Page 17 of Butterfly Effects

“The God of Inconvenient Timing is in his basement fastness, doing Great Works of repair and recovery,” said the mouse, voice a little squeaky and high-pitched but perfectly comprehensible. Aeslin mice can be accused of many things. Poor diction is not among them. “The Noisy Priestess fights a glorious battle against the laundry, but may soon be defeated, and has stated her Intention to summon you from the Pastures to come and assist with Pinning the Washing onto the Line, for lo, did not the Kindly Priestess once say, ‘Many Hands Make Light Work, and Young Backs Lift Heavy Things’?”

It wasn’t uncommon for the mice to answer simple questions with elaborate aphorisms, but like everyone else in my family, I’d been dealing with them since I was a baby, and knew how to translate mouse into English.

“Thanks!” I said, and hurried for the stairs, leaving Sam and the mouse behind.

Extremely short-form explanation, at risk of derailing the extreme importance of my search: Aeslin mice. Intelligent, talking cryptid mice who live their lives according to strict and evolving religious rules, usually centered around one or more idols. In the case of my family’s colony, that means us. The family. We are their gods, and we take our duties to them very seriously. Almost as seriously as they take their duties to us.

The laundry room was, conveniently, in the basement, not far from Grandpa’s workshop. I hurtled down the stairs, probably faster than I should have, hanging off the banister with one hand to keep myself from making an even faster descent that ended with a broken neck.

Reaching the basement, I trotted toward the wall that had been erected to block off the back third of the room and create a series of smaller functional spaces. The laundry-room door was open, sending light and steam into the rest of the basement. I stepped into the doorway.

“Grandma, we have a problem,” I said.

She looked up from the basket of laundry she was sorting through, raising both eyebrows. “Is the problem your boyfriend’s genuine inability to unroll his socks before throwing them into the hamper?”

“Sadly, no, and those aren’t Sam’s socks. Sam doesn’t wear socks. His feet are too big when he’s not pretending to be human, and he really doesn’t like having things between him and the ground.” He’d tried to explain it to me a few times, and the closest I’d come to understanding was “Imagine wearing oven mitts all the time for a full day, and how clumsy that would make you feel.”

“So they’re…?”

“My socks, and you and Mom now have something else in common,” I said, with a shrug. “I keep forgetting people are going to collect my laundry.”

She looked at me and huffed, affectionately. “Of course you do. Little princess.”

There was no anger in her words, only abiding fondness. Grandma was too busy looking for Grandpa to be there for most of my life, or most of her children’s lives. Now that she was home to stay, she took far too much satisfaction in doing basic household tasks. It felt counter-feminist to me, like she was making herself smaller to give the rest of us the space to expand, but if it made her happy, she had the right to make the choice. Rolled-up socks and all.

“Anyway, Grandma, you got a minute? I think it’s important. It feels important anyway, and I don’t know what to do with it by myself.”

“Sure, sweetie.” She dropped the shirt she was holding back into the basket and walked around the sorting table, leaning against it with her arms crossed and her head tilted slightly to the side. “What’s going on?”

This is my grandmother, the infamous Alice Price-Healy: short, blonde, bright-eyed, and perky in the way of the best children’s librarians. Well on her way to ninety years old, which you’d never know by looking at her, since she appeared to be no more than thirty, and that only if you were willing to really stretch your estimation of her age. Tattoos covered the left side of her body, dense and colorful, and only serving to highlight the few stretches of unmarked skin. Those were where the tattoos she’d already activated and used up had been.

Throughout my childhood, her tattoos had always been changing, appearing and disappearing between visits like magic—which they were, technically, magical ink embedded in human skin to anchor acts of artificial sorcery powered by her own body rather than by the pneuma around her. Grandma was no more a sorcerer than Sam was. But, like Sam, she had her own talents, most of which revolved around horrible violence. According to the mice, she was a human wrecking ball even before she spent fifty years throwing herself into strange dimensions trying to find her husband. After, though … well. There’s a reason her name sparks fear in all the wrong sorts of people.

I took a deep breath. “Mark just called me.”

“Mark is?”

“Mark is the cuckoo who helped us rescue Sarah a few years before you got home. He’s been in a coma at St. Giles’s Hospital since then.”

“All right, so he’s awake, then. Why did he call you? And why do you look like this might not have been a good thing?”

“According to Mark, a bunch of strange cuckoos teleported into his hospital room while Sarah was there, seized her, and disappeared. He said they were wearing ‘sci-fi jumpsuits’ and called her current developmental stage ‘the forbidden instar.’ It all sounds sort of, you know, bad.”

“Because it is bad,” said a voice from behind me, male, with the kind of British accent that speaks of years of formal schooling geared at replacing childhood regionalisms with perfect BBC English. “Am I correct in assuming that ‘sci-fi’ is still a favored abbreviation of ‘science fiction,’ meaning your friend likely saw some sort of futuristic attire and simplified it to ‘sci-fi jumpsuit’?”

“That sounds about right.” I turned.

Having my grandfather around has been odd mostly because I was so used to not looking like any of the members of my family. The so-called “Healy look” has been dominant for generations: short, blonde, soft the way a bobcat kitten is soft, packed with claws and teeth and terrible ways to make you regret petting the kitty. I’m tall, brunette, and much more angular than the rest of my generation. Turns out, it’s because I take after my grandfather.

Like Alice, he was covered in tattoos. Unlike Alice, his covered both sides of his body, and served as a clear warning to anyone who knew anything about sorcery, since each of them anchored some magical effect or other, and could be activated at will. The only clear patch of skin I could see below his neck was at the hollow of his throat, where he’d released the charm that had been keeping him from getting physically older before he could be reunited with his wife. They were both aging normally now, which was a nice change for our family.

He was wearing a plain white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and tan work pants. He could have been any man who liked to work with his hands, puttering away on his weekend.

“Then this is definitely bad,” he said. “I don’t think he saw cuckoos.”

“But he—”

“I think he saw Johrlac. The kind that come from Johrlar.”