Page 70 of Butterfly Effects

“We have many protections,” said the Eldest Living. I could tell she was looking at me, but the resin shell around her mind meant that I had no idea what she was feeling, or whether she was happy to see me here. “Some of them more clear than others. What did Ikko tell you about the history of the Kairos on Johrlar?”

“She said you’d been abducted from your home dimension and brought here as slave labor,” I said dutifully. “That the ones who did the abducting wanted a service class with enough telepathic resistance to stand up against the hive, and settled on the Kairos.”

“We serve the timing, but the timing works sometimes in mysterious ways,” she said. “The wasps came for us when there was a great famine upon the land, and the timing saw that more of us would survive if we were removed to Johrlar. So we were taken, and over time we learned enough to escape into the green places, where we could thrive. There was enough here to eat, and we spread and prospered. There are more of us here and now than there were on Caerus when we were taken. It would be better had we never been disturbed, but as we cannot change the past, we choose to glory in what we have done here that is for the better. We are happy, and we are well.”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with what Ikko might have told me,” I said. “I’m glad for you. It’s awful not to be where you belong. But we have a lot in common, you and I. The queens who rule here banished my ancestors, and I was born in another dimension, where I had to figure out how to be happy in a place that was never intended for me.”

“So you understand,” she said. “When you have little, what you do have seems like everything. It’s not worth the risk of losing it.”

Something about her tone was making me uneasy. I took a step backward. “No, it’s not. What I have right now is my freedom, and that’s a lot to lose.”

“But do you really have that, when you’re on someone else’s world and your family is being held prisoner? Or do you have the illusion of freedom egging you on, and need to let go of the idea that you have anything left to take away?”

Alarm bells were ringing in my head. “What did you do?” I asked.

To her credit, she didn’t try to deflect, just looked at me and said, in a cool tone, “Only what was necessary to protect my people. They don’t question how we can be so close to the city and so established without being discovered. They trust the timing, and fail to realize that sometimes even the timing needs a helping hand. I am their Eldest. I am the daughter of the man who was Eldest before me, and my own daughter has been raised knowing that one day she will take my place. She will speak for the timing. She will be the helping hand our people need to thrive. And she, like me, will speak to the collective on the behalf of the Kairos, and will offer them whatever they require to leave us alone. We do not give them our own people, ever. We do not sacrifice what we grow. But everything else is expendable.”

She stood, aged legs shaky but still strong enough to hold her, and began making her way down the side of the piled-up pillows and bedding. She held her head high as she descended, chin tilted slightly upward in a way that gave her an almost-regal bearing. When she reached the bottom she held out her hand, clearly expecting me to help her with the final steps from uneven fabric to solid ground.

I moved forward again, eyeing her warily. Could she possibly not know about skin contact making it easier for me to read her mind? If these people had been avoiding the Johrlac for as long as it sounded like they had, it was actually possible that they’d forgotten that little trick of living alongside us.

I reached out and took her hand. The color in the room shifted, reds becoming brighter as my vision aligned with her own, and I felt the unpleasant sensation of my thoughts sinking into thick, sticky toffee, getting mired and dragged down in something that clung and tangled and refused to let me go. I tried to pull my hand out of hers, but my arm refused to respond to the command. It was like my tangled-up thoughts couldn’t reach the nerves to tell them what to do.

“I do know about skin contact with the Johrlac,” said the Eldest Living. “And I know that faces aren’t a strong suit for your kind, but you should work harder at schooling yours—I could all but read your delight at the thought of crossing my defenses. The queens long ago set traps inside my mind, with my consent, to stop any others of their species from intruding where I didn’t want them. Don’t fight it. You’re mired now, and you’ll be pulled down soon enough, into the peaceful place they’ve made to hold you. Inside my mind, your mind will be able to dream until the time comes to carry you away. They’re already coming.”

She delicately extricated her hand from mine, shaking it like she’d just touched something unpleasant, then wiped it against the fabric at her hip before she turned to climb back up her fabric mountain.

My knees gave way, and I toppled gently forward into the pile of pillows, feeling little muscular twitches race along my limbs and spine. I’d never had a seizure to my knowledge, but this felt like the beginnings of one, my whole body starting to shake involuntarily as the twitches continued.

Johrlac can set traps inside a person’s brain. I knew that. I’d encountered it before, when the hive had been trying to force me toward the queen instar: they’d trapped Artie’s brain, turning it into a prison meant specifically for me. This didn’t feel quite like that. This was more like sinking into a tarpit, too deep and thick for me to pull myself free. I felt my bladder give way, warm wetness running down my thighs and sinking into the pillows beneath me, and I couldn’t even rouse myself to feel shame: if anything, I felt a grim satisfaction in knowing that I had at the very least ruined some of this deceptive liar’s pillows.

It was a small delight. It was the only one I currently felt likely to receive. And so I held on to it as the toffee dragged me down, down, deeper down, back into the whiteness of the void, and then the pride slipped away, and then everything else slipped away, and I was alone with my thoughts.

Seventeen

“There was a world before you existed, and there’s still going to be a world after you’re gone. But it’s not going to be the same. Everything is different now, forever, because you were here.”

—Mary Dunlavy

Back in the white place, which is honestly getting sort of old

THERE IS NO TIME IN the white place, not really. Minutes can feel like hours, and hours can feel like minutes. Meaning I had no idea how long I’d actually been down there. I knew I couldn’t wake up just by wanting it, although I could still rearrange the space to a certain degree: I thought about my wardrobe and I was back in my preferred oversized sweater and long skirt combination. I thought about how much I hated to be bored and a whiteboard appeared, complete with dry-erase markers and erasers to help me fix any errors.

I picked up a marker, uncapping it and inhaling the sharp, familiar fumes before setting the tip to the clean, glossy surface of the whiteboard, ready to begin writing out the first steps of the equation that would take me home. Then I paused, frowning. I couldn’t write that equation. I didn’t remember that equation. It had deleted itself as soon as I’d finished it the first time. It was gone.

But …

I knew it was possible to mathematically travel between dimensions, and I knew I’d been able to do it once. I knew the Johrlac had a better equation than the one I’d used, meaning it was possible to achieve this with more mathematical elegance and less brain-eating ferocity. All I needed to do was define what I needed the numbers to be able to do.

Biting my lip in concentration, I leaned forward and started to write.

What felt like an eternity later, I had fully defined all the functions I needed my new equation to perform. It had to cross dimensional boundaries, and it had to do so in a manner fast and clean enough to not kill the people it was transporting. That would be difficult, no matter how I approached it. But I thought I could see the outline of what it would have to do in order to work, and in that outline, I could also see the issues with the original equation. It wasn’t just that it was hostile and inclined to attack: it was that the equation the cuckoos used was feral, broken by the number of times it had been stripped down and forced to become more efficient. Truly advanced Johrlac math was essentially alive, and like any living thing, it wanted to go on living, and it didn’t want to suffer.

For generations, the cuckoos had been abusing the equation, hurting it as they chopped pieces off and tossed them aside in an effort to make the core more streamlined and easy to control. And at some point, it had stopped taking the damage lightly. It had stopped playing along with its own mutilation. It had been tame once, and now it was a threat to anyone who got too close. It was hungry.

The Johrlac were using an older form of the same equation, and a newer one at the same time, a version that had never been butchered, but had been carefully refined over the course of generations, helping it to achieve its full power and potential. I added a few more conditions to my outline, mapping out the strange and dangerous country of what I needed this equation to do.

If I was going to get my family home, I needed a version that could transport six people—because no way in hell was I going through all this only to leave myself behind—and wouldn’t require me to offload more than the smallest functions onto any other processing centers. I needed the mathematical equivalent of a suitcase nuke, small and powerful and primed to blow the second I hit the button.