Page 82 of Butterfly Effects

“Silence. The accused will not speak to the evidence,” snapped the queen at the center of the collective. “This individual is a revision, and has no right to speak. This … person is a collage of memories and experiences not his own, collected by the accused and assembled into the shape of a man. He does not want for himself, but only as he has been instructed by the accused. He is not real, and has no right to existence.”

Around the arena, eyes flashed white, and I didn’t need to hear their mental mutterings to know what they were saying. The queen’s tone told me everything. She was revolted by Arthur’s existence, and so were they.

Arthur tried to jerk to the side, fighting against his manacles. “I’m real!” he shouted. “I exist!”

“You are improperly made, incomplete and unanchored,” said the queen. She reached out and took the hands of the queens to either side of her. “We may require your testimony before this is done, so we will not delete you, but we will repair the damage that has been done.”

Their eyes gleamed white, all five of them. Arthur made a choked-off sound, then slumped where he stood, not quite toppling over. I rushed to the edge of my platform, barely stopping before I could topple the seventy or so feet to the ground. With the psychic blocker on my wrist, if I fell, I’d have no way of catching myself, and I wasn’t Verity. I hadn’t been practicing safe falls from more than twenty feet since I was in middle school. I would die.

Watching Arthur folding slowly inward on himself like an animatronic that had been forcibly separated from its power source, it was hard not to feel like I would deserve it.

A familiar voice screamed outrage into the echoing air, and I turned to see the curtains blocking another box jerked forcibly aide, revealing a group of four figures. By their hair and clothing, I identified them as my grandparents, Antimony, and Sam. Antimony was the one screaming, her hands balled by her sides and limned with flickering white coronas. She and Thomas were wearing bracelets similar to my own. I wasn’t sure how sorcery suppression would even work, but it appeared they’d been at least partially cut off from the pneuma that fueled their magic. It explained why neither of them was setting the place more enthusiastically on fire.

“Fuck you! Fuck you all!” shrieked Annie. “You have no right!”

“We have every right,” said the queen at the center, calmly. “We are the law. You are uninvited, and your own trial is coming.”

“Leave my family alone!” I yelled.

The queen switched her attention to me. The weight of it was oppressive. I didn’t need to be able to receive her thoughts to feel the sheer power behind her gaze. “The choice is yours, Sarah,” she said. “The choice has always been yours. You know what you need to do if you want them released unharmed. How long are you willing to be selfish? How far will you go to put your needs before theirs? All this ends when you say the word.”

My heart sank as Annie turned toward me, hands still limned in white. “Sarah,” she called. “Whatever they want, just give it to them. Please. Arthur can’t take much more of this.”

“I … can’t,” I called back. “What they want is me. They want me to join them.”

For a moment, the fire burned brighter. “So join them,” said Annie. “You’ve said before that you don’t understand how to be a person anymore. You can stop. Go be a better cuckoo.”

“Annie…” said Sam uneasily.

“We are not cuckoos,” said the queen, disdain dropping from her voice. “We are proper Johrlac, as we have always been, as we will always be.”

“You all look like big fucking wasps to me, lady,” snapped Annie.

Arthur shuddered in place, still moving as jerkily as a broken animatronic, and then, with agonizing slowness, he stood up again. The process took the better part of a minute, during which we all just watched him. Annie stopped yelling at me, which I found much more reassuring than I probably should have. Maybe she could forgive me. If Arthur was all right, maybe we could be all right, too.

He straightened, putting a hand against his forehead like he was trying to hold his head in place, and groaned. That sound, like every other, was amplified by the shape of the arena, but something about it itched at the back of my brain. It was wrong, in some subtle, almost indefinable way.

Then he took his hand away and straightened fully, opening his eyes. He looked around the arena, and even I could tell he was confused. That subtle wrongness followed his every motion, making him look like a familiar stranger, like someone I should recognize but somehow didn’t, just so slightly to the left of my expectations.

“Where the hell am I?” he asked. He looked around at the stands full of identical Johrlac, at the five queens in their box, and then over at the boxes containing the rest of his family. He blinked before focusing on me. “Sarah?”

I went cold, feeling suddenly as if I might collapse. I wobbled, unreasonably close to the edge of the platform, then staggered back from the edge, just staring at him.

“Sarah!” He gripped the edge of his box, pulling it like he thought he could snap the bamboo in half. “Are you all right? Where the hell are we?”

My mouth didn’t want to work. I tried to reach out telepathically, and hit the barrier created by the bracelet, rebounding into the confines of my own mind. Finally, brokenly, I managed to rasp, “Artie?”

“Sarah,” he replied, and looked around again, eyes finally landing on Annie. “Annie, what the hell is going on here? Who’s that man with Grandma? Where are we?”

“Artie,” said Annie, disbelieving. “You can’t be here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re dead,” she said. “Sarah killed you. You can’t be here.”

He actually laughed at that. “Sarah would never hurt me,” he said. “I don’t think she’d know where to begin. I’m not dead, Annie. I have a hell of a headache, but I know Grandpa Martin. I know what dead looks like, and I still have a pulse and everything.”

“Entered into evidence, designate Arthur ‘Artie’ Harrington-Price, pre-revision owner of the physical form in front of us,” said one of the queens, with utter, painful calm. “The cuckoo may believe herself capable, but she is untrained, and her mathematical proficiencies are based on instinct and raw power, not understanding. Her revision was performed via brute force, slamming through the designate’s mental defenses and erasing the information beyond them. It was not properly removed, and was thus possible to recover.”