For days after he had escaped Decarra 12, he had stumbled through sweltering marshland, his only direction taken from brief glimpses of a ghost-girl through the swollen boles of trees. A girl that by all rights should have been glad to see him dead; he had left her in a cave, if only briefly. And then left her again, on New Mecca.

In the weak light of day he hid, curled against a rotten log or against the side of a bank. When it was quiet he could hear the sounds of pursuit, after a time, but they never got close. Still he felt driven even as whatever illness had claimed him in the sewer had him in its grip. He shivered despite the stagnant heat.

At first when he had spotted the dilapidated space port where he had first touched down and been hauled away to the prison in shackles, he had thought it was another fevered vision but when Jack stepped out onto the hard cracked ground, he had followed. If he’d had the will to laugh he would have. One vision that he knew wasn’t real proving the existence of a place he wasn’t all that sure existed.

Jack hadn’t led him astray. He had no idea why she was there, why she stayed even as he left the darkness of the prison, but she hadn’t led him wrong and so he had followed her ethereal shape across the blasted rock surface.

Waiting for trucks and dock hands to pass, he had snuck past the more heavily armed and guarded star jumpers and made for the heavy freighters. His luck had held in spite of all odds and he had boarded without being seen. He didn’t trust that it would hold for the whole trip, freighters had been bad luck to him lately, but he was exhausted, strung out, and almost beyond caring.

Sick. Wracked with fevered visions and the shakes, he had found a dark place to hide in an unkempt engine hidey-hole. Sharpened a piece of steel into a blade and slept fitfully as the freighter rose from the baked stone of Decarra.

All that time, Jack hadn’t left him and Riddick was at a loss to explain why. He simply didn’t understand why she would stay. Or why he would need her so badly that he would create her when he needed her most. In any case, she never opened her mouth to explain but her presence spoke volumes.

While the fever raged within him, he dreamt of her and spoke to her. Only in his dreams did she answer. When it got bad it was enough to whisper the young girl’s name for his fear to subside, at least a little.

When the freighter had set down on another bustling frontier world and he had slipped off with the other space-struck passengers, the worst of the sickness had passed. He still felt weak, broken. And Jack was still there.

Illness had been traded for a wilting depression that he hated but was unable to lift.

He missed her and that was something that had never happened to him before that he could remember. Life was hard and didn’t suffer fools. Riddick had left behind more people than he could remember, more than he wanted to remember. Too slow, too weak, too stupid. Too expendable.

All of that he knew and still the guilt would hit him when he thought about T2. About the young girl he had come to admire, to even like. When he had left her in a cave, knowing it would mean her death. Going back for her gave him a sword against the guilt but it couldn’t set it aside completely. Because he knew that he had left her there to die. So he could move on and survive, and now she had come back for him, hadn’t left him when he needed her.

He missed her and, as another wrack of shivering had him grit his teeth and grip the tea cup in both hands, he knew that it wasn’t just whatever bug he had picked up in the escape that was making him sick. He was heartsick and all he wanted to do was try to hop the next freighter back to New Mecca.

But first he’d have to lose the tail he had picked up.

Finishing his tea, Riddick left a few pilfered coins under the upturned cup, signaling to one of the bartenders and getting to his feet. It was hard to hide the shakes but he hid the weakness as best he could as he left the bar, pulling the hood of his rough robe up over his head, hiding his features, blending into the crowd.

With purpose he strode through the streets and back alleys as weak daylight broke, doubling back and circling to lose any tail he might have picked up. In his condition he couldn’t afford to be caught in the small safe place he had made and if that meant spending longer than he liked in the cold, risking the rain, he would do it.

Day broke cold, the acrid, burnt electric scent of impending rain making him move faster, slipping through the doors of the hotel just as the first fat drops fell and sizzled quietly on the ground. Up the two flights to his room, checking sight lines all the way and then he was inside, the door barricaded and the window an emergency exit if he needed it.

The damp cloak got draped over the radiator and then he snatched the threadbare blanket off the single bed. With no one to see, the shakes settled in with a vengeance and he reached beneath the bed for what little medication he had managed to pilfer from the freighter. There hadn’t been much, little more than a first aid kit, but he had taken it, until he could get something better and find out what was wrong, what he had. Teeth chattering, he dry swallowed two and willed the trembling to stop, hating the weakness he felt.

Nothing moved in the day, not if they could help it. The acidic rain, a byproduct of the planet’s mining operations, fell in a foul yellow drizzle would make sure of that. Whoever was on his trail would also have to wait for nightfall, when the winds changed and the rain moved back out across the desert moonscape of the planet. There would be a scant few hours to get sleep, to get strong, and then the pursuit would begin in earnest.

Listening to the rain outside, Riddick thought back to when he had first spotted the tail. A shape caught once too often in a busy street. Whoever it was was good, knew how to use the crowds, to work in and disappear into the background. Riddick wasn’t so proud that he couldn’t see the skill in that. Knew that it was likely his tail had spotted him more than just twice.

‘Merc.’

Legit law would have come at him right out in the open, badges and guns out, or would have kicked down the door to his room, if they were coming at all. Another convict would have come at him sideways, would have found a way to leave a message for him rather than approach him in the open. So that left mercs.

Not just any merc. Whoever it was, he was good, someone Riddick had never come across before. Eyes closed, he conjured the shape of the man he had seen over the past couple of days.

Nothing had stood out about him; he had blended in with the crowd, disappearing and reappearing amongst the miners and hard men, and if Riddick hadn’t a honed sense for mercs, he never would have made him at all.

A little shorter than Riddick, a little lighter, the man was compact, with a fighter’s build. He had moved fast, fluid, with grace. Dark eyes and dark hair beneath a cloak like those worn by everyone else. It went without saying that he would be armed; being without a weapon would have stood out and marked the man as a target. He never would have made it into the town at all; someone else would have targetted him already and he wouldn’t be Riddick’s problem anymore. Yet the merc hadn’t made a display of his weapons, which wasn’t like a merc at all. Most wore their weaponry right out in the open, looking for a fight, with something to prove. And he had stayed back and watched, instead of coming on the moment his payday was spotted, which separated him from other mercs and made him something more dangerous.

There weren’t all that many places to jump to after Decarra 12, no matter the mode of transport and any decent merc hunting him probably would have stopped on the frontier planet to look for him. Riddick went on the assumption that the merc had made him shortly after planetfall. That meant three days. Made in three days. Impressive.

In other circumstances, Riddick would have jumped port already, shook the tail, but he was in a dangerous unfamiliar system. It was no place for a sick man; he had looked to go to ground. Now the merc would have to go before Riddick could move on.

The bed creaked beneath him as his weight settled and Riddick thought more about the man that followed him. The population of the frontier town was transient. The merc could be holed up anywhere, as empty rooms were common and no one stayed very long. With a weak smile, Riddick thought that the merc could even be staying in the very same rooming house. It was doubtful but something about it struck him as funny.

The others staying in the shabby rooms were furtive, down on their luck or criminal, even in the hardscrabble town they had wound up in. A merc would have stood out to people on the run, even one good enough to spot Riddick. The guests would have bolted for somewhere safer. The merc was staying somewhere else and Riddick thought about where the merc would hole up.

The town was laid out in rough concentric circles with the port at the epicenter. People came and left by the port but didn’t travel much farther. It was a stop off before bigger, better and brighter places and anyone that made a stop stayed close, hopeful about leaving. Even those that lived on-world didn’t leave the few square miles that made up the town.

‘Wouldn’t leave his ship.’

A ship was a merc’s livelihood. Without it, he was nothing, no better than local law. If a merc had a crew he might venture away from port in search of his target but only if he could leave his ship to someone he trusted and Riddick hadn’t made anyone else, just the one.

It wasn’t unheard of to see a merc without a crew; Johns had hunted him alone on more than one occasion, but it wasn’t common either. So, one merc, with the possibility of another staying with the ship.

The rain outside increased, thundering on the patched roof and tinking into an odd assortment of buckets and jars on the floor. The air in the room got damp and the radiator clicked and groaned, working double time to drive back the cold air.

Flipping over onto his side, Riddick curled his knees up to his chest and burrowed under the blanket, willing himself not to shiver, trying to keep warm against the growing damp. It was easier said than done but he knew that once he started to shiver, it would be hard to stop.

He didn’t complain overly about it. Freedom was good. Freedom was always good, no matter what it cost him to get it, but like so many things, there were degrees of freedom. He had never felt free planetside. It wasn’t slam but he still felt stuck, trapped, even if no one knew where he was, if no one was following. What he needed was a ship. And one had just offered itself up.

‘Will you take me with you?’

The young girl’s voice made him smile but Riddick was already asleep. The only time that Jack spoke to him was in his dreams. Instead of rain, he walked beside Jack on the dry dust of T2, the heat of the three suns beating down on them and the bones of hammerheads underfoot as they wandered the ruins of the abandoned settlement. Everyone else was gone and he was alone with her, her and the sound of the hammerheads beneath the ground. Reaching out, he ran his hand over her newly shorn hair, feeling the bristles riffle against the calloused pads of his fingers.

‘This time, you come with me.’

When Jack smiled up at him, Riddick felt lighter than he had in months. It was good.