Chapter Twenty-five: Jack – Inquiry

The exploits of the young magistrate Judge Dee held her attention for a few hours, but Riddick's absence -- and its meaning -- kept tugging at her. Finally she slid a bookmark into the novel and set it down. The ship was empty and lonely without him. He'd gone out every night since they checked out of the clinic, staying out until well after she gave up waiting and went to sleep. And every night, as he left, he acted like he needed to make excuses for it.

It's like he thinks I still haven't caught on, she groused to herself. I caught on the first time we lived together, for God's sake.

She paced the ship for a few minutes, restless energy filling her. Even as it hummed through her, she could feel her underlying sleepiness taking hold. She wasn't sure what it was she wanted to do...

No, she knew. She wanted to hit something.

She climbed down the ladder to the cargo bay and headed for the area that Riddick had converted into a dojo and exercise space. A large punching bag was suspended from the ceiling, hanging so that it was positioned off the ground at approximately the distance of a large, Riddick-sized man's trunk. He'd made her practice her punches and kicks on it so that he could observe and correct her form. Now she did it again for her own sake.

Whenever she'd been angry at the shelter, whenever what little control she had over her life had been taken away, she'd made a point of sneaking down into the exercise room and doing much the same thing. It had helped her survive the grinding emotional desolation of that time. She had pretended that Riddick was standing beside her, commenting and making suggestions.

No games of pretend flashed through her mind now. She struck at the bag simply for the feel of it, to pour her frustrations out of herself in blasts of kinetic release. She imagined no one in front of her; it was just a bag. A vessel for the emotions she was dumping off. She worked it over for almost an hour before she was spent. She returned to the upper level of the ship and went to bed, knowing nothing had been solved but that she could at least live with the current situation for another night. As always, she was fast asleep when Riddick returned from his night of god-only-knew-what debauchery.

He was relaxed and happy in the morning at breakfast. As usual, despite the late hours he kept, he was awake before she was and had breakfast on the table when she came out of her room.

She'd picked yet another "fuck-me" outfit; no harm in it, she figured. Looked like he was so completely sated that he wouldn't even notice it, though. She sat down at the table, hiding her disappointment.

"So..." she said after a time, getting the tones just right. "What are you planning on doing to me today?"

It was a deliberate bit of provocation, carefully disguised. She'd worked on the nuances when he wasn't around, so that it would come off sounding like a completely innocent, unintentional double-entendre. Hot damn, it had worked. He'd blinked, looking a little surprised before he hid it behind his trademark deadpan.

God only knows what you're thinking, but I gotcha.

Point to Jack. Finally. She kept her own face carefully schooled in a look of innocent curiosity. She hated this game, at times, but at least she wouldn't come away humiliated. And maybe she'd get him to notice that there was something more than a little girl in here.

He shrugged after a moment. "No plans for today. Thought you might like some time off. You've been working nonstop."

About damned time. She hadn't seen anything but the inside of this ship for days. "Great. You have a new card for me? I might hit the stores again or something."

He shook his head in amusement. "Don't you have enough stuff yet? Where are you going to put anything else?"

Another painstakingly-rehearsed look of innocent invitation. "Oh, I thought I might expand into your room."

She got him again! Something flickered through his eyes, at least. Two points to Jack! He looked oddly uncomfortable suddenly. She gave it a moment before she laughed, releasing him from having to consider the possibility that she was serious.

He joined her in her laughter, looking strangely relieved. She decided not to throw any more at him for now. Any more and he might catch onto the fact that she was deliberately baiting him. If he managed to figure it out... a lecture on how she was still a child and just his friend would be beyond toleration.

The rest of the meal was fairly pleasant. As they cleared away their dishes, she got up the nerve to be a little bit forward. "You want to come with me?"

She figured she could work in a few fairly suggestive stores if he joined her. But what, really, were the chances that he would?

He shook his head after a minute. "Think I'd just slow you down. I need to do a few things, anyway."

She raised an eyebrow at him, wondering if he'd actually tell her what those things were. He didn't. That meant that they were either of a criminal or sexual nature, the things he still tried to hide from her as if she'd never been on her own in the big, bad galaxy. She knew what was what, but you'd never convince him of it.

She sighed, not bothering to hide her annoyance over his secretive behavior. "Oh well. Can I have my card? What's my name, anyway, these days?"

"Angelica Porter." He pulled a card out of his pocket. "Here. Figured you'd want this today."

She took the card, turning it over in her hands. "Angelica Porter. Huh." She glanced up at him. "You get off on the whole role-playing thing, don't you?"

Huh? Looked like she'd somehow scored another point off him. Did it count if she didn't know what she'd said to cause it? He certainly looked like she'd said something disturbing.

After a few seconds he shrugged and gave her one of his sardonic grins. "Yeah, what can I say? Go new places, be new people."

She laughed, shaking her head and heading for the ladder.

"You going out like that?"

She paused and glanced back at him, another look of innocence on her face. Here we go. Lecture time. "Like what?"

Riddick looked extremely uncomfortable again. "In that outfit."

She glanced down at the small, tight top and shrugged. "Sure. Why?"

I can't wait to hear this.

"Just... you might want to rethink it. This is a kinda rough part of New Paris... and clothes like that might be taken as... well..."

"Yes?"

"Clothes like that might be taken as an invitation. Guys might think you're encouraging them to do things... you don't want them to."

Now how many points did I get for this one? I think he's genuinely flustered. Wish it was because he felt invited, not just because his kid sister's wearing "fuck-me" clothes...

She made a point of looking her outfit over again. Another shrug. "Okay. I'll change."

Let him think he'd scored a point, here. She headed for her room and emerged wearing a loose top and slightly-less-tight pants.

She gave him an ironic smile and turned around. "Better?"

"Yeah, I think you'll make it back home in one piece in that," he answered with a composed grin.

"See ya later," she called out flippantly and headed down the ladder.

Once she left the ship, though, she couldn't figure out where she wanted to go. She headed for the map station near the spaceport entrance and examined the area.

Riddick wasn't kidding. This was rougher territory than their previous port. She was glad her combat lessons had progressed as far as they had. She'd just better make sure she was back before dark. So where did she feel like going?

There were two shopping complexes within walking distance, along with a movie house and one of the main branches of the New Paris Public Library.

Hot damn, it had been years since she'd been to the library. What a silly way to spend her day off... but she already knew where she was headed.

The library was enormous, filled with Old Old World grandeur. Inside its stone edifice it was a realm of towering dark wood posts and panels, carved crenellations, and vivid stained glass windows. Amazing what people would spend to create a particular mood, she thought with awe. She'd never been in a place like this before. She wandered through it staring at everything like a bumpkin tourist from the frontier.

The place was filled with a vast hush, as well, a whispering silence that caressed her ears. I could spend my whole life in a place like this, she thought wistfully, wandering among the looming book cases. She ran her hand along the spines of the genuine, honest-to-god books on the shelves.

Damn, Riddick would love it here, too... she realized, the wistfulness deepening into longing. He'd told her once, back during their first time together, about discovering the small prison library when he was nineteen and how he had begun devouring the books contained within it. He'd read everything he could get his hands on, she recalled. He'd said that his mind escaped the prison long before he liberated his body.

Wandering from floor to floor, Jack tried to picture being able to read everything on the shelves. How many lifetimes would she need? Where did she want to start?

Nestled amongst the bookshelves, in small, out-of-the-way niches, were computer stations. They had been carefully designed to blend with the antique richness around them. The viewscreens were mounted on elegant panels. Small green glass bankers' lamps dotted the tables, illuminating the keypads. Most of the library's visitors were seated at the stations.

Jack spotted a free station and headed for it. As much as she loved being surrounded by the millions of books, she had to admit that she was lost among them. She had no idea whether she was in Fiction or Non-Fiction at the moment, even. She'd let the ambiance continue to soothe her, though, while she used the terminal.

Sitting down, she paused in confusion. What did she intend to look up, anyway?

After a moment she sighed, annoyed with herself. I have got to get a new preoccupation, she thought, as she entered her search:

RIDDICK, RICHARD B.

She was astounded by the sheer volume of news articles the search generated. She sorted them into chronological order and went back to the very first one, thirty-five years ago.

It was a small article from the Albany, New York news service. BABY FOUND ABANDONED IN DUMPSTER, it read. Riddick had been making news from the moment of his birth, practically. The article was full of sensationalism, covering the discovery of the infant and the search for his mother. Oddly, for all the furor the articles about his discovery seemed to have generated, they were never front page news.

A cross-check revealed why. The entire planet Earth was still enthralled by the Scylla Project scandal. Everything on the front pages was devoted to that military debacle and what should be done with the thirty subjects of the most atrocious, unethical experiment ever conducted on human beings.

The arrival of the most dangerous man in the galaxy was completely upstaged by that mess. Ironic, she thought. Riddick was probably more lethal than all thirty of the "Scylla Children" combined.

She didn't expect to find any articles covering the years between his discovery and his first crimes, but she was mistaken. Seven years later, his name appeared in an article about a foster home that had been shut down. He was one of eleven children removed from the home and taken to the hospital. The foster parents were ultimately sentenced to serve prison terms for their abuse of all of the children in their care, including Riddick. The nature of the abuse was never fully specified.

He was featured again in a small local color article four years later, as one of four finalists going to the national levels of some mathematics scholarship program. His teacher, who had sponsored his entry in the program, was quoted as saying that she believed he might genuinely be a genius.

Oddly, nothing further seemed to come of it. When the final rounds occurred in Chicago, no mention of a participant named Richard B. Riddick was made.

Three more years passed before Riddick made headlines again, and he made them in grand, gory style.

ATROCITY AT ALBANY TECH SCHOOL, the headlines screamed. The bodies of nine students in the prestigious academy had been discovered when the school opened one morning. All nine had been brutally murdered. Lurid descriptions of their deaths followed in some of the tabloid papers -- every one of them had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly. The victim with the fewest wounds had more than thirty.

Within a day the identity of their murderer had been determined. Riddick, an inner-city kid attending the school on a scholarship, was arrested for the crimes. This time, there was nothing to upstage him and the front pages were devoted to him for weeks. Behaviorists argued over whether or not the savagery of his crime stemmed from his abandonment, his history of being abused, or whether he was, as one paper called him, "the purest psychopath America has seen since Dahmer and McVeigh."

None of the news articles cast any doubt on the assertion that Riddick was insane.

Albany's district attorney fought hard to keep the trial from being moved out of town, but it was ultimately moved because no impartial jury could be selected. Riddick himself proved frustratingly uncooperative for his defense attorneys. In the rare moments of lucidity he displayed, he continued to insist that he should be put to death. He injured one of his own attorneys very severely when the security around him became a little too lax.

Ultimately, however, he was sent to a maximum-security correctional facility in Texas for the criminally insane. His story would die down only to flare up several times over the next seven years whenever he killed a fellow inmate. One guard, fired from his post for an undisclosed reason, was on record as claiming that, for every inmate Riddick was known to have murdered, there were four others whose deaths had been hushed up.

When he was twenty-one, the decision was made to transfer him off of Earth. He had been classified as Terminally Dangerous by then, and a break-out by another inmate at the prison had the locals up in arms. They wanted all of the Terminally Dangerous inmates out. Lobbying groups from all over the globe joined forces, and the end result was that every convict bearing that particular label was shipped to a new facility on Nereid, one of Neptune's moons. A world of absolute darkness for the darkest souls humanity had ever produced.

Nothing more was reported for almost four years, until the news erupted about his spectacular escape from Nereid. Unconfirmed Riddick sightings plagued the news for months before confirmation came that he'd headed out into the "Colonies." The Known Systems were Riddick's new playground.

Now she was coming up on the part of the tale she already knew very well. She'd followed his exploits as they were reported in the System newscasts, fascinated by this man whose mere name terrified everyone. She could skip over these stories, she decided. There was a link to the law enforcement dossiers, and that should be much more interesting...

She yawned. She suddenly realized that she was very, very hungry, and more than a little tired. A glance at her chrono brought her to her feet.

Shit! It was three-thirty in the morning! Around her, the library was virtually deserted. That same whispering hush still prevailed. She'd gotten completely lost in it as she spent more than half a day enthralled by Riddick's tale...

Riddick was going to strangle her if she didn't beat him home. She hoped he was still getting it on with somebody. God, that was a switch.

She ran all the way back to the spaceport.

The ship was dark and locked tightly when she entered. Thank God, she'd beaten him home. She'd leave the usual dim lights on for him and get in bed fast, and he'd never have to know that she'd been spending her day reading about his past. Not that she thought he'd particularly mind, but she didn't want him to see into her deeply enough to spot the reasons, the continued infatuation she felt for him. She'd tell him about the library, of course; he had to see it. But he'd never have to know--

"Lights."

She froze as the lights came on in the main room. Riddick was sitting quietly in his chair, absolutely still. She hadn't seen him; she hadn't even felt his presence. The cold anger on his face was frightening.

They stared at each other for a long moment. After a day of reading about his exploits, it was difficult for her to see her beloved friend within the glacial mask of fury before her.

"You wanna tell me where the fuck you've been?" he growled.

Buried within the law enforcement dossiers, hidden under layers of security, was a level that few human beings could access. It was well protected, well-guarded. A small trap waited for the unwary inquiring mind that ventured in. It had snapped its jaws on Riddick on four occasions, including the one that had left Jack kneeling in a pool of her own blood. Now it waited with the implacable patience of all inanimate things for her to return, and to wander into its maw. It was only a matter of time.