Page 79 of Butterfly Effects

“Arthur, you’re with me and Thomas,” said Alice. “Sam, if Annie’s in danger, get the two of you out of there as quickly as you can.”

“Why are we splitting up?” asked Sam. “I don’t see any good reason for it.”

“We’re not going to be able to use the door openly,” said Thomas. “That means going through in smaller groups, to avoid detection. We’ll cover more ground in two groups, and this way, each of us has a fire specialist. If you have no other way out, set the building on fire again. I can keep it from reaching us long enough to evacuate, and I’ll do the same thing if it gets bad where we are. The goal is to find Sarah and get outside.”

“How do I tell you if we’ve accomplished that?” I asked.

He smiled, more mischievously than I would have thought possible. “Set the building on fire and we’ll figure out that it’s time to go,” he said.

“Great. So fire means either ‘danger’ or ‘success,’ and the only way to find out which is to meet up behind the building again?” asked Sam.

“That’s correct,” said Thomas.

“Annie, I love you, and I can’t wait to marry you, but your family is like, big fucking weird, you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning at my cousin and grandparents. “I do.”

He rolled his eyes and the five of us kept walking, moving toward the edge of the jungle, Sam and I pulling slightly ahead while Alice, Thomas, and Arthur angled off to the right.

Emerging from the verdant if slightly charred green into the city was jarring. The sounds that had been everywhere in the trees died almost instantly, the buzzing and squeaking of insects replaced by the sound of feet on the sidewalks and the distant grumbling of the livestock in the parking garage. I was relieved to see that the fire hadn’t managed to spread that far: the stromopods and other riding animals were safe.

The fire brigade was gone, as was the triage area they had established; all the injured and deceased Johrlac had been removed. I was embarrassingly relieved by its absence. I knew at least one person had died in the fire I’d set. That didn’t mean I wanted a full list of the lost. Death is always a tragedy, even when you’re not on the same side, and these people hadn’t necessarily done anything wrong: they’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that shouldn’t be an offense worth dying over.

The administration building was singed but standing, with globs of foamy white stuff all over the front of it. Johrlac were going calmly in and out. Maybe they had a different approach to structural damage than we did back on Earth? At home, a building that had been this recently on fire would have been closed for days if not weeks, getting repaired before someone fell through a floor or something.

A group of Johrlac in red-and-brown jumpsuits like the man who’d fallen into the forest went through the door, carrying buckets and what looked like strangely shaped spatulas. Maybe they just had a more efficient means of repairing what we’d broken.

No one seemed to see us. The street was as busy as ever—busier, in some ways. There were substantially more children moving through the crowds, sticking in small groups of three to five, as silent as the adults around them. Interestingly, the children were clearly chatting with each other: their eyes were solidly white from side to side, occasionally flaring bright as a firefly’s luminescence, then dying back down again. Mental silence must come later, when they were more solidly themselves and more deeply absorbed by the collective.

Alice’s group turned directly toward the doors, while Sam looked at the damaged front of the building and scooped me off my feet again. “Hold on,” he suggested.

I held on.

He tensed, then leapt, landing on the side of the building around what I judged to be the two-story mark. From there, he began to climb, moving toward windows and pausing to the side of them while I leaned over to see whether there was anyone on the other side. The locals might be inclined not to allow themselves to see us when they couldn’t mentally “see” us, but that wouldn’t stop them from noticing a window being pried out of its frame.

The first three windows, I shook my head no, and we kept on going. The scenes I’d spotted through the wasp-veined glass were surprisingly mundane, people standing around or moving things from point to point. Sure, some of them moved those things without using their hands, but whatever. Light telekinesis was one of the first lessons Thomas had taught me, and Sarah sometimes forgot whether she was using her hands or her mind when she picked something up. We were not a family that demanded things be done manually. Still, no one looked disturbed or even particularly inconvenienced by the fact that their place of work had just recently been on fire and at least one of their coworkers had died.

At the fourth window, I held up a finger, signaling Sam to pause, and leaned in close to scan the room for any Johrlac I might have missed. There was no one there. The room was utterly empty. I looked back to him and nodded, then pulled back against his chest as he reached up and pulled the window out of its frame.

A moment later, we were inside and he was replacing the window where it belonged. The air smelled even more strongly of char than the forest outside did, underscored with a sharp smell like acetone. I pinched my nose before I could sneeze, but the tickling remained. Sam took a breath and wrinkled his own nose, looking almost comically offended. I snorted lightly and looked around the room.

It was featureless, which seemed to be, forgive me, a feature of the stand-alone rooms in this place; only the prisoners’ cells had been outfitted with anything I recognized as furniture, and there, it had been nothing more sophisticated than rough bunks to keep the prisoners from sleeping on the floor. The map room had been more properly outfitted according to my Earth sensibilities, but that had been about the function of the space: these rooms … I didn’t know why they existed, but whatever their purpose, they didn’t need flat surfaces or seating.

“I do not get these people,” I said lowly, and moved toward the door, Sam close behind me.

It didn’t take long to pick the lock and let ourselves out, into another long, featureless hall. Based on the angle, it was entirely internal: we’d be walking parallel to the outside wall, not moving any deeper into the structure unless we found a juncture. Shrugging, I started to my right, Sam still following. Either we’d find a turn or we’d make ourselves an exit and try again elsewhere in the structure.

With the telepathy blocker back against my skin, I couldn’t pick up on Sarah if I was trying. We needed to find more cells, and try to get her out of wherever she was being held. Once we did that, we could all go home together. This could be over.

We reached the hoped-for juncture and turned, finally starting to make our way deeper. After about ten feet, the hallway widened into a sort of lounge area, like the waiting room at a hospital, only without the desks, plastic plants, or uncomfortable chairs. There were also no doors. This space didn’t seem to lead to anything. It just existed, incongruously shoved into the middle of everything. I hesitated at the threshold.

“Annie? What’s wrong?” asked Sam, voice low.

“This whole thing is … it doesn’t feel right,” I said.

He frowned, and when I stepped forward, he didn’t try to stop me.

The attack came when we reached the middle of the room. The walls fell away, revealing a larger room filled with Johrlac in blue jumpsuits. They had us on numbers alone, but we fought as hard as we could before they overwhelmed us, Sam throwing punches while I threw fireballs. Several of them went down, their eyes glinting white as they fell, but the rest just kept coming.