Chapter 1 #3
The kitchen hasn’t really changed since the first time I’d seen it.
Oh, they’d replaced the wallpaper right around the time I was finishing high school, and it was a new kitchen table, polished oak in place of the old walnut, but the fixtures and appliances were all the same.
Dad’s never been the world’s biggest fan of avoidable change.
He knows most of his kids are aging faster than he is, and he’ll have to bury Evie and Drew someday, and probably his grandkids too, and he understands the world won’t slow down to meet his sometimes-lumbering tempo, but he’s never asked it to.
He just asks Mom to buy two toasters when she has to replace one, so he can extend the period before something wholly new has to enter his space.
The only major change was the people. Alex was at the stove where I would normally have expected Mom to be, flipping pancakes with one hand and cracking eggs with the other.
Dad was in his usual spot. Charlotte and Isaac were across from him, Lottie with a bowl of cereal and some pancakes, Isaac with pancakes and a plate of scrambled eggs covered in so much ketchup that it looked like a murder scene and a smaller cup of what looked like cocktail sauce, which he was carefully dipping each bite of pancake in before he ate it.
They brightened when they saw me, their thoughts taking on an effervescent, bubbling edge, like mental champagne.
“Sarah!” chirped Lottie. “You’re still here!”
“Not f’long,” said Isaac, more glumly. His thoughts were sparkling, but his tone was dour.
I sat down at the end of the table, close enough that I could lean over and put my arm around his shoulders.
“Hey, you. You know I have to go. I’m sorry I can’t be here all the time and always, but there are places I need to be, and people I’ve promised to visit.
Do you want your auntie Verity to be all sad because I’m not coming to see her? ”
“Auntie Verity’s already sad enough,” said Isaac.
His eyes flashed briefly white as he raised them from his plate and looked at me.
She’s always going to be sad, whether you’re with her or not.
And when you go to see her, you come back sad, because of your hospital friend.
I’d rather you stayed here, where you can be happy, and didn’t run away all the time.
“You know I can’t do that, Isaac,” I said. “Greg can’t be here with me, and I need Greg to be happy at all. If I stay here without him for too long, I’ll start having nightmares again. And when I have nightmares, the whole neighborhood has nightmares.”
It’s not fair.
“Neither is talking only in our heads, because not everyone can do it,” I said firmly. “Come on, buddy. Time for our outside voices, okay?”
He shot me a look, thoughts turning disgruntled. I shrugged, projecting neutrality in his direction.
Charlotte—Lottie to her family—was only a few months older than Isaac, and they’d grown up in each other’s pockets.
Because she was a Price by blood, she had the protection from mental manipulation provided by her father’s Kairos ancestry.
Even so, she could receive telepathic communication, and reply to them in kind.
She and Isaac had both been slow to speak, not seeing the need for communicating with other people when they already had each other.
Shelby had been briefly concerned she’d need to hold them back from starting formal schooling, since kids who sounded younger than their actual ages were likely to be the targets of bullying.
Alex hadn’t initially agreed that the threat of bullying was a good-enough reason to keep them home, but Shelby had looked at him, shrugged, and asked calmly how many kindergarteners would need to have their minds melted by Isaac for the crime of being mean to Lottie before it would be a good-enough reason.
He’d agreed with her after that. Apparently, that agreement had been enough to make both children start catching up with their peers.
They’d been talking more or less normally by the end of the month, and had been able to start school on the expected schedule.
Because they refused to be separated and Isaac’s official birthday was in November, they were both in second grade, and the only remaining trace of their delayed speech was in the way he would sometimes shorten words or create new contractions when he didn’t feel like talking.
Well, that, and the way he slipped into telepathic speech if he thought he could get away with it.
He and Lottie both carried anti-telepathy charms to school to keep him from accidentally answering the teacher without opening his mouth, but sometimes I was still concerned about being one bad playground argument away from a Stephen King novel.
I’d managed to survive elementary school in Ohio without going full Carrie White. I had confidence that my little brother could do the same. Probably.
“When are you leaving, Sarah?” asked Dad.
“I figured I’d wait until everyone had come downstairs for the day, so I could say my goodbyes,” I said.
“I’m planning to be gone for a few weeks this trip, just to make sure I can deal with everything in New York and then spend some real quality time with Greg in Michigan.
I’ll call when I head for Buckley, so you know where I am. ”
“I agree with Isaac: I wish you could stay longer,” he said.
“And I wish I could have Greg here with me, but the Blue Fairy isn’t granting requests right now,” I said. “St. Giles’s wants to have a serious talk with me about Mark’s future, and that means I have to go. Everything else aside, we owe him.”
Dad sighed. “I suppose we do.”
Mark is a cuckoo. Like me, he’s a pretty reasonable person who’s not totally into the idea of psychically manipulating and abusing everyone around him.
Unlike me, he didn’t have anyone to hold his hand and help him get there.
I never properly entered my second instar, thanks to Mom carefully removing every trace of my ancestral memories before they could rupture and wipe out my ability to see people as, well, people.
Mark didn’t get those memories removed until much later, when I’d needed the processing space for the world-breaker equation and removed them with his permission.
His instar proceeded normally, and the memories had spread through him like wine through cotton.
He’d reacted the way cuckoos normally did, by having a brief mental break and trying to murder his younger sister, Cici.
But Cici had been young enough to think he was playing a game with her.
She’d evaded him for so long that his thoughts had time to calm down again, and he’d stopped seeing her as a target and remembered how much he loved her.
His love for his sister had been strong enough to drag him back over a line that should have been impossible to recross once he had crossed it.
He’d been working with the cuckoos who took me purely because they told him that if he didn’t, they’d kill his sister.
The whole time, he’d been planning to kill me himself before I could end the world, assuming my family didn’t arrive in time.
But they had, and he’d been with us on our cross-dimensional bullshit adventure.
Like Artie, Mark had been seriously damaged by my attempt to solve, resolve, and destroy the equation.
Unlike Artie, his mind hadn’t been erased, just subjected to the kind of stress and trauma that could trigger his fourth instar.
He was changing. But because he hadn’t been primed for it by going through a third instar, he was trying to accomplish them both at once, and it had already taken eight years.
Eight years of catatonia while his brain physically broke down and rebuilt itself, and the staff at St. Giles’s Hospital—a medical establishment catering almost completely to cryptids—got more and more nervous about what he was going to be if he woke up.
Eight years of his human family having no idea what had happened to him.
Cici had been twelve when he disappeared, and there was no good way of telling her he was alive, or how he’d been hurt, or anything.
From her perspective, her big brother—the brother who’d loved her so much that he’d been able to defeat his own biology to stay with her—just walked away one day and never came back.
I spent time with him when I could, sitting by his bed and holding his hand and hoping that one day I’d pick up on even a flicker of sapient thought coming from him.
I didn’t know who or what he’d be if he ever managed to wake up.
I just knew it was my fault he was in that bed, and I wanted him awake more than I wanted almost anything else that I could think of.
Without Mark, we would never have been able to make it back from the dimension I’d shunted us all into.
Without all of them. And I owed them. I would owe them until the end of my days.
I didn’t get to rest and enjoy the love of my family until such time as I’d made sufficient amends for what I’d done.
If that was even possible.
I leaned over, pressing a kiss to Isaac’s temple. His delight at the gesture washed over me, comforting and warm as a towel fresh out of the dryer. “I love you, little bee,” I informed him.
He squirmed, embarrassed and pleased. “Don’t be gross, stupid sister,” he said.
“Sorry,” I replied. “Can’t help it.”
Lottie giggled. I took a piece of pancake from Isaac’s plate and dipped it into the cocktail sauce before popping it into my mouth. She made a face.
“That’s weird,” she informed me. “You can’t put ketchup and stuff on everything you eat.”
“Isaac does it,” I said.
“It’s still weird when he does it,” she countered. “Yesterday he put ketchup in his fruit cup in the cafeteria. The lunch aide took it away ’cause she thought he was messing around and making messes.”
Across the table, Dad’s attention focused on Isaac. “Zach…” he rumbled, in a disappointed tone.
Isaac hunched his shoulders. “It tastes wrong when it’s just sweet-sweet-sweet!” he said. “Tomatoes are only considered a vegetable for tax purposes anyway!”
I blinked, then looked over my shoulder as Mom stepped into the room, hair still damp and sticking to the sides of her face. “Was I like this when I was eight?”
“You were worse,” she said sweetly. “You’re the reason I learned how to make gummy candy at home.
If I didn’t send you to school with tomato gummies, you’d find ways to sneak tomatoes into everything, and it was scaring the other children.
Not that you made it past seventh grade, whereas Zach is going all the way to high school, aren’t you, buddy? ”
“Yes, Mom,” he said dutifully.
“With me,” said Charlotte.
“Yes, with you.” I knew she was smiling because she projected it to me and Isaac even as she folded her face in the appropriate ways. It’s nice to spend time around people who telegraph their facial expressions. Makes it easier to react to them.
Sometimes I thought Charlotte was to Isaac as those therapy dogs were to the cheetahs in zoos.
She gave him something to focus on and hang on to.
Like me with Greg. Telepathy isn’t an anxiety disorder, but being a telepath in a non-telepathic world can feel very similar.
He’d been doing better than I did in public school from day one.
Maybe if I’d been able to go to Portland and attend school with Artie, I could have made it to high school instead of having a nervous breakdown in the seventh grade and finishing out my education in this very kitchen.
Or maybe we’d just have ended up even more codependent than we already were, and I’d have fallen apart completely when I accidentally erased his mind, instead of just falling apart mostly. No way of knowing.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “You got the value of the variable wrong on your fourth equation. It should have been three, or the whole thing fails to resolve.”
“I knew you’d catch that, sweetie,” she said, crossing the kitchen to kiss my forehead before ruffling Isaac’s hair with one hand. “You always were my little perfectionist. When do you leave?”
“As soon as Shelby comes downstairs.” There was a clatter from the hall, telling me that she was doing precisely that.
“Aren’t you going to eat first?” asked Alex.
“I’ll grab something in New York,” I said. “Promise.”
Shelby stepped into the kitchen, nodding in my direction just as I stepped away from Mom and grabbed for the inherent mathematical structure of the world around me.
I had to do the mental equivalent of squinting in order to see it, but once I did, I could see the chained functions that made up everything.
Physics, matter, and distance, they were all equations, and equations could be modified.
I waved at Shelby, and I was gone.
There aren’t really words for the way I can move around now that I’ve stabilized as a fully mature queen.
“Spatial tunneling” is the closest we’ve really come.
I basically just take the math that tells me my location and change it to something different.
As soon as I release it in its changed state, it becomes an absolute truth, and reality is happier to change things about itself than it is to modify its underlying math.
It does make an impact, leaving little errors in the math between the two points I’ve modified, and they need time to correct themselves before I can safely tunnel to the same location again.
I try to think of it as drawing lines that are never allowed to overlap, a logic puzzle playing out in four dimensions at once.
And even that is a simplification, because I don’t know how to explain the beautiful crystalline network of numbers that is the equations that transport me.
I reach out, I tweak, and I’m gone. Over and over again. It’s that simple, and that complicated.
It’s definitely not an ability that should have been extended to someone with my reasons for running away.