium empire."

"Jack?"

"She awaits in the throne room."

"Waits what?"

"The investiture ceremony."

"Will she be killed?"

"Toal says not."

"Pentheselia?"

"Awaiting execution for your murder."

"Anything I should know?"

"Your core access has been cancelled. Lord Vaako's core access has been cancelled."

"Reactivate it."

"Unable to comply."

"Why?"

"Unknown."

"Jack's access?"

"Uncompromised."

"Anything else I should know?"

"The army is restless. They do not like the rumors of your murder."

"Tell no one I am here. That is all."

"Yes, Riddick."

Somewhere early in all that, Vaako had fallen to his knees, reverent, before the stone. "The lost Holy of Holies. We thought its location had died with Lord Zhylaw."

"You're worse than Jack." His voice was a growl.

"You took her here? A woman?" Vaako's reverence was cracked by shock.

"Yeah. Why?"

"If the . . . old stories are true, the only . . . females ever brought here were brought to die." Vaako gave Aereon a convulsive look.

Aereon interrupted Riddick's increasingly dark thoughts. "You two should check what is going on upstairs. Can you find your own way out of the city if . . . I need to leave?"

She had kept her tone light, but there was a clear warning threaded through it. Riddick met her eyes. Nodded, slowly. "Do what you have to do," he said, quietly. Led Vaako away.

Finally, he returned to the conversation that had mysteriously infuriated him before. "Women bleed. But you love your wife."

"With all my heart. My biggest sin."

I can't deal with this. I should kill that woman on sight. It shouldn't bother me that Vaako loves her.

Toal had left Jack kneeling by the stone. When she leaned forward, she could press her forehead against it. The drugs were still giving everything an opiate haze, leaving her only dimly aware of the ceremony beginning to take shape around her. She could hear the words; order, mercy, blessings, blah blah blah.

She was also beginning to see things that couldn't be there; strange, shadowy shapes swirling around her. Waiting.

They emerged at last in the Lord Marshal's chambers. Riddick's weapons were mostly where he left them. Had to break a few locks. He outfitted them both, found some hooded robes. The stairway to the throne room was locked, and for some reason, someone really had taken the time to override the computer and door access of the two 'dead' men. They needed more information. They headed out through a door that could be forced open. Headed towards the common area.

Riddick suddenly stopped, headed in a new direction "Riddick!" Vaako hissed. "What are you doing?"

"Just wait."

Ten steps further, and Riddick was shoving a blond soldier up against a wall. Inhaled deeply. Eyes narrowed. "What the fuck did you do?" he growled.

The soldier quailed. "My god. My Lord Marshal."

"What the fuck did you do?"

The man just trembled. Riddick leaned close, took smelled the man. "Tell me."

The man's eyes slotted towards Lord Vaako. "What I was ordered to do."

"Where's Jack?"

"In the throne room."

Riddick stared hard at the guard. "Ordered by who?"

The man's eyes flitted again to Vaako. He shook his head. Riddick's hand was on the man's neck, and he did not resist when Riddick's fingers tightened, tightened, then broke his neck.

"Have you gone mad? What are you doing?" Vaako hissed.

Riddick's look could have curdled cheese. "Jack's blood."

"What about it?"

"He stinks of it."

Vaako blinked at him, rapidly. "You know what her blood smells like?"

"First thing I noticed about her." Riddick turned away, his step heavy. He was halfway down the hall before he added, his voice low, almost regretful, "You Necros ain't the only ones who hone in on blood."

Toal had mounted the steps again while Jack wasn't paying attention, too mesmerized by the thing swirling in the air around her, too anesthetized by the drugs. He pulled her to her feet, fairly gently, given the way her day was going. He bound her wrists together with a pair of manacles that looked just like the ones bound to the stone under Riddick's room. She shuddered. But Toal smiled down at her. He kissed her palm.

Then he sliced through the skin of his own left hand without flinching. His blood poured onto the rock. "By my blood, which has never mingled in the dark womb of life, I recommit our people to the eternal Underverse."

It sounded like a wedding vow.

He took her unresisting right hand, sliced through the skin. "By the blood of this childless woman, I abjure the flow of life and I recommit our people to the Underverse. We will pass through the Threshold."

He held Jack's hand, bleeding, in his own, affectionately. He pressed it against the stone, and for a dizzying moment, Jack felt as if she was being sucked down into a whirlpool. She whimpered and leaned into Toal, who's solidity was strangely comforting. He slipped his other arm around her.

"By renouncing life, we claim life eternal," Toal intoned. "We will wipe the tears from our eyes. We will pass through the Threshold."

The crowd was chanting, deep, words that made no sense. Jack could see the whirlpool unwinding. The dizzy disorientation was becoming intoxicating. She repressed a giggle.

"By renouncing death, we shall not die," Toal continued. "There will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. Hail the Threshold."

The repressed giggles became laughter, dizzy, exultant. Hungry ghosts were swirling around her, lapping up her were calling out to her in a language she knew. She called back to them. The words sounded strange in her ears.

"Your head is freaky," Kyra accused. "Snap out of it. It just got harder. You gotta get out of here cuffed and with your hand bleeding. You've got to get me to my body; damn it, I'm not resurrected yet!"

Jack ignored her, beginning to babble unfamiliar words.

Riddick and Vaako slipped into the throne room, anonymous in their robes.

The fresh scent of Jack's blood almost undid him. Jack was there, swaying slightly in front of a stone that looked like it had been sliced off the one in the labyrinth under the Necropolis, Toal's arm around her.

He knew the white dress, the manacles, the necklace she was wearing. He'd taken them all off of a dead girl.

Toal was pinning her bleeding hand down on the rock. Riddick managed to edge his way around the back of the crowd to a place he could see her face. She was in the grasp of an ecstasy he actually resented. A look he wanted her to give him, not a dead piece of stone. Her eyes were dark, drugged, with fierce joy moving strangely underneath.

A whirlpool of shadows spun around her, no, not shadows, things. Like the things under the Necroverse. Like the things swirling around the old Lord Marshal. Had they always been there?

She was babbling . . .

One of the priests was leaning over the stone, whispering into her ear. "What do you see, child?"

"Hungry ghosts . . . spinning around the stone . . ."

"What stone, child?"

"Underneath . . . soaked with old blood . . . they are going through it . . . oh god . . . it's opening. The Threshold . . . "

She looked around the room. Her eyes were still glazed, drugged. She met Riddick's eyes for an instant, almost without recognition. But she mouthed a single word.

"Wait." Jack's face, but the eyes that met his were more like Kyra's than her eyes had ever been. Then the swirling shadows resolved, and he could see that they were funneling up from the floor, spreading out, like they were . . .leaving?

One of the priests was hissing at Toal. "Sire, let us take her to the Quasi-Deads. See if she speaks true." Toal nodded, his eyes oddly soft. Two priests led her from the room. One had a ritual knife swinging from his belt. In her bare feet, she looked tiny. Toal settled back onto the throne.

I should go after her. Slip out the back, gather her up, steal a ship . . .

And be chased the rest of my life? His vision shifted again, and he could see Jack's skin through the thin dress. Cut and deeply bruised. He could see Toal gazing after her, his eyes tender. Expectant.

Not acceptable.

Then he heard a soft noise, the sound of two bodies hitting the ground. The sound of bare feet running. He smiled. That's my girl.

He gave Vaako a look, suddenly realizing that this true believer might have a reason to go after Jack; to stop her. Vaako met his eyes. "You with me, Vaako?" Riddick mouthed, quietly.

"'Till Underverse comes, my lord."

"Even if that's today?"

Vaako twitched. Looked at his wife. Looked at Riddick. Leaned close. "I love my wife. You let me keep her, I'm with you even after the Underverse comes."

"I can live with that."

*

The priests were old and fat. Suddenly grateful Kyra had made her practice this move, Jack kicked out the knee of the one holding her. Seized the other's knife and slit both throats. She was running down the hall before the last body hit the ground.

Riddick pushed back the hood of his robe. Stalked forward, Vaako at his back.

"You're in my chair, Toal."

Toal jerked, shocked. But he rallied well. "Mine now, Riddick. It's time for you to cross over."

"Been there. Done that. Back now."

Then they were fighting, a whirling, spinning fight among whirling, screaming ghosts.

Despite everything, everything, aching, and some things bleeding, Jack made it to the little chapel Riddick had built at a dead run. The door slid back to her hand.

Kyra's stasis tube was still operational. Jack's heart began to beat a little more normally. She opened the tube, disengaged the stasis field. Gazed at the corpse, still warm.

Now what do I do?

"Kiss me, you idiot. Remember, that's how you wake up princesses."

You're a princess? Am I a princess?

"Do it!"

On one condition. You help Riddick.

A sharp laugh. "You got it. I was right about that, by the way. He's not dead."

I noticed. Feeling absurd, Jack leaned down and kissed the corpse softly on the lips. Something drained out of her. Time hung, until at last the girl in the box rose, triumphant. She shook her long hair, let out a whoop and crowed, "I'm back, baby."

Jack puddled to the floor, completely spent. Far below, something rumbled, darkly. Kyra leapt lightly from the box. The smile on her face was fierce, malicious, triumphant. "You did good, sis. Come on." She got a shoulder under her, half carried her out the door to a weapons' locker. The rumbling intensified.

Jack stared at the door, uncomprehending. She could feel herself bleeding again. With an exasperated snort Kyra grabbed her uncut hand, shoved it hard onto the lock panel. The door slid back silently. She pulled her inside, settled her against a wall. Started pulling things off the shelves.

"Hold your hands out." Jack did, slowly. Kyra had a laser cutting tool. Sliced right through small connector, leaving the cuffs on her wrists, no longer bound together.

"Stay here. I'll be back for you. And kid – you did good."

"What are you going to do?"

Kyra hefted a piece of equipment with a feral grin. "Use this to blow up that rock down below. Don't worry, I'll put it on a timer. Once that rock's blown, it should snap the connection to the Underverse, and blow this place. After I set it, I'll collect you two, and we're gonna live long and prosper in a universe without Necromongers."

"What about everyone else here?"

"Everyone else dies, Jack." Kyra strapped on a blaster, grabbed a light source.

"Wait – there's a damping field in the throne room. You won't be able to use that."

"I known, sweetie. Fought there before, remember? Now you, stay here." She kissed Jack's forehead, took off at a dead run. The door slid shut behind her. Jack stared after her open mouthed.

Like I can even walk. Resurrecting the dead is hard work. Why didn't anyone ever tell me how hard this was going to be?

Jack sat still for an eternity, exhausted.

Kyra sent the mercs after me.

The thought was paralyzing.

I'm being paranoid. Why would she do that?

To find him. Her Prophecy Boy. The one who could get her vengeance.

No time for this. No time.

Next you'll be thinking she sabotaged the Hunter-Grazner too.

Fuck. She'd been looking for him for two years at that point. How hard would it be to hire someone to fuck up a navsys?

She stared at the weapons on the walls, lovingly arranged on shelves.

Was she telling the truth when she took me to Arden? Or was it just to get me out of the way? Did I hate Riddick because of her?

Can I trust her?

Weapons. Easier to trust if I'm armed.

She looked harder at the room. It wasn't just full of weapons. Her eyes fell on battle armor. Some of it had built in EMT kits, with nanites to repair injured soldiers. She struggled one down.

It was too big, but it smoothly conformed itself to her body. She felt needles enter, energy flowing back into her veins.

Not just nanites. Stimulants. This thing is pumping me full of them. More rumbling.

She had a sudden image of herself bound to an altar, a knife heading to her throat. An image of herself, tossing dirt on Riddick's corpse. She shuddered. Started pulling down weapons.

This place is going to blow up. Do I care?

Sudden image of Pentheselia smiling at her, promising protection. Sudden image of Toal saying she was going to be executed. Thoughts racing. Not good. Found a knap sack. Filled it with as many weapons as she could carry. Got the computer to tell her where Pen was. Took off.