Page 46 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Sally blinked. “They worship . . . cake.”

“No, they worship us. The cake is just a fulfillment of the promise made to them by Great-Great-Grandma Beth when she found them in her chicken coop.”

Sally’s expression turned dubious. “How many generations of your family am I going to be expected to memorize? Ballpark figure, if you could.”

“Your family too now, Sally,” said Thomas with amusement. He had been watching the Ceremony of Cake without getting involved, perhaps not wanting to test the bounds of the Holy Bargain that was keeping him from being swarmed like a sheet cake himself. Now that more than half the mice were gone, it must have felt a little safer to speak. “We’ll be presenting you to the town as a cousin, and I do believe those new identities Alice mentioned arranging in Las Vegas would list you as a relation.”

“With your permission,” I said, as Sally shot me a sharp look. “I mean, we’ve already established that you don’t want to go back to Maine, and Thomas seems pretty set on keeping you; if we can make that true on paper, we make things a lot easier on all of us in the future. So I guess you’re experiencing the adoption equivalent of getting drafted, if that makes sense.”

“I guess I am,” said Sally. She didn’t look displeased about it. “I guess you weren’t kidding.”

“How could we be kidding?” I asked, and picked up a few of the bags. “The mice adore you. Thomas adores you. I mostly don’t want to push you down a well. That means you’re on a par with how I feel about most of the rest of the family, and we’re keeping you as long as you want to be kept.”

“And if you want to go to college, or go off somewhere and start a life with fewer talking rodents and random assaults by monster-hunters, we can help with that,” said Thomas. “Alice tells me the family accounts are still intact. We don’t want for money.”

“This is so weird,” muttered Sally. She looked at me. “There a reason you’re stealing my underwear?”

“I figured I’d put it in your room,” I said. “Unless you really wanted to haul it all yourself?”

“. . . you can help,” Sally allowed, sounding only slightly overwhelmed. I picked up two more bags. She did the same, and we began the process of getting everything upstairs while Thomas continued to watch the mice denude their offering of cake.

Sally set to unpacking her things, and then Thomas joined me upstairs so we could do the reverse, packing clothes and weapons for the trip ahead. He discouraged me from bringing too many grenades, saying mildly that while he was not averse to some recreational violence, he would prefer I not blow my own limbs off while I was recovering from my delusions of indestructibility. I encouraged him to bring more shirts than he thought he’d need, glad once again that I had never thrown anything away; he might be out of style, but at least he wouldn’t have to wear anything that was actively bloodstained for very long.

All in all, it was a soothing process, and we finished and went to bed shortly before midnight, home, safe, and back in a world we almost understood.

That night, Thomas and I slept in our own room, together, with no refugee camp outside for us to defend and a closed door between us and his adopted adult daughter, who had still been sorting through her purchases in her room, which she seemed to be starting to believe was actually hers, when we went to bed. The mice had whisked away our dinner leftovers along with their cake, carrying them off to feed the parts of the colony who weren’t as free to scavenge on their own—the infants and the elders. The bones had been given to the tailypo. Our house was an ecosystem, as it had always been before, and while the exact balance of residents might have changed, it felt like home for the first time in decades.

To my mild surprise, neither of us felt like being any more intimate than the inherent closeness of curling up against each other in a space that had always belonged to just the two of us, where the rest of the world had somehow managed never to truly intrude. I slept the deep, cleansing sleep that normally followed a fever, the kind of sleep that had been so common when I was a kid that I had barely noticed it slipping away.

I woke up to early-morning light streaming around the edges of the curtains and the feeling of a hand stroking my hair. I lifted my head, which had been resting on Thomas’s chest, and looked up to find him half-propped on the pillows, smiling at me.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, and smiled drowsily back. “Sun’s up and we’re still here.”

“Not for long,” he said. “I believe what woke me was the sound of someone honking a horn outside. You were far too deeply asleep to notice.”

“I felt safe,” I said, and stretched, scooting slightly away from him to do so. “Not the most common thing, so when it happens, I tend to just let myself have it.”

“I intend to make you feel safe a great deal more often,” he said solemnly. I smiled at him. He leaned over and kissed me. “We’re home now. We’ll be safe from now on.”

“After we go drive your former co-workers out of New York,” I said. “Not thrilled about that part. I was excited about having time and privacy.”

“We have both right now,” he said, and reached for me. My smile grew as I let him gather me close, and for a little while, the urgency of everything else didn’t matter. We were here. We were home, and we still had each other, despite the impossibility of that fact.

We won.

When we finally pulled apart, I kissed him before rolling over to get my feet on the floor, stretching again in the process. “I could definitely get used to that as a way to start the morning.”

“I intend to see to it that you do,” said Thomas, sitting up on his side of the bed. He paused then, a quizzical look on his face. “I thought the bed I had in the bottle dimension was a reasonable approximation of this one; it seems I was wrong.”

“Wait until we get one that’s less than fifty years old,” I said.

He smiled at me. “Temptress.”

“Temptress calls first shower,” I said. “You can go wake Sally. Or ask the mice to do it, but realize that if you do, they may decide they’re allowed to start badgering you.”

He was still laughing when I left the room and made my way down the hall to lock myself in the bathroom. There would be time for shared showers later, when an unfamiliar routewitch wasn’t about to be honking outside the house. We didn’t have any neighbors for them to bother, but still, if we were going to get on the road before lunch, we couldn’t get too distracted.