Page 63 of Butterfly Effects

One of the first things any member of our family learned was that you should never touch a cuckoo’s skin if you had any way to avoid it. When you’re touching them, all the telepathic resistance in the world won’t keep them out of your head; they can scythe through the protections we inherited from Great-Grandma Fran like a hot knife slices through butter, and once they’re in, it can be hard to get them out.

Arthur yanked the prisoner he was trying to save out the door and let go of him, pointing toward the fire. “Look, fire,” he said, maybe needlessly. “Run now, okay?”

The man ran, his eyes flashing white, and I grabbed Arthur by the wrist, jerking him along as I ran down the hall after Sam.

“What?” he asked.

“White eyes means they’re contacting the collective,” I said. “We have to save them, but they’re telling on us as soon as we do.”

“Fuck,” said Arthur, with heartfelt earnestness. “Anything we can do about it?”

“Hope the fire is a big-enough distraction to let us get the hell out of here, and hope that these are the only cells.” The thought that Sarah might be in another burning hall, locked in with no way out, was a terrible one. Not as terrible as it might have been, but bad enough to make me feel a little queasy.

“I think they are. From the way the guards talked when they shoved me in here, they don’t get a lot of people who need to be detained like this.”

“Less talk, more escape before getting barbequed,” suggested Sam. He kicked through another door, revealing an empty room on the other side. It was a mirror of the room we’d arrived through, down to the wasp-wing window on the far wall. He rushed toward it, wrenching it out of its frame, then gestured frantically for the two of us to join him.

I stopped in the doorway. “Get Arthur out first,” I commanded, and turned to face the fire.

It was working its way steadily along the hall toward me, not as fast as I would have expected. That made sense: Thomas’s element was also fire, and if he was pulling on the flames from the other side of the fire, he could slow them down. I put my hands up, feeling for the outline of the inferno.

It was still too far away for me to feel the heat it was generating, but this was my fire; I’d created it, and it knew me. It answered my reach with a reach of its own, surging toward me. I pushed back, telling the fire I wanted it to leave us alone.

Fire is a living thing. It’s not a very obedient one—fire doesn’t like to be told what it’s supposed to do—but it’s alive, and like all living things, it can be communicated with if you only know the words you’re supposed to use. I pushed and I spoke to it silently, in the language of the flame. It wasn’t like Johrlac telepathy. This was something older and more primal, and it transcended language to become its own creation.

Stay, I told the fire, and Burn but not too close to me.

Home, said the fire. Return?

But alas, that was the tragedy of setting my fire free. It could never truly come home again. Even if I pulled it back into myself—and this was too much fire for me to extinguish it like that—it would remain apart from the rest of the fire, burning inside my bones and never entirely mine again, not the way it had been before. We were separated now, this fire and I, and yet it still remembered it belonged to me.

Burn, I replied. Stay, spread, burn.

Burn, replied the fire, and actually turned around, moving with patent disregard for the way fire normally behaved. It rolled back down the hall, consuming what it had missed the first time, burning holes in the floor and dropping to the next level, basically continuing to do what fire has always done after encountering a firebreak. I turned back to Sam and Arthur, wiping the sweat from my forehead with one hand.

They were staring at me, Sam with Arthur half-boosted to the open window, and kept staring as I trotted over to greet them.

“Well?” I asked. “Why are we just standing here? This whole place is going to be coming down!”

“It is so hot when you do that,” breathed Sam.

“Can we go?” asked Arthur. He grabbed the sides of the window and pulled himself the rest of the way out, stepping away to make room for us.

“He’s focused, I’ll give him that,” said Sam, and boosted me out.

This time, we didn’t bother putting the window back in place. The building was on fire: it wasn’t like a little hole was going to be the most noticeable thing about it.

Sam slid out the window barely a beat behind me. I grabbed his hand and took off running, heading for the large branches that overhung the building. We quickly passed Arthur, who had never been much for fieldwork. He struggled to catch up with us. I let go of Sam, freeing him to double back and sling my cousin over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He turned and ran back toward me, passing me as he moved to toss Arthur up into the foliage. Arthur yelped and grabbed on to the limb, dangling, as Sam grabbed me and leapt.

Behind us, the fire worked dutifully at swallowing the building whole, ripping it down one piece at a time. There had been no sign yet of my grandparents, but I believed in them; they’d be popping out somewhere on the other side any moment now. Sam lowered me to my feet, and I turned to grin at him, pausing when I saw his eyes.

His pupils were huge, so blown out that they had almost swallowed his irises, and his whole expression was glassy and drawn. I knew at once what was going on. Sighing, I hugged his arm.

“You breathed too close to Arthur, didn’t you?” I asked.

Arthur, like Artie before him—same body, after all—was half-incubus, making him a walking, talking sex bomb. His pheromones were unpredictable, but more likely to cause problems when he was under stress. The Johrlac wouldn’t have noticed: their non-mammalian nature made them immune to his allure. I hadn’t noticed, because we were blood relations, and Lilu pheromones were supposed to expand their breeding pool. As one of the only known species to be cross-fertile with virtually everything, the population of people with at least some Lilu heritage could quickly skyrocket. Blood relatives being immune was the only way to prevent some pretty gross hook-ups.

Sam, though, was not genetically related to Arthur. He also wasn’t particularly attracted to men, which kept the pheromones from hitting him like a lust-hammer. He still looked drunk or drugged at the moment, and that wasn’t how we needed him to be.