Page 71 of Butterfly Effects

I could do this. It was possible. I could almost see it, and the one benefit of being banished to the white place was the total lack of distractions. I kept writing until I had filled my entire whiteboard, then summoned a second and continued onward, working toward a solution, working toward salvation. I could save us all. I could get us out of here. I could—

“Whoever taught you had some skill, we’ll grant them that,” said a cool female voice from behind me. “Fascinating, given how primitive they must have been. There’s no possible way you could have located a real teacher in that backwater dimension you keep considering your home. If you’d been taught by someone who truly understood the ramifications of what they were doing, you would never have committed your many, many crimes.”

“Collective,” I said coldly, and replaced the cap on my pen. I did so with careful precision, not rushing before I turned to face the cuckoo woman I knew would be standing there. She smirked at me. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I hate it so much when the bad guys gloat. “I don’t remember inviting you into my mind. This is the second time you’ve trespassed without my permission.”

“We don’t trespass,” she said, with a sneer. “We are the collective and this territory is our own. The territory and all that it contains. You are here, therefore you are ours, and we can no more trespass against you than a body can trespass against a bone. You belong to us. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can end this whole charade.”

“I am not anyone’s property,” I said. “I belong to myself, if I belong to anyone. I am a queen and a collective in my own right, and you took me from my territory. I’m only contained here because you forced me to be.”

“The weaker collective is absorbed,” she said dismissively. “If we were able to take you, it’s because you were weak. We’ve won. We’ve already won. Stop fighting us.”

“I thought I was here for a trial, not a conquest.”

“So allow us to try you.”

“No.”

She raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“No. I don’t recognize your authority over me, or over my family. Let me go. Let my cousin go. We’ll leave, and you’ll never need to hear from us again. That’s my final offer.”

“You’re not in a place to be making demands right now, little cuckoo. We were afraid of you at first—the cuckoo queen, the thing we’ve been dreading for centuries. And when you caught us by surprise, you did a little damage, true. But you’re just a jumped-up version of your peers. You’re not strong. You’re not clever. You got lucky somehow. We know how to handle luck.”

“Subvert it and use it to trap innocent people, apparently,” I snapped.

“The Kairos and their precious timing do complicate things,” she said. “Still, they’re all but guaranteed to encounter every person we bring here who manages to evade us, and so we can use them to catch our runaways. And we’re not here to fight with you. We’re here to offer you a bargain you might find worth pursuing.”

“What’s that?” I asked warily.

“Agree to stand trial. Agree to let us measure you against your crimes, and to abide by what we find in that analysis. If you do, we promise to return your family to their home dimension, and to leave them peacefully.”

“But you won’t be returning me.”

“Oh, no. Not unless you’re somehow found innocent—which you won’t be.” She smiled venomously, slow as a snake in winter. “Your bones will join all the other criminals who’ve come before us or, if we find your mind to be of unexpected value, we’ll erase your malfeasance and your wickedness, and the woman you become will join us. Either death or apotheosis.”

I stared at her, briefly too stunned to speak. She kept smiling, apparently unbothered by my long silence. Finally, recovering my voice, I said, “I thought the greater punishment would take priority, but no. This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Get me here, and then make me over in your own image. Why even pretend this has something to do with the law? Why bother with the pretense of a trial if you’ve already made up your minds?”

“We aren’t the only authority in the multiverse,” she said, smile dropping. “There are busybodies out there who believe we have a responsibility to the worlds the cuckoos damage, that because we freed them upon the dimensions, we share some culpability in their crimes. Simple fools, but it serves us better to pretend as if we respect their authority than it does to defy them. Traveling to another world to pluck one of its residents away would be an act of war were we not doing it to enforce our laws. So we use the law. A cuckoo queen should have been an impossibility, and the strength you’ve already demonstrated … we can’t allow it to belong to another collective. You’ll be ours.”

“I’ll eat you from the inside out.”

“No, you won’t. The you who believes in threatening her sisters won’t be here any longer. But the people you would kill to defend will be going safely home, unharmed, their minds intact. Isn’t that worth it, to you?” She leaned closer, voice dropping conspiratorially. “We can see your guilt, like a velvet worm wrapped around your throat. We know how much you loathe what you’ve become. Here’s the way to put paid to everything you’ve done, to cap it all off with a single act of penance. All you have to do is stop resisting us and this can all be over.”

It was tempting. It was so tempting. And that was how I knew it was almost certainly the wrong thing to do: anything that sounded that appealing was probably a cover for something I was going to like a lot less. Not that it mattered how much I did or didn’t like it when I was talking about the actual death of the self. My body would still be here, as a power supply for the collective, but the person in control of it wouldn’t be me.

“I don’t want it to be over,” I said, voice quiet. “There’s too much left in the world that I want and need to do. I want to see the next Pokémon game. I want to find out what happens with the X-Men. I want to see my baby brother grow up, and know that he’s a cuckoo with a sense of ethics, just like our mom. I want to see my friend Mark reunite with his little sister, and I don’t want to make the people who love me deal with losing me. They’ve already lost so much in the last few years. It’s not fair to ask them to lose even more.”

The collective’s face contorted immediately into a scowl. “You act like you have an actual choice in the matter. We were trying to be polite.”

“I’m not interested in being polite. I’m just interested in going home.”

“You have committed crimes against the collective, Sarah Zellaby. You have acted against your own kind; you have killed without concern or discrimination for the innocent and the unwell. You are a criminal by any measure of the term, and for the sake of Johrlar’s treaties with our surrounding realities, you must be held accountable for what you’ve done. It’s nothing personal.”

“Really? Because it feels pretty damn personal.”

Between one breath and the next, the collective was gone, and I was alone with my whiteboard once again. I turned back to it, but the math had lost some of its allure; it no longer beckoned me quite as openly, no longer seemed like a fractal flower caught in the moment of unfurling. It was just numbers, pressed flat as insects under glass. I still uncapped my pen and tried to go back to work.

I had to finish this equation.