Page 6 of Butterfly Effects

I’d managed to survive elementary school in Ohio without going full Carrie White. I had confidence that my little brother could do the same. Probably.

“When are you leaving, Sarah?” asked Dad.

“I figured I’d wait until everyone had come downstairs for the day, so I could say my goodbyes,” I said. “I’m planning to be gone for a few weeks this trip, just to make sure I can deal with everything in New York and then spend some real quality time with Greg in Michigan. I’ll call when I head for Buckley, so you know where I am.”

“I agree with Isaac: I wish you could stay longer,” he said.

“And I wish I could have Greg here with me, but the Blue Fairy isn’t granting requests right now,” I said. “St. Giles’s wants to have a serious talk with me about Mark’s future, and that means I have to go. Everything else aside, we owe him.”

Dad sighed. “I suppose we do.”

Mark is a cuckoo. Like me, he’s a pretty reasonable person who’s not totally into the idea of psychically manipulating and abusing everyone around him. Unlike me, he didn’t have anyone to hold his hand and help him get there. I never properly entered my second instar, thanks to Mom carefully removing every trace of my ancestral memories before they could rupture and wipe out my ability to see people as, well, people.

Mark didn’t get those memories removed until much later, when I’d needed the processing space for the world-breaker equation and removed them with his permission. His instar proceeded normally, and the memories had spread through him like wine through cotton. He’d reacted the way cuckoos normally did, by having a brief mental break and trying to murder his younger sister, Cici. But Cici had been young enough to think he was playing a game with her. She’d evaded him for so long that his thoughts had time to calm down again, and he’d stopped seeing her as a target and remembered how much he loved her.

His love for his sister had been strong enough to drag him back over a line that should have been impossible to recross once he had crossed it. He’d been working with the cuckoos who took me purely because they told him that if he didn’t, they’d kill his sister. The whole time, he’d been planning to kill me himself before I could end the world, assuming my family didn’t arrive in time. But they had, and he’d been with us on our cross-dimensional bullshit adventure.

Like Artie, Mark had been seriously damaged by my attempt to solve, resolve, and destroy the equation. Unlike Artie, his mind hadn’t been erased, just subjected to the kind of stress and trauma that could trigger his fourth instar. He was changing. But because he hadn’t been primed for it by going through a third instar, he was trying to accomplish them both at once, and it had already taken eight years.

Eight years of catatonia while his brain physically broke down and rebuilt itself, and the staff at St. Giles’s Hospital—a medical establishment catering almost completely to cryptids—got more and more nervous about what he was going to be if he woke up. Eight years of his human family having no idea what had happened to him. Cici had been twelve when he disappeared, and there was no good way of telling her he was alive, or how he’d been hurt, or anything. From her perspective, her big brother—the brother who’d loved her so much that he’d been able to defeat his own biology to stay with her—just walked away one day and never came back.

I spent time with him when I could, sitting by his bed and holding his hand and hoping that one day I’d pick up on even a flicker of sapient thought coming from him. I didn’t know who or what he’d be if he ever managed to wake up. I just knew it was my fault he was in that bed, and I wanted him awake more than I wanted almost anything else that I could think of.

Without Mark, we would never have been able to make it back from the dimension I’d shunted us all into. Without all of them. And I owed them. I would owe them until the end of my days. I didn’t get to rest and enjoy the love of my family until such time as I’d made sufficient amends for what I’d done.

If that was even possible.

I leaned over, pressing a kiss to Isaac’s temple. His delight at the gesture washed over me, comforting and warm as a towel fresh out of the dryer. “I love you, little bee,” I informed him.

He squirmed, embarrassed and pleased. “Don’t be gross, stupid sister,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Can’t help it.”

Lottie giggled. I took a piece of pancake from Isaac’s plate and dipped it into the cocktail sauce before popping it into my mouth. She made a face.

“That’s weird,” she informed me. “You can’t put ketchup and stuff on everything you eat.”

“Isaac does it,” I said.

“It’s still weird when he does it,” she countered. “Yesterday he put ketchup in his fruit cup in the cafeteria. The lunch aide took it away ’cause she thought he was messing around and making messes.”

Across the table, Dad’s attention focused on Isaac. “Zach…” he rumbled, in a disappointed tone.

Isaac hunched his shoulders. “It tastes wrong when it’s just sweet-sweet-sweet!” he said. “Tomatoes are only considered a vegetable for tax purposes anyway!”

I blinked, then looked over my shoulder as Mom stepped into the room, hair still damp and sticking to the sides of her face. “Was I like this when I was eight?”

“You were worse,” she said sweetly. “You’re the reason I learned how to make gummy candy at home. If I didn’t send you to school with tomato gummies, you’d find ways to sneak tomatoes into everything, and it was scaring the other children. Not that you made it past seventh grade, whereas Zach is going all the way to high school, aren’t you, buddy?”

“Yes, Mom,” he said dutifully.

“With me,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, with you.” I knew she was smiling because she projected it to me and Isaac even as she folded her face in the appropriate ways. It’s nice to spend time around people who telegraph their facial expressions. Makes it easier to react to them.

Sometimes I thought Charlotte was to Isaac as those therapy dogs were to the cheetahs in zoos. She gave him something to focus on and hang on to. Like me with Greg. Telepathy isn’t an anxiety disorder, but being a telepath in a non-telepathic world can feel very similar. He’d been doing better than I did in public school from day one. Maybe if I’d been able to go to Portland and attend school with Artie, I could have made it to high school instead of having a nervous breakdown in the seventh grade and finishing out my education in this very kitchen.

Or maybe we’d just have ended up even more codependent than we already were, and I’d have fallen apart completely when I accidentally erased his mind, instead of just falling apart mostly. No way of knowing.