Page 27 of Butterfly Effects

“She’s fine,” he said finally, looking back down at me. “Alice is … Alice is extremely Alice when she needs to be. I don’t know a better way of putting it. She’s either following us or she’s still getting transport under control, and either way, she’ll show up when the time is right. And she’ll be all the happier and easier to deal with because she’s been punching giant ladybugs or something.”

“Why did we need another world full of giant insects?” asked Sam plaintively. “Greg’s okay, but one’s enough. I’d like to go to a dimension full of things that don’t go above four legs apiece if that’s cool.”

“There are plenty of non-insect dimensions,” said Thomas. “Some of them are even pleasant places to visit. Ithaca, for example. But the Johrlac evolved from insects, and it makes sense that their world would be more of the same. I’m so sorry Sarah got abducted to a place that doesn’t suit your sensibilities.”

“Yeah, well, someone should be,” grumbled Sam.

The man from before stepped back out of the tree, looking cautious and relieved at the same time, like he didn’t particularly want to be in our presence, but was glad to know what he was coming back to do.

“The Eldest Living will see you now, weapons and all,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his bident.

The three of us moved to stand closer together. “Thank you,” said Thomas, and we walked past the man, into the shadows of the tree. The scouts, all six of them, remained behind.

Inside the trunk it was surprisingly bright, thanks to the many small openings formed by the interweaving of the trunks; they allowed shafts of sunlight to shine through, which then hit any one of a number of shining reflective disks hung from the high walls of the tree, bouncing the light back and forth between them. The end result was an odd mosaic of light and shadows, dazzling and dark at once.

The center of the space was occupied by a ring of chairs clearly designed for human-shaped bipeds, surrounding a pile of pillows and soft fabrics. Settled at the top of the pile was a woman. True to what I assumed was her title, she was quite possibly the physically oldest person I had ever seen. Her hair was white and wispy; her skin was deeply seamed with wrinkles and looked softer than the cloth below her. Her fingers were straight, but her knuckles were huge, like knobs on the length of a stick. She turned toward us as we entered, and smiled.

“Our travelers,” she said, and her voice was sweet and clear. “How fortuitous. Right time, right place, my friends. Please come and have a seat.”

“These are your people?” asked Thomas. He approached the chairs without hesitation. Sam and I did the same, following his lead.

“The village? Yes. I’ve been guiding them for a long, long while now. I’ll be done guiding them soon enough: the correct time for my departure approaches.”

“I am Thomas Price,” said Thomas. “This is my granddaughter, Antimony, and her betrothed, Samuel. We’re here because two more of my grandchildren have been abducted from their homes by the Johrlac, and we need to get them back. Your scouting party stumbled across us shortly after our arrival.”

“Right time, right place,” she said. “If they found you, you can be sure a detachment of the heartless ones was not far behind. You must have triggered something when you came through the dimensional wall.”

“You know about dimensional travel?”

“We do.” She looked up, toward one of the beams of light. “We were a domestication project for the heartless ones, many generations ago. They were looking for people who could take the place of the underclass they had sent into exile, who could do the tasks they had no interest in performing for themselves without losing their minds, and they found the Kairos. They found Caerus, the world of our beginning, and they came for us in such numbers that the only thing the timing could do was send us into the arms of potentially kinder masters, leaving the cruelest to hunt in vain. They brought us here, believing they could tame us, believing our resistance to their minds would make us sturdier over the long tail of time. And they set us to work. But we never forgot where we had come from, and we told our children, and we remembered that we were Kairos. We remembered that we didn’t belong here. We remember still.”

Well. This was interesting. We’d only known about the Kairos for a few years; before that, our family’s occasionally improbable luck had been chalked up to chance and turned into a running joke. It wasn’t until Mark that we’d learned we owed our sometimes-tumultuous relationship with coincidence to a streak of non-human heritage. Given the presence of jinks and mara on Earth, I had never really considered that the Kairos might have an extra-dimensional origin.

“If you were brought here as a slave population, what changed?” asked Thomas. His tone was polite, but I could hear the hunger for knowledge under the civility of it all: like the rest of us, he wanted to understand more than almost everything else.

“The heartless ones could read our intentions, even through the dampening effect of the timing, and that made organization difficult, but with, well, time, they paid less attention, and the timing was forever working in our favor. When we reached the right coincidences, we broke free, all but the barest few of us, and we made for the wild places of their world. Once we were here, the timing hid us better than they could seek, and we vanished into the green. We’ve been here ever since. Some of us have escaped to other worlds through the crossings. That would be how you”—she nodded toward me, eyes sharp within their nests of wrinkles—“could come to be. We are no more of Caerus. We wouldn’t know how to be. This is not our world, but it is our home, and this is where we die.”

“Why did your hunters bring us here?” asked Sam.

She switched her attention over to him. “You, I don’t recognize,” she said, after a moment. “The girl is of the Kairos, if not entirely, and the man is of whatever sister species birthed her. You, though … I don’t know you.”

“Human,” said Thomas politely. “We’re from a place called ‘Earth.’ It’s not far from here, as the dimensional axes are measured. Someone who was traveling one step at a time could get there in no more than five hops.”

“And they have evolved there a sister species?”

“Three, we think,” I said. “Humans, jinks, and mara. We’re all considered primates, evolved from the simians that also live there.”

“Fascinating,” said the woman. “What is special about these ‘humans’?”

“To be honest, I don’t know for sure,” I said. “They’re cross-fertile with several other species, including Kairos, and they’re capable of sorcery, sometimes—interaction with the pneuma. It’s not universal.”

“It was more common once, but we spent centuries with an extradimensional predator feeding on our world and destroying anyone it found who could manipulate the pneuma,” added Thomas.

The woman looked impressed. “Still, to have any hope of manipulation of the pneuma without death is a rare attribute. It serves you well. Now. Why are you here?”

I hesitated, looking to Thomas to see if he was going to supply any answer. He shook his head, saying nothing, which meant that it was down to me. I looked back to the Eldest Living. “My grandfather already told you. Two of my cousins have been abducted by the Johrlac, and we’re here to get them back.”

“Why?”