Page 23 of Butterfly Effects

“This is Johrlar,” said Thomas, adjusting his glasses with one hand. He wasn’t holding the book I’d seen before any longer; instead, he had a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. I couldn’t tell whether he’d had that all along or it was something he had conjured somehow.

It didn’t really matter, I supposed. Alice was crouching and rolling a bit of the dirt between her fingers, expression drawn into a look of profound seriousness. I turned to my grandfather, not wanting to interrupt her.

“Now what?” I asked him.

“Normally, the Johrlac would come looking for any strangers who snuck in through the back door the way we did,” he said. “Thanks to the charms we’re carrying, it should take them a little while to realize we’re here, and by then, we’ll have moved on from this point, which will make it more difficult for them to find us. Believe me when I say we’d prefer not to be found before we’re ready.”

“Is there a plan here?” asked Sam, shaking off his shock with admirable quickness. “Or are we going with the Price family ‘Let’s just run at it with our arms up and scream so it thinks we’re too big to kill and goes away on its own’ classic?”

“I thought we’d get at least a moment’s awe out of you,” said Alice, looking up from her examination of the ground. “Come on, we’re in a whole new dimension. Isn’t this exciting?”

“Oh, right, ooh, ahhh, new dimension, very cosmic, I’m so impressed,” said Sam, deadpan. “Look, I’m a dude who’s actually a monkey, because my dad was even more monkey than I am, and for all I know, fūri are originally from another dimension, so I’m less interested in being impressed than I am in getting home alive, preferably with a fiancée who remembers who I am and knows her own name. Can we have the plan?”

“Johrlac are telepathic, and don’t tend to expect people who don’t show up on their radar,” said Thomas. “Some of them won’t even acknowledge the existence of people who can’t be read, which is, right now, us. We’re basically inanimate objects unless we put our charms down. Much of the population is likely to ignore us unless we start trying to actively interact with them, which seems profoundly unlikely. We need to locate the city where Sarah and Arthur have been taken, and follow any members of the judiciary we can find back to their courthouse.”

“How are we supposed to recognize members of the judiciary?” asked Sam.

“Some of the castes have actual reason to keep secrets from the others,” said Thomas. “The judiciary, administrative, and intelligence castes all practice a certain measure of mental shielding to prevent contaminating the rest of the hive mind. They make up a large-enough percentage of the population that when you’re in an urban environment, all hive members who leave their homes have to be visually recognizable. Hence the jumpsuits Elsie saw. We just find the Johrlac wearing red, yellow, and black jumpsuits, watch them for a while, and we’ll know where we need to go.”

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. “We’re really going to just wander around until we find a city, and then hope we can stumble on someone who can show us where to go?”

“No,” said Alice. She bounced to her feet, dropping the bit of dirt she’d been studying so intently. “Stay here.”

She didn’t wait to see if we would agree, only ran off into the foliage, vanishing into the thick sprays of flowers. Thomas watched her go, smiling indulgently.

“She just ran away,” said Sam. “Did you see that? We were talking about plans, and she decided to just run away. Is this how you do this sort of thing normally? Just running away without saying anything?”

“Don’t you know by now?” asked Thomas.

“No, because usually if I’m going outside to do stupid shit, I’ve got Annie with me, and we worked the trapeze together. She knows you can’t just do things unless you want somebody to get dropped. So we don’t do it like that. We make plans, we communicate them to each other, and then we follow them as much as we possibly can.”

Thomas shot me a dubious look. I nodded.

“We try to communicate as much as we can,” I said. “I don’t like being dropped on my head.”

“Fascinating,” he replied. “A Price that plans. You really do have more of my family in you than I would have thought possible. I’ve never been here before, but your grandmother has, and she assured me that if my transit spell deposited us in the countryside, she’d be able to find us easy passage to the nearest city. I assume she’s gone off to secure that passage, whatever form it may take.”

Sam continued to look unconvinced. I nodded again.

“So she’s what, off hotwiring us a car?”

“The local equivalent,” said Thomas. “The Johrlac were able to subjugate most of the occupants of their world and put them to work. As a consequence, they never spent much energy on the invention of machines that could do those same jobs for them.”

“Are you saying they mind-controlled the horses, and so they never made cars?” asked Sam.

“Essentially,” said Thomas. “Your grandmother grew up with her own mother’s horses, and while she’s not the rider Fran was—no one is the rider Fran was—she’s a fairly decent horse thief. She’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”

“Did horses evolve here?” I asked.

“Not as such,” said Thomas. “Johrlar never did much in the way of true mammals. This is an insect-based world, and large herbivores are unheard-of here. The only mammals I know of to have a large population on Johrlar are—”

“Kairos,” said a new voice.

I turned, Sam turning with me, and watched as a small group of people—six in total, so while they were small, they still had us well outnumbered—pushed their way through the nearest patch of tall, bell-shaped flowers. They were holding long polearms that resembled jagged bidents more than anything else, with shafts made of wood that gleamed like it had been dipped in crude oil and heads of polished steel.

And they looked human, as human as Thomas and I did, and substantially more human than Sam, who was still in his mostly monkey form. A few of them could have been related, but they didn’t have the eerie similarities of the Johrlac; their skin and hair colors varied from dark to light, and their faces were entirely different.

The man at the front of the group, who had dark skin and short-cropped black hair, aimed his bident at us and smiled unpleasantly, showing far too many teeth. Sam stiffened beside me, tail tightening around my waist.