Page 51 of Butterfly Effects

“By humans for the first years, and by a cuckoo and her Revenant husband for the rest. Surrounded by cousins and siblings and people who taught me how to be a person one day at a time.”

“And how did those lessons serve you when you turned on your own people?”

“About that.” I smiled, the sort of smile I’d had to learn by riding along inside my cousin Verity’s skull when she went to her dance competitions. She wore her smiles like they were weapons when she went to face her peers, honing and sharpening them until they were as terrifying as they were attractive. The woman with my face recoiled. We were inside the mind here, and she didn’t need to understand faces to understand what my expression really meant.

“You sit here, all comfortable and safe and sure of yourself in an environment you’re actually evolved to suit, and you judge me for not knowing your rules when I had to grow up in another dimension, with only the knowledge of your culture that you allowed my ancestors to retain? I don’t think you have the right. I don’t see what in this world or any other justifies you thinking that you have the moral high ground here. You have no right to judge me. You have no right to judge my cousin, either, who didn’t do anything wrong. You’re going to give him back to me, and then you’re going to let us go home.”

She smiled, less fiercely than I had, but still. The fact that she was able to smile at all proved she was paying attention, and learning more from me than I was learning from her. The math was tilted too far in her favor. She was supported by the power of five people while I was supported by only one, myself, and that wasn’t fair. Not that she cared. Not that any of these people cared about what they were doing to us.

“Ahh, but you see, that’s where you’re incorrect,” she said. “Your cousin, as you call it, is not a person, therefore we cannot let it go anywhere. It can be removed from our keeping, if you’re brave enough to try, but we doubt you will be. We have the measure of you now, Sarah Zellaby, and you’re no threat to us. Come peacefully. Stand trial as we intended you to do. Give up this idea that you can face us. We refuse it.”

I raised an eyebrow, reaching out mentally as I tried to follow this projection back to its origins. I hadn’t gone far before I encountered a junction, and realized this wasn’t a member of the collective, as I had been assuming: this was the entire collective, five queens braided together and presenting themselves to me through one impeccably designed persona, like the Wizard of Oz in a black jumpsuit with no Emerald City in sight.

“If you hurt him in any way, I will make you pay for it on a scale you have never even imagined,” I said, and mentally snipped one of the five ribbons of thought feeding into the braid that was “her.” The effect was immediate and electric. She jerked like I’d jabbed her physically with a pin, eyes widening. At the same time, her hair became a little less smooth, her jumpsuit a little less flawless. Her projected perfection was a group project, and I had interfered with the group.

Oopsie.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Stop that right now.”

“Stop what?” I asked innocently, and broke the second thread. “I thought it was just the two of us in here, sizing each other up. Was I wrong about that?”

“We are not singular,” she said. “We are never singular. Even a … a cuckoo like yourself should understand that. We are the collective. We control this city and this territory, we are the voice of these people. Our desires are their desires, our dreams are their dreams. We speak with the voice of Johrlar.”

“Oops,” I said, snapping the third thread. This time, she staggered, looking almost like she was going to vomit. “Does that hurt? Why don’t you stop me?”

“We will,” she said, eyes wide with fear. She began backing up, opening space between us. It wasn’t real—distance was just a concept here, not a real thing that could extend between people—but when I reached out for her, she was farther away. I couldn’t quite grasp the remainder of the braid. It was too far removed from me.

“We will stop you,” she said, terror in her voice. “You think you can come here, to our place, our territory, and threaten us so? We will stop you. We will end you. And once we have destroyed everything you are, we will rewrite you, so that even in death, you answer only to a name you didn’t choose. You are a threat too great to be endured, and we will not stand for it.”

She vanished then, winking out like a computer program being disconnected. The white went with her. I stared for a moment at the space where she’d been, then spun and looked behind me. There was nothing there but true void, black and empty and endless. I turned back to where the collective had been, and the blackness was there as well, consuming everything.

Frustrated, I sat down to wait for myself to wake up.

Thirteen

“Any man who’d drug a lady’s drink deserves to meet the sharp end of the shovel, preferably face-first. Self-defense is never a crime.”

—Enid Healy

In the home of Fetch and Carry, waking up on the kitchen floor

I HAD TIME TO COUNT WELL past three hundred thousand before I felt the blackness around me starting to erode, falling away like a riverbank in the rain. It was replaced by more darkness as it dissolved, but I could feel the change; I was ascending through the layers of my own mind, moving back toward consciousness. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to help it, either. Depending on what had been used to put me under, “helping” might result in the void trying to yank me back under.

By going limp, I could just allow myself to drift higher and higher, not resisting or encouraging the transition from deep unconsciousness to waking up. When the air around me started to lighten out of dark and toward dusky dawn, I closed the inner idea of my eyes, shutting out the world and allowing the transition to proceed without me doing anything to force it.

Bit by bit, something hard appeared below me, and the air around me became warm and humid, sticky in a way that dreams could never really be. I heard the soft woosh of my own breathing, and the hissing of the wind around the windows, and decided that I had waited long enough: I opened my eyes and I was back in the kitchen, the remains of my salad spilled on the floor all around me, alien lettuce in my hair.

It was still reasonably crisp. Given the temperature and humidity, and again drawing on my summers at Lowryland, where we’d often left sandwich fixings spread out across the counters in our tourist rentals, I guessed I’d been unconscious for maybe twenty minutes. Still longer than I liked when the collective might be looking for me. They had to know where Annalist was when they took him over.

I sat up and plucked the lettuce out of my hair with the same motion, wrinkling my nose at the scrap of greenery even as I tossed it aside. I would normally have felt bad about making a mess in someone else’s home, but these people had set me up to be drugged and thrown to their collective, whether they’d known they were doing it or not. They could deal with a little dressing on their tile.

My head was spinning as I pushed myself up into a crouching position and straightened, moving slowly so as not to make the dizziness even worse. It helped that the room was dim, quiet, and—except for me—empty. I blinked, realizing what was different.

Annalist was gone.

I turned to the doorway, walking back into the front room. My head was still spinning, and my vision was blurry around the edges, the last of the drugs working their way through my system. I massaged my temple with one hand, trying to chase away the first stirrings of a headache. I couldn’t allow myself to collapse here. Not when I didn’t know where Annalist was. Not when the collective might be coming.

He wasn’t in the front room, which was probably for the best. I preferred the idea that he’d knocked me out while the collective had him under their control and run for the hills as soon as they released him to the thought of the collective sticking around in his skin to gloat over my body. I kept walking, storming toward the closed front door.