Page 77 of Butterfly Effects

Arthur never got to choose anything. Arthur came into existence with so many of his choices already made. Even with as mad as I still was at Sarah, I knew she hadn’t intended to do that to him. She’d been acting on instinct and panic, trying to save someone who was already gone, and she’d made a mistake. That was all.

No one would say it would have been better if Arthur hadn’t existed. I liked him well enough. The ways he reminded me of Artie hurt, but the ways he didn’t were an endlessly unfolding delight. Still, it worried me when he talked about Sarah: his love was too deeply rooted in who he was as a person, and it consequentially verged on becoming obsession, something that might eventually harm them both.

“So we haven’t managed to find Sarah yet,” said Alice. “But finding Arthur means we’re in the right place—dimensional crossings of this distance are expensive enough that they wouldn’t have sent multiple groups over unless they had a central working.”

“It didn’t seem that expensive for Grandpa,” I said.

“Your grandfather is working with a different set of rules,” she said, delicately.

“Tell me,” I said.

Thomas looked back over his shoulder at me, brow furrowed. “I don’t want you getting ideas about attempting dimensional crossings on your own,” he said. “I’ve been avoiding the topic until we’d finished more of your foundational schooling.”

“I don’t want to go dimension-hopping for funsies,” I said. “Mary would kick my ass. She’s never forgiven herself for not doing a better job of convincing Grandma it was a bad idea.”

“And I’d pout for days if she said she was going to run off like that,” volunteered Sam.

Thomas sighed and stopped walking, looking around until he spotted a bush covered in large, peach-colored berries. “Imagine each of these is a world,” he said. He reached over and plucked a berry, holding it up for inspection. “The Johrlac travel via concentrated, somewhat destructive mathematical means. They can bend their numbers so that inserting them into another world’s sphere of existence doesn’t rupture anything, but rather passes cleanly through. This takes an immense amount of power and effort from the caster, as the energy consumed is either channeled through or created by the mathematician.” He twisted his free hand, working a needle free of his shirt cuff, and slid it through the surface of the berry and out the other side. “The punctures they make are so small as to do functionally no damage, when the math is done correctly. When done incorrectly, we get the scenarios I’ve been told the cuckoos intended to play out with Sarah shortly before my return home. Worlds end.”

He tossed me the berry. I turned it over in my hand, but a quick inspection didn’t reveal the puncture marks. Only squeezing it slightly made beads of juice form where the needle had passed.

“Okay,” I said. “Surgical and precise, got it.”

“Surgical, precise, and limited by the power the cast can generate or have fed to them. Sorcerers, on the other hand, use the pneuma they’ve collected or carried with them to fuel the crossing.” He plucked another berry, holding it up. “This causes more damage, but means they don’t need anyone else to feed them power.” He picked at the delicate edge of skin left around the hole where the berry had attached to its skin, finally pulling a thin strip away. Again, he tossed me the berry. This time, the damage was easy to see.

“It will heal, given time, but dimensional crossings are expensive for the worlds, rather than for the caster. We can still exhaust ourselves channeling that much power, but we do it on our own, without large groups to help us shape the spell. Indeed, sorcerers are more likely to experience complications when we try to work with others.”

“Sarah brought us back on her own.” But that wasn’t true, was it? That had never been true. She’d done the math herself, but she’d bolstered it with the power and storage capacity of hundreds of minds, using them to do the brute force computing while she shaped the equation to her will. She wouldn’t have been able to make the transition without all of us to support her. Even Artie, although we would never know for sure whether he had been aware when he touched her that he was going to be trading his life for our ticket home.

“What about Grandma?” I asked, trying to make sense of all this. “She can’t bend pneuma.”

“Can’t even see the stuff,” she said cheerfully. “I was shocked as anything when I found out I was covered in it. Could have knocked me over with a feather.”

“If that serpentine bastard hadn’t been holding you down and flensing you alive on a regular basis, you would have been carrying enough pneuma to make yourself the most terrifying magician the worlds have ever seen,” said Thomas.

“So let’s be glad that didn’t happen,” she said, still far cheerier than she had any right to be under the circumstances.

Thomas sighed. “Your grandmother can’t manipulate pneuma, but she can be given objects, whether physical or representative, that are attuned to it and allow her to utilize what she has. The result is almost a hybrid of the human and Johrlac methods of crossing. Like the human, they use pneuma as a base, and work by expending it. Like the Johrlac, they also draw from their users.”

“That’s why I had horrible traumatic flashbacks every time I crossed dimensional walls using one of my tattoos, and why it could exhaust me so badly that I had to carry glucose packs to be sure I wouldn’t pass out before I could get to safety.” As was almost always the case when she was describing something objectively horrible, Alice’s tone remained upbeat and even delighted with the subject. It wasn’t the strangest defense mechanism in the family.

Thomas clearly also recognized it for what it was. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder with one hand, then looked back to me.

“Me bringing us all here was expensive in terms of pneuma consumed, and since Earth is still recovering from what the crossroads did to us, it’s better if I don’t try to repeat the process more than strictly necessary, which is why we’re not going back until we’re all together. The Johrlac coming for your cousins was expensive in terms of risk to both the mathematician and the people powering the spell, which is why we don’t have to worry about them doing it on a regular basis. And your grandmother going home on her own would be expensive in terms of the toll it would take on her body, which is still recovering from the beating she took getting us all out of the bottle dimension I’d been imprisoned in.”

“Got it,” I said. “Thank you for taking the time to explain.”

“Under the circumstances, it seemed like the best way to avoid something happening that we wouldn’t be able to recover from quite as well as we could a brief delay. Now. We need to find your cousin.”

“I have a suggestion,” said Sam, slowly. He didn’t sound happy about it. “We’ve all been wearing those charms Alice handed out since before we got here, and we know they make us basically invisible to most of the Johrlac. Arthur didn’t have a charm, but he was in a cell designed to stop telepathic contact. Even if none of those things are enough to stop a queen on their own, they might be enough to turn down her volume.”

“Sam…” I began.

He held up a hand, signaling for me to let him keep going. “I’m just saying, Annie set fire to their capital building, after they figured out Alice was here for nefarious purposes. Pretty sure this is no longer a stealth operation, if it ever really was. Maybe one of the people who’s more attuned to Sarah than me or Alice should take their charm off and see if they can make contact.”

Arthur opened his mouth, already reaching behind himself to remove his charm. Before he could, I grabbed mine by the strap and heated up my hand, burning through the leather cord in a matter of seconds. The charm dropped harmlessly into my other hand, and the world of Johrlar came alive around me.

The four hums I’d already been able to hear were joined by a dozen more, the jungle harmonizing with itself. One of those hums was discordant, a whimper of pain cutting through the chorus, and I knew from the tone of it that it was the forest, a single mind made up of all the interconnected root systems and mycelia under our feet. This was a telepathic world, and never had I been able to understand that better than when I let myself be open to it.