Seven

(Hello, everyone. I won't be waiting for months to update this, anymore! Things are squared away, one surgery later, and I am back in the game! Thank you for sticking with Alessandra for all this time.)

The first order of business was to verify the details of Riddick's story. The con himself ignored me as I approached the comm. station, intent on his star chart calculations and completely assured of his power over all of us, and rightly so. For now. Maddie, dressed in new clothes more suitable for her abilities, sat at her station and picked nervously at an errant cuticle. I contacted Mr. X's dummy line and received an incoming transmission minutes later from an unknown origin.

"Is it morning where you are?" Silk and honey rolled from his tongue to mingle with his sarcasm. His face was in shadow, but I knew he was smiling.

"In a poetic sort of way, yes," I replied. "I experienced some complications, as you know. I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what you really want me to do?"

"All I want you to do, Alessandra, is to keep being you. I can offer advice to make this an easy and relatively painless journey, if you like. First: you'll find some more appropriate clothing in the rear storage area. I picked it out personally. I'd like to see you in it at our next meeting. Secondly, sleep as little as you can. You can imagine how uncomfortable it would be to wake and find yourself changed beyond recognition. No, far better to watch the gradual progression yourself. Don't be concerned about your mental faculties; Lord Riddick knows what to do. Do as he says."

I feigned an eye roll in order to steal a glance at Riddick and saw his lip curl for a moment at the edge of my field of vision. There was bitterness there. That was a good sign. It was easy to mold bitterness into murder, and I began to toy with the idea of using Riddick as a tool. At any rate, I had everything I needed for the present. "As you wish," I quietly told Mr. X as I reached for the comm. cutoff. "Good day."

A flash of light on teeth as Mr. X smirked wolfishly, and then he was gone. Ah, well, not gone. Not truly. I knew he was still watching us like a spider, patiently spinning his web out into the cold depths of space to make a shroud for us. But I had no intention of wearing it. I was a spider, too, and I knew how to walk on threads.

My new clothing turned out to be a bizarre mixture of Mr. X's fanciful fashion tastes and…actual practicality. Cargo pants and a sleeveless shirt in olive drab and combat boots hung from a rung in the closet marked for me. There was tough leather armor for the forearms and straps for each thigh, upper arm, and both boots for knives. To cover it all, Mr. X had included a long, surprisingly well-tailored jacket. It took a few moments to get into these new clothes, but I felt much more secure when I hung the ridiculous sundress in their stead in the closet.

Despite the unsettling nature of the day's events, once I had absorbed this new information, I found myself once again in my comfort zone—the realm of analysis. As I returned to my seat and watched Riddick plot our course, I mulled over each fact carefully. In the matter of dispatching Mr. X, the course was both simple and, unfortunately, impossible without more resources. In order to find the man, I merely needed to follow his proverbial web strands back to their source—but I didn't possess the technical knowledge to isolate his signal. In any case, that was immaterial if he had gotten to Riddick. I needed something valuable to bring to the table. I had to compete with Mr. X, and in order to do that, I needed to divine the nature of his offer. The most obvious answer was freedom, a release from the bounty that hampered his movements. A clean slate. That was, after all, what he had offered me. He was also using my sister as leverage, of course, but I doubted that Riddick had any such attachments.

The thought sparked a second idea so suddenly that I blinked. His hands. I am lying on the ground and looking at him through my lashes, noticing his white teeth and his black hands. He was supposed to have been with the Necromongers. The Necromongers had not been heard from since. He was on Furya. He was near a field of graves. His hands were black with Furyan soil. And the bitterness, the bitterness in the twist of his mouth when Mr. X called him Lord. My lips formed a soft and reverent O. So he had lost someone recently, probably in connection with his time with the Necromongers, and it actually mattered to him. He could be reached.

As though he could feel my eyes on him, Riddick spun his chair slowly around to face me and leaned back. "You're thinking of trying something stupid," he said with a note of amusement in his slow, low voice. "Don't waste your energy."

Maddie looked at me questioningly. I smiled. "I was thinking about murder."

Riddick smirked. "What a coincidence."

"Mr. X offered me immunity from the law and the safety of my little sister in exchange for information about the disappearance of the Necromongers. Do you think he'll keep his end of the bargain?"

He shrugged. "Not my problem."

"Glory, Riddick, she's just trying to make conversation," Maddie said, crossing her arms and yawning. "You heard that shady bastard—she's not supposed to sleep."

"She can talk to you."

He was brushing us away at every turn, the infuriating stoic. Well, it was time to needle him. I moved closer to him and leaned against his chair. "Then we only have a short time to get to know each other. So. Who did you come to bury in your family's graveyard, Riddick? Did you bury…" Him, her, him, her. I considered for a moment and made my choice. "…her…" Yes, he definitely stiffened slightly. "…in a way befitting a warrior—upright with her weapons around her, face turned toward her enemies? Or did she die wastefully like the rest of your defenseless kin? Lying on her back in a hole, with dirt in her mouth."

I glanced at Maddie. She gave me a pained look and shook her head, her lips tight. You're a monster, her eyes said. Well, tell me something I don't know. But Riddick's anger would keep his love fresh in his mind, instead of buried in an untouchable place. I could not afford to let that wound stop bleeding. He wouldn't kill me for my cruelty; he needed me…just as I needed him. We both knew it. He gave me a long, appraising look.

"Be careful," he said. "I can play this game. And once you're in it, you don't get out until I say it's over."

"I like a challenge."

Maddie stood up without looking at either of us. "Where's the fucking minibar in this thing? I need a drink."

Reaching into his pants pocket, Riddick drew out a flask and tossed it to his grandmother, who immediately drank deeply without choking. She wiped her mouth with the back of her gnarled hand and exhaled contentedly. "Thanks, honey. I needed that. What is this stuff, anyway?"

"Little Susie. Bourbon."

"Well it tastes like jet fuel," she pronounced, then tilted her head back and drained the rest of it with relish.

"It should; Little Susie is160 proof," I said, shaking my head. "You've been sober for six years, Maddie…."

"Yeah, well…" The old woman shrugged futilely. "It's not like I had a choice."

Riddick was still watching me, his fingers locked together behind his head. I was crowding him intentionally, but he didn't seem to mind. In fact, there was a very palpable electric feeling in the heavy air between us. His body and mine were releasing pheromones; chemically, I knew, we were like lightning rods, and I considered this for a few moments. Slowly, I pulled my hair behind one shoulder and let it fall with a whisper. His nostrils flared slightly as he breathed in my scent. He had no pupils for me to examine, but his eyelids slowly sunk over those shining orbs until they were halfway closed.

I've got you, now.

At the moment, we were enemies, but the science of the reproductive system is older and stronger than that of the sentient brain. I am a terrible, murderous creature, but I am physically beautiful and—worse yet—highly aware of it. I will pretend no false modesty. It is simple fact. Many females of many species have used this as a weapon for millennia. You may be surprised to know that I have never had occasion to do so, before, however, until just then, and so I was uncertain about how to go about it. I knew that I must not fail in an attempt to seduce Riddick, or I would never have another chance, and I also knew that in order to be successful, I would have to be very confident about what I was doing. So I resolved to study, make small advances, and observe.

"What were you in for?" His voice ground my thoughts to powder in an instant.

I turned, letting my hair brush against his elbow, and sat down in the copilot's chair beside him. My eyes flickered over his screens for the barest moment, and I saw that we were headed for the Chiel system. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know anything about that place, but it was obvious that I soon would.

I spun my chair so that I was facing Riddick. Maddie slumped in her own seat, pretending to be much drunker than she really was. That was all right. She knew the story. "I have a younger sister named Luciana," I told him honestly. "We were separated after our mother's death and her foster family treated her very badly. After several years of searching, I found her, and I went to the authorities about the abuse. I was granted custody of Luciana, but the family was not properly punished."

He never stopped looking at me; he hardly blinked. There was a patience in him that ran to his core. I couldn't be sure if I was holding his eyes or he was holding mine.

"I waited until Luciana was a legal adult. Then I went back to her old foster family and killed them all. I made them chain themselves to a radiator, confess to me every act of perversion and evil they had committed against my sister, and then I set their house on fire with them still inside it. While the house was burning, I went to each neighbor's house and told them the firemen were on the way, and not to worry, that the family had gotten out already and been escorted to a hotel. Then I watched the house collapse in on itself. The fire was louder than the screaming."

"You let yourself get caught," Riddick said, a note of curiosity in his voice. He cocked his head to the side slightly and leaned forward with his elbows on his big thighs. "Why?"

"I didn't want to make Luciana into a fugitive. I gave her my house and all of my investments so that she could live out her life peacefully. If I had run, she would have followed me."

For some reason, that seemed to hit a soft spot somewhere inside him. His lips twitched and he finally looked away. I leaned forward and lowered my voice to a murmur. "The girl you buried," I breathed, six inches from his face. "Did she try to follow you?" I realized that I really wanted to know. It wasn't part of my calculations and scheming. The answer was important to me.

The bitter look had come back to him, now, and he crossed his arms over his chest, still looking somewhere—probably somewhere inside his mind, not the Pirahna. "Yeah," he said. "She was just a kid."

"What was her name?"

That made him chuckle, a short snort that shook his head and shoulders. "I'm not really sure. I met her when she was twelve. She was pretending to be a boy. Called herself Jack. She wanted to be just like me. When I saw her again five years later she said her name was Kira."

I wanted to say I was sorry. Riddick didn't look like the type to appreciate an apology, however, especially not from me. Instead I said, "Luciana wants to be like me, but she never was and she never will be. Someday she'll be glad."

He looked at me again, and a silent exchange occurred between us. We didn't trust one another, we were still enemies, but we acknowledged something then that went beyond all of that. We were molded from different materials and had been struck with different hammers, but we were similar creatures. We had been tempered by the same fire.