Page 96 of Butterfly Effects

I looked to the guard who’d been pacing me, and mouthed, Is this it?

He looked baffled. The mind-mind flowers could clarify language, but not the shape a word left on the lips. I leaned in closer, whispering, “Is that the collective?”

“Ah. No,” he whispered back.

I nodded understanding, and we kept moving deeper.

The longer we walked, the more apparent it became that the building was constructed in a series of concentric circles, each one slightly smaller than the last. There were chambers in the rings, marked by paper walls and occasional voices, but on the whole, each ring was empty until it merged with the next along the line. We moved deeper and deeper, and the rings began to show signs of actual use.

We were maybe five rings in when we stepped into what I could only describe as a nursery. The walls were lined with hex-shaped cubbies, each one occupied by an infant or small child—I’d estimate up to two or three years old, as humans measured growth. They sucked on bud-shaped bottles or scooped pollen out of flowers with tiny hands, eating and staring blankly into the distance. None of them cried or babbled or anything I would have expected from babies.

That didn’t match what I knew about cuckoo children. Isaac had cried from the beginning, cried for food, for warmth, for contact. He’d reached and wanted just as much as any human infant.

There were adult Johrlac on the nursery ring. They wore black-and-white jumpsuits and walked in silence with glowing white eyes, presumably in constant communion with the children in their care. A few of them glanced in our direction as we walked through, and I had the distinct feeling they could see us, but none of them said anything or seemed alarmed in any way, so we just kept going, passing out of the realm of those strange and silent children, seeking our goal.

Two rings later, we encountered our first signs of resistance. A line of Johrlac guards blocked the way, holding bamboo canes like quarterstaffs, clearly prepared for a fight. Their eyes were blue: whatever orders they were following, they weren’t telepathic ones. All of them focused, immediately, on Mark and Artie, the only members of our group not currently wearing anti-telepathy charms.

“Shit,” I muttered, and moved to stand between Artie and the guards.

They attacked in silence, moving in a ragged line that didn’t make sense until I looked at their faces and realized that in order to see us, they had shut down their telepathy and focused on the physical world as much as possible. Like humans blindfolding themselves to fight invisible monsters, they were blocking everything that might interfere with believing their eyes. They couldn’t communicate or coordinate the way they normally would, and that put them at a disadvantage.

The first two swung for Artie. I grabbed their canes, wincing at the impact against my palms, and lit them on fire. It spread quickly, consuming the wood and licking at their hands, which caused them to yelp and drop their weapons. I pulled a knife out of my shirt and threw it at the closer of them, sending him to the floor as it embedded itself in his throat. The second looked at his empty hands, then lunged for Artie, only to be met with a baton across the wrists.

I shot Artie an impressed look. He pulled the baton back, getting it into a defensive position. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Knock ’em down.”

Sam was cheerfully bowling Johrlac guards at one another, bouncing from place to place almost too fast for me to follow. The Kairos guards were meeting canes with bidents, and were clearly more accustomed to actual combat: when they were hit, they went down silently, whereas the Johrlac guards yelped and shouted and groaned, broadcasting their injuries more openly than I would have expected from trained security.

Mark … wasn’t visibly doing anything. He was standing perfectly still, guards throwing themselves at him and never quite making contact. His eyes were glowing steadily white, and his hair had started to move, ruffling like he was in the path of a stiff breeze. More guards flung themselves at him, only to hit the ground behind or beside him, unable to make contact.

“This is boring,” said Mark. “Can’t you do any better?”

One guard, either smarter or braver than the rest, stopped at the very edge of what I would have considered the combat zone, pulling what looked like a dart gun and aiming it at Mark. He blew on the end of the gun, sending a fletched dart straight at Mark.

It never reached him. Halfway there, it stopped like it had struck an invisible wall, then flipped in the air and shot back toward the guard who had launched it in the first place. It slammed into the side of his neck and his eyes rolled up in his head before he went down in a heap, twitching and foaming at the mouth. Gradually, the twitches stopped. He didn’t get back up.

“Huh,” said Mark. “Guess I can do that now. Anyone else want to go?”

He looked around at the guards who were still standing, expression speculative. They shied back, and one turned to run. Sam was immediately there, standing between him and freedom. His hands came down on the top of the guard’s head, fingers laced tightly together to form a solid ball, and the guard crumpled. Like so many of the others, he didn’t get back up.

It was a strangely PG battle scene: Johrlac bleed clear, and so the floor just looked slick and slippery, not covered in gore. A few of our Kairos guards were bleeding, but none badly; we’d come through the encounter with nothing much worse than bruises. I turned to check on the man I’d been talking to as we walked, and found him watching our rear with a deeply concerned expression on his face.

“They know we’re here,” he said. “The queens only lay ambushes when they believe the hive has been compromised. We’re walking into a trap.”

“Why not overwhelm us? Why risk us getting close?”

“Most of their fighters can’t see us even as well as these last ones could,” he explained. “It takes them time to muster a defense, whereas their hive is prepared for assaults. We must go carefully from here, but we must still go. We won’t get another chance this clean.”

“Sarah may not have another chance at all,” said Artie grimly.

“So we keep going,” I concluded, and looked down the hall. There didn’t seem to be any more guards there, but I had no way of being certain.

None of our fighters were down.

We kept going.

We encountered more resistance another two rings in. This group was larger and better armed, with amentums and metal-tipped darts as well as the bamboo staffs. Like the first group, they fought fiercely and focused on Mark and Artie, but went down in the face of a force they couldn’t properly see or organize themselves against. I found myself relieved to be fighting in a building made of stone, which wasn’t nearly as flammable as the paper that they used for everything else.

We kept going. The two rings after that were empty, and warmer than any of the others had been, the air growing hot and humid, like we were moving into the outskirts of a greenhouse. I looked askance at the Kairos guards, but they just kept moving, apparently unbothered by the changing climate.