Chapter 4 #3
Throughout my childhood, her tattoos had always been changing, appearing and disappearing between visits like magic—which they were, technically, magical ink embedded in human skin to anchor acts of artificial sorcery powered by her own body rather than by the pneuma around her.
Grandma was no more a sorcerer than Sam was.
But, like Sam, she had her own talents, most of which revolved around horrible violence.
According to the mice, she was a human wrecking ball even before she spent fifty years throwing herself into strange dimensions trying to find her husband.
After, though … well. There’s a reason her name sparks fear in all the wrong sorts of people.
I took a deep breath. “Mark just called me.”
“Mark is?”
“Mark is the cuckoo who helped us rescue Sarah a few years before you got home. He’s been in a coma at St. Giles’s Hospital since then.”
“All right, so he’s awake, then. Why did he call you? And why do you look like this might not have been a good thing?”
“According to Mark, a bunch of strange cuckoos teleported into his hospital room while Sarah was there, seized her, and disappeared. He said they were wearing ‘sci-fi jumpsuits’ and called her current developmental stage ‘the forbidden instar.’ It all sounds sort of, you know, bad.”
“Because it is bad,” said a voice from behind me, male, with the kind of British accent that speaks of years of formal schooling geared at replacing childhood regionalisms with perfect BBC English.
“Am I correct in assuming that ‘sci-fi’ is still a favored abbreviation of ‘science fiction,’ meaning your friend likely saw some sort of futuristic attire and simplified it to ‘sci-fi jumpsuit’?”
“That sounds about right.” I turned.
Having my grandfather around has been odd mostly because I was so used to not looking like any of the members of my family.
The so-called “Healy look” has been dominant for generations: short, blonde, soft the way a bobcat kitten is soft, packed with claws and teeth and terrible ways to make you regret petting the kitty.
I’m tall, brunette, and much more angular than the rest of my generation.
Turns out, it’s because I take after my grandfather.
Like Alice, he was covered in tattoos. Unlike Alice, his covered both sides of his body, and served as a clear warning to anyone who knew anything about sorcery, since each of them anchored some magical effect or other, and could be activated at will.
The only clear patch of skin I could see below his neck was at the hollow of his throat, where he’d released the charm that had been keeping him from getting physically older before he could be reunited with his wife.
They were both aging normally now, which was a nice change for our family.
He was wearing a plain white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and tan work pants. He could have been any man who liked to work with his hands, puttering away on his weekend.
“Then this is definitely bad,” he said. “I don’t think he saw cuckoos.”
“But he—”
“I think he saw Johrlac. The kind that come from Johrlar.”
“I don’t understand why we act like they’re not the same species just because of where they come from.”
“Because in many ways, they aren’t,” he said.
“The cuckoos are the exiles of Johrlar, the ones who’ve been expelled from their society and set to wander the universe forever.
Instars are triggered by the appropriate level and degree of psychic exposure.
A Johrlac who never goes beyond the second instar will not be the same creature as one who’s gone all the way to the ending.
They’re related, but they’re not the same. ”
“And these people snatched Sarah?”
“It certainly sounds like it. The few Johrlac I’ve met have been very focused on keeping their exiles from reaching full maturity—the forbidden instar, as you say. They don’t want them to have access to the sort of power that comes with full maturation.”
That didn’t sound good. “Mark said the Johrlac said they were going to hold Sarah responsible for her crimes. Do you think they know about what happened when we went to giant spider world?”
“If they didn’t know before they took her, they almost certainly know now,” said Alice.
My phone rang.
I pulled it out of my back pocket, glaring at it. I was still dealing with the aftermath of my last unexpected phone call. I certainly wasn’t ready for another one.
At least this time it was coming from a familiar number. I swiped my thumb up the screen, tapping the speaker icon.
“Elsie, hi,” I said. “I’m here with Grandma and Grandpa. I’ve got you on speaker. What’s up?”
“What’s up is some asshole cuckoos dressed like they escaped from a production of Starlight Express just came in here and snatched Arthur!
” she wailed. “We were in the living room, and then they were just there. They grabbed him, said something about gathering evidence, and disappeared. What the hell is going on?”
“Why do you think I would know what’s going on?” I asked. “I don’t know. But—”
“How many of them were there, Elsinore?” asked Grandpa, coming close enough to be heard without shouting.
“Er, three. Sir.” Elsie still wasn’t entirely comfortable with our grandfather being back from the dimension where he’d been lost for so long.
It made sense. To her, he was a stranger who’d come swooping in and suddenly expected a familial relationship.
He was technically the same thing to me, but I had the dual advantages of James’s relationship with Sally and my own blazing need to learn sorcery from someone who actually understood the way it worked. It made accepting him easier.
“And what did they look like?”
“Like cuckoos! They all look alike!”
“If we were talking about members of literally any other species, I would feel the need to remind you that a refusal to see distinctions between individuals is a form of prejudice,” said Grandpa.
“As it stands, given that they’re insects with very little morphological variance, I’ll allow it. They were all cuckoos?”
“Yeah. Pale, black hair, blue eyes.”
“And their, er, Star Trek Express outfits?”
Elsie snorted. “Starlight Express. It’s a musical. About trains. Lots of glitter and spandex. They were wearing these weird bodysuits that were cut to look sort of like they were segmented. Like insect exoskeletons, only flexible.”
“Yes, that was what I thought you were saying. What colors were the bodysuits? It’s very important that you remember.”
“Um. The one who seemed to be in charge was wearing red, black, and yellow.”
“In that order?”
“Yes. Her chest was red, and her abdomen and hips were black, and then her legs were yellow.”
“All right. The other two?”
“One was in all black with red stripes along his back. They wrapped around like they were supposed to look like wings. And the other one was a really deep blue on top, and this sort of two-tone orange and magenta on the bottom, that changed when she moved. It was all iridescent and very cool-looking, except for the part where they were in the process of abducting my brother.”
“Thank you, Elsinore. You’ve been extremely helpful.” He turned back to me, mouthing “Hang up,” and making an exaggerated gesture with one hand, like he was hanging up an old-fashioned landline.
I blinked, then turned my attention back to the phone. “Thank you for letting us know, Elsie,” I said. “I think Grandpa has some idea of how we’re supposed to deal with it, so I’m going to go work on that with him now, okay?”
“I’m just getting used to this version of my brother,” she wailed. “Bring him back.”
“I’ll do my best. Call again if you need anything.” I hung up before she could say anything else. I felt a little bad about it, all things considered, but I didn’t really see what else I could do.
When Elsie’s brother Artie got pulled into another dimension with me, Mark, James, and Sarah during the whole “Cuckoos try to destroy the world” incident, he got his mind erased in the process of the rest of us getting out of there.
I was there, I saw it happen, and I know it was an accident, but I can completely understand why Elsie blamed Sarah for the way things went down: most days, I blamed her too.
Artie had touched her. That was all he did.
He’d touched her, and she’d lost control of her powers, because cuckoos are too dangerous to be around normal people, and he was gone in less than the time it took to blink an eye.
He left his body behind, because he didn’t die: he was just deleted, like he’d never existed to begin with.
Sarah had built a new person to take his place, one who remembered a lot of Artie’s life and shared some of his passions—but not enough to believably replace him.
He’d started coming apart inside of six months, losing the memories that weren’t properly anchored inside his head, forgetting things he should have known, and insisting we all call him “Arthur,” because he knew he wasn’t Artie.
Watching a stranger wearing my cousin’s body like a borrowed suit had been hard on me.
It had been a lot harder on Elsie. She was his sister, and she loved him—both versions of him—more than any of the rest of us.
It had taken a cross-country road trip with Arthur and Mary before she’d started really spending time with Arthur on any sort of a voluntary basis.
But somewhere between Oregon and Massachusetts, she figured out how to love him as he was, not mourn him for what he wasn’t.
And now he was gone. Taken by the cuckoos, just like Artie had been, if a bit more physically.
I slid the phone back into my pocket, looking between my grandparents.
They both looked horrified in their own ways: Thomas’s mouth was set in a hard, furious line, and Alice’s hands were flexing like she wanted a knife, or a pistol, or something.
“Well?” I asked. “What do you know, and what are we going to do about this?”