Pakchikt would not go to KekTan to surveil the prey and discover her routines. He appeared too obviously different and would attract far too much attention.
Deena said she couldn’t go either, because of her unusual type, and she would be recognized immediately. Her attempts to surveil ‘Buster’ would be questioned.
The Mek, it appeared, believed security paramount.
Pakchikt decided to go back to the planet on which Deena’s existence came to his attention. The pleasant society had a few grubby little areas within which he felt sure he’d find someone to do the work for hire.
He allowed Deena to tie herself to him, and carried her down the castle walls in the depths of the inky black night. Little outdoor lighting illuminated the castle; much of Faire for that matter was dark. Most of the inhabitants preferred to sleep at night.
The guards were quite unsuspecting. When they passed on their rounds, he simply stopped crawling on the walls above them and pressed against the cold stones to flatten their silhouette, or hid amongst the crenellations. The guards rarely, there being little need, looked up. Once they made the discovery of Deena‘s escape, they would have no idea how it had been achieved.
The tricky part involved reaching the nearby forest. Since Pakchikt was strong and insanely fast, Deena hung on to his segments while he raced across the dry, hard ground. The grass he crushed in passing smelled delicious to her. She’d been imprisoned in that stuffy castle too long. The tall, cold forest blocked even more light, and the mossy, moldy, moist scent of soil made her feel the need to sneeze, though she successfully gave in to the impulse almost silently.
Pakchikt raced along. His ship was hidden a full day away at half his fastest pace, but he couldn’t carry Deena the whole way. Eventually, she had to get off and walk, so he could rest. She coiled the rope and carried it. Just less than three days passed before they reached his ship, because Deena moved much more slowly than Pakchikt, though she still possessed excellent strength and stamina.
His pin-pointy feet would make it impossible for soldiers to track them until the point at which she’d jumped off to run. At any rate, they didn’t notice her vacancy for three days, and only then because she didn’t pick up her weekly supplies at the one ground floor entrance not bricked over. Deena and Pakchikt arrived at his ship an eighth of a day before the soldiers realized her absence. Their quick ships equipped with infrared detectors were searching a wide circumference around the castle when Pakchikt sped Deena into space and away from Faire.
He decided on a trajectory empty of commercial traffic. The traffic he’d spotted from space on his arrival clustered on the other side of the castle, dictating why he’d set down where he had.
His speedy ship allowed him to avoid alerting military patrols in orbit until he passed them. They gave chase briefly, but Pakchikt’s small, powerful craft left them behind. They noted his course and passed on the information, but of course he was wise enough to change course once out of the range of their sensors. The identifiers they’d picked up from his craft had been falsified. Taken by surprise, the only action available to them was to put out a BOLO.
Deena reveled in the joy of leaving them behind, stumbling and stammering in surprise.
“Caught ‘em flat-footed,” Deena sneered as she leaned back on a sort of passenger’s ledge at the rear of Pakchikt’s tiny bridge. He inserted the tips of several of his segmented forward legs into depressions in the console, changing their course once again, and cranked himself around to look at her feet.
“What does this mean?” he asked her.
She looked at his hundred feet, then her two.
“When humans aren’t ready to run, it takes several moments or more to get going. Our knees aren’t bent, we’re not rolled forward on the balls of our feet,” here she pointed to the area she described, “poised to push off the ground and run. It’s an expression meaning they couldn’t react fast enough to catch us.”
“Yes. You are correct. They stood flat-footed. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat,” Deena said. Deena had done a lot of daily running and stair climbing inside the castle. Almost a decade’s worth, so she ate whatever and whenever she wanted. She was curious to find out what he’d stocked for her.
His own meal was moldy smelling, some fungus or lichen, she guessed, but he’d had the foresight to put up plenty of human food for her from the last planet he’d visited having humans on it. However, the quality was only adequate. Deena didn’t mind, this was her first meal as a free person in many years, and she heated the hell out of everything to kill any bugs it might be harboring. She carefully kept that saying to herself, though.
Pakchikt was a giant bug, like a centipede. Deena used to kill his like in the castle, and around her home on Earth. As a bird,[11] she might have eaten a lot of what could have been his cousins, or ancestors.
She wondered if she would have to kill Pakchikt. Would he try to kill her after he’d finished with Ghee? Probably. It was something Deena would do, were she in his place. No reason to leave anyone alive to describe you, and what you’d done. She’d like to be able to steal his ship, as well, but there was no way for her to fly the craft. The ship had been built for giant flat creatures with multiple pointed limbs, not humans, and anyway, she wasn’t a pilot.
Deena long ago stopped thinking about God. She didn’t even pray anymore. But this new development had her contemplating Him once again. She’d decide a while ago that what she’d thought of as His test to determine her fitness for entering Heaven had gone on too long. Then again, what use had God of time? She felt conflicted. Infrequently, she wondered if killing Carol on Earth constituted the mistake which informed God’s decision to leave her in this unending life of repeated betrayals. But no, this couldn’t be right.
She had been in control of Freda’s Home Emporium, everyone had danced to her tune, the right tune. Then Carol had hired on and revealed herself as a danger. Carol caused people question Deena, people who had not questioned her before, like some of the managers and the other workers. Deena then pulled out all the stops and ran Carol off the job with the help of her coworkers - the one’s who knew Deena would be a danger to their jobs, too, if they didn’t go along with her. The problem with college educated people is they think they’re better than you and they think you should be replaced with people like them. Oh, no, Deena had not allowed Carol take away her job and leave her at the mercy of the welfare state, ridiculed and humiliated. No, Deena was convinced she’d done the right thing. She’s vanquished her enemy then, just as she’d vanquish her new enemy, Ghee-nye, now.
Ghee-nye had been doing well when last Deena had seen her. Ghee-nye had defeated Deena that last time. The Fairans took many decades to finally revolt against her, but eventually, with Ghee-nye and her Meks’ help, they’d done as the land squids had before them, by murdering her, and the birds even earlier, when they didn’t come to her rescue by annoying and distracting the prey bird, like they should have.[12] You just couldn’t trust people, or any other thing, for that matter.
Deena deemed total and complete control, maintained by threats and actual violence toward nonconformists, as the only solution to her social dilemmas.
How long would this creature take to turn against her? He surely wouldn’t until after he killed Ghee-nye. He believed Ghee-nye must be this other creature he wanted, because Deena had fooled him. Buster and Ghee-nye looked similar. She’d explained the scarring. Deena could hardly wait to see Ghee-nye dead. Deena knew, with absolute certainty it was Ghee-nye and her short, wide, predatorially mouthed friends, pretending so hard to be sophisticates, who had inflamed the Faire Admirals long suppressed desires to get rid of her. God damn them. She knew because they were the ones who had benefited afterwards, while she lived trapped in that damn castle.
Oh, she understood they wanted her out of the way, who wouldn’t? Everyone wants to be Queen, or King. No one wants to be servant. The Fairans had done well since they’d dethroned and imp
risoned her. She couldn’t begrudge them. Faire seemed to prosper. She’d watched this from her upper window.
Faire would never be hers again, but another planet might be. She could be Queen again somewhere, and everyone would work for her benefit, in another completely controlled society - her society. Would God then realize she was working for Him, acting very much like Him, and would He see then that she was able to impose His will on others? Through her, He ruled. For Him, she would rule. The perfect partnership, God and his servant, and then, then, would he let her die and go to her Heavenly reward? Finally?
But why hadn’t he let her die and go to Heaven during the many decades she’s successfully ruled Faire? She must have missed something. She’d failed to accomplish His will somehow. This was a test, right? Yes. Life and Judgment were both tests, and she hadn’t passed yet. Slow, Judgment was so slow. Surely she was making a fool of herself in front of God by not understanding and accomplishing whatever He wanted her to do. Think, fool, think!
She hadn’t pushed Christianity on the Fairans because they’d already practiced it. Should she have signed some decrees, or something, ordering Christianity to be the one religion of the planet? This seemed trivial, the Fairans didn’t need orders to practice their faith, and God must have seen that.
This test had all started with Carol, on Earth. Deena couldn’t remember any existence before her life as Deena on Earth. She’d begun all this creeping around in different bodies after she died in the car accident, when she’d only tried to scare Carol, but had managed to kill herself as well. Deena had rewritten her own history in her mind, and convinced herself she hadn’t been trying to kill her foe, only scare her. God had intervened and killed them both, and set them on this path, creating this test for them. For them? Was Carol being judged, too? Had Carol been put in a body like hers, like this strange undying shell currently trapping Deena? Could Carol actually be Ghee-nye?
Suddenly Deena knew. She knew it like she knew her own mind. Carol was Ghee-nye. Carol, the self-righteous, goody-two-shoes, corporate snitch bitch, was Ghee-nye. Of course! Why hadn’t she realized this before? Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Probably Carol had gone on a journey similar to hers after their deaths: resurrecting dead creatures, living those lives, being tested. But Carol had failed, too, obviously. She damn sure wasn’t in Heaven. Probably, in each incarnation, Carol snitched on someone and was being punished, just as she, Deena, kept failing her tests, falling short of killing, conquering, controlling, or destroying those who would defeat her! Of course! She must prevail thusly to enter Heaven. She must kill Carol, up close and personal, not by accident, but deliberately, to pass the test, to conquer the enemy, to succeed.
Which must why God had sent this bizarre creature to her. Deena smiled at Pakchikt over what seemed to be a fried chicken drumstick. Pakchikt would take her to Ghee-nye, to Carol, but Deena would be the one to kill her.