Page 78 of Butterfly Effects

And under the louder hums surrounding me, there was a thin, almost silenced tone, one muffled and deadened by some sort of barrier, one that I still knew all the way down to my bones. Sarah had stolen my memories of her, intentionally or not, but she couldn’t change the things my flesh remembered. My skin knew she was my cousin, barely short of a sister; my skin knew she was family, and beloved. I heard her with my body as much as with my mind, and I knew she was here, and I knew she was captive, and I knew she needed us. More than anything else, she needed us.

“Annie?” said Sam, anxiously. “You okay, babe?”

I shushed him, then closed my eyes and turned in a circle before I stopped and pointed in the direction the hum seemed to be coming from. “She’s that way,” I said. “Over there.”

“One small problem, pumpkin,” said Alice. “That way takes us back toward the building you set on fire.”

“Maybe it’s done being on fire by now,” I said. “We know she wasn’t there when we were inside. They must have her someplace nearby.”

“That, or they moved her while we were walking,” suggested Arthur. “Annie’s the only person here who’s better at picking up on Sarah than I am. If she says that’s the way, then that’s the way. I trust her.”

“Thank you,” I said, still pointing. “Sarah’s this way. I think she’s behind some kind of dampener, but it’s not quite strong enough to block her out completely.”

“All right,” said Alice. “Lead the way.”

Traveling back through the jungle without the speed added by Sam’s panicked flight slowed us down considerably. We’d been walking for what felt like over an hour before the air began smelling of smoke again, and shortly after that, we emerged into a clearing that had clearly burned, and recently. Ropes of foamy white clung to the newly crisped foliage around us, having been used to control and extinguish the blaze, and Arthur yelped as he tried to keep walking.

I turned to look back at him. He grimaced sheepishly.

“Ground’s still hot,” he explained.

“Let me get that,” said Thomas. He raised and then lowered his right hand, a stern expression on his face. Arthur watched this with wide eyes, and when Thomas beckoned, he once again tried to step into the clearing. His eyes widened with surprise, and he kept on going.

“The ground’s cool now,” he said. “I thought you could just make fire happen, not cool things down.”

“Wait until you get to experience one of your grandmother’s holiday dinners,” said Thomas. “As soon as she realized I could shunt the heat away from objects as well as summon it, she threw out all her trivets and declared roast roc a reasonable substitute for turkey.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Thomas,” said Alice. “It took at least a year before I believed you wouldn’t freeze my gravy doing that.”

Arthur looked utterly baffled. Thomas smiled at him, visibly taking pity.

“Antimony and I are both elementalists, and the easiest manifestation of what we can do is fire, but really anything to do with moving heat around falls under our purview. Once Antimony has been fully trained, she’ll be able to cool things down as quickly as she heats them up. Heat will always come more naturally.”

“Huh,” I said. “Does that mean that eventually James will get heat to go with his cold?”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “Assuming he can focus on his studies.”

“Hey!” I protested. “James focuses just fine when he needs to. It’s not his fault that he’s still getting used to the idea of having a family that actually likes him. He gets distracted sometimes. You would too, in his position.”

“You did, too,” said Alice, bumping her hip against his as they walked. “When I first started sleeping over, you damn near burned the house down, you were so distracted.”

“A man has that reaction to finding a beautiful woman he’s wanted to hold for years suddenly available and waiting in his bedroom,” said Thomas, with stiff dignity. “I doubt James is having the same experience with Sally.”

“No, I would think not,” said Alice, almost laughing.

James and Sally—my adopted brother and their adopted daughter, respectively, which made our specific familial relations a sort of whacked-out macramé no one could follow without a flow chart—are both about as queer as it’s possible to get while still adhering to a binary gender. He likes boys, she likes girls, and never the twain shall meet. She’d been his beard for a few chaperoned dances when they were in high school together, back when his father had been convinced he could bully the gay out of him.

That shit has never worked. Not from the beginning to the end of time. Bullying your queer kid isn’t going to get you a straight one. If you’re lucky, it’ll get you what James’s dad got: a living queer kid who doesn’t consider you family and will never voluntarily speak to you again.

If you’re unlucky, it’ll get you what so many families receive. It’ll get you a dead queer kid. And yeah, dead queer kids are still queer. Just ask Mary.

We had reached the center of the burnt-out place. We all paused there for a moment, going quiet and listening for any sounds from the nearby street. There weren’t any. Even the bugs were quieter here, having been driven off by the smoke and flames. If the fire brigade was still out there, they were working in total silence. Not outside the realm of possibility, but that implied that they had moved on to cleanup. Throwing sheets of foam makes a sound, even if it’s not as loud as people yelling or flames crackling.

I took my anti-telepathy charm and tied it around my throat again, securing the knot against the back of my neck so that it hung like a very unfashionable choker. The distant buzz of Sarah’s presence immediately flickered out, and I felt a strange hollowness where it should have been. It was difficult not to pull the charm off again, just so I could know she was all right, which made no sense. I didn’t like her. I certainly wasn’t so worried about her that I needed a constant reminder that she was okay.

But I still missed that sound when it was gone.

I shook my head like a dog trying to shake off a flea, and turned to look at Sam. “From here, we’re as quiet as we can be,” I said.