Chapter 16 #3
Artie had been that for me, as much as he could be.
Falling in love with him hadn’t been part of the plan, and had only made everything more difficult, but I couldn’t deny that sometimes I missed how soothing his mind had been, how comforting it had been to make contact with someone whose thoughts I understood from the bottom to the top.
Ikko looked up at me as I spoke, listening attentively. “Is that why you want to go home so badly?” she asked when I was done. “To get back to your brothers?”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “They don’t have any idea where I am. None of my family does. Isaac’s a wasp like me, and so is our mother, but the rest of my family … we’re all different species, and they’ll have no way of following me here.”
“That must be really scary.”
“It’s about the most scary thing I’ve ever thought of, and I’ve seen and done some really scary stuff,” I said. “I want to go home. I want my family.”
“I would, too, if someone took me away from here,” said Ikko.
She let go of my hand, gesturing for me to keep following her.
I did, feeling her thoughts muffle themselves, like she was standing on the other side of a glassy barrier.
The resistance of a full Kairos made the telepathic barriers my family had seem almost negligible.
No wonder these people had been able to hide for so long.
Ikko was leading me toward a tree with a trunk that resembled a massive basket, woven from dozens of smaller trunks that had interlaced as they were growing, forming a structure full of openings that stared out on the world like unblinking eyes.
Something about it sent a chill along my spine, and I stood up a little straighter, too anxious to slump.
Ikko kept walking, not seeming to notice my discomfort.
“Ikko,” I said. “This Eldest Living you’re taking me to see. Who is she?”
“Her name is her explanation,” said Ikko.
“She’s the very very oldest of all of us in the whole world.
This isn’t the only place we have where we can be safe, but it’s probably the biggest, and the Eldest Living was here when the timing brought us to it.
She doesn’t remember Caerus, but her great-great-grandmother did, and she can tell stories about the world our from happened on.
She knows everything worth knowing, and she’s the nicest person ever, and she’ll know how you can get your people back, and how you can get home again from here.
You can trust the Eldest Living. All of us do, and you can, too. ”
We had reached the tree. She stopped outside, gesturing toward an opening in the trunk. “Go on inside,” she said. “It’ll be better if you announce yourself. That way it doesn’t look like somebody made you.”
She turned then, scampering away, back toward the village. I watched her go, feeling suddenly uncertain.
Then I turned, and stepped into the tree.
The interior of the tree was surprisingly bright, thanks to shafts of sunlight shining through the holes in the trunk.
White-winged moths fluttered in the shadows between the shafts, the motion drawing my eye for a moment before I realized the center of the room was a ring of chairs made from rough-hewn wood, more humanlike than the furniture in Fetch and Carry’s home, the seats unpadded: they were just plain and hard, making them unappealing to sit on, especially when contrasted with the massive heap of soft things in the middle of the ring.
Pillows and blankets and reams of unhemmed fabric formed a virtual mountain of comforting options, and atop them sat a very old person I assumed was the Eldest Living.
She was wearing a knotted shift of bright red fabric, embroidered with what looked like wasp wings around the hems. It was an interesting fashion choice, to be sure, and I paused to study her before coming any closer.
She was definitely Kairos. She could have passed for human, with her wispy white hair and pale, heavily wrinkled skin, but when I tried to brush the surface of her mind to confirm that she was who I’d come to see, I struck a shell as hard as resin wrapped around an insect that had mired itself in amber.
There was no getting through that without using force, and maybe not even with using force—it was the strongest mental shield I had ever bounced off of.
“Hello,” she said, turning her face in my direction. “Are you the Sarah?”
“What?” I came closer, unable to help myself. “How do you already know my name?”
“There are people looking for you, little wasp,” she said. “They came out of the space between worlds, into the green not far from here, and my hunters brought them to see me. But they were very poor guests, and they left without allowing us to help them in any meaningful way.”
“Who were they?” I asked, almost frantically. There were only a few members of my family who could potentially travel between dimensions without my help, and I didn’t want any of them to be in danger, especially not because of me. Again.
“The Thomas Price, and the Antimony and the Sam,” said the Eldest Living. “They had a fourth, but she had been lost to the green before my hunters found them, and they worried for her safety. They said they had come to reclaim the Sarah, and the Arthur.”
So they knew Arthur was here on Johrlar? That was encouraging. I wasn’t trying to rescue him alone. “How long ago was this?”
“Oh, hours,” she said, waving a hand almost carelessly. “The suns have moved a great distance since they left me. Would you like to sit and speak with me a time?”
“I’d rather find my family, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind, I’m afraid. The timing has brought you all before me, and the timing only serves so when the need is great. The wasps search the green for their missing prisoners. They search the green for you. If you walk away, they’ll be free to find you, and possibly to find us as well.”
I blinked. “Are you saying I have to stay here so the Johrlac don’t learn where your village is? I thought you had protections in place to stop that sort of thing from happening. Ikko said that you put up barriers and distractions and other ways to warn the community before anything could happen.”
“We have many protections,” said the Eldest Living.
I could tell she was looking at me, but the resin shell around her mind meant that I had no idea what she was feeling, or whether she was happy to see me here.
“Some of them more clear than others. What did Ikko tell you about the history of the Kairos on Johrlar?”
“She said you’d been abducted from your home dimension and brought here as slave labor,” I said dutifully. “That the ones who did the abducting wanted a service class with enough telepathic resistance to stand up against the hive, and settled on the Kairos.”
“We serve the timing, but the timing works sometimes in mysterious ways,” she said.
“The wasps came for us when there was a great famine upon the land, and the timing saw that more of us would survive if we were removed to Johrlar. So we were taken, and over time we learned enough to escape into the green places, where we could thrive. There was enough here to eat, and we spread and prospered. There are more of us here and now than there were on Caerus when we were taken. It would be better had we never been disturbed, but as we cannot change the past, we choose to glory in what we have done here that is for the better. We are happy, and we are well.”
“I’m not sure what that has to do with what Ikko might have told me,” I said.
“I’m glad for you. It’s awful not to be where you belong.
But we have a lot in common, you and I. The queens who rule here banished my ancestors, and I was born in another dimension, where I had to figure out how to be happy in a place that was never intended for me. ”
“So you understand,” she said. “When you have little, what you do have seems like everything. It’s not worth the risk of losing it.”
Something about her tone was making me uneasy. I took a step backward. “No, it’s not. What I have right now is my freedom, and that’s a lot to lose.”
“But do you really have that, when you’re on someone else’s world and your family is being held prisoner? Or do you have the illusion of freedom egging you on, and need to let go of the idea that you have anything left to take away?”
Alarm bells were ringing in my head. “What did you do?” I asked.
To her credit, she didn’t try to deflect, just looked at me and said, in a cool tone, “Only what was necessary to protect my people. They don’t question how we can be so close to the city and so established without being discovered.
They trust the timing, and fail to realize that sometimes even the timing needs a helping hand.
I am their Eldest. I am the daughter of the man who was Eldest before me, and my own daughter has been raised knowing that one day she will take my place.
She will speak for the timing. She will be the helping hand our people need to thrive.
And she, like me, will speak to the collective on the behalf of the Kairos, and will offer them whatever they require to leave us alone.
We do not give them our own people, ever.
We do not sacrifice what we grow. But everything else is expendable. ”
She stood, aged legs shaky but still strong enough to hold her, and began making her way down the side of the piled-up pillows and bedding.
She held her head high as she descended, chin tilted slightly upward in a way that gave her an almost-regal bearing.
When she reached the bottom she held out her hand, clearly expecting me to help her with the final steps from uneven fabric to solid ground.
I moved forward again, eyeing her warily.
Could she possibly not know about skin contact making it easier for me to read her mind?
If these people had been avoiding the Johrlac for as long as it sounded like they had, it was actually possible that they’d forgotten that little trick of living alongside us.
I reached out and took her hand. The color in the room shifted, reds becoming brighter as my vision aligned with her own, and I felt the unpleasant sensation of my thoughts sinking into thick, sticky toffee, getting mired and dragged down in something that clung and tangled and refused to let me go.
I tried to pull my hand out of hers, but my arm refused to respond to the command.
It was like my tangled-up thoughts couldn’t reach the nerves to tell them what to do.
“I do know about skin contact with the Johrlac,” said the Eldest Living.
“And I know that faces aren’t a strong suit for your kind, but you should work harder at schooling yours—I could all but read your delight at the thought of crossing my defenses.
The queens long ago set traps inside my mind, with my consent, to stop any others of their species from intruding where I didn’t want them.
Don’t fight it. You’re mired now, and you’ll be pulled down soon enough, into the peaceful place they’ve made to hold you.
Inside my mind, your mind will be able to dream until the time comes to carry you away. They’re already coming.”
She delicately extricated her hand from mine, shaking it like she’d just touched something unpleasant, then wiped it against the fabric at her hip before she turned to climb back up her fabric mountain.
My knees gave way, and I toppled gently forward into the pile of pillows, feeling little muscular twitches race along my limbs and spine. I’d never had a seizure to my knowledge, but this felt like the beginnings of one, my whole body starting to shake involuntarily as the twitches continued.
Johrlac can set traps inside a person’s brain.
I knew that. I’d encountered it before, when the hive had been trying to force me toward the queen instar: they’d trapped Artie’s brain, turning it into a prison meant specifically for me.
This didn’t feel quite like that. This was more like sinking into a tarpit, too deep and thick for me to pull myself free.
I felt my bladder give way, warm wetness running down my thighs and sinking into the pillows beneath me, and I couldn’t even rouse myself to feel shame: if anything, I felt a grim satisfaction in knowing that I had at the very least ruined some of this deceptive liar’s pillows.
It was a small delight. It was the only one I currently felt likely to receive. And so I held on to it as the toffee dragged me down, down, deeper down, back into the whiteness of the void, and then the pride slipped away, and then everything else slipped away, and I was alone with my thoughts.