Page 26 of Butterfly Effects

“I don’t get a lot of annoying monkey urges,” he said. “Mostly they have to do with covering my teeth and not wearing shoes. But I’ll be damned if those beetles don’t look like some sort of ultra-fancy snack food.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Okay, one, ew, and two, ‘Hey babe, I wanna eat bugs’ was not the confession I was expecting from you today.”

“None of this is what I was expecting!” complained Sam. He shot a glare at the man who had brought us here, who hadn’t said a word since announcing that he was taking us to the Eldest Living, whoever that was. Then again, it might well be the tree. It’s dangerous to make assumptions about species and cultures you don’t belong to.

I patted Sam’s tail with one hand. “Sorry we wound up in another dimension instead of spending the evening watching videos on YouTube and getting lost in the forest.”

He sniffed. “You better mean that.”

The man who’d been leading us thus far turned to face the entire group—me, Thomas, and Sam, and the other five Kairos who’d come to intercept us at our landing spot. He raised his bident.

All the other Kairos stopped walking. Not wanting to get stabbed with a bident, we did the same.

“You will be polite,” said the man. “You will be deferent. You will be courteous as befits your position—guests in our home, with no cause to expect anything beyond the most basic of hospitality. Do you understand?”

“Sure, I guess,” I said. His word choices were strange, and I knew they weren’t actually his own; they were supplied by the mind-mind flowers, providing the easiest translation they could find.

I didn’t trust it. It was like having a conversation with a generative text engine, only I didn’t know what data sets it had been trained on, or whether he had any way to control what he said to us. Maybe he was explaining the manner in which we were going to be executed, and all we could do was stand by and politely agree, since we had no way of knowing what we didn’t get to hear.

Sam’s tail tightened, pulling me a few inches closer to him, and I knew he was having similar thoughts. Thomas, however, looked utterly relaxed, which didn’t match up with my grandmother’s tales of what a paranoid and cautious man he was. Either she’d been exaggerating to make the rest of us like him when he wasn’t around to correct her, or he had a plan.

Oh, I hoped he had a plan.

The man eyed me. “There will be no trouble. There will be no violence. The Eldest Living will answer for you what may be answered, and will tell us what is to be done. Do you understand?”

“We do,” said Thomas. He sounded almost bored. “May we continue?”

“No weapons may be brought into the presence of the Eldest Living,” said the man.

He looked utterly nonplussed when all three of us started laughing. Sam actually uncoiled his tail from around my wrist so he could wrap it around himself as he bent double. It wasn’t that funny, but we were all wound-up and out of our normal environment, and that added an edge of hysteria to the laughter that would have been entirely over the top in any other circumstance.

The man, looking puzzled, stepped closer to us and prodded at Thomas with his bident. And Sam moved.

It’s difficult to describe or overstate just how fast a fūri is when not trying to seem unthreatening. One second Sam was next to me, laughing uproariously, and the next he was in front of Thomas, one hand on the shaft of the stranger’s bident, holding the weapon up so that its tines pointed at the sky. It was like he’d clipped across the distance between them, only touching down on one frame out of every four.

His lips were drawn back, displaying large, square teeth. They weren’t pointed or even particularly sharp, but they looked strong, and it would take a braver person than me to look at that display and think it was a good idea to keep doing whatever had caused him to make that face.

“No,” he said, with absolute calm. He shoved the bident toward the man as he released it, and the man staggered back several feet, unable to keep his balance in the face of Sam’s force.

“Why are you laughing?” demanded the man, not advancing again. He held his bident in front of himself like he wasn’t sure what he was meant to do with it, clearly uneasy and off-balance.

“Even if we wanted to spend the next hour debating what you do and don’t consider a weapon, all three of us are weapons according to any reasonable definition,” said Thomas. He held up one hand, fingers flat and facing upward, and briefly lowered his eyebrows. A ball of flickering red flame burst into being above his palm. He moved his hand and the fire moved with it, making his control clear. “My descendant and I are elementalists, and as you can see, her partner is fūri. He can have a careless person’s arms off their body in seconds. Asking us to put our weapons aside is the same as saying that we can freely go. May we go?”

The man looked increasingly flustered. He turned to his companions, saying sharply, “Keep them here,” before he turned and ducked into the hollow trunk of the massive tree.

Sam scoffed as he moved back to my side. “Coward,” he grumbled.

“Most people are when faced with giant angry monkeys,” I said, bumping my shoulder against his. “Look at those branches. You think we’ll be here long enough to play trapeze up there?”

“It’s not trapeze if we don’t have swings. It’s just Olympic-level jungle gym.” He paused, sounding much calmer as he added, “I sure hope so. Lots of good geometry up there.”

“Of course they have good geometry. This is the Johrlac world. They’re all mathematicians.” I looked over at Thomas. “Is that speciesist? If I say they’re all mathematicians?”

“Normally any statement that begins with ‘they’re all’ is going to be a little bit prejudiced, but in this case, no,” he said. “A fondness for mathematics is as natural and inborn as everything else about them. Johrlac can no more help their love of numbers than they can decide to trade hemolymph for hemoglobin and become true mammals.”

“Good to know,” I said. “Should we have heard from Alice by now?” I didn’t want to worry him. At the same time, I wanted someone to reassure me.

He glanced up at the sky, apparently trying to calculate how long it had actually been. If he could manage that, he was a better navigator than I was: normally when I was trying to measure time by the motion of the sun, there was only one of them, and I was on a planet whose orbital axis was familiar to me. Here, there were either three suns or two suns and a very large moon that was reflecting enough light to seem lambent in its own right, and I had no idea how long the days or nights were supposed to be.