Page 67 of Butterfly Effects

She tugged and I followed willingly, resisting the urge to run back and fill my hands with berries, to cram them into my mouth until I choked. Everything about this world, the air, the fruit—I had evolved to exist here. My body knew how to be here. But my mind … I couldn’t imagine giving up Earth. I needed the internet. I needed to know how my shows were going to end. I needed to see Isaac grow up, and I needed to be there for Greg. Johrlar was a sweet dream. Michigan, and Oregon, and New York, those were my sweet reality.

Ikko pulled me deeper and deeper into the trees, occasionally pointing out a bug or flower she thought I’d like, but otherwise content to walk in silence. We emerged into a clear band of grass, or what looked like grass, dotted with little flowers, white with transparent petals. She kept walking, and I kept following, until I realized the flowers were turning red where we had stepped.

I pulled my hand from hers and stopped walking, indicating the flowers. “What are these?”

“Telltales,” she said. “Stinging wasps can’t see them once they’ve changed, so they don’t realize they’re leaving clear trails to tell us where they’ve walked. We plant them around everything important to us, and that way we know when someone’s been poking around where we don’t want them. They’ll go back to white and clear in a little bit. So if you wanted to sneak in while the suns were down, you could, but since they don’t know what kind of trail they’re leaving…”

“They don’t think to be careful of the flowers,” I said, thoughtfully. “That’s really clever, Ikko.”

She preened, but said, “I didn’t come up with them. Still, it is pretty clever, isn’t it? Guess you need some clever if you want to stay alive when you’ve got wasps chasing after you all the time.”

“Then I hope you’ll have enough clever for the both of us,” I said firmly.

She laughed, pulling me through the flowers to the trees on the other side.

We walked through this patch of forest—although really, I needed to be thinking of it as a jungle. We could pass through it only because someone, presumably Ikko’s people, had been cutting paths through the brush; they were tangled and almost choked with underbrush at some points, but I could still see the cleared earth under the returning vines. Bugs of various sizes moved in the greenery, some the size of Earth creatures, some large enough to provide reasonable hunting for Greg.

I could bring him here. The thought was so sudden as to be almost surprising, and I considered it for a moment as I continued to follow Ikko. The air was cleaner, and he would probably be more comfortable in a place where I wouldn’t need to continually hide him from everyone else. I’d even seen giant spiders in the Johrlac city: he might be able to accompany me openly.

Assuming the collective of Johrlac queens didn’t have my mind wiped to keep me from challenging the shape of the group mind they’d constructed between them. I scowled and pitched the thought away. No matter how beautiful it was here, I wasn’t going to be bringing Greg. I was going to find Arthur and discover a way to take us both home, so that we would never need to worry about these people again. And if some of them got hurt or broken in the process …

There had been no reason to make themselves my problem. This wasn’t my world. I would never have come looking for them, would never have involved myself, had they not decided to force the issue. I wasn’t going to feel bad if they suffered the consequences of their own actions. I wasn’t.

No, really, I wasn’t.

“You’re thinking pretty hard, Sarah,” said Ikko, pronouncing my name with precise care, like it was some sort of magical incantation that would unlock a world of sweet rewards. “It tickles.”

“Sorry,” I said. I hadn’t even been aware that I was projecting in her direction. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” She shrugged. “We’re almost there.”

“Speaking of being ‘almost there,’ how are you here?” I asked. “This world doesn’t really seem to do ‘mammals,’ as a rule, and I know Kairos are mammalian.”

“What’s a mammal?” asked Ikko blankly.

“Uh…”

“Oh, that’s a mammal.” She radiated relief and mild smugness. “The mind-mind flowers had to have the word a few times before they could understand it enough to translate. Mammals are people with red blood and bones on the inside.”

“I think that’s fundamentally correct,” I said. “There’s some other stuff, and really it’s all about common ancestors, which means no one who originated outside of Earth—where I grew up—is a mammal as I understand it, but sometimes you just have to say ‘close enough’ when you’re talking about biology.”

“And wasps aren’t mammals?”

“No. We’re a type of insect—like all of those over there.” I waved a hand, indicating a group of flying bugs clustered around a large, sticky-looking flower. “Everything I’ve seen that evolved on Johrlar is what we’d call an insect back on Earth. Except you. Kairos are mammals, or close enough to reproduce with Earth humans. Why are you here?”

“Humans?” she echoed, dubiously. “What is humans?”

“They look like Kairos, but they can’t manipulate coincidence the way you can.”

“Oh.” She sounded baffled by the idea of people who couldn’t manipulate coincidence. “That must be awful, living without the timing. The timing is how everything works the way it’s supposed to. The timing is how I found you.”

I decided not to mention that I had been the one to chase her down. Let her have her victory for right now.

“But the Kairos are here because the stinging wasps wanted people to do work for them, and when they went looking for people who could be around them without getting worn away to nothing like rocks in a river, they found us. Or our ancestors, anyway. We’ve been here a long, long time.” She sounded totally nonchalant about that, like it was completely normal for her to be telling me that her species was in this dimension to be used for involuntary labor. I hated to use the word “slavery,” but when people are taken from their home dimension and taken someplace utterly alien to their biology and needs, forced to work without choice or compensation, well. The word felt pretty accurate.

“And you … they let you go?”

“No. They wanted us because we could stand up against their minds for a long, long time before our own minds fell apart, but they didn’t think about how that would mean all the ways they usually kept people under control wouldn’t work on us. As soon as they stopped trying all the time to keep us tame, we just got up and walked away. Now they look for us all the time, but we hide really well, and they don’t know how to handle people they can’t see. The Eldest Living says we’re the same as the stinging wasps—there’s things we don’t know how to handle, because they’re so alien to us that we can’t even prepare for what we don’t all the way understand. So we have to be careful, and not try to control anybody else, or we’ll get done and have nowhere to run. We just trust the timing.”