Page 52 of Butterfly Effects

Had he been working with the collective since the beginning? Were Fetch and Carry in danger? Or had he spoken of revolution, expecting it to come to nothing, and attracted the collective’s attention in the process? It was impossible to know whose side Fetch and Carry were really on without asking them, and I couldn’t trust telepathic communication when I didn’t know whether the collective had taken them too.

Regardless, they didn’t deserve to come back to a damaged house, and so I hit the switch to open the doors rather than telekinetically forcing them. If they were innocent, they were about to learn that they’d been betrayed by someone they trusted. No point in adding property damage to the shock.

The doors repeated their alternating airlock behavior before they let me outside, neither pair willing to open until the other was closed. After what felt like far too long, I was stepping into the humid air and strangely conflicting sunlight, the trees around me filtering it into dappled shadows. The same insects I’d seen before were still flitting and crawling in the branches, painfully visible.

Visible, and undisturbed. No one had passed this way in at least a few minutes. I paused to watch the insects buzzing around, making note of their colors. Most of them had gray patches that I could only assume would turn red if I had a human around to borrow color vision from; it would explain why the Johrlac had so much red in their uniforms if they were just replicating things they’d seen in nature.

I wanted to drop all my shields and broadcast a challenge to the collective. I also wanted to find Arthur without them finding me. So I pulled back as hard as I could, pushing forward the partition Fetch had instructed me to create: I was Gather, a civic assistant, and if using an identity she’d helped me to cobble together was a risk, it was a smaller risk than trying to come up with something on my own. The uniform I was wearing seemed like it would do half the work for me, anyway: most of the people I was likely to encounter would just assume they knew me based on what I was wearing, and if I could avoid answering any direct questions, that would be more than good enough.

I made my way carefully down the meandering lane connecting Fetch and Carry’s home to the main thoroughfare, not seeing a single other person until I reached the walkway and looked down the street. If the collective was sending people to collect me, they weren’t in any hurry to get it done. Johrlac moved in the distance, heading to and fro on their unknowable errands, and none of them spared me so much as a second glance.

A woman walked by, pulled by a spider the size of a cocker spaniel. The sight made my guts clench. How long had I been gone? Had anyone thought to try explaining to Greg that I wasn’t going to be back any time soon? Not that most of my family could reach him on a level he’d be able to understand. Alex and Shelby would have to agree to take Isaac to Michigan before that could happen.

The woman noticed me watching her and paused, shooting me a curious look. I knew it was curious: I could feel the confusion washing off her like heat off a summer highway. I turned hastily away, clamping down on my own thoughts and emotions as tightly as I could manage. She didn’t need to know that I was scared, lost, and hopelessly missing my own giant spider, who was very far away but safe, which put him one up on the cousin I owed the world to. After what I’d done to him, Arthur was my responsibility, now and forever.

At some point I’d begun heading back toward the building where I’d been held. I paused, trying to decide whether I needed to turn around and go looking for someplace else to start, then shrugged and continued onward. The collective could find me wherever I was. If I’d been held in the administration building, they might have Arthur there now. I could bust him out and …

And what? What was I going to do once I had him? I still couldn’t stand to be around him, and it wasn’t like I could manage a dimensional crossing unsupported. I might have psychic powers beyond what should be trusted to an individual, like, ever, but that didn’t make me omnipotent. Trying to do the math with no one around but Arthur would risk either erasing my own mind or swallowing his for a second time. Could I even build a new person on a brain that had been wiped clean more than once?

I had no idea, and finding Arthur was a priority no matter how I wanted to look at things. Worst case, I could bust him out and run for the hills with him, find someplace isolated where we could hole up and get on with our lives. Best case, I could seize control of the collective as Annalist had been encouraging me to do—although I was no longer sure whether or not that had been some sort of a trap—and maybe that would give me the processing power I needed to get home.

Problem with being a Price: the majority of my relatives have the kind of luck where every lottery ticket is a winner and every missed flight is the start of a Final Destination film, their ludicrous connection to coincidence kicking in to keep them from meeting an untimely death. It means they’ve never really developed much of a skill for planning, since they genuinely haven’t needed it. And that means they’ve never taught me how to plan.

Stop. Breathe. I stepped into the shadow cast by one of the buildings, leaning against the wall and trying to focus past the adrenaline the collective’s visit had caused to flood my system. I needed to think like a Baker, not react like a Price. Not that I had ever really been either: I had been a McNally, and then, after my family had died, I had transformed myself into a Zellaby, taking my name from a cautionary tale that felt like it could have been written about my species, whether or not the author had ever known us.

John Wyndham could have been a cuckoo like me or Angela, divorced from the ancestral memories that were supposed to dictate his life and trying to find a way to navigate existence in a world that was disinterested in his success. It was an oddly appealing thought, the idea that some of the people I’d grown up trusting were the same sort of creature I was.

I wouldn’t have needed to guess if I’d been allowed to grow up on Johrlar. I would have known. Every role model I had would have bled clear and spoken without opening their mouths, and I would have been surrounded by a society of my peers.

And based on what I’d seen so far, that wouldn’t have done much to make me a better person.

I breathed slowly in and out, focusing on what was going to happen next. The collective knew I was here. Of course the collective knew I was here: they were the ones who’d chosen to bring me. But they knew I was loose, and that was new information. Had Annalist been under their control the whole time? Now that I’d had a moment to think, I was pretty sure he must have been, since he’d drugged my salad before their message about my escape came through. Were they also controlling Fetch and Carry? If that was the case, the collective had wanted me to escape, and that was a distressing thought. How much of what had happened since my arrival had they been manipulating?

Did it matter? Even if everything had been scripted on their end, I’d been reacting naturally, and I was going to have to deal with the outcome of my actions. The collective was only as in control as I allowed them to be.

So: plan. Get back into the administrative building, locate Arthur, break Arthur out. Once we were free, I could attract the collective’s attention on purpose and find out how to get us home. They’d been five strong when they came to study me, and they hadn’t been able to stop me from blocking their entanglement. I didn’t think I was necessarily their equal, but I was definitely something they hadn’t been expecting, and I could exploit that.

Taking another deep breath, I pushed away from the wall, turned, and stepped back onto the sidewalk, rejoining the general flow of traffic. None of the people I could see seemed to be upset, or to be hurrying for any reason beyond efficiency, which clearly motivated much of what happened here on Johrlar. I still didn’t know what their society was based on, or what most of these people could possibly be doing for work. Did they have accountants? Dentists? I supposed they must have a medical career track, although even that felt a little odd, given the level of technology I’d seen so far.

I tugged on the cuff of my jumpsuit as I walked, then paused. The fabric felt like heavy silk of some kind, mixed with a slick textile that was definitely synthetic. They might have more-advanced technology that they were simply not choosing to share with prisoners and tourists. That would make more sense than them being a completely green-tech pastoral society, given everything I knew about the Johrlac from records and, yes, sometimes prejudicial stories told by people who’d survived them long enough to write their experiences down.

A whole life spent thinking my people were monsters hadn’t exactly left me prepared to judge them fairly, but fair or not, I really didn’t see how they could have built all of this with nothing more than bamboo and natural fibers.

I rubbed the hem of my sleeve again, trying to decide what it felt like. Silk and … rayon, maybe? Something slick and sturdy and stain-resistant. I wasn’t the seamstress in our family, and Elsie wasn’t here. Not that she was speaking to me at the moment anyway.

Arthur still thought he loved me. Intentionally or not, I’d programmed him that way, and he couldn’t just shrug it off because he was tired of it. Elsie, though … Elsie knew she hated me, and nothing I could say or do was going to change her mind about that.

And it shouldn’t. However sorry I was now, I killed her brother. I was the reason he was no longer walking in the world. Mistake or not, I did that. Only me. She deserved to hate me for the rest of her life, if that was what she needed. I was pretty sure that was what she was intending to do.

On the sidewalk ahead of me, a man stopped walking and turned around, looking in my direction. His eyes flashed momentarily white. I met his gaze without flinching or looking away, allowing him to reach out and touch the partition I had so carefully constructed. I felt him pushing against it, checking it for weak spots, and pushed back, shoving him out of my mind. His eyes flashed again, brighter this time.

My apologies for the intrusion, said a voice in my mind, mild, male, and polite. We have been informed of an intruder in our midst, and your presentation matched the information I had been provided. Please tender your forgiveness.

How would a civic assistant reply to that, I wondered? With no idea what message his jumpsuit conveyed, I could only guess, and decided erring on the side of politeness was unlikely to get me into any real trouble. I am on my way back from afternoon leisure, I replied. I apologize for wasting your time with unnecessary suspicions.

There: show humility and take responsibility for his mistakes. Not that they’d been mistakes, but I wasn’t telling him that, and if he believed me, he might never know.

Apologies accepted, he said. Please continue. I would not want you to be late on my account.