Chapter 13
Thirteen
“Any man who’d drug a lady’s drink deserves to meet the sharp end of the shovel, preferably face-first. Self-defense is never a crime.”
—Enid Healy
In the home of Fetch and Carry, waking up on the kitchen floor
I HAD TIME TO COUNT WELL past three hundred thousand before I felt the blackness around me starting to erode, falling away like a riverbank in the rain.
It was replaced by more darkness as it dissolved, but I could feel the change; I was ascending through the layers of my own mind, moving back toward consciousness.
I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to help it, either.
Depending on what had been used to put me under, “helping” might result in the void trying to yank me back under.
By going limp, I could just allow myself to drift higher and higher, not resisting or encouraging the transition from deep unconsciousness to waking up.
When the air around me started to lighten out of dark and toward dusky dawn, I closed the inner idea of my eyes, shutting out the world and allowing the transition to proceed without me doing anything to force it.
Bit by bit, something hard appeared below me, and the air around me became warm and humid, sticky in a way that dreams could never really be.
I heard the soft woosh of my own breathing, and the hissing of the wind around the windows, and decided that I had waited long enough: I opened my eyes and I was back in the kitchen, the remains of my salad spilled on the floor all around me, alien lettuce in my hair.
It was still reasonably crisp. Given the temperature and humidity, and again drawing on my summers at Lowryland, where we’d often left sandwich fixings spread out across the counters in our tourist rentals, I guessed I’d been unconscious for maybe twenty minutes.
Still longer than I liked when the collective might be looking for me.
They had to know where Annalist was when they took him over.
I sat up and plucked the lettuce out of my hair with the same motion, wrinkling my nose at the scrap of greenery even as I tossed it aside.
I would normally have felt bad about making a mess in someone else’s home, but these people had set me up to be drugged and thrown to their collective, whether they’d known they were doing it or not.
They could deal with a little dressing on their tile.
My head was spinning as I pushed myself up into a crouching position and straightened, moving slowly so as not to make the dizziness even worse. It helped that the room was dim, quiet, and—except for me—empty. I blinked, realizing what was different.
Annalist was gone.
I turned to the doorway, walking back into the front room.
My head was still spinning, and my vision was blurry around the edges, the last of the drugs working their way through my system.
I massaged my temple with one hand, trying to chase away the first stirrings of a headache.
I couldn’t allow myself to collapse here.
Not when I didn’t know where Annalist was.
Not when the collective might be coming.
He wasn’t in the front room, which was probably for the best. I preferred the idea that he’d knocked me out while the collective had him under their control and run for the hills as soon as they released him to the thought of the collective sticking around in his skin to gloat over my body.
I kept walking, storming toward the closed front door.
Had he been working with the collective since the beginning?
Were Fetch and Carry in danger? Or had he spoken of revolution, expecting it to come to nothing, and attracted the collective’s attention in the process?
It was impossible to know whose side Fetch and Carry were really on without asking them, and I couldn’t trust telepathic communication when I didn’t know whether the collective had taken them too.
Regardless, they didn’t deserve to come back to a damaged house, and so I hit the switch to open the doors rather than telekinetically forcing them. If they were innocent, they were about to learn that they’d been betrayed by someone they trusted. No point in adding property damage to the shock.
The doors repeated their alternating airlock behavior before they let me outside, neither pair willing to open until the other was closed.
After what felt like far too long, I was stepping into the humid air and strangely conflicting sunlight, the trees around me filtering it into dappled shadows.
The same insects I’d seen before were still flitting and crawling in the branches, painfully visible.
Visible, and undisturbed. No one had passed this way in at least a few minutes.
I paused to watch the insects buzzing around, making note of their colors.
Most of them had gray patches that I could only assume would turn red if I had a human around to borrow color vision from; it would explain why the Johrlac had so much red in their uniforms if they were just replicating things they’d seen in nature.
I wanted to drop all my shields and broadcast a challenge to the collective.
I also wanted to find Arthur without them finding me.
So I pulled back as hard as I could, pushing forward the partition Fetch had instructed me to create: I was Gather, a civic assistant, and if using an identity she’d helped me to cobble together was a risk, it was a smaller risk than trying to come up with something on my own.
The uniform I was wearing seemed like it would do half the work for me, anyway: most of the people I was likely to encounter would just assume they knew me based on what I was wearing, and if I could avoid answering any direct questions, that would be more than good enough.
I made my way carefully down the meandering lane connecting Fetch and Carry’s home to the main thoroughfare, not seeing a single other person until I reached the walkway and looked down the street.
If the collective was sending people to collect me, they weren’t in any hurry to get it done.
Johrlac moved in the distance, heading to and fro on their unknowable errands, and none of them spared me so much as a second glance.
A woman walked by, pulled by a spider the size of a cocker spaniel.
The sight made my guts clench. How long had I been gone?
Had anyone thought to try explaining to Greg that I wasn’t going to be back any time soon?
Not that most of my family could reach him on a level he’d be able to understand.
Alex and Shelby would have to agree to take Isaac to Michigan before that could happen.
The woman noticed me watching her and paused, shooting me a curious look.
I knew it was curious: I could feel the confusion washing off her like heat off a summer highway.
I turned hastily away, clamping down on my own thoughts and emotions as tightly as I could manage.
She didn’t need to know that I was scared, lost, and hopelessly missing my own giant spider, who was very far away but safe, which put him one up on the cousin I owed the world to.
After what I’d done to him, Arthur was my responsibility, now and forever.
At some point I’d begun heading back toward the building where I’d been held.
I paused, trying to decide whether I needed to turn around and go looking for someplace else to start, then shrugged and continued onward.
The collective could find me wherever I was.
If I’d been held in the administration building, they might have Arthur there now. I could bust him out and …
And what? What was I going to do once I had him?
I still couldn’t stand to be around him, and it wasn’t like I could manage a dimensional crossing unsupported.
I might have psychic powers beyond what should be trusted to an individual, like, ever, but that didn’t make me omnipotent.
Trying to do the math with no one around but Arthur would risk either erasing my own mind or swallowing his for a second time.
Could I even build a new person on a brain that had been wiped clean more than once?
I had no idea, and finding Arthur was a priority no matter how I wanted to look at things.
Worst case, I could bust him out and run for the hills with him, find someplace isolated where we could hole up and get on with our lives.
Best case, I could seize control of the collective as Annalist had been encouraging me to do—although I was no longer sure whether or not that had been some sort of a trap—and maybe that would give me the processing power I needed to get home.
Problem with being a Price: the majority of my relatives have the kind of luck where every lottery ticket is a winner and every missed flight is the start of a Final Destination film, their ludicrous connection to coincidence kicking in to keep them from meeting an untimely death.
It means they’ve never really developed much of a skill for planning, since they genuinely haven’t needed it.
And that means they’ve never taught me how to plan.
Stop. Breathe. I stepped into the shadow cast by one of the buildings, leaning against the wall and trying to focus past the adrenaline the collective’s visit had caused to flood my system.
I needed to think like a Baker, not react like a Price.
Not that I had ever really been either: I had been a McNally, and then, after my family had died, I had transformed myself into a Zellaby, taking my name from a cautionary tale that felt like it could have been written about my species, whether or not the author had ever known us.