Page 80 of Butterfly Effects

Then a hand closed around my wrist and it was all over. The anti-telepathy charm I was wearing wasn’t enough to protect me from skin contact with an actual Johrlac. I was slammed immediately out of connection with my body, and into a featureless expanse of infinite whiteness.

A woman who looked like Sarah in the way a cobra looks like a garter snake was waiting for me there, wearing an iridescent bodysuit that gleamed like an oil slick in all the possible colors of the rainbow and a few additional ones that my brain didn’t know how to make sense of. She was smiling, which was almost as unnatural as the cold detachment in her icy eyes.

“You lose, little hive destroyer,” she said, and her voice was and was not Sarah’s, and I knew she was the collective, infinite and enormous, looking down upon me from whatever height they chose to watch over their people.

I fell into a fighting stance, raising my fists, and her smile turned cruelly amused.

“Such a mammalian response. We’ll never understand how you became the dominant life form on so many, many worlds. You’ve lost. Let yourself lose. It’s time to stop now, mammal.”

Her eyes gleamed white, and the fight drained out of me.

I barely noticed my eyes closing.

I certainly didn’t notice myself hitting the ground.

Nineteen

SARAH

“Time may come where someone comes along and says they’ve got a claim on you from something they did without asking you first. You can be polite to them if you like, but you’ve got no obligation. They have no power over you.”

—Frances Brown

The Ka’krin Hall of Justice and Law

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I sat there before they came for me, eight guards in blue jumpsuits who grabbed me roughly and pulled me out of my cell, dragging me down the hallway to a small room where they thrust a bundle of fabric into my arms and snapped aloud, “Get dressed.”

Interesting. They didn’t even want to risk making mental contact with me. As soon as they’d pulled me out of the cell, the world had returned to its usual depth and focus: I could feel their minds around me, self-contained and bright, like little candle flames I could have reached out and dragged my fingers through. I kept my thoughts to myself—literally—and didn’t try to communicate telepathically with any of them. Better not to feed their fears when they’d already decided I was a monster.

As for me, I was still trying to decide how monstrous I was going to become. Their collective had brought me here against my will, and now that same collective was afraid of what I could do to them. But was I willing to do it? So much hinged on Arthur’s condition. If they had him and he was unharmed, I might just stand down. Let them have their trial, let them promise to send my family home, and then …

After that, I didn’t know. I’d meant what I said before. I still had things to do. I wanted to see Isaac grow up, whether having Charlotte and Mom and me around would mean he was a better example of our species than Mom or I had been able to become. I wanted to meet Cici. I wanted to take care of Greg. But even more than all of that, I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, and hurting people seemed inevitable if I continued on as I had been. I didn’t belong on Earth. I was an invasive species there, and I always, always would be.

Maybe we’d all be better off if I just stopped fighting and let the collective do whatever they wanted with me. At least if they erased the Sarah-I-was and replaced me with a Sarah-they-made, they’d know they had someone who could be useful and wouldn’t go around accidentally deleting people’s memories or wiping their minds.

But that would be rewarding them for their terrible behavior, and I didn’t want to do that either.

The bundle of fabric they had handed me was another jumpsuit, this one arctic white with bands of pale gray that I guessed would be pink if I had a pair of mammalian eyes to orient myself with. Interesting. I wondered which of their castes this aligned with; it seemed odd for them to have a whole color scheme for prisoners.

One of the guards made an impatient gesture, clearly signaling me to get on with it. I removed the loose shirt and pants they had dressed me in, leaving them discarded on the floor. I shook the jumpsuit out to remove the wrinkles, stepping into it and easing it over my hips before doing up the seam at the front, which wasn’t a zipper but might as well have been. It adhered to itself when I pinched it, sealing the fabric around me. I couldn’t figure out how that worked. I wasn’t sure it mattered.

Turning, I walked the short distance back to the guard who’d handed me the jumpsuit in the first place. “Do I get shoes?” I asked. The jumpsuit covered the soles of my feet, but it was so thin that anything rougher than the interior floors would probably tear the fabric.

“No,” the guard replied tersely. “Come with us.”

They turned then, starting down the hall, while the others fanned out to surround me, leaving me with no choice but to accompany them. I didn’t particularly want to run away again. This whole thing had been like one big game of cat and mouse, and I was tired of it. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to know they were okay.

I wanted this to be over with.

So I didn’t resist and I didn’t run, and I didn’t reach out and mentally squeeze the guards around me until they collapsed and I could get away. I just walked.

The building smelled like the inside of a cheap barbeque joint, all smoke and char and the sharp, almost fruity tang of acetone. Someone had managed to light a fire here recently. I blinked, looking around as we left the hall for a large atrium—the main atrium, if the pattern of the dome above us was anything to go by. Some of the walls were blackened, and janitorial crews were already hard at work cutting away sheets of damaged material and replacing it with fresh panels, using a muddy substance to glue them in place. This really was a giant wasp’s nest, with little adjustments made where necessary to adapt it to bipedal uses.

I faced front again as we crossed the atrium, feeling fleeting touches from all the minds around us. The people were intensely curious. From a few of them I caught glints of recognition, and the meaning of my jumpsuit: it was their signal for “cuckoo.” As long as I wore this, I was branded as an exile, someone outside their system. I immediately liked it better for knowing that it was accurate, it actually described me, and liked it less at the same time, because it would make running away harder, if things came to that. Now anyone who looked at me would know what I was.

As if they wouldn’t have known already. I tried to reconstruct the partition I’d been using with Fetch and Carry, then paused as I realized that I was out of my cell. Experimentally, I reached for the numbers that would let me take myself away.

They were back, all of them, a beautiful Fibonacci spiral of possibilities that could take me anywhere I wanted to go if I could just define my destination to the eighth decimal place. That was easy. That part had always been easy. I could pull on the underlying threads of reality to put myself someplace else, someplace I could be, however momentarily, safe.