Page 89 of Butterfly Effects

He sounded utterly besotted, and well he should. Mark was the only cuckoo we knew of who had broken his prenatal programming without outside help. Sarah had been deprogrammed by her mother. Mark had gone through a normal cuckoo puberty, waking up one morning with an innate desire to destroy anyone who got in his way. His human baby sister had managed to distract him long enough for the initial rush of homicidal urges to pass, and he’d decided to let his family live for her sake. Anyone who could convince a cuckoo that a rampage of destruction was less important than playing tea party was someone I could respect without ever meeting them.

“Okay, can we go?” asked Artie.

Mark turned to frown at him. “Hey. I didn’t agree to go anywhere, and I’m not sure where you want us to go, so no. Not without more information.”

“I told you Sarah was on Johrlar,” I said.

“You did,” Mark agreed. “But I don’t know how to get to Johrlar. I’ve never been there. I’m an American citizen. I was born here. Telling me Sarah’s in the cuckoo equivalent of the old country doesn’t help me navigate.”

“The collective of Johrlac queens tossed us from their dimension back into my grandparents’ basement,” I said. “I’m betting the traces of the math they used will still be there. You can use that to follow the trail back to where we were. That’s the last place we saw Sarah.”

“All right,” said Mark. “You three stay here. I don’t trust you not to break something while I’m gone.”

“Gone?” asked Artie, sounding stunned.

“My sister just got me back. You’re right that I owe Sarah—she may have triggered my instar, but she took care of me until I could recover, and she took care of my family. Cici loves her. It’s hard not to love someone who visits you and brings you gifts for eight years when your brother can’t. She’ll want me to save Sarah. But I’m not vanishing on her for six months or whatever without telling her where I’m going. No one gets to ask that of me, ever again.”

His eyes flashed white and the air next to him tore, creating an opening. He stepped through it and was gone. Artie blinked.

“That’s like the rift Sarah made.”

“Yeah, she does that all the time now,” said Sam. “Getting her to hold still is sort of basically impossible. But I bet she’ll hold still more with you home. She’s missed you real, real bad, Artie.”

“I know I haven’t been me, technically speaking, but I’ve missed her too,” said Artie.

Something was moving at the edge of the woods off to our left. I lit my hands, wary of the many things that could come out of the Galway. Bears and moose were possible, but unlikely; they didn’t tend to survive long around here, not with all the nastier options the trees kept tucked away. Whatever it was didn’t look humanoid, which meant it wasn’t the neighbors, friendly or otherwise. That left way too many options for me to be comfortable.

Then the shape put several of its legs past the tree line, into the light, and I relaxed, even as Artie shrieked. Sam gave him a curious look.

“What’s up?”

“That is a spider the size of a bear!” shouted Artie.

“I think of him as more the size of a draft horse,” said Sam. “Look, Annie, Greg’s okay.”

“He must have gone into diapause to survive the winter,” I said. “Plenty of good hunting for him out here in the woods, even if Cynthia hadn’t been bringing him sheep.”

The giant spider continued making his cautious way toward us, emerging fully into the light and keeping low to the ground.

“It’s all right, Artie,” I said. “This is Greg. He belongs to Sarah. He’s basically her emotional support animal.”

“None of us were qualified for the job,” said Sam. “She needed something she could hold on to, and a giant spider from another dimension turned out to be just the thing.”

“What,” said Artie.

Greg was still approaching. Spiders don’t have ears, as such, but they can still hear by picking up vibrations with the small hairs on their bodies. Jumping spiders are especially good at detecting human voices. He moved faster and with more ease as he recognized our voices. It’s hard to say what excitement looks like in a spider, but he was walking tall and waving his pedipalps at us like an eager puppy.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, as he got closer. “Sarah’s not with us yet, but we’re going back to get her. Yes, we are. Yes, we are. Who’s a good horrifying abomination of the local laws of nature? You are. What a good boy.”

He walked up to me and nudged his massive head against my leg. I scratched him gently behind the eyes, on the flat part of his head, while Artie just stared.

“I feel like I should remember something about this, but it’s all hazy, like a dream,” he said, in a stilted voice.

“That’s because she adopted him after she scrambled our memories, and it sounds like that’s the demarcation for you. Everything that happened after Iowa.”

“His name’s Greg?”

“To be fair, she wasn’t thinking about the long term when she called him that, just about having a name for him so we’d treat him like a dog or something and not a terrifying arachnid nightmare.”