Page 66 of Butterfly Effects

“Got it!” said Arthur jubilantly. I turned back to him. He had pulled his hand—now covered in a viscous liquid that dripped like artificial maple syrup—out of the flower. He began rubbing it on his face and neck, then reached under his shirt and applied it liberally to his armpits. Basically anywhere that was likely to get sweaty and start to stink.

It was an ambitious undertaking, but by the time he finished, that Macy’s-perfume-counter smell was overwhelming everything else, effectively shutting off our noses.

“I can get us down now,” said Sam, scooping Arthur and me off our feet and under his arms. Holding us securely, he turned around, and jumped out of the tree.

Sixteen

SARAH

“Not every choice I’ve made in my lifetime has been a good one. Some of them were pretty objectively bad. But they were my choices, and at the end of the day, I’m nothing more than the sum of them. They’re what made me.”

—Alice Healy

Walking through a tangled, unfamiliar jungle that still manages to feel like home

IKKO’S HAND WAS WARM IN mine as we walked. The longer I held on to her, the more my telepathy eroded her natural defenses, and the cheery background noise of her surface thoughts became gradually more and more evident, until I was listening to her inner monologue. I knew I should let go. I knew she might not understand what prolonged physical contact with one of us would mean. But it was so nice to know the names of the plants and insects around me without needing to break the comfortable silence we had established that I just wanted to hold on.

Wait. Silence? I glanced at Ikko. She kept looking serenely ahead, not picking up on my confusion.

Of course she wasn’t picking up on my confusion. She wasn’t a telepath. “Ikko, how old are you?” I asked.

“Old? Oh. I’m four full rotations in age,” she said happily. “Why?”

I paused, blinking. That didn’t mean anything to me. Of course it didn’t: how was I supposed to know how long a year was on a planet with three suns?

“It’s just that you look a certain age as we measure things on the world I’m from,” I said. “And it would be very strange for someone that age to be quiet as long as you have. I’m impressed no matter how old you are.”

Ikko stood a little straighter, pleased with herself. It radiated off of her, almost palpable. “I’m very good at being quiet,” she said. “Daddy says it’s a problem sometimes, when I sneak up on him and he doesn’t want me to sneak up on him. I think it’s good to be quiet. Means you can get in almost anywhere you want to. It doesn’t just work on the stinging wasps.”

“How do you know that they’re wasps?”

She shrugged. “Because when they try to get into your head, they buzz, and they sting you on the inside with their sharp, sharp thoughts.” She glanced at me. “I know you’re in my head, but you’re not buzzing. More just a quiet little hum. I don’t mind the hum, and I know you need to use my eyes to know what you’re looking at. Wasps don’t see so good. Safe or stinging, they need us to see things for them.”

“And who is ‘us’?”

This question seemed to confuse Ikko. She stopped walking and dropped my hand, turning to face me. “We are. The Kairos.”

I blinked. “The what?”

“Kairos. Silly wasp, you should know what we are. You’re the reason we’re here.” She started walking again, heading deeper into the green. After a pause to collect my thoughts, I hurried after her. She was my only guide, and some of the insects I’d identified via her mind had jaws I didn’t want to get any closer to.

Ikko turned toward me as I caught up, offering her hand again. I took it without hesitation. If she was willing to let me share her mind, I wasn’t going to refuse.

Knowing that she was apparently a full Kairos made the hard shell of her thoughts more understandable, and also the way I was shut out almost entirely when I stopped touching her. I could linger in the heads of my family, but they were only partially Kairos, and getting less so with every passing generation. Eventually, that protection would give way completely, and they’d be as vulnerable to people like me as any other human.

That was a distressing thought, and not one I wanted to dwell on. The family I had now was safe, and Charlotte, Olivia, and David all had the level of resistance I would have expected from them if I’d been making guesses, but what about their kids? Or their grandkids? Johrlac have a substantially longer-than-human lifespan. I’ve never been sure precisely how much longer, but I know Mom looks more like my older sister these days, and she was at least sixty when she adopted Aunt Evie. I could have a lot of years to watch the people I loved get slowly vulnerable.

“You’re worried,” said Ikko.

I blinked at her. She shrugged.

“Your hum just went all spiky. You don’t need to be worried. We’re not going to hurt you. We don’t blame you for things you never did. That would just be silly.” She pushed aside a branch with her arm, then pointed to a lower bush covered in large clusters of peach-colored berries. “Those are tasty. To us, but also to the wasps. They love them lots. You should try one.”

“All right,” I said, and leaned over to pick a berry as we walked by the bush, then popped it into my mouth.

It tasted like the sweetest tomato I had ever had, tart enough not to be cloying, but not so much as to detract from the pure sugary decadence of it. I stopped in my tracks, turning to stare at the bush.

Ikko shook her head. “I guess you must really like berries. We can come back later with a basket.”