Page 57 of Butterfly Effects

Verity—my older sister—had always been a big fan of firsts. She’d been the first, and so far only, member of our generation to get married, the first to move out, the first to know what she wanted to do with her life. The first to find herself widowed and raising her children as a single mother. Her husband, Dominic, had been ex-Covenant, just like Thomas. Sometimes they even sounded the same. It wasn’t really a surprise that she wouldn’t want to be around our grandfather, given the similarities. It was still a tragedy that she wasn’t building a relationship with him—or improving her relationship with me. Verity and I had never been the closest siblings, but she was still my sister, and I worried about her all alone out there in New York. And then I catch myself thinking things like that and realize I’m in danger of turning into my mother, just like I always said I wasn’t going to let myself do.

Families are complicated.

Sam met my eyes and nodded, tail curled high behind his back. I nodded back, moving into position beneath the central skylight. He was bigger and heavier than I was, so I wouldn’t be able to do much beyond breaking his fall, but that might be better than nothing, depending on how this went.

Sam leapt.

He impacted the central skylight with all four limbs at the same time, landing with hands and feet both pressed to the frame. He hung there for a long moment, suspended by his fingers and toes. The frame began to detach from the wall, jerking downward what felt like a quarter-inch at a time. Sam leapt free of the skylight, sticking to the wall above the shelves and looking delighted as his impact allowed him to punch twenty delicate holes into the grayish material, clinging on.

The skylight frame continued to detach, finally falling to clatter to the floor with a remarkably anticlimactic thudding noise. The lack of metal in their construction was definitely showing. Alice moved to pick it up, turning it over in her hands before passing it over to Thomas for further examination.

“Fascinating,” he said. “The panels are extremely thin glass—I would expect it to be impossible without some sort of machining, but the substance that holds them in place is organic, and feels related to the glue some insects produce to build their nests. The material holding everything together is bamboo. They must heat it and bend it into position. It’s beautiful, and would do a reasonable job of keeping the place climate-controlled.”

“And we can get out now,” said Sam, dropping down from the top of the shelves and moving to stand next to me again, his tail snaking around my ankle. “If they’re expecting us to be moving around in here, it might be better for us to move around the outside of the building.”

“As long as they still can’t see us, that may be the most sensible way to do this,” I agreed, looking toward my grandparents, who exchanged a speculative look before nodding their agreement.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Alice. “Then they can really wonder where we went.”

“Samuel?” said Thomas. “If you would be so kind?”

Sam smiled, then unwound his tail from my ankle, grabbed me, and jumped.

It only took him a few minutes to ferry all three of us up to the opening. I pulled myself through the hole and then helped my grandparents out onto the flat surface of the nearby roof, which crunched and flexed uncomfortably under our feet, but showed no signs of caving in. Sam came up at the very end, carrying the skylight with him. He pulled it back into the opening it had fallen out of, tugging until it seated itself with an audible pop.

“Seemed like it would fit back where it had come from,” he said, shooting me a pleased look. “Now they won’t have an immediate pointer to where we went, unless they go checking the outside wall. People don’t normally think to do that.”

“Well done, Samuel,” said Thomas.

“Thank you.” He preened.

I smacked him on the shoulder. “You broke it and then you fixed it. Don’t be too smug.”

He smiled at me. “You know you love me.”

“Yeah, I do,” I agreed, and kissed him on the cheek before taking a frank look at our surroundings.

The walls around us were never fully smooth, but rounded and ridged, like the outside of a wasp’s nest. The top layers of the papery building material crunched underfoot, and there was no predicting where the next window would appear. Neighboring trees overhung the structure at some points, and I watched as a butterfly with wings like dinner plates went gliding silently by, flying with long, smooth wingbeats that were nothing like the rapid fluttering of the butterflies I knew from home.

Sam leapt and landed on a tree branch, looking instantly more comfortable than he had while we were all inside. He looked around, then leaned back down toward us and said, “There’s a lot of activity down on the street, but no one’s pointing at me.”

“They’re not going to register you as anything worth pointing at if the anti-telepathy charms continue to hold,” said Alice. She looked around, then gestured farther up the slope of the building. “We should head this way. If I remember the layout correctly, that will take us toward the holding cells, and we might be able to find our people and get out of here before something else goes wrong.”

“Alice…” Thomas hesitated, expression twisting. “I hate to ask this, but is there any chance the collective was actually able to modify your memory while they were inside your head before? I don’t know if we should be letting you take the lead.”

“My memory’s been manipulated before, and while I can’t swear I would know, I still remember why we came here,” said Alice. “We’re getting my grandchildren back. I’m not feeling any urge to lead us straight to the collective, or to betray my allies. I think I can be trusted for right now, and if it starts to look like I can’t be, I won’t fight back.”

“All right,” he said, and turned toward me. “Annie? What do you think?”

“I think I’ve trusted Grandma Alice for my whole life, and I can trust her now,” I said. “I’m happy to let her lead the way until she gives me a good reason to feel otherwise.”

“All right. Alice? Show us where we need to go.”

Alice smiled brilliantly, then turned and began hiking up the slope of the building, not looking back as she moved toward the next slope in the sequence. We followed after her, although Sam stayed on the tree limb as long as he could, only dropping down onto the side of the building when he clearly had no other choice remaining. The four of us hiked grimly and silently from there, occasionally swatting away palm-sized flying beetles.

“I hate to say this in case it jinxes us or something, but at least there aren’t any mosquitoes,” said Sam.

I flinched. If the mosquitoes were to scale with everything else we were seeing around here, they would be a genuine threat. “Died to extradimensional mosquitoes” was not how I wanted future generations to remember me.