Six

(Please excuse my absence. I've been battling Lyme disease and Ehrlichiosis since around May. I'm back in action with a new laptop so I can lie in bed and write for you! Please enjoy.)

While Maddie and Riddick talked, I remained motionless, my head still pulsing painfully. A fine sweat coated my body, chilling me. If Maddie's common racial heritage wasn't enough to convince him to get on our ship, then I would have no choice but to catch him by surprise with my own singular brand of "persuasion." And I knew I did not have the strength to do it. I was so cold…

But what came out of Riddick's mouth just then introduced an entirely new set of rules to the game. I understood him. He was not making a comment on Maddie's age. She was—or at least, he thought she was—his grandmother. He knew her name. Through my eyelashes I could see a muscle going slightly in his jaw. Once. Twice. It was enough. Maddie, too, was clearly disturbed. She stared at him as though she could not see him properly.

"You know who I am?" she whispered.

Very deliberately, Riddick lowered Maddie's rifle and propped it up against a stone. He had put it down, but it was not out of his reach, I noted. I could hardly blame him.

"My mother was Naomi Riddick. She used to be Naomi Rosier," he said in his deep, slow voice. I noticed that his teeth behind his full lips were very white. He took care of himself, for a man constantly on the run. Only his hands were black with soot and dirt. "She wrote about you. Not good things. I never did get to talk to her, myself, though, so who knows how it really was?"

Maddie stood very still, her arms rigid by her sides. She looked as though she had just been slapped, and I was nearly seized by a sudden urge to comfort her. Riddick showed no such inclination, however. Instead, he picked the rifle back up and slung it over his shoulder. "I take it you didn't come here to bring up family business. So if you've got somethin' else to say, we'd better get moving before they find us. Where's your ship?"

Maddie grew still paler. She wiped her eyes and glanced at me. I shut my eyes the rest of the way and willed myself to stop shivering, knowing Riddick's gaze would follow hers.

"What's wrong with her?" I heard him ask in what struck me as an awfully casual tone for someone looking at an apparently unconscious woman in a sundress lying near a pool of vomit.

"I—I don't know," Maddie stammered. "She's sick. She's my…my friend. We need to get her to the ship."

I felt fingers brush my neck and fought off the desire to shiver. "She has an ignition chip. Must be a nice ride. What's her name?"

"The sh-ship or the girl?" I asked, opening my eyes and letting myself resume shivering. His face was very close to mine, and I got the distinct impression that he was not merely looking at me, but smelling me, too. His hands moved to his goggles and he raised them away from his eyes. Like moonstones in the darkness… I tried to shake my head, but only succeeded in making the rest of the world spin. What was wrong with me? His nostrils flared briefly; he reminded me for one hysterical moment of a prize racehorse—all smooth muscle and coiled grace.

"The ship," Riddick answered, smirking. His canines glinted in the light. "Press that chip, 'cause we don't have time for anymore introductions. For now you're just The Girl. Can you walk?"

"Fuck no, she can't!" Maddie interjected while my fingers found the ignition chip. "Look at her!"

"Nice to see the shock of f-finding your long-lost grandson's worn off, Maddie," I muttered, shaking. "I like you better when you're swearing and yelling."

The old woman gave me a lopsided smile that did not entirely mask her concern. "Yeah, well I'll like you better when someone gives you a breathmint, Angelface."

"Me too, come to think of it," I admitted.

The wind was driven out of me and I nearly vomited again as Riddick scooped me from the ground and flung me over his powerful shoulder. The ship must have arrived, which struck me as odd, because I never heard it. My senses were obviously becoming less and less reliable, which disturbed—no, terrified me. Where would it stop? What was the cause? These were the things I needed to know in order to control the damage. My life was about control. That was the fine line between my body and my corpse.

I felt Riddick's hand close over my wrist and then the warm metal of the ship was briefly pressed against my hand. There was a low hiss, and the light changed. We were in the cockpit.

"Ugh," I said. My eyelids fluttered. If I could just make the spinning stop. Focus on something else… Physics. Yes…there was a book I had read as a girl. An old book. What did it say? We have inquired into the nature of the vacuum and its zero-point energy, we have come across a diversity of mutually incompatible theories that all account for the Casimir effect… "Th-this is my ship!" I heard myself shout wildly.

"Not right now it isn't! I'm captain now, and I say you're delirious with fever and you should shut up and let me save our asses." Riddick's warm, hard shoulder went out from under me and I felt myself pressed into a chair. "Take care of the Girl, Maddie. Make sure she doesn't puke all over everything. Fuckin' junkies…."

I felt Maddie's cool hand against my forehead, and then she was buckling me into a flight harness and a cryo-sleeve. "She's not on drugs, Riddick!"

"No shit, not anymore. Smells more like withdrawal to me. Get to your canons, we're moving!"

Withdrawal? The word swam through my head several times before I understood his accusation. I had never taken drugs…not even as a young teenager on the street. I was ill, I…

The rough shaking and rumbling of the battle I was not to be part of grew softer.

I felt my already loose consciousness slide away like a sheet from a table as I fell deeply into a dream.

I am standing naked in a ruined city below two pale moons, and all around me is the stench of death. Not simply the deaths of human beings, or even animals, but bacteria, fungi, everything in the city that had once been alive. Except for me. I am a child, clutching my head with tiny, star-shaped hands against my own screams. The eyes of the nearest corpse bore into mine. They say…

YOU DID THIS

When I woke, my mind did not wake with me. I was still an animal, and I screamed and tore at my harness in rage and terror.

"Alessandra! Angel, stop! Riddick, get your ass back here now! Angel, it's going to be okay, you just had a bad dream."

"You know how to drive, old lady?"

"Fuck you, I may be your granny, but I can steer us into the shipping lane. Just do something before she hurts herself!"

Suddenly a pair of bright orbs stared directly into mine. I looked deeply into them and saw a fellow predator. I became docile. My mind returned to me. Riddick was holding me down by my shoulders. I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm all right. I need…" What did I need?

Riddick didn't release his grip. "What have you been taking, Angelface? You and your friend have got convict written all over you."

"Nothing," I said grimly. "The slam we were in required blood tests to check for drugs on regular intervals. If you turned up positive, you were taken out and shot. I was just sick. I feel much better, now."

Over Riddick's shoulder, I saw Maddie's eyes fall.

He shook me once, firmly, and my attention was back on his peculiar eyes. "You feel better because I found a detox kit in the head. You've been getting a shot every half hour for the past six hours."

"So I was drugged," I said slowly. "I think I know by whom. What I don't know is why."

Riddick leaned in close to my ear, until his lips nearly touched them, and spoke softly. "You mean Mr. X? Yeah, he called six hours ago. We talked for a long time. I think he might be a fag."

I blinked, but that was the only part of the spasm of fear and anger I felt inside that I allowed to show. So Mr. X had been drugging me. For how long, and for what purpose? "He told you where to find the kit."

"Looks like you cons got conned. We have a new destination."

"Where is that? And why are you cooperating?"

"That's between me and Mr. X, Angelface. Mmmm, they must have loved you back in the slam. Maddie told me about the broom-fucking incident. Sexy."

I ignored him. Mr. X had known that I would be in a state of horrible withdrawal soon after waking from cryosleep. That meant that the drugs must have been administered to me in prison, without my knowledge, for a fairly respectable amount of time. But I had never felt anything less than perfectly cognizant and clear-minded. Now that I was off the drugs, I would surely discover their purpose. And there was something else…

If Mr. X knew that I would be incapacitated, he knew that I would never have been able to catch Riddick. Yet somehow the ship piloted itself to Furya—Mr. X again, I was sure. He surely knew that Maddie was Riddick's grandmother, but that alone would hardly have been enough to convince him to come with us into what was clearly a sell-out. But there happened to be mercs….and we had the best small star-jumper in the system. So Mr. X had sent the mercs to Furya, too. The entire thing, expertly organized and executed. And now it seemed that it was not so much that he had wanted us to find Riddick, but rather that he wanted Riddick to find us. They had worked out a deal together, and now we were hurtling into the bright sea of space.