Page 75 of Butterfly Effects

I exhaled, sagging in relief.

“That was close,” said Arthur.

The man stopped running.

We all froze again, and stayed frozen as the man slowly turned and started walking back toward us, lowering his broom so that it was held almost like a spear. He was moving slowly, scanning the greenery around him as he did, and I realized he was really looking at everything, each leaf and vine, with the sort of attention to detail I hadn’t expected to see from anyone native to this world. For whatever reason, he’d learned to see the world around him, not just focus on the nearby minds.

Maybe it was the broom. Anyone who thought to bring their broom with them as they jumped out of a burning building would have to be good at paying attention to their surroundings. Dust doesn’t have a mind, but it still needs to be swept up.

Of course, that raised the question of how much not seeing us was a choice the other Johrlac made, a more advanced version of the way Verity had never been able to see the dirty dishes clogging the sink when she didn’t want to deal with them. If it was a choice, then it was presumably one they could stop making any time they wanted to.

Oh, we needed to find my grandparents. But before we did that, we needed to get away from the man who was still moving closer and closer to where we stood frozen.

Sam could move faster than the Johrlac could react. And if he moved at full speed, he’d be hitting like a freight train: he could very well kill this man without intending to, and even though the stranger represented a threat to us in the moment, he didn’t deserve to die for the crime of being able to pay attention. That left me and Arthur.

Arthur’s main defense was his pheromones, which didn’t work against Johrlac. And mine …

Well, mine wasn’t very far away at the moment. I reached out for the fire, feeling my way through the smoky air. We were still very close to the administration building: there was nothing that could keep me from getting to my goal. I extended the tendrils of my magic, and the fire answered me, ready to come at my command as always.

If I pulled it into the jungle, things were going to get a lot more exciting, very quickly. The man was getting closer. I didn’t really think I had a choice.

Come, I commanded the fire.

The fire came so fast and so hard that it blew a hole in the back of the administration building, bursting through the papery wall like it had been fed with some sort of accelerant—which, in a way, it had been. My magic was better than gasoline where the fire was concerned, twice as flammable and infinitely more pure.

The jungle was alive and growing, wet with sap and juices. It didn’t want to burn. I pushed more magic into the flames, and what the jungle wanted didn’t matter anymore, because it was burning, bright as a candle and fiercely hot. Its joy was palpable, and I took a heartbeat to glory in it, letting the ecstasy of the flames burn over and through me. The man with the broom yelped and whipped around, raising his arms to shield his face as he stared, horrified, at what was rapidly becoming an inferno.

Then he ran again, faster this time, away from us … and away from the fire, which was coming right at us.

“You can turn it off now, right, Annie?” asked Arthur.

“It doesn’t work that way, dude,” said Sam. “Once she sets the fire, it’s pretty much out of her control.”

Not entirely. I could call it closer if I wanted to, could bring it to where I could wrap it around myself and let it warm me. Everything in this world was alien, but the fire was so familiar. The fire was here for me, and because of me, and I loved it so.

I didn’t say any of that. Loving the fire was irrelevant. No matter how much I wanted it, I was still flesh and bone, and even an elementalist can be consumed if they linger too close to the flame. “We need to get out of here,” I said, looking up at Sam. “Can you carry us both?”

“Not very far, but hopefully far enough,” he said, and scooped each of us under an arm, holding tight as he tensed, then leapt forward, beginning to race away from the fire, which was quickly turning that patch of jungle into an inferno. His choices of direction were limited by the wall of flame and the fact that the man from before had already taken the most effective escape route.

So he ran, leaping over obstacles and parkouring off tree trunks like he was being timed, and Arthur and I held on, me pulling my legs in as much as I could to prevent being jounced around more than was absolutely unavoidable. Leaves and small branches slapped me across the face and shoulders, but Sam was doing a decent job of dodging anything overly large.

And then there were two figures ahead of us in the brush. Sam dodged around them, still running. I leaned over, getting as close to his ear as possible, and shouted, “Those were my grandparents, Sam!”

He jumped again, using a nearby limb to redirect his momentum as he bounded back the way we’d just come. Landing a few feet in front of my bemused-looking grandparents, he set me and Arthur back on our feet.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was in ‘Don’t burn to death or get caught’ mode, and I wasn’t really looking where I was going.”

“I’m going to be sick,” said Arthur, staggering toward a nearby bush.

I would normally have said something catty, or at least attempted to tease, but I was preoccupied with trying to get my intensely tangled hair out of my face and back behind my ears.

“You’re all uninjured?” asked Thomas. Sam and I made sounds of assent, while Arthur began retching into the brush. Thomas looked past us to him, a faint look of amusement twisting his mouth upward. “I suppose vomiting isn’t an injury.”

“He never liked rollercoasters either, the poor lamb,” said Alice, then grimaced. “I mean Artie didn’t like roller coasters. It’s the same body, so I’d assume things like ‘does not enjoy getting recreationally rattled’ would still apply.”

Arthur tried to straighten and reply, only to double over again, continuing to retch. I grimaced and turned away from him, trying to keep the sounds he was making from unsettling my own stomach.

“How did you get out?” asked Sam.