Chapter 16
Sixteen
SARAH
“Not every choice I’ve made in my lifetime has been a good one. Some of them were pretty objectively bad. But they were my choices, and at the end of the day, I’m nothing more than the sum of them. They’re what made me.”
—Alice Healy
Walking through a tangled, unfamiliar jungle that still manages to feel like home
IKKO’S HAND WAS WARM IN mine as we walked.
The longer I held on to her, the more my telepathy eroded her natural defenses, and the cheery background noise of her surface thoughts became gradually more and more evident, until I was listening to her inner monologue.
I knew I should let go. I knew she might not understand what prolonged physical contact with one of us would mean.
But it was so nice to know the names of the plants and insects around me without needing to break the comfortable silence we had established that I just wanted to hold on.
Wait. Silence? I glanced at Ikko. She kept looking serenely ahead, not picking up on my confusion.
Of course she wasn’t picking up on my confusion. She wasn’t a telepath. “Ikko, how old are you?” I asked.
“Old? Oh. I’m four full rotations in age,” she said happily. “Why?”
I paused, blinking. That didn’t mean anything to me. Of course it didn’t: how was I supposed to know how long a year was on a planet with three suns?
“It’s just that you look a certain age as we measure things on the world I’m from,” I said. “And it would be very strange for someone that age to be quiet as long as you have. I’m impressed no matter how old you are.”
Ikko stood a little straighter, pleased with herself.
It radiated off of her, almost palpable.
“I’m very good at being quiet,” she said.
“Daddy says it’s a problem sometimes, when I sneak up on him and he doesn’t want me to sneak up on him.
I think it’s good to be quiet. Means you can get in almost anywhere you want to.
It doesn’t just work on the stinging wasps. ”
“How do you know that they’re wasps?”
She shrugged. “Because when they try to get into your head, they buzz, and they sting you on the inside with their sharp, sharp thoughts.” She glanced at me.
“I know you’re in my head, but you’re not buzzing.
More just a quiet little hum. I don’t mind the hum, and I know you need to use my eyes to know what you’re looking at.
Wasps don’t see so good. Safe or stinging, they need us to see things for them. ”
“And who is ‘us’?”
This question seemed to confuse Ikko. She stopped walking and dropped my hand, turning to face me. “We are. The Kairos.”
I blinked. “The what?”
“Kairos. Silly wasp, you should know what we are. You’re the reason we’re here.
” She started walking again, heading deeper into the green.
After a pause to collect my thoughts, I hurried after her.
She was my only guide, and some of the insects I’d identified via her mind had jaws I didn’t want to get any closer to.
Ikko turned toward me as I caught up, offering her hand again. I took it without hesitation. If she was willing to let me share her mind, I wasn’t going to refuse.
Knowing that she was apparently a full Kairos made the hard shell of her thoughts more understandable, and also the way I was shut out almost entirely when I stopped touching her.
I could linger in the heads of my family, but they were only partially Kairos, and getting less so with every passing generation.
Eventually, that protection would give way completely, and they’d be as vulnerable to people like me as any other human.
That was a distressing thought, and not one I wanted to dwell on.
The family I had now was safe, and Charlotte, Olivia, and David all had the level of resistance I would have expected from them if I’d been making guesses, but what about their kids?
Or their grandkids? Johrlac have a substantially longer-than-human lifespan.
I’ve never been sure precisely how much longer, but I know Mom looks more like my older sister these days, and she was at least sixty when she adopted Aunt Evie.
I could have a lot of years to watch the people I loved get slowly vulnerable.
“You’re worried,” said Ikko.
I blinked at her. She shrugged.
“Your hum just went all spiky. You don’t need to be worried.
We’re not going to hurt you. We don’t blame you for things you never did.
That would just be silly.” She pushed aside a branch with her arm, then pointed to a lower bush covered in large clusters of peach-colored berries.
“Those are tasty. To us, but also to the wasps. They love them lots. You should try one.”
“All right,” I said, and leaned over to pick a berry as we walked by the bush, then popped it into my mouth.
It tasted like the sweetest tomato I had ever had, tart enough not to be cloying, but not so much as to detract from the pure sugary decadence of it. I stopped in my tracks, turning to stare at the bush.
Ikko shook her head. “I guess you must really like berries. We can come back later with a basket.”
She tugged and I followed willingly, resisting the urge to run back and fill my hands with berries, to cram them into my mouth until I choked.
Everything about this world, the air, the fruit—I had evolved to exist here.
My body knew how to be here. But my mind …
I couldn’t imagine giving up Earth. I needed the internet.
I needed to know how my shows were going to end.
I needed to see Isaac grow up, and I needed to be there for Greg.
Johrlar was a sweet dream. Michigan, and Oregon, and New York, those were my sweet reality.
Ikko pulled me deeper and deeper into the trees, occasionally pointing out a bug or flower she thought I’d like, but otherwise content to walk in silence.
We emerged into a clear band of grass, or what looked like grass, dotted with little flowers, white with transparent petals.
She kept walking, and I kept following, until I realized the flowers were turning red where we had stepped.
I pulled my hand from hers and stopped walking, indicating the flowers. “What are these?”
“Telltales,” she said. “Stinging wasps can’t see them once they’ve changed, so they don’t realize they’re leaving clear trails to tell us where they’ve walked.
We plant them around everything important to us, and that way we know when someone’s been poking around where we don’t want them.
They’ll go back to white and clear in a little bit.
So if you wanted to sneak in while the suns were down, you could, but since they don’t know what kind of trail they’re leaving… ”
“They don’t think to be careful of the flowers,” I said, thoughtfully. “That’s really clever, Ikko.”
She preened, but said, “I didn’t come up with them. Still, it is pretty clever, isn’t it? Guess you need some clever if you want to stay alive when you’ve got wasps chasing after you all the time.”
“Then I hope you’ll have enough clever for the both of us,” I said firmly.
She laughed, pulling me through the flowers to the trees on the other side.
We walked through this patch of forest—although really, I needed to be thinking of it as a jungle.
We could pass through it only because someone, presumably Ikko’s people, had been cutting paths through the brush; they were tangled and almost choked with underbrush at some points, but I could still see the cleared earth under the returning vines.
Bugs of various sizes moved in the greenery, some the size of Earth creatures, some large enough to provide reasonable hunting for Greg.
I could bring him here. The thought was so sudden as to be almost surprising, and I considered it for a moment as I continued to follow Ikko.
The air was cleaner, and he would probably be more comfortable in a place where I wouldn’t need to continually hide him from everyone else.
I’d even seen giant spiders in the Johrlac city: he might be able to accompany me openly.
Assuming the collective of Johrlac queens didn’t have my mind wiped to keep me from challenging the shape of the group mind they’d constructed between them.
I scowled and pitched the thought away. No matter how beautiful it was here, I wasn’t going to be bringing Greg.
I was going to find Arthur and discover a way to take us both home, so that we would never need to worry about these people again.
And if some of them got hurt or broken in the process …
There had been no reason to make themselves my problem. This wasn’t my world. I would never have come looking for them, would never have involved myself, had they not decided to force the issue. I wasn’t going to feel bad if they suffered the consequences of their own actions. I wasn’t.
No, really, I wasn’t.
“You’re thinking pretty hard, Sarah,” said Ikko, pronouncing my name with precise care, like it was some sort of magical incantation that would unlock a world of sweet rewards. “It tickles.”
“Sorry,” I said. I hadn’t even been aware that I was projecting in her direction. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She shrugged. “We’re almost there.”
“Speaking of being ‘almost there,’ how are you here?” I asked. “This world doesn’t really seem to do ‘mammals,’ as a rule, and I know Kairos are mammalian.”
“What’s a mammal?” asked Ikko blankly.
“Uh…”
“Oh, that’s a mammal.” She radiated relief and mild smugness. “The mind-mind flowers had to have the word a few times before they could understand it enough to translate. Mammals are people with red blood and bones on the inside.”
“I think that’s fundamentally correct,” I said.
“There’s some other stuff, and really it’s all about common ancestors, which means no one who originated outside of Earth—where I grew up—is a mammal as I understand it, but sometimes you just have to say ‘close enough’ when you’re talking about biology. ”
“And wasps aren’t mammals?”