Page 7 of Butterfly Effects

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “You got the value of the variable wrong on your fourth equation. It should have been three, or the whole thing fails to resolve.”

“I knew you’d catch that, sweetie,” she said, crossing the kitchen to kiss my forehead before ruffling Isaac’s hair with one hand. “You always were my little perfectionist. When do you leave?”

“As soon as Shelby comes downstairs.” There was a clatter from the hall, telling me that she was doing precisely that.

“Aren’t you going to eat first?” asked Alex.

“I’ll grab something in New York,” I said. “Promise.”

Shelby stepped into the kitchen, nodding in my direction just as I stepped away from Mom and grabbed for the inherent mathematical structure of the world around me. I had to do the mental equivalent of squinting in order to see it, but once I did, I could see the chained functions that made up everything. Physics, matter, and distance, they were all equations, and equations could be modified.

I waved at Shelby, and I was gone.

There aren’t really words for the way I can move around now that I’ve stabilized as a fully mature queen. “Spatial tunneling” is the closest we’ve really come. I basically just take the math that tells me my location and change it to something different. As soon as I release it in its changed state, it becomes an absolute truth, and reality is happier to change things about itself than it is to modify its underlying math. It does make an impact, leaving little errors in the math between the two points I’ve modified, and they need time to correct themselves before I can safely tunnel to the same location again. I try to think of it as drawing lines that are never allowed to overlap, a logic puzzle playing out in four dimensions at once. And even that is a simplification, because I don’t know how to explain the beautiful crystalline network of numbers that is the equations that transport me. I reach out, I tweak, and I’m gone. Over and over again. It’s that simple, and that complicated.

It’s definitely not an ability that should have been extended to someone with my reasons for running away.

Two

“People will always make assumptions about you based on who your family is. Whether you prove them wrong or right is up to you. Pick whichever suits you better.”

—Alice Healy

The smaller bedroom in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment

ONE MOMENT, I WAS IN the kitchen with my family, and the next moment, I was standing in the room I rented in New York. Unlike my childhood bedroom, it was barren, almost austere in its lack of decoration or clutter; there was a bed, for the times when I absolutely couldn’t get out of sleeping here, and a dresser with a week’s worth of clothing, but there wasn’t much else.

It was, however, all spotlessly clean. I creaked open the door, and the sound of Latin pop drifted down the hall, accompanied by the smell of frying eggs and hot bacon grease. I could pick up Malena’s thoughts from the kitchen, as bright and electric as her music. She was in a good mood. That was an excellent thing. An unhappy Malena can be dangerous.

Like me, Malena is a cryptid capable of passing for human. Unlike me, her species is actually native to this dimension. She’s a chupacabra, a synapsid therianthrope whose biology would give most scientists the most confusing orgasm of their lives if they got an hour to study her. Is she a mammal? Is she a reptile? Is anyone going to figure it out any time soon?

Most of the time she’s a Mexican-American woman who works as the handyman in the dragon-owned apartment building where my cousin Verity lives. Malena likes pop music, dirty fried eggs, and ballroom dance; while she no longer danced professionally, she had been teaching local classes, and had managed to acquire a loyal following of amorous retirees, aspiring competitors, and Broadway hopefuls.

She and Verity originally met on a reality dance competition show, Dance or Die, where they’d technically been up against each other, but had actually formed an alliance when the other contestants started showing up dead. They weren’t the best of friends back then, but after Verity’s husband died, Malena had shown up on her doorstep to drag her out of her depression. It hadn’t worked well enough to make them roommates, but it had worked well enough to make Malena a semi-permanent fixture.

I was quietly glad of that. She only needed one bedroom, and was happy to sublet her spare to me for use when I was in the city. That kept me from needing to either rent a whole apartment on my own or—even worse—stay with Verity and her kids. Livvy and David are great kids, very sweet, very friendly, and very unaccustomed to spending extended periods of time around a telepath. It’s the mental equivalent of going to the mall on Black Friday without earplugs.

Reaching out, I could tell Verity and the kids were in the building, and I’d be able to check in with them before heading to the hospital. I started walking quietly down the hall, following the sound of Malena’s music.

I was almost there when she said, voice bright and friendly, “If you’re not Sarah, you should know I don’t have any of those silly human compunctions against killing people who invade my den, and maybe turn around and go the other way.”

“Definitely Sarah,” I said, stepping around the corner into the narrow, cream-colored kitchen.

Malena was standing in the center of the room. She folded her arms, eyeing me. “You ever hear of calling first? Texting? Maybe drawing up a nice schedule so I know when to expect the sudden appearance of my occasional roommate? I could have been in the middle of eating my breakfast.”

“I don’t care if you need to eat around me,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

She unfolded her arms in order to shake her spatula in my direction. “It will, once I put everything in the blender.”

Chupacabra don’t handle solids well. They’re not strict sanguivores like Huldra, but they get horrific indigestion if they eat things that aren’t pureed, or have less than about eighty percent animal protein. There was an industrial-strength blender next to the stove, already half full of what looked dauntingly like raspberry jelly.

Coagulated pig’s blood is an acquired taste, and as a chupacabra who lived among humans, Malena had acquired it. Seeing me looking, she picked up her frying pan and began scraping bacon and eggs into the blender, a challenging buzz at the top of her thoughts.

Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if I could look at people’s faces and know what they were thinking, rather than looking at their thoughts and guessing at what they actually wanted me to see. I guess the grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence.

“You want some?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said. “There’s a juice bar near the entrance to St. Giles’s that does tomato-ginger smoothies, and I’m going to grab one before I go to see Dr. Morrow.”