Chapter 6
Six
“If you ever want to truly understand where you came from, you have to leave. Distance grants perspective. Distance, and a good sniper scope.”
—Enid Healy
Well, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore
THE LIGHT WAS DAZZLING ENOUGH to leave me temporarily blinded.
I rubbed my eyes, trying to clear them, and listened to the sounds around me, none of which corresponded easily to standing in a basement.
I could hear what sounded like enormous insects buzzing, a drone like small aircraft taking off, and the rustling of leaves in the breeze.
I could feel the breeze, too, soft against my skin, warm as a spring afternoon in San Diego.
It smelled like unfamiliar flowers, spicy and sweet and strangely compelling, and honey, and water somewhere in the near distance.
There was a hint of salt to it as well, which coated the back of my throat and made me want to sneeze.
Sam’s tail was still wrapped securely around my waist: wherever we were now, we hadn’t been separated. I nodded to myself and tried to focus on what else I could pick up about my surroundings.
The Daredevil model of “lose one sense and your other senses are heightened” doesn’t work exactly like that, but if you close your eyes and focus, you’ll often find you can pick up on things you might otherwise have overlooked.
As I focused, I could tell that the buzzing was divided into at least three registers, like I was hearing cicadas, bees, and some sort of cricket all at the same time.
There was no electrical hum. Wherever we were, it wasn’t near any power lines.
Little black spots were starting to appear in the burned-out white of my vision.
I opened my eyes and blinked hard, and they got bigger, the world beginning to come clear in colorful blurs.
I squinted my eyes shut again and rubbed at them as hard as I could, and when I opened them, I could finally see.
We were standing at the top of a low rise, surrounded by rolling hills like the English downs, but greener, as green as something out of a cartoon, and covered with patches of the most incredibly vibrant flowers I had ever seen.
These were rainforest brilliant, hothouse bright, the kind of flowers that had no business growing in a climate as mild as the one around us, which felt more like Seattle or Vancouver than anything remotely tropical.
Ahead of us, stretching out as far as I could see to either the left or right, was the bright flat disk of a lake, the waters so blue that they looked almost glacial.
The far shore was visible, barely, a bristled line of trees against the distant mountains.
I couldn’t see any towns or cities, or anything that looked remotely like civilization as I would recognize it.
Except for my companions, there weren’t even any people.
I looked behind myself. There were trees in the distance, with twisting limbs and broad, waxy-looking leaves; they dripped with flowers and fruit, depending on the type of tree, and they looked entirely alluring.
“This is … a lot,” said Sam, sounding faintly strangled. I turned to blink at him. He was gawking at our surroundings like a child at their very first carnival, and I abruptly remembered that he’d never been off-world before; this was his first non-Earth dimension. What a fun starting point.
“This is Johrlar,” said Thomas, adjusting his glasses with one hand. He wasn’t holding the book I’d seen before any longer; instead, he had a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. I couldn’t tell whether he’d had that all along or it was something he had conjured somehow.
It didn’t really matter, I supposed. Alice was crouching and rolling a bit of the dirt between her fingers, expression drawn into a look of profound seriousness. I turned to my grandfather, not wanting to interrupt her.
“Now what?” I asked him.
“Normally, the Johrlac would come looking for any strangers who snuck in through the back door the way we did,” he said.
“Thanks to the charms we’re carrying, it should take them a little while to realize we’re here, and by then, we’ll have moved on from this point, which will make it more difficult for them to find us.
Believe me when I say we’d prefer not to be found before we’re ready. ”
“Is there a plan here?” asked Sam, shaking off his shock with admirable quickness. “Or are we going with the Price family ‘Let’s just run at it with our arms up and scream so it thinks we’re too big to kill and goes away on its own’ classic?”
“I thought we’d get at least a moment’s awe out of you,” said Alice, looking up from her examination of the ground. “Come on, we’re in a whole new dimension. Isn’t this exciting?”
“Oh, right, ooh, ahhh, new dimension, very cosmic, I’m so impressed,” said Sam, deadpan.
“Look, I’m a dude who’s actually a monkey, because my dad was even more monkey than I am, and for all I know, fūri are originally from another dimension, so I’m less interested in being impressed than I am in getting home alive, preferably with a fiancée who remembers who I am and knows her own name. Can we have the plan?”
“Johrlac are telepathic, and don’t tend to expect people who don’t show up on their radar,” said Thomas.
“Some of them won’t even acknowledge the existence of people who can’t be read, which is, right now, us.
We’re basically inanimate objects unless we put our charms down.
Much of the population is likely to ignore us unless we start trying to actively interact with them, which seems profoundly unlikely.
We need to locate the city where Sarah and Arthur have been taken, and follow any members of the judiciary we can find back to their courthouse. ”
“How are we supposed to recognize members of the judiciary?” asked Sam.
“Some of the castes have actual reason to keep secrets from the others,” said Thomas.
“The judiciary, administrative, and intelligence castes all practice a certain measure of mental shielding to prevent contaminating the rest of the hive mind. They make up a large-enough percentage of the population that when you’re in an urban environment, all hive members who leave their homes have to be visually recognizable.
Hence the jumpsuits Elsie saw. We just find the Johrlac wearing red, yellow, and black jumpsuits, watch them for a while, and we’ll know where we need to go. ”
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. “We’re really going to just wander around until we find a city, and then hope we can stumble on someone who can show us where to go?”
“No,” said Alice. She bounced to her feet, dropping the bit of dirt she’d been studying so intently. “Stay here.”
She didn’t wait to see if we would agree, only ran off into the foliage, vanishing into the thick sprays of flowers. Thomas watched her go, smiling indulgently.
“She just ran away,” said Sam. “Did you see that? We were talking about plans, and she decided to just run away. Is this how you do this sort of thing normally? Just running away without saying anything?”
“Don’t you know by now?” asked Thomas.
“No, because usually if I’m going outside to do stupid shit, I’ve got Annie with me, and we worked the trapeze together.
She knows you can’t just do things unless you want somebody to get dropped.
So we don’t do it like that. We make plans, we communicate them to each other, and then we follow them as much as we possibly can. ”
Thomas shot me a dubious look. I nodded.
“We try to communicate as much as we can,” I said. “I don’t like being dropped on my head.”
“Fascinating,” he replied. “A Price that plans. You really do have more of my family in you than I would have thought possible. I’ve never been here before, but your grandmother has, and she assured me that if my transit spell deposited us in the countryside, she’d be able to find us easy passage to the nearest city.
I assume she’s gone off to secure that passage, whatever form it may take. ”
Sam continued to look unconvinced. I nodded again.
“So she’s what, off hotwiring us a car?”
“The local equivalent,” said Thomas. “The Johrlac were able to subjugate most of the occupants of their world and put them to work. As a consequence, they never spent much energy on the invention of machines that could do those same jobs for them.”
“Are you saying they mind-controlled the horses, and so they never made cars?” asked Sam.
“Essentially,” said Thomas. “Your grandmother grew up with her own mother’s horses, and while she’s not the rider Fran was—no one is the rider Fran was—she’s a fairly decent horse thief. She’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
“Did horses evolve here?” I asked.
“Not as such,” said Thomas. “Johrlar never did much in the way of true mammals. This is an insect-based world, and large herbivores are unheard-of here. The only mammals I know of to have a large population on Johrlar are—”
“Kairos,” said a new voice.
I turned, Sam turning with me, and watched as a small group of people—six in total, so while they were small, they still had us well outnumbered—pushed their way through the nearest patch of tall, bell-shaped flowers.
They were holding long polearms that resembled jagged bidents more than anything else, with shafts made of wood that gleamed like it had been dipped in crude oil and heads of polished steel.
And they looked human, as human as Thomas and I did, and substantially more human than Sam, who was still in his mostly monkey form.
A few of them could have been related, but they didn’t have the eerie similarities of the Johrlac; their skin and hair colors varied from dark to light, and their faces were entirely different.
The man at the front of the group, who had dark skin and short-cropped black hair, aimed his bident at us and smiled unpleasantly, showing far too many teeth. Sam stiffened beside me, tail tightening around my waist.